Nevertheless there was richness to life; the seeds of his anarchist philosophy were planted in the hard dirt of poverty.
Despite the horrible economic conditions, there was, at least in our neighborhood, far less crime than now. We could walk the streets at all hours of the night unmolested, sleep outside on hot summer nights and leave our quarters unlocked and feel perfectly safe. To a great extent this can be accounted for by the character of the new immigrants. The new immigrants, fortunately, had not yet become fully integrated into the American “melting pot.” The very local neighborhood communities, which enabled the immigrants to survive under oppressive conditions in their native homes, sustained them in the deplorable new environment.
The new arrivals lived in the same neighborhoods as did their friends and countrymen, who shared their cramped lodgings and meager food supplies, found employment for them where they learned a new trade. They helped the new arrivals in every possible way, at great sacrifice, to adjust to the unfamiliar conditions in their new homes. Thus, upon arrival, as already noted, my father was taught the painting trade by his fellow countrymen, who lodged and sustained him until he could establish himself.
My father became a member of the Vitebsker Benevolent Society, which provided sickness and death benefits, small loans, and other essential services at cost. Fraternal and other local associations actually constituted a vast integrated family. Neighbors in need received the widest possible assistance and encouragement, and the associations promoted the fullest educational and cultural development.
Social scientists, state “welfarists” and state socialists, busily engaged in mapping out newer and greater areas for state control, should take note of the fact that long before social security, unemployment insurance, and other social service laws were enacted by the State, the immigrants helped themselves by helping each other. They created a vast network of cooperative fraternities and associations of all kinds to meet expanding needs—summer camps for children and adults, educational projects, cultural and health centers, care for the aged, etc. I am still impressed by the insight of the great anarchist thinker Proudhon who in the following words outlined a cardinal principle of anarchism: “Through the complexity of interests and the progress of ideas, society is forced to abjure the state…. Beneath the apparatus of government, under the shadow of political institutions, society was closely producing its organization, making for itself a new order which expressed its vitality and autonomy. (General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century [London: Freedom Press, 1923], 80.)
When Grandpa Max pieced together the money to move his family to the less crowded “wilds of the south Bronx,” their meager possessions were loaded onto a horse-drawn cart. Grandma Anna wept and embraced the other wives as if she were crossing the Atlantic again. It might as well have been. The trip took nine hours through congested streets and the virtually impassable Willis Avenue Draw Bridge. Can you imagine the pile up of loaded down carts, teamsters, horses, horseshit, flies, and stink?
Sam loved the common horses that did the world’s hard work. He would approach them on the street and pat their sweating hides. Though it is hard to imagine a more unsuitable soldier than my father, he was, along with cousin Izzy, enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and sent to hot, faraway, hostile New Mexico: two underage Yiddish kids circa 1916. They served as grooms, mucking out stables and swabbing and feeding the animals. Sam liked that part of it, and—contrary to what you might expect—he liked his sergeant, too, who counseled him in a kindly way on how best to adjust to the disciplines of Army life. That did not prevent Izzy and Sam from deserting at the first opportunity.
It is clear to me Sam was a restless, sensitive boy condemned to hard labor and poverty, searching to know the world, searching for a way out. School certainly did not provide that way out. It was instead his introduction to hierarchal authority, and a profoundly unhappy one. He often described grade school as a hell hole of neo-Victorian child abuse.
You’d walk through the halls and hear the bedlam coming from the rooms. “Ouch! Leave me alone you bastard.” Whoop! You could hear the rod come down. Children would run out the rooms screaming and their teachers—who were like prison guards—would drag them back in by the ear. You sat on benches and recited things by rote. The teacher would walk behind you with the rod. You had to look straight ahead. You never knew when the rod would come down on you or if you had to open your hands for it in front of the room. The object was to break the child’s spirit, make an obedient citizen.
Eight-year-old Sam faced the added obstacle of having to help his father support a family of five children. That is when he took to delivering milk and bread from a horse-drawn wagon, seven days a week: school days, six to eight each morning and four to six in the afternoon; Saturdays and Sundays all day. It paid three dollars a week. Under those circumstances, he found it difficult to pay attention in class and, worse yet, he was plagued with poor eyesight. And he was rebellious. So he was left back, and surrounded by younger boys in class. They ridiculed him because he could not see well, called him “dummy,” and did to him all the nasty things oppressed children can do.
He graduated elementary school, then found work ten to twelve hours a day on the factory floor of the Continental Can Company. But he was rebellious. Finally, Grandpa Max felt it best to leave his obstreperous son with his friend, who was a small-time contractor: “Stay on top of him, because he don’t like to listen.” He did learn to be a painter, but he also learned that his salvation lay in escape: San Francisco, Shanghai, the U.S. Cavalry, the Open Road, and ultimately, himself.
Sam’s “formal education” ended at the eighth grade, but not his education. These are among my strongest boyhood memories of him: He would arrive home from work with the smell of sweat and turpentine about him, paint encrusting his nails and glasses: exhausted, haggard. After eating, he soaked in the bathtub for an hour; he had a tight, muscled body in those days, not the bloated, emphysema-distorted one that many who knew him in later life remember. Then his education began. He would lie in his bed surrounded by books and obscure radical publications piled as high as the mattress. And he would read. Not just political theory. Everything. Night after night, every weekend, each spare moment, he would lie on his back in a haze of cigarette smoke, reading.
He took his learning seriously but not his learned self. Years beyond these childhood memories, in 1971, Angus Cameron, the distinguished editor at Alfred Knopf, prepared to publish Sam’s ground breaking Bakunin on Anarchy. It was—is—a scholarly treatise on the towering nineteenth-century Russian revolutionist. Sam had translated Bakunin’s writings from various languages into English; the manuscript was replete with footnotes and references, which in some respects are the most important part of the book.
“Your credentials?” Cameron asked.
“Doctor of Shmearology, New York University, with a concentration in shit houses and boiler rooms,” Sam answered with mock pomposity, describing what he had painted there. It was the closest he had ever come to a college degree.
Cameron, a man of humor, appreciated the answer. “Bet you never expected to be in this office,” he exclaimed.
“As a matter of fact, I am well acquainted with your office!” Cameron was astonished to learn that by astounding coincidence Sam had painted his office several years earlier.
In fact, Sam’s knowledge of history, social movements, philosophy, psychology, and literature was vast and deep on many fronts. It started when he was a young man, taken under the wing of many leading anarchist and socialist intellectuals of the time. “They were my university,” he said.
He would take no job that required him to hire or fire another worker; he considered it immoral to exercise the power of bread over a fellow human being. Nor would he follow the career path of many an ex-radical and take the cushy jobs in the union bureaucracy he was offered. He wanted no part of union corruption and the betrayal of its members.
“Sam! Sam, it’s great to have you back!” It is Martin Rarback, the all-powerful Secretary Treasurer of the all-powerful District Council 9 of the Painter’s Union.