Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Molly Crabapple

Co-Author of Brothers of the Gun Molly Crabapple

Introduction

During his elder years, my great-grandfather, the post-Impressionist artist Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called “memory paintings,” one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she'd hurled a rock through one now-shattered cottage window. On the painting's margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.

“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.

I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great-aunt's sunbaked living room or my mother's apartment; I don't recall exactly. What sticks with me is the old-world awkwardness of the heroine's name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?

This question became a thread that led me to the Bund, a revolutionary society of which my great-grandfather had been a member, whose story was interwoven with the agonies and triumphs of Jews in eastern Europe, and whose name has all but been erased. But this thread did not merely draw me back into the vanished past. It became a guide for our moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.

Founded in 1897 in the city of Vilna in the Russian Empire, and reaching its height in interwar Poland, the Bund was a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish. Bundists fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions out of little more than love and grit. Seeking to liberate Jews from the poverty and violence of interwar Poland, they raised their children on the radical ee-thoss of working-class solidarity and subaltern pride. Ultimately, these youth helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Though the Bund was largely obliterated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the group's opposition to Zionism better explains its absence from current consciousness. Though the Bund celebrated eastern European Jews as a people, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists created the doctrine of do'ikayt, or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood. They would fight for a better and more beautiful world, even alongside people they had been raised to see as enemies.

The Bund's philosophy spoke to my sense of Jewishness in a way neither the synagogue nor Israel ever had. Maybe this had to do with my upbringing. My Jewish mother, a gifted illustrator, taught me to paint when I was four. My Puerto Rican father, a professor of political economy, introduced me to Marxism when I was six. I grew into an incorrigible artist with a commitment to leftist politics. In 2011, when the anticapitalist Occupy Wall Street protests broke out near my Manhattan apartment, I hurried downstairs to draw them. This would be my gateway to journalism. For the next decade, I traveled around the world covering demonstrations, war zones, and refugee camps. I watched the Arab Spring, and other idealistic mass movements like it, buckle under state violence, and I saw how the mass arrival of refugees was seized by the international far right to catapult itself to power.

All of this drew me toward the party that my great-grandfather referenced in that evocative watercolor. In my free time, I began to read about the Bund. Despite vast differences in the worlds that we inhabited, Bundists seemed to me like kin. Like them, I knew the floor of a police cell, the boredom of a leftist meeting, the electric charge of passing a pamphlet to a stranger, the high of believing, rightly or wrongly, that you are about to change the world. In 2018, I wrote an article about the Bund for The New York Review of Books. It remains the most popular piece I have ever done. Afterward, hundreds of young Jews sent me messages to say the essay healed a wound within them. They had never known their ancestors had fought back. I also received notes from the elderly descendants of Bundist leaders, each bearing anecdotes more precious than rubies. These convinced me that Bund's story was too big for a single article. I needed to write a book.

For the next six years, I lost myself in research. In order to read the words of Bundist activists, I studied Yiddish, the once nearly extinct language of the eastern European Jewish working class that the Bund had championed, even though its Germanic syntax tortured me and its vagabond vocabulary, garbed in Hebrew letters, laid constant traps for my tongue. This allowed me to dive into dusty archives, decipher forgotten pamphlets, and commune, unmediated, with the Bund's rebel dead. But I didn't content myself with text. Revolutionary life is far richer than the words in a propaganda pamphlet. To discover the sensual reality of the Bund's world, I traveled to the former Pale of Settlement. I laid daffodils on the graves of ghetto fighters and took night trains through a Ukraine battered by the Russian invasion. In a Los Angeles parking lot, I listened to an octogenarian Yiddish scholar sing me partisan hymns, and I translated Bundist literature while stuck at Israeli army checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.

As the poet Irena Klepfisz wrote, “History stops for no one,” least of all a writer. Over the course of my making this book, millions died in a global pandemic. Far-right parties rose in Europe. Israel embarked upon a genocide in Gaza. The weakness and hypocrisies of the Democratic Party paved the way for the sadistic revanchism of a second Trump term. Horrors multiply. In the America of today, just as in the Bund's interwar Poland, state security men lock immigrants in concentration camps and kidnap dissidents for the crime of speech. As I wrote this book in the New York Public Library, chants for Palestine resounded outside the windows. Often, I went down to join the protesters.

The more I dug into the Bundist past, the more I realized it was not past at all. It was, rather, a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present. Despite war, state collapse, and genocidal repression, the Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions at the ballot box. The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today. The Bund was a Jewish group, but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity. In the story of the Bund—across decades and geographies, ages and faiths—I found the story of our own time, a blueprint for survival, a cautionary tale of death, and a philosophy that might yet save us.

Part One

Underground

1772 to 1905

Chapter 1 Origins

(1772 to 1897)

E very family has its legends.

My mother brought me up on stories of her family's nonconformity. We came from a line of grand and impecunious artists. There was Cousin Jack Lush, a militant vegetarian long before it was en vogue. Cousin Jack walked across America to prove the health benefits of his diet. When he finally reached the East Coast, some mayor came out to present him with the key to his city, but Jack could not stop walking and passed him by. Eventually he walked off the entire continent, into the Caribbean, where he retired as the battery king of Trinidad. Or so my mother said. His sister, the dark beauty Vivian, was a sculptress, the sole protégée of Attilio Piccirilli, the Bronx's "master of stone," and carved her own sister, naked, for the doors of Rockefeller Center. Another relative, back in the 1930s, dreamed of buying a van and driving it down South to sell Theosophical pamphlets, and thus deliver a message of peace to Alabama in his thick Jewish accent. This cousin wrote to my great-grandfather Sam to raise funds but was not, I presume, successful. His was only one of the fascinating letters addressed to Sam. There are piles of these, crammed with spiraling Yiddish script—reminiscences of Paris, notes from famous writers, Rosh Hashanah cards with art nouveau type pressed into the luxuriant cardstock—that my mother kept in shoeboxes in her closet.

If Jack and Vivian were stars in my mother's recounting of family lore, my great-grandfather Sam Rothbort was the moon and sun combined. He was an artist whose thousands of sculptures filled the storage room for which my mother begrudgingly paid. He was the humanist who thought all men were brothers, and the prankster who could eat fire and hang by his feet from a chin-up bar well into his eighties. He was an autodidact whose daughter, my glamorous grandmother Ruth, stewed in resentment because he would not send her to college, and he was a monomaniac who took back his paintings from the Brooklyn Museum in a fit of pique, only to spread them out on the lawn of his humble house in Sheepshead Bay, dubbed “the Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art,” in an effort to impress his genius directly upon the masses. He was a Great Man, in his mind and our minds, unrecognized by this selfish city. He was New York. He was ours.

My mother grew up close to her grandfather. When she was sick, Sam spooned honey in her mouth and called it medicine. He taught her to paint, just as she taught me. Falling asleep each night surrounded by his art, I tried to absorb his gift by proxy. I would stare at the wood frames he carved himself, each Yiddish letter gouged with a chisel, and imagine that someday I would paint something good enough to hang inside them. I read Sam's self-published book of essays, Out of Wood and Stone, and I listened eagerly to my mother's stories. I never met Sam Rothbort, but I might as well have. I knew him. He spoke to me through countless mediums, his smile wry, his black eyes mischievous. He had made himself an artist. This meant I could do the same.

In the myriad photos Sam Rothbort left, he appears in many guises. In one, taken during his twenties, when he had just arrived in America, he stands awkwardly, his head pinched by a derby a size too small. In another, he balances on a scaffold and applies swirls of plaster to a ceiling. There he is in his Brooklyn garden, and in the pages of a long-out-of-print New York art magazine. These photos, as much as his paintings, fleshed out his image as Artist Progenitor, who brought the family line to the New World in 1904 and remained alive long enough to see my parents wed. Occasionally, my mother would find a photo of the family that he had left behind in Volkovysk, his hometown in the old country. Was it Russia or Poland? Our notions were vague. I could divine no resemblance between the family members in the photos and my jovial great-grandpa. His relatives were skinny, religious Jews, men in black coats and women with wigs, like the Williamsburg Hasidim.

They didn't smile, because life was hard in the Old World. Their pinched mouths seemed to whisper a warning.

You might have made it in America, kid. But it's different back in Europe. Poverty. Shacks. Cholera. In the end we all were gassed.

No need to look back.

The Past

As a kid, I never felt at home in the present. I loathed school, loathed my peers, loathed my own awkward inability to speak. I imagined that I would have done splendidly elsewhere, in a bohemia from long ago and far away. My great-grandfather was one thread to this imagined future—past. The biography section of my local library provided others. I took out fat volumes on Lola Montez and Oscar Wilde and tried to scary my own future in their stories. I bought armfuls of thrift store paperbacks for similar reasons. The past soaked my art. I copied Goya and memorized the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. After I left home at seventeen, I tried to live like I was some mashup of Anaïs Nin and Toulouse-Lautrec, often to comic effect. I posed for art classes for cash. I hid myself in the corners of burlesque clubs, where I drew fan dancers and fire-eaters who were themselves trying to resurrect a half-fictitious Paris. After I moved into a squalid little tenement in Williamsburg, I hung Sam's paintings on my walls. But my fascination with my great-grandfather didn't extend to the place he came from. I imagined myself in lavish capital cities—Paris, Mexico City, Saint Petersburg, built by people who were not his people—and never in the Volkovysk of his birth. A darker history loomed in the background of the family photos he brought from Russia, one that I declined to research further. I papered over the ignorance with stereotype. I didn't look back.

Only later did I ask myself about the history that had shaped Sam Rothbort. I was a journalist by then. I had traveled to war zones and interviewed refugees in camps that disgraced the European continent. I had sat on a balcony in Gaza and listened to Israeli bombs fall in the distance until, at last, the muezzin called in the dawn. Used to asking questions about others, I now began to wonder about my own family's past. Sam's unconventionality had paved the way for mine, but why was he himself so different from how the world intended him to be? Why was he, the son of a Talmudic scholar, never seen inside a synagogue? Why did he sculpt a communist fist, then add rueful commentary in his notebooks? Why did he denounce war? At a time when intermarriage was taboo, why did he accept my Puerto Rican father? Why did he never mention Israel?

What was the nature of his bond to Volkovysk, his hometown, which he immortalized in six hundred loving watercolors? How did he create himself in a place as grindingly oppressive as his birthplace? Then my mother gave me one of his notes, found in a shoebox, with these enigmatic words: “I belonged to the underground.” And for the first time, I realized that Sam Rothbort had not just been shaped by the Pale of Settlement. He had tried to shape it in turn.

“Everyone makes mistakes, even God,” says Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster king of Isaac Babel's Odessa Stories. “Was it not a mistake on God's part to settle the Jews in Russia, where they have been tormented as if in hell?” Of course, Jews had settled themselves in those lands long before the Russian Empire claimed them for herself. In the mid-1300s, as the Black Death burned across Western Europe, Jews became scapegoats, booted from one fiefdom to the next, until the Kingdom of Poland saw an opportunity for economic development: in 1343, King Casimir the Great granted Jews legal protections. Nobles invited them to establish towns on the banks of the country's many rivers, to run liquor monopolies, and to collect taxes from peasants. So Sam's ancestors came. Centuries passed, times of strife and times of acceptance, until this world shattered in 1772. That August, Prussian, Russian, and Austrian troops simultaneously invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and sliced it up amongst themselves. Sam's ancestors ended up on the Russian side. The partition brought more than a million Jews under the control of the Russian Empire. Immediately, the Russian nobility fretted about what this would do to their Orthodox Christian kingdom. Worried that these rapacious infidels would prey upon the peasantry, Catherine the Great drew a border around her newly conquered portion of Poland and declared it to be the Pale of Settlement, the place Jews could not leave. Things got worse with each tsar that followed. By the time Catherine's great-grandson, Tsar Nicholas 1, took the throne, whole bodies of law had been written to restrict the empire's Jewish subjects. Tsar Nicholas 1 wrote his policies with the declared aim of forcing a third of Jews to die, a third to emigrate, and a third to convert to Christianity. Most Jews were already banned from the great cities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but he expelled them from the countryside, barred them from all manner of professions, and harshly restricted their admission to universities. Jewish boys became eligible for military conscription at age twelve, with the term lasting twenty-five years. Bigotry was constant and mob attacks a regular occurrence.

Life in these Jewish communities was confined as much from within as from without. We are the people of the book—or books, rather: a library of legal texts that stretch back to Babylonian exile and cover everything from the rules around menstruation to the permissibility of tying different types of knots on days of rest. Time was religious time, set in an eternal cycle of holidays, the mikvah, and sabbath. Life was hierarchical, with the rabbi at the top. Daily affairs were dictated by a kehillah, a council of pious notables who dealt with tsarist officials through bribes and supplication. Sometimes, they did the government's dirty work. It was the kehillah who provided the quota of Jewish kids for military service, and it was the kehillah who hired kidnappers to snatch poor children for the army and thus keep the rich kids safe at home.

In the late 1700s, a group of young Jewish men rose up against this thicket of legal constraint and communal obligation. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Jewish Enlightenment—the Haskalah—swept through central and eastern Europe, a century after the Christian Enlightenment had so inadequately sundered Church and State. A maskil—or follower of the Haskalah—sneered at the bearded shtetl traditionalists. While maskilim approved of modernized religious practice and glorified Hebrew as a “great” language on par with Russian or French, everything else about being Jewish had to go. Ditch your insular ways, the maskil said—your yeshivas, your arranged marriages, your special haircuts, your Yiddish. Prove that you are civilized enough to deserve some civil rights. In Germany, Jews like the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the saloniste Rahel Varnhagen sought to slay Christian prejudice through urbane intellect, social glitter, and commercial triumph. Germany freed Jews of their last legal restrictions in 1871.

Things didn't work that way in the Russian Empire. A backward autocracy that drew its legitimacy from the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, the empire defined Russian identity as Slavic and Orthodox Christian, casting Jews as the eternal racialized others. There was no free press, no parliament, and no legal outlet for dissent. The government put down street demonstrations with elite mounted troops drawn from Ukrainian Cossack communities, and a secret police force called the Okhrana suppressed potential subversion with floggings, public executions, and Siberian exile.

Out of this morass, Tsar Alexander 2 emerged in 1855 as a bearer of modernity. He freed Russia's serfs in 1861 (forcing them to pay back the costs incurred by their emancipation) and eased some of the old antisemitic laws, including the university quotas and the childhood military conscription. Russian maskilim hailed him as their champion.

Propaganda of the Deed

“Be a man in the streets and a Jew at home,” wrote Judah Leib Gordin, a maskil poet in Vilna, in the 1860s. The implication here was of mutual exclusivity. But why were only Christians men? Why must you cut off pieces of yourself in an attempt to squash your soul, like an ugly stepsister's foot, into a glass slipper that was not cast for you? Though I sympathize with the maskilim, I do not wonder why so many young Jews chose to join their Christian peers in other, more militant ideologies.

Take the populist Narodnik movement—romantic socialists who believed Russia would be redeemed by its noble peasantry. In 1874, Jewish and Christian Narodniks abandoned the cities for the countryside, where these mostly middle-class kids imagined they could incite a peasant uprising. The peasants promptly reported them to the police. After this failure, some Narodniks grew more extreme. Were these rebellious youth the first people to refer to themselves, and not merely their enemies, as terrorists? Believing exemplary violence could provoke a mass uprising against the tsar, they swore themselves to the propaganda of the deed.

In the late 1870s, a legion of violent Narodnik-inspired groups emerged in the Russian Empire. They were comprised of university boys—like Vladimir Lenin's idolized elder brother—and, even more famously, of girls, the nihilist pinups who glared out from illegal political postcards. It is from this group that the bohemian Vera Zasulich emerged. She shot her way into history with a bulldog revolver, even if the bullet she fired merely wounded Saint Petersburg's governor. In 1881, the aristocratic Sophia Perovskaya did Zasulich one better and masterminded the death of Tsar Alexander 2.

On a chilly March afternoon in Saint Petersburg, Perovskaya watched the tsar's imperial cortege turn onto Catherine Canal's embankment, then took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. At this signal, a young man threw a bomb beneath the bulletproof royal carriage. It exploded, killing a Cossack guard. The dazed Alexander emerged from his battered carriage, incredulous at his own survival. Moments later, another young man threw a bomb at the monarch's feet. Shrapnel tore apart both assassin and tsar.

The government sentenced Perovskaya to hang, along with her five accomplices. One of them was Hesya Helfman, a beautiful Jewish seamstress who had fled an arranged marriage for Kyiv's revolutionary underground, then run the safe house where Perovskaya and her co-conspirators plotted the tsar's assassination. Helfman died of blood poisoning in the Peter and Paul Fortress, shortly after giving birth to a little girl.

Alexander 2's son, now crowned Alexander 3, watched blithely as pogroms swept the Pale in the wake of his father's murder, which many blamed on the Jews. The pogroms hit all classes of Jewish society, regardless of dress, piety, or politics. Pogromists beat the clean-shaven elite and the bearded poor alike. The attacks shattered the maskilim's faith in integration. In the aftermath of the 1881 pogroms, an Odesa physician named Leon Pinsker began to advance the new idea that Jews could only be safe in an independent Jewish state. In a few years, this would be known as Zionism.

Tsar Alexander 3 drew several lessons from his father's murder: Crush dissent. Reforms indicate weakness. Never trust the Jews. In 1882, the new tsar brought back the old antisemitic laws that his father had overturned. These May Laws set off the first great Jewish exodus from the empire. Villages emptied out as gangs of young people slung bags over their backs and walked together, borders be damned, all the way to Antwerp, to sleep on the streets and wait for the steamships that would take them anywhere. Johannesburg. Buenos Aires. Orchard Street.

Pavel Axelrod

If desire to escape the Old World's hatred sent Jews across the oceans, Geneva was where revolutionaries—Jewish and not—gathered to keep the Old World close enough to kiss. A rich, modern city in politically neutral Switzerland with thriving universities, a free press, and convenient transport to London, Paris, and Berlin, Geneva was the perfect place for a wanted man—or woman—to raise funds, gather disciples, and prepare herself for a return to the fray. Marxists, nihilists, populists, and anarchists gathered together to dream great dreams of the incipient twentieth century. What cataclysms would shake it? What utopias would they build from the ash? Pavel Axelrod was one such rebel. Jewish by birth, Axelrod rejected any pull of the particular. “How senseless then and indeed how criminal to devote oneself to the Jews, who are only a small part of the vast Russian empire,” he wrote. Back in Russia, he had been a Narodnik sympathizer who ran a safe house, just like Hesya Helfman, but he had fled years before Tsar Alexander's I.I's murder and now ran a successful dairy business in Switzerland that financially supported other revolutionaries. As Axelrod watched the 1881 pogroms back home with horror, one revolutionary proclamation issued by the Narodnik terrorist group People's Will made him pause. “People in the Ukraine suffer most of all from the kikes,” the pamphlet read. “The kike curses the peasant, cheats him, drinks his blood.” Axelrod's Jewishness meant little to him, but now he began to wonder what it meant to everyone else. Some Russian revolutionaries cheered the pogroms as an uprising by the dispossessed. In an essay he wrote in their aftermath, Axelrod described the pain of the Jewish student who realizes that “the majority of this Russian society…considered all Jews—the pious Jewish worker, a petit bourgeois, a moneylender, an assimilated lawyer, a socialist prepared for prison or deportation—as kikes, harmful to Russia, whom Russia should get rid of by any or all means.” This held true even among the “socialist-minded Russian students” who were Axelrod's comrades. Few Russian socialists wanted to hear this critique, and they deemed Axelrod's thoughts too controversial to be published.

This was Axelrod's last foray into what would later be labeled identity politics. He soon put aside the “senseless and criminal” pull of his own ethnicity in favor of the wide world where history could be so thrillingly made. In Geneva, he reconnected with an old comrade from the Narodnik underground, a patrician rabble-rouser named Georgi Plekhanov. Together, they discarded their Narodnik faith in favor of the scientific certainties of Marx and Engels. In 1883, Axelrod, Plekhanov, their fellow revolutionary Leo Deutsch, and the would-be assassin Vera Zasulich founded Emancipation of Labor, the first Russian Marxist group, which, after four decades of improbable events, would lead to the creation of the Soviet Union. Like Marx, and many Marxists, Axelrod made a choice that superficially seemed like an abandonment of his people. The revolution would wipe away race hatred, these rebels believed. All men would live as brothers once they remade the world.

Volkovysk

My great-grandfather Samuel Rothbort was born on November 25, 1882, a year after Tsar Alexander 2's murder. As luck would have it, the pogrom wave that followed never hit his hometown.

Volkovysk is a place that appears only passingly in history books. Smack in the middle of the Grodno Governorate in the Pale of Settlement, Volkovysk was a picturesque stop on the railway line that ran between Bialystok and Slonim. It was ringed by fir forests, bisected by the Nieman River. Outside the town, the sun shone over the chalk quarry, whose white cliffs reflected into a miraculous turquoise lake. The old watermill churned beside the Polish church, and by the river sat two prisons. The Black prison held ordinary criminals, and the White prison was for radicals. Jews made up just under half of the latter's eight thousand residents.

Volkovysk's houses were wooden, decimated by fires with such regularity that townsfolk marked the years by how long it had been since a conflagration; a fire destroyed much of the town when Sam was four. It was a religious place, well stocked with synagogues that, decades later, Sam would paint from memory—the cupolas, the carved white bimah, the frescoes and stained glass, the men beneath their prayer shawls, swaying as one. Such piety only complemented the striving of the town's Jewish bourgeoisie—the balebatim in Yiddish—who founded scores of communal self-help institutions, including an orphanage, a hospital, and an old-age home. When the workers dug the foundation for the railway station, they found a mammoth tusk. The balebatim crowded with delight. The ancient beast must have ridden the ark with Noah, they reckoned. After the waters subsided, the mammoth would have walked all the way from Mount Ararat to their Volkovysk. And why not? It was such a fine place, almost as good as Bialystok, and maybe one day it would grow just as big. The balebatim proudly hung the tusk in the railway office.

One night when I visited my mother's apartment on New York's Upper West Side, she dug through her shoeboxes of family papers until she unearthed a small rectangle of paper that must have come from the dawn of photography. It was a picture of Sam's grandparents. In the photo, the old man, a horse doctor by trade, wore a caftan and yarmulke, and ruefully arched his left eyebrow. The woman rested her hand on his shoulder. She was corseted in dowdy black, with a pious woman's wig to cover her shaved head. Further shoebox investigations turned up photos of Sam's father, Reb Hersch. He wore a skullcap and Ottoman-style waistcoat and held his handsome head proudly, his skin stretched tight over angular bone. A baker's son who had transcended his father's humble profession to become a Talmudic scholar, Reb Hersch left Volkovysk in 1884 and spent most of Sam's childhood in America, a country he detested for its cheerful impiety and lack of kosher food.

We have no photo of Sam's mother, Chaya Ruchl—only images painted from memory by her son. In one watercolor, Chaya Ruchl runs over to the men's section of the synagogue and halts the Sabbath services—a time-honored way for the shtet's powerless to get a hearing for their grievances. What her problem was I don't know, but in her defiant bearing I see a spark that would later manifest in Sam Rothbort, and perhaps, later still, in me. This single insurrection aside, Chaya Ruchl's life followed the standard script. She married at twelve, after which she toiled to run a religious home, raise her children, and earn enough money to support her husband as he analyzed Talmudic minutiae with the men. The last part she accomplished by means of a tiny flour mill, whose products she sold at the market that sprung up in Volkovysk during fair days, when peasants streamed in from surrounding villages. Before heading to the market, Chaya Ruchl prepared her bread. As she kneaded the dough, bits fell beneath the table, which Sam, her toddler son, pilfered. He molded the dough into lions. These would be Sam's first works as an artist.

From deeper inside her shoebox, my mother pulled out her only photo of Sam as a child. He is a sharp-boned waif in a sailor suit next to a fey little sister named Ruchl, who is garbed like a harlequin. His smooth cheeks show that the photo was taken before his bout of smallpox. But this boy seems less real than the child Sam portrayed in his autobiographical watercolors, and it is through these painted memories that I understand his early life. I see him as a baby, rocked by Chaya Ruchl beneath a photograph of his absent father. Or at age five, as he listened to his uncle Simcha the shoemaker weave fantastical tales. I see him during the harsh Volkovysk winters, when he sketched with his fingers on the frosty windowpanes. I see him during green summer days, a little boy who rolled up his pants and waded into the marshes to make flutes from the reeds. He climbed trees to spy on the girls as they swam naked in the river. He ran with a gang of boys as mischievous as he. Once, Sam's grandfather caught him shimmying down a neighbor's cherry tree. His fingers were stained red, his mouth purple. His pockets bulged with pits. "Search me," Sam bluffed. The old man reached for his belt, then shrugged and walked away.

Beyond the Jewish neighborhood lay rye fields, full of “fearful poetry and strange beauty,” Sam later wrote, and beyond that the Christian part of town. “I began to understand that I am a Jewish child, surrounded by strange neighbors, speaking a strange language, with a cold look in their eyes,” Sam wrote in an autobiographical sketch my mother found in a shoebox. When Sam and his friends ventured over to Volkovysk's Christian side, boys their age chased them with dogs. The Jewish boys hurled rocks back. Later, Sam took revenge in his watercolors, caricaturing his Christian neighbors as ruddy blond giants, dressed in riotous magenta skirts and embroidered rubashkas that contrasted with the black capotes of conservative Jewish men. This sartorial flamboyance only highlighted the slack stupidity that Sam gave their faces.

An army garrison was quartered outside Volkovysk. On their days off, the soldiers drank, then staggered into the streets, where they squeezed accordions, bellowed army songs, and merrily smashed the Jewish shops until local heroes like nine-fingered Shmuel Dovid and his sons grabbed iron bars and chased them away. Though the town had been spared during the death-soaked year of 1881, Sam painted another pogrom that took place at some point during his youth. Blond oafs tore apart a feather bed. Beneath the goose feathers lay a battered child.

Sam's childhood freedom ended when his grandparents consigned him to a cheder—a traditional religious school. Sam hated cheder, just as I hated school, for its boredom and constraint. He glared at the walls and plotted his insurrection.

Sam began to draw in class. He had no sketchpad, so he used his prayer books, hidden beneath his desk—the same maneuver I mastered as a recalcitrant student a century later. He drew Reb Herschel, his frumpy wife, and his fellow cheder inmates. He sketched mean and fast. When Reb Herschel found the book, he beat Sam's ass, but Sam kept drawing. Soon, he earned a nickname: Shmuel Chudozhnik—Shmuel the Artist.

一

Sam was nine years old in 1891, when the great famine hit Russia. His watercolors do not show the skeletal peasant families who were forced to remain in their villages by Cossacks, while the tsar stole their grain so that exports could continue apace. Next year came cholera. By the end of 1892, five hundred thousand residents of the Russian Empire were dead. Sam's mother, Chaya Ruchl, was one of them. She must have been younger than I am now. She had married at twelve, to a man who returned home only to fill her with another pregnancy, and she had seen nothing of the world except a few miles of muddy streets. That was all life offered to a woman who knew her place. There she remained, in her place, the section of Volkovysk's Jewish cemetery reserved for cholera victims.

Soon after his mother's death, Sam's grandparents apprenticed him to a cantor. Sam would have joined one of the innumerable troupes of boy singers who trailed their masters around the Pale, trilling folk songs and passing the plate at synagogues after big holiday gigs. Then puberty hit, and his clear voice became a ranine croak. With his showbiz career done, he took on a less glamorous apprenticeship at Bloch's tannery, one of Volkovysk's largest industrial concerns.

“The Russian Jewish proletariat is the pariah among pariahs,” wrote the Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky in 1901. Banned from seeking better prospects in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, Jewish workers were trapped in a spiral of unemployment and poverty. Kept out of the best-paying jobs in heavy industry by racism, by their observance of Sabbath, and by owners' belief in their troublesome natures, most Jewish workers toiled for Jewish artisans nearly as impoverished as themselves, in homes or suffocating sweat-shops too small to fall under the meager rubric of tsarist employment law. They worked at least sixteen hours a day—men, women, and children as young as six—for pay so low they could hardly afford to die. Theirs was an almost entirely Jewish world, held together by pseudofamilial solidarity. Your boss might punch you, but you'd still sit together at synagogue on Friday. And above your boss squatted the tsarist legal code, predicated on your, and his, unworthiness. You were both Jews. That identity mattered more than your status as exploiter or exploited. You lived together under a discriminatory legal regime and the floating morass of racism it enabled.

Russian revolutionaries didn't think about Jewish workers like Sam Rothbort. These workers didn't till the land, like the peasantry that the Narodniks idolized, and were not members of the industrial proletariat in whom Marx's disciples placed their hopes. The Jewish worker made stockings, not railway track. He manufactured brushes, not steel. He could strike, and what would it matter? You can't stop an empire by refusing to tailor a dress. He didn't even have the courtesy to stay in a single class. Instead, ever precarious, he slipped from town to city in search of work, from "boss" to "employee" and back again. Yiddish had a word for these workers: luftmenschen. They owned nothing and belonged nowhere. Rootless, they wandered, as if they themselves were made of air.

The Tannery

Production in the Bloch tannery took place beneath racks of dripping skin. The workday began before dawn, when the skins arrived from the slaughterhouse, and lasted till late at night. The factory had no windows, and the rooms reeked of burned hair, birch oil, dead animal, and piss. Many tanners died by forty—some from “Siberian plague,” the excruciating black sores now known as anthrax poisoning. Bloch's leather had buyers in Europe and even New York City. This earned his workers nearly nothing but made the old proprietor rich enough to spend his days studying Talmudic law.

Sam later wrote that when his voice cracked, it sealed his destiny as a painter. About this I have my doubts. A twenty-hour workday has a way of depleting one's energy, and had things continued as intended, Sam's true talents might never have been expressed. No, something else tipped the scales in favor of my great-grandfather. Call it what you will. God, or chance, or the dialectical forces of history. But it would greet Sam Rothbort in the summer of 1898.

Chapter 2

The Party

(1890 to 1898)

Pati Kremer

the events that would change my great-grandfather's life—and the history of Europe—began 130 miles to the north, in the walled medieval city of Vilna. Vilna was home to 154,000 people—about half of them Jews—and was a center of Talmudic scholarship. Polish, Russian, and Yiddish jostled on hand-lettered storefronts. The city's apartments clustered around private courtyards in which roving theater troupes performed. This was the hometown to which a young Jewish woman named Pati Srednitskaya returned in 1890, to begin her sentence of internal exile under the watchful eyes of the Okhrana—the Russian Empire's secret police.

I picture Pati as she was at twenty-three, when she stepped down from the locomotive into the jewel box of the Vilna train station, the strain of her months' imprisonment in the empire's heartland still visible on her lovely fairy face. Perhaps she wore the black then favored by radicals, or perhaps some corseted confection more befitting of the wealthy merchant's daughter that she was. And who waited for her at the station? Her doting family? Or her lover, whom she had followed to Saint Petersburg—and whose influence her family no doubt blamed for her arrest?

Pati was quite capable of getting into trouble on her own. She had the trait most common in revolutionaries—the inability to take the world before her as a given—combined with a dazzling energy that made her try to fix things, no matter how quixotic her quest. When Pati was fifteen, the lady who sold her parents sauerkraut mentioned she had an illiterate daughter in Novgorod, six hundred miles away. Within a week, our heroine had stowed away on a train, blackboard under her arm, intent on teaching the girl how to read. Pati tracked the girl down to a sweat-shop, but she and her fellow workers cared more about their future marriages than Pati's academic ministrations. Soon their mothers ran Pati out of town. The mission failed, but the missionary impulse remained. A few years later, a musician acquaintance told her parents about an unusual boarder to whom he rented a corner of his attic, a poor, friendless teenager from the shtetl. He never smiled. He spoke with no one except stray cats. He sat in the corner all day with his head buried in a book, and pity the fool who interrupted him. "Pati, you're so happy," the musician wheedled. Couldn't she stop by and cheer his wretched tenant up?

Pati climbed up to the tiny attic on Zavalne Street and squinted in the dim light. The tenant sat reading in the corner. When she entered, he raised his curly black head and regarded her with hostile curiosity. He was the most handsome boy she had ever seen.

"What is your name?" she asked, trying to compose herself.

“Arkady.” He didn't ask her name in return.

She looked at the dingy room and the words poured out of her, stupid and heartfelt. “It's so dark here! Come! Stay with my family! There everything is beautiful!” His glare stopped her.

“Tell me,” asked Arkady Kremer, “have you ever seen how poor children live?” The words hung in the air like a reproach, and suddenly she was ashamed of her nice dress, of her happiness.

“I guess I'll go,” she whispered, turning to hide her tears. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back. “Stay,” Arkady demanded. “I'll talk with you. Maybe then you'll understand.”

How many girls like Pati—pretty, vivacious—have fallen for cold, ironic boys like Arkady Kremer? How many have tried to save those boys through the energetic bounty of their love? You can't rescue the world one man at a time, I told my friends when they fell in love with New York's angry radicals—the mean, Derrida-quoting grad students, the pouty anarchists fresh out of lockup, the supposedly brilliant writers who preferred video games to writing—but they fell hard anyway. It seldom ended well. Trysts at squats left them covered in spider bites. The boys drained their bank accounts for experimental magazines that never materialized, then hopped freight trains down South to disappear into the latest protest encampment. Sometimes, more dangerously, they stayed.

So it was for Pati. Arkady was a provincial tutor's son with a temperament so ascetic that he refused to replace his decaying shoes. "They're full of holes!" Pati pleaded and offered to buy replacements for him. He countered as he always did. "Who am I to act like I'm better than anyone else?" Over the years, she followed Arkady through a series of miserable rooms with pipes that froze, while he scratched out a living tutoring yeshiva boys in math, secretly introducing them to the scandalous secular world. When he left to study engineering in Saint Petersburg, Pati followed, taking up dentistry, one of the few trades that earned a Jew the right to live in the capital. In Petersburg they had everything two radical young lovers might need, including an apartment shared with a friend and Arkady's sister, where they sat all night at the samovar trying to figure out the best ways to remake the world. Once, they tried to educate some sex workers about socialism. Arkady was too awkward to approach the women, but his friend came home with two, who pretended to listen to their lectures, sweet-talked Pati out of money, and disappeared. Their idyll ended when Arkady refused to inform on fellow students to the university administration. Expelled from school and thus deprived of his Saint Petersburg residency permit, he left to study in Riga. With him away, Pati joined an illegal Narodnik reading group. Before long, she was arrested as a terrorist.

The Vilna Group

In Vilna, Pati reunited with Arkady Kremer. Like her, he had a rap sheet. Things had not gone as planned for him in Riga, where he had dabbled in socialist politics, been arrested, and spent six months in jail before being exiled from the city. Together again, the couple ensconced themselves in a garret just big enough to fit their books. After prison, the idealistic all-night discussions they enjoyed in Saint Petersburg must have taken on a sharper edge. Prison taught a person how a stone floor felt against their cheek when they tried to sleep before their next interrogation. Or how much blood could pour from a person's mouth if a guard hit them right. The tsarist empire may have lagged behind the rest of Europe in other areas of industrial production, but it sure knew how to manufacture its own enemies. For little more than joining a discussion group, generations of bookish youth were jailed, tortured, and exiled to Siberia. They came back as enemies of the state.

It didn't take long for Arkady and Pati to find their people: four educated Jewish idealists like themselves who already had their first arrests behind them. They met John Mill and Timofey Kopelzon, two schoolboys who snuck off together to study Marx, then Shmuel Gozhansky, a young teacher who had helped plot a tailors' strike; and then Liuba Levinson joined their reading circle. Liuba's father had forbidden her to study abroad, but she ran off to Geneva anyway. There, she joined the Marxist disciples of Plekhanov and returned home carrying suitcases packed with illicit pamphlets spelling out the workers' revolution to come. Cops grabbed her on the Russian side of the border. (Something terrible had happened to Liuba in prison, but the sources I read didn't go into specifics. It could have been anything, from rape by guards to the torture of solitary confinement. She was never the same afterward.)

Now known as the Vilna Group, this clique accepted Arkady Kremer as their leader. They were all in their early twenties and had wrecked their lives well enough to free themselves from the prospect of a future. Their loyalties lay with each other, their bonds cemented in unheated rooms where they drafted pamphlets while listening for the policeman's knock at the door. In a different country, they might have dissipated their energies on sex or drugs or electoral politics, but in Russia, they threw everything into laying the groundwork for a revolution they doubted they'd ever see. They called themselves "pioneers," and indeed they were—explorers who built outposts in their own hometowns, dedicated to converting their communities to a foreign faith.

Anyone might be a traitor, and a radical's only protection was mastery of the conspiratorial arts. The rules were strict. Choose a pseudonym. Write in code. Don't ask unnecessary questions. Speak in whispers, even in your own home. They used disguise, trickery, and pretexts. Pati opened a dental office that doubled as a conspiratorial center. Revolutionaries came and went with their faces bandaged, as if with toothache, to hide their identities from the police.

At first, the Vilna Group devoted itself to setting up “circles”—free classes where educated revolutionaries taught uneducated workers, intending to transform seamstresses and leatherworkers into a revolutionary vanguard. That vanguard would train their fellow workers, who would then train more workers, until, one far-off day, they would constitute a working class educated enough to topple the tsar and build a socialist utopia.

There were some obvious problems with this plan, not the least of which was language. The Vilna Group might have been Jews, but they were also members of the intellectual middle class. As such, they spoke Russian. Yet in the Pale, three quarters of Jewish workers spoke Yiddish, a language that only Pati and Shmuel Gozhansky could manage. How could the Vilna Group organize the proletariat if the proletariat didn't even understand what they said?

What the Vilna Group didn't count on was the workers' own gluttony for knowledge. Jews fetishized books, but because of the strict quotas that kept them out of university, the best a poor kid could hope for was a few years of rote memorization at cheder. Education (especially in Russian, the language of state power) gave these workers a chance at something more. They were tanners like Sam, factory girls who had abandoned shtetl life for the yoke of the big city sweat-shop, escaped yeshiva students who already doubted God. On a blackboard, Pati would write out the Cyrillic letters. Ahh. Beh. Veh. She pronounced. They imitated.

Once workers had basic Russian, a plethora of topics opened up. Physics, economics. Surplus value. Life in other lands. The teacher offered them Marx like a prize. Nothing felt more modern than Uncle Karl, an insurrectionist with a prophet's beard. To be a Marxist was to become a citizen of the dawning century, at least until the lecture wrapped up. Afterward, the exhausted workers walked back to their tenements, where their religious parents rebuked them for staying out late.

Over time, the Vilna Group's popularity grew. Pati helped workers start their own circles. She ran from a conspiratorial meeting to a rich supporter's house and shamelessly hustled up funds. Our girl could not sit still. She was a tuer, a doer, as practical activists were charmingly called in Yiddish—not a theorist like Liuba Levinson, and not a leader like Arkady. But for all the Vilna Group's success in starting lecture circles, after four years, they had to admit they were no closer to the revolution. The workers who attended their circles hadn't used what they learned to organize their factories. Instead, they put on airs. Peppering their speech with mispronounced Russian phrases, lugging Russian books they could barely read, the Vilna Group's pet workers mocked their shop-floor colleagues as hopelessly unsophisticated hicks. They were meant for better. Some even began to prep for their gymnasium exams. Why shouldn't they go to university like their teachers, Arkady and Pati, and leave the wretched Pale behind?

The Vilna Group had aimed to produce revolutionaries. Mostly, they'd created hipsters.

They'd have to try a different tack.

The People

For decades, Jewish workers in Vilna had been creating their own trouble. The first strikes broke out in 1871 among the teenage girls who rolled cigarettes and sewed socks in the city's factories. By the 1880s, workers across the Pale had built themselves the rudiments of a trade union movement. They created mutual aid funds to sustain their strikes, and organized militias to defend picket lines and punish strikebreakers. These were the workers the Vilna Group needed to reach.

Jewish workers suffered both ethnic bigotry and brute economic exploitation, a dual oppression that the Vilna Group was the first to put into words. Concepts like intersectionality (coined more than a century later by the scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the ways a person's various identities subject them to interlocking systems of oppression) and identity politics (a phrase first used by the Combahee River Collective to name "the most profound and potentially most radical politics" that came when they, Black lesbian socialists, fought for their own liberation) are commonplace in American intellectual circles today, even if they're mostly misunderstood. In the fin-de-siècle Russian Empire, they had not even been dreamed of. That's why an 1894 May Day speech by the Vilna Group's Julius Martov had such a bracing effect. The scion of a wealthy Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Martov was a brilliant, sensitive writer of twenty-three sentenced to serve out a stint of political exile in Vilna. His outsider's perspective gave him an insight that would prove formative for his comrades.

Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, as a race and a class, Martov said. They could not “rely solely on the Russian or Polish proletariat,” who might sell them out for profit or under duress. Instead, they must “fight as an organized Jewish group alongside the other groups for economic, civic and political liberty.” While Martov would renounce his words as he rose through the ranks of international socialism, the idea that one should fight as both a Jew and a worker became the Vilna Group's lodestar.

Tuers like Pati put Martov's ideas into practice, in the language that workers spoke. I see her squint as she translates a Marxist pamphlet into Yiddish. How would she turn this argle-bargle into something the factory girls would understand? She reproduced each pamphlet by hectograph. For hour after hour, she pressed each Yiddish master sheet into the hectograph's gelatin, rubbed it with alcohol to transfer the words onto the gel, then smoothed down the pamphlet paper until her text appeared. She could earn a prison term for each phrase. She put on her worst dress and snuck past the factory gates to slip a pamphlet into a teenager's hand. Later, she met the girls who ran workers' mutual aid funds. Did they look at her with the same curious hostility as Arkady once did, when she first met him in that attic on Zavalne Street? Did they wonder what she could possibly know about their lives? I think about the time I spent canvassing housing projects in New York for socialist political candidates. I knocked on doors whose buzzers read Cabán, the same Puerto Rican last name I was born with, and I tried to overcome all their well-founded skepticism about politicians, and about pale bourgeoise women like me. We all deserve better, I told them, repeating the campaign talking points. We can have better. Together we are strong. I often worried that these were lies, but I reproached myself for my cynicism, because sometimes, intoxicatingly, we would win. Pati must have felt the same.

The Vilna Group's new strategy was simple. Talk plainly. Listen. Make things better in the here and now. Shmuel Gozhansky scored their first victory. When workers complained about long hours, he uncovered a law dating back to Catherine the Great that guaranteed a twelve-hour workday. Through a combination of strikes and legal know-how, the Vilna Group got the law enforced. After that, the workers saw these radicals as more than bizarre rich kids. Suddenly, they were useful.

On Agitation

The Vilna Group's conspiracy spread across the Pale of Settlement. John Mill carried it to Warsaw, Liuba Levinson to Bialystok, others to Minsk and Lodz. In cities across the Pale, they supplied preexisting mutual aid groups with literature and cash. Thousands of workers joined the Vilna Group's unions. Strikes spread. Wages climbed. Hours fell. In 1893, as the movement flourished, Arkady decided to write up the conclusions he drew from its success.

A slim pamphlet in his native Russian, Kremer's On Agitation has received none of the laurels owed to such a foundational text. In English, it exists in a single academic anthology, rather than in the sort of gilt-edged volumes dedicated to the collected works of Kremer's future enemies. Intended as a manual for aspiring revolutionaries, its ideas were soon used, then condemned, by more brilliant and ruthless men. Forgotten or not, On Agitation remains an unpretentious, practical text that promises no utopias. Instead, there are strikes, pickets, petitions, street canvasing—a grind well known to any activist. It is an invitation to work.

Kremer held that illegal educational circles didn't work. You might teach a few dozen workers to speak the jargon of scientific socialism, but this just made them seem like freaks to their follow workers, whom you, the putative revolutionary, needed to organize. Outside your pretentious little circles, workers were already launching strikes for wages, hours, dignity. The revolutionary just had to listen. As he organized with workers around issues they cared about, the revolutionary's insights would “teach workers to stand up for their interests,...raise their courage,...give them confidence in their own strength, [and] make them realize the need to unite." With unions banned, the workers' fight for a raise would bring with it split skulls and prison terms, and so would naturally grow into a struggle for free speech, free association, and other political rights. With each casualty they suffered and each victory they won, the workers would grow more radical, and the revolutionary would egg them on. The capacity for revolt was like a muscle that they'd build through constant use. At last, when no more economic concessions could be wrung from the bosses, the class struggle would transform into a revolution.

On Agitation does not mention Jewish workers. Arkady Kremer wrote for workers. Full stop.

Ulyanov

Words travel. They are tapped in Morse code on the walls of jail cells, concealed in false-bottomed suitcases, wedged beneath a woman's corset. In the spring of 1894, On Agitation began to move. A copy reached Moscow, where it was immediately hectographed and distributed to radicals around the empire. Before Arkady Kremer ever set foot abroad, On Agitation made its way to the Geneva offices of the Emancipation of Labor group, where it was read by Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Leo Deutsch, and Vera Zasulich, the four founders of Russian Marxism, who had spent the last decade in fractious exile. They printed their own edition in 1896.

Arkady's words flew farther. It was in Saint Petersburg that On Agitation found its most influential reader. In 1895, police had allowed Julius Martov, the young writer whose May Day speech did so much to chart the Vilna Group's course, to return to his close-knit family in Saint Petersburg. Unreformed, Martov resolved to bring the skills he'd learned in exile to the capital's industrial districts. He gathered a crew. Some were old comrades from Saint Petersburg, some were newer comrades from Vilna, and some were intellectuals who ran illegal study circles of the sort that Kremer dismissed. Their clunkily named Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was the first Marxist group to form inside Russia proper. Its leaders were Martov and a single-minded, prematurely balding young aristocrat named Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov. With On Agitation as a guide, they set to work.

Vilna was one thing, and Saint Petersburg another. The Okhrana could hardly allow revolutionaries to infiltrate the empire's economic core. In December, they arrested the entire group and exiled Ulyanov and Martov to Siberia.

Six years later, after he was safely settled into London exile, Ulyanov wrote a short book that praised On Agitation for its usefulness to his generation of organizers. Unlike Kremer's words, Ulyanov's are easy to find today. Translated into countless languages, What Is to Be Done has been kept continuously in print for over a century. It's published under Ulyanov's pen name: Lenin.

The Organization

The year 1896 was delicious. Despite the arrests of its leaders, the Saint Petersburg Union of Struggle flourished using the Vilna Group's techniques. Mass strikes spread, and new social democratic groups established themselves from Moscow to Kyiv. That summer, Georgi Plekhanov led a delegation of exiled Russian socialists to the fourth congress of the Second International, held in London—the main gathering for socialist parties from around the world. It was the first time Russian socialists had been represented at the international event. There, Plekhanov praised the Vilna Group's efforts. "These pariahs, destitute even of those pitiable rights which are the heritage of the Christian subjects of the tsar...[are entitled to be] ranked as the avant-garde of the Russian Labor movement," he said. He ended his speech with a stirring call to unite Russia's scattered Marxist groups into a single Russian social democratic party.

Back in Vilna, Plekhanov's call forced Arkady and his comrades to think. Where would the loose network that the Vilna Group had organized fit into a party that spanned the entire Russian Empire? How could they hold their own and represent themselves at the congresses that defined international socialism? They needed to transform themselves into something more formal, not quite a party, perhaps, but an organization—in Yiddish, the word was Bund.

Arkady set the Bund's founding conference for October 5, 1897, on the evening of Yom Kippur. Invitations arrived by various means: encoded in a Warsaw newspaper classified, or delivered by anonymous courier, scrawled in invisible ink. However they came, all carried the same promise. At a safe-house attic in the suburb of Lukiskes, Pati, her now-husband Arkady, and their friends would remake the world.

Then, in late September the police arrested Pati Kremer.

Despite his wife's arrest, Arkady Kremer met with twelve comrades in the safe-house attic. They were five intellectuals and eight workers, all veterans of the Vilna Group. Two were women—a translator named Rosa Greenblat and Maria Zhaludskaia, a brash seamstress who ran the Vilna Group's activities in Warsaw. Like all Marxists, they wanted to overthrow the tsar and bring about socialism. But for Jews like them, the revolution promised something greater: equality. It would not just overturn the laws that restricted their movements and stunted their educations. It would also bring about brotherhood between people formerly divided into oppressed and oppressors. The Bund would fight not just for general Russian political demands but also for the specific interests of Jewish workers, Arkady Kremer said, echoing Martov's 1894 May Day speech. “That is because the Jewish workers suffer not only as workers but also as Jews, and we dare not and cannot remain indifferent at such a time.”

Next March, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party held its first congress in Minsk. The Bund found the safe house, ran the security, and sent three out of the nine attendees. They entered the R.S.D.L.P as “an independent organization for the Jewish proletariat.” If the R.S.D.L.P was meant to represent the entire working class of the vast Russian Empire, the Bund would speak, act, and fight for the Jewish working class of the Pale of Settlement. They joined the party as equals.

Chaim Nemzer

Though the R.S.D.L.P was tiny, the Okhrana moved fast to quash it. Days after the congress, police arrested five hundred members of various Marxist grouplets around the empire.

Three months later, police seized the Bund's printing presses in Minsk and Bobruysk and grabbed at least forty-five members. They found Arkady at his parents' home. As they led him off, his mother ran after them. "Take me," she screamed, but the police threw her to the floor, where she convulsed, in a stroke or heart attack. She would never walk again. By the end of summer, the Okhrana had reduced the R.S.D.L.P to a few tiny Bundist cells. Their new leaders were not bookish class traitors like Pati Kremer but, instead, the workers she had educated, a tough, Yiddish-speaking proletariat.

These workers resurrected the Bund after the empire's assault, increasing its fame through strikes, illicit handbills, and newspapers in Polish, Yiddish, and Russian, with propaganda sandwiched in between stories by popular writers. The party's name spread from gangsters to factory workers to itinerant agitators, like a young tutor named Chaim Nemzer, whom the Bund dispatched from Vilna to Volkovysk in the summer of 1898. In Sam Rothbort's hometown, he found surprisingly fertile ground.

The Strike

Sam was fifteen that summer. He was a skinny kid with big ears and smallpox scars who liked to swim in the Neiman River. He drew charcoal portraits for extra money, but talent didn't save him from Bloch's tannery. After work, he would lie down in a corner of the shirt factory where some apprentices slept. He would hide beneath a sheet and try to ignore the rats as they scampered across his face. In sleep, he honed his talent for escape. He had absconded from Christian peasants, from his teacher, from the cantor, and he could flee again into the many-colored dream.

There are many ways Chaim Nemzer could have met my great-grandfather. Perhaps a co-worker slipped Sam a pamphlet at Bloch's tannery. Or perhaps Nemzer accosted Sam on his way back from work and told him there was no God. It was a technique perfected by John Mill. "If God exists, he should prove it," Mill would announce. "He should kill me on the spot." By remaining impudently alive, the agitator laid the groundwork to shatter other convictions. Regardless of how Sam and Nemzer met, God played his part in bringing Sam to the movement. It was He, after all, who designated a weekly day of rest. Even a lowly apprentice got twenty-five hours off—from Friday's sunset start to Saturday's sunset end—in which to praise the lord and eat his herring, but come Saturday night, it was back to work for him. When Sam saw the sky darken on Saturday, he thought of the dead sinners whose souls Satan released for the span of Sabbath. His respite was also ending. In a few minutes, he would return to the flames. Apprentices loathed those Saturday nights, and that September of 1898, Volkovysk Bundists decided to take advantage of their hate. Just after Rosh Hashanah, whispers began in the workshops. Everyone wanted Saturday off. The bosses wouldn't give it to them. Together, workers could make them listen. Strikes had a standard choreography, wrote the revolutionary Hersh Mendel. Organizers planned in secret. On a predetermined day, at a predetermined shop, one guy gave a signal. In unison, workers stormed into the streets, where a group of supporters was waiting. Together, they marched to other shops, where they called for the workers to join them. Once they had collected a critical mass, they smashed the windows, halted the work, and beat any scabs the boss brought in to replace them. At this point, the boss might hire thugs, and the strike would become a battle. I can picture Sam when he heard the strikers outside Bloch's tannery. He would have smiled as he threw down his scraper, untied his apron, and swaggered out, his boss's curses be damned. These were the Days of Awe, when God inscribes each human's name into the book of life, and the apprentices were determined to write themselves some better entries. They hollered. They threw rocks. They grinned at their own daring.

When the boss brought in strikebreakers, they beat them in the streets.

After Yom Kippur, the bosses agreed to the apprentices' demands. Sam never worked another Saturday night in Volkovysk.

The Dialectic

So it was that my great-grandfather abandoned his place in a secure if circumscribed community and plunged into a modern insurrection. In keeping with the underground's conventions, he took a nom de guerre: Shmuel Chudozhnik. Shmuel the Artist, in Russian. I wonder what this new Chudozhnik had to say to his father, Reb Herschel Rothbort, during the two times the old man returned to Volkovysk before he at last settled in New York and married, abandoning his rebellious son.

Along with Sam's father, God the father slunk away across the ocean. To be a Bundist meant to break with religion. At a Bundist gathering, the pastries might be fried in pig fat, just to prove a point. For the new revolutionary man, the synagogue was only an edifice on which to slap up posters (which they did on Friday nights, knowing the laws of Sabbath forbade the synagogue guardians from removing posters until Saturday at sunset).

For many revolutionaries, History took God's place. According to the Marxist conception of dialectical materialism—an immortal, inescapable, and unfalsifiable science—man shaped history and was shaped by the history he made. History was a train, barreling up and down the rollercoaster track of thesis-antithesis-synthesis until, at last, the train pulled up in front of its final destination, that ill-described heaven known as communism, and the passengers, Sam among them, would step out dizzily into the sun. Until then, the train of history kept moving. Revolutionaries could divine its direction, but only the workers themselves could steer. As for Tsar Nicholas 2, or Bloch who owned the tannery? History was merciless here. It barreled forward. All those who stood against it would die beneath its wheels.

Over a century after that Yom Kippur strike, my mother found a note Sam Rothbort had written to himself.

For a thousand years, the Jewish people lived their own life, which they called Golas—captivity—waiting each day for the messiah to arrive and bring them back to their homeland, the kingdom of Jerusalem. Also to wake up all the dead and bring peace to all nations, and freedom from hate...

That was only until the 1890s. Till the revolution movement spread. The new Messiah arrived—no more Jew, no more Goy and no more God. A world of brothers. “Working men from all the nations, be united” was their slogan. Overnight I threw off humble Judaism and became a world brother.

Along with his belief in God, when Sam Rothbort joined the revolution, he lost, or tried to lose, his feeling of separation from the non-Jewish world. For his whole life up until that point, Sam had mocked and feared Volkovysk's Christians. They were the aliens across the rye fields, the stone throwers, the soldiers, the belligerent, dangerous drunks. Now he would have to accept them as comrades. Of all the breaks with his old life, this perhaps was the hardest.

after the strike, the Volkovysk Bund grew to seventy members. Like Chaim Nemzer, these young people have mostly vanished into time. If they exist at all, it is on the pages of the Volkovysk Memorial Book, an oral history of the town compiled after the Holocaust, but even there they hide behind nicknames, noms de guerre, or spellings transformed by changes of borders and citizenship. Still, I find a few. The smartass shoemaker Meir Zeleviansky. The bricklayer L. Schlossberg. Berl Dzhik, exiled to Siberia and forced to leave his wife behind. There were three girls: Perl, the baker's daughter; the seamstress Beyle Rivkah; and Rosa Einhorn, a dental student. underground offered these girls something finer than an arranged marriage, a flour stall, and a lifetime tending kids. They could stride out into the night, like Itka in Sam's painting, to hurl rocks through windows and release the new world waiting on the other side of the glass.

As new men and new women, the Bundists needed new knowledge to replace the old. They made a library, which offered Yiddish translations of popular novels to newcomers, but socialist texts to people they knew. Out of these books, a community began to emerge, tied together by ideology, yes, but also by the adrenaline of pent-up youth. Before Chaim Nemzer came, their elders had decided everything. They lived in the shadow of the father/the boss/the teacher who beat them, then the cop/the provincial bureaucrat/the tsar above. Now there was no more shame. They were radicals. They were teenagers. They were breaking the law, and crime tasted as sweet as their neighbor's stolen plums. They met in the Zamkov forest, where they raised the red flag beneath the rustling branches and sang their anthem, "The Oath," written by the poet S. An-sky just for them.

Heaven and earth will hear us,

the bright stars will bear witness,

an oath of blood, an oath of tears—

We swear, we swear, we swear!

Sam stretched out on the grass and listened. Sometimes, he kept watch for cops. He knew the forests well enough to paint them forty years later from memory. No police would catch him there.

Some days, the Bundists tossed illegal flyers like confetti. Others, they fought the bosses' thugs. They held demonstrations, these naughty youth dressed in high-necked shirts like the peasants who once beat them. And why not? The peasants were the people, but so were they. The great earth, whose forests and chalk cliffs Sam had wandered as a child, belonged equally to them all.

On Sabbath nights, when parents slept off their meals, these kids had once snuck off to ice-skate. Now they stole out to the houses of their tribes. The Bundists had the seamstress Beyle Rivkah's house, the Zionists another, and the rich gymnasium students a third. They would sing, each in their own language, in Yiddish, Hebrew, or Russian, the songs floating over the streets where the apolitical boys and girls walked hand in hand, their loyalty not to a party but to each other, and snuck down by the river to kiss. All these young people knew they were creating the world anew. When they parted, the samovar cold, the cigarettes smoked down, the rich to their silken beds and Sam to his rat-infested shirt factory, they were equals, just like the poor Arkady and the rich Pati were equals, because the revolution would make everyone equal, and never again would anyone have to bow their head.

Vladimir Medem as a young man Chapter 3

Questions of Identity

(1897 to 1902)

Vladimir Medem

Ladimir Medem was only three years older than Sam and might as well have been his photonegative. Where Sam was a dark little urchin who spoke Yiddish and stank of chemicals, Medem was a rich boy with exquisite Russian, whose class showed in every wave of his flaxen hair. Yet the two were comrades, even if they never met.

Medem's path to the revolution was also distinct. He was born in 1879 in Minsk, where his father, an army doctor who converted to Lutheranism to keep his job, had him baptized to spare him the indignities of anti-Jewish laws. Seeking to conceal the family's ethnicity, his father banned the word “Jew” from being used in the house, lest the servants hear. “My Jewish origin was…a degradation, a sort of secret disease about which no one should know,” Medem wrote. He grew into a pious, literary Christian. One memory troubled his assimilation: his father, lit by his kerosene lamp, reading from a Hebrew bible he had bought during army service in Constantinople. For Medem, this moment symbolized his Jewishness. Seductive letters he could not understand.

Medem entered medical school at the University of Kyiv in 1897, the year the Bund was born. By that time, he'd lost both his parents and his Christian faith. He began to question his identity. Was he a Russian? Or was he something else, that shameful thing his family only admitted in whispers?

The University of Kyiv was the ideal place to find out. The school was a subversive hotbed, where Narodniks and Marxists argued in smoky student apartments and illegal pamphlets slipped from hand to hand. Every so often, at night, mysterious men dropped by to visit Medem's roommate, only to vanish in the morning. One evening, Medem eavesdropped on their conversation. He heard an unfamiliar word: Bund.

Medem's life would soon change. In February 1899, Cossack troops broke up a student street party in Saint Petersburg. The Cossacks' motives were obscure, but the students' bashed skulls and new arrest records delivered a message: the revolutionary organizing happening across the empire was not to be tolerated. Thirty thousand students went on strike in solidarity—those at the University of Kyiv among them. Despite his shyness, Medem's classmates elected him to the strike's central committee. He spent three feverish months dashing off communiqués demanding amnesty for the Saint Petersburg students and his striking classmates until, one June morning, Cossacks arrested them all. A few days later, Medem was exiled back to Minsk and banned from university for life.

Adrift, he haunted the streets of Minsk's Jewish quarter. On Friday nights, he stared longingly at the sabbath candles in his neighbors' windows. In spite of his baptism, he was sure that these were his people. Armed with the Hebrew bible, Das Kapital, and story collections by Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz, Medem threw himself into the city's subversive bohemia. That winter, the Bund got in touch. Medem expected to start at the top. Surely his intellectual mien and unfinished medical degree qualified him for a spot on the Bund's central committee. The Bundists told him to organize Christian railway workers instead. Medem donned a peasant blouse and embarked upon a series of ill-fated rendezvous. The workers didn't live up to his expectations. They were better dressed than he was, and their apartments considerably cleaner. Far from wanting his guidance, they mocked and evaded him. Medem had more success as a writer, and on May Day 1900, a Bundist newspaper published his first article.

From there, things moved fast. He joined the editorial board of the Bund's illegal newspaper, The Minsk Worker. At night, he snuck past Governor's Street, now transformed into a birzhe—a temporary autonomous zone for revolutionaries. It was risky to visit the birzhe, Medem knew. The police had been spying on him since his arrest. Still, he snuck over whenever he could. His comrades might have nicknamed him “the goy,” but Medem knew that he had finally found his place.

I recognize something in Medem's awkward groping for an identity that was only imperfectly his own. It's common among children from plural, blended backgrounds, children of immigrants, and children of mixed marriages like me. I remember my own uneasy longing when I attended a concert at El Maestro, a Puerto Rican boxing gym in the Bronx. An aged performer sang “La Borinqueña,” the island's revolutionary anthem, and everyone raised their fists. Everyone sang along, except me. Back then, my Spanish was as bad as Medem's Yiddish, and I didn't know the lyrics. Was I even Puerto Rican? Was Medem even a Jew? When I got home, I memorized the words, so I could pass this test if it came up later. Medem had more dramatic options. In 1901, police rounded up a passel of Minsk organizers, Medem among them. At the prison, he wrote down his nationality on the intake form. Jew. He didn't hesitate.

Exileland

Switzerland remained the first stop for most revolutionaries fleeing the tsarist empire. In an 1881 letter to freed-rick Engels, the elderly Marx sneered at the luxury exiles had who “in order to carry on propaganda in Russia...came to Geneva!” Twenty years later, these troublemakers had fanned out to capitals across Europe. I call this revolutionary diaspora “Exileland”—a country within a continent, as cramped, cosmopolitan, and histrionic as the place from whence it fled. Exileland was the crucible that forged the revolutionaries who defined the twentieth century, as well as a garden in which thousands of grandiose dilettantes squawked like parrots let out of their cages.

Some of Exileland's residents were hunted men like Medem. Others were merely students kept out of Russian universities by various restrictions, whose hearts and allowances became targets for prophets false or true. All hid contraband, begged for loans, and skipped town often, as the local government's forbearance could vanish overnight. Georgians and Latvians honed their nationalism in Exileland, as did Polish socialist bank robbers.

Exileland was a place for smugglers. Snitches. Scoundrels. Nihilist poets mooching off their mistresses. Pamphleteers who gifted money for printing presses they never bought. Trust fund boys who wanted to blow up an opera. Girls who planned assassinations to reclaim their good names. Lunatics. Sluts. Queens. Con men. Cop killers. Sublime cynics. Disillusioned workers. A duke pretending to be a laborer. A laborer pretending to be a duke. Every Marxist sect found its followers, from tame social democrats to blood-curdling democratic socialists. Or was it the other way around? Every so often an Exileland murder got written up in the local newspaper. The victim might have been a comrade offed by the Okhrana, or just an informant getting his due.

Above all, Exileland's residents believed they would return. No matter how long someone stayed in Exileland, they felt it was temporary. One day, the revolution would kick off, and they'd return to Russia to die on the barricades or be crowned as messiah—and possibly both at once.

Medem arrived in Exileland in 1901. After his arrest in Minsk, he'd skipped bail and navigated a purgatory of safe houses to escape the Russian Empire, making his way to Berne.

Berne was home to hundreds of Russian Jewish students, who scandalized the stodgy Swiss with their zest for living. “No Russians!” read signs at many boarding houses. They gorged themselves on political tracts forbidden in the homeland and held nightly lectures, for which an escaped activist like Medem was eagerly sought.

From Berne, Medem's relatives wanted him to continue on to Belgium to study engineering, and he might have done just that if not for a devastating discovery. His health had been delicate since a teenage bout of typhus, and his escape from Russia left him in such rough shape that a friend insisted he see a doctor. The prognosis was dire. Incurable kidney disease. The doctor doubted Medem would live past thirty. This news clarified his thoughts. If he had only a few years left, he wanted to spend them with the sort of people he loved. He enrolled in the University of Berne to study Spinoza and sunk into the student colony's embrace. He also rejoined the underground, enlisting in the Bund's foreign committee, a support group for the party that published newspapers and raised funds to be sent back to comrades inside the Russian Empire.

Launched in 1898 in Geneva, the foreign committee quickly attracted a following amongst Exileland's idealistic, footloose Jewish students. Within a few years, these converts had spread the Bund's ideology to European capitals, then across the globe, to Los Angeles and Mexico City, Johannesburg and Melbourne. If a city had Jews from the Pale of Settlement, then it would have a support group for the Bund.

The foreign committee's work was half prosaic paper shuffling, half conspiratorial drama. One day, a tuer like Medem might write an article, send a press release, and continue an epistolary argument with a union boss in Antwerp. The next day, he would spend hours wedging subversive handbills between the pages of scientific catalogs. After meticulously gluing the pages shut, he would pack the catalogs into a false-bottomed suitcase and give it to a student returning home to the Russian Empire, where the handbills would be distributed. Medem and his comrades tracked down political detainees, sent them letters, and organized escapes. When, after two years' imprisonment in Moscow, Arkady Kremer fled Russia, the foreign committee eased his way to London. In 1902, they arranged for Pati to join him. When she arrived, she was horrified by the poverty and clutter of Arkady's leaky flat. “What happened to all the money I sent you?” she demanded. “I gave it to the foreign committee,” Arkady drawled, staring at her through glasses held together with tape. “You want to take it back?”

Istanbul

The yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York holds the archives of the Bund's foreign committee. For two years, I stole away there whenever I had a chance. I wore a good dress, did my hair, and, taking nothing but a pencil and notepad, climbed the steps to the archive's inner sanctum, thoughtless of obligation and of time. I told myself I was hunting ghosts. But was that right? The papers that the archivist spread before me felt as alive as any person.

They didn't look like much—just jumbled scraps—but they were survivors of Medem's world. Sometimes, as I touched the pages, I imagined that my fingerprints lined up with his. More than a century ago, Medem had leafed through these archives in search of a certain sentence, just as I leafed through them in search of him. Pamphlets shouted their slogans. Correspondents bantered in Swedish, Russian, Polish, English, German, French. Yiddish letters swirled, then grew jagged like the lines of a heart-rate monitor. Writers filled each postcard to its edges. They sometimes cut out the stamps, to be cleaned with vinegar and reused. These were the papers of skinflints who employed every trick to survive. A Greek postcard from Brooklyn recalled walks in the hills of Thrace. Another passel of letters bearing the Ottoman script of the Socialist Workers' Federation of Salonica discussed how the Sephardi workers there and the Yiddish workers of the Bund might collaborate to stamp out Zionism. I stopped on one card, postmarked from Constantinople. On it, a new arrival from Jaffa provided an update on the local union scene.

I ran my fingers over the stamp.

Here, Medem's world met mine. I had my own stint in Exileland. For years, I commuted to Istanbul to write a book with a journalist from the isis-held fragment of Syria. The worst war in the world was churning just across the border, and the cafés of Istanbul's hipster neighborhood Cihangir were filled with its flotsam—the aid workers, refugees, journalists, lobbyists, and spies—drinking, fighting, and loving beneath the jerry-rigged fairy lights. For many of them, these would be the best years of their lives, built on the hell lived by other people. Ironically, there were few Turks in this story. They were busy dealing with their country's slide into dictatorship. Cihangir was full of foreigners, both the privileged kind and those who adamantly were not.

Sometimes, I hear a bar of Turkish sanat music and nostalgia cuts me deep. I remember the parrot in the lobby of the Grand Hotel de Londres whom I tried to teach to say, “Fuck the police.” I remember the Syrian guys on Istiklal Avenue singing the anthem of their revolution: “Janna Janna.” My country is heaven. They belted each line straight from their chests. The Syrian bookstore in the formerly Greek neighborhood. (It is gone now, and the Syrians, like the Greeks before them, have been partially expelled.) One night, the journalist took me to a Kurdish bar. The floor was soaked with beer, a rainbow Pride flag hung from the ceiling, and someone had scrawled tributes to guerrilla movements all over the walls. The patrons stamped through a joyous halay. I drew them, my hands moving to the singer's voice. We staggered out into the sunrise to see the Bosporus topped with domes.

For two years, this journalist and I wrote about the war together, typing all afternoon, then walking to Cihangir, where we smoked Marlboros, drank bitter coffee, and petted cats.

We ran into people from everywhere in Istanbul. Many of them can no longer return. First, the war against the Kurds reopened, like the stitches of a half-healed wound, and those who covered it were arrested and deported. D., whom I planned to spend Thanksgiving with, was bundled into a car in the middle of the night. E. was grabbed while investigating antiquities and spent a week in solitary. R., possessor of a less lucky passport, spent months inside. Then came the passport bans. The names rumored to be on lists. I missed a date with C. in Istanbul, but she fled to Croatia before we could reschedule. The lira plummeted. The border closed. Editors' interest in the war faded. Everyone wanted out.

With each month, more of our Istanbul vanished. Favorite bars became construction pits. The freelancers were replaced by Saudi hair-transplant tourists, bandages still swaddling their heads.

The roundups of Syrians began, and no one except Syrians complained. Police combed the streets, checking I.D's, beating up guys, boys even, then throwing them on buses back to the war. The secular opposition politicians said this was a rational response. How else could Turks deal with all the Arabic letters on the shop signs? How else could they process this rude resurgence of their Eastern past? The journalist slipped over the border, back home to Raqqa, unsure of what would come.

Some nights I dream of Istanbul. Did people once dream of Casablanca, of Marseilles? For some, these cities were their last ports of call before they flung themselves out to sea, to test their strength and swim for the rock that was a future. For others, for journalists, for me? We were vultures, circling in a photogenic locale that for a few years felt like the center of the earth. As Trump gained and lost and regained power, as isis rose and fell, I thought of the Istanbul I had known. One night, years after the golden days, I sat in a bar in London, drinking with other castoffs from this time. A harsh nostalgia filled the room, and we staggered onto the streets, drunk and angry, because we had lost a city that had never really been ours.

Nation

Medem quickly became a hot ticket on the radical lecture circuit, where the rhetorical skills he'd discovered during the Kyiv student strike now won him the admiration of countless young women. In the overheated back rooms where Medem wowed his acolytes, he liked to dissect Exileland's hottest topics, and at the dawn of the twentieth century, no topic was hotter than the debate between ethnic nationalism and internationalism.

“A people destined to achieve great things for the welfare of humanity must one day or other be constituted a nation,” wrote Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy's prophet of nationalism. For the Italian people to seize to their destiny, they needed an Italian state. Ethnic nationalists of other countries agreed. From Greece to Serbia to Poland, these ideologues flogged the causes of their assorted Peoples, whose folktales, embroidery patterns, and glorious, martyr-strewn histories entitled them to ethnically homogenous countries on their God-designated slices of land. European ethnonationalism had little place for Jews or other diasporic peoples, who were viewed as eternal aliens at best and toxic bacilli at worst. Zionism grew alongside it, as both a reaction and, in the writer Naomi Klein's words, a doppelgänger.

Others objected to all this talk of blood and soil. “The working men have no country,” wrote Karl Marx and freed-rick Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Internationalists to the core, they believed that despite the identities the state foisted upon them, people were people, and workers were, above all, workers. Ethnic divisions amongst them were distractions meant to keep them from toppling their true oppressors. So Marx said, and so Marxists believed.

Arkady Kremer had founded the Bund as an internationalist. For him, a Jewish organization was a defense against the ferocious antisemitism of the Russian Empire, where no matter how secular and assimilated a Jew might be, he still endured legal discrimination and quotidian violence. Kremer believed that Jewish workers needed their own organization because they couldn't trust Christians to fight for their rights, but his attachment to ethnic particularism stopped there. His co-founder John Mill had a different take. Mill came from Warsaw, where he admired the pride Poles felt for their oppressed country, culture, and language. Why did eastern European Jews deserve anything less? Legal equality was essential but insufficient, Mill thought. Instead, he advocated Jewish self-organization for its own sake, and the preservation and promotion of Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Borrowing the concept of national cultural autonomy from the Austrian socialists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, Mill envisioned a Russian socialist movement, and eventually a Russia, where each region's ethnic groups could keep their own languages, customs, and representative bodies while still fighting side-by-side for a better world. By the time Medem arrived in Exileland, most Bundists supported Mill's ideas. One of Mill's most passionate young partisans was Mark Liber. Son of an aspiring Hebrew-language poet from Vilna, Liber was the youngest of five radical siblings. One brother had helped start the Union of Struggle for the Working Class with Lenin. Liber had his scars. Traumatized by his experience as a journalist covering a pogrom's aftermath for a Bundist newspaper, he argued obsessively with the assimilationist old guard that the party needed to fight for Jewish autonomy. Liber and Medem grew close in Exileland, but their attraction was that of opposites. The twenty-three-year-old Raphael Abramovich balanced them out. Witty and affable, Abramovich had a radical pedigree equal to that of Liber. As a schoolboy, he mischievously swiped a classmate's jacket, only to find an illegal Marxist economics pamphlet in the pocket. From then on, he was hooked. At first, he limited his revolutionary activities to participation in university in Riga, then arrest and exile. When Abramovich and Medem first met, Abramovich dressed like a hobo. The soles of his shoes flapped, revealing holey socks. The debonair Medem recoiled. For years afterward, Abramovich teased him for his bourgeois airs.

The trio soon became inseparable. Medem used Abramovich and Liber as sounding boards for his ideas about nationality, but talk of identity hit him on a level deeper than it did them. Both of them grew up Jewish in the Pale. Neither ever had to wonder who he was. It was different for Medem. Like many young people raised between cultures, Medem yearned for a simple sense of self and community that he imagined people with less complicated backgrounds possessed.

Medem's ideas got their first major public hearing in 1903 in Zurich, at the Bund's fifth conference. The exact text of Medem's speech has been lost, but it was broadly similar to an essay titled “Social Democracy and the National Question” that he published some months later. He began with a symbolic act of a parricide. Medem described the assimilated Jew of Western Europe, who, “trembling, humiliated, accustomed to have other people spit in his face,” could only secure civil rights by erasing his difference. “Make yourself like others! Deny your heritage, mock everything of Jewish character, spit three times whenever you hear the dirty [Yiddish] spoken… Because that is the only way you will get an equal fat share like the 'resident' bourgeois…and secure for [yourself] a slice of the Leviathan.” Medem's target is unmistakable, even though he does not say his name: his father, the convert who banned Yiddish from his household and whispered when he said the word Jew. Doctor Medem, who baptized his son in order to give him what in today's America they would call “whiteness.” In two brutal pages, Medem exorcised his father's ghost. He then moved on to more current concerns.

Even as he mocked assimilation, Medem loathed nationalism, which he saw as a scam that elites used to justify new wars, corner new markets, and inscribe new borders in blood. The nationalism of the oppressed was no better. If a persecuted minority managed to obtain a country for itself, it still had to deal with the other people living there. For a new state's newly minted minorities, “the old oppressor is simply replaced by a new one,” Medem wrote, neatly predicting the eastern European border wars of the next forty years.

Class came first for a socialist like Medem. His sympathies lay with Polish factory workers, not Jewish industrial barons. “Solidarity of the entire nation means giving up the class struggle, [and the] spiritual and material enslavement of the proletariat,” he wrote. When, decades later, the Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton said, “We say we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism,” Medem would have cheered. But class war alone would not eliminate the racism Jews faced in the tsarist empire, nor the self-contempt it had bred, which had made assimilation seem like the price of acceptance.

“Oppression is eliminated not only through the destruction of unjust state forms, but also through the creation in their place of certain guarantees,” Medem wrote. In other words, it wasn't enough for the Russian government to take its boot off minorities' throats. Jews and other minorities needed government support to build their own cultural institutions, to study and work in their own languages. Only then could assimilation be a choice.

Medem's text was a sensitive exploration of how to build multiracial democracy, but it was too complicated for his audience. It was too assimilationist for some, too identitarian for others. At the 1903 conference, debate grew so violent that the whole matter was struck from the official record.

Tuer

The Bund was a practical group whose strength lay in its tuers, not its theoreticians.

A hundred and twenty years later, these tuers are not easy for me to study. They didn't write books, and their cares—the smashed skull, the empty strike fund, the stinking vats at Bloch's tannery—are far from the disputes that Medem was having in Switzerland. Rank-and-file activists only occasionally surface in archives. Their names are more likely to appear in a provincial police report than in a newspaper, in a deportation order than on a banquet invite. Their greatest chance for fame comes if they are murdered during a protest. In that case, they might wind up on a commemorative party postcard. But while I can't flesh out these tuers' lives the way I can with Medem, they were his party's blood and bones.

For this reason, one of my prized possessions is a photographic history of the Bund, The Bund in Pictures, published in 1957. Bound in smoke-blue cloth, it resembles a high school yearbook, comprised almost entirely of tuers. I turn to page twenty-one. There he is, in the upper right. Hirsh Lekert, bootmaker, hero, and terrorist.

Lekert made his name in 1902, in Vilna, after Governor Victor von Wahl forbade any May Day celebrations. Polish and Jewish workers marched anyway. Cossacks charged them with whips. Thirty arrests. So far, business as usual. That night, while von Wahl attended the theater, Bundists showered him with flyers. Police arrested these activists too. The next day, von Wahl ordered the detainees to be stripped naked and beaten. Periodically, a doctor checked their pulses. They were not allowed to faint.

Hirsh Lekert was a man of action. Two years before, he had led workers in a mass jailbreak. As punishment, he was jailed and exiled to Ekaterinaslav in Russia's interior, but escaped and arrived back in Vilna just in time for that fateful May Day. When he heard about his comrades' torture, he and five friends decided that something needed to be done.

All good Marxists disapproved of terrorism, so the Bund's central committee forbade their plan. Hirsh Lekert didn't listen. Instead, he bought a pistol. On the night of May 18, von Wahl and his cronies stumbled out of the Lushinka circus. Hirsh Lekert fired twice, but the bullets only grazed von Wahl's leg. Thanks to the intervention of the minister of the interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, a military court hanged Lekert a few weeks later. On the scaffold, he refused the consolation of a rabbi. Lekert must have known that there are many sorts of immortality. Despite the failure of his attack, he lived for decades as an icon. He starred in plays and ballads, and was celebrated in the radical press that he, an illiterate shoemaker, would not have been able to read.

After such an outpouring, how could the Bund reject Lekert? Soon, the central committee issued new pamphlets to praise his action. The failed assassination was not terrorism, after all, but “vengeance for a shameful insult,” and so in line with official party policy. Safely martyred, Lekert joined the Bund's pantheon.

Volkovysk

By 1902, the Bund was the largest revolutionary party in Russia, with thirty thousand members, and Volkovysk hosted an energetic little cell. Volkovysk Bundists robbed the government liquor store to fund their movement. They attacked the wagons that transported political prisoners, threw tobacco in the face of the guards like makeshift pepper spray, and freed their friends. After cops arrested Sam Rothbort's comrade Berl Dzhik, Bundists sawed through the bars of his cell and hid him in Beyle Rivkah's house. When the cops came looking for Berl, Beyle disguised him as an old woman, and he fled into the night.

I try to picture Sam Rothbort as he was then, in the Zamkov forest, sprawled with his friends on a fragrant carpet of pine. Being an artist, he will forgive me if I use imagination to fill the archive's silence. They probably all laughed at Berl Dzhik's escape. Berl in drag? Ridiculous! How did anyone fall for his disguise? Sam would take a pocketknife from his coat. He would find a branch, then begin to carve it. Berl Dzhik, wig, tits, and all, would appear beneath his wiry hands.

Chapter 4

Rivalries of Exile

(1903 to 1904)

Leon Trotsky in his youth

Kishinev

he fifth congress of the Bund, in Zurich, took place in the shadow of a pogrom that had happened a few months earlier in the town of Kishinev. Whipped up by a local newspaper editor, over the course of three days in April 1903, Kishinev Christians raped dozens of Jewish women and murdered forty-five Jews. In and of itself, this was hardly a departure from the past, but unlike other towns where pogroms took place, Kishinev was near Russia's border with the Habsburg Empire. Foreign press flooded in to photograph the rows of shrouded corpses and telegraph rape victims' testimonies across the ocean, and the name Kishinev became an international synonym for the massacre of Jews.

Despite its notoriety, Kishinev was unexceptional in its way, parallel to the contemporaneous terrorism of Southern whites on Black enclaves in America. This comparison is not my own. In 1903, Black activists drew immediate parallels between lynch mobs and Russian pogromists. It was not just the brutality. It was the complicity, even connivance, of the state. While Southern sheriffs used lynch mobs to reinforce hierarchies inherited from slavery, the Russian state permitted pogroms as a safety valve for popular rage. Most Jews blamed the Kishinev pogrom on Vyacheslav von Plehve, Russia's notoriously antisemitic minister of the interior, especially after a letter appeared in The Times of London that purported to show von Plehve ordering the attacks (historians later proved this letter to be a forgery). For Jewish radicals, Kishinev only strengthened their revolutionary beliefs. One doesn't negotiate with a government helmed by murderers. One overthrows it.

Iskra

After Kishinev, Medem toured Exileland to speak about the poisonous ideologies that led to the pogrom. In the German city of Karlsruhe, he had scarcely finished his speech when one of the attendees sprung up to disagree. Medem knew the young man by reputation. He was a devotee of Iskra, the punchy new newspaper Lenin and Martov had founded to advance their Marxist vision. Iskra was already notorious for the rhetorical savagery it used against other socialists, and for its commitment to total centralization.

In his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done, Lenin spelled out his belief that only a ruthlessly centralized party of obedient professional revolutionaries had a chance of seizing power in Russia. Meanwhile, the Bund had developed in the opposite direction, preaching that a decentralized coalition of autonomous groups would do the best job at revolution. In this they were consistent. When the Bund co-founded the R.S.D.L.P in 1898, they were the largest, best- organized socialist group in the Russian Empire. The Bund entered the new party as an autonomous entity whose turf was the Yiddish working class. They meant to keep their turf exclusive.

Lenin saw this as a recipe for failure. The thirty-three-year-old was already revealing personality traits that would shape the coming century. He was a brilliant tactician, a Machiavellian in the service of utopia, who devoted astounding will, focus, and discipline to pursuit of revolutionary ideals. A man of few scruples, he excelled at backroom bureaucratic maneuvers. He flew into debilitating rages. He shouted curses at rivals he wanted to dominate. He was always right—in his own eyes, at least.

Lenin had long yearned to subordinate the Bund, and he saw his chance in early 1902. After police arrested half of the R.S.D.L.P's organizing committee, Lenin decided to shape the new committee to his liking. Mysteriously, the Bund's invitations were never sent. With no Bundist delegates in the room, Lenin stacked the committee with his partisans. Iskra attacked the Bund for their absence.

When Medem finally met Lenin in Berne, he was not impressed. He had imagined Lenin would be a giant, but instead, Iskra's leader resembled a “a crafty Russian grain dealer.... When you speak to him, he looks at you with his small eyes—eyes directed at you obliquely, from something of an angle, and with a cunning devilish smile, as if to say, 'There's not a word of truth in what you're saying!'” Medem later wrote. He pegged Lenin a tyrant in waiting. For the next year, the Bund and Iskra fought in their respective newspapers.

The Bund devoted much of its fifth congress, held in Zurich, to strategizing against the pugnacious Iskrites. They prepared to offer the R.S.D.L.P an ultimatum: they would have to recognize the Bund as the sole representatives of the Jewish proletariat during the upcoming party congress, or else the Bund would walk.

But back to that tiny discussion group in Karlsruhe, where Medem and the young Iskra devotee first came face-to-face. The Iskrite had a corona of black curls and a mordant mouth that reminded Medem of a bird of prey, but Medem's eyes immediately went to his yellow shoes. They seemed too flamboyant for a political refugee.

The young refugees's comment had nothing to do with Medem's lecture. Instead, he berated the Bund for criticizing the R.S.D.L.P over a perceived failure to fight antisemitism. This was just more obsessive fixation on Jewish victimhood, the refugee said. If Russian workers were racist, it was because they were ignorant products of a backward autocracy. Overthrow the tsar and the racism would disappear. The R.S.D.L.P was the only group with a plan to do it.

The young man's birth name was Leon Bronstein, but he went by the nom de guerre of Trotsky.

A few months later Medem again crossed Trotsky's path. This time, he demanded to know if Trotsky considered himself a Jew or a Russian.

“I am a social democrat. That's all,” Trotsky responded, honestly.

The Cage

Even in revolutionary circles, Jews differed over how to protect themselves. Bundists believed that safety came not just from socialist solidarity but from ethnic pride and smuggled handguns. They wrote war ballads in Yiddish and swaggered down the streets of their Jewish neighborhoods, flaunting their Jewish noms de guerre. Other Jewish revolutionaries disagreed. Jewish men and women like Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lasalle, Karl Kautsky, and Rosa Luxembourg make up the honor roll of European socialism. Believers in neither God nor tribe, they denied that there was such a thing as a Jewish people. Lacking their own land or any single language, Jews were not a nation but a caste, created through what the Black Marxist academic Barbara Fields would later call racecraft. Once legal oppression ended and medieval prejudice stopped, Jews would cease to exist as a separate group.

They were able to believe this because, despite stereotypes as to their looks, Jews could at least try to pass as ethnic Russians or Germans or Poles. When the Black poet Amiri Baraka wrote about “the ugly silent deaths of Jews under the surgeon's knife, to awake on Sixty-ninth Street with money and a hip nose," he was talking about a capacity to conceal their difference that Black Americans would never have. Bronstein could change his name to Trotsky. He could convince himself that this would work.

Julius Martov (birthname Tsederbaum) was the best critic of the Bund's identity politics, and that's probably because he helped create them. His 1895 speech "The Turning Point" first clearly articulated their intersectional approach. Eight years later, Martov had rejected its content. He saw no point in creating a movement for a tiny minority, and Jews were only 2 percent of the Russian Empire's population.

“However perfect the organization of that relatively insignificant section which the Jews constitute may be—so long as the organization of the vast majority of the proletariat of heavy industry limps on both legs, the most intensive and dedicated work in its own little corner will not yield even a tenth of that result which it could produce,” Martov wrote.

To overthrow the tsar, they needed Russians.

When the Bund demanded to be considered the sole representatives of the Jewish proletariat, Trotsky and Martov took it as an insult. How could it be otherwise? They aimed for the world. The Bund wanted to shove them back into the Pale of Settlement. If the Bund was a practical impediment for Lenin, for its rival Jewish socialists it was something worse. It was a cage.

The Second Congress

When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party's second congress began in Brussels on July 17, 1903, few realized it would have cataclysmic effects on the Bund's future.

Every day, Vladimir Medem and Mark Liber joined the dozens of delegates gathered in the back room of a wool worker's cooperative, which they soon realized was infested with fleas. That was the least of their problems. Everything had been stacked against them in advance. Plekhanov was chairman, and Lenin vice-chairman. Every important delegate was with Iskra, and Iskra drafted the agenda. Though the Bund was overwhelmingly the largest revolutionary group in the Russian Empire, out of the conference's fifty-one delegates, only five, thanks to Lenin's maneuverings, were Bundists. Standing astride a makeshift dais draped in red cloth, Plekhanov scolded the Bund, whose status was the first item on the agenda. Within days, Trotsky, Martov, and Medem's friend Mark Liber were engaged in open war.

Meetings

Scholars have analyzed the minutes of the second congress at length, but it's hard for me to do justice to the tendentious hellscape of those weeks. I could lay out every motion or objection, but that wouldn't evoke the misery of a leftist meeting, a torment you must live through to grasp. When I read the minutes, I am there. In Brussels, yes. But also in New York, at the monthly meeting for a socialist group held in an airless library basement, where I watch two graduate students wrangle over the creation of bylaws no one bothers to read. It's hour three. The air is hot. "Stack!" Comrade A. screams. His Adam's apple bobs with fury. "Point of order!" hisses Comrade B. I want to squeeze through the walls and escape into the clean sunlight. Time is the only thing we can't replace, and I feel each second slip away. I can't count how many hours I've spent like this, convinced that this was how we build an organization, and from there a future. It's a conviction I still hold. So much of our past has been shaped by this petty proceduralism. You could draw a straight line between an amendment in Brussels and a mass grave in Kazakhstan. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

London

After three itchy days spent arguing at the Belgian wool cooperative, the delegates in their hotel rooms were awakened by knocks. The political police had arrived to question them as foreign subversives.

After some unpleasant nocturnal interrogations, the delegates fled to London, where they booked meeting rooms under the pretense that they were members of a fishing club. The congress mercilessly resumed. Medem immediately loathed the British megapolis. When the steam-powered metro stalled, which it often did, its cars filled with black soot. Above ground, Medem wandered helplessly between identical apartment blocks while street kids, recognizing him as a foreigner, lobbed rotten vegetables at his back.

The congress had dragged on for six weeks when Martov put the Bund out of its misery. He demanded the Bund delete a paragraph of its rules that gave it the right to organize Jewish workers wherever it liked. It was a referendum on the party's autonomy. When the vote came, the Bund lost, 41 to 5.

There was nothing left to say. Liber announced the Bund's withdrawal from the R.S.D.L.P. The stunned delegates marched out, as lost, Medem wrote, as a “piece of flesh” torn from a living body.

Majority

From the Bund's foreign committee headquarters in London, Medem ruefully listened to rumors that the Iskrites had begun to fracture over the question of party membership. Should the R.S.D.L.P be a mass party of workers, as Martov envisioned? Or should it be the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed? "Lenin had bared his teeth," Medem wrote. "A section of his comrades of yesterday had failed to dance to his tune on even the smallest point of statute;—presto!—they had already become personae non grata."

Lenin won, and though he didn't admit it, Medem had played a part in his victory. The Bundists had had five delegates, whose votes they could have used to extract concessions. Instead, when the moment called for ruthlessness, Bundists made speeches, then showily left the room. They kept their principles but frittered away their power. Lenin himself was baffled by the Bund's exit. "They were actually masters of the situation," he later wrote.

With the Bund gone, Lenin had just enough delegates to win. Ever astute on matters of branding, Lenin labeled Martov's crew “Minorityites,” or Mensheviks. He seized the term “Majorityite” for his side. In Russian, the word is Bolshevik.

Basel

On the way home from one interminable political gathering full of enemies, Medem stopped by Basel, Switzerland, to observe another group of antagonists—the Zionists, who were in the midst of their sixth world congress. Political Zionism had made its global debut in 1897, the same year as the Bund, and the two groups had been enemies from the start. They couldn't have been more different. While the Bund's first congress comprised a few fugitives in a Vilna attic, the inaugural Zionist congress filled a posh Swiss casino and turned Theodor Herzel, its founder, into a superstar. A journalist from Vienna, Herzel had once thought Jews could win acceptance through assimilation; he even proposed mass conversion to Christianity. Then he covered the Dreyfus affair. In sophisticated France, Herzel watched the courts condemn a Jewish army lieutenant named Alfred Dreyfus on obviously fake charges of espionage, then sentence him to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Dreyfus was loyal. He had fought for France. He had assimilated. He had done everything right. It didn't matter in the end. After the trial, French crowds beat Jews and burned Jewish shops. The Dreyfus trial convinced Herzel that hatred was baked into the bread of Europe. Jews couldn't fix it. No matter how patriotic they were, Europeans would loathe them, and before long, the old European lust for ethnic slaughter would return. Jews needed a state of their own as a refuge, Herzel thought. At first, he didn't care where it was. More crucially, he didn't care how they got it. Herzl settled on Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. An atheist himself, he was driven not by religious faith but by the force of biblical branding. Neither he nor any other Zionist leader cared about the Palestinian Arabs who made up the vast majority of the land's inhabitants. Initially, Herzel pitched his potential Jewish state as an outpost of European civilization that would somehow benefit Palestinians. (In his private journals, he was franker and wrote that they should be stripped of their land and coerced to leave.)

This attitude was typical. When Zionist leaders bothered to mention Palestinians at all, their approaches ranged from condescension to calls for ethnic cleansing.

The Bund found the entire idea delusional. How would Zionists convince Europe's nine million Jews to move to tiny Palestine? And what would they do with the people living there? The whole project was a fanciful distraction from the real battles that Jewish workers faced in eastern Europe. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who later became the first president of Israel, wrote in 1903 that “our hardest struggle everywhere is conducted against [the Jewish Labor Bund],” while the Bund described Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.” The Bund banned Zionists from membership, and the two groups tussled on the lecture podium and in the streets. Medem himself spent many nights arguing with Zionist orators in various student colonies. He stopped by Basel anyway, driven by curiosity about Herz.

When Medem squeezed himself into the Basel casino, the whole crowd seemed to be suffering from mass hypnosis. The audience moaned and writhed when Herzl appeared onstage, waving their handkerchiefs and unleashing thunderous applause. A tall man with a regal beard, Herzl proudly spoke about his meeting with the notorious Russian minister of the interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, whom Jews held responsible for the Kishinev pogrom. Like Herzl, von Plehve thought that Jews needed to abandon Europe. When Herzl asked von Plehve to pressure the Ottoman sultan to turn over land in Palestine for settlement, the minister had generously agreed. The crowd cheered. Medem was appalled.

Medem's disgust grew when a writer he knew told him the price for von Plehve's acquiescence. Von Plehve promised to support the colonization of Palestine if, in return, Herzł convinced the Jewish Labor Bund to stop its activities against the tsarist state.

The conversation between Herzl and von Plehve illustrates the Bund's problem with Zionism. Zionism was not just impractical, in Bundists' eyes. It was submission to the same bigots who wanted to kick Jews out of their homes. The Bund believed that Jews belonged in eastern Europe. "We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers us as such," one local Bund committee wrote. "The richness of the land is soaked through with our blood.... We demand and fight for that which belongs to us, for human, civil and political rights." To leave meant letting their tormenters win. The Bund coined a word for this stubborn insistence on staying: do'ikayt. Hereness, as opposed to the There of Palestine. Bundists would fight for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived.

Hereness was hard-won in eastern Europe. It had nothing in common with the fuzzy tolerance beloved by liberals. Do'ikayt meant defiance, backed by arms. In 1906, the American Jewish Yearbook published a table of forty-seven pogroms that took place in the year after Kishinev. In three cities, the table notes, “riots were suppressed by Self Defense.”

In The Bund in Pictures, these self-defense groups pose as if for a high school yearbook. The young men crane their skinny necks to show their good sides to the camera. They wear black. They angle their weapons in parallel. They pose in front of a studio backdrop. In a forest. Next to the corpses of their friends. In September 1903, two hundred of these youth beat back a pogrom in Gomel, a mostly Jewish town not far from Kishinev, which was carried out by Christian railway workers who were supposed to be their proletarian brothers. The pogromists only managed to kill seven Jews.

The purpose of these self-defense squads was never merely practical. They were also a way for young Jews to re-create themselves. Gone was the humiliating past, when their fathers bowed their heads before the Russian Bigmen and paid fat bribes to avert calamity—not that it always worked. When a Jewish kid picked up a gun, she cast herself as a subject of history, not its object. She did not need to plead for sufferance from anyone. She was an equal in her own land. “Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre about anticolonial violence in his preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. He could have been speaking about the young fighters of the Bund.

Over the next years, the Bund turned self-defense into a science. During Easter, a group's blond members might attend church services, to see the mood of the parishioners. When funds from abroad didn't suffice, fighters “asked” wealthy Jews for contributions, then bought knives, whips, handguns, and metal bats. They organized neighborhoods to fight back. Chemists made bombs. Girls learned first aid and women boiled water to throw at attackers. Families turned their homes into barracks. Teenage seamstresses lobbed rocks, and big-eared youths, twins of Sam Rothbort, gulped as strangers shoved pistols in their hands.

Volkovysk

My mother always told me Sam Rothbort left Volkovysk because of trouble. She regretted that she had never asked about specifics. When I researched the self-defense groups, I found a likely answer.

In an essay titled “Self-Defense as an Emotional Experience,” the historian Inna Shtakser dove deeply into the testimonials of tsarist-era political prisoners who sought pensions from the new Bolshevik government. I skimmed the endnotes. My eye caught on the name Volkovysk.

The endnote contained the pension application of one Naum L'vovich, member of the Volkovysk self-defense militia. The militia protected the city on market days, when farmers poured in by thousands to sell their crops to Jewish traders and get good and drunk at local taverns afterward. The market was a tinderbox in which hard bargaining turned easily into violence.

In his application, L'ovich described a pogrom in Volkovysk that took place at the end of 1903. L'ovich wrote that he had commanded a unit of ten fighters in the defense of one of Volkovysk's main squares. Two policemen led a crowd hunting for Jewish stalls to plunder. Details about the two men are scarce. One was the chief. The other had a nickname, Chugunchik—Little Cast Iron—that hinted at his disposition. The defenders opened fire. Both cops died on the spot.

After the pogrom, police began to hunt for socialists. Naum L'vovich was soon in jail. A few months later, my great-grandfather Sam smuggled himself out of the empire.

in 2020, my mother found a piece of paper on which Sam Rothbort had written an outline of his life. In it, he said he had been “involved in a shooting” on behalf of the underground in Volkovysk. With these four words he confirmed what I can only assume was his involvement in Officer Chugunchik's death. He never said anything else, but the Bund had only seventy members in Volkovysk, and Sam was one of the most active. Whether or not he pulled the trigger, he would have been a target for retribution.

What had Sam done on the afternoon of the pogrom? Had he held a pistol, or merely a metal bat? What did he think as he watched Chugunchik's blood seep into the market dirt where he had sat as a child? He never said.

During one of her shoebox excavations, my mother found another note. In it, Sam describes himself as a young revolutionary, whose dignity recoiled when he smashed his “goyish brother” with his fists. It is the “Christian world that cuts each other's throats with the blessing of Christ, and blames the Jews for their troubles,” Sam wrote. For two thousand years, Jews had not involved themselves in war. How could they now make bloody revolution? Sam's comrades did. He hints darkly at the price.

In his words I see the seeds of a pacifism—exemplary, inflexible, and self-defeating—that he clung to through the next half century. I read and reread the note, trying to divine the meaning behind his awkward grammar. He had fought, yes, but violence was not his nature. “It had come from their side first.”

Flight

Sam must have spent his last days in Volkovysk in a state somewhere between excitement and fear. There would have been money to be gathered and telegrams to be sent. I don't know how long Sam stuck around after Officer Chugunchik's death, but thanks to one of his watercolors, I have an image of his final moments. In Grandmother's Last Goodbye (to America), an aged woman screams. Her upflung arms mirror the narrow dirt street on which she stands, the narrow houses, the narrow, blighted life that the boy in the foreground is about to put behind him, just as his father had done. Two generations had abandoned her. On a winter day when Sam Rothbort stepped into some train station on the line between Bialystok and Slonim, he was trailed by his grandmother's reproach.

Sam made the three-hundred-mile journey to Germany by train, horse cart, and foot. He had no passport, and often no ticket. In one watercolor, he painted himself hiding from conductors beneath a woman's skirt. As the Polish-German border got closer, he would have encountered other Jews headed for America. By day, they would have crammed together in peasant safe houses, and by night, smugglers would have taken their cash, rounded them up like cattle, brought them to a field, and told them to run, dammit, because the cops were behind them and Germany was on the other side. Liars. How many fields had they crossed, only to find themselves still inside Russia?

At last, Sam made it into Germany. From there he rode the rails 625 miles to the port city of Antwerp. On March 19, he boarded his ship.

Chapter 5

The Golden Land

(1904 to 1905)

new York city

A.M's ship docked on March 30, 1904.

Twenty million immigrants would arrive in the United States before the country's entry into World War 1, the majority of whom passed into New York City through Castle and Ellis islands. They were Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Chinese, Syrians, Greeks. In New York, refugees, fugitives, immigrants, and exiles intermingled, intermarried, and swapped roles. They created new dance forms and new political machines, invented new creole languages of capitalism and corruption. The vast majority of immigrants planned to stay, but a good number longed to return to their homelands once the occupier had been kicked out, the king killed, and a new, more agreeable, ideology adopted.

New York was the world capital of radical diasporas at the turn of the century. A visitor could drop by the headquarters of the Irish nationalist Clanna Gael to help buy guns for the precursor to the I.R.A, then swing downtown to Little Syria, where the nation's first Arabic newspaper, Kawkab Amreeka, excoriated Ottoman oppression of minorities. Armenians and Filipinos, Koreans and Czechs, all used New York to hone their anti-imperialist arguments and build their fundraising networks. Here, the great Cuban poet José Martí drew up plans to rid his island of Spanish domination, and here was his last port of call before he boarded the boat that took him to die in battle in Contramaestre. The Puerto Rican flag first flew in 1895, not in San Juan but at Chimney Corner Hall, on the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, at a meeting of the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico. Two years later, with the committee's assistance, Antonio Mattei Lluberas would purchase thirty thousand machetes and, waving that new flag, set out to lead an uprising in Yabucoa. (Spoiler: he failed.) New York hosted two Italian branches of the Socialist Party, as well as the anarchist Bresci Circle, named for the assassin of King Umberto I. On the Lower East Side, Russian Narodniks shared café tables with German socialists booted by Bismarck, while, a few blocks over in Chinatown, residents refused to acknowledge their membership in the secretive Revive China Society, helped by the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Forget Exileland. New York was Exile Galaxy. It had Geneva's political freedom combined with America's economic might. Here, cash was so plentiful that a few coins could shake loose into the hands of even the poorest immigrant to fund an insurrection somewhere else.

Like most of these immigrants, Sam didn't know it, but when he came to America, he had entered an even more vicious human hierarchy—and radically improved his place. In Russia, Jews had been the prime targets for state persecution. In America, they were merely discriminated against and disdained. Sam would soon learn he had other identities here, and that, like all countries, America was built on someone's blood.

At the turn of the century, New York was home to tens of thousands of African Americans. Most were internal refugees from Southern lynch mobs and Jim Crow-inflicted poverty. The city was less of a refuge than they had hoped. 1900 was the year of the so-called New York City Race Riot, when, for five days, Irish mobs attacked Black neighborhoods, furious because a Black man named Arthur Harris had defended his wife from an undercover cop. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek—no matter who an immigrant was back home, once he got here, he was better off than Black Americans. Sam had left Russia as a hated Yid. At Ellis Island, the immigration officer listed his nationality as “Hebrew.” In 1917, on his naturalization papers, the official merely described him as “white.”

The East Side

At Ellis Island, a bureaucrat filled in Sam Rothbort's details. No money. Leather tanner. Closest relative? His father.

Harris Rotbarth, once Reb Hersch, lived in a tenement on 97 Forsyth Street. It would have been the same sort of place in which I spent my early twenties, a lightless railroad apartment with an air shaft for ventilation, where the sounds of child abuse mingled with the scuttling of rats. At least I had my own room. In Sam's day, the Lower East Side was one of the most densely populated places on earth, where a family of ten might share three hundred square feet in an apartment that was at once laundry room, cafeteria, garment factory, and hostel for a rotating cast of new arrivals from eastern Europe. This was Sam's first place to crash.

Back in Volkovysk, Reb Hersch had been a Talmudic scholar, but in New York he worked in the remnants business. With his new wife, Celia, the new American Harris picked through the trash to find fabric that his neighbors discarded after doing piecework. He smoothed out the scraps and sold them on a pushcart, likely on nearby Orchard Street. Sam found the street's name ironic. He didn't see a single tree.

To reconstruct the next four years of Sam's life, I have only his recollections, as well as the studio portraits he took with his New World friends. My mother pulls these from her shoebox. "A trumbonik," she calls him. A troublemaker. Sam is five foot four, his slight frame filled out with muscles, his jaw clenched, a bowler hat perched atop his head.

Years later, Sam wrote some doggerel about his time on the Lower East Side. The Grand Street mademoiselles (seamstresses decked out for their day off). The Yiddish theaters where the audiences laughed so hard they choked on their peanuts. The rush-hour delis full of cheap pastrami sandwiches. The bedbugs and lice. The big talkers, like “Uncle David with a clean shave/Fell from heaven/in America he was months—six, seven”—a sweat-shop worker whose ulcer didn't dull his enthusiasm for the “wonders of Columbus' land.”

In thousands of garrets, thousands of Davids spun their improbable dreams. A greenhorn might live in shit, but if he worked hard enough, the city dangled promises of plenty. Sam's first job was as a house painter. Companies made paint out of white lead mixed with linseed oil, and if the chemicals made him puke, well, that was just “painters' colic,” which is to say, a normal part of the job.

The Lower East Side was home to 290,000 Jews, enough to constitute their own cohesive world. Jewish landlords fought Jewish tenants, and Jewish sweat-shop bosses fought Jewish workers. Everyone kept their grudges against Christians for old times' sake. Italian guys hassled Jewish girls, and Jewish guys beat Italians for their effrontery. It was rough, but it was nothing like the pogroms back home. For white immigrants across New York, street violence was a game of equals, and Jews gave as good as they got.

A few weeks after Sam arrived in New York, two drunk marines stumbled into a Jewish neighborhood for some old-fashioned harassment. One had a revolver, the other a bayonet. When the pair tried to pull the beard of a man named Sam Stein, it became clear that Brooklyn had different rules. Stein fought back. The marine with the gun tried to shoot Stein but missed. The bullet shattered a shop window instead. The whole neighborhood poured onto the street, and only police intervention saved the two marines from mob justice. Afterward, they were court-martialed. There were plenty of antisemites in America, but in 1904 there was little in the way of state antisemitism. Sure, Christians attacked Jews, but those Christians might go to jail. Local newspapers gave significant space to the persecution of Jews in tsarist Russia, even as they justified or glossed over the persecution of Black people at home.

Goaded by homesickness, Sam began to draw the town he had left behind. None of these drawings survive, but based on Sam's autobiographical writings, I can guess that he drew Volkovysk with a love that was at once pagan and biblical. "The nearby little river was my Jordan. The synagogue with its cupolas was the temple that Solomon had built." These watercolors became his respite from the New York present.

Socialism in Yiddish

It didn't take Sam long to find his people.

He had landed in the largest Jewish city on earth, home to the largest, most radical Jewish proletariat in history. “From the margins of Europe Jews had moved to the very heart of the world's new economic colossus, 'the capital of capitalism, the capital of the twentieth century, and the capital of the world,” wrote the historian Tony Michels. By the late nineteenth century, these poor youth packed into the sweat-shops of the titanic New York garment industry. Educated radicals like Mikhael Zametkin and Abraham Cahan also toiled in the shops. They had fled the police roundups that followed Tsar Alexander 2's assassination in 1882 and now found themselves condemned to live as part of the masses that they preferred to fetishize from afar. Like Arkady Kremer, these radicals spoke Russian (if they knew Yiddish, they preferred to hide it), and so formed a pretentious little circle they called the Russian Colony, which devoted itself to speeches about revolution in the motherland.

Cahan and the rest of the Russian Colony might have stayed stuck in impotent nostalgia if not for encounters with their exiled German neighbors. Heirs to the most advanced socialist tradition in Europe, these Germans convinced their Jewish peers to move beyond their insular circles of declassed intellectuals and speak to the actual workers toiling alongside them, using Yiddish, the language these workers spoke. Cahan's cohort took this advice to heart, and the Russian Colony succeeded wildly. It organized trade unions, self-education societies, libraries, strikes, and boycotts. In 1886, years before Pati Kremer had started educating her small groups of workers in Vilna, a strike by New York Jews brought the entire garment industry to a halt.

The Russian Colony created the modern Yiddish press. Back in Russia, censors had permitted a single, stultifying Yiddish weekly, but in New York there were no such restrictions. The city had papers to represent every tendency, from highbrow socialism to insurrectionary anarchism to the comfortable Orthodox middle class. Inevitably, these newspapers made their way back home. In 1886, radicals shipped copies of the socialist Folkstaytung to the Pale of Settlement, where it was immediately banned by tsarist censors. It didn't work. Smugglers snuck more New York Yiddish newspapers into the Pale, where revolutionaries like Arkady Kremer used them as inspiration for their own, underground Yiddish press. In 1897, the year the Bund was born, Abe Cahan launched The Forward in New York City. It would become America's most popular Yiddish newspaper. Like the early Bundists, Cahan was internationalist in theory. He wrote in Yiddish because Yiddish was the language that Jewish workers spoke, but he wanted to “erase all boundaries between Jew and non-Jew in the labor world.” Instead, like the Bund, he ended up creating a secular, socialist, but specifically Jewish world.

By the time Sam arrived in New York, this sort of socialism was alive on every East Side street—in the mutual aid societies, debate clubs, picket lines, night schools, and the lectures that Jewish workers obsessively attended. (Utopia, for them, might have been one long lecture series.) Socialist Yiddish papers sold 120,000 copies a day. Socialism filled the mouths of the soapbox speakers at Rutgers Square, who worked their crowds like old-school village preachers, shifting from topic to topic until one caught the imagination of the exhausted humans shuffling by. Wham. Hook. Bam. Make 'em stop. Cry. Believe. On the Lower East Side, socialism meant more than Marx. It was the idiom of something broad, free, and generous—the fight for a Better and More Beautiful World. To be a socialist meant to be a human, to affirm that there was more to life than the brutism quest for coin. Back in Volkovysk, the Bundist Chaim Nemzer had helped Sam survive Bloch's leather tannery. In New York, socialism did the same for hundreds of thousands of Jews.

Dozens of strikes took place during Sam's first year in the city. There were strikes by butchers, bricklayers, elevator operators, and the kids who made boxes at Cohen's factory, during which little girls attacked child scab laborers and made hideous faces at the cops. In April 1904, on Orchard Street, a hundred asphalt workers threw rocks at scabs. In July, fifty thousand garment workers struck, with The New York Times remarking that the seamstresses “get into all sorts of arguments with the men strikers when they meet in the little coffee shops of Ludlow, Suffolk and Forsyth.” Then, in August, forty thousand members of the Structural Building Trades Alliance unions walked off the job. Sam would have walked off too—except he wasn't in the union. The Alliance's painters' union had banned all Jews from membership.

Naturally, all this ferment attracted Bundist visitors. In December 1903, Arkady Kremer arrived from London. Pati was already in town making arrangements. Thanks to her work, Arkady would be greeted by a rally organized by the labor lawyer Meyer London and would go on to give spare, ironic speeches at private gatherings arranged by The Forward. Pati saw little of the city. She may have been a revolutionary, but by now she was also the mother of a little girl named Vera. Parenthood came first. In her memoirs, she insists this was her choice, which she made despite Arkady's protests. "I will do your share of the work for our child, you do my share of the work for the party," she told him, comparing the division of labor to military discipline. Over the next eight months, Arkady met with small groups of workers while Meyer London set up the Bund's U.S. fundraising operation and Pati subsumed herself in the domestic sphere that takes so many women out of historical record, while sometimes compensating them with private joys.

That same year, another of the Bund's pioneers, the brilliant, morose Liuba Levinson, sailed for New York City, where her sister lived. Like Pati, she had her baby with her, but she lacked Pati's commitment to family life. Liuba had given birth in Siberian exile, which wrecked her health, though her nerves had been shot even earlier, as a teenager, after some unspecified incident during her imprisonment. Liuba intended to dump her baby with her sister, sneak back into Russia, and return to the revolution unencumbered. It was not to be. During the heat wave of 1903, Liuba drew herself a bath. Once in the tub, she grew dizzy. Her head slipped below the water. Liuba Levinson was thirty-seven years old when she drowned in that kitchen bathtub. She must have looked like the Ophelia of Orchard Street.

Volkovysk Revolutionary Union

On November 11, 1903, a small group of Bundist immigrants gathered in a tenement on 56 Orchard Street and founded the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union. They printed up membership cards and elected a board. They also addressed more practical matters. When a woman comrade was arrested in Berdichev, in northern Ukraine, the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union sent cash.

At some point after his arrival in New York, Sam joined the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union. It was not a powerful group, to put it kindly. They were broke young people, lost, like him, in a selfish city, struggling to support each other while they kept their connections to the past. To keep the old spirit alive, they held picnics, ran lectures, and sold tickets to the endless series of balls where the Lower East Side workers passed their time. They sent letters to Bundists back in Volkovysk to announce their endeavors and took out ads in The Forward when they got letters in reply. They talked big, as if to compensate for the inadequacy of their actions. From their workbenches they would free first their hometown, then Russia, then the world.

In November, the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union held a masquerade ball at New Irving Hall, with cash prizes for the best costumes. Decades later, Sam would paint himself in myriad disguises—as a pirate, as a sorceress, as Rembrandt. I wonder if the habit dated back to this event. In the one costumed photo I have of him from the era, Sam wears a tiny derby. His two friends wear top hats. They glower like vaudeville thugs. Perhaps he dressed like this when at one of the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union's masquerade balls. Once past Irving Place Theatre's Moorish doorways, the workaday world would have disappeared into a fantasia of self-creation. At a masquerade, it didn't matter how poor you were. A rag seller could be the Angel of Socialism. A pattern cutter could be a Cossack, and a factory girl an acrobat. Corsets nipped waists. Rouge brightened pallid cheeks. Someone passed out glasses of schnapps. The band played their hometown songs. Couples whirled through the violent new Bowery waltz. Like a revolution, a party is an attempt at utopia. The revolutionaries savored it. They danced long into the night.

At their tenement clubhouse, the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union devoured Forward articles chronicling the ferment back in Russia. They read about rebellions in Siberia, strikes in the Lena goldfields. In July 1904, they would have joined the spontaneous celebrations that broke out when a terrorist belonging to the peasant-populist Socialist Revolutionary Party killed that arch-antisemite, the minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. “Von Plehve Dead!” crowded The Forward in its largest typeface, so that the headline took up half the page. Abe Cahan threw a party the next day at the newspaper's office and invited readers to bring along their American friends. The East Side danced in the streets.

The Jewish Labor Bund held weekly picnics at the pleasure parks in the Glendale section of Queens, a five-cent ride on the streetcar from the Lower East Side. Jostled by beery Germans, the Bundists staked out their spot of grass and toasted the death of von Plehve. They riffed on The Forward headlines to one another. The tsar's nuts! He's locked himself inside his palace! They knocked back their beers, then sang their anthem.

Heaven and earth will hear us.

the bright stars will bear witness,

an oath of blood, an oath of tears—

We swear, we swear, we swear!

Buoyed by the lyrics, they felt their loyalty anew. Maybe the movement had seemed insignificant when they were bent over their sewing machines, but in the park, they could allow themselves to indulge in the exile's vice—the fantasy of return.

As the months passed, memories of Volkovysk dimmed beside the struggle for subsistence. Then, on the morning of January 23, 1905, Sam looked at the front page of The Forward, and his old home, with all its idealism and carnage, came crashing back.

A Bloodbath.

St. Petersburg Strikers Murdered by the Thousands...Women and Children Among the Victims...Bloody Revolution Breaks Out.

The Volkovysk Revolutionary Union would have scoured the papers for details of the events that would later be known as Bloody Sunday. Beyond the thrill, they must have felt the certainty that Marxism always promised. History was not merely a corpse, dissected upon the table of the academy, but a secret and mighty current whose course they too could shape. Were they not also the proletariat? For a house painter named Sam Rothbort, the revolution had finally come.

Chapter 6

Revolutionary Prequel

(January–September 1905)

Bloody Sunday

Ladimir Medem was blah-zay as he walked the swarmed streets of the Russian colony in Zurich, where it seemed that all of Exileland was gathered around copies of the Neue Züricher Zeitung. In Saint Petersburg, the paper revealed, workers had decided to take matters into their own hands.

Marxist schematics said that Russia was not ripe for revolution, Medem thought, and he had never heard of Father Gapon, the former priest who, the night before, on January 22, 1905, had led fifty thousand workers on a march toward the Winter Palace, home of Tsar Nicholas 2. Gapon had advised the authorities that the march would be peaceful. Workers and their families, dressed in their Sunday best, marched with the utmost faith that the government would listen to their requests for better working conditions. They sang songs of praise to the tsar they called their Little Father. The tsar was a good man, they thought. He wanted what was best for his children.

When they approached the palace, soldiers opened fire, murdering at least 130 people within minutes. Tsar Nicholas was at his vacation palace at the time.

The workers who survived would never forget the sight of the children strewn like broken dolls over the cobblestones, the wives whose tidy, much-mended dresses bloomed with dirt and gore. The betrayal twisted within them, until it became a weapon. The next morning 160,000 Saint Petersburg workers walked out on strike.

During a lecture to student groups a few days later, Medem continued to shrug off the events. Maybe the uprising represented progress, but, as an atheist and a Marxist, he couldn't imagine a real revolution springing from the actions of a priest. Inside the empire, in the Latvian industrial city of Dvinsk, Medem's Exileland friend Raphael Abramovich saw things more accurately. Now a prominent Bundist orator, days after the massacre, he dashed off a pamphlet called To Arms:

The Great Day has come! The revolution has come!...We will gain our freedom, or we will die! Let everyone go into the street and unfurl the red flag! Attack the stores where arms are sold! Everyone get a gun, a revolver, a sword, an ax, a knife!...Let every street become a battlefield! Let us give up the blood of our hearts and receive the rights of human beings!

Revolt

The Bund's foreign committee printed two hundred thousand copies of To Arms, in three languages, which they then mailed to over a hundred cities inside Russia. Activists passed out the pamphlets at the birzhes, dropped them from theater balconies, and scattered them in factory courtyards where workers could find them in the morning.

Within a week, strikes wracked the Pale of Settlement, as two hundred thousand workers walked off their jobs. Whether in swish provincial capitals or muddy shettlach, workers thronged into the streets, where Cossacks cut them down with bullets and whips. As Arkady Kremer had predicted a decade earlier in On Agitation, this repression was clarifying. As the dead piled up, demands quickly leapt from the economic to the political: not just a pay raise but the end of autocracy.

Even having withdrawn from the R.S.D.L.P, the Bund's thirty thousand members still made it the largest Marxist party in the empire, but as representatives of an ethnic minority, they knew they couldn't work alone. They needed to unite with their rivals. There were many to choose from around the empire. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions since the congress of 1903, had twelve thousand members. Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine each had its own social democratic party. Poland had two: the pro-independence Polish Socialist Party P.P.S and the anti-independence Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania S.D.K.P.i.L. With great difficulty, the Bund persuaded this alphabet soup of groups to hold a conference in Riga in February, where they agreed on a list of liberal demands including the right to vote, freedom for political prisoners, an eight-hour workday, free speech, a free press, the separation of church and state, and, the most cherished demand of revolutionaries, a freely elected constituent assembly. Without dropping their theoretical and personal disputes, the groups agreed to work together in the streets.

Here, I want to put myself into a protester's skin. The closest I've known to 1905 is the summer of 2020, after the police murdered George Floyd, when the sickly silence of lockdown New York was shattered by a mass uprising. Still, the past is a foreign country, and I need a guide. Itka, the girl who shattered a window in Sam's watercolor that so affected me as a teenager —what was she doing during the revolution's early days? Let's light a candle to her. I hold her hand as she leads me through some Pale of Settlement slum shuttered tight on the Bund's orders. We come upon a cordon of thugs in flat-caps, members of the party battle squad. Some of them have scars earned fighting pogroms. Itka nods. They let us pass. We slip into the stream. Red rags wave. Songs sound in multilingual cacophony. Everyone is here—the grandmothers, the brats from the block, the boy who called Itka a whore. Our bodies move with theirs. Our feet carry us into rich neighborhoods we never dared enter. They're ours. We float in disbelief. It happened. We broke open the world. Despite our century of distance, Itka and I share a few common experiences. We both have taken over a street and mistaken it for a country, both grabbed hands with a stranger and mistaken it for a vow. I remember the Black kids who marched into the Financial District that hot 2020 summer. They stood next to the statue of a man who owned their ancestors and said that this was their land, then danced down the steps of the New York Stock Exchange with joyous rage. The same joy and rage played out in 1905, throughout the Pale of Settlement.

Krynki

Three weeks after Bloody Sunday, Bundists and socialists in the Polish town of Krynki called a mass meeting in a synagogue to incite a general strike. With the 1,500 people who showed up, they proceeded to take over the city.

As they marched through the city streets, police fled in their wake. The revolutionaries looted the post office and trashed the police station, destroying the records but confiscating the weapons. They poured all the liquor into the street to avoid drunken fiascos and set up armed patrols to keep order in the city. The next day, the Russian military marched in. In the melee that followed, soldiers shot forty-two workers and arrested several hundred more, but not before Bundists had sampled a drug that revolutions unreliably deliver. For twenty-four hours, they had held power, hand in hand with their Christian brother workers. They were not outsiders, nor were they victims. They were equals. The Here they had so precariously inhabited became, for a moment, home.

New York City

News of the Russian uprising electrified New York. Uptown, in the splendid new St. Nicholas Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox archpriest prayed for the survival of the “well-loved” tsar. The Lower East Side was a different story. The New York Times reported: “All the highways and byways of that crowded section of the city at once became filled with...a series of unbroken processions converging on the offices of the Jewish newspapers.” At The Forward, the staff scrambled to produce bulletins of the latest information, but this only excited the crowd further. They shoved their way into the newsrooms and demanded, now, to know what was going on.

Meetings began that night. Sam and the rest of the Volkovysk Revolutionaries might have crowded into Clinton Hall, where delegates from the Bund's twenty-six American branches listened to the poet Morris Winchevsky read the latest dispatches. When Winchevsky told the audience that troops in several cities had refused to fire on protesters, a veteran Bundist named Jenny Horowitch dissolved into tears. "They are our brothers too! I knew it all the time!"

Revolutionaries held multiple meetings each night. Some devolved into riots. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, hundreds packed the American Star Hall and, to the bemusement of a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter, chanted “Hurrah for the terrorist organization.” (By this they meant the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had blown up Interior Minister von Plehve.) When the first round of fundraising proved disappointing, labor lawyer Meyer London berated the crowd. How dare they fritter away their paychecks gambling on boxing matches when a great drama was taking place back home? The time for forbearance was over. Their brothers needed arms. London demanded a week's wages from every attendee. They'd thank themselves next year when they were marching in a parade to celebrate Free Russia. The donations flowed. A local real estate developer even ponied up one hundred dollars, as long as eighty dollars went to “the terrorists.”

As I read London's speech, a pair of sentences struck me.

Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives...for liberty? They...pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.

Egypt, the site of Jews' Old Testament enslavement, was a metaphor for tyranny, in the American South as well as Russia's Pale. In Egypt, Egyptians cracked the whips. When Moses led the Jews to the promised land, Egyptian armies pursued him, until God drowned them in the Red Sea. London's speech offered no such escape. These kids would stay and fight there, amongst the Egyptians, until they won a freedom that encompassed even their oppressors.

On February 15, on the other side of the world, twenty Bundists gathered in Dvinsk, where the central committee had set up its secret headquarters inside a covertly rented apartment. The delegates analyzed the course and future of the uprising. How could they turn an outburst into a revolution? They planned more strikes and protests, guarded by workers organized into battle squads. They discussed how to deal with their newfound financial bounty: a Friends of the Bund branch in New York had raised a thousand dollars, the equivalent of twenty-four thousand dollars in today's money. This cash would be sent to Belgium, where comrades would acquire pistols that young women would then smuggle into the Pale, border guards being less suspicious of girls. Inside the empire, legions of small-town chemistry students turned themselves into bomb makers—"Nobels," in party slang. In his memoirs, Abramovich recalled a shtetl rabbi who proudly presented the central committee with his homemade hand grenades.

Despite their skill with weapons trafficking, the Bundists knew that armed civilians were no match for the power of a state. They pinned their hopes on the army, which was comprised of conscripts, and already demoralized from the wretched war with Japan. To win over the troops, thousands of Bundist pamphlets found their way into soldiers' barracks, where they were hidden in toilets, or left at canteen samovars. All had the same message: Shoot your officers. Protect the people. Join us.

“Patrol!” the lookout screamed. The delegates inside the Dvinsk apartment shoved their notes into the oven. Just before lighting the match, they realized it was a false alarm. The police were on the hunt for an illegal liquor distillery in the building's basement. Finding nothing, they trotted past their actual enemies.

Martyrs

Arkady Kremer missed the Bund's conference in Dvinsk, but he was likely there two weeks later when the party proclaimed a general strike, one of hundreds they would call in the coming months. Over the next five days, mobs of mostly Jewish workers shuttered the factories, then battled the cops their bosses called for help. When soldiers cordoned off the city center, three thousand Jewish and Christian workers, marching beneath the red Bundist banners of revolution, tried to force their way past the wall of bayonets. The bayonet blades slashed at workers' flesh, and the workers responded with rocks, sticks, and fists. Young Bundist men fired from the courtyards, disappeared into tenements, then fired again from the balconies. Within days, one Dvinsk resident in five was in the streets. When soldiers shot a teenage worker named Aba Reich in the clashes, protesters carried him to the cemetery on their shoulders. A young girl waved his bloody shirt like a flag.

Reich's death couldn't go unanswered. By the end of March, a growing number of police officials would be gunned down by Bundist battle squads, or dispatched by clever little explosives, nicknamed “matzoh balls,” hurled by guys who turned up later in Brooklyn under unassuming American names. Aba Reich was neither the first nor the last protester killed in 1905. Martyrs need funerals, and funerals become protests, which produce more martyrs, more vengeance, more state retaliation, more martyrs again.

Pati Kremer

Pati had spent the first months of the revolution in Vilna, under police surveillance, raising her daughter, Vera, alone. She seized a brief break between protests to smuggle herself and her child to Dvinsk, where Arkady toiled on the central committee. It had been fifteen years since Pati's first arrest. In that decade and a half of poverty and exile, she and Arkady had been apart more often than they had been together, but she never wavered from their path. They had aged. Pati was thin and dry, Arkady mustachioed and stout. As she watched him hug their child, she was filled with a terrible tenderness. He was the same boy she had discovered in the attic on Zavalne Street, marooned amongst his thoughts. Was she marooned in him? Pati's memoirs say little of the cities beyond their apartment, where the seeds that they had once so quixotically planted had at last burst into bloom.

I know just as little about Sam's thoughts during this revolutionary year. He painted walls. The white lead got in his mouth, into the corners of his eyes. It mingled with his sweat. On the scaffolding, his head reeled. He choked down the vomit, then steadied himself. He went on. After work, he drank a beer in the tenement at 56 Orchard Street where the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union met. Perhaps they had a letter from home. From Moishe Katriel, Beyle Rivkah, Chaim Nemzer. Whoever it was, the revolutionaries tore open the note. Thrilling tales came from their no-longer-sleepy hometown, about smuggled guns and mutinous soldiers in the local garrison, where officers had ordered five men shot for insubordination. After these executions, the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union held a special meeting, with a fifty-cent fine for not attending.

Solidarity

From the uprising's first days, the Russian government sought to make the word Jew synonymous with revolutionary. Undercover agents circulated pamphlets that called for genocide, and police spread rumors that Jews would torch the churches, believers inside, then launch the “kike revolution” for their “kike kingdom”—to use the authorities' words.

Their efforts were augmented by nearly two hundred far-right groups who bore the collective nickname the Black Hundreds. With their secretive membership, government connections, and flagrant murders of ethnic minorities, the Black Hundreds came to resemble a Russian version of the K.K.K. Cops and Hundreds worked hand in hand, while unaffiliated racists—whether criminals, peasants, or college kids—were always available to help.

Though they liked their guns, the Bundists believed that solidarity was their greatest weapon. If they liberated Egypt alongside the Egyptians, they wouldn't need to flee across the sea. Bundists raised strike funds for Christian workers and loaned them their printing presses. In the Grodno, they led strikes amongst Christian brick workers. In Riga, they organized draft riots. In Ukraine, they created parallel organizations. In the tsarist empire's rural Belarusian borderlands, they worked with local peasant groups to publish pamphlets that described how the peasants' true enemies, "the military, the rich, and the uncaring regime," used Jews as their scapegoat.

Lodz This solidarity reached its apex in industrial Lodz, the tsarist empire's answer to Manchester. In mills that resembled miniature cities, a multiethnic workforce of Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews wove textiles for industrial barons like Izrael Poznanski, who constructed neoclassical palaces with the profits.

The Russo-Japanese war was wrecking the Lodz economy, and after strikes broke out at Grohman's textile factory on May 16, 1905, Cossacks shot three workers. Fifty thousand people attended their funeral. The cycle was set into motion.

It was a fifteen-minute walk from Grohman's factory to Wschodnia Street, the Bundist birzhe. For years, Wschodnia Street had come alive each Saturday at sunset when members of the Little Bund, the party's unauthorized kiddie affiliate, came out to play. Despite the prohibitions of older activists, these preteen hellions organized themselves into a Little Rascals-style gang with socialist trappings. They walked out of cheder, smashed bosses' windows, bullied Zionist youth groups, and paraded with sticks they held like guns.

On May 27, the conflict escalated when the police turned their attention to Wschodnia Street and to the Little Bund, which was enjoying their weekly parade. Cops stormed into the crowd of kids, swinging their clubs and, eventually, shooting their pistols. The bullets found their marks. Two little boys fell to the pavement, blood gushing from their shocked mouths. Impatient to leave, an officer kicked another boy. His boot shattered the child's fragile ribs, puncturing his lung. The child died in the gutter.

The Bund organized a funeral for the murdered children. The victims' ragged friends led ten thousand workers toward the cemetery. The marchers were Polish, German, Jewish, but it didn't matter. As James Baldwin wrote, "The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe."

by May 30, thirty-five thousand people were out on strike. Crowds wandered the city, red flags in hand, until police dispersed them. Once night fell, cops retreated to their stations, and the workers ruled the streets.

On June 18, the Bund and Lodz's two Polish socialist parties hosted a joint picnic in the nearby forest. Thousands of Jewish and Polish workers came. They spent the afternoon drinking booze and listening to rabble-rousers, so when they marched back to town, they were high on the idea of their own power. On Lagiewnicka Street, they ran into an army detachment. Someone shot a pistol—each side blamed the other—and by the time the chaos stopped, five Polish and Jewish protesters were dead.

Troops took the protesters' corpses to the gray stone monolith of Poznanski Hospital. Crowds gathered outside the iron gates. Within a few hours, orderlies brought out the shrouded corpses of the Polish victims. Workers carried their bodies to the Catholic cemetery and buried them in the black summer earth, without a single cop daring to make a peep. The Jewish bodies remained inside Poznanski Hospital.

The sun set. Outside the hospital, the crowds muttered darkly about the delay. The Poles had already buried their people. Why was the hospital holding onto the corpses of the Jewish victims? Jews and Poles waited together till dawn. At sunrise, their patience broke. They stormed the hospital, only to find the bodies gone. Police had smuggled their dead friends through a side door and buried them in secret graves. The crowd would not even be permitted the opportunity to grieve.

From the hospital, the crowd marched toward Piotrkowska Street in fury. Soon, they were fifty thousand strong. Fortified by looted liquor, they shouted slogans against tyranny and belted out banned subversive ballads. Sympathizers flew revolutionary banners from the windows. Terrified cops fled their posts, but the protesters pursued them. Crowds crammed into Old Market Square, beneath the Andalusian arches of the Old Synagogue. Speakers from each party climbed atop boxes and hollered out paeans to the workers' bravery. They'd kicked out the cops. They'd seized the streets. Next, they'd seize the world.

The workers lingered for an hour, cheering the speakers, growing braver from one another's chants. At nine in the evening, they reformed into a protest line and began to march down Glowna Street. "Down with despotism," they shouted. Without warning, Cossacks rode in from the side streets, firing volleys of bullets into the crowd. Hundreds screamed as the bullets entered bellies, knees, shoulders. Eighteen workers fell down dead. The panicked crowd scattered, leaving the victims behind.

The next morning, workers began building barricades on the Bundist birzhes on Wschodnia and Poludniowe streets, under the leadership of the twenty-two-year-old Virgil Kahan. They used trash cans, overturned wagons, poles, girders, sand barrels, signboards, cobblestones, lashed together with telegraph wire. The three parties proclaimed a general strike. “The fury of the mob found full vent, and even children, caught by the contagion, were…heard swearing they were ready to die for liberty,” reported The New York Times. In Old Market Square, a Bundist girl mounted a crate to address the people. A police sniper eyed her, aimed, then pulled the trigger. Her head snapped back. Blood poured from her shattered skull.

From there, the rebellion exploded too quickly for any party to claim it as their own. For a few heady days, Lodz belonged to its multiethnic working class, united across race and ideology.

Dozens of infantry battalions marched into Lodz. On shuttered streets, the clip-clop of Cossack ponies mixed with rebel rifle fire, directed at anyone foolish enough to break the strike. “Every alley must be a fortress,” read one Bundist broadsheet. “You must shower bullets on the servants of tyranny from every rooftop, balcony and window.” Workers stripped guns from the bodies of dead soldiers. They threw sulfuric acid, petrol bombs, and rocks. Barricades spread from Jewish neighborhoods to the Polish and German ones, until they had cut off a hundred streets. Beneath constant gunfire, government sappers blew up the barricades. Once a barricade fell, Cossacks invaded, to steal and murder as they pleased; witnesses watched them snatch baubles from dead women's necks. In Baluty, the workers' neighborhood, Cossacks gunned down an entire Jewish family as they attempted to catch a train out of town. Later that day, revolutionaries threw a bomb into the Cossacks' barracks.

Prominent citizens begged the governor general for protection. On June 26, Lodz came under martial law. The prisons overflowed with Jewish socialists. Over eight days, authorities killed 561 people to put down the rebellion. Most of them were Jews.

Rebellion was spreading across the empire, and the Bund followed its currents. That summer, the party sent their top orator, Anna Lipshitz, south to Odesa, the empire's fourth largest city, to win converts. A corrupt, cosmopolitan boomtown lounging on the Black Sea, Odesa lured ambitious poor from throughout the empire, especially from the Pale of Settlement. But bosses paid low and played rough; when girls in Popov's factory went on strike in 1902, police broke down the doors of their apartments and dragged them back to work by their hair. No wonder the city was on edge. Lipshitz, who traveled under the false name Maryushka, was only twenty-two. She was literary and romantic, to the point that fellow revolutionaries chided her for her decadent tastes. She was tiny, with massive black eyes and a long nose that a male comrade mentioned unkindly in his memoirs. But even he had to admit that she was the best speaker of their group. Lipshitz was a born street orator. Her sister Esther had been tortured to death by the police, and this loss must have given her words an extra weight. She came at the right time. In early June, workers in the Peresyp industrial district planned a general strike. After informants tipped off the police, the government ordered a clampdown. On June 13, protesters gathered at Henn's factory. Cossacks fired into the crowd. When the news spread, workers across Odesa walked off their jobs. Soon, to move between neighborhoods, Anna would have had to weave around overturned tramcars and slip behind barricades jerry-rigged from telephone poles, all while teen girls hurled cobblestones at Cossack patrols. She would have witnessed the beatings of police officers who strayed from their units and likely heard the explosion of anarchist bombs. It must have thrilled her. This moment was meant to be hers. On June 15, in the opal hour before sunrise, Anna Lipshitz heard the news, alongside the rest of the city. A battleship named Potemkin had just

Odesa

dropped anchor in Odesa's port. It was flying a red flag.

Hoarse, bleary, her dress stiff with dried sweat, Lipshitz would have pulled herself off the floor of her safe house and joined the crowds clambering toward the port. The ship gleamed like a dream.

About a week earlier, a Potemkin sailor named Vakulenchuk had protested the maggoty meat that the crew received for rations. When officers executed him, it triggered a mutiny. Sailors shot the captain, threw a few officers overboard, locked the rest below deck, and seized control of the ship. They sailed for Odesa, where they hoped to contact local revolutionaries while waiting for other ships in the Black Sea Fleet to join them.

The sailors had deposited Vakulenchuk's body on a pier. A sign on his chest explained he had been killed over wormy meat. Crowds knelt before the dead man, kissing his hands, surrounding him with flowers. Lipshitz would have seen the battleship towering above this tableau of Christian reverence: its hull armored with Krupp cement, the twin gun turrets on its fore and aft, the sixteen quick-firing guns in casements, the four Hotchkiss guns—all pointed at the city. Here was a tool of violence—modern and powerful. For the first time, it was on her side.

The Potemkin sailors warned Odesa's authorities that their battleship would bombard the city if they interfered with the protests, so cops and military kept their distance from the port. Thus protected, every revolutionary party called its people down. Lipshitz mounted the Bund's platform. Beneath a black banner that read honor the fallen comrades, she began to speak. Her words have been lost, but they must have been powerful; newspapers nicknamed her the Fury.

As Lipshitz inflamed the crowds, two Mensheviks and a Bundist rowed out to the Potemkin to try to persuade the sailors to lead an uprising. They just had to come ashore, distribute guns, seize the city's arsenal, and call on the restive Odesa garrison to side with them. If they did, one of the empire's largest cities would be theirs. This was their moment, the Menshevik Constantine Feldmann shouted, his voice hoarse from overuse. They just had to seize it.

Iresolute and impressionable, the Potemkin's crew rejected his proposal. They wanted to wait for the rest of the Black Sea Fleet to mutiny. They believed that time was on their side.

Tens of thousands of people wandered on the wooden boardwalk of the port beside the sea. There were many speakers, but accounts paint Anna Lipshitz as their queen. In his book on the events of 1905 in Odesa, historian Robert Weinberg sketches the following story. An undercover cop tried to heckle a Bundist woman speaker. He called her a kike, thinking that would turn the audience against her. Instead, the woman incited the crowd against the provocateur, until they set upon him and smashed his skull.

The woman is not identified in Weinberg's text, but the moment is shown in Sergei Eisenstein's pioneering silent film, Battleship Potemkin. His script identifies the orator as a "Bundist," and for her party comrades who saw the film, she was unmistakably Anna Lipshitz.

By afternoon, people started to loot the harbor's warehouses. Soon the kegs were freed. Pricey wine burned mouths that had never tasted the like before and would never taste it again. Revelers drank all they could, then hauled the rest to the city center. The looting wasn't universal. One sailor pleaded, "We need freedom, not vodka." Some workers guarded the warehouses. Others threw the kegs into the sea, shouting curses at the alcohol whose convenient appearance would derail so many revolutionary moments. But few listened.

No one knows who started the fires, but they spread quickly, since Odesa's warehouses were built from wood. Soon, flames were everywhere, eating the loot, the port, and its people. Blinded by smoke, the revelers tried to escape the port, but it had been cordoned off by the military in an attempt to contain the day's disorders, and those whom the fire spared, the soldiers didn't. Nearly 1,300 people died that night. The crew of the battleship Potemkin watched it all, unable or unwilling to help.

The next afternoon in Odesa's ruined port, the bodies lay swelling in the summer heat. The whole city was rotten with fear. Soldiers attacked a funeral procession to bury the now putrid corpse of Vakulenchuk, the Potemkin's martyr. Worried when their crewmates didn't return on time from the funeral, the Potemkin finally fired on the city. They aimed for the opera house, where officers were meeting, but the gunner deliberately missed. Like many of his fellow sailors, the previous night had convinced him that revolution was less seductive in practice. Two days later, the battleship Potemkin abandoned Odesa, having failed to either spark a mutiny or protect an uprising. After months of wandering, it finally surrendered in Romania.

As in Lodz, tsarist officials blamed the whole Odesa business on the Jews.

Chapter 7 Reaction

(October 1905 January 1906)

Zurich

the trouble in Odessah notwithstanding, by autumn, the Bund had achieved some of its most cherished goals. On the Lodz barricades, they had proven themselves as fighters against the empire. Through their battle squads, they had shown they could defend their people. Above all, they had changed how Jews saw themselves. For centuries, Jews had cowered before the representatives of tsarist power. Now they stood upright as armed, equal citizens of the land. The Pale became the Bund's kingdom. As Raphael Abramovich traveled from town to town, he felt like the ambassador of a great power.

At the beginning of October, Medem awaited Abramovich's arrival in Zurich. For months, he and the rest of the Bund's foreign committee had been preparing for the sixth party congress—a momentous occasion in these revolutionary times—and at last they had succeeded in smuggling most of their leaders over the border. But just as the Bund's top leaders had crossed into Switzerland, papers arrived from Russia with news that a massive general strike was underway.

It had started in Saint Petersburg, when the printers' union went on strike for higher wages. The railway and telegraph workers joined, bringing transport and communications to a halt. Soon, millions of workers had walked off their jobs, and the dead could not be buried due to lack of undertakers. All of this was being organized by soviets—committees of factory workers, union leaders, and delegates from revolutionary groups that had sprung up in cities across the empire.

This was not the time to have a party congress, but what could the Bundists do? They were stuck in Switzerland. With telegrams from Russia cut off, they had no real knowledge of the situation on the ground. Separated from the revolution to which they devoted their lives, they decided to pretend that nothing had changed. The revolutionaries would not discuss the tumult in Russia but instead slogged through a list of topics that grew less relevant by the hour. Who cared about theoretical questions of school autonomy when, back home, the workers ran the cities, when activists from the factory committees traveled the empire on locomotives with red flags?

Resentful and on edge, the Bundists debated, but the words did nothing to still their anxiety. One night, Medem sat down at the piano to play the party anthems. They sang the words from memory.

Heaven and earth will hear us.

the bright stars will bear witness,

an oath of blood, an oath of tears—

We swear, we swear, we swear!

For years, the Bundists had considered Jewish workers the avant-garde of revolution in backward Russia. Now it was reversed. Seemingly in a day, the revolution had moved out of the Bund's borderlands to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, great cities that banned most Jews from residence, and to the trains and telegraphs, vital infrastructure where Jews were not permitted to work. “When strikes involve millions of workers; when the movement has pulled warships into its wake—what significance does your Bund have with its handful of would-be 'proletarians'? It's all so small, so pathetic and wretched,” says a young revolutionary in S. An-sky's 1907 novella In Shtrom. History was being made, and as the party of the Jewish working class, the Bund was condemned to the periphery, just like the men and women it represented.

Blood on the Pavement

The tsar's ministers could ignore many things, but not the economic paralysis of the empire. After four days of general strike, the technocratic minister of finance, Count Sergei Witte, convinced Tsar Nicholas 2 to offer meager concessions in the form of his October Manifesto. In it, the tsar legalized several political parties, made it easier to publish a newspaper, and established a duma, or elected legislature, with paltry powers. The manifesto's importance came from the fact the tsar had offered it against his will. The revolution had forced the absolute autocrat to acknowledge his people. The palace published the manifesto on October 17.

In Exileland, Bundists celebrated the manifesto as a victory. “A mighty new crack...has shaken the rotting edifice of the autocracy to its foundations.... The proletariat showed that a general uprising is not a dream but a reality.” But even as they tried to grapple with the implications of the new political freedoms now on offer, terrifying telegrams began to arrive from home.

Within hours of the manifesto's publication, street celebrations turned to horror as police opened fire on protesters in cities around the empire. Their whips slashed protesters' faces. Their truncheons broke protesters' bones. Police gunned down protesters in Saint Petersburg and Warsaw and Minsk. Even Volkovysk got a martyr, a Bundist named Yossel the Guts. The party called for a funeral parade. Sam's hoodlum friends hoisted Yossel's body on their shoulders and walked silently down shuttered Broad Street, behind the black and red flags that Beyle Rivkah had sewn. It felt like all Volkovysk was behind them. The cell's leader, baby-faced Yudel Likovsky, spoke at the cemetery. Though his words have been lost to time, the impression they made lingered in the town's memory long after the facts of Yossel's death had been forgotten.

From there, news got worse. Over twelve days, pogroms broke out in 690 towns and cities across the Russian Empire, as supporters of the tsar took out their anger and confusion on the Jews. Medem read the telegrams, and he imagined blood rising like a tidal wave, carrying away his beloved streets.

Pogrom is a vague word, so let's describe specifics. In less than two weeks, in nearly seven hundred places, humans—formerly complex individuals, but now uninhibited members of a mob—invaded the homes of their Jewish neighbors, ignored their appeals to sentiment or shared history, and gleefully beat them to death. They cut open the bellies of old men and stuffed them with the feathers from their goose-down comforters. Swollen with booze, righteous with reactionary politics, they raped teenage girls, then threw them out windows. When Jewish families offered them bribes in exchange for their lives, they laughed, took the money, and killed them anyway. Police only encouraged the attackers.

Jews who survived pogroms seldom did so unscathed. They lost legs, eyes, life savings, parents, sweethearts, sanity, and above all, the belief that the towns where their families had lived for centuries had ever been their homes.

In Odesa, the pogrom began on October 18. Young radicals had gathered in the dusty streets of the city's Jewish Moldavanka district to celebrate the October Manifesto. They waved red flags and carried desecrated portraits of the tsar. High on unexpected victory, the radicals passed a group of Russian workers. One of the radicals demanded the Russians remove their hats.

The two groups began to brawl. Soon an ethnic riot engulfed the Moldavanka. Christians looted Jewish shops and attacked Jewish passersby, some of whom fought back. By the end of the night, four Christians and an unknown number of Jews were dead.

The next day, Odesa conservatives called a patriotic demonstration in support of the tsar. Toward the end of the march, gunfire broke out. No one can agree on where the bullets came from, though two eyewitnesses later testified that they saw some demonstrators fire into the air. It didn't really matter. Self-defense fighters, who had been hiding on rooftops to protect Jews from another pogrom, thought they were under attack and showered the nationalist crowd with homemade bombs. The marchers headed to the Moldavanka shouting, “Death to kikes.”

For four days, Christian Odesa pillaged Jewish Odesa in a festival of destruction helped by the smirking indifference of the state. City Governor Dimitri Niedhardt even told a delegation of Jewish leaders that since they had wanted “freedom,” this was the freedom they were going to get. Pogromists murdered Jews with sadistic hysteria. According to historian Robert Weinberg, one girl watched as a “neat, delicate” youth of her acquaintance was dragged from their hiding place and had his skull smashed in with a table leg. Just like lynchings in the American South, pogroms were family affairs. Blood-smeared Russian mothers loaded their pushcarts with the spoils from looted Jewish houses, then had their kids torch the homes behind them as they left.

Jews and socialists fought back as best they could. The Bundist self-defense militia, led by a self-possessed young woman named Nadezhda Grinfeld, battled the mobs, dragging captive pogromists back to the university, where law students did interrogations. But despite their bravery, these militias were outnumbered and outgunned—especially since both police and soldiers helped their attackers. Within a day they had been overcome, and Grinfeld had a bullet in her leg. Twenty-two Bundists died fighting the mobs.

By October 22, pogromists had murdered eight hundred Odesa Jews, and left perhaps a hundred thousand more homeless.

While mob violence can only happen if enough people are prepared to kill their neighbors, most Jews thought the real culprit was the state. In 1904, the Bund had written that “pogroms exist only where the government wants them,” and the events of 1905 proved them right. Pogromists rampaged under police protection. Police and conservative journalists had blamed Jews for Russia's military defeats, so troops fresh from Japan—the same soldiers the Bund had put their faith in—joined the murders.

Then there were the multitudinous Black Hundreds groups, the most famous of which was the Union of the Russian People. Founded by physician Alexander Dubrovin and boasting three hundred thousand members, the union was Europe's first fascist political party. Believers in a pure Russian empire helmed by an omnipotent Russian tsar, the union denounced Jews in genocidal terms as “the root of all evil,” who should be wiped from the face of the earth. The union played a key role in Odesa's mass murders.

Tsar Nicholas 2 might not have planned pogroms himself, but he adored Dubrovin's pogromists. He sported the union badge at events and hosted Dubrovin's friends at his vacation palace in Tsarskoye Selo. He personally pardoned every Dubrovin follower that his courts managed to convict. A few days after the Odesa pogroms, Nicholas wrote to his mother that, since “ninetenths of the revolutionaries [were] Jews,” Jews had brought the pogroms upon themselves. He even telegrammed Dubrovin to thank him for his service.

All this would have seemed familiar to anyone who had watched the local sheriff put on a Klan hood in the American South, so it's not surprising that in the early years of the twentieth century, America's preeminent Black newspaper, The New York Age, devoted significant column space to attacks on Russia's Jews. By the winter of 1905, it was running nearly a condemnation a week.

On November 23: “The Jewish people have been persecuted more than any other people since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.... Our sympathies are with the persecuted of all races and lands.”

On November 30, they decried the fact that “no nation has yet interfered on behalf of Odessa's butchered thousands.”

One December 7, they wrote: “The civilized world has never witnessed anything quite so horrible as the massacres of Jews, which are daily taking place in Russia. With the Ku Kluxism, peonage and chain-gang systems in the South, we have believed that the American negro endured the hardest lot of all mankind. We must revise our judgement.”

These are generous statements from people facing similar attacks in the blood-soaked turn of the century. Oppressed themselves, the Age's writers sought solidarity with oppressed people elsewhere. Though I do not believe that oppression gives anyone the power of prophecy, it can sharpen analysis, leading to predictions more astute than anything put out by comfortable columnists at The New York Times. “The crime of the century is being committed in Russia,” the Age wrote at the end of 1905, by which point thousands of Jews had been murdered. “According to the inexorable law of compensation, it must be paid for in years to come at a terrible price.”

Saint Petersburg

Always one to seize a moment, Trotsky had smuggled himself back into Russia not long after Bloody Sunday and wasted no time transforming himself into a star. Living under a fake name, with old arrest warrants hanging over his head, Trotsky swaggered through the capital, conscious of the role he would play in the drama around him. Trotsky had broken with Lenin during the tumultuous second R.S.D.L.P congress of 1903, but he soon split as well from Julius Martov's Mensheviks, who dominated the Saint Petersburg Soviet, the revolution's organizing body in the capital. He was now a party of one. Words were the source of Trotsky's power. He churned out pamphlets and spoke constantly, to every sort of audience, honing his rhetoric and switching his codes. With the soldiers he talked as brashly and simply as they did. Amongst the beau monde, no radical was more chic.

If Medem had turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people, Trotsky took a different tack. For him, there were no people, and no nations. His loyalty was to history, and his stage was the entire world. Wildly arrogant, indifferent to identity, impervious to fear, Trotsky rushed to wherever the action was happening, and he spoke to the largest crowd he could, in whatever terms it took to move them. You can see the results. On October 17, the day of the Manifesto, Medem was stuck in Exileland, playing the Bund's anthem on the piano of Café Terese. Trotsky was at a Saint Petersburg demonstration, with hundreds of thousands of protesters at his feet. He knew exactly what to say.

He warned them not to trust this moment. The tsar had granted them nothing. They, the workers, had taken their rights by force, and so could rely only on their own strength to protect them. The manifesto was just a piece of paper, Trotsky said. He took out a copy and dramatically tore it to shreds.

After the October Manifesto was announced, the Saint Petersburg Soviet told the unions to end their general strike. With rail service resumed, the Bundists cut their conference short and boarded trains packed with political exiles headed toward Russia. Raphael Abramovich set off for the Saint Petersburg Soviet, where he would serve as the Bund's delegate. The party sent Medem to Dvinsk, where the Bund had its headquarters. From there, leaders would assign him to where he was needed.

Before Medem caught his train to Dvinsk, he sat in his rented room and burned letters from the last four years. Silently, he said goodbye to Exileland. He imagined the lakes, the snow-covered trees of Berne, the nights in London, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Maybe he thought of the girl from summer. She was a medical student, a comrade. For her, he was a god. For him, she was just a fling. She'd gotten pregnant. He didn't want a baby. She decided to give birth anyway. Did this weigh on his decision to leave? One by one, he consigned each letter to the fireplace. He wouldn't need them where he was going.

In late November, Medem and his comrade Vladimir Kossovsky stopped by the Bund's office in Geneva to grab fake passports and pistols that they barely knew how to shoot. Disguised in derby hats and fancy suits, they arrived at the Russian border on November 27. When they switched trains, Medem noticed how shabby the Russian cars were compared to the German ones. He settled into his seat and tried to sleep. In the next compartment, two military officers rented about the kikes. He shut his eyes, but "the constant return of the angry hissing of the malicious word. Kike. Kike Kike" kept him awake until the train arrived in Dvinsk. Kossovsky and Medem stepped out into the mud of the provincial city. They stumbled through the rundown streets until they spotted a particular door. They knocked. An eye appeared in the peephole. Medem whispered two Hebrew words, "Gam tsu," that formed the first half of a passport. "Le'tovah," the man on the other side responded, completing the sentence. This too is for the best. The door opened. His friends embraced him.

When Medem walked through Dvinsk, all he could think about was a past visit to Berlin. Memories of those grand boulevards only emphasized the poverty of the present. Why had he come back? Between shabby houses, a band of Jewish children play-acted revolution. They marched in ranks and shouted “hurrah,” then broke into a run, as if fleeing from the cops. On the next block, a Zionist speaker harangued a crowd. “Proletarianization!

Emigration! Colonization!" “Silly boys,” Medem's companion smirked. When Medem returned to his hotel that night, the streetlights were all broken. He remembered the pogroms and felt grateful for the gun in his pocket.

Vilna

A few weeks later, the party assigned Medem to Vilna.

In the winding stone streets of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, the Bund seemed to run the show. This was due to a twenty-seven-year-old playwright named A. Vayter, the head of the local self-defense squad. After cops gunned down protesters in early October, Vayter had refused to be cowed. He demanded the city remove police from the route of the funeral procession. For reasons lost to history, they agreed. The next day, thousands of Jews and Christians marched behind Vayter to the cemetery, their silence more threatening than any chant. Not a single cop dared to show his face along the way. From then on, cops hid in their stations, leaving security to Vayter.

Walking down the street on his first day in Vilna, Medem heard someone shout his name, in flagrant violation of conspiratorial protocol. He forced himself not to turn. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a student who'd attended one of his speeches back in Switzerland. “Medem!” hollered another voice, then another. How did so many people know who he was? He tried to ignore them, but soon the calls overwhelmed him, and his fans bore him to the Bund's office, where the secretary was so busy signing up new members that he barely had time to mutter hello. Medem embraced old friends. His doubts faded. Of course he was right to come back.

The savagery of tsarist repression hadn't dimmed the revolutionary fervor of the streets. Radicals had seen, and sacrificed, too much. They had experienced the spontaneous brotherhood of barricade fights. They had seized neighborhoods—even whole towns, like Krynki. They had wrung concessions from a monarch who thought himself appointed by God. They had also watched their friends bleed out from gunshot wounds and didn't want to imagine those deaths had been in vain. They told themselves that the massacres were merely the system's death spasms. They just needed to keep struggling and, inevitably, they would triumph.

Vilna's old city functioned as a temporary autonomous zone, and those of us who have known such zones can still feel their magic at the distance of a century.

In 2011, the anticapitalist protesters of Occupy Wall Street set up camp in downtown Manhattan, a block from my apartment. They turned a sterile concrete square into a mini city, complete with a gourmet kitchen, a library, even a table to get free hand-rolled cigarettes. Occupy's wild generosity was meant to prefigure a different world. For fifty-nine days, the square evolved into a stage for art projects, theoretical experiments, lunatic feuds, moments of failure and grace, until police batons drove us out. After the mayor destroyed the Occupy encampment, the city scrubbed off every trace of us, as if soaping out the mouth of a defiant child. It wasn't just our ideas, which were a mixed bag at best. They hated us because we had claimed the streets as ours.

The anarchists who founded Occupy hobbled it with a cumbersome form of direct democracy in which anyone could veto any proposal (a method that favored its most bumptious participants). The Bundists, however, were comfortable wielding power over neighborhoods they controlled. In cities throughout the Pale, they levied taxes and used the money to fund soup kitchens for strikers. They forced bosses to close early, creating an eight-hour day in practice where it didn't yet exist in law. In many towns, the mere mention of the Bund's name was enough to make an employer fold. In their birzhes, Bundists set up courts that took over the roles once played by rabbis; they mediated business disputes and ruled on broken engagements. When streets were too small, they commandeered the synagogues. They bolted the doors, elbowed their way to the front, and spoke to their captive audience. Who would stop them?

Medem savored his first days in Vilna. He would stride into the Intellectuals' Club on Gedimino Avenue, the unofficial headquarters from which the Bund ruled the city, and watch the urgent debates, the writers pounding out proclamations. He visited the secret apartment where the Bund's provincial representatives met. He'd cross the courtyard of some nondescript tenement, climb a harrowing staircase, and walk into a room filled with people clamoring, arguing, demanding a fake name, a fake passport, justice for a failed romance. Conversation stopped when Medem entered. Some of the guests had seen him in the student clubs in Exileland. Others had heard his story. Here he was in the flesh, a blond and elegant young man, baptized as a Christian, who could have done anything but chose to live as a member of the oppressed.

A few days after his arrival, Medem's comrades took him to the circus grounds, the same place where, two years prior, Hirsh Lekert had tried to shoot Governor von Wahl. Medem climbed the rickety stage, looked at the thousands of faces gathered beneath him, and gave his first public speech inside the Russian Empire. Afterward, the gang ambled over to the theater. Before the curtain went up, the audience demanded the orchestra play “The Marseillaise.” When it finished, they demanded an encore, then another. To hell with the play, Medem thought. Our revolution is still alive.

Autumn

The Bund's fervid activity in the Pale soon compelled Abramovich to leave Saint Petersburg, ceding his spot on the soviet to Mark Liber, and join Medem in Vilna. Together, the two friends set up the Russian-language journal they'd imagined back in Zurich, but as the days grew colder, they began to notice a change in Vilna's mood. The air felt raw, ugly. Cops returned to the streets. There was no question of Medem speaking at the circus where he had made his triumphant homecoming address; police had padlocked the building.

The Bund planned street demonstrations against the tsar. Expecting bloodshed, they set up first-aid stations for their protesters. When he went outside, Medem carried a pistol. He and Abramovich made regular trips to the railway station, awaiting the arrival of newspapers from the capital. Every issue brought worse news. Even Medem's landlord was getting nervous. He pleaded with his tenant, “When the moment comes for new 'events' to break, let me know, so I can hide myself abroad.”

In the papers, Medem learned of strikes and more strikes, each of which only impoverished workers further. In the wake of the October Manifesto, the revolution's supports started to fragment as middle-class liberals peeled away, satisfied with the new rights promised to them. The Saint Petersburg Soviet organized a worker's militia to protect workers from the police. The Bund's self-defense squads drilled to defend their communities from pogroms.

By November 22, the authorities had had enough. That day, police arrested the soviet's ostensible leader, leaving Trotsky in charge. On December 2, the soviet issued a financial manifesto, urging everyone to withdraw their money from banks and refuse to pay taxes, to starve the tsar of the cash he needed to buy guns. The next day, soldiers stormed the soviet's headquarters at the Technological Institute. When they entered the soviet's meeting room, Trotsky coolly scolded them for their interruption. He declared the session closed, as was his prerogative, then allowed himself to be arrested with a smile. In the wake of this news, Medem advised his landlord to flee.

Odesa

The arrests in Saint Petersburg infuriated revolutionaries across the empire. In response, the Moscow Soviet called for a general strike. Within ten days, thousands of armed Moscow workers took to the barricades.

“This time we're not alone,” read one pamphlet issued by the Bund, with an optimism verging on delusion. “The army is not against the people.... Whole battalions and regiments are aligned with us.”

The Odesa Soviet planned a solidarity strike for the Moscow uprising, and the party dispatched Medem to the city. He found Odesa's grand avenues hostile, its people still reeling from the pogroms that had left eight hundred dead. At the Bund's canteen, Medem's comrades prepared for the strike without enthusiasm. The memory of October's bloodshed was too fresh. The Odesa Soviet turned out to be a dozen Jewish nerds who gave passionate speeches about how Russian factory workers would walk off their jobs and join an armed demonstration in the heart of the city, but when the soviet called the strike, few workers listened. The strike fizzled. The city went under martial law.

Hunger stalked Odesa that winter. In workers' neighborhoods, Medem saw the ashen faces, with cheekbones that were too sharp. “The famished people would drop into a coffeehouse; the proprietor would allow them to warm themselves while they huddled in the corners and stared at food with hungry eyes,” he wrote. The revolutionary meetings stopped. The days drifted by, empty and few-tul, until the news came that the army had killed over a thousand workers to crush the Moscow rising.

Governments are machines far sturdier than most radicals imagine. The ecstasy of the street fades quickly. Cold sets in. Intellectuals dither. Respectable folk long for order. Daily life resumes, with its petty joys and wearisome practicalities. People need to eat. With the Saint Petersburg Soviet's leaders in prison, workers were adrift. They had a year of unemployment behind them, and the defeated Moscow uprising was a grim example of where armed resistance led. The uprising also scared the well-heeled liberals who once paid radicals like Trotsky to dazzle their party guests. For them, the existing regime was preferable to an anarchic uprising—especially now that Count Witte, ghostwriter of the October Manifesto, had been elevated to the role of de facto prime minister. Once the revolution's supporters split, the government swooped in to arrest, flog, and execute hundreds of suspected rebels.

Medem returned to Vilna. Only two weeks had passed, but the city was no longer his. The Intellectuals' Club closed its doors to the Bund, and the same crowds that had once fêted them now snubbed them as failures. A coachman explained it to Abramovich like so: "We understand the tsar, socialism, and solidarity, but a horse is still a horse. A horse wants oats, and the strike committee has no oats to give him."

Medem got to work on his newspaper. He tried to ignore the obvious. The revolution was dead.

On Monday, December 4, 1905, 125,000 eastern-European Jews converged on Rutgers Square, on the Lower East Side, to mourn their families murdered in Russian pogroms. They had walked for hours, in long columns, from the synagogues of Brownsville and Bushwick. They had sung their dirges on Meserole Street. They howled the whole length of the Williamsburg Bridge. Guys climbed the lampposts to get a better view. They would have seen an ocean of funeral black dotted with upside-down American flags and mourning banners. Led by the socialist congressional candidate Joseph Barondess, the mourners surged west to Broadway, where they shut down traffic, then north to Union Square. Thirteen hundred cops couldn't control them. Along the way, the band played the Dead Man's March. Every few blocks, they stopped to pray. This time, they didn't pray to free Egypt, as Meyer London had had them do a few months earlier. They prayed for their family and their friends. Their cries echoed for blocks.

“For many Jews inclined to socialism, [the pogroms] constituted a blow that tended to disorient them completely. They had awaited for years the advent of the great day of jubilee, and when it finally came it found itself drenched in rivers of innocent Jewish blood,” wrote Medem.

The pogroms forced Jewish socialists to face the hostility of much of the Christian working class. Jews and Christians had struck, demonstrated, and died together in 1905. They draped their friends' coffins in red flags and marched to the cemetery together, where they gave speeches together about the international brotherhood of working men. Then the pogroms began, and the Christian workers vanished or joined in. Historian Simon Dubnov described a sense of betrayal that the Bund's ideologues barely dared articulate. The workers and peasants across the Russian Empire who "broke Jewish heads, tore out children's eyes, raped women and cut them to pieces, were doing what their fathers and brothers did in years past and will do again in favorable circumstances." As for the Christian radicals who died defending Jewish neighborhoods? They were, Dubnov wrote, merely “wonderful exceptions to the miserable rule.”

I saw a glimpse of this when I walked around Lodz on a frigid Easter in 2022. The city was shut as tightly as it would have been for a general strike. When I turned down Revolution of 1905 Street, named for the moment when the Bund came closest to reaching its dreams, I noticed the buildings had been graffitied with dozens of six-pointed stars. I saw more stars in Baluty, the old Jewish workers' district, and over the streets that had once been the Bundist birzhes. The stars had been scrawled over Polish words I didn't understand, in such density and profusion that I soon lost count. Google told me what was going on. Before the war, Lodz's two football teams, Widzew and L.K.S, both had Jewish players. The Jews are gone now, but their memory remains, and each team's fans calls the others' fans "Jews" as an insult. When they see their rivals' graffiti, they paint a Jewish star over it. Sometimes the fans just spray-paint the star all by itself and write the Polish word for fuck next to it. Fuck [Jewish Star]. Fuck [Jewish Star]. The city does not bother to paint them over.

“I cannot but emphasize the great respect in which…Christian Lodz holds the Jews,” a correspondent from Iskra had written after the revolution of 1905. A lot can change in a century. I walked down Wschodnia street, my hands shoved in my pockets. I counted the six-pointed stars.

If this was eastern Europe, no wonder so many of us had decided to leave. Only a fool would try to free Egypt, many Jews reckoned. It was, after all, filled with drunken, violent Egyptians. New York beckoned from across the sea. One hundred twenty-five thousand Jews from the Russian Empire arrived in America in 1906. They filled the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, then overflowed east, turning Brownsville into a boomtown. In muddy Brooklyn lots, real estate hustlers threw up shacks to house these refugees. The next year, official efforts to restrict Jewish immigration began.

Around this time, Sam received a photo from his comrades back in Volkovysk. It was a beautiful thing, on embossed cardstock, and when I was a teenager, I hung it in my bedroom. I liked to make up stories about its subjects. The photo showed two rows of nerds, posed awkwardly in front of an ornate studio backdrop. They were not imposing figures, to say the least. They wore black peasant blouses that, when draped over their sloping shoulders, made them resemble seals. Their eyes cracked with mischief. Arrests dogged them. The police had shot their friend. The governor of their district decried the “endless looting and terrorist acts” done by Jewish criminals just like them. Judging from that photo, they remained unbowed. Soon, even these true believers were skipping town. Isadore Cohen and handsome Moishe Katriel both turned up on the East Side before the decade's end. The Volkovysk Revolutionary Union hobbled along, and even managed a costume ball in the winter of 1906, but their hearts were not in it. The New York present, of garment sweat-shops and modest union victories, held more promise than the fight for paradise in a Russian Empire that wanted them dead. The last mention I could find of the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union was in 1907, in The Forward. It was on a list of organizations who gave money to a strike fund. It didn't contribute much.

Sam was also coming apart. His stomach screamed. His joints ached. At first, he thought it was tuberculosis, but like most painters, he had lead poisoning. Too sick to work, he left for Norwich, Connecticut, where he got a job in the Davenport gun factory. He slipped from the record.

Part Two

Revolution

1960 to 1961

Chapter 8 Interregnum

(1906 to 1914)

Arkady Kremer

have been struck by how hard it is, from inside an uprising's nucleus, to even know when a revolutionary moment has passed," wrote Naomi Klein in her foreword to a book by the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El-Fattah. "Among core organizers there are still meetings, still strategy sessions, still hopes for a new opening just around the corner—it's only the masses of supporters who are mysteriously absent." She could have been speaking about what happened after the revolution of 1905.

In the two years that followed the October Manifesto, the tsarist government arrested thousands of people. One of them was the Bund's founder, Arkady Kremer. In 1907, a decade after he had launched the Bund in a safe-house attic, a Vilna court charged Arkady as leader of an illegal political organization. Pati stepped in to save him. A wealthy family friend presented the judge with an affidavit, swearing that Arkady was an itinerant salesman for his dental equipment company and not the wandering revolutionary that they imagined. She offered a bribe to assuage any last-minute doubts. Her maneuvering worked. After a few months of pretrial detention, Arkady was free. As he stepped past the stone walls of Lukiskes prison, he might have taken stock of his life. He was middle-aged, with a wife he seldom saw and a young daughter he barely knew. He had given the last two decades to a revolution that had failed. With a self-awareness rare in leaders, Kremer understood that he had little to offer in whatever battles would come next. In his speech resigning from the Bund's central committee, he said that the new era needed an orator, a great intellectual, or a military man. He was none of the above. He asked to resume the trade that he had learned as a young outlaw. Arkady Kremer became a typesetter for a Bundist newspaper. He and Pati would never live apart again.

The party tried to keep going, even as its best leaders quit or fled to New York. Frustrated young people picked up the guns they had been sent for self-defense and instead embarked on countless robberies—expropriations, in revolutionary parlance. Leadership disapproved, but the kids did it anyway. Who could blame them? They wanted to bring the exhilaration of the past into their drab and compromised present. Mostly, people quit. The Bund had thirty thousand members in 1906. By 1910, this number had plummeted to 609.

Vladimir Medem

Medem had not imagined things going like this in 1906, when the Bund appointed him to the central committee. Then, he had relished the convivial warmth of the Bund's Vilna office on Chopin Street, where he edited a newspaper with Abramovich. But after the government began to yank back the meager freedoms that the October Manifesto promised, things soured fast.

Funds ran out. Subscribers dwindled. Writers couldn't be paid. Despite the supposed freedom of the press that followed the October Manifesto, police shut down each Bundist paper after a few issues. Once, Medem arrived late to an editorial meeting, only to find that cops had arrested his entire staff. Pushed by police repression on one side and the competition from Zionist and Orthodox Jewish parties on the other, the Bund turned away from thoughts of revolution and instead tried to organize and elevate ordinary life. They set up unions, which engaged in a series of disastrous strikes that failed to win any pay raises. They stood candidates for local elections, which they mostly lost to their more religious rivals. They worked with aid societies. They helped build secular Jewish schools. They participated in Yiddish conferences. With the support of their old enemies, the Bolsheviks, they even rejoined the R.S.D.L.P. None of this helped them hold on to their membership.

With most of his friends abroad or in jail, Medem was often alone in Vilna. He sat in the empty safe house that had once swarmed with comrades from other cities. He was broke. The party had no money to support him, and he couldn't get a job, since he was living on false papers. He felt like a burden. His memories of Western Europe beckoned him back. When Medem arrived in Berlin in 1908, he expected his trip to last the summer. He ended up staying in Exileland for years. Hundreds of Russian radicals did the same. Why not? It was a good time for a breather. Europe had been at peace for decades. The old cosmopolitan empires held sway. In countries grown prosperous with wealth stolen from their colonies, taboos were shattered, and culture reached a dazzling refinement. The old coexisted with the new. Gustave Klimt painted golden vamps in the Habsburg capital. In Paris, Picasso and Braque violently deconstructed bodies into cubes. Their figures' painted contortions echoed those of the dancers in Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. A thousand isms bloomed. Literary. Artistic. Political. On a single street, Freud could squeeze past Trotsky. At the British Library, Aleister Crowley and Lenin might have battled for a chair. When I read memoirs of this time, life seems rich as molten chocolate. Why would anyone want to change anything, I asked myself, even if they were a revolutionary? If I were in Medem's place, I would have sunk into those European days, like I sank into the subversive bohemias of New York, London, and Istanbul. I would have forgone all utopian aspirations for the actual paradise right there, in, say, Vienna. Fuck the dialectic. Give me fine words and coffee topped with whipped cream, radical journals spread over the bar of an underground nightclub, speeches whose primary purpose was to impress a fan dancer, not a gaggle of the most disagreeable men in the world. That would have been enough for me. Medem shared my hunger for beauty. "I would hurl myself like a ravenous creature, at...the cultural riches of those European capitals," he wrote. Opera, theater, galleries, yes, but other entertainments as well. In Berlin, he saw a poster for an appearance by Saharat, one of the faux-Oriental dancers popular at the time. He rushed off to the Wintergarten to watch her. later." Yet it was never enough. He was a star speaker, an idol for the students in the Russian colonies that he toured, but beneath this, he was deeply depressed. Though the Bund had rejoined the R.S.D.L.P, most of the larger party's energy was taken up with verbal knife fights between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, or between Lenin and other Bolsheviks, or between Trotsky and everyone else. Rumors and counteraccusations flew. It all disgusted Medem. His kidney disease worsened. Still young, he felt the paralyzing imminence of death. He pictured his future self, poisoned by his own body. More and more, he locked himself in his room.

Perhaps there was additional reason for his sadness. Nothing is more temporary than a paradise, and there is no garden without a snake. Writers like to trot out the Gramsci quote: “The Old World is dying, and the new world waiting to be born. The interregnum is the time of monsters.” Maybe, when Medem looked out at the hopeful faces that filled the lecture halls of Exileland outposts from Paris to Berne to Berlin, he realized that none of it could last. This was the interregnum. The monsters may not have been obvious, what with the chestnut trees, the sunlight, and the Seine, but they would reveal themselves soon enough. And they would not be strangers either.

Brooklyn

Sam did not last long at the Davenport gun factory. After two years of Connecticut exile, he returned to New York around 1908 and planted himself in the East Side's overflow room—the recently Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg.

Sam took up residence in the very neighborhood, South Williamsburg, where I write these words. He sauntered beneath the same elevated train tracks that I do, squeezed past the same sorts of hawkers, and sidestepped similar piles of trash. As soon as Sam snagged a room, the quest for rent began. First, he found a plumber to take him on as an apprentice. When union members ran him off the job, he tried his hand at day labor. Armed with a wheelbarrow, he hauled bricks on construction sites in Harlem. This time, he had better luck and was promoted to watchman.

At night, in mansions still coated with construction dust, Sam finally had space to draw. He was alone. No one could tell him to stop. He used scrap lumber for paper, a burned stick for a pen. He carved creatures from wood. He doodled into wet plaster. He discovered his artistic voice. After a year of Sam's solitary practice, the master builder found his graffiti. It must have been good. Rather than kick him off the job, he told Sam he was wasting his talent. "You're an artist, Rothbort," he said. Overhearing the master builder's praise, a Hungarian painter named Stein asked Sam if he'd like to become his apprentice. You can carry my bag, Stein offered. Sam enthusiastically agreed.

Sam and Rose

Not long afterward, Sam met Rose Kravitz at a friend's house in Williamsburg. She was only eighteen, a sweat-shop seamstress, and had arrived two years earlier, from a shtetl not far from Volkovysk called Lunna Wola. As a child, I marveled at the romance of her hometown's name. Luna. Moon. I imagined a Marc Chagall sort of wonderland, celestial, pearlescent—not the cluster of dilapidated shacks that I later found in old photos. Years later, I learned Lunna's name came not from the moon but from lunas, an old Baltic word for mud. In comparison, Volkovysk might as well have been Constantinople. Rose would have known about the Bund, since their battle squad attacked the Lunna post office a year before she left for America.

Rose had flushed cheeks, luxuriant hair, and the round black eyes of a Scottish Fold cat. Sam looked at her breasts. He thought of an afternoon, years earlier, after he finished a mural in the office of a Lower East Side fortune teller. The man offered to tell his future. “There's a girl for you with beautiful mamtakim”—Yiddish for sweets, money, or tits—the fortune teller pronounced. Rose had no sweets, and no money, but otherwise, she fit the description.

At twenty-six, Sam at last had something to offer. His apprenticeship with Stein led to a stint with a legendary decorator, Gordon the Bum. The name was fitting. Gordon, Sam wrote, “worked me for eight months but only paid me for three weeks.” Still, the exposure led to better things. Soon, Sam was climbing forty-foot extension ladders to adorn the ceilings of mansions all over East Harlem. He painted George Washington, grapes, nymphs. He copied Michelangelo. He filled a pastry bag with plaster and squeezed out rosettes in rococo efflorescence. It was a time before “the beautiful classic disappeared, and the modern went to a world unknown,” he later wrote.

Rose's family quickly arranged a marriage.

Vladimir and Gina

So much about Vladimir Medem's marriage to Gina Bizenzwieg remains a mystery. Daughter of a wealthy Lodz family, Gina joined the Bund in her teens. She first heard Medem speak during a visit to Switzerland in 1903, but groupies surrounded him, and she couldn't get close. They ran into each other over the years at parties, where they flirted audaciously. She relished his attention—he was, after all, a star—but the thought of getting close frightened her. Marriage to a famous man meant endless sacrifice, and she had no desire to subdue her own confident vivacity. One afternoon the pair sat at a café in the mountains outside Geneva. For the first time, Medem revealed the gravity of his kidney disease, telling her he only had a few more years to live. She didn't know what to say. "I will never let you be alone," she had blurted out. The 1905 revolution came, as if to save her from her hasty promise. They both returned to the Russian Empire, where she organized factories, was arrested, and spent eight months in a Lodz jail.

She ran into Medem again four years later, in 1909, at Lake Maggiore, in southern Switzerland. She was on vacation with her student friends, and he, fresh off the Vilna disaster, asked to join them. The pair strolled through vineyards heavy with blood-dark grapes. They rowed a sailboat out to islands with musical names, like Isola Madre and Isola Bella, and watched the white peacocks strut over the steps of ancient palaces beneath the harvest moon.

On the boat back to Geneva, Medem's illness returned. This, more than the lakeside romance, set Gina down her path. Like so many formidable women in eras hostile to female ambition, she decided to make Medem her project. He could "give so much to the world if there was someone else who would renounce a normal, healthy life, and all the experiments and journeys," she later wrote. That someone would be her.

Everyone opposed their marriage. “You're too young to end up a nurse,” warned a mutual friend. Medem's family was still Christian and didn't want him to marry a Jew. Nor did her family want a “goyish” revolutionary for a son-in-law. Medem's father had baptized him into the Russian Orthodox Church, which didn't permit intermarriage. To marry Gina, the famous orator of the Jewish Labor Bund converted to Lutheranism.

For Medem, these were years of fervent productivity, when he made his name as a theoretician. He churned out essays on Jewish history, identity, and the Yiddish language. In response to both Zionism and the demands of European societies that Jews assimilate completely to earn acceptance, he defined the Bund's philosophy of diasporic nationalism, in which Jews could preserve their cultures in the countries where they lived, rather than building a far-off ethnostate in Palestine. Inevitably, his kidney disease attacked. More doctors. More bills. All the things that made Gina herself—her revolutionary activities, her flirtations, her friends and family—became subservient to caring for the Great Man. While Medem posed at the podiums of innumerable party conferences, she tried to scrape together rent. She grew to dislike the Bund, though her memoirs do not specify the reasons—beyond claiming a certain coldness on the party's part, incidents of carelessness or selfishness. Perhaps they just treated her like Medem's wife.

In the spring of 1912, the party sent Medem to Vienna to edit a new newspaper called Lebens-Fragen that would be published out of Warsaw. Though the Bund intended Lebens-Fragen to be a legal periodical, Warsaw police quickly arrested its entire staff. Medem didn't think much of it at the time. He was too enraptured with the Habsburg capital. It appeared to him a cosmopolitan wonderland. The city's Germans, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Bosnians, and Jews seemed to live together in idyllic harmony, the peace barely ruffled by the occasional protests held by insignificant groups of racists, who, Medem imagined, would never attain power.

Thanks to government missteps, the Bund was on the rise again. That year, tsarist troops massacred over two hundred striking workers at the Lena goldfields, and the public outrage that followed brought new members to the party. The next year, in 1913, a Kyiv court tried a Jewish factory foreman named Mendel Beilis on the sensational charge of ritual murder. On the orders of the justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov, the empire's top prosecutors claimed Beilis had stabbed an adolescent Christian boy in order to use his blood for sinister religious rites that their star witness, an alcoholic Lithuanian priest, claimed were mandated by the Talmud. Shcheglovitov hoped the Beilis trial would redirect popular anger toward pogroms. It backfired. On the trial's first day, the Bund launched protest strikes across the empire. Their defense of the innocent Beilis won them thousands of new recruits. The foreign press saw the trial as a classic example of Russia's medieval backwardness. Their articles made the tsarist regime into the laughingstock of Western Europe and America. Brilliant defense lawyers browbeat the prosecution's witnesses, trapping them in webs of contradictions. After a few hours' deliberation, the jury acquitted Beilis, who quickly fled to New York.

In Vienna, Medem sat at the legendary cafés, contentedly writing up the Bund's latest victories and translating articles on the Balkan Wars across the border. Gina didn't share his enchantment. She had no friends in Vienna. Her whole family was in Lodz, where Medem, with his open warrant, could not travel, and where he, ill and needy, would not even permit her to visit. At last, the isolation was too much. She gave him an ultimatum. She would kill herself unless they returned to the Russian Empire.

Abramovich warned Medem not to cross the border, saying that when the police caught him, they'd ship him to Siberia. But Medem ignored his old friend. He and Gina boarded a train toward the Russian Empire at the end of 1913. Maybe this time things would work out better. Maybe this time it would feel like home.

I have a photo of Sam and Rose from the early days of their marriage hanging in my bedroom. They are glamorous, as people from the past often are. She wears a stole of murdered minks, heads and all, around her slender shoulders, and her face is topped with a plumed picture hat. With his bowler, Sam looks almost bourgeois. This photo would have been taken during the years when they hopscotched through tenements around Brooklyn's chaotic Broadway Triangle.

In 1911, Rose gave birth to their first child, a boy named Henry. She persuaded Sam to leave their pestilent little apartment behind and go in with three other families on a dairy farm in the Catskills. A few notes left by Sam reveal that the land provided none of the consolations he had hoped for. With forty cows to milk each day, the couples began to bicker, and within a few years, the farming experiment collapsed. The Rothborts returned to Brooklyn in 1913. Rose may have been pregnant again, this time with my great-aunt Ida.

By then, New York's Jewish left was teeming with Sam's old comrades. The failed 1905 revolution had pushed thousands of Bundist refugees to the city, and in the intervening years, they'd managed to find their legs. Bundists dominated the Workmen's Circle, a socialist mutual aid society. With fifty-nine thousand members in hundreds of branches across America and Canada, the Workmen's Circle catered to every aspect of life—cultural, economic, and social. They provided medical insurance, old age homes, and burial plots. Thousands of children studied at their secular Yiddish schools. Flush with success, the Workmen's Circle swallowed up radical grouplets like the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union, which celebrated its induction as an official Workmen's Circle branch by printing new membership cards in gold.

Other former Bundists rose to lead equally powerful organizations. Sidney Hillman, boss of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, had led the Bund's first May Day demonstration in Kovno. David Dubinsky, boss of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, had helped the Bundist bakers' union in Lodz before moving to America. Trained since their teens in the discipline of smuggled pamphlets, illegal marches, and prison cells, they found conditions more congenial in America. By 1914, their two groups represented over a hundred thousand workers between them and had wrung concessions from employers through massive strikes. Victory had a moderating effect.

Revolution might have been the only choice when they lived under the hemophiliac Romanov autocracy. In America, they could strike and vote. For the moment, this seemed sufficient. Here where they lived was their country.

That is not to say that New York's socialist Jews forgot about the There of Russia. It was their birthplace, after all. They supported Russian insurrectionists with such brio that the Okhrana sent secret agents to monitor their activities. Hundreds attended the Bund's annual summer picnic in Liberty Park. Thousands marched on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. When Russian revolutionaries visited New York, they were received ecstatically. People packed lecture halls to see the Bundist orator Maxime, a bookworm who had won over Riga's railway workers and so seized control of the city during the 1905 revolution. They applied their values to their new home; in 1908, when a white mob attacked Black people in Springfield, Illinois, Yiddish dailies didn't merely condemn the "pogrom"; they urged street protests and collected donations for survivors. But their milieu combined radical beliefs with a surprising American patriotism. Old Glory waved alongside the red flag. Street parades marked May Day and the anniversaries of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the assassination of Alexander 2, as well as the Fourth of July. They sang their ballad, "Women Workers," which implored women to emulate Hesya Helfman, the seamstress who helped to kill Tsar Alexander 2, then followed up with "The Star-Spangled Banner."

In these years, Jews flocked to the powerful Socialist Party of America, whose 113,000 members made it one of the largest socialist movements in the world. In the 1912 presidential election, its candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received nine hundred thousand votes, an astounding 6 percent of the popular vote. Over the next few years, Jewish districts in New York elected ten socialist assemblymen, seven socialist city councilmen, and one socialist municipal judge.

By the time the 1914 congressional elections rolled around, excitement among New York's Jewish neighborhoods was at a boil. The last time, Tammany Hall's man, Henry Goldfogle, had managed to squeak into office through a combination of ballot forgery and physical attacks on rival organizers, but Jewish leftists resolved not to let him win again. The socialist candidate was Meyer London, now a beloved labor lawyer, who had represented fifty thousand cloak makers during their victorious strike of 1910. To defend London's voters, the unions organized their workers to fight off Tammany thugs at the poll sites. "Don't worry about Goldfogle's pathetic little gang," promised The Forward. "It's all been taken care of. [They] won't dare to make a peep."

On election night, fifty thousand people gathered in front of the new Forward Building at 175 East Broadway to wait for the results. The building itself seemed like a harbinger of triumph. Constructed only two years before, the beaux arts wonder towered over the surrounding slums like a narrow wedding cake. It was the first skyscraper on the Lower East Side. Above the doorway glowered carved busts of Marx, Engels, Lasalle, and a bearded man who could have been either August Bebel or Karl Liebknecht, but no one was quite sure. The Workmen's Circle, the Farband, and the United Hebrew Trades all had offices there. "Where is the synagogue of our Jewish workers? Where is the temple of freedom, of equality, of brotherhood?" Abe Cahan had asked. This was it. Forward staffers used a magic lantern to project the election results from each district on the building's walls. Each time London's tally rose, the crowd broke into cheers. A Forward writer spotted many Bundists among the crowd. One said to another it felt "exactly like the October days" of the revolution nine years prior, which is to say, the days before the defeat. At two A.M., there were no more districts to count. London had won. Screams, kisses, the chords of "The Marseillaise." In the stinking East Side, the air itself seemed perfumed with victory.

When London arrived at four A.M., supporters carried him on their shoulders to the Forward Building, where he addressed the crowds. He was a small, bespectacled man with a professorial mien, but in the sketch that appeared the next morning on the front page of The Forward, he towered over Rutgers Square like the colossus.

Sam Rothbort

When Sam came back to New York, he turned his full attention to art. He seldom slept more than four hours a night. He began painting the city in a postimpressionist impasto. The bathers in Coney Island. The ice skaters. Rose's profile, her chin now round from motherhood. She encouraged his art. Paints came before shoes, she said.

He began to exhibit his work at the Forward Building. When the Brotherhood of Painters and Decorators at last permitted Jewish members, Sam joined Local 992 in Brownsville, where he took newly arrived Bundists under his wing. He made his living painting murals in bordellos and funeral parlors, mansions and Williamsburg slums. Cupids flew in lazy circles. Sometimes he gave them his daughter Ida's face. As he painted, he wondered how such delicate wings could hold aloft the tubby cupids. Then again, these were the golden days of the interregnum, a time when even fat little babies could fly.

Chapter 9 Collapse

(1914 to 1916)

Homecoming

M Edem crossed the border without incident. Gina had gone ahead to Warsaw, and he was probably grateful for the time alone. He stopped in Kovno, where his brother lived, and where he hoped to put his papers in order. He was happy to be back. As he rested at his brother's flat, he realized the weight of his homesickness, and his relief to have it gone. The fifth day after his arrival, he attended a lavish party thrown by his brother's in-laws. It was a vodka-soaked debauch, where celebrants gorged themselves, danced, and toasted long into the night. Medem staggered to bed just before dawn, hoping to pass out for eternity.

His brother woke him up an hour later. The cops were outside, and they had a warrant.

The police led Medem through the sleeping city. It was too bright. He shut his eyes, but the sun pounded on his eyelids. He wasn't afraid. This wasn't his first ride. What was the worst they could do? Kick him out of Russia? Only one detail of the warrant made him pause: it was signed by a magistrate in Warsaw.

What did they want with him in Warsaw? His mind went back to the previous year, when Warsaw cops had raided the Bund's newspaper, Lebensfragen, which Medem edited from Vienna. They had arrested the staff, but arrests were so frequent that he hadn't given it much thought at the time. He didn't know about the letters police had discovered in one of the defendants' homes. She must have saved them out of sentimentality. A decade old, they detailed every drama, feud, and fuck among the radical set in the Swiss student colonies, with special attention to Vladimir Medem, whom she identified by his legal name as a leader of the Bund. The Warsaw magistrate sent out orders for Medem's arrest on charges of membership to an illegal organization.

When Medem had come back to Kovno, his brother wasn't the only one waiting.

Medem entered the cell. The iron door clanged shut behind him. He let himself collapse onto the cot. Head pounding, mouth still dry from last night's vodka, he fell into an unquiet sleep.

He passed the next five months in cells like this, first in Kovno, then inside the whitewashed walls of the Tenth Pavilion, a prison housed in the Warsaw Citadel, in a monotony that was only tolerable because he forced himself to conform to its rhythms. Ritual was the key to sanity, Medem knew. He would be disciplined. He would not think about the future. He would take each day as if it were his first and his last. Straighten up the cell. Guard your clothes so no one steals them during bath time. Preserve any small object—soap sliver, button—like it was a diamond. Tolerate the morons. Watch the snitches. Organize a protest for the poor guy stuck in solitary. Find your comrades—one of his cellmates was a barely educated young Bundist named Bernard Goldstein who bore a terrifying scar across his face. Eavesdrop on the conversations that prisoners tap out on walls in their special prisoners' morse code. One tap means a. Two taps mean b. Each tap is a second. Sixty taps in a minute. Three hundred and sixty taps in an hour. Eight thousand six hundred forty taps in a day. Tap tap tap.

The lawyer came every other week, with cheerful updates about his prospects.

Gina came every other week. She blamed everyone but herself.

So it went. Tap tap tap. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Until one balmy afternoon in June, when Gina told him that Austria's archduke, Franz Ferdinand, had taken a wrong turn in Sarajevo, into an unplanned encounter with Gavrilo Princip, teenage assassin for Serbia's ultranationalist Black Hand Society.

Medem closed his eyes. The snares of alliances and counteralliances, pan-Slavic loyalties and mutual defense pacts, appeared with all their idiot logic, leading to a conclusion so obvious that he didn't need to wait for whatever pompous announcement the government would issue later.

Three shots. Russia was at war.

The Great War

The Great War began with all the inevitability of a Grecian play. After Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, with the help of its ally Germany. Bristling from defeats in the Balkan Wars, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire soon joined up on Austria's side. These four states comprised the Central Powers. Meanwhile, mutual defense pacts with Serbia pulled England, France, and the tsarist empire into the war. They were known as the Allies.

Most Europeans thought the conflict would be over by Christmas. They had not yet been on the receiving end of industrial warfare. For decades, they had done their killing in the colonies—turning their poison gas and machine guns on Africans armed with ancient rifles. Now everyone—banker and trashman, poet and line cook—itched to bring that murder home. War would be an adventure, Europeans thought. It would wipe out the decadence. Make men manly. Put women in their place. Even European workers thought this way. European workers' parties followed.

The Second International, the worldwide organization of socialist parties, of which the Bund was a member, was supposed to prevent wars like this. Yet it collapsed like a meringue on a humid day. First, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the biggest, most powerful socialist party in Europe, betrayed Marx's adage that the working man had no country and voted to fund their country's war. Socialist parties in the other belligerent countries followed. In France, England, Belgium, Austria, and so on, socialists turned their backs on long-held ideals of international brotherhood and instead threw themselves into nationalist hallucinations, somehow blind to where they would lead.

Things didn't go well for socialists who foresaw the coming catastrophe. Some antiwar intellectuals were merely kicked out of their current countries. of exile. Take Leon Trotsky, who had settled in Paris after a dramatic escape from Siberian exile. After the war, the French government deported him; our man landed in the Bronx. Others, like the brilliant critic of the Bund Rosa Luxembourg, were locked in jail for pacifism. And these were the lucky ones. The famed socialist leader Jean Jaurès had sought to avert France's entry into the conflict. He was dining at Montmartre's Café du Croissant when a nationalist shot him in the back; a Parisian jury declared his murderer innocent of any crime.

The war divided Russian socialists into three camps. There were the defencists, who believed Russia needed to be defended against Germany, and thus wanted to continue the war. There were the internationalists, who called for an immediate end to the war, without victors or victims, but had only vague ideas on how to get there. The Bund's 1914 statement is typical of this view. "International socialists must strive to put an end to this bloodbath" by putting pressure on the warring governments to make a peace without annexations or indemnities. "Down with the war. Long live international brotherhood."

Finally, revolutionary defeatists wanted Russia to lose so the war between nations would become a war between classes. This unpopular approach was championed by Vladimir Lenin.

The war spelled the end of the freewheeling Exileland in which Medem had come of age. His Vienna was gone. No coffeehouse, no polyglot spread of newspapers, no Kaiserschmarrn, no espresso topped with crème Chantilly. A wartime capital had no place for rootless radicals like his friends. Bundists fled Austria for neutral countries. Those who stayed ended up in prison camps. As the weeks passed, the carefully constructed idylls of retired revolutionaries turned into cages. Take the Kremers, now a decade into a new life in Provence. Arkady was an engineer. Pati raised their daughter, Vera, a precocious teenaged artist, comme une francaise. When they had begun their life in France, they were only a train ride from their Vilna family, but the war began, and the borders rose like brambles. They and their loved ones might as well have been on opposite sides of the earth.

These were metaphorical prisons, while Medem sat in the real thing. His thoughts didn't revolve around geopolitics or international brotherhood, but around a single question: Would the war set him free?

The war was a disaster for every Russian revolutionary party, but it hit the Bund hardest.

Overnight, the government banned the Yiddish press. The military drafted four hundred thousand Jews, including many of the Bund's best activists, while police rounded up leaders like Mark Liber in the wave of arrests that accompanied mobilization.

The Pale of Settlement was now a front line, and the military viewed its five million Jewish inhabitants as potential spies. Fearing Jews would assist the advancing enemy armies, the empire's top general ordered mass deportations east, to central Russia. Within months, over two hundred thousand people were made homeless. Often, they had as little as twelve hours to pack and could take only what they could carry. “Go to Palestine” jeered their Christian neighbors as the Jews waited at the rail stations. These neighbors then looted their homes.

Jews were emptied from Grodno, from Dvinsk, from Kovno, onto cattle cars moving east. They were disgorged into towns in central Russia, far outside their former area of confinement. Though they were impoverished and despised by their new neighbors, they might have noticed one ironic upside to current events. For two hundred years, Jews had been trapped in the Pale of Settlement. Now, by order of Tsar Nicholas 2, the borders of the Pale had been demolished, if not in law, then in reality.

Pogrom

Through the autumn of 1914, the Russian army advanced into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They marched into the provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, where nine hundred thousand Jews had enjoyed quasi-equality for the past two centuries under liberal Habsburg rule. This ended overnight. Jews were fired from their government jobs, their land stolen, and their businesses sacked. The poet S. An-sky used his job as an aid worker to chronicle the atrocities. In one torched synagogue, An-sky wrote, “the corners of the room and the adjoining chapels were fouled, not by horses but by people. They turned a temple into a latrine.”

Most Russian army pogroms started with an accusation. A Jew fired at soldiers from his window. A Jew communicated with the Austrians via a radio hidden inside his beard. Murder, rape, and robbery followed. In Volkovysk, survivors told S. An-sky that the army had driven Jews into the market square—the same market square where Sam Rothbort watched his mother sell her wares—and forced them to strip naked and ride on pigs. Soldiers finished them off with machine guns.

I don't know if Volkovysk's Christians took part in these amusements, but in village after town after bustling city, pogroms unfolded with local help. Christians told the army which property belonged to Jews. They watched their neighbors, who bought their grain and mended their pants and flirted with their brothers, get their teeth knocked out with rifle butts, and after the army took their neighbors hostage, these Christians walked through the busted doors of their vacant homes and loaded their bags with as much loot as they could carry.

Austrian Jews fled en masse from the conquered provinces: to Vienna and Budapest.

Hobbled by wartime repression, its local branches isolated from each other by the shifting front, the Bund tried to protest. On hidden printing presses, they churned out illicit broadsheets to condemn the massacres. In free Geneva, the Bund's foreign committee appealed to socialist parties and to the citizens of the world for solidarity against the violence. They got some statements of support, but little else. Inside Russia, party activists threw themselves into aid for the displaced. They set up tea houses, canteens, and work bureaus. These were not only for Jews. Longstanding German communities were also deported under suspicion of espionage, and the Bund extended them help. When Yiddish schools sprang up to educate displaced kids, Bundists signed on as teachers. Twenty-five thousand children were enrolled in these schools over the next few years. Despite their socialist, secular ideology, the Bund took part in the larger Jewish aid organizations alongside Zionists and rich businessmen. Here where they lived was their country, they said, no matter how much events tested this conviction.

Evacuation

Despite his hopes, the war didn't bring Medem freedom. A few days after mobilization began, a guard told Medem to collect his things. The Tenth Pavilion was being vacated. Prisoners would be sent to the interior. Medem boarded the prison wagon to a fortress in another city. Then another. Then another.

Through smuggled newspapers, guards' chatter, and the reports of new detainees, Medem began to grasp what had befallen his country. In sweltering cattle cars too crowded to sit or lie down in, the men gossiped to distract themselves from thirst. What was happening outside? Stories flew about barricades in Saint Petersburg and labor disturbances in Berlin. Could this be a revolutionary moment bigger than 1905? The train stopped at a station jammed with soldiers, as unfree and interchangeable as the prisoners themselves. When the soldiers filed past, one prisoner whispered, “Comrades! The German workers don't want to fight! They've already gone on strike.” “Let them strike...We'll march to Berlin and finish them off,” the soldier laughed. No, Medem thought, revolution is not in the cards.

Orel

When Medem arrived in Orel prison, it was already packed with hundreds of men like him taken from Polish prisons near the front. At first, he bristled at the company. He was a political prisoner, and thus slightly higher in the prison hierarchy, yet he was forced to share a cell with hooligans so filthy they could pull clumps of lice out of their pockets. But prison exerts an equalizing effect. Those men had nothing, and neither did he. Guards had long since stolen their money. Medem had prepared for this eventuality by hiding a roll of bills inside his shoe, but the guards stole his shoes.

Every few weeks, they moved him on. Sometimes east, sometimes west toward Warsaw. The cycle pointlessly repeated. The men lined up for transfer. The warden barked. The men stripped. The guards' fingers went on his dick, in his ass. They searched his clothes for cigarettes. Then came slaps. Then shackles. Then the trip to nowhere, to do it all again. “One became a minuscule element in the vast pile of gray human dust.... As if by a gigantic steam shovel, this dust pile was scooped into an amorphous heap...shoved into filthy prison cars...swept apart, lumped together in a new pile,” Medem wrote. He tried to cling to his old self—the star orator, the aristocratic aesthete, the radical students' idol—but each day it slipped further away.

To keep sane, he tried to control what he could. He was one of thirty-five men in a cell made for nine, and bedbugs carpeted the floor. The old-timers just let the bugs suck their sores, but Medem refused. Twice a day, he stripped naked and crushed any eggs they had laid in his clothing. These bug hunts improved his spirits. Many prisoners have told me that the key to survival is the achievement of small goals.

Peregrinations

Smolensk. Orel. Orel. Smolensk. Back to Warsaw. The authorities shuffled Vladimir Medem this way and that. Slowly the superiority he felt as a political prisoner disappeared, and he began to realize he was just a victim among victims, snatched capriciously by a machine. He listened to his cellmates' stories. The authorities told some Polish peasants to form a militia against the Germans, then arrested them for forming a militia. They held Ukrainian day laborers over expired passports. They picked up lunatics for no reason and held them until they'd accumulated enough lunatics to justify hiring a specialist to take them all to an asylum in Moscow. They carted off little boys as enemy combatants, just because of their German ethnicity. Medem didn't favor the innocent over the guilty. One of his best friends was a Persian murderer who played a good game of dominos. Medem admired the professional thieves for their camaraderie and dash. Unlike the innocents, they entered the cells with their heads high and immediately divvied up their tobacco according to strict codes of solidarity. They saw theft as a trade like any other. “Someone's got to steal,” one said. “And here I am. That someone is me.” Medem found them more moral than most respectable people. No prisoner ever cared that he was a Jew.

His kidneys got worse. He could no longer hold down prison food. When it was time to scrub the floors, he sat in bed and smoked, and his weakness was so obvious that his cellmates picked up the slack. Or perhaps it was the force of his personality. "Style can become a sort of moral courage," Edmund White wrote of Jean Cocteau, and I would say the same about Vladimir Medem. Fellow prisoners described him as an aristocrat, so determined was he to cling to any bit of culture that survived in the archipelago of cages. Somehow, he procured literary magazines from avant-garde Saint Petersburg. He played chess expertly with pieces made from chewed-up bread, and he sang Russian duets from memory with the communists. He gave fabulous lectures in which he detailed the proposals from the last congress of the Bund in Vilna. Perhaps he read their statements aloud. "The fight against tsarist reaction is, for the Jewish worker, a fight for life, in the purest sense of the word," etcetera The imprisoned workers were so impressed that they wouldn't even let him carry the toilet bucket.

Warsaw

In May 1915, nearly two years after his arrest, the Warsaw judge gave him a sentence. Four years' hard labor in leg irons. The amount of time didn't matter, Medem knew. With his disease, he'd never leave prison alive.

Medem's only hope was the Germans. That summer, they were moving fast. The German army booted Russia out of Galicia and Bukovina, then kept going until they had pushed into Poland. The Russian press blamed Jews for the defeats, and the Russian military pogromed as it retreated.

Each day, the Germans moved closer to Warsaw, bringing with them Medem's chance of freedom. Each day, the Russians shipped more prisoners to the interior. Medem watched these men line up by the hundreds in the prison courtyard. Some were his friends. But sick prisoners were not supposed to travel, and Medem was sicker than ever. Thanks to Gina's bribes, he lay alone in the nearly vacant prison hospital. Just when he let himself hope he'd outlast the Russian army, guards threw him on a wagon to another Warsaw prison. This time, they promised, they'd send him somewhere he'd never escape.

Medem and his cellmates became experts in divination, scrying meaning in the mysterious rumbles that might have been artillery shells. The Russian guards left, to be replaced by a Polish citizens committee, but they could still come back. Vladimir Medem pictured the bridges over Warsaw's Vistula River. Prisoners crossed those bridges to get to the train station. As long as they stood, he wasn't free.

The night of August 4, pandemonium broke out. Gunfire. Cannon shriek. Medem, a revolutionary who plotted to bring down the state but who mostly wrote pamphlets, had never heard such fury in his life. Despite the instinctual horror in his body, he was seized with desperate joy. He grabbed his cellmate's hands so tightly he could feel the other man's pulse. They waited to hear the mines planted on bridges across the Vistula River that the Russian army would detonate behind them when they fled. The sun rose. The mines boomed. The bridges collapsed into the water. There was no way back to Russia.

The Polish guards put on civilian clothes. Shrapnel whistled overhead as the Russians fired from the other side of the river. A shell hit near the prison. The walls shook. Medem braced. Would the machine get him in the end? It would not. Call it God, or chance, or the dialectical forces of history, but for the first time in his life, Medem was exactly where he needed to be. The shells stopped. The prison administrator came in and told the men that the Germans had ordered their release. “Gentlemen, you are free.”

Medem walked out the open gates. Except for a few German military trucks, the streets were empty. A drizzle fell. The patter of raindrops mixed with gunfire. Gina was there waiting for him.

Later, at a sumptuous dinner with her family, he looked out the window and thought how miraculous it was that there was no one to prevent him from escaping into the streets of Warsaw. He took Gina's arm. They walked out the door, into the occupied city, the Paris of the East, guarded by a mermaid with a sword. By this time, millions had died in the war, and Medem owed his freedom to the occupation army. It didn't matter. The pair would seize delight, even in the midst of the apocalypse. They walked wherever they wanted. They walked until they could walk no more.

Chapter I.O

Revolutionary Ecstasies

(January–April 1917)

Sophia Dubnova

Ofia Dubnova began the year 1917 in a state of fraught expectation. At thirty-two, she lived the delicious but sometimes contradictory life of an artist revolutionary. The favorite daughter of the renowned Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, Sophia grew up in Vilna. She had scored a lucky university placement in Saint Petersburg, only to be expelled for signing a petition against the war with Japan. At nineteen, she joined the Bund. She agitated in small towns under false identities, smuggled pamphlets between cities by taping them to her body to mimic a pregnant belly, and incited mutiny in the Grodno army garrison. (Her soldier boys were later shot.) She spent the halcyon year of 1910 in Parisian Exileland, where she studied literature at the Sorbonne and participated in the internecine political dramas that played out across the tables of the Taverne du Panthéon. The Bund once chose her to speak at a memorial for the Paris Commune. Lenin preceded her on the podium. He didn't speak about the commune, but instead about the mechanics of revolution. An uprising might break out from the unthinking energies of millions of people, he said, but to become something more, it needed to be shaped by history's priests—career revolutionaries like himself. At the time, Sophia didn't dwell on his words.

In Paris, she reunited with an old flame. She'd met Henryk Erlich years before, in the microscopic Saint Petersburg Bund, which was more of a debate society than a revolutionary cell. Henryk, the only son of a rich, religious family in Lublin, was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks, and sad, hooded eyes beneath heavy brows. First arrested at twenty during brawls over the performance of a racist play, he was halfway through his law degree when they met, and the pair spent nights wrapped in intellectual conversation. Once Henryk finished his degree, the two parted ways. When Sophia saw him again in Paris, he was fresh off a three-month prison stint in Warsaw. They wandered the Left Bank together. The booksellers by the Seine had never been so charming, the lilacs of Boulevard Arago never so sweet. You can love a city through a man, Sophia learned. They married in Saint Petersburg the next year, in 1911, with no family and little fuss. She wore a gray overcoat. Henryk messed up the vows. She resolved to keep using her maiden name.

In the years that followed, they settled in Saint Petersburg and had two sons. Henryk was in and out of jail but rose through the ranks of the party and, in 1915, became a member of the Bund's central committee. During these years, the Bund became close to the Mensheviks, with top Bundists like Henryk taking prominent roles in the Menshevik party. He often visited the Duma at Tauride Palace, where several Menshevik deputies served. When his cab pulled up before its splendid bulk, he would gather the pages of whatever speech he or Sophia had written and shove them into his briefcase, then walk down the colonnaded hallways into the domed hall where near-powerless delegates sat stacked in semicircles, their faces turned toward a portrait of Tsar Nicholas 2. Outside the palace, Henryk managed brutal electoral campaigns and edited the Bund's Russian-language newspaper, all while practicing law in the office of a famous defense attorney. He worked late and was seldom home. Politics was his life.

Her husband may have been a party man, but Marxist dogmatism fit Sophia like an itchy dress. She was a socialist aware of the movement's absurdity, and an artist who couldn't resign herself to the injustice of the world. In youth, she crushed on the family maid with sapphic fervor. She briefly dated the right-wing Zionist journalist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who organized self-defense squads after the Kishinev pogrom, until her liberal father banned him from their house. Sharp-eyed and bohemian, she shunned revolutionary asceticism. She read Nietzsche—too decadent, said her comrades—and dressed in lavish costumes for the artists' balls she attended during an Arcadian few months in Munich. (Henryk had to be bullied to participate.) After her return to Saint Petersburg in 1911, Sophia had made a name for herself in the feverish artistic world of the capital, reading her verses in the smoky basement cabarets and blue-curtained salons that defined the Russian Silver Age. Her work soon caught the eye of Russia's most famous leftist writer, Maxim Gorky, who invited her to contribute to his celebrated literary journal, Chronicle.

In Petersburg, the Erlichs lived on the quiet Bolshaya Monetnaya Street, next to Chronicle's cramped offices. “Here you could meet the beginning writer nervously kneading his manuscript, the party activist just returned from exile,” Sophia wrote. Even the Odesa prodigy Isaac Babel came through. Then the war came, and the city's name changed to the more Russian-sounding Petrograd.

The army conscripted Sophia's friends. The censors sliced her poetry apart. The Germans advanced, taking Lublin, where Henryk's parents lived. The Chronicle office became her retreat. There, wartime privations seemed to disappear amidst the cigarette smoke and talk and clack of the secretary's typewriter.

As the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday neared, Henryk busied himself with crafting statements for the Workers' Group of the War Industries Committee. ^{[*1]} “Our urgent task is to destroy autocracy, to bring full democracy to the country.... The whole Petrograd working class must head for Tauride Palace.” Two days later, the government arrested most of the Workers' Group.

“Not everything can be foretold and foreseen. Blood and fire can give voice when no one expects them to,” wrote Sophia's acquaintance, the poet Alexander Blok, in 1913. As 1917 began, his words took on a prophetic resonance. As the Russian Empire entered its fourth year of war, it had nothing to show for it except lost territory and over a million dead soldiers. The economy collapsed. Food prices climbed. In front of bakeries, lines of women stood until icicles formed on their faces while, far away, their men died for nothing. Sophia sensed that something was about to happen, but she didn't know what.

Women's Day

On the miserable gray morning of International Women's Day, March 8, 1917, ^{[2]} working women of Petrograd took to the streets. It was not the first protest that year—the city's metal workers were also on strike—but the women were furious from hunger and grief. They began in the Vyborgsky factory district, where they screamed for their men to join them, then poured into the posh parts of Petrograd—like Bolshaya Monetnaya Street, where Sophia Dubnova and her family lived. She watched the crowds gather, the “workers in long vests, women in shawls, members of the intelligentsia in lambskin hats.” The red flag appeared. First, they called for bread. Next, they called for the death of the regime. The tsar ordered police to suppress the protests. Mounted police charged the crowds, slashing with their whips. But the crowds stood firm. They shouted curses and pelted the cops with hunks of ice. By March 11, over two hundred thousand people were on strike. Stores shuttered. Streetcars lay on their sides, the windows smashed. The air was lived with chants and the sound of bullets, as police, protesters, and soldiers clashed in a war whose battle lines shifted by the hour. Sometimes the soldiers obeyed orders to shoot into the crowds, but mostly they hesitated to fire bullets at women who could have been their mothers. Most of them agreed with the protesters. They also wanted bread and peace. That night Henryk Erlich received an invitation to a gathering of leftist activists at the home of a flamboyant young Duma deputy named Alexander Kerensky. A celebrated defense lawyer and self-described socialist, Kerensky bubbled with enthusiasm about the possible beginnings of a revolution. "Characteristic hysteria," smirked another guest, who assured the room that this so-called revolution was going nowhere. The next afternoon, the Fourth Company of the Imperial Guard's Pavlovsky Regiment mutinied. They marched out of their barracks, opened fire on a mounted police patrol, and disappeared into the streets. After this first revolt, a dam broke, and whole units began to defect, taking their weapons with them. Desperate reports piled up at the Petrograd office of the Okhrana. The Litovsky Regiment had plundered the arsenal at Kirochnaya Street, hauling off rifles in stolen automobiles. Soldiers from the Preobrazhensky Regiment had lynched their commander when he refused to give them weapons. “They sent soldiers by horse and by car to all the other military units for the purpose of inciting mutiny. Shooting has started. The crowds...are very large.” After that, the tsar's secret police went silent.

Insurgent troops marched toward Tauride Palace, where the Duma was holding an emergency session. Though the Duma's delegates had been chosen in an election in which most people were not permitted to vote, they formed the closest thing the Russian Empire had to a parliament, and so protesters looked to them for leadership. Kerensky was happy to oblige. This was their moment, he thought. The Duma should lead the revolution. When he heard shouts from Tauride's entrance signaling the mutinous soldiers' arrival, he knew exactly the pose to strike. He ran to the center gate. With a flair for the dramatic that would define his role in coming days, Kerensky greeted the mutineers as heroes.

At the same time, another crowd attacked Kresty prison and released the prisoners, among them Erlich's comrades, the leaders of the Workers' Group. These activists also headed to Tauride Palace.

That afternoon, in room 12 in the left wing of Tauride, these prisoners joined several dozen representatives of radical parties, including Henryk Erlich. Together, they took up an idea from the revolution of 1905 and declared themselves the Temporary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Inspired by the Saint Petersburg Soviet of 1905, and with the help of several of that original soviet's leaders, the Petrograd Soviet was created to represent the capital's workers and soldiers. It would be a grassroots forum for direct democracy. By the people. For the people.

To make this vision a reality, the Soviet's leaders dispatched messengers to Petrograd's factories and barracks, seeking delegates for their first session at Tauride Palace that night. Two hundred and fifty people showed up. After hours of feverish chatter, they elected an old Georgian Menshevik named Nikolai Chkheidze as president of the Soviet, with the magnetic young Kerensky as a vice president. Kerensky, though, had grander dreams. After a passionate homily to revolution, he disappeared into the right wing of Tauride Palace, where he and thirteen other progressive Duma delegates formed the Provisional Government of Revolutionary Russia.

Meanwhile, Erlich and the rest of the executive committee worked through the night. When dawn came, each man staggered off to find a spot of floor on which to sleep. I imagine Erlich spread his fur coat between a box of bullets and a stranger's feet. As he stared at the topless nymphs who capered across Tauride's ceiling, contradictory thoughts must have filled his mind. The bloodlust of the streets would likely have disgusted Erlich, who was a refined, gentle man. He would have worried that a tsarist general might attack the city. Every tendon would have ached. But, exhausted as he was, perhaps Erlich didn't want to let himself slip into unconsciousness, because that would have meant the revolution's first day was over. When someone has waited for something their entire life, and it arrives at last, they never want it to end.

Outside, teenagers tied red rags around their arms and loaded guns onto trucks they barely knew how to drive. Fire rouged the sky. When Erlich woke up, he might have seen soldiers bayonetting portraits of Tsar Nicholas, the Last.

The First Days

In Petrograd, there were now two centers of power—the Duma on the right side of Tauride Palace and the Soviet on the left. While foreign states recognized the Duma as Russia's government, the Soviet ran the city. By this I mean the Soviet's temporary executive committee, otherwise known as Erlich and his comrades.

Chaos defined Erlich's first days in revolutionary Petrograd. The temporary executive committee had few resources and immense responsibilities. Crowds burst in constantly with news of real and fictitious emergencies. The tsar's loyalists holed up in church belfries, taking potshots at members of the newly formed People's Militia. Freed criminals robbed houses. Rioters torched the Okhrana office; the lists of informants went up in smoke. Military deserters wandered, confused, homeless, and hungry, threatening at any moment to erupt into pointless violence. There was no bread. The trams didn't work. Everything was a ruin, and the executive committee knew they had to fix things fast.

As the Soviet struggled to establish order, the capital's people took their vengeance. Mobs hunted representatives of the old regime. Among their first catches was Ivan Shcheglovitov, former chairman of the state council. Four years earlier, Shcheglovitov had ordered Kyiv police to frame the innocent Jewish factory foreman Mendel Beilis on charges of ritual murder. Now Shcheglovitov was the wanted man. Soldiers broke into his apartment and marched him at gunpoint to Tauride, where, in the name of the people, Kerensky put him under arrest.

New York City

On March 15, the tsar signed his abdication papers; with that, 450 years of autocracy were over. You go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly, Hemingway wrote. He might have been talking about the Romanovs.

When the news reached New York, residents of Jewish neighborhoods flooded the streets. “Almost a million men, women and children turned the day into a festival of rejoicing,” wrote the New York Tribune. In Café Monopole, at Leavitt's, in Little Hungary, former prisoners raised glasses of Schnapps to the revolution's leaders. Crowds smashed every window at the corner of Clinton and Houston streets, just from a surplus of delight.

Thousands gathered in front of the Forward Building for updates on the thrilling events back in Russia. The paper's city editor, former Bundist Baruch Charney Vladeck, addressed the crowd from the balcony. “I was a Russian prisoner in 1905. It was right after a revolution, but such a puny, strengthless revolution it was. Today is different.” When rumors spread that the tsar had been killed, the crowds burst into hurrahs.

Blindsided by the uprising in Petrograd, American journalists turned to emigres for expertise. Journalists besieged the offices of Novy Mir, an obscure Russian paper on Saint Marks Place, to get the analysis of its pugnacious editor, Leon Trotsky. They mingled with the crowds on Orchard Street and jotted down quotes that compared the revolution to the coming of the messiah and Petrograd to a new Jerusalem. One old professor told them, "Do you wonder at our happiness? We are to be restored from exile, just as we were two thousand years ago." For the moment, the media seemed to agree.

One American journalist struck a more sober note. In The New York Age, the country's preeminent Black newspaper, N.A.A.C.P activist James Weldon Johnson described the celebrations sympathetically, noting that Black people were the only Americans who could truly understand the East Side's joy. After all, they had partied the same way when Lincoln announced emancipation, only to learn bitterly that democracy on paper was far from democracy in practice. After fifty years of betrayal by their white fellow citizens, they'd grown disillusioned, and Jews would be too if they trusted the Christians of the Russian Empire. The revolution might remove some hated laws, but it didn't change society. At best, it had given Jews the opportunity to fight.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies

Overwhelmed with work on the Soviet, Henryk moved into Tauride Palace. He telephoned Sophia a few times a day to give her updates, which she passed on to the gaggle of acquaintances who converged at their apartment for advance news of the Soviet's decisions. With most newspapers still shut, Petrograd's people watched the walls for pasted-up Soviet decrees. They listened for gunfire dispatching this alleged reactionary or that. They lived on rumor.

One morning, Sophia woke up to banging on her door. She opened it to see Henryk's sister and her husband, a military doctor at the naval base in Kronstadt, nineteen miles west of Petrograd. Built by Peter the Great on an island in the Gulf of Finland, Kronstadt was home to the Russian Empire's Baltic Fleet. Its tens of thousands of sailors constituted a veritable city and were some of the revolution's most enthusiastic participants.

Behind Sophia's in-laws sat a cart piled with hastily grabbed possessions. The sister's usually vivacious face was haggard, and she had a horrified look in her eyes. Her husband told Sophia that Kronstadt sailors had torn their admiral to pieces with their bayonets.

This is a revolutionary moment, Sophia told herself that night, and many nights afterward. She thought of the French Revolution. This wasn't any different. She tried to suppress the nausea in her gut.

Sophia often braved the snowdrifts to walk three miles to Tauride Palace, to attend meetings of the Soviet in the palace's Catherine Hall. By then the Soviet had swollen to thousands of delegates, and Sophia sweated from the heat of their combined bodies. Beneath gold chandeliers and friezes of Grecian heroes, journalists stalked diplomats, Kronstadt sailors slurped tea, and representatives of political factions competed in noisy grandiloquence. The Soviet measured votes by the volume of the cheers. When the Soviet's leaders tried to talk, no one listened. "People had come not to hear speeches but to claim their right to rule the country," Sophia later wrote.

This experiment in direct democracy quickly spread across the Russian Empire, including to the former Pale of Settlement. Workers and soldiers set up their own soviets, with countless Bundists among the leaders. I think of Leivik Hodis, a military mechanic stationed in Smolensk. When news of Petrograd's revolution came, he joined some Christian socialists in his unit, arrested his officers, and seized control of the city, where he now represented the Bund in the local soviet. He had gone from pariah to power.

When I imagine Hodis that February, I think back to twelve years prior, at the American Star Hall in Brownsville, when socialist orator Meyer London told the crowd: “Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls…pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt?” For Hodis, and for thousands of other Bundists spread across the empire's borderlands, it seemed like their prayers had been answered. The revolution flamed, and they threw themselves into it, as both participants and offerings. By their actions, they sought to make good on the Bund's redemptive credo. Here where they lived was their country. They had liberated it, alongside their Christian brothers. Egypt was now free.

The Provisional Government

On March 15, the day of the tsar's abdication, the first cabinet of the Provisional Government of Revolutionary Russia was appointed. Its members immediately set about trying to make Russia the freest country on earth. In rapid succession, they abolished the death penalty, banned torture, and gave women legal equality. Free speech, free press, and universal suffrage were the laws of the land. Soon, the provisional government promised, a freely elected Constituent Assembly would be convened to determine Russia's ultimate form of government.

Among the most eloquent exponents of liberty was the newly appointed justice minister, the dashing young lawyer Alexander Kerensky. He was a magnetic figure, so beloved that crowds wept at his speeches. Clearly, the future belonged to him.

In his first act as justice minister, Kerensky freed all political prisoners, including the hundred thousand troublemakers confined in Siberia. Immediately, these exiles embarked on a race against time. They had to get to the train stations before spring came, thawing the ice and turning the roads into impassable mud. Anyone who could commandeered reindeer sleighs. Those who couldn't walked. Twenty Bundists joined a band of political convicts who stumbled upon a reporter from the Associated Press. After ten days on the road, the group was "shaggy, uncouth, unwashed, emaciated. Two had lost hands and feet from frostbite, and one had been shot in the leg." Some wore rags, others fur coats donated by sympathizers, one "the gold braided uniform tunic of the dismissed governor under a ragged and greasy overcoat." Many were chained hand and foot, but the blacksmiths were on strike, so no one could be found to free them. At the former governor's mansion, sympathetic locals held a banquet in the prisoners' honor. The clang of their shackles nearly drowned out the toasts.

Return

In Bronx tenements, Swiss cafés, and Austrian detention camps, exiled Russian radicals learned they could come home. At New York rallies in support of the revolution, marchers raised money to buy steamship tickets back to the motherland. In the following year, eight thousand people returned to the Russian Empire, in perhaps the largest voluntary reverse migration in American history. One of them was Leon Trotsky. Vladimir Medem was among those who could not return. Thirty-eight years old and living in Warsaw at the time of the revolution, Medem had emerged from prison in 1915 as a legend on both sides of the Atlantic. He had made good use of the years since. Taking advantage of the tolerance for Jewish political activity shown by Warsaw's German occupiers, he restarted the Bund's newspaper, Lebens-Fragen, and set up the foundations of a thriving subculture, including Yiddish schools, orphanages, libraries, and soup kitchens. But Medem soon found the limits of German tolerance. Appalled by the starvation and forced labor that the occupation imposed, Medem wrote a series of critical pamphlets. As punishment, the Germans locked him briefly in a concentration camp. ^{[3]} Medem never stopped longing for Russia. Then the revolution came, bringing with it the fulfillment of his life's work. What did Warsaw soup kitchens mean when, back in Russia, the Bund had helped topple a dynasty; when his old underground friends were now reshaping their homeland? In Russia, hundreds of Bundists now served on kehillahs (Jewish communal councils), city councils, and soviets. Party membership exploded until it reached thirty-three thousand members, and new Bundist branches sprang up from Crimea to the Siberian city of Irkutsk. The Russian Bund was building the future. Soon, friends' surreptitious messages began to arrive in Warsaw, pleading for Medem to join them in revolutionary Petrograd. But with Germany and Russia at war, the border remained unbreachable. History beckoned, and Vladimir Medem was trapped outside.

The Jewish Nation in the Hands of the Russian Nation

On March 22, 1917, the provisional government announced the abolition of all restrictions based on nationality, religion, and class in the Russian Empire. After 126 years of government oppression, Jews were now officially equal.

The tsarist race laws had choked ambitions and stifled lives. As a girl, Sophia Dubnova had watched her father study bookbinding in a few-tul attempt to qualify as one of the categories of Jewish tradesmen permitted to live in Saint Petersburg. Glue-smeared practice volumes sat on his bookshelf as a testament to his failure. After Sophia's radical clique was expelled from university, one Jewish girlfriend even registered as a prostitute, just to retain her right to live in the capital. Now, before Sophia's eyes, the bureaucratic walls of the Pale of Settlement fell forever. Universities opened. Jews could enter government service. The New York Tribune reported, with astonishment, that one Mr. Epstein had even become the police commissioner of Minsk.

If the Bund's founders had once said that “Jewish workers suffer not only as workers but also as Jews,” such suffering now seemed like a thing of the past.

From their commandeered office on the posh Nevsky Prospect, the Bund sent a communiqué to The New York Times to celebrate legal equality. It was a document full of swagger, as befitting a party that had won. It closed with a statement of trust in Russian society that is all the more remarkable because it contradicted their foundational beliefs. In 1897, Martov wrote that Jews could not “rely solely on the Russian…proletariat,” who might sell them out for profit or under duress. Twenty years later, the Bund thought otherwise. “The liberation of the Jewish nation is in the faithful hands of the Russian nation,” they wrote. They allowed themselves to believe.

Sophia also allowed herself to believe. On March 23, she was one of the million Petrograd residents to make their way to the Field of Mars for the funeral of protesters killed in the first days of the revolution. Columns from factories, trade unions, and political parties marched behind two hundred red- draped coffins. Among them marched the Bund. They held their banner high, its gold Yiddish letters shimmering in the sunlight. This was no longer the flag of despised criminals. It flew openly in the capital, held by equal citizens of a revolutionary state. At the Field of Mars, Sophia saw S. An-sky, the poet who'd penned “The Oath,” the Bund's anthem. She took the old man's arm. The spring air, the old friend, the crush of silent mourners, all conspired to overwhelm her. She had never felt such brotherhood in her life.

Mark Liber

On April 27, 1917, in Petrograd, the Bund opened the first conference it ever legally held inside the Russian Empire. Beneath banners reading long live the revolution, old friends embraced as if their years of exile had never happened. They teased one another about their gray hair and wandered timidly amongst the unfamiliar hordes of new recruits to their party. Who were all these people, the old-timers asked themselves. No matter. Life was starting afresh.

They took their seats in a massive auditorium and looked up at the presidium, where the Bund's central committee sat surrounded by crimson flowers. Among the elderly pioneers from the Vilna days, they would have recognized a younger face, that of Mark Liber. By 1917, Medem's Exileland best friend had grown into a star. He had spent years touring Russia, America, and Europe, living on fake papers, addressing illegal meetings, and escaping jails. When the revolution hit, he was two years into a sentence of administrative exile in Kazakhstan. He hurried back to Petrograd, where he joined Henryk Erlich in the Soviet. In no time, he had become the city's most famous orator. Most nights found Liber at Ciniselli Circus, where he spoke about the revolution's glories as if possessed. Kronstadt sailors carried him out on their shoulders afterward.

“His talent was created for meetings of thousands of workers, for a parliament,” wrote one admiring journalist. “His hour has come.”

While maintaining his role in the Bund, Liber threw his energies into their sister party, the Mensheviks, quickly rising to leadership. In Petrograd, this made sense. Russia's capital might have been the center of world revolution, but it was far from the Bundist base.

Due to laws that had, until a month earlier, locked Jews out of the capital, Petrograd had few Jewish workers, and the local Bund branch was really just a club for a few hundred well-off professionals. But if Mark Liber missed the scrappy counterculture of the Pale of Settlement, he didn't show it. As a Menshevik leader, he could shape policy for the entire Russian Empire—especially now that the Mensheviks had teamed up with the Socialist Revolutionaries to rule the Soviet. That spring, Liber was the most powerful Bundist in history.

After the fraternal greetings and theoretical debates that lard all leftist conferences, the Bundists moved to a crucial question: Should their party participate in the provisional government?

This seemingly obvious question was more fraught than we might guess. For Bundists to join the government would mean tearing up Marx's theory of historical development, which foresaw inevitable progress from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, to communism, with each stage following the last, much as, at a formal dinner party, the seafood follows the soup. As orthodox Marxists, the Bundists believed that a socialist revolution could not take place in a backward country like Russia, which needed a few centuries of capitalist industrialization and parliamentary democracy to set the stage. Only then could socialist parties dream of taking power. That was what the laws of dialectical materialism said—by the Bund's reckoning, anyway—and they were committed to following their theory to the end. I wonder too if power felt dirty for these lifelong underdogs. Maybe they wanted to remain pure. Whatever the reason, in the name of Marxism, the Bund resolved to sit on the sidelines.

The Bund then turned their attention to the war.

Here, Mark Liber took the stage.

Before the revolution, most Bundist leaders had opposed World War 1, but with the tsar gone, things took on a different cast. Russia was no longer an autocracy run by inbred aristocrats. It was theirs. By April 1917, most Bundist leaders believed that Russia should keep fighting alongside her allies until they all made a joint peace deal. What better way for Russia to join the club of Western democracies? Besides, Germany and Austria now occupied most of the former Pale of Settlement, the Bund's heartland, where they forced Bundists onto labor gangs and imprisoned party activists. They had to rescue their people. They had to defend the world.

That was the case Mark Liber made.

(Can I be surprised? How often have I seen the powerful politely justify mass murder, and otherwise decent people go along with it because it seems like the responsible, respectable thing to do? And despite everything, Liber was a decent man.)

Liber erred in one regard. You can't fight a war without an army. By 1917, Russian soldiers were starving conscripts, so badly armed they had to take guns off their comrades' corpses. Caught in a blind machine of mechanized slaughter, they simply wanted to survive. Soldiers in Petrograd overthrew the tsar for one reason: to stop the war. If the revolutionary government wouldn't stop the war, soldiers would overthrow them too.

Liber mentioned none of this. After a fervent denunciation of German aggression, he proposed a resolution to “fight for peace and defend the land.” It passed with a healthy majority.

Finland Station

Liber's speech must have been influenced by the arrival two weeks prior of a man he loathed from his own Exileland past.

As soon as news of the revolution reached Switzerland, the country's eight hundred Russian political exiles elected a committee to negotiate their return to Petrograd with the British government (which would have transported them home on military ships). This proved difficult, however, since, due to their antiwar activities, British intelligence services had put many of the exiles on a travel blacklist. Negotiations went nowhere. At last, one person decided to make separate arrangements. On April 9, 1917, Vladimir Lenin, joined by six Bundists and thirty-one other socialists, boarded a private train in Zurich. They traveled through Germany, with the permission of the German government, to arrive in Petrograd on April 16. Though many in the Soviet viewed this trip through an enemy country as an act of treason, they knew Lenin from abroad and, more out of protocol than enthusiasm, organized a delegation to greet him. Late that night, Erlich joined his fellow representatives at Finland Station.

Masters of the visual, the Bolsheviks had organized a crowd to greet their leader. Lenin stepped out into a sea of flags and flowers. Erlich saw a man of medium height, broad shouldered, with a bald head and the “small, sprightly, crafty eyes” that Medem had remarked upon over a decade earlier, which reminded them both of a tricky salesman. Erlich noted the strength in Lenin's back.

The Soviet's chairman offered some cautious greetings, but for Lenin, the old man might as well have stayed home. The moment the speech ended, Lenin turned his back on the delegates. He walked out of the reception room and into the square, climbed atop an armored car, faced the crowd, and launched into a pitiless denunciation of the Soviet.

“The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread.... We must fight for the socialist revolution, fight to the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat.”

The delegates were dumbfounded. The war was their fault? The hunger was their fault? They, lifelong socialists, survivors of prison and exile, were obstacles to a socialist revolution? Them? None of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd talked this way. The speech didn't correspond to the orderly progression of development that Marx laid out in Das Kapital. It was not comradely. It was not nice. Had Lenin gone nuts?

The crowds cheered like he was the messiah. ^{2} The Russian Empire used the Julian calendar, which is thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used by Western countries. Women's Day fell on February 23 inside Russia and March 8 outside it. Soviet Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar in early 1918.

^{3} Pioneered by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War, concentration camps imprisoned minorities and dissidents rather than criminals, and were soon taken up by governments across Europe.

Chapter 2

Revolutionary Discontents

(May-October 1917)

May Day

M Ay 1, 1917, marked the first legal celebrations of May Day inside the Russian Empire. On that bright, chilly Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people streamed through Petrograd's boulevards to the Field of Mars. Marchers pulled their coats tight as they walked behind their hand-sewn banners. Socialist red dominated, dotted here and there with anarchist black. Walking beside her husband and father, Sophia Dubnova held on to her sons' hands. Her boys wore red ribbons pinned to their lapels, and they were proud to look like men.

On the river, the sunlight melted the ice floes. Sophia listened to the pieces crack. Years later, she recalled the moment in a poem.

Oh distant First of May,

The bridge humming in spring apparel.

The Neva, the golden Neva

Under the swelling drift ice!

Sun transparent chunks

Were borne off in foam and spray,

The ice was helpless and fragile

Like your freedom, my fatherland

Sophia must have cherished the day as a respite from the tumult of the previous weeks. After Lenin's arrival at Finland Station, Petrograd's formerly congenial revolutionary milieu had shattered into warring camps. From his first day in town, when he strode into Tauride Palace to inform the socialist delegates that they had done everything wrong, Lenin insisted that his party's job was to overthrow the "government of capitalists and landowners" and give all power to the soviets. He quickly marginalized any Bolshevik dissenters, as he had done in Exileland.

Just as quickly, his ideas became inescapable.

The Bolsheviks commandeered a palace belonging to the tsar's ballerina-mistress Mathilde Kshesinskaya for their headquarters, and Lenin often harangued the crowds from its balcony. He spoke in terms simple enough for a five-year-old to understand, even if that five-year-old was Sophia's son Alex. The boy first saw Lenin thanks to his nanny, who mooned around the palace looking for a Kronstadt sailor of her own. While his nanny cased the crowd, Alex listened to the bald little man on the balcony, who said the war was stupid, the government's plan to retake Constantinople was stupid, and that troops should turn their bayonets on their officers. Alex thought that baldie had a point.

“I don't care about Constantinople,” he proclaimed one night.

“Where did you hear that?” Sophia asked.

“That's what the uncle says,” he answered. She knew immediately who uncle was.

The Trials of Governance

Winter blossomed into spring. The ice floes melted along the Neva. Fissures grew in the revolutionary homeland, threatening to crack it apart.

It turned out that the people who had just overthrown their autocrat nourished even more dangerous dreams. Around the empire, long-suppressed nationalist movements raised their heads. In Ukraine of the golden sunflowers, intellectuals had put together a parliament—the Rada—whose calls for autonomy scandalized Petrograd politicians. Wasn't Ukraine a Russian possession? Workers too shook off their fear. Demanding higher wages, an eight-hour workday, and respect as equals, over half a million people went on strike. Wages went up, but prices climbed higher. To cover the deficit, the government printed money. Inflation soared.

Peasants itched to evict their aristocratic landlords and divide up the land for themselves. Soldiers wanted to return to their villages, not die in a pointless war. The revolution was nine weeks old, and patience was running out for the politicians in Petrograd.

The End of Exile

Back in Switzerland, Bundist Raphael Abramovich was furious when he read about the splash Lenin made in the capital. Back in 1905, Abramovich had been among the revolution's most enthusiastic agitators, but after several arrests, he mellowed, got an office job, and urged the party to turn its back on its illicit past by forming legal trade unions and running in elections.

Then came the revolution of 1917. Now Lenin was in Petrograd making history, and the rest of the exiles were sitting on their asses in Switzerland. Abramovich had one thought. They needed to get home.

At last, the great day arrived. On May 13, two hundred and eight exiled revolutionaries boarded the train toward Petrograd to the sounds of brass bands and the cheers of hundreds of Swiss workers. Among these exiles were Polish socialists, Iskra editors, and gray-bearded Narodniks who had once conspired to kill Tsar Nicholas 2's grandfather. The sarcastic Bolshevik journalist Karl Radek grinned, showing a gap where German police had knocked out his front teeth. Menshevik leader Julius Martov nursed a cough. Abramovich and his family boarded the Bundist wagon. From the window, he watched Exileland load itself into the train cars. I will never forget this, he thought.

Even as they barreled toward the homeland, the exiles couldn't help but get into the squabbles that marked their previous lives. At a German border town, one grouplet staged a sit-down strike to demand a dedicated railway car like the other parties. They refused to move until Abramovich surrendered half the Bund's wagon to them. Abramovich spent so much time like this—smoothing egos, finding seats, and warming milk for babies—that he never had a chance to look out the window, at the dark track guarded by enemy soldiers, and think about the step he had taken. In Sweden, his baby daughter got sick, so while the rest of the exiles proceeded to Petrograd, the Abramovichs stayed behind to find doctors. When their train finally pulled into Finland Station, Abramovich expected no one to be waiting, but his Exileland crew organized a welcoming party several hundred strong. Henryk Erlich stepped forward to give him the official greetings of the Bund and the Menshevik party.

They embraced. Abramovich knew that he was home.

Raphael Abramovich

In Petrograd, Abramovich quickly found himself at odds with Bundist leadership over the issue of World War 1—especially with his old friend Mark Liber, who had become one of the war's most strident supporters. Abramovich had always opposed the war, and the revolution had done nothing to change his views. A slaughterhouse was a slaughterhouse, he knew. It didn't matter who owned the building. Alienated from his comrades, Abramovich drew closer to the brilliant Menshevik leader Julius Martov, who now helped a dissident antiwar faction called the Menshevik-Internationalists.

Despite his deviation from the official line, the Bund valued Abramovich's long service to the party. They appointed him as editor of their Petrograd newspaper, Workers' Voice, where he compiled stories about Bundist groups around the empire. While the Petrograd Bund might have been peripheral in the capital, local Bundist groups in the former Pale were transforming Jewish life through vivid networks of culture and mutual aid, while also arming up to defend their communities against pogroms that they hoped were the last gasps of the hateful old regime.

But Abramovich did not merely use his platform to glorify his party. He lobbied relentlessly for peace.

As much as he opposed the war on moral terms, Abramovich was painfully aware of how the continued slaughter empowered the Bolsheviks— the one group to speak out definitively against it. Lenin's party might have been a small minority in the Soviet, but they were a rising power on the streets. They organized relentlessly in barracks, in factories, and on the front. For muscle they had Kronstadt sailors and brigades of armed workers called the Red Guards.

But instead of sensing the popular mood, Liber and his fellow socialists who ran the Soviet grew more conservative, hewing ever more closely to Kerensky's provisional government. These former radicals now spoke of patriotism and moderation and postponed their old promises of world peace and eight-hour workdays to an ever more distant tomorrow. This earned them the ironic nickname "right-wing socialists." Obliviously, most Bundist leaders did the same. If Marxist theory told them that Russia needed a capitalist government, and that socialists could not seize power in Russia in 1917, they would follow that theory to the end.

Liber soon lost his star spot at Ciniselli Circus, where, every night, Bolshevik orators incited the crowds against the capitalists and landlords in government. Within weeks of Abramovich's arrival, an incident showed him how deeply these speeches resonated. He was on a packed tram passing through Vyborg, the factory district that was now a Bolshevik stronghold. A woman worker entered the car and squeezed her way next to him. She elbowed him the entire ride. When they reached their stop, he smiled at her. "Why did you shove me?" he asked.

She sneered. "Why shouldn't I shove you?" she answered, with unmistakable menace in her voice.

Abramovich was about to respond when he felt the eyes of the other passengers on him. He was suddenly aware of his suit, which he'd brought from Switzerland, of his fedora and glasses. All of it was perfectly normal over there, but here, he realized, it looked provocatively ostentatious, like the sort of thing a capitalist or landlord might wear. He wanted to defend himself to these workers. After all, he'd spent time in prison for their sake. The hatred in their eyes stopped him. He stared at the floor in silence until he reached his stop.

The First Congress of the Soviets

On June 16, the First All-Russia Congress of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opened at the building of the First Cadet Corps on Petrograd's Vasilyevsky Island. In what was the first real test of mass democracy in the former Russian Empire, twenty million people had cast their ballots to choose eight hundred delegates, including the Bundists Henryk Erlich, Mark Liber, and Raphael Abramovich. Abramovich could not help but marvel at the clamorous Cadet School hallways, which were packed with innumerable political factions, trade unions, and freelance orators, all talking as if they could make up for centuries of enforced silence in a single day.

At the congress, the most pressing issue should have been a new military offensive championed by Alexander Kerensky, who had recently been appointed minister of war. Against the advice of the army's general staff, the government mobilized hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers in a last-ditch attempt to turn things around on the Western Front. Many were middle-aged farmers, ripped from their villages at the start of summer planting. They marched through Petrograd under banners that read let us make bread for the people, well within the delegates' sight. Yet when Bolsheviks proposed a debate about the upcoming offensive, Mark Liber's bloc of right-wing Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries refused to consider it.

Four days into the conference, Liber ran into the Cadet Corps building red with rage. He held proofs for an upcoming edition of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, whose front page called for an armed demonstration against the provisional government. Liber had always believed Lenin was a dictator in waiting. Now he had proof. There it was, plain as day, Liber shouted. Lenin was plotting a coup.

Liber's announcement threw the congress into a tumult. The Soviet quickly banned the Bolshevik demonstration and instead organized a counterdemonstration to support the provisional government.

The next day Raphael Abramovich watched as Liber marched down Nevsky Prospect alongside the rest of the Soviet's executive committee, with five hundred thousand people behind them. But though it ought to have been a triumph, Abramovich could not help but notice that Bolshevik banners far outnumbered Menshevik flags.

In the sea of Cyrillic signage, Abramovich spotted the Yiddish flag of the Petrograd Bund. Its leader, Virgil Kahan, also held a banner, reading all confidence to the provisional government! that was painfully out of touch with the crowd's mood. Abramovich felt a terrible tenderness as the little crew passed from his sight.

Later, Virgil would tell Abramovich how his comrades ended their day. They had thoughtlessly wandered into a group of thousands of burly Bolshevik steelworkers, who did not appreciate the Bund's progovernment banner. Words were exchanged. A steelworker tore the Bund's flag from its pole. Virgil dove to retrieve it.

During the revolution of 1905, Virgil had been fighter-king on the Lodz barricade, but things can change in a dozen years. The contrast between former strength and current frailty feels ever greater when one is surrounded by younger men, their boots, and their fists. The Bund's torn flag told Abramovich one story, but a detail Virgil added made his stomach sink. During the scuffle, the workers called him a kike.

Henryk Erlich

After two days at the first congress of the Soviets, Henryk Erlich had had his fill of demagogues. At one point, he listened incredulously while Lenin spat out un-Marxist nonsense about ending capitalism by forcing all the capitalists to reveal their hidden gold (which, Erlich mused, the learned Lenin could not possibly have believed!). Worse, the soldiers had cheered. Enough! Everyone wanted to talk about the war, but Erlich was poised to do something about it. The Soviet planned to set up an international peace conference, and thanks to his German-language skills, Henryk Erlich would be the only Bundist taking part.

The idea seemed logical. They would get unions and socialist parties from the warring countries to meet in neutral Sweden, put out a collective peace appeal, and pressure their governments to end the war that, in the span of three years, had already killed over ten million people. When Erlich departed Russia that June, he had every reason to hope. But these were not logical times. The tour, which began with speeches before ecstatic crowds in Italy, quickly devolved into a gauntlet of humiliations. French papers called him a Jewish agent of the Kaiser. When Erlich and his colleagues reached London, the press smeared them as German spies.

Erlich soon realized that there would be no peace conference in Stockholm. Even if individuals wanted to attend, the French and British governments had blocked their exit visas. Thanks to the Allies' stubbornness, the Soviet's efforts for “a democratic peace without annexations and indemnities” ended in total defeat.

When Erlich returned in August, Russia seemed ready to disintegrate. Workers struck constantly, and robbers prowled the Petrograd streets. Things were worse at the front, where the debacle of Kerensky's offensive had taken four hundred thousand soldiers' lives. Hundreds of thousands more soldiers simply demobilized themselves, lynching their officers, grabbing their weapons, and fleeing home to their villages. Kerensky too had lost his youthful shine. After violent antiwar demonstrations by Bolshevik soldiers, he appointed himself prime minister in a bid to keep order, then moved into the Winter Palace, where he fired off increasingly authoritarian dictates while swanning around in robes once worn by Tsar Alexander 3. In September, he secretly got involved with a coup attempt, led by the army's new commander in chief, Lavr Kornilov. Or not so secretly. When Kornilov's coup collapsed, rumors spread that Kerensky was in on the conspiracy.

As Kerensky's fortunes fell, those of the Bolsheviks soared. For the working people of Petrograd, they seemed like the only option. Other parties had discredited themselves by supporting the war and Kerensky's foibles. The Bolsheviks, at least, promised peace, land, and bread. Each night, crowds jammed Ciniselli Circus to hear Trotsky speak. With scathing wit and prophetic power, Trotsky denounced the provisional government, along with his special scapegoats, the right-wing socialists like Mark Liber, who prevented the Soviet from seizing power to serve as the true tribune of the people. Trotsky's words echoed on every street.

When Erlich walked through the crowds on his way to the Soviet, he felt like his city had gone insane. Who were these people? Were these the People, the agents of history? He could no longer recognize them. His mouth could not form words that they would hear. If only he could lie or play on their emotions. If only he could recite the simple slogans that moved their hearts. But he couldn't. He was helpless. The masses were a foreign country. He walked by the speakers without having the heart to challenge them.

Revolutionary Russia

The Bund's official history of this time, when the Russian Revolution was hurtling toward its denouement, devotes itself to lists of conferences. Abramovich, Erlich, Liber, and their comrades spent the eight months of Russia's democratic experiment traveling around the empire attending conferences on languages, unions, schools, and cultural work. In August, Abramovich went to Kyiv to attend a conference for the Ukrainian Bund, where they released an enlightened platform that called for public bakeries, better sanitation, free healthcare, as well as unpopular positions like “Jewish schools without god.” At the same conference, Abramovich finally induced the Bund to pass a resolution in support of peace. It took them long enough.

Words, and more words. That was it. I can see all these delegates on all these podiums, passing all these motions about eight-hour workdays and the dignity of Yiddish, committed to the belief that they were building a new world and closing their eyes to the world around them. They read off the fraternal greetings from this or that socialist splinter group from this or that London neighborhood—and the tectonic plates were shifting beneath their feet.

When I try to picture the Bund in the summer of 1917, I think of a crumbling Yiddish anthology called Revolutionary Russia, published in New York to raise funds for the Bund's Petrograd newspaper. The anthology's editor, A. Litvak, had arrived from New York in July. When Abramovich saw Litvak at the door of the Bund's office, he could barely recognize the tattered vagabond he'd once known. An American gentleman stood before him. The pleats in Litvak's pants were razor sharp. His shoes twinkled. His collar was white as cocaine. Filthy and sleep-deprived, Abramovich merely gawped.

“Chaim Yank?” Abramovich asked, calling Litvak by the name he'd used in Vilna. A childlike smile broke out across Litvak's chubby face. Proudly, Litvak presented the Petrograd Bundists with treasures from the Big Apple. A wristwatch. A fountain pen inscribed with his name. Several dozen American dollars to contribute to the party treasury. Immediately upon arrival, Litvak began compiling Revolutionary Russia.

It was a beautiful volume, with an art nouveau cover, reports from the March uprising, analysis of power dynamics in the provisional government, and stirring poems with titles like “My Sharpened Song, My Singing Sword.” Financial contributors were in the back. More than once, I ran my finger down the list in search of Sam Rothbort's name. It was not there. Instead, I found the Radical Pinsk Workmen's Circle branch 210. Anna Kishin of Omaha. Jack Zilberknapf (formerly Warsaw's Yakov the Bootmaker). There were many Harrys, Loises, and Beatrices who garbed their insurrectionary politics in bland American names. Each gave a dollar to support the Bundist press in Russia.

The most touching part was Litvak's foreword. It was full of the same idealism that induced him to leave New York, that rich city where he had carved out a literary career, for hungry and threadbare Petrograd. How could he do otherwise? He was a Bundist, and this was the greatest event of the century. He wanted to convey every detail to the “the revolution's far-flung children”: Sam and his fellow Jewish workers in America. Things could be different. The future had not been written. They could change the world. “Through the cold ink and arid pages of this collection,” Litvak would deliver them a gospel from their comrades back in Russia, their “old, long enslaved, but finally liberated home.”

Chapter I.2 Denouement

(November 1917)

Minsk

on October 7, the Bund celebrated its twentieth birthday. With both Warsaw and Vilna under German occupation, the party chose Minsk, home to their central committee, to host their jubilee. If the Bund was insignificant in Petrograd, in Minsk they were a people's party, with 3,500 local members. They ran the local soviet alongside their Menshevik allies and controlled the central bureau of trade unions, and the Bundist Aron Vaynshteyn chaired the city council.

Abramovich began the five-hundred-mile journey from Petrograd to Minsk in an ominous mood. His train car was packed with soldiers shutting to and from various collapsing fronts. The brotherliness of the revolution's early days was a distant memory. Faces were drawn and skinny—food was growing harder to find in the cities. As the train lurched along the battered tracks, the miserable passengers cursed each other and elbowed for more room.

Only thirty miles from the front line, Minsk hosted the headquarters of the empire's Western Army. Everything showed the marks of war. Many factories were dismantled and shipped east to prevent them from falling into German hands. Thousands of wounded soldiers filled the hospitals. Streets swarmed with refugees. Even so, when Abramovich stepped out of his train car, the city felt like a celebration. The Minsk branch of the Bund spared no expense in celebrating their movement's birthday. Hawkers offered commemorative issues of their newspaper, printed in red ink. Five thousand workers marched in their parade. For three days, Minsk's Bundist leadership gathered with thousands of well-wishers in the lemon-drop splendor of the City Theater. Singers serenaded them, poets recited odes, and every party, except the Bolsheviks, sent their greetings.

At a soirée for leaders, Esther Frumkin led the songs. Frumkin was the only woman on the Bund's central committee. She was a single mother with a spartan work ethic, a ferocious intellect, and a jealous fixation on Yiddish, whose supremacy against Hebrew she had famously fought for at the first international Yiddish conference in Czernowitz in 1908. (Famous in the small world of Yiddish scholars, at least.) At Bund conferences, she argued with equal passion for Russia to continue the war.

Frumkin and Abramovich might have spent the last months in political combat, but that night, they put their knives away in favor of fragile comradery. Outside, the world fell to pieces, but here, the Bundists were among family. They papered over differences, like they always did. They toasted their old leaders, who had founded the party and led it to victory in their revolutionary homeland, then belted the words of their latest song, an impudent parody of a song from the Passover Haggadah set to a folk tune made for dancing.

What is one?

The Bund is One

And more is none...

The night passed too quickly.

The next day, they returned to the City Theater to give their talks. Liber, of course, was the star. He didn't rain insults on the Bolsheviks as he usually did. Instead, he gave a panegyric to his party. "We were always democratic," Liber told the crowd. "Though our work was underground, our leaders always lived amongst the people. We had battles of ideas but never split into warring factions. We cherished our party unity above all else, and so we remained as one." The audience sang "The Oath." Their voices rose in a wave.

Petrograd

Abramovich arrived back in Petrograd in a vile mood. After a glorious opening, the Bund's jubilee had collapsed into rhetorical battles over the war; the arguments grew so sharp he feared that his party would split.

He returned to a city ready to boil. There were violent strikes and attacks on bakeries. Gangs searched the houses of anyone accused of hoarding food. Breadlines stretched as long as they had in February. Eight months after they had overthrown Tsar Nicholas 2, ordinary people felt like they had little to show for it.

Disgusted with the war, Kerensky, and his socialist enablers like Mark Liber, the people of Petrograd turned toward the Bolsheviks as the only party promising to give all power to the soviets. Bolsheviks swept the municipal elections and, after a feverish get-out-the-vote campaign, won majorities in the Moscow Soviet and the Petrograd Soviet, which Kerensky had exiled to Smolny Institute, an aristocratic girls' school on the city's outskirts.

This move didn't faze Trotsky, the Petrograd Soviet's new chairman-in-waiting. He strode through Smolny in a black leather jacket with the air of one anointed. Which, in a way, he was. His Military Revolutionary Committee controlled forty thousand armed Red Guards and had the allegiances of the Petrograd and Kronstadt garrisons.

In Workers' Voice, Abramovich warned of an imminent Bolshevik coup, but no one in the government had the will to intervene.

November 7

Later, Abramovich would bemoan that he moved through November 7 like an automaton, oblivious to the details. He didn't realize he was living through history—we seldom do—so the day's texture was lost. This was only one of his regrets.

His morning started like always. At ten, he slogged through the rain to Mariinsky Palace, where he served on the newly convened pre-parliament—one of the several pointless pseudo-institutions that Kerensky cobbled together to shore up his government's legitimacy that fall. Abramovich and his fellow delegates were due to meet before the second congress of the Soviets. that night. He could see Mariinsky's columns from blocks away, arranged like soldiers in ceremonial dress. As he got closer, he noticed a tank blocking the palace doorway. It was topped with a red flag.

“You can't go in!” barked a boy soldier, pointing his machine gun toward Abramovich.

“There's a session of pre-parliament.” Abramovich responded.

“Pre-parliament has been arrested,” the boy insolently replied.

Abramovich backed away.

In the four miles between Mariinsky and Smolny Institute, Abramovich would have seen trucks taking Red Guards from the factory districts. He would have heard the thwack of paper pasted against buildings as teenagers hung posters to announce the transfer of power to the soviets.

Tanks blocked Smolny's entrance, but when Abramovich proffered his delegate's pass, a soldier waved him through.

He ran through crammed and reeking hallways, to the repurposed classroom that he and Julius Martov used for their Menshevik and Bundist internationalist groups. There, he learned that the previous night, Bolshevik detachments had seized most strategic points in the city, even encircling the Winter Palace, the headquarters of the provisional government, which was meeting there that night. Kerensky had escaped the city in a car flying the American Embassy's flag.

When the second congress of the Soviets opened that night, the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Socialist Revolutionary breakoff group called the Left S.R's, would hold the majority. They would rubber-stamp the seizure of power.

Unwilling to either fight Lenin or submit to him, the Menshevik-Internationalists decided to send a delegation to the Bolsheviks—maybe they could convince them to create a power-sharing agreement with the other socialist parties. Abramovich and two comrades trudged to the Bolshevik headquarters in classroom 36.

Inside, top Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky lounged at a table with his friends. Dzerzhinsky had a long history with the Bund. He had been Liber's schoolmate, Medem's cellmate, and fiancé to Liber's sister, who died of tuberculosis in his arms. Prison changed him. When the wounds from his shackles festered, doctors nearly had to amputate his legs. Guards beat him so badly that his jaw was permanently broken, jutting to one side. He had a fanatical mien that disconcerted Abramovich; at the Smolny buffet a few weeks prior, he had fantasized about shooting every last member of the bourgeoisie.

Dzerzhinsky icily rejected Abramovich's requests. No, the Bolsheviks would not hold fire until after the congress of the Soviets. No, they were not particularly interested in making a government with other socialist parties.

Abramovich tried some arguments about the Marxist progression of history, but he could see he'd lost his case. He felt a sharp pain in his belly and realized he hadn't eaten since the previous evening. He decided to go home and prepare for the congress that night.

Smolny

Abramovich returned to Smolny around nine P.M. He took a second to appreciate the tableau. Before the revolution, aristocratic belles had practiced waltzes in Smolny's ballroom. They whirled in circles, their pale skirts like petals around them, while oil paintings of long-dead duchesses stared down. "Be pretty, be useless," the duchesses commanded, and the girls prepared themselves for a world they imagined would last forever. They revolved, their hands outstretched, to brush each other's fingertips, while radicals like Abramovich planned a revolution that would sweep them from the floor. Now the revolution had spun beyond him. On the presidium sat six members of the Soviet's old executive committee, including Mark Liber, who had an ashen face and indignant, sunken eyes. Two thousand soldiers, sailors, and factory workers jammed the ballroom. They clambered up the columns, hung off the ledges, filled the air with their cigarette smoke and sweat.

The Soviet's old chairman, the Menshevik Fyodor Dan, opened the congress with a declaration that the Winter Palace was under siege. He and the rest of the Soviet's former leaders left the stage, to be replaced by twenty-one Bolsheviks and Left S.R's, including Leon Trotsky.

On the floor, the delegates screamed, hooted, and traded insults until an explosion shut them up. It was the Aurora, the Bolshevik gunship, firing on the Winter Palace.

A frail figure fought his way to the stage: Martov, the leader of the Menshevik-Internationalists.

In the bombardment of the Winter Palace, Martov heard the first shots of what would become a civil war. Believing that unity was the only way to forestall grave violence, he implored the Soviet's socialist parties to form a government together, before the workers they represented started slaughtering each other in the streets. In the name of the Bundist Internationalists, Abramovich backed him up. The Soviet unanimously accepted.

I can imagine a future in which Martov's proposal had won, and the other socialist parties had built a government alongside the Bolsheviks, with all the compromises this implied. Their presence might have forestalled Lenin's worst instincts, letting Russia develop into a flawed, impoverished, but somewhat functional democracy. But this was not to be, because of right-wing socialists like the Bundist Mark Liber.

These men would never compromise with the Bolsheviks, whom they saw as a pack of coup plotters and demagogues. The assault on the Winter Palace was only the latest proof. Some of these men were members of the provisional government while others loathed it, but all viewed it as a legitimate institution. No one had the right to overthrow the provisional government, least of all that scumbag Lenin.

One after the other, these right-wing socialists fought their way to the ballroom stage and right-to-left declared that they would have nothing to do with the Bolsheviks.

Henryk Erlich got the final word. American journalist John Reed transcribed his speech in his classic work of reportage, Ten Days That Shook the World, though he confused him with Abramovich, an error Abramovich bemoaned in his memoirs. Reed described Erlich's "eyes snapping behind thick glasses, trembling with rage" as he took the podium.

What is taking place now in Petrograd is a monstrous calamity!…Our duty to the Russian proletariat doesn't permit us to remain here and be responsible for these crimes. Because the firing on the Winter Palace doesn't cease, the Municipal Duma together with the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Executive Committee of the Peasants' Soviet, has decided to perish with the Provisional Government, and we are going with them! Unarmed we will expose our breasts to the machine guns of the Terrorists.

The Bolshevik Lev Kamenev cut him off, jingling a bell. “Keep your seats and we'll go on with our business!” he sneered.

Erlich led fifty delegates toward the door. I doubt he realized he was giving in to the same tendency that the Bund had shown fourteen years before, when Medem and Liber walked out of the third conference of the R.S.D.L.P and left the floor clear for Lenin's takeover. It was the fatal impulse to value principle over power, to leave the battlefield at the very moment they most needed to stay and fight. Amidst curses, threats, and distant gunfire, they marched out of Smolny, into a future shaped by violence and a Russia in which they would no longer play a part.

Erlich and the rest made one last effort to save the provisional government. Three hundred socialists, including the elderly mayor of Petrograd, marched four abreast down Nevsky Prospect toward the Winter Palace, defiantly singing “The Marseillaise.” After a block, they ran into a cordon of sailors who would not let them pass. The group insisted. “We are ready to die, if you have the heart to fire on Russians and on comrades.” The sailors would not give them the satisfaction. “We will spank you! And if necessary, we will shoot you too. Go home now and leave us in peace!” one said, laughing. Offered slapstick rather than sublime martyrdom, the group retreated, still four abreast, in silent, dignified defeat.

Raphael Abramovich

After Erlich's group of socialists left the Soviet, the rest of the delegates were in no mood to hear Martov's call for unity. Why should the Bolsheviks form a government with a bunch of losers? To the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Bundists, Trotsky declared: "You are miserable bankrupts. Your role is played out; go where you ought to go—into the dustbin of history."

Martov stormed out. Loyally, Abramovich followed.

New York

History keeps moving, and we all wind up in the dustbin at the end.

Once, over egg salad sandwiches in his Inwood apartment, Bundist historian Jack Jacobs told me he had met Alexander Kerensky. I was flabbergasted. Kerensky? The leader of Russia in 1917? Was Jack older than I thought?

Jack told me the story. As a teenager, he worked in the Bund's archives, and Kerensky would visit his colleague, the chain-smoking Polish-born Bundist Hillel Kempinski. After Kerensky fled Petrograd in a car flying the American flag, he'd followed the path of so many political exiles, to New York City, where he settled until his death in 1970. Jack recalled how the one-time leader of revolutionary Russia would ask Kempinski to dig out yellowed party texts, undoubtedly for one of his many diatribes against Lenin. When Trotsky sent the Bundists off to the dustbin of history, this must have been what he meant.

They were losers, yes, but what about the people who won? Within two decades, Kamenev would be shot by the state he helped build. Trotsky? Murdered in Mexico. And Lenin, whose indomitable will brought the Bolshevik Revolution into being, would scarcely have time to enjoy it. He was dead a few years later. His body was embalmed, against his wife's wishes, then displayed like a wax doll in a mausoleum meant to legitimize the rule of Stalin, a man he had hated. Meanwhile, Alexander Kerensky was alive in New York City. He could see the sky, smell the subway stink, grab some borscht at B&H, then stop by the Bund's archives, where someone from the old world was there to greet him.

Who's to say who came out worse?

Chapter I.3 After October

(November 1917 August 1918)

Sophia Dubnova

the coo!” blared the front page of the Bundist newspaper Workers' Voice in its first issue after the Bolshevik seizure of power. It was not a revolution, the writers said, but a crazy escapade by Lenin and Trotsky. But, for all the Bund's diatribes, a reader who skipped the newspaper's first two pages might not have realized that anything had changed. The issue was filled with discussions of the Bund's usual concerns, like cultural work, pogroms in Ukraine, and the recently announced Balfour Declaration, in which Britain promised Jews a national home, whatever that meant, in Palestine. Like most observers, the Bund didn't imagine that the Bolsheviks would stay in power.

During its first weeks in control, Lenin's government weathered several threats. In Petrograd, it crushed a revolt at a school for military cadets, then suppressed a potential railway strike.

White-collar employees went on strike, creating chaos at government ministries. When the Bolsheviks set up new departments, liberal intellectuals refused to apply for jobs. One day Sophia received a letter with the unfamiliar signature of Vladimir Sheinfinkel, inviting her to visit a department in charge of the distribution of manufactured goods. When she entered their offices, she didn't recognize the stooped man at the desk, until a memory from a dozen years before flashed through her mind.

She had been a revolutionary in the Gomel underground. He was one of the fugitives who sought shelter in her flat. When he took her copy of Lermontov off the bookshelf, it fell open to her favorite poem. He swore it was his favorite too. They stayed up all night reading to each other. When the sleigh bells rang in the morning to signal his departure, he kissed her hand, in defiance of revolutionary mores.

Here he was, behind the desk of power.

After complimenting the poems she published in Gorky's Chronicle, Vladimirov got down to business. He wanted her to run a new production department for children's goods.

“I've never organized anything,” she replied.

“Who among us has?” he answered. “What were we taught? Conspiracy. And now the time has come to run a government whose like has never been seen anywhere. We'll stumble, make a heap of errors, but we'll learn.”

She told him she couldn't work for the Bolshevik government as a matter of principle.

To her surprise, he quoted a poem she had written after the birth of her son Victor. “There is a terrible force in the pitiful call of a child's hands.” All the job entailed was helping hungry children, he said. She could call him if she changed her mind.

After she left, she walked down Nevsky Prospect feeling feverish. She knew she would not call.

The streets were dark, but not quiet. They echoed with shots, screams, and the songs of sailors drunk from the tsar's looted wine cellars. The only light came from bonfires. It was dangerous to walk outside in a fur coat. One of her friends had recently been stripped by a pair of deserters.

At home, Sophia returned to her well-worn copy of Victor Hugo's Contemplations. She had underlined a sentence: “The revolution that comes to avenge all creates an eternal good from a tran-zee-unt evil.” The evil didn't feel tran-zee-unt.

Elections

A new slogan went up on the front pages of Bundist newspapers: “The Constituent Assembly is the only hope.”

Russian intellectuals had long cherished the ideal of the Constituent Assembly: a democratic body, elected by universal suffrage, that would settle the issues that had bedeviled Russia since March: national independence movements, the division of land to peasants, and the end of the war. The Bund threw itself into the electoral fray. There was a new competitor for the Jewish vote—the Zionists. This movement exploded in popularity after the Balfour Declaration, which gave the previously implausible idea of Jewish statehood the backing of an imperial power. Weeks before the election, 150,000 Jews demonstrated in front of Odesa's British consulate in gratitude. Even though most of these celebrants had no intention of going to Palestine, they hoped a Jewish state might advocate for their rights in Russia.

The Bund chose Raphael Abramovich and Esther Frumkin as candidates for the Constituent Assembly. Their first campaign stop was the impoverished Belarusian town of Vitebsk, where Jewish residents apologetically told the two candidates that they were voting Bolshevik because they wanted their sons to come home from the war.

Abramovich heard the same in the city of Polotsk on the Dvina River, when he made his case at meetings of the town's twenty-thousand-man garrison held in the circus every night. He told the soldiers that his party also wanted to make peace—they just didn't want soldiers to lynch their commanders and flee the front in chaos. German shells punctuated his remarks. He swore that the Bund had wanted to form a unified socialist government, but that Bolsheviks backstabbed them when they tried to negotiate. The crowd applauded. They gave more applause to the Bolshevik speaker who followed him.

Voting began on November 25 and stretched over two weeks. Abramovich and Frumkin lost their races. All the Bund had to show for themselves was a single delegate.

Crackdown

Despite the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, they still had a rival—the Socialist Revolutionaries, a party of agrarian populists with a long record of peasant activism and an even longer list of tsarist officials they had assassinated. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionaries won a plurality of the votes. Shocked and humiliated to have come in second, the Bolsheviks launched a campaign to discredit the election results. Simultaneously, they put Petrograd and Moscow under martial law. To enforce this repression, they created a new secret police organization, the Cheka, helmed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, who brought the lessons he learned as a prisoner to bear in his new office.

In the leadup to the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks cracked down on the opposition press. They ordered the closure of the main Menshevik paper, Workers' Gazette, where Henryk Erlich was co-editor, then sent detachments of sailors to smash the printing shop. The Mensheviks resurrected their papers with new names to stay ahead of the bans, but the Bolsheviks arrested their editors.

At a December meeting of the Menshevik central committee, Liber vented his contempt for anyone who still advocated compromise. The Bolshevik usurpers shut down more newspapers and arrested more socialists than any tsar ever dared, he said. They were preparing an attack on the Constituent Assembly. It was time for armed revolt, not playing nice on the soviets. When Martov argued that they could work with the new government while keeping their principles, Liber threatened to quit the party.

From then on, the Mensheviks would be split between Liber's and Martov's followers. Each side ran their own electoral slates, advocated contradictory policies on everything from participation in the soviets to collaboration with armed uprisings, and engaged in mutual recrimination. Once among the most popular parties in the empire, the Mensheviks bled members.

The Constituent Assembly

On January 18, 1918, came the long-awaited day of the Constituent Assembly. Inside Tauride Palace, over four hundred delegates, from Irkutsk to Tiflis, converged to decide the most important questions of their revolutionary homeland.

Though they had spent the last months working to discredit the assembly, the Bolsheviks grudgingly allowed it to go ahead—not that they intended to permit its Socialist Revolutionary plurality to accomplish much. To intimidate delegates, they encircled Tauride Palace with thousands of Red Guards. Machine guns pointed threateningly from adjoining rooftops.

Despite these attempts at suppression, tens of thousands of white-collar workers and intellectuals gathered in the Field of Mars, under banners that read, long live the constituent assembly. Sophia marched alongside Henryk, looking cautiously from side to side. A protester struck up an old revolutionary song. Around her, marchers whispered that soldiers were waiting a few blocks away to ambush them. They sang louder in defiance. "We'll push our way into the kingdom of freedom," Sophia sang, walking forward even as she heard the gunfire. Then she heard a scream. Images slid before her eyes like slideshow frames. A sailor, cap turned sideways, gun in hand. An old man on his knees. Shots. The crowd shoved apart, tearing her hand from Henryk's. His coat disappeared behind strangers' bodies. Someone pushed her. She tumbled onto the sidewalk. A building caretaker pulled her into a dim passageway filled with protesters, then bolted the gate. "Until they stop shooting, I won't let anyone out," he barked. "Afterward, good riddance."

Bolshevik forces killed twenty-one people that day.

While Sophia was dodging bullets, the Constituent Assembly met for a single session at Tauride Palace. When the Socialist Revolutionaries refused to ratify Lenin's latest manifesto, the Bolsheviks and Left S.R's walked out. The remaining delegates spent the day giving meandering speeches until, a few hours after midnight, Bolshevik sailors forced them out at gunpoint. When they arrived the next morning, they found Tauride's gates padlocked.

“The best among the Russian people have for almost a hundred years lived for the idea of a constituent assembly.... Yet now the 'people's commissars' gave the order to shoot down the crowd demonstrating in honor of this idea,” wrote Sophia's friend Maxim Gorky. But though the Constituent Assembly might have been the ideal for intellectuals like Sophia Dubnova, it meant little to the average Russian. They didn't protest when it was destroyed.

K.Y.T.V

The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly might have been a nonevent in most of Russia proper, but it horrified the leaders of the Ukrainian Central Rada.

For the past year, the Rada's leaders, socialist intellectuals Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, had wrangled for Ukrainian autonomy, only to be met with contemptuous dismissals. Even for liberal Russians, Ukraine was a prized possession. They did not intend to give it up. When Red Guard gunmen shot up pro-Constituent Assembly protests in Petrograd, it was the final straw. If the Bolsheviks would shut down the most cherished organ of revolutionary democracy, Vynnychenko wrote, then they were “the same Russian chauvinists and imperialists” as the last regime. On January 22, 1918, the Rada declared Ukrainian independence.

The Rada's leaders were enlightened, humanistic men who envisioned a multicultural, socialist Ukraine. In keeping with these ideals, the Rada adopted the Law of National-Personal Autonomy, which provided government funding for Jews and other minorities to run their own cultural institutions. They set up a ministry of Jewish affairs and proclaimed Yiddish an official language, to appear on street signs and exquisite new banknotes.

But despite the Rada's liberal gestures, Bundists remained deeply suspicious of Ukraine's national movement, even voting against Ukrainian independence in the Rada. This was probably inevitable. Though generations of tsars had oppressed both Ukrainians and Jews, there was little love lost between the groups. Many Jews viewed Ukrainians as violent peasants, and many Ukrainians viewed Jews as usurious collaborators of foreign tyrants. The history went deep: between 1648 and 1657, Ukrainian Cossacks led by Bohdon Khmelnytsky had slaughtered twenty thousand Jews as part of their uprising against Polish rule. (Khmelnytsky remains a national hero.) Intellectuals in Kyiv might have issued earnest proclamations about multiculturalism, but in the countryside, old hatreds burbled like lava, always ready to erupt. When the Rada's minister of military affairs, Symon Petliura, left his post to create a Cossack-inspired militia called the Haidamaks, it seemed to validate the Bundists' worst fears about armed ultranationalists. Pogroms broke out. When Moishe Rafes, the Bund's delegate to the Rada, tried to pass a resolution condemning the attacks, his fellow delegates voted it down.

Five days after the Rada declared independence, Russian soldiers laid siege to Kyiv, and on January 29, hundreds of pro-Bolshevik workers launched an uprising at the city's arsenal. Some of these workers were Jews. Petliura's Haidamaks quickly crushed the rebellion. Afterward, they marched through the cobblestone streets of the Jewish neighborhood of Podil screaming, "We will slaughter all the yids." They slaughtered twenty-two Jews, two of them Bundists. After death threats from Petliura's men, Moishe Rafes went into hiding.

Petliura's victory was short-lived. On February 9, the Russians took Kyiv. Despite their skepticism about Ukrainian independence, local Bundist leadership was horrified by the invasion. They condemned the Russians as “an occupation army” who “bombed out all the national achievements of the revolution in Ukraine”—and refused to recognize the Bolshevik government.

As the Reds instituted their own reign of terror against Kyiv's citizens, rumors spread that Jews had welcomed the invasion. As vengeance, Petliura's Haidamaks rampaged through the countryside murdering Jews who they claimed were communists.

Desperate to free themselves from their Russian invaders, on February 9, Ukraine's leaders signed a defense treaty with Germany and Austria. Three weeks later, Haidamaks and their German backers booted the Reds from Kyiv. More pogroms followed, carried out by Ukrainians who blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik invasion.

On March 3, after months of wrangling, the Bolsheviks signed their own treaty with Germany and Austria in the city of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia's role in World War 1. In exchange, Russia gave up control of most of the former Pale of Settlement and over half of its industrial land. Russians of all political stripes considered the Brest-Litovsk treaty a humiliating capitulation.

Lenin forced it through anyway. Only he seemed to realize the basic truth that you can't fight a war without an army.

The Brest-Litovsk treaty rid Ukraine of Russia—for the moment, at least. But their German defenders were beginning to act a lot like occupiers. The Germans took over railroads, looted state warehouses, and even hauled away Ukraine's famous black earth to fertilize German fields. Rebellion grew against the Germans, and against the Rada who had welcomed them.

Despite the violence, Rafes and his fellow Bundists added their voices to a new constitution, which, after weeks of haggling, contained enlightened laws on national autonomy. On the afternoon of April 28, Rada delegates gathered in their headquarters at Kyiv's Pedagogical Lyceum to discuss the increasingly tyrannical German rule. Rafes had just started to speak when a German officer burst in, barked that the building was surrounded, and put the entire government under arrest.

Hunger

Half of the former Russian Empire's wheat fields were behind enemy lines. The war destroyed the rest. The earth was blasted, the silos torched, the horses shot, even the seeds stolen by this army or that. Peasants refused to sell their crops to the government for worthless paper money, notwithstanding the commissars and their pious exhortations to feed their brothers in Petrograd. They buried the surpluses or used them to make vodka.

Factories laid off their workers. Starving workers fled to the countryside.

The Bolsheviks called on workers to abandon their quest for the eight-hour day, to accept wages at a third of their prewar level, to toil and shut up. When persuasion failed, the Bolsheviks gunned down their protests.

Seeking to channel the popular discontent, Bundists ran candidates for local soviets. On the rare occasions when they won, the Bolsheviks either falsified results or arrested their delegates.

That spring in Petrograd, the great hunger began. Breadlines became melees, and black-market prices soared. Writing grew harder for Henryk Erlich. After he edited an issue of his newspaper, he lay on the couch for hours with his eyes closed. Hunger made it impossible to think.

In May, Erlich went to Moscow to represent the Bund at a Menshevik conference. The party was more divided than ever, unsure if they should keep running candidates for the soviets, despite repression, or forgo what Liber called “Bonapartist clubs that gather together around these déclassé dregs” and instead join armed anti-Bolshevik uprisings. While the two sides bickered, Erlich's neighbor whispered that there was black-market flour available for purchase somewhere on Moscow's outskirts. When Erlich returned to Petrograd, Sophia asked the results of the conference. He dropped a sack of flour on the table by way of reply.

Horses collapsed from hunger, and dogs picked at their bodies. Impoverished members of the old elite sold their possessions on the side of the road. After hours in line, all Sophia could manage was a ration of salted fish so hard she needed to beat it into dust to make it edible. As she pounded the fish on the counter, she imagined she could hear all the other women in their kitchens, pounding the same fish, the beat of their efforts hammering through the revolutionary slogans until nothing was left but this metronome of survival.

Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes

The situation grew darker for Bundists in Kyiv, where the German occupiers installed an aristocratic Ukrainian general named Pavlo Skoropadskyi as the country's dictator; he preferred the traditional Cossack title: hetman. Hetman Skoropadskyi undid the social reforms of his predecessors, dissolving the Ministry of Jewish Affairs and overturning laws allowing for Jewish cultural autonomy. With German help, he brought back the old elites to suck more money from the impoverished populace. Ukrainians responded with a guerrilla insurgency. The hetman blamed the Jews.

Kyiv soon filled with anti-Bolshevik refugees. Flush with cash they had smuggled out of revolutionary Russia, aristocrats and business magnates partook in orgiastic self-indulgence. More menacing were the young military officers whom the revolution had stripped of family estates and career prospects, and who hated the Bolsheviks with a nauseous fury. These men would flock to the fledgling Volunteer Army, soon known as the Whites.

Founded by tsarist generals who had fled Russia just weeks after the Bolshevik takeover, the Whites fought to restore some version of the old regime that had so richly benefited their families. As Whites battled Reds across the Russian steppes, each side left a trail of war crimes behind them. The Whites relished pogroms—vengeance, they said, for the prominence of Jews amongst the Bolsheviks. They emphasized this point by cutting Bolshevik stars into the corpses of their Jewish victims. But Reds also carried out pogroms, most notably in the Ukrainian city of Hlukhiv, where, under the cry of “Eliminate the bourgeoisie and the Yids,” they murdered over a hundred Jews. After the massacre, the Bundist leader Vladimir Kossovsky saw the street outside the Soviet “literally sodden” with victims' blood.

By summer, much of the former Russian Empire fell out of Soviet control. Across the shattered corpse of this empire, nationalist independence movements, foreign proxies, Allied expeditionary forces, megalomaniacal warlords, forest robbers, and peasant bands all trained their guns on the new government. The term civil war does not do justice to the chaos. It was the bellum omnium contra omnes that Thomas Hobbes invokes in Leviathan. The war of all against all.

Sophia Dubnova

“The summer was dusty and torrid,” Sophia wrote. “In the piles of trash scattered on the street, mangy stray cats rooted about persistently, in hopeless search for something edible, and filled the air with their cross meows. In well-to-do houses people cautiously chewed hard horse meat.”

Repression reverberated around Russia. The Cheka arrested the Bund's local leaders in Bogorodsk, and in Vitebsk they publicly executed a Bundist for smuggling a comrade's letters out of prison, then refused to give his family his body. A Menshevik report in June 1918 noted that in Minsk, "the persecution of socialists has reached such proportions that they had to go underground, just like under czarism."

All of this must have weighed on Sophia's mind when she and Henryk contemplated a painful decision. At the start of the year, a letter arrived from her in-laws begging them to return to Henryk's Polish hometown, Lublin, which was then under Austrian occupation. Their steam mill was back up, the authorities left them alone, and best of all, they had plenty to eat. Sophia's boys were so skinny that she could encircle their upper arms with her middle finger and thumb. They followed her from room to room with sing-song supplications for food. If they stayed in Russia, she worried they would starve to death.

When their travel permits arrived that August, Henryk and Sophia swore that the move would not be final. They would stay in Lublin just long enough for their sons to put on weight, then resume their lives in Petrograd. On the freight train west, Sophia heard guns rumble in the distance; they were not far from a front line of the civil war. They rode in semidarkness, sitting on their bags to protect them from thieves. When Henryk bought bread at the Minsk station, the boys ripped into it like animals. They got out at Orsha, a small city at the fork of the Dnipro River, where the Austrian-occupied zone began. As they went through passport control, a sharp pain overtook Sophia. Terrified she would lose her sons in the crowd, she grabbed their hands so hard that they yelped. From the train window she watched as the letters on the signs went from Cyrillic to Latin. She began to cry uncontrollably—ugly, choking tears that Henryk would not understand. Where had this come from? She seemed so calm before. She swallowed hard, forcing herself to be silent. She knew her Polish-born husband could never feel as she did then. Her old life, with her family, her friends, poetry in her own language, in her own familiar country, passed irrevocably into the distance. In a later poem, she wrote that she was “a daughter/Torn away from her mother.”

Part Three

The Alternate World

1917 to 1939

Chapter I.4 The Chaos

(1917 to 1921)

Sam Rothbort

The Year 1917 brought chaos to Russia, but on the other side of the world, my great-grandfather's art career was on the rise. That was the year he first exhibited with the Society of Brooklyn Artists in the glittery Abraham & Straus department store (a palace of commerce whose white-gloved attendants spoke twenty-three languages, from Gaelic to Arabic), and at the Pouch Mansion in Prospect Heights. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle began to mention his work. He painted Rose, his kids, and the streets outside their Bushwick tenement, in a postimpressionist impasto that he called "direct art." His canvases were bold, modernist, New York. In May 1917, one month after the United States joined World War 1, he finally applied for American citizenship. Samuel Rothbort, age thirty-four, renounced forever his allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereign. He was neither an anarchist nor a polygamist. It was his intention to become a citizen of the United States of America, so help him God.

It was a good time to cement his status. After America entered World War 1 in April 1917, it began to look less kindly on European Jewish radicals, many of whom opposed the conflict. The American government would target them with the Espionage Act that June. The prominence of Trotsky and other Jewish Bolsheviks turned this state scrutiny into an obsession. The F.B.I's precursor, the Bureau of Investigation, sent spies to radical haunts, like the evocatively named Golden Rooster, where they tried to comprehend the ornate factionalism of socialist politics, imagining a network that connected Trotsky to Hindu priests and the Jewish Labor Bund. They got most things wrong but managed to ruin lives all the same.

In my mother's shoebox we found a faded card from the Bureau of Investigation acknowledging an interaction with Sam Rothbort. It was filled out with his 1918 address. I wrote to the F.B.I asking for any records pertaining to my great-grandfather, but they claimed that none existed. Then I looked at the signature on the Bureau of Investigation card. Chas. De Woodey, district supervisor. I contemplated the name's Knickerbocker etymology, the waspish abbreviation of Charles to Chas. I had found my antagonist.

De Woodey, it turned out, was J. Edgar Hoover's boy, a hunter of German spies and other subversives who sent undercovers to arrest any immigrant drunk enough to publicly doubt American military might. He made his career persecuting Wobblies, Indian freedom fighters, and a famous Turkish dancing girl, but his path crossed Sam's during the "slacker raids" of September 1918. With the help of a jingoistic quasi-civilian spy group called the American Protective League, de Woodey's officers poured into immigrant neighborhoods to demand draft cards. Officers herded sixty thousand men who could not produce cards into horse carts and dragged them off to the Fifth Avenue Armory, where draft dodgers were set up with registration appointments at their local boards. Anyone who refused was shipped to a concentration camp upstate.

So it was that on September 12, 1918, fourteen years after he escaped conscription into the tsarist army, Sam stood at Local Board 75 in Greenpoint, to be registered to fight in someone else's war.

Sophia Dubnova

While my great-grandfather was cursing his luck in a Brooklyn draft office, Sophia Dubnova was going to crazy in Lublin. She hated the overstuffed, overfed Erlich family home, where her mother-in-law nagged her to get Henryk to take up work as a pricey lawyer, and where the prosaic nattering of her father-in-law's business acquaintances constantly interrupted her thoughts. She was a poet, dammit. She needed space. To keep her cool, she buried herself in Russian newspapers. Things were going to hell, as usual. The civil war raged in the south. Sophia lived for the occasional letter from her father.

Henryk was equally miserable in his childhood home, but he had the party as an escape. The Bund flourished in occupied Poland. Cut off from the old intelligentsia in Russia, confronted with mass unemployment and starvation, the party turned away from the theoretical cul-de-sacs of its early days toward its true strength, practical organizing. With money provided by the Jewish socialist diaspora, tuers set up trade unions, economic cooperatives, and soup kitchens that fed hundreds of thousands of workers. Built on the principle of mutual aid rather than top-down charity, members elected their own leadership and settled their own disputes. The Bundist Emanuel Nowogrodski would later call these institutions “universities of socialist self-management” that trained the next generation of leaders. The Bund's city committees stood up to the forced labor regime imposed by the German occupation. Under Vladimir Medem's leadership, the party wove itself into the fabric of daily life.

When Medem arrived at the Erlich home in Lublin that autumn, he was like a visitor from another planet. Prison had not damaged his good looks. "Oy, he looks like a real count," sighed Sophia's mother-in-law, and the Erlich women flirtatiously proffered delicacies for him to sample. Only Sophia recognized the pain in Medem's eyes. His three-year-old daughter, Natasha, had recently died of meningitis. Medem implored Henryk to stay in Poland rather than returning to Petrograd. "We are in greater need of living leaders than of prisoners languishing in Russian jails," he told them. Sophia knew her exile would be permanent.

Geopolitics

Events in nearby Germany shook the world. A mutiny amongst sailors on a doomed naval campaign broke out in Kiel. Uprisings spread to Munich and Berlin. Soon Germany was in the midst of a full-scale revolution. Kaiser Wilhelm fled, and the social democrats proclaimed a republic. For socialists around the world, Germany offered an unexpected hope. Perhaps the events in Russia were the start of a worldwide revolution. Perhaps Lenin and Trotsky were right.

On November 11, 1918, the Republic of Germany signed an armistice. The First World War ended before America could send Sam Rothbort to fight. For Russia, its costs were incalculable. Russian casualties included the Romanov dynasty, the March Revolution, and three million human beings. Things went better on Sophia's side of the border. After 130 years of partition, Poland stood united and independent under the leadership of general Józef Pilsudski, aristocrat, revolutionary bank robber, war hero, and longtime acquaintance of the Bund, whose leaders he befriended during a stint hiding out in Vilna.

By 1918, Pilsudski was no longer the fiery leftist of his youth. “I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that's where I got off,” he told an old underground acquaintance who greeted him as “comrade.”

Pilsudski may have been an authoritarian nationalist, but he differed in one respect from others who wore this label. He envisioned a multiethnic Poland, like the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which would include Jews and other minorities as equals. When he came to power, he invited the Bund to join his government. The Bund declined, declaring that, for them to participate, Pilsudski would need to grant Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and all the rest their national-cultural autonomy. Bundists were also furious because Polish soldiers kept smashing up their clubs.

As Medem wrote, every nation-state creates its own minorities, and this was especially true in Poland; ethnic Poles barely constituted a majority within the borders of the newborn state. This demography gave right-wing Polish nationalism an insecure, paranoid disposition, especially with regard to the Jews, who made up 13 percent of the population. Jews' numerousness made them "the worst enemies" of Poland, according to one pamphlet published by the National Democrats, an economically conservative, Catholic, and luridly racist political party that would become the Bund's most dangerous Polish antagonists.

Co-founded by right-wing pamphleteer Roman Dmowski in 1897, the National Democrats, or Endeks, had spent the last twenty years building their Polish nationalism not upon the armed struggle for independence but upon genocidal antipathy toward the country's Jews. In the now-independent Poland, they enjoyed terrorizing Jewish neighborhoods while nourishing grand dreams of mass ethnic cleansing. They yearned for a Poland free of Jews.

This sort of racism wasn't confined to nationalists—it even infected members of the Polish left. Days after independence, workers' parties formed soviets in most major Polish cities. Erlich joined the Lublin Soviet as the Bund's delegate. At the first meeting, Polish socialist delegates announced that if they served alongside Jews, their own constituents would reject them. "The Polish proletariat still isn't adult enough to understand that we need a united front" to fight the capitalists, Erlich shot back. The soviet kicked out the Jewish parties anyway.

All this depressed Sophia Dubnova further. She spoke Polish, adored Polish poets, supported their country's struggle, and would have liked to celebrate their independence alongside them, but after months in Lublin, her sympathies were wearing thin. She realized that many of the Poles who had so recently freed themselves from Russian oppression were all too eager to take on the role of oppressors. “For the first time in my life, I felt compelled to breathe the stuffy air of the ghetto,” she later wrote.

The Bund sent Henryk Erlich to Warsaw, where the soviet accepted Jewish parties. He could not afford to bring Sophia with him. To escape the claustrophobic Erlich home, she would wander Lublin's old city. In the gothic church, she watched the worshippers prostrate themselves, while the saints glowered at her from the frescoes, their pinched mouths seeming to whisper, "You have no place in this place."

When Henryk visited from Warsaw, he was full of excitement at the Bund's success. She said nothing about her homesickness. Why cause her husband more pain?

Lveev Borders were ill-defined in the former Pale of Settlement. They leapt forward and backward, squiggled and curved. They melted like slush in the springtime. They dissolved beneath the boots of passing armies, like Trotsky's Reds and Anton Denikin's Whites, Petliura's Haidamaks, the Black anarchist armies of Nestor Makhno, the peasant Greens, and the armies of newly minted nation-states whose mutually contradictory revanchist claims would, in the coming years, turn the region into a killing field.

Now free of the Russian Empire, Poland immediately embarked on its own imperial wars of conquest, starting with the exquisite, formerly Habsburg city of Lviv.

Beautiful Lviv, I first saw you in 2022, almost a year into the Russian invasion. I remember your stone nymphs, the grace of your squares, the tart sea buckthorn tea served in your cafés, the girls with glass-smooth blow-outs, their sexiness a middle finger to the air raid sirens. I remember the exhibit of destroyed Russian military hardware. You had to walk on a Russian flag to enter, and a mannequin in a Russian uniform hung over the doorway from a noose. You were Ukrainian Ukrainian when I visited, but this had not always been the case. You once were called Lwow by your Polish majority. In Yiddish—your population was one-third Jewish—you went by Lemberg.

After the Germans left in November 1918, Ukrainian fighters declared Lviv the capital of their short-lived West Ukrainian People's Republic. Pilsudski differed. With over half the population being Polish, Lwow clearly belonged to him.

When Polish troops took Lviv (or was it Lwow?), Lemberg was the place that suffered. The soldiers burned the Jewish neighborhoods, pillaged their stores, broke down their doors with hand grenades, raped women and forced them to stand naked in front of mobs, which, it must be said, contained many members of the local Christian elite. This was not the drunken bloodlust of the Russian countryside but, rather, a massacre carried out by a professional army in a city they had secured, in front of the approving gaze of local residents. The Polish army murdered at least seventy-three Jews. When Jewish newspapers reported on the pogrom, the Polish government blamed the victims.

The Lviv massacre was the among the first of over a thousand pogroms that took place between November 1918 and March 1921 within the former Pale of Settlement. They were of a ferocity and sadism never before experienced in eastern Europe. Almost everyone took part. Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Poles. Cossacks, criminals, warlords, aristocrats, soldiers, deserters. Whites, Greens, monarchists, reactionaries, nationalists, people with no ideology whatsoever, and even units that were ostensibly communist.

It didn't matter who one was, or what one believed. Everyone killed Jews. Everyone raped Jews, burned their houses, threw them out of trains. When Jews tried to form self-defense units, they were outnumbered, and the sight of Jews with weapons only provoked their attackers more. Each pogrom aimed not just to kill but to humiliate, to prove the victims' sub-humanity, to them and to an audience, often made up of the victims' acquaintances. Pogromists —drunk, singing, laughing—slit open their neighbors' bellies, burned their children's babysitters alive, forced their classmates to dig their own graves. Pogromists rewarded themselves by filling their carts with so much loot it made their horses groan and selling it cheaply in the bazaars that sprung up around killing sites. Sometimes, they just left it in the gutter. Why not? They'd gotten it for free.

Everyone claimed these massacres were justified. Poles said Jews sided with Ukrainians. Ukrainians said they sided with Russians. Russian Whites said they sided with Russian Reds. Russian Reds said they were capitalist exploiters. Jews were spies for every side, Christ killers, traitors, internationalist financiers, unscrupulous speculators, and, above all, revolutionaries. Everyone agreed they had it coming.

Warsaw

Poland began 1919 in turmoil. On January 4, the racist Endek party tried to overthrow the government. The coup failed, but Pilsudski refused to charge the conspirators, afraid this would make them martyrs. In parliamentary elections later that month, Endeks won a plurality of the vote.

Sophia joined Henryk in Warsaw. The Erlich family moved into a cheap apartment near the Lebens-Fragen offices, where Henryk worked alongside Medem as an editor. At the paper, one hot topic was the rise of Zionism. Since the Balfour Declaration, the movement had exploded, siphoning resources from Poland's exhausted Jewish community. In one article, Medem described a Jewish man fainting from hunger beneath a Zionist poster that called, with “fat, black, screaming letters” for money to be sent to Palestine.

Medem found Zionist ambitions ridiculous. For the Bund, the fight for Jewish life was in Poland, and Erlich joined Medem at its center. He got elected to the Warsaw city council, supervised union work, and stayed up late writing urgent editorials denouncing government repression. The Warsaw police often confiscated the Bund's newspaper, which only egged Erlich on.

In their cramped apartment with its peeling wallpaper, Sophia strove to convey the beauty of Russian literature to her boys. Despite their age, she gave them Gogol and Turgenev. She took them on walks to Saxon Gardens, where they discussed poetry in her native language, indifferent to the shouts of passersby. “Speak Polish!” they sniped. “I speak it as well as you,” she quipped back, whereupon they'd say that Jews like her ought to get out while the going was good, back to “her” Trotsky's Russia, or, inevitably, to Palestine.

Bernard Goldstein

Days after the end of World War 1, posters went up around Kyiv calling on the population to overthrow the hated regime of Hetman Skoropadskyi and to restore the Ukrainian People's Republic—the democratic government German occupiers had overthrown back in April. These posters were issued in the name of an underground organization called the Directorate, which had been founded by the Rada's former leader, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, with Petliura's troops for muscle. Since they hated the hetman as much as anyone, Kyiv Bundists heeded the call.

Bernard Goldstein led their fighters. Born in an impoverished shettl in eastern Poland, Bernard joined the party at age thirteen. By sixteen, he had already survived one prison term; for a keepsake a guard left a saber scar across his face. A quiet bruiser who spoke in a mangled mixture of three languages, Bernard spent the next decade escaping jails and organizing unions. He once shared a cell with Vladimir Medem. In 1915, during a stint in Siberia, Bernard earned his place in legend. During a routine checkup, the police commissioner flipped Bernard's eyelids up to check for trachoma. "Are you a doctor?" Bernard sneered. The commissioner slapped him across the face. Not one to be insulted, Bernard slammed a kerosene lamp over the commissioner's head. The commissioner retaliated harshly. But Bernard had a compassionate streak. When the Revolution broke out in March 1917, the prisoners overthrew their guards, tied the commissioner to a tree, and presented him to Bernard to execute. Bernard refused. The revolution, he declared, must be humane. From Siberia, he made his way to Kyiv, where he served on the city's soviet during the brief days of revolutionary democracy.

When the 1918 uprising against the hetman began, Bernard's two hundred fighters took over the elegant streets around the Bessarabian Market, in the city center. They might have set up snipers' nests amidst the market's wooden stalls, lit bonfires, or gotten boot prints all over counters that once groaned with sturgeon and champagne. When they guarded Khreshchatyk Street, the archangel atop City Hall must have seemed to raise her arm in benediction.

Ukraine

In late December, Vynnychenko and his Directorate returned to power in Kyiv, with a little bit of help from the Bund.

This time, it would be different, Vynnychenko swore. He offered promises of autonomy and condemnations of pogroms. But there were menacing signs. The Directorate barely controlled its own troops outside of Kyiv. What troops it did control were under the ostensible command of Petliura. Over the next year, these troops would carry out pogroms of world-shattering violence.

Berdichev's Bundist mayor, David Lipetz, quickly learned about the gulf between the Directorate's lofty words and the actions of its soldiers. Lipetz was not naïve; he even helped found self-defense squads. Yet, when pogromists gathered outside his house in January screaming, "Give us the Yid who runs this city," he was as helpless as any old-time shtetl victim. The pogromists lined up his family, put guns to their heads, and would have pulled the triggers if Lipetz hadn't managed to bribe them with some valuables. Pogromists murdered seventeen Jews that day. When Lipetz and other Jewish leaders tried to bury their dead, the pogromists attacked the funeral and killed two more. Lipetz and Moishe Rafes led a Bundist delegation to Kyiv to demand they stop the pogroms. The Directorate did nothing.

The pogrom wave grew after Petliura took over the Directorate in February. A few days later, a division of Petliura's troops led by Ivan Semesenko rode their horses through the main drag of the small town of Proskurov and murdered 1,500 people in Petliura's name.

The Polish army was hardly better. “In order to deflect the attention of the masses from their real needs, and to drown the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in a wave of race-hatred…the reactionary forces organized a series of anti-Jewish pogroms,” Erlich told the Warsaw Soviet in March. In early April, in Pinsk, the Polish army arrested thirty-five Jews at a meeting about aid distribution and gunned them down against the wall of a nearby monastery. Two victims were Bundists: the municipal worker Moishe Glauberman and the teacher Abraham Chaim Haltsman. At a parliamentary inquest later, the army justified themselves by exhibiting a photograph of Jewish men armed with pistols, meant to be proof that their victims were a threat to Polish security. It was a photograph of a Bundist self-defense squad taken during the revolution of 1905.

After Erlich denounced the Pinsk pogrom in the Bund's Polish-language paper, the Warsaw police hauled him to court on accusations of attempting to “abolish the social order of Poland.”

On April 19, Pilsudski led Polish forces into Vilna. In the days that followed, his soldiers murdered eighty-five Jews. Two days into their rampage, Polish legionnaires broke down the door of an apartment that the famed playwright A. Vayter shared with two poets. Vayter had been the leader of the Bund's Vilna self-defense group during the 1905 revolution but, disillusioned by the October pogroms, had turned to literature. When the Red Army seized Vilna, they appointed Vayter as head of a Yiddish publishing house. Now his body lay in the gutter, one of the many Jewish corpses scattered around Vilna's old town.

“The Polish Army brings Liberty and Freedom to you all,” Pilsudski declared once he had secured the city.

Kombund

In the first twenty years of their existence, the Bund had accomplished many things in the areas of mutual aid, cultural production, and armed self-defense. But there was one thing that the Bund had neglected: the necessity of taking power. As armed bands ravaged the former Pale of Settlement, Bundists got a brutal lesson in their own helplessness. They represented a small minority. For their communities to survive, they needed allies, but every armed group in Ukraine had carried out pogroms. Only two groups even tried to stop the violence: forces led by the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno and the Bund's enemies, the Red Army. For the Bolsheviks, stopping pogroms was a matter of self-interest as well as ethics. They had long known that the conflation of Jew and revolutionary would redound against them, and Trotsky's role as leader of the Red Army brought these slanders to a fever pitch. In the spring of 1919, they began to view pogroms as an existential threat to themselves. They published antipogrom leaflets, and imprisoned or shot instigators. Lenin himself made a gramophone recording to convince soldiers that antisemitism was a tool of the bourgeoisie. Sometimes Red Army units got drunk and murdered Jews anyway, but whatever atrocities they committed paled in comparison to those done by Petliura's Haidamaks, the Polish army, and the Whites. Unsurprisingly, Bundists in Ukraine began to take a second look at the Bolsheviks. When the Red Army appealed for Jewish recruits, many Bundist pogrom survivors signed up—including the Bundist mayor of Berdichev, David Lipetz. After a second pogrom rocked his city, he lost all faith in the Ukrainian government, quit his post, and enlisted in the Red Army under the goyish pseudonym of Petrovsky. In February 1919, in Kyiv, Moishe Rafes inaugurated a new group, the Communist Bund, or Kombund. (The Bolsheviks had changed their name to the Communist Party a year before.) The Kombund would ally with the Red Army, which Rafes saw as the only force that could protect Jewish workers. from what he described as “mass annihilation.” Bundist groups around Ukraine followed his lead and transformed into Kombunds.

Did Rafes and Lipetz have a choice? Poles, Ukrainians, and Whites murdered Jews en masse. Bundists had turned to the Ukrainian government for help, only to be ignored. The Red Army ^{[*]} was the only group even claiming to defend them. In the words of one Bundist survivor, “For us there is no other way.”

Sarah Fuchs

Despite the multidirectional terror they lived under, not every Bundist agreed with the choice that Lipetz and Rafes made. I think of Sarah Fuchs. In her photograph in The Bund in Pictures, her hollow eyes evoke the intensity of her belief. She'd been a sweat-shop seamstress since fourteen. The Bund gave her a union, an education, a family, and a methodology to analyze the world. In return, she gave them everything she had. She never married. She had no lovers. She just worked for the Bund. She rotted in jail cells. She organized soldiers on the front lines. At a circus in Berdichev, she promoted the Bundist candidate for the Soviet before an audience of thousands. At a Jewish convention in Kyiv, she explained the party's platform with cool selfassurance while rabbis heckled her for daring, as a woman, to stand so shamelessly onstage. Fuchs could not reconcile herself to the terror that followed Lenin's Revolution. "I do not imagine any social democracy without democracy," she wrote to Rafes a few months after the Bolsheviks took power.

In June 1919, the Cheka stormed Berdichev's Bundist cultural club, where Fuchs spent much of her time. “Where is the counterrevolutionary Sarah Fuchs?” one agent demanded. “I am the counterrevolutionary Sarah Fuchs,” she replied. She was interrogated for twenty-four hours straight by a Cheka agent who once had been her party comrade. This made up her mind. She was sick of betrayed trust, of strangers' slogans spoken by her friends' familiar lips. She bought a train ticket to Kyiv. She told her friends she was going for party business, but her smile was too tight. When she arrived, she walked toward the Jewish neighborhood of Podil. The streets were empty except for a few militiamen. She stopped on the bridge over the Dnipro River. She climbed awkwardly atop the railing. She took a breath. Kyiv is beautiful in June, when the air feels floral, electric. Perhaps she paused to enjoy the summer breeze on her face before stepping out, right foot then left, into the sunshine.

She slammed into the water. For a second, her skirt billowed around her like a bell. Did she reconsider her choice? Or did she remember her letter to Rafes: “I know that people with opinions and spirits such as these will now be stoned or (in the best-case scenario) spat upon. I know that there is no place among the living for people of my type. They are superfluous.” Her clothes became saturated with water, pulling her to the river bottom.

Gomel

In April 1920, at the Bund's twelfth congress, in Gomel, the disagreements between the party's pro-and anti-Soviet factions led to a final rupture. A majority of delegates, led by Esther Frumkin, voted to have the Bund enter the Communist Party as an autonomous organization, just as they had entered the R.S.D.L.P in 1903. They had little choice. The Bolsheviks might have been bastards, but they were bastards the Bund knew. Soviet rule seemed like the only protection Jews had against the murderous depredations of the Polish army, Ukrainian warlords, and the Whites. And for the moment, the Soviets seemed inclined to be generous, allowing Bundists in Minsk to keep publishing their newspaper and running their clubs, even as they shut down similar efforts by other leftist groups. By Frumkin's reckoning, it was time for the Bund to get on board with the world's first socialist state. When she announced her faction's decision, she no longer spoke in the poetic register of previous years, but with the pseudoscientific jargon of the newborn Soviet state.

This decision was the last straw for Raphael Abramovich, who was fresh out of jail after a hunger strike. He didn't see why his party should fight some murderers by submitting themselves to others. Rather than capitulate, he and his followers left to form the Social Democratic Bund, which, he swore, would uphold the true spirit of the party.

“The existing government demands unquestioning, silent, and total submission,” Abramovich wrote in a letter to his Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod. He was right. The Soviets banned Abramovich's speeches as counterrevolutionary, and the Cheka ransacked his apartment. He lived in fear of another arrest. After much wrangling, Abramovich obtained a visa to accompany his dying friend, Menshevik leader Julius Martov, to Germany.

Shortly after Abramovich's departure, the Cheka arrested the entire Social Democratic Bund committee in Mogilev and sent the leaders to concentration camps. More arrests of Bundist leaders across Russia followed. The Social Democratic Bund issued its last illegal bulletin in 1923. After that, silence.

Poland, Sea to Sea

After a year of war with the Soviets, Polish nationalism mutated into a fever dream of empire. Polska od mirza do morza! the slogan went. Poland from the Black Sea to the Baltic! With more expansion in mind, Pilsudski signed an alliance with Petliura. They would kick out the Reds, retake Kyiv, and divide Ukraine between them.

In Warsaw, the atmosphere was stifling. On May Day of 1920, after Medem spoke before twenty thousand people in Iron Gate Square, police sealed the side streets and beat the celebrants to a pulp. Cops wrecked the Bund's club in Praga, a suburb on the opposite side of the Vistula River. They shut down Lebens-Fragen and arrested its editors. That month, with Petliura's help, Poland took Kyiv and Pilsudski returned to Warsaw as a hero.

The Soviet counteroffensive was savage, spearheaded by the First Cavalry Army—the Red Cossacks immortalized by Sophia Dubnova's old acquaintance Isaac Babel, who served as their political commissar. Babel fetishized these manly men who had once tormented his family ("his long legs were like girls clad to the shoulders in shining jackboots," Babel wrote of one officer), then snuck off to celebrate Jewish holidays with mournful intellectuals who dreamed of revolutions without bullets and of Internationals of good men. As the Red Army advanced, Babel recorded a war fought in both the future and the deep past, with bombers and armored trains, with machine guns hauled by horse carts, with a Scythian cavalry, with sticks and rocks. The Red Army moved through mud-dark rivers, over fields red with poppies and livid with decayed hunks of human flesh. The Reds retook Kyiv, then Minsk, then Vilna, then crossed the Bug River to reach Bialystok, where Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky set up shop as the future leader of Poland.

Sophia Dubnova

On July 8, 1920, at an emergency meeting of the Warsaw city council, Henryk Erlich demanded immediate peace and an end to Polish imperial ambitions. “What are we fighting for?” he asked. “Land which doesn't belong to us.” He was the only councilman who raised his voice. Hysterical demonization followed. Newspapers smeared the Bund as Soviet traitors, and the government banned the party. Soldiers smashed their union halls and shut down their meetings. The Bundist press went underground. Sympathetic printers typeset their newspapers after work and ran them off on the presses of mainstream newspapers that Bundists commandeered at gunpoint.

Police sealed Warsaw's Jewish districts and hunted leftists house-to-house. They arrested hundreds of Bundists, shipping many off to a concentration camp near Krakow. When undercover cops began to watch his home, Erlich went into hiding.

Sophia was with her maid when the cops broke down her door to demand her husband's whereabouts. "He's away in the provinces," she lied. They tore through the house, overturning drawers, knocking down books, jeering that Yids like her were out to ruin Poland. One policeman picked up a German economics pamphlet. "Communist stuff!" he crowed. His chief, an ashen anorexic with drug-blurred eyes, complimented Sophia on her taste in literature. "You live in modest surroundings," he said. "The Bolsheviks pay meagerly for the services Mr. Erlich renders them." As he interrogated her, she realized that the police knew every detail of the Bund's acrimonious debates about Soviet Russia. Their party was clearly infiltrated with spies.

After the police left, Sophia stood in the middle of her scattered papers. Her head raced. She couldn't move for a long time.

By August, the Red Army was a few miles outside of Warsaw. The Communist Party of Poland promised Lenin they would “unfurl the Red Banner of Revolution inside this Fortress of Imperialism.” Inside the city, the Polish army hunted draft dodgers for immediate conscription, and the Polish Socialist Party raised battalions of workers armed with scythes. Then, on August 15, Polish forces counterattacked in a little town called Izabelin, forcing the Soviets into a shambolic retreat. Wherever the Polish army went, soldiers carried out pogroms to avenge themselves upon the Jews who they believed were traitors.

The police caught Henryk Erlich in September. Bored with hiding at his friend's place, he shaved off his signature beard in a half-assed effort to conceal his identity and went for a walk. Cops grabbed him within minutes.

Erlich's arrest thrust Sophia into the ranks of women who love imprisoned men. This sisterhood is familiar to me from the times I've taken the visitors' bus to the jail at Rikers Island. You rarely see men onboard. Only women seem to visit Rikers. Once there, these wives, sisters, daughters, mothers, and lovers wait for hours to have guards take their fingerprints, shine flashlights beneath their tongues, and watch them shake out their bras. They pay this price to see their men. In Sophia's Warsaw, women waited the same wait beside the blank brick walls of Mokotow prison. Sophia observed them. They were every age. Some wore fur coats, some tattered sheepskin. Some cried. Others kept a stony silence. All of them had the same bewilderment in their eyes. How could they navigate this bureaucracy? How could they get lawyers for their men, or even permission to visit? Everything was against them.

Sophia knew what to do. After fifteen years in radical circles, she'd been around this block before. She explained the visiting procedure. A crowd gathered around her. She passed out her address so she could help the women file paperwork. Sophia Dubnova may have lost her country, but she hadn't lost her sense of self. She was still the same girl who had incited a military mutiny in Grodno, who smuggled pamphlets taped to her body. She was a revolutionary. She would do what revolutionaries did. She organized.

Volkovysk

bad straits ever since. In April 1920, after rumors spread about matzoh made with babies' blood, soldiers smashed up the Jewish neighborhood. That summer a group of Volkovysk immigrants in New York scraped together eighty thousand dollars to help their families back home. They dispatched two representatives to deliver money to the town rabbi, who intended to use it to buy off the next round of pogromists, whoever they might be. Shortly after the money arrived, the Red Army took back Volkovysk. With them came one of Sam's old Bundist comrades, Berl Dzhik. The boyish radical who had escaped the cops dressed in drag back in 1903 returned wearing a secret policeman's leather jacket. With Berl and his men searching Volkovysk door to door, the rabbi knew it was a matter of time until they found the New York cash. Rather than trying to hide, the rabbi summoned Berl for a meeting, to remind him of how the Jewish community had cared for his family during his Siberian imprisonment. Now it was Berl's turn to save them. Berl agreed, despite his alleged ideology, and the two came up with a plan. The rabbi showed Berl where he had concealed the money beneath his floorboards. When Berl supervised a search of the rabbi's house, he made sure to stand on that exact spot so that it, and it alone, remained untouched. Berl knew there were debts to be paid, even in the brand-new Bolshevik state. In October 1920, the Polish army invaded, retook, liberated, and/or occupied Volkovysk. When a well-known captain died in the battle, the Poles announced they would retaliate by slaughtering the entire Jewish population. The only thing that stopped them was a payment from the rabbi, using the New York cash that Berl Dzhik had helped him conceal. No matter how I searched, I never found another word about Berl Dzhik, though perhaps his name is hiding in archives in Minsk or Moscow. I don't know if he died in the war, in the purges, in the Nazi invasion, or even, improbably, as an old pensioner in his bed. However it was, a secret policeman like him would have deserved it. Every secret policemen committed his share of murders, and Berl's quotidian workday involved the imprisonment, interrogation, and torture of other human beings. Yet Berl was not foreordained to be a murderer. God and chance and the Dialectical Forces of History all had their parts to play. If events had occurred in a different sequence, Berl might have taken a boat to New York, gotten a job in a sweat-shop, and joined a Workmen's Circle branch like my great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. He could have taken Sam's path, and if Sam had stayed in Volkovysk, who's to say he would not have taken Berl's?

Refugee

Around two hundred thousand Jews were murdered in the pogroms that took place between 1918 and 1921. The chaos forced six hundred thousand more to flee to Western Europe, America, and Palestine. Governments tried to keep them out with immigration laws, but regulations are no match for the human will to move. The refugees crowded into synagogue basements, into camps filled with dysentery and typhus, and into cities like Vienna, Paris, and lurid, inflationary Weimar Berlin. There, they joined Jewish political exiles from the former Russian Empire, like Raphael Abramovich.

Refugees lead to reaction, as we Americans should know. These Jews were “the world's foremost problem” in the words of Henry Ford, a mass of swarthy subversives who brought with them the whiff of hectographed manuscripts and homemade bombs. Everywhere they went, the right-wing press followed. The venerable New York Times listed the Jewish birth names of the “Former East Siders Responsible for Bolshevism.” Even if Jews fled Soviet Russia, their countries of refuge saw them as Bolsheviks, just as the world saw the Syrian refugees who fled isis in 2015 as terrorists. Their arrival caused a panic in the good citizens of Western Europe—one that men like the young Nazi newspaper editor Alfred Rosenberg were only too eager to exploit.

Sophia Dubnova

Poland and Soviet Russia signed a ceasefire agreement in October 1920, though official peace would have to wait till the Treaty of Riga the following spring.

From her dining room table Sophia ran an office to help the prisoners' wives, while undercover cops paced the street below. Every day, the women lined up by Mokotow prison. They were whipped by wind, soaked by fat November snowflakes. When Sophia met with Polish Socialist minister Ignacy Daszynski to plead her husband's case, she also appealed for her "nameless sisters," like the nursing mother arrested and separated from her baby because she wouldn't give police the names of her husband's friends. While Sophia spoke, Daszynski fiddled with his silver cigar box. What was he supposed to do? he asked. The woman's husband was a communist. Even the babies of communists need their mother's milk, Sophia answered.

The government threatened Erlich with an eight-year sentence for subversion. When Sophia visited her husband, he passed her fistfuls of notes his fellow prisoners had slipped him during walks around the exercise yard, which she then gave to their wives. After she put her boys to bed, she sat awake. Her thoughts circled each other. Was she still a poet? Or had she forgotten? If she could no longer write, how could she live? Finally, she had enough. She sat down at her desk. She wrote about the prisoners' wives, the tortured, steadfast women who had become her friends. It was nearly sunrise when she put down the pen. Relief flooded her. She could write.

They released Erlich from prison in November. He was thinner, Sophia wrote, “with little tufts of stubble on his sallow face.” Other Bundists trickled out of the jails and concentration camps. They came home to a fractured political landscape in a poor and wounded country. They had enemies everywhere. Their party tore itself apart over Soviet Russia. Poland would never welcome them. But this was the first place the Bund landed where they had the freedom to build institutions. Over eighteen years, the span of one generation, they would create an alternate world.

The Communist Romance

(1921 to 1923)

Viktor Alter

Oland emerged from the war with its industry in shambles and its farmland poisoned by bombs. During the occupation, Germany had dismantled the factories of Lodz and Bialystok and carted their machinery back home. To avoid starvation, the Polish government had bought massive amounts of food from America on credit. Now the bill was coming due.

Poverty exacerbates divisions. It forces people to compete over who deserves survival on such-and-such piece of land. Yet, amidst the hunger, bigotry, and bloodshed of interwar Poland, the Bund staked their claim of Hereness—their right to exist as equals in the places where they lived. To stay was not an act of naïveté, nor of weakness. “Here where I live is my country,” the Bund wrote. They accepted all the struggle this implied.

Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other. Their methods remind me of those of America's Black Panther Party, another group of young radicals who carried guns and started free breakfast programs and asserted their people's beauty in a country that wanted them dead. Like the Panthers, the Bund was a Marxist party built by and for oppressed and racialized others, who created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic.

Both parties published newspapers that became gateways to capacious intellectual worlds. The Bundist Folkstsaytung ran international reporting, sandwiched between ads for handguns, face powder, and nightclubs offering dances with pretty girls. One issue might contain a dispatch from their comrade Pedro Wald in Buenos Aires. (In 1919, Argentine police arrested Wald on accusations of attempting to overthrow the government and form a Patagonian Soviet Republic.) Or they might print a blistering indictment of the state-backed mob murders of Black people in Missouri, writing that “the 'civilized' American lynches with the sort of pleasure one would find among…wild beasts.” Folkstsaytung's internationalism connected small-town Jewish workers to far-flung struggles. Activist Yonia Fain recalled visiting a tiny shtetl where his shoemaker host asked how he could help the socialists of China.

The Bund created a youth movement, Tsukunft (the Future), for teenagers who worked ten hours a day and lived five to a tenement room but still dreamed of a better and more beautiful world.

Bundist teachers dominated the new, secular Yiddish school system, Tsee-sho (Central Yiddish School System). These schools directly challenged the traditional cheders that my great-grandfather endured—which Bundists described as filthy holes where subliterate old men “filled [a child's] small brain with nonsense,” using a cat-o'-nine-tails to reinforce their points.

The Bund helped transform Yiddish, the language of the Jewish Street, into a vehicle for transnational literary culture. When they fled disaster, Yiddish became a portable homeland that Bundists carried on their tongues. Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together, until Bundists became the literature's greatest champions. Bundists devoted themselves to the perpetuation of Yiddish long after they had been forced to abandon everything else.

Bernard Goldstein

Like the Panthers, the Bund worked in gang-ridden neighborhoods that the state both neglected and surveilled. Jewish Warsaw was a rough place by any measure, with enough crimes to fill the pages of the city's hundred Polish and Yiddish newspapers. Pimps whisked poor girls off to Argentine brothels. Gangs terrorized shopkeepers. Scorned wives threw acid in rivals' faces. When a "cannibal" bit off an enemy's nose in the courtyard of 29 Smocza Street, it was just a blip in the news. To organize this chaos, the Bund tapped Bernard Goldstein, the scar-faced leader of their Kyiv militia, who had recently returned to Warsaw.

The criminality of Bernard's milieu often disgusted him. He struggled against it and tried to get kids out of it, but ultimately, it was what he knew. Since youth, Bernard had been an enforcer. He got on easily with thugs, like the teamster brothers known as the Seven Lions of Praga. When the eldest Lion, Yankl Scarface, married into robber royalty, Goldstein earned an invite to the wedding. He was at the synagogue when Yankl Scarface read the Torah, and he was at the afterparty at their Zygmuntowska Street garret, where they gorged on herring and whisky, and a chanteuse sang gangster ballads till sunrise.

Bernard knew the secret argot of the child bagel hawkers—the codes by which they warned each other of the arrival of the police. He slurped tea at the union buffets with the unemployed. At the thieves' synagogue behind the Gesia Cemetery, where all the Warsaw cutthroats prayed, Bernard chatted up back porters (lawless men who hauled the city's goods in huge wicker boxes lashed to their shoulders). He converted them to Bundism one by one, until his party dominated their union. When the Jewish and Polish slaughterhouse workers were fighting over the allocation of jobs, the party sent Bernard to mediate. He arrived to find the two groups circling each other, knives in hand. When he told them they should refer their disputes to their respective unions, they hurled their knives at the concrete floor with such force that sparks flew from the ground, but they listened to Comrade Bernard.

The Comintern

The same questions that split the Russian Bund threatened to tear the Polish Bund apart when, in 1919, Soviet Russia announced the creation of the Communist International, or Comintern, an international organization of labor parties intended to replace the discredited Second International. The Comintern believed that any day now, capitalism was about to crumble beneath the boots of a global communist revolution. It was time for socialist parties around the world to unite and seize the moment.

The idea of the Comintern attracted Polish Bundists, just as Soviet Russia enchanted leftists the world over. It was, after all, the first country in history to put socialism into practice. But for Polish Jews, it had a special resonance. After the unspeakable massacres of the last two decades, Soviet Russia was the one place in eastern Europe where Jews could ostensibly live as equals. Or even become leaders, like David Petrovsky, formerly David Lipetz, the Bundist mayor of Berdichev. After joining the Red Army, he moved to Moscow and rebuilt the Soviet military education system from the ground up. When Bundist writer Moyshe Olgin visited Moscow in 1921, he watched the old tsarist general Aleksei Brusilov salute Petrovsky at a military parade in Red Square. The sight moved him nearly to tears. If an aristocratic general saluted a Jew in Soviet Russia, then the country must have abolished racism, Olgin reckoned. He returned to New York a committed communist.

Then there was Trotsky, the most famous Jewish revolutionary on earth, though he loathed being identified as such. In Soviet Russia, Trotsky was a hero, the first Jew to command a nation's army since 1037, when Samuel Hagnid led the troops of the Emirate of Granada. Even Bundists were impressed. "I wish that more radical Jews like Trotsky were heads of government," wrote one Bundist journalist in New York. "Our foes would not have dared touch us, let alone perpetrate massacres and pogroms against us.... If a people can still produce men that can undermine the foundations of the world, [that is] a clear sign of its youthfulness, vitality and stamina." For many Jews, Trotsky was proof that in Soviet Russia, they could do anything.

In April 1920, at the Bund's Krakow convention, a majority of delegates voted to join the Comintern. The main dissenter was Vladimir Medem. He had made up his mind about Lenin in 1903, and every step the Bolsheviks had taken since only strengthened Medem's convictions. In 1918, he predicted that the terror Bolsheviks wielded against their rivals would soon turn inward, to be used against each other. "The day is not far off when we will see revolutionary tribunals in which the more kosher Bolsheviks will execute the more suspect; the circle of 'kosher' or 'authentic' socialists grows narrower," he wrote. Few wanted to listen. The Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was a living socialist state. Most Bundists wanted to be its ally.

When Medem failed to convince his comrades, he resigned from the central committee. Exhausted and disillusioned, he asked American garment unions to send him steamship tickets to New York. He and Gina arrived at Ellis Island in January 1921. He would never see Poland again.

The Twenty-One Conditions

Only one thing stood in the way of the Bund's entry into the Comintern: a list of rules, called the Twenty-one Conditions. Most of the conditions were fine—the Bund was happy to agitate amongst soldiers, organize peasants, and condemn European imperialism—but a few were intolerable: for instance, the requirement that parties belonging to the Comintern purge themselves of moderate socialists and kick out any leader who disobeyed the dictates of Moscow. Despite these onerous terms, the Bund wanted to find a way to make things work. Perhaps the Soviets would make an exception for them.

Around the time Medem sailed for New York, the Bund dispatched an envoy to Moscow. No documents list this secret agent's name, so I'll call him X. The trip was illegal, and X carried no passport, so that if the Polish authorities caught him, they would not discover his identity. The war had not officially ended, and the borders bristled with armed and jumpy men. Over six perilous weeks, X crossed into Lithuania disguised as a mushroom merchant and, from there, joined a convoy of Latvian prisoners of war. In Riga, the Russian ambassador put him on a train to Moscow.

While still in transit, he received a telegram from the Russian Bund to let him know that the Soviet government had ordered the party's liquidation. As soon as he arrived in Moscow, he got on a train to Minsk to watch their funeral.

X joined the hundreds of people who gathered to hear the Russian Bundists' tormented final speeches. "Comrades, what this has cost each of us will perhaps one day inspire an artistic genius to create a great tragedy. But let us rather be silent about this, friends," cried Esther Frumkin. After voting to dissolve the party, her friend Aaron Vayshteyn shouted "Long live the Bund!" No one applauded. The next month, Frumkin, Vayshteyn and their comrades marched to Minsk's State Theater, where, just four years before, they'd celebrated the Bund's future in revolutionary Russia and turned over their banners to the local Communist party.

The Comintern sent X back to Warsaw with a letter for the Bund's central committee. Its contents shocked them. To join the Comintern, the Bund would have to purge their leadership, change their name, and eventually dissolve themselves into the Polish Communist Party. In other words, they would cease to exist.

Clinging to hope, the Bund sent two local leaders, Chaim Wasser and Viktor Alter, to plead their case at the Third Comintern Congress in Moscow.

At thirty-one, Alter, who had been born rich in small-town Poland, was a ladies' man whom friends later nicknamed "the Cary Grant of labor." He had a crackling wit and an explosive amount of energy; he liked to fight with nationalists at the Saxon Gardens for fun. Alter had joined the Bund during the 1905 revolution at age fifteen. His leadership of a student strike earned him a lifetime ban from Russian universities. The next year, a cache of illegal guns exploded in his parents' attic. After that, he thought it would be prudent to skip town. He studied engineering in Belgium, married a Belgian socialist, and returned to Poland on party work in 1912. The Okhrana quickly exiled him to Siberia. He escaped and snuck back into Belgium with a fake passport he'd artfully concealed inside the sole of his shoe. The World War saw him in the Belgian resistance, then as a refugee in London, where he got a factory job, joined the British Socialist Party, and campaigned for Jews to resist the draft. The revolution brought him to Moscow, where he earned a seat on the Bund's central committee. The Bolsheviks jailed him after October. Upon his release, he settled in Warsaw, where he was elected to the city council alongside Henryk Erlich. With his razor-sharp cheekbones, his wave of dark hair, and his collar upturned like a film noir detective, he became a bona fide celebrity—instantly recognizable in City Hall, at a protest in support of the anarchist death-row prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti, or at an eviction on Niska Street, hauling the poor family's furniture back up the stairs. He seemed like the perfect person to plead the Bund's case in Moscow.

When Alter and Wasser arrived in Moscow, they received a chilly reception from the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, which many Russian Bundists had joined after their own party's dissolution. As if to draw a distinction between themselves and their old comrades, the Jewish Section's newspaper berated the Polish Bund for its weak-kneed and “slovenly” refusal to expel more moderate members. Former Bundist Moishe Rafes went one step further and publicly denounced Alter as a spy.

For Alter, Moscow seemed even more oppressive than it had during his last visit, especially when he learned that old comrades were rotting in jail cells on spurious charges. Two weeks after the congress concluded, he tried to help one of these imprisoned socialists by passing their smuggled letter to the British communist leader Sylvia Pankhurst. When the Cheka found out about Alter's role in this illicit communication, they threw him into the notorious Butyrka prison on accusations of espionage. Eleven days' hunger strike nearly killed him, but in the end, the Soviets let him go. They still feared international opinion.

Alter's arrest finally ended the Bund's doomed courtship of the Comintern. In December 1921, at an underground conference held in the Free City of Danzig, Bundists voted to reject the Twenty-One Conditions. A splinter sect of Soviet fanboys flounced out and quit the party.

Bernard Goldstein

From then on, communists would be the Bund's mortal enemies, and the labor movement was the front line of their fight. Jewish communists fought Bundists for control of tiny workshops in penny-ante industries like matzoh, candy wrappers, and ladies' shoes—demonstrating their dominance with guns and razor blades as well as the more traditional fists. In this farcical struggle, left-wing Jewish workers in run-down Warsaw districts—many of them literal cousins—bludgeoned one another senseless because of the ideological swerves of Moscow.

Attacked by nationalist thugs outside their neighborhoods and fellow Jewish leftists within them, the Bund decided they needed a more formal means of protection. Enter comrade Bernard. Using his experience running a paramilitary in Kyiv, Bernard Goldstein organized Warsaw union workers into a self-defense militia. Militiamen fought with lead-tipped walking sticks, brass knuckles, and spring-loaded retractable steel rods. He limited gun ownership to a few trusted leaders; the point was to teach a lesson, not leave a trail of murdered enemies. To this end, he forbade his fighters to drink on the job. Most importantly, Bernard created a culture that blended verbal secrecy with visual menace. Armed, uniformed militiamen paraded each May Day, but when asked about their exploits, they said nothing. Silence creates legends.

Election Season

In the autumn of 1922, the Bund plunged into their first ever election campaign for the parliament in Poland. Their candidates offered a social-democratic platform of eight-hour workdays, unemployment benefits, peace, equality, and minority cultural rights. They held innumerable rallies in union halls guarded by Bernard's militia, with police bribed to make themselves scarce. They drove trucks emblazoned with their slogans, distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors. Late at night, their kids fanned out in cities across Poland to glue posters to courtyard walls. A photo of these boys electioneering in a northeast mill town shows a gang in flat caps, sneering back at the camera. All the while, Bernard's militia protected campaigners from attacks by Endeks and communists.

When the votes came in, the right triumphed; Endeks won 40 percent of deputies. The Left had split itself between the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund, and the communists. The Bund didn't win a single seat.

A friend of Pilsudski's, the liberal populist Gabriel Narutowicz, was elected president, thanks in part to Jewish votes. This exercise of the franchise enraged the Endeks. Hours after Narutowicz's election, nationalist mobs rioted in Warsaw, chanting, "Narutowicz, president of the Jews." On inauguration day, rioters barricaded Ujazdów Avenue, pelted Narutowicz's carriage with snowballs, and beat leftists, journalists, and Jews. A few days later, a nationalist painter shot Narutowicz dead at an art exhibition. The Endek press fêted the assassin as a hero.

The Endeks

After President Narutowicz's assassination, a peasant populist named Wincenty Witos took office as prime minister. Disgusted with the nationalists he held responsible for his friend Narutowicz's murder, Pilsudski retired from politics. While he stewed at his country home, Poland's economy tanked. It became terribly convenient to blame the Jews.

Endek leader Roman Dmowski fulminated about the need to deport all Jews from Poland, and his newspapers called for “a wholesome struggle for [the Jews'] elimination.” Attacks ravaged Jewish communities across the country, from Vilna and Lviv to Bialystok and Pinsk. Suffice it to say, these were not good years for the Bund's base in Poland. It was a time of smashed synagogues, blockaded shops, plundered neighborhoods, and broken skulls, when Jews were blamed for every offensive aspect of Soviet policy. When Jewish parliamentarians tried to protest, their Endek colleagues beat them bloody. Endek students petitioned the government to keep Jews out of universities, then went home for summer vacation and beat more Jews for fun.

The government targeted the Bund for both bureaucratic and kinetic repression, banning their unions, strangling their schools in red tape, and shutting down Folkstsaytung right before May Day; Erlich reopened the paper the next day, to show that his party would not be intimidated.

On May Day 1923, the Bund organized a massive procession, flanked by a thousand militiamen holding wooden bats. The marchers wove their way to Theater Square, where the Polish Socialist Party had saved them a spot. Fighting started before Erlich even had a chance to speak. Cops attacked communists gathered at nearby Trebacka Street, and within minutes, Theater Square transformed into a whirlpool of knives, sticks, and screams. Nationalists tried to grab the Bund's banner, but Bernard tore the fabric from its pole and hid it beneath his shirt. He saw old Benish Michaelwisz from the central committee swinging his cane at nationalists until it snapped. At the Bund's afterparty at Nowosci Theater, Bernard counted the black eyes. This satisfied him. They had taught both themselves and the government a lesson. They had showed they would fight back.

Vladimir Medem

Medem got to America just in time. A few months after his arrival, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which radically slashed immigration from the Middle East and from eastern and southern Europe. The main targets were those people that the bill's author, Albert Johnson, called “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits,” which is to say the Jews.

The Red Scare was well underway, so, perhaps out of caution, Medem confined himself to cultural writings. Though he loathed their Soviet flirtation, Medem didn't leave the Bund. The party, he wrote, “was cemented by the blood and tears of its martyrs...[which] are thicker than the ink with which platforms are written.” Though his politics were out of touch, the East Side never forsook him. He would always be their prince who had given up a life of privilege to fight alongside them, as a fellow member of the oppressed.

Medem died of nephritis on January 9, 1923, in Brooklyn, at the age of fourty-four. Despite the snowstorm, ten thousand people came to his funeral. Over his coffin, Baruch Charney Vladeck said his death was like the passing of a world.

Enemy of Zion

(1923 to 1926)

Vladimir Jabotinsky

Ber, David, and Vladimir

U _{N} December 23, 1923, Endek economist Wladyslaw Grabski became prime minister of Poland. Granted near-dictatorial powers by parliament, Grabski immediately began to slash and burn. In the name of balancing the budget, he sold off industries and cut wages. When workers went on strike, cops shot up their protests. Three thousand political prisoners crowded Poland's jails.

Grabski's reforms devastated the Bund's base. When the government launched new public works projects to help the jobless, they turned away Jewish applicants. Parliament rescinded Jews' permits to sell tobacco and alcohol and dismissed Jewish workers from nationalized industries. Grabski raised taxes to perilous heights, targeting Jews the hardest. As much as the violence, Grabski's taxes provoked another wave of Jewish emigration. With the doors to America shut, Polish Jews began to look toward Palestine, which the U.K. ruled under the so-called British Mandate, with the explicit aim of helping Zionists set up a Jewish national home.

There was only one problem. Palestinian Arabs made up the vast majority of the land's population, and the Zionist movement had already set about turning them into enemies. Unlike immigrants, who generally try to integrate into their new countries, the Zionists aimed to supplant Palestinian society. With British support, they set up a quasigovernmental body called the Palestine Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Palestine) to represent Jews inside Palestine and encourage more Jewish immigration. (Britain forbade Palestinians to create similar institutions.) New Zionist immigrants bought land from Palestinian feudal leaders, brutally expelled farmers who had lived there for generations, and used these dispossessed farmers' labor to build up a parallel society of Jewish-only collective farms, towns, and even a city, Tel Aviv, right next to the graceful Levantine port of Jaffa. They referred to themselves as settlers, or colonists, but they also considered themselves to be the land's native people, returning home.

The Jewish Agency answered to the Zionist Congress, that same body that Theodor Herzl set up in a Basel casino in 1897. Many parties jostled beneath its umbrella. Their philosophies ranged from secular to religious, socialist to fascist, ostentatiously proletarian to snottily bourgeois. In Poland, the Bund's main adversaries were the Labor Zionists and the Revisionist Zionists.

The Marxist Dov Ber Borochov developed the Labor Zionist philosophy in the same late-nineteenth-century ferment that produced the Bund and organized the political party Poale Tsion to carry out his ideas. According to Borochov, Jews' minority status in Europe prevented them from embarking on productive work (by this he meant shirtless hammer-swinging) and relegated them to their stereotypical roles of tailors and money lenders. Jews could only become proper proletarians if they established a Jewish state in Palestine, where Jewish capitalists would exploit Jewish proletarians until class war broke out and the Jewish proletarians gloriously created communism. Borochov thought that since Jews and Arabs were cousins, Palestinians would be perfectly happy with this plan. To back up this dubious point, he brought up the friendship between African Americans in Liberia and the Kru people they colonized. (These African American settlers would later bring plantation slavery to their new West African home.)

By the 1920s, David Ben-Gurion, né Grun, had emerged as Poale Tsion's most important leader in Palestine. A short, squeaky-voiced admirer of Lenin, Ben-Gurion had spent his formative activist years brawling with Bundists in his Polish hometown, Plonsk. After losing one particularly vigorous debate in a synagogue, he had screamed at his Bundist opponent, "We have weapons, and we will kill you all like dogs." In Palestine, Labor Zionists like Ben-Gurion paid lip service to the idea of brotherhood with the Palestinian masses while enforcing racial segregation in practice. The new Labor Zionist paramilitary, the Haganah, sometimes kidnapped and sexually tortured Jewish women who dated Palestinian men. In 1920, Ben-Gurion was elected secretary general of the Histadrut, a Jewish-only labor union that locked Palestinians out of the Zionist economy in the same way Polish labor policy locked Jews out of jobs in Warsaw.

Labor Zionism's main rival was Revisionist Zionism, which, as propounded by its founder, the Odesa-born journalist Vladimir Jabotinsky, wanted a Jewish state that didn't just stretch from the river to the sea but even encompassed contemporary Jordan. Like Borochov and Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky came up in the same milieu as the Bund. He even briefly dated the young Sophia Dubnova before her marriage to Henryk Erlich. During the revolution of 1905, the Bund's self-defense militias impressed Jabotinsky, leading him to view Bundists as his greatest rivals. In one polemic, he wrote that the Bund's heroism was a waste. Jewish revolutionaries died to make history on behalf of an alien people—Russians, who would just as soon have them dead. Once the revolution spread, Jews were doomed to be forgotten. “The Jewish revolt was only terrifying to the government because it was a match which could set the Russian heartland afire,” Jabotinsky wrote. “When all Russia is ablaze, who remembers the match?”

Jabotinsky was a fascist, in the original meaning of the word. He admired Mussolini. His followers called him Il Duce. He loved a shiny jackboot, a snappy military march. In 1923, he wrote an essay called “The Iron Wall” that shattered the genteel doublespeak of the Zionist Congress. In it he said that, like all colonies, Israel could only be built by subjugating the native people. Palestinians would resist, as all native people do, and one had to either accept this or give up on Zionism and remain powerless and doomed in the diaspora.

Palestine

To advance their project, Zionists collaborated with antisemites, among them Arthur Balfour himself, the conservative politician who hoped his Declaration would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.” Theodor Herzl tried to cut deals with the notorious tsarist minister Vyacheslav von Plehve. During the Ukrainian massacres, Jabotinsky cozied up to Petliura, and right-wing Polish newspapers praised him as a “Jewish Endek” who would remove “millions of destructive microbes” to the Levant.

The Bund considered these alliances acts of treachery. Throughout the twenties, Zionists and Bundists battled one another in newspapers, in city councils, and with their fists.

But while Revisionists and Bundists were like oil and water, the beef between Bundists and Labor Zionists was more intimate. They were fighting for the souls of the Jewish working class. A young person looking for pride, purpose, and community could easily go either way; many switched between groups. Young Labor Zionists in Poland generally had little idea about the brutal evictions that Zionism entailed. Their press either ignored Palestinians entirely or painted a rosy picture of friendship between Jewish kibbutzniks and the grateful Arab villagers nearby. They would only learn the reality upon arrival in Palestine.

The darker things got for Jews in Poland, the more seductive Palestine seemed. While some potential immigrants were drawn by visions of national rebirth in their biblical homeland, for many others, it was merely a way out of Dodge. “Zionism drew its vital juices from defeats and catastrophes,” wrote the Bundist leader Emanuel Nowogrodski. With immigration to America cut off and Poland averaging an outbreak of violence a week, even apolitical Jews turned up at the Warsaw offices of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist organization that chose amongst prospective immigrants to Palestine, to apply for a coveted entry permit.

In 1924, Viktor Alter sailed for Jaffa to see the Zionist endeavor up close. He chronicled the trip in The Truth About Palestine, a pamphlet he published upon his return to Warsaw.

Palestine didn't impress Alter. No matter how many times he heard American tourists hee-haw the words "holy land," he felt no sense of the divine. The place seemed downright shabby. Everything felt small. Culture, politics, horizons. On a boat ride through the Suez Canal, a Polish merchant told him that he didn't understand why a man as smart as Moses had led the Jews into the land of Canaan. He should have sent the Egyptians across the Red Sea and left Jews to enjoy the splendors of Thebes.

Alter had a typical European attitude of superiority. He looked down on the hundreds-of-years-old Sephardic community—elegant urbanites, integrated into Palestinian society, who spoke the same Arabic and wore the same tarbooshes as their neighbors. “I have more in common with a radical Russian student than a hundred Arab Jews,” Alter sniffed. He quickly saw through Zionist marketing. At the time of his arrival, less than a hundred thousand Jews lived in Palestine, where they formed 11 percent of the population. Fewer than ten thousand Jewish immigrants arrived each year. Most lived in cities and did the same sorts of jobs they had in Europe. Despite the Labor Zionist promise of transforming shtetl nerds into muscular kibbutzniks, Palestinian workers powered Zionist collective farms. Zionists' new, Jewish-only communities were underwritten by British guns and the charity of rich Jews in the West.

Allergic to the very idea of assimilation, most Zionists interacted as little as possible with the larger Palestinian society. “There is almost no relation between these two people, and no shared cultural life,” Alter wrote. Jewish immigrants didn't learn Arabic, and when they built new neighborhoods, they banned Palestinians from residence. “They are two worlds, frightful strangers to each other,” and when trouble broke out, it did so with pyrotechnic brutality.

I could not pinpoint the Jerusalem mansion where Viktor Alter met Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini, president of the Palestinian Arab Congress, but I can guess what it looked like. It was probably built of golden stone, like the rest of the old city, with stained-glass windows and jasmine-covered walls. At seventy-five, Musa Kazim was witty and aristocratic, patriarch of one of the city's most prominent families, and in every way Alter's social superior. I can picture his luxurious hospitality, with tulip tea glasses, Egyptian cigarettes, and silver plates of baklawa. Nothing European could compare. Since the Mandate began, Musa Kazim had had a tumultuous relationship with the British authorities. In 1918, the British had appointed him as mayor of Jerusalem, only to fire him in 1921 after he delivered a passionate speech at the anti-occupation riots that broke out at the city's Nabi Musa festival. He had spent the years that followed leading a diplomatic struggle against the Mandate. While Musa Kazim initially sympathized with Jewish immigration, by the time Alter visited, he was fed up. "The immigrants dumped upon the country from different parts of the world are ignorant of the language, customs and character of the Arabs and enter Palestine by the might of England against the will of the people," he wrote in a 1922 letter to Palestine's British occupiers.

“Palestine will be a free country that rules itself alone, exactly as other countries in the world do,” Musa Kazim told Alter in his erudite English. He explained that the Palestinian Arab Congress aspired to a democracy that represented Christians, Jews, and Muslims, with full equality for Jews, and even free Jewish immigration if the economic situation permitted. “We are not fighting against Jews, but only for our freedom,” he said. Alter wondered who could object to such a program. But outside the plush confines of Musa Kazim's reception room, he sensed a more violent sort of Palestinian nationalism, one that the Zionist movement was doing everything to provoke.

“We feel this is our country,” eastern European immigrants assured Alter. He wanted to laugh at their naïveté. Jews might have bible stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he wrote, but Palestinians had lived on the land for a thousand years. If a claim to a country was decided by longevity of continuous residence, the Palestinians were indisputably in the right. Not that Alter believed in this sort of blood-and-soil logic. It reminded him of Polish nationalists, who excelled in “antisemitic agitation which, in the name of Historic Right, tries to divide the population into Masters of the Land and foreigners.”

“The right of people to live and work in the land where they are born is independent of whether their forefathers were born there,” he wrote. Here where I live is my country.

As for a Jewish state in Palestine? The whole enterprise was doomed. Jews made up a smaller percentage of the population in Palestine than they did in Poland, and the trickle of new immigrants would never add up to a majority. Palestine was Arab, Alter wrote, and Arab it would remain.

“The great majority of the local population views Jewish immigrants with hostility, as foreigners. The anti-Jewish agitation grows stronger by the day. Why will Zionists fight in Palestine, but not in Poland?” Alter asked. “It's because they hope they can vanquish the Arabs.” Alter was certain that they would fail.

Grabski's reforms didn't work, and by 1926, Poland was in a major economic depression, with a third of the workforce unemployed. Nationalists continued their attempts to drive Jews out of Poland. Despite everything, the Bund fought for their place in their country.

They threw themselves into labor organizing, uniting Jewish trade unions into a single body, the National Council of Jewish Trade Unions, chaired by Viktor Alter, which fought not just for higher pay and shorter hours but for the right to use Yiddish, and for freedom from racist abuse. They created campaigns to combat anti-Jewish discrimination in government employment and held mass meetings to demand state support for the jobless.

They challenged their own community's religious conservatism. The Bund's struggle with Orthodox Jews began in 1922, when the party decided to publish a Saturday edition of Folkstsaytung, deliberately flouting rules that forbade work on the Sabbath and infuriating religious Jews. After enough of the Bund's newsboys showed up at the Folkstsaytung offices with black eyes, Bernard Goldstein sent in the militia to protect them. This escalated matters. Soon, the Warsaw rabbinate excommunicated Folkstsaytung's entire staff. Yeshiva students and Jewish workers squared off in brawls that filled whole city blocks. In retaliation, Henryk Erlich ran a raucous campaign to get on the Warsaw kehillah. It was a longshot. The kehillah was so conservative that women were not allowed to vote in its elections. But Erlich's charisma and the Bund's relentless social organizing paid off. Despite being dubbed "the enemy of Zion and the enemy of learning," and despite telling a heckler that his party opposed circumcision, Erlich won his race. More Bundists followed him onto the kehillah. And if things didn't always go smoothly—once, a session closed when a Bundist delegate threw a chair at an Orthodox delegate's head—the Bund had another way to serve their people.

Bundist women founded their own organization, Y.A.F (Yidishe Arbeter Froyen, or Jewish Working Women), which set up day care centers, disseminated birth control information, and campaigned for free childcare and equal pay. In the summer, Tsukunft boys and girls pitched their tents in the forests. They hoisted red flags, argued socialism, then snuck away to hook up on the meadow grass. Bundist workers gathered in resort towns and went on mountain hikes. Yiddish writers published their oeuvres on Bundist presses. In 1925, the Bundist Max Weinreich founded the yivo Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna to study the culture of eastern European Jews. Created by working-class intellectuals who had been kept out of universities by racist quotas, yivo's scholarship was imbued with a defiant insistence that the oppressed should write their own histories. This same spirit led young radicals like my father to fight for the creation of Black and Puerto Rican Studies departments in 1970s New York.

In January 1926, the Bund opened the crown jewel of their network: the Medem Sanatorium, built on four acres of forest in Miedzeszyn, near Warsaw, for poor children at risk of tuberculosis, and named after their legendary leader. Inspired by Rousseau's ideas on education, Medem's director, the Vilna-born educator Shloyme Gilinsky, said that nothing was too good for Warsaw's slum kids. Each day, he tried to prove it.

Medem Sanatorium was a fantasy, a respite for kids who lived seven to a room, who had no electricity, no running water, no bed of their own. Some Bundists even worried that the hoity-toity-ness of the place, with newfangled baths and toothpaste, would alienate children from their parents, but Gilinsky insisted that they'd bring back the good influence. Gilinsky believed that kids and adults were equal, so, contrary to the era's norms, the staff at the Medem Sanatorium didn't beat children. Kids needed to laugh. The hellions played amidst Miedzeszyn's wildflowers, the forget-me-nots, buttercups, and gaudy thistles that blossomed beneath the spruce and pine. They plucked apples from the orchards, inspected snails in the biological museum, raised geese, sunned themselves on the deck, and felt the clean country dirt beneath their feet. Children governed themselves; they made their own newspaper and elected their own parliament. They didn't keep kosher or pray. They observed Jewish holidays in their own heterodox manner. When they put out Elijah's cup at the first Passover seder, Medem's ghost might have taken a sip.

A decade later, the Bund released a film about the Medem Sanatorium, showing the how the place transformed its children. Mischievous Lazar, tormenter of chickens, thief of bread rolls, slowly softened when he realized that, for the first time in his life, there was enough to eat. The yeshiva boy, prissy little Zalman, shed his long Orthodox coat to play. They were happy, because for one summer they experienced the world their party fought for. Here where they lived was their country, the Bund promised. In Medem Sanatorium, they could believe it.