|
Some books can indeed be judged by their
covers, and this is one of them. The interesting photo it bears is an
accurate reflection of its contents. A familiar face looks out from
familiar surroundings, but history is somehow out of joint here: It’s
Leon Trotsky, his wife Natalya, and three younger people sitting
together on the stoop of a New York City apartment building.
Trotsky did spend a little time in Manhattan
and the Bronx, to be sure, but it was when he was a young man, and in
this photo he is clearly no longer a youth. The photo has been
doctored, but to honorable purpose because it is a good allegorical fit
for a novel about how Trotsky affected a generation of youth in New
York in the 1930s.
One of the three young people in the cover
photo is the author herself, Lillian Pollak, a remarkable woman, and
this book, while ostensibly a work of fiction, can be read as a
slightly fictionalized memoir of her coming of age in a Communist Party
milieu at a time when Stalin’s crimes were becoming all too apparent.
Lillian’s alter ego, Miriam, is portrayed as a "Jimmy
Higgins"—a rank-and-file member of the nascent Trotskyist movement
who did a great deal of organizational work but found the interminable
polemic-heavy meetings leading up to a major split difficult to endure.
The novel form allows the author to convey
the "feel" of those turbulent times with more imaginative
flare than might have been the case had she stuck to a strictly factual
format. Lillian Pollak, now 93 years old, was a firebrand of an activist
in the nineteen-thirties, and today, in the two-thousand-aughts,
continues to be a pain in the arse of the ruling clarse. In a
singularly effective example of political theater, she and her fellow
"Raging Grannies" not long ago descended in force upon an
Army recruiting center in midtown Manhattan to demand that
they—octogenarians and nonagenarians all—be allowed to enlist for
active duty in Iraq in place of the youth who are being sent there as
cannon fodder.
Like the cover photo, the book’s narrative is
"not quite" true—not completely historically accurate—but its
story line is based on the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky and many
of its characters are real people, including numerous historical
figures with recognizable names. Denizens of the intellectual and
cultural milieu of the early CPUSA and beyond pop in and out of these
pages: Max Eastman, Delmore Schwartz, John Dos Passos, George Orwell,
Ernest Hemingway, Paul Robeson, Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow, Helen
Tamiris, and many more. Some of these have cameo roles, but some are
more centrally involved in the narrative.
The historical figures most critical to the
plot are the Trotskyists (and at least one pseudo-Trotskyist) whom the
author knew personally. Among them were Leon Trotsky himself, his wife
Natalya, Jean Van Heijenoort, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and several
leaders and rank-and-filers of the Trotskyist movement in the United
States, including "Jim" Cannon, Max Schactman, Joseph Hansen,
Harry Milton, Bunny Guyer, and the Ageloff sisters—Hilda, Ruth, and
Sylvia. And then there was Ruby Weil, who introduced Sylvia Ageloff
into a fateful liaison with a fellow who claimed to be a Belgian named
Jacques Mornard, but was really a Spaniard named Ramón Mercader.
With Trotsky’s assassination as its
denouement, the novel is not likely to have readers with knowledge of
that event sitting on the edge of their chairs wondering how it will
end. Its appeal resides in the author’s depictions, based in her
personal experience, of the assassin Mercader and of Sylvia Ageloff,
the unfortunate young Trotskyist he wooed in order to gain entry into
Trotsky’s inner sanctum.
I have no hesitation in recommending “The
Sweetest Dream” as a first-rate historical novel, but a word of warning
and advice to the discerning reader is in order: Don’t be put off by
the many, many typographical errors. They can, it is true, be
distracting at first, but before long it becomes clear that they don’t
really distort the meaning of the text, and perhaps even add an
appealing note of "Jimmy-Higginsness" to it.
|