V. J. Jerome

Victor Jeremy Jerome (1896 - 1965) was born Jerome Isaac Romain in Strykov, Poland in 1896. He immigrated to New York City in 1915, and went to City College.

He was a bookkeeper for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the early 1920s. In 1924 he joined the Communist Party and in the following year married Rose Pastor Stokes. He returned to college and in 1930 received a Bachelor of Science degree from New York University. After Rose Pastor Stoke’s death in 1933, Jerome spent a year in Hollywood raising money for the Spanish Loyalists. He returned to New York and in 1935 he became editor of The Communist (which later became Political Affairs) and held that position until 1955. In 1937 he married Alice Hamburger.

He had risen in the Party hierarchy and in the mid-1930's was appointed cultural commissioner of the Communist Party. Novelist Howard Fast observed in an [http://www.trussel.com/hf/prospect.htm an interview] , "I always looked upon V. J. Jerome – who was the cultural czar of the Communist Party – as a horrible, rigid little monster who never knew what he was doing." Many other writers had similar opinions of Jerome in this position.

Between 1935 and 1965 Jerome wrote constantly. He wrote two autobiographical novels A Lantern for Jeremy (released during the "Foley Square Trials" in 1952) and its sequel, The Paper Bridge (published posthumously in 1966). He also published a collection of vignettes entitled Unstill Waters (1964). A prolific writer, he turned out short stories, plays, and literary and art criticism. Victor Jerome is best known, however, for his political and cultural essays. Among these are "The Intellectuals and the War" (1940), "The Negro in Hollywood Films" (1950), and "Culture in a Changing World" (1948).

A 1952 pamphlet -- "Grasp the Weapon of Culture" -- which Jerome presented as a report to the Communist Party, became the "overt act" under which Victor Jerome was prosecuted and convicted under the Smith Act. He was Iindicted with sixteen other Communist leaders in 1951. Following a nine month trial in New York's Foley Square Courthouse -- Jerome passed the long hours in court writing poetry and reading page proofs of A Lantern for Jeremy -- Jerome was convicted and in 1953 sentenced to three years at Lewisburg Penitentiary. He served the sentence between 1954 and 1957.

Following his release from prison he began on a novel based on the life of Spinoza.

He died in 1965 at the age of 68.

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