Pogrom
Page 11
Shy, essentially unschooled, Bialik was an odd choice for the assignment; most likely he agreed because he was desperately short of money. Greatly respected in the small circle of devotees of Hebrew poetry, he was little known beyond it. He brought with him to Kishinev his list of interview questions for eyewitnesses and had already written an initial, poetic response, “Al Ha-Shehitah” (“On the Slaughter”). The poem was rather conventional in structure and theme: “Vengeance for the little children/The devil has not framed.” He now devoted himself to the meticulous recording of witness testimony. His weeks in Kishinev, listening day after day to victims, drove him, as he later admitted, “half-mad.”26
Drawing out witnesses with a rare delicacy—an assistant later described Bialik’s singular power of empathy—he and his associates filled five notebooks with the testimonies, translated from their original Yiddish into Hebrew. Once this labor was finished, Bialik left Kishinev for his father-in-law’s summerhouse several hundred miles away, in the countryside between Kiev and Zhitomir. There he set his notebooks aside, never touching them again, and worked instead on his Kishinev poem, which he had already started during his sojourn in the pogrom-afflicted city.27
There is every reason to believe that Bialik set out to do just what he had been asked to, but then, of course, he did the opposite. Or so it might appear. Yet this would not be how Dubnow saw it: He was greatly pleased with Bialik’s poem, and he recognized that it had a far greater impact than any work of history could. Curiously, as Dubnow seemed to see it, no substantive difference existed in this instance between the tasks of a chronicler and those of a poet; the lines separating history from journalism or poetry blurred in the pogrom’s wake. With victim relief as well as the moral education of the Jewish people at stake, poetry seemed a far more valuable—perhaps an even more accurate—vehicle than the historical narrative Dubnow had first envisioned.28
In part this was because (as Dubnow’s Odessa circle saw it) there was little new information to be learned, since the substance of Kishinev’s story was already known. Immediately on hearing of the massacre, that circle of writers had formulated—and circulated widely—their sense of what transpired; this occurred well before Bialik was dispatched on his mission. Kishinev’s tragedy was amply visible to all around them: Odessa’s hotels were packed with refugees, the Odessa railway station was inundated, and rumors of still another pogrom were rife. Based on little more than what might be gleaned from those fleeing Kishinev for Odessa and points west, as well as the reports of the Kishinev schoolteacher Pesach Averbach—an eyewitness, soon one of Bialik’s Kishinev assistants, whose accounts were already appearing in the St. Petersburg Hebrew daily Ha-Zeman—a declamation was issued within days of the riot. This statement prejudged not only the pogrom’s cause but also its long-term implications. It was written largely by Ahad Ha’am and declared that, without doubt, Kishinev’s massacre was only the first of many such tragedies, that Russian authorities were culpable (this was written weeks before the surfacing of the Plehve letter), and that the most troubling aspect by far was not the violence perpetrated by gentiles but the cowardice of the Jews.29
Supported by Bialik together with others in the Odessa Jewish literary orbit, and circulated throughout Russia’s Jewish community, the declamation insisted that the lamentable shortcomings of Jews were Kishinev’s most shocking feature. When asked a week or so after the disaster to contribute to a volume whose earnings would be donated to victim relief, Ahad Ha’am wrote in a letter: “This isn’t, in my view, a run-of-the-mill misfortune for which it is appropriate to provide succor with the use of regular solutions of this sort.” No one doubted the usefulness of such efforts, he admitted, but they failed to address the fundamental dilemma so vividly revealed by the pogrom, namely the “inner poverty” of Jewish life now apparent for all to see. It was because of such wretched inadequacy that Jews responded in Kishinev like “slaves” undergoing humiliations that healthy human beings would never have tolerated. The only credible response now was the “raising of a new flag . . . a flag of inner freedom, a flag of individual honor.”30
As soon as he heard news of the massacre, Ahad Ha’am said it “filled his heart,” making it “impossible to do anything else.” It so shattered and overwhelmed him that his deep-set inclination toward moderation—such caution being among his most pronounced characteristics—and his politics, so often assailed as hopelessly bourgeois, were now decisively cast aside. So thoroughly were these renounced that he insisted that the Odessa document call for Jews to defend themselves by taking up arms and that all its signatories list their names despite the risk of imprisonment. Calmer heads prevailed, and, once the text was issued, its authorship was attributed to the (nonexistent) “Association of Hebrew Writers.” (Learning of this decision after it was already on record, Ahad Ha’am’s response was bitter and uncompromising.)31
The thrust of the statement, however, was just as he wrote it. It condemned the terrible actions of the mob and the inaction of the Russian government as inexcusable. But these comments were almost an afterthought. Its target was Jewish passivity—a passivity so noxious that such behavior was itself a possible source of gentile hatred.
Not since the massacres of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—more or less in the same region—had Jews undergone anything comparable with the Kishinev pogrom that was not the doing of rank criminals, as Russian officials claimed. Such behavior would have been inconceivable had Jews enjoyed equal protection under the law and not been subjected to the whims of the mob. “A human being for whom there exists no obligation to treat with justice” possessed no true rights. In the absence of such protection, the belief prevailed that beating—even killing—Jews was justified. No decree, no commission, no jail time could dislodge such assumptions, reinforced daily by government hostility.32
This was all sufficiently dreadful. But far worse—and here the document reached fever pitch—was the wretchedness of a people numbering some five million who saw as their only recourse to throw themselves on the mercy of others, indeed to do so without so much as trying to protect themselves or their loved ones from attack. “Who knows if such disgraceful behavior isn’t the fundamental cause for the hatred felt for us by the masses?” Had it been known that Jews would not tolerate such treatment, the pogrom never would have erupted.33
“Brothers, the blood of Kishinev cries out to you,” the document exclaimed, as much cri de coeur as reproof. What must be launched, it urged, was a “perpetual organization” with its goal being ever-vigilant preparation for armed resistance. The document never spelled out explicitly its call for the arming of Jews; indeed, it acknowledged that the precise details of what Jews were to do must not be spelled out. But its militant message was sufficiently clear—so clear, in fact, that many of its readers were shocked at its brazenness. Though issued without a listing of the names of those responsible for it, this soon became an open secret among Jews. Bialik, a chubby, nondescript man, arrived in Kishinev with its bitter words ringing in his ears.34
Davitt came to Kishinev with altogether different baggage. Long a fixture in the Irish struggle against England—a point of identification that helped shape his sympathies—he was widely regarded as a figure of stalwart principle. (He broke with Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell after the latter’s divorce.) An ailing, middle-aged man of strong independent views, Davitt exerted significant political influence for a time. His early advocacy of working-class solidarity across English and Irish lines was a major force in the creation of the British Labour Party. Tireless in his insistence on the linkage between landownership and political freedom, he was a powerful inspiration for the young Mohandas Gandhi. James Joyce, an admirer, would draw on him in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Self-made, born into a poor family, Davitt endured long terms in British jails as the result of his political activity; these stints, curiously enough, were interspersed with his election to Parliament. For years he eked ou
t his living from journalism and public speaking.35
Contacted by the London editor of Hearst’s New York American—then a scandal-splattered tabloid with sparse international coverage—Davitt was invited during an age of great muckraking (Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, for instance, was published in 1906) to travel to Kishinev to cover the pogrom’s aftermath. Front-page notices declared him the paper’s “emissary” to devastated Kishinev. The trip was an arduous one: It required connections in Paris and then Constantinople, with transport to Odessa before, finally, arrival in Kishinev. Despite precarious health—Davitt died three years later, at the age of sixty—he threw himself into the task.36
As it happens, Davitt’s views on Jews were complex, born of sympathy yet based on unassailable beliefs regarding inbred racial characteristics that presumably led Jews to exploit the weak, ignorant, or naive. In a bloated six-hundred-page tome published in 1902, The Boer War for Freedom, he singled out as prime exploiters of the beleaguered South African region no fewer than forty “Anglicized and German Jews” who, alongside Cecil Rhodes, were “the capitalist kings” most responsible for oppression of the Boers. Davitt never entirely turned his back on such notions: In the preface to his Kishinev book, written the following year, he states: “Where anti-Semitism stands in fair political combat . . . or against the engineers of a sordid war as in South Africa . . . I am resolutely in line with its spirit and programme.”37
It seems that Davitt endorsed not-dissimilar views even while on his way to Kishinev. By coincidence he found himself traveling on a sleeping car in a seat across from the British businessman and Marxist politician (the author of the first introduction to Marx in the English language) Henry Hyndman. Hyndman knew Davitt because of his activity in Irish causes, and he relates in his memoirs how surprised he was on entering the car and noticing on the opposite seat the name “M. Davitt.” Once Davitt entered, Hyndman writes, “Our fellow travelers were astonished to see two elderly and apparently sane travelers suddenly set to work to dance a fandango of jubilation in the corridor of the sleeping-car.” The first words out of Davitt’s mouth were: “There is not a police bureau in Europe [that] would believe this was an accidental meeting.”38
They talked about the boon of small landownership (by far Davitt’s greatest preoccupation as an Irish nationalist), about the beauty of the Bavarian and Austrian countryside, about socialism, and about Jews. Hyndman would remain in touch with Davitt after his Kishinev stay. The gist of what Hyndman took away regarding Davitt’s views of Jews was that, while he felt great antipathy for those responsible for the massacre, he saw Jews as fanning discontent or worse. “Undoubtedly, Davitt in private while not excusing the Russian authorities felt that Russia would be much better off if she had no Jews at all in her boundaries.” (Hyndman might have exaggerated Davitt’s antagonism to Jews in light of his own jaundiced opinions: “Anglo-Hebraic empire in Africa” was how he referred to South Africa.) Sitting together on the train, Hyndman related to Davitt the story of one ragged Jew who, within a few months of stumbling into a Russian village, had “to use Marx’s phrase, . . . eaten up the pores of this simple society. All now was his with the peasants and their families little better than his slaves.” Hyndman was left with the impression that Davitt agreed that the story captured something essential, if also tragic, about the economic activity of Jews.39
True, upon returning to Ireland, Davitt defended Jews in the wake of the Limerick riot and boycott of 1904, widely described at the time as a pogrom—no more than two thousand Jews then lived there—where he criticized anti-Jewish attackers in print while also visiting the homes of victims. However, he continued to share a set of staunch views regarding the intractable characteristics of the races: English motivations he would forever distrust; African “savages” he sidelined in his book on South Africa; and the responsibility of Moldavians for most of Kishinev’s violence could be traced to their ancestry as Roman slaves. And then there were the Jews—harmless where gentiles were clever, such as in the United States, but justly feared in backward Russia. He never did rationalize their oppression, but it was a sufficient argument for Jewish mass migration elsewhere—preferably, as Davitt would come to see it, to Palestine.40
Davitt reached Odessa on May 2 amid fear of new anti-Jewish attacks and was greeted straightaway by the local Jewish leader Meir Dizengoff, who served as Davitt’s translator during his first day or two in Russia. (A few years later, in Palestine, Dizengoff would emerge as the founding—and long-standing—mayor of Tel Aviv.) Davitt quickly summoned Kishinev’s Jewish communal leader Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, just back from St. Petersburg, where he had gone to report on the pogrom, to his Odessa hotel room. (Davitt had arrived in Odessa eager to speak with Bernstein-Kogan since, when first hired by the Hearst press in London, he had been given a list of local contacts, with Bernstein-Kogan’s name at the top.) In that hotel room he related details of the massacre for seven or eight hours. Davitt spent the next two days speaking with a cluster of Russian officials and merchants and also an English merchant or two residing in the city. All condemned Kishinev’s violence while also singling out the rapacity of Jews as its essential cause. As one Russian official put it, the Jews “exploited the Christians in a hundred unscrupulous ways, to their own aggrandizement.”41
Once Davitt arrived in Kishinev some five weeks after the pogrom’s end—during the Russian Orthodox festivities of the Feast of Ascension and Holy Trinity and persistent rumors of new riots—his hotel room was swamped by Jews beseeching his help to immigrate to the United States, though he was unlikely to have much influence on this score. He communicated with the help of two translators, Averbach (who would also work with Bialik) as well as a retired Hungarian Jewish officer, both of whom were fluent in Yiddish.42
A meticulous journalist, Davitt spent his few days in Kishinev collecting impressions, speaking with Mayor Schmidt and others, and even seeking out Krushevan and—once it was clear that the latter had left months earlier—his closest coworkers. Almost immediately Davitt was browbeaten by his London editor for articles and warned that, if he did not come up with something soon, he would have to abandon Kishinev for an interview with Tolstoy. Davitt resisted the pressure, insisting on gathering with care the many disparate details of the massacre. Thus, as he would acknowledge in his book, “to discover the truth amidst a mass of conflicting evidence would be a formidable task; to arrive at definite conclusions as to the immediate and the contributory causes of the sanguinary outrages perpetrated upon the Jews of Kishineff on the 19th and 20th of April, was a tedious and painful process, beset with innumerable difficulties.”43
It is no exaggeration that the five weeks Bialik spent in Kishinev irrevocably changed the rest of his life. Entering ransacked homes, day after day, he sat with victims and bystanders, prompting them with rare gentleness to air the most gruesome experiences. Not infrequently he spent hours at a time with a single victim.
During the same period Bialik was urged by the literary critic Klausner, a close friend and editor of Ha-Shiloach, the journal most closely linked to Ahad Ha’am, who had now stepped down from the editorship, to write an autobiography of sorts. Klausner planned to draw on it for a biographical essay, the first to appear, on Bialik. The poet threw himself into this task too, producing a document in the form of a letter many dozens of pages long. In it he dwelled, much as Klausner had urged him to do, on his earliest years. At the same time, of course, he also started work on his Kishinev poem. The meshing of childhood recollections—some of them achingly painful as he listened, day after day, to stories of the rampage on Kishinev’s streets, including the rape of its young girls and women—served to strengthen his belief in the perversions of exile. This contagion, as he now felt more strongly than ever before, could only be rectified once Jews finally removed themselves from the Diaspora’s dark, terrible shadow.44
Quite how intimately Bialik conflated his personal anguish with that of Kishinev’s defiled females has been explored b
y the literary scholar Michael Gluzman, who unearthed how Bialik expropriated the language of Rivka Schiff without quoting her—whose rape testimony was the lengthiest and most detailed that Bialik recorded—in an early draft of his autobiographical letter. Schiff had described to Bialik how, once she finally stood up after the multiple rapes that she endured, “I was pulverized and crushed, like a vessel filled with shame and filth.” So overwhelmed was Bialik by the phrase that he expropriated it, introducing the same words into the first version of his letter to Klausner. He did this in a description of a childhood humiliation that he now admitted had haunted him ever since; it involved the repeated beating of his buttocks in an outhouse by an older cousin, who was probably mentally unstable, soon after the death of young Bialik’s father. The phrase would also appear in the original Yiddish version of the autobiography—though this manuscript remained unpublished—but was eventually dropped once the Hebrew version adapted by Bialik appeared in print.45
Gluzman believed that Bialik’s inner turmoil at the time was composed of a fierce condemnation of weakness directed simultaneously inward and at the Jews of Kishinev. The raw recollections of the rape victims he now heard, sometimes daily, recalled for him a long-suppressed, dreadful memory when he too found himself intimidated, powerless, and shamed. What Bialik would do with this humiliation was to recast it, replacing it with rage directed at the beaten Jews of Kishinev. “This rage,” argued Gluzman, “. . . leads him to construct the Jews of Kishinev as abject, and in the process to reshape and reconstruct his own identity.”46