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86 | 7 “Socialism Is Not a Dream” (1888) Dovid Edelshtat Dovid Edelshtat (1866–1892) immigrated to the United States in 1882 in response to the pogroms that broke out in the Ukraine in the previous year. Edelshtat initially settled with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he found work as a buttonhole maker. He moved to New York City around 1887 and became active in the nascent Jewish labor movement. A native Russian speaker, Edelshtat learned Yiddish in New York and was considered among the best Yiddish poets at the time of his premature death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. Dear parents, beloved brothers, and dear Sonia!1 We in New York live at a remarkably fast pace. In a single day you often experience so much, as much as you would experience and ponder in five whole years in the calm, peaceful city of Cincinnati. In this letter, I want to share with you all the impressions that have flooded into me, like a boiling hot southern storm, from nearly the first day I came here. A new life, new energies, new truths, self-education, and an avid striving for light are noticeable here, especially in Jewish circles. But I’m not going to speak about that now. I want to tell you about the memorial event for the Chicago anarchists2 that took place here in New York. This was a grand, historical event, which I’ll never forget in my life and will never be forgotten, I think, in world history . Knowing that there would be a large crowd at the Cooper Institute, I got there at 7 o’clock in the evening, but by then there was already a mass of 1,000 people. And a group of our Russian Jews was standing in a corner bickering in Russian about some writer, and they shouted so loudly that the Germans and Americans looked astonished, like they wanted to send them to an insane asylum. Finally, the Institute opened, and the mass of people lurched forward, shoulder to shoulder, into the hall. . . . When I recovered from all the pushing , I was standing in the middle of the hall, squeezed among thousands of people, who went there to show the world that the ideas of anarchism, the “Socialism Is Not a Dream” | 87 ideas of people’s freedom, are far from dead; they live in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people, who assembled in all corners of the world to protest bourgeois oppression. This mass of thousands, which gathered in this gigantic hall, covered with red banners of the revolution, found tribunes in the persons of [Johann] Most3 and [Sergius] Schewitch,4 whose grand speeches I cannot convey to you. I will only say that when Schewitch spoke, I felt tears streaming from my eyes, and, afterward, when the band played the Marseillaise and the gigantic mass of people let out cries of unadulterated enthusiasm, I felt that socialism is not a dream, not an illusion, that it is the real future of the people, and that the time is not far off when this mass will grow to be hundreds of thousands of people, who will consciously struggle for their stolen human rights. Most was greeted by the audience with thundering applause, which lasted ten minutes. [. . .] It was remarkable that our Russian Jews stood at the forefront with their dedication to humanity’s great strivings. There were Russian Jews everywhere. Source: Reprinted in the Russian original alongside a Yiddish translation in Kalman Marmor, Dovid Edelshstat (New York: IKUF, 1950), pp. 189–190. Translated by Tony Michels. Notes 1. Edelshtat’s sister, then living in Cincinnati with his other family members. 2. Edelshtat refers here to the five men who were sentenced to death—unfairly, many in the radical community believed—for their alleged role in the Chicago Haymarket riot of May 1886. 3. Johann Most (1846–1906), German immigrant and foremost anarchist in late-nineteenth -century New York. 4. Sergius Schewitsch (1835–1912), the son of Latvian nobility, editor of the Germanlanguage daily New Yorker Volkszeitung, and a leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party. Both Schewitsch and Most had a strong influence on Jewish radicals during the 1880s and 1890s. ...

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