Chapter 6

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I arrived safely in Kiev. My teacher Klachkin had given me several addresses in Kiev and in Yekaterinoslav. As soon as I got to Kiev, I began asking the way to the address I had brought. It turned out to be in the Podol [the lower town of Kiev]. I hired a droshky [horse-drawn carriage] and rode there. I went into the house and asked for Anyuta. The landlady said she wouldn’t be back until eight in the evening, and I asked if I might wait for her. As soon as I told her my name was Golodny, she took me into a room and said I could stay there. I was very tired from the journey, so I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

I slept a good few hours. Then, half asleep, I heard two young women talking to each other in Russian: “Where will he sleep tonight? It’s too late to find him a room. And the police might still come and make a raid.” One of them said, “It’s a big bed; three can sleep in it.” At that I woke up completely and saw two pretty young women standing in front of me. I was overjoyed, because one of them was Frida, the girl from Mozyr whom I loved. The other was Anyuta. My heart felt lighter. Frida told me that she had been summoned to the gendarmerie several times, and they had kept interrogating her about me. They accused her of knowing where I was and threatened to arrest her. She had had to promise to bring me to them, and right after that she fled to Anyuta in Kiev.

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Both of them felt I couldn’t stay there more than a few days, because the danger of a raid was very great. They thought I should take the steamboat to Yekaterinoslav. They were right: late that night there was a raid. The girls hid me in a wardrobe full of clothes, and luckily the police didn’t find me. First thing the next morning I left for Yekaterinoslav by steamboat. The whole trip cost me ten kopecks, and they threw in a big bread roll besides, because the steamboat lines were competing with each other.

I arrived in Yekaterinoslav in the month of March. I asked my way to the address on Karaimskaya Street. When I got to the house, I saw a young man standing outside in a blue shirt belted with a fringed cord. I asked him whether Kolya Teper was there. He smiled and answered, “That’s me, Golodny.” I asked how he knew my name. He said he had gotten a telegram from Frida in Kiev saying I was coming, and since he was registered in that house under another name, he had been standing out front waiting for me. He took me to his room, where I met his companion, Shapiro. They asked me about the comrades in Mozyr (they knew Klachkin well, and Frida too).

Kolya Teper and Shapiro were both very interesting people. Even then they held important positions in the Russian Social Democratic Party, and they were very close to Plekhanov¹. I was very pleased to know such prominent people.

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The second evening Kolya took me to a skhodka. He told me I would have to give a report there on the towns I came from: how things stood with the work, and with preparing the proletariat for action, strikes and demonstrations. My report went over very well.

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After a few days’ rest I began looking for work, and I found a position as a prikazchik [clerk] in a timber business. The firm was called “Paley Lesnoi Torgovli” [Paley Timber Trading], and it was a very rich firm. Learning the work was easy for me, because Paley’s son supervised me, and he was a comrade, a Social Democrat. He also knew Kolya well.

I became active in the movement. Soon packages of literature began arriving from Geneva, addressed to my employer’s son, Isak Paley, as though they were goods for the firm. I took charge of getting this literature to wherever it was needed, and the distribution went smoothly.

Preparations began for a May Day demonstration (this was already 1900). I was appointed to the small inner committee that was to direct all the preparations. On this committee I met Isak Paley. He was glad to see me, though surprised to find me on such an important committee. Many proclamations were distributed. One appeal called for a joint May Day demonstration of all the parties: the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bund, the Social Democrats and the “Soyuz Rabochei Voli” [Union of the Workers’ Will]. The preparations were very tense. The governor ordered the gendarmerie and the police to prevent the demonstration by every possible means.

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The first of May arrives. Masses of workers gather on the broad Deribasovskaya Street. The red flags of the various socialist parties are unfurled. The demonstration sets off and begins to march. At once mounted gendarmes and police with nagaikas [Cossack whips] in their hands come charging in, lashing out left and right. The horses trample people. The first victims fall. The demonstrators tear stones out of the pavement and hurl them at the police and gendarmes, and policemen and gendarmes fall wounded too. Seeing that it could end in a great bloodbath, the committee gave the order to disperse. Many demonstrators were arrested, Isak Paley among them.

I go to the office where I work. Isak’s father asks me why I didn’t come in that morning. He also asks me about his son. I tell him he has been arrested. He tells me not to come to work anymore and pays me what he owes me. He asks me not to hold it against him; it will be better for me, too, not to be found there. Without a word I left and went to my room.

When I got home, I found Comrades Boris and Liza Shapiro in my room waiting for me. They showed me a letter from the Central Committee. I had been appointed the Central Committee’s representative for illegal literature for the whole “Yuzhny Krai” [the Southern Region], that is, Ukraine, with my base in Odessa². All of this was to be arranged within a month.

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In the meantime I was given another mission: to help the union at the Bryansk Works³ call a strike of the factory’s workers. The Bryansk Works was an important center of heavy industry. It produced locomotives and other iron and steel goods, and several thousand people worked there. The exploitation of the workers was so terrible that the workers themselves were itching to revolt. Once the ground for a strike had been prepared, the strike committee, of which I was a member, set the day. It was to begin at eleven in the morning, in the middle of the working day.

The Bryansk Works was surrounded by a high stone wall and covered a large area, about 25 blocks. There were four entrances in the wall, and policemen stood guard at each one. Every worker wore a number around his neck, and without it he couldn’t get in or out. The strike committee decided that I should get inside the works and find out where the machinery was that powered the whole factory. That was also where the whistle was that told the workers when to start work and when to stop. They got me the number of a worker who was out sick. I was very proud of the responsible mission entrusted to me. On the day of the strike, I was to get into the department where the factory whistle was and make sure the whistle was set off at exactly eleven o’clock. That was to be the signal for the strike. Some of the workers in that department were organized, and they were to help me stand up to anyone who tried to stop the whistle.

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At seven in the morning on the appointed day, I went into the factory with the great stream of workers. I showed “my” number at the gate and got through safely. For four hours I had to hide and drift from place to place so that nobody would notice I wasn’t doing any work. At exactly eleven o’clock I went into the machine department, walked boldly up to the whistle and set it off. A loud whistle rang out. Several men came running at once to stop it, but our organized workers blocked their way. A big fight broke out, and we gave those few fellows a good beating. The workers made for the exits. They streamed toward the gates from every direction, and by the time the police arrived, the whole day shift was already out in the street. Soon soldiers and gendarmes arrived too and drove the crowd of workers back into the factory. The strike committee ordered everyone to sit down on the ground and not go back to work.

Soon the governor himself arrived. He demanded that representatives of the strikers present themselves to him. The strike committee chose several people on the spot, and I was among them. When we came close to the governor, he gave the order to arrest us. We took off running. Soon I heard heavy gunfire behind us (the governor had ordered them to shoot after us). As I ran, a bullet hit me in the leg and I went down. The police came over and took me to the uchastok [police station]. Then they took me to the hospital, where the bullet was removed from my leg. That same night I escaped from the hospital with the help of one of the doctors. He was a comrade, and he helped me get away on the party’s instructions.

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I went to the train and traveled to Kiev, to my comrade Frida. There I learned that she had had to flee Kiev, because the police had their eye on her and were searching for her. I was told she had gone to her parents in Kalinkovichi, 10 versts [11 km] from Mozyr.

Kalinkovichi was the railway station for Mozyr and a number of other small towns in the area. Most of the Jews of Kalinkovichi were wagon drivers who carried passengers from the train out to the surrounding towns in carts. Kalinkovichi was an entirely Jewish shtetl, and all the shops belonged to Jews.

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When I arrived in Kalinkovichi, I went to Henye Gorelik, for whom I had a letter from Kiev. Henye Gorelik was an active worker in the Bund. I asked her whether she knew Frida Karasik. She answered that Frida would be coming over soon, and just then in walks Frida. We were overjoyed to see each other. Frida told me to come to her house, because she had told her father she had a fiancé.

Frida had lost her mother. There were two children: a son, who was already married, and Frida. Her father was quite well-off. He owned two houses; he lived in one and his son in the other. He also owned five horses with britzkas [light carriages] that carried passengers from the train to Mozyr, and for several years he had held the mail contract. He was counted among the respected Jews of the shtetl.

Frida took me into her father’s house and introduced me: “Father, this is my fiancé. He’s Ben-Zion’s son. His father is the Loyev Rebbe’s emissary.” Everyone knew my father, because he was also a cantor and often led services in Mozyr and the towns around it.

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We agreed to write to my father, asking him to consent to my marrying Frida and to come to Kalinkovichi. Meanwhile I stayed at Frida’s house and began giving Russian lessons. I charged 25 kopecks an hour. I had eight pupils: five came to me, and I went to the homes of the other three. At first I earned two rubles a week. Then I raised my price, and my earnings grew to three rubles a week.

My father came and stayed with the rabbi. He sent word for me to come to him, and Frida, my fiancée, went with me. He called me into another room and told me he liked the girl. But a boy of seventeen was too young to marry, he said, and it wasn’t fitting for us to make a match with a Jew like Frida’s father. I answered my father that I loved her, and that Frida had no mother, just like me, and one mustn’t cause grief to an orphan. Then my father consented to the match, and the wedding canopy was set up.

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A few weeks later we left for Odessa, where I immediately took up my party work. I had to organize a group of comrades in every town and appoint one of them, someone reliable, as its head, to whom I could send illegal literature. My district was very large; it stretched from Odessa to Kiev. I had to travel to all these towns myself to set up the connections. I had to throw myself into the work right away, and I couldn’t remain together with Frida.

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Frida became pregnant and went to Mozyr. A short time later the Central Committee sent Dramashkin to help me in the work. Kolya Teper and his wife also came to Odessa then. In my work I had to be strictly conspiratorial; only a select few leaders of the movement met with me. It was interesting work, but it was hard, and we had to hide from the police at the same time. I was so absorbed in the work that I never even thought about my wife’s time drawing near. So it came as a surprise when I got a letter from Frida saying she had safely given birth to a little girl, a beautiful baby who took after her, and that she had been named Khane-Leye. In the letter Frida asked me to come to Mozyr.

But I couldn’t go, because sharp debates had broken out in the party then, which soon led to the famous split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. A large meeting was called in a big quarry pit outside the city. Kolya Teper, Dramashkin, Boris and I, who were known as the rabochie intelligenty [worker-intellectuals], were to debate the question. We organized the meeting with great secrecy. We posted people along the route to show the way. At each post you had to give the password “Tovarishchi” [Comrades], and then you were shown the next stretch of the way. But in the middle of the meeting the police and gendarmes arrived. They broke up the meeting and arrested many people, and I was arrested too. But they found nothing on me.

A cousin of mine, a medical student, came to the uchastok and got me out. My older sister Malke was in Odessa at the time, staying with our great-uncle, and she had asked his son, the student, to go and get me out of jail.

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As soon as I was freed, I asked the party committee for permission to go to my wife and child. I got it and left for Mozyr at once. There I learned that Frida and the baby were already at her father’s in Kalinkovichi, so I went straight there. Henye Gorelik, a close friend of Frida’s, was there too. A few days later Henye let us know that the whole shtetl was in an uproar about Mordkhe Karasik’s son-in-law, who had come to town: he didn’t go to shul to pray, he was a socialist, and he wanted to overthrow the tsar. The town’s wagon drivers had decided that when I went out in the street, they would search me to see whether I was wearing a tallis-koton [the fringed undergarment worn by observant men], and if I wasn’t, they would hand me over to the police. Henye Gorelik organized a group of strong young men to protect me from the wagon drivers. I went out on the street with Frida, carrying the baby in my arms. The wagon drivers didn’t dare come near. They had probably been given to understand that they would be met with force.

After two weeks I left with Frida and the baby for Yekaterinoslav. We settled in Amur, a suburb of Yekaterinoslav, where my sister Feygl lived. She had married a man named Fogelson, a shochet’s son. I left Frida and the baby there and went back to Odessa and my party work. In Odessa I registered under a false name. Frida became the leader of my group in Yekaterinoslav. I came home often, for both reasons: to see my family and on party business.

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At the beginning of 1903 Frida gave birth to a second child, a boy, and we named him Tsodek, after Frida’s grandfather. With two children it was hard for Frida to manage, so we decided she should go back to her father with the children. I couldn’t even go with her, I was so busy with party work, so a woman comrade went along and helped her on the way.

At that time, in 1903, the work of the Social Democratic Party, and especially of Iskra⁴, was very stormy: strikes, frequent demonstrations, a flood of proclamations and agitational literature. My group had to supply literature for every city. Suddenly the Central Committee informed me that Zubatovites [agents of the police-run labor movement] had infiltrated my group, and that it had to be broken up and completely reorganized. Since the Zubatovites knew me well and were already watching me, I had to leave Odessa immediately. I went to Kiev, where I was transferred to a new party post. I was sent out as an agitator among the peasants in the villages. First I was sent to Pinsk, to organize the “Polesskaya Zheleznaya Doroga” [the Polesye Railway]. There I got a letter from Frida telling me not to come home, because the police were still asking about me and watching the house. She had already been arrested. They had demanded that she tell them where I was, and she answered that she hadn’t heard from me in several months. After a few days they released her.

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