of permanent precariousness.”5 Jewish life was centered in the shtetl (small town), although by the 1880s many Jews began moving to larger urban centers. Within these Jewish communities, there existed an uneasy balance between the traditional reverence for Talmudic scholarship reserved for boys and men on the one hand, and the encroaching attractions of modernity and wealth on the other. Life was always hard, however, and despite some wealthier residents, most inhabitants of the shtetl were poor.
It was this world that was the setting of Helene Minkin’s childhood in the small town of Grodno (now Hrodna in Belarus), a county seat located on the Nieman River. In 1887, the year before the Minkins left for America, the city had a Jewish population of 27,343 out of a total of 39,826—or 68.7%.6 After their mother’s death in 1883, Helene and her sister Anna went to live with their grandparents who were shopkeepers and strict disciplinarians, presumably in the city of Bialystok, about fifty miles southwest in what is now Poland. As teenagers living in an oppressive household, the girls were nevertheless exposed to new ideas by way of hired tutors, young Russian students who clandestinely exposed them to anti-czarist and perhaps even socialist literature. Helene also picked up a rudimentary knowledge of German. Then her father’s brother decided to make his way to America in order to escape military service, an issue that had long traumatized Russian Jews since the reign of Nicholas I. According to Minkin, it was she and her sister who, sometime in 1887 or 1888, resolved to follow their uncle and emigrate. The Minkins were thus part of what would be the first wave of Eastern European immigrants from czarist Russia.
Minkin’s arrival in Manhattan in June 1888 and her adjustment to the big city was not unlike that of thousands of other teenage Jewish immigrants. Urban life per se would not have been foreign to her, having lived in Grodno and Bialystok, but the cosmopolitan bustle of New York must have been overwhelming. They settled in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, a large working-class district cramped with beerhalls, eateries, and vendors. During the 1880s, the district was still a predominantly German enclave known as Little Germany (or Kleindeutschland), but would, a decade or so later, be transformed into an overcrowded Jewish ghetto. The district’s inhabitants were working people ranging from skilled artisans to laborers and small shopkeepers. Like many Jewish women of the neighborhood, Helene and her sister Anna found work in the booming garment industry.
Helene Minkin first heard about anarchists while eating a meal at Sachs’ restaurant on Norfolk Street, a meeting place for Jewish radicals. A great tragedy was being discussed. A year earlier, on November 11, 1887, after a controversial trial, four self-proclaimed anarchists had been executed in Chicago, and its first commemoration was to be organized.7 As Helene soon learned, the executions were the ghastly outcome of an equally shocking bomb attack during an anarchist rally held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. This rally had been called to protest police violence against strikers. When a police force appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse, a bomb was hurled into the police ranks, killing one instantly and leaving many horribly wounded. An unknown number of workers died of police fire during the melee. Seven police officers lost their lives, and one succumbed to his wounds a few years later. The identity of the bomb thrower remained a mystery. Anarchist leaders were rounded up, some of whom had not even been present at the rally. But advocacy of revolutionary violence was not alien to many anarchists of the 1880s; Johann Most had been recommending dynamite for years. In fact, a handful of Chicago anarchists did manufacture bombs days before the Haymarket rally. Next in this drama was the trial of eight defendants accused of being part of an anarchist conspiracy that led to the bloodshed. On August 20, 1886, the jury convicted all eight and sentenced seven to death. For Minkin, fresh out of czarist Russia, hearing the story of Haymarket was difficult; her “first blow in this free country,” as she wrote in her memoir.
The New York anarchist movement in which Helene Minkin made her quiet entry was dominated by German immigrants, many of whom had been drifting from socialism toward anarchism in the years 1879–1883, or had been expelled from Germany. This movement grew slowly and found a political home in hundreds of beerhalls sprinkled throughout the German-speaking sections of the Lower East Side. During the early 1880s, the immigrant radicals were never sharply divided into neat political camps; revolutionaries of all stripes mingled most often in Justus Schwab’s tiny saloon on First Street, the premier “gathering place for all bold, joyful, and freedom-loving spirits.”8 It was Schwab who, in 1882, made an attempt to invite Most—who had gained a reputation in the Austrian and German socialist movement but now searched for a new direction—to come to the United States and inspire the revolutionaries with his famed oratory.
Johann Most had been living in London since December 1879, where he edited his beloved Freiheit, a radical paper charting a course increasingly independent from the socialist party line. For this stubborn and indefatigable man in his mid-thirties, it was a difficult yet formative time. He and his wife divorced. He was expelled from the Socialist Party in August 1880 and found himself at the center of new infighting as the radical exile community searched for new philosophies to bring about revolution. In Germany, authorities successfully cracked down on a network of cells critical for the distribution of his paper. When Most openly celebrated the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881, British authorities jailed him for sixteen months. Released in October 1882, Most reasoned that the only way to save Freiheit was to relocate to New York.
Most’s arrival in the United States revived the social revolutionaries not only in New York but in scores of cities in the northeast and midwest following a hectic lecture tour that would become a stock-in-trade until his death. With singular intensity and energy, Most who now called himself an anarchist, thundered his preachments of insurrection and armed resistance. His speeches were stirring, as much a one-man theater act laced with humor and sarcasm as an edifying oration on the relations between Capital and Labor. Freiheit, boosted by new subscriptions and ably managed by Most, reflected this often-violent tone. Ever since 1880, the paper published articles on insurrectionary methods, chemistry, and the uses of dynamite. This infatuation with revolutionary warfare was itself a reflection of a wider debate over the philosophy of “propaganda of the deed,” which had gained currency among the revolutionary groups in Europe—even Peter Kropotkin endorsed it. At first somewhat divorced from the issue of firearms and explosives, propaganda by the deed taught that small groups or individuals can further the cause of revolution among the masses by staging exemplary deeds of rebellion and resistance. It didn’t take long before some justified acts of political violence (Attentat) as effective propaganda, especially in light of increasing repression by the state.
Most’s uncritical brushing aside of a distinction between revolutionary deeds and senseless criminal acts caused the American press to shift its earlier coverage of him as a foreign curiosity to charging him with lunacy and terrorism. During most of the 1880s, he openly praised assassins of police officials and businessmen in Austria and Germany. He was indirectly involved in the bombing of a Frankfurt police station. Indeed, Freiheit claimed responsibility stating that it wanted to test dynamite.9 He defended insurance fraudsters—many were members of the New York anarchist group 1—who recklessly set their tenements ablaze to collect payments. One such incident went horribly wrong, killing a woman and her two children. Most’s refusal to condemn such practices caused Justus Schwab to break with him.10 In the fall of 1884, Most secretly retreated to New Jersey where he worked in an explosives factory to gain access to certain chemicals, some of which he mailed to Germany. Throughout the next year, he shared his chemistry lessons with his readers in numerous articles culminating in a pamphlet unabashedly titled Revolutionary War Science.
But Most and his fellow revolutionaries were not merely apostles of destruction, as they were branded in the press. Most had considerable experience in and appreciation for organization and discipline going back to his days as a labor leader and editor
