Despite some information leaks during WW2, many American Jews refused to believe that FDR, Churchill & Stalin would allow Hitler to commit mass murder of Jews & non-Jews in East Europe. They should have joined with their non-Jewish brethren in USA to resist this cave-in to tyranny & mass murder. Author Howard Fast whom I met in NYC in 1950 admitted this. RIP Howard.
Today Americans should unite & end polarization to fight Islamifascism. Carl:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4624752-103684,00.html
Obituary
Howard Fast
Prolific radical novelist who championed the cause of America's common people
Eric Homberger
Friday March 14, 2003
The Guardian
The writer Howard Fast, who has died aged 88, was the last surviving American
recipient of the Stalin peace prize. His first novel appeared at the height of
the depression, and he was still publishing bestsellers in the 1980s.
Fast was a literary phenomenon of a recognisable American kind. Untouched by the
ugly racism of Jack London, and certainly more skilled at the delineation of
character and the crafting of a readable plot than Upton Sinclair, he was the
champion of the progressive novel in the United States.
For a decade after the second world war, he moved in the upper strata of inter-
national anti-fascism and communist propaganda. His historical novels, which
ranged from portraits of slave revolts in antiquity, as with Spartacus (1953),
to the American revolution, won him a broad readership across the world. In the
Soviet Union, his print runs were substantial.
Having refused to cooperate with the House un-American activities committee and
provide records of the joint anti-fascist refugee committee, he was convicted of
contempt of Congress in 1950, and served three months in jail - it was in effect
a congressional imprimatur of his leftwing credentials and integrity. It also
meant that, overnight, his books became unpublishable. He was blacklisted. Angus
Cameron (obituary, November 30 2002), the editor-in-chief at his publishers,
Little Brown, came under fire in 1951 for publishing avowed or secret communist
authors, and was forced to resign.
Fast was driven to publishing his own books - including the bestselling
Spartacus - until he broke with the American Communist party, which he had
joined in 1943. Despite his misgivings about the party, he regarded the rising
tide of McCarthyism as a more immediate threat to American liberties. He ran for
Congress on the American Labour party ticket in 1952, after it had come under
the CP's covert control. He wrote a eulogy of the anar chists Sacco and
Vanzetti, who had been executed during the 1920s red scare. The party had played
a key role in the worldwide campaign against the American legal system.
For this and other services, Fast was awarded the Stalin peace prize in 1954. He
was the one truly popular American writer to remain loyal to the Communist party
until 1956, when Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" on Stalin's crimes, and
the Red army's crushing of the Hungarian revolution, led three-quarters of the
membership of the American Communist party to quit.
In the ideological ruins that followed, Fast remade himself as the author of
slick, efficient thrillers, written under the pseudonym of EV Cunningham,
featuring a Japanese-American detective. He was also the author of firmly
researched novels about the Lavette family, turn-of-the-century immigrants to
San Francisco. Beginning with The Immigrants (1977), he published seven novels
over the next decade, continuing the family story over several generations to
the struggles of Vietnam and feminism.
They successfully combined progressive mythology - the struggle of the
individual against the establishment - and skilled social and political
reportage. As in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd novels, Fast could never resist the
temptation to have his fictional characters on hand when history-making events
took place; he had been doing it, with considerable skill, from his earliest
novels about the American revolution.
Fast wrote largely without the benefit of an academic education. His father
worked in the New York garment industry. Following the death of his mother Ida,
in Fast's childhood, he worked in assorted part-time jobs before graduating from
George Washington high school, New York, in 1931. That year, he sold a story to
the magazine Amazing Stories. At the age of 18, his first novel, Two Villages,
was published. He then attended the National Academy of Design in New York,
before resuming his career as a novelist.
His fourth book, Conceived In Liberty (1939), set during the American war of
independence, gave Fast a new subject matter - the heroism of the ordinary
American. It became a million seller. Citizen Tom Paine (1943) enshrined his
reputation. The historian Allan Nevins admired the novel, but wished that the
finer shades of historical truth, and the more delicate effects of art, had not
been sacrificed to the speed and energy of the narrative.
Harvey Swados made the terrible insult that Fast's conception of history was
rather like that of Cecil B DeMille. There is an uncomfortable truth in this
observation, and for several reasons.
The first is that Fast, like virtually every American writer from the 1920s on,
wrote cinematically. The chapter was not his natural structural device, but
rather the scene, envisaged in terms of a direct conflict between characters, or
structured around an image which would convey the essence of the story. His
books show a writer hungry for the speed of a quick procession of scenes, who
uses flashbacks, and sharply defined visual images conveyed through montage, to
make palatable the needed amount of historical explanation. There is nothing in
Fast like the studied disconnections between scene and character which John Dos
Passos made his own, and which DH Lawrence joyously parodied: "Broadway at night
- whizz! gone! - a quick-lunch counter! gone - a house on Riverside Drive, the
Palisades, night - gone!"
Fast was much easier on his readers, and certainly enjoyed a readership vastly
larger than that of Dos Passos. He wrote prolifically, publishing more than 40
novels under his own name, and 20 as EV Cunningham. He wrote plays, screenplays,
television plays, poetry, non-fiction books for children (Haym Salomon, Son Of
Liberty, 1941), popular political biographies (two books on Yugoslavia's
President Tito), a history of the Jews, and two accounts of his political
itinerary - The Naked God: The Writer And The Communist Party (1957), and Being
Red: A Memoir (1990).
He seldom wrote autobiographically; the nearest he came to a self-portrait was
in Citizen Tom Paine. For Paine, the greatest revolutionary propagandist of the
18th century, the likely fate of the American revolution of 1776, as well as of
the French of 1789, was betrayal and defeat. Paine knew the vicious attacks of
enemies in America and abandonment by his friends, as well as persecution and
imprisonment in France under the Jacobins.
And, indeed, Fast's novel is a portrait of the writer as revolutionary. It is
also a singularly harsh portrayal of the nature of revolution itself, and of the
terrible fate awaiting its creators; it belongs on the same shelf as Arthur
Koestler's novel of the fate of an old Bolshevik, Darkness At Noon (1940).
It was while writing Citizen Tom Paine that Fast joined the Communist party. The
wartime love affair with the Soviet Union and the Red army was at its peak. Fast
later showed himself to be an insightful diagnostician of the way good people,
worthy of affection and respect, were degraded, humiliated, lied to and betrayed
by Stalin and his conscienceless henchmen in the American party.
The title for his 1957 study, The Naked God: The Writer And Communism, was drawn
from a brief, brilliant passage reflecting on the East German Stalinist leader
Walther Ulbricht: "He has lost touch with humankind. For him are no more hopes
or visions or high dreams - only the caress of power over his righteousness."
It was not only communist politicians about whom such words seemed appropriate.
Wearing the robes of Ulbricht's party righteousness, such a man served at the
altar of a naked god. Fast's departure from the party, and his writings on the
party, inevitably attracted the broadsides of party polemicists, well-skilled in
the savage denunciation of renegades.
He knew what to expect, for he was himself a professional at such ritual
denunciations; they were part of the stock and trade of party life. He had
delighted in the comradeship of leftwing writers, whom he largely imagined to be
men of the people, like himself. The Chilean communist poet Pablo Neruda
dedicated a poem to Fast, and he was warmly greeted in Paris in 1949 by another
high- profile Communist party member, Pablo Picasso.
Visiting Soviet writers were entertained at the home he shared with his first
wife Bette. He believed in the kinship that united all men of goodwill and
progressive sentiments in the struggle against fascist aggression.
It was when Fast learned that the Soviet writer Boris Polovoy had lied to him
about the whereabouts of an admired Jewish writer (who had, in fact, been shot),
and when he learned that Alexander Fadeyev had lied to Mary McCarthy in 1949
about other "silent" Soviet writers, that Fast saw the moral bankruptcy that was
international communism's final legacy. Others, like Dos Passos, had seen it
earlier; some never saw it at all. For Fast, Khrushchev's 1956 speech was a
final cherry on the cake, when he finally felt able to say much of what he had
felt.
But he never became a professional anti-communist. There were too many novels
and books to write, and too much to say about freedom. Some of his work was
filmed, notably, in 1960, Spartacus, with a screenplay by another blacklisted
writer, Dalton Trumbo. In 1979, the 1944 novel, Freedom Road, became a TV
mini-series, starring Muhammad Ali as a former slave who becomes a senator after
the American civil war.
Fast's last novel, Greenwich, was published in 2000. Bette died in 1994. He is
survived by their son and daughter, his second wife Mercedes, whom he married in
1999, and her three sons.
