Word: gornickes
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...ROMANCE OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM by Vivian Gornick; Basic Books; 265 pages...
...Vivian Gornick takes a considerably more dramatic-indeed romantic-view of what she calls the "romance" of American Communism: "Marxism was for those who became Communists what Helen was for Paris. Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings." These, writes Gornick, became a consuming passion, "that was in its very essence both compellingly humanizing and then compellingly dehumanizing...
This is a fair example of the author's wafting prose style. Phrases like "an awesome move toward humanness" and such gauzy generalizations as Communists "were like everybody else, only more so" swell throughout her pages. Yet the book does have a vital core. Gornick, an essayist for New York's Village Voice, stages her psychopolitical Liebestod with a living chorus of former Communist activists whom she interviewed in various parts...
...York, there are aging Jewish immigrants whose ideas of social justice were formed by the Russian Revolution, and whose heated arguments Gornick remembers from her own Bronx childhood. The East Side of Manhattan was politically unique to an Italian who grew up there. "The right-wingers were the New Dealers," he wrote, "and the political conjugation went on from there: Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists...
...Cape Cod, Gornick talked to a 70-year-old Polish-born Catholic, a former labor organizer and Spanish Civil War volunteer, who today is a folk hero to vacationing liberals. There are old Wobblies from Idaho, miners from West Virginia, women who left their families to go "underground," fiery daughters of dirt farmers, rebellious sons of the rich, and even an ex-Communist who now works for organized crime...