Unleashed Books: “Fugitive” / Tony Kahn

An exciting graphic memoir from a victim of the nightmare Congress visited on some of Hollywood’s greatest talents in the depths of the Cold War … a bitter object lesson for today's world.

This is the latest episode of a feature from Andelman Unleashed that will explore compelling new works in print or gestation in English or French.

The series is free to all subscribers. Eventually, we hope it will attract a substantial audience to our (lightly) paid tiers that will also help support all the work that goes into Andelman Unleashed each week.

Tony Kahn, Fugitive: My Boyhood on the Hollywood Blacklist, 182 pp.

Full disclosure—Tony Kahn was a classmate of mine at Harvard and fellow member of the news staff of WHRB, Harvard Radio Broadcasting. What I did not know at the time was that Tony was also the son of the great Hollywood screen writer Gordon Kahn, who for a decade or more was blacklisted by American studios, forced to flee with his family to Mexico to avoid testimony before the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee chaired by J. Parnell Thomas (R., New Jersey), whose members included a young congressman, Richard Nixon. Kahn was also pursued by J. Edgar Hoover and all the forces of the FBI. Eventually, too late, his father was cleared and Tony resumed his climb toward a stellar career in the media that in so many ways eluded his father.

Now, Tony has prepared a masterful graphic novel of his childhood and adulthood under the shadow of a shame that is itself an indelible stain on the American landscape and that risks being reconstituted in different form depending on the outcome of the November elections.

The following is an abridged version that will provide a taste of this extraordinary document….

The saga began in the halls of Congress in 1947 when the fears of communism in America began to spread…all but unchecked….

That initial wall began quickly to crack….

The saga first began to hit home to young Tony in 1949….

But that would not be for long….

Their father was forced to flee Mexico…..

….the family not far behind….

Life in Mexico was a constant series of challenges….even for an eight-year-old

Back home, friends turned on friends…and named names….

… and rumors went from the sublime to the ridiculous….

….but in exile, young Tony was growing up….fast …..

…but somehow Gordon found a way to keep writing….

…. while eventually, after 5 years in exile, finding a way back ‘home’ ….

….in Manchester, NH….life for the whole family was still a challenge…

how could dad resist putting this all down on paper … for family & friends….

….even at home, the burdens and ills were mounting….

….just as the clouds were beginning to lift….

….eventually, Tony prepares to follow his brother off to Harvard….

 ….. [find Tony …. find Andelman!]

….eventually, even J. Edgar Hoover had his limits ….

….. Tony has long reflected on the consequences he believed deeply buried….

…though clearly not in conservative America ….

….but in all this, of course, there is a message, especially in today’s no less troubled times……

There are any number of messages buried in the pages of Tony Kahn’s Fugitive….but none so urgent as this last page.

The mission of Andelman Unleashed is to examine the present through the prism of the past….and there is no more profound such message as in this extraordinary graphic memoir.

For those who’d like to see a draft of the full book send me a personal request through SubStack Chat and I will email a link.