Tribal territory
A few years ago Russo American journalist Masha Gessen was back living in Moscow, having returned there to report on Russia’s cyclically oppressive politics. As a writer and LGBTQ activist, she was anything but risk-averse, but in 2013 the Russian government was threatening to break up gay families like hers and annul adoptions by parents of the same gender.
Like her parents in the 1970s, who faced relentless persecution as Jews in the Soviet Union, Gessen decided that her home had become too dangerous, too threatening. It’s an old Jewish problem, she knew: when to run, when to stick it out in hopes that things will “return to normal.”
So Gessen left Moscow again and threw herself into what would become “Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region.” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews in Europe and those who hated them turned again and again to the question of where this people might find a homeland.
Of course, by then millions of Jews had made homes across Eastern Europe, and in almost all its major cities. Still, they were often regarded (and sometimes regarded themselves) as different, and politicians, dreamers, demagogues and scoundrels periodically considered where these Jews could all go together, with their Torah, their Yiddish and their strange ways. How to solve the Jewish problem, the problem of difference?
Gessen describes the Soviet solution to the Jewish problem: the creation of a “Jewish Autonomous Region” in the East, bordering on China. Never mind that it was a swampland (when it wasn’t frozen), that the mosquitoes were monstrous and that there was no real infrastructure for the families that were sent there. Everyone, at least for a short time, seemed to agree that the Jews, that enterprising people, could turn Birobidzhan into a homeland where the language would be Yiddish and the Jewish difference could flourish without disturbing the Soviet Union’s agenda.
The Yiddish writer David Bergelson was one of those who celebrated the prospects of the new homeland — albeit from the comfort of cities far, far away from the autonomous region and its harsh conditions. Bergelson is at the center of Gessen’s story, and readers will learn more about him than about what it was like to live in Birobidzhan.
He was one of those Jewish writers, like Gessen herself, who often had to ask whether it was time to abandon a city or a country that had become home. He was committed to Yiddish culture, and he pursued that commitment in the Ukraine, Berlin, Kiev, Moscow, and if only for a quick visit, in Birobidzhan.
There, he wrote, one could build “a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content.” He wrote those words in 1935, after having been received in the homeland “as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe.” But the royal writer chose not to stay and enjoy the glory, returning instead to Moscow, where he lived quite comfortably ... until the purges.
The Nazi-Communist rapprochement of 1939 meant that hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews had to be assimilated into the Soviet society, and when Germany invaded its former ally two years later, Jews like Bergelson urged their co-religionists around the world to support the fight against fascism. After all, Hitler’s solution to the Jewish problem was to be final, so marshaling support for Soviet Russia was crucial for saving Jewish communities from annihilation.
After the war, thousands of Jewish survivors, having been liberated from concentration camps, returned to their homes to face vicious violence from former neighbors who had taken over their properties. What could be done? Birobidzhan! Head to the border with China and live with fellow Jews! Speak Yiddish in peace, urged poets like Bergelson, and make real a communal (and socialist) dream.
Gessen’s sad story tells how that dream died. By 1948, Stalin had turned to the tactic of anti-Semitism; Jews were now the main enemy within. Bergelson’s wartime efforts to rally support for Jews fighting against fascism was recoded as a “nationalistic” mistake, although Jews could still be persecuted for having no allegiances, for their “rootless cosmopolitanism.”
It was time to leave again, but it was almost impossible to get out. Yiddish language books were burned at Sholem Aleichem Library to show comrade Stalin that these poor souls understood their “bourgeois nationalist mistakes.” No matter. During the “Night of the Murdered Poets,” Bergelson and his friends were executed. More fortunate writers got years of hard labor.
I wish Gessen had told the reader more about what it was like to live in the Jewish Autonomous Homeland (which still exists, though not with many Jews). Unfortunately, she has found few sources about daily life there. In any case, her real interest is less the homeland than the writers, like Bergelson, who can never feel at home — those who must always wonder when it’s time to leave, who must decide when to run, when to stick it out.
Bergelson, says Gessen, was “trying to square the circle of Jewishness in a world that did not want Jews, protecting the seeds of a religion he did not practice, and insisting on his right to try to keep alive a dying language.” Her sad and absurd tale is less about a failed social experiment and more about the contradictions of writing without roots while longing for home.