An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century— for workers’ rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racism—Jumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick chronicles his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing.
Herrick chronicles a life of great conviction and great disillusion. He went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists and there witnessed the horrifying acts that Fascists and Communists alike committed, before he was felled by a near-fatal wound. Here he tells about the life that led him, a working-class Jewish kid from New York, into the idealism and then the murky politics of this internecine conflict. From the bloody fight in Spain he takes us to the battlefields of the Communist movement in the U.S., where he found himself parading up and down the garment district of Manhattan, denouncing his former comrades.
When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herrick’s remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesn’t always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.
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Herrick's life is anything but dull. He has worked with Orson Welles, met Rita Hayworth, lived as a hobo, and almost died from a bullet wound during the Battle of Jarama. Herrick is a controversial figure who exposed Communist crimes to the media. At the same time he is honest--admitting he too would have done anything asked of him by the Communist party. This is a gutsy memoir told in plain prose, with enough wit to keep the subject from becoming overly dry.
In the 1930's, Herrick, like many American Communists, went to Spain to fight the Fascists. He writes about what he saw at the front lines in vivid, unsentimental prose. But there is much more to William Herrick than war stories. The childhood that sent him on the path to Spain, conflicts with those who continued to toe the Party line after Spain and the Hitler-Stalin pact, as well as his run in with the lackeys of the McCarthy Senate committee.
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