Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, Asher:
Althea's grandfather, Solomon Goss (born Guza), who contributed 1/16 of your genetic inheritance, fled Poland after the worker's rebellion in Lodz in 1905, walked across Europe to Rotterdam where he boarded a ship and traveled steerage-class to Philadelphia. He had been a silk weaver in the old country and was able to find similar work here. In two years he saved enough money to pay for second-class passage (not the dreaded steerage) for his young bride Miriam Halpern.
Solomon Goss played his part in the wave of political and social unrest that rocked the Russian Empire in the first years of the twentieth century -- uprisings that preceded and anticipated the 1917 Russian Revolution. The resistance had at its root the exploitation of workers especially in rapidly industrializing cities like Lodz (which had grown six-fold in a generation), in the state policy of enforced Russification, in czarist tyranny both cruel and arbitrary, and in heady intellectual and Marxist ferment both in universities and in informal worker self-education projects. The workers' strikes and revolts in Lodz (the city, though Polish, was then incorporated into the Empire) were part of that great historical process. The Lodz Insurrection, also called the June Days, was one of the largest of these local rebellions. Following months of unrest and strikes, repressed by Russian police and soldiers, enraged workers began building barricades and assaulting police and military patrols. Additional troops, including the hated Cossacks, were called in. By June 23, the city and commerce was immobilized. Martial law was declared. But rocks proved futile against bullets and horses. By June 25, the uprising was crushed. It was officially reported that several hundred workers were killed but modern scholars estimate that between 1000 and 2000 died and many more were injured. There were arrests and imprisonments and executions. In this atmosphere Solomon Goss, who had manned the barricades, wisely decided that his time in Lodz had come to an end.
I do not know how he was able to walk to the Netherlands and shipboard. A secular non-believer, he would not have been welcomed at local synagogues. Were there way-stations manned by sympathetic socialists? How did he eat? Where did he sleep? He never talked about his trek and if anyone ever asked him, they did not pass the information along to me.
When he came to America he found work in the silk mills in and around Paterson, New Jersey, which was then known as the "Silk City." Weavers were skilled workers. Most were immigrants from traditional silk-weaving areas in England, Germany, and Italy but there was also a considerable influx from Lodz itself. The working day was ten hours long with a half day on Saturday and the new fifty-five hour week was considered a victory for the workers. Between 1881 and 1900 there were nearly 140 strikes. By the first decade of the 20th century, practically every mill had one or more labor organizations.
Solomon Goss told me that when he would take a job in a mill, he would immediately set out to organize and radicalize his comrades. As a result, he said, he was frequently fired. But he was, he claimed, a very skilled worker, able to operate four looms at once (he looked down on American-trained workers whom he thought of as inferior and whom he derided as "Columbus weavers)."
By 1913, close to 5,000 Jewish men and women worked in the Paterson silk factories. It was in Paterson that Solomon Goss must have participated in one of the crucial events in American labor history, the Paterson silk strike. In February. nearly 300 mills and dye houses were closed, as 24,000 men, women, and children joined in an industry-wide strike. The strikers' demands were radical. They wanted an eight-hour day as well as increases in wages. Workers agreed that no one would return to work until all of the owners accepted their terms. Picket lines kept "scabs" and strike breakers out of the mills. More than 2,000 workers allowed themselves to be arrested, flooding the jails. But mill owners held firm and refused to meet with the workers. By the end of May, the workers' solidarity cracked. English-speaking and better paid workers voted to accept settlements with individual mill owners. At the same time workers started to cross the picket lines. In July the central strike committee voted to endorse shop-by-shop settlements. The Paterson silk strike collapsed and owners conceded nothing. "Your power is in your folded arms," IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood had said. But the mill owners, with greater resources, outlasted the hungry workers.
I do not know how Solomon Goss responded to this second crushing defeat nor when he abandoned the silk trade. But in the 1940s, when Althea first knew him, he operated a "candy store" in Clifton Heights, New Jersey. When I met him in the late 50s, he had long ago sold the store and moved with Miriam to a tiny apartment in Utica, New York, where his son Dan and wife "Grandma Anne" (your great-grandma) lived. The man who had once been a proud unionist and socialist and who considered himself a follower of Daniel de Leon, founder of the Socialist Worker's Party, had drifted into conservatism, even voting for Richard Nixon in 1972. Defeat and poverty and deracination had not ennobled him. On the contrary, he was to my eyes a mean old man, given to gratuitously cruel and cutting remarks. His default stance toward me and toward the world was scorn. Miriam died in the late 60s; Solomon, having alienated his friends and relations, lived out his widowhood in a single room in a hotel in Rockaway and ultimately in the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, where, a secularist to the end, he complained to Althea and to me about the intermittently broadcast Hebrew prayers.
I find it almost impossible to reconcile the two sides of the man: the sour, sad, nasty old reactionary that he became and the heroic youthful fighter for social justice who fought the Cossacks, walked seven hundred miles from Lodz to Rotterdam and, I like to imagine, welcomed his beloved, radiant bride at the New York dock with tears in his eyes.
