When he died in 1943 while on a lecture tour in Canada, Chaim Zhitlovsky was still a well-known figure in the Jewish world as he had been for some forty years, so much so that posthumously he at once became the object of a bitter and highly publicized controversy. Accused in articles and monographs by leading members of the Forverts group–Abe Cahan, Hillel Rogoff, and Chaim Liberman – of having been a life-long Jewish antisemite, he was defended by the literary critic Shmuel Niger in a series of articles in Der tog and in a book put out by his memorial committee, which included such prominent publicists on the pro-Communist left as Ben Zion Goldberg and Kalman Marmor. By now, however, he is largely forgotten.

Perhaps this fate is no more than poetic justice. A man who adopted, abandoned, or lost interest in so many different political programs and causes; who joined, left, or drifted away from so many parties was probably destined, at least in the short run, to oblivion. At varying times, he was a sharp opponent of Zionism and a Zionist, an antiterritorialist and a territorialist, a supporter of the Bund and one of its harshest critics, a Socialist Revolutionary and an apologist for Bolshevism. He was a kind of ideological nomad, forever on the move.

Such a man might, of course, have imposed himself on the imagination of posterity by his sheer creative power or the depth of his personality.