Pogrom

by Steven J. Zipperstein

  The city’s grim past retains a palpable presence not only because of the pogrom’s lingering infamy but also because so many of its original, crumbling buildings—despite a massive earthquake in 1940 and, of course, the devastation of its Jewish population in World War II—have survived largely as a result of Chişinău’s chronic poverty. It is a shambling, unpretentious place, surprisingly lush, village-like in some of its corners, still bounded at its northern edge by the unassuming but harsh eyesore, the river Byk. A cement bridge stretches across this marshland, with the Old Town just around the corner, a quick walk from Aziatskaia Street (now renamed), a tenement brushing up against the street’s clapboard structures, which have weathered so much with no evidence, needless to say, that this was once and still remains one of the most storied sites of the recent Jewish past.

  The dusty street is crowded in daytime with earnest, hardworking locals—women with their shopping bags, schoolchildren (there is an elementary school nearby), men lugging tools. Densely housed, a hodgepodge of Soviet-age construction and century-old piles, it is a place that has inspired lessons of heroism and shame, cowardice and militancy, loathing or trust for gentiles. As many would come to believe, it was here, in this crowded alleyway, where exile reached its sudden, bloody end.

  * Russian peasant-oriented populists that by the time Walling wrote were associated mostly with the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book started as a cultural history of the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Accumulating material for that broad, synthetic work, I found myself so intrigued by evidence of the spillage from Kishinev’s pogrom that, over time, the prospect of telling that story felt more pertinent: It offered a singularly revealing way of exploring how Jews of Russia and beyond would come to understand themselves and, in turn, came to be understood by others.

  Two lengthy stints—a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and five months as Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—provided me with precious stretches of time and the incomparable resources of Harvard and YIVO. My thanks to Judith Vichniac at the Radcliffe and Jonathan Brent, Eddy Portnoy, and Lydmilla Sholo­khova at YIVO. It was at YIVO that I had first embarked on my archival research as a graduate student, and it was a special pleasure to return daily again to that precious, intellectually boisterous institution.

  I’m grateful to the following archives: Yale Special Collections; Manuscripts and Archives Research Library at Trinity College, Dublin; Hoover Institution Library and Archives; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives; New York Public Library of the Performing Arts; Central Zionist Archives; Gnazim Institute Archives; Beit Bialik, Tel Aviv; the Academy of Sciences of Moldova; and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). For research-related advice in Israel I thank Shmuel Avreri, Dan Porat, and Tali Tadmor-Shimoni; the suggestions of the literary scholar Avner Holtzman were invaluable. As always, I remain in the debt of Zachary Baker, assistant university librarian for collection development for the Humanities and Sciences and Reinhard curator of Judaica and Hebraica at Stanford.

  I thank those who assisted me with a wide range of library and archival research as well as transliteration and translation tasks: Samuel Barnai (Jerusalem), Aleksandra Zolkina and Oleg Kaesch (Moscow), and California-based Heidi G. Lerner, Andrew Gay, Maria Greer, Eliza Davidson, Kristen Edwards, and Carnie Burns. The days I spent in Chişinău with graduate student Orest Dabija and Irina Shikova, director of the Jewish Heritage Museum of Moldova, in September 2016 helped greatly in firming up my sense of their city’s topography. Special thanks to Tel Aviv’s Asia Lev and retired Hoover Institution researcher Ron Basich (a truly extraordinary archival expert) for their patience and wisdom. Chişinău colleagues Igor Casu and Sergiu Musteata, both at Ion Creanga State University, unearthed invaluable material. Many of the photographs in this book were supplied by Chişinău researcher and archivist Iurie Svet.

  As the writing of this book seemed to be drawing to a close, Mikhail Khazin generously provided me with an archival cache in his possession—the papers of Kishinev’s most infamous antisemitic intellectual, Pavel Krushevan. This book would have been far different without this treasure-trove that has been acquired by the Hoover Institution.

  Friends and colleagues have commented on drafts: Mitchell Cohen, Anita Shapira, Robert Alter, Eli Lederhendler, Derek Penslar, Joel Beinin, Jeffrey Shandler, Ken Moss, Sarah Abervaya Stein, and Andrew Ramer. John Efron read the manuscript in its entirety with great care. Writing side by side with my Stanford colleague Aron Rodrigue, now at work on a major book on the Jews of Rhodes, has been the source of uncommon intellectual inspiration. I’ve benefited from the help of many others, too, including Michael Hagemeister (whose pathbreaking work on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has much influenced me), Carla King, Joe Lee, Sylvie Goldberg, Sidra Ezrahi, John Boylan, Christopher English Walling, Michael Strunsky, Leon Fink, Diane Everman, Patrick Phillips, Edward H. Judge, Mikhail Gluz­man, Tony Michels, Anna Shternshis, Scott D. Seligman, Seth Perelman, ChaeRan Freeze, Norman Naimark, Amir Weiner, Bryan Cheyette, Hasia Diner, Gordon Chang, Abraham Socher, David Levering Lewis, David Fort Godshalk, Martha A. Sandweiss, C. S. Monaco, and David Fogelson. My conversations with University of California, Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine have left a considerable imprint on these pages.

  Julia Zafferano, for many years the managing editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, for which I served as a senior editor, brought characteristic acuity and grace to an early draft of this book. Sue Llewellyn, my copyeditor at Liveright/W. W. Norton, proved no less astute if also memorably astringent. Barbara Roos, a splendid indexer, has worked with me since my first book in the 1980s.

  The support of Stanford’s dean of Humanities and Sciences, Richard Saller, and associate dean for the Humanities—and my longtime friend—Debra Satz, proved crucial. I’ve benefited from suggestions and criticisms made at public presentations at the Radcliffe Institute; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (where I gave a series of lectures drawn from my research on this book as a visiting professor); Central European University, Budapest; Ion Creanga State University, Chişinău; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; Columbia University; University of Chicago; Emory University; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Champaign; National Yiddish Book Center, University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, San Diego; and UCLA.

  My tireless agent, Charlotte Sheedy, brought this work to the attention of my publisher, Robert Weil. He has proved to be a true collaborator and friend. I thank his staff, particularly his remarkably even-tempered editorial assistant, Marie Pantojan. At Stanford’s History Department, I thank Monica Wheeler, Maria Van Buten, and Brenda Finkel for their kindnesses and patience.

  Most of this book was written in the downstairs study of my Berkeley home with my wife Susan Berrin’s vegetable garden just outside the window and the editorial office of her magazine, Sh’ma, on the floor above. At lunchtime we’d meet at a small table on a veranda outside the kitchen. May this last forever.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1. Peter Burke’s introduction to Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca (London, 2000), 4.

  2. See Ben-Zion Dinur’s comments in H. Shorer, ed. Ha-pogrom bi-Kishenev bi-melot 60 shanah (Tel Aviv, 1963), 243–259.

  3. Serge Dmitreyevich Urussov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor (London, New York, 1908), 14.

  4. On pogroms see Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, CA, 1986), John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Cambridge, UK, 2011), and a thoughtful local study, Darius Staliuˉnas, Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Lithuanian Violence Under the Tsars (Budapest and New York, 2015). For comparative work see Donald L
. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA, 2001), and Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge, UK, 2002).

  5. Gur Alroey, Zionism Without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflicts with the Zionist Organization (Detroit, 2016); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, UK, 1981); Adam Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York, 2014).

  Chapter 1. Age of Pogroms

  1. The Economist, November 22, 2014.

  2. Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird,” The Complete Stories (New York, 1997), 323; Carol Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975 (New York, 1995), 149; Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall, directed by Woody Allen, 1977 (MGM Home Entertainment, January 24, 2012); Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, in Richard Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford (London, 2007), xxi; Ian Whitcomb, Irving Berlin and Ragtime America (Pompton Plains, NJ, 1988), 19.

  3. Nekula Marek, Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts (Prague, 2016), 208; Arthur Koestler, Thieves in the Night (London, 1947), 217.

  4. Report of Kahan Commission Report (Jerusalem, 2012); New York Times, June 1, 1993; Homeland, season 6, episode 4, “A Flash of Light,” directed by Leili Linka Glatter (Bonanza 2017).

  5. Malamud, “The Jewbird,” 323.

  6. Leo Motzkin, ed., Die Judenpogromme in Russland (Leipzig and Cologne, 1910); Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, CA, 1992), 145–154; Lamed Shapiro, “The Cross,” in Leah Garrett, ed., The Cross and Other Stories, (New Haven, CT, 2007), 8.

  7. Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, trans. Timothy J. Portice (Philadelphia, 2012).

  8. Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, nos. 1–2, Papers, vol. 81 (London, 1882); Harold Frederic, The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia (New York and London, 1892).

  9. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 82–92; A. R. Malachi, “Pera’ot Kishinev be-aspaklaryat be-‘ivrit ve-yidish,” Al admat Bes’arabyah 3 (1963–1964), 64–98; Australian Jewish Historical Society 11 (1992): 821.

  10. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 4; K. Baedeker, Russland: Handbuch für Reisende (Leipzig, 1901), 31–40.

  11. Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, CA, 1986), 9–40; Rogger, Jewish Policies, 25–40.

  12. Jeffrey Veidinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington, 2009); Steven J. Zipperstein, “Inside Kishinev’s Pogrom: Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Michael Davitt, and Burdens of Truth,” in ChaeRan Freeze et al., eds., The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz (Waltham, MA, 2015), 376–382; Gregory Freidin, “Isaac Babel,” in George Stade, ed., European Writers: The Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (1885–1914), (New York, 1989), 1885–1914.

  13. Steven J. Zipperstein, “Fateless: The Beilis Trial a Century Later,” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2015).

  14. John Moore, A Journey from London to Odessa (London, 1833), 69–70.

  15. Ibid., 74–75, 87–88.

  16. Times, December 7, 1903, reprinted in Jewish Chronicle, December 11, 1903; Sam Johnson, Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s “Jewish Question,” 1867–1925 (New York, 2011), 85–88; Sam Johnson, “Use and Abuses: ‘Pogrom’ in the Anglo-American Imagination,” in Eugene M. Avrutin and Harriet Murav, eds., Jews in the East European Borderlands (Boston, 2012), 158–166. See also David Engel’s superb “What Is a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence,” in Jonathan Dekel-Chen et al., eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in Eastern Europe (Bloomington, 2011), 19–37.

  17. Times, December 7, 1903.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Peter Steinfels, “Beliefs; A century ago, in what is now Chisinau, hundreds fell victim to a pogrom. Yesterday, a day of healing, Christians and Jews Remembered,” New York Times, May 30, 1998; Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948, trans. William Templer (Stanford, CA, 1992), 34.

  20. Anita Shapira, Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life, trans. Anthony Berris (Stanford, CA, 2015), 42; Forverts, May 10, 1903.

  21. Edna Nahshon, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit, 2006), 211.

  22. Cyrus Adler, ed., The Voice of America on Kishineff (Philadelphia, 1904), xvii. On the Kishinev pogrom: Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York, 1992) is a first-rate monograph without, however, the use of Hebrew or Yiddish-language sources. See also Monty Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning-Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24, no. 3 (October 2004): 19–43; Kishinevskii pogrom, 1903 goda: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Chişinău, 2000); Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and Jews: Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia (Chur, Switzerland, 1993), 139–166.

  23. New York American, May 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 1903; David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston, 2000), 163.

  24. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 463–484; Yisrael Halperin, Sefer ha-gevurah: ‘antologyah historit-sifrutit (Tel Aviv, 1949–1950), vol. 3, 4–35.

  25. Bund: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 2010), 215–308; J. L. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963), 117–122; H. Shukman, “The Relations Between the Jewish Bund and the RSDRP, 1897–1903” (PhD diss., London University, 1961).

  26. Yitshak Maor, Ha-tenuah ha-Tsiyonit be-rusyah (Jerusalem, 1973), 244.

  27. James Boyland, Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (Amherst, MA, 1998), 136.

  28. Edward H. Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902–1904 (Syracuse, NY, 1983), 94–101.

  29. See the excellent analysis of now-discredited explanations regarding the authorship of The Protocols by Michael Hagemeister, “ ‘The Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility’: Sergei Nilus and the Apocalyptic Reading of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” in Richard Landes and Steven T. Katz, eds., The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 2012), 79–91.

  30. Bikher-velt 3–4 (1923), 241–242.

  31. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York, 1949), 254, 343; Jehuda Reinharz, The Making of a Zionist Leader (Oxford, 1985), 149–152, 156–157.

  32. Noam Chomsky, “Interview with Amy Goodman,” Democracy Now!, National Public Radio, January 13, 2014.

  33. Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York, 2013), 102–104.

  34. Ibid., 108.

  35. Ibid., 131.

  36. Ibid., 132.

  37. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmesti (1795–1995), vol. 1 (Moscow, 2001), 321–338.

  38. Steven J. Zipperstein, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Favorite Poet—and Ours,” Forward, July 7, 2014.

  39. Igor’ Petrovich Shornikov, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i literaturnaya deiatelnost’ P. A. Krushevana” (PhD diss., Pridnestrovskii Gosudarstvennyi universitet im. T. G. Shevchenko, Tiraspol, 2011).

  40. Forverts, April 28 and May 1, 1903.

  41. “Why Netanyahu refuses to ‘turn the other cheek,’ in his response to the UN Vote,” Times of Israel, December 27, 2016.

  42. Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York, 2008),

  Chapter 2. Town and Countryside

  1. T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (New York, 2002), 119.

  2. Iulian Brescanr, “Karl Schmidt—Geschichte eines deutschen Humanisten aus Bessarabien,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen aus Bessarabien, vol. 64, 201–204.

  3. New York Times, June 6, 1903.

  4. Keith Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774–1866 (Oxford, 1996), 285–289.

  5. Michael F. Hamm, “Kishinev: The Character and
Development of a Tsarist Frontier Town,” Nationalities Papers 26, no. 1 (1998) 24–27. On the paucity of archival sources on Kishinev’s early years see V. I. Zhukov, Goroda Bessarabii, 1812–1861 (Moscow, 1964), 21.

  6. Bessarabia: Handbook Prepared Under the Direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, No. 51 (London, 1920), 4–5; Zhukov, Goroda Besarabii, 62; V. S. Zelenchuk, Naselenie Bessarabii i podnestrov’ia v XIX v. (Kishinev, 1979), 148–160.

  7. Hamm, “Kishinev,” 22–23; Zhukov, Goroda Besarabii, 71, 98; George F. Jewsbury, The Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, 1774–1828 (New York, 1976), 7–54.

  8. Bessarabia: Handbook, 36–38.

  9. Y. Zlatova and V. Kotel’nikov, Across Moldova (Moscow, 1959), 26–27; Istoriia Kishineva (Kishinev, 1966), 83–87.

  10. Bessarabia: Handbook, 30; S. Konstaninov, Kishinev: ekonomicheskii ocherk (Kishinev, 1966), 22–23.

  11. Judge, Easter in Kishinev, 26–27; Bessarabia: Handbook, 30–32; Miriam Bernshtain and Yitshak Koren, eds., Sefer Bernshtain-Kogan (Tel Aviv, 1946), 101.

  12. Shlomo Hillels, Har ha-keramim (Tel Aviv, 1930), 7–8, 16–17.

  13. Ibid., 57–58.