Music from a Speeding Train

Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia

Harriet Murav

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804779043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe—one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture.

The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibrant Soviet Jewish culture that persisted beyond Stalinist oppression.

Part I From the Revolution Through the Second World War

One The Stillbirth of Revolution

Let us reject the old world
Shake its dust from our feet!
Workers’ Marseillaise¹

I don’t want anything to do with the comfort-givers
Those that dwell upon the earth between other worlds!
The size of my human loneliness,
The scale of my mourning—
That is my comfort,
My certainty
And my strength . . .

Hofshteyn 1922, 19

In the years following the 1917 revolution Jewish and non-Jewish authors in the new land of the Soviets celebrated the overcoming of all boundaries. The lines dividing class, nationality, language, gender, genres, the self from the world, the proper from the improper, the sacred from the profane, the literary from the nonliterary, and art from life, were to be no more. A certain wariness, however, accompanied the celebration. In David Bergelson’s ironic short story “A zeltener sof” (A rare ending), a writer witnesses a scene at a party. Plates and glasses break when a drunken guest knocks over a bottle of wine: “Together with the glasses and the plates the entire sense of respectability among people, the whole responsibility for maintaining order in life, were also shattered, and therefore one was supposed to be joyful [darf men zayn freylekh]” (1930b, 238). The new obligation to be joyful jars against the liberation from all obligations. The story ends with a police raid and multiple arrests.

In Andrei Sobol’s one-act play, significantly titled “Pereryv” (Intermission), identities are in flux and the past changes its meaning. An international theater troupe performs a lighthearted version of the ritual murder trial of Mendel Beilis. The Jewish national trauma, the centuries-old “blood libel,” is nothing more than a bit of theater. The event no longer defines the essence of Jewish experience. In the play, the Jewish actor playing the Catholic priest who accused Beilis of ritual murder is also something of an actor in real life, whose roles include a Bolshevik in Russia and a vendor of pornography in Constantinople. Sobol’, who was born in 1888, and committed suicide in 1926, was a member of a Zionist-socialist group in his early years, served time in tsarist prisons, and became a commissar on the Northern Front after the February revolution. He served with Isaac Babel, Eduard Bagritskii, and others on the editorial board of the literary journal Moriak (The sailor). A year before his suicide, he wrote to a friend, a former revolutionary terrorist living in Palestine, that even though without Russia he was “dead” as a writer, he was desperate to get away from Russia and live at least temporarily in Palestine.²

Sobol’s “Intermission” and Bergelson’s “A Rare Ending” emphasize the ephemeral nature of events. Nothing is permanent. The suspension of all boundaries could mean that the Jews were at home everywhere in “whole round earth,” as the ending of Perets Markish’s 1929 Brider (Brothers) proclaims, or it could signal the beginning of universal homelessness. In Lev Lunts’ short story “Native Land” (Rodina) the revolution fails to resolve the problem of national identification:

In Petersburg on a summer evening my friend and I go out to look for alcohol. In the next room, my father, an old Polish Jew, bald, with a gray beard and side curls prays facing east, but his soul weeps because his only son, the last scion of an ancient family, drinks rotgut on Sabbath eve. And the old Jew sees the blue sky of Palestine, where he never was, but which he saw, and sees, and will see. And I, an unbeliever, also cry, because I want to and cannot see far away Jordan and the blue sky, because I love the city of my birth, and my native language, which is an alien language. (Lunts 1981, 14)

In this fantastical story the two friends find themselves transported to ancient Babylon, where one becomes a prophet and the other, a slave. In Lunts’s picture of the Jew, the native and the alien uneasily cohabit the same body. Lunts (1901–24), a playwright and short story writer, studied Hebrew and was invited by the Hebrew theater group Habima to develop materials for their productions. In a letter to his parents, Lunts expressed his unease as a Russian-Jewish writer, finding a contradiction between his Jewishness, in which he “rejoiced,” and the demands of being a Russian-language writer (1981, 318).

The 1920s was a decade of great artistic experimentation in all areas of the arts, and Jews occupied prominent roles across the new movements in literature, the visual arts, film, and criticism. Lunts was a founding member of the Serapion Brothers, a group that included Veniamin Kaverin (pseudonym of Zil’ber) and advocated the importance of intriguing plots, with Western literature as a key model. Kaverin’s portrait of a Jewish gangster, a former rabbinical student, in “Konets khazy” (The end of the gang, 1925) includes biblical references and Yiddish expressions. Il’ia Sel’vinskii and Eduard Bagritskii were on the other side of the artistic spectrum. They helped to found the Literary Center for Constructivism, which rejected literary models of the past in favor of an emphasis on new forms of literary production more closely tied to the laboratory and the factory. Iurii Libedinskii, on the other hand, was associated with the proletarian writers’ movement. In the same time period, Yiddish culture underwent a similar ferment of artistic and political movements and allegiances. Experimentation in the literary and visual arts combined to produce a print culture of remarkable artistic quality.³ David Hofshteyn’s poem cycle Troyer (Mourning), the source of the second epigraph to this chapter, was published in Kiev in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall. There is no single form of Jewish expression in the 1920s.

As Lunts’s story “Native Land” and Sobol’s letter both reveal, the opening of new possibilities both in art and in life did not necessarily reconcile the contradictions of the past. For some writers, working in both Russian and Yiddish, the free-floating carnival of revolution came together with a heightened sense of ongoing catastrophe, produced by the First World War and the devastation of the Russian Civil War, during which many thousands of Jewish lives were lost. The two events were related: when the newly formed Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, it lost territories that the imperial Russian government had once controlled, including Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, thereby making possible the series of national conflicts that followed in those regions. The Pale of Settlement, where most of imperial Russia’s Jews lived, comprised precisely this area. Peter Holquist speaks of a “continuum of crisis” in the period 1914–21 (2002). The anti-Jewish policies of the Imperial Russian Army during the First World War, including the classification of Jews as enemies and the massive deportations based on this assumption, fed directly into the “deterioration of basic legal and social norms,” with disastrous consequences for Jews (Lohr 2001). The anti-Jewish violence of the civil war period, however, was distinctive in its duration, scope, and scale: a given locale could be in pogrom mode for “weeks or months on end” (Miliakova 2007, vii). Whites, Reds, the Polish Army, the army of the Ukrainian National Republic, and numerous roaming military bands all perpetrated the killings, rapes, and mutilations, and the destruction of Jewish property. There is general agreement that the lower limit of Jewish deaths in the period 1918–22 in Ukraine, Belorussia, and the European part of Russia (the former Pale of Settlement) was fifty thousand and the upper limit, two hundred thousand.⁴

Hofshteyn’s response to these events expresses two conflicting impulses: he mourns and, in mourning, revels in his autonomy. The poet rejects all authorities (“the comfort-givers”), taking refuge and strength in the superman scale of his own human mourning. This and other Yiddish poetry of the 1920s and early 1930s, and Perets Markish’s Brothers, Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Semen Gekht’s work, and Bergelson’s civil war stories, are haunted by a particular sense of loss over “the pillage and murder of the Jewish shtetls in Ukraine.”⁵ These texts construct the present as an “intermission,” an uncertain moment between epochs.

Mikhail Bakhtin developed his theory of the body and popular culture in the mid-1930s, not long after Markish, Bergelson, Babel, and Gekht produced their civil war literature. In his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin described the realm of carnival as the creation of a new, collective body in which individuals lose their individuality while the “people,” the mass body, gains immortality. The open orifices of the grotesque body, according to Bakhtin, indicate openness to the world and an unchanging cycle of birth and death. The overflowing mass body is pregnant with new life.⁶ In Markish, Kvitko, Babel, Gekht, and Bergelson, in contrast, birth is precarious, and the body—displaced, fragmented, and swollen in illness—is paradoxically full of loss. These authors represent the outcome of the revolution as stillbirth.

Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of psychic incorporation provides a better analytic model of Markish, Babel, and Bergelson than Bakhtin’s carnival. Abraham and Torok describe incorporation as an alternative to mourning. Instead of acknowledging loss, subjects narcissistically take lost objects into themselves, thereby threatening, even as they try to preserve, the boundaries of their own identities. A loss that “cannot be acknowledged” results in the creation “of a secret tomb inside the subject” (Abraham and Torok 1994, 131). Incorporation is a regressive process, in which the desires of the past come back to haunt the present.

A New Masculine Order

In the mid-1920s, emerging literary templates for the depiction of the civil war emphasized order, unity, and discipline. For example, Iurii Libedinskii’s novella Komissary (Commissars), published in 1925, describes the reeducation of a group of civil war heroes. In the novella, the military commander says that in 1918 “we built a disciplined army and cauterized anarchy with red-hot iron” (96). Libedinskii’s medicalizing language compares political disorder to a festering wound, suggesting by contrast a closed-off, integral, and masculine body as the image of a healthy body politic.⁷ In Aleksandr Fadeev’s Razgrom (The rout) the partisan detachment finds itself trapped in a wood with the enemy on one side and a swamp on the other. The mass of overwhelmed and frightened men, who have been reduced to a “heap,” ready to cry and despair, “were suddenly transformed into an inhumanly quick, obedient, fierce movement” (1947, 150). It is none other than the Jewish commander Levinson who brings about the transformation. In spite of his physical weakness, small stature, and unimposing appearance (he has a wedge-shaped red beard that makes him resemble a gnome), Levinson, who has few compunctions about violence and no interest in the past, exerts an overwhelming, compelling force over his men.⁸

In 1929 the Soviet and Jewish literary critic Abram Lezhnev described a demand for literary work that captured the dynamism and rapid tempo of change that was unfolding in daily life. The great novel of life, the five-year plan, was already written, and literature had to catch up. One of the most important changes had to do with human nature itself. The new emphasis on the remaking of the self, or “reforging” (perekovka), was not compatible with a preoccupation with loss. As Lezhnev explained, the proponents of proletarian literature saw “psychologicalism” as a retreat into the self and an attraction to psychopathology, both of which bordered on the decadent modernist style of the 1890s, and the neurasthenic self-analysis characteristic of that era (1929, 34).⁹

Markish’s Brothers, Babel’s Red Cavalry, and Bergelson’s “Civil War” challenge these models of the revolution. None of these works shows how “authentic communists forged an army with proletarian discipline.”¹⁰ The image of forging as a tool of self-creation reflects the masculine ethos of the time, the hallmarks of which Eliot Borenstein in Men Without Women characterizes as “production rather than reproduction, participation in the historic process rather than domestic ahistoricity, heavy industry, construction, and, of course, ‘the struggle’” (2000, 3). In contrast to this ethos, in Markish, Babel, Gekht, and Bergelson the opposition between the domestic and the political, the Jewish and the non-Jewish space, and the closed and the open body become blurred. In their works, the trope of the festering wound, the open, flowing body, and the “mound” overwhelm all boundaries to become dominant elements of the artistic text. It is not only the destruction of the past that they lament but, in addition, the failure of the revolution to give birth to something new.

Markish’s Brothers

Born in 1895 (a year after Babel) in Volynia, Ukraine, Markish attended heder, and was apprenticed to a cantor for a brief period. He was wounded on the front in the First World War. In his early lyrical works, reminiscent of Walt Whitman and Vladimir Maiakovskii, Markish celebrates his absolute freedom from the past and the future; he proclaims that he belongs to “the now that belongs to no one” (nishtiker atsind); he is undefined, unfettered, unlimited.¹¹ He was one of the most prolific authors in the Soviet Yiddish canon. Brider (Brothers) was published in 1929, and Russian translations of the Yiddish appeared in 1935 and 1969.¹² The 1969 Russian translation of Brothers was included in a volume of his selected poetic works in the prestigious series the Poet’s Library, originally edited by Maxim Gorkii. The introduction praises Markish as a “leading Soviet Jewish poet,” whose work “objectively reflects” the history of the Jews in the twentieth century, beginning with the revolution and concluding with the “Soviet triumph over the fascist enemy.” In 1938 the Great Soviet Encyclopedia praised the work as “one of the most important in the literature of the peoples of the USSR,” and the 1969 volume states that the original publication of the Yiddish work was “a significant event for all Soviet literature” (25). Very little of Markish has been translated into English.

Brider, at first glance, satisfies the new demand for a new type of Jewish literature and a new type of Jewish hero, who embodies change. On closer inspection, however, it reveals a continuity with his pogrom poem of 1921, “Di kupe” (The mound). The two “brothers,” Shloyme-Ber and Azril, wield bayonets, commandeer horses, shoot Jewish speculators, j...