I think my father had complicated feelings about the way things eventually turned out, including the fact that he had children who did not sound like him. Certainly, he never stopped being angry about what had happened to him and to others. But he also knew that the life he ended up leading was a rather wonderful one, arguably much richer and more interesting personally and creatively than the one he would have led if he had not become a victim of the blacklist.  

He felt strangely comfortable in England from the very start. Like so many Hollywood writers of his generation, he was steeped in English literature and history. He told me that when he saw the Houses of Parliament for the first time — and every time afterwards — his heart beat wildly. The London of 1952, despite bomb damage and post-war austerity, was recognisably the London of Joseph Conrad and the Victorian novelists. It was still the capital of an empire, the centre of a coherent culture that foreigners admired for its grace under pressure.  

Unlike his children, who grew up on both sides of the Atlantic, he was firm in his sense of nationality. This seems all the more surprising given that he was a second-generation American who grew up speaking Russian and Yiddish at home to his immigrant parents. My father and the children he grew up with — whether they were East European Jews or the Poles, Irish and Italians who lived in adjacent neighbourhoods — burned to be real Americans.  

My father's sense of his Americanness remained unshaken even when his government did something worse than the blacklist. In 1953, the State Department revoked his passport privileges and ordered him to surrender it to the US Embassy. This was intended to force him back to the US, where he would not be able to work at his profession. Without a valid passport he would not be able to renew his visa and stay in the UK.

To his amazement, when he went to the alien registration division of the Home Office, and explained his predicament to a man who looked like George Smiley in the le Carré novels, the civil servant kindly told him that the Home Office would consider his case and in the meantime renewed his visa for another three months. For the next three years (until my father won a lawsuit against the State Department and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for the return of his passport privileges), the Home Office continued to extend his visa, even though technically he no longer possessed a valid American passport. This was all the more remarkable given that a Conservative government was in office and that Britain was America's closest ally in the cold war.