Chapter Three / 1903

"The most important thing in my life has been the revolutionary movement, even since I was a young child without understanding. I must have been born that way, feeling that I was with the downtrodden, with the people that suffer and against those that punish us because they want more money. Sooner or later you have to start thinking about it, y'see. And it's so 'easy for you to become a revolutionary if you think.

"But in Russia, you were afraid to open your eyes, no less your mouth. If, like they say, misery loves company, then it loved Russia. The peasants didn't have what to eat. They couldn't read, they couldn't write, and they couldn't struggle. They didn't know how. All they knew was God and the czar father and how to make soup out of nothing, out of bones. And meanwhile there were people drinking champagne from women's shoes and feeding veal to their dogs.

"If you crowd animals together in a pen, they bite and they kick each other instead that they should all push together to knock down the fence. If just once, in all my eighty-eight years, everyone who had been on the good side had fought together, instead of spending time making up their own little fights, their own little curses, then we could have gone to bed early! But whatever's wrong with the society, y'see, you find at least a little part of it in each person, including the revolutionaries. Competition. Greed. Racism. Anti-Semitism.

"So, in Russia: The Jewish people were not allowed to own land, so they took on jobs, like trades, or f'rinstance they sold whiskey until the government took the license from us. But we owned shops, we sold goods, we fixed things, and always we were very poor. But to a peasant, forget it, say the word 'Jew' and he spits. He might be a slave himself, but the Jews are not even human! The Jews, he says, make money off his back. The Jews, he says, won't put a finger into the earth except to dig up buried treasure. Everyone tells him this; what else can an ignorant person believe if he's hearing anti-Semitism from the priest—our priest was good, y'see, but most of them were rotten—and he hears it from the czar and from everybody else? Plus—don't forget—the Jews killed the Messiah!

"So then you get a pogrom, a riot against the Jews. The government doesn't do anything to stop it, of course. In fact, the gendarmes help to start it. It's just like the Ku Klux Klan does to the blacks in America—with the help of the FBI.

"And the Jews didn't behave much better, y'see. To a Jew, the peasant is an ox without a brain. You cheat him, and if he finds you out, you say you're sorry and cheat him again! We were better than the goyim and scared of them at the same time.

"There was no one to be a bridge between people. My father tried, he was a liberal man, but still, he had a mind like from a small town, a shtetl. 'Pray and God will provide.' And my brothers, especially Yeshua, like a lot of the revolutionaries, they forgot they were Jewish. They became assimilationists. They thought that Marx and Moses can't be served on the same plate together. So they didn't make the genuine connection with the Jewish workers until after the pogrom at Kishinev-19o3. Even a group like the Jewish Labor Bund, which especially tried to organize Jewish workers in the big cities, even they didn't really get going until after Kishinev.

"Forty-seven Jews were murdered in Kishinev, in two days. After that, everyone in the world realized that the czar was using the Jews for a scapegoat, helping to make pogroms against us so the peasants should think they're achieving something by beating a Jew. A lot happened after Kishinev. Many Jews went to America, some became Zionists and planned to go to Palestine, but most important was that a real progressive movement grew in Russia, with a lot of support from young Jewish people. It doesn't mean you have an end to anti-Semitism—the stronger the revolutionaries got, y'see, the more the government looked for scapegoats—but at least now you had organized groups that they could fight against the pogromchiki and maybe show the peasants who the real enemies are.

"Look, it's hard just to cook a noodle pudding—can you imagine how hard it was to make a whole revolution and hold it together? But I tell you, when I go back and talk about it, I really feel my blood circulating!"