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Testing testing. Turn this on. Everything should be working smoothly and I'll hand the mic over to you. Let's start um you just give me your name and spell it out. OK. My name is Ann Weissman, A N N W E I S S M A N.

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And you were born where and when? I was born in Niagara Falls, New York on July 28, 1947. My father was a Communist Party functionary at that time, uh, who had just been assigned to upstate New York and he worked with several different unions there. Um,

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who were the other members of your family? You have siblings and I have a mother, um, who just died and uh she and my father met through the Communist Party. Um, and I have a sister who's 3 years younger than me, and that's our immediate family.

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Um, and um tell me about who they are, where they came from. OK. My dad was born, um. I think on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, uh, maybe, hm, maybe on actually way up on the Upper East Side, which was a very poor neighborhood at

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that time. Um, his name's Irving Weissman. Uh, his parents were as poor as poor can be. They were both immigrants. Um, his father was a tailor, uh, who I guess had developed some kind of a heart condition as a young man and, um, tried a series

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of things that didn't work, a tiny grocery store, um. They lived from day to day. They had no money at all. Um, my father's memories are of the deepest, most biting poverty. um, his mother was also an immigrant who, uh. Never learned to read or write.

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She was illiterate in 5 languages because she did speak Yiddish and Polish and English and a little Russian, and I forget what her other one was. Um, she never worked outside the home. Uh, she was a very, very unhappy, bitter woman and uh the marriage was

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a very, very miserable one. Um, and I guess she herself came from the poorest possible family. She came from the underclass of Warsaw, and she and her sisters used to spend all day indoors rolling cigarettes that her father peddled on the streets. Um, my grandfather came

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from a, a somewhat happier family, um, that lived in the country outside of Warsaw, and I guess they worked as laborers in an orchard and it was a better life, though he was apprenticed, sent away from his family, apprenticed out at the age of 13, and

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never really lived with his family again after that. And so your father was born in the United States, his first language was Yiddish. He never learned English till he started school. My father says the same thing, although some of us don't believe him, but he seems

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to like it. No, I think it was really true of a lot of people, maybe not your father, but clearly mine because he has an accent that he's never lost. No, I can do it with one hand. Um, what do you know about your um. Well,

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and then your mother's, uh, childhood. I know less about my mother's childhood because she, uh, when my father went on trial, she and her family severed all relations, but, uh, my mother grew up on Staten Island. Her parents also were immigrants, but, um. They had a

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more fortunate story I guess her father had actually grown up in Moscow where Jews were not allowed, and he had been educated. His, his older brother had been some kind of advisor to the Tsar, and the family fell out of favor when the boy was 14

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and he came to America by himself on a boat, and um he said the first language he had to learn to survive in New York was Yiddish, which he did not know. But um he met his wife in Vermont actually and they settled on Staten Island

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where he opened a small uh candy and magazine store and they were pretty prosperous. There was a family of 55 children. Um, They were the only Jews in the neighborhood. My mother, who was kind of a tomboy, remembers uh. Being beaten up by Irish kids fairly

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frequently and getting in lots of fights, um. But and she, you know, she wasn't, her family didn't want her, she was an unwanted unplanned child and. She wasn't very well loved, but I think her, her, her life was reasonably stable until the depression. She graduated high

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school in the depression and never could find work. So your finished high school and they go on. Both my parents finished high school. Uh, my father went to City College for, I don't know, maybe a semester or two, but he was, uh. I guess it was

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probably a combination of political activity, being involved in the YCL, um, his family's poverty, uh. Whatever it was, he, he really, he tells me he never liked school very much anyway, and he didn't follow through in college. I don't think my mother ever Went to college

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until she turned about 50 or so when she did go to college. Well, my father, my father really had a rather fascinating career. My father went, he fought in Spain with the International Brigades and then he was in the American army during World War 2 and

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um. At least a lot of interesting stories to tell about that, and after the war, he came back to the United States and he became a um A full-time Uh Party worker of party functionary. And um, I don't know the exact story, but I know that

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he was a dissident within the ranks at that time. Um, he, he felt that the American Party was way out of touch with the American working class and uh. He was, he was pretty much opposed to all the policies the party was following at the time.

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He tells me he never believed in the Trotskyist trials. He always knew they were show trials. Anyway, my mother during the war she ended up in Buffalo and she had been working in an airplane factory there. And um. She had written some letter to a party

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newspaper, uh, criticizing some policy that they were doing at the time and uh. My father met her, um. I think she was manning a table or something at some party function and when he realized that she was a person who had written that letter, you know,

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he told her that he had really agreed with it and and so they, they met and they married within 3 months and my mother became pregnant, um, within several weeks after that. I was born 10 months after their marriage. So your father, both your parents obviously

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um were political for already by then, as young adults with your, in your father's case, his political involvement in high school or when he finished school? I don't know exactly sometime around then. And what were the influences on him, was he? I mean, I suppose it's

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sort of in the air. His father was an anarchist, um. Not, not a member of any organization as far as I know, but, uh, the newspaper the Friarbe I told him used to be in the house and, um, he was certainly very involved in the, you

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know, the garment workers, uh, union union campaign. So I guess the ideas of unionism, socialism, um, communitarianism were around very much around the house and uh And so his own family was an important influence. Oh yes, I'm sure of that, definitely, definitely, and, and my dad

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was really, really poor and um. I think it was probably the combination of those things. One of her sisters um recruited her into the party, um, and I've never heard the whole story of that. But one or two of her sisters had gotten involved. They were,

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she was the youngest child, my mother. And uh. And as I say, when she graduated high school and she's described to me how every day her dad would give her 2 nickels and she would take the Staten Island ferry into New York and she was supposed

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to be looking for work. There was no work to be looked for. She'd go sneak into a movie or something and at the end of the day she'd take the other nickel and take the ferry home and. So, you know, it was a time when many

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uh many young working people uh were very. Open to the ideas that it didn't have to be this way, that there was a reason why it was this way, that capitalists made large profits while people starved and uh And those theories appeared to be um. Just

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totally illustrated by what was actually going on. Long time, I mean, well, nobody was here that long, but he went early and um. He survived through the war. He left when the International Brigades left. I guess he was badly wounded and spent quite a few months

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in a hospital there. About 80. And your mother died last year in June at 77. Um, so they, they, um, you're born within the next year, and you were born, where were your, was your family? I was born in Niagara Falls, um, and not long after

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we moved to Charleston, West Virginia, which is where my sister was born, and uh it's the same thing it was a, you know, reassignment from the party. My father always said. That the party did not want you to stay in any one place too long because

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you might become more loyal to the people you were working with than to the party bureaucracy. Hm, um, and he was working in trade union campaigns, I guess I never know exactly what he did, you know, when I was a kid, he used to tell me

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he'd been a union organizer, but he does not say that anymore. He now says he was a party functionary. So I guess he was trying to influence various unionists to uh Follow certain policies and probably trying to share his knowledge and expertise to help them organize

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their unions. So I don't remember anything about that. I don't remember what age were you when you moved to New York, um. Let's see, my sister was born in Charleston and I was almost 3 then. Um, I was probably 4 or 5 when we came to

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New York City, and your father had been assigned similar kinds of um You know, I'm not exactly sure, um, that is a time when he was already getting to be on the outs with the party and I don't know when he There's a lot of things

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going on at that time. A lot of people were going underground. So you were born in, so this is like 51 that you came back to New York. And my father did go underground almost as soon as we moved to New York. We actually never lived

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by our, well, we moved in with his parents. Um, So I don't know. I don't know the details from his point of view. What are your first memories then or conscious memories of family life and your father's role in the family, family life and my father's

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role in the family. I don't have a lot of childhood memories. I have very few childhood memories, um. I can tell you from later childhood that uh my father was considered um In my family to be a great intellect, um, a wise man. Um, For how

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long was he away underground? Well, he spent about a year underground, I think, and um I believe at that time he would come and meet us sometimes he would just show up from time to time. Um, and then he was arrested and he was taken to

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Pittsburgh, which is where the trial was supposed to be. And that went on for a long time. Um, His trial was a mess. I'm not sure. I don't know. I think probably 2. So you couldn't have been more than 6, so much of this. What do

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you, if not specific instances, do you recall a tenor, a mood, earliest childhood memory and um Say that earliest memory. My earliest childhood memory was a party at our house where a lot of people came and uh from the conversation from the conversation. That's fine. I

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had no problem. I, I gleaned that we must have borrowed a lot of money from these people and that we were having a party to celebrate having paid them back, and I also gleaned that my father had been in jail and I had already at that

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age blocked it out, um. This is why I have no childhood memories. Um, But you know, I remember. Depression, fear, um, paranoia. Uh, another very early childhood memory of mine is, um, people calling on the phone asking me if my daddy was home. And when I

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said no, asking me where he worked and what his phone number was and uh being told afterwards that I had done a very bad thing by giving that information out, would that have been when he was underground? It would have probably been when he was looking

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for work later because he had the typical experience of the FBI following him around and making sure that he couldn't get work. What kind of um instructions do you remember from your mother or your grandparents during that time, if they told you you've done a bad

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thing by answering the phone, had someone told you who to speak to or who not to speak to? No, it was my father who told me I had done a bad thing by answering the phone and uh no, nobody had told me, you know, not to

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answer the door, not to answer the phone, not to talk to people, but from that I learned and from then on I was completely secretive until I became about 40. Um, What um was the mood? I mean, it's hard to know, you know, I ask these

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questions no memories, but um um how would you describe your childhood? That's a really hard question. Um, All my memories are of the time, you know, after the trial really when my father was living with us again and um. They were very, very long spaces of

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unemployment and uh he had a really hard time establishing himself uh and uh. There was tremendous anxiety, anxiety in the family, anxiety about um. Anxiety about money, anxiety about unemployment, anxiety about the FBI, anxiety about politics, um. Anxiety about what did people know or not know

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about us uh my father had had the experience of leaving the party at the same time that he was put on trial and and um so they had been shunned. That's correct. There was tremendous feelings of isolation you know my mother would always talk talk and

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talk about uh people crossing the street not to say hello to her. Um, and these were former comrades. Uh, not neighbors who were scared of us for being communists, but former comrades, and also, um, my mother's family had severed all relations with her when my father

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was put on trial because they didn't want to be involved and so, um. That was a very bitter thing for my mother. The four of us, really, really in a very tiny tiny number of loyal friends. Yes, yes. And the friends that remained, were they, were

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they people who were no longer in the party as well, or were there? I guess so, yeah, there weren't a lot of them. It was, it was a very isolated situation. Um, did your mother work? My mother always worked as far back as I can remember.

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And um she also left the party then? Yeah. And um how. Um, what kind of, uh, you, you, you described just a sort of general mood of, of anxiety, worry and uncertainty, um, do you recall much about your early years in elementary school? I do recall

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quite a bit about that because I was very focused on school and school achievement. School was a place where maybe you could pursue things that that couldn't happen, uh, couldn't happen at home. Um, were you known, was your, was your personal situation known and your parents'

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politics known in school? Probably not. I mean, I was told to be very, very quiet and to never say anything about politics in school and to never mention that my father had been in jail and Um, and I was very, very careful about keeping our secrets.

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Now, there were undoubtedly teachers at school. Who had been in the teachers' union. And uh Probably a few of them knew. Um, but, uh. As far as I knew this was a family laundry that I was not to air. Were there people outside the family and

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you mentioned this tiny group of loyal friends that you could trust? Um, well, my parents trusted them. I mean, they were grown ups, so I don't think I ever felt like I had a great deal to do with them. So the, the adults with whom you

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had the closest relationship, the relationships were with your parents weren't. No, no. Um. So the world was basically a pretty threatening place outside of your apartment, I guess so, but I did very, very well in school. I was, you know, the best student in my school

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and um And you know, I guess I felt like as long as I kept my distance and kept my secrets, um, it could be safe. Those were your parents' political affiliations, your father's time in jail, what were the other secrets? I guess those were them really

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and, and also what our opinions were that we believed, you know, in nuclear nonproliferation and uh. And in peace and in labor unions about that, no. Um, Let's talk a little bit about um. Any activities, um, outside, I mean, was, did you take part in demonstrations

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at this point still, or what kind of, and what kind of organizational connections did your father have? No, nothing, cut off the end. So did he have a political life then after that? Well, um Depends on how you look at it, not certainly not a public

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political life in any way. He had people who came over to, uh, my father is a very smart man and um people used to come over and ask him questions, what's your opinion about this? What's your opinion about that? Um, so there was always a lot

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of talk going on that I heard. He was involved with the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which he's now the editor of their newsletter, but, um, and there, there have always been a million fights. They're almost all dead now, so they don't fight anymore,

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but, uh, you know, um. This was probably later, but it's an example of probably what was going on at the time, uh. Gomoa in Poland had a very large anti-Semitic campaign and one of the things that he did was he took away all the benefits from

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the Polish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. And so, uh, my father was fighting that, you know, the vets should be pushing to give them back their benefits and then there's the other people say there's no anti-Semitism in any communist countries, um, so there's always stuff

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like that going on. He was very involved with that organization. But he uh didn't join any other organizations after he left the party and um he really withdrew from the political scene. What does he tell you and what have you learned since about the period of

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his trial and then his imprisonment? What kind of defense was mounted on his behalf and what effect did that have on your mother and those of you? That that was quite a disaster. Um, my father. They had to have a joint defense, but on the other

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hand, because the other 4 were still it was a conspiracy trial and the other 4 were still in the party and he wasn't um. The party wouldn't raise money for his bail or for his legal defense, so my mother had to do it all by herself

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with two very young children, really a 1 year old and a 4-year-old, um, and she was terrified, depressed, um. It was a very, very bad time for her. And the first lawyer they got from my father was very idealistic man who um actually had a nervous

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breakdown when he realized that uh the government was going to run this frame up um the trial was endlessly delayed first. First, my father's lawyer had a nervous breakdown. Then the judge, the presiding judge, died in all this time, right, eventually, I think he was in

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custody for about 6 months and then when he was did finally get the bail, he wasn't allowed to leave Pittsburgh, so we used to go visit him there. Do you remember anything? Just a, just only the Vegas and it was the first time I was on

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an airplane. I remember being on an airplane and uh I remember staying in somebody's house that had a backyard and that's that's that's my memory, yeah. Um, And then when a new judge was was appointed. There was a mistrial declared uh because the chief prosecution witness

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had died. Um, My father ultimately spent 7 months in jail on a contempt of court charge for taking the Fifth Amendment, um, but the whole thing was declared a mistrial and they never did retry it and so, um. I think but if you kind of count

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from the time he was underground till the time he came back home. It was probably about 4 years. It was a long time. Well, from the time I was about 3 or 4 to it was, it was a very major chunk out of my life, um,

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and out of his too, no doubt, and I believe that he felt terrible guilt, um, towards his family that he always thereafter for the rest of his life has felt terrible guilt that that happened to him. that he does he feel that there was something he

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could have done to to prevented it, or would he have done things, what would he have done differently? I, I imagine he's never said so, but I imagine what he thinks is he should have left the party earlier that he had seen for years that they

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were. Not going to be effective and generally the distance of the party leadership from the working class in the United States. What other and maybe the position on anti-Semitism, what other, Well, I think in general he thought that uh that the Communist Party of the United

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States was trying to follow a Russian model and to treat American workers as though they were Russian peasants and um. And didn't really understand the culture of the United States. That was #1 and #2 is that uh Russian foreign policy was more important to them, being

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a tool of Soviet foreign policy was more important to them than um. Making a revolution in the United States. I those are probably his two main. So what was it like when your father came back, um. You're about 8. Probably 7, probably 7. Um, well, you

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know, as much as I can recall was that he couldn't find a job for months and months and months, and we were very, very hard up for money. Um, and he was. I believe that he was terribly depressed. Um, How did your parents explain to you

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what was happening? They never explained anything to me. I asked my mother, um, a few years ago, how come, and she said you never asked. Um, they never, my mother didn't tell me my father was in jail. Um, my father certainly never told me what my

00:27:42.569 - 00:28:04.359

mother certainly never told me why he was in jail. She never even told me he was in jail. He was just away, um. And uh There's a lot of stuff I was never explained. And, and today or later in their lives, their, their explanation is that

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limited one that you didn't ask. Do you think they felt that they were protecting you? By doing that I don't know what they felt. I think my mother was, I think my mother was so upset that she couldn't stand to uh. I think that her kids

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were upset too. It was just it was just easier for her to believe that we didn't know what was going on. So your politics as strong as they were, were not something to be expressed to the rest of the world, so you could only be proud

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of those beliefs within your own home, and it's summer camp, right? When did you start which camp was that? Well, um, when did I start going to summer camp? Probably when I was 8 or 9, something like that and uh. Well, the first summer camp I

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went to was just an ordinary summer camp for ordinary people, but the next year I went to a camp. Let's see, I think it was called Camp Wingdale at the time and in later years changed his name to Camp Calumet. Yeah, I'm sure you've heard of

00:29:20.890 - 00:29:39.569

this camp, and I did that for a few years and then I started going to Camp Hurley, um, oh, that's, that's another one. Um, they're all, you know, in the Catskills just north of New York and uh. We sang folk songs, sang union songs, uh, believed

00:29:39.569 - 00:30:05.189

in integration, um. Always had a few non-white campers, a few non-white counselors, and these were basically white Jewish, um. Places, but uh you could talk about being against the bomb or. Um, your father's situation was not a problem, was not an obstacle to his relationships or

00:30:05.189 - 00:30:22.380

his severed relationships. No, by this time, you know, a lot of people have left the party. By now it was even after Hungary or well, by the time I was 10, Hungary was in '56, right? Yeah, and a lot of people had left and so um.

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Not that my parents ever, ever, ever became friendly with any of those people again, but uh. You know, it was just a bunch of kids together and it didn't really matter. And that was a place where you felt safe, comfortable, and known for who you for

00:30:40.560 - 00:30:59.729

who you were. What was it like to come back? I think I just developed this incredible um. Separation between the two worlds, you know, I, I became very good at secrecy, very, very young. And um as I look back on it from the vantage point of

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an adult, I can see that um. That it resulted in me being a somewhat cold, remote, withdrawn person who um Who's often afraid to tell the truth, um. It's very good at keeping secrets and you know.