Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide

10. De-Centered Writing: Aspects of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Russia

ten ‰ R ainer Grübel & Vladimir Novikov De-Centered Writing: Aspects of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Russia Contemporary Russian Jewish literature can be characterized as a “de-centric” form of writing. This term—coined in opposition to Thomas Nolden’s characterization of recent German Jewish literature as “concentric writing” (Nolden 1995)—is derived from the very history of Russian Jews; it refers to their geographical distribution and relates to the aesthetics of their literary production. Whereas present-day German Jewish writing, according to Nolden, describes a “concentric movement” toward the “concentrationary experience” of the Shoah, the dynamics of Russian Jewish literature do not concentrate on the most catastrophic event in modern Jewish history.1 For Russian Jewish authors the problem of constructing a Jewish self-consciousness at Europe’s periphery involves articulating and locating their own cultural position in the space between Jewish tradition and dominant Russian culture.2 The negotiation of this de-centric positioning primarily entails a distancing from the highly centralized structure of Soviet and Russian culture.3 The most recent generation of Russian Jewish authors was, for the most part, born in non-Russian parts of the former Soviet Union, whereas most contemporary Russian (non-Jewish) authors come from the Russian areas. The var- De-Centered Writing 193 ied cultural contexts of their upbringing and education led to a considerable degree of artistic (i.e., thematic, linguistic, and stylistic) diversity, compounded by the fact that almost no Russian Jewish author now lives and works where he or she was born. As a result, de-centricity resists the general centralization of Russian culture. From czardom through socialism, a strong emphasis on centralization eliminated a great deal of regional—in many cases non-Russian—cultural productivity. Destroying farming communities as well as the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the Soviet regime substantiated the centrism of party and government by radically reducing the social structure until only two discernable parts remained, namely, the governing and the governed. In doing so the Communist Party ruined the regional cultures of peoples of non-Slavic origin, the rich oral Russian tradition, Russian and Ukrainian peasant cultures, and the distinct cultures of the prerevolutionary Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Due to a lack of a genuine proletarian culture in Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution, Lenin and Stalin extended the Russian petit bourgeois culture across society, enriched by pseudofolkloric traditions. The victims of cultural centralization included traditional Hasidism as well as the open-minded culture of Jewish intellectuals .4 Many Jews expected that their situation under German occupation would be better than it had been under the Soviet government. That expectation , however, proved to be tragically wrong. Between 1941 and 1944 the remnants of Jewish culture tolerated by Communist authorities were destroyed by the German occupying forces. Anti-Semitism is still alive in Russia,5 which makes it a precarious endeavor to speak about Russian Jewish literature—a term canonized by Vasilii L’vov-Rogachevskii in 1922. Any attempt to classify individual Russian authors , texts, or ways of reading as part of “Russian Jewish literature” needs to acknowledge the false dichotomy put forth by Russian anti-Semitic nationalists , who have been dividing Russian literature into two opposed domains. There is “Russian literature” (russkaia literatura), which they imagine to be written by so-called autochthons, or “true” Russians; and there is a “literature in the Russian language” (russkojazychnaia literatura), which is supposedly written primarily by Jews.6 To be sure, this anti-Semitic strategy has a long history . In response to it, Marina Tsvetaeva penned the celebrated lines: “In this utmost Christian-orthodox world / The poets are Yids” (1984, 389). Russian Jews still face difficulties in obtaining positions in government or private institutions in present-day Russia. The origins of Russian state-sponsored anti-Semitism can be traced back to the nineteenth century when pogroms7 in the southern and western parts of Russia resulted in an exodus of approximately 1.2 million Jews, mostly to the United States. Anti-Semitism became a part of official Russian politics and policies and was only halted after the Russian Revolution for less than two decades, during which Jews were granted the same rights 194 rainer grübel & vladimir novikov as Russians living in the Soviet Union. (A number of Russians even changed their Slavic-sounding names to make them sound more Jewish.) Concealed beneath Stalin’s terror campaign (1936–38) was a strong current of...