“[...] Imagine being that poor with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn’t always be this way.

“That’s what our politics was to us. It literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves. During the Depression my father couldn’t even get work as a button-maker. He made syrups—vanilla and chocolate, I’ll never forget—on the kitchen stove, and he poured them into huge milk cans, and he lugged them around the neighborhood selling them door-to-door. From the time I could schlepp the milk can I went with him. . . .

“But every Sunday for thirty years, rain or shine, in blizzards, in heat, sick, starving or otherwise, he sold the Daily Worker down at the railroad yards. And when he sold the Daily Worker he seemed suddenly whole and strong, and then I loved him desperately.