Читать книгу Storm in My Heart - Helene Minkin - Страница 5

In 1993, when historian Paul Avrich published his monumental collection of oral histories of American anarchism, he realized that it was going to be his most important work to date. Not only must the words of anarchists themselves be preserved for posterity, he felt, but these voices “add a human dimension often lacking in scholarly monographs, not to mention the accounts of journalists, policemen, and officials, and of other, for the most part hostile, observers.”1 Anarchism is meaningless without the men and women who embraced it, lived it, and publicized it. Thousands joined the movement, some briefly, some for life. Many others listened to speeches, attended fundraisers, or, while not agreeing with certain tactics, still believed that the anarchists had something to say.

The history of American anarchism from 1880 to the 1930s was overwhelmingly an immigrant and working-class story. Most of these newcomers made their home in the American republic at a time of rapid industrialization and a bewildering growth of cities. Many were active transnationally, conceiving the movement not as defined by national borders, but as an international arena strung together by radical newspapers and traveling orators. Three figures loom large in this story of immigrant anarchism: Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. While there were thousands of other activists and writers, these three became most familiar to an anxious American public. In many ways, fairly or not, they came to define what anarchism stood for in the eyes of the general public (the Haymarket affair was another defining event). All three increased their profile by publishing lengthy, personal memoirs. Most, who lived in the United States from 1882 to 1906, published his reminiscences in German in 1903 (it has yet to be translated);2 Berkman penned his account in 1912, mostly dealing with his fourteen-year prison term; and Goldman released her memoirs in 1931, first serialized, then as a book.3 With regard to later historiography, these three magnetic personalities have tended to act as centripetal forces pulling other personalities and events into an orbit around them.

Helene Minkin had a close relationship with all three of them, and often saw things very differently than they did. Born in 1873, she was a few years younger than both Goldman and Berkman, and like them, she was raised in a Jewish family, hailed from the same region in western Russia, and became an anarchist in the great American metropolis. Minkin, Goldman, and Berkman were all influenced by the older Johann Most, who was not Jewish and had been active in Switzerland, Austria, his native Germany, and England for fourteen years before coming to New York. Eventually, Minkin became Most’s partner and mother of their two children, John Jr. and Lucifer. Their bond was most likely a common law marriage that left no record.

In her memoir, Minkin recreates a moment when she and Most relate their life stories to each other. Hers was a story familiar to thousands of Jewish families living under the czars of Russia in the Pale of Settlement, a huge area in western Russia in which millions of Jewish were forced to live as second-class citizens. They were barred from agriculture, and could not attend universities until Czar Alexander II’s modest reforms. It was the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 that brought back the cruel anti-Jewish policies that where in effect earlier in the century. A wave of pogroms swept the region. Censorship, arrests, intimidation, conscription, and expulsion from their homes were common. The idea of leaving the Pale for a new homeland slowly took hold throughout the region where a collective identity had sustained the Jews for decades. “The Jews,” historian Elias Tcherikower has written, “constituted an autonomous, isolated, self-enclosed, and collectively responsible social entity.”4 The outside world was hostile and very often a threat creating what Irving Howe has called a “condition of permanent precariousness.”5 Jewish life was centered in the shtetl (small town), although by the 1880s many Jews began moving to larger urban centers. Within these Jewish communities, there existed an uneasy balance between the traditional reverence for Talmudic scholarship reserved for boys and men on the one hand, and the encroaching attractions of modernity and wealth on the other. Life was always hard, however, and despite some wealthier residents, most inhabitants of the shtetl were poor.

It was this world that was the setting of Helene Minkin’s childhood in the small town of Grodno (now Hrodna in Belarus), a county seat located on the Nieman River. In 1887, the year before the Minkins left for America, the city had a Jewish population of 27,343 out of a total of 39,826—or 68.7%.6 After their mother’s death in 1883, Helene and her sister Anna went to live with their grandparents who were shopkeepers and strict disciplinarians, presumably in the city of Bialystok, about fifty miles southwest in what is now Poland. As teenagers living in an oppressive household, the girls were nevertheless exposed to new ideas by way of hired tutors, young Russian students who clandestinely exposed them to anti-czarist and perhaps even socialist literature. Helene also picked up a rudimentary knowledge of German. Then her father’s brother decided to make his way to America in order to escape military service, an issue that had long traumatized Russian Jews since the reign of Nicholas I. According to Minkin, it was she and her sister who, sometime in 1887 or 1888, resolved to follow their uncle and emigrate. The Minkins were thus part of what would be the first wave of Eastern European immigrants from czarist Russia.

Minkin’s arrival in Manhattan in June 1888 and her adjustment to the big city was not unlike that of thousands of other teenage Jewish immigrants. Urban life per se would not have been foreign to her, having lived in Grodno and Bialystok, but the cosmopolitan bustle of New York must have been overwhelming. They settled in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, a large working-class district cramped with beerhalls, eateries, and vendors. During the 1880s, the district was still a predominantly German enclave known as Little Germany (or Kleindeutschland), but would, a decade or so later, be transformed into an overcrowded Jewish ghetto. The district’s inhabitants were working people ranging from skilled artisans to laborers and small shopkeepers. Like many Jewish women of the neighborhood, Helene and her sister Anna found work in the booming garment industry.

Helene Minkin first heard about anarchists while eating a meal at Sachs’ restaurant on Norfolk Street, a meeting place for Jewish radicals. A great tragedy was being discussed. A year earlier, on November 11, 1887, after a controversial trial, four self-proclaimed anarchists had been executed in Chicago, and its first commemoration was to be organized.7 As Helene soon learned, the executions were the ghastly outcome of an equally shocking bomb attack during an anarchist rally held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. This rally had been called to protest police violence against strikers. When a police force appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse, a bomb was hurled into the police ranks, killing one instantly and leaving many horribly wounded. An unknown number of workers died of police fire during the melee. Seven police officers lost their lives, and one succumbed to his wounds a few years later. The identity of the bomb thrower remained a mystery. Anarchist leaders were rounded up, some of whom had not even been present at the rally. But advocacy of revolutionary violence was not alien to many anarchists of the 1880s; Johann Most had been recommending dynamite for years. In fact, a handful of Chicago anarchists did manufacture bombs days before the Haymarket rally. Next in this drama was the trial of eight defendants accused of being part of an anarchist conspiracy that led to the bloodshed. On August 20, 1886, the jury convicted all eight and sentenced seven to death. For Minkin, fresh out of czarist Russia, hearing the story of Haymarket was difficult; her “first blow in this free country,” as she wrote in her memoir.

The New York anarchist movement in which Helene Minkin made her quiet entry was dominated by German immigrants, many of whom had been drifting from socialism toward anarchism in the years 1879–1883, or had been expelled from Germany. This movement grew slowly and found a political home in hundreds of beerhalls sprinkled throughout the German-speaking sections of the Lower East Side. During the early 1880s, the immigrant radicals were never sharply divided into neat political camps; revolutionaries of all stripes mingled most often in Justus Schwab’s tiny saloon on First Street, the premier “gathering place for all bold, joyful, and freedom-loving spirits.”8 It was Schwab who, in 1882, made an attempt to invite Most—who had gained a reputation in the Austrian and German socialist movement but now searched for a new direction—to come to the United States and inspire the revolutionaries with his famed oratory.

Johann Most had been living in London since December 1879, where he edited his beloved Freiheit, a radical paper charting a course increasingly independent from the socialist party line. For this stubborn and indefatigable man in his mid-thirties, it was a difficult yet formative time. He and his wife divorced. He was expelled from the Socialist Party in August 1880 and found himself at the center of new infighting as the radical exile community searched for new philosophies to bring about revolution. In Germany, authorities successfully cracked down on a network of cells critical for the distribution of his paper. When Most openly celebrated the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881, British authorities jailed him for sixteen months. Released in October 1882, Most reasoned that the only way to save Freiheit was to relocate to New York.

Most’s arrival in the United States revived the social revolutionaries not only in New York but in scores of cities in the northeast and midwest following a hectic lecture tour that would become a stock-in-trade until his death. With singular intensity and energy, Most who now called himself an anarchist, thundered his preachments of insurrection and armed resistance. His speeches were stirring, as much a one-man theater act laced with humor and sarcasm as an edifying oration on the relations between Capital and Labor. Freiheit, boosted by new subscriptions and ably managed by Most, reflected this often-violent tone. Ever since 1880, the paper published articles on insurrectionary methods, chemistry, and the uses of dynamite. This infatuation with revolutionary warfare was itself a reflection of a wider debate over the philosophy of “propaganda of the deed,” which had gained currency among the revolutionary groups in Europe—even Peter Kropotkin endorsed it. At first somewhat divorced from the issue of firearms and explosives, propaganda by the deed taught that small groups or individuals can further the cause of revolution among the masses by staging exemplary deeds of rebellion and resistance. It didn’t take long before some justified acts of political violence (Attentat) as effective propaganda, especially in light of increasing repression by the state.

Most’s uncritical brushing aside of a distinction between revolutionary deeds and senseless criminal acts caused the American press to shift its earlier coverage of him as a foreign curiosity to charging him with lunacy and terrorism. During most of the 1880s, he openly praised assassins of police officials and businessmen in Austria and Germany. He was indirectly involved in the bombing of a Frankfurt police station. Indeed, Freiheit claimed responsibility stating that it wanted to test dynamite.9 He defended insurance fraudsters—many were members of the New York anarchist group 1—who recklessly set their tenements ablaze to collect payments. One such incident went horribly wrong, killing a woman and her two children. Most’s refusal to condemn such practices caused Justus Schwab to break with him.10 In the fall of 1884, Most secretly retreated to New Jersey where he worked in an explosives factory to gain access to certain chemicals, some of which he mailed to Germany. Throughout the next year, he shared his chemistry lessons with his readers in numerous articles culminating in a pamphlet unabashedly titled Revolutionary War Science.

But Most and his fellow revolutionaries were not merely apostles of destruction, as they were branded in the press. Most had considerable experience in and appreciation for organization and discipline going back to his days as a labor leader and editor in Germany. In 1883, from his perch as editor of the foremost German-language anarchist paper in the world (although challengers would appear), he naturally felt cast in the role of director, even of arbiter, and this attitude was sometimes resented—or at best tolerated—by his associates and readers. Still, Most spoke repeatedly of the need to organize, to build, to bring the fight to the enemy. When in 1883 a call went out for a new conference of American revolutionaries in Pittsburgh, Most emerged the leading force and author of its famous Proclamation. The International Working People’s Association was established; it was to gather under its federative umbrella all autonomous groups and a handful of movement newspapers. As a result, dozens of groups sprang up in cities along the east coast, including in Philadelphia, New Haven, Newark, Buffalo, and several in the New York City area. The Proclamation invoked Jefferson’s dictum that an oppressive government warrants its victims to overthrow it, and thus declares as its first principle the “destruction of the existing ruling class by all means.” All that was needed was “organization and unity” now possible since “the work of peaceful education and revolutionary conspiracy well can and ought to run in parallel lines.” In other words, propaganda by the deed should coexist with propaganda by the word.

By the time of the Haymarket verdict, Most’s views had tempered, although he never missed an opportunity for verbal provocation. As far as is known, he never committed a violent crime, which did not prevent New York authorities from arresting and jailing him several times mostly for inciting to riot. Thus, by the time Minkin, Goldman, and Berkman entered Most’s orbit, this German firebrand had piled up a reputation—at least among anarchists—of stubbornness, resilience, and courage. This is not to say that his stature went unchallenged. Rifts in the movement had been visible since the London days, mostly over ideology and tactics. Most’s efforts to keep Freiheit afloat, combined with his undisguised desire for control, led the Autonomists, a rival faction led by the Austrian anarchist Josef Peukert, to openly challenge Most. Autonomists favored Kropotkin’s philosophy of anarchist communism whereby the collective fruits of labor were to be distributed according to need. Most and other so-called collectivist anarchists believed that distribution had to proceed according to ability. Personal enmity and the emotions that come with operating in a movement rife with police spies exacerbated the situation. When, in 1887, Most’s friend and key smuggler Johann Neve was arrested by Belgian police, Most lashed out at Peukert accusing him of betraying Neve. This rivalry between the Mostians and Autonomists suffused much of the atmosphere during the 1880s and 1890s in London as well as in New York.11

From the anarchist perspective, the Haymarket affair was a devastating tragedy, but the publicity surrounding it exposed many young Jewish immigrants to anarchism. They learned of its philosophy, its characters and their courage in the face of state repression. And they were inspired by the anarchists’ alliance—especially in Chicago—with an increasingly vocal labor movement. Two months after the death sentences were meted out, the first Jewish anarchist group, Pioneers of Liberty (Pionire der Frayhayt), was founded in New York with club headquarters on Orchard Street. They affiliated with the International Working People’s Association, held meetings and fundraisers, and found in Johann Most an inspiring force even though most Yiddish-speaking Jews—like Minkin—were not fluent in German. “It is an understatement,” declared Chaim Weinberg, “to say that Most had the ability to inspire an audience. He electrified, all but bewitched, every listener, opponent, as well as friend.”12

By the time Minkin arrived in New York in June 1888, this Yiddish-speaking movement had grown and there was talk of launching a publishing venture of their own. The Pioneers of Liberty made such an announcement in January 1889, and a month later the first issue of Varhayt (Truth) appeared—the first Yiddish anarchist periodical in the United States.13 Jewish comrades could read articles by Kropotkin and of course Most, and educate themselves about the Paris Commune and American labor news. The venture ended after five months due to lack of funds, but was soon followed by another paper, the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, one of the longest-lasting anarchist papers in history as it turned out. An entire subculture emerged modeled on what the Germans had built. Jewish anarchists set up cooperatives, mutual aid organizations, and clubs, and they staged concerts and theater performances. They were especially conspicuous as a voice for atheism and anticlerical agitation, something that made Most feel right at home. In fact, it was one of Most’s most widely read pamphlets, The God Pestilence, translated into Yiddish in 1888, that inspired and energized much of this activism. Most shocking to traditional Jews was the annual Yom Kippur ball organized by anarchists, which made a mockery out of Judaism’s holiest day of the year.

Minkin, then, witnessed upon her arrival a mature, diverse, and vibrant—if dejected after Haymarket—anarchist movement, predominantly German with a growing Jewish contingent. A movement alive with weekly meetings, large commemorative gatherings, festive fundraisers, outings, and reading clubs. Pamphlets, books, and anarchist newspapers were readily available by subscription or at various beerhalls and restaurants. This movement was also male-dominated despite the fact that some German activists championed women’s rights. Women were by no means absent; every press account of large anarchist gatherings noted the impressive attendance by women. But most club members were men, and while reliable sources are rare, it seems that most German anarchist families retained traditional gender roles within the household. Occasionally, anarchist papers in their event announcements encouraged women to participate more fully.14 But elsewhere in a paper like Freiheit, gendered language was not uncommon, and on one occasion, in March 1887, a woman complained about the insulting tone and promptly received an apology.15

When Most and Minkin began a relationship and started a family, the anarchists loyal to Most expressed their disapproval, as Minkin relates in her memoir. Implicit in this backlash was an assumption that family life for movement members impeded the cause of revolution, softened the (male) activist, and would likely result in trouble. It may also drain resources away from the movement’s activities, they feared. One dramatic incident—if perhaps not wholly representative—illustrates this dynamic. On January 28, 1902, comrade Hugo Mohr was found dead in his Paterson, NJ apartment; he had gassed himself out of fear of a second arrest after he had been released on bail that day. According to a court reporter for the New York Sun, no friend of anarchists, Mohr had been charged with “cruelty to his family.” He had been out of work for a year, “took the money that his wife and oldest daughter earned and bought Anarchist literature with it.” He also donated money to Most’s defense fund by sending it to Helene Most who was managing the paper. The reporter added that “he beat his wife and children until they were afraid of their lives. Last Tuesday night he caught his oldest daughter by the ear and nearly tore it off.”16 Remarkably, Freiheit, in a brief notice chose to blame Mohr’s death on his wife: “Comrade Mohr has committed suicide by gas in Paterson. An evil woman drove him to his death. That’s how they are.”17

Emma Goldman, who arrived in New York in August 1889, was especially attuned to the politics of gender and sexuality. She had recently ended a brief and unhappy marriage, and was bent on maintaining her independence and rebelliousness. If the German movement, and Most especially, provided her a foot in the door, she nonetheless became disillusioned with their outdated ideas around gender. “I expressed contempt,” she wrote, “for the reactionary attitude of our German comrades on these matters.”18 And again, in 1929, in a letter to Berkman, she charged that “[the Germans] remain stationary on all points except economics. Especially as regards women, they are really antediluvian.”19

Johann Most’s views on women and gender fit Goldman’s description perfectly. And she would know. It was in fact Goldman’s brief but intimate relationship with her mentor Most that confirmed for her the underlying conservatism of many male activists. What Most sought in the relationship was domestic comfort and security with an assumption that she would provide it. Goldman would not, and she told him as much. Moreover, she would from now on judge herself superior as a woman activist to her roommate Helene Minkin who accepted, to some extent, a domestic role with Most. As Goldman wrote in her memoir with a hint of disdain: “A home, children, the care and attention ordinary women can give, who have no other interest in life but the man they love and the children they bear him—that was what he needed and felt he had found in Helen.”20 But in a 1904 letter to Berkman, her tone is much harsher. “Helena M. is a common ordinary Woman, has not developed in the least,” she wrote. “I am sorry to say, that all those of my sex we have known together [the Minkin sisters] have become ordinary Haustiere [pets] und Flatpflanzen [potted plants].”21

Most’s past going back to his adolescent years provides clues to his disposition toward women. Two childhood traumas defined much of his later life: the death of his beloved mother when he was nine, and a life-saving operation on his jaw, which left his face horribly deformed. One year after the loss of his mother, Most’s father married Maria Lederle who strictly enforced her will on the children. Instead of play, Most was put to work in the house and was forced to attend mass. He later described his tyrannical stepmother as a “shifty arch-Catholic” and a “crafty bitch.”22 Not only did Most develop a hatred of all forms of oppression, but also a mistrust of women.

The surgical operation that Most underwent when he was thirteen seems to have been even more traumatic. Successful though it was, the procedure disfigured him for life, and until he could grow a beard, Most could muster little confidence in the outside world. It was the “deepest tragedy of my life,” he once told Goldman in later years. She was convinced that it produced in him “what would now be called an inferiority complex.”23 When other young women and men enjoyed flirting and dating, Most convinced himself that he had to forgo such pleasures, and at times blamed women for shunning him. He recalls an episode from 1868 when he was twenty-two and a member of a workers’ educational society in Switzerland. It was not unusual, he tells us, for male members to have relations with the female cooks despite some strict house rules. “For my part,” Most writes, “I understood very little of those things at the time, because I convinced myself that my shifted face did not get me that eternal Feminine, and that as a result the tables turned and my ‘woman-hater’ comes out, which in later years did not of course protect me from the (totally unwarranted) accusation of being a ‘Don Juan’.”24

As soon as Most found a home in the emerging socialist movement in Germany, he overcame much of the pain and humiliation of his earlier years. Work in the movement—whether as speaker, editor, or writer—consumed him. Then, at age twenty-five, he met Clara Hänsch, the daughter of a policeman, and, according to Most, considered one of the “prettiest girls in town.”25 They married in January 1874, only weeks after Most’s first election victory to the German Parliament (Reichstag). The endless persecutions by authorities, including stints in jail, inevitably strained the relationship. They had two children but both died before reaching their first birthdays, which Most thought was probably for the best. It was Most’s rise in the movement and his increasingly hectic schedule that left no time for family and doomed the marriage. In one brutally honest passage, Most distills it this way: “In time, everything came down to the following question: “Party or Family? […] I sacrificed my family.”26 The marriage lingered for years as a kind of “dog and cat existence,” as Most phrased it, until 1880 when they divorced in London.27 There is evidence that there Most had a brief relationship with Marie Roth, a teacher of German descent. Even years after Most’s departure to New York, Roth contemplated joining him in 1885. She eventually married the Irishman John Lincoln Mahon, secretary of the Socialist League and later cofounder of the Socialist Union, a precursor of the Labour Party.28

Throughout Most’s life, the topic of women and feminism remained awkward. Women’s rights, while a worthy cause, could not take precedence over the urgent fight for political and economic liberation, he felt. He could not see that gender equality was intrinsically linked to economic freedom. Sexual politics and the issue of free love, which became a central issue for many anarchists, appeared to Most as frivolous distractions. In December 1899, when fifty-three-year-old Most was on lecture tour in California, Sarah Comstock, a young, Stanford-educated reporter for the San Francisco Call, managed to track him down for an interview. After hearing about his childhood and his political beliefs, Comstock asked, “What do you think about women?” “As I tell you, I had troubles,” he said. “I do not like to get into the woman question.” About his wives, he complained that they “made my life a misery. They fought, fought, fought me all the time.” Then he resumed with a typical analysis that reserved feminism for a future date:

The woman of the future will have a different life from the woman of the present, and so she will be a different creature. She will no longer be a mere housewife, but she will enter all fields which are open to man, and she will be his companion in art and science and labor. She will not need to marry that she may be supported. There will in the happy future be no unfortunate marriages.29

If the 1870s chronicle Johann Most’s rise in the socialist movement, then the 1880s recount his rise in the anarchist movement, a turbulent decade in which Most does not seem to have had any long-term relationships. And so an interesting evolution emerges regarding his balancing family and the activist life: whereas during the 1870s Most was obsessed with work and perhaps fame, by 1890 he seems to have expressed—if we can believe Goldman—a desire to settle down, to have a home other than the editorial office, and to have children again.

Contrary to Goldman’s comment, however, Helene Minkin did have other interests in life, and there were times she too resented housework. She was certainly more than a domestic sidekick of the famed Johann Most. She was a committed anarchist in her own right and believed deeply in the cause for freedom and workers’ rights. She did not share the uncompromising vision of a Berkman who modeled himself after the unswerving Russian revolutionaries. She did not have the talent for forceful public speaking like Most or Goldman. She did have a talent for writing, management, and editing. After she and Most moved in together, Minkin became active in the running of Freiheit, Most’s paper that made its way to readers since 1879. And so perhaps their relationship offered, for both, a workable balance between family and work. Especially during the late 1890s when the paper nearly died, Minkin was crucial in keeping it afloat while many of the (mostly male) comrades failed to step up. At one point, Most was ready to quit and burn all the books.30 “Of the few who stood faithfully beside him [Most] during these tough months,” wrote biographer Rudolf Rocker, “his brave life partner Helene Most deserves special mention because time and again she helped him to keep up his work, and she took care of almost the entire expedition of the paper.”31

After Most’s death in 1906, Helene Minkin was briefly in charge of Freiheit, but decided to withdraw from the movement.32 She insisted that Freiheit fold for good now that its creator had passed away, but a handful of German anarchists decided to continue publication by setting up the Freiheit Publishing Association. Minkin also insisted that she and her children did not need financial support from the comrades. She and Most had talked about the obligation that many supporters would surely feel if the moment of death would arrive. “I told him that I will never agree to that,” Minkin wrote in a letter published in Freiheit right after Most’s death. One of the reasons for refusing any help was the bitterness she felt toward many of Most’s supporters who had criticized him for starting a family in 1893, which to them would hamper the cause. This treatment was harmful and unnecessary, Minkin felt, but “now I feel my strength has grown and, Comrades, I’m able to support myself and Most’s sons.”33

Clearly, relations between Minkin and the majority of German comrades had soured, and the issue of how Most would be remembered became very sensitive. Right after Most’s death, Minkin believed herself to be the guardian and protector of her late partner’s legacy. She was briefly editor of Freiheit because Most had brought her on board and trusted her, but she was prevented from folding the paper and forced to relinquish any claims. She presumably was in possession of much of Most’s papers, and the fourth volume of his memoirs had yet to be published (Most had published the first three himself). At least according to her, she was obstructed and ignored every step of the way in her efforts to publicize Most’s writings. She tried her best to keep Most’s memory alive by selling buttons and photographs in order to raise funds, but even this became an ordeal though she doesn’t explain how.34 When the fourth volume of Most’s memoirs was finally released in March 1907, Helene Minkin voiced her frustration in a short preface:

Had the relations not been so unfortunate and had I been able to find any lasting local organ, the many impatient questioners would have been long satisfied. Since the existence of the “Freiheit Publishing Association,” no communication has taken place between them and myself, and I was thus robbed of any aid that could have allowed the publication of the literary legacy for the Most family. Whatever mischief was done regarding the Most buttons and pictures, whatever rumors about the “handing over” of “donations” became public, the survivors of John Most are not to blame for the mischief and rumors and have no other share in them than—the cost of them.35

The next decade in the life of Minkin is sketchy. She raised her children by trying different jobs and moving around, occasionally assuming the name Miller or Mueller instead of Most as they had done in the past. According to her son John, she became a midwife, and in 1907 she is listed as a midwife living at 4038 3rd Avenue.36 When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, Lucifer, the youngest son, enlisted.37 After the war, he became a salesman, and in 1930 lived in the Bronx married to Nadia Most (née Hillman).38 His brother John was in college and became a dentist, and shared his father’s interest in anarchism.39 Minkin moved in with John in a house at 1290 Webster Avenue in the Bronx.40 John Jr. struggled to keep his practice afloat partly because his social activism included caring for the poor even if they were unable to pay. In the early forties, he joined the NAACP and attended its rallies.41 In June 1932, Minkin officially declared her intention to become a US citizen and would eventually swear the oath of allegiance on February 11, 1935.42 By this time, both sons had moved to North Arlington, New Jersey just north of Newark and only two blocks from each other.43

Helene Minkin was fifty-nine when she began to publish her memoirs in Yiddish in the Forverts (or Jewish Daily Forward); the first installment appearing on September 18, 1932. She was then living at 15 West 177th Street in the Bronx possibly still with her oldest son.44 She tells us that she was spurred to write her own account after reading Goldman’s, which was released in October 1931.45 Minkin had considered writing “everything down” before, but nothing came of it. Her life story, she believed, was too painful. Would anyone be interested? Was she relevant for posterity? “But now,” she says, “when the famous Emma Goldman has come out with her book, in which she allowed herself to drag in other people and offer incorrect facts in an often wholly unsympathetic and partisan light, I feel it is my duty not to be silent and to reveal the other side of the story.” While Goldman’s Living My Life was received with acclaim by the mainstream press, Minkin’s criticism of Goldman’s style was echoed in other commentaries. The New York Times review, while praising her autobiography as “one of the great books of its kind,” also stated that “for those who differ with her she has little tolerance, and her book is full of what may be called brutal judgments.”46 Alexander Berkman wrote a friend that “[Goldman’s autobiography] is well done in every respect. Some details could have been left out, but you know Emma—she fought me on every passage and page that I cut out.”47

Minkin sent Forverts thirteen installments (the last one appeared on December 18, 1932), all of them now translated into English and edited together as one document. Her memoir covers the period from 1888, when she, her sister Anna, and their father Isaac arrived in New York, to about 1913 when her youngest son graduated from high school. The account is roughly chronological, but several sections describing her childhood in Russia are inserted as a flashback when she was asked by Most to recount her life story.

After World War II, Lucifer moved to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some thirty-four miles west of Newark, where he lived in a house on Raccoon Island in the middle of the lake. He died there on August 26, 1949 at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind his wife Nadia and two sons, Norman L. and John J.48 Minkin’s oldest son John Jr. eventually moved with his wife Rose, a Russian immigrant, to Boston. Their son, Johnny M. Most, born on June 15, 1923 in Tenafly, New Jersey, would become the celebrated sportscaster for the Boston Celtics (he died in 1993).49 John Most Jr. retired in a Boston senior center where he died of pneumonia at age ninety-two on January 30, 1987, but not before being interviewed by the late historian Paul Avrich. He talked about growing up in New York as a child of anarchist parents, about his admiration for his father. His mother Helene, he said, died at age eighty sometime in 1953 or 1954.50

Footnotes

1 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (1995; Oakland: AK Press, 1995), xii.

2 Johann Most, Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1903; Hannover: Edition Kobaia, 1978). His memoirs consist of four volumes: the first volume deals with his youth (“Aus meiner Jugendzeit”) and was published in 1903; the second volume covered the Vienna high treason trial (“Der Wiener Hochverrats-Prozeß”) and also came out in 1903. The third volume covered his years in Saxony as an activist and Member of Parliament (“In Sturm und Drang: Agitations- und Parlaments-Reminiscenzen”) and appeared in 1905. The fourth volume relates his many arrests, court appearances, and imprisonments mostly in Berlin (“Die Pariser Commune vor den Berliner Gerichten,” which includes “Die Bastille am Plötzensee”) and was published posthumously in March 1907.

3 Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1912); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), vol. 2 (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1934). Other important memoirs include those of Austrian anarchist Josef Peukert and Jewish anarchist Chaim Weinberg (1861–1939) of Philadelphia. See Peukert, Erinnerungen eines Proletariers aus der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Gustav Landauer (Berlin: Verlag des sozialistischen Bundes, 1913) and Weinberg, Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jewish Anarchist, trans. Naomi Cohen, ed. Robert Helms (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2008).

4 Elias Tcherikower, The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1961), 5.

5 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976; London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 11.

6 Shmuel Spector and Bracha Freundlich, eds. Lost Jewish Worlds: The Communities of Grodno, Lida, Olkieniki, Vishay (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), 18.

7 The commemoration in the great hall of Cooper Union was attended by over 3,500 men and women, according to the New York Times. The hall and stage were decked out with banners and flags. Music was provided by two large orchestras, one socialist, the other anarchist. The keynote speakers were the socialist Sergius Schevitch, and of course, Johann Most who, when introduced, “was greeted with a perfect storm of applause.” See “They Mourn Their Dead,” New York Times, November 11, 1888.

8 Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 26.

9 Heiner Becker, “Johann Most,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung Vol. 41, no. 1–2 (March 2005): 52; Eduard Müller, Bericht über die Untersuchung betreffend die anarchistischen Umtriebe in der Schweiz an den hohen Bundesrath der schweiz. Eidgenossenschaft (Bern: K.J. Wyss, 1885), 58, 69; J. Langhard, Die anarchistische Bewegung in der Schweiz von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart und die internationalen Führer (Bern: Verlag von Stämpfli & Cie, 1909), 280 note 1.

10 New York Times, November 23 and December 1, 1885. These “firebugs” were exposed as members of anarchist groups in Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty of March 27, 1886 (“The Beast of Communism”). Shortly thereafter the mainstream New York Sun picked it up with a headline: “A Chapter on Anarchism. Is Most’s Arson Doctrine in Practice Here?” (May 3, 1886).

11 Peukert was eventually cleared of all charges, although Most never accepted the findings. Neve died in 1896 in the “lunatic” section of a German prison.

12 Quoted in Paul Avrich, “Jewish Anarchism in the United States,” Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 178.

13 Ibid., 179.

14 Freiheit, October 25, 1884 and June 25, 1892.

15 Freiheit, March 2, 1889. The editors had used the slur “old hags” (alte Weiber).

16 “Anarchist End His Life. Mohr Taught His Children to Anathematize the Dead President,” New York Sun, January 29, 1902. See also “Killed Himself, Cheated Police,” New York Evening World, January 28, 1902.

17 Freiheit, February 1, 1902. Originally: “Genosse Mohr hat zu Paterson per Gas Selbstmord verübt. Ein böses Weib hat ihn in den Tod gejagt. So sinn’ se.”

18 Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1, 151.

19 Goldman to Berkman, St. Tropez (France), February 20, 1929, in Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, eds. Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 145.

20 Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1, 77. Italics added.

21 Emma Goldman to Alexander Berkman, New York, ca. February 21, 1904, in Goldman, Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 2: Making Speech Free, 1902–1909, eds. Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 137.

22 Most, Memoiren, I, 14.

23 Emma Goldman, “Johann Most,” American Mercury 8 (June 1926): 159, 160.

24 Most, Memoiren, I, 56. Most recalls another experience from the time he lived in Vienna where he had joined the socialist movement. Sometime in 1870, Most, then twenty-four, temporarily lodged in the tiny house of a comrade who had a grown-up daughter sharing a room with Most. He soon found out she was engaged and compared himself to her fiancé. “He was a strapping lad, I a weak fellow. He was handsome, I ugly as sin; since I could not grow a beard yet, I most likely made […] a mere repulsive impression on the eternal Feminine.” See Most, Memoiren, II, 62–63.

25 Most, Memoiren, III, 27.

26 Ibid., 28.

27 According to the historian Heiner Becker, Most had a relationship with Clara Ringius while he was living in Berlin in 1878 (and while married). See Becker, “Johann Most,” 27, note 89.

28 Ibid. See also Andrew Carlson, Anarchism in Germany I: The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 227.

29 Sarah Comstock, “Why Herr Most Likes California,” San Francisco Call, December 24, 1899. Most exaggerated the number of his marriages, perhaps deliberately. Twice in Comstock’s article Most says he had three wives. During an interview in Seattle six weeks later, he reportedly told the press of his six marriages. See Yakima Herald, February 8, 1900.

30 Minkin, “An die Leser der ‘volume,” Freiheit, April 21, 1906.

31 Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen (Berlin: “Der Syndikalist”, 1924; Glashütten im Taunus: Detlov Auvermann, 1973), 387.

32 Her name was listed as “Publisher” on the masthead of the April 21 issue.

33 Minkin, “An die Leser der ‘Freiheit’,” Freiheit, April 21, 1906.

34 See the expense account in Freiheit, July 6, 1907. The photographer connected to the German anarchist movement was George Boelsterli who had a studio at 201 East 89th Street. See his ad in Freiheit, August 10, 1907.

35 Minkin’s words were included in the preface to volume four by the anarchist writer Frederick Thaumazo (pseudonym for Frederick Loevius). Interestingly, Thaumazo would become a vocal critic of both Berkman’s and Goldman’s depiction of Most in their respective autobiographies. In response to Berkman, for instance, he published a scathing pamphlet, The Martyrdom of Berkman. See Thaumazo, “Eine Erklärung als Vorwort,” in Most, Memoiren, vol. 4, ii–iii; Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 207.

36 Paul Avrich interview with John Most, Jr., October 28, 1979 in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 19; Trow’s General Directory of the Boroughs of New York and Bronx, City of New York (New York: R.L. Polk & Co., 1907), vol. 2, 1015.

37 “Most, Lucifer J.,” Ancestry.com. U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918. Original data: United States, Selective Service System, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration), M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm. Lucifer would also enlist in 1942.

38 See U.S. Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930; see also Lucifer J. Most’s obituary in New York Times, August 28, 1949.

39 Mike Carey and Jamie Most, High Above Courtside: The Lost Memoirs of Johnny Most (SportsPublishing LLC, 2003), 4.

40 Trow’s New York City Directory 1917 (New York: R.L. Polk & Co., 1917), 1434.

41 Carey and Most, High Above Courtside, 4.

42 Minkin’s Petition of Citizenship at Ancestry.com. U.S., Naturalization Records—Original Documents, 1795–1972 (World Archives Project). Original records are at Naturalization Records for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, 1890–1972. NARA Microfilm Publication M1541, 40 rolls. Records of District Courts of the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Archives), Record Group 21.

43 Both sons signed affidavits as witnesses to Minkin’s petition for citizenship. John Jr.’s address was 22 Beech Street, North Arlington, NJ. Lucifer lived at 137 Seeley Avenue, Kearney, NJ. See Petition of Citizenship at Ancestry.com.

44 Trow’s New York City Directory 1933–34 (New York: R.L. Polk & Co., 1934), vol. 2, 2377.

45 Emma Goldman began writing her life story in the spring of 1929 while living in southern France. Berkman agreed to help her with revising and correcting the manuscript, and, according to Goldman, it was he who thought of the title Living My Life. Goldman contracted with Alfred Knopf as publisher, and the two met in Paris where they talked about producing a Yiddish version as well. It is perhaps this version that appeared in Forverts. In January and February 1930, Goldman dispatched the manuscript in installments to New York. Berkman contemplated writing his own story beginning with his release from the Western Penitentiary, but nothing came of it. See Avrich and Avrich, Sasha and Emma, 350–354.

46 Quoted in Avrich and Avrich, Sasha and Emma, 354. See also R.L. Duffue, “An Anarchist Explains Her Life,” New York Times, October 25, 1931.

47 Quoted in Avrich and Avrich, Sasha and Emma, 355.

48 Lucifer J. Most’s obituary in New York Times, August 28, 1949. He was buried at Hurdtown Cemetery (Morris County, NJ).

49 See Carey and Most, High Above Courtside, 3. See also “Johnny Most, 69, Radio Voice, That Cheered On Boston Celtics,” New York Times, January 4, 1993.

50 Paul Avrich interview with John Most Jr., October 28, 1979 in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 19. There is a grave for “Helen Most” at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, NY, marking her death on February 3, 1954.