S. M. Levitas-1894-1961
S. M. LEVITAS 1894 — 1961 Samuel M. Levitas, executive editor of The New Leader, died on Tuesday, January 3, 1961. He would have been 67 years old in February. Some men are fortunate in that...
...His youth was a time of excitement, of ideas and of calls to action, of a view of the world as brimming with life...
...and some of their dust settled on him...
...Samuel Levitas—Sol, as he was known to his friends—was a fortunate man...
...Sol Levitas always retained that Russian side...
...For seven years he crisscrossed America to raise funds for the Russian exiles...
...He was of a generation that produced some of the finest idealists in history...
...He became a member of the American Socialist party...
...America has put its stamp on countless immigrants...
...By 1923, it had become clear that the Bolshevik party would not only jail but even murder the democratic opposition (a year before, the first of the great show trials, that of the Social-Revolutionary party leaders, had been held) and the Russian socialists, led by Abramovitch, Dan and Tseretelli went into long exile...
...It was Sol Levitas' achievement to hold that community together...
...A Menshevik is defined by his politics, but equally by his temperament...
...to escape sentence to Siberia...
...With him went Esther Zilboorg, whom he married that year...
...But the mystery of Russian character is that such melancholy— not the pale, wan, whimper of the defeated, but the cosmic sigh of those who live a full and burdened life —is joined to a wit and warmth, a droll sense of foibles which are not foolish, a gusto which is not grotesque...
...In the few pages of Russian democratic history, Sol Levitas has some honorable footnotes...
...From 1919 to 1923 he skipped in and out of the jails of Kiev...
...He went to school in Chicago, but his heart was still in Russia...
...Today we are brought together because of Sol Levitas, and we are together in our loneliness...
...many have made a mark in return...
...He was of that generation which is cosmopolitan in that it has lived life at its best and at its worst—and endured, and survived...
...in the 1930s and 1940s...
...Some men are fortunate in that their work and life are one, that their creative energies are fused with a satisfying purpose...
...The phrase "sad-eyed Sol Levitas" was once used in a magazine profile...
...In 1918, he was one of seven delegates from Siberia to the Congress of Soviets called to ratify the BrestLitovsk Treaty...
...He was one of a small band of men whose hopes reached the mountains, whose despairs the deepest pits, yet who remained through trials of imprisonment and exile as witnesses to the testament that man should not exploit his fellow man—even in the name of high ideals...
...The February Revolution was the wind that drew him back...
...Sol Levitas was equally fortunate in his friends— and they in him...
...In 1930, Sol Levitas became the general manager of The New Leader, responsible for business and circulation affairs...
...In April 1917, he was in Vladivostok, and on the request of the Menshevik leadership in Moscow, he remained there, first as editor of the Labor Daily, and later, but briefly, as vice mayor—enough time, as Sol said, to learn administration, or how to make a something out of nothing...
...He opposed those who would take the Socialist movement along a sectarian path...
...as few natives have, and these encounters gave his socialist philosophy the tinge of pragmatism and the openness to ideas which he sought to embody in The New Leader...
...He wrote articles in the Jewish Daily Forward...
...Of the two, the latter was the longer-lived passion...
...Sol Levitas was too gay, too undogmatic, and too tenderhearted to adopt the tough, ruthless stance of the apparatchik...
...In common with others of his generation (David Dubinsky for one), Sol Levitas came to the U.S...
...One remembers and cherishes a man...
...In those many journeys across the country he came to know the U.S...
...He fought, unflaggingly, to expose the Communist movement, a task which was extraordinarily difficult during the years of the Popular Front and the illusions about Russia which were predominant in the intellectual community of the U.S...
...and this vitality, absorbed in the streets and jails of Kiev, he never lost...
...He was equally at home in New York, in Paris and in Rome...
...Certain tales, though twice-told, remain ever picaresque: This was true of Sol Levitas' life through World War I and after...
...Levitas, as one of the younger activists of the group, left too...
...But such tales belong to chronicles...
...At the age of 15, he became a socialist, and instinctively a member of the Menshevik group...
...They did so not only because the journal offered them a forum, but because it was a gesture of affirmation in the community of democratic men...
...Within a few years, he had taken charge of the editorial side as well...
...The best minds in the free countries, in exile, and even in jail wrote for The New Leader...
...He was born in Kiev, in 1894, and all his life he had a fierce love for a city that he last saw 40 years ago...
...During one of his periods out of jail, he met Esther Zilboorg, the sister of an ardent young radical, Gregory Zilboorg, who had served as secretary to Alexander Kerensky...
...He was, and more than on the surface, often of melancholy mood...
...The end of the adventure, the final tragicomic touch, is that Sol Levitas left the Soviet Union by donning the uniform of a Red Army colonel...
...During one of his periods in jail he was elected to the Municipal Council, but never served...
...The Bolsheviks soon took over control of all the Soviets—originally a set of democratically elected councils—and Sol Levitas was again, and this time permanently, in the minority...
...At the age of 16 he was in jail where he learned the two tools of his trade as a socialist and a Russian revolutionist: to discourse on Marx, and to play chess...
...primarily as a spokesman for the Russian Social-Democratic opposition...
...For the past 30 years, his life work was The New Leader...
...With single-minded devotion, he worked to keep the magazine alive ("the greatest deficit publisher of all time," another magazine editor wrote of him in spontaneous tribute a few years ago), and these efforts won an extraordinary response not only for The New Leader, but for Sol Levitas as well...
...His traveling companions, comically enough, were Bukharin and Trotsky, the fact of which, registered in a photo taken en route, later allowed him to escape the Cheka...
...Sol Levitas came to the U.S...
...We remember him as friend, and, in that ancient, unbefouled use of the word, as comrade...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 2
