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I was one of them.

One of the 147 million Americans who had their information compromised in the epic 2017 Equifax data breach. It was one of the largest hacks in history, leaking the names, social security numbers, addresses, and credit history of over a third of the country.

At first, we were led to believe it was the result of sloppy cybersecurity and greedy hackers who wanted credit card data.

But now, according to last weeks indictment from the Justice Department, we know it was the handiwork of four members of Chinas military.

To think it was a few renegade black hat hackers with expensive tastes was upsetting enough, but now to learn it was the long arm of the Chinese Communist party? This is serious.

What do the Chinese communists want with my credit history? Is it to spam me with emails or offers in the mail? Or, worst-case scenario, to add me and millions of my fellow Americans to their social score database so our behaviors can be ranked and judged?

Most of the fallout between liberal democratic nations and China in the last few years has been over governmental policy: trade spats, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property. These high-level issues were problematic enough, and now it seems Chinas desire to exert control over the US is directly affecting the people.

Weve known for years that Chinese Communist Party censors have made creeping demands in Hollywood: Tibetan monks replaced with Celtic ones in Marvels Doctor Strange, Tom Cruises bomber jacket with the Taiwan flag removed in the Top Gun sequel, and cut scenes in Bohemian Rhapsody to obscure that Freddie Mercury was gay.

When Quentin Tarantino refused to edit his latest movie, Once Upon a Timein Hollywood, to please Chinese censors, they pulled its release date. It was eventually shipped to Chinese cinemas, but its uncertain if portions of the film were cut.

China has the worlds second-largest movie market, making it no surprise that with Chinese capital comes more aggressive demands for censorship. Will they allow any criticism of Chinese communism, or even praise of liberal democracies? What about a potential movie about the brave Hong Kong protesters fighting for their liberties?

Mike Pompeo recently warned American governors to be wary of any dealings with institutions or businesses with significant ties to China.

Theyve labeled each of you friendly, hardline or ambiguous, he said. And, in fact, whether you are viewed by the Communist party of China as friendly or hardline, know that its working you, know that its working the team around you.

These revelations about the insidious nature of the Chinese government come at a critical time.

The Hong Kong protests continue after months of mounting force from police. Fears of the spread of the Coronavirus have emboldened Chinese authorities to fully exercise their authoritarianism: canceling the Chinese New Year, a complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and arrests of doctors and health workers who shared their concerns about the virus on social media.

The Chinese people, at least, are beginning to wake up to the antics of their government. Li Wenliang, a doctor who was threatened by police for fear mongering about the Coronavirus, which later took his life, was labeled a hero for his efforts to spread the truth about the disease. But it will take many more acts of courage to cause a total paradigm shift in the minds of the people.

From the theft of credit information to entertainment censorship and brutal authoritarian crackdowns, its clear that citizens and consumers in liberal democracies have something to fear in the rise of the Chinese Communist party.

For our part, we must continue to champion our free societies as bulwarks against the authoritarian regime. We must fight for the ideas and principles that have helped make liberal democratic countries great stewards of our liberties.

Yal Ossowski is a writer, deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center, and a director at 21Democracy.

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Why does the Chinese Communist party want my credit history? - The Spectator USA

A Lithuanian immigrant who attended President Donald Trumps rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Friday spoke to Breitbart News and warned of the dangers of communism, saying Bernie Sanders (I-VT) supporters should go to a socialist country to understand what it is like.

I thought America is free, said Daiva Gaulyte, an immigrant from Lithuania who has lived under communism. Ive been in a communist country. I dont want to have it here.

The communist took away my grandparents land, they transported them to Siberia, and then when they got all this land, they didnt know what to do with them because theyre lazy, Gaulyte continued. Communists are lazy.

There is nothing they can do with that land so they gave lands back to work on it, but it was very difficult to have any kind of profit, but you could work on it because the lands were just sitting there and communists didnt know what to do with it.

Gaulyte also explained how she was restricted from viewing certain American materials under the rule of communism.

We were not allowed to watch American movies, she said. We had to hide if someone gets American movie, we close the curtains and watch it so nobody knows.

Gaulyte also offered advice to those who support Sanders bid to become the next president.

I feel sorry that they do not understand what they are doing, she concluded. Maybe if they really want to experience socialism, they should go to the socialist country and live there for a while so they know what it is.

Follow Kyle on Twitter @RealKyleMorris and Facebook.

Originally posted here:
Lithuanian Immigrant to Bernie Supporters: They Should Go to a Socialist Country and Live There a While - Breitbart

Pictured is the late Sir Roger Scruton. (Photo credit: Andy Hall/Getty Images)

We meet by chanceand find in chance necessity:what seems an accidentin retrospect is fate.

These were the opening words of a poem that British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote seven years ago to celebrate my marriage to Anna. We are among that fortunate group of people who knew the Aged Professor as a dear friend and mentorhis lifes true work, as he called it. Its a life that sadly ended earlier this monthat the age of 75.

Sir Roger was a warrior for Western culture. Culture was, for him, everything: a vessel in which intrinsic values are captured and handed on to future generations. He saw the slow and steady accumulation of traditions, teachings, and habits as the necessary ingredient for the good life and the just society, containing more truth and beauty than anything built by the most brilliant planners and intellectuals. Intellectuals of the left, he thought, were all too willing to discard the wisdom of the past for untriedor failedideologies, a risky endeavor because good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

Sir Roger gladly held a worldview he traced back to the great 18th-century English statesman Edmund Burke and beyond. Burke made his name opposing the ideological terror of the French Revolution. For Scruton, it was a near-French revolution in Paris in 1968 that caused his younger self to reject the radicalism of 20th century socialists and communists. He recounted to us many times how he marveled from the window of his mansard room in Paris at the mayhem the 68-ers caused, and at the global slaughters and starvations perpetrated by their fellow ideologues in power, which they ignored.

The cultural and intellectual elite never forgave his principled stand. After he started his career as a university professor in the 1970s, his peers shunned him, even despised him. They sought to drive him from the academy and polite society. In one of his final speeches, given before the Polish Parliament last year, he described his fellow academics as nice colleagues who taught him how nasty niceness can be.

He hardly fared better from his erstwhile allies in politics. The Conservative Party had a love-hate relationship with the United Kingdoms most famous conservative intellectual for the simple reason that he sought to conserve things.

He admired von Mises and Hayek and defended free markets (calling them a necessary part of any stable community) yet saw certain issues as beyond the markets bounds, from city planning to sexual morality. When he thought the Conservative Party undermined his countrys culture, he said so. Whether as a professor or in politics, Scruton was proof of the biblical adage, a prophet has no honor in his own country.

His rejection at home led him abroad. The 1970s and 80s saw him frequently travel behind the Iron Curtain in support of those who sought to reclaim their countries and cultures from Soviet domination. He taught at underground universities and wrote for samizdat publications, even smuggling in printing materials at great personal risk.

Sir Roger hated communism because it rejected the inherited wisdoms of the people it enslaved. He later opposed the post-modernist direction of the European Union on similar grounds. Like communist internationalism before it, the EUs progressive transnational project ran roughshod over distinct nations and cultures. He cheered the recent surge of national sentiment in Eastern Europe, while urging it to be grounded in something deeper and higher than mere national feeling. He supported a vibrant, sophisticated nationalism, instead of a reactionary, short-sighted one.

Whether it was politics, philosophy, or any other endeavor, Scruton excelled and elevated our minds by reminding us of our inheritance and celebrating the beauty of the natural world and the human capacity to create. He was the most brilliant and celebrated philosopher of aesthetics in modern times and authored dozens of books.

He wanted buildings that made us feel at home; art that inspired thinking of the sublime; and institutions that help all people flourish. His philosophical investigations and pursuit of the truth were always grounded in human experience. Sir Roger should be remembered as the patron saint of Common Sense.

Given his ideals, Scruton was often painted as a dark and dour man, wistfully mourning societys slide away from the tried and true. Those who met him knew otherwise.

My wife, Anna, and I first met him as students more than a decade ago. He was to us the great encourager in an age of alienation. We and many others felt at home with him whether it was in a Schloss in Vienna, a country house in Virginia, a downtown caf in Budapest, or the bright green fields of the Cotswolds.

Sir Rogers generosity of spirit will reverberate on in the thousands of lives he personally touched and in our great civilization that he conveyed into a new century.

Originally published inThe Federalist.

The rest is here:
Sir Roger Scruton's Rejection of Communism and War for the West - CNSNews.com

As the calendar year 1989 began, Jews in what were then the Soviet satellite states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, and Bulgaria) knew pretty much what they could look forward to: calls for world peace (the Soviet way), condemnations of imperialist America and its evil puppet Israel, along with slim pickings in the way of fresh fruit. By the time 1990 began, they were living in a very different world.

Ever since the one party state cemented control of these countries in 1948, rabbis had been run out of town, seminaries and Jewish schools had been closed, kosher food became all but impossible to obtain, and if you showed up for synagogue services (even without a fully ordained rabbi officiating), your future job prospects would dry up.

As if that wasnt bad enough, the official Jewish communities in every one of these countries seemed to exist solely to serve up a steady stream of anti-Israel propaganda, as prepared and precooked for them by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Little surprise that most Jews wanted little or nothing to do with the official Jewish organizations, although the communities usually allowed for Hanukkah and Purim parties, which were the two times in a year Jews felt safe getting together without fear of reprisal.

Then something happened. The political changes that began in June 1989, started as a brush fire, gathered strength, grew into an inferno that swept the region, and sent every central committee fleeing for the exit. By the time Hanukkah ended on Dec. 29, the Communists were looking at nothing but scorched earth, while everyone else wanted to start planting seedlings.

That meant Jews in these countries were ready to deal with the official community organs that had been spewing anti-Israel propaganda and preventing their children from studying Hebrewor learning even the first thing about Judaism. It didnt happen everywhere, all at once, but change was in the air.

Although no one loved the community leadership in Hungary, it did operate both a small Jewish school and a rabbinical seminary in Budapest that functioned during the Communist decades, and by 1989, the Lauder Foundation was about to open a new school while the Joint Distribution Committee opened its first office in Budapest since 1948. Further, by September 1989 Zionist youth clubs were given the green light to set up shop once again, Hebrew classes were being held in several locations every week, a half dozen synagogues drew congregants regularly and a Jewish summer camp functioned on Lake Balaton (the much larger camp at Szarvas would open in July 1990).

Romania had always been the odd man out. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was the only Warsaw Pact leader not to sever diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967, and the Jewish community operated choirs and a summer camp and Talmud Torah classes ran weekly in four cities. If any family asked for a bar mitzvah, Chief Rabbi David Moses Rosen made sure the child was prepared properly.

Poland was also an outlier. First, there were few Jews who were even registered in the 1980s, and to the communitys credit, at least it ran soup kitchens for elderly Holocaust survivors in Wroclaw and Warsaw along with a Yiddish theater in Warsaw. There was, however, little to nothing on offer for younger Jews. Much would happen in the coming years, as Jewish families came out of the woodwork and hundreds (some claim thousands) of younger Poles discovered genuine, or at least tenuous, Jewish roots.

But it was in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, two of the most hard-line states, where Jews launched their revolt during Hanukkah of 1989 and in January of 1990.

Dezider Galsky (born Goldfinger) had been a diplomat in the Czechoslovak foreign service, and a historian who had published several books on the Middle East. In 1980, he agreed to serve as president of Czechoslovakias Jewish Federation.

It was under his aegis that the Prague Jewish Museums blockbuster exhibition, The Precious Legacy, began its world tour. Galsky often went with it to speakalways diplomaticallybut it did him little good. The Communist Party had no idea that an exhibition of Czech Judaicanearly all of it gathered from Bohemian Jewish communities wiped out during the Holocaustwould garner such praise wherever it went, and that infuriated them. Galsky was accused of corruption, removed in 1985 and in his place came Frantisek Kraus, a man of such a complex background it beggars belief.

Born in the Czech Republic, Kraus and his family had been sent to Theresienstadt; I had once photographed him in front of the barracks where he was interned. He and his family were sent to Auschwitz where they perished and he survived. At wars end, Kraus left for Palestine, fought with the Haganah in Israels War of Independence, but decided to return home in the 1950s.

He was immediately imprisoned and, I was told, tortured by the authorities for being a Zionist spy and had even been threatened with a firing squad, but a general amnesty at the last minute freed him. Years later, Galsky gave him a job running the kosher kitchen in the Jewish community center, but when Galsky fell out of favor with the authorities, Kraus offered to take his place.

During his tenure at the Jewish Federation, Kraus forbade any programs that had to do with Israel, and when a group of younger community members asked him to at least consider allowing a Hebrew language course, he informed the secret police, who went and grilled everyone who had even asked him.

The one Jewish organization we did have, said Andrej Ernyei, a piano tuner and jazz musician, was our Jewish choir. Almost all of us were adults, and most of us had kids. Singing Hebrew songs together was the one thing we could do together as Jews, and Kraus didnt think we could do harm to anyone. But he was wrong. Were the one who pushed him out.

When Hanukkah came that December, and choir members were thrilled as the Communists were being hounded out of office, they demanded a communitywide meeting with Kraus. And with no one answering at party headquarters to help him out, Kraus gritted his teeth and prepared for the reckoning.

Hundreds of Jews crowded into the venerable hall on Meiselova Street and demanded he resign, and Dezider Galsky was asked to resume his old post. Kraus agreed, and not long after, Galsky asked Tomas Kraus (no relation), an executive at one of the countrys larger artists agencies, to become the general secretary.

Galsky knew hed need someone to help run things, as he was suddenly the name in everyones Rolodex. I just took Francois Mitterrand around the Jewish quarter, he told me in January 1990, Margaret Thatcher is coming and I cannot count the number of foreign ministers who have showed up, often with no warning at all.

Frantisek Kraus refused to apologize for anything he had done, but later came to Tomas Kraus and he practically begged me to allow him to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. He really did fear this would be the worst possible punishment. Of course I said yes, and he left the community. I never saw him again, although I was told he spent his last years as a security guard in a department store.

If Czechoslovakia was a hard-line Communist state, the countrys leadership was positively enlightened compared to Bulgarias aging Central Committee, headed by Tudor Zhivkov, who, by 1989, had ruled his country since 1954 and was now 78 years old.

With its economy in free fall in 1989, it wasnt hard for more moderate members of the Communist Party to force Zhivkov from power only one day after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9. A few days after that, Bulgarian Jews gathered in the Jewish community center on Stambolijski Boulevard and had come with a suggestion for the Jewish community leadership headed by Iosif Astrukov. Namely: resign. Now.

Robert Djerassi described the scene. We didnt know how many would come but at least 150 people showed up, and although there was some tension and a lot of excitement, I remember saying that we needed to thank those who had run the community until now, but it was time for a new administration. Astrukov agreed to step down, and Eddy Schwartz, a publisher, theater director and novelist, was asked to take over.

By the time 1990 had begun, a new Jewish cultural organization had been launched: Shalom: the Organization of Jews in Bulgaria. And everyone would be welcomed.

Djerassi said that we inherited a five story building with almost nothing in it, other than a typewriter dating from 1880 and a secretary who managed the office. There was also a museum with a giant photograph of Czar Boris III shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler, which led into a museum of how Communists saved the Jews of Bulgaria.

Becca Lazarova, who would be the first director of the Lauder Jewish school in Sofia, said, We, the parents, knew almost nothing about being Jewish, and so at night we would teach ourselves, and then work alongside our children the next day in class.

Although Jewish organizations like JDC and ORT rushed in to help as Bulgarias economic collapse deepened, Schwartz never lost his sense of optimism. In September of 1990, when I asked him how Shalom was going to overcome its difficulties, he said, We have around 4,000 Jews in this country. Out of that we have 10 composers, 10 poets, 150 journalists, 12 theater directors, 200 full professors, six members of parliament with, of course, three on each side, 70 lawyers and nearly 100 doctors. So when it comes to tackling our problems, Id say we have the right people to do it.

The Jewish communities in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were the first to make serious changes during and after the fall of Communism in 1989, but they would not be the last. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and communities in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia started rebuilding Jewish life with an enthusiasm that belied their meager numbers. Then came Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.

Well over a million Jews would leave the Soviet Union as soon as they could, but that is a topic of another discussion, as is the story of how 150,000 opted to move to Germany, where they have given that community something it did have in the 1980s: a future.

The Central European Jewish communities, the ones wedged between Germany and what had been the Soviet Union, were all about to face a difficult road, a road they are still traveling three decades later. Except for the city of Budapest, where well more than 50,000 Jews live, no Jewish community in this region has a long-term future. The numbers, the critical mass, just isnt there.

But that is not the point. Starting 30 years ago, when 1990 began, the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe started grabbing back a future that had been denied them for far too long. And they were throwing off the mantle of remnant like a garment that no longer fit. It is, after all, not a story about numbers. Its about the dignity of the effort.

***

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Edward Serotta is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker specializing in Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe.

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Reclaiming Jewish Life After the Nightmare of Communism - Tablet Magazine

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Every now and then, a younger writer will approach the critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick and profess love for a book she routinely disparages: The Romance of American Communism, the oral history of the American left that she published in 1977. If, as often happens, her admirer is too young to remember the Cold War, Gornick tries to clarify a point that she fears has been missed. I say, This is about the Communist Party, not social democracy, she says, sitting in her West Village apartment one afternoon in November. It was the most authoritarian she trails off into incredulous laughter. I dont know why they want to read it.

When I arrive at the apartment where Gornick has lived for more than 35 years, shes dressed all in black, her blue-gray eyes emphasized by bold black liner and silver shadow. Her home is unshowy, with comfortable furniture that bears the evidence of cat claws and with books stacked on the dining-room table and crammed onto white-painted floor-to-ceiling shelves. In conversation, as in her writing, Gornick is sometimes lyrical (It was like iron in my mouth, she says of reading Me Too testimony that echoed the humiliations she experienced in her own 20s), sometimes wryly provocative (Is that good for us or bad for us?, she asks when I explain that the Cut is a womens vertical). She has written about living alone as a feminist project about the emotional assaults of loneliness and the vital self-possession that rewards those who withstand it. (Several years ago, she softened her solitude by adopting two cats. She informs me that the one that hops onto the side table during our interview is less attractive than the one that hides from company.)

Gornick, likewise, does not seek the spotlight. Though she deserves as much credit as any writer alive for codifying the current form of the personal essay The Paris Review has credited her with pioneering the genre of personal criticism now associated with essayists such as Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, and Jia Tolentino her influence as a writer has always outstripped her exposure. Other authors have long valued her writing about writing its unyielding frustrations and the battle for selfhood it encompasses. Perhaps most beloved among her 12 books are a pair of memoirs: Fierce Attachments, from 1987, and The Odd Woman and the City, from 2015, both of which consider her struggle to forge an unconventional life. A 13th book, Unfinished Business, a reflection on rereading done in her signature hybrid of memoir and criticism, comes out in February. Over the years, a certain romance has accrued to the person of Gornick herself, a born-and-bred New Yorker, radical second-wave feminist, and archetypal staffer for the late, great downtown alt-weekly The Village Voice. Though she says she has always felt like an outsider in literary circles, her work sits at the heart of an alternative canon in which art grows from the politics of being oneself.

Until recently, Gornick was not as well known as the writers whose work owes a debt to hers, but in the past few years, that seems to be changing. Shes started to sell around the world, says her editor at FSG, Ileene Smith. Fierce Attachments has been translated into 13 languages in the past four years. It must be a zeitgeist thing something shes connecting with in some profound literary, almost spiritual way, Smith says. At the age of 84, Gornick has become quite a literary figure, well beyond her own very I would say unreasonably modest expectations for herself.

Of all the books she has in the offing, the one receiving the most buzz in literary circles is a reissue of Romance by the leftist publisher Verso this spring. In an interview with New York last year, political theorist Corey Robin called it possibly the best book ever written about [the] inner life of socialists. It received mixed reviews in its own day, including an evisceration by the literary critic and prominent socialist Irving Howe that sent me to bed for a week, Gornick says. Her aim had been to capture the emotional allure the romance that drew so many ordinary Americans to become communists, but critics accused her of falling in love with her subjects and skating past the problem of their fealty to the Soviet Union. Today, Gornick dismisses the prose as disfigured by rhetoric, and the book itself as apprentice work. She is baffled by its sudden popularity among a new generation of leftists.

Its hard to say why Gornick didnt gain her current following earlier. Maybe she was just ahead of her time, writing memoir before the genres boom in the late 1990s, or maybe by writing about feminism and politics with the sensibility of a literary critic, and vice versa she slipped through the cracks between easily marketable categories. Five years ago, Gornick said in an interview with The Paris Review that accepting her limited recognition has sometimes felt like a bitter pill to swallow. Does she still feel that way, I ask? Oh, sure, she says. But I was sorry I said that. She doesnt want to be petty, even though she acknowledges that in a way its not petty the hunger for glory is something no human being is free of. But if she could change one thing about her life, she says, it would be her tortured relationship with her writing, not the number of people who read it. In the end, I can always say that whatever else I yearn for in life, the thing that was absolute and unconditional was my hunger to write, she says. Nothing else approached that for me. The attention of younger fans makes her feel good that the work Ive done feels useful to other people, but thats all. No more than that.

In her writing, Gornick presents herself as an Odd Woman, a figure fundamentally out of step with the values and norms of the society in which she lives. Shes a product of radical politics: a feminist who eschews marriage and motherhood, and a misfit whose indifference to money and mainstream ideas of success carries an anti-capitalist undertone. But its the power and pain of the Odd Woman to be singular, forever apart. She has the clarity of an impartial observer even when she feels the zeal of a convert. Perhaps this paradox is what makes her work feel immediate (and, as she says, useful) to a younger generation of leftists and feminists still figuring out what it means to be defined by ones politics. Even in Romance, her most political book, Gornick doesnt write about politics she writes about how it feels to live through a political time and what it takes to join in without losing ones sense of self.

As she writes in Romance, Gornick was what she calls a red-diaper baby born into a world of working-class, Yiddish-speaking party members and fellow travelers in 1935. She was served Marxism at the kitchen table of her childhood home in the Bronx, where she would sit and listen to her parents and their friends. She renounced communism in that same kitchen at the age of 20 in 1956, after reading Nikita Khrushchevs speech acknowledging the extent of Stalinist terror. After graduating from City College, she moved to California to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley but dropped out, married and quickly divorced twice, and found herself back in New York working in publishing and freelancing with the occasional piece for the Voice. Her lasting political awakening came with her introduction to feminism in 1970, when she was assigned to cover a meeting of what her editor termed womens libbers on Bleecker Street for the Voice, which had by then hired her as a staff writer. Overnight, my inner life was galvanized, she later wrote. It was as though the kaleidoscope of experience had been shaken and when the pieces settled into place an entirely new design had been formed. She got to know prominent radicals such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, and Shulamith Firestone, and she wrote searing feminist criticism of contemporary novels by the likes of Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe.

By the mid-1970s, her relationship with the movement had started to sour. Gornick perceived an emerging party line that seemed to mirror the one that had silenced her parents doubts about the Soviet Union: When she disagreed with a speaker at a feminist meeting in Boston, the woman accused her of being an intellectual and a revisionist. I realized that feminism wasnt enough to understand my place in society or in history, she tells me. It was not going to give me inner peace. I really didnt like myself; I felt I was always alienating people. Gornick writes that her break with feminist activism taught her to sympathize with her parents and their communist friends. She resolved to interview as many members of the old left as possible and weave their voices into a book about the partys emotional hold, from which so many had been unable to escape.

There are, it seems to me, a number of stable hungers in the human psyche, Gornick writes in Romance. One of these hungers, beyond question, is the need to live a life of meaning. Gornicks subjects describe the transformative power of working for a revolution they believed was around the corner. Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world, says one person she interviewed, describing how that sense of purpose gave me a home inside myself. Many other communists described similar changes to their innermost lives as a result of their activism. I didnt feel lonely, says one. For another, Marxism healed a wound in the soul. Everything in my life became one, says a third. Everywhere I was the same person.

The communists of Romance speak directly to a problem Gornick seeks to pinpoint in all of her work: how to create a self you can live with, one strong enough to make its place in the world. Gornick has invented her own idiom for this struggle, which she sometimes calls the search for a sense of all-in-allness of world and self and other times refers to as a quest for expressiveness a word that, in her work, connotes both inner clarity and the ability to translate that insight outward. Politics opens up one conduit to this feeling. Through Marxism, the people at my fathers kitchen table could place themselves, Gornick writes in Romance, and if they could place themselves compelling insight! they could become themselves The men and women at the kitchen table were involved in nothing less than an act of self-creation.

At the Voice, Gornick was, by her own account, a polemicist on the barricades for radical feminism. After she left the paper, the year Romance was published, her work moved toward memoir and literary criticism and away from orthodoxy of any kind. If anyone picks up a book of mine, its eminently clear that a feminist is writing, she says, no matter what Im writing about. But writing itself, living a life defined by work and intellect rather than love or marriage, became her primary feminist commitment.

She narrates the slow dawning of this realization in Fierce Attachments, a memoir framed by her battles with her mother and her mothers idea of womanhood, which revolved around romantic love. Her new book, Unfinished Business, surveys similar territory by tracing her changing relationship with the novels that have meant the most to her. She tells of how, as a young woman, she read romantically, to be swept away by stories of love. After discovering feminism, she read the same novels politically, seeing for the first time that most of the female characters in them were stick figures devoid of flesh and blood. More recently, she tells me, I began to see, in every great work I read, that all great writers struggle, essentially, with cohering. And even though we cant cohere, and we dont, and everyone knows it practically from birth, its still a yearning, and that yearning dominates literature.

A writer whose gaze has turned increasingly inward is an odd patron saint for the resurgent, millennial left a disjunction that became clear in December when Gornick provoked a minor backlash on Twitter by telling Jewish Currents that she doesnt find Bernie Sanders inspiring or believe he can win the presidency. (Shes not much of an Elizabeth Warren fan, either: Neither one of them has a chance, but even if they did, it feels as if they would sink into the way things are rather than be the forerunners of change, she tells me.) In the abstract, she says, she still views political activism as one path toward a coherent self, though it takes vigilance not to lose that self in the task: The most important thing is not to submit to an authority that makes you deny the evidence of your own senses or your own mind, ever. But she has a hard time imagining how anyone could find meaning in our current political moment. For the communists she wrote about in Romance, who believed the world would be remade in their lifetimes, there was the sense of actually living a real and exciting life just by doing the homeliest of political tasks. You know, selling The Daily Worker on the corner, she says. Today, in contrast, it doesnt feel like a political time. In other words, people arent fired by the hope of it. Even Me Too, though she acknowledges it has been useful, strikes her as having no real politics its just anger.

But doesnt she feel the earliest vibrations of something shifting, I ask? Even if she is unmoved by the progressive candidates running for president, what about the regroupings of the labor movement, the mainstreaming of Medicare for All discourse, or, yes, the thousands of young socialists expected to provide an audience for her decades-old book? It doesnt feel like right before the 60s, even though things are worse than they were right before the 60s, she says. It doesnt feel like a gathering storm. By now, its dark in her apartment, though its still late afternoon, and Gornick fumbles with a lamp whose light isnt strong enough to burn off the sense of gloom. I dont want you to get depressed, she says kindly. For herself: I can live with it.

Whether you agree with Gornicks prognosis, the sense of impossible odds she describes may help explain the revival of interest in Romance. Lana Povitz, a 33-year-old activist and historian of social movements who is one of the books proselytizers, acknowledges that young leftists are less likely than the ones Gornick wrote about to think the end of capitalism might actually be imminent. If that goal seems out of reach, she says, then what remains is the day-to-day process, the social and emotional world of activism. Romance was criticized in its own era for celebrating some of the emotions that attended Communist Party membership while eliding many of the actions done in the partys name. But in hindsight, its clear that Romance provided something rarer than an evenhanded account of history: a look into the affective life of the American left. In some ways, I think political emotion is the best thing weve got going right now, says Povitz. Its who people feel they are when theyre doing activism that keeps them turning up.

In a new introduction to the Verso edition of Romance, Gornick celebrates the ordinary leftists she wrote about as exemplars of a certain kind of cultural hero who is often characterized as one who lives for the work. That their work never reached any kind of culmination they did not, in fact, overthrow global capitalism doesnt erase the impression that they succeeded in living lives of meaning. Meaningful work, Gornick writes, makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. In the case of the communists, this centeredness glowed in the dark.

As always, when Gornick writes about the communists of Romance, she is also writing about herself. Im happy if what Ive learned in life is of use, but its not a motivation, she tells me. All I ever really wanted was to experience myself to the fullest.

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