A Remarkable Story
Without a Trace…Pogrom, Sweatshop, Gulag: the Jewish Radical Odyssey of Noah and Miril London, by John D. Holmes. Leiden/Boston: Brill Publishers, 2025. 475pp., $190.00
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One of my favorite books from recent years has the fascinating title, The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce: Lenin, 1870-1924. A multitude of essays from different countries and generations, across the usual lines within the Left, the book offers readers the stories of mostly middle aged men or women who, for instance, keep on their mantles the little busts of Lenin from beloved parents—as often victims of Stalinism as not. Essayists, heartfelt European, Asian, or Latin American Communists of today have their own stories, each different, but also in some sense the same.
Lenin does not go away. Neither does the Russian Revolution nor the Lenin text with the famous evocative title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, aka the Global South manifesto. That is: the narrative holds, in spite of all disappointments and betrayals, now more than a century from those “Six Days That Shook the World.”
The volume under review, reflecting the painstaking, decades-long work of the protagonists’ nephew— himself a longtime Left activist—is definitely of a piece with this larger story.It offers a fascinating angle, or rather a number of angles, intertwined with the biographies of the idealistic, doomed revolutionary couple.
One of the angles closest to the reviewer is the intense world of left-wing Yiddishkayt, the culture of the Jewish diaspora destroyed by the Holocaust, by assimilation, and by the forcible demotion of the Yiddish language (the most spoken language of Jews in 1940) within Israel. Yiddish revolutionaries in that bygone era struggled, by the tens of thousands, within their own culture. Your reviewer was fortunate enough to interview (and archive the interviews) many of them in their final years.
The other angle, more central to the text itself, reflects a little-understood quality of the Stalinization of the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. The failure of the world revolution, forcing the new Russian regime in upon itself, created a new bureaucratic class. To view them as autocratic monsters (a favorite ploy of anti-communists) misses a crucial point and one that, alone, would make this volume valuable, even beyond its biographical virtues.
Russia, an “underdeveloped country” of extraordinary size, resources and diversities of all kinds, needed a supervisory but also technological class to survive, let alone grow its economy and post-Czarist civil society. As the working class’s influence slipped away, this class became ever more important. Yesterday’s revolutionary agitator sometimes became today’s Soviet engineer, “building socialism.” In a capitalist world seeking to overthrow the Russian project, it seemed like a good compromise.
Without a Trace is a saga of enthusiastic, Yiddish-Jewish Communists who returned disastrously and were lost in Stalin’s gulag. But tragedy is not the leading note! Himself an avowed revolutionary of the Original Bolshevik type, Holmes has his own narrative that begins with how the book emerged. His father collected an unpublished memoir from another member of the family. The document was passed on to John, who also found Noah’s writings and his role in the early years of the US Communist movement, especially in the Yiddish-language sector, crucial in Greater New York.
Traveling to Eastern Europe, uncovering layer after layer of evidence in the hopeless degeneration of the” New Russia,” Holmes provides precious insights while trying not to overdraw his conclusions. And, by the way, here we come to the “Jewish Question,” with a fascinating quote from one Yuri Slezkind, in The Jewish Century: “modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate…Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” (p.7)
Surely not! But Jewish modernists, from revolutionary politics to revolutionary art, were surely present in and around exciting developments in Europe, the US and even…Argentina. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism, a phrase thrown around these days against anyone criticizing the vast, destructive acts of the Jewish State, offered a rising bureaucratic class in post-revolution Russia an excuse to use state power ruthlessly. If the Revolution failed, someone had to be blamed. Stalin mistreated many nationalities, of course. Jews, close at hand in Bolshevism, offered him a special target.
Catch this trajectory if you can: East European Jews, spreading to the diaspora, became leading internationalists under the Communist banner even as the deterioration of the Revolution deepened in Russia and, by Holmes’ account, also within the US Communist movement. Somehow these realities existed side by side, along with a whole lot of denial.
Noah London, from a modestly successful family in the impoverished Jewish life of Belarus (then Lithuania), received instruction in Torah, Yiddish grammar, Russian fluency, and rudimentary math. His future wife Miril came from a prosperous merchant family in the same district. Her own experience in a trade school introduced her to student radicals. Noah arrived in Vilna (“the Jerusalem of Eastern Europe”) not long after the notorious Kishinev Pogroms crushed and persecuted radicals but prompted many others to join the struggle.
The Jewish Bund commanded the loyalty of thousands of young Jews in Lithuania. And in being crushed, coming back to life (mainly in Poland), giving thousands an experience that they carried into the Communist parties.
The subsequent detail of Noah and Miri coming to the US, Noah’s engagement in the Communist Party at the highest levels, their return to the Soviet Union, their work and their persecution under Stalin, is too much for the reviewer to relate, even in condensed form. The reader willing to plough through the details will find the fruits of immense, almost incredible detail. And the author’s stern condemnation of Russia’s fall from Lenin’s Bolshevism.
Much of the crucial, dramatic material in the book takes place…in the Ukraine! Here, a large portion of Eastern European Jewry lived, amid desperately needed natural resources. Stalinization found political functionaries looking for imagined “sabotage.” As the author explains, the USSR simply did not have the available resources, a condition made worse by bureaucratic stumbling. Stalin’s fallback, a purge of the “kulaks,” was a disaster that anticipated the popular participation of non-Jewish Ukrainians in the mass murder of Jews, with the direction and participation of the German Wehrmacht.
Holmes brilliantly explains that the growing disappointment and rage of Russian working men and women found an object in local Party leaders, who as specialists, often “outsiders” to their adopted communities and perhaps as mistrusted Jews, could be blamed….and purged.
Noah London, accused ridiculously of sabotaging the construction of a water system, then accused of recruiting other engineers, was sentenced to death. His wife Miril, sentenced to an eight-year stretch in Kazakhstan, survived the war to live outside Moscow with a sister. Learning about the death of her husband years after the fact, she committed suicide in 1949. She was rehabilitated posthumously, at the end of the Soviet era, a few years after Noah’s vindication.
Here is another deviation that Noah London did not live long enough in the US to see: despite the fall of Russia to Stalinism, the Popular Front, most especially in the US, was great! Or the participants certainly thought so. It stayed far from Bolshevism but embraced the leftward edge of the New Deal, and it helped shape the leftish theater, films, and music that emerged and excited wide audiences. Linked to Roosevelt and the Second New Deal, it legitimized industrial unionism, even as—until the death of FDR—the most sweeping and democratic unionism was led by Reds and their allies. It even transformed Hollywood for a while, or at least led to the unionization of writers and actors, a plethora of antifascist films that led to Hollywood’s art film era, and even the earliest serious scholarship on films from within the US. How does this weigh with or against the betrayal of Leninism by Stalin? We still await an answer. Happily, this volume will be reprinted in paper next year at a much lower price.
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