Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 15

In time, Sam came to know many of the anarchists imprisoned with Maximoff during the Taganka hunger strike.

He came to know men who fought at the side of Nestor Makhno.

He came to know at least three men who I know knew Lenin personally and, as delegates to the International, demanded the anarchists’ release.

He came to know I. N. Steinberg, the Minister of Social Justice in Lenin’s first and only coalition government, a man who conferred face to face with Lenin in that room in the Kremlin where he ruled.

He came to know the surviving sister of Fanny Baron, executed by the Cheka.

He came to know the daughter of Peter Kropotkin, Princess Alexandra, who loved to regale Mother with tales of her London childhood in the home of her exiled parents.

He came to know Kropotkin’s disciple, Rudolf Rocker, a powerful intellect and the author of the classic, Nationalism and Culture—in fact, he painted Rocker’s house.

He came to know, with a special affection, Donuluk, the elderly impoverished anarchist who lived among his Ukrainian countrymen in the slums of New York’s Alphabet City—a solitary little guy with a deeply creased face, bald head and rough clothes. In this country fifty years, he barely spoke English and never smiled; he’d come before meetings, prepare the room, and then leave with a nod to Sam.

And most of all Sam came to know Gregorii Maximoff.

When I check the birth dates of the two men it brings me up short that Maximoff was a mere nine years older than Sam. That is because Sam spoke of him with the respect one affords a much older man; he was in a sense his spiritual father. The gap in life experience, knowledge, and poise brushed aside years. Here was a man who had faced down the power of Lenin; had come within hours of a firing squad; had conducted a successful hunger strike in the Cheka dungeons; had organized steel mills and peasant collectives; had served as an editor of important journals and, while in Berlin, helped found an international anarchist organization comprising—it may surprise you—several million people.

Sam first met Maximoff in Chicago, 1926. Yet I witnessed the esteem in which Sam held the man first hand in New York, 1949 or so. Notice I say that I witnessed the esteem rather than the man himself. I remember Sam rising from the kitchen table, waving the just-opened letter excitedly, calling out to Mother, “Esther! Maximoff and Olga! They are coming in three weeks!” I have never seen him react in such a strange way to visitors before or since. At all times he was a warm host, but a decidedly casual one. He thought nothing of greeting guests, male or female, in his undershirt, or if he knew them a little better in his vakokta undershorts. The guests ate what we ate: good, but no special fuss. And if Mother attempted to clean the house a bit, he would take the broom from her and throw it in the closet. All part of his casual, communal self.

But not this time. I had never seen my father actually wash the windows and polish the floor. If he had time he would have painted the place. He went shopping for the best Russian stuff: herrings, smoked salmon, etc., although as it turned out the Maximoffs ate little. No vakokta underwear for the Maximoffs! It was imperative to my father that they see him as a responsible adult worthy of their respect.

As to the man himself, all I remember is this frail, pale individual of uncertain step, accompanied by a concerned Olga. He was obviously a warm man, a sweet man, but not well and they did not stay long. Maximoff died in his mid-fifties a few months later after suffering a massive heart attack. It was the second time I had seen my father weep, the first being the death of his biological father, Grandfather Max.

I have read some accounts calling Maximoff a “designer of wall displays” or some such euphemism. A misguided attempt to preserve his status? The man hung wall paper. It was a trade he was taught by his close friend Boris Yelensky, an earlier arrived exile. Yelensky was the main reason he settled in Chicago, long a magnet for Slavic immigrants. Olga found work in a Loop department store, and that is how they lived. Physically. Spiritually, emotionally, intellectually it did not matter where or how they lived once they were expelled from Russia. Their life was anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism, social justice, history. They were a couple of immense erudition; spoke English fluently despite having arrived but a short time ago. The year was 1926 when Sam met him, as I have mentioned, a foot-loose twenty-four-year-old kid, leading a raffish semi-skid-row existence. Maximoff saw potential there, took him under wing. As Sam put it, “He taught me to read and write.” Before long, Sam found himself the irascible pet of Maximoff, Yelensky—“a man born with boxing gloves on”—and a handful of other Russian anarchist exiles: “They were my university!” Sam recalled fondly.

Sam thought he was hot stuff when he met Maximoff. He had written a few articles, made some speeches, ran with the anarchists and Wobblies. Maximoff saw things differently. “You are bright, but you do not know anything. You lack an education. What have you read?”

So, he and the other Russian comrades proceeded to tutor him. They had him read the classical anarchists: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Reclus, Malatesta, and Rocker, of course. But they did not stop there. They had Sam read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky (“How do you know if you agree or disagree if you do not know what they said?”). They had him read Adam Smith, of all people, for whom he acquired a lifelong respect. (“Most of the things they claim he said, he never said or they’ve twisted. Modern capitalism would make him turn over in his grave.”) They also had him read authors you would not expect. (“You need to be a rounded person. What do you know of poetry? Here, take this!”) And it could be Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Pushkin, or the novels of Tolstoy, or Mark Twain. You get the idea.

Maximoff—and comrades—did not let him off the hook by simply giving him things to read. They proceeded to grill him like a rabbi working over a lazy student of the Talmud.

“The ‘Communist Manifesto’ is at heart a reactionary document—never mind the rhetoric. Am I an idiot to say this? Where is the evidence?”

“What do you think of Marx’s use of Hegel’s categories? Was capitalism inevitable?”

It was never a question of indoctrination. Maximoff NEVER asked him to change an opinion, merely to defend it. He was a great teacher.

From Maximoff Sam acquired the life-long habit of devouring books. You would find his greasy thumbprints all over the pages; he had no respect for books as aesthetic objects, only for their print. Wherever he was, whenever he was not slinging a brush he would read—although it is plain to me that Maximoff’s influence on Sam went deeper than books.

“You are twenty-five years old,” he would say to him, with feeling. “What kind of man are you? How do you live? Is this the man you intend to be?” Sam came to see that, like Maximoff, it was necessary to lead a life that you, yourself, can respect. And Sam sincerely attempted to live that way, especially in his later years. But—then—there was the irrepressible, irreverent side to him. He loved to run with the Ben Reitmans and Harry Meyers of the world. He never lost that sly humor, that sense of the human.

I remember discussing the Cuban Revolution with him in the 1980s. He had written an important book on the subject years earlier, a critique of the Castro regime from the anarchist perspective. The conversation drifted to Batista’s Havana: of the gambling, prostitution, and corruption that existed there, pre-Castro. Sam readily agreed. “It was awful,” he said, very serious. Then his voice dropped and he added with a mischievous wink, “But, you know, people had a hell of a good time!”