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see, however, the "tragic" situation of Arab and Jew, and this is
hardly a mark against him. The question of Arab-Jewish relations
remains paramount , and peace remains the ultimate and still unob–
tainable condition for the successful realization of Zionism .
Several years ago while visiting my cousin in Tel Aviv, not far
from where Trotsky might have settled and next door , in fact , to
where Max Brod (who saved Kafka from anonymity) died , I picked
up a book and leafed through it.
It
was a Hebrew Bible - published
in St. Petersburg in 1909 . I asked her how she had obtained it, and
she told me that Raya Dunayevskaya, nee Shapiro, an old friend,
had been Trotsky's secretary in Mexico for a while and had found
this book in his desk when he died . Although Trotsky studied the
Bible "in the original" for a few months as a very young man, to
please his father, I doubted that he was carrying one - or in posses–
sion of one - at the time of his death.
I wrote to Dunayevskaya, still a Marxist activist, now based in
Detroit. She wrote back that the Bible had nothing to do with Trot–
sky, but was rather the result of a comical and successful ruse to get
around the F. B.
1.
and establish her date of birth . As far as Trotsky
was concerned, Dunayeskaya "imagine[s] that he would rather be
caught dead than with a Bible in his hand." Which he was . On the
other hand, there was a connection between Dunayevskaya and
Trotsky's desk-but it involved a gun, not a Hebrew Bible . She was
still with him in Mexico when his last son was murdered, "And I
feared what the Old Man might do in that tragic situation, and
removed the gun from his desk."
So my cousin's memory was (almost) correct. By the time of the
assassination, Dunayevskaya was gone, breaking with Trotsky over
the "state capitalism" theory of the Soviet Union she favored - he
clung to the "degenerated workers' state" theory which allowed for
"critical support."
In a letter to me, Joseph Nedava wrote that he believes things
might indeed have worked as in our fantasy. But the final word
belongs to my Tel Aviv cousin after all. In Nedava's book , I read
that a journalist for a New York Jewish newspaper, Jean Jaffe , who
was also a friend of my cousin's in the forties, was sent to Coyoacan
after Trotsky's death. There, in his desk, she found a bundle of let–
ters in Hebrew and Yiddish, a correspondence about Palestine,
wrapped in a Jewish calendar, separate from his archives , as if
waiting to be translated and then read, with great care, by the be–
spectacled Old Man.
