Soviet Jews in World War II Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering Borderlines: Russian and East-European Studies
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SOVIET JEWS IN WORLD WAR II Fighting, Witnessing, RemembeRing Borderlines: Russian and East-European Studies Series Editor – Maxim Shrayer (Boston College) SOVIET JEWS IN WORLD WAR II Fighting, Witnessing, RemembeRing Edited by haRRiet muRav and gennady estRaikh Boston 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-313-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-314-6 (electronic) ISBN 978-1-61811-391-7 (paperback) Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www. academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................ 6 Preface. Gennady Estraikh and Harriet Murav ...............................7 Part 1: HISTORIES Chapter 1. Mordechai Altshuler, “Jewish Combatants of the Red Army Confront the Holocaust” .............................................16 Chapter 2. Joshua Rubenstein, “Ilʹia Ehrenburg and the Holocaust in the Soviet Press” ..................................................36 Chapter 3. Oleg Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front” .............57 Chapter 4. Gennady Estraikh, “Jews as Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life” ................................................85 Chapter 5. Arkadi Zeltser, “How the Jewish Intelligentsia Created the Jewishness of the Jewish Hero: The Soviet Yiddish Press” .............104 Part II: REPRESENTATION, DOCUMENTATION, AND INTERPRETATION Chapter 6. Marat Grinberg, “Foreshadowing the Holocaust: Boris Slutskii’s Jewish Poetic Cycle of 1940/41” .........................130 Chapter 7. Harriet Murav, “Poetry After Kerchʹ: Representing Jewish Mass Death in the Soviet Union” ...................151 Chapter 8. Olga Gershenson, “Between the Permitted and the Forbidden: The Politics of Holocaust Representation in The Unvanquished (1945)” ....168 Chapter 9. David Shneer, “From Photojournalist to Memory Maker: Evgenii Khaldei and Soviet Jewish Photographers” ......................187 Chapter 10. Memoirs: a. Boris Slutskii, “The Story of Gershelʹman, a Jew” .....................208 b. Mikhail Romm, “The Question of the National Question, or A Rally for a Genuinely Russian Cinema” ...........................219 c. Anatolii Rybakov, “A Novel of Memoirs” .............................230 Chapter 11. Zvi Gitelman, “Afterword: Soviet Jews in World War II: Experience, Perception and Interpretation” ............................251 Index ................................................................264 Acknowledgments We are extremely grateful to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Blavatnik Archive Foundation, and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University for their sponsorship of the con- ference on which this volume is based. We would also like to thank the Fund for the Study of the Holocaust in the USSR, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, New York University, and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their generous support of the publica- tion of this volume. Preface Preface Gennady Estraikh and Harriet Murav The Holocaust is commonly defined as the mass murder of millions of Jews by the German Nazis and their collaborators. This book, however, mainly discusses a concurrent phenomenon of World War II: the participation of Jews in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union and as it is still called in many Russian-language sources. Approximately 300,000 to 500,000 Jews served as combatants; the estimate of non-combatant Jewish deaths is 2.5 million.1 In the West, the Holocaust emerged as a unique and paradigmatic set of events, of singular significance for world history. The Holocaust occupies a privileged place in Jewish identity, especially in North America and Israel.2 Beyond issues of identity, moreover, the Holocaust came to signify the limit case of representability, as in Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. The same events, however, came to be understood and represented in different terms in the Soviet Union. For example, when the authors of Eynikayt (Unity, the newspaper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee) used the term “khurbn” in 1942, they were doing so to reference a Jewish national disaster the way that Yiddish-speaking Jews, whether Soviet or not, traditionally referred to their national disasters. The term khurbn originally referred to the destruc- tion of the first and second Temples. In a speech given in Moscow in May 1942, published in the first (June) issue of Eynikayt, David Bergelson used the term karbones when he asked the Jews of the entire world to respond to the call of the dead: “our victims [karbones] have not yet been counted and not even brought to their graves.” Neither khurbn nor karbones is identical to the term Holocaust, which began to circulate in the late 1950s; however, both Yiddish terms link the events of the war to traditional Jewish forms of responding to catastrophe.3 The term signified a Jewish understanding of the events as they were taking place, but without the same meanings that the 7 Gennady Estraikh and Harriet Murav term Holocaust eventually assumed. By probing the overlap and the differ- ences between Western and Soviet narratives of the destruction of the Jews, we hope to make a contribution to the broader understanding of the war and the Nazi genocide. In the 1940s, the topic of resistance was central in Yiddish publications, which appeared under the auspices of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, established in 1942 as one of the propaganda units at the Soviet Information Bureau, or Sovinformburo. The Moscow publishing house Emes put out books about Jewish soldiers and resistance fighters, while Eynikayt featured articles describing the heroic deeds of Soviet Jews.4 In the 1960s-80s, the theme of Jewish resistance continued to be discussed in Soviet Yiddish belles-letters, particularly in the Moscow Yiddish journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet home- land).5 One of the Yiddish novelists, Mikhail Lev (1917-2013), wrote almost exclusively about the war.6 Some of these writings came out also in Russian, but very few of them appeared in English or any other translations. The Cold War left a heavy imprint on the field of Soviet Jewish studies. In the Soviet Union, this field was nowhere in evidence, because its potential output might (according to the Kremlin’s paranoid logic) provide fodder for Jewish nationalists. In the West, neither the general ideological atmosphere nor the sources of academic funding stimulated research projects on Soviet Jewish patriotism. Jewish veterans of the Red Army were often stereotyped as die-hard communists and anti-Zionists. It is known, for instance, that some Polish Jews, who fought against the Nazis as soldiers in the Red Army and later settled in America, would not reveal this part of their biography in their immigration papers, because they were afraid that it could jeopardize their chances of entering the United States. General David Dragunskii, twice deco- rated as the Hero of the Soviet Union, was scorned in the West for his role of chairman of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public. During the last two decades, numerous books have been published— predominantly in Russian—about Soviet Jewish soldiers and partisans. The vast majority of the publications are memoirs and diaries, or studies by ama- teur researchers, often themselves veterans of the war. Some of the books are collections of material about Jewish soldiers of a region or city.7 At the same time, professional scholars continue to pay relatively little attention to the participation of Soviet Jews in armed resistance. This volume examines the role of Soviet Jews in the Second World War, not from the perspective of their destruction, but rather, by examining their 8 Preface role in the Red Army and in various domains of Soviet life of the time. We focus on Jews who fought and survived the war outside the zone of occupa- tion, who served as soldiers, journalists and propagandists. Jews created the Soviet narrative of the war; they created the images that accompanied the text. Yurii Levitan, for example, became the voice of Sovinformburo, the cen- tralized Soviet information agency during the war; Ilʹia Ehrenburg was the most prominent Soviet