by Masha Gessen
20
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In the fall of 2009, I traveled to Birobidzhan. Contrary to my expectations and my experience of the Russian Far East, I found Birobidzhan pretty in places. It has ambition, which is evident in the width and length of its avenues and the amount of stone that was used to build a new embankment to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Jewish Autonomous Region. The embankment, with a long promenade, an elaborate balustrade, and a series of statues and decorative benches, is, like so much of Birobidzhan, an unconscious exercise in the falsification of history. There is a gazebo and, next to it, the statue of a seated man in a top hat—as though someone might have been transplanted here from a warmer climate as long as two hundred years ago and spent time by the side of the river. In fact, as we know, the first Europeans got here quite a bit later—and when they did, the river valley was swampland.
An eight-hour flight from Moscow, with a two-hour train ride on top, Birobidzhan is an unlikely destination for tourists—the last time it saw an influx of foreigners was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet authorities lifted the travel ban on foreigners journeying into the border zones and correspondents rushed to see the tantalizingly named Jewish Autonomous Region. But it has a decent tourist infrastructure, all of it geared to the Jewish curiosity seeker. There are two main avenues, one named for Sholem Aleichem and the other for Lenin; the former has a pedestrian-only zone and the latter boasts a series of memorial plaques. The Sholem Aleichem Library, the regional museum, the synagogue, and the Jewish community center are all located along Lenin Street, as are two newly constructed Russian Orthodox churches. The memorial boards are in three languages: Russian, English, and Yiddish. Iosif Bekerman, the one surviving settler, once complained to the library authorities that the Yiddish text contained a mistake: it claimed that Lyubov Vasserman and other Yiddish notables had worked at the library “in Sholem Aleichem’s lifetime.” (The great Yiddish writer died a dozen years before the first Jewish settler arrived in Birobidzhan.) “They told me it doesn’t matter since no one can read it anyway,” Bekerman said to me, still evidently hurt.
As the last of the Yiddish-speaking Jews die, their descendants occasionally find Yiddish-language books in hidden storage spaces in their homes, the heroic feat of having once concealed these banned books rendered obscure by the passage of time and the death of the language. They usually donate the volumes to the Sholem Aleichem Library, which has so little use for them that it recently sent a portion to the local museum of Valdheym, one of the first Jewish collective farms, located just outside of the city. There, the books are displayed under glass. “No one can read them anyway,” the keeper explained to me.
The museum keeper’s name was Maria Rak. She had been brought to Birobidzhan as a baby, a couple of years before the Second World War, lost both parents early—her father was killed in the war, her mother died when Maria was nine—and was raised by her grandparents in postwar Birobidzhan. Left largely to her own devices, she spent most of her time at school, learning to be a good Komsomol leader. For her outstanding leadership qualities, at the age of seventeen, as soon as she finished school, she was chosen to set up a library at a new settlement.
“They were sent here from Ukraine,” she said of the then-new arrivals.
“Jews?” I asked.
“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “Nazi collaborators. They were exiled here.”
Someone must have thought it either hilarious or brilliant to exile Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to suffer among the Jews in their autonomous region. Birobidzhan is full of comical mismatches, most of them less sinister than this. There is the synagogue—and the Jewish community center, unironically named Freud (joy in Yiddish)—on Lenin Street. There is the largest building in Birobidzhan, an angular seventies-style concrete structure on the embankment. It is called the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, and it was constructed to house the Jewish Chamber Theater, which was actually a Moscow troupe that never spent more than a few weeks at a time in its official home city but had an extraordinarily enterprising founder who essentially managed to swindle the construction of the building out of local party bosses. Then there is the question of Jewish food. Valery Gurevich, a deputy governor unofficially in charge of Jewish culture, directed me to the Chinese restaurant at the Philharmonic; he claimed the proprietor, a Chinese man who went by the Russian name of Kolya, had learned the art of Jewish cooking from his Jewish grandmother. But the waiters at the restaurant told me that the Jewish part of the menu had been abolished for lack of demand. In my continuing quest for Jewish food, the following evening I ended up at Café California, ordering a schnitzel à la Birobidzhan; it turned out to be made of pork. On the third night, I scored some gefilte fish at the restaurant at my hotel; this dish, which is usually served cold or at room temperature, had been taken out of a jar and reheated.
There is the region’s flag, adopted around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union; it is a seven-colored rainbow. The Birobidzhan museum’s deputy director giggled when she told me about it—in the intervening twenty years, information that the internationally known gay-pride flag also features a rainbow had reached Birobidzhan. She could not explain why the rainbow had been chosen to represent the region. In 2015, as Russia ramped up its anti-gay campaign, the flag was examined for evidence of homosexual propaganda, and cleared.
I liked the museum. I have been to dozens of these small regional museums in the former Soviet Union, and I fancy myself something of a specialist in their many ways of misapprehending history. All local Russian museums begin with rocks. They are the ideal museum exhibit: rocks do not need to be rearranged in case of a regime shift. In the Birobidzhan museum, rocks take up the entire first floor. Upstairs, I found three rooms devoted to the history of the Jewish Autonomous Region—one each for the prewar, war, and postwar years.
The prewar room begins with an exhibit whose own history I was able gradually to reconstruct. In the late 1980s, the staff of the museum apparently wanted to put the Jewish back into the museum of the autonomous region, but all evidence of Jewishness had been destroyed. So they organized an expedition to what had been a shtetl in what had been the Pale of Settlement. As a result, a visitor to the second floor of the Birobidzhan Regional Museum is greeted by the picture of an old, bent Jew with tefillin and a prayer shawl, captioned, “There is only one person left in this old shtetl who remembers how to put on traditional clothing”; a picture of the old shtetl synagogue, now a canning factory; and a glass display case with the “everyday objects of Jewish life,” which include a stringless fiddle. The rest of the room covers the earliest stage of Birobidzhan history, from the arrival of the first settlers and the establishment of the autonomous region to a detailed account of the purges of the late 1930s.
The next room, like most war rooms in most Russian museums, has no identity of its own; it is the canned canon of the Great Patriotic War, reproduced faithfully in every regional, school, and workplace museum all over the country. The room is draped in red flags, and it drips Soviet patriotism. Many such war rooms in other museums are dedicated to the heroism of Alexander Matrosov, a nineteen-year-old soldier who threw himself on the opening of a German bunker, thus shielding his comrades from fire. This feat of turning oneself literally into cannon fodder has long been the Soviet definition of heroism.
Birobidzhan, as it happened, had its own hero of similar standing, Iosif Bumagin. Born in Vitebsk in 1907, he joined the Red Army in 1929 and served for four years. He moved to Birobidzhan in 1937 and worked at the one big industrial plant in town. He was drafted again in May 1941, before the German invasion. Purges had decimated the Red Army, and Bumagin was among those chosen for officer training; his credentials were seven years of formal schooling, four years of military service, and years of working as a Communist organizer. He managed to stay at military school virtually until the end of the war, joining the front in April 1945, in Germany. It was during the storming of Breslau, just two weeks befor
e the war in Europe ended, that Bumagin used his own body to silence a German machine gun.1 The Birobidzhan Museum did not tell me any of this; rather, the exhibit informs the visitor that “Iosif Bumagin repeated the feat of Alexander Matrosov,” and for this an entire neighborhood of Birobidzhan is named after him. That is the only local color in the war room, which, oddly, does not even make any mention of the Japanese front, which was virtually a stone’s throw from here.
The third and final room has the most difficult job. Whoever put together the first display cases clearly could not make up his mind whether they were devoted to the Yiddish literature and culture of Birobidzhan or to the purges of the late 1940s. As a result, both stories are mangled, a collection of stand-alone pictures—David Bergelson, Lyubov Vasserman, the Jewish theater, a copy of another local writer’s book—with brief captions that do not add up to stories:
“D. R. Bergelson. The first leader of a writing group in Birobidzhan in the 1930s. Arrested, executed in 1952.”
“Poet I. B. Keller. Arrested in 1948. While incarcerated, wrote and concealed 80 poems. Released in 1956.”
It gets even more confusing after that. A couple of displays show sterile, unidentifiable pictures of the Soviet Union in the era of stagnation, a period when Birobidzhan seemed no longer Jewish and the entire country had reached almost total uniformity, with identical people wearing identical clothes living in identical buildings working identical jobs. Skip over perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union—a few uncaptioned pictures of Yeltsin and public rallies gloss over the fact that most of Birobidzhan’s Jews emigrated to Israel during this period—to end with present-day Birobidzhan, which holds biannual Jewish culture festivals but balances them with Slavic culture festivals in the off-years.
I visited the museum on a day in early October, when the sun outside was still bright enough to let me walk around wearing a light coat but it was already brutally cold in this unheated building, where I made a detailed inventory of the displays. I left the building with an uneasy feeling, the sense of something missing. Something big. Something essential. Something catastrophic.
It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened.
That view of history is the post-Soviet condition. What happened to people—to families that still carry the memory, whose physical and psychic scars are plainly visible—was so enormous and so inexplicable, and, worst of all, the victims and their executioners were so intimately entangled, so indistinguishable at times, that, following a brief and torturous period of examination, the country’s population has conspired to treat it as a force of nature. I went to the Birobidzhan State Archives, a fortresslike concrete building where local government and party documents are maintained. I was allowed to read most of the documents that concerned settlers and settlement, but when I asked for files from the 1949 party conference that launched the Birobidzhan purges, the young librarian on duty blanched, blushed, then blanched again.
“I’m afraid we cannot give you that file,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s a personnel file. It contains confidential information.”
I tried to explain to her that dead people have no right to confidentiality, that the file itself concerned official proceedings and could not be considered confidential, but I did not even broach the topic of how the story of Stalin’s purges needed to be told, and told again, if the country were to have any chance of reclaiming its history and moving beyond it. Visibly embarrassed and even scared, the librarian refused to budge.
“People might be disturbed,” she explained.
That was the argument used all over Russia in the early 1990s, when, after a year or two during which access to KGB and party archives was truly open, the authorities began the process of restricting it. If I had waited another few years to visit Birobidzhan, I suspect, I would not even have found the documents in the catalog. Eventually, I dug up a locally published volume by a local historian, David Vayserman, who had gained access to the files in more liberal times and faithfully copied them down.
Another artifact of those days, about twenty years earlier, when the post-Soviet citizenry was briefly engaged with its history was the permanent glassed-in display in the archives’ on-site museum. It contained copies of some of the documents to which I had been denied access—but the case was sealed shut, so I still could not touch them or read them in their entirety.
“In 1949–1953 a full-fledged cleansing of the state and Party apparatus began all over the country,” the anonymous curator informed me through captions. “A campaign against so-called rootless cosmopolitanism and nationalism unfurled. It could not have passed over the Jewish Autonomous Region. Massive arrests of well-known cultural workers, academics, and Party and state workers were undertaken.” The captions went on like that: “persecution began,” “purges were conducted,” “books were removed,” “connections with foreign organizations were discontinued.” The was the Stalin-as-a-force-of-nature narrative.
The utter denial of human agency is the ultimate insult to survivors, but ninety-year-old Bekerman, the last living voluntary settler in Birobidzhan, was the only one to articulate this. I picked him up from the synagogue on a Saturday morning. A synagogue had been established in Birobidzhan in 1929, a small wooden building constructed by some of the first settlers. Twenty years later, everyone who attended the Rosh Hashanah services was arrested; the rabbi was sentenced to death. Jews returned to the wooden building in the late 1950s, but with the end of Khrushchev’s Thaw, gathering there became too risky again and services moved to private apartments. In the 1970s, when the air in the Soviet Union once more grew a bit lighter, services at the synagogue resumed. But the last of the occasionally observant Jews were old, and by the mid-1980s a minyan—a quorum of ten Jewish adults—became impossible. The wooden building was repurposed. There was no synagogue in the Jewish Autonomous Region for the next twenty years—until American Jews had given enough money to erect two small stone buildings on Lenin Street, one for the synagogue and one for the Freud Jewish community center, both protected by a single metal fence.
The morning I met Bekerman at the synagogue, he had just attended services for Simchat Torah—the highest holiday of the year for Soviet Jews of my generation. On that day, hundreds of people would dance in the street in front of the central Moscow synagogue; we would shield our faces ineffectually from the secret police and Komsomol informers, out in force with their cameras, but still put our arms around one another and dance in circles to old Yiddish tunes, which we belted out ourselves. The Birobidzhan synagogue, however, is essentially an American import, with a young Lubavitcher rabbi who probably knows nothing of the peculiar traditions of secular Soviet Jews.
“He wanted us to cover our heads,” Bekerman grumbled as we walked the fifteen yards to Freud. “What does he think? He thinks I believe in God?”
He waited for me to take the bait. I waited for him to continue. We studied each other. He was so tiny it was hard to believe that real old-man clothes could have been made for him. His eyes were largely obscured by cataracts, but he walked confidently enough, and I sensed that he could see me better than I might have thought. His lower lip was permanently rolled out, shiny and purplish. His hands were disproportionately large, with cracked, disintegrating yellowed nails, and once we were seated in the community center, he slid the fingers of his right hand along the edge of the table with a grating sound when he was nervous. He was a tiny shell of an old man, and this shell was filled with emotion, so strong and so raw I thought it might just be pure will to live.
“I go to synagogue,” he explained to me, apparently angry at how little I
seemed to understand, “because I like to read and I like to study. But God? I cannot believe in God. Where was your God when the Jewish people were killed? When my parents and my five brothers and sisters were buried alive? You say he chose the Jewish people? He forsook the Jewish people!”
The difference between me and ninety-year-old Bekerman was that I had heard this before. He had not. He might have said it a few times, but the opportunities would have been few. There might be a synagogue and a community center in Birobidzhan, but there was still no place in the Jewish Autonomous Region to talk about the Jewish people and what had happened to them.
On one of my days in the city, I took a taxi across the Bira River, to the slums of Birobidzhan, where inebriated creatures of indeterminate age and gender wandered among the remaining wooden barracks. My destination was the film archive, where I would pick up a reconstituted copy of a 1937 propaganda film with Mikhoels’s closest ally, the actor Benjamin Zuskin (executed in 1952), in the starring role. In the film, called In Search of Happiness, Zuskin portrays an American Jew who shuns the collective farm to look for gold—and comes to no good—while his wife leaves him for the collective farm and a Russian man. It is one of the most unappealing portrayals of anyone and anyplace that I have ever seen, and I cannot imagine whose idea of propaganda it could have reflected.
The director of the film archive, a sixtyish heavyset woman with dyed blond hair, had no desire to discuss the film. But she said she had things to tell me. Sitting behind her pressboard desk, she juggled several telephone headsets in her hands, shuffling papers at the same time, as though she had been looking for something important to show me. After a few minutes, she let her hands rest, looked at me, and said what she had to say in a very loud, very clear voice.
“Things are fine here,” she declared sternly, though I had said nothing to suggest otherwise. “I like my city, I like my country, I like my family. In other countries, people like to talk about being Jewish. But here”—she looked straight at me, and her voice grew even louder—“we don’t like to talk about it!”