“I sit in solitary confinement. . . . My parents brought me a photograph of the girls [his daughters Zina and Nina]—I wrote you about it. They are both wonderful in their own way, Ninushka has such a face—frightened and yet slightly inquisitive at the same time. And Zinushka is so thoughtful. Someone here managed to put a smudge on Zinushka’s face. If you have a spare picture, please send it.”374
—Leon Trotsky to Alexandra Sokolovskaya Bronstein, from prison in Saint Petersburg, May 17, 1906
LITTLE SERGEI HAD been stuck in bed on doctor’s orders for more than a week with diphtheria, but the fever had finally broken during their last week in America and he wanted to go outside. The cramped three-room apartment on Vyse Avenue had started to feel like prison. He asked. He begged. He whined the way nine-year-olds do, insisting until his mother felt compelled to ignore better judgment.
Natalya told him he could go. The doctor had no objection. Just so long as he stayed nearby and came back after half an hour. After all, winter was turning to spring in New York City. Temperatures no longer plunged below freezing day after day. Mounds of snow by the curb had started to melt. People strolled the neighborhood, for errands or just to walk. The spring religious holidays, Easter and Passover, were just two weeks away, on April 7 and 8, though as socialists she and Trotsky didn’t celebrate either one.
Natalya had plenty to keep her busy that day, tying up loose ends for the return to Russia. She had arranged to take the boys out of the Bronx public school where they already had learned enough English to make American friends. She didn’t need to pack much for the trip. They carried no furniture, no artwork, few clothes or keepsakes. Having been in America just ten weeks, they hadn’t had time to collect much clutter. As refugees over the years, she and Trotsky had learned to travel light. They would end up carrying just three bags for themselves and the boys, no trunks or boxes.
That week, Natalya probably enjoyed a final lunch and sight-seeing outing with her friend Rose Hammer, the doctor’s wife, in their chauffeured car, a rare luxury just for herself. The boys, Sergei and Lyova, also felt the excitement. For them, the trip meant another great adventure, crossing the Atlantic on another big ship with sailors and smokestacks and seagulls and icebergs and strangers and endless vistas of ocean. They would finally get to see Russia, the place their parents came from.
Sadly, though, it also meant leaving New York, this city they’d barely gotten to know, where everything seemed so big and busy and exciting.
Sergei had found New York fascinating since they day they’d landed. He liked to count things, and here the numbers grew so big: so many stories in the skyscrapers, so many subway stops, so many streets. They lived in the Bronx on Vyse Avenue at 172nd Street. Papa’s office was on Saint Marks Place, or Eighth Street. The numbers went up or down depending which way you walked.
Sergei, with his nine-year-old’s curiosity, always wondered: If you went far enough, would you actually reach a First Street? And what came after that? Zero Street? And what after that? It might sound silly, but once his mother let him out of bed that day, dressed him in warm clothes, and sent him out to the sidewalk, little Sergei started to walk. He didn’t plan to go far. It would take just a few minutes, and who knew if he’d have another chance. He went south, where the numbers got smaller. He crossed a big street, navigated the horses and motorcars, saw the buildings and shops on the other side. One block looked much like the next. He walked to the next street corner, then the next. Then he looked around.
Then something changed. Sergei noticed how streets below 172nd didn’t have numbers anymore but names: Jennings Street, Freeman Street. After a while he reached 167th, but then Vyse Avenue itself disappeared and became something else: West Farms Road, then Hoe Avenue, then Westchester Avenue.
After a while, none of these streets looked familiar. He didn’t recognize any of the names. He looked all around and saw apartment buildings and stores, but not the ones near his home. Where was he? Which way had he come?
He walked faster, not sure what direction to take. Then it dawned on him. He was lost.
Back in the apartment, Natalya, busy trying to pack bags and decide what items to carry halfway around the world back to Russia, noticed after a while that Sergei had not come back. Half an hour had gone by, and he had promised to return by now. At this point, she would have gone to the window and looked outside but not seen him on the sidewalk. She would have gone downstairs onto the street and walked to the street corners but not seen him there either. She’d have waited, looked around again, then gone back upstairs. But more time passed, and still nothing. She grew anxious. What to do? She picked up the telephone and called her husband at Novy Mir, but he didn’t know either. So she waited.
Sergei, meanwhile, not the least bit shy, started asking people on the street where he was. In this neighborhood, even dozens of blocks away from his apartment, he had no trouble finding someone to understand his garble of Russian and English. Someone finally offered to walk him the few blocks to the nearest police station. Here, a nice man in a blue policeman’s uniform asked Sergei if he knew his apartment’s telephone number. Of course he did, he said.
It was three hours by the time the telephone finally rang and Natalya frantically picked it up. She heard a man’s voice on the line, speaking in English, which she didn’t understand. Then she heard Sergei. “I am here,” he told her.
By now Natalya had found her older son, Lyova, and together the two of them raced over to the police station. When she walked up to the front desk and told them who she was, the officers on duty were thrilled and relieved. “She was greeted gaily,” Trotsky wrote later, “like a long awaited guest.”375 Natalya found little Sergei playing checkers with one of the officers, chewing a stick of gum they had given him, having a delightful time with his new friends.
What an odd place, this America. Strangers in the street stepped up to help. The policemen were nice. They treated her like a welcome neighbor and treated her son like their new best friend. Would Russia be anything like this?
DURING THESE LAST days, Trotsky made at least one attempt to mend fences with the establishment leaders of the New York Socialist Party, though apparently not with Morris Hillquit. Hillquit, ever since his narrow victory at the Lenox Casino two weeks earlier defeating Trotsky’s minority report, had continued trying to build a united peace front, even as doors now closed in his face. The country appeared days away from entering the European conflict. Hillquit had called a national emergency convention of the Socialist Party in Saint Louis on April 7 to address the crisis. He promised a strong antiwar stance, which only provoked criticism from all sides. He faced a growing revolt in his own ranks, not just from Trotsky’s leftists but also among high-profile socialists who now suddenly decided to put country first. Novelists Upton Sinclair and Jack London, historian Gustavus Myers, journalists Charles Edward Russell and a dozen others all threatened to bolt the Socialists unless they gave up their pacifist line and supported going “over there.”
At the same time, Hillquit insisted that any antiwar effort by the Socialists must be “strictly on American lines,” no general strikes, no violence, no lawbreaking, a view certain to alienate hardliners on the left.376
Trotsky met a group from Hillquit’s circle to talk, but it didn’t go well. Trotsky still found them infuriating. He recalled how at one point he explained that the proletariat party in Russia would seize power in a second stage of the revolution, but they “took my words as a joke,” as he put it. One of them told Trotsky that it was “not worth while wasting five minutes to refute my nonsensical dreams.” The whole scene, he wrote, produced “the same sort of impression as a stone thrown into a puddle alive with pompous and phlegmatic frogs.”377
With time now running short, Trotsky decided to spend his last Sunday morning in New York giving yet another speech, this time to a group of five hundred members of the National Committee of Jewish Workmen jammed into Beethoven Hall on East Fifth Street. Henry Moskowitz, then New York’s commissioner of public markets, happened to share the stage with Trotsky that morning and wrote about it later. What struck Moskowitz was the connection this curious Russian had built with these immigrant workmen. Moskowitz noticed how Trotsky sat on the podium that morning “shabbily dressed” with “lines of suffering in his face,” looking “unshaven,” his hair “disheveled,” like a “fighting agitator [with] neither the means nor the inclination to concern himself with his appearance,” staring out with his “keen and blazing eyes.”378
But when this Trotsky took the podium to speak, the impression changed abruptly. Trotsky’s appearance didn’t matter. His presence captured the room, “calm, sincere, and undramatic. His sharp metallic voice penetrated the hall without exertion and carried conviction.”
Trotsky spoke Russian to the men, a foreign language to Moskowitz, though a friend at his side translated bits and pieces. But Moskowitz caught the room’s reaction: a chuckle here, then laughter, then a round of nods, all eyes fixed on the shabbily dressed man. They “recognized him as one of their own,” he wrote. The speech itself, as much as Moskowitz could decipher, had Trotsky’s usual flair, painting the world war as a clash of capitalists: America’s Morgans versus Germany’s banking family, the Bleichroeders, and the Rothschilds of France and England. Countries and governments took a backseat to these men of money. The common interest of workers from all lands stood on the opposite side. There was “only one war,” Trotsky told them, “the class struggle; and only one enemy—capitalism.”379
When he finished, Trotsky sat down and let the applause wash over him. There would be much to miss about America.