The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson

Mayn tsvaoeh durkh dir ikh loz: The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson

Rebecca L. Thompson

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Dr. David A. Patterson, Chair

______Dr. Sean Cotter

______Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

Rebecca L. Thompson

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, and cultural movements. This dissertation will contribute to the scholarly examination of these later writings and will work against the common perception that socialist realism is a manifestation of a soulless, formulaic system

with no form or function other than the promotion of state-sanctioned ideas. Indeed, to dismiss these later works of Bergelson’s as formulaic, soulless machinations is to perform a great disservice to the fields of Russian literary studies, Yiddish literary studies, Jewish philosophy, and minority literatures.

Aside from brief biographical sketches accompanying short translations—for example, in Ruth Wisse’s Yiddish anthology or Joachim Neugroschel’s collection of

Bergelson’s Berlin stories—the greater part of recent scholarship on Bergelson can be represented by two monographs. The first is David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist

Realism, a collection edited by Gennady Estraikh and one of Bergelson’s foremost translators, Joseph Sherman. Published in 2007, this collection examines themes of religion and ideology in Bergelson’s works, illuminated by the opinion that Bergelson, raised among

Hasidim but having chosen engagement with the secular world, was always in search of greater meaning and motivation in his life. Pieces by diverse scholars, such as Harriet

Murav, Mikhail Krutikov, and David Schneer, examine Bergelson’s ideological attachments—to the diasporic Yiddish life in Berlin, to the Russian Revolution, to the

Kultur-Lige, to the Soviet nation-building project in Birobidzhan, and to the Jewish Anti-

Fascist Committee—through the lens of this lifelong search. Ultimately, Sherman and

Estraikh seek to dismantle the “critical opinion” first voiced by Shmuel Niger that

Bergelson had produced a collection of glorious work, and then, after 1917, “prostituted his talent in the service of Stalinist propaganda” (“Preface”). Indeed, Sherman and Estraikh note that most readers of Yiddish works value Bergelson’s impressionistic techniques, which are highly represented in his pre-1926 modernist work, and ignore the later socialist

realist works, which operate in a much less “oblique and allusive” manner (“Preface”). I very much agree with these arguments. While this collection aims to challenge these conventional views by examining writings from Bergelson’s whole career, I seek to shift away from these conventions completely by examining primarily the Soviet writings.

Though I do briefly discuss a few important modernist works from earlier in Bergelson’s career, I do so in order to illustrate the shifts, changes, and continuities present in the author’s movement from one ideology to another.

Secondly, Allison Schachter’s 2012 Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish

Literature in the Twentieth Century identifies a schizophrenic element in what she terms

“Jewish literature”: nationalist tension often places “fracturing” pressures upon literatures that are inherently diasporic, even supra-statist. Schachter’s work, in its examinations of

Hebrew and Yiddish literature in relation to language, borders, intercultural spaces, and diaspora, seems indeed to argue for the adoption of a supra-statist mindset. I see her work positing that the bordered, physical homeland is not something to feel deprived of, but something that can be seen as limiting and superfluous—something that can be overcome, and not necessarily longed for, in the act of writing diasporically. In the introduction to her monograph, Schachter cites the founders of the Jewish PEN Club who, in 1926, found themselves challenged with choosing a city to headquarter their group. She notes that “the founders of the Jewish PEN embraced a nonterritorial, diasporic view of Jewish literature, and believed, at least for a time, that Jewish-language culture could flourish independently of any sovereign political territory” (Schachter 6). She identifies this lack of a political

“home” as a central contributing factor to the “culturally and linguistically specific

modernist aesthetic” produced when diasporic languages, lacking bordered national spaces and established institutions, take it upon themselves to produce and consume literature

(Schachter 7) However, where Schachter examines numerous Hebrew and Yiddish authors, from Yosef Chaim Brenner and Gabriel Preil to S. Y. Abramovitsh and Kadya Molodowsky, I focus only upon Bergelson, and furthermore, I do not focus upon his modernist writing produced under conditions of diaspora. Instead, I focus on the Soviet writing, which I argue possesses tensions all its own. Bergelson sought to home Yiddish letters in the USSR, but still wrote as a minority voice because of his Jewish identity. Futhermore, while the Soviet regime featured established and powerful cultural institutions, those institutions often sought to censor and silence the very voices they published. For these reasons, my research differs greatly from Schachter’s, and at the same time builds upon her work.3

I propose to examine Bergelson not only as an author engaged in a lifelong ideological evolutionary process, but as a lens through which to examine censorship and self-reflective identity formation, Communism and authoritarianism, diaspora and supra- statism, and Judaism. My primary claims revolve around Soviet-Jewish identity: what it is, how it is formed, what it seeks and what it finds in Bergelson’s writings. By moving from basic assertions about Yiddish letters, to specific claims regarding Bergelson’s modernist

3 Numerous critical works on Bergelson exist in Hebrew. The central monograph originating in Hebrew is a dissertation by Abraham Novershtern, the title of which can be translated as “Structural aspects of Dovid Bergelson’s prose from its beginnings until ‘Mides-hadin’.” Interestingly, few monographs, if any, exist in Russian on the topic of Bergelson. Numerous works of his have been translated into Russian, however, and these writings contain notes on his life and career as accompaniments to the stories themselves. Be that as it may, this dearth of Russian-language criticism on this author is surprising, and certainly deserves further examination.

and socialist realist novels, to wider conclusions on Soviet identity and Yiddishkayt, my research presents a new perspective on Dovid Bergelson and new assertions about his contribution to Soviet Jewish identity and the wider field of Yiddish letters.

This will be accomplished by first examining the basis of Bergelson’s work, namely the echoes of the Haskalah and the three Yiddish authors—S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem

Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, collectively known as di klasiker—whose works form the foundation of Yiddish literature. After examining the tensions that shaped early Yiddish literature, I will move into an examination of Bergelson’s early modernist writing, most of which was produced in Kiev and Berlin in the 1910s and early 1920s. This will lead into the discussion of a key problem in Yiddish literature rooted in the language’s diasporic condition, which I term “the problem of temporospatiality.” I will then examine the solutions Bergelson posits to this problem and mark the ways in which his writings interact with this and other cultural and historiographical structures—for example, the shtetl as a physical and metaphysical space, wartime reporting within the USSR, the Jewish

Autonomous Region (also known as Birobidzhan), and the work and research of the Jewish

Anti-Fascist Committee. In doing so, I will analyze the creative and expressive aspects of a genre that can be misconstrued as little more than a vehicle for government propaganda.

Finally, I will discuss the effects of Bergelson’s work upon his Soviet-Jewish people, and I will analyze the ways in which these effects promoted the formulation and performance of a composite Soviet-Jewish identity to Bergelson’s readership. These analyses have, to my knowledge, not been performed before, and I hope to contribute to this field alongside scholars such as David Schneer, Harriet Murav, Dov-Ber Kerler,

Gennady Estraikh, and others who examine Yiddish and Jewish topics alongside global themes of art, literature, politics, and culture. Furthermore, this dissertation will examine

Bergelson’s work in English, with reference to his writings in the original Yiddish, whereas the most in-depth critical treatments of this author have, up until Sherman and Estraikh’s recent From Modernism to Socialist Realism, been conducted primarily in Yiddish.4

In outlining the parameters of this project, I must mention that Bergelson’s bibliography is enormous.5 I have limited the examined works to those that were written in

Yiddish, published in the USSR, and intended for Soviet-Jewish audiences This first and last distinction will be taken as one and the same, for an understanding of the Yiddish language is a strong indicator of an individual’s Jewish religious observance, Jewish cultural identity, or both. The relevant works date from the year of Bergelson’s ideological shift, 1926, to the year of his murder, 1952. Earlier works will be discussed for the sake of comparative analysis and a thorough treatment of Bergelson’s oeuvre, but will appear less often and be analyzed to a lesser extent.

For example, Bergelson wrote for the Yiddish newspapers Forverts and Frayhayt, but these were based in the United States and intended for an American Jewish audience, and have therefore been excluded from this project. On the other hand, articles from the

Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt, a periodical of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, will

4 Where I type quotations and excerpts in the original Yiddish, I adhere to the YIVO standardized system of transliteration. Exceptions occur only when the transliterated Yiddish appears in a quotation from another text which has used a different standardized system. 5 The most thorough and authoritative bibliography of Bergelson’s work has been compiled by Roberta Saltzman and can be found in Sherman and Estraikh’s David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (306).

be discussed in depth. Likewise, while Bergelson’s Nokh alemen, or The End of Everything, was published before 1926, it will be examined briefly, along with other works from

Bergelson’s modernist period, in order to treat his whole oeuvre accurately and to provide adequate support for analysis of later works. In terms of these writings, almost every

Yiddish-language primary source has been read in the original Yiddish, and often in English as well. Quotes in this dissertation appearing in-text in transliterated Yiddish will feature my own English translations footnoted.

I argue that Bergelson’s work, which adheres to socialist-realist strictures while operating in Yiddish, models a way of being and offers a composite identity to the Jews occupying this space. This dissertation will analyze Bergelson as an architect of a new

Soviet-Jewish identity, which proposes to serve several functions. First of all, this composite identity helps in recognizing and solving the problem of Yiddish that originates as a symptom of a diasporic state of being, the aforementioned problem of temporospatiality. Secondly, constructing this identity helps to situate the Jew in the “new

Russia” and provide salvation from the shtetl, both as a metaphysical construct and a bordered location. Finally, this identity facilitates the organization of a system of Soviet loyalty that allowed for Jewish identification and pride without threatening the hegemony of the state and its monopoly over the loyalty of the individual. The examination of these constructs will also necessitate examinations of socialist realism, the Holocaust, propaganda, and martyrdom. In positing these ideas and tracing their implications and textual representations to their most logical conclusions, I hope to prove that Bergelson’s

later writings, though indeed socialist realist and pro-Soviet, possessed a Jewish soul and a loyalty to his people that no censorship could eliminate.

CHAPTER ONE

THE DEGRADATION OF THE PEN: THE FOUNDATIONS OF YIDDISH LITERATURE

The European Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the development of a new class of intellectual on the European continent. This wide movement also affected the Jewish intelligentsia and was referred to as the Haskalah. During the 1780s, European

Jewry saw the first development of a new intelligentsia class, typically “[j]udged on the bases of their acculturation, openness to European society, and adoption of new lifestyles…They were…unquestionably the first who were conscious of being modern Jews, and the first to advocate a modernist, transformational ideology” (Feiner, Haskalah, v). The movement continued until roughly the 1890s, and its major figures included Hebrew authors and poets such as Abraham Mapu and Yehudah Leib Gordon; reformers and proponents of Jewish modernization, such as Ayzik Meyer Dik; and religious thinkers and scholars like Eliezer Zweifel (Feiner, “Zweifel, Eli’ezer”). Though the Haskalah occurred over an admittedly limited span of time, it had a lasting effect on Jewish letters, Yiddish literature, and the intelligentsia who constructed these movements.

In analyzing the foundations of the Haskalah, Shmuel Feiner identifies a duality often present in the lives of these intellectuals. On the one hand, they were young people in a rapidly-modernizing Europe who were in favor of the European Enlightenment they saw represented around them. On the other hand, they were young Jewish thinkers, often traditionally Torah-educated, who possessed deep cultural and religious connections to their Judaism (Feiner, Haskalah, 9). This consideration of faith is what marked the Haskalah

as a distinct subsection of the wider European Enlightenment. However, while

Enlightenment scholars retained a focus upon faith even while rejecting superstition and embracing rationality, I believe that the Jewish intelligentsia was often coerced into

“choosing a side,” so to speak. Jewish cultural identity was so tied up with religious identity that religious observance and secular engagement sometimes viewed as mutually exclusive: one could be observantly Jewish, or one could be assimilated and non-religious.

A system of values was in place, and a prejudiced one, at that. It argued that to be religious was to eschew any assimilation into or intellectual discourse with the non-Jewish world, and that to be a member of the intelligentsia was to deny one’s Jewishness and reject engagement with Jewish culture or Yiddishkayt.

I believe that this system of values originated from outside the intelligentsia, however, and that many thinkers within the Haskalah wanted very much to embrace rationality and modernity while maintaining a connection to their Jewish identity—an identity that was often unopposed to rationality and modernity in the first place. After all, even as Michael Stanislawski resists generalizations in his biography of Yehudah Leib

Gordon, For Whom Do I Toil?, he admits that while most Eastern European Jews

“never became Zionists or Bundists…were not politicized in the sense of actively belonging or even identifying with any…ideology…[they] were living with one foot in their tradition and the other outside of it, striving—at times tentatively, at times stri- dently, more often than not unselfconsciously—to reconcile the way of life of their parents with the attractions and challenges of modern existence” (Stanislawski, Toil, 5).

We see in this statement that the lives of Eastern European Jews, while observed in hindsight as radical, political, opinionated, and turbulent, were just as everyday and

“unselfconscious” as the lives of any other group in any other region. What Stanislawski seems to argue against here is presentism, and the sweeping application of generalizations rooted in fancy rather than fact.

That being said, where an opposition did exist between enlightened rationality and traditional religiosity, a connection could be maintained through the simultaneous recognition of moral ethics and the value of experience. Feiner notes that many philosophers, including Immanuel Kant and John Locke, valued the notion that experience served as a doorway into truth: “historical thinking was combined with philosophical thinking, and the view that experience, along with pure and abstract reason, was essential in order to acquire a coherent knowledge of truth and values gained wider currency”

(Haskalah, 19). This idea inherently valued human thought, combining occurrences with perceptions and relying upon the human capability to evaluate an outcome and adjust future actions in order to avoid or approach said outcome. Many of the Haskalah intelligentsia maintained a connection with their Jewish faith by evaluating outcomes in ethical and moral terms, and leaned fully into the Enlightenment by utilizing history and historical events as key components of that ethical philosophy.

The tendency I note here, one of schism, compromise, and self-definition, also heavily influenced Jewish literature and its usage of Yiddish. Dan Miron notes in his monograph A Traveler Disguised that nineteenth-century Yiddish literature was almost solely defined by the fact that it was written in Yiddish—or rather, that its creative minds had elected to use Yiddish in the first place (Miron 1). After all, the usage of Yiddish in literature was nothing revolutionary, but Yiddish works were generally meant for the

uneducated, women, children, and the poor, none of whom would have access to education in Hebrew. For those who knew Hebrew, usually well-off men, to engage with Yiddish instead was practically sacrilegious (Miron 2). However, in connection with the Haskalah,

Miron argues that 19th-century Jewish writers “constantly asserted” their desire to be useful in bettering the working classes, broadening their horizons and indicating the ways in which they could strive for improvement. Yiddish was clearly more suited to the task than Hebrew. Their goal was to produce valuable, secular literature in the language already spoken by the Jewish masses, and in this manner, to bring culture and a literary manifestation of Jewish national identity to people who might not otherwise have easy access to it. It also stands to reason that, in a philosophical moment focused upon the value of experiences both personal and historical, the language already thriving as the vernacular of European Jews would be best situated to serve a distinctly European and Jewish movement.

Though we see here that the usage of Yiddish enabled 19th-century Jewish literature to pursue its goal of enlightening the working classes, Miron notes that in many ways,

Yiddish was not more suited to the task than was Hebrew. For example, very few Jewish authors spoke and wrote only in Yiddish. Where they spoke at least one more language equally well, or at least well enough to produce and possess cultural capital, they engaged within a phenomenon Miron calls “literary multilingualism.” This very notion goes against

Enlightenment-era notions that “true,” “good” literature must be honest and direct, its every aspect, including its language, issuing as organically as possible from the author.

Because Yiddish was often a mamaloshen, or “mother tongue,” but almost never the only

mother tongue, its suitedness to literary expression was, in the eyes of the Haskalah, questionable.6 It was accessible to its readership, but did not necessarily fulfill all the cultural and creative urges of its author (Miron 8-11).

Here, we see the phenomenon that renders Yiddish literature so unique among national genres: it was consciously created. Miron refers to the self-development of these

Yiddish writers as “peregrinations,” noting that

“Yiddish was almost never the first choice of nineteenth- century Jewish writers. Even those Yiddish writers who did not develop as pronounced bilingualists…made their debuts and performed at least a part of their literary apprenticeships in another language…Yiddish writers had to grope in the dark, to wander in a linguistic twilight before they found the way to their medium” (Miron 11).

In short, we see here that for most Yiddish writers, some kind of hesitation existed, either unconscious or acknowledged, that rendered Yiddish unsuited to literary expression. One early Yiddish writer, Ayzik Meyer Dik, even explained to his Hebrew readership that he resorted to Yiddish, and in doing so “degraded my pen,” because of his resolute belief that observant Jewish women were badly lacking meaningful and educational reading material

(Miron 13). Dik’s protestations may seem dramatic, but we see here that Yiddish was a mode of cultural communication with definitive goals, and that the usage of the language was more often than not a conscious, calculated decision.

6 Miron cites Max Weinreich here as positioning Hebrew and Yiddish in a relationship he calls “internal bilingualism,” where both languages function within Jewish spaces but serve different purposes (8). In this case, Hebrew is the high language of religion and education, and Yiddish is the low language of the home and the street.

Meanwhile, the political pendulum of Eastern Europe was rapidly swinging to the left, and the concurrent rise of the General Jewish Workers’ Union, or the Bund, linked

Jewish secular culture with socialism that, at least in theory, rejected anti-Semitism in favor of proletarian unity geared toward the collective betterment of society. Many secular Jews became aligned with socialism, and the decision to publish the Bund’s newspaper, Di arbeter shtime, in Yiddish cemented the position of Yiddish as the language of that movement.7 Then, in 1901, the Bund released its official platform, which called for

“national and cultural autonomy” and aligned itself with Yiddish, the language of “the

Jewish working classes” (Schneer 8). In this manner, a cycle of alliances rendered Yiddish the language of working-class European Jews: the Bund, as a product and representation of the working class, officially adopted the language of that class; politics continued its leftward march and the Bund became the most powerful representative of Jewish interests in Eastern Europe; and these occurrences served to strengthen the position of Yiddish as the population’s primary mode of oral and written communication.

It is not inaccurate to state that without the Haskalah, Yiddish literature may never have come to be. The development of the genre was methodical: the Jewish intelligentsia identified a need for Jewish national culture, particularly in the face of internal divisiveness and diaspora and external anti-Semitism and sociopolitical oppression. These scholars and artists actively selected the language in which they intended to create and consume that

Jewish national culture, and their interactions within that culture (against the backdrop of a turbulent, dynamic place and time) served as the catalyzing agent for Yiddish letters to

7 “The Worker’s Voice”

take root and grow. Before moving forward, a discussion of three such authors known as di klasiker—S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz—will examine both the historiographic relevance of their lives and careers as well as their discursive styles and techniques. This literary analysis will be conducted using a selection of stories from the oeuvre of each in English translation: Abramovitsh’s Dos kleyne mentshele; two of

Aleichem’s monologues in which Tevye the Dairyman muses on his troublesome daughters

“Hodl” and “Chave;” and Peretz’s Dos shtrayml and “Tsvishn tsvey berg.”8, 9

Abramovitsh was born into pre-revolutionary imperial Russia, a setting in which most Jews led dangerous, difficult lives. Theodore Steinberg details these hardships, explaining that Jewish life was often dependent upon the whims of a line of far-away and often anti-Semitic tsars: namely Catherine the Great, who acquired the lands in which

Jewish Russians would be ghettoized and that would come to be known as the Pale of

Settlement; Alexander I, who swayed back and forth between leniency and hardline politics involving the exclusion of Jews from various occupations and living areas and the heavy taxation of their meager incomes; and Nicholas I, who “was a virulent anti-Semite who would have liked to destroy the Jews completely” (Steinberg 18). Though the successor to

Nicholas I, Alexander II, was more enlightened and allowed Jews to enter universities and live in thriving metropolitan areas, his death saw a backslide into earlier “hatred and degradation,” and the reigns of Alexander III and the last tsar, Nicholas II, were truly brutal

8 Abramovitsh’s The Little Man and Fishke the Lame…Peretz’s The Shtrayml and “Between Two Mountains.” 9 A shtrayml is a large fur hat shaped somewhat like a stout cylinder. It is worn by Hasidic rebbes in the context of Peretz’s story, but is also worn by other adult Haredi and specifically Hasidic men.

(Steinberg 19). These years saw Abramovitsh writing in both Hebrew and Yiddish, a decision that would help foster the development of and appreciation for both genres.

Abramovitsh was also known as Mendele Moykher Sforim, or “Mendele the Book

Peddler.” This narrative identity was present in almost all of his stories, and came through vividly in a first-person narration heavily reminiscent of oral storytelling traditions. The voice of Mendele mediates all the information Abramovitsh presents to his reader, and this clear delineation of first-person limitation creates a tone very similar to first-person mode of oral storytelling. This tone is meant to generate a sense of questioning in the reader; this

“word of mouth” sensation is similar to the feeling generated when gossiping with a friend or hearing a news story related by a coworker. While the information may very well be correct, it is impossible for the listener to forget that this information is secondhand, and that it is inherently influenced by the narrative of the current storyteller.

This sort of separation of the narrative from the “pure,” “factual” storyline is, in reality, a complex discursive technique, though at first glance, its first-person informality and lack of pretension may seem simplistic or “folksy.” Furthermore, these tales are fictional, but in the world of Mendele the Book Peddler they are factual. The reader is drawn into that world as they mediate the potential for conflicts between a subjective reality and Mendele’s convoluted, potentially faulty memory. The act of mediation and attributing value to Abramovitsh’s statements, mediated by Mendele, assist in the dismantling of skepticism, a suspension of disbelief, and the development of a fuller, richer immersion in the narrative.

For example, Dos kleyne mentshele opens with an introduction and an almost instant reminder of Mendele’s unique perspective:

“As for me, I was born in Tsviatshits and my name is Mendele the Book Peddler. Most of the year I’m on the road, traveling from one place to another, so people know me everywhere. I ride all over Poland with a full stock of books printed in Zhito- mir…Truth is, since the Yiddish newspaper Kol mevasser started coming out a couple years back, I’ve also taken to carrying a few issues. But actually that’s not what I’m driving at—I’m getting off the point. I want to tell you about something else entirely” (Frieden et. al. 3).

This short paragraph contains multitudes, though it seems to be little more than a personal rambling by a distractible narrator. First of all, Mendele situates himself in the world of the reader by citing the names of cities they know and publications they have most probably read. As Dos kleyne mentshele was serialized in Kol mevasser throughout

1864 and 1865, the reader would literally read an intertextual mention of the journal as they read a piece in that journal itself. This is clearly not intended as an advertisement or promotional maneuver—this would be preaching to the choir, so to speak—so the question remains of what Abramovitsh’s intentions are in namedropping the title of the journal within the journal itself. I argue that the author does this in order to firmly cement Mendele within the world of his readership. This conceit was clearly successful: in Abramovitsh’s memoirs, he attempted to dismantle the theory rampant among the Yiddish-reading public that he himself was Mendele the Book Peddler, and that every story narrated by that character was autobiographical. According to Frieden, Abramovitsh’s attempt to

“[reestablish] that dichotomy” was for the most part successful (Frieden et. al. x). Questions and rumors on the nature of his storytelling continued to circulate, however, and it more or

less agreed upon among scholars that Abramovitsh’s works were often inspired by his life, and that many of them were in fact autobiographical. In fact, scholars agree that

Abramovitsh did indeed root some of his tales in his own experiences—for example, critics and friends of the author alike claim that the tale of Fishke the Lame is based upon

Abramovitsh’s own wanderings with a beggar named Avreml the Lame in roughly 1853

(Frieden et. al. xi).

This straddling of the line between reality and fiction is cleverly manipulated by

Abramovitsh as he continues his story, setting the tale in a specific time and place: “Last year, just before Hanukah in 1863” (Frieden et. al. 3). While this “dates” the tale, a term often used to dismiss an earlier work as irrelevant or old-fashioned, here we see that the benefit of grounding the narrative in reality far outweighs any negative consequence of that action. For his Yiddish readers, strongly connected with the history of their people, this thorough dating only serves to place Mendele within the historiological flow of the Jews of

Eastern Europe. The story continues from this exposition, punctuated by Mendele’s constant refrain of “I’m getting off the point” and frequent insertion of Yiddish proverbs.

We see here that Mendele is clearly not a professional or polished writer, and that his words and style are more suited to a casual, spoken conversation than to a print medium.

The effect of these shortcomings is endearing, however, and the readership of Kol mevasser would likely not have been irritated by the presence of an orally-transmitted style in the journal.

These two primary techniques—the positioning of the story in a real time and place, and the constant reminder that our narrator is a first-person, fallible character—serve to

dismantle the division between the reader and the author. As the reader moves through the text, the voice within their head becomes that of Mendele himself. For example as the tale continues, Mendele listens to the rebbe read a letter aloud from a Jew named Isaac

Abraham, who is seeking a judgment and some help in a legal issue. The letter is articulate, with a strong and reliable structure, and outlines the presence throughout Isaac Abraham’s life of the concept of “the little man,” or the embodiment of the human soul present in the eyes of every Jew. The tone of the letter is strongly contrasted with the tone of Mendele’s own storytelling, further imposing a structure that emphasizes the difference between spoken storytelling and the written word. Abramovitsh does not seem to press any kind of value-coding upon this sense of difference. No one marvels at Isaac Abraham’s articulate and gracefully-written letter, and no contrast is struck between the style of Abramovitsh relating this letter and Abramovitsh narrating through the mouth of Mendele. Indeed, the lack of judgment here seems to imply that the written Yiddish word has always been used to transmit stories and reach out to others in the community, and that Yiddish literature, though a recent cultural development, is also a continuation of a strong and established tradition. To tell stories orally is nothing new or groundbreaking, but neither is the communication of a long and winding story on paper.

Based on the above analysis, I argue that the defining aspects of Abramovitsh’s writings are as follows: a flawed first-person narrator who maintains an air of personability, familiarity, and friendliness with the reader; a bridging of the divide between the reader and the author; and a conflation of fact with fiction and of historicity with imagination. These trends continue into the works of Sholem Rabinovitsh, better known by

his pen name: Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem was a great humorist, the child of

Hasidic parents, known for stories that identified humor, beauty, sadness, and anger in shtetl life and the trials experienced by the poor Jews who lived there. His life was similarly marked by illness, poverty, and violence, but he maintained a generally successful career after switching from composing in Hebrew, to Yiddish.

Sholem Aleichem is best known for his monologues, many of which are written from the perspective of Tevye, a poor workingman with seven daughters and a strong-willed wife. The genre suits his subject matter; he successfully immerses the reader in the mindset and experiential base of one character, and by doing so, makes statements and pokes fun at his own people. Where Sholem Aleichem himself could have been lambasted for these mockeries, placing wry observations or discontented criticisms into the mouth of a fictional character insulates the author from much of the lambasting he could have otherwise attracted. Tevye can complain about rich upper-class Jews, stingy customers, and even the wider, inhospitable goyishe world without implicating Sholem Aleichem in the process.

Furthermore, in much the same manner as Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem writes himself into his own stories. This is primarily accomplished by having the speaker, Tevye, speak directly to the author—in short, Tevye addresses his own creator as a friend and fellow Jew. For example, the monologue “Hodel” opens with Tevye remarking on how much time has passed since he has spoken with Sholem Aleichem: “You’re surprised at Tevye,

Sholem Aleichem, it’s so long since you’ve seen him. He’s gone way downhill, you say?...Ach, if you knew the troubles, the pain that your Tevye’s lugging around with him!” (Frieden et. al. 57). In this manner, the reader catches on to the fact that Tevye is a friend of the author,

and I would argue that by virtue of choosing to read a story, any friend of the author is a friend of the reader. Therefore, Tevye becomes the reader’s friend. By seeing Tevye speak to Sholem Aleichem, the latter distances himself from Tevye’s person even more, further insulating himself against the conflation of his own opinions with those of Tevye. Here, we see that where Abramovitsh intentionally conflates his own identity with that of Mendele,

Aleichem draws a clear line between himself and his creation. The two are portrayed as friends who respect each other and seek each other’s company, but Sholem Aleichem is a silent partner in this fictional friendship, where Tevye takes the reins and leads the story with his relatable joys and sorrows.

This relatability is not to imply, however, that Tevye is a faultless man, or possesses beliefs completely in agreement with those of the modern reader. As a traditional Orthodox

Jew, he upholds a patriarchal system in his home, and the shtetl where he lives also operates according to the traditional modes of Western patriarchy. However, the world in which Tevye has grown up is very different from the world in which his daughters are growing up and making their own lives, and he finds himself constantly at odds with the decisions his children make. For example, in this monologue, Tevye’s second daughter

Hodel defies her father’s wishes, and defies tradition, by marrying a revolutionary and student named Fefferel instead of the aging and wealthy bachelor selected for her by the shadchen (Frieden et. al. 63-64).10 Her father is deeply displeased, and for reasons the reader does not need to surmise. Tevye spells out the reasons behind his anger quite succinctly, once Fefferel informs him that he and Hodel have been engaged a long time, and

10 matchmaker

are only telling Tevye so they can be married before the groom departs to participate in revolutionary agitation:

“This got me angry…Engaged I can put up with. How is it written there? Ohavti, I have loved—he wants her, she wants him. But married? What kind of talk is that, get married? It doesn’t make any sense” (Frieden et. al. 66).

Clearly, the issue in Tevye’s mind is not the match between the two, or their love, or their intention to be together. He can understand the emotions behind their engagement perfectly well. However, the notion that they will be married boggles him, primarily because it denotes a certain finality not present in the transitive state of being betrothed.

While an engagement is meant to lead somewhere, it is not a permanent state, but to an

Orthodox Jew of this time, marriage is indeed permanent and unassailable. Tevye’s anger originates in the fact that Hodel will be entering into this state of commitment and finality without going through the proper, traditional channels, and without first checking for the approval of her father. I argue here that Tevye’s anger, therefore, is based in a discomfort with the ways in which the world, and the roles of women and children, are shifting. As the man of the house, he would traditionally hold power over his children, particularly female children. While his daughters do indeed seek his approval when they make their choices, and while they value their relationship with the father they respect and love, their minds are set upon their goals, and a lack of paternal approval will not change their minds. In short, when Tevye butts heads with the strong and independent women in his life, we see the quiet and subtle ways in which an old-world, paternalistic hierarchy is being challenged within this family.

This theme also applies to the story of Chava, a monologue with an ending that is far more contentious. When Tevye’s third daughter falls in love with a Gentile, Tevye is enraged, and is even angrier when he finds that the village Russian Orthodox priest, with whom he is on good terms, has aided in hiding the couple’s romance and is working to convert Chava to Christianity. By the same function by which Tevye becomes the reader’s friend via his friendship with the author, the priest becomes the reader’s enemy by virtue of his conflict with Tevye: “‘Who? My daughter is under your supervision? By what right?’ I could feel myself falling into a rage. The priest’s smile was utterly cold-blooded. ‘Let’s not get worked up, Tevel…You know that I am, God forbid, no enemy of yours, even if you are a

Jew’” (Friden et. al. 79).11 The offense is deepened when Tevye arrives home and finds his other children crying and Golda “more in the next world than in this one” (Frieden et. al.

80). The chaos and grief of his household mirrors the chaos and grief inside Tevye, and we see the damage done to the Jewish household by the choice Chava makes to marry a non-

Jew. Unlike the case of Hodel, however, Tevye does not come around to this decision, and when Chava approaches him on the road in the next days and attempts to hold Tevye’s horse and speak to her father, he ignores her despite every impulse urging him to take one last look at the daughter who is now dead to him: “…Tevye’s no woman. Tevye knows how we’re supposed to deal with the devil…If I was ever destined for the torments of the grave,

I’ve surely passed through them by now…” (Frieden et. al. 86).

11 “Tevel” is the Yiddish diminutive of the name “Tevye,” and would be “Tevele” when diminutized even further. The implication here is that the priest and Tevye are either on familiar terms, rendering this betrayal even deeper, or that the priest is being disrespectful.

While the trial of Hodel’s marriage implies a societal shift in the place of women and their own agency and self-determination, Chava’s storyline examines the role of Jews in relation to non-Jews. As Tevye muses:

“What’s this thing called a Jew, and what’s a non-Jew? And for what reason did God make Jews and non-Jews? If you simply accept that He did, then why should one be so cut off from the other, and why should they be unable to look at each other— as if one came from God and the other didn’t?” (Frieden et. al. 87).

This shift, unlike the other, is unacceptable and too dangerous to comprehend. While a woman may marry who she likes, and may stand on her own to feet, to use Tevye’s words when describing his seven daughters, no one may choose to leave their Jewish birthright behind in favor of assimilation into another group. In Tevye’s eyes, and in the eyes of Jews of this time period, and even in the eyes of today’s Jews, to desert Judaism is to turn one’s back on God and the worldwide community of the Jewish people. In a religion so dependent upon the Torah and upon community, this is an assault on the core of Judaism itself. When one seeks to leave, the perception is that Judaism has failed. It must be noted that Chava only wants to marry the Gentile man she loves, and that it is internal societal and external

Russian Orthodox pressure forcing her to abandon her family and her God. However, these circumstances are the ones in place in the time and setting of this tale, and Chava makes her decision despite the repercussions. In this manner, Tevye is grappling not only with the loss of his daughter—a loss for which he instructs his family to sit shiva—but in the active assault upon his faith represented by her departure.

This is the central theme behind Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye monologues: in a world that is shifting, modernizing, and being enlightened, the roles of Jewish people in shtetl society are shifting as well. The question remains of what is left for a shtetl-dweller when the shtetl is no more, however—symbolically, when Tevye attempts to board a train to the town where Hodel now lives, he is told that that place, Yehupetz, does not exist. In this manner, Tevye is caught between the old worl and the new, attempting to move forward but finding that this new place is inaccessible (Frieden et. al. 87).

This problematizing of shtetl life is rooted in the discursive techniques present in

Abramovitsh, but finds new expression and new meaning in the works of Sholem Aleichem.

We see here that the shtetl is far more than a physical location: it is a structure, patriarchal and religious, and it prescribes strict roles for every person based upon their religion, income, social standing, gender, and participation in other roles and identities. To transgress these roles can result in a wide range of consequences, from fleeting disapproval to being totally ostracized from the community. Sholem Aleichem problematizes shtetl hierarchies and power structures, and thereby problematizes aspects of Judaism and

Jewish domestic life, with humor and grace.

With the movement forward into the modernism of I. L. Peretz, however, these constructs are criticized in a way that is more consciously artful and literary—for example, using metonymy to equate a shtrayml with rabbinic power, and the creator of the hat as the organizer responsible for all the rebbe’s judgments and good deeds. Not just expressions of patriarchal control, but Judaism itself, is satirized and complicated. In a manner that eschewed an oral style in favor of a consciously literary tone, “Peretz’s neo-hasidic stories

revisit an aspect of Jewish religion—not in order to choose that form of life, but to draw from it in the service of secular art and culture” (Frieden et. al. xiv). Peretz was very much a secularist, and as Ruth Wisse describes, he “tried to chart for his fellow Jews a ‘road’ that would lead them away from religion toward a secular Jewish existence without falling into a swamp of assimilation” (Wisse xiii). This was intended as a vote of confidence, for Peretz was sure that the richness of modern, secular Jewish and Yiddish culture could sustain the people in much the same way that the Torah and Talmud had sustained ancient Jews

(Wisse xiii-xiv). Encouraged by Polish positivism and the writings of liberal non-Jewish

Poles, Peretz was sure that his people could successfully participate in a wider humanist society while maintaining a secular and cultural connection to their common Jewish bloodlines (Wisse 4-5). This secularism, paired with the author’s attachment to and faith in his people, positioned him in an ideal space in which to observe his people while not devolving into mockery or anti-Semitism.

This is not to claim, however, that Peretz never delved into anti-Hasidism. For example, Peretz’s Dos shtrayml pokes fun at the shtetl Hasidim by mocking the power held and reverence accorded to the personage of the rebbe. More specifically, Peretz focuses upon the rebbe’s hat, which “governs the Jews, irrespective of the fool or knave who wears it” (Wisse 45). In this tale, a hatmaker named Berel muses upon the fact that, of all his projects and commissions, he gets the greatest joy out of the rare occasion when he can make a shtrayml: “Seldom, very seldom, does a shtrayml turn up, for who wears a shtrayml? A rabbi! And the shtrayml outlives him” (Frieden et. al. 137). In this, the fourth sentence of the story, we already see that the visual indication of a rebbe’s status is held

above the person of the rebbe himself—after all, rebbes are born and die, but a shtrayml will outlive him.

In a parallel commentary, Berel discusses the process of making a peasant’s coat, and how in his younger days, those were the projects he treasured most, for the coat protected the peasant during his long winters resting from the fields. However, as the years passed and the scarcity of land took its toll on the peasant classes, those peasants began working during the winter to make ends meet. Now, instead of resting all winter, the peasants transport goods. Through no fault of the peasant, Berel now loathes making the peasant’s coat, because it now “stay[s] soaked all winter, crawling along behind two dying horses that carry Leybl Milner’s grain five miles for six kopecks per sack” (Frieden et. al.

138). This is the satire for which Peretz is known; rather than pinpointing those at fault for societal ills, or admitting that no one is at fault, Peretz locates the peasant’s suffering and only makes note of it for its effect upon the enjoyment of his own work and the treatment of his handicrafts.

As the tale continues, Berel’s logic grows even more outlandish. He argues that his shtrayml declares meat kosher and treyf, that his shtrayml blesses weddings, circumcisions, and other celebrations (Frieden et. al. 140). He does address the fact that many locate the rabbinic power in “what is under the shtrayml,” but rationalizes that underneath the hat is nothing but a shlimmazl with a nagging wife and “the frightened eyes of a beggar” (Frieden et. al. 141).12 Clearly, Peretz does not hold the Hasidic rebbe in high

12 A fool or unfortunate person, whose misfortune is the fault of his own doings or ignorance

regard. He does not see the position as being earned through goodness and education, nor as requiring charisma or religiosity. The rebbe is simply the one who appears as a rebbe, an effect easily achieved by wearing a shtrayml.

Much as Dos shtrayml relies upon literary metonymy and satire to make its point, so

Tsvishn tsvey berg relies upon symbolism and figurative language. From the perspective of a

Hasidic follower of the Rebbe of Biale, the story outlines the conflict between a scholar, the

Rabbi of Brisk, and his former student the Rebbe of Biale, who deserts his former teacher spiritually and philosophically. This is because

“at the yeshiva in Brisk they studied Torah, but the Rebbe felt that it was dry Torah. They would study, for example, the laws concerning women’s matters, kashrut, or money. Well and good! When Reuven and Shimon come for a legal decision, or a servant comes with a question, or a woman asks about ritual purity, at that moment Talmudic study takes on new force, comes to life…But without them, the Rebbe felt that the Tal- mud alone—the body of the Torah, revealed Torah, and what lies on the surface—is sterile. That, he felt, is not the living Torah. The Torah should live!” (Frieden et. al. 167).

These observations are paired with a dream in which the Rebbe follows his teacher through a crystal castle, uncomfortable and with nowhere to rest, in which his teacher declares that “Here there are endless chambers…Here people walk forever!” (Frieden et. al.

168). This castle is devoid of people, and as the Rebbe walks, “a deep longing” comes over him to see another Jew. This is a metaphor for the loneliness and dryness he perceives in non-Hasidic Torah. After all, Judaism without Jews is nothing, and it can be argued with as a king without subjects is no king, a God without his creations, without Jews worshipping him, is no God. In any moral and ethical religious system, the recognition of the Other is of

the utmost importance, and this is the contact and meaning for which the Rebbe is longing.

As he touches the walls of the castle, he finds that they are cold and hard as ice, and he cries out to the Rabbi to take him away from the castle, that he does not wish to be alone with the Rabbi, but to be with “the people of Israel” again (Frieden et. al. 168). This symbol, while not particularly opaque, is effective in demonstrating the lure of Hasidism to

“woodchoppers, butchers, coachmen, and other simple Jews” (Frieden et. al. 178). In the

Rebbe’s eyes, where learning and education are lacking, the simple workingman will be attracted to a Judaism that is simply contingent upon faith, joy, and love.

Lest the reader think that Peretz is advocating for Hasidism, the end of the story rests upon a gentle reminder that, just as Judaism is nothing without humanity and love for the Other, love and faith cannot be the only fuel for a human life. The two scholars finally meet after years, and on the holiday of Simkhes Toyre. When the Rebbe of Biale offers to show the Rabbi of Brisk the Torah in action, they go outside into a beautiful day and see

“group after group of Hasidim” walking through a meadow alive with flames of sunlight, living green grass, and clouds trembling and dancing with joy (Frieden et. al. 177). Their clothing also seems alight with passionate joy, and even their torn caftans and belts seem glittering and gorgeous. However, as the Rabbi of Brisk mentions that it is time for Mincha, the reverie is broken, and “[a]bove was a simple sky; below was a simple pasture with simple Hasidim in torn caftans. There were broken bits of old melodies. The flames were extinguished. I looked at the Rebbe and saw that his face had also gone dark” (Frieden et. al.

178). In this manner, the reader knows that while the Rebbe is right, and Judaism without love for the Other is no Judaism at all, his own viewpoint comes with its own set of

difficulties. The Rabbi knows that poverty and hunger cannot be erased by ignoring these worldly problems, and we see that in Peretz’s eyes, to focus on God and the heavens at the expense of earthly concerns is equally as unholy as too strong a focus on dry, unemotional laws.

We see here that while Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem use a rapport with the reader in order to lend credence to their tales, situating them in a concrete place and time,

Peretz uses a more modernist and markedly literary method. He does not place himself within the bounds of the story at all, simply using a first-person limited narrator as a type of witness, who then relates the tale to the reader. This lack of focus upon the author allows for Peretz to employ other devices, such as figurative language, symbolism, metonymy, and so forth. In doing so, Peretz pushes Yiddish literature forward into the modernist era.

In summary, this chapter has attempted to outline the foundation of Yiddish literature by locating its roots in the 19th century Haskalah, tracing its goals in relation to its readership, and identifying the techniques and advances made by its early authors. One phenomenon remains to be discussed, however. I argue that this phenomenon is the defining moment in the formation of Yiddish literature, and an example of great rhetorical sleight of hand.

Y. M. Lifshits, a great champion of Yiddish lexicography and literary production, declared in 1876 that Yiddish literature was “worth nothing” (Miron 25). While I agree with Dan Miron that this statement was ill-informed and unfounded, we see that Yiddish authors of the late nineteenth century “did not feel their activity to have any historical relevance…the continuity and development of the literary use of Yiddish did not surface

into consciousness” (Miron 26). In short, Yiddish literature lacked cultural capital, and was therefore not a valued aspect of Jewish culture. While a wide cadre of authors and critics actively situated this literature within a historical moment by writing reviews, studies, and criticisms, the foremost figure among them was the singular “mythmaker” Sholem

Aleichem.

Once he moved into Yiddish writing and discovered earlier writers like Dik and

Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem craved a cultural literary narrative. Because no time- honored tradition existed for the literature, he created one. He made a comparison in 1884 between Russian literary figures—Gogol the satirist and Turgenyev the humorist—and those who he claimed were their Yiddish counterparts: Abramovitsh and Linetski, respectively. Sholem Aleichem referred to their greatness as a foregone conclusion, as if to know the work of Gogol was as common as to have read Yitskhok Linetski’s serialized satires of the 1860s. Sholem Aleichem continued this pattern of valuing, comparing, and pushing little-known Yiddish writers into dialogues amongst themselves and their works.

Abramovitsh was “our greatest Yiddish writer,” Linetski a satirical genius, Dik “pleasant”

(Miron 28). Reality and truthfulness were praised, and those Sholem Aleichem dubbed romanmakhers were accused of writing sentimental, naïve novels (Miron 29).

We see here that Sholem Aleichem defined the tradition of Yiddish literature by defining its limits: that which it was, and just as importantly, that which it was not. The phenomenon continued. Sholem Aleichem gave the Yiddish literary tradition gravitas and authority by naming Abramovitsh its grandfather in the introduction to his 1888 novel

Stempenyu (Miron 30-31). He published a Folks-biblyotek, an almanac of sorts containing

narratives on the history of Yiddish literature, memories and nostalgic meditations from its authors, and minor publications implicated as being repressed, valuable, and woefully unknown (Miron 30). It is impossible to know the extent to which Sholem Aleichem rooted these claims in fact, but the utter rhetorical genius of his machinations is undeniable.

This is not to claim that Sholem Aleichem’s actions are without fault. He and his compatriots, among them Simon Dubnow, performed careful manipulations to impose order where there was none, and in doing so rewrote the history of Yiddish literature into that which they deemed more desirable and more respectable. However, to focus overly on this conscious organization may lead to an ignorance of the organic value of Yiddish to

Jewish literature: the language linked the intelligentsia to a working class ready to reap their knowledge, and linked both the intelligentsia and the workers to a political movement that would soon rise to its ultimate expression of power. My goal in this chapter has been to illuminate the complex relationships among these parties, and to illustrate the development of Yiddish literature up to the moment of Dovid Bergelson.

CHAPTER TWO

BERGELSON IN KIEV AND BERLIN

Dovid Bergelson was born in 1884 in Okhrimovo, a Ukrainian shtetl, and grew up in a wealthy Hasidic family. After the early deaths of his parents, he lived with his older brothers, and after coming of age moved to Kiev in 1903. This is where Bergelson published numerous writings, including his first Yiddish novella, Arum vokzal.13 However, the novel that launched Bergelson to fame was 1913’s Nokh alemen.14 Published in the major Yiddish hub of Vilna, but while Bergelson was engaged with Yiddish letters in Kiev, the novel was lauded as a sort of Yiddish Madame Bovary in its depiction of a beautiful and discontented young woman searching, desperately and fruitlessly, for something with which to give meaning to an unfulfilled life in a rapidly-changing world. Indeed, Bergelson’s own perceptions of his reality influenced the feelings of his characters—as noted by Joseph

Sherman in the introduction to the Yale University translation of Nokh alemen, Bergelson’s chief readership was the “well-to-do Jewish shtetl bourgeoisie,” and that class was in the process of being dismantled and swept away by the leftward turning of Eastern European politics (Sherman in Bergelson x). This fragmentation and disorientation is reflected in the lives of his characters, who, like their author, find themselves disoriented in a world where the old ways of being and old systems of values are stripped of meaning.

For example, Mirel Hurvits, the protagonist of the novel, is first seen after rejecting her longtime fiancé and leaving herself an unmarried woman of 21 (Bergelson, Everything,

13 At the Depot 14 The End of Everything, or After Everything

1). She elects instead to wander the shtetl in the company of her best friend, the crippled student Lipkis. While she is often cold to him, her tolerance of his presence is the closest she comes to showing consistent, reliable warmth to another human, and Lipkis realizes this. Indeed, just being in her presence as they walk together is enough to make him wonder “why human beings had built houses for themselves instead of wandering about in couples over this huge frozen world” (Bergelson, Everything, 35). Meanwhile, the town wonders why she is so picky, why she is so spoiled, and why she refused to marry such a handsome and hardworking man as her former fiancé.

In addition to rejecting marriage and householding, embodied by her friend, the reformed revolutionary Miriam Lyubashits, Mirel also rejects the wealthy, promiscuous life lived by her cousin Ida. These two options, sedate domesticity or frivolous and hedonistic wealth, are the only two available to a woman of Mirel’s shtetl. Her insistence on wandering the streets day and night, and her pattern of making intense-but-brief emotional connections with various men, are proof that she seeks a third niche. I argue that this wandering nature, her fickleness in affairs and friendships, and her deep desire for emotional connections with others are symptoms of Mirel’s search for deep meaning in a world unsuited to her nature.

These themes of personal autonomy, questioning, and self-doubt are inherently linked to the broad concepts that joseph Sherman deems characteristic of modernist literature, primarily “skepticism of all ideological systems…and a quest for individualistic new forms” (Sherman in Bergelson, ix). Mirel’s view of the world is a highly skeptical one as she questions the suitability of her own personality to institutions like marriage, organized

religion, and the hierarchies and norms of well-to-do social spaces. Instead, the third- person narrator notes that

“[i]n reality, though, this spoiled and self-centered young woman was incapable of thinking seriously about anyone who lived outside the confines of a soul like her own, shrunken by the solipsism inevitable in an only child. Lipkis began to understand this clearly only some time later and subsequently even reproached her for it in the many letters he failed to send her” (Bergelson, Everything, 26).

Mirel’s perception of the world around her is a self-reflexive one, and Enlightenment values of self-formation and individualism. As evidenced by Lipkis’s failure to mail the aforementioned letters to this friend, nothing can break through this shell of self- absorption, not even the friends and lovers who know Mirel best. Her method of mediating the world around her is constructed upon her own ideas and perceptions of herself.

This disjointed and disintegrated mode of interpreting reality is also evidenced by

Bergelson’s writing style. Nokh alemen is an expressive and bleakly realistic work noted for its deviation from the oral style of Yiddish storytelling represented in works by, for example, Sholem Aleichem. This conceit, termed by Sherman as a “conscious literariness,” focuses more upon the internal states and moods of its characters and upon observations of the setting, and focuses less upon plotline, the linear passage of time, and the interconnectedness among events and observations. The onus is put upon the reader to form these connections for him- or herself. Furthermore, judgement is never passed upon a character’s actions or desires; the reader is entrusted to form judgments as they proceed through the work.

Take, for example, the passage where Mirel and Lipkis roam the frozen shtetl and the surrounding district. The passage opens with an observation:

“The moderately cold air froze into unhearing silence, and the first snows settled over the dispirited shtetl and over the va- cant, wintry district all around. Unable any longer to endure her father’s house even for a single minute, Mirel wandered aimlessly about the surrounding windswept fields for as long as the short periods of daylight lasted…No one had noticed that by then she was on familiar terms with Lipkis and had started addressing him by his first name” (Bergelson, Everything, 27).

Here, disjointed facts are presented to the reader without any connection or logical linking process. The mere proximity of one statement to another seems to suggest that the two should be logically related. This technique seems to position Bergelson more as an observer and less as the arbiter of reality within this discursive world. He is simply the recorder of facts, and the reader is the one tasked with forming connections and reaching conclusions.

This disjointed and observational quality extends throughout the whole book, and features heavily in the ending as well. Mirel is still unmarried two years later, though engaged again to the blond Shmulik, and has fallen in love with a Hebrew poet named Herz.

As she spends a sleepless night pacing her room at the beginning of her Tisha b’Av fasting, she convinces herself that though Herz has promised to return to her, her hopes of leaving the shtetl and living somewhere with him are “foolish self-delusion.” She lies down to sleep, and the passage ends with her reminiscing over her childhood and remembering her mother awaiting her father’s return home on Shabbos evenings. This seems to imply a cyclicality in the passing of time, and Mirel’s suspicion that “the next day she, Mirel, would

no longer be here” seems more possible than before. In the end, her departure is performed in stages, disjointing even the simple act of leaving a town. She wanders down a side street, then down the road leaving the shtetl. She takes a cab to the railway depot and sends for her things, then spends a week at an inn nearby, walking to and from the depot every day as if she is waiting for someone. Finally, the narrator informs the reader that “[a]t length she left by herself on the train that traveled to the border. This was reported in town, but knowing where she’d gone was impossible” (Bergelson, Everything, 260-262). In this manner, Mirel leaves not only the shtetl, but her life, and even that action is not simple. The text of Nokh alemen performs a sort of un-framing, both in its de-schematized content and its disjointed, observational narrative. Bergelson disintegrates the space of the shtetl into something unfamiliar and unfulfilling, and in communicating the internality and self- reflexive focus of Mirel Hurvits’s days, Bergelson points out the fate of the young people of the shtetl in a world that was modernizing without them.

Nokh alemen, with its themes of ennui and the limitations inherent in shtetl life, can be read as a representation of Bergelson’s time in Kiev. However, it was his time in Berlin that I argue pushed him, ultimately, into the arms of the Soviet Union. Though this chapter will not deal with Bergelson’s ideological shift towards the USSR, I will briefly examine the significance of Berlin and the Weimar Republic to Yiddish literature, and the implications of a movement from Weimar Berlin back to a Moscow that had become, by this time, deeply

Soviet.

Between 1920 and 1928, Delphine Bechtel claims that Berlin became a home-away- from-home to the Yiddish authors known as the Kiev group: Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid

Hofshteyn, and others. Critics such as Simon Dubnow were in Berlin as well, as were linguists like Max Weinreich. Berlin had become a cradle of Yiddish culture, not least of all because of famines, pogroms, and counter-revolutionary activity across Russia and

Ukraine. It would be overly simplistic to consider the city a refuge, however. Melech

Ravitsh, a Yiddish poet based in Warsaw, wrote in 1922 that someone sitting in the

Romanisches Café and “looking at us from afar, dragging the carriage of our culture, is a deserter” (Ravitsh 40-41). The Kiev group and their comrades also expressed discontent, but more so in the form of “fragmentation…disorientation [and] alienation” (Bechtel,

“Babylon or Jerusalem,” 117). This can be seen in almost all of Bergelson’s Berlin stories, two of which will be discussed in the coming chapter.

Further complicating this transplant were the tensions between German Jews and

Eastern European Jews, or Westjuden and Ostjuden. In her article on the topic, Bechtel points to the radically different lifestyles between the groups: where the German Jews were extremely assimilated and “adhered to the German concepts of Bildung and Kultur…Eastern

European Jews had developed a cultural bilingualism, combining Hebrew…and Yiddish, which completed its evolution into a modern literary language at the same time as Hebrew”

(Bechtel, “Ostjuden and Westjuden,” 68). Assimilated German Jews looked upon their

Eastern European brethren with loathing and condescension at worst, and admiration and gratitude at best—after all, these Ostjuden were genuinely and vitally Jewish, and spoke a

German-sounding language that kept Germanic influence living and relevant in the Eastern lands (Bechtel, “Ostjuden and Westjuden,” 69-71).

Most tellingly, however, Bechtel analyzes the German Jewish response to the contemporary Yiddish literature of the time. She notes that while many German Jews were attracted by the folksy, simple humor of Yiddish stories in translation, these translations were often biased specifically to fit these expectations: for example, Alexander Eliasberg, a

Jew born in Minsk and transplanted to Munich, was responsible for what Bechtel deems

“preposterous” mistranslations of Sholem Aleichem’s trilingual wordplay:

“When Tevye quotes a biblical verse, he often distorts it and changes its meaning completely. Eliasberg, however, renders the original quotation without seeming to notice how Tevye transforms it. When Tevye says, for example, ‘kol dikhfin ye- tei veyitzrakh’ (whoever is hungry, let him come and be need- y), he misquotes and subverts the sentence from the Pesach Haggadah: ‘Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat, whoever is needy, let him come and celebrate Pesach.’ Eliasberg translates ‘Wer da hungert, komme und esse,’ ignoring the social criticism underlying Sholem Aleichem’s humor…Sholem Aleichem’s sophisticated trilingual humour, with its self- derision and subversion, is swamped by sentimental naivete and religious nostalgia” (Bechtel, “Ostjuden and Westjuden,” 76).

Though this is a single example, its implication is vast. Eliasberg’s dismissal of the witty, saucy, and subversive aspects of Sholem Aleichem’s prose is symptomatic of the Western assumptions facing Eastern European Jewish migrants in Berlin, who were often viewed by the more assimilated German Jews as provincial, quaint, old-fashioned shtetl-dwellers.

Bergelson eventually moved back to the Soviet Union in 1933, seven years after he professed his ideological acceptance and support of the Soviet project. It is unknown why

Bergelson waited so long to move back to the USSR. Perhaps he had grown comfortable with his wife and child in Berlin, or perhaps the rise of National Socialism finally

encouraged him to leave the country where he had found considerable personal and commercial success as an author and newspaper correspondant. Whatever the reason, I argue that Bergelson would have found a surprise waiting in the Russia that had been, at the time of his departure, a hotbed of revolution and dissident activity. By the time of in

1933 return, this revolutionary zeal had matured into the law of the land: dissidence was no longer defined as a favorable, honorable anti-imperial activity, but unacceptable agitation against the Bolsheviks who had seized power.

While in Kiev and later Berlin, Bergelson wrote avant garde Yiddish works. His material may not have been about the Revolution, but it was revolutionary. The opposite held true when he moved back to Moscow in 1933, however—no longer was Bergelson, now a socialist realist, writing revolutionary material in Yiddish. At the present moment,

Bergelson was faced with the challenge of using Yiddish to communicate the ideals of one, singular, established Revolution. After all, opinions that had once been revolutionary were no longer so, and the Party whose rhetoric was formerly dissenting had grown intolerant of dissent. I argue that the challenge of writing Soviet work in the new Russia inspired some of Bergelson’s most interesting works, both in form and function. To truly appreciate these works, however, one must examine the tensions and crisis of time and space that led

Bergelson back to Russia.

CHAPTER THREE

DIASPORA AND THE PROBLEM OF TEMPOROSPATIALITY

Yiddish literature has always represented the condition of diaspora: an identification with this literature requires little more than an understanding of the Yiddish language, because its readers and writers are defined primarily by their usage of the language—geography is not a relevant consideration. Yiddish itself arose as a fusion of

Middle and High German, various Slavisms, words from ancient Hebrew and Aramaic

(loshn koydesh), and a smattering of English derivatives, written in Hebrew letters and pronounced with wide variances based upon geographic location and religious affiliation.

Simon Dubnow’s memoir Fun “zhargon” tsu yidish examines the evolution of this language from a sort of dialect to the moment commonly considered to mark the unification of the

Yiddish world: the 1908 Yiddish language conference in Czernowitz. Dubnow argues that

Yiddish began as a “kikh-shprakh,” or “kitchen-language,” suited to “hoyz, shul un gas”

(Dubnow 1).15, 16 After outlining earlier conceptions of the “zhargon,” Dubnow goes on to make recommendations for its continued evolution into a full-blown and respectable language: “…men muz arayngisn dem inhalt fun der yidisher kultur in di dozike shprakhn…Ober onveyzn oykh der groysartiker dersheynung—dos oyfbliyen fun der folks-

15 “home, temple/school, and street” 16 “Shul” is a complex term. It implies a certain level of Orthodoxy in which the synagogue would also be the center of education for young people, but (at least in my view) not always with the frum and male-exclusive associations of the word “heder.” For example, many Jews of my own egalitarian and secular Reform movement refer to the synangogue or temple as shul.

shprakh in der greserer helft fun der yidisher natsiye—zenen mir mekhuyev, vel dos is a vikhtiker historisher fakt” (Dubnow 1-2).17 We see here that Dubnow values Yiddish not only for its strategic importance to the political and social spheres of Eastern European

Jewish life, but because it is a moral and national duty to help this “kikh-shprakh” in its blossoming into the language of the Jewish people.

Second in importance to the Czernowitz conference, when considering the organization and motives of the extraterritorial Yiddishist movement, was the organization of the Central Committee of the Culture League (Kultur Lige) in 1918 in Kiev. Gennady

Estraikh identifies the group as follows:

“The league was conceived as a supraparty organization whose aim was to construct and promote a new Jewish culture, based on Yiddish and secular democratic values…The [Kultur Lige] epitomized the idea of Jewish national-cum-cultural survival as an extraterritorial, autonomous Yiddish-speaking nation” (Estraikh, In Harness, 31).

We see here a disconnect between the notion of Yiddish identity and the idea of a bordered space within which one engaged with Yiddish, and outside of which Yiddishness and

Yiddish identity was impossible. Rather, Yiddishkayt was a system within which any person could engage, so long as their usage of the language enabled them to understand and be understood. This dependence upon the interaction with the Other is at the crux of one’s Yiddishness, and the recognition of the Other is at the heart of secular Yiddish

17 “One must mint the content of Yiddish culture in this very language…But also, to prove this wonderful phenomenon—the blossoming of the people’s language in the majority of the Jewish nation—we are obliged, because this is an important, historical fact.”

culture’s undeniable entanglement with Judaism and Jewish morality.18 As I will discuss later on, this undeniable and unavoidable connection between secularity and religion creates uneasiness in the concept of Soviet-Yiddish identity and the notion of a secular

Yiddishkayt.

A similar lack of ease is at the root of what I have termed “the problem of temporospatiality.” The metaphysical space of Yiddish expression and experience defies delineation—its borders are porous, defined by the people and thoughts that occupy it, not by arbitrary delineations and physical space. This area of interaction and relation was first termed “Yiddishland” at the turn of the twentieth century. Efrat Gal-Ed defines

“Yiddishland” as primarily a site of memory—Jewish and Yiddish collective memory as well as the experiences of individuals. Gal-Ed argues that this term came to be as Yiddish writers and readers sought a cultural and metaphysical home, the search for which was oriented towards defining and locating their language and way of life. Judaism was an integral component of that way of life, of course, and as Judaism views historicity as a cyclical formation, that formation can be contrasted with the standard Western view of time as a linear construct. We see here one possible root of this problem of temporospatiality: the conflict between Jewish, and therefore Yiddish, conceptions of time and space as compared to those held by the majority and dominant culture.

Yiddishkayt also seems to be defined quite often by what it is not, more so than what it is: its speakers use Yiddish, not the language of the political state; they are most

18 I use the Levinasian “Other” here, signifying a sentient soul outside of the self. This concept will be denoted by the capitalization of the term.

likely to practice Judaism, not the religion of the majority; they live in diaspora far from their historic homeland, not on the same roads and in the same towns where their people have lived for centuries. Allison Schachter’s Diasporic Modernisms analyzes this diasporic condition through the lens of Jewish literature written in both Hebrew and Yiddish. She argues that both Hebrew and Yiddish literature existed before the establishment of Israel as a geopolitical nation-state, proving that both languages and literatures occupy a decidedly non-statist position, albeit often with a Zionist slant (24). Furthermore, I strongly argue that even secular Yiddishism holds a relation to Judaism and to the Jewish God, a distinction placing it outside the realm of firmly bounded, statist literatures. An engagement with Yiddishkayt will always retain something of the metaphysical, will always be located in a place far removed from geography and political affiliation. This metaphysicality is generally present within the individual as faith, emotional connection, and the relevance of religion to one’s personality and worldview—even if that religion is only relevant as the secular Yiddishist denies and repudiates it.

Nokhum Oyslender, a contemporary of Bergelson’s, agrees with Schachter. His Veg ayn, veg oys: literarishe episodn examines Yiddish authors active until the book’s publication in 1924, and includes a considerable piece on the diasporic nature of Yiddish- language writing. Schachter cites Oyslender’s monograph and explains Oyslender’s fear that, without “a permanent address…or a name to call its own,” Yiddish literature might cease to be. I argue that while the literature Oyslender so cherished lacked a bordered space marked on a map, it existed in a space all too familiar to the Jewish mind: the shtetl.

This is not a particular shtetl that existed in actuality, but a metaphorical construct viewed

negatively by Bergelson as a symbol of anti-Semitic violence, pain, and ingrained, deeply limiting social and religious hierarchies. It must be noted that while the shtetl could also appear in positive moments of nostalgia and memory, Bergelson’s depictions tend toward the negative.

For example, Tvishn emigrantn, published by Bergelson in 1923 in Berlin and anthologized repeatedly afterward, focuses on a young refugee from the Ukrainian pogroms.19 He waits to speak with the narrator as the latter arrives home for the night, and the visitor is restless to the point of rudeness—“zeyer an umgeduldiker,” according to the narrator’s family (Geklibene verk, 175).20 He speaks with the narrator and comes to reveal that he needs help. The narrator is a prominent figure in Berlin’s community of Jewish emigrants, and the young man has realized that a former pogromist, a Ukrainian man known to have incited horrific violence, is living in the room across from his in a communal boarding house. The young man identifies himself as a “yidisher terorist” without a party or political affiliation, governed only by his own sense of direction and morality (ibid. 176).21

This terrorist-sans-ideology is Bergelson’s metonymous representation of his literature: trapped between international concerns (life as an Eastern European and Jewish expatriate in Berlin) and national loyalties (an inability to forget home and the violence that occurred there). Schachter argues that Bergelson’s modernist work communicates these conflicts and a general sense of foreboding concerning the fate of Yiddish literature, which seeks both a voice in the secular world and a linguistic and cultural tie to the metaphysical

19 Literally “Among Emigrants,” often translated “Among Refugees” 20 “quite an impatient one” 21 “Jewish terrorist”

homeland. These ties to Yiddishkayt are represented by Bergelson via the symbol of the shtetl, a construct that serves not only as the figurative backdrop of frum Jewish life, but as a symbol of poverty, superstition, and otherness. Bergelson’s yidisher terorist is unable to flee the shtetl for long: he sends a communication to the narrator of Tsvishn emigrantn that his agonies over how and when to eliminate the pogromist will be resolved if he eliminates himself instead. This internalized shame and self-loathing, not the Ukrainian pogromist, is the true antagonist of Bergelson’s tale. By killing himself, the young man resolves his own internal conflict in the only way he sees fit: by snuffing out the consciousness that plagues him, particularly those aspects of his consciousness focused on the unsuitability of the schemas of home, heder, synagogue, and family to the situation in which he finds himself.

This crisis of identity is based upon the collapse of those schemas, resulting in unbearable anguish on the part of the terorist.

This plot point is representative of a unique conceit of Bergelson’s work, termed by

Mikhail Krutikov as “disintegrated space” (Sherman and Estraikh, Modernism to Socialist

Realism, 169). Where the shtetl was governed by intangible hierarchies—religious order and organization, strict gender roles, and the relation between the city, the depot, and the village—the spaces occupied by uprooted and relocated emigrants were disjointed and unfamiliar. Religious life was either absent or very different, economic uncertainty and the search for work often left traditional male and female gender roles unsuitable, and the shtetl itself was no longer a relevant structure in everyday life. Whether these changes were viewed positively or as problems, the disintegration and reinvention of the spaces where Yiddish life was conducted led to what Krutikov calls the “dejudaization” of space.

This dejudaization occurred when “familiar details, images, and expression” were removed from their usual contexts (ibid. 174). The shifting of relations and the deconstructing of the reader’s preformed schema allow Bergelson to communicate to his reader the position of homelessness and diaspora occupied by Yiddish literature. This dejudaizing experience served to dismantle the shtetl mindset and, for better or worse, Bergelson’s “Dray tsentern” marked a departure from its confines in favor of the uplifting, equalizing community of

Communism. Indeed, where alienation occurred from Jewish traditions and Jewish spaces,

Communism often served as a suitable way to fill that void.22 This certainly does not imply a congruence between spaces of Yiddishkayt and spaces of Communism: after all, where the former transmitted a tradition of faith and morals, and thereby also implied the existence of a higher power, Communism only carried its own self-reflexive message. In other words, Yiddish spaces and traditions communicated Judaism and Jewishness; newly- formed Communist spaces failed to serve this function. Despite this failing, non-religious and less-religious Jews found themselves faced with newly-available Communist spaces for interaction and cultural discourse. However, this discourse, by virtue of the space in which it was conducted, was inherently haunted by the Jewishness it could not encompass or transmit. Communism could be conducted in Yiddish, but it could not perform the functions of spaces of pure Yiddishkayt.

22 For a fascinating analysis of the cultural and religious vacuum resulting from such disintegrations and dejudaizations of space, and the manner in which that vacuum is addressed, I highly recommend Anna Shternshis’ Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 from Indiana University Press.

This spatial disintegration is a central feature of Bergelson’s early novella Arum vokzal. The piece takes places primarily at the train depot of a town described as forsaken, useless, and doomed (Bergelson in Wisse 84-85). This value judgment and problematizing of traditional shtetl spaces is at the heart of Bergelson’s modernism, and is also heavily present in Tsvishn emigrantn. Within these first pages, we also see a key feature of

Bergelson’s early work: an omniscient voice focused not primarily upon occurrences and dialogue, but upon the internal emotions and perceptions of characters that are described sparingly, sketched in only the barest of outlines, and who sometimes even remain nameless. Take, for instance, the central character of this work, Benish Rubinstein, and his nameless wife. Benish is described as brooding and dark, well-educated, but not having good luck in his business as present. These facts are communicated to the reader clearly and straightforwardly, through direct exposition rather than through indirect evidence.

Benish’s second wife, who we are told he married in order to collect the second dowry of his adult life, is described in two places as being “a dumpy woman with a greenish complexion” (Bergelson in Wisse 90 and 93). The repetition of these exact words, and the fact that they occur both the first and second times this wife is mentioned, seem to imply that there is little more to be known about her, or that the supposedly omniscient narrator is even unaware of the depths of her soul. Perhaps she possesses none. This lack of information, whether it implies a lack of personality or just a lack of knowledge of her personality, sketches this second wife in the barest of strokes and renders what could be a welcoming or comforting personage stark and disquieting.

This discomfort also presents itself in the spatial positioning of the novella. For example, when Benish becomes aware of his infatuation with the new wife of his colleague

Avromchik, he is standing outside her home on a dark and windy night. He has wandered home from the depot when faced with the prospect of returning to his own home, and to his dumpy, greenish wife. He hears the depot’s bell ringing behind him, announcing that a train is coming, and sees the light of Avromchik’s little house before him, “standing alone in the cold black night that stretched endlessly across a frozen expanse of fields and valleys and naked mountains” (Bergelson in Wisse 106-107). He is positioned between two oppositions: the train, representing travel and business dealings, and the small house, representing home life and stationary borders. Benish is trapped between the two, unlucky in business but unwilling to return home. Likewise, time loses meaning, as he wanders through the darkness, fails to work efficiently during the day and sleep at night, and does not return home for meals with his wife. He upends the traditional structure of his days, rendering time just as meaningless as space.

This sort of spatial disintegration of the shtetl shows itself early on in Bergelson’s career, as familiar schemas are portrayed as chilling and lonely. Benish continues to return to this house night after night, and when he is finally noticed by Avromchik’s wife and invited inside, the resulting conversations are pleasant, but soon disrupted by Benish’s realization that this “homedness” is also unsuitable: “He sensed that it wouldn’t do for

Avromchik to discover him there again, and rose to his feet” (Bergelson in Wisse 111). With this, Benish’s momentary respite is over, and he returns to his wandering, displaced existence.

This internal sickness at the heart of Benish’s type of wandering, which I term “dis- ease,” is at the heart of the problem of temporospatiality. Those who exist in a diasporic condition face the additional burden of carving out not only physical spaces for themselves and their culture, but homing themselves emotionally as well. Because Yiddish is diasporic, inherently linked to a group of people living in a land that has not always historically been

“their own” (whether by virtue of their own dis-ease or by the insistence of the majority culture that the Jews do not “belong” in that land), it is sometimes bereft of a space with clear borders and obvious, safe boundaries. Bergelson’s early modernist work deals heavily with this problem of temporospatiality, and with “Dray tsentern,” Bergelson seems to be proposing a solution to the sensations experienced by Benish—homelessness, discomfort, a lack of ease among those with whom he should expect to fit in, and a sense of placement within the flow of time and historicity.

Gennady Estraikh’s In Harness examines the loyalties of Yiddishists to Communism, and I believe, as does Estraikh, that the attraction was strong. Marxist Communism was predicated on the notion of a classless, borderless society governed only by the will of the people, and as previously mentioned, Leninist thought, the foundation underlying

Bolshevism, considered anti-Semitism to be a bourgeois conceit that had no place in an ideal society. These features of the Bolsheviks’ founding philosophy rendered socialism a good economic and Communism a good political match for the secular Yiddish movement.

Here, we see the urge within Yiddish letters to find a geopolitical home base of sorts, even at the risk of “[undermining] the extraterritoriality of Yiddish literature and the cultural homogeneity of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Diaspora” (Estraikh, In Harness, 78-80).

It bears mentioning, however, that Karl Marx was an avowed anti-Semite. Take, for instance, his early writings on the “Jewish question.” In his article treating Bruno Bauer’s book of the same name, The Jewish Question, Marx begins by approving of Bauer’s analysis: the Jew desires civic and political emancipation, but Bauer argues that this is impossible, because the nature of Jewishness is fundamentally at odds with the nature of civic

Germanness (Marx). The argument is summed up as follows: because of this opposition and lack of coherency in relation to each other, “the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it” (Marx). The Christian state can only grant privileges and permit the Jew to be separate from the dominant religion—a conceit that seems to aim for a separate-but-equal status, which is unequal in its very nature. However, the Jew can

“behave towards the state only in a Jewish way—that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing his ima- ginary nationality to the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law…by abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jew- ish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people” (Marx).

While Marx approves of Bauer’s conclusion, which states that the German people must emancipate themselves before they can emancipate others, both Bauer’s text and

Marx’s approval of its positions are deeply problematic. First of all, the very argument that

Jews are fundamentally “other” is anti-Semitic in itself. To be Jewish is certainly to possess a degree of difference from the Christian world at large, but Jewishness does not negate the

human desire for freedom, recognition, participation in a national identity, and the forward movement of history. Secondly, Bauer clearly uses a value-based hierarchical system in discussing the Jew versus the German. The Jew is secondary, “other,” and “less than.”

Jewishness is a metaphysical stain, a condition requiring examination, and a problem to be solved. The notion of being both a secular German citizen and a Jew, either ethnically or religiously, is impossible. Jews are to be emancipated only after “true” Germans have been emancipated. Jewishness itself is a question requiring an answer, because those in this state of being cannot simply be left in peace. This metaphysical anti-Semitism is both responsible for and cuts deeply through the tragedies of pogroms, massacres, and the

Khurbn. I argue that while Yiddishists sought a home in a Bolshevik system that considered anti-Semitism to be a bourgeois distraction from revolution, Marxist thought itself refuses to engage in anti-Semitism not because of a belief in equality and the emancipation that

Bauer speaks of. Rather, this denial of anti-Semitism is rooted in a denial of reality. To recognize the Jew-hating roots of Karl Marx’s thought is to recognize that Marxist

Communism is not accessible to the workers of the world; some workers are unworthy of the Communist utopia, no matter how they strive and how dedicated they are to the cause.

Furthermore, to acknowledge Marx’s anti-Semitism is to open up the complicated question of Otherness. How can one’s philosophy be the only path to truth if the Other is allowed to believe otherwise? To allow a degree of difference is to imply flexibility. To permit the Jew to exist equally with the Christian or the Communist would be to posit that those philosophies were not absolute. In short, if the Jew is allowed to live and participate and

breathe unmolested, the dominant power acknowledges that there may in fact be other paths to the summit of the same mountain.

Evidently, Yiddish literature was outgrowing the metaphysical space of the shtetl, and was seeking a larger arena within which to spread a modern, secular Jewish nationalism. Bergelson’s “Dray tsentern” posited a new solution to these anxieties over identity and temporospatiality. Oyslender had written about the problems posed by decentralizing Yiddish literature into Russian, Polish, and American spheres, and the

Yiddish-American Leyvick was cited in a 1925 issue of Der emes speaking on the same topic, particularly about the problems posed by a Russian sphere. Bergelson’s polemic flew in the face of these worries, arguing that nowhere else on earth could offer Yiddish culture and literature the security it needed to blossom into true Jewish nationalism. We see here that the problem of temporospatiality had come to the forefront of the Yiddish literary sphere, and that Bergelson was among those seeking its solution.

First of all, Bergelson identifies the American Jewish center as overrun with “yidishn

‘alreytnik’,” or “allrightniks” (Bergelson, “Tsentern,” 87).23 These assimilationists favor personal and economic ambition over Jewish nationalism. Their counterparts are the proletarian Jews, who have little interest in the lives and glories of their affluent counterparts. Bergelson recognizes that value of these proletarians to the Jewish nationalist movement, but feels that their efforts are for naught. Likewise, the Polish Jewish center is deemed unsuitable for Jewish national revival: its proletarian class is strong but

23 “Jewish ‘allrightniks,” Bergelson’s term for bourgeois and assimilationist Jews of any class.

divided into factions, the strongest of which is Zionism. Bergelson argues that this Zionism discourages new individuals from ameliorating the Jewish proletarian ranks, especially because of the Zionist focus on Palestine and the Hebrew language, and its inherently negative view of Yiddish as running counter to the aims of the Zionist movement:

“Farsheydene Talmud-Torat un ‘Tarbutn’ shlept di oreme un mitele shikhtn tsurik tsum barg

Sinai un shtern dem kamf mit der ortiker makht un mit der arumiker bafelkerung…”

(Bergelson, “Tstentern,” 87).24 However, using Yiddish is still not sufficient to encourage

Jewish nationalism, because it is used in a traditional, religious context. Bergelson says:

“[k]eyn tsveyte chasidishe epokhe darf men nit un zi vet shoyn mer nit shafn” (Bergelson,

“Tsentern,” 87).25 The Jewish life in this setting is antiquated and backward—occupying that metaphysical condition of the shtetl—and Bergelson sees no hope for its uplift or betterment while the masses remain factionalized and committed to a religious, hierarchical mode of living (Bergelson, “Tsentern,” 89-90). We see here that the

“metaphysical condition” now occupied by the shtetl means that it is no longer a place, but an idea. This idea does not exist in a bounded location, but rather permeates aspects of

Yiddish culture. In short, the small Eastern European Jewish town has become reified: it possesses a meaning greater than its reality, to the extent that it is disconnected from reality.

24 “Various Talmud-Torat and Tarbut [schools] carry the lower and middle classes back to Mount Sinai, and corrupt the struggle with the governing powers and the surrounding population…” 25 “One has no need of a second Chasidic era, and it will now create nothing more than that.”

However, Bergelson finds his solution to the problem of re-homing Yiddishland in the new Soviet state. While he does differentiate between the Yiddish-speaking working masses and the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia, it is with a protective respect: the intelligentsia makes the workers more productive, communicates to them their rights and helps them realize their potential, and “farhit im fun der virkung metsad der arumiker kleynburgerlekher ortodoksal-tsiyunistisher oysgevortsltkeyt” (Bergelson, “Tsentern,” 90).26

Bergelson goes on to examine Jewish equality before the law, not merely as the freedom to pursue physical and economic security as a separate, and one could say ghettoized, group, but equality as self-determination and the possibility of full participation in the future of one’s own nation. This stands in direct contrast with the concept of the shtetl, where the notion of Jewish liberation could mean little more than safety from pogroms and the ability to feed one’s family. This life could be conducted alongside goyishe countrymen, but the

Jewish citizens of the shtetl would almost always occupy a second-class postion. I would go so far as to argue that, in Bergelson’s mind, the only freedom available to the enlightened individual trapped in the shtetl is the freedom to commit suicide: consider the option taken by the yidishe terorist of Tvishn emigrantn. Though the young man’s body inhabited Berlin, his spirit was trapped in the hierarchical, dead-end space of the metaphorical shtetl. Its bordered spaces and anti-Semitic violence never left him, and while he sought peace and escape in fantasies of murdering the man who incited such violence upon his people and inflicted such trauma upon his own psyche, his religion and personal morality were

26 “…protects [them] from the effects of the surrounding uprooted petit-bourgeois orthodox-Zionism”

unswayable enough to preclude this action. In the end, the only freedom he felt still existed for him was the freedom to die.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, offered to a young Bergelson the conditions of escape he saw Jewish nationalism as so desperately wanting: the freedom to be Jewish without fear, the freedom to participate in the movement of the Union towards a socialist goal, and the freedom to abandon the ennui and bordered claustrophobia of the shtetl.

While Bergelson’s views would change and evolve over his career, this piece is the first in which he unequivocally brands himself a Soviet. This decision was no doubt influenced by a myriad of factors, and it would be erroneous and little more than fiction to speculate as to

Bergelson’s personal reasons for this ideological shift. However, I argue that one of these factors was the search for a geopolitical home for Yiddish letters; that is, the search for a solution to the problem of temporospatiality. The implementation of this solution was far from simple; the young Soviet state functioned according to a system of requirements and displays of loyalty to state goals and ideas, neatly packaged in the Russian term partiinost’.

The creative, expressive, and literary manifestation of this philosophy was the genre and school of thought called socialist realism. The irony and tragedy here is that, while

Bergelson saw hope and opportunity in the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin would be the end of

Bergelson and many of his colleagues, and would almost succeed in destroying Yiddishland itself.

CHAPTER FOUR

SOCIALIST REALISM AND THE REHOMING OF YIDDISH LETTERS

It is not a hyperbolic statement that of all literary genres and devices, few are as divisive and controversial as socialist realism. The genre was deeply prescriptive, and the censorship required to ensure its proper functioning was both preventative and punitive— works were screened to ensure their adherence to proper socialist-realist guidelines, and the presence of unacceptable material could result in retaliatory action against the author in question. Furthermore complicating this value system is the fact that the genre’s very existence presented a paradox: the good socialist author policed not only his or her own creative writing, but the words, behavior, and even the thoughts he or she used. In other words, the “good” socialist writer performed a sort of “self-policing,” writing appropriate socialist-realist material because they wished to do so. Therefore, if socialist realism realized its goal of perfectly loyal adherents, external censorship would be unnecessary.

The fact remains, though, that external censorship (both preventative and punitive) was a common occurrence in the life of the Soviet writer. Hence, we can conclude that the very functions of this genre belie its imperfections, even as its proponents honor it to the best of their abilities.

As discussed previously, Bergelson’s 1926 article “Dray tsentern” posits that of the three Yiddish cultural centers—the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union—only the

Soviet Union possesses the class and cultural structure necessary for a flourishing of

Yiddish secularity, and therefore for the strengthening of Jewish nationalism. I argue that

socialist realism provided the perfect avenue for the communication of Bergelson’s works, which served two purposes. First of all, his writings at this time allowed him to express his loyalty to the system that could provide a bounded home for a borderless, diasporic literature. Secondly, Bergelson’s early engagements with Yiddish-language literature and socialist realism demonstrated to his readership that one could read “Jewishly,” in a Jewish language and about Jewish characters, while still participating in socialist doctrine and witnessing the forward movement of the country toward a utopian, Communist goal. This being said, we must mention that any nationalism runs counter to the Marxist notion of a universal Communist utopia—a direct and undeniable conflict with Bergelson’s aspirations. Indeed, any nationalism whatsoever runs counter to the aims of Communism in creating its universal utopia of and for the workers of the world.

As the leader of the Bolsheviks from their conception, Vladimir Lenin was the first

Soviet authority to speak on the issue of literature and art in the new state. In his On

Literature and Art, a number of publications, primarily letters and articles, are anthologized in English translation in order to trace the development of Lenin’s thoughts on the topic.

One of the earliest pieces is from Novaya Zhizn no. 12, published on November 13, 1905.

Lenin states that since the October Revolution, the question of Party literature had come to the fore, and that because the issue itself was becoming more central to political discussions, “the distinction between the legal and illegal press, that melancholy heritage of the epoch of feudal, autocratic Russia, is beginning to disappear…nothing comes of the stupid attempt to ‘prohibit’ that which the government is powerless to thwart” (Lenin 24).

It is important to note here that Bolshevism and nascent socialist realism are on the side of

the “illegal” press. A clear value-based delineation is formed here: Party literature, socialist- realist expression, is portrayed as an inherent and logical truth that the government cannot thwart any longer.

Lenin goes on to explicate what socialist expression will aim to accomplish: “a free press” liberated from the control and expectations of

“capital…careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois- anarchist individualism. These last words may sound paradoxical…[but] we are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes…[b]ut every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views” (Lenin 27).

We see here the seeds of Stalinist socialist realist doctrine: the literature is a tool to be used by the Party, and this tool is meant to help the Party strengthen its narrative, situate itself within the flow of history, and indicate forward movement toward a Communist ideal.

Before moving into the Stalinist interpretation of these thoughts, I wish to examine

Lenin’s views on Jewish nationalism, represented in this study by Yiddish-language creative expression. In late 1913, Prosveshcheniye nos. 10, 11, and 12 published a serialized article entitled “Critical Remarks on the National Question.” In this piece, Lenin discussed the question of establishing a national language in Russia, using Switzerland as a corollary example of a country divided among numerous linguas franca, but whose citizens engaged happily with whichever languages were necessary in the spheres of daily life: the home and family, business, religion, and so on. Lenin expresses the opinion here that a single legally- designated national language should not be necessary in the Russian example, primarily because individual cultural and ethnic nationalisms should be happily placed aside in favor

of full engagement with the Soviet system (using the Russian language, of course). This leads Lenin to examine the “national question” in terms of the Jews. He states that “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies,” and that whosoever promotes this nationalism is promoting the condition of “the lower caste” occupied by Jews in “Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarous countries.”

However, he follows the Swiss example with the example of Jewish Marxists, who use

Russian and Yiddish to foster an international community of workers, even though the

Bund may maintain itself separately from the Party large (Lenin 94-95). This separate-but- equal mindset emphasizes Lenin’s beliefs regarding the national question of Yiddish- speaking Jews: so long as their use of another language furthers the Marxist goal, it is acceptable, but any promotion of Jewish identity above Soviet identity is problematic. This hierarchical system allows a place for Yiddishkayt, but demands its subordination to the

Party.27

While Lenin laid the foundation for Soviet attitudes regarding literature, and those ideas were supported by Marxist definitions of the problems facing Communism

(embodied by national minorities, and specifically the always-Othered and always inferior

Jews), Josef Stalin, through his deputies Maksim Gorky and Andrei Zhdanov, brought socialist realism to its fullest articulation during the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. This event took place over weeks, when writers, readers, and Party officials gathered to discuss the future of Soviet letters in the post-revolutionary world. This world was deemed new and challenging, and the goal of the Congress was to outline the manner in which Soviet

27 This subordination will be discussed as a crucial component of Chapter Five.

literature could become a literature of the world and “find great artistic expression for the new life, for the new people, for the new social and personal relations existing among them” (Gorky et al. 7). Interestingly, the leading article on the Congress, featured in a

Russian magazine on literary criticism, cited the most important development of the

Congress as the fact that writers and readers were made aware of “the tremendous achievements of literature in the languages of national minorities…” The work of “the many writers, poets and dramatists from among the national minorities” were cited as the best proof of the fact that Soviet literature was an “all-Union literature” (Gorky et al. 9). Many speeches were also made by members of the imperial intelligentsia, who unanimously spoke of their awakenings to Soviet themes, “their development as thinkers and artists…and of how they came to link their fate irrevocably with that of the proletariat”

(Gorky et al. 9-10). Though there is surely no restriction against being both intelligent and a member of the proletariat, the term “intelligentsia” in this context is truly a class distinction, and these speeches therefore conveyed both the downfall of the elitist intellectuals of tsarist Russia and the victory of Bolshevik thinking in the field of the arts.

This valuing of Bolshevik, proletarian voices in Yiddish literature also represents a tentative solution to the tension between high literary registers and the usage of a

“people’s language” in communicating that literature.

Gorky explores this theme in his speech “Soviet Literature,” the second featured presentation of the Congress. Gorky begins a logical process focused on the role and responsibilities of socialist realism—art by the proletariat, so to speak—by discrediting the contributions of the bourgeoisie, stating that their

“role…in the process of cultural creation has been greatly exag- gerated, especially in literature… The culture of capitalism is nothing but a system of methods aimed at the physical and moral expansion and consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie over the world, over men, over the treasures of the earth and the powers of nature” (Gorky et al. 25-69).

Gorky discredits bourgeois cultural achievements—that is, any pre-Marxist or pre-

Soviet cultural achievements—and then positions Marxist and Soviet culture as the sole contender to fill that void. For example, folklore, the “unwritten compositions of toiling man,” features heroes Gorky deems “profound, vivid, and artistically perfect” (Gorky et al.

25-69). These heroes are never pessimistic, despite life’s challenges, and the simplest of men will always be revealed as wiser than his brothers, his father, even the king. The perfection of these figures results from a blending of reason, intuition, cognition, and emotion, and this blend, Gorky argues, can only be created by someone who “directly participates in the work of creating realities”—in short, a working comrade, because to work was the only way to effectively push reality and history forward towards the long- awaited communist utopia. As will be discussed shortly, these requirements are heavily represented in numerous works from Bergelson’s oeuvre, but deviations from this trope also exist.

The other figure most central to the Congress was Andrei Zhdanov. At the opening of the Congress, Zhdanov delivered a speech conveying “flaming Bolshevik greetings” and paying tribute to “the mighty banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin” (Zhdanov in Gorky et al. 15). In this brief address, Zhdanov characterizes other literatures as rife with mysticism, prostitution, superstition, pornography, and so on. Socialist realism, in contrast,

finds its inspiration in lofty goals, true strivings for greatness and rightness, and “from the life and experience of the men and women of Dnieprostroy, of Magnitostroy…from the heroic epic of the Chelyuskin expedition, from the experience of our collective farms, from the creative action that is seething in all corners of our country” (Zhdanov in Gorky et al.

20). Indeed, Zhdanov admits that Soviet literature may lean towards the tendentious, but argues that this is not a sin, because this tendency is one with an aim to “liberate the toilers, to free all mankind from the yoke of capitalist slavery” (Gorky et al. 21).

Here we see that while Gorky characterizes the discursive representations that are correct and suitable for socialist realist writing, Zhdanov discusses the metadiscursive features of the genre: its derivations and inspirations, its responsibility to be “an engineer of human souls” and to communicate ideology in a manner to which the working class will be receptive. This engineering of the soul is an internal, highly personal process, and when this process is facilitated by a piece of literature, I consider that literature to be a

“laboratory” of identity formation.28 The personal nature of this reflection does not imply that it was conducted in private, however; even the most personal thoughts were privy to interference by the state. This interference implies an issue with the Soviet system’s own perception of its degree of control over the average citizen, and therefore presents a problem with the function of the system itself.

When the internal mechanizations of the individual are constantly supervised by the state, the state is implying the possibility of its own failure—after all, the perfectly-behaved

28 The inspiration for this term comes from Jochen Hellbeck’s dissertation on the Soviet diary, which will be discussed in Chapter Five.

child requires no babysitter. This totalitarian insistence on being privy to even the most private thoughts implies the state’s own imperfection. By virtue of this fact, the ultimate endgoal of the Soviet system is to reach a moment in Communist historiography when that very system is no longer needed. I argue that it is this discrepancy, which does not take into account the natural human desire for power and control over others, which pushes the

Soviet system over the line from true Communism into authoritarianism.

This performative aspect of identity formation, which could also be considered self- censorship and self-policing, became a vital part of the public and private lives of members of the Union of Soviet Writers. This group consisted of writers whose work was at least tacitly endorsed by the government by virtue of its publication and the authors’ continued freedom to publish. Membership in the group was not necessarily especially selective, but to join was to imply that one accepted the new terms of life as an artist in the USSR, and to more or less agree that these terms were acceptable.

Some critics, however, disagreed that the terms of socialist realism were at all tolerable. Under the pseudonym Abram Terts, the Russian-Jewish Andrei Sinyavsky wrote his On Socialist Realism sometime in the 1930s and 1940s. He smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR, and it was published in a French translation in 1959. Sinyavsky begins by giving a history of Marxism and Communism that seems rooted in a proper Soviet attitude.

He links literature to the Soviet view of historiography, formulating an argument that clearly differentiates between the USSR as a historical entity as the USSR as a teleological unit engaged in the performance of historiography. For example, Sinyavsky states: “Our art, like our culture and our society, is teleological through and through. It is subject to a higher

destiny, from which it gains its title of nobility. In the final reckoning we live only to speed the coming of Communism…” (Terts 26). 29 While history itself simply unfolds in a linear fashion, Marxism is focused on the application of history itself to a goal: “leading all concepts and objects to the Purpose…the history of humanity’s march toward

Communism” (Sinyavsky 35). He speaks of how human purpose, which he sees in the

Soviet Union as the march toward Communism, drives the movement from one era to another. He claims that throughout history, mankind has moved from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and finally to Communism: “[t]he magnificent aim is achieved, the pyramid is crowned, history at an end” (Terts 30-31). With this intentional hyperbole, Sinyavsky’s true feelings toward Communism and the Soviet Union begin to show.

To be sure, Sinyavsky objects to totalitarianism and to repression—this is made apparent in the way he wrote this treatise and smuggled it to the West for publication.

However, Sinyavsky also objects to the very philosophy that defines the Soviet Union. He views the manipulation and revision of history, the historiographical action meant to depict

Marxism as the natural evolution of human civilization, as the be-all and end-all of the

Soviet system. This form of manipulation requires not only the policing of actions, but the policing of thoughts. Sinyavsky notes later on that Communism “resembles our aspirations about as much as…man resembles God…This resemblance lies in the subordination of all

29 It is notable that here, Sinyavsky speaks of life lived solely towards the purpose of reaching Communism. This is much the same manner in which the devout Jew speaks of living a life aimed towards the coming of the Mashiach and the messianic age. I mention this correlation in order the underline the inherent religiosity of Communism.

our actions, thoughts, and longings to that sole Purpose which may have long ago become a meaningless word” (Terts 39).

In the second part of On Socialist Realism, Sinyavsky discusses the discursive techniques and conceits that figure centrally in many Soviet novels. He discusses the mindset of the Soviet writer, who views every conflict and subject through the lens of its relation to the ultimate goal of forward movement toward Communism. He notes that many works include sections at the end discussing the glories of Communism or summarizing the coming Communist utopia (examples of writers using this technique include Mayakovsky and Gorky himself). In terms of temporality in these novels, time itself is pushed forward quickly because “each day completed is one day closer to the realization of the Soviet dream/revolutionary ideal” (Terts 46). This linear, temporal movement is mimicked by linear progression in the psychologies of one or more central characters, whose thoughts and desires are assumed to move forward and “improve” based upon a socialist-centered values system. The characters are expected to recognize their faults unflinchingly and re-orient themselves toward the Communist ideal, because becoming a better Communist is equating with becoming a better person (Terts 47-48). We see here that in terms of social conduct, societal progress, and individual psychology, Communism replaces any concept of God or morality. Communism is the new religion.

This poses an “insoluble contradiction,” to quote Sinyavsky (91). If Communism has usurped religion to the extent he describes—and I agree that this is the case—its format is completely incompatible with realism. The grand strivings of Marxism, its Holy Grail of a coming Communist utopia, is centered in teleology and cannot be expressed in real-life

imagery more suited to hunger, war, the factory, the city, and the shtetl. To summarize,

Sinyavsky declares that the most successful socialist realist writers “are those who can present our achievements as truthfully as possible and our failings as tactfully, delicately, and untruthfully as possible” (Terts 94). Success, in the case of producing socialist realist literature, seems to be encapsulated by the avoidance of negative repercussions, the creation of as convincing as possible a portrait of society moving towards a Communist goal, and the depiction of loyal socialist workers improving themselves and their families to better serve that goal.

Such a story is found in Bergelson’s Baym dnyepr, the 1932 novel focused on the son of a bourgeois Jewish family, Penek, and his re-education into a good Soviet Jew.30 The story opens with a clear socialist realist conceit: a paragraph announcing the time, the place, and the relevant characters: “a dor a yor draysik far der revoliutsiye; shtet afn rekhtn breg dnyepr…tif in der shvartsediker, grinbleterdiker ukrayine” (Dnyepr, 5).31 This small fragment of text accomplishes several purposes: first of all, it establishes the text as being firmly realist. The involved parties exist in a real place, concretely represented and familiar to Bergelson’s readers. Secondly, the text is socialist. Readers are informed that the action of the novel commences three years after the revolution, and because the work is realist, this means the novel occurs in a true-to-life Communist Ukraine. Thirdly and finally, the text is presented with a solution to the problem of temporospatiality: this novel will occupy a Yiddish space by virtue of its language, and this space is firmly bordered within a time

30 By the Dnieper 31 “a generation three years after the revolution; towns on the right bank of the Dnieper…deep in dark, green-leafed Ukraine”

frame and a spatial location. Yiddish literature has a home in this iteration, and that home is shvartsediker, grinbleterdiker ukrayine in the early years after the Soviet rise to power.

Though the first and second volumes of Baym dnyepr are too lengthy to analyze in depth here—the first one alone comes to roughly 550 pages—the central aspect of this

Soviet Bildungsroman is Penek Levin’s development from an unloved child of the bourgeoisie to a strong, idealistic Soviet-Jewish worker. Harriet Murav discusses this development, stating that “the project of remaking the self involves overcoming [a] bourgeois past” (Sherman and Estraikh 241). Penek is young and privileged, and entirely disconnected from the Soviet project of utopia-building: . Indeed, at seven years old, he was born four years before the fall of the tsars. It must be noted, however, that Penek’s early mistakes are attributable to his family and not his own shortcomings—after all, he is a child. As he grows, he sees “the reality, and hence the truth, of life in the [hintergeslekh], and the hellish underbelly of the brewery that is one of the sources of his father’s wealth”

(Sherman and Estraikh 241).32 This movement from wrong action into right belief and right action marks Penek’s transformation into the positive hero so necessary to the socialist realist genre. This process is complicated by the fact that while Penek is a wrongdoer of sorts, he is a mere child, separated economically, physically, and even temporally from the struggle of the world’s workers. His process of maturation and education, however, can be fully appreciated by the reader. I argue that this appreciation is possible because the Soviet reader is not obligated to hate Penek. His ignorance is a byproduct of his upbringing, and as

32 “backstreets”

he learns and grows, as all children do, he unlearns the conditions imposed upon him by his family, specifically his father. Levin the elder is the character that earns the hatred of the socialist reader, and Penek only serves to embody Soviet ideals of education and self- improvement.

Indeed, Penek’s transformation is characterized by conscious separations: for example, leaving his family’s home and splitting from his traditional shtetl community, or abandoning Hebrew as a generative activity in favor of Yiddish. Penek first decides to leave his family home after seeing his friend Borukh’s “naye shikh—tsum ershtn mol in lebn naye eygene shikh” (Dnyepr, 326-327).33 This causes Penek to reflect on his own life, his own privileges and the inequality perpetuated by those privileges, and he undergoes a deep internal shift long in the making: “tsurikh mit etlekhe teg hot penek mit farkvetshte tseyn bashlomn [sic]: er muz poter vern funem ‘hoyz,’ vu me is tsu im erger…” (Dnyepr, 327).34, 35

Here, Penek undergoes a major maturation, transforming himself from a child to a true

Soviet. He seizes upon a plan of action, formulating with his friend Yankl how he will leave the city and his family, and in doing so, manages to engage with his own life in a forward

33 “new shoes—for the first time in his life, new shoes of his own” 34 “Penek had been clenching his teeth over this decision for several days: he must free himself from that ‘house’ where everyone is angry with him…” It should be noted here that Bergelson places “hoyz” in quotations throughout the novel, a conceit which transforms the term from signifying a simple habitation into a symbol encompassing Penek’s family, his father’s business, and the bourgeois class as a whole (Kerler 166). 35 I disagree with Murav’s transliteration here; while extensive searches of numerous common a is ”באַשלומן“ ,”באַשלאָמן“ or “bashlomn” for results no rendered dictionaries Yiddish word meaning “decision” or “resolution.” I therefore believe Murav’s transliteration of this text ought to use the word “bashlumn.”

movement. In doing so, Penek engages with the movement of time itself toward a

Communist ideal, rendering him a positive socialist realist hero.

This movement is best described in spatial terms: Penek moves away from his family and his father, and therefore moves forward in the course of history and his own development as a young Soviet and worker. Movements of this sort encompass the experiences and depictions of many socialist realist heroes, primarily because of the Soviet focus upon spatial conquest and transformation. For example, in later discussions on

Bergelson’s novel of Jewish pioneers, Birebidzhaner, I will defend the assertion that Soviet

Communism was expected to spread in a movement upholding concepts of center- peripheral relations—that is, as power emanates from the dominant center of an institution, change is effected in the peripheral areas which rely upon the center as the source of their power and autonomy. Suffice it to say for now, however, that Penek’s transformation in these terms—the notion that expanding outward and moving forward are good, positive occurrences—attribute value to this transformation. Bergelson shows here that to a good, successful Soviet, widening one’s perspective is crucial, and experiencing more and more of the world is the method by which that development occurs.

As the Soviet hero experiences more places and comes to know more people, it goes without saying that he is retain his commitment to the ideals of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin. After all, the truth and methods of the Communist system are so absolute that its success is a foregone conclusion, even as the believer grows and learns about the world.

Later in Baym Dnyepr, a teenage Penek, a prolific writer and journal-keeper, attempts to express himself fluently in Hebrew as opposed to the Yiddish of his childhood.

He feels “az nit er shraybt mit hebreyishe verter, nor hebreyishe verter shraybn mit im”

(Murav in Sherman and Estraikh, 241).36 Bergelson argues in numerous places that Yiddish literature is far too obsessed with its past, a preoccupation which undermines its status as the language of the Soviet-Jewish future. Interestingly, however, Penek attempts to resort to the past, symbolized by his use of a Biblical language, as a means of communicating his present and designing his future. Notably, this attempt fails. He cannot move forward as a

Soviet without letting go of his past in his father’s household, and he cannot mold a future or write his modern Communist thoughts with Hebrew letters. However, he can create some kind of productive Soviet future by virtue of his Yiddish-language diaries. This focus on the diary and on the language of the self—in Penek’s case, Yiddish—pushes the reader towards the thought that the Soviet self is one which requires mediation and active shaping. I argue as well that a separation from Hebrew represents Penek’s complete split from Judaism as a religion, which in turn signifies that Communism now fulfills the role once played by this religion. In Soviet eyes, Hebrew is the language of religion, and more threateningly, the language that distracts good Soviets from their work in the rodina by luring them toward Zionism and the Holy Land. By rejecting Hebrew, Penek rejects thoughts and goals that could render him a less-good, less-motivated Soviet worker.

Finally, Penek becomes a classic positive hero by recognizing his past faults and evaluating the suitability—that is, the usefulness in terms of Soviet values—of the actions

36 “not that he is writing with Hebrew words, but that Hebrew words are writing with him”

and individuals around him. During a childhood Rosh Hashone service in shul, Penek observes the Jews around him and feels that “zey aribergevorfn di taleysim zeyer niderik iber di kep…un mit groys kavone:—‘un ale veln makhn eyn bintl tsu ton dayn viln mitn gantsn hartsn.’ Zey ziftsn derbay zeyer tsebrokhn, fun tifn hartsn…” (Dnyepr, 315).37 Bergelson’s discrediting of the people around Penek serves two purposes. First, it firmly establishes the youth’s discontent with the life planned for him—his family, Judaism, and shul, traditional beacons guiding a shtetl life, only frustrate and anger Penek. Secondly, Bergelson depicts the internal censorship present in Penek’s character, and in all socialist realist heroes.

Because the Soviet consciousness is meant to be actively developed as a personal project of sorts, with the text serving as the laboratory of that work, an inherent culling is necessary: the hero must be willing to strip away those traditions, people, and constructs which do not serve the Communist ideal. Where Penek judges and censors the practices around him, he sorts the schema of his daily life into “good”—that is, sufficiently Soviet—and “bad” categories. Because the service around him is centered upon internal work, such as praying and reflecting, little external activity is available to the eye. Furthermore, the internal

“work” being performed is in service of the Jewish soul, not for the sake of any goal or objective related to the Communist project. For this reason, the child Penek sorts religiosity and Jewish observance into a negative value category. This incident is marked as a major one in Penek’s maturation, and signals the continuation of his deviance from Hasidic life into secular Communism.

37 “…they were tossing prayers around, low over their heads…and with great intention:— ‘and all will commit to doing Your will with their whole heart.’ They sigh, close and so broken, from deep in that whole heart…”

Another interesting aspect of this passage, linguistically, is its display of tense- switching. Bergelson utilizes this technique as a method of value-coding, and as a method of communicating which actions are mere occurrences, and which contrasting actions are held to be moral or metaphysical absolutes. For example, here, the Jews of this minyan are praying, and Bergelson uses the past tense to communicate that fact. At this moment in the past, these Jews were praying. However, the following thought, that they sigh brokenly from within their singular, shared heart, is in the present tense. This elevates the statement from a mere occurrence in the past to one that is still happening—in short, in happened in the past and it happens in the present. It is universally true. Bergelson breaks the tense of his plot narrative, which is conducted in the past, in order to make an overarching judgment—in this case, a judgment on the interior condition of the souls of the faithful. In the present tense, always and to this day, they utter broken sighs. This statement is meant to portray these Jews in a negative light, and to communicate to the reader Bergelson’s assertion that there is a deep sadness here, and something lacking.

The two published volumes of Baym dnyepr comprise a Bildungsroman of a specifically socialist realist variety. The hero, Penek, grows from a bourgeois child into a positive Soviet hero, and this transformation manifests itself in Penek’s conscious separations from his old way of life. This intentional internalization of Soviet values, combined with external demonstrations of loyalty, renders Penek the ideal Soviet Jew: one who has renounced his Judaism in favor of the Communist ideal. This is what the new

Russia requires of its Jewish citizens: an adaptation to the flow of history and the active

preparation of schema meant to revise Jewishness and Yiddishkayt into methods of achieving socialist perfection.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE “NEW” RUSSIA, THE “OLD” RUSSIA, AND THE JEWS

So far, this project has asserted that a problem of temporospatiality exists in Yiddish literature, and that Dovid Bergelson considered the Soviet Union and socialist realism to be the solution to this problem. With Tsvishn emigrantn as an example of this angst and Baym dnyepr illustrating the ways in which the exposure to and acceptance of Soviet-Yiddish identity could transform an individual, questions remain about the role of that Jewish individual in the nascent Bolshevik state. How did Jews interact with the “old” Russia, a term which I use here to signify the imperial, tsarist period? How does the concept and metaphor of the shtetl encompass that interaction? With the shift to the “new” Soviet

Russia, how does the shtetl adapt—that is, if it adapts at all? Furthermore, what is the role of the Jew in terms of not only the new Bolshevik present, but in the construction of the

Communist utopia to come? How does Bergelson’s work represent the Jewish movement forward into a Soviet and Communist future?

As a major symbol in Bergelson’s work and a central structure in Jewish life both pre- and post-Revolution, the shtetl is a logical starting point for this discussion. Jewish life in Imperial Russia was characterized by the centrality of the shtetl to the formation and condition of the individual, especially given the tendency toward subsistence-based, poverty-stricken living conditions within these small towns. Both these conditions are complex and rooted in diverse causes, to be sure, but central among those causes is the geographic “Pale of Settlement.” With the 1795 and 1835 laws declaring that Jews could

only live in the peripheral area known as the Pale, they were cut off from the opportunities and vibrancy of urban life, either through forced relocation from metropolitan centers or by eliminating the option for Jews to move to these centers in the first place (Rubinstein

34).38 This relocation and scattering was instrumental to the development of shtetlekh, discrete areas of economy and habitation populated by a mix of Christians and Jews, ranging from very poor to middle- or upper middle-class. In Bergelson’s work, the shtetl is representative of ennui, discontent, a sense of claustrophobia, and thwarted dreams and ambitions. While it makes positive appearances at times, these appearances are filtered through the experiences and nostalgia of individual characters, thereby problematizing their interpretation and separating the concept from Bergelson’s narrative. Furthermore, these positive reflections on the shtetl are generally prompted not by a longing for that lifestyle, but by the encounter with unexpected difficulties in the Bolshevik, post-revolution world.

Opgang, published in 1920, is a novel of times “before”—it was written before

Bergelson’s pro-Soviet ideological shift and is set in the imperial years leading up to the

38 The Pale of Settlement occupied much of present-day Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Yiddish, much of this area was referred to as “Lite,” which is still the term for present-day Lithuania in modern Yiddish. It is important to note here as well that, up until the first Polish Partition of 1772, few Jews historically lived in the Russian Empire. When these formerly Polish spaces were acquired by Russia, the empire also acquired the Jews living there. This partition, the following two in 1793 and 1795, and the simple vastness of the Eurasian empire prevented policy regarding Jews from being particularly consistent, coherent, or reliable (Stanislawski, “Russian Jewry,” 266). This led to wide- ranging experiences and living conditions throughout Jewish areas within Russia, as well as the difficulty of making reliable generalizations about the Jewish lives lived therein.

October Revolution.39 The shtetl of Rakitne serves as the backdrop to the story of Meylekh, a young pharmacist who returns from his recent travels only to commit suicide. The novella observes the community as it comes to terms with Meylekh’s death, and focuses specifically upon the people closest to him, specifically his best friend, Khaym-Moyshe, and the women who loved both of them. The most important relationship to the plotline, however, is between Khaym-Moyshe and the departed Meylekh. Avraham Novershtern argues:

“[t]he internal dialogue that the living character conducts with his departed friend portrays…his own vacillation between opposing drives, between a death wish that holds him in its clutches and the hope of finding a way in the world that will satisfy him intellectually and emotionally” (“Bergelson, Dovid”).

We see here that the living protagonist’s hopes are unfulfilled in the shtetl, and his conversations with Meylekh represent his dilemma—to take the same avenue as Meylekh, end his own life, and symbolically resign himself to an eternity in the shtetl, or to remain in the land of the living and find a way into fulfillment and happiness, even if that means leaving Rakitne and entering the wider world in which he has already failed once. This metaphor can be expanded to encompass the transition from an old imperial Russia to its new Soviet iteration: protagonists are torn between an old, closed, familiar society, and a new, vibrant, utopian unknown that presents a wide range of threats, but also a vast array of opportunities.

Indeed, Bergelson saw himself trapped in a similar situation to Khaym-Moyshe.

While writing Opgang, Bergelson felt, in his own words, “paralysed.” The revolution around

39 Descent

him had convinced the author that “no one needed belles-lettres any longer,” and Bergelson was resolved that this would be his last book. He asserted that his earlier works had reflected the death of the shtetl bourgeoisie, and that the intelligentsia was now alone and abandoned, with no one to talk to and no one to write for—indeed, one could argue that the rise of the working-class voice means the fall of literature in its high-browed, belles-lettres formations. Bergelson even noted that Khaym-Moyshe was so alone that his only option was to speak to a dead man (Bergelson in Sherman and Estraikh, 18). This supports my assertions regarding the symbolism of Khaym-Moyshe’s situation in terms of the lives of

Russian Jews of the time. He continues to guard secrets and hold conversations with a dead past, symbolized by his friend Meylekh, who has voluntarily isolated himself from the wider world by virtue of his suicide. However, Khaym-Moyshe is also lured back into life and engagement with a wider, secular world by the woman he grows to love, Chana. It is telling that despite all his internal conversations with his dead friend, words fail Khaym-

Moyshe at the moment he chooses the real, living world over the one in his mind: “Ihre oygn hobn oyf im gekukt glaykh fun akegn, vi fargliverte hobn zey oyf im gekukt, vi glezerne, vos konen nit reydn. Er hot zi derkont. ‘Akh, Chanke…’” (Bergelson, Opgang, 242).40 We see here that while shtetl life is dead and gone, our protagonist attempts to reconnect with it in much the same manner he converses with his dead companion. By leaving Meylekh behind and recognizing and reaching out to Chana, Khaym-Moyshe chooses, in Bergelson’s construct, a life outside of the shtetl, among the living and secular world.

40 “His eyes gazed straight across the room, eyes that were motionless, glazed over, speechless. They fell upon her. ‘Oh, Chanke…’”

In his article “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Dan Miron argues that no matter how realistic (or socialist realistic) the literary work, the shtetl is often examined in a manner that is decidedly fictionalized and unhistorical. He states that “intrinsic, nonmemetic norms” govern these literary constructs, no matter how “extrinsic [and] nonfictional” their basis in reality may be (5). For example, the works of Sholem

Abramovitsh occupy a cohort that are praised for realism and being “inherently ‘true’ to life…The great writers supposedly not only told the historical truth, but told the whole truth and nothing but the truth…The two realities, the ones narrated in the stories and the one existing ‘out there,’ fully converge” (Miron 6). Miron continues on to note that while

Abramovitsh’s work is considered to represent the full scope of 19th century Jewish life in

Eastern Europe, various aspects of this life are not represented at all: for example,

Hasidism or the Musar and Chabad movements (7). These deficiencies indicate that the literary representation of the shtetl is not solely realistic. Furthermore, Miron notes that the tendency to treat these representations metonymously leads to an ignorance of their discursive features, stating that the only underlying feature of a purely realistic representation of the shtetl would be sociohistorical context. This is not the case. Miron notes that “less obvious poetic mechanisms” occupy the more hidden strata of these “shtetl stories,” as he terms them. These stories are “very complex and multitiered artifacts” (11).

Finally, the argument is made that while discursive and metonymic readings of these works of fiction are necessary, a third variety—metaphorical—is also required. The author terms these shtetl stories “mega-metaphors” that require both discursive and metonymic analysis

in order to properly observe the hierarchy formed among all the literary techniques at conceits in play.

I believe that this analysis is deeply reflective of Bergelson’s socialist realist work.

While Miron only briefly discusses Bergelson’s Baym dnyepr in terms of its representations of Christians and Jews in the shtetl, the links between Miron’s analysis and Bergelson’s representations go much deeper. For example, Miron’s arguments reflect the status of the shtetl as something neither wholly realistic nor wholly artistic. While shtetl stories may deal with the roots of the shtetl in reality, these roots will develop into something that serves another, discursive purpose. For example, an author may represent a shtetl as completely populated by Jews in order to use the happenings there as representation of different ways of life and belief systems among the millions of Jews of Eastern Europe. To accurately represent this hypothetical shtetl as mixed between, say, Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Judaism would weaken its symbolic and discursive power. Therefore, given its position between reality and fiction, the rise of Bolshevism in the region would redefine the shtetl, rendering its structures and representations potentially obsolete. After all, what place does a hierarchical social construct, represented with a hierarchical organization of literary devices, have in a classless, egalitarian Communist regime?

This question can be rephrased and simplified as follows: is the shtetl in Soviet

Russia still a living entity with agency, or is it simply a relic, a dead thing to be buried?

Bergelson’s 1929 Mides hadin examines these questions through the story of Filipov, a

Bolshevik officer and Gentile sent to the border town of Golikhovke to monitor the new border crossing—represented by the fortress of Kamino-Balke—between Soviet and non-

Soviet spaces.41 Though its protagonist is not Jewish, I argue that the real central character here is Golikhovke, “a small shtetl, which spoiled the valley” (Mides hadin 13). The second chapter opens with the return of a nameless Christian woman from an attempt to cross the border into non-Bolshevik territory, and the reader is told that “arriving back in the shtetl in the early morning was difficult…During the day Golikhovke did not go out, and when it did, it was on the quiet, in stocking feet” (Mides hadin 13). The shtetl is a blight, something that ought to remain quiet and hidden from the outside world as its citizens remain quiet and hidden from each other. This seems to be equally for reasons of safety as for reasons of privacy: when Pani Voltsis sees the woman return, she is “so afraid she didn’t do anything, except go outside” (Mides hadin 13). Even to step outside is to invite trouble, much less to make a scene or any noise outside the confines of one’s home. Even in these first few pages,

Bergelson establishes a system of values: a shtetl is meant to be quiet and hidden, and this muffled existence is in opposition to Bolshevism, which occupies the active role of searcher, punisher, and authority figure. Bolshevism has agency, and the shtetl—not only its occupants, but the shtetl itself—has none. The shtetl is also portrayed as being as silent internally as it is externally, for Bergelson focuses the majority of his omniscient narration on the thoughts and feelings of non-Jewish characters.

These characters are primarily Filipov and the nameless Christian woman. I argue that the decision to focus so intensely on these two personages mediates the shtetl through critical eyes—after all, while many shtetlekh were mixed Christian and Jewish, the phenomenon itself only came to be with the relocations and livelihoods of Eastern Europe’s

41 Stern Judgment or The Fullest Extent of the Law

Jewish population. Examining the shtetl through Gentile eyes, however, pushes even the reader most familiar with Judaism and Yiddishkayt into a position of foreignness and self- censorship: he or she is pushed to view the shtetl with disdain, confusion, and fear. This is reinforced when the Christian woman leaves the home of Shmuel and Nekhe Voltsis, the married couple with whom she and her child have been lodged since before her attempt at the border. After becoming sexually involved with an undercover Jewish agent, the woman is disgusted and ashamed that she has consented to “let her body be defiled by a dirty Jew without rhyme or reason” (Mides hadin 119). She crosses herself and prays all night, and in the morning, bundles herself in furs and runs away from the “unclean Jewish household,” traveling on foot with her child in her arms.

Here, we see the woman’s internal anti-Semitism being made external. Her horror at her role in her own “defilement”—the encounter between herself and Yokhelzon was enthusiastic and consensual, rendering her complicit in her own downfall—prompts her to leave in as emotional and impulsive a manner as possible. An internal, unbearable disjointment between herself and her surroundings becomes central to her interpretation of the shtetl. Her only defense is to flee from a threat that poses no real danger; the horror she perceives is within herself. Bergelson seems sympathetic to this horror, locating its source not in anti-Semitism as pure Jew-hatred, but in a fear of the superstitious, uncomfortable, metaphysically contaminative shtetl. He seems to imply that in uneducated or provincial societies where a Gentile’s only exposure to Judaism would be in observing the form and function of shtetl life, a certain degree of anti-Semitism may be tolerable or even understandable.

Here we see Bergelson’s interpretation of the role of the shtetl in the new Russian order. It is not a symbol or a theme, but a character with perceived intentions and desires.

This is not to say that it retains any real agency, however; this character is a static one, and one generally understood and interpreted through the eyes of its critics. This transition represents the rapidly-changing role of the Jew in Bolshevik Russia, whose autonomous

Jewishness is repressed within the confines of the Soviet system. Where that Jewish identity used to have agency, it is silenced and stilled, and where the shtetl was once a warm and familiar community, it is threatening and limiting. Bergelson’s representation of the shtetl, both in Opgang and Mides hadin, seems to label the relation between the shtetl and Soviet fulfillment as mutually exclusive.

What is this fulfillment, then? What is Soviet “happiness?” After all, Communism is heavily concerned with justice and utopia-building, which implies the definition and examination of individual happiness, as well as the manipulation of that concept. In a unique work based upon the proceedings from a May 2006 conference of the same name at the University of Nottingham, Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet-Style examines the idea of happiness in the USSR, and examines what Soviet citizens considered important to questions of happiness (Balina and Dobrenko ix). Dobrenko and Balina argue in the introduction to this collection that “the pursuit of collective happiness is traditionally considered a utopian ideal that structured multiple aspects of Soviet culture” (xvi). In other words, if happiness is considered to be a positive mode of emotional existence that all persons seek, any utopian society would fulfill those needs. Because a utopia is defined as a perfect society, its achievement requires the coexistence of collective happiness and

individual happiness—indeed, the latter cannot exist without the former. Balina and

Dobrenko note this interrelatedness and argue that conflict arises in “the tension between committing oneself to the collective ideal and the natural human desire to pursue individual happiness” (xvi). The defeat of this tension can only be engineered when happiness is consciously modeled by the state and by one’s own peers, thereby allowing the individual to model his or her own happiness upon the (perceived) happiness of the collective surroundings. State-sanctioned modes of happiness are demonstrated in ways both covert and overt, and in this manner, ideas of what happiness is and what it means to be happy are inculcated into the population by a totalitarian government.

With the notion established that Soviet happiness was focused upon the collective and not the individual, questions arise as to the specific implications of these ideas on a

Jewish collective. I argue that as Marxists awaited a utopia signaled by the rise of a classless, egalitarian world community, religious Jews awaited a Messianic age that would witness the end of war, hunger, suffering, and so on. The alignment of secular Jews to the utopian dream of Communism only reinforces earlier claims that Soviet socialism functioned as a religion of sorts. In both cases, humanity finds collective happiness and fulfillment in bettering itself, a “forward movement” meant to bring society closer to “the

‘horizon of expectations’ offered by the government,” which assumes a quasi-godlike role

(Balina and Dobrenko xix).

This horizon, and the goals and dreams it represents, are central to the notion of

Soviet nation-building. In his anthology on spatiality and Soviet rhetoric, The Landscape of

Stalinism, Eric Naiman argues that a logical binary is in place here: about the contributors to this anthology, he states

“nearly all…emphasize the paradoxical centrality of the periph ery in the Stalinist landscape. The provinces and edges of the nation were continually labeled periphery, yet this insistence on distance was often paired with an affirmation that distance could be magically annihilated” (Dobrenko and Naiman xv).

This annihilation of distance is little more than the elimination of foreignness, and hence the appropriation of, the Other—this Other being the unknown geography, the inhabitant of another land, and the non-Soviet ripe for conversion. This political and ideological appropriation is inevitable: the USSR functions as a Communist system, and all Communist systems hold up a global, classless, workers’ utopia as the goal of humanity. This global utopia can only exist if Soviet ideology spreads outward from the center (the areas of

Westernized, “European” Russia) to the periphery (for the time being, the far Eastern and

Northern reaches of Russia).42 For these reasons, space and distance become sacralized as enemies to be vanquished and obstacles to be overcome. These victories play their role in turn, as they represent the positive movement of the individual and the collective towards that utopian Communist dream.

42 The centrality of Moscow and the Kremlin is a quasi-religious issue in itself, because these constructs represent comrade Stalin: “According to the cultural geography mapped out by the socialist-realist worldview, Moscow was both the physical and the spiritual center of the universe. For the Soviet nation and the Soviet people, it was the axis mundi around which the USSR turned. At the very center was the Kremlin, the sacred sanctuary in which Stalin himself sat enthroned in glory. Stalin, the great Father of Nations, remained hidden from ordinary eyes, but his love and concern radiated outward from the Kremlin to every man, woman, and child in the Rodina, the socialist motherland” (McCannon in Dobrenko and Naiman, 242)

Later in the same collection, Emma Widdis examines this hierarchy—one of the most blatant and powerful in a system to be purportedly non-hierarchical. Widdis points out that this structure “pictured a space that was essentially static and hierarchically organized around a dominant center…It produced a vision of the Soviet territory as known and mapped” (Dobrenko and Naiman 221). The immense plains of the steppe, the blinding snow and freezing cold of Siberia, and the mosquito-infested swamps of the Russian far east were daunting to those tasked with spreading Soviet ideology across Eurasia.

However, the mastery and assimilation of these spaces, encapsulated by the Russian word osvoenie, ideologized the struggle to control the periphery by means of radial movement from the ideological and physical centers of power (Widdis in Dobrenko and Naiman, 221).

Widdis argues that in order to successfully perform these acts of osvoenie, the horizon became a “point of focus” demarcating the edge of visible space, creating a distinction between that which had already been achieved and that which was yet to come (Dobrenko and Naiman 220).

Nowhere is this movement towards a promising horizon embodied more representatively than in Bergelson’s Birebidzhaner.43, 44 This novel opens upon the scene of a family en route to the Russian Far East, part of a mass of Jews Bergelson refers to as

“ibervanderer.” It is telling that here, Bergelson uses a term that encompasses both the singular and the plural forms: a vanderer may go alone, and a group of vanderer may go

43 This is the demonym for a person living in Birobidzhan. Some scholars have explicated the title further in their translation and used Migrants to Birobidzhan. 44 I transliterate this proper noun in the Yiddish context as “Birebidzhan” because this represents its spelling in Yiddish. However, the English academy uses the Anglicized name “Birobidzhan” more frequently, and that is the term I use in an English-language context.

together, but the significance is in the movement and the goal. We see here the continued theme of the conflation of the individual and the collective—to be a whole, functioning

Soviet individual is to lose oneself in the collective, and a whole, successful collective should ideally be as unanimous and undivided as an individual.

When the ibervanderer arrive in Birobidzhan, it is early morning, just before daybreak, and only a lantern lights the first moments in their new home. In this small sphere of light, the settlers are disappointed. They comment on the thick and sucking mud, and a despairing voice wonders “Ver hot den gekont aykh tsugreytn do trotuarn”

(Birebidzhaner 45).45 It seems here that literal darkness is a signifier of darkened spirits; the arrival in Birobidzhan is underwhelming because its beauty and its potential, which I argue is represented by its vast horizon, is not perceptible. Simcha, our perennial socialist realist hero, is the only one to speak up and declare that the group has not made a mistake in coming. Bergelson portrays him as a simple, honest worker transformed by the journey:

“borves, in eyn tsekhrastet hemd mit hoyzn on a gartl…nokh eynem an umbakantn”

(Birebidzhaner 45).46 This explanation reinforces the fact that Simcha has every reason to be exhausted and depressed—he is poorly equipped for the work ahead and worn down from the journey to the far eastern reaches of Russia. However, Simcha reassures the group that “me iz sheyn gekumen,” and as the sun rises, the group raises their faces and eyes to the wide-open sky “on shum volkn-shpurn” (Birebidzhaner 46).47 As their surroundings become

45 ”Who among us could ever build a sidewalk here?” 46 “barefoot, in an open shirt and pants with no belt…standing before everyone, unrecognizable.” 47 “it is good that we came here”…“without a trace of a cloud”

visible, the ibervanderer are symbolically shown an untainted expanse of blue sky, implying that in this new place, their own lives may very well be untainted and clean.

Most important, however, is the acknowledgement of the horizon in this passage.

The term Bergelson uses is “horizontn,” the plural form of “horizont,” which simply means

“horizon.” The question here, however, is why Bergelson pluralizes the term. The full sentence reads “Ale dray vayte horizontn—ful mit op di barg” (Birebidzhaner 46).48 This

“dray” seems to number the horizons, not individuals, wagons, mountains, or anything else.

I do not pretend to know Bergelson’s motivations in choosing to use “dray…horizontn” in the text, and the interpretive possibilities are endless.

One such possibility is as follows: because the settlers have reached the easternmost edges of the USSR, they are, at least in the central/periphery binary of Soviet spatial politics, positioned at the eastern compass point. Perhaps these three horizons in the text are the northern, southern, and western compass points. Another possibility is that, based upon the Soviet regard for historicity and the historiography, the three horizons here are the past, present, and future. The ibervanderer are consistently looking to the past to orient themselves in this new Russia, and their focus on the future is meant to guide their present towards a Soviet-Jewish utopia in their new home.

Regardless of the reasoning behind Bergelson’s choice to reference three horizons, we see that where the ibervanderer once saw no horizon, only lantern light and mud, there are now multiple horizons marking the edges of their sight. Furthermore, there is plenty beyond the horizon—while the horizon delinates the edges of vision, it also carries the

48 “All three far-off horizons were filled by these mountains”

implication of all that exists beyond it. This implication weighs heavily upon the Soviet consciousness, because in order to achieve a Communist utopia, every Russian worker must do their utmost to further the goals of the system. To achieve utopia is to begin with an ideal and a vision, then spread that vision across the globe. The recognition of the horizon—or horizons—and that which lies beyond it is the first step in this process.

The significance of the horizon to Birebidzhaner is present in these discursive aspects, but it also features heavily in the structure of the novel itself. For example, in the very beginning, Bergelson situates the time and place of the action: “Zumer nayntsn hundert akht un tsvantsik iz keyn birebidzhan opgeforn eyne fun di ershte grupes yidishe ibervanderer” (Birebidzhaner 3).49 This is followed, at the end of the first section, by a similar passage in a sort of bookending technique: “S’iz geven in sof zumer, ven keyn birebidzhan zaynen geforn di ershte grupes yidishe ibervanderer” (Birebidzhaner 6). This conceit serves two purposes (and probably many more). First of all, these intertextual narrative breaks establish the realism of the novel, as was the case in Baym dnyepr: the plot occurs in a relevant and historiologically accurate time and place. Secondly, these passages mark progress; the first one is a “starting point” of sorts, and the second noted here serves to encompass the action performed up to this point. If the novel is to portray socialist realist movement toward a goal, there must be a starting line from which to move, and like mile markers on a road, progress must be noted as it unfolds.

49 “In the summer of nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, one of the first groups of Jewish ibervanderer set out for Birobidzhan.”

In this case, the starting line for the ibervanderer is a state of utter placelessness and transit. The novel itself opens upon a scene of chaos and departure. Simcha and the other pioneers are never seen in their pre-revolutionary lives in the old Russia, because that life is no more. The only relevance of this past is to the Soviet process of history-building, and once the past has served its function in supporting the construction of a new present, it can and should be done away with. As the pioneers travel across the continent and then work to make their new land from a muddy wilderness into a Soviet rodina, they home themselves within the Soviet project. Because of this homing-through-toil, the progress of the novel as a whole reflects the imagined progress of civilization towards its Communist, utopian endpoint.

Aside from this Marxist utopia-building, by bringing his characters home to

Birobidzhan, Bergelson performs an act of “homing” Yiddish literature within the confines of the Soviet sphere, as if to say that the Soviet Union is truly the perfect place for the development of secular Yiddishkayt and Jewish nationalism. The fact remains, however, that Birobidzhan was largely a failed experiment, and reinforced the idea that an artificial homeland could not be created for the Jewish people in the place of their affiliation with

Eretz Yisroel. For example, in Masha Gessen’s Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd

Case of Birobidzhan, the development of the Jewish population in the autonomous region is traced from 1928 to 2010. With only 850 Jews in the region at the beginning, the number steadily increased to its peak in 1939, just over 17,500 Jews in a region of about 110,000 people. With the Khurbn and deaths resulting from WWII, that number of Jews in the region plateaued, even slightly decreasing (Gessen, inside cover).

Though this postwar world could have offered great potential for the shoring up of

Birobidzhan as a Jewish homeland, many Jews had doubts. Bergelson “expressed enthusiasm” for the region’s beauty and natural resources and said a poet would find much to inspire him there, but Peretz Markish was concerned that it was so far away from

Western Europe and the Russian city centers, and Ilya Ehrenburg went as far as to comment that Birobidzhan was set to become “a new ghetto” (Gessen 93).50 Though Jews did move there slowly but surely, particularly those whose homes and families had been destroyed, Israel Emiot is quoted as saying that when he arrived in the region, Yiddish culture there was in a shambles. Only one newspaper existed, and it was in Russian with occasional Yiddish pages. The official language was no longer Yiddish, though a Jewish secondary school saw children reciting Yiddish stories and poetry. In Gessen’s well- researched monograph on Birobidzhan, she paints the region as one rife with conflict and confusion, and Emiot’s opinion of the postwar state supports that. Birobidzhan may have been functioning, but the presence of Yiddish in the region was despite government actions, not because of them. The region had become little more than a dumping ground for the wounded, the grieving, the homeless, and the traumatized.

As the years passed and Stalin grew older and more paranoid, his anti-Semitism began to target the region; Gessen identifies the tipping point as the murder of Solomon

50 Bergelson made a few highly-publicized trips to Birobidzhan, the most noted of which occurred in 1932 and prompted the writing of Birebidzhaner (Gessen 53). Despite myriad claims that he intended to make his home in Birobidzhan with wife Tsipe and son Lev, this never came to be. Scholars and even personal acquaintances of Bergelson’s debate whether he really supported the establishment of the region and if he ever wished to move there, or if his claims and praises were intended to ingratiate him to the Party and to the fledgling Yiddish institutions in the region.

Mikhoels. The Jewish identity and nationalism pushed upon Birobidzhan decades earlier was now dubbed “bourgeois nationalism” and a “Yiddish nationalist conspiracy” (Gessen

107). For example, a regional party secretary mentioned a May 1944 article from

Birobidzhanskaya zvezda where

“materials…compared the heroic feats of Jews in the Great Patriotic War with the biblical story of Samson[. T]hey said that ‘the lion’s heart of the Maccabees beats in their chests.’ But how could they make an equal sign between patriotic feats of the peoples of our country, standing up for the achievements of socialism, and events from Jewish ancient history and biblical tales?” (Gessen 109).

The unsuitability of this literary comparison was seen as equating socialism with religious mythology, an unacceptable minimization of Soviet achievements. We see here that where

Birobidzhan was literally forced to accept a facsimile Jewish history, forced to be considered of value in the Jewish historiographical narrative, it was now being de-Judaized and that history, revoked. Officials promised to cleanse the region of “nationalistic elements,” and within years, all those present at the conference on the fate of Birobidzhan had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor in the gulag (Gessen 110).

Bergelson represents Birobidzhan as the long-awaited Yiddish homeland, marking it as a place for Soviet Jews to make their own, all based upon the goodness and generosity of the Great Leader—as Stalin put it, “[the tsar] gave the Jews no land…We will give it”

(Rubinstein 33). With the prevalence of spatial constructions in the work, from horizons to borderedness, and the understanding that these constructions represent opportunities offered by the great Stalin himself, Birebidzhaner is a true reflection of Bergelson’s hopes for the homing of diasporic Yiddish letters in the USSR, as well as his hopes for the

belonging of Jews within the new Soviet state. However, we see a dark pall developing over the postwar safety and security of Jews in the USSR. It becomes clear, with a presentist view towards this history, that Bergelson’s literature is intended to glorify the state and paint a positive picture of the Jewish situation in the new Russia. However, this is socialist realism at work, and in reality, the totalitarian leanings of Stalin and the Party were becoming more dangerous and unpredictable.

CHAPTER SIX

JEWISH SUBJUGATION AS A MECHANISM OF SURVIVAL

Despite the positive representations of Jewishness and secular Yiddishkayt finding a home in the Soviet Union, Soviet Jews still walked a careful line in terms of reconciling their

Jewish loyalties with their Soviet identities. After all, as a totalitarian state, the USSR did not tolerate any personal interests that stood in conflict with, or even alongside, those of the government. For example, in Lenin’s “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” Jewish national culture is labeled “the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies” (Lenin 94). As one unfamiliar with Judaism’s teachings, and specifically with its emphasis on education often transmitted by the rabbis, Lenin seems ignorant of the fact that to name rabbis as the enemy is the name Judaism itself as the enemy. Rabbis are the teachers and the possessors of the religious knowledge at the heart of Judaism.

Furthermore, these rabbis are the ones to pass that knowledge on to the children held so dear in the Jewish and Yiddish traditions. Here we see Lenin equivocating these rabbis to bourgeois enemies of the state—that is, as internal actors inherently opposed to the Soviet system. Both factions are denounced as using “slogans,” terminology meant to invoke notions of propaganda and manipulation towards political ends. Ergo, Lenin positions

Judaism in opposition to the Soviet government: the two are at odds, and only one side is portrayed as benevolent and honest.

Jewish nationalism was seen as a threat to Soviet hegemony: it held too tightly onto the hopes and memories of Yiddish-speakers, and the Party could not risk being faced with

divided loyalties in its citizens. Even aside from the risks posed by the actions of individual

Jews, the very existence of Judaism itself posed a metaphysical threat. Within a totalitarian system, the existence of any belief system outside the majority implies a threat. To allow the existence of that minority system is to accept, and to allow, the implication that the majority mode of being is not the only correct mode. Furthermore, when that minority system is one based upon ethics and universal morality, that system poses a threat by threatening to expose the “wrongness” underlying the totalitarian majority. After all, totalitarian and authoritarian institutions are not known for their receptiveness to criticism. The existence of the Jewish nation within the USSR implied their adherence to the

Jewish faith, and that Judaism posed a threat to the moral and philosophical hegemony pursued by Stalin. After all, to be Jewish was to be different, and the existence of these differences undermined Soviet claims that the Communist way was the only “right” and

“true” way.

I believe that this metaphysical threat, combined with a history of anti-Semitic belief and practice in the USSR, further allowed the government to easily engage in hierarchical rhetoric that routinely positioned Jewishness below Sovietness and Jewish identity politics below Soviet identity politics. This history of anti-Semitism has been ongoing since the medieval period and before, and is far too extensive, convoluted, and I assert, baseless to examine in this project. However, I do argue that in order to portray Soviet Jewishness in a manner that, by virtue of its very existence, was tacitly endorsed by censors and Stalin alike, Bergelson utilized a technique of both overtly and covertly subjugating Jewish identity to Soviet identity. This “correct” positioning is manipulated in numerous examples,

but those I will treat most extensively here are from Bergelson’s pamphlet Yidn un di foterland-milkhome; the literary organ of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the journal

Eynikayt; and Bergelson’s drama Prints Reuveni.51 These works, produced more or less against the historiographic backdrop of the Khurbn and Second World War, utilize Jewish nationalism and rage as a rallying point for anti-Nazi and pro-Soviet sentiment.52 However, they do so in a manner that always promotes Soviet loyalty above Jewishness, and I argue that a major component in Bergelson’s fall from favor was his continued use of Jewish nationalistic themes after the war, and the usefulness of these themes to the Party, came to an end. An example of these unacceptable Jewish themes occurs in Prints Reuveni, a historical drama set during the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century.53 This play features heavy themes of the power of Jewish self-identification, messianism, and Jewish martyrdom, and I will examine it in opposition to Mides hadin’s portrayal of Filipov’s

Gentile martyrdom. Through these examinations, I will attempt to define exactly what the

Soviet system found so dangerous in Jewish pride and nationalism. Furthermore, by silencing this nationalism, what did the Party hope to deny and oppress?

51 Jews and the War for the Fatherland…Unity…Prince Reuveni 52 While the Western academy generally refers to the genocidal destruction of the Jews during WWII as the Holocaust, a lesser-known Hebrew term is “Shoah,” and a still less- known term is the Yiddish “Khurbn.” I find the first term completely inappropriate, because while “holocaust” was first used in a Jewish context in the Torah, the word signifies a burnt offering made to God—that is, a sacrifice intended for glorification or worship purposes. The deaths of over six million Jews during this mechanized genocide were not an offering to any god. “Shoah” means “calamity” or “destruction,” which I find vastly more fitting. However, the Yiddish term “Khurbn” means “destruction,” and is also used in a religious and historical sense to refer to the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Because of the focus of this research, and because of the extent of this tragedy, I use “Khurbn.” 53 Prince Reuveni (“Reuveni” is a proper name most closely approximated in Hebrew and English by “Reuben” or “Reuven”).

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, hereafter referred to as the “JAC,” was formed in

1941, six weeks after Hitler invaded Soviet territory, for the purposes of uniting Soviet Jews against the Nazi threat (Rubinstein 7). They served this goal by representing the interests of Soviet Jews both at home and, when permitted to do so, abroad, and by using their access to social and cultural capital to disseminate ideas, news, and creative works among

Yiddish-speaking Jews. A considerable part of the group’s work also included fundraising and garnering financial support for displaced Jewish communities, and to ensure the continuity of the JAC itself.

Notable members of the group included Solomon Mikhoels, Itsik Fefer, Peretz

Markish, David Hofstein, and Bergelson. Mikhoels was the head of the Moscow State

Yiddish Theater (the Moskovskii Gosudarstvyenniy Yevreyskii Teatr, or GOSET) and a popular Yiddish actor who would go on to play a central role in the remembrance and memorialization of the Khurbn: for instance, in the gathering of testimonies for The Black

Book and tenacious hold upon the creative and cultural expressions of Yiddishkayt in the face of destruction. Itsik Fefer was a prolific and noted Yiddish poet, also known for his

1943 fundraising trip to the U.S. with Mikhoels. Peretz Markish was another, even more renowned poet. He was a recipient of the Stalin Prize and ardent Communist who served on numerous literary journals. All these men also served on the board of the JAC, where they raised money, created petitions, and wrote propaganda and journalistic texts during the Second World War.

These people occupied a dangerous cultural space: they performed functions marking them as important Soviets and as valued proletarian comrades, but their

difference—their Jewishness—was not allowed to be forgotten, even if they had wished it to be. This Jewishness, in Stalin’s eyes, was their most valuable trait. Joshua Rubenstein goes so far as to argue that some members of the JAC became stima, or decoys, held up as examples of Jewish assimilation and success when the government was accused of anti-

Semitic behavior. That behavior took many forms, some present-day manifestations of long-held religious biases, and some unexpected slights made by a government that professed to be egalitarian and to condemn anti-Semitism. For example, Stalin’s “rootless cosmopolitan” speech of 1946 argued that Jews were untrustworthy as countrymen and as individuals because they were a disaporic people with no inherent connection to the land on which they lived. This “rootlessness,” combined with the “cosmopolitanism” that viewed humanity as inherently linked, and which refused to be kept in the dark and uninformed by an oppressive government, rendered Jews dangerous to Gentiles and to the USSR itself. To be a cosmopolitan was to value like-mindedness in others regardless of their nationality, and to acknowledge like-mindedness in a non-Soviet, even to a minimal extent, would be anathema for its undermining of the state and Party.

Within the purview of this specific project, the most important function of the JAC was of un-silencing in the face of such anti-Semitism. For example, the committee published Eynikayt, a Yiddish newspaper dedicated to the voicing Jewish thoughts and giving expression to Jewish themes, from 7 June 1942 to 20 November 1948 (Kerler 223).

To speak Jewish thoughts, and about Jewish themes, was to bring Soviet Jewish existence to light, and to demonstrate to the paper’s readership that their own existence was not solitary. Indeed, their existence was far from solitary; Dov-Ber Kerler calls the paper “a

reviving breath of life for many Yiddish writers, journalists, scholars, educators, and other

‘linguistically unassimilated’ members of the Jewish intelligentsia” (“Soviet Yiddish Press,”

223). Postwar circulation numbered about 10,000 copies, many of which were sent abroad, and during the first year of the paper’s publication, over 5,000 letters were received from all over the USSR (Litvak in Kerler, 223).

This cultural space was a fraught one. For one, the members of the JAC submitted to almost constant censorship of their work, including the avoidance of Yiddish words deriving from loshn koydesh in favor of words of Slavic or Germanic origin (Rubinstein 5).

The assault on the “holy tongue” of Judaism carried implications similar to those of the equivalence of rabbis with enemies of Marxism. The nature of Judaism was one of continuity since Biblical times, and arguably the central agent of that continuity was the usage of an ancient tongue preserved for millennia. To silence Hebrew was to assault and deny both the manner of communicating Jewishness and the manner of preserving

Jewishness. The implications behind censoring the use of loshn koydesh were thus far- reaching and ominous.54 Yiddish may have been the language of the JAC and of Eynikayt, but Hebrew possessed a historiographical and cultural relation to Judaism that rendered it inseparable from the religion itself.

54 Interestingly, there seems to be a pattern in Bergelson’s work, and presumably in the work of other Soviet-Yiddish writers, where words deriving from the loshn koydesh are “de- Judaized.” I argue that this is accomplished by shifting from the traditional Hebrew spelling, which eschews many vowels and uses some different letters than Yiddish, to a phonetic and quite typically Yiddish spelling. Sometimes the Hebraic words are avoided entirely in favor of Slavic or Germanic synonyms, but this edited Hebrew does appear consistently and often. Note the use of the Hebraic word “mishpokhah” in Birebidzhaner, as opposed to the non-Hebrew “familiye.”

100

Furthermore, as the silencing of Hebrew amounted to the silencing of Jewish expression and creativity, Jewish participation in the march of Soviet history was silenced.

This action of silencing carried deep significance in both the Soviet and Jewish spheres. In terms of Communism, all history is moving forward toward the end goal of a world of united workers, and as we know, full participation in that project required full participation in the creation of human history. Every good Soviet was meant to act as though their every action would be recorded and known in perpetuity. To live fully as a Soviet was to participate in history, and to silence Hebrew was to threaten Jewish autonomy and historical participation.

In terms of the Jewish concept of history, the passage of time is seen not as a forward march toward an endpoint, but a cycle, always repeating, always linked to that which comes before it and that which follows. Indeed, one of the central prayers of Judaism is the evening ritual of the Ma’ariv, the prayer marking the coming of night. In the Reform

Jewish Mishkan T’filah, sections of the Ma’ariv are translated from Hebrew as follows:

“Blessed are You, ‘ ‘ our God, Ruler of the universe, / who speaks the evening into being, / …

/ You are Creator of day and night, / rolling light away from darkness and darkness from light, / transforming day into night and distinguishing one from the other” (Frishman

147).55 This cyclicality is at the heart of this evening prayer, which reminds the observant

Jew that time moves in patterns and with intentionality, not simply in a march forward. To

55 This quote here uses one of the names of God that, once written, is not to be destroyed or disposed of any way. For the sake of my own religious observance, I have used a place- holding pair of quotations in its stead. Incidentally, the other name of God considered not only to be unwriteable, but unpronounceable, is the Tetragrammaton.

101

that end, another poem, an original written for the Mishkan, appears earlier in the Shabbos evening service: “We are a people in whom the past endures / In whom the present is inconceivable without moments gone by. / The Exodus lasted a moment, a moment enduring forever. / What happened once upon a time happens all the time” (Frishman 45).

Though this evidence is, of course, retrieved from an American Reform Jewish siddur printed in 2007, the intention behind these passages, and their significance, is clear.

Time is not a linear or a chronological construct in Judaism, but rather a cycle that enables the Jew to note change, mark anniversaries and significant moments, and to remain connected to the events and people that came before one’s own life. Therefore, we see that just as Soviet thought values history and the full participation of the citizen in its creation, so does Judaism favor the Jew’s participation within cyclical history. To silence Hebrew in

Soviet publications, including Eynikayt, was to silence speech, dissent, prayer, debate, creativity, and all the other human impulses allowing Soviet Jews to participate fully in their country and in their religion.

In addition to linguistic pressures faced by the JAC journal, content was ruthlessly censored to an even greater extent than other publications, primarily because the JAC was a state organization, and its published ideas were regarded as being endorsed by the Party.

Censorship as a whole was rampant at this time, and my research indicates that it generally took three forms. I argue that the most invasive of these was the prescriptive mode, where authors were inculcated with state ideas and requirements before a written work was even produced. This could be achieved by propagandizing, attendance at conferences and Party gatherings—for example, the Soviet Writer’s Congress of 1934—or by earlier punitive

102

action that used negative reinforcement to communicate what was desirable in a socialist realist work and what was not. The notable difference between this mode and others is that this one, while originating from outside the writer, would be enacted by the writer him- or herself upon the written work. The action is self-reflexive, but the motivation is external.

Secondly, censorship could take a punitive approach, where works, either previously published or somewhere in the stages of production, were “caught” by a censor and perceived to be problematic. The author would then be “corrected” for failing to notice the work’s unsuitability sooner, or for producing the work in the first place. This

“correction” could run the gamut from the editing of the work of the offending author, to verbal admonishment, to physical torture or imprisonment. Here, we see that both the action of the censorship and the intention behind it originate externally, for the author refuses, either knowingly or unknowingly, to adhere to the requirements of the state.

The third and most complex method of censorship was the self-inflicted. In this case, an author would face a choice when contemplating a new work: should the work adhere to state guidelines and hence be considered for publication, regardless of the writer’s creative impulses? Or, should the work be produced according to the thoughts and desires of the author, but potentially spend its life in a drawer, never to be submitted, published, or read?

The decision to opt for the former, rather than the latter, is an example of self-inflicted censorship. The distinction here is that this mode can be both witting and unwitting: the author may willingly produce something soulless in an attempt to be published, earn a living, and communicate at least some small artistic message to the public; or the author may choose to follow his or her passions and impulses, producing something transgressive

103

that, should it be discovered, could doom its writer to any number of fates. Both the intention and the method here are self-reflexive. The state and the Party do not occupy the central role in the author’s considerations. That role is filled by the author’s artistic spirit and by the dilemma between artistic fulfillment and self-preservation. The very presence of a transgressive urge indicates that the writer does not value the interests of the state to the extent that the Party would desire. Here, both the action of censorship (or the lack of censorship) and the motivation behind it are self-reflexive and self-referential.56

By analyzing a sampling of articles from Bergelson’s time as a wartime reporter for the JAC and Eynikayt, an impression can be formed of the war’s effects on Soviet-Jewish national expression, as well as of the effects of that war upon censorship and freedom of

Jewish expression. I argue, based upon David Schneer’s analyses of these same articles, that a certain Jewish nationalism is certainly present in these pieces. However, a degree of subjugation always exists in a hierarchical system that I term “value-coding.” For example,

Bergelson will link some characteristics with the shtetl or Jewish cultural practice, and other characteristics with Soviet loyalty or Communist beliefs. While these “Jewish characteristics” may be coded as positive, they will always be complemented by “Soviet characteristics” that amplify that positivity. If the “Jewish characteristics” are coded as negative, the “Soviet characteristics” will serve to redeem or otherwise ameliorate those drawbacks. A selection of Bergelson’s articles that display this value-coding will be

56 Though these thoughts on censorship are very much my own, I owe a great deal to Arlen Blyum’s A Self-Administered Poison: The System and Function[s] of Soviet Censorship. I recommend that any study of censorship in the Russian context should begin with this monograph.

104

discussed chronologically here, in an attempt to trace the development of Bergelson’s freedom to express his Jewish nationalism over the wartime years.

David Schneer comments on these pieces, in his contribution to Joseph Sherman’s and Gennady Estraikh’s From Modernism to Socialist Realism, entitled “From Mourning to

Vengeance: Bergelson’s Holocaust Journalism (1941-1945).” I argue, supported by

Schneer’s survey of Bergelson’s wartime writing, that the key concept here is the evolving nature of the author’s emotions. Where early works such as the Milkhome pamphlet

“urge[d]… readers to stop complaining about wartime hardships and take up arms against the greatest enemy the Jews have ever faced,” later works take a less corrective approach towards perceived errors in Jewish national conduct. (Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh,

251). As the months pass and the casualties mount, Bergelson’s writing moves into a tone of grief and despair as he learns more of German destruction and is exposed to more testimonies centered upon rape, murder, torture, and extermination.

Around 1942, exhaustion appears to set in, and his prose ceases to exhort readers to action. Bergelson rather turns to memorialization, publishing articles such as September 5,

1942’s “Gedenkt” (Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh, 254).57 Here, the Khurbn enters the

Soviet-Jewish war narrative as a specific phenomenon, marked by its mechanization and its focus upon the Other—those targeted, though primarily Jewish, were always the not-Nazi, the not-Aryan: in short, the not-worthy. To the Soviet Jews, this attack posed a dual threat, as it attacked not only their political homeland and Marxist society, but their community

57 “Remember”

105

and the very blood in their veins. Schneer agrees that this article marks the moment when

“Bergelson began introducing Holocaust narratives into the general storyline of the war,” and notes that up until this point, the focus was on Soviet autonomy and the Jewish responsibility to support Soviet actions (Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh, 254). “Gedenkt,” on the other hand, literally exhorted readers of Eynikayt to remember that the German

Hitlerites were those responsible for wartime hardships, violence, and atrocity. For the first time, Bergelson put the onus on his own people to remember the identity of their attackers, implying retribution to come and that this retribution will be naught without Jewish motivations. This theme of vengeance would, from this point on, be a common one in

Bergelson’s work.

An Eynikayt piece of November 7, 1942, “Der yunger sovetisher yid,” manages to utilize the motif of Jewish vengeance while still utilizing one common discursive technique for representing subjugated Jewish identity: the image of Soviet indoctrination as the

“cure” for the sickness that is Judaism.58 The reader sees a young man, with the traditional

Yiddish name “Moyshe-Leyb Shoykhet,” returning from a Bolshevik training program of some sort.59 Bergelson compares him to a Jew of the same name from an earlier, imperial

Russian era, who “would have gone to heder, had limited job options, been drafted into the tsar’s army. The second would have been an equal member of the Communist Youth and

58 “The young Soviet Jew” 59 A “shoykhet” is, in Yiddish, the term for a ritual slaughterer, one who prepares meat in a kosher fashion. In picking this name, Bergelson implies that the Shoykhet here is a universal Jew, one who could be found in any shtetl. His very name represents a universal aspect of Jewish observance: the reliance upon traditionally slaughtered, kosher food.

106

would have gone on to pursue any career he wanted” (Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh,

256). I argue that here, the natural Jewish condition is represented as limited, ignorant and disenfranchised. Bergelson is not simply describing the conditions forced upon communities of Jewish men by the institution of the Pale and their limitations to typically

“Jewish” livelihoods, but rather describing the conditions to which the Jew became accustomed without the liberating help of Karl Marx—who, as has been discussed, was a virulent anti-Semite. I would argue that Bergelson even hints that the Jew is suited to this lifestyle, approaching dangerously anti-Semitic territory. The Soviet Jew, however, has encountered the teachings of Marx and Engels, and has therefore been handed the ability to improve himself through both Communism and Comrade Stalin.

Furthermore, Bergelson argues that Comrade Stalin has empowered the Soviet Jew to exact “nekome far zayn foterland un far zayn yidish folk” (Schneer in Sherman and

Estraikh, 257).60 This revenge is motivated from deep within Comrade Shoykhet’s being, and Bergelson argues that a degree of this passion and determination has been inherited from the earlier Shoykhet, the Hasid. We see here a representation of the Jew as one of the

Soviet minorities defended, at least officially, as belonging within the nation, but we also see a definite marking of the Jew as fundamentally different from ethnic Russians and other minority groups. The nature of this difference, while sometimes rooted in real, concrete traditions or religious practice, is also metaphysical. The condition of Jewishness, whatever it may be, renders the Jew unsuited to modern life without the help of the Soviet system to modernize and train him. In short, this “shtetl mindset” is the natural condition of the

60 “revenge for his fatherland and for his Jewish people”

107

diasporic, antiquated, superstitious Jew, and while he is indeed capable of other achievements and lifestyles, some sort of intercession must occur to render him suited to that task. For these reasons, while Jewishness is not represented entirely negatively here,

Bergelson does indeed perform an act of value-coding that marks Jewish identity as less than Soviet identity. Soviet identity allows revenge to be enacted; Jewish motivations and emotions simply play a supporting role.

Aside from this overtly hierarchical treatment of personal identities, Bergelson’s journalistic pieces employ other, more covert rhetorical devices that I also consider to be a coding of values. Discursive techniques, themes, and authorial choices, such as the omission of some information and the focus on other points, allow the author to speak a certain truth while adhering to the dominant societal values of the time—that is, Marxist and totalitarian

Soviet values. Nowhere is this careful manipulation and self-editing more evident than in the case of Bergelson’s later writing on the Khurbn, from mid-1944 onward. Here, one would expect every article and headline to be filled to the brim with Jewish pain and rage.

However, Bergelson employs careful techniques to report information and evoke fury without using a specifically Jewish voice.

For example, earlier articles such as “Kiev” and “Undzer Kiev,” from May 1, 1943, and

November 11, 1943, respectively, discuss the specifically Jewish past of Bergelson’s hometown, and focuses primarily on the Jewish aspects of its beauty: “From the Black Sea to places beyond Kiev, in all cities and towns, every Friday at sunset, at exactly the same hour…the same minute…the same instant, Jewish windows were aflame with candlelight”

(Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh, 260). Even in his sorrow, Bergelson discusses the

108

destruction of Kiev’s Jewish neighborhoods, not the state of the city as a whole. Victims are designated as Jews, not as faceless Ukrainians or Soviets, and those responsible are all

Germans, not just Nazis. This rhetorical technique portrays the “good” side as weak, exploited, and brave in the face of imminent destruction, and represents the “bad” side as immense, strong, and cowardly for failing to face down an enemy of their own size, so to speak. These moral designations were meant to hold up to even the scrutiny of one unconvinced that rampant mass murder made Nazi forces the “bad” side of this interaction.

This changed with “Dos hobn geton daytshn!” published on August 14, 1944.61 This piece turned recently-liberated Maidanek into

“the grand symbol of German depravity…Bergelson began the process of universalizing the story of the Holocaust by steadily ceasing to speak only in an in angry Jewish voice, as he had often done in his earlier wartime essays, and starting to write from a more universal perspective in relation to victim and vengeance” (Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh, 262).

Crimes against Jewish people become crimes against humanity, de-Judaizing the Khurbn years before the rhetoric of the Nuremberg trials would serve the same purpose, regardless of that rhetoric’s intentions.62 With the removal of Bergelson’s earlier calls to exact Jewish revenge on Germany, “Soviet authorities literally erased Bergelson’s rage…[it is easier] to see Bergelson as a victim of a Soviet regime that silenced him during the anti-cosmopolitan

61 “The Germans did this!” 62 It is interesting to note that in 1985, according to Schneer, the publishing house Sovetskii Pisatel’ published a heavily edited version of “Dos hobn geton daytshn!” among others of Bergelson’s writings. These pieces were intended to be more politically correct, and focused upon the removal of any remaining references to Jewish particularity. They also omitted references to the enemy as “German” and “Hitlerites” in favor of the term “fascist.” Even the article itself was retitled “Dos hobn geton fashistn!”: (Schneer 265-266).

109

campaign, rather than as an angry patriot stirring up Soviet Jewish anger to get revenge”

(Schneer in Sherman and Estraikh, 266). We see here that in terms of both rhetorical history and modern scholarship, history is comfortable with the trope of the Jew as victim.

Bergelson is portrayed as being silenced, being brutalized, being executed, and so on. His active, autonomous emotions—his grief, his rage, his calls for revenge and further bloodshed—do not fit this narrative. History is comfortable with the Jew as victim, to be sure, but not so comfortable with the Jew as seeking retributive justice, as a nationalist patriot and avenging angel. Furthermore, despite the fact of the Khurbn;’s Jewish particularity, Bergelson calls on not only Jews to exact revenge, but upon the whole world:

“Kimat biz eynem hot er oysgerotn undzere brider…Un dokh,..nit bloyz undzere aleyn iz di plog, vos heyst ‘daytsh,’—zi iz di plog fun a gantser velt” (Bergelson, “Dos hobn geton daytshn!” 2).63

Aside from Bergelson’s writings for Eynikayt, a pamphlet called “Yidn un di foterland-milkhome,” published by Emes in 1941, served an altogether different function.64,

65 This piece served a dual purpose: while Bergelson speaks to the Jewish people as a group

63 “Almost to the last one he murdered our brothers…and yet…not ours alone is this plague known as the German—it is the plague of the whole world.” 64 “The Jews and the War for the Fatherland” 65 Incidentally, “milkhome” is a word deriving from the loshn koydesh, and Bergelson specifically chooses this term instead of the Germanic and more common word “krig.” However, though the Hebraic word is chosen, its spelling is not Hebraic any longer. This is an example of the de-Judaizing technique mentioned earlier: whereas the word should be the uses Bergelson Yiddish, in preserved be would which Hebrew, in ”מלחמה“ spelled its diluting while word Hebraic a chooses specifically He ”.מילכאָמע“ spelling phonetic linguistic reliance upon the Hebrew language, and thereby minimizing its link to the holy tongue.

110

and rallies them together, this is paired with a strong urging to unite with the Soviets against Germany, whose people are referred to as “Hitlerites.” This sort of metonymous treatment of a whole nation served to position Soviets, including the Soviet-Jewish minority, against their common enemy. After all, Germany contained many factions, and while Nazism was the dominant political and social movement of the time, it is a simplification to claim that the entire nation, down to the last citizen, enthusiastically or even tacitly supported the goals of the Third Reich. However, such a calm and unemotional evaluation could never be expected of a European, a Jew, and a thinking, feeling individual such as Bergelson, nor should that evaluation be expected or sought. That lack of emotion would also have failed to serve the interests of Bergelson, Eynikayt, and the JAC.

Take, for instance, the first sentence of the pamphlet: “Der tseyusheter merderisher fashizm hot upgehoybn zayn retsikhedike hant op undzer groyse foterland” (Milkhome 3).66

Fascism is personified here to the extent that it possesses human extremities, and though an abstract thought certainly does not have hands looming over the horizon Bergelson so adores, by portraying it as such, Bergelson underlines the inevitability of the encounter with fascism and avoids any muddling talk of politics or affiliations: Germany is fascist, fascism is bad, and that bad thing is coming for the huge, proud fatherland of Bergelson’s readers. Bergelson pushes this conception of danger further in a section entitled “Vi bagayen zikh di fashistn mit yidn,” or “How the fascists deal with the Jews” (Milkhome 5).

The title is ominous, communicating that the fascists see Jews as a problem that needs to be

66 “The raging, murderous powers of fascism have raised their violent hand to our immense fatherland.”

111

“dealt with.” Bergelson begins by stating that “Yidn zaynen far zey dos kapore-hindl, di letste niderike bashefenish” (Milkhome 5).67 A strong degree of metonymy and evocative language is present here as well: while the German Nazis are summarized as “zey,” or a group of individual and like-minded humans, Jews as a whole are labeled one cohesive “bashefenish,” one creature. This reductive and insulting technique is placed in the mouths and minds of the “fashistn,” effectively communicating the degree to which Nazism saw Jews as low, animalistic, and undeserving of life. It is important to note here that because of the

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, also known as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, accuracy of reporting on the Nazi problem was questionable. For example, in an Isvestia article entitled “On Soviet-German Relations,” the pact was euphemistically referred to as a

“trade and credit agreement,” and its aim was stated as the “improving of political links between Germany and the USSR” (“Soviet-German Relations”). Clearly, with these goals in place, accurate reporting of Nazi atrocities against Jews would have been out of the question, and the intentions of Nazism could have been denied altogether. For this reason,

Bergelson’s comments on the “Hitlerites” could very well have been the only exposure or public discussion of Nazism experienced by Bergelson’s Soviet-Yiddish audience. This historical circumstance lends a degree of authority to Bergelson’s writings that, if not for the Pact, those writings might not have possessed to such an extent.68

67 “To them, the Jews are scapegoats, the last and lowest creature.” 68 For example, we know, by virtue of Kerler’s scholarship and work cataloguing Eynikayt materials and records, that of 1,633 “communications and correspondences” sent by the JAC and Eynikayt to foreign press and media representatives, 568 were on the topic of Jewish heroism and involvement in the Red Army; 108 were about partisan Jews; 275 were on the lives and works of Soviet Jews in the “hinterland;” 256 were on the general topic of

112

Aside from these deeply unsettling techniques utilized for the purposes of emotional evocation, Bergelson uses Milkhome to pit the entire Soviet and Communist morass against the forces of German evil. These comments focused primarily on the rallying of Jews together with Gentile Soviets, and encouraged the readers of the Yiddish text to abandon

Jewish nationalist concerns in favor of protecting and supporting the Soviet rodina. For example, a section of the pamphlet is called “Gedenkt, az di sovetn-makht hot undz gemakht mit laytn glaykh!”69 The first sentences of this section continue the thought:

“Gedenkt ober oykh, az fun ale umglikn, vos zaynen do oysgerekhnt, hot undz geratevet di sovetn-makht un nor di sovetn-makht. Nor adank undzer sovetn-makht, vos iz ful mit emeser libe tsu yedn arbetndikn un orntlekhn mentshn… zaynen mir poter gevorn fun pogromen, shkhites un fun der gantser vis- ter un fintsterer lage, un velkher yidn hobn inem tsars tsaytn zikh gefunen” (Milkhome 13).70

This concept lies at the root of Bergelson’s incitements to the Jews to throw their lot in with that of the Soviets: the Soviet regime, for all its shortcomings, provided a haven from the imperial era of pogroms and mass slaughter. It was a weak and watered-down sanctuary, to be sure, but when the Jews saw the “unacceptability” of anti-Semitism in the Communist

Jewish culture in the USSR; and 426 were about anti-Semitic atrocities perpetrated by fascist forces (Eynikayt in Kerler, 225). Research potential seems to exist here regarding the proportion of these correspondences that elicited a response from the “outside,” or non-Soviet-Jewish world, and regarding which of these communiqués were the sole of their kind, or among very few of their kind. To my knowledge, no such study has been conducted as of yet. 69 “Remember that the Soviet regime treated us with respect from the very beginning!” 70 “But remember also, that from all the bad luck that has been counted up, the Soviet regime saved us, and only the Soviet regime. Only thanks to the Soviet regime, which is full of true love for every hardworking and honest man… are we freed from pogroms, massacres, and from the entire wretched and dark situation in which the Jews have found themselves since the times of the tsars.”

113

philosophy—even if that unacceptability was often primarily in theory, not practice—a debt was owed. Almost the whole of the Milkhome pamphlet takes this approach: glorifying the Soviets and their good deeds, and urging Jews to repay this debt and thank their benefactors.

It bears mentioning here that, as seen in both the transliterated excerpt and the translated footnote, Bergelson talks about the saving powers of the “sovetn-makht.” Not

Comrade Stalin or his officers, not individual Soviet citizens and workers; the only good here is attributed to the nameless, faceless “regime.” This technique refers to the collective, not the units and individuals and souls who comprise it. Bergelson makes the calculated move of referring to the collective as a living, intentioned entity for two reasons. Firstly, it enables him to fall back on the metonymous devices discussed earlier in this chapter. All

Soviets are inherently hardworking and honest, just as the regime would wish them to be, and therefore the regime is one, unflawed collective and ought to be referred to as such.

Secondly, Josef Stalin is the embodiment of the Party and regime, commanding and watching over the country from his seat in the Kremlin. To praise the collective “sovetn- makht” is to praise Stalin himself. With this choice of words, Bergelson avoids glorifying the individual at the expense of the collective, but he also pays homage to one of the most megalomaniacal personality cults of the 20th century.

The varied pieces from Eynikayt and the Milkhome pamphlet, despite their differences in rhetoric and in intention, feature a commonality based upon the aforementioned value-coding. Where Jewish identity is specifically referred to, it is less than Soviet identity. Jewish rage is less than Soviet rage, and where Soviet revenge is

114

possible and even encouraged in these pieces, Jewish revenge must be eliminated from the text. Something inherently threatening is implied by the notion of Jewish autonomy being turned toward violent ends, regardless of who the recipient of that violence may be, and the Soviet project seeks to devalue and silence that autonomy. Bergelson’s pieces often adhered to these goals, and if he overstepped, he was corrected.

It is argued by many scholars of Soviet-Jewish culture and letters that the WWII period allowed for greater artistic expression of Jewish themes. After all, to rally the Jews together was to rally yet another group against Nazism. For example, Joseph Sherman argues in Sherman and Estraikh that this wartime leniency led Yiddish writers to “[believe] that wartime expediency would extend to permanent sanction for the continued celebration of national self-awareness” (286). However, peacetime saw the memory of the

Khurbn repressed. Zvi Gitelman points out that Soviet policy used the slogan of “Do not divide the dead” to maintain the myth that all peaceful Soviets were targeted equally by

Nazism, and “Jewish suffering was not acknowledged as qualitatively and quantitatively different from the suffering of other ethnic groups…Soviet vocabulary had no equivalent term for ‘Holocaust’ and never evoked the concept” (Gitelman, ‘Politics and the

Historiography…’ in Sherman and Estraikh, 285). This de-Judaizing of a phenomenon that inherently targeted the Jews serves two purposes. First of all, it denies anti-Semitism and erases Jews from history, rendering their testimonies on violence and prejudice invalid through the silencing of their experiences. Secondly, the erasure of Jewish voices erases the

Jewish people’s connection to European lands and historiographies, reinforcing the

115

stereotype of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” metaphysically apart from and outside of the stream of history.

This term, “rootless cosmopolitan,” appeared most notably in a 1949 piece by Stalin that first appeared in Pravda. In the short article, Stalin claimed that criticism, especially theatrical and literary criticism, was a den of “followers of bourgeois aestheticism” who had

“lost their sense of responsibility to the people” and were “deeply repulsive and inimical to

Soviet man” (Pinkus 183-184). To the readers of the Party publication, it was very much understood that Stalin spoke of Solomon Mikhoels and other members of GOSET and the

JAC. The term played upon the aforementioned stereotypes of Jews as wanderers, disconnected from their homelands and the interests of the countries in which they lived, and combined them with further anti-Semitic notions of Jews as comprising an elitist, proletariat-despising intelligentsia. By identifying the publications in which these

“cosmopolitans” expressed their views, Stalin more or less identified which Jews he was targeting with these false accusations of undermining socialist and Soviet art (Pinkus 183-

184).

This labeling of the Jews as an internal, seditious threat, and the denial of the specificity of Jewish suffering in the Khurbn, is directly linked to the fate of Ilya Ehrenburg’s

The Black Book of Russian Jewry. Conceived of in the early 1940s by Ilya Ehrenburg, and separately but simultaneously by Albert Einstein and Sholem Asch, among others, The

Black Book was intended to serve as a record of the destruction of the Jews and to “rally protest against domestic Soviet anti-Semitism” (Rubinstein 17). Hundreds of stories and testimonies were collected in the making of the book. Eynikayt released a call for narratives

116

from survivors of the Khurbn and their families, and Ehrenburg directed a team of over two dozen writers in collecting these stories, editing them, and presenting them in as clear and true a fashion as possible. Major names of contributors and editors include Abraham

Sutzkever, Margarita Aliger, and Vasily Grossman. Rubinstein and Nauman include an anecdote relating that

“[o]ne survivor, learning about The Black Book, wrote to Ehren- burg that it would serve as a new book of Lamentations for the Jewish people, ‘a monument…, a cold stone on which every Jew will be able to shed bitter tears over his wounded friends and relatives’” (Altshuler et. al. in Rubinstein and Nauman, 18).

This was the nature of post-Khurbn grief: there were no gravestones or marked sites of massacres at which to mourn, because the sky was a grave for the cremated, and the relevance—the very occurrence—of an execution or mass shooting could be called into question, even outrightly denied, by the powers that governed.

This pain and lack of reverence directly impacted the fate of Ehrenburg’s project. As time passed, Vasily Grossman took over the project, and the JAC’s Literary Commission helped with the editing process. The work was scheduled for publication in 1947, but when the aging Stalin’s whims shifted, the Jews were suddenly enemies of the USSR once again, and the project was dismantled. Helen Segall’s introduction to the new Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry reveals that in 1948, the typeset plates of the manuscript were destroyed, as were existing proofs of the entire book. Ehrenburg died in 1967 without ever seeing his project published. In 1970, while going through her father’s belongings, Ehrenburg’s daughter Irina found parts of the book in archived folders. She smuggled the contents to

Yad Vashem, and that manuscript was combined with another earlier finding, articles by

117

Ehrenburg in Russian and Yiddish, and some material from a 1946 Romanian version of the book. Tarbut Press published the result in 1980 as a Russian language Chyornaya kniga, which was then published in English translation in 1981 by the Holocaust Library

(Grossman “Introduction”). For decades, this was the authoritative record of the fate of

Eastern European Jews during the Holocaust. The most damning evidence of anti-Semitic violence was edited out, and even eyewitness or first-person testimonies were whitewashed for the sake of the preservation of the image of the Red Army and the Soviet

Union. As Rubinstein states in the introduction to Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Post-War

Interrogation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, “…once the war was over, attempts to document Jewish suffering were dismissed as expressions of Jewish particularism”

(Rubinstein and Naumov 25). It became unacceptable to hold the opinion that Jews had been targeted in the Khurbn, and history was rewritten from the perspective that all Soviet people, enemies of fascism, had been equally targeted by German violence.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a complete copy of page proofs was brought to Irina Ehrenburg, who spent years perfecting and fact-checking the manuscript. Meanwhile, the work was published in 1993 in Russian by a Lithuanian house, then translated into numerous languages. The English-language translator, Dr. David

Patterson, found an American publisher within the last days of Irina Ehrenburg’s life, and she died knowing that her father’s entire project, as it was intended to appear in 1947, was going to finally be published. Despite the five or so manifestations and extensions of the

Black Book which exist to this day, the authoritative and most accurate version is the one mentioned here; it appeared in Russian from the Lithuanian publishing house Yad in 1993,

118

and was printed in the United States in 2003, facilitated by the work of Irina Ehrenburg and

David Patterson.

The denial and de-Judaization of the Khurbn was an unexpected post-war occurrence. Yiddish writers had grown used to expressing Jewish nationalist themes much more openly, as the socialist realist dogma saw a relaxation during the war years

(Veidlinger in Sherman and Estraikh, 270). This hope for further freedom of expression often had disastrous results.

In my research, I was led to closely examine one of Bergelson’s last original works not only because of its production late in his life, but because it is so different from the rest of his oeuvre. This dramatic play, Prints Reuveni, is set during the fifteenth century and focuses upon a Spanish Jew-by-choice, Diego Pires, who takes the name Shlomo Molkho, and his adulation of Reuveni, a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah. Most of Bergelson’s socialist-realist work takes place during his present moment or the revolutionary years preceding it, and more often than not, it takes place in a setting familiar to his readership: the shtetl, the border of Bolshevik territory, Berlin, Kiev, and so on. These decisions render his work easily assimilated into the Soviet flow of history toward its Communist endpoint.

While the motivations behind the writing of Reuveni cannot be truly known—admittedly, I imagine that Bergelson was attracted to the idea of a Jewish messiah and martyr as fallible and mistaken, but still urging his people onward to greatness in the face of death and despair—it is probable that the leniency of literary publication during the war prompted

Bergelson to try publishing something even more daring than his Eynikayt articles.

Furthermore, the play had been commissioned by the head of GOSET, Solomon Mikhoels,

119

who commissioned it in September of 1944 and fully intended to stage a production of it during late 1947 or early 1948 (Veidlinger in Sherman and Estraikh, 269-272).

However, the play would never be performed. It was deeply problematic in terms of collective thought and of socialist realism; Jeffery Veidlinger goes so far as to identify the play as “an implicit repudiation of the ideologies [Bergelson] had earlier espoused, and of the entire Soviet system for which he had served as a spokesperson” (Sherman and

Estraikh 271). Though it was approved for performance in February of 1945 and rehearsed continuously, it was never staged. After its reapproval in 1946, it remained in planning and rehearsals until the murder of Mikhoels in the first weeks of 1948 and GOSET’s liquidation in 1949. Indeed, Mikhoels was one of the first to be executed in this round of purges.

According to Mikhoel’s daughter Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels’ memoir, the script was found on his desk in the days following her father’s execution (Veidlinger in Sherman and Estraikh,

269).71

I argue that this unsuitability arose from several central features of the work. First, the existence of the character of Shlomo Molkho, a “crypto-Jew,” presents an interpretation of Judaism as a faith, a philosophy, and a culture above its position as a mere ethnicity, as

71 Some scholars and acquaintances of Mikhoels theorize that he left the script on his desk because he knew his end was near, primarily because of the erasure of his name and work from state documents and publications. By leaving Reuveni on his desk, he sought to identify the project, if one could be specifically blamed, that may have contributed to his death. In addition, Mikhoels’ death was staged to look like a traffic accident—his body was dumped, sprawled, in a snowbank on the roadside. We see here that the state perceived Mikhoels and his colleagues to be a such a threat, they could not even take responsibility for his death.

120

the Soviet state was wont to label it.72 After all, Jewish bloodlines could be eradicated, but

Jewish belief would be much more challenging to locate and exterminate. This is proven by the existence of conversos, a term used for Iberian Jews who professed a conversion to

Catholicism while still holding to their Jewish beliefs and practicing as Jews in secret. These themes of hidden and clandestine Jewishness reinforce the fact that, to an authoritarian regime, the existence of the Jew is the existence of the Other, and that Other cannot be allowed to exist untormented or unattacked.

The Dominicans and soldiers serving as Inquisitors are present from the first page of the play as they interrogate various prisoners and inflict these attacks. Their captain’s callousness is clear from his first line: “Farvos, fregt ir, farvos?—Vayl ir zayt yidn!” (Reuveni

11).73 The terror induced by his cruelty is undeniable, but Molkho remains brave without clearly announcing an allegiance to one religion or another—“‘Im’ eynmol bloyz hot men gekreytst, un mikh / der lign hert nit oyf tsu kreytsn tog / nokh tog…mer ken ikh nit!”

(Reuveni 13).74 As the drama continues, Reuveni continues to amass disciples, including

Benvenido, the doubter, and Shabbosi, the mystic and longtime believer in Reuveni’s message.

72 Historically, a “crypto-Jew” was one who adhered to Judaism while pretending to be of another religion. This term is generally applied to Spanish Jews pretending to be Catholic during the time of the Inquisition, just after the March 31, 1492 Alhambra Decree that evicted the Jews from Spain. 73 “Why, you ask? Why? Because you are Jews!” 74 “Once upon a time, they stripped and crucified ‘Him,’ and I lie here day after day on my own cross…I can do no more!”

121

The new messiah teaches and preaches up until the end of the play and the end of his life, where he leaves his people with a last message: “Di shlakht fir vayter…Mayn tsvaoeh

/ durkh dir ikh loz, ikh shtarb: ‘Du kemfst, mayn folk, / dos heyst—du lebst, mayn folk!’”

(Reuveni 126).75 The rationale behind Soviet dissatisfaction with this message is clear—

Reuveni is stating that his people are larger than he himself; that even if he is martyred, the

Jewish folk will never die. Not only will the people live on, they will fight, even if the battle could easily be deemed a slaughter. This continuity in the face of danger and annihilation would present a threat to the Soviet powers-that-be, who would prefer to think that they held sway over the very existence of the Jews, and hence could control them.

Another aspect of this metaphysical threat posed by Judaism is represented in the linguistics of the Yiddish used by Bergelson in this line. In some places, Reuveni refers to his followers, his “people,” with the word “folk,” a generic term for one’s community.

However, he also uses “koydesh,” a Hebrew term which means “holy” or “holiness.”

However, the traditional Yiddish word for “holy people” is “kedoyshem,” a term that

Bergelson eschews. It seems notable that Reuveni does not refer to his community using the pluralized “kedoyshem,” a word from the loshn koydesh pluralized according to the rules of Hebrew grammar, but with the singular term “koydesh” instead. This is reinforced by

Bergelson’s use of “du,” the singular and informal second-person pronoun, to refer to his koydesh, rather than the plural “ihr.” We see here that this messiah’s relationship to his followers is one that is deeply personal and metaphysical—they are not simply his

75 “The battle will go on…I leave my last testament to you, as I die: ‘You fight, my people, and this means—you live, my people!” “Shlakht” can, however, also signify a slaughter, leaving the fate of Reuveni’s koydesh in doubt.

122

disciples, but his “holiness,” that which makes him the messiah in the first place. This poses a deep threat to the notion of Soviet collectivity because the collective is eliminated. What is left, in Reuveni’s view, is a deep recognition of the Other, to the extent that all barriers between the self and the Other fall away. In the pure and holy utopia represented by

Reuveni, all collectivism and Marxist utopianism are rendered null and void. The Other is that which defines the self, and that which allows the self to be what it is—in short, the

Other is the self. If this structure is to be followed to its most logical conclusion, individuality does not exist, and therefore neither does the collective.

Secondly, the central figure of the play is a secular Jew who takes up arms to protect other Jews. This evokes questions of the Jewish dilemma between messianism—that is, a specifically Jewish utopianism—and political action:

“The Holocaust convinced many Jews of the futility and suffering that can result from passive messianism, and induced them instead to value force. For them, this meant not only repudiating the Messiah of Jewish tradition, but also rejecting the secular utopianism of Communism that had attracted so many followers, including Bergelson himself…Consequently the envisaged goal of Jewish political action, more often than not, was the establishment of a Jewish nation state” (Veidlinger in Sherman and Estraikh, 273).

If, as Veidlinger argues, Jewish messianism was being passed over in favor of Jewish political action, this action would necessarily run counter to the aims and hegemony of the

Soviet morass. To take up arms for a national cause—that is, a national cause apart from the interests of one’s nation of citizenship—is often one method of officially giving up one’s citizenship in that country. I state this simply to underline the gravity of that action. To take up arms in a conflict unrelated to one’s Soviet identity—and furthermore, to support a

123

religious cause directly opposed to the philosophies of Communism—would have been an unthinkable threat to Soviet hegemony. Even if the physical or political threat to the Party was minimal, the metaphysical implications of throwing off Soviet identity in favor of a war for Jewish nationalism would have been unthinkable, and for the Party and Comrade Stalin, completely intolerable.

Even aside from the Jewish religious dream of a messiah, whose coming would signal the advent of a peaceful, unified world order, Jewish messianism is deeply tied to

Zionism and the existence of a Jewish political state. Jacob Katz, for example, identifies messianic ideals as the “principal motive force of Zionism,” primarily because of the

“insistence on the Land of Israel as the goal of immigration in spite of the special difficulties settlement there entailed. Were it not for the messianic factor, the Jews would never have made their state here; the country had an attraction for them that outweighed all rational considerations” (Luz 103-104). Furthermore, Katz believes that Zionism gained additional power from the fact that its messianism possessed a quality of topos that other utopian visions did not: it pointed to a specific, concrete location for the realization of its dream.

Where other utopian goals—for example, the Communist utopia—were intended to exist on a global scale, and as such, favored a decentralized, scattered mode of origin, the Jewish messianic age would originate in the Holy Land of the Jewish people.

Obviously, Katz’s arguments need to be read and understood with reservations. The reality of the Jewish attachment to Israel is a fact, but it is diverse and wide-ranging; every

Jew will have a different emotional, spiritual, and concrete attachment to this place. It is a gross oversimplification to point to messianism as the driving force behind all Jewish

124

sentiment regarding Eretz Yisroel. Secondly, Zionism does possess a topos-centered aspect lacking in other utopian worldviews, but that aspect is indeed present in many such visions. For example, Stalinist Communism clearly favors the Soviet Union as the center of the Communist worldview, primarily by virtue of its rule by Comrade Stalin. Likewise, I would argue that the modes of totalitarian Communism that have existed in countries such as China, Cambodia, and Vietnam would consider their physical, bordered locations to be inseparable from the utopian fates they perceived for their societies.

Despite these qualifications, however, Katz’s point is ultimately a valid one. We see here that Judaism as a whole is a religion based upon a hope for the redemption of the world. Unlike Christianity, where the human soul is inherently sinful and in need of redemption, Judaism focuses upon the redemption of the world as the ultimate project for a flawed, but well-meaning, soul. This redemption can be furthered by the performance of mitzvot and the adherence to Halakhic law—at least in the Orthodox mindset—but the coming of a messiah is the only singular avenue to a true messianic, Jewish future. By virtue of all these points, we see that a focus upon themes of Jewish messianism in Bergelson’s play would have been absolutely unacceptable in the Soviet sphere. While the implications of messianic thought may not have been entirely perceived by Stalin, the censors, and other government apparatchiki, even the Soviet functionary unacquainted with Judaism would have perceived in Prints Reuveni something forbidden, mystical, and deeply incongruent with Soviet ideals.

Finally, I argue that Prints Reuveni signified a major overstepping of socialist realist confines because of its theme of Jewish martyrdom. At the end of the play, when Reuveni

125

perishes in battle after communicating his last will and testament to Shabbosi, the reader is to understand that he is dying for the sake of his people. After all, when Benvenido asks

Reuveni from whom he should draw the strength to carry on, with the death of the latter looming (“…un kraft / deroyf funvanen zol ikh shepn?”), Reuveni’s answer is that the people will provide strength to each other (Reuveni 126). With the fall of this messiah, the people will stand in his place for the sake of their community.

Reuveni’s taking up of arms and rejection of passive religiosity makes him a Jewish warrior, and, furthermore, his death-with-intention renders him a martyr. This willful encounter with death would also be hard to accept from a Soviet viewpoint, primarily because it follows a system of logic that presupposes the existence of an afterlife—no logical being wishes to end their own existence, so if Reuveni willingly dies, he must trust in the existence of a form of being after death. The Soviet system would reject this entirely, stating that religious notions of a life after death are a bourgeois conceit. As the blonde

Gentile woman, the wife of a White army officer, states in Mides hadin, “…I am certain: death is death. My life right now is all I get…the revolution is my death. That’s why I am running away from it” (Judgment 25). Despite her imperial loyalties, this woman has been immersed for a long time in a society based upon Communist ideals that focus on historiography, progress, technology, and the goals of humanity. Here, martyrdom represents religiosity and is irreconcilable with Communism and Soviet ideology. Indeed, any sort of messianism is completely incompatible with the Soviet Communist utopia, which is to be attainable only through the work and striving of the collective. The notion that one person, one Messiah, could bring on that utopia is fundamentally individualistic

126

and unacceptable to the Soviet mindset. This is, of course, in theory; the Stalinist mindset that casts Chaver Stalin as a messianic figure of sorts is deeply problematic.

But what if, in this problematizing, Communism is raised to a level of reverence and moral absolutism typically reserved for religious belief? After all, Filipov, the socialist realist hero of Mides hadin, is also martyred when he is shot down from a distance as he rides through the forest near Kamino-Balke. The man serves as the embodiment of

Bolshevism to Kamino-Balke and Golikhovke—for instance, while the antirevolutionary

Yuzi Spivak stews in his prison cell, he thinks about his fears: “he was afraid not so much of

Filipov as of the incomprehensible justice that Filipov embodied—a cold, iron jutice, on which he, Yuzi, and the second half of his death depended” (Judgment 84). The moral absolutism here is evident. Bolshevism represents justice, meaning that any White or antirevolutionary activity is fighting against justice and the positives it represents.

It can be argued, therefore, that Filipov is martyred for Bolshevism. He rides through the forest in the dead of night, growing sleepy, thinking about his past life as a man named Anastasyev and feeling that old identity slipping away under the pressure of Soviet ideals and the revolution. This is the moment when “only the villagers whose houses

[border] the Verminsky forest [hear] the shots,” and the reader understands that Filipov has been assassinated (Judgment 196-197). This death occurs because of Filipov’s role as the representative of a new world order, an order which has usurped religion as the primary arbiter of morality, judgment, and survival. To occupy such a space is to run the risk of angering those who wish to cling to the old order: in this case, the White, imperialist army. It is notable, however, that the identity of Filipov’s assassin is never clearly revealed,

127

and therefore, neither are the political affiliations of that assassin. In electing to leave this plot point undefined, Bergelson paints the world as a confusing, violent, anti-Bolshevik morass set against the interests of the Red Army and its officers. Nothing is for certain in

Golikhovke, only that the Bolsheviks are threatened by forces and dangers they cannot see.

When the martyrdoms of Filipov and Reuveni are viewed on a level plane as described, with each dying for the sake of the faith they espouse, it becomes clear that the former’s martyrdom is acceptable in the Soviet sphere while the latter’s is not. This is simply because Filipov’s character dies for the sake of the powers that be, and Reuveni dies for the sake of his Jewish nation and koydesh. The former reinforces the centers of power governing the USSR, and the latter is seen as undermining those centers with his nationalistic fervor and self-sacrifice for the Other. Of course, the average post-Khurbn

Soviet Jew was not torn between his or her Jewish identity and Soviet identity to this extent. The fact remained, however, that “performative” Soviet adherence, for which this project uses the Russian term partiinost’, was valued and encouraged, while such public expressions of Jewish pride and identification were not.76 In terms of Soviet-Jewish identity, this project’s research indicates that Prints Reuveni, had it been widely viewed or read, would have promoted a vital and vibrant expression of Jewish nationalism and pride, especially in the years following WWII and the Khurbn. Sadly, this project was not

76 Katerina Clark sums up this term as signifying “an enthusiasm for things Bolshevik” (Clark in Dobrenko and Naiman, 3). I agree, but argue that a performative aspect was also required—after all, this enthusiasm was of little use if it remained imperceptible to one’s family, coworkers, and higher-ups.

128

accessible within the Soviet Union, and its effects on the morale and identity formation of the Soviet Jewish community will never be known.

What can be surmised, however, is the effect of Bergelson’s writings on the formation of a composite Soviet-Jewish identity. From 1926 to his death in 1952, Bergelson performed this complicated literary and discursive mode of being for his readership, and I argue that the success of this identity was contingent upon five central points: situation within the geopolitical space of the USSR; active engagement with the role of the worker in fictional and factual Soviet historiography; acceptance of the endpoint of the Soviet system; the conscious subjugation of any Jewishness in favor of Soviet identity and concerns; and finally, the formation and sculpting of the self within the “laboratory” of the text.

129

CHAPTER SEVEN

SOVIET-JEWISH IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE

Up to this point, this dissertation has identified a problem of temporospatiality in

Yiddish literature; analyzed socialist realism and “homed” Yiddish letters in the Soviet

Union by way of the genre; examined the role and requirements of the Jew in the “old”

Russia as opposed to the “new” Russia; and analyzed manifestations of Jewish subordination to Soviet interests and how that subordination is obeyed and transgressed in various works by Bergelson. With these schema in place, I argue that Bergelson’s later socialist realist works allow for the formation of a complicated literary and discursive identity that accommodated both Jewish cultural identification and Soviet belonging. I will defend this assertion by examining Jochen Hellbeck’s work on Soviet identity formation and its relationship to written texts. However, rather than examining the relationship to the text as a reflexive exercise, as Hellbeck does in analyzing Soviet diaries, I will focus more upon the prescriptive features of Bergelson’s writings and how their modeling of

Soviet-Jewish being is experienced and utilized by the reader.

I will then analyze the specific requirements of successful Soviet-Jewish identity constructs. What goals, if any, can be attributed to the formation of this identity? What would the individual gain from adhering to this identity, as opposed to eschewing one school in favor of complete engagement with the other? What movements are performed by Soviet-Jewish engagement, and how does this movement relate to the spatiality of the

Soviet system related earlier? Finally, I will ask the question begged by following these

130

ideas to their most logical conclusion: is it ever possible to reconcile a belief in a totalitarian system with any other ideology? Is it possible, in the first place, to be both a Jew and a

Soviet comrade?

In Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era, Hellbeck argues that the

Soviet regime used “subjectivizing practices” to “[promote] the writing of diaries as a means of self-regulation and self-perfection” (Hellbeck, abstract). This observation is supported by a discussion of the significance of diary-keeping in the Soviet period, which is backed by chapters analyzing four specific diaries and the people who kept them.

Hellbeck’s work provides an excellent starting point from which to examine the effects of textual experience upon the self-construction of the Soviet individual. I argue that in the case of Bergelson’s work, a certain degree of self-construction is present in seeking out and reading Yiddish-language material. Furthermore, the discursive modes and content of the text itself would prompt the Soviet Jew to engage in a process of reflection and self- perfection. While this process would logically have no culminative moment—after all, one could never be a “good enough” Soviet—Bergelson’s modeling of Soviet-Jewish identity occupied a position primed to assist Soviet Jews in navigating their pre- and post-war society.

This discussion necessitates the definition of “success” in terms of identity. Without sinking into a subjective and morality-based discussion of happiness and goodness, I argue that, specifically in the Soviet bloc, successful Jewish identification would include the freedom to express that Jewishness in comfortable settings and to de-emphasize that

Jewishness in dangerous or unwelcoming settings—in short, to exercise self-determination

131

in cultural expression and to ensure one’s own safety. Bergelson’s writings feature characters engaged within a process of cultivating that identity-based success, and by witnessing the modeling of those personalities and interactions, Bergelson’s readers are familiarized with strategies toward formulating a safe and successful Soviet-Jewish identity.

However, specifically in the post-war era, successful Jewishness developed other implications. Soviet Jews were a community dealing with immense grief, loss, and anger.

The Khurbn had decimated their numbers, and the grief of losing friends and family was compounded by the knowledge that, in many cases, one’s fellow citizens were involved, directly and indirectly, in violent, collaborative, and anti-Semitic actions.77 Because of the trauma inflicted upon European Jews, to “successfully” perform Jewish identity became synonymous with safety and stability: to find lost loved ones, to rebuild a functioning life after upheaval and chaos, and to find inclusivity and respect within a national narrative.78

Every life and story would find differing levels of fulfillment in these categories, but for the purposes of this study, we will assume that all Soviet Jews sought those things that every human being wants: love, respect, safety, purpose, and so forth. The difference here is that the conditions in which Soviet Jews strove toward these ideals were inherently

77 For two incredible accounts of violence perpetrated at the hands of one’s countrymen, I recommend both Jan Gross’ Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland and Alicia Appelman-Jurman’s Alicia: My Story. 78 This is not the first condition in which I have used the term “perform” to relate to identity, but it requires elaboration in the context of this chapter. While identity is obviously an internal and private aspect of being human and seeking community, our myriad identities will generally make appearances in our private and public lives. I refer to the action of generating these appearances as “performing” identity. These performances can be intentional or unwitting, and they may be perceived by others, or may go unnoticed.

132

unwelcoming ones. Indeed, any form of safety or stability was often contingent upon one’s ability to hide one’s Jewishness.

With the establishment of the notion that the reformation of the self was crucial to the realization of the Soviet dream, it is logical that the foremost tool in the Soviet arsenal was physical labor. Hellbeck quotes S. Firin, the commander of a Soviet gulag, in saying that socialist labor was the “most noble instrument in our country” (82). Bergelson features positive socialist realist heroes clearly engaged within the actions of physical toil—for example, Birebidzhaner’s Simcha, whose arduous trek across the Eurasian interior render him a better leader of his yidishe ibervanderer and a more loyal socialist. Likewise,

Filipov is represented as the ideal Bolshevik, having remade himself in the years since

October 1917, to the extent that he has even taken a new name. However, he suffers every second that he works, both by virtue of the suppurating skin infection on his neck and the constant opposition he faces from society’s own infection: imperialist, White Army sympathizers. Filipov’s work is rendered even more redeeming because it is good, socialist work performed under conditions of unbearable discomfort and pain.

This notion of redemption through labor and pain is supported by the scholarship of

Robert Weinberg in his monograph Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a

Soviet Jewish Homeland. Weinberg argues that because of the relegation of Jews to certain trades and industries—for example, commerce, moneylending, and the sale of alcohol—

“tsarist officials regarded them as parasites who exploited the defenseless peasantry.”

Some tsars, like Alexander I, tried to “normalize” the Jews by integrating them into common peasant industries like agriculture, but Weinberg notes that by the mid-1910s, only three

133

percent of Russian Jews were agricultural workers (Weinberg 18). Efforts, continued, however, and in the 1920s both the Party and Zionist organs were aiming to “normalize” and “productivize” Jews in order to “weaken popular anti-Semitism as well as promote the integration of Jews into an emerging socialist economy and society” (Weinberg 18-19).

The ultimate story of redemption through work, however, is found in Baym dnyepr’s

Penek Levin. Penek begins as the absolute negative counterpart to a socialist realist hero: he is spoiled, soft, weak, young and thoughtless, reliant entirely upon his father and traditional heder learning. As he grows and matures, Penek become a hard worker, sympathizing with the mistreated employees at his father’s brewery and viewing religious services through critical, skeptical eyes. Penek grows to be both the ideal Soviet and a secular Jew, clinging to Yiddish above Hebrew and mingling with other secular, socialist

Jews in workers’ organizations and Bund-style institutions. While his labor is primarily labor of the mind, the work is equally hard and, in terms of Soviet value-coding, equally important. Weinberg notes this tendency towards the glorification of Soviet thought in a propaganda piece from the 1920s that extols socialist life while labeling the heder as dangerous and outmoded: “Di alte shul hot oysgearbet knekht, di rotn-shul greyt gezunte…mentshn boyer fun der sotsialistisher ordenung” (Weinberg 20).79

We see here that an inherent duality exists in Soviet-Jewish life: though the Soviet identity is a requirement to live and work in the USSR, of course, a deep adherence to

Jewish life and culture is also present. Though this Jewish identity is clearly not a

79 “The old [heder] school produced slaves[;] the council school prepares healthy…people who are tools to build the socialist order…”

134

requirement of Soviet belonging, and it is debatable whether that identity is even seen as desirable, these individuals cling to it. Penek does not elect to write in Russian, even after his failed attempt at using Hebrew—he holds onto Yiddish as his primary method of generative creative activity. Simcha does not lead his family to Arkhangelsk or Crimea, even though the latter is as challenging and far-flung as Birobidzhan, nor does he set his sights on the remanants of shtetlekh and traditional frum life. Simcha chooses to throw his lot in with the burgeoning experiment in Birobidzhan, a project which combines Soviet utopia- building with a new, active, autonomous iteration of traditional Jewishness and

Yiddishkayt. Cultural belonging is close to the hearts of these characters, as it presumably was to many, if not most, Soviet Jewish citizens. One’s home and family are indispensable parts of self-perception, and to remake oneself as a good Soviet did not imply a willingness to forsake one’s Jewish language, traditions, foods, and other constructs.

We also see that while Bergelson portrays this region as a beautiful experiment full of utopian possibilities, it is, in reality, a glorified place of exile. In examining the occurrences in Birobidzhan in postwar Russia (as discussed at the end of Chapter 4), it becomes clear that the relocation and diversion of Jews to Birobidzhan was little more than a forced resettlement. In addition to this, the contradictory official position on the region’s

Jewishness—a Jewishness first forced upon it, then taken away and labeled a “Yiddish nationalist conspiracy”—precluded any form of home-building or nation-building in the region whatsoever.

With the necessity and inescapability of this dual formation, we see that to be both

Soviet and Jewish was to be caught between two conflicting interests. The Party demanded

135

adherence to its precepts above all else, and even secular Judaism—the term I use for

Jewish identity not reliant upon shul and religious services, but upon culture, language, and an ideology based upon one’s Jewish community—demanded a loyalty to family and culture that could very well have displaced Soviet loyalties into a lesser role. This hierarchical formation can be conceived of as a spatial formation; this study favors a return to Foucault’s model and posits the duality of Soviet-Jewish identity as a center-periphery construct. Ideally, the two would be opposite sides of the same paper: inseparable and equal. Perhaps in the lives of some citizens, they were. But for a Soviet Jew such as

Bergelson, vocal and often captured in the searchlight cast by the Kremlin, Soviet concerns needed to occupy the central position in this model. Jewishness occupied a peripheral position, where it was regarded a “minor” identity and influenced steadily by Marxist thoughts and values. It would be nearly impossible for Jewishness to gain the cultural and social capital necessary to usurp the central position, and even if that possibility arose, to perform Jewishness above Sovietness was to risk notice by the Party, and subsequently, the loss of privileges or social and cultural capital—even outright punishment.

This hierarchical spatiality retains another implication. In the model represented in many of Bergelson’s works, the periphery does not simply feed off the strength of the center like a parasite. While the Bolshevik notion would assume this parasitism—note the earlier citations of Lenin’s thoughts on nationalism among minority communities—I argue that the structure asserted by Bergelson is one of support. The periphery, rather than leaching off the lifeblood of the center, performs its own autonomous work and supports the center by virtue of that work.

136

Take, for instance, the Milkhome pamphlet. This work is intended for Jews, and no other community. It is a communication amongst the periphery. However, far from rallying the Jews together against the Soviet majority or usurping Soviet power, Bergelson uses

Milkhome to position the USSR as the Yiddish foterland, and focuses upon the Jewish community’s power to unite and support that land against the Nazi threat. We see here that far from the classical model of Soviet spatial politics where the center mediates the conception and expression of the periphery, members of the periphery are engaged in the performance of their own, autonomous work in favor of the center. Note the earlier passages from Milkhome in which Jews are reminded of their debt to the Soviets, and then exhorted to repay that debt by supporting them in their fight against Nazism. The periphery cannot simply be commanded to support the center: it is a unit formed of logical and free-thinking minds, and those minds must be convinced with ideas and rational thoughts.

Even in situations where the Jewish periphery challenges the Soviet center, resulting expression’s of the center’s power and totalitarianism reinforce the power it holds in the first place. Take, for instance, the assassination of Filipov by unnamed agitators in Golikhovke. Here, the shtetl as a concept poses a challenge to Bolshevik hegemony.

Rather than crumbling under that pressure or fleeing back to the city, however, Filipov’s underlings retrieve his body. They give him a proper state burial decorated with confiscated Bolshevik banners, and go on to execute the blonde Christian woman, a White

Army general’s wife and imperialist sympathizer (Mides hadin 206-207). Her death symbolizes the futility of struggle against the Bolshevik morass, though her struggle was a

137

weak one. She is no Sofia Pokrovskaya, arrested for passing underground literature and orchestrating smuggling attempts across the border. Rather, the blonde’s dissent is simply one of fear—she only seeks to move herself and her adopted daughter across the border and out of Bolshevik territory. Even this weak resistance, however, is crushed, and the blonde is sentenced to death. Even with Filipov’s assassination, the execution of the blonde woman moves forward, and even though her resistance was no threat at all, her harboring of anti-Bolshevik thoughts and feelings rendered her a threat. This metaphysical threat is ultimately dealt with by executing her, a fate to which she does not succumb quietly.

(Judgment 206-207).

The fact that this weak resistance was deemed enough of a threat to be so brutally crushed reinforces this point: here, the periphery, far from operating at the will of the center, operates so independently and so vibrantly that its very existence poses a threat to central hegemony. This is a key reason why Bergelson’s work was so crucial to the development of a successful Soviet-Jewish identity. To simply perform both loyalties was not sufficient, because partiinost’ left no room for conflicts of interest. Rather, Jewishness was constantly portrayed as a supporting aspect of Soviet identity and loyalty, and the

Soviet Union upheld this structure by “gifting” the Jewish community with various symbolic and concrete boons: for example, the state of Birobidzhan; the rhetorical labeling of anti-

Semitism as “bourgeois” and undermining to the working class; and the ability to access cultural, social, and economic capital in Yiddish. Bergelson, at least publicly, seems to recognize these gestures as backed by genuine goodwill and the fostering of Soviet goals of

138

unity and collectivity, but it remains doubtful whether or not this feeling extended into his innermost self.

The successful balancing of this structure, which positioned Jewishness as supportive of and depending upon the Soviet system, necessitated the constant subjugation of Jewish identity to Soviet identity. The idea was that the USSR and Comrade Stalin allowed for Jewish people to express themselves and live Jewishly, but that this was purely due to the benevolence of the State and the Great Leader. This freedom was a privilege, not a right, and was earned through the careful and conscious shaping of the self into a better and more loyal Soviet. Consider Simcha, who is given the freedom to move to Birobidzhan and build a better life on the condition that he work hard and, as such, embody the pushing forward of history as part of a wider Soviet narrative. Some reactions to this conflict and duality are less productive and border on complete and utter irrationality: for example,

Penek, who thoughtlessly rejects his family and his way of life in favor of the dirty, dangerous hintergeslekh. Finally, we have the schizophrenic reaction, where the blonde

Christian woman of Judgment lives and interacts with Jews while maintaining both an anti-

Semitism and anti-Bolshevism to which Bergelson is sympathetic, but not accepting.

To borrow from Hellbeck, Bergelson’s works served as a sort of “laboratory” of identity formation and self-reflection (99). The key difference here is that while Hellbeck’s

Soviet diaries are self-reflexive, written by the self and for the self, the texts analyzed in this project are far more external. They provide a space in which to encounter successful Soviet

Jews, examine their lives and decisions, and to reflect upon the application of these expressions to the reader’s own life. Rather than encouraging self-construction and self-

139

formation, these texts encourage the reader to examine, admire, and mimic. These positive socialist realist heroes may be loyal Bolshevik Gentiles, pioneering Jewish ibervanderer, or bourgeois children unlearning their conceits and becoming proletarian workers. Despite these distinctions, though, it is certain that Bergelson’s representations of Jewish autonomy and interaction with the Soviet world order enabled many Soviet Jews to function more successfully and find fulfillment more readily while performing aspects of both Jewish and

Soviet identity.

To answer the final question posited at the beginning of this chapter: is it ever possible to challenge hegemony? Was the performance of simultaneous Jewishness and

Sovietness doomed to failure, or did some Soviet Jews successfully engage with both identities?

My answer is that, quite simply, there is no relative and universal success in this situation. To define success in the first place is impossible, and it is a relative term. To one individual, this successful engagement with Jewishness and Sovietness could mean masking Jewishness for the sake of personal and familial safety, passing as purely ethnically Russian. For another, this success could encompass living a healthy Jewish life at shul and among friends and family, and adhering to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” credo while at work or with professional contacts. For a third hypothetical Jew, this success could require the absolute denial of Soviet ideals and the profession of Jewish loyalty, even at the expense of harassment or death.80

80 For a discussion of the individuals this hypothetical brings to mind, refer to the writings of several notable refuseniks, or Jews who sought permission in the 1970s to leave the

140

Given this lack of universality, my use of the term “success” throughout this project has been geared towards the interpretation of the individual. To live even a day as a Soviet

Jew was to successfully walk multiple lines connecting and intersecting personal and cultural loyalty, political adherence, and Communist ideals. The act of balancing upon these tightropes, even for a moment, can be viewed as a success.

The difficulty in conducting these analyses, however, is also rooted in the differences between defining Judaism as opposed to defining Stalinism, Marxism,

Communism, and so forth. Of course, differences in defining the parameters of these concepts also imply differences in defining what it means to believe in these concepts.

Stalinism, Marxism, Communism, and the like are ideologies based upon facts, statements, and the interpretations of those facts and statements. Those interpretations may be influenced or colored by the opinions of a founder or significant thinker, either based upon voiced convictions or upon convictions that the figure may logically have held. These ideologies often deal with abstract concepts—for instance, money, the work force, government, and political parties—that, despite their roots in abstract conceptions of value, debt, labor, and so forth, are represented by concrete actors, such as elected officials or Party literature. As an example, let us take the Bolshevism of 1917. This school of thought is predicated primarily upon the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin, who is in turn influenced by people such as Marx and Engels. The thoughts of all three would rely upon abstract concepts such as “the worker,” “debt,” “loyalty,” “nationalism,” and the like. These

USSR for Israel, only to be denied and held captive in their home country. I highly recommend Hand in the Darkness: The Autobiography of a Refusenik by Ida Nudel, and Mark Yakovlevich Azbel’s Refusenik!: Trapped in the Soviet Union.

141

ideas and thinkers would give rise to concrete, tangible manifestations of this belief system: for example, Party pamphlets, the loudspeaker on the street corner emitting speeches by Lenin or Kerensky, and the hammer-and-sickle Party pin on the lapels of Party members. I argue that an ideology requires these three to exist in congruity: the thoughts and convictions of one or more central figures; the abstract concepts required in order to render those thoughts and convictions logically sound; and the physical representations of ideological power in the day-to-day lives of the population in question.

However, I posit that the premises defining a religion—in this case, Judaism—are different. While religions will possess central figures and personages, abstract concepts will underlie foundational beliefs and doctrines, and tangible reflections of that religion will exist in the surroundings of its adherents, these disparate characteristics are much less requisite. A religion features aspects of emotionality and morality that mere ideologies do not, but even more so, religions feature faith. One can be a Communist without believing that that system is inherently right or “true.” For example, one can see flaws in Communism but possess impulses and personality traits shaped by the fact that they have come of age in a Communist setting. One could elect to be a Communist, become of a member of the Party, and so on if one sees those options to be more beneficial and of greater use than other social and political alternatives. Likewise, many capitalistic individuals loathe the system in which they live, but find that their practices, personalities, and habits have been deeply shaped by that school of thought. However, one cannot be a Jew, a Catholic, a Buddhist, and so forth if one does not believe in the inherent moral “rightness” of that system. I argue that

142

while a religion may feature the three aspects of ideology discussed above, another, more important requirement exists: that of faith.

Because of these differences in defining the very premises of being Soviet versus being Jewish, some may argue that there is no inherent reason that the systems should risk displacing each other, and that Sovietness and Jewishness should be able to successfully coexist within the same individual. I argue, however, that the incompatibility between these two systems only demonstrates the inevitability of conflict. Proponents of and adherents to these systems struggle to understand the other, and while coexistence and nonviolence is certainly a theoretical possibility, the Soviet system, which seeks to usurp and encompass the minority-affiliated “Other,” cannot claim its own hegemony while allowing that Other to exist unassaulted. This is the root of the conflict between the two: while Judaism foresees a messianic age in which non-Jews will celebrate Sukkot with Jews, in an atmosphere where their non-Jewishness is acknowledged and appreciated, the Soviet system and Communism as a whole is predicated upon the conversion of all, the encompassing of all, and absolute unanimity.

143

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF THE YIDDISHISTS

Dovid Bergelson was murdered in the middle of the night on August 12, 1952, a date now known as “The Night of the Murdered Poets” in English and “Harugey malkus funem

Ratnfarband” in Yiddish.81 He had endured years of torture and interrogation since his arrest in 1948, a casualty of the period of harsh repression known as the Zhdanovshchina

(named after Stalin’s director of cultural policy since 1946, Andrei Zhdanov). Arrested with other colleagues from the JAC—excepting Mikhoels, Bergelson’s good friend and head of

GOSET who had been assassinated four years earlier, his body dumped on a roadside in an attempt to pin his death on a traffic accident—Bergelson was among those accused of

“nationalism” from every direction. As Joshua Rubinstein points out, any activity routinely engaged within by students, artists, or the intelligentsia, such as classes, literary salons, readings, or language lessons, became evidence of Jewish nationalism and the sabotage of the Soviet system (50).82 For these reasons, students, professors, writers, and artists were disproportionately targeted by these purges, eliminating those best situated to criticize the regime and its actions.

Prior to their arrests, both Mikhoels and Bergelson were subject to an interesting and foreboding technique utilized often by the Soviets: a degree of historical revisionism that I term “historical erasure.” As detailed by Joshua Rubinstein in the introduction to his

81 “Martyrs of the Soviet Union” 82 Rubinstein comments extensively on the friendship between Bergelson and Mikhoels, relying primarily upon written correspondence and the French-language memoirs of Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels.

144

book with Vladimir Naumov, as the tides of official Soviet popularity and approval ebbed and flowed, state publications would offer varying opinions on public figures in order to agree or disagree with the government. When a person fell out of favor to the extent that their arrest seemed imminent, many state publications would remove any and all references to that individual and their work, sometimes going so far as to alter official records and back issues of publications (Rubinstein xi). This is a silencing not only of the voice of these men and women, but a silencing of their very existence. To alter records and strip history of their names was a calculated measure intended to strike fear into the hearts of dissenters, who would not even be remembered for the works they had produced while still in favor.

This imbued the act of dissent with a certain degree of power. Of course, any form of censorship undertaken by a repressive regime tacitly acknowledges the fact that that dissent possesses power. Otherwise, why would it be deemed necessary to silence that dissent in the first place? The regime imbued the actions and writings of these people with power, to be sure. A question remains as to where the power of dissent is rooted—

Bergelson’s work and the work of the JAC seems to argue that this power originates not solely in the content of ideas, but in the very existence of opposition and an opposing testimony.

Regardless of the power wielded by the presence of opposition, however, to erase the individuals comprising that opposition from history would be a hard blow to someone who tried to be a good Soviet, working and contributing in order to push the Soviet project forward. Communism places great meaning in historiography and the participation of the

145

worker in that process, so to see one’s own government wipe one’s contributions and existence from all public record would come as a shock and a warning.

The trial of the JAC defendants on May 8, 1952, was originally intended to be an open show trial of the kind Stalin was known for. However, Stalin was distracted by other arrests, and by the reinstatement of the death penalty. The trial was, therefore, completely closed, and the defendants were given more of a voice while on the courtroom floor

(Rubinstein 55-56). After all, there were almost no witnesses in front of which the defendants needed to be censored. Defendants examined and cross-examined each other in a painful and angry carousel of emotions and private matters, and according to Rubinstein, the judges soon realized the trial was a farce (56). Despite their best efforts, they were powerless to stop it. Their only recourse was to supervise a team of stenographers, who recorded every word and produced a reliable account of what went on that day.

The transcripts of the trial proceedings are chilling in their treachery and outright irrationality. The trial as a whole began with Itsik Fefer, a Yiddish poet who, it is now generally believed, was a Soviet agent positioned close to Solomon Mikhoels in order to monitor his actions—for example, on their 1943 JAC fundraising trop to the United States

(Gessen 116). His position as the first to be put on the stand set the stage for the rest of the trial. Fefer laid out a detailed and presumably shocking case against his colleagues and supposed friends,

146

“reaching back to 1920 to do so. ‘Nationalist attitudes are in essence anti-Soviet attitudes…Bergelson and [Dovid] Hofshteyn expressed their nationalist attitudes in their literary work.’ The work of Eynikayt during the war similarly engaged in nationalist propaganda by singling out Jewish war heroes as well as Jewish victims of Nazism, he claimed” (Gessen 116-117).

Here we see that, even if Fefer was not a Soviet informant as evidence indicates, the second he stepped into the courtroom, he was not a friend to Bergelson or his other JAC colleagues.

Markish was the next to take the stand, and he was not shy about the fact that he and Bergelson had never been close. However, unlike Fefer, who worked side-by-side with friends and then turned on them, Markish was loathe to turn on his colleagues. He called

Bergelson “the most avid supporter of the Jewish national cultural tradition of anyone on the committee,” and emphasized the fact that Bergelson was well-known in the U.S. and therefore a perfect choice for the JAC. Though this support of the “Jewish national cultural tradition” was akin to Jewish nationalism, for which all the JAC members were on trial,

Markish is careful tell the truth about Bergelson and his other colleagues in the least damning terms possible. Furthermore, when pressed to give his opinion on whether

Bergelson was a spy or engaged in the JAC’s “criminal activity,” Markish says that he “can believe that of Fefer, but I can’t imagine that Bergelson was a spy” (Naumov in Gessen,

118).

This was the nature of the trial, which was for all intents and purposes a show trial, despite its closed doors. While the defendants were not on show for the sake of the public, the charade of justice was staged for the defendants themselves. They were imprisoned, they had been beaten and tortured and interrogated, but the regime still sought to

147

humiliate them and dismantle the friendships, even the mere working relationships, the

Yiddishists had cultivated over decades. These people were the heart of Yiddishland, the metaphysical space inhabited by those who work in a diasporic language with no borders, those who write a Jewish literature that is hard to define but impossible to ignore. The fact that Yiddishland had no physical borders made the interpersonal relationships among its inhabitants indispensible to the literature itself. Hence, the destruction of these relationships was akin to the destruction of Yiddishland itself.

Bergelson went on trial next, after Fefer and Markish respectively. Rubinstein and

Naumov note that, according to police and his family, Bergelson’s home was raided after his arrest and “three large bags of manuscripts” were confiscated, most of which his family believed was written “for the drawer,” to borrow the words of Arlen Blyum (Rubinstein and Naumov 132). Of course, to produce and not publish was still dangerous, given the risk and eventual probability of these forbidden works being discovered. This insistence upon following his artistic impulses, even at the expense of his own safety, is reflected in

Bergelson’s testimony, which was always polite and precise, but nonetheless proud. When asked to what he pled guilty, Bergelson said, “To running away from the Soviet Union and toward nationalism.” He goes on to discuss his childhood as the son of a Hasid, explaining how as a child, he was so grief-stricken on Tisha b’Av that he swore he could smell the smoke and fumes of the First and Second Temples burning.83 This is seen as evidence of an

83 Tisha b’Av, or the Ninth of Av, generally falls in August and memorializes the burning of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians and of the Second Temple in the year 70 by the Romans. It is a fast day for observant Jews and is considered to be the saddest day of the Jewish year (Rubinstein and Naumov 133).

148

ingrained and problematic nationalism, and Bergelson relates the anecdote in order to illustrate how far he has come in his Soviet and secular ways, so to speak. He is questioned on the topic of the assimilation of the Jews in Soviet life, and when he mentions that that process seemed as if it would be a “prolonged agony,” the interrogator seems almost offended that the prospect of being subsumed into the Soviet morass could seem anything other than a privilege and a joy (Rubinstein and Naumov 134).

As the interrogation continues, Bergelson is asked about earlier interrogations, and when he claims to have withheld some of the truth because of a fear that the official would not believe him, he is suddenly examined over the fact that he would dare to mistrust a

Soviet official. This type of pettiness, where insults are sought in the simplest statements about government agents, is typical of Stalin-era trials. However, it carries a strange implication. In much the manner of Filipov in Mides hadin, the servant of the regime becomes the embodiment of the regime. To assassinate a Bolshevik is akin to assassinating a crucial component of the regime itself, and in Bergelson’s case, to distrust an official interrogator is to imply a distrust in the judicial and punitive systems of the USSR.

Finally comes the moment that I feel summarizes the true, illogical nature of this trial. During an earlier interrogation, when an official said the sentence “[Ben Zion]

Goldberg is an American spy,” Bergelson replied by restating the claim, then with a word that is generally translated as “yes” or “really.” I believe that that Russian word is most likely “prav.” However, when Bergelson replied, according to himself and others, he inflected his voice upwards, indicating disbelief or a question (this is the case in many languages, and certainly holds true in Yiddish, Russian, and English). However, the court

149

stenographer transcribed Bergelson’s response without any indication of questioning, rendering his reply to the accusation that Goldberg was a spy, “Goldberg was an American spy? Yes” (Gessen 101).

Masha Gessen, a native Russian speaker and a Soviet citizen until her emigration at age 12, vehemently claims that it has always been acceptable in modern written Russian, including at the time of the JAC trial and in the present day, to use the double punctuation

“?!” to indicate a surprised or shocked question. However, when Bergelson reviewed the transcript at the end of this interrogation, as was his right, he expressed dissatisfaction with his implied agreement with the idea that the American journalist Goldberg was a spy.

However, the stenographer informed him that “‘We do not have the custom of using double punctuation’” (Naumov in Gessen, 101-102). To the reader of this transcript, it appears that

Bergelson had inside knowledge of clandestine activity against the Soviet Union, which would make him guilty of treasonous offenses. For the purposes of his trial, he was: his alleged provision of information to a known American spy was one of the central accusations against him in the document condemning him to death (Rubinstein and

Naumov 399).

Bergelson was murdered on the night of August 12, 1952 (Rubinstein 63). It was his

68th birthday. The official charges against him “being hostile to Soviet power,” “publishing anti-Soviet, nationalistic articles,” and promoting “the idea that the Jews as a people are set apart, special, and exceptional and the idea of the unity of Jews the world over transcending class” (Rubinstein and Naumov 399). His final statement before being shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison simply reiterated his innocence, but featured a mea culpa of the sort

150

intended to appeal to Party officials. Bergelson claimed that he was not the “backbone of the [JAC], for there wasn’t one,” adhering to the notion of the group as a collective soviet of

Communist and Jewish ideas operating in sync. He goes on to deny giving Goldberg or any other agent any sort of information, classified or otherwise, but states that he feels “guilt” all the same and “would like to speak of it to the Supreme Court of the USSR” (Rubinstein and Naumov 388).

This technique is intended to bring the regime inside Bergelson’s own laboratory of the self, so to speak: he posits that the literature of which he is being found guilty, more or less, is not an accurate window into his soul, and asks for the chance to give the Soviet regime a look at who he really is. Bergelson closes his remarks by reminding the listener of his own prestige and his focus on giving back to “the working masses and not to those rich people from whom I came” (Rubinstein and Naumov 389). He closes by stating that the only thing of which he is guilty is of falling short of becoming a “real Soviet man,” one who works tirelessly for the good of the Communist state and for the good of the world’s workers. Bergelson’s words are painful to read, for at this point, he knows he is condemned to execution by firing squad. This state of extreme distress makes his words hard to trust, and even harder to analyze objectively. However, what is certain is that Bergelson had given his life to this state, and to the notion of the Jew as an integral part of the mission. He was repaid with bullets.

When the news of the murders of the Yiddishists broke globally in March 1956, the

Jewish community was shaken, and even more jarring was the effect on the community surrounding Yiddish letters (Rubinstein 63). Beyond the loss of these talented writers and

151

poets, the myth of Jewish safety in the Soviet Union had been crushed once and for all.

These people—Peretz Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Khayke Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, Dovid

Bergelson, and so many more, had advocated for the Soviet system, sought to further its goals and visions, and homed their lives, their families, and their art there.

The end of the JAC would not mark the end of Stalin’s anti-Semitic excesses. The

Great Leader’s late-in-life increased paranoia about “rootless cosmopolitans,” and his theories about Jews serving as agents of the U.S., had fueled his increasing anti-Semitism for years. After the deaths of the majority of the JAC, Stalin turned his ire toward his Jewish physicians, who would be targeted by the Doctor’s Plot, a concocted tale arguing that the

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Solomon Mikhoels had sent physicians to murder Stalin and other head Soviets. This concoction was intended to target Jews all over the USSR, not just the physicians close to the dictator: with the Great Leader calling into question the loyalties and intentions of those closest to him, the most protected individual in the land, how much more easily could the average Russian find it to distrust a

Jewish coworker, friend, or neighbor? In this sense, the Doctor’s Plot was an attack on Jews across the country, and many feared that the era of pogroms had returned.

Evidence indicates that Stalin intended to murder the defendants in the Doctor’s

Plot and then deport the Jews of major Soviet cities to the Russian steppe and Birobidzhan

(Rubinstein 62). On December 1, 1952, he was quoted as saying during a Presidium meeting that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence” (Malyshev in

Rubinstein and Naumov 62). This attitude of suspicion carried on into his dealings with the families of the JAC defendants: families of those executed were barred from living in major

152

cities, then exiled for periods averaging 10 years to Siberia and Kazakhstan (Rubinstein and

Naumov 62). At this time, they still had no idea what had happened to their loved ones.

Stalin’s death occurred none too soon. He died before any of the Jewish doctors implicated in the entirely fictional Doctor’s Plot could be indicted or put on trial, and the dictator’s passing also led to the posthumous rehabilitation of the Yiddishists in 1955. This gesture which was never publicized or announced in Party literature. The only indication that the regime admitted any wrongdoing in their treatment of the JAC defendants was in public records, where their names were added back into the spaces from which they had been erased years before.

To attempt to locate reason in unreasonable acts is a futile exercise, and to rationalize the loss of life at the hands of another is to dishonor those who have died. This project has been focused on the life and work of Dovid Bergelson, and this focus will not be derailed by an unfitting examination of or focus upon the matter of his death. It deserves to be recognized, however, that Bergelson and his compatriots were slaughtered at the hands of the system that they sought to glorify, to inhabit, and to find safety within. Whatever overstepping Prints Reuveni committed, whatever Jewish nationalism was present in

Eynikayt, and whatever themes existed in Bergelson’s myriad works, his torture and execution cannot be justified. This is simply the nature of totalitarianism. Bergelson should not be remembered for the circumstances of his death, but rather for his gifted prose work.

Even more so, Bergelson should be remembered as a person of hope and ambition, who saw a new land in the making and sought to build a safe, fruitful homeland there for his people.

153

CONCLUSION

YIDDISHLAND

In this dissertation, I have aimed to identify the presence of a composite Soviet-

Jewish identity in the socialist-realist works of Dovid Bergelson, namely the early works

Opgang, Tsvishn emigrantn, and Nokh alemen, the article from In shpan entitled “Dray tsentern,” Mides hadin, Baym dnyepr, Birebidzhaner, articles from Eynikayt, the pamphlet

Yidn un di foterland-milkhome, and the drama Prints Reuveni. These works span a time period encompassing most of Bergelson’s life, but primarily from 1926 to the author’s death in 1952, and most of them are heavily influenced by the prescriptive Soviet genre of socialist realism. Those that adhere to the genre do so in a manner meant to convey clear

Soviet sympathies, but also attempt to retain a sense of Jewish pride and nationalism.

Those that overstep the boundaries of socialist realism do so in marked departures from the sphere of acceptable Soviet writing. I have identified key moments in which these works engage with Soviet ideas, and analyzed the relevance of those moments to the composite Soviet-Jewish identity formulated by Bergelson. Furthermore, I have attempted to examine the way in which this composite Soviet-Jewish identity functions, and the problems it attempts to solve.

The first chapter of this dissertation examines the roots of Yiddish literature, and particularly the Haskalah, its echoes throughout the following decades, and the three authors known as di klasiker. From the oral and self-referential style of Abramovitsh that blurs the line between reality and fiction, I discuss the monologue-style writings of Sholem

154

Aleichem (as well as his revolutionary invention of the Yiddish literary tradition and heritage itself), then the modernist, satirical, and consciously literary tales of Peretz. This chapter is meant to examine the giants upon whose shoulders we stand, so to speak.

Bergelson’s modernist work is certainly not the focus of this project, but to neglect to analyze these three writers and their effect upon the early writings of Bergelson would be a profound oversight.Through the lens of Mirel Hurvits’s life lived in Nokh alemen, I examine

Bergelson’s engagement with modernism, and the ways in which his early work reflects the values of the Enlightenment and of secular Yiddishists.

The second chapter moves on into a discussion of Bergelson’s time in Kiev, then in

Berlin, and examines Nokh alemen as an example of this pre-1926 modernist writing. I conclude this chapter with the assertion that Bergelson, a creative mind accustomed to producing revolutionary material, would have faced a shock upon returning to Moscow in

1933. There, Bergelson would have been expected to write the values and mores of the

Russian Revolution in Yiddish, rather than writing Yiddish material that was revolutionary or avant-garde in and of itself.

In the third chapter, I argued that a “problem of temporospatiality” exists in Yiddish literature, originating both in its nature as a diasporic tongue, and in the often schizophrenic condition of the shtetl. This shtetl is not a physical space, but a mindset, which is upset and problematized by a rapidly-modernizing secular world and the resulting deformation and devaluation of traditional schema. In examining the Haskalah and the

Hebraist movement that functioned in opposition to the Yiddishists, I examine the role of

Yiddish in the lives of secular and socialist Jews. Finally, using Bergelson’s “Dray tsentern,” I

155

argue that his promotion of the Soviet Union as the new home of Yiddish letters is meant to help resolve the tension of placelessness and borderlessness that plagues Yiddishland.

The fourth chapter focuses on the genre that Bergelson believed posed an answer to this question of temporospatiality: socialist realism. By attempting to use socialist realism to provide boundedness to Yiddish letters, a new perspective is gained of Soviet historicity and historiography. Socialist realism is based upon portrayal of the world as it ought to be, but insists that it portrays the world as it is—at least in the USSR. The requirements of the genre are that every positive character reflect the participation of the worker in the forward movement of history towards a Communist and utopian endpoint. I use Gennady

Estraikh’s In Harness to examine how well Yiddish literature is suited to an acceptance of

Communism, one aspect of which is based upon the unacceptability of anti-Semitism to

Bolshevik ideology. Bergelson’s Bildungsroman Baym dnyepr tells the story of Penek, the son of a wealthy Hasidic family who spurns his father’s legacy in favor of a life among the working class in the backstreets of his hometown. As Penek ages into a Soviet hero, he makes decisions that align him with Soviet ideals, and his conscious self-improvement reflects the internal and external aspects of Soviet identification.

The fifth chapter here examines the shifting role of the Jew from the “old” tsarist

Russia into the “new” Bolshevik state. This role suddenly expands and is given the responsibility of consciously supporting the state and the Party in a performance known as partiinost’. This stands in sharp contrast to the “shtetl mindset” of Jewish life in imperial

Russia, a lifestyle Bergelson characterizes as superstitiously religious, uneducated, backwards, and lacking opportunities for ambitious young people. Examples of this

156

metaphysical shtetl mindset, manifested as a concrete place, include Golikhovke in Mides hadin and Rakitne in Opgang. By discussing this pre-revolutionary shtetl side-by-side with

Birebidzhaner, a tale of settlers populating the new Jewish Autonomous Region, the reader gains a deeper understanding of Russian Jewish life before and after 1917. Furthermore, the reader is able to compare and contrast texts from before Bergelson’s ideological shift and afterwards, examining the ways in which he portrays protagonists and conflict.

Chapter 6 delves into one of the primary methods of ensuring that Jewish self- identification did not surpass or exceed Soviet self-identification: the constant subjugation of Jewish identity to Soviet identity. For example, in much of his wartime reporting,

Bergelson refers to the Germans as one threatening, homogeneous Nazi morass, and rallies the Jews to support the Soviets in the ensuing fight—for example, in the 1941 pamphlet

Yidn un di foterland-milkhome. In other places, Soviet indoctrination is portrayed as the

“cure” for the condition of Jewishness. Finally, in order to keep Jewish concerns out from attracting too much attention or support, and for other unfathomable reasons, the Khurbn is “de-Judaized” by denying the specificity of its attack on the Jews. Under the slogan “do not divide the dead,” the USSR focused its energy on denying that Jews suffered any more or less than other groups opposed to fascism. Indeed, many monuments in the former

Soviet Union still feature inscriptions dedicating them to “Soviet victims of fascism” rather than to the Jewish citizens massacred there. This “successful” balancing, which I define as any performative life choice designed to keep the individual safe, is contrasted with

Bergelson’s decision to write and attempt to produce the play Prints Reuveni. With intense

157

themes of Jewish nationalism, messianism, and the taking up of arms as an alternative to passivity, the play was unacceptable to the Soviet regime and to Communism as a whole.

In Chapter 7, I examine the nature of this composite identity in terms of a center- periphery relationship, the center represented by Moscow, the Party, the Kremlin, and

Stalin, and the periphery encompassing Judaism, Yiddishkayt, and the ability to participate within those identities and associated communities while maintaining a meaningful connection with the center. This hierarchical structure is reflected in various texts by

Bergelson where characters engage with societal pressure in different ways and with varying degrees of success. For instance, Birebidzhaner features successful and productive interactions between the center and the periphery—the settlers perform hard physical labor that is directly linked with their active creation of a new home, and as such, they perform a forward movement in the flow of Communist history. In contrast, Mides hadin portrays an example of the chaos that accompanies a complete breakdown of relations between the center and the periphery. The work of Jochen Hellbeck on Soviet diaries and the laboratories of identity formation lends support to this ideas. We are led to the conclusion that Bergelson’s texts model Soviet-Jewishness to his readers, which in turn allows those readers to mimic successful identity formations and avoid negative ones. This chapter, while primarily theoretical, brings the concepts of the preceding chapters to a logical conclusion and allows this dissertation to examine the implications of Bergelson’s work in the lives of the Soviet Jews who read him.

Finally, Chapter 8 deals with the arrest of the JAC defendants, the ensuing interrogation, and the execution of all but one of these defendants in the summer of 1952.

158

These events were intended to deny and silence the Yiddishists for reasons both political and anti-Semitic. Even their names were erased from publications and official records, thereby erasing them from the Soviet historical record and, from the viewpoint of the

Party, from the wider story of mankind’s movement toward a worker’s paradise. While these actions censored them, all censorship imbues the censored material with a certain power—after all, only material with the potential to disrupt needs to be censored. This discussion of censorship, and the ways in which the interpersonal relationships of the JAC members were spotlighted during the trial, also serves to illuminate questions regarding

“Yiddishland,” the term Efrat Gal-Ed uses for those who work in Yiddish and produce the content comprising Yiddish letters. The conclusion is reached that because Yiddishland is a diasporic, borderless, and metaphysical space, those who inhabit it are indispensable to its very existence. Because of this, the Soviet assault on the Yiddishists of the JAC also constitutes an assault on Yiddishland itself. The goal of my research is to link Bergelson in new ways to the Soviet regime, and to analyze his literature—both in content and in context—and its fraught relationship to the spaces occupied by Jewish citizens of the USSR.

I argue that these spaces are what make up the specifically Soviet iteration of Yiddishland.

Unsurprisingly, the future of Yiddishland and Yiddish letters is a fraught one. The

Khurbn had an undeniable and damaging effect upon the language and its literature—after all, what language could survive the murder of millions of its speakers? Even aside from the catastrophes of the Khurbn and WWII, Yiddish has more or less been abandoned as a language of commerce, ideas, and daily life. At present, those who speak it regularly tend to inhabit the most tightly closed, non-secular, and frum societies. The language of religious

159

and cultural Judaism is much more likely to be Hebrew, especially in Israel, and both secular and frum Jews around the world generally speak the languages of their geographic nations. Yiddish still exists, but very few speak it as a mamaloshen, or “mother tongue.”

This perceived dearth of cultural engagement and production in Yiddish is a situation that many cultural centers are working to remedy. The Yiddish Book Center at the

University of Massachusetts at Amherst has made thousands of Yiddish publications available for free online, and the YIVO Center in New York conducts research on

Yiddishkayt, Eastern European Jewry, and the culture largely lost by the mid-20th century.

Two related institutions especially close to my heart, the Bibliothèque Medem and Maison de la culture yidish in Paris, hosts regular classes and events on their campus and conducts annual Summer Yiddish Universities in various European cities. Prestigious Yiddish language programs such as the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program and the Naomi Prawer

Kadar Program are offered every year in Amherst, Massachusetts and Tel Aviv, Israel, respectively. These programs are valuable, and the very fact of their existence is meaningful in itself. However, I do not believe that this is the essence of Yiddishland, and these programs cannot solely sustain Yiddish literature or ensure its perpetuity.

What could very well sustain Yiddishland, however, is the possible increase in the number of its speakers. According to Jeffrey Shandler’s Adventures in Yiddishland, the number of fluent or partial Yiddish-speakers could very well be on the rise; it is widely spoken in communities who traditionally favor “a high birthrate and maintenance of a close-knit communitarian lifestyle” (Shandler 2). Shandler is also optimistic about the future of Yiddish because, although the language is not necessarily used primarily as a

160

Jewish vernacular in our post-WWII era, recent years have witnessed “the proliferation of other forms of engagement with the language” (Shandler 3). I agree with Shandler on this point. I have witnessed, since the commencement of my research, an intense love of and focus upon Yiddish among my colleagues and fellow researchers. Those who study the language are immensely passionate about it, and I feel that this further reinforces the status of the language as a sort of living relic. Usage of the language, and the population of people who speak it as a mamaloshen, decreased precipitously with Khurbn, to be sure. However,

Yiddish is still very much alive and well.

Even aside from the optimistic circumstances of creative literary production and consumption in Yiddish, I consider the future of research and nonfiction writing in the field to be promising. The fate of the Yiddishists was tragic, to be sure, and the impact of the

Khurbn and various pogroms upon this community cannot ever be forgotten. However, the nature of the human being is to search for survival and furthermore, to fight for the perpetuity of one’s community and one’s work. Much as Irina Ehrenburg located lost manuscripts and files in her father’s belongings, so can we continue to look for things that have been forgotten—lost books, old archives, and the other ways in which those who came before us preserved their threatened ideas. Research will continue in these fields as more and more sources come to light, and with every new discovery, new avenues of interpretation and scholarship will be revealed. The challenge will be to direct at least a fraction of our efforts, funding, education, and promotion to producing the resultant papers, articles, and books in Yiddish as well as English, French, Hebrew, and the like.

161

To quote Tal Hever-Chybowski, the head of the Maison de la culture yidish and the

Bibliothèque Medem, this is the new Yiddishland: students and teachers meeting in a central location, learning and communicating, and returning to their disparate home bases with new knowledge and new motivation to use Yiddish. The 21st century also enables these Yiddish-speakers to quickly and efficiently continue to communicate in Yiddish across continents, even in situations where close proximity is impossible. In this manner we see, again, Shandler’s assertion of postvernacularism: we may not speak Yiddish often in day-to-day life, but we conduct other aspects of our lives in Yiddish when we read, text, email, and sing Yiddish songs alone or together. In short, we find ourselves in a situation that may only hold forth the faintest glimmer of hope, but a situation in which we are primed to participate in the creation of a world. It is a tenuous position, but a powerful one primed for action.

Some scholars are hesitant to accept the new nature of Yiddishland, but to long for the Yiddish experience of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a futile exercise. These places and situations have changed and been lost, along with the people who inhabited them. However, as long as students and scholars such as ourselves continue to study

Yiddish, speak it together, and consume and produce creative material, Yiddishland can find a way to adapt and grow into something new and different from that which has come before—not better or worse, just different. The duty of modern Yiddishists is this: to engage with the new, postvernacular Yiddishland, to never forget the culturally and religiously Jewish roots of the traditions of Yiddishkayt, and above all, to honor the

162

memories of those who have fought and gone before us. Our foundation is strong, and upon it, we can only build onwards and upwards.

163

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE TO

“JEWS AND THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND,” OR YIDN UN DI FOTERLAND-

MILKHOME

This pamphlet was originally published by Der Emes in 1941 as propaganda material to muster Jewish support for the Soviet fight against German Nazism. To my knowledge, this is its first appearance in English. It proved difficult to track down, and after several failed attempts and research leads, was ultimately discovered on a microfilm reel consisting of roughly 50 Yiddish-language articles, pamphlets, and short book-length publications. I provide a translation here for several reasons: first of all, because of its relevance to this project. This piece displays many of the techniques Bergelson uses to situate Soviet-Jewish identity within the context of the second world war: subordination of

Jewish identity to Soviet identity; a common identification with hardship and prejudice; a logical process equating the existence of the Soviet regime with the betterment of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; and so on. The “Hitlerite” is portrayed as evil and bloodthirsty, the sovetn-makht is good and benevolent, and the Jew, with his devotion, zeal, bravery, and skill, is enlisted to aid the latter in the fight against the former. In the same breath, the piece exalts the attributes and capabilities of the Jew and presses him into service to the Soviet war machine.

In addition, this piece is a valuable lens through which to examine the Soviet propaganda machine, and in particular the adulation of and emotional fervor towards Josef

Stalin. The piece begins by delineating and defining the enemy, and then lays the

164

foundation to support assertions of Soviet goodwill towards the Jews. This is accomplished by examining history, legal precedents, the Revolution, and so on. Finally, the focus of the piece shifts to focus on Comrade Stalin, whose support and words will make possible a

Soviet, and therefore a Jewish, victory.

Linguistically, this pamphlet features some aspects that rendered its translation both a fascinating and a complicated process. The aspects of Yiddish vocabulary borrowed from other languages, for example, appear here in full force. Words such as sluzsheshtshye and osedlost’ are clear Slavisms, and many Hebrew terms appear here as well (as mentioned in earlier chapters, these words are considered to have originated in the loshn koydesh, or holy tongue). An interesting aspect is present here, however—these words are not spelled in their traditional Hebrew manner, despite the fact that Yiddish uses Hebrew orthography and almost always preserves the Hebrew spellings of Hebraic words. This

Hebrew spelling can be easily recognized against a backdrop of standardized Yiddish, because no vowels appear in the words. However, Bergelson uses phonetic Yiddish spellings of Hebraic words, a choice which I assert reflects two concerns.

First of all, I assert that these linguistic decisions are made in order the facilitate the

Yiddish reader’s engagement with the text. The average Soviet Jew consuming printed material in Yiddish would have been, most likely, less than familiar with Hebrew, and would therefore have had an easier time identifying and understanding Hebrew words when they were printed phonetically. Secondly, and more importantly to my fields, I argue that the phonetic representation of Yiddish words originating in the loshn koydesh serves to

“de-Judaize” them, so to speak. To shift spellings from Hebrew to phonetic Yiddish obscures

165

linguistic connections to Hebrew, the preserve of religious Jews, and allows Bergelson to use Hebraic terms without evoking their strong religious undertones, and therefore to write more freely in a non-religious, dedicatedly Communist society. Examples include milkhome, a sakh, and mesires-nefesh. Soviet-specific terms, as well as religiously Jewish terminology, have been translated as accurately as possible. Where further elaboration is absolutely required, a footnote has been inserted—this occurs both for specific sociopolitical terms, such as oyber-rat, and for popular political and cultural references of the time, such as those to Petliura, Denikin, Shtern, and Moshkovsky.

Finally, some words have presented difficulties in translation, especially those that seem to be transliterated into Yiddish from Russian, Ukrainian, or Hebrew. Some made sense in context but, upon further inspection, presented a problem or confusing element that raised doubts as to the actual meaning. With the assistance of Sebastian Schulman of

KlezKanada, a large portion of these problems have been resolved in as accurate a manner as is realistically possible.

This being said, in spaces where a word remains either unknown or deeply historically significant, it has been transliterated and left in italics. A footnote will also be inserted describing the word’s closest possible translation, any alternate meanings, the source of my confusion regarding its signification and relevance, and any relevant linguistic comments. The Yiddish language varied greatly from region to region in its heyday, and possessed a high degree of dialectical and regional variance, both in the lexicon and in phonology. For these reasons, I acknowledge spots where my own ignorance comes to

166

light—not out of laziness or frustration, but because this uncertainty and constant self- education is a feature of my Yiddish learning that I treasure deeply.

167

APPENDIX

JEWS AND THE WAR FOR THE FATHERLAND

Fascists—the Absolute Grimmest of Murderers and Thieves!:

The raging, murderous powers of fascism have raised their violent hand to our great fatherland. With this, they have declared war upon all free people, and upon the Soviet territory these people have inhabited and tended for twenty-four peaceful years as an immense brotherly family, with all divisions among them made with great fairness in terms of both day-to-day toil upon the land and the earnings produced by this toil.

The fascists, who are through and through thieves and criminals, have for the past two mad years taken everything, down to the last shirt, from the people of Czechoslovakia,

Poland, Belgium, Holland, France, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary,

Yugoslavia, and Greece.84 According to all reports, these people have had the last morsels taken from their mouths. Parents, sons, and daughters have been torn from their homes, left making their way through fascist territory laboring to find work, and the families—the elderly, old women and children—are left yearning for a crumb of bread and dying of hunger, freezing with cold and falling ill, which comes with starvation and poverty.85 The fascists do this with every national people that they have overtaken, as well as with every people who gave in without even the smallest resistance.

84 Rather than using the Yiddish term for Hungary, Ungarn, Bergelson transliterates the Russian name, Vengriya, into a Yiddishized Vengriye. 85 The word “laboring” is used here because of the notion of “hard labor” as a punitive or corrective action. The original word, “katorzshner,” is an adjective used to describe a task that is crushingly difficult, and that possesses a targeted, malicious intention.

168

The fascists, who are through and through thieves and criminals, are little more than the forest-bandits and the sea-bandits that existed one upon a time. They have made themselves a living from the same low robbery and murderousness. They are considered, as it were, nothing more than a dark and unashamed excuse.86 They are permitted, so they say, to rob everyone, to slaughter, to starve and to torture, because they are superior beings and call themselves “Aryans.”

This whole “nation,” after all, is based upon this: that with the term “Aryan,” they called themselves in ancient times one united Indo-European tribe, which enslaved other people, and therefore they alone were crowned with the name “Aryan,” meaning a more respectable people, a more honorable people.87 The fascists have, one might say, “turned their coats.” A more respectable and more honorable man is to them not respectable or honorable at all, is not one who helps the other man, but rather one who drives the other as a horse, who wounds him, humiliates him and makes him old.88 A person of good faith would be depressed by this task.

86 The word for “excuse” can also mean “answer,” (teretz) and is derived from Hebrew. This sentence feels a bit strange, but I feel Bergelson is here arguing that the notion of Aryan superiority is merely an excuse for these modern bandits to do as they wish to other peoples. 87 Many thanks to Bonnie Kraus of the Yiddish for Hipsters Facebook group for her assistance in translating the word for “nation,” “yikhem.” 88 This usage of “as a horse” is based upon the Yiddish word raytndik, literally meaning “on horseback” or "astride.” It seems improbable that Bergelson wishes to communicate that anyone is riding astride another person. Rather, I interpreted this word to mean the utilization of the other as a beast of burden, with no thought for the other’s comfort, emotions, well-being, or humanity. The most faithful translation here necessitated that I not explicate Bergelson’s metaphor any further.

169

And so behave the fascists, without exception, to all individuals of all nationalities, whom they make their slaves. Whoever is not of this Aryan tribe is tread upon by their feet.

How the Fascists Deal with Jews:

A million times over, the fascists have dealt angrily with the Jews. To them, the Jews are scapegoats, the last and lowest creature. To put sorrows upon the Jews, to rob them, to spit upon them and spill Jewish blood drop by drop—this is to them like jam, a sweetness with which they ceaselessly feed themselves while taking it upon themselves to commit a robbery, and then still afterwards when the deed is done. Everywhere, both in our nation and by ripping into foreign lands, they make special calculations in dealing with the Jews.89

The whole Jewish population is not necessarily martyred—though they suddenly are sent away. They are not all suddenly consumed by fire, as once upon a time during the

Inquisition, which is a game in the eyes of the fascists. The Jews are not all suddenly slaughtered, as was done from 1918 to 1920, in the years of Petliura’s and Denikin’s bandits who killed with fury.90 In every newly captured town the fascists martyr a part of the Jewish population through horrible scourges and suffering a thousand times worse

89 The Hebraic word khezhbn here means a calculation, figure, or reckoning. Of course, Bergelson renders it phonetically according to the Yiddish system, not in its traditional Hebraic spelling. 90 During the Russian Civil War, a conflict that ran for roughly two years from 1918 to 1920, Symon Petliura led Ukrainian forces seeking independence in the southwest area of the former Russian territories. According to YIVO, Petliura’s forces incited roughly 40% of the area’s pogroms during this time. While he did not order the progroms, his command has been characterized by a lack of action to protect Jews or other minority groups. General Anton Denikin was likewise the leader of another group especially known for its incitement of and participation in pogroms, the Volunteer Army.

170

than death, and they murder them afterward in the street—and some of these Jews are left to lie there by their murderers, in order to be mocked and bear the brunt of their wild, vicious joy. There are no words for the sorrow, aching, agony, and pain that a Jew endures when he falls into the hands of Hitler’s fascists. The only wish of these men is to enact the vicious deeds they think up. Haman was a dog compared to them. It’s enough to know that

Himmler has already said, more than once: “How can we prohibit them from bringing forth millions of people from the lowest race, which increases itself like insects (like lice, like bedbugs)?”91 Who does he mean, first and foremost? Jews.

These wretched and dark words of his are carried everywhere, in every land, mesmerizing and seeking out the Jews there. He shows no mercy at all. And there is, for him, no exception. He steals, slaughters and torments, he burns and makes weary both the young and the old, women and children, and makes a special mockery of the strength that asks for mercy. He spits upon the cowering man and promotes all varieties of murder, thievery, robbery, burning, rape, and savagery.

And here and now, this terrible world-murder, with its regiments and divisions, has started a war of life and death against our vast and beloved fatherland, against a land where all people are equal in their rights, their work, and their simple pleasures in life; a land where all men should be free from divisions of nation or ethnicity, where all are of the same worth and all are equally dear.

A Jew in our holy fatherland therefore need never question his equality, as he must soon place in the first consideration the protection of this homeland’s existence, which has

91 Interjection in original

171

him and his children elevated from slavery to freedom just like all citizens and has counted him in the family of all the 150 Soviet peoples who are all equal amongst each other. Each of us must remember the value of life, if he falls into the hands of the murderous fascists— it’s a life, which compared to death is actually a shining paradise.

On the other hand, we all must remember that we Soviet Jews are happy in comparison with Jews from other countries captured by fascism. Here at least, payments due are rendered fairly for goods and Jews benefit equally with all other liberated peoples in our fatherland, which has become truly just through the passage of the 24 years of the regime, and also through the benefits that we enjoy equally with all other Soviet peoples in our land.

Remind Yourself of Yesterday’s Darkness!:

Leaf through the pages of Jewish history from beginning to end. This is a story of painful roads, each longer than the last. Pogroms, massacres and exile—you read of these trials throughout the whole Jewish story.92 There is no land, there is no part of the world, where Jews shall be not be outcasts, and not be spit upon, robbed, killed, and, in the end, driven away. So it was in Rome that they soon gave up their independence, and so it was in

Alexandria, in Greece, and in all of Italy, where they tried to settle. So it was in the Muslim lands in Asia, Africa, and Turkey, where they tried to search out a small corner for

92 The word I translate as “exile,” spelled by Bergelson as gerushim, is defined in Hebrew and Yiddish dictionaries as “divorce.” While I logically assumed the meaning here would be more along the lines of “separation,” further research has revealed that the term is also used for an expulsion, particularly the collective expulsion of Jews from a geographical area.

172

themselves. So it also was later in France, Germany, and Austria, the countries to which they attempted to flee. So it also was in Spain, where they were burned at the stake, massacred, robbed, and exorcised. It was the same on the islands of Sicily, Crete, and

Cyprus, where Jews went in search of a hiding place.

This is the only corner in the whole world to which the Jewish nation has been thrown where they may, more or less, hope to be left to breathe freely, and hope to not pay bitterly for the privilege. Here, one is reminded that the Jewish nation has survived and surmounted the last two hundred years of the old tsarist rule. The “Pale of Settlement” is fresh in the memory, during which the people of the Jewish nation were barely allowed to stick out a nose. Squeezed together in tiny shtetlekh by a few governors, the Jewish people knew life employed as tradesmen, owning wretched little shops, and moneylending from stalls in the marketplace. They were not allowed to support themselves by working the soil, not even the borders of the small city or shtetl. They were not permitted, in any way, institutional or agency positions. Whether a Jew could officially find work was determined entirely by a second Jew, one more well-off than him. The greater part of Jews was therefore forced to survive on air, traveling around all week from one shtetl to another to the markets. Once upon a time he earned from the marketplace a meager half a ruble, and then sold the house for his wagon. The children of the Jews were taken by soldiers and into wars in greater proportions than the children of non-Jews, but served in regiments at the absolutely low rank that the Jew was allowed. That he should be a “service” was not endeavored, nor that he be outstanding in devotion, nor capable of excellence all the more, of which a soldier must be capable. And when he performed his service well and turned

173

homewards, he was faced with renewal and sentenced to a suffering life, to the very same limits of endurance to which his Jewish forebears suffered.93 His children were never given any kind of education, because he was a Jew and also so very poor, and did not appear to have any purpose for himself or anyone else—even if he had a trade, as a tailor, a cobbler, a carpenter, a hatmaker, or a smith has. He was not allowed to look for work there, where his work was needed. He was every Jew, bound to the shtetl, where Jews with such a work ethic as him were too many, and all were searching the whole month without a stitch of work, with hardly any sustenance for themselves or their families.

So was the fate of the Jewish masses in tsarist Russia. The Jew was barely alive, growing thinner day by day, his chest sunken, his shoulders hunched, his muscles growing weak and slack with neglect. From life in the confines of poverty were his children, for the most part, ill with rickets, tubercular, and dying young.94 From not possessing enough to pay the doctor or the bloodletter who may have otherwise been called, someone in his family was continuously taken ill, and there was no Jewish household where, at some time, you could not find in bed a sick father, a sick wife, a tshakotetshnye girl, a rickety or half- lame child.95

93 In this sentence, the positive adjective modifying “his service” is kosher. Here and in other places in this text, most notably in regards to the fatherland, kosher is used as a descriptor of something good, respectable, and positive in the eyes of Judaism and Yiddish culture. 94 The word used here is a borrowed Slavism, rakhitnye, from the word rakhit, or “rickets.” Rickets is a softening of bones in children due to vitamin D deficiency and was common up into the early 20th century, but is rare in present-day developed nations. 95 This word appears to be a Slavism and based upon its context, it seems to be related to illness or injury. Its meaning, however, is unclear.

174

This was the life of all Jews in the ordinary, calm times. There were never many years at a time that the Jews did not also taste the pain of violations carried out during pogroms and massacres incited by the tsar’s officials, in order to vent their rage against the fleeing masses. Be reminded of Petliura’s and Denikin’s slaughters! Be reminded of the viciousness of Balakhovitsh’s gang, of that bandit Makhno and of other atamanen and bandits!96 Be reminded of the hundreds and thousands of years that such murderers have encountered a place and joyously burned it to the ground. Be reminded of the Jewish victims whose heads have rolled in the gutters, and whose bodies have laid the whole day in other gutters! Be reminded of the slaughtered children, who were murdered in the laps of their mothers, be reminded of the breasts sliced bloody, the eyes cut out, and in all the survivors woe, unhappiness, and pain! Be reminded of them all and remember, because one should not forget, especially now, when Hitler has raised his sacrificial knife up over the whole world, and first and foremost the Jews.

Remember that the Soviet Union Always Treated Us with Respect!:

Remember also that the Soviet regime, and only the Soviet regime, rescued us from all the unhappiness laid out here. Thanks only to our Soviet Union, which is full of true affection for every hardworking and honest man, regardless of his people and his nation of origin, have we become free from pogroms, killings, and from the whole vast and dark situation in which the Jews of the tsarist times found themselves.

96 Atamanen is the Germanized plural of the Russian word ataman, a title used for Cossack leaders. The term also applies to the leader of a band of thieves or criminals and is interchangeable with the term hetman.

175

It is impossible to calculate the good things that our great Soviet fatherland has done for us Jews, who have become equal with all others and have received all human rights and equal respect. Jewish children are equal to the children of all other workers in the factories and manufacturing plants that are the pride of our land and put the rest of the world to shame. In the Nikolaev quarter, in the Dniepropetrov quarter, in Crimea and in

Birobidzhan, Jewish collective farms bloom as beautifully as those run by Russians,

Ukrainians, and Tatars, and are just as productive as those honored for their national economic performance.

Jewish Stakhanovites put those of other peoples to shame, and are selected just as often to serve as deputies by the authorities.97 Together with academics from the Soviet peoples, Jewish academics carry our country forward to new technology, new culture, and new knowledge. And, a fact of greater and greater importance, our best youth serve equally with the best young people from among all Soviet peoples in our immense, glorious Red

Army, and are named heroes just as often for their great devotion to their homeland.

Jews have given the Red Army such faithful and well-known names as [Yakov

Vladimirovich] Smushkevitsh, Moshkovsky, Shtern, and many other faithful and valued sons, respected in the Army and by the whole fatherland.98

97 A Stakhanovite was a follower of the movement of the same name, enacted during the Soviet five-year plan of 1935. This movement was named for a worker famous in the USSR for his focus on workplace efficiency and overachievement in production. 98 Smushkevich, the most notable of these three names, was a Lithuanian Jew who commanded the Red Army Air Force from 1939-1940 and then served as deputy chief of the Red Army Air Force from 1940-1941.

176

In every moment, when our fatherland faces some danger or another, it has the best of Jewish fathers from the older generation standing with their children beside them, keeping watch and protecting our borders, fully prepared to give their last breath for each cubit of our sacred earth. This reminds one of the furrier from Talne, Avrom Tshudak; only now this elderly Jewish furrier has learned that his oldest son, the mayor, fell heroically in the great battle for the life of Khalkhin-Gol.99 He also sent his two younger sons away to serve in the Red Army. Such patriotic parents are not few among the Jewish population.

These parents alone have survived the sorrows, pogroms, and massacres that the tsarist underlings and various bandits made against the Jews. These fathers know therefore the esteemed degree to which the Soviets have delivered them from all these plagues.

These parents must serve as examples to show each Jewish father and each Jewish mother what they must now do, in these dreadful days when the horrible world-murderer

Hitler has bared his bloody claws to our great fatherland.

What Hitler the Bloody Wants:

He wants to destroy the Soviet Union, enslave and rob all Soviet citizens. “He sets himself the goal of placing the regime in the hands of the nobility, establishing tsarism, laying waste to the national cultures and national self-rule of Russians, Ukrainians,

Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldovans, Georgians,

Armenians, Azerbaijani, and others” (Stalin).

99 A 1939 operation in the Khalkhin Gol region of Mongolia.

177

At the same time, he seeks to implement his dark and wide-ranging plan to kill all the Jews, old and young, men and women. He boasts every day that he will do so in a short time, and that not a single Jew will remain in the entire world. Whomever he does not kill by shooting or by hanging from a rope in the street, he kills by hunger, by cold, by poverty and by hard labor. He does this with Jews in Poland and in all other conquered lands. He kills another portion, whose deaths come through immense scourges, soon after he invades a city; a portion are sent to a labor camp, and the remainder are packed into the worst streets under his orders. They carry shameful marks on their sleeves and arms, and are not allowed material goods so that they die there from hunger, from cold, and from other illnesses. But this is, to him, very little. Of those few Jews that he lets live, he takes the young women into houses of shame for his fascist soldiers, and all youths are ordered to be brought in and operated upon so that they cannot have children.

Together with his rampaging fascist regiments he behaves as in the olden days of

Petliura, Denikin, and others of the White Guard, who in the years from 1918 to 1920 slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews and afterwards ran away to Poland and other countries. He rapidly gives the Jews over into the bloody hands of these vicious gangs in every city that he invades, and commands these gangs to rejoice with all the black-hearted pogromists and anti-Semites who remain hidden away in their holes.

Not with Groans, but with Weapons in Hand!

What, then, remains to be done now by every free Soviet Jew, in this time when entirely two hundred thousand Soviet citizens carry on a holy war for fatherland and gird

178

up their strength to prevent the killing and constant annihilating of this furious world- murderer with his fascist hordes?

All Jews—men, women, sons and daughters together with fathers and mothers— cannot delay a single minute, and all as one must serve our glorious Red Army and our one and only fatherland. Not with moans, not by weeping and not by making requests can one now help defend, and completely so, what every one of us would defend with the greatest mesires-nefesh, sparing no hair of our strength and our lives.100 We would do necessary and good work in the ranks of the Red Army and stand against missiles in order to strengthen the great force of our fatherland against the bloody, dark, and violent enemy.

What is the worth of a Jewish life in the hands of Hitler? We have it in order to cherish it. A mother should not give blows to her son who goes forth and places himself in the fixed ranks of the Red Army, but she should send him out on his own and strengthen her heart, as heroic Jewish mothers have done since long ago, every time Jews protect their independence and their dignity. If the mother of the Jewish Red Army soldier is not yet old and can still be of use in battle, she should go together with her son as a sister comrade in the Red Army. Together with the best and most giving people in every city and in every shtetl, we must, together with the best sons in our land, be the first called to ranks by the

Party and the government committee on defense. We must be one with the first to mobilize, both those related to the front, and those who have work to do for the front and for the

100 Mesires-nefesh is the Yiddish pronunciation of mesirat nefesh, the Jewish notion of self- sacrifice without the threat of death, but with the acceptance of any and all other repercussions. Because of the religiosity of this term, I have chosen to leave it in loshn koydesh.

179

population inside the area. We must be vigilant in eradicating every diversionary obstacle and, not sparing our own lives, throw ourselves against that obstruction in every place and time where we catch sight of it. We must band together with the best people in the country to keep holy and carry out everywhere Comrade Stalin’s order:

“To organize a merciless fight against all who disorganize the mill, against deserters, against panicmongers, against those who spread misinformation, we must destroy spies, diversions, parachutist enemies; we must appear in all haste to assist our destruction- battalions. One must keep in mind that the enemy is vile and false, cunning and skilled in deception and the dissemination of false information. One must keep in mind all the more, and never underestimate, provocateurs. One must immediately be devoted to judging all war tribunals—wherever they may be—that, with their panicmongering and with their shudders at their own weakness, they hinder the work of the self-defense committee”

(Stalin).

We Have to Put Our Lives on the Line!:

Our holy fatherland now demands heroism from every one of us, and our good and just land has earned that heroism, and has the right to demand it from all citizens and from among the Jewish people. In the past two thousand years of losing their freedom, Jews have never had such freedom anywhere else as they have in the Soviet Union, never! They have therefore put their lives on the line! Now, when our holy fatherland has attacked the same false and low murderer and robber, rest is never to be ours, until the bloodthirsty enemy no longer lashes out at the people of our borders, and will never again break apart whoever

180

opposes them. All together as one, we must work and fight untiringly with our heroic Red

Army, fight for those whom the Red Army shall never be without. We are called to and strengthened by Comrade Stalin’s words:

“Friends! Our strengths are countless. In the wager the relentless enemy quickly must be overcome.101 Together with the Red Army we must raise the morale of thousands of workers, residents of the collective farms, and scholars in this war against an attacking enemy. This will raise up the millions of Soviet people. Hardworking Muscovites and

Leningraders have already mobilized to create a many-thousand-strong folks-opoltsheniye to support the Red Army. In every city that has found itself fallen to enemies and into danger, we must create this type of folks-opoltsheniye to push all workers toward the fight so that our fatherland will do the same in this fatherland-war with German fascists (Stalin).

“In this fatherland-war we will not be alone. In this immense war we will have united faithfully together with the people of Europe and America, including the German people whom Hitler’s high command have enslaved. Our war for the freedom of our fatherland will combine with the struggle for the peoples from Europe and America for their independence, for democratic freedom. This will be a united front of all peoples that support freedom from slavery and from the dangers of enslavement to Hitler’s fascist armies (Stalin).

101 What I translate in this sentence as “relentless” did not originally read farbisener, but farisener. It seems contextually sound to use the former, and because the latter does not appear in any Yiddish dictionary consulted and is not a word that I am aware of in Hebrew or in related languages, I have proceeded with the thought that the original farisener may be a typographical error. Given the low production cost of the original pamphlet, this does not seem an outlandish argument.

181

“Do not look back once the enemy’s best divisions and best aviation units have been destroyed and found graves on the battle-fields, hear no danger and crawl on ahead, throw renewed strength against the battlefront (Stalin).

Only by facing this battlefront, can one man stand apart from the mass of two hundred million people who are educated in Bolshevist daring, and mercilessly fight against the enemy in the spirit of Lenin or Stalin. At the head of the whole Soviet people fights the glorious Red Army, whose strength is not yet exhausted.

“The daring of the Red Army warrior has no match. Our repulsion of the enemy strengthens and grows, and together with the Red Army raises up to protect the fatherland and the entire Soviet people” (Stalin).

Comrade Stalin Carries Us to Victory!:

And as one with all peoples in our homeland that have melted into an immense and brotherly family, all Soviet Jews, to the last man, must exalt our homeland. The situation demands the same mesires-nefesh from us with which our fatherland behaves, and with mesires-nefesh will we offer up all our strength.

Carrying Stalin’s name in our hearts, every one of us must be ready at any moment to give up their life in the great coming battle between our fatherland, who is the pride of the world, and the dark and murderous fascist, who is the shame of the world. The ugliest and lowest force of robbery and murderousness has called for a war of the loftiest and purest strength, and the loftiest and purest victories, because this strength is in all respects stronger and more powerful than the enemy, because it carries Comrade Stalin with it, and

182

because the best people of the whole world, including the best people of Germany, are with

Stalin and for Stalin.

With Stalin’s name comes protection for our holy fatherland! It comes soon, it does not delay—to every place where you can make use of it! It comes to give us strength to live our happy lives in our beloved land!

It is such a good word—our fatherland!—it will overcome!

It is such a glorious name—Stalin!—it will save the world!

—D. Bergelson

183

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramson, Henry. “Russian Civil War.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Russian_Civil_War. Accessed 23 January 2018. Web.

Adamsky, Dima. “Smushkevich, Iakov Vladimirovich.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. http://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Smushkevich_Iakov_Vladimirovich. Accessed 23 January 2018. Web.

Balina, Marina and Evgeny Dobrenko eds. Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style. New York: Anthem Press, 2009.

Bechtel, Delphine. “Babylon or Jerusalem: Berlin as Center of Jewish Modernism in the 1920s.” Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, edited by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, Wayne State University Press, 1994. 116-123.

Bechtel, Delphine. “Cultural Transfers between ‘Ostjuden’ and ‘Westjuden:’ German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture 1897-1930.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 42, issue 1, January 1997, 67-83.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Arum vokzal.” Verk, vol. 2. Berlin, Germany: Farlag Vostok, 1922-1923.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Among Refugees,” in The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Ed. David G. Roskies. New York: New York Jewish Publication Society, 1988. 263-274.

Bergelson, Dovid. Birebidzhaner: dertseylung. Moscow: Emes, 1934.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Der toyber: ertsehlung.” Kiev: Kunst-ferlag, 1914.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Der yunger sovetisher yid,” in Eynikayt, 7 November 1942: 2.

Bergelson. Dovid. “Di broytmil: drame in dray akten.” Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1930.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Dos hobn geton daytshn!,” in Eynikayt, 14 August 1944: 2.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Dray tsentern,” in In shpan I, April 1926, Vilna and Berlin: 84-96.

184

Bergelson, Dovid. The End of Everything. Trans. Joseph Sherman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, The Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, and the National Yiddish Book Center, 2009.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Gedenkt,” in Eynikayt, 5 September 1942: 2.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Kiev,” in Eynikayt, 1 May 1943: 2.

Bergelson, Dovid. Opgang: The Complete Yiddish Text. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999.

Bergelson, Dovid. Prints Reuveni. New York: YKUF, 1946.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Tsvishn emigrantn.” Shturemteg: dertseylungen, Kultur Lige, 1927. Originally published 1923.

Bergelson, Dovid. “Undzer Kiev,” in Eynikayt, 11 November 1943: 2.

Bergelson, Dovid. Yidn un di foterland-milkhome. Moscow: Emes, 1941.

Blyum, Arlen Viktorovich. A Self-Administered Poison: The System and Functions of Soviet Censorship. Trans. I. P. Foote. Oxford, UK: European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, 2003.

Chubinsky, Borukh. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 1. New York, 1956. 382 383.

Clark, Katerina ed. Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Dobrenko, Evgeny and Eric Naiman eds. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Dubnow, Simon. Fun “zhargon” tsu yidish. Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929.

Emiot, Israel. The Birobidzhan Affair: A Yiddish Writer in Siberia. Trans. Max Rosenfeld. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981.

Estraikh, Gennady. In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.

185

Feiner, Shmuel. Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness. Trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston. Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 2002.

Feiner, Shmuel. The Jewish Enlightenment. Trans. Chaya Naor. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Feiner, Shmuel. “Zweifel, Eli’ezer.” Trans. David Fachler. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Zweifel_Eliezer. Accessed 27 February 2018. Web.

Frieden, Ken ed. Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. Trans. Ken Frieden, Ted Gorelick, and Michael Wex. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Frishman, Elyse D., ed. Mishkan T’filah: Services for Shabbat; a Reform Siddur. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2007.

Gal-Ed, Efrat. “The Making of Yiddishland.” Yiddish in Berlin, 26 August 2017, buch|bund, Berlin, Germany. Guest Lecture.

Gessen, Masha. Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. New York: Schocken Books, 2016.

Gitelman, Zvi. “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.” Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, edited by Zvi Gitelman, Indiana University Press, 1997.

Gitelman, Zvi Y. and Ya’acov Ro’i, eds. Revolution, Repression, and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Hellbeck, Jochen. Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1998. UMI, 1998. 9838941.

Howe, Irving and Eliezer Greenberg. Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

Kerler, Dov-Ber. “The Soviet Yiddish Press: Eynikayt During the War, 1942-1945.” Why Didn’t the Press Shout?: American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, edited by Robert Moses Shapiro. New York: Yeshiva University, 2003. 221-249.

Kerler, Dov-Ber, ed. The Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature & Society. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998.

186

Lustiger, Arno. Stalin and the Jews: The Tragedy of the Soviet Jews and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Enigma Books, 2002.

Luz, Ehud. Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality, and Jewish Identity. Trans. Michael Swirsky. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Marx, Karl, “On The Jewish Question.” Trans. and ed. Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant, and Matthew Carmody. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844. Works of Karl Marx 1844. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. Accessed 22 December 2017.

Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

Moss, Kenneth. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Naumov, V. P., ed. Nepravedny sud: Poslednii Stalinskii rasstrel. Moscow: Nauka, 1994.

Novershtern, Avraham. “Bergelson, Dovid.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Bergelson_Dovid. Accessed 13 June 2017. Web.

Oyslender, Nokhum. Veg ayn veg oys: literarishe episodn. Kiev: Kultur Lige, 1924.

Pinkus, Benjamin. The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967: A Documented Study. Ed. Jonathan Frankel. New York: Cambridge University Press, in association with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Contemporary Jewry and The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984.

Rabinovitch, Lara, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman, eds. Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013.

Ravitsh, Melech. “Di dezertern funem yidishn emes,” in Di vog, September 1922: 35-43.

Ravitsh, Melech, “Di ideye vos felt,” in Literarishe bleter, 10 December 1926: 823.

Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York: Random House, 2004.

Rosenthal, Donna. The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land. New York: Free Press, 2003.

187

Rubinstein, Joshua and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Trans. Laura Esther Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.

Schachter, Allison. Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Schneer, David. Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 1918-1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Shandler, Jeffrey. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Sherman, Joseph and Gennady Estraikh, eds. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism. London: Modern Humanities Research Association Maney Publishing, 2007.

Stalin, Josef. “On an Anti-Patriotic Group of Theatre Critics,” in Pravda, 28 January 1949.

Stanislawski, Michael. Introduction. For Whom Do I Toil?: Yehudah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry, by Stanislawski, Oxford University Press, 1988, 3-7.

Stanislawski, Michael. “Russian Jewry, the Russian State, and the Dynamics of Jewish Emancipation,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship. Ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 262- 283.

Steinberg, Theodore L. Mendele Mocher Seforim. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., Inc., 1977.

Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky). On Socialist Realism. Pantheon Books, 1960.

Weinberg, Robert. Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

Weinreich, Uriel. Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. New York: Schocken Books with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1968.

Wisse, Ruth R. I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.

188

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rebecca L. Thompson was born in Buffalo, New York. She graduated from Alden Central

High School in 2008 and spent two years as a Russian Language and Literature major at

Binghamton University before graduating from the State University of New York at

Fredonia in 2012 with a BA in French Language and Literature and minors in History and

Political Science. Rebecca graduated from The University of Texas at Dallas in May 2014 with an MA in Humanities—Studies in Literature, focusing upon critical translation theory and comparative literature. She then continued on into the PhD program with research specialties in the state censorship of written works, Russian and Soviet literature, and

Yiddish language and literature. She graduated in May 2018.

189

CURRICULUM VITAE

Rebecca L. Thompson

Education University of Texas at Dallas 2018 Ph.D. in Humanities—Studies in Literature Dissertation: “Mayn tsvaoeh durkh dir ikh loz: The Socialist Realism of Dovid Bergelson”

University of Texas at Dallas 2014 M.A. in Humanities—Studies in Literature Areas of Focus: Critical Translation Theory, Literary Translation Portfolio: “Québécois Poetry in the Quiet Revolution: Expressing and Translating a Movement”

State University of New York at Fredonia 2012 B.A. in French Language & Literature Areas of Focus: French Language & Literature, Political Science, European History

Presentations and Publications 48th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and 2018 the Churches: Dallas, TX “The Holocaust Writing of Dovid Bergelson”

Milin Havivin: Yeshivat Chovevei Torah 2016 “Emmanuel Levinas in the Works of Elie Wiesel”

Metamorphoses: The Five College Faculty Seminar on 2016 Literary Translation “Three Poems by Larisa Emilyanovna Miller”

27th Annual Australian Association for Jewish Studies 2015 Conference: Sydney, Australia “Emmanuel Levinas in the Works of Elie Wiesel”

38th Annual European Studies Conference: Omaha, NE 2013 “Journalistic Attitudes Towards Immigration in the French Republic: A Case Study” “The International Criminal Court and Its Efficacy in the Darfur Genocide”

Honors and Recognitions Istvan and Zsuzsanna Ozsvath Research Fund Award 2017 Recipient

Graduate Student Association Scholarship 2015

The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi 2014

Golden Key International Honour Society 2014

Tau Sigma National Transfer Honor Society 2012

Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society 2012

David E. Manly Scholarship for Achievement in Foreign 2011 Language