by Masha Gessen
Bergelson was part of the same tour Brown was taken on. In fact, I suspect that a recurrent character who first appeared in his fiction after this trip to Birobidzhan was based on Brown.
The wind lifted a cloud of fine snow over the roofs and spread it again. It shed some light over the long street, with its deep frozen footprints in the iced-over mud. They looked as though left by giant boots that walked on their own, without the aid of feet.
The door opened. In walked a tall, light-haired man wearing a fur, unbuttoned, on top of an overcoat. A crooked half-smile rested on his pale face; he introduced himself self-consciously, as though the need to state his name embarrassed him. He slowly removed his eyeglasses, wiped them off with a suede cloth, and slowly replaced them, fixing the earpieces carefully and closing his eyes to ensure that the glasses assumed their proper place. It might have looked as though the eyeglasses had been placed upon his face by someone else and he merely, magnanimously, allowed this to happen. He made a chewing motion with his thin, slightly crooked lips, and said as he approached the desk,
“I am Prus, the economist. I have been to see you before.”
He sat down as slowly as he had done everything else and extended his hand, which held several sheets of paper covered in his handwriting.
“This is the plan I am taking to Moscow,” he said, scanning the walls and the ceiling with his eyes. “In New York I am well known as a specialist in matters of colonization. I spent some time at the IKOR collective farm, where American settlers live….I state my position openly.”
Increasingly, he sounded as though he had been insulted.
“This is what I think. The tiny pieces of land they are trying to work here, amid the swamp, are worthless. It’s ridiculous! Even America leaves vast lands empty and imports bread from Canada. Alaska, for all its riches, spent a long time living without its own food production. I have said it before and I will say it again: the collective farmers should be shifted to the construction of a furniture plant. Just give me a chance to build a factory or two on the Amur and I will export their production and in return flood the area with bread from Manchuria. I want to explain this to you….”
He was feeling hot. His eyes scanned the room ever more quickly, searching for a place to put his fur coat. He was beginning to take off his coat when he noticed a hand holding his sheets of paper, extended toward him, and heard the response:
“Take this. You can keep it. We have nothing to discuss.”6
The story is set in November 1932, when Bergelson and Brown were both touring Birobidzhan. Brown was the hapless American, well-intentioned and potentially useful to Birobidzhan, with his weekly paper and his access to wealthy and equally well-intentioned American Jews, but apparently deaf to the music of Birobidzhan. Bergelson was the one who heard it: it was the music of Yiddish.
There were six Yiddish-language schools in Birobidzhan. There was a Yiddish-language newspaper, Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star), edited by an old acquaintance, the writer Henekh Kazakevich. There was a printing plant under construction; until then, the newspaper was typeset and printed in one of the barracks, often by the light of oil lamps or even candles.7 There was even book production: a volume of poems called Birobidzhanstroy (The building of Birobidzhan) was printed in October 1932, launching the local publishing enterprise. The book had sixty-two pages, a press run of three thousand, and an eighteen-year-old author,8 who, to Bergelson, may have been the single most important argument in favor of Birobidzhan.
Emmanuil Kazakevich had founded a Yiddish writing group in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where his father, Henekh, was a prominent literary figure. The younger Kazakevich called his group Bird’s Milk, an allusion to a saying (of ancient Greek origin, recycled occasionally in Russian) referring to extreme wealth. At the age of seventeen, Kazakevich became obsessed with Birobidzhan and not only moved there but persuaded most of his fellow Bird’s Milk members to join him. “That’s the place where we’ll really be able to spread our wings,” he promised.9 His parents followed him to Birobidzhan a year later.10
Kazakevich was something of a new and improved version of Bergelson. The older writer, the literary organizer of the Pale, had been self-conscious, hypercritical of his own writing, which had a cloistered and highly regimented form. As the literary soul of the new Jewish quasi-state, Kazakevich was overconfident, hyperenergetic, and impulsive. He had wholeheartedly adopted this expansive land; at the time of Bergelson’s first visit, in fact, the teenage poet was employed as the head of the Valdheym collective farm. He also functioned as a one-man hospitality committee, at least whenever new writers arrived in Birobidzhan. He would greet some of them at the resettlement headquarters with offerings of bread and butter, honey, and local salmon roe, which seemed all the more fantastically generous following a ten-day train journey.11 He would take others on long nighttime walks through the crisp snow, stopping in the spotlight provided by the moon to declaim his own poems and his translations of Heine, Shakespeare, and Lermontov.12
In Bergelson’s case, he proposed a hike to the scenic hills about fifteen miles from the town in the direction of Birofeld. Bergelson was nearing fifty, and his small frame had started to grow heavy. He had to acknowledge that he would not make it. “I’ll have to get a car,” said Kazakevich, stating the obvious and the obviously impossible, and disappeared. He returned a short while later, aboard a truck—one of only about ten in the entire region. Bergelson and Kazakevich and two more poets—a young man who had followed Kazakevich from Kharkiv and a young woman who had come, incredibly, from Poland by way of Palestine—piled onto the bed of the truck and began the rough journey over an unpaved road. Presently, Kazakevich began to sing. The popular Soviet tunes sounded familiar to Bergelson, even though he had spent most of the last decade abroad: all had been written by Jewish composers, and all had easily recognizable klezmer origins. The songs had titles like “Moscow in May” and “My Country Is So Broad.” Kazakevich sang in Yiddish, which surprised his young companions.
“You like?” he asked. “I just translated them today. Seems to work.”
Kazakevich proceeded to give the group a detailed walking tour of the hills, lecturing them on the vegetation. “Here is a poplar tree,” he would say. “It grows very fast, so we’ll be planting it along city streets and in the parks.”
On the way back to town, Kazakevich recited his own poem—later to become an epic—called “Citizen Taiga Has the Floor.”13
Bergelson might have suspected that this was the only place in the world where young people, plural, were writing poetry in Yiddish. He placed himself in the service of Birobidzhan. On January 4, 1935, the Warsaw-based paper Der fraynd printed his manifesto.
WHY I AM IN FAVOR OF BIROBIDZHAN
1. All activity on behalf of Birobidzhan, which is part of the great Soviet Union, is activity on behalf of the socialist enterprise in its entirety.
2. Birobidzhan is one of the most important and prominent fronts in the establishment of a classless society.
3. The desire to become a “mirror” of what is being accomplished in Birobidzhan, with every plot of earth, every new house, and every manufacturing plant becoming an “open book” where I plan to expend all my working hours.
4. Birobidzhan, which is an undeveloped region on the border of “the imperialist world,” gives one the pleasure of creating history, in the fullest sense of the word.
5. As a Jew, I feel more intensely in Birobidzhan, the only autonomous Jewish region and a future Soviet republic, the purpose of the national Soviet policy, under which all of the Soviet Union’s national cultures will develop under equal conditions.
6. In Birobidzhan I will help build a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content, which can serve propaganda purposes as well as a concrete model for the liberation of nations in the Soviet Union and for other nations in capitalist countries.
7. Refusing to work in and on behalf of Birobidzhan would be both against m
y own personal interest and against the interests of our entire Soviet collective.
8. I want to work in and on behalf of Birobidzhan, because I wish to partake of those fascinating, delectable juices of life that our Soviet regime bestows upon me.14
Reason number 7 breaks my heart. He was a cornered animal. Was he unable to hide it? Was he still hoping that someone—Lady Liberty, perhaps?—would hear him this time? But then what? By the time this manifesto was published, Bergelson had been in Moscow a few months. Upon their arrival in that city, Tsipe may or may not have pronounced, “We have perished,”15 but the move had changed everything. No longer was Bergelson the wandering Jew: once one came to the Soviet Union, one could not leave. (This was true until the 1970s, when a new generation of Jews secured the right to emigrate—and Bergelson’s only granddaughter became one of the first Soviet Jews to move to Israel.) He had voluntarily surrendered his freedom to travel in exchange for the protection of a state that offered him a home. That Tsipe’s dismay was immediate is eminently believable: the family had traveled by rail through Belarus, had seen hordes of the living dead, hundreds and thousands of people in the end stages of starvation who had gathered in the railroad stations, looking for a way to escape the nightmare.16 Then they had arrived in Moscow, and after a dozen years spent in interwar Berlin, a city of excess and extremes if ever there was one, the stark and pervasive poverty of Soviet life could only have been a shock.
But even before the move—indeed, in order to earn the right to move—Bergelson had postponed all other tasks to create his first work of socialist realism, an undertaking unthinkable just a few years ago. The main character in Birobidzhaner, published in 1934, is an American misfit who cannot find his place in the Soviet Jewish socialist workers’ paradise because he is motivated by money while everyone else is driven by ideals.
9
* * *
By Soviet standards, the Bergelsons were living extraordinarily well. Useless anywhere else, Bergelson’s Soviet money was enough to finance a large apartment in the center of Moscow; a special dispensation allowed him to own property. Markish reported in a letter to the Yiddish novelist Joseph Opatoshu in New York: “Bergelson lives like a count! He has never in his life had a more prosperous time—both creatively and financially. An apartment is being built for him. And until it is completed, the government is paying a hotel 100 rubles a month for him and he is growing as broad as he is tall from the proud pleasure of it!”1
In 1935, Bergelson celebrated his fifty-first birthday in Moscow and left for Birobidzhan. He was on assignment for a Yiddish-language anthology called Two Five-Year Plans, to be published in 1937. Greeted and treated like royalty again, he went everywhere with first party secretary Matvei Khavkin and party executive committee chairman Joseph Liberberg. Bergelson had formed a surprisingly strong bond with Khavkin, an ill-educated and rather crude man who had accepted that Bergelson was the “Jewish Maxim Gorky,” as he had been told when they were first introduced. For Bergelson’s part, he spared no effort greasing the wheels. He described Khavkin as “a deeply and exceptionally devoted comrade, a likable fellow, a former tailor, a Bolshevik who grew up to become a person of eminence. I am entranced by his genius, his talents, his marvelous energy, and the tremendous idealism that this man of the people carries with him.” Liberberg, a Yiddish scholar from Kyiv whom Bergelson had actually known in his past life, elicited no such praise.
The three men appeared together at a gala reception for a “special migrants’ ” train from Kyiv on October 12. This was a terrible time to alight in Birobidzhan, at the beginning of the long winter, which promised nothing but cold and privation for new arrivals, but he seemed too caught up in the unceasing celebration of Birobidzhan to take note of this. The following day, at a reception in honor of the new arrivals, Bergelson announced that he would be making his home in Birobidzhan. He received a standing ovation. Two weeks later, Birobidzhaner shtern published what was in essence another manifesto, this time intended for consumption within the Soviet Union. Here were the arguments:
1. The transformation of Birobidzhan into a Jewish autonomous region despite numerous difficulties.
2. The achievements of the previous year that had surpassed anything that could be imagined from a distance.
3. Only here could a Jewish Soviet writer work effectively.
4. The hope that this decision would accelerate the process of turning the district into a republic.
5. The opportunity to do interesting and effective work alongside Comrade Khavkin.
6. The desire to bring about a revolution in the minds of the Jewish intelligentsia so that they would start to move to the autonomous region.2
The announcement may have been part of a negotiated deal: Bergelson might never have had any intention of actually living in Birobidzhan, but making a show of it would inspire settlers to continue to come from America, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and all other places where Jews read the Yiddish-language press.3 But it was also in keeping with Bergelson’s custom of maintaining a destination in reserve, one foot constantly out the door. The mechanisms of Soviet terror worked in unpredictable ways, often dependent on the fervor or fear of the local authorities, so maintaining two residences in the country was wise. In a nation that had largely succeeded in eliminating private property, Bergelson was slated to become the owner of multiple homes: in January 1936, the Birobidzhan authorities passed an act “setting aside land for the construction of a one-story house for the writer D. Bergelson as well as the construction of a center for writers,” with an eye to those who would be following his example and moving to the region in large numbers.4
What was happening in Birobidzhan had often been, and would often be, repeated in the Soviet Union: after people were placed in conditions demonstrably unsuitable for living, after thousands fled and died, in a few years life seemed to settle into some semblance of stability. Once again, the Soviet experiment had demonstrated through great human sacrifice that people can survive anywhere. More than eight thousand people arrived in 1935, and none gave up—a remarkable reversal following a year in which more than half the newcomers turned around and left.5 That year, the Jewish population of Birobidzhan would have roughly doubled.6
It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At the end of that year, the local authorities inaugurated their institutions of power;7 a complete set of councils of workers’ deputies, courts, and representatives in the federal Nationalities Council went along with the new status.8 In August 1936, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR declared the Jewish Autonomous Region to be a Soviet Jewish culture center, in which “masses of working Jewish people will develop their own state-structure,”9 thereby affirming the region’s ambitions and promising lavish funding for cultural institutions. “For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, its burning desire for a homeland, for the achievement of its own national statehood, has been fulfilled,” the resolution declared.10
By this time, the young Kazakevich had left his job as chairman of a collective farm and was directing the construction of a theater. This would be the first in a series of stone buildings that reflected a grand aesthetic plan for Birobidzhan laid out by Hannes Meyer, a Swiss-born architect who had been one of the leading lights of Bauhaus before falling out with Walter Gropius and moving his team to Moscow to build socialism. The plan called for a large modernist city on the left bank of the Bira River, but all that materialized were a few beautiful constructions on the right bank, including the theater and the regional hospital, completed at roughly the same time. Before the theater building was finished, an entire troupe had arrived, trained by the great Solomon Mikhoels in Moscow and dispatched to work in Birobidzhan11 at the request of twenty-year-old Kazakevich, who had traveled to the Soviet capita
l to recruit actors for the theater.12
In February 1936, all of Birobidzhan rejoiced to receive a visit from Lazar Kaganovich, secretary of the Central Committee, commissar of communications, one of Stalin’s closest allies, and certainly the most powerful and most prominent Jew in the Soviet Union. His was anything but a cursory visit. He gave a two-hour talk to a meeting of party activists. He attended a gala production of Sholem Aleichem’s comedy Di Goldgreber (The gold diggers) at the theater and declared that “the time has come to bring to the stage the heroic moments in the history of the Jewish people.”13 He had dinner at the Khavkins’ house and praised their traditional Jewish cooking,14 the importance of which he stressed in some of his Birobidzhan speeches. He also suggested that Birobidzhan should host a large scholarly conference on the Yiddish language.15