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35 Jew d’Esprit Eugene Goodheart This essay is an offshoot of a memoir I recently published with the title Confessions of a Secular Jew. Here is a confession that I did not make in the memoir: the title was an afterthought. I did not set out to write about being a secular Jew—as if it were a phenomenon as definable as being an Orthodox or Conservative or even Reform Jew. We know what a secular Jew is not, a religious Jew. We might rest perhaps with the positive idea that he is a worldly Jew, but is that sufficient to define him? Religious Jews may also be worldly. Hasidim, for instance, are famous as diamond merchants. If worldliness were all that secular Jewishness comes to, it would seem not to come to very much. Notice I refrain from speaking of secular Judaism because of the religious connotations and associations of Judaism. Abstract definition is a fruitless effort. So perhaps I should begin by describing how I came to write the memoir and how after much struggle I arrived at the title—that is, at the meaning of secular Jewishness. The germ of the memoir is a personal essay I published with the title “I Am a Jew.” Enclosed in quotation marks because it is a translation of the title of a Yiddish poem by a once famous Soviet Jewish poet Itzhik Feffer. The poem is a celebration of Jewish struggles for liberation from the time of Moses through the Maccabean uprisings against the Syrian-Greeks, Bar Kochbah’s revolt against the Romans to the struggle against Nazism. Here are two of the many stanzas of the poem (my translation). The forty years in ancient times I suffered in the desert sand Gave me strength. I heard Bar Kochba’s rebel cry At every turn through my ordeal Morris_FINAL.indb 35 Morris_FINAL.indb 35 9/25/2008 8:13:37 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:37 AM 36 EUGENE GOODHEART And more than gold did I possess The stubborn pride of my grandfather I am a Jew. I am a Jew who drank From Stalin’s magical cup of happiness. To those who wish to destroy Moscow And turn us out of our land To them I shout, “Down with you!” I march together with the peoples of the east. The Russians are my brothers. I am a Jew. As a kid, I attended a Yiddish shuleh where I learned to recite—better, to declaim—Yiddish poems in public. One of the poems I learned was “Ich bin a Yid.” When Feffer came to America during World War II to raise money for the Russian War Relief, he visited Camp Kinderland, a summer camp in upstate New York where I was a camper. One of my gifts was the possession of a Yiddish diction that one hears on the Yiddish stage. How I acquired this precocity I cannot say, but I had an extraordinary ear for the words and cadences of Yiddish poetry and was in demand by Yiddish-speaking clubs to recite Yiddish poems. When Feffer arrived at Camp Kinderland, I was asked to recite the poem to a large audience in his presence. As you can imagine, it was one of the great events of my childhood. I have a photo of myself age twelve reciting the poem with clenched fist in the air on a stage draped with Soviet and American flags. “Ich bin a Yid” is not a good poem, filled as it is with banal sentiments, but it has an impressive and stirring sound in Yiddish. Its most memorable line is the unfortunate, “I am a Jew who drank from Stalin’s magical cup of happiness.” What a terrible irony! Feffer was an apparatchik and a wordsmith. He knew more than he spoke. He certainly knew enough or thought he knew enough to survive in Stalin’s Russia. Despots love to be celebrated in poetry. While Feffer focuses his bravado on the grave the Nazis are preparing for him and his fellow Jews, without his knowledge a grave is being prepared for him by his own god, the being from whose hand he has received, so he tells us, the cup of happiness. Some time after he wrote the poem, Feffer was denounced under the red flag. Joshua Rubinstein of Amnesty International has recently published a book, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, about the persecution and prosecution of fifteen Soviet Jewish writers on trumped...

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