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Rindzer falls silent. Glances out his window. Plays with the venetian blind behind him. Looks around his book-lined office. Then he says:

“So for me there’s no politics anymore. The years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best of my life. The relation for me between the personal and the…

“But there is one thing about those days I am sure of, one memory I have that sticks like glue. I began haunting the movies on Forty-Second Street like every other miserable unemployed bum in New York in those days. I never even looked at the marquee to see what was playing. I simply bought a ticke…

“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around …

Immediately, she entered into a state of conflict from which she never seemed to emerge: when she was playing the piano she felt guilty because of all the people starving to death in the world, and when she was at Party meetings she felt uneasy because she knew she wasn’t really very good at being …

When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of cour…