She would have done anything to escape Flatbush, gone anywhere to find a life of meaning and consequence that surely existed beyond the pale of Brooklyn—a territory that, like Ireland or Poland, was always doomed to lie in the shadow of a superior power.
As salutatorian of her class at Erasmus Hall, she’d set her sights on attending one of the esteemed private women’s colleges, where she would spend four years mingling with other intellectually curious and unconventional young women. That Florence had believed her father would finance this plan said less about her self-regard than about Solomon Fein’s ability to shield from his family certain obvious financial realities. Her first year at Hunter College was largely spent getting over her disappointment. Then, in October of her sophomore year, the stock market collapsed, and her unhappiness was replaced with astonishment at her good fortune to be attending college for free. The following year saw another unexpected turnabout: the Brooklyn branch of Hunter merged with the City College of New York, and was spun off into Brooklyn College, the first coed public campus in the city. To call it a “campus,” as Florence observed, was a stretch; having as yet no buildings of its own, the college rented classrooms in five different office buildings in the restless business district that circled Borough Hall. Dodging trolleys and manning the obstacle course of Fulton Street, Florence soon discovered the cafés and cafeterias of downtown Brooklyn, where lawyers from nearby courts popped in for corned-beef sandwiches, as did congregations of curly-headed students who formed, if not the brain center, then a close synapse of the student movement. She hadn’t even known there was a student movement. But here they were, arguing Lenin versus Marx, Stalin versus Trotsky, not arguing so much as yelling at one another across the long wooden tables while brandishing slices of rye. At first she had been intimidated by these kids from New Utrecht High who’d read William Foster’s Strike Strategy, who knew how to set up a committee, how to print a pamphlet, how to organize. While the girls and boys at Erasmus were reenacting the Lincoln-Douglas debates in civics class, these Bensonhurst kids were staging milk boycotts to protest the price hikes of their high-school lunches.
It struck her as crazy that she’d ever considered attending a college where the girls adopted finishing-school attitudes and the teachers tried to govern their morals and behavior. At Brooklyn College, the girls were no less militant than the boys, cutting their hair, wearing sacklike dresses and sandals without stockings, knocking on doors to advocate birth control to the Irish housewives. And they were militant in another way that Florence had yet to follow. Under the blessing of their patron saint, the anarchist Emma Goldman, they felt the need to give away their virtue freely, so as not to commit the more venial sin of trafficking their virginity under the hypocritical code of Capitalism.
—
EACH WEEK, FLORENCE STOPPED to examine the Help Wanted section of the campus bulletin board. “Part-time work for Physical Science majors,” a posting might read. And when she, a mathematics major, would inquire, the job would turn out to involve not physics or chemistry or astronomy, but lugging trash cans or mopping snow slush. The administration would post jobs by major to prevent the whole college from applying.
She learned of the job at Amtorg from a professor for whom she did occasional secretarial work. He told her an organization uptown was seeking a secretary with a head for numbers. “You know a bit of Russian, don’t you? That could be helpful.”
It was her father who had insisted she study mathematics, with the advice that the insurance business sailed on an even keel even in the severest economic storms. Florence was fairly sure, however, that the job the professor had in mind had nothing in common with the life-insurance company where Solomon Fein spent his days as an actuary.
“The Soviet Trade Mission?” She had a vague recollection of it from reading the newspapers. It operated as a de facto embassy, since America didn’t officially acknowledge the Bolshevik government. “Aren’t they mostly…spies?” she inquired uncertainly.
The professor, a grizzled old progressive who smelled of tobacco and menthol, did his best not to look disappointed. “I didn’t peg you for a reader of the yellow press, Florie. Anyway, the contracts department is staffed mostly by Americans,” he said reassuringly. “And if you’re nervous that they’ll ask you to present your Party card, not to worry. No American who works at Amtorg is permitted to be an active communist. The diplomacy is too delicate. Mainly, they put together import-export contracts for companies selling goods to the Russians—tractors, cars, factory equipment, and so on.”
“I thought we didn’t do business with the Bolsheviks.”
Again the man indulged her with a downturned smile. “During the Napoleonic Wars, ships traveled along the English Channel, carrying goods back and forth between England and France. This, while the two nations were locked in bloody battle. Are we at war with the Russians?”
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