Customer Reviews

Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was a teenager at Hollywood High during these dark years. Struggling to understand the turmoil and politics that my family was living through. Each day I saw the pain my loving, idealistic father was enduring as more and more of his friends and coworkers became ensnared in the stupid net of fear and accusation that was spreading through his industry.

Jean's story of their quick decision to slip across the border with their children and their day to day challenges of providing a good education and rich family life as exiles makes great reading.

Rouverol's clean prose and unsparing eye will draw readers into recollections of her family's life on the run and the work they scared up to support their nearly decade-long stint underground. Poignant and unapologetic, Rouverol's memoir juxtaposes the support they found south of the border with the unrelenting weight of living as fugitives. -- Publishers Weekly

Jean Rouverol has written here a rather readable personal history of a very public assault on civil liberties (such as they were and are in the US) during the post-WWII Red Scare.

While it does not appear to have been her intention to delve into the politics of the period except as it pertained to women in general and her family (and the expatriate community in Mexico) in particular, especially during the blacklist, the inquiring reader is left wondering, for example, what happened to Rouverol's husband, screenwriter Hugo Butler, perhaps during their Mexican exile, to lead him to celebrate the display of Italian Communist Party banners in Rome even as he wishes that Party to lose the 1960 parliamentary election in Italy -- he, like his wife, having been a member of the Communist Party USA. But then, she tied up the loose ends of her family's Mexican experience somewhat hastily, leaving one to speculate as to whether Butler's political regression was a result of his overall mental deterioration -- a condition Rouverol noted. Nevertheless, her detailed account of their life in Mexico -- the focus of the book -- makes this a worthwhile record of survival during an intensely repressive time.

Jean Rouverol recreates those traumatic years with sensitivity, care and love. With a young family she and her husband not only managed to get away from, (rather than escape), the harrassment of anti-communism in Hollywood but also managed to create a new and productive live in Mexico. Her prose is crisp and very readable.Her sense of humour never fails. Her message is clear- if you believe in it you can do it! One of the few books I have read cover to cover in one sitting.