A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938–1963
A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938–1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC is a book by US-American Charlotte Inez Pomerantz (b. 24 July 1930; d. 24 July 2022).[1][2] from 1963.
Review
- “I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman wrote, “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” Nearly a century later, James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — another poet laureate of the human spirit — embodied this ethos in one of his shortest, most searing, and timeliest essays. In 1963, the children’s book author Charlotte Pomerantz edited an anthology of prominent writers’ and artists’ critiques of the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the Orwellian investigative committee largely responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans and the Hollywood blacklist. Titled A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938– 1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC, it featured writing and art by such titans of creative culture as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Ben Shahn. Baldwin’s contribution was later included in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (public library), which also gave us his abiding insight into the redemptive power of language and the artist’s role in society.[3]
Charlotte Pomerantz
Charlotte was the daughter of anti-German Jewish attorney Abraham "Abe" Louis Pomerantz[4] (1903–1982) and his wife Phyllis, née Cohen (∞ 10 January 1926). She married economist, leftist writer, film director and publisher Carl Aldo Marzani (1912–1994) on 12 November 1966, member of the Communist Party in GB and the Communist Party in USA, co-owner of the Marzani and Munsell publishing house, author of The Promise of Eurocommunism (1980), with whom she had two children. Carl had two further children with his first wife (∞ 1937), actress Edith Eisner (d. 1971, 56 years old), who had suffered from multiple sclerosis for 20 years. Marzani was convicted in 1947 of hiding Communist affiliations while employed by the State Department.
References
- ↑ Obituary Note: Charlotte Pomerantz
- ↑ Charlotte Pomerantz, Erfinderische Kinderbuchautorin, stirbt im Alter von 92 Jahren
- ↑ James Baldwin on Resisting the Mindless Majority, Not Running from Uncomfortable Realities, and What It Really Means to Grow Up
- ↑ Pomerantz's father was a well-known lawyer, Abraham Pomerantz, a former Nuremberg Trials prosecutor whom Congressman George A. Dondero alleged to have communist sympathies. In 1946, Pomerantz went to Germany and led the prosecution of German industrialists for collaborating in alleged war crimes, as U. S. Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the industrialist cases. In this role, he proposed prosecuting corporations in their corporate capacity, a proposal that was rejected. Eight months later, he left Germany after accusing the Truman Administration of not really wanting to pursue the trials. Pomerantz pioneered suits by small shareholders against officials of such big corporations as McDonnell Douglas Corporation and the Dreyfus Fund. He specialized in so-called derivative suits, in which the company receives the award and passes it on to all stockholders. The New York Times wrote of him in 1981: "He championed the virtues of Socialism and the rights of the poor while commanding large legal fees." On 9 July 1947, US Representative George Anthony Dondero named Pomerantz while publicly questioned the "fitness" of United States Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson for failing to ferret out Communist infiltrators in his department. Dondero cited Pomerantz for denouncing President Truman's loyalty purge, and addressing a Communist-controlled organization. Pomerantz defended Soviet diplomat Valentin A. Gubitchev, accomplice of Judith Coplon, a spy for the Soviet Union. That original law firm, founded 1936, is now called Pomerantz Limited Liability Partnership (Pomerantz LLP) and no longer embraces the derivative suit approach but represents the rights of defrauded investors.
