A Yiddish take on Leon Trotsky: the judgement of the New York socialist daily Forverts

The New York exile, 1917

On 7 December 1916, the Forverts informed its readers that ‘Genose Trotsky, a known social democrat, is coming here.’ This information came from Trotsky’s wire received by the New York Russian socialist ‘sister newspaper’ Novy mir (New World). In a characterisation given earlier by the Forverts, the Novyi mir was ‘the only Russian daily socialist organ in America, which conducts highly valuable work among Russian workers … Such an organ, which is vitally needed for the [socialist] movement in general, is also important for the Jewish movement, because Jewish workers have uniquely frequent and close contacts with the Russian workers.’⁴ Upon his arrival in New York, Trotsky would join the newspaper as its co-editor.

The article published on 7 December also explained that Trotsky belonged to the ‘international’ wing of the social-democratic movement and categorically disagreed with those Russian, French, German and British socialists who supported their governments in the war. His anti-war stance led to his expulsion from both France and Spain.⁵ Readers learned that Trotsky had participated in a conference, convened in September 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, which gave a collective voice to those who opposed the patriotic trend in the socialist parties in the belligerent countries. Among the Russian delegates were Bolsheviks, most notably Vladimir Lenin, and Mensheviks, their factional counterparts. Trotsky did not belong to either group at that time. A maverick, he tried to carve out his own path in the socialist movement. A forum that shaped the ‘internationalist’ strain in the socialist movement, the conference was also a forerunner for the Third (Communist) International, or Comintern, established in 1919. Abraham Cahan dismissed the Zimmerwald programme as ‘utopian’ and compared its effectiveness to the power of prayer to put out a fire.⁶

Very late on the night of 13 January, Trotsky – along with his wife and two sons – arrived in New York Harbor, where Arthur Concors, a top figure in the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, met him. It seems that the new arrivals spent the first night at ‘the swanky Hotel Astor near Times Square’.⁷ On 15 January, an article in the newspaper Di Varhayt (Truth), a weaker competitor of the Forverts in the American Yiddish socialist reading market, mentioned that the Trotskys had already moved into a small, fourth-floor apartment in the Bronx, hosted by the family of Alexander Menson (Minkin), a staff member of the Novy mir.⁸ Later, the Trotskys ensconced themselves in a separate apartment in the Bronx on Vyse Avenue.⁹ Sholem Asch, a star writer for the Forverts, acted as a guarantor of Trotsky’s debt and, in the end, seemingly had to pay when Trotsky left without completing the instalments for purchased furniture.¹⁰

On 16 January, Trotsky’s photo, taken a day earlier, appeared on the front page of the Forverts. The caption read: ‘This is comrade Trotsky, the Russian-Jewish revolutionary who had been expelled from all of Europe for his revolutionary thinking.’ The same issue carried an article based on a conversation with Trotsky, ‘a man who was in the thick of things during the [1905] Russian revolution and became the leading spirit of the Russian social democracy’. The newspaper placed him in the foremost ranks of both the Russian and the Jewish revolutionary movements. (The emphasis on his Jewishness was noticeable in the coverage.) The anonymous author argued that even Trotsky’s appearance pointed to his intellect: a high forehead, serious eyes and a sympathetic face. He spoke a highly literary Russian, inserting French words and phrases. Trotsky told the interviewer that because his father was quite secular, he and his brother had not received any religious education. Trotsky grew up not knowing Yiddish, and he regretted it, especially when he had to communicate with Bundists. He had even tried to learn Yiddish but never had time to pursue it seriously.¹¹ On 21 January, the Forverts once again ‘heartily welcomed our dear guest’, stressing that Trotsky’s name was associated with the ‘most beautiful moments’ in the 1905 Russian Revolution. He was praised as one of the ‘brilliant writers or orators’ among Russian social democrats.¹² Four days later, Cahan and Max Goldfarb, the labour editor of the Forverts, spoke at a welcoming event at the Cooper Union Hall.¹³

As Tony Michels points out, although Trotsky’s articles appeared in Russian and German socialist newspapers, at that time he ‘reached his largest audiences through Yiddish, a language incomprehensible to him’.¹⁴ His articles, translated from Russian, appeared in the Forverts, as well as in the journals Tsukunft and Di naye velt (New World), an organ of the Jewish Socialist Federation, which was also closely, if not always harmoniously, associated with the Forverts. Whereas the Jewish Socialist Federation was a constituent of the Socialist Party of America, the Forverts was aligned with the party but remained an independent organ.

On 30 January, the Forverts introduced Trotsky’s articles with a note that his and the newspaper’s views often differed considerably, above all on war-related issues.¹⁵ An editorial footnote with similar content accompanied Trotsky’s article entitled ‘What the American Workers Should Do in Case of the War’. According to Trotsky, this was a question of life and death for socialism, because a socialist party that supported the government’s war policy inevitably transformed from a revolutionary party into a nationalist one. He drew historical parallels with Christianity, which initially appealed to the suppressed groups of the population until the rulers hijacked it to use as a mechanism of power. Similarly, the Reformation, born as a movement against the yoke of the Catholic Church, became a political instrument serving the capitalists. Also, the bourgeoisie had repurposed liberalism and democracy to suppress the working class.¹⁶ In all, he, like other ‘internationalists’, believed that ‘the working men have no country’ – as Marx and Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto, categorically rejecting proletarians’ nationalism and patriotism.

Although the façade of the Forward Building, the first skyscraper on the Lower East Side, completed in 1912, featured carved bas-relief portraits of Marx and Engels, Cahan dismissed the arguments of those who tried to safeguard the purity of Marxist dogma. He prided himself on his independent thinking, stressing that he was not ready to ‘put in pawn’ his brains to anyone, even to Marx. He kept repeating that Marx’s internationalism did not exist as yet and, therefore, the Zimmerwald ideas were fundamentally wrong.¹⁷

M. Baranoff (Moyshe Gormidor), a veteran socialist and Cahan’s friend, whose column ‘In Passing’ (‘Farbaygeyendik’) was especially popular with the intellectual segment of the Forverts readers, criticised Trotsky for labelling as ‘traitors’ such prominent European socialist figures as Jules Guesde, George Plekhanov, Henry Hyndman and Emile Vandervelde for not supporting the Zimmerwald anti-war camp.¹⁸ As the American press discussed the rumours of a (never-enacted) treaty between Germany, Mexico and Japan, the Forverts made clear its patriotic fervour, urging American socialists to be ready to defend their country. Baruch Charney, city editor of the Forverts at the time, wrote that if Mexico really was going to attack the United States, then every socialist, every citizen and every resident of the country would fight to protect it.¹⁹ Charney, better known by his Bundist pseudonym Vladeck, used a different pseudonym – Brokhes – when he and Trotsky were delegates to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in London in 1907.

Trotsky, in his turn, insisted that only military industrialists would benefit from the USA’s participation in the war against Germany. He found the patriotic sentiment expressed by the Forverts unacceptable and announced his break with it. A quote by socialist journalist David Shub, who was not working for the Forverts at that time, describes a fiery encounter: ‘He [Trotsky] rushed into the editorial rooms, straight into Cahan’s office. Angry shouts were soon heard, the loud voices of Cahan and Trotsky mingling together. Several minutes later, Trotsky stormed out and left without saying goodbye to anybody.’²⁰ This incident, however, is not mentioned in Shub’s detailed memoirs.²¹

A Forverts editorial stated that Trotsky’s open letter on severing his association with the newspaper stemmed from an erroneous translation of the Forverts material. Moreover, a staff member (his name was not revealed), who had known Trotsky from previous years, telephoned him, trying in vain to explain this. The editorial continued by stating that it had been a goodwill gesture to publish Trotsky’s articles and that this geshikhtele (little story) had been closed.²² Meanwhile, Trotsky accused the Forverts of establishing a dictatorship over its readership and urged Jewish workers to liberate the newspaper from its editor and expel him from the Socialist Party.²³ Very soon, however, a historical event eclipsed the geshikhtele of Trotsky’s conflict with the Forverts: on 15 March 1917 (2 March by the Julian calendar used in Russia until February 1918), Nicholas II abdicated the throne, and the next day, Russia became a de facto republic with the newly formed Provisional Government.

Following the conflict, Trotsky’s name did not disappear from the Forverts. On the contrary, the newspaper ran advertisements for meetings and rallies with Trotsky’s participation. His name even appeared with Forverts contributors or its staff members. Thus, Trotsky and Goldfarb spoke at a rally celebrating the anniversary of the Parisian Commune.²⁴ After leaving New York on 27 March, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd as late as 4 May 1917 (21 April by the Julian calendar). His journey took him, his family and five Russian socialists through Canada (where the British authorities kept them interned for a month) and northern Europe. Baranoff wrote sarcastically: ‘What will we do now without Trotsky and his cardinals? Oy vey! And what will Russia do with them?’. And he added, ‘Little people must strongly puff themselves up to look bigger.’²⁵

A habitué of the Café Monopole, at the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street, remembered Trotsky as ‘simply another café’s seer and pundit. However, as time went on, he collected a small coterie of disciples, all of them Russian [Jewish], a handful of revolutionary asteroids revolving around a star of the first magnitude.’²⁶ Trotsky pushed to radicalise some local socialists into a revolutionary cohort that later played an important role in shaping the early American communist groups.²⁷ Arguably, none of the Russian socialists, even those who spent more time in New York, left such a deep trace on the American radical landscape.

Next to and after Lenin, 1917–27

Several days after learning of the revolutionary events in Russia, Cahan wrote that he and his colleagues remained in an emotional daze, overwhelmed by the realisation that their dreams had materialised.²⁸ On the day of Trotsky’s departure, the Forverts published Vladeck’s article, whose title ‘My Body Is in America, My Heart Is in Russia’ paraphrased the poetic line ‘My heart is in the East, and I am in the farthest reaches of the West’, by Judah Halevi, a medieval Jewish poet. Vladeck wrote that he himself was surprised to discover that, for all his success in integrating into American society, Russia, ‘that great wonderful land, which was so cursed and which is now so blessed’, still retained a very important place in his heart, head and soul.²⁹

Moissaye (Moyshe) Olgin, a Forverts staff writer who was considered an expert on Russia’s revolutionary transformation (his Columbia University dissertation came out in book form in 1917 as The Soul of the Russian Revolution), praised the less radical Menshevik faction of the Russian revolutionary movement and faulted Lenin and Trotsky-led Bolsheviks for attempting to implement a programme unfit for Russia whose economic and social structures were not ready to lay the foundation for a socialist state.³⁰ In his political portrait of Lenin, written for The New York Times, Olgin contended that the Bolshevik leader’s extreme tactics weakened democratic Russia. He (later a passionate communist) characterised Lenin as a man who saw ‘life only from the angle of his own ideas’, could not ‘acquiesce in the co-operation of revolutionary socialists with representatives of other parties’ and lived ‘in an imaginary world in which he mistakes the creations of his mind for realities’.³¹

The Bolshevik coup had left Cahan and his team of journalists perplexed. A Forverts editorial, ‘A Revolution or a Mutiny?’, admitted that the newspaper was not ready to define the full meaning of what had happened and whether it was a real revolution.³² From afar, it was hard to grasp the situation, especially as the American press had limited access to reliable information directly from Soviet Russia.³³ The Forverts was in a better position thanks to Vladeck’s elder brother, Shmuel, a literary critic who lived in the Russian capital and briefly acted as a reporter. His telegrams, which appeared, often daily, on the newspaper’s front pages, regularly mentioned Trotsky’s name.

In November 1917, Cahan characterised Trotsky as ‘an honest man, though a misguided radical’.³⁴ In February 1918, Cahan shared with his readers his surprise at Trotsky’s transformation from a talker of hyper-radical nonsense, as he remembered him in New York, into a reasonable, practical figure.³⁵ A couple of days earlier, Cahan wrote about ‘the valuable work that Lenin and Trotsky are doing for the entire humanity’, and that even an anti-nationalist Jew found it heartwarming to read about such prominent Jewish personalities as Trotsky, the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the singer Rosa Raisa.³⁶ It seems that by the spring of 1918, Cahan had tacitly accepted the Bolshevik revolution as a fait accompli. He might have believed that the established regime was propitious for both socialism and Jews. Like many other Jewish socialists, he felt thrilled to see that Lenin’s government included several Jewish politicians, most notably Trotsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks and emerged as a real revolutionary hero. Some contemporary observers and, later, historians even argued that Trotsky was then the most famous Jew worldwide.³⁷

In 1918, Olgin put together a collection of Trotsky’s essays, translated them from Russian into English and provided a biography and explanatory notes.³⁸ He had first met Trotsky in 1907 at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, then in Copenhagen at the International Socialist Congress in 1910 and once again during Trotsky’s New York sojourn in 1917. His portrayal of the leading Bolshevik was sympathetic:

He is tall, strong, angular; his appearance as well as his speech gives the impression of boldness and vigor. His voice is a high tenor ringing with mettle. And even in his quiet moments he resembles a compressed spring.

    He is always on the aggressive. He is full of passion – that white-heated, vibrating mental passion that characterizes the intellectual Jews. On the platform, as well as in private life, he bears an air of peculiar importance, an indefinable something that says very distinctly, ‘Here is a man who knows his value and feels himself chosen for superior aims’. Yet Leon Trotzky is not imposing. He is modest. He is detached. Back in the depths of his dark eyes there is a lingering sadness.³⁹

It is highly improbable that many people considered Trotsky a ‘modest’ person. In 1920, the journalist Moyshe Katz (later a committed communist), who spent a couple of years in Ukraine and Russia, wrote three articles focusing on Trotsky. He portrayed him in a positive light, but did not omit to mention Trotsky’s chutzpah, which had only become more apparent after his rise to the leadership.⁴⁰

In 1920, Cahan regularly wrote pro-Soviet articles, explaining Lenin and Trotsky’s success by their ability to understand the Russian people and arguing that American socialists should also tap into the needs of the American people. Cahan believed that there was no praise too high for Lenin’s historical deeds and for his and Trotsky’s bravery, energy and moral steadfastness.⁴¹ In December 1921, Cahan praised the Soviet government for retreating from extreme nationalisation and centralisation by introducing the New Economic Policy, which made the Bolsheviks less arrogant and, as a result, more bearable. Lenin and the people around him earned Cahan’s respect, because they ‘took the bull by the horns’ rather than theorising ad nauseam about whether Russia’s conditions matched this or that aspect of Marxist dogma.⁴²

The Forverts was not a newspaper of one strictly defined ‘general line’. Rather, it was a forum for a relatively broad range of socialists, including those who remained active in or were sympathetic to the Bund, which in 1912 formally aligned with the Mensheviks. In 1922, the Bundist-cum-Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch, a prominent figure among anti-Bolshevik socialist emigrants, began his collaboration with the Forverts. On 15 February, an editorial informed readers that the newspaper would publish informative but essentially anti-Soviet articles by Abramovitch and that the editors had commissioned pro-Soviet articles by other authors to form a balanced picture of the situation in Russia.⁴³

In December, Abramovitch’s article ‘Communism or Capitalism?’ focused on the issue widely discussed at the time: whether the legalisation of private enterprises and foreign concessions as part of the New Economic Policy, initiated by Lenin in the spring of 1921, had undermined the Bolshevik (renamed the Communist in 1918) Party’s programme of building a true socialist society. This issue had already been discussed in the Forverts, including in an article by Paxton Hibben, who was actively involved in famine aid operations in Russia. The Forverts published an extended version of Paxton’s summary of his conversation with Trotsky, originally written for The New York Times.⁴⁴ Abramovitch, who had known Trotsky for many years, characterised him as ‘a master of creating new theories’, including ones that justified the introduction of a state-controlled capitalism. According to Abramovitch, this dramatic turn could bring positive results only in combination with democracy. However, he did not believe that the Bolsheviks would change their tightly centralised regime of governing.⁴⁵

In April 1923, Abramovitch received Cahan’s invitation to write for the newspaper on a systematic basis.⁴⁶ By that time, Cahan had admitted the failure of the Bolshevik ‘experiment’. He was also angered by the split in the Jewish Socialist Federation in September 1921, when its majority revealed pro-communist sympathies.⁴⁷ In May 1923, at a convention of the Socialist Party of America, he laid out his new vision of Bolshevism:

We have been flirting with Soviet Russia long enough. Somehow, at first, we all felt that there was a man, Lenin, who was willing to make a great trial of Communism. We thought it worthwhile to give a chance to the revolutionists and see how they would work it out. Trotsky is a great big, bombastic windbag, but still he’s sincere. We have given them their chance, but they have failed … We have got to quit flirting with the Soviets.⁴⁸

After Lenin’s death in January 1924, the Forverts kept a close eye on the dramatic decline of Trotsky’s standing among Soviet leaders and on his role in the Left Opposition faction in the Communist Party. In September 1926, Jacob Lestschinsky, who headed the Berlin bureau of the Forverts, received a letter from Cahan, which revealed the editor’s satisfaction with the victory of Joseph Stalin and his group over the ‘wild, bloodthirsty tactics and rhetoric of Zinoviev and Trotsky’. (Grigory Zinoviev, who had gained much international notoriety for his role as chairman of the Comintern’s Executive, was removed from the party’s headship.) Cahan praised Stalin’s victory over the Opposition as a promising augur of the improvement of the Soviet government’s relationship with the West and, generally, bringing normality to the much-suffering country.⁴⁹

In the summer of 1927, Cahan spent three months travelling in the Soviet Union and later wrote in his travelogue:

The growth of the Opposition (although Trotsky’s programme finds but few adherents and notwithstanding that Stalin is a wiser statesman) is perhaps evidence that an absolute despotism cannot indefinitely maintain itself in Russia.

    Trotsky is popular now with a new kind of popularity that comes primarily from the fact that he is generally regarded as a martyr. His arguments in favor of a ‘revolutionary revolution’ leave his hearers cold, but the brutal fact that he is deprived of the opportunity to present his case to the public is the cause of much of the general sympathy for Trotsky.⁵⁰

At the same time, the Forverts did not demonstrate sympathy for Trotsky. His enthusiastic sympathisers, such as Moyshe Olgin and Max Goldfarb, had left the newspaper – Olgin to edit the New York communist daily Frayhayt (Freedom), launched in April 1922, and Goldfarb to become a high-ranking Soviet official.⁵¹ Those who continued to write for the newspaper remained sceptical or even critical of him. Benzion Hoffman, best known by the pen name Tsivion, one of the most popular Forverts journalists, met with Trotsky in his student years, first in Switzerland in 1903 and then in Germany in 1904, and, like Vladeck, remembered him as a delegate to the 1907 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Tsivion praised him as an excellent orator and journalist, a ‘prophet of the revolution’, but not its guiding leader. He observed that Trotsky usually had admirers rather than followers. Trotsky’s talents as a persuasive propagandist were in high demand during the revolution, but they later became harmful.⁵²

In exile, 1928–40

In answer to the news of Trotsky’s exile to ‘Siberia’ (in fact, to Kazakhstan, until 1936 an autonomous republic in the Soviet Union’s Russian Republic) at the beginning of 1928, a Forverts editorial remarked that he, a conscience of the Communist Party, had dug himself a grave and that socialists who championed freedom and democracy would not shed any tears over his plight.⁵³ Abramovitch quoted an anecdote about the Soviet authorities’ decision to exile Trotsky and other oppositionists: ‘The sun disappeared in the west, whereas the opposition disappears in the east.’ He pointed out that Trotsky and his family had travelled from Moscow in a separate train car rather than being conveyed with other convicts. On a more serious note, Abramovitch stressed that neither Trotsky nor any other oppositionists had a chance to bring about change in the regime, which was protected by the Stalinist bureaucratic and repressive apparatus. He did not see any reason for feeling sympathy for Trotsky, given Trotsky’s total lack of compassion for socialists, including former friends, whom the Bolsheviks had persecuted when he was a top Soviet official.⁵⁴

Like Abramovitch, Tsivion did not believe that Trotsky had a chance of returning to power, nor that he deserved compassion. In fact, he believed that Trotsky had been given a taste of his own medicine. Tsivion quoted from the Mishnah (Pirkei Avot 2:6): ‘Because you drowned others, they drowned you; and in the end, those who drowned you will themselves be drowned.’ At the same time, Tsivion noted, the decision to expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union (in February 1929) demonstrated Stalin’s lack of wisdom, because this strengthened Trotsky’s position.⁵⁵ Two years later, Tsivion once again highlighted Trotsky’s popularity and reiterated that this happened thanks to Stalin’s flawed decision to expel him from the country. Had he not done so, people would have forgotten about Trotsky, as had happened to Aleksei Rykov, chair of the Soviet government between 1924 and 1930.⁵⁶ The Moscow show trial, which began in 1936 and targeted, most notably, those alleged to be active Trotskyists, increased Trotsky’s popularity in the West. The vast scale and intensity of anti-Trotskyist propaganda efforts by the Soviet and pro-Soviet press only confirmed this fact.⁵⁷

In 1930, Trotsky’s autobiography My Life came out in Berlin in Russian and, in the same year, in several other languages, including Yiddish (in Warsaw) and Hebrew (in Tel Aviv). Cahan, who read the Russian original, found that the book had been infused with a sense of Trotsky’s self-importance. He agreed with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the minister of education in Lenin’s government, that Trotsky always looked in the mirror of history. The story of the revolutionary period reminded Cahan of ‘Had Gadya’, traditionally sung at the end of the Passover Seder: Alexander Kerensky came after Nicolas II’s abdication, Trotsky then removed Kerensky and, finally, it was Stalin’s turn to expel Trotsky. Cahan also drew a historical parallel (which became commonplace) to the French Revolution’s Thermidor: Maximilien Robespierre sending his former ally Georges Danton to the guillotine. Cahan did not mention that Trotsky berated the Forverts as ‘a newspaper with the stale odor of sentimentally philistine socialism, almost ready for the most perfidious betrayals’.⁵⁸ However, Cahan got even with him in the conclusion. While praising Trotsky as a talented writer, Cahan also characterised him as ‘a not particularly smart person’.⁵⁹ Four years later, Cahan wrote: ‘Despotism, mercilessness, and demagogy were not the things which Trotsky had to learn from Stalin … Still, Stalin is cleverer, much cleverer than Trotsky.’⁶⁰

This did not mean the Forverts continued to see Stalin as a better man. Thus, a 1940 Forverts editorial read:

Trotsky and Stalin are children of the same parents called Bolshevism. Both are responsible for eliminating the freedom gained in March 1917 through much suffering by the Russian people. Both carry responsibility for turning great Russia into a hell for everyone apart from the communist bureaucracy, as well as for the victory of fascism in several countries, which ultimately led to a new war in Europe and new sufferings for tens of millions of people.⁶¹

On 23 May 1940, Trotsky was interviewed by Melech Epstein for the Forverts. Epstein, a one-time editor of the daily Frayhayt, had left American communist circles in protest after the Soviet Union signed a treaty with Nazi Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in August 1939. The interview took place in Coyoacán, a village on the fringes of Mexico City, where Trotsky’s residence had been turned into a fortress, protected by police and bodyguards. Epstein noted that Trotsky’s appearance had changed significantly since 1917 when he saw him in New York. A wide beard, which had replaced his pointy beard, made him look like a Talmudic scholar or rabbi. Notwithstanding severe life trials, he remained like a strong oak, unbent and unbroken by storms. Still, Epstein’s admiration for Trotsky’s stoicism was mixed with awareness that this remarkable man lived ensnared in an unreal world, believing in Marxist dogmas, even if they were, in fact, non-Marxist and unfit for contemporary life.

Epstein asked Trotsky, inter alia, whether the treaty with Nazi Germany would facilitate the transformation of the Soviet Union into a fascist state, accompanied by the introduction of race-based legislation. Trotsky did not believe that this was possible. He considered Stalin a reactionary rather than a fascist. Also, the key figures in the Soviet government were veteran Bolsheviks, so fascist ideology was alien to them. Another thing was the bureaucratic apparatus, which – certainly excluding Jewish functionaries – showed signs gravitating towards fascism and antisemitism. Stalin had tolerated antisemitic manifestations in attacks on Trotsky but later silenced them. Still, Trotsky did not rule out that the post-Stalinist Soviet leader would be an outspoken fascist. At the end of the interview (conducted in Russian), Trotsky said apropos something else entirely: ‘Jews always paid money to those who would later organize pogroms against them.’⁶²

In the 1930s, Trotsky showed an increasing interest in Jewish issues.⁶³ In May 1930, he wrote from the Turkish island of Prinkipo (known as Büyükada today) to the French ‘Jewish Group at the Left Opposition’, which published his letter in its Yiddish journal Klorkayt (Clarity). In it, Trotsky expressed his scepticism about the Parisian editors’ idea to turn their publication into an international organ for all Jewish communist opposition groups. He urged them to remain part of the French labour movement and to shun the Bund’s example of segregating Jewish workers from the socialist mainstream.⁶⁴ In 1932 and 1934, Trotsky touched on Jewish issues in his letters to Lazar Kling, an editor of the Yiddish Trotskyist journal Unzer Tsayt (Our Time), published in New York. In particular, he explained his attitude to Yiddish, which he considered as good as any other language. He rejected accusations of being an assimilationist and claimed that he did not even fully understand the meaning assigned to this term. His letters also mentioned the Birobidzhan project (Trotsky did not see it as a real solution to the problems of the Jewish people) and the anti-Jewish violence in Palestine in 1929 (he claimed not to have enough material to make a judgement about the issue).⁶⁵

At the beginning of 1937, already in Mexico, Trotsky answered (in French) several questions from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He expressed regret that he did not know Yiddish and could not read publications in this language. Whereas he used to be inclined towards the idea of the assimilation of Jews, he had changed his attitude because of ‘historical developments’ (most likely he meant the Nazi persecution of Jews). Now he believed that Jews needed a ‘common homeland’, though this goal could be achieved only through the ‘emancipation of entire humanity’ by international socialism.⁶⁶ This did not stop him from using essentially antisemitic stereotypes in his polemic. In a January 1940 article, he urged that ‘the Jewish petty-bourgeois elements be shifted from their habitual conservative milieu and dissolved in the real movement’.⁶⁷

Epstein spoke with Trotsky on 23 May, a day before a group of 20 men attacked Trotsky’s residence. This was the last unsuccessful attempt to murder him. Three months later, on 20 August, an assassin fatally wounded him.

After the assassination

As early as 1932, Tsivion wrote that Trotsky’s role in building the Soviet regime would never be forgotten or forgiven, especially as Stalin had embraced his methods. At the same time, Tsivion saw two factors that mitigated Trotsky’s guilt. First, he had not become a dictator after Lenin’s death. Second, he had not fallen under Stalin’s control.⁶⁸ Generally, this attitude of the Forverts to Trotsky changed very little in the following years, including the response to his tragic death. Three days after the fatal attack on Trotsky, an article by Mendel Osherowitch, a Yiddish journalist and writer, stated: ‘We agree with those who reckon that if the power were in Trotsky’s hands, the version of the system could be even worse than under Stalin.’ Yet, though Trotsky deserved punishment, it was tragic to see Stalin, ‘a contemporary Chinggis Khan’, exacting his vengeance against Trotsky and Trotsky’s family and friends.⁶⁹

Epstein, who was still in Mexico, described Trotsky’s funeral, which had been paid for through fundraising because Trotsky had left very little money. He found it disappointing that the eulogists focused on Trotskyism rather than on Trotsky himself. Epstein’s own characterisation of Trotsky as ‘the last giant of the generation who made the Bolshevik Revolution’ revealed his enduring sentiment towards communism. According to Epstein, there had been 15 attempts on Trotsky’s life in the last 12 years, with a hiatus in 1936 and 1937, the period when Stalin needed to have a living Trotsky as a scapegoat for his campaigns of mass repression.⁷⁰ Epstein’s third article focused on the possible reasons for Trotsky’s loss of vigilance in his relations with ‘Frank Jacson’ (Ramón Mercader), the Soviet agent assigned to assassinate him. In Epstein’s analysis, Trotsky had been deserted by many of his former followers because he, a dogmatist, could not tolerate any disagreement with his views. In the meantime, the demand for his books and articles had declined or even collapsed in war-ridden Europe, leading to serious financial problems. Against this backdrop, ‘Jacson’ played the role of a devoted Trotskyist and a wealthy person, a sponsor. Trotsky was lured into this trap.⁷¹

Six months later, on 2 March 1941, the Forverts announced that, after considering several works on Trotsky, the editors – or most probably Cahan himself – had decided to invite Mark Aldanov (Landau), one of the most renowned Russian émigré writers, to write an opinion essay. A sharp opponent of communism, Aldanov had lived in France after the Bolshevik Revolution, but moved to New York in January 1941.⁷² The genre of literary portraits of historical figures was one of his fortes. He was also a very attentive observer of Soviet life.⁷³ His essay, titled ‘The Trotsky Drama’ (‘Di Trotski-drame’), came out in six instalments in the Sunday issues of the newspaper from 9 March to 13 April. Mendel Osherowitch had translated the Russian original into Yiddish. In an earlier article published in the Forverts, Aldanov characterised Trotsky as a gifted actor who demonstrated remarkable mastery of performance during his time in the revolutionary movement.⁷⁴ In a later work, Aldanov defined Lenin as an ‘experimenter’ and Trotsky as a ‘self-seeker’.⁷⁵

Aldanov did not know Trotsky personally and considered this an advantage, as it gave him a more objective viewpoint. In fact, he had had an opportunity to meet him in the summer of 1917 at Maxim Gorky’s home, but he arrived after Trotsky had already left. Gorky, who thought very highly of Lenin, did not like Trotsky at all, considering him ‘egocentric’. Trotsky, in his turn, treated Gorky and, Aldanov stressed, the majority of people with little respect. Aldanov’s opinion of Trotsky, based on other people’s judgements and on Trotsky’s writings and deeds, was the same as Gorky’s. He disliked many things about Trotsky, including his grandstanding, which often looked comical. Also, Trotsky had a poor understanding of people and could not tolerate disagreement or opposition. As a result, many people in his close surroundings later left or betrayed him. Aldanov also believed that, in terms of cruelty, Trotsky surpassed even Lenin. In general, Trotsky’s deeds as a top Soviet official were criminal. Moreover, it seemed he never showed remorse for what he had done.

At the same time, Aldanov was not ready to agree with those who argued that Trotsky was ‘more talented than clever’. Rather, Trotsky’s talent was not creative, and by and large, he borrowed other people’s ideas and theories. Aldanov also disagreed with Churchill’s conclusion that Trotsky’s Jewishness was the reason for his failure to succeed Lenin as the Soviet leader.⁷⁶ In Aldanov’s opinion, being Jewish was not a major handicap. There were two other weighty reasons why he had not used the Red Army under his command to seize power: first, Trotsky lacked the determination to do this; second, he knew that the Communist Party membership disliked him. This did not mean that they loved Stalin. But even those who disliked Stalin tended to loathe Trotsky. Significantly, as a real politician, Stalin was head and shoulders above him. At the same time, Aldanov regarded Trotsky as a great personality and a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions, such as Julius Caesar.

To all appearances, Aldanov’s portrayal of Trotsky corresponded with the views of Cahan and other Forverts editors and staff writers, though there were differences in Aldanov’s and the Forverts’ journalists’ subjective and essentially negative attitude to Trotsky: Aldanov was primarily driven by his anti-communism, whereas the Forverts writers, who were likewise anti-communist in their outlook, had unpleasant memories of meeting him and not liking him personally. Even Trotsky’s anti-Stalinism could not soften the newspaper’s editorial line on Trotsky. The newspaper, more sarcastically than seriously, welcomed the establishment of the Trotskyist Fourth International, but only because it weakened the communist movement.⁷⁷

In fact, Trotskyists also contributed to the restructuring of the American socialist movement in the mid-1930s, when the Trotskyist Communist League of America merged with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States, which, in turn, joined the Socialist Party in March 1936.⁷⁸ These developments, at least in part, stemmed from the Trotskyists’ tactics of entryism, or joining larger organisations and attempting to alter their political stance.⁷⁹ The more moderate ‘Old Guard’ faction of socialists, to which the Forverts clearly gravitated, evaluated it as a rapprochement with the Comintern. Ultimately, the Old Guard would secede to form the Social Democratic Federation, which was recognised by the Forverts ‘as its party’, thus confirming the newspaper’s intransigent rejection of any form of cooperation with communists of any variety, be they Stalinists or Trotskyists.⁸⁰

Conclusion

Trotsky’s name did not leave the pages of the Forverts in the coming years, appearing time and again in numerous memoirs and allusions to the past. Thus, in 1941, Abramovitch recalled that in 1918, when he was arrested during the Red Terror unleashed by the Soviet regime, Trotsky was among those who advocated his execution.⁸¹ In 1943, Tsivion discussed Soviet options for finishing the war – to stop it at the Soviet borders or to conquer Berlin – and stressed that, in contrast to how Trotsky might have handled it, Stalin would act without turning to historical precedents or weighing up how future generations would view it.⁸² Articles on the successful Red Army’s operations often mentioned Trotsky as the builder of Soviet military strength. As a sign of a more temperate attitude to the slain revolutionary, the Forverts published announcements of the annual memorial ceremonies organised by his admirers.⁸³

In 1943, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, gave an interview to the Forverts in which he argued, in particular, that a communist could not be ‘a good Jew’, because to be a communist meant being a renegade. And Hoover praised Trotsky’s honesty in not considering himself Jewish.⁸⁴

Hoover was wrong. Trotsky never relinquished his Jewish identity. Moreover, it seems that Jewish-related issues increasingly spurred his interest in the last years of his life. In 1937, he wrote in an article published posthumously in 1941: ‘The Jewish question had never occupied the center of my attention. But that does not mean that I have the right to be blind to the Jewish problem which exists and demands solution.’⁸⁵ To the Forverts, meanwhile, Trotsky remained quite a central Jewish figure.

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.