|
Jonathan S.
Tobin |
You
can see them at community events and Holocaust
commemorations in some of America’s larger urban
centers.
The faces are unmistakably Russian. And the
medals that some of these aging veterans wear on
their chests speak proudly of their service in the
World War II-era Red Army against Nazi Germany.
They are the generation of immigrants from the
former Soviet Union who arrived in the United
States after a lifetime of love-hate experiences
with an evil empire.
For most American Jews, Jews from the former
Soviet Union remain an abstraction. They are the
heroic refuseniks for whom we marched and
demonstrated a generation ago. For a younger
generation, they are the “New Americans” whose
success stories or hard-luck immigrant tales are
the stuff of philanthropic fundraisers.
But the reality of the complex lives of the
Jews of the Soviet Union remains as much a closed
book for most American Jews as that of the
immigrants of the Spanish dispersion 500 years
ago. We know of them, but we have no idea who they
really are.
Some of their history is told in the stories
the immigrants can tell us of their long struggle
to survive amid famines, wars, the Holocaust and
state anti-Semitism.
‘Night of the murdered poets’
But
other stories were buried deep in the archives of
the Soviet Union. And it is out of those newly
opened storehouses of records that comes to us the
story of one of the most tragic, yet typical
instances of life for the Soviet Jews.
The process of translating the mountain of
records now available to scholars has been
difficult. But the Yale University Press has
persisted, and has issued a number of invaluable
volumes.
Their latest effort, recently published in
association with the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, bears interest for those seeking
to unlock some of the mysteries of Jewish
existence in the mad world of communism.
Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee tells the
little-known story behind what is usually referred
to as “the night of the murdered poets” in 1952,
when 15 prominent Soviet Jews, including a number
of prominent Yiddish writers, were executed on
false charges of treason and espionage. The book
contains the transcript of the secret trial, along
with an informative introduction by author Joshua
Rubenstein.
Rubenstein, the author of Tangled Loyalties:
The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, who was a
contemporary of the condemned Jews, has taken it
as his scholarly mission to unravel what he has
admitted is the “complicated history” of a group
of Jews who were deeply involved in Stalin’s
regime.
The focus of this particular purge were those
involved in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a
propaganda vehicle founded by the Stalinist regime
during World War II to promote the image of Soviet
Russia and engender American support for its war
effort.
To that aim, a committee of reliable Soviet
Jews were drafted to present the best possible
face of Stalin’s murderous regime at a time when
it was an American ally and a victim of Nazi
aggression. Those involved included men such as
Solomon Lozovsky, a veteran Bolshevik who had
served Stalin faithfully for decades, and Yiddish
poets Itsik Fefer and Peretz Markish.
The committee faithfully did its job during the
war, the highlight of which was a successful tour
of the United States by committee members that did
much to both rouse American sympathy for Russia as
well as whitewash the plight of Jews in Stalinist
Russia.
But though they loyally followed the orders
throughout their service on the committee, they
also began to take seriously the task of
representing Jewish suffering to the world.
Although careful to follow the party line, the
committee began to devote itself to telling the
story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust
within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. And
their Yiddish publications and programs gave a
much-needed boost to the last remnants of Jewish
culture that had not yet been stamped out by the
regime.
Predictably, following the end of the war and
its usefulness to the leader and his party, the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee became the subject
of suspicion. Stalin’s visceral anti-Semitism and
paranoia were fed by the establishment of the
State of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent wild
enthusiasm with which its new ambassador to the
Soviet Union, Golda Meir, was greeted by Moscow’s
Jews.
At that point, he pulled the trap on members of
the committee. They were arrested, imprisoned,
even tortured. As was typical of previous mass
purges under Stalin, the victims were coerced into
making wild confessions, in which they admitted to
bizarre charges of spying for foreign powers and
working to destroy the government.
A show trial — at which these Jewish traitors
and “secret Zionists” could be exhibited for the
purpose of intimidating the rest of the Jewish
population — was planned. But almost all the
defendants in this case recovered their courage
and repudiated the lies that had been wrung out of
them by Stalin’s torturers. In the end, they could
not be “relied upon” to play their parts, and
their trial was kept secret. Reading the
transcript of the trial gives us an idea of the
Kafkaesque trap in which these people had been
put.
In one instance, the victims were accused of
passing information to prominent left-wing
American Jewish journalist B.Z. Goldberg. They
protested that he had been okayed by the Kremlin
and was not an American spy. The records reveal
that when their judge inquired about this, he was
told that, in fact, Goldberg was a Soviet spy, not
an American agent, but that he should forget about
it.
Uncomfortable questions
The book
does much to elicit sympathy for these doomed
Jews, as well as our indignation at both the
anti-Semitic Stalinist state and its disgusting
fellow travelers and supporters abroad. But behind
that there is another uncomfortable question
lurking. That is, where were these people — some
of whom were prestigious and even powerful
individuals in the Soviet state — when millions of
other Russians, Jews and non-Jews alike were
similarly tortured and murdered by Stalin?
The answer is plain. They were either on the
side of the killers or quaking in their boots,
afraid to do or say anything. It would be easier
to think well of them if they really were “guilty”
of Zionism, but the truth is that most were just
scared, while others were eaten alive by the false
god they had themselves worshipped.
Author Rubenstein is, perhaps, a bit too
sympathetic to these “Soviet patriots” as he was
previously with Ehrenburg, a famous Soviet Jewish
journalist who, despite much good work in
promoting the memory of the Holocaust, was himself
a loyal Stalinist.
But however much we might want to judge them
for their previous silence, we cannot do so with
an easy conscience. In this police state, no one
was safe; all feared for their lives. Whether one
had bought into the lying promises of communism —
as some Jews did in the first half of the 20th
century — or were merely trying to survive, in
Stalin’s Russia there was no escape and there were
no easy choices. Everyone, the guilty along with
the innocent, were co-opted into the crimes of the
state.
As Rubenstein says of these defendants: “Their
lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet
Jewry.” Unlike a later generation that found the
courage to stand up to the Soviet state, they had
meekly served the leviathan. Though they are not
heroes, almost in spite of themselves, Rubenstein
is right to say they died as “Jewish martyrs,”
persecuted for promoting Jewish identity. And it
is on that basis we should remember them.
Their deaths may seem remote to us, but they
inform us of the awful dilemmas that Soviet Jews
faced. At a time when modern tyrants — including
the one-time Soviet ally Yasser Arafat — still
pose a grave threat to the future of the Jewish
people, this is a story worth remembering.
Jonathan S. Tobin can be reached via e-mail at:
jtobin@jewishexponent. com.