["The Caravan Passes"] is a rich and violent book, a book of trenchant ideas, stormy action, and urgently human beings. This is a say that Tabori thinks provocatively, writes strong narrative, and has the indispensable gift which makes a novelist good: everyone on whom his writing touches, be it only for a paragraph, comes to life…. It is a minor failure of the book that [the central] dilemma exists for the reader but not for the doctor. The only appeals which reach Varga are bribe offe...

"Original Sin" is a written monologue—partly what is written, partly what is thought while he is writing—by an aging Levantine who runs a sleazy boarding house in Cairo…. An astute craftsman (as those who read "Beneath the Stone" and … "Companions of the Left Hand" know), Mr. Tabori has executed [the design of "Original Sin"] with only a few flaws. In fact, he succeeds in many places where it is quite usual for authors to fa...

Tabori is obsessed with the horror of Hitlerism. Nearly all his writing deals with Fascist savagery…. One of the merits of The Cannibals is that in it Tabori has disgorged the very essence of that which torments him. He has also strived to make a statement beyond the bloody events. Even in the midst of hell, Tabori tells us, where because of intense suffering everything becomes possible, a few men are able to retain the remnants of their stature as human beings. The starved inmates of a prison camp c...

Unable to make up his mind whether what he had in hand were the materials for comedy or tragedy, Tabori has managed [in The Emperor's Clothes] a hybrid that gets nowhere as either and that is further so muddled by a variety of writing styles that it seems to be the combined work of four or five different men, all of them with a different purpose in view and none of them in consultation with one another. The story, laid in the dawning police state of Hungary and in 1930 Budapest in particular, has to ...

["The Niggerlovers"] is as brash as its name. It is a piece of imitation Brecht, which means that it is interlarded with songs, dances, tumbling, and, in this instance, more complex calisthenics. The tone is gleeful contempt—second-hand gleeful contempt. The target is liberals, and the action is designed to expose their disgraceful collapse under pressure. This action consists of two scenes, barely related…. In the first scene, [The Liberal] is an old professor … who plans...

[Tabori's production of The Merchant of Venice] is billed as "improvisations" on the Shakespeare, and as a title it uses a snatch of Shakespeare's dialogue: "I wish my daughter lay dead in the street and wore the jewels in her ears." This response by the shattered Shylock to fate's abuse encapsules Tabori's approach to the play. Shakespeare tortures Shylock without making him tragic. The "Jew" is stripped not merely of the money, the land...

The double core of "The Caravan Passes" is this: Is the murder of a tyrant justifiable and what kind of a man should a real man be? Mr. Tabori divides his work into two parts, one: "The Question"; two, "The Answer."… "The Answer," unfortunately, is not the answer to the question of part one at all. Instead it is an heroic portrait of a messianic man, the kind of man Varga should be but is not….

["The Cannibals"] is a nightmare fantasy—an attempt to dramatize the agony and guilt of Jews in concentration camps who betrayed their own people…. The action itself can be most quickly described as hand-me-down Brecht—full of arbitrary movement, ritualistic behavior, pranks, and whimsey. At one point, there is a small charade in which a boy's arm is sold as liverwurst, and the company breaks into "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Much of the verbal imagery i...

[Beneath the Stone is] a slick, sophisticated, competent job. (p. 356) Despite its trivial plot, the novel has political implications which deserve discussion. Borst is represented as a person of fairly decent impulses; his Prussian arrogance appears as a compensation for his feeling of inferiority vis-à-vis the English. He is sensitive and almost cultured, much more interesting than his English prisoner. It is dangerous, I think, that the Englishman never answers Borst's contentions that the ...

A strictly private affair, ["Original Sin"] concerns a man's struggle for understanding of himself after he has pushed his wife's head far enough down beneath the bath water to give her everlasting peace…. [Mr. Tabori is not content with the obvious motives.] Unfortunately for the book, its author digs … deeper in his search for motives and uncovers a ganglion of complexes in Tristan Manasse. It is in this part of the story, where the author forsakes the outward fac...

[George Tabori] sets The Cannibals in Auschwitz concentration camp and relates it to the New York of the 'sixties by the device of survivors. The play is a deliberate attempt to shock us into a realization of what we as human beings are capable of. First staged off Broadway in 1967, it uses the ritual, symbolism and obscenity which were then the new vogue of the American fringe, literally to ram home the author's angst, with some sideswipes at the modern American way of life. Tabori is involve...

["Beneath the Stone" is] one of the most moving, convincing, poignant between-the-lines and in-back-of-the-lines novels to come out of the war. The author is a master of imagination. So much of this novel is so extremely fine that one feels the ending should be forgiven or, better yet, forgotten. It involves a conversation by Major von Borst and, although George Tabori has built up a background for it and has done so very well, the change-of-heart business is as obvious today as it was a decad...