If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee

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      Trotsky then rose to inform the Congress that twelve Jewish delegates, members of the RSDWP, had signed Martov’s anti-Bund resolution—“and still considered themselves representatives of the Jewish proletariat.” This assertion was angrily challenged by Bundists who asked how Trotsky and his comrades could represent people “among whom they have never worked.”9 Trotsky hit back by charging that in resisting Zionism, the Bund had absorbed some of its nationalism.10

      Despite the charges and countercharges of separatism and assimilationism, the opposition between Bund and Iskraites was not as clear-cut at the time as it may seem in retrospect. Both sides agreed that there was a distinctive Jewish culture and workers’ movement, and, vitally, that its ultimate fate rested on the advance of the larger social democratic movement. What they could not agree about was the framework for that interaction. And that was partly because both sides were burdened with an intellectual apparatus of “nationality” which could not accommodate the indeterminacy of Jewishness, and the multidimensionality of Jewish relationships with non-Jews.

      Kovno was a Bund stronghold. On May Day, 1904, months before Dora and Ed arrived for their visit, it had dared to mount a massive public demonstration through the city’s streets. One of the leaders that day was a seventeen-year-old Bund agitator named Simcha Hillman. As a prodigal Talmudist from a remote village, he’d been sent to Kovno’s famous Musar yeshiva but had soon drifted into secular studies, becoming a full-time clandestine operative for the Bund in 1903. Repeatedly imprisoned, he left Russia for the USA in 1907, and in 1910 played a leading role in the Chicago garment workers’ strike that gave birth to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America which, as Sidney Hillman, he was to lead for more than thirty years. Hillman became one of the most influential American trade unionists of any era, a close confidant of Roosevelt, and one of the masterminds of US involvement in World War II. He was also to play a significant role, from a distance, in the lives of EVM and his future family.12

      Three months after Dora and Ed returned from their transatlantic journey, Russia was gripped by the revolution of 1905. In the northwest of the empire the Bund spearheaded the rolling series of strikes, demonstrations and meetings. They battled the government, the employers and the anti-semitic gangs of the Black Hundreds, sometimes with revolvers and bombs. At the high point of the agitation, in October, 82.1 percent of workers in the province of Kovno joined the strikes.

      In later years, EVM recalled nothing of his trip to Kovno except long days of ocean voyaging. But the debates between and within the Bund and the RSDWP were to echo through his political life as a Jew on the American left. In my own activist career, I’ve experienced the debate re-created and re-worked (never merely repeated) in the relations between black people and the left, and between feminists and the left, in both the USA and Britain; in regard to caste struggles in India; and, most recently, to Muslims and the left in Britain post-9/11. It’s never merely a theoretical argument about “race” and “class”; it’s about individuals and communities—historical agents—shaped and driven by an inescapable intersection of the two.

      Growing up in New York in the years before World War I, the young Ed was doted on by his mother and sister, but not, it appears, by his sister’s husband, who also lived with the family and who ultimately became a successful stockbroker. “When I was a kid my brother-in-law used to hit me,” he confided in a letter to a friend. “Always in the face. To this day, I fear a blow in the face.” He refers elsewhere to “my youth of blows” as the source of his desire to “escape punishment.” Although he made innumerable acquaintances and acquired many cronies in the course of his life, Ed never seems to have forged a lasting, intimate bond with a male friend, and in later years he observed that he had always felt more comfortable around women—whom he nonetheless felt compelled to belittle.

      Later, in a talk he wrote in 1940 entitled “This Assimilation Business,” he looked back at the Upper West Side neighborhood of his youth. “There was to be found a distinct middle-class type of Jew, one who hovered between allegiance to Reform and Conservative Judaism.” A few of “the grandpas and grandmas” displayed more Orthodox inclinations. There were also the wealthy Jews on Riverside Drive whose “kids were fortunate enough to go to summer camp and partake of many luxuries which were denied me.” He attended a Reform congregation where, he says, he “absorbed all the information possible about Jews and things Jewish.” (In those years, prior to World War I fewer than one quarter of Jewish children in New York received any kind of Jewish education.) While there might be occasional shouts of “sheenie” or “kike” in the streets, “in truth our surroundings were tranquil.” Yet peppering his recollections of his childhood and youth are repeated laments over what he calls his “adverse parentage,” “mixed heredity,” and “the discomforts of half-caste social ostracism.” His problem stemmed from “the fact that I looked particularly Jewish and bore a name that was anything but Jewish.” As a result of “this incongruous situation,” he suffered “hours of torment.” He feared that people would think he was “seeking a refuge, a passport” out of the ghetto. “Teachers conversed about me behind books raised to their lips.”

      From an early age he conceived of himself as “a devotee of tolerance,” champion of “a new brotherhood of man,” even as “the Disciple of this new understanding and the Bearer of this new Tolerance.” Intermarriage was to be embraced; in racial science tomes he discovered theories about “cross-breeding” and the development of “a race of hybrids.” Perhaps, in his case, the fusion of “the Nordic” with the “semitic” had produced “not someone who should be a subject of derision” but a new and better strain.

      If out of all this assimilation business a more perfect product should appear, the loss of any one nationalistic characteristic in this melting pot would be more than compensated by the pure gold that must result from this spiritual alchemy.

      At DeWitt Clinton High School, EVM entered “a new world” of intellectual and political challenge. The school, then located in central Manhattan, attracted academically inclined boys from across the city. The faculty was largely gentile, but the students were increasingly Jewish. “I saw the youth of the East Side,” EVM recalled, “more ambitious than I was, even lower in the financial scale than poor me, coming joyously to study, seemingly marvelously equipped to absorb, digest and retain.” Most had to work after school but despite their hardships, they seemed contented. “There was no difficulty in their minds concerning their birthright, nor how they stood in relation to the world at large.” He envied them their “nonchalance.”

      Politics at DeWitt Clinton was “overrun by Jewish students” who “grasped every office and gained every honor hungrily, scrambling for more.” It was here that EVM says he first heard the word goy used derisively; he berated the classmates who used it for their intolerance and “lack of Americanism.” He decided to act on his “assimilationist” views. In his first year, he backed the Protestant candidate for class president, in the interest of “forgetting petty nationalistic impulses and being thoroughly Americanized.” The election resulted in a tie, whereupon EVM’s candidate gracefully declined in favor of the Jewish candidate. Not for the last time in his political career, EVM found himself hoist with his own petard.

      In his second year, he decided to attend school on Rosh Hashanah because, given his lack of religious convictions, “it would be hypocritical of me not to.” Strangely, however, he felt uncomfortable, the object of others’ “silent disdain.” When Yom Kippur came around, he stayed at home. Reporting to class the following day, he was reprimanded by his teacher: “My name required that I be present, and either her near-sightedness or her general stupidity did not prove to her my right to stay at home.” When EVM informed her he was Jewish, she told him he was lying and sent him to the principal, a man named Dr Francis Paul

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