Arcadian Dreams of David Bergelson and His Berlin Circle

STUDIA ROSENTHALIANAARCADIAN 41 (2009), DEAMS 141-171 OF DAVID BERGELSON AND H doi:IS B ERLIN10.2143/SR.41.0.2033470 CIRCLE 141

G E N N A D Y E S T R A I K H

Territorialism

Yiddishism is a widely employed term, though its definition remains as a rule rather vague, meaning cultural, political, or simply sentimental attachment to the vernacular of the Ashkenazim. Despite the fact that many people could not distinguish a coherent Yiddishist program,1 the movement found an intense following in the late Russian Empire and, to a lesser degree, in other countries of the East and Central European Jewish diaspora. Yiddishists rejected assimilation and sought a national route to modernization, but either completely dismissed Zionist projects or regarded them as a partial or later-stage solution to vital problems of Jewish civilization. In 1907-14, Yiddishist ranks became particularly strong. During this period of political repression in Russia, Jewish socialist parties were deserted by the vast majority of their members, and many of the “deserters” became activists in social, cultural, and educa- tional fields.2 Yiddishists were usually occupied with the conceit that non-ritual, non-covenantal culture could substitute for religion as the new cement

I want to thank Dr. Joachim Schlör (Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum, Potsdam), Dr Marion Neiss (Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin), and Ms Ingedore Rüdlin (Solomon Birnbaum Yiddish Society, Hamburg) whose generous help enabled my access to many of the sources consulted.

1. E. Frenkel, ‘Oyfn rand fun Ben-Adirs tsavoe-briv,’ in Ben-Adir, An ofener briv tsu undzer yidishistisher inteligents (Bucharest 1947), p. 21. 2. D. Charney, Barg aroyf: bletelekh fun a lebn (Warsaw 1935), p. 131-138; C. Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900-14: The Modernization of Russian Jewry (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire 1995), p. 70.

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of a modern, secular Jewish nation. If the textual culture of Torah and Talmud could, generation after generation, preserve Jewry in inhospita- ble, repressive surroundings, then – the Yiddishists asserted – highly developed literature, press, theater, fine arts, scholarship, and education should secure the Jewish people’s endurance in the coming egalitarian commonwealth of nations. Although secular intellectuals no longer regarded Jews as God’s chosen people, they usually agreed with the apothegm of the Vilna man-of-letters Shmaryahu Gorelik that ‘national culture equals national self-preservation’3 and, generally, insisted on the exceptional role of culture in the Jews’ historical destiny. Nathan Birnbaum, the German-speaking paladin of Yiddishism in Austro-Hun- gary, argued that Jewish culture did not belong to the various forms of ‘common-to-all-mankind’ (klal-mentshlekhe) or ‘content’ (inhaltlekhe) cultures. Echoing the historian Simon Dubnov’s postulate that the Jew- ish people embodied the highest type of a cultural-historic or spiritual nation, Birnbaum saw in Jewish culture more significant distinctive fea- tures than only its form or content. To him, it was a faith-based ‘absolute culture’, the main source of unalloyed national pride. Such a culture had to have its own linguistic medium, preferably Yiddish.4 Although a considerable number of Jewish intellectuals maintained that Ashkenazic civilization had to preserve its traditional bilingual, Yiddish/ Hebrew, cultural tradition, militant forms of Yiddishism and Hebraism took hold of Jewish political life. Yiddishism differed in such sundry movements as Bundism, Folk- ism, Labor Zionism, Communism, and Territorialism. Yet across the spectrum, Yiddishism often came to ‘Ashkenazism’, or Jewish nationalism aimed at preservation, or at least representation, of Ashkenazic Jews as an independent nation in the dynamically changing world of the twentieth century. Territorialism, or a quest for a Yiddish-speaking Jew- ish homeland outside Palestine, became one of the most consistent doc- trines of Ashkenazic nationalism and had many thousands of followers, particularly in the 1910s and 1920s. Territorialists treasured the millen- nium-long ‘golden chain’ of Ashkenazic cultural tradition, being little

3. Sh. Gorelik, ‘Kunst un natsyonale oyslebn’, Der yidisher almanakh (Kiev 1910), p. 85. 4. N. Birnbaum, ‘Di absolute idee fun yidntum un di yidishe shprakh’, Di yidishe velt 1 (1912), p. 45-52. For Birnbaum, see J. A. Fishman, Yiddish: Turning to Life (Amsterdam 1991).

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interested in creating a melting pot for all Jewish ethnic groups. Israel Zangwill, the best-selling English writer (whose play ‘The Melting Pot’ provided a metaphor for advocates of multiethnic immigrant societies) and the founder of Territorialism, regarded Jews as a compound of many nations, each with its own nationalism. He believed that ‘any Jew- ish nationalism outside an own territory is unpractical and unjustifi- able’.5 At the same time, Zangwill and his followers were free of Zion- ists’ Oriental romanticism and did not believe that God or history deeded Palestine to contemporary Jews. In Eastern Europe, Kiev became a center of Territorialism, when in the fall of 1903 a few intellectuals formed the Vozrozhdenie (‘renais- sance’) group there. Its ideology combined Marxism with Israel Zang- will’s bourgeois territorialism, Nokhum Syrkin’s proletarian Zionism, Chaim Zhitlowsky’s secular nationalism, and Simon Dubnov’s folkist diasporism. The ‘Russian salad’ of their outlook was observable, for instance to Dubnov’s daughter, Sofia, when Simon Dobin, a linchpin of the Kiev Territorialist circles, gave a paper, analyzing the Maccabean period from the point of view of historical materialism and class struggle.6 In 1904, the Vozrozhdenie group split when some of its members founded in Odessa the territorialist Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party. In the United States, the most significant territorialist group was called the Socialist Territorialists, who outnumbered the Anarchists Territorialists and Socialist Revolutionary Territorialists. In Kiev, in April 1906, another faction of the group changed into the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (also known as the ‘Seymists’), which was ideologically close to the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party.7 In May 1917, both offshoots of the Vozrozhdenie group amalgamated into the Fareynikte Partey (‘United Party’) and played a central role in the short-lived Jewish autonomy in Ukraine, which became the promised land in the eyes of many

5. I. Zangwill, ‘Vegn der yidisher natsionalitet’, Renesans 2/1 (1920), p. 15-16; translation here and, unless otherwise specified, elsewhere mine. 6. S. Dubnova-Erlikh, ‘Yosef Leshtshinsky (Y. Khmurner): zayn lebn un shafn’, in Kmurner- bukh (New York 1958), p. 64. 7. See, in particular, A.G. Druker, ‘Introduction: The Theories of Ber Borochov and Their Place in the History of the Jewish Labor Movement’, in B. Borochov, Nationalism and the Class Struggle (New York 1937), p. 32; A. L. Patkin, The Origins of the Russian-Jewish Labour Movement (Melbourne and London 1947).

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Yiddishists. From September 1917 the Fareynikte Partey began to publish in Kiev its daily newspaper Naye Tsayt (“New Times”), edited by Ben- Adir (Abraham Rosin), Moyshe Silberfarb, Moyshe Katz, Moyshe Litvakov, Yankev Leshtsinsky, Moyshe Shats-Anin, and David Bergel- son. All of them will appear as characters or extras in our story. Ukraine’s political and cultural surroundings lent boldness to the Kiev enthusiasts of Yiddish. It was particularly inspiring to see how Ukrainian became a state language after centuries of being treated as a ‘barbarian jargon’ of Russian. All the main parties that cherished Yid- dish – the Fareynikte Partey, the Bund, the Labor Zionists, and the Folkspartey – agreed to delegate their cultural activities to the Kultur Lige (‘Culture League’), established in Kiev in January 1918. The League, which became a Jewish culture ministry of sorts, aimed at developing and promoting secular Yiddish culture, based on democratic values. Among the League’s founders were two former Sorbonnists – Moyshe Litvakov, a pioneer Labor Zionist who later reinvented himself as a leading Territorialist, and Yekhezkel Dobrushin, a poet and literary critic; and two close friends, home-educated scions of rich merchant families – Nakhman Mayzl (Meisel), a Yiddish publisher and literary critic, and David Bergelson, the star of the Kiev Yiddish literary scene.8 Although the two issues of the literary almanac Eygns (‘our own’), sponsored and distributed by the Culture League, went little noticed at the time of their publication in Kiev in 1918 and 1920, they occupy a remarkable place in Yiddish literary history as fora of the trend-setting Kiev, or Eygns, Group of Yiddish Writers. In their choice of the almanac’s name, the Eygns editors could conceivably allude to the leftwing German psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who tied in any new culture building with liberation of die Eigenen (‘one’s own’).9 Ideologically, Eygns continued the tradition of pre-First World War literary axis Vilna-Kiev, particularly the erudite Vilna journal Literarishe Monatsshriftn (‘literary monthly’, 1908), edited by the talented trio of literati – Shmuel Niger,

8. Z. Melamed, ‘Bergelson der gezelshaftler’, Literarishe bleter (13 September 1929), p. 728. The author, a Yiddish activist, had conceived the idea of the League, which he first shared with Bergelson. See also H. Kazovskii, ‘The Art Section of the Kultur Lige’, Jews in Eastern Europe 3 (1993), p. 6-7; H. Kazovsky, The Artists of the Kultur-Lige (Jerusalem-Moscow 2003). 9. D. Bathrick, ‘Die Berliner Avantgarde der 20er Jahre: Das Beispiel Franz Jung’, in Peter Wruck (ed.), Literarisches Leben in Berlin, 1871-1933 (Berlin 1987), II: p. 49.

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Shmarayhu Gorelik, and A. Weiter – who stipulated in their manifesto no concessions to ease comprehension. The Vilna-Kiev elitists argued that literature could not exist and develop freely, if it required the support of an uneducated reader, if it limited itself to satisfying the spiritual and aesthetic requirements of those who had no access to the culture of other peoples. Bergelson, who had introduced Impressionism in Yiddish literature, also filled a position of broader import – as a central figure in the Vilna-Kiev intellectual circle. The Culture League was not fated to become a mass organization. Rather, it was a scattering of ivory towers, whose denizens’ euphoria soon gave way to pessimism. Apart from political instability and massa- cres of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Civil War, there was another reason for the change of mood, namely the lack of mass con- sumers of Yiddish cultural production. Bergelson and his fellow writers, spurned by the mainstream commercial publishers, expected that the revolution would liberate modernist Yiddish literature from its essen- tially test-tube existence. The Eygns writers sought a wider audience of enlightened, sophisticated Yiddish readers, not least the so-called bavustzinike arbeter (‘conscientious workers’) – a concept that echoed the Nietzschean berechenbare Individuum (‘calculable individual’) and Dmitrii Pisarev’s ‘thinking individual’.10 Bergelson’s experience with Eygns, however, brought him to the conclusion that Yiddish modernist literature still did not have a sufficient number of readers. Yet he was confident that, in the long run, society would unavoidably turn to quality literature. One had only to arm himself with patience, and Berlin then looked like one of the best places where a Jewish writer could wait for better times. Bergelson’s emigration from Russia to Germany in the spring of 1921 had much to do with the fact that, in the early 1920s, Berlin was second only to Warsaw as a Yiddish publishing center, exporting its production all over the Yiddish-speaking world.11 One of the Berlin institutions, a small Yiddish-Hebrew publishing house, Klal-farlag (‘public

10. Cf. J. Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien (Munich 2000), p. 15; H. Murav, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford 2003), p. 33. 11. Cf. G. S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture, 1919-1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 42 (1997), p. 85-108.

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press’), was opened at 73 Markgrafenstraße in May 1921. The Klal-farlag announced a program of providing wide Jewish circles with affordable, high-quality books in all fields of classical and modern literature. Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, the founder of the publishing house, played a prominent role in post-1917 political and cultural life in Kiev. For a short time he even took on the portfolio as Jewish Minister during the heyday of Jewish autonomy in short-lived independent Ukraine. He also was a center figure the Yidish Folks-farlag (‘Yiddish people’s press’), the precursor of the Klal-farlag. After Kiev had gone Soviet in 1920, he decided to decamp to Berlin and invited several writers, including the most prominent among them, Bergelson, to follow him.12 Nonetheless, Bergelson first went to Moscow, hoping to launch a literary journal there. In the event, he ended up being employed as editor of Yiddish and Russian literature at the publishing department of the Bolshevik party’s Jewish Sections (Evsektsiia) until fleeing the cold, hungry Soviet capital in March 1921.13

Oases of Yiddish Culture

‘Russians walk in Berlin around the Gedächtniskirche like flies swarm around a fire’, commented a Russian writer. One of the Berlin hubs of Yiddish intellectual circles, the Romanisches Café, was also situated near the Gedächtniskirche.14 Characteristically, German studies and memoirs devoted to the Romanisches Café usually do not forget to mention its dictatorial porter Herr Nietz and regular celebrity patrons, such as Kurt Tucholsky, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph Roth, Alexander Granach, Al- fred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler, and her former brother-in-law, Emanuel Lasker. The same memoirs, though, consistently ignore Bergelson and his fellow Yiddish literati.15 In Yiddish writers’ portrayals,

12. ‘Izdatel’stvo “Klal”’, Rul’, Feb. 12, 1922; M. Krüger, ‘Buchproduktion im Exil: Der Klal-Verlag’, in Juden in Kreuzberg. Fundstücke, Fragmente, Erinnerungen (Berlin 1991), p. 421–426; V. P. Naumov, (ed.), Nepravednyi sud: Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow 1994), p. 80. 13. Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (RCPSDCH), fond 445, opis’ 1, delo 29, p. 42; D. Bergelson, ‘ Moskve’, Frayhayt, 5 September 1926. 14. V. Shklovskii, ‘Eshche nichego ne konchilos’ (Moscow 2002), p. 309. The site of the café is now occupied by the post-war edifice of the Europa-Center. 15. See, e.g., J. Schebera, Damals im Romanischen Café…: Künstler und ihre Lokale im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre (Braunschweig 1988); M. Grüning, Der Architekt Konrad Wachsmann: Erinne- rungen und Selbstauskünfte (Vienna 1986), p. 59-93.

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on the other hand, the café sometimes emerges as an almost all-Yiddish place, albeit in reality the ‘Yiddish café’ occupied only a couple of over one hundred tables in that nerve center of Berlin bohemian life. Bergelson’s son, Lev, remembers his father’s regular visits to the café: Although he was not a Caféhausliterat (‘café writer’), he was drawn to the atmosphere of that place, whose regular patrons included not only bohemians, but also many other figures of Berlin life. There he would frequently see his Kiev friends. The Romanisches Café was not only a place for small talk. People wrote poems, read proofs, and played chess there. Thus, my father played a few times with the world champion, Emanuel Lasker…16 The Yiddish poet Avrom-Nokhem Stencl, another habitué of the Romanisches Café, recalled later that it was ‘swamped with prominent Jewish cultural and communal activists, well-known Jewish lawyers from Moscow and St Petersburg, famous Jewish writers from Kiev and Odessa, and party leaders flying about – from the extreme left to the extreme right; it was swamping like in a beehive’.17 Outside Germany, the Romanisches Café sometimes became a byword for an ivory tower. In the words of the Warsaw poet Melech Ravitch, it was frequented by ‘simply deserters’ who observed from afar as other writers were ‘pulling the carriage’ of Yiddish culture.18 The place, notorious for its poor food and run-down interior, was known as the ‘Rakhmonishes’ (or ‘rakh- mones’) Café (‘Café of Pity’). This name also mirrored the depressive atmosphere among the café’s ‘shtam-gest’ (Yid. calque from Ger. Stammgäste ‘regular customers’), many of whom dragged out a pitiful existence. For Der Nister, one of the Jewish writers from Kiev, Berlin was the city where ‘the Jewish intellectuals are left without roots, rot one by one and collectively’.19

16. L. Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater’, in David Bergelson, Leben ohne Frühling, trans. Alexander Eliasberg (Berlin 2000), p. 284. 17. A.-N. Stencl, ‘Arop funem yarid…’, Loshn un lebn 10-11 (1968), p. 25. 18. D. Bechtel, ‘Milgroym, a Yiddish Magazine of Arts and Letters, is Founded in Berlin by Mark Wischnitzer’, in S. L. Gilman and J. Zipes (eds.), Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996 (New Haven 1997), p. 423. For Peretz Markish’s criticism of the Berlin circle see Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jew- ish Culture’, p. 92. 19. From a letter cited in D. Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Sym- bolist (Berne 1990), p. 15.

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For all that, Bergelson lived in Berlin quite comfortably, though he continued to write predominantly melancholic prose.20 He published stories and essays in the New York daily Forverts (‘Forward’), whose honoraria, paid in dollars, handsomely provided for the writer based in inflation-ridden Germany. In a 1922 Forverts advertisement marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the newspaper, Bergelson’s name, printed boldface, appeared among such leading contributors as Sholem Asch, Yona Rosenfeld, David Einhorn, Edouard Bernstein, Karl Kautski, and Vladimir Medem.21 In two years’ time after arriving in Germany, the Bergelsons occupied a small garden house in Zellendorf (38 Riemeister- straße) given to them by their well-off relatives. Lev Bergelson remembers his father’s routine of writing in the morning and spending the afternoon with his family or friends. Initially, such people as Latzki- Bertoldi, Der Nister, the poet Leyb Kvitko, and the artist Yissachar-Ber Rybak formed the inner circle of his friends.22 The Bergelsons’ house was also visited by people who represented German intellectual circles, such as the writers Alfred Döblin and Arthur Koestler, the actor Alexander Granach, the theater director Erwin Piscator, the theater critics Herbert Jhering and Alfred Kerr. Döblin, arguably the most widely-read German author of belles lettres of the Weimar period, wrote warmly about Bergelson’s stories, translated into German by Alexander Eliasberg.23 Fascination with the Ashkenazic tradition brought together the small-town merchant’s mizinik (‘youngest son’) Bergelson, whose education came primarily from his voracious ap- petite for books, and the son of a Polish-Jewish tailor who worked his way through German academia, Dr Döblin.24 In 1924 Döblin spent two months in Poland, visiting local Jewish communities. His travelogue, published the next year, gave a sympathetic picture of East European

20. D. Bechtel, ‘Dovid Bergelsons Berliner Erzählungen. Ein vergessenes Kapitel der jid- dischen Literatur’, in W. Röll and S. Neuberg (eds.), Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm (Tubingen 1999), p. 257-272. 21. See Bikher-velt 2 (1922), p. 223-224. On Edouard Bernstein’s and Karl Kautski’s attitude to Forverts see J. L. Jacobs, On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (New York 1992), p. 26-28, 67. 22. D. Charney, ‘Vi azoy Bergelson hot mikh gemakht in Berlin far a “kiever”’, Der tog (17 January 1953), p. 5. 23. A. Döblin, ‘Ostjüdische Erzähler’, Vossische Zeitung (24 August 1924). 24. L. Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater’, p. 283-285.

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Jewish life, particularly in Vilna, where the writer came to the conclusion that the Jews were an ‘impressive nation’.25 In 1922, Bergelson and Der Nister edited the literary section of the first issue of Milgroym (‘pomegranate’), a decidedly highbrow, exqui- sitely illustrated journal. After its first issue, however, the names of Bergelson and Der Nister disappeared from its imprint. To continue ed- iting the Berlin journal would have meant spoiling relations with those of their Kiev friends who had stayed in Russia. They had regrouped around the Moscow journal Der Shtrom (‘the stream’) and luridly characterized Milgroym as ‘a gravestone inscription’, a ‘dead [publication,] created for dead people’.26 In his only article published in Milgroym, Bergelson praised young Russian Yiddish poets and expressed his regret that non-Soviet criticism, ‘as if deliberately’, ignored their literary achievements. In general, he believed that Ukraine was the source of real Yiddish talent. This particularist theory was jointly formulated by Bal- Makhshoves (Isidor Elyashev, the founder of modern Yiddish literary criticism and head of the Klal-farlag’s Yiddish department), Nokhem Shtif (the master builder of Yiddish scholarship), and Bergelson, and was committed to paper by Bal-Makhshoves.27 Berlin was a stronghold of Ukrainian Jewish emigration, represented there by a separate Union of Ukrainian Jews. Also in the Union of Russian Jews, the most influential Jewish emigrant organization in Germany, a number of key positions were occupied by emigrants from Kiev, including its chairman, Yakov Teitel, and the head of the union’s juridical commission Aleksei Goldenweiser.28 At the end of 1921, a few recent activists of the Kiev Culture League, led by the economist Yankev Leshtsinsky, attempted to reincarnate it in Berlin.29 Leshtsinsky was one

25. A. Döblin, Reise in Polen (Munich 1987), p. 137. 26. G. Estraikh, ‘Yiddish Literary Life in Soviet Moscow, 1918-1924’, Jews in Eastern Europe 2 (2000), p. 48-49. 27. Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Dos dorem-rusishe yidntum un di yidishe literatur in 19tn yorhundert’, in his Geklibene verk (New York 1953), p. 77-111. See also J. Rappoport, Zoymen in vint (Buenos Aires 1962), p. 381. 28. See E. Solominskaia, ‘Soiuz russkikh evreev v Germanii (1920-1935gg.): urok istorii’, in M. Parkhomovskii (ed.), Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezh’e: stat’i, publikatsii, memuary i esse, vol. 5 (10) (Jerusalem 2003), p. 211-213. 29. See ‘Grinungs-farzamlung fun “kultur-lige“ in Berlin’, Undzer bavegung 4 (1922), p. 11; K. Schlögel, et al. (eds.), Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland, 1918-1941 (Berlin 1999), p. 85.

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of a few Yiddishists successfully integrated into the Berlin intellectual milieu. In 1923-25 he, together with Jacob Segall and Boris Brutzkus, edited the Yiddish academic journal Bleter far yidisher demografye, statistik, un ekonomik (‘pages for Jewish demography, statistics, and econom- ics’). Characteristically, Segall was the editor of the German journal Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, and both Leshtsinsky and Brutzkus were among its contributors.30 Nonetheless, the Berlin Culture League did not become a viable organization, because the majority of political activists shunned the League, and the writers, who initially were active in it, soon realized that Berlin was ‘a city where Yiddish culture and politics were produced for export’.31 In 1922 the League tried to intensify its activity. In particular, it organized a few literary evenings with such speakers as Peretz Markish, Moyshe Shats-Anin, David Bergelson, David Hofshtein, and Rokhl Faynenberg. It also began to make up a workers’ choir.32 To all appearances, however, Berlin did not have a sufficient audience for such activities. Despite a significant Yiddish-speaking population, the city never had a Yiddish daily, and even the couple of weeklies could survive only a short period of time. This center of Yiddish book export imported Yid- dish dailies, primarily from Warsaw, for local intellectuals and “conscientious workers.”33 As an example, Berlin was apparently the perfect place to keep the Bund archives rather than to conduct mass Bundist activities.34 Characteristically, Vienna, with its even more numerous Yid- dish-speaking population, also did not boast any continuous Yiddish press or other forms of Yiddish cultural activities. To all appearances, the affinity of Yiddish with German helped Yiddish-speakers to switch over to reading German periodicals and manage without Yiddish papers.35

30. C. E. Kuznitz, ‘The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’ (Diss. Stanford University 2000), p. 31-32, 50, 198. 31. ‘Berliner “kultur-lige”’, Undzer bavegung 5 (1923), p. 12. 32. ‘Kultur-lige Berlin’, Undzer bavegung 10/12 (1922), p. 15; ‘Khronika’, Rul’ (15 July 1922); ‘Khronika’, Rul’ (9 January 1923). 33. Marion Neiss, Presse im Transit: Jüdische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften in Berlin von 1919 bis 1925 (Berlin 2002), p. 28. 34. Cf. G. Pickhan, ‘The “Bund” in Poland and German Social Democracy in the 1930s’, Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies. Division B. History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem 2000), p. 257-263; S. Dubnova-Erlikh, Khleb i matsa (St Petersburg 1994), p. 203-204. 35. N. Mayzl, ‘Dos yidishe Vin vornt’, Literarishe bleter (12 July 1929), p. 537-538.

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In December 1924, a new organization, the Sholem Aleichem Club, was established with its headquarters at 9 Kleiststraße. Its members were writers, artists, and political activists of democratic currents. In contrast to the Culture League, outreach was not in the club’s agenda. Lectures and other events were usually organized for its members and invited guests only. The club had a library with a reading room and a café. The latter was important, given the extremely bad cuisine of the Romani- sches Café. Lev Bergelson remembers: The club was situated in a set of spacious rooms on the second floor of an apartment house. In the émigré circles the club had a reputa- tion for its good east European cuisine. For a midday meal one could order Ukrainian borsht, sweet and sour meat ‘esikfleysh,’ or ‘gefilte fish’. In the evenings, there were literary parties, discussions and, from time to time, fundraising concerts. In one of such concerts, to which I was allowed to come, Albert Einstein and David Bergelson performed together as violinists (my father played his beloved canzonetta from Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto).36 The Berlin Russian newspaper Rul’ (also reputed to be a ‘Jewish paper’) regularly informed about the club’s activities. For instance, in 1925, during the first six months of its existence the club hosted such speakers as Moyshe Silberfarb, the former Jewish Minister in the Ukrainian government and chairman of the Kiev Culture League (Jan. 11); Daniel Charney, a Vilna and later Moscow Yiddish writer (Feb. 14); and Leon Chasanowitch, a father of Labor Zionism and enthusiast of Jewish agricultural colonization (Mar. 14). Karl Schlögel, the historian of ‘Russian Berlin’, noted that the Jewish intellectuals, who dominated among the Russian émigré professionals and bohemians, usually shunned contacts with the masses of East European Jewish immigrants. They instead preferred to mix socially and professionally with their German Jewish peers.37 Small wonder, then, that some of the lectures in the club were in German. Alfred Döblin spoke on modern German literature (March 22), the Reichstag deputy Edouard Bernstein’s lecture marked the hundredth birthday of Ferdinand Lasalle (April 25), and the German jour-

36. L. Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater’, p. 284. 37. K. Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin 1998), p. 91.

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nalist Hellmut von Gerlach spoke on the topic ‘Why I am not an anti- Semite anymore’ (May 5). During the official opening of the club, in January 1925, the key speakers were Bergelson and Aron Singalowsky.38 Apart from his old friends, some of whom had chosen to stay in Berlin in the early 1920s, Bergelson formed a friendship with a few other émigré or local intellectuals. One of them was Aron Singalowsky, or Syngalowski – a remarkable figure even against the backdrop of many brilliant personalities in Berlin circles of Russian Jewish emigrants. Zi- onism was Singalowsky’s youth passion, and he briefly edited in Kovno a hectographically produced Hebrew leaflet called Ha-Zioni (‘the zionist’), but after 1905 or 1906 he devoted himself to the Zionist Social- ist party. He received his tertiary education in Kazan, Halle, Berlin, and Zurich, and obtained a doctorate in philosophy and law. During World War I he served in the Russian army and was later a POW in Germany. He did not return to Russia after the war, married Michela Frankenberg, a biologist, and worked as a lawyer. In 1919 he edited the first Berlin-based Yiddish weekly called Fraytag (‘Friday’). He also took part in the activities of the Berlin Cultural League. By the time he came to open the Sholem Aleichem Club, Singalowsky, thanks to his author- ity in the ORT, was an influential figure in international Jewish circles.39 The ORT, a Russian acronym for the Organization for the Distri- bution of Artisanal and Agricultural Skills among the Jews of Russia, was initially established in 1880 in St. Petersburg. On 31 July – 3 August 1921, the first post-war conference of the ORT was convened in Berlin, transforming the hitherto Russian organization into the World ORT Union. Key roles in the restructured ORT were played by three lawyers: Leon Bramson, a veteran of the ‘old’ ORT, and two leading Territo- rialists – David Lvovich (Davidovich) and Aron Singalowsky. In general, Yiddishists were trendsetters in the new governing board, chaired initially by Dr Cemach Szabad, who was a builder of Yiddish institutions in Vilna, the virtual capital of Yiddishism.40 In June 1922, editors of the

38. ‘Khronika’, Rul’ (10 January 1925). 39. W. Röder ed., Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933 (Mu- nich/New York 1982; rpt. 1999), II: p. 331-332; Neiss, Presse im Transit, p. 43f. 40. H. Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II (Detroit 1999), p. 314-317.

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Berlin-based Labor Zionist organ Undzer bavegung (‘our movement’) were surprised to receive ORT informational materials in Russian, particularly as the ORT’s ‘governing organ consists of Jewish labor activists, who love the Yiddish language and culture’.41 In fact, the ORT published its materials, including its periodicals, predominantly in Yiddish. Singalowsky, the new Secretary-General of the ORT, was at home in the languages and cultures of three intellectual worlds: Jewish, Rus- sian, and German. For all that, Yiddish was his particular passion, and his ‘brilliant presentations in Yiddish hypnotized his audience’. It is also known that he became a close friend of Bergelson.42 A few people could introduce Bergelson to Singalowsky. For instance, Shmarayhu Gorelik, a literary critic with the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Rundschau, also participated in Fraytag and, therefore, knew Singalowsky. On the other hand, Bergelson was Gorelik’s old colleague. As early as 1910 they, together with Nakhman Mayzl, edited in Kiev the only issue of Der yidishe almanakh (Yiddish Almanac). Nochem Gergel also knew both Singalowsky and Bergelson. Gergel and Bergelson apparently met around 1910, when Gergel was a student at Kiev University. A leader of the Zionist Socialist party and later of the Fareynikte Partey, Gergel worked as the head of the apparatus at the Jewish Ministry in Kiev. Af- ter settling in Berlin in 1921, he was a functionary of the ORT and later directed the Berlin office of the YIVO.43 Bergelson, too, became involved in the ORT activities. In 1924, he went on a mission on behalf of the ORT, visiting Bukovina and Bessarabia. Upon his return he reported about the local Jews’ ‘longing for land’ and the very impressive achievements of the vocational schools opened by the ORT.44

In Harness

Jewish colonization represented one of the main domains of the ORT’s programs. To a considerable degree, the ORT leaders were of the same

41. “ORT in Berlin oyf … yidish,” Undzer bavegung, June 1, 1922. 42. L. Shapiro, The History of ORT: A Jewish Movement for Social Change (New York 1980), p. 95, 143. 43. S. Wininger, Große jüdische National-Biographie (Czernowitz 1925), VII: 4-5; N. Mayzl, ‘Oyfn frishn keyver fun Nokhem Gergel’, Literarishe bleter (27 November 1931), p. 889-890; Kuznitz, ‘The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’, p. 121. 44. ‘Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreev v Bessarabii’, Rul’ (1 January 1925).

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opinion as the mother of the future first President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. Mrs Weizmann, another of whose sons, Samuel, was a Terri- torialist, argued that ‘[w]hatever happens, I shall be well off. If Samuel is right, we shall all be happy in Russia, and if Chaim is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine’.45 To many Yiddishists and enthusiasts of Jewish colonization, Soviet Russia of the mid-1920s was a happier place, particularly as the design of Soviet Jewish territorial units began to come into view. However, for the ORT it took some time to find a modus vivendi with the Soviet authorities. Eventually, the famine in Russia made the regime more pliable, and the palliative formula of cooperation was found: the World ORT and the Soviet ORT (formed from the remains of the pre-revolutionary organization) remained independent bodies, but the Soviet ORT was allowed to receive financial help from its foreign counterpart.46 From 1924, the American Jewish Joint Distri- bution Committee emerged as a sponsor of Soviet Jewish colonization projects.47 The same year, two agencies responsible for Jewish colonization were formed in the Soviet Union: the governmental Committee for the Rural Placement of Jewish Laborers (KOMZET) and the ostensibly independent Association for the Rural Placement of Jewish Laborers (OZET). The Soviet agencies pursued two objectives: first, to make the Jews ‘normal’ in the hierarchy of the Soviet peoples, each with its national territory; second, to find a useful and self-sufficient occupation for at least part of the unemployed shtetl-dwellers. In contrast to the Pal- estinian colonization, neither the KOMZET/OZET nor foreign spon- sors of Soviet projects had to buy land, which had been nationalized by one of the first decrees of Lenin’s government and later was distributed gratis by the powers-that-be. In the beginning of 1924, Rul’ reported about a Soviet governmental commission, which brimmed with ideas concerning a place where a Jewish territorial autonomy could be based: in Belorussia, Altai, Bash- kiria, or even on a strip of land from the Dniester to Abkhazia with the

45. Ch. Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York 1961), p. 13. 46. Barikht funem farband ORT un der oyslendisher ORT-delegatsye far der tsayt fun 1 yanuar 1920 bizn 1 yanuar 1923 (Berlin 1923), p. 20-22; Shapiro, The History of ORT, p. 136-140. 47. See J. Dekel-Chen, ‘An Unlikely Triangle: Philanthropists, Commissars, and American Statesmanship Meet in Soviet Crimea, 1922-37’, Diplomatic History 27/3 (2003), p. 353-376.

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capital in Odessa.48 (The latter project echoed Chaim Zhitlowsky’s 1917 suggestion to proclaim a Jewish republic with the capital in Odessa.49) Boris Brutzkus, a social scientist and activist of pre-1917 ORT, argued that colonization of the Crimea represented ‘the cheapest and most natural project’, and ridiculed as ‘another communist bluff’ the Dnies- ter to Abkhazia blueprint, brought forward by the Soviet journalist Abram Bragin.50 A former Zionist and now a leading figure in the OZET, Bragin was one of those enthusiasts of creating a Jewish republic who challenged the Evsektsiia leaders’ reluctance to further any Jewish territorial projects. Together with Mikhail Koltsov (Friedland), one of the most popular Soviet journalists and a member of the OZET’s Cen- tral Council, he discussed the Soviet Jews’ future in their 1924 pamphlet, which was positively reviewed in the generally anti-Soviet Rul’.51 At the same time, Grigorii Landau, the associated editor of Rul’, argued that the Americans had to start seeing thing clearly and stop bankrolling So- viet Jewish colonization. Landau continued to be a consistent opponent of helping the Bolsheviks to realize the Jewish colonization programs, admitting though that he represented a minority in the non-Soviet Jew- ish circles.52 Singalowsky, who saw Jewish social and economic emancipation as a standard by which to measure progress, rejected Landau’s criticism, explaining that the ORT had become involved in the Soviet project seeing in it the realization of Jewish intellectuals’ quest for productivization of the Jews.53 Indeed, the Soviet colonization drive appealed to many people all over the world, particularly to Yiddishists, many of whom

48. E.K., ‘Evreiskaia natsional’naia problema v Rossii’, Rul’ (10 February 1924); Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas, p. 91. 49. A.I. Golomb, A halber yorhundert yidishe dertsiung (Rio de Janeiro 1957), p. 89-90. 50. E.K-n, ‘Problema evreiskoi kolonizatsii na iuge Rossii’, Rul’ (18 March 1924). According to Dina A. Amanzholova, Brutzkus ridiculed the Crimean project, too – see her ‘Iz istorii zemleustroistva evreev v Rosii’, Cahiers de monde russe 45/1-2 (2004), p. 223-224. For Bragin’s memorandums see V. Khiterer’s publication in Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 1 (1995), p. 212-216, and T. Tsarevskaia, ‘Krymskaia al’ternativa Birobidzhanu i Palestine’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1999), p. 121. Tsarevskaia erroneously introduces Bragin as the head of the Evsektsiia. 51. A. Bragin and M. Koltsov, Sud’ba evreiskikh mass v Sovetskom Soiuze (Moscow 1924); M. I., ‘Novaia “formatsiia” evreiskogo voprosa v SSSR’, Rul’ (3 September 1924). 52. Grigorii Landau, ‘Evreiskaia kolonizatsiia’, Rul’ (29 March 1924); E. K-n., ‘Evreiskaia kolonizatsiia v SSSR’, Rul’ (30 January 1926). 53. ‘Sobranie ORTa’, Rul’ (12 March 1926).

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were disappointed with the state of Jewish life in the West. No doubt, the colonization projects particularly appealed to former and current territorialists. Less than six months before he died in August 1926, Israel Zangwill, the father of Territorialism, took part in a meeting held in support of the Jewish colonization movement in Russia. A decade earlier he suggested carving out a Jewish province somewhere in the vast ne- glected Siberian territories.54 Moyshe Katz, a former editor of the Kiev Naye Tsayt and later a leading journalist of the New York communist daily Frayhayt (‘freedom’), reported in a memorandum written in Sep- tember 1926 for the Soviet Foreign Office: ‘no other campaign of the Soviet government has made such an exceptionally good impression there [in the United States] as does the land settlement of Jews’.55 Among the Soviet Yiddish intellectuals, particularly of the Territorialist vintage, colonization projects were becoming ‘the most significant fac- tor’ of their activities.56 Another former editor of Naye Tsayt, Moyshe Litvakov, who from 1921 edited the Evsektsiia’s Moscow daily Der Emes (‘the truth’), wrote about the Crimea as ‘our Palestine’.57 Some people even came from Palestine to try their luck in the Crimea.58 In the meantime, a more market-driven environment of the New Economic Policy had transformed the country. In 1926, Russia had again attained its pre-war GNP, and an average worker’s salary equaled or even exceeded its pre-war level.59 Many people regarded Stalin as a reasonably authoritarian and fairly enlightened leader. The Soviet Com- munist party’s resolution on literature, adopted by the Central Commit- tee in June 1925, called for tactful treatment of fellow travelers and refused to allow any literary organization, including the militant prole-

54. J. Leftwich, What Will Happen to the Jews (London 1936), p. 161; J. Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (London 1957), p. 217. 55. RCPSDCH, fond 445, opis’ 1, delo 86, p. 115. 56. See the letter written by Yekhezkel Dobrushin to the American Yiddish poet H. Leivik on 4 January 1927, published in M. Altshuler (ed.), Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers (Jerusalem 1979), p. 63. 57. Quoted in N. Levin, Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York 1988), I: p. 146–147. 58. J. U. Golde, Evrei-zemledel’tsy v Krymu (Moscow 1931; rpt. Tel Aviv 1973), p. 74; J. Dekel- Chen and G. Hillig, V poiskakh raia: o evreiskom zemleustroistve v Krymu (Simferopol 2004). 59. A. Chernykh, Stanovlenie Rossii sovetskoi: 20-e gody v zerkale sotsiologii (Moscow 1998), p. 16.

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tarian coteries, to speak in the name of the party.60 The whole Comin- tern net welcomed fellow travelers. Döblin, for instance, joined the literary organization called ‘Gruppe 1925’, which united both left-leaning liberals such as Döblin himself and communists such as Johannes R. Becher.61 In 1926 a few significant cultural events could be interpreted as signs of creative freedom in the Soviet Union: Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Potemkin’ was presented on the movie screen, Mikhail Bulgakov’s play ‘The Last Days of the Turbins’ was successfully staged on the Moscow stage, and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry was welcomed by critics as a land- mark in Soviet literature.62 1925 and 1926 were years generally marked by a record number of pilgrims and returnees. Leyb Kvitko and Der Nister settled in Kharkov after having spent a few years in Germany. Peretz Markish, a returnee from Poland, wrote about Russian poets who ‘steal across the border, from the holy cross towards the hammer and sickle’.63 Nokhem Shtif, who was destitute in Berlin, returned to Kiev to take part in building a Yiddish academic center at the Ukrainian Acad- emy of Science. Joseph Roth wrote in 1926: Today Soviet Russia is the only country in Europe where anti- Semitism is scorned, though it might not have ceased. Jews are en- tirely free citizens – though their freedom may not yet signify that a solution of the Jewish question is at hand. As individuals they are free from hatred and persecution. As a people they have all the rights of a ‘national minority’. In the history of the Jews, such a sudden and complete liberation is unexampled.64 By 1926, Bergelson too had been taken by the Jewish nation-building projects in the Soviet Union. He played the central role in the new journal, In Shpan (‘in harness’), launched in 1926 at Boris Kletzkin’s publishing house. In its first issue, Bergelson published his article ‘Three Centers’, in which he denied any future for modern Yiddish culture in

60. H. Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (Berkeley 1963; rpt. New York 1977), p. 48. 61. B. Zeller (ed.), Alfred Döblin: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller- Nationalmuseum (Munich 1978), p. 25. 62. I. Howe and E. Greenberg (eds.), Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers (New York 1977), p. 84. 63. P. Markish, ‘Gut iz tsu dir kumen’, Frayhayt (12 November 1926). 64. J. Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York 2001), p. 107.

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the two non-Soviet centers, New York and Warsaw. Bergelson’s views on the contemporary Yiddish cultural landscape were shared by some other Yiddish literati. Gorelik, for instance, argued that American Jews liked to come to a Yiddish writer’s funeral but were very reluctant to buy the writer’s book. Sholem Asch, then the most exalted Yiddish novelist, blamed the American Jew for becoming too materialistic and, as a result, hard-hearted towards Yiddish literature.65 Ravitch came to the conclusion that the center of Yiddish literary life, once situated in Warsaw and later in New York, was veering to Moscow.66 Still, Bergelson’s went further than many other critics of Yiddish culture in the West. In his penitential letter published in Der Emes on March 2, Bergelson apolo- gized for having criticized Communists and expressed his desire to be a Soviet writer. He maintained, however, that he yet did not deserve to return to the Soviet Union and had to ‘suffer exile’ for his anti-Soviet stance. In April he moved his literary allegiance from what was, in the Communist prism, the ‘yellow’ Forverts to the ‘red’ Frayhayt.67 Apart from Bergelson, the new journal ‘harnessed’ two other habitués of the Romanisches Café: Alexander Khashin and Daniel Charney. In July 1919, Khashin (Zvi Averbukh) lead the Communist faction of the Labor Zionist movement in the Ukraine and later lived in Berlin; from the end of the 1920s until he vanished in the Gulag in the late 1930s, he worked as a Yiddish journalist in Moscow. A holder of a Soviet passport and an active Moscow Yiddish man of letters in 1917- 1924, Charney remained in Berlin because his health condition did not allow him to immigrate to the United States. He continued, however, to be actively involved in Soviet Jewish literary life.68 Singalowsky was part of the editorial group of In Shpan, but as an ORT functionary he did not want to see his name mentioned in the publication.69 The Vilna-

65. Sh. Gorelik, ‘Ein bemerkenswerte Rede von Schalom Asch’, Jüdische Rundschau (1 Janu- ary 1926). 66. M. Ravitch, ‘Dos vort un vert fun magnetish-magnatishn Nyu-york’, Literarishe bleter (10 October 1926). 67. Altshuler (ed.), Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers, p. 478. 68. D. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930 (Cambridge 2004), p. 155-156. 69. Shapiro, The History of ORT, p. 144.

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and Warsaw-based publisher of the journal, Boris Kletzkin, Bergelson’s old friend, was also drifting to pro-Sovietism.70 In the close-knit world of Yiddish letters, Bergelson’s reorientation ignited a sharp confrontation among critics of adverse camps. On 20 June 1926, by coincidence, Litvakov published an article in Moscow’s Der Emes and Shmuel Niger, Charney’s brother, published an open letter in New York’s liberal To g (‘day’). In the event, they were post- mortem examinations, because In Shpan, hardly an auspicious publication, endured only until May 1926. Litvakov actually characterized it as a pointless exercise: neither Soviet nor pro-Soviet readerships needed it since they already had their own periodicals. Niger, who preferred to see Yiddish literature as a big coherent body and rejected the very idea of class literature, urged Bergelson to refrain from tying himself down to Communist ideology. His open letter was imbued more with regret than with invective.71 Not to be outdone, Bergelson in his response drew a line between his past, given over to the ‘art of tedium and decadence’, and his present, dedicated to Jewish life in the Soviet Union.72 In Shpan contained fragments of Bergelson’s new novel, Mides- hadin (‘severe judgment’), which finally appeared in 1929 as a separate book under the imprint of the Vilna Kletzkin publishing house and, in the same year, of the Kiev Culture League. There is little doubt that this work was written under the influence of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Life and Downfall of Nikolai Kurbov, published in Berlin in 1923. Both Ehrenburg’s and Bergelson’s novels underlined the idea that social progress was impossible without violent revolutions, predetermined by Marxian historical forces. Like Ehrenburg’s Kurbov, Bergelson’s protagonist, Filipov, is a Chekist, a Soviet security officer, representing the merciless power that eliminates enemies of the revolution. Bergelson might see Kurbov-Filipov’s mission as a communist realization of divine

70. On 21 May 1928, Kletzkin sent a letter to Moyshe Litvakov, suggesting his cooperation with the Soviet Jewish cultural apparatus (RCPSDCH, fond 445, opis’ 177, delo 1, p. 98). In 1934-35 he was publisher of the Warsaw newspaper Fraynd, sponsored by the illegal communist party [D. Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere (Jerusalem 1984), p. 50-69]. In the spring of 1936, his Vilna print- ing shop briefly produced Zibn Teg (‘seven days’), a similar newspaper [M. Landau, Mit shraybers, bikher un mit … Vilne (Tel Aviv 2003), p. 98-101]. 71. Sh. Niger, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker (New York 1928), I: p. 121-129. 72. D. Bergelson, ‘An entfer Sh. Nigern’, Frayhayt (22 August 1926).

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redemption: the first messiah, Ben Joseph, was bloodstained and doomed to die after winning the purifying, final war, and only then the second messiah, Ben David, would come to bring the everlasting peace. In such ideas, Bergelson might have found an explanation for, and a jus- tification of, the Bolsheviks’ cruelties. He certainly tried to find a ‘Tal- mudic explanation’ to the post-revolutionary cruelties, believing that they were necessary to safeguard the Communist cause. It is illuminating how the protagonist of his story ‘Citizen Woli Brenner’ argues in a discussion with a German Jew: Now if you will hearken to me – there was among us at one time a sage who was known as Simeon Ben Shetah. And this Simeon Ben Shetah – so it is recorded – executed eighty women in Ashkelon. Whereupon the Talmud asks: ‘We have been taught that you may execute the man, but not the woman’. And the Talmud answers: ‘At a time of stress you may execute even women’. And here with us, I would have you know, it is a time of stress – do you comprehend me? – the whole of world capitalism is seeking to crush us.73

Berlin-Moscow-Berlin

Numerous Yiddish literati visited the Soviet Union to see in situ the transformation of Jewish life. Forverts, for instance, sponsored trips of its eleven contributors, including the newspaper’s manager Borukh Vladek (another brother of Charney), its editor Abe Cahan, and such writers as I. J. Singer and H. D. Nomberg.74 A frequent visitor in Berlin and its Romanisches Café, H. D. Nomberg, who was a significant Yiddish writer and a leader of the Folkspartey in Poland, went to Russia in the second half of 1926. Although he was full of skepticism, and chastised Bergelson for his ideological transmogrification, Nomberg’s travelogue was by no means completely dismissive. He found, for instance, that Soviet Jewish colonization lacked national slogans, but he saw such ‘or- dinariness’ as an effective antidote to disappointment. In any case, in

73. J. Leftwich (ed.), Yisröel: The First Jewish Omnibus (New York 1952; rev. ed. New York 1963), p. 516. 74. H. Rogoff, Der gayst fun Foverts (New York 1954), p. 237-238.

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Russia Nomberg never felt ‘alien’, as it happened to him in Palestine.75 Characteristically, in January 1925, Moyshe Rafes and Maria Frumkin, the former prominent Bundists and now Comintern functionaries, con- sidered (and recommended rejecting) an appeal of the Polish Folkspartey to legalize this Jewish party in the USSR.76 Typically, non-Jewish Soviet functionaries were often more disposed to see foreign Jewish organiza- tions as sparring partners. In 1925, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the formidable head of the Cheka, the secret police, praised the Zionist program;77 the same year Petr Smidovich, the chairman of KOMZET, stated that he had nothing against creating a home for Jews in Palestine, provided Zi- onists did not meddle in Soviet projects.78 The Halutz (‘pioneer’) Zion- ist youth organization was allowed to plod along in the Soviet Union and from time to time to receive individual permits to emigrate to Pal- estine. It can hardly be coincidental that in 1925 Boris Pilnyak, then one of the most widely read of Soviet Russian writers, published his ‘Story About Springs and Clay’, a portrayal of the aliyah from the early Soviet Union. It seems that the story was based on a tourist trip, undertaken by Mikhail Koltsov.79 Bergelson’s felicitous Yiddish translation of this story appeared in the second (and last) issue of In Shpan and was serialized in the Frayhayt (26-30 September 1926). In 1926 Bergelson visited the Soviet Union. On 6 August, Der Emes reported Bergelson’s arrival the day before. In the coming month he would receive a mixed reception at the Moscow Yiddish club Commu- nist, where some of the local literati treated him as a carpetbagger. Yet the upshot of the stormy meeting was that the Soviet literary establish-

75. D. Bergelson, ‘Nomberg – der khalush’, Oktyabr (27 April 1927); H. D. Nomberg, Mayn rayze iber Rusland (Warsaw 1928), p. 199-202; H. D. Nomberg, Erets-Yisroel: bilder un ayndrukn (Warsaw 1925), p. 135. Cf. Abe Cahan’s experience: ‘Cahan felt at home in Russia in fundamental ways. Certainly, Cahan fitted in linguistically much better in Russia than he did in Palestine’; from D. Soyer, ‘Abraham Cahan’s Travels in Jewish Homelands: Palestine and the Soviet Union in 1927’, in G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov (eds.), Yiddish and the Left (Oxford 2001), p. 70. 76. RCPSDCH, fond 495, opis’ 30, delo 123, p. 8-9. 77. M. Beizer and V. Izmozik, ‘Dzerzhinskii’s Attitude toward Zionism’, Jews in Eastern Eu- rope 1 (1994), p. 64-70. 78. A. Merezhin, “Tsvey yor yidishe erd-aynordnung un [in?] sovetn-farband,” Frayhayt, September 19, 1926. 79. See M. Koltsov, “Ahin un tsurik,” Der emes, November 2, 1925.

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ment could announce: ‘Bergelson is ours!’80 Bergelson’s first dispatch from the Soviet Union, a cameo of life in Moscow, depicted the headquarters of OZET. He met there a former Zionist activist who told the writer of his failure to succeed in Palestine because the land kept swal- lowing his money ‘like an alms-box' therefore he repatriated to become a peasant in the Soviet Union. After a few days in Moscow, Bergelson went to the Crimea, which was the main destination of his pilgrimage. Apart from the state-sponsored colonies, Bergelson visited two of the communes in the Crimea, organized to train halutzim before dispatch- ing them to the kibbutzim in Palestine, Tel Hai and Mishmar. In fact, the majority of the nineteen Jewish colonies established in the Crimea before 1925, had Hebrew names and were populated by halutzim.81 Even the colony Ikor had nothing to do with the ICOR, or Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia, founded in the United States in 1924 by a group of Jewish communists and Left Labor Zionists. Rather, it was established with the help of the Joint and the colony’s name referred to a Hebrew word for ‘tiller’.82 Tel Hai was the biggest commune created by Zionist youth in the Crimea, its name commemorating the founder of the Halutz movement, Joseph Trumpeldor, who met with a tragic death while defending the Galilee settlement of Tel Hai in 1920. Bergelson tried to persuade the young people to take part in the Evsektsiia’s Crimea project rather than to stack ‘ricks that wink[ed] at Zion’.83 Although the halutzim had achieved impressive agricultural re- sults, Bergelson’s pen was charged with bile when he wrote about these ‘children of the bourgeoisie’, for whom the Crimea was only a staging post and who were therefore not interested in helping the new Soviet Jewish colonies.84 Interestingly, his description of the Crimea as ‘perhaps a perfect place for uprooted Jewish shopkeepers from a ruined shtetl’,

80. Y. Zilbergelt, ‘A groyser Bergelson ovnt in Moskve’, Frayhayt (8 October 1926); A. No- vershtern, ‘Hundert yor Dovid Bergelson’, Di goldene keyt 115 (1986), p. 54-57. 81. ‘Krym’, Evreiskii krestianin 1 (1925), p. 128. 82. I. Kucherov, ‘Istoriia kolonii “Ikor” (“Zemlepashets”)’, Korni: Vestnik Narodnogo universiteta evreiskoi kul’tury v Tsentral’noi Rossii i Povolzh’e 9 (1998), p. 83-112. For the ICOR see H. Srebrnik, ‘Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Birobidzhan Project’, in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish and the Left, p. 80-108. 83. My nachinali eshche v Rossii (Jerusalem 1990), p. 276-277. 84. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY 2005), p. 87.

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who ‘nowadays, against the backdrop of the new construction in the Soviet Union, […] look wild, hairy, and ancient’, echoes the shtetl dwellers’ characterization, given during the August 1926 ORT Conference in Berlin by the ORT’s representative in Russia Yakov Tsegelnitsky: ‘They are somewhat half-wild’. Disdain for the shtetl and endeavor to trans- form its ‘half-wild’ inhabitants into peasants or urbanites of full value was the common denominator of virtually all pre-Holocaust Jewish uto- pias. Bergelson’s own disdain manifested itself many times. No doubt the words ‘I hate your guts’, flung in a shtetl old-timer’s face by a Jewish Bolshevik in one of Bergelson’s stories written in Berlin between 1926 and 1928, expressed also the writer’s own feeling.85 In November 1926, an ORT delegation came to Moscow and took part in the OZET congress.86 During the congress, Singalowsky, a member of the ORT delegation, was surrounded by his old friends from the Zionist Socialist party, including the leading Soviet Yiddish journalist Henekh Kazakevich, and, generally, felt at home in Moscow. Together with other former Territorialists, he was in the seventh heaven when Mikhail Kalinin, the Chairman of the All-Union Executive Committee and thus largely ceremonial head of the Soviet state, promised to form a Jewish republic in the Crimea.87 Foreign guests witnessed open struggle between, on the one hand, such mavericks as Abram Bragin, abetted by Kalinin, and, on the other hand, the former Bundists, who dominated among the leaders of the Evsektsiia and were worried about the nationalist character of the Crimean and other colonization projects. As a result, the congress looked like a democratic forum, especially when the Evsektsiia published Kalinin’s speech with a delay and in a censored form.88 After his return to Berlin, Singalowsky lectured and wrote about his trip to the Soviet Union. He talked about numerous Jewish villages in Ukraine, Belorussia, and Crimea, scores of dairy farms and reading rooms frequented by young and old. All in all, nine million rubles had

85. A., ‘Na konferetsii ORTa', Rul' (10 August 1926); Howe and Greenberg, Ashes Out of Hope, p. 123. For more on Bergelson and the shtetl, see M. Katz, ‘Bergelson un zayn “shtetl”,’ in Peysekh [Paul] Novick (ed.), Moyshe Katz bukh (New York 1963), p. 178-184. 86. Shapiro, The History of ORT, p. 148. 87. H. Smolar, Fun ineveynik (Tel Aviv 1978), p. 335, 353. 88. M. Wischnitzer, ‘Die Judenfrage in Sowjetunion’, Osteuropa 2/3 (1926/7), p. 198-199; Nomberg, Mayn rayze iber Rusland, p. 273-277.

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been invested in the settlements, including two million contributed by the settlers, three million by Soviet banks and funds, and four million by foreign Jewish organization, predominantly the Joint.89 Singalowsky argued that the Soviet politics towards the Jews was an example for other countries: the Soviets let the Jews put roots in the country rather than trying to get rid of them. He hailed Soviet Jewish colonization not only for its unprecedented scale, but also as the only right method of transferring the déclassé Jewish masses to a healthy social and national life.90 The colonies’ Yiddish names soothed his ear: Friling (‘spring’), Frayland (‘freeland’), Sholem Aleichem (‘peace to you’), Ratndorf (‘soviet village’), Naylebn (‘new life’). He did not see any problems in cooperation with the Bolsheviks as long as they supported Jewish colonization. At the same time, he wanted to make the project more palatable to the Zionist membership of the ORT. He emphasized that the Soviet colonization had no covert Jewish national idea but aimed only at the amelio- ration of Soviet Jewish life by bringing it into an economically healthy state. Therefore it simply was not in the league with such national movements as Zionism.91 In 1927-29, Soviet Jewish colonization continued to be frequently discussed in Berlin. In the beginning of April 1927 Professor Boris Brutzkus lectured on this topic for the Union of Russian Jews. He was for supporting the campaign, but did not want to overestimate it. Moreover, he warned that the Soviet government, notorious for bluff- ing, strove to convince the Jews that it had found a recipe for saving them. He criticized the ORT, in particular Singalowsky, for being lured by the Soviet ‘bait’ and praised the Joint for its more careful policy.92 1928 saw an attempt to establish in Germany an organization for supporting the Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union. The Denkshrift (‘memorandum’) devoted to this endeavor includes articles by Alexander Khashin, Ber Orshnasky, and Daniel Charney. Bergelson was the only representative of Yiddishist circles on the new organization’s Initiative

89. Z. I. Arbatov, ‘ORT v SSSR’, Rul’ (19 January 1927); idem, ‘Bol’shoi den’ ORTa’, Rul’ (3 February 1927). 90. “ORT”-yediyes (April 1927). 91. A. Singalowski, ‘Aufbau und Umbau: Zum Problem des jüdischen Wirtschaftslebens in Osteuropa’, Der Morgen 3/4 (1927), p. 355-365. 92. ‘Evreiskaia kolonizatsiia v Rossii’, Rul’ (12 April 1927).

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Committee (Initiativ-Komitee zur Unterstützung der jüdischen Siedlungen in der Sowjet-Union), among whose member were the German writers Alfons Goldschmidt and Arthur Holitscher, the seasoned communist Eduard Fuchs, and the pacifist Helene Stöcker.93 This initiative was pre- sumably supported – or even advanced – by the Comintern apparatus. It is illuminating that Ber Orshansky, a Soviet Yiddish writer and Jewish functionary in Belorussia, was dispatched to Berlin, where he in March 1928 spoke about ‘Jewish republic in Soviet Russia’.94 In September 1928, another Soviet guest, Professor David Baturinsky, informed a group of intellectuals that a new phase of colonization was on the horizon: the ‘Siberian project’. Baturinsky participated in the expedition sent to the Far East to investigate the territory which soon became known as Birobidzhan.95 In October 1929, the OZET functionary Samuel Weizmann (Chaim Weizmann’s brother) came to Berlin to lecture about colonization.96 In 1929, however, pro-Soviet Yiddish activities in Berlin began to decline after reaching their climax in 1928, during the success- ful guest-performances of the Moscow Yiddish theatre. Characteristi- cally, Alfons Goldschmidt, a member of the Initiative Committee, was one of the three authors (together with Joseph Roth and Ernst Teller) of the pamphlet representing the theatre.97 The climate in Yiddish circles had radically changed in 1929, or the year of the Great Break as it was called in Soviet ‘Newspeak’. The beginning of the year was marked with anti-Zionist and antireligious cam- paigns in the Soviet Union.98 Significantly, many of the ORT activists were anti-Communists, for whom it was hard to play two ‘symmetrical’ parts at a time: to be Zionists or Jewish nationalists of other denomina- tions and to help the Bolsheviks.99 Granted, the return from Palestine of Ben-Adir, a consistent anti-Bolshevik, and his active involvement in the

93. Auf eigener Scholle: Das jüdische Siedlungswerk in der Sowjet-Union: Eine Denkschrift (Berlin 1928). 94. ‘Khronika’, Rul’ (5 March 1928). 95. ‘Die jüdische Kolonisation in Rußland’, Jüdische Rundschau (30 September 1928). 96. ‘Evreiskaia kolonizatsiia v SSSR’, Rul’ (30 October 1929). See also J. Rubenstein and V.P. Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-fascist Commit- tee, trans. L. E. Wolfson (New Haven 2001), p. 199. 97. Das Moskauer jüdische akademische Theater (Berlin 1928). 98. ‘Das Judentum in Rußland’, Jüdische Rundschau (11 January 1929). 99. M. Traub, ‘Zionistische Mitarbeit am ORT’, Jüdische Rundschau (8 January 1929).

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ORT, particularly as editor of the journal Virtshaft un Lebn (‘economy and life’, 1928-31), helped to ‘improve’ the image of the organization’s apparatus. Nonetheless, the German ORT’s leaders, Wilhelm Graetz and Wilhelm Kleemann, spelled out their unhappiness with some pro- nouncements in Singalowsky’s writings about the Soviet Union, in particular his avoiding the notion of Jewish Volk (‘peoplehood’) and prefer- ring such notions as jüdische Massen (‘Jewish masses’) and Judenheit (‘yidishkayt’), which smacked of Yiddishist socialism. They argued that their support of ORT was based on Theodor Herzl’s idea that Zionism meant both a return to Jewish national values and the Jews’ productivization. However, they did not want to tolerate anti-Zionism in the ranks of the ORT leadership, which had already been criticized in the Zionist press.100 In the meantime, the Berlin Jewish literary circle ebbed. The re- maining literati still assembled in the Romanisches Café, though the circle had lost such central figures as Bal-Makhshoves (1874-1924), and Hersh David Nomberg (1876-1927). Now the main habitués were David Bergelson, Daniel Charney, Yankev Leshtsinsky, and Nokhem Gergel. Among them Charney was the most seasoned café intellectual: as early as 1910 he was part of the Territorialist circle led by Latzki-Bertoldi (he later moved to Folkspartey), Lvovich, and Shats-Anin, who would regularly assemble at the Arkaden-Café, the bohemian hub of Vienna.101 Apart from the shtam-gest, the Romanisches Café was visited by many stam-gest (‘occasional customers’). The three main Yiddish centers, as well as ‘smaller’ ones – such as Argentina, South Africa, Rumania, and Lithuania – would meet around the same café table. Even Mikhail Rafalski, Bergelson’s old friend from Kiev and now the director of the Belorussian State Yiddish Theatre, who sharply criticized Berlin emigrant circles in his 1927 travelogue published in the Minsk daily Oktyabr (‘October’), wrote rather warmly about the café.102 The Berlin-based journalist Isaai (Yishayahu) Klinov, one of the shtam-gest, suggested publishing a book devoted to ‘ten years of Yiddish literature in the

100. A. Monussi, ‘ORT – eine nationaljüdische Bewegung?’ Jüdische Rundschau (22 Novem- ber 1929). 101. Charney, Barg aroyf, p. 184-186. 102. M. Rafalski, ‘Rayze-notitsn’, Oktyabr (22 April 1927).

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Romanisches Café’. Klinov also tried to find an explanation for the generally peaceful coexistence of the Berlin shtam-gest who belonged to various political groups. He surmised that it was due to the virtual absence of mass activities which in other places antagonized Jewish intellectuals.103 When Nakhman Mayzl, a Warsaw dweller in the 1920s and 1930s, visited Germany in 1928, he found Bergelson steeped in Berlin and wanting to write a novel devoted to the city that he professed to love.104 Granted, a year later Bergelson was very impressed with the United States and sometimes called it his ‘second home’, though Russia, rather than Germany, apparently remained his ‘first home’.105 On the other hand, Bergelson always wanted to be liked. Therefore his enthusiasm for a place, person, etc. could be artificial and adulatory.106 In any case, the Berlin-based fellow literati did not brand Bergelson an outcast following his political re-affiliation. The educator and journalist Israel Rubin por- trayed Bergelson as the bal-musef (‘cantor officiating at the additional service on Sabbaths or holidays’) of the Romanisches Café. A relentless talker, Bergelson was present there almost every evening, because he ‘need[ed] an audience already during the process of crystallizing, con- ceiving his ideas, he need[ed] listeners who would imbibe his thoughts, even if only partly formulated ones, and follow the embryonic development of his new brainchild’.107 Yet, Bergelson, too, spent much time elsewhere: apart from his lecture tours, e.g. in Poland and the Baltic countries, he in 1929 spent five-and-a-half months in the United States, and in the fall of 1931 went to the Soviet Union for three months.

103. I. Rubin, ‘Bay di tishlekh fun romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter (10 January 1930), p. 28; I. Klinov, ‘A briv tsu Donyel Tsharney’, in M. Shalit (ed.), Donyel Tsharney-bukh (Paris 1939), p. 166-167. 104. N. Mayzl, ‘Dovid Bergelson: loyfike ayndrukn’, Literarishe bleter (2 November 1928), p. 858. 105. Z. Weinper, ‘Dovid Bergelson in Amerike’, Literarishe bleter (19 September 1929), p. 723-724. 106. Cf., in particular, Yankev Shternberg [Jacob Sternberg], Vegn literatur un teater (Tel Aviv 1987), p. 130. 107. See I. Rubin’s five vignettes ‘Bay di tishlekh fun romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter (10 January 1930), p. 28; (17 January 1930), p. 53-54; (14 February 1930), p. 127-128; (21 March 1930), p. 222-223; (4 April 1930), p. 262-263. See also Shternberg, Vegn literatur un teater, p. 129, who wrote about Bergelson as a laydnshaftlekher shmueser (‘passionate/relentless talker’).

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On 3 October 1932, the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern (‘Birobid- zhan star’), edited by Henekh Kazakevich, celebrated the publication of its hundredth issue, and Bergelson took part in the event, during which he announced that he had decided to settle permanently in the Soviet Union. In the meantime, he met beginning writers and journalists in Birobidzhan and helped organize a literary group that later formed the basis for the local branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union.108 Upon his returned to Berlin from the Soviet Union in January 1932, Bergelson informed his friends about his plans to repatriate. Information about his decision appeared in the last issue of Berliner bleter far dikhtung un kunst (‘Berlin pages for poetry and art’; n. 3-4), an ephemeral periodical with a pro-Soviet bent, which closed the history of Yiddish press in the Ger- man capital. Yiddish, and generally Jewish, intellectual Berlin was becoming deserted. In the spring of 1932, the Sholem Aleichem Club de facto amalgamated with the Russian-Jewish Public Club (founded on June 26, 1930).109

Epilogue

Bergelson and a few of his circle stayed in Berlin until expediency dic- tated that they leave the country. ‘Shall it be Palestine, Argentina, Canada … or Birobidzhan?’ – the Berlin-based Jewish bohemian protagonist of the 1933 American Yiddish film ‘Der vandernder yid’ (‘The Wandering Jew’) ponders after Hitler comes to power.110 In the beginning of 1933, Bergelson, too, finally left Germany and, after a stay in Copenhagen, came to live in the Soviet Union. ‘In 1934, the year of his permanent repatriation, Bergelson was by far the highest paid Soviet Yiddish writer’.111 The same year he was the only former Yiddish fellow- traveller permitted to take the floor of the first all-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which actually canonized him as the leading Soviet Yid-

108. E. I. Kudish, ‘Istoriia zhurnalistiki EAO’, in E. A. Kuznetsova (ed.), Raddevskie chteniia: Istoricheskii opyt zemledeliia, razvitiia proizvoditel’nykh sil, ekonomiki i sotsial’noi sfery Evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (Birobidzhan 2004), p. 133-136. 109. Schlögel, Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland, p. 408. 110. J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (New York 1991), p. 196. 111. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, p. 165.

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dish prose writer.112 Apparently he was expected to settle in Birobidzhan and become a symbol of Yiddish culture there. In October 1935, Birobidzhaner shtern gave notice of Bergelson’s decision to settle in the embryonic Jewish metropolis. His first book written in the Soviet Un- ion was called Birobidzhaner (1934), presenting inter alia his far-fetched utopian vision of Birobidzhan as a city rivalling the great European capitals – with the tributaries of the River Bira cutting through the Jew- ish city just as the canals of the Spree cut through Berlin, or the Seine cuts through Paris, and a cable railway, like those in the Swiss Alps, run- ning uphill, to a sanatorium for workers and a very tall monument to Lenin. The Jewish capital itself he envisaged as ‘a big, noisy city with a lot of factories on the outskirts, a completely socialist city in a classless society’. In fact, soon after giving notice of his decision to become a Birobidzhaner, he went to the Crimea and did not return before Sep- tember 1936. In 1937, a wave of arrests ripped through the Soviet Yiddish intelli- gentsia. Some of the arrested literati were murdered shortly thereafter; the others spent a long period in the gulag. The Stalinist purges had reached Birobidzhan, too, making it impossible to convene the widely advertised Yiddish cultural conference with Bergelson among its key speakers.113 In the spring of 1937, he abandoned his plan to stay permanently in the Far East and moved to Moscow. Before arriving in the capital, the writer manifested his loyalty to the regime by eulogizing the ‘People’s Punishing Sword’, as he entitled his article in the Moscow literary weekly Literaturnaia Gazeta, in which he enthusiastically endorsed the concurrent purges and public trials.114 Despite the government agencies’ failure to turn the Far Eastern territory into a viable Yiddish-speaking community, Bergelson always remained an ardent supporter of

112. G. Estraikh, ‘David Bergelson: From Fellow Traveller to Soviet Classic’, Slavic Almanach: The South African Year Book for Slavic, Central and East European Studies 7/10 (2001), p. 191-222. 113. G. Estraikh, ‘Yiddish Language Conference Aborted’, East European Jewish Affairs 25/2 (1995), p. 91-96. 114. D. Bergelson, ‘Karaiushchii mech naroda’, Literaturnaia gazeta (1 February 1937). His widow, Tsipa Bergelson, later rejected attempts to describe her husband as a ‘maran’, arguing that he always ‘believed with complete faith in the legitimacy of the Communist regime’ – see Kh. Shashkes, ‘Bay Dovid Bergelsons almone in Moskve’, in D. Bergelson, Oysgeklibene shriftn (Buenos Aires 1971), p. 317.

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Birobidzhan. It emerged as a fairyland in the pamphlet Birobidzhan: A General Overview of the Jewish Autonomous Region that he penned in 1939 in collaboration with Emanuel Kazakevich, Henekh Kazakevich’s son who, after the Second World War, became a Stalin-Prize-winning Russian novelist. In 1943-48, the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee (JAC), with Bergelson as one of its leadings members, broached the subject of either reinforcing Birobidzhan or returning to the Crimean project. Bergelson was among those members of the committee who did not see any alternative to the further development of the existing Jewish Au- tonomous Region.115 After 1933, Bergelson never left the Soviet Union. In September 1937, the Soviet party leadership did not allow a delegation of five Yid- dish luminaries including Bergelson to take part in the World Yiddish Cultural Congress in Paris that created the leftist Yidisher Kultur Farband (Ikuf).116 In Paris he would have had a chance to meet many of those who a few years earlier constituted his Berlin circle. In October 1937, for instance, Yiddish circles in Paris celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Daniel Charney. After leaving Berlin in 1934, Charney tried to settle in Latvia and Poland, but his Soviet passport was not welcomed in these countries, so he went to Paris in 1936.117 Alfred Döblin also fled to Paris. His library and furniture were transported to him later by Singalowsky, who settled in France and then Switzerland, where he led the ORT through the war years. After the Holocaust he was fired with a zeal to develop Israel-oriented programs. As a result, the vocational school called Singalowsky College is situated in Tel Aviv rather than in the Crimea or Birobidzhan. Ben-Adir came to Paris in 1933, where he began to reform Territo- rialism. Neo-Territorialism took organizational form in 1935, when the Frayland (‘freeland’) League for Jewish Territorial colonization was formed during a conference in London.118 Döblin, who by that time had

115. G. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow 2001), p. 429- 430. 116. Ibid., p. 134-135. 117. See Shalit, Donyel Tsharney-bukh. 118. I. N. Steinberg, ‘Territorialism’, in B. J. Vlavianos and F. Gross (eds.), Struggle for To- morrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People (New York 1953), p. 118-119.

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condemned assimilation as a disastrous mistake,119 became actively involved in the ORT and Territorialist activities. He even began to learn Yiddish, which he had ridiculed a decade earlier (before his trip to Po- land) as a ‘mishmash of languages, […] a sort of naturally developed Esperanto’.120 In 1935, the writer took part in the London conference of the Frayland League, joined its World Committee, and edited the only German issue of the Yiddish journal Frayland.121 He argued that the Jewish nation is more important than the Zionist goal, and yidishkayt is even more important than the nation. He blamed West European Jews for choosing a wrong historical way, which eventually brought – as a punishment – Hitler’s regime. The neo-Territorialist yidishkayt should bring Western Jewry closer to East European Jews, who preserved their national authenticity.122 Among the neo-Territorialists’ sympathizers was also Stefan Zweig, who believed that Jewish emigration ‘would relieve Europe not only of its surplus people, but also of its surplus enmities’.123 Up until the early 1950s, the Frayland movement, which combined anti-Sovietism and anti-Zionism, unsuccessfully tried to find ‘a small corner of God’s earth’ in order to create there a Yiddish-speaking territorial community.124 Their futile attempts echoed the adventures of Bergelson’s last dramatic character – David Reuveni, a sixteenth-century maverick who pretended to be an emissary from a Jewish state in Ara- bia.125 The New York Ikuf published Bergelson’s drama in 1946. Bergelson’s last novel, Tsvey veltn (‘two worlds’), set in Birobidzhan, was serialized in 1947-48 in the Moscow almanac Heymland (‘homeland’) and in 1953 came out as a book under the same Ikuf imprint. It was a posthumous publication. In 1948, the JAC was closed down as a subver- sive organization, and on 2 August 1952, his sixty-eighth birthday, Bergelson was executed among the group of the committee’s leaders.

119. R. Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents (Oxford 1999), p. 382. 120. G. MacDonogh, Berlin (New York 1997), p. 25. 121. Zeller, Alfred Döblin, p. 36, 38. 122. A. Döblin, Der tsil un kharakter fun der Frayland-bavegung: referat, gehaltn oyf der territorialistisher konferents in London yuli 1935 (Warsaw 1935). In November 1941, Döblin ended his quest for ‘pure’ Jewishness by, stunningly, converting to Catholicism – see Zeller (ed.), Alfred Döblin, p. 44. 123. S. Zweig, ‘Foreword’, in Leftwich, What Will Happen to the Jews, p. xi. 124. Steinberg, ‘Territorialism’, p. 118-129. 125. J. Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington 2000), p. 243-245.

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