“That’s what we tried to do, that’s what we did. “The hardest thing in life is to stand facing the wind,” Anatole recalls his father saying more than once. The anarchists, no less than other political creatures, often reserved their most righteous anger against those factions closest to them-the “betrayers of the revolution” or the “revisionists” or “sell-outs,” whatever term suits you. I met his friend Augustin Souchy there, a valiant old Spanish anarchist, around whom an ugly feud arose among the different national delegations over whether the anarchists were right or wrong to join with the Spanish Republican government in the fight against fascism. I shared with Sam my impressions of the 1971 World Anarchist Congress in Paris, which I attended with my girlfriend at the time as the two U.S. In 1978, at the Libertarian Book Club that he led in New York City, I lectured on Brazilian anarchism, the subject of my recent doctoral dissertation. I became friendly with Sam and Esther as a budding scholar of anarchist history. Sam objected to having any favorable attention conferred on a communist at this “anarchist” event. I barely recall what he said, but I do remember that he was offended that at such an event we also invited as a speaker Morton Sobell, who had not long before been released from prison as part of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. We invited Sam up as our keynote speaker, for he had been active back in the 1920s in the movement to save their lives. In 1977 I was part of a group in Connecticut that organized a 50-year commemoration of the execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I knew Sam personally, and his wife Esther. Over the course of a long life, we see his friends shuttling between anarchism, syndicalism, socialism, communism and religion as the winds of time blew them about-and some staying true to their course, unswerving for decades. Debs, Eugene O’Neill, Carlo Tresca, Ben Fletcher, Louis Raymond, Rudolf Rocker, Federico Arcos, Dorothy Day, Dave Van Ronk, Murray Bookchin, Paul Avrich, and Augustin Souchy, among many others. In 71 bite-sized chapters of Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff, Sam’s son Anatole discusses his father’s relationships with such people, famous and not so well known, as Goldman, her lover Dr. 22).Ī salacious little tidbit, to be sure, and hardly of importance, but emblematic of the hundreds of individuals whose lives intersected with that of Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990). As the story filtered down from Emma to Sam Dolgoff, “Seems the Hero of the Revolution was less than a hero of the bedroom” (p. The infamous anarchist and the wife of the Soviet leader (since 1898) shared intimacies. When Emma Goldman-Red Emma-was deported to Soviet Russia during the First Red Scare following World War I, she befriended Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya.
Sam and Esther Dolgoff in the early 1980s.
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