Letteratura yiddish-russa

In April of 1941 a group of Russian Yiddish writers and intellectuals turned to the Sovinformburo (Information office) with a request to restore information in the Soviet Union in the Yiddish language and, in particular, to reopen the newspaper Der Emes (The Truth) banned in 1938, so it would be possible to divulge information and propaganda among the evacuated Jews. After an initial negative response, a Soviet approval followed after a second appeal in September of the same year, which saw in the Jewish antifascist commitment a useful instrument of propaganda and financing. The organizers - Bergelson, Michoels, Kwitko, Halkin, Markish and Nusinov - gave life to a gigantic public manifestation in the biggest park of Moscow. The primary purpose of the demonstration, given Soviet authority, was to inform the Jews, especially American and English Jews, and bring them to a solidarity with the Jewish population in the Soviet Union. The most well-known personages from the Yiddish culture, the Soviet nomenclature, the economy, science and even the Armed Forces, took part. Among the others, the writer Ilia Ehrenburg, Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, the violinist David Oistrach, the director Sergej Eisenstein and numerous other well-known personages. The appeal of the Jewish Intellighenzia began with the words of Solomon Michoels, addressed to the English and American Jews, aking support the American intervention against Nazism. An expansive intervention by Dovid Bergelson followed, who clearly denounced the project of extermination foreseen by the Nazi regime, beckoning the entire world to the mobilization against the project. All the interventions of the manifestation were transmitted in various languages by Radio Moscow. This large assembly modified, at least for a few years, the Soviet line towards the Russian Jews. After this first initiative and a suggestion by Albert Einstein, a Soviet Yiddish delegation, originally numerous but then reduced to the Yiddish theatre actor Solomon Michoels and the Yiddish writer Itzik Feffer, left for a trip which lasted seven months, with stops in the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Mexico, to collect funds and organize international solidarity. Michoels and Feffer returned to Moscow at the end of a triumphant tour, where they had been welcomed everywhere by thousands of people ready to help the fight against Nazism with every means possible. Profoundly impressed by the great western solidarity, the two representatives of Soviet Hebraism began to see new perspectives for the work of the antifascist committee. The Soviet propaganda of those years had pulled out an old definition of anti-Semitism - “a remains of cannibalism” - coined years before by Stalin, to reutilize it in regards to Nazi Germany to which the Soviet propaganda opposed the peaceful cohabitation of every minority in the Soviet Union.
The picture, obviously, did not exactly correspond to the real situation. The thirties were years of silence; writers and intellectuals, silenced by party orthodoxy, had stopped producing; the ideological processes which succeeded one another in the span of a few years, among others to Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister and Leib Kvitko, had struck dumb both critics and creativity. World War II had reversed the situation and had suddenly made the Jewish minority interesting for this very reason - internationalism - for which it had already been condemned in the thirties and which would be exhumed again at the end of the forties, when Stalin’s police, after a number of trials, liquidated the Jewish Intellighenzia.
Internationalism now meant international solidarity, funding, and image -- elements which could not leave the Kremlin indifferent.
In 1942, originating from an idea of Albert Einstein, the collection of material on Nazi crimes against the Jewish population became an international project. The intention to create a cooperation of different countries (Great Britain, United States, France, Italy, Mexico, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Palestine) for the drawing up of the so-called “Black Book”, under the protection of the Soviet Union, quickly became a reality after the visit of Michoels and Feller to the United States and the ratification of the project by the Soviet central committee in 1943. In 1944, Ilia Ehrenburg was nominated chief editor of the project to which he himself had contributed with various material collected in his role as correspondent for the Russian newspaper Krasnaja swesda (Red Star). The changing Soviet position towards the Russian Jews at the end of the world war took the form of a contentious postponement of the Black Book. During those same years the Antifascist Jewish Committee had supplied American material and organizations which, in 1946, had seen to the publication of a part of the material by the title The Black Book. The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People. In the Soviet Union the publication of the Black Book was definitively blocked in June, 1947, when three-fourths of the edition was already in print.
The manuscripts of the Russian edition vanished. Only in 1992 the daughter of Ilia Ehrenburg came into possession of a copy of them. The translation of the Black Book, which appeared in 1994, is based on that manuscript. In the archives of the KGB, in the years that followed, a copy of the book in the version preceding censure was found. This version was pubblished in Vilna in 1993.
The German version also includes the censured sections. The existence of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in post-war years, was marked by increasing difficulties. Soviet politics, initially interested in supporting the Jewish minority in consideration of the retreat of English power in Palestine - let’s remember that the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel - changed direction with an increasing intolerance towards minorities and, in particular, the Jewish minorities.
On May 15, 1948, the new State of Israel was proclaimed. Submersed by letters and telegrams from joyous Jewish citizens, the Jewish Antifascist Committee came into the line of fire. In January 1948, the lifeless body of Solomon Michoels was found in a street of Minsk. The elimination of the well-known Yiddish actor, in appearance a traffic accident, was thought out and ordered by Stalin, who wanted to give with this action a clear message to the Jewish minority that they no longer had any rights. In a document of November 20, 1948, the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party notarized the order of dismemberment of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. The definitive massacre of the Jewish intellighenzia had begun.

Daniela M. Kromer