Vladimir Medem, born of assimilated Russian Jewish parents in Minsk in 1879 and baptized at birth in the Greek Orthodox Church, devoted his life wholly to the cause of the Jewish labor movement in the ranks of the Bund (General Jewish Labor Bund), the Jewish Socialist party founded in 1897.
The Bund developed in underground channels in czarist Russia and its Polish and Lithuanian dependencies. With the bolshevization of Russia and the disenfranchisement of the Bund there, the new republic of Poland, established in 1918, became the center of Bund activity. During the twenty-one years of Polish independence, the Bund exerted a profound influence in all areas of Jewish life. The Jewish trade union movement in Poland was largely under Bund control; a ramified Yiddish school system from kindergarten through teacher-training institutes grew up under its aegis. In later years, Bund representatives gained majorities in local Jewish communal bodies and spoke for the majority of the Jewish voters in municipal governments. The civic defense of the Jewish community of Poland and the struggle against discrimination were largely conducted by the Bund in cooperation with Polish Socialists.
Medem developed as a political personality during the period of conspiratorial revolutionary activity in czarist Russia. He was arrested several times and was frequently forced to seek refuge abroad, usually in Switzerland, where he came into contact with various leaders of the Russian revolutionary movements: Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, and many others. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Medem was arrested in Russia and imprisoned. In 1915, he was released from a Warsaw dungeon when the Russians fled before the Imperial German Army. Medem remained in Warsaw until 1920 as a member of the Central Committee of the Bund; during these five years he became one of the most popular labor leaders among Eastern European Jews.
His poor health, combined with internal party differences, caused him to leave Poland in 1921 and to come to the United States, where he retired from public life and devoted much of his time to writing his memoirs. On January 9, 1923, Medem died of a kidney disease in New York and was buried in the cemetery of the Workmen’s Circle. His tombstone bears, in Yiddish, the inscription: “Vladimir Medem, legend of the Jewish labor movement.”
By constant study of, and immersion in, things Jewish, Medem came to know a great deal about Jewish history and customs, Jewish thought and politics. He learned Yiddish so well that established Yiddish writers declared his style impeccable. During his work with the Bund in Warsaw, he turned his attention increasingly to the educational and cultural aspects of the Bund’s program, especially in the area of the Yiddish secular school. Steeped in Jewish history and politics, Medem was, even in the consistently anti-Zionist Bund, one of the most outspoken critics of political Zionism, and in his journalistic work he frequently attacked Zionist parties for drawing the attention of Polish Jewry away from the immediate, local struggle to improve their status.
Because of his unique personal history as one who had “returned to the fold,” and because of his selfless devotion to the party, the austerity of his personal life, his gentleness, modesty, and integrity, Medem even during his lifetime attained a stature considerably greater than that of most contemporary political leaders. His death grieved Jewish workers the world over; tens of thousands of Jewish laborers braved a raging snowstorm to join his funeral procession. Memorial meetings were held in many cities throughout the world. But especially it was the Jewish workers of Poland who, in every Jewish community of that country, left their factories and workshops in the middle of the day to assemble in the greatest manifestation of sorrow ever aroused by a Jewish political figure.
The following selections have been freely translated from the two volumes of Medem’s unfinished autobiography, Fun Mein Leben (published in Yiddish, New York, 1923).
—Lucy S. Dawidowicz
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My mother sits in the dining room. Before her stands a little old woman. I remember her name was Leyeh or, as she was called in our house, Leykeh. My mother sits, Leykeh stands, and they don’t stop talking for a moment. I don’t remember what they talked about, but I do remember that they spoke Yiddish.
I, a child of six or seven, hover near my mother. I hear Leykeh calling her “dear Madame,” I hear my mother replying in “jargon” [Yiddish], and I am beside myself with anger. Who ever heard of such a thing: an intelligent, educated woman, the wife of a Russian general, speaking “jargon”? I can hardly wait for my father to come home. Such goings-on aren’t allowed in his presence. And indeed, when my father is heard coming, Leykeh disappears hastily into the kitchen. I breathe more freely. Our home is once again truly Russian.
Leykeh used to come to our house every Friday to make Jewish-style fish. True, it wasn’t for Friday night suppers as in Jewish homes, but for Friday dinner. Nevertheless, it was a relic of old Jewish times, a trace of vanished Jewishness. Such traces became less and less frequent from year to year. Our house was increasingly becoming really Russian, not only in language, but in the full content of our lives.
Both my parents were Jews by birth, real honest-to-goodness Jews. I think that my father was even a kohen. He came from Shavli (Kovno region) and had settled in Minsk;, my mother came from Vilna. I never met my paternal grandparents, but I know that my father’s generation was stricken by conversion, as was my mother’s family. Practically all my uncles and aunts were Christians and some of their children did not even know of their Jewish origin.
To understand this, we must remember that this epidemic of conversion began much earlier. My father, for example, was born in 1836. As a boy he studied in a Russian Gymnasium and later attended the St. Petersburg military medical academy. When he was graduated he became an army doctor and established himself in a Russian environment. He had left traditional Jewishness very early, if he had ever known it. Insofar as he had any contact with Jewish life, it was permeated with assimilationist leanings. In the 60’s, the springtide of Alexander II’s regime, the attitude toward Jews was liberal, and the Jewish community responded ardently in its desire to fuse with the Russian people.
Then came a shift in events. The political honeymoon ended and was replaced by years of reaction, pogroms, and anti-Semitism, especially when Alexander III ascended the throne. With political persecution also went social rejection of the Jews. The situation had changed. No matter how hard one had tried to forget one’s former Jewishness, the outside world refused to allow it. “You are a Jew” became an insult, a detraction. And the Jew then began to feel ashamed of his Jewishness.
This shame about Jewishness and the desire to conceal one’s Jewish origin was typical for our milieu. I remember how, in my childhood, my family was speaking about someone: is it known or not known that he is a Jew? I remember that some of our relatives strictly prohibited the use of the word “Jew,” lest the servants hear. A sort of code was developed which only the family could understand. Instead of using the word “Jew,” they said “Italian” or “our kind.” In our house, the shame of Jewishness never reached this absurdity, but the same atmosphere prevailed. I myself, as a young child, was completely acclimated to it. My Jewish origin was a burden. It was a shame, a degradation, a sort of secret disease about which no one should know. And if people did know, then, if they were kind and friendly, they took no notice of it, just as one ignores the deformity of a hunchback so as not to hurt him.
This is why I used to become upset when my mother spoke Yiddish to old Leykeh. Every word reminded me of the ugly disease: you are a Jew, a cripple. I did not want to be a Jew, I did not consider myself a Jew, and I used to prattle in imitation of the grownups: we are Russians.
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This was the atmosphere of our circle and it led to conversion as the final and drastic cure for the secret disease. Actually, conversion was no more than a formality, the last rung of the ladder. My parents did not take this step until quite late. My father became converted at the age of fifty-six, a few months before his death. He was one of the most distinguished citizens of our city, a division doctor, a statski sovetnik, a rank between colonel and general. He could not become a full general because he was a Jew. But that was not why he became converted. As I understood it (I was about thirteen years old then), new restrictions against Jewish officials had been introduced, and my father’s position was endangered. Since he had no private practice, was old and sick, and could not possibly dream of beginning his career anew, he decided to join the Lutheran Church.
My mother became a Christian a short while later, soon after my father’s death. She was very sick, and we children convinced her that her conversion had been our father’s desire. She gave in unwillingly and with considerable distress.
At that time, all the children were Christians. My sister had become converted together with my father in order to marry a Russian. My oldest brother had long been an army officer and, necessarily, a Christian. Two other brothers had been converted, but it was spoken of so little that I don’t even remember when. Oddly enough, all became Lutherans, as did most Jews who joined the Christian church. I believe it was because conversion to Protestantism involved less ceremonial and fewer technical difficulties than Orthodoxy. Thus, our whole family gradually became Lutherans. Only I was an exception—I belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church.
I was the first Christian in our family, even though I was the youngest. When I was born (July 1879), my parents decided: we have suffered enough because of our Jewishness; let our youngest not know such sufferings. And I was baptized in a Greek Orthodox church just as if I had been born into an Orthodox family, while they themselves remained Jews for a long time.
Thus, I was a Greek Orthodox child, reared in a Jewish, later a half-Lutheran, and finally a wholly Lutheran family. I never felt any inconsistency between my Orthodoxy and the Jewishness around me. Actually, I was for a long time convinced that my father had become converted much earlier than he had in fact. In our home all the Russian church holidays were observed. On official festivals my father even used to go to church, so that I never felt any barrier to the full and free development of my religious feeling.
I was about five when I first went to church. It made a great impression on me: the dark gold holy pictures, the glowing lights and candles, the somber mien of the priests in their extraordinarily beautiful vestments, the mysterious ceremonies, the vibrant bass of the proto-deacon, the singing of the choir. It is indeed hard to describe the full beauty of Russian church music with its earnest and sublime harmony.
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But as I grew older, my religious emotions, based on externals rather than conscious religious awareness, began to dissipate, and when I reached my second year in Gymnasium, I began to develop critical attitudes. During my last years in Gymnasium, my circle gradually and imperceptibly turned Jewish. The adults who visited us were still mostly Russian, but the friends with whom I associated were almost exclusively Jews. One was Alexander Eliasberg, the son of well-to-do Jews, who himself had already traveled, read much, and who influenced my taste in art and literature. Another was Yasha Kaplan. I used to visit him quite often, and there I found an unmistakably lower-middleclass Jewish house. Eliasberg’s home was Jewish too; his family observed Jewish customs, so much so that he was afraid even to ride on the Sabbath lest they find out. But I hardly ever saw his family. With Kaplan’s family, it was different: the home was more sociable, more familiar. A portrait of Baron de Hirsch adorned a wall; Yiddish was heard frequently. Once, I remember, some people came and sang Yiddish songs, some by Goldfaden, I think. By that time the sound of Yiddish no longer pained my ears.
There were other Jewish boys with whom I was friendly and who visited me. At home, my Jewish acquaintanceships did not pass without comment. My older brother used to joke good-naturedly about it. He would say, “Go on, one of your Ginsbergs has come; I don’t know whether Kaplan or Eliasberg.” But it was no more than a joke; no one disturbed my friendships.
At that time, I had two other Jewish friends of a different sort, not fellow students. They were sons of a Jewish storekeeper who had his shop in the yard of our house. All day the boys played in the yard until their mother drove them inside. When I outgrew the games, I turned to “education.” I decided to teach them Russian, hygiene, and gentility.
Yet even though I made friends with more and more Jews, I cannot definitely say that I began to consider myself a Jew. The question of my own Jewishness was not yet posed.
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In 1897, I enrolled in the University of Kiev. During this year, I learned about Karl Marx and his Capital from Yasha Kaplan. I used to consider socialists a group of dreamers who with fantastic plans and bombs and riots sought to change the order of the world. Now I learned there was another kind of socialism, not a fantasy nor a dream, but a logical and necessary product of human development. The next year I began to study political economy, and a little later I met real live Marxists and learned the name of the Bund.
Besides studying Marx, I decided to learn Hebrew. But my interest in Hebrew was literary rather than Jewish. I wanted to read the Bible in the original. I did not consider the Bible a Jewish book, for, after all, it had been part of the Christian religious teaching I had had as a child. At home during the summer vacation, I did not have to search far for a teacher. Mitche, the older of the two boys who lived in our yard, agreed to teach me in exchange for Russian lessons. We began with Genesis. He taught me the alphabet and pronunciation. He did not have to translate because the Bible we used, one that my father had cherished, had a French translation. We used to sit in the yard and read aloud. But I wanted to study with system and I asked Mitche to teach me grammar. He began to tell me about dikduk, but I suspect that Mitche himself didn’t understand very well what it was. His reputation as a Hebraist fell in my eyes. I never did learn Hebrew, but I did accomplish something: I learned the alphabet, gaining the key to the Yiddish language. I read very poorly at that time, but the first step had been made.
When I returned to the university, I became active in the student movement. My political work increased my homesickness for Jewishness. Even though no distinction as to Jew or Christian was made among the students, there was one specifically Jewish institution among them—the Jewish student kitchen. Actually, I don’t recall that I had ever been there. It was not merely an eating place; it was an intellectual gathering place, a kind of club for the Jewish students. At first I had paid no attention to it, but getting back from a visit home, I felt something akin to envy. I saw that my Jewish friends had their own group from which I was excluded. It was as though I stood before a closed door that shut me out from warmth and hominess. I felt homeless, and longed for a home. This home was Jewish life. This feeling of envy was a sign that I was still on the wrong side of the door, that I still did not consider myself Jewish. But also it was an expression of an awakening desire to become one of those to whom I was drawn.
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In various ways and for various reasons, I began to turn to Jewishness. Here I should mention my friendship with Isaac Teumin, a man considerably older than I, who had read and seen much, been to America, Switzerland, seen the world, been imprisoned, and was associated with the Jewish labor movement. Teumin was a person with strong Jewish feeling. He came from a traditional Jewish family, knew Jewish life intimately, and loved it. This love communicated itself to me.
I was in Minsk during the summer and early fall of 1899. On Yom Kippur, Teumin took me to the synagogue. I remember that evening well. Earlier, I had wandered through the streets. Minsk is a Jewish city and the stores were closed, the streets empty and desolate. I recall the figure of a Russian hussar, in a light green coat and raspberry trousers with silver band, and a long sword. His strange figure in the empty streets enhanced the extraordinarily solemn appearance of the city. A gray dusk hung over a gray quiet. You could feel that the day was different from other days.
Later Teumin and I went to the synagogue. I had been to a synagogue before, but that had been the large, new-style synagogue in Kiev, with its Western architectural style, its choir, and its rich Jews in top hats. Now for the first time I entered an old-fashioned synagogue.
First we went to the large synagogue and immediately I felt the presence of a new, hitherto unknown atmosphere in all its uniqueness and magic. It was different from the Russian church. There, the large mass of people stood quiet, grave, and silent, and only the priest and the choir spoke and sang on behalf of the congregation, spoke and sang in lovely, carefully harmonic and measured tones. But here, it was as though I had fallen among torrential waves. Hundreds upon hundreds of worshipers—each one taking his own case to God, each in a loud voice with passionate eagerness. Hundreds of voices ascended to the heavens, each for himself, without concord, without harmony, yet all joining together in one tremendous clamorous sound. No matter how strange to the Western ear, it makes a deep impression and has a great beauty derived from the passion of mass feeling.
Afterwards, we went to a small synagogue; it may have been a Hasidic prayer-room. There too, I was carried away by the passionate stream of hundreds of voices. Above the vast mass rumbling there rose a sharp and high-pitched voice, the voice of the old gray-bearded baal-tefila. This was no singing or preaching. It was a lament, a true lament in which you could feel the scorching tears of an anguished heart. There was none of the solemnity or measured harmony of a Christian prayer. It was the true Oriental passion of a suffering soul, a voice from the gray past which wept and beseeched its old age-gray God. In it lay a great beauty.
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In the fall of 1899, Yasha Kaplan and I were expelled from the University of Kiev for our political activity among the student body and ordered by the police to return to Minsk. It was a foregone conclusion that we would sooner or later join the “movement,” the Bund. We had enjoyed the taste of political work and it was clear that our place was in the local movement in Minsk. Even though I had some doubts as to whether the Russian workers were at a stage of readiness to accept socialist doctrines, I was well enough acquainted with the Jewish labor movement to know that its existence was an accomplished fact, and that there could be no doubt about its survival. In the winter of 1899-1900, I became a member of the Bund.
At that time, I don’t believe I understood the concept of the Bund as a Jewish organization, and its proper role in Jewish life. But, looking back, I realize that Bundist thought on this subject had not yet been clarified; Bundism as an ideology with its own concept of Jewish life and of the Jewish labor movement was still in the process of crystallization. The first formulation of the Bund’s Jewish national program was made at the Bund convention of April 1901, when I was in prison. At the time I began working for the party in Minsk, we were still in a period of searching, groping in the dark. The national question was hardly ever discussed in Bundist literature, and what there was of such discussion was inaccessible to me, for I still could not read Yiddish.
I remember once Yasha’s coming to ask: “What do you think—are the Jews a nation?” I didn’t know what to answer; I had never thought about it. But so far as the Jewish labor movement was concerned, we all recognized it then as a unique and independent movement. I remember a conversation concerning the uniqueness of the Jewish labor movement some time later, in 1901. We were in prison, together in one cell, and behind bars we held a discussion about the quality of our movement. I tried to summarize. Our movement, I said, has two major characteristics. Most of our people are employed in small or very tiny workshops belonging to artisans who themselves work. The second characteristic of our movement is that it consists of Jews, children of the Jewish people. Thus, there are two forces impelling the Jewish worker into our movement: his class feeling, the consciousness that he is a worker who is being exploited, that he wants to fight together with his brothers for a better life; and his Jewish feeling, the consciousness that he is a Jew.
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What was my personal Jewishness at that time? My new friends, Jewish workers, used to call me the goy, and in externals I was really quite goyish. I still had lots of trouble with Yiddish. I could understand it (I had heard it around so much), and my knowledge of German came to my aid. But the Hebrew elements used in Yiddish were strange and presented many difficulties. Nevertheless, I was able to follow the general content of a Yiddish speech. In fact, I even remember that when I heard someone read Peretz’s Der Kranker Yingel, I understood it very well. But I still could not speak Yiddish. Once I went to visit a worker who happened to be out. I asked his wife in Yiddish when he would come. They were just four simple words, but immediately she had the feeling that a goy was speaking and answered me in Russian.
The articles I then wrote in the Minsker Arbeiter were written in Russian and then translated into Yiddish. I had already developed some feeling for the Yiddish language and though I wrote in Russian, I used such expressions as readily lent themselves to Yiddish translation. I could not read Yiddish either at the time, but I was learning.
Certainly the Jewish labor milieu influenced me greatly. I cannot say exactly how this influence expressed itself, but the constant association with Jews and Jewish life Judaized me. An especially strong influence was my friendship with Teumin.
I remember one evening when we went walking together through the Jewish quarter, in the outlying poor little streets with their poor little houses. It was Friday night; the streets were quiet and empty; the Sabbath candles burned in the little houses. We were talking about Jewish things. I don’t remember the subject, but I do recall that I was strongly impressed by that unique charm of the peaceful Friday nights and felt a romantic association with the Jewish past, a warm, intimate closeness that one has with one’s own past. And this feeling for the past has always remained associated with the small houses and quiet streets of a Lithuanian Jewish town. My sentiment for Jewry was always, as a Zionist might express it, a galut feeling. The palm trees and the vineyards of Palestine were alien to me. I think this is an indication that my Jewishness was really an ingrained living Jewishness, not a literary fancy.
As I have said, I cannot exactly determine how this “nationalizing” influence of the Jewish labor circles expressed itself. It was the quiet effect of day-to-day living. This life became dear and important to me. It was Jewish and it drew me into its environs. When did I clearly and definitely feel myself to be a Jew? I cannot say, but at the beginning of 1901, when I was arrested for clandestine political activity, the police gave me a form to fill in. In the column “Nationality,” I wrote “Jew.”
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