When I was a teenager, my mother told me that her father had been a philosophical anarchist who wrote articles about anarchism for a Yiddish-language newspaper in the early 20th century. He died when I was a little girl, so I never had an
The Bolsheviks sought to erase all street names associated with the tsarist regime and started to rename places in order to commemorate leading communist officials and heroes. That’s how many cities got streets named not only after Lenin, but also after various foreigners. Here are some of them.
I suppose there is no imagining, unless you were alive at the time, what an incredible shock wave the case of Sacco and Vanzetti created in the 1920s. There are some contemporary newsreels in "Sacco and Vanzetti" that give us some notion of the passionate demonstrations held all over the world on their behalf. And the degree to which their names became part of the common currency is reflected in Daniel Curley's classic and often anthologized "Saccovanzetti," in which a group of children play a game of stick-up and the youngest is told he must be Saccovanzetti. The names have become one word, just as their trial became a symbol to be hurled by the right at the left, and then back again. The misfortune of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, I guess, was that they were anarchists. That made them juicy, stereotyped bomb-throwers for the government's Red Squads - but it also made them distasteful to the Communists themselves, who were to demonstrate in Spain