Plotkin, Sara

PLOTKIN, SARA (1898-1982). An organizer for the Communist Party U.S.A., Plotkin grew up as one of eleven children in the shtetl of Schedrin in White Russia. In an oral history recorded shortly before her death, she recalled this part of her life as “very, very horrible.” She began to work at age eleven and, enduring poverty, ate an abundance of potatoes and often went without shoes. By 1917, though, she became determined to meet a Bolshevik and, still in her teens, trekked forty miles to the nearest city. She reached her goal. At the Bund office, she met a young man who soon asked her to join the ranks of revolutionaries.

In 1922, Plotkin immigrated to the United States, joined the Communist party, and took on the work of organizer. Jailed many times during the Great Depression, she helped form a union among cafeteria workers in New York City and among steel workers in Pittsburgh and coal miners in Wheeling, West Virginia. She also helped out in the unemployed and tenant movements of the era.

Following World war II, McCarthyism took its toll on Plotkin. Shadowed by the FBI, she nevertheless believed the Communist Party should have done more to defend the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of treason and executed. As the party retrenched during the 1950s, she turned to volunteer work under the auspices of the Office of Economic Opportunity and was again arrested for joining a protest. In 1964, the FBI brought her in for questioning, hoping she would provide information on her erstwhile comrades, many of whom, she noted, were now dead. At the time she was volunteering in a senior citizen residence, protesting against the Vietnam War, and fighting for the Harlem 6. In this, her final meeting with the FBI, she scolded the agent, telling him that he would be doing better work if he were in Mississippi registering African Americans to vote.

Plotkin, Sara. Full-Time Active: Sara Plotkin, an Oral History. Edited by Arthur Tobier. New York: Community Documentation Workshop at St. Marks on the Bowery, 1980.

Plotkin, Sara. Oral History, 1980.

http://www.anapsid.org/schedrin/saraplotkin.pdf