All good heroes have to change. So all the storytelling gurus and literary theorists, from Aristotle onwards, agree. If you get to Act III and there’s been no transformation, you’ve lost your audience. There are, of course, exceptions: sit-com protagonists rarely change; there are a few great ‘stuck’ characters, like Peter Pan, whose very inability to grow is the hallmark of their identity; and high literature sometimes throws up a clever-dick like Ovid, who wrote an epic, Metamorphoses, in which the hero was Change itself. But, in Hollywood at least, the Rule of Change is a hurdle few heroes can vault.

The tricky bit, for writers, is that their heroes must also stay the same. It’s no good having Han Solo slough off his vanity and cynicism and embrace the Light Side, if it turns him into another earnest Luke Skywalker. Elizabeth I’s transformation from woman of passion to ivory-skinned Virgin Queen only moves us if we know her passion is still seething beneath her leaden foundation.

Seen in this context,  Mel Gibson’s decision to make a film about Judah Maccabee comes straight out of the screenwriting primer. Right now, Gibson is at the nadir of the Act II crisis — what script-doctors call ‘Descent to the Deepest Cave.’ Already consumed by alcoholism and battered by domestic strife, Gibson has branded himself a pariah with his rants about Jews. He has to change. But his redemptive transformation will be entirely in character. For, as with Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, the story of Judah Maccabee offers the opportunity for a rich historical drama, with lovingly evoked scenes of sadistic torture and a hero prevailing against numerically superior but spiritually impoverished foes. Only this time, it will be a Jewish hero. Presto, change-o, Mel is kosher again — and yet somehow he’s still Mel. But what exactly is a Jewish hero? And does Judah Maccabee count as one, anyway? The figure of the Jewish hero is a contested one. Here’s a conversation I recently overheard between two old schoolfriends:

A: I don’t like the Israeli-type macho hero. I prefer my Jewish heroes old school.

B: Like Bar Kochba?

A: Like Franz Kafka. The little specky guy who thinks too much. Who can’t really get his head round having a body — let alone putting it in danger. Not the IDF commando with his wraparound shades. There’s nothing Jewish about wraparound shades.

B: Yeah, but without the commando to protect him, Kafka gets killed by the Nazis.

A: The Nazis didn’t kill Kafka. B: Communists, then.

ME: Can’t you two shut up while the game’s on?

Which, I realise now, implicitly put me in B’s camp. As for the Maccabees, if they are heroes they are curiously uncelebrated ones. At cheder the details of the Chanukah story were always left vague. Occasionally I, or another mystified child, would pipe up, asking who exactly the Maccabees were fighting, and over what, and why they sounded so Scottish. No one ever explained. No one bothered to mention how Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world; how his empire fused local traditions with Greek culture — the gym, the games, the theatre, the household as a hive of economic productivity (this was ancient Greece); how little Judaea managed to retain a degree of religious and political independence as part of the Seleucid empire; how tensions between Hellenized and traditional Jews escalated into something close to civil war; how the Seleucid king Antiochus IV waded in on the Hellenisers’ side, massacring Jews, banning traditional practices, gruesomely torturing dissenters; and how these outrages kindled a rebellion under the command of a provincial priest’s son called Judas Maccabeus, who waged a guerilla campaign against the might of the empire. (In addition to their vagueness about the bigger picture, our teachers glossed over the little details left on the ground when the Maccabees forcibly mass circumcised the Hellenised Jews they conquered. But rest assured that that’s one bit Mel won’t cut.)

The apocryphal texts certainly trumpet Judah as a great military and religious leader. He is implicitly compared to the judges, especially Joshua, who, like him, waged a divinely inspired war of conquest against pagan neighbours. And yet, being a great military leader does not make him a hero in any way that his people would have understood. Nowadays the term ‘hero’ can be used loosely to describe any protagonist, or, for tabloid newspapers, any professional soldier. But the word was originally, of course, Greek. And the notion of a Jewish hero, to a traditional Jew of Judah’s time, would have been nothing less than a contradiction in terms. For heroes were not only foreign — they were blasphemous. The Greeks were literal hero-worshippers: the cultic worship of figures like Hercules and Theseus was ubiquitous across the Greek world. Indeed, having a cult in your name was the only absolute requirement for the job of hero. That said, an all-action background was preferred: some heroes were great statesmen or lawgivers or even artists in life, but being big and violent was a definite plus. The basic mould of the hero was the warrior or the athlete, and the foundational texts of Greek culture were the Homeric epics, in which prodigiously big and strong men relentlessly compete — in war, games and sometimes love — for honour. This battle for personal martial or athletic glory and cult worship is what makes these heroes so unjewish. ‘Kafka heroes’ were thin on the rocky ground of Greece. It’s true you get the odd outlier like Odysseus, who’s big and violent but also wordy. And then there’s Oedipus, who’s big and violent but has a complicated relationship with his mother. But what is lacking is anything akin to Judaeo-Christian morality. Certainly, Homeric heroes had a value system. But the key value they fought and died for was their kleos: their honour, their name, the story that would be told of them down the ages, accompanied by the sacrifices that would nourish their immortal shades. They were not required to embody or fight for anything that we — or the Judeans — would have recognised as good against evil.

The full version of this essay is available in the printed Jewish Quarterly. Please go here to subscribe.

Writing necessarily reflected the experience of those passing through the phase of “liminality”; that is standing on the threshold of disparate experiences, attractions and borders. This perception of borderlands was especially though certainly not exclusively within the spectrum of the Jewish population. The Jews were living in changing and uncertain times and subject to pressures often pulling in opposite directions. They inherited a tradition to which they might well have sensed a dubious loyalty. The adherence to the ancestral faith was often shaken by the exposure to new sources of truth testing and to a welter of ideologies. They lived amongst the Czechs, often spoke their language and shared their concerns. But were they really authentic Czechs? Many on the outside cast doubt on this, even such a person as their great friend and advocate Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937), first president of the republic, and such uneasiness was also sometimes experienced by the Jews themselves. And what about the German attraction? The primary language of communication of the Jews of the region might well have been German, and it was indeed most frequently their primary language, particularly amongst city dwellers. It was also the language of world culture, leading into, as it was hoped, a greater general acceptance of their intrusion on the part of that world. But did this bare fact, born of reality, mean then that they were genuinely German? The ambivalence relating to the responses to both questions, the Czech and the German, indicated a greater uncertainty. The truth was that they straddled three identities, Jewish, Czech and German, all embracing ethnicity, nationality and religion. In addition to which, these optional identities were  not only delimited themselves, but also in process, and thus changing their own nature quite significantly.

So the expressed culture that emerged reflected this exciting but unstable situation. Literature of a specifically characteristic tone was produced by what was, in terms of population proportion, a very small clique. These individuals, centred in Prague, became known as the Prague Circle (der Prager Kreis), primarily recoginized as such and described by Max Brod (1884-1968). Brod is mainly thought of today as the promoter and biographer of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), but he was, in his own right, a leading light of the Prague intelligentsia, a prolific novelist, music critic and publicist. He was not only Kafka’s closest friend, but he also became his executor and promoter par excellence, without whom Kafka might not have been widely published, let alone known as one of the greatest and most distinctive narrative writers of the era. Brod was also the primary historian of the Prague Circle, which soubriquet he created, arguing that the group as he saw it could not be regarded as a “school” in any coherent sense.

Indeed there were so many strands and tendencies amongst these writers, ideologically and technically, that this in effect did not constitute a school. Not only were the sympathies divided as between Left and Right, between Czechism, Germanism, Zionism and Internationalism, but these all also morphed with the changing times and situation.  The Jews of Bohemia were indeed positioned on the border. That border was composed of an inherited but weakening Jewish background and allegiance, a location within a growing and increasingly militant nationalism springing up within the indigenous population. But  there was also an impinging German presence. Simultaneously there began to emerge too as a third option an insistence that the Jews also should plant a stake in a recognition of their own ethnicity and a forging of a Zionism of a special brand.  As for the outside world which the writer inhabited, the situation was not only dynamic and fluid, but also not so slowly but surely moving in the direction of catastrophe.

How some of these various tendencies were reflected can be seen, for example, in the contrast between the work of Max Brod himself and that of Franz Werfel (1890-1945), the older man originally cherishing and nurturing the younger. Brod moved from a position of idealised assimilationism towards a single minded Zionism, whereas Werfel, one of the most celebrated Expressionist poets in the world, shifted from his commitment to world peace and a kind of pacifistic Communism,, towards a tender but enormous sympathy for Catholic Christianity. He also developed a career as a highly successful novelist, dramatist and Holywood  script writer, whilst fleeing the threat of Nazi persecution. Kafka himself, whilst dabbling in efforts to familiarize himself with Yiddish and also to learn Hebrew, clearly felt himself alienated from practically everything, both from his Czech environment and from his bourgeois Jewish background. He was desperate to be able  to commit himself to one of the possibilities extended, but he felt unable so to do. Such was the case too in regard to his inability to get married, despite his engagements and loves. He sought a meaningful anchor in life, but he also eschewed all labels and loyalties. As he saw it, he could not even know himself and remain whole within that entity, let alone to belong to publicly declared movements and to associate himself with some generalised ideological tendency. He was locked into a position of someone trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to know himself. Because of that failure he could not achieve marriage (vivre dans le vrai, as his hero Flaubert named it), and, as we observe, he could not either bring any of his long narratives to completion (his three novels are all uncompleted). This seems to parallel his understanding of the Messiah, who may indeed “come”, but only when it is too late.

Bohemia was not usually the final destination of these writers. Many were those who migrated, just as there were others, such as Martin Buber (from Poland) and Joseph Roth (from Galicia), who moved to Prague for brief snatches. The local authors, like the international ones, wrote primarily in German, although thy often knew Czech well. But German was no longer the undisputed master of the roost in Czechoslovakia, as the country was moving from a situation of imperial province to independent State. It was not only the immediate environment that was being transformed though, but the entire world. And this applied too to the personal world of the writer and to its expression in letters.

So many of our writers’ activities were disrupted, shifted and disturbed by the turbulence of events, as well as by attractions of ideology. Leo Perutz (1884-1957) left Prague and  served as an officer in the great war, and was wounded. Then he emigrated to Haifa (Palestine/Israel) and functioned as a successful novelist in the German tongue. But Prague remained the backdrop of his magical settings. This was the case too of the Vienna born Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), who moved to Prague in his youth, and became the author of the Golem legend in fiction. The blind author, Oskar Baum (1883-1941), regarded by Brod as a founder member of the Prague Circle, wrote two collections of stories set in Prague. Paul Lappin (1878-1945) was a translator from Czech, but he wrote creatively mainly in German and was totally possessed by the presence of Prague. The great modernist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was Prague born, and is seen by Brod as being on the fringed of the circle. Although he had departed the city early in life, he still regarded it as lodged deep in his heart. Many and various are the connections and associations of these authors, so disparate, but still drinking from this same well.

Where now do we locate this group? Perhaps, in our recognition of its differentiated nature, we should indeed not categorize it as a group at all, but rather as a historical phase and as a segment of cultural history. How was it that these writers, so meagre in number, managed to contribute so hugely to the cultural life of Europe? Here was the borderland position crying out for a voice in the contemporary world. This voice was, of necessity, the possession of all, but it also belonged to nothing totally. This stance constitutes its quintessential  character, and that is what it has transmitted to our own world. It appears to be so distant, as further radical transformations have taken place, and yet it is still close at hand. It both belongs to a vanished time and place, and yet is still present in so many guises.

Leon Yudkin is the author of The Prague Circle and Czech Jewry. Copies are available from the author, by contacting Yudk4@aol.com

The University of Sussex, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in autumn 2011, has always been a cosmopolitan institution. When I joined the staff as an assistant lecturer in German in autumn 1963 it was a surprise to discover how few of those teaching literature courses were of English origin. David Daiches was the son of an Edinburgh rabbi whose mother tongue was Yiddish, while other colleagues included Larry Lerner from South Africa, Gabriel Josipovici from Egypt, and Gamini Salgado from Ceylon.

Daiches was the most inspirational figure. Literature, he argued, explores the human condition, but under circumstances that are continuously changing – hence the importance of an interdisciplinary approach within clearly defined historical contexts. The most remarkable innovation was the Modern European Mind, a course originated by Daiches to which colleagues contributed across a plurality of subjects: literature, philosophy and the history of ideas, psychology and even theology. The course was to inspire successive generations of students for over forty years.

When I returned as a professor in 1992, after gaining further experience as a lecturer in Cambridge, my impression was that the original Sussex vision had stood the test of time. Students and staff were grouped in Schools, preserving an intimacy of scale amid rapid expansion, and the revitalized Modern European Mind, including topics like Literature & Psychoanalysis and Modernism in the Arts, was still proving exceptionally popular.

However, the approach to German literature through periods like the Age of Classicism struck me as pedestrian, so I drafted two fresh proposals: German-Jewish Culture and Politics, and Anglo-German Intellectual Relations. The Anglo-German project would have focused on the influential achievements of poets like Goethe and Heine and philosophers such as Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. To encourage students to reflect on their own position, there would have been a module on the idea of the university, so influentially redefined by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

It was the Jewish option that appealed to colleagues whose judgment carried most weight, Gabriel Josipovici (who had spent his early years in hiding in Vichy France), Laci Löb (a Holocaust survivor from Hungary), and the Anglo-German political historian John Röhl. All three had indelible memories of their childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, a factor that may have inhibited them from making the academic case themselves.

The challenge was to explain how such a civilized nation as the Germans had succumbed to barbarism, charting the trajectory from the ideals of the Enlightenment to the atrocities of the Holocaust. To modify the crude perpetrator-victim model of German-Jewish relations, we would highlight the role of Jews as catalysts for European civilization. Their innovative achievements attracted envy, as I’d noted in a Jewish Quarterly article of autumn 1990:

Jewish entrepreneurs built the railroads, financed the coalmines, set up pilsner beer production, pioneered sugar-refining, developed the iron and steel industries, controlled the leading banks and newspapers, and were prominent in the leather goods, furniture, clothing and food-processing trades.

Tragically, I concluded, this provoked such resentment in both Germany and Austria that the Jews found themselves victimized for their success.

The purpose of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, which has flourished at Sussex for almost twenty years, is to study the contribution of German-Jewish communities to modern civilisation and to train new generations to understand the causes of racial prejudice and the consequences of enforced migration. From its base within a dynamic modern university committed to interdisciplinary studies, the Centre makes a distinctive contribution to both historical and scholarship and multi-cultural education.

‘What was so important about Vienna?’ asked Max Kochmann, a refugee from Berlin, as the launch of the Centre was being planned. ‘Vienna’, I replied, ‘exemplified the contribution of German-speaking Jews to modern civilisation –  think of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, Arnold Schoenberg and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many German speaking Jews came from highly educated backgrounds, and they brought with them as refugees from National Socialism their love of the arts and sciences, greatly enriching the cultural life of Britain.’

The aim of teaching and research, as defined in the Centre’s original mission statement, has been to reassess the concept of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’, that creative identification with German culture which was so characteristic of Jews in many parts of central Europe, including the territories of Austro-Hungarian Empire. A second main objective is to research the experiences and achievements of refugees and their families. Taking amount of the currents of anti-Semitism which culminated in National Socialism, the Centre has also developed a third group of projects relating to commemorations of the Shoah.

The founding of the Centre coincided with a surge of international interest in the Holocaust. The opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in April 1993 was followed by the release of Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Thus our timing could hardly have been more fortunate. When the ecologist Gordon Conway was appointed Sussex Vice-Chancellor, he asked the Chancellor Lord (Richard) Attenborough whether there was any programme at Sussex that he would like to support. The consequences were unexpected. In January 1995 the Higher Education Supplement announced that Steven Spielberg had pledged $100,000 of the revenues from Schindler’s List to the Centre for German-Jewish Studies.

At Attenborough’s suggestion, Spielberg was making the donation through his Righteous Persons Foundation, set up to support Holocaust research. Interviewed in Higher Education, I explained that the grant would help to research the experiences of refugees. Their testimony would complement the Sussex-based Mass Observation Archive, a unique collection documenting British attitudes during the Second World War. ‘Even those refugees who came to the UK as children are reaching retirement’, I explained. ‘It is time to put their memories on record.’

By the turn of the century the work of the Centre had gathered such momentum that Sussex awarded an honorary doctorate to Max Kochmann, chairman of our London Support Group, which regularly meets in the library of Belsize Square Synagogue. That synagogue, together with other institutions created by German-Jewish exiles like the Warburg Institute, the Freud Museum and the Association of Jewish Refugees, has featured prominently in the Centre’s research.

The eulogy to Max Kochmann delivered at the honorary degree ceremony in January 2000 acknowledged not only of his individual merits but those of the remarkable generation he represented. Those who fled from Nazism in the 1930s brought to Britain traditions of economic enterprise, cultural achievement and public service that have provided long-term benefits.

The Sussex ceremony was attended by Lord Attenborough, whose presence has been an inspiration for the innumerable graduands on whom he conferred degrees. On that same day, 27 January 2000, he inaugurated the Centre’s Archive in the University Library. After movingly recalling his family’s involvement with the refugees of the 1930s (they provided a home for two Jewish girls), he unveiled a plaque with the Centre’s logo, designed by Christopher Calderhead (Fig. 1). This features the Star of David encircled by a rose, symbolizing the ideal of cooperation between Jewish and Christian communities.

It was essential, Attenborough continued, highlighting our sense of mission, to teach the younger generation how the murder of Jews and other people deemed ‘unworthy of life’ could have occurred. The Sussex Archive would help to ensure that those events were never forgotten. These ideas were echoed in the vote of thanks by a Sussex student, who cited an exalted concept from Jewish liturgy: ‘shamor ve-zakhor’. Remembrance combined with remedial action is needed to reshape the future.

The Centre’s archive, which forms part of the university’s Special Collections, is developing in accordance with our three main themes. There is a particular interest in materials documenting histories of German-Jewish families since the Enlightenment, including diaries, letters, oral testimony, survival narratives and other biographical sources. This has enabled us to focus on the impact of National Socialism, using the methods of Life History to record the voices of the victims.

Our archival research was enhanced by a further momentous discovery. Not long after the founding of the Centre the phone rang in my office. ‘What has happened to the Daghani collection?’ asked an anxious voice. The Sussex archives, the Librarian had assured me, held no Jewish collections (the emphasis was on the Mass Observation Archive, the Kipling papers and the Bloomsbury Group). But on the line was a journalist from Hove, Mollie Brandl Bowen, insisting that only a few years earlier the university had acquired the work of a Holocaust survivor. Asked where this mysterious collection was located, the chair of the archives committee, Margaret McGowan, took several weeks to find the answer. Locked away in a storeroom in the Education Building we then discovered a treasure trove – the artistic and literary estate of Arnold Daghani.

This strengthened our sense of mission, for the artist was born in 1909 in an eastern frontier town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a member of a German-speaking Jewish family. After enduring persecution, deportation and exile, Daghani had died in 1985 in Hove, where he and his wife Nanino had finally found sanctuary. The Trustees, his sister-in-law his Carola and her husband Miron Grindea, had the task of finding a home for the works that had been displayed at the artist’s apartment. When the collection was offered to the Israel Museum in February 1987, the offer was politely refused by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. But Miron and Carola found an ally closer to home: Norbert Lynton, Professor of the History of Art at Sussex. ‘As a refugee who has lost many relatives and some childhood friends in the Holocaust,’ Lynton later explained, ‘I could not but be sympathetic.’ When the Trustees offered Daghani’s estate to the university, Lynton ensured that the collection found a haven on the campus.

‘MAJOR ART COLLECTION COMES TO SUSSEX’ proclaimed the University Bulletin on 12 May 1987. But at Sussex, despite its interdisciplinary ethos, the collection fell between two schools. Professor Lynton took early retirement, and his colleagues in History of Art had other priorities. The gift, which was to form part of the University Art Collection, was not their departmental responsibility. For political historians, on the other hand, it was too subjective to be regarded as a reliable source, while it was too pictorial to be acceptable as part of the Manuscript Collection in the Library. Moreover, there was no funding to catalogue the collection, so for ten years it languished in storage, virtually forgotten.

With colleagues at the Centre I rescued key works from the dismal storeroom and raised funding to have them catalogued. A grant from the Ian Karten Trust enabled us to employ a young art historian, Deborah Schultz, to catalogue the collection and develop a strategy for conservation and analysis. Daghani’s estate included approximately 6000 artistic and commemorative works – the most significant collection of work by a Holocaust survivor at any British institution. Further items were added after Deborah and I visited Carola Grindea at her West London home. The wall of her music room was covered with paintings, while half the floor space was taken up by a grand piano. ‘Have a look under the piano,’ Carola said, and several hours later we were still marvelling at the treasures that lay there. I drove back to Sussex with Daghani’s monumental album 1942-1943 in the boot of the car, a unique compilation of commemorative paintings and writings.

To draw attention to the achievements of this idiosyncratic artist, the Centre published our initial findings in a research paper entitled Memories of Mikhailowka: Labour Camp Testimonies in the Arnold Daghani Archive. One of his albums concludes with an account of how more than a hundred and fifty Jews from the camp were executed by the Germans in December 1943, followed by a calligraphic portrait of a woman prisoner incorporating their names (Fig. 2). Daghani’s aim was to rescue the victims from oblivion and remind us that each of them had a human face.

Fulfilling Attenborough’s admonition to collect and evaluate the testimony of survivors required systematic collaboration. To balance my focus on culture and politics, the Centre recruited researchers with complementary skills. Our study of Racist Materials on the Internet was undertaken by Information Technology experts led by Stella Rock. A further project, funded by the British Academy, related to those who fled from Nazism as children on the Kindertransport. Together with the archivist Samira Teuteberg, our research fellow Andrea Hammel compiled a database of British archival materials relating to the refugee generation, exploring the international context in collaboration with Wolfgang Benz, Director of the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University in Berlin. An archive-based study of Refugee Experiences in London and New York was completed by Lori Gemeiner, while Iris Guske from Bavaria undertook oral history interviews for her project on the Kindertransport Experience: A Socio-Psychological Study.

Further educational projects were developed by Cathy Gelbin and Chana Moshenska with the support of the ANNE FRANK-Fonds. As Director of Educational Programmes, Chana arranged a remarkable series of speakers to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. In January 2002 we heard the testimony of two Auschwitz survivors, Trude Levi and Fred Knoller. Sensitive to the atmosphere of xenophobia resulting from the destruction of the World Trade Building in New York, we began the day with an inter-faith service on the theme of Remembrance and Hope. Our theme the following year, Survivors and Refugees 1933-2003, connected the experiences during the Nazi period of Janina Fischler-Martinho with the more recent ordeal of a refugee from Afghanistan, Abdul Lazlad, whose escape from the clutches of the Taliban gave a personal edge to his analysis of British Asylum Policy. During the following years we explored further topical themes, especially relating to genocide. In January 2008, after Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg had analysed the obstacles to inter-faith dialogue, we were warned by Mark Levene (of Southampton University’s Parkes Institute) that the competition for scarce resources caused by climate change could have apocalyptic consequences.

Strengthening international cooperation has been one of the priorities of my successors as Director of the Centre: first Dr Raphael Gross, who held the post jointly with the Directorship of the London Leo Baeck Institute; and more recently Professor Christian Wiese, author of a widely acclaimed study of the German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas. Professor Wiese’s appointment to the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought at the University of Frankfurt am Main is a signal honour which is also bringing benefits to the Centre, for he has continued to act as Interim Director of the Centre. Meanwhile, a permanent post as Reader in Jewish History and Director of the Sussex Centre has been advertised and should shortly be filled. Our current research includes a three-year project on the Quakers as Rescuers during the Nazi Period supported by a generous gift from Dr Alfred Bader, channeled through the American Friends of the University of Sussex.

The above account is excerpted from the memoirs of Edward Timms, Taking up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments (Sussex Academic Press, 2011) by kind permission of the publisher.

Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, the original manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was thought to have been lost after the Second World War. It first appeared in 1990 in the short-lived journal Vek, and is translated here into English for the first time. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ is a powerful and historically significant essay: one of the earliest public statements about the mass murder of Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls the ‘greatest crime ever committed in history.’ ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was initially rejected for publication in 1943 by the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), where Grossman had earned a huge following from his reports of the Soviet Army’s harrowing defense and stunning victory at Stalingrad. The essay was then translated into Yiddish and published in the weekly paper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Unity (Einikayt). It was published in two abridged sections and then discontinued. The Yiddish translation remained the only extant version of the essay after 1943, and was back-translated into Russian in 1985. In 1990, the original Russian manuscript (near three times the length of the back-translation) surfaced from Grossman’s estate and was published in Vek. The recovery of ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ in its original form allows us to trace the origins and development of Grossman’s historical, commemorative and literary writing about the ‘catastrophe’ (as the Shoah was known in Russian). Grossman expanded upon and modified many of the ideas in this essay in later writings, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (used as documentary evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), as well as his editorial work on the monumental anthology The Black Book, and his two greatest novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ also provides unique insight into Grossman’s initial reaction to the genocide as a Soviet Jew; in it he expresses both his pride in socialist principles and Soviet military power, and his desire to publicize and explain the exceptional nature of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Nazis, whose genocide had claimed the life of his own mother in the western Ukrainian city of his birth, Berdichev.

Polly Zavadivker

Ukraine Without Jews

When our forces enter the villages of Left-bank Ukraine under a volley of fire and the din of hand grenades, domestic geese rise up into the air. Flapping their enormous white wings, they circle above peasant huts, above lakes covered in water lilies, above fields and gardens.

There is something worrisome and strange in the heavy, arduous flight, and the sharp, alarming and sorrowful cries of these domestic birds. It is as if they are calling the soldiers of the Red Army to witness heartbreaking and frightening images of life, as if they are rejoicing at the arrival of our forces, simultaneously weeping with joy and lamenting, screaming of great losses, and of the tears and blood that have aged and salted the soil of Ukraine.

There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin…I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.

If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labor and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behavior, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.

There are also villages in Ukraine where one doesn’t hear any crying or see tear-filled eyes, villages that are ruled by silence and peace. I visited a village like this on two occasions—the first time on 26 September, and again on 17 October in 1943. This village, Kozary, lies on the ancient Kievan highway between Nezhiny and Kozelets.  I visited Kozary once during the day, and another time on a heavy autumn night. On both occasions silence and peace ruled over Kozary—the peace and silence of death.  The Germans burnt seven hundred and fifty homes here before Easter, and seven hundred and fifty families were burnt alive in these homes. No one, not a single child or old woman emerged from the flames. In this manner the Germans punished a village for having sheltered partisans.  Tall, dusty weeds had sprouted from the ashes. Wells were filled with sand and gardens were covered in wild grass.  A withered flower could be glimpsed among the weeds.  There is no one in Kozary with whom one can mourn, no one to talk to, no one to cry to. Silence and peace hang over dead bodies buried in homes that have been reduced to rubble and covered with weeds. This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentation.

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.  Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are threeyear-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eightyyear-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, laboring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth.

There are descriptions of Jews in the works of all of our great writers who have depicted life in Ukraine—Gogol, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Gorky. How could it be otherwise? Who among us born and raised in Ukraine did not from their earliest years absorb a living portrait of Jewish people in the cities, shtetls and villages of Ukraine?  Remember Sabbath days when elders walked with their prayer shawls beneath poplar trees on quiet spring nights; remember old men standing on corners carrying on sly and clever conversations among themselves; remember self-important shtetl shoemakers, sitting on rickety stools in front of the rickety doors of their shops; remember naive, humorous signs hanging above the locksmith, hat-maker and tailor shops; remember bearded wagon drivers showered in bags of wheat flour tied up in their aprons; remember old ladies in dresses offering you candies and apples; curly-haired, black-eyed children running in the dusty streets, their curls and eyes sparkling next to the pale hair and eyes of their Ukrainian counterparts and mingling like flowers generously scattered upon the rich, soft Ukrainian soil. Our grandfathers lived here; our mothers, and the mothers of our sons were born here.  So much sweat and so many tears have been shed here that no one could think to call the Jew a stranger, or say that he is alien to this land.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew. This was Lieutenant Shloyme Shmilevich Kipershtein. He fell into German entrapment in September of 1941 near the city Iagotin. His wife Vasilina Grigorievna Sokur, a Christian, had tried to pass him off as a Moldavian. The Gestapo brought her in for interrogation several times and came to her home two different times suspecting that her husband was a Jew, but she insisted that her husband’s name was Stepan, and his family name Novak. I met him, spoke with him, spent an entire evening listening to his stories, and all of us—Kipershtein, his wife, his fellow Christian neighbors, and I marveled at the fact that Kipershtein is alive and has not been killed. I did not meet any other Jews in Ukraine. Acquaintances told me that they had seen one Jew in Kharkov and one in Kursk; the writer Ilya Ehrenburg told me that he had met a Jewish female partisan somewhere in southern Ukraine. But that is all.

Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians?

The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth.  It is neither meaningful nor possible to list the names of every victim, for all of them are equally innocent and must be counted, regardless of whether they were famous and world-renown scholars, or whether they were unknown, barely literate women living in quiet shtetls far from any railroads. Why name some of the victims but remain silent about others? But it is impossible to list an entire people by name. There is no sense in, and no possibility of naming all the places where Jews were murdered in great numbers during the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942. These executions took place in every large and small city and in every shtetl. The only thing that must be said is that if there were 100 Jews living in a small town, then 100 Jews were slaughtered, nowhere a single person less. If 55,000 Jews lived in a city, then in that city 55,000 Jews were killed, and never a single person less. These massacres, we must understand, were carried out according to finely detailed lists, lists that did not overlook hundred-year old elders or newborn babies. These lists ensured the death of every last Jew in Ukraine.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew.

We must remember that mass murder was carried out uniformly, according to strict and elaborate instructions in which provisions were made for how to murder a person who was too senile to walk, and one who hadn’t yet left his mother’s arms or taken his first steps. It was announced in hundreds of towns that Jews would be sent to ghettos and were required to gather fifteen kilograms of baggage; and in hundreds of towns, they were then led to the outskirts and murdered with the latest automatic weapons.  Even now, even a year or two after the event, people who happened to see these executions still weep and lose their ability to speak upon recounting the images of horror and madness to which they became witnesses.

It is impossible to recount the names of all the colonels, generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants in the German army who assisted the Gestapo by organizing the execution of a people. It is impossible to recount the names of all the soldiers, lance-corporals, senior lancecorporals, non-commissioned officers, security guards and policemen who carried out this murder.

How is this murder different from the hundreds and thousands of people that the Germans executed elsewhere in fascist-occupied Europe? There is a difference, and it lies in the fact that the fascists execute French, Dutch, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech people for violating fascist rules and laws—hiding a switchblade or an old revolver, accidentally uttering an angry word, a young man refusing to abandon his elderly parents for a German labor camp, or offering a sip of water to a partisan. But the Germans execute the Jews only because of the fact that they are Jews. In their view, Jews have no right to be alive. To be a Jew is the greatest transgression, a crime that can be punished only by death. That is why all the Jews in Ukraine were murdered, and that is why they were killed in many countries in Europe. The majority of those killed were old women, the elderly, sick people and children. The reason for this is that able-bodied men, women and youth were able to retreat along with the Red Army and are now either fighting in its ranks or working on its behalf. Those who stayed behind in Ukraine did not have the strength to leave. It was these people—old people, sick people and children—whom the Germans killed in cold blood, annihilating all of them to a man.

As long as humanity has existed on earth, there has never been a murder of innocent and defenseless people as organized, massive, and as cruel as this one. This is the greatest crime ever committed in history, and history has known many crimes; it is written with blood. This is a matter of the murder of an entire people, the slaughter of millions of defenseless children, women and elders.  The Jews of Ukraine are no more.

Human consciousness is built in such an unfortunate, though perhaps also fortunate way that when people read or hear about a tragedy that has claimed millions of peoples’ lives, they are simply incapable of understanding the horrifying profundity of what took place. This limitation is a fortunate attribute of human consciousness because it protects people from moral suffering and insanity. This limit of human knowledge is equally terrible because it enables people to be lenient, superficial and morally passive.  But in this era, it seems to me, the life of individuals and entire peoples has been devalued, and the value of personal freedom has been trampled under the boot of Germanfascist dogma—and it is precisely now, as never before, that demands for moral purity and righteousness must be raised to unattainable heights, both with respect to our individual lives and to the State. It is not only Europe, but in fact all of humanity that stands on the threshold of extinction.  This immense earth has been transformed into a wasteland, thousands of its great cities have been blown up and burned down. The world war has taken millions of people who like animals live in pits and trenches, and flung them backwards to prehistoric times. H.G. Wells’ most dismal fantasies about imminent global catastrophe seem like harmless folktales in comparison to present-day reality.

This seething, amoral force came from National-Socialist Germany.

It was born from a sense of German racial exclusivity, from the deep and heartfelt conviction held by contemporary Germans that they are the chosen people; that their happiness, tranquility and security are the only sacred things on earth. This is an ideology of exclusivity, of suspicion and indifference to the suffering of other nations, and of sentimental pathos for one’s own people.  This consciousness is the scourge of present day humanity, and it was aroused in Germany. It has led her down a path of bloody crimes, and it shall bring her to the precipice of cruel defeat.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness? Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda.

In our times, the equality of all people constitutes the highest moral principle of humanity.  Racism is the exact opposite of this principle.  People will ask me, ‘are the Germans a nation of murderers and criminals, then?’

No! For we believe in the great principle of equality of the world’s peoples. We know that the German people have not only produced Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Rozenberg; not just the Hohenzollern and Krupp dynasties; not only Stennes and Guderian, Ley and Ribbentrop, Horst Wessel and Nietzsche. This is the same people who produced Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feurbach, Marx, Engels, and the great martyr Liebnekht. It produced the enlightened wisdom and pure soul of August Bebel, and has borne thousands of proletarian fighters, hundreds of humane and modest social and scholarly activists, and many kind women and sincere old workers.  When the war is over, will we tell the German people, ‘You are murderers: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’?  Will we avenge the murder of a people by killing another?

No. Democracy’s victory will not only be a victory of weapons. There will be a true victory when the dark force of racism is finally reduced to ashes. Germans will understand that the idea of racial exceptionalism is a criminal and false one, and that their happiness and peace are not the only sacred things in the world. This victor will endure because of the mighty power of weapons, which will force the Germans to always know that all people are equally entitled to life on earth. The raised sword is answered with the language of the sword. This is the sacred logic and morality of contemporary war.  But today we are still at war, and Hitler’s obedient murderous gang, fascist Germany, is spilling innocent blood.

I had the chance to talk to dozens of German POWs.  Our conversations took place amidst the smoky ruins of devastated cities and villages. We talked about mass murder, about executions of Ukrainian and Russian populations, and about the complete destruction of the Jewish people, and I did not once detect in them a sense of humiliation, despair, or desire to disavow the disgraceful crimes associated with the name of Germany. With extraordinary naivet., all of them espoused the view that ‘crimes against humanity’ are not really crimes because their purpose is to benefit Germany. These soldiers could explain every act in terms of its instrumental value, and many of them said that the execution of the Jewish people had in fact turned out to be useless, and that mass murder and the burning of hundreds and thousands of villages had not brought Germany the advantages that had been expected from these measures. It is from this point of view that they judged the massive crimes committed by Germany.

Why did National-Socialist Germany become the executioner of the Jewish people? I want to raise this particular question not only because I myself am a Jew, and not only because those closest to me were victims of fascist bloodshed.

The treatment of Jews expressed contemporary fascist German ideology and tactics in their crudest and most complete and final form. The Germans did not commit such bestial, inhumane violence, lacking all traces of humanity, against any other people on earth. For fascism, hatred for the Jews became paramount; it was the fuel for its fire. Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism.

The significance of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that a war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world. Given present circumstances, Jews do not have their own state, and are scattered across all parts of the world. One finds Jews among American capitalists, English social activists, Russian communists, and French anarcho-syndicalists.  This is very convenient for a state and people that have raised the black flag of war against all states and all peoples of the world. By selecting the Jews as victims of its demagogy, National-Socialism freed its hand against every nation and social class. It was able to declare war both on Marxism and the new structure of Russian society, and on plutocratic England, America and France; in a word, it was able to declare war against the world. This choice of victims constituted the first decision made by the criminal, jingoist National-Socialists.

Anti-Semitism has always been the banner, weapon and wool used by reactionaries to blindfold the masses.  It has always been an opiate in dark times when ruling minorities sought to deceive the masses, and deflect the righteous anger of the oppressed. National-Socialism came to power in Germany during a period when reaction had gripped every stratum and class within German society.  Reactionary politics won out in Germany after its defeat in the imperialist war of 1914. Blinded by national egoism, every strata of German society had invested different hopes in an eventual victory. But the war failed to resolve the conflicts of the modern capitalist world, and the Treaty of Versailles proved equally unable to resolve them. The solution to these conflicts lies in the great and sacred principles of brotherhood and equality of all peoples; it lies in the eradication of imperialistic conflict between states, the elimination of class structure in society, and in the creation of a collective means of production and a just distribution of goods.

But to its own misfortune, humanity did not have the strength to complete this task.

At that point, National-Socialism led onto the executioner’s block a universal and eternal, tried and true, defenseless and therefore desirable enemy: the Jew. With no law and no army to defend him, the Jew is an optimal target for the wrath of a weak underdog.

‘You fear proletarian revolution,’ the Nazis told Germany’s capitalists, ‘you fear communism, which is a hundred times more frightening to you than the Versailles Treaty. We too fear the proletarian revolution. Let us unite against the Jews. They are, after all, the eternal origin oftrouble and bloody rebellion; it is they who as orators and authors of revolutionary books inflame and agitate the masses; they who created the idea of class struggle and proletarian revolution!’

To the toiling German masses the Nazis said, ‘You suffer the consequences of the Versailles Treaty; you are hungry and out of work. The heavy burden of reparations has fallen on your weary backs. But just look at whose hands turn the wheel—it is the hands of Jewish tycoons, Jewish bankers, kings without crowns in America, France and England. Your enemies are our enemies; come, and let us fight together.’

Addressing the German intelligentsia, the Nazis said ‘You are humiliated, your ideals have been shattered. No one needs your talents or knowledge. You, salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Don’t you see the cold and merciless eyes of world Jewry gazing at you like a fog encircling Germany? Let us fight on behalf of our national honor and trampled earth, let us together extinguish the decaying world of Jewry.’

Having reached this dead end, Germany blindly followed National-Socialism. It was pushed onto this path by defeat and reaction. But not by these things alone, no.  Germany had been prepared for this path over the centuries by a culture of national and political egoism. Germany had never lost faith in the strength of its clenched fist to knock the world flat. It had always continued to believe in the sanctity of righteous war, and regarded the strategic plans of its military as its highest social ethic. And so, ten years ago Germany finally became wedded to National-Socialism. The explosive interaction of historical factors and a reactionary atmosphere became the second reason why National-Socialism felt compelled to choose the Jewish people as victims of its criminal demagogy.

And the final reason: fascism is profoundly opposed to the idea of equality among nations, of the brotherhood and unity of all peoples of the world. The foundational principle of fascism, after all, is a belief in the master German race.  Fascism therefore decided to construct a great ladder of forced labor of nations. It resolved to poison each nation against all others: to place the Dutch and Danes on the highest rungs of the ladder of punishment in order to show them that they are better off than the Norwegians and French; to poison the French with an awareness of the petty privileges they have over the Czechs and Greeks; to place the Serbs further down, and appease them with the fact that Ukrainians and Belorussians stand below them on the bottom rungs. And finally, fascism resolved to frighten this whole entire colony of peoples, its ladder of oppression, with the horrible abyss of non-existence it had prepared for the Jewish people.

But for fascism it was not enough to scare the Ukrainians with the destruction of the Jewish people, or to placate their fear with the notion that they had at least been granted existence on the ladder of forced labor. Fascism hoped for more than this; it hoped to infect Ukrainians with hatred for the Jews and to deceive them by spreading the idea that Jews were to blame for all the poverty, misfortune and burdens that had devastated Ukraine.  The principle to divide and conquer, and to poison enslaved and doomed nations with hatred for one another was the third factor that compelled Adolf Hitler to embark on a bloody provocation, and to lead millions of defenseless women, elderly people and children to the executioner’s block.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness?  Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda. They are unprincipled by the very fact of their existence, and people without principles do not possess and are not capable of possessing any beliefs.  Their actions are guided solely by temporary circumstances and pragmatism. While I may disagree with President Roosevelt on several issues, I am absolutely certain that regardless of how much circumstances might change, Roosevelt’s principles would remain the same.  There is infinitely greater integrity, honesty and room for partnership in this persistence of values (even regarding matters where there are great differences of opinion), than there is in the conformism, deceit, and sudden shifts of sham ideology that constitutes the extremes of German National-Socialism.

At this point I wish to express some ideas about the inner essence of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism exists in every country in the world and has existed throughout human history. It can be found even in contemporary democratic states. Its character changes in different times and places, of course.  Anti-Semitism in England and anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia are not the same thing. Its appearance depends on reactionary forces, such as deceitful attempts of ruling powers to explain and ameliorate social and ideological discontent. Anti-Semitism is a paradigmatic conflict with no solution. The period of post-revolutionary reaction in Russia between 1905 and 1911 has become known for bloody Jewish pogroms and charges of ritual murder. But the great Russian Revolution was a period of history that did not know anti-Semitism. Here I am speaking of state anti-Semitism, that is, of the willful incitement of anti-Semitism by a government apparatus.

In addition to state anti-Semitism, there is also so-called ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism. Ideological anti-Semitism is a phenomenon born of a physiological need to explain human and global problems by examining them in a looking glass rather a mirror. One finds ideological anti-Semites primarily among educated people. When the great Dostoevsky blamed the Jews for impoverishing the masses in Russia’s borderlands, he merely substituted the invisible and mysterious historical process that had produced bourgeois, feudal Russian society with the idea that Jewish commercial circles had supposedly invaded Russia.  Mid-nineteenth century Russia experienced an intense growth in capitalist relations. Petty buyers and sellers, small factory owners, and contractors began to appear everywhere, destroying the old means of production to benefit themselves, and ruining idyllic relations between feudal lords and their serfs.

Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism….A war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world.

Dostoevsky saw the new relations, but he did not, or perhaps could not see the new qualities and types of Russian people—the plundering buyers, merciless leasers, and greedy factory owners—who accompanied them. He did not sense that Russian people had changed at all, and this meant that some other people who were not Russians had introduced the new qualities into life. These were the Jews: people who had no love for the system of Russian patriarchy, and no connection to the soil; people who were driven only by a hunger for profit, and who regarded the toiling masses with cold indifference. Dostoevsky saw these features in the Jewish merchant and developed a profound hatred for him. But the one thing he failed to understand was that by looking at the Jewish trader, Jewish leaser, and Jewish middle-man, he was only gazing at a mirror that showed him a magnified image of the new Russian bourgeoisie, frantically evolving in hundreds and thousands of Russian villages, provincial cities, capitals and far-flung hamlets.

This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout all of Jewish history. The medieval Spanish inquisition that burned Jews at the stake did not grasp the fact that it held up the Jews as a mirror of its own rigid intolerance, orthodoxy and backwards prejudice; that by burning Jews, it was contending with flaws that had grown up inside its own heart. When Russian reactionary thinkers perceived the Jews as the source of a revolutionary epidemic, they did not and perhaps could not know that they were seeing a reflection of a Russia that was unconsciously birthing a revolution in thousands of its factories, plants and mines, and in its universities and army barracks. Ideological anti-Semitism cannot and does not want to understand this.  One can put it this way: ‘Tell me what you blame on the Jews, and I will tell you what you are guilty of yourself.’

What did the Nazis blame on the Jews?  They accused them of the seven deadly sins. The paradoxical, remarkable thing is that the portrait that the Nazis painted of Jews—their supposedly fanatical racism, thirst for global power, hunger to enslave and recklessly rule over humankind—was in fact a self-portrait. By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans are now being expelled from Ukraine.  Every day the glorious, weary earth is being liberated, as if a flood of muddy, filthy German hatred is receding and in its wake, bread is once again beginning to rise, hunched black trees, bushes and forests are straightening themselves out, and the sun and wind are drying out soil that is soaked with blood and tears. People are speaking in normal voices again and looking at the world with open eyes. Millions of people have been freed from slavery.

Ukraine was one of the fascists’ most important prizes. Its discussions about Ukraine had begun as early as 1933. And now, it is in the process of losing—it has already lost—Ukraine. Fascism failed to understand (how could it possibly understand?) the strength of our people’s resistance, their great spirit and undying sense of human worth. Fascism did not understand the power of the Soviet system! A system that endured trials of adversity in the Revolution, Civil War and period of great construction.  Fascism misunderstood and underestimated the friendship of nations among the peoples of the Soviet Union, and crudely dismissed the Union as a ‘geographic concept.’ Fascism was incapable of fathoming that the Soviet Union is the noble, triumphant and courageous soul of liberated humanity.

Fascism did not gauge the strength of our Red Army; its powerful reserves, courage, technical power. It failed to see that this army is immortal, that its generals, soldiers, tanks, guns and planes are the creations of an immortal people. With its boorish, small and primitive mind fascism attempted to change the march of history. German fascism understood nothing and was mistaken in everything.

By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans failed to deceive Ukraine because its people cannot be deceived. The senseless and horrifying murder of elders, women and children transformed Ukraine into a nightmare. In Ukrainian towns and villages, people speak with profound empathy for the victims, and with repulsive hatred for the butchers who committed a mass murder of Jews in the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942.

Khristia Chuniak, a forty year old peasant from the village Krasilovka, in the Brovary district of Kiev oblast, described to me how the Germans led a Jewish doctor named Feldman to be executed in Brovary. This Feldman was an old bachelor who had adopted two Christian boys and was loved by everyone. A group of weeping and lamenting peasants went to appeal to the German commanding officer so that he would spare Feldman’s life.  The women’s tears moved the commander, and he agreed.  This was in the fall of 1941. Feldman continued to live and work as a doctor in Brovary, and he was executed in the spring of 1943. Khristia Chuniak described how the old man had to dig his own grave; apparently he had to die alone, for by the spring of 1943 there were no longer any living Jews. As she came to the end of the story, she sobbed and openly wept. The sorrow-filled words of this simple story expressed with astonishing clarity Ukraine’s relationship to its murdered Jewry.

No one believed the fascist propaganda that Jews were preparing to enslave Ukraine and take over the world.  Ukrainians were familiar with Jews after generations of working, growing old and dying beside them on the same earth, and working people have always been free and estranged from anti-Semitism in all of its forms. Towns with large Jewish populations like Berdichev had never even known anti-Semitism. Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews always lived and worked together in friendship in these towns.

And so a great people, simple and wise, figured out the eternal tragedy of the Jewish people, and understood something that many educated reactionaries could not: they understood the inner essence of anti-Semitism. The people knew that the Germans were themselves guilty of whatever crimes they had blamed on the Jews, that the concepts of world domination, bloody racism, suspicion, and hatred had been imported by the fascists themselves.  The people knew who had tormented, humiliated and robbed them; they understood why the Germans shouted day and night about the criminal Juden. Once they understood this, they bowed their heads in sympathy and grief for the executed Jews, and with silent contempt, they clenched their teeth and glared at the Nazis.

The people understood the inner essence of fascist anti-Semitism, and with their simple and wise vision, they saw through a mirror of lies and looked deep into the eyes of the butchers of modern humanity. This is how they defeated the goal of National-Socialism, a goal that led Germany to put an entire people on the executioner’s block, and commit a crime unprecedented in all of human history.

In gullies and deep ravines, in anti-tank ditches of sand and clay, under heavy black soil, and in swamps and pits, there lie hastily flung bodies of professors and workers, doctors and students, old people and children.

No sound of tears or moaning; no sight of faces drawn from suffering. Jews are silent with the dreadful silence of the village Kozary on the old highway to Kiev.  The wind carries sand onto enormous common graves.  Grass has grown on the fields of death. Tall poplar trees flutter above the earth, like dark flags folded in a sign of mourning.

Silence and peace.

Oh, if the murdered people could be revived for an instant, if the ground above Babi Iar in Kiev or Ostraia Mogila in Voroshilovgrad could be lifted, if a penetrating cry came forth from hundreds and thousands of lips covered in soil, then the Universe would shudder.

The Yiddish version ‘Ukraina on yidn’ appeared in Einikayt on 25 November 1943 and 2 December 1943; for the Russian back-translation from the Yiddish, see ‘Ukraina bez evreev,’ trans. Rokhl Baumvol’, in Vasilii Grossman, Na evreiski temi, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1985) vol.2:333-340. The complete Russian version of ‘Ukraina bez evreev’ on which the present translation is based may be found in VEK: Vestnik Evreiskoi Kultury, no. 4 (Riga, 1990): 1-8

Published with the kind permission of the Grossman Estate, courtesy of Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd

Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two great Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century and lifelong friends, took opposing sides on one of the great Jewish debates of modernity: was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

Scholem believed in the utopian collective—a partial redemption in the here and now—while Benjamin saw any solution other than global revolution as usurping the prerogative of the Messiah. In 1923, Scholem emigrated to Palestine to help build a utopian community. A series of letters between the two men, covering religion, politics, Marx and Kafka, illustrate the passion of the debate between Communism and Zionism, the two philosophical positions warring for the heart of the interwar, vulnerably assimilated, European Jew.

At the heart of their discussion lies the failure of the Enlightenment to assimilate Europe’s Jewish population. France,the home of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, had been rocked by the Dreyfus affair, and the full extent of Jewish vulnerability was exposed and felt everywhere. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, responded to this failure by turning to theology, attempting to root utopia in the revival of the mystical tradition. Benjamin, on the other hand, rejected Zionism and progressive politics, believing that a superior, Communist, universality could emerge from the Jewish position in Europe.

Neither man was typical of their political tribe. Scholem’s ‘Cultural Zionism’ placed him apart from mainstream Zionists, who wanted to found a powerful Jewish nation state excluding the Arab population of Palestine. In a letter to Benjamin reporting on the 1931 Zionist Congress, Scholem describes his Zionism as a ‘religious-mystical quest for a regeneration of Judaism.’ He also warns of parallels between the attacks upon him—a ‘deracinated intellectual’—by the mainstream Zionists who deplored his ‘Diaspora mentality’ and those attacks upon Jewish intellectuals by the German far-right.

He rejected a future for the Jews that was not based upon reviving an authentic experience carried by the fundamental texts of Judaism. Underpinning his utopian collective was this command from Exodus: ‘You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites’. Not only did it dissolve the distinction between priest and non-priest, unifying the sacred with the profane, but it made each person equal. For Scholem, this particular type of Zionism represented the fulfillment of Jewish theology. Even before he emigrated to Palestine, he argued, in his 1918 text ‘On the Bolshevik Revolution’, that there could not be a revolution for the Jews, as this would be tantamount to building the messianic kingdom without the Torah. Founding a Jewish collective in Palestine along these lines should synthesise theory and practice. In 1933, when Benjamin contemplated emigrating to Palestine, Scholem warned him that only if he were able to ‘feel completely at one with this land and the cause of Judaism’ would his emigration to Jerusalem be a success. For Benjamin however, Judaism, as the experience of marginality and the failure of assimilation, denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself. The contra- dictions between theory and practice, the individual and community, politics and theology, were, for Benjamin, testament to the unredeemed state of the world and the necessity of Revolution. Rather than Palestine in 1933 he chose Paris, embracing the very experience of marginality and exile that had prompted Scholem to emigrate.

Was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

In Benjamin’s work, after his Marxist turn in the mid 1920s, there could be no immediate return to the teachings of Torah. His figure of the ‘angel of history’ represents a critique of Scholem’s understanding of Judaism, particu- larly, his notion that ‘all that befalls the world is only an expression of this primal and fundamental galut (exile)’ Of the angel, Benjamin writes: ‘his face is turned towards the past.Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ Communism, he believed, had the power to raise the dead through the force accumulated through past political action (even when that action had failed):

It is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [refined and spiritual things] make their presence felt in the class struggle.They manifest themselves in this struggle [of the oppressed] as courage, humour and fortitude.They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.

With his commitment to political action, Benjamin takes his place in a canon of Jewish Messianism that asserts humanity’s role in achieving redemption. He translates this into Marxist terms:

Not man, or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.

Benjamin’s ‘Jewish interpretation’ of Marx enacts a short-circuit between partiality (the agent of redemption is the working class not humanity as a whole) and a stronger universality (the inclusion not only of present and future generations among the redeemed but also the past generations of the downtrodden).

Both Benjamin and Scholem take as their starting point the inauthenticity and vulnerability of assimilated European Jews, but for Benjamin, the response of Zionism, even the variety advocated by Scholem, was a betrayal of what was essential to Judaism. The sharpest description of this Zionist tendency comes from Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch: Zionism was a denial of the Jews’ ‘power of being chosen as the agents of redemption’ and entailed the assimilation of Jews, previously a internationalist, group, into the system of balkanised nation states. Even in Scholem’s ‘cultural Zionism’, the attempt to found healthy socialist communities of the previously excluded represented a refusal of the link between Jewish marginality and universality in favour of partiality and fixed national identity in which all contradictions were resolved.

For Benjamin, Judaism denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself

Both Benjamin and Scholem’s politics were defeated. Scholem’s anarchic cultural Zionism was marginalised by mainstream Zionism, which adopted the reactionary policy towards the Arabs that he always feared, and created Israel as a nation state like all others. Benjamin killed himself fleeing the Nazis, who, in turn, extinguished the possibilities of European Jewish Communism. However, there remains something to salvage politically from Benjamin’s rejection of Zionism: how the refusal of fixed identities and the easy resolution of contradictions cannot be undertaken in the name of a complacent liberal cosmopolitanism, but instead always carry a link between marginality and the universal. The contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou’s link of foreignness to universality in the absolute defence of immigrants repeats this:‘let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war’.

Tom Gann is a political activist and former Labour Parliamentary Candidate. He blogs on politics as part of the Labour Partisan collective at labourpartisan.blogspot.com

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause.

In forming Tel Aviv’s first cabaret, Ha’Meiri and Koestler chose the name Ha’kumkum, from a Yiddish saying, ‘Don’t speak nonsense into the kettle.’ Ironically, the choice of name itself seems to indicate a permission to speak nonsense, and thus to disguise the Kumkum’s particular brand of aggression and judgment within humour and play.

The choice of Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem as the site of the Kumkum was an obvious one. Tel Aviv had already become a cultural centre, boasting Palestine’s first opera house, ballet and museum. The British presence was also much less obtrusive in the ‘first modern Hebrew city’. The British governmental offices were in Jerusalem and, though British soldiers could still be spotted walking the streets of Tel Aviv, they were usually there as tourists rather than as law enforcers. Cabarettists felt free to create biting political satire, without fearing undue disruption from the British censor. Moreover, the majority of Tel Aviv’simmigrant population were European and somewhat familiar with satiric cabaret. Tel Aviv’s cabarets, alongside a number of other performance genres, might never have succeeded without the 4th and 5th aliyahs, or mass immigrations to the Jewish settlement of Palestine; the 4th aliyah brought huge numbers of young eastern Europeans to Tel Aviv (such as Ha’Meiri), while the 5th brought German Jews to the city, together with their hard capital, affinity for Weimar cabaret and hunger for sophisticated nightlife.

Through its satiric cabarets, tel aviv offered the yishuv an outlet for its socially unacceptable emotions

In 1929, actors from Ha’Kumkum split from Ha’Meiri’s original troop and founded the Ha’metateh, which ran until 1952 and became the most popular ‘Teatron Ammami’ or folk theatre in Jewish Palestine. Usishkin, a highly respected Zionist leader, was said to have claimed,‘If I want to know what is going on in populist Israel, I simply go to the Metateh.’The songs of the Metateh were among the most well known of the period, and (after the founding of the first Israeli radio station, Kol Yisrael, in 1936) were played on the radio constantly. Many of them subsequently became part of the canon of Shirey EretzYisrael—the songs of the early State of Israel.

Subjects for satire included corruption in the munici- pality and tension between various ethnic groups in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine): for example the song Shir Hateymaniyot which Natan Alterman wrote in 1934 for the Metateh, based on a traditional Yemenite Shabbat song. In Alterman’s re-imagining of the song, a cleaner complains to the audience of her experiences scrubbing the floors of Tel Aviv’s municipality and interacting with the governmental officers who work there. At the opening of the song, she proclaims: ‘A fire burns in my eyes; in my body there’s a trembling. Don’t hate me because I am dark!’ with the Hebrew text echoing the Song of Songs.

Alterman’s cleaner goes on to sing about her scrubbing techniques and the constantly expanding city of Tel Aviv, all the time with a cleaning brush in her hand.While this caricature may have offended some, the female protagonist regales us with her attitudes in a loud, empowered, voice. Moreover, the song functioned as part of the larger cultural meeting taking place in theYishuv between various ethnic groups, a meeting in which the satiric songs of cabaret played an essential part.

Alterman was not the only cabaret writer who employed existent songs such as the Teymaniyot melody to new ends; composers such as Ha’meira, Wilensky, Ha’Roosi and others all did the same.This musical grafting technique is inherently satiric, creating a gap between the original song and the newly penned one, thus commenting on both the old version and the new. In the case of Shir Ha’teymaniyot, Alterman makes use of the traditionalYemenite melody to denote a new kind of Yemenite woman;she sings the same old religious melodies, but instead of singing them around the Shabbat table, she sings of Tel Aviv.

Songs targeting the British were encouraged—such as Tzik Tzik Boom/Zeh Lo Tov (It’s Not Good)—as well as songs which mocked the capitalist values of Tel Aviv. Titina, a 1932 satiric song by Chaim Chefer, is based on a Charlie Chaplin melody that the famous comedian performed in City Lights. In Chayim Chefer’s reimagining of the melody, a pioneer couple—Titina and Ephraim—are trying to find a home for themselves inside British Palestine. Ephraim is content to stay on the kibbutz, digging ditches and draining swamps, but Titina has other plans in mind. As a result of her constant nagging, the couple eventually set up shop in Tel Aviv, where they quickly make large amounts of money and surrender to a life of carefree, capitalist decadence. Of course, the Tel Aviv audience enjoying this mockery-in-song were, for the most part, people just like Titina and Ephraim. By laughing at these characters, they were also laughing at themselves.

Attending a cabaret became an ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire

Ha’kumkum and Ha’metateh’s satiric performances had clear boundaries in terms of subject matter. British censorship forbade the portrayal of Arab characters on stage and Jewish cultural constraints were equally strict; I challenge you to find a single cabaret song from 1930’s Tel Aviv which questions Zionism, or a song which upholds Yiddish or German as the real language of the Jewish state, or one which promotes life outside the Yishuv. I have also not encountered a single yearning or nostalgic song for a home left behind in Paris,Vilna, or Berlin. Such songs simply don’t exist in this repertoire, although they form an important part of the Yiddish Theater of the Lower East Side.

Moreover, the cabarets were limited by the injunction that they only perform in Hebrew. In some of the satiric songs and sketches there are snippets of Yiddish or German, as well as English—particularly when a British officer appears in a song. But aside from these interruptions, all sketch and song material was performed exclusively in Hebrew. Attending a cabaret became a kind of ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire.The challenge to write and perform exclusively in Hebrew tested the talents and ideological fervour of many a cabaret artist, most of whom arrived in the Yishuv with virtually no Hebrew. Even Ha’Meiri, who was well versed in Hebrew before arriving in Tel Aviv, could be found at times scribbling in Hungarian in the margins of a song or sketch. Sometimes he wrote new lines in his mother tongue, which would later be translated into Hebrew.

Though satiric cabaret material became hugely popular and much loved by the mid-thirties, it did have dissenters, particularly at the start. A 1976 article from the newspaper Al Ha’mishmar reflects back on the times, and writes: ‘Already in 1928 the Kumkum…was performing programs which angered critics and the establishment in general.’ By the heyday of the Metateh, however, the act of creating satire in the Yishuv had been assimilated into the mainstream, turning the act of satiric performance into an essential expression of Israeli identity. As Leah Goldberg reminds us: ‘This is the first time that the Jewish capacity for irony, which became a fixture of the exile, returns to its roots, healthy, deeply planted in the ground.’

Musing on the function of satire, scholar Friedrich Max writes:‘That satire is an attack is probably the least debatable claim that one can make about it. In such attacks we have on public display some of the least socially acceptable emotions: anger, indignation, frustration, right- eousness, hatred, and malice.’Through its satiric cabarets, Tel Aviv offered the Yishuv an outlet for its own socially unacceptable emotions: disillusionment, frustration, anxiety, and rage. Through the satiric expression of these emotions, presented on stage, Tel Aviv’s cabarets guided audiences, ultimately, towards a love of nation, language, and land.

Rebecca Joy Fletcher is New York City based playwright, actress, and cantor; she is also a scholar and perform of international Jewish cabaret. Recent achievements include: the hit one woman show Cities of Light, which has been touring cabaret venues and synagogues across the US, as well as venues in London, Paris, and Warsaw. Next fall the Piven Theatre in Chicago premiers the theatrical run of Cities. Rebecca guest lectures and teaches at universities around the world and serves as a Vice President of the Association for Jewish Theater. For the on-sight, archival research she’s done into Tel Aviv’s cabarets Rebecca is indebted to the assistance of the Confidence Foundation. www.RebeccaJoyFletcher.com

And once again, a feeling of superstitious terror took hold of the enemy: Were the ones attacking them people, could they be mortal?’ In a slightly modified form, these and other words from Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘The Direction of the Main Strike’ (1942) are engraved on Mamaev Kurgan memorial on a hill overlooking Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Grossman’s words refer to the shock of Nazi forces as they faced the heroism of Soviet soldiers fighting under Stalin’s order: ‘Not a step back’.The Soviet victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, but it could not stop the Shoah. When the Soviet troops, Grossman embedded with them, came to the death camps in Poland in the summer of 1944, most of the Jews of Europe had been annihilated.

The Jewish-Russian writer and political thinker Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is not identified as the source of the seething words carved out on the Stalingrad memorial. Grossman’s deletion—words ‘popular’ author ‘unknown’,— constitutes much more than a double twist of black Soviet humour. According to John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s dedicated biographers, the absence of Grossman’s name on the Stalingrad memorial is an ‘open wound’ on the writer’s legacy. Fifty-nine year old Vasily Grossman died in Moscow of stomach cancer, devastated by the Soviet efforts to erase him from history. His novel Life and Fate, a comparative indictment of Stalinism and Hitlerism, had been ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961, leaving him free to die of illness and grief during the headiest years of the Thaw. ‘They strangled me in the back alley’, Grossman had said to Boris Yampolsky, author of the novel Country Fair (1940), a lament for Jewish life in the former Pale. Ironically, some of Grossman’s loyal official supporters were the ageing generals he had interviewed at Stalingrad, who understood his love for the ‘holy Red Army’ and the extent to which it had bolstered the war effort. In orchestrating Grossman’s literary death, the regime was symbolically murdering the legacy of the people’s war against Hitler while also pogromising the Soviet memory of the Shoah.

Born Iosif Grossman but accustomed to being called Vasya (diminutive of Vasily), Grossman adopted the emblematic Jewish-Russian pen name ‘Vasily Grossman’. His first novel, Glück Auf!, a Soviet Germinal devoid of desire or violence, is stronger and less formulaic than his next novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937-1940), a story of a working class youth’s path to Bolshevism. His early prose of the 1930s is a search for his own voice, via the styles and artistic devices of other Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Perhaps Grossman’s greatest inspiration was Chekhov (he would title one of his Stalingrad essays ‘Through Chekhov’s Eyes’; the essay zoomed in on the experience of the famous sniper Anatoly Chekhov). To write in a form that resisted pathos and narrative closure would remain a lifelong aim, even as a Tolstoyan novelistic ambition pulsed in his temples. These early works gave little indication of the authorial voice Grossman would acquire in 1941 at the war front reporting from the trenches, gathering his material directly from the fighting soldiers. There is courage and sacrifice in his wartime articles, but there is also humour and tenderness; despite being a time of personal trauma the war against Nazism was also, for Grossman, a time of glory—literary, civic, and military. For him and many other Jewish soldiers, including poets and novelists serving as military journalists, this was a war with double the cause and double the commitment. (In the notebooks, Grossman recorded a comment by a Jewish commanding officer that ‘in a war like this Jews should be fighting like fanatics’).

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Sung by the Barry Sisters, and to audience guffaws at the mention of prostitution, ‘Ketzele Baroiges’ is a popular song from Eastern Europe. But I am English, a Yiddish folk singer recently turned London Yiddish song detective, and in scouring for Yiddish songs that make mention of London people, places and experiences, the subject of prostitution has come up repeatedly. Sometimes, as in ‘Ketzele Baroiges’, it is a comic aside but in other cases it describes a social reality, reflecting Jewish history in London.

After Tsar Nicholas II’s assassination in 1881, life for Jews in the Pale of Settlement became desperate. Terrorised by waves of pogroms and new legislation that prohibited them from living in the countryside, thousands left the shtetl for the city where they tried to find work. The only option was factory work, but Jews were largely unskilled in factory technologies, anti-Semitic factory owners were reluctant to employ them and many religious Jews could not combine factory hours with religious observance. Many chose to leave Eastern Europe and seek a better life in England and America.

On arrival in England, the majority of immigrants headed for the East End of London. There are no reliable figures, but at its peak in around 1915, this square mile housed up to 250,000 Jews. Not for nothing was it called the Jewish East End: whole streets were Jewish markets, there were Yiddish theatres and synagogues on every other street corner and an abundance of Yiddish newspapers and magazines. The existing Jewish community was concerned about the record influx of poor immigrants and how it would affect their standing in British society. The Rothschilds and other wealthy Jewish families built sanitary tenement blocks for hundreds of Jewish families, but many could not afford the high rents and were forced into renting only part of a room. Competition for jobs was tough and workers were poorly paid for long hours of hard, often dangerous work.

Morris Winchevsky’s song Di Dray Shvester is the story of three sisters who probably lived in the East End but worked in the West End, in Leicester Square:

Di yingster farkoyft dortn blumen

Di eltere, bendlekh tzi shikh

In speyt in der nakht tut zi kumen

Di drite vus handlt mit zikh

The youngest sold flowers, the next shoelaces and the eldest herself. The lyrics continue, ‘The younger sisters don’t hate the oldest sister, they hate di velt (the world) and di shtot, (the town) and di gas, (the street). Late at night when they come home, the shoelaces and flowers are mixed with their tears’.  Morris Winchevsky, a political activist was born in Lithuania in 1856. A socialist and atheist, he moved to Whitechapel where he lived for five years and co-founded the first Yiddish socialist newspaper, Dos Poylishe Yidl. According to Bill Fishman in East End Jewish Radicals:

Winchevsky’s distinctive style may be discerned throughout, with its regular alternating sweep from pathos to bitter irony in the traditional patois of the shtetl. He and his co-writers present the reader with a many-sided picture of immigrant life in the 1880s. Features included local, national and world news with political analysis and commentary; correspondence from the other great Jewish centre in Leeds and weekly dramatic criticism of the spiel at the Yiddish theatre. But above all was a didactic appraisal of the harsh conditions suffered by Jews, with practical suggestions for their amelioration.

The mass movement of Jews enabled Jewish criminals to take advantage of international links and develop, within an already established ‘white slave trade’, a trade in Jewish women. Conditions in Eastern Europe made this easy; waves of emigration had created a dearth of young men, leaving families open to seemingly suitable suitors.  Jewish traffickers would procure women under the pretext of marriage (often a secret stille khuppe that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law), offering girls greater economic ease and a better life in London (or the US, South America, and South Africa). Once there they would be sold to brothels or forced into prostitution, powerless to help themselves. They were easy victims: often from religious homes, they were innocent of worldly matters and unable to speak English.

The trafficking didn’t only take place abroad.  Fishman describes the men ready at the dockside to take advantage of unaccompanied young women:

…young men were employed to pick up lonely girls embarking at the dockside and inveigle them to a place of refuge, which soon revealed itself as a brothel …Virginity being regarded as sacrosanct before marriage, the fallen woman could find no redemption but to sink deeper into the morass of prostitution.

Jewish trafficking was an embarrassment to the Jewish community who wanted to keep it out of the media, particularly concerned it would be seized upon by anti-Semites (as indeed it was by journalist and agitator Arnold White, among others). The situation, however, was made public by organisations set up to protect and support the women such as The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). Set up in 1885 by women from leading London Jewish families, JAPGW set out to protect women and reduce the trade by publicising its existence and making communities aware of the dangers. Lloyd Gartner writes that as early as 1890 there were notices printed in Jewish newspapers on the continent ‘warning young girls from leaving their homes by the advice of strangers or under the care of strangers’. The JAPGW made their presence felt at the dockside, boarding ships to find women travelling alone or with male non-family members.  They would escort women to their addresses, and if these addresses were suspicious, they would offer protection. Criminologist Paul Knepper credits the JAPGW as ‘the most visible Jewish anti-crime organisation in Great Britain and the model for initiatives in Jewish communities across the world’.

Although the East End was London’s largest Jewish community, the sisters in Winchevsky’s song go to the West End to work. Soho, a notorious area for prostitution, was a wealthier area with businessmen and foreign visitors. Writer Bernard Kops, in his memoir The World is a Wedding, recalls the kindness of his neighbour in the 1930s:

A woman who lived nearby sometimes brought us in potatoes. She worked ‘Up West’ my mother told me —‘Up West’ was that fabulous world beyond, our Eldorado. It was only years later that I guessed what sort of work the woman did — for who in the buildings could afford to give their neighbours potatoes in those days?

I learned Dray Shvester at London Klezfest in 2006 from Karsten Troyke, a charismatic German Yiddish folk singer who found the song on a 1961 recording by the Buenos Aires Yiddish actress Cipe Lincovsky. I later learned from Cipe that Helene Weigel (widow of Bertolt Brecht and then director of his theatre) gave her the lyrics. According to Weigel, Brecht loved the song because the sisters do not judge their sister but blame society for forcing her into prostitution.

According to the elderly Jewish Londoners I interviewed, girls were vulnerable up until as late as the 1940s and warned not to enter the Jewish gown shops in Oxford Street, as they could ‘take you into the back room and sell you to the white slave trade.’ Not all Jewish East End prostitution was a result of white slave trafficking. There were times when wome became prostitutes of their own volition, supplementing their tiny incomes when necessary. Historian Lara Marks has recounted how frequently a Jewish woman would follow her husband to London only to find he had disappeared or started a new family, leaving her an agunah, a deserted wife, unable to get the divorce needed by Jewish law as it had to be given by the husband. The Jewish charities would pay to track down the husband, but not to support the wife. Whichever way Jewish women turned, they met with discrimination.  As they lacked charitable support and were faced with a menial existence in the labour market, prostitution could seem an attractive alternative. German Jewish feminist movement, the Judischer Frauenbund, in 1904, considered prostitution as a non-choice, akin to the ‘voluntary-ness’ of a young foreign legionnaire who had no idea what he was getting himself into. Pappenheim became an outspoken activist in the fight against the white slave trade. Historian Marion Kaplan describes the attitude of the Judischer Frauenbund to the enslaved women, whether enslaved by pimps or by poverty.

She writes:

It was not unusual for Jewish feminists to view prostitutes as white slaves even if no traffickers were implicated. One Judischer Frauenbund member pointed to inadequate housing or to poverty as ‘the real trafficker’.

But comic songwriters often bypassed reality, turning instead to escapism and humour. The song Victoria Park is set in a park just north of the East End dubbed the ‘lungs of London’ when it opened in 1850. In his famous novel ‘Children of the Ghetto’, Israel Zangwill describes it as ‘the park to the ghetto’ where Eastenders would flock on shabbes and holidays. The song portrays an assortment of curiouys characters hanging around the park. Yudke and Rachel, he with one shoe and she with one sock, immigrants looking for a job, a thick necked porter, red Benny and poxy Fanny. And amongst these characters we have a rousing chorus of:

Dort geyt Khay’ite a moyd fun Lite / Zi iz di drite, zi voynt in City.

There goes Khayite from Lithuania, she is the third, lives in the City.

This has double meanings similar to Kops’ ‘Up West’, and when Bertha Jackson sang this song, she interpreted this line as a euphemism for working as a prostitute. Jackson, who was born in Liverpool in 1888, learned the song at the age of eight from her uncle, a travelling salesman. Eighty-two years later, Derek Reid, poet and folklorist, recorded her singing the song, which must date back to some time before 1897. To underline this point, the melody of the chorus is is a famous square dance called Little Redwing, whose lyrics are coarse, graphic and misogynist.

An old ex-Eastender friend chanted to me, at full speed, as if he was davening, the words to the comic song, Sadie iz a Lady. It builds an idyllic picture of shtetl life and then relocates to East Stepney:

East Stepney, East Stepney, vu di libe iz tzebrent Un yeder Sadie iz a lady, un yeder Sam a gent East Stepney, East Stepney where love has burned, and every Sadie is a lady and every Sam a gent.

The line ‘Sadie is a lady and Sam a gent’, implies an upward mobility, but the rhyme coming after the first line exposes it as another coy allusion to prostitution, with the double entendre adding the comic twist. The rhyme ‘Sadie’ and ‘Lady’ was often used in songs such as Mayn Fair Sadie (a parody of ‘My Fair Lady’) and Johnny Bond’s 1961 country song, Sadie was the Lady. There is Barbara Streisand’s 1964 Sadie, Married Lady from the musical ‘Funny Girl’. John Farnham in 1967 sang Sadie Cleaning Lady (with dancing cleaning girls, rabbit tails and mini-aprons). But most important, with film versions in 1932 and 1953, is the 1930 Somerset Maugham story of a prostitute, Sadie Thompson.  The name Sadie, popular in the East End, sometimes a nickname for Sarah, had associations for Eastenders I interviewed, including a song sung to me by Ruth:

Sadie was a lady, and all the money was spent. She spent

it here, she spent it there…

A ‘Sadie’ was described as a ‘yachne’, a ‘busybody’, a ‘right Jewish girl’, an ‘outcast woman’, a ‘woman going off the rails’. Solly, a 95-year-old ex-tailor, explained that ‘Sadie’ was used as a nickname for a fellinghand, the lowest woman in the clothing industry who would sew buttonholes.  These songs reveal a hidden social history, one missing from the more formal accounts of East End Jewish life. Through their informal, often humourous, descriptions, these songs confer a lost dignity on their subjects while shining a light into the darker recesses of Jewish life in the East End. Yiddish songs and Jewish prostitution may seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet through their wry humour, intense sadness, and anger, these songs brought Jewish audiences face to face with their own hardship in a typically bittersweet celebration.

References:

Bristow, Edward . J. Prostitution and Prejudice: Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870 – 1939. (1982) Clarendon, Oxford Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals 1875 – 1914.  (1975) London: Duckworth.

Gartner, Lloyd P. Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914 in Association of Jewish Studies Review (1982), 7 : 129-178 Cambridge University Press Kaplan, Marion. Prostitution, Morality Crusades and Feminism:

German-Jewish Feminists and the Campaign Against White Slavery in Women’s Studies International Forum (1982)

Knepper, Paul. British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire in The British Journal of Criminology (2007), 47(1): 61-79.

Kops, Bernard. The World is a Wedding. From By the Waters of Whitechapel (2006)

Marks, Lara, ‘Race, Class and Gender: The Experience of Jewish Prostitutes and Other Jewish Women in the East End of London at the Turn of the Century’, in Women, Migration and Empire, ed. Joan Grant (1996) 31-50 Trentham books Zangwill, Israel. 1892 Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People.

Klezmer Klub’s CD ‘Whitechapel, mayn Vaytshepl – Yiddish songs of London’ www.klezmerklub.co.uk

Vivi Lachs is the singer with the band Klezmer Klub. She is researching Yiddish songs of London and the social histories they contain.  She gives illustrated talks, concerts and also leads Klezmer dancing at simchas. She studies Yiddish and Her real job is working in education in Hackney.

Anyone knowing a Yiddish song about any aspect of London or England, however small, please email vivilachs@gmail.com

Empty boxes, some child-made, some commercial.  Sponges from around the world. Postcards from the Hotel Celeste in Tunisia. A suitcase that belonged to a man who fled Danzig in 1939. Whistles.  A figurine of a stag scratching his ear with a hind leg. A snake curled on a lotus leaf, in ivory.  Three sweet chestnuts. A hare with amber eyes.  These are items in the respective collections of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal, two very different artists and writers who turn traditional Holocaust memoir-writing on its head by telling the stories of their Jewish families through objects like the ones above.

An Israeli-born, New-Yorkraised illustrator, designer, children’s-book author and artist across many media, Kalman is best known for her December 2001 The New Yorker cover with Rick Meyerowitz, a map of ‘New Yorkistan’ including such neighbourhoods as Botoxia and Upper Kvetchnya. Her two year-long series of monthly blogs blending image and text for The New York Times are now available in two books, And the Pursuit of Happiness (2010) and The Principles of Uncertainty (2007). In a visual essay for the latter, ‘Collecting Myself ’, Kalman calls the objects she collects ‘tangible evidence of history, memory, longing, delight.’ The history and memory evoked by the Danzig suitcase are all too familiar; of it, Kalman writes, ‘as if I need reminders of the Holocaust. That’s all I think about.’ Grief runs through her work, which draws on the partial survival of her own family, but by grounding her stories in objects, she tempers her grief with the longing and delight these objects elicit.  In the beautifully written The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal tells the story of his ancestors through a collection of 264 netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings, purchased in the 1870s in Paris and passed down by Charles, a cousin of de Waal’s greatgrandfather Viktor, to Viktor, to his son Iggie, and to Edmund himself. De Waal, a renowned British ceramic artist, has been making pots since he was a child and left school at seventeen to apprentice in England and Japan. ‘How objects get handled, used, and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question,’ he writes. It is a desire to understand the netsuke better that leads him, albeit warily, into his family story. Inheriting the netsuke, he writes, ‘means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.’

Objects used to memorialise the Holocaust usually represent absence; they are invoked as traces of the dead and reinforce a story of destruction.  Quantity plays a vital role in this process of reinforcement. Twenty-five thousand pairs of shoes sit in the Auschwitz Museum, representing one day’s collection at the peak of the gassings. The museum also contains 3,800 suitcases and 12,000 pots and pans. The artist Christian Boltanski, whose Jewish father hid under the floorboards during the Nazi occupation of Paris, emerging in 1944 to beget Christian, has made a career out of memorial art. His work The Children of Dijon uses blurred, anonymous photographs of children’s faces to create dozens of tiny shrines; his 2010 installation, Personnes, includes a 50-tonne pile of old clothes. Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna’s Judenplatz, Nameless Library, works on a similarly vast scale; it is a cast of the inside of a reading room with hundreds of books.

By ballasting their stories with the specificity of objects, Kalman and de Waal counteract this traditional narrative of loss with a celebration of the stubborn ‘thinginess’ of these things. This celebration both pulls the viewer repeatedly back to the present and plays with the darker desire to experience history and memory through these remainders of the past. Under Kalman’s brush, the Danzig suitcase, part of her suitcase collection, does not become a symbol of lost multitudes, as in the piles of suitcases at Auschwitz. Rather, she delights in the specifics of this one suitcase, announcing that it was made by Josef Winker and Sons, who owned a shop on Himmelpfortgasse. This irreducible thinginess, with its random humour, cannot be abstracted into the symbolic. Rather, the vibrancy of detail draws the viewer into the unique world of each object, a rich world replete with creativity, taste, humour, and individuality that counteracts absence with presence and loss with discovery.

The writer and scholar of Jewish philosophy Philipp Blom suggests in his book, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, that collecting is a way of building up meaning, a way to ‘make sense of the multiplicity and chaos of the world’ while also allowing collectors to ‘overcome the limits of their time and upbringing.’ For Kalman and de Waal, objects provide novelty and memory, meaning and escape. Kalman juxtaposes her image of the Danzig suitcase with other ordinary things she has amassed—egg slicers, pieces of white linen, notes on the mosses of Long Island. De Waal’s collection of netsuke—‘figures and animals and erotica and creatures from myth: they cover most of the subjects that you could expect in a comprehensive collection’—testifies to the fact that ‘someone with knowledge has put this group together.’ Kalman’s oeuvre contains collections within collections: her father-in-law, ‘transplanted in 1957 from soigneÅL Budapest to lumpy Poughkeepsie,’ collected insults in a tiny notebook, and her friend collects air from around the world in labelled jars.

The netsuke, and the exacting attention their individuality demands, help quell the unease de Waal feels about telling his family history; he catches himself turning it into dinner-party conversation and feels ‘slightly sickened by how poised it sounds.’ Recording his great-uncle’s memories of Vienna feels ‘formal and inappropriate…also greedy: that’s a good rich story, I’ll have that.’ Wary of falling into the nostalgia trap, he writes in the preface, ‘I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.’ As he rolls a netsuke of a medlar fruit between his fingers, he muses, ‘melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness…and this netsuke is an explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.’ Tracing the netsuke allows de Waal to tell the story of his ancestors through the art, clothing and houses they acquired, loved and lost. De Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis, parlayed their success as Odessa grain merchants into a banking empire in the late nineteenth century, marrying into the Rothschild family and building fabulous residences in Vienna and Paris. Charles, a ‘spare son’ and the model for Proust’s character Charles Swann, avoided the world of finance to become an art collector and critic, planning assignations with his lover in Parisian dealerships at the height of Europe’s craze for Japonisme. He gave the netsuke as a wedding present to his Viennese cousin Viktor, de Waal’s great-grandfather, in the 1890s, and Viktor’s wife installed the figurines in her dressing room at the Palais Ephrussi for her children to play with, where they remained until World War II.

In March 1938, hope for an independent Austria was crushed by the Anschluss; the Palais Ephrussi was raided on the first night in an ‘unsanctioned Aryanisation.’ Next month, the house was turned into Gestapo headquarters, and most of de Waal’s family fled Vienna. His grandmother Elisabeth returned after the war to find that Austria, considering itself the ‘first victim,’ was unwilling to help her trace her family’s belongings. But back at the Palais Ephrussi, an ‘emptied house,’ she is reunited with the family maid Anna, who produces the 264 netsuke. She had smuggled them past the Gestapo and hidden them under her mattress during the war. Elisabeth takes the netsuke back to her home in England, where her brother Iggie claims them and takes them with him to Tokyo, where he spends the remaining forty-seven years of his life. De Waal now keeps them in an unlocked cabinet for his children to play with.  Throughout the text, the immediacy and charm of the netsuke short-circuit the vagueness of nostalgia. They provide a touch of gentle, selfreferential humour; the medlar is a hard object made from a fruit only edible when rotten, and another, of a cooper at work, is about ‘finishing something on the subject of the half-finished.’ Moments given over to description of the netsuke provide interludes of delight; there are rats, ‘because they give the maker the chance to wrap those sinuous tails round each other,’ and ratcatchers, erotic carvings and beggars bent over bowls. De Waal picks up this teasing humour; when his glasses break in Vienna, he jokes, ‘I am 400 yards… from the front door to Freud’s apartment, outside my paternal family home, and I cannot see clearly.  Bring on the symbolism.’ Nostalgia depends on an idealisation of the past, but this humour precludes fogginess; the netsuke give shape to the stories of this reluctant biographer, allowing him to work with specific memories rather than a vague concept of memory.

On the level of story, de Waal resists using the netsuke as tokens of hope to recuperate his memoir from loss. He writes, ‘the survival of the netsuke…is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism.  Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not?’ The netsuke do not redeem his family story, but create a space for its telling while circumventing an overfamiliar Holocaust narrative of gradual loss.  Like de Waal, Kalman uses ‘explosions of exactitude’ as points of entry into her family memories, saving them from spiraling entirely into a story of disappeared worlds by providing moments of contrapuntal humour. In ‘Heaven on Earth,’ Kalman’s aunt tells her the story of Maishel Shmelkin, the genius of Lenin (the Russian village her family comes from), who once went for a walk wearing no trousers. Maishel recurs—again with no trousers—in Kalman’s stories for children. This story invokes a certain sadness for a vanished world of such characters, but an illustration of Maishel (from the chest up) shares space with drawings of Tolstoy, fruit platters from around the world and Kalman as a rabbit wearing shoes. The blog begins with an image of the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s best friend; playing with autobiographical expectations, Kalman writes, ‘she is not my relative…there is no obvious reason she is here, other than that we may linger for a moment and say, “How extraordinary.”’

After an illustrated discussion of Dostoevsky’s love life (he was infatuated with the writer Polina Suslova, who hated him) Kalman’s conversation with her aunt becomes more personal. ‘We talk about my mother and why she did not marry the man she loved, but instead married my father, who accidentally fell out of the 2^nd-floor window of our apartment in Tel Aviv, but bounced and did not get hurt. Perhaps that is why he was a little crazy.’ Food punctuates these family stories, sometimes introducing and sometimes banishing gloom—the honey cake she shares with her aunt, baked in a Bundt pan (invented, as Kalman notes, by the late H. David Dalquist, who ‘had a very good obituary’), the Mocha Cream Cake from Mother’s Bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, N.Y. served at a 1963 tea party at which her parents were barely speaking, attended by a mustachioed lady ‘dentist [who] served meatloaf sprinkled with colored cookie crumbs.’

The randomness and humour of these surprising juxtapositions allow Kalman to conjure up but not surrender to loss, addressing it in her trademark tangential fashion. Sometimes, she achieves this within a single image. In ‘The Impossibility of February,’ Kalman evokes the lost world of Jewish Europe with an image of two matching objects:

‘twin sisters…there are black stripes on their sleeves. One sister…will become my mother-in-law.’

The setting is not depicted in the image but written in careful curlique—Budapest. The vanished pre-war community is recalled, but as backdrop; Kalman’s reference to the sisters’ matching yellow dresses with black trim protects the image from the vagueness of nostalgia and introduces a note of delight.  The final instalment of The Principles of Uncertainty, ‘Finale’, is a masterpiece of selective juxtaposition and object celebration. Her depictions of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans post-flood sit alongside a cheeseburger deluxe from her favourite coffee shop (Joe Junior, where ‘you cannot order a deluxe grilled cheese sandwich—there are limits to deluxe’) and Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, balancing a giant wig on her head ‘at the tender age of nine or ten. She did it. Amazing.’ At the close of The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal notices that the netsuke—a sleeping rat, the medlar, the eponymous rabbit—have been moved around by his children. ‘It is not just things that carry stories with them,’ he writes. ‘Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina.’ Fittingly, he is unsure whether this patina is a process that adds or rubs away. In Kalman and de Waal’s stories, it may be both.

Fran Bigman is a PhD student in English at Cambridge studying the representation of abortion in British literature and film. After university, she spent two years teaching English at a high school in rural Western Japan.

It peaked in particularly dramatic fashion just before the Russian Revolution. Less than 5 percent of the total Russian population at that time, Jews numbered over 50 percent of the students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, a demographic feat that produced its own commentary. Students joked that it was the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students. In Odessa the situation reached a point of absurdity. With over 80 percent of the student body Jewish, in 1916 the Conservatory officials reacted by launching a novel affirmative action scholarship program for ethnic Russians. Of course, Jewish visibility in a bitterly antisemitic regime had an obvious downside. Charges of Jewish opportunism were common, particularly since a conservatory degree provided a draft deferment and a legal pathway out of the Pale of Settlement. Professional antisemites, such as the music critic Emil Medtner, a leading member of the Russian symbolist movement, spoke darkly of a plague of ‘little Jew boys from Lodz’ ruining Russian and European music with their ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarous’ ways. Even well-meaning friends were liable to resort to specious racial explanations for the preponderance of Jewish musical talent. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once declared that without Jews, ‘music would die out.’ Yet, he went on to explain that this talent stemmed from the biologically feminine character of the Jewish race, which predisposed them to more sensitive, lyrical instruments: ‘For an orchestra to sound right,’ he confided to a colleague, ‘it must have no less than 15 percent Jews in the string and horn sections.’

To explain the special relationship between Russian Jews and music we must return to the man who invented the modern classical music profession in Russia: Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). Though his name is barely remembered today (and often confused with an equally great pianist of no relation: Artur Rubinstein), in the second half of the nineteenth-century Rubinstein stood virtually without equal as a pianist in Europe, considered by many as the sole successor to Franz Liszt. His colourful, titanic personality and prodigious musical feats inspired George Eliot to write him into Daniel Deronda, in thinly-veiled form, as Herr Klesmer, the symbolic centrepiece of the novel. Born in a shtetl near Berdichev and baptized as an infant, he grew up in Moscow and Berlin. The result was a quintessential European Jewish cosmopolitan, who summed up his own fate thus: ‘To the Jews I am a Christian. To the Christians, a Jew. To the Russians I am a German, and to the Germans, a Russian. For the classicists I am a musical innovator, and for the musical innovators I am an artistic reactionary and so on. The conclusion: I am neither fish nor fowl, in essence a pitiful creature.’
Rubinstein was not only prone to grand statements; he also sought grand solutions to his life’s dilemma. He dreamed up the Russian conservatory as an instrument of artistic emancipation for Jews and Russians alike. His quest to liberate classical music in Russia from its ancien regime legal shackles and Slavic provincialism took a decisive turn in 1862, when he opened the St. Petersburg Conservatory. From its founding, the school enjoyed a reputation as a particularly liberal and tolerant Russian educational institution. And it proved extremely popular with Jews. In the five decades before 1917, they flocked in increasingly large numbers to St. Petersburg and other music schools across the Russian Empire. To these thousands upon thousands of young Russian Jews, music beckoned as a path to European enlightenment and Russian citizenship, crucially one which didn’t demand an abandonment of their Jewishness. Music’s secular universalism required no grappling with dogmatic questions of belief. Nor did it insist on an existential choice about the proper language of expression, the recurring problem for Jewish writers. Besides this cultural neutrality, music’s appeal also stemmed from its continued accessibility as an educational option. When in the late 1880s the Tsarist authorities introduced quotas at universities and institutes to staunch the growing influx of Jews into Russian society, the St. Petersburg Conservatory—along with many of its sister schools around the empire—successfully staved off the new restrictive policy. Women were admitted in equal numbers as well, in stark contrast to almost every other university-level institution in Russia.
That this thin cordon of liberalism prevailed at all is remarkable given its cultural setting. For nineteenth-century Russian music was otherwise a seething cauldron of nationalist brio. However sentimentally we may like to remember the great Russian composers for their Romantic souls and rebellious spirits, many were also unabashed Slavic chauvinists and rabid antisemites, including the likes of Modest Mussorgsky and Mili Balakirev. Before the St. Petersburg Conservatory had barely opened, let alone admitted Jewish students in noticeable numbers, it was loudly attacked as a ‘synagogue’ run by one Rabbi ‘Rebenstein,’ a place where foreign ‘Yankels’ incapable of composing their own national art simply imitated and corrupted Russian music. Russian antisemites continued to voice this canard with increasing volume across the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. More striking, however, is the fact that after 1900 Jews also began to ask whether perhaps the antisemites were correct in their claims. The strange fact of the preponderance of Jewish musicians coupled with the ostensible dearth of Jewish classical music led even Jewish nationalists to lament that Jews had failed to grow their own musical garden. As one St. Petersburg critic wrote at the time, ‘They say that we Jews are the most musical nation, that the violin is our national instrument; we have given the world composers of genius; we have more professional musicians among us than any other people . . . . And at the same time, you will hardly find another nation whose national music has been so much neglected as ours.’
In 1908, a group of St. Petersburg Conservatory Jewish students took it upon themselves to rectify this problem. Their solution was to launch a new organisation known as the Society for Jewish Folk Music. The idealistic collective soon spawned a Jewish national musical movement that spread rapidly across Russia. Its leaders constituted the pride of Russia’s younger generation of composers:
Mikhail Gnesin, Moisei Milner, Joel Engel, and Alexander Krein. Disciples of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, friends and rivals of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, these young composers envisaged a modern Jewish music capable of standing alongside the grand national schools of Germany, Russia, Hungary, and Italy. Drawing on the rich folk sources of Ashkenazi Jewry—Hasidic nigunim, Yiddish songs, klezmer dance melodies, and the like—they forged a repertoire of Yiddish lieder, chamber works, choral arrangements, symphonies, and operas.
In the turbulent decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jewish composers of Russia pursued their national mission. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, they formed nonprofit publishing concerns to disseminate their music virtually for free. They sponsored lectures, concert tours, and large-scale outdoor symphony performances, even as World War I raged on around them. And like all the great European Romantics before them, they worshipped at the altar of authentic folkpeople. Hauling primitive phonographs around the Pale, these Russified musicians raced to save the melodies and lyrics of Yiddish-speaking Jews as the world of the shtetl rapidly eroded. Their nostalgic devotion to folklore was matched, however, by a quintessentially modern impulse of reinvention. To save Jewish folk music meant uprooting it from its native cultural terrain. Once isolated, the ‘frozen folk songs’ could be freely recast along modern harmonic and rhythmic lines. More often than not, it was the stylistic conventions of Russian classical music—the late Romanticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, and Taneev, the impressionistic modernism of Scriabin—that formed the template for this new genre of Jewish classical music. If Jewish music looked to Russian music for inspiration, the reverse also held true. For one of the most intriguing aspects of the Russian-Jewish musical encounter was the cultural infusion of Yiddishkayt into the heart of Russian classical music. There were, of course, the early flirtations with Jewish folk melodies on the part of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and even Glinka, part of their wider foray into Oriental exoticism. But ironically it was during the Soviet period that the sounds of Yiddish folk song and klezmer interpenetrated furthest into the aesthetic fabric of Soviet classical music. The trend began after 1917, as Krein, Gnesin and other Jewish compatriots initially received a surprising degree of recognition and support from the Bolshevik state for their Jewish symphonies, folk song collections, and related endeavours. The best example of this phenomenon is found in the famous friendship between the Soviet Union’s greatest composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and his Jewish doppelganger, Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996). Their relationship reveals the depth of the Jewish imprint on the Russian musical imagination. Shostakovich’s biographers have all puzzled over why this ethnic Russian composer, so sensitive to the Bolshevik political winds, suddenly decided in the mid-1940s to start writing Jewishthemed music. The answer lies in the story of his wartime friendship with a younger Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland. During World War II, Weinberg, son of a Warsaw Yiddish theatre composer, sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The two men met in 1943, and from that point on were virtually inseparable. Weinberg came to Shostakovich as a young composer and quickly adopted some key features of Shostakovich’s musical style as his own, particularly the distinctive admixture of modernist textures and folk idioms. At the same time, Shostakovich found in Weinberg’s Jewish background a captivating source of inspiration. From the mid-1940s onward, he began to insert Yiddish melodic inflections, pulsating klezmer rhythms, and Jewish programmatic elements into his works. Over the next few years, both men produced a body of Jewish-themed music, including hauntingly similar settings of Yiddish poetry.
The relationship between Weinberg and Shostakovich was so close and continuous that scholars have often wondered who inspired whom. A case in point is their respective ‘Holocaust’ symphonies. Shostakovich’s 1962 Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled ‘Babi Yar,’ and Weinberg’s 1963 Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the ‘Jewish Violin’ represent two of the most searing musical memorials ever created. Remarkably similar in form and theme (both are five-movement choral symphonies in A minor, with the last three movements performed without interruption), they also constitute parallel portraits of the intertwined history of Russians and Jews. Taken together, the works reveal how resilient and entrenched Jewish musicality remained—as cultural symbol and social reality—in Soviet culture. Indeed, Shostakovich’s symphony, which commemorates the 1941 Nazi massacre of 33,000 Jews on Soviet soil, features one of the most provocative lines to emerge from the mouth of a modern Russian artist. At the end of the first movement, the narrator declares, ‘No Jewish blood runs through my veins, but I feel the corrosive hatred of the antisemites as if I were a Jew, and that is why I am a true Russian!’ Weinberg’s work repays the favour by combining Yiddish and Russian poetry to extol the universal, redemptive power of music, underscored by a dynamic third movement of surging rhythms and violin effects that summon up both the klezmer tradition and the somewhat similar scherzo movement in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. The Russian-Jewish musical encounter encapsulated in the friendship of Shostakovich and Weinberg is all the more compelling given the virulent antisemitism and Stalinist terror that overshadowed the middle decades of the twentiethcentury. From the outset, Soviet officials vacillated between the contradictory policies of promoting Jewish music and denying its existence. So too did the statistical predominance of Jews in Soviet classical music prove to be an embarrassment among Communist Party apparatchiks determined to put a proper ethnic Russian face on Soviet culture. The Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the 1940s attempted to solve this problem once and for all. Bolshevik cultural officials produced detailed ‘exposeÅLs’ of the Jewish numbers in music, absurdly framed as a Zionist threat to Communist rule. Less laughable were the purges. Stalin’s ‘silent pogrom’ began in 1948 with the murder of actor Solomon Mikhoels, who happened to be Mieczysław Weinberg’s father-in-law and the person responsible for introducing him to Shostakovich. Soon other composers and musicians began to be rounded up. Weinberg’s turn came in February 1953, when he was arrested and accused of a secret CIA-funded plot to launch a breakaway Jewish Republic in the Crimea. Weinberg’s possession of a Jewish liturgical music anthology was taken as proof of his intent to launch the would-be Jewish Republic’s national conservatory along bourgeois, imperialist, and, of course, Zionist lines. Only Stalin’s death a month later ended the anti-Jewish campaign and spared Weinberg his life.
How far did Stalin intend to go in his repression of Soviet Jewry? Even with the benefit of hindsight and tantalising glimpses at formerly secret Soviet archives, it is difficult to say. One thing, however, is clear. In the case of Soviet music, he would have faced a formidable challenge in attempting to disentangle Russians and Jews. Stalin’s own favourite singer was Leonid Utesov, another native Jew of Odessa, who introduced jazz to the Soviet Union and klezmer to Russian popular song. His favourite pianist was Maria Yudina, whose recording of Mozart’s piano concerto (made in the middle of the night after Stalin heard a live radio broadcast and requested the disc be brought to him) was said to be spinning on his record player at the moment of his death. And the prestige of Soviet culture abroad depended in large part on the greatness of genius talents such as David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan, and Emil Gilels. Year after year, these soloists were trotted out around the world to perform the Russian classics and burnish the Cold War reputation of Soviet culture as a repository of urbane European humanism.
Just as in the Tsarist era, individual Jewish fame did little to resolve later Soviet Jewish vulnerability. But it did suggest the fundamental embeddedness of Jews inside Russian culture. Political, religious, and ethnic outsiders, perennial scapegoats of the regime, Jews nevertheless emerged over time as remarkable cultural insiders and nowhere was this more obvious than in the musical realm. Music was not necessarily less political a cultural arena than literature or visual art in Tsarist and Soviet times. But its political import was not as immediately explicit, its ideological valences less transparent. Even at the most politically delicate moments therefore, the subject of Jewish musicians was somehow less fraught and more palatable to the authorities. Hence nineteenth-century Tsarist bureaucrats sometimes declined to enforce educational quotas on Jewish musicians by reference to the benign character of music (as opposed to commerce and law). Or the notoriously antisemitic, reactionary official who in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 legally approved the formation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, noting with fondness how he had once heard klezmer music at a Jewish wedding in Odessa.
In fact, all roads eventually led back to Odessa. It was there that the intertwined dreams of Jewish musical fame and Russian liberal cosmopolitanism were born. Even at the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR, when the political freedom of Soviet Jewry had become a subject of international controversy, the old Jewish musicians of Odessa still beckoned as a nostalgic symbol of the shared cultural past that linked East and West. Witness the famous quip of Russian-born violinist Isaac Stern, who summed up the entirety of Soviet-American cultural diplomacy in the simplest terms: ‘They send us their Jews from Odessa and we send them our Jews from Odessa.’ Isaac Babel could not have said it better.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring.
I had never heard of Amichai before that day, and by that point in August had had my fill of imparted wisdom. We were herded into a small, humid classroom: a grid of plastic seats with metal legs and wood veneer, chipboard desks for righties. I was sitting beside a young woman, R, with whom I’d been frustratingly trying to mate all summer. I don’t know to what extent that frustration — that life-affirming, joy-denying, self-making-and-destroying frustration — influenced Amichai’s impact on me, but I doubt that afternoon would have been so important to me if I’d entered the room contented.
I’ve kept exactly one diary in my life, and that only because it was one of the conditions of the Israel program. The diary began on July 6 with these words: ‘I am on a plane heading for Israel. I am sitting next to R. She is beautiful and extremely amiable.’
Four days later, on July 10, I wrote, ‘Last night, R and I talked together on a hill overlooking the Old City. It became clear after a short period of time that we had a lot, in fact almost everything, in common. She is fantastic. I feel 100% comfortable talking to her about almost everything, from our families to music to God. I sincerely hope that our friendship doesn’t end with the summer.’
On July 14, eight days after meeting her, I wrote: ‘R had a minor asthma attack today. We sat next to each other on the bus and I asked her if she didn’t, hypothetically, have a boyfriend, would we be lovers? She thought so, as did I. I won’t pursue it. Maybe I should get my head shaved as some sort of metaphor for this relationship.’
The afternoon of July 29, shortly before meeting Amichai, I came back to the dorms and opened my journal to write in it. I found the following: ‘Dear Jonathan, Don’t worry, I didn’t read your journal. I am sixteen going on seventeen. I hear you on the stairs and I can’t write any more.’
What does it mean to tell someone you haven’t read his journal? That you were tempted to read it, but chose not to? That the thought never crossed your mind, but because journals are so potentially nuclear, you want to set his mind at ease? That in fact you read it, of course you did, but by saying you didn’t, you and he can continue with a charade of mutual ignorance?
She hadn’t read my journal. I was in love with her precisely because she was the kind of person who would not read a journal whose pages were sure to be filled with statements of love for her. Which meant I was never able to state that love to her, because I couldn’t do it in life.
An hour after walking out of that meeting with Amichai, I could remember very little of what he said. Ten years later, I can remember — or feel that I can remember — virtually every word. Impressions usually work in the other direction — they diminish with time. Memory always seems to. Nietzsche said that everything we have words for is already dead. To follow this path, the people we speak to become the coffins for our words. This feels true most of the time. But Amichai was a great exception in my life. I became a greenhouse for his words.
I’ve returned to many, many things he said that afternoon, but one has stood out: ‘I wish there were two more commandments. The eleventh would be: don’t change. The twelfth would be: change.’ (In an only slightly altered form, it wound up in my first novel.) We were sixteen going on seventeen, and he was asking us to always stay sixteen, to always be so frustrated, so unsatisfied, romantic, angered by boredom, inspired by uncertainty, demanding, disappointed and unrealistic. And at the same time to become men and women. That afternoon has changed and stayed the same for me, remained still like a city in a snow globe, while also moving with me into my present, through my fingers and onto this page.

II.

The second time I met Yehuda Amichai was in my sophomore year of college. I was twenty, a long four years older than when we first met. He had come to Princeton to give a reading. In anticipation of his visit, I made a small, sculptural gift for him out of a snow globe I’d emptied and refilled as a kind of surreal diorama. I intercepted him in the hallway, reminded him of our first meeting in Jerusalem, told him how much his words had come to mean to me, and presented him with the gift.
He took the box and nodded. I don’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t enough.
‘You can open it now,’ I said.
He removed the tissue paper from the box, and the snow globe from the paper. After examining it from all sides, he said what I thought was a very earnest ‘Thank you.’ And then he put it back in the box.
What was I expecting? I didn’t know. Perhaps if I’d developed a clear image of how I wanted him to respond, I would have been able to dismiss it as preposterous. Instead, I was left with the feeling that he didn’t sufficiently appreciate my appreciation, that the gift hadn’t meant anything to him. He turned and walked away.
At the reading, he spoke with great beauty, and at great length, about nothing in particular. (And not that it matters, but he didn’t repeat a single thing I’d heard in Israel.) I remember the buzz as people left the room. We had witnessed something special, something life-changing and contagious. I can only imagine that many went home to write or have sex.
Among the dozen poems he read that afternoon was, ‘A Man Doesn’t Have Time,’ the poem I had used as my yearbook page upon graduating high school halfway between our two meetings. It’s an argument against Ecclesiastes: we don’t have time for every purpose and so must, in the same moments, laugh and cry, hate and forgive, remember and forget, throw stones and gather them together.
A man doesn’t have time. The easy (and not incorrect) interpretation is that life is short, and so we must pack our experiences tightly, often one atop another. We shouldn’t expect the seams to hold.
But I like to think he also meant something different, more nuanced. Man doesn’t have time because he exists outside of it, changing and unchanging, always returning to his past and engaging with his future. We were never 16 going on 17. We were 16 going on 16, and 3, and 77. In 2000, 5 years after I gave him the snow globe, Amichai died at 76 years old. There was still one more meeting ahead of us.

III.

My first son was born on January 25, 2006. The following January, my family moved to Berlin for four months. While there, I gave a phone interview to an Israeli journalist, on the occasion of the Hebrew translation of my second novel. As we were getting off the phone, she said, ‘I almost forgot. One more thing. Do you know any Israeli literature?’ Among the writers I mentioned was Amichai. And for whatever reason, I then told the story of the snow globe I’d given him. It was the first time I’d mentioned it to anyone, as it felt so unimportant, and there was something embarrassing about the imbalance of regard. I’d spent hours making the thing, and rehearsed what I wanted to tell him. He received it with a nod, and for all I knew, proceeded to toss it in a garbage can.
A few weeks later, I received this e-mail:

Dear Jonathan,
Please let me introduce myself: my name is Hana Amichai and I am Yehuda Amichai’s widow. I read your interview in the Israeli paper Maariv, and was very moved by your words on Amichai. I wanted to tell you that he brought home your glass object, saying he got it in one of his readings. My children liked it and got hold of it. I do not know where it is now.
Thank you,
Hana Amichai

Two years after that, I returned to Israel, this time as a professional writer participating in a literature festival. My wife and I spent an afternoon with Hana at her home in Jerusalem. We ate almond-stuffed dates in her living room, drank cappuccino from her new machine, had the history of our view of the Old City explained to us, heard the story of Amichai’s death. I kept thinking some version of, Why didn’t I know then what I know now?
Why didn’t I write him letters? Why didn’t I insist on another meeting, which could have been done easily enough. (I’ve since heard of a number of people who got to spend time with him this way.)
Why didn’t I realize that he wasn’t going to live forever?
Because I was too young? Because he did live forever?
R, who is one of my closest friends, wrote me the following in 2004, ten years after I met her on the plane to Israel: ‘But still, I find myself not quite happy, but invigorated, realizing that while I might not leave the world a better place, I am, everyday committed to acting like I can. This fills me with a bigger-than-myself swelling, the swelling that has been keeping me up at night: the world never seems to get dark enough for me to sleep easily these days.’
Did Amichai meet with us that afternoon because he wanted to leave the world a better place? Is it ridiculous even to wonder such things? What motivated his writing? Why did he meet with us that afternoon in Israel?

My first son is named Sasha, after my wife’s grandmother. In a few weeks he will be three years old. One week ago today, my second son was born. We named him Cy Amichai Foer — Cy for my wife’s grandfather, Amichai for the poet. A good friend of ours, who was a good friend of the poet’s, sent us a book of Amichai’s, which Amichai had inscribed to him: ‘For Leon / with love, Amichai.’ Below this inscription our friend wrote: ‘For Amichai / with love, Leon.’ I’ve never encountered a more powerful expression of the declension of life, the generational giving and taking, the reading and writing of each other that has no beginning or end, yet is all the time beginning and ending. The book’s title is Time.

The Snow Globe is reprinted from Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). Copyright (c) 2009 by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan Safran Foer is appearing at Jewish Book Week 2010. www.jewishbookweek.com

Thomas was an English-speaking European, born in Sri Lanka. His parents had a penchant for Eastern meditation. His mother was a Spanish artist, who had a disconcerting habit of  leaving the table in the middle of a meal to stand on her head in a corner. His father was a Swedish architect, who would go out for a short walk and forget to return for several days. Unsurprisingly, Thomas too was an unconventional character. From the mid-1950s he was studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of  Technology in Zurich. When he decided to apply for permanent residence in Switzerland he began his CV with the words: ‘My father and mother met on an adventurous journey to India.’ I warned him that this would not predispose the Swiss authorities in his favour, but he insisted and was duly turned down.

I was born in Transylvania, a territory that has been shunted to and fro between Hungary and Romania as long as I can remember. When one of my daughters mentioned this at her English school, the teacher corrected her: ‘Transylvania exists only in horror films.’ In fact there was enough real horror, and for the Jews the worst came in the last year of World War II, in March 1944, when German troops invaded Hungary to prevent it defecting to the Allies. They were accompanied by Adolf Eichmann, and within two months half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. I was lucky enough to be rescued from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and taken to Switzerland with nearly 1,700 others, thanks to a deal between Eichmann and a Jewish leader called Rezsö Kasztner, who was later wrongly accused of collaboration and assassinated in Israel. In the mid-1950s I started studying English and German at the University of Zurich.

As foreigners surrounded by Swiss people, Thomas and I spent a lot of time together. Thomas had a gift for coining phrases. When I suffered a setback of some sort he comforted me with a cheerful ‘Never mind, things are never as bad as they’re going to be.’ To deter time wasters, his door carried a notice: ‘If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here’.

One day we were taking my dog Simon for a walk along the lake. Simon came from a village called Reinach. From his father, a Dachshund, and  his mother, an Appenzeller mountain bitch, he had inherited a long body, short legs and floppy ears that almost touched the ground. People in the street  often stopped to ask me what breed he was. When I truthfully answered that he was a mongrel, they walked on with their nose in the air. On this occasion a fat gentleman with six fat children in his wake asked the usual question in a particularly patronising tone. Before I could answer, Thomas said: ‘He’s a Reinach Retriever.’ The fat gentleman raised a pedagogic finger: ‘Have a good look, children. This is a typical Reinach Retriever.’ As they waddled away, Thomas remarked: ‘I never could stand pompous people.’

After finishing my studies I worked as sub-editor of a news agency. Most of the stories I had to edit were routine stuff about road accidents, petty thefts and the meetings of the local male choir, although at times there was a flurry of excitement about world events such as the kidnap of Eichmann by Israelis in Argentina. But eventually I got tired of the irregular hours and the callous treatment of human tragedies. I became a schoolteacher and continued to write some articles on the side.  When I felt restless again, I offered my services to a number of American universities and received a single offer from the Deep South, which I regretfully declined as I was asked to educate students in the right Christian spirit. Then, in 1963, I was offered a job at the new University of Sussex. I came to Brighton for one year and am still here. Given my history, it seems ironic that I ended up as a professor of German. But my commitment was to a German language and literature that the Nazis had not managed to poison with their hateful ideology.

Thomas also completed his degree — with some difficulty, as we shall see — and started looking for a job. Having developed an interest in computing, he presented himself at one of the large IT companies and was promptly offered a position with a salary far beyond what I could ever hope to earn as a teacher and occasional journalist. The interviewers were surprised when he told them that he would accept only half the salary, but by the time he added that he wanted to work only half the normal hours they were so dazzled by his blarney that they agreed. I should add that around 1960 neither computers nor part-time work were as common as today. Thomas was nothing if not innovative. 

About the time I came to Sussex Thomas went to America and we lost touch. A few days ago I was surfing the Internet when a name brought him and his final-year project back to me with a jolt.

The task Thomas had been set for the project was to design a shopping mall. The examiner, as I said, had turned out to be the professor he disliked most. With some misgivings he submitted a plan showing shops, a cafe, a restaurant, a moving staircase and various other items. Some weeks later he was summoned to the professor.

After keeping him waiting in the corridor for an hour the professor rejected the plan, as it did not include any public conveniences. Thomas was irritated by his tone, but submitted a new one, having added two small squares with a stylised drawing of a man in one and of a woman in the other. He did not bother to provide detailed specifications, as he had for everything else.

Once more Thomas was kept waiting in the corridor. Even more arrogantly than before, the  professor rejected the plan because the dimensions of the conveniences had not been calculated in the proper scientific manner. Thomas saw the professor’s point, but objected to the tone. ‘Who does he think he is, Adolf Hitler?’ he growled as he redrew the plan. Now he included many figures indicating the exact width, length, height, cubic capacity and other properties of the conveniences. He attached a statistical table with estimates of how many shoppers would use the conveniences, and how much time they would spend in them. For one user he allowed an extra forty minutes, with a footnote to the effect that this customer liked to read his newspaper in the lavatory.

The result was a third wait in the corridor and an explosion of fury on the part of the professor, who declared that he had never been so insulted in his life. How did Thomas dare to make fun of a distinguished academic? Was Thomas devoid of any respect for his superiors? Did Thomas realise how lucky he was to be protected by some pussyfooting Swiss rules from punishment for his insubordination? Finally he tore up the plan and promised to make sure that Thomas never got a degree.

This time Thomas realised he had gone too far. For all his hatred of authority he wanted his degree. He appealed to the Dean, who advised him to send the professor a fulsome letter of apology. I helped Thomas write it, suggesting phrases like ‘momentary aberration’, ‘profound regret’ and ‘highest respect’; on reflection I withdrew ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’ and ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’. The Dean forwarded the letter, in his turn pleading for leniency. The professor grudgingly passed the project with the lowest available mark and Thomas obtained his degree.

It was nearly half a century later that I saw those reports on the Internet and realised that the professor who had almost failed Thomas in Switzerland was in fact a German war criminal.

I always knew that the Swiss had sheltered many prominent refugees from racial or political persecution, but had also turned thousands of Jews away from their borders to perish at the hands of the Nazis. I have long been aware of what I owe the Swiss for granting me and some 1,670 other Jews from Hungary asylum four months before the collapse of the Third Reich. But I have only recently learned that some 500 German Nazis, Italian fascists and Vichy French also escaped to Switzerland after the war. And that one of these was the professor.

The professor was born in Berlin in 1914. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht on both the eastern and western fronts. In 1950 he was appointed to a chair at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. As head of the Institute of Local, Regional and Country Planning, he acted as advisor to many major European cities. One newspaper called him ‘Europe’s number 1 traffic planner.’ Thomas called him an arrogant bully with no sense of  humour.

The professor had occupied his elevated position for nearly a decade, when one of his former subordinates reported him as a war criminal. It took the German police two years to arrest him at Frankfurt airport, but in August 1961 he was finally put in the dock in Stuttgart. A journalist’s account of his self-confident posture, his impenetrable expression, his brusque speech and his deliberately late appearance in court seemed to confirm Thomas’s descriptions.

The prosecutor claimed that in August 1944, when the professor was a first lieutenant in charge of a Wehrmacht company in retreat before the Allies, he had 31 Italian forced labourers shot by two camouflaged machine guns as they were having a rest in a field near Avignon. There had been no trial and no military necessity. Twenty-six Italians had died and 5 escaped, gravely wounded.

The professor resorted to the time-honoured expedient of passing the buck. He asserted that the Italians had threatened to go over to the French resistance and that he had been ordered to forestall such a mutiny by any means at his disposal. He explained that he had not been personally present at the shooting, but had only forwarded the order and received a report after the event. He voiced his ‘disgust’ at the use of hidden machine guns: if he had not been away at the time, there would have been ‘a proper military execution’. It would appear that shopping malls were not the only things he liked to be proper.

In 1963 the professor resigned from the Federal Institute in Zurich, but the trial continued.  When his former superior officers testified that they had neither received nor given any orders involving summary execution, his chances looked bleak. But when it came to confirming the charges against him, none of the men he had commanded remembered anything — possibly on the advice of his counsel, who had successfully defended several  important Wehrmacht figures before him.

In 1966 the prosecutor abruptly changed tack. Having spent six years accusing the professor of murder, he suddenly switched his case to manslaughter and recommended that the proceedings be closed under the statute of limitations, a statute that was applicable to manslaughter but not to murder. The professor was immediately released. I do not know how he spent the rest of his life, but he died in Santo Domingo in 1985.

At the end of the trial the presiding judge had remarked: ‘This decision does not condemn the accused. But neither does it certify his innocence.’ Whatever the technicalities, in my eyes, the professor who tried to ruin the future of a young student to avenge a slight impertinence got away with mass murder.

From my earliest days I have had the sense that Jews embody the distillation of what it is to be human. As if being Jewish were somehow a more extreme version of being human. Perhaps this sense I have is heightened by Jewish history with its unmatched defiance of the dual imperatives of time and place. For me, being Jewish embodies the triumph of ideas over events and the persistence of hope against overwhelming odds. As a student in South Africa I came across Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. When I saw and heard him in Oxford later, I believed, and I still believe, that he was the greatest exponent of a broadly liberal, pluralist politics there has ever been. What he saw, and I think this must be inseparable from his Jewishness, is that fixed credos and closed systems of belief invariably lead to disaster. No one is the sole proprietor of knowledge. In his words ‘there is no incorrigible proposition.’ He understood that freedom is not an absolute: it cannot be guaranteed by subscribing to one political system. To my immense relief he confirmed that there are essentially only two freedoms; the first he called ‘freedom from’ which is the freedom to be left alone as far as possible to do what your inclinations tell you — essentially liberalism — and the other, very dangerous kind of freedom, is ‘freedom to’ which means that you achieve freedom only by total surrender to a state or closed system of belief. In South Africa we who were opposed to the apartheid state were supposed to want the alternative of Marxism, the path chosen by the ANC. It seemed madness to reject apartheid in favour of another absurd belief system, which had all the characteristics of a secular religion. Berlin’s simple distinction of freedoms shone a cool light of hope and truth upon the dark chaos of apartheid.
Berlin was fond of Kant’s saying ‘out of the timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved’.
Perhaps romantically, but understandably, he attributed many of his values to England. He understood that respect for others and tolerating dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency: that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how rational and disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is no appeal.
When in his last years a Polish academic asked Berlin about the meaning of life he replied, ‘All I can say is that anyone who thinks there is a script or a libretto for life is seriously deluded. Life has no meaning…’ What he meant was that life entailed making the most of the here and now, rather than delaying gratification for an afterlife, or a communist utopia, or a fascist heaven. One of his favourite sayings was from Alexander Herzen: Where is the song before it is sung? ‘Nowhere, is the answer,’ said Berlin. ‘One creates the song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it step by step.’ I took this as the title of my novel, because it seemed to encapsulate exactly the differences between Berlin and his Oxford friend, Adam von Trott, which forms the basis of my story.
Berlin’s personal history — born in German-speaking Riga, emigration to Britain with his parents, a swift rise through British academia to become the first ever Jewish fellow of All Souls College — all this gave him a perhaps exaggerated respect for the liberal aspects of British life, while his close understanding of Germany and Russia, informed by wide reading in both languages, made him aware of the extreme danger facing the world. The leader, in the German version of romanticism, is the demiurge; this god-like creature is exclusively a product of the Germanic race, so creating two classes of humanity — men proper, who have access to these higher worlds, and inferior people with inferior cultures.Berlin saw that this was something wholly new in history. Von Trott, on the other hand, was raised with the concept of a national destiny and the German romanticism which turned so vicious. Berlin’s distrust of his friend arose not from the thought Trott was a closet Nazi, but because he saw that Trott had ideas about Geist and the inevitable destination of history, both of which were anathema to him; from an early age he understood where they could lead, and he recognised that they were present in both Communism and Fascism. I think this is what Berlin had in mind when he said that Von Trott was not really ‘one of us or on our side’, that Von Trott was primarily a German nationalist and that it was possible to be against Hitler for the wrong reasons. Von Trott’s friend, Col Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, rightly considered a hero, had some very anti-democratic plans for Germany had the Bomb Plot succeeded. With his two brothers he was a devotee of the sinister cultist poet, Stefan George, whose poetry was the apotheosis of extreme German romanticism. George was courted by the Nazis when they came to power and after his death in 1934 his devotees tended his grave and held candle-lit poetry readings. Incidentally, Von Trott’s family have been adamantly opposed to my novel, as if my task as a novelist should have been to applaud everything Von Trott did, rather than explore the moral issues that divided two friends.
Later I was to discover that there were other aspects of Berlin’s personality and belief that were supremely charming. Since my book appeared  many of his friends have discussed him with me, so much so that I feel as if I, too, knew him. I wish, as we wannabe Jews say. Berlin’s friends speak of his excitable conversation, and the swooping nature of his vowels. He loved gossip and music, and understood that we cannot live in an entirely rational world. Love, music, poetry, friendship are none of them susceptible to logic. When he was listening to music, his head would be bowed and his concentration absolute. When he was gossiping, he was a bubbling fountain.
But behind his inexhaustibly charming self, lay a steely mind. I don’t wish to over-dramatise my own philosophical torments as a young man, but from the moment I read Berlin for the first time I felt liberated. Above all, this was because he loathed abstractions about people and society. In his famous lecture Fathers and Sons, he spoke of Turgenev, but in fact he could have been writing about himself:

He shared their hatred of every form of enslavement, injustice and brutality, but unlike some among them he could not rest comfortably in any doctrine or ideological system. All that was general, abstract, absolute, repelled him: his visions remained delicate, sharp, concrete, and incurably realistic. Hegelianism, right-wing and left-wing, which he had imbibed as a student in Berlin; materialism, Socialism, positivism, about which his friends ceaselessly argued, populism, collectivism, the Russian village commune idealized by those Russian socialists whom the ignominious collapse of the left in Europe in 1848 had bitterly disappointed and disillusioned – these came to seem mere abstractions to him, substitutes for reality, in which many believed and few ever tried to live, doctrines which life with its uneven surface and irregular shapes of real human character and activity, would surely resist and shatter if ever a serious effort were made to translate them into practice.

So as a human being and a political philosopher, as a student of life and history and of ideas, but most particularly as a human being, Berlin is my greatest hero.

Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung won the London Jewish Cultural Centre’s 2008 Award for literature.

[/hidepost]

The letter Hey is made up of a Dalet and a Yud. The Yud is rotated and hovers inside the Dalet.

There are many interpretations as to what the Hey alludes to. Some suggest that it is a diagram of detachment: the experience that action is detatched from thought, others see it as a symbol of speech, with the left leg representing words or breath leaving the mouth. But it does seem that the beauty of the Hey is somehow related to the mysterious hovering of the left leg.

According to the laws of Hebrew Calligraphy, the letters do not sit on the line as we find with English lettering, but rather hang down from it. A line is scored into the  parchment beneath which the letters  are written. Some scribes prefer to use a rose thorn so as not to use any steel in their work,  steel being a material associated with war.

In every Torah scroll just after the account of the creation, you will find a verse which contains an unusually small letter Hey.

The verse says: ‘These are the generations of heaven and earth “Behibaram” when they were created’, but the diminutive letter Hey suggests that it can be read ‘B’ Hey Baram’ with a “Hey” were they created, announcing, quietly, that through speech was the world called into being.

The definite article

In Hebrew grammar the Hey is used to denote the definite article which, in the defining moment, simply attaches itself to the beginning of the definiendum i.e. the thing which it seeks to define. Please note however, that if the Hey is attached to the end and not the beginning of the definiendum, it results not in definition but in a feminine ending.

Hey the Fifth letter

In Arabic the number Five is pronounced Hamsa similar to the Hebrew Hamesh.  Hamsa is also the name given to the Five fingered amulets popular with Sephardic Jews and Muslims for warding off the Evil-eye.

Five sided shapes and the rules of football

Some of the most perfect pentagons in the world at the moment are those found on the surface of a football. According to mathematicians the football is something which satisfies the following rules:

1.     It is a polyhedron that consists only of pentagons and hexagons

2.     The sides of each pentagon meet only hexagons

3.     The sides of each hexagon alternately meet pentagons and hexagons.

Heys and Almond trees

In trying to define the secret of the Hey’s beauty, consider that of the Almond flower. Almond flowers have two things in common with us:

First, like us they are alive and second like us, with hands and feet, they are multiples of five.

www.alefsinwonderland.com

Ever since Joseph served in Pharoah’s court, Jews have struggled to balance the desire to belong against maintaining a central kernel of Jewishness that keeps them separate. The particular difficulty facing the volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War when the particular battle was to reconcile an ideological universalism with an identity that was specifically Jewish.  Between 1936 and 1939, over 7,000 Jews from 45 countries went to join the International Brigades to defend the democratically-elected Republic against Franco’s fascist uprising. Their struggle is one that continues to resonate with contemporary significance.

Many Jews joined ‘the good fight’ in response to the Popular Front ideal that workers of the world should transcend differences of nationality and creed to unite against the common fascist enemy. They also hoped that their involvement in such action would enable them to assimilate more easily into wider society. Paradoxically, such universalism was also the product of a particularly Jewish imagination, the shared mindset of those involved a reflection of ideas and experiences that were specifically Jewish.

The letters, diaries and poems written at the time of the war suggest that the majority of the volunteers were left-wing ideologues, who did not feel that being Jewish inspired their presence in Spain. ‘We didn’t volunteer as Jews, but we felt the fascist threat because we were Jews’, Moe Fishman, a member of the American Lincoln brigade, commented. Yet while they may not have acknowledged it, the inescapable fact of their Jewishness undoubtedly affected how they experienced and interpreted the war.

Jewish volunteers from the US and Britain were, in the main, the children of Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrants. The majority were born into the radical milieu of New York’s Lower East Side and London’s East End, where Jewish garment unions, fraternal orders and a Yiddish and socialist press contributed to a world in which left-wing activism was a way of life. As British volunteer Frank Lesser recalled ‘the East End was full of street corner meetings…it was impossible not be interested in politics’.

Many young people were attracted by the way Socialism abrogated ethnicity in favour of a cosmopolitan ideal of proletarian solidarity, encouraging them to reject the parochialism of their parents’ generation. Joining a People’s Army presented them with an opportunity to shed the elements of their identity that were uniquely Jewish, and remould themselves as universal citizens; as one volunteer put it, ‘looking back on the Spanish Civil War, you can see the Jews were tearing up roots’.

Although few denied their background, hardly any volunteers went to Spain outwardly identifying as Jews, and in letters home to parents and girlfriends, they emphasised class struggle as the primary motivation for their action. Jewish-American volunteer, Alvah Bessie, explained in his diary: ‘My decision to come here was to achieve self-integration…I wanted to work in a large body of men, to submerge myself in the mass seeking neither distinction nor preferment’.

Similarly, British volunteers tended to downplay their origins, although their closer encounters with anti-Semitism gave them a more explicitly Jewish angle on the benefits of fighting fascism; the Spanish Civil War coincided with the famous Battle of Cable Street, which took place on 4 October 1936. The Jewish Establishment, represented by the Board of Deputies, adopted a defensive position that was far removed both from working class opinion and that of youthful firebrands. It published a warning in the Jewish Chronicle urging that people ‘keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings. Jews who however innocently become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping anti-Semitism and Jew baiting…KEEP AWAY’.

Unsurprisingly, such warnings went unheeded. An estimated 100,000 people, many of them Jewish, took to the streets to resist a proposed rally by Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. It was no coincidence that the protestors’ rallying cry ‘They shall not pass’ was a translation of the Spanish Republic’s ‘No pasaran’.

It was not long before the Communist Party became the leading anti-racist organisation in both the US and Britain. For the large number of Jews already sympathetic to left-wing causes, joining the party became the best way of resisting fascism at home and abroad.

For some, this was not enough, and they took their conviction to its natural conclusion by travelling to Spain to fight. Many changed their names in an attempt to become truer partisans – Solomon Regenstreit became Commander John Gates, Eli Begelman, Ellis Beal and William Horvitz, William Herrick. A change of name meant a reinvention of self, and the acceptance of a white Anglo-Saxon identity, free of Jewish association.

In the event, the realities of the conflict in Spain challenged the cosmopolitan self-image of many Jewish volunteers. Many found themselves fighting alongside thousands of other Jews – it is estimated that 20% of the International Brigades were of Jewish origin. With fighters from around the world, a common language proved a more practical unifier than Marxist politics and Yiddish became the lingua franca of the brigades, with Yiddish newspapers produced at the battlefront. Wilfred Mendelson observed that ‘the real international language is Yiddish. Jews from Germany, France, England, Poland…have come to battle the common enemy of the workers and of the Jews as a special oppressed minority’.

Volunteers from Eastern Europe had a more pronounced sense of Jewish solidarity than those from America and Britain, not least because of they had experienced anti-semitism of the most virulent kind. Those from Poland formed an all-Jewish unit, named after the Polish-Jewish and Communist martyr Naftali Botwin, news of whom had spread to communities worldwide. The Morgen Frayhayt, a New York-based Yiddish-language Communist newspaper, reported that they represented ‘a new type of Jewish hero that has already during its life become a legend, the Jewish freedom-fighter’. Mendelson saw his contribution in an even wider historical context, commenting in a letter to his father that ‘I am sure we are fighting in the best Maccabean tradition’.

The differing desires of the volunteers to shed their ethnic identity and take pride in their background stemmed from their mixed feelings about what it meant to be Jewish. A visit by two Jewish-Americans to a Barcelona restaurant run by German Jewish immigrants illustrated this dichotomy.

One of the men, Harry Fisher, expressed a longing for familiar Jewish culture. ‘The meals were delicious – just like mom’s. I heard Jewish spoken again. Was I homesick’. Harold Smith, his companion, also enjoyed his meal, but was contemptuous of the other Jewish restaurant-goers. He described them as a ‘disgusting lot…incapable of seeing beyond the ends of their noses. Spain is at war with exactly those people who are persecuting Jews. But do you think these bastards would do what one would expect any man to do and join the fight?’ For Smith, an ideological communist, these non-partisans had failed, ‘in their duty as Jews if nothing else’. He consoled himself with the knowledge ‘that we have others of a different type who have proven themselves in the International Brigades’.

The ambivalence of some volunteers towards their Jewishness was replicated in their feelings towards Zionism. Among the International Brigades were three hundred volunteers from Palestine. The majority were drawn from Communist Party ranks, and broadly believed in Jewish-Arab working-class co-operation, rather than partition along ethno-religious lines. This was in step with Comintern’s official position at the time, which rejected Jewish nationalism in the belief that unity based on ethnic or religious ties would divert energy from the fundamental class struggle.

Paul Sigel, a Jewish-American volunteer, felt an added responsibility to fight discrimination on behalf of all oppressed minorities. To him it was inconceivable that Jews, so often the victims of persecution themselves, should fail to act on behalf of the Arab population. This same duty was later reflected in the prominence of Jewish activists in the American civil rights movement and the struggle against apartheid.

The anti-Semitism with which many volunteers were confronted caused them to reflect on the inescapable nature of their Jewish identity, and echoes of Jewish persecution in Spain were not lost on them. One letter home read ‘Spain is perhaps a fit arena for this struggle. Here it was that the Medieval Inquisition drove the Jews from their homes. Today Jews are returning to fight the modern Inquisition’.

Jack Freeman, another American volunteer, described his visit to a Republican hospital which had yet to admit any Jewish patients:

‘Name?’ asked the Spaniard. I told him my first name. He didn’t know how to write it. So I showed him. Then he asks ‘Father’s name?’ Samuel, I say. He looks at me crooked but he writes. After that he wants Mom’s names and I tell him Eva. Suddenly he springs up. ‘Now I know’ he says ‘you’re a Yid’ and he runs immediately to bring in his friends in order to show them the ugly animal, a Jew. I must have been the first Jew they’d seen in their whole lives.

This experience reminded Freeman of his Jewishness; his war correspondence until that point suggested that his ideological commitment to Communism overwhelmed any attachment to his background. In a sense, it was not only the Spanish staff seeing a Jew for the first time, but Freeman too.

The Jewish volunteers who fought in Spain were idealists, and like many of their kind, they achieved a great deal, but were also the victims of grand expectations. The hope that they could defeat fascism and establish a utopian socialist society in Spain was shattered, first by Franco’s victory and then by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. Moreover, the expectation that they could transcend the politics of identity by their submersion in a People’s Army was naïve; they were identified by the right as specifically Jewish heroes, whilst others on the left refused on principle to separate them from the masses.

For the majority of Jews, the ideological battles of the 1930s are a thing of the past. Today’s political landscape is rendered in shades of grey rather than black and white. The left has undergone massive changes, with Soviet repression and the collapse of Communism discrediting its radical wing. At the same time, the migration from the Lower East Side and East End slums to the leafy suburbs has been accompanied by a political shift to the right.

Yet despite these developments, questions of Jewish identity politics persist, albeit in a different context of affluence. The ‘double-consciousness’ experienced by the volunteers — the disparity between how others saw them and how they wished to be seen — is as much a part of today’s Jewish dilemma as it was then. Rooted in a liberal individualist, rather than a socialist perspective, the story of Jewish volunteers in Spain reflects the contemporary struggle of a people striving to vindicate their cosmopolitanism, while simultaneously maintaining their unique identity within the community of nations.

Sarah Sackman read history at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where she specialised in Modern American and British History.  Her research into Jewish and African-American volunteers in Spain received prizes from New York University and Cambridge University and was presented at Madrid University in 2006 and Limmud Conference in 2007. She is currently working as a pupil barrister in London and volunteers as a legal advisor at Toynbee Hall.