The Jewish Century, New Edition by Yuri Slezkine

Author:Yuri Slezkine
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some of the Jewish members of the Soviet cultural elite were old rebels like Tevye’s Hodl, F. A. Moreinis-Muratova, and V. G. Tan-Bogoraz, who left their blind fathers to fight the tsar and came of revolutionary age in the underground world of terrorist conspiracies, reading circles, Party conferences, and Siberian exile. A few of them would remain active “builders of socialism” into the 1930s, but all would be forever “old” by virtue of being the living progenitors and dutiful memoirists of the socialist revolution.

Some—like Natan Altman, El Lissitzky, and David Shterenberg—joined the revolution through the back door of the avantgarde and went on to paint its facade during the early years of poster messianism, and then again during Stalin’s Great Transformation.

Some, like “Hope” Ulanovskaia, Eduard Bagritsky, or Babel’s Elijah Bratslavsky, renounced their parents to become children of the civil war. Their revolution stood for the cavalry attacks, bandits’ bullets, and campfire brotherhood of the last and decisive battle against the old “world of violence” (to quote the “Internationale”). The most faithful chronicler of that generation and the author of two of its greatest anthems—“Granada” (about a Ukrainian boy who died for the happiness of poor peasants in faraway Spain) and “Kakhovka” (about “our girl in a trench coat” who walked through a burning town to “the machine gun’s even roll”)—was Mikhail Svetlov (Sheinkman). As a little Jewish boy in Ekaterinoslav, he used to be frightened of his rabbi’s morbid tales—but not anymore.

Now I wear a leather jacket,

Now I’m tall—and the rabbi is small.

He is ready—“if necessary”—to burn down the old temple, and he looks forward to a fiery apocalypse “when the old rabbi dies under the collapsed wall of his synagogue.” The death of the rabbi signals the birth of the Bolshevik.

The red flag overhead,

The flashing bayonet,

The armored car.

This was the dawn of the holy day

The Bolshevik was born.

… … …

I stand before my Republic,

I have come from the distant South.

I have placed all my weakness—truly—

Under arrest.

The participants in the battle would carry the memory of that day—and the hope of its reenactment, over and over again—for as long as they lived. Few of them lived as long as Svetlov (who died, his youth “aged” but not used up, in 1964), but none of them—Chekist or poet (they made no such distinctions themselves)—would ever grow old. The son of a Jewish artisan from Zhitomir, author of the official Komsomol song (“The Young Guard,” 1922), and one of the Party’s most uncompromising crusaders against old age and degenerate art, Aleksandr Bezymensky wore his Komsomol badge until his death at seventy-five. He did not need to wear it: “My very old mother, who is but a speck / In our struggle, / Cannot understand that my Party card / Is a part of me.” Nor did he need to die:

People! Sharpen your swords and knives!

People! Wouldn’t you rather

Live forever?

These are the thieves of your lives:

Sleep and death.

Death to both!32

And then there were those—“the younger brothers”—who were raised by the Komsomol of the 1920s to “besiege the fortresses” of the First Five-Year Plan.

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