The Accidental Anarchist (2 page)

In principle, my father had nothing against Warsaw, but he held to the belief that a boy’s only assurance of seizing his golden opportunity in life lay in having a skilled craft. So he arranged for me to work in a series of apprenticeships with various tradesmen in town. Why ‘a series’ of apprenticeships? Because I proved incompetent at even the simplest task. As a result, most jobs didn’t last a week; some didn’t last the day. At least one boss predicted that, before long, I would end up in front a firing squad, about which he wasn’t too far wrong.

Soon I found myself in Warsaw, working twenty to 22-hour days (and before
yom tov
, a full 24), something that Mordechai had neglected to mention in his infrequent letters. The only salvation was
shabbos
; without that one day of rest, none of us could have survived.

Having made such a fuss about needing to get out of Vishogrod, I could hardly turn around and go home. Nor did I have enough money to return, even if I wanted to. So, for the next seven or eight years, I worked as a baker’s assistant, and in a variety of other mindless jobs, not one of which had a future.

But what would have been the point of thinking about the future when, at the age of 21, I would be conscripted into the Czar’s army? In the meantime, work was simply a way to stay alive, and sometimes barely that. My sympathies, as I rolled from one deadening job to another, were with the exploited souls who were enslaved by their employers – not that the bosses had it much better.

Meanwhile, my young blood craved adventure. Aside from the revolution, which I personally felt in no position to start, I could try to improve the lot of the people around me. At the time there was no such thing as a “union.” Each worker was on his own. And merely talking about organizing workers was an engraved invitation to scrutiny by the secret police.

But by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I was fed up with being powerless. So one day I went to the boss and told him that his three best clerks and I were quitting. The boss was furious. He accused me of being a Bolshevik, a hooligan, a nihilist, and a spoiled young man who’d never be satisfied with anything short of total chaos, anarchy, and the destruction of the social order.

I got angry, too, but instead of quitting, I called a strike, and demanded – and this was unheard of in Warsaw – a reduction of our working hours from twenty to twelve hours a day. I was in a position to do this because I didn’t have to worry about losing my job as I was approaching the age of mandatory army service. Which, after working 120-hour weeks and more, didn’t sound like such a bad alternative.

Our little strike spread throughout Warsaw as workers and apprentices began walking out and demanding a 72-hour week. Under the guidance of an experienced
Bundist
  who showed me the ropes, I managed to “unionize” over 3,000 workers in less than a month. The police harassed me at every turn, arresting me several times, and beating me up once or twice. Although they had me on their list as some sort of political troublemaker, they never figured out exactly what I was up to.

After such a fine start, the strike went off like a ship without a rudder. No one had any idea of tactics or negotiating positions. While I had a knack for agitating, making speeches and signing up members, I had none at all for strategy or administration. We also didn’t bother our heads with theories and ideology. We simply wanted to support the cause of oppressed workers.

As a result, the strike dragged on until, gradually, each boss came to some sort of quiet arrangement with his workers. It was like a husband and wife deciding it was better to live together in hatred than to have their self-respect and lie in the street. So one morning I awoke to find myself a strike leader without a strike to lead.

But even though we hadn’t achieved our goal of a shorter work week, at least we had shaken Warsaw to its very foundation, and given thousands of workers a sense of revolutionary consciousness.

And it gave an ignorant boy who, once upon a time, had set out for Warsaw to conquer the world, a taste of what he could do.

Chapter 2: How to Become the Czar’s Son-in-Law

As summer dwindled to an end, a familiar pall of fear began to descend upon our village. Soon it would be the fifteenth of September, a date that struck terror even in the breasts of mothers who were still suckling their sons. For on that day, all young men of military age became subject to immediate conscription into the Russian army.

Do I need to paint a picture of what it meant in 1902, particularly for an Orthodox Jew, to be pitchforked into the Czar’s army? Our parents’ terror was due only in part to the knowledge that we would be exposed to the traditional dangers and discomforts of military service, but also that we would be subjected to the mercies and whims of superiors who would as soon torment a Jew as scratch themselves. (Such inconveniences were not exactly unknown, even in
Vishigrod
, among one’s own, good Polish neighbors.)

But what Jewish parents dreaded most was the prospect, amply shown to be true, of returning soldiers who, within less than four years, would come home coarsened, brutalized, Russianized and with scarcely a spark of human (that is, Jewish) feeling left in them. Thus, every home rang with heated family conferences, all dedicated to the search for some means by which an innocent child could be preserved from the fatal clutches of
Vanya’s
army.

For the rich, there was no problem: they bought their way out. For the poor, however, there was only one avenue of escape: self-mutilation. And since there were any number of equally frightful possibilities to choose from, long evenings of consultation took place.

My Aunt Tzivia strongly recommended a man who would draw out all my teeth. Feibush, the bath attendant, held that the surest remedy would be for me to blind myself in my right eye, without which one cannot aim a rifle. And my Uncle Yonah, never at a loss, knew a man skilled in the art of severing a tendon at the knee. Had I accepted even half the suggestions offered to me, I should not only have escaped military service, but would have ended up a cripple such as the world had never seen. None of these schemes, I am glad to say, found favor with my parents.

Although no one had bothered to ask me, I hadn’t the slightest intention of maiming myself. In fact, the prospect of becoming the Czar’s
eydem oyf kest
for three years and eight months did not strike me as the world coming to an end. I hadn’t spent but a short time back in Vishogrod before I became eager for more thrills. I longed only to be sent to the front lines and earn my share of adventures and medals before it was all over and I was obliged to return to Vishogrod and put the humdrum remainder of my life into some matchmaker’s hands.

When we prepared to leave our home town – I, full of idiot enthusiasm, and my friend since boyhood, Chaim Glasnik, with a prophetically long face – his mother seized my arm in two trembling hands and pleaded with me to stay close to her son so that we might protect each other. She swore that, if anything happened to him, she would not survive him by even one minute. By the time she was done, my eyes were drowning in tears, while Glasnik merely stood to one side squirming, pretending that she was someone else’s mother.

Too tearful to speak, I simply nodded my agreement. When I felt comfortable exercising my voice again, Glasnik and I pledged to each other that, should either one of us not return from the war, we would take each other’s parents into our own home and “honor and support them all the days of their lives.” So inspired were we by our generosity that we went further, adding that, if either of us returned to find ourselves orphaned, “My father will be your father, and my home will be your home, for all the days of your life.”

On the appointed day, in such a downpour as might have swamped Noah’s Ark, I was accompanied to the meeting place not only by my near and distant relatives, but also acquaintances who seemed to have come solely for the purpose of adding their tears to the puddles made by the rain. As I said my goodbyes, I stood tall and upright, trying to look older than my face, which only sparingly released those quills of manhood. But anyone would have looked taller than Glasnik whose head seemed poised in advance of his body, never quite certain where it wanted to be.

In that gloomy spirit, we climbed into one of the open wagons with the other 21-year old boys from our district who hadn’t found a way to avoid serving in the Czar’s army.  My soldier’s baggage consisted primarily of a canvas-covered box that my mother had filled with bread, herring, chicken fat, and sausages. (Those who did not intend to touch
Vanya
’s unclean food until they have absolutely no choice had to stock up on such things).

As our wagon prepared to depart, my father, alone, expressed his sorrow by remaining mostly silent. But it was only his three parting words that continued to ring in my ears long after the cart had taken me away. All he said was, “Be a Jew.”

Chapter 3. A Small Cheer for Corruption

With a good deal of comradely passing of vodka between Jew and gentile, we jolted toward Plock, the capital of the
gubernya
. From Plock, we departed from by barge, which rocked along the Vistula River under a weeping sky. I could still faintly glimpse the nebulous hills of my birthplace and, with the sudden sharp realization that soldiers don’t always return alive, I wondered if I should ever see it again.

Crowded below deck on account of the rain, we conscripts stood in steamy, suffocating closeness: Jew and Pole, Balt, Ukrainian, and transplanted German – and although the recent
Syedlitzer
pogrom
was still green in our memories, we managed, somehow, not to be at each others’ throats. This may have been because of our common fate. Or because few young people had remained untouched by the prevailing revolutionary spirit with its rosy premonitions of universal brotherhood.

Some time around noon, determined not by the absent sun but by the hunger pangs in our bellies, the barge stopped and we were marched, in a straggling column of twos, toward a passenger train. We were loaded into boxcars that had signs advising that occupancy was limited to eight horses or 40 men, but with a little effort were able to hold many times that number. Although it was unheated, we could, at least, sit down.

While waiting for the train to depart, we shared another bottle of vodka providentially carried by one of the Polish boys. A
Vanya
non-commissioned officer with a stripe on his collar came pushing in with a stack of papers and started calling out names. Having, to his visible astonishment, found us all accounted for, he launched into a pompous sermon on how we should conduct ourselves as good, pious subjects of the Czar, meaning we were to jump to obey all of his orders. In the meantime, we would shortly be issued our subsistence pay.

Before Glasnik could wonder aloud if this was the right train and not some cattle express bound for Manchuria, another
Vanya
walked into our car bearing a sack of coins. I knew that the Czar didn’t pay princely wages, but even I was unprepared to be handed seven groschen for a day’s subsistence, which was not quite enough to buy a pound of bread. Among those who raged against this Russian stinginess were some of the gentile Polish boys who had been raised to believe that Poland was their country, and not a Russian colony.

There was a roar of protest, which the second
Vanya
tried to appease by pointing out that at each stop we would also get free hot water. The two non-coms seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by a spontaneous uprising.

For my part, I wanted nothing to delay my getting to Petersburg, and tried to calm down the Poles by pointing out that it was undoubtedly not the non-coms who were robbing us, but the greater thieves at the top who took the money allotted for soldiers’ food, and put it in their own pockets.

I never would have dreamed I’d said anything out of line, but the two non-coms I had saved from a taste of hearty Polish violence, asked me gratefully for my name and let me know they’d have their eye on me now as a revolutionary agitator. Following which, they began to bless us all impartially with good Russian benedictions, ending with the assurance that there was an excellent chance the lot of us would end up sampling the inside of a prison fortress for attempted mutiny.

By this time, being a soldier of the Czar had lost much of its charm. I resolved for the balance of my enlistment to keep my nose out of all brawls, mutinies, riots and revolutions or, in fact, any incidents other than those involving what I grandly thought of as “the honor of the Jewish people.”

After a couple of hours, the train finally left Poland and, in the gloom of a sunless afternoon, began its grudging progress through a desolate landscape of meager fields, occasionally populated by skinny Russian horses and skeletal cows hunting for blades of grass. The Russians may have been a great military power, but they had a lot to learn about farming.

Night fell, and the train sped on without stopping for the promised hot water, while the lot of us scratched our unwashed bodies and groped peevishly for comfortable positions in which to sleep. Finally, due to the suffocating air and the foul smell of our bodies and feet, most of us fell into a state that was not so much sleep as loss of consciousness.