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The play Homens mapole (Haman’s Downfall) was performed in many different cities in Europe and the Americas between 1945 and 1949.1 Its author, Dr. Haim Sloves, was both a Communist and a writer committed to Jewish causes, and the play provides us with a glimpse into the mentality of a Jewish Communist of this type and of this period. The play also makes us ponder the relationship between religion and politics, for Communism in Homens mapole is both an argument for a political alliance between the Jews and the Soviet Union and something much more diffuse—not an argument at all, but blending into a religious sensibility. Purimshpiln , the traditional folk plays retelling the story of the Jews’ triumph over their archenemy Haman (Homen), have always been a blend of religion and politics .2 I will describe this blend as it appears in Homens mapole. Before doing so, however, a few words about its author should shed light on how the two parts of the equation—Jewish tradition and Communist allegiance—functioned offstage in his own life. Haim Sloves (1905–1988) had two great passions from early youth. The first, which he developed in the Yiddish secular school he attended in his native Białystok , Poland, was for Yiddish language and culture. As Sloves describes it in a much later autobiographical sketch, the young teachers at his school inspired in their students a life-long love for Yiddish literature. They did not merely study it, but learned it in the way a Talmud student would pore over a page of Gemara, but, claims Sloves, with much greater enthusiasm.3 This passion for secular Yiddish culture was to remain with him for the rest of his life, fueled rather than dampened by that culture’s decline in the postwar years. His second great love was for the Communist cause. Sloves joined the Red Army at the tender age of fifteen, when the army passed through Białystok on its CHAPTER 12 Joy to the Goy and Happiness to the Jew: Communist and Jewish Aspirations in a Postwar Purimshpil Annette Aronowicz 276 Annette Aronowicz way back to Moscow.4 His native city had previously been occupied by the protsarist Whites, who had engaged in various acts of violence against the Jews. The Communists, who had put a stop to this anti-Jewish violence when they took over the city, inspired him to renounce all his other plans. In his autobiographical sketch, Sloves describes the intense excitement of hearing Lenin’s speech on Red Square.5 It led him to become the secretary of the Jewish section of the Polish Komsomol (Communist Youth League), which in turn earned Sloves four years in prison, during which his commitment to the cause only grew stronger. Soon after his release in 1926, unable to continue his studies in Warsaw, Sloves emigrated to Paris. He pursued his education, eventually earning a doctorate in law at the Sorbonne. By the time Sloves got this degree in 1935, he had been a member of the French Communist Party for six years and was active in its Yiddish-language sub-section. His Jewish activism was to intensify during the period of the Popular Front and during the war itself, but was inseparable from his Communist commitment. Sloves organized a World Congress for Yiddish Culture in 1937 in Paris, and helped found a long-lasting international organization, the Yidishe Kultur Farband (YKUF). This organization, whose center was in New York, disseminated a very influential periodical, Yidishe kultur, and concerned itself with Jewish education. Both the congress and YKUF allied themselves ideologically with the Soviet Union. During the war, Sloves joined the French Communist Resistance and co-edited an underground Yiddish newspaper. It is, in fact, as part of that resistance that Homens mapole needs to be seen. The original version was completed just before the Germans entered Paris in June of 1940. Sloves describes being suddenly gripped, in the face of dire circumstances, by the traditional bitokhen (trust) of the Jewish people in the future. The form that this took was that of the purimshpil, the traditional folk play in which Jews customarily thumbed their noses at the tyrants who wished to destroy them. Sloves set to writing and managed to send a copy to a friend in New York.6 At war’s end, upon returning from Lyon where he had been in hiding, Sloves considerably shortened the play, modifying a few of the central characters in...

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