Thursday, February 17, 2005

 
"To the wall!" -Whittaker Chambers, Greenwich Village, Juliette Poyntz...

Emily Katrencik, like the Greenpeace thugs, should be careful about "biting off" more than she could(or should)chew, lest the "revolution" again eat its own...

From "Perjury - The Hiss-Chambers Case" by Allen Weinstein, pages 310-311:
"The disappearance of Juliette Stuart Poyntz remains to this day an unsolved mystery in the files of the FBI and the New York City police. She had been a leading Communist...had been recruited for espionage work by the GPU...By 1936 she had become thoroughly and openly critical of the Soviet Union....Reports circulated among her non-Stalinist radical friends that she was writing her memoirs...On June 5, 1937, Juliette Poyntz left her room at the Women's Association Clubhouse in Manhattan. She was never seen again....During the 1940s, after he began working for Time, Chambers told others on the magazine that Poyntz had been killed and buried behind a brick wall in a Greenwich Village house."

Chambers may have misinformed, of course, for we haven't seen anything of Poyntz that might inspire a "C.S.I. New York" episode or exceed the ratings of a reality-based apartment/home makeover show. Still, given the prevalence of rent control, the tenants may have been few in number and carefully screened.
-'spose this has gone from present-day ridiculousness to stuff that's old and somewhat weird, but one might still like to see the Poyntz case somehow reopened, given that her disappearance predated the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner by only some seven years.