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Act III "Sholem-Aleichem's Dream" (1938-41) For generations false comforters and deceivers fed the Jewish working people with legends about a land flowing with milk and honey. The Jewish people received a real homeland, a land of plenty, a land of milk and honey, from the Bolshevik Party. - Nokhem Fridman, from his review of the play Milkh till hanik Dynamic of the Sharpening Class Struggle Goldblat's departure became another of the signs of the deepening cnS1S being experienced, not only by the theater, but by the whole Birobidzhan project. No one mentioned any more the previous grandiose plans for resett1ement1 Beginning in 1938 official statistics on Jewish resettlement in Birobidzhan ceased being published altogether, and the local leadership stopped reporting to Moscow about rates of resettlement. It became more and more obvious that the transformation of Birobidzhan into the center of Jewish culture was no longer of any interest to the Soviet leadership. The repressions continued. Since the tenures of Liberberg and Khavkin, the first secretary of the Regional Committee had already been replaced three times and the chairman of the Regional Executive Committee twice. Many journalists and administrative and economic figures were arrested. Persons who had been foreign citizens suffered in particular; almost all of them were prosecuted as agents of foreign intelligence services. There was, for example, Shmuel Klitenik, the regular reviewer of BirGOSET 's plays, who disappeared in the Siberian camps. He had emigrated from Poland to the USSR in 1929 and was at one time the Birobidzhan correspondent of the New York communist Yiddish newspaper Morg l1-frayhayt. BirGOSET director Natan Vainhoiz was arrested during the summer road tour and released, miraculously, at the beginning of 1940. He later related that the investigator had demanded from him "materials" on a large number of actors of the theater-Goldblat, Shapiro, Arones, Kotointi, Rubin, Karlos, 1 10,000 Jews in 1938, 15,000 in 1939, 20,000 in 1940, etc. See Lvavi, HahityashvlIt hayehudit bebirabidzhan, 98. 122 IN SEARCH OF MILK AND HONEY Helfand, and Basikhes- whom they planned to arrest on their return to Birobidzhan2 Emmanuel Kazakevich, who directed the literary department of the theater at that time, decided not to wait for his turn to come and left Birobidzhan without notice3 After arriving in Moscow, he hid in the apartments of friends for more than a year, until the peak of the repression passed. Immediately before the war he again announced his existence by several small booklets of poems in Yiddish, and after the war, which he spent as a military translator and intelligence officer, he began to write prose exclusively in Russian. Kazakevich 's book about the war, Zvezda (The Star), was awarded a Second Degree Stalin Award, which opened his way into Soviet literature at large. From 1950 he again began to publish in Yiddish, in the Polish Folks-shtime and Yidishe shriftn. Kazakevich never returned to the city of his youth, Birobidzhan, but he was not forgotten there, and right after his early death in 1962 a local street was named after him. Sholem Rabunski, the composer and conductor of the BirGOSET orchestra , and the poet and translator Buzi Olevski, also left Birobidzhan. Olevski volunteered to join the Red Army, and at the very beginning of the war with Germany he was killed at the front. Boris Hertsberg, an official promoted by the party, became the new director of the theater. Although he had completed the course for film directors in Moscow, he preferred to make his career in the "public arena." The appointment of Hertsberg, who had until then been the director of the City Park of Culture and Recreation, frightened the actors. The people of Birobidzhan could not forget how, at the beginning of the campaign of arrests of foreign new settlers, Hertsberg had publicly repudiated his wife, the mother of his child, who had come to Birobidzhan from Lithuania. The young woman could not bear this and threw herself under the wheels of a train.4 The new director thought that his basic function must be to lead the theater on the path of "communist education." He began his activity with a call to the members of the troupe to join the Communist Party, following the example of the actor Gross, who had already submitted his membership application. In due course a number of actors- Abramovich, Rozenfeld, Reingold, Kotointi, Sara Fridman , Mikhl Fridman, Moishe Zhelkover, and others-actually followed this example. Chaim Helfand, once he submitted his...

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