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