Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of The

Chapter 7 Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew The castration complex is the deepest root of antisemitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis — a piece of his penis, they think — and this gives them a right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women. Sigmund Freud. 1909.1 With the advent of the Glasnost reforms the subject of ethnicity gained a particular momentum, becoming one of the dominant themes in public debate. On the wave of this ethnocentricity, which was one of the driving forces behind the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, there returned, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the theme of Jewish ethnicity. This time both Jewish and non-Jewish authors used the softening of state censorship and its subsequent collapse to express their views on all things Jewish, Russian, or any other ethnicity. In line with the fashion of the day for ethnic themes, the ethnic identity of Jews gained momentum and was invariably expressed by Jewish and non-Jewish authors through the Jew’s ethnic body, physical appearance, dress, language, and speech. This chapter looks at the modification of the peculiar and paradoxical construct of the male Jew’s body as a carnal Jew, a Jew whose materiality is expressed in his libidinal drive and lust, both of which invariably lead to corruption. This construct is intrinsically linked to the new post-censorship discourse in Russia that arrived with the reforms of Glasnost. This period was characterized by an increase in expressions of formerly forbidden material, including such topics as sexuality, criminal pathologies — such as sadism — of various kinds, ethnic differences, and family crime. Art and the media responded to, and often exploited, the public’s demand for such material, and the market was flooded with semi-pornographic and hard 168168 Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew pornographic material depicting devious and criminal behavior. This new art was dubbed pornukha and chernukha — pornography and dark perversion (chernyi refers to the color black) — and included murder, sadistic sex, and every form of pathologic expression of basic instincts.2 It is under these discursive circumstances that the image of the Jew’s body receives its construction, reconstruction and, in line with the culture’s newly discovered taste for postmodernism, deconstruction. The construct of the Jew’s body is a combination of heightened sexual instinct and lust for Russian women and money.3 All these instincts find their freedom of expression in the conditions of the Perestroika period, when the government relaxed its controls and Soviet society was imbued with a new sense of anarchy. With a special word coined to characterize this new state — bespredel, or a state of things with no limits or bounds — the image of the Jew’s body underwent similar reconfigurations. The sexuality and lust of Jews was seen to be limitless; their instinctive greed was deemed to be without boundaries. The Jew thus became the living incarnation of the concept of bespredel itself. Admittedly, the essence of this construct had already existed in fin-de- siècle culture and had found its expression in the work of Vasily Rozanov. It also appeared, as was shown earlier, in the post-Stalin Russia of the 1950s and later in the 1970s, resurfacing again during the Perestroika years and continuing into the present. But never did it receive such overt and explicit expression as it did during the Perestroika years and in post-Soviet Russia. If Ivanov’s novel The Yellow Metal was taken out of circulation because it contained gross images of ethnic Others, then in the society since Perestroika there have been no such controls imposed, and the proliferation of representations of the grotesque body of the ethnic Other — the Jew, Chechen or other Kavkazets (a person from the Caucasus) — has become unstoppable.4 Previously in Soviet culture the construct of a carnal Jewish male hungry for love of Russian women existed both as a vivid image and as a silent phantom. It existed even when it was not part of the official discourse, during the time in which so-called deracinated Jews were appearing on the pages of Russian literature in a form that rendered them indistinguishable from other Soviet people.5 What is of interest to this investigation, however, is the paradoxical situation in which Jews were not verbally identified as Jews yet were nevertheless, as seen in the previous chapter, recognized by the audience as Jews due to features which, while not verbally articulated as “Jewish” or “Muslim,” signified a group that was vaguely Jewish or non- Slavic. Into this latter category fell “people of Caucasian nationality” (“liudi kavkazskoi natsional’nosti”) — a lexical formation parallel with “people 169 Chapter 7 of Jewish nationality” (“liudi evreiskoi natsional’nosti”) whose darker complexion and dark hair made them a part of a vague group of racial Others with definite moral and economic characteristics, including professions and occupations that earned them considerable money. The cult film Ivan Vasilievich meniaet professiu (Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession [1973]) serves as an example of this “code” that was used to depict Jews and other dark non-Slavs: a dentist, tall, dark, and handsome and living in luxury, has extravagant tastes and, as the mild humor of the comedy implies, probably earns his money by having a few private patients.6 Never does the film make it explicit to what nationality this person belongs; the viewer, however, will think of him as non-Slavic, as Jewish or Armenian or Georgian or belonging to some other nationality from the Caucasus. Why? Because he is depicted as excessively enterprising, not “straight” enough and, of course, because he is too dark in his coloring to be a Slav. The audience thus learns to receive such signals and, in spite of the official culture’s perceived attempts to stop sending these signals, the markers survive in society through their circulation in oral culture and their transmission from one generation to another via the microcultures of families and communities. As Perestroika and the decade of the 1990s revealed, ethnic knowledge as a foundation of ethnic identities survived among Jews and other non-Russian nationalities, despite official efforts to erase it. Indeed, antisemitic stereotypes are a part of the larger construct of Otherness against which the Russian Self identifies itself as a monolithic ethnic collective. Russianness thus defined becomes a major feature of Russian nationalist assertiveness in post-Soviet Russia. This chapter demonstrates the stereotypes of the carnal and material Jew through the examples of a novel and a film: Vasily Belov’s novel Vse vperedi (The Best is Yet to Come [1987]) and Leonid Gorovetz’s film Ladies’ Tailor (1990).7 The author of the novel is an ethnic Russian of nationalist orientation, and the director of the film is an ethnic Jew. The novel contains the most explicit attacks on Jewish males by depicting their sexuality as a danger to the very core of Russian society. Gorovetz’s film can be regarded as an example of how a Jewish author uses the newly acquired freedom of Glasnost to deal with the alterity of Jews in the dominant cultural discourse. It will be argued that the film represents a Jewish view of Jewish corporeality. Intended to counter antisemitic stereotypes, it attempts to rework these stereotypes by displacing evaluative signs and challenging the dominant culture’s binary archetype which privileges spirit over body. But in spite of its attempts to challenge a number of political stereotypes, including those linked to the Jewish character, this film unexpectedly reveals views on Jewish corporeality that confirm the construct of Jews as a people who are 170 Glasnost and the Uncensored Sexed Body of the Jew associated with distinctive attitudes toward the sexed body. It is these themes that will be the focus of this chapter’s investigation. The Jewish Male as Destroyer of the Russian Family: Vasily Belov’s Novel Vse vperedi Belov’s novel The Best is Yet to Come was the first open outburst against Jews and Judaism to appear in the Soviet Union as a result of the softening of the policy of censorship as part of the Glasnost reforms. The novel was published one year after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, at a time when the Soviet government and the public were in a state of panic that both triggered the reforms and prompted the Soviet people to start unleashing their hidden fears and frustrations. Before Glasnost Belov had been known to readers as a writer of village prose affiliation — a group of writers that promoted nativist Russian values and endorsed the inborn qualities of simple rural Russian people.8 Their writing disseminated the rising sentiments of Russian nationalism, and the authorities’ approval of this ideological dissemination can be seen as silent support for growing Russian self-assertiveness following the years of Brezhnevite “stagnation” during the 1970s and 1980s. The Best is Yet to Come, however, exceeded all the norms of expression of Russian nationalism, effectively launching a new era in the expression of racial hatred and anti-Jewish sentiments in Russian discourse during the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.9 The novel has a definite and well-defined theme devoted to the topic of the disintegration of the Russian family. In interviews Belov has expressed his concern surrounding issues linked to rising divorce rates, alcoholism, infidelity in marriage and the traumatic effect of divorce on children. These issues, he explained, have a considerable impact on the demographic situation in Soviet society which is marked by low birth rates.10 This demographic crisis facing the Russian population has escalated since the Glasnost period and continues to be a feature of Russian society today.

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