The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir

Although Tony Hiss firmly disbelieves the charge that his father was a Soviet agent who passed along State Department documents, the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss is not entirely the point of this memoir. Instead, drawing on the letters Alger sent his wife and son during the nearly four years he spent in federal prison during the early 1950s, Tony Hiss reveals "the essence that Alger had kept private for so long," an "effervescent and playful" self far more appealing than the rather wooden, lawyerly public persona he adopted when defending himself during the trial. The warm human being who made friends easily, even in jail, was seldom available to his young son during the busy years that preceded Alger's incarceration. Their relationship deepened during his imprisonment, enabling Tony to endure those difficult years of deprivation and separation. Without minimizing the stresses on his family--Tony was plagued by bad dreams and inexplicable accidents; his parents separated a few years after Alger's release--the author emphasizes the courage and nobility of his father, who strove to find occasions for joy even behind bars. This is a moving, very human portrait of a man who in other accounts is usually either demonized or sanctified. --Wendy Smith