My grandma was not a closet anti-Soviet rebel, but she did quietly rebel at being told how and what to write. She thanked the editor, picked up her stories, went home, and never tried to get published again.
In recent years, with the rapidly advancing progressive politicization of American and more generally Western culture, I have often thought of that episode from my family lore. The ideological battles in the Young Adult fiction community, first chronicled a year and a half ago by Kat Rosenfield on New York magazine's Vulture site, are a particularly obvious parallel.
The latest skirmish in that battle is playing itself out right now, and it's an ugly one. A Chinese-American immigrant, Amélie Wen Zhao, has been bullied and shamed into withdrawing her debut novel, Blood Heir, due for release in June, after a Twitter mob denounced it as "racist" based on snippets from advance review copies. Zhao, who had a three-book deal and had been hailed as an exciting new voice in Young Adult literature, posted an apology for the "pain" her book had caused:
Comment: Aircraft accidents and crashes are in the news with an increasing frequency these days, and one wonders whether there's any connection: