1929: Mapping the Jewish World

3. The Stalinist “Great Break” in Yiddishland

36 > 37 While the number of Jews who achieved access to the most prestigious and lucrative positions in society was growing rapidly through the 1920s, they remained a minority of the general Jewish population. Thus, even when the party’s Jewish membership quadrupled during the years 1922–30 to 76,000, communists made up less than 3 percent of Soviet Jews—or perhaps as much as 10 percent, if one takes into account the communists’ spouses and children. The number of trade-unionists (some of whom were also members of the party or Komsomol) was more significant—about 300,000, or over one million if one includes members of their families—but they also represented a minority of the 2.75 million Soviet Jews. In 1926, during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Shimen Dimanshtein, the first commissar in charge of Jewish affairs in Lenin’s government, had to admit that initially the revolution had brought misfortune to the majority of Jews.2 That was hardly surprising in a country ruled by a “workers’ and peasants ’ government” in which only a small minority of the Jews belonged to the proletariat or peasantry. It is hard to gauge how many people—predominantly traders and artisans—later succeeded in finding their place in the liberalized but always volatile market economy of the early Soviet Union. The number of Jews who benefited in some way from the NEP could be around half a million. Compare this with the total number of achievers (over one million) and the up to one million Soviet Jews who had an indefinable vocation and were categorized as “déclassé.” Although some of the entrepreneurs, known as “NEPmen,” became rich or at least welloff during this period of time, the average self-employed “beneficiaries” earned a very modest income—which did not stop the authorities from disenfranchising them as “bourgeois elements.” For instance, artisans would get twenty to twenty-five roubles a month. Since fifteen to twenty roubles had to be paid for accommodation and taxes, such a monthly income consigned them and their families to poverty. The majority of shopkeepers, too, could hardly keep their heads above water.3 For all that, the artisans and shopkeepers were better off than the déclassés, who dragged out a miserable existence and often survived only thanks to American relatives or charities, most notably the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).4 38 > 39 emerging for the large-scale development of a rich, diverse, healthy and deeply rooted Yiddish literature! This is exactly the same Yiddish writer who looks with great fear at the new, alien tribe that is now being created, before our very eyes, in Palestine.6 The colonization project particularly appealed to the Territorialists, who called for creation of a Jewish statehood outside Palestine. Israel Zangwill, the father of Territorialism, less than six months before he died in August 1926 took part in a meeting held in support of the Jewish colonization movement in Russia.7 Moshe Katz, a Comintern Yiddish journalist, reported in a memorandum written in September 1926 to the Soviet Foreign Office, “No other campaign of the Soviet government has made such an exceptionally good impression there [in the United States] as it has the settlement of Jews on the land.”8 Among Soviet Yiddish intellectuals, particularly of the Territorialist stripe, colonization was becoming “the most significant factor” in their activities.9 Moshe Litvakov, a Territorialist-turned-Communist, who edited the Moscow daily Der Emes (Truth) starting in 1921, wrote about the Crimea as “our Palestine.”10 Some people even came from Palestine to try their luck in the Crimea.11 The Soviet Jewish colonization drive developed in the climate of the NEP, when Russia achieved its pre–First World War GNP and an average worker’s salary equaled or even exceeded the prewar level.12 Many people regarded Joseph Stalin as a moderately authoritarian and a fairly enlightened leader and did not realize that he was already backsliding on the liberalization of the early NEP period. In 1926, Abraham Cahan, editor of the largest New York Yiddish daily, Forverts (Forward), was satisfied with the victory of Stalin and his group over the “wild, bloodthirsty tactic and rhetoric of Zinoviev and Trotsky.” According to Cahan’s delusional analysis, this was a promising development that augured improvements in the Soviet government’s relationship with the Socialist movement and the...