Diary 
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Ya ya ya, your father’s a Communist! The girls at my school in Melbourne in the late 1940s liked to taunt the oddballs in their midst; other targets were orphans (Ya ya ya, your father died in the war!) and Jews. My father was not in fact a Communist, he was an independent, a maverick who ran the Australian Council for Civil Liberties as a front organisation for himself, I thought, though others said for the Communists. It might have been easier for us if he had been a Party member, since that would have provided ready-made comrades and perhaps even an income, which in my father’s unemployed state was notably lacking. I asked him early on (though without getting a serious answer) why we didn’t move to Russia, if, as he seemed to think, things were better there.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the editor (with Stuart Macintyre) of Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics.
Other articles by this contributor:
Pessimism and Boys · Sheila Fitzpatrick reads the diary of a Soviet schoolgirl
The Good Old Days · The Dacha-Owning Classes
A Little Swine · Snitching
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