Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  For us, this had been a remarkable year. One year before at this same time we had watched sadly as Pom-Pon was led away in Le Beausset. We had visited Ezra Pound and heard him speak of Mussolini as “The Boss”; we had been alerted to the dangers of fascism when we saw Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, and we had been present at a fascist demonstration in Italy. During this past year we had studied Soviet movies, searching for clues of what socialism might mean in our own lives, and we had just seen in Mexico a degree of socialization applied to the benefit of development in that country. Revolution and socialism were respectable words in Mexico. We returned to New York City from California to find families sleeping on their household goods, piled on the sidewalks in front of their apartments. The city had an air of disaster; the unemployed were the refugees who had exhausted their resources and did not know where to turn.

  An appeal was made to intellectuals by the seventh World Congress of the Communist Parties in 1935 to join in a united front to defeat fascism and war. We responded to that call, and in the winter of 1935 we decided to work with the Communist Party, not as artist or writer because we did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left. (I could make an exception for Bertolt Brecht and for some Soviet movies.) We said to each other, “Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our other interest in the arts for a later time.” Few in the Party or in the Workers Alliance knew anything of our past, and in a short time we were no longer thinking of Paris or of To Publishers, of poetry or of painting. We also left it to our friends and families to keep in touch with us if they chose. We felt that our political decision was not one in which we wished to involve them.

  “We are those selfish travelers, happiest in foreign streets.” If George and I had come from the working class we would probably never have joined the Communist Party—that was the nearly unanimous decision of the United States’ working class. We searched for escape from class. George’s experience in the class he came from was one of isolation, and to be a poet who knew no more than that was a bleak outlook; my class background had not led me into an intellectual world. Artists and writers have often looked for ways to escape class and the burden of class mores, and while we did not look for an ivory tower, we did search to find and to understand from the grassroots.

  The Communist and the Socialist Parties were the only organizations which were organizing the unemployed to do something themselves about their predicament. When we asked to join, a secretary seemed suspicious of us and sent us to a Brooklyn address, where we again asked to join. The two people in the Brooklyn office also seemed to find us queer birds, and they turned us over to Doretta Tarmon.

  Doretta had taken part in the many schisms within the radical left; she had joined with Jay Lovestone when he left the Socialist Party, and she broke away from his group to become a Communist. She came to New York where the Movement was her breath, her sustenance, her life. She had intense black eyes behind thick lenses which flashed as she tossed her head in impassioned speech. She held crowds with her speeches at street meetings—words came to her faster than her mouth could say them. “Prize your fellow worker like the skin of your eye,” she said once at a street meeting. Conviction made her a great speaker and a remarkable but difficult friend. Doretta told of herself and of her life-long friend Esther who organized on every job they held; two women, they understood each other and the same passions moved them. Arguing with their boss’s lawyer once, they held on to his sleeve while they poured words on him; he pulled and they pulled, and his sleeve came off in their hands. Words failed them, and the lawyer took them to court. The judge listened carefully, and said patiently to the lawyer, “But isn’t it possible that the tailor only basted your sleeve to your jacket? Isn’t it possible that the tailor neglected to sew the sleeve on his machine and it may have come off rather easily?”

  Doretta might as well have moved in with us, as we became constant companions. She was new to our experience, and we were continually surprised, confounded, and delighted with her. She took us to our first street meeting, which we could have gone to, of course, without permission, but she gave us permission and we went like adolescents to a first grown-up party. Doretta wore a leather jacket and a hat with a long red feather; having come recently from Paris, I was bare-legged and bare-headed, wearing a Paris dress. Doretta cautioned me, “You don’t want to be sectarian, comrade.”

  At the street meeting in an Italian neighborhood nearby, a speaker explained to Italians on their own block that fascism meant dictatorship. Italian families were sending money to Mussolini, and wives were contributing their marriage rings. To the Italians, Mussolini was a hero because he was winning the war against Ethiopia, and he was unifying Italy, where the trains did run on time. It was a difficult audience at the street meeting, but Italians too were out of work and were threatened with eviction or loss of homes; and although a few milk bottles were thrown, the day after the meeting a few Italians came into the Workers Alliance for help. A short time later, George and I created organizations of the unemployed through this same Alliance.

  Doretta invited us to join a new-members class in the Communist Party. Of the fourteen people in the class, not one was foreign-born. Several of those new members are still our friends, but with these new friends we found ourselves in a very different world, a world in which we were politically exposed. The Communist Party remained strange to us; we threaded our way in the organization, and even the vocabulary within the Party was a different vocabulary than I had known. The older Communists were wearing leather jackets that had become almost a uniform. Most of the older members were Russian, Jewish or Polish immigrants, and they were not easy to understand.

  The Socialist Party had organized the Workers Alliance, and the Communists had organized the Unemployment Councils—these two organizations merged to form one organization, called the Workers Alliance. George began work in the Borough Hall area of Brooklyn, in a neighborhood that contained the Philippine, Puerto Rican and Syrian-Lebanese population; it included Atlantic Avenue from Flatbush Avenue to the waterfront and from Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Bridge, with all the slums that crowded under the El (the elevated railway). Slums pressed in and around the sweatshops that were now closed. Many single men in this population had come to the United States to work, leaving their women behind. It is hard to understand now the way things were then. Almost no one was working, and the people were in their own neighborhoods, at home or on the street in their own block; the activities of the Workers Alliance in every neighborhood where it existed were the immediate concerns of that neighborhood. George tells in a poem of Petra Roja, who called a crowd together by leaning out her tenement window and beating on her dishpan. When no one worked in a family the rent could not be paid, and if a family could not get “the relief” (as it was called), the landlord gave them an eviction notice and called the city marshal, who with several assistants put the furniture in the street and put a lock on the door. If the furniture was not soon taken from the street, the sanitation department hauled it away to the city dump. This was one of the frequent emergencies for which Petra beat her dishpan. She came down the stairs to march at the head of her little army to the apartment of the family that was threatened with eviction. When the marshal struggled up the solidly packed stairs to the apartment, he found Petra and the other Alliance members filling the apartment. “What’s going on here?” yelled the marshal.

  Petra yelled back, pointing at George, “It’s his birthday!”

  When the furniture finally reached the street, the neighbors helped by sitting on it to prevent its being hauled away. One man returned to his evacuated apartment with a big bag of plaster-of-Paris, which he mixed and slowly poured into the toilet, and as it went down through the tree of plumbing the plaster solidified in the pipes of the whole building. It was a war for food and shelter.

  George had a bodyguard, a big man named Raf who had been a prize fighter in Puerto Rico and who appoi
nted himself to be George’s protector. The membership of George’s group in the Workers Alliance treasured George and appreciated the organization they had built together, but they did not think that George was well dressed. A committee was organized to go with George to a nearby men’s clothing store. Raf asked to see the manager. “We are from the Workers Alliance on Adams Street,” he told him. “We want to buy a new suit for our organizer, and it had better be a good suit or we will come back and picket your place.”

  A short way out Flatbush Avenue, in front of a big Protestant church, George went one morning with leaflets calling for a demonstration at the nearby relief bureau. As the congregation came out of the church and George was handing out a few leaflets, he noticed that a group of men went back into the church with the leaflets, to emerge in a wedge aimed straight at George. They came swiftly and dispersed the other people who were just standing around; a young police officer directing traffic at the corner moved in fast close to George, who was already belabored. He stopped George from handing out the leaflets, and said, “I’m taking you in.”

  “But I have a constitutional right—” George began.

  “Please,” said the cop, and he drew George around the corner. “They’d have slaughtered you,” he said as he let George go.

  Mary Auerbach and I went to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn to form a new local of the Workers Alliance in a neighborhood of Jews, Italians, and many blacks who had just come from the South. In most of the southern states nothing was done for the hungry, and thousands were on the roads, moving into the industrial areas. New York had more liberal laws concerning the relief of hunger, and many Southerners came and stayed in the city, but the settlement laws made it difficult for these people to obtain food or rent orders when they first arrived, and they did not know where to turn for help. Emergency relief was given only in dire cases. Poor people do not usually keep records, a year’s residence had to be proven, and these people had been harassed on the roads; starvation was real for them and they were frightened. Mary Auerbach and I went through the apartment buildings, knocking on every door and explaining that it was not the fault of the men that they could not find work and bring home a wage at the end of the week. Many men took to the roads looking for work, while others were just not in evidence, as women and children could more easily get aid if there was no man in the house who presumably should be working. Many women were alone with their children, living in misery. We spent hours every day talking to these people in their apartments. We presented ourselves as members of the Workers Alliance, but our intentions were doubted, and only men came to our first meeting; Mary and I went with these men to the relief bureau, and we did get emergency food and rent orders. We soon had a membership made up almost entirely of young black women with their little children and older women who knew how to run an organization. They collected dues of ten cents a month, visited the sick and talked to neighbors; it was they who really built the organization. We rented a store building next door to the Nostrand Avenue relief bureau, where we talked with clients on their way in to confront the bureau. We found that they usually came to our headquarters after failing to get food or rent orders. The unemployed wanted jobs, and in the demonstrations we asked for jobs, but the purpose of the Workers Alliance was to relieve starvation and to guide people to a realization that government could solve these problems—not with fascism, but with a liberal solution. But as the organization increased in numbers and its successes became apparent to all levels of government there were attempts to break the Alliance.

  We “sat-in.” I asked George to bring the membership of his Borough-Hall Workers Alliance to picket the sit-in at the Nostrand Avenue relief bureau. We had learned this technique from the auto workers in Detroit; we sat in for a day and a night, holding the relief bureau so that the day’s business could not go on. The administration of the bureau decided on the second day to smash the demonstration, and the police came through the big front doors with clubs swinging as our women screamed. I remember watching a young black woman while she screamed, and as the sound continued it seemed to me she screamed that scream for minutes. Manuel, from George’s local, was clubbed to the floor and a cop bent over him beating him on the head. I threw myself between Manuel and the cop, Manuel, not knowing it was my hand beside his face bit my thumb! The cop pulled me to my feet by my long hair, and for days after I could not turn my head nor use my thumb.

  We were arrested. The plan of the relief administration was to break up our organization by depriving the membership of leadership. The International Labor Defense took charge of our defense; we were accused of attacking the police. The trial began, and it dragged on for two years—a tactic planned to dissipate energy from the organization by making us attend court. The trial was postponed again and again, but every time it was called, our membership escorted us to court. In November of the second year the trial was finally held, and we were charged with felonious assault on the police. As the jury was chosen we watched and speculated about each person chosen, until the defense’s challenges were exhausted, and a Jewish manufacturer of flags and emblems was the last jury member called—we would have rejected him. After deliberating for many hours, the jury returned to the courtroom at ten o’clock at night with a not-guilty verdict for all of us except Manuel, who was the only non-white arrested. We went out free to the street, and there, waiting for us, were our Workers Alliance members.

  At a later time we met the girl who was secretary to the manufacturer of flags and emblems, and she told us his account of the jury room. The eleven other members had opposed him—they were for a guilty verdict. The compromise was to convict Manuel, and he served nine months in prison.

  George and I were twenty-nine years old. The war in Spain had been going on for a year, and George wanted to go, but I would not agree unless I went too. As we did not have any special skills that would have made a difference in the war, we did not try to go to Spain, but friends near us in age or younger, who were single men and women or who had special skills either went to Spain or tried very hard to get there. Mary Auerbach, with whom I worked every day, gave permission for the son of her old age to go; barely eighteen years old, he had never held a gun. In Spain he was rushed into the lines the very day he arrived, and he was killed in his first battle. Our friend Joe Hecht was one of the heroes who swam the Ebro River into fascist-held territory at the point where the Loyalists established a pontoon bridge to move the army across the Ebro. Our friend Conlon Nancarrow, the composer, went to Spain from Boston, at age eighteen. Conlon told us of Bart van der Schelling, a Dutch friend we came to know later in Mexico: “I saw him walking on the deck of a ship on which a group of us were crossing from France to Spain.” Bart was German-looking, stiff-necked and red-faced. Conlon said, “Our group talked together and we decided to dump him overboard,” but more sober minds prevailed.

  Bart tells next, “I had had war experience in Indonesia when I was sixteen, so I was made a commander in Spain. All was quiet at the front, as it had been raining for days, and everyone was miserable; I asked myself, ‘What can I do?’ I jumped out of my trench and began to do vigorous exercises in view of all the men, then I strode down the line inspecting fox-holes. Conlon was in his fox-hole, dug out of the earth just as everyone’s was, but Conlon’s hole had an improvised shelter under which Conlon sat with his feet propped up out of the wet; with a niche for books and for cigarettes, Conlon was reading.” Bart came close and Conlon’s mouth dropped a little as he recognized the “enemy” from shipboard.

  “What are you reading?” asked Bart.

  “French,” said Conlon. “I thought I might as well study French with so much time on my hands.” Conlon came home with dysentery, but he came home alive. Joe came home too, to die in the next war as soon as he went into action. These men were convinced that fascism must be stopped. Of 3000 who went to Spain from the United States, 1500 died there. Little news came to us of the war in
Spain. The United States government joined with France and England in an embargo of all arms to Loyalist Spain; meanwhile Hitler and Mussolini were supplying Franco with men, arms, and planes.

  In 1937 George went to a Party training school for a period of study and discussion. I went to see Pete Cacchione, who was chairman of the Communist Party in Brooklyn, and said to him, “You sent George to school, and now you must send me too.” Pete felt pressured, but he agreed, and I went for the next three months to the school. George went on to Utica, where we had agreed to go after finishing the school, which was held in the Catskills at a resort hotel. In the wintertime this hotel was the center for lectures on Marxist economics and political theory, discussions of the women’s movement, Negro history in the United States, and trade union tactics.

  Pop Mindel was the teacher I loved. Pop was Russian-born, Jewish, a scholar of Marxism. He was acutely intuitive in his understanding of each one of us, and he is the only person I ever met in the Party who I am sure loved each one of us. A young Negro boy from the deep South who wanted to be an artist drew with his pencil every chance he had. Pop Mindel finally told him, “It’s the wrong time for you to be an artist—you have set your foot on the path to help your people, and you can help them more in politics than you can with your art.”

  To me he said, “There are times in your life in which you might choose to be a revolutionary, but there are also times, as when you marry or when you have children, that this is impossible.”

  George and I had been unaware of our being a special kind of couple until Hitler and fascism made being Jewish a pointed issue of survival. Our interest had been to understand a class not our own and to be part of sweeping changes in the United States. We held close a belief in ourselves as artists, and we intended to find our way back to a life in poetry and the arts. If there had not been a clear need for people like us to defeat fascism, we would probably have dropped the politics as the depression eased, and we would have resumed a life in the arts. But fascism, socialism or a more liberal form of republicanism were the choices: Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain became fascist, France had a People’s Front government, Russia was socialist, and the United States had embarked upon a more liberal form of republicanism with the election of Roosevelt and his cabinet of Keynesian economists and politicians. Events moved us with them, and we believed that fascism meant death to us along with the other Jews of the world, and death to millions who would be caught in the war which actually came to pass. Communists were still, at the end of the Depression, the ones who warned most consistently against this danger.