A Paler Shade of Red by W. E. Gutman

Author:W. E. Gutman [Gutman, W. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Communism, The Inventor, Journalists, W. E. Gutman, Flight from Ein Sof, Editors, Holocaust, Jewish, Alan Riding, USSR, Memoir, Biography
Publisher: CCB Publishing
Published: 2012-09-06T06:57:28+00:00

UP THE FOURTH ESTATE!

To speak English is not a virtue. Not to speak it is an infirmity. And so I proceeded to conquer the strange language I’d first mastered in school, a virile idiom full of Anglo-Saxon dissonance, peculiar rhythms and intonations, an alien tongue as bizarre as the fabled domain on which I alit that bleak morning in late January 1956.

But fluency in English, I soon discovered, was not enough. In language are imprinted elements of culture peculiar to those who speak it. I found myself denied a subtler eloquence, a poise, an intuitive effortlessness granted native speakers who acquire and articulate without the slightest exertion all manner of doctrines, partialities and cultural idiosyncrasies, most of which, hitherto unknown to me, and promptly rejected, would forever deny me the rewards of total assimilation.

After fifty-six years in the United States, I still have a hard time reconciling with a host of eccentricities, anachronisms and absurdities. Among them, is the two-party system -- two parties indistinguishable one from the other except for the partisanships and antipathies they inspire in their respective camps, both tied to corporate wealth, both intent on blocking reform in the name of capitalism, both involved in immense larceny against the poor. A close second is the Electoral College, which fails to accurately reflect the national popular will and risks foisting a minority president. (I would remain conflicted about the Electoral College every time I reminded myself that, in America, a reflection of the “national popular will,” would keep blacks confined to the back of the bus, going to ghettoized schools and eating at segregated lunch counters).

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