[From October 31 through November 13, 1949, The New York Post ran a twelve part series entitled "Girl Communist, An Intimate Story of Eight years in the Party" in which Oliver Pilat interviewed Joy Davidman.  Because American Communists were subject to legal sanctions, Pilat thinks that this legal issue "has obscured the real questions facing a democracy," and his interview is an attempt to balance the picture as Davidman discusses her reasons for joining and later leaving the Party as well as the Party's daily operations.   In the following excerpt, Davidman provides a caveat for War Poems of the United Nations by explaining why she ghost wrote some of the poems.  The excerpt combines Pilat's summaries and Davidman's direct quotations.]

Some ethical problems were involved in producing an "Anthology of War Poems of the United Nations."  This opus was almost the final act of the League of American Writers, which died in 1942 of an ideologically broken back through shifting too abruptly from an earlier anti-war position.

 A committee of poets was named to help Joy Davidman, but the committee promptly evaporated, leaving her alone to meet the terms of a formidable Dial Press contract.

 What help she had came largely in the form of letters from women's poetry clubs reading like this: "There are 11 of us.  We are each sending you a copy of a poem for your book."  Invariably the poems were unreadable.

For four months, Joy Davidman collected, selected, translated and edited poems from all over the world.  Refugees did some translating, but she had to do much of it herself.  Unable to locate any decent English war poetry, she was obliged to invent two English poets.

One of the imaginary bards had the mouth-filling name of Megan Coombs-Dawson.  The other was Hayden Weir.  As an authentic touch, Weir was reported to have died heroically in battle.

Joy Davidman asked the Soviet Writers Union for war poems, but its selections did not arrive until a year after the book went to press in 1944, so she was forced to supplement inadequate offerings from the Russian American Institute.

"After the book appeared, I saw a clipping from Russia complaining about my translation of a line by Pasternak," she recalls.  "The funny thing was that I had practically made up that whole poem except for the one line by Pasternak which had been in the middle of his poem and which I put at the end of mine. (sic)

"If anybody says this was dishonest, remember I was translating 20 poems a day at the time.  Where I could find anything decent to translate, I did translate accurately."

She smiles.  "In any event, it can now be told: anything resembling poetry in the Soviet section of that book owes a great deal to Joy Davidman.  I also did a lot for the Poles . . ." (sic)