Quick Take
- Narration: Randye Kaye holds a book that is mostly other people talking, and a buyer hears the join immediately, wherever the reporting stops and a subject begins
- Themes: political faith and its collapse, working-class identity, disillusionment after Stalin
- Mood: intimate, elegiac, argued with rather than argued for
- Verdict: an unmatched record of what believing felt like, and a poor place to look for a reckoning
Publication, reissue, recording: this listing carries three different books at once. Vivian Gornick published The Romance of American Communism in 1977, it returned to print decades later with a new introduction, and Tantor made the audiobook in April 2020, eleven hours and fifty-one minutes with Randye Kaye reading. One counter, showing 105 ratings, sits above all three of them.
Working Class Before Jewish, Before a Girl
Gornick's opening line is quoted at the top of the copy and it tells you the method in advance: before knowing about being Jewish or being a girl came the knowledge of belonging to the working class. Everything follows from that ordering. This is a portrait of American socialists, communists and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s, tracked through the shape of a life rather than the shape of a movement, from joining, through the years spent inside the Party's orbit, to leaving in disillusionment as Stalin's crimes became public. The word doing the heavy lifting in the title is romance. What the book is actually about is what a political faith did to the interior life of ordinary people, and why so many of them describe those years as the only time anything they did felt connected to something larger.
Two complete passes through the book, with a third expected, produced the sharpest praise on the page. Five stars in July 2012 named the achievement precisely: the book brings alive people who sincerely believed that building Communism in America would produce a better life. Having known some of them, the same entry adds the other half, that they were deeply idealistic and could also be very difficult to be around. That double judgment is Gornick's own, and it is what keeps this from being either a tribute or a prosecution.
Kaye's One Voice, Two Things to Separate
Method is what makes it durable. This is new journalism rather than history, built out of long interviews gathered across the country, and a five-star from September 2008 puts a finger on exactly why it works: the personal accounts of individuals who were inside the movement are what make the thing readable at all. That entry describes the subject as the socialist movement in New York from the thirties into the fifties, hard-working people who wanted better conditions for the average working man and woman, and frames the book as the way into a slice of the country's past that rarely gets told at this range. Nobody is being explained here. People are talking, at length, about the most important thing that ever happened to them.
Randye Kaye has the assignment, and the structural problem is the join. A book made of long interviews inside an authorial frame asks one voice to keep two things separate: the reporting, analytical and controlled, and the testimony, which is somebody remembering their twenties. Do that without signaling and the subjects blur into the writer; overdo it and eleven hours becomes a gallery of impressions. Most of the written verdicts on this page were composed when this recording did not exist, so none of them speaks to how it goes. Look for a place where an interview runs long, because a stretch of Gornick's own prose tells you nothing about the harder half of the work.
Oral History Filed on the Memoir Shelf
Dissent arrives once and it is the most useful entry on the page. A three-star from September 2020, headed Puzzling, comes from somebody who grew up in a suburb about as far from radical politics as it is possible to get and met a few red-diaper babies as a teenager without understanding their parents at all. That reader credits the book with opening a world that must have existed before they were born, then lands the objection: it is a series of long interviews with nostalgic followers of the Party line, and it never comes to terms with the many lies, manipulations and destroyed lives the American Communist Party left in its wake. The text breaks off mid-wish. That objection is the standing one, and anybody buying this should hear it first.
Chronology explains a good deal of the rest. Three responses of the five were already sitting on the page before this recording existed, and one of them is a five-star whose entire text runs to two words, under a headline calling it a rare book, which grades availability rather than content. So the 4.5 sitting above 105 ratings is pooling verdicts on a 1977 edition, on a later reissue and on an audio file, with nothing on the page separating them. The listing also never says whether the new introduction Gornick wrote for the reissue is included in the recording, which is the one thing a returning reader would want to know.
Categories on this record do not survive contact with the book. It sits under biographies and memoirs, with a topical tag reading Art and Literature. This is oral history and political reportage about the American Communist Party, and it is not a memoir, whatever the first line suggests, since the interviews belong to other people. Somebody browsing the art and literature shelf has no reason to want it, and the listener who does want it, the one after twentieth-century American political life at close range, is looking somewhere else entirely.
A Good Book, Quietly, About Aging Too
Worth owning if you care about what political commitment does to a person rather than what a party did to a country. It suits listeners of oral history, readers who know Gornick as a critic and want to hear the reporter underneath, and anybody trying to understand why the American left of that generation still argues with itself. It is also, quietly, a good book about aging, since the interviews are conducted with people looking back at selves they no longer are.
Settled verdicts on the Party are not on offer here. Listeners who want the crimes accounted for, the archives weighed and the record set straight will finish frustrated, and the book never pretends to be doing any of that. Nearly twelve hours of people remembering also asks for patience: the structure repeats by design, because the pattern of joining and leaving is the argument. Temperature was the target here rather than judgment, and readers who need the judgment should take that as the warning it is.
Does this audiobook carry the material added to the reissue?
Nothing on the record confirms it. The copy attaches an added introduction to the print reissue and then goes quiet about whether it was recorded, which is exactly what a returning reader wants settled before paying. Check the chapter list if that piece is the reason you are buying.
Is the audiobook a memoir, given how it is shelved?
No, despite the biographies and memoirs placement. Gornick's own childhood supplies the opening and the vantage point, and then the book hands the microphone to a long line of other people. What it actually is, is new journalism built from long interviews with Party members and fellow travelers.
Do you need to know the history of the American Communist Party first?
No. The book assumes almost nothing, because its subject is experience rather than chronology, and each interview arrives with enough context to stand alone. What you will not get is a framework, so a listener who wants the political timeline should bring it from somewhere else.
Why does the rating cover so many editions at once?
Because the counter above this recording is collecting responses filed across three publication events: an original from 1977, a later reissue and this 2020 audio. The record never labels which edition a response belongs to, so the average describes a reputation built over decades rather than this particular file.
