The Jewish Century

Tuwim’s syllogism was as faulty as it was powerful. He did not call on all decent people to call themselves Jews—he was calling on all Jews by blood to become Jews by national faith (and by open declaration) because of the blood of Jews (Jewish blood) that the Nazis were spilling. Ilya Ehrenburg was—uncharacteristically—more straightforward. One month after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he said:

I grew up in a Russian city. My native language is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Now, like all Russians, I am defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this with pride. Hitler hates us more than anyone else. And that does us credit.¹¹³

Jewishness, like Russianness (only more so, because of its Mercurian past) was ultimately about parents and their children. In Grossman’s Life and Fate, the protagonist’s mother writes to her son from the ghetto, shortly before her death:

I never used to feel Jewish: all my friends growing up were Russian; my favorite poets were Pushkin and Nekrasov; and the play that reduced me to tears, together with the whole audience—a congress of Russian village doctors—was Stanislavsky’s production of Uncle Vanya. And, Vitia dear, when I was fourteen and our family decided to emigrate to South America, I told my father: “I’ll never leave Russia—I’d rather drown myself.” And so I didn’t go.

But now, during these terrible days, my heart is filled with a maternal tenderness toward the Jewish people. I never knew this love before. It reminds me of my love for you, my dearest son.¹¹⁴

Her son, Viktor Pavlovich (in fact, “Pinkhusovich,” but his mother had Russified his patronymic) Shtrum becomes Jewish because of his love for his mother—because of what the Nazis are doing to her.

Never, before the war, had Viktor thought about the fact that he was a Jew, or that his mother was a Jew. Never had his mother spoken to him about it—either during his childhood or during his years as a student. Never while he was at Moscow University had one student, professor, or seminar leader ever mentioned it.

Never before the war, either at the institute or at the Academy of Sciences, had he ever heard conversations about it.

Never—not once—had he felt a desire to speak about it to [his daughter] Nadya, to explain to her that her mother was Russian and her father Jewish.¹¹⁵

His mother’s last letter would force him to hear the “call of blood.” The sight of the liberated areas—“Ukraine without the Jews,” as Grossman called it—might cause it to grow even louder. And the gradual rise of unabashed popular anti-Semitism—first in the Nazi-occupied territories, then in remote evacuation centers, and eventually in the Russian heartland—might make it impossible to resist. Ukraine, in particular, had been the main stage for the old Pale’s “two solitudes,” the revolution’s bloodiest pogroms, and the Soviet state’s war against the peasants (at least some of whom identified the Soviet state with the Jews—from anti-Semitic habit and because of Jewish visibility in the Party). Now, after “three years of constant exposure to relentless, exterminatory, anti-Semitic rhetoric and practices” (as Amir Weiner puts it), some Soviet citizens seemed to be saying, for the first time in around two decades, that they preferred their Ukraine “without the Jews.”¹¹⁶

Perhaps most important, and most fateful for “state Jews” like Shtrum and Hodl’s children, the Party kept strangely silent (for the time being)—silent about the new anti-Semitic talk, about the Kiev pogrom of September 1945, and about what had happened to Soviet Jews under the Nazis. The experience of a total ethnic war had made the newly ethnicized Soviet regime even more self-conscious about blood and soil, or rather, about the blood of those who had a formal claim to the Soviet soil. The Jews were not a regular Soviet nationality, and this seemed to mean that they were not entitled to their own martyrs, their own heroes, and perhaps even their own national existence. And this, after what had happened to his mother and all of her friends and neighbors, might force Viktor Shtrum to rethink both his Soviet patriotism and his Jewish nationality.¹¹⁷

This would not happen until late in the war, however. In the early stages, when more and more Soviet soil was being overrun by the Nazis, and more and more Soviet patriots of Jewish nationality were heeding the call of blood without ceasing to be Soviet patriots, the Party had not been shy about proclaiming its commitment to Jewish martyrs, heroes, and national existence. Two months after the invasion, it had sponsored “An Appeal to World Jewry” signed by four well-known Yiddishists and several Soviet cultural celebrities of Jewish background, including the Bolshoi conductor S. Samosud, the physicist Petr Kapitsa, and the chief socialist-realist architect Boris Iofan (who was still at work on the ultimate public building of all time, the Palace of the Soviets). On the day the appeal was published (August 24, 1941), a special “rally of the representatives of the Jewish people” was broadcast by Radio Moscow to the Allied countries. Both the written appeal and the radio addresses referred to their audience as “brother-Jews the world over,” emphasized the role of the Jews as the primary victims of Nazism, expressed pride in the heroism of their fighting “kinsmen,” and called on those who were far from the battlefields for help and support. In the words of the published document, “Throughout the tragic history of our long-suffering people—from the time of Roman domination through the Middle Ages—there has never been a period that can compare to the horror and calamity that fascism has brought to all humanity and, with particular ferocity, to the Jewish people.”

In this hour of horror and calamity, it turned out that the Jewish people—“ethnic” or religious, Communist, Zionist, or traditionalist—were one family. As the director of the State Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, put it,

Along with all the citizens of our great country, our sons are engaged in battle, dedicating their lives and blood to the great patriotic war of liberation, being waged by the Soviet people.

Our mothers themselves are sending their sons into this battle for justice, for the great cause of our free Soviet homeland.

Our fathers are fighting alongside their sons and brothers against the enemy who is ravaging and annihilating the people.

And you, our brothers, remember that here in our country, on the battlefields, your fate as well as the fate of the countries you live in is being decided. Don’t be lulled by the thought that Hitler’s brutal savagery will spare you.

Of all the brothers and sisters living outside of the Soviet Union and occupied Europe, the largest number lived in America. It was to them that most of the appeals were directed, and it was from them that the strongest fraternal sentiment was expected. In the words of Ilya Ehrenburg, “There is no ocean behind which you can hide. . . . Your peaceful sleep will be disturbed by the cries of Leah from Ukraine, Rachel from Minsk, Sarah from Białystok—they are weeping over their slaughtered children.”¹¹⁸

Mikhoels, Ehrenburg, and others were moved by the “call of blood” and moral outrage. The Soviet officials who sponsored the rally and edited the speeches were mostly interested in financial assistance and the opening of a second front. (Although some of them may have heard the call of blood too: the head of the Soviet external propaganda apparatus, Solomon Lozovsky, was himself an ethnic Jew, as were the Soviet ambassadors to Great Britain and the United States, I. M. Maisky and K. A. Umansky, who met with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion in 1941 as part of the Soviet effort to court world Jewish organizations.) In late 1941–early 1942, the Soviet Bureau of Information created a special Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Its purpose (like that of several others formed at the same time: the Women’s, Scholars’, Slavic, and Youth Committees) was to cultivate a specialized overseas constituency for the benefit of the Soviet war effort. The JAFC’s main task was to raise money in the United States. The committee’s leaders were Mikhoels, Soviet Jewry’s most recognizable face, and Shakhno Epstein, a journalist, the Party’s Jewish Section veteran, and a former Soviet secret agent in the United States.¹¹⁹

During World War II, the Soviet state received around $45 million from various Jewish organizations, most of them U.S.-based. The greatest fund-raising effort of all was the North American tour undertaken in the summer and fall of 1943 by Mikhoels and a member of JAFC’s presidium, Itsik Fefer, a Yiddish writer and secret police informer. Mikhoels and Fefer spoke at mass rallies (the one at the Polo Grounds in New York was attended by about fifty thousand people); negotiated with the leaders of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization (in ways that had been approved by Soviet officials); and met with—among many others—Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Cantor, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Yehudi Menuhin. The visit was enormously successful: American audiences responded eagerly to the Soviet Jewish appeals, and both Mikhoels and Fefer were greatly impressed by the wealth, influence, and generosity of American Jewish organizations. The tour’s chief organizer was Ben-Zion Goldberg, a pro-Soviet Yiddish journalist, immigrant from the Russian Empire, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law. Some of Tevye’s surviving children and grandchildren were finally getting together again.¹²⁰

Within the Soviet Union, Tevye’s surviving children and grandchildren—including those, like Viktor Shtrum, who had never considered themselves Jewish—were finally getting together again, in ways that threatened to overwhelm the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. As Perets Markish stated at the JAFC Second Plenary Session in February 1943, “A colonel from one of the tank units came up to me a while ago. ‘I am a Jew,’ he said, ‘and I would like to fight as a Jew. I would like to contact the appropriate authorities to suggest forming separate Jewish units.’ . . . Then I asked him: ‘How effective do you think such units will be?’ And he replied: ‘Uniquely effective. The Jewish soldiers have only one choice: to kill the enemy or perish.’ ”¹²¹

A year later, a first lieutenant teaching at the Penza Artillery Academy wrote to Mikhoels asking for help in getting transferred to the front. “I, too, am a Jew, and I have a personal score to settle with Hitler’s gang. The German thugs massacred my relatives who were living in Odessa and destroyed our happy, quiet life. And I want to take revenge for it. Revenge, revenge, and more revenge, in every place and at every moment.”¹²²

As the Soviet Army rolled westward, the demands for a specifically Jewish answer to the specifically Jewish suffering became one “insistent, subterranean call.” Soviet Jews were writing to the Anti-Fascist Committee asking for help in burying and commemorating the dead, chronicling Jewish martyrdom and heroism, regaining access to prewar homes, and combating growing anti-Semitism. But more than anything else, they were writing about the insistent, subterranean call itself. As one war veteran put it in a letter to Mikhoels, “Let us not be ashamed of our blood. And what is more, in our country we Jews are not poor relations. I have grown convinced that Israel lived, lives, and will go on living forever and ever. My eyes are full of tears. They are not tears of grief, but of joy.”¹²³

Another one, a lieutenant of the guards and a “senior engineer,” addressed the entire committee:

I make this appeal to you as a member of the younger generation of adult Jews.

We see in you the representatives of a Great Nation—a nation of genius and martyrdom. Through you we express our hope for a distinctive statehood and national-cultural autonomy. We cannot allow the disappearance of a wonderful nation that gave the world some of its brightest luminaries and has preserved, through centuries of persecution, death, and suffering, the banner of humanism and internationalism, an unparalleled thirst for creativity, exploration, and invention, the dream of a happily reunited mankind, and a faith in progress.

You are the only headquarters of that wonderful nation in the USSR. Only you can assure the preservation of our Great Nation of prophets, innovators, and martyrs.¹²⁴

Some members of the committee were wary of usurping the Party’s role. (As one Old Bolshevik and experienced Party and state official, M. I. Gubelman, put it, “the nationalities question in our country has been sufficiently addressed by Comrade Stalin and needs no further amendments.”) But many, especially the Yiddish writers in the committee’s presidium, seem to have felt that they did, in a sense, represent the Jewish people, and that the Jewish people required special consideration because of the national tragedy that had befallen them and because the survivors of that tragedy were their people, their blood relatives.¹²⁵

The boldest political initiative that resulted from this sentiment was the February 1944 letter to Stalin, in which the committee leaders Mikhoels, Epstein, and Fefer proposed the creation of a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic in the Crimea. First, they argued, the Jewish refugees from the Nazi-occupied territories had no homes or families to go back to; second, the creation of national intelligentsias among “fraternal peoples” had rendered the professionals of “Jewish nationality” superfluous; third, the existing Yiddish cultural institutions were too few and too scattered to meet Jewish cultural requirements; and fourth, the war had led to a resurgence of anti-Semitism and, as a reaction to it, Jewish nationalism. The existing Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, they concluded, was too remote from the “main Jewish toiling masses” and thus incapable of solving “the administrative and legal problem of the Jewish people” in the spirit of the “Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy.”¹²⁶

The Politburo members Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov (the first Jewish, the latter two married to Jewish women) seemed cautiously sympathetic, but Stalin did not like the idea and the project died a slow bureaucratic death (despite a brief flare of enthusiasm following the deportation of the Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia and Kazakhstan). The alternative plan of resettling the Jews in the former Republic of Volga Germans appealed to Fefer and Perets Markish as an act of “historical justice” but was vetoed by Molotov as another quixotic attempt to put “an urban nation . . . on a tractor.” The “Jewish problem,” it appeared, could not be solved in the spirit of the Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy.¹²⁷

Disappointing as these reverses may have been, they occurred in the dark recesses of “apparatus” politics and concerned the wartime refugees from the former Pale of Settlement, not their kinsmen in the capitals (Tsaytl’s surviving children, not Hodl’s). Everything changed, however, after the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine. In an attempt to put pressure on Britain and acquire an ally in the Middle East, the Soviet Union had supported a separate Jewish state, supplied Jewish fighters with arms (via Czechoslovakia), and promptly recognized Israel’s independence. It was inside the USSR, however, that the official encouragement of Zionism produced the most striking and—for Soviet officials—disconcerting results. Assuming that they were within the boundaries of the official policy, or possibly no longer caring whether they were or not, thousands of Soviet Jews, most of them Jews “by blood” from Moscow and Leningrad, took the occasion to express their feelings of pride, solidarity, and belonging. As one Moscow student wrote to the JAFC,

Please help me join the Israeli Army as a volunteer. At a time when the Jewish people are shedding their blood in an unequal struggle for their freedom and independence, my duty as a Jew and a Komsomol member is to be in the ranks of their fighters.

I am twenty-two years old; I am in good physical shape and have sufficient military training. Please help me fulfill my duty.¹²⁸

Before the war, being a Komsomol member of Jewish descent had meant being an internationalist and, for Hodl and her children, an avid follower of Russian high culture. After the war—and apparently still in the spirit of Leninst-Stalinist nationalities policy—it meant being a proud ethnic Jew too. As another Muscovite wrote two days earlier, “there is no doubt that the government of the USSR will not hinder this effort [of sending arms and volunteers to Palestine], just as it did not hinder the campaign of aid to Republican Spain.” Jewish national redemption equaled anti-Fascism equaled Soviet patriotism. “A tremendous change has taken place in our lives: our name—‘Jew’—has been raised so high that we have become a nation equal to other nations. At present, a small handful of Jews in the State of Israel is conducting an intense struggle against Arab aggression. This is also a struggle against the English empire. It is a struggle not only for an independent State of Israel, but also for our future, for democracy and justice.”¹²⁹

Comrade Stalin and the Soviet government, according to another letter to the JAFC, “had always helped independence fighters” (unlike “the English and American scum,” who are “inciting, and will always incite, the Arabs”). Ultimately, however, the Jewish cause in Palestine was the cause of all Jews because all Jews were related by blood and because of what they had all been through. “Now [wrote another JAFC correspondent], when a war to the death is being waged, when the war is getting more and more intense, when our brothers and sisters are shedding their blood, when the fascist Arab gangs supported by Anglo-American imperialism are trying to strangle the heroic Jewish people and drown them in blood, we, Soviet Jews, cannot sit and wait in silence. We must actively help those self-sacrificial heroes triumph, and active help means fighting alongside our brothers.”¹³⁰

As Fefer would later describe the May days of 1948, “we were under siege. Dozens of people would come every day.” And as G. M. Kheifets (Fefer’s deputy in the JAFC, the committee’s principal secret informer, and formerly the head of Soviet espionage on the West Coast of the United States) reported to the Central Committee of the Party, most visitors wanted to go to Palestine as volunteers.

The majority of the petitioners speak not just for themselves, but on behalf of their colleagues and schoolmates. The largest number of requests are from students of Moscow institutions of higher learning: the Law Institute, the Chemistry Institute, the Foreign Language School, the Institute of Chemical Machine-Building, and others. There are also petitions from Soviet employees—engineers from the Steel Research Center and the Ministry of Armaments—as well as Soviet Army officers. As their motive, the petitioners cite their desire to help the Jewish people in their struggle against English aggression, on behalf of the Jewish state.¹³¹

Indeed, some went so far as to make “unheard-of, shocking” statements (as one JAFC presidium member described them) to the effect that Palestine was their homeland. But what was even more unheard-of and shocking was that thousands of people were making such statements publicly and collectively. On September 3, 1948, the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR, Golda Meyerson (later Meir), arrived in Moscow. What followed was a series of improvised, spontaneous, and unsupervised political rallies—something the Soviet capital had not seen in more than twenty years. For Golda Meir, who had been born in the Russian Empire, visiting the Soviet Union was a kind of homecoming. On the very first Saturday after her arrival, she went to the Moscow synagogue and, having greeted the rabbi, broke into tears. The purpose of her visit, however, and of course the purpose of the new state she represented, was to remind the Jews of all countries that their true home was not their home. During the next month, every one of her public appearances was accompanied by a demonstration of Soviet Jewish identification with Israel. On October 4, 1948, on Rosh Hashanah, thousands of people came to the Moscow synagogue to see her. Some cried, “Shalom”; most had probably never been to a synagogue before. And on October 13, on Yom Kippur, a large crowd followed the Israeli diplomats from the synagogue to the Metropole Hotel, chanting, “Next year in Jerusalem.”¹³²

The two trends—the ethnicization of the Soviet state and the nationalization of ethnic Jews—kept reinforcing each other until Stalin and the new Agitprop officials made two terrifying discoveries.

First, the Jews as a Soviet nationality were now an ethnic diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state. After the creation of Israel and the launching of the Cold War, they had become analogous to the Germans, Greeks, Finns, Poles, and other “nonnative” nationalities presumed to be beholden to an external homeland and thus congenitally and irredeemably alien. The official assault on the Jews would be a belated application of the ethnic component of the Great Terror to an ethnic group that had escaped it (as an ethnic group) in 1937–38.

Second, according to the new Soviet definition of national belonging and political loyalty, the Russian Soviet intelligentsia, created and nurtured by Comrade Stalin, was not really Russian—and thus not fully Soviet. Russians of Jewish descent were masked Jews, and masked Jews were traitors twice over.

All Stalinist purges were about creeping penetration by invisible aliens—and here was a race that was both ubiquitous and camouflaged; an ethnic group that was so good at becoming invisible that it had become visible as an elite (perhaps the Soviet elite). Here was a nationality that did not possess its own territory (or rather, possessed one but refused to live there), a nationality that did not have its own language (or rather, had one but refused to speak it), a nationality that consisted almost entirely of intelligentsia (or rather, refused to engage in proletarian pursuits); a nationality that used pseudonyms instead of names (this seemed true not only of Old Bolsheviks and professional writers but also of most immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement: the children of Baruchs, Girshas, and Moshes had routinely changed their patronymics to Borisovich, Grigorievich, and Mikhailovich). Being Jewish became a crime: those who claimed a separate Yiddish culture were “bourgeois nationalists”; those who identified with Russian culture were “rootless cosmopolitans.”

The more brutal, if relatively small-scale, campaign was waged against the first group (the public Jews). In January 1948, the best-known Soviet Yiddishist, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders by the secret police. (The man who had lured him into the trap, a Jewish theater critic and police informer, V. I. Golubov-Potapov, was murdered with him. They were both tied up, thrown to the ground, and run over by a truck as part of the plot to make it look like a traffic accident.) Over the next two years, all Yiddish theaters and writers’ organizations were closed, and most Yiddish writers were arrested. In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen former members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were put on trial as “bourgeois nationalists.” One was spared; one died in prison; and the remaining thirteen were sentenced to death (one month before the trial began) and shot on the same day (one month after the trial ended).

Most of the accused—especially the fiction writers David Bergelson, Isaak Fefer, Leiba Kvitko, and Perets Markish—were Communist true believers who had dedicated most of their lives to promoting Stalin’s “socialist content” in Yiddish “national form.” Such had been the official Party policy toward the formerly abused nationalities in general and the long-suffering Jewish people in particular. According to Fefer, “I wanted my people to be like all the others. . . . It seemed to me that only Stalin could correct the historic injustice committed by the Roman emperors. It seemed to me that only the Soviet government could correct this injustice by creating a Jewish nation.” He was right, of course. The Soviet government had made a serious effort to make the Jews “like all the others” and had amply rewarded those who had helped lead the charge. As Fefer said at the trial, “I am the son of a poor teacher. The Soviet government made me a human being and a fairly well known poet too.” And as Kvitko said a few days later, “Before the revolution, I lived the worthless life of a miserable stray dog. Since the Great October Revolution, I have lived thirty wonderful, soaring, useful years filled with happiness in my beloved homeland, where every blade of grass smiles on me.”¹³³

And then, for reasons they could not quite understand, the same Soviet government had reclassified the Jews from a would-be normal nationality comparable to the Ukrainians or Mordvinians to a potentially disloyal nationality similar to the Poles or Greeks. The Jewish national form had become the symptom of a hostile bourgeois content. Saying in public that your mother’s name was Hannah had become a nationalist act.

Some refused to go along. As Solomon Lozovsky put it, “My mother’s name was Hannah too; so what, am I supposed to be ashamed of it? What kind of strange mentality is that? Why is it considered nationalism?” And as for the attack against Yiddish, “if you write for a Yiddish newspaper, you write in Yiddish. But when Bergelson says that this constitutes nationalism, then what is on trial here is the Yiddish language itself. This defies comprehension. You can write in a Negro language if you want. It’s up to you. What matters is what you write, not what language you write in.”¹³⁴

Such missionary universalism had long since stopped being the official Soviet policy, and most of the accused, especially those who had championed the idea of Jewish settlement in areas that had been vacated by the summarily deported Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, knew it only too well. The question was whether the Jews would join the Crimean Tatars, who had been exiled to Uzbekistan, or the Uzbeks, whom the Soviet government had helped become a nation “like all the others.” As Fefer explained, “I was very jealous as I watched the Uzbek art festival. . . . I had fought for Jewish institutions as hard as I could.”

That had been before the Cold War, however—back when the Party had not considered all Jewish institutions to be subversive and Fefer “had not believed that resisting assimilation was a form of nationalist activity.” Things were different in 1952. Fefer still “loved his own people” (“for who does not love his own people?”), regarded the Bible as “one of the greatest monuments of Jewish culture,” and maintained, under hostile interrogation, that no other nation had “suffered as much as the Jews.” Yet he was also a committed Party member and the designated agent provocateur whose job at the trial was to argue that the love of one’s own people was nationalism, that nationalism was treason, and that all the defendants were therefore guilty as charged. Leiba Kvitko, another committed Communist and professional Yiddishist, seemed to agree:

The . . . thing that I consider myself guilty of—and what I think I am being accused of and feel responsible for—is this. Believing Soviet Yiddish literature to be ideologically healthy and genuinely Soviet, we Yiddish writers, myself included (I may be guiltier than anyone), did not raise the question of how we could contribute to the process of assimilation. I am talking about the assimilation of the Jewish masses. By continuing to write in Yiddish, we could not help becoming a brake on the process of assimilation. Insofar as the work of Soviet writers is ideologically and politically healthy in content, it has helped to bring about the assimilation of the majority of the Jewish population. But in recent years the Yiddish language has stopped serving the masses because it has been abandoned by the masses and thus became a hindrance. When I was the head of the Yiddish Section of the Union of Soviet Writers, I did not propose that the section be closed down. Of this I am guilty. To use a language that has been abandoned by the masses, has become obsolete, and is responsible for setting us apart not only from the larger life of the Soviet Union but also from the bulk of the Jewish population, which has already become assimilated—to use such a language is, it seems to me, a particular form of nationalism.¹³⁵

The Yiddish professionals and other self-described and state-appointed guardians of Jewish culture could be imprisoned or executed. There were very few of them and they had, it is true, set themselves apart “from the bulk of the Jewish population” (including their own children, virtually none of whom knew any Yiddish or showed any interest in Jewish culture). The principal targets of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign, however, were Russians of Jewish descent or, as far as the Party’s Agitprop was concerned, Jews who claimed to be Russians in order to appear Soviet. The Party’s relentless will to purge and its routine “personnel policy” merged to become an exercise in investigative genealogy: every Russian in high position was a potential Jew, and every Jew without exception was a potential enemy.

The campaign to cleanse the Soviet elite of ethnic Jews began as early as May 1939 when, in an apparent attempt to please Hitler, Stalin put Molotov in charge of Soviet diplomacy and ordered him to “get rid of the Jews” in the Commissariat of External Affairs. The purge gathered speed during the Nazi-Soviet alliance; became a part of government policy during the Great Patriotic War (as an expression of revamped official patriotism and a response to the new Jewish self-assertion); and turned into an avalanche in 1949, when ideological contagion became the regime’s chief concern and Jews “by blood” emerged as its principal agents. Party officials responsible for the “cadres” flailed about in search of covert aliens. The closer to the core, the more rot they found.¹³⁶

Who were the guardians of Marxism-Leninism? In 1949, “passport” Jews made up 19.8 percent of all Soviet professors of Marxism-Leninism, 25 percent of all those teaching Marxism-Leninism in the colleges of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Rostov, Saratov, Kazan, and Sverdlovsk, and 7 out of 19 faculty members in the Dialectical and Historical Materialism Unit in the Philosophy Department of Moscow University. At the main Soviet research institute for the study of political economy (wrote the head of Agitprop to the head of the State Planning Agency), out of 51 senior researchers, there were 33 Jews, 14 Russians, and 4 others. (After the first series of firings, the new head of the reformed institute had to apologize to the Central Committee for the fact that out of 34 Academy of Sciences members, corresponding members, and “doctors of sciences” still employed by the institute, there were 20 Jews, 12 Russians, and 2 others.) In August 1949, the Red Presnia District Party Committee discovered that Jews made up 39 percent of the faculty at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence; and in 1950, the newly appointed director of the Institute for the Study of Law reported that he had succeeded in reducing the proportion of admitted Jewish graduate students from 50 to 8 percent. According to another Agitprop investigation, the secretariat of the editorial board of the multivolume History of the Civil War included 14 Jews, 8 Russians, and 6 others. Perhaps worst of all, a review of the main academic mini-Stalins (every discipline was supposed to have its own) revealed that the deans of Soviet philosophers (M. B. Mitin), economists (E. S. Varga), historians (I. I. Mints), and legal scholars (I. P. Trainin) were all ethnic Jews. (Varga had come from Budapest, the others from Russia’s old Pale.) Finally—and most disconcertingly—B. I. Zbarsky, the man who had embalmed Lenin’s body and was still the keeper of Communism’s most sacred relics, was not only a Jew from the Pale of Settlement but also, according to the obligingly efficient secret police, a wrecker and a spy.¹³⁷

And what about those other pillars of official ideology—Russian patriotism and high culture? A group of concerned scholars informed the Central Committee of the Party that 80 percent of the members of the academic council at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Literature (the “Pushkin House”) were Jews. (The Central Committee confirmed the report and ordered swift action.) The secretaries of the Writers’ Union—A. Fadeev, K. Simonov, and A. Surkov—promised mass firings in response to the revelation that Jews made up 29.8 percent of the organization’s Moscow branch. The head of Agitprop, G. F. Aleksandrov, wrote to the secretaries of the Central Committee about the “extremely grave situation” on the musical front: almost all of the leading lights at the Bolshoi (“the center and pinnacle of Russian musical culture”), the Moscow Conservatory, Moscow Philharmony, and Leningrad Conservatory were “non-Russians”—as were the music critics who praised their work and the heads of the arts sections of the central newspapers, who abetted the critics. Why was the History of Russian Music edited by a non-Russian? Why were there so many Jews among the directors of Moscow theaters (42 percent, according to the Central Committee’s personnel data); art exhibits (40 percent); and popular music shows (39 percent)? Why did the 87 Soviet circus directors and administrators include 44 Jews, 38 Russians, and 4 Ukrainians? And what about the number one Russian patriot among journalists—the one whose mother’s name was Hannah? And, speaking of journalists, who was instilling Marxism-Leninism, Russian patriotism, and high culture in the Soviet masses? Pravda had to be purged mercilessly, as did the government’s Izvestiya and the army’s Krasnaia Zvezda. The official organs of the Young Communist League and the Writers’ Union were found to be dominated by Jews; the main sports newspaper was ordered (by the Central Committee’s personnel boss, G. M. Malenkov) to fire 12 journalists; and at the Trade Union Council’s Trud, the proportion of Jewish employees was first reduced to 50 percent and then, after 40 more firings, to a more acceptable 23 percent. The agency that organized the delivery of all 4,638 Soviet newspapers to retailers and subscribers around the country was run by 18 officials, 10 of whom were discovered to be Jews. The situation at the central censorship office (Glavlit) did not inspire “political confidence” for similar reasons.¹³⁸

The more frequent the contact with the enemy, the greater the danger of infection. In whose hands—still speaking of journalists—was Soviet overseas propaganda, an area where political confidence was so hard to earn and so easy to abuse? Jews made up 23 percent of the top managers in the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), and 49 percent in the Radio-Telegraphic Agency of Ukraine (RATAU). The “national composition” of the Soviet Information Bureau was 48 percent Jews, 40 percent Russians, and 12 percent others; the Russian Section of the Foreign Literature Publishing House was 90 percent Jewish; and the official Soviet English-language newspaper, Moscow News, was being produced by 1 Russian, 1 Armenian, and 23 Jews.¹³⁹

The economic base was as rotten as the ideological superstructure. Who was building Soviet cars? Forty-two Jews were arrested and thirteen executed in connection with the “Jewish nationalism” affair at the Moscow Automobile Plant. Who was designing Soviet airplanes? Sixty Jewish researchers were fired from the Zhukovsky Institute (but not S. A. Lavochkin, the creator of LA fighters, or M. L. Mil, the creator of MI helicopters). Why was Soviet tank production being entrusted to Isaak Moiseevich Zaltsman, from the shtetl Tomashpol in Podolia? Why, at the end of the Great Patriotic War, did Jews constitute one-third of all chief engineers at Soviet armaments plants? And who (stage whisper) was building the Soviet atomic bomb? And how were they connected to their kinsmen building the American atomic bomb? And what about the spies who were, in their own way, trying to connect the two atomic bombs?¹⁴⁰

Aliens were everywhere: in your home, under your bed—or even in your bed. Was it a coincidence that Comrade Stalin’s elder son, Yakov, was married to a Jewish woman? (She was arrested after Yakov’s capture by the Germans but released soon after his death.) Or that Comrade Stalin’s daughter kept falling in love with one Jew after another? (Svetlana’s first love, A. Ya. Kapler, was sent into exile, and her first husband, G. I. Morozov, was asked to move out and given a new passport with the marriage entry removed.) And what about all those wives: Comrade Molotov’s, Comrade Andreev’s, Comrade Voroshilov’s?¹⁴¹

Most frightening of all was the realization that the “vigilant Chekists” combating the forces of evil were themselves werewolves. A special secret police investigation of the secret police revealed a massive “Zionist conspiracy” and a hopeless confusion of friend and foe. Lev Shvartsman, the star interrogator who had coauthored Babel’s confession, now produced his own, in which he claimed that he had belonged to a Jewish terrorist organization and had had sex with his son, his daughter, the former state security minister V. S. Abakumov, and the British ambassador. N. I. Eitingon, who had organized the murder of Trotsky (among many others), was accused of planning to murder the Soviet leaders; L. F. Raikhman, who had run the secret surveillance of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was arrested as a Jewish nationalist; Lieutenant Colonel Kopeliansky, who had interrogated the savior of the Budapest Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, was fired as a Jew; and M. I. Belkin, who had staged the Rajk trial in Hungary, confessed to having spied for the Zionists and recruited, among others, the head of the Hungarian secret police and his fellow Jew Gábor Péter. The Soviet espionage network in the United States had to be completely revamped because most of the agents (including the highly successful atomic spy Semyon Semenov, who had “controlled” both the Cohens and the Rosenbergs) were Jews. Even G. M. Mairanovsky, the head of the most secret of all secret police institutions, the Toxicology Laboratory of the Ministry of State Security (“Lab-X”), was unmasked as a Zionist spy. Lab-X specialized in producing poisons, testing them on Gulag inmates, and using them in secret assassinations (including the one of Raoul Wallenberg, according to Pavel Sudoplatov). Mairanovsky had directed Lab-X since 1937 and had personally administered some of his poisons to “enemies” singled out by Soviet leaders for quiet removal (sometimes in the form of an injection during a medical checkup). Now, after repeated beatings, he confessed to having belonged to a Jewish conspiracy within the Ministry of State Security and to having planned the murder of those same leaders on the orders of American Zionists.¹⁴²

Mairanovsky was Stalin’s tool, creature, and worst nightmare. Stalinist purges had always assumed that all departures from perfection were caused by deliberate acts; that deliberate acts were perpetrated by enemies selflessly committed to evil; that commitment to evil was endemic and institutionalized outside the Soviet Union; and that the Soviet Union contained “alien elements” who were predisposed to devil worship because of their social or national origins. In the 1930s, national origins had begun to overshadow social ones, and during World War II, Jewishness had emerged as a perfect combination of suspect tribe and suspect class. Much of the Soviet professional elite was Jewish, and a large number of Jews belonged to the Soviet professional elite. As far as Stalin and his investigators were concerned, the two groups might very well be identical—especially because no elite profession was more esoteric or more invasive than medicine, and because medicine was the most Jewish of all professions.

In traditional societies, those who communicate with spirits are both feared and revered. To ward off evil, one must enter into contact with it; the power to cure suggests the power to injure. By destroying the church’s distinction between priests and magicians, the modern state had reintroduced shamans—or rather, professionals who possessed secret knowledge that could be used to either save or destroy souls, bodies, countries, and the planet Earth. Not unlike Nazi Germany, but much more coherently and consistently, the Soviet Union was a modern state with an official church. The Party, embodied by Stalin, claimed both transcendental and political authority and encouraged a Faustian quest for limitless knowledge on the assumption that scientific truth pursued by trained professionals would coincide with the Marxist-Leninist truth upheld by “conscious” officials. Before the coming of the millennial fusion of the people with the Party and spontaneity with consciousness, however, the Soviet Union remained an uneasily dualistic society, with the Party enforcing ideological orthodoxy among the professionals on whose expertise it depended. In the 1920s, the opposition between commissars and “bourgeois specialists” was stark and asymmetrical; in the 1930s, it seemed to disappear as the new “Soviet intelligentsia” embraced both science and Party orthodoxy; in the 1940s and 1950s, it reemerged with a vengeance in response to the growing demands of the arms race and the widespread sense among war survivors that the great victory entitled them to a greater role in decision making. The more autonomy the Soviet professionals acquired, the more difficult it became to reconcile the science-based modernity they represented with the charismatic faith they were supposed to profess. Stalin’s deathbed crowning as “the coryphaeus of Soviet science” was the last serious attempt to reestablish prewar conceptual seamlessness. In his capacity as linguist and economist, among other things, Stalin argued that no progress toward communism was possible without science, that “no science [could] develop and flourish without a struggle of opinions”; that no struggle of opinions could take place in the shadow of a “closed group of infallible leaders”; and that no one outside the Kremlin was capable of determining what constituted progress, science, or worthy opinions.¹⁴³

For as long as Stalin was alive and incontestably infallible, such reasoning—and the world it held together—seemed to make sense to most members of the Soviet elite. There were three professions, however, that questioned the sacred unity of knowledge and virtue simply by performing their regularly assigned tasks. One was the secret police, which sought out corruption within the Party and thus persisted in acquiring secret knowledge that the Party had no direct access to. This was a familiar problem that came with two familiar solutions: the employment of Mercurian strangers and the repeated extermination of the bearers of autonomous knowledge. The second solution (embraced after the mid-1930s, when strangeness became suspect) proved both cheap and effective because the detective work demanded by Stalin required little special training beyond the mistaken conviction that unmasking more enemies was the best way not to become one. Few professional groups within Soviet society had as high a mortality rate or as little understanding of the nature of their work as the secret police. In 1940, the doomed architect of the Great Terror, N. I. Ezhov, had said: “I purged 14,000 Chekists. But my great guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few of them.” In 1952, the doomed architect of the Jewish “affair,” M. D. Riumin, wrote: “I only admit that during the investigation I did not use extreme measures, but after my mistake was pointed out to me, I corrected it.”¹⁴⁴

Another professional group that undermined the official orthodoxy as a matter of course were the nuclear physicists, whose success in building the bomb seemed to depend on their rejection of Engels’s “dialectics of nature.” Because the building of the bomb was of paramount importance, the official orthodoxy (including the newly mandated mistrust of ethnic Jews) had to be partially waived for the duration of the project. What made such suspension of belief possible was the fact that the group in question was extremely small and the affected portion of the canon relatively marginal. What made it dangerous in the long run was the implicit recognition by the Party that its authority was political and not transcendental. Few professional groups within Soviet society had as high a status or as little need for Marxism-Leninism as the atomic scientists.

Finally, there were the physicians. Under normal circumstances, their expertise did not obviously challenge the Party’s monopoly on truth, but when Stalin entered his seventies and began to lose his vigor, it became clear that the life of the “great leader and teacher”—and thus the fate of world socialism—was in the hands of professionals whose claim to vital knowledge could not be checked or verified—except by other professionals. The Soviet unity of knowledge and virtue had always been tenuous: in one purge after another, experts had been unmasked as wreckers, engineers as saboteurs, spy catchers as spies, and priests as black magicians. Doctors, who fought death for a living, had been featured as “poisoners” at the Bukharin trial of 1938 and in numerous rumors about the untimely deaths of various Soviet leaders. They were never targeted as a class, however—until Stalin confronted limits to his immortality and Jews were identified as key agents of contagion. The first court physicians to be arrested were ethnic Russians, but as the “doctors’ plot” thickened, the campaign against “murderers in white robes” became fused with the assault on “Jewish nationalism.” The most alien of nationalities had merged with the most lethal of professions.¹⁴⁵

Stalin’s attack on the Jews was similar to numerous other attempts to rid the Soviet Union of variously defined groups associated with the pre-Soviet past or the anti-Soviet present. While filling out his personnel form, Viktor Shtrum, in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, comes to Line No. 5, “nationality,” and writes “Jew.”

He had no way of knowing what filling in Line No. 5 would soon mean for hundreds of thousands of people who called themselves Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Jews. . . . He did not know that . . . in a few years many people would be filling in Line No. 5 with the same feeling of doom with which, in past decades, the children of Cossack officers, noblemen, factory owners, and priests had filled in Line No. 6 [“social origin”].¹⁴⁶

There were some differences too. Possibly as a consequence of Stalin’s death in March 1953, the attack on the Jews was on a much less massive scale and was much less lethal than the treatment of the other ethnic groups on Grossman’s list (and many others not on the list), the “national operations” of 1937–38, or the persecution of various “socially alien” categories during the Red Terror and then again in the 1930s. It was also much less consistent than the discrimination against “the children of Cossack officers, noblemen, factory owners, and priests” had been in the 1920s and early 1930s. But this was a matter of degree; what was particularly unusual about the anti-Jewish campaign of the late 1940s–early 1950s was that it combined a focus on the professional elite with a consistently ethnic and pointedly public selection criterion.¹⁴⁷

The targets of the violent cleansing campaigns against “the bourgeoisie” and the “kulaks” had not thought of themselves as belonging to “bourgeois” or “kulak” communities. The victims of the antielite terror of 1937–38 had had no idea why they were being condemned. The majority of those arrested as part of Ezhov’s “national operations” had not known about the existence of such operations and had had no way of separating their “cases” from those of other victims. Even the wholesale ethnic deportations, which had left no doubt about who was being targeted, had been conducted in secret and had gone almost totally unnoticed by the elite (because they had involved the shipment of mostly rural people from one borderland to another).

The anti-Jewish campaign was both public and relatively clear about its objectives. It was directed at some of the most vital and articulate elements of the Soviet state—and it contradicted some of that state’s most fundamental official values. As Lina Kaminskaia, a college student, active Komsomol member, and daughter of a former employee of the Commissariat of Aviation Industry, said in 1952, “Our country’s policy on the national question is incorrect. After the war, the country was hit by a wave of anti-Semitism, which is an expression of fascist ideology. . . . My point of view is the result of what I have been hearing and seeing. . . . Everything I say is based on a firm conviction. My opinion is shared by all my close friends from among the intelligentsia: doctors, engineers, lawyers, students.”¹⁴⁸

Kaminskaia was expelled from both the university and the Komsomol, but it does appear that her views were widely shared by members of the Soviet intelligentsia well beyond her circle of friends. As the prominent film director M. I. Romm wrote to Stalin several years earlier,

Examining my feelings, I realized that for the past few months I have been forced to recall my Jewish origins quite frequently, even though I had never thought about them during the previous twenty-five years of Soviet rule because I was born in Irkutsk, raised in Moscow, speak only Russian, and have always felt completely Russian. So, if even people like me are beginning to wonder, the situation in our movie industry must be very alarming indeed, especially if one remembers that we are fighting against fascism, which has anti-Semitism emblazoned on its banner.¹⁴⁹

For the first time since the revolution, the ethnically Jewish members of the Soviet elite were being attacked directly and unequivocally—not because of some “alien elements” in their midst, as in 1937–38, but because they were ethnically Jewish. (My ethnically Russian father, who graduated from Moscow State University in 1949, could enroll in any graduate school he wished because his Jewish peers, a majority of the applicants, were not welcome. His “gentry origins” were no longer a factor; his “indigenous” nationality was.)

For the first time, Soviet citizens of all nations were being told that the internal enemies were not people who belonged to certain fluid social groups or elusive secret societies, but people who were certified members of a particular ancient tribe remembered for its treachery, as depicted in both the Christian tradition and the Mercurian stereotype, and closely associated with the cosmopolitan phase of the Bolshevik Revolution (which had always been seen by some Russians and Ukrainians as deliberately anti-Russian and anti-Ukrainian). The result was a rapid spread of anti-Semitic rumors, insults, leaflets, threats, and assaults culminating in the hysterical unmasking of “murderer physicians.”¹⁵⁰

For the first time, the Soviet state had turned on some of its loyal and privileged subjects according to a clear—and apparently non-Soviet—principle. For the first time, Hodl and her children found themselves among the aliens. For the first time, many of them began to doubt their Soviet faith—and the culpability of previous aliens. As Ester Markish put it,

Only our own grief made us realize the horror of our lives in general: not only the suffering of the Jews or the suffering of the intelligentsia, but the suffering of the whole country and all the social groups and peoples that lived in it. After the arrest of [Perets] Markish, our maid, who had lived in our house for more than fifteen years and had, in effect, become a member of our family, said to me: “You are crying now, but you did not mind when my father was being dekulakized, martyred for no reason at all, and my whole family thrown out in the street?”¹⁵¹

Even Pavel Sudoplatov, an ethnic Slav, top secret police official, and faithful Party warrior, was confused and dismayed by the attack on the Jews. As the head of the security ministry department in charge of assassinations and sabotage, he had participated in numerous political “liquidations,” but the only murder he unequivocally condemns in his memoirs is the murder of Mikhoels (with which, as he points out, he—“fortunately”—had nothing to do). During his thirty-year service in the secret police, he had seen many of his comrades purged, but the only arrest he claims to have opposed was the arrest of N. I. Eitingon, one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished assassination experts (also known for his mischievous sense of irony and his ability to “recite Pushkin from memory”). One reason for Sudoplatov’s scruples was the fact that this was the first purge of his friends and colleagues that had a discernible pattern which was both unmistakable and offensive to a true believer of the civil war generation. The other reason was the fact (not surprising to most true believers of the civil war generation) that some of Sudoplatov’s best friends were Jews. The best of them all was his wife, Emma Kaganova, a professional agent provocateur who had spent most of her career reporting on Moscow intellectuals but had to retire as a lieutenant colonel in 1949 because of the anti-Jewish campaign. After a lifetime of moral certainty, the two found themselves betrayed by their Party and compelled—for the first time ever—to talk to their children about the emerging distinction between the state and the family, the public and the private, the “brazen anti-Semitic statements” and their mother’s Semitic “nationality.”¹⁵²

The Sudoplatov household solution was to continue to regard Pravda (which, after all, “contained no hint of pogroms”) as the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, but also to emphasize (especially if asked by middle school teachers) that utmost vigilance was needed in the face of hostile provocations in the form of rumors. Such “grammatical fiction,” as Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov calls it, was still the dominant true-believer strategy. At the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ilya Vatenberg (a former Zionist, ardent Communist, Columbia Law School graduate, and secret police informer), declared that he had signed his falsified interrogation record because he and his interrogator were on the same side of the barricade.

PRESIDING OFFICER: One must tell the truth everywhere, except when it needs to be hidden from the enemies.

VATENBERG: There is no such thing as abstract truth. Truth is always class-based, and since truth is class-based, I thought, then maybe he was right, after all.

PRESIDING OFFICER: But if he really was right, then why are you retracting your testimony?

VATENBERG: Perhaps he really is right. I need to reconsider my whole life.¹⁵³

There was another solution, however—virtually inconceivable for a high-ranking true believer during the Great Terror of 1937–38 but possible now, when some Party spokesmen seemed to have adopted the Nazi definition of the enemy (thereby making it impossible for a Vatenberg to remain within the fold no matter how thoroughly he reconsidered his whole life). This solution consisted in allowing for the possibility that Truth and the Party were two different entities; that Truth could be pursued according to the rational grammar of logic and common sense; and that if the Party did not agree with the Truth, then so much the worse for the Party. Remarkably, this approach was embraced by the highest-ranking of all the JAFC defendants, Solomon Lozovsky. The only person associated with the work of the JAFC because of his Party position and not because he had ever shown any interest in Yiddish culture, Lozovsky was a prominent Old Bolshevik who had been a member of the Party’s Central Committee and the Presidium of the Comintern, head of the Communist Trade Union International, deputy foreign minister of the USSR, and, as head of the Soviet Information Bureau, the supreme chief of Soviet external propaganda. He had dutifully followed the Party line and had accepted the extermination of most of his old friends as part of the grammar of revolution, but when he was put on trial for having a mother called Hannah, he refused to go on speaking the Party language because he seems to have concluded that communicating in that language—even in the Bukharin-Vatenberg mode of confessional self-abasement—was no longer possible. He reconsidered his whole life and found it wanting—or rather, he expressed pride in his service to the cause but maintained throughout that the official case against him “contradicted truth, logic, and common sense.” He might not have read a word of Yiddish “in sixty years,” but he did not think that writing in Yiddish was a form of nationalism; was not ashamed of his parents; refused to accept that there was anything wrong with “three Soviet citizens writing a letter to their own government”; and insisted to the end that he, “not as a Central Committee member but as a regular Soviet citizen,” had “the right to know” what he was going to be executed for. With an eloquence wasted on his hanging judges but not on his fellow defendants, who cautiously followed his lead, he described the indictment against them as issuing from “the realm of poetic calumny, if not of political inspiration,” and concluded the proceedings by stating:

I have said it all and want no special consideration. I demand either full rehabilitation or death. I have devoted my entire life to the Party’s cause and do not want to be a parasite. If the court finds me guilty of anything at all, I request that the Government change my sentence to execution. But if it turns out someday that I was innocent, then I ask that I be posthumously readmitted to the Party and that the fact of my rehabilitation be announced in the newspapers.¹⁵⁴

He received no special consideration. He was executed along with the others. Three years later he was rehabilitated and posthumously readmitted to the Party. It was a different Party from the one he had joined.

The great alliance between the Jewish Revolution and Communism was coming to an end as a result of the new crusade against Jewish Communists. What Hitler could not accomplish, Stalin did, and as Stalin did, so did his representatives in other places. In the fall of 1952, a large show trial was staged in Czechoslovakia. Eleven of the accused, including the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, were identified as ethnic Jews and accused of being agents of international Zionism and American imperialism. Other Soviet dependencies had to follow suit, whether they wanted to or not. In Hungary, Romania, and Poland, a high proportion of the most sensitive positions in the Party apparatus, state administration, and especially the Agitprop, foreign service, and secret police were held by ethnic Jews, who had moved up the ranks because of their loyalty and now had to be squeezed out because of their nationality. All three regimes resembled the Soviet Union of the 1920s insofar as they combined the ruling core of the old Communist underground, which was heavily Jewish, with a large pool of upwardly mobile Jewish professionals, who were, on average, the most trustworthy among the educated and the most educated among the trustworthy. There were important differences, however. On the one hand, the experience of World War II in East-Central Europe had made Jews the only possible candidates for some sensitive positions; on the other, the creation of the new Stalinist regimes had coincided with Stalin’s discovery of Jewish untrustworthiness. The predominantly Jewish “Moscow Hungarians,” “Moscow Romanians,” and “Moscow Poles” had been installed in power, then encouraged to promote the indigenous cadres who were to replace them, and finally thrown out as Zionists, Stalinists, or both. The Soviet Union’s erstwhile representative in Romania, Ana Pauker, was ousted in 1952; Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi and Poland’s Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc (among others) followed after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956. In matters of “global historical importance” (to use a Stalinist cliché), Soviet satellites were not allowed to lag a whole generation behind (they were supposed to be younger brothers, not children). Jewish Communists were to be replaced by ethnically pure ones. Ultimately—and fatally for Communism—ethnically pure Communists would prove to be a contradiction in terms.¹⁵⁵

Meanwhile, the United States Congress was conducting its own purge. In scale and severity it was not comparable to the Stalinist version, but the targets came from similar backgrounds and had similar convictions—except that in the Soviet Union they were persecuted as Jews, and in the United States as Communists. Both governments were aware of the connection, but both dismissed it as dangerous or irrelevant. The postwar Soviet officials probably realized that the attack on Jewish “cosmopolitanism” was, in some sense, an attack on Communist internationalism, yet they had no choice but to make the subject taboo because the newly ethnicized Soviet state continued to derive its legitimacy from the Great October Socialist Revolution. Likewise, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee knew perfectly well that many Communists, hostile witnesses, and Soviet spies were Jews, but chose not to transform this fact into a political “issue” because they thought of both America and its Soviet nemesis as purely ideological constructs.¹⁵⁶

There were, of course, other reasons why associating Communism with Jewishness might not be a very good idea. The most pragmatic of them was the observable fact that the Jewish association with Communism was coming to an end. A high proportion of Communists and Soviet agents in the United States were still Jews, but the absolute numbers of Jewish Communists were falling steadily, and their place in the Jewish community was becoming marginal. At the Rosenberg trial, both the presiding judge and the prosecutor appointed to the case were Jews. This was the result of a concerted political effort to create a visible counterweight to the accused (who used their Jewishness in their defense), but it was also a faithful reflection of the new postwar reality. Beilke’s children began to turn from Communism to Jewish nationalism at the same time and for many of the same reasons as their Soviet cousins: the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the destruction of European Jewry, the creation of Israel, and the Soviet purge of Jews from elite positions. But mostly, they turned away from Communism because they were doing so well in America. The two postwar decades saw the emergence of the Jews as the most prosperous, educated, politically influential, and professionally accomplished ethnoreligious group in the United States. As in fin de siècle Vienna and Budapest or early-Soviet Moscow and Leningrad, the children of Mercurian immigrants moved en masse into the professions that define and underwrite the modern state: law, medicine, journalism, entertainment, and higher education. Unlike their predecessors in Vienna and Budapest, they encountered little anti-Semitism; unlike their cousins in the Soviet Union, they were free to pursue both traditional Jewish vocations: learning and wealth.¹⁵⁷

They moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, from the cities to the suburbs, from Weequahic High in Newark to Arcady Hill Road in Old Rimrock. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a “slum-reared” Jewish entrepreneur with the ruthless drive of Sholem Aleichem’s Podhotzur or Mordecai Richler’s Duddy Kravitz begets a “household Apollo” nicknamed “the Swede.” The father is one of those “limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up.” The son is gentle, even-tempered, and considerate. The father is “no more than five seven or eight”; the son is “handsome as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself.” The father cannot stop climbing; the son marries a Gentile Miss New Jersey, settles in a dream house on Arcady Hill, and celebrates his American fulfillment on the “dereligionized ground” of “the American pastoral par excellence”: Thanksgiving.¹⁵⁸

The Swede’s Thanksgiving dinners in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, are perfect replicas of the Gaister family dinners in the House of Government, Moscow. The more or less fictional Swede (Seymour Irving Levov) was born in 1927; the very real Inna Aronovna Gaister was two years older. Both had indomitably successful fathers (Podhotzur the businessman and Perchik the revolutionary) and preternaturally loving mothers (the self-effacing Beilke and the self-assertive Hodl). Both had happy childhoods, both had to deal with non-Jewish in-laws, and both worshiped the countries that had made dreams into reality. The upwardly mobile American Jews of the 1940s and 1950s loved America as passionately as their upwardly mobile Soviet cousins had loved the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The Swede was as American as Inna Gaister had been Soviet: “He lived in America the way he lived inside his own skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that success and happiness had been American.” And for both, the Paradise Found was the rural idyll of the newly welcoming Apollonia: the dacha pastoral of Inna Gaister and the suburban pastoral of Swede Levov. According to Gaister’s memoirs:

In 1935 we started spending our summers at a dacha in Nikolina Gora. . . . The settlement was located in a beautiful pine forest, on a high hill above a bend in the Moscow River. It was a magnificent place, one of the finest in the Moscow area. . . . Our plot was right above the river, on a high bank. The dacha itself was a large two-story house, which my mother’s brother, Veniamin, not without jealousy, used to call the “villa.” It really was a villa. . . . In front of each dacha was a little wooden pier for swimming. . . . My friends and I liked spending time on the pier below the Kerzhentsev dacha. The water there was shallow and good for swimming. . . . Life at the dacha was wonderful.¹⁵⁹

The dream of Babel’s little boys had come true: not only were they the best at learning, but they could swim too—Hodl’s children, and Chava’s, of course, and now Beilke’s, as well. “The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball.” In the early 1950s, as a successful businessman, he liked to walk home through the Elysian Fields of the “Garden State”—“past the white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields, the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the substantial old stone house he loved—pretending, as he went along, to throw the apple seed everywhere.”¹⁶⁰

This was immigration-as-transformation on the Soviet and Zionist model, complete with the acquisition of an Apollonian language, an Apollonian body, and perhaps even an Apollonian spouse (true of both Inna Gaister and Swede Levov but not in Palestine, where all Jews were supposed to become enlightened Apollonians while all non-Jewish Apollonians were fated to remain unenlightened). The head was still Mercurian, but now it was firmly attached to a first baseman’s frame, suburban landscape, and the country’s most important social and political institutions. The Superman cartoon had been created by two Jewish high school students in Cleveland, in 1934.¹⁶¹

Jewish American intellectuals, too, had stopped being exiled rebels in order to become salaried professors. A Russian-style prophetic intelligentsia had been transformed into a large contingent of rigorously trained intellectuals (“bourgeois experts”) organized into professional corporations. By 1969, Jews (less than 3 percent of the population) made up 27 percent of all law faculties, 23 percent of medical faculties, and 22 percent of all biochemistry professors. In the seventeen most prestigious American universities, they accounted for 36 percent of law professors, 34 percent of sociologists, 28 percent of economists, 26 percent of physicists, 24 percent of political scientists, 22 percent of historians, 20 percent of philosophers, and 20 percent of mathematicians. In 1949, there was one Jewish professor on the faculty of Yale College; in 1970, 18 percent of Yale College professors were Jews. The United States began to catch up with the Soviet Union in the realm of Jewish accomplishment at the very time that the Kremlin set out to reverse the Jewish accomplishment in the Soviet Union. Within two decades, both had achieved a great deal of success.¹⁶²

Having moved into the upper reaches of American society, most Jews adopted America’s official faith. In the 1940s and 1950s, Liberalism replaced Marxism as the orthodoxy of Jewish intellectuals (with Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination providing an early manifesto). Like their counterparts in Palestine and the prewar Soviet Union, American Jews of the 1940s and 1950s eagerly identified with their new home’s first principles (themselves sharpened by the prewar Jewish search for “that society in which no racial barriers could possibly exist” and increasingly referred to as “Judeo-Christian”). But what exactly were those principles? State Liberalism separate from Christianity and tribalism was only half a faith—a set of legal rules, metaphysical assumptions, and founding fathers endowed with transcendental meaning but tenuously connected to the exigencies of kinship and personal immortality. To the (rather limited) extent that the postwar American state was, indeed, separate from Christianity and tribalism, it had developed a new conception of its own role and its citizens’ welfare. It had become increasingly therapeutic and substantially (if often unself-consciously) Freudian.¹⁶³

All modern states have developed a capacity for “caring” previously associated with families, churches, and licensed physicians. In the United States, the institutional and intellectual groundwork of the new regime was laid by native-born Progressive reformers (including the advocates of vocational guidance and mental hygiene), but it was Freudianism, practiced and professed by upwardly mobile Jewish professionals, that provided the core vocabulary and some of the most durable concepts. By bringing Freudianism to America and by adopting it, briefly, as a salvation religion, Tevye’s children made themselves more American while making America more therapeutic. As Andrew R. Heinze put it, “Through the idiom of modern psychology, Jews wrote middle-class Americans a moral prescription that, if followed, would produce a social order that was ‘good for the Jews’ but also propitious for other outsiders seeking integration into American society.” To paraphrase Mark Shechner, the transformation of Jews into Americans required the transformation of revolutionaries into convalescents.¹⁶⁴

Freudianism was a doctrine born of the nineteenth-century Jewish Revolution. It shared Marxism’s familial origins; partook of its obsession with patricide and universal evil; and replicated (on a much smaller scale) its institutional structure centered on priestly guardians of sacred texts. The salvation it promised, however, was strictly individual, always provisional, and ultimately dependent on marketable professional expertise. Freudianism aspired to being the religion of modern capitalism as much as Marxism aspired to being the religion of anticapitalism: it appeared to provide a scientific justification for the liberal focus on the incorrigible individual; applied the tenets of political liberalism to the mysteries of the human soul; adapted the American Declaration of Independence to the religious search for personal redemption. The pursuit of individual happiness—like the maintenance of a decent society—turned out to be a matter of managing imperfection, of imposing fragile checks and balances on ineradicable internal pressures.

Freudianism’s greatest contribution to American life, however, was in the form of overall psychological orientation and a number of influential formulas. Just as the “Marxism” adopted by various states and movements was a mosaic of readings and interpretations often attributed—also by way of rough approximation—to local revisionist prophets (Lenin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Gramsci), so Freudianism was but an echo of the founder’s voice, usually much clearer and more consistent than the original. (One crucial difference is that whereas the Marxist connection, however dubious, is proudly asserted, the Freudian paternity is often denied and even more often unacknowledged—mostly because it is shared with the prevailing culture and so either taken for granted or resented as not capable of providing a genealogy of resistance.)

In the United States, psychotherapy became optimistic: treatment could lead to complete healing; instincts could be channeled and organized; aggression and the death wish could be countered with affection and introspection or allowed to lead one to normalcy. Most important, after World War II and especially starting in the 1960s, most schools of psychotherapy switched from curing the ill to reassuring the unhappy and to “managing one’s self to happiness and fulfillment through techniques of self-inspection . . . and a new vocabulary of the emotions” (as Nikolas Rose put it). Evil became a symptom of a curable sickness, and most sick people became victims of their psyches, childhoods, parents, nurses, and neighbors (as opposed to the “social system”). Everyone was normal, in other words, and all normal people were maladjusted (insofar as they were not permanently and unshakably self-satisfied). All happy families were dysfunctional (in the same way); all children were abused; and all grownups were repeatedly harassed and traumatized. Priests became therapists; therapists became priests; and the state, still separate from traditional organized religion, made increasingly sure that citizens’ confessions were heard by licensed social workers, probation officers, marriage counselors, family therapists, and grief counselors, among many others. In the workplace, managers were to achieve greater productivity not by suppressing the irrational but by using it creatively and scientifically (with the help of special counselors); and of course the family became a relentlessly self-reflexive institution for the production—never quite successful—of psychologically well-adjusted individuals (i.e., future adults who would not have been abused as children).¹⁶⁵

All these developments are far removed from Freud’s psychoanalysis (as far, perhaps, as Castro’s Cuba is from Marx’s Das Kapital), but they are all consequences of the great psychological revolution, of which Freud was the most influential prophet (the way Marx was the most influential prophet of socialism and class revolution). Dostoevsky may have discovered the Underground Man, but it was Freud who diagnosed Dostoevsky, as well as Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and every one of their underground prototypes and creations (whether they liked it or not or indeed knew anything about it). He put together what Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin called a “micro-cosmos of communism”; he provided the language, the theodicy, and the prescription for the new world. As Philip Rieff put it in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “who, without Freud, would so well know how to live with no higher purpose than that of a durable sense of well-being? Freud has systematized our unbelief; his is the most inspiring anti-creed yet offered a post-religious culture.”¹⁶⁶

Freud’s cause is very much alive, in other words, even if his personal cult and particular therapeutic techniques are not. Like Marxism, it succeeded as an intellectual blueprint; like Marxism, it was never a science and it failed as a religion. It failed as a religion because, like Marxism, it misunderstood the nature of immortality and did not outlive the first generation of converts.

All humans live in tribes. All traditional religions, including Judaism, are tribal religions. The world’s greatest rebellions against tribalism, such as Christianity and Islam, survived by incorporating tribal allegiances, sacralizing marriage, enforcing sexual and dietary restrictions, and representing themselves as renewable nations (bodies of believers, Umma). The decline of Christianity resulted in the rise of nationalism as new old tribalism: the rights of man equaled the rights of the citizen (“de l’homme et du citoyen”); citizenship, on closer inspection, turned out to be more or less ethnically defined.

Both Marxism and Freudianism tackled modernity-as-liberalism without recognizing or even seeming to notice the vital modernity of nationalism. Both charted paths to salvation (collective or individual) that were not grounded in household devotion, marriage arrangements, or dietary taboos. Neither Marxism nor Freudianism could be inherited or passed on meaningfully through a succession of family rites (the way even Christianity, and certainly Judaism, could). Both lost out to nationalism without ever realizing that there was a war going on. In the Soviet Union, Marxism as a revolutionary faith did not outlive the revolutionaries—having mutated into a camouflaged nationalism, it finally expired along with the last high-ranking beneficiary of the Great Terror. In the United States, Freudianism as a salvation religion encompassed the life span of the World War II generation before transmogrifying into a doctrine of tribal, as well as personal, happiness and victimhood.

Both Marxism and Freudianism were produced and eagerly embraced by newly emancipated Jews, who had achieved conspicuous success at capitalism without recourse to the much needed protection of nationalism. In the Soviet Union, the Jewish members of the establishment would be thwarted by the rise of Russian nationalism. In the United States, the Jewish members of the establishment would be transformed and greatly strengthened by the rise of ethnic politics.

Freudianism became so influential in the United States because the United States, like the European Jews, was conspicuously successful at capitalism without having recourse to the much needed protection of nationalism. Or rather, the official nationalism in the United States was primarily political, not tribal, and thus in need of constant intravenous injections. Freudianism was one, briefly; subnational tribalism (often in the form of religion) was another—permanently. In the Mecca of rootless cosmopolitanism, the existence of secondary loyalties is a constituent part of the political arrangement. That is why America is the most church-going of all modern societies, and that is why American Jews, having exhausted the relatively meager resources of Marxism and Freudianism, joined the fold by becoming nationalists.

It was only when they entered American institutions, in other words, that secular American Jewish intellectuals felt compelled to become Jewish—while American Jewish traditionalists felt fully justified in having preserved their tradition. In the two decades after World War II, that tradition was primarily represented by the memory of the shtetl—a shtetl shorn of its economic function and Gentile surroundings (other than the pogroms); a shtetl comparable to everyone else’s rural “old country”; a shtetl embodying the piety and community of the ancestral home; a shtetl all the more radiant for having been extinguished.

This quest for the blessed lost past and a meaningful American present was launched in 1943 by Maurice Samuel’s remarkably eloquent The World of Sholom Aleichem—“a sort of pilgrimage among the cities and inhabitants of a world which only yesterday—as history goes—harbored the grandfathers and grandmothers of some millions of American citizens.” These grandfathers and grandmothers were so many Tevyes and Goldes because Tevye and Golde were the real Abraham and Sarah of American Jews—just as Sholem Aleichem (“the common people in utterance, . . . the anonymous of Jewish self-expression”) was—or should be, at any rate—their new Pentateuch. To become good Americans, Jews were to become the Chosen People again. “The study of history will never become obsolete, and a knowledge of one’s grandfathers is an excellent introduction to history. Especially these grandfathers; they were a remarkable lot.”¹⁶⁷

The next landmark on the pilgrimage to Tevye’s world was Life Is with People, an extremely popular anthropological “portrait of the shtetl” produced in 1952 under the auspices of Ruth Benedict’s Research in Contemporary Cultures project at Columbia University. As Margaret Mead wrote in her foreword, “This book is an anthropological study of a culture which no longer exists, except in the memories, and in the partial and altered behavior of its members, now scattered over the world, rearing their children in new ways, to be Americans or Israelis, as members of collective farms in the changed lands of Eastern Europe.”¹⁶⁸

This was a book about Tevye written for Beilke’s children—now that they were ready for it.

This book is an attempt to bring our anthropological discipline to the task of preserving something of the form and the content, the texture and the beauty, of the small-town life of Eastern European Jews, as it was lived before World War I, in some places up to World War II, as it still lives in the memories of those who were reared in the shtetl, and in the memories of Jews in other lands, who can remember the stories their grandparents told, the tremendous happy worrying bustle with which the holidays were prepared for, the unrelenting eagerness with which a grandfather tested his grandson for signs of intellectual worth. It lives on, more than a little, in the memories of those [like Margaret Mead herself] who, themselves without any Jewish birthright, nevertheless have at some point warmed their hands by a shtetl fire, or sharpened their wits against the many-faceted polishing stone of talmudic reasoning.¹⁶⁹

Life Is with People begins with a description of the Sabbath Eve and never loses the warm glow of the festive candlelight. Babel’s dark rooms with “Grandmother’s yellow eyes” and Mandelstam’s “suffocating” grandparents with their “black-and-yellow shawls” are transformed into Rembrandt-like golden interiors, at once remote and welcoming, or possibly into flickering reflections of Thanksgiving, “the American pastoral par excellence.” Fittingly enough, one of the book’s two coeditors and, according to Margaret Mead, “the crucial person in our seminar,” was Mark Zborowski, “who combined in one person the living experience of shtetl culture in the Ukraine and Poland and the disciplines of history and anthropology through which to interpret his memories and readings, and the new materials which members of the project collected from interviews and written materials. For him, this book is the realization of a plan cherished for many years.”¹⁷⁰

Like the book itself and most of the book’s readers, Mark Zborowski seemed to stand for the continuity between Tevye’s Sabbath and American Thanksgiving, the shtetl home and academic nostalgia, self-conscious Jewishness and self-conscious Jewishness. He also stood for something else, however. In the 1930s, Zborowski (alias Étienne) had been a Soviet agent provocateur in France, where he had infiltrated the Trotskyite organization; become the closest collaborator of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov; assisted in the publication of the Bulletin of the Opposition; was granted full access to Trotsky’s European archive (parts of which were stolen shortly thereafter); maintained contacts with remaining Trotskyists in the USSR; and, in 1938, arranged for Sedov to be admitted to the small private clinic where he died under mysterious circumstances after an appendectomy. After Sedov’s death, Zborowski had taken over the Russian Section of Trotsky’s Fourth International. In 1941, he had immigrated to the United States, where he had embarked on an academic career while continuing his espionage work (which mostly consisted in befriending and betraying refugees from the Soviet Union).¹⁷¹

But of course the central event in the story of American Yiddish nostalgia was the staging of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, followed by the movie adaptation in 1971. Tevye, it turned out, was as prophetically American as he was proudly Jewish. Gone were his irrepressible loquacity, stylistic eccentricities, and quixotic schemes; gone were his loneliness, homelessness, and braggadocio. The Broadway and Hollywood Tevye is an Apollonian patriarch, “handsome as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself.” The Yiddishization of middle-class suburban Americans seemed to require the Americanization of everyone’s Yiddish grandfather. Tevye stood for tradition, of course, but he also understood the value of progress, freedom of choice, individual rights, and the nuclear family. The home he would live in if he were a rich man is like Swede Levov’s New Jersey house with lots of rooms and stairs going up and down, and the love he preaches to old Golde is the romantic love he learned from his rebellious daughters and his suburban American grandchildren. The only exercise of free choice he remains ambivalent about is marriage outside the tribe—for if everyone behaved like Chava, there would be no Jewish granddaughters for Tevye to be a Jewish grandfather to (“anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one”). Even here, however, he finds a reasonable compromise by blessing the “mixed” couple without addressing them directly. Chava and her Gentile consort leave chastened, but not excommunicated.¹⁷²

Of all the admirable things the Broadway and Hollywood Tevye does, the most admirable and most natural is his decision to emigrate to America—the same America the original Tevye despises so much, the same America that, in Sholem Aleichem’s text, is a proper refuge for crooked Podhotzur and his long-suffering Beilke. Sholem Aleichem’s book ends with Golde dead and Tevye “on the go”:

There is no getting around the fact that we Jews are the best and smartest people. Mi ke’amkho yisro’eyl goy ekhod, as the Prophet says—how can you even compare a goy and a Jew? Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one. Ashrekho yisro’el—it’s a lucky thing I was, then, because otherwise how would I ever know what it’s like to be homeless and wander all over the world without resting my head on the same pillow two nights running?¹⁷³

Fiddler on the Roof ends with Tevye, Golde, and two of their daughters going to America. One of the daughters is little Beilke; there is no Podhotzur; the reason they are leaving is anti-Semitic persecution. This is a crucial part of the American Jewish genealogy. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is expelled from his home by the government decree banning Jews from rural areas, but the real reason for his plight as he understands it is God’s mysterious ways (“a lot of good it does to complain to God about God”) and of course “today’s children,” who are “too smart for their own good” and only too ready to fall for all sorts of “craziness.” As for the local “Amalekites,” they never get around to smashing Tevye’s windows. “Bring out the samovar,” they say, “and let’s have tea. And if you’d be kind enough to donate half a bottle of vodka to the village, we’ll all drink to your health, because you’re a clever Jew and a man of God, you are. . . .” IntheUnited States of the 1960s, such an ending did not ring true. Act 1 of the musical ends with a pogrom (one that never takes place in the book); and act 2 concludes with a procession of somber families carrying their scant possessions into exile. As far as Tevye’s American grandchildren were concerned, the locomotive of Jewish history had been anti-Jewish violence. According to the musical, there had been no Jewish Revolution and virtually no Russian Revolution (outside of the pogroms) in Eastern European Jewish life. The Jews had been unique in the Russian Empire but they were not—yet—unique in the United States. As Seth Wolitz put it, “the musical Tevye becomes a Jewish pilgrim, a victim of religious persecution, fleeing intolerant Europe to the land of fulfillment, America.”¹⁷⁴

American Jews rediscovered their Jewishness at the same time and for essentially the same reasons as their Soviet cousins. The Nazi mass murder (not yet conceptualized as the Holocaust), the Soviet purges, and the formation of Israel were all important factors (debated and remembered as such), but it was the spectacular Jewish success in the Soviet Union and the United States that provided the context and the impetus for the new allegiances. In both places, Jews had entered crucial sectors of the establishment: in the Soviet Union, the Jewishness of elite members was seen by the newly Russified state (and eventually by some Jews too) as a threat and a paradox; in the United States, it appeared to be a sign of perfect fulfillment—both for the liberal state and for the new elite members.

Meanwhile, Chava and her Sabra children, who served as remote beacons of authentic Jewishness for both Beilke and Hodl, had no particular interest in rediscovering Tevye because they had always been Jewish and because their Jewishness was of a very different type. Israel was the only postwar European state (“European” in both composition and inspiration) to have preserved the ethos of the great nationalist and socialist revolutions of the interwar period. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy had been defeated and discredited; Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal had discarded whatever fascist fervor they had tolerated; Atatürk’s Turkey had routinized its triumph over both cosmopolitanism and popular religion; the National Party’s South Africa had embarked on an administrative, not popular, revolution; and Stalin’s Soviet Union had begun to represent itself as middle-aged, mature, a little weary, and perhaps ready for some material comforts and a bit of family happiness. Only Israel continued to live in the European 1930s: only Israel still belonged to the eternally young, worshiped athleticism and inarticulateness, celebrated combat and secret police, promoted hiking and scouting, despised doubt and introspection, embodied the seamless unity of the chosen, and rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness. The realization of the scale and nature of the Nazi genocide merged with the Zionist pioneer tradition to produce a warrior culture of remarkable power and intensity. To an even greater extent than the nationalist and communist movements in interwar Europe, Israel was imbued with the sense of “never again,” “enough is enough,” “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nothing summarizes the spirit of victorious Zionism better than Stalin’s 1931 “We do not want to be beaten” speech.

Israel of the 1950s and 1960s was not simply Apollonian and anti-Mercurian—it was Apollonian and anti-Mercurian at a time when much of the Western world, of which it considered itself a part, was moving in the opposite direction. In postwar Europe and North America, military messianism, youthful idealism, pioneer toughness, and worship of uniform were in decline, but the realization of the scale and nature of the Nazi genocide merged with a certain awkwardness over complicity or inaction to place Israel in a special category where general rules did not apply. The attempt to create a “normal” state for the Jews had resulted in the creation of a peculiar anachronistic exception (admired and ostracized as such). After two thousand years of living as Mercurians among Apollonians, Jews turned into the only Apollonians in a world of Mercurians (or rather, the only civilized Apollonians in a world of Mercurians and barbarians). They were still strangers—but this time they were welcome (to the Westerners) because they remained remote. During the quarter of a century following World War II, Israel was everyone’s fantasy of youthful vigor, joyful labor, human authenticity, and just retribution. It was the only place where European Civilization seemed to possess a moral certainty, the only place where violence was truly virtuous. Apartheid South Africa, which also saw itself as the defender of a small ethnically pure tribe guided by manifest destiny, governed by democratic institutions, committed to making deserts bloom, and surrounded by unruly and prolific barbarians, was increasingly seen as an impostor and an embarrassment. Israel, which provided a home for Holocaust survivors while continuing to embody a genuine grassroots revolution by a nation brutally victimized by Europeans in Europe, was a righteous reproach to the “civilized world” and perhaps a guarantee of its future redemption.

The most important institution in Israel was the army; the most admired heroes were generals; and the most celebrated profession was paratrooper (and the most celebrated paratrooper in the 1950s was Ariel Sharon). One of the most popular books was Aleksandr Bek’s Soviet war novel, The Volokolamsk Highway (1943–44), which describes how a fatherly Russian general, who combines utter simplicity with an innate knowledge of the “mystery of war” (very much in the tradition of Tolstoy’s Kutuzov), and a young Kazakh lieutenant, with the “face of an Indian” carved out of bronze “by some very sharp instrument,” transform a motley collection of patriotic men into a cohesive, invincible unit. Their main weapon is “psychology.” In one of the novel’s key passages, the lieutenant approaches a recent recruit who has not yet mastered the art of fighting or understood the true meaning of patriotism.

“Do you want to return home, embrace your wife, and hug your children?”

“This is not the time . . . We’ve got to fight.”

“Right, but what about after the war? Do you?”

“Of course I do . . . Who doesn’t?”

“You don’t!”

“What do you mean?

“Because whether or not you’ll be able to go back home depends on you. It’s all in your hands. Do you want to stay alive? If so, you must kill the guy who is trying to kill you.”¹⁷⁵

After Stalin’s death, the anti-Jewish campaign fizzled out, and ethnic Jews returned to the top of the Soviet professional hierarchy. The rate at which they advanced was slower than before the war and less impressive than that of many other groups, but they remained by far the most successful and the most modern—occupationally and demographically—of all Soviet nationalities. In 1959, 95 percent of all Jews lived in cities (compared to 58 percent for the Russians); the proportion of employed college graduates among them was 11.4 percent (compared to 1.8 percent for the Russians); and the number of “scientific workers” per 10,000 people was 135 (compared to 10 for the Russians). Thirty years later, 99 percent of all Russian Jews lived in urban areas (compared to 85 percent for the Russians); the proportion of employed college graduates among them was 64 percent (compared to 15 percent for the Russians); and the number of “scientific workers” per 10,000 people was 530 (compared to 50 for the Russians).¹⁷⁶

All Soviet nationalities were different, but some were much more different than others. According to the occupational “dissimilarity index” (which represents the percentage of one group that would have to change jobs in order to become occupationally identical to another group), the Jews were by far the most “dissimilar” of all major Russian nationalities on the eve of the Soviet collapse. The difference between Russians and Jews, for example, was greater than the difference between Russians and any other group in the Russian Federation (including the Chechens, the least urban of those surveyed). The top five occupations for Russians were metalworkers (7.2 percent of the total employed), motor vehicle drivers (6.7 percent), engineers (5.1 percent), tractor and combine drivers (2.4 percent), and “nonmanual workers with unspecified specialty” (2.4 percent). The top five occupations for Jews were engineers (16.3 percent), physicians (6.3 percent), scientific personnel (5.3 percent), primary and secondary schoolteachers (5.2 percent), and chief production and technical managers (3.3 percent). Jewish employment patterns were much less diverse, much less segregated by gender, and much more concentrated at the top of the status hierarchy. Of the main Jewish occupations, the most exclusive (the least represented among the Russians) were physicians, scientists, chief managerial personnel, artists and producers, and literary and press personnel.¹⁷⁷

Jews remained prominent in the Soviet professional elite (and thus at the heart of the Soviet state) until the breakup of the USSR, but the special relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state had come to an end—or rather, the unique symbiosis in pursuit of world revolution had given way to a unique antagonism over two competing and incommensurate nationalisms. The Russian and Jewish Revolutions died the way they were born—together. The postwar Soviet state began to apply its traditional affirmative action policies favoring “titular” nationalities to the Russians in the Russian Republic (mostly by engaging in covert and cautious negative action with regard to the Jews). At the same time, and partly for that very reason (as well as for the many reasons provided by Hitler, Stalin, and the founding of Israel), the Jewish members of the Soviet elite began assuming that “Jewish origins” stood for a common fate, not simply a remote past. Everyone was listening to the “call of blood”—and hearing different languages.

This development coincided with a general parting of the ways between the Party-state and the professional elite it had created. Ever since the revolution, upward mobility through education had been one of the most consistent and apparently successful policies of the Soviet regime. For a party representing consciousness amid spontaneity and urban modernity amid rural backwardness, the “enlightenment of the masses” coupled with breakneck technological modernization had been the only way to correct History’s mistake (of staging the socialist revolution in a precapitalist country) and bring about both socialism-as-abundance and socialism-as-equality. Between 1928 and 1960, the number of Soviet college students had grown by 1,257 percent (from 176,600 to 2,396,100); the number of college-educated professionals by 1,422 percent (from 233,000 to 3,545,200); and the number of scientific personnel by 1,065 percent (from 30,400 in 1930 to 354,200). Most of the members of the new “Soviet intelligentsia” were beneficiaries of class-based affirmative action and—outside ethnic Russia—its various ethnic substitutes. Their healthy roots were supposed to ensure the unity of scientific knowledge and Party Truth—and, for a while, they did.¹⁷⁸

After Stalin’s death, however, things began to fall apart. The demise and posthumous damnation of the only infallible symbol of both Truth and Knowledge suggested the possibility of their separate existence; the Cold War on Earth and in outer space seemed to push scientific knowledge ever further from Party Truth; and the gradual reinterpretation of socialism as a generous welfare state and bountiful consumer society tended to invite unwelcome comparisons with a revamped postindustrial capitalism (which seemed better on both scores). The viability of Soviet modernity depended on the success of Soviet professionals; the success of Soviet professionals required “a struggle of opinions” (as Stalin had put it); the struggle of opinions led a growing number of Soviet professionals away from Soviet modernity. Unlike Marx’s capitalists but very much like the Russian imperial state, the Communist Party had created its own grave diggers—the intelligentsia.

Like Peter the Great’s new service elite, the new “Soviet intelligentsia” was created to serve the state but ended up serving its own “consciousness” (split, in various proportions, between “progress” and the “people”). The more desperately the state clung to its founding Truth and the more intransigent it became in its instrumental approach to the educated elite, the more passionate that elite became in its opposition to the state and its attachment to (true) progress and the people. For Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, the greatest Soviet champion of true (non-state) progress, and eventually the conscience of the Westernizing segment of the Soviet intelligentsia, the moment of truth came in 1955, after a successful test of his “device.” According to Sakharov’s memoirs, the test was followed by a banquet at the residence of Marshal Nedelin, the commander of Soviet Strategic Missile Forces.

When we were all in place, the brandy was poured. The bodyguards stood along the wall. Nedelin nodded to me, inviting me to propose the first toast. Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.”

The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said: “Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.”

My whole body tensed, and I think I turned pale—normally I blush. . . . The point of the story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of Party and military hierarchy would make the decision. I knew this already—I wasn’t that naïve. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being, like the reality of life and death. The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking.¹⁷⁹

Sakharov’s thinking was shared by many of his counterparts across the ocean, but what was remarkable about the Soviet Union is that Sakharov’s thinking was shared—with their whole beings—by a growing number of inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen working on much less explosive devices. In theory—and often enough in practice to produce a sense of unrelieved humiliation—the Party claimed the right to make all decisions about everything—from the Bomb to whether one was worthy of a trip to Bulgaria (as Vladimir Zhirinovsky would recall in 1996). What added injury to insult was the fact that the Soviet economy of the “stagnation period” (like the economy of late imperial Russia or European colonial empires) could not expand fast enough to accommodate the professionals it kept manufacturing. At the same time, it became clear that the Soviet intellectual elite had congealed into a hereditary institution, and that the higher in the professional hierarchy one went, the more hereditary intellectuals one found. In the 1970s, 81.2 percent of the “young specialists” working in the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences were children of white-collar professionals. They knew they belonged to a cohesive social group with a lofty mission and an uncertain future. Many of them shared Sakharov’s thinking.¹⁸⁰

Acutely aware of this Frankensteinian dilemma, the Party reacted by reintroducing massive affirmative action programs for blue-collar workers. But because it did not reintroduce massive repression against white-collar workers, it merely added to the resentment of the entrenched cultural elite without jeopardizing its ascendance (well-protected by superior education and patronage). The result was an ever widening social gap between the Party ideologues, who continued to be recruited from newly promoted provincials of humble backgrounds, and the hereditary inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, who thought of themselves as the guardians of both professional competence and high culture. The Party hung on to its ideological rhetoric and political monopoly, but most apparatchiks tacitly recognized the primacy of the professionals insofar as they raised their own children to be professionals, not apparatchiks. The Soviet regime ended the way it had begun: with “dual power.” In 1917, the standoff between the Provisional Government, which had formal authority but no power, and the Petrograd Soviet, which had power but no formal authority, had ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who had Knowledge and Truth. In the 1980s, the standoff between the Party apparatus, which had power and formal authority, and the intelligentsia, which had Knowledge and Truth, ended with the final defeat of the Bolsheviks, exposed as purveyors of the “Big Lie.” The Party, unlike the intelligentsia, proved incapable of reproducing itself. The Soviet Union was a regime that served one generation—or rather, thanks to Stalin, one and a half. The original revolutionaries were killed off in the prime of life; their heirs moved up after the Great Terror, reached maturity during World War II, suffered a mild midlife crisis under Khrushchev (who attempted to force the whole country to relive his First-Five-Year-Plan youth), grew senile with Brezhnev, and finally breathed their last along with K. U. Chernenko, who died of emphysema in 1985.

Marshal Nedelin did not have to suffer the indignity of infirmity: he was killed during a missile test in 1960, at the age of fifty-eight. Academician Sakharov, who was almost twenty years younger, went on to become the patron saint of the anti-Soviet Westernizers and a member of the last Soviet parliament. He died in 1989, days short of finishing his draft of a new Soviet constitution and less than two years before the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1963, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, had written about Sakharov’s generation (those born in the early 1920s): “They are the best of the best. . . . They are our future Decembrists, they are going to teach us all how to live. They are going to say their word yet—I am sure of that.”¹⁸¹

She was right, of course: the innocent beneficiaries of Stalin’s “happy childhood,” proud veterans of the Great Patriotic War, melancholy bards of Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” and standard-bearers of Gorbachev’s perestroika, they were the ones who transformed the new Soviet “specialists” (white-collar professionals of proletarian background) into the old Russian intelligentsia (lone guardians of Truth and Knowledge). They were, indeed, the Decembrists of the growing anti-Party sentiment, and they “woke up” the various bolsheviks and mensheviks of the “New Russia” that followed. And a great many of them were Jews.

The Jews were prominent among Soviet inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen—especially at the top, among the hereditary members of the cultural elite most likely to be frustrated by the Party monopoly on decision making and the Party officials’ social and cultural provincialism. But they had their own reasons to be frustrated too. Intelligentsia members (“foreigners at home”) are strangers by definition. The Jewish intelligentsia members of the late Soviet period were doubly strangers because the newly ethnicized state was suspicious of them on account of their “blood,” and they were suspicious of the newly ethnicized state for the same reason.

The distrust was mutual, but the relationship was asymmetrical. In pursuit of both general proportional representation and particular Jewish demotion, the post-Stalinist state continued, in a mild form, the policy of limiting Jewish access to elite colleges and prestigious professional positions. According to the Soviet sociologist V. P. Mishin, “Whereas some peoples (Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldavians, Tatars, Uzbeks, Azerbajanis and others) are still far below the national average with regard to the development of higher education and the training of scientific cadres, certain other peoples (Armenians, Georgians, Jews) have greatly exceeded that average. . . . Therefore, the proper goal of the directed development of interethnic relations consists not only in the equalization of conditions, but also in the continued maintenance of real equality among the peoples of the USSR.”¹⁸²

The Soviet state did its best to achieve that goal. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of employed professionals with higher education increased by more than 100 percent among Ukrainians, Belorussians, Moldavians, Tatars, Uzbeks, and Azerbaijanis, and by 23 percent, among Jews. The Jews were still light-years ahead (166 “specialists” per 1,000 people, as compared to 25 for Ukrainians, 15 for Uzbeks, and 35 for the second-place Armenians), but the trend was clear and durable. In the two decades prior to 1970, the proportion of scientific personnel increased by 1,300 percent among Uzbeks and 155 percent among Jews.¹⁸³

Most American readers will find Mishin’s recommendations and Soviet practices fairly familiar and possibly understandable, but it is also true that the two institutional frameworks are not at all alike. The main structural difference between the United States and the Soviet Union was the fact that the Soviet Union was a federation of ethnoterritorial units; the main difference between the Jews and all the other nationalities on Mishin’s list was the fact that the Jews did not have a unit of their own. (Birobidzhan was not taken seriously by anyone, and there is little reason to believe that any other Jewish unit on Soviet territory would have been.) The Georgians and Armenians were, like the Jews, overrepresented among white-collar professionals and hurt by Soviet affirmative action. Unlike the Jews, however, they had “their own” republics, within which their dominance was accepted as entirely legitimate by both the central state and all would-be competitors. The Jews were far from being the main victims of the Soviet nationalities policy (the Piedmont nationalities, such as the Finns and Poles, were not even included in official statistics, and some deported peoples, such as the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, remained in exile until the end of the Soviet period), but they were unique among the USSR’s “major nationalities.” It was the combination of cultural prominence with administrative irrelevance that made the position of the Jews (as a Soviet nationality) truly exceptional. They were Number One according to every measure of Soviet modernity except for the most reassuring one: a proto-nation-state complete with its own culture-producing institutions.

But there is an even more important difference between the late twentieth-century American and late Soviet strategies for dealing with ethnically defined inequality. Affirmative action always implies negative (relative to strict meritocracy) action toward those not targeted for preferential promotion. In the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, the negative action was focused and deliberate, albeit publicly unacknowledged. Some elite institutions were closed to ethnic Jews; others employed numerus clausus; yet others limited professional advancement, publication opportunities, or access to benefits. Wherever one found oneself on Soviet territory or in the Soviet status hierarchy, Jewish nationality was a stamp of (undeserved) social advantage, political unreliability, and tribal difference. The “passport Jew” was a universal target of official discrimination without a Soviet home to go back to, a formal punishment to appeal against, or a communal ethnolinguistic culture to hide behind.

There were no clear discriminatory procedures—just makeshift arrangements formulated in secret and applied selectively and unevenly across economic branches, academic disciplines, and administrative units. Some second-tier institutions left open to the Jews gained professional prominence for that very reason; some projects were too important to be deprived of skilled participants; some managers were well-connected enough to be able to protect their employees; and some ethnic Jews changed their names or edited their biographies. The anti-Jewish discrimination was relatively small-scale (the difference, for the most part, was between best and second-best) and not very successful (the enormous achievement gap between the Jews and everyone else was narrowing very slowly), but its secrecy, inconsistency, and concentration on elite positions made it all the more frustrating. This “negative action” was as obvious to everyone concerned as it was contrary to post-Khrushchev public rhetoric, which extolled professional meritocracy tempered ever so slightly by tactful assistance to those who lagged behind. Even more remarkably, it was accompanied by a deafening public silence about all things Jewish. Histories of Lithuanian or Belorussian cities were not supposed to name those cities’ principal inhabitants; World War II museums never referred to the Jewish genocide; and when Kornei Chukovsky asked to be allowed to publish a children’s Bible, he was granted permission on condition that the Jews were never mentioned (he refused the commission). The world chess champion Tigran Petrosian was an Armenian; the world chess champion Mikhail Tal was “from Riga.” And in 1965, all archival documents relating to Lenin’s Jewish grandfather were ordered “removed without leaving any copies.” The reason behind this was no longer a fear of providing more ammunition to the counterrevolutionary identification of Bolshevism with the Jews (as had been the case in the 1920s and early 1930s); it was a fear of sacrilege. Jews were aliens; Soviet heroes who happened to be Jews were either not true heroes (Jews were not mentioned on the lists of war heroes as Jews) or not really Jews (Yakov Sverdlov, for instance, was primarily associated with a square in Moscow and a city in the Urals).¹⁸⁴

Like the “emancipated” European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, the Soviet Jews of the “stagnation period” combined unparalleled social success with indefensible disabilities and a “chimerical” nationality unprotected by state nationalism. Their response, in a familiar mode, was either principled liberalism (exemplified—or so it seemed—by the United States) or Jewish nationalism (represented—more and more forcefully—by Israel). The third—Soviet—option was no longer available. As Mikhail (formerly Marx-Engels-Liebknecht) Agursky wrote about the Soviet 1960s,

The Jews had been converted into an estate of slaves. Could one really expect that a nation that had given the Soviet state political leaders, diplomats, generals, and top economic managers would agree to become an estate whose boldest dream would be a position as head of a lab at the Experimental Machine-Tool Research Institute or senior researcher at the Automatics and Telemechanics Institute? The Jews were oppressed and humiliated to a much greater degree than the rest of the population.¹⁸⁵

On the face of it, this statement may appear patently untrue and perhaps morally questionable. Not only were some deported nationalities still in exile, some Christian denominations formally banned, and most nomadic communities forced to part with their children, but the overwhelming majority of the Soviet population was not allowed to reside in large cities (let alone work in elite research institutes), and most rural inhabitants, whatever their nationality, were not entitled to internal passports and remained, in effect, serfs of the state. But of course Agursky was not (on this occasion) writing a work of history—he was writing a memoir about the making of a rebel, and what made Jewish rebels was the perception of unrelieved humiliation. In late imperial Russia, Jews had been—according to various economic and cultural criteria—better off than many other groups, but they had become the most revolutionary of them all because they had measured themselves according to the strictest meritocracy (and not in reference to Lamaists or peasants); thought themselves capable of making it to the very top (with very good reason); and considered their disabilities completely illegitimate (based as they were on the old confessional, not the new liberal, state-building principle). In late Soviet Russia, the “Jewish problem” was at least as acute: the disabilities were milder, but the official position was less defensible (in official terms), and the degree of Jewish social achievement—and thus the danger of downward mobility—much greater. The Jews were not more oppressed and humiliated than the rest of the population, but they had, indeed, provided the Soviet state with political leaders, diplomats, generals, and top economic managers, and they were poised to provide more if the officially adopted meritocratic principle were duly enforced. Jews were not more oppressed than the rest of the population, in other words, but they felt more humiliated because of their peculiarly exalted and vulnerable position in Soviet society. Moreover, the covert official persecution encouraged open popular anti-Semitism, which seems to have thrived on a combination of the old Apollonian hostility to “disembodied heads” and a vested interest on the part of new-minted Slavic technocrats that some of their more successful competitors be removed as ethnically ineligible. Swann’s nose was a dangerous attribute to have; the public statement “I am a Jew” was either a confession of guilt or a gesture of defiance.¹⁸⁶

The Jewish problem was a distillation of the general intelligentsia predicament. The father of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, had rebelled against the tsar not because he was being oppressed as much as his serfs; rather, it was because he considered himself equal to the tsar but was being treated like a serf. The same was true of Andrei Sakharov, who considered himself superior to Mitrofan Nedelin (not to mention Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev) but was still being treated like a serf. The same, mutatis mutandis, was true of the Jews—except that in the postwar Soviet Union they were not just analogous to the antiregime intelligentsia—they were, in many ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia. The Jews were overrepresented among those who were making the Soviet Union hard, and they were underrepresented among those who were doing the guiding (and felt even more underrepresented among the latter because they were so strongly overrepresented among the former). In the 1970s and 1980s, the gerontocratic Soviet state had trouble telling the Jews and the intelligentsia apart; a large proportion of Soviet intelligentsia members (especially in the most elite occupations in Moscow and Leningrad) considered themselves Jews; most Moscow and Leningrad Jews thought of themselves as intelligentsia members; and when someone was being beaten up in a dark alley for wearing glasses or having an upper-class accent, the insults “Jew” and “intelligent” were likely to be used interchangeably. In May 1964, the head of the KGB, V. Semichastnyi, reported to the Central Committee of the Party that the trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky had greatly agitated the “creative intelligentsia,” and that the most active agitators came from the “creative intelligentsia of the Jewish nationality” (even though neither the trial nor the protests—nor, indeed, Brodsky’s poetry—had anything to do with the “Jewish question”). In 1969, at a scholarly conference, Mikhail Agursky told two young colleagues, Yuri Gurevich and Yuri Gastev, a “semipolitical joke.” After he left, “the vigilant Gurevich” asked Gastev:

“Who was that guy? What does he mean by telling jokes like that? Do you know him?”

“Yes, I do,” said Gastev firmly.

“Since when?”

“Since this morning.”

“And you trust him?”

“Just look at his nose!”—said Gastev by way of concluding the polemic.¹⁸⁷

Swann had come a long way. In the semipolitical jokes themselves, the Jew “Rabinovich” emerged as the ultimate symbol of the brutally oppressed but irrepressibly ironic Homo sovieticus. Or rather, traditional shtetl humor reemerged as the voice of the Soviet intelligentsia.

A political instructor asks Rabinovich:

“Who is your father?”

“The Soviet Union.”

“Good. And who is your mother?”

“The Communist Party.”

“Excellent. And what is your fondest wish?”

“To become an orphan.”

This joke was about all Soviets, of course, but it fit Rabinovich especially well because, in his case, the first two answers seemed just as truthful as the last one. As Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym wrote in their pioneering book about Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, “while in the 1920s the notion emerged that the Jews were exceptionally loyal to the regime, the 1970s witnessed the emergence of another convenient myth of the Jews’ intrinsic political unreliability. Both contained elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”¹⁸⁸

Of the three options available to Russian Jews—Liberalism, Zionism, and Communism—the third one was gone and the first two were illegal. This made most Moscow and Leningrad Jews “politically unreliable” and in some cases consistently oppositional. Of the three principal intelligentsia ideologies of the late Soviet period—Liberalism (Westernism), Zionism, and Russian nationalism—the first one was predominantly Jewish, the second one entirely Jewish, and the third one more or less anti-Semitic (because it celebrated unspoilt peasant Apollonianism in opposition to urban Mercurianism, which was now associated with the Jews, not Germans; and because the antipeasant Bolshevik Revolution had been Jewish to a considerable, if frequently exaggerated, degree).

The proportion—and importance—of ethnic Jews among Western-oriented liberal dissidents was very substantial. The movement’s founding moments included the 1964 trial of Joseph Brodsky; the 1966 trial of Yuli Daniel (who was Jewish) and Andrei Siniavsky (who was Russian but wrote—by way of emphasizing his alienation—under a Jewish-sounding alias, Abram Terz); the documentary collection about the Daniel-Siniavsky trial, compiled by Aleksandr Ginzburg; the January 1968 “Appeal to World Public Opinion,” written by Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz; and the August 1968 demonstration on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, staged by seven people, four of them ethnic Jews. As Lev Shternberg had said about their grandparents, the socialists, “it is as though thousands of the prophets of Israel have risen from their forgotten graves to proclaim, once again, . . . their urgent call for social justice.”

Equally great was the Jewish share of academic innovators with cult followings, such as Yuri Lotman in literary criticism, Aron Gurevich in history, Petr Kapitsa and Lev Landau in physics, and Izrail Gelfand and Leonid Kantorovich in mathematics. Close relatives of Western scholarly icons (Einstein, Oppenheimer, Boas, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Chomsky, and the members of the Frankfurt School, among others), they were Thorstein Veblen’s “disturbers of the intellectual peace” who stood out “among the vanguard, the pioneers, the uneasy guild of pathfinders and iconoclasts, in science, scholarship and institutional change and growth.” Hodl’s children had finally rejoined the family.¹⁸⁹

Along with the West, a crucial source of models and inspiration for the Soviet Westernizers was the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Most of the original avant-garde artists had been strongly antiliberal (and in some cases aggressively Bolshevik), but their late Soviet followers interpreted their work as the ultimate expression of individual creative freedom (and thus the natural antipode, as well as victim, of socialist realism). The latter-day iconoclasts were even more heavily Jewish than their models: according to Igor Golomstock’s survey of Soviet “unofficial” artists, “a figure of 50 percent would be too low rather than too high.” From the “Decembrist” generation of the Thaw artists, led by the monumental Ernst Neizvestny, to Oscar Rabin’s “Lianozovo” chroniclers of Soviet dreariness, to the chief iconographers of late Soviet irony (Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, and Aleksandr Melamid), most of the pathfinders and pioneers were ethnic Jews.¹⁹⁰

Russia being Russia, however, the truest prophets had to be poets. With the Pushkin religion taken for granted and shared with the regime, the particular patron saints of the anti-Soviet intelligentsia were two women (Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva) and two ethnic Jews (Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam). All four were worshiped as the lone guardians of Truth and Knowledge, martyred—out of impotent jealousy—by the demonic Party-state. Their only legitimate successor, anointed by Akhmatova before her death and canonized in his lifetime as the divine voice of the resurrected intelligentsia, was Joseph Brodsky, the son of a Soviet naval officer and the grandson of a Petersburg book publisher and a Pale of Settlement sewing-machine salesman.

The death of communism proved the undoing of Hodl’s life. Some members of her generation who had survived into the 1960s and 1970s were still living their dream (in “Old Bolsheviks’ Homes”) or waiting for it to come true (in the land of “actually existing socialism”), but most seemed to agree that the dream had been a chimera. The author of one of the most influential samizdat exposés of Stalinism was Evgeny Gnedin, the onetime head of the Press Department of the People’s Commissariat for External Affairs and the son of Parvus, who had formulated the theory of “permanent revolution” and persuaded the German government to let Lenin travel to Russia in April 1917. An even better-known camp memoir belonged to Evgenia Ginzburg, who, in the mid-1930s, had been the chair of the Department of the History of Leninism at the University of Kazan and the head of the Culture Department at the Red Tataria newspaper. The “inquisitor” who had sent her to prison was Abram Beilin, whose eyes, according to Ginzburg, “shone with a subdued, sardonic joy at the expense of his fellow creatures,” and who “exercised his Talmudic subtlety in polishing up the definition of my ‘crimes.’ ” Beilin, too, was later arrested, reduced to driving an oxcart in Kazakhstan, and finally allowed to retire to Moscow, where he was shunned by his old apparatchik friends (who had all read Ginzburg’s manuscript).¹⁹¹

One of Beilin’s old friends was Samuil Agursky, the erstwhile nemesis-in-chief of the Hebrew language who spent the last years of his life reading books on “ancient Jewish history.” As his wife, Bunia, lay dying, she told their son, Mikhail, “I should have lived my life very differently.” To which Mikhail responded, “I’ve always told you that you should have lived your life differently.” And when Hope Ulanovskaia, the onetime child revolutionary and professional spy, arrived in Israel at the age of seventy, she met some women who had left the Pale for Palestine at about the same time she had left her native shtetl for Russia. Visiting their kibbutz, she felt “regret that she had not lived her life the way she should have” and “humility before her contemporaries who had chosen a different path.” According to her daughter, she knew that “her life could have been as beautiful and productive as the life of these old kibbutzniks.”¹⁹²

Hodl’s children all agreed that she had not lived her life the way she should have—and that neither, if they were old enough to have been happy in the 1930s, had they. The leather-clad bard of the civil war’s “flashing bayonets,” Mikhail Svetlov, metamorphosed into the much lionized sad clown of the 1960s, whose witticisms were written down and widely circulated. (The best known was: “What is a question mark? It is an exclamation point that has grown old.”)

The “Komsomoler of the 1920s” and “pitiless” collectivizer, Lev Kopelev, became one of the best-known Soviet dissidents of the 1970s—as did his wife, Raisa Orlova, who had been a buoyantly happy member of the “first Soviet generation.” Another member of that generation was Mikhail Gefter, a “frenzied” Komsomol inquisitor in Moscow University’s History Department during the Great Terror who went on to become a leading moral philosopher of the perestroika period and president of the Russian Center for the Study of the Holocaust. Hope Ulanovskaia’s daughter, Maia, spent more than five years (1951–56) in prisons and camps for belonging to a student organization called the Union of the Struggle for the Cause of the Revolution, almost all of whose members, including all three founders, were young Jews (Hodl’s children). It was Maia’s son (and Hope’s grandson), born in 1959, who talked both of them into emigrating to Israel.¹⁹³

One of the leaders of the Jewish emigration movement was Samuil Agursky’s son Mikhail (the one who reproached his mother for having lived her life incorrectly). Among his fellow activists was David Azbel, whose uncle, Rakhmiel Vainshtein, had been Samuil Agursky’s rival at the helm of the Party’s Jewish Section. And among those who—in the late 1950s—had introduced the young Mikhail to modern Western art and Moscow’s bohemian scene was the first Soviet abstract expressionist, Vladimir Slepian. Slepian’s Jewish father had been the head of the Smolensk province secret police directorate.¹⁹⁴

The conversion from Communism to anti-Communism might lead to a trenchant mea culpa (like Kopelev’s or Orlova’s), mild bemusement (like Ulanovskaia’s), or labored obfuscation (like Gefter’s). But it almost never led to a sense of collective responsibility—on anyone’s part. The USSR’s most celebrated achievements—the revolution, industrialization, victory over the Nazis, the welfare state—were largely (if inconsistently) represented as supranationally Soviet in inspiration and selflessly global in spirit. They were carried out in the name of a common future, and they could be cheered, furthered, and treasured by anyone who shared the dream. The same uncertainty (generosity) of both authorship and target was true of other things—the Red Terror, the Great Terror, forced labor, “dekulakization”—that were now seen by the aging regime as dubious accomplishments and by the new antiregime intelligentsia as terrible crimes.¹⁹⁵

Acts of violence that are not committed by one tribe against another tribe cast a very short shadow. Unlike genocides, they produce no legitimate heirs—for either the victims or the perpetrators. “Germans” as actual or metaphoric children of the Nazis may be urged to repent and to atone; “Jews” as the actual or metaphoric children of the Holocaust may be entitled to compensation and apology. Communists (like animists, Calvinists, or any other nonethnic group) have no children other than those who choose to be adopted. The only identifiable collective descendants of the victims of Stalinist violence are nations: primarily the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet empire (including the Jews) but also, in some accounts, the Russians (as the main target of the Bolshevik war against rural backwardness and religion). The only identifiable collective descendants of the initiators and perpetrators of Stalinist violence are nations too: primarily the Russians but also, in some accounts, the Jews (as the most enthusiastic ethnically defined supporters of the Soviet state). The claim to ethnic victimhood is utterly convincing but—considering the overall scale and nature of Stalinist violence—relatively marginal; the identification of alleged victimizers appears dubious. The concept of ethnic responsibility is as inescapable (what is a “nation” if one is not responsible for the acts of one’s “fathers”?) as it is morally uncertain (what is repentance or atonement if there is no priestly or divine authority to provide absolution?). It is even more uncertain—and thus easily and justifiably escapable—with regard to the legacy of Communism, which was almost as strongly committed to cosmopolitanism as it was to mass violence.

Communists might have children, in other words, but Communism did not. The children of Communists who did not wish to be Communists could go back to their tribal or cultural genealogies, however defined. For Hodl’s children and grandchildren, this meant being a Jew and a member of the Russian intelligentsia (in various combinations). As Raisa Orlova wrote in her Memoirs of Times Not Past,

I know so little. It’s shocking how little I know. I know nothing about my roots, I know nothing about my genealogy. I don’t even know my maternal grandmother’s first name and patronymic, and she lived with us for a long time—she didn’t die until after I was married. And now it is vital for me to find out. To see in my mind’s eye the Kiev-Warsaw train that took my future parents on their wedding trip in March 1915. Their honeymoon.

. . . The wheels are pounding. That coach in the Kiev-Warsaw train is moving forward, and the two happy passengers do not know what lies ahead. I never heard the pounding of the wheels on that train before—but now I hear it more clearly all the time.¹⁹⁶

What does she hear? Her parents’ move to the center of both Russia and the world revolution (Gorky Street 6, next to the Kremlin) and their rise to the top of the Soviet bureaucratic and later cultural elite is a part of the Communist abomination she needs to forget if her true “roots” are to be recovered. What is left is her parents’ rejection of Judaism, their prerevolutionary college education (Commercial Institute for her father, School of Dentistry for her mother), and her mother’s passionate, lifelong love of Pushkin (“perhaps she had read Pushkin to my father on their honeymoon?”).

In the 1960s, when Orlova was writing her memoirs, one of the most popular books among intelligentsia teenagers was Alexandra Brushtein’s The Road Leads Off into the Distance, an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a sensitive girl from a Jewish intelligentsia family growing up in prerevolutionary Vilna. An engaging collection of literary clichés from the late nineteenth century, the book contains a warm and caring mother, a morally upright father (a doctor who divides his loyalties among his indigent patients, Pushkin, and the revolution), a silly German tutor, a faithful peasant nanny, and a rich collection of revolutionary exiles, ignorant priests, fat industrialists, book-reading proletarians, heartless gymnasium teachers, and fierce adolescent friendships in the face of the world’s injustice. What it does not contain—in the midst of the Pale of Settlement—are Jews (except an occasional ghostly victim or “shadow of forgotten ancestors”). There is a lot of anti-Semitism (along with other forms of injustice), and there is the intelligentsia devoted to the cause of universal equality, but there are no Jews because most Jews are members of the Russian intelligentsia and most members of the Russian intelligentsia are Jews. Such was the genealogy of most of Brushtein’s readers and the assumption behind Orlova’s quest.¹⁹⁷

There were other possible lineages, however. No, not Tevye: he was of no use to the late Soviet intellectuals, few of whom were curious about Judaism and virtually none of whom had any interest in shtetl culture or Yiddish literature (there could be no Soviet—i.e., anti-Soviet—Life Is with People or Fiddler on the Roof). As far as Hodl’s children and grandchildren were concerned, the world she had come from was every bit as “frightening and suffocating” as she had always told them it was.

But Hodl was not Tevye’s only daughter, and Hodl’s children and grandchildren had cousins, as well as grandparents and great-grandparents. There were, after all, two clear alternatives to Communism that could also serve as alternatives to the Soviet Jews’ precarious and—according to the state and the tribal Apollonians—illegitimate membership in the Russian intelligentsia. One was Beilke’s America as unadulterated Liberalism, or possibly Liberalism diluted with “Protestantized” Judaism (the kind that assured tribal solidarity without requiring strict ritual compliance or even a faith in God). The other was Chava’s Israel as Apollonian nationalism, or rather, Zionist Jewishness seemingly unpolluted by Tevye’s language, self-reflexivity, or religion.

While young Soviet Jews were rebelling against Hodl’s left radicalism and turning toward Zionism and—especially—Capitalism, young American Jews were rebelling against Beilke’s Capitalism and turning toward Zionism and—especially—left radicalism. The Jewish participation in the radical student movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was comparable to the Jewish participation in Eastern European socialism and prewar American Communism. In the first half of the 1960s, Jews (5 percent of all American students) made up between 30 and 50 percent of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) membership and more than 60 percent of its leadership; six out of eleven Steering Committee members of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley; one-third of the Weathermen arrested by the police; 50 percent of the membership of California’s Peace and Freedom Party; two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who went to the South in 1961 to fight racial segregation; one-third to one-half of the “Mississippi Summer” volunteers of 1964 (and two of the three murdered martyrs); 45 percent of those who protested the release of students’ grades to draft boards at the University of Chicago; and 90 percent of the sample of radical activists studied by Joseph Adelson at the University of Michigan. In 1970, in the wake of the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State (three of whom were Jewish), 90 percent of the Jewish students attending schools at which there were demonstrations claimed to have participated. In a 1970 nationwide poll, 23 percent of all Jewish college students identified themselves as “far left” (compared to 4 percent of Protestants and 2 percent of Catholics); and a small group of radical activists studied at the University of California was found to be 83 percent Jewish. A large study of student radicalism conducted by the American Council of Education in the late 1960s found that a Jewish background was the single most important predictor of participation in protest activities.¹⁹⁸

When, in 1971–73, Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter surveyed 1,051 students at Boston University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Michigan, they discovered that “53% of the radicals were of Jewish background, as were 63% of those who engaged in seven or more protests, 54% of those who led three or more protests, and 52% of those who formed three or more protest groups.” Most important, they found that “the dichotomy between Jews and non-Jews provided the most parsimonious means of accounting for the many other social and psychological aspects of New Left radicalism. . . . After examining our results, we concluded that there was little point in dividing the non-Jewish category into several ethnic or denominational components, because these subgroups differed only slightly in their adherence to radical ideas. Jews, by contrast, were substantially more radical than any of the non-Jewish religious or ethnic subgroups.”¹⁹⁹

Among Jews, “radicalism rose substantially as religious orthodoxy declined. Reform Jews were more radical than orthodox or conservative Jews . . . , and Jews who specified no further affiliation were more radical still.” By far the most radical of all were the children of “irreligious but ethnically Jewish parents,” especially those from upper-middle-class professional households. The uncontested leaders on the radicalism scale were the offspring of Jewish academics. Curiously, the non-Jewish students from professional households were not significantly more radical than non-Jewish students from other occupational backgrounds. The connection between secular professionalism and political radicalism seemed to apply only to Jews.²⁰⁰

In nineteenth-century Europe, Jews had been overrepresented among revolutionaries because their extraordinary success in the modern state had not been protected by that state’s legitimizing ideology, nationalism. Or rather, many young Jews had launched a patricidal revolution because their fathers seemed to combine boundless capitalism with “chimerical nationality.” All modernity is about “nakedness” covered by modern nationalism. The Jews—tragically—had become emperors with no clothes.

Mid-twentieth-century America was a country of universal nakedness because America’s commitment to capitalism seemed boundless and because the American nationality was, by European standards, chimerical. Once again, however, the most consistent “rootless cosmopolitans” in America were Jews. No one else was quite as secular, urban, or meritocratic as the Jews, and even those non-Jews who were as secular, urban, and meritocratic as the Jews were less patricidal because they were more patriarchal—more attached to the rituals, relatives, and conventions that make life meaningfully tribal. Of all the modern revolutions, the most uncompromising had been the Jewish one.

The Jewish American rebels of the 1960s were the only radicals who came from radical households—either because their parents were Communists or because their parents made the mistake of pursuing uncompromising Enlightenment liberalism in a country of subnational ethnic and religious allegiances. The Jewish parents were the only ones who believed in universal nakedness and raised their children accordingly. Philip Roth’s Swede Levov married a Catholic Miss New Jersey, bought a house on Arcady Hill, and raised his daughter Merry to love the America of Thanksgiving and “perfect self-control.” Instead, she grew up to become first a revolutionary terrorist and eventually a priestess of radical nonviolence. As the Swede’s father, the no-nonsense entrepreneur, put it, “once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression.” Or, as the Swede himself seems to have concluded, once Jews ran away from Jewishness; now they run away from non-Jewishness. “They raised a child who was neither Catholic nor Jew, who instead was first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain.” Babel’s and Mandelstam’s little boys had had to overcome their Jewish muteness in pursuit of the “clear and pure” sounds of Apollonian speech. Merry Levov stuttered in her native English because Thanksgiving was a poor substitute for Passover. Or Pushkin. Or Communism.²⁰¹

Merry was incurable: she was “gruesomely misbegotten.” But most other Jewish radicals of the 1960s did recover in the 1970s because they found clothes appropriate to their station—a faith that was both warm and modern, messianic and perfectly compatible with Thanksgiving. They became self-conscious Jews sharing in their people’s suffering and accomplishments. They became, in this broad sense, Jewish nationalists. According to Will Herberg,

The third generation [of American Jews] felt secure in its Americanness and therefore no longer saw any reason for the attitude of rejection so characteristic of its predecessors. It therefore felt no reluctance about identifying itself as Jewish and affirming its Jewishness; on the contrary, such identification became virtually compelling since it was the only way in which the American Jew could now locate himself in the larger community. . . . As the third generation began to “remember” the religion of its ancestors, to the degree at least of affirming itself Jewish “in a religious sense,” it also began to lose interest in the ideologies and “causes” which had been so characteristic of Jewish youth in earlier decades. Social radicalism virtually disappeared, and the passionate, militant Zionism espoused by groups of American Jews until 1948 became diffused into a vague, though by no means insincere, friendliness to the state of Israel.²⁰²

After the Six-Day War, Hodl’s and Chava’s children resumed their responsibility of endowing the lives of Beilke’s children with meaning: the Soviet cousins, as victims, and the Israeli ones, as both victims and victors. In the 1970s, most American Jews by blood became Jews by conviction—and thus full-fledged Americans. Nostalgia for a lost world was replaced with an allegiance to living relatives; chimerical nationality was transformed into a proper ethnoreligious community; Tevye, it turned out, had had other choices besides martyrdom and Thanksgiving. Tevye, it turned out, had descendants who were at peace with themselves and at war with their oppressors. The American Jews had finally become regular American “ethnics,” complete with an old country that was also a new state with a flag, an army, and a basketball team. More than that, they had become the first among American ethnics because their new old country was uniquely old, uniquely new, uniquely victorious, and uniquely victimized. And of course its very existence—and therefore the continued existence of all Jews, Soviet and American, was (it turned out) a response to an event that was the “most unique” of all events that had ever occurred. As Elie Wiesel wrote in the New York Times in 1978, “Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized. Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. . . . The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering. . . . The Holocaust? The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted.”²⁰³

Jewish American Communism had flared up one last time in the Jewish Century before finally yielding to nationalism. Relatively few of the erstwhile cosmopolitans would become “neoconservative” champions of Israeli-style uncompromising belligerence and “moral clarity,” but virtually everyone would join the “normal” modern nations in finding a decent cover for their nakedness. The place of ethnic Jews in America would ultimately depend on how normal or how unique Israel would become.

Meanwhile, the existence of ethnic Jews in the Soviet Union was becoming untenable. Most of those who had given up on Communism preferred American Liberalism (with or without the Jewish national content), but there were always those who looked to Palestine. The Moscow International Youth Festival of 1957, which launched the adulterous love affair between Soviet youth and all things foreign, included a much sought-after Israeli delegation; the “ideological struggle” waged by the Soviet state against alien penetration included periodic campaigns against “Zionist propaganda”; and the most influential heretical texts that tempted the Soviet intelligentsia away from Party orthodoxy included underground translations of such “Zionist realism” classics as Howard Fast’s My Glorious Brothers and Leon Uris’s Exodus. (Both books had the advantage of combining redemptive Jewish nationalism with militant Apollonian secularism; Fast, in particular, appeared to be a perfect icon—both Soviet and American—of a Communist ideologue and Stalin Peace Prize laureate awakened to the truth of Jewish chosenness and Soviet anti-Semitism.)²⁰⁴

The most important episode in the history of Soviet (and American) Zionism was the Six-Day War of 1967. “I sat at my dacha glued to the radio, rejoicing and celebrating,” writes Mikhail Agursky. “And I was not the only one.” Ester Markish, for one, “listened to the radio day and night. . . . The Jews were openly celebrating, saying to each other: ‘We are advancing!’ When the threat of war loomed over Israel, many Russian Jews made the unequivocal choice: ‘Israel is our flesh and blood. Russia is, at best, a distant relative, and possibly a total stranger.’ ”²⁰⁵

The children of the most loyal of all Soviet citizens had become the most alienated of all antiregime intellectuals. Back in 1956, Mikhail Agursky’s “sympathy” for Israel had not yet “reached the level of full identification.” In those days, “Israel had been a small provincial country, whereas I lived in a large metropolis, a superpower on which the fate of the world depended. I had grown up near the Kremlin, at the center of the world. Like most citizens of my country, I was a great-power chauvinist.”²⁰⁶

Now, almost overnight, the center of the world had shifted to where his family sympathy lay. “The Six-Day War convinced me that my platonic Zionism was becoming the real thing and that, sooner rather than later, I was fated to live in Israel. . . . From being a small provincial country, Israel had become a power one could identify with.” And from provincial poor relations, the half-forgotten Israeli cousins had turned into heroes and possibly patrons. As Ester Markish put it, “the photographs of Israeli aunts, uncles, and cousins twice removed had been kept in the remotest drawers; it was better not to discuss them out loud or mention them in government questionnaires.” Now, they had become “the distant fragments of our families that had survived Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms.” They were strong; they were virtuous; and they were free. According to a popular Soviet joke from the late 1960s, Rabinovich is confronted by an NKVD investigator:

“Why did you say on your questionnaire that you had no relatives overseas? We know you have a cousin living abroad.”

“I don’t have a cousin living abroad,” says Rabinovich.

“And what is this?” says the investigator, showing him a letter from his Israeli cousin.

“You don’t understand,” says Rabinovich, “my cousin lives at home. I am the one living abroad.”²⁰⁷

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, more and more Soviet intelligentsia members felt abroad at home and, as Elena Bonner would put it, “alone together.” Or rather, more and more Soviet professionals were becoming Russian intelligentsia members (“foreigners at home”). And the most foreign of them all were the hereditary strangers—the Jews.

Not only were the Jews heavily concentrated at the top, targeted for discrimination (for that very reason), and seen as tribal aliens in an increasingly tribalized state—they did, unlike most of their fellow professionals, have a different Jerusalem to turn to; they did, literally or metaphorically, have cousins who were at home abroad. Returning to their Moscow apartment after receptions at the Israeli Embassy, Ester Markish and her children “felt dejected: it was as if we were leaving our homeland for a foreign land.” Mikhail Agursky, Maia Ulanovskaia, and Tsafrira Meromskaia all felt the same way—and so did the Soviet state. Along with the Soviet Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, who also had prosperous foreign cousins willing to pay their ransom, the Jews were the only Soviet citizens—and virtually the only members of the Soviet professional elite—who were allowed to emigrate from the USSR. The official reason for the privilege was the existence of Israel: the Jewish “historic homeland.”²⁰⁸

After the Six-Day War, the number of emigration applications shot up. The regime retaliated by stepping up its “anti-Zionist” campaign and multiplying Jewish disabilities in education and employment. The Jews responded by applying to emigrate in even greater numbers; the regime retaliated by charging a higher education tax; and so it continued until Gorbachev opened the emigration floodgates (along with so many others) in the late 1980s. As an official from the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, L. Onikov, wrote to his superiors in a secret memo dated September 30, 1974, “almost all the Jews, including those (the overwhelming majority) who have never considered leaving this country, are in a state of psychological tension, uncertainty, and nervous anxiety: ‘What will happen to them tomorrow?’ ”²⁰⁹

The Party leaders seemed baffled. On the one hand, any desire to emigrate from Heaven was an open challenge to the true faith, and thus both a temptation to the faithful and an embarrassment before Hell. As Onikov wrote in his memo, “the fact of the departure of some Jews from the USSR is widely used in anti-Soviet propaganda as a confirmation of the old slander about a flight from ‘Communist paradise.’ ” Moreover, he continued, “the emigration of some Jews to Israel has a negative effect on other nationalities, including some Germans, Balts, Crimean Tatars, and others, who ask: ‘Why are Jews allowed to go to foreign countries, and we aren’t?’ ” Finally, there was the much discussed question of the “brain drain” and the dynamics of great-power politics in the Middle East. As L. I. Brezhnev put it at a Politburo meeting on March 20, 1973, “not only academicians but even middle-level specialists shouldn’t be allowed to leave—I don’t want to upset the Arabs.”²¹⁰

On the other hand, why not get rid of the rotten apples? In March 1971, the KGB chief Yuri Andropov recommended that the screenwriter E. E. Sevela be allowed to leave the country on account of his “nationalist views” and his “low moral and professional level.” In Onikov’s words, the emigration of “Zionists and other nationalists,” “religious fanatics,” “adventurers,” “self-seekers dreaming of private enterprise,” and “losers hoping to get lucky,” was a good thing. “The sooner such elements get out, the better.” There was, of course, a disconcerting Brer-Rabbit-and-the-briar-patch element to this logic (Andropov, for one, might deny permission to emigrate for the same reasons he might grant it), but Party leaders seemed to agree that, in some cases at least, the benefit of getting rid of troublesome subjects justified the anguish of having to watch them prosper in exile.

Finally, some Party leaders were prepared to discourage the Jews from leaving by granting them some of what they wanted. But what did the Jews want? Brezhnev, the top Party leader, had a rather narrow view of the question. On March 20, 1973, he reported to the Politburo the surprising fact that the Soviet Union had a Yiddish magazine.

And so I asked myself this question: we have a certain number of Gypsies, but surely not as many as Jews, right? And we don’t have any laws against the Jews, do we? So why not give them a little theater of five hundred seats, a Jewish variety theater, which would be under our censorship, and its repertoire under our supervision. Let Aunt Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I am not proposing this, I am just thinking out loud. Or how about opening a school? Some of our kids even study in England. Mzhavanadze’s son is going to school in England. My own granddaughter graduated from a so-called English school. They do study the language, but the rest of the curriculum is standard. So I’m wondering: why not open a school in Moscow, and call it a Jewish one? The curriculum would be standard, but they would teach Yiddish, their national language. What’s the big deal? After all, there are three and a half million of them, compared to 150,000 Gypsies.

So I had this really bold idea. Of course, I’m always full of ideas. Anyway, I realize no one has proposed this before, but why not allow a Yiddish weekly? We do have some little Jewish weeklies in Birobidzhan. Not everyone will be able to read it. Some Jew, some old Abramovich will read it, but so what? It all comes from TASS anyway. . . . I am speaking freely because I am not raising my hand to vote yet. I’m just thinking out loud for now, and I am keeping my hands on the table, that’s all.²¹¹

None of Brezhnev’s bold ideas came to pass, but the reason he was entertaining them—and the reason the Jewish emigration ranked so high on the Politburo’s agenda—was unrelenting political pressure from the United States. By the early 1970s, Beilke’s children—now one of the most politically and economically powerful communities in America—had rediscovered their Soviet cousins and adopted them as “the distant fragments of their families that had survived Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms.” The transformation of Socialists into Jews in the United States had coincided with the transformation of Socialists into Jews in the Soviet Union, but whereas in the United States it had marked the Jewish entry into the elite, in the Soviet Union it had accompanied the growing Jewish alienation. (Only a minority of American Jews had been Socialists, of course, but there is little doubt that Protestantized Judaism had supplanted Socialism as the dominant nontraditional Jewish ideology.) The poor relations of the 1930s had metamorphosed into the rich uncles of the 1970s, and after Israel had vanquished its enemies and begun to lose some of its luster and innocence, the exodus of the Soviet Jewry had become—briefly—the American Jewry’s most urgent, emotional, and unifying cause. By 1974, a broad coalition of Jewish organizations and politicians had managed to thwart the Nixon-Kissinger “détente” designs by assuring congressional adoption of the “Jackson-Vanik amendment,” which linked U.S.-Soviet trade to Jewish emigration from the USSR. As J. J. Goldberg put it, “Jewish activists had taken on the Nixon administration and the Kremlin and won. Jews had proven to the world and to themselves that they could stand up and fight for themselves. The stain of Holocaust abandonment had finally been removed.”²¹²

Although the Jackson-Vanik amendment (initiated and guided through Congress by Senator Jackson’s chief of staff, Richard Perle, and Senator Ribicoff’s chief of staff, Morris Amitay) referred to the freedom of emigration in general, it was applied only to the Jews. The exclusive right to request an exit visa resulted in ever greater alienation: all ethnic Jews became would-be émigrés, and thus potential traitors. It also led to the creation of an ever growing group of pseudo-Zionists and pseudo-Jews: the only way to leave the Soviet Union was to claim a desire to go to Israel. The late twentieth-century exodus was similar to the early twentieth-century one in that the overwhelming majority of émigrés preferred America to Palestine; the main difference was that the only way to go to America (or anywhere else) was by applying to go to Palestine.

The question of where to go mattered to some more than to others, but what mattered to all of Hodl’s grandchildren was that they had the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. The late twentieth-century exodus had much more to do with the perception that Hodl had chosen incorrectly than with the discovery that Chava and Beilke had chosen correctly. Everyone seemed to agree that Hodl’s path—socialism—had been a tragic mistake, and that the only real question was whether to do now what Hodl should have done then: emigrate from a false paradise.

Many of them did—both before and after the Soviet state finally agreed that socialism had been a tragic mistake. Between 1968 and 1994, about 1.2 million Jews left the USSR and its successor states (at 43 percent of the total, a larger emigration than the one of which Beilke and Chava had been a part). The first wave, which reached Israel between 1968 and 1975, carried with it most of the ideological Zionists (such as Markish and Agursky) and many of Tsaytl’s grandchildren from the former Pale of Settlement. The flood that followed was mostly U.S.-bound and included many of Hodl’s Moscow and Leningrad grandchildren (about 90 percent of whom went to the United States). The Israeli government attempted to curb this trend, but it was only after 1988, when the overall proportion of those going to America reached 89 percent, that the United States agreed to significantly decrease immigration quotas for Soviet Jews. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Israel opened its own consulates in the Soviet Union, closed down the notoriously porous transit point in Vienna, and ultimately succeeded in preventing the majority of the 1989–92 refugees (the largest group of all) from “dropping out” en route. By 1994, 27 percent of all Soviet Jewish émigrés from the USSR had been taken in by Beilke’s grandchildren, and 62 percent by Chava’s.²¹³

Wherever they ended up, most of Hodl’s descendants have remained faithful to the late Soviet concept of belonging. They are Jews by blood, Russians by (high) culture, and religious not at all (outside of the Pushkin cult). They are, therefore, not fully Jewish according to their American and Israeli hosts (many of whom seem as disappointed as anyone who has sheltered a long-lost relative). Indeed, they are like reverse Marranos: public Jews who practice their Gentile faith—complete with special feasts, rites, and texts—in the privacy of their homes. But this is a temporary condition, because the most important thing that all of Tevye’s descendants share is the knowledge that they are all Tevye’s descendants. Or rather, they all share Tevye’s most important belief: “Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be born one.” All Jews are Jews “by blood”; the rest is a matter of “absorption” (to use an Israeli term). Sooner or later, the Soviet Jewish émigrés to Israel and the United States will “recover their Jewishness” in its entirety. This does not mean going back to Tevye’s religion, of course (any more than any renaissance means actual rebirth). In Israel, full recovery implies the supplanting of the Russian intelligentsia canon with the Israeli Hebrew one; in the United States, it requires the replacement of the Russian intelligentsia canon with a blend of Protestantized Judaism and Zionism. It is a high price to pay, but most of Hodl’s grandchildren are willing to pay it. Because Hodl “should have lived her life differently,” the life that she did live must be forgotten. As one of Hodl’s daughters, Tsafrira Meromskaia, put it,

I lived in Moscow for more than forty years. I loved it as passionately as one loves a human being. I thought I would not be able to live a single day without it. And yet I have left it forever—consciously, calmly, even joyfully, without a chance to see it again or any desire to return.

I live without nostalgia, without looking back. Moscow, such as it is, is gone from my soul, and that is the best proof of the correctness of my decision.²¹⁴

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tevye’s daughters had three promised lands to choose from. At the turn of the twenty-first, there are only two. Communism lost out to both liberalism and nationalism and then died of exhaustion.

The Russian part of the Jewish Century is over. The home of the world’s largest Jewish population has become a small and remote province of Jewish life; the most Jewish of all states since the Second Temple has disappeared from the face of the earth; the sacred center of world revolution has been transformed into the capital of yet another Apollonian nation-state. Hodl, who was once admired by her sisters for her association with Russia, world revolution, and the Soviet state, has become a family embarrassment, or possibly a ghost. Few Jewish histories seem to remember who she is: the twentieth century as they represent it includes the lives of Tsaytl, Beilke, Chava, and their descendants, as well the sudden exodus of Tevye’s forgotten and apparently orphaned grandchildren from the captivity of the “Red Pharaohs.”²¹⁵

The Jewish part of Russian history is over too. It is closely associated with the fate of the Soviet experiment and is remembered or forgotten accordingly. Most Jewish nationalist accounts of Soviet history have preserved the memory of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Whites, Nazis, Ukrainian nationalists, and the postwar Soviet state, but not the memory of the Jewish Revolution against Judaism, Jewish identification with Bolshevism, and the unparalleled Jewish success within the Soviet establishment of the 1920s and 1930s. Some Russian nationalist accounts, on the other hand, equate Bolshevism with Jewishness in an effort to represent the Russian Revolution as a more or less deliberate alien assault on the Russian people and culture. As I write this, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has urged Jews to accept “moral responsibility” for those of their kinsmen who “took part in the iron Bolshevik leadership and, even more so, in the ideological guidance of a huge country down a false path.” Citing the German acceptance of “moral and material” responsibility for the Holocaust and reviving Vasily Shulgin’s arguments about Jewish “collective guilt” in the wake of the revolution, he calls on the Jews to “repent” for their role in the “Cheka executions, the drowning of the barges with the condemned in the White and Caspian Seas, collectivization, Ukrainian famine—in all the vile acts of the Soviet regime.” Like most attempts to apply the Christian concept of individual sin to nationalist demands for inherited tribal responsibility, Solzhenitsyn’s appeal envisions no ultimate absolution, no procedure for moral adjudication among competing claims, and no call on his own kinsmen to accept open-ended responsibility for the acts that any number of non-Russian peoples—or their self-appointed representatives—may consider both vile and ethnically Russian.²¹⁶ Both of these approaches—Hodl’s victimhood under Stalinism and Hodl’s moral responsibility for it—are quite marginal, however. Most accounts of twentieth-century Russian history are like most accounts of twentieth-century Jewish history in that they have nothing to say about Hodl. As Mikhail Agursky told his mother, she should have lived her life differently. Agursky’s mother seemed to agree—and so did Hope Ulanovskaia, my grandmother, and most of their relatives and fellow countrymen. Oblivion in many languages seems to be their punishment.

The Jews who remain in the Russian Federation (230,000, or 0.16 percent of the population, according to the 2002 census, or about half as many as in 1994) face the choice of all Mercurian minorities in Apollonian nation-states. One option is assimilation, made possible not only by the adherence of most ethnic Jews to the Pushkin faith but also by the conversion of a growing number of ethnic Russians to universal Mercurianism. More and more Russian Jews (the absolute majority) marry non-Jews, strongly identify with Russia as a country, and show no interest in perpetuating their Jewishness in any sense whatever. According to a 1995 poll, 16 percent of Russia’s ethnic Jews considered themselves religious: of those, 24 percent professed Judaism, 31 percent Orthodox Christianity, and the remaining 45 percent nothing in particular (beyond generic monotheism). At the same time, surveys of public opinion in the Russian Federation as a whole suggest that the majority of non-Jewish Russians have a favorable opinion of Jews and Israel, are neutral or positive about their close relatives’ marrying Jews, would welcome Jews as neighbors or colleagues, and oppose discrimination in employment and college admissions. The younger the respondents, the more positive toward Jews or ethnicity-blind they tend to be. (By comparison, both traditional and recently acquired Russian hostility toward Gypsies, Muslims, and peoples of the Caucasus remains quite pronounced.) Most demographic indicators seem to point toward a continued reduction in the number of self-consciously Jewish citizens of the Russian Federation. One might call this the Iberian option: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most of the ethnic Jews who did not emigrate from Spain and Portugal went on to become ethnic Spaniards or Portuguese.²¹⁷

The other possibility is that ethnic Jews will remain an overachieving Mercurian minority in a predominantly Apollonian society. In a 1997 poll, a substantial majority of the respondents claimed that Jews lived better than other people (62 percent), avoided manual labor (66 percent), were well brought up and well educated (75 percent), and included in their midst a large number of talented people (80 percent). These are standard Apollonian generalizations about Mercurians (as well as Mercurian generalizations about themselves). Like many such generalizations, they are, to a considerable extent, true. Ethnic Jews are still heavily concentrated at the top of the professional and educational hierarchy (more heavily, in fact, than in the late Soviet period because discrimination against them has been discontinued, and because Tsaytl’s grandchildren, who were mostly nonelite, emigrated from the Soviet Union at a higher rate than Hodl’s). Moreover, after the introduction of a market economy, Jews quickly became overrepresented among private entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, and those who claim to prefer career success to job security. Of the seven top “oligarchs” who built huge financial empires on the ruins of the Soviet Union and went on to dominate the Russian economy and media in the Yeltsin era, one (Vladimir Potanin) is the son of a high-ranking Soviet foreign-trade official; the other six (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) are ethnic Jews who made their fortunes out of “thin air” (as Tevye would have put it). In the long run, strong Jewish representation in certain positions may contribute to a continued group cohesion and recognition; the fact that those positions are familiar Mercurian ones may reinforce the traditional Russian-Jewish opposition and perpetuate the sense of Jewish strangeness (among both Jews and non-Jews). According to the polls, Russian Jews who think of themselves as Jewish or binational are more “achievement-oriented” than Russian Jews who think of themselves as Russians. Or, perhaps more to the point, the Russian Jews who specialize in dangerous and (according to most Russians) morally suspect occupations are naturally keener on preserving their strangeness (Jewishness). To return to an example cited in chapter 1, the Mon people of Thailand were divided into rice farmers and river traders. The farmers thought of themselves as Thai and were unsure about their Mon ancestry; the traders thought of themselves as Mon and felt strongly about not being of Thai descent. The main question for the future of Jews in Russia is not whether Jews will become farmers (as some tsars and Communists had hoped). In the age of universal Mercurianism (the Jewish Age), the main question is whether the Russians will learn how to become Jews.²¹⁸

The other revolutionary option, “Chava’s choice,” has proven much more successful. In the most general sense, Zionism prevailed over Communism because nationalism everywhere prevailed over socialism. Tribalism is a universal human condition, and the family is the most fundamental and conservative of all human institutions (as well as the source of most religious and political rhetoric). All human cultures are organized around the regulation of reproduction, and reproduction—whatever the regulatory regime—requires a preference for some partners over others and the favoring of one’s own children over those of others. All radical attempts to remake humankind are ultimately assaults on the family, and all of them either fail or dissimulate. For most humans most of the time, the pursuit of happiness involves pursuing the opposite sex, being fruitful, and raising children, all of which activities are forms of discrimination and inexhaustible springs of tribalism. No vision of justice-as-equality can accommodate the human family however constituted, and no human existence involving men, women, and children can abide the abolition of the distinction between kin and nonkin. Christianity, which urged human beings to love other people’s children as much as their own, managed to survive by making marriage (a pledge of exclusive loyalty to one person) a religious sacrament analogous to the central institution of all tribal societies. Communism, which was Christianity’s foolish, literal-minded younger brother, withered away after the first generation’s idealism because it failed to incorporate the family and thus proved unable to reproduce itself. In the end, it was nationalism that triumphed decisively over both because it updated the traditional (genealogical) brand of immortality by introducing the tribal way of being modern and the modern way of being tribal. Nationalism needs no doctrine because it seems so natural. Whatever Chava’s grandchildren think of her idealism and sacrifice, they have no trouble understanding her motives. Even the most disenchanted of Israelis would never ask Chava the bitterly uncomprehending questions that haunted Hodl at the end of her life: “Did you really believe that? How could you?”

Zionism prevailed over Communism because it delivered on its (relatively realistic) promises. The language of God has become a viable vernacular; a part of the Land of Israel has become the State of Israel; and the world’s most accomplished Mercurians have been reforged into a new breed of Jewish Apollonians. Europe’s strangest nationalism has succeeded in transforming a radical Jewish “self-hatred” (renunciation of Tevye) into a functioning nation-state.

It is a peculiar state, however—almost as peculiar as the doctrine that brought it into being. Self-consciously Western in the heart of “Oriental” darkness and ideologically Apollonian in the face of Western Mercurianism, it is the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe in the postwar—and post–Cold War—world. The Israeli equivalent of such politically illegitimate concepts as “Germany for the Germans” and “Greater Serbia”—“the Jewish state”—is taken for granted both inside and outside Israel. (Historically, the great majority of European states are monoethnic entities with tribal mythologies and language-based high-culture religions too, but the post-1970s convention has been to dilute that fact with a variety of “multicultural” claims and provisions that make European states appear more like the United States.) The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life. And probably no other European state can hope to avoid boycotts and sanctions while pursuing a policy of territorial expansion, wall building, settlement construction in occupied areas, use of lethal force against demonstrators, and extrajudicial killings and demolitions. It is true that no other European state is in a condition of permanent war; it is also true that no other European state can have as strong a claim on the West’s moral imagination.

In the wake of the Six-Day War, many people in the postcolonial West enjoyed a vicarious identification with a country that was both European and Apollonian, small but victorious, virtuously democratic yet brash, tanned, youthful, determined, khaki-clad, seamlessly unified, and totally devoid of doubt. However, it was the rise of the Holocaust culture in the 1970s that provided the primary legitimation for Israel’s continued defiance of the changing world. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and especially during Menachem Begin’s premiership in 1977–83, the Holocaust became the central episode in Jewish and world history and a transcendental religious concept referring to an event described as incomparable, incomprehensible, and unrepresentable. Israel’s raison d’être, it turned out, was not so much a repudiation of Tevye’s life as retribution for Tevye’s death; “not so much a negation of the Diaspora as a continuation of its fate in a new way” (as David Biale put it). Rather than representing a permanent escape from the ghetto, Israel became the ghetto’s mirror image—an armed camp (Masada). Along with being the creature of Chava’s rebellion, it became a mausoleum dedicated to Tsaytl’s martyrdom.²¹⁹

One reason for the wide acceptance of the new image of Israel was the substantial influence wielded by American Jews, whose Jewishness and possibly Americanness seemed to depend on Israel’s continued chosenness and the Holocaust’s transcendence of history. Another was the continued hostility and inflexibility of Israel’s Arab neighbors and the growing Western antipathy toward both Islam and Arab nationalism. But the most important reason was the nature of the Jewish genocide itself—or rather, the character of Nazi ideology and practice. By identifying the Jews as the source of all imperfection and injustice, the Nazis formulated a simple solution to the problem of evil in the modern world. The Age of Man received an identifiable devil in human form; the Age of Nationalism attained the perfect symmetry of a fully ethnicized Hell (to go with the ethnicized Purgatory and Paradise); and the Age of Science acquired a clear moral purpose by becoming the main instrument of a violent racial apocalypse. The Nazis lost the war (to their messianic twin and nemesis, the Soviet Union) but they won the battle of concepts. Their specific program was rejected, but their worship of ethnicity and their focus on demonology were widely accepted. The most fundamental way in which World War II transformed the world was that it gave birth to a new moral absolute: the Nazis as universal evil.

By representing Satan in the cosmogony they helped create, the Nazis gave meaning and coherence to the world they hoped to destroy. For the first time since the European states began to separate themselves from the church, the Western world acquired a transcendental universal. God might be dead, but the princes of darkness—in their special dark uniforms—were there for all to see. They were human, as required by the Age of Man; they were ethnically defined, as desired by the Age of Nationalism (not in the sense of all Germans’ being willing executioners, but in the sense that the Nazis’ crimes were ethnic in content and the Germans as a nation were held responsible for the Nazis’ crimes); and they were so methodically scientific in their brutality as to create a permanent link between the Age of Science and the nightmare of total violence. It was only a matter of time, in other words, before the central targets of Nazi violence became the world’s universal victims. From being the Jewish God’s Chosen People, the Jews had become the Nazis’ chosen people, and by becoming the Nazis’ chosen people, they became the Chosen People of the postwar Western world. The Holocaust became the measure of all crimes, and anti-Semitism became the only irredeemable form of ethnic bigotry in Western public life (no other kind of national hostility, however chronic or violent, has a special term attached to it—unless one counts “racism,” which is comparable but not tribe-specific).

At the same time and for the same reason, Israel became a country to which standard rules did not apply. The Zionist attempt to create a normal European nation-state resulted in the creation of the most eccentric of all European nation-states. One consequence was substantial freedom of speech and action; the other was growing isolation. The two are connected, of course: freedom from convention is both a cause and an effect of isolation, and pariah status is as closely linked to exceptionalism as is heroism. In an act of tragic irony, the Zionist escape from strangeness has led to a new kind of strangeness. From being exemplary Mercurians among Apollonians, the Israeli Jews have become exemplary Apollonians among universal (Western) Mercurians. By representing violent retribution and undiluted ethnic nationalism in a world that claims to value neither, they have estranged themselves from the states they wanted to join. Chava’s choice has proved successful in that her grandchildren are proud Jews in a Jewish state. It has proved a failure insofar as Israel is still a stranger among nations. Either way—because it has succeeded or because it has failed—the Zionist revolution is over. The original ethos of youthful athleticism, belligerence, and single-mindedness is carried on by a tired elite of old generals. Half a century after its founding, Israel bears a distant family resemblance to the Soviet Union half a century after the October Revolution. The last representatives of the first Sabra generation are still in power, but their days are numbered. Because Zionism is a form of nationalism and not socialism, Israel will not die when they do, but the new generals and civilians who come after them may choose to strike a different balance between normality and ethnic self-assertion.

Of the three options available to Tevye’s daughters at the turn of the Jewish Century, the least revolutionary one proved the most successful. At the century’s end, the great majority of Tevye’s descendants seemed to agree that Beilke’s choice had been the wisest. The choice that Tevye had despised (“where else do all the hard-luck cases go?”); the place that had attracted the least educated and the least idealistic; the Promised Land that had never promised a miracle or a permanent home (just the hope for more luck at the old game)—this was the option that ended up on top. America had virtue as well as riches, and it contained enough riches to make even Tevye a wealthy man. It represented Mercurianism in power, service nomadism without strangeness, full freedom of both wealth and learning.

The Jews are the wealthiest of all religious groups in the United States (including such traditionally prosperous denominations as the Unitarians and Episcopalians). They have the highest household incomes (72 percent higher than the national average), the highest rate of self-employment (three times as high as the national average), and the highest representation among the richest individual Americans (about 40 percent of the wealthiest forty, as reported by the Forbes magazine in 1982). Even the new immigrant households from the former Soviet Union begin to earn more than the national average within a few years of arrival.²²⁰

The Jews are the most educated of all Americans (almost all college-age Jews are in college, and the concentration of Jews in professional occupations is double that of non-Jews). They are also the best educated: the more prestigious the university as a general rule, the higher the percentage of Jewish students and professors. According to a 1970 study, 50 percent of the most influential American intellectuals (published and reviewed most widely in the top twenty intellectual journals) were Jews. Among the academic elite (identified in the same fashion), Jews made up 56 percent of those in the social sciences and 61 percent in the humanities. Of the twenty most influential American intellectuals, as ranked by other intellectuals, fifteen (75 percent) were Jews. The overall Jewish share of the American population is less than 3 percent.²²¹

Wealth and learning come in due course, but Mercury’s original job was that of a messenger. According to studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, Jews made up between one-quarter and one-third of the “media elite” (the news divisions of the three television networks and PBS, the three leading news magazines, and the four top newspapers). More than one-third of the most “influential” critics of film, literature, radio, and television were of Jewish background, as were almost half of the Hollywood producers of prime-time television shows and about two-thirds of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing movies between 1965 and 1982. In October 1994, Vanity Fair profiled twenty-three media moguls who made up what the magazine called “the new establishment”: “men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries, whose ambitions and influence have made America the true superpower of the Information Age.” Eleven of them (48 percent) were Jews.²²²

“Establishments” and superpowers may change, but the degree of congruence between posttraditional economies and traditional Mercurian skills remains very high. The American Jews are successful in the same occupations as the European and Soviet Jews—which are, essentially, the same occupations that have always been pursued by literate Mercurians (and are being pursued in today’s United States by the Lebanese Christians and Overseas Indians and Chinese, among others). “Doctors and lawyers” are both the oldest Jewish professions in Europe and the badge of middle-class accomplishment (and Jewish upward mobility) in the United States. In the mid-1980s, the concentration of Jews in elite positions and the occupational and educational gap between Jews and non-Jews were still growing.²²³

In the nation-states (or would-be nation-states) of Europe, Asia, and Africa, similar triumphs of strangers over the natives have led to discrimination and violence. But the United States—rhetorically—has no state-bearing natives and therefore no permanent strangers. What makes the United States different is that Mercurianism, including meritocracy, is the official ideology of the state; that traditional Mercurians, including the Jews, have no legal handicaps; and that nativist tribalism, including anti-Semitism, plays a relatively minor role in political life. American Jews are free to succeed because they are Americans—the way Soviet Jews of the 1920s and 1930s were free to succeed because they were Soviets. Of all the non-Jewish polities in the history of the world, the postwar United States is second only to the prewar Soviet Union in the importance of Jewish participation in the political process. Jews are strongly overrepresented in both houses of Congress (three to four times their percentage of the general population), and they are extremely prominent among political consultants, staffers, funders, and volunteers. Jews provide between one-fourth and one-half of all Democratic Party campaign funds, and, according to Ze’ev Chafets, in twenty-seven out of thirty-six senatorial races of 1986, “at least one of the candidates (and often both) had a Jewish campaign manager or finance chairman.” A 1982 study of the American economic, cultural, and political elite found that most Protestants included in this category owed their rise to business and electoral politics; most Catholics, to trade union and party activism; and most Jews, to work in the media, public-interest organizations, and civil service. There is little doubt that the Jewish strategy is the most effective of the three because of its high degree of compatibility with the modern postindustrial state. Indeed, the Jewish prominence in the American political elite began to grow perceptibly in the 1970s, during the ascendance of nonprofit organizations, political foundations, regulatory agencies, new information technologies, and public-interest law firms. There was no single “Jewish interest,” of course (other than the tendency to support the continued growth of those same institutions), but there was one question on which most of Beilke’s grandchildren agreed and around which their considerable wealth, education, and political influence could be organized: the welfare of their overseas cousins.²²⁴

The American Jewish mobilization on behalf of the Soviet Jewish exodus from the USSR ended—as abruptly as it had begun—with the demise of the USSR and the emigration of all the ethnic Jews who wished to leave. The American Jewish identification with Israel proved more durable because it transformed America’s ethnic Jews into the most accomplished and the most beleaguered of all American ethnics. But it was the identification of both Beilke’s America and Chava’s Israel with Tsaytl’s martyrdom that became the true source of late twentieth-century Jewishness. In a world without God, evil and victimhood are the only absolutes. The rise of the Holocaust as a transcendental concept has led to the emergence of the Jews as the Chosen People for the new age.²²⁵

In the competitive world of American ethnic communities, there are two paths to success: upward mobility defined according to wealth, education, and political power, and downward mobility measured by degrees of victimhood.²²⁶ Beilke’s descendants are among the leaders on both counts: at the very top by dint of their own efforts along traditional Mercurian lines, and at the very bottom because of their association with Tsaytl, the universal victim. Once again, the majority of the world’s Jews combine economic achievement with the status of a punished nation. But the world has changed: at the end of the Jewish Century, both titles are in universal demand. Economic achievement is an inescapable standard of worth, and victimhood is a common sign of virtue (especially for those who lack economic achievement). Jealousy of the Jews may remain both a fact of life and an ineradicable Jewish expectation.

But then again, it may not. The majority of the world’s Jews live in a society that is Mercurian both by official faith and—increasingly—by membership, a society without acknowledged natives, a society of service nomads destined to redeem humanity. As the historian Joseph R. Levenson put it, “a Jewish style of life . . . may be more endangered when everyone eats bagels than when Jews eat hot cross buns.” In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent. The American pastoral that eluded Swede Levov and his “gruesomely misbegotten” daughter may yet work for his son, Chris. Hodl’s choice may still be available, for better or worse, in Beilke’s America.

For better or for worse? Tevye was not sure. Why raise Jewish daughters if they were going “to break away in the end like the leaves that fall from a tree and are carried off by the wind?” But then again, “what did being a Jew or not a Jew matter? Why did God have to create both?”²²⁷