Word: gornick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...VIVIAN GORNICK MUST have been a precocious child. By the age of five she had adopted a world view; unfortunately she kept it intact through four decades. Born during the mid-1930s in a Jewish enclave of the Bronx, Gornick identified with her father's working class bonds long before she recognized the significance of her religion or sex. While her more orthodox peers studied the Commandments, she memorized the basic formulae for good and evil: "Labor=Socialism, Capital=Nationalism...
...analyst. She is as deeply mired in objective determinism on a personal level as the ex-Communists whose lives she recounts were on a world historical plane. She blames emotional vacuums in her political life on her place in history. Had she been born a decade earlier, to use Gornick's own gushing framework, her adolescent crush on the Old Left may have developed into a mature passion. Ten years in the other direction and she could have "realized herself" in the glorious Sixties. Instead, she grew up as a mildly disgruntled member of the silent generation, rousing herself...
INTERVIEWS WITH 47 AGING ex-Communist Party members are sandwiched between Gornick's nostalgic memories of the Bronx and her subsequent experience as a radical feminist. Her childhood taught her that optimistic left-wing ideology could soothe the pain of voiceless poverty: "People sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them." During her teens, she joined the Communist-affiliated Labor Youth League, but she recalls, "I had often been in a state of dismay as I felt the weight of simplistic socialist explanations...
...Khrushchev report confirmed truths about Stalinism that Gornick believes many Communists and sympathizers already suspected but could not face. For her, the 20th Congress Report "snapped the last thread in a fabric of belief that was already worn to near disintegration." As a feminist 15 years later, she watched closely as consciousness succumbed to rigid rhetoric. But for Gornick, the knowledge that "dogma was the kiss of death for all thought" was cathartic. At long last, she forgave the Communists for their mistakes and began again to love them for their passion...
Through the material Gornick extracts from the interviews, she presents a fairly standard interpretation of the Party's appeal in the '30s, when many of her subjects signed on. Time and time again, the former Party members recall the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of European fascism. Communism seemed a viable alternative. Looking back 40 years later, a surprising number of those she interviewed still believed that Revolution--not merely Prosperity--then lurked around the corner...