A Communist Odyssey

A Communist Odyssey PDF Author: Thomas Sakmyster
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155225524
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
A group of Central European communists, most of them Hungarians, in the interwar period served the world communist movement as international cadres of the Comintern, the Moscow-based Communist International. As an important member of this cohort, József Pogány played a major role in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the "March Action" in Germany in 1921, and, under the name of John Pepper, in the development of the American Communist Party of the 1920s. During the 1920s he was an important official in the Comintern apparatus and undertook missions on three continents. A prolific writer and effective organizer, he was one of the most flamboyant and controversial communists of his era. Some of his comrades praised him as "the Hungarian Christopher Columbus." Others, like Trotsky, called him a "political parasite."This study is based on newly available primary sources from Hungary, Russia, and the United States; it is the first ever written about this colorful and well-travelled Hungarian communist. Examines Pogány's development as a socialist and communist, the influence of his Jewish origins on his career, the reasons for his remarkable success in the United States, and the circumstances that led to his arrest and execution in the Stalinist terror.

A Communist Odyssey

A Communist Odyssey PDF Author: Thomas Sakmyster
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155225524
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
A group of Central European communists, most of them Hungarians, in the interwar period served the world communist movement as international cadres of the Comintern, the Moscow-based Communist International. As an important member of this cohort, József Pogány played a major role in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the "March Action" in Germany in 1921, and, under the name of John Pepper, in the development of the American Communist Party of the 1920s. During the 1920s he was an important official in the Comintern apparatus and undertook missions on three continents. A prolific writer and effective organizer, he was one of the most flamboyant and controversial communists of his era. Some of his comrades praised him as "the Hungarian Christopher Columbus." Others, like Trotsky, called him a "political parasite."This study is based on newly available primary sources from Hungary, Russia, and the United States; it is the first ever written about this colorful and well-travelled Hungarian communist. Examines Pogány's development as a socialist and communist, the influence of his Jewish origins on his career, the reasons for his remarkable success in the United States, and the circumstances that led to his arrest and execution in the Stalinist terror.

The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade PDF Author: Peter N. Carroll
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804722773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Looks at the role of the United States in the Spanish Civil War

The Odyssey of Communism

The Odyssey of Communism PDF Author: Michaela Praisler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781527569027
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This volume looks into the ways in which film has contaminated and re-shaped culture(s) and the collective unconscious, at both local and global levels, arguing that our lives have been impacted by the 'then' that we keep revisiting, lest we forget. It takes the reader from the Berlin Wall to China, and from the terror of communist political prisons and labour camps to the rosy image promoted by propaganda. A key point throughout the text is its interdisciplinary nature, as it brings together literature and film scholars, directors, sociologists and philosophers, whose overall conclusion is that communism, lingering in mentalities, still needs interrogation. Structured along four parts which trace a Homeric (or rather Joycean) journey to a home metonymysed by the long-awaited freedom, this book sets out from the gloomiest aspects of totalitarianism in the Romanian, Serbian and Soviet 'Hades(es)' of traumatic psychological and physical experiences and of imposed silencing. The second part gathers together case studies of films illustrating more optimistic views of communism as 'spring' (in the USSR) or as a 'golden age' (in Romania), thus narcotising the communist 'subjects' and preventing them from seeing the actual inferno. The third section offers filmic accounts of the aftermaths of communism, engaging the readers in a nostalgic process that revisits, questions, reflects on and remembers communism on a larger, world stage. The coda rounds up the volume (and the journey therein) by crossing genre frontiers to written narratives with a cinematic component.

Koestler

Koestler PDF Author: Michael Scammell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588369013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers, Koestler is the definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure. Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon, Koestler is here revealed as much more–a man whose personal life was as astonishing as his literary accomplishments. Koestler portrays the anguished youth of a boy raised in Budapest by a possessive and mercurial mother and an erratic father, marked for life by a forced operation performed without anesthesia when he was five, growing up feeling unloved and unprotected. Here is the young man whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who risked his life from the North Pole to Franco’s Spain, where he was imprisoned and sentenced to death; the committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin’s show trials inspired the superb and angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940. Scammell also provides new details of Koestler’s amazing World War II adventures, including his escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was the first to portray Hitler’s Final Solution. Without sentimentality, Scammell explores Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, his manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape that posthumously tainted his reputation, and his startling suicide while fatally ill in 1983–an act shared by his healthy third wife, Cynthia–rendered unforgettably as part of his dark and disturbing legacy. Featuring cameos of famous friends and colleagues including Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Koestler gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Koestler adds up to an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as “one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius.”

Radical Son

Radical Son PDF Author: David Horowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439135193
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Originally a radical socialist, the current driving force behind the rise of the Hollywood right recounts how he moved from one set of political convictions to another over the course of thirty years, and challenges readers to consider how they came by their own convictions.

The Odyssey of an Apple Thief

The Odyssey of an Apple Thief PDF Author: Moishe Rozenbaumas
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815654723
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922–2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic orchard, and Rozenbaumas’s early apprenticeship as a tailor once his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during, and after WWII, Rozenbaumas’s account stands out for the singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures

The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures PDF Author: Jeannette Shambaugh Elliot
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295997559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description


An Afghan Woman's Odyssey

An Afghan Woman's Odyssey PDF Author: Farooka Gauhari
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803271166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
An Afghan Woman's Odyssey is a first-person account of the tragedy that disrupted daily life in Afghanistan after the Communist coup of April 1978, events that eventually contributed to the volatile Taliban rule. This is the tale of a woman desperate to find her missing husband and her painful decision finally to abandon the search and to leave the country with her three children. Her story typifies the kinds of human-rights violations that became common practice after the Soviet invasion and made way for the later abuses of the Taliban.

Practicing Public Diplomacy

Practicing Public Diplomacy PDF Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857450131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
There is much discussion these days about public diplomacy—communicating directly with the people of other countries rather than through their diplomats—but little information about what it actually entails. This book does exactly that by detailing the doings of a US Foreign Service cultural officer in five hot spots of the Cold War - Germany, Laos, Poland, Austria, and the Soviet Union - as well as service in Washington DC with the State Department, the Helsinki Commission of the US Congress, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Part history, part memoir, it takes readers into the trenches of the Cold War and demonstrates what public diplomacy can do. It also provides examples of what could be done today in countries where anti-Americanism runs high.

A Chinese Odyssey

A Chinese Odyssey PDF Author: Anne F. Thurston
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN: 9780684192192
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Thurston has written the extraordinary life of Ni Yuxian, one of the founders of China's democracy movement. Born in 1945, Ni's first memories are of the Communists taking over his village. Although subjected to humiliation, imprisonment and torture, Ni bravely waged repeated battles against corruption and hypocrisy within the Chinese system.