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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Alan Wald. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvii + 412 pages.
The more we learn about certain revelations from the newly opened Soviet archives, the harder it becomes to think of American communists as much more than pawns of the Comintern. As many believed all along, American communists accepted their marching orders from overseas and thus failed to forge an indigenous radicalism capable of addressing their own historical and exceptional situation. It seems harder and harder to see anything but Soviet directives and strategies in the activities of American Communist Party members. Nonetheless, some keep trying to argue to the contrary. Alan Wald's most recent book is a fine example.
Wald focuses on culture and finds that, instead of being pawns, some communists working in poetry, literature, and film writing retained a certain amount of autonomy in coming to their political views. It might be best to start with a rarity in the opening pages of Wald's book--that is, a figure who some might have heard of before (admittedly, the African-American writers Wald deals with are fairly well known, but the book is full of those most will never have come across). Mike Gold, author of Jews without Money (1930) and spokesperson for "proletarian literature," rarely receives favorable treatment in American literary histories. He is seen mostly as a hack apologist for Stalinism. But in Wald's hands, he becomes less a crude propagandist for bad artistic and political ideas and a much more complex and rich personality. Instead of just regurgitating what the...
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