A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo Read Free Book Online

culture in the school and convince myself to be interested in what interested other students, then work at introducing them to what interested me. With my other friends and with the kids at Kinderland, I could be more spontaneous since we knew we came from the same left-wing background; that was our bond.

    Camp Kinderland—I’m in the pointy hood next to Sue Zuckerman (far right).
    There was no reason to create subdivisions for religions or ethnicity. We’d been brought up to unite, not separate. We had in common an outsider status inflicted on us by the Cold War and our parents’ political beliefs. Other than our seriousness about freedom, justice, equality for all, and banning the bomb, we were still just a bunch of teenagers.
    The big event of the Kinderland summer was a play for the entire camp put on by the CIT group. The counselors picked the musical
The Pajama Game,
a recent hit on Broadway, for its theme about a union in a pajama factory seeking a pay raise and better working conditions for the employees, as well as for the central love story between Babe, the head of the union grievance committee, and the plant’s new superintendent, Sid.
    I was picked for the role of Babe, and Sid was to be played by my boyfriend. Fun, except that I cannot carry a tune. The counselors cum directors must have had second thoughts about my voice after the first few song rehearsals, but they did not act on them. I must have been god-awful, yet everyone was enthusiastic and we had a great time doing all the work that putting on a stage production entails. I forgot to be afraid of singing in front of people.
    The Babe and Sid offstage romance didn’t last the summer, however. I don’t think it was because I couldn’t sing and he could and I massacred all our love duets—but that might have contributed somewhat.

Identity
    When the school year began again, so did the trips to Washington Square on Sundays. My friends and I would meet at Astor Place, then wander off to a coffee shop, a bookshop, or Nedicks, a nondescript hot dog place at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, where the painters and Beat writers of the forties and fifties had hung out, to carry on intense conversations about the world we were learning about and how we figured in it. And we made plans to see one another at the next folk concert.

    Washington Square Park with friends
    I traveled back and forth on the subway from Queens to Manhattan and did a lot of reading if I was alone. One book that intrigued me was
The God That Failed
, a selection of essays by internationally known writers of the time, including Stephen Spender, André Gide, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright, explaining why they quit the Communist Party. The appeal of Communism was the search for a better, more equitable society, but the disillusionment each of these writers experienced was a long, agonizing journey. As an examination of the Cold War and Stalinism by these important thinkers, without the usual rhetoric, the book made an impact.
    The fact that these respected intellectuals publicly repudiated their previous beliefs was a blow to the left. Because
The God That Failed
had been so touted and praised by anti-Communists, I felt I was betraying the elders by reading it. Hence I read in secret. In those terrible times of anti-Communist fervor, you were either on one side or the other; there could be no middle ground, at least publicly. Behind the scenes the book was read and discussed by the left, as well.
    I was wary of dogma, of black-and-white opinions. In this climate, it wasn’t easy for red-diaper babies to raise questions about the Soviet Union and Stalin, since we knew our parents were living within a siege mentality. When the writer Howard Fast left the Communist Party he was denounced by it as a traitor and an opportunist. His book
Spartacus,
about a Roman slave revolt, was made into a Hollywood movie starring Kirk Douglas. My pal George Auerbach, also a red-diaper baby, said that