Читать книгу Trotsky in New York, 1917 - Kenneth D. Ackerman - Страница 14
Оглавление“‘The beautiful Bronx’—that’s what we called it. It was an unusual and exciting place to live in those Days. Millions of people—hardworking, family folk—poured out of the congested tenements of the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and other crowded sections of Manhattan . . . to make a better life for themselves in the Bronx. Why did they come? Because it was ‘like country.’”133
—Lloyd Ultan, The Beautiful Bronx: 1920–1950
“I don’t need bodyguards. I grew up in the South Bronx.”
—Al Pacino, actor
AGAIN, TROTSKY AND his family took the subway. From the Astor House, they left Times Square and navigated snow-crusted streets across Fifth Avenue to the East Side. Here they grabbed the Third Avenue Elevated. At the Forty-Second Street Street Station, Trotsky, already a budding subway veteran, would have led them up the narrow stairs, plunked down four nickels for the four of them—himself, Natalya, and the boys—and followed signs to the platform marked “Uptown.”
Subway cars back then had a single long bench along each side, so sitting passengers faced each other, leaving the middle for people to stand packed together, holding leather straps hanging from the ceiling. As the train rumbled down its steel tracks, the boys could stare out at rooftops and windows that flew by. Watching the view, they’d have hardly noticed the crowd, pushing, shoving, some smoking cigarettes in the tight, stuffy space. Jammed subway cars already had become a dreaded part of New York rush hours.
It took twelve stops to reach 129th Street, the last station in Manhattan. Then the train lurched right onto a steel bridge. Here they could see water out the window, a narrow muddy channel lined with docks and warehouses and clogged with barges. This was the Harlem River, and on the far side lay the Bronx.
The boys probably giggled at the name. It came from a Dutch settler named Jonas Bronck who had bought land here back in the 1600s. Bronck named a local stream after himself, Bronck’s River. Other settlers started calling his farm Bronck’s land, then just the Bronx. Few people lived here until the subway lines, elevated and underground, came to connect it with Manhattan. Then came a flood of transplants from New York’s packed downtown tenements. This caused the population to explode, rising from 200,000 to 732,000 between 1900 and 1920 and hitting 1.2 million by 1930.
As a result, much in the Bronx in 1917 was still new and fresh—the train tracks, the houses, the trolleys, the streets and stores, the parks. Farms and dirt roads still covered most areas east of the Bronx River. Once in the Bronx, the family sped past a commercial district called the Hub, with shops, office buildings, and department stores, then past rows of backyards behind homes and apartments, then a courthouse, then blocks and blocks of neighborhoods. They finally got off at 174th Street, descended to Southern Boulevard, and then walked two blocks to Vyse Avenue, a small side street with trees.
While Trotsky had kept himself busy at Novy Mir and over Ludwig Lore’s dinner table, Natalya Sedova had spent her first day in America finding the family a place to live. How exactly she did it is unclear. A New York friend must have helped, sifting real estate listings and haggling with landlords. But she liked the result. On seeing the three-room apartment at 1522 Vyse Avenue, a relatively new, clean building with wide halls and stairways, Natalya snatched it up.134 She paid a deposit of three months rent at $18 per month and arranged for furniture to come. A neighbor, the writer Sholem Asch, agreed to guarantee payment for the furniture on the installment plan.135
So out they moved from the Astor House with its sky-high prices to what Trotsky later described as a “workers district,”136 though two or three days in the plush Astor House may have skewed his standards. Not all his new Bronx neighbors actually worked in factories or did hard manual labor. Shop owners, writers, clerks, and craftsmen—immigrants who had climbed the first few pegs toward middle-class life—filled many nearby apartments, petit bourgeois as much as proletariat.
Still, the boys loved it, and Trotsky marveled at the modern features. This was how Americans lived. “The apartment,” he wrote, “was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service-elevator, and even a chute for the garbage.”137 Just as good was the location. The apartment stood just four blocks from the Third Avenue Elevated, a direct shot to his job in Lower Manhattan. Crotona Park, a beautiful landscape of green trees, snow-covered lawns, and a small lake, sat a short walk away. Cinemas and vaudeville theaters dotted nearby Tremont Avenue, with plenty of groceries and diners. A few blocks farther north was the new Bronx Zoo. Yankee Stadium, unfortunately, would not come to the Bronx for another five years.
The Trotskys also had neighbors. Moshe Olgin of the Forward lived nearby, as did Louis Fraina, the young socialist Trotsky had met at Ludwig Lore’s dinner party. One neighbor, though, made a special impression. Trotsky kept the man’s name secret. He never revealed it, referring to him only as “Dr. M.,” a wealthy physician. Natalya in one interview called him “Dr. Mikhailovsky,”138 though no such Mikhailovsky existed in the city directory for 1916 or 1917, under that or any similar spelling. Dr. M. had a car, a chauffeur, and money for the finest downtown restaurants. A Bronx historian later narrowed down the likely Dr. M. to one real-life physician who lived at 1488 Washington Avenue, just across Crotona Park from the Trotsky family’s new apartment.139 His name was Julius Hammer.
Dr. Hammer spoke the same languages as Trotsky and Natalya. A Russian émigré educated in Odessa and fluent in Russian and German, Hammer had come to America in the 1890s and worked his way through Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In addition to his medical practice, he owned eight drugstores by 1917 and a supply business called Allied Drug and Chemical. Hammer’s son Armand was following in his footsteps, himself a Columbia medical student at the time.
But Hammer also counted himself a dedicated socialist, having learned his politics back in Russia. In America Hammer had joined the Socialist Labor Party and married a party comrade named Rose. He had traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, to meet Vladimir Lenin at the 1907 Congress. Hammer steeped himself in party affairs and often picked up legal bills and dinner tabs for the cause. Hammer even enrolled his son Armand as a Socialist when the boy turned sixteen. With thinning hair and a slight build, Hammer easily could have been one of the unnamed guests at Ludwig Lore’s dinner party that week, especially with Louis Fraina living just a few neighborhoods over on Kingsbridge Road. Maybe the two came together. When word had gone out for local comrades to help make the Trotskys feel welcome, Julius and Rose Hammer had happily stepped forward.
In many ways, their new Bronx home could have been the nicest Trotsky had known in his life up to that point—the clean modern apartment, the friendly neighborhood, the school for Leon and Sergei, the friends and neighbors for Natalya. At work, Trotsky had a steady paycheck, a platform for his radical articles and speeches, plenty of fans and followers, and freedom from censors or harassment. As a Russian, he would not have known the concept of the American Dream, but he was quickly finding it in New York City.
