Reva (Hoffman) Grossfield

Class of 1957

The Long Island Version

The Long Island version of this story is similar to the city version.  My memories also include the fear of FBI agents at the door and following us in the car with the instruction of saying "I have nothing to say" when they called on the phone wanting the names of others.

Republican Long Island was a challenging and scary environment for this constitutionally shy Red Diaper baby.  I was the first baby of the Long Island section of the Communist Party, from which I received a child size wooden table and chair when I was born.  I was named for my two maternal great grandmothers, Rachel and Chaie AND Mother Bloor, Ella Reeve Bloor.  For years I thought of this as a classic double message, i.e., stay close to your traditional roots and also go out and make the revolution, or at the very least, try to repair the world (Tikkun Olam).

I believe it was in the fall of 1956 after I had been in camp that summer having been on the Soviet team in our United Nations Peace Olympics.  There had been an article in The New York Times about Camp Kinderland with photos of the Soviet flag in the dining room.  The article mistakenly said that we had table cloths with hammer and sickles on them.  I remembered that we had painted the Soviet flag and that they were drying in the dining room.  When some of my classmates talked of this news item, (an inverted twist on fake news) I was not able to correct them for to do so I would have had to reveal that not only was I a camper at Camp Kinderland, but that I was also on the Soviet team.

I recall my first summer in camp.  It was 1955, and it was also the year that Bill Haley and the Comets came out with "Rock Around the Clock."  So in addition to being in a politically safer summer space, camp also enabled us to be the teenagers that we were.  There was even talk among us of turning Camp Kinderland into a Rock and Roll Camp.  With all its imperfections, being in camp allowed for us to move into our teenage years with peers, politics and rock and roll music.