Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  First there was the terrain: mountains that were, while not especially tall, prohibitively steep and plagued with rock formations that met at such sharp angles that they could not be traversed even on horseback. The valley was largely swampland.

  Then there was the weather. Winters, which began in October and lasted through April, were harsh; summers brought torrential downpours interspersed with days of scorching hot weather.

  And then there was the evil that warranted the report’s most eloquent paragraph:

  We should especially like to underscore the significance of the bloodsucking insects—the exceeding quantities of gadflies, mosquitoes, and midges, which, over the course of the two summer months, cause extreme suffering to cattle and man. The bloodsucking insects affect farming by lowering the animals’ productivity over the summer and by creating insurmountable obstacles to conducting work involving horses in the light of day. To fight the bloodsucking insects, the locals use smoke and strong-smelling ointments applied to cattle. People wear netting and head gear but, generally speaking, grow accustomed to the evil that are the insects.

  And, finally, there were the locals. Most of them were Cossacks sent there by a decree of the czar in the 1860s to help fortify the border. They arrived decades before the railroad stretched this far, and they endured unspeakable hardships before they managed to tame the land enough to live on it. The area was also home to a small population of Korean-Russians, clear second-class citizens compared to the Cossacks (among other things, czarist decrees granted the Korean families only half as much land as the Cossack ones). To complicate things further, marauding gangs of ethnic Chinese known as the honghutzu—literally, the red-bearded ones—terrorized the locals, especially the Koreans, who cultivated opium poppies, the local currency of choice.

  The report closed with five pages of conclusions, mostly warnings that the Jewish settlement project would be forbiddingly difficult. Getting people there would be hard: there was the railroad, but the supporting infrastructure was in disrepair. Getting cattle to the people would be harder still—and more expensive. Housing construction would have to happen fast—the weather afforded no more than a couple of months’ opening, provided the settlers arrived in June—but building would be difficult, since much of the region had already been deforested by man and fire. This was also one of the reasons the local Cossacks tended toward a nomadic lifestyle: firewood was scarce. The agricultural project, in other words, looked unrealistic, and the experts, agronomists all, made the polite suggestion that the settlers consider going the industrial route. A full year of intense preparations, including the construction of roads, residential buildings, and melioration systems, was necessary before any settlers could arrive. No settlers should plan on coming before 1929—and no more than a thousand families in the first year and a couple thousand families each year after that.

  The report also mentioned that the local population felt anxious about the planned Jewish invasion.

  The Soviet government ignored virtually all of the committee’s recommendations and decided to settle the region immediately, aiming to move a million people to the area within ten years.

  The name Birobidzhan, after the rivers Bira and Bidzhan, would come later. For now, there was a dilapidated train station called Tikhonkaya, “Little Quiet One,” which was someone’s polite way of saying “godforsaken.” The first trainload of settlers arrived in April 1928; within a few weeks, 504 families and 150 individual settlers had arrived, roughly doubling the population of Tikhonkaya, which at that point boasted 237 houses, a single elementary school, and one shop. There was nothing else: no post office, no telephone service, no paved roads, and no sidewalks but for some wooden planks floating in the mud.

  Two strains of settlers arrived. On one side, there was a steady trickle of Jews relocating from abroad, mostly Yiddish speakers who had fled the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century and were now returning from Argentina, the United States, and even Palestine. These people were no strangers to hardship, but they had generally lived in places with existing infrastructure: running water, electricity, schools. The stream coming from the other side were the poor and desperate from the decimated shtetlach of Ukraine and western Belarus. They had known misfortune and danger, including pogroms that had run as long as most of them could remember, but faced with the prospect of living in tents indefinitely, most of them—roughly two-thirds—turned back. It snowed that May. It is safe to assume that most of those who stayed either had no home at all to go back to or no way of scraping together the cash for a return ticket (90 percent of the cost of inbound tickets for those coming from the Soviet Union had been covered by the settlement program).5,6

  A number of those who stayed were directed to eight plots of land about thirty miles southwest of Tikhonkaya, where in the summer of 1928 they founded Birofeld, the first Jewish collective farm in the Far East. The farm subsumed a tiny Cossack village called Alexandrovka, marking probably the first instance in history when a Jewish name supplanted a Russian one. Over the following year and a half, three more collective farms appeared: Amurzet (so named for the river Amur and OZET, the Jewish land-resettlement body); Valdheym (“Forest Home” in Yiddish); and IKOR, named for the U.S.-based organization that was the chief sponsor of both the farm and its inhabitants—the settlers who had arrived from abroad. IKOR was to be a collection of communes jointly administered by Soviet and American Jewish authorities, in accordance with a utopian plan tolerated by the Soviet authorities because it drew U.S. backing. In 1929, an IKOR delegation visited the commune and gave its seal of approval to immigration to Birobidzhan from outside the Soviet Union.7

  In the summer of 1928 there were torrential rains, causing flooding that washed out what little the new settlers had managed to plant, stymied by the late arrival of seeds. Their cattle arrived late, too, and were felled by an anthrax epidemic that raged that first year. The settlers at Birofeld, though they managed to put up eighteen houses over the summer, faced a cold winter of relentless hunger, surrounded by their ruined fields and foreboding woods, where tigers and bears roamed. Most of these collective-farm pioneers from the shtetlach were men who had traveled ahead of their wives, planning to send for them once they were settled; now they wintered in isolation, the nearest people dozens of miles away, unreachable in the absence of cars or even horses that would be strong enough to make the journey. Jews who had not been assigned land immediately upon arrival actually fared better: local Cossack families took some of them in, keeping them warm and fed through the long winter—and teaching them to fish, among other things.8

  Out of hundreds of settlers, only a handful had ever worked on a farm—and that had been in the agricultural south of the Russian Empire, where the climate was kind and the land was accommodating. Few of the new arrivals knew how to clear a field, how to choose horses or cows, or how to care for them. They set about building clay-walled huts—traditional Ukrainian dwellings that could not keep out the extreme cold or stand up to the local rains. Many of the settlers—the furriers, the cobblers, the tailors—had brought the tools of their old trades with them and wanted nothing more than to start skinning, cobbling, and sewing again. After the first miserable winter on the collective farms, they fled—some back to Ukraine, some only as far away as Tikhonkaya, which they now viewed as a city, and where they hoped they might be able to work again.

  Inexperienced new settlers immediately materialized to take the place of those who had escaped. “Often it would happen in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, that a new crop of settlers would suddenly appear in Valdheym,” recalled Leyba Shkolnik, one of the founders of that collective farm, in an interview recorded in 1935. “And they never asked whether Valdheym needed new settlers and what kinds of jobs they could be used for. They just sent them in, with their wives and children, and they all needed to be fed. And this was still at a time when there was no [workable] land in Valdheym, when we were still just clearing it. The authorities wh
o assigned new arrivals to their place of settlement were not good to the people. The usual thing to do would be to bring them in during a heavy rain. They would drive them in, drop them off in the middle of the night in the rain, and leave.”9

  Four years after the first settlers arrived, in the summer of 1932, the area was again hit by uncommonly heavy rains that led to flooding, destroying all of the settlers’ accomplishments. “Almost all of our crops were under water,” recalled Shkolnik. “Even in the few greenhouses that were not flooded, everything we had been growing was killed….And then things got worse. We had no straw. Cows started dying off. What grass we had managed to salvage wasn’t enough to feed even two hundred cows. It got worse than it had ever been. People started running. They ran during the day and they ran at night. The ones who had saved a little something over the years ran under the cover of night so they would not have to share what they had with the collective farm. Before winter came, almost half the people had abandoned Valdheym.”10

  7

  * * *

  In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution—an unprecedented role for a foreign national.

  The price had been named. In exchange for a dignified return to Soviet Russia, Bergelson would sing the praises of Birobidzhan. He got to work at once.

  All around chains of mountains rose up, high and rounded, their summits mantled in peaceful blue clouds, as though this was the way it had always been, for thousands of years. All three distant horizons were filled with these mountains. Their dawn was a crystal of pure light, shimmering in every hue. The sun offered powerful heat and an expansive glow. In the blue, marvelously lofty skies there was no trace of a cloud. Oceans of light caught at the pale blue smoke on the distant horizon and scattered it. Peeking out through the diffusing pale blue smoke were the blue summits of the mountains, myriad rivers gleaming in the sun, valleys narrow and wide, expanses of taiga and mixed fields, and all of this taken together was the land that the authorities had allocated for the working Jews, all of this together bore the name:—Birobidzhan.

  He returned to Berlin in mid-December 1932. He postponed all meetings and assignments to get on with the Birobidzhan book.1 The urgency could not be underestimated. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany.

  Bergelson’s biographers note that fifteen-year-old Lev was harassed in the street.2 But this was certainly not what distinguished Bergelson from the hundreds of thousands of Jews who remained in Germany after January 1933. What made him different was his instinct for survival and action. He sent his wife and son to Copenhagen, because he could. He wrapped up in Berlin and joined his family in Denmark briefly. In Copenhagen in March, he wrote a letter to a friend, detailing his desire to press on with a book on Birobidzhan, at the expense of his fiction writing: “This socialist construction, which is part of the general socialist construction in the Soviet Union and therefore has the same great scale and great future, the completely new and extremely interesting human material, with these people’s enthusiastic and heroic way of overcoming difficulties, the rapid development of a new multifaceted life on a multifaceted basis—everything was so unexpected and overwhelming for me that, as happens when one is destined to witness an event of great importance, I was simply unable immediately to start portraying the grandeur of what I could see all around me.”3 He took another quick trip to Paris, where so many of the former-Russian, formerly of Berlin Jews were now hoping for the best; then he returned to Copenhagen, collected his family, and moved to Moscow.

  Family lore has it that when Tsipe took a look around the vast, empty Moscow train station, she exclaimed, “We have perished.”4 This may, of course, be true, as even family lore sometimes is, but given Bergelson’s options and his history, what choice was there? Berlin, with its streets patrolled by Hitler-Jugend? Palestine, where a hundred and fifty thousand madmen insisted on living atop a volcano (and where the British had instituted visa quotas following unrest)? New York, with is vapid Jewish culture and its utter lack of job prospects, where Bergelson would have every chance of joining the ranks of paupers? Soviet Russia had two million Jews, many of whom could read Bergelson’s books, being readied for reissue by Soviet publishing houses, or see his plays, which had been staged by the state Jewish theater—and this, in turn, made Bergelson unexpectedly flush. Royalties, paid in inconvertible rubles, had been accumulating in Moscow for years.5 The rumormongers may have been right, after all, about the lure of wealth that had called Bergelson to Moscow. Perhaps it was a win-win proposition: Bergelson would get to make a living as a writer while aiding Moscow’s plan for solving the Jewish question—and if the question had to be posed, then the solution proposed by Moscow seemed preferable to all the others.

  8

  * * *

  What did he really see in Birobidzhan when he first visited? The cold would already have set in; the mud with which the wooden sidewalks did a losing battle in the warmer months would have been frozen. A family legend had Bergelson walking the muddy streets all night, returning to the hotel in the morning “ashen-faced and covered in mud,” so shocked and dismayed was he at what he had seen.1 Like so many family legends, this one probably expresses the needs and knowledge of others. There would have been no mud. The days would have been short, light, and crisp. The sky would have been wide and the sun stubborn, making for prolonged periods of dusk, which Bergelson, a child of the relative south, might never have experienced before. His description of Birobidzhan—its “three distant horizons,” its “pure” and “shimmering” light, the powerful sun, “marvelously lofty skies,” “myriad rivers gleaming in the sun,” two variations on the word expanse and five uses of blue in a single paragraph—show that he was genuinely awed, after a decade and a half spent running from one crowded city to another in an overstuffed train car, or as a third-class ship passenger, to be offered something so plainly huge: “and all of this taken together was the land that the authorities had allocated for the working Jews, all of this together bore the name: Birobidzhan.”

  Tikhonkaya had been so renamed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party just a year earlier; what had been a village was now termed an “urban workers’ settlement.”2 Twelve long two-story barracks-type buildings had been constructed, more or less doubling the amount of residential space in the city. The barracks had no running water; each family was allotted a single room along a long corridor, which was crowded with belongings that did not fit in the rooms, where every square inch did double and triple duty. The publisher of the weekly American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, David Brown, visited Birobidzhan at the same time as Bergelson and reported, “I have learned that the impossible is possible. I saw barracks that housed several families at the same time. Some of them had no windows but had no lack of ventilation: the wood for their construction had not been properly dried out and as it settled now, cracks formed, freely letting in the cold October air.”3 These living conditions, though, would for several more decades remain fairly typical for all Soviet cities, overcrowded now as a result of massive rural flight. All over the country, people were running from their villages as the Soviet regime requisitioned private property, imposing collective farming and, more often than not, policies that led to hunger, sometimes policies that produced mass famine. Here in Birobidzhan, the reasons for abandoning collective farms were the same as anywhere else in the country: the overwhelming fear of a long cold and hungry winter.

  The year Bergelson came to visit, the year of
the second great flood, about 40 percent of the new settlers had turned back—the highest proportion in three years. Altogether, between nine and ten thousand of the Jews who had arrived starting in 1928 remained in Birobidzhan.4 Most of them seemed to believe that the agricultural experiment had failed. A new industrial plan was taking shape. An IKOR delegation that visited the region in 1929 had recommended that Birobidzhan settlers focus on building factories large and small, and it had promised to help. Various industrial equipment had been arriving in regular shipments from America, and now, following the flood of 1932, the local party authorities had finally drafted a five-year plan that projected that nearly three-quarters of the population would be working in industry. Or so they told David Brown, who was a former banker and one of the leading American fund-raisers for Birobidzhan.

  “They tried to impress me by demonstrating the factories that are already functioning in Birobidzhan,” reported Brown.

  The friendly thing to do might be to leave them without comment….The factories manufacture, as they like to say here, twenty-seven kinds of products: bricks, limestone, carts, cart parts, soap, shoe cream, turpentine, firewood, baskets, rattan furniture, chairs, desks, wardrobes, suitcases, shoes, clothes, etc….The factories are cooperative ventures, initial funding for which was provided by the government, while most of the equipment was provided by IKOR, the American organization….The factories are located either in old buildings or in poorly constructed new ones. In most cases, these buildings also serve as the residences for the workers, a regrettable situation as each family has use of only a single barracks-style room with no running water or other conveniences….The quality of the workmanship here is poor, primitive for lack of proper equipment and high-quality raw materials as well as insufficient worker expertise and a poor organization of labor. There are other reasons, too: poor oversight, lack of discipline, a lack of desire to excel, since everything will be bought anyway—not a single product has been returned to date. Additionally, the working conditions are poor to say the least, and have a negative impact on these people’s health. After visiting several factories, I came to the conclusion that this kind of industrial production is a result of poor planning: it was begun solely to create work for settlers who had despaired of working in agriculture in Birobidzhan. If I said that they shouldn’t have started production at all, I would be going too far, but continuing production on such a weak foundation would yield regrettable results. It is a matter of time—a short time, I believe—before Russians start demanding quality goods and the factories of Birobidzhan, such as is their condition now, will be unable to compete.5