Murray's description of Richard Nixon's funeral, for example, which the book's fictional McCarthyites attend, is marvelous: Roth is unrepentantly hostile to McCarthy and his ilk. At one level, it is an account of the personal and social devastation wrought by the anticommunist witch-hunts. The book is remarkable in a number of ways. Discredited and abandoned by her spiteful daughter, she dies "in a drunken stupor" in a New York hotel in the early 1960s. Ira's radio career is finished he ends up in rural New Jersey selling minerals to tourists, dying not long after his blacklisting. It always was and it always will be." Ultimately, when Eve discovers Ira has been having an affair, she denounces him to a couple of witch-hunters and writes a tell-all book entitled I Married a Communist. Murray tells Ira: "The menace to you isn't your public actions, the menace to you is your private life. The girl is furious at her mother for her remarriage and desires nothing more than to punish her. She is weak-willed and terrorized by her daughter from a previous marriage, Sylphid, a harpist. "I discovered," he explains, "the sense of betrayal that comes of trying to find a surrogate father though you love your own." Meanwhile, even as the blacklist is closing in on Ira, his marriage to Eve is disintegrating. The 16-year-old Nathan takes up with Ira against his father's wishes.
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More or less accidentally, Ira becomes an actor (first portraying Abraham Lincoln at CIO functions), winding up on a popular, vaguely leftist radio program, The Free and the Brave, in the late 1940s. A Stalinist steelworker, Johnny O'Day, recruits Ira to the Party while the two are working as soldier-stevedores on the docks in Iran. Nathan knew Ira, through Murray, as a teenager.īorn poor in Newark to a cruel family, raised in a tough Italian neighborhood, Ira drops out of school and, immediately after Pearl Harbor, enlists in the army. The details of Ira's political and moral destruction are recounted half a century later to the book's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman-Roth's favorite protagonist-by Murray Ringold, Ira's brother and Zuckerman's one-time high school teacher. The most recent book tells the story of Ira Ringold, a Communist Party member brought down in the McCarthyite days of the early 1950s by his relationship with a well-known actress, Eve Frame. Born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, Roth has published more than 20 works, including Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Portnoy's Complaint (1969), My Life as a Man (1974), Zuckerman Bound (A Trilogy and Epilogue) (1985), Sabbath's Theater (1995) and American Pastoral (1997). I Married a Communist is the latest extraordinary work of fiction by the American novelist Philip Roth. "At any rate, all I can do with my story is tell it.