Welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jack have been managing editor Micah Eutrich.

Today's episode is about a book that is very near and dear to my heart,

The Romance of American communism by Vivian

Gornick. This is a book that was out of print for many years. It was written in

1977 and it obtained a kind of cult status on the left. I think I first heard about the book from

Political Scientist, Corey Robin, who mentioned it maybe on social media somewhere and I picked up a copy from Amazon for a penny

And I got this you know beat-up copy with no dust jacket. It was a discarded book from a library.

And I read this book, which is a collection of interviews from members of the American Communist Party with a focus on the

party's heyday in the 30s and 40s. The book came out at a time when

discussion of the American Communist Party

was basically relegated to treating life in that party as drudgerous as gray and dull and

basically existing only to serve Joseph Stalin and the interests of the Soviet Union at the period of its highest

Stalinism.

And Gornick is someone who grew up in New York City in that era, the hey day of the American Communist Party,

with parents who were Jewish immigrant garment workers and who were not members of the party themselves,

they were socialists, but some of their best friends were party members.

I mean, she had party members who were,

family members who were in the party,

and the Jewish life in New York City,

especially in the immigrant working class communities that she was a part of, especially on the Lower East Side.

That world, as she described describes it revolved around the party even for people who

weren't members of it the party played this really central role in political and in cultural life.

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