Villager

AN AMERICAN TESTAMENT -- Joseph Freeman--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

The recent group of contemporary autobiographies has given U. S. readers detailed pictures of the worlds of modern diplomacy, politics, the labor movement, of feminists, spies, social leaders, patronesses of art, expatriate writers, journalists. Last week a blank space in this growing record of current experience was filled in with a sober, conscientious, 678-page study of the world of radical U. S. intellectuals. Almost too long for its burden of events, too short for its burden of ideas, An American Testament pictures an environment that no other autobiographer has described so fully--the shifting, seething little world of impoverished and defiant Greenwich Village scriveners, of radical magazines run on a shoestring, of fierce controversies on esthetic and political subjects, of Communist meetings, transient love affairs, protest demonstrations, anti-war parades, strikes, arguments, psychoanalysis, unfinished novels and unwritten poems, of stories, gossip, limitless ambition, ineffectuality, tolerance and intolerance. As is the case with most of the current memoirs, the details of Joseph Freeman's personal story are less interesting than their background. Born in a Ukrainian village of Jewish parents, he lived there long enough to remember a pogrom, was taken to the U. S. in 1904. Growing up in the poverty-stricken Williamsburg district of Brooklyn, he learned U. S. ways painfully, was beaten up by Irish boys, stumbled over the English language, saw one of his friends flee after killing a policeman, learned the reality of hard times when his parents were evicted from their tenement.

He escaped from this environment when his father grew prosperous in the building business. He attended Columbia University, whence he graduated to literary and radical circles in Greenwich Village. Deeply influenced by Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. Freeman was a Socialist during the War, supported the action of Columbia's Historian Charles Beard, who resigned in protest against the expulsion of pacifist professors. Working as a foreign correspondent in Paris and London after the War, Freeman covered the crash of the ZR-2, worked under Floyd Gibbons, conducted a long international correspondence on political and literary matters with his old schoolmates, many of whose letters he includes in his autobiography, saw enough of journalism to be sure it was not his career. Returning to the U. S. he wrote for a left-wing literary magazine called The Liberator, had himself psychoanalyzed, set up a Greenwich Village establishment with a gentle, observant girl named Laura, lived in an experimental colony in New Jersey.

Freeman lectured on poetry to workers in the needle trades, noting that they liked Whitman but complained that T. S. Eliot was as bad as the Talmud. He worked his way to Russia on a freighter, got a job at the office of the Comintern as a translator. In Russia during the excitement before the expulsion of Trotsky, he was depressed by the conflicts in the Communist Party, dispirited by the unprincipled career-hunting he observed, but did not lose his faith in Communism as a result. He is now on the editorial staff of the New Masses.

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