Finally an American : ‘Born Rebel’ Becomes a Citizen at 75 After Battling McCarthy-Era Deportation Proceedings Since 1956

When Ethel Shapiro Bertolini finally became an American citizen on July 15, her “citizenship day” was almost comical.

“After 30 years of waiting, my car conks out on the freeway,” the small, 75-year-old woman recalled. The beautiful, wavy red hair that once earned her the nickname “Red,” or “Red Ethel”--a fact raised for different reasons at deportation hearings during the McCarthy era--is now black and flecked with gray.

She wanted to call her lawyer about the freeway delay but: “I can’t get a telephone because a man was making dates and wouldn’t relinquish,” she explained, her demeanor still as intense as ever, her blue eyes magnified and keenly staring from behind her large glasses.

Runs Out of Money

Bertolini finally got to the phone, but ran out of money trying to let the lawyer, Gary Silbiger, know what had happened. Silbiger was the last of several attorneys to handle Bertolini’s case since she was arrested on Oct. 10, 1956, while on her way to buy food for an engagement party for her fiance, Angelo.

Though not the longest deportation case on record, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, civil liberties activists believe Bertolini’s to be perhaps the most prolonged of McCarthy-era cases, certainly in the Los Angeles area.

While most similar cases were resolved or dismissed by the mid-1960s, attorneys say, this one was not dismissed until March, 1985, clearing Bertolini’s path to citizenship.

She has been an activist since the late 1920s when she lived in Chicago, where her family had fled Jewish persecution in the Ukraine.

A self-described “born rebel,” Bertolini battled rent increases and evictions during the Depression, fought for passage of the Social Security Act, and was arrested in “thousands” of demonstration marches, she said, sitting now in the Venice apartment she shares with Angelo, an actor and free-lance sports writer.

Outspoken and passionate about workers’ rights, she insisted on being a union organizer, even though, Bertolini said, she found that unions in those days preferred men for that kind of work.

Despite an education that stopped at ninth grade, because her family was poor and she needed to work, she was driven by her “vision” of a “society free of exploitation, free of war and greed,” and tirelessly wrote on these subjects for union newspapers.

Arrested by U.S.

Bertolini was arrested under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which was McCarthyite legislation that broadened the grounds for exclusion and deportation of aliens--such as previous membership in a radical political group, homosexual ties or mental illness within the family.

The government charged Bertolini with being a member of the Communist Party from 1930 to 1933, and between 1946 and 1947.

Bertolini does not talk about the accusation. “That has nothing to do with being an American citizen,” she said. “I was arrested for my convictions.”

Silbiger, 38, who took over her case in 1979, said her stance has always been that the charge was “an attack on the right . . . to think and associate.”

After her arrest, and during the years of appeals of the subsequent deportation order, she worked as a secretary. But she also wrote nine books, one a 1966 novel, “And My Heart Was At Home,” based in part on her experiences.

Bertolini is still intense about her “vision” for a better world. She needs no prodding to talk about the need for greater rights for immigrants, fair pay for sweat shop workers, or a nuclear freeze. Her dialogue is not that of a typical conversation, but more like a speech.

Wary of Strangers

In the last month, Bertolini has started a new book, and closed down her “defense fund,” to which friends had contributed over the years with $5 and $10 bills enclosed in birthday cards. Further aid came from the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, which was created in the 1950s to assist McCarthy-era alien arrestees and since expanded to become the Los Angeles Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

Bertolini said she does not know the total costs for her defense.

Because of her past wariness of strangers, any of whom she felt over the years might have been government agents, Bertolini is still ill at ease when asked even the simplest questions.

“I’m tired of it,” she said. “This broke down my health. I feel bitter about that.”

She has emphysema, Bertolini explained, and other ailments she believes were caused by the stress of her case. But then she added, since July 15, “I’m just beginning to get some good sleep. I’m just beginning to feel wonderful.”

That day, she did finally get down to the swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles.

Along with about 50 other people, Bertolini raised her hand when the oath of allegiance was read and at the end, like everyone else, said, “So help me God.”

Then, she recalled--still the rebel, but to Angelo and not so the judge could hear--she added, “So help me Goddess!”