ABSTRACT
Vivian Gornick wanted no more tampering with her dream of Communism, which spoke “with such power and moral imagination.” If only she had shared with her readers what she meant by “moral imagination,” there might have been far more than the singularly cluttered, but uninformative contents of her account. The New York Times published a section of the Gornick “passion” in its Book Review , followed by a laudatory review by a democratic socialist, whose emphasis on the crucial requirement, that socialism must all be democratic, played a part in the departure of this reviewer from the Communist movement. Some value may be wrung from the Gornick and Jessica Mitford books because there are Americans who will discover that Communists were real live people, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases.
