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Preface Birobidzhan-the "Center of Soviet Jewish Culture"? The partially collapsed walls in the very center of the city of Birobidzhan always held a secret for me. It would surface in the words of my mother as we hurried by the ruins at the end of the 1970s. There used to be a big auditorium in this old House of the Pioneer Youth Movement, she would say, with a rotating stage and numerous secret corners that the children liked to investigate. Doors opened unexpectedly in different places, mirrors suddenly appeared, and the resonant echo of far-away conversations could be heard. On holidays bright and fantastic costumes appeared out of somewhere. At the beginning of 1949-when my mother's whole large family, including my great-grandmother, was resettled in Birobidzhan after the protracted evacuation in Central Asia-a theater, a Yiddish theater, was still operating here. A short time later this institution, the Birobidzhan State Yiddish Theater (BirGOSET), together with all the other Yiddish theaters in the Soviet Union, was closed down on orders of the central authorities. Most of the actorsapart from those who were arrested and sent to labor camps in Siberiamoved as far away as possible from the place where they had spent their youth and where everything they had created was destroyed. Gradually the Jews of Birobidzhan forgot their theater, just as they forgot their Yiddish language. Only the semi-mad former actor Maks Epshtein, as long as he was alive, still tried to sing for chance passers-by the song of the new settlers from the sensational musical of its day, Er iz fun Birobidzhan (He Is from Birobidzhan). S'vet a lebn zikh tsetsvaygn, Shtolts un broyzndik un fray, S'vet mayn folk in freydn shtaygn, Ufkumen do fundosnay!1 Life will take roots Proudly, actively, and freely, My people will rise up in joy, And be reborn here again! 1 See B. Miler, "Er iz fun Birobidzhan," Birobidzhal1, no. 3 (1947): 67. 2 IN SEARCH OF MILK AND HONEY Seldom did any of the passers-by understand him. According to the Soviet census of 1979, only slightly more than 10,000 Jews remained in Birobidzhan . Of these, less than 1,500 declared Yiddish as their mother tongue2 Intriguingly, those walls, standing there guarding the story of the old Yiddish theater from the eyes of strangers, remained in my memory for many long years after bulldozers had demolished the ruins and cleared the way for a modern kindergarten building. This memory led me to undertake the present in-depth study. Almost half a century before my childhood encounter with the Birobidzhan theater, at the beginning of April 1937, the recently established town and modest regional center Birobidzhan welcomed a number of important visitors : administrative officials of the Far Eastern province, members of the Far Eastern theatrical elite, journalists, and a group of actors from Moscow's Malyi Theater. The latter, led by the famous director Konstantin Zubov, happened to be on tour in not-so-far-away Khabarovsk. These VIPs were joined by numerous Jewish settlers from both nearby and distant settlements and collective farms of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). This was not the first time the small town, then composed mostly of not very inviting one- and two-story barracks-type wooden houses, had hosted out-of-town visitors. As a rule the visits had an official character. Thus, for example , in December 1934, the First Regional Congress of Soviets of the JAR took place here to mark the establishment of the brand-new Jewish Autonomous Region. This time, however, the important visitors came not for some official occasion inspired by the authorities, but to participate in an event of an entirely different kind. They came to view the premier of Boytre, a play about Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the 19th century, written by the Minsk Yiddish writer Moishe Kulbak and produced and directed by Moishe (Moisei) Goldblat. The latter, one of the leading actors of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (MosGOSET), and founder of the Moscow Gypsy Theater "Romen," had come to Birobidzhan in January 1937 at the recommendation of Shloime (Solomon) Mikhoels, the indisputable master of Soviet Yiddish theater and head of MosGOSET. Goldblat immediately set to work on Boytre. He enlisted the talents of several major Soviet Jewish cultural figures in the preparation of the production. The composer and conductor Shimen Bugachevski, former concertmaster of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra and...

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