many of Most’s supporters who had criticized him for starting a family in 1893, which to them would hamper the cause. This treatment was harmful and unnecessary, Minkin felt, but “now I feel my strength has grown and, Comrades, I’m able to support myself and Most’s sons.”33
Clearly, relations between Minkin and the majority of German comrades had soured, and the issue of how Most would be remembered became very sensitive. Right after Most’s death, Minkin believed herself to be the guardian and protector of her late partner’s legacy. She was briefly editor of Freiheit because Most had brought her on board and trusted her, but she was prevented from folding the paper and forced to relinquish any claims. She presumably was in possession of much of Most’s papers, and the fourth volume of his memoirs had yet to be published (Most had published the first three himself). At least according to her, she was obstructed and ignored every step of the way in her efforts to publicize Most’s writings. She tried her best to keep Most’s memory alive by selling buttons and photographs in order to raise funds, but even this became an ordeal though she doesn’t explain how.34 When the fourth volume of Most’s memoirs was finally released in March 1907, Helene Minkin voiced her frustration in a short preface:
Had the relations not been so unfortunate and had I been able to find any lasting local organ, the many impatient questioners would have been long satisfied. Since the existence of the “Freiheit Publishing Association,” no communication has taken place between them and myself, and I was thus robbed of any aid that could have allowed the publication of the literary legacy for the Most family. Whatever mischief was done regarding the Most buttons and pictures, whatever rumors about the “handing over” of “donations” became public, the survivors of John Most are not to blame for the mischief and rumors and have no other share in them than—the cost of them.35
The next decade in the life of Minkin is sketchy. She raised her children by trying different jobs and moving around, occasionally assuming the name Miller or Mueller instead of Most as they had done in the past. According to her son John, she became a midwife, and in 1907 she is listed as a midwife living at 4038 3rd Avenue.36 When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, Lucifer, the youngest son, enlisted.37 After the war, he became a salesman, and in 1930 lived in the Bronx married to Nadia Most (née Hillman).38 His brother John was in college and became a dentist, and shared his father’s interest in anarchism.39 Minkin moved in with John in a house at 1290 Webster Avenue in the Bronx.40 John Jr. struggled to keep his practice afloat partly because his social activism included caring for the poor even if they were unable to pay. In the early forties, he joined the NAACP and attended its rallies.41 In June 1932, Minkin officially declared her intention to become a US citizen and would eventually swear the oath of allegiance on February 11, 1935.42 By this time, both sons had moved to North Arlington, New Jersey just north of Newark and only two blocks from each other.43
Helene Minkin was fifty-nine when she began to publish her memoirs in Yiddish in the Forverts (or Jewish Daily Forward); the first installment appearing on September 18, 1932. She was then living at 15 West 177th Street in the Bronx possibly still with her oldest son.44 She tells us that she was spurred to write her own account after reading Goldman’s, which was released in October 1931.45 Minkin had considered writing “everything down” before, but nothing came of it. Her life story, she believed, was too painful. Would anyone be interested? Was she relevant for posterity? “But now,” she says, “when the famous Emma Goldman has come out with her book, in which she allowed herself to drag in other people and offer incorrect facts in an often wholly unsympathetic and partisan light, I feel it is my duty not to be silent and to reveal the other side of the story.” While Goldman’s Living My Life was received with acclaim by the mainstream press, Minkin’s criticism of Goldman’s style was echoed in other commentaries. The New York Times review, while praising her autobiography as “one of the great books of its kind,” also stated that “for those who differ with her she has little tolerance, and her book is full of what may be called brutal judgments.”46 Alexander Berkman wrote a friend that “[Goldman’s autobiography] is well done in every respect. Some details could have been left out, but you know Emma—she fought me on every passage and page that I cut out.”47
Minkin sent Forverts thirteen installments (the last one appeared on December 18, 1932), all of them now translated into English and edited together as one document. Her memoir covers the period from 1888, when she, her sister Anna, and their father Isaac arrived in New York, to about 1913 when her youngest son graduated from high school. The account is roughly chronological, but several sections describing her childhood in Russia are inserted as a flashback when she was asked by Most to recount her life story.
After World War II, Lucifer moved to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some thirty-four miles west of Newark, where he lived in a house on Raccoon Island in the middle of the lake. He died there on August 26, 1949 at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind his wife Nadia and two sons, Norman L. and John J.48 Minkin’s oldest son John Jr. eventually moved with his wife Rose, a Russian immigrant, to Boston. Their son, Johnny M. Most, born on June 15, 1923 in Tenafly, New Jersey, would become the celebrated sportscaster for the Boston Celtics (he died in 1993).49 John Most Jr. retired in a Boston senior center where he died of pneumonia at age ninety-two on January 30, 1987, but not before being interviewed by the late historian Paul Avrich. He talked about growing up in New York as a child of anarchist parents, about his admiration for his father. His mother Helene, he said, died at age eighty sometime in 1953 or 1954.50
Footnotes
1 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (1995; Oakland: AK Press, 1995), xii.
2 Johann Most, Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1903; Hannover: Edition Kobaia, 1978). His memoirs consist of four volumes: the first volume deals with his youth (“Aus meiner Jugendzeit”) and was published in 1903; the second volume covered the Vienna high treason trial (“Der Wiener Hochverrats-Prozeß”) and also came out in 1903. The third volume covered his years in Saxony as an activist and Member of Parliament (“In Sturm und Drang: Agitations- und Parlaments-Reminiscenzen”) and appeared in 1905. The fourth volume relates his many arrests, court appearances, and imprisonments mostly in Berlin (“Die Pariser Commune vor den Berliner Gerichten,” which includes “Die Bastille am Plötzensee”) and was published posthumously in March 1907.
3 Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1912); Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), vol. 2 (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1934). Other important memoirs include those of Austrian anarchist Josef
