We live in interesting times. Terrible, tragic, ugly, if you will, but interesting just the same. And it would be foolish to long for death before passing through them. But another time–I speak of ten years ago–was even more interesting: in any event it was more beautiful. That was the time that witnessed the founding of the Russian Poale Zion. This Purim will mark ten years since that event and Poale Zionists the world over will celebrate the anniversary. It will be a modest celebration, for our hearts are too heavy to indulge in merrymaking. However, those who were privileged to do battle in those revolutionary years will be filled with emotion. I related the historical facts of that dramatic gathering in the Kemfer-shtime, the central organ of America’s Poale Zions, but having the opportunity to address myself in these pages to a larger constituency, I shall summon up even more dramatic scenes.
The Jewish Labor movement has been splintered into four distinct Jewish socialist parties. Foremost, claiming to be the "sole champion," (of the Jewish workers) is the Bund. The Bund has long made its reputation on spiritual platitudes, boorishness, irresponsibility and a total inability for rational thought. But it acted like a Mr. Moneybags, a noveau riche, dispensing favors through its kulak, intimidating all the Jewish artisans and petty bourgeoisie. The Bund always tried to ingratiate itself with the Russian Social Democrats, who were not impressed and refused to acquiesce to the former’s ambitions. That’s how the Russian socialists are by nature–they fawn over brilliant sophistry and go mad for piquant paradoxes. Some theoreticians! And this is just what the Bund lacked. Plekhanov used to break out laughing: "The Bundist theoreticians, ha, ha!"
But a Jewish socialist not wishing to court favor with his foes, a person who can think straight and wants to fight hard, will run from the Bund as if from a wilderness. And he will be welcomed by the Poale Zion with open arms. But then the Poale Zionists were tearing each other up over conflicting theories. The spiritual father of Socialist Zionism, Dr. Nachman Syrkin, only made his amazing discovery a year after the sanctimonious Bund was ushered into life. Yet no one in Russia had an inkling of his new theorems. It was my lot to stumble upon the discovery of Socialist Zionism on my own. It happened in Ekaterinoslav in September 1900, and by November I had already founded the first Socialist Poale Zion group to appear on the globe. The group consisted of 150 souls–high school students who studied at home, and workers.
I belonged at that time to the Russian Social Democratic Party and worked under the supervision of the Ekaterinoslav Social Democratic Committee, which was responsible for the illegal paper Iuzhnyi Rabochii (Southern Worker). The members of that committee who still stand out in my memory are the Christian Pozdniakov (a fellow who was booted out of seminary for atheism), Tzavakoi the Georgian, and the Jew Taratatu. Pozdniakov–who had consumed prodigious amounts of knowledge–and I would drown ourselves in drink and heated discussions on Karl Marx and Richard Avenarius. Both of us–we were all of nineteen–knew Marx’s Capital by heart, and we would go agitating among the workers, Jews and Gentiles alike, pressing illegal brochures into their hands. I was assigned to read whole chapters of Bogdanov’s Short Course of Economic Science with the workers, explaining it with illustrations from everyday life. I do not remember what turned me into a nonbeliever. After meeting with both Jewish and Gentile workers, I came to see the truth of Socialist Zionism. The committee noticed my increasingly deleterious effect on the workers and charged that I was teaching them to think independently. I was quite unceremoniously given the boot by the Russian Social Democratic Party. Years later, Pozdniakov reverted into a devout Christian mystic, abandoning socialism altogether, and the Jew Taratatu adopted terrorist anarchism, falling in an armed clash with an entire pack of Cossacks. I have no idea what became of the Georgian Tzvokoi.