Growing Out Of Communism

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

"Red Diapers" is the first anthology of autobiographical writings by the children of American communists. These memoirs, short stories, and poems reflect the joys and perils of growing up in a subculture defined by its opposition to society's most deeply held values. 15 photos.

It is a story of America. This modern-day odyssey is a tribute to family, friends, mentors, guides, and to brother fire-fighters here and throughout the international community. It takes us to the island of Culebra in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, to Oklahoma City, and to the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

'When people ask me what it was like growing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most people expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live'. From my 'Goulash and Solidarity' article, The Guardian, 2nd November 2002. My book presents a detailed, nuanced account of what everyday life was really like behind the 'Iron Curtain', written from a working-class perspective. How we lived, worked, loved, played and laughed (and at times suffered too). After my original Guardian article, (which was featured on the front cover of The Week magazine as one of the 'Best British Articles') was published I received a large number of emails and letters from readers from all over the world who had given up hope that such an honest, balanced account would ever be published. The dominant view we have of countries behind the 'Iron Curtain' is a very negative one, because the accounts tend to be written by those fiercely hostile to communism. But there is another side to the story, at least in relation to my country, Hungary. Thirty years on from the seismic political changes of the autumn of 1989, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in eastern Europe, my book, based on first-hand experience, provides a refreshing, alternative view to the one we have read or heard so many times before. My aim in writing 'Goulash and Solidarity' is to inform you, to entertain you, and I hope, surprise you.

Paylie Roberts spent the first eight years of her life living under communist rule in Poland. From age eight on she grew up in the US and became so Americanized that she refused to acknowledge her native Polish heritage, including her birth name. Only after researching the history of why her family was exiled from Poland by the communist government did she realize the tremendously important and unique lessons that the Polish Solidarity movement offers about overcoming tyranny, oppression, and corruption, and how these lessons are imminently relevant and applicable to America today. Paylie combines her personal story with historical facts and sheds light on the many unnerving similarities between growing up in communist Poland in the early 1980s and life in the US now, in a way that is engaging, insightful and inspiring. She recounts her memories of living under the Soviet Union's rule over Poland, as her family struggled along with most other Poles just to survive. This book also includes memories that are only told by Poles as they were never recorded in "official" history due to media censorship during those years. Paylie wrote this book not only to honor the brave Polish people (including her parents) for defeating tyranny using largely non-violent means, but also with the hope of spreading knowledge that could help prevent her worst fears from manifesting regarding what the future in "free" America may hold.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

In this groundbreaking book, Katrina Schwartz examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in a small East European country: modern-day Latvia. Based on extensive ethnographic research and lively discourse analysis, it explores that country's post-Soviet responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. These responses were shaped by hotly contested notions of national identity articulated as contrasting visions of the "ideal" rural landscape.The players in this story include Latvian farmers and other traditional rural dwellers, environmental advocates, and professionals with divided attitudes toward new European approaches to sustainable development. An entrenched set of forestry and land management practices, with roots in the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras, confront growing international pressures on a small country to conform to current (Western) notions of environmental responsibility—notions often perceived by Latvians to be at odds with local interests. While the case is that of Latvia, the dynamics Schwartz explores have wide applicability and speak powerfully to broader theoretical discussions about sustainable development, social constructions of nature, the sources of nationalism, and the impacts of globalization and regional integration on the traditional nation-state.