Chapter 4
HODL’S CHOICE: THE JEWS AND THREE PROMISED LANDS
The old man’s sons had different worth:
The first was very bright from birth,
The second, not the sharpest tool,
The third one was a perfect fool.
—P. P. Ershov, The Humpbacked Horse
Tevye the Milkman had five daughters. (He mentions seven in one place and six in another, but we meet only five, so five it will have to be.) Tsaytl rejected a wealthy suitor to marry a poor tailor, who died of consumption. Hodl followed her revolutionary husband, Perchik, into Siberian exile. Shprintze was abandoned by her empty-headed groom and drowned herself. Beilke married a crooked war contractor and fled with him to America. Chava eloped with a non-Jewish autodidact (“a second Gorky”) and was mourned as dead, only to return, repentant, at the end of Sholem Aleichem’s book.
Chava’s story is not particularly convincing (most of those who abandoned their fathers for Gorky never came back), but it is not altogether implausible because many Jewish nationalists (including such giants of Zionism as Ber Borokhov, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) started out as socialist universalists and worshipers of Russian literature. Most of them never returned to Tevye’s house and Tevye’s God the way Chava did—in fact, they tended to be more explicit in their rejection of his “diaspora” ways than their Bolshevik cousins and doubles—but they did return to a kind of Jewish chosenness that Tevye would have recognized. (And of course the more readily Tevye would have recognized it, the more explicit they tended to be in their rejection of his diaspora ways.) It seems fair to propose, therefore, that Chava’s homecoming stands for her emigration to the Land of Israel, not her improbable return to Tevye’s deserted house on the day he was expelled from exile.
A great deal has been written about Chava the Zionist and Beilke the American, representing as they do the two apparently successful solutions to the European Jewish predicament. Even more has been written about the unassuming Tsaytl, who—let us suppose—stayed in rural Ukraine to be forgotten or patronized by the emigrants and their historians; beaten and robbed by Shkuro’s and Petliura’s soldiers; reformed resolutely but inconsistently by the Soviets (possibly by her own children); martyred anonymously by the Nazis; and commemorated, also anonymously, in the Holocaust literature and ritual. Which is to say, relatively little has been written about Tsaytl’s life but a great deal has been written about her death—and about its significance in the lives of Chava’s and Beilke’s children.
But what about Hodl? Hodl might be celebrated in Russian Soviet history as a “participant in the revolutionary movement” or, if she made the right early choice, as an “Old Bolshevik.” She might be remembered in the history of international socialism as a member of the movement’s Russian contingent. Or she might be mentioned in the history of Siberia as a prominent educator or ethnographer. She would not, however, be a part of the canonical Jewish history of the twentieth century on the theory that a Bolshevik (assuming this is what she became, along with so many others) could not be Jewish because Bolsheviks were against Jewishness (and because “Judeo-Bolshevism” was a Nazi catchword). Hodl’s grandchildren—fully secular, thoroughly Russified, and bound for the United States or Israel—are an important part of the Jewish story; Hodl herself is not.
It is obvious, however, that Hodl’s grandchildren would not have entered Jewish history had Hodl not been one of Tevye’s daughters—the one he was most proud of. A Marxist cosmopolitan dedicated to the proletarian cause and married to a “member of the human race,” she would probably never have gone back to Boiberik or Kasrilevka, would never have had her sons circumcised, would never have spoken Yiddish to any of her children (or indeed her husband, Perchik), and would never have lit candles at a Sabbath dinner. She would, however, have always remained a part of the family—even after she changed her name to something like Elena Vladimirovna (as she was bound to do). “She is God’s own Hodl, Hodl is,” says Tevye after she leaves, “and she’s with me right here all the time . . . deep, deep down . . . . ” And of course Perchik, the son of a local cigarette maker but “a child of God’s” by adoption and by conviction, was the only son-in-law Tevye admired, considered his equal, and enjoyed “having a Jewish word” with. “He really did seem like one of the family, because at bottom, you know, he was a decent sort, a simple, down-to-earth boy who would have shared all his worldly possessions with us, just as we shared ours with him, if only he had had any . . . . ” As far as Tevye was concerned, conversion to Communism was not a conversion at all. Abandoning Judaism for Christianity was an act of apostasy; abandoning Judaism for “the human race” was a family affair. But did not Christianity begin as an abandonment of Judaism for the human race? Did it not start as a family affair? Tevye did not like to think about that . . . .1
There were not two great Jewish migrations in the twentieth century—there were three. Most of the Jews who stayed in revolutionary Russia did not stay at home: they moved to Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad, and Moscow, and they moved up the Soviet social ladder once they got there. Jews by birth and perhaps by upbringing, they were Russian by cultural affiliation and—many of them—Soviet by ideological commitment. Communism was not an exclusively or even predominantly Jewish religion, but of the Jewish religions of the first half of the twentieth century, it was by far the most important: more vibrant than Judaism, much more popular than Zionism, and incomparably more viable, as a faith, than liberalism (which forever required alien infusions in order to be more than a mere doctrine). There were other destinations, of course, but they seemed to offer variations on the same theme (minority status within someone else’s nation-state), not a permanent Jewish solution to the Jewish problem.2
The Modern Age was founded on capitalism and science-centered professionalism. Capitalism and professionalism were fostered, structured, and restrained by nationalism. Capitalism, professionalism, and nationalism were opposed by socialism, which claimed to be both their legitimate offspring and their final vanquisher. The Jews, Europe’s traditional Mercurians, were supremely successful at all modern pursuits and thus doubly vulnerable: as global capitalists, professionals, and socialists, they were strangers by definition, and as priests of other tribes’ cultural pedigrees, they were dangerous impostors. Mercurians twice over, they were not wanted in a Europe that was all the more fervently Apollonian for being newly and incompletely Mercurianized.
There was a life beyond Europe, however. In the early twentieth century, Jews had three options—and three destinations—that represented alternative ways of being modern: one that was relatively familiar but rapidly expanding and two that were brand-new.
The United States stood for unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism and professionalism. It was—rhetorically—a collection of homines rationalistici artificiales, a nation of strangers held together by a common celebration of separateness (individualism) and rootlessness (immigration). It was the only modern state (not counting other European settler colonies, none of which possessed the iconic power and global reach of the United States), in which a Jew could be an equal citizen and a Jew at the same time. “America” offered full membership without complete assimilation. Indeed, it seemed to require an affiliation with a subnational community as a condition of full membership in the political nation. Liberalism, unlike nationalism and Communism, was not a religion and could not offer a theory of evil or a promise of immortality. It was—especially in the United States, which came closer than any other nation to speaking Liberalese—always accompanied by a more substantial faith (which tended to gain further substance by being “separate from the state”). The role of such spiritual scaffolding might be played by a traditional religion, tribal ethnicity, or both religion and ethnicity (fused, in the case of the Jews, into one harmonious whole). Whatever it was, a Jew became American by subscribing to a particular (at least outwardly religious) definition of Jewishness. As Abraham Cahan, who used to be a “member of the human race” by virtue of being a member of the Russian intelligentsia, wrote in New York in April 1911,
In many educated, progressive Jewish families people sat down to the Passover Seder last night. Twenty years ago, if anyone had heard that a Jewish socialist was interested in a Jewish religious holiday like that, they would have called him a hypocrite. But today, such a thing is perfectly natural.
Twenty years ago a freethinker would not have been allowed to demonstrate any interest in the Jewish people, but today he can!3
Ia. Bromberg wished to remain a member of both the human race and the Russian intelligentsia and repeatedly ridiculed “the flood of thoughtless, superficial, and banal ethnic boastfulness of the Jewish-American press.” As he wrote in 1931,
In those who used to bring to the altar of the fraternity of nations all the bitterness and pain of centuries-old misery and discrimination, there rose the demon of the most intolerant racial separatism . . . . In recent years, it has been possible to observe the alarming phenomenon of the Protestantization of Judaism, its transformation into one of the countless sects that adorn, in such peculiar fashion, the landscape of American religious life with the loud colors of eccentric provincialism.4
The New World looked like the old country. Palestine and Petrograd did not.
The Land of Israel stood for unrelenting Apollonianism and for integral, territorial, and outwardly secular Jewish nationalism. The world’s most proficient service nomads were to fit into the Age of Universal Mercurianism by becoming Apollonians. The world’s strangest nationalism was to transform strangers into natives. The Jews were to find their true selves by no longer acting Jewish.
Soviet Russia stood for the end of all distinctions and the eventual fusion of all things Mercurian and Apollonian: mind and body, town and country, consciousness and spontaneity, stranger and native, time and space, blood and soil. The challenge of the nation-state was to be solved by the abolition of all nations and all states. The Jewish question was to be solved along with all the questions that had ever been asked.
None of the three options was clearcut, of course; none quite lived up to the billing; and each one contained elements of the other two. In the United States, vestigial establishment tribalism was strong enough to slow down the Jewish ascendance; Communism was the principal religion of the young Jewish intellectuals (to be replaced by Zionism after World War II); and Freudianism, brought by the Jews from Central Europe, would help transform homines rationalistici artificiales into potentially well-adjusted champions of things natural. In Palestine, socialism (including collective farms, economic planning, and official trade unionism) became an important part of Zionist ideology, and in the presence of genuine—and undeniably native—Arab Apollonians (the “Polacks of the East,” as Brenner once called them), the traditional “diaspora” preference for mind over body and consciousness over spontaneity remained just below the surface (and sometimes rose well above). In early Soviet Russia, carefully selected Mercurians were still leading, teaching, or censuring the overly rotund or rectangular Apollonians; the New Economic Policy created enough opportunities for entrepreneurial creativity to lure some émigré businessmen back to Russia; and various efforts to promote a secular Jewish culture and launch Jewish agricultural settlements seemed to recognize the seriousness of the Zionist challenge.5
The three options did not just share some important features—they also shared the same set of people. Tevye’s crooked son-in-law was equally willing to ship the old man to America or to Palestine. Tsaytl could have joined any one of her three surviving sisters in their new homes. And then there were the four brothers of Anatoly Rybakov’s Uncle Misha (the “kind, devil-may-care, courageous, just, and selfless” Red Cavalryman). One was a “speculator, greedy and cunning.” Another, “a simple, calm, and delicate man,” worked as a truck driver in America. The third, “a visionary and a daydreamer,” left for Palestine but came back after his wife’s death. And the fourth became a Soviet prosecutor and spent years renouncing his father the shopkeeper (as well as denouncing and sentencing many more people to whom he was not related). Some of them probably could have exchanged places. Ester Markish’s father left Baku for Palestine but then liked what he heard about NEP (the New Economic Policy) and came back to Baku. Tsafrira Meromskaia’s Uncle Sima experimented with pioneer life as a settler in Eretz Israel before settling on pioneer life as a construction worker in western Siberia. Feliks Roziner’s father was a Zionist in Odessa and a Communist in Palestine before becoming a Communist in the Soviet Union and eventually a Zionist in Israel. My own grandmother went first to Argentina, then to “Stalin’s Zion” in Birobidzhan, and finally to Moscow. One of her brothers stayed in Belorussia; another stayed behind in Argentina (before moving to Israel), a third became a businessman in Warsaw (before being arrested in the Soviet Union), and the fourth became a Mapai and Histadrut official in Israel.6
Whatever the similarities or substitutions, however, there is little doubt that each of these three options took Jews as far as they could go in pursuing one particular facet of modern life—or that all three represented radical alternatives to the status of an overachieving minority in underachieving European nation-states.
The United States was the least radical—the only nonrevolutionary—option. It was the place “where all the hard-luck cases went” (as Tevye put it); where nostalgia for the shtetl was not an absolute taboo; where Yiddish was spoken in city streets; where Tevye and his “kissing cousin” Menachem Mendl could ply their old trades; where Jews went as whole families (and where succeeding generations of young Jews would keep reenacting the great patricidal rebellion they had missed out on). America was a Utopia where anyone could become a Rothschild or a Brodsky (or perhaps an Einstein), but it was a familiar Utopia, an Odessa minus the tsar and the Cossacks. According to Bromberg, “This enormous, million-strong ghetto of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the East Side—what is it if not a concentrated and hypertrophied version of Malaia Arnautskaia [in Odessa], Podol [in Kiev], and hundreds of obscure provincial towns and shtetls? The streets are paved but unprepossessing and unbelievably dirty, while the strong admixture of Italian, Negro, and Greek-Armenian elements serves only to bring back the memory of the old Moldavian, Gypsy, and the same Greek-Armenian proximity.”7
Palestine and Soviet Russia were real New Worlds—worlds built for a new breed. If Tevye and Menachem Mendl had been compelled to go there, they would have become silent and invisible both in their children’s homes and in the public rhetoric of the two movements (with the possible exception of a brief career for Menachem as a NEP speculator). Palestine and Soviet Russia were the centers of apparently victorious Jewish revolutions against God, patriarchy, strangeness, and everything else Tevye stood for. Both were on the cutting edge of the great European rebellion against universal Mercurianism—a rebellion that included a variety of fascist and socialist movements and was led by Mercurians who desperately wanted to become Apollonians (again). Zionism and Bolshevism shared a messianic promise of imminent collective redemption and a more or less miraculous collective transfiguration. As David Ben-Gurion wrote to his wife Paula in 1918, “I did not want to give you a small, cheap, secular kind of happiness. I prepared for you the great sacred human joy achieved through suffering and pain. . . . Dolorous and in tears you will arise to the high mountain from which one sees vistas of a New World, a world of gladness and light, shining in the glow of an eternally young ideal of supreme happiness and glorious existence, a world only few will be privileged to enter, for only rich souls and deep hearts are permitted entry there.”8
The eternally young ideal was to be realized by eternally young idealists. Both Zionism and Bolshevism labored on behalf of the “next generation” and celebrated full-blooded youthful vigor disciplined by work and war. The youngest of the idealists (who were going to inherit the land or the Earth, depending on the location) were trained for both work and war in various young pioneer organizations that promoted group hiking, marching, singing, and exercising. Boys were to turn into young men (the fate of the girls was, in the early days, not entirely clear); young men were to stay young forever by sacrificing themselves for the cause or stopping time altogether. Both Zionism and Bolshevism exalted well-tanned muscular masculinity and either despised old age or willed it out of existence. The most valued qualities were Apollonian (proletarian or Sabra) solidity, firmness, toughness, decisiveness, earnestness, simplicity, inarticulateness, and courage; the most scorned were Mercurian (bourgeois or diaspora) restlessness, changeability, doubt, self-reflexivity, irony, cleverness, eloquence, and cowardice. “Stalin,” “Molotov,” and “Kamenev” stood for “steel,” “hammer,” and “rock.” Among the most popular names created by early Zionists were Peled (“steel”), Tzur (“rock”), Even/Avni (“stone”), Allon (“oak”), and Eyal (“ram,” “strength”). “We are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement,” said BenGurion in 1922. “We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it.” The original leaders were Mercurians transformed by true faith; their disciples were Apollonians endowed with idealism. Their common descendants would be harmonious new men with new names.9
War and hard work were supposed to bring all the true believers together, steeling yesterday’s Mercurians and tempering youthful Apollonians. War made peaceful labor possible; peaceful labor drained swamps, conquered nature, made deserts bloom, and tempered human steel still further. The need for war and work perpetuated the culture of asceticism and asexuality, which required more war and work in order to reproduce itself (and thus ensure eternal youth and brotherhood). In both Jewish Palestine (the Yishuv) and Soviet Russia, brotherhood stood for the full identity of all true believers (always the few against the many) and their complete identification with the cause (ardently desired and genuinely felt by most young Jews in both places). Eventually, both revolutions evolved in the direction of greater hierarchy, institutionalized militarism, intense anxiety about aliens, and the cult of generals, boy soldiers, and elite forces, but between 1917 and the mid-1930s they were overflowing with youthful energy and the spirit of fraternal effort, achievement, and self-sacrifice.
They were not equal in scale, however (the Zionist emigration was much smaller than the Soviet one), and they were not equal in prestige. Because the Russian Empire was the main source of all three emigrations, the birthplace of most Zionist and Communist heroes, and the cradle of much of modern Jewish mythology, the migrants to the Soviet interior benefited a great deal from linguistic connection and geographic proximity. In Palestine, Russian shirts, boots, and caps were adopted as the uniform of the early settlers; the flowing Cossack forelock developed into one of the most recognizable trademarks of the young Sabra; Russian songs (both revolutionary and folk) provided the melodies and sometimes the lyrics of many Zionist songs; and the Russian literary canon (both classical and socialist-realist) became the single most important inspiration for new Sabra literature. Ben-Gurion’s letter to his wife was written in the language of Russian (and Polish) revolutionary messianism.10
In the United States, which had no imminent perfection to offer, the memory of Russia—as the world of Pushkin and Populism—shaped the imagination of many first-generation immigrants. In Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, one of the characters (Mr. Tevkin, a Hebrew poet and a Zionist) invokes a common cliché when he says:
Russia is a better country than America, anyhow, even if she is oppressed by a Tsar. It’s a freer country, too—for the spirit, at least. There is more poetry there, more music, more feeling, even if our people do suffer appalling persecution. The Russian people are really a warm-hearted people. Besides, one enjoys life in Russia better than here. Oh, a thousand times better. There is too much materialism here, too much hurry and too much prose, and—yes, too much machinery. It’s all very well to make shoes or bread by machinery, but alas! the things of the spirit, too, seem to be machine-made in America.11
Tevkin lived in a past that had promised a very different future. In the words of Ia. Bromberg,
Those who visit the Russian room of the New York Public Library can often see these aging men and women with Jewish features leafing through the canonical and apocryphal writings of the prophets of the old revolutionary underground, the pamphlets printed in Geneva and Stuttgart on thin, “smuggled” paper, the Russian History by Shishko, and the appeals by the Committee of the People’s Will. The incessant din and clamor of the “intersection of the world” at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street seeps in from outside; the multilevel shrines of the modern Babylon peer in with their thousands of lit-up advertisements. But the thoughts of the readers are far away, following their memories to a mysterious secret meeting in the slums of Moldavanka, Pechersk, and Vyborgskaia, or perhaps to a noisy student rally on Mokhovaia and B. Vladimirskaia, or to the years of lonely contemplation in the smoky and bitter warmth of a Yakut encampment lost in the darkness of the polar night. And looking up at them from the pages of revolutionary memoirs are photographs of young men in Tolstoy shirts, with sunken eyes and obstinate lines by their tightly shut, big, loquacious mouths, and of young girls, penniless martyrs with their touching, thin braids tied above their high, pure foreheads.12
There was still hope, however. That past might yet become the future, even for those who had never experienced it. For Alfred Kazin,
Socialism would be one long Friday evening around the samovar and the cut-glass bowl laden with nuts and fruits, all of us singing Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, ale tsuzamen! Then the heroes of the Russian novel—our kind of people—would walk the world, and I—still wearing a circle-necked Russian blouse “à la Tolstoy”—would live forever with those I loved in the beautiful Russian country of the mind. Listening to our cousin and her two friends I, who had never seen it, who associated with it nothing but the names of great writers and my father’s saying as we went through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—“Nice! But you should have seen the Czar’s summer palace in Tsarskoye-Selo!”—suddenly saw Russia as the grand antithesis to all bourgeois ideals, the spiritual home of all truly free people. I was perfectly sure that there was no literature in the world like the Russian; that the only warm hearts in the world were Russian, like our cousin and her two friends; that other people were always dully materialist, but that the Russian soul, like Nijinsky’s dream of pure flight, would always leap outward, past all barriers, to a lyric world in which my ideal socialism and the fiery moodiness of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique would be entirely at home with each other.13
But of course they already were entirely at home with each other. For most New York Jewish intellectuals of Kazin’s generation, socialism had indeed arrived—exactly where it should have. The land of the free in spirit had become the true Land of the Free; the Russian soul had leapt outward to offer salvation to the world; Russia without a tsar had become that country of pure flight led by young men with obstinate lines by their mouths and young girls with touching braids above their foreheads.
Of the three great Jewish destinations of the first quarter of the twentieth century, one was an actually existing Promised Land. America was a compromise and the promise of a fulfilled Mercurianism; the Jewish state in Palestine was a dream of a handful of idealists; but Soviet Russia was a dream come true, which offered hope and a second home to young American Jews and inspiration (and a possible alternative destination) to Zionist pioneers. In Soviet Russia, young Jews had, in fact, grabbed the “rings attached to heaven and earth” and pulled heaven down to earth (as Babel put it).
Even the enemies of the victorious Jewish Bolsheviks seemed to admit their primacy. In Jabotinsky’s The Five, a successful Odessa grain merchant’s family has the requisite five children. Marusia was born for love and warmth but dies in flames, like a moth; Marko, the dreamer, drowns senselessly in an attempt to save a Russian who does not need or want to be saved; Serezha, the prankster, is blinded by acid; Torik, the careerist, converts to Christianity and disappears without a trace. Only Lika, the Bolshevik and Cheka executioner, is alive and well at the end of the novel. Many young Jewish intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s disagreed with Jabotinsky’s indictment of the revolution: as far as they were concerned, it was Marko, Marusia, and maybe even Serezha (duly “reforged” and reeducated) who had, along with Lika (having first shipped Torik to America), risen to positions of power in Soviet Russia. More important, however, they saw nothing wrong with Lika the Cheka executioner because Lika was both “necessary” and righteous—accepting as she did “personal responsibility” for the pure violence of the socialist revolution. Such was the official view of early Soviet literature and the more or less official view of the non-Soviet Jewish intellectuals. As Walter Benjamin—with glasses on his nose, autumn in his soul, and vicarious murder in his heart—wrote in 1921, “If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means.” Over the next fifteen years, Benjamin would become much more direct in his admiration for Lika and her violent religion (he called it a “critique of violence”). He kept planning to go to Jerusalem but traveled to Moscow instead (on a brief excursion: the actual goose killing was Lika’s job).14
Of the three Jewish utopias, one was in power. Many Jews who did not go to Moscow wished they had. Most young Jews who did go to Moscow pitied or despised those who had not. Roziner’s father came back from Palestine and named his son Feliks (after the founder of the Soviet secret police). Agursky’s father came back from America and named his son Melib (Marx-Engels-Liebknecht). Mikhail Baitalsky moved from Odessa to Moscow and named his son Vil (Vladimir Ilich Lenin). My great-aunt Bella arrived from Poland and named her son Marlen (Marx-Lenin). The mothers of two of my closest friends (second-generation Muscovites of “Jewish nationality”) are named Lenina and Ninel (“Lenin” read backward). Such was the Hebrew of the international proletariat—the true language of paradise.15
The journey from the former Pale of Settlement to Moscow and Leningrad was not any less of a migration than the voyage from Odessa to Palestine or from Petrograd to New York. It could take as long and, during the first postrevolutionary years, it might be much more hazardous. Born of revolution, it involved large numbers of people, resulted in a near miraculous transformation, and constituted one of the most important, and least noticed, landmarks in the history of Russia, European Jews, and the Modern Age.
In 1912, the Jewish population of Moscow was about 15,353, or less than 1 percent of the total. By 1926, it had grown to 131,000, or 6.5 percent of the total. About 90 percent of the migrants were under fifty years old, and about one-third were in their twenties. By 1939, Moscow’s Jewish population had reached a quarter of a million (about 6 percent of the total and the second largest ethnic group in the city). In Leningrad, the number of Jews grew from 35,000 (1.8 percent) in 1910, to 84,603 (5.2 percent) in 1926, to 201,542 (6.3 percent) in 1939 (also, by a considerable margin, the second largest ethnic group in the city). The numbers for Kharkov are 11,013 (6.3 percent) in 1897; 81,138 (19 percent) in 1926; and 130,250 (15.6 percent) in 1939. Finally, Kiev (in the old Pale of Settlement) had 32,093 (13 percent) in 1897; 140,256 (27.3 percent) in 1926, and 224,236 (26.5 percent) in 1939. On the eve of World War II, 1,300,000 Jews were living in areas that had been closed to them a quarter of a century earlier. More than one million of them, according to Mordechai Altshuler, “were first-generation immigrants in their places of residence outside the former Pale of Settlement.”16
By 1939, 86.9 percent of all Soviet Jews lived in urban areas, about half of them in the eleven largest cities of the USSR. Almost one-third of all urban Jews resided in the four capitals: Moscow and Leningrad in Russia and Kiev and Kharkov in Ukraine. Nearly 60 percent of the Jewish population of Moscow and Leningrad were between the ages of 20 and 50.17 In the words (1927) of the Soviet Yiddish poet Izi Kharik,
So here is a list of all those
Who have lately departed for Moscow:
Four shopkeepers, a ritual butcher,
Eight girls who are going to college,
A few melameds, and twelve youngsters
Who went there in search of employment;
Fat Doba with all of her children,
Who followed her husband, the tailor,
And Beilke, whose husband, a Gentile,
Is at the Academy there,
And Berele, the wheeler-dealer,
Who seems to have been there forever;
Oh yes—and the good old rabbi,
He, too, has now traveled to Moscow
And brought back all sorts of fine presents,
And has carried on for a year
About the wonders of Moscow,
Where life is so good for the Jews.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And everyone’s eager to tell you
How wonderful life is in Moscow.18
Some of the immigrants engaged in traditional Mercurian trades. The near-total destruction of the prerevolutionary entrepreneurial class and the introduction of NEP in 1921 created extraordinary new opportunities for the four shopkeepers and Fat Doba’s husband the tailor, among others. In 1926, Jews constituted 1.8 percent of the Soviet population and 20 percent of all private traders (66 percent in Ukraine and 90 percent, in Belorussia). In Petrograd (in 1923), the share of private entrepreneurs employing hired labor was 5.8 times higher among Jews than in the rest of the population. In 1924 in Moscow, Jewish “Nepmen” owned 75.4 percent of all drugstores, 54.6 percent of all fabric stores, 48.6 percent of all jewelry stores, 39.4 percent of all dry goods stores, 36 percent of all lumber warehouses, 26.3 percent of all shoe stores, 19.4 percent of all furniture stores, 17.7 percent of all tobacco shops, and 14.5 percent of all clothing stores. The new “Soviet bourgeoisie” was Jewish to a very considerable extent. At the bottom of the “Nepman” category, Jews made up 40 percent of all Soviet artisans (35 percent of Leningrad tailors, for example); at the top, they constituted 33 percent of the wealthiest Moscow entrepreneurs (the holders of the two highest categories of trading and industrial licenses). Twenty-five percent of all Jewish entrepreneurs in Moscow belonged to this group (as compared to 8 percent for the city’s non-Jewish Nepmen).19
The Jewish preeminence in the NEP economy was reflected in their prominence in NEP-era representations of “bourgeois danger.” Soviet literature of the 1920s contained a substantial number of loathsome Jewish smugglers, speculators, and seducers of Komsomol girls. One of them was V. Kirshon’s and A. Uspensky’s Solomon Rubin (in The Korenkov Affair), who claimed to be “like a wart: you burn me with acid in one place, and I pop up in another.” Another was Sergei Malashkin’s Isaika Chuzhachok (“Little Isaiah the Outsider”), who was “small, feeble of body and countenance, and with only three prominent adornments on his spindle-like face: a big red nose; large, yellow fangs; and a pair of beady eyes the color of coffee dregs that, despite Little Isaiah’s extraordinary mercuriality, appeared blank and lifeless.” Ultimately, however, the Soviet “bourgeois” never became identified with the Jew. The class enemies of NEP-era demonology were primarily Russian peasants (“kulaks”), Russian shopkeepers (lavochniki), and Russian Orthodox priests, as well as the largely cosmopolitan pusillanimous “philistines” and foreign capitalists. (In the revised version of The Korenkov Affair, known as Konstantin Terekhin, the Jewish Nepman Solomon Rubin becomes the anti-Semitic Nepman Petr Lukich Panfilov.) Overall, the proportion of Jews among poster Nepmen seems to have been much lower than the proportion of Jews among real-life Soviet entrepreneurs, and many of the pointedly Jewish fictional capitalists had Bolshevik opposite numbers who were pointedly Jewish themselves. Matvei Roizman’s grotesquely devious Aron Solomonovich Fishbein is confronted by the poor blacksmith and workers’ faculty student Rabinovich, who moves into his house. More canonically, Boris Levin’s war profiteer Morits Gamburg, who “speculated in flour, cloth, shoes, sugar, gramophone needles—anything at all,” was renounced by his own son, the sensitive Sergei.
Sergei Gamburg did not like his parents . . . . He was disgusted by the way his parents were trying to weasel their way into the aristocracy . . . . They had the same lampshade in their house as the Sineokovs. His father had his books, which he never read, rebound to match the new silk upholstery in his office. A grand piano appeared in the living room, even though no one ever played it. His sister Ida had no musical talent at all, but her music teacher came regularly . . . . They bought a Great Dane the size of a calf. His mother and father, and everyone else in the house, were afraid of that huge dog with its human eyes . . . . They had “Tuesdays” and invited a select company. Sergei knew perfectly well that people came to their place for the food . . . . When his mother said “cucklets,” Sergei would wince and correct her, without looking up: “cutlets.”
Finally, Sergei resolves to leave home. “ ‘Speculators,’ he thinks of them with revulsion, ‘bribe takers, scoundrels.’ ” His parents’ pathetic attempts to stop him cause him to explode.
“You’re disgusting,” said Sergei through clenched teeth and in a terrible rage. “Do you understand—disgusting. I hate you!” he said as he pushed his father away and jerked at the doorknob.
“Serezha! Sergei! Think about what you are saying!” implored his mother, grabbing him by the sleeve of his trench coat.
“Let him go to hell! To hell! To hell!” screamed his father.
His sister Ida came rushing in, wearing a Ukrainian dress with lots of ribbons. Mimicking and gesticulating, as if she were out of breath, she kept pointing toward her room. This meant: “Quiet, for God’s sake, I have people over, and they can hear everything.”
Sergei slammed the door behind him, rattling the pink cups in the buffet.20
The Jewish Revolution—or violent family romance—was as much a part of NEP and Stalin’s Great Transformation as it had been of the Russian revolutionary movement, the Bolshevik takeover, or the civil war. No tsarist decree had condemned Tevye’s religion and livelihood as uncompromisingly as might his daughter Hodl—in her new capacity as writer, scholar, or Party official. Kirshon, Roizman, and Levin were all Jews (as well as proletarian writers), and even Malashkin’s anti-Semitic book was reportedly much admired by one of the most influential Jews in the Soviet Union, Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina (Perl Karpovskaia). When NEP came to an end and all remaining private entrepreneurs—with Jewish “fathers” prominent among them—were being hounded, robbed, arrested, and kicked out of their homes, most of the OGPU officials in charge of the operation (including the head of the “hard currency” department of the OGPU Economic Affairs Directorate, Mark Isaevich Gai [Shtokliand]) were Jews themselves. By 1934, when the OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, Jews “by nationality” constituted the largest single group among the “leading cadres” of the Soviet secret police (37 Jews, 30 Russians, 7 Latvians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Poles, 3 Georgians, 3 Belorussians, 2 Germans, and 5 assorted others). Twelve key NKVD departments and directorates, including those in charge of the police (worker-peasant militia), labor camps (Gulag), counterintelligence, surveillance, and economic wrecking were headed by Jews, all but two of them immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. The people’s commissar of internal affairs was Genrikh Grigorevich (Enokh Gershenovich) Yagoda.21
Of the many Russian revolutions, the Jewish version was (by 1934) one of the most implacable and most successful. Yagoda’s father had been a goldsmith (or, according to some sources, a pharmacist, engraver, or watchmaker). Ester Markish’s father, who had been a wealthy merchant, was tortured in prison by a man named Varnovitsky, currently the head of the “gold expropriation” campaign in Ekaterinoslav and formerly Perets Markish’s classmate and fellow Yiddish poet in Berdichev. The Cheka agent Khaim Polisar did not “surprise or offend” any of his Komsomol friends (according to Mikhail Baitalsky, who was one of them) when he confiscated his own father’s hardware store. And, of course, Eduard Bagritsky, who publicly renounced his “hunchbacked and gnarled” Jewish parents, was the most popular of all the “Komsomol poets.” Mikhail (Melib) Agursky, Anatoly Rybakov, and Tsafrira Meromskaia all had grandparents who were classified as lishentsy (persons subject to official discrimination in politics, education, employment, and housing on account of their “class alien” origins or occupations), yet all of them (like Ester Markish, the daughter of a lishenets) were proud and privileged members of the Soviet elite. As V. G. Tan-Bogoraz (a former Jewish rebel and a prominent Soviet anthropologist) put it,
In Rogachev, the grandfathers are Talmudists, the sons are Communists, and the grandsons are tref—not purified by Jewish circumcision. And so a grandfather smuggles such uncircumcised contraband into the synagogue with him and seats him on a table, next to a huge volume in a leather binding that smells of mice and decay.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Berka?” To which Berka responds with much deliberation and self-importance: “First of all, my name is not Berka but Lentrozin [Lenin-Trotsky-Zinoviev], and as for what I am going to be—I am going to be a Chekist.”22
There was little to prevent young Berka from realizing his dream (once he had dropped “Lentrozin” to become Boris), and nothing at all to keep him from leaving Rogachev for Moscow or Leningrad. There, chances are, he would have gone to school—and done very well. The Jews were, consistently and by a substantial margin, the most literate group in the Soviet Union (85 percent, as compared to 58 percent for Russians, in 1926; and 94.3 percent, as compared to 83.4 percent for Russians, in 1939). Relatively free access to public education, coupled with the destruction of the prerevolutionary Russian elite and the relentless official discrimination against their children, created unprecedented opportunities (by any standard anywhere) for Jewish immigrants to Soviet cities. Of the two traditional Jewish pursuits—wealth and learning—one led into the NEP trap. The other, also facilitated by the absence of well-prepared competitors, was the ticket to success in Soviet society. Most Jewish migrants, and almost all the young ones, chose the latter.23
By 1939, 26.5 percent of all Jews had had a high school education (as compared to 7.8 percent of the population for the Soviet Union as a whole and 8.1 percent of Russians in the Russian Federation). In Leningrad, the proportion of high school graduates among Jews was 40.2 percent (as compared to 28.6 percent for the city as a whole). The number of Jewish students in the two upper grades of Soviet high schools was more than 3.5 times their share in the general population. Education was one of the top priorities of a Marxist regime that came to power in a country it considered “backward” and in a manner it described as inverted. The mission of the Soviet state (“superstructure”) was to create the economic preconditions (“base”) that were supposed to have brought it into existence. Forced industrialization was deemed the only way to correct history’s mistake; mass education of the “conscious elements” was viewed as the key to successful industrialization; the Jews were seen as the most educated among the conscious and the most conscious among the educated. For the first twenty years of the regime’s existence, the connection seemed to hold.24
Between 1928 and 1939, the number of university students in the Soviet Union increased more than fivefold (from 167,000 to 888,000). The Jews could not quite keep up—not only because there was a limit on how many students a small ethnic group (1.8 percent of the population) could provide, but also because many of them were not eligible for the preparatory “workers’ departments” that the regime was using as an important tool of upward mobility, and because various “affirmative action” programs in the non-Russian republics included preferential admissions for “indigenous” nationalities, as a result of which, for example, the Jewish share of all university students in Ukraine fell from 47.4 percent in 1923/24 to 23.3 percent in 1929/30. Still, Jewish performance was second to none. In the ten years between 1929 and 1939, the number of Jewish university students quadrupled from 22,518 to 98,216 (11.1 percent of the total). In 1939, Jews made up 17.1 percent of all university students in Moscow, 19 percent in Leningrad, 24.6 percent in Kharkov, and 35.6 percent in Kiev. The share of college graduates among Jews (6 percent) was ten times the rate for the general population (0.6 percent) and three times the rate for the urban population (2 percent). Jews constituted 15.5 percent of all Soviet citizens with higher education; in absolute terms, they were second to the Russians and ahead of the Ukrainians. One-third of all Soviet Jews of college age (19 to 24 years old) were college students. The corresponding figure for the Soviet Union as a whole was between 4 and 5 percent.25
The most striking consequence of the migration of Jews to Soviet cities was their transformation into white-collar state employees. As early as 1923, 44.3 percent of Moscow Jews and 30.5 percent of Leningrad Jews belonged to that category. In 1926, the white-collar share of all employed Jews was 50.1 percent in Moscow and 40.2 percent in Leningrad (compared to 38.15 and 27.7 percent for non-Jews). By 1939, these percentages had reached 82.5 percent in Moscow and 63.2 percent in Leningrad. From the inception of the Soviet regime, the unique combination of exceptionally high literacy rates and a remarkable degree of political loyalty (“consciousness”) had made Jews the backbone of the new Soviet bureaucracy. The Party considered old tsarist officials—and indeed all non-Bolsheviks educated before the revolution—to be irredeemably untrustworthy. They had to be used (as “bourgeois experts”) for as long as they remained irreplaceable; they were to be purged (as “socially alien elements”) as soon as they became expendable. The best candidates for replacing them (while the proletarians were “mastering knowledge”) were Jews—the only members of the literate classes not compromised by service to the tsarist state (since it had been forbidden them).26 As Lenin put it, “The fact that there were many Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution. They put an end to the general sabotage that we were confronted with after the October Revolution. . . . The Jewish elements were mobilized . . . and thus saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.”27
The Soviet state urgently needed new professionals, as well as officials. Jews—especially young Jews from the former Pale—answered the call. In 1939 in Leningrad, Jews made up 69.4 percent of all dentists; 58.6 percent of all pharmacists; 45 percent of all defense lawyers; 38.6 percent of all doctors; 34.7 percent of all legal consultants; 31.3 percent of all writers, journalists, and editors; 24.6 percent of all musicians; 18.5 percent of all librarians; 18.4 percent of all scientists and university professors; 11.7 percent of all artists; and 11.6 percent of all actors and directors. In Moscow, the numbers were very similar.28
The higher one looks in the status hierarchy, the greater the Jewish share. In 1936/37, Jewish students made up 4.8 percent of all Moscow schoolchildren in grades one through four, 6.7 percent in grades five through seven, and 13.4 percent in grades eight through ten. Among university students, their proportion (in 1939) was 17.1 percent, and among university graduates 23.9 percent. Three percent of all Soviet nurses and 19.6 percent of all physicians in 1939 were Jews. In Leningrad, Jews constituted 14.4 percent of all store clerks and 30.9 percent of all store managers. In the Soviet Army in 1926, the proportion of Jews in military academies (8.8 percent) was almost twice their share of Soviet commanders (4.6 percent) and four times their share of all servicemen (2.1 percent). In the Russian Republic in 1939, Jews made up 1.8 percent of all schoolteachers and 14.1 percent of all researchers and university professors (the corresponding figures for Belorussia and Ukraine were 12.3 and 32.7 percent; and 8 and 28.6 percent).29
It was at the very top of the Moscow and Leningrad cultural elite that the Jewish presence was particularly strong and—by definition—visible. Jews stood out among avant-garde artists (Natan Altman, Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo, Moisei Ginzburg, El Lissitzky, Anton Pevsner, David Shterenberg); formalist theorists (Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Kushner, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov); “proletarian” polemicists (Leopold Averbakh, Yakov Elsberg, Aleksandr Isbakh, Vladimir Kirshon, Grigory Lelevich, Yuri Libedinsky); innovative moviemakers (Fridrikh Ermler, Iosif Kheifits, Grigorii Kozintsev, Grigorii Roshal, Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Zarkhi); and Komsomol poets (Eduard Bagritsky, Aleksandr Bezymensky, Mikhail Golodnyi, Mikhail Svetlov, Iosif Utkin).
Jews were prominent among the most exuberant crusaders against “bourgeois” habits during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist realism during the “Great Retreat” (from revolutionary internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis (some of them were the same people). When the Society of Militant Materialist Dialecticians was founded in 1929, 53.8 percent of the founding members (7 out of 13) were Jews; and when the Communist Academy held its plenary session in June 1930, Jews constituted one-half (23) of all the elected full and corresponding members. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Jews made up 19.4 percent of all delegates (behind the Russians with 34.5 percent and ahead of the Georgians with 4.8 percent and the Ukrainians with 4.3 percent), and 32.6 percent of the Moscow delegation. Between 1935 and 1940, 34.8 percent of all new members of the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union were Jews (85 out of 244). Most of the popular Soviet mass songs were written and performed by immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement, and when the time came to identify the victorious revolution with the classical musical canon, the overwhelming majority of the performers were Jewish musicians trained by Jewish teachers (45 percent of all teachers at Moscow and Leningrad conservatories appointed in the 1920s were Jews). The Soviet Union competed against the capitalist world in every aspect of life, but before its athletes began to participate in international competitions in the 1940s, there were only two spheres in which the land of socialism confronted the “bourgeois world” directly, openly, and according to conventional rules: chess and classical music. Both were almost entirely Jewish specialties, and both produced some of the most celebrated and highly rewarded public icons of the 1930s, among them the future chess world champion Mikhail Botvinnik and a whole pantheon of Soviet music laureates including David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Boris Goldstein, and Mikhail Fikhtengolts.30
And then there was war. The Spanish civil war was narrated for Soviet citizens by the country’s most famous journalist, Mikhail Koltsov (Fridliand), and conducted on their behalf by some of the country’s best secret agents and diplomats, most of them Jews. During the war against the Nazis, the Soviet regime spoke with two voices: the mouthpiece of Russia’s rage and revenge was Ilya Ehrenburg (Stalin’s main cultural ambassador), while the sublime baritone of the socialist state belonged to Yuri Levitan (Soviet radio’s official announcer). At least 40 percent of Moscow writers killed during the war were Jews. One of them was my maternal grandfather, Moisei Khatskelevich Goldstein, an immigrant from Poland by way of Argentina, who wrote to my ten-year-old mother in February 1943: “On the 25th anniversary of the glorious Red Army, in whose ranks I now serve, my wish is that you do well in school, as the great Party of Lenin-Stalin demands.” A month later, shortly before his death, he wrote, in imperfect Russian, to my grandmother:
It is hard to imagine the suffering of the people who were under the German occupation. For millennia to come, people will tell stories and sing songs about the suffering of the Russian woman. Her husband has been killed, her children taken away, her house burnt down, and yet there she stands, amid the ruins of her house, like a monument, a living image of the will to live. She lives, and will live on.31
Some of the Jewish members of the Soviet cultural elite were old rebels like Tevye’s Hodl, F. A. Moreinis-Muratova, and V. G. Tan-Bogoraz, who left their blind fathers to fight the tsar and came of revolutionary age in the underground world of terrorist conspiracies, reading circles, Party conferences, and Siberian exile. A few of them would remain active “builders of socialism” into the 1930s, but all would be forever “old” by virtue of being the living progenitors and dutiful memoirists of the socialist revolution.
Some—like Natan Altman, El Lissitzky, and David Shterenberg—joined the revolution through the back door of the avant-garde and went on to paint its facade during the early years of poster messianism, and then again during Stalin’s Great Transformation.
Some, like “Hope” Ulanovskaia, Eduard Bagritsky, or Babel’s Elijah Bratslavsky, renounced their parents to become children of the civil war. Their revolution stood for the cavalry attacks, bandits’ bullets, and campfire brotherhood of the last and decisive battle against the old “world of violence” (to quote the “Internationale”). The most faithful chronicler of that generation and the author of two of its greatest anthems—“Granada” (about a Ukrainian boy who died for the happiness of poor peasants in faraway Spain) and “Kakhovka” (about “our girl in a trench coat” who walked through a burning town to “the machine gun’s even roll”)—was Mikhail Svetlov (Sheinkman). As a little Jewish boy in Ekaterinoslav, he used to be frightened of his rabbi’s morbid tales—but not anymore.
Now I wear a leather jacket,
Now I’m tall—and the rabbi is small.
He is ready—“if necessary”—to burn down the old temple, and he looks forward to a fiery apocalypse “when the old rabbi dies under the collapsed wall of his synagogue.” The death of the rabbi signals the birth of the Bolshevik.
The red flag overhead,
The flashing bayonet,
The armored car.
This was the dawn of the holy day
The Bolshevik was born.
. . . . . . . . .
I stand before my Republic,
I have come from the distant South.
I have placed all my weakness—truly—
Under arrest.
The participants in the battle would carry the memory of that day—and the hope of its reenactment, over and over again—for as long as they lived. Few of them lived as long as Svetlov (who died, his youth “aged” but not used up, in 1964), but none of them—Chekist or poet (they made no such distinctions themselves)—would ever grow old. The son of a Jewish artisan from Zhitomir, author of the official Komsomol song (“The Young Guard,” 1922), and one of the Party’s most uncompromising crusaders against old age and degenerate art, Aleksandr Bezymensky wore his Komsomol badge until his death at seventy-five. He did not need to wear it: “My very old mother, who is but a speck / In our struggle, / Cannot understand that my Party card / Is a part of me.” Nor did he need to die:
People! Sharpen your swords and knives!
People! Wouldn’t you rather
Live forever?
These are the thieves of your lives:
Sleep and death.
Death to both!32
And then there were those—“the younger brothers”—who were raised by the Komsomol of the 1920s to “besiege the fortresses” of the First Five-Year Plan. Too young to have fought in the civil war and too “young at heart” to live in peace under NEP, they battled vulgarity, cupidity, mediocrity, inequality, patriarchy, and, above all, “philistinism.” As one of them, Lev Kopelev, described the evil they were up against,
NEP stood for private stores and small shops stocked much more abundantly and decorated much more colorfully than the drab workers’ cooperatives; dolled-up men and women in restaurants, where bands blared through the night, and in the casinos, where roulette wheels spun and dealers screamed “The Bets are down!”; girls with bright lipstick in short dresses who walked the streets at night accosting single men or laughing shrilly in cabs.
NEP stood for farmers’ markets swarming with dirty, brightly colored crowds: kulak carts drawn by overfed horses, loud women hawking their goods, unctuous speculators, and ragged street children black with dirt.
NEP stood for newspaper reports about village correspondents killed by kulaks; trials of embezzlers, bribe-takers, and quacks; satirical stories about moral corruption, settling-down, and formerly honest Communist lads from the working class becoming bureaucrats and time-servers sucked in by the swamp of philistinism.33
To keep their faith amid corruption and imperfection, Party and Komsomol members had to continuously cleanse themselves of impure thoughts—while the Party and Komsomol continuously cleansed their ranks of impure members. Baitalsky’s Komsomol comrade Eve (who bore him a son they named Vil, and whom he never formally married because it would have been a philistine thing to do) was the daughter of a poor shtetl tailor.
Everything she did, every step she took, Eve dedicated to the revolution. Every single moment was lived with enthusiasm, whether it was volunteer work unloading coal at the port or the study of Russian grammar in a workers’ club. Having been unable to attend school as a child, she took up the study of grammar late in life, but in the firm conviction that she was doing it not for herself, but for the proletarian revolution. Looking back at my own life and that of my companion, I can see: most of Eve’s actions were like solemn religious performances.34
Hope for universal redemption depended on personal righteousness and on the imminent triumph of the revolution. When, after the murder of Kirov, all deviationists had to be purged, Eve banished Baitalsky (a onetime Left Oppositionist) from her house. When, in 1927, war seemed imminent, Mikhail Svetlov looked forward to “marching westward” again (“The Soviet bullets / Will fly like before . . . /Comrade commander, / Open the door!”). And when, in 1929, the final offensive against the countryside was getting underway, he—ever the voice of Komsomol activism—asked for his civil war wound to be opened so that the old bullet lodged in his flesh might be reused. “The steppes are ablaze, my friend, / My lead is needed again!”35
They got their wish. The veterans of the civil war and the “Komsomols of the 1920s” were in the forefront of the great battles of the First Five-Year Plan. They vanquished the unctuous shopkeepers, “reforged” the shrill streetwalkers, purged the morally corrupt, and “liquidated the kulaks as a class.” It was a time to be firm: according to Kopelev—who took part in the confiscation of peasant property in Ukraine, witnessed the famine that followed, and attempted to reconstruct, many years later, the way he had felt then—“You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty. We are procuring grain for our socialist Fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan.” For Kopelev, and for most Jewish and non-Jewish members of the new Soviet intelligentsia, it was a time of revolutionary enthusiasm, self-sacrificial work, genuine comraderie, and messianic expectation. It was the eagerly anticipated reenactment of the civil war that provided those who had missed the revolution with their own “rebellious youth”—a youth that was meant to last forever (and, in many cases, did).36
Finally, there were the members of the Moscow and Leningrad elite born in the 1920s, when the erstwhile revolutionaries got around to starting their own families. Children of the new regime—Hodl’s children—they were the first postrevolutionary generation, the first fully Soviet generation, the first generation that did not rebel against their parents (because their parents had done it once and for all). Most of them grew up in downtown Moscow and Leningrad and went to the best Soviet schools (usually housed in former gymnasia or aristocratic mansions). The proportion of Jews among them was particularly high, probably higher than among previous cohorts. As Tsafrira Meromskaia wrote, using the sarcasm and categories of another age,
Our school was in the center of the city [Moscow], where the privileged classes of the classless society lived, so the children were of a certain kind too. As for the national composition of the student body, the “Jewish lobby” was absolutely dominant. All those Nina Millers, Liusia Pevzners, Busia Frumsons, Rita Pinsons, as well as Boria Fuks and company, overshadowed in every way the occasional Ivan Mukhin or Natasha Dugina. This elite studied with brilliance and ease, setting the tone for all activities without exception.37
They went to theaters, read the nineteenth-century classics, and spent summers at dachas or on the Black Sea in ways that recalled those nineteenth-century classics. Many of them had peasant nannies who, in later memoirs, would become faithful reflections of the old revolutionaries’ peasant nannies (and ultimately of Pushkin’s Arina, the immortal prototype of all peasant nannies). Inna Gaister, whose father was an immigrant from the Pale and a prominent theorist of collectivization, was raised by Natasha Sidorina from the village of Karaulovo outside of Riazan. Raisa Orlova (who lived on Gorky Street not far from Meromskaia and the Bagritskys, and across the river from Gaister’s “House of Government”) had a nanny who liked an occasional shot of vodka and worshiped her good-natured and simple-hearted peasant God.
Actually, there were two gods rather than one in my childhood. My very old grandmother—my mother’s mother—also lived in our apartment. She slept in a small room off the entryway, and I always picture her lying in bed. . . . Her room was stuffy, foul-smelling, and for some reason frightening. Grandmother would tell me about her God and about the Bible. Grandmother’s God—unlike Nanny’s—was mean, and was always throwing rocks and fighting wars. For the longest time, those rocks would remain my only memory of the Bible. Perhaps that was because Nanny and Grandmother kept feuding with each other, and I was always on Nanny’s side.38
Orlova’s grandmother was indistinguishable from Babel’s and Mandelstam’s. Her mother asked to hear Pushkin on her deathbed. Her nanny’s name was Arina.
Pushkin Street stretched from the dark rooms of the old Pale to the center of both Russia and the Soviet Union (in the late 1930s, three-quarters of all Leningrad Jews lived in the seven central districts of the old imperial capital). Hodl’s children grew up speaking the language of Pushkin and the language of revolution. They spoke both natively, and they spoke them more fluently and with greater conviction than anyone else. They were the core of the first generation of postrevolutionary intelligentsia—the most important and most influential generation in the history of the Soviet cultural elite. They considered themselves the true heirs of Great Russian Literature and the Great Socialist Revolution at the same time. As Baitalsky put it, “we inherited the moral ideals of all the generations of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia: its nonconformity, its love of truth, its moral sense.” And as the same Baitalsky put it a few pages later, “we all prepared ourselves to be agitation and propaganda officials.” Only those of them who died during World War II succeeded in creating a sublime blend of the two. The survivors would have to choose.39
But back in the 1930s, when they were young and, by most accounts, happy, their greatest challenge was to discover a language worthy of paradise. As one of Raisa Orlova’s classmates (Anna Mlynek) said in a famous—and apparently deeply felt and passionately received—speech at a nationwide high school graduation ceremony in 1935,
Comrades, it is difficult to speak today, but there is so much I would like to say, so much that needs to be said. One searches for the right words to respond to our dear older comrades, the right words that would express the feelings that fill our hearts—but what words would do our lives justice? . . .
The highest mountain on earth—Mount Stalin—has been conquered by our country. The best subway in the world is our subway. The highest sky in the world is our sky: it has been raised by our aviators. The deepest sea is our sea: it has been deepened by our divers. In our country, people fly, run, study, draw, and play faster, farther, and better than anyone else in the world! . . .
That is what is expected of us—the first generation produced by the revolution.40
In the second half of the 1930s, the most prestigious Soviet university was the Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature (IFLI), headed by R. S. Zemliachka’s sister A. S. Karpova (Zalkind) and known as the “Communist Lycée” (by analogy with the aristocratic Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, attended by Pushkin and forever associated with joyous creativity, lifelong friendships, auspicious beginnings, and, above all, poetry). IFLI had all of those things in great abundance. According to Orlova’s recollections, “The cult of friendship reigned supreme. We had our special language, our Masonic signs, and a very strong sense of belonging. Friendships were formed overnight and lasted a long time. And even now [1961–79], whatever the moats and precipices that divide some of us, I find myself saying: ‘God help you, dear friends.’ ”41
The quotation is, of course, from Pushkin. The most popular IFLI teachers (Abram Belkin, Mikhail Lifshits, and Leonid Pinsky) were professors of literature, and the most charismatic students (also predominantly Jewish) were poets, critics, and journalists. As Kopelev wrote about Belkin, “he did not just love Dostoevsky—he professed Dostoevsky’s work as a religious doctrine.” And as David Samoilov wrote about Pinsky, “in the old days he would have become a famous rabbi somewhere in Hasidic Ukraine, a saint and an object of worship. In fact, we worshiped him too. He was a great authority, a famous interpreter of texts.” But it was not their professors that the IFLI poets worshiped—it was their “age,” their youth, their generation, their fraternity, and their art.
We would talk until we were hoarse and recite poetry until we were blue in the face. We would sit around long past midnight. I remember how I ran out of cigarettes once, around two in the morning. We walked about five kilometers through the city, to an all-night store near Mayakovsky Square. Then we walked back and continued our argument in the haze of tobacco smoke.42
Many of these boys and girls were the unself-conscious children of Jewish immigrants living the life of the Russian intelligentsia—being the Russian intelligentsia. They were not concerned about where their parents had come from because they knew themselves to be the descendants of the Russian intelligentsia, the true heirs of the sacred fraternity that their parents had joined, helped destroy, and then—unwittingly—labored to reconstitute. At IFLI, the uncontested prophet of “the generation” was Pavel Kogan, the author of one of the most popular and durable Soviet songs ever written: “The Brigantine.”
I am sick of arguing and sitting,
And of loving faces wan and pale . . .
Somewhere in a distant pirate city
A brigantine’s about to set sail . . .
The old captain, windswept like a sea rock
Lifted anchor, leaving us behind.
Let us say farewell, and wish him true luck
Raising glasses filled with golden wine.
Let us drink to the pirates and strangers
Who despise the cheap comforts of home,
Let us drink to the proud Jolly Roger,
Flapping fearlessly over the foam.
The revolution was over; the captain had sailed away; and the poet’s peers had matured along with their country. But of course the revolution was not over, and the poet’s peers had not matured any more than had their country—where, according to Kogan, “even in the winter, it was forever spring.” Stalin’s Russia was a land of perpetual bloom, youth, and warmth (such was the reality of “socialist realism”), the land of “roads through eternity” and “bridges over time.” For the eternally young, there were always wars to wage—
In the name of our fierce adolescence,
In the name of the planet we’ve wrested
From the plague,
From the blood,
From the winter
And from obtuseness.
In the name of the War of 1945,
In the name of the Chekist stock.
In
The name!
This was written in 1939, when Kogan was twenty-one years old and the war was two (not six) years away. Kogan’s comrades were going to be worthy of their Chekist predecessors because they came from the same stock and wielded the same wedge against the same “obtuseness” and “cheap comforts.” Kogan’s most famous lines were these: “I’ve never loved the oval, / I’m keen on sketching angles.” His “age” was ultimately the same as Bagritsky’s: “awaiting you out in the yard” and demanding blood sacrifices.
I understand it all, it’s no great mystery.
Our age is speeding down its iron trail.
I understand, and I say: “Long live history!”—
And throw myself head-first upon the rail.
One of Kogan’s last poems, “The Letter,” was written in December 1940. “We’ve lived to see the day,” he wrote.
We, the high-browed boys of a remarkable revolution—
Dreamers at ten,
Poets and punks at fourteen.
Put down on casualty lists at twenty-five.43
Kogan was killed in 1942, when he was twenty-four years old. His novel in verse, which was conceived—almost sacrilegiously—as his generation’s Eugene Onegin, remained unfinished. His best “Monument” is a poem by his fellow bard Boris Slutsky (who would do so much to reclassify—and immortalize—the graduates of the Communist Lycée as the “war generation”).
Let’s do a little boasting
Now that the fighting’s done.
We did our share of toasting,
We had our drinking fun.
Yet somehow we all shared
A faith in future rockets:
My friends were well prepared
To do their job as prophets.44
Some of those who survived to become “the war generation” would go on to become “the generation of the sixties” and eventually the oldest of the “foremen” of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But in the 1930s (before “the fight was done”), they were still the eternally young boys and girls of the remarkable revolution. What all the members of the prewar Soviet elite had in common was their total identification with their “age”; their belief that they—and their country—were the embodiment of the revolution; their conviction that, as Kopelev put it, “the Soviet power was the best and most just power on earth.” All of them—from Hodl to Hodl’s children—were ready and willing to do their job as prophets.45
Most members of the new Soviet elite were not Jews, and most Jews were not members of the new Soviet elite. But there is no doubt that the Jews had a much higher proportion of elite members than any other ethnic group in the USSR. In absolute terms, they were second to the Russians, but if one divides the elite into groups whose members came from the same region, shared a similar social and cultural background, and recognized each other as having a common past and related parents, it seems certain that Jews would have constituted the largest single component of the new Soviet elite, especially (or rather, most visibly) its cultural contingent. They tended to be the poets, the prophets, and the propagandists. According to David Samoilov, a member of the Kogan generation who was born in Moscow to a Jewish doctor from Belorussia and went on to become one of the most eloquent chroniclers of the Soviet cultural elite, Jews had filled “the vacuum created by the terrorist regime” and then graduated from a “social stratum” to become a “part of the nation.” The Jews, he believed, represented “a certain kind of mentality, a branch of the Russian intelligentsia in one of its most selfless variants.”46
In effect, the role of the Jews in the prewar Soviet Union was similar to the role of the Germans in imperial Russia (or the role of Phanariot Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, among other instances). Mercurian nations in cosmopolitan empires, they represented modernity and internationalism among Apollonians doomed to becoming Mercurians. Closely associated with Mercurianizing regimes at their inception, they were used by those regimes as models, missionaries, surrogates, eager converts, and incorruptible officials. Both the tsar’s Germans and the Soviet Jews identified themselves with their states because they shared those states’ goals, were good at implementing them, and benefited tremendously from both their loyalty and their ability (for as long the regimes remained cosmopolitan). Both served as bureaucrats, elite professionals (including scholars), and leading officials in those most Mercurian of all state functions: diplomacy and the secret service. The Russian Germans were traditional Mercurians who tended to maintain their external strangeness and internal cohesion as a prerequisite for the continued performance of their mediating roles. The Soviet Jews were moderns who had abandoned traditional Mercurianism in order to overcome their strangeness and create a society that would dispense with all forms of mediation—only to find themselves performing traditional Mercurian functions almost identical to those of their imperial German predecessors (and in many ways similar to those of their own grandparents in the German and Polish lands).
One crucial difference (which was probably due to the unplanned and unpremeditated nature of the Jewish transformation into specialized Soviet Mercurians) was the much greater proportion of Soviet Jews (compared to the Russian Germans) among those who thought of themselves as members of the Russian intelligentsia. In imperial Russia, there was a distinction, largely inconsistent but always insisted upon, between the prophetic spokesmen for the country’s Apollonian “people” and the unapologetically Mercurian modern professionals, some of them allied with the state and many of them Germans (real or metaphoric). In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, most people who thought of themselves as members of the intelligentsia were both prophetic spokesmen for the country’s Apollonian “people” and unapologetically Mercurian modern professionals, all of them allied with the state and many of them Jews. David Samoilov tried to draw the line between the two, or rather, to extend the line that seemed so clear in the 1970s and 1980s back into the 1920s and 1930s. Among the Jewish immigrants to Soviet cities, he wrote in his memoirs, “there were both the Jewish members of the intelligentsia, or at least the material out of which the intelligentsia would be made, and the many-thousand-strong detachments of red commissars and Party functionaries, dehumanized, raised by the wave, intoxicated by power.” Tsafrira Meromskaia, born two years later (in 1922), assumed that she belonged to the intelligentsia by virtue of her Jewish origins in combination with her elite upbringing and social success. Describing the communal apartment in which her family, newly arrived in Moscow, lived in the late 1920s before moving to an elite building on Tverskaia, she mentions the apartment’s former owner and his “overripe daughter with straight greasy hair the color of rotten straw and deep-set eyes with colorless eyelashes”; “the proletarian Gurov, who had done well for himself by trading his heavy hammer for a job as a seeing eye of the Soviet security agencies”; the “prosperous chief accountant, Comrade Rubinchik, with his smooth, childless wife”; the “semiresponsible” Party official with his “irresponsible” mother-in-law; the engineer Fridman with his wife and two small children; and finally “the representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia”: Meromskaia’s own family. Meromskaia’s grandparents had been traditional Jews from the Pale of Settlement; her parents had both gone to prerevolutionary gymnasia and then to the Kiev University law school. Under the Soviets, her father (born Abram Mekler) had become a prominent journalist at the Peasant Newspaper and Izvestiya. Her aunt had become a film director and producer; her mother never worked.47
Being a Soviet intelligent of the 1930s meant being both fully Soviet (committed to the building of socialism) and a true intelligent (committed to the preservation of the cultural canon). One reason Meromskaia ended up living in an elite house was that she lived with Pushkin.
That’s right. He was always with me. I always checked my feelings, opinions, and tastes by asking myself: What would he have said, decided, thought, believed?
I remember asking my dad when I was about five, “Did they have ice cream in Pushkin’s day?” It was important for me to know whether he had had the opportunity to enjoy it as much as I did.
Later I read everything ever written about him. I knew all the houses in Moscow where he had lived or stayed, the places where his friends had lived, and of course the famous church where he was married.
When in Leningrad, I never failed to visit his last apartment on the Moika; the site of his duel on the Chernaia Rechka, and the church where his funeral service was held. I saw the city through his eyes. I went to Tsarskoe Selo, where he had attended the lycée. Traveling around Bessarabia, I kept thinking of his “Gypsies.” And then there was Mikhailovskoe and Trigorskoe, where I could wander in the park to my heart’s content. In the Crimea, I saw the sea through his eyes.48
Much later, she made a pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaia Poliana—to “listen to the silence” and to experience the “feeling of being a part of something important, powerful, and pure.” Raisa Orlova had already been there: she and her first husband Leonid Shersher (an ethnic Jew and an IFLI poet) had spent their “honey week” there.49
In the 1930s, all college-educated Soviets—and especially Hodl’s children—lived with Pushkin, Herzen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and an assortment of Western classics as much as they lived with industrialization, collectivization, and cultural revolution. Samuil Agursky, a top official in the Party’s Jewish Section and the greatest Soviet enemy of the Hebrew language and Zionism, raised his son Melib (who did not speak Yiddish) on “Heine, Diderot, Shakespeare, Schiller, Plautus, Goethe, Cervantes, Thackeray, Swift, Beranger, and much else. Father also bought a lot of prerevolutionary literature, especially the Niva supplements, which contained Gogol, Andreev, Hamsun, Ibsen, and Goncharov. We also had Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Rabelais, Maupassant, Hugo, Pushkin, Gorky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermontov, Chekhov, Belinsky, Derzhavin, Veresaev, and Nadson. As for Soviet literature, we had curiously little of it, except for Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, and Furmanov.”50
The combination of all of the “great books” (paintings, symphonies, ballets) ever created with faith in Party orthodoxy was known as socialist realism. In the 1930s, “world culture” and its ever growing Russian component informed and molded Soviet socialism the way classical, baroque, and Gothic architecture shaped Soviet cities and dwellings. When Evgenia Ginzburg, a privileged Communist intellectual and the wife of a high Party official, found herself in cattle car no. 7 on the way to a labor camp, she kept up her own spirit and that of her fellow inmates by reciting from memory Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Nekrasov’s The Russian Women. When the eavesdropping guards accused her of having smuggled in a book, she proved her innocence—and revealed theirs—by reciting the whole text of Eugene Onegin. The head guard sat in judgment. “At first [he] wore a threatening expression: she’d get stuck in a minute, and then he’d show her! This gave way by degrees to astonishment, almost friendly curiosity, and finally ill-concealed delight.” He asked for more. “So I went on. The train had started again, and the wheels kept time to Pushkin’s meter.”51
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was to do for the Great Patriotic War what Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace had done for the “Patriotic War of 1812.” The central character is an ethnic Jew who, before the war, “never thought of himself or his mother as Jewish.” His mother, a doctor, had thought of herself as Jewish once, but that was many years ago, before Pushkin and the Soviet state “had made her forget.” When the Nazis forced her to remember, she had to pack up her things and move to the ghetto.
I got a pillow, some bedclothes, the cup you once gave me, a spoon, a knife and two plates. Do we really need so very much? I took a few medical instruments. I took your letters; the photographs of my late mother and Uncle David, and the one of you with your father; a volume of Pushkin; Lettres de mon moulin; the volume by Maupassant with Une vie, a small dictionary. . . . I took some Chekhov—the volume with “A Boring Story” and “The Bishop’—and that was that, I’d filled my basket.52
Evgeny Gnedin, whose birth in 1898 had been announced by his father, Parvus, as the birth of an enemy of the state with no Motherland, went on to become the head of the Press Department of the People’s Commissariat for External Affairs. His whole generation, he wrote in his memoirs, was formed by “two currents of intellectual life: the socialist revolutionary ideology and the humane Russian literature.” During the collectivization of the peasants, he worked as an “agitator,” and when he was later locked up naked in a cold punishment cell for a crime he had not committed, he recited Pushkin, Blok, Gumilev, and Viacheslav Ivanov, along with his own poetry.53
Lev Kopelev was a collectivizer, poet, and Gulag inmate too. He was also an IFLI student, a bilingual Russian-Ukrainian speaker, and a card-carrying citizen of the world (“Satano,” in Esperanto). One thing Kopelev was not—as far as he was concerned—was a Jew. He did identify himself as “Jewish” on standard Soviet forms and his internal passport, but that was because he did not want to be seen as “a cowardly apostate,” and—after World War II—because he did not want to renounce those who had been murdered for being Jewish. “I have never heard the call of blood,” he wrote, “but I understand the language of memory. . . . That is why in all the formal questionnaires, to all the official questioners, and to anybody who is just curious, I have always said and will always say: ‘Jew.’ But to myself and my close friends, I speak differently.”
To himself and his close friends, Kopelev spoke the language of international Communism, Soviet patriotism, and world culture, which—to him, his close friends, and all Jewish immigrants to the Soviet capitals—was Russian. As Mayakovsky put it, and Kopelev repeated “as his personal conviction,”
I would have learned Russian—
If only because
That language was spoken by Lenin.
But since he had learned it as a native language, as Lenin had, he had no choice but to create the rest of the world in its image. “My feelings and my perception of the world were formed and developed, above all, by the Russian word, Russian mentors, and Russian translations of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dickens, Mark Twain, and Jack London.” For Hodl and her children, Pushkin Street and the road to socialism were one and the same thing. “To be Russian,” wrote Kopelev, quoting Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech,” “means being a Universal Human Being.”54
The mass migration of Jews to the big cities, their close identification with Bolshevism, and their emergence as the core of the new Soviet Russian intelligentsia provoked hostility among those who objected to the arrival of these new immigrants, did not approve of Bolshevism, or could not, for various reasons, join the new Soviet Russian intelligentsia. “If you only knew what the city’s population looks like,” wrote one Leningrad resident to a friend in the United States in 1925, “what kind of revolting Jewish types you run into—with earlocks, speaking their croaking, hiccuping jargon.” And as another one wrote to a correspondent in Yugoslavia three months later, “the sidewalks are filled with people in leather jackets and gray trench coats, spitting sunflower seeds in your face, and there are so many Jews with long earlocks feeling totally at home that you might as well be in Gomel, Dvinsk, or Berdichev.” One Muscovite, in a letter sent to Leningrad in April 1925, felt the same way: “I don’t go to public places anymore and try not to walk around too much because of the aggravation of having to look at Jewish faces and Jewish store signs. Pretty soon, a Russian sign will become a rarity in Moscow, or I should say, in New Berdichev. This Soviet nation is everywhere; I make the point of not reading newspapers or servile literature.”55
The association of Jews with the Soviet state was a common theme in the anti-Jewish letters intercepted by the Leningrad secret police in the mid-1920s. “The Jewish dominance is absolute” (October 1924); “the whole press is in the hands of the Jews” (June 1925); “the Jews, for the most part, live extremely well; everything, from trade to state employment, is in their hands” (September 1925); “every child knows that the Soviet government is a Jewish government” (September 1925). Some members of the prerevolutionary elite, in particular, resented the “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and the subsequent rise of the Jewish immigrants as both prominent new Kulturträger and leading “proletarian” iconoclasts. The art historian A. Anisimov wrote to a colleague in Prague (in November 1923), “Out of 100 applicants to Moscow University, 78 are Jews; thus, if the Russian university is now in Prague, the Jewish one is in Moscow.” The father of a student about to be “purged” for alien origins wrote to a friend or relative in Serbia: “Pavel and his friends are awaiting their fate. But it’s clear that only the Jerusalem academics and the Communists, Party members generally, are going to stay.” And according to the wife of a Leningrad University professor, “in all the institutions, only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is very hard.”56
Mikhail Bulgakov, who thought of the Soviet regime as above all the reign of vile plebeians with “dogs’ hearts,” considered Jews important (if clearly secondary) instigators and beneficiaries of what had happened to “the great city of Moscow.” As he wrote in his diary on December 28, 1924, after a public reading of his “Fatal Eggs” at a meeting of the fashionable “Nikitin Saturdays,” “there were about thirty people there, not one of them a writer and none with any understanding of Russian literature. . . . These ‘Nikitin Saturdays’ consist of stale, slavish, Soviet riffraff, with a thick Jewish admixture.” A week later, accompanied by his friend M. (Dmitry Stonov, a writer and a Jewish immigrant from the Pale of Settlement), he visited the editorial offices of the Godless magazine.
The circulation is 70,000, as it turns out, and it is going fast. The offices are filled with unbelievable scum coming and going. There is a little stage, some kind of curtains, decorations. . . . On the stage there is a table; on the table there is some kind of holy book, perhaps the Bible, with two heads hovering above it.
“Reminds me of a synagogue,” said M. as we walked out. . . .
That very night, I skimmed the issues of the Godless and was stunned. The point is not just that this is a sacrilege, although the sacrilege is, of course, boundless, formally speaking. The point is that they represent Christ, Christ himself, as a scoundrel and a cheat. It is not hard to see whose work it is. This crime is immeasurable.57
The Party took such views seriously. According to the August 1926 Agitprop report to the Central Committee secretariat, “The sense that the Soviet regime patronizes the Jews, that it is ‘the Jewish government,’ that the Jews cause unemployment, housing shortages, college admissions problems, price rises, and commercial speculation—this sense is instilled in the workers by all the hostile elements. . . . If it does not encounter resistance, the wave of anti-Semitism threatens to become, in the very near future, a serious political question.”58
The Party did offer some resistance, and the wave of anti-Semitism never became a serious political question (as far as the Party was concerned). One method of dealing with the threat was surveillance and repression. Most of the letters read by the secret police (in 1925, approximately fifteen hundred a month by the Leningrad Political Control Office alone) were accompanied by “memoranda” that included the names of the sender and addressee as well as excerpts relevant to the work of specific OGPU departments. All the letters quoted above (except the Anisimov one, which comes from a different source) were passed on to the Counterrevolution Department (KRO) or the Secret-Operational Department (SOCh) of the OGPU for further action. In March 1925, seven Russian nationalists were shot for advocating the toppling of the “Communist-Jewish” regime and the deportation of all Soviet Jews to Palestine (among other things).59
In another—inconsistent, uncoordinated, and more or less individual—strategy, prominent officials of Jewish descent took care to avoid undue prominence or to play down their Jewish descent. Trotsky claimed to have refused the post of commissar of internal affairs for fear of providing the enemies of the regime with additional anti-Semitic ammunition, and Molotov recalled that after Lenin’s death, the ethnic Russian Rykov was chosen over the more competent Kamenev as the new head of the Soviet government (Sovnarkom) because “in those days Jews occupied many leading positions even though they made up a small percentage of the country’s population.” Neither Trotsky nor Kamenev considered themselves Jews in any sense other than the narrowly genealogical (“ethnic”) one, but of course it was the narrowly genealogical sense that was dominant (and, after the introduction of the passport system in 1933, more or less compulsory) in Soviet “nationality policy.” When in 1931 Molotov requested information on the ethnic breakdown of the members of the Central Executive Committee of the third convocation, both Trotsky and Kamenev were included on the list of those who did not fill out the delegates’ questionnaire but whose nationality was “common knowledge.” The nationality of Emelian Yaroslavsky (Gubelman) and Yuri Larin (Lurie) was less well known; both were leading Soviet spokesmen on the question of anti-Semitism, and both consistently referred to Jews in the third person.60
But of course the most sensitive “nationality” of all was Lenin’s. In 1924 Lenin’s sister Anna discovered that their maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Dmitrievich Blank, had been born Srul (Israel), the son of Moshko Itskovich Blank, in the shtetl of Starokonstantinov in Volynia. When Kamenev found out, he said, “I’ve always thought so,” to which Bukharin allegedly replied: “Who cares what you think? The question is, what are we going to do?” What “they,” or rather, the Party through the Lenin Institute, did was proclaim this fact “inappropriate for publication” and decree that it be “kept secret.” In 1932 and again in 1934, Anna Ilinichna begged Stalin to reconsider, claiming that her discovery was, on the one hand, an important scientific confirmation of the “exceptional ability of the Semitic tribe” and “the extraordinarily beneficial influence of its blood on the offspring of mixed marriages”; and, on the other, a potent weapon against anti-Semitism “owing to the prestige and love that Ilich enjoys among the masses.” Lenin’s own Jewishness, she argued, was the best proof of the accuracy of his view that the Jewish nation possessed a peculiar “ ‘tenacity’ in struggle” and a highly revolutionary disposition. “Generally speaking,” she concluded, “I do not understand what reasons we, as Communists, may have for concealing this fact. Logically, this does not follow from the recognition of the full equality of all nationalities.” Stalin’s response was an order to “keep absolutely quiet.” Anna Ilinichna did. The enemies of the regime were deprived of additional anti-Semitic ammunition.61
Another way of dealing with the overrepresentation of Jews at the top of Soviet society was to move some of them to the bottom—or rather, to turn the Jews into a “normal” nationality by providing the Mercurian head with an Apollonian body. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet nationality policy consisted in the vigorous promotion of ethnic diversity, ethnic autonomy, and ethnoterritorial institutional consolidation. According to the Party orthodoxy (as formulated by Lenin and Stalin before the revolution), the injustices of the tsarist “prisonhouse of nations” could be overcome only through sensitivity, tact, and various forms of “affirmative action” (to use an apt anachronism). The formerly oppressed peoples felt strongly about their cultural peculiarities because of their history of oppression. The end of that oppression and a pointed promotion of national peculiarities would inevitably lead to the disappearance of national mistrust and—as a consequence—of undue preoccupation with national peculiarities. As Stalin put it back in 1913, “a minority is discontented . . . because it does not have the right to use its native language. Allow it to use its native language and the discontent will pass by itself.” The passing of ethnic discontent would result in the demystification of ethnic groups and their ultimate fusion under communism. Nationality, as every Marxist knew, was a facade that concealed the reality of class struggle. Bolshevik multiculturalism was like politeness: nothing was valued as highly and cost as little (or so the Bolsheviks thought). By promoting the “national form,” the Party was reinforcing the “socialist content.” Diversity was the surest path to unity. The greatest monument to this dialectic was the first ethnoterritorial federation in the history of the world: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.62
The Jews were considered a formerly oppressed Soviet nationality and were treated like all the other formerly oppressed Soviet nationalities (all except the Russians, that is). Religion was a bad thing, of course, as was the use of scriptural languages for secular purposes (the Muslims had to abandon Arabic script), but a modern, secular national culture was a very good thing indeed. In the case of the Jews, this meant the creation of several special ethnoterritorial units in Ukraine and the Russian Republic and a massive promotion of the Yiddish language, theater, press, schools, and literature (complete with a large-scale celebration of Sholem Aleichem as the Jewish Pushkin). The enthusiasm of the Bolshevik Yiddishists was great, but the overall results—by 1934, when the Soviet state paused to take a breath—were meager. The problem was not Zionism, Hebraism, or Judaic traditionalism, which were negligible irritants compared to the challenges that the Soviet culture-building effort encountered in Central Asia, for example. The problem was that, according to the official Marxist blueprint, the Jews were too far ahead of the Soviet culture-building effort. There were many Soviet nationalities without compact homelands and many more Soviet nationalities that seemed unable to separate religion from ethnicity, but no other Soviet nationality was as top-heavy, in class terms (resembling, like the iconic Trotsky, a downward-pointing triangle); as heavily represented at the Soviet top; or as little interested in either the state’s attack on its religion or the state’s promotion of its “national culture.” No other ethnic group was as good at being Soviet, and no other ethnic group was as keen on abandoning its language, rituals, and traditional areas of settlement. No other nationality, in other words, was as Mercurian (all head and no body) or as revolutionary (all youth and no tradition).63
Accordingly, in one crucially important sense, the “normalization” of the Jews was the reverse of the “modernization” of all the other Soviet nationalities. The purpose of fostering ethnic units, cultures, cadres, and institutions was to eliminate nationalist obstacles on the way to socialist urbanization, education, and cosmopolitanism. The Jews, however, were so heavily urbanized, so well educated, and so eager to become cosmopolitan (by way of secularization, intermarriage, and language shift) that Soviet nation building seemed either irrelevant or counterproductive (to both the Party and most Jewish consumers). Commendably but also dangerously, the Jews seemed much more Soviet than the rest of the Soviet Union. Moreover, those Jews who had stayed behind in the old shtetls as traditional traders and artisans did not fit into either the new Soviet economy or the peasant-into-worker-into-New-Man Marxist progression, whatever language they spoke. And so, in the name of equality and in order to deal with the threat of anti-Semitism on the one hand and capitalism on the other, the Party supported Yuri Larin in his attempt to turn at least 400,000 urban Jews into farmers—an attempt that, according to Larin’s opponent Kaganovich, contained “elements of Zionism,” and that, however one looks at it, was the mirror image of both Marxist theory and Soviet practice.64
Larin and most of his supporters (including the ones in the United States, who provided most of the financing) wanted to locate the center of new Jewish agriculture—and eventually “the national Jewish republic”—in northern Crimea and in the adjacent areas of the Kuban and southern Ukraine. This plan, and the early phases of its implementation in 1926–27, proved a serious political challenge because of strong resistance on the part of local officials, especially the head of the Crimean Autonomous Republic Veli Ibraimov, who claimed to speak on behalf of the Crimean Tatar population and was lobbying for the return to the Crimea of hundreds of thousands Tatar exiles living in Turkey. In October 1926, Larin wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Party accusing Ibraimov of inciting pogroms, defending kulak interests, and “serving the nationalist-chauvinist aspirations of the part of the Tatar bourgeoisie that advocates a Turkish orientation.” Larin’s complaint may or may not have been a factor in Ibraimov’s 1928 execution on charges of espionage for Turkey; either way, the demise of the Crimean project’s most determined foe came too late to prevent the demise of the Crimean version of Jewish Apollonization. On March 28, 1928, the Soviet government approved the creation of a Jewish agricultural settlement in a remote part of the Soviet Far East not assigned to any other ethnic group (the local hunting and gathering population had no clout in the capital and no apparent intention to engage in agriculture). In 1930, Birobidzhan was proclaimed a Jewish National Region; in 1931, my grandparents arrived there from Buenos Aires by way of Hamburg and Leningrad; in 1932, their first daughter froze to death; later that same year, they moved to Moscow (leaving my grandmother’s sister and her family behind). The idea of settling on the land—especially such inhospitable land—made little sense to most Soviet Jews, less sense to conceptually consistent Soviet Marxists, and almost no sense whatsoever at the time of the most intense industrializing drive ever attempted by any state and the most resolute assault on the Apollonian countryside ever undertaken by any urban civilization.65
Thus the brunt of the struggle against the “wave of anti-Semitism” had to be borne by those responsible for agitation and propaganda. In August 1926, the Central Committee’s Agitprop conducted a special meeting on the subject, and in December 1927 Stalin launched a massive public campaign against anti-Semitism by declaring to the delegates of the Fifteenth Party Congress, “This evil has to be combated with utmost ruthlessness, comrades.” For the next four years, the Party sponsored countless formal appeals, celebrity speeches, mass rallies, newspaper exposés, and show trials aimed at eradicating the evil. In 1927–32, Soviet publishing houses produced fifty-six books against anti-Semitism, and at the height of the campaign in 1928–early 1930s, articles on the subject appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily. The campaign fizzled out in 1932, but as late as 1935 the newly dismissed commandant of the Moscow Kremlin R. A. Peterson had to apologize to the Party Control Commission for saying that one way to combat anti-Semitism was not to hire Jews. On May 22, 1935, the secretary of the Writer’s Union A. S. Shcherbakov wrote to the Central Committee secretaries Stalin, Andreev, and Ezhov, recommending that the poet Pavel Vasiliev be punished for an anti-Semitic brawl. On May 24 Pravda published an article condemning Vasiliev for anti-Semitic “hooliganism,” and within days he was arrested and sentenced to three years in a labor camp. And on May 17–23, 1936, the federal public prosecutor A. Ia. Vyshinsky was assigned to a widely publicized murder case (the first one of his career and presumably a dress rehearsal for the first “Moscow Trial,” which was to take place within a few months). Konstantin Semenchuk, the head of the polar station on Wrangel Island, and Stepan Startsev, his dog-sled driver, were accused of murdering the expedition’s doctor, Nikolai Lvovich Vulfson, and planning to kill his wife, Gita Borisovna Feldman. Anti-Semitism was one alleged motive; Vulfson’s and Feldman’s selfless defense of state property and Soviet nationality policy was another. No evidence was presented; none was needed (according to Vyshinsky, who proclaimed cui prodest, “who benefits,” to be his main legal principle); and none existed (according to Arkady Vaksberg, who claims to have seen the file). Both defendants were shot.66
The campaign against anti-Semitism was part of the Great Transformation policy of vigorous “indigenization” and “internationalism.” Between 1928 and about 1932–34, the Party demanded the widest possible use of the largest possible number of languages, the aggressive promotion of “national cadres,” and the tireless celebration of ethnic differences, peculiarities, and entitlements. Once again, however, the Jews were in a special position because, according to both anti-Semites and philo-Semites (as well as some Jews), their main peculiarity was their denial of possessing any peculiarities, and their chief entitlement was to being considered exceptionally good Russians and Soviets—and thus exceptional among nationalities. Before the mid-1930s, “Russian” and “Soviet” were the only two nationalities that were not seen as properly ethnic—or rather, as having a politically meaningful national form. Both were immune from nationality policy because both were defined exclusively in class terms. And so, mutatis mutandis, were most Moscow and Leningrad Jews. Or rather, they were supposed to be a part of the nationality policy but did not seem interested, and they were often defined in (upper-)class terms but were not supposed to be. They seemed to be a nationality without form—a caste of exemplary Soviets.
But what did this mean, and why was this so? The Soviet campaign against anti-Semitism consisted of two elements: an attempt to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, jealousy, and hostility (old and new), and an attempt to explain why the Jews occupied such a peculiar place in Soviet society. The two fundamental approaches were (a) the Jews did not occupy a peculiar place in Soviet society; and (b) the Jews occupied a peculiar place in Soviet society for perfectly wholesome and understandable reasons. Approach (a) implied that anti-Semitism was a form of false consciousness inherited from the old regime; approach (b) suggested that anti-Semitism was a form of jealousy that could be cured through a combination of Jewish normalization and Apollonian modernization. Most Soviet authors used both approaches. According to Emelian Yaroslavsky, propaganda about Jewish overrepresentation among Soviet leaders was being spread by the enemies of the revolution. “What do they care that in the Communist Party, which has 1,300,000 members and candidate members, there are more than 1,000,000 Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and other non-Jews!” And as for future leaders, “even the tsarist government allowed the Jews to make up 10 percent of all university students, but under the Soviet government that number has barely reached the average of 13 percent for all institutions of higher education.” On the other hand, argued Yaroslavsky, anti-Semitism could not be defeated unless the proportion of Jewish workers (“which is still totally insufficient”) and that of Jewish peasants (“the center of gravity in the struggle against anti-Semitism”) were increased dramatically.67
Larin went much further. He did say that the Jews were far from being “preeminent, overabundant, dominant, and so on” among Soviet leaders, even though they had “spilled more blood [“than the workers of other nationalities”] in the struggle for freedom, for the liberation of our country from landowners and capitalists, from tsarism.” Larin’s main point, however, was to explain why the Jews were, indeed, overrepresented (about 19 percent of the total in 1929) “in the apparatus of public organizations,” including “both elected and appointed members of trade union boards, provincial administrations, Party committees, and similar organs.” The reason, he suggested, was that “the Jewish worker, because of the peculiarity of his past life and because of the additional oppression and persecution he had to endure for many years under tsarism, has developed a large number of special traits that equip him for active roles in revolutionary and public work. The exceptional development of the special psychological makeup necessary for leadership roles has made Jewish revolutionary workers more capable of gaining prominence in public life than the average Russian worker, who lived under very different conditions.”
There were three main reasons for this, according to Larin. First, the economic “struggle for survival’ in overcrowded shtetls had created unusually active, resilient, and determined individuals. “In other words, the conditions of everyday life produced in urban Jews a peculiar, exceptional energy. When such individuals became factory workers, underground revolutionaries, or, upon arrival in Moscow after the revolution, employees in our institutions, they moved up very quickly because of this energy—especially because the bulk of our Russian workers were of peasant origin and thus hardly capable of systematic activity.”
The second reason for the Jewish preeminence was a strong sense of solidarity among them. Because of discrimination against Jewish workers under the old regime, “there developed, among this segment of the Jewish people, an unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and support. This exceptionally strong solidarity was very useful in both revolutionary struggle and Party work, and is generally one of the fundamental class virtues of the proletariat. . . . Consequently, within the revolutionary movement, Jewish workers were bound to move up into the revolutionary apparatus at a much higher rate than was their share of the proletariat as a whole.”
The third advantage that the Jews had over the Russians, according to Larin, was their generally higher level of culture (kul’-turnost’). Because education had always been the main path to Jewish emancipation and because of the long Jewish tradition of literacy and urban life, “tens of thousands of Jewish laboring youth used to spend long years, night in night out, bent over their books, in an attempt to break out of the narrow circle of restrictions. It rarely worked . . . , but the higher cultural level acquired in this manner went on to benefit the revolutionary struggle.”68
There was nothing inherently wrong with Jewish excellence, according to Party ideologues (Jewish or not), but it did offend against the principle of full national equality and led to the growth of anti-Semitism. Larin’s remedies were the same as Yaroslavsky’s and everyone else’s: Jewish normalization (especially through agricultural settlement), non-Jewish modernization (especially through education), and a concerted campaign of consciousness-raising among non-Jews on the subject of Jewish excellence (to the effect that it did not exist or existed for good but temporary reasons).
The most remarkable thing about these remedies was that two of them worked as intended. The Jewish normalization project was a failure, but the combination of the public assault on anti-Semitism and the dramatic expansion of educational and employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Apollonians during the First Five-Year Plan seem to have borne fruit. It is possible, of course, that the problem was not widespread in the first place: in Izmozik’s study of intercepted mail, only 0.9 percent of all letters opened by the Leningrad secret police between March 1925 and January 1926 (67 out of 7,335) contained negative comments about Jews. It is also quite probable that, especially in the former Pale, both traditional anti-Semitism and the new resentment over Jewish prominence in the Soviet state simmered just below the surface, occasionally glimpsed despite official prohibitions and camouflage. What does seem striking, in any case, is that virtually all memoirists writing about Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia life in the 1930s seem to agree that there was no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few manifestations of ethnic ranking or labeling. Allowing for a degree of nostalgic wishful thinking and for the fact that most of these memoirists are elite members writing about elite institutions, it seems fair to conclude that the new-minted, self-confident, optimistic, and passionately patriotic Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s included a very substantial proportion of ethnic Jews and a remarkably small number of their detractors. The prominent philosopher Vitaly Rubin went to a top Moscow school. More than half of his classmates were Jewish.
Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there. Not only did it not arise in the form of anti-Semitism; it did not arise at all. All the Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with Jewishness a thing of the past. I remember thinking of my father’s stories about his childhood, heder, and traditional Jewish upbringing as something consigned to oblivion. None of that had anything to do with me. There was no active desire to renounce one’s Jewishness. This problem simply did not exist.69
The Soviet Union was building a unique blend of Apollonianism and Mercurianism, and the rapidly expanding Soviet intelligentsia consisted of grateful young beneficiaries. The children of Jews were acquiring Apollonian bodies and belligerence; the children of “workers and peasants” were gaining Mercurian cleverness and mobility. Both despised their parents (for the half-humans they were), and both were being trained as brothers, as well as prophets. Vasily Stalin once told his little sister Svetlana, “Our father used to be a Georgian.” Or, as Sholem Aleichem’s little Motl put it, “I am lucky, I’m an orphan.”70
The story of the Jewish social rise, Jewish patricide, and Jewish conversion to non-Jewishness (of whatever kind) is of course not peculiar to the Soviet Union. What is peculiar is that there was no preexisting elite to compete with or alienate, no special membership fee analogous to baptism, and—up until the late 1930s—no official discrimination of any kind (given total ideological purity, of course). Hodl’s husband Perchik, who had always considered himself a “member of the human race,” would have become one de jure and possibly by profession when he arrived in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution. Assuming he did not die in the civil war and did not join an opposition, there is a good chance he might have ended up running a publishing house, a People’s Comissariat, and perhaps even a special agency directly responsible for ideological purity.
Indeed, the Soviet secret police—the regime’s sacred center, known after 1934 as the NKVD—was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions. In January 1937, on the eve of the Great Terror, the 111 top NKVD officials included 42 Jews, 35 Russians, 8 Latvians, and 26 others. Out of twenty NKVD directorates, twelve (60 percent, including State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement [deportations]) were headed by officers who identified themselves as ethnic Jews. The most exclusive and sensitive of all NKVD agencies, the Main Directorate for State Security, consisted often departments: seven of them (Protection of Government Officials, Counterintelligence, Secret-Political, Special [surveillance in the army], Foreign Intelligence, Records, and Prisons) were run by immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. Foreign service was an almost exclusively Jewish specialty (as was spying for the Soviet Union in Western Europe and especially in the United States). The Gulag, or Main Labor Camp Administration, was headed by ethnic Jews from 1930, when it was formed, until late November 1938, when the Great Terror was mostly over. As Babel (himself a onetime secret police employee, a friend of some prominent executioners, and ultimately a confessed “terrorist” and “spy”) described one of his characters, one nicknamed A-Jew-and-a-Half, “Tartakovsky has the soul of a murderer, but he is one of us, he is our flesh and blood.”71
There was, of course, no separate Jewish interest that these people had in common—any more than the German officials and professionals in imperial Russia had had a special German interest. On the contrary, all these groups made perfect policemen and plenipotentiaries precisely because of their Mercurian training and their uniquely Mercurian rootlessness. The rise of the nation-state had made internal strangeness impossible (the very traits that had signified loyalty now suggested treason), but the Soviet Union was neither an Apollonian empire nor a nation-state, and Soviet Jews were no ordinary Mercurians. Before the mid-1930s, the USSR was a relentlessly universalist Centaur state that aspired to a perfect combination of Mercurianism and Apollonianism (with a temporary emphasis on the former, given Russia’s excess of the latter). The Jews played a central role in this endeavor both because they were traditional Mercurians and because they were so eager to become Apollonians. Their parents provided them with the skills necessary for success in Soviet society; their rebellion against their parents made them unusually consistent at Soviet internationalism. Jews were relatively numerous in the chambers of power because of their Jewish energy and education, and because of their singular commitment to socialism (Jewish non-Jewishness). Apollonized Mercurians did better than Mercurianized Apollonians.
In any case, in early 1937 Hodl the Muscovite would not have been allowed to correspond with her sisters, but she probably would have been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow (not far from Meromskaia, Gaister, Orlova, Markish, and so many others), with access to special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid (the Markishes had both). At least once a year, she would have traveled to a Black Sea sanatorium or a mineral spa in the Caucasus.
If Hodl had written her memoirs in the 1930s, they would have been about her revolutionary youth. Hodl’s life as she would have remembered it had no childhood (except perhaps a brief mention of her family’s poverty), no Kasrilevka, and no Tevye. It had no adulthood and no old age. The revolution turned preexisting revolutionaries into “Old Bolsheviks,” and Old Bolsheviks had nothing but their revolutionary youth to remember (or look forward to). The 1930s Soviet present belonged to Hodl’s daughters’ happy childhood.
Hodl’s daughters’ memoirs all have childhoods—happy 1930s childhoods and happy 1930s adolescence. They adored their nannies and their parents (but not necessarily their grandparents—supposing Tevye was still around, living quietly in Hodl’s new apartment). They loved their schools, their teachers, and their friends. They took piano lessons, worshiped famous tenors, and knew all the Maly Theater actors. They read a lot of nineteenth-century novels and lived nineteenth-century intelligentsia lives. Their memories of New Year celebrations are versions of canonical Christmas reminiscences, and their descriptions of their dacha summers are Nabokovian evocations of the Russian gentry’s paradise lost. Even Meromskaia’s sarcasm—in a book entitled Nostalgia? Never!—dissolves in the presence of the Soviet version of manorial Arcadia.
Oh, those vistas and evenings outside of Moscow, in the dacha settlements with their wooden houses with open verandas overlooking small gardens enclosed by picket fences or wildly overgrown yards, which were, in effect, fenced-in sections of the woods complete with mushrooms and berries. The cultivated ones overflowed with lilacs, jasmine, and wild cherry. The flower beds smelled of mignonette and looked bright and pretty thanks to the pansies and all sorts of other members of the friendly flower family. Under the windows, the Romantic dachniki planted aromatic nicotiana, nondescript during the day but sweetly pungent at night, while the more pragmatic ones planted gorgeous dahlias, which looked nice but would not get stolen. Beyond the gate, there was a narrow beaten path running alongside the fence. And somewhere close by there was always a river or lake, and, of course, the woods: the mixed forests south of Moscow and the dry, warm pine forests to the north and west—the tall, slender trunks smelling of resin, and the ground strewn with black pinecones half covered by yellow needles.
In the evenings, after a “long day’s work,” we would wash ourselves with warm water heated by the sun and put sandals on feet hardened by many hours of barefooted recklessness. And then we would join the grownups over evening tea or, more often, talk endlessly, into the night, with our girlfriends—and with the boys too. From each terrace came the sounds of the gramophone: sultry tangos, Utesov, Shulzhenko, the semibanned Leshchenko, sometimes Ellington’s “Caravan,” but mostly “Me and My Masha by the Samovar.”
Gradually, all these familiar dacha sounds would die down, the dachniki would go to bed, and night silence would fall, interrupted by an occasional train whistle or the beckoning call of mothers and grandmothers. The moon would emerge slowly from behind the trees. A slight smell of smoke would hang in the air.72
Most of the dachniki—and generally most members of the Soviet “new class”—were not Jews. But few Soviet groups, however defined, had as good a chance of finding themselves among Meromskaia’s dachniki as did the immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. More of Hodl’s children than just about anybody else’s had the proverbial Soviet “happy childhoods.”
In 1937, Inna Gaister’s grandmother Gita came from Poland to Moscow to see her children. She had seven sons and daughters. The youngest still lived with her; all the others had moved to Moscow. Rakhil (Inna’s mother), a Party member since 1918, worked as an economist at the People’s Comissariat of Heavy Industry; her husband, Aron Gaister, was deputy commissar of agriculture; their youngest daughter, Valeria, was named after Valerian Kuibyshev, one of Stalin’s top lieutenants. Khaim, a civil war veteran married to an ethnic Russian, was deputy head of the Military Chemical Academy in Moscow. Veniamin was a history Ph.D. (“doctor of sciences”) and a researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Politics. Lipa was an engineer at a factory; her first husband was a Soviet secret agent in Hungary, her second an engineer at the Moscow Automobile Plant. Pinia was a navy pilot, a student at the Air Force Academy, and, like Khaim, a colonel. Also like Khaim, he was married to a Russian woman. They named their son Valery, after the famous Soviet pilot Valery Chkalov. Adassa had immigrated to the Soviet Union illegally in 1923; she had since graduated from college and was working as a chemical engineer. Finally, Leva had arrived in 1932, gone to work at the Moscow Automobile Plant, and enrolled as a student by correspondence in the Bauman Superior Institute of Technology.
Grandma Gita did not speak Russian, so Adassa met her at the border town of Negoreloe. From the Belorussky Railway Station she was taken to Lipa’s in my father’s car. That night all seven children and their spouses came to see her. Many years had gone by since they, as young people, had left the family home. We can only guess what her hopes for them may have been back then. What kind of fate had she asked God to grant her uneducated children from a miserable Jewish shtetl? And now here she was, surrounded by prosperous people with all kinds of degrees: engineers, colonels, Ph.D.’s. As far as she was concerned, my mother, for example, was “Madame Minister’s Wife”! She had a lot of grandchildren too. All her life she had been tied to her garden and her cow. My great-great-grandfather, Grandma Gita’s grandfather, had been a rabbi who had written famous Talmudic commentaries called “Elijah’s View.” Her own literacy was limited to reading Hebrew prayers and painstakingly composing letters in her own shtetl dialect.
I was there that night. According to the Jewish custom, Grandma was wearing a wig. It was red. I was also surprised that she was eating off special plates that she had brought with her from Poland. She sat proudly at the head of the table in the place of honor. I also remember her full dark skirts that reached the ground. That night must have been the first time in her life that she was truly happy.73
We do not know how happy Grandma Gita (who could not speak with her grandchildren) truly was or whether she had been truly happy before, but we can be certain that her children, grandchildren, and in-laws sitting around the table were genuinely proud of their accomplishments and fully convinced that Grandma Gita had never been truly happy before. They also knew—beyond all doubt and reflection—that their lives were a part of History and thus incommensurate with the lives of their kinsmen languishing in America and Palestine. Tevye loved all his daughters, of course; Hodl (who was approximately the same age as Rakhil Kaplan, Gita’s oldest daughter and Inna Gaister’s mother) worried about her sisters Beilke and Chava; Hodl’s children felt nothing but pity for their overseas cousins (on those rare occasions when they thought about them at all).
When Hope Ulanovskaia and her husband were told in 1931 that their next posting as Soviet secret agents would be to America, and not Romania, as they had supposed, Hope was “terribly upset.”
The First Five-Year Plan was underway; people were building socialism, making sacrifices. At least in Romania we would not have had an easy life. We might have had enough to eat, but at any moment we could have been arrested by the secret police. But in America, as everyone knew, Soviet espionage was not of great interest to anybody. I knew about America from Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and the very thought of going there was revolting to me.74
America did prove a rather unpleasant place, if not quite as unpleasant as Hope had been led to believe. “I knew that America was the classic capitalist country, the most disgusting place in the world, and was anxious to see all the ‘ulcers’ of capitalism as soon as possible.” She saw the lines at Salvation Army soup kitchens, the “frightful enormity of stone” (“like a well”), and the “real despair” of unemployment, but she also found informality, prosperity, and many good friends (especially Whittaker Chambers, whom she and her husband knew as “Bob”). Most important, she found her favorite aunt and uncle, who had left their native Bershad because of family trouble and still knew her as “Esterka.” Uncle had his own window-cleaning business but had had to let his assistant go because of the Depression. “He had a five-room apartment; they took baths every day and drank orange juice in the morning. In other words, they had become real Americans.” Neither Hope nor Uncle himself was much impressed, however.
Uncle was unhappy with capitalism and very interested in how people lived in the Soviet Union. He had heard about this person’s son becoming a doctor and that person’s daughter an engineer, and was very unhappy that his own children had not gone to college. He had wanted his younger son, Srulikl, who was now Sidney, to be a dentist, but he had become an ardent Communist, dropped out of school, and was working for a Communist newspaper in Baltimore. The older one, David, was a worker, a member of a leftist trade union. Aunt was complaining that her children were reproaching her: Why had she taken them out of the Soviet Union? Uncle asked me: “Do you think I’d be better off there?” I wanted to be honest: “I would not leave the Soviet Union if I were offered all the riches of Morgan. But I’ll be frank with you, Uncle: you may be a window washer, but you live better than our engineers. We don’t drink orange juice in the mornings and don’t eat chicken. Nobody has apartments like yours. We, for example, live in one room.”
. . . Then my cousins arrived. They listened to me with rapt attention. . . . I was telling them: “You see, workers in our country feel that they are the true masters of the land. Through blood and sweat, we are building a beautiful building. When we finish, we’ll have everything.” How they listened to me! They loved me. They believed me. We had grown up together.75
She believed it too. She meant every word. But she was also right about the difference in material conditions—a difference caused by America’s greater wealth and Jewish American economic success. The Jews had done well in America—much better, in fact, than any other immigrant community and better, as far as social mobility was concerned, than most native-born Americans. The Russian Jews were the latest, largest, and most specialized of the Mercurian immigrants, and they acted and succeeded accordingly. They arrived as families (about 40 percent of the Jewish immigrants were female, and 25 percent children); intended to stay (the average rate of repatriation from the United States was 7 percent for the Jews, 42 percent for everyone else); became fully urbanized; took almost no part in the competition for unskilled jobs; included an extraordinarily high proportion of entrepreneurs (in New York in 1914, every third male immigrant); and did business the old-fashioned Mercurian way—by relying on cheap family labor, long hours, low profit margins, ethnic solidarity, vertical integration, and extremely high rates of standardization, specialization, and product differentiation. In New York, in particular, the Russian Jewish immigrants took advantage of their traditional skills and old-country experience to monopolize and revolutionize the clothing industry (in 1905 the city’s largest, worth $306 million and employing one-fourth of New York’s industrial labor force). By 1925, 50 percent of New York’s Russian Jewish heads of households were in white-collar occupations, almost exclusively through entrepreneurship. As Andrew Godley put it, “most Jewish immigrants . . . rose from the direst of poverty to positions of economic security and social respectability within fifty years when most of those around them did not.”76
The story was a familiar one: business success followed by success in the educational system and the professions. At the end of World War I, Harvard’s Jewish enrollment was about 20 percent, and Columbia’s about 40 percent. In 1920, City College of New York and Hunter College were 80 to 90 percent Jewish. In 1925, more than 50 percent of the children of Jewish immigrant businessmen had white-collar jobs that required formal education. According to an Industrial Commission report, “In the lower schools the Jewish children are the delight of their teachers for cleverness at their books, obedience, and general good conduct.” And according to one bemused Boston prep school student, “Jews worked far into each night, their lessons next morning were letter perfect, they took obvious pride in their academic success and talked about it. At the end of each year there were room prizes given for excellency in each subject, and they were openly after them. There was none of the Roxbury solidarity of pupils versus the master. If anyone reciting made a mistake that the master overlooked, twenty hands shot into the air to bring it to his attention.”77
In the Soviet Union and the United States, the children of Jewish immigrants were going to school at about the same time and with the same degree of eagerness and excellence. In both places, the dramatic expansion of the educational systems coincided with the Jewish influx and helped accommodate it. And in both places, there arose—eventually—“the Jewish problem” of excessive success. In the Soviet Union, the state responded by expanding enrollments and intensifying affirmative action programs for “workers and peasants” and titular ethnics. As Larin put it, not without some defensiveness, “we cannot do what the tsarist government used to do: pass a law mandating that Jewish workers be accepted by workers’ preparatory departments at a lower percentage rate than the Russian workers, or that Jewish intellectuals and artisans be enrolled in colleges in smaller proportions, relative to their total population, than their Russian counterparts.” In the United States, most top colleges could not do what the tsarist government used to do, either, but they could—and did—use indirect methods, such as regional quotas or “character” tests, to combat the “Jewish invasion.”78
The most notable thing about Jewish students in the Soviet Union and Jewish students in the United States was the fact that whereas Soviet colleges produced Communists, the American colleges also produced Communists. As Thomas Kessner put it, “The immigrant generation sought security for their children and as they understood it this required American education. In the process they propelled their children away from themselves, producing a generation gap of enormous proportions, resulting in conflicts of fierce intensity often beyond reconciliation. While other groups held their offspring firmly to the old ways, the Eastern Europeans did not pass on the moral norms of their past. Instead they passed their children on to America.”79
In other words, America was reproducing the familiar European pattern. The Jewish emergence from the ghetto and success in the expanded marketplace were followed by the Jewish Revolution against Jewishness as the “chimerical nationality” of capitalism. Jews were, proportionately, much more Marxist than the international proletariat because they were much more like Marx. In America, they were even more so because America was the promised land of homines rationalistici artificiales, a country of chimerical nationality with no Goethe-Schiller cult or messianic intelligentsia to replace the lost Jewishness. One strategy was to retain the Jewishness, recover it if it seemed lost, and possibly reform it by means of a peculiarly American procedure that Bromberg called the “Protestantization of Judaism.” Another was to form one’s own messianic intelligentsia, “the Movement.” Most of the “New York intellectuals” of the 1930s were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They were not modern intellectuals involved in “cultural production”—they were the overseas chapter of the Russian intelligentsia, the true believers in the temple of eternal youth, the priests of proletarian politics, the denizens of “the little islands of freedom” in an evil empire that, according to one City College graduate, “resisted the analysis of Marx the way other lands in other times had resisted the thunderous anguish of Isaiah.”80
Like old Russia’s little islands of freedom, the American ones were not uninhabited. According to David A. Hollinger, the new cosmopolitan intelligentsia in the United States “was formed by the amalgamation of two antiprovincial revolts, one manifest especially among well-to-do WASPs of native stock, directed against the constraints of ‘Puritanism,’ and the other manifest especially among the sons of immigrants, directed against the constraints of Jewish parochialism, particularly as identified with Eastern Europe.” As Joseph Freeman, a refugee from the Pale of Settlement to Communism by way of Columbia University, saw it (through Matthew Arnold’s prism), both groups were moving, at the same time, “from Moses and Jesus to Venus and Apollo, from a common ‘Judeo-Christian asceticism’ to a Hellenistic ‘refuge of souls in rebellion against puritan bondage.’ ” Like Abraham Cahan’s Vilna circle (“No distinction between Jew and gentile! In the spirit of true equality and brotherhood!”), Freeman’s refuge was a new family without fathers, in which “Nordic Americans” communed with Jews and Negroes, and which “represented that ideal society which we all wanted, that society in which no racial barriers could possibly exist.”81 They—the Jews among them, at any rate—had inherited the entirety of human history in order to transcend it. “By the time we were leaving the university we were no longer, culturally, Jews. We were Westerners initiated into and part of a culture which merged the values of Jerusalem, Egypt, Greece and ancient Rome with the Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, the humanistic culture of the Renaissance, the equalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, and the scientific concepts of the nineteenth century. To this amalgam we added socialism, which seemed to us the apex, so far, of all that was greatest in Western culture.”82
They were, like Mandelstam’s mother’s Vilna friends, a self-conscious “generation” following “luminous personalities” toward “self-immolation” (vicariously, as it turned out, except for the few who became Hope Ulanovskaia’s secret agents). They were an army of fraternal prophets. They were “the Movement.”
According to Isaac Rosenfeld’s recollection of life at the University of Chicago in the 1930s,
The political interest colored practically every student activity on campus, with the major division drawn between Stalinists (who dominated the American Student Union) and the Trotskyites (who worked through the local chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League). The two Marxist groups, with their symps and associates, spoke bitterly about, but never to, each other and avoided all contact, except to heckle, and occasionally strong-arm, each other’s meetings. Politics was everywhere, in a measure, one ate and drank it; and sleep gave no escape, for it furnished terror to our dreams. . . . Liaisons, marriages, and divorces, let alone friendships, were sometimes contracted on no other basis than these issues. . . . Politics was form and substance, accident and modification, the metaphor of all things.83
It was Soviet politics, or perhaps socialist anti-Soviet politics, or rather, prophetic politics in the shadow of the Soviet Union, that was the metaphor of all things. Beilke’s children agreed with Hodl’s children that History (as future, not past) was unfolding in Moscow. The USSR might be on the straight road to perfection, or it might have taken a wrong turn somewhere; either way, the USSR is where the “accursed questions” were being answered and the “last and decisive battles” were being waged. Most of the secret agents recruited by the Ulanovskys in America were Russian Jews or their children, and there is little doubt that Trotsky’s greatest appeal was that he was both Jewish and Russian: a perfect Mercurian Apollonian, a fearsome warrior with glasses on his nose (he was, in effect, the Israel of the 1930s; or rather, Israel would become the Trotsky of the next Jewish American generation). According to Irving Howe, no major figure of the twentieth century “combined so fully or remarkably as did Trotsky the roles of historical actor and historian, political leader and theorist, charismatic orator and isolated critic. Trotsky made history, and kept an eye on history. He was a man of heroic mold, entirely committed to the life of action, but he was also an intellectual who believed in the power and purity of the word.”84
Some Jewish American rebels in the 1930s were also the children of Jewish Russian rebels—the ones who spent hours in the New York Public Library “leafing through the canonical and apocryphal writings of the prophets of the old revolutionary underground.” For them, socialism began at home—as “one long Friday evening around the samovar and the cut-glass bowl laden with nuts and fruits, all of us singing Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, ale tsuzamen!”; or as heated arguments among uncles and aunts about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the treachery of the revisionists. When Daniel Bell converted from Judaism to the Young People’s Socialist League, his family’s main worry was whether he had joined the right sect.85
But most Jewish American parents in the 1920s and 1930s were not rebels, so most Jewish American rebels renounced their parents as well as the cold world they had launched them into. As in Europe outside the Soviet Union, Jewish parents and capitalism seemed to take turns representing each other (“the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism”). Much of early Jewish American literature was about Jewish boys questioning their legitimacy and about Jewish entrepreneurs selling their soul to the devil. Isaac Rosenfeld’s underground young man in Passage from Home hates his father and would rather have another one; Henry Roth’s “cellar” boy in Call It Sleep is hated by his father, who would rather have another son (of whose parentage he would be certain). Both Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky and Budd Schulberg’s Sammy Glick lose their fathers, lose themselves, and produce no children as they climb up in search of wealth and status.
Tevye’s American daughter (Beilke), his Soviet daughter (Hodl), and their children all agreed about what each destination stood for. For David and his mother in Call It Sleep, New York was a “wilderness.” For Boris Erlich in Babel’s “Jewess,” the Soviet Union was both his home and his masterpiece.
Boris showed her Russia with so much pride and confidence, as if he, Boris Erlich, had himself created Russia, as if he owned it. And to some extent, he did. There was in everything a drop of his soul or of his blood, the blood of the corps commissar (of the Red Cossacks)—from the international train cars to the newly built sugar factories and refurbished train stations.86
For Beilke and her children, language and “tonguelessness” were sources of agony and fascination; for Hodl and her children, “the clear and pure Russian sounds” came naturally (or so they seem to have felt). Beilke’s children despised their father Podhotzur, the brash businessman and social climber; Hodl’s children adored their father, Perchik, the ascetic revolutionary and hardworking official. Beilke’s children were uncertain Jews and incomplete Americans; Hodl’s children were native-born Russians and perfect Soviets.
But what about Chava’s children in Palestine? Their Moscow cousins were too close to the center of the world and the end of history to pay much attention (other than to extend a generic promise of salvation), while the ones in New York were too busy looking toward Moscow (or doing business). One of Beilke’s daughters may have preferred Eretz Israel to the Soviet Union, but her voice was drowned out by the chorus of world revolution.
Meanwhile, Chava’s children were living a revolution of their own—building, consistently and unapologetically, socialism in one country. Like their Soviet cousins, they were the first generation: “first” because they were Sabras (the Yishuv’s firstborn) and a self-conscious “generation” because they knew that they all belonged to the fraternity of fulfilled prophecy and eternal youth. In the words of Benjamin Harshav, “The cell of life was not the family but the age group sharing a common ideology and reading the new Hebrew journalism. Theirs was a consciousness of the end of all previous history: the end of two thousand years of exile and the end of thousands of years of class warfare—in the name of a new beginning for man and Jew.” And, like their Soviet cousins, they had little use for Tevye. Or rather, Hodl’s children pitied Tevye when they thought of him at all: most of them knew that Sholem Aleichem was the Yiddish Pushkin even if they had never read Tevye the Milkman, and many of them had heard of Mikhoels’s Yiddish theater even if they never went there. In Eretz Israel, the repudiation of Tevye was the cornerstone of the new community, the true beginning of the new beginning for man and Jew. According to Harshav, “it was a society without parents, and for the children growing up, without grandparents; the former admiration for grandfather as the source of wisdom was turned upside down, and the orientation of life was toward the utopian future, to be implemented by the next generation.”87
The American cousins questioned—and sometimes disowned—their fathers. The ones in the Soviet Union and Eretz Israel joined their mothers and fathers in disowning their grandfathers. The task of the “next generation” was to show themselves worthy of their parents by completing the patricidal revolution they had begun. As a fourteen-year-old boy wrote to his parents from Kibbutz Yagur in 1938, “I feel happy that the yoke of the general good has been laid on me, or more precisely, that I have placed the yoke of the general good on my own back and bear it. . . . I desire, as they say, to put myself at the service of my people and land and the world and the workers and everything, so that I can fix and renew things.”88
Like the first Soviet generation and the true believers among their American cousins, the first Sabra generation lived in a world where politics was “the metaphor of all things.” The kibbutz, the moshav, the school, the youth movement, and the military were closely interrelated, mutually dependent, and ultimately subordinate to the political leadership and the cause of Zionist redemption. The Sabra loved their teachers, who were prophets, and worshiped their military commanders, who were teachers. Kindergartens had “Jewish National Fund corners” analogous to Soviet “red corners” (Communist shrines), and the Palmach (the elite strike force of the Jewish military organization, the Haganah) had political officers analogous to Soviet commissars. Both generations lived amid relentless and mostly spontaneous political unanimity; both grew up among living saints and proliferating memorials; both drained swamps and made deserts bloom; and both struggled to merge the personal and the communal into one heroic story of timelessness regained. As David Ben-Gurion proclaimed in 1919, “a distinction between the needs of the individual and the needs of the nation has no basis in the lives of the workers in Eretz Israel.” And as one young Sabra wrote in his diary in 1941, the “memories of private events” had begun to overshadow the “national historical background” in the chronicle of his life. “I will now correct this imbalance and write about enlistment and those who evade it, about the death of Ussishkin and the death of Brandeis, about the wars of Russia. . . . Why should I not write about these things in my diary? These facts are history and will always be remembered, while the details of individuals go astray and get lost in oblivion. Get lost and vanish.”89
The Yishuv was no Soviet Union. It was small, particularist, and proudly parochial. Its unity was entirely voluntary (defectors were despised but free to go), and its warrior energy was directed outward, at the easily identifiable non-Jews. It was messianic but also one among many, unique but also “normal,” in the familiar nationalist mold (which was mostly biblical in the first place). As one Herzliya Gymnasium student wrote in 1937, “this is the nation that has produced great heroes, zealous for freedom, and from whom rose prophets who prophesied the rule of justice and honesty in the world—because this nation is a heroic and noble nation and only the bitter and harsh life of Exile debased it, and this nation is still destined to be a light unto the nations.”90
Zionism and Soviet Communism were both millenarian rebellions against capitalism, “philistinism,” and “chimerical nationality.” But Zionism belonged to the integral-nationalist wing of the twentieth-century revolution against modernity and shared much of its rhetoric and aesthetic. In the 1930s, Chava’s children did more hiking, exercising, and singing around the campfire than did their Soviet cousins; talked more about the healthy (masculine) body; communed more passionately with nature (in a year-round dacha pastoral); and spent a lot more time learning how to shoot. The Soviets were trying to create a perfect mix of Mercurianism and Apollonianism; the Zionists were trying to transform Mercurians into Apollonians. The Soviets were erasing the differences between town and country by building cities; the Zionists were overcoming the diaspora urbanism by building villages. Hodl’s children wanted to be poets, scholars, and engineers; Chava’s children wanted to be armed farmers and “Hebrew commanders.” Beilke’s children wanted to be somebody else’s children—preferably Hodl’s.
If Hodl’s husband, Perchik, did indeed become a people’s commissar, publishing house director, secret police official, or a prominent Old Bolshevik, his family’s prosperity and his children’s happy childhoods were likely to end during the so-called Great Terror of 1937–38. Soviet socialism strove for complete human transparency in pursuit of equality; the full coincidence of every person’s life with the story of world revolution (and ultimately with the story of Stalin’s life as recorded in the “Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party”). Having vanquished its military enemies and political opponents, destroyed all “exploiting classes,” replaced (or “reforged”) the “bourgeois specialists,” suppressed internal dissenters, nationalized both peasants and pastoralists, and built, by 1934, “the foundations of socialism,” the regime had no open and socially classifiable enemies left. Impurities persisted, however—and so, having proclaimed victory over the past, the regime turned on itself. Watched over by Stalin, committed to boundless violence, haunted by the demons of treason and contagion, and transported by the frenzy of self-flagellation and mutual suspicion, the high priests of the revolution sacrificed themselves to socialism and its earthly prophet. As Nikolai Bukharin wrote to Stalin from prison,
There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. . . . This business could not have been managed without me. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and a third group in yet another way. What serves as a guarantee for all this is the fact that people inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other. . . .
Oh Lord, if only there were some device which would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and ripped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul. . . . No angel will appear now to snatch Abraham’s sword from his hand. My fatal destiny shall be fulfilled. . . .
I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. . . .
I ask you one last time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise).91
And as Nikolai Ezhov, who presided over Bukharin’s execution, later stated on the eve of his own,
During the 25 years of my party work I have fought honorably against enemies and have exterminated them. . . . I purged 14,000 Chekists. But my great guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few of them. . . . All around me were enemies of the people, my enemies. . . . Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips.92
The revolution had finally gotten around to eating its own children—or rather, its own parents, because Hodl and especially Perchik were much more likely to be arrested and shot than the youthful members of the “first Soviet generation.” The revolution was as patricidal as the original revolutionaries had been, and no one was as puzzled by this as the original revolutionaries themselves. According to Hope Ulanovskaia, who had recently returned from the United States,
Once, when after yet another arrest, I asked: “What is going on? Why? What for?” your father [i.e., her husband, an agent of the Main Intelligence Directorate] replied calmly: “Why are you so upset? When I told you how the White officers were being shot in the Crimea, you weren’t upset, were you? When the bourgeoisie and the kulaks were being exterminated, you used to justify it, didn’t you? But now that it’s our turn, you ask: How, why? This is the way it’s been from the very beginning.” I reasoned with him: “I understand that it’s terrible when people are killed, but before we always knew that it was for the sake of the revolution. Now nobody is explaining anything!” And so we started looking into our past, trying to determine when it had all started.93
The Ulanovskys were looking into their past in their own apartment; most of their friends and colleagues were doing it in their interrogation cells. Every prison confession was a (coauthored) attempt to determine the sources of treason, and every public pronouncement was a comment on the origins of perfection. As Babel had said in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934,
In our day, bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution. . . . As writers, we must contribute to the victory of a new, Bolshevik taste in our country. It will not be an insignificant political victory because, fortunately for us, we do not have victories that are not political. . . . The style of the Bolshevik epoch is calm strength and self-control; it is full of fire, passion, power, and joy. Who should we model ourselves on? . . . Just look at the way Stalin forges his speech, how chiseled his spare words are, how full of muscular strength.94
Babel was executed for bad taste—for not mastering the style of the epoch, not having enough calm strength and self-control, not being able to forge himself like Stalin. Because, unfortunately for him, there was nothing in Stalin’s Soviet Union that was not political and muscular. Babel was executed by his own creatures and his only true love: those who could “shuffle their fathers’ faces like a fresh deck of cards”; those “whose fury contained within it everything that was necessary to rule over others”; those who had “murder in their souls”; those who had mastered “the simplest of skills—the ability to kill a man.” The name of Babel’s first interrogator was Lev Shvartsman.
Mikhail Baitalsky was arrested and sent to a camp. My grandmother’s brother Pinkus, a visiting businessman from Poland, was arrested and sent to a camp. My grandfather, Moisei Khatskelevich Goldstein, was arrested, tortured, and released a year and a half later, after Ezhov’s ouster. Tsafrira Meromskaia’s childhood ended when her parents were arrested. And so did Inna Gaister’s. Of Grandma Gita’s children and in-laws gathered around the table at her welcome dinner, at least ten were arrested.
After the arrests of Lipa and my mother, Grandma Gita had been living with Adassa. After Adassa was taken to prison, Grandma had moved in with Veniamin. In early December Elochka, Lipa’s daughter, came home from school one day and found Grandma Gita sitting on the stairs in front of their apartment. Veniamin, without warning Niuma [Lipa’s husband] or Leva, had brought her there and left her by the locked door. Grandma moved in with Niuma. I would often see her there. She was no longer the same proud and happy Grandma I had seen arrive from Poland. I can still picture her with her red wig all twisted round and her bun hanging over her ear. She could not understand why her children had been imprisoned. She kept pacing up and down the apartment, intoning: “It’s all my fault. I have brought grief to my children. I must return home immediately. As soon as I leave, things will get better again.” She was saying all this in Yiddish. Of course, Elochka and I could not understand a word of what she was saying, so Leva had to translate for us.95
Members of the political elite suffered disproportionately during the Great Terror. Because Jews were disproportionately represented within the political elite, they were prominent among the victims. Many of Evgenia Ginzburg’s fellow passengers on the train bound for the Kolyma camps were Jewish Communists, and the same was true of Roziner’s mother’s cellmates at the Butyrki prison in Moscow. There were other women there, “but intelligentsia Communists, including my mother, kept apart from them. Practically all of them were Jews, all believed unconditionally in the purity of the Party, and every one of them thought that she had been arrested by mistake.” Roziner’s mother, Iudit, had graduated from a heder and spent two years in a Jewish gymnasium in Bobruisk before moving (in 1920) to Moscow, where she had become a student at the city’s best school (the Moscow Exemplary School-Commune). After a short stint in Palestine, where she had joined the Communist Party, Iudit had returned to the Soviet Union.96
Members of the political elite suffered disproportionately, but they were not the majority of those affected. The Jews, who were not numerous among nonelite victims, were underrepresented in the Great Terror as a whole. In 1937–38, about 1 percent of all Soviet Jews were arrested for political crimes, as compared to 16 percent of all Poles and 30 percent of all Latvians. By early 1939, the proportion of Jews in the Gulag was about 15.7 percent lower than their share of the total Soviet population. The reason for this was the fact that the Jews were not targeted as an ethnic group. None of those arrested during the Great Terror of 1937–38—including Meromskaia’s parents, Gaister’s relatives, and my grandfather—was arrested as a Jew. The secret police did put together several Jewish-specific cases, but they were all politically (not ethnically) defined. Iudit Roziner-Rabinovich, for example, was arrested during the sweep of “Palestinians,” but her interrogator (himself Jewish) was interested in Zionist organizations, not nationality. Samuil Agursky, the great crusader against Zionism, Moyshe Litvakov, his political enemy and fellow leader of the Party’s Jewish Section, and Izi Kharik, the Yiddish “proletarian” writer and the author of the poem about the exodus to Moscow, were all arrested as part of the attack against former Bundists (real or imaginary). At the same time, similar campaigns were being waged against the former members of all the other non-Bolshevik parties, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Ukrainian Borotbists, the Azerbaidjani Mussavatists, and the Armenian Dashnaks, among others. And while Jewish national districts and schools were closed down, all other national districts and schools were closed down too, many of them more brutally and abruptly than the Jewish ones (“national” meant an ethnically defined unit within a different ethnically defined unit, such as Jewish or Polish districts and schools in Ukraine).97
Indeed, Jews were the only large Soviet nationality without its own “native” territory that was not targeted for a purge during the Great Terror. Ever since the revolution, the regime had been promoting ethnic particularism in general and diaspora communities (those with “national homes” across the border) in particular. One of the reasons for the latter policy was to offer the neighboring peoples clear and tangible proof of Soviet superiority. A special Politburo decree of 1925 had mandated that the national minorities of the Soviet border regions receive a particularly generous portion of national schools, national territories, native-language publications, and ethnic hiring quotas. The idea behind the “Piedmont Principle” (as Terry Martin calls it) was to instruct, inspire, and influence the peoples of neighboring countries—and perhaps offer them an alternative home. Starting in the mid-1930s, however, as the fear of contagion grew and the nature of the enemy seemed harder to determine, it became painfully obvious to the professionally paranoid that the opposite of inspirational influence was hostile penetration, and that cross-border kinship meant that bad Soviets, and not just good foreigners, might seek an alternative home. Between 1935 and 1938, the Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Iranians, Koreans, Kurds, Latvians, and Poles were all forcibly deported from border regions on the theory that their ethnic ties to neighboring non-Soviets made them uniquely susceptible to alien penetration. And in 1937–38, all diaspora nationalities of the Soviet Union became the subject of special “mass operations” involving quotas of arrests and executions. Twenty-one percent of all those arrested on political charges and 36.3 percent of all those executed were the targets of “national operations.” Eighty-one percent of all those arrested in connection with the “Greek operation” were executed. In the Finnish and Polish operations, the execution rates were 80 and 79.4 percent.98
The Jews did not seem to have an alternative home. Unlike the Afghans, Bulgarians, Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Macedonians, Poles, and Romanians, they were not seen as naturally attractive to foreign spies or congenitally weak as loyal Soviets. In 1939, Soviet publishing houses produced fourteen different titles by Sholem Aleichem on the occasion of his eightieth birthday; the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad organized the exhibition Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR; and the director of the State Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, received the Lenin Order, the title “People’s Artist of the USSR,” and a place on the Moscow City Soviet. Most Soviet Jews were not directly affected by the Great Terror, and of those who were, most suffered as members of the political elite. Because the people promoted to replace them tended to be former peasants and blue-collar workers, the Jewish share in the Party and state apparatus dropped precipitously after 1938. Because the cultural and professional elite was not hit as hard and experienced no significant turnover, the Jewish preeminence among top professionals remained intact.99
And then two things happened. In the second half of the 1930s, following the establishment of High Stalinism and especially during the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet state—now manned by newly promoted ethnic Russians of peasant and proletarian origins—began to think of itself as the legitimate heir to the Russian imperial state and Russian cultural tradition. At the same time, following the rise of Nazism and especially during the Great Patriotic War, more and more Soviet intelligentsia members—now branded inescapably with biological ethnicity—began to think of themselves as Jews.
The Soviet Union was neither a nation-state nor a colonial empire nor a United States of interchangeable citizens. It was a large section of the world that consisted of numerous territorially rooted nationalities endowed with autonomous institutions and held together by the internationalist ideology of world revolution and a cosmopolitan bureaucracy of Party and police officials. It was designed that way and claimed to remain so until its collapse in 1991, but in fact both the ideology and the bureaucracy began to change after about 1932 as a result of the radical collectivization of industry, agriculture, politics, and speech during the “Stalin Revolution.” The newly completed command economy and the newly unified socialist-realist society seemed to require greater transparency, centralization, standardization, and thus—among other things—a unionwide lingua franca and a streamlined system of communications. By the end of the 1930s, most ethnically defined soviets, villages, districts, and “minority” schools had been sacrificed on the altar of a symmetrical federation of relatively homogeneous protonation-states and a few ethnic subunits too well entrenched to uproot (most of them in the Russian Republic).
Modern states require nations at least as much as modern nations require states. By representing and embodying political communities that share a common space, economy, and conceptual currency, they tend to become “ethnicized” in the sense of acquiring a common language, purpose, future, and past. Even the epitome of non-ethnic liberal statehood, the United States of America, has created a nation bound by a common language-based culture and thus by a sense of kinship more tangible and durable than the cult of a few political institutions. The Soviet Union’s version of “the American people” was Sovietness, of course, but the Soviet Union was an ethnoterritorial federation in which each unit had its own native language and native speakers (except for the Russian Federation, which was still doing penance for its imperial past while also serving as an example of an ethnicity-free society). For the first fifteen years or so, Sovietness seemed to refer to the sum total of all native languages without exception plus a Marxist cosmopolitanism centered in Moscow. After Stalin’s Great Transformation, however, the language of Marxist cosmopolitanism became the lingua franca of the entire Soviet command society. That language was Russian (not Esperanto, as some people proposed)—and Russian, in addition to being the language of Marxist cosmopolitanism, was the proud possession of a very large group of people and the revered object of a powerful Romantic cult. Moreover, it was the everyday language of top Bolshevik officials, most of whom (including the important Jewish contingent) were members of the Russian intelligentsia as well as revolutionaries of “the Social Democratic nationality.” Equally devoted to Pushkin and world revolution, they did not sense any tension between the two because most of them believed that Pushkin and the world revolution were fraternal twins. In a familiar paradox of nationalism, the Soviet advance toward modernization and unification led to the “Great Retreat” toward the Volk. The leap into socialism resulted in Russification.
The Soviet Union never became the Russian nation-state, but the country’s Russian core did acquire some national content (although not as much as the other union republics), and the overarching concept of Sovietness did come to rely on elements of Russian nationalism (although never conclusively or consistently). “Russian” and “Soviet” had always been related: first as the only nonethnic peoples of the USSR and eventually as partially ethnicized reflections of each other: the Russianness of the Russian Republic was relatively underdeveloped because the Sovietness of the Soviet state was predominantly Russian.
When, during the civil war, Lenin appealed to the revolutionary workers and peasants to defend their “Socialist Fatherland,” the Russian word “Fatherland” could not be stripped of its presocialist connotations whether Lenin wanted it to be or not (he probably did not). When, during the mid-1920s, Stalin called on the Party to build “socialism in one country,” at least some Party members must have associated that country with the one in which they were born. And when, in 1931, Stalin urged the Soviet people to industrialize or perish, his reasoning had more to do with Russian national pride (as he understood it) than with Marxist determinism:
To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. . . . In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will uphold its independence.100
The “mature” Stalinist state ensured the “friendship of the peoples of the USSR” by promoting the nationalism of the non-Russian republics (complete with the officially sponsored and highly institutionalized cults of national bards and ethnic roots). It cemented that friendship by promoting the cult of the Russian people, language, history, and literature (as a common Soviet asset, not as the exclusive property of the Russian Republic, which remained a ghost entity until the end of the Soviet Union). In 1930, Stalin ordered the proletarian poet Demian Bedny to stop carrying on about the proverbial Russian sloth. “The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries are avidly studying the edifying history of the Russian working class, its history and the history of Russia. . . . All this fills (cannot but fill!) the hearts of the Russian workers with the feeling of revolutionary national pride capable of moving mountains, of working miracles.” Bedny was too proletarian a poet to get the point. On November 14, 1936, a special Politburo decree banned his comic opera Warriors for “slandering the warriors of the Russian historical epics, the most important of whom live on in popular consciousness as the representatives of the heroic traits of the Russian people.” Several months earlier, Bukharin had been attacked for calling the Russians “a nation of Oblomovs,” and a few days before that (on February 1, 1936), a special Pravda editorial had formally announced that the Russian people were “first among equals” in the family of Soviet nations. By the end of the decade, patriotism had superseded world revolution, “traitors to the motherland” had replaced class enemies, most of the newly Latinized languages had been switched to Cyrillic, and all non-Russian schools in the Russian regions of the Russian Federation had been closed down. The study of Esperanto had become illegal, and the study of Russian had become obligatory. In May 1938, Boris Volin (an education official and the former chief censor) summarized the new orthodoxy in an article entitled “The Great Russian People,” published in the Party’s main theoretical journal:
The Russian people have every right to be proud of their writers and poets. They have produced Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language, the founder of modern Russian literature, who enriched humanity with his immortal artistic creations. . . . The Russian people have every right to be proud of their scientists, who have provided more evidence of the inexhaustible creative genius of the Russian people. . . . The musical gifts of the Russian people are rich and diverse. . . . No less powerful are the manifestations of the Russian popular genius in the realm of fine arts and architecture. . . . The Russian people have created a theater that, one can say without exaggeration, has no equal in the world. . . .
The Judas Bukharin, moved by his hatred of socialism, slandered the Russian people by describing them as “a nation of Oblomovs.”. . . This is base slander against the Russian nation, against the courageous, freedom-loving Russian people, who have struggled and toiled tirelessly to forge their happy present and are in the process of creating an even happier and more beautiful future. . . . The great Russian people find themselves in the forefront of the fight against the enemies of socialism. The great Russian people are at the head of the struggle of all the peoples of the Soviet land for the happiness of mankind, for communism.101
At first, nothing seemed to suggest that the new role of the “Great Russian People” was incompatible with the continued openness of the Soviet cultural elite to the Jewish immigrants from the former Pale. Indeed, some of the leading ideologues of Russian patriotism (including Boris Volin, the jurist I. Trainin, the critic V. Kirpotin, and the historian E. Tarle) were ethnic Jews themselves. The young Lev Kopelev had not been alone in being impressed by Stalin’s “We do not want to be beaten” speech. “It was then that I, a convinced internationalist, a Soviet patriot, and a representative of the newly formed multinational Soviet people, began to feel an acute sense of hurt and injustice on behalf of Russia, Russian history, and the Russian word.”
I was very pleased with this new turn in political propaganda and historical research, this decisive rejection of national nihilism. The Party confirmed and affirmed what I had felt since childhood and become conscious of in my youth.
Such concepts as the “Motherland,” “patriotism,” the “people,” and “national” were being restored. And I mean restored—because previously they had been toppled, overthrown. . . .
I enjoyed the films about Peter the Great, Alexander Nevsky, and Suvorov; I liked the patriotic poems by Simonov, the books by E. Tarle and the “Soviet Count,” Ignatiev; I reconciled myself to the return of officers’ ranks and epaulets.
My childhood attachment to the historical tales of our land came back to life in an adult form. And the never forgotten sounds of “Poltava” and “Borodino” rang out with renewed force.102
No one knew “Poltava” as thoroughly as Babel’s and Marshak’s Jewish boys—or their Soviet children. When the Great Patriotic War began, those children (Pavel Kogan’s “generation”) found themselves “amid the dust of battle” restaging both Poltava and the revolution. Boris Slutsky was a young political officer who spoke to the troops “on behalf of Russia”:
And I remind them of our native land.
They’re silent, then they sing, then they rejoin the battle.103
Slutsky’s friend David Samoilov was his company’s Komsomol leader. While waiting to go to the front, he wrote a paper on Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
What I (and perhaps someone before me) was trying to do was discern—through Tolstoy’s eyes—the shape of socialism, of social equality, in the structure of the patriotic war. . . . A literary young man was seeking a confirmation of his state not in life, which he did not know, but in literature, which provided a firm support for the spirit. The point (as I sensed very deeply) was to leave behind the idea of intelligentsia exclusivity, or rather, the idea of the primacy of obligations over rights. I needed to shed this idea, which had been instilled in me—unwittingly—by my environment, upbringing, education, the IFLI elitism, and my dream of poetic talent and special election.104
He found exactly what he was looking for: the Great Patriotic War as a reenactment of the Patriotic War of 1812 and his own spiritual journey as a reflection of Pierre Bezukhov’s—and possibly of Babel’s, too, for the story of the Jewish runt’s “awakening” is but an ethnic version of the canonical Mercurian-Apollonian (intelligentsia-people) encounter. “The exhilaration I felt,” wrote Samoilov, “came from the feeling of having common duties shared by all, and at the same time from the perception of a special value of my own individuality as equal to any other.” Before long, Samoilov found his very own Platon Karataev and his very own Efim Nikitich Smolich. “The only person in our unit who truly revered spirituality and knowledge was Semyon Andreevich Kosov, a plowman from the Altai. A man of large stature and enormous strength, he felt a special tenderness for all those weaker than he was, be they animals or human beings. He suffered from hunger more than anyone else, and sometimes I would give Semyon my soup, while he would hide a tiny lump of sugar for me. But it was not this exchange that sustained our friendship—it was the mutual attraction of the strong and the weak.”105
Samoilov combined weakness with knowledge because he was a Russian intelligent and because he was a Jew. For him, the “Russian people” he loved and wanted to share duties with were both an alien tribe (the Russians) and an alien class (the people). This was an old Romantic equation, of course, but it seems to have been more passionately felt by first-generation intelligentsia members freshly liberated from “tonguelessness.” In Samoilov’s version of Mandelstam’s immersion in the “rootedness and the sound of Great Russian speech, slightly impoverished by intelligentsia conventions,” Semyon stood for language as both life and truth. “Semyon’s wisdom came not from reading but from all the experiences that had accumulated in popular speech. Sometimes I felt that he had no thoughts of his own, just clichés for all occasions. But now I understand that we also speak in clichés, except that we quote inaccurately and haphazardly. Our signs may be individualized but they are pale as speech acts. The people swim in the element of speech, washing their thoughts in it. We use speech to rinse our mouths.”106
Sharing duties with Semyon was an immaculate culmination of Babel’s and Bagritsky’s first loves. During the Great Patriotic War, the Jewish Revolution against Jewishness seemed to achieve—finally—a perfect fusion of true internationalism and rooted Russianness, knowledge and language, mind and body. Samoilov and Semyon were fighting shoulder to shoulder “on behalf of Russia,” the world’s savior. Samoilov the poet was Semyon’s true heir. “Semyon . . . belonged to the Russian folk culture, which has now faded away almost completely along with the disappearance of its carriers, the peasants. This culture lived for many centuries and became an inherent part of the national culture, having dissolved into the geniuses of the nineteenth century, above all Pushkin.”107
Samoilov’s fulfillment was platonic, fraternal, and mostly verbal. Margarita Aliger’s passion was a direct—and self-consciously female—response to Babel’s “First Love,” “First Goose,” and “First Fee.” Her long poem “Your Victory” (1945–46) is the story of an all-conquering love between a beautiful Jewish girl from “Russia’s southern coast,” who “escaped the prison of warm rooms and favorite books,” and a “savage, fearless, and obstinate” boy from a Cossack village, who “stole watermelons and teased girls.” They both belonged to the generation conceived by the revolution, raised to the sounds of the “Internationale,” and tempered by the First Five Year Plan—a generation that “will never grow old” and “will never learn how to save money or keep goods under lock and key.” They shared hopes, friends, and their faith; they got married in Turkmenistan, where she was a Komsomol official; and they moved to Moscow, where they received a new apartment with “two rooms, a balcony, a hallway.” They were in love, but they had different “characters” and different “souls,” and their last and decisive revolutionary battle was the one for mutual discovery, recognition, and acceptance. Or rather, it was her personal battle to learn how to “live in dignity” with someone as “huge, frightening, good, perfidious, faithful, and confused” as he was.
Whose muse will do you justice,
The frightening, virtuous, bold,
The heart of both light and darkness,
The soul of the child and the artist,
The wonderful Russian soul?
. . . . . . . . . .
When, gradually, you unearth
Your husband’s most hidden riches,
You see that he’s so much worse
And better than what you had pictured.
That everything you had imagined,
All things you’d longed to admire
Are trivial, slight, and wretched
Compared to this blackness and fire.
He was doubly different, desirable, and enigmatic because he was both a man and a Russian—the way Samoilov’s Semyon was both a “man of the people” and a Russian. Eventually, Aliger’s protagonist (perhaps Margarita too) understands that “there is no other path and no other fate” for her, but it is only during the Great Patriotic War, when he leaves for the front and she stays behind to share (as poet and political “agitator”) “the miraculous faith of the Russian people,” that she makes her final commitment and promises to bear him a daughter in his image. “You can give her any name you like.”
But it is too late: because he will never come back from the front and they will never have children. The moment of greatest intimacy and true fulfillment (as compared to Babel’s and Bagritsky’s flailing adolescent attempts) is the beginning of the end of the Russian-Jewish First Love. The reason is “blood.”
Chased out of Odessa by the Nazis and wandering somewhere in the Tatar wilderness, Margarita’s mother loses her usual “serenity and nobility” and acquires “a frightening, charred resemblance / To those who have no homeland.” Why is that? Are they not at home in the Soviet Union?
Staying warm by the stove somehow,
Improvising a table to set,
“We are Jews,” said my mother, “How
Could you ever, how dared you forget?”
Margarita is not sure what she means. She does have her Motherland, after all, one she loves all the more because “you don’t get to choose it.”
Yes, I dared! Can’t you see, I dared!
There was so much else I could love.
Why would I—why should I have cared,
When so blue was the sky above?
Is Motherland—is nationality—not about “Pushkin’s golden tales,” “Gogol’s enchanting voice,” “Lenin’s expansive gesture,” and “the unsparing love of a wild Russian man”? Not entirely, as it turns out.
Our freedom’s firstborn generation,
Raised in blissful ignorance of Hell,
We forgot about our ancient nation,
But the Nazis—they remembered well.
We all knew that war demanded valor,
Not that it required one final choice;
We all knew that human blood had color,
Not that it might also have a voice.
When the scythes of Death began to mow,
We found out that Hell had several rungs;
When the time came for the blood to flow,
It cried out in many different tongues.
As I listen to the mortal moaning,
I discern one voice I can recall.
And each day gets louder, more imploring,
Blood’s insistent, subterranean call.108
The Nazis classified people, particularly the Jews, according to the voice of their blood. Most people, and particularly the Jews, responded by hearing their blood’s call. Nowhere did it make more sense than in the Soviet Union, where all citizens, including the Jews, were classified by blood and expected to listen earnestly to its call.
From its inception, the Soviet state had been promoting ethnicity as a remedy against the memory of oppression. In the absence of new oppression, ethnicity was—eventually—going to die from an overdose of oxygen (the way the state itself was going to wither away as a consequence of being strengthened). In the meantime, the state needed to know the nationality of its citizens because it needed to delimit ethnic territories, teach native languages, publish national newspapers, and promote set percentages of indigenous cadres to a variety of positions and institutions. The state kept asking its citizens about their nationality, and they kept answering, over and over again—first according to their self-perception or self-interest and then according to their blood (whether they liked it or not).
With the introduction of the internal passport system in 1932, nationality became a permanent label and one of the most important official predictors of admissions and promotions in the Soviet Union. When, at the age of twenty, Lev Kopelev received his first passport, he did what many of Hodl’s children would do: he chose to be a Jew. Russian and Ukrainian by culture and conviction, he “had never heard the call of blood” but he did understand “the language of memory,” as he put it, and he believed that to renounce his parents, who had always thought of themselves as Jews, would be “a desecration of their graves.” What made his choice easier was the fact that it did not make any difference. One could benefit from being an Uzbek in Uzbekistan or a Belorussian in Belorussia; “Jewish” and “Russian” were—back in 1932—virtually interchangeable (both inside and outside of the Russian Republic).109
But the Kopelev option proved short-lived. As the Soviet Union became more thoroughly ethnicized, ethnic units became more rooted (in history, literature, and native soil), and personal ethnicity became exclusively a matter of blood. When it came to killing enemies, in particular, biological nationality proved far superior to fluid political and class affiliations. On April 2, 1938, as most diaspora ethnic groups were being purged, a special secret police instruction introduced a new, strictly genetic, procedure for determining nationality.
If one’s parents are Germans, Poles, etc., irrespective of where they were born, how long they have lived in the USSR, or whether they have changed their citizenship, etc., the person being registered cannot be classified as Russian, Belorussian, etc. If the nationality claimed by the person being registered does not correspond to his native language or last name (for instance, the person’s name is Müller or Papandopoulo but he calls himself a Russian, Belorussian, etc.), and if the real nationality of the person in question cannot be determined at the time of registration, the “nationality” line is not to be filled in until the applicant produces written proof.110
Germans, Poles, and Greeks were subject to “mass operations”; Jews and Russians were not, but the procedure was the same for everyone. When the Nazis came, most Soviets had no trouble understanding their language.
When the Nazis came, most of Hodl’s children knew that they were, in some sense, Jews. They may never have been to a synagogue, seen a menorah, heard Yiddish or Hebrew, tasted gefilte fish, or indeed met their grandparents. But they knew they were Jews in the Soviet sense, which was also—in essence—the Nazi sense. They were Jews by blood.
When the Nazis came, they began killing Jews according to their blood. Inna Gaister’s Grandma Gita was killed soon after she returned home, and so was Mikhail Agursky’s grandmother and also his great-aunt, and so was my grandmother’s only brother who did not emigrate from the Pale, and so was Tsaytl, Tevye’s daughter, who stayed in their native Kasrilevka, and so were most of her children, grandchildren, friends, and neighbors.
Killed were the old artisans and experienced craftsmen [wrote Vassily Grossman on reentering Ukraine in the fall of 1943]: tailors, hatters, cobblers, tinsmiths, jewelers, painters, furriers, and bookbinders; killed were the workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, stonemasons, and plumbers; killed were the wagoners, tractor operators, truck drivers, and cabinetmakers; killed were the water carriers, millers, bakers, and cooks; killed were the doctors: physicians, dentists, surgeons, and gynecologists; killed were the scientists: bacteriologists, biochemists, and directors of university clinics, killed were the history, algebra, and trigonometry teachers; killed were the lecturers, assistant professors, masters and Ph.D.’s; killed were the civil engineers, architects, and engine designers; killed were the accountants, bookkeepers, salesmen, supply agents, secretaries, and night guards; killed were the grade school teachers and seamstresses; killed were the grandmothers who knew how to knit socks, bake tasty cookies, cook chicken soup, and make apple strudels with nuts, as well as the grandmothers who could not do any of those things but could only love their children and their children’s children; killed were the women who were faithful to their husbands and the loose women too; killed were the beautiful girls, serious students, and giggly schoolgirls; killed were the plain and the foolish; killed were the hunchbacks, killed were the singers, killed were the blind, killed were the deaf, killed were the violinists and pianists, killed were the two-and three-year-olds; killed were the eighty-year-old men with their eyes clouded by cataracts, their cold transparent fingers, and soft voices like rustling paper; and killed were the crying babies suckling at their mothers’ breasts to the very last moment.111
And for every one of their surviving relatives, for all Jews by blood, as for Margarita Aliger, the spilled blood spoke in their mother tongue. As the Polish Jewish poet Julian Tuwim put it,
I hear voices: “Very well. But if you are a Pole, why do you write ‘We—Jews?’ ” I reply: “because of my blood.” “Then it is racialism?” Nothing of the kind. On the contrary. There are two kinds of blood: the blood that flows in your veins and the blood that flows out of them. . . . The blood of Jews (not “Jewish blood”) flows in deep, broad streams; the dark streams flow together in a turbulent, foaming river, and in this new Jordan I accept holy baptism—the bloody, burning brotherhood of the Jews.112
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