Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
The Bund, “The League of Jewish Workers,” was originally a peaceful union aiming to protect the interests of the workers in the garment factories in Poland. But, under the pressure of the administration which forbade all union activities, it became Socialistic economically and Revolutionary politically under a policy outlined in a secret convention held in 1896 in the town of Vilna. Later, the Bund joined the ranks of the Social Democratic party as a separate, autonomous group with some nationalistic tendencies.
The Social Democratic party was the outgrowth of the revolutionary movement that developed in Russia upon the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The freed peasants were given small parcels of land, some antiquated agricultural implements, and little if any livestock. The peasants were illiterate and poor. The sons and daughters of the nobility--the so-called “regretting noblemen”--in order to atone for the sins of their fathers, went to the villages and hamlets of the peasantry to teach them and to help them in every way conceivable. They became known as the “Narodniki” (Populists). The administration of that time, although liberal, was autocratic by nature and, as such, it feared the enlightenment of the masses. Persecution followed. The Populists became organized under the name, “Will of the People,” and adopted terrorism as the means of combating the regime.
Out of this party came the assassins of Czar Alexander II. The famous anarchist, Bakunin, the rival of Marx in the First International, belonged to this party, later to become known as the Socialist Revolutionists.
At the time this agrarian party appeared on the political horizon, Russian industry was in its infancy, and there was practically no urban proletarian element. The party, for a time, held the field for itself, pinning their hope of overthrowing the regime and establishing a Socialist state on the peasantry. Their antagonists, the Marxists, considered the peasantry as a reactionary class unable to accept socialism. Poor as the peasants were, and not all of them were poor by any means, they possessed land and the tools of cultivation. In other words, they belonged to the petty bourgeoisie. Only the proletariat “who had nothing t.0 lose but their chains” could be depended upon to bring about Socialism in the wake of a revolution, according to the Marxists. With the development of industry and the growth of the urban proletariat, the Marxists gained strength. In 1897, in a convention abroad, a vigorous radical party called the Social Democrats was formed with Lenin the moving spirit and prime authority.
Zionism, as a memory of past glory and yearning for a return to the homeland, is as old as the Jewish nation in Diaspora. It first found expression in the words of the psalmist, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept, remembering Zion; on the willows between we hung our harps.” Zion permeates the prayers and religious ceremonies of the Jews. Modern Zionism arose in the period of awakening from the dream of assimilation. The adherents came to be known as “Lovers of Zion.” The movement was nationalistic, non-political, and homogeneously bourgeois. It was not until the advent of political Zionism, as outlined in the first Zionists' Congress in Basel in 1897, that the masses became involved and a differentiation took place. Some members who did not believe in the possibility of a homeland in Palestine, then under the rule of the barbarous Turks, became known as “Territorialists.” They were looking for any place under the sun for mass emigration. Uganda, in equatorial Africa, was named as a possibility. Colonies in Argentina were founded with the financial aid of Baron de Hirsh with no great success. At the same time, there came into being two radical workers' parties, “The Workers of Zion,” and the “Socialist Zionists,” who became the rivals of the Bund for hegemony on the “Jewish Street.”
While the various political parties fought the common foe, the Czarist regime, the rivalry among them manifested itself in verbal clashes; armed clashes resulting in imprisonment, exile, torture, and death to many; and to the establishment of a reign of terror for a time far exceeding by its excesses and number of victims that of the French Revolution.
The discussions at the Linetski’s--my future in-laws--became more heated and at times explosive. The boat rides became a subterfuge for reaching some secluded place along the river. Debates of a political nature were then held, and illegal literature was read, discussed minutely, and commented upon. The most popular and risky literature of this kind was “The Spark,” published in Geneva and edited by Lenin whose influence was already felt and whose authority among the Marxists was undisputed. Out-of-town revolutionaries of note were brought in and debates held in private homes. Guards were posted and the inevitable samovar put on the table to make it look like a peaceful gathering of friends--just in case of a raid by Czarist police. The enlightening and revolutionizing of the workers were being achieved through spoken words and distribution of forbidden literature. Mass meetings for propaganda purposes were resorted to whenever possible.
Once the town was treated to an unusual spectacle. Some hundred boys and girls in their teens, members of the Junior Bund, were arrested upon holding a meeting in the Jewish cemetery in broad daylight and were led under a police escort through the main street. It was a gay crowd, nonchalantly singing the International, exchanging greetings, and cracking jokes with the spectators. The police were the only ones who looked unhappy because the situation was new to them, and they did not know how to behave. They knew better the next time under similar conditions. The participants were then beaten, flogged, arrested, and sent to prison.
As is always the case, repression breeds resistance, and resistance leads to violence, the gateway to revolution. The town became more and more ardently revolutionary. My own political views had not yet crystallized, although as a man who had witnessed poverty in all its dire aspects and oppression in its ugliest forms, my sympathies were naturally with the underdog. In my youth, I had belonged to a Zionist group called, “The Lovers of the Hebrew Tongue,” the members of which talked or, at least, were supposed to talk only Hebrew at their meetings. However, in a revolutionary atmosphere, other influences took place, and I began to study “Das Kapital,” an ambitious task in view of the intricacies and hair-splitting of dialectical materialism.
Meanwhile, I met with serious difficulties of a personal nature. My “dumbbell,” whom I came to dislike profoundly, worked on my nerves; his parents, disappointed with the slow progress of their offspring, cooled toward me. It also dawned upon me that they had contemplated me as a possible suitor for their grown daughter. I had to be very careful, lest I be caught in the matrimonial net through some indiscretion. I was reminded of a story by Chekhov about a young man who frequented a home where there was a daughter whose parents constantly spied on him. Once, when the young people were in a compromising position, the parents rushed into the room. The mother snatched from the wall what she supposed to be an icon to bless the union, but in her haste took a picture of the poet, Derjavin, instead. Confusion ensued. The husband cursed; the mother fainted; the would-be bride became hysterical; and the young man made good his escape.
At the same time, letters from home became more and more disturbing. My older sister, Eva, was forced to go to work as a domestic. My youngest brother, Harry, a very gifted boy of 11, was working in a printing establishment, rotating with his slender hands a heavy wheel. The family caught the fever of emigration to the “Golden Land.” This was a dream shared by almost all the inhabitants of the ghetto, and there was now an additional reason to make the desire for emigration more acute.
A man from Pereyaslav who had lived for some time in a midwestern town called Duluth came home for a visit. He described life in America in glowing and enthusiastic terms. The workers, he said, were paid high wages for very little work (this at a time when 12 to 14 hours was the rule). Anyone who did not want to work in a factory made easy money by picking up valuables for nearly nothing in junkyards and selling them at enormous profit. People were rich and had gold in their teeth! He proclaimed Duluth to be as big and more beautiful than Kiev, a metropolis of nearly half a million and one of the most beautiful cities in Russia. Actually, he did not fool Father. In one of his letters, he wrote that the statement of picking up valuables in the yards reminded him of the story about the beggar who tried to find out the price of a diamond the size of a dove egg. “Of course,” he added modestly, “I really don't have one, but if I should find it in my wanderings, I want to know its worth.”
The man was crude, illiterate, and a notorious liar, but the idea of emigration was a sound one. However, it required a great deal of money, and I could not expect to accumulate it with my uncertain income. Because of this, I accepted a well-paid position of tutor in a small town. It was a hard decision to make in view of my mounting love for the girl of my choice, my attachment to her family, and the interesting life in a center of culture. No word was said upon my departure about waiting, but there was a tacit agreement between Rose and me that wait we would. At least, I was positive about myself.
I spent nearly two years in “exile,” and by self-denial I accumulated enough money for a passage for two--my father and my oldest sister. It was not a happy combination, but the other children were too young for blazing a trail. This accomplished, I came back to Belaya Tserkov, and we were married.
This was 1903, one of the saddest years in the annals of Jewish martyrdom in Russia. In the beginning of the 20th century, the revolutionary hydra, dormant for some time, raised its head again and attacked the regime in great force. In far Siberia, along the shores of the Lena River, were rich gold mines exploited by English capital. Conditions of work in this sub arctic region were very bad and led to a strike which resulted in the killing of more than a hundred workers with no attempt to settle the strike peacefully. The reaction to such atrocity manifested itself in strikes and demonstrations all over Russia. There were disturbances in the universities. Students were arrested, beaten, and the universities closed. A number of terroristic acts took place, culminating in the assassination of the Minister of the Interior, Sypyagin. The exasperated Czar replaced him with the most experienced and the most brutal henchman of the Russian political inquisition, the hangman, Plehve. He devised the devilish plan of organizing a massacre of the Jews in order to intimidate the revolutionaries among them and to “have the revolution drown in Jewish blood.” Kishinev, a town of over 100,000 population, predominantly Jewish, was elected for the first experiment.
The city was well conditioned for a pogrom. Having once belonged to Romania, it was inhabited largely by Romanians, past masters of pogroms in their own right. The local paper, subsidized by the administration and edited by a rabid Judophobe, had long been inciting the population against the Jews. An opportunity soon presented itself.
On the eve of Passover, a servant girl employed by a Jewish family died suddenly. The paper seized upon this opportunity to come out with screaming headlines: “The Zhyds again drink Christian blood!” “Let all Zhyds be massacred!” Arms were openly passed out; vodka flowed freely. The bacchanalia of pillage, rape, and murder lasted for two days. Fifty were killed with a bestiality unparalleled since the days of the Kmelnitzky massacres. Nearly 500 people were severely wounded. Many left without medical aid eventually died. Synagogues were desecrated; Torahs were torn and trampled. A great part of the Jewish section was in ruins. This aroused such indignation in England and America that sharp protests were made officially through diplomatic channels, and the press of both countries advocated the severance of diplomatic relations with the barbaric country of Russia.
In the country itself, the cry of indignation by Leo Tolstoy, Korolenko, and the liberal press was stifled by Plehve’s censorship. A cleric from Kronstadt by the name of Ivan, greatly revered by simple people all over Russia as a saint and miracle doer, made a speech from his pulpit in which he condemned the atrocities and called for repentance. The next day, a statement appeared in all the papers in which the “saint” declared that this speech had been made in a moment of mental aberration and that the guilt lay with the Jews who had killed Christ. A mixed feeling of wrath and shame seized the Jews all over Russia--wrath against the organizers and abettors of the massacre, shame for the tortured and degraded who had offered no resistance to the beasts in order to obtain immunity. The great poet, Byalick, wrote an inspired poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” in which he bitterly castigated the men who left the rape of their wives unpunished and the death of their children unavenged.
“No tears shall flow for you, the Lord swears by His name,
For though the pain is great, great also is the shame.
And which is the greater thou, son of man, decide.”
It was the last time that no resistance was offered. In the pogroms to come, Jews were no longer slaughtered like sheep; they died like heroes.