Trauma through absence —a memorial to the twofold destruction of Soviet Jewry
Today is the 65th anniversary of “The Night of the Murdered Poets”, the execution of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures in the basement of a Moscow prison. In this article I discuss a poem by Russian-Soviet-Jewish poet Boris Abramovich Slutsky that, in part, acts as a memorial to those murdered. The poem describes the total and fairly rapid destruction of Eastern Europe’s Yiddish-speaking Jews — a people, culture, language, and lifestyle —in the USSR during and right after the War.
About Slutsky
Slutsky was born in Sloviansk, Ukraine on May 7, 1919 and grew up in Kharkov (northeastern Ukraine). In Kharkov he was embedded in a web of cultural and linguistic intersections, that included Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and, thanks to his mother, also Hebrew and English. In his mid 20s he went to Moscow to study law. During the War he served in the Red Army as a politruk (political officer) of an infantry platoon and left the front in 1945 as a decorated officer.
To this day Slutsky is known as a ‘war poet’, which means basically that his work is tied up with and not very valued beyond the specific context of the war, in this case WWII. Slutsky’s lesser known work, much of which wasn’t published until after his death or has yet to be published still, deals directly with his Jewishness and the trauma of the Holocaust. These poems are not only notable and singular poetically, but remain important memorials to the Soviet Jewish experience.
It’s important to note that Slutsky wrote primarily in Russian, as opposed to Yiddish, the official language of the Soviet Jews (though he spoke Yiddish and translated many Yiddish texts into Russian). The point here is that Slutsky was very much not part of the milieu of the Soviet Yiddish cultural figures who were executed in 1952 (though he clearly read and appreciated their work and what it stood for, as I’ll discuss in reference to the poem below). As a Soviet Jew writing in Russian, Slutsky wrote texts that are a testament to the wide range of manifestations of Jewishness in Jewish literature during the Soviet era.
Part 1: Absence by replacement, village vs. shtetl
Slutsky’s poem “I was liberating Ukraine” (see full English translation here, or listen to me read it below) is, as I mentioned, a memorial to the trauma of the extermination of eastern European Jews, specifically those living in the the shtetlach in the former Pale of Settlement, whose primary language was Yiddish.
The poem deals with the central problem that the tradition of Holocaust literature sets before itself: how does one respond to catastrophe through language and the text? In this case, the poem glances back at Jewish tradition primarily through articulating absence. The opening stanza reads:
I was liberating Ukraine,
Walked through [its] Jewish villages.
Yiddish, their language, is long since a ruin.
It died out and for about three years has seemed ancient.
The use of the word “villages” has important nuance in the original text. The Russian word for village used here is derevnia, which refers generally to a rural Russian village. The small Jewish villages through which the narrator walked are not in fact Russian derevni, but shtetlach. The phrase “Jewish villages” (evreiskie derevnii) draws attention to the linguistic Russification of a particular phenomenon, from which emerges an indication of absence, a hint at the story of the destruction of the Yiddish language and its people, which unfolds in the following stanzas of the poem. The word in Russian usually used to refer to shtetl, (again, not used here) is mestechko, which can roughly be translated as “little place” or “little town”.
Part 2: Absence by mimesis, Yiddish becomes gibberish
The third stanza of the poem describes the verses written by the great Soviet-Jewish poets who wrote in Yiddish. Later in the poem, Sluskty utters three of their names— Markish, Hofshtein, and Bergelson — three poets whose life work was to preserve Yiddish language and culture.
These three poets were also all members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Commitee (JAC), one of the several official committees formed during the War to garner foreign support for the Soviet war effort. After the war, Stalin turned on the members of JAC and those associated with it, in a wave of anti-semitism, poorly disguised as anti-nationalism and a general witch-hunt for “rootless cosmopolitans”, in the postwar USSR.
Hundreds of Yiddish cultural figures were arrested, and a secret show trial took place for fifteen of them. They were tortured and forced to “confess” to crimes they did not commit, namely espionage, treason, and “bourgeois nationalism.” The trials culminated in the senseless execution of thirteen of them on August 12, 1952, which came to be known as “the Night of the Murdered Poets”, the 65th anniversary of which is today.
The third stanza of Slutsky’s poem reads:
In their verses, some sweet, some bitter,
Some burning, blazing with bitterness,
In the past, perhaps, too prickly,
In the present — actual.
The dominant sound in this stanza in the original Russian is a combination of the root gor and the particularly Russian resonance of the husher consonants ch, shch, zh, and sh. The meaning of the root gor is polysemantic: in various parts of speech it can encode the meanings: burning or hot, both in a literal sense and metaphoric sense (ardent), bitterness and grief. Slutsky plays with the multi-valenced nature of gor by repeating the root in four different words (three adjectives and a noun) in the first two lines of stanza three, the words translated as bitter, burning, blazing, and bitterness. The repeated hushers ch, shch, zh, and sh, which appear in almost every word of the stanza, unify the entire stanza in a particularly Russian (as opposed to Yiddish) soundscape.
On the other hand, the cluster of hushers also creates a blended, garbled combination of sounds that phonetically transform the spoken Russian words into gibberish. Again, the poem memorializes Yiddish, now a dead language, through absence; it is not that Yiddish phonemes are present and imbedded in the Russian text, but rather that the catastrophe must be told in Russian (recall the use of derevnia in stanza one), because Yiddish is dead. Russian fills the void of the destroyed language. But this time it accomplishes its memorializing work through mimesis: Russian itself is defamiliarized as it performs Yiddish’s transition from communicability to unintelligibility.
Part 3: A dual destruction
By providing a memorial to the Yiddish language and Yiddish speakers in Ukraine, Slutksy’s poem, on the one hand, gives testimony to the Holocaust, and specifically to the mass murder of those Yiddish–speaking Jews whose deaths took place not in labor or death camps far from home in Germany, Poland, or Austria, but over pits and ravines just outside their own towns and cities. On the other hand, the poem references the final blow to what ostensibly remained of Soviet-Yiddish culture after the war — the mass arrests, fake trial and real execution of the leading Yiddish cultural figures in the final years of Stalin’s reign.
I say final blow for a reason. Though Soviet-Yiddish culture was officially allowed to thrive in the early years of the Soviet Union, this tolerant, celebratory attitude towards Jewish-Yiddish culture eventually transformed into accusations of “bourgeois nationalism” right after the war, which, as with the JAC members, meant not only accusations, but torture, humiliation, and death.
Jews in the Soviet Union — an overview
The Bolshevik revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union was, overall, not a positive development for the Jews of the former Russian Empire. For the millions of Jews living in the former Pale, the Soviet revolution brought violence and more pogroms during the civil war years (1918–1921). Then the establishment of a State monopoly on production and the outlawing of private industry meant the destruction of the livelihood and increased poverty for the Jews in the former Pale. In the beginning of the Soviet project, as I mentioned above, the state allowed for the creation of official Jewish cultural production (in Yiddish), as it did for many of the non-Russian ethnicities living in the USSR. Unlike other non-Russian ethnic minorities, however, the Jews did not have their own established nation/republic. In response to this fact, the Soviet State even undertook an ill-advised experiment to build a new republic for the Jews of the USSR in far southeastern Russia, called Birobidzhan (which still exists, and is now officially Russia’s Jewish autonomous region).
If you want to hear the “sad and absurd” story of the making of Birobidzhan and the experience of Jews in the Soviet union, go ahead and listen to our episode where we discuss Masha Gessen’s book on the topic:
