In the United States, which had no imminent perfection to offer, the memory of Russia—as the world of Pushkin and Populism—shaped the imagination of many first-generation immigrants. In Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky , one of the characters (Mr. Tevkin, a Hebrew poet and a Zionist) invokes a common cliché when he says: Russia is a better country than America, anyhow, even if she is oppressed by a Tsar. It’s a freer country, too—for the spirit, at least. There is more poetry there, more music, more feeling, even if our people do suffer appalling persecution. The Russian people are really a warm-hearted people. Besides, one enjoys life in Russia better than here. Oh, a thousand times better. There is too much materialism here, too much hurry and too much prose, and—yes, too much machinery. It’s all very well to make shoes or bread by machinery, but alas! the things of the spirit, too, seem to be machine-made in America. 11 Tevkin lived in a past that had promised a very different future. In the words of Ia. Bromberg, Those who visit the Russian room of the New York Public Library can often see these aging men and women with Jewish features leafing through the canonical and apocryphal writings of the prophets of the old revolutionary underground, the pamphlets printed in Geneva and Stuttgart on thin, “smuggled” paper, the Russian History by Shishko, and the appeals by the Committee of the People’s Will. The incessant din and clamor of the “intersection of the world” at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street seeps in from outside; the multilevel shrines of the modern Babylon peer in with their thousands of lit-up advertisements. But the thoughts of the readers are far away, following their memories to a mysterious secret meeting in the slums of Moldavanka, Pechersk, and Vyborgskaia, or perhaps to a noisy student rally on Mokhovaia and B. Vladimirskaia, or to the years of lonely contemplation in the smoky and bitter warmth of a Yakut encampment lost in the darkness of the polar night. And looking up at them from the pages of revolutionary memoirs are photographs of young men in Tolstoy shirts, with sunken eyes and obstinate lines by their tightly shut, big, loquacious mouths, and of young girls, penniless martyrs with their touching, thin braids tied above their high, pure foreheads. 12 There was still hope, however. That past might yet become the future, even