November 1939, when he traveled to New York City on a political assignment for a few months. In May 1940, after a group of Mexican Communists led by David Alfaro Siqueiros assaulted the Trotsky household with machine guns and murdered an American guard, van Heijenoort volunteered to rejoin Trotsky's staff at once. But Trotsky urged that he stay in the the International Typographical Jean van Heijenoort
(1912-1986)
JEAN VAN HEIJENOORT, secretary to Leon Trotsky from 1932 to 1939 died at the age of 73, in Mexico City on March 25, 1986. In 1977 he had retired from the philosophy department at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and for the past several years lived in Palo Alto, California, where he was editing the papers of the logician Kurt Godel.
He became a radical at the age of
1931 joined the French Trotskyist group, the Communist League. He was the first adherent who had not been expelled the French Communist Young Communist League.
In October 1932, at the age of 20, van Heijenoort arrived in Prinkipo, Turkey, to begin seven years of service with Trotsky as secretary, translator
United States; van Heijenoort was teaching French in Baltimore in August 1940 when he read in the newspaper that a second assassination attempt had succeeded.
For the next few years van Heijenoort, known under the pseudonyms "Marc Loris" and "Daniel Logan," served as secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, which was located in New York City during World early 1940s he contributed copiously to Fourth International, theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party, especially on matters pertaining to Western Europe. He also in an internal party discussion on the nature of dialectical materialism.
In the mid-1940s, van Heijenoort
Heijenoort
Van born on was
July 23, 1912, in Creil, France, and attended the Lycee St. Louis in Paris.
Jean van Heijenoort (front), with Trotsky (left) and others. (DR)
24 in Turkey, France, and bodyguard,
Norway and Mexico. This ended in supported a political tendency led by Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow which switched its allegiance to Max Shachtman's Workers Party in 1946. In the autumn of 1947 van Heijenoort read a paper on the 100th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto to a group of friends and political associates, in which he argued that, despite the reasonableness of Marx's predictions in 1848, the political incapacity of the working class had been definitively proven to be an inherent and not a conjunctural weakness. The paper was published in the March 1948 Partisan Review as "A Century's Balance Sheet" under the pseudonym "Jean Vannier."
Van Heijenoort subsequently departed from radical politics and devoted himself to an academic career. In the 1950s he joined the department of mathematics at New York University, and in 1965 he became a member of the philosophy department at Brandeis. A 1967 book published by Harvard University Press, From Frege to Godel: A Sourcebook in Mathematical Logic, earned him a national reputation. In 1978 Harvard University Press also published his book of recollections, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan.
During the late 1970s, van Heijenoort assisted in the preparation of the Trotsky Archives at Houghton Library, Harvard University, which became open to the public in 1980. From then until his death he cooperated in aiding the research of scholars and others interested in Trotskyist historiography.
International Viewpoint 19 May 1986