6The Kishinev pogroms in 1905 marked another period of crisis when the community locally, and the Jews nationally, organized themselves into various bodies to protest the outrages.
The American sociologist Louis Wirth first wrote those words in his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, which, when published in 1928, was justly hailed as a landmark study of urban life. He was knowledgeable in Jewish history, with a large swath of The Ghetto providing a reliable summary of Jewry’s past, and when he described Russia’s pogrom wave of 1905–6, it was Kishinev that, for him, was the natural marker, the most transparent way to capture early-twentieth-century Russian violence against Jews. Kishinev was—as for many others—so synonymous with pogroms that simple fact-checking likely felt unnecessary.
America’s obligation to free Russia from barbarism had preoccupied liberal and left-wing opinion in the United States and Britain for decades before the Kishinev pogrom. As early as 1891, George Kennan, a war correspondent and explorer (a distant cousin of the renowned diplomat George F. Kennan), wrote Siberia and the Exile System, which contrasted a senselessly vindictive, dark penal system with the decency of those caught up in its web, and with Russia’s nihilists embodying the best of its qualities. In response to Kennan’s revelations, for example, the Philadelphia Ledger insisted that “civilized nations should refuse to have anything to do with Russia until she abandons barbarous practices.”1
Unsurprisingly, such denunciations would often bring to the surface the embarrassing question of the similarity between Russian oppression of Jews and others and American treatment of blacks or, for that matter, of Chinese and Native Americans. In the United States these issues arose with such regularity in discussions regarding Russia that, as one historian has observed, “comparisons of the problems in the United States to troubles in Russia became so common as to seem almost a reflex.” In 1892 the platforms of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties denounced religious persecution in Russia amid widespread criticism of Russia’s antisemitic practices—most recently a mass expulsion of Jews from Moscow the year before.2
A wide range of motives fed such preoccupations, including the inclination to emphasize Russian obscurantism, thus sidelining the alarmingly commonplace practice of lynching as well as urban antiblack riots. Another crucial ingredient was Protestant- and Catholic-inspired contempt for Russian Orthodoxy. On the Left, it was the protestations of figures like the London-based exiled anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most congenial of all Russian radicals, whose leadership inspired the “Free Russia” movement of the 1890s.3
Though it had lost much of its momentum by the turn of the twentieth century, the critique of Russia’s sins returned to the front pages of American newspapers with the Kishinev pogrom. “When refugees from Kishinev docked in [New York] harbor,” as the historian Christine Stansell has written, “their saber wounds still festering, there were people from the Henry Street Settlement there to meet them and publicize their plight.” Some feared at the time that Kishinev’s impact on left-wing politics in the United States, centered on the Lower East Side but with ample spillage beyond it, could well overshadow attention to the spike in antiblack violence, including lynchings-turned-riots in Delaware and Indiana in May 1903. Others insisted that, with pogroms now entering the American lexicon as synonymous with race riots, Russia’s horrors would sensitize Americans to the need to react with urgency to their own country’s indignities as well.4
Denunciations became commonplace, as evidenced even a decade and a half later in Forverts in the wake of the St. Louis race riot of 1917: “Kishinev and St Louis—the same soil, the same people. . . . Actually twin sisters that could easily be mistaken for one another.” The Jewish communal administrator Oscar Leonard, an immigrant from Russia, insisted that the Black Hundreds “could take lessons in pogrom-making from the whites in St. Louis.”5 It was Kishinev’s horrors—followed soon afterward by the pogrom wave of 1905–6—that would propel a new cadre of activists, many of them Jewish, for whom the conflation of lynching and pogroms would be second nature. The belief that such travesties were born of similar causes—the connivance of authorities, the rightlessness of the victims—helped give the issue of black injustice a prominence it had not enjoyed before.
This intersection between the call for the protection of blacks from lynching and Jews from pogroms would provide the immediate backdrop to the launching in 1909 of the first major American organization for the promotion of black civil rights: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. The high visibility in the United States of pogroms in Kishinev’s wake gave a new sense of urgency to calls for the protection of blacks. Kishinev’s influence on the politics of the American left—with the Yiddish-inflected preoccupations of the Lower East Side suddenly overflowing well beyond its immediate confines—also helped create a lexicon for the condition of America’s blacks with comparisons to that of Jews under the most barbaric of autocratic regimes.
For decades Americans had tended to see Russia either through the lens of a Protestant prism, lacerating its primitive Russian Orthodox Church, or through that of an abolitionist critique of serfdom. An example of how Kishinev’s pogrom, too, was made to fit readily into a Christian framework was displayed in the first book to appear in any language on the massacre: W. C. Stiles’s Out of Kishineff: The Duty of the American People to the Russian Jew, which was rushed into print in June 1903. A retired Congregationalist minister, Stiles acknowledged that the “widespread interest, not to say excitement” in the pogrom “indicates an opportunity to draw the lessons of the case.” Such lessons from the massacre (which left, as he reported, 240 dead) included proof of a Russian people who beat old men “in the presence of their sons . . . delicate women [were] violated and killed in the sight of their own children.”6
Such Protestant-inspired criticisms of Russia were represented by the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom, a stepchild of Boston’s antislavery movement, which had by then run out of steam. Starting in mid-May, it was the Plehve letter—more so than the Kishinev pogrom itself—that would galvanize the movement’s sudden rebirth. Such efforts were pushed from the start by the Hearst press, which was publishing day after day Michael Davitt’s harrowing reports from the streets of Kishinev; these were augmented by banner headlines in Forverts and the Jewish press nationwide. Protest meetings would be held in twenty-seven American states, and a petition with the names of more than twelve thousand dignitaries would be forwarded in June as part of a formal call on the Russian government to investigate the pogrom, sent by President Theodore Roosevelt with the request that it be presented to the foreign minister and the tsar.7
Amid this cacophony, political radicals marginalized in the wake of the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by an anarchist found a new, increasingly resonant voice. Much of their activity would concentrate on relief for pogrom victims. At the same time the widespread empathy for the victims, with its attendant message that tsarist Russia was no better than a prison house for Jews, opened up a full array of new prospects for left-wing endeavors.
Emma Goldman’s rise to national prominence would occur amid the furor surrounding Kishinev. Just a few years earlier she had found herself so browbeaten after the McKinley assassination that she took an alias and found it necessary to earn her living at a Madison Avenue facial and massage parlor. She managed to extricate herself—emerging as the first immigrant-born celebrity to rise to national fame from New York’s teeming Jewish ghetto—initially in the role of a theatrical promoter for a Russian troupe, the first of its kind to tour the United States, showcasing a wildly successful production built around the Kishinev pogrom.8
To be sure, Goldman had previously achieved a considerable reputation on the Lower East Side as an orator, and in 1897 had embarked on her first cross-country lecture tour. But it was only once she promoted, in the winter of 1905, the work of Pavel Orlenev’s St. Petersburg Dramatic Company that she would be catapulted into widespread prominence. Just a few months earlier, in late 1904, Goldman had cut her teeth as a promoter of the speaking tour of Catherine Breskhovskaya, the “grandmother of the Russian revolution,” who was the first Russian radical of real prominence to appear on the American lecture circuit. Breskhovskaya did much to popularize the plight of Russian radicals under tsarism; her message was all the more effective because of the nobility of her bearing and her combination of integrity and straightforward intelligence. She appeared onstage with Goldman at her side as an interpreter. The tour electrified liberal and left-wing audiences, introducing Goldman, too, well beyond immigrant circles.9
But it was Goldman’s achievement—while still using the unlikely pseudonym Smith—in introducing the first Russian theatrical troupe to tour the United States, ushering them onto Broadway with the financial help of German Jewish donors, celebrities, and the literary elite, that made Goldman into a household name. The vehicle was a ragtag group of actors who had arrived in the United States with little more than a sheaf of supportive letters signed by Kropotkin and others, with no financial backing and essentially penniless. What they chose from their repertoire was a Kishinev-themed play—originally called The Jews and renamed The Chosen People—by Evgenii Chirikov. After a debut at New York’s Herald Square Theater with the guarantee of just one performance, Goldman took them under her wing, first caring for the entire troupe in 1905 at her summer retreat on Hunter Island near Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx (they slept in tents) and eventually booking further Broadway performances. With the use of both charm and relentless drive, Goldman induced Ethel and John Barrymore, the actor-manager Henry Miller, a collection of German Jewish grandees, and other luminaries to join the audience. “Now that I had greater access to the American mind,” Goldman wrote in Living My Life, “I determined to use whatever ability I possessed to plead the heroic case of revolutionary Russia.” The Chosen People served, as she saw it, as the best of all ways to do just this, and she stepped into the roles of the troupe’s manager, translator, and press agent.10
Chirikov’s play had been written in 1904 and published, without the pogrom scene at the end, in Russia. It had been praised by Maksim Gorky but savaged by most Jewish critics as didactic, lacking in drama, and essentially dull. Still, because of its explosive content, it could not be performed in Russia until 1906, when censorship restrictions lessened in the wake of the 1905 revolution. It first appeared onstage as it toured abroad in Germany and the United States.11
The performance is built largely around a series of conversations about Jews and their fate. Its male characters are shown mostly as cool, rational, and blind to the feelings of its female characters, which are the source of true wisdom born of the heart. The lead character is Liia, a Jew expelled from the university because of her radicalism. The crisis brings her to a deep affiliation with Jews, born mostly out of awareness that it was ignoble to abandon one’s own people under siege.
In the play the description of the Kishinev pogrom is given to a Zionist, and soon after his harrowing account the Jewish characters are overwhelmed by a mob. Facing the likelihood of rape, Liia takes her own life. In stark contrast to Liia’s stalwart resolve are the male characters, all of them incapable of reacting adequately to the crisis; for example, one accidentally shoots Christian workers seeking to defend Jews. Others are too weak or uncertain to do anything at all. Audiences responded enthusiastically to the play’s message that there was an undeniable dignity to Jewish victimhood as represented by the noble Liia. The play, as Goldman would describe it, took the New York stage—and, unsurprisingly, the audiences of the Lower East Side—“by storm.”12
Once Goldman emerged from this episode, she quickly dropped most of her ethnic ties. She minimized, as Stansell observes, her Russian past, taking her first steps toward becoming an American cultural celebrity, “something that few immigrants . . . and no immigrant Jewish woman had yet done.” Much like Eugene O’Neill, who managed at more or less the same time to move beyond the world of Irish American letters—the first writer from his background to make this transition—Goldman with the use of Kishinev managed to shed, by and large, the remnants of her background. Leaning on the many useful contacts forged during her work with Orlenev—whose troupe soon fell apart because of rumors that some of its actors were, in fact, outspoken antisemites—Goldman found herself able to raise the funding to launch her remarkable magazine, Mother Earth, the freshest voice at that moment on the American Left.13
For others on the American Left, the Kishinev pogrom—and the widespread outbreak of attacks on Jews in the wake of Russia’s constitutional crisis in the fall of 1905—moved them to recalibrate the issue of American blacks. Conflation of the sins of Kishinev with those of American lynching would surface as an item of paramount concern on the American Left, with pogroms and lynching increasingly viewed as evil twins.
The explosive interest surrounding Kishinev prompted surprise in some of the black press, with several outlets noting the stark contrast between an overall indifference to the mistreatment of American blacks and concern about the treatment of Russia’s Jews. Hence applause for the American petition decrying Kishinev—an effort supported by many in the South and elsewhere who had publicly justified lynching—was scorned in several black newspapers. Such criticism appeared in a cluster of independent newspapers, especially those that had rejected the moderating influence of Booker T. Washington; these papers were mostly small and poorly funded but nonetheless likely representative of a significant swath of black public opinion.
That the mayor and city council members of Evansville, Illinois, had signed the Kishinev petition in June, and then in early July defended those who attacked blacks in the same city—the riot forced thousands to flee into the woods from their homes—elicited angry responses. Many black papers were infuriated by Booker T. Washington’s expressed sympathy for Kishinev’s Jews (“the horrors of Kishineff were shocking to the last degree”) but unwillingness to condemn antiblack violence close to his own home. Chicago’s Broad Axe attacked his “hypocrisy [that] . . . is more than enough to shame the very devil and all his imps in hell.”14
Jewish leaders were also subjected to accusations of hypocrisy by black newspapers. One of the heads of the Philadelphia branch of B’nai B’rith, the organization responsible for drawing up the Kishinev petition, rejected any comparison between the pogroms and lynching, saying that “with rare exceptions [lynching] originates in crimes committed by Negroes.” Reactions in black newspapers were fierce. Still, comparisons between Kishinev and lynching were commonplace in the black press. As the Cleveland Gazette stated on May 23, 1903, “The terrible massacres of Jews last week in Kishineff . . . are only what have taken place many times in the south.” True, the numbers killed in Russia were larger, but the similarities outweighed the differences, since “the inhuman brutes of the southern part of this country are actuated by the same miserable motives”; their actions were “the dirtiest blot upon the world’s escutcheon.”15
Yet the same newspaper, known for its iconoclasm, also drew on the findings of a prominent French antisemite who disparaged the American public over its reaction to Kishinev while showing general indifference to lynching. There were no greater scoundrels, the paper insisted, than those Jews who campaigned for the rights of Russia’s Jews while ignoring the mistreatment of American blacks. “Of all the morally wretched defenders of this crime . . . the American Jew who defends lynchers while denouncing Russian massacres—as some do—is the most contemptible.”16
The first to formulate concrete proposals, however, drawing on the comparison between the treatment of blacks and Russia’s Jews, was a married couple, once darlings of the American Left: William English Walling, the founding chairman of the NAACP, and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Anna Strunsky. Before surfacing as leading proponents of black civil rights, they—particularly Walling—had gained a national reputation as major interpreters of the Russian radical scene. Indeed, before John Reed’s canonic evocation of the 1917 revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, which was published in 1919, it was Walling’s 1908 Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution that provided the fullest account of the Romanovs as seen through the eyes of an American radical. The book was so influential that it would even be translated into Russian. Its treatment of Jewish suffering was extensive, if also unreservedly sympathetic, with considerable attention paid to the community’s staggering poverty, government persecution, and anti-Jewish massacres and with Kishinev’s pogrom described extensively. The couple spent nearly two years in Russia amid the turbulence of the 1905 revolution and its aftermath, interviewing scores of radicals, officials, and others. This work was aided greatly by Strunsky’s native Yiddish and Russian.17
Their backgrounds could not have been more different. Walling was born into a wealthy Kentucky family; Strunsky, living first in New York and then in San Francisco, was born into a secular, left-leaning Jewish clan whose home figured among the liveliest of San Francisco’s bohemian salons, attracting the likes of Jack London (who was, for a time, Strunsky’s lover). Walling had long sought out—together with other patrician-born, left-wing friends—Jews on New York’s Lower East Side, exploring, as one later recalled,
. . . the teeming life down there. In those days when immigration poured countless thousands into the Lower East Side, most of them young, with political oppression behind them and new lives suddenly opening here, the whole vast region had become a melting pot for new ideas debated at a feverish heat in numberless cafés, large and small. Though in many the only drink was tea or coffee, and the men and boys and girls who gathered there worked hard by day, most of them beginning at dawn, still those night discussions would run on till three or four o’clock. . . . We went to the Yiddish theater, too, . . . to meetings in Cooper Union and to Bowery barrooms.18
Unsurprisingly, Walling found just this exotic intensity in Strunsky, a remarkably intelligent, strikingly attractive Jew. By the time they met in 1905, Strunsky was in her late twenties and had already coauthored a book with London, The Kempton-Wace Letters, which explored the interplay between rationality and emotion in romantic love. Built out of a series of letters inspired by the couple’s many conversations on the subject, it is a stilted, clotted volume, packed nonetheless with a fierce intensity. Since her late teens, Strunsky had won for herself a reputation as one of Northern California’s most sought-after socialist speakers. She was chair of the local Friends of Russian Freedom and editor of the Berkeley-based journal Russian Review. Her autumn 1905 diary records lectures at the Sequoia Club, Ruskin Club, Oakland Socialist Branch, Jewish Council, and Socialist German Branch. She was a beautiful woman, and according to one admirer who knew her from her days as a Stanford student, had “soft brown eyes, a kindly smile and a throaty little voice that did something to your spine.”19
At the time that Walling met Strunsky, as described by one historian, he was “an eclectic blend of European Marxism, the American equal rights movement and a romantic populism favored with a Russian Narodnik twist.”* He counted among his ancestors from his storied Southern stock a democratic vice-presidential candidate and Daniel Boone. Lanky, broodingly handsome, a graduate of the University of Chicago at the age of nineteen who then worked as a factory inspector, he was convivial, a serial womanizer, and—as Strunsky wrote soon after his death—a man who carried with him always “a great loneliness.” His books (there were five, including one on Walt Whitman) tended to be lengthy if also rather raw and pedantic. His energy seemed boundless; his writing was typically hastily done, though, until his sudden death, it continued to command a wide readership. Active in a broad array of progressive organizations, at the time of his death in an Amsterdam hotel room at the age of fifty-nine he had just rushed from Paris for still another meeting.20
Anna Strunsky.
Strunsky had none of his restless fluency. Her anticipated work on the Russian pogroms was left unfinished, as was a manuscript, tentatively called Revolutionary Lives, a series of well-observed and passionate sketches of the many inspiring radicals she and Walling had met during their Russian travels, beginning in 1906. It remained in manuscript even in 1917, when she sought, without success, finally to publish it.21
Strunsky retained a stalwart commitment to socialism, but, after marrying and giving birth to three children (following two miscarriages), she retreated as a public figure, becoming little more than a helpmate to her prominent husband. A novel, Violette of Père Lachaise, was completed in 1905 but would not be published for another decade. When the journalist and socialist activist Mary White Ovington described the founding meeting of what would become the NAACP, launched in Strunsky and Walling’s New York apartment, she would characterize it as launched by “three people”: a Jew (Henry Moskowitz), the descendant of an abolitionist (Oswald Garrison Villard), and the Southerner, Walling.22
Yet Strunsky had set much of this into motion. Amid the turmoil engulfing Russia in the first years of the twentieth century, Strunsky and Walling worked together to amass the information for Russia’s Message. The book compared tsarist treatment of Jews to, no less, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Spanish Inquisition, and the workings of the Mafia. Russia’s Jewish policy was, essentially, a “slow massacre system.” It described in great detail attacks on Jews in Odessa and elsewhere, the connivance of authorities, and the indifference of the police, with the official explanation of the disturbances always blaming victims for incitement. The volume included two photographs of Krushevan, whom it decried as one of Russia’s most vicious anti-Jewish leaders, responsible “for the first great massacre of recent years, Kishinev.”23
While preparing notes for an article on the Gomel pogrom of January 1906, Strunsky interviewed victims at a hospital. She described, for example, attacks on a woman who had been bayoneted and a girl with her eye gouged out. Strunsky visited the city’s most dreadful slum, an enclave known as the Hole, and she collected photographs of shrouded dead. She interviewed authorities who insisted that the attack on Jews was little more than a Jewish scam to collect insurance money. Such claims left her speechless: “My arms trembled, my eyes swam. My pen began streaming ink over my notebooks.” At Gomel’s train station the next morning, amid Jews fleeing the city, she knew that she had to drop all pretense of dispassionate journalism, recognizing that “I felt I was seeing these people for the last time, and for the last time I belonged to them.”24
Still, Strunsky bristled at the prospect of any special attention paid to Jewish political concerns: Her interest, she insisted, was in Jews as victims of oppression but not of special concern for any other reason. Particularly unimpressive were those promoting Jewish nationalism in the midst of revolution. In a draft of Revolutionary Lives dating to 1917 but based largely on interviews conducted a decade earlier, the only figure whom she took to task in an otherwise breathless paean to revolutionary devotion was the Jewish socialist activist and Bundist Mark Liber. She acknowledged his unstinting devotion as well as his intelligence but admitted her exasperation with his insistent preoccupation with Jews. Liber, she wrote, turned his back on “that romantic and highly varied result which comes out of the melting-pot of life.” It was therefore all the more ironic “that Liber and hundreds of thousands like [him], having espoused Nationalism, forsook the vision which has inspired the revolutionary and democratic forces seeking to weld the world together!”25
Returning from abroad in early summer 1908 at the time Russia’s Message appeared, Strunsky and Walling were immediately drawn to the eruption of antiblack violence in Springfield, Illinois. The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, it was a city Walling had often visited. The riot broke out in August 1908, the first antiblack massacre in the North in half a century.
Visiting relatives at the time in Chicago, Strunsky sensed right away that this was an American version of what they had just witnessed in Russia. Explaining their sudden departure to their hosts, Walling wrote: “It was Anna’s idea to begin with. She has been anxious for years to get an insight into one of these troubles and to write a broad, sympathetic and non-partizan [sic] account—as she did to the Homel massacre.” Both arranged to publish articles: Strunsky promised to send reports to Collier’s, and Walling committed to the liberal magazine The Independent, which had already published much of his just-released Russia’s Message. Walling’s piece, which appeared on September 3, created a veritable sensation, leading one year later to the creation of the NAACP; Strunsky, once again, never managed to finish hers.26
Taking the night train from Chicago, the couple arrived in Springfield the next morning to discover that “the rioting had been continuing throughout the night, and was even feared for the coming evening, in spite of the presence of nearly the whole militia of the State.” What they found was that the town was all but unanimously committed to dislodging all of its blacks, hoping that those who had not already done so would “flee.” Seven people died, forty homes and twenty-seven businesses were destroyed, and 107 indictments would be issued against rioters.27
Much like in Russia, where Jews themselves were as often as not blamed for attacks on them, Walling found this to be the case in Springfield. As expressed in the Illinois State Journal, there was “no other remedy than that applied by the mob. . . . [It was] the negroes’ own misconduct, general inferiority or unfitness for free institutions that were at fault.” Walling acknowledged that black criminality existed there and was encouraged by the bosses of both political parties. But, again much like in Russia, ultimate responsibility for the antiblack campaign was borne by the press, which had egged on the rioters and then justified their crimes.28
The similarities between how Walling and Strunsky would understand Russia’s pogroms and the Springfield attack were striking. And both would now break ranks with the Socialist Party, which had avoided support of the nascent movement for black civil rights as sectarian and at odds with exclusionary unions. On arriving in Springfield the couple heard the riot explained away—by rioters and local officials alike—on the basis of the argument that blacks were on the cusp of taking over the city. Their incursions justified the riot, whose express goal was to run them out of Springfield. It was claimed that blacks had fired first—a standard charge in official reports on Russian pogroms as well—and that mob violence was revenge for the murder of whites.29
Walling ended his article with the warning that what Springfield revealed was that, unless checked, the heinous antiblack repression so characteristic of the South was certain to move northward: “What large and powerful body of citizens,” he asked, “is ready to come to their aid?”30
Ovington responded immediately to Walling’s call, pressing him in a letter to take the initiative to launch just such a “large and powerful body.” A few days later, on September 12, at a public meeting in New York City’s Cooper Union, Walling and Strunsky spoke about their travels in Russia with special attention to the suffering of Jews. There the first concrete moves were made toward creating a national black defense organization. And the call for its establishment was made in direct response to Strunsky’s insistence—spontaneous, it seems, and formulated by her right on the spot—that the pogroms of Russia and the violence against blacks in the United States were horrors made of much the same stuff.31
Walling quickly countered that Springfield was, as he saw it, even worse than any pogrom. The rest of the meeting’s program then shifted to a detailed airing of “comparative oppression,” as an observer recalled, and as soon as it ended the couple sat with Ovington and several others late into the night, planning how best to launch an organization with the goal of putting a stop to the terrorizing of blacks. Over the next few weeks, as Strunsky and Walling continued their lecture tour to Indianapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere (which was slated originally to promote Russia’s Message), they shifted its primary focus from Russia to the oppression of blacks. In a letter from Strunsky to her parents in California after Walling’s first address in a black church, she said: “Great speech lasting two hours in a negro church. . . . All my family was there.”32
Once back in New York, the couple rented an apartment on West Thirty-Eighth Street, and the meeting described earlier by Ovington, where the “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro” was created, finally took place on January 9, 1909. Strunsky’s name appears among its founders. This set the stage for the first National Negro Conference—whose proceedings would be opened by Walling as the chair of its executive committee—on May 31, 1909. It was renamed, the next year, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.33
Though so much of the impetus behind the launching of this initiative was Strunsky’s, many close to Walling saw her as little more than an attentive spouse, a rather shadowy, even dowdy figure. The critical role she played, and so publicly, in fueling attention to the plight of blacks by linking it directly to the widely publicized persecution of Russia’s Jews would recede from view. Suffering profoundly from two consecutive miscarriages—she may well have absented herself from the founding meeting at her home of the “Committee for the Advancement of the Negro” because she was feeling ill—she now retreated from the public stage and was quickly forgotten. She missed the May 1909 National Negro Conference meeting because of another miscarriage four days before.34
A socialist for the remainder of her life, Strunsky would never again achieve the prominence she enjoyed in her twenties. A great-nephew recalls how, as an elderly woman (she died at the age of eighty-seven in 1964), she was known in family circles as someone who would corner young relatives and relate lengthy tales of the famous people she had once known. She never managed to finish Revolutionary Lives (the manuscript was deposited eventually in Special Collections at Yale University), but its pages contain comments scribbled in pencil by her children with jottings of love for their mother and gratitude for the joys of her home. “I love Mother and Mother loves me, and we are the happiest people you would ever see.”35
In October 1908, at much the same time that Walling and Strunsky were beginning to cobble together what would soon emerge as the NAACP, the biggest hit on Broadway was a play built around the Kishinev pogrom. This was Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, which debuted in Washington, DC, with Theodore Roosevelt in the audience; the president admitted in a letter to Zangwill a decade later that it still remained for him an abiding inspiration. “True Americanism” is what the play preached, as Roosevelt saw it. Zangwill likely saw the play somewhat differently, influenced as he was by an intermixture of beliefs that somehow combined Jewish nationalism and assimilation. Still, Zangwill’s starkest message, as articulated most clearly at the close of his play, was evident to all: America represented that spot where “all races and nations come to look forward” in contrast to horrific Kishinev, the site of “crimes beyond human penalty . . . obscenities beyond human utterance.”36
With the memory of Kishinev still fresh at the time of the play’s premiere, the town’s mention alone, according to one of Zangwill’s biographers, was “enough to electrify an audience.” Its protagonist is the violinist and composer David Quixano, a Kishinev orphan. His surname is meant to evoke noble Sephardic ancestry, with his profession intended—in this archly polemical production, more treatise than theater—as a refutation of Richard Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music” and its argument regarding the inability of Jews to create truly original compositions. High-strung, often hysterical, apparently brilliant but plagued by horrific recollections of Kishinev’s brutality, Quixano is meant to be the voice of the new American:
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! German and Frenchman, Irishman and Englishman, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. . . . [T]he real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible. I tell you—he will be the fusion of the races, perhaps the coming superman.37
Zangwill wrote these words while also campaigning, oddly enough, as a fervent Jewish nationalist, a maverick in the Zionist movement, then at the helm of his own organization pressing for a Jewish home anywhere in the world—not excluding venues distant from Palestine. (The same year The Melting Pot debuted on Broadway, he admitted to the Jewish Chronicle that he was so busy running the London office of the Jewish Territorial Organization that he no longer considered himself a writer.) How he reconciled his play’s unambiguous call for assimilation with his public Jewish activity he never managed to explain. And the play itself, while resoundingly successful at the time and the inspiration for the most resilient of all depictions of American exceptionalism, describes a phenomenon that never existed: “The point about the melting pot,” wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their pathbreaking 1963 study, Beyond the Melting Pot, “is that it did not happen.”38
In a dramatic work that, despite its title, had little if anything to do with the United States—it was, as Glazer and Moynihan rightly summed it up, “about Jewish separatism and Russian anti-Semitism”—Kishinev provided not so much a theme as scaffolding. Zangwill summed this goal up well, explaining that this theatrical work, much like his organizational activities, was little concerned with Russia “except as a place to escape from.”39
This would become Kishinev’s most salient of all lessons. The pogrom would serve for many as the final, definitive way in which the most nagging of all questions regarding the fate of Russia’s Jews was put to rest. True, there would remain much to debate, with Jews divided, often furiously, over whether the best course was the fall of the Romanovs or flight from Russia to the United States, Palestine, or elsewhere, as the historian Ezra Mendelsohn insightfully captured in this conundrum: Here or there, and if there where?40 What Kishinev made starkly clear, as its lessons would come to be absorbed over the next few years, was that Romanov Russia was beyond repair, now for Jews no more than, as Zangwill would put it, a springboard overready for flight.
It was the pogrom and the purported letter—these now meshed together irrevocably in the public mind—that provided the most indisputable of proofs. Kishinev was fodder for a host of stark, straightforward answers, the ideal focus for Bialik’s fierce, brilliant poetic curse, for (albeit quickly discarded) synagogue liturgy, Jewish propagandist art, and the declamations of Israeli politicians to the present day.
The interplay between the wealth of readily accessible information regarding Kishinev’s massacre—a veritable mountain of data—and the proliferation of distortions regarding it remains perhaps the saga’s most profoundly intriguing legacy. A huge body of documentary evidence was readily available in the pogrom’s wake, accompanied—indeed, as often as not overshadowed—by a stream of forgeries whose lessons retain their resonance still. The massacre would provide so many Jews as well as non-Jews with a conclusive sense of past and present. It would constitute for many the final nail in the coffin for the prospect of Russian Jewish integration, the ultimate verdict on the necessity for emigration to the United States or Palestine, the clearest of all clarion calls for revolution, and the starkest of all proof regarding Jewry’s uncanny worldwide influence. It would be invoked as the grimmest of all modern Jewish humiliations, as evidence of the necessity for Jews to fight resolutely against their foes, and as evidence of a Jewish cunning so supremely manipulative that the benefits accrued from violence against Jews far outweighed its harm.
The city at the heart of this story, renamed Chişinău after the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of an independent Moldova, is a place known mostly in recent years as one of the world’s notorious depots for international prostitution, the capital of a fast-crumbling nation-state bedeviled by corruption, petty and grandiose, with an ambiguous identity readily absorbable either into that of Romania or, perhaps less likely, Russia.
Chişinău itself possesses a certain gray, tired grandeur: a few largish parks in the city center, an imposing arch just outside its main state buildings, a beautiful ethnographic museum situated in a leafy part of town, peppered with some of the city’s more fashionable houses and embassies. To be sure, nearly all its streets are badly potholed and in need of repair; police corruption accompanied by shakedowns of foreigners are no less a fixture of the local scene than its undrinkable water. There are hints of gentrification in a cluster of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, whose decrepitude the newly rich (their source of wealth at best legally ambiguous) have designated as enticing. Most of the city’s Jews decamped long ago for Israel or the United States. A local literary scholar whose specialty is Krushevan’s fiction—for which she had great admiration—explained to me as we were sitting at the local Jewish community library that, had Jews not left Chişinău in the 1990s, it would now be faring far better economically; yet she had insisted just a few moments earlier that the real reason for the outbreak of the 1903 pogrom was that the city was packed with far too many Jews, with this justly exasperating locals. Though pressed, she acknowledged no contradiction in what she had just said.
The city’s grim past retains a palpable presence not only because of the pogrom’s lingering infamy but also because so many of its original, crumbling buildings—despite a massive earthquake in 1940 and, of course, the devastation of its Jewish population in World War II—have survived largely as a result of Chişinău’s chronic poverty. It is a shambling, unpretentious place, surprisingly lush, village-like in some of its corners, still bounded at its northern edge by the unassuming but harsh eyesore, the river Byk. A cement bridge stretches across this marshland, with the Old Town just around the corner, a quick walk from Aziatskaia Street (now renamed), a tenement brushing up against the street’s clapboard structures, which have weathered so much with no evidence, needless to say, that this was once and still remains one of the most storied sites of the recent Jewish past.
The dusty street is crowded in daytime with earnest, hardworking locals—women with their shopping bags, schoolchildren (there is an elementary school nearby), men lugging tools. Densely housed, a hodgepodge of Soviet-age construction and century-old piles, it is a place that has inspired lessons of heroism and shame, cowardice and militancy, loathing or trust for gentiles. As many would come to believe, it was here, in this crowded alleyway, where exile reached its sudden, bloody end.
* Russian peasant-oriented populists that by the time Walling wrote were associated mostly with the Socialist Revolutionary Party.