Raising Secular Jews by Naomi Prawer Kadar

Author:Naomi Prawer Kadar [Kadar, Naomi Prawer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611689884
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 2016-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Socialist Realism

Birobidzhan, a Jewish autonomous region, was established by Joseph Stalin in 1928 as a Soviet Zion, a homeland for Jews in the far east of the Soviet Union, bordering on China. This Soviet experiment attracted thousands of impassioned Jewish settlers. However, the majority of them had left by the mid-1930s, unwilling to stay in a region with extremely harsh winters and little arable land.23

Y. Papernikov’s poem “Birobidzhan” in the second issue of Yungvarg is a paean to the life of the farmer in Birobidzhan. With the soothing tones of regular rhyme and lilting meter, the poem describes two old bearded Jews who have been transferred from the “poverty and sadness” of the shtetl, and from their bourgeois occupations as “melamed and storekeeper” to the beauty of “this giant field,” to find honor and respect in the physical work they do.24

The poem contrasts the pre-Soviet shtetl with the dream of a Soviet autonomous homeland for the Jews. The Jews of the shtetl are called Menakhem Mendls, after the stockbroker who had nothing to sell in Sholem Aleichem’s episodic short stories. Like Menakhem Mendl, they are accused of being involved in luftgesheftn, businesses that deal with making a living “out of thin air” and of not being able to be “productive,” a Communist term that attributes value only to agricultural and factory work. The poem praises the ideal of collectivity as expressed in the construction of kolkhozn and kolvirtn, collective farms that are “productive” for the country and “bring happiness” to the population. Describing Birobidzhan with great optimism, the poem praises it as a solution for all the woes of the “wandering Jews” who will finally have a homeland in accordance with the Soviet doctrines, instead of the “nationalistic” Zionist land of Palestine.25 The hope elicited by this poem describes a dream that by this date had already proven itself to be unrealistic.

A story in the December 1937 issue, “Reyzele dem vasertregers” (Reyzele, the water carrier’s daughter), was written by Khaver Paver—a beloved children’s author and regular contributor to Yungvarg—and illustrated by William Gropper. The story opens with the heroine sitting on the steps of her parents’ destitute home the evening before she is to leave her birthplace to become a servant in the home of a wealthy relative. The red sky on the horizon and the protagonist’s wish that night might never fall symbolically signal the development of the narrative, as the red color of the upcoming revolution struggles against the reactionary night of poverty, inequality, and oppression of the lower classes by the wealthy. Rose, the color associated with the protagonist’s name, is also a harbinger of what is to come. Reyzele has dreams of going to the gimnasye (high school) and of playing the piano. When she and her father make the trip to their wealthy relative, they find that he has been dispossessed of his property by the Bolsheviks as the new world order is established. The end of the story is a flash forward to a

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