Bettina Aptheker is a well-known American radical who in the 1960s was a leader of the campus Left, and now, like so many of her peers, is a tenured activist on the faculty of a major university. Her father, Herbert Aptheker, was the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual and, as the Party’s “leading theoretician,” a noted enforcer of its orthodoxy. The author of a notorious tract justifying the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Aptheker earned academic credentials as the author of a Columbia University doctoral thesis on American Negro Slave Revolts and was appointed editor of the papers of fellow Communist and friend, W.E.B. DuBois, and eventually executor of his literary estate. These achievements made Aptheker an unwitting intellectual forerunner of the ethnic and gender “identity politics” that would capture the allegiance of his daughter’s generation and supplant the economic Stalinism that was his own window on the world.
“The Party was everything” for him, his daughter tells us in a newly published memoir – “glorious, true, righteous, the marrow out of which black liberation would finally come.” His truth was not that of the scholar and skeptic but of the priest, framed “in absolutes: Loyalty, loyalty to this movement above all else.”[1] It was a mantle the daughter aspired to put on: “To inherit a father’s dreams makes you the eldest son. To further his ambitions makes you heir to the throne.” The apercu is quoted from an anthology of lesbian writings and appears on the very first page of her memoir, provocatively titled Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel.

I sat down to read this memoir expecting to learn little or nothing from the effort. The low expectations were not personal but a response to the genre of Communist memoirs, with which I was all too familiar. Political missionaries such as Bettina Aptheker and her father are self-confined prisoners of a religious faith, a fact she unexpectedly acknowledges early in her text: “While some families embraced religion to believe in and guide their lives, we had Communism.”[2] It is this fact that makes such reminiscences normally unrewarding. The moral compass of an ideological faith requires a flattening of the human landscape and the reduction of its complexities to the formulas that enable its pilgrims to chart their earthly progress.

In the Apthekers’ household, this moral rectitude routinely required the suppression of facts inconvenient to their cause and the occlusion of perspectives that questioned its truths. The father’s apologetic for the Soviet outrage in Hungary was an obvious case in point. By her own account, the daughter rigidly followed his ideological footsteps. Indeed despite her claim to be a “feminist rebel,” she owes to him every achievement of notoriety in her own political career. By her own account the Aptheker daughter was not even aware of the ideas of non-Party Marxists like Herbert Marcuse and Maurice Merleau-Ponty before encountering them in graduate school in her late twenties. “There was a whole world of ideas out there about which I knew almost nothing,” she observes in her text, “because my reading had been so (self-) censored.”[3] It is an even more striking admission in that she had spent the previous 10 years as a student and political actor in an environment – Berkeley – which was the capital of the “New Left” and thus the center of a veritable renaissance of unorthodox radical ideas.

Because of the authorial mission, the first editorial principle of the ideological memoirist is invariably the exclusion of the politically inexplicable. Unruly experience cannot be permitted to enter the autobiographical frame where it might unsettle the meanings of a devotional life. Drained of the unexpected, such reminiscences, therefore, are not really self-portraits but summaries of the hero’s political postures over time. Eric Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times is an example of the genre, as is the autobiography of Al Richmond, one of Aptheker’s Party mentors. But it is not only memoirs by Communist authors that suffer this literary constraint. I remember my acute disappointment on reading the autobiography of Irving Howe, a stalwart of the anti-Communist Left, just because of this fact: In writing it, he had left out his life.

The very title of Aptheker’s book, Intimate Politics, was unpromising. It is an obvious play on the familiar feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” As I understood it, the phrase expressed an ideological will to reduce everything personal to a political formula, stamping out the messy particulars of an individual existence in the process.

Despite these forebodings, my interest in Intimate Politics had been piqued (along with everyone else’s) when a dark secret at its core was leaked by the first reviewers. The famously loyal daughter of a famous progressive father had outed him as a child molester. In the daughter’s telling – which is hard to credit – she had repressed the memory of her molestation for 40 years and recovered it only as she sat down in her fifties to interrogate her past. According to the daughter, the father whom she adored as an avatar of humanity’s future “liberation” had forcibly masturbated on her innocent flesh “from early childhood until age thirteen.”[4] To conceal the shame, he had terrorized her into silence with a threat, which merged with the political terror that defined their lives: If you speak out, if you reveal who we are, you will betray us, and “terrible things will happen.”[5] So fearful was the child of losing her father to unseen forces if she spoke the truth, she suppressed it, keeping the secret eventually even from herself.

The daughter’s 500-page memoir, 10 years in the writing, is framed by this secret and by its unceremonious revelation at the end of the patriarch’s life: “As I began writing, sifting through my childhood memories, they erupted in ways I would never have predicted. A story emerged. A fault line opened and my world underwent a seismic shift.”[6] So she begins her book; and closes it with her confrontation with the patriarch over his unspeakable crime. At the time of her revelation, Herbert Aptheker was 84-years-old and had already suffered a “major stroke.” Fay, his wife of 62 years, was dead a mere 17 days. Yet, in response to a seemingly innocent question, “Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?”[7] she accuses him: You are a molester and I am your victim. “This is worse than Fay dying!” the old man squeals. The daughter drives on: it happened. Desperation overwhelms him. He talks of suicide. Facing a personal destruction as complete as if his existence had been erased by a totalitarian state, he denies the claim. “I can’t live with this…I have no memory of it! You must have dreamed it, or read about it somewhere! I cannot live with this. Therefore, I deny it.”[8] But the daughter persists and the old man, increasingly frantic, clutching at his own reality as it slips irretrievably away, interjects bizarrely: “You know a great moment in history? Nat Turner was in his cell. One arm chained to the wall.” He is reaching for the legacy and the myths that have sustained him and has become in his own mind one with the rebel slave confronting the jailers who are about to execute him, crying, “Was not Christ crucified?”[9]

It is a scene of betrayal unique to this literature. For a family living for history, as the Herbert Apthekers did – living for humanity – this is the point of no return. Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Talk about the patricidal fury of the heir apparent! Talk about unruly!

For Bettina Aptheker, the recovered incest memory – if that is what it is – provides one of the insurmountable fault lines in the perfect sense her parents attempted to make of the world with their progressive values and ideas. But in the end it is not what triggers her exit from the Stalin cult or propels her on the road to her second thoughts. The prime mover of this painful odyssey – the indispensable peg that will not fit the ideological frame – is not any act inflicted on her but the contingency of her own sexual identity: “I don’t think I ever would have moved out of the perceived safety in which I had enclosed myself by the mid-1970s had it not been for the fact that I was a lesbian. My strong desire to live my own life – as a lesbian and as a feminist-activist scholar – overrode fear, parental pressures, and Communist imperatives.”[10]

But here, as on many other occasions in her book, her self-understanding falls short. For the desire that drives her story is more than just a need to live her own life. It is also the religious desire for a vision that will unify her life. The desire to close the gap between her personal truth and her political ideas is the true theme of Aptheker’s memoir, justifying both the title of her book and the feminist slogan from which it derives. It is this need that drives her ruthless determination to confront the fault lines of her parents’ lives and her own, even when the confrontation is emotionally violent; even when it expresses itself in cruel and unnecessary acts; even when it means ripping asunder the foundations of hearth and home.

"Everywhere in my life there were secrets. There were those I was told to keep and others about myself that I chose to keep…[These] secrets kept me isolated, especially from other children, and instilled in me the belief that what went on at home had nothing to do with my parents’ political beliefs – those of socialism, peace, social justice, racial equality and civil rights. Of course, I didn’t see the contradiction between the way they lived and what they believed until much later, when I realized that I had to live what I believed if I was going to overcome my past and thrive as an authentic person."[11]

Not all the secrets were sexual. Some were personal, like the fact of her mother’s first marriage, which she discovered inadvertently at the age of 10, when an old family acquaintance accosted them in a department store and addressed her mother by a previous married name: “Now I knew that Mother and Father had lied to me my whole life about something that felt very important to me. What else had I not been told? What else had I been told that wasn’t true?”[12]

But the Aptheker secrets were above all political, deriving from the public activities that provided meaning to their lives. Bettina describes the execution of the Rosenbergs, the martyred saints of the Communist church, as “the political nightmare of my childhood,” a common experience for those of us who grew up in that radical generation.[13] She was eight at the time: “After their execution my mother pulled me onto her lap one evening when she got home from work. We were in the big green leather chair in the living room. She said: ‘I have something very important to tell you.’ Her voice was soft, almost without inflection. I could feel her breath on my cheek. ‘Your daddy and I are Communists. You must never, ever tell anyone. Do you understand?’”[14] The message was clear. If you reveal who we are the consequences may be death.

A year later, at a camp for “progressive” children, Bettina betrayed the secret. The children were lying on their bunks before going to sleep, boasting about their parents, and ranking them politically. “My parents are Communists,” said one proudly. “Mine aren’t,” responded another, challenging the presumption of virtue behind the claim. “‘My parents are Communists too,’ I said. Then I froze. I had betrayed the secret. I was terrified. FBI agents were lurking outside our bunkhouse. They would have heard me. They would arrest my parents….”[15] Terrible things would happen.

But of course, it was pure fantasy, since – as Aptheker herself concedes – her father was a publicly known Communist. Her mother was protecting her from possible repercussions from other children and unwittingly terrorizing her instead.

Decades after, Aptheker had occasion to contrast her family’s Byzantine household with a conservative foil. She and her life partner, Kate Miller, were visiting Miller’s Lutheran parents, who were from the Midwest and who believed – and made no secret of their belief – that an “unrepentant homosexual” like their daughter “would literally burn in hell.” It was an attitude, however, as Aptheker notes, that didn’t prevent them from loving their daughter. Aptheker had spent decades in the closet out of fear of revealing her secret to her own mother and father (and for a long time even herself), because she thought it would mean expulsion from her family and her Party and world. What she was observing in Kate’s family came as a revelation: “I was most amazed however by their family interaction. The content may have been conservative, but at least everything was out in the open. In my family, everything was communicated by innuendo, and undercurrent, and we kept so many secrets from each other, lying by omission, by denial, by erasure.”[16]

Not surprisingly, the secrets of the Aptheker household were accompanied by a psychological rage whose dimensions could be frightening. “Though my father was passionate and articulate on behalf of causes he believed in, particularly Communism,” Aptheker observes, “this fire could also quickly turn to unrestrained anger.” She provides examples. The stories of his war service are mainly “harrowing.” On one occasion he recalls for his daughter that he pointed his sidearm at the head of the unarmed mayor of German village after liberation, demanding milk for children in a refugee camp. “My father cocked the gun and told him to find the milk or ‘I’d blow his goddamn head off.’ The milk arrived but my father still regretted not ‘shooting the sonofabitch anyway.’”[17] This could have been mere bravado, but the incidents she relates are too numerous and too detailed to doubt.

Besides being a dedicated teacher and scholar, Naison is a community activist, and very much involved in various interracial youth organizations. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project,"Save a Generation," and an organizer and fund-raiser for the Bonnie Youth Club, the largest sand-lot baseball league in Brooklyn and the only one that is predominantly African-American.

In the Fall of 2002, I sat down with Naison and interviewed him about his life and career, and the relationship between his activism and his scholarship.

Gerald Zahavi: Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Mark Naison: I am very glad to be here.

Zahavi: Well, let's start by being provocative. How did a 'white boy' like you ever get so involved with the study of African American culture and history?

Naison: I grew up in Crown Heights in the 1950's at the time that it was undergoing a very dramatic change in its racial composition, a change which really polarized the community. I grew up in the early 50's when there wasn't a visible race problem Crown Heights was a Jewish and Italian community. Perhaps one and two percent of the population was Black and the Jewish population, at least on the surface, was very racially tolerant. They welcomed the Jackie Robinson Dodgers. Racial epithets were not used in my presence. When people were talking about Blacks they used the term"Shvartza"; they actually went into Yiddish. I was there when integrated sports were capturing the imagination of the neighborhood. I was there when rock and roll was doing the same. But then, by the time I entered High School, the neighborhood became very tense. I went to a local high school which had about twenty percent of its students African American, many of them coming down by bus from Bedford Stuyvesant. There were fights outside the school; there were fights in the school. I got in a locker room fight with six black kids. It led me being knocked out cold. I ended up going to a school out of the district, and my parents who had not talked about race very much when I was eight, or nine, or ten--by the time I was thirteen or fourteen-- [were] becoming very visibly angry about the changing racial composition of the neighborhood and their anger came to a head for the first time when I was in High school and decided to participate in my first civil rights demonstration which was being organized by the Erasmus Hall High school Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, which was joining Brooklyn CORE in picketing Ebinger's Bakery. This bakery chain refused to hire African Americans as truck drivers or [have] people working in the stores, even though many of their stores were being located in Black neighborhood. And when I went to this demonstration my parents hit the ceiling and said one, that I can get in trouble for going to a demonstration because in their era people lost lost their jobs because of this, but two, I should'nt be doing something to help black people; I should be doing something to help the Jews if I wanted to help somebody. It was clear that they saw African Americans as a treat to their neighborhood, their security -- in ways that upset me. So, when I went to college I also became involved in the chapter of CORE at Columbia. [I] was watching with great concern and dismay at the violence that greeted civil rights demonstrators in the South. [I] also was disturbed at how race played itself out in the Columbia campus. There were some Southern students at Columbia who were openly racist. Columbia itself had this very contemptuous attitude toward Harlem, had also displaced many people of color from the neighborhood. And so, I looked around me and saw an extension of the racial issues that I was seeing in my own neighborhood which seemed to really divide people, and of course was now dividing the whole country. So when I started taking history classes in American History, I decided to do my research papers on subjects relating to race. The first big research paper I did was on the disfranchisement of the Negro in Alabama in the early 20th century, when the Alabama Constitutional Convention was debating whether to overturn the Reconstruction actions which had placed African Americans in positions as voters and as office holders and basically eliminate them from politics and establish a formal segregation code. So that was my first research venture into the study of race and it was a fascinating experience. I loved going back into the past. It was, I think 1903, and I was living this. I was at the convention, and the issues seemed so alive to me that I said"well, this is the kind of history I wanted to do." And I got some encouragement from this. I mean, this was a time at Columbia there were no courses in African American History. I don't ever recall reading a book by an African American author, but I had professors who encouraged this interest, particularly Walter Metzger who really, you know, every time I took a course with him and wanted to do this kind of research, he encouraged it. So I was moving in this direction, based upon my experience in Brooklyn, based upon what I was seeing and experiencing at Columbia, based upon what I was watching in the news, but the thing that really pushed me into this was what happened to me when I was a senior at Columbia and I met an African American woman at a basketball team party at Columbia. We started dating and then I fell in love with her. When I told my parents, they reacted with a level of hysteria that just blew me away. They had no interest in this young woman's background, character, personality, accomplishments; just the fact that she was Black meant that they would have nothing to do with her. They basically told me she could never be part of our family, and they would see me but never with her, and basically said that I was destroying everything that they had worked for in their lives. Now this experience (and parenthetically I was adopted by her extended family of transplanted Southerners), that experience made me feel that race was the overwhelming issue in American society , that we as a nation was unable to deal with not only at the level of politics but at the level of folk culture mores. And as an intellectual, if I was going to do anything to make a difference it was to find the language, find the images, to try to understand the force of this in people's lives. So I said I've got a subject that will keep me busy for a lifetime. I mean I wish I didn't have the momentum and drive for this interest coming from this experience, but it did and it's something that's never left me. ...