In the Weekly Standard, Suze Rotolo’s memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time,” is reviewed by Ron Radosh. Having been a “red diaper baby” himself, Radosh brings a particular insight to bear on Rotolo’s story. Some extracts:

Rotolo’s Italian parents were committed Communist party members, making Rotolo one of the ranks of New York’s somewhat unique colony of “Red diaper babies.” She grew up in a narrow and sectarian culture, among those who believed the Soviet Union was the model for a good society. This gave her a sense of identity, but made her feel alienated from her more conventional peers. Her mother was, for a time, an editor and columnist for L’Unita, the Italian-American CP newspaper.

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Her view of the Communist left was rather naïve. Like Dylan’s, her bent was art, music, theater, and painting. Yet she saw herself as part of a family of like-minded people of the left who intended to change the world for the better and institute what she calls Karl Marx’s good ideas. Fear of McCarthyism and what might happen to her and her friends’ Communist parents was always in the background, giving her what she calls “an outsider status inflicted on us by the Cold War and our parents’ political beliefs.”

Yet she was inquisitive enough to seek out and read The God That Failed, which she calls the story of six ex-Communist writers’ “agonizing journey … an examination of the Cold War and Stalinism by these important thinkers,” a book that “made an impact.” She knew the stories told were accurate. Yet Rotolo felt, at the same time, that she “was betraying the elders” and so she read it in secret! To acknowledge that the book contained difficult truths, she writes, was impossible: After all, The God That Failed was praised by anti-Communists, and “you were either on one side or the other.”

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In her book she is very forgiving and shows great respect for [Dylan] as an artist, despite their difficult relationship. All artists, she writes, move through the path of “imitate, assimilate, then innovate.” Dylan may have started out echoing Woody Guthrie and Jack Elliott but “worked hard to learn his craft, to make his art his own.”

Hearing his early songs, the press soon dubbed him a “protest singer.” He had come to some issues because, as she writes, “I threw those interests out to Bob.” He may have started singing traditional folk music and blues, but soon began writing his personal interior monologues in a form that captivated the world and transformed American music. Rotolo read Arthur Rimbaud, and soon Dylan did, too. He did not betray anyone when he “went electric” in 1965, she writes: He wrote about what was on his mind, and did not want to do what others wanted, even if it meant “alienating his public, fans, friends, and lovers.”

The leftwing audience, steeled in the dogma of the Old Left’s Marxism, expected Dylan to continue the political song tradition of Guthrie. “Bob listened, absorbed, honored them, and then walked away,” explains Rotolo. An artist “can’t be made to serve a theory,” she writes. Hence Dylan refused to accept the torch they sought to hand him. Sadly, she found that the emerging New Left was not much different and “felt equally betrayed by Dylan.” She cannot comprehend how this supposedly different New Left, that she thought had rejected “the orthodoxy that had kept the left cemented to Stalinism,” acted just the same as the Old Left.

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