The Jew: Between Victimhood and Complicity, Or How an Army-Dodger and Rootless Cosmopolitan Has Become a Saintly Ogre

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Chapter 4 The Jew: Between Victimhood and Complicity, or How an Army-Dodger and Rootless Cosmopolitan Has Become a Saintly Ogre

There has never been and there is no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Alexander Kosygin1 ∵

Introduction

It is hardly possible to write about the 1941–1945 conflict between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany without mentioning the Jewish experience in a war that, as Kiril Feferman claims, was ‘the Jews’ war’, the Nazis’ principal enemy being Judeo-Bolshevism.2 Indeed, when Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941 Soviet Russia boasted the largest Jewish diaspora in Europe3 and, as in other countries conquered by Hitler’s army, in the German-occupied parts of the USSR Jews became the prime target of Nazi violence. Having been rounded up into ghettos, they were either shot after digging their own graves or, less frequently, transported to concentration or extermination camps. Jews were also the victims of the worst genocide that the Germans carried out on Soviet soil: in September 1941 at Babi Yar, a huge wooded ravine on the out- skirts of Kiev, over thirty-three thousand men, women and children were killed within two days. Yet, in the Soviet context, Jewish wartime history goes beyond the Holocaust, as some half a million Jews fought in both the Red Army and

1 Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers 1964–1980. 2 Kiril Feferman, ‘ “The Jews’ War”: Attitudes of Soviet Jewish Soldiers and Officers towards the USSR in 1940–41’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27.4 (2014), 574–90 (p. 574). 3 It is estimated that three million Jews were living within the pre–1939 borders of the Soviet Union and five million after the Soviet Union’s 1939 annexation of Eastern Poland. See Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, vol. 3, ed. by M. Avrum Erlich (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009), p. 114.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004362406_006 The Jew 187 partisan units.4 Not only that, but many Jews occupied high-ranking positions5 and became distinguished with the highest Soviet orders, including the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.6 Despite these statistics, both Jewish soldiers and Holocaust victims have been entirely absent from, have marginal presence in, are treated indirectly or are even vilified by Soviet cultural repre- sentations of World War II.7 Such a situation only reflected the official Soviet policy on the Jewish war experience; without denying the Holocaust or accus- ing Jewish soldiers of cowardice, the Shoah was, as Catherine Merridale puts it, ‘the most ominous of the silences at official ceremonies of commemoration’,8 as state-controlled historiography programmatically submerged Jewish suf- fering and heroism into the general Soviet victories and losses of the Great Fatherland War.9 Whereas the very strict (self-)censorship to which works published in Soviet Russia were necessarily submitted can be partly blamed for the literary misrep- resentations of Jewish wartime experience,10 it can hardly justify the conspicu- ously derisory role that Makine’s novels, all published in the West and in any case already when the Soviet system was crumbling or had already collapsed, assign to Soviet Holocaust victims and Jewish combatants. It could even be postulated that by minimising the Jews’ presence in his oeuvre, Makine, on the

4 Ibidem., p. 948. 5 For example, there were three hundred and five Jewish generals. Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: Gefen Books, 2010), p. 6. 6 Ibidem, p. 24. See also Gershon Shapiro, The Stories of Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988). The exact number of Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union varies from source to source, oscillating around the figure of one hundred and fifty. 7 For a discussion of the underrepresentation of the Holocaust in Soviet literature, see, for example, Lukasz Hirszowicz, ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror’, in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Soviet Jews in the Nazi- Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. by Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 29–59; or Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 387–420. For an analysis of the Shoah in Soviet film, see Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 8 Merridale, The Night of Stone, p. 292. Cf. Carleton, ‘Victory in Death’, p. 139. 9 See, for example, Zvi Gitelman, ‘History, Memory and Politics: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 5.1 (1990), 23–37. 10 Such an explanation is offered by Gary Rosenshield in his analysis of Anatoly Rybakov’s 1978 novel about Jewish life and the Holocaust. Gary Rosenshield, ‘Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand’, Modern Language Association, 111.2 (1996), 240–55 (p. 240).