‘I’m thinking of joining the Party.’  It was 1956 and I, at 16, had intercepted my parents on the stairs, knowing full well that they hated the Communist Party and blamed it for betraying them and wasting their lives.  We met halfway, the irresistible force meeting the immovable objects. My heart pounded in my throat. Pop and I made eye contact and we all took a deep breaths.

‘Your mother and I forbid you to join.’  

We stood in charged silence, the cool autumn sunlight spilling through the window onto the piano. Mom glared down at the step, her body shaking, her eyes too angry to meet mine. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

But I had already joined, and the only thinking I had to do was about how long to wait before telling them. I respected Mom and Pop and hated to hurt them, but political action was important to me, and after two years of hideous isolation in the midwest, an invitation into an elite club was not just flattering, it was life-saving, and my parents would just have to get used to it.  I wished they could realize what the Party meant to me, and how it had changed since they had been members.

In the last few years, my parents had drifted from the Party, their faith giving way to doubts and disaffection. The last straw had come after Stalin’s death, with Kruschev’s speech at the 20th Congress revealing decades of the dictator’s brutal crimes and abuses.

Within weeks, Mom, Pop, Grandma, and 30,000 equally enraged friends and comrades walked away from the CPUSA.  Twenty years of being lied to had left them cynical and heartbroken. They had shielded me from their experiences in the Party and their hard-won insights. Besides, I didn’t consider their experiences in the ‘old’ Party relevant.  

After all, time and again, a militant radical identity had been my life-raft, carrying me through two years of lonelines, my political analysis keeping rejection, depression, and despair at bay. Contempt made not fitting in a virtue. With it, the power to reject was mine, a great reason to love politics.

So I stood my ground where Mom and Pop once stood. Sadly, they had devolved into liberals and become devoted members of

Singing City, an interracial, progressive chorus. Mom’s stalwart loyalty to women led her to Women’s Strike for Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Not strong enough for me, but forgivable.

They had done their bit, and now it was my turn, with or without their blessing.  

My grim-faced parents continued upstairs, and said no more about it. Being realists, they resigned themselves to the bitter pill of my self-determination. ‘From that I learned not to forbid you to do anything,’ Pop told me long afterwards. ‘You would just do it anyway.’ From his lesson I learned not to forbid my daughter Adrian for the same reason.

Pop’s first doubts about the Party had emerged at sea on his way back from Greenland with the Merchant Marines in 1944. He had spent his free time reading some fancy theory by Earl Browder, CPUSA Chief at the time. It changed the rules of Marxist-Leninist theory, distinguishing ‘good cartels’ from ‘bad cartels’ and showing that some capitalism was OK. Pop laughed at the absurdity. ‘I’d lie in my bunk and read it over and over, and it never made any sense.’ He shook his head at the jargon I was raised with. By the time I was old enough to understand what the terms meant, I stopped hearing the familiar sounds, comforting, like the sound of dixieland.   And now I was a ‘card-carrying’ Communist, except for the card which, sadly, they no longer issued. Had Mom and Pop ever carried cards? I knew Pop’s Party name had been ‘Mack’ and wished I knew more about their secret past, but asking would only call the rage back into Mom’s eyes.

For as long as I could remember, marxist publications like ‘Political Affairs’ and ‘Mainstream,’ along with the progressive ‘I.F. Stone Weekly’ and ‘The Guardian’ had been familiar sights in our livingroom, but they’d disappeared before I thought to notice them. Now I kept my own copies in my room and out of sight, along with other marxist literature, and copies of the literary ‘Monthly Review’ or ‘The Worker.’ Now it was my folks not asking, and me not telling.  In a single decade, we had accomplished a complete role reversal.

Dobkin performs this Sat., July 12 at Mountain Moving Coffeehouse for Womyn & Children, along with poet Alex Olson, 7:30 p.m.