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Overview
Howard Fast’s life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to one hundred books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast’s Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast’s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in twentieth-century America.
“A notable study of a thorny protagonist whose life has much to reveal about the times in which he lived and about the interplay of political belief, personal identity, art, and ambition.” —Publishers Weekly
“Sorin . . . has written a heavily researched critical biography of Fast. . . . The volume’s strength is its explication and analysis of the complex social and political context of Fast’s activism and creative work. . . . Sorin’s lengthy critique of Fast’s adherence to Communism long after most American writers and intellectuals had abandoned the party, and his shameful public silence on Stalin’s crimes and Soviet anti-Semitism, are of significant import. . . . Recommended.” —Choice
“An intriguing biography, not least for its examination of how Fast interwove his political activism, his Jewishness and his art during the heyday of McCarthyism. Recommended.” —Recorder (Melbourne)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253007322 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | The Modern Jewish Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 529 |
| Sales rank: | 809,013 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Gerald Sorin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American and Jewish Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is author of Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award in History and The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 (IUP, 1985).
Read an Excerpt
Howard Fast
Life and Literature in the Left Lane
By Gerald Sorin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Gerald SorinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00732-2
CHAPTER 1
Paradise Postponed
On July 20, 1948, a month after the United States Supreme Court refused to review Howard Fast's conviction for contempt of Congress, he wrote to screenwriter Albert Maltz in California complaining about the "cold fear" sweeping America. Those "bastards in Washington," Fast said, had purposefully "singled out" and "attacked" leftist writers such as him and Maltz and the Hollywood Ten. But "once we do go to prison," Fast said, "I think the whole nature of the campaign will ... change." He and the other writers, Fast believed, would then have an "extraordinary distinction" and "a responsibility we cannot fail."
Despite Fast's belief, neither he nor the Hollywood Ten were going to prison for what they had written. They had been called to testify by HUAC in 1946 and 1947 for what they had allegedly done, or had seen done by others, that could be considered "subversive." Their refusal to answer potentially incriminating questions or to "name names" earned them their contempt citations and convictions. HUAC did not ask or say anything about Fast's books, which numbered nine in 1946. The congressmen focused instead on the account books of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), an allegedly pro-Communist organization to which Fast belonged and which had founded and continued to support a hospital in France for wounded antifascist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Fast ended up in prison not because he wrote books, but because he refused to turn over books that contained the names of donors supportive of the work of JAFRC.
As with HUAC, so with the FBI: books were not what brought Fast to the agency's attention. Although J. Edgar Hoover and his agents trusted writers as little as the Communist Party (CP) did, they did not initiate a dossier on Fast in 1932 because of what he had published up to that point: one short story of science fiction not remotely related to politics. Instead, an FBI file on the seventeen-year-old Fast was initiated with astonishing speed after he attended a meeting of the John Reed Club, a literary organization associated with the CP.
Still, it was writing and not politics with which Fast most closely identified in 1932. It was of utmost importance to him—not "all his life," as he told a high school audience in 2000, but "only since [he] was twelve." The students didn't get the joke, but Fast wasn't kidding about his very early interest in writing stories and getting them published. He had submitted his first effort to Cosmopolitan magazine at the age of fourteen.
The odds of Fast becoming a writer had not been in his favor. He was the fourth child born to Ida (Miller) Fast and Barnett Fastov, poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she via England, who lived on 159th Street near Amsterdam Avenue in a deteriorating section of Manhattan. For the first eleven months of Howard's life he suffered from an infection of the temporal bone behind his left ear, which he barely survived. Howie, as he was called by family and friends, remained small throughout his boyhood, but by the time he was two, he had regained his health and could interact with his three-year-old brother Jerome (Jerry) and his twelve-year-old sister Rena. One brother, Arthur, the Fasts' second child, had died of diphtheria in 1912, two years before Howard was born.
Howie's father, who changed his own name to Barney and the family's to Fast, was something of a romantic. He fell in love with Ida, a sister of one of his fellow workers, after seeing only her photograph. A correspondence followed, and Barney sent Ida the money to travel to America from London, where she had been living with her Lithuanian family. They married with great enthusiasm in 1899. But by the time Howie was born fifteen years later, the atmosphere in the Fast household had descended into general lassitude. Barney, who worked very long hours for very low pay, came home late and exhausted from his job as a wrought-iron worker, didn't talk much, and would generally fall asleep while reading the Yiddish papers. He had little time or energy to spend with Howie and his siblings, and even less to demonstrate affection or intimacy. Ida thought him "dull" and kept comparing him to other men she knew who were "entertaining ... amusing, and jolly." By doing so, her daughter said, Ida "became more and more unhappy." She took care of the children, cooked, cleaned, and did "a great deal of washing at night," hoping, Rena recalled, to scrub "her unhappiness away." As soon and as often as she could, Rena fled the family's gloomy apartment to visit friends in more "cheerful surroundings."
After Julius (Julie), the family's fifth child, was born in 1918, the Fast household grew even bleaker. Ida failed to regain her strength after giving birth and was increasingly neglectful when she wasn't impatient. Four-year-old Howie, apparently feeling displaced by the newcomer and unsettled by the change the baby seemed to have caused in his mother, began to engage in more and more serious misconduct. Jerry, however, to the disadvantage of Howie, continued to be a "model child." Howie's behavior brought insidious comparison and derision from Rena, and physical punishment from Barney. Though rare, the beatings increased the distance between father and son.
For more than three years before her death in 1923 when Howie was only eight, Ida was intermittently hospitalized. A quarter of a century later Fast, who had suffered what he called instant "infantile amnesia" so as to forget the ordeal of his painful childhood, chose to emphasize only the years of nurture and attention. His mother was "wasting away from a disease [pernicious anemia] which at the time was ... incurable. The implacable approach of death," Fast wrote, "had a devastating effect on all of us.... The end came ... brutally and abruptly—a coffin standing in the tiny room of a slum apartment, a hideous journey to a cemetery, and then the disappearance of my protector, my love, my total connection with the thing called life."
Although Barney virtually ignored Jewish commandment and entered synagogue only on Yom Kippur, he made Howie and Jerry say Kaddish after their mother died. Their father's insistence "meant rising every morning just before sunrise," Fast remembered, "trudging three blocks to the ancient Orthodox synagogue ... then going to school, six blocks more in another direction ... and doing this for twelve long months." At synagogue the service consisted of a dozen or more old, white-bearded men who spoke only Yiddish, not a word of which Jerry or Howie understood. For their ignorance, Fast said, the two motherless boys were held in contempt, never hearing a word of sympathy. "This period of mourning ... and my experience with these old men" embarrassed and angered Fast, and led, he said, "to my avoidance of Hebrew instruction," and "drove me and my brother away from any connection with Jewish religious practice for years to come." Each had a "perfunctory Bar Mitzvah," but it would take many more decades before Fast could sit without unease in a synagogue.
With the virtually absent Barney working long hours, Rena fully employed, and three-year-old Julius sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Jerry and Howie were effectively abandoned. When Rena finally left the household forever to get married less than two years after Ida died, the boys had no choice but to make their own way. And they were resourceful. Each day they took the nickel Barney gave them to drop into the poor box at the synagogue, changed it into pennies, put in only one coin, and kept the rest for themselves. This was just the beginning of a series of thefts, of milk and bread from front stoops and of shirts and pants from clotheslines, that helped keep the boys fed and fully dressed. Nor were the two street urchins above begging.
"Work as he would, twelve and fourteen hours a day," Fast wrote years later, Barney, "still could not feed and clothe us." Unorganized workers did not benefit much from the economic boom of the 1920s, and Barney's income remained well below average, ranging between only $15 and $30 per week until 1928. Pressed by poverty, Howie at ten and Jerry at eleven began working daily as newspaper delivery boys for the Bronx Home News, which was also delivered in their uptown Manhattan neighborhood. By working on Sundays, when they had to rise at three in the morning and drag themselves to the newspaper collating station, they could each earn up to eight dollars a week.
Summer supplied something of a reprieve for the boys, but even this experience had its dark side. From the time Howie was seven and Jerry eight they spent July and August in Kaaterskill, New York, at Camp Jened for boys, owned by their cousin Sam, and named for Sam's mother Jenny and father, Edward, Barney's wealthy older brother. The rich relatives showed "two poverty-stricken slum children ... some of the most beautiful mountain areas up around Hunter and Tannersville that exist in the East. But they were not kind to us," Fast told an interviewer in 1968; "they were right out of Dickens.... We were mistreated and pushed around and given no sustenance of love or compassion or even human decency."
His aunt Jenny, Fast remembered, was "destined to move through the early years of my life as if cast for the role of the cruel and avaricious stepmother so beloved of the Brothers Grimm." The forest, which Howie learned to love, was his refuge "from this half-mad, malignant old woman ... who ruled this summer kingdom and who regarded my older brother and myself with implacable hatred." Jerry as usual "tried to be deserving of praise," but Howie true to form "went the other way and allowed myself to sink into a deep and unremitting anger—directed in part at my aunt and my cousin, but for the most part directed against myself and this so-called childhood that I was cursed with."
Back home in September, work competed with school, which for Howie was another sorrowful experience. P.S. 46 on 156th Street was a crumbling, dreary pre-Civil War building where, because of overcrowding, what should have been eight years of education were for Howie and some others compressed into five. Moreover, "we had terrible teachers," Fast later complained, "bigoted" and "racist." This was an era of especially strong anti-immigrant sentiment, during which the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Still, more than half the students were Jewish, with a sprinkling of Catholics, but as Fast wrote, "99% of the teachers were Protestant." They mocked us, he said, "called us names, made fun of us." Fast also had the misfortune of having been born left-handed. In school he was forced to write with his right hand, and the result, he complained, was that his handwriting never became totally legible. Public school in general, he said, "was a nightmare."
Street life was worse. Howie occasionally had time for shooting marbles or playing stickball. More memorable, however, was the degradation, Fast said, and the violence. There were gang fights, especially on Halloween, involving hundreds of kids, black, Italian, Jewish, and Irish boys, wielding knives and broken bottles, leaving more than a few dead. In the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan had reached a peak in its membership and notoriety, and lynchings in the South had risen to record numbers, a black boy was hanged by a mob of youngsters at McComb's Bluff over the Polo Grounds, an event Fast witnessed and wrote about later in his novella The Children (1937).
In addition to the racism there was, Fast said, a "maniacal" antisemitism that often plunged him, as well as his brothers, into combat. "Until my mother died," he wrote in his memoir, "I had no sense of being Jewish." Being labeled the son of a whore or a son of a bitch was one thing, but being accused of having killed the God of practically every kid in the neighborhood, or being called a Jew bastard or a kike, was thoroughly confusing to Fast. His was the only Jewish family on his block, and to ward off physical attacks by the Irish and Italian kids, which were frequent, Howie had brass knuckles in his pocket and wore a butcher knife, purchased for sixty cents, which he threatened to use. It worked. He, as well as Jerry and Julie, survived the name-calling and the violence, at least physically. "I was the product of the gutter and the gang," Fast said, "the lousy bedbugridden railroad tenement, the burning streets and empty lots. I carried brass knucks and used them, and in my animal way, I was beaten and I beat others." Antisemitism made the Fast brothers bond even more closely as they held off superior forces and endured. But until a very angry Howard Fast had a framework in which to try to understand these experiences, it is probable that they tested his nascent commitment to a more diverse brotherhood, and whatever belief may have been gestating in him about the possibility of solidarity among the poor.
Having been "skipped" too rapidly in public school, Howie found himself at George Washington High School in the Fort George section of upper Manhattan at the age of eleven and a half instead of fourteen. He tried the ninth grade for two or three weeks and "just gave up." Jerry wrote phony illness notes for Howie claiming that his absent brother suffered everything from pneumonia to tuberculosis to yellow fever. After a year or more of "a series of dismal and underpaid jobs," Howie was convinced by Jerry to give high school another try. But then with "going to high school until three o'clock in the afternoon, working from three to seven, coming home [and with his] two brothers putting together some sort of catch-as-catch-can meal," Fast's life was an endless battle against fatigue. "I had no time to study," he complained, "and little time to think."
It is difficult to imagine the frenzied quality of Howie's day. Awake at seven, their father already off to work, Howie and Jerry slapped together a cold breakfast for the three boys, got Julie off to P.S. 46, made peanut butter or cheese sandwiches for lunch, took the streetcar to George Washington, hurried to their newspaper jobs after school, leaving seven-year-old Julie to do his best with his own door key, and then came home hoping to find their little brother there, and not at the police station, and finally somehow got a late meal together. Between them, Jerry and Howie could usually put enough money together for a tin of sardines, bread, tomatoes, and even cake on rare occasions. Jerry, as compulsively neat as he was well-behaved, would take the time to lay a newspaper on the table before the brothers ate, so that when they finished he could just roll it up, food wrappers and packaging encased—there were never leftovers—and throw it all out.
In saying he had little time to think, however, Fast was uncharacteristically too modest. By age twelve Howie was taking batches of books from the public library at St. Nicholas Avenue between 160th and 161st Street and reading prodigiously. He read without discrimination—novels, adventure fiction, psychology, politics, and lots of history. Howie understood only some of what he read, but every book he opened, especially those by Mark Twain and Jack London, was "a treasure," he said, "a new world, a region of hopes and dreams and promise." At fourteen he was writing stories long into the evening. On those extremely rare occasions when Howie's father could spare the time, Barney "sat and watched." Forty years later Fast remembered "the simple joy of the man, his whole life had been his two hands and his strong back, but now he had a son who actually wrote stories. So he sat there in that wretched ... slum kitchen and watched," and in this way expressed the "love and faith that made any of it possible." It would be four more years before Howie had a story published, but his father, if only infrequently, and his brothers, too, provided the few positive things he could remember about his "so-called childhood": encouragement and cooperation; and with these precious gifts, and by his own voracious reading, Howie widened the world of his imagination.
The material condition of the Fasts improved near the end of 1927. Barney, now employed as a pattern maker, was bringing home fifty dollars a week, the most he had ever earned in his life. Howie and Jerry were working at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library and between them were paid another twenty dollars. These previously unimagined riches lasted just long enough to allow the Fast family to leave their cramped and dingy thirty-dollar-a-month railroad flat on 159th Street for a larger, newer apartment in Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan.
The bubble that was the economy of the 1920s burst with the stock market crash of October 1929. Barney's company folded, he was unemployed for some time, and of the few jobs he was ever to have again, none paid well. The Fasts were poor once more. The boys continued to work and scrimp and were able to keep the family in the apartment, and to keep food, such as it was—beans and water, or spaghetti and ketchup—on the table. Howie had several odd jobs and occasionally went to the movies between them, skipping school often. Between 1929 and 1932 Anna Christie, Arrowsmith, and Farewell to Arms, socially conscious films derived from works of Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway, were the movies he was most likely to have seen. He may also have been moved by All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel. And it is quite possible that he saw Joan Crawford in Possessed, an up-from-poverty film that dramatized the ruthless and seamy struggles of the Depression years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Howard Fast by Gerald Sorin. Copyright © 2012 Gerald Sorin. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Paradise Postponed
Publish or Perish
Politics Delayed
2 The War Against Fascism
The Fatal Embrace
The Reds and the Blacks
3 The Life of the Party
Innocent Abroad
The Road Not Taken
The Politics of Literature
4 Cold War, Hot Seat
The Discouraged American
Down and Out in the USA
5 Banned, Barred, and Beseiged
It Can't Happen Here
War and Peace
6 The Myopia of American Communism
Foley Square Follies
Waltzing at the Waldorf
April in Paris
The Poison of Peekskill
7 Literature and Reality
Howard Fast: Prisoner
Great Expectations
8 Free! But Not at Last
9 Trials and Tribulations
Despair, Distraction, and Defeat
The Push and Pull of Politics
Confrontations Left and Right
10 McCarthyism, Stalinism, and the World according to Fast
11 Culture and the Cold War
To Flee or not to Flee
An Even Brighter Star in the USSR
Signs of Thaw in the Cold War?
12 Things Fall Apart; the Left Doesn't Hold
13 Fast Forward
14 Life in the Fast Lane
California to the New York Island
Looking Backward, Seeing Red
15 Fast and Loose
Disappointment and Despair
Fast in Pursuit
16 Fall and Decline
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
Winner, 2012 National Jewish Book Awards, Biography, Autobiography, Memoir Silver Medal winner, Biography category, 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards
Sorin brings Fast's personality to life in a way that is both sympathetic and critical. The narrative is fluid and engaging.
An engaging account of Fast that pays attention not only to his politics but also to his writings. . . . It should stimulate discussion of the appeal of Communism for some American Jews in the mid-20th century.
Sorin brings Fast's personality to life in a way that is both sympathetic and critical. The narrative is fluid and engaging.