A communist childhood

...He blamed the tensions with my mother, her "nervousness" and her migraine headaches, on capitalist-induced poverty, which led to anger and hopelessness for those who didn't understand that a socialist America was coming soon...

...People invented myths in ancient times to make themselves feel safe and secure, he said, before science was discovered and explained all these things rationally...

...Amy SWERDLOW is professor emerita, Sarah Lawrence College, and author of Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s, and numerous articles on U.S...

...In a flash I conceived a plan for deliverance...

...During the wretched summer of 1930, my father, unemployed and without a son, often took me for walks and discussions in the park...

...Fox, all greedy, fat-bellied capitalists with leering faces like those in William Gropper's painting The Senate...

...And lo—as in a fairy tale—the opportunity arose...

...Unlike my mother, I valued discussions with my father, having learned that listening to him was the only way to capture his attention...

...The larger part they kept for themselves...

...She was scolding and sobbing: "Yold, fool, it's not your property, you stooge of the bosses, you scab, you ante-semitt...

...But to our astonishment and dismay, what we saw when we peered out into the night was the familiar corner of Allerton Avenue and Bronx Park East...

...When I did, he told me that I had a gutte kup, a good head, and hugged me so enthusiastically that I feared he would break my ribs...

...When Yosef realized that he could not engage his wife in a "rational discussion," he resorted to a taunt that I had heard many times before...

...There was nobody to consult...

...I now settle for "Band-Aid" efforts in the local community, something my father sneered at...

...My mother, Esther, was not as philosophical as my father in the face of our evolving family krizzis...

...Yosef returned what seemed like many hours later to find Esther holding her head and moaning...

...She complained bitterly about Yosef's indifference to their need to borrow from family and friends just to feed dus kind, the child, which is what they always called me when they were quarreling...

...As I struggled to hold back tears, Yosef suddenly turned cheerful and began to hum the Wobbly song: Hold the fort for we are coming Union men be strong Side by side we'll battle onward Victory is nigh...

...Where would we go...

...I gave up on Mount Olympus, reluctantly...

...The word "revolution" had a reassuring ring...

...Would the president come all the way from Washington to the Workers' Cooperative Colony in the Bronx just to make trouble for my mother...

...All I needed to do was to awaken at the right moment in the middle of the night, and off I would go...

...Yosef, who knew everything, but had to tell it in a long speech, was at a meeting of the Unemployment Council, and Esther was banging her fist on the door, which had just closed behind the departing Hoover...

...Arthur, coming from a backgound almost identical to mine, was enthusiastic...

...I can't even pay the rent," he sighed, turning his pockets inside out to reveal only a few coins—not even one dollar bill...

...Under the bed I tried to convince myself that I was a child stolen from a happy bourgeois family, and prayed that the affluent, handsome, English-speaking parents of Honey Bunch and Her Sister Sue, the protagonists in a book both my parents had denounced as "bourgeois junk," would soon come to take me home to wonderful toys, bakery cookies, cheerful sisters, and good times...

...In a solemn, professorial, yet seductive manner, he explained that there had been a crash, of what I couldn't make out, and that all of America was in trouble...

...What's a myth...

...Box, and Mr...

...There, a feeble street lamp shone on what was then called the Hebrew Home for the Incurables—as gray and as grim as its name...

...This would happen in my lifetime, he assured me, because "the contradictions of capitalism" would lead it to "self-destruct...

...His reply was more than I could understand or tolerate...

...That's where you belong...

...I could already see my bed and dresser on the sidewalk...

...Myths are stories people make up," he intoned, "to understand the sun and moon, night and day, the stars, the storms, the seasons and where we go after we die...

...My father never tired of telling me that under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Five Year Flan there was no such thing as unemployment in the Soviet Union...

...Later I was to give up on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—also a myth...

...The working class would triumph as it had in the Soviet Union...

...For God's sake," he shouted...

...red face who had come to take our vacuum cleaner, with all its little parts, really the president...

...What if the people's paradise was like Mount Olympus (which I had also wanted to visit when my parents presented me with a beautifully illustrated Child's Book of Greek Mythology...

...I suspected that Hoover had something to do with the krizzis, but I didn't realize just how much—until our vacuum cleaner was repossessed...

...Arthur and I were crushed...

...I have spent my adult life seeking the way, with an ever more critical view of the notion of utopia...

...But it was not so easy to leave home, even for paradise...

...Having no globe, he used an orange, revolving it around his finger to illustrate that the world was round and turned on its axis every twenty-four hours...

...However, I never abandoned my yearning for a world of justice, peace and joy...

...He seemed never to let up, or to face the desperate situation in our own home...

...What had gone wrong...

...Yosef had made me very angry when he told me that Olympus was not a real place...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 s 93...

...It was confusing...

...He made sure to point out that in approximately twelve hours, the United States would be where Russia had been in relation to the sun...

...He couldn't convince her that losing her first and only electrical appliance, in addition to the money already invested in paying it off, was neither humiliating nor tragic compared with the fate of the starving miners in Harlan County, Kentucky...

...Had my father misled me, or had I misunderstood...

...I jumped up and seeing that it was very dark outside I knew the time had come...

...We agreed that the first one up would wake the other...

...She invoked the name several times a day, as she shook her head and brought forth a pained Oy Vey...

...Because Yosef believed that even a seven-year-old girl should have a well-rounded view of science as well as society, he determined to give me a graphic understanding of the "revolution of the planet...

...I sensed that he was warning me that our own family, all three of us, would soon have to leave our sunny apartment facing Bronx Park...

...Knox, Mr...

...If at midnight the United States arrived where Russia was, I could get there by jumping out of my ground-floor bedroom window at the right moment in the revolution of the planet...

...NOTEBOOK Eureka...

...But his explanations of complex political and economic theories were so simple, or simplistic, that I understood him much of the time...

...He used an illustrated child's primer translated from the Russian that told the story of Mr...

...Although my mother had been a trade unionist in her youth, and a sotzialistke from the age of thirteen, she objected to Yosef's incessant political sermons...

...But what I can't accept is the realization that, unlike Yosef the believer, I can't promise my children and grandchildren a people's paradise in their lifetime...

...As my eyes began to close and my head dropped back on my pillow, I had a troubling thought...

...She only sobbed when he pointed out that he had warned her not to buy anything on the installment plan because it was just another ruse by the capitalist class to enrich itself at the expense of poor workers...

...He moaned "i-d-i-y-u-t" and shook me when I couldn't grasp an important concept soon 92 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 enough...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 91 NOTEBOOK Finally, exhausted by her fury, Esther placed a damp washcloth on her forehead, told me to go to my room and "read something," and took to her bed with a migraine headache...

...I cried, suspecting the usual bad news...

...Why don't you go back to your petit bourgeois relatives in Hartford...

...He was ready to make the jump...

...In the summer of 1930, as my father, Yosef, and I were sitting on a large glacial rock in Bronx Park, our favorite spot for reading and "serious discussions," he informed me without apology that he could not buy me the porcelain doll's dishes for which I had been pining and whining because, like millions of other members of the American working class, he was unemployed, "out of work...

...According to Yosef, this led to overproduction, the krizzis, and freezing heads for workers' children...

...Was the fat man with the...

...Thousands upon thousands of families will be evicted from their homes," he predicted...

...What seemed to disturb my mother most, however, was "Hoover...

...I hoped to clear it all up in the morning and try again...

...Knox, Box, and Fox employed workers in their factories to make hats, but these bad men, sometimes called bosses, sometimes capitalists, paid the workers for only a small part of what they received in payment for the hats they sold...

...yOSEF INTRODUCED me to the Marxist theory of surplus value when I was seven...

...It was a myth...

...We were facing an economic krizzis, he declared as if he were addressing thousands, and because of the krizzis we would soon see millions of workers standing in lines waiting for a piece of bread...

...Yosef 's description of the Soviet Union as .the people's paradise was so enticing that I was anxious to see it for myself...

...Sensing that an ugly quarrel was brewing, I hid under my bed, eyes closed, with my hands covering my ears to shield myself from my father's shouts, my mother's brokenhearted retorts, and the throbbing in my own head...

...In what seemed like only a few moments, Arthur was tugging at me...

...I even tolerated my father's impatience...

...Finally, when a friend was sleeping over because his parents were at a meeting, I told him about my plan...

...We flung open my bedroom window with pounding hearts and a sense of destiny...

...I overslept night after night...

...women in radical movements for social transformation...

...Because the workers were paid for only a small portion of what they produced, they never had enough money to buy back for their own use the hats they made...

...Having become a keen judge of which topics were likely to drive my mother wild, I couldn't bring myself to ask her why she was so disturbed by Hoover...

...Yosef made sure that I understood that the part the workers didn't get was called surplus value...

...I could send for my parents later...

...He placed his arm on my shoulder protectively and advised me to be optimistic about the future, not because he would take care of me, but because the krizzis would awaken "the masses...

...Thus, I concluded, there would be no fighting parents and no frightened children...