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ABSTRACT
The article is concerned with three fictional works by the Soviet writer Masha Rol’nikaite: Tri vstrechi (Three Encounters, 1970), Privykni k svetu (Get Used to the Light, 1974), and Dolgoe molchanie (A Long Silence, 1981). It discusses how these texts fit within Soviet memorial culture of World War II. Rol’nikaite is used to illustrate the difficulties of commemorating the Holocaust in Soviet literature, and goes on to show how she confronted Soviet readers with topics such as the trauma of survival, the grey zone, and survivor’s guilt in post-war Jewish culture. It emphasizes the aesthetic strategies she used for integrating these topics into a discourse that was indifferent and sometimes hostile to them.
Acknowledgement
I want to thank Masha Rol’nikaite for her impressive generosity, for access to her personal archive and for providing me with background information. This article is dedicated to her memory. I also want to thank Marina Balina and Gennady Estraikh as well as the two anonymous reviewers of this article for helpful criticism and comments of first drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Shneer, “Probing the Limits of Documentation,” 124. See also “Lithuanian Anne Frank,” Association of Jewish Refugees, May 1964, accessed October 2015, http://www.ajr.org.uk/journalpdf/1964_may.pdf.
2 Rol’nikaite, Ia dolzhna rasskazat’. The book saw several editions. The latest edition from 2013 partially restores the original text, indicating the passages that were censored in the Soviet editions with brackets and using “nemtsy” (Germans) instead of the politically correct “fashisty” (fascists) in the censored version. Rol’nikaite, Ia dolzhna rasskazat’. This edition also contains Rol’nikaite’s post-Soviet memoir Eto bylo potom (This Happened Afterwards) and an essay by the author as well as additional material like a chronicle of the Vilna ghetto by the editor Pavel Polian. Quoted in the article is the 2013 edition.
3 See Rol’nikaite, “Naedine s pamiat’iu.” Rol’nikaite gives a short account of her sister’s fate during the war in memoir from 2013.
4 Bernard, “Anne Frank,” 201–29.
5 This holds true for Anne Frank to some extent, too. See Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust”, esp. 4, as well as Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
6 For an overview of wartime narratives about adolescent war heroines see Tippner, “Girls in Combat.”
7 Rol’nikaite, Tri vstrechi (first published in Zvezda 3–4 (1969): 3–73, 127–68); Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu (first published in Zvezda 5 (1974): 3–123); Rol’nikaite, Dolgoe Molchanie.
8 Though atrocity films like e.g. Sud Narodov (directed by Roman Karmen and Elizaveta Svilova, SU, 1945) about the Nuremberg trials or Osvencim (directed by Elizaveta Svilova, SU/PL, 1945) were made in the Soviet Union too, they were not widely shown in the USSR and mainly targeted audiences in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe.
9 Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust, 223. See also Epelboin and Kovriguina, La Littérature des Ravins, and Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust.
10 The Cult of the Great Patriotic War was and is a main pillar of Russian identity. For a discussion of this cult and its evolution in the Soviet Union see Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead. For a discussion of the cult of war in Post-Soviet Russia see Malinova, “Political Uses of the Great Patriotic War in Post-Soviet Russia from Yeltsin to Putin,” 43–70. For an account on the implementation of the Soviet war narrative in Lithuania and post-Soviet attitudes see Makhotina, Erinnerungen an den Krieg.
11 For a collection of childhood memories of World War II see Aleksievich, Poslednie svideteli.
12 Leingang, Sowjetische Kindheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 273, 279–82. Leingang discusses two post-transformation childhood memoirs that confront the Holocaust and points out that they do not purport a markedly Jewish identity or culture and that Soviet Jews constituted a “Erinnerungsminderheit” (a minority within the frame of memorial culture). What can be regarded as a diversion from the Soviet model is the fact, that the Post-Soviet texts stress the collaboration of Soviet citizens in the Holocaust.
13 Another aspect of Holocaust literature, namely the fact that salvation was the exception and death the rule, did not pose problems in Soviet literature, since this was a cultural environment that favored death over survival especially in inspirational wartime stories. See Tippner, “Girls in Combat”.
14 In this year the book was also published in Hebrew, Polish, Spanish, English, and Japanese. A French edition was published in 1966. There are also Swedish, Latvian, Finnish, and German editions. See Rol’nikaite Ia dolzhna rasskazat’, 8.
15 The diary first appeared in Lithuanian (1963) and Russian translations (1965) made by the author herself. The original Yiddish text was also published in 1965. For an account of the publication history of her memoir and its place in Soviet literature about the Holocaust see Tippner, “The Writings of a Soviet Anne Frank.”
16 “Za shest’ millionov govorit odin golos – ne mudretsa, ne poeta – obyknovennoi devochki … ”. Ehrenburg, “Predislovie,” 9–10. An English version can be found in Ehrenburg, “About Anne Frank.”
17 He writes that the diary is “a valuable antifascist document, especially useful for the young” (tsennym antifashistkim dokumentom, polesnym dlia vospitaniia nashei molodezhi). Frezinskii, “Il’ia Erenburg i dnevnik Mashi Rol’nikaite.”
18 This is the term Lydia Kokkola uses in her study on Holocaust writing for children and young adult readers. See Kokkola, Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature, 7. For the difficulties of defining the genre see also Hunt, “Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists.”
19 For a discussion of the functions of crosswriting, see Beckett, Crossover Fiction as well as Falconer, The Crossover Novel. Both authors only comment very much in passing on the situation in the Soviet Union. In their studies, they attribute several roles to crossover fictions, and regard them as a phenomenon of crisis.
20 Compare the books recommended in Sullivan, The Holocaust in Literature for Youth. He points out that for librarians, “young adult” means readers from twelve to eighteen years. With regard to the actual reading done by this age group he maintains that there are “numerous adult titles” that are of interest for these group of readers. See Sullivan, Holocaust in Literature for Youth, 9. His suggestions for a core collection for young adults can be found on pages 225–226. Unsurprisingly, Rol’nikaite’s texts do not figure in his bibliography.
21 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 141.
22 The only hint of a gender divide is apparent in the opposition of Irena and Algis in Three Encounters, Rol’nikaite’s other texts lack in male protagonists as counterparts for their female main characters. For the prevalence of the model of the androgynous girl in Soviet youth literature see Balina, “Vospitanie chuvstv à la sovietique: Povesti o pervoi lubvi.”
23 It also challenges the presuppositions of literature for young audiences. Kertzer, My Mother’s Voice, 38.
24 “Ia poniala, chto ne vse o nem [i.e. o Golokauste] rasskazala.” Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 470.
25 “A rasskazyvat’ nado. Osobenno molodym.” Rol’nikaite, Dolgoe molchanie, 10.
26 Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 437. In this passage she describes how one editor wants her to stress the Russian presence during the war even more, but here she puts her foot down. The topic of positive Soviet protagonists comes up again in talks with her editor (451).
27 “Russkii narod vynes na svoikh plechakh glavnye tiagoty voiny […]”. Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 485. This critique is echoed in the commentary that Anatolii Rybakov received when he submitted the manuscript of his novel Tiazhelyi pesok to the journal Novyi mir, as he describes it in his memoir Roman-vospominanie. See Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 239–40.
28 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 191.
29 In some ways this is true for Lithuanians as well, they too, are rarely identified as such, there are no toponyms used, and one can infer the Lithuanian setting mostly by the characters names such as Algis, Petronele, Ionna, etc.
30 “Teper’ vse dolzhny byt’ soldatami. Inache ot nemtsev nekogda ne izbavit’sia! Pereb’iut oni tut vsekh!” Rol’nikaite, Tri vstrechi, 149.
31 “Nedostachno vyiavlen vopros pomoshchi zhiteliam getto.” Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 436.
32 For accounts of different aspects of the Holocaust in Lithuania see Bartusevičius et al., eds., Holocaust in Litauen. See also Bankier, Expulsion and Extermination and Dieckmann, “The role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust,” 149–69.
33 For an elaboration of the grey zone see Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, esp. 40.
34 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 168–76. Clark describes this as one of the fundamental myths of the Soviet novel, as for example developed in Fadeev’s The Young Guard. The elder person usually initiates the younger one but also leaves the action and the fore to the younger protagonist.
35 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 130.
36 For definitions of “Amidah” see Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 120–1, as well as Bauer, Der Tod des Schtetls, 27, 15–158 and passim.
37 In Rol’nikaite’s own opinion this is the least successful of the three texts, marking for her the transition from document and memoir to fiction. Personal information, 07.06.2014.
38 Rol’nikaite, Tri vstrechi, 197–8.
39 “[…] prokuror ne smog nichego dokazat’. Net svidetelei.” Rol’nikaite, Tri vstrechi, 205. To this Irena replies that all the witnesses were killed.
40 For this thesis see Toker, Russian Literature about the Holocaust, 130. For war crime trials of the 1960s see Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” 29–61, esp. 41–42. Hirszowicz lists a series of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union among them several in Lithuania and other Baltic states, most of which were covered in the local press but some of which got also reported in newspapers like Komsomol’skaia pravda and Trud, and magazines like Novoe vremia. Though in some aspects outdated Hirszowicz is still interesting for his sources. For more recent explorations of the topic see Simkin, “Death Sentence Despite the Law,” 299–312, Feferman, “Soviet Legal Procedures Against Nazi Criminals and Soviet Collaborators as Historical Sources,” 34–43.
41 “No sud’ia sprashivaet sovsem ne o tom! Ona dolzhna rasskazat’, kakaia Petronele khoroshaia. Kak ee priatala.” Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 165, and again 167.
42 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 36.
43 “Chelovek vosstaet protiv fashisma”. Dagniia Zigmonte, “Pamiat’ – oruzhie,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 27, 1965. See also a book announcement in Izvestia a year earlier (Izvestia, March 21, 1964) that is written in the same vein.
44 “No ved’ baba Rina byla evreika. i otets tozhe … ” Rol’nikaite, Dolgoe molchanie, 108, 112.
45 Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 491.
46 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 177–8. This is in accordance with political correctness in Soviet texts. Rybakov mentions that his editor asked him to substitute “Jews” with “people” ([…] ne «еvrei», a voobshche «liudi»), Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 240.
47 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 35.
48 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 125.
49 ibid.
50 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 169. “Nas iz zhizni vybrosilo […] I vernulis’ my uzhe ne v svoiu, prezhniuiu zhizn’, a v ikh – tekh, kto zhil bespreryvno.” This sentence and the depiction of survivor’s guilt as well as the impossibility of return is also a divergence from the common plot in youth literature on the Holocaust. Since as Kokkola stresses youth literature tends towards the reassurance that after the war “life continues” and the Holocaust is “past”. See Kokkola, The Holocaust in Children’s Literature, 155.
51 Merridale, “The Collective Mind,” 39–55, esp. 46.
52 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 89. “Vse ei govoriat, chtoby ne dumala, tak mnogo o tom, chto bylo. Eto proshlo, bol’she ne budet. Teper’ nado zhit’ nastoiashchim, tem, chto segodnia, seichas. No chto delat’, esli samo vspominaetsia, a budto eshche est’ – strakh, ukrytiia. I eto ee, Norino. A vse tepereshnee – chuzhoe, neprivychnoe.”
53 Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 199.
54 “Tetia Liuba i tak govorit, chto ona slishkom otkrovenna so vsemi. Zachem chuzhim liudiam vse znat’ o nei? A Nora ne ponimaet, pochemu im nel’zia znat’.” Rol’nikaite, Privykni k svetu, 142.
55 Vice, Children Writing the Holocaust, 63.
56 Rozhdestvenskaia, “Biografia.doc,” 212.
57 This effect is heightened by the fact that some of the victims might themselves have been perpetrators during Stalinist repressions, as Dan Diner points out. See Diner, Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse, 60.
58 “[…] ne govorili oni bol’she – ni ona, ni Volodia – o voine. I voobshche ni o chem takom, chto moglo ny Zhene napominat’ pro lager’.” […] “I ei samoi eto stalo kazat’sia nevozmozhnym. V lagere, gde takoe mnozhestvo liudei unichtozhili v gazovoi kamere, rasstreliali v upor, zabili nasmert’, – ona ostalas’ zhiva.” Rol’nikaite, Dolgoe molchanie, 8–9.
59 For the absence of trauma and the demand for optimism in post-war Soviet literature see Anna Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls.”
60 Vice discusses this in Vice, Children Writing the Holocaust, 12–29.
61 Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov's ‘Heavy Sand’,” esp. 240 and 242, for the critique of “de-judaization” see 248.
62 Toker, “The Holocaust in Russian Literature,” 118–31, esp. 126.
63 It has to be said that the reliance on background knowledge applies not only for Soviet books dealing with this topic but for some Western European and American books about the Holocaust, too. But here the motivation is to spare the young readers the confrontation with traumatic and violent content, as Lydia Kokkola has pointed out in her study – which does not deal with Eastern European books. Kokkola, The Holocaust in Children’s Literature, 160.
64 Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 62–63. They have also put the argument forth that Anne Frank became a post-war icon of the Holocaust because her diary was almost devoid of Jewishness much as is the case with Rol’nikaite’s texts.
65 Joachim Tauber, “14 Tage im Juni,”40–51.
66 Al’tman, Kholokost na territorii SSSR. Ėntsiklopediia, 930. Al’tman writes: “Eti poteri v protstnom otnoshenii (95%–96% dovoenonnego evreiskogo na[seleniia] – samye bol‘shie sredi vsekh okkupirovannykh respublik byv[shei] SSSR, a takzhe evreiskikh obshchin vse evropeiskikh gosudarstv v rranitsakh na 1.9.1939.”
67 Rol’nikaite, Eto bylo potom, 470, 491.
68 Especially notable is the absence of these texts in Epelboin and Kovriguina, La littérature des ravins, because the authors do discuss Rol’nikaite’s memoirs extensively, but completely ignore her fictional texts. Olaf Terpitz too, does not touch upon her books in his study of Jewish literature in the late Soviet Union. See Terpitz, Die Rückkehr des Štetl.
69 This need is not restricted to the Soviet period. Oxane Leingang’s study on memoirs of wartime childhoods shows that many of the restraints put into place during Soviet times are still viable today, though she does not discuss this or puts the thesis forward it becomes apparent in her analysis of two Jewish childhood memoirs.