Young Communist League

By the same age she had become a youthful Communist, a member of the Young Communist League .

TO famously categorized herself: Race, human; Religion, none. Her parents were politically active Russian Jewish immigrants, and did not become naturalized American citizens until Tillie was seven. By that age, she and her siblings...

She started her new school with a new name, HM , as if her stepfather had actually married her mother. By the time she was sixteen, she had left Catholicism and supported the Young Communist League .

Some of her jobs after leaving highschool were alienatingly bourgeois, like working in an antiquarian bookstore. Other casual paid work was less important in her life than her speaking on behalf of the Young Communist League

Before she left school Tillie parted company with her father over politics. He was now a leading Omaha Socialist; the Communists were accusing the Socialists of pandering to capitalism; Tillie sided with the Communists ...

TO wrote about her arrest and trial for vagrancy at about the time when she received a huge publisher's advance for her novel in progress. She made this into a story for the New Republic...