Although the impact of antisemitism on the negotiation of Communist-Jewish identity plays an important role in Stefan Heym's life and work, scholars have paid it surprisingly little attention. In Marxist fashion, Heym himself tended to view antisemitism as a “secondary,” class-related phenomenon: the ruling classes utilize Jews as scapegoats to divert the attention of the masses from their true oppressors. Like racism or misogyny, antisemitism (along with societally constructed forms of Jewish “difference”) should disappear in the classless society. As Heym acknowledged in a speech delivered in 1982, “I admit it was one of my great hopes that with the arrival of socialism, antisemitism would disappear and the new, classless society would do away with any kind of discrimination whatsoever; no longer would one differentiate between Jew and non-Jew… .” In other words, Red assimilation would eliminate not only antisemitism but Jews as well. Much of Heym's writing adheres to this framework, as I outline in the following chapter. But some of the more explosive moments in his oeuvre occur when other, competing claims emerge, challenging and disrupting the neatly comforting pattern Heym struggles to establish.

Stefan Heym was born as Helmut Flieg in Chemnitz, Germany in 1913. Doubly endangered as a leftist and a Jew, Flieg fled Germany in 1933 for Czechoslovakia, where he assumed the pen name Stefan Heym. He was fortunate to receive a scholarship from a Jewish organization to emigrate to the United States and attend the University of Chicago, where he obtained a master's degree with a thesis on the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine. Unbeknown to Heym, he had left his Czech lover pregnant; the child would be murdered at Auschwitz. In the United States, Heym made increasingly urgent efforts to help his family leave Germany. He ultimately was able to obtain visas for his brother and his mother. His father, whom the Nazis had briefly taken hostage as they searched for Heym, committed suicide while Heym was in the United States.