April 9 is the 100th anniversary of the Stalinist entertainer Paul Robeson's birth. Although he died more than two decades ago -- and despite the fact that he made relatively few movies while he was alive -- Robeson's life will be remembered over the coming year in no fewer than six documentary films, numerous magazine pieces, and a collection of essays from Rutgers University Press. How is Robeson's reputation faring in the press these days? Judging from a New York Times piece that appeared in the March 29 Sunday arts section "A Giant Denied His Rightful Stature in Film" not bad at all. " He proved one of the rare celebrity figures," writes Martin Duberman, " willing to place their careers in outright jeopardy to call attention to the bigotries and barbarities of the age."
Duberman should know better. A professor of history at the City University of New York, Duberman is also the author of a respected 1989 biography of Robeson. Among other things, Duberman establishes in the book that in 1949 Robeson met in Moscow with his friend Itzik Feffer, a Yiddish author who had been arrested by Stalin. Using sign language in a bugged hotel room, Feffer told Robeson about the anti-Semitic purges then beginning in the Soviet Union. By 1952 Feffer himself had been executed. What did Robeson have to say about the bigotries and barbarities taking place under Stalin? "I met Jewish people all over the place," the actor explained to a reporter when he returned from the Soviet Union after meeting with Feffer. "I heard no word about" anti- Semitism.