My grandfather Will Stone was a radical Jewish labor organizer of the sort that got investigated by the FBI for all sorts of things, some of which he did, and many of which he didn’t. I know he tried to sign up for the Abraham Lincoln brigades in the Spanish Civil War, but I don’t know if he went. I know that he was an avowed Communist, well after Bob Hope had dropped the “noble Russian Bear” line from “Thanks for the Memory,” when it should have been obvious to everyone that Stalin was not the kindly “Uncle Joe” pictured with the allies at Yalta.
I know that some time around 1948 he left my grandmother and my father alone in New Jersey, and that my father didn’t hear from him for twenty-some-odd years. I don’t know what it was like to be a godless Communist divorced single mother in the 1950s, but it cannot have been easy.
I know that my biological grandfather later claimed he had not written or sent money in order to protect the family, because he was being investigated and followed. I don’t know how many of those anti-Communist forces were real and how many were imaginary, but I imagine it was some of each. I don’t know how much his siblings agreed with his politics, but I don’t think it was much. I never met him and I don’t know when he died.
I learned all of this just last weekend, at my second cousin’s bat mitzvah. I’d never met anyone from his side of the family before. The only two people of my grandfather’s generation in attendance were his youngest brother Sam, with his wife. Sam told me the story about the Spanish Civil War, and said that my father looked just like Will. Sam’s wife told me that Will had never been an easy one to get along with, that his preaching about labor rights seemed cultish and his preaching about women’s rights hypocritical. She also told me she once went on a date with my great-uncle Paul, way back in New York when dinosaurs and Studebakers roamed the earth. She and Sam both remembered my grandmother fondly.
Sam had been my grandmother’s favorite of her half-dozen brothers-in-law, but I doubt they had spoken since the divorce (that’d be nearly sixty years, if you’re counting). My dad called and put her on the phone with him and they talked for a few minutes. Then we all had cake and promised to keep in touch.
Secretly Ironic 