Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  On February 5, 1926, Bergelson submitted to Forverts a story called “An Unusual Ending,”28 the tale of a young writer struggling and failing to portray a revolution that draws him in but evades understanding. The tone of the story left the reader wondering whether it was the protagonist, the author, or the reader being mocked.

  Less than a month later, the Moscow Yiddish-language daily Der emes (The truth), the official paper of the Yevsektsia, now edited by Litvakov, printed Bergelson’s letter of repentance. “I confess,” he wrote, “to having erred in 1923 by openly coming out in print against the Yevsektsia….I think the question of my returning to Soviet Russia is inopportune under present circumstances [because of hostility engendered by my attacks]….I find that the exile that I suffer here is a deserved punishment for my earlier failure to understand the difficult position of the Yevsektsia.”29 Bergelson was hedging his bets, positioning himself as one doing penance in exile, one who might someday ask to be taken back—if one were desperate enough. His flight instinct was still in good working order.

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  Rumors flew. Yiddish speakers in Berlin whispered that Bergelson was plotting a return to Moscow, where he might try to become a timber merchant, like his father, or conjure up some other sort of lucrative enterprise.1 It was hard to tell which was more absurd: the idea of the writer becoming an entrepreneur or the idea of anyone doing so in Soviet Russia. In fact, Dubnow was arguing that the end of private enterprise spelled the end of the autonomists’ hopes for Russia. Speaking at a major Jewish political congress in Zurich in August 1927, Dubnow laid out his vision of the battle for Jewish rights. Revolutions often presented opportunities for the Jews, he said. The French Revolution had granted the Jews civil rights while robbing them of their cultural rights. The Russian revolutionary period of 1905 through 1917 had prompted the Jews to formulate the agenda of full citizenship that would include cultural autonomy. The Bolshevik revolution, however, had ended constructive work for cultural autonomy in Russia, said Dubnow, and now he saw hope only in the Jewish communities in Poland, the Baltic states, and the Balkan ones—for Jewish activists in those countries had recourse to the League of Nations, which could act as guarantor of the Jews’ rights within their states.

  The Soviet Union took umbrage at Dubnow’s assessment of Jews’ rights in the Bolshevik state. A highly placed party bureaucrat gave a talk a few months later, a rebuke to Dubnow; he pointed out that Jews in Soviet Russia had more rights than anywhere else and, unlike Jews in Poland and Lithuania, were not confronted with anti-Semitism. Both claims were highly contestable, but in his response, written in April 1928, Dubnow chose to focus on a deeper issue. Granting full civil rights to the Jews, he wrote, would not compensate them for the losses they had suffered from losing the right to be traders and merchants after the Bolsheviks eliminated all private enterprise. If most Jews living in the Russian Empire had been poor, now they were destitute. Physical poverty devalued any rights they had on paper.

  Was Bergelson, who was well off by Berlin standards, really considering plunging into the economic disaster zone that was Russia? The absurdity of the proposition was surely behind the rumors that he stood to make a fortune in timber. Cahan, the Forverts publisher, was among those who struggled to make sense of Bergelson’s Der emes article. As soon as he saw the story, in March 1926, he telegraphed his Berlin bureau chief: “What are the real facts about B and his letter for Soviet Russia—please write at once.”2 Whatever response he received, Cahan in short order formed his own theory explaining his writer’s behavior.

  “I got to know Bergelson fairly well in Berlin,” he wrote to his bureau chief. “I felt that he was making plans to return to Russia….I also noticed that certain stories of his were heading in the same direction—laying a foundation for ‘subjugation’ to the Bolsheviks. I brought this to his attention and explained that we couldn’t print such stories. Even a few of the stories that we were able to print were of the same sort. After his letter appeared in Emes, I received letters from several comrades in Europe, who expressed the opinion that after writing such a letter, he should no longer have a position at Forverts. I responded that I preferred to take a philosophical attitude toward the situation, and that if he were to write things that we could print, we would do so….But many of his stories and other pieces in our possession remained unpublished, all for the same reason: they are not literature, but propaganda.”3

  For Bergelson’s part, he staged his break with his publisher the way one of his female characters might take her leave from a lover: with sudden and calculated cruelty. On May 1—International Workers’ Day—he resigned from his position at Forverts with a cool letter to Cahan, citing delays in the publication of his pieces and asking for any unpublished manuscripts to be returned.4 In fact, he had already taken up with other publications. He had spent months trying to recruit Yiddish-language writers to his newest periodical venture, In shpan (In Harness), a literary journal of pro-Communist writing. In the inaugural issue, published in early 1926, he had written that Warsaw and New York no longer promised a future for Yiddish writers. He dismissed New York Jews as willing to relinquish their Jewishness in order to blend in with Americans, and Jewish life in Warsaw, he wrote, had been seized by the Orthodox and the Zionists.5

  While Dubnow gradually mellowed toward the Zionists, Bergelson grew increasingly intolerant of them. The way the Zionists handled the ideas of home and language fed Bergelson’s resentment. He missed his home, and he had little patience for people who fantasized a home they had never seen. But it was their cavalier attitude toward language that pained him the most: the Zionists had no use for Yiddish, the language of Bergelson’s stories and arguments. It was early—one might say premature—to perceive in 1926 that Yiddish could become an endangered language. But even though New York City had five Yiddish-language daily newspapers, Bergelson, who had never been there, saw New York Jews switching to English. In Eastern Europe, the Zionists’ Hebrew-literacy campaigns were rapidly displacing Yiddish-language education. That left Soviet Russia, where there were no Zionists—legally, at least—and no Americans.

  At the end of May 1926, Bergelson published his first story in Freiheit, the youngest of New York’s Yiddish dailies and the only one that unequivocally supported the Soviets. In a note appended to the story, he informed the readers (and perhaps Cahan and most certainly whoever was monitoring the Yiddish media from Moscow), “I find it necessary [to state] that I have severed my ties with the American newspaper Forverts and no longer publish my work there.”6 This first story painted a heroic and optimistic picture of “Jewish life in Russia in a few years,” under the watchful guidance of the Yevsektsia and the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia. Der emes in Moscow printed this piece simultaneously with Freiheit.

  In August, Cahan published a retort to Bergelson’s In shpan piece. “I know that he doesn’t believe one word of his article,” he asserted.7 He may have been right, but when the article came out, Bergelson was in the Soviet Union, for the first time in five years, partaking in a bizarre ritual designed to prove his commitment to the Bolshevik cause.

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  Bergelson had gone on assignment for Freiheit. He spent a week in Moscow, filing lovely happy dispatches on life in the Soviet Union. He then traveled to the Crimea, where he reported on Jewish territorial settlements, set up by the Soviets and funded by American Jewish communities. The stories were long on red banners and grand pronouncements and short on the detail that had once marked Bergelson as a great writer. Nothing in the pieces communicated the sense, smell, or sound of a real place—it was as though Bergelson had been writing with his eyes and ears shut. But this was how propaganda pieces were done. The author reserved his passion for ideological traitors—the Zionists who were using the Crimea as a way station to Palestine, the shtetlach refugees who hoped to re-create a middle-class life on a collective farm. Bergelson, who would return to his charming garden house in Berlin and
his marble table at the Romanisches Café, had no mercy for these pettily bourgeois Jews.1

  Before returning to Berlin in late September, he stopped in Moscow for what amounted to a public flogging, a ritual reserved for returning émigrés. A meeting was called, with Litvakov, his old friend and nemesis, presiding. Bergelson came wearing patent leather shoes—a shining mark of Western decadence—as though asking for the ridicule he immediately got. Litvakov reproached him for the “emptiness” of his earlier writing—this after Bergelson had just spent a month filing some of the emptiest prose produced in this emptiest of times. To thundering applause, he mounted the stage to acknowledge that, while he had been prepared for the criticism, it had exceeded his “worst expectations.” Then, playing his part in this sadomasochistic play, he read a story called “The Red Army Soldier.” The audience of writer-comrades took turns trashing the story. Then all those present professed satisfaction with the ritual. “All and all, I love this evening,” said Bergelson, addressing the people who had just spent hours humiliating him. “This evening, with its strictness, binds me to you even more tightly than before.”2

  Then he returned to Berlin, flummoxing the rumormongers. He was not rushing to go back to live in Russia. It was as though he knew it was inevitable. For now, all he observed in Berlin were storm clouds, ominous rather than dangerous, but he understood that they would not simply dissipate. Perhaps what made his new writing so terrible was that the requisite passion in it was manufactured out of a sense of hopelessness. Bergelson was like Mirl, the female protagonist of his best novel, When All Is Said and Done, who agrees to marry a man she does not love and awaits her wedding date in dull despair, finding relief only in the vain hope that the engagement can be called off (it will not be) or the marriage will not be consummated (it will be). After the wedding, she is by turns impassive and impulsive, looking for a love that will take her away from the prison of her marriage, finding many takers and no feeling in her heart for any of them.

  Like Mirl, Bergelson revisited those who had once jilted him. He traveled to New York, arriving as a third-class passenger on December 1, 1928, and was greeted on the shore by a group of Yiddish literati. He turned theatrically back toward the water, gestured to the Statue of Liberty, and exclaimed, “Your lie is displayed naked before the whole world.” Less than a decade earlier, Bergelson had been tired and poor and begging to be helped, and had been ignored. Now America was just as oblivious to the plight of European Jews, who sensed, with varying degrees of acuity, that they were in danger in Kovno and Warsaw, in Berlin and Paris. Russia might be demanding that Bergelson beg for forgiveness, but America had already shown itself to be as indifferent to begging as it was to all other things. A week after landing, Bergelson spoke at the Central Opera House to a crowd of thousands, some drawn by the scandal that had surrounded his departure from Forverts, some brought in by their habit of attending all Yiddish literary events, and some bussed in as part of a field trip for the association of natives of Okhrimovo, the shtetl where he was born.3 This American attention was mistimed and perhaps misplaced, for America—and its community of Jewish writers in particular—was the lover whose rejection had forced Bergelson into the arms of the husband who now humiliated him.

  Like Mirl, Bergelson made emotional, dangerous statements and seemed to have no recollection of them a day later. Or perhaps he was engaging in the cacophonous play of all propaganda, sending out as many messages as possible and listening carefully for any response to inform his further action. In an interview for Der tog, a Yiddish daily higher in tone and more moderate in politics than Forverts, he lashed out against Soviet anti-Semitism and had some choice words for the “déclassé Jews” of the Soviet Union. Then he granted a counterinterview to his own paper, Freiheit, in which he claimed that Der tog had misrepresented his views. Individual writers offered to help him make his home in New York. But there were no job offers or legal papers attached to these offers, and Bergelson bristled, said no, and went on at great length about his dislike for the Jewish community in America.4

  Occasionally, he tried to explain. The Jews in America, he said, thought Jewishness was religion with a bit of Zionism mixed in. But Jewishness was culture, and culture was language, and their five Yiddish dailies were not long for this world because the language was fading, dissolving into the great American abyss of false security. Bergelson could always sense when something was about to die. Just as he knew that he could never make the American Jews understand.

  On the way back to Berlin, Bergelson stopped off in Warsaw for two weeks. He had spent time in this city as a boy, and he had visited it again as a young writer, seeking the blessing of his elders. Here the smell of impending death was even stronger. He complained that the air in the city “stank.”5

  Weeks after Bergelson returned to Berlin, a wave of riots in Palestine left 133 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and the rest terrified. “A hundred and fifty thousand Jews living atop a volcano” became a catchphrase.6 The Yiddish press in America invoked the rhetoric of pogroms, and the American Jewish community mobilized to support a new defensive ethos among the Jews of Palestine. The Palestinian Communist Party joined in this mobilization but was quickly reprimanded by the Communist International, which sided with the Arab members of the party;7 with more than a hundred Arabs killed in the riots, the disturbances could hardly be compared with the pogroms in Russia or Ukraine, where armed gangs massacred a defenseless population. Freiheit was the only one of the Yiddish dailies to follow the Comintern line; this cost it a number of its readers, writers, and funders, but Bergelson remained, even if the paper now had trouble paying regularly as agreed.8 Ever since Bergelson had left his lucrative gig at Forverts, Tsipe had been working as a typist at the Soviet trade mission, supporting the family.9 Working at the Soviet trade mission was another common rite of passage among those who wanted to return to Russia.

  Bergelson had burned all his bridges, made the rounds of all his old suitors and told them off, and now he led a ghostly existence in Berlin, hoping perhaps that his engagement to Moscow would prove a long one. He still held court at the Romanisches Café, but so rarely that one of the regulars dubbed him its balmusef—the cantor who officiates at special services only.10 He took another trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, saw friends and former rivals who warned him that returning to Russia would be difficult—as if he did not know, as if he had a choice—and he came back to Berlin and publicly announced his intention to repatriate.11 This may have been an effort to keep himself convinced, and it was certainly a part of paying his dues: he had to continue earning the right of return. His trips were growing longer and more frequent, but still he kept Tsipe and Lev in the garden house in Berlin and one foot in the Romanisches Café.

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  Soon after coming to power, the Bolshevik government adopted a strategy of trying to harness nationalism to preserve the empire rather than pull it apart—by granting each self-identified ethnic group a form of autonomy, ranging from a national village soviet at the bottom to a national republic at the top. Between nationalization and some warped idea of justice, Jewish autonomy became bound to agriculture; the Jews, who had not been allowed to own land in czarist Russia, would now toil at collective farms. Aided financially by American Jewish communities, dozens of such settlements appeared in the Crimea and southern Ukraine in the first decade of Soviet rule, generating enormous resentment among besieged local peasants. A top Ukrainian party official warned the Politburo in a letter in 1926, “Innumerable attempts to create exceptionally favorable conditions for Jewish agricultural settlement, to the detriment of the interests of the broad mass of Soviet agriculturists, has called forth from the latter a sharply heightened anti-Jewish mood.”1 At the same time, as the Soviet regime eliminated private enterprise large and small, increasing numbers of Jews lost their livelihoods. A study conducted on the territory that used to be the Pale of Settlement confirmed that “the living conditions of the broad Jewish ma
sses have not only failed to improve but have, in certain ways, become worse.” Between 30 and 40 percent of Jews in Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia had no source of income.2

  The government continued to insist that the Jews must now live off the land. In 1926, Mikhail Kalinin, the titular head of the Soviet state, sounded an ominous note in his address to a conference of the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land (OZET):

  The Jewish population faces a major challenge—the preservation of its nationality. To accomplish this, a significant portion of the population has to be converted to a compactly settled agricultural population of at least several hundred thousand. Only if these conditions are met can the Jewish masses have any hope for the continued existence of their nation.3

  What he apparently had in mind was an underpopulated region on the border of contested Manchuria. The following year, a group of agronomists spent the summer in the region, defined by the rivers Bira and Bidzhan, studying the settlers’ prospects. They produced an eighty-page report that reads like a litany of the difficulties the Jewish settlers would face. In fact, it reads like a list of arguments against the very idea.4