Beyond / First Person

My Great-Grandfather the Bundist

Family paintings led me to a revolutionary society my mother’s grandfather was a member of and whose story was interwoven with Eastern European Jews.

by Molly Crabapple via New York Review of Books on October 6, 2018

...Sam, the self-taught artist, the trickster who blew fire and hung upside down on a chin-up bar into his eighties, who believed all men were brothers—though artists were a cut above. Who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. Whom she never saw visit a synagogue, though his own father had studied the Talmud.

I knew Sam Rothbort was a rebel, of course, but I knew only vaguely what that had meant. Perhaps he did associate with “revolutionists” in the old world, but my awareness of that word’s implications paled beneath all I knew about my mother’s beloved grandfather. Photos showed him as the charming old joker with a nimbus of white hair, an axe-like nose, a smile full of earthy humanity. He was not a party man in America, either Democrat or Communist. He confined his political activity to writing letters to President Eisenhower, which he was convinced hastened the end of the Korean War.

So, when I first saw that word “Bundist” among his painting titles, I gave it a quick Google and moved on. Only later, after my own work of reporting, from Gaza and elsewhere, did my research turn into a fixation. I needed to know about the Bund, and not just because they were my great-grandfather’s comrades, but because I wanted to make visible again a group that had almost vanished, though it was so just and so right. I acquired the few books on the Bund that are still in print, spent days squinting at dusty pamphlets in the New York Public Library, at photos put out by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the archives of Bundist newsletters on the web.

Finally, I hired a Yiddish translator to unlock for me a chapter on the Bund in Volkavisk’s Yizkor Book (Yizkor books were oral histories compiled after World War II to record something of the lives of the countless murdered from the shtetls of Eastern Europe). When the translator returned the pages, there sat Sam’s name, as one of the book’s narrators, right above a photo of a group of girls, including the famous Itka, at first sight unfamiliar with her sleek bob. This was proof: Sam had taken part in an armed resistance movement, something I had never imagined him capable of. What change of heart or evolution in his thinking took him from that commitment to a pacifism so intense he would not kill a chicken, I can only guess at.

But as far as he had traveled from Volkavisk, I came to see the traces of Bundism that he kept within. His benign lawlessness. His contempt for money. The welcome he gave to my Puerto Rican father and my Korean aunt. His lack of ties to Israel. The sculpture he made of a worker’s fist, clenched Communist-style—though he slyly mocked Communism in the caption. His bohemian humanism, big enough to take in the world.