To the Editor:

Although I have already written one letter concerning David G. Roskies’s article, “ ‘There Go Our Little Jews’ ” [April 1990], I feel it necessary to make some further remarks on the sinister exchange of attacks between Mr. Roskies and Bernard Choseed in your November 1990 issue [Letters from Readers]. As one who is deeply involved in several activities dealing with the problem of the survival of Yiddish in the Soviet Union (I am an editor of Yungvald magazine, a student of Shimon Sander, the author of Yiddish Self-Taught, and am also active in a joint Soviet-American educational and archival project), I see the problem being discussed in a different light. Unfortunately, both Mr. Choseed and Mr. Roskies are wrong in their treatment—the one fervently defending, the other fervently accusing—of the Communist Yiddish cultural model in the Soviet Union, simply because that model has already ceased to exist. Mr. Choseed’s advocacy of Birobidzhan cannot help to restore even that level of Jewish culture which existed there until 1948, and in any case it is clear now that Birobidzhan as a Jewish Autonomous Region is doomed due to the present wave of emigration. Nor is Mr. Roskies right in his completely derogatory evaluation of Birobidzhan as a Potemkin village. Such a judgment is incorrect in light of the culture that did exist there until it was cruelly exterminated by Stalin in 1948 (almost all Jewish activists were imprisoned, books were burned, schools closed down, etc.).

I was really troubled by this harsh polemic, the more so insofar as both writers could be of practical help in attempts to keep what remains of Yiddish culture in the USSR alive. I think few languages have suffered as much as Yiddish has in our century from the destructive power of ideologies: Fascism denied Yiddish speakers the right to live, Communism first deprived Yiddish of Jewish content and then condemned it to death. And even Zionism (not to compare it to the other two) was not too favorable to Yiddish. I cannot understand why we need to continue this old struggle now, a struggle which could be fatal for Yiddish. I think that only the de-ideologization of Yiddish and tolerant cooperation on the part of all its adherents (not least among them Mr. Choseed and Mr. Roskies) can prolong its life and help it to die with dignity when the time comes. . . .

Michael Krutikov
Moscow, USSR

_____________

David G. Roskies writes:

Soviet-Yiddish orthography was designed to cut Soviet Jews off from their religious heritage and from anything published in Yiddish west of the Soviet border. Birobidzhan was designed to derail and subvert all Jewish national aspirations. The postwar Soviet press, publishing industry, and academic establishment did everything they could to erase all memory of the Holocaust and thus rob the Jews even of the right to mourn. Soviet Jews who wish to begin again are faced with a legacy of moral abomination. Should they lay ideology aside and let bygones be bygones in order to give their language a proper burial, they would be the only oppressed nationality in the USSR to do so.