Guest editor’s introduction

In the second half of the 1960s, the predominantly Russian-assimilated Soviet Jews started to explore their Jewish heritage, inspired by the Aliyah (Hebrew: ascent) movement. Referring back to the events narrated in the Book of Exodus, Russian Jews, a “stepchild” and silent minority in the officially proclaimed multinational Soviet family, identified as people of the galut (Jewish diaspora, more precisely exile). For them, leaving the Soviet Union and relocating to the “original homeland” for which they yearned, Israel was collectively conceived as both an exodus (liberation and flight) and Aliyah. However, since authorities denied most Soviet Jews exit visas, and the process of waiting for the permission to leave the country often lasted for years, they became “refuseniks.” State refusal and discrimination played a major role in the birth of a Jewish underground, which continued to exist until Soviet political liberalization at the end of the 1980s. Scholars often point to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which the Israelis achieved a rapid victory against the Soviet-supported Arab forces, as a trigger for the Jewish national renaissance.¹ Indeed, the victory stirred enthusiasm among Soviet Jews and initiated the development of a broad cultural and political underground movement.

The actual cause for the emergence of the Jewish national movement, however, lies not in international events but in a series of notable events in Soviet history, of which the experience of relative spiritual freedom during the period of the Khrushchev Thaw played a significant role. Irena and Nati Cantorovich identify precisely this peculiar pendulum between cultural concessions on the one hand (e.g. the 1960 translation of The Diary of Anne Frank or the publishing of Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoirs People, Years, Life), and the regime’s simultaneous stigmatization of Jewish matters on the other hand as the stimulus for the revival of Jewish political and cultural self-reflection.²

The discussion about certain aspects of the totalitarian Soviet past and the partial renunciation of the Socialist Realist canon, which became possible in the 1950s, paved the way for an alternative understanding of history. Not only did it foreshadow a revision of the past, it also pointed out cultural and ethnic differences that existed in Village prose – a sort of Russian-ethnic “back to the roots” literature – and later in the so-called shestidesiatniki literature of the 1960s generation. The end of the cultural thaw, which finally came with the ouster of Khrushchev and his replacement by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, provoked the emergence of an underground counter-culture. The restrictions on public intellectual activity caused the development of the informal culture and dissident movement. In this respect, the 1967 Six-Day War merely consolidated the gradual individualization of Jews in (semi- and anti-) public life. As Petr Vail and Aleksandr Genis argue, “The Six-Day War completed the process of the ‘manifestation’ of Jews in the Soviet society.”³

Despite its internal heterogeneity, which will be explicitly highlighted and analyzed in this issue, Jewish unofficial culture was one of the most visible of all the Soviet non-conformist communities. The character of its dissent can be traced back firstly to social and political disobedience, which manifested in the organization of “nationalist” and “particularistic” (in the language of the Soviet authorities) Jewish cultural events, in the observance of religious customs in an officially atheistic state, and, finally, in the public request to leave the Soviet Union. It included, secondly, a collective of “differently minded” intellectuals and artists, who closely collaborated with the non-Jewish Soviet underground but simultaneously intended to revive their “own” ethnic culture. However, this did not always mean solidarity with the political aims of Soviet dissidents, whose activity sought to reform the state system.

Jewish unofficial culture developed in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), but also existed in Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Belarus, in the Caucasus, as well as in Central Asia. The networks that constituted the social basis of this Jewish renaissance enabled a variety of collective activities, including the celebration of Jewish religious rites, meetings in (or in front of) synagogues, private workshops and city tours, Jewish samizdat (self publishing in the Soviet Union) and tamizdat (smuggling material out of the country to be published abroad), and the organization of artistic circles and exhibitions in numerous contact zones.

The networks of the sam- and tamizdat were based on a living communicative system and produced a number of alternative public spheres. However, recent works exploring these networks have paid little attention to the sociocultural context of the Jewish underground scene.⁴ Even though a number of witness reports, excursus, chronicles, and historiographic studies have been published since the 1970s, there are still only a few studies that address systemic phenomena such as the interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish unofficial networks, collections of unofficial Jewish publications, specifics of alternative public sphere(s) that originated in the refusenik movement, and finally, the original context of Jewish artifacts born from the spirit of collective communication.⁵ The question regarding the cultural production of Soviet Jews requires an examination of the literature, (also Jewish) historiography, and art that the unofficial intellectuals, who sought to create a new Jewish culture, received. Moreover, this special edition of East European Jewish Affairs will investigate the sources, institutions, and non-Jewish mediators through which this occurred.⁶ These questions shed new light on the Jewish underground culture, for they provide insights into how far it was incorporated into the broader context of the Soviet Union “second culture” and how Jewry functioned as an ethnic culture in late Socialism.

The contributors to the present issue try to fill this gap by exploring the phenomenon of the Jewish underground within a broader social and communicative context and also between official and unofficial cultural spaces, by closely examining the complex lifeworld connections of the Aliyah movement and by tracing back the artifacts originating in this cultural movement to the everyday practices of its protagonists. In her contribution, Ann Komaromi analyzes unofficial Jewish activity in Leningrad. She uses interviews with former Jewish activists and other Jewish voices associated with the city in order to understand how the renewal of Jewish identity in the late Soviet Union depended on the Russian Jewish and Soviet Jewish cultural heritage. How do activists themselves tell the story of this renewal? Komaromi questions the strict opposition between public and private, as well as between Jewish, Russian, and Soviet facets of Aliyah culture. She argues that Soviet Jews could find themselves poised between different spheres, negotiating the gap between the public Soviet sphere and the private Jewish sphere, recalling the Jewish past in the Soviet present, and, in the late Soviet environment, between the official culture and the unofficial Jewish culture. The Jewish world represented a separate and semi-clandestine realm for Late Soviet Era Jews. However, according to Komaromi, this did not always constitute an “underground,” with all the implications of conspiracy and organization that are associated with that term. So, the Jews often utilized unofficial means that were neither quite illegal nor centrally coordinated – among them, Israeli radio transmissions, private book collections, and conversations with people who lived through earlier times. Moreover, many interviewees talk about having transformed their “double life” with a hidden Jewish side into an integrated life that involved being Jewish in public.

Klavdia Smola examines Jewish art and literature that originates in the context of the late Soviet unofficial public sphere. Her premise is that the Jewish cultural underground, like the late Soviet unofficial culture as a whole, emerged within a specific communicative niche, which was the result of intensive private exchange, limited knowledge, and collectively discovered sources. Referring to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action and the concepts developed by the Russian formalists — “literary everyday life” (Boris Eikhenbaum) and “domestic semantics” (Iurii Tynianov) — Smola discusses the Jewish underground’s intermediate position between the private and public spheres. She examines the ways in which the semi-private public life and political pressure influenced Jewish cultural production. Her main thesis is that precisely this context determined the aesthetic nature of the artifacts: their intertextuality, numerous cross-medial links, and the incorporation of the alternative lifeworld into art. The predominantly non-Jewish socialization of the “new” late Soviet Jews and their close contact with other unofficial artists produced a highly mediated and highly synthetic culture.

In his article, Roman Katsman addresses another important question, which he approaches with the help of concepts situated between literary studies and cultural anthropology: what was the specific utterance of the Soviet Jewish nonconformism in the late Soviet era? He applies the notion of “Jewish fearless speech” to the prose of Russian-Jewish writers Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Felix Roziner, and especially David Shrayer-Petrov. Katsman draws upon Eric Gans’s anthropological model, which explains the growing of culture out of violence against a victim at the scene of a conflict. Following in the footsteps of Rene Girard, Gans formulates his theory of generation of a first sign as an “abortive gesture of appropriation” towards an object of desire, thus providing the origin of signification with nonvictimary foundation. In the works by Shrayer-Petrov, Katsman discerns the fearless utterance of nonconformism as a transition to the nonvictimary paradigm. As protest discourse, the nonconformist Jewish literature produced spaces of conflict generation, its symbolic overcoming, and a way out toward a new and different existence.

Finally, Michael Beizer’s essay is an analytical first-hand account, written by a prominent participant and scholar of the late Soviet Jewish underground. Beizer reflects on the development of Judaic Studies in Leningrad in the 1980s – the time of the Soviet regime’s refusal to allow Jews to emigrate and of intense self-education. Both an initiator and analyst of Jewish education and Jewish cultural research in the late period of the Aliyah movement, he provides a unique vantage point which reinforces more abstract analytical arguments of the other contributors. Beizer describes the communicative structure and practices of unofficial knowledge transfer, such as seminars and excursions. He also documents scholarly resources available to the participants as well as transgressive practices, e.g. exchange between Jewish activists and scholars in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Two book reviews at the end of this issue more or less directly mirror the title subject. They discuss research works on the topics of unofficial Jewish art and recent Russian literature in Israel, which have been published in the last years.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of East European Jewish Affairs, and in particular David Shneer, for their professional and organizational support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Cf. Pinkus, “Soviet Jewry and the Six-Day War;” Gitelman, “The Psychological and Political Consequences of the Six-Day War in the USSR;” Irena and Cantorovich, “The Impact of the Holocaust.”

2 Irena and Nati Cantorovich, “The Impact of the Holocaust,” 119–136.

3 Vail and Genis, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka.

4 About the relation between the private and public spheres in the Soviet Union cf. Voronkov and Wielgohs, “Soviet Russia;” Hankiss, “The ‘Second Society,’” and Komaromi, “Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics.”

5 To mention but a few: Lazaris, Dissidenty i evrei: Kto otkryl zheleznyi zanaves?; Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence; Pinkus, “Jewish Self-Expression in Soviet Publications;” Beizer, “Kampf um die Alijah;” Smola, “The Reinvention of the Promised Land.”

6 A significant contribution to the systematic exploration of the Jewish unofficial culture was offered by the authors of the volume The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union (cf. endnote 1).