Sister Ethel: On the Run, Living Underground in America
It was like, yesterday
In 1978, as a 20 year old first-year student, I did a series of oral history interviews with legendary activist Ethel Bertolini, who survived some of the toughest times of the Blacklist Years in the 1950s. She lived underground for years.
Sometimes a homework assignment leads . . . to a dear friendship. There’s so much there to explore, and if you interview a willing subject, especially someone who’s fed up with being quiet, you are going to hit the mother lode.
So, about Ethel: If you’ve ever hung your head and cried, “Has America seen such dark times before, in decades?” — 1 listen to Ethel’s story, and you’ll be reminded the answer is YES.
Ethel’s miracle was that she survived to tell the tale. She was a Ukrainian Jew who fled the Russian pograms as a child. In America, she was a socialist in the most barbaric red-scare era— she was an immigrant, a Jew, a union member— it was the trifecta of persecution targets. The number of times she was marked for violence, for imprisonment, for deportation is unreal. — The crazy part was that she remembered it all, with darkest humor.
There is nothing like “living through it,” to get the joke.
Her life depended on “SAY NOTHING.” It was a leap for me to ask her to unburden herself, to ignore the party lines and niceties. The timing was right, and I also think if we hadn’t had a certain chemistry, the interviews wouldn’t have happened. She saw some of herself in me, too.
How We Began
In 1978, I took what the influential class of my college education: Women’s Oral History, at CSULB. Sherna Gluck taught us how to interview strangers, how to listen closely, how to get things no one talks about. No J-school experience could touch it.
The “women’s angle,” was that unlike most history research, we looked into what is euphemistically called domestic life, the biological blood passages of women’s lives, the unspoken areas of women’s work.
Each time Ethel and I got together, with my cassette recorder, we hung out in her sunspot, her Ocean Park kitchen. This was not a woman who sat around! Her hands were always in motion, never at rest. She taught me how to cultivate yogurt, and from the yogurt, to make a simple cheese. I remember her laughing when my eyes popped at how good it was.
She said she was an expert at making “something out of nothing.”
Below, you’ll find our recordings, and my notes, which were originally hand-written. Handwritten! Those were the days.
Another thing I loved about 70-something Ethel, was that she welcomed my questions about sex, desire, and “free love.” She had an avant-garde sexual life in her teens and young womanhood. Just as I was experiencing at 20 in 1978, sexual freedom was celebrated by one part of the socialist movement, while others were prudes, and did their best to shame and expel us.
Ethel had the Emma Goldman spirit; she believed in emancipation and sexual liberation from the 1930s, onward! No one was going to put Baby in the corner. I can’t help thinking about her in those terms, what a role model she was. All her dark years living on the run, underground— it was amazing to be around her generous and vivacious spirit. I don’t think she quite understood it, either.
The Mini Bio
Ethel Shapiro-Bertolini was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant to the US in the 20s, and a longtime organizer for the Communist Party (CP), from the time she joined the Young Communist League (YCL) in 1926, til her expulsion in the 70s.
She went underground at the Party’s orders in 1951. Ethel lived in danger and deprivation, four years on the run. It destroyed her health and changed her habits forever.
In her 40s, she married another party activist, the singer and printer, Angelo Bertolini. She remained a CP member, uneasily, until she was expelled in 1974, over bupkis.
Ethel published a Roman a clef, and a book of letters from prisoners called Through the Wall: Prison Correspondence. 1 She also wrote a small book on Martin Luther King: I Never Died Said He.
She finally became a US citizen in 1985, after fighting deportation hearings since the 1950s. The LA Times covered it!
When Ethel Shapiro Bertolini finally became an American citizen on July 15, her citizenship day was almost comical.
“After 30 years of waiting, my car conks out on the freeway,” the small, 75-year-old woman recalled. The beautiful, wavy red hair that once earned her the nickname “Red,” or “Red Ethel”— a fact raised for different reasons at deportation hearings during the McCarthy era— is now black and flecked with gray.
She wanted to call her lawyer about the freeway delay but: “I can’t get a telephone because a man was making dates and wouldn’t relinquish,” she explained, her demeanor still as intense as ever, her blue eyes magnified and keenly staring from behind her large glasses.
Audio Interview 1
Bertolini (Shapiro), Ethel — (audio interview #1 of 3)
Ethel was born in 1909 in the Ukraine. She remembers the constant movement of soldiers through her village during WWI. After the Russian Revolution, they experienced a brief period of stability, which was shattered when the communists were driven out by Polish and German armies and violent pogroms were instituted.
Her family sought refuge with a Gentile family on several occasions to avoid persecution.
Bertolini's family left the Ukraine in several waves, beginning with her parents. After reuniting with her family in Poland, they made arrangements to immigrate to the US., but as a result of paperwork problems, her father was left behind in Germany.
Bertolini's father worked as a leather merchant, purchasing and selling leather to peasants. Although the other homes in the village were primitive, the home her father built was well constructed. They obtained their water from a nearby lake or from a peasant who made rounds delivering water.
Their living conditions were “uncultivated and undeveloped and the sanitary conditions were horrible.” During warm weather, they bathed and washed their clothes in the river. Otherwise, the entire family shared bath water as well as used it for cooking.
She spent her childhood playing in the forest and at a lake near her home.
Bertolini and her siblings did not attend public school because of anti-Semitism. She received some instruction at a private Hebrew school. When communists took control of their village during the Russian Revolution, Jewish children were sent to school. She describes her mother as an intelligent and well-read woman whose strength and ingenuity helped her family adjust to life in the US.
Her father was strictly Orthodox and was looked upon by others “as a saint.” He father immigrated to the US prior to WWI and was not allowed to return to the Ukraine during the war. In the US, he took up cigar making and opened a business in his home because he refused to work on the Sabbath or Jewish holidays. Occasionally, Bertolini helped her parents strip tobacco and roll cigars.
Ethel spoke of both fond and traumatic memories of her life in the Ukraine. She can still recall the sound of soldiers entering their village to commit crimes of rape and theft during pogroms. Occasionally, they were forewarned of their presence by villagers yelling, "The killers are coming!" She learned how to run and hide during pogroms, frequently into the homes of friendly Gentiles.
Bertolini's childhood activities included making dolls and slippers. She could not recall if she played with boys. The boys attended Hebrew schools, which "were run by very bigoted, backward and ignorant men who would try to beat education into the heads of these young kids."
When she and two siblings left the Ukraine, a gentile transported them across the Polish border by hiding them in his wagon under a bale of hay.
During the Russian Revolution, one of Bertolini's sisters became a Communist and greeted the Red Army as they entered the village by hanging a red flag in front of their home. She also allowed the soldiers to help themselves to her father's leather supply because they needed boots. Her father was not upset by this action because "at the time, we knew that as Jews, our only salvation was the Red Army... we looked forward to them marching in."
I asked her about “discipline” at home. Although she and her siblings occasionally misbehaved, they rarely gave their parents reason to be cross. She could recall only one occasion when her father physically reprimanded her after he caught her playing cards. Her siblings were devoted to one another. It was difficult for the entire family when her oldest brother and sister went away to school.
Even though there was a hospital in Bertolini's village, the Jewish women in the community gave birth at home. Sex and reproduction was considered a taboo subject and not discussed in her family. When her older sisters started menstruating, "it became a secret in the family." When she started to wear a bra, she put it on under the covers so that no one would see her. She learned most of the information about these subjects from her girlfriends not her relatives.
Bertolini's family left the Ukraine in waves and ultimately reunited in Poland where they lived for a year and a half. While there, they received assistance from a Jewish organization that aided refugees trying to immigrate to the US. They lived in a flat with several Jewish families in a small, Polish community where "anti-Semitic breakouts were just as bad as the ones in the Ukraine."
They then moved to Germany to await the arrival of their father from Poland. Conditions in Germany were far better than in Poland and her family was not harassed. They boarded a ship bound for the US in 1922. (Interesting to think how that would change in a few years). Their paperwork and passage was financed by relatives living in Chicago.
The passage to the US took seventeen days. Terrible conditions as you’ve heard. People suffered from sea sickness during most of the trip. Her older sister's boyfriend accompanied the family on the voyage and he doted on her and the rest of the family the entire time. Her sister was not in love with this man, as she had fallen in love with someone she met at school and "that was the kind of love affair that the entire family was involved in." Although her oldest sister pursued a relationship with a man who accompanied them on the passage to America, she pined for her lover from Odessa for the rest of her life.
As the youngest in the family, Bertolini was coddled by her parents and her siblings. Others often commented on her cute features of red hair, rosy cheeks, and freckles. Talking about her siblings, she notes that they were old enough to feel the affects of the pogroms to a greater extent than she did.
She believes that her brother did not develop intellectually past the age of fifteen or sixteen as a result of his traumatic experiences in the Ukraine.
One of her sisters fell in love with one of their cousins in the Red Army and converted to communism. When they arrived in the US, her sister joined the YCL and remained a communist her entire life.
Bertolini's family stay on Ellis Island was brief because their paperwork was in order and supervised by HIAS, as the Jewish relief organization known. Although her name was not changed at Ellis Island, her age was, and she does not know exactly how old she is.
After her family left Ellis Island, they boarded a train in New York to Chicago. Bertolini was homesick. Although she’d mastered languages before, she was resistant to learning English. She did not arrive in time for the school year and spent the summer missing her homeland and expressing her sadness in a series of poems, which were destroyed when their basement was flooded.
When they arrived in Chicago, Bertolini's family rented a small apartment that was equipped with two gas stoves, one for cooking and the other heating the apartment. They got electricity one or two years after they moved in. Although their living conditions were unsanitary, the women in the family kept their home clean. Her older siblings went to work to help support the family, and they all went to night school to learn English.
Talking about her marriage, she notes that both she and her husband matured late in life and it took awhile to feel comfortable with being physically affectionate towards one another. And, I note, it was after she had lived underground for so long.
Bertolini was athletic when she was younger. When she started junior high school, her first priority was developing a girls' baseball team of which she was the captain. They played against the boys' baseball team. She was offered several athletic scholarships and thought about pursuing a career as a physical education teacher.
In the early 1930s, Bertolini returned to the Soviet Union and competed in a women's international run in which she represented the US. People often made references to her being unladylike because she was athletic. They also called her the "Virgin Mary" and were careful not to discuss inappropriate topics in her presence.
Bertolini received three years of schooling in Chicago, going through nine grades in those three years as a result of skipping a few grades. Although she disliked school, she was a perfectionist and had to do everything well, which was both "a curse and a blessing."
When she went to work as a seamstress, she surpassed her employer's skills. She also excelled in business college, completing every course offered at the school in nine months. She was the fastest shorthand writer and typist in her class.
When Bertolini finished business college, she held a few office positions for a year before she was hired by the YCL to travel around the country as a paid organizer. Among her family and friends, everyone lived a relatively comfortable life and were totally unprepared for the crash.
Approximately six months after the rest of the family arrived in the US, Bertolini's father was permitted to leave Europe and join the family in Chicago. He opened up a cigar factory on the back porch of their home. Most people were unprepared for the Depression and had no savings to fall back on. While the government reported that prosperity was around the corner, people were being thrown out on the streets in droves because of mass unemployment and evictions.
Her family survived during the Depression through her father's cigar sales and the money he and her brother made selling newspapers. At the time, she was working for the YCL and frequently went without food because the YCL could not afford to pay its organizers. She took up smoking during this period and it helped ease her hunger pangs.
Bertolini dedicated 22 years to the socialist movement. At one point, the CP asked her to work in the garment industry and organize workers, during which time she became a highly skilled seamstress. She worked in that trade for ten years.
Audio Interview #2
We began by talking more about her early YCL years. It was also the 30’s era of what would later be called the civil rights movement, the rights of Black Americans.
While organizing for the CP, Bertolini traveled with a small suitcase and hitchhiked her way to her destinations. Although she was not afraid, hitchhiking was not considered a respectable activity and she notes, "You would get a little razzle and ridicule from the people who picked you up." She describes her experiences hitching a ride with four, young men while on her way to the YCL National Convention in New York. CP funds were generally low and she could rarely afford to stay in a hotel. More often than not, she stayed the night in the private home of a stranger or a comrade.
With the money she earned organizing for the CP/YCL, Bertolini purchased books from the party's bookstore, which was located downstairs from the party headquarters on Division Street. Reading and studying were her main interests until the age of twenty-five when she began dating.
One of her favorite periodicals was the International Press Correspondence. When she did not earn enough money to buy books, she would sneak them into her bag. The owner of the store turned a blind eye, knowing youngsters like her were thirsty for knowledge and could not afford to purchase the books they needed.
Bertolini did not earn enough money while she was with the CP/YCL to buy luxury items. For several weeks she admired a blue, silk dress displayed in a store window. She describes the dress, stating that its high neckline and long sleeves were appealing because they would hide the parts of her body about which she was the most self-conscious. The dress cost $17, which was more than she made in a month. While she was working in Gary, Indiana a couple of years later, she saved up enough money to purchase such a dress.
Bertolini's first dating experience was with a comrade who worked as a union organizer. Their relationship did not last long because he also was involved with a pretty, middle-class professional, a sharp contrast to Bertolini's political work and tomboyish looks and mannerisms.
One of her comrades instructed her on matters of the heart and how to improve her appearance so that she could get a date. . .
Bertolini described one affair with a Black comrade. After they saw a movie together, he rented a room for the night so that they could spend time together without dealing with discrimination on the street. She was not offended by this arrangement and greatly appreciated that he "would not have me parade around on the south side as his date." When they entered the rooming house, however, the woman who greeted them looked at Bertolini as if she was a prostitute. Their relationship did not go beyond one or two dates, it was too difficult.
While organizing a YCL branch in Buffalo, New York in the 1930s, Bertolini pursued a serious relationship with a comrade who was the head of the CP branch there and for whom she worked as an assistant. During their relationship, she looked upon him as her husband. They split up when she found out that he was involved with another woman with whom he had a child.
She learned that he was a stool pigeon for the government after he testified against her when she was arrested on a deportation order in 1952.
Bertolini's comrades were neither promiscuous nor sexually rigid. They did not conform to the mainstream morals regarding sexuality and the notion that a woman was supposed to save herself for marriage. While no one discussed these matters openly, her comrades felt free to express themselves sexually with one another, which "led to extremely deep friendships and dedications."
Couples often traveled together on organizing drives, many of which raised families together whether or not they were married.
Bertolini never personally used birth control before she married, but depended on the men she was with whom she was sexually active to use condoms. She reiterates that these matters were peripheral to her political activities and do not stand out in her mind as anything memorable. [“But they are to me! It’s all political” I said, until she shushed me].
In 1933, the CP/YCL chose her to go abroad for study because of her contributions to the party and her effectiveness in organizing young people. She spent over a year in the Soviet Union traveling as far as the Soviet-Chinese border. After she left Russia, she spent several months traveling through various parts of Europe. She recalls spending her twenty-fifth birthday with comrades in Asiatic Russia. She returned to the states some time in 1936, indicating that she spent a total of two years in Europe. When she returned from Europe in 1936, the CP sent Bertolini to Gary, Indiana to assist the branch leader. When he left, she was placed in charge of the branch. During her four years there, the steelworkers union was formed.
The CP was integral in organizing the communist forces in the city in support of the union and the Steelworkers Organizing Committee. “They knew that if they were going to get the union on the map they had to get the CP to work with them."
During the campaign, she wrote articles and distributed leaflets for the union. When union organizers were unsuccessful in signing workers, she distributed application cards to her comrades in the steel mills and they were effective in organizing the work force into the union.
Bertolini notes that in the 1930s, unemployed communists were more likely to openly express their affiliation with the party, making clear that they were adherents of the Soviet Union, "the socialist motherland."
She believes that their failure to acknowledge the problems occurring in Russia in the late 1930s isolated them and made it difficult to recruit a large following in the US.
During the 1930s, the party regularly called meetings and organized Unemployed Councils, as well as distributing the party newspaper.
The employed comrades, however, had a tendency to conceal their party affiliation. These people distributed communist literature in secret and rarely revealed themselves as communists when they joined a union.
She digresses regarding the reasons why communists were accepted by steelworkers during the period they organized their union. She was called “Red Stevens” by her comrades because of her hair color. During the period she helped organize the steelworkers union, she was the only woman from the CP.
She became more conscious of the sexist mentality in the CP. She frequently had to deal with people who gave her “the shit work: and took political credit for her accomplishments”. Occasionally, she wrote articles criticizing the male chauvinistic tendencies in the party.
Women who joined the auxiliary groups were militants who showed their support for the steelworkers by participating in strikes, guarding gates to keep out scabs, and supplying picketers with food.
However, the men held onto their traditional views towards women. —Even though she was the opposite of a man's image of a woman because she was a chain smoker and visited taverns to collect CP dues.
Bertolini was not critical of John L. Lewis's decision to disassociate the steelworkers union from the communists after the union was organized. She notes that they were prepared for it; It worked both ways. She believes that it would have been very difficult to bring workers into the CP without getting involved in their labor struggles.
Like many people in the Party, she anticipated that Lewis would try to break up their collaboration because he was a reactionary. By 1940, Bertolini had been arrested at least twenty-five times. When the war broke out and the Alien and Sedition Acts were imposed, the CP asked that all non-citizens in the party apply for citizenship so as not to jeopardize the party's standing as a legitimate anti-war organization.
However, she was denied citizenship because of her arrest record, at which time the CP asked her to leave Gary, Indiana and arranged for her to go into hiding.
She traveled around the country doing odd jobs like waitressing and domestic work. The most difficult years of her underground experience occurred between 1951-56 when she was hiding from the McCarthyists.
She later wrote a novel entitled, When the Storm Broke, detailing this period.
In 1940, Bertolini went to work in the New York office of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE). Because the union preferred that their organizers come up from the ranks, they asked her to get a job at a metal shop to prepare her.
At the time, the company was slowly introducing women into the factory and sexism was widespread. The men in the shop tried to sabotage her by smashing tomatoes on her machinery and tripping her while she walked through the factory.
She befriended a man in the tool and dye area who asked her to be his assistant and taught her many skills, as well as protected her from the men in the shop.
After obtaining several promotions, the UE took her out of the shop and hired her as a full-time organizer. She continued her communist activities and refused to leave the party.
While working for the UE, Bertolini developed a social services department, for which the union received $10,000 in city funds. The department provided referrals to families suffering from the work and domestic pressures of the war. She also organized blood and war bond drives to aid the war effort and collaborated with various community groups in order to establish a united front "to relieve the pressure among the workers in the shop."
Besides her, the staff of the social services department consisted of two social workers. During this period, more and more women moved into production work and were faced with discrimination in terms of poor jobs and slow promotions, but "at least the doors were open for women to get into industry."
While Bertolini worked for the UE, she sent some of her earnings to her parents in Chicago. When she visited them, her mother tried to give her back this money but she refused to accept it. Her father continued his work as a cigar maker. He established a regular clientele, which included several accounts with delicatessens in the Chicago area.
Whenever she visited her parents, she helped them roll cigars. Her parents admired both Bertolini and her sister for their dedication to the communist movement. They concealed their daughters' activities when necessary and did not reveal to anyone when Bertolini visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Ethel talked about the time her father visited her in jail. She was arrested twenty-nine times, usually serving sentences of no more than two weeks to a month. She was arrested and served three months in New York County penitentiary following a demonstration at the city council for the purposes of obtaining milk money for unemployed families.
She recalls this period fondly, stating that the forty women in jail ate in the officers' kitchen while male prisoners ate in the regular cafeteria. She worked in the sewing department and taught other prisoners how to operate a sewing machine.
Audio Interview #3
Shortly after WWII ended, Bertolini's father died and she was called home to Chicago to attend his funeral. She remained there as a party organizer until 1949. She led a delegation from Chicago to New York to protest the prosecution of the CP's national leaders under the Smith Act (formally known as the Alien and Registration Act of 1940).2 They picketed in front of the courthouse for about five or six days. They returned to Chicago after Judge Harold Medina convicted and sentenced the CP leaders to prison.
When Bertolini returned to Chicago following the protest at the Smith Act trial, she decided to move to California in anticipation of getting married and starting a family.
She requested a transfer in the CP and moved to California at the end of 1949 or the beginning in 1950. When she arrived in California, she moved into her sister's home in the Los Angeles area. Once in Los Angeles, the CP assigned her to work in the garment industry to recruit for the CP as well as help unionize workers for the ILGWU. She learned new skills quickly and worked as an operator, a finisher and a sample maker. She worked in several different shops because she was fired each time her employer found out she was talking to workers about the union.
Within a year, she established connections with about 200 Black and Chicana women employed in the needle trades.
On average, she only earned $18-20/week, which was far less than other highly-skilled garment workers, some of whom also were members of the CP.
In 1951, the CP ordered Bertolini to go underground to avoid arrest for her communist activities. She spent four years in hiding, which she describes as the most traumatic experience of her life. It has left her physically altered.
In the first city where she moved, Bertolini rented a room from a woman who worked as a waitress and prostituted herself for money and luxury items.
Bertolini changed her appearance while she was in hiding, but was unable to conceal her red hair and heavy accent. During the nine months she lived in one city, she earned a living doing alterations and domestic work. She was forced to leave that place when she recognized a comrade who was later revealed as an FBI agent. In total, she lived in sixteen different places while she was in hiding.
After moving to another city while she was underground, Bertolini was hired as a seamstress for a clothing designer whose clientele included the wealthiest women in the city. They became friends and Bertolini eventually agreed to accompany her employer to a concert. Waiting for the concert to begin, Bertolini was approached by an FBI agent and questioned about her identity, indicating that she changed her name and social security number when she moved to a new city.
She immediately left that city and learned years later that her employer was interrogated by the FBI about her association with Bertolini. Bertolini never told anyone she was affiliated with the CP while she was in hiding.
Bertolini met her future husband, Angelo, in 1950 at a dance organized by radicals in the Latino community of east Los Angeles. She was forty-five and he was forty-three. They dated for a short time before she was forced to go underground.
During the period they were apart, she thought about him often and he frequently inquired about her well-being with her sister. Bertolini corresponded with her sister by passing letters through an underground mail system managed by the CP.
The CP gave her permission to come out of hiding in 1955 when it became clear that Joseph McCarthy and his campaign against the CP was losing momentum.
Bertolini recalls that his demise began when he attacked army officials and was censored. At that time, most of her comrades ended their period of underground activities and there was a resurgence in the radical movement. Prior to coming out of hiding, she wrote CP leaders and criticized the party for going underground.
At that time, her request to resume a normal lifestyle was rejected by the CP. After she was allowed to come out of hiding, she rekindled her relationship with Angelo at a New Year's Eve party in 1955.
They were in their forties when they decided to marry, and they scheduled their wedding for May 1st of that year. In April 1956, they planned a dinner with friends and family to announce their engagement.
Just before the dinner party, however, she was arrested by FBI and immigration officials on a deportation order. She was taken to a jail cell at the immigration office. Her friends raised enough money to post her bail later that evening.
After she married, Bertolini returned to work in the garment industry and spent her spare time writing. In 1960, she quit working and decided to focus on her writing activities.
Bertolini discusses the 1956 reports of Joseph Stalin purging the old guard of the CP. A substantial number of people in the American CP left the party following these reports. Although she felt that Stalin's actions were unjust, she went along with his explanation that he did what was necessary "for the revolution and to protect the socialist state."
There was little discussion in the party regarding his actions and people were simply told to take it or leave it.
Even though she accepted this stance, she ran into conflicts with the party when she questioned things of this nature years later. Some discussion was generated in 1959 following the release of a book documenting the developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership. Her first book, And My Heart was at Home, chronicled the persecution of foreign-born communists during the McCarthy era.
John Howard Lawson, a playwright, John Howard Lawson, with whom she worked for six months on the book, wrote jacket copy for the book. [Lawson was one of the "Hollywood Ten."]
The book was used by the “Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born” during its efforts to prevent the government from deporting 160 foreigners, including Bertolini.
Ethel was active in anti-war and civil rights protests until 1968 when she was taken aback by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She believes that her criticism of and conflict with the party regarding this incident contributed to her subsequent expulsion in 1974, which was ostensibly over a petty matter — refusing to attend a lecture the Party ordered her and Angelo to show up for.
Bertolini agrees with Dorothy Healey's assessment that the CP began to discourage discussions relative to Soviet matters around 1967. In fact, Bertolini's main argument during her citizenship proceedings has been that her membership in the CP after 1967 "was not meaningful and that citizenship has been won for other members of the CP that did not have a meaningful membership with the party."
The most difficult aspect of being expelled from the CP was losing the friendships she developed over the fifty-year period she was a member.
On a positive note, however, she and Angelo’s expulsion was "one of the most liberating experiences for us . . . We removed those pink eyeglasses that were shading our vision and I began to read and study things from an international perspective, not from the viewpoint of what Stalin use to say or what the party feeds me."
Although she was no longer a member of any political organizations, her original beliefs and interests remained the same.
"Those (years in YCL) were the rich and fulfilling years of my life. Anything that I learned was because I was inspired by socialism . . ." Her biggest regret was not fighting the party on the underground orders during the McCarthy Era.
PostScript
Ethel is not around anymore. I was so lucky to meet her, during her last decade when she was still healthy and unstoppable.
When I turned in my “homework” to my college class, I didn’t make copies of the tapes or my original handwritten notes. The very memory still nauseates me What was I thinking? I wasn’t. That would be the last time I ever turned over originals without copies.
For decades, I would check to see if the college could give me a copy, and then said, “No, you have to get special permission to see the files, in person, etc.”
Another publishing lesson about “who owns the I.P” was imparted to me.
But then, quite by accident, a family member of another one of my interviewees, Bessie Letwin, told me that the tapes had been digitized and were publicly accessible.
Although the editor’s notes on the page are a little rude — whomever did the archives was probably not imagining how many people would eventually study these records— it is still invaluable. And going over these records, all these years later, has been a revelation to me. I am just about the age she was, when we first met.
I want to thank Alita Letwin, who introduced me to Ethel, and made our friendship possible. Alita brought people together like no one else.
In Case You Missed It
Here’s an internet archive copy
This is what Trump et al is reenacting today.
“Her hands were always in motion, never at rest. … She said she was an expert at making “something out of nothing.””