Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography) Book

William Herrick provides an eye opening and fiery account of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 in his powerful memoir Jumping the Line. Raised with Communism in his blood, it was inevitable that Herrick would volunteer to fight in Spain with the hope of quelling fascism and battling for the rights of workers. Young and idealistic, Herrick soon learned that both the fascists and Communists committed grotesque acts against humanity, and shame is etched in many of Herrick's accounts of the war. In the 1950s Herrick went on to testify against his former Communist comrades, and again a great sense of guilt pervades his account of this difficult decision. Herrick's life is anything but dull. He has worked with Orson Welles, met Rita Hayworth, lived as a hobo, and almost died from a bullet wound during the Battle of Jarama. Herrick is a controversial figure who exposed Communist crimes to the media. At the same time he is honest--admitting he too would have done anything asked of him by the Communist party. This is a gutsy memoir told in plain prose, with enough wit to keep the subject from becoming overly dry.Read More

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  • Product Description

    An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century for workers rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racismJumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick chronicles his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing. Herrick chronicles a life of great conviction and great disillusion. He went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists and there witnessed the horrifying acts that Fascists and Communists alike committed, before he was felled by a near-fatal wound. Here he tells about the life that led him, a working-class Jewish kid from New York, into the idealism and then the murky politics of this internecine conflict. From the bloody fight in Spain he takes us to the battlefields of the Communist movement in the U.S., where he found himself parading up and down the garment district of Manhattan, denouncing his former comrades. When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herricks remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesnt always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.

  • 0299157903
  • 9780299157906
  • William Herrick
  • 30 June 1998
  • University of Wisconsin Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 260
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