New from Monthly Review Press: The Socialist Imperative new from Monthly Review Press A Socialist Defector From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee by Victor Grossman —Norman Solomon, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy; author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death “This book is a gift to readers who hunger for firsthand insights about pivotal historic events, and a challenge for us to think anew about ideological divides and the complexities of human experience.” —Jeffrey St. Clair, editor, CounterPunch; author, Bernie and the Sandernistas “With the narrative gifts of a novelist, Grossman confronts us with our own secret history and the consequences, both human and political, of an ideological war that was fought for decades in the shadows whose generational reverberations are only now coming into focus.” —Bill Fletcher, Jr., former president of TransAfrica Forum; writer & labor activist “The book gives the reader a picture of a life that few in the USA understood. We were brought up on stereotypical views of the GDR. Victor Grossman smashes those.” —Alex Locascio, translator of Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society “Grossman has a keen eye for the multifaceted, sometimes contradictory, aspects of GDR society, the heroic achievements, as well as the tone-deaf absurdities of clueless bureaucrats. In a Europe currently being torn apart by the rise of the far-right, it’s time to re-open this chapter of history. I can think of no better guide to this history than Victor Grossman.” “Grossman has, as he says, ‘an unusual opportunity to make comparisons.’ And he shares those with the reader in a fair and optimistic tone, with the hope for the possibility of a better world.” Norman Stockwell, publisher, The Progressive

“The book reads like a detective novel—and contains descriptions of some little-known crimes as well. It will be of interest to Bernie Sanders enthusiasts, for Grossman dreams of a new and different world—a very realistic dream, built on the incredible life of a man of ninety.” —Horst Schäfer, German journalist and author , publisher, The Progressive The threat of a McCarthy-era prison sentence impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Bavaria, to flee his barracks one day in 1952 and swim across the Danube River to the Soviet Zone. The Soviets sent him to the German Democratic Republic, where he remained for years: observer and participant; husband and father, as he watched the rise and eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. A Socialist Defector is the story, told in rare, personal detail, of an activist and writer who grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent 38 years in the GDR’s nationally owned economy; and continues to survive, given whatever the market can bear, in today’s united Germany. His account focuses on the socialism he saw and lived—the GDR’s goals and achievements, its repressive measures and stupidities—which, Grossman argues, offers lessons now in our search for solutions to the grave problems facing our world.

352 pages | $23 pbk



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Victor Grossman,born Stephen Wechsler, a New York red-diaper baby of the 1930s, joined the Communist Party as a Harvard student. Fleeing the U.S. Army during the McCarthy Era, he swam the Danube River to the Soviet Zone of Austria and was sent to East Germany. There, he studied journalism and became a freelance writer and popular speaker. He was pardoned by the U.S. Army in 1994 and, in 2003, published an autobiography, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. 352 pages | $23 pbk

