Norman Howard A. - My famous evening: Nova Scotia sojourns, diaries & preoccupations

Sudden Noir,
Deeper Calm

IN 1979, I WAS HIRED TO WRITE A DOCUMENTARY FILM script, Trotsky in Halifax. The film never got made, but the research was a job well done, and allowed me to be apprised of yet another instance of history suddenly imposed on quotidian life. Escorted by the authorities, yesterday the mysterious figure of Leon Trotsky suddenly arrived to our unsuspecting city, one journalist wrote, with a slightly anxious air of melodrama. Tongues were set wagging, our citizenry rapt with alarming curiosity.

Why did Leon Trotsky pass through Halifax on his way to the October Revolution? In 1915, the Vitagraph Studio in New York hired migr Emile Vester to direct My Official Wife, a WWI spy drama. I have seen this fierce, clumsy, noirish film. One crucial sequence depicts a band of embittered revolutionaries meeting in a dank basement. Vester had decided that in order to provide authentic Russian atmosphere, he needed nihilistic types as extras in this scene. To recruit, Vester simply walked into a Second Avenue caf and offered its habitus five dollars a day for their work in a feature film. This is the exact point where the fact of a real personage and the fiction of a film scenario were inextricably bound, for among the volunteers who jumped at the chance for a screen appearance was Lev Bronsteinthat is, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had spent nearly a year in forced exile in New York editing the Bolshevik newspaper Novy Mir (New World), and the job with Vitagraph offered a welcome supplement to his meager salary. He appeared in the studio roster as Mr. Brown. At one point in the film, if I recall correctly, Mr. Brown pounds the wall with his fist.

To my knowledge, My Official Wife was never shown in Halifax, at least not in any commercial theater. But on March 28, 1917, the Norwegian America Line ship Kristianiafjord steamed into Halifax Harbour from New York with a general cargo assigned to T. A. S. DeWolfe and Son. Tsar Nicholas II had only just abdicated, and the port authorities had received order to arrest eight passengers aboard the Kristianiafjord one of them was Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky was taken before the military authorities, and a man named Dave Horwetz was assigned the duty of being Trotskys official Russian interpreter. A document from the Naval Control Office, April 3, 1917, found in the Public Archives, is titled, Russian Socialists on board the s.s. Kristianafjorde. The lengthy document itself says of Trotzki, Bronstein, age thirty-seven: traveling on card of Identity vised by the Russian Counsul at New York. He was President of the Workmans Delegations in Russia in 1905, was imprisoned for a time, but got away to Austria and was a journalist in Vienna till the commencement of the War: he then went to Switzerland and on to Paris, remaining there about 20 months, doing journalistic work. From Paris he went to New York, via Spain, and has continued the same vocation. He states that owing to the new regime in Russia he is returning to assist the Government. He makes no secret of his Socialist ideas, which appear to be very advanced, and he seems to have been in touch with Socialists of every nationality. He has a large amount of Socialistic literature in his possession. He claims acquaintance with the present Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs: he is accompanied by his Wife and two sons of 12 and 9.

From the Citadel in Halifax, Trotsky was removed to an internment camp in Amherst. His internment dragged on for nearly a month, during which, according to the Halifax Herald, he raged protested and hurled insults at the camp administration. There were at Amherst eight hundred German prisoners, many of them sailors of sunken submarines. Trotsky addressed them, explaining the ideas of Zimmerwald and telling them of the fight against the Kaiser and the war that Karl Liebknecht had been waging in Germany. The camp resounded with his speeches, and life in it changed into a perpetual meeting. Finally, after much intrigue, bungling, and subterfuge, Trotsky left Amherst on April 29, followed to the gates of the camp by cheering German sailors and by the sounds of the International played by their orchestra.

During her husbands internment in Amherst, Mrs. Trotsky and her boys were ordered to remain in Halifax and given into the custody of Mr. Horwetz, who took them to his humble home on Market Street. Accounts of Mrs. Trotsky and her sons in Halifax are quite wonderful, though some are nastily biased and require to be looked at askance. Reading of her daily walks around the city, one is toured through Halifax with vivid immediacy; her presence is noted as historical, and one reporter even allows, Seeing Halifax through this foreigners eyes is seeing it somewhat anew, albeit at times unpleasantly. Mrs. Trotsky and sons watched workers passing into the boot and shoe factory of Robert Taylor and Company, which extended up Duke Street to Brunswick Street; this five-story brick structure was considered to be a first-class factory with light, airy rooms and modern machinery, and later was used by J. and M. Murphy for the manufacture of clothing. On Saturdays they watched horses and oxen toiling up the hill from the Dartmouth ferry, pulling market carts loaded with produce to be sold at the City Market, as the new market building had opened in July 1916 to replace the old Green Market held on the streets by the post office.