Mr. and Mrs. Pumpkin

My mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, had grown up in the first decades of the 20th century chafing against the bourgeois restrictions of Cleveland Jewish society. She went to the University of Chicago where Thornton Wilder frightened her out of serious literary effort and learned photography. She also got involved with the Communists there as a result of a trip she had made to the Soviet Union. The combination of visual arts and left-wing politics fused into a determination to become a documentary filmmaker.

This ambition took her to New York where she worked for Paul Strand, Mexico, where she took photographs exhibited under the title, "Portraits By Marion Michelle and Man Ray." In Hollywood she met the man who was to determine the next five years of her life, Joris Ivens, the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker.

"Mr. and Mrs. Pumpkin" details the adulterous passion that swept her into Ivens' exciting, nomadic, resolutely Communist world during and after World War II -- Hollywood, Australia, the new Soviet republics behind the Iron Curtain, and finally Paris. 

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