To the Editor:
I read with interest your recent article, “‘There Go Our Little Jews’” by David G. Roskies [April]. . . . Both the American and the Russian Jewish communities know little about each other’s real lives. Only recently, with the increased openness in Soviet-American relations, has there been a certain amount of progress in this area. One indicator of such progress was the visit to Kiev this past January of the two American Jewish educators, David G. Roskies and Peysach Fiszman, which is so vividly described by Mr. Roskies in his article. I would like to look at that remarkable event from the perspective not of New York but of Moscow.
For the past twenty years the American view of the problems of Soviet Jews (a view which more or less corresponded to the real situation) has been rather one-dimensional: a small group of heroes fighting the Communist leviathan for the right to emigrate, since only through emigration could they maintain their Jewish identity; all Jews who remained in Russia were doomed, sooner or later, to disappear as a national group. There was no question what Jewish identity meant; it would manifest itself in one of the ways familiar to Western Jewry. Soviet Jewish activists therefore strove to adopt one of the Western models of such identity, either religious or secular. . . .
Be that as it may, we now face a situation different from the one of twenty, ten, five years ago. There are now new leaders and new activists in numerous Jewish cultural societies who come from a different background and have a different orientation in their Jewish activities. It is not the refusenik who is now the central figure in Soviet Jewry but the cultural activist. Though he may not be quite so attractive a figure as his predecessor was to Western eyes, nevertheless, he and his fellows have succeeded in achieving great progress over the last two years. It would have been impossible, for example, to organize the visit of the two teachers described by Mr. Roskies in his article without the efforts of these Kiev activists. On its own, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education would not have cared so much about training Yiddish teachers.
These new activists are not as grounded in and receptive to Western ideas and values—in both the general and the Jewish senses—as the former leaders were, but I daresay they represent a truer mirror of the views and values of the 1.5 million Jewish population in the Soviet Union than the previous small group of refuseniks did.
Their shortcomings are evident, but what about their virtues? As Mr. Roskies remarks, Kiev Jews remind him of the world of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. And indeed one of the most obvious features of Sholem Aleichem’s heroes was perhaps their creativity and ability to respond to a changing situation. (This creativity does not necessarily always achieve positive results, but that is another problem.) In my opinion this new generation of Soviet Jewish activists has more of that vivid Jewish creative spirit than did the former one, whose outlook was determined primarily by Western examples and standards. Today, Jews in the Soviet Union must be especially active and inventive because they face a serious challenge. Their future depends on their ability to find a right way now.
This does not mean, of course, that Soviet Jews have nothing to learn from their American cousins. On the contrary, we need to use every possible opportunity to acquire more knowledge about Judaism in all of its aspects, but we must keep in mind that nobody has an immediate recipe for solving our problems. I believe that the solution is to be found only by collaborating with the West, but not by copying Western models. In these endeavors we may not neglect any kind of Jewish experience—whether positive or negative. Perhaps American Jews are only now beginning to get acquainted with the true life and history of Russian Jewry. Mr. Roskies’s article is a first step in this direction.
Michael Krutikov
Moscow, USSR
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David G. Roskies writes:
I sympathize with Michael Krutikov’s distaste for a McDonald’s Judaism—mass-produced, prepackaged, and utterly foreign to the native palate. Yet what alternative is there when Jewish communal life has been destroyed in the Soviet Union, when Jewish creativity in Russian and Hebrew has been stifled for sixty years, and when God, the Torah, and all national aspirations have been expunged from Yiddish books, songs, and plays? One alternative is to translate into Russian the best of the East European Jewish cultural heritage, which is precisely what Mr. Krutikov and his friends have been doing since April 1989 in the journal VEK, published in Riga. But in the Ukraine, where an estimated half-a-million Jews still live, Ukrainian nationalists are eager to foster Jewish creativity in any language other than Russian. As the sovereignty movement gains ground throughout the USSR, a journal like VEK would then have to appear in about a dozen different “national” languages.
All things being equal (which of course they aren’t), such interethnic rivalries might advance the position of Yiddish as the unifying language of the Jews. I shall not repeat here how saddened my experience teaching Yiddish in Kiev left me on that score. Since Yiddish without Yiddishkayt is a doomed enterprise (even if its main exponents had not been murdered by Stalin), the massive reeducation of Soviet Jews in classical and modern Hebrew remains the only untried possibility. Were such a messianic project to be carried out, it would require thousands of trained teachers from the West and Israel, millions of imported texts and textbooks (how many Hebrew typesetters are currently employed in the Soviet publishing industry?). In short, all available resources would have to be imported.
Meanwhile, of course, large numbers of Soviet Jews will continue voting with their feet, in much the same way as did the Jews in Sholem Aleichem’s fiction before them. They are choosing their guaranteed freedoms in the brave new world over fighting for a cultural, political, and economic foothold in the old.
