Adam Raskin, My Brother and Comrade, RIP
Adam Raskin, not long before his death.
It never was easy to be Adam Raskin, an uncommon radical, and the youngest of four brothers born to Mildred and Sam who left the Communist Party in ’48—two years before he arrived in the world, which was in Huntington, Long Island. In 1950, my parents were still communists and remained communists until they died. As a kid, Adam urged them to move into the basement of our house on Rogues Path and to invite a Black family to live in the space they vacated. He often asked for the impossible and didn’t stop until cancer laid him low.
As a teenager, he threw pot parties and did drugs and had sex before I did, though I was born eight-years before him. I was an orphan of the Cold War, while he was a child of the Sixties who attended McGill in Montreal where he supported the taxi drivers’ strike there by tossing Molotov Cocktails at designated targets. He was never a notable New Leftist, and was not written about in lefty publications, but he attained a certain notoriety in 1970 in the wake of an explosion at a townhouse in Manhattan. When Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson escaped from the ruins, Boudin said to Wilkerson, “Where’s Adam?”
She meant Terry Robbins, who had taken the code name Adam. Some in the crowd on 11th Street heard the question and repeated it to a police officer investigating the explosion, which led to a manhunt for my brother Adam and to the surveillance of our parents. The FBI decided that my “Adam,” an American original, was the link between the Weather Underground and the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). Not true. In fact, a total fabrication.
In 1970, two FBI agents went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was teaching and told Irving Ribner, the chair of the English Department, that I died in the blast at the townhouse explosion. When I showed up for work, Irving fainted. “I thought you were dead” he told me, when he revived. I’m not complaining about the FBI. Agents did far worse things in that era.
Adam and Jonah in their Hood River caps.
As his older brother, I was supposed to mind him when our parents went away for weekends or longer. On those occasions, which were frequent, I learned more from him than he learned from me. I learned about Cuban cults, Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the Seminoles of Florida and much more. He never graduated from McGill, but he earned a B.A. from an institution of higher learning created for wayward souls like himself.
In the late 1960s, he belonged to a group of activists who went on the road to search for the perfect city where they could make a revolution. Known as “The Lost Collective,” they never found what they were looking for, though they tried Cleveland, Albuquerque and Boston. A life-long searcher, he made his way to San Francisco and lived in the Mission, spoke Spanish with a Cuban accent, passed for Cuban, became a drummer and joined The TroubleMakers Union, an interracial group of musicians that made music and trouble.
In the 1970s, he was in the thick of the Bay Area’s movement for local, organic food, which my father, still a Stalinist, ridiculed. Then, partly by accident and partly because of his friendship with attorney Stuart Hanlon, who defended Black Panther Geronimo Pratt among other clients, my brother became a private investigator and learned the trade, he told me, by reading Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. How appropriate that the novels of a Communist Party member who refused to name names inspired my brother, the son of Communists!
A dogged and persistent PI, he visited men on death row and on those occasions when I saw him he always emerged from under a dark cloud. It wasn’t easy to go into San Quentin and talk to condemned prisoners. But he did it for decades and helped them survive death row.
He met his son’s first-grade teacher, a Mexican national, fell in love with her, married her and moved from the Mission to the Outer Sunset, where he surfed, cycled, ran, jogged, and walked. He also played handball, swam in San Francisco Bay and hiked in the Sierras. Then cancer laid him low. He died at home, at age 75, in bed with his wife at his side, about six months after the doctors told him his chances of surviving a year were slim. He didn’t whine or moan.
The other day, I told my brother Daniel that they broke the mold after Adam was born. He said, “He broke it himself.” An iconoclast, he mellowed as he aged, grew more compassionate and never lost his indomitable sense of curiosity. Our father couldn’t see it or recognize it, but Adam was the best kind of communist, a communist who mostly steered clear of Communist parties, but who attended for decades every rally and every march for every good cause imaginable. The whole Bay Area will miss his revolutionary spirit. I do already.
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