Posted byArthur Maglin
Posted in Amazon with a five star review
This review was written December 11, 2019 as an Amazon five-star review. I have since expanded it. The book made a powerful impact on me. I still find myself thinking about it.
Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey by Suzanne Berliner Weiss. Halifax and Winnipeg: Roseway Publishing, 2019. 320 pages. $21.31.
Suzanne Berliner Weiss has written a compelling autobiography that begins in France where she was saved from the Nazi Holocaust and then adopted by progressive Americans only to grow up in the witch hunt 1950’s and to emerge into the 1960’s with a lifelong outlook, in her words, of “solidarity, generosity and love.”
She spends her life working first as an organized and fully committed socialist activist and then as an organizer of international solidarity work. Along the way, she puts her family history together, reunites with the remnants of her birth family, becomes a psychologist working with the elderly, and uncovers virtually unknown aspects of the French and Jewish Resistance movements in France during World War II.
Much of her time in the Socialist Workers Party overlaps with my own–although she stayed in that organization much longer than I did before deciding that it was no longer a good vehicle for promoting socialist ideas. Much of her time in the party was done as a party print shop worker, work which she enjoyed. This gave me a lot of insight as to what things looked like for people who were part of the internal infrastructure of the organization as opposed to its activist external side. I was, myself, a combination of activist and writer for SWP-affiliated publications. I did also write for non-affiliated publications while I was in the party, but not nearly as much as, in that period as I did after I left.
Suzanne’s print shop years are thoroughly explored as are her more external activist periods. She describes both with enthusiasm and satisfaction. Her personal development unfolds as the acquisition of new skills, new ideas, and new experiences that she feels have enriched her life. Suzanne is remarkably without regrets and retains in her senior years all of the fighting spirit of her youth.
Her book adds an illuminating contribution to the growing biographical literature of books written by and about American Trotskyists which can help to inspire and inform the militant young radicals of today and help older radicals understand their past.
Suzanne Berliner Weiss knows how to tell a story well, how to put it into social and political perspective, and pulls you into her story with her very open recounting of her feelings at every stage of her life. This book was a page turner for me and I had trouble putting it down.
Arthur Maglin is a longtime socialist, activist and writer.