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i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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Notes / 193a man (who loves children). Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), 230–31.47. Tony Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” Jump Cut 14 (1977), 28.48. These ƒlms were restored in 1982 and are in the ƒlm library of the Museum ofModern Art in New York. Information on the League is compiled in the Tom Brandonƒles.49. Safford, “Interview with Sam Brody,” 29.50. Ibid., 30. In the same issue of Jump Cut, Leo Seltzer described Brody as “somewhatof a writer and a talker and a screamer. Those who did most of the ƒlming, editingand screening were Del Duca, Balog and I.” Ibid., 31.51. Ibid., 29.52. “Horizon Films Presents ‘Of These Our People,’” „ier in the archives of the NationalCenter for Jewish Film, <strong>Brandeis</strong> University. With thanks to the Center’s director,Sharon Rivo, for providing me with this material.53. Ibid., 58.54. His description of the patrician Edmund Wilson ascending the “proletarian ‘bandwagon’ with the arrogance of a myopic, high-bosomed Beacon Hill matron enteringa common street-car” is unforgettable. For his part, Wilson was quite measuredin his assessment of Gold.55. Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 414.56. Mike Gold, “Foreword” to catalog of Alice Neel exhibition, New Playwright’s Theatre,1951, in scrapbook 1, Neel Arts, New York City.57. It is hardly coincidental that the vicissitudes of their careers are parallel. In the1950s and 1960s, neither artist enjoyed favorable critical reception, but by the1970s and 1980s, neo-Marxist and/or feminist critics had begun the process of reevaluationand reassessment. In 1961, in an important early history of Americanproletarian literature, Writers on the Left, Daniel Aaron concluded that communistwriters such as Gold produced little more than “journalistic ephemera.” DanielAaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York,Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 393. Thirty years later, in Left Letters: The CultureWars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, James Bloom found that the densityand complexity of Gold’s prose demonstrated a “subtle sophisticated cultural politics[that] belies the surviving image of him as a primitive sentimentalist, merely aCommunist Party mouthpiece.” James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars ofMike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 21,23. A contemporary of Bloom, Morris Dickstein, in his 1990 essay “The Tenementand the World: Visions of Immigrant Life,” also countered the received opinionthat Gold was a bad stylist: “I came to realize that his abrupt, impacted sentencesand paragraphs were long-limbed lines of prose-poetry . . . Gold was the missinglink between the plebian Whitman, whom he idolized, and the youthful AllenGinsberg, who must have read him as a Young Communist in the 1930s or early’40s.” In William Boelhower, ed., The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic WritingBetween the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 68–69.58. Frederick Ted Castle, “Interview with Alice Neel,” Artforum (October 1983); re-

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