In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history. events of the 20th century and the repression of dissent. Hers is a gripping story about surviving hardship and summoning the courage to live according to one's convictions.
A HISTORIAN'S PERSONAL VIEW OF 20TH CENTURY CRISES
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
Gerda Lerner, one of our most important historians, has written a magnificently honest and perceptive autobiography. She takes us through her youth in Vienna, her imprisonment by the Nazis, her escape to the United States where she married, raised children and built a new life, her years in Hollywood and New York, and her experiences as a radical during the McCarthy period. It is an engrossing, very human story that will touch and enlighten all who read it. We can only hope that Lerner will follow it with a volume that relates the story of her years as a historian who helped to create modern women's history.
Fireweed
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
An honest, courageous and illuminating account of a radical life. Also a reminder that our current troubles are not unique. Lerner's account of the persecution of members of the Communist Party USA during the 1950's, the abrogation of their civil rights and the threat to their livelihood should be a warning to us today.
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