Biography
Harry Eduardovich Eisman, born in Kishinev (Chisinau), then in the Russian Empire, was a Bronx schoolboy and Young Pioneer whose repeated arrests made him the best-known child political prisoner in America. Between May Day 1928 and March 1930 he was arrested at least eight times: distributing May Day literature outside Public School 61, a felony concealed-weapon booking over what was reportedly an automobile-jack handle, mass picketing in the dressmakers' and fur workers' strikes, Young Pioneer May Day demonstrations, a police-brutality protest at the Workers Center, and a waterfront demonstration against Boy Scouts sailing aboard the Samaria to an international jamboree, for which the Children's Court sent him to six months in the Hawthorne Jewish Reform School for Boys. After the March 6, 1930 Union Square unemployment demonstration he was recommitted to Hawthorne under a commitment reported as five years or more, or until his twenty-first birthday. Released on November 15, 1930 under an arrangement allowing him to leave the country, he sailed for the Soviet Union via Germany on November 17, 1930. He died in Moscow on May 6, 1979 and is buried at Donskoye Cemetery. Some sources give December 2, 1915 as his birth date, but his Soviet military record gives November 26, 1913, and a 1929 Children's Court report describing him as fourteen supports the 1913 date.
