Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties

I was intrigued by Sally Belfrage's memoir after reading the jacket synopsis. McCarthyism and a memoir of growing up -- all in the same book? Okay, I was game. This book will knock you off your feet. Not only do you get a glimpse of a time that you might only read about briefly in school history books (depending on how interested you are), but you get to read about Ms. Belfrage's dramas and traumas and happiness of growing up. She was trying to find a fit for herself in the two complete opposites in her life: Her father who was accused of being a communist and was deported from the US and her boyfriend, the West Point cadet. Tossed in the mix is her mother, whom Ms. Belfrage lived with until age 20, who just cannot relate to her daughter nor her daughter to her (her mother was also deported -- this is when Ms. Belfrage moved in with her father). There's a great story written here -- and I mostly appreciate Ms. Belfrage's honesty in both the retelling of her personal life and the retelling of a life the was forced upon her because of her parents' choices. I would recommend this book to everyone!

This title came out in paperback only a few short years ago, and received almost uniformly rave reviews. Now it is out of print. HarperCollins, the publisher, is to be booed roundly for failing to keep such a valuable and well written time capsule of the 1950's in print, as an important antidote to the treacle about this era that "Nick at Nite" continues to perpetuate.

I know nothing of Sally Belfrage, save for the wonderful and witty glimpses at her life contained in UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES, and that her death four years ago is a loss at once untimely and tragic. It is easy and perhaps good to be cynical about the American memoir--this being the realm of writing, after all, that often falls prey to numbing self-aggrandizement or an equally offensive "woe is me-ism." But where others sing the praises of an unattainable past or apologize for national pathologies, Belfrage embraces ambiguity with a voice that is both witty and serious. For those of us born after the 1950s--i.e. those whose conceptions of the period are informed by Henry Winkler and Bill Haley on one pole and the baleful stare of Roy Cohn on the other--this book is an entertaining and effective antidote to our shared cultural myopia. Suddenly, my parents make so much more sense to me...