Word: gornick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GORNICK SET OUT to prove that Communists were ordinary human beings who responded to their times in what they deemed an appropriate manner, she succeeds. One wishes, however, that she chose some other manner to do so. Gornick believes that these people became Communists simply because they "cared more." They cared about the people in the mills and the mines, about the migrant workers, about the immigrants who sought a bright new life and found only a dank tenement. But instead of stressing the moral or political outrage that fed their "caring," she harps on their emotional needs. Human beings...
...insists, the Party failed. Certainly Communists did not mobilize masses of workers or save the migrants. In retrospect, some of the Communists now note that they failed to see America through American eyes and were thus unable to weather Stalinism or McCarthyism. But Gornick downplays the social and political context of these failures, although the best sections of the interviews address precisely these issues. She dwells instead on the Party's loss of humanity. Marriages suffered, friendships were severed and psyches were bruised. Communists, she tells us sadly, did bad things to one another...
...Gornick's insistent sentimentality is not the book's only flaw. It is, after all, difficult to weave numerous interviews together in a readable fashion. One wishes, nonetheless, that Gornick devised transitions more imaginative than bulletins announcing with which ex-Communist she drank coffee and with whom she guzzled Scotch. Descriptions of living room decor also fail to enhance the reader's understanding of American Communism's nature, romantic or otherwise. And, in most instances, her discourses on her subjects' family histories are of interest only to an eager parlor Freudian...
...GORNICK IS BY NO MEANS a stupid woman and one regrets that she is so dogmatically silly. Nonetheless, she does remain free of the stereotypes that have ensnared past analysts. She does not, for example, attempt to prove that all Communists are busily repenting the error of their ways, nor does she argue that all Communists are busily repenting the error of their ways, not does she argue that all Communists are misunderstood saints. In fact, she successfully shows that Communists came from--and return to--all types of intellectual, cultural and economic strata...
...Gornick's own politics are clearly to the left of center. She wants to believe that men and women will continue to struggle to overcome the "warring elements of the race to humanize itself." She turns to passion and hope as a means to this end. The Romance of American Communism lacks coherence, though, because of its purgative function for the author. Gornick cannot overcome the contradictions inherent in her dual role as an intellectual critic and a sentimental admirer. For despite her ideological opposition to American Communism as she has known it, she remains an emotional fellow traveler...