During the Depression the Communist Party sponsored and ran the Tenants’ Councils, organisations formed to fight eviction for non-payment of rent. My mother became the head of Tenants’ Council Number 29 in the Bronx (‘I was the only woman in the building who could speak English without an accent, so automatically I was voted head’), and continued to act as head until shortly after I was born, when my father made her ‘stop everything’ to stay home with the baby. Until then, she said, she ran the council. Mama running the council was a childhood classic. ‘Every Saturday morning,’ she would tell me, the way other mothers told their children Mary had a little lamb, ‘I would go down to Communist Party headquarters in Union Square and receive my instructions for the week. Then we would organise, and carry on.’ How she loved saying, ‘Then we would organise, and carry on’. There was more uncomplicated pleasure in her voice when she repeated those words than in any others I ever heard her speak.