In Memoriam: Remembering Ella
Shattan, Joseph
by Joseph Shattan Remembering Ella A secret sharer and life force who never grew old. B ertram D. Wolfe 0896q977) , the great historian of Soviet Communism, called his...
...I wonder whether you knew that during those years Bert and Pearl Buck traveled over the entire country, Pearl Buck defending Mao's views and Bert attacking her...
...Prize information and additional details are available from: The Mont Pelerin Society, EO...
...Her judgments were frequently wrong--I was never the literary lion she mistook me for--but her enthusiasm for people and books was unflagging...
...Instead, there was Ella Wolfe, who actually had been a Lovestonite...
...The essays will be judged by an international panel of three senior members of the Society The deadline for submission of essays is May 31, 2000...
...In dealing with persons who have attained a very great age, it is impossible not to speculate about the nature of human longevity...
...lution...
...Time and again, he would warn me against taking everything Ella said at face value--and, in fact, I did not...
...But I always learn something new when I read you...
...With what values did he identify and reject by it...
...I am certain many will be writing you in appreciation of the warmth of your tribute to Bayard Rustin...
...I imagine you had much fun in writing it...
...Your covering forgotten history is simply wonderful...
...It is a truly original piece of writing like so many of the other essays you have written...
...She had a Master's Degree in JOSEPH SHATrAN is the author of Architects Spanish Literature from Columbia Uniof Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, versity, was fluent in several tongues, published by the Heritage Foundation...
...B ertram D. Wolfe 0896q977) , the great historian of Soviet Communism, called his posthumouslypublished autobiography A Life in Two Centuries, but his wife Ella, who was born in Ukraine in 1896 , and died in Palo Alto in 2ooo, lived her extraordinary life in nearly three centuries...
...Not long after receiving her letter I called her, but the lady who looked after Ella (the proceeds from the sale of one of the Kahlo paintings financed her medical care) informed me that she was unable to come to the phone...
...read everything, knew everyone, and spent her days at the Hoover Archives adding to the already voluminous Bertram D. Wolfe Collection--or as she put it, "keeping Bert's files green...
...I first met Ella in a978 , when I was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University researching the "Lovestonites," a dissident Communist group that flourished in New York between 1929 and 194o...
...Accurate or not, her performances were riveting...
...It is a story much needed by the American people, a book from which your audience will learn the history of their country they never got from any other source...
...I thought I knew a lot about him after I read my brother's biography of him, but I see that I did not know enough, and I learned a lot from your profile, especially about his hypocrisy and enormous vanity which he handed on to his daughter Indira...
...She also tried to further my education by sending me copies of articles she found particularly interesting...
...What a scoop you are for The American Spectator...
...And of my TAS review of Stanley Wolpert's Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, she said, That was a very wide mirror you used to hold up to Nehru, the complicated man--great and not so great...
...If he were what joy he would have in telling you how much joy he had in reading your perceptive, warm and tender tribute to his remarkable life...
...Her last letter is dated October 3 ~ , 1999: I have just finished reading your interesting book [Architects of Victory...
...It is written not only with your great knowledge but with your quiet wisdom which I find in all your writings, and no one who will be O reviewing the book will go to the center-56 March 20 o o _9 The American Spectator the heart of the book- in the way you have done...
...I grew very fond of Ella Wolfe, and even after I left Hoover for Washington, D.C., we stayed in touch...
...The Board of Directors of the Mont Pelerin Society Announces the Friedrich A. Hayek Fellowships for the 2000 GENERAL MEETING OF THE MONT PELERIN SOCIETY (Santiago, Chile--November 12-18, 2000) "The more I l e a r n a b o u t the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig - - w i t h the s t r e s s on the ' o l d ' . " E A. Hayek, "Why I am not a Conservative, " The Constitution of Liberty (1960) The President of the Mont Pelerin Society, Dr...
...Ella was equally impressed by a brief piece I wrote about the Iraqi-born British scholar Elie Kedourie...
...You must be thinking of it by now...
...She was four months shy of her lo4th birthday...
...I felt like a paleontologist who had somehow stumbled upon a living dinosaur...
...Dear Joe," it began: Your essay [a review, in the December 1984 TAS, of John P. Roche's The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organi- z zational Theory] is simply splendid...
...I suppose that living a long life is largely a matter of luck, but to the extent that it's not, perhaps it has something to do with one's attitude...
...But Ella and I never got a chance to discuss my next project...
...She was also my biggest fan...
...I am certain that their reputation has grown since you came to be writing for them...
...The only exception I can recall was the redoubtable philosopher, Sidney Hook, who, like Bert Wolfe, was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Recently widowed--Bert died in 1977, at the relatively young age of.8a, in a freak accident--Ella was full of vim and vigor, and seemed to enjoy nothing more than talking about the life she and Bert had shared...
...Essays of 5,000 words or less may be submitted by students or faculty members 35 years of age or younger...
...What can we learn from Hayek's self-definition as an Old Whig...
...After your celebration is over--What is your next project...
...Still, I was astonished when, in January 1985, I received a letter from her...
...But Ella was anything but fossil-like...
...A stickler for the facts, Sidney was convinced that Ella's recollections often bore only a passing acquaintance with the truth...
...Then, on January 8, that same lady called to say that Ella was refusing all food and drink, and death was imminent...
...Love, Ella That was heady stuff, but it was the merest foretaste of what was to come...
...I recall the day I entered the reading room of the Hoover Archives, expecting to spend my time poring over moldy newspapers and fading journals from the 193o's...
...I don't know what impressed me more-the ~/rticles themselves, or the fact that Ella, now well into her nineties, took the trouble to xerox these essays and send them to me...
...A Communist (like her husband) in the first half of the twentieth century, and a Reaganite (like her husband) in the second half, she was a woman of great culture, warmth, and high spirits...
...But Ella didn't confine herself to letters...
...As long as I live," she wrote me, '.'I will never find words enough to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your splendid and tender profile on Elie Kedourie...
...I find that since you have joined them, their issues have really improved...
...Ella's conviction that I was God's gift to TAS cropped up repeatedly throughout her letters: "I keep wondering," she wrote me in 1997, if the bosses who publish The American Spectator have a real understanding of the kind of brilliant profiles you publish in its pages...
...Over the next fifteen years, whenever an article of mine appeared in TAS--or anywhere else, for that matter--Ella, who somehow managed to read everything I wrote, would drop me a line, showering it with the most extravagant praise...
...Ella maintained her correspondence with me up until the final days of her life...
...The Hayek Fellowships will be awarded for the three best essays on the above topic...
...For example, after TAS published my review of Peter Conn's Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Ella wrote: I have just finished reading your brilliant essay on Pearl Buck, and I am happy to see in every issue how you teach all of us America's forgotten history...
...A diminutive sprite who had been a beauty in her youth, Ella enchanted virtually everyone who knew her...
...As they grow older, most people have their "life-gladness" knocked out of them, but Ella retained hers to the very end...
...Even at the close of her life, when her body was in what she called "a state of full decay," she radiated a sense of joy...
...Similarly, after I reviewed Jervis Anderson's Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen in TAS, Ella wrote: What a pity that Bayard Rustin is no longer with us...
...I ! expected you to say a lot of interesting things but you said even more...
...And what a life it was...
...On January 10, I was informed that Ella had passed away peacefully in her sleep...
...I will miss her, and her preposterous letters...
...Present at the founding of the American Communist party in 1919, she had met Stalin, had struck up a deep friendship with the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo (Kahlo's paintings, doubtless worth a forElla Wolfe' with Frida Kahlo tune today, adorned the walls of Ella's modest home near the Hoover Institution), and had midwifed her husband's metamorphosis from Communist ideologue into major historian, author of the classic study, Three Who Made a Revo...
...Box 703t, Alexandria, Virginia 22307, USA or www.montpelerin.org Made possible by a grant from the Aequus Institute...
...R~mon D~az, notes that students of Hayek cannot ignore the single definition of his political philosophy which Hayek bequeathed to us...
...Still, who could resist falling under Ella's spell when she described Leon Trotsky's surreptitious love affair with Frida Kahlo, or when she recalled how fellow-Lovestonite Will Herberg (the future religious-conservative icon) would pinch Bert's books when he thought no one was watching, or when she held forth on her 1929 encounter with Stalin, who had "the yellow eyes of a mountain lion...
...Is there any alternative definition more accessible to the general public...
...The American Spectator _9 March 2o o o 57...
...That is what you must continue to do...
...Ella's attitude is best captured by the Russian word zhizneradostny, generally translated as "cheerful" or "joyous," but which literally means "life-glad...
...These included Andr4 Malraux's "Remembering Trotsky," Edward Shils's "The Gommunity of Learning," Anthony Grafton's "Arnaldo Momigliano: A Pupil's Notes," Milan Kundera's "Kafka's World," and Joseph Brodsky's "Uncommon Visage...
...I am touched and deeply grateful for your understanding...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 2
