Mayn tsvaoeh durkh dir ikh loz: The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson by Rebecca L. Thompson APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: _________________________________________________________ Dr. David A. Patterson, Chair _________________________________________________________ Dr. Sean Cotter _________________________________________________________ Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth _________________________________________________________ Dr. Nils Roemer Copyright 2018 Rebecca L. Thompson All Rights Reserved Mayn tsvaoeh durkh dir ikh loz: The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson by Rebecca L. Thompson, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES—STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Despite the moments when this felt like a solitary process, the amount of support I have enjoyed along the way is more than anyone could ask for. I would like to sincerely thank the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, and particularly donors to the Istvan and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth Research Fund, whose generosity enabled my research in Berlin. A sheynem dank to the educators, organizers, and participants of the 2017 Summer Yiddish University in Berlin, Germany—especially di yidishe meydlekh. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my committee members, and in particular to my chair, Dr. David Patterson, for their wisdom, encouragement, and insight. Thanks and love to my family, because nothing can be built on a weak foundation. Thank you to my cats for sitting on my Yiddish dictionary, walking on my keyboard, and pulling the page flags out of my research materials. Finally, unending love and thanks to my partner in life. You have been supportive, encouraging, and very, very patient, and I can think of no one more deserving of this dedication. March 2018 iv Mayn tsvaoeh durkh dir ikh loz: The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson Rebecca L. Thompson, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018 Supervising Professor, Dr. David A. Patterson This dissertation examines the socialist realism produced by Dovid Bergelson from 1926 to 1952. This socialist realism, primarily in the form of novellas, epic novels, and journalistic pieces, expresses a genuine faith in the Soviet system and in its leader, Josef Stalin. However, Bergelson’s work also manages to engage with Jewish culture and identity, both by virtue of its creation and publication in the Yiddish language and through its focus on Yiddish and Jewish themes. This project hypothesizes that Bergelson identified an issue of identity within the realm of Yiddish literature. While earlier authors in the field constructed the literature by building upon Judaism’s oral tradition, consciously choosing Yiddish in opposition to other languages, and even manufacturing a hierarchy and criticism within the genre, Bergelson’s work elaborates upon this self-referential uncertainty by questioning the location—or what I call the “homing”—of Yiddish literature. This homelessness was, I argue, based in the insufficiency of the shtetl as both a physical, bordered location, and as a metaphysical mindset that, to Bergelson, represented superstition, oppression, and poverty. v Bergelson’s solution to this problem was the “new Russia,” or the Soviet state. Where earlier modernist writings produced in Kiev and Berlin, such as Nokh alemen and Opgang, deal with this shtetl, his new writings, such as Baym dnyepr and Birobidzhaner, portray Jews engaging with historicity, self-formation, and a new Jewish consciousness. While a conflict certainly existed between one’s identity as a Soviet and one’s identity as a Jew, however those identities were undertaken and performed, I argue that Bergelson’s readers found, in his writings, inspiration and guidance in their lives as both Soviet citizens and Jewish individuals. At the same time, this ever-present conflict is based in two systems that, though they may appear diametrically at odds with each other, do not function along the same delineations and cannot be defined in compatible ways. Though this incompatibility should have precluded any conflict or usurping of one system by the other, the tension between Jews and the Communist Party, particularly Jews active within their community, often had tragic outcomes. Indeed, Bergelson and his colleagues were simply writers and activists— sometimes reluctant activists—caught between, and within, two identities. This project will examine Bergelson’s writings in relation to the Soviet Jewish experience, the fields of diasporic literature and minority literature, and the notion of self-creation in the face of totalitarianism. In performing this scholarship, I hope to illuminate new aspects of the spaces occupied by Soviet Jews, and to prove that those spaces make up a sort of uniquely Soviet “Yiddishland.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………..………………...………………………………...…………………………...iv ABSTRACT……………………..……………………………………………………………………………………………….v INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER ONE THE DEGRADATION OF THE PEN: THE FOUNDATIONS OF YIDDISH LITERATURE………………..……………………………………………………………………………...……………….10 CHAPTER TWO BERGELSON IN KIEV AND BERLIN……………………………………………...…34 CHAPTER THREE DIASPORA AND THE PROBLEM OF TEMPOROSPATIALITY…………….42 CHAPTER FOUR SOCIALIST REALISM AND THE REHOMING OF YIDDISH LETTERS.…58 CHAPTER FIVE THE “OLD” RUSSIA, THE “NEW” RUSSIA, AND THE JEWS…..……………76 CHAPTER SIX JEWISH SUBJUGATION AS A MECHANISM OF SURVIVAL………………..95 CHAPTER SEVEN SOVIET-JEWISH IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE…………………………130 CHAPTER EIGHT THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF THE YIDDISHISTS..…………………….144 CONCLUSION YIDDISHLAND……………………………….....……..………………………………….154 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE TO “JEWS AND THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND,” OR YIDN UN DI FOTERLAND-MILKHOME………………………………………………………………..……………………………164 APPENDIX JEWS AND THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND………………………..…....168 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………….…………………..…………………………………………...184 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………..………………………...………………...…………………….…189 CURRICULUM VITAE vii INTRODUCTION Dovid Bergelson was born in 1884 in a Ukrainian shtetl and reached wide recognition in 1909 with his first Yiddish-language novella, Arum vokzal.1 In 1921, Bergelson fled the harshness of life under the Bolsheviks, moved to Berlin, and secured a position as a correspondent for the Berlin offices of the Jewish Daily Forward. He continued to write prolifically, mostly in the form of novellas and articles in various periodicals. Despite his involvement in Yiddish life in Weimar Germany, Bergelson underwent an ideological shift in the late 1920s that would shift his geopolitical focus back to the young Soviet Union, primarily because he saw it as the only future home for secular Yiddish life. Bergelson published his groundbreaking article on this topic, “Dray tsentern” (1926), in one of the only two issues of the journal he edited at the time, In shpan.2 In this piece, Bergelson argued that the U.S. and Poland had fallen away as centers of Yiddish life and creativity, and that the only remaining place for the Jewish people to live traditionally and in safety was the Soviet Union (Novershtern). Bergelson returned to Russia in 1933. His leftist political leanings continued to influence his writings, and he became an enthusiastic adherent to the confines of socialist realism, indicating a strong identification with the policies and purported goals of the Soviet system. However, Jewish nationalist themes saw continued prevalence in his work. This involvement with the Jewish community and secular Jewish political engagement was also indicated by his activities as a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), 1 “At the Depot” 2 “Three Centers,” in the journal In Harness. 1 whose founding in 1942 was significantly motivated by the violence of Nazi Einsatzgruppen against Soviet Jews. National Socialism also provided a common enemy for the peoples of the USSR to unite against—one theory, perhaps, that could explain the survival of Bergelson and other Jewish public figures throughout the Great Purge of 1936-1938. However, this was only a temporary reprieve. Bergelson was arrested along with other committee members in 1948, during the anti-Semitic purges of Yiddishists that became the hallmark of Stalin’s final years. He was tortured, interrogated, accused of crimes against the Soviet state related to “Jewish nationalism,” and was executed at the Lubyanka prison in 1952 (Novershtern). The news of his death broke years later, and he was quietly and unassumingly “rehabilitated” by Khrushchev’s government in 1955. The complexity of Bergelson’s work renders it a rich subject for discursive and sociopolitical contextual analysis, as does its close relation to the conditions from which it arose. After all, because of the close interrelatedness of topics such as Bergelson’s work, socialist realism and the conditions of cultural production in the USSR, Jewish life and religion, and the politics of Yiddishkayt, to examine one such topic is to inherently examine and explore others. However, the majority of the scholarship focused on Bergelson’s oeuvre concentrates on his early modernist prose, produced during his years in Kiev and Berlin, and overlooks his later socialist realist writings from within the Soviet state. Many scholars dismiss these writings as lip service to Stalin, ignoring the connections between these writings and other historical, social,