.
Kenosha’s Michael Schumacher has become Allen Ginsberg’s literary caretaker as biographer and editor. With Iron Curtain Journals, Schumacher presents the poet’s diary from his 1965 journey to Cuba, Czechoslovakia and Russia. A generous soul, he may have expected to find a viable alternative to Moloch but encountered something worse instead. Communist Cuba proved uncongenial for free expression and expelled him; he was arrested in Czechoslovakia and sent packing to the friendlier climes of Swinging London. In Iron Curtain Journals, Ginsberg jotted down aspersions against the “dogmatic mediocrity Marxists” and the heavy-handed Puritanism of the Castro regime, although he enjoyed watching Castro perform on TV. The Czech section of Iron Curtain Journals is sketchier—there, the police confiscated his journals and they remain lost in the archives of totalitarianism. The side trip to his parents’ homeland, Russia, went better, and he wrote beautifully of the country, spreading a torrent of ink across the pages.
