“Seven-Fold Betrayal”: the Murder of Soviet Yiddi

Page 1 of 15 Discovering Ashkenaz Module 6 Lesson 5 Midstream Magazine July/August 2002 “Seven‐fold Betrayal”: The Murder of Soviet Yiddish By Joseph Sherman Seven lights irradiate his head To set against his seven‐fold betrayal— He is become again anointed poet On the dead floor of the prison cell. —H. Leivick, “Der man fun lid (Moyshe Kulbak)” [The Prisoner Poet] Jewish tradition mandates the lighting of memorial candles on the anniversary of bereavements, to re‐member those departed. This year, the Jewish literary world commemorates Stalin’s post‐war destruction of Yiddish literature and culture. Fifty years ago, on August 12, 1952, thirteen prominent Soviet Jews were shot in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. One third of them were distinguished men of Yiddish letters: the poets Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish, and the novelist Dovid Bergelson. The victims of these judicial murders were all accused of “bourgeois nationalism,” the crime of claiming for the Jewish people the right to be regarded as a nationality with a distinctive cultural identity. They were virtually the last among dozens of important 20th‐century Jewish literati eliminated by the Soviet state from the early 1930s onwards: among the most prominent eliminated by the Soviet state were Moyshe Litvakov, Max Erik, Izi Kharik, and Moyshe Kulbak in 1937, Yisroel Tsinberg in 1938, and Zelig Akselrod in 1941. At first, Stalin’s “purges” of those who opposed him, through the use of fabricated show trials and arbitrary death sentences, were directly antisemitic neither in origin nor in intention. They swept away many Jews because these had risen to high rank in the Communist Party, and Stalin therefore perceived them, in company with thousands of their Page 2 of 15 Russian countrymen, as potential threats to the absolute nature of his despotism. Some supported Trotsky and were therefore inevitably doomed after Trotsky’s expulsion from the USSR in 1928. Others, however, faithfully served the Revolution with high idealistic conviction. They certainly did not anticipate being vilified and shot as spies, traitors, and counter‐revolutionaries. But here lay the bitter irony of so much commitment to Bolshevism, particularly on the part of Jews in general and Yiddish writers in particular, for whom the Soviet Union, in the first decade of its existence, appeared as the savior of their language and its culture. This near‐messianic hope seemed well founded. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks enunciated a new nationality policy, based on their professed commitment to universal human brotherhood, that would ostensibly enable the Jews of Eastern Europe to live at last as equals in the land their forbears had settled for generations. Five members of Lenin’s first Politburo were Jews, and during the first decade of the emerging Soviet Union’s existence, Jews were in the forefront of all Party activities. Funded and encouraged by the new Soviet state, Yiddish cultural activity appeared on the verge of a fresh new blooming. Research institutes, literary organizations, newspapers, publishing houses, theaters, and schools were established in great cities with large Jewish populations like Kiev, Minsk, Kharkov, and Moscow, inspiring Yiddish writers throughout Eastern Europe to set their work afloat in the mainstream of a world culture that seemed to flow from the great haven of the USSR. To clarify the Jews’ anomalous position vis‐à‐vis other “national minorities,” in 1928 Stalin, at that time People’s Commissar for Nationalities, declared Birobidzhan, an area in southeastern Siberia, a Jewish territorial district that, with Yiddish as its official language, was upgraded to an autonomous Jewish region (oblast) in 1934. Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union sang the praises of the new world opening up before them, urging Yiddish‐speaking Jews worldwide to throw off the yoke of capitalism and join the revolutionary struggle in the new motherland. By 1930, however, when Stalin was in the final stages of entrenching his dictatorship, some Yiddish writers started to feel oppressed by the insidious menace steadily encircling their lives and work. Izi Kharik was among the first to articulate what was then still a nameless dread: Page 3 of 15 Flee? I cannot, I do not want to flee, And now it has become impossible to stay here anymore. Destruction has blanketed the courtyards, The windowpanes show only shrouded streaks of light. Nothing and emptiness, wasteness and winds, A gloomy silent hour hovers here ... I walk on and my fancy plays me false— Someone still comes on from behind: I turn around to look and no one’s there, I slowly go my way and yet I want to run ... My footsteps clatter terror‐stricken on the ground, I drag my body onward and beg that day will dawn, That day will dawn, that day will dawn— I cannot go on anymore! Why had the atmosphere changed so radically in so short a time? Who could believe that it had changed, when all the major state‐supported structures of Yiddish cultural life were still in place? As was steadily to appear, the danger lay in these very cultural structures themselves. In 1919, barely two years after the Revolution, when a special “Jewish Section” of the Communist Party was created to address matters of direct Jewish concern, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (Russian acronym GOSET), was founded in the capital to bring to the Jewish masses, in their own Yiddish vernacular, the teachings of Marxism‐Leninism in plays especially scripted to emphasize the stultifying domination of traditional Judaism by comparison with the exhilarating freedom of the Revolution. Some of the seeds of Stalin’s emerging anti‐Jewish persecution were sown by this theater’s work, and by the opportunities for encoded self‐expression it offered some of those most closely associated with it. Since it increasingly became more and more criminal to express any sense of Jewish pride and particularity, the productions mounted by GOSET kept moving in and out of danger. The founder‐director of GOSET, Alexander Granovsky, had worked intensively with the troupe for nearly ten years, bringing it to a high standard of artistic expertise before he defected to the West during the theater’s first European tour in 1928. Direction of the theater then passed to the company’s leading actor, Solomon Mikhoels (Solomon Mikhailovich Vovsi). Though Mikhoels was committed to the ideals of the Revolution, he Page 4 of 15 remained equally committed to his Jewish heritage and never became an official member of the Communist Party. He valued his people as an identifiable national group with a proud culture, and his work consistently endeavored to marry socialist ideology to Jewish national traditions. When increasing pressure was brought to bear on him to make his theater’s repertoire conform more closely to the Party line, he responded by attempting to depict contemporary events and doctrines from the perspective of Jewish history, and he further enhanced the Jewishness of his productions by drawing extensively on Jewish folklore and music. Mikhoels was wholly convinced that unless his Yiddish theater developed materials drawn from specifically Jewish sources, it would render itself superfluous, so he solicited and produced plays from some of the most gifted Yiddish writers of his day: Dovid Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak, Peretz Markish, and Shmuel Halkin all saw their distinctively Jewish dramas received with acclaim on his stage. As a result, almost all of them were also doomed, to some extent as a result of the “nationalistic” themes this work developed. Initially, the goals of GOSET under Mikhoels did not conflict with the policies of either the Communist Party or the Soviet State. However, the Party line on what was acceptable in public discourse and what was not hardened significantly between 1928 and 1934. With the introduction of his first Five‐Year Plan, Stalin ruthlessly enforced the collectivization of farms and the intensification of industry, in part by eradicating all who in any way opposed his policies. Thus began the Great Purges, which systematically destroyed all so‐called “wreckers,” “saboteurs,” and “rightwing deviationists.” At the same time, as a counterweight against mounting German aggression abroad, Stalin reintroduced at home the same brand of Russian chauvinism on which the tsarist empire had depended for so long. Earlier Bolshevik catchphrases like “world revolution” and “proletarian internationalism” were subtly replaced by Stalin’s “theory of the elder brother,” written into the Soviet constitution in 1936. This doctrine severely truncated the hitherto guaranteed liberties of the Soviet republics, and wholly eliminated those of formerly respected national minorities. Inevitably, Soviet Jews, without any recognized historical claim to their own territory, felt this repression most immediately. Another assault on them came in March 1938, when a Politburo resolution introduced compulsory study of the Russian language “in the schools of the national republics and regions.” National minorities, again including the Jews, suffered the steady but total closure of their cultural and educational organs. Lenin’s early dictum that complete assimilation was a precondition for the acceptance and survival of the Jews in Russia was now also repeatedly invoked, so that far from pursuing that national‐cultural self‐identity the Revolution had promised them, Jews came Page 5 of 15 to feel that their inviolable Soviet duty was to acquire Russian culture and language as quickly as possible. The state’s demand for complete Russification and assimilation thrust Yiddish cultural workers into a dangerously untenable position. They were devoting all their creative energy to a cause that official Party ideology now insisted was “nationalistic.” Those they were supposedly addressing were dying away: children, no longer taught in Yiddish, regarded Russian as their mother tongue; great numbers of GOSET’s Moscow audiences no longer spoke Yiddish.

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