Living My Life - Emma Goldman [272]
New guests arrived, Byalek among them, square-set and broad-shouldered, looking more like a prosperous merchant than a poet. A slender man with vibrantly sensitive features was introduced as a famous authority on Jewish persecution and pogroms. Sasha immediately engaged him in conversation on the subject, but in the midst of it, during the meal, he suddenly grew deathly pale and begged to be excused. Together with Doctor Landesman, I reached Sasha just in time to save him from falling in a faint. He was writhing in pain and gasping for breath, and presently he became unconscious. After a half-hour that seemed an eternity the good doctor had him somewhat restored. Packed in hot water bottles, he felt relieved, but still very weak. I told Landesman that my friend had been very ill when he left the United States, and that he had never been quite well since. The black bread in particular seemed to affect his condition, and he had showed considerable improvement since we had been able to procure white bread in the south. Our hosts insisted that we remain overnight with them in view of the possibility of Sasha’s suffering another attack. “What good will it do?” the patient suddenly piped up. “The expedition must proceed to Moscow.” The doctor suggested that the expedition proceed, but that Sasha and his nurse remain in Odessa until he could find out the cause of the trouble. Presently Sasha fell quietly asleep and I sat watching his thin, pale face intently. It had lost nothing of its endearment to me since we had met so many, many years ago. What would it mean to lose him, and in Russia? I shuddered at the thought, my mind unable to follow up the cruel possibility. My pal lay peacefully resting, and I went back to the dining-room, my thoughts upon my life and the struggle I had gone through together with my friend and comrade.
The dishes were about to be cleared away when Sasha suddenly entered as if nothing had happened. Did they think he would be so easily done out of his share of the meal, he demanded with a broad grin. His appetite was great, he announced, and he would not think of allowing a little indisposition to stand between him and Mme Landesman’s culinary art. The company roared with laughter. The doctor, however, vetoed heavy dishes, but Sasha read him the riot act about attempting to keep an anarchist from eating what he likes. I stared at him in wonder. It was the same boy who had called for extra steak and coffee in Sachs’s restaurant in New York just thirty-one years before. The patient of an hour ago not only ate heartily, but became the spirit of the company. He had found the man for whom he had been looking for a long time, he declared, and he held on to the expert investigator of pogroms for the rest of the evening.
The man proved a walking encyclopaedia on the subject. He had visited seventy-two cities where pogroms had taken place, and he had collected a wealth of data. Jew-baiting during the various Ukrainian regimes, he stated, had been of more fiendish character than the worst massacres under the tsars. He admitted that no pogroms had taken place since the Bolsheviki had come to power, but he agreed with the younger element of the Kiev writers that Bolshevism had intensified anti-Semitic feeling among the masses. Some day it would break out, he was certain, in the wholesale slaughter of vengeance.
Sasha argued heatedly with him. Speculations about future possibilities aside, he emphasized, it remained a generally recognized fact that the Bolsheviki had put the lid down on pogroms. Did that not point to a sincere and determined purpose to eradicate every violent manifestation of the old disease, if not the disease itself? The investigator denied it, asserting that the Bolsheviki had deprived the Jews of their right of self-defence, forbidding them to organize for the purpose. They were even suspected of plotting against the Soviet Government because they had applied for permission to arm themselves against future attacks. Doctor Landesman added that the local