💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › paul-avrich-mollie-steimer.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:11:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Mollie Steimer
Author: Paul Avrich
Date: 1988
Language: en
Topics: activism, Americas, anarchists, anti-militarist, biography, Emma Goldman, history, informant, New York, NY, Russia, Jewish anarchism
Source:  http://libcom.org/history/mollie-steimer-1897-1980-paul-avrich][libcom.org]].  Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4312, retrieved on July 14, 2020.
Notes: Avrich, Paul, *Anarchist Portraits*, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1988.

Paul Avrich

Mollie Steimer

On July 23, 1980, Mollie Steimer died of heart failure in the Mexican

town of Cuernavaca, ending a life of uninterrupted activity in behalf of

the anarchist cause. At the time of her death, Steimer was one of the

last of the prominent figures closely associated with Emma Goldman and

Alexander Berkman. She was also one of the last of the old time

anarchists with an international reputation, the survivor of a

remarkable company of Russian political exiles in Mexico that included

such diverse figures as Jacob Abrams, Victor Serge, and Leon Trotsky.

When her heart gave out, Steimer was eighty-two years old. Born on

November 21, 1897, in the village of Dunaevtsy in southwestern Russia,

she had emigrated to the United States in 1913 with her parents and five

brothers and sisters. Only fifteen when she arrived in the New York

ghetto, she immediately went to work in a garment factory to help

support her family. She also began to read radical literature, starting

with Bebel’s Women and Socialism and Stepniak’s Underground Russia

before discovering the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Goldman. By 1917

Mollie had become an anarchist. With the outbreak of the Russian

Revolution, she plunged into agitational activity, joining a group of

young anarchists gathered around a clandestine Yiddish journal called

Der Shturm (The Storm). Plagued by internal dissension, the Shturm group

reorganized itself towards the end of the year, adopting the name of

Frayhayt (Freedom) and launching a new journal under that title, of

which five numbers appeared between January and May of 1918, with

cartoons by Robert Minor and articles by Maria Goldsmith and Georg

Brandes, among others. For its motto the editors chose Henry David

Thoreau’s celebrated dictum, “That government is best which governs not

at all” (in Yiddish: “Yene regirung iz dibeste, velkhe regirt in gantsn

nit”), an extension of Jefferson’s “That government is best which

governs least.”

The Frayhayt group consisted of a dozen or so young men and women,

workers of east European Jewish origin, who met regularly at 5 East

104^(th) Street in Harlem, where several of them, including Steimer,

shared a six-room apartment. The most active figure in the group, apart

from Mollie herself, was Jacob Abrams, thirty-two years old, who had

immigrated from Russia in 1906. In 1917, as secretary of the

Bookbinder’s Union, Abrams had labored to prevent the extradition of

Alexander Berkman to San Francisco, where the authorities were seeking

to implicate him in the famous Mooney-Billings dynamiting affair.

Another member of the group was Abrams’s wife Mary, a survivor of the

tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, from which she managed to

escape with minor injuries by jumping out of a window. The rest included

Hyman Lachowsky, a printer, Samuel Lipman, twenty-one years old and more

a Marxist than an anarchist, Lipman’s girlfriend Ethel Bernstein, her

sister Rose Bernstein, Jacob Schwartz, Sam Hartman, Bernard Sernaker

(whose daughters, Germinal and Harmony, attended the Ferrer School at

Stelton), Clara Larsen, Sam and Hilda Adel (uncle and aunt of the writer

Leon Edel), and Zalman and Sonya Deanin.

The group, as a collective, edited and distributed their newspaper in

secret. This was necessary because it had been outlawed by the federal

government for its opposition to the American war effort, not to speak

of its anticapitalist, prorevolutionary, and pro-Soviet orientation

(“The only just war is the social revolution,” proclaimed its masthead).

Printing the paper on a hand press, the group folded it tightly and

stuffed it at night into mailboxes around the city. Federal and local

officials soon became aware of their activities but were unable to track

the group down, until an incident occurred that catapulted Abrams,

Steimer, and their comrades into the headlines-and also landed them in

jail.

What provoked the incident was the landing of American troops in Soviet

Russia during the spring and summer of 1918. Viewing the intervention as

a counterrevolutionary maneuver, the members of the Frayhayt group

resolved to stop it. With this object, they drafted two leaflets, one in

English and one in Yiddish, appealing to the American workers to launch

a general strike. “Will you allow the Russian Revolution to be crushed?”

the English leaflet asked. “You; yes, we mean You, the people of

America! THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION CALLS TO THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD FOR

HELP. The Russian Revolution cries: ‘WORKERS OF THE WORLD! AWAKE! RISE!

PUT DOWN YOUR ENEMY AND MINE!’ Yes, friends, there is only one enemy of

the workers of the world and that is CAPITALISM.” The Yiddish leaflet

bore a similar message: “Workers, our reply to the barbaric intervention

has to be a general strike! An open challenge will let the government

know that not only the Russian worker fights for freedom, but also here

in America lives the spirit of revolution. Do not let the government

scare you with their wild punishment in prisons, hanging and shooting.

We must not and will not betray the splendid fighters of Russia.

Workers, up to fight!”

Both leaflets were printed in five thousand copies. Steimer distributed

most of them at different places around the city. Then, on August 23,

1918, she took the remainder to the factory in lower Manhattan where she

worked, distributed some by hand, and threw the rest out of a washroom

window on an upper floor. Floating to the street below, they were picked

up by a group of workmen, who immediately informed the police. The

police in turn notified American military intelligence, which sent two

army sergeants to the building. Going from floor to floor, they

encountered a young worker named Hyman Rosansky, a recent recruit of the

Frayhayt group, who had been helping with the distribution of the

leaflets. Rosansky admitted his involvement, turned informer, and

implicated the rest of his comrades.

Steimer was quickly taken into custody, along with Lachowsky and Lipman.

The same day, police raided the headquarters of the group on East

104^(th) Street, wrecking the apartment and arresting Jacob Abrams and

Jacob Schwartz, who were beaten with fists and blackjacks on the way to

the station house. When they arrived, further beatings were

administered. Schwartz was spitting blood. Soon afterwards, Lachowsky

was brought in bruised and bleeding, with tufts of hair torn from his

head. During the next few days, the rest of the group were rounded up

and questioned. A few were released, but Abrams, Steimer, Lachowsky,

Lipman, and Schwartz, along with a friend named Gabriel Prober, were

indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate the Sedition Act, passed by

Congress earlier that year. Rosansky, who had cooperated with the

authorities, was granted a postponement of his hearing.

The Abrams case, as it came to be known, constitutes a landmark in the

repression of civil liberties in the United States. The first important

prosecution under the Sedition Act, it is cited in all standard

histories of the subject as one of the most flagrant violations of

constitutional rights during the Red Scare hysteria that followed the

First World War.

The trial, which lasted two weeks, opened on October 10, 1918, at the

Federal Court House in New York. The defendants were Abrams, Steimer,

Schwartz, Lachowsky, Lipman, and Prober. Schwartz, however, never

appeared in court. Severely beaten by the police, he was removed to

Bellevue Hospital, where he died on October 14, while the trial was in

progress. Official records attribute his death to Spanish influenza, an

epidemic of which was raging. According to his comrades, however,

Schwartz had been brutally murdered. His funeral became a political

demonstration; and on October 25 a memorial meeting, chaired by

Alexander Berkman, was held in his honor at the Parkview Palace. It was

attended by twelve hundred mourners, who heard speeches by John Reed,

who had himself been arrested for condemning American intervention in

Russia, and Harry Weinberger, the defense attorney in the Abrams case,

who had previously represented Berkman and Goldman in their 1917 trial

for opposing military conscription. He would shortly serve as counsel

for Ricardo Flores Magon in his bid to secure release from prison.

The Abrams case was tried before judge Henry DeLamar Clayton, who for

eighteen years had represented Alabama in Congress. Clayton proved to be

another Gary or Thayer, the judges in the Haymarket and Sacco-Vanzetti

cases. He questioned the defendants about their “free love” activity,

and he mocked and humiliated them at every turn. “You keep talking about

producers,” he said to Abrams. “Now may I ask why you don’t go out and

do some producing? There is plenty of untilled land needing attention in

this country.” When Abrams, at another point, called himself an

anarchist and added that Christ was also an anarchist, Clayton

interrupted: “Our Lord is not on trial here. You are.” Abrams began to

reply: “When our forefathers of the American Revolution”- but that was

as far as he got. Clayton: “Your what?” Abrams: “My forefathers.”

Clayton: “Do you mean to refer to the fathers of this nation as your

forefathers? Well, I guess we can leave that out, too, for Washington

and the others are not on trial here.” Abrams explained that he had

called them that because “I have respect for them. We are a big human

family, and I say ‘our forefathers.’ Those that stand for the people, I

call them fathers.”

Weinberger, the defense attorney, tried to show that the Sedition Act

was meant to penalize activities which hindered American conduct of the

war, and that since American intervention was not directed against the

Germans or their allies, then opposition to it by the defendants could

not be, construed as interference with the war effort. This argument,

however, was thrown out by judge Clayton with the remark that “the

flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, have nothing to do with the

case.” The New York Times, praising the judge’s “half-humorous methods,”

declared that he deserved “the thanks of the city and of the country for

the way in which he conducted the trial.” Upton Sinclair, by contrast,

said that Clayton had been imported from Alabama to make Hester Street

safe for democracy.

Before the conclusion of the trial, Mollie Steimer delivered a powerful

speech in which she explained her political beliefs. “By anarchism,” she

declared, “I understand a new social order, where no group of people

shall be governed by another group of people. Individual freedom shall

prevail in the full sense of the word. Private ownership shall be

abolished. Every person shall have an equal opportunity to develop

himself well, both mentally and physically. We shall not have to

struggle for our daily existence as we do now. No one shall live on the

product of others. Every person shall produce as much as he can, and

enjoy as much as he needs-receive according to his need. Instead of

striving to get money, we shall strive towards education, towards

knowledge. While at present the people of the world are divided into

various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies

another-in most cases considers the others as competitive-we, the

workers of the world, shall stretch out our hands towards each other

with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all

my energy, and, if necessary, render my life for it.”

With Clayton on the bench, the outcome of the trial was predictable. The

jury found all but one of the defendants guilty (Prober was cleared on

all counts). On the day of sentencing, October 25, Samuel Lipman stepped

forward and began to address the court about democracy. “You don’t know

anything about democracy,” interrupted judge, Clayton, “and the only

thing you understand is the hellishness of anarchy.”” Clayton sentenced

the three men, Lipman, — Lachowsky, and Abrams, to the maximum penalty

of twenty years in prison and a $1,000 fine; Steimer received fifteen

years and a $500 fine. (Rosansky, in a separate proceeding, got off with

a three-year term.)

The barbarity of the sentences for the distribution of leaflets shocked

liberals and radicals alike. A group of faculty members at the Harvard

Law School, headed by Zechariah Chafee, protested that the defendants

had been convicted solely for advocating nonintervention in the affairs

of another nation, in short, for exercising the right of free speech.

“After priding ourselves for over a century on being an asylum for the

oppressed of all nations,” declared Professor Chafee, “we ought not

suddenly jump to the position that we are only an asylum for men who are

no more radical than ourselves. Suppose monarchical England had taken

such a position towards the republican Mazzini or the anarchist

Kropotkin!”

Joining Chafee in drafting a petition for amnesty was “the whole legal

staff at Harvard,” including such distinguished jurists as Roscoe Pound

and Felix Frankfurter. Similar petitions were signed by Norman Thomas,

Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, Leonard Abbott, Alice Stone Blackwell,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, and Bolton Hall. In Detroit, Agnes

Inglis, the future curator of the Labadie Collection at the University

of Michigan, worked in behalf of the defendants. An Italian anarchist of

the same city wrote a play about the case and acted in it with his

comrades.

In addition, two organizations in New York came to the aid of the

prisoners, who appealed their conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. The

first, the League for the Amnesty of Political Prisoners, chaired by

Pryns Hopkins, with M. Eleanor Fitzgerald as secretary and Leonard

Abbott, Roger Baldwin, Lucy Robins, Margaret Sanger, and Lincoln

Steffens as members of the advisory board, issued a leaflet on the case,

Is Opinion a Crime? The second group, the Political Prisoners Defense

and Relief Committee, was organized by Sam and Hilda Adel, along with

other former members of the Frayhayt group, supported by the Fraye

Arbeter Shtime, the Workmen’s Circle, and the Bookbinders’ Union, of

which Abrams had served as secretary. In 1919 it issued a

thirty-two-page pamphlet entitled Sentenced to Twenty Years Prison,

which constitutes a valuable source of information about the case. (A

Russian translation was published by the Union of Russian Workers in the

United States and Canada.)

Meanwhile, the four anarchists were released on bail to await the

results of their appeal. Steimer immediately resumed her radical

activities. Over the next eleven months she was arrested no fewer than

eight times, kept in the station house for brief periods, released, then

rearrested, sometimes without charges being preferred against her. On

March 11, 1919, she was arrested at the Russian People’s House on East

15^(th) Street during a raid by federal and local police that netted 164

radicals, some of whom were later deported on the Buford with Goldman

and Berkman. Charged with inciting to riot, Steimer was held for eight

days in the notorious Tombs prison before being released on $1,000 bail,

only to be arrested again and taken to Ellis Island for deportation.

Locked up for twenty-four hours a day, denied exercise and fresh air

and, the right to mingle with other political prisoners, she went on a

hunger strike until the authorities eased the conditions of her

confinement. “The entire machinery of the United States government was

being employed to crush this slip of a girl weighing less than eighty

pounds,” Emma Goldman complained.

The government, however, was not yet ready to deport the

twenty-one-year-old prisoner, whose case remained before the courts.

Released from Ellis Island, Mollie was kept under constant surveillance.

In the fall of 1919, when Goldman returned to New York after completing

a two-year sentence in the federal penitentiary at Jefferson City,

Missouri, Mollie took the opportunity to call on her. It was the

beginning of a lasting friendship. Mollie reminded Emma of the Russian

women revolutionaries under the tsar, earnest, ascetic, and idealistic,

who “sacrificed their lives before they had scarcely begun to live.” In

Emma’s description, Mollie was “diminutive and quaint-looking,

altogether Japanese in features and stature.” She was a wonderful girt,

Emma added, “with an iron will and a tender heart,” but “fearfully set

in her ideas.” “A sort of Alexander Berkman in skirts,” she jested to

her niece Stella Ballantine.

Soon after her meeting with Goldman, Steimer was again arrested. She was

imprisoned in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island, where she remained

for six months, from October 30, 1919, to April 29, 1920. Locked up in a

filthy cell, isolated once more from her fellow prisoners and barred

from all contact with the outside world, she protested by singing “The

Anarchist March” and other revolutionary songs at the top of her lungs

and by staging another hunger strike.

During this period, word came that the Supreme Court had upheld the

conviction of Mollie and her comrades. Two justices, however, Louis

Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, issued a strong dissenting opinion,

agreeing with the defendants that their aim had been to help Russia and

not to impede the war effort. “In this case,” wrote Holmes, “sentences

of twenty years’ imprisonment have been imposed for the publishing of

two leaflets that I believe the defendants have had as much right to

publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United

States, now vainly invoked by them.”

When the Supreme Court announced its decision, Abrams, Lipman, and

Lachowsky jumped bail and tried to escape to Mexico from New Orleans.

Spotted by federal agents, their boat was stopped at sea, the men were

removed and were taken to the federal prison in Atlanta, from which

Berkman had just been released, pending his deportation to Russia. Like

Berkman, Abrams and his comrades spent two years in Atlanta prison, from

December 1919 to November 1921. Steimer, who had been informed of their

escape plans, had refused to cooperate because it meant forfeiting

$40,000 in bail contributed by ordinary workers. To deceive the men and

women who had come to their aid, she felt, would be a dishonorable act.

In April. 1920 she was transferred from Blackwell’s Island to Jefferson

City, Missouri, where Goldman had been confined before her deportation

with Berkman in December 1919.

Mollie remained in Jefferson City for eighteen months. Since the time of

the trial, her life had been full of tragedy. Apart from her repeated

incarcerations, one of her brothers had died from influenza and her

father had died from the shock that followed her conviction. Yet she

refused to despair. In a letter to Weinberger she quoted from a poem by

Edmund V. Cooke:

“You cannot salt the eagle’s tail, Nor limit thought’s dominion; You

cannot put ideas in jail, You can’t deport opinion.”

Weinberger, meanwhile, with the support of the Political Prisoners

Defense and Relief Committee, had been trying to secure the release of

his clients on condition of their deportation to Russia. Abrams and

Lipman favored such an arrangement, but Lachowsky and Steimer were on

principle opposed to deportation. Mollie was particularly adamant. “I

believe,” she told Weinberger, “that each person shall live where he or

she chooses. No individual or group of individuals has the right to send

me out of this, or any country!” She was concerned, moreover, for the

other political prisoners in America who must remain behind bars. “They

are my comrades, too, and I think it extremely selfish and contrary to

my principles as an Anarchist-Communist to ask for my release and that

of three other individuals at a time when thousands of other political

prisoners are languishing in the United States jails.”

Abrams, exasperated by Steimer’s stubborn adherence to principle,

offered Weinberger a word of advice. “She must be approached like a good

Christian,” he wrote, “with a bible of Kropotkin or Bakunin. Otherwise

you will not succeed.” In due course, an agreement was concluded, and

Weinberger obtained the release of the four prisoners, with the

stipulation that they must leave for Russia at their own expense and

never return to the United States. The Political Prisoners Defense and

Relief Committee took up a collection to pay for their transportation,

and in November 21 Steimer and the others arrived at Ellis Island to

await deportation. They were not in the least upset about leaving

America. On the contrary, they were eager to return to their homeland

and to work for the revolution. As their comrade Marcus Graham wrote:

“In Russia their activity is yet more needed. For there, a government

rules masquerading under the name of the ‘proletariat’ and doing

everything imaginable to enslave the proletariat.”

Although Mollie’s friends and entire family were in the United States,

her heart was light at the prospect of returning to Russia’. “I shall

advocate my ideal, Anarchist Communism, in whatever country I shall be,”

she told Harry Weinberger five days before her deportation. Two days

later, on November 21, 1921 a farewell dinner was held at the Allaire

Restaurant on East 17^(th) Street in honor of the four young anarchists,

with speeches by Weinberger, Leonard Abbott, Harry Kelly, Elizabeth

Gurley Flynn, Norman Thomas, and others. From her cell on Ellis Island,

Mollie sent an appeal to all “freedom-loving Americans” to join the

social revolution.

ON NOVEMBER 24, 1921, Mollie Steimer, Samuel Lipman, Hyman Lachowsky,

and Jacob Abrams, accompanied by his wife, Mary, sailed for Soviet

Russia on the SS Estonia. The Fraye Arbeter Shtime issued a warning.

Despite their opposition to American intervention and their support of

the Bolshevik regime, the paper predicted, they would not receive the

welcome they expected, for Russia was no longer a haven for genuine

revolutionaries but rather a land of authority and repression. The

prediction was soon to be borne out. Victims of the Red Scare in

America, they became victims of the Red Terror in Russia. Arriving in

Moscow on December 15, 1921, they found that Goldman and Berkman had

already departed for the West, disillusioned by the turn the revolution

had taken. (Steimer’s disappointment in missing them, she wrote

Weinberger, was “very deep.”) Kropotkin had died in February, and the

Kronstadt rebellion had been suppressed in March. Makhno’s insurgent

army had been dispersed, hundreds of anarchists languished in prison,

and the workers’ and peasants’ soviets had become instruments of party

dictatorship, rubber stamps for a new bureaucracy.

Amid the gloom, however, there were some bright spots. Abrams organized

the first steam laundry in Moscow, operating it in the basement of the

Soviet foreign ministry. At the same time, he was able to work with his

anarcho-syndicalist comrades at the Golos Truda publishing house, which

had not yet been suppressed. Lipman was reunited with his sweetheart

Ethel Bernstein, who had been deported with Berkman and Goldman on the

Buford. Always closer to Marxism than to anarchism, he completed a

course of study in agronomy and in 1927 joined the Communist party.

Lachowsky, unhappy in Moscow, returned to his hometown of Minsk to find

work as a printer. And Steimer met Senya Fleshin, who became her

lifelong companion.

Three years older than Mollie, Senya had been born in Kiev on December

19, 1894, and had emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen,

working at the office of Goldman’s Mother Earth until he returned to

Russia in 1917 to take part in the revolution. He had been active in the

Golos Truda group in Petrograd and afterwards in the Nabat Confederation

in the Ukraine. Writing in the confederation’s journal in March 1919, he

chastised the Bolsheviks for erecting a “Chinese wall” between

themselves and the people. In November 1920, the confederation was

broken up and Senya, along with Volin, Mark Mratchny, and Aaron and

Fanny Baron, were arrested and transferred to a prison in Moscow.

Released soon after, he returned to Petrograd to work at the Museum of

the Revolution. It was here that he met Steimer shortly after her

arrival from America, and the two fell immediately in love.

Deeply disturbed by the suppression of their movement, Senya and Mollie

organized a Society to Help Anarchist Prisoners, traveling about the

country to assist their incarcerated comrades. On November 1, 1922, they

were themselves arrested on charges of aiding criminal elements in

Russia and maintaining ties with anarchists abroad (they had been

corresponding with Berkman and Goldman, then in Berlin). Sentenced to

two years’ exile in Siberia, they declared a hunger strike on November

17 in their Petrograd jail, and were released the next day. They were

forbidden, however, to leave the city and were ordered to report to the

authorities every forty-eight hours.

Before long, Senya and Mollie resumed their efforts in behalf of their

imprisoned comrades. On July 9, 1923, their room was raided and they

were again placed under arrest, charged with propagating anarchist

ideas, in violation of Art. 60–63 of the Soviet Criminal Code.

Sequestered from their fellow prisoners, they again declared a hunger

strike. Protests to Trotsky by foreign anarcho-syndicalist delegates to

a congress of the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern) soon

brought about their release. This time, however, they were notified of

their impending expulsion from the country. From Moscow came Jack and

Mary Abrams and Ethel Bernstein to bid them farewell. On September 27,

1923, they were placed aboard a ship bound for Germany.”

Upon landing, Senya and Mollie went straight to Berlin, where Alexander

Berkman and Emma Goldman were awaiting them. They arrived half-starved

and penniless and without a permanent passport. For the next twenty-five

years they lived as “Nansen” citizens, anarchists without a country,

until they acquired Mexican citizenship in 1948. From Berlin Mollie sent

two articles to the London Freedom, “On Leaving Russia” (January 1924)

and “The Communists as jailers” (May 1924), in which she described her

recent experience. When deported from America two years before, her

“heart was light,” she said, but she was “deeply grieved” to be deported

from Russia, even though the “hypocrisy, intolerance, and treachery” of

the Bolsheviks “aroused in me a feeling of indignation and revolt.” In

her homeland, she declared, a great popular revolution had been usurped

by a ruthless political elite. “No, I am NOT happy to be out of Russia.

I would rather be there helping the workers combat the tyrannical deeds

of the hypocritical Communists.”

In Berlin, and afterwards in Paris, Senya and Mollie resumed the relief

work that had led to their deportation. Together with Berkman, Goldman,

Alexander Schapiro, Volin, and Mratchny, they served on the joint

Committee for the Defense of Revolutionaries Imprisoned in Russia

(1923–1926) and the Relief Fund of the International Working Men’s

Association for Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists Imprisoned in Russia

(1926–1932), sparing no effort to maintain a steady flow of parcels and

messages of encouragement to their imprisoned and exited comrades. Their

archives, housed at the International Institute of Social History in

Amsterdam, bulge with letters from Siberia, the White Sea, and Central

Asia, from such exotic-sounding places as Pinega, Minusinsk, Ust-Kulom,

Narym, and Yeniseisk, which made up the Gulag Archipelago. Some of the

letters were from anarchists they had known in America.

In Paris, to which Senya and Mollie moved in 1924, they lived in a room

with Volin and his family, before moving in with yet another Russian

anarchist fugitive, Jacques Doubinsky. In 1927 they joined Volin,

Doubinsky, and Berkman in forming the Mutual Aid Group of Paris to

assist fellow anarchist exiles, not only from Russia but also from

Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Bulgaria, penniless, without legal

documents, and in constant danger of deportation, which in some cases

would have meant death.

At the same time, they joined Volin, Berkman, and others in denouncing

the Organizational Platform drawn up by another Russian exile, Peter

Arshinov, with the encouragement of Nestor Makhno. To Senya and Mollie,

the Organizational Platform, with its call for a central executive

committee, contained the seeds of authoritarianism and clashed with the

basic anarchist principle of local autonomy. “Alas,” wrote Mollie in

November 1927, “the entire spirit of the ‘platform’ is penetrated with

the idea that the masses MUST BE POLITICALLY LED during the revolution.

There is where the evil starts, all the rest ... is mainly based on this

line. It stands for an Anarchist Communist Workers’ Party, for an army

... for a system of defense of the revolution which will inevitably lead

to the creation of a spying system, investigators, prisons and judges,

consequently a TCHEKA.”

In order to earn a living, Senya had meanwhile taken up the profession

of photography, for which he exhibited a remarkable talent; he became

the Nadar of the anarchist movement, with his portraits of Berkman,

Volin, and many other comrades, both well known and obscure, as well as

a widely reproduced collage of the international anarchist press. In

1929 Senya was invited to work in the studio of Sasha Stone in Berlin.

There, assisted by Mollie, he remained until 1933, when Hitler’s rise to

power forced them to return to Paris, where they continued to live until

the outbreak of the Second World War.

During these years of exile in the — 1920s and 1930s, Senya and Mollie

received a steady stream of visitors-Harry Kelly, Rose Pesotta, Rudolf

and Milly Rocker, among others-some of whom recorded their impressions

of their old friends. Kelly, for example, found Mollie “as childlike in

appearance as ever, and as idealistic too.” Goldman, however, thought

her “narrow and fanatical,” while Senya was always “ill and broken.”

Emma again compared Mollie to Berkman as a young militant and “a fanatic

to the highest degree. Mollie is a repetition in skirts. She is terribly

sectarian, set in her notions, and has an iron will. No ten horses could

drag her from anything she is for or against. But with it all she is one

of the most genuinely devoted souls living with the fire of our ideal.”

The most emotional reunion of these years came in 1926, when Jack and

Mary Abrams arrived from Russia, disenchanted with the Soviet system.

For several weeks the four old comrades shared Senya and Mollie’s room

in Volin’s flat, talking over old times and wondering what the future

held in store, until the Abramses went on to Mexico, where they lived

out the remainder of their lives. As for the other defendants in the

1918 trial, Lachowsky had moved to his native Minsk and was never heard

from again, while Lipman worked as an agronomist until Stalin’s Great

Purge, when he was arrested and shot. His wife Ethel was sent to a

Siberian prison camp for ten years and now resides in Moscow, alone and

impoverished. Their only child, a son, was killed at the front during

the war against Hitler.

The outbreak of the war in 1939 found Senya and Mollie in Paris. At

first they were not molested, but before long their Jewish origins and

anarchist convictions caught up with them. On May 18, 1940, Mollie was

placed in an internment camp, while Senya, aided by French comrades,

managed to escape to the unoccupied sector of the country. Somehow,

Mollie secured her release, and the two were reunited in Marseilles,

where they saw their old friend Volin for the last time in the autumn of

1941. Soon afterwards, they crossed the Atlantic and settled in Mexico

City. “How my heart aches for our forsaken beloved ones,” wrote Mollie

to Rudolf and Milly Rocker in December 1942. “Who knows what will become

of Volin, of all our Spanish friends, of our Jewish family! It is

maddening!”

For the next twenty years Senya operated his photographic studio in

Mexico City under the name SEMO — for Senya and Mollie. During this time

they formed a close relationship with their Spanish comrades of the

Tierra y Libertad group, while remaining on affectionate terms with Jack

and Mary Abrams, notwithstanding Jack’s friendship with Trotsky, who had

joined the colony of exiles in Mexico. Shortly before his death in 1953,

Abrams was allowed to enter the United States to have an operation for

throat cancer. “He was a dying man who could hardly move,” their friend

Clara Larsen recalled, “yet he was guarded by an FBI agent twenty-four

hours a day!”

Mollie, however, never returned to America. Friends and relatives had to

cross the border and visit her in Mexico City or Cuernavaca, to which

she and Senya retired in 1963. When deported from the United States,

Mollie had vowed to “advocate my ideal, Anarchist Communism, in whatever

country I shall be.” In Russia, in Germany, in France, and now in

Mexico, she remained faithful to her pledge. Fluent in Russian, Yiddish,

English, German, French, and Spanish, she corresponded with comrades and

kept up with the anarchist press around the world. She also received

many visitors, including Rose Pesotta and Clara Larsen from New York.

In 1976 Mollie was filmed by a Dutch television crew working on a

documentary about Emma Goldman, and in early 1980 she was filmed again

by the Pacific Street Collective of New York, to whom she spoke of her

beloved anarchism in glowing terms. In her last years, Mollie felt worn

and tired. She was deeply saddened by the death of Mary Abrams in

January 1978. Two years later, not long after her interview with Pacific

Street films, she collapsed and died of heart failure in her Cuernavaca

home. To the end, her revolutionary passion had burned with an

undiminished flame. Senya, weak and ailing, was crushed by her sudden

passing. Lingering on less than a year, he died in the Spanish Hospital

in Mexico City on June 19, 1981.