Why did I think this would end? The tour is over, said I. It is not over. The ride is over, said I. The ride keeps whirling on.
I’m typing to you from a hotel be in Edinburgh, where the sky is snailsnot grey, and where I’m due to be speaking about my book tomorrow. I’ve had four hours of sleep, I think. Last night, I was in New York, in a firehouse turned arts space temporarilly full of covers I did for In These Times magazine (in a few days, I start a one year term as their artist at large). Walls were lined with paintings of Pete Hegseth in tighty whiteys, Trump’s suppurative chin cellulite, Elon’s torso that was created wrong.
That morning, I was recording pickups on a new audio version of my book. (Yes, I heard you people. There is a new audio version coming out. I read it all myself. If I mispronounced the Polish words, I don’t want to hear it). I was leaning close to the mic, delivering each sentance like the little mermaid might deliver her voice to the Sea Witch.
Thank you so much to the hundreds of monsters who have bought paid subscriptions to my substack. As an independent artist with a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. I am truly grateful.
If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.
The day before I was on a punk girl’s public access show.
My agent told me that we sold translations of the book in German and Czech. A French magazine called Society profiled my work in a piece so touching it made me tear up a bit.
Conversations I taped with brilliant people, like Arielle Angel and Dan Denvir keep being published online. For Polyester, I also wrote a guide to drawing babes.
And finally, a letter, of the sort that makes everything worth it
Dear Molly,
I just finished your book. I have been waiting for someone to write this book and I’m so glad it’s you. I found it remarkable for so many reasons. As someone raised on the trauma you describe, I usually avoid reading anything about it — because my work was to let it go, because of how it’s deployed in service of so much I abhor. You achieved something that all the bloated institutions founded for preserving these memories failed to do: you told the story in a way that made it come alive in excruciatingly intimate yet history-shaking detail while refusing to put these holy memories in service of oppression.
It is also a book that takes leftist politics seriously in a way that feels necessary at this moment. It maps the struggle, devotion, rivalries, pettiness, courage, boredom, poetry of what it means to build a political movement that is capable of changing our social foundation. It is easy to have an opinion, it is hard to change history.
And the Bund did change history. It is striking that a people who are so devoted to memory have largely expunged the Bund from our collective memory. Your resurrection of their world, their political power, their achievements is proof that ideas never die and they are offering us an inheritance forged in love and blood.
I have spent a long time thinking about this question of whether the Holocaust exposes the dreams of universal solidarity as naive. What happens when both the Bundists and Zionists are right: ethnonationalism will turn us into the monsters and hereness will slaughter us.
It was a question that obsessed me for many years without even knowing about the Bund.
It surprised me, having left religion when I was 17, to find my answer in religious texts. Biblical narrative is a story of a people’s evolution. Each time they sought to conquer land through violence, their Temple was destroyed. Ask any cheder kid why the Temple was destroyed and he will answer two words: sin’as hinam, baseless hatred. And what will rebuild it? Ahavas ahim, fraternal love. This is the meaning of the exile. The only path for survival is through creating the conditions for fraternal love. The only temple that will stand is one built in harmony with other nations. This is the prophecy of the messiah. It is not an easy destiny, but every alternative is illusory. Every act that builds toward fraternal love hastens the messiah and every act that stokes baseless hatred sets it back. This is at the core of Jewish faith.
Above my bed, I have six words of a beautiful midrash. The Baal Shem Tov has a vision of the messiah and asks him when he will come: אימתי קאתי מר. The messiah answers: when your springs spread forth: לכשיפוצו מעינותיך החוצה. I like to understand this as the beauty of each person’s life force gushing forth, which is the basis for real fraternal love. But for this we need the material conditions for people to thrive.
I am still not a religious person in most senses of the word. But I have accepted this article of faith. We either build toward fraternal love or we perish. Everything else is an illusion.
Thank you for writing this beautiful book.
Where to see me
August 28 - Edinburgh Book Festival
me x Seth Anziska (SOLD OUT)
August 29 - Edinburgh Book Festival
M Abdel-Magied, me & Hannah Lilith Assadi: Global Solidarities
September 3 - University of Detroit
September 4 - First Methodist Chruch in Ann Arbor
September 9 - Scientists for Palestine Bisan Lecture Series
(Online Only)
September 19 - DIRTY Magazine presents RE/Union Screening + conversation Molly Crabapple x Chris Smalls
New York City
September 20 - Baltimore Book Fair
me x Margaret Killjoy
September 23 - ABF Stockholm, Sweden
September 26- Gothenburg Book Fair, Sweden
September 27- Copenhagen. Details TK
Thank you Ms Crabapple. This history of the Bund begins its regeneration. My kindle edition doesn’t work perfectly. I wish there were clear maps with all the cities. Kindle is always hard on illustrations. My kindle shows “book completed” before the last chapter. But it gets the per centage right: We are 43% through at that point with the last chapter, the wonderful 57% of endnotes and the huge selected bibliography still to come.
I hope someone with eyes younger than mine will undertake to construct Volume II, the annotated bibliography, with more information about the sources, what is in print, what needs to be republished, how to get our hands on, etc. etc.
This is a long post, easy to skim or skip; it’s just my way of enquiring about connections. Someone might know something to add, see an error to correct, etc.
As I was born in 1941 a significant bit of the Bundist story happened in my lifetime, though I didn’t know. My parents had returned from Oregon to Chicago shortly after that. My first political memory is being sent down to the street with a metal pot to bang when the last truce of WW-II was signed so that I would remember that day—you see, I do, but I didn’t know it was historical. I attended a Jewish school at a synagogue nearly just across the street—I don’t know what flavor—I hated the enforced nap time.
When I was 6, we moved to Denver, Col., where we had little community, a limited circle of Jewish friends. There was a conservative synagogue which my atheist father insisted we attend on high holidays. [I still remember with horror how my wool suit itched.] We had an after-school school where I learned some Hebrew phonetics. There we got a wall chart to take home and paste little leaf stickers on as we raised money to plant trees in Israel. Yet, somehow, my memory insists there was a very limited or in some way tainted enthusiasm for that project in my house though my father, I eventually learned, was very much a Zionist. He was a high level chemist but later, in the sixties, jobless for two years. He and I were on the outs when he walked into the Israeli consulate in NYC and got three job offers. He went with Mom to Beersheva for about six years, unluckily, his last. He had become very disillusioned though I don’t know how much was politics, bureaucracy, or his deteriorating health.
I got ahead of my story there. At some point my parents had agreed that I was not to be raised on horror stories of the holocaust. I think it was probably a smart decision, maybe a bit overdone. Children raised the other way learned too young to fear and to hate and to distrust. My injury was just an amputation of roots. Not total, but enough to make me somewhat duller as an adult.
My real introduction to politics was in 1954 (aetat 13). I could understand some things. Mother’s father, Grandpa Paul visited Denver. I remember sitting in our basement with him listening to the Army-McCarthy hearings. That resolved an active, frightening trauma. I was a bit taller than the old victrola radio. My parents knew victims. I remember Grandpa Paul’s intensity and satisfaction. When Mom’s kosher-keeping paternal grandmother, who lived with Paul and Tania, had died, my mother recollected years later, her father, Paul, took her to the corner restaurant and ordered pork chops. It made her sick, but he was adamant that she understand. No food consumed by humans can be considered treif, dirty. (Bund?) He was from Poland and worked for a bank in Chicago that took advantage of his linguistic competence, sending him back to Poland after WW I to regulate currency issues and, my cousin has now informed me, help some people escape.
Our subsequent move to southern California, Nixon territory, meant more isolation. My father took the initiative to organize a synagogue there. After that, in 1957, we were in New York, where I married Marilyn Strauss (1940-87) from Pittsburgh who was, politically, much more sophisticated than I. We heard Senator Wayne Morris speak about Viet Nam and went to Canada in 1965-6.
When she was hardly more than a toddler, Marilyn’s father, Leonard, had taken her to the Library and sat her down facing the statue of the donor, Andrew Carnegie, and explained, contrary to what she would hear, that Carnegie was a very bad man who hired the police to shoot his steel workers when they went on strike. He gave a bit back to protect his repurtation. (Bundist connection?) Leonard’s death, the year we married meant I would never ask him.
I had a bit of German from University, a wee bit of Yiddish from home and got a part-time job in Montreal directing a Yiddish Folk Choir, all old people who had not learned French. In that Jewish group, history didn’t come up. Isreal didn’t come up. Some Americans reading this won’t know of Louis Riel (1844-85), the Métis chief and organizer hanged for treason. The poet, John Robert Columbo, arranged his last words to the jury as a “found poem”, a visionary plea for international brother, The choir was thrilled to perform my arrangement with Marilyn at the piano—that was their (Bundist?) ethic.
I knew a little bit about the European Enlightenment and its slow dispersal north and east, but “Here Where We Live…” was my first glance at where my own ethics must have come from. “Sporulation” is an awkward word. Dare we say of the Bund, it was neither loss nor failure but sporulation?
Thank you for setting up an audio of your book in your own voice. I bought the book (hardcover) and listened to the audio of it that I borrowed from the Brooklyn Library. The book is massive and a true tribute to your scholarship and passion. But it is also part of YOUR story.
I was therefore so disappointed to learn that it wasn't done in your voice (which is so dulcet!) nor even an "American-accented" one -- whatever that means, other than that the simplest, most common English words weren't often syllable-stressed in the same places in the audio version that most of us have come to expect hearing in American speech. It was very disconcerting trying to decode the words in your "alternate's" version. If you had been someone who wasn't American-raised and were telling your story in English, the differently stressed pronunciations would have been fine.
I may even buy a copy of your audio version when it comes out, even though I already own the book, just to hear "Molly" speak Molly's words!