"In the City of Slaughter": The Hidden Voice of the Pogrom Victims

Abstract

In the light of recent scholarship, "In the City of Slaughter" can be read as an emotional and a political manifesto, considerably removed from the actual events of the Kishinev pogrom. Taking this reading one step further, this essay attempts to recover the authentic voice of the pogrom victims, which presumably remains intact in the eyewitness accounts that Bialik transcribed during his visit in the site of the pogrom.

In order for these voices indeed to be exposed, however, this text, too, requires a subversive reading, which works to deconstruct its logic and organization. Such a reading pays close attention to the core experiences of the pogrom: the element of surprise (despite previous warnings), the blurring of borders between friend and foe, and, most importantly, the preferred strategy of self-defense: negotiating with the perpetrator was often revealed to be more effective than aggressive responses.

Obviously, these insights adumbrate the major public controversies about the appropriate Jewish response to violence, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust. These, in turn, help explain the lasting preoccupation with the Kishinev Pogrom and Bialik's literary responses thereto in Jewish and Israeli public discourse and of its formative role in constituting Jewish and Israeli collective memory.

As the accumulated body of research on "In the City of Slaughter" demonstrates, and as the deliberations of the 2003 conference "Kishinev and the Twentieth Century" tended to confirm, it is by now quite a matter of fact to conceive of Bialik's poem as an unreliable and, to a certain extent, invalid testimony to the Jewish response to the Kishinev pogrom (see, for example, Goren 1991: 36-47). Whether attributed to the voice of an omnipotent furious God, profoundly disappointed by His people's alleged disgraceful passivity, or to a self-annihilating God, testifying to His own collapse of power, Bialik's narrative avoids any reference to the acts of heroism and self-defense that apparently did take place during the 1903 riots and chooses to blur the circumstances that possibly worked against any chances of such acts bearing significant outcomes.¹

The frequent references to this aspect of the poem attempt to explain it in terms of the political and psychological dynamics to which the poet is assumed to have been subjected during his mission to Kishinev. It has been suggested that Bialik was particularly influenced by the openly declared activist agenda of the Odessa Historical Committee, which sent him to the site of the atrocities: namely, to use the pogrom and its grave outcome as a trigger for change in the reaction of Eastern European Jewry to its deteriorating political position (Goren 1991: 16-44; Gluzman 2003: 113). Indeed, as Anita Shapira has shown, the historical appraisal of the poem's outstanding influence on Jewish public discourse demonstrates such an effect to have been obviously produced (Shapira 2005, in present issue). In terms of the poet's own emotional stance, it may well be assumed that the humiliating situations recounted by the victims aroused in him deep and possibly unconscious anxieties, which may also account for his poetic response to it.

Read from this twofold interpretive perspective, "In the City of Slaughter" may thus be conceived of as a representation of a contexture of interests and motivations: the aggressive response of the poem's narrator, who becomes a "hostile witness" to the victims' conduct during the events of the pogrom, is both a political manipulation and an expression of an eruption of threatening effects. Michael Gluzman provides evidence to such an eruption by demonstrating Bialik's preoccupation, during his stay in Kishinev, with threatening childhood memories reminiscent of the victims' traumas (Gluzman 2003). The poem itself supports this impression by its emphasis on the transformational process through which fear, threat, and anxiety are converted into rage and fury. The psychological defense mechanism of reaction formation, whereby an anxious response is transformed into an openly hostile one, is frequently identified among victims of human atrocities, who are thus often diagnosed as identifying with the aggressor. Some well-known lines of "In the City of Slaughter" impressively articulate this very process, in which an aggressive response emerges from a strong feeling of both grief and inferiority (which Bialik, as witness to the act of witnessing, possibly experienced): "But thy tear, son of man, remain unshed! / Build thou about it, with thy deadly hate / The fury and the rage, unuttered, / A wall of copper, the bronze triple plate! / So in thy heart it shall remain confined / A serpent in its nest-O terrible tear!-/ Until by thirst and hunger it shall find / A breaking of its bond. Then shall it rear / Its venomous head, its poisoned fangs, and wait / To strike the people of thy love and hate!" (Hebrew lines 205-7; English lines 262-71).

The unshed tear that God orders His prophet to transform into a poisonous strike of a hungry serpent (English lines 266-69, as quoted above) is one of numerous elements that create in the poem a highly emotional tone and atmosphere. At one and the same time, however, it works in a different, even contradictory, direction. Being "unshed," held back, this tear also suggests an attempt at restraining emotional responses. Taken together with various other descriptions of restraint responses throughout the text, such as a hardened heart (Hebrew line 145; English line 184), a gaze turned away from the dead (Hebrew line 174; English line 216), and a cry stifled within the throat (Hebrew line 205; English line 262), as well as the constant presence of "a thousand golden arrows of the sun" that "flash upon [the poet's] malison" in spite of himself (Hebrew lines 19-20; English lines 21-22), presenting him with the unspoiled beauty of nature, it does indeed suggest the possibility of an emotional distance and detachment from the catastrophic events being experienced and conveyed by the poet.² This, too, is a common phenomenon among direct and indirect victims of human atrocities: overwhelmed by anxiety, they retreat to a psychological defense mechanism of "isolation" (in which threatening emotional responses are defensively flattened, emptied, neutralized) and develop what psychologists refer to as "psychological closing off" or "numbness" (Lifton 1967: 174). Taken together, these readings of Bialik's poem as both an emotional and a political manifesto indicate that it is a document considerably removed from the actual events of the Kishinev pogrom.

Is the "true story" of the victims, which they innocently narrated to Bialik, whom they believed to be an interested, deeply involved, and empathic listener, therefore lost? It seems that it is not lost, but rather exists elsewhere: since the poem was written as the unintended result of a grand operation of collecting firsthand testimonies, which were planned to be included in a historical document to be titled The Book of Kishinev, the authentic voice of the victims could be assumed to be represented in this alternative text (of which only an initial draft was ever completed).³ Indeed, the testimonies, originally given orally by the victims in their native tongue, Yiddish, and translated into Hebrew by Bialik and his assistants in the project, seem to be strongly committed to a highly accurate and detailed account of the events. In one of the very few editing remarks that he added to the testimonies, Bialik refers to this commitment: "There is nothing in [the testimony] that is not true. Moreover, parts of it I have omitted, as it is well known that not everything that is said can be written down, and not everything that is being written down can be printed" (Goren 1991: 51).

However, this very remark, which intends to emphasize the accuracy of the testimony, points to its being an edited (and thus unavoidably distorted) document. Furthermore, other existing materials indicate that, like the poem, the initial draft of The Book of Kishinev is also removed from the "true story" of the victims. Rather than providing a stage for their authentic voice, The Book of Kishinev, too, presents an attempt to organize the story of the pogrom in accordance with a well-conceptualized preconceived order. This calls for a reading of The Book of Kishinev's existing first draft against its logic and organization in order for important components of the experiences of the victims to come to light. In other words, in spite of the fact that the firsthand testimonies draw a representation of extremely painful situations, which were honestly recounted and meticulously recorded, they simultaneously reflect attempts at silencing such aspects of the ordeal that defy its preconceived narrative.

The purpose of the following comments on what I suggest to be the hidden voice of the pogrom victims is an attempt to recover aspects of the silenced story of the internal narrators of the events: the Jews who fell prey to the hostility against them by the gentile population of Kishinev. The potential contribution of this exposure is the better understanding that it may possibly give rise to of the threat of a pogrom as a constituting trauma in the collective Jewish and Israeli memory. Moreover, the long-term impact of the Kishinev pogrom and of Bialik's poetic response to it may be understood as emerging not only from the political agenda that it successfully advanced and from its role in creating the ethos of self-defense, but also from the contradictory aspects of it-namely, the silenced presence of the pogrom as a sudden and unexpected chaotic event, which is, by definition, impossible to predict and defend against. The fact that present Israeli public discourse makes frequent use of quotations from "In the City of Slaughter" (and "Al hasheḥitah") in reference to present military and terrorist threats demonstrates that it is indeed this existential trauma-told and untold at the same time by both the poem and the compilation of testimonies-to which readers still readily respond.⁴

"Drawing an Ordered Historical Picture of the Entire Event"⁵

Reconstruction and organization are inherent to the act of testifying. In other words, a testimony is, by definition, a mediated text, and its delivery is equivalent to a production of a narrative that strives for coherency and integration. The organizing principles of a testimony are dependent on the context of its delivery, particularly on the interests of both the testifier and the testimony's addressee (see a thorough discussion of the interactive process of producing a testimony in Laub 1992). In the testimonies of the Kishinev riots, the two competing organizing agents of the testimonies are, accordingly, the victims and the interviewers (i.e., Bialik and his assistants). The agenda of the former may only be guessed: the victims probably needed opportunity for catharsis, as well as human empathy and emotional support, which they hoped would also be transformed into financial support in the form of compensation for losses. Since Bialik was asked by the Kishinev Jewish community to help survey property damages while interviewing the victims for his own purposes, the testifiers were possibly led to believe that the reception of such compensation might very well be dependent on their cooperation with the interviewers (Goren 1991: 48). The position of Bialik, the testimonies' initiator and addressee, has already been outlined here: the complex dynamics that possibly determined the nature of his poetic response to the events can be surmised to have been at work in determining his treatment of the entire project of collecting evidence. Bialik arrived at the scene equipped not only with the aforementioned political agenda but also-as representative of the Historical Committee-with what was assumed to be an elaborate historical perspective (thus fitting the position of the external, omnipresent narrator of the "ordered historical picture of the entire event"). The notes that he made of the steps to be taken in collecting evidence-appearing in a small undated notebook of preparations that must have been prepared ahead of time⁶-indicate his intention to sketch an all-encompassing picture of the pogrom, including such categories as conform to traditional documentation practices: the general and specific circumstances that gave rise to the riots; the channels of communication between the gentile and Jewish population of the area through which information about the allegedly expected riots could have been transmitted; the steps taken by both sides before the pogrom; the actual hostile activities; the degree of involvement of the law-enforcement agents in organizing the riots, and so on.⁷ The notebook thus includes exhaustive lists of participants in the project, of persons to be met, of inquiries to be performed, of streets to be visited, of documents to be collected, and of questions to be addressed to the witnesses.⁸

These lists of questions and categories to be investigated are of particular relevance to the issue at hand: they point to the fact that the interviews themselves were pre-structured and determined a priori the chronological sequences and the causal chains of the victims' stories. The basic framework according to which these stories were to be structured drew direct causal relations between the Jews' neglect to take precautionary steps, including preparation of self-defense measures, and the grave outcomes of the pogrom. It is evident from the transcribed testimonies that the interviewers strictly followed the guiding questions, to the extent that each of the testimonies can be read as a series of well-ordered replies to them.⁹ Moreover, a notation that Bialik made in one of the notebooks containing the materials collected in Kishinev shows that this order was indeed planned to dominate The Book of Kishinev in its entirety. This is a sketch of "a table of contents" where he indicated that The Book of Kishinev was to be similarly divided into three chronological/causal categories ("before," "during," and "after" the riots).¹⁰

In addition, the arrangement of the testimonies in the first draft of The Book of Kishinev is also based on a spatial dimension: the testimonies are sequenced along geographical coordinates that follow the route taken by the rioters throughout the three days of the pogrom. The spatial concern of the interviewers is also reflected in each of the testimonies, as the flow of events is characteristically described in terms of specific locations and directions taken by the rioters at each stage. Clear traces of a similar urge for chronological and spatial order are, of course, apparent in the poem itself, as many of its verses are sequenced as an "organized tour" of "the city of slaughter": from the courtyards of the attacked houses to their insides, then to the open yards again (where not only signs of slaughter can be found but also the beauty of blossoming nature), up to the attics and roofs and down to the cellars of town, then to the facilities surrounding the houses (the privies, jakes, and pigpens), where men, women, and children hid, and finally, to the city's outskirts: an open garden out in the town's valley and the cemetery that is located out of town ("Beyond the suburbs go, and reach the burial ground" [Hebrew line 138; English line 175]).

The compilation of evidence (namely, the text that is assumed to hold the "true story" of the victims, their authentic voice) is, then, highly dominated by an urge for well-defined order. Obviously, this urge works not only in the service of the historical committee's agenda but also as an additional psychological defense mechanism against an anxiety-arousing confrontation with an extremely threatening reality. Such an urge for order indicates that what is probably most threatening in the situation is its extreme chaos. In fact, chaos penetrates many of the scenes recounted by the victims. These scenes, which describe the brutality of the attackers and the vulnerability of the victims at their peak, often culminate in a wild flight of terrified men, women, and children who lose all sense of direction and destination. Attacked inside their own homes and on their own premises, they flee out into open, even less protected places. They climb ladders, jump off roofs, move from one courtyard to the next through breached walls, advance from one hiding place to another in complete darkness, not realizing where the usually familiar but now completely strange roads may lead, not knowing who, in their natural surroundings, has turned into a perpetrator and who may still offer refuge.

What emerges from these descriptions in The Book of Kishinev is a complete blurring and distortion of clear boundaries between friends and enemies, helpers and traitors. Time and again, the victims describe how their close Christian neighbors turned down their desperate pleas for mercy. However, they also recount numerous cases where Gentiles (whom the testifiers define as "kosher goyim" [Goren 1991: 204]) came to their rescue and provided a great deal of aid. The testimonies tell in detail how these "kosher goyim" placed idols at the windows of Jewish homes to mislead the attackers; how they fed the Jewish children Easter bread; how they urged Jewish families to hide and offered them safe hiding places (though threatened that their own houses would be burned, had Jews been found in them); how they took care of the Jews' wounds; and how they even tried, sometimes successfully, to reproach the rioters and stave them off (for examples of such situations, see Goren 1991: 69, 70, 77, 78, 81, 91, 104-5, 141, 150, 174, 183, 184, 202, 204, 222).

But these benevolent acts paradoxically intensify, rather than diminish, the disorientation to which the victims have been subjected, because the merciful "kosher goyim" were very often the rioters themselves. A helpful neighbor of a Jewish family could very well also have been an active, cruel participant in the violent acts. Numerous testimonies describe how Gentiles who gave refuge to Jews went ahead to loot their property and even joined the murderers. Hiding in the cellar of a Christian home, Jews could overhear family members of their protector getting drunk in an adjacent room and planning further murderous attacks on Jewish neighborhoods. They sometimes even witnessed their own protectors going drunk out into the streets to rob and kill whoever crossed their way. One of the most powerful testimonies, that of the rape of Rivka Schiff, wife of Shabtai Schiff of 11 Nikolayevskaya Street, dramatically demonstrates this chaotic situation: "One [of the four rapists] kneeled by my side and started, so to speak, to condole me. Then he saw my earrings-and tore them off my ears and wanted to rape me again," Rivka Schiff recounts (Goren 1991: 81). This incident took place a few minutes after she had begged her neighbor, Mitya Kresilchik, who had tried to torture her, to leave her alone, saying: "Don't touch me, Mitya. You have known me for many years" (ibid.: 80). Other men and women tell of similar episodes in which they were mercilessly beaten and tortured by rioters who a few minutes earlier had tried to save them, making them suspect that every hiding place offered to them was actually a death trap.¹¹

Many years after the victims of the Kishinev riots had been interviewed by Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, Primo Levi wrote the famous chapter of The Drowned and the Saved titled "The Grey Zone" (Levi 1986), in which he described the confusion of the prisoners of the concentration camps, resulting from their inability to draw a clear and unmistakable line between their fellow victims and the perpetrators (due to various manifestations of collaboration with the Nazis), and defined this confusion as a most devastating experience, very often a deadly one (ibid.: 38-39). "The world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside, the 'we' lost its limits.... One could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers" (ibid.). The testimonies from Kishinev foretell these insights: the subversive narration of the events, which denies the existence of a "single frontier," highlights that in the trauma of the pogrom lies the experience of a shattered, broken, chaotic, unpredictable, undecipherable, and, therefore, uncontrollable, reality.

The Book of Kishinev allows these stories of loss of control and disorientation to take center stage and draw attention and compassion toward the victims. But it suggests that these episodes are to be understood within the general framework of the pogrom-namely, as the direct outcome of the alleged refusal of the Jewish population to respond to warnings and take proper action. Defined differently, these testimonies of the pogrom could not have been manipulated to function as an effective warning signal against the alleged indifference and passivity of the Jews.

The extrapolated voice of the victims of the riots rejects this narrative and defies its logic not only in reference to the actual events but also with regard to the general causal framework inherent to the "before," "during," and "after" plan of the compilation of testimonies. First and foremost, what emerges from their stories, when they are read against the order and logic imposed on them by the external, omnipresent narrator, is their opposition to the basic assumption regarding their prior knowledge of the catastrophe. Recounted from the perspective of Jews living within a dense gentile population, the hostile attack of the Kishinev pogrom was not a foreseeable incident: in spite of their awareness of the rumors anticipating it, the victims experienced the outburst of hostility as an absolute surprise. It is not, however, an attitude of blind indifference to the reality of their life as a minority group within an antisemitic population that the testifiers thus reveal, but rather a complex existential situation arising from a highly symbiotic relationship with the Christian majority. Prejudice and fears, very often of a primeval and mystic nature, that are deeply embedded in the collective unconscious of each of the groups in its relation to the other, is one side of this complex ambivalent relationship. An intimate acquaintance among members of the two groups-resulting from many years of living together in physical proximity and maintaining strong economic ties, and even a sense of friendship and solidarity between Jews and Christians-is the other side. The testimonies thus highlight the fact that profound disorientation was a fundamental experience of the Jews living among Gentiles not only in times of riots. Therefore, rumors about a forthcoming pogrom during Passover, though suggesting a concrete threat, were taken for granted and did not necessarily put their potential victims on alert. Perceived in this context, the fact that the Jews ignored the warnings and did not take precautionary measures may be understood as a manifestation of their trust in their neighbors-"their" Gentiles, as they referred to them-who consistently promised that they were going to protect "their" Jews at all costs rather than hurt them (and, in many cases, indeed did so; see Goren 1991: 51-54, 73-74, 77, 80, 106, 175, 186).

Self-defense is therefore revealed to be much more complicated than the Odessa Historical Committee (and "In the City of Slaughter") would have it. This is even more so in light of the fact that acts of self-defense that did take place during the riots were much less effective than the non-activist measures taken by the victims. Practically all of the few attempts at aggressive reactions, as recounted in the testimonies, aroused further waves of hostility on the part of the rioters and ended up in failure, while the passive responses, the pleas for help, and the attempts at redeeming life for money often proved successful and undoubtedly saved many lives.¹²

The discrepancy between these two alternative perceptions of the Jewish response again constitutes a prolepsis to future profound dilemmas, as it foresees the problematic gap between what Nathan Alterman many years later defined as "the two roads" taken by the Jews during World War II: the passive reaction of the majority (often encouraged by the Judenrat and sometimes transformed into what may be conceived of as acts of collaboration) as opposed to the active response of the underground fighters.¹³ Well aware of their inferiority and of their poor chances of winning over the aggressors, the victims of the pogrom retreated to what they intuitively believed might have dismantled the rioters' hostility (as the great majority of Jews during the Holocaust chose to do). Indeed, they were often successful in their attempts to quiet down the attackers by manipulating their own ambivalence toward the Jews. The testimonies bring forth situations in which the victims tried to converse with the rioters (whom they were very well acquainted with) and, under the immediate threat of rape and killing, approached them in a way that caused them to retreat.

One testimony tells of a Jewish woman who washed the blood (probably that of the victims) off the rioters' hands and took care of their wounds while her husband gave them wine and a few kopecks. They both spoke very softly to them and finally made them leave. From the point of view of these and other victims, the pogrom was, among other things, strongly connected to the drinking habits of the Gentiles. Very often working in wine houses (and, like Bialik's own father, having much experience waiting on drunken Gentiles), the Jews were well aware that the outburst of violence was destined to quiet down, since the drunken goy would unavoidably fall into a drunken sleep. Their strategy of dealing with the situation may thus be perceived as a successful maneuver rather than an expression of weakness. It also could have been a further expression of the Jews' ambivalence toward the Gentiles and of the fact that dismay and trust as well as hatred and attraction between Jews and Gentiles were not, in that specific time and place, necessarily mutually exclusive.