On his return to the US he again served as editor of The Militant from 1946-47 and 1951-53. In 1954 he moved to Detroit, where he worked as a proofreader for the Detroit Free Press and became a member of the International Typographical Jean van Heij (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.
Van Heijenoort was born on July 23, 1912, in Creil, France, and attended the Lycee St. Louis in Paris. Jean van Heijenoort (front), with Trotsky 24
Union. He spent 13 years as an active leader of the Detroit party branch, where he founded the Friday Night Socialist Forum, which ran continuously from 1954 until 1967. When he left Detroit George returned to New York City where he remained for the rest of his life. He is survived by his wife, comrade, and companion of 46 years, Dorothea. enoort He became a radical at the age of 15, and in about 1931 joined the French Trotskyist group, the Communist League. He was the first adherent who had not been expelled from the French Communist Party or 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 and bodyguard, in Turkey, France, Norway and Mexico. This ended in (left) and others. (DR)
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 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 "Mare Loris" and "Daniel Logan," served as secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, which was located in New York City during World War II. Throughout the early 1940s he contributed copiously to Fourth International, theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party, especially on matters pertaining to Western Europe. He also participated in an internal party literary discussion on the nature of dialectical materialism.
In the mid-1940s, van Heijenoort 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