Deadly Farce

   1956: coldest of Cold War years. In Budapest, Russian firing squads are gunning down revolutionists. In Washington, Eisenhower is about to defeat Stevenson's second bid for the presidency amid echoes of Joe McCarthy's red menace ravings. And in Manhattan, Maxim Karpilov flirts with a receptionist at the publisher's office where he writes technical electronics manuals for the Army and Navy. Then, later that day, two FBI agents threaten to have him fired as a security risk unless he cooperates by joining the Communist Party to infiltrate it. When Max refuses, the axe falls, his wife reacts with terror (Rosenbergs electrocuted three years earlier), and his lover introduces him to an associate of famed wealthy activist Corliss Lamont. Meantime, meager savings dwindling, wife pregnant, Max soldiers on, landing work and having his first affair as a married man. But when his immigrant father gets hit with a deportation order back to the USSR in the very same week that an old lefty solicits his help in creating a new political party, Max begins to perceive the magnitude and terms of the price he'll have to pay for the survival of them all.                        

How much of Deadly Farce is autobiographical, how much fiction? Don't ask Sidney Norinsky. He insists readers are due no such differentiation, and that his career does not parallel that of Max, the protagonist. What he does insist on is the accuracy of his portrayal of the Fifties and, especially, how public events affected anyone who stood in the way of the military-industrial power Eisenhower warned about in 1961. Sidney Norinsky writes fiction, journalism, and stage plays from his upstairs study in the century old house on the side of a hill he shares with his wife, painter Lynne Friedman, and a fat cat named Plum, one hundred miles north of Manhattan.