Up from Bohemia.(Review)

Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh (Encounter, 216 pp., $24.95)

Ronald Radosh's memoir is a valuable addition to the literature of leftist intellectual disillusionment. Its chief distinction may be its author's sense of humor, which contrasts strongly with the torment and anguish experienced by nearly all his predecessors who made the trek from revolutionism to the discovery that Soviet Communism and its works were a brutal deception.

Which is not to say Radosh has not suffered. He was once considered an outstanding radical scholar among the young American historians to emerge in the Cold War era. But since his plunge into "extreme truth- telling"-by confirming, in his 1983 book The Rosenberg File, the guilt of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-he has undergone a professional ostracism that, once upon a time, would have been condemned as "un-American."

Radosh is no whiner, and he does not elaborate on the fate that has been his. Since he left the City University of New York in 1992, he has-aside from a brief period at Adelphi University-been academically blacklisted. Yet he seems to grasp that no career is constitutionally guaranteed. Rather than plead for solidarity and mercy from those "progressives" who would loudly protest such a sanction against one of their own, he has preferred to recall, without rancor, his radical origins and middle years. Radosh exhibits no personal bitterness toward a leftist movement that, in fact, swindled and betrayed him. Rather he evinces something close to nostalgia for the enthused innocence with which he once embraced the Leninist cause.

Radosh was born in 1937, a child of the New York garment workers' milieu. His father worked in the once-bustling hatmaking industry, and supported a Communist labor faction; his mother was a union activist. The parents had made a pilgrimage to Soviet Russia in 1924, the year Lenin died, and returned red-starry-eyed.

Young Ron's most important formative influence was his mother's cousin Jacob Abrams, an anarchist and a legendary figure in American radical history. The subject of a landmark Supreme Court civil-liberties case, Abrams had been deported from the United States for distributing subversive literature. He ended up in Mexico, where he became a fixture in the emigre intellectual community and attempted to help Trotsky defend himself against the conspiracy that would ultimately kill him. After Abrams gave the family a set of plates that had belonged to Trotsky, Radosh used them to serve snacks to his pals in the Stalinist youth movement, who came to include the arch-provocateur David Horowitz-and whose faces paled in horror when they realized which "renegade" hands had once touched them.

From Abrams, Radosh learned very early, even as his parents remained faithful to the cause, that Stalinists were murderers, and that the revolutionary ideal had an extremely ambiguous character. This early skepticism may have been fortified by a certain distance his parents seem to have taken from Muscovite orthodoxy, at least by the 1950s. Despite having enrolled Ron at the unabashedly leftist Elisabeth Irwin High School (students called it "the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds"), they had become wary of his joining the Labor Youth League, the junior section of the CPUSA. Ron himself showed a reluctance to sign up, having been pitched as a prospective recruit by two Greek Communist partisans who showed up at his summer camp in upstate New York. "There was something about their austere nature and fanatical commitment that scared me," he writes.