Abba Gordin
Born	1887 (1887) Smorgon
Died	August 1964 (aged 77)[1] Tel Aviv
Occupation	Writer

Abba Lvovich Gordin (1887–1964) was an Israeli anarchist and Yiddish writer and poet.

Early life and career

Abba Gordin was born in 1887 in Smorgon (now in Belarus) to Rabbi Yehuda Leib Gordin of Łomża and Khaye Ester Sore Gordin (née Miller).^[1] As a teenager, he organized a strike by apprentice tailors in Ostrów, disseminated radical propaganda in Kreslavka (Krāslava) and Dvinsk (Daugavpils), and was briefly imprisoned after taking part in the abortive revolution of 1905–1906, having led demonstrators to storm the jail and free political prisoners in Vilkomir.^[2] He and his brother Wolf (Ze'ev), who were at that time affiliated with the labor-Zionist youth movement Tseirei Tsion, broke from their father's religion after their mother's death in 1907.^[3][4]

In 1908, Abba and Wolf Gordin opened a secular Hebrew school, "Ivria," where they experimented with a unique form of libertarian pedagogy. To teach a modern, secular Hebrew, they believed, required teaching methods that were concrete and active, involving the body.^[4][3] They founded their own publishing house, "Novaya Pedagogika" (New Pedagogy), to publish their theory and methodology.

Migrating to Moscow with other refugees during World War I,^[3] he and Wolf (under the collective title of the "Brat'ya Gordinii," the Gordin Brothers) joined the editorial staff of the influential newspaper, Anarkhiia, published from 1917–1918.^[1] There, they published a series of works delineating the principles of "Pan-Anarchism," a form of anarchism intended to address the distinctive problems and aspirations of "the Oppressed Five":

The "Oppressed Five" referred to those categories of humanity which endured the greatest hardships under the yoke of Western civilization: "worker-vagabond," national minority, woman, youth, and individual personality. Five basic institutions – the state, capitalism, colonialism, the school, and the family – were held responsible for their sufferings. The Gordins worked out a philosophy which they called "Pan-Anarchism" and which prescribed five remedies for the five baneful institutions that tormented the five oppressed elements of modern society. The remedies for the state and capitalism were, simply enough, statelessness and communism; for the remaining three oppressors, however, the antidotes were rather more novel: "cosmism" (the universal elimination of national persecution), "gyneantropism" (the emancipation and humanization of women), and "pedism" (the liberation of the young from "the vise of slave education").^[5]

As tensions mounted between Russian anarchists and Bolsheviks, Abba Gordin attempted to make peace with the Bolshevik government, founding an "Anarchist-Universalist" tendency among the anarchists that was willing to postpone the abolition of the State. A Communist Party Central Committee memo of 1921 noted that the All-Russian Section of Anarchist-Universalists was "one of the most peaceful in the Anarchist movement," as it "recognizes 'workers' parliamentarism' as represented by the Soviet government" and "finds [it] necessary to participate in the work of the Soviet apparatus, to uphold the Red Army, the civil war and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional form toward Anarchy."^[6] Nonetheless, both Gordin and the Anarchist-Universalists faced increasing government persecution. Observers attributed this persecution to Gordin's relative popularity among Russia's radical working class. In Seventy Days In Russia: What I Saw (1924), Angel Pestaña, recounting his visit to Moscow in 1920, notes that Abba Gordin, the "most visible spokesperson" among those anarchists who were "inclined to accept centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat," had been imprisoned for three months in the notorious Butyrka prison "for the crime of having been elected to the Moscow Soviet by the workers of the factory where he worked":

Gordin was a worker in a munitions factory. When the elections for the Soviet of the district that his factory belonged to were held, despite the fact that the communists always allowed only their nominees on the election list for the Soviet and did not allow any of their candidates to be defeated, the workers in the factory where Gordin worked chose him instead of the communist nominee. When the votes were counted at the Soviet headquarters, and it was discovered that a communist was not selected and that Gordin was chosen instead, the Soviet exercised its veto powers and annulled the election, but only with regard to this particular delegate, and not with regard to the communists who were elected during that same proceeding.

After the election was repeated with the same result and subsequently nullified three times, Gordin was jailed and the munitions factory denied representation.^[7] Alexander Berkman reports that it was only on May 25, 1920, after some 1,500 Butyrka prisoners refused to eat, that Gordin was released "by order of the Tcheka, in the hope of breaking the hunger strike."^[8]

In 1925, speaking at a public event, Abba Gordin was shot and then arrested by the Cheka; only the personal intercession of Lenin's wife won his release.^[9] Abba and his wife, Voronina, fled across the Manchurian border, making their way to Shanghai.^[10][11]

Exile

Abba Gordin emigrated to the United States in 1927^[11] where he wrote books, essays, and poems in several languages. He later established the Jewish Ethical Society. Gordin became a co-editor of the New York Yiddish-language anarchist journal Freie Arbeiter Stimme and editor of his own polemic periodical, The Clarion. By the early 1930s, Gordin had identified nationalism as a more prominent driver of modern history than social class conflict. He also critiqued Marxist doctrine as a "hybrid ... of quasi-religion and pseudo-science" that would depose one king for another.^[12]

He emigrated to Israel around 1957, where he translated his Yiddish writing into Hebrew. Gordin died in Tel Aviv in 1964. Services were held August 23.^[1]

Works

Notes

References