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”