Early life Chana Mindlin was born on March 25, 1864, in an inn in the
Vitebsk Governorate of the
Russian Empire. She was the third of eight children and raised in an
Orthodox Jewish family. As only her brothers were allowed to be educated, she was informally taught how to read by one of her brothers, but was not taught how to write. After the death of her mother and eldest brother, by the 1880s, the rest of the family sought to emigrate, as
pogroms in the Russian Empire increasingly threatened their safety.
Settlement in America Chana Mindlin, known by the
anglicised name "Annie", arrived in
New York City in April 1886. There she was introduced to
anarchism by her brother Harris and his friend
Israel Kopeloff, a follower of
Johann Most, and she joined the
Pioneers of Liberty, a Jewish anarchist organization. In New York, Mindlin went to work in a
sweatshop, earning less than $6 () for up to 80 hours of work per week. Unable to handle the stress of the job, she quit two months later and set off to the
Midwestern United States. On July 7, 1886, Mindlin handed in her
resignation notice and set off for
Kansas. There, her uncle
Chaim Mindlin had established the
Lasker Colony, a small Jewish colony named after the German liberal
Eduard Lasker, on land seized from the
Osage Nation. Her train went through miles of dusty farmland before arriving in Lasker, which she discovered had been filled with wildflowers by the Jewish colonists. On August 5, 1886, she registered as a homesteader with
Ford County. She had her own house and planted 9 acres of corn with the help of her brothers. On November 7, 1887, she married
Jacob Livshis, first in a ceremony performed by a
justice of the peace, followed by a traditional
Jewish wedding. In 1888, Jacob and Annie Livshis moved to
Chicago, where they got factory jobs in sweatshops. There the couple began organizing Jewish workers against the factories'
exploitative working conditions, establishing a cloakmakers'
trade union in 1890. That same year, they returned to their homestead on Lasker Colony, where they had two children: Peter () and Annie (). Their son was born deaf and asthmatic and their daughter died while she was still young. By 1898, persistent
drought had made farming impossible, so they left Lasker Colony and returned to Chicago.
Life in Chicago In Chicago, the Livshis family founded the
American anarchist movement at its strongest. They established an anarchist reading group, named after the Ukrainian Jewish anarchist
David Edelstadt, whose
Yiddish poetry inspired them. Their home in
Wicker Park became a centre for anarchists in Chicago. There, Annie Livshis hosted prominent anarchist intellectuals such as
Abraham Cahan,
Emma Goldman,
Sadakichi Hartmann,
Rudolf Rocker and
Michael Zametkin. Livshis hosted members of her family and regularly received visits from her friends
Lucy Parsons and
Ben Reitman. She also opened their home to the anarchist writer
Voltairine de Cleyre during the last years of her life, although she found living in the communal household difficult due to the constant activity. When de Cleyre died in 1912, Livshis organised her funeral in
Walheim Cemetery. She also published a pamphlet,
In Memoriam: Voltairine de Cleyre, to raise money for the collection and publication of her deceased friend's work. During this period, she was also able to get her son an education, and found him a public elementary school with a program for deaf children. He later graduated from
Tuley High School and attempted to further his education at the
University of Chicago, but he was not able to keep up with the lectures. She cared for Peter and his wife Inez, who had met at a deaf club, and provided them with a home. After her husband's death in 1925, Livshis continued their anarchist activism. On her 80th birthday, she was praised by her son and the Russian anarchist
Boris Yelensky, respectively for her devoted parenting and activism. In 1950, Livshis, her son and daughter-in-law moved to
Arvada, Colorado. She died there, on April 1, 1953, at the age of 89. ==References==