One summer, on the cusp of middle age, Ann Kimmage traveled to Europe with her husband and two sons. On arrival in Prague, she switched immediately and naturally to Czech. Her sons gazed at her in astonishment. Clearly she had been there before. Could she explain? Thus did this American professor of literature, living quietly in upstate New York, begin a decadelong reckoning with the past, which culminated in a memoir of unusual wisdom and force.
Kimmage is hardly the first reddiaper baby to author a book, but her Un- American Childhood (University of Georgia Press, 260 pages, $ 29.95) is a model of the genre. It is balanced, objective, historically aware. It also tells an amazing, novelistic tale. The bookstores are bulging with reminiscences of youthful hardship — of alcoholic parents, uncommunicative parents, domineering parents, parents who failed to attend enough ball games or clarinet recitals. What of Communist parents who wrenched their children from their home and took them on a thirteen-year exile, subordinating every facet of their lives to totalitarian politics?
Kimmage’s parents were Abe and Belle Chapman, radicals of minor renown. He was an essayist and propagandist, she a faithful functionary and sometime editor. They started their family in Queens, where Ann lived until she was 8. These years she describes as peaceful, even idyllic, except for the occasional anti-Communist taunt on the playground. While her parents were orthodox Communists, her grandparents were Orthodox Jews, providing her with a counterexample that never fully left her. “Although I loved the excitement and stimulating atmosphere created by my parents and their intellectual friends,” she writes, “I was also drawn to the stability and calm reflected in my grandparents’ way of life.”
This season of innocence came to an abrupt end in 1950, just as Ann was completing the second grade. She and her older sister were awakened in the dead of night, whisked in a cab to Grand Central Station, and put on a train to Mexico. The family’s expatriation had begun. Ann would not return until 1963. She would be 21 years old, speak a foreigner’s English, and have forgotten her name.
Why did the family leave the United States? Kimmage cannot say, for her parents would not tell her — to their last breaths. Of one thing she feels certain: “I know the decision to flee was based on party instructions.” It is possible, she hazards, that the party sent her parents underground “to preserve its intellectual leadership for the future,” but “speculation is not a satisfying substitute for the facts.” She has been unable to determine “if our flight and subsequent exile were the result of something dangerous, worthy, noble, ignoble, or trivial.”
Once in Mexico, the Chapmans were shut up in a party-controlled farmhouse, where they awaited further orders from “the comrades in charge of our fate” (a sickening phrase and an inevitable theme of the book). Ann had moved from girlish gaiety to “concealment, isolation, and strangeness.” As her bewilderment increased and her sister grew physically ill, she thought, “Did my grandparents know where I was? Could they come find me, rescue me?”
Eventually, the family was installed in Prague, where Abe was to pen his tracts and Belle was to serve as a kind of den mother to Western Communists passing through the Eastern bloc. (The Chapman children, in accordance with radical custom, called their parents by their first names.) Ann’s first obligation was to submerge her former identity and adopt a new one. How does one succeed in forgetting the only name one has ever known? “An instinctual fear of consequences, coupled with not hearing its sound, wiped it out of my memory.” But despite the amorality relentlessly pressed on her, it bothered Ann to lie. She was conscious of falsehood and of her own uneasiness with it – – “the urge to tell the truth about my identity never left me.”
The Chapmans occupied a villa vacated by defectors, and Ann was sent to a Czech school, to blend imperceptibly with society. This she accomplished with gusto, becoming a dutiful pioneer and exalting the “earthly saints.” ” Greetings to you, beloved Comrade Stalin,” she sang. “You and Lenin have thrown open to us boundless sunny expanses, and filled us with hope and joy.” Hungrily, she sought the novels and films of socialist realism. And when she marched in May Day parades, bearing her comically Orwellian banners (” Limitless love for the great Stalin,” “Rejection of all remnants of bourgeois thinking and behavior”), she did so with unfeigned bliss.
But along the way, there were little Kronstadts. She grasped that she was sleeping in someone else’s bed. She could tell in the classroom that not all hearts were in the sloganeering. She noticed that old women furtively crossed themselves as they passed churches and averted their gazes from monuments to Stalin. In friends’ houses, she saw old photo albums and she fingered books, like Kafka’s, that were in disfavor. She judged older paintings to be superior to sanctioned ones. A secular burial, heavy with “nothingness,” frightened and confused her. She worried over reports of a crackdown on Jews. Party leaders, praised as redeemers only days before, were made to confess to atrocious crimes. A teacher of hers walked alone in a graveyard, paying homage to dead heroes whom he could not mention to his students. She heard a performance of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony and remembered “a portion of a street, a vague house, part of the way to a corner drugstore, and the faint outline of my grandmother’s face.” When the Soviets rolled into Budapest in 1956, she gave them the benefit of the doubt — “I reasoned that in Hungary the people were wild and that their Gypsy blood made them dissatisfied and restless” — but she nonetheless could feel all Prague tense around her.
In time, Abe and Belle became disillusioned with revolutionary progress in Czechoslovakia. So they set their sights on Mao’s China, where a thousand flowers were supposed to be blooming. They received permission to transfer to Peking (as Kimmage refreshingly transliterates it) in 1957.
Her parents were pleased with the change, but Ann, age 15, was not. She was loath to leave her home, her culture, her country. She was three years short of her highschool graduation. But she was tied to her parents and all they aspired to, and she had no choice but to be uprooted, once again.
China proved a particularly bizarre chapter of an already bizarre life. With the family lodged in a Soviet compound, Ann’s education took place entirely in Russian. Her primary tutor was the 16-year-old daughter of Spanish Communists, born in Moscow. Ann herself was far from an American, but her Soviet teachers demanded that she recount for her classmates the horrors of life in the United States, a land she barely knew.
The immense turmoil within young woman finally came to a boil, erupting in a long, cathartic letter to her parents — “a desperate plea for the truth.” She declared that she could “no longer live in silence,” that she was “worn out being a pawn.” She insisted on knowing why the family had left America and “why we could not return.” What was her “original family name”? This time, she wanted “more than just the fabricated story, more than the party line.” ” Surely I had to be worth it!”
She formed her words in phonetic English, because she could not spell. After keeping the letter for several weeks, “frightened it would devastate” Abe and Belle, she slipped it under their door. The next day, they invited her out for a walk. After an uncomfortable silence, Belle told her daughter, ” It is safer for you not to know, for what you don’t know nobody can get you to talk about. We cannot tell you anything.” Abe, normally a fount of volubility, “sat hunched over, gently rocking his body,” unable to console his daughter, unable to speak to her, unable even to look at her. Always, ” family needs were secondary to the party commands.” Not again did Ann attempt to breach the parental wall. That day, “I broke my childhood chains.”
Soon, the environment in Peking turned uncongenial to the Chapmans and their fellow foreign apparatchiks. The government viewed them as potential subversives. Friends were arrested, vanishing “without farewells.” “Self- criticisms” began to speck the city, tacked to bulletin boards, strung from clotheslines. With relief, the family boarded a train back to Prague in 1959. As it pulled from the station, Ann heard her mother murmur, “I wasn’t sure we were going to get out in time” — a moment of exceptional candor.
At last “home,” Ann completed her schooling and entered the Czech “fast lane” as a government translator and interpreter. She was part of the nomenklatura and knew that her work contributed to a false picture of Communist society, designed to deceive both West and East. Yet when her parents maneuvered, in 1963, to sail with their younger daughter back to their country of origin (the older daughter had married and would stay), Ann was furious. Not only was she a Czech, she was virtually an antiAmerican.
The exile might have been “a casual addendum” to her parents’ lives, but it was the meat of her own. And now she was required — by her parents? by the party? (was there a difference?) — to enter the U.S. embassy, in front of which she had participated in vigorous demonstrations, and embrace an identity she had once been denied and no longer wished to reclaim. After their ship docked in New York, Abe and Belle could pick up the pieces and live out their lives as admired “free spirits.” But Ann’s pieces were elsewhere, and she would have to begin anew. She buried those thirteen years – – deep — until faced with the curiosity of her sons and the task of remembering, recording, and understanding.
Not every life deserves to be chronicled. Not every story deserves to be published and sold. But Ann Kimmage has something to say, and An Un- American Childhood is not only an interesting book, but a useful one. The Soviet empire collapsed less than a decade ago, but for some, reflecting on communism is akin to reflecting on the Peloponnesian wars. It is bracing, then, to be reminded of the drama of communism, of its absurdities and seductions, of the wreckage it made (and, in China and elsewhere, is still making) of countless lives.
Kimmage meets the difficult challenge of remaining touchingly loyal to her parents — for whom her love is obvious and abundant — and (relatively) clear-eyed about what she euphemistically refers to as their “political commitments.” She has yet to shed the vocabulary of the Left and is wont to throw around words like “witch hunt,” “anti-Communist hysteria,” and “the McCarthy persecutions” (in what might be regarded as her true native tongue). She characterizes the execution of the Rosenbergs as “the most brutal and inhuman expression of McCarthyism.” Yet, though she winces at history, she does not blink in the end, recognizing that, in the long, twilight struggle, the side that ought to have lost, did.
An Un-American Childhood is chiefly concerned with loyalties and identity. “Who was I to believe?” she asks. “My parents, their parents, the state, or my own judgment?” Before Abe died, he had a quasi-reconciliation with his ancestral faith. And because he was a veteran of World War II, an American flag was draped over his coffin (which Belle refused to keep, depositing it in a postal box). Belle, for her part, stayed adamant, although her daughter discovered that, shortly before she died, she sent a birthday card to her mother, whom she had not spoken to or about in decades. Her final words were, “Mama. Mama.”
This Communist pair was exceedingly lucky to have a daughter as large- hearted as Kimmage. “The fall of communism,” she writes, “may now make it possible for us to be more compassionate and less judgmental about the winners and losers of the Cold War and more conscious of the twisted lives left in its wake.” Perhaps, but An Un-American Childhood, even if despite itself, is laden with judgment, indicting a wicked philosophy that turns parents into sadists and little girls into tremblers.
By Jay Nordlinger
