When Your Book is Accidentally Topical (Part #3)

A Literal Literary Loser Wraps Up

It’s been an unusual week here at the Literal Literary Loser Substack. But, then again, we live in unusual times. (Or maybe the times are business as usual, and we just failed to heed the lessons of the past and thus are doomed to keep living the same experience over and over again, convinced it’s somehow new and different this time. There’s a quote about that…)

When a reader suggested I connect my May 2025 historical fiction novel, “Go On Pretending” to present day events, I knew exactly which excerpt to highlight.

In 1986, Emma Kagan, daughter of American defectors to the USSR, and her husband, Dennis, a Soviet journalist hired to host an American television show, move to the United States and are instantly embraced by New York City’s proudly socialist milieu.

In Part #1, they meet their hosts, the owners of the means of production, and are warned about what media censorship looks like in the US. In Part #2, Emma is lectured on how lucky she is that her parents escaped American capitalism and she was spared agonies like dealing with servants and feeling compelled to make more and more money. Now, in Part #3, the Kagans are formally welcomed into their new community….

“You must visit our school.” Tag team, a married couple took their turn welcoming Emma. “Both our children attend. It’s called The Little Red Schoolhouse. We’ve been at the forefront of progressive education since the 1920s! We encourage cooperation, activism, social justice, and acceptance. The Meeropol boys are alumni. That’s the adopted name of those poor Rosenberg orphans.” They assumed Emma knew about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, put to death for the crime of passing radar, sonar, and atomic secrets to the Soviets. Mom told Emma about them, including that Julius attended the same Lower East Side high-school as she had, graduating right before Rose started. “Oh, and, of course, Angela Davis.” Their coy smiles made it clear why Emma should feel a particular affinity with the activist. She unconsciously ran a hand along the back of her hair, newly straightened for the occasion. “We took her in her junior year of high school. Poor thing was absolutely stagnating in Alabama. Why, if we hadn’t extended a helping hand, who knows what might have happened to that brilliant mind!”

“That is very nice that New York City is supportive of such a progressive school.”

“Oh, please! That couldn’t be further from the truth. They pretended to be supportive in the beginning. We started as a public-private partnership, where the Department of Education gave us money to operate. But then, as soon as the depression hit, they used the lack of funds as an excuse to shut us down! We transitioned to a private school and have been independent ever since. No government bureaucrat is going to keep us from teaching our collective values!”

“So now the school is paid for by the Socialist Workers Party?”

“In part. And, of course, everyone pays their fair share in tuition, we’re very cooperative.”

“In America, you pay for school? How much does it cost?”

“A few thousand dollars a year, we do our best to keep tuition as low as possible, so that the children can interact with peers from all walks of life. That’s very important to us.”

“They do not have free schools in America? Government schools?”

“I realize this is difficult for you to understand, coming from a classless society, but, the government schools, they’re called public, they are terribly… oh, how can I explain – they’re just terribly middle-class. They teach children bourgeois values like individualism. No surprise, they were established to perpetuate an oppressive, colonialist, capitalist way of life. The only way we can be certain our children value an egalitarian community where all are respected not based on how much money they have but on what they contribute to the greater whole, is by removing them from the brainwashing of our government. We need to protect them from any ideas which might prevent their growing into true revolutionaries, untainted by status quo pablum.”

Emma didn’t get a chance to speak with Dennis all night. They were constantly being tugged in separate directions, here to meet a publisher who’d just released a compendium of Chairman Mao’s quotations; like The Little Red Book, but not quite so political, or there to say hello to a banker who’d visited the USSR as a Yale student and was just enchanted by the Soviet system of no-cost medical care. He’d been considering becoming a doctor, but once he realized how inequitable American medicine was, he wanted no part of such injustice.

The next time Emma saw her husband, he’d been pressed to the front of the room and introduced by Larry as their guest of honor. Larry thanked Dennis and Emma for joining them tonight. He hoped he’d helped them see that not all of America was greedy and materialistic. That there were people like them out there, fighting the good fight, supporting the USSR in their struggle for workers’ rights, an end to racism, and liberation for the Third World. Larry nudged Dennis to make a speech. Emma’s husband never shirked from the spotlight.

He held up his champagne flute in a toast. The audience followed. Dennis thanked the assembled for their warm welcome. He thanked them for showing him the true heart – and the true power – of America. He thanked them for being free-thinkers rather than meek, obedient sheep. He thanked them for instilling him with confidence about the future. There could and there would be peace between their two countries, as long as men and women like them could gather in friendship, as they had tonight. He thanked them for being them. He drank a toast to them being them.

When the group spontaneously broke into a rousing chorus of L'Internationale, first in French, then in English, then in Russian – the gentleman who’d rushed over to accompany them on the Fazioli grand piano looked like someone Emma might have seen in concert in Moscow – she finally caught her husband’s eye. His expression, just for her, said: This is only the beginning.

****

For those interested in learning more about the USSR through the eyes of a Soviet born child, my daughter and I discuss “The Genius Under the Table” by Eugene Yelchin, below.