Bessie: A novel of Love and Revolution
by Lawrence Bush
"The most important thing in my life has been the revolutionary movement, even since I was a young child without understanding. I must have been born that way, feeling that I was with the downtrodden. . . ."
Bessie's "career" is full of hazards. At the tender age of twelve, she is exiled to Siberia because of her brothers' anti-czarist activities. At twenty-five, she loses her husband and baby girl to the ravages of civil war in revolutionary Russia. At forty, she faces down Nazi hoodlums as she tries to disrupt a pro-Hitler rally in Madison Square Garden. At fifty-five, she is driven to an underground life by McCarthyite persecution and rejection by her own son. At sixty-two, she squares off against racists during civil rights campaigns in the South—and nearly loses the loyalty of her beloved daughter.
"How many beatings can this little stinker take and still be alive? Let me tell you something—I wonder mysel.,"
Yet here she is at eighty-eight, still making trouble and still making jokes. Bessie is more than a survivor—she's a winner, for her spirits are never dampened, her humor never fails, and her faith in human love and potential is never shaken, however long it might take for her dreams of a better world to become real.
"History is not made like you make a cup of coffee. They say that a Jewish man prayed to God. He said, 'Lord, to you a thousand years is just a minute, and a million dollars is like a penny. So please, God, give me a penny?'
"And God said, 'Wait a minute.' "
Bessie is a profoundly optimistic novel about a woman who is a leader in a generation of fighters and poets. An enchanting novel from an engaging, talented writer, it is a masterful achievement of passion, grace, and wit, echoing with the honest, earthy voice of its remarkable heroine—a rebel, a lover, a mother, a grandmother, a nurse, a Jew, an extraordinary human being.