The un-American : autobiographical non-fiction novel / by Emanuel Fried.

This book contains numbered chapters but no table of contents.

“HEROISM IS messy. It's easy to look back now and honor people like Manny Fried for standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the political witch hunts of the 1950s. They lost their jobs and their friends. They suffered for their principles. Bravo. That's what we'd do, too. (Sure.) But what if the victims of the hero's stand include his own spouse and children? Who would sacrifice the happiness of his family members on an altar of ideals they barely comprehend? This is the dilemma at the center of Fried's new autobiographical novel, "The Un-American" (Springhouse Editions) … It is uncharacteristically gray territory for Fried to explore, more befitting Joseph Conrad than Buffalo's labor playwright, whose working-class dramas are known for didactically depicting a morally black-and-white world. But on a recent afternoon, as he sits comfortably sipping yellow grape juice in his Amherst Street home, the eminence grise of Buffalo's left wing admits he waffled before he did the right thing in the face of the House committee. "Nobody has really written about it from the inside, the thoughts and emotions as we were dealing with this," says Fried. A few readers have even said he "maligns" the blacklisted heroes by describing their doubts. But Fried says this is the true story, the human story. Fried, 79, finished the "The Un-American" in 1956, two years after he was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which at the time was trying to smear labor unions as subversive. But he didn't publish the book until this year, for fear of hurting his late wife, the former Rhoda Lurie. Mrs. Fried died in 1989. Fried says the story is a factual account of the events leading up to and shortly after his defiant testimony in 1954, but he has changed the names of the real-life characters and written about himself in the third person. In brutally confessional scenes, he describes how his labor activism and reputation as a communist sympathizer damaged his marriage, nearly destroyed his relations with his in-laws and exposed the hypocrisy of many of the Frieds' so-called friends in Buffalo.” - from book review in the Buffalo News, October 30, 1992.