Artist and author Molly Crabapple joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and VV Ganesanthan to talk about the Jewish Labor Bund and its socialist, secular, anti-Semitic principles. Crabapple, whose artist great-grandfather Sam Rothbort was part of the organization, discusses researching and writing about new York Times best selling book, Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Dam, Which details the Bund’s roots, its establishment in 1897 and its development in the 20th century. Crabapple draws the Bund’s connection to Herenes’s idea and his belief that immigrants were home and that they belonged where they lived; the Bund’s relationship to the Russian Empire and Jewish identity; and the fate of its leaders in the genocide. She also reflects on how she structured and shaped the vast history of the Bund after a chance encounter with a fallen book on the street. she studies from Where we live is our country.
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Molly Crabapple
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part of conversation Molly with Crabapple
VV Ganesanthan: Arkady Kramer, previously involved in the Vilna Group, was one of the founders of the Bund. So who was he, and why was Vilna the starting point of the Bund’s predecessor? After reading this I kind of went on a Vilna internet spiral.
Molly Crabapple: They called it the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Vilna was just this big intellectual center for Jews. It was the place where religious movements came from, it was the place where literary movements came from, and it was the place where political movements came from. Arkady Kramer is one of the thirteen original founders of the Bund, and is generally considered the group’s father, even though the Bund was never a group that had a single all-powerful leader like the Bolshevik Party.
Arkady Kramer was a boy from a poor family who had a gloomy disposition, he was a bookworm, his nature was so ascetic that he would not buy new pants even though he had a lot of holes in them, and he was the kind of person who, in the form of an irritable young student, was discovered by one of the book’s heroines, his wife, husband. Pati and Arkady Kramer were two of a band of young Jewish troublemakers who were looking at the decaying Tsarist empire with all its repression, all its racism, all its famines, all its epidemics and all its backwardness, and they were thinking “There’s got to be something better than this. There’s got to be a better way to live.”
These young Jews, like many young non-Jewish subjects of the Empire, were turning to revolutionary thinkers like Karl Marx, and in exchange for even the smallest acts of rebellion – like, say, founding a book club – Arkady, the husband, and the rest of their environment were soon exposed to being arrested, beaten, and sometimes imprisoned and sent into periods of internal exile. Now, Arkady and husband founded what was called the Vilna Group in the late 1800s on the idea that was common in Russian revolutionary circles at that time, which was that the proletariat is the agent of history, but the Russian proletarian is really stupid, he’s really uneducated, there’s no way he can be the agent of history.
Therefore, to bring revolution in a backward country like Russia, you cannot do it immediately. You had to educate the worker. You had to set up book clubs, and I’m not kidding you, the basic theory of how the revolution would start in the Russian Empire was that young intellectuals would set up book clubs for workers who would then set up more book clubs which would then inspire more workers to come to their book clubs and eventually, if enough workers came to enough book clubs, there would be a revolution.
This is how the Vilna Group began, but very quickly they realized that it was not actually going to lead to revolution. It’s just inspiring workers to be hipsters, and talk to other workers, and lug their books around to look good. They realize they will need a different strategy. Then, as now, it is true that workers have never needed professional revolutionaries to tell them that their work is worthless. It is no revelation to workers that they are being paid very little for working in conditions that are arduous and very long hours, and in Vilna and other cities around the Pale of Settlement, workers were already beginning to organize to do something about it. The outlines of a primitive trade union movement with strikes and mutual aid funds already existed.
So, Arkady, Pati, and their friends in the Vilna group decide: How will we use our skills as young, educated intellectuals to help these workers? How do we research employment law? How about we print their pamphlets? How about we create networks between cities and abroad to give them access to rich people in Switzerland to fund their strikes? How about if we make ourselves useful instead of talking to them? And it was actually the meeting between these very educated and idealistic young Marxists and the incredibly practical and tenacious worker movement of the Jewish proletariat of the Pale of Settlement that led to the Bund.
Whitney Terrell: People in America have often criticized Democratic Socialists because they are educated people living in Brooklyn who don’t really know any workers. It always seems difficult to make the connection between the intellectual class and the actual working class.
MC: This is also the story of every revolution and every movement. They are all about the meeting between the working class and educated young intellectuals. This has been the situation since the French Revolution,
WT: Arkady writes a little about it. You mentioned his book on the movement that Lenin quoted from, which I found fascinating. So, the Bund is created – the Yiddish word means organization – and they join the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as representatives of the Jewish working class for the entire Russian Empire. About a year later, in 1898, we brought you the character of your great grandfather. One of their representatives comes to Volkovysk, where your great-grandfather was a tannery apprentice, and when the apprentices go on strike to get the Saturday off, they are successful, and Sam Rothbort joins the Bund. How did this change his life?
MC: Sam was a man who grew up in a very religious world. His father was a Talmudic scholar, although he was also in the shmata business in America. I don’t want to make this sound too glorified, but his father was an incredibly pious and learned man, and the way Judaism was practiced for a person like Sam was something that really impacted every aspect of your life. It determined how your wedding would go, what you would do on Friday versus Saturday, what kind of clothes you would wear, what you would eat, whether you would walk with a walking stick on Friday night. It was a complete way of life. It wasn’t like you practiced once a week in a religious building. It was your whole world, and with it, it brought a lot of isolation from the Gentile world.
Volkovysk, where Sam was from, is about half Jewish, a quarter Polish and a quarter Belarusian. There were also some Crimean Muslims, but in general, Jews lived lives that were socially distinct from their Christian neighbors. He also lived a life where he did not read secular books. Sam went to Cheder, religious school, where he was studying Talmud and Torah. He wasn’t studying math or science or Jules Verne or Charles Darwin. So for him, joining the Bund was something that changed his life in the broadest and most intimate aspects. This meant he could hang out with girls he could date. This meant that on Friday nights he was quietly attending revolutionary meetings instead of being absorbed in prayer. It meant that he was breaking Sabbath laws by taking something on Saturday, and especially – I think this is the most important thing – it meant that he could no longer see himself as separate from the larger Gentile world. People who previously saw him as the rude Polish boys who threw stones at him, or as the drunken soldiers who trashed the shops, or as the local Tsarist authority figure who talked down to his grandfather, suddenly cease to be foreigners and may instead be comrades even non-Jews.
Written by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photo of Molly Crabapple by Daniel Efraim.
