Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

6. When Jews Talked to Jews: Wartime Soviet Yiddish Culture and Soviet Photographers' Jewishness

• 184 • • 6 • When Jews Talked to Jews wartime soviet yiddish culture and soviet photographers’ jewishness Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union was a moment when Soviet Jewish photographers and all Soviet Jews were most radically integrated into the heroic Soviet nation as Red Army soldiers and simultaneously singled out as racially inferior victims. This tension between the pull to universalism and the stark reminders of particularism shaped the world of these photographers and their photography throughout the war. In 1940, Evgenii Khaldei returned to his home town of Stalino to visit his dying grandmother and had a family portrait taken that would be the last of its kind (Fig. 6.1). The dapper twenty-three-year-old photographer is pictured in the background, surrounded by members of his family. The phrase “Our family, 1940” is handwritten on the photograph. This photo is a far cry from that of his family’s living room in Stalino, then called Yuzovka, from the 1920s (see Fig. I.1), which showed how the Khaldei family embodied the early twentieth-century Russian Jewish experience with pianos and the Russian language, on the one hand, and a kippah, Yiddish, and bearded men on the other. The comparison of the two family portraits shows how far the Khaldeis had come in the twenty years of Soviet rule. In the later photo the men are clean-shaven and are wearing ties; the women are in dresses with high necklines and somewhat modern hair; and the note on the photograph is in Russian. Although this picture was taken before the German invasion, Khaldei recalled the photo frequently after he went to Stalino during the war in 1943 and discovered the mass murder of several of those pictured in the photograph . According to Khaldei, these visits prompted him to think more “Jewishly” about this Soviet war. It perhaps prompted him to take photographs of the Budapest ghetto or of Jewish cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe. Georgii Zelma engaged with his Jewishness during the war more subtly. He spent most of fall 1942 photographing Stalingrad and subsequently took a short break in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to visit his family, who was living there having evacuated from Moscow. It was probably accidental that Tashkent was not only home to many wartime Jewish evacuees, but was also Zelma’s birthplace. The return to his home town was a reunion, unlike Khaldei’s return to his hometown in 1943, when he became a witness to his family’s murder. Tashkent was also perceived as a symbolically Jewish city during the war, but in a negative way. Many Soviet citizens, including Jews, lived for part of the war in evacuation in places like Tashkent. But because it was a place of evacuation and one with a large Jewish population, those in the city were said to be fighting on the “Tashkent front.” The antiSemitic joke was that Jews shirked their war duties by hiding out in evacuation, fighting on a Tashkent front—where there was no fighting. The presumptions that Jews were evacuated , fled the front, or were hiding out in Tashkent waiting for the Russians to save them from the Germans affected how Jews themselves saw the war and their role in it. For many Soviet Jews, and among them the photographers, myths of Jewish cowardice increased their resolve to fight even harder to disavow the prejudice. In fact, Jews served in the Red Army at rates exceeding their percentage of the population. Therefore, Zelma’s visit to his Tashkent Jewish family, despite being a reunion, reminded him of his own stake in the war. It also stirred in him a Jewish pride that he hid well, but that came out on rare occasions in his wartime diary. For instance, in a 1942 entry, Zelma recalls a famous boxing match that pitted a Jew against a German. The match Zelma recalls was the famous 1933 fight between Max Baer, whose grandfather was Jewish and When Jews Talked to Jews • 185 • figure 6.1. Unattributed, Khaldei family in his hometown of Stalino, 1940. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency. who famously wore a Jewish star on his boxing trunks, and Max Schmeling, a German who would go on to fight for the Wehrmacht during World War II. The June 1933 fight that took place in Yankee Stadium in New York was enmeshed in global politics as...