Founded in 1897 in Vilnius, the Yidisher Arbeter Bund (Jewish Labor Bund, simply referred to as “the Bund”) was a non-Zionist, socialist party active among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe through the Holocaust years. It helped found the general Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898, and played an important role in the underground revolutionary movement against tsarist autocracy. Suppressed by the communist regime in the Soviet Union, it emerged as a true mass movement in independent Poland, where, though constantly harassed by the authorities, it led a legal existence. There, in addition to the Bund itself, allied groups such as children’s and youth movements (Sotsialistisher Kinder Farband – SKIF – and Yugnt Bund-Tsukunft), a women’s organization (Yidishe arbeter froy – YAF), a sports club (Morgnshtern), as well as Bund-led trade unions and secular Yiddish children’s schools enrolled tens of thousands of members. The Bund’s record of struggle against anti-Semitism and for social justice gave it great credibility among the Jewish masses, and paid off in tremendous election victories in city council and Jewish community council elections at the end of the 1930s. Smaller branches of the Bund operated in independent Lithuania and Latvia, as well as in Romania.
Along with Polish Jewry, the Bund was decimated by the Holocaust. The party’s last heroic stand took place in its participation in the resistance to the Nazis, and especially in the uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos. After the war, the remnants of the Bund were once again suppressed by a communist regime, this time in Poland. Bundist survivors scattered – to North and South America, Australia, Western Europe, and Israel. They set up Bundist clubs and organizations and continued their socialist and Yiddish cultural activities, but, for the most part, never achieved the kind of influence they had had in Poland. As the survivor generation passed from the scene, it was not replaced, and the Bund slowly dwindled and died out (except, for some reason, in Australia). Today, few Jews in the United States, Israel, or elsewhere remember the Bund, though scholars certainly do, as do some who came from Bundist families.
Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund is a memoir that calls to life the heyday of the Polish Bund. Originally published in Yiddish in 1960, and now available in a highly readable English translation with helpful annotations, it provides an intimate view of life in the movement. Its author, Bernard Goldstein, was a party leader, union organizer, and chief of the Bund militia in Warsaw. Not known primarily as a writer or intellectual, Goldstein wrote two memoirs: this, of his activities during the interwar period, and one on the Warsaw Ghetto that came out in Yiddish in 1947, and in English as The Stars Bear Witness (a phrase from the Bund’s anthem) in 1949. Goldstein saw himself as a part of history, and his life as bound up with the movement, and he uses his keen eye and memory for detail to bring to life a milieu that has otherwise been lost.
The current edition of Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund includes two introductions. One by Bundist leader Emanuel Sherer appeared in the original edition and is translated here. Sherer noted that the Bund’s interwar period had at that time received less attention than either the tsarist or Holocaust periods, and he seems to have wished that Goldstein, or someone, had written a more comprehensive history. Sherer was an intellectual and party theoretician, and he would have liked more on party congresses and resolutions, and on the Bund’s place in history. But, he wrote, somewhat apologetically, “memoirs are not history. But they can be an important source and material for history” (p. 7). Goldstein wrote about what he himself experienced, Sherer concluded, and that is the book’s strength.
The translator, Marvin Zuckerman, also contributes an introduction, in which he lays out a useful concise history of the Bund. Zuckerman, a retired professor of English and son of Bundists (a picture of his father as a young activist appears among the many illustrations in the book), explains the Bund’s ideology: its socialism, which he frequently refers to as the more innocuous-sounding “social democracy”; and its concept of do’ikayt (or “hereness”), the idea that Jews belonged wherever they were and should struggle for equal civil and national rights in the societies in which they lived. Nevertheless, Zuckerman argues, citing Plekhanov’s famous witticism that the Bundists were nothing but “Zionists with seasickness”, that the Bund and Zionism were “two sides of the same coin” as Jewish nationalist responses to European modernity (p. xix). The book also includes a short foreword by nuclear physicist Victor Gilinsky, the son of Shloyme Gilinsky, one of the founders of the Bund’s Meden Sanitarium, a facility for children at risk of tuberculosis in interwar Poland.
Goldstein tells the story of the Bund from the street level up. As a union organizer, he often worked with the toughest segments of the Warsaw Jewish proletariat, including slaughterhouse workers and porters. As an organizer, and as head of the Bundist party militia, he also came into contact with members of the underworld and underclass, who often overlapped with his official constituency. As Sherer notes, Goldstein does not deal with ideology or (much) with party congresses. Of course, the Bund never had the chance to institute the kind of socialist society it dreamed of. Even so, as Goldstein conveys vividly, the Bund improved the lives of its members and constituency on an everyday basis. It won occasional material improvements for the workers, and it defended all Jews against anti-Semitic attacks. It also raised its members’ cultural and intellectual horizons, providing them with the tools to understand their world and their predicament. To its members the Bund provided a close comradely community, with a family feeling that had always been the Bund’s hallmark.
Goldstein conveys the difficult conditions of Jewish working-class life in Poland between the wars. He describes the poverty, the anti-Semitism – which ranged from efforts to force Jewish workers out of the slaughterhouses to the institution of “ghetto benches” in the universities – and the political repression. The Bund militia busily battled anti-Semitic hooligans and, occasionally, the police. It was also constantly at war with the communists, who for much of the period under discussion regarded the Bundists as “social fascists” in accord with Comintern policy, and once even launched an armed attack on the Medem Sanitarium. It might surprise some how often gunfire is mentioned in a memoir of interwar Jewish life. Significantly, Goldstein also frequently notes cooperation with the Polish Socialist Party, especially when it came to battling anti-Semitism. The Bund’s ability to reach out to Polish comrades, even when relations between the parties were sometimes tense at the top, was one of its chief appeals during its election victories. Other Jewish parties simply did not have that connection to counterparts in the majority population. On the other hand, the Bund’s relations with the Zionists were hostile, but do not seem to have erupted into violence.
Zuckerman provides a fluid and, for the most part, accurate translation of the original, as well as good notes and a glossary explaining unfamiliar terms, and identifying individuals and organizations mentioned in the text. Twenty Years in the Jewish Labor Bund is published as a “Shofar Supplement in Jewish Studies”, and it would make good reading for students of East European Jewish history, modern Jewish politics, or the history of socialist movements, or, indeed, for anyone else without access to the original.
