The Communist and The Communist’s Daughter

I’m glad I managed to get my hands on Jane’s Lazarre’s memoir The Communist and The Communist’s Daughter. It is an interesting and intensely personal memoir, the story of a complex man and his never-ending quest for justice and love.

The man is Lazarre’s father, Will Lazarre, an immigrant from what's now Moldova, a radical activist and a member of the American Communist Party, a man who held to his ideals all his life, despite the disillusionment, the persecution, and the risk to his family.

“My father,” writes Jane Lazarre, was “a man with at least three names: his first, in the old country, Itzrael Lazarocitz; the one on his citizenship papers, anglicized by himself, William Lazar, later to become Lazarre, an elegant addition of letters made by his elegant wife, our mother; and his communist Party name, Bill Lawrence.

My father Bill: a revolutionary leader, a commissar in the Spanish Civil War, and a teacher-labors with overlaps in methods and aims. He taught in a public square, and one of his early speeches there landed him in a Philadelphia prison in the 1920s. Jane Lazarre intertwines the story of her father with a part of the story of hers and explores the complicated relationship between them and the strong emotions that accompany this relationship.  It is an intelligent and engaging concept, it makes you keep reading.

Jane Lazarre includes a lot of information in this memoir. One of the best sections of the book is the transcript from a 1958  testimony of her father before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Bill Lazarre was not deported or sent to prison. He lost so much, but never betrayed his principles. Even at the end of his life, he ends a letter written to his daughter when she turned twenty-eight with the words: ‘My faith in mankind knows no boundaries.”