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Chapter 1. Family, Revolution, and Emigration
- University of Illinois Press
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Chapter 1 Family, Revolution, and Emigration Archie Green was born on June 29, 1917, in Winnipeg, Canada. When he was six years old, Samuel and Rose Green “bundled up” young Archie along with his two sisters and got on a train, leaving “snowy Canada for sunny California .”1 Family lore holds that Rose disliked the severe Winnipeg winters, but Archie suspected that the post–World War I recession also contributed to the relocation.2 The continental excursion marked a definitive rupture in his early life. Green insisted that he had no conscious memories of life in Winnipeg but perhaps the “train ride might have been such a cutting and traumatic break” that none of his early childhood memories survived. What Green knew of his early life he knew mostly through the stories of his father. Samuel Green’s stories served as a foundation for Archie’s identity in multiple ways. On one hand, the stories politically and culturally linked Archie to “the Old Country,” specifically, the Chernigov Province of Czarist Russia (north of Kiev in modern-day Ukraine). On the other hand, Samuel’s tales structured his son’s encounter with American culture as an immigrant child. The stories, therefore, offer an important starting point for exploring experiences that formatively shaped Archie’s political orientation and commitments. In late October of 1905, Nicholas II, the Russian czar, implemented martial law in several of the most politically tumultuous provinces of his empire.3 Revolutionary calls for economic justice and political representation were spreading through rural and urban areas alike. In the cities, workers held mass strikes. In the countryside, peasants organized to seize land, looting and burning massive estates. Russian Cossacks stormed into these regions, looking to imprison anyone associated with radical challenges to the czar’s power or the stability of rural land holdings. These political upheavals, commonly referred to as the Russian Revolution of 1905,were a heightened manifesta- 4 . Part 1. Of Shreds & Patches tion of long-term struggles to defeat monarchical absolutism and overcome feudal serfdom. Samuel Green, sixteen at the time, lived in Chernigov and was inspired to support these revolutionary causes. No one political party spearheaded the Russian Revolution of 1905. Numerous parties debated whether social change should proceed through leadership from the emergent urban proletariat or be rooted in the vast peasantry of agrarian Russia. The most established of these parties were the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) and the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (SDs), the latter ultimately produced the split that became the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The SRs promoted agrarian revolt while the SDs focused on organizing the urban proletariat, as explored in V. I. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?4 Green had few details on his father’s early life and regretted not recording him talking about his youth. What he did know about young Samuel, however , formatively influenced his own political identity. The father’s political values served as a kind of north star for the son’s constellation of commitments . Samuel was born around 1889 and spent his adolescence in Chernigov Province. His family name was Canterovich, and his given name Shmuel. Both would be changed during immigration.5 The men of his extended family were all connected to trades. They were tailors, tinsmiths, and foundry workers. Samuel had little contact with city life and in his early teens began apprenticing as a harness maker, being that horses were still the prevailing mode of transportation. He also began to engage with revolutionary political groups in the years preceding the Revolution of 1905 and was likely familiar with the competing platforms of the main revolutionary parties by the time he was sixteen. According to Archie’s sister, Mitzie Green, Samuel hid a primitive mimeograph under the floorboards of the family house and used it to run off socialist broadsides.6 Green portrayed his father as a politically sophisticated young radical who, like many other East European Jews, was captured by ideals of the French Revolution, particularly the challenge to orthodox religion by scientific rationality . Samuel told Archie that he identified as an agnostic at a young age. He also conveyed that the decision of whether to affiliate with either the SRs or SDs during the years leading up to the 1905Revolution was deeply entangled with questions of ethnicity and nationalism. Of his Jewish Ukrainian father, living in a Russian, Christian Orthodox empire, Archie explained: Minorities had the choice to be either with the SD or SR and affect revolution...