Wisdom in Old Books
Shortly after writing about Sophie Gerson’s passing a few weeks ago, I was contacted by her grand-daughter Frieda and daughter Deborah. They’re cleaning out the family house in Bensonhurst and thought I might be interested in some of Si Gerson’s books. Would I! Si had a voluminous book collection on topics like socialism, the labor movement, election law and policy and New York City politics that stretched back decades. There was an impressive diversity to Si’s collection, as it was not limited, like too many young leftists’ today, to those writers with whom he agreed. Si’s habit of underlining sections and scribbling exclamation points in the margin suggest his opinion of the material. My favorite so-far being the prominent question mark beside Norman Thomas’ preposterous claim, in “Socialism Re-Examined,” that Marx’s theory of surplus labor value could not account for automation (Marx, of course, devotes several chapters of “Capital Vol. […]