by Masha Gessen
It began as a confession. “There is a day in August,” Bergelson said, “when the temple of Solomon burned down. On this day all Jews, even the children, fast for a twenty-four-hour period. They go to the cemetery for the entire day to pray ‘among the dead,’ and I was so seeped in the atmosphere of the burning of the temple, people talked so much about this, that when I was six or seven years old, I felt I could sense the smell of the smoke and the fire. I tell you this to show how deep-seated the nationalism was.”
He told the court of his mother’s death, and of living with his older brothers and having to pay for his keep. He told the three military judges, whose primary job was signing pre-scripted death verdicts, of starting to write, of struggling to break onto the literary scene, and of the recognition he received much later, when his best novel was published in Russian in 1939. He then blamed his old rival Moyshe Litvakov, executed on a terrorism conviction more than a decade ago, for trying to turn Bergelson into a Territorialist.
“What was their goal?” the presiding judge asked about the Territorialists.
“To procure a territory for the Jews. Gradually, he began to influence me a bit, in the nationalist way.”
Bergelson did not mention that back when Litvakov was arrested, he’d signed a letter condemning his activities, as one did if one wished to survive. He perhaps hoped that the court knew about the letter.
He told the court about living in Kyiv after the Bolshevik revolution. “The regimes changed frequently. Before 1921, there were many regimes: there were Denikin, the Germans, Petlyura,” he said, listing the names of some of the Soviet regime’s most villainized enemies. He seemed to be damning himself by placing himself in this context and at the same time making a hopeless play for human sympathy. “It was the kind of time when a person who has nationalism in his blood can’t get his bearings, he can’t tell where he is or who he is with.” He called the Kultur-Lige, that heady attempt at bringing to life an autonomous Yiddish world, a nationalist organization—nationalist not, clearly, in the Dubnowian sense of promoting cultural cohesion but nationalist in the Soviet sense of pure anti-Bolshevik evil.
“I didn’t believe the Bolsheviks would win,” he said. Today this, too, may sound like a play for sympathy, but in 1952 this confession of lack of faith was pure self-flagellation. “I had no hatred for the Bolsheviks,” he said. “I even liked them because, in a way, they had saved my life. But my nationalist friends told me this was all ephemeral and would pass. This was my attitude toward the Bolsheviks.” He said he had worked for a newspaper, and he then appealed to other defendants to testify as to the content of the articles he had written thirty-five years earlier. He said it was not all nationalist.
The court, however, had no tolerance for the defendants’ attempts to clear their names in any way. The presiding judge demanded that Bergelson continue the self-flagellation: “You stand accused of having opposed the October Revolution….You must testify as to the substance of the charges. Tell the court how you opposed the Soviet regime.”
Bergelson seemed to search his memory for further evidence he could provide against himself. “It seems to me that opposition has to take the form of some sort of action. So what were my actions?” he asked himself on the stand. “My opposition to the Soviet Union took the form that I fled the Soviet Union.” The man who had spent half his life running to save his life and had then paid what he thought were all his dues for the right to return to the Soviet Union was now suggesting his very emigration could be seen as treason.
The presiding judge wanted Bergelson to drive this point home. “Let’s finish with this period of your life,” he said. “Why you fled. The Soviet system had saved you….This was your response to your own salvation, to the salvation of the Jews. The attitudes toward Jews had changed drastically, pogroms had ceased, Jews were granted equal rights—why under these conditions did you need to flee the country?”
The judge’s list of the Bolsheviks’ gifts to the Jews was factually accurate. Bergelson had said as much himself. But now the court was demanding that he describe how his most basic instincts worked, that he articulate the finely tuned sense of impending doom that had caused him to run. Bergelson explained that things had been very difficult in Kyiv. That was the winter he had written the desperate appeal to American Jews on behalf of the Yiddish writers of Kyiv. He now said he regretted writing the letter. He said he came to Moscow in 1920 and felt at loose ends. “I felt I should be writing, but I couldn’t write, it seemed I could do nothing, it seemed I had no talent, and we were hungry, and it was hard.” An invitation to go to Berlin and be published proved too tempting to reject. Bergelson began to describe the circuitous route he took to Berlin, then caught himself trying to justify his treason. “It is now that I consider my fleeing the Soviet Union to be an enemy act,” he explained. “Back then, I did not see it that way.”
Bergelson spent all day testifying about his treason through emigration.
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The following day, Bergelson testified about Birobidzhan and OZET, the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land. The prosecution’s case classified OZET’s work as enemy activity.
“So you were worried about assimilation?” asked the presiding judge.
“It’s not that I didn’t believe in assimilation,” Bergelson said vaguely. “It’s that I thought it could be a very long process. And that would mean a prolonged agony, which can be worse than death.”
“Do you still believe assimilation of the Jews among the Soviet people to be akin to agony?”
“I’m not speaking of the people; I am speaking of the culture.”
“Where there is culture, there is the people?”
“I was so steeped in the ideas of the Soviet Union, I could actually be happy in the end, knowing that the Jewish people were living among other peoples.”
Something had changed overnight: Bergelson was now trying to deflect some of the accusations, if not deny them outright. So the presiding judge asked a question that could not be deflected: he demanded to know what exactly was discussed “during the anti-Soviet gatherings at your apartment.” Bergelson struggled to deny the premise of the question, and failed.
“So you didn’t hold special gatherings, but as soon as you got together, the talk would begin?” the judge pressed.
“Yes, that’s correct,” admitted Bergelson.
“Answer specifically,” the presiding judge instructed. “Did the Jewish Section of the Union of Soviet Writers dispatch its allies to other cities, where lectures and other events devoted to nationalist themes were conducted?”
“The section did dispatch its members, yes. There were events held, there were themes that, in essence, were nationalist. Their goal was the desire to broaden Jewish culture, to make it flower, to have it engage the masses.”
“The lectures and the talks were in the Jewish language?”
“Yes, in the Jewish language.”
“So what is there to deny?” the judge demanded.
This lasted all day, and continued the next, May 15.
“So does this mean that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, in both oral and written propaganda, engaged in the glorification of Biblical images and preached the unity of the Jews of the entire world based solely on their having common blood, with no regard for class distinctions?”
“The glorification of Biblical images would slip in everywhere,” admitted Bergelson. “It happened in work, in conversation, and in poems. I don’t see what’s criminal about this. There are images that it is very appropriate to glorify. It can happen that the glorification of certain images yields some very useful ideas.” In the face of death, the nonbelieving son of a pious Jew chose to try to defend this one thing: the images from the holy book of his childhood. Perhaps he was thinking of that day, in August 1941, when he had used the words from a Hebrew psalm, “I shall not die, but live,” and they heralded a period of several years when he believed every wo
rd he wrote.
The presiding judge was thinking of the very same period of time. He picked up a piece of paper and read out loud, his voice brimming with disdain: it was Bergelson’s open letter to the Jews of the world. “This appeal calls on every Jew to take the oath ‘I am a child of the Jewish people’ and so on. This is a call to unity on the basis of common blood, isn’t it?”
“The appeal discusses unity in the fight against fascism.”
“So you think Jews are the only people fighting fascism?”
The official Soviet historiography of the Second World War had by now taken hold. The war had been fought by the anti-fascists against the fascists. Any special role of the Jews, including their role as victims, was interpreted as an effort to undermine this narrative. The only special roles belonged to Soviet soldiers, as fighters against fascism, and Communists, as its victims. This, too, made the publication of The Black Book impossible.
Bergelson was also accused of libeling the Soviet Union by claiming that anti-Semitism was rampant in postwar Ukraine. He had been wise enough not to write about this issue, and to stay out of the entire postwar Crimea effort, but a witness had apparently testified that “Bergelson, upon learning that the most pronounced desire to move to the Jewish Autonomous Region was observed among Jews residing in Ukraine, told me, libelously, that he had information that anti-Semitism was growing in Ukraine and that the situation there was already quite tense. Continuing this conversation, Bergelson spoke about himself and said that he wanted to go to the Jewish Autonomous Region, where, as he said, ‘I could die.’ ”
“That last sentence is true,” said Bergelson. “I said that I wanted to move to Birobidzhan and live there.”
Bergelson had entered a plea of “guilty in part.” The presiding judge now asked him to which of the charges he was pleading guilty.
“I am guilty of nationalism,” he said, “and I am guilty of fleeing the Soviet Union.”1
He finished testifying on May 15. On July 18, thirteen old Jews were sentenced to death by firing squad. A fourteenth defendant, the one who had been too ill to stand trial, was dying in prison. The fifteenth, Lina Shtern, was sentenced to five years’ exile, as per the Kremlin’s instructions. They had lied to Fefer, the secret-police agent: for all his cooperation, he would now be shot, too, alongside the people he had helped set up. On August 12, 1952, Bergelson’s sixty-eighth birthday, he was executed.2 For decades, before the transcripts of the trial became accessible to the public following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the date was known, and observed in many Jewish communities the world over, as the Night of the Murdered Poets. There was no accurate information about the number of victims of the execution, or their precise identities, but somehow word got out that there were poets. Markish, Kvitko, Hofshteyn, and Fefer had indeed been poets. Other defendants included journalists, a doctor, a scientist, a scholar, a theater director, and the writer Bergelson, who had gone to his death doing what he had always done: trying to square the circle of Jewishness in a world that did not want Jews, protecting the seeds of a religion he did not practice, and insisting on his right to try to keep alive a dying language.
The JAC trial was to launch a new chapter of Stalinist terror. In addition to the defendants in Moscow, 110 people had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor or death in connection with the JAC. Other Yiddishists had been rounded up and sentenced without a trial; Der Nister had died in a prison hospital in 1950. Next would come the trial of the Jewish doctors, who were accused of poisoning Central Committee members under the guise of treating them. They would be sentenced to death. That would unleash a wave of anti-Semitism so strong that the government would have to deport all Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan for their own protection. Or such were the rumors in Moscow, so frightening and so vivid that my grandmother could recount them to me in great detail decades later.
The doctors were arrested within a few months of the JAC execution. But on March 5, 1953, Stalin died. A month later, the charges against the doctors were dropped, and they were released. The misnamed Night of the Murdered Poets would go down in history as Stalin’s last execution. Two years later, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reviewed the case and acquitted all the defendants, only one of whom, Lina Shtern, was still alive.3
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The jailed Yiddish writers of Birobidzhan had to wait two to three years after Stalin’s death for their release—and even then they were amnestied, not cleared of charges. The oldest of them, seventy-two at the time of sentencing, died in prison. The rest returned, at least for a time, to Birobidzhan. It had become just another Far Eastern province—different, and remarkable, in name only. The New York Times’ Harrison Salisbury, the only foreign correspondent to have diligently covered rumors of the impending Jewish deportation (his stories were never published, but my own grandmother, who censored American correspondents’ dispatches, remembered them for decades), hastened to Birobidzhan as soon as he was able to secure permission to travel there, in 1954. “It was plain that Birobidzhan had lost its significance as a Jewish center a long time ago,” he reported. “I could not see that the place had any special Jewish character.”1
The library, however, still bore Sholem Aleichem’s name. Soon after returning from prison, the Yiddish writers gathered there for a reading. The room filled to capacity. “The representative of the Department of Culture and Education, speaking Russian, was interrupted continuously by shouts of ‘Yiddish! Yiddish!’ ” recalled Emiot in his memoir, written in the 1970s in Rochester, New York, where he lived for the last twenty years of his life.
There is a picture in the collection of the Birobidzhan museum: six triumphant-looking Yiddish writers, four of whom had spent seven years in the camps, holding up a copy of a journal in which all of them were once again published. Lyubov Vasserman, sitting in the middle, is beaming, as though justice could indeed be restored, as though a Yiddish writer could claim a motherland in the Soviet Union.
She stayed in Birobidzhan because she believed in it. She had a brother, a trade-union organizer, who lived in Israel and tried to persuade her to join him there. She would not budge; she said that she had been a “no one” in Palestine, where she had worked as a domestic, and she was someone in Birobidzhan, a Jewish writer. Her brother reportedly pointed out that she was “someone” only in the context and the company of the ten other Jewish writers in Birobidzhan, but this clearly did not work. Long after she was widowed and only after she had become so frail that she could no longer care for herself did Vasserman agree to be moved to Kishinev, Moldova, where her son lived. She spent the last three years of her life in the city of the great pogrom of 1903. She left a book of poetry, published posthumously, called Birobidzhan, My Home. As was her wish, these same words are inscribed on her tombstone in the Kishinev cemetery—over the drawing of an open book designed by her son.2
Little remains of the post-Stalin history of Birobidzhan, aside from Vasserman’s exalted account and Salisbury’s bemused one. In 1956, the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Yosef Avidar, and his wife, Yemima Tchernovitz-Avidar, a popular Israeli children’s author, managed to organize an unofficial two-day trip to the Jewish Autonomous Region. They then succeeded in breaking away, briefly, from their handlers, who had concocted a Jewish Potemkin tour. They went back to their hotel room around four in the afternoon on Saturday, the second day of their visit. Presently a woman showed up at their door. “She started asking us questions about Israel,” Yemima Tchernovitz-Avidar wrote in her journal. “She was mostly interested in the culture….She turned out to be knowledgeable about the [Hebrew] language and literature….She did not attempt to put a gloss on her life there. ‘I have no close friends here or anyone who understands me. I gave my daughter the Hebrew name Shushana, for I myself have a Hebrew name, Hemda bat Shmuel, but what does she know of Jewishness? She remembers the Hebrew lullabies I sang for her, like “Sham shualim yesh,” but now she goes by the name Susanna, is
married to a Russian man, had adopted a non-Jewish child….But my heart aches for the Jewish word.’…She asked for a book in Hebrew, asked if she could read my stories. I said, ‘If I send it to you from Moscow, will you come to the post office to pick it up?’ She said, ‘Send me the Tanakh. Send me anything. I am not afraid. You can send it right to my home address.’ She opened the Tanakh and began to read the Song of Songs in a voice as rusty as a door that has been forced open after many years.”
A short while later, there was another knock on the door: another aging Hebrew speaker wanted to see the Israelis. “When the old man saw the Tanakh in Hemda’s hands, tears came to his eyes. He took the book in his hands and would not let go. ‘I burned a large library during the purges, but when I was about to burn the books of Bialik, I said, Enough! Let the fate of this book be my fate! If I survive, so will the book, but if I die, let it be taken from me. So I remain now with a book of Bialik poems, and nothing else.’ There we sat, the four of us, these two representatives of a Hebrew world that had been entirely destroyed here and the two of us, who had so much to offer them. We were like two people carrying full jugs of water meeting two others who had been lost in the desert, dying of thirst….I think it was the old man who first started singing [the Tchernichovsky ballad] ‘Sakhi, sakhi al halomot’ (Laugh, laugh at me, laugh at my dreams). Hemda picked up and then we did. When [the handler] Dukhno came in and saw the four of us singing, he was flabbergasted. He sat down with us, but he was too ignorant to understand anything: he was a worthy student of Birobidzhaner shtern.” The Avidars found their Birobidzhan encounters so upsetting that they cut their visit short, taking the train on Saturday night rather than Sunday.
