Four Communist Replies
Four Communist Replies Below we present the first of four articles which, in effect, constitute Communist replies to the official Soviet position on Jews in the USSR, as expressed by Khrushchev and...
...In the Lenin Library's periodical department are to be found, in addition to the Birobidjan Shtern, a number of Yiddish newspapers from outside the country the Paris Neie Presse, the New York Morgen Freiheit, the Tel Aviv Freie Israel, The collection of the Birobidjan Shtern lies there as if it had just come off the presses, unmarked and untouched, whereas the foreign Jewish papers have worn so thin from being read through and handled by so many eager readers that they have become virtually illegible...
...And these 3,000,000 are a factan official, unchallenged, stubborn fact which no amount of theoretical analysis can eliminate...
...We must therefore conclude that this failure to satisfy the cultural needs of the Jewish population is a violation of the fundamental principles of socialism as they relate to the national question...
...The whole subject reached a dead end...
...Each confirmed the report I brought back...
...In the course of discussions which were often sharp and passionate, I was frequently asked: 'Which is preferable, from the vantage-point of both the writer and literature itself a Yiddish edition of 2,000 for problematical readers at best, or a huge Russian edition for 200,000,000 readers?' This is one of those questions that pose a false dilemma like asking a child which he loves better, his father or his mother...
...Of course we should welcome the considerable translations from Yiddish into Russian of very many books...
...10 newspapers and periodicals...
...Smaller states than the Soviet Union Poland and Rumania have Yiddish publishing houses, schools, theaters...
...It is not the fault of the Jewish writers that this special commission has evidently accomplished nothing in the course of two years...
...Its importance lies in the fact that although it is concerned particularly with the Jewish problem, it nevertheless appears to throw considerable light on the general situation...
...They showed me a proposed plan which was impressive in scope, especially since it appeared at a time when there had been no Jewish cultural activity for eight years...
...its questions remain unresolved today . . . and we must take a stand on them...
...At the same time, however, and parallel to this process of integration, another process no less historic with the Jewish people, though built on new foundations began to evolve: a process of national consolidation...
...Even the Morgen Freiheit comes all the way to the Soviet Union and is read eagerly...
...There were also many soldiers present, officers of various ranks...
...Nor will the unwritten manuscripts that perished with their creators ever see the light of day and who can know what masterpieces were thus senselessly lost to Jewish and world literature...
...For example, Heimland, a Yiddish journal, was in the library up to the volumes of 1948 and no later...
...than before the fearful events of 1948...
...Why are the whereabouts of their remains unknown to this day...
...There were at this time 42 Yiddish newspapers and periodicals, four publishing houses, 10 Yiddish State theaters and two theatrical schools...
...Several radio stations gave many hours to Yiddish broadcasts...
...One told me that he knows Yiddish well...
...It is equally incorrect historically to allege that Soviet Jewish culture had virtually expired even before 1948that is, before the arrests of the writers began...
...The older writers perfected both the form and content of their work, the younger ones developed beyond recognition, and those who before the war had merely shown promise have become mature artists of high caliber...
...Furthermore, there seems to be general support among Soviet writers for the rehabilitation of Yiddish, its publications, theaters, newspapers, etc...
...But does this mean that the writers believe the prospects are rosy...
...The Soviet Union possessed the largest network of Yiddish schools in the world, the greatest number of Jewish teacher-training academies, pedagogical institutes, the only Jewish institution of higher learning in Yiddish in the world, scientific institutes, university chairs, and Yiddish departments in universities...
...It would be far more correct to recognize that in 1936-38 a conspiracy against Jewish culture took place, producing tremendous and perhaps irreparable damage to it...
...It is not merely literary impetus or prolific creativity: It is, in the highest sense, sacred dedication...
...Had it not come from the Soviet Vice Minister for Culture himself, I would have thought it either a mistake or an exaggeration...
...The historic tendency of Jewish communities to integrate into the economic, political and cultural life of the countries they live ina tendency as old as the history of the Jewish people was quite naturally enhanced in the circumstances created by a Socialist society in which all artificial barriers between peoples, races and religions have been wiped out...
...At about the same time that the Moscow Yiddish State Theater was closed down, a number of other Jewish State theaters in various Soviet republics were also closed down...
...Georgian, Kazakh, et al.strive energetically, through translation into Russian, to reach 'the vast ocean of 200,000,000 readers.' But no one ever conceived, or dared suggest, that all these national literatures of the USSR must content themselves with Russian translations of works they created in their own languages...
...Aside from this one celebration, which was conducted exclusively in Russian, no special evening in Yiddish was arranged for this most distinguished poet, whom the Government itself once decorated with the 'Order of Soviet Worker.' "And so it was that at the quite fortuitous encounter with visitors from abroad [including myself], the Soviet Jewish writers used the occasion to express their love and veneration for this founding father of Soviet Jewish literature something they had had no opportunity to do in a more fitting and ceremonious fashion...
...Is this what the contents of a Jewish newspaper ought to be?' "The other Jews nod assent...
...These, in short, were the arguments I was given on the highest Soviet Government and Party levels...
...But, fortunately, quite a few writers and artists survived those evil days and recovered their freedom and their homes...
...I started a conversation with three of them, who seemed to be around 18 or 20...
...They have still to regain Jewish books, the Jewish theater, a Jewish press, Jewish schools, scientific institutes and university chairs...
...In the most natural and healthy way...
...A leading member of the French Communist party, he was part of a three man delegation dispatched by party chief Maurice Thorez in late 1958 to examine the status of Soviet Jews...
...that it was usually held that such things have to be nurtured and encouraged...
...Meanwhile, months and years have gone by...
...From time to time, the Yiddish press of Western Europe and the United States has published assertions, real or concocted, to the effect that the status of Jewish literature in the Soviet Union would be considerably improved today if the Soviet Jewish writers applied themselves to its revival more actively and energetically...
...Ringing verses sounded bravely: " 'But who can desecrate our word That lives from age to age?' "And another poet roused his audience with: " 'Strength, lasting strength, is what we need, We the surviving ones.' "And yet another poet, as though giving voice to a note that had somehow reverberated mutely in the background, repeated after each stanza of a brilliant poem, in the rhythm of prayer: " 'And autumn leaves rustle, Only do not despair, only do not despair.' "It is certainly true that it was not only Jewish writers and artists who were brutally liquidated in the gruesome years of 1948-53...
...What is the present policy of the Soviet Union toward the Jews...
...It is in the light of the above-mentioned developments that one has to consider what happened to Yiddish culture in the USSR in 1948...
...But friend and foe alike erred...
...For the rest, it's just local Birobidjan news, and how can that interest me...
...It had drawn its last breath and was already a virtual corpse even before the Jewish writers and artists were liquidated...
...And my own talk with many Jews in Moscow quite convinced me that there is great interest in Jewish literature, greater perhaps, I was told...
...IN JULY 1956, I returned from a trip to the Soviet Union, where I had spent a little more than a month...
...they talk of it and long for it...
...For the vast majority of Russian literary people, including the most famous and influential, favor the immediate revival of Jewish literature...
...Far more serious is the fact that current official policies are completely out of keeping with present-day Soviet realities...
...Book publishing in Yiddish experienced a five-fold increase from 73 titles in 1913 to 339 in 1939...
...Some time ago, the Union itself created a special commission to study the problem and to propose the requisite measures for its speedy and effective resolution...
...Its three-part report on all facets of Soviet life appeared in consecutive issues of the London Communist weekly, World News...
...The Jewish cultural conference was not called...
...But even without any assurance of influencing the objective situation...
...All the arguments we heard from certain Soviet leaders that the Jews themselves do not want Yiddish publications do not correspond with reality...
...All the projects remained suspended in air...
...A reproach that is heard about the no-longer-existent Jewish publishing business is that Jewish books used to gather dust on the shelves of book stores...
...But what about the 3,000,000 people who in 1957 alone attended the more than 3,000 Jewish cabaret-theater performances...
...It turned out that there is nothing in Yiddish later than 1948, when publication of Yiddish papers and journals must therefore have ceased...
...To be sure, much can be said against the manner of rehabilitation...
...In the whole of the Soviet Union (with the possible exception of Birobidjan, which I wouldn't know)where barely 20 years ago there existed thousands of Jewish educational institutions of all kinds there is today not one school, not one evening course, not one club, or any other institution which provides the opportunity to learn Yiddish for anyone who should want it And evidently there are such young people, young Soviet Jews for whom a newspaper must serve as both primer and text book...
...by 1932 the figure was 64 per cent...
...Friends mourned them with deep sorrow and pain...
...All in all, these Jewish cultural and educational institutions trained hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, who must now be in their 30s and 40s...
...a certain measure of indifference to human values which does violence to those of us, brought up in bourgeois capitalist society, who have given our support to the Socialist cause...
...Then came the discovery from private conversations by Comrade Levy with Jews that the years 1948-52 were known among them as 'The Black Years,' the period during which many Jews were dismissed from their posts, Jewish poets and writers were arrested and charged with treason and executed...
...In this way, practically the whole of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was liquidated...
...and a scientific institute...
...I must confess that I was astonished to hear that figure...
...Not one of them despaired of the future of Jewish literature in the Soviet Union...
...The victims have been rehabilitated and formal justice has been done...
...Enemies shed crocodile tears and delivered sonorous funeral orations...
...It is therefore simply not true historically that Soviet Jewish culture was already in the process of dissolution on the eve of the war...
...Crimes and distortions of this type cannot be the work of one man...
...the more venomous their enmity and the mere intense their hatred, the louder were their lamentations...
...Some time ago, the answer would have beenabsolutely yes...
...The approximately 1,000 people, young and old, nearly all of whom could be heard, before the performance began and at intermission, conversing in Russian, sat with open-mouthed delight drinking in every Yiddish word from the stage...
...Look,' he says, pointing to the first page, 'I read this article a week ago in Pravda, and that one I read about 10 days ago in Izvestia...
...a children's theater...
...It seems quite clear, then, that accepting Comrade Suslov's statement as official policy, that policy expects that the Jewish people in the Soviet Union will become completely absorbed . . . that there is no need, therefore, for special encouragement of Yiddish culture, and that it is undesirable to take such steps...
...The contradiction between theory and reality, between desired objectives and actual results, is too great, as is the contrast between the proportions of the problem as originally conceived and as now reflected in unexpected world-wide reaction for the competent Soviet authorities not to re-evaluate the whole question...
...Among ordinary Jews of the older generation of the type of the 2,000 who gathered in the Leningrad Synagogue this summer to celebrate the festival of the Rejoicing of the Law (Simchas Torah)the non-existence of a Yiddish paper was regarded as a deprivation and an injustice...
...It is not my intention here to discuss whether these theories are theoretically false...
...There is no doubt that the problem is being discussed and considered in the USSR...
...But the reality of the Soviet Union does not fit them at all...
...a conference was to be called of Jewish cultural workers and leaders...
...At this point, Mr...
...to visit the Soviet Union since the disruption of Jewish cultural activity in 1948 had become known...
...The uniqueness of the Jewish tragedy was not only that individual writers and artists were liquidated, but that annihilation was decreed for the culture as such, the language as such, the very alphabet...
...This fact is so obvious, so indisputable, that the majority of Soviet Russian writers, including such prominent ones as Sholokhov, Leonov, Fedin, Kirsanov, Azayev, Katayev, Polevoy, Agapov and others, have expressed their conviction that their Jewish colleagues should also be published in Yiddish...
...And as for the Jewish books that appear in Russian translation, the demand for them is so tremendous that people stand in line for them and will pay as much as 100 rubles for a three-ruble book...
...By far the most telling of these Communist replies is this fourth one, by Chaim Sloves...
...This made us all feel certain that the plan would really be carried out...
...Not at all...
...Sholom Aleichem's books in Yiddish rose from 220,000 in 1913 to 3,200,000 in 1939...
...One need not be an expert to understand that if the Soviet Government were convinced of the correctness of these measures, they would be adopted with dispatch...
...The official version is that 'Einikeit was losing readers daily...
...One can safely say that the vital source of Jewish writing, its 'black earth'the people definitely exists...
...My own experience has convinced me that large masses of Jews in the Soviet Union are hungry for the Yiddish word...
...The Soviet Jewish writers are more creative today than perhaps ever before...
...also four Yiddish faculties attached to universities.' At a similar conference in 1928 the above figures were almost doubled...
...As against this...
...What perspectives can be said to exist for Jews as a people in the cultural sphere...
...Great oaks were indeed felled by the cruel tyrant's axe, but the forest remained...
...And that the only book in the Jewish alphabet to have appeared in the Soviet Union is a Hebrew prayer book...
...it belongs to history...
...The charges specifically named a number of Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals as having been tortured and physically destroyed, particularly during the period 1948-52, and this included the whole of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had done such yoeman service in helping to mobilize Jewish support and sympathy for the struggle of the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the war...
...Such questions can be raised, and rightly so...
...Unnatural things can not persist...
...What about the 3,000,000 who flocked to the Yiddish concerts given sporadically in the USSR in 1957 (a figure given by N. N. Danilov, Vice-Minister for Culture, to the French Jewish delegation in February 1958) ? Why should these millions, or even thousands, be denied full facilities to publish, speak, see plays, in what is still their mother tongue, namely Yiddish...
...But it lives, intensively and obstinately...
...another said that he merely understands it...
...But efforts were made to convince me of the accuracy of this allegation, and the fate of both the Moscow Yiddish State Theater ("Goset") and Einikeit, the daily Yiddish newspaper, were frequently cited...
...in actual fact, this sweeping program was carried out at the order of the administrative authorities...
...A few months [before my visit], the Soviet Writers Union arranged a major celebration in honor of Samuel Halkin in which a number of important and well known Russian writers participated...
...Let us remove this weapon from the hands of the enemies of the Soviet Union and of Socialism...
...But with only a single exception (which proves the rule), not one Jewish writer turned his back on Yiddish literature and forsook it...
...Ramelson notes that] 'justification given for these measures (elimination of Yiddish) is that there was not sufficient demand for it to justify such undertakings.' Yet further on the same page Comrade Ramelson states that 'neither financial cost nor the relative smallness of the population of a nationality can be seriously considered as an obstacle to the application of this principle' namely, 'the Marxist approach to national culture is not only to permit, but to facilitate by every possible means, the fostering and development of all national cultures.' . . . "If all facilities and help were extended to their culture and language between 1917 and 1948, what change has taken place in their status after 1948 to warrant the cessation and elimination of this culture...
...And everyone has his own work ready for the press volumes of poetry, novels, stories, dramas...
...so the facts have to be ferreted out by other means...
...most of its copies ended up in the waste basket.' But the Jewish writers assert that the demand for Einikeit was steadily increasing: Just before the paper was shut down, its editors had approached the authorities for permission to increase its circulation...
...And this, in a country with a still-fresh memory of the proud tradition of the Soviet Jewish theater, a theater whose artistic caliber was frequently cited as a prime example of Soviet theater art...
...There seems to be no doubt that had Jewish books appeared in the past decade, they would have won a great body of readers...
...In my opinion, this failure stems from the fact that the leaders of the Soviet Government and the Soviet Communist party still cling to an incorrect policy developed during the postwar period that all the Jews in the Soviet Union are linguistically and culturally assimilated and have no need for separate institutions...
...Thus, though there may be legitimate differences of opinion about the internal state of Soviet Jewish culture in the postwar years, and about the extent of its influence, there can be no doubt that in 1948 this culture was unmistakably alive, creative and influential...
...The mood among Jewish writers and artists, who had just returned to their homes, was one of confidence and exaltation...
...If it were true that Jews do not want Yiddish, then the Yiddish concerts everywhere in the Soviet Union would not be packed to overflowing...
...35 newspapers and periodicals in Yiddish appeared regularly (four of them daily...
...But these are facts which must under no circumstances be forgotten...
...And that is where it is to this day...
...Sloves then sent it to Yiddishe Kultur, a pro-Communist American Yiddish monthly in whose February 1959 issue the article appeared...
...What do they signify...
...He replies that he doesn't and then goes on to tell me why...
...They reacted to every wink, every wrinkle, to the slightest hint...
...16 technical high schools...
...Would it not be reasonable, at least, for those who deplore the atrocities that were committed, for those who mouth words about 'when the tragedy happened,' to try, now that the evil days are gone, to redress the injustice, in the limited measure that this can be done...
...That year seemed to be marked out as a significant date...
...The extraordinary spiritual joy and pleasure of these 1,000 Moscow Jews, ranging in age from 16 to 60, were virtually palpable...
...But there is no assurance and this must be stated forthrightly of a just solution to the problem...
...Not a newspaper, not a book, not a magazine...
...The Soviet Jewish literary community has never ceased pressing this question inside the Soviet Writers Union, the only professional body competent to take it up...
...Facts Lenin used to love to say facts are stubborn things...
...It was not until after the 20th Congress revelations that steps were taken to bring back the families of the murdered men, to reinstate them in their homes, and to recompense them in some measure for the suffering through which they had passed...
...It would be more accurate to recognize that the bloody Beria period represented a continuation of the conspiracy against Jewish culture as a whole, with its writers and artists, its theaters, publishing houses, newspaper and libraries and even against Jewish printing presses and linotype machines, which were literally shattered and shot up...
...What is the official explanation for the fact that in place of a formerly flourishing Soviet Jewish culture, there is now only a desert...
...In contradistinction to the French Revolution, which ushered in for the Jews of Western and Central Europe an era of civil emancipation, the Socialist October Revolution brought the Jewish masses not only individual political liberties, but national liberation as well...
...Not a day passes that I don't write,' everyone tells you...
...And if a brave word is occasionally uttered, it is either the product of official optimism or a means of obscuring from outsiders and perhaps even from oneselfthe gnawing doubts, the pain, the lostness, the unending dumb sorrow...
...As for the first, it was a simple matter of murder and tragedy, recognized as such and deplored by everyone as though it had been a natural catastrophe...
...FOR SOME YEARS prior to the death of Stalin, rumors began to spread that all was not well in [the Jewish] field, and that well-known Jewish writers and intellectuals had disappeared...
...Every ordinary Jew, every friend of progressive Jewish culture, must face himself and rediscover himself through such a declaration of principle...
...But even if we view the gruesome fate that befell the Jewish writers as part of a greater, broader catastrophe, the fact remains that the tragedy of Jewish culture stands out in horrifying uniqueness...
...Marx was no longer referred to as a Jew...
...But the second chapter belongs to our own time...
...By now it is well known that for some time before the war, especially in the period of Yezhov's bloody direction of the secret police, Jewish culture in the USSR came under increasing pressure from the administrative organs...
...And they tell me that the foreign Yiddish newspapers, which for a time it was possible to receive in the USSR by direct subscription, used to be carried from house to house and read by thousands of families...
...It seems that in addition to the elderly and middle-aged Jews who come there to read Jewish newspapers, quite a few young people also come...
...47 reading clubs...
...For a while after the delegation's return to France, Sloves remained silent about his findings...
...And sooner or later, the grave wrong done it will be redressed.' "Another writer said: 'I recently returned from a trip, and I feel I can speak not only of Jewish writers but of Jewish readers...
...But more recently, the prospects have increasingly dimmed...
...In 1932, in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic alone, the network of Jewish schools and cultural institutions comprised: 765 schools (Yiddish was the language of instruction) with more than 90,000 pupils...
...But that is a closed chapter...
...Soviet Jewish literature did not perish...
...As regards Jewish literature, the real situation increasingly breaks through all formal hypotheses and abstract theories...
...It would be wrong to believe, however, that the Soviet Jewish writers express their sorrow only in silent protest...
...They recited from their works about war, about love . . . about various kinds of fear and about the worst of all: the fear of betrayal by one's own brother . . . about the destruction of Vilna, about a wedding in Vilna, about the first snow, about autumn and rainy days, about the bitterness of onions and horse-radish, a parable that ended on this note: " 'But this bitterness, when I know not why They keep spitting in my face, I wish upon all my enemies' "They read about . . . the beauty of Yiddish letters and the sacredness of the Yiddish word . . . about love and death...
...I am convinced that just as there are nationalist tendencies among other national groups in the Soviet Union, so there are among the Jews...
...It was a review called 'It's Healthy to Laugh.' The hall was packed, even though this particular program had already been on the boards in Moscow for nearly a month...
...I attended one of these shows in Moscow myself...
...Comrade Ramelson writes:] 'Wherever the ghetto walls were broken down, as in Western Europe and AmericaYiddish ceased to develop.' Yet there are still three daily newspapers, three Yiddish theaters, scores of journals, amateur theatrical groups, choirs, Yiddish secondary schools and Yiddish faculties at the universities in the U.S...
...Jewish books are continually read and re read...
...As a well-known Jewish writer said at an intimate literary evening I participated in in Moscow, 'It is no accident, this matter of writing todaythat is, of writing in Yiddish...
...So why did you come to a Jewish concert?' I asked...
...It is a problem which has been raised again and again by every Jewish progressive delegation which has visited the USSR since 1955...
...The same success, I am told, greets all other Jewish cabaret-theater performances (concerts, as they are called here) both in Moscow and throughout the USSR...
...It is true that many Soviet nationalities lost writers and artists, frequently some of their most important ones...
...three teachers colleges...
...I believe, therefore, it is important now, a little over a year later, again to go into the matters which I raised with various leaders in the Soviet Union and see 'what the score is.' "Let me first review briefly what I learned last year about the perspectives for Jewish cultural work in the Soviet Union...
...To wish to deny this uniqueness, to close one's eyes to its monstrous quality and in a Socialist state, at that is to turn one's back on the most elementary of truths...
...The collected works of [Samuel] Halkin and [Aron] Vergelis, Yiddish poets still alive, were there up to 1948...
...that Jewish papers had ceased publication and the Yiddish Publishing House had been closed...
...each has something to say...
...Three million people who sought out performances of Jewish music, Jewish words, Jewish theater...
...According to these theories, the national culture of a people like the Jews, who are scattered through the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, should by this time have disappeared...
...According to this plan, a Yiddish literary journal was to appear several times a week...
...This is, of course, a painful situation for those whose creative medium has been Yiddish...
...But not one Jewish writer was asked to speak...
...the third said he knows very little, practically none...
...a permanent Yiddish State Theater was to be re-established...
...No one has been given a concrete promise, nor the slightest guarantee of action (except the occasional polite response, 'Yes, the matter deserves further consideration' or 'We intend to study the matter...
...It's just that I'm enormously interested.' "Many of the Jews I met in Moscow confirmed, judging by their own children and those of their friends and acquaintances, that a large segment of Soviet Jewish youth has experienced a profound spiritual revolution in recent years...
...Immediately after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, the question of restoring Jewish culture seemed to have been resolved in principle...
...The answer came back equally clearly and unequivocally: Unless there is a specific demand for them from Soviet Jewry, no, these things will not be re-instituted...
...This attitude was in no way shaken by the argument that it did not reflect the usual approach to cultural work to expect that it should pay for itself...
...He leads me over to the Shtern collection, picks up the latest number, opens it wide and starts reading aloud, oblivious to the hundred other readers in the library...
...The only trouble with this Soviet theory is that it simply doesn't jibe with the facts about the past or the present...
...Something more is owed them, however, something else they were robbed of: their calling, the very substance and meaning of their existence...
...50 rural culture centers...
...And if its last performance were played to smaller audiences, it was not because the public had wearied of it, but because of factors stemming exclusively from the circumstances prevailing in the dark Beria period...
...The October Revolution broke down the ghetto walls of the Pale of Settlement...
...For it might be supposed obvious, from what has been said, that the printing of books in Yiddish, the publication of Yiddish papers, and the re-institution of the Yiddish theater would follow as a matter of course...
...In the USSR as a whole that year, four Yiddish State publishing houses and 14 State theaters functioned actively...
...But he also cites the conviction of the Jewish writers and others associated with the theater that the financial crisis stemmed less from any loss of Jewish interest than from an artistic and repertorial crisis inside the theater.] "However, no matter how great the artistic gulf was between the theater and its audience, Goset continued to be loved by the Jewish population...
...Translations of Yiddish poems by Peretz Markish and others who were shot have appeared recently in Soviet literary journals...
...The only Jews in the Soviet Union who are organized are the religious Jews around their synagogues...
...Naturally these charges created consternation and bewilderment in the ranks of Jewish Communists in all countries, so that it became a matter of urgency and of importance to expose their truth or falsehood...
...Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality and they are among the most culturally advanced nationalities in the USSR no longer need Yiddish as an instrument for the expression of their creative potentialities in all fields of culture, literature, art and science...
...Nor can this situation be explained by 'technical difficulties.' There has been enough time now to overcome these difficulties...
...there has got to be something in the soil, in the air, to make it blossom and leaf...
...The Yiddish literary journal has not yet appeared...
...It would of course be senseless not to take cognizance of the extent and depth of Soviet Jewish assimilation in the 1920s and especially the 1930s, until the eve of the war...
...If there actually existed a demand for it, if a large enough group of Soviet Jews put forward a request for it, they could have their theater and their press...
...Today, two years after Sutler's report, the situation remains unchanged, to judge by this third piece, excerpted from an article by A. Waterman in the April 1959 issue of the London Communist journal, Marxism Today...
...No Socialist and no friend of the Soviet Union can overlook this or condone it...
...The remarkable flowering of Soviet Jewish communal and cultural life national in form and Socialist in content now seems, viewed from the perspective of the subsequent catastrophe, nearly like a tale from the Thousand and One Nights...
...But in this case, as in the cases of books and theater, the reality of Soviet Jewish life itself gives the lie to the core and essence of this position...
...Considering that there are about 3,000,000 Jews in the USSR, one would hardly call these considerable communities a 'breaking-up' of concentration...
...The identical question could be asked, with equal justice and logic, of every other nationality's literature in the USSR...
...It would not be so bad, however, if this were merely a question of past history, a difference of opinion about the validity of one or another historical evaluation...
...The Jewish institutions of higher learning produced an intelligentsia which numbered tens of thousands of intellectuals, artists, scientists, teachers, writers, members of the liberal professions, whose average age today must be around 50...
...That a Yiddish theater would be revived...
...A number of high-ranking Jewish writers and scientists, including Moshe Kulbak, Izi Kharik, Max Erik and others, were thrown into prison, where they subsequently perished...
...that the Moscow Jewish State Theater had been shut down...
...But it is clear to all that now, a year later, this plan has not been carried out...
...The Soviet Encyclopedia, which in its 1932 edition devoted about 160 columns to the Jews, reduces this in the 1952 edition to four columns...
...According to these theories, the Jews no longer need their separate language and culture...
...The Jewish Almanac would shortly be produced...
...The first piece of concrete information came from a visit to the Lenin State Library...
...The Jews who do not attend synagogue and are not religious do not have their own cultural or community organizations of the type of the Jewish Cultural-Social Association which functions in Poland...
...What is the official explanation for this situation...
...Here there exist a Yiddish and a Hebrew section...
...To mention in the same breath those who honestly and sincerely question the forced elimination of Yiddish culture in the USSR, with those who slander the USSR and accuse her of practicing anti-Semitism, is a sleight of hand which encourages the slanderers and bitterly offends the friends of the USSR...
...THERE IS TODAY in the Soviet Union a great and significant Jewish literature...
...And when all these great artists were put to death, there was for a time the impression that the whole of Soviet Jewish literature had perished...
...This argues a certain level of degeneration in this sector...
...I turned out to be the first Jewish newspaperman from the U.S...
...Particularly striking was the large number of young people, something to which we in Western Europe and the United States are not accustomed...
...And even were we to subtract from that figure a half million, even a million or more, there would still remain the fact that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Soviet citizens manifested their devotion...
...the publishing house, Ernes, was to be re-opened...
...I must cite the known fact that Jewish workers in a number of White Russian and Ukrainian cities voluntarily and joyously pledged themselves to buy out and distribute entire editions of any Jewish books that might appear...
...That such an organization is necessary in a country with 3,000,000 Jews is no longer debatable...
...Jewish culture in the Soviet Union died a natural death...
...A world which they now seek, with youthful passion and fire, to probe and understand and became part of...
...from the security police, in fact...
...Of six such delegations which have visited the USSR since 1955, almost all have had varying promises made to them: "A...
...At the Lenin Library in Moscow, which services not only some 5-6,000 readers daily but also all the libraries in the country, I was informed that requests for Jewish books pour in constantly from scores of towns and cities all over the Soviet Union...
...But let it be said that this fear did not emanate from any general feeling of antagonism from among the Russian population, but from official or quasi-official sources...
...If this theory implies the disappearance of every aspect of Jewish communal life as it in fact unquestionably does if the synagogue is to remain the only expression of Jewish distinctiveness, then a Jewish newspaper would certainly be unnecessary...
...Why, for example, should there not be an open, official declaration, giving dates and other details of the martyrdom and destruction of so many Jewish writers and artists...
...I was simply overwhelmed by the number of Jewish youngsters I saw at the Jewish concert in Moscow...
...and France) and not in their country of origin, the USSR...
...And what about Jewish books...
...Estonian, Tadjik...
...He notes that it came to face a financial crisis, resulting from dwindling attendance, and required subsidization...
...The number of students at the Jewish pedagogical academies and in the Jewish departments of various universities totalled 3,360...
...For the Jewish public at large, and even in smaller circles more closely associated with literary matters, Soviet Jewish literature tended to be identified with a few outstanding names, a few authors who were at once great artists and standard-bearers...
...Why has Yiddish publishing activity not been resumed in the Soviet Union...
...Shortly after his arrest, the immediate relatives of the arrested man would be deported to some distant place and there set to work, and often at low wages...
...Sloves enters into an analysis of Goset's situation during the last years of its existence...
...In the fraternal family of nations which the new-born Soviet Republic constituted, the Jews gained, equally with all other Soviet peoples, the status of Jewish nationality, and with it, all national rights in every field of public and private life language, culture, education, a court system, public administration, etc...
...The only solution is to translate and publish their works in Russian: Only thus will they fulfill themselves as writers, with an audience of millions among all the Soviet peoples, rather than a mere handful of readers...
...But one other fact is certain...
...Conversations with the relatives of cultural workers who had been liquidated seemed to suggest that the procedure was invariable...
...It was signed by the entire delegation, which included party Secretary J. R. Campbell...
...And so it is clear not only that the official integration theory is absolutely contradicted by the facts of the Soviet Jewish scene, but that both the theory and the policy based on it have produced results that are diametrically opposed to those that were expected...
...A new world has of a sudden revealed itself to them, a world they had not known and which had not existed for them before...
...In October 1956, two months after J. B. Salsberg's interview with Khrushchev, the British Communist party dispatched an eight-man delegation to the Soviet Union...
...And the Soviet Jewish masses are still owed the right to enjoy their own Jewish culture in all its facets, national in form and Socialist in content just like all other Soviet nationalities...
...In 1921, only 21 per cent of Jewish children went to Yiddish schools...
...Those arrested and charged in secret were prominent political or cultural workers...
...The question of Jewish newspapers, on the other hand, is made to appear rather different, perhaps because it affects the very essence and root principle of the Soviet theory of integration, which would collapse without that principle...
...That Soviet Jews are interested in having a Yiddish newspaper can be seen from the fact that close to 2,000 copies of the Warsaw Folkshtimme come into the Soviet Union and are avidly read...
...The reply was, 'Some do, and those who don't know come here to learn it by reading the papers.' "That short answer perfectly reflects the strangeness and tragedy of the situation...
...but no artificial encouragement would be forthcoming...
...Finally, the husband would be shot, perhaps after torture to try to force him to confess or to incriminate others...
...While the changes in content of the Encyclopedia could have been the individual decision of the editor himself, interpreting what he conceived to be the official mood, the cessation of publication of Yiddish books and papers could hardly be anything else than official policy...
...It opened to the Jewish population all the doors to the boundless expanse of Russia, which for the first time in history became a true homeland, a beloved fatherland for Russian Jewry...
...and yet Jewish intellectuals in the USSR had just published an appeal to precisely such Jews asking them to use their influence to restrain Israel in its attack on Egypt...
...It is said that no one in the USSR any longer wants the Jewish theater...
...In accordance with instructions from various official authorities, Jewish writers and communal leaders worked out detailed plans for Jewish books, theater, press, et al...
...Then came the revelations of the 20th Congress [of the Soviet Communist party] and later (April 4, 1956) specific charges in the Folkshtimme, a Polish Jewish workers' paper, that could not be ignored, for these charges were consistent with the kind of accusations which Khrushchev had leveled against Stalin, Beria and the security police...
...This was an extraordinarily heavy blow to Jewish culture, an attempt to cut it off from its roots and doom it to extinction...
...That a Yiddish Almanac would be issued, and book publication resumed...
...The biographies of many eminent Jews had been removed...
...In certain regions of the Ukraine and White Russian Republic, there were Jewish courts and civil administrations that functioned in Yiddish...
...Many of them are quite capable of fulfilling their artistic aspirations in that language...
...The further natural development of these basic processes was distorted by external factors of an administrative character...
...Similarly in France, the Argentine not to mention the New Democracies, i.e., Poland, Rumania, where one would hardly say that the 'ghetto walls' had not been broken down...
...Chaim Shoshkes of the Day, G. Koenig of the Paris Neie Presse, Gershman of the Canadian Vochenblatt...
...And these theaters had suffered no crisis of any kind...
...The second article is by Chaim Suller, manager of the New York Morgen Freiheit...
...After considerable internal debate, the article was rejected...
...Yet I have not yet come across a coherent Marxist argument why these books, originally written in Yiddish, should never see daylight in their original tongue, nor why Soviet Yiddish writers should have their novels, stories and poems published (in Yiddish) by left-wing publications in capitalist countries (the U.S...
...Jews in official positions both in Moscow and Leningrad explained that it was easier to close an institution than to reopen it...
...What, then, can be done for these Jewish writers...
...So far, these have remained promises...
...three state theaters...
...It remains now to attempt to give a rational explanation of how it happened that this particular kind of drive against certain elements in Jewry developed...
...LET ME QUOTE a report given at a conference of Jewish cultural workers in 1924 (Yevrei v SSSR, p. 262) : 'There are functioning in the USSR 52 kindergartens, 439 elementary schools, 56 secondary schools, 44 technical and four pedagogical institutes, all conducted in Yiddish...
...I don't exaggerate they positively yearn for Jewish literature...
...The Soviet authorities appeared to be oblivious to, or at least unimpressed by, the effect produced in the outside world by the criminal treatment of Jewish intellectuals during the Beria period...
...In addition, however, according to official information, there is a score of young Jewish writers at the beginning of their careers who do not yet belong to the Union but who have all the necessary literary qualifications to be eligible for membership...
...It is needed both for cultural and social reasons...
...Jewish collective farmers know and love Jewish literature...
...Just before the delegation departed, however, it had a long interview with Comrade [Mikhail] Suslov, the chairman of the Central Committee, and this question of the reinstitution of the theater and the Yiddish press was raised clearly and specifically...
...The dead cannot be brought to life...
...No other instance provides as clear and striking a demonstration of the bankruptcy of Soviet integration theory as does that of the Jewish youth...
...There is not a single Yiddish newspaper, except the one in Birobidjan (which did not cease publication during this entire period...
...No other country in the world, I believe, can boast of a 3,000,000 annual attendance at Jewish cultural events...
...Where Jewish cultural life spontaneously expressed itself, facilities would be given...
...There still has to be a fundamental change in the attitude of the Soviet Government toward the question of Jewish cultural workers in the Yiddish language...
...This is a lie...
...I ask an elderly Jew who is reading the Neie Presse as intently as if it were some sacred tome whether he reads the Birobidjan paper...
...Accordingly, one of the members of the delegation, Comrade [Hyman] Levy, was given the specific task to examine this problem and to report on it...
...Yiddish disappeared from the street and the market place, the population closed up together, becoming tense and nervy, and young Jews who might otherwise have merged with the general population and have forgotten that they were Jews awoke to a new sense of unity in distress...
...It is clear that among the leading forces of the Soviet Government there are still false theories in this respect...
...many Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian and other writers were also liquidated...
...That many Soviet intellectuals must themselves be puzzled and confused and indeed ashamed of it seems clear from a uniform attitude adopted everywhere when this question was raised...
...The charges implied also that deliberate efforts had been made to repress all expressions of Jewish culture...
...From beginning to end, there was hilarious laughter, and stormy applause even for the most tasteless numbers...
...thev use the language of the country...
...Worse still, in 1938 all Jewish schools and educational institutions were closed down on various pretexts, often ostensibly at the request of Jewish parents...
...Similar conflicting reports were supplied about the newspaper, Einikeit...
...All of them Ukrainian, Lithuanian...
...But Soviet Jewish literature does persist and will continue to do so...
...Nor was there any response to the point that there seemed to be little recognition of the importance attached to such matters in influential Jewish circles in the capitalist world...
...Four Communist Replies Below we present the first of four articles which, in effect, constitute Communist replies to the official Soviet position on Jews in the USSR, as expressed by Khrushchev and Mikoyan...
...In addition to the printed Yiddish word, there is a need in the Soviet Union for an organized Jewish community life...
...Official requests to this end were made, but we were informed this was not possible as they were all on holiday, while Halkin, who was at home, was too ill to receive anyone...
...their auditoriums were invariably filled to overflowing, and their budgets were always balanced...
...Finally, he submitted this article, "Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union," for publication in the French Communist press...
...The facts of history, therefore, simply do not support, the assertion that the 1948 wave of terror liquidated only Jewish writers and not Jewish culture, which was in any event already dead by then...
...Very quickly, a little Jewish group gathers round us...
...And I was told that one has to sign up on a waiting list of several weeks before one can gain access to them...
...Novels and poems written in Yiddish would indeed be published we were also assured of this by the Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and would be immediately translated into Russian and other languages, so that others could understand and share in these contributions...
...I came across something else in that library which astonished and shook me profoundly...
...He published it in the September 22, 1957 edition of the now-extinct Communist Daily Worker, under the self-explaining title, "Jewish Culture in the USSR Today: Another Look One Year Later...
...Yiddish writers and important leaders of the Soviet Writers Union assured me that 'new winds are blowing' in the Soviet Union, that the evil which had afflicted Soviet life beginning in 1948 was being corrected...
...The growing demand for Jewish books is attempted to be met by publishing them in Russian translation...
...Moreover, these again in their minds became an acid test of the extent, if any, to which the Soviet Union had moved away from the path of socialism...
...Nor are the Russian writers themselves to blame for the tragic plight of Jewish literature today...
...Rightly or wrongly, we have expected something vastly different from this...
...As a result of my trip to Moscow, I have the impression and it is, naturally, only an impression that the present situation is not definitive...
...But however great that loss, it was only individuals who perished: The national culture as a whole language, literature, art, science remained untouched...
...Let us first look at the situation as it was in the past...
...They even set dates for the publication of the first Yiddish book, the appearance of the first literary journal, the first theater-opening...
...The first task, therefore, was to meet a few Jewish writers and to examine their reactions to this...
...And why rest content with just an indirect rehabilitationa few commemorative words in a newspaper, a biographical notice in an encyclopedia, publication of the victim's works instead of open, generous, whole-hearted rehabilitation...
...Two separate chapters of history are involved here, past and present...
...It must have been the case that sectors of the administrative personnel must have been aware of what was taking place and must have taken the steps necessary to implement it...
...And no mistake is possible about the figure, for it is based on daily box office receipts...
...This means that in scores of Soviet cities there are Jews who not only read Jewish books that happen to come to hand, but who have taken the trouble to have their local libraries request such books all the way from Moscow...
...Figures are naturally impossible to come by...
...There is no permanent Yiddish theater...
...Russian literature itself...
...Sloves' account is especially significant because he brings to this subject a rich background of Jewish knowledge...
...Startled, I asked whether these young Jewish readers know Yiddish...
...Not one book has been published in Yiddish...
...It is no longer sufficient merely to mention them in restricted circles or to just a tiny handful of individuals, or to note them in confidential documents...
...it is urgent and high time they were turned into reality...
...Madame Markish is at present engaged in translating her husband's play, written before he was shot, on the uprising in the ghetto, and it is to be performed publicly in 1957...
...All these questions receive one and the same official answer: "Soviet Jewry no longer needs Jewish culture...
...Most Soviet Jewish writers, especially of the younger generation, have a superb command of both spoken and written Russian...
...116 libraries and reading rooms...
...All these things must be proclaimed openly and loudly...
...The years of misfortune and pain were also, for the surviving Jewish writers, a period of extraordinary artistic growth, of profound intellectual maturation and moral elevation...
...The second part, devoted exclusively to Soviet Jewry, was published January 12, 1957...
...Ramelson writes further:] 'With the further development of Socialism . . . Yiddish ceases to be a living tongue . . . and rapidly crumbles.' It would appear that up to 1948 Yiddish was a living language, and that overnight it ceased to be so, by 'administrative measures.' "[Finally, Ramelson says:] 'The breaking up of concentrated communities . . . brought about a speeding of the process of integration.' There are 500,000 Jews in Moscow, 40,000 in Kiev, Odessa, Minsk, 25,000 in Vilna...
...The question of Jewish culture must be tirelessly and continually put to the Soviet authorities and precisely by the progressive camp, by the progressive Jewish and non-Jewish forces throughout the world...
...To be sure, it is still a tragic literature, a pigeon-hole literature, one that has not seen the light of day, a literature of mere manuscripts...
...we must categorically and openly condemn not merely the murder of Jewish writers and artists . . . not only the present bloodless tragedy of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union . . . but the very premises of the false theory which underlies and serves to justify the tragedy...
...For a considerable number of Soviet Jews, this tendency was accompanied by an estrangement from Jewish culture and the Yiddish language...
...And I discovered that these tendencies were especially strengthened by the administrative shut-down of all Jewish cultural institutions...
...But this did not prevent their liquidation with one stroke of the pen, just like the Moscow Yiddish Theater...
...Suddenly, the confidence began to peter out...
...Does not the fact that 3,000,000 flocked to Yiddish concerts, the existence of 72 Yiddish writers, poets, dramatists, the emergence of 20 young Yiddish writers (products of the Yiddish schools of 1936) prove that there is a demand for its continuation...
...But this is no solution at all...
...After I returned from the Soviet Union, other Jewish journalists went there and had similar meetings and interviews: Dr...
...The very youngsters whose sense of Jewishness had virtually begun to atrophy seemed suddenly to awaken, as it were, and to develop an extraordinary interest in the most varied problems and aspects of Jewish lifeJewish history, Jewish literature and art, etc...
...That a newspaper would soon be re-started...
...In addition, there were a great many dramatic groups, choruses, orchestras, museums, etc...
...A tree doesn't just grow by itself...
...five agricultural schools...
...And the Soviet Jewish writers categorically declare that Jewish books could without difficulty be distributed today in editions numbering no less than those of any other nationality's literature in the USSR (excluding, of course...
...The Jewish departments at the scientific academies in White Russia and the Ukraine were abolished...
...I met Jewish workers, locksmiths, mechanics, engineers, officials: All strata yearn for the works of the Soviet Jewish writers...
...it lives and grows again...
...The only difference is that while the programs put on in the large urban centers are on a more or less serious level (which by no means precludes cheap or tasteless performances), the majority of the shows that appear in the remote provincial towns are unmitigated trash, with 'songs and dances' from old, well-forgotten operettas...
...Today they belong to the Soviet Writers Union as full and equal members, recognized authors who write in Yiddishsome 80 of them...
...Why has nothing appeared yet in Yiddish...
...The article, "On the Jewish Question," takes issue with the views of a Comrade Ramelson, who had written on this subject in the January 1959 number of the same journal...
...If there were such an organization, it would be able to supervise the programs and personnel of the concerts and other cultural events, help in the reopening of Yiddish libraries, etc...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 33
