To headline writers over the last half-century or so, Dorothy Healey was the "Red Queen of Los Angeles," "our own Madame Defarge," "the Little Dictator." As we discover in "Dorothy Healey Remembers," she has mellowed only slightly over the years: The gravel-voiced, cigarillo-smoking veteran of the barricades is still \o7 La Pasionaria \f7 of the City of the Angels.
"It was in good measure through her influence," insists her co-author, historian Maurice Isserman, in a particularly illuminating introduction to the book, "that the Communist Party in California came to be referred to in those years as the Yugoslavia of the American communist movement."
Healey joined the Young Communist League as a teen-ager in Berkeley in 1928, and she stayed in the party for nearly 50 years before finally leaving its ranks as a protest against the lack of "party democracy." The secret of her longevity as party member and a militant, she reveals, is "the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony."
"Dorothy Healey Remembers" is based upon--or, perhaps more accurately, inspired by--a series of interviews by Joel Gardner of the UCLA Oral History Program, but the book takes its tone and substance from the work of Healey's editor, amanuensis and co-author, Maurice Isserman.
Thanks to Isserman, Healey's "first-person biography" is richly studded with little asides patterned after the "witness" segments of the motion picture "Reds": a letter, a political pamphlet, an entry from a secret FBI file, fragments of Steinbeck and Sinclair and Gorky, the testimony of a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the reminiscences of Healey's family and fellow strugglers.
Much of Healey's narrative focuses rather too insistently on the hothouse politics of the Communist Party, the fusty old ideological battles that once seemed so urgent but now strike us as almost antique: the Popular Front, the so-called "Teheran Line," the uncomfortable bedfellowship of Old and New Left.
But there is genuine outrage and lingering pain in Healey's accounts of the old debates over the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Khrushchev's "secret speech," the Hungarian uprising, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The old embers still burn hot in Healey's memory, and she is still moved by the old causes. For example, she summons up some of the old rancor in recalling the simmering factional disputes of the Old Left.
