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college, and constantly shadowed by her own sense that she was intellectually deficient. “Martha seems immature for her age,” her first-grade teacher wrote home on her report card, apparently not taking into account that the little girl was nearly two years younger than her classmates. When her father abandoned the family once and for all eight years later, disappearing into Manhattan forever, he left behind his twelve-year-old daughter (both sons were already grown and gone) to care for a wife who was on the verge of becoming an invalid. Before leaving for school in the morning, my mother would dress her mother, comb her hair, and tie her shoes. And each night, without fail, she would wake and pad into her mother’s bedroom, where she would slip her arms under the wasted body racked with pain—sixteen aspirin a day—and turn her from one side to the other. But by the time my mother was nineteen and a sophomore in college, she had managed to extricate herself from her mother, sending her on a train back to Mount Vernon to be cared for by others.
    So at that dinner party in 1957, the young Jewish womanand the young Iranian man were introduced for the first time, and saw something in each other, and fell in love, and about one year later they were married, and one year after that they had a son named Jacob, and three years after that a daughter named Jamileh.
    By the early 1960s the Minneapolis area had become one of the most successful recruiting hubs for the Socialist Workers Party. The “cradle of the movement” it was called, an immodest nod to St. Petersburg, which had been christened “cradle of the revolution” by the Bolsheviks. Groups of young comrades—
trailblazers
—would travel around the region, going from campus to campus as they tried to win students over to the idea of socialism. It was at the University of Minnesota where a half dozen of these comrades happened to arrive one Saturday morning in 1964, and unfold their book table, laid out their
Militants
, and draped their banner that proclaimed “Clifton DeBerry for President. Vote Socialist Workers.”
    I can picture those half dozen comrades standing there in much the same way as these half dozen comrades stand now on the corner at Union Square. I can picture the same exhausted diligence, the same knapsacks, the same scuffed shoes, the same
Militant.
Except then it cost ten cents. “Why U.S. is losing war against Vietnam rebels!” “Washington admits arming Congo mercenaries!”
    “Cops in New York kill another Puerto Rican!” Over and over I am sure they called, until it wasafternoon and their mouths were dry and they decided that the time had come to call it a day. And just as they were beginning to pack up their books and roll up their banner for Clifton DeBerry, I can see a young couple passing by with two strollers as they enjoyed the final days of autumn.
    “Let’s give it one last try,” one of the comrades says, approaching the young couple with
Militant
in hand. “Read why Johnson is no answer to Goldwater.”
    The couple stops.
    “We say it is only through the overthrow of capitalism that inequalities in society can be resolved.”
    “How much?” the couple ask.
    “Ten cents,” he says.
    And the young wife reaches into her purse, because back then she carried a purse instead of a knapsack, and she wore dresses and high heels and lipstick, and kept her hair long, and showed off her legs to their best advantage.
    “Thank you,” says the comrade, pocketing the dime and handing them
The Militant.
Then the three of them chat for a while, a second comrade joining in, maybe a third. I am sure they were all friendly people, these comrades, friendly and vivacious and young and full of ideas.
    “Will you vote for Clifton DeBerry in November?”
    “He’s the first black man to ever run for president.”
    “Here’s a pamphlet of what he says about the working class.”
    “I would vote for him,” says the young Iranian man,