Tuesday, October 24, 2006

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.

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1 Comments:

At 11:36 AM, Blogger Dees Stribling said...

We have two sets, the originals in a compilation volume, and a set of "in the style of HA & Marget Ray" published in 1999 - not bad but still inferior works. I haven't seen the feature movie or much of the new TV series on PBS, but I feel certain they're lesser lights too.

George, you know, suffers from the Stockholm syndrome. He was kidnapped in the first book by the man with the yellow hat, whom he soon is quite attached to.

 

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