Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  Yefimov cited two more examples of “bourgeois nationalism” on the part of Alexander Bakhmutsky, then the head of the Birobidzhan party organization, which made him roughly the equivalent of governor: “He personally took the initiative of organizing an orphanage specifically for Jewish children and then had all the children from this orphanage enrolled in a Jewish school; he also used the regional museum to create a department of Jewish culture, which served as a center of nationalist tendencies.” The Birobidzhan leadership accepted aid from an American charitable organization, earmarked, said Yefimov, “for the non-existent Jewish orphans.”3 In other words, Bakhmutsky was simultaneously accused of favoring Jewish orphans and making them up out of thin air.

  For two days following this dressing-down, local party leaders, of whom there were many, took the stage in turns, each of them trying to prove not only his own innocence but also someone else’s guilt.

  “Birobidzhaner shtern,” said Mikhail Levitin, chairman of the regional party executive committee, “committed a gross mistake, a bourgeois-nationalist mistake, when it printed a front-page article called ‘More Attention Should Be Paid to Propagandizing in the Jewish Language,’ asserting that ‘the Jewish language is the best and most accessible for the comprehension of Jewish masses’ and no mention was made of the great Russian language of Lenin and Stalin.”4

  “Political mistakes enabled bourgeois nationalists, enemies of our motherland like Miller, Rabinkov, Vasserman, and other bastards to do their low deed,” contributed Savely Kushnir, secretary of the city party committee.

  “Nationalism is currently the biggest danger facing the region,” opined regional party committee secretary Zynovy Brokhin. “For example, materials published in the [Russian-language paper] Birobidzhanskaya zvezda in May 1944, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Jewish Autonomous Region, compared the heroic feats of Jews in the Great Patriotic War with the biblical story of Samson, they said that ‘the lion’s heart of the Maccabees beats in their chests.’ But how could they make an equal sign between the patriotic feats of the peoples of our country, standing up for the achievements of socialism, and events from Jewish ancient history and biblical tales? Certainly this should not have been allowed!”5

  “Someone here mentioned a cemetery,” said Abram Yarmitsky, deputy chairman of the regional party executive committee, in his own defense, referring to a plan to organize a Jewish burial ground in Birobidzhan. “But there is no Jewish cemetery! We scrapped those plans, because we realized it would have been wrong.”6

  Bakhmutsky, the governor, spoke twice during the conference. On the first day, he tried to walk a fine line between admitting his mistakes and denying his guilt. “It is inarguable,” he said, bumbling, “that Vasserman’s Zionist moods, Zionist motives in places, and not just in works of literature, if you can call them that, have been known, as have been known the nationalist views of Miller, Rabinkov, Grinberg, and others….This is my big mistake….How can I explain this mistake? How can I explain the fact that I ordered the creation of a Jewish orphanage, or about teaching the Jewish language at the elementary school and essentially creating an artificial Jewish school? The main explanation is that a number of nationalists in the region were doing their work, were popularizing their views in the region and focusing everyone’s attention on the fact that Jewish culture here was not developing. I didn’t understand the nationalist substance of these views and essentially became beholden to these nationalists.”7

  The following day, Bakhmutsky, disheveled, exhausted, and sleep-deprived, took the stage again, this time solely to beg. He was only thirty-eight years old, he said, and he implored the people in the audience—especially the head of the regional secret police, who sat at the front of the room the entire time—to have mercy. He knew that they would not.

  The party conference ended by voting to address a letter to Comrade Stalin, expressing undying gratitude for pointing out the mistakes that had so endangered the region and promising “to cleanse thoroughly our ideological and other institutions of all nationalistic elements as well as all those who cannot be trusted and those who do not work well….We will close the ranks of the Party organization and all those who labor in our region around the Party and the Soviet government, and around you, our dearly beloved Iosif Vissarionovich.”8

  “Cleanse thoroughly” they would. Everyone who had been mentioned during that party conference—including most of the speakers—would be expelled from the party, arrested, and sentenced to years in the labor camps.

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  The regional party committee resolved to shut down Birobidzhan in July 1949, “in light of the fact that nationalist elements who have been expelled from the Party were members of its editorial board.” A month later, the regional party committee issued a highly classified order to have all copies of Forpost and Birobidzhan removed from the region’s libraries and bookstores. By this time, the members of Birobidzhan’s editorial board had been arrested.

  In another three months, a series of separate, very precise orders were issued in reference to books by newly identified outlaws, including Emiot, Vasserman, Miller, Bergelson, Fefer, and Markish. “To remove from the libraries and the bookselling network of the Jewish Autonomous Region all copies of the book Sunrise by Birobidzhan writer I. Emiot, printed by the Birobidzhan Publishing House in 1948 with a press run of 2 thousand copies and a page count of 62,” read one such order. In about a month, the head of the local censorship bureau reported that, fortuitously, 1,930 copies of the book had been removed from the printing plant’s warehouse before they ever made it out into the world.1

  What did they do with all those books? Tens of thousands of volumes, most of them fairly thin, all published on cheap, unevenly colored off-white paper, though those written by Bergelson, as befits a living classic, came in fancy hard covers—the destruction of so many words suddenly turned toxic was no trivial task. The magnitude was huge; the danger was palpable. There was no place safe enough and large enough to intern so many books; there was no local facility capable of pulping them. So the Birobidzhan authorities did the only logical thing. Five years after the end of the Second World War, the Sholem Aleichem Library of the Jewish Autonomous Region staged a book burning (or two, according to some sources) in its courtyard, to destroy every Yiddish-language book that had been found in the region.2

  A policy of Russification was applied to Birobidzhan much as it had been to places like Chechnya, from which the indigenous Muslim population had been deported by Stalin. The orphanage was methodically Russified. First, preschool-aged children were transferred to a different home, separated from their older siblings and their Jewish identity at the same time. Then Yiddish was abolished as the primary language of instruction at School Number Two, which the orphans had been attending; from now on all subjects would be taught in Russian. Finally, a group of medics convened at the orphanage to conduct a particular sort of inspection, the sort to which the children’s dead fathers and older brothers had been subjected by the Nazis: boys fourteen and over were divided into two groups, depending on whether they were circumcised. Those who could pass would be shipped off to trade schools all over the Far East, where, in addition to low-level skills, they would most often acquire new identity documents and new, non-Jewish names. With the population of the orphanage thus reduced, ethnic Russian children were shipped into Birobidzhan to take the vacant spots and help eradicate the institution’s Jewish identity.

  Come vacation time, though, many of the Jewish kids attending trade schools hundreds of miles away showed up at their native orphanage, often having traveled on the roofs of train cars. Anna Kogan, the kindly Jewish woman who was now running the home, would welcome these kids for the weeks of their vacation and even find the money to get them tickets back to their trade schools. “When I was living in Birobidzhan in the 1960s, I would occasionally run into other former kids from the orphanage,” recalled one of the few who maintained a Jewish identity
in trade-school exile. “Izya Temnorod would always ask me, ‘Where is my brother, who was sent to the same trade school as you?’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his brother, Motya, changed his name to Dmitry and his ethnicity to Ukrainian, moved to the [central Russian] city of Penza and wanted to have nothing to do with his own brother.”3

  The Jews of Birobidzhan stopped speaking Yiddish. No one had declared it lingua non grata, as had been done with Hebrew decades earlier, but with Yiddish schools switching to Russian and Yiddish writers being dressed down publicly, Yiddish itself no longer dared speak its name. People purposefully switched to using Russian as their everyday language, not only in open places and on public transportation but even at home, for there was still no privacy anywhere in Birobidzhan—with dozens of families sharing kitchens, bathrooms, and hallways, a careless word was liable to be overheard. The fear extended to reading in Yiddish, too. The number of subscribers to Birobidzhaner shtern went from an (admittedly unimpressive) average of 610 in 1947 to 134 in 19504—a precipitous drop that, especially in light of the continued growth of Birobidzhan’s Jewish population, could only be explained by fear.

  It was no longer an oasis free of anti-Semitism. Iosif Bekerman, the pharmacist who had dreamed of Birobidzhan after losing his entire family in Ukraine, had barely started at his job at Teploye Ozero, a settlement outside the city of Birobidzhan, when he noticed “people looking at me funny, you know, because I am a Jew running a pharmacy. Then people stopped saying hello to me. Like I was guilty of something. And then they sent in a lecturer, they gathered all of us together, and he told us about the cosmopolitans, the Jewish cosmopolitans, he said they were so bad.” “Rootless cosmopolitans” were the official targets of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign; the term implied that these were people devoid of clear loyalties, people not to be trusted. “I wanted to say to them,” Bekerman told me about those who had begun to shun him, “that even if the people they were talking about—even if they made mistakes, why do they necessarily need to be arrested, why do they need to be executed? Why can’t you just have talks with them, do the work, you know, clarify the issues for them? But someone told me, If you stand up for them, you’ll be joining them. This was how it was, so we were all silent. We knew a lot, but we were silent. We were each afraid for ourselves, and none of us could do anything.”5

  Seven writers who had worked to popularize Birobidzhan for postwar settlers now stood accused of organizing a secret nationalist organization. Itsik Fefer, in pretrial detention in Moscow and testifying against his fellow JAC leaders, testified against these writers, too: he gave a statement condemning them as nationalists. Among the writers was Buzi Miller, the deposed editor of Birobidzhaner shtern. The investigator demanded that he explain why the newspaper had published a list of Jewish war heroes.

  “Why is the list titled ‘Honor and Glory to the Jewish People’? Are you unaware that this definition—the Jewish people—contradicts the nationalities policy of the Party and the government?”6

  At first Miller insisted that he had made “no nationalistic mistakes,” but after three months of interrogations and torture by sleeplessness, he caved.

  INTERROGATOR: The newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern, which you edited, frequently used the term “Jewish statehood.” There were very few articles devoted to the indestructible friendship of the peoples. Did you consciously publish such articles?

  MILLER: Yes, it was conscious.

  INTERROGATOR: So this was a consequence of your nationalistic views?

  MILLER: Yes, I held nationalistic views.7

  Lyubov Vasserman was confronted with the manuscript of a poem.

  INTERROGATOR: Here is another poem that was confiscated during the search of your apartment. Did you write this?

  VASSERMAN: Yes, the poem I am currently being shown was found in my apartment during the search. I wrote it in 1947.

  INTERROGATOR: Do you admit that it is a nationalist poem?

  VASSERMAN: Yes, because it contains a nationalistic expression: “I love Birobidzhan, my country.”

  INTERROGATOR: So you admit that you consciously propagated nationalism.

  VASSERMAN: No, I do not. Because I never published this poem and no one ever read it. When I wrote the poem, I immediately realized that it was nationalistic.8

  In the case of the Birobidzhan writers, there was no pretense of a trial. They were simply handed their sentences at the end of the interrogation process: ten years of hard labor.

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  In a Soviet court—and, now, in Russian courts—pleas are entered after the initial set of motions, which is how it happened that Bergelson addressed his fiction first and his life second. On the first day of the trial, he petitioned to have some of his writing included in the case, “because the indictment says that while I was living abroad I was always writing against the Soviet Union, but if you read my collection of short stories, you will see that I did not always write against the Soviet Union, I only did it for a time.”1

  Five people, including Markish and Solomon Lozovsky, the propaganda executive who had helped form the JAC, pleaded not guilty. Two pleaded guilty. Seven, including Kvitko, Hofshteyn, and Bergelson, pleaded “guilty in part.”2

  The trial began with testimony by Fefer, a poet Bergelson had known for more than thirty years. He had accompanied Mikhoels to America during the fund-raising trip in 1943—it was understood then that he was a secret police agent, placed by Mikhoels’s side to keep an eye on him. Now he was on trial, but he was also a cooperating witness; he had been promised leniency. He had entered a plea of guilty. He took the stand to begin building the case against the others, reaching back to 1920 to do so. “Nationalist attitudes are in essence anti-Soviet attitudes,” he said. “Bergelson and Hofshteyn expressed their nationalist attitudes in their literary work.” The work of Eynikayt during the war similarly engaged in nationalist propaganda by singling out Jewish war heroes as well as Jewish victims of Nazism, he claimed. The height of anti-Soviet nationalism, Fefer testified, was reached when the committee activists picked up the Crimea idea, which had been proposed by the Americans.3

  Markish, who had lived a life almost perfectly parallel to Bergelson’s, was interrogated on the third day of the trial. The two had never liked each other, and now Markish told the judges as much. Unlike Bergelson, he pleaded not guilty, but he answered the judges’ questions in detail, with what might even have seemed to be eagerness; like perhaps a majority of defendants in Stalinist courts, he fully recognized the court’s authority and saw the case against him not as a willful mangling of reality but as a discrete, unfortunate misunderstanding that could be corrected. He testified about the American journalist Ben Zion Goldberg’s extended stay in the Soviet Union in 1946; back then it had seemed like a breakthrough for the Soviet Union, a prominent journalist staying in the country for six months, filing extraordinarily pro-Soviet reports,4 but now he was supposed to have been the defendants’ American spymaster.

  “He asked me, ‘Why didn’t the Birobidzhan initiative succeed?’ ” Markish testified about Goldberg. “And I said, ‘What Jew would trade Moscow for Birobidzhan?’ ”

  “So you told him of your anti-Birobidzhan convictions?” the presiding judge asked.

  “I was in Birobidzhan in 1934, when I was writing a book on the border patrol. I remembered Birobidzhan not as a place but as people who were living on the border….What was my attitude toward Birobidzhan in 1934? I thought it was a place for Jews who wanted to work the land, or to be fishermen….I didn’t believe that an intelligent Jew might choose to live in Birobidzhan when he had everything here. People who have the mentality of flies, people who need to show themselves off to seem bigger, they need those kinds of places to stand on.”5

  Was Birobidzhan on trial? No, but Bergelson was. And Markish, who had known him since both were in their twenties, now acted as though the espionage charges were not entirely fantastical. Or, even more absurdly, he thought he m
ight be able to play his own game against Fefer, the informant. Testifying two days later, he articulated his vision of how each member of the JAC had participated in the espionage:

  MARKISH: Bergelson was the most avid supporter of the Jewish national cultural tradition of anybody on the committee. They all respected him. He is an old writer, he is known in America, he writes about the traditions of the old world, so he represented the kind of culture the Anti-Fascist Committee needed.

  PRESIDING JUDGE: He was an appropriate person for the sort of criminal activity the committee later led?

  MARKISH: I could only say that about the committee’s nationalist activities. I have thought about whether I agree that they were spies. I can believe that of Fefer, but I can’t imagine that Bergelson was a spy.6

  This was perhaps the strangest thing about the trial, this warped reality in which one made fine distinctions between fantastical charges of espionage and cultural activism, which had miraculously been transformed into a crime called “nationalist activity.” In the absence of defense attorneys, in the absence even of prosecutors, with the knowledge that sentences had been passed long before the trial began, fourteen old Jews spent entire days telling their life stories, pointing fingers at people they had known their whole lives, expounding on the finer points of absurdity—and believing that it mattered. Bergelson was no exception.

  Markish’s testimony lasted almost three days. Bergelson’s commenced a few minutes after Markish finished, just past nine in the evening on May 13, 1952. “I was brought up in the spirit of nationalism,” he began. “I saw no other spirit anywhere around me until the age of seventeen. There was not a single book in Russian around when I was a child.”