Like many Americans who spied for the Soviet Union, Harry Gold had a Russian connection. In 1881, following the murder of Czar Alexander II by revolutionaries and the subsequent repeal of reforms and outbreak of violent pogroms, a vast Jewish exodus began from Russia. Some 35 million Jews fled to the United States between 1882 and 1920. Harry Gold's parents, Sam and Celia Golodnitsky, left Russia around 1904. They stopped for a decade in Switzerland, where Sam found work as a cabinetmaker; Henrich — Harry — was born in Bern on December 12, 1910. The Golodnitskys continued on to America in 1914, were assigned the name Gold by an immigration officer on Ellis Island, landed temporarily with a relative in Little Rock, Arkansas, moved to Chicago and work in the stockyards and coalyards and finally settled in South Philadelphia in 1915- Harry's younger brother Yosef was born two years later.
South Philadelphia was a tough neighborhood. Harry Gold thought the “fertile soil” of his “earnest… desire” to work with the Soviet Union lay there, in his early experience of anti-Semitism:
When I was about twelve I made regular trips to the Public Library at Broad and Porter Streets, a distance of about two miles from my home. On returning from one such trip I was seized by a group [of] about 15 gentile boys at 12th and Shunk Streets and was badly beaten —
Gangs of Neckers, kids who lived in the marshy Neck section of South Philadelphia near the city dump “under extremely primitive conditions and amid the mosquitoes and dirt,” staged “brick throwing, window smashing, lightning forays” into Gold's neighborhood, “their special hatred… directed at the Jews… ”
Gold's father, a hard and honest worker, was similarly harassed at the Victor Talking Machine Company where he was employed sanding radio cabinets. Immigrant workers who “were crudely anti-Semitic… made Pop, one of the few Jewish workers, the object of their ‘humor.'…” An Irish foreman in particular “who hated the Jews far more bitterly than anyone Pop had ever encountered” assigned Sam to sand alone on a fast production line:
So Sam Gold would come home at night with his fingertips raw and with the skin partially rubbed off. This was no exaggeration. Mom would bathe the fingers and put ointment on them and Pop would go back to work the next morning. But he never quit, not Pop, and he never uttered one word of complaint to us boys.
“Many other such incidents could be described,” Harry Gold summarizes. “This was a scheme to which I built up a tremendous resentment throughout the years and [a] desire to do something active to fight and to combat it. Something on a much wider scale than by combat of an individual anti-Semitic.”
If Gold's resentment of anti-Semitism descended in part through his father, whom he idolized, his interest in socialism developed through his mother. Celia Gold was “fascinated” with Socialist Party founder and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, her son would testify. The Golds subscribed to the
A good student in high school, a member of the Latin and Science clubs, Harry went to work for the Pennsylvania Sugar Company after graduation and saved money for college. He started at the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and managed to get through two years before his money ran out. Pennsylvania Sugar rehired him; a decade later he would tell his draft board that he began contributing to his mother's support — to family expenses, that is — in March 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. One week before Christmas 1932 he was laid off. “Here… was [raised] the disgraceful spectacle and deep ignominy of charity. The first thing that followed my discharge was the necessity of returning a parlor suite (the first in 14 years) to Lit Brothers — that $50.00 refund was so necessary and loomed so large.” His mother was opposed to charity, “violently so.” (Celia Gold, according to one of Gold's later employers, was “somewhat of a tyrant in that she ruled the Gold household with an iron hand.”) Gold looked for work “frantically for five weeks.” That was when he met Tom Black, the Party recruiter, who was a fellow chemist.
A friend called Gold and told him about a job that Black had just vacated with a soap manufacturer in Jersey City. Gold needed to see Black that night for a briefing and a recommendation. “Mom hurriedly and anxiously packed a brown cardboard suitcase and I borrowed $6.00… as well as a jacket which closely matched my pants, and I was bundled on a Greyhound bus to Jersey City.” Gold slogged through the snow to the address he was given. “Black was waiting for me downstairs. I can still see that huge, friendly, freckled face, the grin and the feel of the bear-like grip of his hand.” They stayed up all night; Black briefed Gold on soap chemistry and told Gold frankly that he hoped to recruit him for the Communist Party. Most of the five hours the two men talked Black spent attacking capitalism and selling Communism. Gold got the job; the thirty dollars a week it paid kept his family off relief.
Black took Gold to Party meetings in Jersey City, gatherings of misfits where Gold felt “nothing was ever accomplished.” At more sophisticated meetings in Greenwich Village they drank wine and ate spaghetti and oysters while their host read “incredibly funny” Thurber stories from
By then it was September 1933; that winter Gold started night school at the Drexel Institute of Technology, studying chemical engineering. But Black continued to come around. “My family was naturally very glad to greet the man who, in effect, had been our economic savior, and Tom with his bluff and hearty ways quickly endeared himself to them.” The big chemist, “with his build and features a two-hundred-year throwback to those of a British peasant,” began to propagandize Gold's parents “but then suddenly stopped.” He also stopped urging Gold to join the Party. Gold understood later that the change in Black's behavior was significant. In fact Black had gone boldly to Amtorg, the Soviet trading company in New York, and volunteered to work as a scientist in the USSR. The Soviets had proposed instead that he undertake industrial espionage; for good measure they had assigned him undercover duty keeping track of Trotskyites.
Eventually, at the turn of the year between 1934 and 1935, Black told Harry about his new work and asked Gold to sign on. Gold was ready. “I said that I would think it over, but actually I had already made the decision… I was even to a certain extent eager to.” Long afterward, reviewing his life, Gold would carefully, layer by layer, examine his reasons for becoming a Soviet agent: that he owed Black, that he genuinely wanted to help the people of the Soviet Union “to enjoy some of the better things of life,” that acquiescing got Black off his neck. “But these were really surface circumstances.” There were also underlying motives, “far more powerful” that he “did not realize at the time.” Fighting anti-Semitism in all its disguises, including “Nazism and Fascism,” was one of them. “It might be asked, why didn't I try to fight anti-Semitism here in the United States? Frankly, this seemed to me like a pretty hopeless business.”
His “almost suicidal impulse to take drastic, and if need be, illegal action, when [he] believed a situation required it,” was another motive he discerned. He also suspected that “there must have been in my makeup a certain basic lack of faith in democratic processes… Unswervingly through all these years of work with the Russian agents I thought of myself as an American citizen working, outside the law, and underhandedly it is true, for the Soviet Union… If I had thought that my actions might in any way harm the United States I would never have gone ahead.” Gold understood later how absurd that rationalization must sound: “Here I was unwittingly fooling myself.” He understood as well that he was “letting down the strong barriers against deceit, trickery and thieving, barriers which had been built up by my mother over so many years.” Indeed, he was explicitly deceiving his mother with “the lies I had to tell at home and to my friends to explain my supposed whereabouts (Mom was certain that I was carrying on a series of clandestine love affairs).” Espionage, Gold's secret life,
The planning for a meeting with the Soviet agent; the careful preparations for obtaining data…; the writing of reports; the filching of blueprints for copying and then returning them; the meeting with [agents] in New York or Cincinnati or Buffalo…; the difficulty in raising money for the various trips; the weary hours of waiting on street
