by Masha Gessen
Inspired, the cultural and party elites of Birobidzhan got to work. The actors and the local authorities met to rename Kazakevich’s theater the Kaganovich State Jewish Theater. Bergelson and Liberberg set their mutual antipathies aside to organize the Yiddish conference, which would bring together language and culture scholars from all over the country to discuss issues of dialect, orthography, grammar, and newspaper and literary language. The conference was scheduled to begin on February 9, 1937, to mark the first anniversary of Kaganovich’s momentous visit.16
As usual, Bergelson was also engaged in the making of a Yiddish literary journal—this time, a party-funded quarterly called Forpost. Its editorial board included six other people, Moyshe Litvakov of the Yevsektsia among them. Fifteen hundred copies of the first issue came out in July 1936. Eighty-four pages long, it opened with Khavkin’s version of the Jewish Autonomous Region’s “first two years”—this much time had passed since its official status was granted—and continued with Bergelson’s fiction, poetry by Markish, Kazakevich, and others, and essays on the issues of Jewish statehood and the flora and fauna of Birobidzhan.17
In August 1936, Chairman Liberberg was suddenly summoned to Moscow.18 In November, the Kaganovich State Jewish Theater of Birobidzhan hosted a literary evening devoted to the publication of the second issue of Forpost. Bergelson attended, of course.19 The new issue contained works of fiction and poetry, one essay titled “Birobidzhan in Fiction” and another titled “Birobidzhan in Art,”20 and a notice informing readers that Joseph Liberberg had been “unmasked as untrustworthy, counterrevolutionary, and a bourgeois-nationalist.”21 The Great Terror was beginning, and its first wave of purges would profoundly affect Birobidzhan.
Yiddish-language activists began disappearing in Moscow first. Their organizations—including the daily paper Der emes—were being shut down. Bergelson’s instincts had once again proved infallible: having established a residence in Birobidzhan allowed him now to watch the purges from afar and act to try to protect himself. In January 1937, he sent a letter to Literaturnaya gazeta, the Russian-language Moscow writers’ paper, denouncing the Yiddish-language writers who had been arrested22—including his former rival and quasi-friend Moyshe Litvakov, who had presided over the public flogging that had been Bergelson’s repatriation ritual. Now Litvakov, among others, stood accused of conspiring to create a murderous “Bundist Nazi-Fascist organization”; he confessed to everything and more, even “admitting” membership in the Gestapo.23 The physical and rhetorical distance Bergelson had put between himself and Litvakov proved life-saving this time.
In March 1937, Bergelson got word that the Yiddish conference he had been planning for late May would be postponed. He recognized the postponement for the cancellation it was, possibly a prelude to arrests of the organizers, so he packed and left Birobidzhan hastily.24 So did the young Kazakevich—warned, legend has it, by a well-placed friend.25 Bergelson might have been that friend: he was not well placed in the conventional sense, but his survival instincts were unparalleled.
Liberberg was executed the following month.26 Bergelson’s friend Khavkin was arrested along with his wife; their two children became wards of the state.27 Waves of arrests swept through the Jewish Autonomous Region: the party was beheaded, the foreigners’ collective farm was disbanded, and the entire ethnic Korean population of forty-five hundred was deported to Central Asia in sealed train cars in September 1937.28 Other ethnic groups living in border regions were similarly moved inland; Stalin had come to view as a vulnerability any ethnic group with potential allegiances to a foreign government. The Jews, of course, had no country besides the Soviet Union to call their own, but building an autonomy near the border now looked like possible treason.29
Random arrests are a necessary component of mass terror, and this was true in Birobidzhan. The party elite was targeted disproportionately, but anyone could have been reported by anyone else for saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way, whether the account was true or not. The chairman of the Trevoga (“Alert”) collective farm was sentenced to twenty-five years of exile in Kazakhstan for espionage for Japan;30 a prominent athlete sent by Moscow to help set up a sports infrastructure in Birobidzhan was arrested on suspicion of being an escaped prisoner and held for nearly two years;31 a teachers’ college student was arrested and never returned;32 a veterinarian was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for allegedly poisoning cattle;33 a woodworker employed by the bathhouse was sentenced to death for allegedly sabotaging the Komsomol in the region, ostensibly on Khavkin’s orders.34 The arrests worked like a fine-toothed comb, sweeping through the villages of the region. One of the oldest living residents of Valdheym, Sima Kogan, told a local amateur historian that she was delivering milk one morning to a house she visited every day “and saw that the house was locked up and the son was sitting on the porch, crying, and she asked why the house was locked up and the boy said that his parents had been arrested in the night and he would now have to go to an orphanage and later he hanged himself.”35
Khavkin was accused of Trotskyism, “bourgeois nationalism,” and counterrevolutionary activities and eventually sentenced to fifteen years in labor camps.36 His wife, Sofia, was accused of having tried to kill Kaganovich by poisoning him with the gefilte fish he had so highly praised after visiting the Khavkins a year earlier. She spent years in labor camps in Kazakhstan and, upon release, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she died.37
Bergelson walked a tightrope. In late 1937 the Moscow Yiddish-language journal Tribuna, published by OZET, the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land, labeled him a “professional sycophant”—an apparent reference to his relationship with the disgraced Khavkin. His name disappeared from Forpost’s masthead.38 Bergelson went very, very quiet, as though trying to disappear in plain sight. As did, for now, the whole Jewish autonomy project. OZET and its sister organization, KOMZET, were shut down, taking with them not only the Tribuna but also the entire resettlement program, including its system of recruitment centers, chartered trains, and, most important, funding for resettlement, such as it was.39 Stalin’s newfound fear of foreigners in the Soviet midst occasioned the reversal of Soviet nationalities policy: “national” local councils ceased to exist; many non-Russian-language schools closed; the Jewish autonomy project froze.
Birobidzhan reshaped itself. The percentage of Jews in the region’s population stood at eighteen. The days of struggling to assimilate hundreds and thousands of new arrivals were over; the rallies, plays, and gala evenings brimming with proud propaganda had ended; the idea of achieving national-republic status had been buried. The local stars were gone: imprisoned or executed, like Khavkin and Liberberg, or escaped into hiding like Bergelson and Kazakevich. The Yiddish-language Birobidzhaner shtern had been merged with Russian-language Birobidzhanskaya zvezda, similarly eviscerated by the purges. The printing plant, recently outfitted with equipment donated by American Jews, was working at partial capacity.40 Still, in 1939, the Birobidzhan publishing house put out a book of ABCs in Yiddish41 and was readying a set of Yiddish-language textbooks for the upper classes, as well as a Russian-Yiddish dictionary, intended to facilitate communication between old and new settlers.42 The same year, a propaganda booklet authored jointly by Bergelson and the young Kazakevich—presumably written before the purges began—was published for distribution to Jews outside the Soviet Union who might consider moving to the Jewish Autonomous Region. The following year, Birobidzhan held a series of celebrations to honor thirty years of Bergelson’s writing career, including a gala event at which excerpts from his work were staged by the Kaganovich State Jewish Theater. Bergelson chose not to come to Birobidzhan for the festivities.43 Whether these echoes of the earlier state-building efforts were the product of inertia or a new, ominous change in policy is not clear.
10
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On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression treaty that has become known as the M
olotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after the two foreign ministers who brokered the deal. According to the document, the Soviet Union would colonize two Baltic states—Estonia and Latvia—as well as parts of Finland, Poland, and Romania. Germany would take Lithuania, among other lands. The provisions for the territorial division, however, were kept secret, and only the nonaggression part of the treaty was publicized.1 Those who lived in the countries squeezed between Germany and the Soviet Union were left to wonder at what cost and on what premises the two giants had promised peace to each other.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, Britain, France, New Zealand, and Australia declared war on Germany. On September 5, the United States proclaimed neutrality. On September 17, with most of Poland in German hands, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east. On September 29, the USSR and Germany formalized their partition of Poland. The Soviet Union thus acquired hundreds of thousands of new Jewish citizens, many of them politically active. The troublemakers needed to be moved out of the way, and Birobidzhan was an obvious option. In 1940, a group of Moscow officials visited Birobidzhan to investigate the possibility of resettling the Jews of Poland in the Jewish Autonomous Region.2 The authorities ultimately chose the more traditional option, however, and Polish Jews were either imprisoned or exiled, mostly to Siberia. My great-grandmother, a Bundist from Białystok, was among them.
Bergelson, who had watched Hitler’s rise in Berlin, who had picked a lesser evil when he’d opted for Moscow, had to be frightfully pained by the new alliance. All evidence indicates, however, that he continued to keep very quiet. His old acquaintance and fellow repatriate Perets Markish was not quite as careful. Dispatched to occupied Białystok to convert Yiddish writers to Soviet ways, Markish showed an old friend an article written by an American. The author had been a Communist sympathizer until the Stalin-Hitler pact had shown him that “he raised a snake around his neck.” Commented Markish, “Only he nourished this snake around his neck? Only he alone? And maybe all of us weaned the snake? And a time may come when this full-grown snake will choke all of us….Yes, if it keeps going like it’s been going, the time will come that the snake wrapped around our necks will choke us.”3
Markish then broke down crying and, when he had calmed, begged his friend to keep quiet about the conversation—a request the friend respected for two decades. Markish returned to Moscow and began writing a heartbreaking poem called “The Dancer from the Ghetto,” while an epic poem glorifying Stalin, written before the pact, was published, as though to protect him.4
The Yiddish Soviet writers were wrapped tightly in the snake’s embrace. Bergelson knew much more than most Soviet citizens. The whole world could be claiming ignorance for years to come, but Bergelson could distinguish the finest hues of threat. He had seen the raw animal hatred that turned all of Germany, and the people it occupied, into armies of murderers. He had heard enough about the ghettos to know that in them Jews would be humiliated, disgraced, and ultimately killed by the hundreds of thousands. And he knew that for nearly fifteen years he had willingly and willfully stayed in the propaganda service of a state that had not only murdered some of his friends but was now, through its new alliance with Germany, enabling the murder of his people. If Bergelson wanted to stay alive, if he wanted his wife and son to be safe, he had to silence the despair welling up in his throat, he had to hold back his tears of outrage, and he had to keep his hands from putting pen to paper, even if it felt like his people’s last chance to cry for help.
For now, the Baltic states remained technically unoccupied (though they were coming under increased political pressure from the Soviet Union), and Dubnow, in Riga, chose to interpret his location as wisely chosen. On October 9, less than two weeks after the German-Soviet partition of Poland, he wrote in a letter, “What has happened is what we feared, so psychologically, we were prepared….We have been worried strongly here, though we are living in a neutral country. At first we feared that these small countries would be smashed between giants, but recently we have been reassured: the sovereignty of the Baltic states is certain. I have therefore decided to decline my American friends’ offer to make the move across the ocean. It would have upset my spiritual equilibrium, which is all the more essential at times like these….I am especially worried now about the fate of my children in Warsaw.”5
Latvia’s fate had been sealed two months earlier. Sovereignty would be forfeited in less than a year, in July 1940, when the Soviet Union took the Baltics. Earlier in the year, the Soviet Union had secured its hold over a chunk of Finland, and Germany had taken Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. In another eleven months, on June 22, 1941, Germany would break the nonaggression pact and invade the USSR, consolidating what it had grabbed in Europe and quickly advancing east.
On October 25, 1941, the Jews of Riga were ordered to move into the ghetto. Less than two months later, most of them—about twenty-four thousand—were marched to the Rumbula Forest, outside the city, and shot there.6 According to the story established after the war was over, Dubnow was still in the city on December 8, the last day of the Rumbula massacre. He was, his biographer wrote in the 1950s, ordered onto a bus that would presumably have taken him to the forest, but the eighty-one-year-old historian, who had been ill and was running a fever, did not move fast enough, so one of the German soldiers shot him right in the city street.7 In fact, there were no buses: the Jews of Riga had to march to their death, and uncounted hundreds of those who were too slow died or were killed en route.8 Dubnow must have been among them.
The man who had spent decades thinking and writing about Jewish emigration had not known when to run, or where. Or had he? Dubnow had known to flee Berlin. He had spent six or seven peaceful years in Latvia. His October 1939 letter reassuring his friends, and himself, that Riga was a safe place reads tragically wrong seventy-six years later—especially now, as I write this, when Riga has become a safe haven for my friends escaping the Putin regime in Russia, and I worry about the wisdom of their choice—but then I find myself coming back, over and over, to the two years and two months that passed between that letter and Dubnow’s death. From the vantage point of my current secure middle age in America, these two years look negligible, a footnote to Dubnow’s larger error, but these were two years that the Jews in the German-occupied part of Poland spent subsisting and dying in the ghettos. These were two years that Dubnow would not have lived had he stayed in Berlin. These were two years during which many of his friends who had made a home or sought refuge elsewhere found themselves under Nazi occupation—including the friends to whom he wrote that 1939 letter. They lived in Paris, which German troops occupied in June 1940. On June 23, Hitler toured Paris. Soviet troops took Riga exactly one month later, and to many Latvian Jews, their presence seemed to promise security.
Only if I zoom in on those two years do I realize that for months at a time life must have felt stable—stable enough, at least, for Dubnow to consider his options in the tiny part of Europe he had chosen. “I have found myself recently taken with the thoughts of emigration,” Dubnow wrote to his Paris friends in December 1939. “I am not speaking of America, though my friends there have secured a visa for me and it has been waiting at the American consul’s office for over a month. I have decided that in the spring I shall move to Lithuania, either to Wilna or to Kowno.” He was using the Polish transcription of cities now known as Vilnius and Kaunas—two intellectual and cultural centers of Lithuanian and Polish Jewry that had bounced between Poland and Lithuania and within the Russia Empire but were not, for the moment, occupied by Germany. Among other things, Dubnow wrote, he hoped he could work to strengthen YIVO if he moved to Wilna.
He reassured his friends that he was being watchful and cautious. “If the circumstances change and it turns out that my being in the Baltics contains some risks,” he wrote, “then I shall make use of the American visa, for an extension of which I intend to petition the consulate. Let’s hope, however, that the s
ituation will improve and we shall yet see a free Europe.”
Dubnow was concerned that the British and their allies—which did not yet include the United States, still formally neutral—were not sufficiently aware of the damage done to Jewish communities, especially in Poland, then the civilizational center of world Jewry. “We must create a periodical, either in London or in Paris, for exchanging views on the role of the Jewry in the world war,” he wrote. “My plan is as follows: first, we must collect information for a ‘Black Book’ that would reflect the looting of our center in Poland; second, we should begin publishing a weekly devoted to the role of the Jewry in the time of war and in the future ‘new Europe.’ Both the book and the newspaper should be published in English in consideration of the outside world and the millions of English-speaking Jews in America….I have written a letter to the editor of ‘The Times’ saying that the goals of the war must be expanded to include not only [the liberation of] Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc., but also the restoration of devastated Jewish centers on which Hitler has declared the most ruthless of wars.”
The word “ruthless,” as used by Dubnow in 1939, supposed that there would remain something to be restored, someone to do the restoring, and someone to document the destruction. He had perhaps a deeper understanding of Jewish life and identity than anyone before or after him, but the tragedy that was about to befall the Jews would have required an impossible imagination to be able to conjure it.
Dubnow had to scrap his plan to move to Lithuania after the Soviet invasion: the borders between newly occupied Soviet territories were sealed shut. His closest friends had fled Paris for the South of France, where they were desperately working to get a visa that could be used to escape. Dubnow tried to inquire about the status of his United States visa, but he could learn nothing. The only news he received from the outside world came in the form of magazines occasionally arriving from Palestine. But he did not hear from his old Odessa friends who had made their way to Palestine and who were managing his savings, which he had seen fit to deposit there. He was eighty-one years old, widowed, alone, and isolated in a city that had never felt like his own.
