Growing Up Red

     Red-diaper baby. Does anyone under the age of 50 or who’s not in a left-wing corner of the universe know what a red-diaper baby is?

      I didn’t know until I was in college. I told a friend about my grandfather’s response to the Taft-Hartley law, which required all labor union officers to sign an affidavit that they were not then and never had been a Communist Party member. As a Fur and Leather Workers Union officer, he decided to take early retirement in 1948 rather than join his friend, union president Ben Gold, in fighting the law. My friend informed me that a grandparent belonging to the U.S. Communist Party made me a red-diaper baby.

Fur and Leather Workers Union President Ben Gold with the author’s grandfather, Sam Leibowitz.

      Recently I attended a salon of almost a dozen other red-diaper babies, all women. We had grown up in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, most of the other women living in Brooklyn or the Bronx among small communities of fellow leftists, going to socialist summer camps I later heard of but never attended.

      My family moved frequently, from cities to country and suburbs, where I met no one who thought like us. In my suburban high school’s mock election in 1956, only about six students voted for the Democrat, Adlai Stevenson, out of several hundred students. Stevenson was widely derided as an “egghead,” meaning he was an intellectual talking down to ordinary people.

      My experience was different from most of these women’s in many ways, but the one thing we all had in common was secrecy. We all knew we couldn’t say anything at school about what our parents believed. Some of their parents had friends who’d gone underground or were in jail. One was told, as a four-year-old, not to talk to strangers, with the FBI as very specific strangers. None of those were specific red (so to speak) flags for me.

      My parents spoke about the Soviet Union, when everyone else called it Red Russia. I was astonished when I saw my fifth-grade teacher’s car with a “God Bless Joe McCarthy” bumper-sticker; in my home, McCarthy was a bad person.

      Even our books told stories unlike those we found at the library. A Russian children’s book called Schvambrania was about two boys in a Russian city in the 1910s who invent their own country; the older boy is in high school when the 1917 revolution happens, and his friends make fun of his imaginary country because the revolution will make changes in real life.

      There was secrecy toward the outside world, but there was also secrecy within the family. How did I know about my grandfather and the union? I was seven or eight when I overheard a discussion where he said his friend Ben Gold wanted to fight whatever the problem was, but grandpa was 58 and had had enough. The rest of the talk with my grandmother and parents was in Yiddish, which I never managed to learn. I heard the word “affidavit,” but thought they were talking about someone named Affa David. I wondered who he was, but never asked.

      My parents talked about politics only in the vaguest, liberal terms. We were not racist, but my parents weren’t involved in civil rights activities. We didn’t move to North Carolina when the company my father was working for at that moment moved there in 1953 to avoid unionizing; my father’s reason was he didn’t want us to go to segregated schools.

      But he didn’t object that the public school we went to in Connecticut was entirely white, and a Black sister and brother who rode our school bus disappeared one year because their address was moved to another school district. When the first Black family moved into Levittown, Pa., in 1957, my mother took a covered-dish to them as a welcoming gesture, but they wouldn’t let me go along because it could be dangerous. My mother later talked dismissively about the dirty dishes in the sink—and I wondered, who has time to wash dishes when people are throwing rocks and rotten food at their house and making worse threats of violence?

      Sitting around the dinner table when we were teens, my father, an engineer, would present us with a social problem of some sort, then ask how we might solve it. These were not memorable conversations as it became clear that he had a foreordained idea, and if we disagreed with it, he wouldn’t be happy. We didn’t engage in arguments, as he was sure he was right.

      Growing up, I never wondered why we moved so much. I remember these moves primarily because they happened either a month after school had started, or a month before it ended, which made it particularly hard to fit in, and make or keep friends. But I never asked why we were moving or why my father was so often without a regular job.

      Somehow, I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. On the rather innocuous question of how much money he made—kids were often comparing facts like that—he refused to tell us because he didn’t want us to lie if we were asked, and it wasn’t anyone’s business. It seemed clear that there was a lot that “wasn’t anyone’s business” and “we weren’t supposed to lie.”

      In 1954, reading in Scholastic’s “My Weekly Reader” that Vietnam in southeast Asia was splitting in two, with Catholics fleeing the Communist north, I wondered why they would want to escape communism. After the Hungarian revolution in the fall of 1956, I again wondered why people wanted to rebel against communism, and I resorted to the World Book encyclopedia, hoping to find answers there. In neither of these cases did I consider asking my parents.

      As a grownup, I didn’t press my parents much about their political beliefs, but when I did raise issues, I was put off by their responses. After reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, exposing the reality of the Soviet gulags, I asked my mother in the 1970s if she had read it. Her reply? “I don’t want to know bad things about the Soviet Union.”

      In the 1970s and ’80s, they joined the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association and traveled to China several times. When my father shared his house with a woman from China for several years, they argued often about the system in China; he couldn’t accept that the Marxist ideals he still believed in didn’t always work with actual people.

      When I talked to my father about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, he admitted it was okay for the students to ask for reforms, but “they shouldn’t criticize the government.” In a conversation about how Cuba was quarantining people who simply tested positive for HIV, he thought that was fine, asserting that you couldn’t trust people to have safe sex.

      Once I asked them what they’d thought when they heard about Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, and my father actually spoke those clichéd words, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

      When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, I felt liberated, like an anchor I’d been unaware of had vanished. My father saw the hand of the CIA in the USSR’s collapse. It didn’t occur to him that perhaps people living in the Soviet Union didn’t want it to exist and might want to live under some other system.

      In 1991, I began working with women activists in eastern Europe and we formed the Network of East-West Women; if their parents were dissidents, they’d also lived in secrecy about what their families believed—but if they were discovered, the possible consequences could be much worse than simply losing a job.

      In the late 1990s I contributed to the anthology Red Diapers: Growing Up on the Commumist Left. My chapter was titled “What Did I Know, and When Did I Know It?”

      Years earlier I’d asked my father whether he’d belonged to the Communist Party, and he said, “Yes, but a long time ago, and not for very long.” During WW II, he said, he belonged to a political discussion group in Washington, D.C., until learning that a woman in the group was talking to the government, and he quit because he didn’t want to lose his job in the War Department. I asked him again while writing the book chapter, and this time he said, “No,” but he had belonged to the Young Communist League as a teenager.

      So, was he even keeping secrets from himself?

      I’ve sometimes wondered whether the urge, or demand, for secrecy is what did in the left in confronting McCarthyism. The right-wing tried to tie communism to everything it hated, like the civil rights movement, government action to protect citizens, and peace organizations. I’d like to believe that if people called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee had said, yes, they did belong to the Communist Party, it was their political belief and so what, they could have defanged the notion that being a Communist was shameful. 

      As a grownup, I haven’t felt much affinity for communism, or even socialism. Perhaps it was my parents’ secrecy that led to me being open about my own life, as well as my career as an editor and copyeditor, the desire to get people to say what they mean clearly and directly.

      I became an activist against the Vietnam War, then for women’s liberation and then with women in eastern Europe, who’d lived under what they sarcastically referred to as “really existing socialism.” I feel sometimes that my activism is what my parents had not felt free to do, and perhaps it’s my rebellion against their secrecy.