Word: gornick
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...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...
...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...