FIREWEED

A spirited, eminently readable, and unapologetic memoir of leftist life in a rightist era.

A pioneer of feminist history and cofounder of NOW, Lerner (History, Emerita/Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Why History Matters, 1997, etc.) was born in Vienna just after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire following WWI. With sympathy and grace, she recalls her comfortable, bookish youth in the midst of a diverse family she describes with discernment: “Grandmama was a matriarch whose splendid intelligence and energy was entirely devoted to tyrannizing the household and any family members within her reach”; “if my father’s ideal was respectability, my mother’s was creativity.” Their civilized way of life would soon be destroyed by Nazism. When Austria fell to the German invaders, Lerner and much of her family managed to flee the country, and she came to America determined to be “an immigrant, not a refugee.” Shocked by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lerner, now working as a writer on the fringes of the film industry, determined “to live in opposition to government policy, wary of official pronouncements.” Affiliated with the communist party, she and husband Carl lived under the shadow of the anticommunist inquisition (to call that period the McCarthy era, she writes, gives too much credit to the senator from Wisconsin) and spent much of their time trying to slip under the FBI’s radar. Moving to New York, Lerner began to work on a novel about the abolitionist movement that set in motion her subsequent career as a historian and her eventual disillusionment with communist realities, but not ideals. That story will have to wait for another volume, however, for this one closes in 1958, leaving readers hungry for more.

Lerner’s welcome autobiography also makes a fine contribution to social history.