June, 2018 Vol. 47 No. 5 Jewish Peace Letter Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship CONTENTS Patrick Henry Pg. 5 Holocaust Education: I want my students to get the facts Murray Kent State: Polner In Memoriam Pg.2 Some Suggestions for Liberal Zionists and for Progressive Jews Who Jim Front Brave Pianist: Page Maria Yudina --author’s Phil Bentley The Most Important Pg. 6 Verse: A Sermon 2 • June, 2018 jewishpeacefellowship.org From Where I Sit Shalom will be back in early September halom will not be published in July and August. We’ll be back in early Septem- ber. In the meantime we invite you to write STEFAN MERKEN a short article, a letter to the editor, a com- is chair of the Jew- ment about Shalom, or a poem. The dead- ish Peace Fellowship. line for our September issue is August 10th, so you haveS plenty of time to think and create. Y Great Antiwar films Catch-22 Directed by Mike Nichols, U.S.A., 1970 he film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s treatment of the “normal” insan- ity of the war system is based on This own wartime experiences. Paths of Glory Directed by Stanley Kubrick, U.S.A., 1957 Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Doug- las. A general sends his men on a sui- STEFAN MERKEN cide mission. When the mission fails, a is chair of the Jew- few soldiers are arbitrarily selected to be ish Peace Fellowship. tried—and executed—for cowardice. Y BUTLER SHAFFER is a professor at South- A western University School of Law. The Way It’s Always Done Kent State: In Memoriam MURRAY POLNER t’s been 48 years since Ohio National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970 aimed their M-1 rifles at unarmed Kent State College students and killed four and wounded nine others. You have to be at least 55-60 years of age to have a vivid memory of the events. Despite several trials, a presidential commission, ar- Iticles galore, a flood of books and protests, and the creation of a splendid archive, the May 4th Collection at the KSU Library, no one was ever seriously punished but for the imposition of a very small fine. But to me, the bloodied campus represented the way things have always been done here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave: Shooting and killing striking work- ers, African Americans, radicals, religious dissenters, Native Americans, antiwar people. Gun ’em down, mythological cowboy style, and get away with it. The truth as a handful of intrepid historians have pointed out is that had there not been a Cold War MURRAY POLNER mentality there would never have been a Vietnam. is co-editor of And had there not have been a Vietnam War there SHALOM. would never have been a bloodbath at Kent State. Y Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship • Box 271 • Nyack, N.Y. 10960 • (845) 358-4601 Honorary President Rabbi Philip J. Bentley • Chair Stefan Merken • Vice President Rabbi Leonard Beerman z" Editors Murray Polner & Richard Middleton-Kaplan Contributing Editors Patrick Henry, Susannah Heschel, E. James Lieberman, Adam Simms, Lawrence S. Wittner Established in 1941 E-mail: jpf@forusa.org • World Wide Web: http://www.jewishpeacefellowship.org Signed articles are the opinions of the writers and do not nec- essarily reflect the views of the JPF. 3 • June, 2018 jewishpeacefellowship.org Music as Resistance Brave Pianist: Maria Yudina Jim Forest rmando Iannucci’s recent film, The Death of Stalin (2017), briefly filled the two Moscow cinemas where it was being shown but then was abruptly banned. The movie Awas described as an “unfriendly act by the British intel- lectual class” by Nikolai Starikov, head of the Russian Great Fatherland Party, and as part of a “western plot to destabilize Russia by causing rifts in society,” by the head of the Public Council of the Russian Ministry of Culture. In fact, the film provides, in the form of a Dr. Strangelove-sort of black comedy, a remarkably accu- rate portrait of the end of Stalin’s ruthless reign and the subsequent battle for leadership among those in his inner circle. Though only Stalin looks like his historical self, the casting is superb. My only disappointment was the portrayal of the great Russian pianist, Maria Yudina. In the film she is young and glamorous and, though despising Stalin, willing to make a special recording for him in exchange for a bribe of thousands of rubles. The actual Yudina was very different. I have come to know her indirectly through the memoirs of her friend and one-time classmate, the composer Dmi- tri Shostakovich, as related by Solomon Volkov in his book, Testimony (1979), and also through Tatiana Voogd, a founder For Yudina, of our Russian Orthodox parish in Amsterdam, who knew Yudina music was a way personally and even slept under her piano—“the most sheltered place of proclaiming in her apartment,” she told me. It was Maria Yudina’s fate to her faith during live through the Bolshevik Revolu- a time when the tion (she was eighteen at the time) and its aftermath, seeing many of press was policed her dearest friends and colleagues disappear into the Gulag. Fearlessly, more than even recklessly, she wore a cross even while teaching or performing pianos. in public—an affirmation of belief at a time when any display of reli- gious faith could cost one’s work, one’s freedom, even one’s life. In contrast to the on-screen portrayal, she lived an ascetic life, wearing no makeup, spending little on herself, and dressing simply. “I had the impression,” said Shostakovich, “that Yudina wore the same black dress during her entire long life, it was so worn and soiled.” For her, music was a way of proclaiming her faith in a period when printing presses were more stringently po- liced than pianos. “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations “as a se- ries of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” said Shostakovich. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.” She would not only perform piano works but sometimes pause during concerts to read poetry by such writers as Boris Pasternak, himself unable to pub- lish at the time. (Pasternak did the first reading of his novel Doctor Zhivago at Yudina’s apartment in 1947.) Yudina was notorious among friends for her inability to keep anything of value for herself. “She came to see me once,” Shostakovich recalled, “and said that she was living in a miserable little room where she could neither work nor rest. So I signed a petition, I went to see vari- ous bureaucrats, I asked a lot of people to help, I took up a lot of people’s time. With great difficulty we got an apartment for Yudina. You would think that everything was fine and that life could go on. A short time later she came to me again and asked for help in ob- taining an apart- ment for herself. ‘What? But we got an apart- ment for you. Maria Yudina What do you need another one for?’ ‘I gave the apart- ment away to a poor old woman.’” Shostakovich heard from a friend that he had made a loan to Yudina of five rubles. “I broke a window in my room, it’s drafty and so cold, I can’t live like that,” she had told them. “Naturally, they gave her the money—it was winter. A while later they visited her, and it was as cold in her room as it was outside and the broken win- dow was stuffed with a rag. ‘How can this be, Maria Veniaminovna? We gave you money to fix the window.’ And she replied, ‘I gave it for the needs of the church.’” Shostakovich, who regarded religion as super- stition, didn’t approve. “The church may have vari- ous needs,” he protested, “but the clergy doesn’t sit around in the cold, after all, with broken windows. Self-denial should have a rational limit.” He ac- cused her of behaving like a yurodivye, the Russian word for a holy fool, a special category of sanctity. Her public profession of faith was not without cost. Despite her genius as a musician, from time to time she was banned from concert halls, and not once in her life was she allowed to travel outside Russia. “Her religious position was under constant ar- tillery and even cavalry attack [at the music school in Leningrad],” Shostakovich remembered. Serebriakov, the director then, had a habit of mak- ing so-called ‘raids of the light brigade’. ... He realized that Yudina was a first-class pianist, but he wasn’t willing to risk his own position. One of the charges of the light brigade was made specifically against her. The cavalry rushed into Yudina’s class and demanded of Yudina: “Do you believe in God?” She replied in the affirmative. Continued on next page Yes! Here is my tax-deductible contribution to the Jewish Peace Fellowship! $25 / $30 / $50 / $100 / $250 $500 / $1000 / Other $ ____ Enclosed is my check, payable to “Jewish Peace Fellowship” Phone: ______________________________________________ E-mail address: _____________________________________________ (Please provide your name and address below so that we may properly credit your contribution.) 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