Tovarisch Yuri

Ann’s favorite bedtime reading, meaning what I read to her, is from our complete Curious George collection, a hardback we got not long ago. Recently I read a little about H.A. and Margret Rey, learning that they’d escaped from Hitler carrying with them the original Curious George manuscript, which eventually made its way to American publishers.

The other day I found myself wondering, what if they’d gone east instead of west? What if their sympathies had been Stalinist? Probably this odd line of thought occurred to me because on Saturday I listened to a 1951 episode of I Was a Communist for the FBI rebroadcast on WDCB, which plays old-time radio on Saturday afternoons.

Anyway, I re-imagined the output of the Reys as refugees to Soviet Russia. First would have been Comrade George, of course. “This is George. He is a good little monkey and always on the side of the proletariat… He lives with his comrade, the apparatchik with the yellow hat…”

Later books would have included:

Comrade George Fingers a Counterrevolutionary

Comrade George Liquidates a Kulak

Comrade George Gets the Order of Lenin

Comrade George Assists the Five-Year Plan

Comrade George Thwarts U.S. Imperialism

The books were used in Soviet primary education in the ’40s and early ’50s, but alas were banned in 1952 when the Reys vanished into the gulag, only to re-appear in 1992. The books, that is, not the Reys.