This week on The Historians Podcast, When Mommy Was a Commie (Troy Book Makers, 2022) is a comic historical novel set in Schenectady in the early 1950s, inspired by real-life episodes from America’s spy war with Russia. Author Jon Sorensen was a newspaper reporter for The Schenectady Gazette, Buffalo News and New York Daily News.
You can listen to the podcast here.
The tabloids call Martha the “Red Flame of New York,” a beautiful, young Communist whose fiery speeches are as hot as the tight, red dresses she wears. Martha is sent to Schenectady under orders to marry Milo Milwaukee, the diminutive leader of General Electric’s largest union. What Martha and the Communists don’t realize is that Milo is only pretending to be a Red. In the 1950s, this is a dangerous game.
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Readers of Jon Sorensen’s novel might also like “An Un-American Childhood” – 1996 – MEMOIR by Ann KIMMAGE, former. adjunct at SUNY here in Plattsburgh NY, where she and her family settled after return from their self-imposed exile as genuine Communists during the 1950’s McCarthy anti-Red crusade. I had been a shortwave-radio pen-pal with a secondary school teacher in Czechoslovakia later in the Communist era. After the uprising of Prague Spring, 1968, I taught two refugee teens (one Slovak, one Czech) at a high-school in The Bronx NY. I learned as much as I (hope) they did. — Life is truly a journey when we have distance to help us appreciate it.