Trotsky in New York, 1917. Kenneth D. Ackerman

paid, the three-month down payment, had disappeared. Natalya soon heard the story from other tenants. The building’s housekeeper, an African American gentleman, had taken the money, plus some items she had given him for safe storage, without giving her a receipt. Other tenants had also given him their normal rent money. Then he ran off.

      The panic ended quickly. Natalya soon found the property she had given the housekeeper. (She never explained what it was.) It had been in the apartment the whole time, hidden in a wooden box with cookware. And she found the rent money too, carefully wrapped up in paper. As for the other tenants, it turned out the housekeeper had disappeared with the rent money of only those to whom he had given a receipt, so they wouldn’t be forced to pay it twice.

      It didn’t take long for Trotsky and Natalya to figure out the mystery. This housekeeper, in walking off with the cash, had been careful. He “did not mind robbing the landlord, but he was considerate enough not to rob the tenants,” Trotsky wrote about the incident. “A delicate fellow, indeed. My wife and I were deeply touched by his consideration, and we always think of him gratefully.”¹⁵⁵

      Trotsky had never met an African American person before, or any kind of African, except perhaps in Paris. Certainly not in Russia. He knew that racial prejudice existed in America, knew about the history of slavery, but only from books in an abstract, theoretical way. Now he saw something he didn’t understand. “This little episode took on a symptomatic significance for me—it seemed as if a corner of the veil that concealed the ‘black’ problem in the United States had been lifted.”¹⁵⁶ What was the “problem”? How did he define it?

      Years later, Trotsky would devote considerable effort trying to understand this issue. In Russia he would meet with Claude McKay, the American black novelist, leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, and would urge the recruitment of black propagandists in the United States. He would criticize his own American Trotskyist movement for failing to grasp the seriousness of the problem. “But today, the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them,” he told an American visitor in Turkey in 1933.¹⁵⁷ Years later, his analysis of black nationalism would reach a rising young leader named Malcolm X and shape his thinking in the 1960s.

      But that was for the future. For now, Trotsky simply marked the incident to study later.

      GRISHA ZIV HAD not waited around to speak with Trotsky after Trotsky’s address at the Cooper Union Great Hall. Ziv seemed shy about approaching his old friend, describing Trotsky as “arrogant” for “refusing to mingle with audiences after a talk.” Still, after a few days, Ziv had the chance to slip Trotsky a message through an acquaintance, a newspaper reporter they both knew. “When Trotsky visits you, tell him I say hi,” he told the man.¹⁵⁸

      Sure enough, a few days later, the telephone rang at Ziv’s home. “Grisha, is that you? Do you recognize me? It’s me—Trotsky.”

      Ziv seemed surprised at the telephone call, that Trotsky actually had “long wanted to see me” and “did his best to find me,” as he later explained. “In one word, he wanted to see me and asked to set up a good place and time.”

      Ziv agreed. He could hardly say no. “We shared too many old memories and old moments to simply ignore it.” Ziv had known Trotsky far longer than any other person in America, certainly longer than any of Trotsky’s new socialist hangers-on. Their relationship dated back to 1896, when they were both teenagers. They belonged to a commune, a group of young radicals that met at a garden near the industrial town of Nikolaev on the Black Sea. This was before Trotsky’s first arrest, before his first exile to Siberia, before his first escape, before his discovery of Vladimir Lenin.

      From this period, Ziv also knew the woman Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, with long hair and big eyes, who had charmed the young men in Nikolaev and become Trotsky’s first and only legal wife. Ziv had been a witness at the wedding, the proper one that they held in a Moscow transit prison in 1890 with a rabbi. Ziv also knew about the two daughters they had together in Siberia, Nina and Zina, and how Trotsky had abandoned all three of them—his wife and his two infant daughters—when he escaped by himself to follow his destiny.

      Fair or not, politics aside, perhaps that was why Grisha Ziv had an attitude toward Trotsky that often oozed with resentment. But now in New York City, Ziv apparently felt obliged to put aside this history and make a social visit. Maybe he and Trotsky could rebuild an old bridge.