by VICTOR GROSSMAN
It’s reached that time again, a time to look forward but also, for an old geezer like me to look backward. Being 96 for a while yet (until March), I can permit myself some retrospection (while noting that those two digits, if only reversed and embodied, might well have been greatly preferable. Wot-the-hell, while I can still enjoy each new spring and fall and even a snowy winter (if I ever see one again), why shouldn’t I review the many happenings I observed or was part of the worst of them, luckily, from a distance. (But if you’ve read my “Crossing the River” or “A Socialist Defector” you can skip all that follows.)
I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark. A few years later, with my cousin at Times Square, I recall collecting money to “Save Madrid!”—and admiring the Soviets for trying to help do just that, alone (with Mexico) for two years against all the other countries. (And, also largely alone, for bypassing the Depression, building the giant Dnepropetrovsk dam and the model Moscow marble subway stations at New York’s World Fair. In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.
And, in a friendly teacher’s room in September 1938, I recall hearing Hitler boast of seizing much of Czechoslovakia, with British and French compliance—and the tears of my Czech classmate Natalie. A year later, as the only lefty in my class at posh Dalton School, I did my 11-year-old best to convince classmates that Stalin had to sign the pact with Hitler to avoid being hit from all sides; Japan in the East, Germany in the West, with the acquiescence of Chamberlain and Daladier as in Spain and Munich, hoping they might wreck each other. “The USSR needs time to strengthen its defenses.”
I triumphed later when Pete Seeger, in one of his first concerts, had all the kids singing leftwing, CIO songs. June 1941, when the Wehrmacht stormed in, I felt sure the great USSR would smash them. It did, but only after years of sacrifice and slaughter, perhaps 27 million dead, untold destruction—while we in safe but darkened, rationed New York felt deep fear—and then enthusiasm as the tide turned.
Saddened and worried by the death of the only president I had ever known, I rejoiced at the photo of the GI-Red Army handshake on a broken Elbe bridge, not dreaming that, 25 years later, I would be commemorating that event at the bridge at Torgau.
Grateful that V-E Day against German y and V-J Day against Japan saved me , at 17, from the draft and the war—and from a fate like that of my cousin Jerry, taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge and, being Jewish, slaved till his death in a Buchenwald outlier camp in Thuringia. Spurred by Hiroshima-Nagasaki, post-war racist lynching and a big CIO strike offensive, I helped build a Communist Party branch at Harvard, covert in name but active against Jim Crow and in “Win the Peace” actions, like our anti-atomic weapons parade through staid Harvard Yard. In the summer of 1946 , in a lone hitchhike to California and back, I got to know more of my country’s many beauties—and many problems. I had a trip through France and wrecked Germany—and six wonderful weeks at the first World Youth Festival in Prague (1947), with anti-fascist partisan veterans from Europe, freedom fighters from Greece, Vietnam, Burma, Africa, and new friends from Tirana, Bucharest, Moscow, Capetown, Prague—and shared with thousands my hopes for a new-born world.
Monthly Review Online for more