The New York Times:
“Lawrence Bush has written a novel about a Jewish grandmother quite different from those we usually get to read about. Bessie, inspired by his own grandmother, was a leftist, a one-time fervent Communist albeit with an independent mind that often kept her from toing the party line.
“Bessie spent her youth in her native Russia, where her brothers recruited her to the cause which eventually brought her to Siberian imprisonment. When she escaped, she came to New York and paced the immigrant treadmill, working in a factory, attending night school, meeting a young man. When the Bolshevik Revolution erupted, she and her husband sailed to Russia to join it. Her husband died and she once again fled, this time before the onslaught by the Whites, and returned to New York.
“This is an episodic story, taking Bessie through Bund rallies at Madison Square Garden, through strikes,through Vietnam demonstrations and into an old age in the Bronx,where her politics have mellowed into an acceptance of Israel and a sense of identification with the Jewish people. It is an interesting story because it is mirrored in the lives of many who went the same rougte and, without shifting their moral positions onradical issues of the day, often that the world had changed. Bessie was a realist, but this in no way conflicted with her idealism.
“Mr. Bush has written “Bessie” with love and grace. He has placed his protagonist at all the scenes that counted in the lives of such activists and yet he has fashioned a life of small incident for her as well. He has kept Bessie very much an individual and a warm human being. It is a part of the American story that is rarely recounted.”
The Nation:
“I’m prejudiced because I know Bessie. Not personally, but as a type. If you live in a city with an aging Jewish population steeped in left traditions, you have probably seen her in action. Now in her 70s or 80s, talking with a Yiddish accent, almost deaf and troubled with various physical ailments, she can still be found on picket lines, in peace demonstrations and at secular Jewish cultural events. She emigrated from Eastern Europe long ago, but vivid memories of fear and privation remain, flavored with a certain nostalgia for a milieu that has vanished completely. She worked in the garment shops, a gutsy, outspoken young woman. She became a radical and stayed a radical despite repression, disillusionment and apathetic (or politically erratic) children and grandchildren. She will carry on to the end.
“In the left’s literature about heroic militants, avant-garde women and proletarian misery, she is, strangely, hardly to be found. Save for a few brief moments like the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-10, she has been a face in the immigrant crowd, steady but unglamorous. Not even the American Yiddish novelists had much use for her except as girlfriend and mother. Perhaps the reform socialists began the mocking that has steadily pursued her: when organized blocks of young women in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union challenged the New York leadership in 1911, they were offered suggestions on how they could “get it out of their systems.” From then on, her radicalism was made to seem the product of an overaggressive personality. Her image merged into the generic Jewish mother and grandmother, favorite target of wisecracking novelists like Philip Roth. Heart and soul of the left, she has never been taken seriously.
“Now elderly and in her last struggles for dignity in old age, for world peace, against Menachem Begin—she may get her vindication, from the generation of her grandchildren. Meredith Tax’s Rivington Street has been a literary turning point here. The subject is, after all, a natural. Not only were the rebel girls protofeminists, pioneers of birth control and their own sexual emancipation, they proved that women of moral strength could live their lives unbroken by the male-dominated values that persisted even in their intimate political and personal circles.
“Bessie, the remarkable first novel that Lawrence Bush has loosely based on his grandmother’s life, successfully places the type in time and space, with little of the sentimentalism one would expect and without the cardboard characters.”
