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ABSTRACT
In this article, Ann Komaromi reads late Soviet Jewish culture in Leningrad in terms of the “two worlds” Jewish activists negotiated: official and unofficial, Soviet/Russian and Jewish, present and past, etc. While the public rhetoric of the struggle for Soviet Jewry suggested dramatic binaries of death and salvation that resonate with the eschatological extremes of the “Petersburg text,” Komaromi argues for a more prosaic approach to the imaginative and cultural project of reconstructing Jewish identity by people in this context. The article features the recollections of former Jewish activists taken from interviews and memoirs to reveal the range of endeavors in which they engaged, including Hebrew learning and teaching, seminars, demonstrations, Jewish soccer teams, local history walking tours, unofficial book collections, and ethnographic expeditions.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interviewees and Enid Wurtman, who helped me get in touch with many former Jewish activists and hosted a number of the interviews at her house. The feedback and useful suggestions by generous colleagues including Carol Avins and Michael Beizer helped me make my facts and logical connections much more precise. I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers and the editors of EEJA for constructive suggestions and support. In particular, Klavdia Smola, editor of this special issue, provided inspiration and valuable hints and questions to move the work along, as well as the space to make pursuing this topic possible.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Ann Komaromi is Associate Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research has focused particularly on late Soviet culture and dissident publics. Her publications include a book she authored, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Northwestern University Press, 2015), and an English version of Yuli Kosharovsky’s We Are Jews Again: The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union (Syracuse University Press, 2017), which she edited. Her articles include analysis of uncensored literature and theory of samizdat textual culture. She is interested in the response to modernism and the avant-garde in nonconformist and oppositional literary and art of the postwar period. Current projects include studies of Jewish activism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, a comparison of French and Russian neo-avant-garde journals, and a comparative study of the use of trash in art works and museum exhibits.
Notes
1 From Gordon’s poem “Awake My People!” (Hakitsah ami, 1863), cited by Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher, 184–185.
2 Shneer and Shternshis, “Why Jewish Museums?” 151–152.
3 Wiesel, The Jews of Silence, 44. Wiesel further reported on the life or death situation they faced: “In Kiev a Jew said to me, ‘I hope you will not have cause to regret that you have abandoned us.’ And in Moscow a religious Jew said, ‘The preservation of human life takes precedence over all six hundred thirteen commandments. Don’t you know that? Don’t our cries reach you? Or do they reach you but not move you? If that is so, then we are truly lost, because you live in a world wholly guilty, and your hearts have become foul.’” The Jews of Silence, 102.
4 The focus on the oppression of Russian Jews, in need of Western help, dates back to pre-revolutionary times. The title of the English periodical Darkest Russia, begun in 1891 and devoted to the cause of Russian Jewry, is indicative. See Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, 47–48.
5 Gilbert, Jews of Hope.
6 Murav, Music from a Speeding Train, 201.
7 See Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, and Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher.
8 Jews in the central Russian territories – the largest Soviet group – were much more assimilated than Jews in more peripheral territories such as the Baltic republics and Central Asia. See Zand, “Fate, Civilization, Aliya,” 23–34. In response to a question posed by the samizdat journal Evrei v SSSR (Jews in the USSR), regarding Soviet Jews and their national self-consciousness, the activist Larisa Bogoraz wrote frankly about the fact that she did not feel herself to be a part of the Jewish people. Bogoraz, “Do I Feel I Belong to the Jewish People?,” 63.
9 Yuli Kosharovsky spoke with participants of the “hijacking” plot. He also detailed the situation in the run-up to and aftermath of the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when détente collapsed and emigration was seriously curtailed. See Kosharovsky, We Are Jews Again, 72–81, 229–32.
10 Alice Nakhimovsky described Russian Jews, much like Isaac Babel portrayed them, as people “between two worlds,” in Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 106. The other referent is, of course, S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds (1913–16), written first in Russian and then translated by Ansky into Yiddish.
11 Brodsky wrote about the literature of the city:
That prose is read and reread and the verses are learned by heart, if only because in Soviet schools children are made to memorize them if they want to graduate. And it’s this memorization which secures the city’s status and place in the future – as long as this language exists – and transforms the Soviet schoolchildren into the Russian people.
12 In his foundational study of the “Petersburg text,” V.N. Toporov claimed that the inner meaning of the city as developed in Russian literature lay in its irreducibly antithetical and antinomial character. See Toporov’s, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury, 5. A.B. Muratov noted that the “Petersburg text” as described by V.N. Toporov began in the early nineteenth century and ended in the 1920s–30s. Muratov, “Deistvitel’no li sushchestvuet Peterburgskii tekst?,” 17.
13 Mark Amusin, son of the Leningrad Hebraicist and Qumran scholar Iosif D. Amusin (1910–84), looked at metafictional aspects of works about Petersburg Leningrad in: “Tekst goroda i samorefleksiia teksta,” Voprosy literatury 1 (2009).
14 Ellen Chances analyzed Mandelshtam as a “key” to Bitov’s Pushkin House in, “The Energy of Honesty, or Brussels Lace, Mandel’shtam, ‘Stolen Air,’ and Inner Freedom,” 503. Leningrad poet Viktor Krivulin argued for the importance of Mandelshtam to all sorts of unofficial writers of the late Soviet generation in, “Osip Mandel’shtam: otkrytie i preodolenie,” 198.
15 Leonid Katsis used the phrase the “musk of Jewishness” (muskus iudeistva) in the title of his study, Osip Mandel’shtam: muskus iudeistva (2002).
16 Mandelstam, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 81–82.
17 Murav described this trajectory from renunciation to recuperation of Jewish roots (Music, 60), quoting Clare Cavanagh’s analysis of Mandelshtam’s ambivalent treatment of a backward-turning Jewish temporality in “The Poetics of Jewishness,” 324.
18 Katsis cited Martin Buber’s reframing of the idea that “Jewishness is chaos” (evreistvo-khaos) in terms of a regenerative force for a decaying culture, thus adding important semantic nuance to the terms of contemporary cultural discourse on which Mandelshtam drew for the “highly complicated process of cultural self-definition of the poet” in which he was engaged (Osip Mandel’shtam, 246, 250).
19 From “Fourth Prose,” in Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, 316.
20 Compare Marina Tsvetaeva’s lines: “In this most Christian of worlds / Poets are Jews,” as well as Andrei Sinyavsky’s use of a Jewish alter-ego, Abram Terts, for his uncensored writing. Discussed by Komaromi, “Jewish Samizdat - Dissident Texts and the Dynamics of the Jewish Revival in the Soviet Union,” 279.
21 From Aba Taratuta, interview by Laura Bialis.
22 Leonid and Mira Zeliger, interview by author, November 16, 2014, Jerusalem. Interviews taken by author, unless otherwise described. Here and elsewhere, if not otherwise indicated, translations from Russian are my own.
23 Pinkus, The Jews, 106.
24 As part of the passage on the bookshelf quoted above, Mandelshtam also described his Hebrew teacher, who spoke much of national Jewish pride: “But I knew that he hid his pride when he went out into the street, and therefore did not believe him” (The Prose, 82).
25 Evidently, from 1958 on, it became traditional for Moscow Jews to gather at the Choral Synagogue on Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah became the main mass event associated with the synagogue, see Charny, “Judaism and the Jewish Movement,” 314–15. Eitan Finkelshtein told Yuli Kosharovsky that “David Khavkin … played a role in facilitating gatherings near the synagogue, encouraging the practice of singing and dancing outside the synagogue on the holiday of Simhat Torah, a tradition that lasted many years” (Kosharovsky, We Are Jews Again, 47). The practice spread to the synagogues in Leningrad and other cities.
26 Berta Ioffe, Semeinye zapiski, 25. Stefani Hoffman analyzed Ioffe’s memoirs alongside others in “Voices from the Inside: Jewish Activists’ Memoirs, 1967–1989,” 239.
27 Ioffe, Semeinye zapiski, 31.
28 Ioffe, Semeinye zapiski, 33.
29 Ioffe, Semeinye zapiski, 39. The Jewish University was the Institute for Advanced Jewish Knowledge (Institut vysshikh evreiskikh znanii, IVEZ), described by Beizer, Evrei Leningrada, 1917–1939, 295.
30 Michael Beizer, interview by author, June 19, 2007, Jerusalem. On Beizer’s role in the Jewish national revival in Leningrad, see below. David Ioffe recalled what an excellent memory his mother had, surprising those who wanted to hear about life in decades past with substantial stories. David Ioffe, interview by author, November 19, 2014, Haifa.
31 Keis-Kuna, Ty dolzhna eto vse zabyt’, 13.
32 Taratuta, an important leader among Leningrad activists, worked with Eduard Markov after making Aliyah to Haifa, Israel, to assemble documents from the movement – see photos, interviews and other materials of the Association “Remember and Save” (Zapomnim i sokhranim), The Exodus of Soviet Jews.
33 The next day the official press reported the demonstration: “S plakatikami na grudi” (With Little Signs on their Chests) Vechernii Leningrad (March 24, 1987).
34 Keis-Kuna, 201.
35 Keis-Kuna, 246. Vladimir and Anna Lifshits (who spoke excellent English at the time), said also that only the protracted time in refusal allowed them to gain the Jewish consciousness that motivated their Aliyah to Israel: they realized, as Vladimir said, that “in a free world, it is necessary to belong to a group with its own traditions,” (Vladimir and Anna Lifshits, interview by author, November 13, 2014).
36 Alexander Sheinin, interview by author, November 13, 2014, Jerusalem.
37 Valk, who emigrated to Israel from Riga in 1971, worked with Nativ, the semi-clandestine Israeli bureau charged with facilitating Soviet Jewish emigration. Eli Valk, interview by author, November 19, 2014, Tel Aviv. Valk later served as the first Israeli ambassador to Belarus.
38 That book for Hebrew self-study had been commissioned by Shaul Avigur, founder of Nativ, for Soviet Jews. It was published in 1963 by Kiryat Sefer in Jerusalem, and found its way to the intended audience: for example, Mikhail Agursky started his study with it in 1964. Yedidya, “The Struggle for the Study of Hebrew,” 164–65, Notes 57–58.
39 Iosif Radomyslsky, interview by author, November 19, 2014, Tel Aviv.
40 Radomyslsky, interview by author.
41 Lifshits, interview by author.
42 See Iakerson, “Sobiratel’ zhemchuzhin.”
43 Iakerson, “Mne udivitel’nym obrazom absoliutno vse udalos’,” 139, 141.
44 Semen Iakerson, interview by author, February 3, 2015, Saint Petersburg.
45 Iakerson, “Mne udivitel’nym obrazom,” 177–78.
46 Chlenov, a noted ethnographer working within Soviet institutions, was also a Jewish cultural activist and “legalist” working with Jewish refusenik activists. He sought to lay the foundations for legal Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. See further information about his activity and views in Kosharovsky, We Are Jews Again, Chapter 3.
47 See more on ties to the city as a centre of Jewish learning below.
48 Viktor Kelner, interview by author, February 5, 2015, St. Petersburg.
49 Aleksandr Frenkel, interview by author, February 1, 2015, St. Petersburg.
50 Frenkel went with Mikhail Ryvkin to document memory and memorials to Jewish victims during the war in Belarus and Ukraine, an expedition described in print already during Perestroika: A. Frenkel’, M. Ryvkin, “Pamiatniki i pamiat’,” VEK (Vestnik evreiskoi kul’tury, Riga) (July-August 1989), 23-25.
51 Petersburg was the site for pioneering Jewish studies before the revolution. Benjamin Nathans listed outstanding names (Y.L. Gordon, Shimon Frug, Simon Dubnow, et al.) and activities in Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century that showed that “Saint Petersburg may fairly be reckoned the birthplace of the study of East European Jewry as a distinct historical collectivity.” Benjamin Nathans, “Saint Petersburg,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
52 S. Ansky (Shloyme Rappoport) conducted ethnographic expeditions in the Pale of Settlement between 1911 and 1914. Dymshits described the renewed expeditions in “Dva puteshestviia po odnoi doroge,” 8–11.
53 Dymshits, who went on to work with the Centre “Petersburg Judaica” at the European University in St. Petersburg, theorized that the nature of settlement in the two cities after the Revolution and Civil War had something to do with the interest in shtetl history: Jews who came to Moscow tended to settle in Jewish communities on the outskirts of the city and preserve traditional culture longer than the Jews scattered among more abundant housing stock in Petrograd/Leningrad. As a result, Leningrad Jews, cut off more thoroughly from Jewish roots, were more susceptible to nostalgia and interest in this past. Dymshits, interview by author, February 4, 2015. Dymshits briefly outlined this theory in his published interview, “Rebiata, vot zhe ogromnaia kul’tura, a vy ee prospali,” 510–511. See also ibid., 519–520.
54 Ezer, “Biblioteka Isaaka Mikhailovicha Furshteina (Iz istorii nadomnykh bibliotek. Leningrad),” 667.
55 Ezer, “Biblioteka Isaaka Mikhailovicha Furshteina,” 669.
56 Conflicting data suggests the Jewish museum founded by S. An-sky closed sometime between 1929 and 1935, according to Michael Beizer, “Dom na Piatoi Linii,” 42. Possibly Furshtein was in Leningrad earlier than 1933 and visited it then.
57 Ezer, “Biblioteka Isaaka Mikhailovicha Furshteina,” 669.
58 Ezer, “Biblioteka Isaaka Mikhailovicha Furshteina,” 670.
59 Ezer, “Biblioteka Isaaka Mikhailovicha Furshteina,” 671–72.
60 Avital Ezer, interview by author, November 12, 2014, Jerusalem.
61 Beizer, interview by author, Jerusalem.
62 Gimelshtein, “Istoricheskii seminar,” The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem. Collection of the Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry. File 955, 22-36. The tables of contents of the Leningrad Jewish Almanac can be found in Ann Komaromi’s Database Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, (University of Toronto, 2011), and on subsequent issue pages.
63 Beizer published the Leningrad Jewish excursions in LEA, and in English as: The Jews of St. Petersburg.
64 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.
65 Marina Goldina-Vainshtein, a musicologist who participated in Beizer’s seminars, opined that “What Beizer did was practically to ‘discover’ Jewish Petersburg. … In Soviet Leningrad this was a heroic feat based on interest made stronger by a situation in which ‘forbidden fruit was sweet.’” Interview by author, January 1, 2014, New Jersey.
66 According to Kosharovsky, “In the years of mass emigration, the overwhelming majority of Jews—more than 1,500,000 people—left the borders of the former Soviet Union. The majority of those who left—around 900,000—settled in Israel” (We Are Jews Again, 318).
67 Beizer, The Jews, 56–57.
68 Babel, “The Road,” 663.
69 Avins, “Isaac Babel and the Jewish Experience of Revolution,” 91–92.
70 This argument draws on the point made by Wolf Schmid: “In order to make the understanding ‘Petersburg text’ more appropriate for description it seems useful to liberate it from the unnecessary philosophical and historical weight it carries, and in the first place to save it from the idea of salvation. V. Shmid, “Chto takoe ‘Peterburgskii tekst’?” in Sushchestvuet li Peterburgskii tekst, 11–12.