In 1918, the sociologist Max Weber proposed in one of his lectures that the new European world order was one of disenchantment. The premodern era, Weber said, had been like an “enchanted garden” rife with sacral meaning. But the age of technology, rapid modernization, and secularization had paved the way for a collective “entzauberung,” or “demagification.”
Weber’s analysis was relatively simplistic, of course. While it’s certainly true that the 20th century saw its share of disenchantment, it also saw the flourishing of sacralized narratives and potent myths, although not necessarily supernatural ones. Few of these myths attracted as much idealistic fervor as communism.
Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, equal parts memoir and oral history of the old guard of the Communist Party USA, captures precisely the religious character — the wild optimism, the sanctified joy, and the ferocious dogmatism — of this disenchanted faith. First published in 1977 and republished in April, Gornick’s book feels as relevant now as it ever did. As new secular movements, from reactionary atavism to progressive social justice activism, capture our imaginations and provide us with a feeling of belonging, The Romance of American Communism provides a valuable glimpse into just how vital these movements can be — and how potent they are at creating community.
“If they could place themselves,” Gornick writes of her Jewish, working-class family, “they could become themselves. … These people had no external nationhood; nothing in the cultures they had left, or the one to which they had come, had given them anything but a humiliating sense of outsiderness. The only nationhood to which they had attained was the nationhood inside their minds: the nationhood of the international working class.”
Gornick, a child of communists who as an adult became heavily involved in feminist politics, acknowledges that she sees the movement through the rose-colored lens of childhood. But the “romance” part of The Romance of American Communism is integral to its strength. Gornick’s childhood wonder melds with the lovingly depicted but clear-eyed nostalgia of her subjects. At its core, The Romance of American Communism is less about communism than about the search for the sacred. It is the story of human beings who sought, as Gornick writes of one communist party member, “a political vision” that could make them “more human than [they] ever dreamed [they] could be.”
Gornick meets with and interviews ex-Communists — elderly Jews in Greek coffee shops, melancholic trust-funders, ebullient dressmakers. Their expansive personalities are carefully and affectionately rendered. And as Gornick’s narrative moves along, she largely cedes the floor to her subjects’ personalities and words.
Some rhapsodize about the sense of ebullience they felt as youths. “The world was around you all the time,” one of Gornick’s subjects recounts. “That was the tremendous thing about these times. The sense of history that you lived with daily. The sense of remaking the world. Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world … my father’s bitter, forgotten life. I felt myself vindicating that life, and the millions of lives like this, pulling my father back inside the circle of the world.” Another interviewee recalls how the support of the communist party gave his friend the courage to stand up to her Orthodox Jewish father and marry the Chinese man she loved.
Other subjects have more ambivalent takes on their pasts. One especially arresting section tells the story of Paul and Laura Levinson, a married couple who, it becomes clear, wed less out of love or compatibility than out of a desire to live up to the expectations of the party. “If we broke up we were betraying the revolution,” Paul recalls. Elsewhere, we encounter an interviewee who maintains that they were not part of any of the party’s internal expulsion trials, only to find out that they presided over the expulsion of another of Gornick’s subjects. Among the most bittersweet passages in the book comes in the final chapter, when Gornick sees in the infighting of the feminist movement that had given her a renewed sense of purpose echoes of the internal strife that doomed communism. “So this is how it all happened,” Gornick recalled thinking. “This is how all that treachery came about. Who on earth can deal with all this fear and anger? No one. Ever. Not then, not now.”
If there is a flaw in The Romance of American Communism, it is one of pacing. After the early sections of the book, which recall Gornick’s childhood with the lovingly exasperated detail of a Natalia Ginzburg (or, ironically, a Nancy Mitford), the remainder consists of a series of profiles of different party members: “White, black, rich, poor, Jew, Gentile, American-born, foreign-born, abandoned, adored, put up with; from the rural South, from the shopkeeping Midwest, from the bleakness of the Depression Dust Bowl and the get-rich-quick hunger of California in the 1920s.”
Each, in its way, is fascinating. But after a few hundred pages, the format starts to feel repetitive: character studies rather than a fully developed narrative.
Each of these characters, however, strengthens the crux of Gornick’s argument. “Nothing in the twentieth century has spoken as compellingly — with such power and moral imagination — to this need [within the human spirit] to say no to the judgment of man upon man that is the politicalness of life.” Every one of Gornick’s subjects, in their varying ways, tells us that.
Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the author of the forthcoming book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
