I Married a Communist

A National Jewish Book Award Finalist

"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past....The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." --Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books

The second book in the brilliant American Trilogy, I Married a Communist chronicles the rise and fall of a man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, a personal tragedy that echoes the broader national betrayal.

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin).

Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal.

Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's political tribulations in the dark years of betrayal, the blacklist, and naming names.