by AD Nachalo
Harry Eisman came into the world in 1913 in an area of Eastern Europe which today is Moldova, but was then contested between Tsarist Russia and Romania. As war orphans whose older siblings had emigrated to the United States, the younger Eismans would follow their older brothers to the Bronx. At nine years old Harry would move in with his older brother, a house painter and Communist militant, and their three sisters. While the political activity and the workday ate up the elder siblings’ time, the two youngest Eismans would enter school.
In Brownsville, Harry and Eda Eisman would join the Young Pioneers of America carrying out organizational work among their peers and developing as active militants in the class struggle. The siblings helped to form the Lenin Unit at their pubic school. According to a New York Congressman, Harry was responsible for creating a propaganda network that reached 3500 school children with revolutionary literature. He was expelled from school for this act so offensive to the ruling class.
Harry and Eda persisted in their revolutionary activity for the next five years as active members of the YPA. The YPA rivaled the ruling class youth organization, the Boy Scouts of America, an organization which to this day represents backward nationalism, militarism and grooming children to fight in the rich man’s wars. Harry would be arrested in a confrontation with a Boy Scouts event. The Scouts were boarding a ship for their 1929 International Jamboree and a confrontation with the Pioneers who physically blocked the ship’s departure ended with Harry’s arrest. The judge in the case banned Harry from attending demonstrations to restrict and prevent his political activity. The class struggle was the only thing suitable to comrade Harry and he soon violated his conditions by bravely fighting for the unemployed workers at a mass demonstration in Union Square the next year.
For the offense of demonstrating, comrade Harry faced 6 years in a home for boys, a glorified prison for the children of the working class. In response to the repression, the Young Pioneers of the Soviet Union invited him to live there and he accepted. In his own words, comrade Harry wrote of his childhood in the United States that:
“My American childhood was molded in the revolutionary movement. Joining the pioneers in 1924, I have been steeped in the class struggle since age eleven. In 1926 I helped the Passaic strike and I have marched on the picket lines with cloakmakers and furriers, cafeteria employees and fruit clerks in New York. I took part in nearly every workers demonstration; I spoke often from the platform in the name of the Young Pioneers. These activities earned me the hatred of the capitalists and their servants in the public school system of New York. I was arrested seven times in strikes and demonstrations and suspended from school.”
Comrade Harry wrote for the Young Comrade and the Daily Worker. On top of his strike and protest activity, he struggled ardently to organize against the racial oppression of Black Americans in Harlem and the Bronx, helping to lead numerous large rallies. He was elected the honorary president of the Children’s Congress in Moscow. He showed his commitment to the principles of revolutionary violence when interviewed by a Brooklyn newspaper as he departed for the Soviet Union, stating that his goal was to “overthrow the capitalist yoke,” to which the reporter asked if this could be done nonviolently and the comrade replied, “dead men tell no tales.”
At 16 years of age the young militant received a heroes welcome in the socialist motherland which was at that time the center of the World Proletarian Revolution. The accomplishment of freeing comrade Harry from the youth prison and securing his travel to the Soviet Union was a victory for the communist youth movement, and the product of mass struggle known as the “free Harry campaign.” After touring the country for nine months and giving talks, he was admitted to trade school in Moscow. Upon graduation, the comrade worked for the Communist International as a journalist covering anti-fascism among other things.
After the homeland of all the world’s working class was invaded by Hitler’s hordes, comrade Harry temporarily hung up journalism to enlist for fighting on the front lines in the Red Army, where he participated in the battle for Stalingrad, one of the most significant victories of the Great Patriotic War and a battle that will forever be a monument to the Communist cause. After this battle he was moved from the front lines and ordered to take up his post in the army of the arts as a journalist and translator to better serve the antifascist resistance, where he received the medal of Battle Merit and the Order of the Red Star.
Comrade Harry Eisman represents the traits of a revolutionary in service of the people on the journalistic front both as a child of the proletariat and soldier in antifascist war, his example and the quality of his writing must be taken up by young Americans today who are coming to learn the necessity of reconstituting the Communist Party and its many trenches such as the Young Communist League and the Young Pioneers.
Photo: the young Harry Eisman.
