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BOOK REVIEW : A Witness to Communist History in L.A. : DOROTHY HEALEY REMEMBERS: A Life in the American Communist Party <i> by Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman</i> , Oxford University Press $22.95, 263 pages

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To headline writers over the last half-century or so, Dorothy Healey was the “Red Queen of Los Angeles,” “our own Madame Defarge,” “the Little Dictator.” As we discover in “Dorothy Healey Remembers,” she has mellowed only slightly over the years: The gravel-voiced, cigarillo-smoking veteran of the barricades is still La Pasionaria of the City of the Angels.

“It was in good measure through her influence,” insists her co-author, historian Maurice Isserman, in a particularly illuminating introduction to the book, “that the Communist Party in California came to be referred to in those years as the Yugoslavia of the American communist movement.”

Healey joined the Young Communist League as a teen-ager in Berkeley in 1928, and she stayed in the party for nearly 50 years before finally leaving its ranks as a protest against the lack of “party democracy.” The secret of her longevity as party member and a militant, she reveals, is “the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony.”

“Dorothy Healey Remembers” is based upon--or, perhaps more accurately, inspired by--a series of interviews by Joel Gardner of the UCLA Oral History Program, but the book takes its tone and substance from the work of Healey’s editor, amanuensis and co-author, Maurice Isserman.

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Thanks to Isserman, Healey’s “first-person biography” is richly studded with little asides patterned after the “witness” segments of the motion picture “Reds”: a letter, a political pamphlet, an entry from a secret FBI file, fragments of Steinbeck and Sinclair and Gorky, the testimony of a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the reminiscences of Healey’s family and fellow strugglers.

Much of Healey’s narrative focuses rather too insistently on the hothouse politics of the Communist Party, the fusty old ideological battles that once seemed so urgent but now strike us as almost antique: the Popular Front, the so-called “Teheran Line,” the uncomfortable bedfellowship of Old and New Left.

But there is genuine outrage and lingering pain in Healey’s accounts of the old debates over the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” the Hungarian uprising, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The old embers still burn hot in Healey’s memory, and she is still moved by the old causes. For example, she summons up some of the old rancor in recalling the simmering factional disputes of the Old Left.

Some of her Stalinist comrades in the party “never got around to reading much Marx or Lenin,” she explains, because they were too busy with the work of a real revolutionary: “The Trotskyists were so good at theoretical debates,” she gibes, “because they had more time to read.”

The radicalizing influences in Healey’s life are revealed with painful but sometimes comic intimacy. “My mother performed thirteen abortions on herself,” Healey reports. As a young party worker, she yielded to the attentions of a merchant seaman named “Dutch” because “I felt it was my party duty to do it.”

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Still, her sense of humor never fails her. “Later,” she cracks, “I started to think of this as my ‘Salvation Army’ approach to love and marriage.”

Healey is a relentless name-dropper, and there’s hardly a figure from the last six or seven decades of California politics who doesn’t show up in “Dorothy Healey Remembers,” from Tom Mooney to Sam Yorty to Angela Davis.

And she reminds us that even the politics of the Communist Party took on a special flavor in sunny California; she recalls, for example, a star-struck party pooh-bah whom she escorted to a party at Dalton Trumbo’s house: “It was a big disappointment for him, all screenwriters and no stars.”

Healey’s book captures the uglier aspects of the California dream: the vigilantes who drove union organizers from the Imperial Valley with ax handles and shotguns, the ungentle attentions of the Red Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department, the witch trials of Red-baiting politicoes.

Her dues-paying years left Healey unimpressed by the new generation of glib radicals who emerged in the 1960s and displaced the Communist Party from its accustomed primacy in progressive politics: “Once you’ve learned to hold your own on a soapbox on Skid Row, it’s no real challenge to stay calm behind a lectern in a comfortable UCLA auditorium.”

“Dorothy Healey Remembers” is essentially a political testament by a witness to history, a memoir by an Old Bolshevik who was never a true believer because she was cursed with an unrelenting conscience and a ribald sense of humor.

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At its most touching moments, however, “Dorothy Healey Remembers” is more nearly a melodrama--the struggle of a zealous, principled and compassionate woman to make sense of life and love in a world utterly devoted to radical politics.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Cyrus, Cyrus” by Adam Zameenzad (Viking).

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