Trotsky dashed off a quick column for the next morning’s edition titled “
But more important that first day, two other newspapers had asked to interview Trotsky. These weren’t ignorant American English speakers who knew nothing about their movement but rather the two leading voices of American socialism, the Forward and the New York Call. These were people Trotsky actually cared about.
Weinstein didn’t bother to clean the office for these guests. The Yiddish-language Forward sent both a reporter and a photographer for the job. The photographer asked Trotsky to step outside onto Saint Marks Place for the picture, the street making a nicer background than the cluttered basement. Trotsky ignored the cold and took his coat off for the photo, appearing in suit, vest, and tie. Forward readers wanted to see this man’s face, this Trotsky, this Russian Jew who defied the tsar. The large bulk of New York’s immigrant Jews, who now packed the Lower East Side, making it the most densely populated place on earth, had come fleeing violence and organized anti-Semitism from a Russian Empire that still included Poland and Ukraine.
Hatred of Romanovs, Cossacks, and tsarist bureaucrats ran thick here. The Forward would put Trotsky’s photo on its front page.
The Forward in 1917 held a unique place in both this neighborhood and America as a whole, largest by far of New York’s half dozen Yiddish newspapers and also the largest daily socialist publication in the country. The Forward’s founder, Abraham Cahan, a Russian himself, had come to New York in 1882 and become fluent in English. He considered himself second to none in launching American socialism. His paper had backed Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, in every race he ran since 1900.
But Cahan also had good business sense and had built the Forward into a powerhouse, combining socialism with worldly advice to Jewish immigrants. With its two hundred thousand–plus circulation, rivaling any English-language daily in the city besides Hearst’s American or Pulitzer’s World, the Forward had grown rich and recently moved into its own new skyscraper, a ten-story building that towered over the Lower East Side from its perch on East Broadway, facing Seward Park.
Normally, newspapers this big affiliated with one of the country’s dominant political parties, the Democrats or Republicans. But Cahan knew better. His Forward readers had no love for either. In 1917 New York’s Democratic Party was still controlled by Tammany Hall, the venerable organization rife with corruption and limited room for greenhorn Jews. True, Tammany had backed a few labor-reform laws after the ghastly 1911 fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory had killed 146 employees, mostly young women, a tragedy traced to locked doors, rotted fire hoses, and other safety lapses.80 But Tammany had come late to the cause, and Republicans, for their part, had little room for left-wing views that immigrants either brought from the Old Country or learned working in sweatshops.
For Trotsky, this should have been the friendliest possible interview. But as he sat down with the Forward reporter (the paper didn’t print a byline, so we don’t know his name), the conversation took an odd turn. Could Comrade Trotsky speak to us in Yiddish? It seemed only natural for a Jew speaking to a Jewish newspaper. Yiddish, after all, was the street language of Jewish shtetls across Europe and now the dominant tongue of the Jewish East Side with its Yiddish theaters, Yiddish cafés, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish books, and Yiddish newspapers.
But no. To their apparent surprise, Trotsky demurred. He knew a few words and phrases, he conceded, but little beyond that. For all his fluency in Russian, German, and French, Trotsky had never mastered his own people’s language. In fact, Trotsky had grown up on a farm, not in a shtetl. His parents at home spoke Russian and Ukrainian, barely practiced religion, and gave him only bare minimum religious schooling. In Vienna, Trotsky had enjoyed frequenting two popular cafés where they spoke Yiddish as much as German, the Café Central and the Café Arkadian, where he enjoyed haggling over politics, drinking tea, and playing chess. But he never knew enough Yiddish to give a speech or write an article in it.
The Forward reporter took this down politely, putting it this way: “[Trotsky] had even applied himself once to the study of Yiddish in order to be able to understand Jewish revolutionary literature [and] even had a greater desire to master Hebrew, but unfortunately he had no time for that.” As a result, his knowledge was “not deep. We don’t tell you this as something to be proud of. We only pass over the facts.”81 Trotsky tried to make a joke of it. “I have never sweated like now when I am under the crossfire of masters of the [journalistic] trade,” he told the reporter, “not even when the political police would give me the third degree.”82 After that, they changed the subject.83
Just as curious was his performance with the New York Call. The Call too had a special place in New York City, as the semiofficial arm of the Socialist Party, giving it a prominence beyond its fourteen-thousand-copy circulation. It was a staple for political opinion leaders. The Call apparently brought a translator so that Trotsky could chat away comfortably in Russian, and it took a photograph of him for its front page. Trotsky sat at his desk, they at his side, as they peppered him with questions. This time, though, the talk turned to politics, and Trotsky chose to jump right in with a slam at his new country.
“I do not like to criticize a nation that extends the hospitality that the United States has afforded me,” he told them, “but”—a significant but—“it does not seem possible that President Wilson’s efforts toward peace and intervention in the European war can bring results.”84 Why? Because America was capitalist and ruled by its moneyed class, which had no interest in stopping the gravy train of rich wartime weapons contracts. Woodrow Wilson’s meddling in Europe looked two-faced, Trotsky went on, like “the smug, middle class merchant who exploits the poor on weekdays and then goes to church on Sundays, piously asking absolution for his sins.”
He went no easier on the Europeans. Why do France and Germany keep fighting? “They fear the day of reckoning,” Trotsky told them. With peace, “they must give accounting to their subjects for the wastage of human life and money.” And the result? After the war, “social unrest will eclipse anything the earth has ever seen. The workers will demand a heavy accounting of their masters, and the future alone can tell what forms their protests will take.”85
Only the United States, still a noncombatant, fell outside Trotsky’s grim prophesy, at least so long as it stayed out of the war. The reporter from the Call seemed not at all surprised by the diatribe. He knew the socialist line. He read Novy Mir.
Late in the day, they finished setting up the next morning’s Novy Mir, sent it to the printer, and then set out for Brooklyn and the dinner meeting that night at Ludwig Lore’s apartment. Trotsky’s new colleagues Bukharin and Chudnovsky joined him for the ride, and two other Novy Mir contributors would meet them there. One was a fellow Russian named V. Volodarsky coming in from Philadelphia. The other, coming from New Jersey, was Alexandra Kollontai. They all knew Kollontai from Europe, their elegant comrade from Saint Petersburg. They spoke to her often. These days she was the only one, it seemed, who still got along well with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA KOLLONTAI came from aristocratic stock. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1872, she was the daughter of a Russian general, with Cossack military officers decorating the family tree. But her father taught her liberal ideas. He favored a constitutional monarchy over an absolute tsar and sent her to Western Europe for schooling. At home, the family spoke French and English, and Finnish to the servants. Alexandra married a young