Word: bernsteining
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...good memoir should produce shocks of recognition that are both intimate and historical, revealing truths about a person and about his times. Bernstein provides both, in abundance. Juxtaposing excerpts from declassified FBI files with tales of a childhood thrown into turmoil by the early postwar Red scares, he has created a new genre -- what might be called the investigative memoir. It combines the journalistic thrill of Watergate with the emotional punch of that most basic of literary themes, a boy's search to understand his father...
...Bernstein, who was born in 1944, recounts his Washington childhood in a family of politically progressive Jews. Upon returning from the Army at the end of World War II, his father Alfred became active as an organizer for the United Public Workers of America, a left-wing union representing federal employees. After President Truman, in an effort to satisfy political pressures, issued the loyalty order of 1947, the elder Bernstein's life was dominated by defending public workers summoned before the loyalty boards and accused of being Communists...
...member of the Communist Party. His wife Sylvia, also active in progressive causes, did the same three years later in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The family found itself shunned by many of its neighbors, friends and even relatives. The FBI kept the Bernsteins under surveillance for years (Bernstein's bar mitzvah is duly described), accumulating 2,500 pages of files that pop up in the book...
...Young Bernstein's reaction was to become a patriotic rebel -- class air-raid warden, supersalesman of Defense Bond stamps, proud wearer of an I LIKE IKE button -- and a marginal student who eventually skipped college to become a newspaper copy clerk. He also, quite understandably, became interested in whether his parents had actually been Communists. When he was eight, he first blurted out the question to his father. "I remember the silence that followed and my not daring to look at him," Bernstein writes. "My question offered no escape; there is no Fifth Amendment for eight-year-olds." His father...
...loyalties" of the title thus refer to more than just the allegiance Bernstein's parents had to the Communist Party and to their Government. The real struggle in the book is between Carl's loyalty to (and love for) his parents and his search for the truth about their lives. At times his quest becomes traumatic. Bob Woodward makes cameo appearances, comforting his former partner when he breaks into tears at the memory of a childhood schoolmate calling his mother a Communist...