Herbert Aptheker: His daughter, a historian, says in a new book that he molested her
[Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, published last year in a new paperback edition by the University of Michigan Press.]
Aptheker enjoys at least a fraction of her father's notoriety. She is listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors, for example, which purports to identify the "101 most dangerous academics in America." (The entry, regrettably, is replete with errors, such as the claim that she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, when in fact she had resigned from it a full decade earlier.)
Born in the year following publication of American Negro Slave Revolts, Bettina Aptheker was a sole child whose father was at the center of the family's Brooklyn household and of her own perception of the world's possibilities. Her mother, Fay, was her father's first cousin (their fathers were brothers), and she kept his social calendar between the tours she chaperoned to the Soviet Union.
"When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," writes Bettina Aptheker. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do."
This powerful evocation of a child's boundless love makes the book's central revelation, conveyed in an indelible paragraph, all the more devastating:
"My father and I played other games too, besides baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing choo choo train. We were in the living room in the apartment on Washington Avenue, crawling around on the Persian rug my mother treasured. Many years afterward, this memory came to me: My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. I was wet and sticky and I remember my father was crying and I was sitting on the floor next to him and he had put a towel down so we wouldn't dirty the rug. I remember stroking his hair and saying 'It's okay, Daddy. It's okay.' And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they always had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we had moved to a new house."
Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics. We discover that he underpaid the family's black housecleaners. We learn that his celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust." We are told that to cope with Stalin, the war, the party, and his family, he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his own making."
What makes Intimate Politics remarkable, however, is that none of its damning truths are told with rancor. Bettina Aptheker is a powerful witness to her father's contradictions precisely because of her emotional honesty. Her baring of her own shortcomings makes the book far more shattering than any shot ever fired by Eugene Genovese. Intimate Politics could not have been published, one senses, when Herbert and Fay Aptheker were still alive, but it is not governed by a spirit of vindictiveness....
Read entire article at Christopher Phelps in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aptheker enjoys at least a fraction of her father's notoriety. She is listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors, for example, which purports to identify the "101 most dangerous academics in America." (The entry, regrettably, is replete with errors, such as the claim that she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, when in fact she had resigned from it a full decade earlier.)
Born in the year following publication of American Negro Slave Revolts, Bettina Aptheker was a sole child whose father was at the center of the family's Brooklyn household and of her own perception of the world's possibilities. Her mother, Fay, was her father's first cousin (their fathers were brothers), and she kept his social calendar between the tours she chaperoned to the Soviet Union.
"When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," writes Bettina Aptheker. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do."
This powerful evocation of a child's boundless love makes the book's central revelation, conveyed in an indelible paragraph, all the more devastating:
"My father and I played other games too, besides baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing choo choo train. We were in the living room in the apartment on Washington Avenue, crawling around on the Persian rug my mother treasured. Many years afterward, this memory came to me: My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. I was wet and sticky and I remember my father was crying and I was sitting on the floor next to him and he had put a towel down so we wouldn't dirty the rug. I remember stroking his hair and saying 'It's okay, Daddy. It's okay.' And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they always had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we had moved to a new house."
Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics. We discover that he underpaid the family's black housecleaners. We learn that his celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust." We are told that to cope with Stalin, the war, the party, and his family, he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his own making."
What makes Intimate Politics remarkable, however, is that none of its damning truths are told with rancor. Bettina Aptheker is a powerful witness to her father's contradictions precisely because of her emotional honesty. Her baring of her own shortcomings makes the book far more shattering than any shot ever fired by Eugene Genovese. Intimate Politics could not have been published, one senses, when Herbert and Fay Aptheker were still alive, but it is not governed by a spirit of vindictiveness....