The inception and growth of the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States were inseparable from the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in 1881. Jewish immigrants from the czarist empire had been schooled in Russian radical politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period when the revolutionary movement and the anarchist project cooperated against tyrannical oppression by the czar. Jews participated actively in the Russian populist movement (Narodnaya Volya) and in assassination attempts against a succession of government officials and against the czar. Women anarchists like Vera Zasulich, Vera Figner, and Gesia Helfman provided role models for the young generation of Jewish women in the Russian Pale of Settlement who were receptive to secular and political involvement. Some of the women who participated in Jewish radical circles and in anti-czarist agitation at the time of the 1905 revolution came subsequently to the United States.

(via sovietjewry)

Background: Jewish Community in Dnepropetrovsk

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Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak (Russian: Самуи́л Я́ковлевич Марша́к; November 3, 1887 - June 4, 1964) was a Russian and Soviet writer, translator and children’s poet.

In 1902, the Marshak family moved to Saint Petersburg. There was a complication: as a Jew, Marshak could not legally live outside the Pale of Settlement, thus he could not attend school while living in the city. “The philanthropist and scholar Baron David Gunzburg took an interest in [Marshak]” and introduced him to “the influential critic, Vladimir Stasov.” Stasov was so impressed by the schoolboy’s literary talent that he arranged an exception from the Pale laws for Samuil and his family.

In 1904, he published his first works in the magazines Jewish Life and in mid- to late 1900s, Marshak “created a body of Zionist verse, some of which” appeared in such periodicals as Young Judea.

In 1914, Marshak and his wife worked with children of Jewish refugees in Voronezh. ”The death of Marshak’s young daughter [in 1915] directed him toward children’s literature.”

During World War II, he published satires against the Nazis.

Although not widely known, “in the Soviet times, Marshak was on the [political] razor’s edge and barely escaped death in 1937.” ”Stalin’s death in 1953 saved Marshak from inevitable death in the period of ‘the fight against cosmopolitism’.” ”His name was often mentioned in the documents of the eliminated Jewish Anti-Nazi Committee.”

(via Wikipedia)

I’ve posted some of his work.

∞  March 11, 2012 at 11:56pm via

3 notes

The inception and growth of the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States were inseparable from the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe starting in 1881. Jewish immigrants from the czarist empire had been schooled in Russian radical politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period when the revolutionary movement and the anarchist project cooperated against tyrannical oppression by the czar. Jews participated actively in the Russian populist movement (Narodnaya Volya) and in assassination attempts against a succession of government officials and against the czar. Women anarchists like Vera Zasulich, Vera Figner, and Gesia Helfman provided role models for the young generation of Jewish women in the Russian Pale of Settlement who were receptive to secular and political involvement. Some of the women who participated in Jewish radical circles and in anti-czarist agitation at the time of the 1905 revolution came subsequently to the United States.