Underground Odyssey

When she was arrested, the newspapers blossomed with tales of "the girl next door" who went wrong. Like many a militant leftist who turned to antiwar violence in the faraway '60s, Jane Alpert was a model student, a troubled ro, mantic and a political naif.

Teachers called her brilliant, apolitical and given to sweeping enthusiasms. After graduating from Swarthmore with honors in 1967, she did graduate work in Greek at Columbia, quitting abruptly after the student uprising there because of "a complex of personal frustrations." She worked at Rat, an underground paper in Manhattan, and became at 21 the lover of Sam Melville, a radical leader eleven years her senior. After setting off bombs at eight Manhattan buildings in protest against the war, Melville was caught on Nov. 12, 1969, planting dynamite at an armory.

Alpert and Melville pleaded guilty to a bombing-conspiracy charge. He was sent to Attica, where he was killed in the 1971 uprising. She jumped bail, expecting to join a guerrilla band, lead an "intense, life-risking" existence, and then die in the struggle in six months, about the time the revolution would come to America. Instead, she lived a humdrum 4 1/2 years under six false names, wandered aimlessly across the country six times and spent lonely days at menial jobs. Weary of flight, she surrendered, and last week in Manhattan, Alpert, now 27, was sentenced by a federal judge to 27 months in jail.

Straight Woman. Life on the lam was disillusioning right from the start. As she skipped out of New York by train for Washington, D.C., disguised as a middle-class grownup with bleached hair, dress and high heels, Alpert felt that blue-jeaned protesters at the station were sneering at her as a typical "straight" woman. Worse still, the radical Weatherman, who she says encouraged her to jump bail and promised protection, turned out to be fair-weather friends: they kept scheduling meetings that never happened. The people who helped her most were not radicals but kindly middleaged, middle-class couples who asked no questions.

She flew to California, rented a room and joined a group of hippies traveling through the Southwest, discovering along the way "the bedrock conservatism" of the American people. "As I traveled, I slowly became aware that nothing was less relevant to the lives of most people in this country than the white left." Afraid to apply for well-paying jobs for fear her false references would be checked, Alpert worked as a waitress, a medical assistant and a secretary at the magazine Psychology Today in Del Mar, Calif. Like fugitives everywhere, she developed a near paranoia and learned to mistrust almost everyone. She was heartsick for Melville, swept by fantasies of breaking him out of the prison and puzzled by the tardiness of the revolution she expected to erupt in America. By phone, she stayed in close contact with her parents--a Queens businessman and his wife, a teacher--but turned down their tearful pleas to surrender.

She toured the Midwest and the West, settling twice in San Diego. There a women's consciousness-raising group at a Y.M.C.A helped channel her interests from a dying political revolution to a rising feminist one. By accident, she says, she ran into Mark Rudd, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia, somewhere in the Southwest and was repelled by his "sexist" attitudes.

In the fall of 1971, when word came that Attica prisoners had revolted and were holding hostages, Alpert says she knew instantly that Melville would be killed. As she tells it, confirmation came from a Los Angeles radio announcer who said, "Here's one death no one will regret--Samuel Melville, the mad bomber." In her grief, she blurted out to a friend that she had known one of the Attica victims. When the friend innocently passed the word around, Alpert took to the road once again.

Melville's death brought Alpert high celebrity in radical circles as a sort of gold star widow of the left. For an Introduction to a book of his prison letters, she wrote a warm memoir of Melville that in passing chided him for his attitudes toward women. But as the radical movement disintegrated and feminism rose, her views about her dead lover hardened. He became a violent sexist who had manipulated her love in large and small ways, including once writing "wash me" on a refrigerator to remind her of her domestic duties. In 1973 she wrote a long rambling feminist manifesto and sent it to Ms. magazine along with a set of her fingerprints to prove its authenticity. It included gratuitous details about the sexual problems of Melville and Rudd and said of the Attica dead, including her former lover: "I will mourn the loss of 42 male supremacists no longer." The article evoked the heaviest reader response in the magazine's history.

A Minor Figure. The last two years of her odyssey brought Alpert some stability and peace. Tired of hearing anti-Semitic remarks while using such false names as Blake and Davis, she listed her name as "Carla Weinstein" with a Denver employment agency, and was referred to an Orthodox Jewish girls' school run by two rabbis. There she did office work, counseled the girls and found the rabbis intelligent and kind.

But "the strain of living a lie, of being unable to form close friendships, of knowing that you might have to pack up at a moment's notice" finally became unbearable, and she gave herself up.*

Alpert says she is through with leftist politics, because the ideas of the left are "not particularly relevant to what's going on today" and are "basically destructive to women." Though she is a minor figure in the rise and fall of the New Left, her career is a paradigm of the retreat from politics to more personal concerns. Young white activists of the '60s were chiefly concerned about injustices done to others. For Alpert, selflessness must go. As a radical feminist of the '70s, she seeks "an identity not with other people's oppression, but with my own, first and foremost."

* Patricia Swinton, indicted with Alpert, is still a fugitive, as are Weatherpeople Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin.

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