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In Switzerland, where I hoped to find, according to an old tradition, the “heart and the brain” of the Russian Revolution, I found instead a weak echo. There were the autocrats of the social-democratic-Marxists, with their old motto about the “idiocy of village life,” which was like a submerged rock on which the Russian Revolution was constantly smashed. My perspective, which I was developing, was often regarded as an illusion, covered with the dust of generations. At first I was greatly disappointed. But a group of young students, my wife's friends, gave me great hope: in Paris, people would regard my plans differently. There they had a remarkable sympathetic person–himself a Jew, but with the soul of a Russian “narodnik” [Russian revolutionary intelligentsia], a student of Glyeb Ouspensky. His name was Semyon Akimovitch An-ski. One had to conduct a correspondence with him. I have to be grateful that I placed no great confidence in this. But then people delivered this news: “A letter from Paris! Semyon Akimovitch responded! He's coming soon to see you and to discuss things. Until now nothing has moved him like your concerns. He's traveling just to see you. He has a plan about that–about whom among the emigrants you can and should rely on; he knows the emigrants well. But he advises you strongly: until you are with him, you should refrain from whatever is decided, what could tie you down!”

It was easy to comply, considering the interest I had in meeting with him…

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When he arrived, he was a broad-shouldered, well-built man, with the muscled arms of a manual laborer; a broad face, solid and typically Jewish, with a slightly hooked nose, burning eyes deep in his forehead. His back was bent–because he was so bent over, one thought that his heart must also be bent. When he would contemplate something, his face took on a somewhat tragic appearance. Something was lacking in his face, and I thought: if he had a wide, grey beard–he would have the majestic appearance of a biblical prophet!

So what was this Semyon Akimovitch, and what was with that unnatural added name

An-ski! It turned out that his birth name was simple and natural–Solomon Rapaport! This was something else: he would have been a true Rabbi Solomon! But it appeared that aside from Rabbi Solomon, there was within him a mischievous little imp…

Usually when strangers meet for the first time, it is generally thought, they feel a bit awkward, not comfortable. But at my first meeting with An-ski I had no such feeling. He met with me like a total original and a clown…or like a mischievous child who was 40 years old! He was fully ten years older than me: born in 1863, and I–in 1873…

Generally when I have been with a new acquaintance, I have been fastidious about not being too familiar [literally “about not using the second-person familiar form ‘du’”]. But with An-ski, it seemed to come from him. I never noticed how it happened. He had such a character–an open, sincere, childlike, primitive approach to people; a bohemian, artistic nature, mobile, moving, expansive, he would charm you with his openheartedness. It would often happen–he would enter and begin to pour out sayings and anecdotes. He would laugh, and everyone had to laugh with him. Suddenly he would become a different person–he would sit quietly, contemplate. A strange sincerity would waft from him–from his deep eyes, sadness would appear, the eternal Jewish sadness, perhaps a reflection of that same Jewish sadness that his ancestors expressed, “sitting and weeping by the rivers of Babylon.”

And truly, people could well see in this, our new acquaintance, how rich the Jewish national type is with

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Sh. An-ski and his father

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inner contradictions and contrasts that appear in many ways. Endless sorrow and at the same time–a hidden lust for life shines everywhere with sparks of acuity and humor. Of all other national types, it is the most concentrated and peculiar–but at the same time almost them most cosmopolitan, with a spirit open to everyone; armored with sober realism and–dreamily exalted, almost fantastic; morbidly egotistical, but strongly inclined to laugh at itself, to make a joke of itself; it seems that every minute it is prepared to throw on its back a travel pack–spending its whole life dreaming of a new Zion; having the talent to adapt to strange fatherlands as if they were its own, and knowing no higher good fortune than “to die in Jerusalem…”

The figure of Semyon Akimovitch An-ski was original, and original was his personal fate.

Even as a young man, on the threshold of the 70's, he was drawn into the Haskalah movement, which led him to deny all of the old Jewish traditions, the old way of life, beginning with the family and ending in the beis-medresh. This was a kind of late French Voltairianism with a mix of local Russian nihilism. The role that the seminarians played in Russia in the 60's hit the yeshiva students in the Jewish world. Separated from the Russian language, literature, and knowledge by their Jewish studies, they were now drawn to them as to a forbidden fruit, mostly unknown to their parents. They studied the Russian language unsystematically, in a primitive way, simply repeating whole sentences from literature by heart, not understanding the meaning or misinterpreting it, speaking in such a way that true Russians could only understand them with great difficulty. In this way they would read Pushkin, study Pisarev, discussing them up and down, getting carried away with the naïve radical novels of Sheller-Mikhailov, held heated discussions over who was better, he or Dostoyevsky. This, as they understood it, they strove to incorporate in their lives, ripping those family threads that had bound them to the “old world” and trying to build a new kind of life…

Semyon Akimovitch used to say with a smile, “We lived, you understand, in a commune.” He added: “We

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were all equally hungry; none of us had a steady income. From time to time someone would give a lesson for a few groschen, a chance income; we might get a couple of rubles from the gymnasium treasury. For months at a time we would eat only bread and tea, and sometimes not even that. We regarded our poverty not only with philosophical scorn but with proud enthusiasm…”

All of this was in the spirit of the times. Semyon Akimovitch told me what he had personally heard from the well-known member of the executive committee of the “Narodnaya Volya” [a revolutionary socialist organization], Lev Hartmann, about that time in his youth:

“There were days when six of us lived in an apartment, but we had only two pairs of shoes. Four would stay at home waiting for a pair of shoes from someone who would return from the city; the two pairs of shoes served all six of us…We slept on the floor, with our clothing for a pillow, using newspapers for a mattress, eating black bread and sausage, drinking tea.” The leader of the commune distributed whatever personal items they had equally. “Chernishevsky's hero Rakhmetov (from his novel What Is to Be Done?) was for him a model to be followed,” he said, “by all propagandistic revolutionaries.”

In order to convince me completely, Semyon Akimovitch held up to me the memoirs of Panayev, how Nekrasov had lived in one small room with the artist Danenberg: the sun was their clock, they ate only a little borscht, had only a single pair of shoes, one overcoat for both, so they had to take turns going outside!…He himself, Semyon Akimovitch, needed no special “principles” for living such a life. It was quite simple–he was poor and never had anything better…

An-ski tried his luck at being a teacher. He sought students among the petit bourgeois elements in a small Jewish shtetl. But his heresies got in his way, his Gentile appearance, shaved beard–they frightened away the religious Orthodox element, which meant, if not everyone, at least the Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl. In one spot, people were so frightened of his Russian chrestomathy [reading list] that they called it a Christomathy and associated it with Christianity…People accused him of being a missionary, of wanting to convince his students to convert, and so on. A particular danger befell him

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when a young man from the shtetl's “free thinkers” took to reading Lilienblum's Khatat Ne'urim (The Sins of Youth), which was then the Bible of freethinking young people. The local rabbi, learning about this, was ready to call for his excommunication. By luck, Khatat Ne'urim was bound together with Gordon's Two Days and One Night, whose contents were completely innocent, in contrast to Lilienblum's heretical pamphlet, and the people who were seeking heresies were disoriented when the owner ripped Khatat Ne'urim from the volume and showed them nothing but Gordon's book, strongly demanding from the moralists that they should point out every unclean word about which they had complained. The moralists left in disgrace. People also found pages from An-ski's diary, where he clearly expressed his thoughts about the pogroms from the early 80's. People in the shtetl had said that the pogroms–were a punishment from heaven for the evil deeds of such Jews as Semyon Akimovitch…

This was the atmosphere that the young man breathed, he who had aspired to education and progress. It is no wonder that he did not last long; a new wave tore him away–“Going to the village, to the people!” His hope and expectation took him from the Jewish street to the broad plains of general Russian life. The grey everyday of the Jewish town he replaced with the mysterious half-darkness in the salt and coal mines…I must admit that he surprised me with this last feature of his youthful biography…

“Good,” I said to him. “You were drawn to ‘the folk’,” but “folk” in those years meant mostly–the village. The “folk” sit on the earth; where did you get the wild idea–to dig under the ground?”

His answer was simple: all the means and ways of disguising the propaganda in the village that were used in the 70's and 80's were well-known to the spies and gendarmes of the political police; to seek and capture revolutionaries who hid under the mask of a village teacher, a medic, a secretary in a government office, and the like were everyday matters. One had to find new techniques! And his trick worked: for the whole time that he worked in the mines, no one picked him out. He belonged to the dark mass of underground men. The whole

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character of such labor did not allow any thought about falsity, pretense, or disguise. During the time he lived in the shtetl, Rapaport, a Jew among Jews, people noticed him. He was the center of everyone's attention and suspicion; here it was the opposite. Among the coalminers he was left to himself. He abandoned his name and did not need a false pass. The miners were used to the idea that all those who had found no “path in life” would come to them.

…I saw in him a complete and perfect type of a Narodnik with a psyche not consumed by skepticism but hardened against it. Once I tried to ascertain from him whether being a Narodnik was for him a mixture of the Dostoyevkian and Rachmetovian, along with the Tolstoyan, and was that not a kind of ascetism, with self-inflicted pain? He protested strongly against this, but he could not deny it, since he emerged from his life as a caveman in the mines with weakened strength and with fewer teeth, which had fallen out due to scurvy.

“So I'm a Tolstoyan, a mixed up guy like Rachmetov?” he protested. “What would you say about the similar Lev Hartman? When he ‘went among the folk,’ one of the simple peasants perceived something strange about him and called out: ‘Hey you, monsieur!’” This caused an upheaval in his soul: he threw everything off and made of himself a true vagabond and went back to ‘the people’–a real beggar, a tramp. Today Pavel Borisovitch Axelrod? He would search in Podolya Gubernia for a legendary robber who would share among the poor people what he stole from the rich; he did not find this thief and began to preach that all Jews should return to Palestine; who would have expected this from a futuristic Marxist? And Lev Deutsch? He was brought up because of Karakozov's attempted assassination [of Czar Alexander II]. Really, an assassination attempt on such a good czar–that's a crime!” And later on, when he had lost his “czarist” illusions, he was not long full of anger and sorrow, because the Russian and even the Jewish socialists had taken to “fighting for a constitution for the Warshawskis, Brodskys, Poliakovs, Ginzburgs, and their like.” And let us consider Aptekman. In order to mix totally with the “people,” he totally gave up himself, as if he would

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torture himself, he went ahead and converted! No, no one found crazy behavior in me, but in our whole generation, not omitting those who are considered masters of positivism and objectivity!

After these two periods of time–as a teacher and a mine worker–there was a third for Semyon Akimovitch: as a literary man.

He became a writer by accident; his talent as a writer was revealed by another well-known Narodnik who also came, like An-ski, from the Jews: Grigori Ilyich Schreider. Later, after the 1917 revolution, he was called from our party to the honorable post of Petersburg city president (“golova”). At that time he was already the chief editor of our provincial newspaper, “Yug,” (“South”) in Yekaterinoslav. He had a rare talent as an editor and was interested in a modest article about the life of mine workers that was written, so he believed, by one of the workers. He sensed in the author an artistic nerve, and he decided to become personally acquainted with the author, so he called him in and said something like: either he, an old literary man and editor, knew nothing about literature, or Solomon Rapaport, a born writer, did not understand what a talent he had. He must have a good teacher from among the true, already developed, talented writers. Better than anyone else would be such an appropriate teacher as Glyeb Ouspensky. And more than anything, he had to immerse himself in the atmosphere of great Russian literature in the capital. He, Schreider, could give him a recommendation to Ouspensky and to the editors of the Narodnik monthly journal, who gathered around N.K. Mikhailovsk himself.

Semyon Akimovitch was seized by this head spinning perspective that had opened for him. He was nervous, he trembled, he was resolute and then not so resolute. He saved money for the journey. There he developed the attitude, there he strongly believed in himself as a future writer, there he became disappointed in his craft. Finally, his fate came to pass.

In Petersburg, An-ski, right from the train station, went in the evening for a friendly glass of tea with the literary headquarters of the Narodniks. There were the best of the Petersburg Russian intelligentsia. There, too, was the literary foundation of the

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underground revolutionary movement. And there, too, was Glyeb Ouspensky. He read the recommendation and made his way over to An-ski with enchanting friendliness; but he soon went away–he had a family celebration for a close friend. He went there, perhaps to stay into the night; but he goes there in order not to miss the regular weekly meeting of the fighting group. Without him, Semyon Akimovitch turned into a jellied “dumb figure.” He picked up every word of those who were there. They were all “light spirits!” He did not notice how the evening passed. At midnight, people began to get ready to leave. People said good-bye and went home. Home?! Semyon Akimovitch until that moment had not given a thought as to where he would go. He had no relatives there, no acquaintances. In a hotel? He had no permission to stay there. He had no one to ask for advice. Glyeb Ouspensky, to whom Schreider had recommended him, was gone; everyone else he did not know: they were the editorial board. Should he tell any of them about his predicament? The thought alone made him go hot and cold. Having come to no conclusion about what to do, he automatically did what everyone did: he put on his coat, said goodbye, and went out–out to the empty streets of the strange, unknown, big city.

What should he do? He went, went–from one street to another, from one boulevard to another. He lost his directions and soon did not know where he was. His tired feet carried him here and there on the boulevard, where the benches tempt him to sit down. But he has not yet sat down and started to dream when at a distance appears the figure of a policeman. He has to spring up and appear as an untroubled wanderer out for a walk. So passes hour after hour. The night is fearfully long! Suddenly–a familiar figure appears near him. Yes, there can be no doubt. It is Glyeb Ouspensky! He has left his meeting that was like a family celebration and is probably on his way home…Ouspensky looks at him with amazement. He recognizes the “writing colleague of the mine workers” and begins to inquire what and whom he seeks so late at night, nearly at dawn?! An-ski cannot keep his secret. And now Ouspensky sees with his own eyes the mournful, humiliated, tragic results of the requirement that Jews have a “residency permit.” He has heard about this many times; now before him he sees the bloody injury.

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Ouspensky takes Semyon Akimovitch by the hand, brings him home, drinks tea with him, puts him to bed, and sits at the foot of the bed: he will know in all its details the naked truth about the life of the Jews. Semyon Akimovitch talks and talks, not noticing that from fatigue he has begun muttering nonsense, rambling–and he falls, probably, into a deep, if short, sleep. Something disturbed him and he quickly awoke, but he could not tell where he was or what had happened to him. He looked around the room…at the foot of his bed, quiet as a statue of unending sadness, sat Ouspensky, contemplating, beaten down, as he himself had appeared when he was first questioned. From his eyes descended a single large tear…a second…a third…

The Jewish-Russian Encyclopedia of Brockhoyz-Ephron correctly describes a whole period of An-ski's work, the period between 1886 and 1892, whether thematically or philosophically, as “under the strong influence of Glyeb Ouspensky.” The extreme subjectivity that suffuses Ouspensky's work on public affairs with nervous excitement, always shocked An-ski. This recognition on the artistic front in the work of his beloved teacher led him to see “a distant flash that revealed the coming storm of psychic illness.” And he carefully worked out a precise restraint in “pure storytelling art,” sometimes even allowing a light tone of good-natured humor–and occasionally a sharper irony. And like Ouspensky, he was dominated by a specific kind of writerly modesty.

“You know, Victor, what was hard for me at the beginning of my writing activities? You could never guess: it was, how should I sign my work! I was embarrassed to sign my own name. I understand Turgenev, Pisemsky, and Ostrowski–people know what kind of spiritual food you get. In literature, this is like a firm in business. But what will I evince with a Solomon Rapaport, that says nothing? For me it was a real relief when I was told that one could use a pseudonym. But a pseudonym has to be carefully considered, and I was not capable of such thought. Finally, I was helped

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by that same Glyeb Ouspensky. He worked and worked with me, finally took pen in hand, and wrote the initials of my name under the article about the life of mine workers: S.A., then An…he thought for a bit, wrote a hyphen and then added “ski.” “Do you like this?” he asked. I was quite happy. It really pleased me: probably because he wrote it himself. From then on I was S.A. An-ski. Glyeb Ivanovitch gave me the first lesson on how to write fiction. He also gave me a literary name, and finally he gave me the idea to travel abroad, once and for all to shake off–as he expressed it–my Jewish, as well as my Russian, provincialism. And finally–he arranged for me to be a personal secretary to Lavrov in Paris.

If Glyeb Ouspensky long reigned over Semyon Akimovitch's heart, Lavrov disciplined his brain and raised him to the highest levels of human knowledge. When Lavrov died, I got the feeling that the spiritually orphaned Semyon Akimovitch transferred his whole attachment to me.

At first glance, superficially, I could have thought that Semyon Akimovitch was a completely denationalized Jew. That this impression was false appeared only later. Although he had undertaken to master the Russian language late–at 16 or 17–he loved Russian literature so much that he read it, thought about it, and felt it, so that the Russian language became for him for than a “second mother tongue.” Yiddish and Russian were not for him a first or second language but “two firsts,” and they competed in advancing his spiritual life, now one and now the other, depending on the circumstances. It is characteristic that he himself did not like translating his own works from one language to the other (although Nekrosov, for example, and Nikitin he translated into Yiddish). Despite the many requests that came to him, he did not translate into Russian the remarkable poem “Di shvue,” which was the anthem of the “Bund.” Incidentally, that this anthem was a creation from the muse of the Russian writer An-ski, only a few of us knew for a long time, mostly editors of encyclopedias.

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When I met An-ski for the first time, he instinctively emphasized how he had shaken off the Jewish national element that had lay hidden in him. At first I could not understand this; but I quickly came to understand from “The Wind Blows.” Semyon Akimovitch was influenced by the voice of Pyotr Lavrov.

An-ski looked on the revival of the Second International as something inevitable, but not as a successful compromise for the spirit of the times but as a partial capitulation of internationalism to nationalism. I discussed this with him fruitlessly, showing that sometimes people have to withdraw in order to have a place from which to proceed. Otherwise it is not possible to take a bigger step forward. An-ski regarded this as sophistry.

One time our discussion intensified because of the following: in London, a Yiddish group was established that undertook to distribute socialist literature in Hebrew. They came to Lavrov (as did the Agrarian Socialist League later on). They wanted his blessing for their project. But they found no sympathy from him. This did not mean that Lavrov was not someone who promoted “Yiddish.” According to the general publication that I received, he regarded Yiddish as a “jargon,” a crippled German, and he regarded Hebrew–as a Jewish Latin. According to him, neither language lay on the broad road of Jewish cultural development. They were both side roads. A logical deduction, then, would be–a categorical demand that Jews should be linguistically assimilated. But Lavrov did not make this logical deduction. He saw–correctly–the spiritual rape of a small people that had a rich history. There remained an unresolved contradiction that became even more difficult for his true pupil and personal secretary, An-ski.

One time, Semyon demanded from me a categorical response: How would I resolve the contradiction? I answered briefly: Wherever Lavrov said no, I would say yes. The Second International marked not regress but progress in comparison with the First. Without going through the phase of “national self-expression” of socialism in the conditions of

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of every country, the International would be a house of cards. Jewish socialism must go through its period of “nationalization.” The battle between Hebrew and Yiddish makes the matter more complicated. But what can one do? Perhaps they both have a foundation, one for the Ashkenazim and the other for the Sephardim. One for Central and Eastern Europe and the other for the Asian Near East and the countries of the Mediterranean that are bound to it? If the Jews want to return to their former Semitic environment, Hebrew should be called for. If such a return is unsuccessful, then Yiddish should remain the cultural ruler. I should not mix into such a conflict. This is an internal matter for the Jews themselves. Semyon Akimovitch was not happy with such a solution to the problem. At that time he was under the influence of Zhitlovski, who had altogether discarded Hebrew and focused on Yiddish.

I do not know how long the doubts and hesitations would have lasted for Semyon. But then new things happened that made a strong impression on him and changed the course of his “Yiddish” thinking. There was the second conference of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party. At this conference, the Russian Party, whose rise was greatly indebted to the “Bund,” did not agree to give the latter full autonomy in the structure of the party, about which they had earlier had a long discussion. An-ski was totally on the side of the “Bund” in this controversy. I also agreed on general principles with An-ski, although in a more Platonic way, that is to say, as a bystander, while he felt like a Bundist patriot. As I have already said, An–ski, as well as his friend Zhitlovksi, was affected by an impulsive young man who lived in Bern under the name Isaacson: this was the later well-known worker in our socialist surroundings Liber Goldman, who ended his life shortly before the Second World War in a Soviet prison somewhere in middle

An-ski became bored by the fruitless efforts to bring him into the “Bund.” He was also urged by the initiatives of the old Narodnik Volkhovskoy–a Ukrainian by origin–to publish in Ukrainian his own fictional folk story

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“The Wrongful Czar,” and in general he began to work on creating a fund to publish essays in Ukrainian. With my whole heart I welcomed such an initiative. When the announcement about this appeared in “Revolutionary Russia,” Semyon rushed to me all excited: “Why should the party not establish such a fund to produce literature in Yiddish?”

“This is because,” I responded, “our Yiddish writers are good for nothing: They don't do in their area what the unique Ukrainian Volkhovskoy does. In other words–more than anything, this is your fault as well as Zhitlovski's.”

“Because of us there would be no obstacle, but we must know how the party would react to it?”

“And I will tell you: the party would create no obstacle. So don't sleep. Get to work.”

Semyon really took off with this concept…and the work went well. In short order we produced three or four Yiddish anthologies.

At that time the revolutionary events and also personal circumstances separated us for a long period, put us on different sides: I wandered abroad as an emigrant while he determined “to stay at home,” on the basis of legal existence. We encountered each other again during the revolutionary conflagration of 1917-1918. One time I received second-hand news about him. One of our party members, M.A. Levin, told me that he encountered An-ski in Vilna. That was in 1909-1910. He was giving a lecture there about Yiddish literature–this was after a long pause–at the first meeting of the local Jewish community with the popular writer. He was treated as a celebrity, with welcoming speeches. As if answering these greetings, An-ski spoke in the language of a penitent. He asked forgiveness for having devoted himself for so many years to the “Gentiles.” He explained that even in those years, when he had such little connection with the Jewish community, he never lost interest in the Jewish folk spirit, which lay so deep in Jewish folklore. (This was true, and for his later famous work “The Dybbuk” he undoubtedly received

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stimulation and prepared himself thanks to his research and exploration in the area of Jewish folklore.). Unfortunately, his usual impressionism, that was so typical of his way of thinking, gave certain members of his audience the impression, that he regretted the former period of his life. This was a mistake. As one could understand, his regret belonged to the period of his life before the rise of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and probably also at the beginning of its rise, when he was ruled by abstract “cosmopolitan” internationalism; this had blocked for him the perspective of socialism, which was in the flesh and blood of Jewish national life and culture. Even in the Socialist Revolutionary period of his life, An-ski found this perspective and for the first time tried to work in its light. This accords with the entire following political story of his life.

In 1917, during the elections to the Petersburg city council, he was a candidate from the Social Revolutionary Party. He was then a steadfast and convinced Socialist Revolutionary; he then bore a new idea (new for his fellow councilmen, but not for me)–to create a separate Jewish party that should have in spirit the same aims as the Socialist Revolutionary Party, as had the “Bund“–with the Russian Social-Democratic Party. He held that since the purely industrial Jewish proletariat was very small and was bound up with the “little men” who were artisans with the half-proletariat from the business- and middle-classes, only the Socialist-Revolutionary Party has the strength to give Russian Jewry a broad “workers” program instead of the smaller, foreign uniforms in which, according to him, the orthodox and “industrial-centrist” Marxists had stuffed the Jewish body and the Jewish soul…

Another time in the list of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Semyon was in the Constituent Assembly. There he was anxious about the fate of the Jewish question, over how much it would appear in the Constituent Assembly. He spoke with a whole array of Jewish deputies about issuing a special Jewish declaration. He did not come to speak to me about this matter. With great excitement he listened to my opening speech as presider. That, when I was later told about the impression that he took from my speech, forced me not long afterwards to search in the New York Public Library, where I

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sought a rare document–the stenographic report of the first day of the founding assembly (Petrograd, 1918). About the civil war that began with the Bolshevik revolution and that brought a clash between different national groups in Russia I said in my opening remarks:

“Just the fact that we are opening a Constituent Assembly proclaims the end of the civil war among the people who inhabit Russia”; there can no longer be any fear that “the hand of a Russian soldier, a peasant in a gray greatcoat, should rise up against a Ukrainian peasant, who also wears a gray greatcoat (applause from the center and right, voices saying ‘Long live Ukraine!’). As long as the Constituent Assembly is the highest power in the republic, both the Cossack-laborers and the children of those who are free be sure that their right and freedom are in no danger from a Russian soldier”…“The Muslim population–whether concentrated in one territory or scattered like a national minority–can expect that the Constituent Assembly will recognize their sovereign rights, like those of any other nationality.”

“…And finally, citizens, allow me to say about that ‘stepchild’ people, that people that has been persecuted more than any other, that people that has been a scapegoat for exploitation by the whole world, the people others have tried to blame for the misfortunes and sorrows of the working masses, in a way that would be permissible for no other people, because in all peoples, without exception, the working masses are the far greatest majority of the population. And the Jewish people, who did not have their own territory, should have, within the boundaries of the Russian republic, the same rights as all other people to establish their own national self-control and to express their the will of the working people!”

Having heard this speech, Semyon said: “No other special declaration about the Jews is necessary. All that we need, all that concerns our rights, has been said–said openly, categorically, so that nothing more is needed. The project of my declaration I now put away into my archives.”

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