[In the following review of Being Red, Sigal commends Fast's accounts of his persecution, though finds fault in his sentimentality and lack of insight.]

We American ex-Communists sometimes find it hard to tell the truth about our Party experiences, partly because being hunted like animals isn't always nice to recall. The United States is the only western democracy that has not been able to live with its native Reds. In Britain, France and Italy, even Canada and Mexico, indigenous Communists are accepted as part of a political scene. People pass in and out of the Party in those countries as Democrats and Republicans do here. Although a million or more Americans have been Communists since the 1920s, the memoirist's tone has tended to be either celebratory, defensive or disillusioned: Howard Fast is all three, but he's also illuminated by a serious attempt to be straightforward.

Fast's look back at his Party days—from his bitterly poor New York childhood to his fame as the Communists' best-selling writer and internationally acclaimed “cultural” figure—is, by turns, warm, cozy, angry and informative (if not always informed). He is not one of the world's great political thinkers. Except, sometimes, as a byproduct of his research on historical novels like Freedom Road and Citizen Tom Paine, Fast is not predisposed to cool analysis. His strength has always been a tremendous faith in ordinary people to move social mountains—a slightly fulsome love of an American ideal as exemplified in its radical dissidents. Nobody can beat him at establishing historical credentials, in the popular novel vein, of such figures as Illinois' great liberal governor John Peter Altgeld, in The American, or Rome's immortal slave rebel, Spartacus.

But even thoughtful Communists like Daily Worker editor John Gates used to brood that Fast “was not noted for his depth of characterization or historical scholarship.” I'm not sure that's what we want of a populist writer “whose genre falls somewhere between Harold Robbins (without the sleaze) and James Michener (without the historical bulk),” as Fast likes to quote an admiring reviewer. In fact, Fast succeeded in his earlier novels at doing what not even Hollywood's left-wing screenwriters were able to do: put real Communist propaganda into work that passed the censor and sold brilliantly. (Later mainstream books like The Immigrants carried on his historical obsessions but with less slanting.)

As Fast makes clear in this unashamedly affectionate, irksomely egocentric portrait of his young Party self, he—like thousands of Communists—saw absolutely no contradiction between pro-Soviet agitation and a strong, even fanatic, American patriotism. That's the way it was back then. If you were poor in the Depression, you wanted to overthrow capitalism for a socialist utopia, where kids didn't have rickets and black people weren't lynched; a lot of the time it seemed as bald as that. And if you were Jewish and felt Hitler had to be fought, Russia seemed the best hope of the “anti-fascist struggle.”

In other words, you had to have a fairly simple heart to stay a Red. It helped if, like Fast and other non-religious Jews, you “felt a sense of identity with the early Christians” and were, as a more or less full-time activist, “a sort of priest.” The problem is that Fast wasn't a simple rank-and-filer. He was up here with the cultural elite, a big name and a front man. He knew—when he wanted to know—where the bodies were buried.

Those bodies had little or nothing to do with being Soviet agents or spies, as Fast makes clear. With the possible exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—Fast only lightly touches on their ticklish “atom bomb espionage” case—“the issues that Communists fought for were issues that people of good will believe in,” such as anti-racism, affordable housing and labor struggles. The real dead body was the American Communist leadership.

For reasons best left to radical scholars and argumentative old men, the U.S. Communist Party was cursed with leaders considerably more stupid than the membership. Fast finally couldn't tolerate these “arrogant, thickheaded people,” as he calls them. He left the Party in the late '50s and wrote his apologia, The Naked God.

The present book is different in tone and aim from his previous exculpatory and perhaps even obligatory anti-Red confession. (Remember, in those days, “re-entry” for blacklisted artists often was possible only by informing on one's friends or “making a clean breast of it.”) Being Red may be partly an apology for The Naked God or just Fast's way of tying up loose ends. He is still very angry at the witch-hunters, especially the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover (who personally intervened with publishers to ban Fast's novels), and almost embarrassingly warm toward his old comrades. But then what can you expect of an adult who can say, with a straight face, that “[f]or the most part, writers are gentle and sensitive creatures”?

The chief value of Being Red is Fast's first-person evocation of what it felt like to take your whacks in the public eye. The episodes are vivid and plausible, including the nearly forgotten Peekskill, N.Y. riot, when townspeople, including local cops and American Legionnaires, attacked an audience assembled to hear Paul Robeson; his brief spell at a “country club” prison for refusing to tell government inquisitors who had donated to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; and the experience of seeing publishers like Alfred Knopf bend to Hoover's pressure and reject Fast's manuscripts.

But Fast is a sentimentalist at heart. He buys into an essentially unreal picture of what people really are like and won't deal with anything that doesn't fit into a worldview he first developed as the gutter-smart son of a horribly depressed, low-wage steel-and-garment worker. He credits two people with saving his life, his older brother Jerry and his wife of 53 years, Bette, and lavishes a rich stream of compliments upon them. But praise is no substitute for insight. The only people written about with real care in this book are Fast himself and some of the famous people he met, especially the Frenchmen Joliot-Curie and Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Today,” Sartre intones, “how else can a man confirm his right to existence and his membership in the human race” except by being a Communist? Fast reports this, as so much else, without irony. The author has many fine qualities, and a talent for comradeship is not the least. Few writers have conveyed as successfully the thrill of standing side by side with Communist comrades against a common enemy. But he lacks a sense of humor about anything having to do with himself—and in this book that means almost everything.