Donald W. Treadgold

Bertram D. Wolfe: A life in two centuries

I knew Bert Wolfe for close to twenty years, or for about a quarter ? the last quarter ? of his life. But since he did not live to write the story ofthat quar ter, his memoirs, which deal mainly with the period from his birth in 1896 to the mid-30s, deal with a period in which he was often far from the rather conventional writer and teacher he was when I knew him. It was a period in which he often was in danger ? as when assassins bullets intended for some one else whizzed by his head in Mexico, or when he got smuggled into Spain without proper documents, or above all when he slugged it out toe to toe with Stalin in Moscow. He lived largely in a world unfamiliar to many of us today. I offer an illustration not from the memoirs but from a story he once told me, relating to the time he accompanied an aged Russian Jewish ex Menshevik to a U.S. naturalization hearing. The examiner inquired of Berts friend, Did you ever belong to an illegal organization? YES, the friend fairly shouted, meaning the Menshevik party. Did you ever work for the overthrow of the government? YES! trumpeted the man proudly, having in mind the Russian tsars. Finally Bert got the examiner aside and explained the situation to him as best he could, and the man got his citizenship. But the examiner still did not have and could not have any notion of the political underground of tsarist Russia or of the world of radical politics in any coun try. Into that world, as well as some others, I want to try to take you now. Since Wolfe was born in 1896, of course he literally had a life in two cen turies. There is, however, a more important sense in which the title he has given the memoirs is appropriate. Bert was a child of the nineteenth century; that is to say, his outlook was formed by living in the century of peace which followed the fabulously successful postwar settlement of 1815, when the whole world except for Russia and the Ottoman Empire was open to travel without passports or visas, when it seemed that rationality was gaining on irrationality in human affairs and that to bring about more civil liberties and social justice well-intentioned effort would result in significant gains. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a rude shock to such people as Wolfe, and it was his brave and lonely opposition to that war that drove him into