Girl In Movement
Eva Kollisch
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 Glad Day Books
ISBN: 1930180055

Memories of a New York girl's coming of age during World War II & joining the Workers Party.

Girl In Movement was a young uprooted Jewish refugee sent from Austria via the Kindertransport to England & then on to America, who made a home for herself for a few years, among revolutionaries & dreamers in the Labor Party of 60 years ago.

It is also a lively course in the history & thinking of the Socialist Movement, as practiced & argued about by a small group of Trotkyists who called themselves the Workers Party.

&, of course, it is about love & betrayal, dreams & disillusionment, adventures & hard work, all set against the backdrop of a world going to war, & a country coming together, or not, in that effort... & the Waldorf Cafeteria on 6th Avenue, the home of good food 24/7, & “a famous hangout for unemployed intellectuals, radicals, and bohemians; for bums, jazz musicians, poets, pushers and orgone-box Reichians.” (Page 77).

Eva never fit in at school: she hated living in the Italian section of Staten Island & yearned for the Big City. She didn't know enough English to become a cheerleader, or make friends. & then she met Carla DeLeo, & through her her brother Joe, an unemployed, revolution-spouting firebrand who took Eva to her first fateful meeting at the Labor Temple in downtown New York.

Girl In Movement is the unfurling of a green immigrant & teenager, into self-possessed young woman with highly charged political views, a passion for older men, & a desire to work the words of her politics. I learnt more about the Workers' Movement in America, during this time, than I have reading any text book, because it's about one person's point of view, rather than the vetted history of a nervous nation.

As a young woman who got caught up in a Movement -- the Anti-Apartheid one in London, I followed Eva's inculcation & initiation with much interest & amusement. Girls are such suckers for men breathing fire & rhetoric, no matter the nobility of the cause, & those men always treat younger women as if they're empty vessels ripe for filling... which, of course, they are!

So, if you are looking for a topnotch, A1, erudite memoir of one woman's search for a theory & a practice of achieving world justice & personal liberation, as well as a moving coming of age story about a time most everyone has forgotten -- the politics of Labor -- Girl In Movement will satisfy & entrance. It's all about outsiders & hell-raisers, passionate prophets & ardent acolytes, & one strong young woman who put her money where her mouth was, & went to work in the factories of Detroit. Others in the group enlisted & went to fight.

Very well done! Don't be put off that the publishers haven't figured out how to get the cover up on Amazon -- Girl In Movement is an excellent memoir not to be missed about a fascinating time in the lives of one group of the Greatest Generation.

Eva Kollisch taught German & Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College for over 30 years, & has been active in the anti-war, feminist, lesbian & gay movements. She is working on her next publication: stories & essays on the themes of anti-Semitism & exile.
(09/25/05)

Rebecca