Joseph North (1) (1904–1976)

This is a difficult book to place, it seems to oscillate between being an autobiography and a collection of loosely linked essays. North starts conventionally enough, with his semi-literate Ukrainian immigrant parents and his childhood in Chester, Pa., memories of shipyards, school, his mother rescuing their black neighbour from a Ku Klux Klan raid, him winning a scholarship examination and then being told that the sponsors, the local Rotarians, had decided after the event that they didn't want the scholarship grant to go to a Jewish child. But then we turn a page and go without any explanation from the young Joe, apparently condemned to a life hammering rivets in the shipyards, to the only slightly older Joe graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

And that's how it goes on: there's a lot of very interesting reminiscence about his early training as a journalist on a local paper, his conversion to socialism and his move to New York to join the staff of the Daily Worker and become the editor of the relaunched weekly New Masses, about his work there, the writers and cartoonists he worked with, assignments to cover strikes, racist abuses in the South, and so on, but there are all kinds of continuity breaks and odd omissions. There's not a single mention of his brother, the well-known film composer Alex North, for instance, and even his wife, fellow-communist Helen Oken, is only mentioned briefly in passing once (when he's describing his return from Spain she is travelling back with him, but he hasn't previously bothered to mention that she came to Spain). Perhaps this lack of personal detail is understandable given the political climate of the fifties when he was writing, but it gives the book a strangely disconnected feel.

The most obviously interesting parts of the book should probably be the chapters on Spain and Cuba and the final section about Europe immediately after the German capitulation, including a visit to Dachau, but actually most of what he says there is exactly what you would expect a committed communist to say. It's almost painful to read his wriggling justification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, for instance, or his parroting of the revealed truth that the defeat of the Spanish Republic was entirely the fault of the Trotskyists and Anarchists.

What struck me much more in the book were the chapters about the South, in particular his account of going to Georgia in the early thirties to report on the Angelo Herndon case, and his wartime trip to meet black workers in Alabama, where it's made clear to us that we are every bit as far behind enemy lines as we would be in occupied Europe. North tries hard to be optimistic that the workers' movement and the experience of working in a common cause for the war effort will overcome barriers of race in American society, but keeps running up against realities that make him doubt it.… (meer)