COLD WAR SECRETS
Unscrambling the Certain Uncertainties of Family Secrets
“A writer remembers a Cold War–era childhood disoriented by the impenetrable mystery of his parents’ political lives . . . Pitcoff . . . was only 11 years old when a pair of FBI agents visited his [New York City] home in 1954, asking to speak to his father, Robert . . . Pitcoff was finally and dramatically able to discover that his father led a cinematically eventful life . . . This memoir, at its best, is reminiscent of the literary work of French author Patrick Modiano . . . A memoir overflowing with drama that evocatively re-creates the atmosphere of peril and uncertainty during the Cold War.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Paul Pitcoff's memoir Cold War Secrets is well worth reading, informative about when Communist witchhunts dominated politics and ruined lives, a time Arthur Miller once called, along with The Great Depression, one of the two most frightening events in the mid-20th Century America. But Cold War Secrets is also a moving, sharply observed, sensitive remembrance of childhood, adolescence, and early manhood that defies easy expectations."
"What engages the reader throughout, as scenes change and the years go by, is the author's modest, bumbling attempts to live by his father's mantra: Don't trust authority, find out for yourself. It meant for young Paul taking risks, some of them dangerously adventurous, such as when, barely 20, he volunteers to go to Arctic Finland to help farmers homestead, a harsh time during which he somehow gets himself a lovely girlfriend. What he does not (yet) appreciate are the risks that his parents took in living the way they did, including having him."
—Joan Baum, The Independent
Listen to Paul’s radio interview with Francesca Rheannon: https://www.writersvoice.net/2021/01/paul-pitcoff-cold-war-secrets-laura-levitt-the-objects-that-remain/
Watch Paul’s interview on The Writer’s Dream:
Synopsis
Cold War Secrets chronicles growing up in the political and creative hot bed of Greenwich Village in the 40s and 50s. The seriousness and impact of the McCarthy era is fused with humor as Paul encounters the various ironies of the human condition.
The author’s memoir is a search to discover his parents’ well-hidden secrets and learn how they shaped his identity and life perspective. One of Paul’s earliest evidences of secrets is the appearance of FBI agents to interview his father. His mother offers reassurance: “They just happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped by.” Only late in life, while researching his parents for this memoir does the author uncover the purpose of those visits along with other family secrets and consider the effects on his life. Was his father burdened with shame for possibly being a Soviet asset?
Paul connects the journey to discover and make sense of the secrets, to the various rites of passage growing up in Greenwich Village, brimming with artists communists, gangs, and romance.
