Yiddish Culture, Soviet State

The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage by Jeffrey Veidlinger 2000: Indiana University Press

Cubo-Futurist Klezmer: Recordings from the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (1922-1938)2001: Mel Gordon and J. Hoberman

Fifty years ago, on August 12, 1952, thirteen Soviet Jewish activists and writers were executed by Stalin after a secret trial. Yiddishists commemorating the loss of such modernist masters as Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish have long referred to that date as "The Night of the Murdered Poets." But the idea that Stalin attacked these Jews because of their art is a myth, argues the scholar Joshua Rubenstein (coeditor of Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee). In 1994, he points out, Russia released documents from the trial revealing that the accused—the five writers were among fifteen defendants—were being punished for their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), which Stalin had established along with other Soviet anti-Fascist committees after Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941.

Rubinstein's work corrects and completes the record. But the division between cultural and political activity is never so absolute, especially not for Yiddish artists in the first decades of the Soviet Union. Arguably, those five writers, plus the actor Benjamin Zuskin, who was executed along with them, sustained through their art the collective consciousness among Soviet Jews that enabled JAFC to cohere: the head of the JAFC—and the de facto leader of Soviet Jewry in the period—was Solomon Mikhoels, a widely beloved leading actor and for some twenty years the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (or GOSET, the Russian acronym by which it's typically known).

During the war, Mikhoels was sent overseas to raise money for the USSR; as a result, he was branded a "cosmopolitan" once the war was over. The connections he'd forged with "brother Jews" in the West and his not-so-veiled enthusiasm for the establishment of the state of Israel sealed his doom. In January 1948, he was summoned to Minsk ostensibly to judge a play for the Stalin Prize. There, under direct orders from Stalin, agents "liquidated" Mikhoels and, as instructed, made it look like an accident. His body lay in state back in Moscow, where more than 10,000 people came to pay their respects. While the USSR praised Mikhoels in official ceremonies and publications, his murderer was soon awarded the Order of Lenin "for exemplary execution of a special assignment of the government."

In his impressively researched account of the GOSET, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, Jeffrey Veidlinger reverses Rubinstein's overall approach and laments that Mikhoels came to be associated exclusively with the beginning of Stalin's postwar purges, for, Veidlinger writes, his death also signaled "the end of an era of achievement and creative experimentation." Without minimizing Mikhoels's role in the JAFC—on the contrary, the sections on this chapter of Mikhoels's life are the book's most stirring—Veidlinger chronicles the varied and vibrant life of the theater, from its heady beginnings in the revolutionary fervor of 1919 to its forced closure in the Cold War crackdowns of 1949. The book amply shows how those who produced Yiddish culture in the early years of the Soviet Union were engaging in an inevitably, profoundly political Jewish enterprise.

This is the first comprehensive study of the GOSET in English, and Veidlinger is the first scholar to have analyzed newly available archives in Russia and Israel. Though Mikhoels's papers were seized when the GOSET was closed and a 1953 fire at the theater destroyed many of its records, various individuals rescued what they could, and Veidlinger has assiduously tracked them down. Using play texts, rehearsal scripts, correspondence between the theater staff and Party functionaries, reports on productions by the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and other materials—all accompanied by some fifty production photos—Veidlinger pieces together a powerful...