On January 7 of this year, Christmas day in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, a group of young Evangelicals dressed in native Ukrainian costume gave a spirited performance of religious folk songs right under Lenin’s stony gaze in the Plaza of the October Revolution in Kiev. The crowd assembled there was clearly enjoying the first public performance of these carols in over sixty years. Here, in the City of a Thousand Churches, where only a dozen or so actually serve the faithful, Ukrainian nationalists were finally, if tentatively, reclaiming their Christian roots.
The young Ukrainian Jews who accompanied me on that day seemed to take it all in stride because their culture too was enjoying a remarkable efflorescence, and the signs of Ukrainian-Jewish brotherhood were everywhere to be seen. Thus, in Moscow only two weeks before, when the delegates to the first All-Russian Conference of Jewish Organizations emerged from their deliberations, there to protect them from the anti-Semitic heckling and banners of the Pamyat movement was a group of Ukrainian nationalists with their distinctive yellow-and-blue armbands. They had traveled all the way from Lvov to forge this human chain of ethnic solidarity.
My own presence in Kiev was testimony to the Ukrainian government’s genuine desire to foster a Jewish cultural revival. Under the auspices of the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, I and Peysakh Fiszman had been invited from the United States to lead a two-week-long seminar for the training of Yiddish teachers. While the New Yorkbased Committee for the Revitalization of Yiddish and Yiddish Culture in the Soviet Union had paid our plane fares, and while our local accommodations (spartan, to be sure) were being provided by the spanking new Republican Society for Jewish Culture, the 38 officially registered participants could expect the Ministry of Education itself to reimburse their travel and living expenses. Nothing like this had occurred in the Ukraine, or in the entire USSR for that matter, since 1939.
Another first was the official opening of the Osher Shvartsman Library in Kiev. The few thousand Jewish books in Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English that formed the nucleus of this fledgling collection would soon be greatly augmented by private donations once word got around of the library’s existence. Meanwhile, the sixty-odd people crammed into the tiny auditorium on the seventh night of Hanukkah thrilled to the lighting of the candles, courtesy of their guests from America. Though none of the assembled local Jews responded “Amen” to the blessings, it was surely out of ignorance, not hostility. For when later I distributed dreydlekh, the miniature tops used in holiday games, as well as chocolate Hanukkah gelt and even Simhat Torah flags to the children of the Pintelekh Choir who had just performed for us, the adults in the audience broke with official decorum to beg gifts for their own children and grandchildren.
Our hosts were drunk on glasnost. Besides the government-sponsored seminar and library; besides the theatrical ensembles from Moscow and the successful season enjoyed by the Kiev Yiddish Theater, Mazel Tov; besides the spate of recent concerts by Shlomo Carlebach and members of the Israel Philharmonic; besides the ambitious plans for new seminars, new books and periodicals, there was also a wealth of unofficial activities: Hebrew courses galore, Jewish samizdat in Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and even—I saw it with my own eyes—the opening of an Israeli video library.
Predictably, this feverish activity above and below ground was accompanied by fierce infighting. Indeed, seventy years of Bolshevik terror had done little to alter the structure of internal Jewish politics. On the Zionist end of the spectrum, the Iggud Hamorim, or Union of Hebrew Teachers, had split into rival factions. In the meantime, a breakaway group from the Republican Society for Jewish Culture—a kind of latter-day Bund committed to cultural autonomy—had just been formed the week before we arrived. The elite group of young Zionists preferred to go it alone, and seemed to enjoy the romance of semi-clandestine meetings. In addition, they now had an unbroken supply of funds, electronic equipment, and accessories which were the envy of the “Republicans.” The latter, for all their official sanction and much larger membership, had to rely on Ukrainian institutions that were also starving for a ruble.
Contributing to a profound sense of déjà-vu was a gallery of Jewish activists who seemed to be recruited from central casting. The Republican Society for Jewish Culture, for instance, was headed by an old-guard bureaucrat named Ilya Levitas who looked very Stalinist indeed. Lean and muscular (he is a former gym instructor), Levitas never cracked a smile. He also could not speak Yiddish. Opinions on the man were wildly divergent. Some painted him as a Judenrat-style collaborator out to further only himself and his group of sycophants. Others argued that he alone had the contacts and political savvy to organize a common Jewish-Ukrainian front. It was a measure of glasnost, however, that no one was afraid of him. The students of our seminar let him have it for the terrible accommodations and other indignities they suffered.
A more lovable type was Igor Kuperberg, who ran the day-to-day activities of the Society. He was one of the few middle-aged men active in Jewish politics, though his bad eye and paunch belly made his exact age inscrutable. Kuperberg took his marching orders from Levitas, yet he was thick with the Zionists as well. They, in turn, were young and handsome with fiery eyes and healthy heads of hair. The bearded ones betrayed a religious leaning. In addition to their sex appeal, the Zionists also boasted a membership half of whom were young women, a constituency sorely lacking among their rivals. The “Republicans” were mostly pensioners: archetypal Jewish mothers; fathers who always displayed their war ribbons and medals; Holocaust survivors.
But no matter who they were, young or old, male or female, they talked and talked and talked. Never have I so understood the loquaciousness of Sholem Aleichem’s fictional characters. Talkativeness here in Kiev was a surrogate for political power, for happiness, for the truth. Some of the monologues were in fact so close to Sholem Aleichem that the boundary between literature and life broke down completely. A father from Odessa recounted the Via Dolorosa of his son from one institution of higher learning to another, as each time the son was rejected on account of his Jewish name, his Jewish pride, his Jewish brain. It was Sholem Aleichem’s story “Gymnasium” almost to the word. More tragic still was when a daughter recounted the trials of her father, a purged Yiddish writer. “I saw everything,” she said: how a whole housing complex of Yiddish writers, journalists, and scholars was arrested one by one—the good, the bad, and the indifferent.
The loss of her father meant the loss of his language, too. Though she sat in on our seminar from 10:00 to 4:00 every day, she could not read, write, or speak Yiddish. Otherwise, the spoken Yiddish of our informants was just a bit more corrupt than the recorded monologues in Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories. But the pent-up energy of their speech, not to mention their self-deprecating humor, more than compensated for the mishmash of languages. Hardly a story could be told without circling back to a joke, either political or anti-Semitic, or both.
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Of all the hundreds of Yiddish writers who once made Kiev their home, Sholem Aleichem is the only one still enshrined, and only his repertoire is still performed. The hottest tickets in town were for the Ukrainian production of Tevye, a polished three-and-a-half hour performance that borrowed heavily from Fiddler on the Roof but thoroughly exploited the native Ukrainian setting. In this version, Pertchik the revolutionary is caught waving the red flag through the streets of neighboring Kiev (the audience laughed appreciatively). That the Jews are an integral part of the Ukrainian landscape was the message driven home in almost every scene. A more lovable uryadnik, or Ukrainian village policeman, could hardly be imagined. Unwilling accomplice of the czar, this cop passes Tevye some extra pocket money for the long road of exile ahead. As if that were not brotherhood enough, a new character, Stepan the Shabbes-goy, had been invented to exemplify the indivisible bond between the peasants and the Jews.
However idealized, the relevance of Tevye to the present situation of Jews in the Ukraine cannot be overstated. The work deals with the subject that was on everybody’s mind: the Jews of Anatevke and Kiev and Moscow and Leningrad and Tashkent are leaving, this time in the absence of a ukase from the czar. But the full propaganda point of the play became apparent at the end when Fedor, the Ukrainian intellectual, joins his beloved Chava in exile and Tevye is fully reconciled both to a goy for a son-in-law and an apostate for a daughter. The couple’s immediate destination is Berdichev, the trading capital of the Ukraine. Only Leyzer-Volf the corpulent butcher sets out for America, awkwardly uttering his first English word, “Goodbye.”
Sholem Aleichem’s enduring popularity among all sectors of the Ukrainian population provides an accurate measure of how much and how little historical awareness has weathered the Soviet campaign of cultural genocide. Across from the equestrian statue of Bogdan Chmielnitsky, the notorious 17th-century pogromist, is the building where the infamous blood-libel trial of Mendel Beilis took place in 1913. Yet when the Kiev Yiddish Theater drew up a full-color poster for its latest production, Sholem Aleichem’s It’s Hard to Be a Jew, which is loosely based on the events of the trial, the local censor expunged from the upper-left-hand corner a representation of the Chmielnitsky statue. There has not been nor will there ever be a moral reckoning for the Jewish blood spilled by Ukrainian hands.
The memorial plaque to Sholem Aleichem at 27 Saksanovska Street was the only official sign I could find that Jews had ever lived, worked, and died in this ancient capital. The one remaining synagogue, in the historic Podol district of town, did not appear in any guidebook. To be sure, every Soviet Jew knows much more than the official publications allow, but local memory alone cannot compensate for the systematic destruction of Jewish nationhood and Jewish faith. My Jewish activist friends took pride in pointing out the sculpture of Samson fighting the lion, now restored in the center of Podol. Ukrainian wags, they hastened to add, call it “The Zhid [Kike] Torturing the Dog.”
Since my friends had never studied the Bible, none knew much about another biblical hero named Elijah the Prophet. Never having attended a Passover seder, either, they did not know that Elijah is supposed to taste of the wine set aside for him in a special cup. One who did remember the custom of opening the door for Elijah was thirty-four-year-old Boris (Boruch) Kimelfeld. He had played the rabbi in It’s Hard to Be a Jew, the climactic scene of which takes place at the seder table. Never could Sholem Aleichem have imagined that some day in the Ukraine his writings would be the sole preserve of the world’s first monotheistic religion.
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In 1971, during my first trip to the Soviet Union, I had met a very different element, for then to be a Soviet Jewish activist meant forfeiting one’s job and sometimes even one’s freedom. It took a great deal of daring for Esther Markish to greet Westerners in front of the Arkhipova Street synagogue in Moscow or to invite them to lecture at her home. Lev Navrozov would tell visitors in perfect English that since the life of a Soviet Jew began anew from the day he applied for a visa, he himself was at that time no more than a babe in arms. The remarkable Ilya Essas, meanwhile, pumped the Jewish tourist for precise information on the difference between Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker, Midstream and COMMENTARY.
That pioneering group of fearless, urbane Jews had long since emigrated and new generations had also followed suit. But here in the Ukraine, off the beaten track, and in the third year of perestroika, it was amkha, ordinary Jews, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, who attended the Yiddish Teachers’ Seminar. There was not one among them whose Jewish learning and sophistication were even remotely on a par with their general training. While the younger students could barely read or write Yiddish, the older ones had all attended Soviet Yiddish schools. But since the last of these were closed down in 1939 and the purge of Soviet Yiddish culture was completed by 1952, even the native Yiddish speakers had had little access to the mother tongue for almost half a century. I was astonished by how much they still remembered. I was heartsick at how much they had never learned.
To be sure, I had often read the Communist slogan, “national in form, cosmopolitan in content.” But what I had never fully understood was that under the guise of creating a proletarian Yiddish culture, the Jewish Communists had produced two generations of functional illiterates. They had produced someone who could still recite, in Yiddish, Newton’s law of universal gravitation, but who had never read of God’s covenant with Abraham. How diabolically clever it had been to introduce a new spelling system as well, one that rendered all the Hebraisms in Yiddish phonetically and abolished the “superfluous” letters: the vet, the het, the sin, and the taf. As a result, Soviet Jews cannot decipher the simplest non-Soviet text. They cannot even recognize Sholem Aleichem’s name in its standard (Hebraic) spelling. After two weeks of constant drilling, Fiszman and I had barely brought our students’ fear of Hebraisms under control. And even so, once they made out the words there was no guarantee they understood them.
It was painful to watch the older students—whose life for socialism lay behind them and whose life for Judaism would hardly be lived—as they discovered that they had been duped. It was so late in the game to savor the writings of the “bourgeois reactionaries,” all mention of whom had been expunged: to hear, for the first time, about the poet-playwright-ethnographer S. Ansky, who fled the Bolsheviks in 1918; to read, for the first time, the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, blacklisted by American Jewish Communists as early as 1926; to sing, for the first time, the ballads of Itsik Manger, written only a few hundred kilometers away, in Poland. So too were they belatedly exposed to the ghetto poems of Abraham Sutzkever that told of a life-and-death struggle they knew nothing about.
Who had compiled the blacklist? It is easy to blame the faceless shock troups of the Yevsektsia, the Jewish section of the Communist party. It is harder to face the truth, as Esther Rosenthal-Schneiderman recently did in an extraordinary jeremiad for Soviet Yiddish culture: it was the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia itself that was guilty of the crime. With breathtaking candor, she included herself as one of the willing accomplices.
To wean the Jewish masses away from the Zionist vision of the future, the Communists offered them Birobidzhan. (I missed a half-hour television special on this “Jewish Autonomous Region” in eastern Siberia allocated under Stalin in 1928. “A couple of goyim speaking bad Yiddish” is how one of my students described it.) To counter the thirst of ordinary Jews for metaphysics, for God, the Communists gave them historical determinism. Instead of Moses they got Stalin.
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Of course, other modern Jewish movements also renounced God and His Torah. Where else but on a kibbutz would Jews serve a visitor ham with so much visible pride? But even the old-time members of left-wing kibbutzim studied the Hebrew Bible, observed the “historical” and “agricultural” Jewish holidays, and settled a Jewish land. Moreover, the chief rabbi of pre-state Palestine sanctified their marriages ex-post-facto so that their children would not be certifiably illegitimate. Here in the Soviet Union, by contrast, one could neither live as a Jew nor die as one. My young male friends would not stand next to me in the urinal for fear I would see that they were not (yet) circumcised. In class, when we talked about the folk beliefs surrounding death, Elena the seventy-year-old atheist proclaimed that she would gladly forfeit resurrection in the Land of Israel in order to be cremated in Kiev instead. “I don’t want to lie among them.”
Robbed of their historical memory, their prayers silenced, and cut off for so long from other Jews, my students did not even know how to mourn. On Sunday, January 7, we organized an outing to the newly erected memorial at Babi Yar, where more than 30,000 Jews were machine-gunned by the Nazis on a single day in 1941, and where many thousands more were later dumped into a mass grave. For reasons I will never understand, our hosts brought along a professional tour guide as well. This man, a Jew, lectured us for twenty minutes in the freezing cold on the great achievements of the Red Army, and although his voice cracked when he came to the slaughter of the Jews, in his carefully rehearsed speech they were not permitted to be murdered alone. We had to be told about the Soviet sports team that was killed here, and about the sailors, lest chauvinism, God forbid, take root in our hearts. Finally, unable to take it anymore, we pushed our way to the memorial. One of the three plaques is in Yiddish, imperfectly executed, and is dedicated, like the other two, to the “over 100,000 citizens of Kiev” who were slaughtered here. For these “citizens”—the majority of whom were Jews—I chanted the memorial prayer El Male Rachamim and Peysakh Fiszman led us, phrase by phrase, through the mourners’ Kaddish. Then we sang the Partisans’ Hymn, learned in class only the day before.
That evening I attended the opening of the Israeli video library under the auspices of the Hebrew teachers’ group, called Lavie. I was among the first to arrive at this hard-to-locate apartment in a bedroom suburb of Kiev. On the television screen the Israeli rock star Shlomo Artzi was performing in front of 1,500 screaming fans and, for the first time since my arrival, I burst out crying. The discrepancy between the morning, when we had been robbed even of our dead, and the evening, when the renewal of Jewish life was so palpably real, was more than I could bear.
The room was decorated with posters of Jerusalem and of the fruits of Israel, and texts of the various blessings to be made after eating. The fruits were especially appealing, given the chronic shortages in the Ukraine, still identified in my Fodor’s Guide as the “breadbasket of the USSR.” All in all, eighteen young people arrived for the opening, and while fourteen of them were busy watching a dramatization of the Entebbe raid, I sat with the remainder in the adjoining kitchen, giving a Hebrew dictation. For these were the newest crop of Hebrew teachers in Kiev and most of them had only begun studying the language a few months ago.
Sandwiched between the video screening and the spelling lesson was a meeting with Igor Kuperberg, representing the powers that be. Kuperberg brought news that the Ministry of Education was willing to take over the administration of the extension courses in Hebrew. Six hundred Kievites had already signed up for elementary Hebrew and many more were waiting on the sidelines. (Last year at this time it was impossible to get into an English class. Now these courses were being left high and dry.) The Ministry was offering a one-year contract, but Shaul Kotlarsky, the brilliant and charismatic leader of Lavie, cut short the discussion to ask: “Who in this room knows for certain that he will still be here a year from now?” Not a single person raised his hand.
So all this activity, it seemed, was but a temporary stopgap, a way of establishing a Jewish national presence before taking leave of Russia forever. And it made no difference whether one was studying Hebrew or Yiddish. At a Friday night gathering that Fiszman and I organized for our students, someone turned to me and said: “Do you see these people? Not one of them will still be here ten years from now.” Indeed, the conundrum “To Go or Not to Go” had now been replaced by “Whether to Leave Sooner or Later” and “Whether to Pay Through the Nose Via Moscow or Take the Train to Budapest and Let the Jewish Agency Foot the Bill.” The porters at Moscow International Airport had already gone on strike: they were sick of carrying baggage for the Zhids, though they would agree to do it for 100 rubles instead of the usual four. Even the Russian Karaites, for centuries set apart from the main body of the Jewish community by their rejection of the rabbinic Oral Law, were leaving en masse.
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The knowledge of foresight added a dimension of unreality, if not of outright self-deception, to all our meetings with Ukrainians. As anxious as our hosts were to show us off to local officials, the latter were eager to make contact with us as Americans and as Jews. Our first meeting was with the director of Pedagogical Institute No. 1 on Borovskovo Street. On her table she had chocolates (a rare treat), and she was disappointed that we would not share a glass of champagne. To our suggestions for introducing a Yiddish- and Hebrew-language component into the school’s curriculum she replied, “Today, everything is possible.” After all, she told us, there were plans afoot to allow all the languages of the Ukraine’s multiethnic population to be taught as well. Perhaps, she suggested half-earnestly, we could find an American sugar daddy willing to upgrade the school’s pitiful computer room. Meanwhile, it was she who showered us with gifts—lavish art books from her private library for both Fiszman and myself.
The second meeting, with university English teachers, was more spontaneous. One of them nabbed me in the corridor of the Institute where our seminar met daily and asked whether I would address his colleagues on problems of higher education in the United States—for despite their subject, they had had little direct contact with Americans. So I threw together a one-hour talk on (1) the ills brought about by affirmative action; (2) the campaign for cultural literacy following the collapse of the core curriculum; and (3) the birth of Jewish Studies on campus (a bit of special pleading, I admit). Having themselves been raised on blatant discrimination for now-discredited ends, they readily agreed with me about affirmative action. But when I described the phenomenal rise of women’s studies, following the earlier growth of Afro-American studies, they were incredulous. That conferences of the Modern Language Association could be staging grounds for militant interest groups was simply beyond their imagination. Finally, we got to the matter of the Jews. One teacher wanted to know if I ever had to hide my Jewish identity. Another asked about higher education in Israel (she turned out to be a Jew from Vilna, clearly contemplating aliyah). Later I learned that only recently had Jewish teachers come out of the closet; two of their number had already emigrated.
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This candid and open-ended exchange left us all wishing for more, in contrast to my meeting the next day at the Ukrainian Writers Union. It is no small irony that the Union is housed in the former mansion of Lev Brodsky, the great Jewish sugar magnate of pre-revolutionary times, with its magnificent inlaid woods, huge ceramic stoves, and ceilings thirty feet high. In the room where his private synagogue ‘was situated, the ceiling is removable, presumably to allow for a sukkah. All this our hosts—three Ukrainian writers and a professor from Kiev University—were eager to point out. Seated opposite us, they waxed eloquent over the past, and over the wonderful depictions of Jewish life in the works of famous Ukrainian authors. “If only there were young Yiddish writers here in the Ukraine,” said Yuri Serdyuk, general secretary of the Union, wistfully. “We would gladly accept them into the Union and help them publish their work.” Anti- Semitism in the Ukraine, he assured us, was dead; it survived only among the barbaric Russians to the north. On my side of the table sat Levitas and Kuperberg, each one there to foster the illusion of Jewish cultural achievements present and future.
After two weeks of endless talk, with one more day to my visit and nothing to lose, I interrupted the grandstanding. Jews and Ukrainians, I reminded our hosts, were not equal partners. Jewish culture, as I had come to see, was doubly crippled. Whatever had been achieved in the 20’s and 30’s was utterly destroyed by Stalin. But that culture too had been sick beyond recall. There simply was nothing left to resurrect. The greatest achievement of Ukrainian Jews—Hasidism—was no more than a rebbe’s tombstone visited by the faithful from abroad. It was bad enough that in the Ukrainian production I attended, Tevye blessed the Sabbath wine wearing a prayershawl. Worse was that not a single person in the predominantly Jewish audience could recognize the blatant error.
They did not hear me, these men of letters. They were too intent on planning the brave new world of a sovereign Ukraine in which the Jews would be the first among national minorities. They could not acknowledge that their putative Jewish allies feared that very independence and, because they feared it as much as they feared Gorbachev’s demise, were leaving. I had come to Kiev with a letter of introduction to Volodymyr Yavorivsky, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet and a noted writer. “He’s a friend of the Jews,” I was told on arrival. “He’ll tip us off two days before the pogrom.”
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Our actual leavetaking was fraught with emotion. Our students had written poems, presented us with certificates, and spent a lot of money on gifts and refreshments. They took down our addresses as if they were some magic charm. Meanwhile, Levitas announced a follow-up seminar from mid-June to mid-July and Kuperberg spoke about a Jewish elementary school opening up in Kiev in the fall of 1991. My friend Boruch Kimelfeld was drawing up plans for a new alphabet chart with all 22 letters of the alphabet and new graded readers with real Jewish content. Before leaving for Israel, where his goal was to teach Yiddish in a high school, he hoped to revive Jewish culture on Ukrainian soil.
As Kimelfeld and I left the Institute for the last time, the Ukrainian peasant woman who watched the door turned to her companion and said: “There go our little Jews.” She said it with real affection and Boruch burst out laughing.
