Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Conclusion

211 conclusion The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, vegetables and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized zora. But in vain i set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.1 this book has attempted to evaluate the development of Jewish collective and individual existence in a Soviet (Jewish) city during the interwar period. Soviet Jews did not emerge abruptly from a sudden rupture generated by the Bolshevik revolution. in fact, many trends were at work before 1917 and were intensified by the revolution. A push for urbanization had set in since the 1890s and continued with incredible force during the 1920s and 1930s. Yiddish had made a modest appearance as a language of the Jewish public sphere at the beginning of the century and was further promoted by the Bolsheviks. challenges to the role of religion, and the subsequent growth of a new ethnic-based identity among a number of Jews, emerged in the late decades of the nineteenth century, but grew drastically under Bolshevik pressure. Jewish women had searched for ways to “leave the home” and reject their traditional roles of guardians of the hearth long before the revolution. Younger generations had alternated patterns of Jewish cohesion with patterns of Jewish defection since the 1880s. under the Soviets, they adjusted their views to comply with the communist interpretation of reality and took on Bolshevism (with or without enthusiasm) as a vehicle to achieve social empowerment and advancement. Youth were the most susceptible and prone to the centripetal forces of assimilation, as they anxiously strove to belong to, and be accepted into, Soviet society. often times, however, even young Jews maintained the habits, traditions, views, and language of the Jewish group, especially when living in compact Jewish demographic centers. By the late 1930s, the social pressure to fully embrace the ideals of the Stalinist civilization , adopt russian as an alternative to Yiddish, and intermarry with Belorussians 212 | Becoming Soviet Jews or russians took hold of young Jewish men and women with even greater intensity. intermarriage grew exponentially in the Soviet union from the 1920s to the 1930s. According to the 1926 Soviet census, 3.2 percent of Jewish men and women in Belorussia intermarried (5 percent in ukraine, and 21 percent in russia).2 Approximately ten years later, in 1937, the rate of intermarriage increased three times over, reaching in Belorussia 10.5 percent for men and 14.8 percent for women (in ukraine 16.4 percent for men and 14.9 percent for women; in russia 42.3 percent for men and 36.8 percent for women).3 despite the staggering increase in intermarriage rates, the likelihood for Jews to intermarry in Belorussia (and therefore in minsk) remained significantly lower than in moscow and leningrad, where in 1939 Jews made up 6 percent of the city population in both cities.4 This pressure to secularize, conform, and assimilate into the “Soviet people,” boosted by the unrelenting propaganda and terror devices employed by the state, was unique to the Soviet union. The second postrevolutionary generation of Soviet Jews experienced secularization, acculturation, and assimilation differently from the second generation of postindependence polish Jews. under polish rule since world war i, the city of Grodno was located in what the Soviets called “western Belorussia”— and as such would occupy and incorporate into the borders of the BSSr in 1939. like minsk, Grodno belonged to the Jewish cultural tradition of lithuanian Jewish cities —its Jewish community dating back to the fourteenth century. while significantly smaller than the Belorussian capital, it shared with minsk a comparable demographic profile and proportion of Jews vis-à-vis non-Jews: in 1931 Grodno counted 21,159 Jews, or 42.6 percent of the total city population; the rest of its residents were mostly polish and Belorussian.5 unlike minsk Jewry, in the 1930s Grodno Jews experienced both popular and state-driven manifestations of anti-Semitism. These ranged from the profanation of the Jewish cemetery in the center...