Abstract
In 1950, the US communist Abraham Chapman, his wife, and two daughters boarded a train at Grand Central Station in New York City, starting a journey that would take them over the Iron Curtain, a journey involving spies, forged papers, and hidden identities. During the exile of thirteen years in Communist Czechoslovakia, Chapman received his doctorate in American literature and started teaching and writing on this subject.
In 1958, he put together a poetry anthology of the Black diaspora, Black Poetry (1958). In this paper, I look at three layers of secrets.
One is the story of Abraham Chapman (or rather, Abé Čapek, as his Czech name had it). The other is the poem "The Rosenbergs" by W.E.B.
Du Bois, published in Chapman's anthology in a Czech translation. This poem serves as a reminder of forgotten modernist radicalism (brought to attention by US critics such as Cary Nelson or Alan Filreis).
Moreover, one of the most famous Cold War spy cases, the Rosenbergs case, forms an important context and an interesting parallel to Chapman's journey. Finally, the third layer is formed by the archives and their (in)ability to keep a secret.
The attention to archives and the way they tell history has been in the center of critical attention for several decades now: in Chapman's case, it is mainly their silence which reveals important gaps and limitations of the transnational Cold War research. By looking at Abraham Chapman through official histories, literary analysis, and also the reflection on the process of uncovering similar Cold War stories, this paper seeks to position secrets as a key part of Cold War cultural exchanges (and arguably, as a part of cultural transfers in general), inherently linked to other issues such as silence and the cultural memory.