E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

On the bank of a large river, great cliffs are being broken into bits. Fierce machines resembling prehistoric monsters clamber clumsily up the steps of a gigantic ladder hewed out of the mountain … A river appears where none existed before, a river one hundred kilometers long … A swamp is suddenly transformed into a broad lake … On the steppe, where formerly only feather grass and redtop grew, thousands of acres of wheat wave in the breeze … Airplanes fly above the Siberian taiga, where in little cabins live people with squinting eyes clad in strange dress made of animal skins … In the Kalmik region, in the middle of the naked steppe, grow buildings of steel and concrete alongside the felt tents of the nomads … Steel masts rise over the whole country: each mast has four legs and many arms, and each arm grasps metal wires … Through these wires runs a current, runs the power and the might of rivers and waterfalls, of peat swamps and coal beds. All this … is called the Five Year Plan.

Daniel stood in the entrance to the living room. He was still in his pajamas. The cold of the morning had driven itself into his chest. It filled his chest and his throat. It pressed at the backs of his eyes. He was frightened of the way he felt. The cold hung like ice from his heart. His little balls were encased in ice. His knees shifted in ice. He shivered and ice fell from his spine. His father was dressed now, standing in his good suit of grey glen plaid with the wide lapels and square shoulders hanging in slopes off his shoulders and the wide green-forest tie and the white shirt already turning up at the collars, buttoning his two-button jacket with one hand, and his face, unshaven, turned in a moment’s attitude of trying to remember something, trying to remember as if it was on the floor, this sadness, this awful sadness of trying to remember, so unaccustomedly dressed up in his over-large suit with the pleated trousers and cuffs almost covering his brown wing-tipped shoes, and his other hand rises limply from the wrist, his arm rises, and he doesn’t seem to care, attached to a handcuff as the man who holds him captured lifts his hands to light his cigarette, my father’s hand going along in tow, the agent cupping his match and lighting his cigarette, and my father’s hand dangling, having moved just as far as the other man moved it.

I remember that Susan was crying, “Why they do that to Daddy? Why they do that to Daddy?” over and over, “Why they do that to Daddy?” and that my mother was rocking her, holding her tightly, and swaying with Susan in her arms saying shhhh, shhh … But Susan was hysterical, sobbing with great gasps for air. We have none of us ever had enough to breathe. I kicked the FBI in the shins and I butted them in the groin, and I screamed and raged, and swung my fists at them. I know I hurt a couple of them. But I was shoved aside. And when I came back, I was lifted by the hands and feet, and flopping and squirming like a snake, and You leave my pop alone! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! I was dropped behind the stairs in the pile of papers. My father was hustled out the door. I was on my knees, warmed by my own tears, thawed in my rage, and I saw his face as he turned for one brief moment and yelled over his shoulder: “Ascher!”

And then it was terribly quiet. And all the cars were gone, and the gaping people were gone, and the door was closed, and I looked at my weeping mother, and I held her baby daughter for her as she dialed the phone. And I realized my father was really gone.

The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union….

So Ascher came into our lives, the first Surrogate. Ascher was not a left-wing lawyer. He had spent his professional life practicing in the Bronx, primarily in civil law. He was what my Aunt Frieda called a Jewish gentleman. Ascher was the kind of lawyer who quietly handles all the legal affairs of his Synagogue for years without compensation. He was in his sixties when I first saw him, the large features of his face showing the signs of his emphysema. His mouth was stretched wide, his eyes deep-set and slightly bulging. I felt the weight of my grief when Ascher was around because, like a doctor, he would not have been there unless something was wrong. But I didn’t dislike him. He had enormous hands, and a gruff condescension to children that I did not find inappropriate or offensive.

Ascher was a pillar of the Bronx bar. He was not brilliant, but his law was sound, and his honor as a man, as a religious man, was unquestionable. He was an honest lawyer, and was dogged for his clients. I picture him on Yom Kippur standing in the pew with his homburg on his head, and a tallis around his shoulders. Ascher could wear a homburg and a tallis at the same time.

He was not my parents’ first choice. My parents were not accustomed to dealing with lawyers, or accountants, or bank tellers. I think now my father must have called a half-dozen lawyers on the recommendations of his friends, before he found Ascher. Lawyers were not anxious to handle any case involving the FBI, even left-wing lawyers. When my father was trying to find a lawyer while fending off the FBI visits, the case was open-ended, as any sharp lawyer understood. Maybe Ascher understood this too. He certainly understood that this was a bad time in history for anyone whom the law turned its eye on who was a Red, or a “progressive” as Communists had come to characterize themselves. Since 1946, indecent things had happened in the country. He lectured Rochelle as if she might not know. The Democrats under Harry Truman competed with the Republicans in Congress to see who could be rougher on the Left. People were losing their jobs and their careers for things they said or appeals they had supported fifteen years before. People were accused, investigated and fired from their jobs without knowing what the charges were, or who made them. People were blacklisted in their professions. Public confessions of error had become a national rite, just as in Russia. Witnesses naming friends and acquaintances seen at meetings twenty years before were praised by Congressmen. Informing was the new ethic. Ex-Communists who would testify about Party methods, and who would write confessionals, made lots of money. The measure of their success was the magnitude of their sin. It was the time of the Red Menace. The fear of Communists taking over the PTA and Community Chest affected the lives of ordinary people in ordinary towns. Anyone who knew anyone who was a Communist felt tainted. Everything that could be connected to the Communists took on taint. People who defended their civil liberties on principle. The First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Pablo Picasso, because he had attended the Communists’ World Peace Congress in Paris and painted doves for peace. Doves. Peace. There was a new immigration control bill and alien deportation bill, and a control of American citizens abroad bill. And there was an internal security bill providing for concentration camps for anyone who might be expected to commit espionage. And there were now people who couldn’t get passports, and there were now people who couldn’t find jobs, and there were now people jailed for contempt, and there were now people who couldn’t find Mark Twain in the library because the Russians liked him and he was a best seller over there.

Ascher said: “And the Soviets have not helped matters with their bomb. They are now as dangerous as we are. That is intolerable. And the Communists in China now run the show there. We find that intolerable too. It is not a period that our historians will be proud of us. We are in the mood that someone should pay for what we find intolerable. If you are not Robert Taft, watch out.”

This was hardly the kind of talk my mother could find comforting. Ascher was not a tactful man. He lacked a bedside manner. You accepted the way he was because of his obvious integrity, and because you had no choice. Ascher was not a political man, you could imagine him voting for anyone he found morally recognizable, no matter what the party. If anything, he was conservative. He perceived in the law a codification of the religious sense of life. He was said to have worked for years on a still unfinished book demonstrating the contributions of the Old Testament to American law. For Ascher witch-hunting was paganism. Irrationality was a sin. He came to our cold house and sat without taking off his coat, and with his homburg shoved back on his head, he asked a few questions and answered a few questions, and nodded and sighed, and shook his head. For Ascher, my parents’ communism was easily condoned because it was pathetic and gutsy at the same time. One of the people who wrote about Paul and Rochelle, a Jewish literary critic, said that they were so crass and hypocritical that they even called on their Jewish faith to sustain sympathy for themselves in their last months. This writer could not have understood Ascher. Or the large arms of ethical sanctity he could wrap around an atheistic Communist when in the person of a misfit Jew as ignorant as my father of the real practical world of men and power. Ascher understood how someone could forswear his Jewish heritage and take for his own the perfectionist dream of heaven on earth, and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, still consider himself a Jew.