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Title: A Short Autobiographical Note Author: David Stetner Date: April 2000 Language: en Topics: autobiography, Jewish anarchism Source: Retrieved on 28th February 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/djhbsd Notes: From: Bollettino Archivio G. Pinelli No 15, Milan, April 2000 . Translated by: Paul Sharkey.
My family roots were in the Bukovina, a small region at the foot of the
Carpathian mountains. Before the 1914–18 war life was good there… but I
was born in 1914 and unfortunately arrived too late to taste the good
life in the Bukovina. Primarily because my grandfather needed an
operation that could only be carried out in Hungary, the entire family
moved to Budapest which is where I was born. My father found work there
at the pawn and so settled there for good.
We were Jews but of the highly assimilated variety and our ‘Jewishness’
did not mean that much to us. True, on feast days my father would go to
the synagogue but not with any particular enthusiasm, but my mother
preferred avid reading of German literature. Moreover, Hungary in those
days was very tolerant and we lived well.
Things began to change in 1920 when we were deported because of our
nationality; in fact my father was an Austro-Hungarian citizen, but once
the war was over, our native city of Czernowitz was annexed to Rumania
and we became Rumanian nationals.
The situation in Rumania was far from tragic however; indeed the
Rumanians had done away with the social laws and labour laws bequeathed
by the Austrian Empire, laws that were very forward-looking for their
times. And so, at the age of 14, I started work in a textile plant which
is where I first heard workers talking and striking poses, so much so
that I was keen to know more and to educate myself. So I read the works
of Marx, Bakunin, Engels, Proudhon, Tolstoy, Babeuf and lots of others;
all in the German language of which I had a good command.
Remember also that Czernowitz was still feeling the impact of the
October revolution and the sizeable Jewish community was
leftwards-looking, thanks to its being made up largely of workers:
80,000 of the city’s 120,000 inhabitants were Jews and at least 15,000
of those worked in the city’s factories. In 1931 when I was 17, I made
the acquaintance of an extraordinary 50 year old possessed of universal
learning: he used to chat with me about the Kabbalah, Descartes,
Nietzsche and the Talmud. It was through his teaching that I began to
understand anarchism rather than through its history of barricades,
riots and bloody revolutions or through the enunciation of abstract
theories. No; he used to speak to me of a classless society where every
man would be responsible and where no one would have any power over his
neighbours; I had finally stumbled upon the libertarian outlook for
which I had long been blindly groping.
1933 was a crucial year, what with Hitler’s advent to power and we
youngsters were traumatised by what was going on in Germany; we saw
Germany as our main cultural reference point and German anti-Semitism
created a rift between many of my comrades – forced to rediscover their
own Jewish roots, which drew them towards Zionist positions – and those
who, like myself, were left cold because the whole idea of fatherland
played no part in my internationalist anarchist outlook. I wanted to
feel like a citizen of the world. In 1934, after the republic was
declared in Spain, I made up my mind to leave but they would not issue
me with a passport because I had my military service to do. So I decided
to leave clandestinely for Poland, but I was picked up and sent back to
Rumania where a court martial convicted me of desertion. In January 1937
I was released from jail and assigned to my naval fusilier unit in
Galatz, but in June that year I deserted again and spent four months
crossing Europe until I arrived in Paris where I discovered that things
in Spain had gone sour; the anarchists were losing ground to the
Stalinists and the CNT-FAI was no longer looking for volunteers. So I
was left an onlooker far removed from the Spanish tragedy. But in 1939
when France was attacked by the Germans I promptly joined the first
foreign volunteer unit. However, I was demobbed the following year and
things took a turn for the worst for me and my wife Golda, both of us
being political activists and Jewish. We stayed in France, living in
hiding, having no papers. When in 1941 the police started to round up
all the Jews in the 11^(th) arrondissement, it was blatantly obvious
that the time had come for us to clear out, but Golda was arrested at a
checkpoint because of her identity card’s being so obviously a forgery.
She was sentenced to ten months in prison in Caen and so I went to
ground in Paris.
After the war I reestablished contact with the anarchist movement and
along with other militants we decided to publish a Yiddish language
newspaper to communicate with the new influx of Jews coming from eastern
Europe and who could not, as yet, speak French. This was born in 1949
Der Freier Gedank (Free Thought). I had difficulties with this because
my knowledge of Yiddish was poor, but we were greatly helped by Rudolf
Rocker and the editors of the US newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme. It was
an exciting experiment that lasted until 1966 when we decided to shut
down the paper because by then the children of our immigrant readership
preferred reading French or English, which means that our paper had
outlived its usefulness.