Abraham David Shub

Background

Abraham David Shub was born in the Russian province of Vilna, one of five children of Deborah and Nathan Shub; his father was a rabbi.

Career

As a student, Shub joined the revolutionary socialist youth movement known as the School of Struggle. Shub became a member of the Russian Social Democratic party in 1903 at a time when V. I. Lenin was one of its leaders.

When the party split into Bolshevik (Communist) and Menshevik (Social Democratic) groups, Shub became a Menshevik. Later in 1903 he traveled to the United States and worked as a laborer, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City (1903 - 1904).

In 1904 and 1905, he traveled to Paris, London, and Geneva, meeting with Lenin and other Russian political activists. Shub's continued contact with and interest in Lenin would much later result in his primary scholarly work, a biography of Lenin published in 1948, which was updated in 1966 and translated into many languages. Shub returned to Russia in September 1905 to participate in the revolution of 1905-1906. He joined the army to evade the police; he then escaped while stationed in Irkutsk, Siberia.

While in exile he wrote articles for St. Petersburg's Russian-language Menshevik newspaper and the Yiddish newspaper of Vilna. In 1907, he fled to London and soon thereafter emigrated to the United States.

In 1908, Shub became an assistant editor of Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker Newspaper), a weekly founded by the United Hebrew Trades in 1890. He and his fellow Yiddish writers wrote in a simplified Yiddish to increase the appeal of the Yiddish newspapers among the newly arrived Jewish immigrants in New York City.

From 1911 to 1918, Shub was the assistant editor and later editor of the New Post. During this time Shub wrote articles for Der Fraind (The Friend), published by the Workmen's Circle, which supported Yiddish culture and socialist concerns in the United States. At the same time, he wrote for the Russian-language newspaper Novi Mir (New World) and for the People's Newspaper.

During World War I, he became acquainted with future Russian Communist leaders including Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Bukharin, Aleksandr Kerensky, Pavel Miliukov, Viktor Chernov, and Catherine Breshkovsky.

Shub became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and expressed his opposition on the editorial pages of the English anti-Bolshevik weekly Struggling Russia (1919 - 1920).

From 1921 to 1922 Shub wrote articles under the pseudonym A. D. Nathanson in the Yiddish paper Yiddisher Morgen Zhurnal (Jewish Morning Journal), a Zionist daily published in New York City. He also wrote for Der Tog, a competing newspaper, under the pseudonym P. A. Stavski.

These two papers later merged as Der Veker (The Awakener); Shub wrote for it under the pseudonym A. Rosenthal. He edited Der Veker from 1923 to 1927. He also wrote for Justice, a trade union paper. In 1924, Shub joined the Jewish Daily Forward and sat on the Forwards' editorial board for the next forty-five years, until his retirement in 1969.

At the Forward, Shub wrote and solicited articles about the international socialist movement, workers' problems, labor unions, Russia, and Bolshevism, continuing his attacks on the theoreticians of the Russian revolution.

In 1931, Shub wrote about Tsar Nicholas's assassination and continued to explore other topics about Russia.

He explored socialist problems and Jewish social questions with regard to East European Jewry and the Bund (the General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), a non-Zionist organization formed in Vilna to advance Yiddish culture, support secular Jewish life, and promote socialist ideals among Jewish workers. Shub's dual interest in socialism and Jewish issues formed his theoretical approach to such socialist thinkers as Karl Marx and Edward Bernstein, whose work he explored from the standpoint of their approach to Jewish problems. While on staff at the Forward, Shub contributed articles in Yiddish and Russian to various journals in the United States and Europe.

His English-language article on Stalin in the New York Times Magazine was probably the first authoritative profile of the Soviet leader to appear in the American press. In 1968, a serialization by Shub in the Forward highlighted the personalities of the Russian revolutionary movement.

From 1956 to 1971, Shub wrote Russian-language radio speeches for United States-sponsored Radio Liberty, taking an anti-Communist position.

He died while vacationing in Miami Beach, Florida, after a series of heart attacks.

Achievements

• He continued his intimate contact with the many factions in the Russian revolutionary movement for more than forty years. In his obituary in the New York Times, he was referred to as a "veteran of the Russian revolutionary movement and an authority on Russian affairs. " Shub was a prolific writer who wrote for approximately sixty-seven years and who contributed to the development of Yiddish journalism in the United States at a time when the Yiddish press was striving to compete with its English-language counterparts in readership and quality of reporting. He was awarded a Yiddish literary prize from the Chanin Foundation, which was funded by the Workmen's Circle. In addition to Shub's biography, Lenin (1948), he edited the two-volume Jewish Workers Almanac (1926 - 1927), and co-edited and translated with Joseph Shaplen Socialism, Fascism, Communism (1934). He also translated Karl Kautsky's Social Democracy Versus Communism (1946).

Politics

Shub quoted disillusioned former allies of Lenin, asserting that Lenin persecuted dissidents and perverted the ideals of the Russian revolution.

Connections

Shub was married twice: first to Edith Gitelson in 1910, and second to Rebecca Goldstein in 1925; he and his second wife had three children.

Father:

Deborah Shub

Mother:

Nathan Shub

Spouse:

Edith Gitelson

Spouse:

Rebecca Goldstein