In 1952, the great journalist and speaker Victor Grossman defected from Harvard and the US Army to the Soviet region of Germany. He has lived in eastern Germany ever since. He will review his book, “A Socialist Defector”, just published by Monthly Review. He will also describe changes in the condition of women since eastern Germany fell to counter-revolution nearly 30 years ago.
• Victor Grossman, born Stephen Wechsler, a New York red-diaper baby of the 1930s, joined the Communist Party as a Harvard student. Fleeing the U.S. Army during the McCarthy Era, he swam the Danube River to the Soviet Zone of Austria and was sent to East Germany. There, he studied journalism and became a freelance writer and popular speaker. He was pardoned by the U.S. Army in 1994 and, in 2003, published an autobiography, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany.