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Book Review

Conversations with Stalin

by Eleanor Antin 


BOOK FORUM, Dec/Jan 2014

Reviewed by J. Hoberman

"Personae of Interest: Artist Eleanor Antin's Memoirs of a Communist Girlhood"

The Communist experience, Vivian Gornick wrote in her classic oral history The Romance of American Communism, is "a metaphor for fear and desire on the grand scale, always telling us more--never less--of what it is to be human."

Now more or less confined to the historical imaginary, that romance lives on, travestied with appropriate fear and desire (and shock and awe) in Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens, and writ strategically small in Eleanor Antin's comic girlhood memoir Conversations with Stalin, slyly named after the 1961 book that landed Communist dissident Milovan Djilas back in a Yugoslav jail.

For Antin, a photographer and performer whose practice makes use of dress-up and self-dramatization, Stalin is a figure of fantasy--a voice inside her head. She (like Gornick) was the Bronx-raised daughter of Yiddish-speaking Reds, and (also like Gornick) barely out of her teens when Nikita Khrushchev denounced, in 1956, the omnipotent deity who had presided over her childhood. Each of Conversations with Stalin's sixteen anecdote-driven chapters ends in a blaze of magical realism, with protagonist "little Elly" having a rendezvous with the Soviet leader: "I never told anybody, but comrade Stalin and I were very close friends. For years, we used to meet up in Central Park and talk about stuff."

Performance artist that she is, Antin channels Stalinist jargon, from which she derives some moral lesson (or not) regarding her latest misadventure. It's a fey conceit, but thanks to Antin's unsentimental portrait of Elly, together with her faux-naïve ability to articulate Stalin's logic and what might once have been called the party line, it's actually pretty charming--as are the intermittent pen-and-ink drawings, which reinforce the sense of reading a parodic Popular Front children's book. Stalin functions as Elly's superego, both a confessor and a shrewd if fallible Big Brother, giving advice that might otherwise have come from Elly's self-absorbed mother (an aspiring Yiddish actress turned manager of a failing Catskill resort) or her absent father (a Jewish wunderkind in Poland, employed by the garment industry as a cutter in New York).

Unusual for an immigrant Jewish family, it is Antin's mother--rather than her father--who is the feckless dreamer. Antin's sarcasm is never more Yiddish than when she writes of her mother's optimism that "every day is a new day. Every sweepstake ticket is a new ticket. Each new corpse has a new will." Comrade Stalin, however, is not impressed. "Such a bourgeois family," he sneers at the end of a convoluted tale of separation and jealousy that features Antin's kid sister threatening to jump out the window and winds up with her father peering in the window of the Russian Tea Room at his estranged wife and her new beau. "A compound of sentimentality and domestic strife."

Stalin is typically gruff and often stodgy, reminding his young friend that "chance" is inevitably "annulled" by "the iron laws of historical necessity," or haphazardly mixing metaphors, as when he declares, "Progress goes forward. It is an arrow. There can be setbacks, but always it picks up and marches on." He can also be avuncular: "Little Elly, don't you yet know that the artist is the servant of the proletariat? He must show them the contradictions in the world picture so they can band together and make the revolution for the future of mankind."

More or less chronological, with plenty of backtracking, Conversations with Stalin follows Elly from grammar school in the 1940s to her part-time job as a receptionist at a start-up magazine devoted to TV listings. (The latter chapter ends with Stalin sternly chastising her for her impulsive decision to quit over the unfair treatment meted out to a fellow employee rather than staying to form a union.) World

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