Читать книгу If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee - Страница 9

Like many American Jews of his era, my grandfather Ed changed his name. Unlike most, he changed it to something that would sound more, not less, Jewish. His parents were both immigrants to New York, his mother a Jew from eastern Europe and his father a Catholic from Ireland. Since his father died before his first birthday, he was brought up entirely by his Jewish mother, in a Jewish milieu, but he was stuck with the Irish name Moran, and struggled with the consequences for many years. In 1932, at the age of thirty-two, he went to court to have it changed—from Moran to Morand. According to an FBI report compiled years later, he gave the following reasons for wanting to add that d: “He had always been associated with the Jewish people and the name Moran caused most of the people with whom he was associated to think him to be of Irish extract. In many instances he had been deprived of joining certain Jewish clubs, lodges, etc. and he desired always to be associated with the Jewish people.”

It’s strange that all he did was add the d. His daughter, my mother, was never convinced it really made a difference. “When I stayed home from school on a Jewish holiday,” she recalled in a memoir she wrote in 1999, two years before her death, “the teachers always questioned my right to stay at home with a name like Morand, and I would point out that it had a ‘d’ on it. How I wished it had been changed to Goldberg.”

Through most of my childhood, Ed was an absent figure. In 1950 he left my grandmother Olga after twenty-five years of marriage, and he was not invited to my parents’ wedding two years later or to subsequent family gatherings, including my bar mitzvah, though we all continued to live in the New York area. Once a year or so, he would pay us a visit with his second wife, Mabel. They quarreled incessantly. I remember him as gruff and distant, a pale, portly, stubby man who wore wide ties. He never spoke to just one person, but always addressed everyone in earshot, and truculent sarcasm was his habitual mode.

I knew Olga much better. She was part of our life, if not always a happy part. Yet Ed was a legend. My mother told us often about his achievements. He’d had a radio show and a newspaper column; he was a lawyer who fought for equal rights, civil liberties, and progressive causes; and once he had run for Congress. Years later, after I departed for Britain, I came to know him better and we formed a bond. The legend fell away and for a few years, until his death in 1976, I acquired a flesh-and-blood grandfather, whose cantankerousness was a constant irritation to my mother but a source of amusement for me. So, when my mother died in New York, in October 2001 and I inherited a battered, boxlike leather case stuffed with Ed’s papers, I was curious to delve into them, to find out more about the man. That was only weeks after 9/11. It’s taken me some time to explore, and even longer to understand, the contents of the case.

The earliest document is a passport on which he traveled, with his mother, to Russia in 1903, the latest an article in The American Hebrew from 1953. There are several thick scrapbooks bulging with newsprint: numerous columns and articles he wrote in the thirties and forties. There are speeches, neatly typed. There are diaries or, really, fragments of diaries. Poems as well as notes for and passages from uncompleted novels. Job applications. Election campaign literature, leaflets, meeting notices. And letters—only a few written to Ed, most written by him. From an early age he kept carbon copies of the letters he sent to others, including the intimate ones, a reflection of his sense of destiny, his self-importance and his acute self-consciousness, which he buried under the barbed exterior.

Altogether it’s the paper trail of a man at war with the world and with himself, hectically engaged with the events and debates of his time. As I’ve read and reread this documentary legacy, events unfolding in the outside world have infused it with a pertinence and piquancy I never suspected. In Ed’s papers I’ve explored a world where being a Jew with an Irish name had disturbing ramifications, where fascists and anti-semites openly paraded in the streets of New York, protected by a sympathetic police force, where figures like Fiorello La Guardia, Sidney Hillman, Ed Flynn, Mike Quill, Vito Marcantonio were household names. Where the slogan “Free Palestine!” meant support for a Jewish state and a “Palestinian” was a Jewish settler. Where the Zionist anthem “Ha Tikva” took its place with “The Internationale” and the Red Army marching song. Where Jews argued ceaselessly with Jews, not least about whether there should or should not be a “Jewish vote” and how that vote should be cast. A world where New York Jewry—today a global synonym for diasporic Jewishness—was very much in formation, riven by cultural and political divisions, its fate unsettled, its power and prominence yet to be established.

He was Eddie to old cronies and to his first wife, Ed to more distant acquaintances and to grandchildren, Edward V. Morand in public print. The V. was for Vivien, which he detested and never used, though he was punctilious about the middle initial. In his notes and briefer articles, he’s EVM, which is how my uncle says he thinks of him and how I have also come to think of him. Lawyer, poet, columnist, radio show host, political activist, militant Jew, congressional candidate, anti-fascist and anti-racist. Champion of civil liberties, free speech, world peace, and in 1948 of the new state of Israel. EVM is a revealing witness to his times, even, or especially, when he’s wrong, where the craziness that made him unique and the context he shared with others, that wider world he was always addressing or assaulting, seem inextricable.

My mother remembered a grandmother who was “gypsylike,” dressed in bright colors with long red hair—which, as she was then in her seventies, must have been dyed. My uncle recalled how she used to visit with hard candy and the comics from the Daily News, which Ed had otherwise banned from the household as a “fascist rag.”

Dora was born in 1859 in Kovno (modern-day Kaunas), the second city of Lithuania, on the western fringe of the Russian empire. The first twenty-two years of her life were lived under the relatively liberal rule of Czar Alexander II. In the 1860s, Jews who had previously been confined to the old ghetto in Slobodka crossed the river and settled in the centre of Kovno, which at this time underwent rapid economic growth. A railway was established to the German border, raising property prices and lowering export costs, while the czar surrounded the city with great military fortresses in which, eighty years later, the Nazis were to torture and execute Jews by the hundreds.¹

During the years of Dora’s youth, Jews made up some 30 percent of Kovno’s population. New Jewish cemeteries and hospitals were established. Synagogues, Talmud Torahs and yeshivas abounded. Kovno became one of the Russian empire’s major centers of Jewish thought—and inevitably Jewish argument. Chasids were small in number; their base lay further south. For thirty years, the community was led by the renowned Rabbi Yitzhak Elhanan Spektor, who acquired a reputation throughout Russia as a religious authority. Though Orthodox, he was not a fundamentalist, and he was responsive to some of the educational and social proposals of the Haskalah, the Jewish movement for rationalist enlightenment. However, his associate, Reb Jacov Livschitz, became famous as an opponent of secular remedies for the problems of the Jews and leader of what his freethinking enemies dubbed the “black party.” Kovno was known as a stronghold of the Musar movement, a hybrid alternative to both Chasidism and Haskalah. The Musar stressed the need for Talmudic study, and the centrality within that of the ethical tradition, of service to humankind (tikun olam), and of the need for inner piety, cultivated through meditation and prayer. In addition, there was a small Karaite community which had settled in Lithuania in the seventeenth century.²

It was also in Kovno, in the early 1860s, that Judah Leib Gordon, then working as a teacher in a government school for Jews, wrote the Hebrew poems that established his European reputation. Gordon believed that Russian Jews should study Russian and Hebrew (not Yiddish) and redefine themselves as modern Russian citizens. The rabbis “have taught you to deny real life / to shut yourself behind fences within fences / to be dead to the world, to seek pie in the sky . . . you’ve been filled with petty laws and decrees.” In 1863, he composed what was to become his most famous poem, the signature of his worldview. It begins: “Awake, my people! How long will you sleep? . . . Remarkable changes have taken place / A different world engulfs us today.” Jews, he wrote, should no longer see themselves as transient, unwelcome guests in their host country: “This land of Eden is now open to you / Its sons now call you brothers.” In the tradition of the Haskalah, he argued: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” or, more literally, “Be a man on your going out and a Jew in your tents.”³

In addition to the rabbis, teachers and intellectuals, the Jewish middle class was made up of merchants, lawyers, engineers and physicians. The bulk of the Jewish population, however, worked in small workshops: tailors, seamstresses, cobblers, cigarette makers, butchers, fishmongers, bakers, bookbinders, blacksmiths, barbers, oven makers; there were also Jewish gardeners and laborers.

In notes for a very thinly veiled autobiographical novel (written in the 1920s), EVM reconstructs Dora’s early life. His mother as a child was of a “very light-hearted, generous disposition, not over intellectual, not at all inclined to be studious, not beautiful but exceptionally attractive and of a very vivid personality.” But she was oppressed by her father, “the usual type of Jewish talmudic student who because of his Orthodox training had been given the respectful title of ‘Reb’.” For all his “good-hearted generosity,” he was “tyrannical and fanatical.” Dora’s mother, in contrast, was “a business type, very shrewd and very wise. The dominant figure in the family.”

Whatever laughter and dancing even in its remote manner Chasidic Jews might enjoy was forbidden to her people. Mishna-gadim they were. Protestant Jews, ever protesting against beauty in any shape, against poetry of rhyme or of the soul. Awaiting with docility a messiah who never would come.

Nonetheless, from the first, it seems, Dora’s was “a nature of rebellion.” She possessed “a beauty of body and face and a healthy vivacious disposition.” But in EVM’s notes, tragedy awaits. At the age of fifteen, in 1874, she was married off to a rabbi some ten years her senior, a “weak, serious-minded divinity student.” The climax of EVM’s narrative is the shearing of his newly married mother’s beautiful long red hair. She resists, and when told the act is demanded by the law, she cries, “God is cruel. It is unbearable.” This trauma, “the cutting of the scissors,” EVM says, becomes the root of “the final estrangement between the husband and the wife and later the entire family.” Her life after marriage is a dreary one. “The barriers of race and creed, social ostracism from the finer and more cultured traits of life and above all else a weary monopoly of ritual in the home and taboos and superstitions everywhere. As disagreeable as it was to man, it was ever more so for woman.”

Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Jewish communities across southern Russia were assailed by anti-semitic mobs. (Reports of these events in Western newspapers introduced the Russian word “pogrom”—attack—into English.) The new czar, the reactionary Alexander III—champion of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism”—introduced what came to be known as the May Laws. These established a new pale within the Pale, prohibiting Jews from living outside designated towns and cities. Jewish farms were expropriated. Jewish entry to schools and universities was restricted. More pogroms followed, many clearly initiated with state support, and in 1886 an edict of expulsion was issued against the Jews of Kiev.

In this context, liberal faith in Jewish absorption into Russia wavered. Zionists made their first appearance on the Russian scene, arguing that only in Palestine was there a future for the Jews. They were opposed by Judah Leib Gordon, who acknowledged the grimness of the times but argued that if Jews were to leave Russia, then “It is preferable to direct Jews to America or other enlightened lands, for there they will learn how to be free men, liberated from both sorts of exile”—spiritual and political.⁴ In the forty years following the pogroms of 1881, some 2 million Jews left the Russian empire—1,700,000 traveling to the USA, and 45,000 to Palestine.

Among the immigrants to the USA were five of my great-grandparents, including Dora. Somehow, she had procured a divorce (a get), a remarkable feat for a woman married to a rabbi in Jewish Kovno and powerful testimony to a determined and independent spirit. In 1888, she left for the United States with her young daughter, Rebecca. How she fared in those early years in New York is unknown, but in 1898, at the age of thirty-nine, she married an Irish immigrant, John Moran, who managed a bar on 52nd Street. (Dora took Ed there when he was fifteen, by which time it had become “a high-class Rathskellar.”) The next year, my grandfather was born in an apartment on East 41st Street. EVM liked to claim he was a twin but “the good one died at birth.” In a note from the 1920s, he imagined his own briss (circumcision), at which his father arrived “as if he was on his way to the guillotine.”

In spite of his independence of thought and action and his dislike of all matters concerning the church, [he] still has in his blood the tinge of fear and superstition . . . one of his sisters is at the moment lighting candles and having a mass said for the repose of his soul.

John Moran lived only another six months. Dora was left on her own, a forty-year-old immigrant woman with an infant child and teenage daughter. Somehow, she survived and prospered. She opened a hairdressing salon and moved the family into an apartment on West 92nd Street, not far from Central Park. And in October 1904 she did something almost unheard of among her generation of immigrants: she made a trip back to Kovno, accompanied by her four-year-old American son. (According to her passport, Dora was five feet two inches tall, with light gray eyes, small face, a medium nose, short chin, light brown hair, and fair complexion.) They went by ship to Hamburg, then by train to Berlin, and from there across what was still the Russian border.

In the Kovno Dora returned to, there were more Jews and different Jews. Poor Jews crowding into the city from the shtetls joined Jewish craftsmen as employees in capitalist industries, mostly small factories and workshops, in which—for the first time in history—Jews faced, en masse, the brutal vicissitudes of modern industrial life. Their response was the “General Jewish Labor Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia,” known as the Bund. Founded in 1897 at a clandestine conference in Vilna, the Bund developed rapidly from a federation of Jewish unions into a wider political and social movement.

From the outset the organization combined a revolutionary Marxist ideology with a practical, intimate link with daily Jewish working-class life. It organized strikes (mainly against Jewish employers, since these were the main employers of Jewish workers), massive leafleting campaigns (more than half a million pieces of literature in the year 1904, when Dora and Ed visited), and a wealth of educational and cultural activities, conducted, crucially, in Yiddish. Where the Haskalah and the Zionists favored Hebrew and frowned on Yiddish as a debased jargon, the Bundists embraced Yiddish as the language of the Jewish masses of eastern Europe.*

In 1898, the Bund helped create the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), forerunner of what became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Though rooted in the Jewish working class of the Pale, the Bundists defined themselves first and foremost as internationalists and sought, with Lenin, Martov and others gathered around the magazine Iskra, to unite the Russian empire’s dispersed “social democrats” (that is, Marxists). In the following years the terms of that unity were to be fiercely contested, and never fully resolved.

At its 1901 Congress, the Bund declared that the Jewish proletariat had “national aspirations based on characteristics dear and peculiar to it—language, customs, ways of life, culture in general—which ought to have full freedom of development.” What the Bund sought was not Jewish territorial jurisdiction but “national autonomy” within a larger democratic state. In the debate, concerns were expressed about the potential dilution of working-class consciousness by the embrace of “national autonomy,” but delegates stressed the distinction between being “national” and being “nationalist.” At this congress, the Bund also debated the challenge from Zionism, which it condemned as a nationalist, utopian and bourgeois response to anti-semitism.⁵

In the following years, the Bund emerged as a mass workers’ party the likes of which existed nowhere else in Russia. It commanded the loyalties and energies of thousands of workers, artisans, intellectuals and students who shouldered the workload of building a mass base capable of collective action in conditions of state repression. They also faced increasingly violent antisemitism. In response, in 1902 the Bund declared: “We must handle ourselves like people with human dignity. Violence, no matter from where it stems, must not be glossed over. When we are attacked, it would be criminal on our part to bear it without resistance.”⁶

The Kishinev pogrom (in today’s Moldova) of February 1903 took some fifty Jewish lives and hundreds of Jewish properties and spread alarm among Jews across the Russian empire. “It burst upon the Jewish proletariat like a clap of thunder,” a Bundist writer reported, “and left no doubt in any heart.” Two months after Kishinev, the Bund began organizing self-defense programs in Jewish communities, including in Kovno. At the same time, it insisted: “Only the common struggle of the proletariat of all nationalities will destroy at the root those conditions that give rise to such events as Kishinev.”

For the Zionists, Kishinev was further proof that there was no future for the Jews in Russia. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, visited Russia to meet with Von Plehve, the Interior Minister widely believed to have had a hand in the Kishinev events. “I have an absolute binding promise from him that he will procure a charter for Palestine for us in 15 years at the outside,” reported Herzl. “There is one condition however: the revolutionaries must stop their struggle against the Russian government.”⁷ They did not. In 1903, the Bund established street fighting credentials—against anti-semites, strikebreakers, police and employers. Between June 1903 and July 1904, 4,467 Bundists were arrested.⁸

The Bund clashed with Lenin and the RSDWP leadership at a crucial congress held in Brussels in July 1903. The Bund had demanded autonomy within the party, the right to elect its own central committee, to form policy on Jewish issues, and to be recognized as sole representative of the RSDWP among Jewish workers. To the previously agreed demands for equal rights, they added a demand for Jewish “cultural autonomy,” including education in Yiddish.

The Iskra leadership—soon to split bitterly into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—stood united against the Bund’s proposals. Interestingly, Iskra’s side of the debate was presented exclusively by Jews—so this was not an argument between Jews and Russians, but at least in part among Jews. Iskra’s rebuttal was led by the future Menshevik leader Julius Martov, whose exile to Vilna in the 1890s had helped inspire the formation of the Bund. Martov warned that “to squeeze the Jewish workers’ movement into a narrow channel of nationalism” would weaken its ties with the general workers’ movement. “Federation” as conceived by the Bund would obstruct the development of the stronger party organization that was the very purpose of the RSDWP and would be an obstacle to the rapprochement of Jewish and non-Jewish workers.

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.

Even after the Bund withdrawal, Jews continued to join the RSDWP in disproportionate numbers, and there remained a substantial number of Jews among especially Mensheviks but also Bolsheviks (famously Zinoviev and Kamenev).* Yet the Bund continued to outstrip the RSDWP as a force on the ground. In the summer of 1904, it claimed 23,000 members, three times the Russian party’s membership.¹¹

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 who did more than any other to shape the school’s reputation (Paul Avenue in the Bronx, where the school is currently located, is named after him). When the fifteen-year-old EVM—in high dudgeon—explained the teacher’s error, Dr Paul was amused. The episode proved “the foundation for a long and intimate acquaintanceship.” Paul himself had chosen to leave the Catholic school system out of a commitment to secular education. He encouraged EVM to pursue his radical ideas—although he himself strongly disagreed with them.

In 1916, EVM attended a pro-Irish street rally in Manhattan: years later he recalled “thousands of people of all nationalities, addressed by Irish men and women . . . the speeches were for liberty—for tolerance—for an Irish homeland!” A year later the US entered World War I—simultaneously with the launch of the country’s first anti-red scare. “In 1917 many of my best teachers were subjected to a red-baiting investigation,” EVM later recalled, “all the result of war hysteria.” At DeWitt Clinton, EVM would have been exposed to arguments among pacifists, patriots, pro- and anti-German and pro- and anti-British voices. When the US entered the war, EVM took the lead in raising the funds to purchase a DeWitt Clinton High School ambulance to send to the front in Europe. He then enlisted, determined to drive the ambulance himself, though at the time he was still some months short of his eighteenth birthday, and under the minimum legal age for service.

In later years EVM proudly declared himself—especially on his campaign literature—a “veteran of World War One” and always boasted of his membership in the Jewish War Veterans, though he never spared its leadership the benefits of his criticism. The story we heard was that when his concealment of his real age (an expression of his patriotic zeal) was discovered, he was sent home, but immediately re-enlisted (legally) and was about to be shipped off to France when the war ended. “The Kaiser heard I was coming so he surrendered,” he used to tell my mother.

But the papers in the leather case hint at a more complicated, enigmatic tale. In “This Assimilation Business” EVM explains that when he first enlisted in the ambulance corps he found himself the only Jew in the outfit. “It would take volumes to cover my two months’ experience in this company,” he writes. “Let it suffice to say that I arranged for a transfer because of anti-semitic feeling.” When he re-enlisted—in the signal corps—he was posted to a battalion of six hundred, of whom twelve were Jews.

I had a dispute with the top sergeant and managed to get him alone in the barracks. I voiced my disapproval of the manner in which the Jewish boys were treated, especially concerning holiday leaves. He was very frank about the situation. He said to me that he was a member of the United Christian Brethren. That he honestly and firmly believed that the only salvation that existed was that every man in his outfit, should he unfortunately be killed, would at least, as he put it, “die a Good Christian.” I retorted very bluntly that the only thing I was certain about in this war was that the twelve Jews in this outfit would die as Jews.

On his discharge from the army in January 1919, EVM was required to return to DeWitt Clinton for a full year to complete the studies he had abandoned when he enlisted. Finally, in 1920, he received his diploma from Dr Paul, to whom he then wrote a lengthy, pained and accusatory letter in which his military experiences appear in a more candid—and confused—light. Clearly, there had been an angry rupture between the principal and the headstrong pupil, and it had something to do with the war. “Whatever there is that we could actually hold each other accountable for, at least I owe you my sincere thanks for your kindness in giving me my diploma,” he writes, then adds bitterly that he did resent “sitting idly in class a full year just to make up time.” Even as he offers the hand of reconciliation, he insists, “My views have not changed . . . I believed in independence of thought and action. Every concession that I have made, every new angle of thought, was of my own desire. I never could be browbeat into accepting dogma or creeds.” There follows what is probably the most candid account of his time in the army and his attempt to escape from it:

I won’t attempt to justify my war record. Let it suffice that after making a mistake of judgement and not conscience I re-enlisted, not that my ideas had changed but I felt that I owed it to my future to go through with the thing according to schedule. That was a hard thing to do. I had no love for the army, in fact I detested it. The army is a man’s game, and I was a boy . . . My ambulance company was anti-semitic, so much so that I sacrificed my reputation, your friendship and a whole lot besides to get out. To stay in meant a living hell. Once out, I appreciated my situation. Who in the frenzy of war hysteria would have believed my story? So I went back . . . There is much that has not been told. Some day, God granting, I shall try and tell it . . . Remember, petted and pampered as I was, a leader in my school, it was hard to be yelled at and to clean pots. Of course there were a million others like myself . . . Your opinions are your own, so shall mine ever be. Really, should I have suffered for mine? I said I would not talk war, but I have.

Did EVM use his under-age enlistment to get himself out of the army after those two bitter weeks in the ambulance corps? Initially, he was not given an honorable discharge; only in 1925 did Congress pass an act granting honorable discharges to those who’d concealed their minority status at enlistment, thus enabling EVM to boast later that he was “the proud possessor of two honorable discharges from the same war.” What seems clear is that his precipitate return to New York—along with the bitter opinions about the war and the army he seems to have expressed at the time—profoundly displeased Dr Paul (who for his part must have known of EVM’s under-age enlistment from the start). “I prided myself on your friendship. There is much I resent . . . some of the things you stand for and some of your views are still unalterably not to my liking. I admit my radical tendencies have become less red. I still maintain my right to be called a real American.” He ends the letter expressing confidence that he is now on “firmer ground” and that the future holds much for him.

I intend to go into politics. I want to try and shape the destiny of this land as much as any one man can, and I hope to succeed. I want a place in the sun. You see, I have not changed, I still have the ego. But that is a necessity if one is to be a politician. I learned that lesson in the General Organization.

In a letter to a friend written some years later he says: “I wouldn’t join the infantry because the thought of plunging a bayonet into somebody chilled me. I was willing to string wires and run a wireless and take chances. [They] never came.” What did come, though EVM never wrote a word about it, was a military experience of a different kind, in its own way as gruesome as the carnage at the front.

According to the record, EVM was stationed at Camp Devens, a complex of barracks and warehouses outside Boston, from August 1918 to January 1919. At this time the camp was home to 50,000 men, twice the number it was built for. Some were undergoing training in anticipation of being shipped out to the front, and some were on their way back from it. The first influenza cases were reported in early September. The onset of symptoms was abrupt: headache, sore throat, runny nose, fever. Even more abrupt was the deterioration into pneumonia and death, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the first sniffle. Reddish-brown spots would appear on the cheekbones of the doomed, then spread across the face until, a young doctor observed, “it was hard to tell a colored man from a white one.” By the end of September, the epidemic had brought military life in the camp to a standstill. The hospital built to hold 2,000 patients was now crammed with four times that number. While influenza generally preys on the old or the very young, the strain of 1918 seemed to target those in the prime of life. “This infection,” wrote Dr Victor Vaughan, an epidemiologist sent to Devens, “like war, kills the young, vigorous, robust adults.” Coffins ran short and bodies piled up in the makeshift morgue. “It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle,” another doctor noted. In the midst of all this, a US district court judge arrived in camp to administer the oath of citizenship to more than 2,000 soldiers, new immigrants recruited off the streets of New York and Boston.

At Camp Devens, Victor Vaughan was disturbed by his calculations. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” he wrote, “civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth.” But within a month, the epidemic began to recede. In the end, its disappearance was as stealthy and inexplicable as its onset. And though it had taken 20 million lives worldwide, as it receded it was crowded out of the popular memory.¹³ The disease did not fit the prevailing paradigms of war and heroism, and so, like other historical realities that undermine the stories we tell about ourselves, it was erased.

EVM was at Camp Devens when Victor Vaughan was making his apocalyptic calculations. I’ve searched his papers for some reference to the flu epidemic but could find none. “There is much that has not been told,” he wrote to Dr Paul. “Some day, God willing, I shall tell it.” As far as I can see, he never did, though he had more to say about Camp Devens.

* Ahad Ha’am, founder spirit of the Lovers of Zion, told a meeting in Russia in 1902 that “there is now among us a party [i.e the Bund] which would raise this jargon [Yiddish] to the dignity of a national language” when it could never be but “an external and temporary medium of discourse.”

* In 1917 Jews thronged to the Bolsheviks and were numerous in the Cheka and its successors. Anti-Bolshevism leaned heavily on anti-semitism, as did Stalin’s anti-Trotskyism. In the Great Purge of 1937–38, most of the Jewish Bolsheviks and the remaining Bundists were wiped out.