My Father Chose to Be a Red
One man's political odyssey from 1930s Brooklyn, to fighting fascists in Spain, to the melancholy of the postwar Communist Party.
Members of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. WIkimedia Commons
My father Robert Klonsky was born in 1918 in a house off of Eastern Parkway where Brownsville meets East New York in Brooklyn. His parents, my grandfather and grandmother, were Russian immigrants, religious Jews, and poor.
My grandfather was either a rabbi or a cantor, depending on who in the family tells the story. Dad had four brothers and a sister. The boys all sang in my grandfather’s synagogue. My father had a beautiful, deep, rich voice that sounded to me like the Paul Robeson records I heard around the house as a child.
The brothers ended up going in very different directions.
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