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Chapter 4 May Day, Tractors, and Piglets: Yiddish Songs for Little Communists Anna Shternshis Grigorii B., an eighty-two-year-old retired businessman, takes his daily stroll to his neighborhood coffee shop in midtown Manhattan. Grigorii was born in the Ukrainian shtetl Orynin in 1918. On one beautiful April afternoon, I join Grigorii to learn details of his remarkable life story. After he lost his parents in 1927, he moved to Leningrad to live in a Jewish orphanage. During World War II, Grigorii was wounded several times, yet remained in service through 1945. In 1973, he and his family moved to the United States and settled in New York. I ask him whether he has any pleasant memories from before the war. ‘‘Oh, yes,’’ he says. ‘‘I loved singing, especially Yiddish songs.’’ He immediately begins to sing quietly, but clearly: Gekoyft hot mame Shimelen Mother bought Shimele A shterndl a roytn, A little red star, Hot Shimele es ongeton Shimele put it on Un hot zikh shtark gefreyt. And was delighted Zogt di mame Shimelen: Mother says to Shimele: Kum Shimele aher! Come here, Shimele! Bavayz nor mit di fiselekh, Show me with your feet, Vi geyt a pioner.1 How a pioneer walks. This song, written by L. Rosenblum, appeared in the January 1926 issue of the Yiddish children’s literary magazine Pioner.2 Strikingly, Grigorii sings it identically to the published text. He says that he remembers the song because he performed it at a local theater workshop at the Jewish orphanage in 1929. Grigorii explains that the song reflected ‘‘the spirit of that era.’’ When I ask him about other Yiddish songs he liked during his childhood , he replies, ‘‘The Yiddish songs that I learned at the orphanage are especially dear to my heart. All of us [children] in the orphanage did not have many joys in life. We did not have loving parents, home-cooked meals, and any affection. But these patriotic Yiddish songs made us feel that we had a motherland and that someone loved us. I understand now that these 84 Anna Shternshis were propagandistic songs, but when I was a little boy, I absolutely loved them.’’3 Grigorii is very critical of the Soviet regime, its postwar policies toward Jews, and the Communist ideology. Yet he still sings Yiddish Communist songs from his childhood when he meets old friends. He acknowledges that these songs had a significant influence on the formation of his literary and cultural tastes. He also says that he knows many apolitical Yiddish songs that were popular in that era. So why did Grigorii, who generally disagrees with Soviet propaganda messages, choose to sing a Communist Yiddish song as his favorite example of prewar Yiddish culture? Grigorii’s attitude to Communist Yiddish songs illustrates one of the major successes of early Soviet propaganda in creating a new Jewish culture and identity. As Anne Gorsuch, a historian of Soviet youth, has argued: Making the new youth culture was one of the most important projects of the Soviet government in the 1920s, as it prepared the path for the future development of Soviet citizens. The successful transformation of young people was essential to the Bolshevik project. The young generation was seen as the part of society which could grow up free from the corruption of pre-revolutionary Russia. The youth were the guarantor of future social and political hegemony, insofar as they were able or willing to replicate the ideology and culture of the Bolshevik Party. As the new model of Soviet men and women, Soviet youth had to be made communist in every aspect of their daily lives—worlds, leisure, gender relations, and family life.4 Young people from ages nine to twenty-four constituted about a third of all Soviet Jews in 1926, and a quarter in 1939, which represented 893,607 and 755,000 people respectively.5 Like all other groups living within the Russian empire, young Jews faced tremendous changes and challenges after the Russian Revolution of 1917. They were subjected to intensive propaganda directed to them both as Jews and as young people. The process of assimilation , urbanization, Russification, and acculturation, which affected the majority of Jews in the country, was especially focused on youngsters. In the 1920s and 1930s, young people were the first to leave the smaller towns within the Pale of Settlement for larger urban centers in Russia.6 Yet they usually did so after finishing seven years of secondary...

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