A lantern for Jeremy : a novel / by V. J. Jerome.

"Victor Jeremy Jerome (1896–1965) was an American communist writer and editor based in New York City. He is best remembered as a Marxist cultural essayist and as the long-time editor of The Communist, later known as Political Affairs, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA. He was known as the Chairman of the party's Cultural Commission, based in New York. ... n the postwar period, Congress and local governments reacted to the Cold War with investigations of communist activity. Jerome was prosecuted and convicted under the Smith Act for committing the "overt act" of conspiracy to teach and encourage overthrow of the US government through his pamphlet, "Grasp the Weapon of Culture", which he presented as a report to the Communist Party in 1950. He recommended that the Party consider art and entertainment part of its "mass work". He was indicted in 1951, together with 16 other Communist leaders, during a second wave of trials of communist leaders that took place across the country. The first trial was conducted in New York in 1947. During a nine-month trial in New York's federal Foley Square Courthouse, Jerome passed the long hours in court writing poetry and reading page proofs of his memoir, A Lantern for Jeremy. " -- from Wikipedia

"A LANTERN FOR JEREMY is the story of a small boy's view of what occurs in the streets and homes of the Polish ghetto where he lives. Yet the story of the boy and what he sees has so been written by V.J.Jerome, it's author, that it breaks the confines of locale and becomes a tale for the world to hear. The year is 1905. The revolutionary struggle in Tsarist Russia and Tsarist Poland rumbles into the hemmed-in streets of the boy's village, invading iron-clad tradition and religious taboo." -- Goodreads.com