Russian Jews Are Still Jews
FRANK, M. Z.
They have resisted cultural oppression russian jews are still jews By M. Z. Frank In Israel last winter, I met a number of recent arrivals from Russia and Poland. There was a former Polish...
...He told me that most of the 500,000 Jews in Moscow could speak Yiddish...
...Yes...
...There was a former Polish citizen who had spent 13 years in a Siberian forced-labor camp...
...I asked how long he had been in Israel...
...Some Zionist leaders still hope that the Soviet rulers, unwilling to grant the Jews full rights and not prepared to go so far as physical annihilation, will eventually permit emigration to Israel...
...There are only 15,000 Gypsies in all Russia," he said bitterly, "and yet the Soviet Government maintains a Gypsy theater...
...they spoke Rumanian...
...Kiev...
...Why did they close down the Yiddish theater...
...In recent years, he had been director of the commercial department of the Moscow Provincial Sports Union...
...Born in a small town in the Ukraine, he had moved to the capital at the age of 8. During World War II, he was a captain in the Red Army, was wounded and received seven decorations...
...What surprised me about this man was his fluent Yiddish...
...This is my homeland...
...In any case, the Soviet regime, after 40 years, has neither abolished indigenous anti-Semitism nor eradicated historic Jewish sentiments among Russian Jews...
...But some weeks ago Andre Blumel, a French Zionist known for pro-Soviet sympathies, returned from Russia and reported that Yiddish is still alive there despite the regime...
...In that terrible wartime massacre, my informant said, the Jews were told they were being sent to work...
...The official Soviet explanation is that the Jews of Russia have long since lost interest in Yiddish...
...I was surprised...
...In a recent talk with a foreign delegation, however, Khrushchev declared that Jewish emigration would not be "useful" and added a few nasty remarks about Israel's "aggressive" policy...
...Kiev...
...When he was sent to Denmark on a mission, he and two other young Jews requested asylum...
...My entire family was exterminated over there...
...There had been a Yiddish theater in Moscow until 1947, and it was always packed...
...In Baby Yar...
...I was a soldier with the Red Army in Berlin," he said, "and I went over to the other side...
...I have no other...
...This had seemed plausible, and for some time I remained skeptical of the account I received from this Russian Jew...
...The works of some of the murdered writers were published in Russian translation, not in the original Yiddish...
...I found few young Rumanian Jews in Haifa who spoke Yiddish habitually...
...the sister of Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann, recently released from a Moscow jail where she was sent at the time of the 1952 "Jewish doctors' plot...
...In the summer of 1952, I noticed that my driver on an Israeli tour spoke Hebrew with a pronounced Ukrainian accent...
...In Tel Aviv, during the Sinai Campaign last fall, I tuned in Radio Moscow several times and heard denunciations of Israel's "aggressivny, imperialistichesky" policy...
...I asked...
...Yet, here was a young Jew who, since childhood, had lived in Moscow, and he spoke fluent Yiddish...
...After Stalin's death, arrested Yiddish writers were released and purged ones "rehabilitated," but the "rehabilitation" was not extended to the Yiddish language itself...
...But, later, newly arrived immigrants from Russia—whose accounts were confirmed by delegates to last summer's Moscow Youth Festival—told me that Russian Jews' reaction to Israeli efforts were very different indeed...
...on arriving at Baby Yar, they were mowed down...
...Before his death, Stalin was reportedly preparing to destroy the Jewish population physically, starting with deportations...
...The day before I sailed from Haifa, I met a 35-year-old Jew from Moscow...
...Then you must have run away...
...Where do you come from...
...a Warsaw-born engineer who spent 17 years in Russia, returned to Poland last November and decided that it was still not a good country for Jews...
...My informant in Haifa felt that at least 80 per cent of Russian Jews would leave for Israel if given the chance...
...Perhaps there is a connection between events like this and what the former Red Army captain told me in Haifa about the persistent survival of Jewish sentiment in Russia...
...Why do you say I ran away...
...Not a single German hand touched them," he said bitterly...
...The killers were all Russians and Ukrainians...
...For a time, one well-informed Israeli student of Russian affairs told me, Stalin's successors did consider restoring the former rights of Jewish culture, but the idea was dropped...
...During the Nazi occupation, Ukrainians readily collaborated with the SS in massacring Jews, while Jewish Partisans who joined non-Jewish units were in as much danger from their "comrades" as from the Nazi enemy...
...There is as little anti-Jewish feeling among Georgians today (Stalin was apparently an exception) as there was before 1917...
...I came home...
...Four years," he replied...
...At the same time, anti-Semitism in the Ukraine is as rife as ever...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
