I begin with a story from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism. It’s about an organizer named Eric Lanzetti and a young party member named Lilly. I like this story because it illustrates the themes of enlargement and courage that the Party perspective provides.
Lanzetti grew up in a West Virginia mining town after fascism pushed his father out of Italy. He attended Brown and Oxford on scholarship. In 1938, having been radicalized by the war in Spain, Lanzetti joined the Communist Party. Within a short time, he was made a section organizer on the Lower East Side of New York City. In one of the interviews with American Communists at the basis of Gornick’s book, Lanzetti tries to convey the reach of the Party on New York’s Lower East Side in the thirties, its moral place in the life of the neighborhood. He gives the example of Lilly:
She wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was a hardworking, conscientious Communist, with a powerful sense of class. She lived alone with her father on Rivington Street. The old man was an Orthodox Jew who paid absolutely no attention to her or to her politics or anything. She made his breakfast in the morning, went to work, came home, made his dinner, went to a meeting, came home, made him hot milk, and that was it. The old man sat reading the Talmud all day long. Lilly ran the house entirely. If it wasn’t for her working, they would have both starved. But he was her father and she was scared shitless of him.<sup>1</sup>
One evening after a meeting, Lanzetti recalls, Lilly wanted to talk to him about something. Hesitantly, she started to tell him about a man with whom she was in love. Lanzetti assumed Lilly wanted to know whether she should sleep with him, so he started to talk about how sex outside of marriage is not a problem. “‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’” Lanzetti recounts that he stared at her, momentarily dumbfounded. Then he replied, “‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party.’”
A month later, Lilly approached Lanzetti again. He asked her what had happened. She says that it took a while for her to get up the nerve, but then she finally told her father she was getting married. Her father asked, “Is he Jewish?” No, she answered. He’s Chinese. Lilly’s father was silent for a long time. “I’ll kill you,” he finally said. Lilly relates that her knees started to buckle:
Then all of a sudden it was like you were in there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?”
Sometimes You Have to Cook a Few Eggs
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