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, fo…