Storm in My Heart. Helene Minkin

      Helene Minkin, around 1907.

      (Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis [Amsterdam])

      Contents

      Acknowledgments vii

      Introduction, by Tom Goyens 1

      Forverts Editors’ Note 21

      Storm in My Heart 25

      Endnotes 133

      Index 157

      Acknowledgments

      This project would not have been possible without a grant I received from the Fulton School of Liberal Arts at Salisbury University in Maryland. I applied for funds to hire a reputable translator knowing that this was an unusual scholarly pursuit; faculty grants are traditionally awarded for conference travel or lab science projects, not Yiddish translations. I want to thank the School for its generosity and support.

      Not until a few years ago did I become interested in having Helene Minkin’s memoir translated from Yiddish into English. I had begun research for writing a biography of German immigrant radical Johann Most. Much of his writings have been published, almost all in German. Only some of his pamphlets are available in English. Few personal records of his remain, and only a handful of recollections by others who knew him closely, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, are available. What remains of his personal letters has been transcribed (many by the historian Max Nettlau), but not translated. Since I read German I have access to all those records. But what emerges from these records is Most as an activist and writer, not so much Most as a human being with emotions and frustrations, with humor and sorrows. We don’t see Most as a caring partner or devoted father. It was therefor imperative that I unlock the personal memoir of Helene Minkin who knew Most for eighteen years as a friend, partner, and parent. I needed a translator.

      Dr. Alisa Braun, the academic director of the Institute for Jewish Learning at the Jewish Theological Seminar in New York City, deserves all the credit for making Minkin’s memoir available to an English-speaking audience. She previously served as the academic coordinator of the Jewish Studies program at the University of California. She studied and taught in the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. Several people helped me find her. I must thank my friend Paul Buhle who steered me to Eddy Portnoy at the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University who suggested Dr. Braun for the job. In addition, I’d like to thank Robert Helms, Barry Pateman, Jessica Moran, and Kenyon Zimmer for providing information and feedback regarding the editing of this manuscript.

      I particularly salute Zach Blue and the AK Press editorial collective for taking an interest and making this invaluable text a tangible product. I also appreciate Sam Norich and Chana Pollack, publisher and archivist at the Jewish Daily Forward respectively, for their enthusiasm about the project and for agreeing to let us use Minkin’s articles for translation and publication.

      Finally, a word about the manuscript. We have preserved, as much as possible, the original language and structure of Minkin’s writing, including the various subheadings of the narrative. We did alter the title of her memoir by using an apt phrase that appears in it. The original 1932 title was: “What She Says: Memories from the Widow of Johann Most.” A few times, Minkin’s narrative “jumps” across time periods usually by way of a flashback. We have preserved this structure, but alert readers to this with footnotes. In a few places, the original text was illegible due to excessive wear of the crease of the newspaper. We have “filled in” some text where the context of the paragraph allowed it; otherwise, we have indicated omitted text with brackets.

      Tom Goyens

      Introduction

In 1993, when historian Paul Avrich published his monumental collection of oral histories of American anarchism, he realized that it was going to be his most important work to date. Not only must the words of anarchists themselves be preserved for posterity, he felt, but these voices “add a human dimension often lacking in scholarly monographs, not to mention the accounts of journalists, policemen, and officials, and of other, for the most part hostile, observers.”1 Anarchism is meaningless without the men and women who embraced it, lived it, and publicized it. Thousands joined the movement, some briefly, some for life. Many others listened to speeches, attended fundraisers, or, while not agreeing with certain tactics, still believed that the anarchists had something to say.

The history of American anarchism from 1880 to the 1930s was overwhelmingly an immigrant and working-class story. Most of these newcomers made their home in the American republic at a time of rapid industrialization and a bewildering growth of cities. Many were active transnationally, conceiving the movement not as defined by national borders, but as an international arena strung together by radical newspapers and traveling orators. Three figures loom large in this story of immigrant anarchism: Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. While there were thousands of other activists and writers, these three became most familiar to an anxious American public. In many ways, fairly or not, they came to define what anarchism stood for in the eyes of the general public (the Haymarket affair was another defining event). All three increased their profile by publishing lengthy, personal memoirs. Most, who lived in the United States from 1882 to 1906, published his reminiscences in German in 1903 (it has yet to be translated);2 Berkman penned his account in 1912, mostly dealing with his fourteen-year prison term; and Goldman released her memoirs in 1931, first serialized, then as a book.3 With regard to later historiography, these three magnetic personalities have tended to act as centripetal forces pulling other personalities and events into an orbit around them.

      Helene Minkin had a close relationship with all three of them, and often saw things very differently than they did. Born in 1873, she was a few years younger than both Goldman and Berkman, and like them, she was raised in a Jewish family, hailed from the same region in western Russia, and became an anarchist in the great American metropolis. Minkin, Goldman, and Berkman were all influenced by the older Johann Most, who was not Jewish and had been active in Switzerland, Austria, his native Germany, and England for fourteen years before coming to New York. Eventually, Minkin became Most’s partner and mother of their two children, John Jr. and Lucifer. Their bond was most likely a common law marriage that left no record.

In her memoir, Minkin recreates a moment when she and Most relate their life stories to each other. Hers was a story familiar to thousands of Jewish families living under the czars of Russia in the Pale of Settlement, a huge area in western Russia in which millions of Jewish were forced to live as second-class citizens. They were barred from agriculture, and could not attend universities until Czar Alexander II’s modest reforms. It was the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 that brought back the cruel anti-Jewish policies that where in effect earlier in the century. A wave of pogroms swept the region. Censorship, arrests, intimidation, conscription, and expulsion from their homes were common. The idea of leaving the Pale for a new homeland slowly took hold throughout the region where a collective identity had sustained the Jews for decades. “The Jews,” historian Elias Tcherikower has written, “constituted an autonomous, isolated, self-enclosed, and collectively responsible social entity.”4 The outside world was hostile and very often a threat creating what Irving Howe has called a “condition of permanent precariousness.”5 Jewish life was centered in the shtetl (small town), although by the 1880s many Jews began moving to larger urban centers. Within these Jewish communities, there existed an uneasy balance between the traditional reverence for Talmudic scholarship reserved for boys and men