Synopsis "The Good Comrade (in English)"
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD THIS IS A TRUE STORY, INSOFAR AS THERE WERE ACTUAL EVENTS THAT TOOK PLACE ONCE UPON A TIME, TO THE PEOPLE DESCRIBED. IT IS FICTION, IN-THAT I HAVE NOT TRIED FOR ABSOLUTE VERACITY IN THE CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS OR CHARACTERS, I HAVE LET MY IMAGINATION, HAVE FREE RUN OVER THESE EVENTS. This story involves the kidnapping of a child by one parent from the other, and back. This story involves people who joined the communist party during the nineteen thirties, one who married a person of another race, and a cousin of my Mother who betrayed her. This story takes place during what history now calls the McCarthy era. The whole issue of McCarthyism, Communism, Loyalty Oaths, and the left-wing ever being a threat to American life, seems so foreign, that it seems hard to believe that McCarthy was ever feared. In newsreels, he appears to be the buffoon, that hindsight has shown us he was. I will appear in this story, as a minor walk on. A small child doing what a small child does best, just being. My upbringing and inclinations have imparted to me if you will, and if I can make some sense of this, a generational over-view of things. Life as a historical process, of continuing events. The shared history we carry that make us who we are as kith and kin. Therefore, I would like to start telling you this story. Let us now begin, if not at the beginning, then at a convenient, and in this story a necessary point in time. An August afternoon in 1953, just before a birthday party at a roller skating rink in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. "This is not the saddest story I have ever heard", but it is the one I know best, and I seem to need to tell it one last time.
