Bertolt Brecht
fled Hitler's Germany
for McCarthy's Amerika
where he'll bomb on Broadway,
go hungry in Hollywood.
Only HUAC understood his work.
They accused him
of "premature anti-facism."
He denied everything.
They believed him.
"Americans aren't as bad
as Nazis. At least they let you
smoke while they interrogate you,"
Brecht said smoking his cigar.
Besides cigars, he loved
brainy women with red
radical politics.
An irascible, rumpled-looking
foreigner in the Halls of Justice,
hating the Jew-
hater and the big
boss man, he wrote:
"What is the crime
of robbing a bank
compared with
the crime
of founding one."

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First GRIST On-Line publication, December, 1996. © 1996 Maggie Jaffe