The Price of an Obsession

...These are all minor matters, however...

...Politburo member Andrei Andreyev, who fell from grace in 1950, was married to Dora Khazan, and [Lazar M.] Kaganovich the Jew was married to Maria, also one of the tribe...

...Anastas I.] Mikoyan shook his head in assent...

...He is the news editor of the Jerusalem Post...

...Paradoxically, Stalin's "wooden cradle was rocked in one of the few lands [Georgia] where Jews had lived in relative security for centuries...

...Whatever its origjn, Stalin's anti-Semitism antedated the Revolution...

...Rapoport continues his list of Stalin's crimes against the Jews: "Beginning in February 1940 in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, [Lavrenti ?.] Beria's NKVD arrested and deported about 1 million refugees, half of them Jews...

...The ratio of Jewish victims was probably the highest among all the Soviet nationalities...

...Stalin had long been obsessed with a paranoiac belief that the Jews were contriving his downfall by planting Jewish marriage partners among those closest to him...

...Rapoport has produced a very informative volume that contains a wealth of new material gathered from recent interviews in the USSR, conversations with new émigrés and such sources as the Ilya Ehrenberg archive, now located in Israel...

...Feffer was shot on August 12, 1952, as partofthe mass execution of Jewish writers and cultural figures...

...They were joined, in an outspoken manner, by Voroshilov, who, undoubtedly with Catherine's image in his mind, said that acts like the Doctors' Plot deportation plan had aroused the world against Hitler...

...On Stalin's orders, the two were then executed as supposed Nazi agents...

...Only months later, after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin turned over "some 600 German Communists, most of them Jews, to the Gestapo...

...The immediate effect in the USSR was a frightening wave of popular Jew-hatred, directed against Jewish physicians, nurses and pharmacists...

...He had not tolerated the fact that two of his children married Jews, imprisoning his daughter-in-law, Yulia (whom he only referred to as 'the Jewish wife...

...Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Professor of Russian Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign To come MGHT to the point: A scholarly book this is not...

...Among the arrested Polish Jews were Menachem Begin, a young Zionist leader, and two Socialist revolutionaries with an international reputation: Henryk Ehrlich and Viktor Alter...

...and her fatherin-law, [Joseph] Morozov...

...Stalin, however, was not a Georgian...

...Stalin replied, 'a certain section,' and Kaganovich said nothing more...

...Then Kaganovich asked in a hesitant voice whether all Soviet Jews without exception were to be deported...

...Stalin had exploded when he confronted Svetlana over her 'Jewish Problem,' screaming and slapping her in March 1943...

...Joseph Stalin's murderous hatred of the Jews is viewed by Rapoport much as Hitler's was in Lucy Dawidowicz' classic study The War Against the Jews, which probably suggested this book's title...

...In addition, "almost all remaining Jewish cultural institutions—including 750 schools where Yiddish was a language of instruction—were shut down between 1934 and 1939...

...Rapoport believes the actual date of the dictator's death was March 2, 1953 —the same day, that year, as the Jewish festival of Purim...

...Accordingly, heclaims that Stalin "probably was infected by an incipient anti-Semitism in his own home at a very early age: perhaps from his drunken, brutal father, who liked to put his wine-drenched fingers into his infant son's mouth...

...In an account corroborated by other sources, including Khrushchev, Rapoport describes a meeting at which Stalin informed his inner circle of his plans to deport the Jews: "When he finished talking complete silence reigned among the two dozen men sitting around the Kremlin conference table...

...Stalin's War Against the Jews is also a good read, arare attribute in the field of Soviet studies...

...Stalin, his blood rushing to his head, roared: 'Comrade Kliment, it is I who decides at what moment you will no longer be allowed to keep the Party membership card!' Stalin became so enraged that his eyes rolled, and he finally collapsed on the floor—he suffered the fatal stroke then and there...

...One should not be put off by them, or by the scores of misprints...

...Boris Pilnyak (son of a Tatar and a Volga German) appears here as a "distinguished Jewish writer," and Lenin's Sochinenia (Works) is refreshingly translated as "Composition...

...For both dictators, the loathing of Jews was not an opportunistic tactic, a device deemed useful for the attainment of other goals, but an obsessive end in itself—often pursued at the expense of accomplishing political and economic objectives...

...The up-and-coming Leonid I. Brezhnev was said to havea Jewish wife...

...The author obtained the bit about the lady's morals in the USSR, from a grandson of the Djugashvilis' neighbor...

...Nevertheless, Jewish leaders in the West, like Nahum Goldmann, Rabbi Stephens...

...Ironically, while the world's attention was focused on the anti-Semitic legislation and persecution of Jews in prewar Nazi Germany, Stalin was actually exterminating some 500,000 to 600,000 Jews among the 10 million victims of the purges...

...Indeed, as a stylist Louis Rapoport belongs in the illustrious company of tabloid fiction writers...

...Naturally, the signatories were impelled to "totally reject American and Zionist propaganda claiming that there was anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union...

...But then, Louis Rapoport is no phudnick (a nudnick with a PhD...

...Rapoport marshals impressive new evidence to demonstrate that following the physicians' show trial Staun planned a mass deportation of the country's Jews to labor camps...

...In retrospect, the nasty "anticosmopolitan" purges of the late 1940s and the exposure of the Jewish origins of large numbers of Russian intellectuals seem to have been a buildup for the subsequent arrest of a group of physicians on charges of conspiring to poison Politburo members...

...Molotov, whose wife was already in the wilderness, broke the long silence in a trembling voice and said that the expulsion of the Jews would have a negative impact on world opinion...

...He was an Ossetian, and Rapoport's attitude toward that small ethnic group is tainted with serious prejudice...

...His loyal tin soldier, Marshal [Kliment Y.] Voroshilov, was devoted to his Jewish wife, Catherine...

...On January 13, 1953, nine Kremlin doctors, six of them bearing clearly Jewish names, were arrested for allegedlyplotting, on orders from American and Israeli intelligence, to murder Soviet leaders...

...Wise, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, and Chaim Weizmann, the future president of the State of Israel, refused to believe rumors of Soviet hostility to ward the Je ws...

...In a theatrical gesture, the Marshal threw his Party card on the table, saying that the expulsion scheme violated the Party's honor and that he did not want to belong to such an organization...

...But in the 1930s that early distrust flared into violent animosity: "During the Great Terror, Stalinist agitators had stirred up antiSemitic prejudice and brought it to a climax...

...Georgy M.] Malenkov, who was suspected of being a bit of a philo-Semite, had a Jewish son-inlaw, as, it was said, did [Nikita S.] Khrushchev...

...In a closing chapter aptly entitled "Purimshpir—the traditional dramatizations of the Biblical Book of Esther that are annually performed on the holiday of Purim—Rapoport notes that "Marshal Voroshilov loved Stalin, but he loved his Jewish wifeeven more...

...According to Rapoport, Feffer was a KGB agent and had been involved in the murder of Mikhoels...

...Many died en route to Siberia...

...On page one we learn that "Iosif (Joseph) was the son of an alcoholic shoemaker, Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili, and of a cleaning woman and sometime whore who became pious when finally gifted with a child who survived...

...Preparations were well under way: Barracks had been built in Siberia, a million copies of a pamphlet entitled Why Jews Must Be Resettled had been printed, and a petition from the country's most prominent Jews appealed to Comrade Stalin to thus "save the Jewish population from possible violence...

...Throughout the War, Soviet authorities pointedly refrained from specifically denouncing the systematic Nazi slaughter of the Jews...

...It was this greater love, it turns out, that cost Stalin his life—and saved Soviet Russia's Jews from an impending tragedy, much as the ancient Persian King's love for his Jewish wife had spared her people from destruction...

...So do the strongly antiSemitic trials of erstwhile Communist leaders in Eastern Europe...

...Many of his Menshevik adversaries were Jews, as was his archrival Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein...

...They were absolutely charmed by the two-man delegation of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the actor Solomon Mikhoels (whose daughters now live in Israel) and the poet Itzik Feffer...

...The long-term prospects were even more ominous...

...It seemed there were Jews whereever he looked...

...his daughter] Svetlana's first love, [Alexei Y.] Kapler...

...Marshal [Nikolai A.] Bulganin was also happily married to a Jew, Nadezhda...

...At the height of the anticosmopolitan campaign [about 1949] he had sent [Vyacheslav M.] Molotov's Jewish wife to Kazakhstan, and he made [Aleksandr N.] Poskrebyshev's Jewish wife disappear somewhere in eastern Siberia in 1951...

...Mikhoels was murdered in 1948 in a staged automobile accident...

...Pedants like myself may be shocked to see Georgian described as a Semitic language and Znamya as a Yiddish magazine...

...Rapoport writes: "During the purges [in the late 1930s] Stalin had arrested President Mikhail Kalinin's Jewish wife, as well as [Nikolai I.] Bukharin's...

...Another heavy silence followed...