Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union by Arkadi Zeltser (review)

Arkadi Zeltser grew up in Vitebsk, Belarus. Although his parents survived the Holocaust, many of his relatives were killed. His mother and father discussed with him in childhood neither the memory of family members who had died, nor how they themselves had managed to survive. Indeed, this silence was common for many families in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Recounting these memories was often just too painful. This method of dealing with trauma, however, did not exclude an understanding of the need to memorialize the Jewish tragedy.

Zeltser now is the director of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (a part of Yad Vashem), which has collected an enormous amount of information on monuments for Holocaust victims. According to some estimates, Yad Vashem has documented approximately 700 statues or plaques. Zeltser's book contains close to ninety photographs of these monuments, and discusses the extent to which it was possible for artists to emphasize the Jewishness of victims. The large collection of materials available to the author—archival documents, letters, and secondary works—enabled Zeltser to demonstrate the vast complexity of the issues.

From Zeltser we learn how heterogeneous Soviet Jewry was in terms of age, geography, economic and educational status, and degree of religious conviction. In addition, he makes the important point that the struggle to memorialize the victims of Nazism brought Jews together and significantly contributed to their self-identity. Because the Nazis made no distinctions among Jews, the necessity to remember the victims was a universal Jewish obligation. Jews who played no role in particular denominational groups nonetheless felt an obligation to remember their fellow Jews who had been murdered for no other reason than because they were Jewish.

This book is a study of these memorials and, more importantly, how they came into being. The range of material enables the author to demonstrate the complexity of the Soviet authorities' relationship to the Holocaust. From the outset, it was not in the interest of the Soviet government to acknowledge Nazi antisemitism and its consequences (i.e. the particular suffering of Soviet Jewry). According to Soviet mythology, all Soviet people rejected the German occupiers and therefore all suffered alike. Indeed, during the war Soviet propagandists purposely did not mention Jewish suffering in order to distance themselves from the Nazis' assertion that Bolshevism and Judaism were two sides of the same coin. It thus would have been counterproductive to emphasize Jewish suffering, as it would have fed Nazi propaganda, which sought to convince the Soviet people that they were fighting for Jewish interests.

Zeltser demonstrates once again how difficult it is to make generalizations about Soviet society and institutions. At times the central authorities were willing to permit the building of monuments that more or less explicitly stated that the victims were Jewish (not simply "peaceful Soviet citizens"), but at other times it was the local authorities who showed greater liberalism. Different regions maintained different policies. By and large those regions that became part of the Soviet Union as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 exhibited greater antisemitism than the rest of the Union. Antisemites have always been unwilling to recognize Jewish suffering, but in the relatively liberal period of the mid-1960s, more memorials were erected than at later periods of greater state-sponsored antisemitism.

The book also contributes to Soviet history inasmuch as it demonstrates the complexity of situations. There are also frequent references to blat, or the bribes that the Jewish community gave to local leaders in order to reach their goal. On occasion prominent individuals such as Ilia Ehrenburg were able to make significant contributions. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar made an enormous difference in the recognition of Jewish suffering.

Aside from mentioning Poland and pointing out the differences between the Polish and Soviet experience, Zeltser makes little effort to place Soviet memorialization in an international context. He might have mentioned that memorials in other Eastern European countries also...