In the rush to hammer Miller into a non-Communist liberal mold, and thus show that domestic anti-communism was really directed against New Dealers, the obituary writers missed a key opportunity to get at the more complicated truth of the period—and of the playwright’s own life and political allegiances. Had they read his “heroic” testimony before HUAC, they would have come across Miller’s recollection of an essay he had written 10 years previously for a Marxist audience. Calling it the “best essay I ever wrote,” he recalled its thrust:

Great art, like science, attempts to see the present remorselessly and truthfully. If Marxism is what it claims to be, a science of society, then it must be devoted to the objective facts more. … The first job of a Marxist critic is to tell the truth.

It is a pity that HUAC didn’t ask Miller to elaborate. Had they done so, they would have found out that in addition to being a playwright, he was also Matt Wayne, theater critic for the New Masses from 1945 to ’46.

Like one of those Soviet spymasters in an Ian Fleming novel, Matt Wayne was never photographed going in or out of the New Masses offices. No autobiographical information was listed at the end of his essays.  When the historian Alan Wald questioned Wayne’s colleagues at New Masses as to whether Wayne was Miller, they were still so dedicated to keeping Miller’s identity a secret that Wald had to turn off his tape recorder before they would answer his questions.

This deliberate secrecy understandably led Wald to focus on connecting Miller to Wayne. But lost in this quest was what Wayne/Miller represented. Wayne was more than a party pseudonym protecting up-and-comers like Miller from later repercussions. Wayne/Miller represented a brief period of perestroika for the ’40s-era American Communist Party.

Toward the end of World War II, the party would briefly attempt liberalization under its leader, Earl Browder. Unlike in the previous decade, where the only good art was proletarian—Malcolm Cowley, a fellow traveler and New Republic editor, saw adherence to communist orthodoxy as the only way to “write good history” and “good tragedy”—Browder’s movement toward peaceful accommodation with capitalism in 1944 gave hope to the more liberal authors in the party. Isidor Schneider, the editor of the New Masses, characterized the new editorial policy of the magazine to be the following: “No writer need worry about being politically correct if he won’t be faithful to reality.”

Enter the mysterious Matt Wayne in a period when Miller had abandoned play-writing. On the surface, Miller would seem the least-likely candidate for being Matt Wayne. During the war he had been furious at the party’s portrayal of capitalists as “the salt of the earth.” Wayne, however, gave him the freedom to air his views about steering the cultural policies of the American Communist Party away from the rigid “Art as a Weapon” phase and into the mainstream rules for literature. In a 1945 article, Wayne/Miller wrote what might have been the essay the playwright recalled before HUAC: “The authentic theatre will rise again when a playwright comes along who will face the dirtiest corners of the earth and will set about cleansing with real characters.” Nothing must prevent the “artist’s search for the truth,” for the “truth itself is political.”

Wayne/Miller wrote two dozen columns for the Masses from 1945 to ’46 and then dropped down the memory hole. The reasons may have had to do with the infamous Maltz episode. Albert Maltz, one of the party’s more liberalized screenwriters, published an essay titled “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” which criticized communist orthodoxy  as “a straitjacket.” Surveying his and other comrades’ output over the previous decades, Maltz cited American Communist Party artistic rules as “restricted, narrow” and “turned away from life.”

Maltz followed Miller’s thesis, and he suffered for it. The reason had to do with when he wrote it: February 1946. In June 1945, four months after Miller’s essay, Earl Browder was cast out of the party and replaced with the rigid ideologue William Foster. Suddenly, a heresy hunt for “Browderism” was on, and Maltz became the target. The onslaught on Maltz was so intense that he recanted and wrote a “second thoughts” essay stating that he had been in “total error.”

Ironically, Miller was one of Maltz’s initial supporters. He even met with two Communists to debate whether to go public with their support but backed down. With Wayne in the trash heap, Miller subsequently moved from liberalism to Fosterism. Rather than opposing ideologues like Howard Fast (whose Marxism was so rigid that even Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was repelled), Miller now signed petitions on his behalf against the HUAC. In a 1949 New Masses symposium titled “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” Miller typified what George Orwell criticized as the party’s inability to separate good literature from a writer’s politics. Answering in the affirmative, Miller castigated the literary establishment for recognizing Ezra Pound’s ability as a poet.

This orthodoxy continued in 1953 with The Crucible. In later years, Miller admitted that the inspiration for the play was his belief in the innocence of the Rosenbergs, which makes the Salem metaphor even more problematic. Children turning in elders—and husbands and wives committing adultery with politically unreliable people, thus assuring their executions—was more a feature of the Stalinist purge trials than McCarthyism.

In his testimony before the HUAC, Miller stated that he “had never been under Communist discipline.” But his behavior as Wayne and then as Miller shows otherwise. As Wayne, he followed the Browder phase of perestrokia in literature. When the tide shifted away, Miller followed the Fosterite policy that the only good literature was the politically correct kind. Miller was not only a party member, he was also an obedient one, who was willing to submerge his own ideas of good literature and politics to the shifting vagaries of the party line.

The activists sought to secure the right of thousands of Russian Jews—at risk of cultural extinction after years of forced assimilation under Communism—to leave the Soviet Union. Moscow should not receive most-favored trade status from the United States, American Jews insisted, unless and until their Soviet brethren were allowed to emigrate. Under immense pressure exerted by this movement, Congress would eventually pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1974, which conditioned trade with the Soviet Union on Russian emigration policy. In the process, the movement transformed the nature of American foreign policy, helping to establish “the principle that human rights supersede national sovereignty, that democracies are morally bound to intervene in the internal affairs of dictatorships,” as the former activist Yossi Klein Halevi, now an Israeli author and journalist, has written.

Most Iranian Americans are likely unfamiliar with this inspiring saga. But they could learn a lot from its example. They, too, face a totalitarian adversary in the form of Iran’s clerical regime, which has trapped millions of their countrymen for over three decades. And just as the Soviet Jewry movement had to overcome the hostility of a U.S. administration obsessed with realpolitik, Iranian-Americans today are frustrated by a White House seemingly unmoved by the plight of dissidents in Iran. Like American Jews, Iranian Americans are a notoriously fractious bunch, divided by numerous ideological and generational fault lines—and torn between an assimilationist imperative and the urge to preserve their unique cultural and linguistic heritage in the United States.

Unlike the organized American Jewish community, Iranian Americans have been ineffective at mobilizing support for their cause of advancing democracy in Iran or even formulating a coherent political message. Disputes over the meaning and significance of historical traumas—from the 1979 revolution to the failures of the reform movement ushered in by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami—have frequently divided the Persian diaspora. Iranian American activism, moreover, has fundamentally failed at reaching a broad, mainstream audience.

Given the similarities between these two communities, the Soviet Jewry model may help Iranian Americans rethink and revitalize their own efforts to ensure that democratization and human rights are central pillars of U.S. policy toward Iran. Of course, there are contextual differences: Jewish activists in the 1970s and ’80s had the benefit of a Soviet dictatorship open to engagement, whereas the regime in Tehran relishes its isolation and defiance. Nevertheless, Iranian Americans can pick up quite a few lessons from the astonishing successes of the Soviet Jewry movement, which ultimately led to the downfall of Communism in Europe.

Balance the Particularistic Against the Universal

Almost as soon as they launched their movement, the Soviet Jewry activists were faced with a difficult branding dilemma. As Gal Beckerman explains in When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, his magisterial history of the movement, these activists were animated by profoundly Jewish impulses. “The movement involved the whole soup of Jewish psychology—Holocaust guilt, fears of assimilation, all of these very particularistic Jewish concerns,” Beckerman told me. “But if it were limited to that, you would have just had a very small group of protesters screaming.” Aware of the risk that their movement might play as a narrowly ethnic one in the wider culture, the activists consciously grounded their message in the language of universal human rights and fundamental American ideals, such as religious freedom and freedom of movement. To broaden their impact, they reached out to civil rights leaders from outside the community and carefully framed their cause as a mainstream one.

Iranian Americans have struggled with this difficult balancing act. Too often, their rallies, advocacy literature, and messaging come across as part of a debate within the community. Last year, for example, I helped organize a rally in Boston to mark the first anniversary of the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran. Benefiting from the counsel of some veteran, non-Iranian activists, we took steps to appeal to the broader Boston community. We billed the event as an “interfaith solidarity vigil,” secured the endorsements of civic leaders from Boston’s various ethnic communities, including the largest Latino-rights organization in Massachusetts, and began the rally with the U.S. national anthem.

Continue reading: Seeking latter-day Sharanskys

William Dean Howells defined realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”—which is what the amateur photographer believes himself to be capturing when he takes a picture of personal distress. Inevitably though, he is attempting something more—and more slippery—than the truthful treatment of his material: He believes that his subject is symbolic of the grand scale of human suffering and that it is his responsibility to exalt it.

While snapping a picture can easily be construed as an objective reproduction of a pre-existing reality, photographers can’t help but edit the world. And the only thing more boring than amateur photography is obsolete propaganda, especially if it is praising the dignity of the working class. Individual hardship—but not death or all-out disaster—is difficult to care about too much after the fact; bygone squalor doesn’t seem worth our present-day tears. To age gracefully, documentary photographs must have artistic value in addition to historical value, and all too often one currency subsumes the other.

“The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951,” which opened at the Jewish Museum last Friday, captures better than any art exhibition I can remember the ways in which the propagandistic impulse both propels and stifles creativity. Mason Klein of the Jewish Museum and Catherine Evans of the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio have curated an exhibition that privileges the Photo League’s history more than its artistic legacy. It’s a little didactic: The photos are hung in mostly chronological order, the wall text is dry but information-rich, and the seven galleries are labeled with the expository concision of a high-school textbook (“Introduction and Precursors,” “The Great Depression,” etc.). It’s arguable that such pedantry is necessary: Though the Photo League launched tens of world-class careers, the organization itself is hardly remembered today.

Founded in 1936 by self-taught photographers Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman, the Photo League was an indirect descendent of the Workers’ International Relief, a Berlin-based adjunct of the Communist International established to alleviate famine in the Soviet Union. First and foremost, the League’s purpose was pedagogical: Its various Eastside headquarters gave students inexpensive access to a darkroom, along with a gallery to exhibit their work. Classes and lectures were held in on-site salons. When it opened, the Photo League was the only non-commercial photography school in America, and photography itself wasn’t yet quite considered a valid art form. (The Museum of Modern Art didn’t open a photography department until 1940.) Two coinciding developments enabled and inspired the League’s novice photographers: the relatively recent introduction of small, handheld 35mm cameras, and the new ubiquity of illustrated magazines like Look and Life. The League thrived for over a decade before being declared subversive in 1947 by Attorney General Tom C. Clark and placed on the U.S. Department of Justice blacklist. By 1951, it was completely dissolved.

The League’s members were mostly young, first-generation Jewish immigrants, and their goal was to record, through pictures, the daily activity of life in Manhattan. Aesthetically, the Photo League was to photography what the Ashcan School was to painting: Its members’ subjects were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. They took pictures of Lower East Side tenements instead of Fifth Avenue townhouses; men carrying bagels, not fine cigars.

The work on display in “The Radical Camera”—culled from the two museums’ permanent collections—is bafflingly varied in both its content and its quality, which makes sense only when you remember that the Photo League was a school, after all. The work appears admirably ambitious and earnest, if not hugely satisfying—you can see the members navigating the ethics of a new medium: Does formal composition mar truth? Are purely objective pictures even interesting to look at? Stoop scenes are bracketed by brass bands; portraits of architectural landmarks hang in galleries with portraits of rambunctious children—some seem scheming for our pity, others casual to the point of aesthetic negligence. The joyful and glamorous images are tokens, included, it would seem, only for the contrast they provide.

The League, with its roots in Communism and Depression-era radicalism (the photographers called themselves “workers”), produced photographs that served more as evidence for the virtue of their reformist politics than as actual artworks. There are exceptions of course: For every roomful of forgettable cityscapes, there are a few truly stunning compositions (Ruth Orkin’s “Boy Jumping Into Hudson River” is one; Arthur Leipzig’s “Ideal Laundry” is another), but if you were to take the body of work as some sort of sociological record, you’d get a pretty grim view of the city.

Of course a grim view of Manhattan in the 1930s, in the grip of the Great Depression, isn’t all that shocking or radical. The trouble comes when you realize the effect has been created cumulatively, by the simple multiplication of images, and not through the power of works of particular artistic merit. It’s difficult to walk through the show and not suspect the photographers of having selected for sorrow en masse.

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” Susan Sontag famously wrote in “On Photography.” Here it’s a coercive aggression whereby almost every person in every portrait is symptomatic of vague subjugation—there’s little humor, and almost no sexuality. “There was a sense at the time—this almost magical belief—that if you took a picture of oppression, you were somehow doing something to alleviate it or fight against it,” Luc Sante told me over the phone last week. “It leads to a lot of really dull work.”

Isn’t it possible, if not probable, that the youth in Rae Russel’s “Young Boy and Fire Hydrant” is looking down not because he is sad, but because he is anything else (tired, curious about the stain on his shirt, maybe even about to blink)? Lisette Model’s “Lower East Side” depicts a grizzled man in tweed so cartoonishly hobo-like that he could have been shot by Diane Arbus. Perhaps he’s just back from a grueling day on the job, where he is subject to dangerous working conditions and a draconian boss. Perhaps. Or maybe he’s squinting into the distance in search of his wife? Maybe he’s annoyed at a friend who is running late. The point is: We don’t know anything about these people, and the mere fact of the League’s political prescription taints the photographs’ powers of description.

In 1938, a group of League photographers, led by a 21-year-old Lower East Sider named Walter Rosenblum, spent six months photographing a stretch of Pitt Street: men at a flea market, boys playing on sidewalks, a group of women cooing at a baby. The most striking image is by Rosenbaum. It’s of a young girl, dressed in white, swinging at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. She’s suspended at the very crest of her arch, and the perspective is such that she’s the same size as the visible part of the tower. The Pitt Street series is one of the few Photo League projects that doesn’t reek of righteousness or reduce its subjects to the lone fact of their hardship. It’s no coincidence that the neighborhood was Rosenbaum’s own.

I walked down to that same stretch of Pitt Street one day last week. I was working in a coffee shop nearby and wanted a break; I thought I’d see if the blocks looked familiar. They did. The neighborhood is more Dominican than Jewish now, but it’s still a photo student’s dream. The Williamsburg Bridge casts dramatic shadows, and the street is almost as wide as a boulevard. Look south, and you can see the squat silhouettes of two twin Rosenwach water tanks. The blocks are littered (sometimes literally) with specious visual metaphors: empty bottles of Bacardi Arctic Grape in the gutters and a restaurant that serves something called “Big Party,” which only costs $1. As I was walking around last Thursday at 11 a.m., the only two people I saw were a mother and her small daughter, who wore a polyester carnation in her hair. The scene looked to me desolate in that way we’ve all been trained to see as tragic. But I was being a bad realist, not only not truthful but ignoring reality. Why should there have been anyone out and about at 11 a.m.? People have jobs.

The Photo League is more than just a bygone New York institution or casualty of McCarthyism. The New York School was born of it, and many artists affiliated with the League, such as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Arthur Leipzig, went on to have celebrated careers. But as the League photographers tried—and often failed—to negotiate the boundary between their political obligations and their creative ambitions they produced a lot of facile poeticism. I suspect the real legacy of the Photo League, though, was to anticipate the historical course of our reaction to documentary photography—the sympathy that sours so quickly into antipathy.

It is déjà vu all over again. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pirouetted onto the political center stage just as France is marking the 75th anniversary of the mass strikes that accompanied the electoral victory of the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The many parallels between then and now, particularly in the personalities of Blum and Barack Obama, cast the OWS movement in a new and intriguing light.

To better understand them, we’d do well to look at France in the mid-1930s. The country’s economy, still staggering under the weight of the Great Depression, was in a shambles. The policies of France’s deficit hawks had come home to roost with a vengeance. Entrenched conservative distrust of deficit spending had catastrophic consequences for French workers: By the summer of 1936, at least 2 million men and women—one out of six citizens—were unemployed. The lives of those who still had jobs were flushed with anxiety. The French philosopher Simone Weil, who worked for a spell as a power press operator at a Paris factory in the 1930s, was ordered at the end of her first day at work to double her output if she wished to keep her job. The employer, she told a friend, “makes a favor of allowing us to kill ourselves and we have to say thank you.”

Popular Front poster from 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

In order to underscore the nation’s economic inequality, leftist politicians denounced the power of the nation’s “two hundred families.” While the phrase at first designated the 200 shareholders who ostensibly oversaw the monetary policies of the Bank of France, it came to crystallize the popular anger of those who suffered the consequences of a global financial meltdown. At the same time, the Taxpayers’ Federation, an organization funded by the manufacturer François Coty—a great fan of Mussolini—declared that France could recover only if the government cut taxes on the wealthy. Given the abysmal state of national debt, successive centrist governments concluded that they had no choice but to retrench. As credit tightened, the building industry cratered, as state and municipal bureaucracies began to shed workers.

In May 1936, a series of strikes upended France. Business and industrial interests were horrified, claiming that the strikes were the work of communists. But the communists were terrified as well: The leaders of the French Communist Party, along with those of the trade unions, were caught flat-footed by the speed and magnitude of the strikes. As the social media of the era—newspapers, radio, and letters—carried news of the rapidly unfolding events, workers elsewhere were mobilized to follow suit. By June, nearly 2 million French workers had either walked out of their workplaces or simply sat down: Along with Edith Piaf and Pastis, interwar France also gave the world the sit-down strike.

By early summer, as the nation lurched to a halt, the party began. The events of May and June had far more in common with Mardi Gras than with Molotov cocktails. Far from establishing soviets along the Seine, workers instead dressed in drag and did the jig on factory floors. Instead of taking the Bastille, millions of protesters took a break. It was a revolution only insofar as the world was, if only temporarily, turned upside down.

The vast and unruly movement known as Occupy Wall Street is yet another American remake of a French original: OWS has grown in political, ideological, and economic circumstances that echo those 75 years ago in France. The character of the strikes is also remarkably similar. Just as American unions and some Democratic politicians have been playing catch-up with OWS, so too were French Communists, Socialists, and trade unions. As for the carnival-like behavior, it is hard to decide which wins first prize for outrageousness: OWS protesters wearing Superman suits (or nothing at all), or muscular Renault workers donning skirts and bras.

There are, of course, differences. The French workers had specific demands: a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, and higher wages. Yet, like the OWS, French workers expressed a more systemic dissatisfaction with the economic and social inequities tolerated by their republican state. And, like America’s Occupiers, they suddenly saw themselves as actors, not passive bystanders, in a political process indifferent to their material needs and social aspirations. Both then and now, protesters were flush with hope and believed, in the famous French phrase of the era, that “tout est possible.”

Perhaps one English translation of that slogan would be “We are the change we are waiting for.” Which brings us to the most striking parallel of all: the two men leading their nations at these critical moments.

Léon Blum, the French prime minister, was a formidable intellect trained in law and a remarkably eloquent writer. He was a committed socialist, but cautious and consensual to a fault. He was, in brief, a humanist who lacked a human touch, a man who embraced the left less for reasons of the heart than of the mind.

Much of this portrait resembles Barack Obama: His sharp analytical mind, his tendency to didacticism, and his attachment to deliberation match Blum’s character. So too does his ethnic background. Blum was not just the first socialist to become prime minister, but also the first Jew. He immediately became the target of the interwar equivalent of our own “birthers.” French pundits and politicians questioned Blum’s Frenchness, insisting he was instead Hungarian. Their accusations and attacks proved so distracting that they forced Blum to publish an open letter in a newspaper, with documents at hand, titled “I am French.”

The novelist and political observer André Gide’s remark about Blum—“He is never sure, he is always seeking; too much intelligence and not enough character”—has also been echoed by supporters of the current American president. But as historian Tony Judt noted, this was Blum’s strength as well as his weakness. Allergic to dogma, Blum recognized the provisional nature of most political truths, yet never lost sight of his particular brand of socialism, believing that all human beings have basic rights, including that of dignity.

Yet Blum’s moment was short-lived. In June, he used the strikes as a stick, forcing French industrialists to accept all the demands made by the striking workers. It was a remarkable moment—too remarkable, tragically. Historians take Blum to task for doing both too much—by hiking up wages and shortening the work week—and too little by refusing to devalue the franc until it was too late. It’s a very similar situation to the reaction of our own left and right to Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Ultimately, the resistance of French banks and the massive flight of capital overwhelmed Blum’s reforms. A year after he came to office, France’s first Jewish prime minister was forced to resign. It turned out that everything was not possible.

The institutions that challenged Blum are, of course, the very same ones whose power and apparent immunity are now being challenged by the carnival we call OWS. Just as the expectations stirred by the strikes in France were probably too great an aspiration to be met by any government, so too might this be the case with the hopes raised by the men and women, young and old, employed and unemployed now occupying public spaces across the country. But as Blum might have told Obama, this is no reason not to take a stand—one more forthright and determined than he himself took.

It’s not that the particulars of Dorfman’s life aren’t objectively compelling on their own. His grandparents fled pogroms in Eastern Europe; his Marxist father fled the Argentine junta for the United States and then was pushed out of New York by Joe McCarthy. Dorfman himself was an adviser to the democratically elected Chilean leftist president Salvador Allende until a coup and Allende’s assassination sent this Dorfman, too, on the run.

Years of often-penniless and paranoid exile in France, the Netherlands, and the United States—the focus of this book—followed, shaped by the sometimes petty politics of party and solidarity, and the vagaries of daily survival in foreign countries. Literary stars like Julio Cortázar, Heinrich Böll, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, and Il Postino author Antonio Skarmeta make cameo appearances. Except for when Grass kicks Dorfman out of his home for the latter’s hypocrisy in abandoning the Czech anti-Soviets, they don’t have much to say.

Looming above all this is the impossible dream of the exile’s return. As in the case of others banished before him, Dorfman’s return trips to Chile revealed a country that, even as it slowly transitioned to democracy, could never fulfill his outsized hopes and longings.

All this is told in an unsteady, fragmented mix of minutiae and sweeping declarations that even in the confession of imperfections cast the author in an exalted moral light. Dorfman bemoans “this mongrel heretic of language that I have become, this insurgent nomad of the earth.” He asks, in a typical musing, “How is it that I became a bridge for the multiple Americas so at war in the outside world of murderous nations and forbidden borders? Was it necessary and even inevitable that I should end up thus, my Spanish and my English making love to each other after so many years of fighting for my throat?”

It is clear from A Promise to the Dead, Peter Raymont’s 2006 documentary about Dorfman—frequently referred to in the book—that the author does actually talk like this, at least while cameras are rolling. With quizzical friends at his side who rarely get a word in, Dorfman relives the Allendista movement—the only time in his life, he says, that he didn’t feel like “a ghost”—and the bloody days of the coup. “I’ve always been someone who bets on life,” he grandly reflects on his escape.

Later, women who still hold vigil for their disappeared men listen impassively as Dorfman tells them that their pain cured his writer’s block: “Something terrible happened to me when I left. I couldn’t write or say anything,” he says. “It was impossible because I felt a paralysis here in my throat. I was able to start writing in exile because I began to listen to voices of the disappeared … to the voices of the women, mothers, daughters, wives of the disappeared. And I began to feel like I was the place where the living and dead could meet.”

Evidently, Dorfman is earnestly trying to give them credit for his own literary inspiration, finishing by saying, “I owe my birth to you. I haven’t forgotten you, and I haven’t forgotten each of the photographs that you carry.” Nothing resonates more than when the women dance before him the traditional Cueca dance—solo, a hen without a rooster, he explains in the voice-over—and he sits and listens to them sing lines like, “I wonder always where they’re keeping you …” His voice does matter, it does carry further. For all that, the interaction seems so much more about Dorfman’s suffering than theirs.

Dorfman isn’t actually the most overwrought pontificator in the movie—that honor belongs to British actress Juliet Stevenson, whose presence seems to be due to having starred in the original London production of Death and the Maiden. She announces that Dorfman is “very free of class constraints, he’s very free of gender constraints.”

To be fair, the book is at its occasional best when it puts aside platitudes like “we are all exiles,” and admits the nuance of Dorfman’s particular exile, which includes his understanding that his place in politics is as a mouthpiece and not as an operative. Though as a young man he was drawn to Allende’s peaceful revolution, as an exile Dorfman “realized with mounting relief that I was not made out to be a full-time revolutionary.” Instead, he begins to see himself as “a public intellectual at the service of all forms of liberation.”

Dorfman’s role is possible because of his education and class. He is far from the first leftist intellectual to comprehend the contradiction between his revolutionary values and class privilege, but in post-dictatorship Chile, that contradiction has a new pain, which Dorfman describes through his relationship with a parking lot attendant:

Some distress in my eyes, or maybe the deference in which I treat him, must have disclosed that I’m a compañero, that once upon a time we strode together through streets we thought would always be free, but he can’t say compañero to me because the dictatorship has taught him not to use that word, and he won’t say señor to me because it would indicate that we are longer equals, not even in his and my recollection, so he has found the only word that lets him keep his memories unsullied, he calls me amigo, gracias, amigo, he says I’m his friend, attempting an impossible compromise between the joyous past and the squalid present.

The successive murmurings separated by commas, the fixation on language, the suffusion of regret—these are all quintessential Dorfman, and what he does well. And yet we also can’t escape hearing that he is nicer to the poor, which is the kind of literary humble-brag to which the author is often prone.

Dorfman’s role as a revolutionary is also circumscribed by the inescapability of his being identifiably European in a society stratified by color. (He never specifically discusses his Jewishness, at least not here.) Of course, his white skin is not always an advantage; in 1986, at an anti-Pinochet demonstration in Santiago timed to the appearance of Halley’s comet, Dorfman is knocked down and kicked by soldiers and then held at the point of a submachine gun. He writes, “Though I was five meters away from death I couldn’t stop intellectualizing, during those seconds I allowed myself to become acutely cognizant of the divide between us: he was poor and uneducated and I was well-to-do and deft with Western words; he was of Indian ancestry and my folks noticeably came from somewhere else. … I wondered if, now that the tables had turned, he would make me pay for those centuries of neglect.” He did not. But years later, Dorfman’s son Rodrigo managed to talk himself out of prison by brazenly telling a lone white policeman: “You’re white, I’m white. You have blue eyes, I have green eyes. You don’t belong here, I don’t belong here.” Rodrigo subsequently left the country rather than play that card again. And his father eventually realizes he, too, can never return permanently to Chile.

The privilege inherent in his childhood mastery of the English language was another asset that Dorfman was at first reluctant to use. He tried throughout his life to repudiate or subsume his mastery of English, only to realize it was his economic salvation and a powerful tool for getting the revolutionary message out. (The same would eventually be true for accepting U.S. citizenship.) And the further his words went, the closer he became to “the prosperous Chileans … who have profited from Pinochet’s modernization than I am to the impoverished victims toiling like members of a chain gang, the workers I had once called my comrades,” even as the continued rule of Pinochet allowed him to blame everything, up to a broken-down car in a blizzard, on the dictator. The comforts and mobility offered by Norte America, along with Chile’s right-wing intransigence, made him a permanent exile, but it also made him a Latino, linking him to parking attendants and intellectuals from all points south. (The memoir is written in English, though a note in the timeline at the end of the book indicates he’ll “rewrite” it in Spanish.)

More vivid than vague pronouncements about homelessness and exile is the specificity of Dorfman’s portrait of a Chile largely celebrated by the world for betraying the social and economic ideals Allende stood for—a country that remains profoundly socially conservative and whose critical establishment rejected Dorfman’s consummate work, Death and the Maiden. When he wrote that play, he was reacting to a place made up of “an uneasy alliance between those who wanted to forget the past because it was full of their crimes and those who wanted to forget it because it was too painful.” This is where having been gone all those years provides true clarity—and both conveniently and importantly, frees him from any need to have compromised himself to get through daily life. These sharp, specific observations mean more than his grandiose attempts to cast himself as a universal voice for the oppressed.

Early on, Dorfman describes the son of a Communist family friend who back in the sixties moved to a shack in a Santiago slum out of solidarity, only to return home with typhoid. Dorfman’s father “used the occasion to drill a sobering lesson into me: ‘The poor don’t want you to be miserable like them; they want a chance to live decently, to have some say in their life. They want you to help them eliminate the conditions which created that misery.’ ” This useful message might be extended to the book itself: Those left behind probably don’t want you to say that you’re their voice or that you’re the same as them, even as op-eds and the benefit concerts and documentaries and memoirs might give them a better shot at having their own say.

All too often, Dorfman prefers the universal and the ponderous, a tendency that generates the kind of response captured by New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood when he wrote of Widows that it was “the kind of play that makes you feel bad for being bored.” The conclusion of Feeding on Dreams is, straight-facedly, “We are all in this together. Maybe that is why I am writing this memoir, why it may matter to draw some lessons from a life so full of wanderings and conflicts. So I can send out this plea, teach this incredibly simple conclusion: We must trust one another.” Bromides like this may have helped make Dorfman popular in a United States that is usually indifferent to Latin America unless its products come packaged in magic or pat spiritualism. Dorfman’s cheesy universalism is something different: neither politically accurate nor compelling to read.

Traveling by train to Budapest, Hungary, from Vienna in the summer of 1980, Pfeifer was questioned by a female customs official who entered his compartment and asked him politely if he had anything to declare. Pfeifer replied that he did not, but the official looked inside his bag, where she found several dozen photocopies of a review of the memoir Seven Thousand Days in Siberia by Karlo Stajner, published in a Hungarian-language Yugoslavian newspaper. An Austrian-born, Croatian Communist, Stajner had traveled to Moscow in 1932 with dreams of building the international socialist revolution. But like so many others, he became a victim of the cold realities of Stalinist paranoia and was condemned to the gulag.

“I’m going to take away this dirt,” the border official told Pfeifer.

“I draw your attention to the fact that this is not dirt,” Pfeifer calmly replied in Hungarian, a language he’d had learned while living in Budapest from 1938 until fleeing for Palestine in 1943. “This comes from the official paper of the Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia,” he said, in which bristling critiques of the Soviet system were not uncommon.

Thus began Pfeifer’s troubles with the Hungarian Communist regime. (He would later discover from Austrian diplomats briefed about the circumstances that it was his use of the phrase “I draw your attention” and not “I beg to draw your attention” that drew the customs officer’s ire.) Pfeifer was taken off the train and brought to the customs station, where a higher-ranking officer informed him that he had “provoked” the official and would be deported back to Austria. Told that the Hungarian government would pay for his return ticket, he replied: “Finally, at 51 years of age, the Hungarian state pays something for me? Very good.”

Until his final deportation from the country in 1987, Pfeifer acted as a courier between Hungary’s dissidents and the West. “Through Karl Pfeifer we obtained real, normal contact with the democratic, liberal, outside world,” Attila Ara-Kovacs, a Hungarian dissident, said in a 2008 interview for an Austrian documentary about Pfeifer’s life, Somehow in Between. “This contact was very important for us. It naturally changed our lives.”

Pfeifer’s courier work started in May 1979, when a friend in Vienna asked him to deliver medicines to acquaintances in Budapest. Meeting those Budapest acquaintances, a group of sociologists, Pfeifer remarked that Hungary, then practicing a form of “goulash communism”—which allowed for a small degree of private enterprise, greater personal liberties, and easier travel to the West—was “quite free for a communist country.” Afterward, one of the sociologists, Tamás Földvári, took Pfeifer outside and said that his impression of Hungary was false. For instance, he said, workers in rural areas who complained about conditions were targeted for physical violence by the secret police.

Back in Vienna, Pfeifer got in touch with the editor of the social democratic newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung, or Worker’s News, who expressed interest in having Pfeifer publish dispatches from Hungary. Writing under the pseudonym Peter Koroly, Pfeifer began traveling back and forth to Budapest, banging out stories on his Hermes Baby typewriter about everything from the country’s periodic economic crises to the tide of young men refusing military service.

In 1982, two years after that first deportation from the Hungarian train, Pfeifer became editor of Die Gemeinde, or The Community, Vienna’s Jewish newspaper. Pfeifer, whose youthful energy belies his 83 years, told me recently at a Vienna café that this assignment changed his situation, “insofar as for the Austrians it was very uncomfortable” that he be denied entry to a neighboring country. Pfeifer sent a letter of protest to Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, an assimilated Jew who nonetheless had former Nazis in his Cabinet. “I said, ‘Look, Waffen SS men, Arrow Cross men”—from the far right Hungarian party—“can go to Hungary. They get a visa, and I have family that are survivors and I cannot get in. It’s against human rights.’ ” Soon after sending the letter, Pfeifer got his visa.

Because the Hungarian regime of János Kádár was trying to present itself as practicing a more reformed version of communism, it tolerated Pfeifer entering the country. But that didn’t stop authorities from deporting him three more times over the ensuing years. “The more they did it, the more I hated their guts,” he told me. The last straw was a 1987 meeting in Budapest with a high-ranking official from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, who informed Pfeifer that the Hungarian government would no longer allow him to meet with any members of the opposition. Pfeifer responded that, as “a modest Austrian journalist and not a Hungarian policeman,” he did not know whether the Hungarians he interviewed were members of the opposition. “Would you be so kind as to give me a written list and I promise you I won’t meet anybody on the list?” he asked. This sly retort led to Pfeifer’s last expulsion. When Hungary opened the archives of its Communist-era secret police following the democratic transition in 1991, Pfeifer discovered that he had a 100-page file in which regime agents accused him of “ideological subversion,” an allegation that today makes him “incredibly proud,” he told me.

Anti-Semitism was not, at least initially, a major concern for Pfeifer in his early journalism about Hungary. “I was of the opinion that this problem had more or less solved itself in the people’s republics,” he recounts in the documentary. “Whereby I was terribly wrong.” In 1982, he decided to report on the 100th anniversary of the “Tiszaeszlár Affair,” an incident involving the disappearance of a young Christian girl in a northern Hungarian village that had led to a Jewish blood libel, pogroms, and the formation of a political faction called the National Anti-Semitic Party. Meeting with a high-level official in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Pfeifer was told, “We won’t allow you to import anti-Semitism from Austria to Hungary. We have solved this problem once and for all in 1945.”

Living under regimes that denied the particularly Jewish aspects of the Holocaust and the continuing evils of anti-Semitism within their own societies, the people of the Eastern Bloc did not experience, in the same way Western Europeans did, the decades-long, postwar process of atonement and recognition for the crimes committed against their Jewish populations. This is the battle for historical truth that Pfeifer has fought for decades.

***

Born in the Austrian spa town of Baden bei Wien to Hungarian parents in 1928, Karl Pfiefer fled with his family to Hungary following the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. In Budapest, Pfeifer was recruited into the Hashomir Hatzair socialist Zionist youth movement. Paradoxically, he believes that the anti-Semitism he experienced as a young boy saved him from a far worse fate. “Somehow, one has to be thankful for Austrian anti-Semitism,” Pfeifer says with a chuckle in Somehow in Between. “Of the 180,000 [Austrian] Jews, 120,000 fled thanks to Austrian anti-Semitism.”

Things were not much better in Budapest. “In Hungary, people had illusions,” he says in the film. Every morning, students in his Jewish school rose to recite a nationalistic poem, which went something along the lines of, “I believe in one homeland. I believe in one God. I believe in a divine justice. I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” That “resurrection” was a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the post-World War I agreement that broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and left about a third of ethnic Hungarians living outside the Hungarian successor state and that remains a curse word among latter-day Hungarian nationalists. “I always said it the other way round,” Pfeifer recalls in Somehow in Between. “I do not believe in one God. I do not believe in divine justice. And I certainly do not believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” Pfeifer’s ardent Zionism and disavowal of Hungarian identity led to fierce fights with his father, who beat him repeatedly.

Continue reading: “Nazi tones,” a controversial suicide, and the new Hungarian right. Or view as a single page.

But how is Luxemburg relevant to Jewish history? And what, if anything, would she have to say to Sarah Palin and her Tea Party supporters? The critic and essayist Vivian Gornick joined Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz to discuss these questions in the first installment of Long Story Short, a new monthly podcast about the people, places, and ideas that have shaped Jewish life and history. Each installment will focus on a different subject—from the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi to the 20th century’s princes of punk, the Ramones—and will feature a wide array of thinkers, artists, historians, and intellectuals.

The conversations, leisurely and long, are recorded in Leibovitz’s living room over a bottle of wine and are designed as the antithesis to haste, hype, and the other vulgarities that plague our popular culture. The podcast owes a great debt to the BBC’s long-running show In Our Time, with which it shares the belief that ideas matter, and that rather than be marketed, condensed, tweaked, trivialized, or bowdlerized, they should be passionately discussed. [Running time: 42:27.]

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It seems that every year since has brought new revelations about the Rosenberg case and reignites a debate about the meaning of the couple’s actions, the extent of what they actually did or did not do, and whether their actions did real harm to national security. Moreover, many of the Rosenbergs’ supporters still believe, as they did at the time, that the couple were innocent and made into scapegoats for America’s loss of its atomic monopoly.

The truth is that for those who accept evidence and reason, the debate should be over. Beginning with the first release in 1995 of the Venona decrypts of KGB messages to their agents in the United States, it became clear to even the most resolute doubters not only that Julius Rosenberg was a KGB agent who put together and ran an espionage ring made up of college friends who had become engineers or scientists but that his wife, Ethel, knew of and supported his activities. So, the question must be asked: Why did so many ignore the plain evidence of the Rosenbergs’ guilt? And why do so many continue to argue that the Rosenbergs were framed by the U.S. government?

The Rosenberg case was a family affair—almost everyone involved was Jewish: the Rosenbergs and the Greenglasses, those who became government witnesses against the two couples, as well as the prosecutors, Myles Lane, Irving Saypol, and Roy Cohn, and the justice who presided at the trial, Kaufman. The trial took place in New York City, which had the largest Jewish population in the world and where many Jews were still adherents of the leftist beliefs they imbibed along with their mother’s milk from the days of FDR and the Popular Front. Many in the Jewish community feared being branded as traitors. It is no wonder that the American Jewish Committee and the various groups that fought anti-Semitism at home kept their distance from the case, proclaimed that the couple was guilty, and did not join the pleas from all over the world for President Dwight Eisenhower to commute the Rosenbergs’ death sentence.

Indeed, Lucy Dawidowicz, the late scholar of Hitler’s war against the Jews, wrote in the socialist anti-Communist newspaper the New Leader that the American Communist Party was trying to use the Jews in its “war against America,” and hence no Jew who understood that should be involved in an effort to gain clemency for the condemned couple. Anti-Communists should not only oppose clemency, she argued, but should hope that the Rosenbergs’ lives would not be spared, because if judges backed away from imposing the ultimate penalty on them, it would mean America had caved in to the Party’s “moral blackmail.”

In 1983, The Rosenberg File, a book I had co-authored with the late Joyce Milton, was published. That year, Robert Leiter, then as now an editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, wrote that “one aspect of the case—its particular ‘Jewishness’—has, in all but the rarest instances, escaped wider discussion.” Commentators, he wrote, “have avoided coming to grips with it.” The concern at the time of the trial was most clearly expressed by an aide to the AJC’s executive director, who wrote a memo about their fear that “the non-Jewish public may generalize from these activities and impute to the Jews as a group treasonable motives and activities.” Jury members were aware of the issue. The foreman of the all-gentile jury told the press that “I felt good that this was strictly a Jewish show. It was Jews against Jews,” and, as he put it, “it wasn’t the Christians against the Jews.”

On the left, the Communists and their allies did all they could to attribute the indictment and trial of the Rosenbergs to anti-Semitism, which fit with their assertion—as hard as it is to believe today—that the Truman Administration was leading America toward a home-grown version of Fascism. Moreover, the Rosenberg trial coincided with the actual anti-Semitic trial of the former Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership—most of whom were Jewish. Almost all of the defendants in that trial were found guilty of spying for the United States and the Zionists and, after confessions forced by brutal torture, were hanged to death. By focusing on the Rosenbergs as victims of American fascism and anti-Semitism, the Soviets hoped to deflect attention away from what they were doing in their own bloc.

Thus the Old Left newspaper that began the first Rosenberg defense efforts, the National Guardian, explained that it was “nonsensical” to view the Slansky trial as anti-Semitic, because “in Prague the defendants have confessed in open court while the Rosenbergs still proclaim their innocence.” The newspaper went on to note that the Czech prosecutor “presented photostats and documents to support the accusations.” It is no wonder that the independent leftist journalist I.F. Stone—who believed the Rosenbergs were probably guilty (possibly because decades earlier he had himself signed on to work for Soviet intelligence)—wrote that “no picket lines circled the Kremlin to protest the execution of Jewish writers and artists; they did not even have a day in court; they just disappeared. Slansky was executed overnight without appeal in Prague. How the same people could excuse Slansky and [Stalin’s] anti-Semitic ‘doctor’s plot’ and at the same time carry on the Rosenberg campaign as they did calls for political psychiatry.”

Today, so many decades later, the descendants of the people who proclaimed the Rosenbergs’ innocence have now begun yet another campaign to rehabilitate them. They now argue that although it appears Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy after all, he gave little of value to the Soviets, was motivated by the desire to stave off atomic war, and in any case had nothing to do with handing over atomic information of any kind to the Soviet Union.

A new variation of this argument was penned recently by the activist historian and lawyer Staughton Lynd, writing in the Marxist journal Monthly Review, founded in 1949 by the late Leo Huberman and the late Paul M. Sweezy. I have written at length about Lynd’s article, but his argument can be easily summarized. Lynd now accepts as fact that Julius Rosenberg led a Soviet spy network, but he objects to what he calls the triumphalism of those like me who have asserted this for years. More important for Lynd is that the couple refused to “snitch,” therefore making themselves heroes. He maintains that their trial was a “sham,” and he argues that even if they were guilty, they must be viewed as unadulterated heroes. Why? Because, he actually writes, the couple had “obligations as Communists, and as citizens of the world.” So, to Lynd, the Rosenbergs’ obligation to spy for Joseph Stalin stands above any loyalty to their own country, not to speak of their willingness to make their own children orphans. Secondly, Lynd believes that if the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get the bomb, that “might have been justified,” since he believes Soviet strength stopped aggression by the American imperialists.

For years, the American Left argued that the Rosenbergs were framed and innocent. Now Lynd says they were guilty but that their actions were justified because they helped “preserve the peace of the world.” In effect, he is saying that instead of still attempting to prove the Rosenbergs were framed, we should celebrate them for being traitors to their own country. His argument reveals only the desperation some on the left have to descend to in order to maintain their view that the only guilty party was the United States.

The innocence of the Rosenbergs has long been a touchstone of the left, and attempts to discuss evidence suggesting their guilt have been assailed as appeasement of McCarthyism. Most recently, writing in the Nation, its former editor and publisher Victor Navasky endorsed the finding of the late Walter Schneir, who argued that the Rosenbergs were framed and innocent. Walter and Miriam Schneir’s 1965 Invitation to an Inquest was the textbook for this cause, and this strain of thought continues in the latest Schneir book, Final Verdict, published in 2010, after Walter Schneir’s death. The real spy, the Schneirs claim in a new twist, was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, who they claim acted on his own and in return for his cooperation with prosecutors got off with a 15-year sentence. Never mind that in their original conspiracy book the Schneirs argued that Greenglass never engaged in espionage at all and did not hand anything over to Rosenberg’s courier, Harry Gold, who made up his entire testimony. Schneir and Navasky also ignore the incontrovertible fact that Julius Rosenberg, at Ethel’s request, recruited David Greenglass into his network.

Steven Usdin and I answered Navasky’s charges in an article appearing in the New Republic’s website last December, and I wrote a critical review of Walter Schneir’s Final Verdict that appeared in Commentary. Other publications presenting detailed and incontrovertible proof of the Rosenbergs’ guilt are The Rosenberg File; the 1995 release of the National Security Agency’s decryptions of World War II KGB cables (21 of which report on Julius’ espionage); the 2001 autobiography of Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg’s KGB controller; and Steven Usdin’s 2005 book, Engineering Communism, which laid out the enormous extent of the Rosenberg ring’s espionage in the field of military technology. Although it is not freely available online, Usdin’s article “The Rosenberg Ring’s Continued Impact,” in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, is the single most complete source for an overview of the damage the couple did to America’s national security and a detailed account of what the Soviets got from the network. There are no more lingering doubts about the Rosenbergs’ “culpability”—except in the precincts of the dwindling true believers.

Continue reading: the Meeropols, dark secrets, and “I did it for the Soviet Union.” Or view as a single page.

Each change of regime, each military campaign, brought death on a massive scale—from combat, but still more from imprisonment, massacre, deportation, and deliberate starvation. Between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed in this region. As Timothy Snyder emphasizes in his important new history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, $29.95), this fantastic figure does not include combatants, even though half of all the soldiers killed in the Second World War, on all fronts around the globe, died in Eastern Europe.

What it does include, of course, are the 5 to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, which took place exactly in the region that Snyder designates “the bloodlands.” Something like 40 percent of the civilians killed in the bloodlands were Jewish victims of the Germans and their collaborators. Or, as Snyder writes in another attempt to put the Jewish experience in perspective, “Jews were less than two percent of the population [of the USSR] and Russians more than half; [yet] the Germans murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.”

“Jews were in a category of their own,” Snyder goes on to write. The language of history reflects this: We speak of the Holocaust as a unique event, in some way different from the mass killing that took place all around it. One of Snyder’s major achievements in Bloodlands is to preserve this sense of the singularity of Jewish experience, even while showing its complex relationship to the terrible experiences of the peoples among whom Jews lived. This is notoriously a very difficult thing for historians to do, and the ground Snyder covers in this book has often been the source of controversy and recrimination. To Jews, any attempt to put the Holocaust “in context” can sound like an attempt to diminish its importance, to relativize it.

Jews have also been troubled by any emphasis on the suffering of other nations under Hitler—of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians—because collaborators of all these nationalities played a crucial role in the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust could not have happened without the participation of the Slavs. To take just one of the countless illuminating statistics in Bloodlands: In Lithuania, the German unit (Einsatzkommando) in charge of killing the Jews of Kaunas “numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four.” Yet between June and December of 1941, such small units managed to kill 114,856 Lithuanian Jews. Clearly, the work of killing was done mainly by native Lithuanians: The Nazis “had as many helpers as [they] needed,” Snyder writes.

Yet Snyder also does justice to the experiences of the Slavic peoples, which were often as terrible as the fate suffered by Jews. The first chapter in Bloodlands is titled “The Soviet Famines,” and it centers on Ukraine in 1932-33, where more than 3.3 million people died of starvation. This is half as many as died in the Holocaust; and while they died of hunger, rather than gassing or shooting, they were deliberately killed by Stalin just as surely as the Jews were by Hitler. Snyder explains why and how, “facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.”

The reason was, first, economic. Intent on industrializing the Soviet economy, the Communists seized food from the peasants of Ukraine—the Soviet Union’s “breadbasket”—in order to sell it abroad, thus earning the money to pay for foreign technology and industrial equipment. In other words, there was never really a food shortage in the USSR; Stalin could have stopped the famine simply by stopping food exports. Adherence to Marxist ideology—which saw the urban proletariat as a more revolutionary class than the rural peasantry—led Stalin to make war on one section of his own population. In this way, Snyder shows, Communism led to the same kind of ideologically inspired killing as Nazism, though the victims were defined more by class than by ethnicity.

Yet Stalin did also practice what Snyder calls “National Terror,” in addition to “Class Terror.” He persecuted the Poles of the Soviet Union because of his fear of Poland, against which the USSR had fought a war in 1920, and the secret police fed these fears by inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories about Polish espionage. In 1937-38, during the Great Terror, almost 700,000 Soviet citizens were killed; of these, 85,000 were Poles, even though Poles made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Soviet population. Similar atrocities were directed against Lithuanians, Koreans, and other peoples who could theoretically look to a foreign state as a protector. Snyder convincingly argues, in the last chapter of Bloodlands, that the resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism after 1948 can be seen as a late example of this kind of national terror. Once the Jews of the USSR could look to Israel as a homeland, Stalin began to see them as another potential threat. Before he died, in 1953, he encouraged the concoction of the “Doctors’ Plot,” which accused Jewish doctors of medically murdering high-placed Soviet officials—possibly as a prelude to another mass purge.

The relationship between Jews and Communism is probably the most explosive of all the subjects Snyder addresses, and here he benefits most from the strengths he shows throughout the book—deep learning, wide compassion, and clear, careful moral judgment. To this day, there are some in Eastern Europe who continue to minimize, or explain, or even justify the Holocaust by pointing to the atrocities inflicted on their own peoples by so-called Jewish Communists. Snyder shows the reasons why this line of argument has found adherents, especially in the war years. It was never true that most, or even many, Jews were Communists; but it is true that many prominent Communists were Jews. Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet foreign minister during the 1930s, was Jewish—Stalin dismissed him in 1939 when he made his alliance with Hitler, in deference to Nazi anti-Semitism. Lazar Kaganovich was one of Stalin’s most loyal enforcers and played a major role in both the Ukrainian famine and the Terror.

Jews were also disproportionately represented in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. There were historical reasons for this, which Snyder might have stated more explicitly: It was the experience of Tsarist anti-Semitism that led so many Jews to feel that Communism was their best hope. But in the 1930s, the association of Communism with Jews—fed by Hitler’s propaganda, which referred incessantly to “Judeo-Bolshevism”—made it dangerously easy for many Eastern Europeans to see patriotism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism as part of the same package. The fact that one of the last acts of the Soviet regime in Poland and the Baltics, before the Germans arrived in 1941, was to massacre political prisoners only added fuel to the flames. By the time the Nazis arrived, these conditions made many Balts and Slavs feel that killing Jews was somehow striking a blow for their national dignity.

While Snyder explains the feelings behind this view, he also scrupulously shows that it was factually baseless. There was, of course, no connection between massacring Jewish women and children and resisting Soviet power. What’s more, Soviet Communists were themselves active persecutors of Jews, especially in Poland. As Yehuda Bauer showed in his recent study The Death of the Shtetl, Soviet rule everywhere destroyed Jewish civilization: No one was more viciously opposed to Judaism and Jewish culture than Jewish Communists. And, of course, only a small fraction of Jews were Communists at any time, in any sense; more were socialists or Zionists. Still, the association of Jews and Communism lingered even after the war, when some of the Communist rulers imposed by Stalin on Eastern Europe were Jews.

Lithuanian or Ukrainian nationalists who helped the Germans kill Jews, hoping that it would serve their own causes, were quickly disabused. When Snyder turns from the Soviet to the Nazi side of the story, he shows that the Holocaust of the Jews was not the only genocide the Nazis had in mind. They had similar plans for the whole of Eastern Europe, involving the mass murder and starvation of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. In accordance with Nazi racial theory, these peoples were to be reduced to slavery, in the service of German settlers who would turn the whole of Eastern Europe into an Aryan agricultural empire. If the German Army had captured Moscow in the fall of 1941, knocking the USSR out of the war as Hitler intended, the Nazis planned to starve 30 million people to death so the invaders could feed themselves.

When the invasion stalled, the Nazis decided to focus on the one aspect of their “utopia” it was still in their power to achieve: the extermination of the Jews. “The Final Solution,” Snyder writes, “was the one atrocity that took on a more radical form in the realization than in the conception. Soviet Jews were supposed to work themselves to death building a German empire or be deported further east. This proved impossible; [so] most Jews in the East were killed where they lived.” Four of Snyder’s 11 chapters are devoted primarily to the Holocaust, a measure of how central it was to the fate of the “bloodlands.” Indeed, anyone who wants to fully comprehend the Holocaust—at least, as far as it can be comprehended—should read Bloodlands, which shows how much evil had to be done in order to make the ultimate evil possible.

Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

Yiddish poetry was once popular enough to make its way into the pages of major daily newspapers, where it shared space with reporting on politicians, criminals, and the feats of athletes, among other prosaic matters. Yiddish poets sometimes became minor celebrities, drawing large audiences to their readings.

Like the vast majority of the language’s literary figures in the late 19th and early 20th century, these poets had excised themselves from Orthodoxy in order to live and work in environments unfettered by traditional mores. Their productivity kept pace with changes and explosions in other fields—art, literature, and politics attracting young people and sometimes wooing those young away from Orthodoxy. Though many Orthodox Jews were threatened by the new Yiddish papers and literary journals that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they did not all turn away from the new media of the day. Some religious leaders saw the need to allow a measure of cultural permeability, especially after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, when a slew of new Yiddish papers were founded, lest modern art forms and print media lure community members away altogether.

One such figure was the Gerer Rebbe, a forward-thinking rabbi in charge of one of Poland’s largest Hasidic courts. In 1907, he gave the first religious dispensation for a newspaper to serve Orthodoxy, easing tension between tradition and a burgeoning press. He was also among those who founded Agudas Yisroel, the first Orthodox political party, in 1912. Though slowly, modernity was insinuating itself into traditional Jewish life, and the Gerer Rebbe showed that if Orthodox groups failed to adapt to the times, they would continue to bleed adherents.

For some people, the compulsion to write is as powerful as it is unavoidable, and a number of Orthodox writers—those willing to compose prose and poetry within the parameters of traditional Jewish life and law—began to appear in the pages of the newly minted religious press and in tiny literary journals during the 1920s. Many yeshiva kids revered these writers for being able to remain within tradition’s boundaries while writing modern poetry and prose.

One such poet was Shmuel Nadler, profiled in Beatrice Lang Caplan’s excellent essay in a recent anthology, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon. Nadler was born in 1908 into a Hasidic family in a shtetl in Galicia, went to heder and yeshiva, but also studied in a public high school. Considered an excellent pupil, he studied at the Lublin Yeshiva with Rabbi Meyer Shapiro, renowned for having developed the daf yomi, or “page a day,” system, still in use, for Talmud study. Nadler took the unusual step of writing poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew, then considered somewhat daring; in Orthodox circles Hebrew was a holy language to be used for liturgical purposes. In addition, he contributed poems to several literary, political, and socially oriented journals such as Ortodoksishe Yungt Bleter and Beyz-Yankev.

In 1933, Nadler published Besht-symfoniye, the Baal Shem Tov Symphony, which mixed both prose and poetry as well as tradition and modernity in a paean to the founder of Hasidism.

A glowing sun
You have hung upon the skies,
Red roses,
Grass green,
And the trees and I
Draw strength from the sun’s burning.
Praised be God
Creator of Light.

(translated by Beatrice Lang Caplan)

Nadler also included, Lang notes, veiled hints at disbelief and disobedience, pushing the limits of what Orthodoxy would allow.

And though Nadler, the so-called “court poet of the Aguda,” was very much the darling of young religious readers who found him artistically appealing while maintaining some fidelity to traditional parameters, older readers, those who oversaw literary production at the Aguda-run newspapers and journals, were vexed by him.

Meantime, Nadler’s worm had turned, and by the end of 1933, he’d cut off his beard and peyes and left the religious world. His poems, with a distinctly left-wing political sensibility, advocating Communism, began to find their way into publications religious kids were not supposed to read—papers like the Lodz-based Communist journal Literarishe Tribune, where his poems shared space with ideologues like Isaac Deutscher.

Differences between Nadler and his Aguda handlers came to a head in late December 1933, when the party leaders meddled in a performance of the traditional play The Sale of Joseph, meant to be a fundraiser for Khinukh, an Aguda-run educational youth organization. Aguda leaders demanded that the actors in the play be either boys or girls, but not both. Mixing was mukste, or forbidden. They also demanded that the audience be divided by a mekhitse. In the end, neither the play’s directors at Khinukh nor the authorities at Aguda would budge, and the antagonism between them led to the performance’s cancellation.

Nadler, who wasn’t involved in the matter, was nevertheless furious at the meddling and angrily criticized the Aguda for putting its nose where it didn’t belong. He went on to attack Aguda representatives for their lack of action in Palestine, though he did not specify what that action should have been. As reported in the Yiddish daily Moment, Nadler’s grievances were news to the Aguda, and they were shocked by the acerbic provocations on the part of their “court poet.”

But Nadler’s criticisms were just an appetizer. In what seemed like an overnight transformation, he publicly announced that he had become a Communist, shocking everyone. The week after the Khinukh incident, in early January 1934, he gave a lecture at the Warsaw Jewish Literary Union in which he intended to explain his move from God to man. The hall was packed with young people—Hasidic and Communist alike. It was an uneasy mix, and furious arguments broke out between the two groups.

The Hasidim harangued Nadler the turncoat while the proletarians tried dragging them out of the hall. The two sides screamed and pushed and shoved each other until wild fistfights broke out. For his part, Nadler tried to read his text, to explain his exit from the world of Orthodoxy, which had apparently been a long time coming, but he was constantly interrupted by howling catcalls.

Amid the ruckus, a strange thing occurred. A young Hasid who looked remarkably like Nadler mounted the stage and awkwardly approached the poet, screaming in his face, “Akher! For me you are dead,” referencing the Talmudic figure, Elisha ben Abuya, who is said to have gone into pardes, paradise, and became an atheist. The young man began sobbing hysterically, tore his jacket, and collapsed to the floor, silencing the audience. The hysteric turned out to be Nadler’s brother, with whom he had studied in the Lublin Yeshiva, and who was now a rabbi in a Galician shtetl. Nadler’s transformation, in the mind of the brother, was a transgression so colossal that Nadler the poet had to be considered dead. Nadler the rabbi had, right then, begun the process of mourning.

According to Moment’s reporter, the reading was a complete fiasco, brought to an end with the onstage breakup of the Nadler brothers. The crowd dispersed shortly thereafter.

Nadler the poet didn’t stick around either. Immediately after the episode in the Warsaw Literary Union, he left for Paris to work for Di Naye prese, a new Communist Yiddish paper, and eventually became its editor, dropping the heavily biblical “Shmuel” for his nickname, “Munye.”

The last work he published in Warsaw was his Baal Shem Tov Symphony, a mix of Hasidic tales and poetry. Appearing just before he made his public break with tradition, it offered the following:

And to the believer—such goodness for he who believes
In the holy tsadik and the protection he offers,
And who attaches himself to the one above, in thanks and in praise,
When his prayer is realized.

And he who knows that justice will break his solitude
Will never be the man to stumble,
We should all be so privileged to make it
To the redemption in once piece, Amen.

When Nadler got to Paris, his style changed in both tone and content. In the1934 poem “I Didn’t Get My Revolutionary Newspaper Today,” he wrote:

I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today,
I waited fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour
And the postman finally said to me: no way.
My revolutionary newspaper, you didn’t show up.

Not here …  I know, my dear, you did not betray me.
Someone pointed you out, a reactionary, no doubt,
And had a policeman shut your powerful mouth.
I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today.

When World War II broke out and the Nazis occupied Paris, Nadler was still there. It wasn’t the safest place for a Jew or a Communist, but Nadler remained true to his revolutionary ideals and published underground French and Yiddish newspapers during the occupation. By summer of 1942, when it got really hot for the Jews in Vichy France, the Nazis caught and executed him, bringing the story of Shmuel Nadler to a close. He shared his radical attitude toward tradition while facing his own demise in a poem quoted in a Yizkor book for Yiddish writers in Paris:

You shouldn’t say Kaddish at my grave,
And don’t light candles for my soul,
This flourishing, fruitful life
Is our purpose on the earth

That path is the Communist —> anti-Communist —> hawkish —> outright conservative trajectory that broadly defines a certain generation of what we call neoconservatives. The recently departed Irving Kristol and the very much still alive and vigorous Norman Podhoretz both did this (though Podhoretz was never so far left); Kristol, who made his rightward turn in response to the New Left of the late 1960s, might be consider the archetypal neocon.

Beichman, though, was anti-Communist by the ‘40s, and on the right not long after: in other words, well before Kristol, Podhoretz, and the rest. (Others turned away from Communism around the time that Beichman did, but stayed liberal, not continuing over to the right-wing side of the ideological spectrum.) In that sense, Kristol, Podhoretz, and the many who came after them owe Beichman a good chunk of their paychecks.

What’s left are the stories. Here are two.

First, from David Brooks, is a glimpse into the milieu of the New York Intellectuals:

One afternoon, Beichman was walking home when his wife Carroll came rushing out onto the street saying that Diana Trilling had just called, and Arnold should hurry over to Commentary editor Eliot Cohen’s apartment, for something terrible had happened. Beichman arrived to find that Cohen had committed suicide by placing a plastic bag over his head. His body was lying in the kitchen. Soon word spread, and people started pouring into the apartment. Shocked by the sight of the body, they started drinking. The body could not be moved until the coroner arrived, but friends kept arriving, pouring themselves cocktails, and even bringing in roast beef sandwiches. At first, the conversation was about Cohen, but then it drifted to so and so’s review of such and such, and so and so’s essay about this and that. “It became like an unusual cocktail party,” Beichman remembers, with Cohen’s body there in the kitchen.

Those were the days!

And, from the magazine of Beichman’s alma mater, Columbia College, in an excellent profile by Margaret Hunt Gram, we get this tale of what life was like for the editor-in-chief of the campus daily at a party in, I can’t resist mentioning, my own freshman dorm:

With Hitler in power in Germany and tensions running high, Columbia’s Jewish Students’ Society held a dance that year in John Jay Hall to celebrate Purim. As soon as the lights went low, a group of fraternity members crept onto the balcony over the dance floor and threw down handfuls of Swastikas, shouting ‘Down with the Jews.’ After the offending students fled the scene, the adviser of the Jewish Students’ Society found Beichman and asked him to keep Spectator from publishing the story, saying it would be damaging to Jewish students on campus.

Beichman recalls responding, “How can we not publish the story, which was seen by hundreds of people at a dance?” The story ran.

Arnold Beichman, Political Activist, Dies at 96 [NYT]
The Happy Cold Warrior [The Weekly Standard]
Arnold Beichman ’34: Anti-Communist Warrior [Columbia College Today]

The one place where Lester was “political” were his insistent pleas, first lodged over a decade before Jackie Robinson put on the uniform of Lester’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, that Major League Baseball allow blacks to play. In 1942, he wrote in an open letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis:

Negro soldiers and sailors are among those beloved heroes of the American people who have already died for the preservation of this country and everything this country stands for—yes, including the great game of baseball. You, the self-proclaimed ‘Czar’ of baseball, are the man responsible for keeping Jim Crow in our National Pastime. You are the one refusing to say the word which would do more to justify baseball’s existence in this year of war than any other single thing.

No, they don’t make ‘em like Rodney Lester anymore.

Lester Rodney, Early Fighter Against Racism in Sports, Dies at 98 [NYT]

To the small but influential group of his American admirers, Trotsky appeared as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi or George Washington, fighting for freedom against an evil empire. The problem, as Robert Service shows in his new biography Trotsky, is that Trotsky himself was one of the men chiefly responsible for that evil. In the October Revolution of 1917, he was second only to Lenin in leading the Bolshevik coup to success. In the years of civil war that followed, Trotsky, as commissar for the Red Army, designed the campaigns that inflicted horrific suffering on the civilian population of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. None of the Soviet leaders outdid him in zeal for collectivization and terror, or in his commitment to spreading the Communist revolution across Europe and the world. Service, one of the leading historians of the Soviet Union and the author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin, sums up his verdict on Trotsky this way: “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism.… He reveled in terror.”

How, then, did Trotsky become a symbol, to some of the most intelligent American leftists, of a more humane and democratic Communism? In part, as Service writes (and the Farrell essay demonstrates), it was because of “their naivety. They were blind to Trotsky’s contempt for their values…. Like spectators at a zoo, they felt sorry for a wounded beast.” But for the Jewish intellectuals who clustered around Partisan Review, he was an especially irresistible figure, since Trotsky himself was the most powerful Jewish intellectual who ever lived. While this part of Trotsky’s legacy is incidental to Service’s book, it is a significant chapter in the political history of American Jews, and Trotsky helps explain both the allure and the danger of the mass murderer who was affectionately known to his followers as “the Old Man.”

He was born in 1879 as Leiba Bronstein—the name Trotsky was a nom de guerre, like Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) and Stalin (Iosif Dzugashvili). Bronstein’s parents, unusually for Jews in the Russian Empire, were farmers; they belonged to a colony of Polish Jews who had settled in the Ukraine, as part of a czarist project for dispersing and assimilating the Jewish population. As Service shows at the beginning of his book, this meant that Bronstein “did not have a life associated mainly with fellow Jews.” His parents were not devout, and Leiba was sent to a Lutheran German school in Odessa.

Very quickly, like many young, secular Jews of his generation, Bronstein was drawn to the Communist revolutionary movement—partly out of Marxist idealism, partly out of disgust at the reactionary and anti-Semitic czarist government. He was only eighteen when he was arrested, with other members of his small, amateurish revolutionary cell, and exiled to Siberia. As with so many Russian radicals, however, Siberia was less a prison for Bronstein than a kind of finishing school. Bronstein married a fellow prisoner, Alexandra Sokolovskaya—also Jewish, like several other members of his cell—and had two children. He made contact with other Communists, and began to read the clandestine newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which he received hidden in the binding of an innocuous book.

Iskra was edited from London and Geneva by a group of Communists including Vladimir Lenin, and Bronstein decided he had to join them. With surprising ease, Trotsky—as he was now known on his forged or stolen passport—escaped from Siberia and crossed Europe, presenting himself in London as a new recruit to the cause. (It is ironic that, compared to the later brutality of the KGB and the Gulag, the czarist police system looks like benign neglect.)

It soon became clear that Trotsky was a brilliant writer: at their first meeting, Lenin greeted him with the words: “Ah, the Pen has arrived!” And it was by his pen that he became to known to revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, writing for Iskra and other illegal, but widely read, publications. In 1905, when the first Russian Revolution broke out, Trotsky smuggled himself back into St. Petersburg, where he discovered that he was equally magnetic as a platform orator. Still just 25, he became head of the Petersburg council, or Soviet; when the revolution was crushed, he was arrested again and escaped again.

By 1917, Trotsky’s peregrinations and expulsions had led him to New York, where he arrived “to a hero’s welcome among emigrant socialist sympathizers from the Russian Empire,” especially Jews—he wrote a series of articles for the Forverts, the socialist Yiddish daily. Indeed, one of the ironic themes of Service’s Trotsky is the way the revolutionary kept finding himself in Jewish milieux, despite his adamant refusal to claim a Jewish identity. As Service explains, in his chapter “Trotsky and the Jews,” he followed an orthodox Marxist line on matters of nationality and religion: “In his own eyes, he had ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins.” He detested Zionism and the Jewish socialist Bund. Yet it is striking how many of Trotsky’s closest comrades were non-Jewish Jews, just like himself. One might even say, though Service does not pursue the subject this far, that the aggressive rejection of Jewish particularity was the form in which Trotsky, and many Jews like him, lived their Jewishness.

When the czar was overthrown, in February 1917, Trotsky immediately began planning to get back to Russia, and he arrived at Petersburg’s Finland Station on May 4, a month after Lenin. Service traces the complex, ever-shifting circumstances of that revolutionary year, the advances and feints and retreats of the Bolsheviks, until they finally seized the capital, under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, in October. Then came the years of triumph and power and cruelty; and then came the great fall, which turned Trotsky the commissar into the socialist martyr described by Farrell.

Starting in 1923, as Lenin was crippled by strokes, Trotsky and Stalin waged a bureaucratic and propaganda war over who was entitled to succeed him. Trotsky entered the battle with many advantages. His highly visible role in the Civil War had made him iconic; he was still a brilliant and popular writer. Most important of all, he was Lenin’s own choice. The ailing leader dictated a “testament” in which he warned that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had the potential to split the Communist Party, and he came down firmly on Trotsky’s side: “Stalin is too crude and this inadequacy…becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.”

The real question, as Service convincingly frames it, is why Trotsky, given all these advantages, allowed Stalin to outmaneuver him so decisively—to the point that, by 1928, Trotsky had been stripped of office, expelled from the Party, and finally exiled from the USSR. Service concludes that Trotsky, perhaps unconsciously, did not really want to replace Lenin as sole leader of the country; that is why he “lacked the decisiveness for a concerted advance on power.” While Stalin expertly manipulated the Communist Party apparatus, packing the Politburo with his supporters, Trotsky remained aloof, arrogant, inflexible. When it came to making speeches to big crowds or writing scorching pamphlets, no one could beat Trotsky. When it came to making friends and allies, he could not be bothered.

And there was one other factor in Trotsky’s failure of will. In 1917, just after the revolution, Lenin had wanted to appoint him as Commissar for Internal Affairs, which would have made him head of the secret police. Trotsky refused, on the grounds that “it would be inappropriate for a Jew to take charge of the police in a society pervaded by anti-Semitism. If Jews were seen to be repressing Russians, a pogrom atmosphere might be provoked.” For the same reason, he initially resisted taking charge of the Red Army, and rejected the invitation to become Lenin’s second-in-command in 1922. “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang,” Service writes, and “Trotsky continued to believe that his own prominence in government, party and army did practical damage to the revolutionary cause.”

If Trotsky allowed Stalin to get the better of him at the crucial moment, it may have been because he still feared the consequences of a Jew heading the Soviet government. Of course, such scruples made no difference to the enemies of the Jews. By the time Hitler took to power, thanks in part to the Germans’ fear and hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Trotsky had long since been made a non-person in Stalin’s USSR. The rabbi who made the famous quip was right: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the price.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

That is a phrase I first read in Anne Applebaum’s book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which was published five years after the Wall came down. She likened Central Europe during communism to a lake frozen over by ice, and wrote of peering through the ice to see the countries and cultures that existed beneath the Soviet empire.

The person who taught me to see through the ice—or at least to try—was my wife and guide, Amity Shlaes. We had met on the foreign desk of the Wall Street Journal, where Amity’s assignment was to read the transcripts of broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain issued daily by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and to pick out from them newsworthy items for a weekly column.

In 1983, she spotted an item from Yugoslavia. It reported that something of a riot had occurred at a soccer game in Kosovo. The disturbance erupted after rowdies in the crowd began shouting “E-Ho, E-Ho.” They were rooting for the Maoist madman Enver Hoxa, the dictator of Albania. Amity told me that some analysts saw portents. “Yugoslavia can’t survive,” she said.

I suggested she write it up for the next day’s paper. She thought it was an awfully long reach to make on the basis of some football fans in Kosovo. When I pressed, she remonstrated, “You right-wingers are all the same.” But it was newspaper work, and she wrote the column. The clipping that resulted became, once Yugoslavia disintegrated, a memorable item in her scrapbook.

By the late 1980s, we were married and living in Brussels, on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War. One day Amity came into my office and closed the door, looked at me, and announced, “It’s over.” I thought, “What have I done?” Before I could actually say anything, she said, “The division of Europe, it’s over.” This was in July of 1988. The Russians and our side still had intermediate-range nuclear missiles pointed at each other all over the place. The ice looked frozen solid.

It turns out that she’d just read a piece in one of the provincial German newspapers saying that the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, was going to permit the Volga Germans, who had been living in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, to leave. Not only was Gorbachev prepared to let them leave, Amity told me, but they were going to go not to Communist East Germany but to West Germany. A receiving center was being set up for them at Friedland. She told me it was an astounding development, one that meant that the Kremlin had concluded the division of Europe could not be sustained.

“It’s over,” she repeated several times. “It’s over.”

Amity left immediately for Friedland, from which she cabled a dispatch about the refugees and what she called the “provocative way their arrival posed the question of reunification.”

Then things entered a quiescent phase, and by November 1989, I was back in the United States, working on the agreement to bring out the Forward in English.

On November 9, I boarded a plane to visit Amity in Brussels. When I got there, I found my secretary had left on my desk a message Amity had dictated by phone. “Remaining Berlin, Hotel Kempinski.” I rushed back to the airport and caught a flight to Dusseldorf, thence another into Berlin’s Tegel Airport, reaching the Kempinski’s lobby just in time to find Amity dashing for a bus for Checkpoint Charlie, a transit point between the free and the Communist side.

The evening before, at a live press conference, an East Berlin party functionary, Günter Schabowski, had been trying to explain some changes in the rules for exit visas. One description of it is contained in a piece last month by the Wall Street Journal. It describes how questioning by a German tabloid reporter and an Italian foreign correspondent got the hapless Schabowski flustered. My own viewing of the press conference suggests the key moment came when Daniel Johnson, then of the London Daily Telegraph and now the editor of Standpoint, asked what I have called the most consequential question ever asked at a press conference.

It was ten words: “Herr Schabowski, was wird mit der Berliner Mauer jetzt geschehen?” [“Mr. Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?”] Johnson’s account of the “Seven Minutes That Shook the World” is here. Poor Schabowski waffled. And because his waffling was being broadcast live, East Germans by the thousands and thousands began pouring out of their homes and heading for freedom. By the end of the evening, the division of Europe had, in the practical sense, ended.

When I found Amity at the Kempinski, it was 9 p.m. on November 10. We crossed over to the East side and spent the evening with dissident, pro-democracy East Germans. The enormity of what was happening hadn’t sunk in, and they were still pleading for photocopying machines and other tools of the democratic struggle. It was after midnight when we crossed back into Free Berlin, only to discover the crowds had swelled. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands were now in the streets, many holding tools and streaming toward the Wall. Someone gave us a rock-climbing hammer, and we spent the small hours of the morning chipping away at it like everyone else.

When we left Berlin that Sunday, we held hands in the taxi and talked of how it was the right moment to leave Europe to the Europeans and return to America. A piece that we’d chipped from the Berlin Wall is now embedded in the stone retaining wall of our garden in New York. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would be gone and Germany united—a reunification the prospect of which a resurgent Forward greeted with what it called “mixed emotions.”

Not that there was any lack of joy at the liberation of Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire. But the Zheleznovodsk summit, where the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and the Soviet party boss, Gorbachev, cut the deal that would lead to formal unification, proved to be an uneasy moment. Kohl was too bland, and Gorbachev lacked a democratic mandate to speak for Russia. When we think of what happened to the Jews of Europe, the Forward concluded, “the labors of our leaders will always look small.”

When the final papers were drawn up, there was one eloquent cri de coeur reflecting what so many of us were thinking. It came from Heinz Galinski, who after the war rebuilt the Jewish center in Fasanenstrasse and embedded within its walls parts of the famed synagogue. He protested the wording of the unification treaty. He wanted the documentation to contain, as it was characterized in the Forward, a “clearer expression of historical responsibility for Nazi war crimes.” He got nowhere, and when he went public at a press conference, Reuters described him as “visibly angry,” saying the chancellor had not even given him the dignity of an answer. Galinski died in 1992.

A few years ago, Amity and I took our children to Berlin, and one afternoon, we visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It includes—aside from the typewriter on which Charter 77 was written—several exhibits of the methods East Germans used to try to escape Communism by going over, under, or through the Wall. One is a flying contraption. Another is a car in which visitors are challenged to find a full-sized mannequin that has been secreted therein. A white booth that stood on our side of Checkpoint Charlie is now perched a few yards from the museum, in the middle of a street that bustles with commerce. I walked one of the boys over to show him the hut where GIs on duty kept warm as they guarded the entrance to the American sector and the plaza where, under the muzzles the guns of the Warsaw Pact, I had courted his mother. I tried to reassure him that in his time there would be new struggles in which he no doubt would throw himself. It happened to be an unforgettably cold day, and I pulled his collar up around his ears when I got to the part about the importance of not taking history for granted and remembering to look beneath the ice.

Jerusalem Woman Could Help Solve Rosa Luxemburg Mystery [Haaretz]

When Bush administration figures like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle urged America to fight Islamic fundamentalism and build democracy in Iraq, and when Jewish liberals, in turn, denounced those figures as neoconservatives, they were reenacting some of the same battles the New York intellectuals fought seventy years ago, when the combatants were called anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists. Indeed, as Kimmage notes, the label neoconservative—which in the last decade has become almost a kind of anti-Semitic code word—was coined in 1943 by Dwight Macdonald, a charter member of the New York intellectuals, to describe former leftists who had abandoned their radical aspirations.

There is no shortage of books about the New York intellectuals—the mostly Jewish circle of writers clustered around Partisan Review—and their ideological schisms. But Kimmage offers a new perspective on this familiar story by focusing on an unlikely pair of protagonists. Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers could not have been more different in terms of personality and background. Trilling, the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, was a quintessential New Yorker, who spent his whole career at Columbia University; Chambers, a WASP from Long Island, came to see New York as a symbol of America’s decadence, preferring to live on a remote farm in Maryland. Trilling wrote magisterial literary essays for Partisan Review; Chambers wrote blunt polemical articles for Time Magazine. Most important, Trilling was a reserved, professorial figure, while Chambers was a man of action, a Communist spy turned anti-Communist prophet who figured in one of the most scandalous trials of the century.

Yet The Conservative Turn shows that, from the time they met as classmates at Columbia in the 1920s, Trilling and Chambers followed similar intellectual courses. In the early 1930s, with America sunk in the Depression and fascism on the march in Europe, they were among the many American leftists who turned to the Soviet Union for inspiration. The appeal of Communism was especially strong to American Jews, who saw in Russia’s great experiment” the promise of a world without poverty, injustice, or prejudice, including anti-Semitism. Hadn’t Lincoln Steffens, the crusading liberal journalist, visited the Soviet Union and proclaimed, I have the seen the future and it works”?

For Trilling, becoming a fellow traveler was primarily an intellectual commitment, not a practical one. He did nothing more to advance the revolution than joining a Communist front organization, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, and writing some pro-Soviet book reviews. Chambers was much more deeply involved in the Communist cause. After joining the Party, he became a secret agent for the Kremlin, helping to organize a spy ring among mid-level New Deal bureaucrats in Washington D.C. He even tried to recruit Lionel and Diana Trilling, asking if they would help him by acting as a drop” for secret messages. They declined, not wanting to follow Chambers so far into the realm of espionage.

But in the mid-1930s, both Trilling and Chambers underwent a crisis of conscience about Communism. Like many radicals, they were troubled by the show trials in which Stalin eliminated many of his fellow Bolsheviks. It was becoming increasingly hard for anyone paying attention to deny that Stalin, like Hitler, was a totalitarian dictator. Yet in the late 1930s, the so-called Popular Front, which united liberals and Communists in a common crusade against fascism, had blinded many American leftists to the true nature of the Stalin regime. For Trilling and Chambers, it now became imperative to repent of their former error, and to convince those who still believed in the USSR to do the same. Even more than the Soviet Union itself, their target was the Popular Front mentality so common among literary and intellectual people—the belief that Communism was just an advanced form of liberalism, rather than liberalism’s greatest enemy.

Kimmage documents the month-by-month evolution of Trilling’s and Chambers’s political views, studying their correspondence in tandem with their published work. Trilling’s literary criticism seldom addressed contemporary politics directly, yet by quoting extensively from his (still unpublished) letters, Kimmage shows that political motivations were never far from his mind. Writing to the drama critic Eric Bentley in 1946, Trilling declared, I am willing to say that I think of my intellectual life as a struggle, not energetic enough, against all the blindness and malign obfuscations of the Stalinoid mind of our time.”

In his sensitive readings of Trilling’s criticism, Kimmage shows how this struggle” shaped his interpretation of writers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. What Trilling admired in them was a habit of mind that shunned false certainties and embraced difficult realities—what he named, in his influential 1949 book, the liberal imagination.” An art that was morally complex and free from self-righteousness,” Kimmage summarizes, would express the spirit of political anti-communism.”

It is no surprise, then, that when Trilling produced his only novel, The Middle of the Journey, in 1947, he would choose the dilemmas of communism and anti-communism as his subject. What is more surprising is that he chose to base one of the novel’s main characters directly on Whittaker Chambers. Chambers’s clandestine work for the Communists, followed by his dramatic apostasy from the Party, made him unpalatable to both the pro- and anti-Stalinist factions of the left. Kimmage describes a Halloween party Chambers attended in 1938 where New York intellectuals, including the Trillings, shunned him; Diana refused to shake his hand, since it was figuratively covered in blood.

In The Middle of the Journey, Lionel Trilling used Chambers’s dramatic story and enigmatic character as the basis for Gifford Maxim, one of the novel’s protagonists. The few people who read the book when it first appeared would have had no problem identifying Maxim’s original, since Chambers’s history was well known among the New York intellectuals. Just a year after Trilling’s novel appeared, however, Chambers was to become notorious across America and around the world, thanks to his starring role in the Alger Hiss affair.

Kimmage recounts the well known story of how Hiss—a member of Chambers’s old spy network, who had risen to become a leading member of the New Deal establishment—was denounced by Chambers as a Communist and a traitor. The ensuing trials, in which the disreputable, unattractive Chambers testified against the well-connected, personable Hiss, polarized the country. To the anti-Communists, Hiss was a perfect example of the way liberalism, fellow travelling, and active support of the USSR all bled into one another. To most liberals, by contrast, Hiss was the innocent victim of Chambers’s ideologically motivated denunciations. Even after Hiss was convicted, the left remained convinced of his innocence. Not until the end of the Cold War and the opening of the Soviet archives was it established beyond a doubt that Hiss was indeed a spy.

In the aftermath of the trial, Chambers became a hate-figure to the left and a hero to the right. The spectacle of the liberal elite rallying around Hiss helped to galvanize the nascent conservative movement; to this day, Kimmage shows, when a gutter polemicist like Ann Coulter writes that liberals are traitors, she is drawing on tropes from the Hiss case. Kimmage follows Chambers’s subsequent career and offers a close reading of his memoir, Witness, which became one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite books. Between Witness and The Middle of the Journey, Chambers and Trilling helped at once to create and to document the “conservative turn” in mid-century American politics. Kimmage’s book offers a thorough guide to this still powerfully resonant chapter in our history.

Your previous books examine Russia’s relationship to Siberia and the Arctic. What inspired you to write about Soviet Jews?

I was actually researching another book, about a residential building in Moscow that housed many members of the Soviet government in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the House on the Embankment. Every Muscovite knows about it—there’s a novel by that name—and I was beginning to write a history of it when I became interested specifically in the Jewish contingent within that house, the Jewish members of the Soviet political elite.

Most of my friends at the Moscow State University were ethnic Jews whose grandparents had been Communists. What interested me was the connection between those people in that building and the life I remembered in the Soviet Union. I decided to write a chapter about the Jewish inhabitants. It became a long essay and, eventually, the book that you have read.

What was life like during your college years?

By the 1970s, the Soviet intelligentsia was to a considerable extent anti-regime, antisocialist and anti-Soviet. But people had different views of what it meant to be anti-Soviet. Some people responded by becoming aware of their Jewish ancestry, in some cases becoming Zionists. Others preferred to leave for the United States or just be in opposition in the Soviet Union. Many in this latter group were ethnic Jews.

And which camp did you fall into?

I suppose I was influenced by all of those. It was not always easy to distinguish, you know, because there was some sense of being Jewish, and then some sense of belonging to the Russian intelligentsia.

Why do you view the Jewish contingent in the House on the Embankment, and the rest of their generation, as immigrants?

That’s how some of them, at least, thought of themselves. Those people were all first-generation Muscovites, so there were interesting parallels among the Jewish migrations from the Pale of Settlement to America, to Palestine, and to Moscow, Leningrad, and other big Soviet cities. The Soviet migration was similar in many ways to the Jewish migrations to Vienna and Budapest and Berlin in the 19th century. So I did some work on the Jewish emergence from the ghetto and the entry into modern European life.

But you reach even further back than that.

Right. [laughs] So then reading about the 19th century, there were various theories put forth—by Jews and others, some anti-Semitic in tone and others not—about the reasons for Jewish success in the modern world: Why do they do so well in some professions? Why are they so good in the world of education? Those questions we’ve heard so many times were first formulated and debated in the 19th century. I was as interested by these questions as anybody. And I decided to offer my own explanation, or rather as I was reading I was thinking about this, so what is now my first chapter is my attempt to offer an explanation.

And that begins with your distinction between Mercurians and Apollonians. Can you explain what you mean?

In describing traditional preindustrial societies, people talk about agriculturalists and pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. What I’m proposing is that there was another mode of existence: providing services, especially those considered unclean and dangerous by the majority population. I call those people Mercurians, or service nomads, as opposed to the Apollonians, who are food producers. There have been various ethnic groups over the centuries that were Mercurians, that specialized in commercial mediation, medicine, travel, diplomacy, and other intangible, marvelous, and frightening things. Jews are one community among them. There are many others in Africa and Asia.

So from this anthropological perspective, the history of the Jewish people isn’t so unique after all?

They belong to an economic mode that is fairly common in world history. But within that group, they have a very special role to play. What distinguishes Jews is, first of all the amount of time that they spent engaged in that activity, the degree of commitment, the versatility within that specialization. And the fact that Jews were the ultimate middleman minority of the European continent.

Wasn’t Russia an exception before?

Jews were always Mercurians in the Russian empire. They were important in the western borderlands, in the Pale of Settlement. But in the center of the Empire, mostly because Jews weren’t allowed to live there, ethnic Germans were in that role. They were extremely prominent in 18th and 19th century Russia, but eventually some became Russified, and many were deported during World War I.

And in place of the Germans came Jews fleeing war and pogroms, economic migrants, Red Army veterans. What became of them in the big cities?

One remarkable consequence was their move into Soviet educational institutions. Many memoirs of the 1920s and early 1930s focus on being a student, being poor but being excited, being able to live in a great big city at the center of the world revolution—a revolution that would make ethnic hostility a thing of the past, you know. Most young immigrants got tremendous new opportunities, all the greater because the state was discriminating against the members of the pre-Revolutionary elite. Among those who had not been compromised by service to the imperial state, Jews were by far the best prepared and did better than anyone. And there was this sense—shared by many, but we’re talking about Jews in particular—of great excitement, of limitless opportunities.

In some ways, this is like what immigrants coming through Ellis Island experienced.

Except in the Soviet Union in those early days, there were really no legal or quasilegal barriers. There were anti-Semites all over the place, but there was nothing to prevent those immigrants from going to the best Soviet colleges.

Jews as a group were the most successful group in the Soviet Union before World War II in terms of upward mobility, educational accomplishment, participation in political institutions, membership in the professional and intellectual elite. Jews did extremely well and many of them were very much taken by the Soviet project of building socialism.

When and how did things change?

The internationalist cosmopolitan Soviet state stopped being internationalist and cosmopolitan sometime in the 1930s. Soviet intellectuals, professionals, and other officials of Jewish descent also changed. They became interested in their Jewish ancestry, conscious of having kinship ties to the people who were being killed by the Nazis.

So people who earlier in their lives hadn’t thought of themselves as Jews—who thought of themselves as Soviets, and by many standards had been the most Soviet of all Soviet nationalities—began to think of themselves during the war as meaningfully Jewish in some sense. At the same time, the Soviet state began to think of itself as meaningfully Russian in a kind of ethnic-roots way that made Jewish participation in the state and overrepresentation in the elite problematic. The two clashed, which led eventually to persecution by the Soviet state.

You dedicate The Jewish Century to your grandmother.

Both my maternal grandparents were Jews from the former Pale of Settlement. They met in Argentina, where they had emigrated from the Russian Empire. They were both Communists, and they went to Birobidzhan in 1931 to build socialism. They didn’t spend much time in Birobidzhan. When they arrived in Moscow, they found a very large number of fellow Jewish Communists, almost all of whom, if they lived long enough, would live to regret the choices they made.

Many people avoid dwelling on Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution, since it’s a premise of so many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Is this a delicate question, that Communism played such an important role in the life of my grandmother and so many other Jews? Well, of course it is. Can there be very unsavory answers provided to that question? Of course. But I don’t think that is any reason for us, for me, not to ask those questions, not to deal with the story of my grandmother.

So much Jewish history in this country somehow doesn’t deal with the story of my grandmother. And it isn’t that everyone’s grandmother should be in history books. But I think Jewish Communists, both in America and in Russia, where there were many more of them, wrote an important page in the history of the 20th century. And suffered a very tragic fate.

Why has Jewish history overlooked people like your grandmother?

At bottom, there is the question of who is Jewish. When you write about people who proclaim their Jewishness, then it would make sense to tell the story of the Revolution, much of which would be about pogroms. And then you would move directly to the early signs of official anti-Semitism on the eve of the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself, and Stalin’s version of anti-Semitism. And, that, of course, would eventually lead to the emigration and everything else.

But that story leaves out most Soviet Jews—people who were happy to be Soviets for a while until they were told or they realized that it was not quite possible. A lot of the people I write about didn’t want to be Jews, didn’t necessarily think of themselves as Jews, were strongly antireligion—in some cases militantly and aggressively so, in other cases just indifferent. And yet the reason so many of them didn’t want to be Jewish has to do with their Jewish past. All of that is part of Jewish history.

You spent the summer in Russia. Were you working on a new book?

Well, now I’m trying to get back to my original project. It was hard for me to work on that book because I kept returning to questions having to do with the Jews, but now that I’ve exorcised that demon, I can go back to the other residents of that house.