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Elegy for Dead Dreams
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19183 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1991 |
2,971 Words |
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Richard Gid Powers
Richard Gid Powers is professor of history at the City
University of New York. He is the author of G-Men: Hoover's
FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1983), and Secrecy and Power: The Life of
J. Edgar Hoover (New York: The Free Press, 1987). |
RED LOVE
David Evanier
New York: Scribners, 1991
340 pp., $19.95
One by one, history has kicked away the props that sustained the faith of America's radical Left: the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Nicaragua, the communist governments of Eastern Europe. All of them turned out to be frauds, rejected the moment their power slackened.
The remaining props are mythic: a romantic belief in the absolute wickedness of the Left's antagonists--J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and yes, Ronald Reagan--and the innocence of the Left's martyrs--Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs; above all, the Rosenbergs, arrested for atomic espionage in 1950, tried in 1951, and executed at Sing Sing in 1953.
And now in Red Love, David Evanier laughs away the romance of American communism in a savagely funny expose of the myth that the Rosenberg case was the culmination of American fascism's (anticommunism's) assault on the forces of truth and decency (the Left).
David Evanier is a sly and talented writer whose stories have been collected in two well-received earlier volumes, The One-Star Jew and The Swinging Headhunter. In Red Love he has found the story he was born to tell. Now a staff writer and researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, Evanier began his political odyssey in the late 1950s, when the ruins of the Communist Party still cast a huge shadow across New York City's Jewish Left. As he moved within the orbit of the party he jostled the human wreckage of the collapse of the Red dream. Their political harangues and nostalgic memories (if they still believed), or their tears and curses (if they had lost the faith), peopled his imagination with characters so tragic, comic, and grotesque that they simply begged to be put on paper. The result is a comic explosion: a wildly funny story, but also a sad one, because Solly and Dolly Rubell, Evanier's fictional Rosenbergs, sacrifice their lives for what turned out to be a hoax--the delusion that the Soviet Union represented the model of a humanistic society that should be the goal of progressives of all nations, especially the United States.
Red Love assembles a bizarre group of zanies driven out of their minds by the idea that there exists, far-off beyond the sea, an earthly paradise presided over by the kindest, wisest, most wonderful
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