Bronshtein in the Bronx: A Novel

Bronshtein in the Bronx, by Robert Littell (New York: Soho Press, 2025)

After reading the non-fiction work Trotsky in New York, 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution, by Kenneth D. Ackerman, and reviewing it for our Association in 2020, I just had to take on the new, short fictional work Bronshtein in the Bronx, about the sojourn of Leon Trotsky, née Bronshtein, in New York City, early in 1917, until he rushed home to participate in the Russian Revolution.  While I am not a devotee of fiction or films “inspired by” actual events, or fiction in general (since reading scads of marvelous Russian literature long ago), I can recommend Bronshtein as a lively complementary and interpretive work vis-à-vis Trotsky in New York, but if one can read only one of them I suggest that you choose the latter.

The author of Bronshtein is Robert Littell, a former foreign correspondent who has written over 20 novels, often about the CIA and the Soviet Union.  His “fantasizing” about Trotsky’s time in America was inspired, so he says, by his father’s 1919 name change from Leon Litzky to Leon Littell so he would no longer be ridiculed for a name that resembled Leon Trotsky.

Long before he reached New York City and the Bronx tenement on Vyse Avenue, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein had become Leon Trotsky so Trotsky he shall be for the remainder of this review, although the author’s use of the alliterative title Bronshtein in the Bronx is quite understandable.  (After the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, the Bronx Home News ran the headline “Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution.”)

The novel tracks the general history of Trotsky and his family as their ship arrives in New York’s harbor in January 1917, they move into a Bronx tenement apartment near Crotona Park, provided by Nikolai Bukharin, and Trotsky lectures and writes (for Novy Mir and the Forverts) to make money, attack the imperialists’ war, and promote an international revolution.  He rides on the Third Avenue El from the Bronx down to Manhattan.  The news of a February 1917 revolution in Russia propels him back to his homeland, with an interruption of several weeks due to his detention by the British authorities in Nova Scotia.

Throughout the story, Trotsky engages in sardonic “verbal jousting” with his conscience, named “Louis Litzky,” i.e., the original name of the author’s father.  The conscience decides that it will remain in New York, because “[a] conscience worth its salt will draw the line at killing for revolution.” With the weight of that conscience lifted from his shoulders, Trotsky could move swiftly to crush rivals and counter-revolutionaries.

Trotsky’s actual New York meetings with “left” figures such as Abraham Cahan, Eugene Debs, Louis Fraina, Emma Goldman, Morris Hillquit, Ludwig Lore and Aleksandra Kollontai make their way into the book, novelistically of course, to illustrate the hopes and dreams and schisms on the anti-capitalist front in America.  Other encounters in the story are pure fiction, such as Trotsky’s interrogation by “John E. Hoover” before being allowed to enter New York City and later when Trotsky is picked up for questioning about Lenin’s revolutionary goals.  There is an extended encounter, which becomes sexual, with the invented interlocutor Frederika “Fred” Fedora of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who becomes a tour guide for Trotsky, teaches him American “lingo” as well as new sexual techniques.  She declines Trotsky’s offer to take her back to Russia along with his common law wife Natalya Sedova and their two young sons.  Trotsky was not monogamous, as was evidenced by his affair in Mexico with artist Frida Kahlo shortly before his assassination (an affair that the author turns into the aforementioned relationship with “Fred”) and earlier relations in Russia with sculptress Clare Sheridan that may have crossed the line, but the New York dalliance with Ms. Fedora turns poetic license into poetic licentiousness, considering how much time and energy the real Trotsky was devoting to obsessively advancing the cause of revolution while in America.  It is also distracting for a Russian man of that era, or his conscience, to be using American slang from our time, such as “get a life,” “yo, my man,” “piss off” and “I’m out of here.”

Bronshtein does give us a picture of a committed revolutionary who spent years exiled from Russia.  Historian Orlando Figes observed that such exiles “tended to be more international and cosmopolitan in their outlook” than the “nativists” like Stalin who remained in the homeland.    As we know, Trotsky would advocate for the international revolution while Stalin settled for “Socialism in one country.”  Stalin would come out on top; Trotsky and his family would lose everything.

Historical fiction and films are very popular; authors are free to modify the lives of public figures like Trotsky, as well as the events of their era.  “You can’t defame the dead,” i.e. their heirs cannot sue for defamation (and thanks to Stalin the descendants of Trotsky were eliminated).  Should we be concerned about history being handled like modeling clay, for dramatic purposes?  After all, Napoleon once said, “what is history, other than a fable agreed upon?” and Henry Ford may have said, “history is bunk.”  Perhaps we should be concerned if one’s knowledge of history comes mainly from historical fiction, biopics, and docudramas all “inspired by” history, with Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler representing the Old South. Historians complain that Oliver Stone plays too fast and loose with the facts in his movies about JFK, Nixon and Bush, but his (modest!) defense is that he wasn’t doing anything that Shakespeare didn’t do.  In America, we trust that truth will emerge from the “marketplace of ideas,” so we should not attempt to police the accuracy of historical fiction but should encourage readers to supplement works such as Bronshtein with biographies of Trotsky and non-fiction such as Trotsky in New York. 

And we are free to analyze and criticize, and even free to create our own work of historical fiction to challenge the assumptions of prior works, even one as established as Gone with the Wind.  In 2001, Alice Randall published The Wind Done Gone, an alternative tale about life on the Tara plantation (re-named “Tata”) from the perspective of an enslaved woman.  The estate of Margaret Mitchell was unable to suppress this revisionist work in a copyright infringement lawsuit because it qualified as a parody of GWTW.  

Reviewed by Keith Danish, the Book Review and Newsletter Editor of the NY Labor History Association.