Coming to America by Caroline Zilboorg

 

[ Educated in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, Gregory Zilboorg served as a young physician during the First World War and, after the revolution, as secretary to the minister of labor in  Kerensky’s provisional government. Having escaped following Lenin’s takeover, Zilboorg requalified in medicine at Columbia University and underwent analysis with Franz Alexander * at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.]

Years later, in analyzing the psychology of ‘the typical intellectual immigrant’, Gregory would reveal the emotional situation in which he found himself. The intellectual immigrant arrives ‘downhearted and disappointed. His early ideas failed at home, his early hopes at home were shattered.’ He is not a working-class immigrant who can peddle needles or sweets or newspapers and wonders if he can peddle his democratic ideals. Gregory continued: ‘The market for such merchandise seems over supplied, or for some other reasons there appears to be little demand for these wares. Soon

 

A very singular and paradoxical transformation takes place .. . the intellectual immigrant feels most secure in the street and in his room; no one spies on him no one threatens him with imprisonment – he does not have to look furtively about him before he says what he has to say. Yet he feels lonely –not at home.

 

Although he can speak English and express himself freely, ‘he does not know the language well enough to understand easily when spoken to. There are so many busy people around, so many cheerful people, so many strangers’. He feels that ‘silent despair’ which makes him a critic of American life. He feels that every on in America is too cheerful while the rest of the world- in Gregory’s case Russia- is so miserable. The intellectual immigrant sees America as naive, their theaters too full of musical shows, their music screechy, their minds limited, their intellectual horizon narrow and provincial; their interests seem materialistic, while they worship bigness rather than greatness. His mood is one of gnawing criticism and he feels an unwelcome surliness. He seeks out other Europeans as sympathetic souls for, as Gregory explained, ‘no one is a more  severe critic of this country than the newcomer during the first months or even years after his arrival.’ He feels superior, that he does not belong and that there is no market for his wares – and these feelings in turn feed is melancholic egocentricity.

The fact is, the typical intellectual immigrant misses ‘home’, and Gregory missed Russia. ‘There is a child within’, Gregory wrote, ’that longs for ‘mother,’’ which is his native land. This is, Gregory argued, the source of ‘the double allegiance’ which  will at some level stay with tye intellectual immigrant throughout his life because ‘It takes time, a great deal of time and spiritual work before one is able  spontaneously and naturally to call a strange woman ‘mother.’ The process of adaptation involves remobilizing his psychic energies, converting them ‘into creative work, into cheerful effort and serene contemplation of life.’ Earning a comfortable living, having the right to vote and to free speech, or even owning an automobile would be insufficient.

Gregory finally saw language as the most potent factor in assimilation. It was not enough to have the necessary degree of familiarity to order a meal, to read a newspaper, to enjoy a movie; the intellectual immigrant needed to acquire a level of fluency that would allow him to think spontaneously in English . He needed to achieve ‘not the purely intellectual understanding of the language . . . but its psychological flavor’, its emotional nuances. Gregory would only feel part of America when his inner life could b expressed and reflected in English. Only then would his double allegiance become ‘synthesized into a inner harmonious  psychology which would make it possible to utilize the cultural values ‘he had brought with him from Russia with those American values he would adopt’.

 

Gregory felt that writing a book**  would help him attain the fluent English he craved. Hoping for his brother’s support and using his address, Gregory ordered stationary and calling cards and set out to make the connections he needed to work as a journalist and speaker on Russian literature and the revolution – in other words, like the typical intellectual immigrant, he decided to try to peddle  his democratic ideals.
The spring of 1919 wasn’t a bad time to attempt such a task in America, but it wasn’t a very good time either. Fear of Bolshevism  was rife, and the entire labor movement was under suspicion. Throughout the country newspapers reported on leftists of all sorts, on anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in New York as well as labor leaders like Tom Mooney and Warren Billings in San Francisco. Bombs delivered through the post along with protest rallies and union marches  provoked distrust of socialists, , liberals, Europeans, political, activists, internationalists, communists ,Jews in general, and Russians in particular. Hostility towards the Russian revolution, seen as having damaged the war effort, was widespread although unfocused, while at the level of local and national government, anti-communist teams of lawyers and police organized to control actual and perceived threats through arrests and mass deportations. The strikes, race riots, and anarchist bombings unnerved and fascinated the public. ‘The Red Scare of 1917-19230 drew upon and encouraged xenophobia and paranoia, but there was also great intellectual interest in Russia, curiosity about the revolution and what its implications might be for America and the world.

Gregory [was probably inured***] to the danger he was courting when he set out with his calling cards, although James and Eugenia would certainly have warned him. James was sympathetic to socialism, but he had not returned to Russia to fight for it: his feet were firmly planted on American soil, where in 1919 even leftist leanings could cause trouble for a Russian Jew. Like their sisters, James wanted to control his brother, but Gregory would not be controlled by his family or anyone else, although the hazards of socialism would become [more] apparent to him as he sought outlets for his writings and opportunities to speak.. He soon met Pauline Turkel, an energetic young anarchist instrumental in organizing a mass meeting to protest Mooney’s imprisonment, a May Day event in Madison Square Garden Gregory probably attended. Through Turkel he would meet other young socialists, including her friend Eleanor Fitzgerald, a fellow anarchist and the business manager of the Provincetown Players, a group of writers and intellectuals committed to staging innovative theater. One thing led to another, he entered the New York socialist melee with enthusiasm, prepared to take advantage of whatever opportunities presented themselves.

Gregory swiftly began writing. He stated in languages he knew and began publishing in the Yiddish press in May. He would write articles in Russian for the New York daily Novoe Russkoye Slovo into the autumn of 1920, but seven weeks after his arrival he began to send  letters to the editors of the English language journals – making points, correcting articles, getting his name in print. By August  he was confidently writing pieces for The Dial and The New Republic. He would continue to write in English on the revolution, on Russian literature, and particularly on drama through the summer of 1923. . .

Gregory continued to coble together an intensive schedule of lectures throughout the winter and into the spring of 1921, but in March his translation of He Who Gets Slapped appeared in the modernist Dial. Gregory described Andreyev at the time he wrote the play in 1916 as on ‘the last step of the pessimistic ladder which he was ever descending into the abyss of hopelessness.’ The action occurs in a circus, a symbolic world ‘full of spiders, champagne and human outcasts.’ A highly educated intellectual feels he has no alternative but to become a clown, performing stunts and getting slapped, but ‘the public laughs, unaware that this laughter is a mockery at itself, at its culture, at its thought, at its achievement.’ Relations between individuals as well as groups as such that He is forced to efface himself. Andreyev treats his characters with ‘bitter sarcasm and unfriendliness’, yet he does not blame the clowns, jugglers, and bareback riders who finally collapse under the burden of ‘fate, accident, and cowardly slander.’  This powerful play is at once disquieting and poignant, and Gregory’s masterful translation would enable opportunities that he could not have imagined.’

Lecturing, however, remained Gregory’s primary source of income, and in the spring of 1921 he got lucky. He was invited to join the circuit of the Swarthmore  Chautaugua****, one of the traveling tent groups that sponsored educational lectures as well as dramatic and musical performances in small towns and farming communities throughout America in the days before radio and television brought information and entertainment to the masses. Throughout the summer he would follow a tight schedule organized by experienced administrators; he would move from town to town with at bet a day between lectures, but he would meet with sophisticate performers – among them college professors, politicians, writers and actors – and he would be well paid.

With his new suit Gregory cut an elegant figure under the enormous Chautaugua tent. Off stage, he relaxed with the other ‘talent’, as the circuit performers were known, while on the platform in the summer heat, he addressed farmers and shopkeepers, vicars and local officials, housewives and teachers on holiday, all of whom had put aside their normal activities for a week of educational entertainment. The Russian revolution, Bolshevism, and classical and modern European drama may have been topics far from their daily experience, but both in substance and manner, Gregory was a hit. A North Carolina reporter summed up the reaction:’ Dr. Zilboorg  was easily the greatest speaker brought to Elizabeth City by the 1921 Chautaugua and made a profound impression.’ When the season ended Gregory had in his bag not only his tuxedo and plus fours but names and addresses of people who would invite him to speak in the coming months at civic and arts clubs and on university campuses. Perhaps even more important, he also had a signed Chautaugua contract for the following summer.

Gregory worried about Russia but he did what he could in speaking about its history and culture. While he appreciated the enthusiasm of the Chautaugua crowds, in the autumn he began to speak to more sophisticated audiences. In September his article ‘Reflections on a Century of Political Experience and Thought’ appeared in Political Science Quarterly. In November he spoke to the New York City Civic Club on “Traveling Through the Gopher Prairies’; a title that suggests with caustic humor his frustration with naïve listeners  - these he had termed ‘old maids’; - and with his own life as a lecturer. In the same month his translation of He Who Gets Slapped was performed by students at Swarthmore College n Pennsylvania, a Quaker institution where the founder of the Swarthmore Chautaugua Paul Martin Pearson taught public speaking and Jesse Homes, with who Gregory had lectured over the summer, taught philosophy. Before year’s end he declared with some measure of pride,

This  season I visited nearly one hundred towns with the Chautaugua tent, beginning in North Carolina through the Virginias and Pennsylvania to New York State. The Swarthmore Chautaugua with which I traveled has in all about eight hundred towns and it undertook to present at least one drama or comedy and one opera in every town.

He came down hard on popular media, the ‘banality’ of jazz, vaudeville, and the movies (‘a sliver of sheet platitude’) – all, opinion, inferior to drama in depth, emotional range, and psychological understanding.


Between 1920 and 1922, Gregory wrote regularly for Drama, offering everything from ’A Course in Russian Drama’ to his opinions on individual plays and productions. Above all, however, he used his articles to expound his theories of art in general and the theater specifically. In each case, his point of view was ethical and psychological. He declared, for example, that Russian theater was historically ‘a social and moral institution’. While ‘its point of departure, its premises, were psychologically deeply rooted in the social aspirations and moral ideals of a given period. He abhorred the contemporary American ‘star system’, which he saw as ‘anti-individualistic’ since it prevented ‘psychological harmony nd consistency. Drama’s substance, he contended, was the ‘interplay and inner struggle of emotions and ideas in which every actor was given ‘the full possibility of self expression’

Gregory argued that ‘Art must not estrange itself from suffering’,  from depicting characters under stress, but he was simultaneously interested in the sociological as well as the psychological relationship between the audience and the play. This he considered that Hamlet ‘was in Russia almost a national play, because the Russian intellectual, his hesitation, his head of a raisonneur, his heart of an impulsive rebel and his  tiny willpower found himself in Hamlet.


“The lawmaker or politician has no right to interfere with the freedom of the theater any more than he has the right to prescribe the use of certain manners of yawning or sleeping’, while the official moralist has no more rights than the politician. As in The Passing of the Old Order in Europe, in his drama criticism Gregory looked  at the relationship between the masses and the individual, and always came out in favor of the latter: ‘Since freedom is the essential part of any art and especially that of the theater, the drama must be free of the mob spirit which is slavish by nature and cruelly absorbs the creative initiative of the individual.

 

Gregory’s decision, in 1921, to pursue an American medical degree at the very moment he was coming into his own as a drama critic and translator is perhaps ironic but unsurprising. The young  man who had studied under Bekhterev wanted to be a doctor as well as a lawyer, a psychiatrist as well as a revolutionary. He was a student of human beings in their social context, an advocate for those who suppressed by the tsar and the Bolsheviks in Russia and by mass culture, conformity, and commercialism in America. Gregory’s writings and lectures had stressed the psychological impact of war and revolution on the individual, and The Passing of the Old Order in Europe had been an expression of everything he thought and felt about those subjects.



* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Alexander

** The Passing of the Old Order in Europe, dedicated to Romain Rolland, Friedrich Foerster  Maxim Gorky and all those who in the darkness of hatred held fast their lights of love.  Thomas Seltzer, N.Y.  1920

Les idees se use dans une democratie,  d’autant plus vite qu’elles se sont plus promptement propagees.Combiens de republicains en France  s’etaient, en moins de cinquante, degoutes de la republique, du suffrage universal et de tant de libertes conquises avec intresse! Apres le culte fetichiste du nombre, avec ‘-l’optimisme beat qui avait cru aux saintes majorities et qui attendait le progress humain, l’esprit de violence soufflait  l’ incapacite des majorities a se gouvernor ellesmemes- , leur veualite, leur veulerie, leur  basse et peureuse  aversion de toute superior, leur lachete oppressive, soulvaient la revolte . . .

                                          Romain Rolland

Roughly:

Ideas wear out in a democracy all the more quickly the more quickly they spread. with interest! After the fetishistic cult of numbers, with the beat optimism which had believed in holy majorities and which awaited human progress, the spirit of violence breathed the incapacity of majorities to govern themselves, their willfulness, their weakness, their base and fearful aversion to all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, aroused revolt. . .

*** Caroline has it that ‘he probably had no idea’ which seems too implausible. After all, during the revolution he could have been shot anytime, especially in Kiev.

****  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua

https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/agents/corporate_entities/7393?&filter_fields[]=subjects&filter_values[]=Swarthmore+Chautauqua+Associatioin

 

Gregory Zilboorg’s best known work is A History of Medical Psychology, Norton Library, 1941