Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation 9780813577036

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DRAWING THE IRON CURTAIN

DR AW ING T HE IRON CUR TA IN Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation

H MAYA BALAKIRSKY KATZ

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Katz, Maya Balakirsky, 1973– Drawing the Iron Curtain : Jews and the golden age of Soviet animation / Maya Balakirsky Katz. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–7701–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7662–6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7702–9 (e-book (epub)) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7703–6 (e-book (web pdf)) 1. Animated films—Soviet Union—History and criticism. 2. Animation (Cinematography)— Soviet Union—History. 3. Jews in the motion picture industry—Soviet Union. 4. Kinostudiia “Soiuzmul’tfil’m” (Soviet Union)—History. I. Title. PN1993.5.R9K385 2016 791.43’34—dc23 2015024452 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2016 by Maya Balakirsky Katz Second printing, 2018 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by US copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of my mother Dina Levinson (1947–2008), Keeper of Stories

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix Note on Transliteration and Translation  xi Introduction: Puppeteering a Self in the Soviet Union  1 1  Behind the Scenes: Jews and the Studio System, 1919–1989  27 2 

Black and White: Race in Soviet Animation  56

3  The Brumberg Sisters: The Fairy Grandmothers of Soviet Animation  75 4  Big-City Jews: Setting and Censoring the Modern Fairy Tale  96 5  Tropical Russian Bears: Cheburashka’s Jewish Roots  120 6 

The Pioneer’s Violin: Animating the Soviet Holocaust  153

7  Cartoon Cosmopolitans: Drawing Jews into Soviet Culture  189 8 

Tale of Tales: The Rise of the Jewish Auteur Director  204

Conclusion: Tell-Tale Signs and Soviet Jewish Animation  227 Notes  233 Filmography  271 Index  277

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ACK NOWLEDGMENTS

Soviet animation is a group sport. I thank the children, including the adult ones, who watched hours of animation with me and shared their observations with me: Daniel Chechik, Eugene Fedushenko, Jordan Hirsch, Menachem Katz, Ilan Katz, Yair Katz, Talia Katz, Shai Katz, Lauren Pine-Bildner, Milana Isakova Shalumov, Oleg Shalumov, Olga Segal, Roman Yablonovsky, and Lana Yablonovsky. I would not have been able to immerse myself in the institutional life of a now-defunct Soviet animation studio had it not been for several rising American and Israeli institutions. I will always be grateful to Marlie Wasserman and her staff at Rutgers University Press for believing in this project when it was only a vision and shepherding it through the processes of bookmaking. I thank copyeditor Pam Suwinsky for her skill and patience. I am most grateful to Touro College, which has long been my intellectual home. Dean Stanley Boylan and Dean Marian Stoltz-Loike have enabled me to travel to Moscow, conduct interviews, and bring home the riches of RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) with a generous sabbatical, as well as the indefatigable Simcha Fishbane, who helped facilitate my access to Moscow curators. I am grateful to Dean Michael Shmidman at Touro College Graduate School in Jewish Studies, who provided me with a generous subvention grant that made the images in this book possible and, more generally, for nurturing a dedicated community of scholars at the graduate school. I especially express my gratitude to my ingenious graduate student Lana Yankovich, who reintroduced me to Soviet animations in my course on Jews and Media. I am grateful to the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry for making my research in Moscow possible and for their support for innovative perspectives on the Soviet Jewish story. In Israel, I am grateful to art historians Ilia Rodov, Mirjam Rajner, and Sara Offenberg for inviting me to present my material to the lively and knowledgable audience at the conference Constructing and Deconstructing Jewish Art and, to quote Cheburashka, for H ix H

x  H  acknowledgments

“building, building, building, hurrah!” a department of Jewish art at Bar Ilan University that serves as a model for scholars around the world. Although there is a shortage of scholarship on the topic of Soviet Jewish animation, there is a wealth of primary material scattered in thematic plans, practical manuals, Art Council meetings, photographs, scores, memoirs, and press clippings. Without the librarians who made my bibliography available to me, I would be a writer with nothing to say. Mary Ann Linahan and Alex Ratnovsky at Yeshiva University, Tova Friedman at Touro College, and Anna Romanenko and Goryaeva Mikhailovna at RGALI provided me with the sources that constitute my bibliography. I also express my gratitude to editor Katelyn Chin at Brill Press, who granted me access to additional RGALI archives and dozens of mass media publications through the database BrillOnline Primary Sources. I am grateful for the conversations and support that individuals have offered me along the way: Dmitry Astrahan, Giannelberto Bendazzi, Olga Bogolyubov, Georgii Borodin, Steven Fine, David Fishman, Marcin Gizycki, Susan Goodman, Gabrielle Greenlee, Mikhail Gurevich, Batsheva Goldman-Ida, Moishe Indig, Anna Khoroshkina, Moshe Khusid, Clare Kitson, Shalom Krischer, Itella Maustbaum, Margaret Olin, Michael Popkin, Pavel Shvedov, Maya Turovsky, Natalia Venzher, Lecia Voiskoun, and Menachem Wecker. I am especially grateful to the magnificent Alexandra Sviridova, whose generosity of spirit extended far beyond the immediate subject that brought us together. I wish my mother Dina bat Isaak (1947–2008) would have seen me rediscover her childhood in the films that constitute this book, but her voice guides much of my thinking on the subject of Soviet culture. My husband, Menachem Katz, and our children are the reason I have a story to tell.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSL ATION

I use a simplified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system: I did not use diacritical marks, which I find alienates readers. In addition, I used standard Anglicized spellings for names and terms that have become established in English (glasnost, Chagall, Mayakovsky, Tchaikovsky, and so on). I generally italicize transliterated Russian words with the exception of common proper nouns, such as Soyuzmultfilm or Komsomol. In citations, I retain the original spellings, and the reader will invariably encounter more than one system of transliteration. Russian names consist of first name, patronymic, and surname, and there is a lot of social etiquette attached to the use of each of these and in combination with each other, most of which would be meaningless to English-language readers. I have simplified names by including only first and last name. The first reference to a Soyuzmultfilm employee is accompanied by life dates.

H xi H

DRAWING THE IRON CURTAIN

Introduction Puppeteering a Self in the Soviet Union

A

t the end of the Second World War, the Soviet government reassigned a magnificent Moscow building—a Russian Orthodox church that had been nationalized into an antireligious museum in the early 1920s—to its state animation studio Soyuzmultfilm (fig. I.1). Few know of the studio outside of the former Soviet Union, but the films that the studio produced were as embedded in Soviet culture as Disney’s were in American culture.1 The Soyuzmultfilm studio became the largest and most prestigious animation operation in Eastern Europe, producing the majority of children’s media in the country and becoming so pervasive in the broader national ethos that scholars have analyzed the medium as one of the Soviet Union’s national “programmes for identity.”2 Animated feature films, shorts, and advertisements modeled socialist values and behaviors. Many animated films were later adapted for radio, theater, home projector, and books, and were also made the subject of countless theatrical performances, public sculptures, toys, stamps, and collectible medals.3 The people and the projects of Soyuzmultfilm were perhaps unparalleled in their influence on domestic audiences, and the internally focused field also eventually came to make a significant mark on the history of world animation. Although the majority of Soviet animation was geared to the nation’s children, Soyuzmultfilm was among the first studios in the world to seriously experiment with allegory and abstraction and expand the range of animation to address serious philosophical and aesthetic concerns. What is even more remarkable about the innovations of Soviet animation is that the industry bloomed only after the state’s imposition of socialist realism—a style marked by working-class concerns, narrative clarity, accessible realism, and optimism.4 This atypical timeline makes Soviet animation one of the rare forms of cultural vitality during those heavily regulated years and, thus, an essential source for understanding the little-studied cultural scene during the Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev administrations. H 1 H

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Fig. I.1 Soyuzmultfilm, 23-a Kaliaevskaia Street, Moscow. Photograph taken by author, 2014.

Yet, as far as this book is concerned, one of the most astonishing aspects of the institutional development of the Soyuzmultfilm studio is the unusual demographics of the studio’s labor force. Throughout its history, Soyuzmultfilm and Soviet animation in general attracted a disproportionate number of artists and technicians from Jewish backgrounds. Beginning as early as the 1920s and enabled by the korenizatsiia policies (the promotion of non-Russian Soviet citizens), Jewishborn artists from former Pale of Settlement towns (shtetlekh) as well as disparate cities outside the Pale, such as the Uzbekistani Tashkent in the South and the Uralic Perm in the East, migrated to the newly established trick-film departments in the Soviet capital of Moscow. As more Jewish artists attained stable positions in animation on the eve of the medium’s industrialization in the mid-1930s, the field developed a hospitable character toward Jewish-born artists who found the fine arts (for example, sculpture, architecture, and painting) highly restricted by proleterization policies. The studio’s labor force, which peaked at six hundred in the 1960s, was so disproportionately populated by Jewish-born employees that the studio may be as close to Jewish integration as any Soviet cultural industry achieved during the entirety of the Cold War. What big historiographical revisions am I hoping to advance with so narrow a study of cartoons? To begin with, the institutional course of Soyuzmultfilm, in both its exceptional upward trajectory and its atypical workforce, throws new light on Jewish engagement in Soviet culture. Because Jews have been seen as a

Introduction  H 3

litmus test for Soviet nationality policies both within the Soviet Union (referred to as “the Jewish question”) and abroad (where Jews were seen as a disenfranchised minority that undermined the promises of communism), understanding the creative role that a disproportionately Jewish workforce played in the formation of Soviet popular culture has broad significance.5 Although they aimed to create technically and aesthetically sophisticated national films, Soyuzmultfilm animators also significantly engaged Jewish material in ways that the Soviet liveaction industry found impossible and in conscious opposition to Disney constructions of Jewishness, such as the Yiddish-inflecting peddler characterization of the Big Bad Wolf in Disney’s original Three Little Pigs (1933). If indeed a multicultural and multilingual group of civilian employees mined their own nonRussian traditions of the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Lithuanian “peoples” (narodnost’) to create one of the most popular forms of Soviet culture, then the staid image of a Russo-centric Soviet culture requires substantial revision.6 Conventional histories of Soviet Jewish culture are partially skewed by the scholarly willingness to credit American Jewish avant-gardism to what is seen as a specifically Jewish type of secularism and simultaneously to discredit Soviet Jewish artists on the basis of their secularism.7 The application of this double standard to Cold War Jewish culture is not an academic trope insidiously directed against Soviet Jewish artists but, at least partially, a consequence of American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jews in the communist bloc on the platform of religious intolerance.8 Jewish studies titles on Soviet popular culture have largely been shaped by global Jewish institutions during a period of activism on behalf of those whom human rights activist Elie Wiesel coined the “Jews of Silence.”9 Although Wiesel later qualified and ultimately regretted this phrase, claiming that he was actually referring to the indifference that American Jews showed their Soviet brethren, the trope of silence became firmly associated with the Soviet Jewish condition.10 Avram Kampf, one of the pioneers of Jewish art history, imported this attitude into the field when he ended his landmark 1975 catalog on Russian Jewish art with what he saw as the fated emigration of Jewish artists after the 1917 Russian Revolution: “Whether they were still clinging to their faith in Jewish art or whether they had a change of heart, they could all agree that it could not have taken place in Soviet Russia.”11 Kampf’s curatorial discourse remained unchallenged for the remainder of the twentieth century even as Soviet Jewish animators were reaching their creative height.12 In a post-Soviet retrospective on Russian Jewish art, historian Michael Stanislawski reiterated Kampf’s narrowed scope but postponed the demise of Jewish culture by another fifteen years: “Beginning in 1930 and 1931, all attempts at creating a Soviet Jewish Culture were all but smothered in the general obliteration of artistic and cultural creativity throughout the Soviet Union.”13 Film historian Peter

4  H  drawing the iron curtain

Kenez took a more expansive view, dating the Jewish cultural demise to Stalin’s liquidation of Jewish theaters in the late 1930s, after which, and “for as long as the Soviet Union lasted, Jewish themes had no place in Soviet cinema.”14 In his study of Jews in Soviet film, Russian film scholar Miron Chernenko confirmed these conclusions by demonstrating that on the rare occasions Jewish characters appeared on Soviet screens after the late 1930s, they took the form of stock characters in vulgar roles.15 The recent boom in revisionist scholarship on Soviet Jewish culture has added much-needed nuance to the assertions that public Jewishness disappeared from Soviet society, yet even in her groundbreaking study on the Soviet representation and repression of the Holocaust in film, historian Olga Gershenson firmly drew the line in the late 1960s, after which “no Jews were allowed on screens . . . whether in war or in any other kind of film.”16 That Jews were at the center of Soviet animated film from the 1920s to the 1980s, including throughout the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, when Soviet state culture was relatively unproductive in general and repressive for Jewish artists in particular, offers a rare opportunity to study the Jewish voices that did emerge in official— rather than underground—Soviet culture. This book not only moves the markers on the historiographical timeline, but also claims that as the animation field developed apart from the live-action film sector, it evolved its own modes of communication that proved conducive to Jewish cultural expression. Although it is obvious that animators from Jewish backgrounds did not belong to any kind of unified artistic movement, many Jewish animators persistently explored self-reflexive ethnographic material and sought to represent themselves in an atmosphere when the very notion of “Jewish culture” was a matter of significant national debate. Filmmakers in the live-action sector, charged with the creation of a proud national image, were tightly restrained from pursuing overt Jewish themes, whereas animators, charged with the moral education and emotional consciousness of the nation’s ethnic minorities and children, were able to push the boundaries of self-representation with relative impunity even during the Stalin years. Some of these efforts only came to be recognized during the foreign release of Soviet films or at the international venues in the late 1950s made possible by the work of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA). Growing awareness of early Soviet animation, for example, led to the late recognition of the influence that Aleksander Ptushko’s New Gulliver (1935) played on Disney’s witty combinations of live-action and animated elements as well as Lev Atamanov’s The Snow Queen (1957) as a predecessor to Disney’s adaptations of literary masterpieces. It must have been exhilarating for Soviet animators to see the world discover their art and see how their life’s work measured against international standards. Festival insider and scholar Giannalberto Bendazzi described the international animation festivals as a kind of Olympic game and a festival prize as akin to an Olympic medal: “During the Cold War, it was a matter of pride.”17

Introduction  H 5

It was especially a matter of pride to Jewish filmmakers who survived the purges of the late Stalin years. As Jewish animation director Iosif Boyarsky (1917–2008) gleefully reported in his memoir, Jewish director Yuri Norstein’s (b. 1941) philosophical meditation Tale of Tales (1979) came in first place in an ASIFA poll for “best animated film of all time” that was organized for the Olympiad of Animation in conjunction with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.18 “We didn’t find out right away about the prize,” recalled freelance scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova (b. 1951) who was in the room when officials at the Cinema Museum handed the director a slip of paper with the Olympiad results two years later. “Norstein asked if he could keep that paper as a memento,” recalled Sviridova, “but they needed it back for their records. I remember how Norstein turned to the rest of us and said: ‘This is proof of how far our own (nashi) have reached around the globe.’” Norstein’s pronouncement may appear an odd locution today, but Sviridova explained that it was “clear as day” to the other Jewish filmmakers in the room that nashi referred to Jews: “A Jew made the greatest Soviet animated film: he knew; we knew; they knew.”19 That the honor went to a Jewish artist working in a state studio during the intolerant Brezhnev years—rather than Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1935), England’s Yellow Submarine (1968), or Japan’s Dojoji Temple (1976)—confirms the need for a careful reexamination of our current understandings of both the undervalued objects of socialist realism in art history and the image of Soviet Jews as silenced in Jewish studies. This book is not the animation version of Great Jews in Sports. Norstein’s Tale of Tales is not a film that just happens to have been written by a Jewish scriptwriter, designed by a Jewish artist, directed by a Jewish director, and in which other Jews can take pride in as evidence of the Jewish contribution to progressive culture. Rather, Tale of Tales is a film that consciously engages with Jewish themes within the animated text— a criteria that all the films discussed at length in this book meet. In the nonlinear format of Tale of Tales, an alienated and misunderstood Little Gray Wolf serves as subject and courier of Russian folklore as he tries to find his own place within it. He is a character who, according to Norstein and meticulously chronicled by British animation critic Clare Kitson, was based on Norstein’s memories of his own Jewish postwar childhood in the dilapidated Jewish neighborhood of Maryina Roshcha on the outskirts of Moscow.20 Norstein’s film and its reception as a highly autobiographical account of a Jewish auteur exemplifies the radical performative experiments that took place in the state studio Soyuzmultfilm and the Jewish voices that emerged and “reached around the globe.” In Russia today, the Jewish presence in national animation has not been articulated as much as it has been understood. One of the best examples of the perception of Soyuzmultfilm as Jewish in character came as recently as 2012 after the Russian government announced the return of part of the studio property to

6  H  drawing the iron curtain

its original occupier, the Orthodox Church. A mob of sword-wielding religious activists gathered at the former studio following the announcement and publicly burned the studio’s puppets and erected Orthodox crosses in the courtyard. Members of the mob justified their actions with the explanation that they were “exorcising the satanic puppets animated with the blood of Christian babies,” a loaded claim that evokes the pernicious antisemitic history of blood libel accusations to any Jewish citizen who grew up in the Soviet Union.21 The sacking of the studio, although seemingly surreal, is fundamentally characteristic of the postSoviet negotiation between what happened and what was said to happen in the Soviet past. Revolutionary and religious ideologues, intermittent squatters, and bitter former employees have rendered the Czarist-era red brick building and its Soviet-era pale yellow concrete façade an unfaithful monument to what was once a thriving creative hub of artists and intellectuals of all stripes. We have yet to understand the studio’s role as a socialist institution that was also a site for the transformation of religious imperatives, or comprehend its return to religious signification in a more democratic society, for that matter. What is clear is that emotions continue to run hot on the markedly secular role that animation played in Soviet life and continues to play in post-Soviet national identity, especially in relation to religious and ethnic identity. This book seeks to explain the roots and rootedness of this emotional energy beyond the nostalgia for Soviet popular culture by exploring the unrecorded histories behind some of the Soviet Union’s most popular films, when Jewish artists helped to shift the status of animation to the top of the communist cultural hierarchy.

Jews of Silence: Puppeteering Invisibility The relationship between Soviet culture and Jewish artists is complicated by the snare of definitions that have long trapped art history and Jewish studies into tedious if heated debate.22 With all the complexity those two polysemantic words Jewish artist engender both independently and in combination, I have struggled to find less distended terms to describe those artists whose work bewitched me into writing a book about them. Soviet civil servants with Jewish national designation? Soviet artists of Jewish extraction? These tortured amalgams serve only to expose the discomfort that the identification of Jewishness gave rise to in the Soviet Union, an evoked feeling with which I am intimately familiar, having emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 and raised in American Jewish communities during the Reagan years. The only concrete conclusion that I can draw from these semantic exercises is that it is no longer comme il faut to define Jews or Jewishness and perhaps nowhere more so than in the context of Soviet multinationalism.

Introduction  H 7

Although some Jewish animators spoke openly—at least after retirement, emigration, or the collapse of the studio—about their Jewish pedigrees, filmmakers were not in the business of producing work that might be understood as a Jewish genre.23 In fact, Jewish artists went to great lengths to deny the existence of a Jewish genre in any medium, accepting and promoting the illusion of Jewish invisibility when at the helm of their own media productions.24 When the would-be director of the Cinema Museum, the Bukharian Jew Julius Kaveenschikov, first came to Moscow, he expressed amazement at “how well the local Jews camouflage their original middle name! Haimovich and Isakovich become Arkadieviches and Ivanoviches.”25 Like their literary counterparts, Soviet artists passionately—perhaps obsessively—sought to establish their artistic roots in Russian soil (even if they hailed from the Soviet Union’s other republics). In his blunt description of what his Jewishness meant to him, Soyuzmultfilm scriptwriter Michael Lipskerov (b. 1939) illustrates the tautological logic of Soviet Jewish identity: “You know who I wanted to be as a child? Russian! Jewish memory is in me at the genetic level—there’s no getting around it. But actually I am more Russian than any other Russian. . . . All my books are written on behalf of the Russian Jew who considers himself a representative of Russian culture.”26 Contemporaneous animation critics in the main Soviet newspapers Izvestia and Pravda and the specialized Muscovite film journals Iskusstvo kino, Kino i zhizn’, and Kino-front provide little additional commentary on the subject of Jewish identity in the Soviet animation industry. Although critics hyped the role of cinema in the Sovietization processes, they diligently sidestepped any noticeable Jewish references (even as review articles often grouped Jewish filmmakers together). This pervasive attitude toward the identification of Jewishness defined my early attempts to speak candidly on the subject of artistic identity with industry insiders. Maya Turovsky, a Russian Jewish filmmaker who wrote one of the most sensitive Soviet live-action film scripts on Jewish themes, told me that she “never considered the nationality question in relationship to the domestic animation industry” and, while encouraging my inquiry, could not imagine what my research would unearth.27 In one of the most typical responses I received from former industry insiders, animation researcher Natalia Venzher explained that “maybe we knew who was Jewish, but it was completely irrelevant to the work and, for us, the work always came first.”28 Venzher followed this sentiment with a detailed account of her own difficult decision to officially identify with her mother’s Russian Orthodox roots rather than her father’s Jewish status “for professional considerations.”29 Director Yuri Norstein likewise told me that the question was irrelevant because “we were all filmmakers” and then went on to list exactly who was Jewish, half-Jewish, and a quarter-Jewish on his film crews over the past forty years.30 One of the leading Soviet animation critics, Mikhail

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Gurevich, told me, “You have to understand. This conversation is unintelligible if not impossible.”31 Despite these obscure evaluations on the irrelevance of Jewish identity by those active in the business, I have found that the communication modalities of animated film allowed their authors to express themselves in ways that they could not articulate in polite conversation. As many theoreticians of animation have pointed out, the creation of new identities through seemingly independent objects (of one’s own making) offers both an escape from the self and a way to project the self. In the early 1940s, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein maintained that the “plasmatic” quality of animation, by which he meant the ability to forge a transformable body, evoked a profound artistic and social liberation from fixed categories.32 Semiotician Yuri Lotman made a key distinction between puppet theater, where the connection between puppet and man is inescapable, and puppet film, where “the puppet replaces the live actor and thus its ‘puppetness’ comes to the fore.”33 For Lotman, the essential property of live performance is the illusion of reality, while animation “operates with signs of signs,” a twice-removed process that liberates its creator to remain quasiinvisible on screen and “makes this type of cinema particularly suitable for the transmission of various shades of irony and for the creation of an allegorical text.”34 Looking back on a career that began in film acting and culminated in animation directing, Jewish Soyuzmultfilm director Garri Bardin (Bardenshteyn, b. 1941) extends Lotman’s observation by insisting animation triggers “a magical fantasy world of perception” and the moment the viewer begins to believe that the shapes on the screen move of their own accord, the animator achieves the illusion of invisibility.35 In contrast to Eisenstein’s and Lotman’s celebration of animation for its capacity to throw an invisibility cloak over the self and reality, Jewish-born writer Sergei [Seymon] Ginzburg (1907–1974), the first serious theorist of animation in the Soviet Union, railed against animation being reduced to its magical qualities and expounded instead on animation’s “inability to conceal the reality of the artist and of the times.”36 In his classic volume on animation used for decades as a standard text in Soviet training courses, Ginzburg insisted that the dreams, transformations, and subversions of fantastical creatures and events in the animated text held a mirror up to the most impulsive aspects of the animator’s consciousness, which was necessarily bound up in his specific historical moment. Whether we take the view of Eisenstein and Lotman or Ginzburg, it is the unstable in-betweeness of the medium—the ability to occupy both the real and the fantastic and the medium’s flexibility in artistic self-actualization and dematerialization—that offered an added draw for national minorities. As historian Paul Wells posits, the dialectic between authorial absence and presence in a

Introduction  H 9

film-text allows seemingly irreconcilable contradictions in ethnicity, gender, and class to coexist.37 Although invisibility or quasi-invisibility is inherent to the poetics of animation, it is necessary to qualify its application to popular media, in relationship to Soviet Jews whose “invisibility” was a matter of political significance. Beginning with Lenin’s castigation of antisemitism—broadcast on film-trains around the country and thus bound up in the forms of the film medium—Soviet officials routinely condemned and denied Jewish difference in the communist social structure.38 This message, disseminated through the cinematic apparatus, resulted in the development of an official silence around the discourse of Jewishness in the public sphere with a Soviet-specific set of aesthetic and social practices.39 In addition to the sense of invisibility that Jewish animators adopted for their public appearances, especially on screen, the nation’s filmgoers also longed for anonymity. As early as 1929, Jewish media historian Abram Gelmont celebrated the national program of cinefication for the ways that the cinema apparatus in the new “theater halls” socialized ethnic populations within a broader multinational communal experience.40 In other words, scholars have not simply overlooked the Jewish presence in Soviet animation but conformed to a political platform of invisibility directed toward and embraced by Soviet Jewry.41 This mediated silence surrounding the discourse of Jews further complicates definitions of Jewish visual culture, but the methodological limitations that arise from the realities of Soviet media practices should not lead to a denial of the agency that Jewish artists exercised in representing themselves. Moshe Khusid (born Mikhail Aleksandrovich), a Jewish director active in Soviet puppet theater in the 1970s and 1980s, is a good example. Although Khusid and many other Jewish puppeteers were forced to work in relative exile in the Soviet Far East, Khusid describes his career in puppet theater as a space in which he was able to fully express himself within the pliable distortions of theatrical mannerism. After immigrating to the United States, Khusid turned to overtly religious Jewish texts in his animated film Purim: The Lot (2012), explaining that while such sources “were unavailable” in the Soviet Union, his integration of a vast archive of Jewish homiletic tales and rabbinical commentary in America “was entirely based on the Soviet school of animation and predicated on an intimacy with the Russian ethos of folklore.”42 Khusid recalled that although they were not always attuned to Jewish content within the Soviet animated text, he and his colleagues were acutely aware of which filmmakers and actors were Jewish on the Soviet screens, facilitating networking throughways and professional opportunities.43 Whatever assimilation hopes media critics, such as Abram Gelmont, may have poured into cinefication in the 1930s, one Jewish émigré from Stavropol described “the Jewish ritual” of waiting for the credits to roll in order “to watch the Jewish names

10  H  drawing the iron curtain

scroll over our national icons. We didn’t have to say anything. We just knew who was who.”44 For him and countless other Soviet Jewish filmgoers, the cinematic experience offered the security of an invisibility cloak but one with the satisfaction of a Jewish brand label. If interpreting Jewish presence in a film-text is complicated by state policies toward public displays of Jewishness, this reality is coupled by the 1932 institutionalization of internal passports and the concomitant legislation that imposed the identification of a “nationality” (natsional’nost’) on the infamous “Fifth Point” of all internal passports.45 “I did not know right away that I was a Jew,” wrote director Garri Bardin in a part of his memoir that he bluntly entitled The Fifth Point. “When I found out, I won’t say that I was very happy about it. When I forgot about it, others reminded me. One time we were playing in the school yard during a long break and, all of a sudden, one of my classmates pointed his finger at me and said that his father revealed to him the secret to all our troubles. ‘All trouble comes from the Jews,’ which is why everyone always says: ‘Beat the Jews and save Russia!’ They immediately set to saving Russia right there in the yard.”46 The Fifth Point concretely identifies the ethnic status of those that were supposed to be publicly invisible, but it is only one part of the designation “Jewish artist.” The same year as the directive on the Fifth Point was put into effect, the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) imposed artistic status as well by issuing the directive “On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations,” which dissolved the existing Soviet artistic organizations in favor of official workers’ unions. As part of this major overhaul of the art world, the CC directive mandated that officially employed artists were required to join the Union of Artists. Pairing these concurrent pieces of legislation is fundamental to whatever definition of “Jewish artist” we ultimately arrive at, because it is the combination of nationality and artistic status that defined the Jewish artist in the Soviet context. Although the films that I discuss in this book were made by Jewish artists who consciously shaped the Jewish material in their films, it is important to understand that personal anecdotes of former Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees, such as those of Lipskerov and Bardin, were primarily expressed to narrate their artistic development rather than their ethnic identities. Narratives of political marginalization make up an integral component of many twentieth-century artistic autobiographies around the world, but the legal categorization of Jewish difference was especially relevant in a country that made ethnicity part of one’s official artistic status. Although Jewish art history is rarely so simple a task as following the trail of Jewish influences on art, the Soviet case is more complex than usual. In the context of Soviet artistic policies, the directionality of influence goes both ways:

Introduction  H 11

one’s artistic vision and practices proved especially constructive of one’s Jewish identity. Perhaps the most useful example of the constructive role that art plays in the identification of Jewishness is the ways that the externally defined rubric of “Jewish artist” implicates non-Jews as well. Those who escaped the infamous Fifth Point on their passports due to intermarriage, bureaucratic maneuvering, or because they simply were not Jewish but were singled out as “Jews” for their “foreign influences,” “cosmopolitanism,” or “intellectualism”—exemplified by the infamous cases of film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich—still worked at the nexus of ethnic and professional identifications.47 It goes without saying that external labels are a poor litmus test for identity, but it is also true that the Soviet designations of nationality and vocational categories reinforced ethnicity within the structures of professional civilian employment. Because Jewish artists were bound together by legal and social impositions, their private sentiments as Jews are not as helpful to this project as were their public declarations as artists. How artists understood art and constructed the professional categories of the art-making industry have been formative to the self-definition of Jewish civilian employees. In short, I am not interested in ferreting out private religious affiliations in the lives of Soyuzmultfilm employees or reconstructing family trees, but rather in understanding how animators, who have been identified ethnically as Jews in their professional activities, performed themselves in their work and in doing so created one of the most populist forms of Soviet culture. Tying art to the cultures that produced its artists is particularly apropos to industries that developed and flourished under the ideologies of Marxism. Correlating the golden age of Soviet animation to the Jewish backgrounds of its participants makes intuitive sense for the study of this newly emancipated class of people whose exit from their traditional communities was often predicated on their entry into the arts.48 The functional relationship between Jews of the former Pale of Settlement and the “visual turn” of modernism has led performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and historian Jonathan Karp to provocatively wonder “whether the ‘modern Jewish experience’ has in some sense been a pointedly artistic one.”49 Cultural historian David Shneer has eloquently proposed that “if Jews had been the ‘people of the book,’” then perhaps in the context of the Soviet experiment with communism “they were becoming ‘people of the media.’”50 In keeping with cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s thesis that identity is constructed “within, not outside representation,” attempts to find “Jewishness” in “Sovietness” are better served by more discursive studies on the ways that the designations of Jewish, Slavic, Soviet, Russian, and so on, were performed within Soviet culture.51 Examining how Soviet Jewish animators constructed a new Sovietness that accommodated Jewishness requires studying identity as it was produced in the specific institutional and discursive practices of the Soyuzmultfilm studio.

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On Invisible Culture If animators cloaked their performances of “Jewishness” in “signs of signs,” they prided themselves on their performances of “Sovietness” and frequently inserted themselves in their work as film characters—even as celebrities—on the Soviet screens. In one interview, the undisputed leader of Soviet animation in the 1960s and 1970s, the part-Jewish Fyodor Khitruk (1917–2012), asserted the uncompromising insertion of self into his work in a state-sponsored art world largely inimical to autobiographical content: “I don’t know, somehow I had the audacity to draw a parallel—the audacity to claim that in a certain sense an animator is comparable to God. . . . He achieves the same things that God achieved. He shaped a human figure from something and then imbued it . . . well . . . with a soul.”52 Russian puppet animator Sergei Olifirenko (1953–2010) found that his puppets always ended up becoming signs of himself: “Every time there is a need for a new doll there is a new design, but if you look closely at all of my dolls, it will appear, that all of them look like each other. Exactly like me. You will never escape the laws of psychology, or perhaps genetics.”53 Perhaps Yuri Norstein said it best when he responded in an interview, “What kind of viewer do I have in mind in my work? As paradoxical as it may seem, I have myself in mind.”54 Even surface research into Soviet-era interviews, notes, and minutes to Artistic Council meetings reveals that Jewish animators modeled many of their iconic characters either on themselves or other Jewish artists working within the studio, sometimes collapsing several people into one animated personage. In his parody of live-action filmmaking in the animated film Film, Film, Film (1968), Khitruk admitted that he used Jewish director Lev Milchin (1920–1987) as his prototype for the frustrated movie director, and knowledgeable audiences must have enjoyed recognizing the real-life director in the bald, rotund, and nervous animated character. What Khitruk failed to mention is that in actuality, Milchin switched over to animation only after the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) shelved his film Good Fellow (1942), a story of a French pilot shot down by the Nazis.55 In visually styling the quintessential Soviet film director on a disavowed Jewish director, Khitruk inserted Jews into an industry in which they were often denied credit. Although Jews rarely took main roles as Jewish characters in the live-action film sector, Khitruk’s use of Milchin as the prototype for the quintessential character of the Soviet film director makes the film unique in representing the life and work of a Jewish film director at that time. Further to the point, this ability to “cast” Jews in main roles distinguished Soyuzmultfilm from Moscow’s live-action studios.56 Examples of real-life Jewish models for animated characters abound and animators have been all too willing to make connections between their invented characters and their real-life inspirations. Jewish puppet maker Leonid Shvartsman (b. 1920) based the mother in The Mitten on Lev Milchin’s first wife, the animation

Introduction  H 13

artist Tamara Poletika (1922–2011). Shvartsman claimed that he always designed his characters “from a living prototype,” such as the parrot puppet in the animated series 38 Parrots (1976–1991), which he based on the studio’s Jewish puppet director Iosif Boyarsky. According to Shvartsman, the animation crew of the film The Snow Queen (1957) based the old storyteller “Ole Lukoie” on the film’s Armenian director Lev Atamanov (1905–1981) with his round face and soft eyes (figs. I.2–I.3).57 Shvartsman embedded some of the character traits of Jewish director Roman Kachanov (1921–1993) into his design of the bulldog puppet for The Mitten (1967), such as the heavy build of a boxer, the deep-set eyebrows, thoughtful chuckle, and chest covered with medals (figs. I.4–I.5).58 Likewise, Shvartsman based one of the robbers in his film The Monkey and the Robbers (1987) on himself and his tourist character in the film Granddaughter Is Lost (1966) on his colleague, the director Yuri Norstein. According to scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova, Jewish director Boris Ablynin (1929–1988) based the character of the child mammoth in About a Mammoth (1983) on her son, whom she often brought to the office while working on the film.59 Jewish director Zinaida Brumberg (1900–1983) recalled that the sparrow in her film The Girl in the Circus (1950) “somehow came to resemble” the film’s scriptwriter Yuri Olesha (1899–1960).60 When the roles were reversed, the Brumbergs were less sanguine about being immortalized in celluloid: the Brumberg sisters bribed animator Grigorii Kozlov (1915–1988) with a bottle of brandy to destroy a caricature he had made of them as a pair of guinea pigs lest it end up in a future film.61 Although these referents to real people

Fig. I.2 (left) Soyuzmultfilm director Lev Atamanov (1905–1981), 1950s. Publicity photo. Fig. I.3 (right) Leonid Shvartsman, Sketch for “Ole Lukoie,” The Snow Queen (Snezhnaia koroleva, 1957). Dir. Lev Atamanov. From N. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia v strane Mul’tiplikatsii (2010).

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Figure I.4 (left) “Bulldog Character.” The Mitten (Varezhka, 1967). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still. Figure I.5 (right) Soyuzmultfilm director Roman Kachanov (1921–1993), 1960s. Publicity photo.

appear spontaneous and ad hoc from one film to another, the collection of recognizable insiders, down to their most representative mannerisms, created a sense of an artistic community within the animation industry. Animators not only represented themselves and their colleagues through character alter egos, they also channeled their sense of place through their representation of the animated setting. Because travel outside of the Soviet Union was rarely granted to Soviet citizens, research trips for the representation of exotic settings were taken within the “inner abroad” of the republics (fig. I.6).62 When director Svetozar Rusakov (1923–2006) sought to direct the film Meza (1967), he brought back a suitcase of images from his travels to the Russian North for inspiration because they seemed to possess a “fairy-tale quality.”63 Using their visualization of distant countries through local geographies, Soyuzmultfilm filmmakers developed what Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” the blending of physical presence in a specific space with a psychic concept relating to other places or other epochs.64 In outlining her career at Soyuzmultfilm, Jewish director Zinaida Brumberg justified her and her sister’s continual campaigns for travel documents by the professional need to design believable fairy-tale settings: “It is true that our pieces are fashioned in the silence and tightness of the studio, but one has to pore over a lot of materials—folklore, scientific work in libraries and museums. . . . Business trips helped a lot in this preparatory period.”65 When a non-Soviet locale was inaccessible to Soviet animators, especially those animators that were barred from international travel, they constructed the world through their experience with available geographies and their imagination of inaccessible geographies. Thus, the Scandinavian countryside of The Snow Queen was modeled through a month-long research trip to Tallinn, Riga, and

Introduction  H 15

Tartu and the Italian scenes for the Pinocchio tale The Adventures of Buratino (1959) were modeled on Yalta. “Before starting Three Fat Men, we went to Tallinn,” recalled Zinaida Brumberg. “The center of the city seemed to be made for shooting fantastic films. While wandering through narrow ancient streets, among ridge-roofed medieval houses and mighty stoned towers, one can easily imagine that it was here that the entirety of Olesha’s story took place. Everything evoked one’s imagination and gave a possibility to find interesting compositions.”66 These other worlds—transnational in subject, Soviet in practice—blend registers of “real” and “imaginary” and fuse “experience” with “desire.” Perhaps the best example of this transnationalism can be seen in Soyuzmultfilm’s feature-length film The Golden Antelope (1954), which featured one of the most vivid representations of a Jewish-inflected character in Soviet cinema channeled through the setting of in a pre-modern Indian landscape. The Golden Antelope coincided with the growing fervor around India and Indian cinema that commenced with the 1954 Indian film festival in Moscow. The Ministry of Culture officially embraced the exhibition of Indian melodramas for their evocation of a post-colonial consciousness, but film critic Aleksander Lipkov maintained a simpler explanation for the Soviet fascination with India. In citing to cinema fan letters from the 1960s, Lipkov singled out one letter writer who complained that Soviet factory workers “begin a second shift” when they watch television that imitates their daily realities. Only in Indian films, concluded the letter writer, can workers escape into another world where “one can see an abundance of beauty, love, and music!”67 A critic introducing The Golden Antelope promised filmgoers “a fantastic India” and even if the “Indian viewer notices any mistakes,” the critic promises that what comes across is “the feeling of love and respect the people of the Soviet Union feel for the people of India.”68

Fig. I.6 Animation crew trip to Crimea, 1971. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

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The representation of place, judged by its authentic expression of a people encountered only through media, encouraged artists to tap into their imaginations in ways that reflected real feelings about the world both inside and outside Soviet borders. In this vein, the Jewish designer of The Golden Antelope, Leonid Shvartsman, drew inspiration for the film’s familiar/exotic settings based on his own notions of distant homelands. For Shvartsman, a designer from Minsk active in the city’s Zionist youth culture, designing a foreign national space appears to have triggered projections either toward Jewish national space. Although Shvarts­man crafted the Raja’s palace in The Golden Antelope after art historical renderings of classic Indian architecture, particularly the Taj Mahal, close-ups of sunbaked stones of the palace recall the ancient Herodian wall of the last surviving wall of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Throughout the most active years of the Jewish national movement and the closing of immigration, Jewish animators designed many such heterotopia in exotic, Mediterranean, desert, and tropical settings in ways that imagined real (Israel) or psychic spaces that Jews could inhabit. In Shvartsman’s design of the “here-there” settings of The Golden Antelope, the characters also shifted between recognizable real actors and fabulous animated characters. In the early 1950s, almost all Soyuzmultfilm animations utilized Max Fleisher’s rotoscoping method, calling it by its French name éclair so as to dissociate it from American technology, and hailing it as a tool of socialist realist film. Rotoscoping refers to the technique of tracing over footage filmed in live-action one frame at a time so that the characters on screen resemble the fluid naturalistic movements of real people. Because Soviet animation included some of the most popular celebrities of Soviet theater and film, moviegoers came to expect characters based on recognizable actors in the exoticized and prerevolutionary settings that Soviet animation favored. Although The Golden Antelope’s protagonist is a nondescript Indian boy who embodies the character of the ideal socialist worker, the antagonist is the money-hungry Raja, who is recognizably played by Jewish actor Ruben Simonov (1899–1968). The unfamiliarity of the Indian character made him a blank slate onto which the heroic ideal could be projected, while the recognition of Simonov as a real actor from the Jewish theater and the psychologically focused Vakhtangov Theater would have brought the accusations against avant-garde theater and “enemies of the people” to bear, if only ironically, on the film’s narrative of corruption. The irony of Simonov’s presence in a character that represents the “enemy” of the people comes, at least in part, from Simonov’s biography. Simonov came to Soyuzmultfilm with social purpose. Having begun his career in Jewish theater, he used his position in the Vakhtangov Theater to rehabilitate his old theater friends who survived the concentration camps, but the fairly skimpy theatrical seasons

Introduction  H 17

Fig. I.7 “Raja.” The Golden Antelope (Zolotaia antilopa, 1954). Dir. Lev Atamanov. Film still.

of the late Stalin years meant Simonov had to find supplemental work for himself and the actors he sought to rehabilitate professionally. Simonov encouraged animation work as a natural extension of theatrical comedy, writing that both art forms shared the quality of the “grotesque” in the desire to embody plasticity.69 For his role in The Golden Antelope, Simonov dressed up in a Raja costume and performed choreographed movements that the animators then traced, frame by frame, into cel-sheets for animation. Of Jewish Armenian descent, Simonov’s role as the Raja is a case of Soviet “typage,” where casting is based on the actor’s physical similarities to the character role. Animators amplified Simonov’s ethnic facial features in the swarthy character of the Raja, a role for which Simonov adopted the characteristic gait, gestures, and intonation associated with the Jewish theatrical tradition.70 The Raja wore a bejeweled turban and a long robe, walked with a heavy gait, and gesticulated in exaggerated motions, but Siminov’s distinctive features came through on the screen as recognizably those of the actor (fig. I.7).71 The co-presence of Simonov’s body in the rotoscoped body creates a trace memory in the animated movements on screen. The composite Simonov/ Raja was simultaneously visible/invisible and real/imagined, an in-betweenness that carries its own peculiar weight in an “ethnographic” tale starring a recognizable Soviet Jewish actor.

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Identifying acts of self-representation, however buried and multi-dimensional, in the animation of national folklore requires the development of a critical approach to “invisibility” and its related modes of camouflage, encryption, ruse, dualism, displacement, and condensation. We must also take into account how viewers aggressively silence and selectively see uncomfortable content in the film text. I have come to the conclusion that the initial protestations of industry insiders on the Jewish presence in Soviet animation does not support the “Jews of Silence” model, but rather expresses a sense that their autobiographically constituted material is “untranslatable” off the screen. In making the invisibility of Jewish artists and their work perceptable, a methodological imperative that lies at the heart of this book, we access the ways that Soyuzmultfilm became a home for what Jewish artistic director Lana Azarkh (1922–2014) called a “secret society” that was “unintelligible to the uninitiated.”72

On Censorship The role of censorship poses a hurdle to any analysis of “visibility” and “invisibility” in Soviet filmmaking. Even if film directors managed to infuse their films with personally relevant material, the release version of a film cannot be exclusively credited to the film crew. In 1940, the Central Committee of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) and the Committee for Cinematography approved the Scenario and Thematic Plan that put Soyuzmultfilm under direct government regulation.73 Although individual tastes of highly placed functionaries such as the People’s Minister of Education and his cabinet had long affected the fate of specific films, the new plan paved the path for the institutionalization of protocols of the censoring agencies of the General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (Glavlit) and the Ministry of Culture.74 Like the production saga of Khitruk’s Film, Film, Film, a film could only be sent to Moscow’s Goskino once all the necessary internal approvals at the studio were secured. Some scholars have argued that the political influence exerted on animation was even more pervasive than on other forms of media because, as folklorist Natalie Kononenko put it, animation is “cloaked in a veneer of innocence.”75 Building upon Henry Giroux’s critique of Disney’s insertion of gender and social constructions, Kononenko argues that Soviet animation embedded destructive gender and ethnic stereotypes that would have been more readily identified and culled from live-action films. Writing during the peak of Khrushchev’s deStalinization campaign, film critic Sergei Ginzburg maintained that the 1948 regulation of the Ministry of Cinematography specifically targeted Soyuzmultfilm with a mandate to actively participate in the education of the people.76 In a

Introduction  H 19

broader and more sourced critique, historian Georgii Borodin traces the widereaching damage that censorship played on Soviet animation from the 1920s to the 1960s.77 Folklorist Jack Zipes offers what has become a familiar assessment of the power of the censorship apparatus on Soviet animation: “The fairy-tale shorts were screened by state authorities and were obliged to follow the cultural policies of the communist regimes and emphasize pedagogical and moral aspects of the fairy-tale films. These policies kept changing, and the animators were always faced with arbitrary standards and censorship.”78 One challenge to the narrative of creative control was the propensity among Jewish émigré artists—the first artists to leave the Soviet Union during the Cold War—to characterize the Soviet art world in terms of its intolerance for Jewish culture. After all, contemporaneous political activism in Israel and America on behalf of Soviet Jewry at the time showed a marked preference for artists who pitted themselves against the Soviet government, such as the independent Aleph Group or the artists who participated in the unofficial Moscow apartment exhibitions.79 This post facto process of politicization served as a building block among Jewish émigré artists in their new homes in capitalist countries. When scholars rely on the accounts of Soviet-era artists rooted in the nonofficial art world, they inevitably depend on those artists who failed within the official system of registered employment. This recourse to the most accessible sources resulted in an understanding of studio life largely shaped by the unemployed or those who had been fired by the film studios. At the same time, when scholars rely exclusively on the content of the films themselves, they tend to analyze where films are on the socialist realist spectrum in order to measure the censor’s political reach. In analyzing films that seemed to avoid state-sanctioned tropes, scholars often interpret independence as proof of a director’s subversion of officialdom. In cases where neither conformity nor subversion is readily apparent, animation historian William Moritz recommends multiple viewings, stressing that the nonlinguistic aspects of Soviet animation make the subversive content difficult to identify.80 Whatever conclusions these studies ultimately reach, we must recognize that conformity and subversion are two sides of the same coin in discussions on the role that government regulation plays in creative enterprises. Categorizing the nearly 1,200 narrative films and hundreds of advertisements and newsreels that came out of Soyuzmultfilm from 1936 to 1991 as propaganda or writing them off as socialist realist—both vague and unstable categories—dismisses a prodigious production that led to industry-specific shifts that often had little to do with state policies. Although a muscular administrative hand certainly played a formative role in all areas of Soviet culture, one of the discursive problems with the censorship model is the lack of specificity the word censorship connotes in relation to the power of its suggestion. The nonspecific application of the words banned and shelved fails to capture the far more complex regulation

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apparatus at the animation industry. Regulation looked radically different in the live-action studios, where hundreds of films were shelved during the Brezhnev years, and the animation branch, where only a handful of films were shelved during the same period.81 The live-action film career of Aleksander Askoldov (b. 1932), for example, abruptly ended after the shelving of his Holocaust-themed film Commissar (1968), whereas the animation career of Andrei Khrzhanovsky (b. 1939) earned a degree of respectability after the shelving of his film The Glass Harmonica (1968) the same year.82 Even a brief recap of the postproduction history of Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Harmonica highlights the unique experience of Soyuzmultfilm’s creative personnel. The film was first screened to employees and several key representatives of the Moscow cultural elite in Soyuzmultfilm’s screening hall and, although the screening caused debate among the studio’s administrators, semiotician Yuri Lotman publicly lavished the film with praise.83 The administration remained divided over the film’s subject of bureaucratic blindness but, soon after the studio screening, the film premiered at the magisterial Moscow Theater House to great acclaim. However, The Glass Harmonica’s promising critical debut was soon eclipsed by the suppression of the 1968 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, which put an abrupt stop to Khrzhanovsky’s allegorical film about an unenlightened governor who reigns in darkness. As a result of these political circumstances, Khrzhanovsky was assigned to a two-year military tour, and the film was hitherto supposedly “strenuously guarded” with one copy under lock-andkey in Goskino and a second copy kept under the supervision of the director of Soyuzmultfilm.84 Despite this seemingly iron-clad arrangement, the wife of one of the film’s nonconformist artists, Estonian artist Ülo-Ilmar Sooster (1924–1970), recalled that Khrzhanovsky was able to “secretly show the film in the Soyuzmultfilm studio and sometimes at creative evenings in the homes of scientists, composers, and writers.”85 This porous official vigilance surely added to Khrzhanovsky’s standing as a free-thinking art-house director in Moscow’s intellectual circles.86 Although The Glass Harmonica was not officially released until 1986, Khrzhanovsky continued to work with members of The Glass Harmonica film crew in the interim. In fact, Khrzhanovsky became one of the channels through which independent, underground voices, such as the controversial scriptwriter Gennadii Shpalikov (1937–1974), whom Khrushchev personally condemned, and the nonconformist composer Alfred Schnittke, could be heard. 87 Sooster, who served seven years in a prison camp for “anti-Soviet activities,” and Yuri Nolyev-Sobolev (1928–2002), who participated in the polemical 1962 Manege exhibition that Khrushchev denounced as “art by donkeys” and “painted by jackasses,” also continued to work for Soyuzmultfilm directors after the official banning of The Glass Harmonica.88 This gap between state policies and actual studio practices created the

Introduction  H 21

conditions for the production of such cutting-edge animations as the new age musical The Bremen Town Musicians (1969), a contemporary adaptation of the Grimm Brother’s fairy tale that showcased rock & roll, western fashions, and the cultural trends of the cosmopolitan 1960s generation (shestidesiatniki) that Khrushchev tried so hard to eradicate.89 The director, Inessa Kovalevsky (b. 1933), started out as a redactor (or censor) for the Ministry of Culture and threw off the stability of the post when she moved into animation. At the creative department of Soyuzmultfilm, Kovalevsky corralled a classical theater actor to provide the vocals for four of the five characters of the five-piece band. The resulting soundtrack was more reminiscent of rock bands than the film’s visual pretension of a traveling circus that academically trained artist Max Zherebchevsky (b. 1932) created for the storyboards. In an interview under the name Moshe Ariel, which he adopted after his 1981 emigration to Israel, Zherebchevsky recalled how he first designed “peaceful” storyboards so as not to ruffle any feathers, but the film’s composer Gennadii Gladkoff (b. 1935) and cowriters Yuri Entin (b. 1935) and Vasily Livonov (b. 1935) rejected the initial storyboards and admonished him to “stop drooling out snot and start making trouble (khuliganit).”90 In a post-Soviet interview that exemplifies the artistic claim to official rebellion, Zherebchevsky described how he found inspiration in Beatles-inspired British animation Yellow Submarine (1968), but the more interesting narrative lies with Zherebchevsky’s ability to create one of the most iconic Soviet films in a stateregulated studio and with the support and encouragement of his colleagues. Not only was Soyuzmultfilm an institution in which artists could innovate stylistically during and after the Second World War, but the divide between official and nonofficial artists (known as dissidents, nonconformists, and independents) was far more fluid than such categories suggest. In a postwar economy in which every Soviet citizen had to be registered for employment and failure to do so could result in charges of parasitism (tuneiadstvo), Soyuzmultfilm sheltered many independent artists with freelance contracts, such as avant-garde artist Yuri Khrzhanovsky (1905–1987), who found work at Soyuzmultfilm in the 1930s when it became politically expedient to switch gears from avant-garde paintings.91 Dancer and choreographer Aleksander Rumnev (Zyakin) (1899– 1965), whose career at the Chamber Theater was cut short by his arrest and fiveyear term in labor camps, found refuge at Soyuzmultfilm as an actor and scene artist. Actress Zenaida Naryshkin (1911–1993) found work as a voice actress at Soyuzmultfilm after her husband’s arrest for “fascist spying in the Esperanto organization” in the late 1930s and again after his defection to Vienna in the 1960s. According to Sooster’s widow in a memoir she wrote after immigrating to Israel, Sooster described his time at Soyuzmultfilm after his release from the labor camps in euphoric terms: “I am now in paradise. . . . I imbibe the smell of paints and solvent and it is the most fantastic smell, like that of good French

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Fig. I.8 Funeral procession of Ülo-Ilmar Sooster from Soyuzmultfilm. Carrying the coffin from left to right: E. Bachurin, M. Grobman, N. Filatov, and E. Nazarov. From Lydia Sooster, Vremya Yulo Soostera, Zerkalo (2011).

perfume for women. In my soul exotic birds sing. I am so happy. . . . I make Estonian art right here in Moscow.”92 For Sooster’s Jewish wife, who found a vital social outlet in the company of Soyuzmultfilm employees, the ability to express his national identity set Soyuzmultfilm apart from other Soviet institutions. When Sooster died, the national press barely noticed, but Soyuzmultfilm organized the funeral in the studio and opened its doors to Moscow’s dissident artistic community (fig. I.8).93 Among others, nonofficial and semi-official Jewish artists Mikhail Grobman, Ilya Kabakov, V. Yankilevsky, and Arkadii Steinberg paid their respects in the screening hall. Directors who found themselves censured for Jewish subject matter in the live-action film industry found haven in animation. After the contentious receptions of the Jewish themes in his films His Excellency (1928) and A Man from the Shtetl (1930), director Grigorii Roshal (1899–1983) was able to revive his career by cowriting the award-winning New Gulliver, a film that critic Sergei Asenin classifies as “one of the most significant events of Soviet animation in the 1930s.”94 After director Leonid Trauberg (1902–1990) was expelled from the official cinema industry in the early 1950s and his live-action script for Tevye the Milkman was rejected as late as 1966, he wrote uncredited scripts for other animation directors and claimed his first Soyuzmultfilm credit in Wild Swans (1962). Writers Ilya Ilf (Fainzilberg) (1897–1937) and Evgeny Petrov (1903– 1942) stayed afloat in Moscow’s cultural circles through their affiliation with

Introduction  H 23

Soyuzmultfilm after the Writers’ Union issued an attack on their “Turkish” novels during the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns. When writer Yaakov Kostyukovsky (1921–2011) was declared an agent of the “Joint” and world Zionism, state employees paid him to write material that would appear under their bylines, until he reestablished his name working for Soyuzmultfilm and the Russian circus in the 1960s. During the filming of the controversial Commissar, its main actor Rolan Bykov (1929–1988) tried to cover himself by simultaneously voicing a patriotic role in the animated war film Song of the Falcon (1967). The trend continued through the 1970s, and the hiring of independent artists no doubt paved a path for some of the most exciting innovations of the dissident movements, which found an unlikely venue in the state-sponsored studio. By the time the Jewish dissident Aleph Group promoted the use of surrealism, for example, Soyuzmultfilm animators had been producing nonlinear, minimalist, and surrealist works for more than a decade, such as Fyodor Khitruk’s lyric film Man in a Frame (1966) and Nikolai Serebryakov’s (1928–2005) surrealist I Am Waiting for a Bird (1966).95 Yuri Norstein’s contracting of the then-banned Jewish writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938) resulted in her writing the most critically acclaimed script for the studio in its entire history, and the hiring of the independent Jewish writer Alexandra Sviridova resulted in one of the rare Holocaust-themed animations. The studio’s bridge between the official and independent artistic communities colors the popular assumption that the state succeeded in halting Jewish performance with the institutionalization of socialist realism on avant-garde theaters, including the closing of the Moscow State Jewish Theater.96 Some of the scripts that were written for avant-garde theaters but never staged in the conservative atmosphere of the late 1930s eventually made their way to successful production at Soyuzmultfilm.97 Many avant-garde and Jewish theater professionals resumed their careers at Soyuzmultfilm as directors, artists, writers, actors, puppet makers, and cameramen.98 Others, who never worked in Jewish theaters but whose theatrical work was censured for what authorities considered to be Jewish themes, such as semi-dissident writer Aleksander Galich (Ginzburg, 1918–1977), found work in Soyuzmultfilm. The forced closing of the avant-garde Meyerhold Theater in 1938, a vibrant center for Jewish intellectuals, provided a fresh crop of directors, composers, writers, storyboard artists, and actors.99 Heavily influenced by Meyerhold’s concept of synthesis, second-career theater professionals were among the first Soyuzmultfilm actors to seriously engage with ethnographic material and folklore, bringing it to bear on contemporary issues and social commentary. With so many freelance writers, artists, musicians, and actors coming through the doors of Soyuzmultfilm, creative personnel learned to harness the studio bureaucracy under which they labored.100 Most acts of censorship coexisted with the day-to-day practices of filmmaking, such as the formation of project teams,

24  H  drawing the iron curtain

Fig. I.9 Artistic Council, Soyuzmultfilm, 1940s. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

access to studio equipment, and funding negotiations. Studio censorship undermined creative independence, but even a brief recounting of the various constituencies that laid claim to editing rights, and the expedient role bribes played in the process, also dispels the notion of a centralized body making informed decisions of national importance. With characteristic sarcasm, animation director Andrei Khrzhanovsky stated that the censors “had a superbly honed sixth sense, but they did not have the first five.”101 The various stages of the production process resulted in the filing of contradicting evaluations, and the filmmakers could fall back on the authority of one opinion to sweep another under the proverbial rug. Even though Soyuzmultfilm operated under the factory model of hierarchical titles and separate departments, the internal modalities of administration ultimately ended up encouraging interdepartmental collaboration and the concomitant breakdown of rank. Some responsibility for censorship fell on the entire studio because the post-production rejection of even one film by the Ministry of Culture resulted in the withholding of the New Year’s bonus, known as the “Thirteenth Salary,” to all employees.102 In his memoirs, Jewish animation director Aleksander Tatarsky remembered the process of submitting his films as a student to the in-house censoring body, known as the Artistic Council: “After handing in each film we would all come together and analyze it to the smallest frame (today, I think, these ‘Artistic Councils’ have become the best school for

Introduction  H 25

us)” (fig. I.9).103 The Artistic Council was chaired for a long time by Armenian director Lev Atamanov and included many Jewish artists such as the famous Jewish political caricaturist Boris Efimov (1900–2008). According to film critic Mikhail Gurevich, even animation critics unaffiliated with the studio played a formative role in the final film as directors often solicited opinions during the production process to insure positive reception.104 This book’s inclusion of the editing phases of filmmaking as it applies to Jewish subjects elicits new interpretations of seminal Soviet animations and reveals unexpected links between Jewish and Soviet cultural texts. In this spirit, the title Drawing the Iron Curtain refers not only to the Soviet state’s effort to block itself off from European and American influences, but also to the role that animation played in drawing a delicate scrim around the Soviet bloc onto which artists could project themselves.

Structure of the Book Although I loosely organize the chapters chronologically to aid in an overview of the development of the animation industry, each chapter is primarily concerned with the construction of Jewishness that employees developed in the Soyuzmultfilm studio and that informed the reception of their work. This book opens with a historical reconstruction of the professional development of Jewish animators from 1919 to 1989 against the backdrop of the broader history of the Soyuzmultfilm studio. The first chapter is therefore an opportunity to highlight and analyze the horizontal structures that enabled the studio to become a center of Jewish cultural and social activity and provides the backdrop for the book’s further investigations. In chapter 2, I show how the animation department of the Soviet-German Mezhrabpom film studio initiated the independence of animation work from the live-motion film studios in the early 1930s through plans to produce Black and White, a film that was projected to become the most ambitious film on racism ever made. The efforts to make the film also reveal the ways that Mezhrabpom’s representation of American racism prompted analogies to the Jewish question for Soviet filmgoers. Chapter 3 moves on to discuss how the Jewish Brumberg sisters, known as the “grandmothers of Soviet animation,” established their own directors’ group at the newly formed Soyuzmultfilm through which they sheltered and nurtured an underemployed artistic milieu. A case study of the personal, professional, and creative biographies of the Brumberg sisters reveals how they used their group as a bridge for Moscow’s intellectual community after the closing of avant-garde theaters in the 1930s and 1940s.

26  H  drawing the iron curtain

Chapters 4 and 5 analyze how Jewish animators developed a sense of place in the 1950s–1970s through the collective memory of Jewish dislocation and migration. Chapter 4 examines how Jewish émigrés from once-Jewish neighborhoods shaped animation with social and ethnic geographies of cosmopolitan Moscow-like cities. Chapter 5 specifically focuses on the development of the most famous Soviet animated character, the ethnically unidentifiable Cheburashka—known as the Soviet Mickey Mouse—in relationship to the animated setting of the Moscow Zoo and the zoo’s sociobiological theories. Chapter 6 discusses a wholly unexplored genre of Soviet animation: the Holocaust. During the Second World War, animators directly addressed the Nazi threat on native soil, producing around twenty films that by and large universalized the victims of war. Beginning in the 1970s, however, Soviet filmmakers unearthed stories of specifically Jewish victims who had been forgotten, undocumented, or had their Jewish heritage masked to affect an image of unified Soviet citizenry. I consider how filmmakers shaped the animated Holocaust film to redress history as well as to offer commentary on their own time period, when Jewish fears of propagandist antisemitism were revived in the aftermath of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War. Chapter 7 analyzes the cinematic rehabilitation of the intellectual culture maligned as “cosmopolitan” and “Jewish” during the Stalin years. In drawing previously censored Russian materials into Soviet animation during the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish animators combined elements of intellectual history associated with Jewish culture with elements taken from Russian lettres to create a fresh vision of Slavic Jewish heritage. In the process, Jewish directors Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Yuri Norstein gave birth to a new genre in Soviet animation with the use of formalist narrative scripts, nonverbal soundtracks, and evocative musical scores. The final chapter takes a close look at the role that Jewish identity played in Yuri Norstein’s film Tale of Tales, which marks the height of Soyuzmultfilm auteur filmmaking. In the highly evocative experience of watching Tale of Tales, the viewer goes through a gamut of emotional and intellectual reactions to the central character of the Little Gray Wolf, who lives on the borders of civilized society and threatens to pass through established boundaries through the sublime experience of art. The film’s dialectic between visual and aural elements achieves an expressive dissonance between what one sees and what one hears that encourages the viewer to examine his evoked reactions to the Little Gray Wolf. Together, these chapters explore the interlocking stories of Jewish artists adjusting to their urban Soviet identities as they toiled to take themselves out of the ghetto of ethnic difference and animation out of the ghetto of children’s entertainment. As I uncover the deployment of self in Soviet animation, I tell a story that challenges many popular assumptions about both the film industry and Jewish history in the Soviet Union.

1 Behind the Scenes Jews and the Studio System, 1919–1989

E

mployee nostalgia for Soyuzmultfilm tends to be so effusive that it can be difficult to gauge its historical veracity. Where memoirs fall short in quantitative research, much qualitative material can be gleaned, and what comes across is that the studio nurtured a rich social life that sometimes even took the place of the traditional family structure, especially for those employees orphaned during the Second World War. When interviewed after his retirement, Jewish designer Leonid Shvartsman mentioned the studio’s social life as its most definitive characteristic: “Above all, the studio affected the people who created these films. It was truly a collective—a large family of different generations, with their relationships, traditions, and rules. We, the young, looked up to the older masters, the patriarchs of animation, and gladly plunged ourselves into the atmosphere of studio legends, holidays, grief, drawings, and sketches.”1 In a recollection of his career at Soyuzmultfilm, Shvartsman, who had lost both home and family in the Second World War, contrasted the indignities of postwar living conditions with the informal respectability of studio life: “Everyone who is left in the profession, the older generation, remembers it with similar longing and love. It was an unbelievable home. Back then in the 1950s we all lived in kommunalkas [cooperative apartments] and people said we worked too hard, but we simply lived there. No one wanted to return to those grim communal apartments and so we worked there, we played chess and, forgive me, we drank and fraternized” (fig. 1.1).2 One of Shvartsman’s colleagues, Jewish artistic director Lana Azarkh, left a similar assessment of the familial atmosphere of the studio: “The studio was a big part of our lives. It was a second home. We were bored on vacation and were eager for 23-a Kaliaevskaia [former studio address]. Production manager Nikolai Bashkirov made of all of us, of different ages, different races, different characters, one big family. If anyone found out that something happened to another one of us we all rushed to the rescue. Each one’s domestic affairs were well known, [some of them] entire novels. Husbands and wives, past and H 27 H

Fig. 1.1 Drinking at the studio during the filming of Attention! Wolves! From the left: Andrew Demykin, Valery Ugarov, Vladimir Morozov, Eduard Nazarov, Gennadii Sokolsky, Efim Gamburg, and Ülo-Ilmar Sooster. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

Fig. 1.2 Montage made of the children of studio employees, late 1960s. Bottom row from left: Nadia Sooster (Snesarev), Olga Bogolyubov, Shelmanov Jr., Vasily Kafanov, Turkus Jr., Lena Wolf, and Marina Ignatenko. Top row from left: Andrei Smirnov, Aleksander Chekhov, Irina Litovskaya, Aleksander Panov, and unknown. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

Behind the Scenes  H 29

present, have peacefully coexisted in the studio. Someone’s children were always running around the studio” (fig. 1.2).3 Although the extra-professional dealings between administrators and the creative employees were often marked by a formal character, the highly social atmosphere at the studio was nonetheless part and parcel of its attitude toward filmmaking as the product of social labor (fig. 1.3). On a regular basis, employees organized costume balls for the New Year and their children staged elaborate annual plays. The entire studio came together in the middle of the workday for birthdays, award ceremonies, the screening of completed films, and cast parties (fig. 1.4). According to former employees, there was always an excuse to push the desks together for an impromptu dinner on a late night at the office and “pass around the hat” to fund a festive meal celebrating someone’s personal achievements or family milestones.4 Employee socialization extended off campus, such as walks to the nearby pet shop or more ambitious trips to the Moscow Zoo where animators could observe naturalistic animal behaviors for their work. Younger animators designed provocative snow sculptures in the studio courtyard with fraternity flair, and film crews took overnight research trips for inspiration for their exotic animated settings (figs. 1.5–1.6). As was common practice in professional industries in the Soviet Union, the state assigned the studio an off-site plot of land on the outskirts of Moscow that employees used as a collective garden called Cartoon. The studio’s administrators assigned plots to employees to plant vegetables and medicinal herbs and, because employees

Fig. 1.3 (left) Studio portrait of film crew for The Golden Key (1959). Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov. Fig. 1.4 (right) Alexei Zaitsev dressed up as Hasidic Jew, 1980s. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

30  H  drawing the iron curtain

Fig. 1.5 Snowman at the studio, 1980s. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

had to take a train to get to their plots, the garden became an off-site center for informal socialization that employees recalled as formative to their creative lives.5 Beginning in the 1950s, the studio organized a soccer team for its employees, complete with studio uniforms, and organized outings to games. Rather than erecting policies around romantic office relationships or bemoaning the unfortunate reality of close quarters, the studio encouraged office fraternization as natural and conducive to a culture of teamwork. Employees dated, married, and divorced each other. Children of employees who practically grew up in the studio, such as director Roman Kachanov’s son and Vadim Kurchevsky’s daughter, pursued filmmaking careers of their own. To some extent, office culture always contains an element of social life, but, for Soviet Jewish artists, there seemed to be something more to the Soyuzmultfilm collaborative culture than the typical civilian job. Azarkh described her experience in the studio as one of belonging to a “secret society,” a feeling that Jewish scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova succinctly confirms: “It was a very small, closed circle. It was like a religious sect.”6 Despite my focus on a single institution and an atypical labor force that employees likened to a “secret society” and a “religious sect,” there is, I hope, something larger at stake here. At its core, this is a story about culture-making in the Soviet capital. In looking at the formation and work of this “sect” of culture-makers, I first had to reconstruct the institutional structures that inspired employees to express an impassioned sense of belonging and that enabled Jewish

Behind the Scenes  H 31

Fig. 1.6 Soyuzmultfilm employees in forest near railroad station, 1980s. Director Edouard Nazarov at left. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

content to find a national stage. In the course of my study on Jewish employees working in a nascent media industry as it came of age, I have found that tracing the studio’s “horizontal structures”—by which I mean the often unscripted interplay among studio employees—was far more useful to my understanding of filmmaking than focusing on the implementation (or subversion) of dictates originating on the administrative levels.7 I am specifically interested in the horizontal structures or micro-processes that Jewish employees helped to build, maintain, and sometimes dismantle at the individual, team, and administrative levels in order to create a conducive atmosphere for their creative work and a stable home for their professional lives. Before delving into case studies of individual filmmakers and their films, this chapter reconstructs the development of the industry as it relates to Jewish employment at Soyuzmultfilm.

Upstarts: Animation in Revolution, 1917–1924 The birth of animation in Russia began in fits and starts. Several individuals experimented with stop-motion in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Aleksander Shiryaev (1867–1941) and Polish-born Vladislav Starevich (1882–1965), but these were individual efforts with independent programs that folded in the upheaval of the Russian Civil War. After the establishment of

32  H  drawing the iron curtain

Bolshevik power, the Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), a state transportation and communication network, repurposed Starevich’s technology into what it called “dynamic graphics,” a cinematographic version of Rosta’s earlier political poster.8 Using the same proselytizing modalities of its successful poster campaigns—sequential multiframe format, bold lettering, and continuous narrative movement—Rosta relied on the graphic elements of animated film to carry a new vision of the recently formed USSR to the largely non-Russian populations in need of absorption. Using the preexisting infrastructure of the country’s railway system, Rosta outfitted film trains with the necessary machinery for production and exhibition and sent them off with a message to spread and a new medium to popularize.9 With the distance of a hundred years, the influence of animated films on Sovietness is indisputable if also misunderstood. Given the revolutionary ethos of Rosta dynamic graphics and its intended non-Russian and largely illiterate audiences in the vast countryside, it is easy to see why animation scholars John Halas and Roger Manvell concluded that animation in Eastern Europe, “where there is a peasant tradition of craftsmanship in the carving and designing of puppets and dolls,” originated in humble roots.10 Although Halas and Manvell no doubt wished to convey to Anglo readers the aura of authenticity that they saw in the bold draftsmanship and dark coloring of Eastern European puppet animation, such a characterization makes for a damning assessment in the Russian cultural context where artisanship held a very lowbrow status.11 The misconception that animators hailed from illiterate labor pools partially arises from American animation, where many animators started out in the comics business, and partially from the rhetoric espoused by Soviet animators who defended the medium under the banner of socialist labor. Animator Aleksander Bushkin (1896–1929), for example, consciously evoked the artisanal nature of the medium, which he called “frame-shooting” (kadros”emka) to underscore its mechanical nature, by describing how animators “worked in haste” directly on the floor and “with one leg on the ceiling” so as to capture their topical subjects while they were still relevant.12 Bushkin’s description of animation’s salt-of-the-earth work conditions should be understood as the professional narrative of an emerging Jewish artist trying to situate the new medium within the mores of the new regime.13 Young Jewish upstarts criticized the old Russian guard represented by Starevich, whom Bushkin denigrated as a “children’s entertainer” whose puppets “walked on non-ideological ground.”14 At least in part, Bushkin’s criticism of the previous generation of animators who fled the country during the civil war period served to justify a more experimental approach to the medium. Halas and Manvell conflated the proletariat banner with the notion that film puppetry spoke to an artisan mentality, whereas the first Soviet animators would have seen the avant-garde teleology of “industry” as bearing little relationship to

Behind the Scenes  H 33

peasant “artistry.” Characterizing the first animators as village artisans working in a cottage industry undermines the artistic roots of the “cult” that was coming to define the core of Soviet animation in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1920s. Those who embraced animation may have been ideological revolutionaries, but they were hardly uneducated workers embracing their ethnic heritages. When Jewish artist Yuri Merkulov (known as Deni, 1901–1979) described the first generation of Moscow animators as “unbelievable people, real communists,” his rhetorical flourishes may have invited interpretive misunderstandings.15 However, in labeling animators as “real communists,” Merkulov was paying his colleagues’ left-leaning political sympathies a compliment, and his meaning becomes more transparent in some of his more exacting descriptions of animators. Merkulov describes his colleague Nikolai Khodataev, one of the first practitioners of animation after the Russian Civil War, as a bohemian type “with a pale face like the Old Master portraits of El Greco” and who “wore short pants to the knees, black stockings, and ladies’ slippers, like a Van Dyke character tip-toeing at a gathering in a former merchant’s mansion in the manner of the Old Master paintings, while pontificating on the arts and giving us practical advice.”16 The social world that Merkulov and Khodataev inhabited would hardly describe the lifestyle of an industrious tailor recycling remnants. In actuality, the first animation enthusiasts hailed largely from well-educated, middle-class families with professional and personal connections to the Russian avant-garde, such as the Jewish artist El Lissitzky (1890–1941) and Jewish filmmaker Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman, 1896–1954). When Lissitzky exhibited his stop-motion “rotating models” for international expos, for example, one Berlin correspondent praised the models for their artistic value and claimed that Lissitzky’s stop-motion marked “the tremendous results achieved during ten years of Soviet activity.”17 Taken in context, it would be more apropos to compare the first animation experiments by Soviet Jewish artists—such as Lissitzky, Bushkin, Merkulov, and Vertov—to Andy Warhol’s use of silkscreen rather than to ethnic artisans using the “indigenous” materials of their forebears.18 I emphasize the avant-garde roots of animation because the first Jewish artists were not looking to animation to authenticate their humble shtetl (townlet) roots but rather adopted this new high-tech medium as a ticket into Moscow’s elite intellectual circles. Animated films, especially during the silent era, were well suited for the Yiddish-speaking populations that lived in towns along Rosta’s train routes, but the Jewish artists who made the films had successfully left the Pale behind and their immediate concerns revolved around their expanding role as culture-makers and enforcers of Bolshevik principles. The first animators recruited the montage principles of Russian modernism into their technological approach to animation precisely to command social status for the new medium and themselves. In making the first Soviet animated film Soviet Toys (1924), for

34  H  drawing the iron curtain

example, Vertov and Bushkin animated Merkulov’s caricatures through the high modernist techniques of splicing together documentary modes of storytelling with highly abstracted forms rendered in minimalist strokes. Locating the techniques and styles of these Jewish animators in Russian modernism does not preclude their engagement with Jewish-inflected material in the content of their films. For example, in Soviet Toys, Vertov and Bushkin expose the evil nature of the allegorical “NEP-Man” (representing Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy) through a number of social ills that specifically reflected the Jewish collective experience in the Pale of Settlement, such as abuses of the Church, dangers of alcoholism, and the persecution of minorities. As Vertov had done earlier in his live-action avant-garde Cine-Eye films, these abuses are portrayed as emphatically antithetical to the values of Bolshevism, which the early Jewish filmmakers portrayed as a near-messianic force for good. If the memory of the Pale reverberates in the film, the projection of a better world allowed the filmmakers to represent themselves far more directly. Vertov and Bushkin introduce another allegorical figure poised to replace the excesses of NEP-Man and bring about a more equitable and progressive world: the selfreferential “Movie-Man” (fig. 1.7). Within vignettes describing the backsliding behaviors of NEP-Man against the people, the film flashes to reveal a highly abstracted character with camera lenses for eyes and a propeller for a mouth and whose halo-like spotlight identifies him as a “Goskino Film Advertising” (KinoReklama Goskino), a member of the State Committee for Cinematography. If the design of the NEP-Man rehearses old stereotypes of capitalists and usurers as fat and wobbly (perhaps even drawing from antisemitic graphic conventions), Movie-Man strikes a heroic portrait of the Jewish Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky whose apotheosis in Soviet art was at its height in 1924: cut jaw line, sweptback coiffure, signature round glasses, and a Red Army tunic. The introduction of the Movie-Man is labeled as an advertisement for the production company that released Soviet Toys, but Movie-Man is fully integrated into the visual program and the score as a bona fide character. Although Movie-Man is presented as the mechanism for change and the antidote to the abuses of the NEPMan, he avoids squaring off with NEP-Man in single combat as might be expected in such an archetypal rendering of good and evil.19 The appearance of Movie-Man jarringly interrupts the sequences of unrestrained abuse, but Movie-Man’s powers lie in his ability to bear witness on the screen against those profiteers who act in bad faith behind the scenes. In an unexpected turn, it is not Movie-Man but the audience of his “eye-witness testimony” who heroically enacts the necessary change. Seeing the cruel abuse that Movie-Man exposes with his unflinching gaze, Red Army soldiers form a blockade around the NEP-Man and his corrupt priests and hang the lot by the neck (fig. 1.8). Movie-Man’s viewers disable the cruel disruptors of peace who transform into decorative ornaments or toys (igrushki) on

Behind the Scenes  H 35

Fig. 1.7 (left) “Movie-Man.” Soviet Toys (Sovetskie igrushki). Dir. Dziga Vertov. Goskino, 1924. Film still. Fig. 1.8 (right) “Tree Formation.” Soviet Toys (Sovetskie igrushki). Dir. Dziga Vertov. Goskino, 1924. Film still.

the New Year’s holiday tree. It is Movie-Man’s ability to see and record that makes him a powerful agent of Bolshevism. Having modeled the role of filmmakers in forging a path toward redemption, at the conclusion of the film, Movie-Man sits in a thoughtful pose behind a desk at the Goskino offices and turns his goggled eyes squarely on the viewer. Bushkin’s industrial-minded teleology gave modernist artists an employable language through which to fashion their professional biographies and should be understood as facilitating highly individualistic projects in the 1920s.20 Yet, for all of the potential that individual artists, semi-private studio startups, and film clubs promised, their early experiments were so independent-minded that they sustained little continuity because of the lack of organization and infrastructure.21 Until the mid-1920s, animators remained largely independent upstarts, but the duality that characterized their work as an avant-garde movement and a people’s craft outlasted them, and Soviet animation continued to oscillate between these two versions of itself throughout its history.

Start-ups: Organizing Animation, 1924–1935 The “factory” at the State Film Technicum (GTK), destined to become one of the premier film schools in the country but at the time in the flux of defining itself, spearheaded the first successful model for the production of animation. In 1924, GTK offered workshops—a low-budget program that one member proudly described as “a closet with a lamp and no windows”—with the expectation that trainees would produce films worthy of public exhibition.22 The new workshops

36  H  drawing the iron curtain

adopted an open-door attitude toward gender and minorities in line with the proletariat educational initiatives of the first Soviet Minister of Education Anatolii Lunacharsky, and instructed students to appropriate folk techniques (such as flat paper cut-outs) in line with the aesthetic ethos of Sovietization. Yet, like the artists who preceded the formalization of animation education, the GTK workshops could hardly be described as a “people’s studio.” The investment in time that GTK’s business model required of its students hardly appealed to workers in need of a salary. In practice, GTK accepted only graduates of the exclusive fine arts institutes such as the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and its successor, the Russian State Art and Technical School (VKhUTEMAS). GTK’s first members were simultaneously trained as painters, sculptors, and architects in fine-arts institutions: Ivan Ivanov-Vano, siblings Olga (1894–1968) and Nikolai Khodataev (1892–1979), Zinon Komissarenko (1891–1980), along with Jewish artists Daniel Cherkes (1899–1971), Yuri Merkulov, Vladimir Suteev (1903–1993), and the sisters Valentina (1899–1975) and Zinaida Brumberg.23 Because each film crew consisted of fewer than half-a-dozen GTK members, each member mastered all the aspects of filmmaking, including composing the libretto, developing the script and graphics, computing the frames per second, shooting, and editing.24 This nuts-and-bolts approach encouraged artistic control and technical innovation and successfully transformed the ambitious group into the country’s first animation directors. At the same time, the necessary academic and applied instruction created considerable barriers to entry.25 It is fair to say that, although GTK enabled several Jews and women to make a significant mark on the national culture, GTK closed ranks and the industry remained in the hands of the few. However impractical an animation career was in the mid-1920s, when promoting the new medium, GTK members were a pragmatic bunch. GTK animators produced films that showcased various techniques (three-dimensional dolls, flat paper cut-outs with movable joints, and line drawing) and increased the length of their films from 300 meters to 1,000 meters in GTK’s first production year. GTK also produced films with an eye toward demonstrating the genre versatility of the medium; their first film parodied the live-action film Aelita under the title Interplanetary Revolution (1924), followed by the politically oriented China Aflame (1925), and the social-minded Moidodyr (1927).26 GTK must have made substantial headway in demonstrating its potential because in his 1924 tract on revolutionary cinema, Education Minister Lunacharsky praised animated films, which he called agitki, citing their humor and visual absorption as fundamental to their communication of political material.27 In 1928, animator Aleksander Ivanov masterminded a more public endorsement from the state by including a photographed Lunacharsky shaking the hand of the title character in the film Tip-Top in Moscow

Behind the Scenes  H 37

(1928). By 1934, the socialist utility of animation must have been a bygone conclusion among members of the Party if only because the earnest Bolshevik Jewish director Fridrikh Ermler (1898–1967) included an animated personage of Stalin in a dream sequence within his live-action film The Peasants (1934). Although Stalin would not appear in animation again in his lifetime, Ermler’s inclusion of his likeness in The Peasants must have felt like a sign to animators that they had chosen careers with a promising future.28 The first GTK animators adopted Bushkin’s socialist rhetoric, but it was GTK’s practical strides that caught the attention of both a sponsor and competitors. The semi-private, German-Soviet Mezhrabpom-Rus film studio absorbed GTK as a production department in a period of rapid industrialization that began with the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. GTK graduates joined various other film studios such as Lenkinokhronika, Gosvoenkino, Sovkino, and Mosfilm. With multiple shops competing for a small number of qualified employees in the late 1920s, animators formed tightly knit film crews for the duration of a project but fell short of forming what art historians would call a “group” in the sense of shared aesthetic perspective.29

Animation in the Age of Industrialization, 1935–1941 With the rise of multiple startups, a growing number of unemployed or underemployed artists sought out the new medium, but a few years after animation proved its viability, the CPSU turned to Disney for more efficient models of production.30 The great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein was so impressed with Mickey Mouse that he claimed that Disney was the greatest contribution that the American people made to world art.31 Soon after Eisenstein returned from a research trip to Hollywood, the CPSU sent Victor Smirnov (1896–1946), who had spent several years in New York expanding the distribution of Soviet films in North America, on a similar trip to California to research the animation studios of Walt Disney Productions and the Fleischer Brothers. Smirnov returned to Moscow with a former Russian émigré and Disney employee, Lucille Kramer, to teach his employees the Disney technique of drawing on transparent and reusable celluloid strips.32 One critic lauded the “sophisticated streamlined assembly-line production” while another celebrated what he called “volumetric animation” as “the solution to big artistic challenges.”33 Of course, homogenization played poorly among some of the fine artists who complained that the “Disney infatuation” meant the “end of art animation.” Whatever aesthetic setbacks domestic animation may have suffered with the importation of Disney methods, Smirnov’s adoption of celluloid animation introduced a level of regularity that helped make the Soviet enterprise sustainable with socialist-style labor.34

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The more significant change came in Smirnov’s institutionalization of Disney’s corporate model.35 Unlike the highly individualized styles and multifaceted talent that GTK’s mastery system produced, Smirnov sought to standardize the animation process by establishing specialized positions, which included the cameraman (operator), projectionist (mekhanik), animator (mul’tiplikator), intermediate-stage animator known as the “replicator” (fazovshchik), contour draftsman known as a “renderer” (prorisovshchik), and final-stage animator known as the “inker” (raskrashchik). These specializations created professional opportunities for technical workers without comprehensive artistic backgrounds, sparking competitive internal hierarchies between the creative personnel and technical staff. It appears that Smirnov did not quite understand how to behave as a manager within the system he implemented nor how his reforms would soon come to redefine the industry. Although Smirnov advocated the efficiency of the new system to his crew members, he continued to produce his own films and dealt with employee morale by doling out merit-based promotions and demotions.36 In his memoir of the early days of Soviet animation, director Kirill Maliantovich (1924–2007) mused that “in the way that he [Smirnov] conducted himself as a powerful boss, I think he forgot that he was not in America.”37 Despite the occasional tensions that accompanied the transition to specialization, Smirnov’s efficient modifications caught the attention of an impressed politburo and, within a few years, the CPSU moved to consolidate the major Moscow animation studios. One by one, the various studios “yielded” to socialist competition (sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie) and closed their doors in the name of the greater collective benefit.38 On June 10, 1936, the CPSU opened a state animation studio at the site of a former political prison on Vorovskogo Street in the center of Moscow under the name Soyuzdetmultfilm (Union of Children’s Animated Film), which would soon be shortened to Soyuzmultfilm. With an official state studio in full operation in the country’s capital, most of the semi-private regional studios throughout the country “yielded” in turn.39 Soyuzmultfilm attracted many independent contractors with the incentive of full-time employment under the category known as shtatniye sotrudniki (literally, “staff workers”), which resulted in greater integration and cooperation among workers no longer competing for contracts within the different shops. It was hardly all moonlight and roses for every animator in the business. During the consolidation of the numerous animation shops, all foreign or otherwise undesirable workers—who could not legally participate in full-time employment—were fired or arrested on trumped-up charges. Only the group formed by Aleksander Ptushko (1900–1973) remained operative at Mosfilm after Soyuzmultfilm opened its doors, but Ptushko’s animators, who no doubt considered themselves lucky to retain their positions in the upheaval, permanently fell away from the industry within a few short years. Animators who were unable to adjust

Behind the Scenes  H 39

to the new system of full-time state employment, specialization, and standardization such as the stoically avant-garde artists Merkulov and Khodataev, prematurely curtailed their careers in animation.40 At the same time, those who landed at Soyuzmultfilm during the transition period and managed to maintain production stood a good chance of securing full-time employment in the “staff” (shtat). When the dust had cleared, Soviet Jewish animators and technicians from the dismantled Moscow and regional studios made up a substantial core of the founding employees at the new Soyuzmultfilm studio.41 However individual animation artists resisted the rapid changes to their beloved art form, the studio heads suffered the greatest damage to their creative control. Smirnov and Ptushko left animation as a direct result of the consolidation process, returning only briefly during the Second World War to become successive directors of Soyuzmultfilm. Unlike the original studio heads who had exercised creative control in the animation shops that they founded, studio heads at the new Soyuzmultfilm largely handled administrative work. Like all Soviet factories, the studio employed a Party secretary, a trade union representative, and an official from the secret police (GPU, later KGB), which made even small organizational changes a matter of protracted bureaucracy. The new job description of the studio head meant a new sort of candidate. Studio heads who landed at Soyuzmultfilm in the wake of Stalinist restructuring generally hailed from non-animation backgrounds, and when they did weigh in on aesthetic issues, such as the ongoing debates surrounding the use of Disney styles, they did so from practical positions.42 The appointment to studio head became a somewhat dubious honor, such as the case of theater director Nikolai Akimov (1901–1968), who ended up at Soyuzmultfilm after being denounced as a cosmopolitan in the late 1940s. According to veteran Soyuzmultfilm designer Lana Azarkh, live-action film director Aleksander Sinitsyn came to head the studio in 1950 “after working in Paris where he got stung by something.”43 After Sinitsyn came a “winded” S. Kulikov, followed by a few more “walk-throughs,” until Mikhail Valkov (1917–1996) settled into the first long-term appointment from 1961 to 1978. If employee memoirs are any judge, it is safe to say that the position inspired little respect among the creative personnel who saw studio heads, installed to toe the Party line, as hurdles to artistic progress. Jewish director Iosif Boyarsky described Valkov as “a man with complete ignorance of film, especially animated film,” and Azarkh claimed that he was responsible for “the collapse of the studio.”44 With creative control subordinated to the productive division of labor, and administrative control subordinated to Party politics, Soyuzmultfilm was a place where people got to know one another. With external consolidation and internal departmentalization, Soyuzmultfilm employees were part of a collective enterprise in which the scriptwriter, director, artist, cartoonist, renderer, composer,

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voice-over actor, and camera operator had to closely collaborate for months at time. According to Jewish Soyuzmultfilm director Garri Bardin, the intense professional interactions that departmentalization necessitated made “everyone sitting in the screening hall feel that the film was their own” and that everyone saw “their own hand in it.”45 The “share everything” motto describes the studio’s work ethic as well as the content of the films. Almost immediately after the opening of Soyuzmultfilm, the Central Committee (CC) mandated the studio to focus on cultural consolidation, calling for a synthesis of regional traditions within a specified thematic plan.46 Inevitably, an integrated labor force with a mandate to organize the country’s diverse ethnic cultures into a single, indigenous “Sovietness” would embed the particularistic perspectives of their diverse employees both on film and behind the scenes.

Hiring Jews, 1941–1948 On the eve of the Second World War, Soyuzmultfilm had matured to the point that it could again absorb foreign talent, assign employment to sequential graduating classes of GTK’s institutional heir VGIK (All-Union National Institute of Cinema), and generate livelihoods for four hundred animation professionals. In his memoirs, animator Fyodor Khitruk sardonically noted the practicality of the profession he had entered in the mid-1930s: “I always had different interests as a child: a dream to be an actor, a writer, a musician, an aircraft designer. Is there any limit to what a boy could dream? It turned out that animation was the most stable.”47 With the animation industry residing in one mega-studio in the Soviet capital, however, the 1941 German bombing of Moscow threatened to obliterate the entire industry. Soyuzmultfilm evacuated the majority of its employees to the Uzbek city of Samarkand in a single day in October, leaving a cohort to do what they could to save national animation.48 Fyodor Khitruk, one of the men who stayed behind, comically recalled running around on the studio roof “with tongs in hand and covered with metal sheets” to extinguish incendiary German bombs that fell on the building. “One of the first bombs directly hit the studio warehouse and broke the developing machine that the studio had just received from Germany (the irony!).”49 Despite these valiant efforts, the studio suffered a near-collapse during the Second World War both because of the damage German artillery wrought on its building and because little state funding remained for films not directly related to the war effort. In the aftermath of the war, the CPSU, facing a devastated nation of veterans, widows, and orphans, renewed its commitment to animation by calling for optimistic films geared specifically to children. To initiate the reconstruction of

Fig. 1.9 Board of Veterans, Soyuzmultfilm. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

Fig. 1.10 Peter Korobayev, Mural in Large Hall, Soyuzmultfilm. Veterans employed at Soyuzmultfilm, including Mikhail Druyan, Aleksander Vinokoruv, Boris Filchikov, Efim Gamburg, Fyodor Khitruk, Zinaida Zarb, and Svetozar Rusakov. Courtesy of Olga Bogol­ yubov.

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animation, the CPSU moved Soyuzmultfilm to the magnificent site of a former church-cum-antireligious museum.50 The state rarely patronized cultural institutions laid to waste during the war with such commitment, and the effort drew yet another generation of artists to animation simply because it was an open door.51 As director Iosif Boyarsky described it, young people “stormed” the studio in search of employment, a reality evident from the “Board of Veterans” that the studio mounted in its hall and the elaborate mural the studio commissioned from one of their animators in the main screening room depicting studio employees (as they looked in the 1970s) in military uniforms enjoying a few moments of down time in the forest (figs. 1.9–1.10).52 The growing atmosphere of institutional antisemitism, especially in the fine arts, also drove Jewish veterans and survivors of concentration camps to Soyuzmultfilm simply because Moscow’s film studios were still hiring Jews.53 Some artists rejected from the fine arts worked as independent “nonconformists,” but those with connections were often able to cross over to second-rate arts such as animation, as well as translation, graphic design, children’s literature, and variety shows.54 In line with these trends, a disproportionate number of Jewish applicants successfully applied to Soyuzmultfilm’s postwar training programs, which bypassed the rigorous artistic training of degree-granting institutions, but served as a direct pipeline to freelance employment at Soyuzmultfilm. Once established as recognized employees at the studio, a select few would even be recruited to return to the institute as lecturers. As a group, postwar Jewish animators were born to families assimilated to the Russian-speaking center, had seen active duty, and had lost their families at home during the war. Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees combined both a soldier’s sense of national duty and a survivalist sense of in-group loyalty that characterized postwar life. Intent on building a network of support within the studio, Jewish employees nurtured allegiances among themselves. Boyarsky’s post-demobilization interview at Soyuzdetfilm in 1945 paints a revealing portrait of the ethnically aware attitude toward hiring in the Moscow film studios. According to Boyarsky, when he arrived for his interview, Studio Deputy Director Yakov Ivanovich Svetozarov “sat imposingly in a large chair behind a large office desk, on which colorful pencils and notepads were laid out neatly. . . . He was acquainted with my not very long biography and signed an order appointing me to the group of [Jewish] administrator Boris Barnet.”55 Boyarsky, who hailed from a highly connected Party family but who retained “an inimitable small-town Jewish accent” his entire life, understood the deal. He had been granted an interview through a network of friends and colleagues— Boyarsky could count venerable Jewish actors such as Solomon Mikhoels among his friends—and, despite seemingly few professional qualifications, the deputy director assigned Boyarsky to another Jewish director.56 Although the stigma of Jewish identity posed a hurdle for employment and advancement, almost every

Behind the Scenes  H 43

Jewish employee who managed to land a job could point to another Jewish employee as the source of their hire. Consequently, charges of nepotism regularly bloated antisemitic tirades against intellectuals.57 The perception that artists went into animation because they were restricted from the fine arts and had personal contacts in the factories was so widespread that Georgian director Nikolas Sanishvili made it the basis of his film The Dolls Are Laughing (1963). Nineteen-year-old Reziko fails his entrance exams at the conservatory despite the fact that the disapproving examiners were tapping their feet under the table to the beat of his song. Reziko’s father’s friend offers him a job at the toy factory and, there, Reziko discovers his unique ability to animate dolls. Frustrated with his rejection from the conservatory, Reziko turns several of his toys into voodoo dolls, sticks them with plastic cutlery as they laugh, and dreams of becoming “Lord of the Dolls” to regain control over his life. Reziko’s diabolical fantasy does not assume a Jewish perspective but the story does capture how attitudes of artists who landed in state film studios changed as state-sanctioned discrimination exacerbated. Part of the analysis lies in the systems the state put in place to keep Jews and other non-Russian minorities out of certain fields or at least to keep them in highly controlled positions. After the war, the studio conformed more rigidly to state centralization programs aimed at the arts, hiring only those officially registered in the Union of Soviet Artists, while at the same time doling out more contracts to freelancers (vneshtatnye sotrudniki, literally “non-staff” workers).58 Freelance scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova explained that the system was rigged against Jewish employees: “They did not take Jews into the shtat. The vneshtatnye track was the mechanism for hiring Jews. We had no rights.”59 Although hundreds of Jewish writers, puppeteers, doll makers, voice actors, operators, production designers, cameramen, sound technicians, and administrators found work at the studio after the war, the majority were hired through the vneshtatnye track. According to theater and film director Dmitry Astrahan (b. 1957), “Anyone who attained the title of ‘director’ in Soviet times was in the shtat,” but very few Jewish animators, even those who directed their own films, attained the official title of “director.”60 Over time, a two-track hiring system took root. VGIK opened courses for both animators and scriptwriters—or shtatnye and vneshtatnye tracks—that were likewise oriented in different professional directions. Conditions between shtatnye and vneshtatnye assignments differed dramatically: full-time employees received stable salaries, better medical care, merit-based bonuses, sick days, vacations, and pensions, whereas freelancers were paid on a per-project basis of honorariums that were only occasionally tied to royalties (at least those that could be accounted for), and relied on union sick leave benefits and small loans to stretch the payout of freelance contracts. For all the practical annoyances of freelance life, freelancers also enjoyed a

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unique level of artistic freedom and intellectual status. The makeup and character of both the full-time staff and the non-staff workers changed in the late 1940s when the CC excluded many prewar shtatnye positions from the new shtat and likewise included former vneshtatnye positions in the new shtat. Under the new hiring practices, the more replaceable crew members, such as the replicators, inkers, renderers, soundmen, and editors were generally hired into the shtat, while the creative members of the crew, such as the screenwriters, composers, artists, and actors, were usually contracted on a per-project basis as freelancers.61 Shtatnye employees were officially not allowed to moonlight, mainly because the studio depended on “manual” workers for the expensive scheduling of the shooting room, and they settled into the studio for the long haul with little exposure to other artistic enterprises in the city. Freelance employees, however, worked in multiple sites across fields and, despite attempts to professionalize every aspect of the filmmaking process, imported certain attitudes, such as collaborating across fields, to their Soyuzmultfilm projects. Freelancing allowed for gainful if second-class employment as well as more independence to choose one’s projects and follow one’s artistic inclinations. Certain employee positions, such as scriptwriters, could never achieve shtatnye status by virtue of legislation that effectively left freelancing as the only available option. Sviridova pursued scriptwriting as a career for that very reason: “If scriptwriters could not be in the shtat by law then they could not be arrested on charges of social parasitism, which is what happened to Joseph Brodsky.”62 As the studio experienced rapid growth after the war, Jewish-born animators who had been grandfathered into the shtat—such as the sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, Samuil Benderskii (1898–1968), and Dmitrii Babichenko (1901–1991)—contracted as many artists as their budgets could absorb.63 In the absence of having to commit or formalize an employment arrangement with scriptwriters, actors, and composers, senior directors hired many more Jews than would have been otherwise possible. With the swelling of a Jewish presence at the studio, more works of contemporary Jewish writers were adapted into animation. The writers, themselves floundering for commissions, often took an instrumental role in conceiving the treatment of their work in animation, importing a new level of sophistication to Soyuzmultfilm.64 The studio also built an impressive freelance force of dubbing artists by contracting many theatrically-oriented Jewish comedians with experience in pantomime and buffoonery.65 Unemployed and underemployed theater actors began to appear in the film credits in the early 1950s, partially because notable actors were beginning to join the cast at Soyuzmultfilm in the conservative atmosphere that settled over the theater world, and partially because of the use of the éclair method, which filmed footage of live actors that animators used to transcribe into drawn frames. Composers also sought out Soyuzmultfilm contracts for the cover that

Behind the Scenes  H 45

institutional affiliation provided.66 In his memoirs, Iosif Boyarsky recalled that composer Mikhail Meerovich (1920–1993) worked on commissions with some of the most respected directors at Soyuzmultfilm so that he could write his own music “without orders,” including many Jewish-themed compositions.67 During his thirty-year friendship with Boyarsky, Meyerovich often spoke about various Jewish subjects he could adapt for the operatic genre, including the anthropomorphized Golem, and the stories from Joseph Utkin’s The Tale of Red-Haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Comissar Bloch, and Samuel Galkin’s play Bar Kokhba on the uprising of the Jews against Rome.68 The freelance track at Soyuzmultfilm may have engendered complex relationships at the studio that targeted Jews, but the strategic use of contracts allowed some Soviet Jews to devote their lives to independent artistic pursuits and allowed the studio to develop a first-class presence in a “second-rate art.”69

Firing Jews, 1948–1960 The studio’s in-group hiring methods and ethnically aware employment assignments were at times coupled with a firm hand in firing.70 The Stalinist postwar policy embodied strong antisemitic foundations aimed against the “rootless cosmopolitan” (bezrodnyi kosmopolit), which was, in the words of film director Mikhail Romm (1901–1971), “invented to replace that other expression, ‘dirty Jew.’”71 Director Kirill Maliantovich recounted how the studio environment at Soyuzmultfilm grew strained after authorities accused the director of the Moscow Automobile Plant of “surrounding himself with the Jews.”72 With the high number of Jews at Soyuzmultfilm, Maliantovich claimed that everyone at the studio shrank from the brewing storm in the hopes that the campaign would lose its force before anyone was named a “rootless cosmopolitan.” After the 1948 murder of Jewish theater director Solomon Mikhoels, who worked at the nearby Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSET) and whose son-in-law maintained a number of contracts as a freelance composer at the studio at the time, Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees must have felt especially vulnerable. “There were plenty of Jews in the studio and among them were directors, artists of all trades, and even a chief accountant and deputy director,” explained Maliantovich: “To the credit of the team who was then working together at Soyuzmultfilm, there were no signs of antisemitism, and now with the new category of ‘rootless cosmopolitans,’ they did not rush to name colleagues, thinking that the campaign would eventually ebb.”73 By the fall and winter of 1948–1949, Studio Director Nikolai Akimov held secret meetings with Deputy Director N. N. Burov to decide on a sufficient “sacrifice to bring to the altar,” culminating in a mandatory employee meeting in the main screening hall.74 With Soyuzmultfilm’s

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Deputy Director Burov leading the proceedings, Armenian animator Lamis Bredis (1912–1957) approached the stage lined with Party men and announced in mock formality that the biggest cosmopolitan hiding at Soyuzmultfilm was Walt Disney. Bredis denounced Disney as “a heartless craftsman” who created his endless Mickey Mouses and Donald Ducks “to fool the people” with brutal imperialist propaganda, citing the film Bambi (1942) as a celebration of the death of all living things, such as the “man-hating” protagonist and the gun-toting man.75 According to Maliantovich, the tension in the screening room immediately broke and an eruption of applause filled the hall. In another account of the same events, director Evgenii Migunov (1921–2004) saw Lamis Bredis in a completely different light. According to Migunov, Bredis exerted pressure over employees to turn on each other before and during the meeting, threatening Migunov to name cosmopolitans. Although Migunov does not divulge whom Bredis had in mind as the sacrificial lamb, Migunov recalled that composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich and Alfred Koeppler and the once highly regarded film director Sergei Eisenstein were named straightaway, followed by several of Soyuzmultfilm’s own Jewish directors, including the Brumberg sisters, who were two of the most senior directors in the shtat, and Jewish deputy director Efim Aleksandrov. With characteristic wit, Maliantovich recounts how even the poster child of the studio—director Ivanov-Vano, the first artist at the studio to receive the country’s highest title “Honored Artist of the Soviet Union”—defensively took the stage to detail his ethnic Russian genealogy: “Comrades, how can it be that I, Ivan Petrov Ivanov, the son of a Kalutsky peasant, be named a cosmopolitan from this stage?” In his version, Migunov records Ivanov-Vano stating, “I was born, as it were, in the village of Pahry and my grandfather was, as you understand, entirely from the serf class, and my father. . . .”76 Ivanov-Vano’s chauvinistic speech gave Maliantovich pause, for in emphasizing his own Orthodox Russian roots the unspoken nationality question was deafening. Deputy Director Aleksandrov, one of the most senior administrators in the shtat, had much less luck defending himself. “Truth be told,” reported Maliantovich, “few could understand what he [Aleksandrov] was even saying. He was of tall stature, very fat, with an elongated head pointed upward, and with large protruding ears. In addition, he had a big nose and a somewhat guttural voice. . . . We called him by the nickname ‘Uncle Elephant.’”77 It also did not help the Jewish deputy director that animators Boris Dezhkin and Gennadii Filippov used Aleksandrov as a character prototype for their film The Elephant and the Ant (1948) and made his character repeat the “Turkish” phrase salom aleichim in a guttural voice. In Maliantovich’s estimation, that unfavorable caricature at least partially accounted for Aleksandrov’s unfortunate fate at the anticosmopolitan meeting.78 The ways that state-initiated discrimination trickles down from the top is

Behind the Scenes  H 47

an important topic, but what gets lost in the analysis of the implementation of the purges is how the younger animators at the studio, irrespective of national identity, used the anticosmopolitan campaign to censure the Disney aesthetic that had settled over the established directors and their supporters in the shtat.79 Allegations against cosmopolitans took many forms depending on which institution was conducting the downsizing, but the main thread of the accusations at Soyuzmultfilm concerned the pernicious influence that the “German-loving” Walt Disney and his “Teutonic style” exerted over Soviet animation.80 Casting Walt Disney as a capitalist imperialist and linking him to the work of various employees cut to the heart of one of the studio’s ongoing debates on what direction animation should take.81 With the various departments internally divided over the application of Disney techniques, Bredis’s denouncement reflected more on the party conservatives in the shtat than the younger Jewish artists who were experimenting with new styles in a freelance capacity. In his recollection of the events, Migunov reports that the Party-savvy Bredis also elided the anticosmopolitan and anti-Disney campaigns. Migunov responded to Bredis’s request for a name with the retort, “If this is to oust cosmopolitans than I am for it, but what does the studio have to do with it? Do we harbor cosmopolitans?,” and Bredis responded, “Well, deal a blow to the Disneyesque through the other!” In his telling, Migunov took the bait and publicly presented proof that Bredis himself had copied characters from a 1945 issue of Mickey Mouse magazine and that the studio would do well to shape their own indigenous style. Even Burov’s indictment of the Jewish deputy director took recourse against Disney: “Whose portrait hangs in Aleksandrov’s office? Do you think our leader, dear Comrade Stalin? No! He has a portrait of Disney hanging! Even with the signature!”82 This judicious mining of the usable public discourse on cosmopolitanism even implicated members of the studio establishment, such as the once untouchable Ivanov-Vano of falling prey to the Disney spell.83 The source of this accusation revolved around an untimely article Ivanov-Vano published in the film journal Iskusstvo kino in 1947 in which he maintained that no real ideological difference divided American and Soviet animation.84 The critic of Literaturnaia gazeta passionately took Ivanov-Vano to task two years later with the indignant accusation that such a lumping slandered all Soviet artists: “It cannot be that some American cinema artisan such as the arch-reactionary Disney can simply employ the use of gray scale in order to reach the level of Soviet films!”85 In struggling against the Disneevschinoy practices of some of the most established members of the studio, younger animators were also defending their artistic experiments as a pursuit for authentic Soviet art and hammering out arguments for the reallocation of studio resources. In his account of his takedown of Bredis, Migunov cites himself publicly saying, “What do I mean to demonstrate? Not what you might expect. I only want to say that I am far from

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thinking that a prominent Soviet film director such as Lamis Bredis, flawless in his ideological perspectives, a Party member, ‘crawled on his knees before the bourgeois West.’ . . . And I’m not saying that the best exemplary thoughts of our ideologically, politically literate, patriotic director shares similarity to the reactionary, fascist, spiteful schemes of Disney. Nothing of the sort!”86 Echoing Ivanov-Vano’s article on Disney two years earlier, Migunov concluded, “I just want to say that the technicalities of the genre necessitate two people with diametrically opposed value systems would coincidently share similar aesthetics that have nothing to do with each other but only with the art form. Celluloid technology produces forms that are inherently similar to the work of others.”87 Whether Migunov meant to make a studio-wide aesthetic appeal or to obliquely support vulnerable Jewish directors, it was a powerful speech on the need for the studio to take its work into new directions. Neither Maliantovich nor Migunov make mention of the fate of the vneshtatnye employees, many of whom were temporarily relieved of their services or simply unaccounted for in a variety of employment-laundering schemes during the next few years, but the indictment of full-time employees ultimately fell on Aleksandrov, a single Jewish employee in an administrative position in the shtat. Aleksandrov may have been a high-ranking functionary but was not particularly instrumental in the experiments of vneshtatnye artists who more often creatively experimented with alternatives to the prevalent Disney style. At the same time, as the campaign receded and Party officials paid less attention to the internal workings of the studio, creative personnel exercised their own power to purge undesirable hacks. It may be no coincidence that the following year, Lamis Bredis’s conservative film Emergency Service (1949) was panned by Moscow’s film critics who accused it of “vulgarizing” political themes. After the meeting, Bredis could not put another film crew together at Soyuzmultfilm and never directed another film.88 In time, Bredis was fired from Soyuzmultfilm and ended up in the documentary film sector where “coworkers” beat him to death.89 It is also possible that Maliantovich’s and Migunov’s relatively rosy assessments of those years glossed over an invisible purge, such as the one conducted at VGIK, where Jewish full-time faculty members were “fired” from the shtat and rehired in vneshtatnye capacities. Personnel files remain locked for seventyfive years after the files have been sealed at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) and concrete statistics are still unavailable, but a number of memoirs describe the general scene. Iosif Boyarsky records the impression that “the studios of Moscow conducted downsizing based mainly on ethnicity” and that by 1950, “Soyuzmultfilm expunged more than fifty artists.”90 Animation historian Georgii Borodin denies Boyarsky’s claim, which he calls “a complete fabrication since no such purge of Jewish employees happened at Soyuzmultfilm.”91 Yet, the two-class system between those hired in the shtat and

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independent contractors makes accurate employee record keeping particularly difficult to quantify. “If only Russians are hired into the shtat,” explained scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova, “then when someone comes and asks if any Jews work in the studio, the studio head could honestly answer ‘absolutely not—we are a completely Russian organization.’”92 Jewish filmmaker Maya Turovsky recalled a joke from the period about Jews at Soyuzmultfilm: “An officer comes to the gatekeeper and asks ‘Do you have any Jews at the studio?’ The guard answers, ‘Just me and Shlarbaum [the gate].’”93 Whether this joke was aimed at the de-Judaizing at Soyuzmultfilm or the in-house Jewish “gate keeping” at the studio or both, it is clear that the members of the shtatnye and the vneshtatnye employees experienced the anticosmopolitan campaigns very differently. To some extent, the shtatnye employees had a lot more to lose than freelancers, because the studio was their only source of livelihood and they were far more vulnerable to arrest than vneshtatnye employees.

The Golden Age of Soviet Animation, 1960–1980 Soviet animation history does not follow the conventional periodization demarcated by the “thaw” of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program (1954–1964) and the “stagnation” wrought by Brezhnev’s conservatism (1964–1987). In the immediate aftermath of the anticosmopolitan campaigns, Soyuzmultfilm generally tried to stay under the state’s radar with the sort of fairy-tale films that Stalin was said to like. The purges hit other cultural institutions with significantly more force and, several years later, Soyuzmultfilm tapped into the pool of unemployed— and largely Jewish—artists from the Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSET), the Moscow State Jewish Theater School (MGETU), Mosfilm, Detfilm, and many smaller theaters and hired them as vneshtatnye employees. Because of the twotiered employment system at the studio, Soyuzmutlfilm became a relative refuge for purge victims who lost their full-time positions during the increasingly paranoid Stalin years, and many Jewish artists patched together enough projects to sustain their careers in animated film.94 By the end of Stalin’s reign, Soyuzmultfilm focused on absorbing as many intellectuals returning from the prison camps as they could rather than on pushing the envelope with new styles.95 In 1957, when Moscow hosted a cultural festival at which Soyuzmultfilm employees first met animators from other countries, structural changes in studio culture took root. Azarkh recalls that the “graphic manner in which the Poles, Czechs, and Romanians worked was a revelation for us.”96 Soviet animators, who painted every frame anew, became apprised of the so-called limited-animation, which drastically reduced the number of drawings per second and allowed animators to take on more complex story lines on a more manageable production

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scale. Smaller animation shops opened in other republics, such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and, although Soyuzmultfilm continued to produce more than half of the nation’s animated films until its privatization in the 1990s, directors found themselves facing domestic competition for the first time. Soyuzmultfilm entered films to the newly established Annecy International Animation Film Festival and, in 1959, formed a Soviet chapter of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA).97 Animators approved by the authorities began to travel outside Soviet borders in the early 1960s and came into contact with animators in other socialist countries such as Poland, Lithuania, and especially the “Zagreb School” of Yugoslavia, which was swiftly becoming a trendsetter in the use of more modern styles. It was not until Brezhnev’s so-called stagnation that significant change began to seep into the films themselves.98 Although it took over a decade to percolate, the emphasis on alternatives to the Disney style during some of the darkest years of Stalinist oppression, coupled with the talent pool the studio absorbed during the cultural purges, poised Soyuzmultfilm to part from the singular focus on children’s pedagogical entertainment and enter its golden age. Of all the films that Soyuzmultfilm released over its history, half of them—roughly six hundred— were released in the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and proportionately more of these films were released abroad than in any other period.99 Animator Aleksander Tatarsky (b. 1950) recalled that the Brezhnev years hardly stifled artistic ambitions, but rather “everyone’s attention was attracted to working with the artistic youth. I saved a folder with newspaper clippings and documents from those years, including a directive from Goskino of the Ukrainian SSR that specifically mentioned our names as possible debut directors. Many leading directors and artists believed in us, and appealed to management with suggestions of co-productions, where the master would walk the debuting artist through all the artistic and technical obstacles of filmmaking.”100 On the contrary, individual directors, such as Fyodor Khitruk and the Brumberg sisters, tried to stack their crews with younger employees because of the freshness that their thaw-era educations brought to the work. In the 1960s, the Rossiya Theater in Moscow opened “a special hall” exclusively for animated films with a daily schedule of children’s programs during the day and more mature animated content in the evenings, followed by the opening of a second Moscow theater exclusively devoted to animation in 1968, which studio director Mikhail Valkov proudly claimed was “Moscow’s most frequented cinema.”101 If Jews began to experiment with animation in the 1920s because of their integrationist visions, and maintained their numbers in the field in the 1930s and 1940s when avant-garde inspirations were quashed in other sectors, in the 1960s and 1970s the field looked very different to prospective employees. Animation had become a legitimate career choice and Soyuzmultfilm had earned a

Behind the Scenes  H 51

venerable reputation as the largest and most productive studio in Europe. Many Jewish artists, who had entered art institutions during the more liberal thaw years but found professional opportunities again limited in the stagnation years, turned to Soyuzmultfilm as a firmly established institution. For the most part, the 1960s wave of Jewish-born employees at Soyuzmultfilm had been born during the Second World War and raised in an implicitly intellectual milieu. In some sense, this generation was more similar to the first socialist revolutionaries than the interceding generations because they attained their artistic training during the cultural thaw just as the founding animators came of age in the radical movements of the 1920s. Even when the climate shifted to more conservative trends, these animators consistently brought their thaw-era training into their films in order to raise the cultural status of the field. Animation professionals were eligible for the national system of rewards and titles, the socialist equivalent of market competition. Prizes and titles allowed Jewish artists who had migrated to animation to rise in their field alongside their peers in the fine arts.102 The Stalin Prize (replaced by the Lenin Prize in 1956) and the title “People’s Artists of the USSR” came with social capital and monetary awards: an increase in salary, discount for utility bills, a company car, additional living space, and travel permits and upgrades (such as a sleeper car and hotel). Winning a prize also meant that recipients could commit to longer-term projects without pressure from their immediate superiors and could cross into the academy by joining the faculty of VGIK, where a high value was placed on the curricula and many of the institute’s top faculty members published their lectures in prestigious journals.103 Very few animators with Jewish status achieved these accolades and perks, but the general eligibility of animators allowed a patina of prestige to settle over the enterprise as a whole. Some of the extraordinary growth that Soyuzmultfilm experienced beginning in the 1960s can be attributed to the way the studio reorganized itself during the tenure of studio head Mikhail Valkov. To meet the growing demand for films, the balance of power shifted in tangible ways to the studio’s directors. Whereas few Jewish employees that directed individual films attained the official title of “director” until after the 1960s, titled directors developed unprecedented clout.104 Valkov may have retained the right to do all the hiring and firing of shtatnye employees (which correlated with Party status), but film directors exercised considerable control over the formation of their own film crews. The practice to extend invitations to freelance writers, artists, and composers prompted lateral power relationships in which the initial round of hiring procedures held no guarantee of inclusion on film crews. In a revealing anecdote, Azarkh relates how the intermediate-stage animator Misha Pershin “thought that his dream to become a [full-fledged] animator would finally come true” when he attained Party membership, but when he demanded a scene from director Lev Atamanov,

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the latter deflected by saying that all the scenes were already distributed. Pershin responded with outrage, yelling “’How is that? I am a member of the Party and you have to give me the stage!,’” and Atamanov likewise “turned purple” and unapologetically ordered Pershin out of the studio.105 Despite the official division of labor into specialized departments, individual directors often attracted loyal draftsmen, cameramen, soundmen, and scriptwriters who sought out these embedded, semi-independent groups operating within the larger studio. To be sure, practical considerations nurtured at least some of the loyalty that directors engendered in light of the studio paying employees only after the completion of a film. Directors who proved themselves effective in bringing a film to production—and thus getting paid—were able to cultivate hiring clout at the studio and on the street.106 For directors, the bigger draw to fulfilling annual quotas was in the concomitant privilege of choosing scripts without consideration for box office projections. The most productive directors, then, could claim their own brand of cinema. Those who worked for Leonid Amalrik were called “Amalrokom,” those who worked for Boris Dezhkin were called the Dezhkinskoy School, and those who worked for Fyodor Khitruk were called the “disciples of Fyodor Savelyevich.”107 “And we,” recalled Khitruk, “as their immediate disciples, consciously or spontaneously followed after them, forging our own way in our chosen profession.”108 Project teams were so loyal to their directors that the homogeneity in the cel technique shifted to the authorial style of a particular director, leading director Edouard Nazarov to profess that Khitruk was so influential that it seemed that “he was the founder of the Estonian animation school, as well as the Kazakh, and the Georgian schools.”109 Because the development of a film often spanned many months and sometimes years, film directors nurtured the notion of “groups,” leading to both alliances and feuds. “Somehow, we all lived under the same house,” recalled Yuri Norstein, but qualifying the sentiment with the observation that “in a family, there are always feuds.”110 At times, directors formed factions within the studio such as the much-gossiped about professional opposition between Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Aleksander Ivanov (1899–1959), between Lamis Bredis and Eugene Migunov, between Lamis Bredis and Boris Dezhkin, and between Fyodor Khitruk and Boris Dezhkin. With director rivalry, the rest of the crew played, as Khitruk put it, “their Montagues and Capulets.”111 Even the physical layout of the studio’s five-story façade (built for the museum that had formerly occupied the building) encouraged socialization in ways that supported director groups. When the studio moved to 23-a Kalyaevskaya Street in 1945, the ground floor had no partitions, and sixty employees stood at a long row of tables in the high-vaulted room.112 On other floors, open-floor layouts encouraged cross-departmental communication. The rooms were small and narrow, dubbed “canisters” by the employees, and designers sat in the hallways

Behind the Scenes  H 53

so they could keep a pulse on the various departments.113 Storyboard artists usually worked with a certain director’s group, but their desks were located in the hallway where their work could inspire the entire film crew and respond to suggestions from passersby. Only directors received their own private offices, but meetings in the directors’ offices usually overflowed to the hallways where designers were stationed. As director groups grew and developed, they became a secondary “establishment” that bore a structural relationship to the administration. Film critic Sergei Kapok noted that directors managed all the supposedly independent departments working on the film with “constant communication between screenwriters and directors and editors; directors and operators, and artists and animators, and so on.”114 Coordinating various crew members, directors appropriated some of the strategies that the administration used to maintain power and control its affairs. If administrators could appeal to Party functionaries to enforce certain principles and discipline outliers, directors could appeal to film critics post-production to legitimize their work. “Papa Khitruk, as we used to call him,” critic Mikhail Gurevich explained, “took us film critics by the hand and opened up the entire studio to us. He turned us into vested partners.”115 In an interview that addressed how partnerships both developed and devolved in the studio, Norstein explained that secondary flow patterns were necessary to productions “staged on the conveyor” (fig. 1.11).116 The degree to which belonging to a director’s group served as a vehicle for artistic careers lends explanatory power to the “cult” that developed in that institution (fig. 1.12).

Fig. 1.11 (left) Operator Mikhail Druyan at Soyuzmultfilm, 1980s. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov. Fig. 1.12 (right) Film crew of There Once Was Kozyavin (1966). In the checkered shirt, director Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Courtesy of Olga Bogolyubov.

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The effort to distinguish animation from popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s rested on the auteurist view of cinema, the then-fashionable notion that directors were the sole authors of their films. In her memoir, designer Lana Azarkh includes an explanation of how animators were often treated as invisible employees of the studio: “The entire studio worked happily on The Snow Queen, which became a landmark of Soyuzmultfilm, but over time no one [but the director Lev Atamanov] was acknowledged.”117 Designer Svetozar Rusakov of the Just You Wait! series also complained that animation was “collective work,” but in the end “all the laurels are accrued by one person—the director.”118 The auteurist approach made the relationship between the director and the designer (khudzhnik-postanovshchik), who was responsible for the appearance of the characters and the background, the most potentially combustible one. To protect the authority of the director in the making of the film, prominent directors such as Yuri Norstein and Fyodor Khitruk opposed the institutionalization of a separate category of “designer.” If the entangled relationship between directors and designers often strained civility, directors and operators (or cameramen) typically maintained close allegiances because operators officially exercised no creative role while in reality quietly developing many creative solutions. In a rare admission, director Evgenii Migunov recalled how “mechanic” Semen Etlis, whom he described as “a short stocky young Jew with a heavy chin, light melancholy eyes, and slow movements,” became his “gracious genius” in the technical shooting of his films.119 Although power struggles were often laced with bitter personal disappointments, it is significant that these conflicts primarily played out among creative personnel, with the views of Valkov subordinated to the hiring and firing of shtatnye employees that, at least as far as the directors were concerned, held replaceable positions. Throughout his long tenure in the 1960s and 1970s, Valkov tried to retain the old power structures by requiring administrative preapproval for each member of the film crew, leading animator Yuri Batanin (b. 1952) to suggest that Valkov’s attempt to randomize employees from project to project “was done deliberately to uphold the brand of Soviet factories.”120 When a group of young Valkov hires from the production departments joined forces with Valkov in the mid-1970s to disrupt the formation of groups, Valkov slowly forced the senior directors, such as the venerable directors Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, Boris Dezhkin, Dmitrii Babichenko, and Evgenii Migunov, out of the studio. Director Elena Gavrilenko recalled the power struggle between Valkov and the senior directors in terms of “the persecution of the group”: “The belief was implanted that working in groups corrupted employees.”121 “Older directors were not given scripts,” recalled Azarkh, “and if they found them on their own, there was no place in the studio for them to shoot them. . . . The cruel and crude manner in which the directors were treated made it clear to them that it was necessary to

Behind the Scenes  H 55

retire. . . . All were divided into ‘clean and unclean.’ . . . The form in which they were asked to ‘go out’ was disgusting.”122 Valkov’s strategies failed to curb the formation of director groups in the long run. Despite Valkov’s preference for top-down organizational structures and the interchangeability of labor, employees continued to jockey for project teams rather than taking directions from the administrative chain of command. In 1978, a few years after his forced retirement of senior directors, Valkov retired and Soyuzmultfilm took a decidedly auteurist turn with directors at the helm of creative decisions. With some distance, it is fair to say that the state studio Soyuzmultfilm was, for the most part, the product of individual workers with independent artistic visions and managerial styles, trying to work together. The studio record of Artistic Council meetings reflects a wide range of employee assumptions about the studio’s mission and an even wider range of attitudes toward filmmaking. The minutes also reveal that the partnerships that developed between directors and their crew members usually superseded those between administrators and the creative class.123 As would no doubt be true in all largescale collaborative work environments, Soyuzmultfilm employees used the systems put in place by the administration in ways that would suit their own needs. The horizontal structures that arose from the cooperative nature of departmentalized labor, along with the push-and-pull of administrative directives and defiant compliance, created the conditions that allowed Jewish animators to rise among Soviet culture-makers.

2 Black and White Race in Soviet Animation

T

he story of Jews in Soyuzmultfilm begins, perhaps counterintuitively, with the representation of black Americans in the German-Soviet film studio of Mezhrabpom (International Worker’s Aid Fund).1 In line with the nationwide “industrial plan” issued for 1932, which called for economic self-sufficiency and international proletarian content, the Moscow branch of Mezhrabpom announced its plans to make an epic film on American race relations that would expose “the exploitation of the Negro in America from the days of slavery to the present.”2 Mezhrabpom named the projected film after Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 poem Black and White in the hope that the film would be an unparalleled cinematic achievement in world cinema and a rallying cry for American workers and Western intellectuals to the communist cause.3 A critical account of the shortlived production of the unrealized film points to the fundamental differences between American and Soviet cinematic approaches to race while at the same time illuminating how the representation of black Americans expressed Soviet multinationalism (mnogonatsional’nost’) and the interrelated “Jewish question.” From its first public relations statement concerning Black and White, Mezhrabpom emphasized its commitment to representing race with historical veracity, a discourse that we will later see was highly relevant to the representation of Jews in the Soviet Union. Scriptwriter Grigorii Grebner (1892–1954) made “repeated claims of accuracy,” exemplified by his terse bibliographic note for the film scenario as “The Material: Facts” and buoyed by his research into contemporary black media.4 There was more at stake in Grebner’s search for reliable sources than the studio’s internal objectives and, according to historian Steven Sunwoo Lee, Grebner’s desire for “authenticity” reflected the black activist interest in the film.5 Disenfranchised workers around the world were paying close attention to how Mezhrabpom would handle the fraught subject of American race relations, and an international assortment of critics publicly weighed in on the need for authenticity from the start. Admittedly, the project was ambitious if only because H 56 H

black and white   H 57

the USSR had few Russian-speaking black actors to cast, a reality that Mezhrabpom addressed with an initial proposal to use Russian actors in blackface and wigs before retracting and calling for a cast of “authentic black Americans.”6 Taking the moral high ground, the company announced that it would employ an integrated cast that mirrored its subject of collective labor, unlike the “all-negro” casts of Hollywood films exemplified by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film Hallelujah! (1929).7 With support from New York Harlem activist groups sympathetic to the social structures that communism promised minority workers, the young activist Louise Thompson (later Patterson) used her legendary charm to organize an amateur troupe of twenty-two black Americans to board the ship Europa to make the film.8 Mezhrabpom’s commitment to represent the cruel realities of black life under Jim Crow laws drew “a band of eager, adventurous young students, teachers, writers and would-be actors” to cross the Atlantic, including the poet and future civil rights leader Langston Hughes, who would come to leave the most detailed record of the short-lived Mezhrabpom experience.9 As Hughes records the story in his memoir on the “Moscow movie,” the American cast arrived in Moscow full of hope but as soon as they began to work on the film, misunderstandings developed in all directions. The various retellings of the conflicts between the Russian filmmakers and the American cast members shed light on the Soviet-specific treatment of race as well as the vastly different approaches to the cinematic representation of racial “authenticity.” Although members of the American troupe publicly reported that they were received as visiting dignitaries in Moscow, some members soon came to feel that great disparity lay between Soviet social policy and Mezhrabpom’s production arm. According to Hughes, when he first read the script in his hotel room overlooking the Kremlin, he was so astonished that tears ran down his face. I was crying because the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts. With his heart in the right place, the writer’s concern for racial freedom and decency had tripped so completely on the stumps of ignorance that his work had fallen as flat as did Don Quixote’s valor when good intentions led that slightly demented knight to do battle with he-knew-not-what.10 As Hughes tells the story, he told the dismayed Mezhrabpom executives that the script was “just simply not true to American life” and that nothing could be salvaged of the original script if the studio still hoped to make the film.11 According to Hughes, the problem lay in the script’s inability to capture an “authentic” portrait of racialized life and the only possible course for the script was

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“to start over and get a new one, based on reality, not imagination.”12 From Hughes’s version of the events in the summer of 1932, the Soviet officials were astounded primarily because they had already attained the necessary levels of clearance for the script from the Comintern, a process so precarious that it was deemed a ludicrous opportunity to waste.13 According to Hughes, this rejection from an American activist—on the basis of socialist realist principles no less— threw a wrench into Mezhrabpom’s high-minded plans. After weeks of revisions, innumerable delays, and meetings between Russian directors Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Boris Barnet and the American cast, Mezhrabpom canceled the film on August 22 of that year.14 The failure of the film Mezhrabpom had trumpeted only a few months earlier created a public relations fiasco for Moscow. How was the studio supposed to explain its failure to expose the hypocrisies of capitalist race relations when American cast members were feeding the foreign press with stories of Soviet ignorance on the black class struggle? In an effort to curb cast-generated media gossip and deflect accusations of Soviet racism, the studio cited the poor script, the “shortcomings of certain members of the cast,” and “inadequate technical capabilities to complete the film.”15 Some cast members, however, suspected American political pressure played the more decisive hand in the film’s cancelation with the bargaining chip of the official American recognition of the Soviet Union on the table. In the aftermath of the cancelation, several frustrated cast members “denounced Meschrabpom, Communism, and ‘the Soviet betrayal of the Negro race’ in no uncertain terms,” and four cast members released their own press statement calling the termination of the project “a compromise with the racial prejudice of American Capitalism and World Imperialism.”16 A devastated Thompson maintained a broader view toward the media coverage of black actors in Moscow and put on a brave face, referring hopefully to Mezhrabpom’s announcement as “a postponement.”17 Yet, decades after the events of the summer of 1932, a disaffected Hughes bitterly concluded that “the saga of the twenty-two American Negroes who spent their own money to go several thousand miles to make a picture with no contracts, ended in an international scandal and front-page headlines around the world.”18 A deep note of regret over the aborted project resounds in Hughes’s conclusion to his essay: “I hoped that at some future date a picture dramatizing race relations sympathetically—in a way which, up to that time, Hollywood had not chosen to do—might be brought to completion.” Writing as late as 1956, Hughes repeated the lamentations of that fateful year: “So far as I know, however, no such picture as Black and White has yet been made in the USSR—or anywhere else in the world. The problems of organized labor and race in the Deep South are still to be brought to the screen.”19 Hughes was wrong. He was either unaware of the fate of Black and White or he was unwilling to acknowledge the version that Mezhrabpom’s underfunded

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animation department produced the same year that Mezhrabpom informed the twenty-two Americans that their work in Moscow was finished. In October 1932, only two months after the studio announced the cancellation of Black and White, Mezhrabpom released a five-minute animated short under the same title, with same themes, and based on the same poem as the unrealized live-action film.20

Small Ambitions and Epic Shorts There are several possible explanations as to why Hughes and other members of the cast either overlooked or consciously ignored the animated film. To begin with, to admit Mezhrabpom’s success in realizing its pledged race film would mean publicly accepting the studio’s explanation for the cancelation of the liveaction film (such as the “shortcomings of certain members of the cast”). Further to the point, even if Hughes and the other cast members who castigated Mezhrabpom for its failure to support black workers knew about the studio’s release of the animated Black and White, they would have undoubtedly found an animated short a poor and even offensive substitute for the live-action feature film. Unlike the big-budget film for which the cast crossed the Atlantic, Mezhrabpom harbored modest hopes for the animated film during the production stage. It is even possible that Mezhrabpom simultaneously assigned the project to both departments, in anticipation of using short animated segments in the projected live-action feature film, as director Abram Room had done with Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s animations in Plan for Great Works (1930). Or, Mezhrabpom may have ordered the short as an “opening act,” as the studio had done a decade earlier with the simultaneous production of the live-action Aelita (1924) and the animated Interplanetary Revolution. The studio did not allocate substantial human resources to the project either. Unlike the legendary trio of directors that headlined the projected live-action Black and White, the new animation director Ivan Ivanov-Vano, a young and classically trained artist with only a few animated films under his belt, faced slim pickings for his film crew. IvanovVano rounded up a team of novices who had little or no experience in the animated medium because the more experienced studio employees habitually stacked their schedules in an effort to avoid Mezhrabpom’s perpetual purges.21 Ivanov-Vano enlisted whomever he could on the weight of his own connections and for most of the crew members, such as scriptwriters A. Kovalenko and Iosif Sklyut (1910–1985), the film occasioned their very first animation credit. It was also a first for Polish Jewish composer Grigorii Gamburg (1900–1967), who wrote an energetic, emotionally charged score for Ivanov-Vano. Konstantin Eggert (1883–1955), a live-action scriptwriter and a Mezhrabpom financial

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stakeholder, collected the only animation credit of his career for his voice-over role for the narrator. The film was also the first animation work for soundman Nikolai Pisarev (1900–1967) and the artists Artur Bergenrin, E. Felser, Konstantin Malyshev, and Erich-William Steiger.22 Mid-production, Ivanov-Vano promoted the young designer Leonid Amalrik (1905–1997), the only member of the team with any real animation experience, to codirect the short.23 This hasty promotion was presumably motivated by the studio’s need to speed up production after the embarrassing cancelation of the live-action film. In short, Ivanov-Vano’s motley crew would hardly have measured up to the vision that black American intellectuals harbored for something “European,” respectable, and, above all, befitting the gravitas of the subject of Black and White.24 The Great Depression and the advent of sound had wiped out the few black American production companies in operation in the 1920s in the United States, and, with the exception of director Oscar Micheaux, who continued to make films with black stars in the 1930s, black intellectuals put high hopes in the Soviet film industry. It is easy to imagine how Hughes and his colleagues hoped that a Mezhrabpom film on legalized discrimination and mass unrest could upend some of the crudeness that Hollywood films wrought on black identity at the time (e.g., RKO’s 1932 Secret Service).25 After all, American animation, with its roots in comics, vaudeville, and minstrelsy, was at the other end of cinematic respectability with its constant employment of a “Southern idiom” for its soundtrack.26 Not yet accountable to the Motion Picture Production Code that would come into effect two years down the line, American animation studies often featured offensive vaudeville stereotypes of black Americans as entertaining “coons” in raunchy barnyard gags as popularized in the series The Katzenjammer Kids (1916–1918) and Felix (1919–1929), and, most famously, Disney’s first sound cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928). The New York sponsorship of a Soviet production on racism in the American South no doubt simultaneously aimed criticism at the pernicious caricatures Hollywood disseminated on the subject. At the same time, however, the black intelligentsia did not want anything akin to a documentary from the legendary Soviet studio. It is no secret that members of the American cast were drawn to the film by the reputation of the Russian directors and Mezhrabpom’s experience with cinematic monumentalism. D. W. Griffith’s representation of American blacks as depraved and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic patriots in his three-hour saga The Birth of a Nation (1915) demonstrated, to both white and black filmmakers, the power of cinema to influence public opinion. In his notes during the making of Black and White, Grebner occasionally referred to his script as “the Anti-KluKluxKlan scenario,” a phrase that signals that Grebner, and no doubt others, thought of the film as the long awaited response to The Birth of a Nation.27 Human rights advocates, black businessmen, and actors desperately wanted to produce a rival film on the

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post-slavery black experience with comparable epic scope but the few blackowned film companies could rarely command the requisite funding and distribution pipelines for such efforts. Years later, Hughes would still lament the lost cinematic opportunity that the live-action Black and White script imagined: “It would have looked wonderful on screen, so well do the Russians handle crowds in film.”28 With his reference to the cinematic trope of “crowds,” Hughes invoked the spirit of landmark Russian films, and it comes as no surprise that he would not have regarded an animated short as a worthy consolation prize for Mezhrabpom’s failure to produce an epic response to the longstanding violence American cinema had wrought on black identity. The notion that a cartoon could do for American civil liberties what Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) did for the Russian Revolution would have struck Hughes as self-evidently absurd. However disappointed black American intellectuals may have felt over the failure of the live-action film and whatever Mezhrabpom’s original intentions were for Ivanov-Vano’s animation, the studio released the animated short that IvanovVano’s amateur crew produced as an independent film in October of 1932 in prominent theaters such as Moscow’s Shanuar Theater.29 A month later, Mezhrabpom sent the short to Soyuzkino for international distribution and then selected it for festival exhibition the following year. The animated Black and White received high accolades in Russia and abroad, and two of the most formidable Soviet animation critics, Anatolii Volkov and Sergei Asenin, placed the short alongside a handful of other animated classics, such as Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s Post (1929) and Nikolai Khodataev’s The Little Organ (1933).30 Another critic from the film journal Sovetskoe iskusstvo hailed Black and White a serious film “sure to set an agenda” and celebrated it for “not falling behind the best foreign standards.”31 It is difficult to know to what degree the positive reviews were drummed up from above, but whatever the circumstances of the film’s release, Ivanov-Vano’s and Amalrik’s animated short nonetheless enjoyed an independent release in Moscow and exhibition in international film circuits. The singular treatment of the film and its critical reception proved pivotal to Mezhrabpom’s animation department in the long view. The saga of Black and White marks a peculiar moment in Soviet film history when an underfunded production department created one of the most significant milestones within Mezhrabpom’s progressive agenda and proved that its little-known animators could achieve what the great Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Barnet, with their expansive resources, could not.32

Animating Black and White in Red The failure of the live-action Black and White dovetailed with an auspicious moment in Soviet animation when the introduction of sound energized the field

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but Disney cel-technique had not yet taken hold.33 With a brief but powerful wind to his back, Ivanov-Vano consciously avoided American trends of representing race just as he blatantly rejected the perceived need for historical “authenticity.” Instead, Ivanov-Vano, whom Eisenstein’s American student Jay Leyda praised as “the quickest to grasp the needs of the cartoon medium,” assumed a highly interpretive approach to the realities of economic racism and succeeded in creating a wholly original short that one critic described as “genuine innovation, novelty, and boldness shaped by plastic solutions.”34 In being handed the baton to Black and White, whether in conjunction with the live-action film or in the immediate aftermath of its dissolution, IvanovVano and his crew doggedly tackled the very problems Mezhrabpom’s most respected directors found insurmountable. Whereas script rewrites proved untenable with a salaried foreign cast impatient for progress and the international press waiting to report any developments, the new writers wrote a script without public input from Louise Thompson or Langston Hughes and liberal American publications such as the Daily Worker and the New York Amsterdam News. The new scriptwriters bypassed a more realistic view of the American South for a more exacting Soviet view of capitalist racism. In order to reestablish Soviet authority over material that had slipped away from both the meticulous Grebner and the conscientious Hughes, the new scriptwriters went back to the 1925 poem “Black and White” that Vladimir Mayakovsky penned after his visit to the sugar plantations in Havana, Cuba. With a more targeted focus, the animation scriptwriters landed on some of the visual images within the poem (“A Sunland under the palms”) and quoted lines verbatim. Ivanov-Vano’s recourse to Mayakovsky’s poetry was a bold move because the film industry tended to reject the artistic principles of Russian futurism at the time.35 With an iconic Soviet poem for their proof-text, Ivanov-Vano and his crew reclaimed the Soviet understanding and early revolutionary graphic style of working-class struggles—whatever their ignorance of the actual black experience—as the overriding prerequisite to making a race film. Whereas Hughes considered Grebner’s scene of the unionization of black and white workers or the romantic thread “not even plausible fantasy” in the context of the film’s setting in Birmingham, Alabama, the new script condensed the story down to a single black worker in a nondescript agricultural town.36 The short opens in a colonized village lorded over by a hypocritical black priest who is paid off in pineapples and a lazy white slave master who lords over his workers with a whip. A pair of workers, one black and one white, reap the harvest in tandem, and when they pause for rest, the boss wields his whip and the priest his cross over their fatigued bodies. At the same time, the Sugar King (based on deceased tycoon Henry Clay)—decked out in colonialist pantaloons and introduced as “the whitest of white clouds”—drives to the work site in his

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shiny new Ford. Unlike the worn out Uncle Tom image of black workers in American films, the black worker boldly asks in English (with a southern black dialect), “Beg yo’ pardon, Mr. Clay,” followed by a Russian-language quote from Mayakovsky’s poem, “Why yo’ white white sugar produced by a black Negro?” (fig. 2.1). The question throws the Sugar King into a rage and, bearing a set of rotten teeth, throws a punch at the worker’s jaw as the screen goes black. After rejecting the stereotypical role of the compliant “good negro,” the worker is systematically corrected for his brazenness by a penal code put in place by capitalist profiteers. The film runs a predictable course, concluding with another direct quotation from Mayakovsky’s poem: “Poor Negro, how should he have known that such questions must be addressed to the Comintern in Moscow?” This rhetorical question is followed by the appearance of Lenin’s name in the bold lettering of early Rosta posters as the uncompromising answer to both questions that bookend the film. The simplification of the plot and characters certainly made the film’s epic scope easier to manage, but the real challenge was the representation of the black worker. The representation of race posed a serious problem for the original scriptwriter Grigorii Grebner, who admitted that “one of the problems” of the

Fig. 2.1 “Question.” Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. Film still.

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live-action film “was the absence of [local] American blacks on whom to base a prototype.”37 Grebner’s search for an authentic image met with dissenting opinions from both the cast members and the studio administrators. Homer Smith, one of the members of the American cast who remained in the Soviet Union after the cast disbanded and made a life for himself in Moscow, reported that he overheard the Mezhrabpom officials murmuring, “We needed genuine Negroes and they sent us a bunch of metisi [half-breeds].”38 Since most black immigrants to Soviet cities hailed from African countries, the Soviet public came to expect darker skin than the fair tones of most of the American cast members. Notably, press photographs of the cast published in the summer of 1932 were darkened for greater effect.39 Furthermore, the twenty-two members of the cast, whose white-collar East Coast lifestyles made it possible for them to afford the luxury of the trip to Moscow, hardly fit the heroic image of the broad-shouldered proletariat that Soviet film directors habitually valorized in the early 1930s. Although Hughes writes that he thought that the only course of action for the script was “to start over and get a new one, based on reality, not imagination,” the animation team prioritized the “imagination,” experimenting with the cinematic possibilities of Russian futurism.40 In seeking to design a character that could project both a victim of capitalism and a hero of socialist labor, the designer Leonid Amalrik adeptly skipped back and forth between realism and stylization. Amalrik’s apprenticeship to Constructivist artist Aleksander Rodchenko armed him with the bravado to seek a more minimalist approach to communicate the racial ideal and to apply a rough, restrained graphic style. Without the need for live actors or documentary footage, Amalrik imbued the character of the black worker with amplified racial characteristics of pitch-black skin and chalk-white lips and saturated the scenes with expressionistic forms that rejected overtures to realistic slices of life (fig. 2.2). Ivanov-Vano and Amalrik condensed the history of racial discrimination into one conflict faced by a single worker, but rendered him a composite figure. At first, the black worker is a young farming type whose denim overalls speaks to his daily grind, then an older gentleman whose lined face communicates moral outrage, then a prisoner whose muscular, disciplined body is systematically abused. Ivanov-Vano then took Amalrik’s drawings and made the single figure function as a “crowd symbol” through animation’s ability to multiply his body through hypnotic patterns, double-exposure, and distortion.41 In relying on animation technology to render the highly politicized subject of race and racism, Ivanov-Vano and Amalrik showcased how the flexibility of the medium enabled a cinematic truth that live actors, with all their limitiations, could not achieve. Rather than using exaggerated ethnic signs for gag humor, as American cartoons were wont to do or take Grebner’s research approach by mining American black media images, Amalrik opted for design principles that drew upon contemporary Soviet artists (such as Amalrik’s teacher Rodchenko) who were

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Fig. 2.2 Leonid Amalrik, storyboard for Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932).

seeking to find new ways of representing ethnic subjects in line with utopian socialist ideals.42 Ivanov-Vano and Amalrik did not leave detailed notes on their aesthetic choices for this particular film, but animator Yuri Merkulov left a telling description of how Ivanov-Vano took pains to use art historical sources in his representation of peoplehood in his earlier film Senka the African (1927). Merkulov points out that the animators working on racialized characters for Senka the African relied on artistic representations of their native countries: “[Daniel] Cherkes drew the backgrounds for Senka the African in the spirit of Aleksander Iakovlev’s African drawings. [Ivanov-]Vano drew complex patterned ornaments and graphics in the style of K[onstantin] Somov or [Sergei] Chekhonin and I, who was fascinated then by Russian folk lubki [traditional Russian print], drew Senka himself.”43 Hughes and other advocates of black consciousness may have found the representation of Africa based on the work of Russian academicians who made ethnographic expeditions to Africa inherently inauthentic. However, this conceit was part of the progressive Soviet vision of peoples as based on their shared national consciousness. The use of localized design for racialized characters was not central to American visual culture because race was understood to be a matter of intractable biological

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categories, but the inclusion of a living art tradition embodied the Soviet construction of race as a sociohistorical category.44 The Soviet concept of narodnost wrapped race, ethnicity, and nationality in what cultural critics called folk or native culture, and the representation of black Americans through art expressed the Soviet view of Negroes as a distinct nationality in possession of a culture of their own. Although it is probable that the cartoon has not aired on Russian television in the past twenty years precisely because of its heightening of racial signs, the use of Soviet folklorism for the image of black America in 1932 was one of the most pioneering cinematic representations of race precisely because it was rooted in cultural idiom.45 Ivanov-Vano’s use of sound also addresses the specific areas in which the liveaction film failed. According to Hughes, Mezhrabpom agreed to scrap the original script and rewrite it as per Hughes’s suggestion but to begin rehearsing the music in the interim. Mezhrabpom imported Karl Yunghans, a rising film director from Germany, to showcase “black folk songs” such as “All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings” and “Go Down, Moses” for their perceived fidelity to black culture. The proposed soundtrack was a source of contention because the cast had little professional training in singing, and, according to Hughes, simply could not carry a tune despite “that old cliché that all Negroes just naturally sing.”46 Hughes lamented that many in the group “had never crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. They had but little feeling for folk rhythms, and no liking for the idiom. Being city people, college trained, they were too intellectual for such old-time songs, which to them smacked of bandannas and stereotypes.”47 Ivanov-Vano, however, took a more theoretical approach to what constitutes a representative sound for the black class struggle. He turned to a Jewish Polish composer, Grigorii Gamburg, to compose a classical score that would universalize American racism in the legacy of world slavery. Gamburg, who had conducted related material such as Aleksander Crane’s On the Uprising of Slaves in Babylon (recorded in 1930), performed the score with a chamber ensemble to lend intimacy to the universal message, and strung out notes played by the viola to project a wailing sensation.48 Ivanov-Vano paired Gamburg’s classical score with lines delivered by Konstantin Eggert in bombastic tones to signal Soviet moral outrage. Ivanov-Vano then laced the familiar agitprop sound with an exaggerated “Negro dialect” for the plantation worker to firmly locate the conflict in America. For all of its innovative use of sound technology, Gamburg’s score had been independently recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and synchronized only on the editing table, which limited Ivanov-Vano’s control over the organization of the diegetic action to the soundtrack but allowed him unusual flexibility to create rhythmic patterns in the graphic movements. The result further moves the film away from a documentary mode of storytelling to the more lyrical qualities associated with musical composition.49 The

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representation of the black experience through music further casts its subject in the nationalist view of black Americans as Negroes, whose culture—rather than color—defined their national identity. The studio appeared pleased with the results. In prerelease advertisements, Mezhrabpom hailed the animated version as a “sound feature film” and a “sonic experience,” an emphasis that makes sense given the industry-wide focus on the implementation of sound technology in the early 1930s. The film’s use of sound elicited positive reviews, such as one from critic V. Bloom, who singled out the film for its soundtrack: “More than any other sound-synchronized cartoons that we have seen, Black and White specifically attends to the use of sound. Whereas the use of sound in live-action movies focuses mainly on superficial musical accompaniment, the soundtrack of Black and White assigns itself the specific task of treating noise and dialogue with sensitivity as a means of expressing a big and totally serious idea.”50 Eisenstein’s American student Jay Leyda seconded this appraisal of the film: “Sound added nothing to the work of Khodatayev, whose ambitious Organchik looked like a silent cartoon to which sound had been forcibly applied, but Vano’s work matured with the simple rhythms demanded by the music and speech of Black and White.”51 In both image and sound, Ivanov-Vano succeeded where his legendary predecessors had failed because of his embrace of what he saw as an essential truth over “facts” in the representation of race and racism. In his heavy-handed use of Soviet race constructions and design principles, Ivanov-Vano nonetheless responded to the most timely news story related to American racism at the time: the 1931 Scottsboro case in Alabama that sought the death penalty for a group of nine black men accused of raping their two white companions on a train. If Ivanov-Vano’s art historical simplifications, heightened racialization, and universalization of racism offends the modern viewer, Ivanov-Vano also managed to engage with what black activists considered the most pressing issue facing black Americans in the aftermath of the notorious Scottsboro case: corporal and capital punishment. The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party, saw the relevance of the case on its own agenda, leading the international press campaign in support of the accused and helping to make “the Scottsboro Boys a household word from the tenements of New York to the ghettos of Watts.”52 In its representation of corporal and capital punishment, Ivanov-Vano’s film must be seen as part of the international press campaign surrounding the Scottsboro boys. The animated Black and White may have narrowed down the narrative action by limiting the conflict to a stricter reading of Mayakovsky’s verse on the worker’s “question” but, in tune with the political landscape of that time, also broadened the “answer” to include the gamut of American punitive measures aimed at black men. Although the figure of the lone black worker initially gave expressive power to the worker’s question, after the Sugar King retaliates, the black worker becomes an automated node in a

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complex design scheme underscored by a slow cutting rate and close framing. The mandala-like pattern communicates a labor structure that separates the worker from the products of his labor in the remainder of the film. The incorporation of the single black body into the overall design scheme portrays the complete subjugation of the black body to the interests of capitalist imperialists. Of particular relevance to the contemporary black agenda were the film’s shocking lynching images, a motif that Harlem Renaissance artists were only beginning to explore and that the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, presided over by Black and White cast member Langston Hughes, identified as the organization’s main agenda.53 The lynching images in Black and White were several years ahead of what American artists could realistically exhibit in American institutions (despite civil rights activist Walter White’s concerted efforts to mount an exhibition in the early 1930s), but part of a broader Soviet effort to publicize American lynching crimes on the front pages of Trud and Komsomol’skaia pravda.54 The film’s first lynching image depicts the black worker as a decorative plastic toy swinging from the Sugar King’s dashboard as he drives along the road of his picturesque pineapple grove. The body of the black worker, once agile and expressive in previous frames, becomes a stiff and impassive design motif in the Sugar King’s commercial enterprises (fig. 2.3). The swinging figurine alternates

Fig. 2.3 “Lynching.” Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. Film still.

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only in color from black to white as it flashes in reverse: a horrific photo-journalistic image. As the Sugar King drives along a road, the rows of tropical pineapple trees transform into the second lynching scene. In the place of pineapple trees, faceless black bodies appear strung up on a methodically outlined perspective grid of electric poles (figs. 2.4–2.5). The two mirror images share the same design elements in the organization of line and shape, but again reverse the color scheme so that the photographic negative of the pineapple grove are revealed as the scene of lynched bodies: the black sky turns white; the white fields become black; the black bushes become the white buttresses for the poles; and the white heads of the pineapple trees are converted into the black bodies of the lynching victims. The message is clear: beneath the picturesque scene of plenty lie the brutalized bodies of black workers. Ivanov-Vano and Amalrik pull out all the stops for this scene. The embedded topical content and black-and-white reversals in the lynching scenes index photo-journalistic subjects and processes. In a technique still rare at the time, the individual frames in the segment of the second lynching scene are painstakingly rendered; both the foregrounded figures and the background are uniquely redrawn in every one or two frames. The effort results in the vivid portrayal of the forward motion of the Sugar King against the stillness of the hung bodies that he leaves behind. Although the momentary use of the documentary mode speaks to a contemporary reality, Amalrik’s use of Renaissance perspective grids imbues the scene with allegorical weight. Amalrik made several highly calculated preparatory sketches of the grids for the film; they are all marked by the deliberate sense of proportion that grids with single vanishing points typically possess.

Fig. 2.4 (left) “Lynching.” Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. Film still. Fig. 2.5 “Lynching II.” Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. Film still.

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Fig. 2.6 Black and White (Blek and uait, 1932). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amalrik. Film still.

The deliberate and calculated technical control that the backgrounds requires creates a startling juxtaposition between an ordered and harmonious society and irrational acts of violence.55 On an allegorical level, the successive frames from pineapple grove to mass lynching show a linear progression between Western capitalism and capital punishment—with the black worker hanged on the fruits of his own labor. In contrast to the religious overtones with which American artists would imbue their anti-lynching images in subsequent years, Ivanov-Vano and Amalrik relied on cultural cues, such as the traditional Renaissance schematic, to unmask the grotesque realities underpinning capitalist labor practices. With distinct clarity, the frames dominated by the single vanishing point offered viewers unsettling visuals of lynching, hanging, a prison chain gang, and penal electrocution in order to reveal the dark side of consumerism (fig. 2.6). In key moments in the gruesome march of corporal punishments, the film fades over a transparent portrait of the aged black worker’s wizened face to show the individual human cost of these punitive systems of mass incarceration. Hughes’s accusation of Mezhrabpom’s “inauthentic” understanding of the realities of the black class struggle still lingers over Mezhrabpom’s endeavor to produce Black and White, but Ivanov-Vano proved that the unique poetics of the animation medium could make an unexpected claim on truth in both its immediate context and universal scope.56

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Black and Jewish: Representing Race on the Soviet Screen It would be impossible to predict how Hughes and the other cast members would rate the animated Black and White on the authenticity scale and more difficult still to measure whether the film actually inspired international support for the Scottsboro boys or communism, but it goes without saying that Soviet filmgoers engaged with the film in far more immediate ways. Ivanov-Vano’s instinct to channel black suffering through a Soviet lens was perfectly in step with how Soviet audiences were accustomed to interact with the cinematic representation of the workers of the world and their struggles. If Mezhrabpom sought to project an image of the USSR as a raceless society by exposing the racist excesses of American capitalism, then the representation of the victim of racial discrimination in the West would naturally prompt comparisons to the analog situation in the Soviet Union. If the conflicts in Birmingham, Alabama, were too abstract to locate in real space and time, the use of Mayakovsky’s poem and Lenin’s name would have brought the black class struggle home, especially because Lenin’s Siberian prison term continued to grow in significance during his posthumous apotheosis. To the degree that films encouraged the interpretation of world affairs through a comparative lens of Soviet multinationalism, the Soviet filmgoer is meant to situate himself as far removed from racism, sexism, and bigotry. Russian film critic Rashid Iangirov argues that the cinematic treatment of Soviet multinationalism implicitly and explicitly raised the prickly “Jewish question” in light of the role that cinema played in constructing Soviet multinationalism and because Jews were exceptional to the system because they lacked territory within the Soviet borders (with the exception of the short-lived Birobidjan project).57 This comparative mode of viewing onscreen representations of race was especially relevant to the subject of “Negroes” living without their own national territory in the United States for its analog to Jews living without national territory in the Soviet Union. If Iangirov’s thesis is too tightly wound around the cinematic apparatus, it is still undeniable that, in terms of content, Soviet antisemitism was persistently compared to American “Negro” discrimination in the 1930s.58 The relationship between the “outsider” in Soviet cinema and the underlying “Jewish question” was evident from the very start of Mezhrabpom’s unrealized Black and White script. In the film’s depiction of a tragic love story, a relationship between a black factory worker and a Jewish tailor’s daughter develops from their mutual experience with suffering. In one of the most poignant lines, the tailor says, “We suffered almost the same [as Black Americans] in Czarist Russia and what is the difference between Czarist Russia and modern Poland?”59 In other parts of Grebner’s script, the black worker sings the Jewish tailor’s song in a southern vernacular, and rape charges against black men are compared to the 1913 trial

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of Menachem Beilis for blood libel charges. If these scenarios were, as Hughes complained “not even plausible fantasy” in the context of Birmingham, Alabama, they would have certainly hit close to home for Soviet Jews. The message appears rather straightforward: the black experience in America mirrors the Jewish experience within the pre-Soviet system and the not-yet-Sovietized countries surrounding the Soviet Union. This direct comparison between black Americans and Soviet Jews underscores the exceptionalism of Jews in the system of “nations” at the same time as it holds up the Soviet Jewish experience as proof of the superior Soviet model. The animated Black and White also suggests certain parallels between the minority experiences between black Americans and Soviet Jews.60 Ivanov-Vano’s use of a score by a Polish Jewish composer, who regularly conducted Jewishthemed music for the Stradivari Quartet in Moscow, encourages a comparative ethnographic analysis, if somewhat more subtly. When faced with seemingly disconnected aural and visual cues, the film viewer tends to provide missing materials of her own in order to make connections that will make the film a unified text. Yet, it is not so much Gamburg’s scoring of the black class struggle that offers the clearest reflection of the shared representation of American blacks and Soviet Jews, but rather the insistence on representing the black worker through expression of the “folk” rather than through strictly biological categories. This triangulated mode of representing race makes the film relevant to the broader questions surrounding the Soviet representation of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The very flexibility, even interchangeability, in the sourcing of Negro “folk”—from black actors and the performance of Southern spirituals to Soviet Futurist poetry and classical Soviet music—makes the analogy between American Negroes and Soviet Jews all the more tangible. In preparation for the first Soviet animation festival, the studio again swapped one for the other by replacing Gamburg’s classical score and Eggert’s bold narration with the English-language southern spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” recorded by Soviet darling Paul Robeson (1898–1976).61 In preparation for an international audience, Mezhrabpom hoped that Robeson’s signature voice would authenticate the black experience in line with its original hopes for the live-action performance of southern spirituals.62 If the animated film implicitly addressed “the Jewish question,” the comparison between Robeson’s experience with American discrimination and the Jewish experience with Soviet socialism was made explicit in the press. One 1938 article in Sovetskoe iskusstvo, though not specifically related to Black and White, bears directly on the issue at hand. In a discussion of Robeson’s American experience with racism, the paper illustrated the article with a photograph of a pair of smiling Jewish puppeteers working with Jewish character dolls in Kiev (fig. 2.7).63 The caption below the illustration explains that the puppeteers were preparing for

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a production of Binyomin Gutyansky’s Angry Lazar, mounted by the Jewish chapter of the Kiev Academic State Puppet Theater with no other explanation of how the newspaper image tied back to the article on Robeson. The Jewish chapter of the theater had recently won first prize at the First AllUnion Festival of Puppet Theater for its performance of Angry Lazar, and the inclusion of the photograph drew a visual parallel between Soviet Jews and American blacks. The juxtaposition between the newspaper text and illustration suggested a comparison between Robeson’s marginalization in America and the rich Jewish cultural experience in the Soviet Union. Robeson also made ample use of the analFig. 2.7 Jewish puppeteers. From the ogy between black Americans and Jews newspaper Sovetskoe iskusstvo 2, January by tying his performances to broader 10, 1938, 4. social issues, especially antisemitism: “When I sing ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child,’” Robeson stated, “I can feel sympathetic vibrations from my audience, whatever its nationality. It is no longer just a Negro song—it is a symbol of those seeking freedom from the dungeons of fascism in Europe today.”64

Social Action and Professionalizing Animation There are many aspects to the cinematic representation of race in the 1930s, but the saga of Black and White overlapped with the professionalization of animation in a curious combination that makes more sense than one might assume. Social movements often give rise to new communication practices, and, in turn, the channels put in place for the dissemination of social messages often outlast those messages. Long after American race relations ceased to appear on annual thematic plans in Soviet film studios, animation continued to grow into a powerful medium of mass communication and held onto a social activist attitude that transcended American labor issues. Although key moments in history are often overstated, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the saga of Black and White represents a moment in Soviet history when the film industry fractured

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into multiple and, within a few years, independent industries. In stepping into a failed live-action film project during a national low in film production in the early 1930s, Mezhrabpom’s animation department made major in-roads in the contest over political imagery and, to some degree, breached the professional hierarchy at the studio. The victory did not go unnoticed. Convinced by animation’s ability to broach serious social concerns, the Central Committee began to pay more attention to the burgeoning medium as a viable solution to the representational limitations of live-action film.65 In March 1933, the Writer’s Union held the first All-Union conference on animation, focusing specifically on the various genres of animated film and development of sound technology. Despite another aggressive round of layoffs at Mezhrabpom, the studio increased its animation department to “the employment of nearly 100 artists.”66 Several of the contributors to the Black and White animation advanced in their careers: Amalrik went on to become one of the most sought-after designers at Mezhrabpom; Gamburg went on to score several other animations and many live-action films throughout his career; ErichWilliam Steiger went on to direct other notable sound productions such as The International (1932) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); and Konstantin Malyshev became the most successful of the Black and White drawing animators with more than sixty animation credits. Konstantin Eggert, the voice of the incarcerated black worker, went on to a decade of productive work in the film industry before he would, in a cruel twist of fate, become the first film director to noticeably disappear into Stalin’s gulag system.67 As the country moved away from the animated representation of international race relations in the mid-1930s, animation continued to develop as a medium uniquely capable of manifesting authentic narodnost and folk. As one critic pointed out, Soviet animators understood the “profound relationship” between animation and “the art of the people” as the primary function of their art.68 In 1936, Stalin’s government dissolved what was left of the once- legendary Mezhrabpom studio and inaugurated the children’s studio Soyuzdetfilm and the animation studio Soyuzmultfilm in its place. Many Mezhrabpom employees eventually made the move to Soyuzmultfilm, including members from both the live-action and stop-motion Black and White film crews. The new hires at Soyuzmultfilm included the frustrated Black and White scriptwriter Grigorii Grebner, who would come to write several classic fairy-tale scripts, including the feature films The Scarlet Flower (1952) and The Snow Queen (1957).69 The biggest coup went to Black and White director Ivan Ivanov-Vano who replaced Daniel Cherkes as the head of the animation department at Mezhrabpom and began to recruit a group of full-time employees committed exclusively to animation.

3 The Brumberg Sisters The Fairy Grandmothers of Soviet Animation

B

lack and White director Ivan Ivanov-Vano emerged as the “Patriarch of Soviet animation” through his work in agit-prop animation, but it was the Jewish sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg who came to be known as the “grandmothers of Russian animation” for their contribution to the genre of animated fairy tales.1 Industry insiders tagged the Brumberg sisters as grandmothers for very practical reasons: they were among the first generation of animators and they went on to codirect more than forty animated films over their long careers. Yet, the quaint honorific “grandmothers” also refers to a different kind of director from the one that Ivanov-Vano with his agit-prop films projected: a more sympathetic storyteller traditionally associated with children’s fairy tales.2 The reference to “Russian” in the Brumbergs’ appellation rather than the modifier “Soviet” in Ivanov-Vano’s title reflects the fact that, although Ivanov-Vano was an active Party man who carried a great deal of authority behind the scenes, the sisters never joined the Communist Party and tended to assert their influence in less direct ways. One colleague attributed Valentina’s “social nature” to her being “born long before the reign of Soviet power.”3 “Russian” rather than “Soviet” refers to the alternative professional route that the sisters forged at Soyuzmultfilm in comparison to Ivanov-Vano’s group known as IVVOS (an acronym of the surnames of directors Aleksander Ivanov, Nikolai Voinov, and Panteleimon Sazonov). An understanding of the Brumberg family background, particularly the sisters’ inheritance of their father’s activism on behalf of Jewish refugees, gives clarity to what attracted the Brumberg sisters to the field of animation, what they hoped to achieve, and the “Russian” path the sisters took to their directorial position at the office that resulted in their becoming the proverbial grandmothers of the field. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg were born exactly a year apart to the day, in 1899 and 1900 respectively, and grew up in a highly educated, well-to-do Jewish family that earned their father Shimon Tzedekov Brumberg (d. 1919) and H 75 H

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mother Tsitsillia Iosophova Klein (1872–1942) exemptions from the 1891 imperial order expelling all Jewish artisans from Moscow. Not surprisingly, Valentina and Zinaida and their two brothers never put pen to paper on their parentage or Jewish backgrounds, but today’s relative ease in accessing Soviet archives and memoirs published outside of the Soviet Union reveals that their father was a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army, a doctor by profession, and one of the most committed Jewish activists in Moscow in the first two decades of the twentieth century.4 In his memoir, exiled poet Mark Vishniak (1883–1975) recalled that when he needed a Hebrew-language tutor during his student days at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, he hired one of the “needy Jewish students at the Moscow University” who turned out to be Shimon Brumberg, “a good and simple medic and a future active and passionate Zionist.”5 In his memoir on Jewish life in Moscow, Samuil Vermel (1860–1935), a fellow Moscow physician and Jewish activist, similarly described Shimon Brumberg as a soft-spoken man who only came alive in his passionate activism on behalf of less fortunate Jews. According to Vermel, Brumberg was a Zionist “whose name is now known all over Moscow, but then belonged to the poor, unknown medical student.”6 Although the term medic likely referred to Shimon Brumberg’s military post rather than his civilian profession, Vishniak’s and Vermel’s description of Brumberg as a passionate Zionist is more complicated to pin down, because the term meant something different before the establishment of the State of Israel than it does today. Shimon Brumberg identified with the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia (OPE), whose mission was to aid indigent Jews in their transition from the Pale of Settlement to the broader society. OPE was the largest Jewish cultural organization in Czarist Russia, and Brumberg’s position as its educational secretary during the early years of the First World War, a period that saw the military expulsion of Jews from great swaths of the Pale, speaks to the nature of his activities and his central place in the organization’s leadership. According to Vermel, Brumberg “remained a tireless worker over the years, campaigning in favor of the organization, popularizing its activities in Moscow, recruiting members, collecting donations, waking the slumbering and apathetic, pushing and cajoling the stubborn and inert, instructing and reproaching, and strongly raising the interest of the Society.”7 Because of the functional relationship between Jews leaving the villages and townlets of the disintegrating former Pale of Settlement and the economic expediency of artisan, artistic, and theatrical professions, OPE members generally embraced secular Russian education as the key to Jewish advancement. At the same time, OPE leadership advanced the rebirth of Jewish culture in the face of “proleterization” policies aimed at the assimilation of Jews.8 Brumberg and other OPE members believed that the promotion of Hebrew national culture or, in the Russian iteration, Jewish folk, was paramount to the future of Jewish

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Sovietization, a view expressed by the leading Russian-language Zionist publication Evreiskaia zhizn’, of which Brumberg is listed as the editor in 1915–1917.9 One of the strangest documents Shimon Brumberg left behind is one of his own revolutionary poems, which provides a view into the complex constellation of seemingly competing ideas at play in the early twentieth-century Zionist mind-set. Published in Pravda in May 1917, Brumberg’s poem celebrates “May 1,” a day that the revolutionary movement assigned to mark its political agitation on behalf of the working classes, through a metaphor of cultural rebirth. Brumberg’s poetic voice wraps the political tide in a linguistic messianism that references the Jewish liturgical imagery of a “seed” fertilized by death that will “sprout” a “flower.”10 The vegetation imagery is not simply forward-looking in the way that poetic recourse to the season of spring might suggest, but specifically references the Jewish prophetic tradition of the Resurrection of the Dead, which anticipates the transformation of the buried dead into seeds that will “sprout” to bring human history to a close and war between peoples to an end. In May 1917, when the poem was published, there would not have been any contradiction between Brumberg’s Zionist worldview, reference to religious literature, and Jewish support for the revolution because Jews still believed that revolutionary goals aligned with Jewish self-actualization. Brumberg’s perhaps naïve position on how all of these various strains could coexist in the new regime would come to an end a few months later with the October Revolution, but until then Brumberg felt personally responsible to help bring into reality his revolutionary Jewish vision for the future for his children and for the Jewish people. Brumberg’s worldview is perhaps best summed up by another OPE member, Jewish folklorist S. An-Sky, in his justification for his obsessive collecting of Jewish folk art: “If we manage to make our culture live, we will live, but if we do not manage it, we will be tormented to death. No surgeon will be able to sew onto us an alien head and an alien heart.”11 As his published list of objectives in Evreiskaia zhizn’ demonstrates, Shimon Brumberg’s activities for OPE channeled welfare programs primarily through cultural initiatives, particularly through theatrical and musical performances.12 With Shimon Brumberg’s social-minded attitude toward the performing arts, OPE members played an active role in the city’s theaters and used their professional positions to help more recent Jewish refugees acculturate into the city’s cultural life. Shimon Brumberg encouraged the arts not only in his humanitarian work on behalf of Jewish refugees from the former Pale but at home with his children. According to Zinaida Brumberg, “Because there were no children’s theaters at the time, our father took us to the opera house to see Snegurochka, the Tale of Tsar Saltan, and even Faust.”13 Given their father’s political leanings, cultural activities, and profession as a physician (one of Stalin’s most hated professions), there is little biographical information available, but in a short passage

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written immediately following the death of her older sister, the typically introverted Zinaida mentions her father in relationship to his love of theater, with the implication that the sisters went on to work for the first children’s theater in Moscow and to adapt tales such as Tale of Tsar Saltan because of their father’s influence.14 To be sure, such an upbringing prepared the Brumberg sisters for a career in theatrical fare, fairy tales, and folktales as an embodiment of national identity, but on the eve of the revolution, the sisters could not be described as swept up into the spirit of proletariat culture. The sisters initially aspired for the fine arts, enrolling in the cutting-edge VKhUTEMAS institution in 1918, which soon merged with the more traditional Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. There, the sisters gravitated to the more avant-garde faculty, particularly the neo-primitivist artist Ilya Mashkov.15 Only after their father passed away in January 1919 did the sisters temper their aspiration for the citadels of the traditional arts and high modernism with socially conscious work more consistent with the Jewish world views of their father. The family buried Shimon Brumberg in the Dorogomilovskaya Jewish Cemetery, which was still standard practice among Moscow Jews in the early years after the revolution, although they would later be forced to exhume his body from the site.16 We can only guess how renewed contact with their father’s colleagues from the world of Jewish activism during the week of Jewish mourning (shiva) affected the sisters. What we do know is that, following their father’s death, the sisters decided to couple their fine arts education with participation in the newly opened animation workshop at the All-Union National Institute of Cinema (GTK, later VGIK). Valentina was a year ahead of Zinaida in art school and, although their personalities were as different as ice and fire by all accounts, they entered GTK together as a collaborative unit, a partnership that would continue for the rest of their careers. According to a fellow Jewish VKhUTEMAS student, the young avant-gardist Yuri Merkulov, it was the new medium’s promise of progressive culture that convinced the sisters to join GTK. Something had fundamentally changed for both sisters after their father passed away, and it was at GTK that the sisters passionately adopted their father’s love of the theater in relationship to humanistic enlightenment and their father’s social-minded attitude toward the performing arts.17

Folktales: Animism versus Animation From the start of their animation work, the Brumberg sisters turned to national folktales (narodnoy skazke), which OPE members also identified as one of the most powerful agents in the preservation of culture. Some of the largest OPE

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efforts have been on behalf of the preservation of national folktales, including An-Sky’s ethnographic expeditions and the publication of an anthology of Yiddish-language folk songs that OPE members Pesach Marek and Saul Ginsburg compiled at the beginning of the century.18 Unfortunately, the first years of the Brumberg sisters’ careers coincided with a brief period in Soviet history when folktales fell into ideological disrepute both for their perceived religious backwardness and for reflecting bourgeois values. As folklorist Felix Oinas points out, the Children’s Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization (Proletcult) “sought to eradicate folktales on the basis that they glorified tsars and tsarinas, corrupted and instigated sickly fantasies in children, developed the kulak [rich farmer] attitude, and strengthened bourgeois ideals.”19 Vladimir Mayakovsky is said to have exclaimed: “We are shooting the old generals! Why not Pushkin?”20 As historian Anna Shternshis points out, Yiddish folklorists “developed a theory of how these new [Soviet] images symbolized the new essence of Soviet Jewish folklore.”21 The Brumberg sisters, together with their fellow colleagues Nikolai and Olga Khodataev, directed the first Soviet children’s animation, The Samoyed Boy (1927), which presented a “correct” view of the new realities of Soviet socialism while building a meta-case for the preservation of the inherited experience of minority national groups. The film follows the story of a young Eskimo named Chu in the Tundra Nenets who heroically conquers a bear, skins it, and hangs the hide in his family home. In the meantime, the village Shaman claims the bear for himself and sets Chu to work a mechanical machine to animate a statue that the villagers worship (fig. 3.1). Still bitter from the loss of his bear hide, Chu retaliates against the Shaman’s exploitation of the people by exposing the machinery he uses to evoke the illusion of lifelike movement in a statue. Chu’s act of rebellion picked up on the much-maligned concept of animism, a Marxist term referring to the magic endowment of life to inanimate objects or beings, which became a buzz word in the 1920s attack on the primitivism of folklore for its inculcation of children in the idea and experience of enchantment. Chu’s exposure of the priest’s animism makes Chu a harbinger of enlightened atheism within the film’s narrative arc. At the same time, the scene makes a clear distinction between the false animism that backward priests preach and the transparent scientific approach that animation brings to the subject of folklore. After the ruined Shaman lures Chu into the sea, a modern Soviet ship rescues him and takes him to Leningrad, where a title card states, “Our Samoyed Boy is no fool / He went to the Workers’ School.” Here, again, the directors mount a defense of folklore by referencing an actual school in Leningrad that catered to “Northern Peoples” by teaching them how to use their artisan skills in the industrialization efforts of the country. The scene also makes a more subtle case for the continuum between old and new by rendering the carefree character of

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Fig. 3.1 Chu exposes Shaman. The Samoyed Boy (Samoedskii mal’chik, 1928). Dir. Nikolai and Olga Khodataev and Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Film still.

Chu in hand-drawn paper cut-outs and then naturalizing this Old World Chu in the village scenes through the adoption of a style reminiscent of the Samoyed art of scrimshaw carvings. The directors then contrasted the elaborate and terrifying beauty of the village scenes with the simplified and measured architectural draftsmanship of Mstislav Dobuzhinskiy (1875–1957) for the Leningrad scenes.22 In step with live-action film trends during this period, Samoyed Boy corrals as many timely political issues as it can fit into the “timeless” folktale in order to justify the sustained use of the genre in contemporary film. Yet, unlike the hardedged assimilationist perspective in other Jewish-directed live-action films of the period such as Comrade Abram (1919), Samoyed Boy takes a more nuanced, and even positive, attitude toward the fate of ethnic identity in modernization by adopting an empathetic view of the boy’s sense of loneliness both in his childhood home and as a refugee in the new world. In their representation of an ethnic refugee who finds his way to socialist enlightenment but nonetheless maintains emotional ties to his past, the Brumberg sisters projected the short-lived optimism their father expressed in his 1917 poem “May 1” onto the Soviet screens. Not only did Shimon Brumberg’s daughters inherit their father’s mission to help modernize and preserve traditional Jewish life in the new country, but they presented the processes of acculturation as one of the country’s great cinematic themes. After his rescue and arrival in Leningrad, Chu momentarily daydreams of his lost childhood home in his childhood village, reluctantly pushes off the nostalgia with a deep sigh, and heads off to a polytechnic college specifically for

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“Northern Peoples” with a willed determination. The film ends with a title card announcing, “Year after year goes forth / but Chu never forgets his North.” After Samoyed Boy, the Brumbergs created a wide assortment of ethnic characters that seem to repeat Chu’s predicament of exploitation, migration, and acculturation. Throughout these films, the Brumbergs projected, if only in rarefied and primitive style, the pastoral and mystical Old World onto a myriad of non-Russian folkloric traditions. Given the background and cultural sensibilities of the Brumberg sisters, the Jewish conception of “olden times” (Evreiskaia starina) cannot be separated from the dozens of ethnic characters that they created to mourn the loss of the Old World setting in their embrace of the new.23 The same year that the sisters made Samoyed Boy, the young theatrical firebrand Natalia Sats (1903–1993), also a daughter of a Jewish intellectual engaged in Jewish subjects, recruited the Brumberg sisters to animate segments for her children’s ballet The Little Black Boy and the Monkey (1927).24 Although the Brumbergs’ animated segments for Little Black Boy did not survive, we can reconstruct the outline of the performance through theatrical reviews and stageset photographs. The performance focused on the friendship of a little African boy named Nagua and a monkey in their native land, which Sats staged and the Brumbergs animated as a primitive but idyllic world.25 The drama of the performance begins after the boy and the monkey are attacked and separated from each other by white conquerors. In short order, Nagua finds himself in the same predicament as Chu—on a Soviet ship headed toward socialist enlightenment. This time around, the conclusion to the story is even more satisfying than the mature self-determination of Samoyed Boy, for the two friends eventually reunite.26 The production was an unparalleled hit, which the Moscow Children’s Theater performed one thousand times in its first six years and which other Eastern European theaters incorporated into their repertoires. The multimedia performance, which would become the signature performative mode of the Moscow Children’s Theater, brought Natalia Sats and the Brumberg sisters wide recognition in the Soviet and foreign press as the sort of artists that the Soviet Union needed and that Soviet socialism produced. In the context of the discussion on the displacement of the “Jewish question” onto racialized characters (begun in chapter 2 and continued in chapter 5), the Little Black Boy scenario raises parallel identity issues that would be personally relevant to both Sats and the Brumbergs. Sats later admitted that opening her children’s theater with a performance of the biblical story of David in 1918 complicated matters for the theater because of its overt Jewish material, an admission that might have encouraged her to play out future performances of ethnic themes through nonJewish characters. Likewise, in accepting both transformation and continuity as essential features of Sovietization in their animated films, the Brumberg sisters

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adopted their father’s optimistic approach to the “Jewish question.” When the Brumbergs could no longer rationally pursue their father’s answer to the “Jewish question,” they adopted their father’s emotionally empathetic response. In their exoticized treatment of ethnicity in Little Black Boy, Samoyed Boy, and many other projects in their early careers, the Brumberg sisters turned their father’s life’s mission on behalf of Jewish migrants into an official Soviet image of itself as inherently tied to the past even as it simultaneously espouses the dawn of a new day. By the early 1930s, the tide on folklore had turned once again. The Commissariat for the People’s Education confiscated OPE’s libraries and Jewish folklore collections while the CPSU revised its earlier suspicious evaluation of folklore and celebrated its usefulness as “a weapon of class conflict.”27 With the public display of Jewish culture going underground and the genre of national folklore coming out on top, the Brumbergs followed suit by directing fairy tales in the studio’s preferred Disney style. Their fairy-tale projects included “topical” versions of such classics as Little Red Riding Hood (1937) and Puss in Boots (1938).28 The sisters drew heavily on Slavic/Russian folklore but creatively reworked the naïve hero of the traditional fairy tale who vanquishes the all-powerful villain into a culturally superior character whose political consciousness and self-awareness of social injustice serves to bring about changes that affect society as a whole. This new self-aware hero often starts out as a victim of base greed and, with a perceptive view of power dynamics rigged against the people, exposes system hypocrisies through an intractable work ethic (rather than magical powers). It is difficult to say what, if anything, this preference for quick-witted heroes with finely honed observational skills meant to their creators, but they were not always to the liking of film critics. In line with the new cultural doctrine, critics evaluated films on the Brumberg sisters’ “folk sensibility” (Narodnii tvorchestvo) and class logic.29 One critic, an avowed fan of the Disney style, praised the “good class work” of the visual components of the Brumberg’s Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots, but found fault in the Brumbergs’ “revisionism” and incorporation of “low taste” in their narrative adaptations of the classic tales.30 The critic questioned the Brumbergs’ ability to faithfully translate Russian culture into their animation work through a biting evaluation of their film Ivashka and Baba Yaga (1938): “V. and Z. Brumberg should work more on the external appearance of the characters because Ivashka’s appearance does not hold up to the smart ways of the Russian village boy and the image of Baba Yaga is at odds with folklore.”31 It is a revealing critique; one that was targeted at the film directors as much as the content of their film. In the ethnographic approach to culture, the concept of peoplehood was thought to be dependent on rootedness to native land, and the accusation that the Brumberg sisters could not fully grasp

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Russian folklore insinuated that they were disconnected from their national soil. The critique on the perceived anachronisms in the Brumberg adaptation of folklore would soon fall under the more familiar parlance of “rootlessness” and “cosmopolitanism.”

Building Director Groups Several Jewish women, such as Mariya Benderskii (b. 1894) and Sarah Mokil (1906–1984), achieved prominence in Soviet animation in the 1920s, but the Brumberg sisters stood out from other Jewish women artists in that they made a career of it.32 Stalin’s new mega-studio hired the Brumberg sisters in a single “order” on July 7, 1936.33 Soyuzmultfilm gave the Brumberg sisters, who previously had worked ad hoc for a number of different shops and under the guidance of and occasional collaboration with male directors, their big break. As soon as the sisters arrived at the new studio, they struck out on their own with the authority that a position in the full-time staff (shtat) afforded them and set about building a semi-independent subgroup, or “director’s group” (rezhisserskaya gruppa).34 The sisters led very different private lives—Valentina, the elder, was a social firebrand and Zinaida, the younger, a reclusive intellectual—but they were inseparable in their professional pursuits (fig. 3.2).35 In press releases announcing their films, the Brumberg sisters listed the principal members of their film crew and carefully crafted the text to read “The group is under the direction of V. and Z. Brumberg.”36 Asserting authority largely of their own making, the sisters took every opportunity to develop and extend the parameters of their group. Although the innovation of sound technology inspired Ivanov-Vano’s IVVOSTON group to develop the technical side of sound, the Brumbergs took the opportunity to make a more practical case for a reconceptualization of employees working on a film as a cohesive group.37 In a 1935 article, Valentina turned to Disney’s Silly Symphonies to expound on Disney’s successful implementation of stable project teams as a useable model for Soviet animation.38 Although some animators resisted the use of sound, seeing it as a disruption of their creative autonomy and distribution (because the majority of theaters were not yet sound equipped), Valentina celebrated the end of silent film if only because the adoption of sound required more crew members and the formation of stable “groups.”39 In shaping the Brumberg group on the pretext of introducing sound to animation, the sisters transformed themselves and their employees into members of a new professional circle. In a short but lucid essay on her career, Zinaida Brumberg wrote that “in the beginning of our career, we did a lot ourselves. We were at once scriptwriters and artists and directors,” but consistent innovation came about

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“only through the group.”40 In a nostalgic tone, Zinaida wrote: “I think that when you make up a company of people who think in the same manner and who are both talented and enthusiastic, only then can true success be reached.”41 More than their cinematic projection of their father’s love of “folk,” the Brumbergs’ approach to their day-to-day jobs speaks to their enactment of their father’s activist legacy. Fig. 3.2 Zinaida (left) and Valentina Brumberg in With a literary father who did their office, 1950s. Courtesy of Natalia Venzher. a lot of political socializing with Jewish cultural figures, the Brumberg children grew up connected to Moscow’s Jewish intellectual elite. The names of former OPE cultural activists, such as Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha-Am, Mendele Moher Sforim, Haim Nahman Bialik, and Simon Dubnow, must have been household names in the Brumberg home, and their father regularly associated with the next generation of Jewish intellectuals who took up the cause of Jewish cultural rebirth, including Jechiel Tschlenow, Vladimir Harkavy, Miron Kreynin, and Yakov Maze.42 “One can’t fail to mention with a note of emotion,” wrote Vermel of the regular OPE gatherings in which these figures regularly gathered, that the door “was always open to all Jewish social and cultural affairs.”43 Without the demands of husbands or children (the younger sister never married, the elder was widowed during the war, and neither had children), the Brumberg director’s group became the sisters’ surrogate family. Like the open-door policy of their father’s OPE circle, the Brumberg door was open to Moscow’s vulnerable artists, writers, and theater professionals. The Brumberg collaborative model played a vital social role in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the sisters’ shtat position in a state studio would become a lifeline for other Jewish artists. During their period of evacuation in Samarkand, the Brumberg sisters set out to animate the tale Sindbad the Sailor (1944), a project for which they drew in one of their former teachers from VKhUTEMAS, Jewish artist Robert Falk (1886–1958), who had not been able to reestablish institutional affiliation after he returned from a decade in France. When the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) canceled

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Faina Ranevskaia’s (1896–1984) role in Sergei Eisenstein’s forthcoming Ivan the Terrible (1944) because of her controversial role as a Polish Jewish mistress (one of the most significant Jewish characters in world cinema) in Mikhail Romm’s film Dream (1943), the Brumberg sisters immediately snapped her up with a contract for their film The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1943).44 After the war, the sisters worked to secure contracts for unemployed and underemployed theater professionals after the closing of the Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSET) and other experimental theaters that had closed in the 1930s and 1940s. By using their institutional affiliation at Soyuzmultfilm and the perks of full-time status, the sisters became formidable salonnières and patrons of the Moscow art and theater world. Using the mechanisms of “contractual arrangement” (dagovernaya systema) and contract employment (vneshtatnye sotrudniki), the Brumbergs hired politically compromised artists, including many former Jewish theater actors and artists with no place else to go. Puppet designer Leonid Shvartsman, one of the Jewish animators who worked for the Brumberg sisters after he lost both family and home in the war, characterized working for the Brumbergs with a sense of collective consciousness: “An eternal holiday! In the everyday sense, we all lived with hardship and so we virtually moved to the studio. Came to work nine in the morning, left at midnight. Playing chess, played each other, ate, drank (and drank well!), carried on romantic affairs, married. Nevertheless, a lot of hardship.”45 Years after her retirement, Jewish designer Lana Azarkh spoke of the Brumberg sisters with awe: they “believed in me and helped me establish myself as an artist. They and I listened and prayed to the same God.”46 Despite the positive reputation that the sisters earned over the years among the studio’s creative staff, their employee records reveal administrative dissatisfaction with their attitude toward social affairs at the studio. In the annual character reference that accompanied their file for 1949, both sisters were characterized as “disorganized in managerial capacities and passive in the public life of the studio.”47 This loaded accusation on their “passivity” in the studio, directed against two of the most active and socially minded directors at Soyuzmultfilm, likely refers to the Brumbergs’ propensity for doling out contracts to independent—unemployed or underemployed—artists, composers, writers, and actors. Rather than hiring in-house shtat editors or other shtat employees to “adapt” classic Russian fairy tales to the screen, the sisters consistently contracted independent artists to write, draw, and score original scripts from scratch. But it was precisely the shaping of their unique directors’ group, populated by freelancers, that allowed the Brumberg sisters to create a vibrant cultural center in the middle of Moscow, as their father had done before them.

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Vandalism and Jewish Theater Over the years, the sisters became less interested in classic folktales, or even the treatment of migration and acculturation themes in their films, and more interested in the intellectuals they could save through filmmaking and their immediate concerns of livelihood and social standing. The film that best captures the atmosphere of the Brumberg group and the mature work that it produced is their award-winning Fedya Zaitsev (1948), a film that embeds a complex and sensitive meditation on art in state institutions, and that expressed some of the key struggles that members of their group experienced. After a title sequence featuring three painters whitewashing a school building in choral unison, the basic storyline of Fedya Zaitsev follows the title character after he draws a black stick figure on the freshly painted wall of his classroom (fig. 3.3). When the teacher notices the unauthorized drawing of the Little Man on the wall and no one comes forward to claim responsibility, he roundly admonishes the entire class. Finally, the teacher accuses a hapless redheaded boy who had inadvertently gotten some of the illicit chalk on himself when shaking Fedya Zaitsev’s hand in greeting. Fedya Zaitsev does not come to the boy’s aid and the boy is helpless to defend himself. After school, Fedya Zaitsev conjures a fantastical scene in which his books and toys stage a rebellion against him for his cowardly behavior. In the meantime, back in the darkened classroom, the stick figure springs to life in the manner of Emile Cohl’s The Puppet House (1921) and tries to convince a white doppelgänger on the blackboard to trade places with him so that the Little Man might go in search of the young vandal and inspire in him a sense of moral responsibility. The white chalk figure points out the obvious: “I would assist you with utter joy / But I am a chalk-drawn blond boy.” The black Little Man dismisses the objection: “Is that all?” and instructs the chalk figure to “drink not wine, but simple ink” so he can temporarily exchange his black exterior for “a clean conscience.” The Little Man then rides through the Moscow night on another graffitied character, an animal of “unknown breed,” and delivers a high-minded speech to the cowed Fedya Zaitsev (fig. 3.4). The boy is so thoroughly shamed that he promises to take responsibility for his vandalism and when he returns to school the following day, Fedya Zaitsev confesses, “It was I who drew the little man.” The film may seem like a straightforward morality lesson on childhood vandalism and the redemptive power of the moral conscience, but its underlying meanings depend on an understanding of the film as a rehabilitative project of the waning Moscow theater world.48 Released in 1948, the same year that Vano Muradeli’s controversial opera The Great Friendship prompted an oppressive resolution on culture (and during which cinema production fell to a mere seventeen films). As an indirect result of the conservative atmosphere that befell

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Fig. 3.3 (left) Drawing on the School Wall. Fedia Zaitsev (1948). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Film still. Fig. 3.4 (below) Animal of Unknown Breed. Storybook based on Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, Fedia Zaitsev (1948).

the Moscow theater world in the late 1940s, the project team working on Fedya Zaitsev was made up almost entirely of artists whose early careers began in the Meyerhold Theater and other theaters that had recently been closed down. With a group of highly talented theatrical luminaries working on the film, Fedya Zai­ tsev exemplifies the Brumberg group’s success at producing avant-garde theatrical fare in a hostile climate. Yet, in her recollection of the film, Zinaida Brumberg does not credit the group for the success of the film, but rather the film for the success of the group.49 The most significant conduit between the avant-garde theater world and the sisters’ director’s group was actor Mikhail Yanshin (1902–1976), whom the Brumbergs recruited several years earlier after the closing of the Stanislavsky Theater where Yanshin had moonlighted. A ladies’ man by reputation, Yanshin contributed more than just his acting skills to the Brumbergs. Lana Azarkh described the widowed Valentina as a woman who “played at full gallop, but her main source of attraction was not a horse but M. M. Yanshin.”50

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Yanshin introduced the sisters to “a resplendent company” made up largely of struggling members of Moscow’s intellectual circles. Yanshin connected the sisters to his ex-wife, the theatrical gypsy singer Lala (Chernaya) Black (1909– 1982), the writer Yuri Olesha, playwrights Nikolai Erdman (1900–1970) and Mikhail Volpin (1903–1988). True to their reputation, the sisters managed to absorb these underemployed artists into their group. “Fedya Zaitsev brought such luck to us,” Zinaida Brumberg recalled of that period.51 “Thanks to [Yanshin],” recalled Azarkh, “all of MAT [Moscow Art Theater] visited us.” The underemployed actors and writers of MAT, once the most prestigious theater in the country, found a way to make it through the dry spells at least in part because of the Brumberg directors’ group. In turn, Azarkh notes, the actors “received great pleasure in the company” where there “was no censorship and they could do whatever they wanted. No one would stop them.”52 Although administrators and members of the full-time staff criticized the sisters for their liberal wielding of contracts outside of the studio’s full-time staff, film critics were simultaneously complaining that in-house scripts “were technologically weak and lacked stylistic unity” and resulted in “an extremely weak representation of the Soviet reality.”53 Rather than adapt a classic fairy tale in-house, the sisters cultivated their group by offering a contract to writers Michael Volpin and Nikolai Erdman—both of whom had been arrested and imprisoned in the 1930s on charges of “anti-Soviet tales”—that gave the writers a back-door residency permit into Moscow. The sisters commissioned the pair to write an original “modern Soviet fairy tale” (sovremennuyu sovetskuyu skazku), a genre considered “one of the most suspicious” for its representation of “a contemporary reality” and all the ideological pitfalls into which contemporary material may stumble.54 Years after Fedya Zaitsev captured the minds and hearts of the nation, Zinaida would celebrate the script of Fedya Zaitsev specifically for its contemporary aspects: “At the time, everyone was used to czars, heroes, queens, wood cutters, princesses, Cinderellas, and, of course, hares and wolves. But where were the plots, conflicts, and images of our Soviet reality?”55 The contemporaneity of the script, originally titled Realm of Lies, raised flags with the editors, and Volpin and Erdman had to rewrite the script by relegating the fantastic elements of the plot to a dream sequence.56 The script eventually went through a number of protracted editorial phases, including a title change, the blanket cutting of a sequence called the “Realm of Lies,” and the revision of a more ambiguous final scene into what became Fedya Zaitsev’s clear-cut confession.57 Despite the difficulties in getting the film to meet administrative approvals, animation historian Georgii Borodin credits the film as single-handedly rehabilitating Erdman and Volpin in Moscow’s cultural circles.58 It was not simply the employment of down-on-their-luck intellectuals like Erdman and Volpin to work under Soyuzmultfilm’s institutional protection that

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makes Fedya Zaitsev a compelling artifact of intellectual history, but the loaded casting of specific roles within the film. Schoolchildren, the film’s target audience, would not have noticed the casting of floundering celebrities from the waning MAT and the defunct Meyerhold Theater, but for adult viewers who recognized the off-screen voices and on-screen movements designed to resemble real actors and their signature theatrical gestures, Fedya Zaitsev communicated on a whole other level.59 Part of the inner circle of the Meyerhold Theater, Erdman wrote lines for specific actors, and Azarkh described how “these great artists” approached the script with great care and “delved into the minutiae of the genre.”60 Vera Bendina (1894–1974), a student of the psychologically oriented director Yevgeny Vakhtangov and an actress in MAT, recorded the part of the naughty schoolboy who drew the stick figure on the wall, and Erast Garin recorded the part of the straitlaced teacher.61 There would have been irony in Garin’s nasal dramatization of a strict disciplinarian rebuking a boy for mischievous drawings because Garin was one of the leading comic actors of the then-radical Meyerhold Theater. Garin was one of the only visitors that Erdman received during his prison term for writing “anti-Soviet tales,” an aspect of their relationship that adds further irony to Erdman’s rendering of Garin’s character as a sanctimonious schoolteacher.62 The real kicker would have been the idea of Mikhail Yanshin as the Little Man riding around town on the “Animal of Unknown Breed,” played by Meyerhold actor Sergei Martinson (1899–1984), whom the sisters had been supporting with occasional commissions ever since his acting career was damaged by his caricature of Hitler in a concentration camp in Sergei Yutkevich’s New Tales of the Soldier Schweik (1941). The Brumbergs’ reunion of Moscow’s leading comic actors for a film filled with linguistic play and physical buffoonery certainly made for a dark comedy in the old style. Former MAT employee Victor Oransky (1899–1953) wrote a lively score that makes the ridiculous scenario even more playful and recognizable as Meyerholdian theater, which espoused the use of music as the organizational element for the acrobatic movement on stage. Recognition of visual and aural cues to obsolete cultural figures stimulates nostalgia and inducts the knowing viewer into intellectual company, which was not an altogether carefree association in 1948. It was an accident of fate that the Brumberg sisters re-created a theatrical troupe and fashioned a film in the spirit of the Meyerholdian repertoire the year that the Stalinist government assassinated Meyerhold, but it necessarily affects the viewing of the old theatrical antics and absurd tautological overtones in the dialogue.63 The influence of Meyerholdian techniques can most clearly be seen in the integration of theatricality into the film and, especially, in the film’s calling attention to that theatricality as conscious artistry within the dramaturgy itself.64 The film consciously creates a tension between styles through the character of

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Fedya Zaitsev, who enacts the naturalistic acting techniques of Stanislavsky in the film’s “real world,” and the Little Man, who adopts the emphasis of gesture and voice in the film’s “world of representation.” This dichotomy is mirrored in the film’s juxtaposition of classical Disney style of rounded figures that moved in a fluid, naturalistic way for Fedya Zaitsev’s “real world” and the minimalist contour drawings that move with heightened conventionalism for the Little Man’s “world of representation.” The duality in the style operates as a metafictional technique within the film in the same way that Meyerhold used two-dimensional drawings for the stage design with the three-dimensionality of the actor’s body. The stick figure emerges as the main character of the film, outstripping Fedya Zaitsev in both dialogue and physical movements.65 Upon coming to life, the Little Man jumps off the wall and moves in the rhythmic steps familiar from Meyerholdian techniques in which actors adopt theatrical conventions that are “true” in the constructed language introduced within the performance but that do not mimic everyday life.66 Yanshin “conducted long conversations with the directors on what style and techniques to employ for acting,” a process that resulted in the implementation of a veiled Meyerholdian aesthetic of pure theater as an escape from the cruel realities of life.67 Influenced by his theater work, Yanshin incessantly spoke about the need to develop a complementary relationship between the actor’s voice and the musical score, a skill that inspired the studio staff to refer to him as “butter.”68 In his voice-over for the Little Man, Yanshin employs a variety of methodical vocal manipulations to signal theatricality, such as a rhythmic cadence, formal diction, and his delivery of polite mannerisms such as the repetitious use of “excuse me” and “pardon me” when addressing chalk drawings, street graffiti, and finally, Fedya Zaitsev. Azarkh proudly recalled how the other actors also “studied the sketches of the film characters and scenes and fully entered the atmosphere of the film” both visually and aurally. After school lets out, the Little Man delivers an impassioned monologue to an imagined audience in a room emptied of “real” people. Finally free from his disgraced place on the wall after a long day at school, the Little Man goes about planning and carrying out the absurd scenario of admonishing his creator. Although the Little Man’s speech is ideologically “correct” in content, the very scenario that allows the Little Man to exist enacts the modernist notion that art is entitled to its own reality (a problem that critics took note of). When the Little Man announces, replete with an index finger raised for effect, “I cannot agree with the teacher, of course, that this wall is ruined by my figure,” he comically challenges institutional authority. “Quite the contrary,” concludes the Little Man, “I would even venture, that without me something is missing on this wall.” The Little Man then reflects on the debate over theatricality and the question of the relationship between illusion and reality: “But still,” concludes the Little Man, “as an honest man, I cannot abide by that which is false.” The absurd logic

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of the Little Man’s speech, delivered with the full weight of his eloquent and hyper-enunciated Russian and indignant tone, resembles the tautological theatrical games that Meyerholdian theater relished. If viewers work out the parallels between Fedya Zaitsev’s real world and the Little Man’s world of representation, then the theatrical Little Man has a lesson to teach the reality represented by the comparatively dull Fedya Zaitsev. In the binary of “theater” and “reality,” the Brumbergs suggest that the Little Man’s performance is more “honest” or “real” than that of Fedya Zaitsev, the believable boy who lives in a credible social world and speaks in the more colloquial language of ordinary folk but who is both a vandal and a liar. The Brumbergs not only inserted the theater motif in the film’s dialogue, but conceptually incorporated a theatrical set into Fedya Zaitsev. Before the Little Man enters Fedya Zaitsev’s room, the Little Man climbs up a two-dimensional staircase that he draws with his own umbrella and appears in the silhouette of the boy’s window, which functions as a three-walled minimalist theater set (fig. 3.5). He pauses at the window’s ledge, takes a deep breath, and dramatically enters through the window as if onto a stage. On the other side, the Little Man is in Fedya Zaitsev’s “real world” but, with his formal movements and classical enunciation of the theatrical vernacular, the Little Man takes on the role of a stage narrator.

Fig. 3.5 Fedia Zaitsev (1948). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Film still.

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This “theatricality” is nowhere more apparent than in the Little Man’s overthe-top dialogue with Fedya Zaitsev at the end of the film. He uses his umbrella and top hat to great effect, and delivers classical monologues with conscious theatrical flair.69 The Little Man strikes a pose by putting one leg up on a stack of books and delivers his lecture to Fedya Zaitsev in couplets. When the Little Man sits on the edge of a pile of books with his back to Fedya Zaitsev, the boy complements the pose by sitting on the edge of the table with his back facing the Little Man. In symmetrical motion, Fedya Zaitsev and the Little Man have their backs to one another but turn their heads toward each other for the delivery of their lines. In his actualization of standing up against “that which is false,” the Little Man uses the pile of books as a stage, stamps his leg to punctuate the delivery of his words, maintains expressive pauses, crosses his arms over his chest and one leg over the other, and then dramatically pivots to once again turn his back to Fedya Zaitsev (fig. 3.6). In time with the music, Fedya Zaitsev seems to momentarily step out of his naturalistic world and begins to mirror the choreographed movements of the Little Man. As Fedya Zaitsev delivers his maudlin response to the Little Man’s energetic performance, the two stand back to back as the light fades over the screen: reality and illusion, falseness and truth, in a single performance. Erdman’s and Volpin’s experience with charges of “anti-Soviet tales,” coupled

Fig. 3.6 Back Turned. Fedia Zaitsev (1948). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Film still.

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by the life experience of the other semi-independents in the Brumberg group, calls into question any straightforward reading of a boy who is filled with an urge to draw over a dripping, institutional hack job.70 Thinking back on how animation benefited from the repressive environment of Russian theater, Zinaida Brumberg admitted that “very often in conversation of Volpin and Erdman, one hears a note of regret that these talented writers have gone into animation and have not realized their potential in Great Drama.”71 If we consider the biographies of the film’s writers, the title sequence of Fedya Zaitsev drips with clever double-edged references. Choreographed to the rhythm of a patriotic socialist labor song, similar to those that Erdman and Volpin wrote for the Soviet secret police (NKVD) during their exile, the threesome of school peasant-painters sing in unison: “Pavel, Prokhorov, and Gerasim / Three skilled painters / We paint the school with soul / We pick out color / Lay it, paste it, don’t regret it / Move that brush a little merrier.” The three professional painters (with their quintessentially Ukrainian ethnic names) mechanically slap a new coat of white paint on the drab wall while an imaginative schoolboy follows his heart on the still-hopeful first day of school. After all, the trio of government workers create an institutional cleanliness and the boy’s heartfelt act of vandalism results in the disarmingly honest black, stick figure. This interpretation of Fedya Zaitsev’s character would certainly have struck a chord for Erdman and Volpin and the other disenfranchised theatrical stars in the Brumberg group. The Brumberg group may have been reaching for contemporary parallels to express their experience of life in Stalinist institutions in their representation of the Little Man’s dynamism and vigor set against the drab wall. From this perspective, it is even possible to interpret the Little Man’s rebuke of Fedya Zaitsev not for his act of vandalism but rather for refusing to take credit for his work of art. Erdman’s and Volpin’s imprisonment on charges of anti-Soviet tales also colors the cinematic treatment (or at least interpretation) of Fedya Zaitsev’s cultural exile in the scene that takes place in Fedya Zaitsev’s home after school. In a scene imagined by a guilty Fedya Zaitsev, the icons of Soviet high and popular culture turn against the boy in a magnificent exhibition of Soviet shame culture. On a cover illustration of Arkadii Gaidar’s Timur and His Gang, a model Soviet youth erases the text and, in a disapproving tone, tells Fedya that “Gaidar did not write this book for you, boy.” Fedya dismisses Gaidar as a mere “children’s author” and turns to nineteenth-century Russian “classics,” but a drawn vignette of a wolf on the cover of Anton Chekhov’s Kashtanka bites his finger when he tries to read the book. Giving up on literature altogether, Fedya turns to his Sovietmanufactured toys, who stage an organized rebellion: his spinning top spins away from him; his toy soldiers march out of his room; and his beloved nesting doll harshly lectures him about his shameful behavior. If much of this subtext is lost on viewers who grew up watching the film

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as a candid educational film against graffiti, studio administrators took note of the possibility of subterfuge at the time. During the anticosmopolitan campaigns that settled over the studio the same year that Fedya Zaitsev was released, Soyuzmultfilm administrators identified the Little Man as having Jewish speech traits. In two different memoir accounts of the anticosmopolitan campaigns at the studio, directors Kyrill Maliantovich and Evgenii Migunov recalled accusations against the Brumberg sisters for characterizing the Little Man with an ethnic dialect. Migunov, whom the Brumberg sisters championed in the early years of his career, recalled the deputy director shouting at the gathering of employees in a public meeting: “Take our sisters Brumbergov. What do they do? How does their [actor in] Fedya Fig. 3.7 From the book Domu KinoZaitsev speak?”72 Maliantovich recalled skazok 40 let. In the collection of the that the sisters started and tightened as author. Deputy Director N. N. Burov screwed up his face and mimicked Yanshin’s voice in his role as the Little Man, “Escusi me, pardoni” [with an i at the end of each word]. . . . What are these words, I ask you? Are these Russian words?”73 Migunov does not take note of the sisters’ response, and they likely thought it best to silently endure the public humiliation and let matters unfold in the hands of their colleagues. A 1949 internal review of the Brumberg sisters praised the script of Fedya Zaitsev but criticized the treatment of its characters as “lacking in artistic quality,” alluding to the movements, gestures, and voice tricks that smacked of theaterical practices of the previous decade.74 Although the film suffered a bumpy start in the year of its release, Fedya Zaitsev stood the test of time both in the aesthetic principles that the film showcased and in terms of the empowerment that the Brumberg group secured in the studio. The Brumberg sisters eventually remade and expanded the film under the title of Fedya Zaitsev’s shameful or, given the new view of the project that I have proposed, celebratory confession: It Was I Who Drew the Little Man (1960). In the coming years, the sisters adopted the character of the Little Man as a Brumberg director’s group emblem for other films they directed. The Little Man, with his top hat and umbrella, strikes a permanent pose on a square of white paint,

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just as the informally constituted Brumberg group became a formidable voice in the national discourse on art and left their mark on an “institutional” paint job (fig. 3.7). Above all, Fedya Zaitsev is a testament to the cultural haven that the Brumbergs created among Muscovite intellectuals through their directors’ group with its overlapping networks of labor and social life. If their careers are any guide, the Brumbergs’ aesthetic consciousness was formed by their awareness of cultural decline, a mission to revitalize intellectual life, and an awareness of being surrounded by indifferent or antagonistic functionaries bent on programs that would destroy that culture. It is easy to see how the production of Fedya Zaitsev, and the symbol that the Little Man became, dovetailed with the “Zionist” activism of their father.

4 Big-City Jews Setting and Censoring the Modern Fairy Tale

F

or a decade after the release of the Brumberg sisters’ double-edged Fedya Zaitsev (1948), Soyuzmultfilm focused almost exclusively on classic fairy tales set in recognizable if also idyllic countryside settings.1 Following the principles of folklore-as-proletariat culture outlined by the Union of Soviet Writers and the Ministry of Culture, Soyuzmultfilm promoted the depiction of the Soviet countryside as rooted in collective identity, and the depiction of rural life as an expression of proletariat values.2 By design, ideology informed the cinematographic approach to the fairy-tale genre throughout the 1940s and 1950s, resulting in the embedding of politicized images, including those of ethnic minorities, in the depiction of exotic fairy-tale characters and their magical landscapes. At the same time, folklorist Jack Zipes has observed that Eastern European fairytale films were not simply propagandistic tools of authoritarian regimes but often “undermined the hypocritical announcements and pronouncements of the state and party.”3 Zipes finds many examples of subterfuge in Stalinist-era fairy tales, but it was the fairy-tale setting that provided the most significant opportunity for Jewish animators to explore their own identities and their sense of place in the social landscape. Classic animated films by Jewish directors such as Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg’s The Lost Letter (1945), Lev Atamanov’s The Scarlet Flower (1952), and Dmitrii Babichenko’s Brothers Liu (1953) shaped rural settings around a Soviet geopolitical context and populated these settings with ethnic characters who engaged with their environments in often nonconventional and even confrontational ways.4 The evolution of the animated setting is a window into how animators reshaped the Soviet social map and spatialized ethnic minorities in new ways. The shifting attitudes toward the fairy-tale genre that Soyuzmultfilm directors faced during and after Stalinism can be generalized through the filmography of Aleksander Ivanov (1899–1959). Ivanov had initially embraced political subjects in his films, such as Fyodor the Hunter (1938), which made few direct overtures H 96 H

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Fig. 4.1 Weeds. The Miracle Maker (Chudeshnitsa, 1957). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov. Film still.

to modern life but was inseparable from its timely conversation on ethnic minorities. Its depiction of a Buryat-Mongol family living on the Far Eastern border coincided with the brutal genocide of the Buryat population in the buffer state of Mongolia.5 However, with the growth of a pernicious censorship a decade later, Ivanov retreated to more quintessentially Russian and apolitical fairy tales.6 In the decade after the anticosmopolitan campaigns, Ivanov served diligently on the Artistic Council and made animal fables, exemplified by his film The Magic Swan (1949), in which the idyllic countryside and surrounding forest structure the narrative. It was not until 1957 that Ivanov branched out of the formulaic countryside setting and conventional Stalinist fairy tale with a seemingly minor but highly influential change in The Miracle Maker (1957), the first postwar film to target adult audiences.7 Responding to the Central Committee’s (CC) deStalinization call for more culturally relevant representations of the countryside, Ivanov introduced an anthropomorphized stalk of corn in place of the traditional fairy-tale hero and enacted the customary miracle motif through natural agricultural processes (with clear reference to Khrushchev’s maize-growing policies).8 The stalk of corn defies the pessimistic expectations of the farm collective and boards a train headed to the northern farms, where she successfully spreads her seed despite the cooler climates (fig. 4.1). Ivanov’s stylistic approach conformed to Disney-like realism that the industry considered ideologically safe if stylistically outdated. The world of officialdom enthusiastically received Ivanov’s

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clever innovation of the classic fairy tale, no doubt because of his treatment of the borders of Russian territory as a fertile site for collectivization. The response was so enthusiastic that, if director Kirill Maliantovich is to be believed, Khrushchev showed the film at all of his government meetings.9 What delighted filmgoers and riled art critics was Ivanov’s insertion of a contemporary rock number, a scene that one critic called “Russian whooping and whistling,” with its jolt to the urban youth culture of the here-and-now. Ivanov judiciously placed the catchy tune in the scene with the offensive weeds just as he had channeled the pessimistic opinions of Khrushchev’s dissenters through the cloying voices of uneducated farmers.10 Ivanov’s superficial conservatism and timely countryside setting shielded his bold importation of popular culture, which shattered the aura of timelessness in Stalinist-era films.11 Whereas animation had previously enacted arrangements of a semi-mythical nature that reinforced socialist models, The Miracle Maker disrupted normative cultural mores as part-andparcel of Khrushchev’s campaign to challenge biological patterns.12 By presenting a precarious modernity on behalf of a productive Soviet future, Ivanov landed on a formula the CC could rally around for its expedient topicality. At the same time, the insertion of a scene that spoke to youthful urbanity caught the attention of other animators from a creative angle. Inspired by Ivanov’s disruption of the staid fairy-tale formula, other directors continued to liberate the animated landscape through the prism of official doctrine, a process that involved the censorship apparatus in significant and sometimes surprising ways.

The End of the Black Morass Soyuzmultfilm director Vladimir Degtyarev (1916–1974) was not the sort of man one would ever describe as an agitator. A graduate of the Leningrad Art College who lost his right arm in service during the Second World War, Degtyarev enrolled in the animation courses at VGIK after demobilization in order to retrain himself to work with his left hand. When Degtyarev came to Soyuzmultfilm, he was a medaled patriot returning to his native Moscow and, by all accounts, was an affable employee, never complained to the administration or got embroiled in petty disputes with colleagues, and met deadlines.13 In short, he was the kind of reliable director that Soyuzmultfilm needed for its inauguration of a puppet department, a form of three-dimensional animation that the Soviet Union had discontinued after Vladislav Starevich and Aleksander Ptushko left the country during the Russian Civil War in 1919. Together with scriptwriter Arkadii Snesarev (1932–1979), Degtyarev adopted Ivanov’s revisionist treatment of the fairy-tale setting as a way to showcase the rebirth of puppet animation in the debut film The End of the Black Morass

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(1960).14 The revival of traditional puppetry is mirrored in the film’s fairy-tale characters who learn that the once-magical countryside is a dead end and they must restart their lives in the modern world of film.15 The film opens with two fairy-tale characters, a wood goblin and a water sprite, who are waiting to be rescued from the modern technologies that threaten their bog-like existence.16 Like the corn character in The Miracle Maker, the airplanes, satellites, pesticide spraying, and drainage systems appear incongruent with the timeless fairy-tale characters and the mystical swamp setting and, by their very presence, signal a post-Stalinist view of Soviet reality as difficult and in need of change. Even the title itself signals the cinematic modernization of the outdated fairy-tale setting; in the opening credits, the title word konets (the end) is graphically set off and appears in hand lettering typical of the phrase flashed at the end of films to signal the film’s conclusion (fig. 4.2). This graphic affectation marks the “end” of the timeless idyllic landscapes of the socialist fairy tale in all film. This disempowerment of the fairy-tale is most powerfully introduced in the figure of the Russian arch-villain Baba Yaga, whom folklorist Helena Goscilo identifies as “by far the most popular and complex figure in Russian tales” and who appeared in full villainous glamor in such Stalin-era films as Ivashka and Baba-Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful (1939).17 We first meet Baba Yaga when she unceremoniously falls from the sky by a gust of wind turbulence produced by modern technology, a scene that effectively robs Baba Yaga of an epic battle scene or even a triumphant hero worthy of the victory. To add insult to injury, two children benevolently rush to Baba Yaga’s aid as if to a vulnerable old woman rather than a witch who wields terrifying magic and bakes children in her oven. “What?” she yells, “I am Baba Yaga!” The children laugh in surprise: “But you are all grown up! Even we already know that there is no such thing as Baba Yaga. These are only fairy tales!” Baba Yaga is so indignant at their nonchalance that she threatens to run away from the swamp because the “children laugh at us!” The goblin and the sprite match her dark mood by declaring their intention to follow her. Despite their half-hearted pledge to strike out across the border of their parochial morass, all three fairy-tale characters have nowhere to go. Dispirited, the goblin blindly meanFig. 4.2 Title frame. The End of the Black Moders across a busy highway to a rass (Konets chernoi topi, 1960). Dir. Vladimir Degtyarev. Film still. nearby agricultural school and

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overhears an ethnography lecture on “The Evil Forces in the World of Modern Science” (fig. 4.3). In a self-reflexive scene on the end of timeless fairy tales, the lecturer minces no words: “The Russian peasant could not see a path out of his frankly difficult scenario. He relied on the notion that God would come to his aid or some sort of magical force, a sort of fairy-tale fantasy attributed to natural [causes], to nature, for example a wood-goblin or a water-sprite. Hee  . . . hee . . . hee . . . [a silly laugh]. But in the reality of our own times and in our country, wood-goblins and water-sprites exist only in the poetic imagination of folk art and the beloved heroes of folktales. But if one seriously believes in them, then this is a harmful situation. A harmful situation and a remnant of the past.” In the resolution of the film, a Soviet subsistence farmer (kolkhoznik) approaches the self-pitying goblin with news that they will drain the swamp and build a collective farm on the land. The kolkhoznik proposes a creative solution for the evicted locals of the Black Morass: Kolkhoznik:  Why are you hiding? Oh, everything is clear. You are a goblin. Goblin:  No, not a goblin. We are harmful superstitions. Kolkhoznik:  Understood. So, why are you still here? Goblin:  Where are we supposed to go?

Fig. 4.3 Ethography lecture. The End of the Black Morass (Konets chernoi topi, 1960). Dir. Vladimir Degtyarev. Film still.

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Kolkhoznik:  What do you mean “where”? Your place is in the fairy tale. Goblin:  Where? Where? Kolkhoznik:  Everywhere. First, in literature. Second, theater. Third, film. Goblin:  Oh, and film? Will they take us? Kolkhoznik:  Of course they’ll accept you; we do not turn away ancient tales. There is no need for you to idle about here.” Goblin:  And they’ll take the sprite too? Kolkhoznik:  Yes, they will take the sprite too. So, there is nothing left for you to do here. Goblin:  Then we will go. With the impending swamp drainage, the goblin and the sprite cross over the border of the morass to what they imagine is the world of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic fairy tale. Following after them, Baba Yaga screams in disbelief: “Where!?” “The fairy tale,” they repeat in unison. Hand in hand, the goblin, the sprite, and Baba Yaga leave the dormant countryside accompanied by a soft instrumental version of the popular song “Evenings in the Moscow Countryside” and a romantic fading out of the scene (fig. 4.4) The three once-villainized characters exit the outdated fairy tale that

Fig. 4.4 Into the sunset. The End of the Black Morass (Konets chernoi topi, 1960). Dir. Vladimir Degtyarev. Film still.

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assigned them to the borders of the bog because “there is nothing left for us to do,” and enter a new, self-aware world of the big city where they can provide education and entertainment to the masses. The film’s internal logic parallels the rebirth of the cinematic fairy tale with extraordinary grace but, unlike its politically sensitive predecessor The Miracle Maker, The End of the Black Morass gave the Artistic Council pause. For historian Georgii Borodin, the council’s relentless editing of the film before and during production demonstrates doctrinaire concerns for socialist realism, but if this was indeed the driving force behind the council’s amendments, it is curious that the final version of the film does not effectively address, much less resolve, the most basic problems that socialist realist principles would raise. A close analysis of the film’s editing phases reveals that though the council may have cloaked their criticism in socialist realist principles (similar to Ivanov’s strategy for the incorporation of urban pop culture into expedient political issues), an altogether different logic runs through the amended version of the film. In one of his first assignments at Soyuzmultfilm after a decade in Armenia following the Stalinist purges, Jewish director Iosif Boyarsky distributed the Artistic Council’s list of amendments to Degtyarev and Snesarev.18 Unlike Degtyarev, a Party member in good standing, and scriptwriter Arkadii Snesarev, a descendant from a priestly family of Don Cossacks and a scion of a highly placed family in Leningrad, Boyarsky’s experience in the Moscow film industry was shaped by institutional antisemitism. His personal experience with antisemitism was rooted in the tragic fate of his father Yaakov Boyarsky (Shimshelevich, 1890–1940), a Belorussian Jew and high-ranking revolutionary who was arrested as an “enemy of the people” and executed in July 1939.19 As the first chairman of the Union of Workers in the Arts (RABIS) in 1929–1935 and the director of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) in 1937–1939, Yaakov Boyarsky persistently faced accusations of censorship (most notably by theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold). Such fingerpointing is not in itself surprising, but what is significant is Iosif Boyarsky’s defense of his father’s censoring role with the justification that his father used his position to elevate the State Jewish Theater.20 Of course, the two claims need not be mutually exclusive, but what is clear is that Iosif Boyarsky, who never followed his father into the Party, considered the promotion of Jewish cultural content a positive activity that justified acts of censorship.21 If Boyarsky’s administrative roles technically put him at the center of the censorship apparatus, many Soyuzmultfilm animators credited Boyarsky for their success in producing films that pushed the boundaries of political content.22 When Boyarsky replaced Degtyarev a few years later as the director of the puppet division in 1962–1979, he remained committed to the work of Jewish artists and facilitated the production of many films by Jewish directors (e.g., 25th—The First Day, Cheburashka, 38 Parrots, and The Mitten). Even later, in his role as dean of the Higher Courses

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for Scriptwriters and Directors at VGIK (1980–2000), Boyarsky fielded approval for many student scenarios bumped up from the in-house Artistic Council. “The flourishing of puppet animation in Soyuzmultfilm was undoubtedly related to the name of Iosif Yakovlevich [Boyarsky],” attested director Yuri Norstein. “He was not a Communist Party member, and thus, was not engaged in all those things. It was thanks to him that most bold and fresh ideas were able to be implemented in the animation studio.”23 An understanding of Boyarsky’s attitude toward his position in the film industry—and the reach of his influence—teases out how the studio’s censoring apparatus was sometimes the very vehicle that embedded Jewish-related content into the cinematic text. Snesarev and Degtyarev sought to revitalize the pre-Stalinist medium of three-dimensional animation through a concomitant modernizing of the Stalinist fairy tale and their impeccable credentials makes them an unlikely pair for ideological criticism. Yet, Boyarsky and other Jewish members of the Artistic Council faced more personal concerns in releasing a film about a population of people assigned to live in an outdated proto-Soviet bog, systematically expelled, left to wander, and forced to undergo reeducation and urbanization.24 Because Snesarev based the character of the lecturer on his uncle, Gleb Snesarev (1910–1989), a respected ethnographer and the former director of the Central Museum of History of Religion and Atheism, and imitated his uncle’s antireligious scholarship on ethnic minorities, the pre-amended film appeared to also reference real ethnic populations who “relied on the notion that God would come” to their aid.25 An urban Jew with Belorussian shtetl roots, Boyarsky could not have failed to pick up on the embedded ethnic themes in Snesarev’s ethnographically-styled “Black Morass” and may likely have interpreted the script as alluding to the Pale of Settlement where four million Jews were confined (and not permitted to live in cities) before their mass urbanization in the early twentieth century. If parallels could be drawn between the film characters and the modernization of Jews of the former Pale, a comparison between the original script and the final film demonstrates that the Artistic Council chaperoned the film into more neutral territory. Once implemented, the Artistic Council’s required amendments effectively defused the negative characterization of the bog-dwellers and softened some of the comparisons between the goblin and the Jewish experience of urbanization that appeared in Snesarev’s original script.26 For example, in a deleted scene depicting the goblin appearing before the village council, the president asks him “How long have you been a ‘goblin’?” The goblin sighs and says, “For two thousand years.” With a knowing nod of his head, the president answers, “It happens.”27 This allusion to the length of the Jewish Diaspora (two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem) makes an equivalency between goblin and Jewish identity. In another example of a

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deleted section of dialogue, the goblin decides to leave the woods because “there is no place in Russia for us!” and two girls sitting nearby overhear him and decide that “it is probably the devil.”28 Furthermore, the Artistic Council’s order to rewrite the “highly controversial foreign elements and speech characterizations” was not so much an issue of socialist realism as a neutralization of potential negative comparisons to real ethnic populations. Even the change in the film’s title from its original Adventures of a Goblin to its amended The End of the Black Morass shifts the focus away from the ethnographic study of superstitious characters to the cinematic treatment of once-magical settings. In the amended title (Konets chernoi topi), the archaic Russian term topi, or morass, suggests an intangible psychological space incongruent with modern life in comparison to the term boloto, which would refer to an actual water-logged place. The new title located the setting firmly in the Russian imagination while, at the same time, embedding a reference to one of the quintessential Jewish towns in the former Pale called “White Church” (Belaya Tserkov) in Russian Shvartze tum’a, or Black Morass, in Yiddish. The dual nature of the title End of the Black Morass, which embeds a Jewish ethnographic perspective within a larger Russian narrative, is emblematic of the final film. With the most obvious allusions to Jews removed from the film, the council softened the sting of the lecturer’s speech which initially made the film seem like a soundand-color remake of revolution-era silent films in which an agent of the socialist enlightenment rescues a village native from his premodern lifestyle. Without direct references to an actual people, the final version of The End of the Black Morass uses the lecturer’s outdated speech as a comic period-piece dialogue. To industry insiders, the film’s use of Gleb Snesarev as the prototype for the lecturer was all the more comical because Gleb Snesarev refused to evacuate the Central Museum of History of Religion and Atheism after the state decided that an animation studio was more politically relevant and reassigned the building to Soyuzmultfilm. Because of Gleb Snesarev’s stubborn denial of the new realities, the two institutions had to share the building for nearly two years from 1945 to 1947, resulting in many daily irritations survived by a prodigious amount of anecdotes. There is an additional layer of irony in locating the state’s decision to replace Gleb Snesarev in the migration of the people the lecturer declares “a remnant of the past.” In a re-creation of this irony within the film’s dramaturgy, the ethnographer delivers his speech on “The Evil Forces in the World of Modern Science” with the face of the goblin amusingly framed in the window of the lecture hall as if to say “We are still here after all” (fig. 4.3). Initially, the council paid lip service to the script’s elision between the fabulous and the “real” as problematic to socialist realism, but, as the final version of the film demonstrates, these amendments were allowed to fall by the wayside. When the council could not edit out the academic references to real ethnic populations or completely defuse the negative connections between the fairy-tale

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characters and real peoples, the council made the goblin’s entry into the urban world of film more concretely reference themsleves (the Moscow film industry). Thus, in the final film, the lecturer’s speech serves as the impetus for the goblin’s reinvention of himself as a subject for the poetic imagination and as a beloved hero of literature, theater, and film. The council ordered the replacement of the contemporary song “Evenings in the Moscow Countryside” in the first part of the film with stock forest sounds, so that the song was introduced only in conjunction with the migration of the fairy-tale characters to the big city.29 The reference to the resettlement of goblins, sprites, and witches to Moscow—where Jews were the largest non-Russian ethnic group—casts the reinvention of shtetldwelling archetypes into urban culture-makers as a historical reality and in a more positive light.30 The deletion of another section of an intermediary script uncovers another important detail into how the censorship of Snesarev’s narrative came to emphasize the cultural capital of the people of the former Black Morass. The kolkhoznik tells the goblin, “I want to make a portrait of you for a contest for amateur artists.” The goblin responds, “How can you do a portrait of a subject that does not exist?,” to which the kolkhoznik answers, “We can’t just throw away a national folk tale.”31 If the script proposed to tell the tale of the eviction of obsolete shtetl dwellers, the final film represented the emancipation of a threatened population and their emergence into the broader Russian and Soviet culture of literature, theater, and film. This perspective mirrors, as Susan Goodman has observed, the historical realities of Jewish acculturation in Russia, which was often led by those Jews who managed to cross from the Pale of Settlement into the Russian theater.32 In the final version of the film, the goblin claims his rightful place in the modern world not as a subject for the objectifying gaze of the kolkhoznik’s art but as an artist in his own right. Once released, the film painted an evocative portrait of a population once assigned to live in darkness and superstition but who left for the enlightened world of literature, theater, and especially film where their ancient traditions and stories would not be denied entry.33 The representation of a once sovereign but no longer compatible topology would have presented a challenge for Boyarsky because, like his father, he vacillated between the antisemitism Jews faced in the new Soviet realities and the acknowledgment that the dismantling of the Pale of Settlement resulted in Jewish emancipation.34 Although the film anticipates the end of the Black Morass, the film’s Jewish cameraman Michael Kaminetsky (1924–2006) nonetheless created nostalgic scenes reminiscent of the Old World (Staraia zhizn’), and puppet designer Vladimir Danilevich (1924–2001) crafted the characters as literally rooted in the typology of their land by assembling them from twigs, bark, and other wooden parts.35 Like the Brumbergs’ sensitive treatment of the migration and acculturation themes in their films, The End of the Black Morass handles the

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migration from the once-autonomous morass to the new cultural sphere of the big city with empathy. With a heavy heart, the goblin gently chuckles and repeats the apprehensive refrain of the song “Evenings in the Moscow Countryside”: “It is difficult to express, and not to express, what is in my heart.” It might appear reductionist to suggest that once the Artistic Council had its way, the film could have just as aptly been called The End of the Pale: Modernizing Jews in the Borderlands, but the parallels between the Jewish experience of migration and reinvention in the Russian Empire and the fairy-tale characters in the film are striking. The links between actual ethnic minorities and the fairytale characters are all the more glaring in light of the self-referential overtones in the plot to the ideological ethnography of the Central Museum of History of Religion and Atheism that Soyuzmultfilm replaced after the Second World War. Urbanism was not simply a cinematographic trope for Jewish-born directors and editors, but a contemporary reality that the vast majority of Soviet Jews shared after the Second World War.36 In shaping an urban setting in film, animators and editors of Jewish descent reflected their own feelings toward the largest nonSlavic ethnic minority in cities such as Kiev, Leningrad, Odessa, and especially Moscow.37

Story of a Crime The first Soviet animation to concretely set its action in a contemporary Moscowlike city was Fyodor Khitruk’s directorial debut Story of a Crime (1962). Khitruk recruited the young artist Sergei Alimov (b. 1938), whose education during the more liberal years of Khrushchev’s “thaw” exposed him to Western art and theory, to design a fully developed city with a full range of emotional characteristics. The film follows the kind-hearted accountant Vasily Vasilevich Mamin, who is driven, after a series of draining daily commutes and a sleepless night, to bludgeon to death a couple of noisy women gossiping in the courtyard of his urban high-rise apartment building (fig. 4.5).38 Immediately following the public exposure of the crime, a policeman enters the scene and orders the outraged crowd to “stop,” which in Russian also means to “stand up,” and the two dead women obediently rise. The policeman asks the angry mob to judiciously consider the twenty-four hours that led up to the crime. After a reverse-shot sequence, the story begins anew and the policeman recounts the events that led up to Mamin’s crime. The film’s stylistic nonconformity has led critics to celebrate it as a subversion of officialdom. The film’s reliance on “documentary” modes such as photography, film clips, street posters, and newspaper clippings in tandem with disjunctive stylized drawings of crowds, multi-storey buildings, and construction sites

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Fig. 4.5 Women Gossiping. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

has provoked interpretations that the film is a critique on Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and the narcissistic lifestyles that such living conditions engender. According to animation critic Clare Kitson, the film’s perceived take on the individual’s plight in urban society “caused great indignation among party loyalists, who saw it as a criticism of government housing policy.”39 In her analysis of the cultural context of Soviet animation, Laura Pontieri emphasizes the film’s censure of urban life and its lack of decorum and argues that every character in the film “represents a particular violation of the kul’turnost’,” the cultural norms meant to curb the “uncultured masses” that poured into Moscow during the era of Stalinist industrialization.40 Mamin’s propriety and collective consciousness clash with his neighbors’ uncouth drinking and idle gossiping. Following this line of thought, historian David MacFadyen interprets the pulse of the film’s stop-motion as “blocks of nervousness” and the film’s “nervous bodies, overworked cars, and other overly mobile forms” as a pathological reaction to the overstimulated city.41 Interpreting the urban cacophony as a powerful metaphor of the collective itself, animation critic Sergei Asenin sympathizes with the beleaguered Mamin, whom he describes as “entrenched in his own apartment by unrestrained, intense rudeness.”42 The interpretation of Khitruk’s film as critical of modern urban life and sympathetic to Mamin’s homicidal frustrations loses sight of the demographic

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realities of many of Soyuzmultfilm’s animators who, like Khitruk, were internal migrants who left their small Jewish towns with the hope of a better life in the capital city. Khitruk was born in the rural town of Tver in 1917 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father from the Byelorussian town of Vitebsk, moved to the city of Bezhetsk to escape the famine, and then to Moscow in 1923 with the large wave of immigrants from the countryside.43 Although Khitruk was an exceptionally cultivated individual, he belonged to the migrants, often described as “uncultured masses,” who poured into Moscow in the 1920s. Like the living conditions on display in Story of a Crime, Khitruk and his family lived in an urban resettlement project in the middle of Moscow that housed multinational families together. Although life was difficult in those circumstances, Soviet citizens, especially those who worked in the creative fields, clamored for Moscow residency permits (propuska). Mikhail Volpin, the scriptwriter for Story of a Crime, received permission to move back to Moscow only after the Brumberg sisters invited him to work on their film Fedya Zaitsev, and never wanted to live anywhere else. The Jewish animators at the studio were generally not nostalgic for the pastoral life, the eldest among them having lived through the confinement and liberation of the Pale of Settlement and many of the younger generation having lived through the mass exterminations of their Jewish neighborhoods during the Second World War. In choosing to animate the Soviet city, Khitruk and others were entering non-neutral territory, reflecting the social geography of the modern metropolis in which they lived and worked as Jews, Party members, artists, and intellectuals. Rather than projecting “nervousness” or “pathology” as MacFadyen posits, Khitruk’s and Alimov’s application of nontraditional styles and kaleidoscopic colors expresses the excitement of the period when Soviet artists embraced their newfound freedoms. The complex, moody city is the only truly dynamic element in the film and, by comparison, Mamin is a comparatively underdeveloped character. While the vibrant night life drowns out Mamin’s voice, the film’s use of flattened aerial panoramas, surface drawings, split screens, extreme angles, skewed perspectives, and discordant styles for the setting rendered the animator more “visible” than he had been since the 1920s (fig. 4.6). In the technocratic rhythm of the crowded city through which the relatively nondescript Mamin must find his way, the animator is on full view. In a nod to animation history, the city outside Mamin’s office blooms in a montage of drawings and architectural photographs to the rhythm of his photo-realistic counting machine, an invention of Soyuzmultfilm’s first studio head Aleksander Ptushko (fig. 4.7).44 In another scene, members of Mamin’s family in a black-and-white photograph turn into hinged flat paper cut-outs reminiscent of early Soviet animation. These references to animation incorporate the unprecedented style of Story of a Crime within the industry’s larger history of technical and aesthetic innovation.

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Fig. 4.6 (left) City View. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still. Fig. 4.7 (right) Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

The experiences of Mamin, a character whose gestures and vocalizations are limited to reflexive nonverbal sounds, are channeled through the active city. During the day, Mamin’s path through orderly crowds at the monumental metro station and long escalator queues revels in the perpetual pulse of modern city life, and Mamin goes about his day with punctilious respect for traffic lights, women, small children, the elderly, and his job (figs. 4.8–4.9). The mood changes in the evening when, much to Mamin’s chagrin, this same orderly city transforms into an urban playground for boisterous adults. Mamin’s apartment is initially defined by the same indexical relationship to real space through a traditional camera view of an apartment window as seen from the outside.

Fig. 4.8 (left) Moscow Metro. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still. Fig. 4.9 (right) Street Scene with Film Poster. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

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Fig. 4.10 Onegin on Television. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

With an air of conditioned movements, Mamin waters his window plants, reads the paper, and brews his tea. When Mamin steps inside his flat, however, the camera perspective switches to project a psychological space in the apartment interior as the room becomes an elastic square whose walls contort and change color in relationship to an uncontrolled barrage of external sounds. Mamin’s physical world flexes in rhythm to the noises of modern urban life. When Mamin turns on the television, a live-action clip of a boxing match appears on the screen followed by a film adaption of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (fig. 4.10). When the actress opens her mouth to sing the libretto, the neighbor’s rock and roll music drowns out her lines. The physical space narrows from the panoramic views in Mamin’s city-wide commute to a claustrophobic cave inside the single apartment building. In the aftermath of the crime, the policeman tallies the indignities that Mamin faces in the city. Yet, the film glorifies what it purports to critique. Late-night dinner parties, salty dried fish and drinks, contemporary fashions and hairstyles, modern music and dance, and youthful attractions menace Mamin but add another layer of drama to the second half of the film (fig. 4.11). After a parting kiss between two young lovers, the infatuation endures through the coded clanging on the building’s heating pipes. Although the clanging interrupts Mamin’s sleep and he paces back and forth in front of the pipes like a fuddy-duddy, the clanging is rhythmically catchy to the viewer. Even in the early hours of the next morning, the city’s citizenry has not rested. The cleaning women who finally send

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Fig. 4.11 Late-Night Party Upstairs. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

Mamin over the edge are busy exchanging a bit of gossip as they sweep the tidy courtyard and water the beautiful communal gardens. To read the city as the negative force behind Mamin’s actions neglects the film’s representation of cause and effect. It is Mamin, and not the neighbors, who lost his moorings in the modern city. The film depicts Mamin’s psychological break as a result of his disconnectedness with his city. Initially, Mamin’s character is enmeshed with the city’s character: during the day the city blooms to the beat of his counting machine. At night, Mamin’s isolation is palpable as his space grows distinct from and intruded upon by the passionate social energy of his neighbors. As the light of dawn approaches, Mamin is a lonely misanthrope living with his cat and whose only family is represented by an antiquated family photograph (and even they momentarily dance to the modern music reverberating from the upstairs neighbors).45 Story of a Crime emphasizes the relationship between the city’s motions and Mamin’s soul, and when the two become disconnected, Mamin commits the most extreme social crime in the light of day. Unlike the alienating city popular in films such as Iosif Kheifits’s The Rumiantsev Affair (1955), where crime either goes unnoticed or is brutally punished without due justice, in Khitruk’s city, Mamin’s cold-blooded murder results in a transparent process of law and order. The policeman may beseech his audience to take Mamin’s circumstances into account before passing judgment, but the sense of collective responsibility does not end with their contribution to the city’s night life. There is an equal notion of collective experience in bringing Mamin’s crime

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to justice as well. If the neighbors drove Mamin to insanity, the film mobilizes all the previously noisy neighbors who witnessed the crime from their apartment windows to immediately come out to the courtyard in defense of justice (fig. 4.12). The same people who stayed up late to party the night before come together in the morning to enforce law and order, and a policeman promotes a vision of social stability through shared responsibility.46 Khitruk originally submitted his editorial script under the title Silence, which would have been the alternative to the city’s bustling rhythm and would have been the greater tragedy in the context of the murder of neighbors for alleged crimes.47 To read Khitruk’s film as a raging indictment against the urban noise of the uncultured masses overlooks the film’s treatment of sound in the manner of the visual symphonies of filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann in the 1920s, which synchronized real city sounds to the action on the screen.48 The film is not the story of one man’s struggle against a police state in which ordinary citizens retreat in silence if for no other reason than it is the policeman who recounts the contributing factors of Mamin’s emotional breakdown in the manner of a defense attorney. The policeman-cum-narrator initially casts an imposing figure against a backdrop of looming apartment buildings in anticipation of a swift display of Soviet law enforcement, but then thwarts viewer expectations

Fig. 4.12 Morning. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film still.

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by calmly addressing the angry mob with a request for measured consideration of the facts (figs. 4.13–4.15). It is also relevant that Khitruk cast Zinovii Gerdt (born Zalman Efraimovich Khrapinovich, 1916–1996) for the voice-over of the policeman, because Gerdt’s distinctive voice was commonly assumed to betray his Jewish background. In her memoir on Soviet documentary filmmaking, director Marina Goldovskaya recounted that when she sought approval for her film Deniska-Denis (1976), Deputy Minister Georgii Mamedov complained, “That voice of Gerdt’s—everyone’s sick of it. It’s disgusting, with that provincial talk.” According to Goldovskaya, Mamedov’s insult referred to the fact that Gerdt “was Jewish, born in Odessa, and his accent revealed his background.”49 Goldovskaya’s anecdote about the perception of Gerdt as possessing a distinctly “Jewish voice” is her way of explicating her own experience with institutional antisemitism, but Gerdt was actually not from the cosmopolitan city of Odessa but from a Jewish village in the Vitebsk Province that was very close to Khitruk’s birthplace.50 As Goldovskaya pointed out, Gerdt was often typecast in Jewish and other ethnic roles in the many theatrical, cinematic, and live puppetry roles in which he played ethnic characters. The casting of Gerdt in the role of the policeman-narrator flies in the face of what Jewish writer Osip Mandelstam described as the quintessentially non-Jewish “police aesthetics” (politseiskaia estetika) of his childhood: “Police aesthetics may well have been proper to some son of a corps commander with the appropriate family traditions, but it was completely out of keeping with the kitchen fumes of a middle-class apartment, with father’s study, heavy with the odor of leathers, kidskin and calfskin, or with Jewish conversations about business.”51

Figs. 4.13, 4.14, 4.15 Police. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia, 1962). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Film stills.

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Khitruk’s casting of a recognizable Jewish actor often typecast in Jewish roles as the authoritarian policeman further characterizes the city not only as a place where Jews can live inside the social order but where they can participate in the protection and enforcement of the law. Whereas Mamin’s consternation is caused by and directed toward the noisy city, Khitruk’s use of the law ultimately enforces the cacophony of social life over the genteel desire for silence. Many of the characters who annoy Mamin are dark-skinned, or more farcically, green-skinned, and they are relishing city life, even if at the expense of Mamin, the light-skinned bureaucrat. If the city is too noisy for the Tchaikovsky-loving Mamin, it is an absolute hoot for its more varied, love-happy, and musical residents with their bohemian decor and salted fish. Even after the policeman ends his recap of the day in the life of Mamin, the urban noisemakers get the last “word” when they drop packaging off a truck in a ruckus to the hyperbolic astonishment of the crowd. As in the case of The End of the Black Morass, focusing on top-down censorship in Story of a Crime leads to key misunderstandings. If Khitruk’s directorial debut film caused the administrators of the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) any consternation, it was short-lived. The film was awarded first prize at the All-Union Film Festival (the Soviet Union’s most important film festival) and collected awards at international film festivals in San Francisco, Oberhausen, and Venice. Veteran director Ivan Ivanov-Vano listed the film by name as an example of a successful film in his memorandum on behalf of the CC to improve artistic cinema in the early 1960s.52 According to animation director Yuri Norstein, “The film Story of a Crime lit us all up. It opened another door, another sun flooded over us. I think that everything that came before it was trash.”53 In his memoirs, auteur director Aleksander Tatarsky (1950–2007) also singled out Story of a Crime as formative to his decision to become an animator.54 Ivanov’s, Degtyarev’s, and Khitruk’s respective twists on the fairy-tale genre opened a door for other animators and, within a decade, the modern city and its urban types had become a mainstay of Soviet animation, such as in Roman Kachanov’s Mother (1972), Lev Atamanov’s The Bench (1967), and the series Kid and Karlson (1968–1970) and Just You Wait! (1969–1993).

Just You Wait! With the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution approaching, the studio’s pragmatic director Mikhail Valkov sought out writers to submit scripts that would commemorate a half-century of Soviet progress and demonstrate the utility of the studio under his leadership. According to one animator, Valkov begged for “something like the Reds riding horses toward the Whites. Something! We need

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something!”55 Boris Efimov’s Prophets and Lessons (1967), Yuri Norstein and Arkadii Turin’s 25th—The First Day (1968), and Vitold Bordzilovsky’s The Eaglet (1968) exhibited Soviet military glory and scientific progress, but three Jewish humorists—Felix Kamov-Kandel, Aleksander Kurliandsky, and Arkadii Khait—proposed a slapstick series that followed a cigarette-smoking hippie Wolf as he chased a clever Hare through Moscow. Under the title Just You Wait! (based on one of their earlier segments for a cine-magazine), the comic trio envisioned a series that would hold up a mirror to the nation not as it hoped to be remembered in history but as it was lived on the street in the present.56 Each episode would incorporate familiar aspects of Soviet urban culture through the latest fashions, contemporary art trends, scenes of national festivities, celebrity sightings, and references to current events. No one was particularly confident about the proposal, not Goskino, not Valkov, not the director Vyacheslav Kotenochkin, and not even the writers who had dreamed up the project. The designer Sviatozar Rusakov recalled disagreement about the execution of the script; the three writers “wanted Meyerhold, they wanted the Moscow Art Theater” (artistic stylization) but the film crew ultimately “pursued the ‘road of Stanislavsky’” (naturalism).57 Instead of an artistically theatrical film or even a nostalgically historic film that would have satisfied the studio director, Just You Wait! employed rounded-edged drawings and relied on physical gags of anthropomorphized animals to sustain the plot. Although the series is comparable in style and content to Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner (beginning in 1949), the development of the series’ urban setting distinguishes the project from earlier Soviet animations. The series shaped a “situated reading” in the way that each episode incorporated concrete references to Moscow landmarks as well as local markers such as urban street signs and Elvis impersonators. These local visuals are further tied to Soviet reality through the use of iconic voice-over actors and a contemporary soundtrack that included the Hungarian melody “Vizisi” (Water Skis), as recorded by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian folk songs, techno-music by the band Digital Emotion, and pop hits by singers Alla Pugachova, Muslim Magomayev, James Last, and others.58 To the surprise of the studio director who was looking for patriotic gravitas and the writers who wanted something more artistic, the series became an instant hit and released sixteen episodes before 1989, the longest-running and most popular series in Soviet animation history.59 It is interesting to consider how three Jewish writers, each with strong ties to Jewish causes and one who would become an infamous refusenik within a few years, handled the representation of the Soviet city. If shtetl dwellers first entered the animated city in The Black Morass, and a multicultural population staked their place in the city in Story of a Crime, Wolf’s and Hare’s perpetual pursuits depended on a more nimble concept of the Soviet city as an unrestricted space in

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which its residents can exist anonymously and move about with ease. Wolf and Hare carry out their never-ending tricks and reprisals in an urban backdrop of ubiquitous cafés, shops, urban parks, street parades, traffic circles, the Moscow Metro, the Moscow stadium during the 1980 Olympics, and Moscow’s Museum to Science and Technology.60 Much of the drama of the chase scenes depends on the cloak of invisibility that the city offers both Wolf and Hare. In one episode, the foreman of a construction site does not question Wolf’s unexplained presence at the worksite and immediately puts him to work. When Wolf disturbs the peace, such as when he kicks over a lid of a garbage can with a satisfying racket, he manages to consistently avoid the attention of seemingly ubiquitous policemen and, when a police car does pass by, Wolf assumes such a deep bow that the gesture can only be interpreted as comically mocking. Wolf and Hare’s free-spirited adventures also depend on their ability to move through the crowded city. The anti-authoritarian Wolf is always driving cars, stealing speedboats, and catching rides on construction vehicles and public transportation throughout the city in his mission to capture the elusive Hare (fig. 4.16). As the series develops, Wolf’s modes of transportation become more and more fantastic, as in Episode 14 when Wolf drives a coal-powered car complete with a chimney, an umbrella for a roof, and a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament for style. It is a clunker of a car and comes undone at inconvenient moments but magically reconstructs from scene to scene. The potential for anonymity and unrestricted freedom of movement enables the antics of Hare and Wolf, but by imbuing the recognizable city in which they lived and worked with a fantastic liberation of movement, the series’ Jewish writers expressed their own dreams of the sort of invisibility that comes with true integration. Wolf and Hare run amok without required permits and, at the same time, without consequence because, unlike Mamin, Wolf will never get his revenge because the city offers Hare the same cover and equally improbable ease of movement.61 Every vignette ends with a frustrated Wolf shaking his fist in the air and promising the world, “Hare, just you wait!” Writer Kamov-Kandel claimed that the three writers took on the series to avoid nationalist propaganda: “We hid behind the wolf and the rabbit. . . . It was a way to earn a living . . . without getting ourselves ‘dirty’ with politics.”62 Instead, the writers saturated the series with what historian David MacFadyen calls “contextually-dependent” material in which viewers imbue representations of everyday life with personal meanings and lived experiences.63 Viewers brought their own perceptions of everyday life to the animated text, and the project crew reveled in repeating various interpretations. In one anecdote, Kamov-Kandel relates how a couple of non-Jewish admirers approached Sviatozar Rusakov to observe that “the wolf is our brother, he is a worker like you and us, and the hare is an intellectual, and no matter how hard we try to catch him, nothing works out for us.”64

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Fig. 4.16 Official Greeting. Just You Wait! (Nu Pogodi!, 1969–1993). Dir. Viacheslav Kote­ nochkin. Film still.

The film crew was always looking for ways to capitalize on the viewer’s knowledge of popular culture for an unstated and otherwise inexplicable punch line. For example, Kotenochkin tried to cast the quasi-underground cult singer Vladimir Vysotsky in the role of Wolf to endear the trouble-making Wolf to his audience. Although Goskino ultimately hired actor Anatoly Papanov instead of Vysotsky, the writers nonetheless inflected the hooligan character of Wolf with the unique style and street slang for which Vysotsky was famous.65 In the first episode, Wolf whistles Vysotsky’s song “Song about a Friend” as a knowing wink to Vysotsky. The joke behind Wolf’s rendition of “Song about a Friend” depends on the knowledge that Vysotsky originally composed the song in honor of mountaineer Leonid Eliseev, who rescued fellow climbers from a steep slope. Wolf nostalgically whistles the heroic song of mountaineering rescue as he climbs up a rope on the steep slope of an apartment building to eat Hare. With popular culture giving meaning to otherwise opaque material, Wolf’s raspy-voiced hare hunt would have triggered Vysotsky’s protest song “Wolf Hunt” (1968), which was enjoying unparalleled popular success at the time of the episode’s release: The wolf hunt is on, the hunt is on! . . . Why, pack leader, answer us, Do we turn toward the shots as if doped, And never try to go beyond the prohibitions? The problem this contextually-dependent comic mode presented for censors is obvious. The Artistic Council cannot very well take issue with underground

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political texts that do not even appear in the episodes and that they are not supposed to officially acknowledge. If, censors were to acknowledge the coexistence of dissident texts in the animated texts, the comic material would make the conversation quickly ridiculous. If we apply the same logic to Vysotsky’s “Wolf Hunt” as to his “Song of a Friend,” the analogy of a wolf hunt would have been comic in light of Wolf’s eternal Hare hunt! If Vysotsky’s wolf hunt raised allusions to the embattled position of the persecuted artist, then Wolf’s aspirations to become a professional ballroom dancer would have rendered that idea comic as well. Director Vyacheslav Kotenochkin sidestepped the periodic concerns the Artistic Council raised on the point of the chain-smoking Wolf by replying that the series was simply meant to be funny.66 Although Just You Wait! managed to avoided censorship in its production and release phases, the scandal that the series attracted post-production demonstrates that as multicultural and risqué representations of the urban setting shifted became more mainstream, the censor’s focus shifted away from the animated content to the people who made the films.67 Soon after he completed the seventh episode, the series’ writer Kamov-Kandel and two other Jewish filmmakers went on a public hunger strike after their applications for immigration to Israel were denied.68 Despite every indication that the series was primarily comic in nature and the soft political subtext was part of the topicality that made the series so relatable to viewers, “the biggest scandal,” recalled the director Kotenochkin, “was when Kamov went to Israel.”69 The popularity of the show made KamovKandel’s case a cause célèbre when Goskino, in reprisal for his public demonstrations, removed his name from the credits of the first seven episodes of Just You Wait!70 According to Kotenochkin, “The show was on the verge of collapsing” and “the whole crew was automatically embroiled as ‘friends of the enemy of the people.’”71 Kamov-Kandel’s story was publicized in the American and Israeli movements to aid Soviet Jewry, and Kamov-Kandel’s name became synonymous with the repression of Soviet Jewish voices and how his open expression of Judaism had damaged his career. Although the censorship of people is far more pernicious than that of content, what is lost in the accounts of Kamov-Kandel’s refusenik story is that during his time at Soyuzmultfilm, Kamov-Kandel smoothly transitioned from military service and into a creative career, created some of the most popular images of the unrestricted and open city in Soviet culture, and wrote for unauthorized, uncensored (samizdat) periodicals such as Evrei v SSSR and Tarbut on the side. Taking Kamov-Kandel’s refusenik story as the end of the analysis neglects the story of his development of Jewish national awareness and creative self-actualization during his time in the institution. It was at Soyuzmultfilm that KamovKandel found a supportive network of like-minded individuals during his initial turn to Zionism, such as his colleagues Michael Lipskerov (b. 1939) and Danill

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Mendelevich (b. 1931), both of whom maintained ties to Kamov-Kandel after his dismissal and eventually immigrated to Israel. A singular focus on censorship may serve to conceal those Jewish artists at Soyuzmultfilm who, like Kamov-Kandel, found fertile soil to express their own visions of freedom in the animated setting. The loaded representation of animated settings is not always dictated from the top, and films such as Story of a Crime and Just You Wait! are better understood within the genre of lyrical ode rather than political satire. Focusing on personal (rather than political) concerns in the analysis of censorship invites a reconsideration of the artist as an agent of the state and the redactor as suppressing artistic expression in the interests of the state. Boyarsky saw himself as protecting Jewish cultural interests and KamovKandel saw himself as avoiding getting his hands dirty with propaganda. Likewise, Arkadii Snesarev proved amenable to rewriting the script in accordance with the Artistic Council’s suggestions, a flexibility that no doubt facilitated his subsequent appointment to the head of the Artistic Council, where Snesarev would become one of the most supportive members of experimental filmmaking. The final version of The End of the Black Morass conformed to studio director S. Kulikov’s desire for anti-superstitious educational content and fulfilled Boyarsky’s desire to reframe the film in ways that would speak to the successful modernization of the “goblin people” and their contribution to Soviet culture. Unfortunately, for the mild-mannered accountant Mamin or the ill-mannered Wolf, Moscow is both the city that never sleeps and where hunted intellectual hares call home.

5 Tropical Russian Bears Cheburashka’s Jewish Roots

W

atching Roman Kachanov’s (1921–1993) series starring an “unknown beast” (neizvestyi-nuke zver’) named Cheburashka was an important marker of childhood in the last two decades of Soviet power. After the popular slapstick series Just You Wait!, the series became the most famous Soviet animated series despite the release of only four episodes over a span of fourteen years: Crocodile Gena (1969); Cheburashka (1971); Shapokliak (1974); and Cheburashka Goes to School (1983). So few episodes and a running time that collectively amounted to just over an hour and ten minutes may seem paltry compared with contemporaneous American series such as the 166 episodes of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones (1960–1966), but cartoons enjoyed a high profile and a long exhibition life in the Soviet Union. Each episode debuted in the new landmark theaters that were built across the nation and were often shown prior to live-action feature films. In the city of Nobosibirsk’s Victory Theater, for example, Cheburashka ran continuously for years on a large external screen overlooking the crowded Lenin Street. By virtue of its debut in the 1960s, the series also enjoyed the still novel experience of national television syndication coinciding with the opening of the children’s television studio Multelefilm in 1968 and the state-sponsored nightly Children’s Hour program that sought children’s programming for national holidays and school vacations. As the characters of the series came to be recognized as national signs of the Soviet childhood, the episodes were adapted for media as diverse as broadcast radio and the theatrical stage, and children memorized and recited the songs in choruses during school assemblies and for events of the communist youth organization known as the Pioneers (fig. 5.1). Neither the hooligan Wolf nor the sanctimonious Hare characters of Just You Wait! could realistically represent the studio as icons of socialism, but the hardworking Cheburashka appealed to Party officials and popular audiences alike. In 1970, the studio adopted Cheburashka for its studio emblem (fig. 5.2). In time, H 120 H

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Fig. 5.1 Cheburashka memorabilia, Moscow, 2014. Photograph by the author.

Cheburashka became the quintessential Soviet pop icon and was extolled for his moral superiority over American film icons, such as the replacement of the roaring lion of the MGM studio emblem with the modest figure of Cheburashka in Efim Gamburg’s film Robbery (1979) (fig. 5.3). Cheburashka’s popularity held steadfast after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; rock bands, nightclubs, school programs, and humanitarian organizations adopted Cheburashka for their company logos, and Cheburashka served as Russia’s national mascot for three different Olympic Games.1 In the past twenty years alone, the series aired 416 times on the major Russian television stations.2 As recently as 2005, public monuments of the series’ characters—Cheburashka, his best friend Crocodile Gena, and the flippant Old Lady Shapoklyak—were installed just outside of Moscow and near the Chinese border in the city of Khabarovsk. Cheburashka and his friends have not only appeared in marble but in body tattoos, graffiti, video spoofs, character costumes, and housewares. More recently, Cheburashka “topped the charts of things cute in Japan” with a computer-animated version of the original series

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Fig. 5.2 (left) Soyuzmultfilm logo, 1970. Fig. 5.3 (right) Robbery . . . (Ograblenie Po . . . , 1979). Dir. Efim Gamberg. Film still.

and a number of spin-off series.3 “In my opinion,” wrote former Soyuzmultfilm director Yuri Norstein, “Cheburashka is comparable to the appearance of Mickey Mouse.”4 The transmedia nature of the series and Cheburashka’s extra-cinematographic cult status speaks to how post-Soviet viewers understand their own history, but Cheburashka’s longevity has obscured how the series’ Jewish creators expressed far more personal material in their creation of Cheburashka and his world. Though the series’ creators are well known for their achievements in children’s Soviet animation, the multifaceted material of the Cheburashka series also belongs to the history of Soviet Jewish self-representation. This chapter demonstrates that the project team behind the Cheburashka series, robust in Jewish artists from various departments at the studio, laced writer Edouard Uspensky’s (b. 1937) description of Cheburashka as an “unknown beast” with their own identity issues.

The Project Team As recent copyright disputes over Cheburashka demonstrate, those who contributed to the series saw their work as self-representative (fig. 5.4).5 The creative team for the Cheburashka series was made up almost entirely of Jews, including the director Roman Kachanov and the puppet maker Leonid Shvartsman (b. 1920), composers Vladimir Shainsky (b. 1925) and Mikhail Ziv (1921–1994), cameraman Aleksander Zhukovsky (1933–1999), cameraman Teodor Bunimovich (1908–2001), operator Iosif Golomb (1920–2005), animator Yuri Norstein (b. 1941), and puppet maker Semyon Etlis (1928–1984).6 Rethinking the Cheburashka series in the context of a group of filmmakers whose creative careers

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Fig. 5.4 Leonid Shvartsman and his puppets (1974). Photo Vladimir Rodionov. RIA Novosti.

were shaped by their Jewish identities (particularly their experience in the Second World War as Jews) provides a more accurate view on the possibilities for Jewish self-expression in the late 1960s and 1970s rather than analysis of the films alone. Although there is no single type of Soyuzmultfilm animator, the series’ director Roman Kachanov typifies the classic refugee background of many of the Jewish men that he drew into the project. Kachanov was born in a poor neighborhood in Smolensk, a modern city with a developed Jewish community. Kachanov’s father was a cobbler, one of the more profitable artisan professions, and his mother was a homemaker who died when he was only eleven years old.7 Kachanov attended a local art school during his youth, pursued a stint in boxing (possibly in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist Movement) followed by a more practical course in transportation engineering. After completing his formal education, Kachanov joined the Air Force, but a near-fatal accident in 1940 ended his active service. While he was serving as a parachute instructor behind enemy lines, Kachanov’s father and only sister were murdered point blank at a mass execution site near Smolensk as Jews.8 The German occupation laid waste to the entire city of Smolensk, leaving Kachanov both orphaned and homeless. Like other veterans after the war whose injuries rendered their prewar skill sets obsolete, Kachanov was also unemployed. Kachanov enrolled in the poorly attended two-year training program at Soyuzmultfilm and secured stable work at the studio only by virtue of the sponsorship of more senior directors such as

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Aleksander Ivanov and Jewish directors Dmitrii Babichenko (1901–1991) and Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Sources abound on Kachanov’s high standing in the social fabric of both Moscow’s film institute VGIK, where he served as dean of animation beginning in 1959, and at Soyuzmultfilm where he worked on more than sixty films during the five decades of his career, yet Kachanov never received the Stalin or Lenin prizes nor secured the country’s highest title “Honored Artist of the USSR.”9 Kachanov’s collaboration with Leonid Shvartsman began in the early 1950s, when they worked together on The Scarlet Flower (1952), and continued for the rest of Kachanov’s career. Shvartsman’s career path bears similarities to Kachanov’s. Shvartsman grew up in a Yiddish-speaking, religious family in the Belorussian city of Old Minsk. His father worked as an accountant at the local brick factory but died prematurely when Shvartsman was thirteen years old. His maternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States in 1924, which left the fatherless Shvartsman family financially destitute and the young Shvarts­man in the care of his older siblings. After a parochial elementary education that ended prematurely due to Shvartsman’s interest in communist youth movements, he attended a former gymnasium that had been converted into a public school. In 1935, he attended a newly opened local art school, where he studied drawing with his friend and future Soyuzmultfilm colleague Lev Milchin. After graduation, Shvartsman and Milchin both moved to Leningrad in the hopes of pursuing artistic careers, but the Academy of Fine Arts never acknowledged their applications and the pair was forced to complete their studies in a preparatory program in the nearby Leningrad Art School. Shvartsman’s mother and nephew starved to death in the German Siege of Leningrad and, as Shvartsman recalls, not “a single one of my peers summoned that spring ever returned from the battlefields.”10 Those relatives and neighbors who remained in the Jewish ghetto established in Minsk, including Milchin’s entire family, were killed in mass execution sites in the early years of the war.11 Without parents or siblings, homeless, and denied a career in the fine arts, Shvartsman, like other Jewish aspiring artists, sought out more marginal corners of the creative world. Like Kachanov, Shvartsman applied to the film institute VGIK in 1945 and, upon graduating in 1951, secured entry into the burgeoning Soyuzmultfilm through an invitation from animation director Lev Atamanov and attained steady work through the sponsorship of the Jewish Brumberg sisters who made it their business to shelter struggling Jewish artists. Shvartsman remained at Soyuzmultfilm his entire career, is credited with more than seventy films, many of which received a host of international awards but, like Kachanov, never received the national Stalin or Lenin prizes and received the title People’s Artist of Russia only at the age of eighty-two, in the post-Soviet era. To what degree Kachanov’s and Shvartsman’s status as Jews affected the

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trajectories of their careers is largely a matter of speculation, but significant perspective can be gleaned from their characterization of Cheburashka’s status as an unknown beast and the myriad social, educational, and professional rejections that they make the poor creature endure. We also know that Kachanov recruited like-minded Jewish veterans, who professionally and personally engaged in Soviet Jewish life and culture, to work on the film. Kachanov recruited Teodor Bunimovich, a photojournalist who recorded many frontline documentaries of Nazi atrocities in Belarus, as his cameraman. Kacharnov recruited Iosif Golomb, who also worked at the front lines as a ranked naval cameraman, as his operator. Like Kachanov and Shvartsman, both Bunimovich and Golomb hailed from traditional Jewish families and witnessed the atrocities of war firsthand. If the Cheburashka series has gone down in Russian history as the most quintessential example of Soviet children’s media, Kachanov, Shvartsman, Bunimovich, Golomb, and other Jewish members of the crew meaningfully sifted Soviet popular culture through a highly personal sieve that drew upon their experience of life as members of an “unknown species.”

Creating Soviet Jewish Symbols: Orange Passports and Heavy Suitcases The biography of the writer Edouard Uspensky is very different from that of Kachanov and Shvartsman. He grew up on the outskirts of Moscow with familial ties to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CPSU), which helped him transition to a writing career after a lackluster stint in engineering. Uspensky wrote the Cheburashka story in the standard “reeducation” format, a type of tale in which labor transforms conflict and character. Kachanov, who shares the scriptwriting credit on the series, rewrote key aspects of Uspensky’s story in ways that satirized the very form of the reeducation narrative. The vetted conservatism of Uspensky’s script allowed the film crew to work without raising flags with the buttoned-down studio head Mikhail Valkov, the studio’s in-house redactors, and even the post-production censoring bodies of Goskino.12 Thus, Uspensky’s socialist stories provided cover to the Jewish artists who recognized themselves in Cheburashka’s outcast status and saw an opportunity not only to champion the lovable underdog but to expose the hypocrisies that subject Cheburashka to public humiliation and official rejection by the state and its institutions. The first two of the four episodes focus primarily on Cheburashka’s status as a persona non grata, even as he pursues an ideologically correct, productive life in the Soviet workforce. In his original book, Uspensky identifies the main character of his story as “a very funny animal that lived in a dense tropical forest,” and Kachanov and Shvartsman maintained this sociogeographical characterization

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Figs. 5.5, 5.6 The Arrival of the Orange Bear. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film stills.

by having Cheburashka arrive at a greengrocer’s street stand in a wooden crate of oranges imported from an unidentified tropical country (fig. 5.5).13 Upon discovering the odd creature among his inventory, the astonished greengrocer checks the sales receipt and reads in a heavily accented English, “o-ran-jes” (fig. 5.6). Cheburashka’s mysterious origins provide one of the central intrigues of the series. Many years after the dissolution of the communist bloc, Uspensky cited famous refusenik Felix Kamov-Kandel (b. 1932) as his inspiration for Cheburashka, after Kamov-Kandel described Uspensky’s niece as a “cheburashka,” a diminutive noun from the Old Russian verb “to fall down.”14 By identifying Cheburashka with a famous refusenik, Uspensky laid claim over his rights to Cheburashka with the loaded comparison to Kamov-Kandel’s denial of his creative rights after applying for immigration. Whatever Uspensky’s motivations, however, the word usage makes sense in the context of the series: in the first episode, the creature is so numb from his cramped conditions in the wooden crate that he repeatedly tumbles over. This interpretation of falling down also supports historian Sergei Petrov’s assertion that the Cheburashka character stems from the iconic Russian roly-poly doll (nevaliashka), which always manages to right itself no matter how many times it has been pushed over.15 Over the years, Cheburashka has come to symbolize persistence in the face of adversity linguistically (from the Old Russian), visually (from the roly-poly doll), and anecdotally (in copyright debates). Given the explicit and implicit discourse around Cheburashka’s roots, it is easy to see how Cheburashka’s dramaturgical persecution reflects aspects of the Soviet Jewish experience both in the films and in the ancillary media surrounding the series.16 Uspensky’s belated backstory does not really elucidate anything about the

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internal elements within the animated episodes, whereas the series itself embeds a number of readable signs suggestive of Cheburashka’s Jewish identity. These hints are dropped at the outset of the first episode when Cheburashka appears in a cramped orange crate. Oranges, according to Israel studies scholar Michal Oren, were “the ultimate symbol of Zionism—representing establishment of roots, Jewish labor and technological advance in contrast to Arab ignorance.”17 Oranges were Israel’s largest and most commercially visible export after the country’s establishment in 1948, and the Soviet Union began to import Jaffa oranges as early as 1952. In a 1958 interview for the French newspaper Figaro, Khrushchev described the Soviet Union’s precarious relationship with Israel through the Soviet import of oranges: “All we buy from Israel are a few oranges. And we can make do without them.”18 In his memoir My World as a Jew, humanitarian Israel Goldstein wrote that when he was on a tour of Jewish life behind the Iron Curtain, he was told that “Jaffa orange juice was the most popular and widely recommended brand imported by Poland.”19 Although Goldstein’s may have overstated the realities of the Polish juice market, his anecdote nonetheless demonstrates the imagined Eastern European connection between oranges and Israel.

Fig. 5.7 Postcard issued by the Citrus Marketing Board of Israel, 1960s. In the collection of the author.

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Beginning in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the newly established Citrus Marketing Board of Israel launched a massive advertising campaign aimed at its international markets in an effort to tie oranges to the “Jaffa” label (including one commercial by former Soyuzmultfilm animator Alexandre Alexeïeff).20 In the late 1960s, when the first Cheburashka episode debuted, 35 million wooden crates, which looked identical to the one portrayed in the film, bore the label “Jaffa Oranges—Made in Israel.” After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Citrus Marketing Board of Israel, the postcard company Palphot, and the domestic doll-making industry issued dozens of posters, postcards, and dolls depicting oranges with the Jaffa label for international distribution (fig. 5.7).21 In one typical postcard published after the 1967 Six-Day War, two Israeli national costume dolls sit among a slew of bright oranges in the same fashion as Cheburashka did when he first appeared in the Soviet Union among a bounty of tropical oranges. Cheburashka’s association with oranges hints at his unknown roots, an idea that would have resonated with Cheburashka’s puppet maker Leonid Shvartsman, who changed his own name to Israel after Israel’s astounding victory in the Six-Day War.22 Alexandra Sviridova, one of Shvartsman’s colleagues at Soyuzmultfilm, described Shvartsman as “one of those Jews who didn’t hide behind another nationality. He always inserted himself into his films in a variety of ways that you wouldn’t always recognize until he finally represented himself naturally as a skipper with a pipe in one of his films. This is an act of fearlessness,” explained Sviridova, “an act that screams: ‘This is I.’ This goes both ways—he’s showing the communists that he is not afraid and he’s showing the Jews that it is possible to be proud. If it was safer to remain invisible, Shvartsman was flipping them the bird in his pocket (figu v karmane) with his loaded characters and his plots. The whole country may not have known, but we knew.”23 While the Jewish nationalist awareness of the series’ creators no doubt informed Cheburashka’s transnational character, Cheburashka in no Zionist, at least not in the American sense of the term. He certainly harbors no desire to leave the Soviet Union and return to his native land. Rather, his identification with oranges renders him out of place and communicates his questionable status. In delivering this line of thought with wide-eyed wonder, the film evokes sympathy for Cheburashka’s impossible position. As a strange creature who wants nothing more than to live a productive Soviet life, Cheburashka’s identification with oranges (read “Zionist”) raises the absurdities that Jewish Soviet ideologues faced in the 1960s. Despite the conventional xenophobic treatment of foreigners in Soviet cinema of the period, Kachanov and Shvartsman succeeded in making the illegal stowaway a sympathetic foreigner by virtue of the absurd constellation of rules governing his status.24 Our sympathy is aroused by the absolutely desperate and downright pitiful situation that the anxious creature finds himself.

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The greengrocer is baffled by the appearance of this Cheburashka—part Russian bear and part imported tropical fruit—and takes him to the likeliest institution that could find him a place: the city zoo. The greengrocer gives the zoo guard a piece of the orange crate’s packaging in lieu of a passport (fig. 5.8). The idea that a piece of foreign commercial cardboard could replace a Soviet-issued passport was meant to elicit a laugh, but the official declaration of “orange” for a homeless and ethnically ambiguous character would have struck a more somber chord for people whose internal passports included their national identification as “Jew.” In the scene at the zoo, the guard returns with both Cheburashka and the orange document under his arm and reports that the zoological experts rejected his entry to the zoo on “scientific” grounds. “No, this will not pass,” says the zoo guard in reference to the unprecedented orange passport. “He cannot be classified in the current scientific system. There is nowhere to place him.” Like his creators, Cheburashka has no known kin and nowhere to call home and is forced to traverse the Soviet city with its complicated set of restrictions in search of residency and work. Scholars have made a variety of interpretations of whom or what Cheburashka represents in the immediate context of the shifting realities of Soviet childhood

Fig. 5.8 Orange Passport. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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in the late 1960s. In her study on Russian children’s films, Birgit Beumers interprets the character of Cheburashka as symbolizing “the child’s isolation in the modern world,” a motif that artist Sergei Kuznetsov sees as addressing the new demographics of single-family homes and the first generation of divorcees.25 When film critic Sergei Asenin described the first two episodes in which Cheburashka appeared, he also saw the child’s perspective.26 Indeed, the animated series parts from Uspensky’s stories in the characterization of Cheburashka as a childlike creature. Shvartsman revised Uspensky’s literary description of “a very funny animal” with an anthropomorphized body, upright posture, and disproportionally enlarged eyes and ears. The puppet’s disproportional body rendered his clumsy movements more characteristic of a toddler, and the actress Klara Rumyanova’s honeyed voice-over enhanced the childlike sweetness of the character. The interpretation of Cheburashka as a do-good child allows, at least initially, his declarations of socialist values to be taken at face value. Yet, as childhood studies scholars Catriona Kelly and Alla Sal’nikova have pointed out, the use of the child idiom is not synonymous with the representation of children.27 The uninhibited and immature child narrator only heightens the ontological disparity between Cheburashka’s lyrical optimism and the harsh realities that ethnic minorities faced in the Soviet labor force. The child in Cheburashka is a cinematic trope that fosters a satirical representation of the world that Cheburashka encounters. “They shouldn’t laugh on screen,” Kachanov was known for saying. “They should laugh in the auditorium.”28 The application of the emotional attribute of vulnerability allowed the filmmakers to ironically evoke the continuous danger of falling prey to duplicitous “adults,” without having to portray these social gatekeepers directly, such as the zoo experts in the first episode and the school officials in the final episode.29 The Cheburashka puppet was all eyes and all ears—physically and intellectually—taking in all the nuances of “adult” dialogue and reacting with overstated childlike innocence. Cheburashka presents all the naïveté and idealism of childhood in his desire to find a suitable home and job despite his questionable roots, but his exaggerated role as a wide-eyed toddler provokes both anxiety and skepticism on the part of adult viewers who understand that the correlation between productivity and place in society is far more complicated. It is through his exaggerated naïveté that Cheburashka exposes the moral corruption and the intellectual inflexibility of the adults with whom he comes into contact, a strategy used by Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg in their film Great Troubles (1961).30 In subsequent years, the alleged innocence of Cheburashka would inspire many popular anecdotes, known as “Cheburdotami,” of Cheburashka as an ironic poster child for a peace-loving nation. These spoofs often gave him facial piercings and counter-culture tattoos, an alcoholic streak, smoking pot, and toting a gun.31

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It is not the broad realities of children of divorce or alienated children of modern life that inform Cheburashka’s character, but Kachanov’s and Shvartsman’s orphaned Jewish childhoods. In deploying the Soviet language of childhood, the film’s Jewish creators add a more specific sociohistorical resonance to Cheburashka’s desire and failure to belong. For Kachanov and Shvartsman, the barring of a homeless tropical bear at a national institution and his homeless wandering reflected their own experiences of displacement. Kachanov was born right after the First World War in Smolensk, and the deluge of Hasidic Jews seeking refuge aggravated the local authorities, who posted signs at the railroad stations informing the refugees that “there are absolutely no free apartments or rooms in Smolensk!”32 Shvartsman also experienced firsthand the question of place in the ghettoization of the Jewish population of Minsk, where his entire neighborhood was isolated, regulated, and wiped out. At the same time, the film’s focus on residency also played out in the contemporary climate of heightened Jewish concerns over Soviet national policy that undermined ethnic minorities living outside their homelands, severely restricted Jewish residency in the country, and aggravated the issue of immigration. In giving voice to their post-Holocaust sensibilities through Cheburashka, the filmmakers turned the Soviet reeducation narrative on its head. Art historian Sergei Oushakine has argued that the “merry little heroes” of children’s animation were “liminal,” reflecting the ambivalent Soviet culture characterized by nonworking taxonomies.33 Although this interpretation may very well be the takeaway for post-Soviet viewers, at the time of Cheburashka’s creation, it was those very real taxonomies that created the conditions for the ghettoization and murder of Kachanov’s and Shvartsman’s families and friends, for the barring of careers in the fine arts, and for the extra restriction on Jews for residency and travel permits. In light of the personal backgrounds of the film’s creative team, the zoo’s coded rejection of Cheburashka, with its muted echoes of racial classification, moves past pure literary fiction. After Cheburashka is rejected from the zoo, the fruit salesman takes his ward to a shrewd storekeeper, who assigns Cheburashka the task of sitting in a store window pushing a spin-top to attract customers. Cheburashka again expresses enthusiasm to fulfill his duty to work, but when he asks where he could live, the storekeeper points to a city telephone booth and says “Live? Hmm . . . well, this will be, as they say, your . . .” and with both hands making the A-OK gesture, “home.” Outside of making phone calls, public telephone booths were considered unsavory places to loiter, and associated with teenagers and alcoholics who used them for sexual liaisons and drug use.34 Cheburashka takes a long look at the telephone booth and acquiesces with a sardonic “Umm . . . hmm.” Immediately following Cheburashka’s expression of existential angst, the film

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Fig. 5.9 Zoo Employee. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

turns to Crocodile Gena, who “works” at the zoo from which Cheburashka has so recently been barred (fig. 5.9). Film historian Sergei Asenin’s grouping of Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka as championing collectivism together makes sense in the light of their mutual feelings of social ostracism, but the comparison fails to account for differences in their respective states. After all, Crocodile Gena is an insider within the spatial dynamics of the zoo while Cheburashka cannot find a place at all.35 Crocodile Gena has a steady and well-placed job to bathe in the sun at the zoo, and the sign on his enclosure also indicates that “feeding and touching is permitted.” Crocodile Gena works as himself, an “African” crocodile in a spacious installation complete with a tree and a pond. Crocodile Gena, whose name, species, and origins are clearly identified by a conspicuous sign that hangs over his head, can leave the confines of the zoo at the end of his workday. It was Crocodile Gena’s all-too-simple job that drew Kachanov to the project: “Can you imagine,” Kachanov is said to have repeated on numerous occasions at the studio, “a crocodile who works at the zoo as a crocodile!”36 Crocodile Gena has an identifying honorific “Crocodile” before his proper name, which parallels the title “Comrade” given to individuals in their places of employment. In a recent poster series inspired by the Cheburashka films, artist Alexei Kuznetsov goes so far as to portray Crocodile Gena as a KGB agent in an investigation cell with

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torture implements waiting for Cheburashka to arrive for questioning.37 Unlike the rootless and homeless Cheburashka, the fifty-year-old crocodile was born in the early years of the revolution and has a respectable red jacket and bowtie to show for it. His reading material is limited to dry Soviet reference materials—newspapers, dictionaries, textbooks, and train schedules—and he doles out advice at every opportunity. Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka may even both be Jewish within the symbol system of the series but just as Cheburashka’s tropical country of origin speaks to his “Zionism,” Crocodile Gena’s African roots speak to his status as a member of the ancient Hebrew race. Crocodile Gena is a sell-out: an old Party Jew who walks around with a pipe dangling from his mouth but without a pair of pants to show for all his compromises. At the end of his workday, Crocodile Gena is lonely, playing both sides of a misprinted chess board and interacting with a reflective tea kettle. Dispirited with his lot, Crocodile Gena decides to take action and advertise for friends with carefully composed signs that he posts all over town (fig. 5.10). A schoolgirl named Galya meets a lost puppy named Tobik outside of a yellow building where they see the notice, and they decide to answer the advertisement together. On the other side of town, Cheburashka also sees the advertisement, which Crocodile Gena plastered on the outside of his makeshift home in the telephone booth. Cheburashka rushes across town to answer the call for friendship.

Fig. 5.10 Personal Advertisement. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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By the time Cheburashka arrives at Crocodile Gena’s door, Galya is already busy tidying up the apartment. Galya looks up from her chores and innocently asks Cheburashka, “Who are you?” Cheburashka sadly answers, “I . . . I don’t know.” Galya ventures, “Are you by any chance a little bear?” Galya’s hopeful suggestion coaxes Cheburashka to identify with Russianness, at least on a symbolic level, as the bear is a widespread symbol for Russia just as the orange is a popular symbol for Israel. The drama of the moment is stretched out as Cheburashka’s ears slowly droop downward and he quietly repeats, “Maybe. I don’t know.” The ever-resourceful Crocodile Gena attempts to look Cheburashka up in a thick dictionary, and in a line composed by Kachanov that has no source in Uspensky’s original tale, Crocodile Gena reads aloud, “Chai? Chemodan? Cheburaki? Cheboksary?” (Tea? Suitcase? Dumplings? [City of] Cheboksary?). Where Crocodile Gena may have found Cheburashka” he instead finds Slavic ethnic foods and local Russian place names along with the discordant term “suitcase,” a loaded term that throws doubt on Cheburashka’s national loyalties by signaling the theme of immigration. Suitcases make an appearance in every episode of the series, and are a perpetual burden to Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka. In the very first scene of the first episode, the man who wants to buy the oranges is carrying a suitcase signaling his unsavory character, confirmed by his distrust of the grocer’s scale and swiping of an orange. In the third episode (1974), Cheburashka’s and Crocodile Gena’s suitcases again become a problem for the two when they are evicted from a train headed to a seaside resort. Cheburashka asks Crocodile Gena, “Gena, is it very difficult to carry our things?” After a melancholy pause, Crocodile Gena answers, “How should I explain it to you?” In a discordant deep voice that conveys a broader existential state, Crocodile Gena sighs and concludes, “How should I put it? Very difficult.” Overwhelmed by his burden, Crocodile Gena eventually abandons the suitcase, which is soon stolen by the series’ antagonist, the troublesome Old Lady Shapoklyak. In the fourth episode (1983), Crocodile Gena is again encumbered by his suitcases when Cheburashka fails to meet him at the airport and, after he finds a porter and cab to transport his suitcases, Crocodile Gena finds the elevator under repair and must carry his cargo up the stairs by himself. This is the way Alice Kogan, a great-niece of Felix Kamov-Kandel, appropriated the character of Cheburashka for her organization’s logo of Cheburashka as “a symbol of the generation of Russian Jewish immigrants who came to the United States as children.”38 Artist Tanya Levina envisioned Cheburashka wearing a blue Jewish head covering (kippa), holding a suitcase labeled “Rome,” and waving an American flag (fig. 5.11).39 Given the negative association with suitcases throughout the series, the exclusion of Cheburashka and the inclusion of suitcase in the Russian dictionary in the first episode are meaningful. “Strange,” observes Crocodile Gena after he

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Fig. 5.11 Tanya Levina, The Cheburashka Project, 2013. Courtesy of www.cheburashka project.com.

looks up from his dictionary. “No Cheburashkas in here.” Once again undefinable, Cheburashka is a scientific oddity who has no place in the zoo and no place in the Russian language. Sadly, Cheburashka makes the only reasonable conclusion: “So it means you will not be my friends.” If, as cultural historian David MacFadyen posits, Soviet filmmakers in the late 1960s sought to create meaning through contextual clues, then the state policies toward Jews at the time give a particular sociopolitical coloring to Cheburashka’s predicament.

Setting the Story: Jewish Space and the Moscow Zoo Cheburashka’s adventures take place in a Moscow-like city recognizable through a wealth of urban details that include large government buildings, freestanding phone booths, construction sites, a railway station, and rows of low-rise residential buildings typical of 1960s Moscow. The streets of the animated city abound with Soviet types such as street musicians, policemen, street sweepers, store clerks, and a brigade of Pioneers. Even the film credits appear in standard urban style: a worker mechanically slaps the names of the film crew on the side of a city building in the form of movie poster advertisements. With

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this abundance of concrete clues identifying the setting as a Moscow-like urban space, adult audiences may have recognized that the animators tweaked Uspensky’s generic “city zoo” with details that referenced the famed Moscow Zoo, the first zoological garden in Russia and the first zoo to be nationalized after the revolution. For example, Kachanov and Shvartsman designed the front entrance of their zoo with aesthetic recourse to the actual zoo on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street with its signature artificially planted gardens, adjacent high-rise buildings, simple wooden structures, surrounding intricate wood trim, and decorative ironwork. For viewers familiar with the landmark spatial layout of the Moscow Zoo, Crocodile Gena’s parklike enclosure would be recognizable as the Moscow Zoo’s “New Territory” that in the 1920s replaced cages with more picturesque enclosures such as Goat Hill and Animal’s Island in an effort to preserve genetic diversity through natural habitats (fig. 5.12). The legendary Moscow Zoo and its progressive gardens offered a ready-made set of historic sociopolitical associations for Cheburashka’s identity crisis. More than a children’s urban respite, the Moscow Zoo was a scientific organization dedicated to proving the basic tenets of Soviet socialist society through nature. In 1933, the zoo opened a comingling-of-species exhibition to demonstrate that the supposedly instinctual patterns of aggression between species could be altered with rigorous training that began at birth. The project was meant to prove the theories of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), who argued that only certain traits were genetically (or vertically) passed down while others were environmentally (or horizontally) inherited. The exhibition, hailed by the media as

Fig. 5.12 Drawing from the flyleaf of the book Moi vospitanniki by V. Chaplina (1937).

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the first of its kind, reported that young lions, bears, and wolves were peacefully playing with lambs, kids, suckling pigs, and rabbits.40 In 1936, Vera Chaplina, a member of the Young Biologists’ Circle of the Moscow Zoo (CYBZ) who described herself as someone who “believed that young animals of all different species could be trained to live side by side peaceably,” attracted media attention for raising a lion cub abandoned by his mother in the Moscow Zoo in her communal apartment.41 Chaplina named the lion Kinuli, which in Russian means “abandoned” and she brought a dog named Perry to live and care for the lion cub (fig. 5.13): “I am afraid I cannot claim a brilliant inspiration,” Chaplina once wrote. “It was really because of a housing shortage. In Moscow, you know, we must all live closely together because there are not yet enough apartments to go ’round. That was also true in the zoo in 1933, when I began my experiments.”42 In her memoir recounting the experience, Chaplina emphasizes the lion’s and dog’s attachment to one another and to the diverse population of people who lived in the kommunalka, especially a schoolgirl named Galya. Chaplina sketches a portrait of Galya as a child who was willing to side with the abandoned Kinuli despite her own grandmother’s campaign to evict the lion from their communal apartment building. Kinuli became something of a media sensation, a symbol of Soviet socialism and the communal lifestyle that would ideally replace the outdated family structure with more progressive communal structures. Kinuli appeared on television and in newspapers, and Chaplina went on the radio to speak about the unusual friendship between the lion and the dog.43 A variety of media outlets regularly published or

Fig. 5.13 Vera Chaplina, the lion Kinuli, and the dog Perry in Vera Chaplina’s communal apartment (1930s), from her book Kinuli (1965).

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displayed photographs of Kinuli, together with the beautiful Chaplina, her handsome husband, her smiling children, her helpful neighbors and, of course, Perry the dog. In sum, the media framed Chaplina’s experiments in the Moscow Zoo’s “New Territory” into a powerful symbol of the synthesis between Soviet-style genetics and social theory. Chaplina eventually left zoological work to become a full-time writer and traveler, maintaining her interest in the relationship between society and nature in her literary work. In the 1950s, after several crippling bouts of encephalitis that left her paralyzed for almost a year, Chaplina simplified her lifestyle and brought her zoo animal stories to Soyuzmultfilm in the form of scripts for such films as Forest Travelers (1951) and In the Thicket (1954). Chaplina’s intermittent work at Soyuzmultfilm makes it highly probable that Kachanov and Shvartsman were not only familiar with her well-known stories but knew Chaplina personally.44 For the Cheburashka series, Kachanov adopted key elements of Chaplina’s much-beloved stories of an abandoned lion, a faithful dog, and a schoolgirl named Galya in his own version of the animated characters of a friendless lion, a faithful dog, and a schoolgirl named Galya. With meaningful revisions, Kachanov restaged Chaplina’s Kinuli story in a plot that leads to the lion, the dog, and the schoolgirl Galya to find their way to Crocodile Gena’s home and immediately befriend each other despite their differences (fig. 5.14). If

Fig. 5.14 The Lion and the Dog. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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Chaplina aimed to secure nature’s endorsement of the Soviet socialist principle of “friendship of the peoples” (druzhby narodov), Kachanov’s appropriation and revision of Chaplina’s story and the Moscow Zoo setting suggested quite the reverse: the failure of society to endorse the “friendship of the peoples.” Kachanov waged his critique on the “friendship of the peoples” by populating his animated Soviet capital with Jewish auto-representations. Outside the complex character of Cheburashka—whom Shvartsman took to sketching with his own signature skipper’s beard—the most direct self-portrait appears in his puppet of the long-haired intellectual lion. Although it would be difficult to prove that Shvartsman consciously intended to model the Cheburashka puppet or the lion puppet on himself, it is not difficult to see a resemblance between the lion character and Shvartsman’s long facial features and swept-back hairstyle of his younger self (fig. 5.15).45 The modeling of the lion should be considered alongside Kachanov’s and Shvartsman’s reputation for creating satirical characters with humanistic traits, often resembling their own relatives, coworkers, friends, and public figures. In one interview, Kachanov stated, “It seemed to me that characters need to be familiar so that the viewer could see himself in them and imagine himself as one of them. That is why we carefully worked out all the details of the environment. Each character was based on a prototype of a real person nearby. It helps us a great deal with our work.”46 Shvartsman recalled

Fig. 5.15 Lev Chander. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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that his characterization of Old Lady Shapoklyak and Crocodile Gena as remnants of the “abolished classes” coincided with his memories of the transition period after the Bolshevik Revolution that comprised his Jewish childhood in Minsk. “That was the time closest to me in many respects. I could visualize my parents and their friends. In the twenties such old ladies could still be seen in the streets. Am I not myself a link bridging the two epochs?”47 If Shvartsman modeled the traditionally clad lion on himself, the lion’s baritone voice and austere demeanor projected a specifically Jewish self, one reminiscent of the bygone world of Yiddish culture in his native Minsk exemplified by the writer Sholem Aleichem (whose broad nose, jaw-length hair, and penchant for formal dress Shvartsman used for his lion puppet). In a series of seven paintings under the title Old Minsk—Memories of Childhood, Shvartsman portrays two views of the exterior and interior of his childhood synagogue, with the interior vignette showing himself as a small boy standing beside his father before a monumental Torah ark (aron kodesh) crowned with the traditional Jewish motif of two lions.48 In her description of the Old Minsk series, Shvartsman’s niece Yana Larionova wrote that “all these are not merely ‘images from the past,’ but rather a deep and integral experience that has grown vertically up, as life went on, tying together different temporal levels.”49 The redactor for the Cheburashka series, Natalia Abramova (b. 1937), reiterated that Shvartsman always seemed to live “in the air of Old Minsk.”50 It may also be relevant to the analysis of Shvartsman’s use of self-representation in his design of the lion puppet that Shvartsman’s birth name was “Leib,” Yiddish for “Lion.” Knowledge of Yiddish is relevant to the lion’s signification not only as an Old World Jewish type, but as a coded critique of the Soviet Jewish condition in the principle of the “friendship of the peoples.” Kachanov and Shvartsman, as well as some of the other members of the crew, knew Yiddish and were raised in Yiddish-speaking homes. Shvartsman went to a Yiddish-speaking school in Minsk, a thriving center of Yiddish language and culture, and he recalled that “the majority of the class was Jews . . . except the janitor’s son Alyosha who knew Yiddish even better than me.”51 The series’ operator, the Lithuanian Iosif Golomb, not only spoke a fluent Yiddish, but his father was an avid collector of Hasidic music and contributed much to the Yiddish musical lexicon.52 The crew’s intimate knowledge of Yiddish allowed them to insert coded comic elements in the first episode that help knowing viewers navigate the social dynamics between the characters. With a slight formal bow, the lion formally introduces himself as “Lev Chander,” a non-Slavic name with a distinctly Yiddish-sounding cadence and a close approximation of the Yiddish phrase “Leib Shander” (Yiddish for “Lion’s Shame”).53 The lion’s baritone voice and musical accompaniment of a melancholic violin melody further evokes a bygone Yiddish type.54 If Chaplina named her lion “Abandoned” (Kinuli) to emphasize how societal love

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could surpass even that of a biological mother, Shvartsman’s lion evoked the “Lion’s Shame” (Leib Shander) in society’s abandonment of the Jewish people in the Soviet dissolution of the Old World and the friendless state in which the Jewish people found themselves in the aftermath. These various examples demonstrate that Kachanov represented various aspects of Jewish life and identity through his treatment of setting not as a discrete feature but as a formative element in the emotional and moral development of his characters and their plots. Just as Cheburashka’s tropical origins, the designation of the Moscow Zoo, and the transplantation of Old Minsk to Modern Moscow are significant symbolic forces within the series, Crocodile Gena’s African roots signify yet another aspect of Jewish identity. Africa was long associated with the ancient Hebrew race, but after the Zionist proposal in 1903 to begin Jewish settlement in East Africa (the Russian delegates walked out in protest), the connection between Jews and Africa became more generalized.55 Many early Soviet stop-motion films were rendered in what contemporary critics called “Negrism,” which historian Hillel Kazovsky points out “was identified not only with the African race, but also seemed to be an essential feature of Semitic and particularly Jewish, appearance.”56 The first feature animation produced in the Soviet Union, Senka the African (1927), follows a boy who falls asleep after visiting the Moscow zoological gardens and meets the uncivilized Crocodile Krokodilovich, whose behavior requires the boy to force the crocodile to flee to “Africa.” Based on a 1916 verse tale by Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969) and rewritten for the screen by Jewish artist Daniel Cherkes, Krokodilovich is introduced much the same way Uspensky described Crocodile Gena: “There lived / a Crocodile. / He walked on the streets, / Smoked cigars, / Spoke Turkish.”57 Upon hearing of the zoo adventures of Crocodile Krokodilovich, the African animals travel to the urban zoo and are trained by the boy and granted the opportunity to reside in the zoo. Defined by his uncivilized foreignness, Crocodile Krokodilovich’s relationship to Africa and to the urban zoo are used to convey lessons about unsuitable behavior and the need for institutional life. Senka the African was followed by other ethnographically stylized animations that used the African landscape as settings for outsider characters, such as Hot in Africa (1936), the Ukrainian animation Murzilka in Africa (1934), and Fyodor Khitruk’s Boniface’s Vacation (1965). The strong identification of African characters as Semitic quasi-outsiders who are nonetheless capable of entry into the Moscow Zoo informs the character of Crocodile Gena as an Old Bolshevik Jew. Crocodile Gena is not only identified by a huge sign over his head at the zoo, but in a myriad of other clues in his home. In the storyboards for Crocodile Gena’s apartment, Shvartsman included several details that do not make it into the final scenes, including a non-indigenous cactus plant and Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian painting The King’s Wife (1896)

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on the wall. Art historians have long seen Gauguin’s brown-skinned nude reclining among scattered tropical fruit as an image of eroticized colonialism, and Shvartsman’s placement of it in his design of Crocodile Gena’s apartment creates a signifier of “Negrism” to set the stage for Crocodile Gena’s home as a gathering place for “tropical” people.58 Soon after the Cheburashka series debuted, other Jewish writers set their folktales and anecdotes in the Moscow Zoo and made reference to Africa in ways that played off the theories of Lysenkoism and the theme of “friendship of the peoples.” Yuri Yakovlev (born Hovkin), a Jewish writer who wrote a Holocaustthemed animated script for Soyuzmultfilm the same year, wrote the fairy tale Lev Left Home (Lev ushol iz doma, 1971) about a lion named Lev who was born in the Moscow Zoo and who tries to run away to Africa.59 Lev the Lion is perfectly satisfied with his life in the Moscow Zoo until a young visitor comes to Lev’s cage and shows him an exotic portrait of free lions napping in a jungle in Africa (fig. 5.16).60 “Lev, my friend,” says the boy, “I know where your native homeland is, where your brothers live. If you want, I’ll help you get to that place. In Africa. I will be sorry to see you go, but everyone, whether person or lion should live in their own homeland.”61 Intrigued by the image of lions roaming and napping where they please, Lev decides to run away in search of these hitherto unknown “relatives” in Africa. In Soviet advertisements for Lev Leaves Home, his character is always shown with a suitcase, which harkens back to Kachanov’s inclusion of suitcase in the dictionary where Cheburashka should have appeared. The bicultural character of Lev is reinforced with his bilingualism: initially he speaks

Fig. 5.16 Relatives in Africa. Y. Zalzman, illustration in Yuri Yakovlev, Lev ushol iz doma (1971). In the collection of the author.

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with his parents in Russian but on the way to the airport he breaks out in song in “the language of the lions.”62 Lev expresses his heartfelt intention to meet these distant relatives and testifies that he will be satisfied with simply seeing these lions roam free in Africa, but the zookeeper predicts that once he gets to Africa, he will forget that he was born in the Moscow Zoo, where “he grew up in my arms and where I fed him milk from the horn.”63 In his analysis of the film, Russian-Israeli writer Arie Olmany observes that the theme of immigration would not be taken literally by Soviet children who would consider moving to a different country as fantastical as “flying to the moon,” and only Jewish families could realistically think that they might one day leave the country under the legal loophole of family “reunification.”64 Although the vast majority of Soviet Jews emigrated only in the last years of Gorbachev’s government, more than a quarter of a million Jews emigrated during the run of the four Cheburashka episodes. In Michael Drob’s recent documentary Stateless (2014), former immigrants describe the haphazard letter-writing search for individuals in Israel who could pose as relatives and who could send formal “invitations” to Soviet Jews to fulfill the state requirement for exit visa applications. At the end of the film Lev Leaves Home, Lev is faced with a one-way ticket from “Moscow to Africa” and has no way to return to his native home in Moscow. With all of the complex issues at stake and the development of Lev’s self-awareness, the story moves toward what appears to be an inevitable denouement only to conclude abruptly (and possibly farcically). In what could only have been an unsatisfying ending for viewers rooting for the runaway lion to attain his most heartfelt wish to see his estranged relatives in “Africa,” Lev delivers a staid patriotic speech: “I’m used to the lights of Moscow, to the noise of machines, the smell of gasoline. My Africa is here! And you, the hippos and giraffes of the Moscow Zoo, are my siblings.”65 Viewers in Cheburashka’s predicament may very well have responded in Cheburashka’s sardonic “Umm . . . hmm. . . .” If the urban gardens at the Moscow Zoo encompassed all the hopes of social reform in the 1930s, the same setting in the late 1960s would cynically address the decline of Soviet biological theories underpinning the philosophy of dialectical materialism.66 The zoo grew exponentially in the late 1960s, immediately preceding the creation of Cheburashka, and according to urban legend the Moscow Zoo repeated its 1933 experiment during a period of the Soviet “peace offensive,” again featuring a lion and lamb living together in peace.67 The story became a source of well-known jokes that appeared in American Cold War–era memoirs and speeches. In an essay on the press and national security, then-director of National Security Programs at the Nixon Center, Peter Rodman, recorded a common version of the joke: “One day the Moscow Zoo advertised that it had a lion and a lamb living together in the same cage. People came from

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miles around to see this miracle. Sure enough, there they were—a lion and a lamb, lying side by side in the same cage, apparently in a state of perfect bliss. Someone asked the zookeeper how this miracle had been accomplished. The zookeeper answered, ‘No problem. Of course, we have to put a new lamb in several times a day.’”68 In setting Cheburashka’s rejection at the site of the historic Moscow Zoo, where animals were trained to live together as a demonstration of Soviet socialization, Kachanov and Shvartsman developed their own version of the cynical joke. Cheburashka’s official rejection from the zoo implies that despite the supposed socialist commitment to genetic diversity and national policies promoting friendship of the peoples, some “tropical” characters were simply not allowed to cross the threshold. Toward the end of his career, Kachanov took the joke to its logical conclusion in his science fiction animation The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981). Set in the year 2181, a Soviet space program launches an expedition to find rare animals for the Moscow Zoo and the scientists find a host of odd alien types that they consider suitable for life in the Moscow Zoo.

Organizing Jews: Pioneers and Activists Keeping in mind the tragic histories of Kachanov’s Smolensk, Shvartsman’s Minsk, and Golomb’s Vilna before they sought refuge in Soyuzmultfilm and befriended each other, we might reexamine the end of the scene that features the dog Tobik, an approximation of the Yiddish word Tovik (“the Good One”) and the lion Lev Chander, an approximation of the Yiddish phrase “Leib Shander” (“Lion’s Shame”). As they walk off together into the romantically dimming light to the lion’s nostalgic humming, Crocodile Gena observes in the grave voice of a philosopher: “Do you know how many people live in our town who are lonely like Tobik and Chander? And, no one sympathizes with them when they are sad.” Unlike the non-sympathizers evoked in Crocodile Gena’s sad speech, Cheburashka and Galya pledge to build a “House of Friends” for the city’s alienated and misplaced people. The process is riddled with complications wrought by the Old Lady Shapoklyak, who calls Cheburashka “an uneducated chimp,” an ethnic pejorative; unleashes her pet rat Larissa to intimidate the group; and throws watermelon rinds at Cheburashka and his friends at the construction site. After several false starts, the novice builders succeed in raising a picturesque little house for the city’s disenfranchised people, albeit out of children’s blocks and without mortar. But the film does not allow this righteous act on behalf of the Leib Shanders and Toviks of the world to pass without another bitter, historically inflected note. After the inauguration of the community center, a repository of the integrationist wishes of its alienated members, Crocodile Gena announces his intention to

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make a “list” of everyone who has come to the House of Friends. His announcement touches upon what the underground (samizdat) journal Khronika called “lists” compiled by ever-present KGB agents at Jewish gathering places. At least in popular perception, these notorious lists restricted Jews from freely visiting synagogues out of fear of retribution at their place of employment.69 An offended female giraffe that has come to the gathering reacts abrasively, “For what reason are you making a list? We have already befriended each other!” Cheburashka, who appears not to grasp the underlying meaning behind the giraffe’s outburst, asks, “So what? We did it all for nothing?” Galya immediately responds, “No, it was us who brought everyone together!” Crocodile Gena seemingly abandons the idea of making a list (although he does not actually state his intentions) because the group collectively agrees that the exercise would be redundant, as they had already become friends during the construction process (fig. 5.17). At the impromptu ribbon-cutting ceremony, Cheburashka gives a short speech that has become an iconic Soviet idiom: “We were building, building, and we built. Hurrah!” When Galya suggests that Cheburashka live in the finished house, Cheburashka selflessly shakes his head at the thought of living alone in the House of Friends and proposes instead that they could donate the house to the local kindergarten where he could work as a toy, once again

Fig. 5.17 Lists. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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embodying the Soviet ideal to establish identity through useful contribution to the social fabric. After he expresses his wish to find employment in the kindergarten, Cheburashka is gripped by another wave of anxiety and sadly whispers: “If they’ll have me because, after all, it’s not clear who I am.” Crocodile Gena immediately jumps to Cheburashka’s defense, passionately proclaiming, “Oh, it is clear who you are!” Crocodile Gena’s statement suggests that character rather than category is the only true measure of identity, but despite his confident assertion, neither he nor any other members of the group further illuminate the nature of Cheburashka’s ambiguous identity. The rest of the cast, including the list-making and red-jacket-wearing Crocodile Gena, publicly pledge their commitment to Cheburashka to speak up for the eager creature with the officials at the kindergarten. The extraordinary round of promises that rings through the group to name Cheburashka as a comrade and publicly declare Cheburashka’s rightful place in society is a biting parody of the history of informing on neighbors and colleagues. Both Kachanov and Shvartsman experienced this chapter of Soviet purging during the notorious anticosmopolitan campaigns of 1948–1950, when Soyuzmultfilm held public forums calling for names in a campaign that Jewish studio director Iosif Boyarsky called “downsizing based mainly on ethnicity.”70 At the end of the film, everyone seems to learn their lesson. Even the formerly mischievous Old Lady Shapoklyak contributes a conciliatory flower pot to the House of Friends and gives Cheburashka a note of remorse: “I will not do it anymore.” Crocodile Gena closes the scene with his tragic “Birthday Song,” sung in honor of his (and the country’s) fiftieth birthday. Jewish composer Vladimir Shainsky (known for his Yiddish-language melodies performed by Jewish music bands known as klezmer troupes) described his tune as “absolutely primitive,” and actor Vasily Livanov hums it in a hoarse voice to the accompaniment of an accordion version of what sounds like a typical klezmer tune.71 Though there is a superficial resolution to the drama of the House of Friendship, there is a note of irony in Crocodile Gena’s birthday song because of its message of unresolved conflicts despite the passage of time. In Crocodile Gena’s klezmer-like image, the episode ends with the affirmation that no one has really learned any lesson at all: half a century after the revolution it is still the strange tropical worker Cheburashka who cannot find his place in the Soviet labor force. Throughout Cheburashka’s urban adventures, Kachanov and Shvartsman create a satirical sketch of a beautiful but bigoted city in which external political and social realities reverberate within the dramaturgy. In the second episode (1971), when Cheburashka first sees a line of Pioneers marching, he says in exaggerated awe: “Pioneers! Authentic Ones!” Every city had a local Pioneer Palace where children participated in extracurricular activities but not all of the Pioneer buildings were the same. Moscow’s Pioneer Palace, opened at the time of

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the first Cheburashka episode, was a microcosm of Moscow’s status as a “closed city.” The magnificent landmark building and cutting-edge programs (including its own children’s puppet theater) were restricted to those with the right social connections. Cheburashka would not have stood a chance. It was socially imperative for Soviet youth to participate in the Pioneer organization, and when Shvartsman recalled his Jewish upbringing, he compared his intellectual disinterest in his religious studies to his emotional draw to the Pioneers: “I fought back: all Soviet children were preparing to enter the Pioneers,” and finally, “The rabbi hit me on the head with a prayer book, slammed the door, and left.”72 Shvartsman channeled the same youthful excitement for the Pioneers into Cheburashka, who begs Crocodile Gena to request membership on their behalf in the Pioneers organization.73 Crocodile Gena shakes his head and definitively responds, “No, Cheburashka, they will not accept us.” With the innocence of an uninitiated child, Cheburashka perseveres and asks if he and Crocodile Gena can join the Pioneers, but they rebuff him as a nonproductive pet: “What? You? In the brigade? No, it is not allowed.” Another child condescendingly suggests: “We could take you into our little petting corner.” The oldest boy straightens the red kerchief that signifies his status as a Pioneer and announces, “And anyway, the Pioneers accept only the very best.” Never one to give up hope, Cheburashka sets out to prove his worthiness of the Pioneers by building a birdhouse (productivity) and mastering the Pioneer march (social membership). He comically fails at both tasks, subtly resisting the expectation to blend into the greater population, but succeeds in contriving a playground for the city’s children and collecting scrap metal to aid the Pioneers in their environmental campaign. The amorphous social code that restricts Cheburashka’s inclusion in the Pioneers extends to all four episodes in which Cheburashka maintains his desire to live and work “as himself” within the collective (fig. 5.18). Even in the last episode, Cheburashka Goes to School (1984), which appeared nearly a decade after the original trilogy, Cheburashka is as persistent about entering school as he was in joining the Pioneers, but Cheburashka never does find a permanent profession or home. Crocodile Gena must travel by airplane to visit Cheburashka in the provinces, where Cheburashka discovers that he is illiterate (he was able to read in earlier episodes when he was still living in the city). In 1984, the year of the episode’s release, Soviet policy again severely restricted Jewish immigration and the official press stigmatized Jewish would-be immigrants for sapping the free Soviet educational system only to devote their years of productive labor to foreign countries. Jewish activists, at the same time, cited the heavy restrictions on Jewish applicants to schools and the limitations for employment for Jewish artists, scientists, and government posts. In a conversation whose meaning depends once again on the contemporaneous

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reality, Cheburashka expresses the hope that after he learns to read Russian and graduates from school, he will be able to work at the zoo with his friends. The wizened Crocodile Gena shakes his head as he had over a decade earlier in the Pioneer episode: “No, Cheburashka, not for anything. It is not permitted for you to work with us.” When Cheburashka innocently asks for further explanation, Crocodile Gena cryptically responds, “Nu, why ‘why’? They’ll eat you up.” In the last two episodes of the series, Cheburashka, Crocodile Gena, and Old Lady Shapoklyak attempt to travel on a sky-blue train across the country, but are repeatedly frustrated by a lack of tickets, heavy luggage, and the lack of official uniforms. When the Pioneer episode was submitted to the Artistic Council, members questioned the social undertones of the film: “What [criteria] is necessary to ‘become ready’ to become a Pioneer?” and “Why was it necessary for Crocodile Gena and ‘an unknown beast to science’ to answer this question?”74 Even after the script attained in-house approval, Jewish Deputy Studio Head Iosif Boyarsky recalled that “it was difficult to get approval for the script from the Ministry of Cinematography. They said to me, ‘How can an animal of unknown origins become a Pioneer?’”75 Although the scene ultimately remained in the final film, the State Committee for Cinematography initially took issue with the personal

Fig. 5.18 Pioneer Brigade. Cheburaska (Episode 2) (1971). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

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ambition and individual resourcefulness of Crocodile Gena and his newfound friends.76 The committee complained that if Cheburashka could collect more scrap metal than the Pioneers then his act would render the Pioneer organization redundant; Kachanov resolved the perceived imbalance by granting a few more “good deeds” to the Pioneers.77 After the episode’s release, one reviewer wryly criticized the idea that Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka could “simply do good deeds” as a backdoor into the Pioneer organization.78 Boyarsky and others have retold these anecdotes of official censorship to characterize the Ministry as vacuous and paranoid, but in reality both the Artistic Council and the Ministry of Cinematography picked up on precisely the point that the creators were trying to drive home vis-à-vis their own position in Soviet culture as Jewish artists. It is not surprising that the people charged with the ideological material of filmmaking would single out this particular issue of access and restriction to state institutions. Kachanov had piled on so many iconic Soviet signs and quotations that it may be difficult to clearly identify how the series parodied the irrationalities of Soviet life. After all, the basic plotlines in which Cheburashka showcases his morally uncompromising positions are squarely on the “correct” side of Soviet ethos: he wins over the Pioneers with hard work, teaches environmental responsibility to factory workers, and encourages construction workers to work more efficiently so that they can finish in time for the opening of school. The issues that Cheburashka takes on were hardly antithetical to state policies at the time. Since the real issue underlying the theme of access was the ethnic identity of the restricted classes, non-Jewish members of the Artistic Council struggled to identify what felt so discordant about Cheburashka’s childlike demeanor, while the Jewish members remained tight lipped. In one of the Artistic Council meetings convened to discuss the first episode, the Jewish Council members appear to have been initially reluctant to voice a concrete opinion and allowed others to initiate the discussion. Veteran Jewish artist Boris Efimov (1900–2008) praised the sketches of the puppets with the bland opinion that once the puppets were made they would presumably “not be worse.” When Valkov asked the “chief” for an opinion, Iosif Boyarsky simply responded, “Noncommittal.” Valkov pressed the issue, asking Boyarsky again, “But what is your personal opinion?” Boyarsky answered with one word: “Normal.”79 If Valentina Brumberg offered any initial opinion, it was not recorded. It was the “patriarch of Soviet animation,” IvanovVano, who presented the first real criticism. He questioned the meaning of the grave seriousness of the lion character and suggested that he might wear brighter colors to appeal more to young audiences. He also questioned the “luxury” of Crocodile Gena’s apartment and then, finally, posed the central question: “Why is it a House of Friendship?”80 Ivanov-Vano took no issue with Cheburashka’s social-minded causes per se, but rather his individualistic methods of going about

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them coupled with his association with friendless folks and their strange ways. In a heated exchange, Kachanov responded to Ivanov-Vano’s criticism: “I don’t think Ivan Petrovich read the script. We have the impression that you wanted to scold us a bit, but this is not correct. I think the lion is about my age and it does not make sense for him to wear bright clothes. You may have noticed the crocodile does not wear pants, but that is acceptable because it is not imperative that everyone conform to a single style. I think some freedom is allowed here.”81 Both Ivanov-Vano and Kachanov were talking around the heart of the loaded representations of the lion and the House of Friendship, and after the matter was raised, however obliquely, Jewish Council members Valentina Brumberg and Efimov attempted to defend the inclusion of these elements. “Although I respect Ivan Petrovich,” stated Efimov delicately, “I disagree with him. You are attacking the artistic perspective of the world as seen by the artist. The House of Friendship is very good.”82 Because no one was articulating the issues straightforwardly, and Ivanov-Vano may have felt that he was a lone voice in a meeting with a formidable Jewish representation, Ivanov-Vano threw down the gauntlet, if somewhat unceremoniously: I didn’t want to scold anyone. I could have said the same thing that V. C. Brumberg said and everything would have been very good and pleasant, but I honestly expressed all my doubts as an artist. They may be right or wrong but I was not going to scold anyone. I understand that this is a puppet film, but I have an unsatisfied feeling in the world that these characters live in. My doubts may be wrong but this is no big deal. I simply noticed that there is a reality like the kettle that you bring from Leningrad and the chess board with five rows and I question the combination of these elements. Why create such a reality as a tea kettle and a theoretical chess board? I thought it had a conscious purpose and it turns out to be random. The crocodile’s room seemed a little spontaneous to me and this is not only my impression.83 Poor Ivanov-Vano was right on the button. After all, Cheburashka meets his friends and forms a small community through personal advertisements written in longhand in the privacy of Crocodile Gena’s home, word of mouth, apartment meetings, and grassroots organizations, which mirrored the much-criticized way that Jews organized themselves and created communities beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s (fig. 5.19). Galya meets Tobik “on the street” outside of a yellow building with a neoclassical façade that echoes the architecture of the Moscow Choral Synagogue (figs. 5.20–5.21). The street outside the Moscow Choral Synagogue, Arkhipova Street, was a

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Fig. 5.19 Handwritten Advertisement. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1971). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still.

meeting place for Jews. Some scholars cite the spontaneous demonstrations held outside the synagogue in October 1948, when Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union as the impetus for the first repressive policies toward Jewish national consciousness. Refuseniks regularly demonstrated on the stairs in front of the synagogue for the right to immigrate.84 Moscow’s chief rabbi maintained a learning program in the corner of the Choral Synagogue throughout the Khrushchev years, but those who sought to connect with organized Jewish culture were better served by informal operations on the street and in people’s homes. In light of these realities, it is no surprise that one Goskino editor disparagingly referred to Crocodile Gena and his friends as “house friends.”85 Even Cheburashka’s decision to build a community center came from a spontaneous grass-roots effort and the inspector sent to the site must be brought up to date. One reviewer questioned the spirit of individualism in the film, calling attention to the “hijacking” of a compressor without a permit, building a community center, and organizing support without official orders or any documentation.86 Symbol-systems expressed in the idiom of children’s puppet animation allowed the show’s Jewish creators to double semiotic systems in ways that enabled them to sublimate their own ethnic backgrounds into their puppets, and to express personal testimony within the preexisting language of Soviet culture. The loneliness of Cheburashka and his friends appealed to children, but the specificity

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Fig. 5.20 (left) Waiting for Friends. Crocodile Gena (Episode 1) (1969). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Film still. Fig. 5.21 (right) Photograph of Moscow Choral Synagogue, 2014. Photograph by the author.

of his loneliness as stemming from his questionable ethnic roots, his coupling of a foreign tropical orange and a native brown bear, and his threatening individualism reflected important aspects of the lives of his creators. Cheburashka’s persona as an unthreatening and loveable orange-bear draws the viewer to empathize with his desire to be included in Soviet life and face the reality that Cheburashka’s world will never be a place where his dreams come true. Cheburashka’s predicament reflects the Soviet social geography in which every creature must have a designated place but that prohibits certain “tropical” people. These auto-representations have been lost as they found wide appeal in the last two decades of the Soviet Union and in the years that followed the dissolution of communism, when people saw themselves reflected in Cheburashka’s identity crisis, impossible idealism, and perpetual burden of heavy suitcases.

6 The Pioneer’s Violin Animating the Soviet Holocaust

A

merican film studios rarely represented Nazi aggression before the American entry into the Second World War because of Germany’s control over European film distribution. After the war, American film studios shunned any earlier anti-fascist cinematic tropes for their perceived communist messages.1 The Soviet Union, however, showered cinematic attention on the ascendency of the Third Reich and its crimes against humanity and, after the war, awarded filmmakers, including animators, military medals for their efforts.2 With military strategy as their goal, Soyuzmultfilm reacted to the German invasion of their land by sending their animators and cameramen to the front and directing those employees who stayed behind to form editing crews to aid production.3 Whatever else could be said about Soviet media, the film studios rejected the Hollywood divide between news and entertainment and unequivocally tied every cinematic production to the contemporary political consciousness. As film critic Jay Leyda observed, when the Documentary Film Studio moved back to Moscow from its wartime evacuation site, it was “joined by most of the animated cartoon technicians who were employed throughout the war, keeping close on the heels of the war’s progress.”4 Although Soyuzmultfilm evacuated nearly its entire workforce to Samarkand, groups of seasoned animators managed to produce three-minute cartoon posters within a week of the German invasion, which gave the Soviet war effort a media advantage over Germany, which remained relatively uncompetitive in the field of animation.5 Animated shorts by Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, Dmitrii Babichenko, and Olga Khodataev were critical to the formation of an antifascist image bank of dystopian scenarios that portrayed the enemy as racist and genocidal. Films such as Fascist Boots on Our Homeland (1941), Vultures (1941), We Beat, Are Beating, and Will Beat (1941), and the animated “newsreels” in the series Political Journal (1938–1941) fanned fears of the Nazi threat and, later, Russia’s engagement in the war. In children’s animation, films such as Elephant and Moska (1941) and The Stolen Sun (1944) H 153 H

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strategically used the fairy-tale genre to shape and promote the moral foundations for fighting. At the same time, it is commonly accepted that Soviet media consciously avoided representing the specifically Jewish character of the genocidal campaigns waged on Soviet land during the Second World War.6 In his study on film and the Holocaust, film historian Jeremy Hicks explained that “identifying a personal vision,” even an “aesthetic authorizing,” in the war genre posed “insuperable difficulties” for the Soviet image of itself as fighting on behalf of humanity as a whole.7 Historians Olga Gershenson and David Shneer have recently weighed in on the issue by arguing that Jewish filmmakers and photojournalists did in fact take an active interest in representing the specifically Jewish nature of the ravages that they witnessed at the front, but that their efforts were curtailed by editors in the production and distribution phases in Moscow.8 In this regard Soyuzmultfilm again proved exceptional to mainstream Soviet media because several animators managed to imbue their films with powerful perspectives on the Jewish experience in the war and succeeded in having their films released and distributed. A close analysis of the war genre reveals that, while Soviet animators helped shape the Second World War into the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War,” they also gave voice to the Jewish collective experience, including some of the earliest images of mass murder and citizen collaboration.9 In the aftermath of the war, the Central Committee tasked Soyuzmultfilm to spearhead the rehabilitation movement by instructing the studio to produce morally driven entertainment for the nation’s orphaned children. The desire to return to the feeling of stability and progress led to a decade of animal fables and fairy tales rendered in the classic Disney style and Stalinized through a timeless romanticism. Despite the much-needed escapism inherent in these classic children genres, Soyuzmultfilm animators were wounded healers, and they laced seemingly innocuous material with personal testimony in ways that resist narrow interpretation.10 As such, we must look to animation to see the Soviet Holocaust film.

Cartooning Citizen Collaboration Aleksander Ivanov’s film Polkan and Shavka (1949) is the first film to encode Jewish intellectuals’ perspectives on wartime events through the vehicle of the then-favored genre of animal fable. On the face of it, Polkan and Shavka is a straightforward morality tale on the theme of loyalty rendered by some of the strongest Disney-oriented animators in the studio. The story is driven by a vivid character comparison between Polkan, a noble St. Bernard whose mane heroically billows in the wind, and Shavka, an anxious mutt whose scrappy fur hangs in tufts on his tail (fig. 6.1).11 After a rabbit runs across their path, the two dogs

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Fig. 6.1, 6.2 Polkan and Shavka (Polkan i Shavka, 1949). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov. Film stills.

chase after it into the forest and are swiftly surrounded by a pack of menacing gray wolves. The smaller dog Shavka sizes up the enemy and cowardly slinks into the forest to escape the impending slaughter, leaving Polkan to face the two gray wolves alone. In a frenzy of fur and blood, Polkan fights courageously despite the disparity in numbers and size and manages to kill the larger wolf but is himself left for dead on the battlefield. The remaining wolves surround the deserting Shavka, who begs for mercy by appealing to the wolves as canine “relatives” and licking their paws in obsequious submission (fig. 6.2). With a servile bow of her head and her tail between her legs, Shavka desperately offers to lead the wolves to the flock she has been entrusted to protect, a promise that the near-dead Polkan overhears in disgust. After Shavka delivers the wolves to the innocent sheep, the wolves renege on the deal and turn on their turncoat guide and eat her (according to the original poem “just in case”). Back on the battle field, Polkan manages to raise himself and, upon discovering the torn remains of Shavka’s collar, delivers the last spoken line in the film with uncompromising moral force: “The gray wolves you wanted to befriend, but your own skin you did not save.” An instrumental soundtrack accompanies the physically depleted but morally upright Polkan as he drags himself to his beloved flock and sounds the alarm. The eerie plot, enacted through a familiar, even clichéd, prewar style, conveys material close to the Soviet postwar heart. Russia was invaded many times over its history, and the theme of collaboration is one of the oldest themes of Russian literature; yet, given the immediacy of collaboration in the late 1940s as evacuees were still learning of what happened to their relatives in the occupied territories, this 1949 iteration of the theme is inseparable from current events.12 Shavka’s petition to the gray wolves, rendered through the grotesque arching and slinking of Shavka’s skeletal body, triggered associations with the contemporary phenomenon of citizen collaboration with Nazi forces. In the context of

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the large numbers of Polish and Ukrainian citizens, including NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) members and former Red Army soldiers, who willingly cooperated with the Nazis in exterminating its local Jewish populations in Western Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus, Shavka’s moral failure is a thinly veiled allegory about turncoats who wanted to save themselves by delivering their native “sheep” to the slaughter.13 Official Soviet reportage never covered the widespread phenomenon of Nazi collaboration, but the Soviet Army continued to subdue active cells of anti-Soviet partisans, who were seeking national independence and were fueled by local antisemitism for years after the war. When Shavka begs the wolves to consider her a family relation, she endears herself to them by saying, “My little pigeons, don’t kill me. I am your relative, believe me. Look at my ears, look at my tail. Is this fur of mine not Wolf fur?” In pandering to the enemy by claiming an affinity to her attackers and offering her sheep to the enemy, Shavka’s character makes reference to those Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians who cashed in on their German ancestry (Volksdeutsche) to curry favor with the Nazis. Director Aleksander Ivanov based the core narrative of the film on a poem written by the veteran writer Sergei Mikhalkov (1913–2009), whose official vitae includes composing the postwar Soviet National Anthem, and who reputedly collaborated with the KGB for years. Described by political historian Georgi Derluguian as “Stalin’s poet laureate,” no one could accuse Mikhalkov of writing an unpatriotic line in favor of Soviet Jews.14 On the contrary, Mikhalkov’s poem reached for Russian Romantic aesthetics to illustrate the party line in heroic terms, and if Mikhalkov inserted any subtext into his literary characterization of Shavka then it would likely point to Jewish cowards running away from the front in order to save themselves. Yet, in its final version, the film also embedded the personal perspectives of three Jewish intellectuals who worked on the film in the intermediary stages of production: Muscovite Jewish filmmaker Boris Barnet (1902–1965), Polish Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919–1996), and Polish Jewish conductor Grigorii Gamburg (1900-1967). Though ostensibly a Stalinist fairy tale by a Soviet ideologue, the various stages of Polkan and Shavka reveal much about the craft of animated films and the agency that Jewish intellectuals exercised within one of Moscow’s central media institutions at the height of the Stalin years. Understanding how the adaptation of Mikhalkov’s poem came to resonate as an anti-collaboration morality parable, we must look beyond the final credits. After Mikhalkov turned in his script to Soyuzmultfilm on October 17, 1948 for production, someone in the creative department passed the script along to Jewish filmmaker Boris Barnet, an interesting figure in Soviet film history who made his name as an auteur in the silent era. Although Barnet avoided accounts of an autobiographical nature—probably because of his family’s pre-revolutionary

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status as propertied bourgeoisie as much as his Jewish roots—we know that he began his career in Lev Kuleshov’s largely Jewish film circle, traveled in a Jewish intellectual milieu populated with many dissidents his entire career, and took a special interest in the Holocaust theme in the late 1940s. Several months after receiving Mikhalkov’s script, Barnet resubmitted the manuscript to the director, signing and stamping the new script as a “reworking” (razrabotka).15 Barnet’s description of his editing of Mikhalkov’s script as a “reworking” drips with condescension because the term carried associations in the late 1940s with the “reworking” of citizens accused of cosmopolitanism through extreme physical labor in the Gulag system (experienced by Barnet’s close colleagues Nikolai Erdman and Mikhail Volpin for their alleged writing of “antiSoviet tales”). Although Barnet’s editing may appear modest within the overall storyline, Barnet’s approach was so autocratic that he often ran into problems with the authorities (he would eventually commit suicide after falling out with the leadership of another studio). Barnet’s changes targeted Mikhalkov’s core narrative so fundamentally that the original themes of timeless national duty metamorphosed into a sharp critique of contemporary social hypocrisies. The changes flew under the radar because Mikhalkov’s poem was attached to the file that ultimately got submitted to the administrative offices and only Mikhalkov’s name appeared in the final script and credits.16 Barnet’s uncredited reworking was expedient given that Barnet’s films were banned one after the other in the years preceding Polkan and Shavka for his insertion of Holocaust-themed material into the Soviet imaginary of the Great Patriotic War.17 A comparison between Mikhalkov’s poem and Barnet’s editing demonstrates that his main modifications concerned the relationship dynamics between the various characters in ways that felt too human or too emotionally resonant. According to Barnet’s colleague, film director Aleksander Mitta, Barnet “was definitely not a dissident and knew absolutely nothing about politics,” yet “the bureaucrats” saw too much of a recognizable reality in Barnet’s fictional characters. Mitta elaborated that Barnet “did not know how to make the stereotypes that the bureaucrats gave him: he only knew how to reflect life. He did not attack the stereotypes, but life seeped into them, washed them away, and that made the bureaucrats absolutely mad because it could not be corrected. Life had taken the place of the stereotypes.”18 Simply put, Barnet made Mikhalkov’s romantic poetic mode more realistic and especially more relevant to the postwar context. Barnet’s revisions emphasized the peaceful world of the community-oriented farm animals. Although Mikhalkov’s script began with the hare crossing the path of the dogs and focused exclusively on the ensuing fight, Barnet inserted an opening scene of the farm animals graphically organized by mother-andchild pairs grazing peacefully. The bright and bouncy Disneyesque characters,

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drawn by some of the strongest animators at the studio and only partially offset by designer Evgenii Migunov’s rendering of the background stills in oils, gave the scene a disturbing ambiance in light of the brutal violence that threatens to obliterate the pastoral scene that Barnet inserted. When the wolves encroach upon the unsuspecting sheep, Barnet called for the flock to be rendered in mother-child pairs and one baby suckles his mother in the pasture. Likewise, Barnet shaped the conclusion of the film with another loving scene between the shepherd and his loyal dog Polkan.19 These scenes serve to create a prewar world in the way that Holocaust museums and films use family photographs to signal the irrational victimization of peaceful Jewish citizens. This humanism is again palpable in another of Barnet’s changes to Mikhalkov’s original script with the replacement of the cave setting with the more human setting of a forest spring for the confrontation between the wolves and the dogs.20 “My ambition,” admitted Barnet in a 1959 interview with film critic Georges Sadoul, has always been “to show the place of man in contemporary life. I could and would not wait that long before taking my chance.”21 Barnet’s heightening of the emotional levels in Mikhalkov’s narrative envisions the encounter with the grey wolves in more human terms and, thus, with more recognizable historical realism. Barnet was not the only Jewish intellectual who reworked Mikhalkov’s nationalist script on the studio’s conveyer belt. Once Barnet completed editing the literary script and before it went back to Ivanov to turn into a shooting script, it was given to Polish Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919–1996), known in Russia as Moisey Vainberg.22 Conducted by another Polish Jewish composer, Grigorii Gamburg, at the State Symphony Orchestra of the Ministry of Cinematography, the recorded performance was used by Ivanov as the basis for his shooting script. Gamburg, who participated in Jewish music projects in the 1920s, performed the score with a full orchestra to give the seemingly childlike nature of the animal fable the full weight of a classical composition. The score and the shooting script were then distributed in tandem to the animators who were instructed to use the music as the basis for each frame.23 Weinberg and Gamburg were a suitable pair for Barnet’s “reworking” of Mikhalkov’s patriotic poem into an allegorical film about citizen collaboration because they both tragically lost family and childhood homes in Warsaw during the war. Their professional and personal biographies cannot be irrelevant to their work on the theme of collaboration. In effect, they were the intermediaries between Barnet’s literary reworking and the visual animation that sought to match character movements to the musical notation. Just as Barnet’s interest in Holocaust themes played a decisive role in his realist “reworking” of Mikhalkov’s patriotic poem, Weinberg’s biography played a role in his compositional choices characterizing a “mutt” that turned against her

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own native “sheep.” Weinberg was raised in a Jewish theatrical family and his father was the director of the Yiddish theater in Warsaw. With the war encroaching, Weinberg and his sister set out by foot from Warsaw to Russia in September 1939, but his sister’s shoes were too thin to survive the journey and she tragically turned back. In 1943, while Weinberg was newly married and living in Moscow, Weinberg’s mother, father, and sister were murdered in a mass slaughter of Jews at Trawniki Concentration Camp. Weinberg was confronting news of citizen collaboration on a very personal level as the concentration camp in which his family was murdered doubled as a major training base for Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian collaborators who conducted mass murders for the full-fledged extermination of Polish Jewry known as Operation Reinhard.24 Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman’s documentation of citizen collaboration in their volume The Black Book was underwritten by the Jewish Antifascist Committee, which was led by Weinberg’s father-in-law, the famous Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, and circulated among the intelligentsia until its suppression after the war. Given his ties to Mikhoels and other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, Weinberg was certainly aware of the stories that were circulating among Moscow’s intellectual circles in the last years of the war, although it took him many years to confirm the rumors of his own family’s fate. In 1948, immediately preceding Weinberg’s composition of the Polkan and Shavka score, Weinberg’s family suffered another tragedy. Weinberg’s father-inlaw Mikhoels was assassinated in Minsk by order of Stalin, a family crisis that must have replayed emotions over the murder of Weinberg’s own father at the hands of his countrymen. Weinberg was himself put under twenty-four-hour surveillance and essentially blacklisted from the Soviet musical establishment beginning in 1948, forcing his debut in animation with his score for Polkan and Shavka later that year. In order to understand the film in its specific time and place, it is important to know that Weinberg composed the score for Polkan and Shavka during a period of general suspicion toward the creative class and personal surveillance that Weinberg described as “worse than prison.”25 In a strategy that I see as similar to Weinberg’s retitling of his 1943 “Jewish Songs” (based on the poetry of Yiddish writers I. L. Peretz and Shmuel Halkin) to the generic title “Children’s Songs” to facilitate publication in 1944, Weinberg cloaked any autobiographical links in Polkan and Shavka in the guise of children’s literature.26 When Weinberg finally confirmed what he had long feared about the fate of his family, he would compose The Passenger (1967–1968), an opera that takes place partially in the Auschwitz death camp, but at the height of the Composers’ Union crackdown on composers in 1948, Weinberg’s response was necessarily coded.27 Like Weinberg’s composition of Sinfonietta No. 1, Op. 41, in March of 1948, which scholars have long scrutinized for Weinberg’s response to his fatherin-law’s murder, the overlooked film Polkan and Shavka belong to the suite of

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creative responses that Weinberg produced in the aftermath of the war and his father-in-law’s assassination.28 Weinberg introduced his own nuances to the script, especially in his treatment of Polkan and Shavka. Of the various authorings within the film, the relationship between the two dogs seems to have inspired the least consensus among the various departments working on the film. If Barnet’s modifications heightened the emotional aspects of good and evil, Weinberg’s musical foregrounding of action suggested that individual ethical choices defined the characters of Polkan and Shavka rather than traditional fairy-tale archetypes that portray characterological binaries as predetermined and fixed. Barnet emphasized the collective beauty of the little world of the farm, but Weinberg put the fate of that peaceful collective into the hands of individuals and their potentially devastating personal choices. Unlike the trend to key instruments to character that Sergei Prokofiev popularized in his musical Peter and the Wolf (1936), Weinberg keyed the score for Polkan and Shavka primarily to action. A full symphonic performance of Weinberg’s score narrates the film: a string section accompanies the opening credits, woodwinds introduce the first scene of the shepherd boy with his two dogs that Weinberg calls the “overture,” and an energetic Soviet-style melody animates the darting movements of the hare. Even when the appearance of a character coincides with the introduction of a new instrument, such as the use of the French horns at the menacing entry of the wolves, Weinberg shapes the musical program around the action. For example, the horns reach full tilt in what Weinberg called “the struggle.” Even more typical of the overall score, a flute suggests the slaughter of the innocent sheep, kettle drums sound out the two shots that the young boy takes, and pauses introduce danger, such as the long pause when Shavka makes her deal with the wolves.29 Whereas the visual depiction of Polkan and Shavka focuses on their fundamental differences in species, scale, and, above all, movement, Weinberg’s score describes the two dogs with a single melody and dramatically juxtaposes the pair with the gray wolves.30 The heraldic tone of trumpets and the high strings accompanies the two dogs to signal heroism with a notable fanfare quality, while the wolves receive an ascending line and an anxiety-provoking modulation of the violins in nervous eighth notes to evoke sirens, while bassoons sound out the wolves’ menacing march. The graphic treatment of Shavka characterizes her as a wily bitch, but the music complicates such moral certainty with the underscoring of both Polkan and Shavka with classical Soviet musical idioms. When Polkan and Shavka face their assassins, the syncopated rhythm of folk music produces an association between the dogs and drinking dances of Ukrainian peasants, thus throwing Soviet folk culture back on its betrayers. When Shavka slinks back, the music has an even more Russian quality similar in style to Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav, suggesting something all too familiar about the identity of the native dog

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in delivering her sheep to the Gray Wolves.31 Scholars have debated Weinberg’s motivation in dedicating the Sinfonietta he wrote in the aftermath of his fatherin-law’s murder by Stalin’s men to “The Friendship of the Nations of the USSR,” and his quotation of Russian classical music and Ukrainian folk tropes in Polkan and Shavka adds weight to the interpretation that Weinberg applied a dose of cynicism to his post-1948 music. If this musical referencing affects the characterization of the two dogs, it plays an even more concrete role in the motif of the hunt. Whereas the graphic treatment of the dogs’ hare hunt bears no resemblance to the wolves’ attack of the dogs, Weinberg’s music makes an unmistakable aural equivalency between one hunt and the next. The same musical phrase used for the dogs’ alledgedly innocent hare hunt is repeated for the unequivically evil wolf hunt of the dogs, creating a symphonic leitmotif for the “hunt” and exchangeability between the hunter and the victim in what could be interpreted as a pacifist sentiment.32 The flexible introduction of the hunt theme avoids a position of moral relativism—the musical text maintains an uncompromising moral position throughout the film—but focuses instead on the role that individual choice plays on the hunt and the struggle. After Shavka is killed, the dénouement is delivered exclusively through graphic and musical movement. Polkan tries to beat the wolves to the sheep, and there is a dramatic back-and-forth between minor and major keys to signal the urgency of their alternating movements. This race to the sheep is far more traditionally shaped, resulting in unresolved tensions within the film between an uncompromising indictment of the collaboration of the mutt with the wolves, who are predisposed to the murder of an entire population, and the role that individual choice plays in determining villains, victims, and heroes.

Creating the Image of War A mortal fear settled over Moscow’s intellectual circles in 1948. Like so many others, Weinberg was under strict surveillance for years before he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1953 “as a Jewish nationalist” and for “preparing the founding of a free Jewish region in the Crimea.”33 Any attempts to represent the Holocaust disappeared into the Stalinist image of the Great Patriotic War. As Zvi Gitelman notes, Jews “came increasingly to realize that the special tragedy of the Jewish people was going largely unmentioned in the media, in literature, films, and the theater.”34 Even after Stalin’s death in 1954, Soviet artists steered clear of Holocaust-related subjects both because the national image of the war was so entrenched in Soviet culture by then and because intellectuals retained their fear of aligning themselves with perspectives that could be identified as Jewish for many years. The Six-Day War and the 1968 Soviet invasion

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of Czechoslovakia pushed Jewish subjects even further away from the Soviet screens, leading Olga Gershenson to conclude that “for nearly twenty years, until Gorbachev’s Perestroika, no criticism of any Soviet regime, past or present, was permitted. No Jews were allowed on screens either, whether in war or in any other kind of film.”35 Animation would again distinguish itself from mainstream Soviet media by pushing the envelope on the war genre. In contrast to the bleak situation in many sectors of the national media in the late 1960s, animation was just coming into its most productive period; between 650 and 670 films were released between 1960 and 1979, compared with about 205 films between 1940 and 1959. As fate would have it, Stalin died only a month after Weinberg was incarcerated, and it is yet another testament to the extraordinary atmosphere of Soyuzmultfilm that Weinberg was immediately put to work on films such as On the Forest Bandstand (1954), Tanya, Tyavka, Top, and Nyusha (1954), Forest History (1956), Twelve Months (1956) and, during the rest of his career, worked on another twenty cartoons, including classics such as the philosophical Boniface’s Vacation (1964) and the wildly popular Winnie-the-Pooh (1969). As production increased in Soyuzmultfilm in the 1970s, several directors returned to the theme of the Holocaust, reaching for a new way to express something about the Jewish collective fate in the signifying system of the Great Patriotic War. When considering retrospective Soviet animation of the Second World War, several films can be understood as giving voice to a Jewish sensibility toward the historical record at the same time as they reworked the mainstream Soviet war narrative.36 Perhaps there is no better example of the slippery categories of universalist “Soviet” and particularistic “Jewish” war imagery than the animated work of the Soviet Jewish caricaturist Boris Efimov (Fridlyand, 1900–2008). Efimov was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Bialystok that produced three sons and several cousins that would become some of the most prolific culture-makers in Soviet media. Efimov’s career alone spanned the entirety of Soviet history. After Stalin ordered Efimov’s brother Mikhail Koltsov (Fridlyand, 1898–1940) arrested and executed in 1940, Stalin personally requested that Efimov resume his work in political illustration. Efimov prudently returned to work and published more than seventy thousand images over his long career in national newspapers such as Pravda and Izvestia, and the satirical magazines Krokodil and Ogonek. Perhaps in a spirit of self-preservation, Efimov viciously lampooned alleged “enemies of the people” during Stalin’s show trials of the late 1930s, including his personal friend Leon Trotsky but, at the same time, Efimov found sincere common ground with the Stalinist regime in his hostility toward Hitler and the Third Reich. His heckling of Hitler was so inflammatory that the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels is said to have vowed that Efimov would be among the first to hang after the Germans captured Moscow.37 In

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1945, Efimov triumphantly attended the Nuremberg Trials, where he portrayed the Nazi defendants with recognizable head portraits emerging from insect and rodent bodies in a manner hauntingly similar to the vicious antisemitic images published by Nuremberg defendant Julius Streicher in the journal Der Stürmer. Given Efimov’s brother’s tragic fate and his own relationship to the center of totalitarian power in the following decades, Efimov’s relationship to his Jewish identity is a complex and often contradictory affair that defies any single explanation.38 The most difficult aspect of Efimov’s relationship to his Jewish background lies in his zealous anti-Israel work, not so much because he saw Zionism as a potential threat to Soviet stability but because he drew on the same typecasting and symbolism he developed for the Nazis to caricature the Jewish state.39 Efimov’s pro-Stalinism and anti-Zionism, coupled by his unaccountability for the damage his work wreaked on Soviet Jews even after the end of Soviet power, has perplexed his biographers, but his work at Soyuzmultfilm offers a rare opportunity to revisit Efimov’s attitude toward his career and his treatment of Jewish subjects.40 In 1959, several years after Stalin’s death and fired up with the Brezhnev-era tolerance for cultural criticism, critics called for Efimov’s participation in the reintroduction of political fare to animation: “Why is there no progress in the direction of satirical cartoons? History has demonstrated that animation works well in satire. Let us recall movies of the 1920s. . . . Why do we not see the satirical posters and political cartoons of the Soyuzmultfilm Arts Council member Boris Efimov on the screen?”41 At Soyuzmultfilm, Efimov worked as a member of the Artistic Council and, occasionally, as a scriptwriter, artist, and consultant. It is a testament to the collegial atmosphere at Soyuzmultfilm that Efimov seemed more willing to express himself there than in any other Soviet institution with which he was affiliated.42 In her memoir, Soyuzmultfilm artistic director Lana Azarkh recalled how in the early years of Khrushchev’s term, before Efimov had published a single autobiographical account of his life and career, he appeared in the studio “agitated and pale and spoke about his brother. He was going to look for the grave of Koltsov.”43 When Efimov turned to retrospective war films at Soyuzmultfilm, it was under the leadership of another member of Soyuzmultfilm’s Artistic Council, the Jewish director Iosif Boyarsky, who turned out to be crucial to the production of the few Holocaust-themed films that were made at Soyuzmultfilm in the 1970s.44 Efimov’s involvement in retrospective war films during Boyarsky’s tenure at Soyuzmultfilm surpassed mere professional ties between the two men. Boyarsky’s father, an Old Bolshevik, had been arrested for anti-Soviet activities and executed on the same day as Efimov’s brother. In a career that bears similarity to Efimov’s brother, Boyarsky’s father began his revolutionary activities before the Revolution under the influence of the Jewish socialist party known as the Bund. After demobilization from the military, Boyarsky’s father diligently served as the

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head of various cultural committees for the Party. Like Efimov, Boyarsky junior regularly appeared at social and professional events sponsored by the highestranked officers of the Communist Party and was personally acquainted with Stalin and Stalin’s outspoken defender and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. As journalist David King demonstrates in his exposé album The Commissar Vanishes, Stalin coupled the execution (often under mysterious circumstances) of many Old Bolsheviks (including Boyarsky’s father and Efimov’s brother) with the order that their existence be expunged from the national record altogether.45 “No single skyscraper existed where legions of Stakhanovite airbrushers, montagists, and scissormen would labor through the darkest hours of the night, slavishly fulfilling their work norms for some glowering Ministry of Falsification,” wrote David King in his introduction to the collection of doctored photographs that includes the erasure of Yaakov Boyarsky. “Rather photographic manipulation worked very much on an ad hoc basis. Orders were followed, quietly. A word in an editor’s ear or a discreet telephone conversation . . . was sufficient to eliminate all further reference—visual or literal—to a victim, no matter how famous she or he had been.”46 Orphaned and robbed of his father’s legacy, Boyarsky nurtured an oppositional (albeit consciously understated) attitude toward Soviet image making. “He was something else,” recalled freelance writer Alexandra Sviridova: “He mistakenly received a passport with a misprint on the Fifth Point as evreika (“Jewess”) and, instead of turning the passport in for correction, Boyarsky kept it in his front lapel and showed it to whoever would look.”47 In a character reference written in 1983, the secretary of the Union of Cinematographers succinctly noted Boyarsky’s achievements and shortcomings: “Comrade Iosif Yakovlevich Boyarsky was born in 1917, a Jew, not a Party man, received higher education, graduated from VGIK in 1952, and awarded four medals from the government.”48 Unlike Boyarsky’s quiet reinsertion of purge victims back into the national media, Efimov’s career is marked by a completely different inclination to stay out of trouble. From the evidence of his hefty artistic portfolio, Efimov appears to have successfully kept his nose to the grindstone after his brother’s mysterious execution. Yet, if Efimov’s caricatures seemed unrelenting in his attack against Israel and Jews on the wrong side of Soviet policies, his animated films Prophets and Lessons (1967) and A Lesson Not Learned (1971), made under the tenure of Boyarsky, reinsert the Jewish presence into the Soviet narrative of the war. These animated films also suggest that Efimov’s primary motives had little to do with Israel and more to do with the issue of self-representation in the Soviet context.49 More than any other film, A Lesson Not Learned interrogates the mainstream image of the Great Patriotic War, not to challenge the official narrative of the war as a universal Soviet saga, but to reclaim that image as the work of Soviet Jewish artists.50

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Efimov both wrote the script and provided the art for A Lesson Not Learned, which follows a Nazi commander, likely a reference to German chancellor Willy Brandt who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 on the platform of strengthening German relations with Eastern Europe and fighting the “reapproachment” of fascism in the world. Hiding under a sheep skin and waving a white flag to American and British military police, the character of the Nazi commander walks out of Germany a free man as a liberated camp prisoner. The commander is graphically exposed as a double agent in details such as the comical repurposing of his bandages from his arm to his leg in what becomes obvious as a feigning of injury. From the point of view of the film, Western supporters unwittingly rehabilitate this former Nazi commander as a victim of Nazi abuse. In the meantime, the commander writes propaganda against “the Soviet danger” in his temporary and luxurious prisoner-of-war cell. The situation appears bleak with fascism again threatening the Soviet people with the ignorant support of the countries who had formerly identified as the allied forces. In the end, however, the war criminal is unequivocally stopped by the massive Berlin Wall erected by the clear-eyed Soviets. This “contemporary” framework story on the disingenuous Western treatment of the war is a warning call on the dangers of historical whitewashing, a clever deflection of the accusations against the Soviet universalization of the war. Efimov leaves no room for compromise by connecting historical revisionism with power falling into the hands of duplicitous leaders whose hands are dirtied with the murder of their own citizens. This framework story embeds a retrospective look at the Soviet history of the war, suggesting that the Soviet version of the Great War is the “true” history of the war. Efimov’s strategy provides him with the opportunity to canvas the most iconic Soviet images of the war made by himself and other Jewish artists. The film opens with archival photographs and film footage, primarily the iconic war photographs by Yevgeny Khaldei (1917–1997), another Jewish artist singled out by Stalin to record the war and promote postwar Sovietization as a staff photographer for the Soviet news agency TASS. Efimov and Khaldei witnessed the Nuremberg Trials in the same cohort and shared the task of interpreting the horror of their revelations for the Soviet public. Khaldei’s wartime photographs are some of the most iconic images of the war and the film makes use of the most famous among them, such as the famous photograph depicting hundreds of German helmets piled up in a suggestive heap. The sequence of photographs are synchronized to a sound track of a firing machine gun and interspersed with drawn versions of Khaldei’s classic black-and-white photographs of a Soviet soldier waving a red flag over the destroyed Quadriga at the Brandenburg Gate (fig. 6.3).51 Historian David Shneer has recently drawn our attention to the fact that, like the pull of Jews into the marginal field of animation,

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nearly all Soviet photojournalists active in the Second World War were Jewish.52 Scores of Jewish photojournalists defined the war for the Soviet public from a position of divided identity: “Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union was a moment when Soviet Jewish photographers and all Soviet Jews were most radically integrated into the heroic Soviet nation as Red Army soldiers and simultaneously singled out as radically inferior victims.”53 In an analysis that illuminates the war’s photographic record, Shneer considers the “tension between the pull to universalism and the stark reminders of particularism” as fundamental to the wartime work of Jewish photographers.54 If Jewish photojournalists wanted to record the Jewish presence in fighting and suffering at the front lines, the authorship of that record was absolutely central to the retrospective use of Efimov’s and Khaldei’s wartime work in A Lesson Not Learned. In this sense, it is relevant that A Lesson Not Learned was filmed under the art direction of Lev Arkadiev (1924–2003), whose writing career was heavily influenced by the wartime murder of his entire family in Odessa specifically as Jews. Unlike the quiet intervention of Boyarsky to correct the expunged record of Jewish heroes, Arkadiev devoted decades, beginning in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War when an official silence around Jews prevailed, to the identification of an unnamed Soviet girl in a series of photographs depicting her

Fig. 6.3 A Lesson Not Learned (Urok ne vprok, 1971). Dir. Valentin Karavaev. Film still after Yevgeny Khaldei’s photograph Soldier Hoisting Flag (1945).

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being hanged by her German and Lithuanian captors in Minsk. Arkadiev’s efforts resulted in the identification of the girl-martyr as Masha Bruskina, a seventeenyear-old Jewish partisan and Komsomol (Soviet youth group) member. In an article that traces his meticulous research, Arkadiev wrote that photographs of the brave Minsk partisans “have been printed by the millions in textbooks, encyclopedias, and brochures. The caption under the girl has long read ‘unknown’ in place of her name.”55 Likewise, Arkadiev’s use of Efimov’s and Arkadiev’s Jewish-created iconic war images in A Lesson Not Learned recognizes the role Jews played not only on the front lines but as creators of the very image of the Soviet Union at war. In his discussion on Khaldei’s Berlin photographs, Shneer demonstrates that Khaldei shared Arkadiev’s attitude toward the importance of identifying and acknowledging Jewish participation in the Great Patriotic War. In his commentary on Khaldei’s use of a mysterious dash to notate “Jewish” on the back of a photograph of three Jewish photographers at the Brandenburg Gate, Shneer observes, “Khaldei was teaching the next generation two lessons: about coded Jewishness among the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and about the fact that Jews were among the key culture-makers of the Soviet Union and documenters of the great Soviet victory. Why else write the mysterious dash on the back, which anyone in the know knew meant ‘Jews’?”56 In the same spirit, Efimov wrote and illustrated and Arkadiev directed A Lesson Not Learned during a period in which Efimov’s caricatures and Khaldei’s photographs could rely on their own established visual language to carry meaning to the viewer. Arkadiev’s use of Efimov’s wartime caricatures together with Khaldei’s war photographs insists on the constructive role Jewish artists played in determining Soviet reality (rather than merely reflecting an already determined reality).57 The reuse of Efimov and Khaldei’s by-then iconic imagery purports to visualize the Soviet Union as a perpetual victim for whom history cruelly repeats itself, but the use of self-citation to formulate this teleological narrative also positions Efimov and Khaldei as architects of wartime Soviet socialism.58 This insistence on the identity of the war’s image-makers relies not only on the documentary mode but on aesthetic authorizing as well. If Efimov and Khaldei created some of the most enduring conventions for Soviet war symbolism, the animation of what had already become inculcated as national codes of Soviet patriotism turned their earlier work into reflexive parodies of their own visual language. Arkadiev’s fragmenting, multiplying, and montaging of Efimov’s wartime caricatures and Khaldei’s photography even pays tribute to the Constructivist cinematography that Efimov’s cousins, Jewish filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kauffman, introduced to cinema in the 1920s. The rehabilitation of these techniques and images decades later frames the film in the context of historical memory and

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reasserts the authorship of Jewish artists in the Soviet project in general and in the war in particular. The film’s Jewish crew also asserted their aesthetic authority in imaginative scenes by restricting them to the segments devoted to the Nazi general in his private world. In one scene, historical indexicality makes way for a satisfying moment of imaginative authorship when the war criminal exchanges his striped uniform for his military jacket and Hitler’s ghost comically slips into the prison uniform. With the clever distinction between the real and the fictitious views of the war, the film’s Jewish crew provocatively imagines Hitler as a concentration camp inmate, incarcerated and punished. The animation of his early work allowed Efimov a latter-day opportunity to reconceive his career during the harshest years of Stalinism. The ephemeral details of day-to-day politics, no longer relevant as news, could be reevaluated for larger historiographical ideas or for their role in creating the very structure of Soviet history. Whereas Barnet’s rewriting and Weinberg’s musical composition for Polkan and Shavka addressed the nature of victims and perpetrators from an ethical point of view, A Lesson Not Learned interrogates the representation of victims and perpetrators by juxtaposing Jewish-authored real-time images with the fictitious narratives of a Nazi commander poised to reestablish fascism in the world by claiming victimization. The primary “lesson” of the film may be the perpetual threat of fascism in the context of contemporary revanchist fears, but it also delivers lessons on memory by equating erasure of Jewish culturemarkers with the insincerity of German Vergangenheitsbewäeltigung (“mastering the past”). Arkadiev’s use of Efimov’s and Khaldei’s iconic war imagery strategically interrogates historical revisionism as motivated by the fascist desire to reestablish power and supported by the West to score points in the Cold War. In replaying these iconic images of the Great Patriotic War, the film crew—made up of Jews and under the quiet protection of Boyarsky whose relationship with national politics was both intimate and tortured—reclaimed their place in the war and in the socialist cause.59 As Efimov’s Soyuzmultfilm experience so evocatively demonstrates, Jewish artists at Soyuzmultfilm may have avoided consciously linking their work to anything that might be construed as overtly Jewish, but they were hardly silent witnesses. Rather, Efimov sought not only to add his own voice to the formation of the Soviet Union but to reestablish his role in the historical legacy of the Great Patriotic War. When Soviet structuralists and semioticians were ripping the author away from his work, Arkadiev was immortalizing Efimov’s and Khaldei’s names into celluloid and reclaiming the Soviet war image as the uncompromising work of Jewish artists. Arkadiev’s retrospective film A Lesson Not Learned metamorphosed Efimov and Khaldei from Stalin’s puppets to puppeteers of the “universal” image of the Great Patriotic War.

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The Jewish Victim The first animated film in Eastern Europe to directly depict the concentration camps came from Polish animation director Ryszard Czekala (1941–2010) in his short The Roll-Call (1971), which portrays a horrific prisoner slaughter. Czekala’s film, which Poland promoted as a film about the martyrs of the Nazi death camps, took a neorealist approach with black-and-white cut-outs to evoke documentary-style reportage along with the repetitious use of uniform stripes to convey the emotional effects of dehumanization.60 Russian animators were familiar with the film not because of its bold depiction of the war but because Polish animation, which appeared on the cultural scene only after Khrushchev’s rise to power, was quickly emerging as an independent and competitive force in Eastern Europe.61 This film was of particular note to Russian animators because The Roll-Call won the grand prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1971 in a three-way tie with the Yugoslavian animated short The Bride (1971) and the American short The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam (1971), while Soyuzmultfilm collected nothing. Although it went largely unnoticed the year of its release, Soyuzmultfilm’s director Boris Stepantsev (1929–1985) made the film The Pioneer’s Violin (1971) the same year. In retrospect, Stepantsev’s film was one of the most poignant Holocaust films to come out of any animation studio at the time, but at the time, the studio remained tight-lipped on the subject. Unlike the Polish press that had positively reviewed Czekala’s film for its treatment of the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet press barely acknowledged Stepantsev’s film.62 In the brief notices that did mention the film, critics noted its “maturity” and “psychological depth,” but neglected to concretely identify the film’s subject.63 Only after Stepantsev’s death did animation director Fyodor Khitruk acknowledge Stepantsev as one of the first Soviet animators to seriously develop the “heroic” and “patriotic” themes, although Khitruk too proved elusive in his description of what exactly Stepantsev had engaged with as his subject: “This is a difficult topic for animation. We were all rather afraid of it but he was not.”64 The circumstances under which “this” topic was difficult remain difficult to reconstruct, as it is doubtful that the studio would have allowed The Pioneer’s Violin to be made had its connection to a historical Jewish child-martyr during the Holocaust been known at the highest administrative levels.65 After an opening image of a flame burning inside a surrealistic violin-shaped incision in the ground—an enigma begging to be deciphered—the film’s plot is brutally straightforward. A naïve painting of a small house dances on the violin strings and the notes instigate a wartime memory set in a bucolic Russian village (fig. 6.4). A sunlit window frames a young boy playing violin, but the

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surreal weightlessness of the pastel-colored house and the musical dreaminess of the scene are violently shattered by a German aerial bombing. An imposing German tank drives over the rubble and its enormous driver orders the child to play the Viennese folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin” (“Oh, You Dear Augustin”). The stand-off between the authoritarian tank driver, who sadistically demonstrates the tune on his hand-held harmonica, and the young violinist provides the psychological drama of the film (fig. 6.5). As the tank driver threatens to gun the boy down should he fail to play the required tune, the boy first tries to hide behind a thin Russian tree, then is driven to helpless tears, and finally collapses in an emotional heap. At the last desperate moment when the Nazi tank driver forces the boy to stare down the barrel of a long tank gun, the boy heroically lifts the violin to his jutting chin and plays the then-Soviet national anthem “Internationale.” The Nazi tank driver unleashes a round of bullets on the child for his act of defiance. Critically wounded, the boy musters just enough energy to pluck a few more notes of “Internationale” before he is executed. He dies a martyr for his country. In the black of night, the film returns to the use of color with the explosion of fireworks indicating Soviet victory, followed by a scene of young Pioneers mourning at the graveside of the murdered violinist in the middle of the forest. The violin-shaped incision from the opening scene flares up with a surreal and mystical red flame, at last identified as the boy’s grave (fig. 6.6). On its face, the pioneer hero of the film functions in line with popular Soviet images of pioneer heroes “active” in the Great Patriotic War, such as those depicted in live-action films such as The Street of the Youngest Son (1962) and The Brave Five (1970).66 Indeed, The Pioneer’s Violin was bundled and distributed as part of the Pioneer genre (rather than in the war genre) and discussed alongside other animated films on the pioneering theme that came out at the same time, such as Old Photo (1971), The Adventures of Red Scarves (1971), and Song about a Young Drummer (1972).67 In the case of the executed violinist, however, the child hero was not a generic Pioneer character but was based on an actual event and on a real boy. Although no direct references appear anywhere in the film, and it is unlikely that Soyuzmultfilm administrators or the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) knew of the connection, the story is based on the life of Avram (“Musya”) Pinkenzon (1930–1942), a violin prodigy from a well-to-do Jewish family with a well-known medical practice. According to records that could be traced back to Pinkenzon, German troops occupied the village of Ust-Labinsk in the winter of 1942, where Avram’s father was stationed in a military hospital that failed to evacuate in time. The Jews in the village were rounded up, along with the entire Pinkenzon family, and transported to the shore of Kuban, where they were joined by residents from surrounding villages. As one brief article in

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Fig. 6.4, 6.5 6.6 The Pioneer’s Violin (Skripka pionera’, 1971). Dir. Boris Stepantsev. Film stills.

Izvestia reported in 1968, “The Nazis produced machine guns at which point a thin, dark-haired lad stepped forward with only a violin in his hands. He waved his bow and began to play ‘Internationale’ and dozens of bullets cut the life of the young hero short.”68 The act of bravery posthumously earned the young violinist the rare Medal of Honor, but the twelve-year-old Avram was mentioned only by his Russian name Musya, and no indication of his Jewish identity ever appeared. At the time that Stepantsev made the film, a small memorial plaque “to the young Pioneer” had been mounted at the Labinsk public school that Pinkenzon attended during the war with no hint to the boy’s Jewish identity.

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Even when a life-sized monument was installed in the late 1970s at the site of the mass grave in which Avram Pinkenzon was assassinated, the accompanying plaque used wording similar to the memorial erected at the mass grave in the Ukrainian town of Babi Yar in 1976: “Mass grave of 370 peaceful civilians and the Pioneer-hero M. Pinkenzona who was shot by the Nazi occupiers, 1942.”69 The film was a departure for Boris Stepantsev, who was generally known as a convivial long-time bachelor, a politically savvy employee, a Party man, a member of the Artistic Council, and vice president of ASIFA, USSR (International Animated Film Association). Yet perhaps it is no coincidence that Stepantsev embraced the story in the same cultural climate that writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s denouncement of antisemitism in his poem Babi Yar (1961) appeared and disappeared from the official literary scene. Yevtushenko’s poem stimulated the Soviet intelligentsia to turn to the subject of Jews in the war and, for all of his buttoned-down conformity, Stepantsev justified his interest in making specialinterest films as a profoundly Russian trait (adopting Yevtushenko’s logic in Babi Yar): “I think that a film must specifically address and be clearly focused on a specific audience. . . . I am convinced that even Pushkin primarily addressed only a small circle of friends, but these seemingly intimate messages become extremely important to all of us throughout Russia.”70 Although the Jewish basis of The Pioneer’s Violin could only be understood by a small group of insiders with familiarity of the historical case or the knowing members of the film crew, Stepantsev justified the film on the grounds that it expressed a broader national characteristic and that the bulk of viewers would nonetheless imbibe its message whether or not they could decipher it. Yevtushenko’s influence reverberates in the film. The song the young Jewish martyr plays before his execution lines up with the end of Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar, when the narrator declares, “No fiber of my body will forget this / May ‘Internationale’ thunder and ring / When, for all time, is buried and forgotten / The last of antisemites on this earth.” Yevtushenko seeks a rehabilitation of the national anthem “Internationale,” which had been replaced in 1943 by Sergei Mikhalkov’s more Russo-centric “Hymn of the Soviet Union.” Yevtushenko’s call for the reinstatement of “Internationale,” symbolically fulfilled by the violinist, demands a return to the worker’s internationalism embraced by Lenin and Trotsky and rejected by Stalin’s racist campaign to create “Socialism in One Country.” Barnet and Weinberg had reworked Mikhalkov’s script in Polkan and Shavka into a more deeply humanist vision for the Soviet Union, but the young violinist’s desperate plucking of a few notes of the “Internationale” responds to Yevtushenko’s vision of a world before Mikhalkov-like ethnocentrism. According to animation historian Georgii Borodin, Stepantsev had to endure negative criticism for romanticizing the victimization theme, adding that “in Victor Nikitin’s unpublished memoir, Nikitin accused Stepantsev of concealing his Semitic roots.”71

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Whether or not Stepantsev was himself Jewish or harbored philosemitic sympathies (or Nikitin was just a judeophobe), the film’s primary source to the Holocaust-hero theme was the Jewish scriptwriter Yuri Yakovlev (born Hovkin) who worked primarily in the war genre and, particularly, in the theme of Pioneer heroism.72 Yakovlev’s Jewish identity played a significant role in his personal life; he blamed his father’s arrest and the accusations of cosmopolitanism he personally endured on their Jewish status, and his own son immigrated to Israel and became a follower of the Jewish pietistic movement of Chabad.73 During his long career as a freelance writer, Yakovlev supplemented his erratic salary by serving as an editorial board member of the newsreel Wick and a member of the Artistic Council at Soyuzmultfilm. Yakovlev wrote about many Jewish characters that were shunned by neighbors but nonetheless heroically acted on behalf of the collective. Yakovlev eventually penned the story “The Mystery: Passion of the Four Girls,” which chronicled the heroism of Anne Frank, Tanya Savicheva, Samantha Smith, and Sadako Sasaki, highlighting the theme of Jewish heroism within the universal human drive to resist evil.74 Although Yakovlev shaped the character of the fallen boy in the film The Pioneer’s Violin in line with Soviet representations of militant heroism in the Great Patriotic War, he departed from the conventional image by representing a specifically Jewish martyr-hero.75 The film depicts the child violinist as a prototype of the heroic Pioneer, but for those familiar with the author or the subject, their viewing of the film came with the understanding that they were experiencing the first Soviet animated film on a specifically Jewish event within the Great Patriotic War. Despite the lack of direct attribution to Avram Pinkenzon, the film’s hero is visually encoded as Jewish with a number of cues, beginning with the use of color and artistic style. Stepantsev was primarily known as a children’s artist, both in animation and in book illustration, but he used his training in the Moscow Printing and Graphics Institute to create a more mature graphic style for some of his more artistic films, such as the gray-scale color scheme in Window (1966) and The Pioneer’s Violin. A vibrant Chagall-esque color scheme creates the ambient atmosphere of the first scene of the young violinist, but after the German aerial bombing, the film switches to the dark tones, strong contrasts, and simplified use of crude line incisions of traditional woodcuts. With the change in graphic styles, the boy is likewise metamorphosed from a Chagall-esque fiddler—perhaps the most enduring image of Russian Jews—to the Orientalized subject of black-andwhite woodcuts, a medium and style associated with medieval Jewry and, as such, suggestive of a historical legacy of violence.76 The film’s music is not an accompaniment to the visual elements, but the subject of the film. Jewish composer Mikhail Ziv (1921–1994) assembled the musical score for The Pioneer’s Violin as ‘source’ music, or music whose source originates on screen, and Stepantsev animated the characters to communicate through

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different musical instruments by merging the wordless script with the score.77 At the core of the musical text, the culture of the boy’s violin is juxtaposed with the barbarity of the Nazi commander’s mouth-organ. Of course, there is nothing particularly Jewish about a violin or Nazi about a mouth-organ, yet in the symbolic terrain of the film, the two instruments assume opposing cultural qualities with allegorical weight. Some of these associations with the two instruments would have been familiar to cultured Soviet viewers, such as Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s (the composer of Polkan and Shavka) tribute to Russian-Jewish history in his Sixth Symphony (1962–1963) that became known as “The Jewish Violin” or the association of the mouth-harp, which originated in Vienna and was produced primarily in Germany, with folk music and commoner culture.78 In Soviet cinema of that period, the mouth-harp signaled premodern life, such as the musical sheep-herding mountaineers featured in the Ukrainian film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965).79 In addition to the treatment of the physical instruments in the animated text, the song the Nazi tank driver commands the boy to play, the Viennese folksong “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” adds additional irony to the representation of the binary nature of the two cultures at war. According to legend, the song was dedicated to a beloved balladeer who traversed Vienna entertaining plague victims with his bagpipe music but whose life was cut short after he passed out in a gutter after a drunken night and was mistakenly thrown, together with his bagpipes, into a mass grave of plague victims. The lyrics mourn that the death of the bagpiper “dear Augustin” symbolizes that “all is lost”: “Every day was a feast / And now? Plague, only plague / Only a great corpse’s feast / That is the rest.” A more direct component to the inscription of Jewishness in The Pioneer’s Violin is the way that the Nazi tank driver murders his defenseless victim. The smiling commander sadistically threatens the boy with his massive machine gun and finally kills him point blank, which is how the vast majority of Jews on Soviet land were killed during the war.80 Olga Gershenson argues that Soviet films largely ignored the representation of murder at gunpoint near the victims’ hometowns and directly into their makeshift graves precisely because this was the way that three million Jews (who were murdered as Jews) were killed in the Holocaust on Soviet land.81 The Pioneer’s Violin rectifies this cinematic whitewashing by depicting the boy as the historical Avram Pinkenzon was murdered: at close range by machine gun, into his own grave, and in his hometown. While Czekala’s concentration camp setting in Roll-Call documented the way the majority of Jews were killed in Poland, Stepantsev’s representation of the boy’s murder by machine gun into his own grave spoke to the way the majority of Jewish victims were killed in Russia and Ukraine. The violinist, inasmuch as anyone would identify him as Jewish, served as an example of Jewish resistance at a time when, as historian Mordechai Althshuler puts it, Jews had an “emotional need to prove to non-Jews—and perhaps first

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and foremost to the Jews of the Soviet Union themselves—that the Jews played just as great, and perhaps an even greater, role in the war against the Nazis.”82 When the Jewish correspondent Saul N. Itzkowitz discovered the story of Avram Pinkenzon a decade after the release of Stepantsev’s animation, he wrote a book about Avram Pinkenzon in which he contextualized the boy’s heroism in relationship to broader trends of Jewish resistance during the war.83 The Jewish heroism behind Pinkenzon’s act of martyrdom was also why his story was included in the three-volume series Sketches of Jewish Heroism in the 1990s.84 When a cousin of Pinkenzon, Bezalel Gandler, submitted the report on Avram “Musya” Pinkenzon to Yad Vashem’s victim database, he included the portrait of the boy as a blond Pioneer with his red scarf tied around his neck from the series Pioneer Heroes—CCCP.85 Along with setting the record straight on Jewish resistance in the war, the film also staged a contemporary display of resistance. The violinist’s posthumous canonization in the forest by a small band of Young Pioneers justifies his otherwise senseless martyrdom, but in the more immediate context of the 1970s, the boy’s stalwart resolution to play his own song reflected the position of Yevtushenko and other intellectuals, who saw the suppression of individual autonomy, especially that of cultural expression, as the most pressing challenge of their generation. For “a small group of ‘insiders,’” or Jewish cultural activists, Yakovlev’s forest setting would have also been understood as the contemporary site

Fig. 6.7 Exhibition of Jewish activities in the forest, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Maryina Roshcha. Photograph taken by author, August 2014.

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for Jewish cultural events, holiday celebrations, Hebrew lessons, and planning meetings. In the final scene, children gather in the forest to mourn the otherwise unmarked grave, itself a symbol of mass graves such as Babi Yar in Ukraine or Rombuli in Riga or Paneri in Vilnius, where young Jewish activists regularly gathered in the 1970s. The association between the forest setting and Jewish culture in the Soviet Union was so entrenched that when the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center mounted a display about the dissident Jewish National Movement, the curators opted for a faux-forest display with a full-sized photograph of children playing in the forest (fig. 6.7).

The Jewish Artist In 1976, the year the Soviet Union erected a memorial “to Soviet citizens” at Babi Yar, Jewish animation director Boris Ablynin thought the time was ripe for a film that depicted life in the camps. He contracted Jewish scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova to write a script about a doll rumored to have been found in the Auschwitz concentration camp and put on exhibit at the Auschwitz museum.86 “None of us [working on the film] ever went there, not to Poland, not to Auschwitz,” explained Sviridova.87 With no access to documentary sources or any way to confirm the facts, Sviridova tapped into the whispered stories she heard from her own mother, the only surviving child of a large prewar Jewish-Christian Orthodox family, who had lived through the Kherson Ghetto, deportation, the Greigovo concentration camp in Nikolaev, Ukraine, the Neumarkt concentration camp in Germany, and the Regensburg concentration camp in Germany. Sviridova wrote a nightmarish account of the doll, which she imagined as the impossible dreamer Don Quixote, and the doll maker, who she imagined as a Polish Jewish inmate at the Ausch­ witz concentration camp.88 As a freelance writer relatively inexperienced with the implicit boundaries of Soyuzmultfilm tolerance, Sviridova naively included the words “Jew” and “Auschwitz” in the script. The film was rejected. In 1984, with the fortieth anniversary of Soviet Victory Day looming, Ablynin decided to try his luck with the film again, but this time more judiciously. He turned once more to the now wizened Sviridova, who rewrote the script for Story of a Doll (1984), this time avoiding direct mention of Jews, Holocaust, or Auschwitz. Direct references to Auschwitz were absent in the final film as well, although Ablynin managed to include text toward the end of the animation segment stating that the story “is based on historical facts.” The animated segments of the film are nestled within live-action sequences that rely on recurrent documentary images to establish historical and geographic context. Consequently, military explosions, wartime maps, photographs of young men lying prostrate

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on barbed wire, and concentration camp identification photographs buoy the surreal and sentimental account of the animated doll. The film was made through a network of silent supporters: Sviridova gave her script to Ablynin and “Ablynin gave the script to Boyarsky and Boyarsky gave it to whoever needed it and we made the film.” Sviridova gives the lion’s share of the credit to Boyarsky, whom she describes as “a dignified old Jew who knew how to make things happen in his own way. I’ll never know for certain, but this is just how Boyarsky worked.”89 Like many Soyuzmultfilm employees, Boyarsky had lost an uncle and nieces in the Minsk ghetto in the early years of the war and was hyper-attuned to the role that Jewish identity played not only in the war but, having lived through Stalin’s assassination of his father in 1940, in broader Soviet culture. At the time of the making of Story of a Doll, Boyarsky was the dean of the graduate program in Animation Directing and Screenwriting at VGIK, and he commanded considerable administrative clout, but he walked, as Sviridova puts it, “between the raindrops.”90 Part of the credit for the film’s acceptance goes to the director Boris Ablynin, whom Sviridova colorfully describes as “an antisemite’s wet dream! He was fat and his ass shook when he walked.”91 “Boris Ablynin was a genius of intrigue,” explained Sviridova. “He knew that no one wanted to endorse the script so he singled out Marina Kurchevsky,” the daughter of the established director and Honored Artist of the RSFSR Vadim Kurchevsky (1928–1997). “Ablynin told Vadim Kurchevsky, ‘I’ll take your daughter’ and Kurchevsky told his daughter that she would be working on a film on the great Don Quixote.”92 Marina Kurchevsky (b. 1956) transformed Sviridova’s script into a series of lavish storyboards that contained no hint of contemporary history, Jewishness, or death camps. The in-house Artistic Council enthusiastically embraced the film as a modernization of a literary classic. “I don’t know what Marina Kurchevsky understood about the script at the time that she was working on the film,” states Sviridova, “but she was irrelevant once the council accepted the scenario. It was her first credit as an artistic director and she had no right to interject. Anyway, no one would have listened to her as a debut artist.”93 Marina Kurchevsky’s lavishly colored storyboards secured Ablynin his approvals and allowed Kurchevsky to move on to more classical fare, such as her father’s adaptation of Aleksander Pushkin’s Legend of Salieri (1986), but her beautiful storyboards for Story of a Doll played no part in the making of the gaunt and malnourished Don Quixote puppet, the zombie-like movements of the camp inmates, and the dark minimalist scenes. Boyarsky’s and Ablynin’s decision to hook the Artistic Council with a storyboard artist, rather than an animator or a writer, was no fluke. The film’s assigned redactor, Elena Nikitkina, whose job it was to make sure that the film conformed to the accepted script, bypassed the storyboards altogether, but

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when the journal Iskusstvo kino reviewed the film after its successful reception in Poland, the editors revived one of Marina Kurchevsky’s romanticized storyboards of Don Quixote riding through an unrecognized landscape to frame the film in a more palatable, and publishable, light.94 It would be difficult to evaluate what Soviet audiences understood of the film’s subject matter, but Sviridova claimed that before the film’s release, “nobody knew that it was a Jewish film about the Holocaust except for me, Ablynin, and Boyarsky.”95 If Boyarsky maneuvered behind-the-scenes to secure initial studio approvals, Marina Kurchevsky managed the film’s public relations campaign. When Iskusstvo kino ran a series of interviews with “young masters of animation,” Kurchevsky represented the film from the perspective of her storyboards rather than the film that Ablynin and Sviridova made. When the interviewer asked Kurchevsky whether she was more drawn to “high” tragedy or “low” farce, Kurchevsky spoke in very general terms about the usefulness of all genres.96 Toward the end of the interview, Kurchevsky judiciously stated that “we could not do without the grotesque element, despite the fact that, if I may say so, [the story was] in the genre of an artistic documentary.”97 The film ended up in the XXII Krakow International Film Festival, qualifying for the live-action film category on the technicality that there were live-actor hands in the film, and Sviridova presumes that the submission was quietly arranged by Boyarsky. “Neither Ablynin nor I knew that the film had been submitted until it earned the Silver Dragon prize in Krakow at the International film festival of short films in 1985.”98 While Boyarsky quietly cleared a path for the film’s release and critical reception and Kurchevsky managed the press, Sviridova and Ablynin worked on telling a story without explicit reference to Jews or the Holocaust. Sviridova and Ablynin compensated with a heavy-handed use of visual symbols, including the conscious manipulation of easily recognizable ones. One of the clearest ways Ablynin and Sviridova dealt with the silencing of the Holocaust was by bookending the film’s central scene in the concentration camp barracks with black-andwhite faux-footage of a prewar radio announcing false weather reports (fig. 6.8). The film opens with a close-up of a multinational radio, whose dial is turned by an invisible hand, announcing that “over all of Spain, the sky is clear,” a historic code phrase broadcast on July 17, 1936 to communicate the nationalist military revolt in Spain. Ironically, rain pours over the radio as it announces sunny skies. Since radios were fairly standardized in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it is notable that the radio used in the film is not a Soviet one based on its markings (i.e., MW for medium wave, SW for short wave, and LW for long wave) while radios with horizontal glass panes first appeared in the Soviet Union only in the late 1950s. The use of a radio would connect many Soviet citizens with wartime memories because many people first heard of the German invasion and stayed

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informed of safety procedures, evacuations, and news from the front through the radio. Yet, the use of a foreign radio that makes false predictions and an invisible hand guiding the dial speaks to the widespread suspicion Soviet citizens harbored toward their national media. This reliance and distrust of the radio can be read in animation director Fyodor Khitruk’s recollection of the day he first heard of the invasion: “I was still lying in bed, turned on the radio-program ‘Pioneer’ and caught an overseas station. But instead of the usual music, I heard through the noise and crackling a hysterical voice shouting something in German. . . . I recognized the voice of Hitler and realized that the war had started.”99 According to Khitruk, “Everyone believed that the war would end quickly and with an easy victory. . . . So assured us the movies, radio, books, newspapers, and especially the upbeat songs like ‘Our Beloved City Can Sleep in Peace!’”100 The radio used at the end of the film to signal the end of the war appears in full color and is surrounded by red roses, but is once again not the white, utilitarian radio that became a household staple after the war but rather a “magnitolia,” a shortwave radio and cassette player that came out in the early 1980s and was commonly used for listening to underground music (fig. 6.9). By the 1970s, the

Fig. 6.8 False Radio I. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

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Fig. 6.9 False Radio II. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

entire Soviet Union was tied together by one radio station broadcasting one program at all times, and in the 1980s the magnitolia shortwave radios offered Soviet citizens alternative news sources (one that played an important role in Jewish national self-awareness). The second radio, which sits in the middle of the lawn, announces that “in Santiago there is rain,” but sunlight shines ironically over the scene. The false radio reports refer to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War that began on July 17, 1936, and end with the fascist coup of Pinochet in Chile in 1973, but the use of these two radios and their programs portrays the radio as perpetually lying to its listeners. After the first radio announcement, the film then turns to a scene of a fullfigured monument of Don Quixote, which initially appears life-sized in scale because of the strategic use of archival footage of massive buildings being destroyed in combination with the monument, but is unmasked as visibly small in stature after its restoration at the end of the film (fig. 6.10). The appearance of a life-sized monument, a symbol of Soviet monumental art, followed by its appearance as a toy (it was made in plaster in the studio) is another demonstration of the lies that national media was capable of disseminating (fig. 6.11).101

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Figs. 6.10, 6.11 Prewar Monument. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film stills.

The jovial and generic music of the film’s soundtrack creates a jarring juxtaposition during the battle scenes that include clips of smoke emanating from ovens, a photo-montage of concentration camp inmates, a Nazi march in the shape of a swastika, and images of book burnings. The camera zooms in on one of the books in the burning heap, and an illustration from the title page of Cervantes’s book Don Quixote alights. “We had heard that Hitler banned Cervantes. It took us some time to confirm this, but our research found that it was true. Hitler gives Don Quixote status by burning his book. At the moment that Hitler listed him as banned, he transformed Cervantes’s status.”102 Sviridova, who worked outside the system of full-time state employment, found personal resonance in the German banning of Cervantes and in using his masterpiece as a literary source for her own story. Sviridova was not only drawn to the image of book burning as a foreshadowing of the Nazi burning of people but to the ways that the story of Cervantes spoke to her experience as a writer in the Soviet Union. Cervantes, the great writer, had to work as a grain collector and, after failing to collect the necessary taxes, was imprisoned despite having lost his left arm fighting for the king. For Sviridova, the image of the loyal Cervantes, writing in a prison hole with his one good hand, kept her writing all those years.103 After the book burning scene, the film abruptly turns to a photographic essay of children fishing, sitting around a table with their families, and learning in school for the same reason that Boris Barnet inserted an opening scene of peaceful farm animals in Polkan and Shavka: to depict what one film critic described as “prewar family photographs taken during the peaceful life of the peoples of Europe” (fig. 6.12).104 Sviridova recalls that the directors tried to “find families that looked as if they could be Jewish, but not too Jewish. It needed to be

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Fig. 6.12 Prewar Photo-essay. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

difficult to tell.”105 Whether or not the destruction of black-and-white family photographs could signify Jewish subjects, the prewar images were not of soldiers but of civilians and, therefore, their destruction is not a casualty of war, but suggestive of genocide. The photographs are then violently shred and replaced by photographs of concentration camp victims in a repetitive and relentless grid of faces and camp uniforms. Although the family photographs of women and children describe the victims of the war as peaceful citizens, the directors limited the camp inmates only to men, leaving open the possibility that the inmates were prisoners of war rather than civilians. The stark reality of the camps emerges in the sounds of crying children, growling dogs, and the monotonous ticking of a clock, which signals the irreversibility of history. In the midst of all the tragic sounds and sights, a doll maker—portrayed by a live actor—surreptitiously whittles a doll around a skeletal frame fashioned from a piece of barbed wire and a strip of aluminum (fig. 6.13). “He had to make do with what he had around him,” said Sviridova. “We all have to make do with what we have.”106 With skilled precision, the puppet maker designs movable joints, adding small details such as a boot and a hat with the

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Fig. 6.13 (left) Making Don Quixote. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still. Fig. 6.14 (right) Don Quixote. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

light of a kerosene lamp whose fire doubles as a suturing tool for the creation (rather than burning) of art. Don Quixote’s face is gaunt like that of a starving camp inmate, but when the puppet comes to life in the hands of his maker, he repeats his own name “Don Quixote” with growing resolve (fig. 6.14). The artist begins to animate his doll, which attempts to duel with a windmill in the shape of a swastika but gets tied up by his own strings and is thrown lifeless to the ground. A sign with the German word Achtung (“Attention”) and a blaring sound alert the prisoners to get into formation as the heavy door slides open to reveal a glaring light. As the commander enters, the doll is silently lifted off the floor and furtively passed from one prisoner to another behind their tight row of backs in an act of united spiritual resistance (fig. 6.15). The camera attends to the lifeless doll, focusing on its material presence in the hands of his saviors, whereas the commander is represented only by a shadow silhouette of his boot and hat. The commander’s heavy and deliberate footsteps resound in the aftermath of the quiet shuffling sounds of the inmates. The commander shoots the first prisoner dead, leaving an empty space in the tight line, and the puppet falls to the ground. An entire row of inmates are shot one by one until the puppet is left alone in the cavernous crypt. After the murders, the puppet rises on his own without his strings (fig. 6.16). “Everyone understood that the doll’s body was dead and that when he rose it was his spirit,” said Sviridova: “Those who knew understood that it was a dybbuk in a way.” A close-up of the doll’s face reveals a tear forming in the puppet’s sunken eye sockets and dripping down his gaunt face, which identifies Don Quixote

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Fig. 6.15 Roll-call. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

once again with the concentration camp inmates. Through a barbed wire in the foreground and backlit by a thin shaft of light, the puppet heroically lifts his sword in the air. Behind him, a row of ghostly uniformed inmates silently rise from the dead and gather to witness Don Quixote’s epic battle. One critic wrote that “the film viewer perceived Don Quixote’s fight with ‘windmill fascism’ not as puppet-theater but as a fierce, uncompromising battle between Good and Evil. We forget about the dramatization and begin to actively believe in the reality of the battle, to believe that it decides the fate of mankind.”107 With every stroke of his sword against the swastika, the film cuts to documentary footage that “our frontline cameramen filmed in May 1945,” until the windmill lays in a heap and the Red Army liberators open the gates.108 Russian shouts signal the liberation of Auschwitz, celebratory graffiti appears on the once-impenetrable brick walls, and the hands of a live actor in the jacket of a Red Army soldier gently pick up the puppet from the asphalt. The film did not aim to simply recover history that had been silenced decades earlier; in fact, the documentary footage comprises some of the best known material of the war. Rather, the filmmakers sought to challenge the role of media

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Fig. 6.16 Don Quixote Rises. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

in society by rearranging the documentary material. It is interesting that Story of a Doll focused on puppet making rather than the much more common artistic work on paper that came out of Auschwitz. When the marionette rises without his strings, a scene that the Quay Brothers would employ for their adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1986) the following year, he embodies the medium of animation. This use of the puppet and puppet animation is overtly self-reflexive and, in imagining the puppet maker dressed in the uniform of an otherwise invisible Holocaust inmate, Ablynin and Sviridova inserted themselves (fig. 6.17). As Jewish puppet-makers working in a state institution, Ablynin and Sviridova created a puppet-maker and a puppet that outlasted their oppressors. The film’s endearing close-ups of the puppet’s boot and hat conveys a more real character than the Nazi commander’s shadow of his boot and hat. The light by which the puppet maker furtively worked is a purer light than the blaring lamp of his superior. The found-object puppet survives his would-be destroyers. As the puppet maker constructs the puppet, a quote from Turgenev appears on the screen: “When Don Quixote will vanish from the world, let the book of history be closed. There will be nothing left to read in it.” Turgenev’s essay “Hamlet

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Fig. 6.17 Liberation. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

and Don Quixote” takes Don Quixote seriously as a self-sacrificing ideologue and not a fool pontificating idealistic nonsense on the basis of a pathological fantasy. Turgenev’s essay, delivered in 1860 on the occasion of a fundraiser of the Society for the Aid of Indigent Writers and Scientists, frames Don Quixote as a symbol of the people who give up their lives for better realms. It was in the spirit of Turgenev that Ablynin and Sviridova presented the subject of the Holocaust in ways that paralleled life under a repressive regime and in their own medium. Filmmakers of Holocaust narratives have long struggled with meaningful conclusions; Zionist trends favored the promise of the establishment of a Jewish state as an optimistic image of future safety while American filmmakers tended to emphasize the moral dimensions of democratic values of human rights as reassurance against similar violence. With little precedent for the creation of Holocaust films, Sviridova and Ablynin opted for a conclusion that resonated with them as Soviet Jewish artists. The film asserts the Soviet perpetuation of repression as early as the opening credits when the black acrid smoke from towers spills over to obscure the names of the film crew. The final scene repeats this accusation through the design of the sticks that controls the marionette taking

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Fig. 6.18 Auschwitz Museum Display. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly, 1984). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Film still.

the shape of a Russian Orthodox cross (fig. 6.18).109 At the same time, the final scene of the museum exhibition of the doll does offer some resolution to the theme of art and repression. Through a ribbed window pane made opaque by rain, a line of well-dressed tourists bear witness to the doll and, when a child places a memorial flower on the ledge beneath the doll, we can see the line of museum visitors reflected in the glass vitrine protecting the doll. Ablynin and Sviridova used this same technique in their 1983 film About a Mammoth, where a book about a mammoth dead “for 6 million” years can be seen in a bookstore window display in front of which a tiny flower breaks through the asphalt as a symbol of long-suffering resistance. By closing with the museological preservation of the puppet in the face of the death of six million Jews, the film makes a bold and self-referential claim for the triumph of art despite the most extreme measures of repression. Both The Pioneer’s Violin and Story of a Doll engaged with the themes of victimization and heroism in ways that drew parallels to contemporary Jewish culture. Both films broach the Holocaust through the motif of resistance in ways that cast resistance through artistic expression (whether through the notes of the

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violin or the surreptitious creation of a puppet from found materials). The truth of the war, as it was depicted in these films, was not so much a question of victimization or heroism, but of authorship. All four films discussed in this chapter insist on the Jewish presence: Jews were there, they saw, they fought, they died, and they helped the country conquer the fascist threat and recover the Soviet soul through their art. This juggernaut to the animated war genre included, at its most powerful, an element of intellectual dissent. In inserting Holocaust-related themes into their films, Soyuzmultfilm filmmakers were able to forge cultural throughways: classic Russian music is pitted against peasant drinking music in Polkan and Shavka; the Jewish authorship of the Great Patriotic War is pitted against the lies of Western propagandists in A Lesson Not Learned; the high art of the violin plays a superior moral “note” to the popular entertainment of the harmonica; the prewar anthem of the “Internationale” resounds over the Nazi cult of the volk in “Ach, du lieber Augustin”; the museum exposes the lies of the radio, and the creation of an animated puppet signals a more enlightened civilization than one that bans and burns literature. In posing high [Jewish] culture against low [fascist] culture, Soviet animators simultaneously made a case for the preservation of that culture. In struggling to redefine the Soviet cultural landscape, these films are very much a product of the intellectual community that inaugurated the Golden Age of Soviet Animation.

7 Cartoon Cosmopolitans Drawing Jews into Soviet Culture

I

n the de-Stalinization programs of Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet art enjoyed a more liberal atmosphere that writer Ilya Ehrenburg famously called the “thaw.” It was with a giddy sense of anticipation that animation director Lev Atamanov predicted that the 1959 formation of a Soviet chapter of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA) would necessitate the adoption of innovative styles and aesthetic frameworks in which to integrate the new ideas filtering into domestic animation from the international scene.1 Atamanov’s enthusiasm proved short-lived because, less than a decade later, the new general secretary Leonid Brezhnev called for a return of the socially-minded artist who understood his work as constructive in the building of a progressive society. Brezhnev’s scaling back of Khrushchev-era liberalism, which became known as the “stagnation,” came as a blow to artists educated in the relative artistic freedom of the “thaw” era. Several of these freshly graduated artists reacted to the new restrictions by sidestepping contemporary hot-button issues altogether and resurrecting older material that had fallen under official scrutiny in their parent’s generation but whose political sting had lost its potency over the years. The adoption of the retrospective format, or “retro” in popular parlance, was a hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s around the world, yet each dig into the past carried its own set of regional sensibilities and produced unique results.2 Even in a discussion limited to the Moscow artistic scene, the self-conscious mining of relatively recent history largely depended on who was doing the digging, what was being recovered, and how it was being reused. For Jewish animators, the country’s national art history was particularly relevant to their own identities because Jewish intellectuals were often implicated in the history of modern Russian art, which art historian John Bowlt posits “can be regarded as the story of constant confrontations between conditions of wholeness and disease, sanity and insanity.”3 On some level, the revival of once-censored art and music, regardless of whether the reclaimed material could H 189 H

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even be identified as particularly Jewish, assuaged a Jewish pride that had been damaged during the Stalin-era attacks on formalism as a pernicious Jewish culture. It would be easy to interpret Soviet revivalism as a principled stand against state art, but the greater pull to the past for young animators was individuation from their parents’ generation and the national identities of their youth. When Jewish animators tapped into this fraught postwar material in the 1960s, their appropriations were often personal explorations of the perceived Jewishness of what had been perceived as “lowbrow,” “alien,” and “contaminated” in their parents’ generation: a discourse that allowed young animators to play out their own inheritance of the intellectual tradition. In adopting the retro mode, some animation directors, such as Jewish director Efim Gamburg (1925–2000), specifically redressed the history of “lowbrow” entertainment in slapstick historical parodies of westerns, spy thrillers, costume dramas, and Broadway musicals. In his first retro comedy, for example, Gamburg parodied Western spy films in his film Passion of Spies (1967), which cleverly resurrected cinematic trends and fashions that had once been disparaged as “bourgeois entertainment,” antiproletariat, and anti-Soviet, but with such a heavy-handedness that the film’s comic mode highlighted the harmless silliness of the material. Other directors drew upon more “highbrow” material tarred by ideological scrutiny in previous decades, such as art historical and psychoanalytic tropes. Animation director Andrei Khrzhanovsky, for example, applied neosurrealism to the Baroque masters in The Glass Harmonica (1967) and animation director Nikolai Serebiakov applied a Chagall-esque style in his neomystical film Happiness Isn’t in the Hat (1968). In these and many other films, Khrzhanovsky and Serebiakov made satirical use of aesthetic tropes of “formalism,” a term that charged artists with naval-gazing compulsions over the forms of art and the rejection of social-minded content. The recourse to once-politicized material pushed animation into stylistically and narratively complex films, a trend that critic Mikhail Bakhtyn described as “an intellectualization of animation.”4 By definition, the revivification of the past engages with various strata of cultural bedrock: the historical moment in which the work was first created and acquired meaning and the contemporary moment in which the work was selfconsciously imitated and its meanings deconstructed. This layered engagement with culture resonates within the Soviet Jewish art context in fascinating ways. By way of illustration, I return to our discussion in Chapter One where I emphasized how the first Jewish-born artists to experiment with stop-motion technologies (such as El Lissitzky, Yuri Merkulov, and Dziga Vertov) understood their work as an aesthetic, rather than ethnographic, approach to Jewish folklore. While the Jewish artists of the 1920s, as expressed by Issachar Ryback and Boris Aronson in their 1919 manifesto “The Jewish Way of Painting,” channeled their art toward the universalism of the Russian avant-garde, the Soviet animators of

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the 1960s reclaimed this chapter of art history to express a deliberate embrace of an embattled Jewish consciousness. Like most revivalist movements, the use of retro in animation devolved its subject of its original meanings by ironically deploying its cultural currency through the politicized prism of contemporary cultural reform. Although scholars of Jewish art have tried to locate El Lissitzky’s, Dziga Vertov’s, Yuri Merkulov’s, Sergei Eisenstein’s, and Sergei Jutkevich’s (perceived) Jewishness in the avant-gardism of the 1920s, the more consciously Jewish imprint that these filmmakers would play on Soviet culture would come from Jewish animators in the 1960s who returned to the formalist aspects of their art. By resurrecting the radical filmmaking of the past, Jewish animators challenged the post-Stalinist legacies of these masters, on the one hand, and shaped their own Jewish and artistic identities in a post-thaw atmosphere of renewed state regulation, on the other. With the perspective that our own retrospective gaze affords, the identification of Jewish themes in the retro trends of the 1960s was more intuitive than we might expect. Art historians have long acknowledged, for example, the nonconformist Jewish artist Ilya Kabakov’s deliberate appropriation of El Lissitzky’s utopian vision of the revolutionary era for his own dystopian images of the grim realities of the late Soviet years. Despite the scholarly neglect of Jewish motifs in official art and the state film studios, Jewish animators took a similar interest in the politicized revival of revolutionary art of the 1920s (and much of it predated the experiments of non-conformist artists). Iosif Boyarsky’s work for the film The Flying Proletarian (1962), based on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 futuristic poem of the same name, for example, made use of the radical graphic elements of Jewish revolutionary artists with flat, simplified forms, bold lines, and intense color schemes. The Brumberg sisters’ adaptation of Yuri Olesha’s 1924 story Three Fat Men revived not only what was considered the first artistic rendering of a Soviet revolutionary fairy tale, but made overtures to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s 1930 dramatization at the Moscow Art Theater and Victor Oransky’s 1935 modernist ballet adaptation. The artistic engagement with a tainted cultural past gave animators a canvas on which to examine their own still-undermined place as artists of Jewish descent within their national culture. It was in this revivalist spirit that Jewish directors Andrei Khrzhanovsky and Yuri Norstein, both of whose fathers’ careers suffered irreparable damage during the Stalin years, began to replace Soyuzmultfilm’s easily accessible narrative structures and propensity for childish dialogue with complex formal choices and film scores that had been identified as “anti-Soviet” in their parents’ generation.5 In line with theorist Jean Baudrillard’s definition of “retro” as a detached disruption of the concept of historical narrative, Khrzhanovsky’s recourse to the past creates a sort of palimpsest that records the traumatic erasures lying underneath official Soviet historiography.6 By exploring the legacy of a dissolved

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intelligentsia within Ilya Ehrenburg’s late construct of the Stalinist “freeze,” the Khrushchev “thaw,” and the Brezhnev “stagnation,” Khrzhanovsky and Yuri Norstein redressed their own place in the Soviet intelligentsia and, in the process, “de-proletarianized” or, as Bakhtyn put it, “intellectualized” animation.7

Cosmopolitans in the Audience Andrei Khrzhanovsky grew up in an intellectual family with a Jewish mother who was a classical musician and a non-Jewish father who studied painting under modernists Pavel Filonov and Kazmir Malevich. His father exhibited in avant-garde circles in the 1920s but transitioned to theatrical fare and voice-over work for Soyuzmultfilm during the Stalin years when many Muscovite intellectuals were being arrested on charges related to their engagement with formalism. Very much defined by his parents’ connection to a Muscovite artistic milieu, Andrei Khrzhanovsky enrolled in the film courses at VGIK (All-Union National Institute of Cinema), where many of his teachers were family friends who had personally witnessed and experienced the repressions of the Stalin years, including Jewish directors Boris Barnet, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Lev Kuleshov (who served as his advisor). Khrzhanovsky was initially drawn to the medium of animation by his interest in the convergence between literature and art, but his filmography also reveals that from his first student film in the 1960s to his recent film on the life of exiled Jewish poet Josef Brodsky in the film One and a Half Rooms (2012), Khrzhanovsky sustained a lifelong interest in adapting material created in his parents’ generation and marked by charges of Jewish influences in the interim.8 Despite his entry into the film courses at the precocious age of sixteen, Soyuzmultfilm produced Khrzhanovsky’s VGIK graduation film There Once Was Kozyavin (1966), and the film received a long and mostly positive review in the journal Sovetskaia kul’tura.9 Based on a short story by Jewish writer Lazarus (Ginzburg) Lagin and adapted for the screen by Khrzhanovsky’s classmate, the stubbornly independent composer Gennadii Shpalikov, the film combines a surrealistic landscape in the style of artist Giorgio de Chirico. Although the graphic text and soundtrack are stylistically sophisticated, the plot is so simple it can be understood by the youngest film viewer. The employee Kozyavin, a romanticized male lead who assumes the ultra-stylish persona of the communist hero Kozyavin, is instructed by his boss to locate another employee named Sidorov. The boss points out a general direction and Kozyavin treads a straight path with mechanical determination, stepping over desks and other employees, including one who has hanged himself from the rafters of the office (fig. 7.1). Oblivious to the world around him, Kozyavin tramples through city markers such as a

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Fig. 7.1, 7.2 There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin, 1966). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Film stills.

construction site, an open-air violin concert, an outdoor fitness park, an art shop in the midst of a robbery, and so on, robotically asking everyone he encounters, “Have you seen Sidorov?,” and offering only the mundane explanation that “the cashier has arrived” (fig. 7.2) In landscapes shaped by a strict linear rationalism and bold geometric patterns, Kozyavin traverses the Earth’s hemisphere, absurdly lifting his briefcase over his head to cross oceans, until he finally arrives back at the office having failed in his task to locate the truant employee. Soon after the film’s release, critic Sergei Asenin commended the film for its satirical take on the familiar theme of the compulsive nature of the bureaucratic personality, noticing that Kozyavin “even breathes in the prescribed manner” when crossing a balance beam at a session of gymnastics that he interrupts.10

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Fig. 7.3 There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin, 1966). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Film still.

Yet, although the film takes up an old Russian literary theme of the bureaucrat, Khrzha­novsky’s eclectic amalgam of retro-inspired fine arts and mass media, derivative painting styles, a hodge-podge of cultural referents, and a compilation of historical quotations appears more concerned with the theme of the contemporary artist in society. The theme of the artist is most visible in Khrzhanovsky’s depiction of a violin concert scene that Kozyavin so daftly disrupts (fig. 7.3). As the violinist performs a phrase of classical music, a pair of theatrical dancers, a sailboat, and a street lamp glide across the stage as if propelled on horizontal tracks, but when Kozyavin grabs the violinist’s bow mid-stroke, the scenic elements quiver, and stage props, such as an ionic column and a classical Venus sculpture, spring from the violinist’s bow and violently crash to the floor. Khrzhanovsky’s ironic fusing of classic and modernist elements expresses a Baudrillard understanding of retro as an untethered relationship to historical narrative.11 Kozyavin does not simply interrupt a single concert; he triggers a generalized rupture in the cultural continuum upon which the very notion of progressive culture relies. The shattering of the theatrical set, for example, evokes the break in the development of the Russian school of avant-garde theater. Other examples of discontinuity in Soviet cultural progress follow the fall of the stage set. As Kozyavin grabs hold of the violinist’s bow to ask about Sidorov’s whereabouts,

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Fig. 7.4, 7.5 There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin, 1966). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Film stills.

atonal jazz notes bifurcate the classical score. With the sudden disruption of the music, the carefully choreographed stage set instantly disappears and the achievements of classical culture are consigned to an empty wooden room evocative of a prison cell (fig. 7.4). A single light bulb hangs overhead. The now bow-less violinist mimes the last few notes of his performance, and newsprint springs from his empty hands in crude origami shapes in a biting critique of the contemporary reliance on mass media as the basis for culture (fig. 7.5). After the debacle on stage, which Khrzhanovsky filmed in high-speed stopmotion action, the camera turns to the bewildered audience, rendered by a single frame. For his shot of the audience, Khrzhanovsky resurrects a number of famous intellectuals through easily discernable portraits, such as writer Aleksander Tvardovsky, artist Natan Altman, writers Nikolai Gogol and Boris Pasternak, art critic Ilya Ehrenburg, artist Wassily Kandinsky and French artist Henri Rousseau, taken from his Self-Portrait with Palette (1890) (fig. 7.6).12 The immediate recognizability of all the audience members is all the more notable given that Khrzhanovsky designed both Kozyavin and the violinist as anonymous characters in the generic romantic style. The scene depicts each member of the audience as a highly individualized figure expressing a different listening pose or an independent attribute, such as the journal Novyi Mir tucked under the arm of its editor Tvardovsky. In addition, the individual members of the audience are plucked from various periods of modern Russian history and grouped together by virtue of their status as intellectuals belonging to an ideational community in the spirit of Raphael’s School of Athens (1510). Yet, unlike Raphael’s Renaissance masterpiece, the characters in Khrzhanovsky’s film are not the beatified founders of Western civilization, but members of a disbanded intelligentsia that had relatively recently been threatened with historical erasure.

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Fig. 7.6 There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin, 1966). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Film still.

The stasis of the characters, in a scene that assumes a freeze-frame effect, communicates metaphorically since the historical figures experienced an on-again, off-again official status between periods of cultural freezes and thaws. The only sense of movement comes through the camera, which pans out from a close-up portrait of Ilya Ehrenburg, the writer who coined the term “the thaw” as well as one of the first Soviet intellectuals to publicly embrace his Jewish identity and publicly denounce the official antisemitism of the Khrushchev era.13 The panning out of the still from Ehrenburg evokes the contemporary trend of a Jewish consciousness that was awakened through the political purging of cultural figures. Although this combination of celebrities could never have gathered together in life, the ahistorical presence of the fin-de-siècle French painter Henri Rousseau, standing to the side of an otherwise exclusively Russian gathering, poses a separate interpretive problem. In a recent interview with film scholar Laura Pontieri, Khrzhanovsky explained his inclusion of Rousseau as representing “art that is alien to socialist realism,” an explanation that may carry some cachet in a post-Soviet art climate but would have been less meaningful to a VGIK graduate student who even won a VGIK prize signed by the chairman of the jury, Boris Efimov, known as “Stalin’s artist” in part for his fine-tuned sense for political

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pragmatism.14 A 1966 reference to Rousseau is hardly embracing an enfant terrible; more likely, the portrait pays homage to a bon ton artist who made it in the bourgeois Parisian art world despite his proletarian roots. Rousseau, whose early admirers included Russian avant-garde artist Wassily Kandinsky (also included in the scene), came to Paris to work as a government employee but devoted himself to painting and is widely considered to be a self-taught artist with little academic training. The young Khrzhanovsky’s reference to Rousseau in his graduation film might function akin to a popular American yearbook quote—Paul Simon’s “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all”—as an irreverent boast on the inefficacy of education. At the same time, Rousseau, the earliest historical figure in the group, signals the beginning of the retrospective period under examination, a starting point that locates the roots of contemporary Russian intellectual circles in turn-ofthe-century bohemian Paris, similar in fashion to Marc Chagall’s insertion of an image of the Eiffel Tower in the window of his Paris studio in his first self-portrait Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912–1913). For Khrzhanovsky, who could not hope to study in Paris as Chagall and many other Russian and Jewish artists had done, Rousseau embodied a no-longer accessible artistic haven. Natan Altman, the only figure depicted twice on Khrzhanovsky’s lawn, was one such Eastern European expatriate who began his artistic career in Rousseau’s Paris as part of a thriving Jewish artistic community that included Leon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Max Weber.15 Altman appears as an audience member (in the red bowtie) and is represented again with his cubist-inspired 1914 portrait of writer Anna Akhmatova, who lounges in the blue dress and white chemise. Of the Jewish artists active before the 1917 October Revolution, it was Altman who took an active role in the new state art institutions and would have been a model for artists working for rather than against the state.16 The scene appears more concerned with reclaiming the tarnished reputations of marginalized figures who constructed the official Soviet art scene rather than with the insertion of cloaked references to underground movements. From this perspective, Khrzhanovsky’s assertion that Rousseau represents “art that is alien to socialist realism” can be taken as a reference to artists like his father and other intellectuals in the largely Jewish milieu of his family’s inner circle. Rather than an act of artistic protest against official art, Khrzhanovsky more likely argues for the rehabilitation of “alien” artists into the Soviet cultural hierarchy. In gathering this particular audience together for the concert, Khrzhanovsky includes these compromised figures in the canon of official state art as he concurrently establishes his own membership among them on the occasion of his graduation project.17 Khrzhanovsky’s deliberate arrangement of the celebrities presents them as part of a single community in which Jewish intellectuals find a place that is not

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governed by an ethnographic logic. In the first row, Jewish writer Boris Pasternak, himself a victim of a political scandal after he was awarded the Nobel Prize despite the official banning of his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) in the Soviet Union, sits not beside one of his own supporters, but beside the aristocratic Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva, whom he publicly supported after her exile. The second row consists of Russian and Polish non-Jewish intellectuals who supported Jewish culture: film director Andrei Tarkovsky offered Jewish actors a safe haven in the movie industry; writer Konstantin Paustovsky flirted with Jewish themes in his work and refused to denounce Pasternak despite considerable pressure; poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko openly challenged antisemitism; and composer Dimitri Shostakovich encouraged Jewish music and supported Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg after his arrest in 1953. Although Jewish intellectuals are integrated in the audience, the latter two portraits of Yevtushenko and Shostakovich in the second row enact the most dramatic performance of Jewish integration despite neither’s being Jewish. Khrzhanovsky rubbed out Yevtushenko’s and Shostakovich’s mouths, an erasure that may speak to their shared experience with censorship under Khrushchev. The extraordinary detail of Yevtushenko’s vertically striped concentration camp uniform, however, renders the erasure of their mouths as a more specific iteration of the suppression of Jewish voices.18 Yevtushenko made international headlines with his controversial poem Babi Yar (1961), which, like Ehrenburg’s The Black Book (1946), took for its subject the genocide of Soviet Jewish citizens during the war. In Babi Yar, published abroad and distributed widely (though unofficially) by and among Jews in the Soviet Union, Yevtushenko empathizes with Jewish suffering so completely that he begins each stanza with a declaration of Jewishness: “I see myself an ancient Israelite”; “It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself”; “I see myself a boy in Bialystok”; “It seems to me that I am Anna Frank.” At the end of the poem, Yevtushenko frames his identification with Jewish suffering as the fulfillment of his Russianness: “No Jewish blood runs through my veins, but I feel the corrosive hatred of the antisemites as if I were a Jew and that is why I am a true Russian!”19 Khrzhanovsky’s concert audience enacts Yevtushenko’s conflation of Jewish suffering and Russianness soulfulness. With Yevtushenko sitting on an urban lawn in a concentration camp shirt, Khrzhanovsky reverses the Sovietization of Jewish victims under the official doctrine of Soviet universalization by Judaizing a Russian cultural laureate. If, according to the official policy surrounding the memorial of the Babi Yar massacre, all Jews could be subsumed under the category of “peaceful Soviet citizens,” then for one frame in There Once Was Kozyavin, a peaceful Russian intellectual could likewise be subsumed in the fate of Jewish Holocaust victims. Dimitri Shostakovich’s position on the concert bench besides Yevtushenko underscores Khrzhanovsky’s reference to the Babi Yar

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Fig. 7.7 There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin, 1966). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Film still.

poem, which Shostakovich adapted in his 1962 Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled “Babi Yar.” Music historian James Loeffler argues that Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” exercised tremendous power over Soviet Jewish consciousness: “Four decades after the Society for Jewish Folk Music had vanished, and ten years after Jewish music in its entirety had officially ceased to exist, Jewishness resounded through the work of Soviet music’s leading composer.”20 In order to credit Shostakovich with a cultural status unacknowledged by the state within the animated text, Khrzhanovsky seated the controversial theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose execution Stalin ordered in 1940 in a dissent-quashing measure, in the row behind Shostakovich and directed his gaze to Shostakovich rather than the anonymous violinist on stage. Although There Once Was Kozyavin comically lampoons bureaucratic shortsightedness, the film treats the destruction of culture with grave seriousness. When Kozyavin disturbs the violin player mid-measure to repeat his robotic refrain “Have you seen Sidorov?,” the famous audience bears witness to the debacle that has befallen Russian culture in general and themselves in particular. Khrzhanovsky’s revival of a circle of intellectuals does not pitch itself against official cultural policy so much as it reinserts once-maligned intellectuals—both Jewish and non-Jewish—into the history of official Soviet culture. The film’s

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viewer—if she belongs in the audience on the concert lawn—is meant to nod her head in agreement with the idea that misguided bureaucrats can subvert a glorious national culture through blind obedience to small-minded rules and that the real Soviet project requires the reintegration of its neglected intellectuals. Kozyavin exits the stage-cum-prison in Magritte-like fashion through a landscape painting that suddenly appears behind the violinist’s head. Kozyavin’s entry into a picturesque landscape reverses the proletariat “life-is-art” dogma symbolized by the sprouting of origami newsprint from the violinist’s ineffectual instrument to the view that art creates its own reality (fig. 7.7). The passage through that work of art allows Kozyavin, for all of his tone deaf efficiency and tunnel-vision purpose, entry to the entire world.

Celebrating the Revolution Like every other Soviet media outlet in 1967, Soyuzmultfilm prepared dedicated projects for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, producing such patriotic animations as Prophets and Lessons (1967) and The Eaglet (1968). Animators Yuri Norstein and Arkadii Turin approached Jewish Deputy Director Iosif Boyarsky, who was sympathetic to the artistic experiments of the studio’s younger artists, with an idea for a retrospective film that would simultaneously celebrate contemporary life under Soviet socialism. They envisioned the film, which was eventually made under the title 25th—The First Day (1968), as a revival of the avant-garde art of the 1910s and 1920s shot in rhythm to the contemporary classical music of Dmitri Shostakovich. From all accounts, Norstein and Turin saw the idea as a sincere expression of their patriotism. Norstein described himself as a devout revolutionary during the period that he made the film, leading his biographer Clare Kitson to conclude that Norstein was inspired to use the work of the Russian avant-garde for its “extraordinary attempt to convey the spirit of the times in state-sponsored art.”21 Norstein’s and Turin’s revivification of the bold graphic programs of the 1910s and 1920s that popularized Bolshevik concepts was a precarious proposal because the revolution-era promotion of “national rootlessness” and “internationalism” had become associated with “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the interim decades. The standard textbook History of Russian Art (first published in 1955), for example, continued to uphold the official position toward the post-revolution avant-garde as inferior in form and elitist in content well into the 1960s.22 Nonetheless, Boyarsky was drawn to their proposal, which would incorporate Jewish artists such as Natan Altman and Marc Chagall, into the revolutionary narrative. In hindsight, Norstein was drawn to the “revolutionary” spirit in the sense expressed by Yuri Slezkine in his description of the first decade of the

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Soviet state as a period of “perfect assimilation” of the country’s various nationalities.23 Convinced if also hesitant, Boyarsky submitted the shooting order for studio time and the requisition order for film supplies on the condition that if the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) rejected the film, Norstein and Turin would “keep quiet.”24 When the inevitable happened and Norstein refused to make the necessary amendments, Boyarsky turned to film director Sergei Yutkevich, who had himself been demoted from shtat status for “cosmopolitan” activities in the late 1940s for help. Yutkevich advised Norstein to stand down. With one of the most respected filmmakers counseling them to salvage their careers under the banner of cooperation, Norstein and Turin buckled under the pressure and allowed the required changes to be made on the editing table. The story of the film has been retold many times, but usually from the perspective of Goskino’s bureaucratic short-sightedness. There has been little discussion of the social implications in Norstein’s and Turin’s original concept, aspects of which survived to the release version of the film despite excessive editing.25 Like Khrzhanovsky, Norstein and Turin championed the insertion of fine arts into the animated text, which they showcased in 25th—The First Day by integrating European paintings with Rosta (Russian Telegraph Agency) posters and caricatures by Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Yet, it was not only a confluence of the fine arts and mass media that the film sought to unify into their retro compilation of the “greatest hits” of the October Revolution. Like Khrzhanovsky’s There Lived Kozyavin, Norstein and Turin significantly drew Jewish cultural figures into the birth story of the nation. Norstein and Turin opted for a camera technique in which each frame was shot on the principle of double exposure, simultaneously giving shape to Bolshevist art writ large and cinematographically integrating images created by Jewish artists Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Natan Altman with those of Russian artists Pavel Filonov, Kazmir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky into a single, pulsating text.26 In a late-career explanation of one of the intermediary versions of the film, Norstein described how he had even overlapped a Chagall angel flying over the abyss of Pavel Filonov’s Formula of Revolution (1925).27 Works of both “Jewish” and “Russian” artists are organized, in turn, within the cubist assemblage technique that Vertov’s, Eisenstein’s, and Kuleshov’s respective film groups had brought to animated film. Norstein’s and Turin’s conscious integration of Jewish artists into the construction of the revolution was thus presented through a mode of filmmaking associated with an “alien” Jewish culture. The film’s ultimate shelving must have felt like an especially stinging defeat after Brezhnev’s silence on the contribution of Jews in the revolution in his nationally broadcast speech on the day of the jubilee.28 Norstein and Turin were not the first directors at Soyuzmultfilm to resurrect the graphics of the 1920s, but whereas earlier films such as The Flying

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Proletarian and Three Fat Men tapped into the radical graphics of the 1920s, Turin and Norstein took their revivalism one step further by rhythmically timing the sequence of frames to the contemporary music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the same composer Khrzhanovsky had recently referenced to great effect in There Once Was Kozyavin. Russian graphic art of the first revolutionary decade was the visual source material for the animated film, whereas the music was composed by Shostakovich in the 1960s, after decades of his music vacillating between official and unofficial status. The cinematographic representation of history using revolutionary avant-garde art would have brought up complex associations with the past ranging from nostalgia to bitterness, but the synchronization of 1960s modern classical fare would have resonated within Turin’s and Norstein’s immediate cultural sphere. Following Baudrillard’s logic on the use of “retro,” this amalgamation between revolutionary culture and contemporary culture allowed for an ironic detachment from history, which in turn, encouraged a reappraisal of the revolution’s big ideas through the prism of its unfulfilled ambitions in the present.29 Norstein described the film’s arrangement of revivalist imagery in rhythmic combination with Shostakovich’s musical score a “Revolutionary étude,” which created an associative form of viewing and listening that would become the hallmark of Norstein’s later films.30 Although symphonies are numbered chronologically and there is no overarching program from one symphonic text to the next, Turin’s and Norstein’s consecutive use of Shostakovich’s Eleventh and Twelfth symphonies renders the musical choice meaningful to the culturally sensitive listener who might anticipate Shostakovich’s infamous “Thirteenth Symphony: Babi Yar” (even if only to note its exclusion from the film’s conclusion).31 Whereas Shostakovich’s Eleventh and Twelfth symphonies would not have raised an eyebrow at the time of their release, his subsequent “Babi Yar” was at once banned and celebrated: cancelled after only two performances in December 1962 and performed to an audience of ten thousand a month later.32 Tying revivalist imagery and graphic slogans such as “All Power to the Soviets” from the 1920s to contemporaneous music brings the unrepresented intermediate years to the surface. The combination of bold red-and-black graphics with their largerthan-history promises and Shostakovich’s challenged musical oeuvre throws the unrepresented gap of time between these cultural achievements into question as a period that failed to bring about the revolution because of its suppression of culture. The film’s consistent fast-paced transitions have the feel of a militant march forward while the sequence of symphonies that anticipate Shostakovich’s “Thirteenth Symphony: Babi Yar” poses the revolution against odious versions of Soviet repression. The phantom presence of the “Thirteenth Symphony: Babi Yar” hovers over the visual recollections of the revolution as an accusation of the official failure to acknowledge both Jewish cultural contribution and genocidal

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antisemitism. Where one might expect Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, the film ends with a graphic affectation of a revolutionary poster of Lenin addressing the masses (a detail added during the editing stage much to Norstein’s chagrin). The use of formerly suspicious cultural contributions of the 1910s and the palpable absence of the cutting-edge culture of the 1960s casts a shadow over the triumphant tone of the revolution. The film presents itself as an ode to national memory but doubles as a monument to national forgetting. The cut-out technique that Norstein employed for his earlier work for Ivanov-Vano’s film Lefty (1964) becomes a giant eraser over history in 25th—The First Day. Like Yevtushenko in Babi Yar, Khrzhanovsky and Norstein sourced revolutionary ideals to recode Russian lettres in ways that assimilated Jewish citizens, much in the same way that the North made the Constitution a bulwark for its cause during the US Civil War and the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus used the French Revolution as a linchpin for their campaign during the Dreyfus Affair. In 25th—The First Day, the retrospective of the revolution presents the glorification of military pageantry, but with the contemporary score and the anticipation of Babi Yar, the militarized body becomes a grotesque feature of the repressions of modern life. Films that utilized aesthetic principles associated with formalism were subject to changes on the editing table, but the realities of institutional life should not completely override the fact that these films were products of Soyuzmultfilm rather than subversive bristling against the state media apparatus. It is not that the Artistic Council was so stupid that Khrzhanovsky, Norstein, and Turin pulled the wool over the eyes of their colleagues; quite the contrary, these young filmmakers proudly worked within the state apparatus and wanted to create a critical body of national art and to forge their own place within it. Khrzhanovsky and Norstein were also armed with a Jewish self-consciousness and found the tensions from the cultural past a fruitful subject for their artistic endeavors. Even if theatrical screen time did not always meet the directors’ expectations, their films were used in courses at VGIK and other college film programs across the Soviet Union. These up-and-coming directors recoded Russian letters in ways that sought to raise animation into the cultural vanguard and, at the same time, to present the work of Jewish artists through a prism of integration that Soviet socialism had long promised.

8 Tale of Tales The Rise of the Jewish Auteur Director

W

ith his 1979 animated film Tale of Tales (1979), Jewish director Yuri Norstein emerged as the most influential art house director to come out of Soviet animation. Tale of Tales is a nonlinear film that sustains several narrative strands through the perceptual world of an alienated wolf cub. Norstein actively engaged with Jewish material both during the production of Tale of Tales and in his extra-cinematic accounts following the film’s international release. Analyzing Norstein’s stages of engagement with Jewish subjects both in the film and in the long afterlife of the film provides insight into the contours of cinematic signification of Jewishness, the experience of Soviet Jews in animation under the leadership of Khrushchev, and the international reception of Soviet Jewish animators and their films during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost policies of the mid-1980s. Analyzing the post-production phase of Norstein’s Jewish discourse before turning to his creative processes during filmmaking makes his development as an auteur filmmaker more transparent and the Jewish themes in the film more apparent.

Reception: Airing Out Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales The State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) did not actively market the release of Norstein’s unconventional film Tale of Tales, but its reception was so enthusiastic that it exceeded all expectations both domestically and abroad. The film filled Moscow’s premier theater palace, Rossiya, for an unprecedented fourteen months and when the theater temporarily pulled the film from its daily schedule, filmgoers protested. The Soviet press neglected to review the film until years after its release (with the exception of two reviews by critic Mikhail Yampolsky for a specialized film journal), but the film garnered unparalleled international attention, raking in animation awards abroad, including the Grand Prix H 204 H

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at the Zagreb International Animation Festival and prestigious awards in Oberhausen, Ottawa, and Lille.1 Italian scholar of animation Giannalberto Bendazzi, one of the members of the international selection committee of the 1980 Zagreb animation festival, recalled that after screening the film the selection committee never again “referred to it by title, but only by ‘the masterpiece.’”2 The critical response to Tale of Tales surprised both Goskino and the foreign press. If Goskino was taken aback by the international interest in so opaque a film, the international animation community was likewise astonished to discover that a Soviet Jewish animator had emerged as an indisputable auteur on par with the likes of American animators John and Faith Hubley and Canadian animators Caroline Leaf and Norman McLaren.3 Perhaps most surprising of all was the noticeable spirituality, even religiosity, that laced the film of a Soviet film director who openly identified himself as Jewish. As one of those culture-makers prohibited from traveling outside of the Soviet Union until the mid-1980s, Norstein was absent from the international film festival circuit in which his films first appeared. As when his earlier films Battle of Kerzhenets (1971), The Fox and the Hare (1973), and Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) won festival prizes, “special delegations from the U.S.S.R.” presented acceptance speeches on Norstein’s behalf.4 In her description of her film festival experience in the 1970s and 1980s, British animation critic Clare Kitson noted that “the KGB men were just part of the scene at that time.”5 When Kitson organized a season of Soviet animation in London in 1983, the selection committee requested the attendance of Yuri Norstein and Andrei Khrzhanovsky from the Ministry of Culture. Instead, she recalls, “we got Khrzhanovsky and a KGB lady. She was really very lovely and we understood that that was just how it went.”6 Norstein was not officially notified of the many prizes his film received abroad and Goskino sent Norstein’s Soyuzmultfilm colleague Boris Stepantsev to represent Soviet animation at a ground-breaking Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition in 1980. In an interview Stepantsev conducted after his return to the Soviet Union that smacks of official rhetoric, Stepantsev judicially framed Norstein’s film as part of a broader blossoming of the Soviet animation industry throughout all of the Republics.7 The lag between the attention of the foreign press and Norstein’s direct contact with his international audience allowed the story of the film to evolve at a remarkable rate.8 In Norstein’s absence at the international festival scene, the animation community attributed Norstein’s emergence on the world stage to what they saw as his resistance to socialist realist cinema. For animation cinephiles, the festival regular Ivan Ivanov-Vano represented the institutional face of Soyuzmultfilm while the absent Norstein represented a fundamental rupture of the state studio system (fig. 8.1). Although Kitson accepted Norstein’s claim that IvanovVano was a source of support at face value, years later Giannalberto Bendazzi

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Fig. 8.1 Group picture ASIFA London, 1969 (Soviet representatives Fyodor Khitruk and Ivanov-Vano). Courtesy of Clare Kitson.

amended the characterization of collegiate cooperation between Ivanov-Vano and Norstein with a note of satisfaction: “I am happy to get good news: according to the whispers I had collected, Stalinist Ivanov-Vano had, quite the reverse, exploited and hindered his younger colleague.”9 Bendazzi also revealed that, “the Russian officials had exerted a lot of pressure” on program director Zlatko Grgic to reject Tale of Tales from the Zagreb festival.10 Unlike Stepantsev’s or Goskino’s framing of Norstein within domestic trends in animation, Western commentators tied Norstein’s directorial practices to their growing awareness of the Soviet repression of Jewish culture by touting Norstein as representative of free-thinking Jewish artists trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Clare Kitson was one such cynic and, vexed at Norstein’s absence at the film festivals but mesmerized by what she describes as the film’s “religious qualities,” Kitson was inspired to eventually write the first full-length biographical account of the director and his film in which she argued that Norstein’s Jewish identity informed the independent-minded aesthetic program in Tale of Tales.11 It probably helped Norstein’s image as an embattled Jewish artist that months after the film collected awards at the prestigious Zagreb and Ottawa animation film festivals, Tale of Tales was featured as the centerpiece of film exhibitions in cities where activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry and Jewish cultural patronage ran deep: MoMA and the Film Forum in New York City; the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Center Screen in Boston.12 The pinnacle of Norstein’s coronation in the west came four years after

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the film’s debut when Tale of Tales was immortalized as “the greatest animated film of all time” by an ASIFA-Hollywood poll, organized in conjunction with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, which the Eastern European bloc boycotted in retaliation of the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow games.13 American animator William Littlejohn, known for his work on Tom and Jerry and one of the organizers of the program that became known as the 1984 “Olympiad of Animation,” reported the dubious anecdote that the Russians “didn’t know about this guy submitting the film. It wasn’t until about five years later that they woke up to the fact that it was their film that won the award!”14 When arrangements were finalized to bring Norstein to the festival circuit in 1988, New York film distributor Charles Samu, who had organized the 1980 MoMA exhibition on Soviet animation, reported that he had worked for ten years “to get Norstein out of the Soviet Union.”15 That year, all notices and schedules triumphantly listed Norstein as “attending.”16 After he began to travel abroad in the late 1980s, Norstein reiterated some of the rhetoric of his international admirers. In one interview, Norstein quipped, “I was counted as the only representative of the Soviet Union in the Olympics.”17 In another interview, Norstein gave the Anglo-Jewish activist scene an indication of the threat to spiritual identity that was at stake for Soviet Jewish artists like himself. Norstein told a Boston audience in 1987 that “I wanted to convey a spiritual experience,” expanding on the concept in a Washington Post interview in 1988 by stating that he wanted to express his soul in a spiritual wasteland in which people have lost themselves in the “self-laceration of their soul.”18 As Norstein began to travel outside of the Soviet Union beginning in 1987, he occasionally described his artistic project within political forms of engagement: “Since I was praised by the ideological opponents that meant that I was fraternizing with them or something,” reported Norstein, adding, “We’ve had many victims of ideology; I don’t think I’m the biggest.”19 The complex differences in attitudes between Norstein’s domestic and international receptions are illustrated in one of the most repeated episodes in his making of Tale of Tales: the story of Goskino Chairman Filip Yermash’s (b. 1923) negative reaction to the making of the film. As Norstein has recounted on numerous occasions, after the film was finished and delivered to Goskino, Yermash unilaterally canceled the film’s release and put several extreme conditions on its reconsideration, including cutting its running time by a third.20 “The studio head thought he’d scare me with that bit of paper because he himself lived by those rules,” recalled Norstein of Yermash. “That’s an illustration of internal and external freedom. He thought his external freedom gave him power over people. He didn’t know anything about inner freedom. He was chained to his masters. He was amazed and even frightened when I refused to change the film.”21 Kitson uses Norstein’s embittered account of the episode as proof of

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the pressure Soviet officialdom put on Norstein, coupling Yermash’s reaction with a comment Norstein received from a previous studio director who sardonically apologized for the length of a correspondence with an apology laced with antisemitic sentiment: “This letter didn’t turn out to be brief after all. You can be brief within the Pale of Settlement. You don’t need to explain anything there.”22 Nearly a decade later, at the height of Glasnost, Norstein revealed yet another detail related to the story of Yermash’s reaction in an interview for the liberal journal Ogonek. According to Norstein, when he refused to edit the film, an administrator remarked that “one other director refused to change his film and he doesn’t work in the cinema anymore,” referring to filmmaker Aleksander Askoldov, who never returned to the film industry after his Holocaust-themed film, Commissar (1967), was banned.23 Norstein’s polemical bullets fired in Yermash’s direction further framed Tale of Tales as an independent film for international audiences, but the same account could just as well demonstrate the unique leeway that the temperamental director achieved at Soyuzmultfilm and with Goskino. While tagging the story of the film’s release with these anecdotes may explain the institutional antisemitism that Soviet Jewish artists endured, Norstein’s account of his bureaucratic struggles also highlights his uncompromising attitude toward his art. After all, Norstein was not an independent artist working in the privacy of his own studio, but a salaried employee in a regulated state film industry with budgets, deadlines, production quotas, and annual thematic plans. In fact, Norstein held an enviable position among the creative personnel at Soyuzmultfilm and inspired a level of jealousy among the more conservative directors.24 His previous films had earned him the adoration of more senior administrators and directors (such as Iosif Boyarsky, Sergei Yutkevich, Lev Milchin, Fyodor Khitruk, and Andrei Khrzhanovsky), who came to his support in his confrontation with Goskino functionaries. The in-house Artistic Council at Soyuzmultfilm approved the film with glowing remarks, and when the time came to advance Norstein’s case with Goskino, a prestigious group of directors applied enough pressure behind the scenes to get the film released. Notwithstanding the misgivings of various studio administrators and Goskino officials at various stages of production, the film was released as Norstein had created it with the only concession going to a title change from the original “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come” to the less intimidating “Tale of Tales.”25 If Anglo audiences saw in Norstein the image of an embattled Jewish artist threatened with state repression, in Russian-language publications Norstein insisted that Tale of Tales grew out of an uncompromising personal vision reflecting his own lived reality. Like more recent works such as Ari Folman’s animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008), in which the author and protagonist reassemble the city at war through the lens of personal memory, Norstein has responded to questions of meaning with the claim that Tale of Tales is a mediated text of

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his wartime childhood. For example, while the film’s title character, the Little Gray Wolf, assumes a fairy-tale quality, Norstein has persistently cast his use of national fairy-tale idioms in relationship to the self: “In tales of different nations and continents, researchers have long pointed to their common genetic link, as if everything came from a single grain. . . . But for me it was important to what extent these stories resonated with me and with my own life.”26 In dealing with the fairy-tale aspects in Tale of Tales, for example, Norstein has meticulously documented even the most magical elements as expressing real and familiar experiences of his Jewish upbringing. He even claimed that he cast Jewish actor Aleksander Kalyagin (b. 1942), who lost his own father in the war, as the Little Gray Wolf precisely because he recognized something “wolflike in his eyes,” and that he directed Kalyagin to draw upon his own childhood experiences during the war for the role.27 Before storyboarding the scenes in which the wolf would appear, Norstein returned to his own childhood home in the Moscow suburb of Maryina Roshcha with his cameraman Aleksander Zhukovsky to document the neighborhood as the prototype for the setting in which the Little Gray Wolf would find himself. In the hundreds of photographs of the research trip to his childhood home, Norstein appears in many of the shots, among the poplar trees, standing on the site of his former home, and in the communal yard, which he would later reconstruct in animation and into which he would insert the Little Gray Wolf (figs. 8.2–8.3).

Fig. 8.2 (above) Aleksander Zhukovsky, photographer Maryina Roshcha, 1976. From Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein. Fig. 8.3 (right) Drawing for Tale of Tales. Private collection of Natalia Venzher.

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The director’s autobiographical assertions promise an underlying logic to the otherwise unhinged aspects of the film, a modus operandi that begs for Norstein’s extra-cinematic annotations. Norstein has obliged. Almost everything about the film’s meanings originates from Norstein’s own accounts. Beginning with his postscript to the original 1976 treatment that Goskino required, Norstein has delivered VGIK (All-Union National Institute of Cinema) lectures and made many public speeches, appeared on television, conducted innumerable interviews, participated in film publications in both popular and specialized sources, and advised on museum exhibitions. For years after the film’s release, Norstein continued to expound upon the film’s autobiographical elements, keeping notes from his pre-filming research trip and copiously annotating the photographs with personal details for an eventual exhibition at the Moscow Cinema Museum in 2000, which re-created the film version of his childhood home with another overlay of memories triggered in “real time.”28 Over the years, Norstein has compiled and recompiled all of his extra-cinematic explications of the film’s autobiographical material into illustrated tomes, marketed them during his public appearances, and sold them in his studio (open to the public). What makes the rich repository of Norstein’s autobiographical backstories so extraordinary is that Norstein has shown a sustained willingness to shape his artistic identity as an uncompromisingly Jewish one.29 By Norstein’s own account, the war swept into his family’s backyard in the Jewish village of Andreyevka soon after his birth, and the family was first evacuated to a remote village to the east of Moscow and then to a kommunalka in Maryina Roshcha, a working-class town on the outskirts of Moscow with a large Jewish community. Norstein has described his most formative childhood memories as those connected to being transplanted during the war, his father’s loss of a career because of the family’s Jewish status, his father’s death that Norstein attributes to career hardships, fantasies of integration, and experiences of antisemitism. Norstein uses such autobiographical stories to explain many of the film’s most ethereal images: the nurturing breast stemmed from the memory of the milk he was fed after his aunt’s baby died; the woman leaning over the stove was based on one of his kommunalka neighbors whose son was a KGB informer; the men who disappear under the street lamp were based on photographs of neighbors who went off to war from his own Jewish neighborhood; his grandfather was the prototype for the fisherman; and the image of the angelic baby was inspired by his own son. Norstein explained even more removed images, such as the speeding train that brings the winds of change—a popular symbol of progressive socialism—through personally meaningful associations, such as a triggered memory of his realization that “the transports [were] already prepared to deport all Jews to Siberia.”30 Norstein stated that he considered, at one time or another, the Jewish figures of his cultural milieu, such as Albert Einstein and Osip Mandelstam, as

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prototypes for his poet character and that he based the wolf’s nose on the nose of the film’s Jewish scriptwriter Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.31 With all of these materials made available only years after the debut of the film, how are we to understand Norstein’s autobiographical narratives in the broader historiographic account of Soviet Jewish artists? In more concrete terms, how do we process Norstein’s public claims of an all-consuming Jewish identity, as well as his insistence that his Jewish-specific wartime childhood informed every artistic decision he made in a film sponsored by the Soviet government? The most straightforward approach to these questions lies in applying a more exacting distinction between the contextually dependent meanings that the film produced at the time of its release and those that the director has added, tweaked, and amended in the decades after the film’s release. Attending to this distinction reveals that both the account of Norstein’s aesthetic resistance to officialdom and his claim over a highly autobiographical account do not technically elucidate the film as it unfolds and, instead, belong to a post-production reception history aimed at redefining the role of the Soviet animation director. The key to untangling the competing cinematic claims is an acknowledgment that Norstein belonged to those artistically-minded directors who were trying to enlarge the directorial role to the level of auteur filmmaking, a notion that rested upon the idea that a film must be the sole product of the director’s artistic vision. This point helps to explain Norstein’s seemingly contradictory claims of the restrictions on creative independence with his unilateral approach to filmmaking. Norstein repeatedly subordinated the collaborative nature of filmmaking by underscoring the director’s uncompromising vision in creating a unified work of art. When asked about his working relationship with his artistic designer and wife, Francesca Yarbusova (b. 1942), Norstein minced no words: “Sometimes Francesca begins to complain that any pressure narrows her creative personality. In my opinion, the more complete the self-denial for the sake of the film, the more intense the creative being. That is, either the artist should not start the job if he cannot find his place in it, or is obliged to throw himself into this mess and completely trust the director.”32 Although Norstein’s evaluation of Yarbusova appears harsh, the film crew seems to have understood that the film’s status as an independent film required declaiming Norstein’s singular vision. Norstein’s authorial claim over the film was a critical part of the reforming discourse over the paradigm of filmmakers as regulated workers completing assignments in a centralized system.33 In his first Russian-language article after the film’s release, Norstein downplayed the role of the state watchdog by insisting that spontaneity was his primary mode of operation and that he changed whole scenes mid-production on a whim.34 Individual members of the film crew, including the film’s artistic designer Yarbusova,

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reiterated the view that Norstein’s internal world drove the creation of the entire film. “You understand, a great deal depends on Yura because he is essentially the actor,” explained Yarbusova in a recent interview: “Here I am creating this here mask and he’s already acting. . . . It is one thing to make a sketch and another to shine the light on it. . . . Although it all depends on all the pieces and indeed I made them, they are transformed within the sum of all the little pieces. . . . When a character is born, only then do you understand, but by then those pieces are no longer yours.”35 Likewise, writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, who shares the scriptwriting credit with Norstein, published an open letter to Norstein on the occasion of an international exhibition stating, “Only after you had finished shooting the film did I begin to grasp your idea.”36 Aleksander Kalyagin, the actor who voiced the Little Gray Wolf, defended this version of Norstein when he told Norstein’s biographer that he understood absolutely nothing of the film even during his own performance and that Norstein “coaxed” a powerful performance by directing the actor to “think about his childhood and about his childhood fantasies.”37 Mikhail Meerovich, the film’s composer, similarly downplayed his own artistic vision within the film by referring to himself as Norstein’s “court composer.”38 Norstein’s insistent tethering of his Jewish identity to his filmmaking requires the same exacting attention to the film’s timeline. The analysis of Norstein’s selfidentification as a Jew in his post-production annotation of the film is connected to the unprecedented international reception that the film enjoyed after its debut. The international attention that festival prizes showered on films meant something different to Norstein and his colleagues than Anglo audiences in the late 1970s and 1980s may have imagined. Winning the stand-off with Goskino was a major career-altering coup for Norstein and for the entire creative subsidiary of Soyuzmultfilm, whose frustrations with administrators have been chronicled in employee memoirs in the preceding chapters. Directors were acutely aware that those among them who successfully attracted the attention of ASIFA could strategically leverage their international status to navigate administrative interference with Goskino in the future and to capitalize on international recognition for economic privileges and artistic latitude. For their part, Goskino functionaries tried (with little success) to limit a film crew’s knowledge of international awards partially to stave off additional pay-outs and demands for longer deadlines. If Goskino had enormous resources at its disposal in maintaining what it saw as a desirable managerial strategy over creative personnel in its studios, Norstein’s Jewishness mobilized what little leverage he had at his disposal to harness the political clout of media attention from abroad. A closer analysis of Norstein’s self-exposure in relationship to his work demonstrates that Norstein was not explicating the symbol system in the film as much as he was communicating how restricted and undervalued artists were in the state’s employ. The beauty of this theory is that it resolves Norstein’s seemingly

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contradictory claims over his unabated creative control within the film and his recourse to his identity as a Jew in the context of his engagement with the state cinema apparatus. Though Norstein aggressively rejected the narrative of state interference in his creative work, he was much more willing to discuss the state’s restrictions over Jews in real life. If we apply this interpretive lens to Norstein’s brief and opaque 1980 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the USSR State Prize at the Kremlin, a certain logic becomes transparent. As reported by one of his colleagues, Norstein’s speech was deliberate and to the point: “I am proud of my art, which was born from the ‘toon,’ to become equal among equals. I am a happy person. I have met a lot of good people in my life. Thanks to them, I am standing here in this room. And I am also grateful to my father, who taught me to be brave and uncompromising, and to my mother, who did not lose her presence of mind even in the most tragic situations.”39 Norstein’s reference to his parents is meaningful because he saw their life’s hardships as closely tied to their Jewishness. His father had died in 1956 from lung disease, which Norstein blamed on antisemitism because his father had been forced out of his Moscow job without cause and needed to “travel considerable distances to work in much harsher conditions.”40 For Kitson, the death of his father marked “the end of Norstein’s childhood,” when Norstein “began to reach against the ingrained need to submit to the constant rain of insults and innuendo. . . . He simply ceased to see himself as a second-class citizen and formed a determination to do well despite the problems of prejudice.”41 Even if only Norstein and plugged-in Moscow intellectuals understood the underlying meaning of his speech at the Kremlin, Norstein’s recourse to the repercussions of his Jewishness confronts critics who accused him and other modernist directors of cultural imperialism. When Norstein intertwined his independent style with his Jewish upbringing, his observation was limited to how his Jewishness accounted for his difficulties in being recognized by the state. If Norstein’s post-production narratives of Jewish themes do not really explicate the film text, they uncompromisingly shape the character of the film director as an auteur who emerged from a specific experience with a particular artistic enterprise and unique set of skills. In retrospect, Norstein’s struggle for artistic freedom paid off. The most substantial effect the film had on Soyuzmultfilm was in legitimizing a new attitude toward “artistic” film and a sense of impunity that some directors, such as Norstein, assumed in the process (in the year following the retirement of long-time Studio Head Mikhail Valkov who was known for his antagonism toward directors’ groups). In explicating the film for over three decades, often in relationship to his Jewish identity and experiences with institutional antisemitism, former Soviet Jewish film viewers came to understand Norstein’s artistic freedom as the very characteristic that identified his work as expressing Jewishness.42 The Cold War reception of the film has become part of the film’s meaning in the present and, for Jewish audiences, Norstein’s exercising of artistic freedom in the face of state

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repression has remained his defining trait as an artist in the post-Soviet world.43 In 2008, Russia’s chief rabbi Berel Lazar presided over an awards ceremony at the Kremlin that honored culture-makers in Russian and Soviet history. Rabbi Lazar opened the ceremony that would present Norstein with his most recent award— the “Living Legend” award in the “Man of the Year 5768” category—by comparing the spirit of the award to the Jewish war waged against the Hellenization of the Jews and commemorated on the holiday of Chanukah. When Vladimir Posner, known in America as a Soviet spokesman during the Cold War, presented Norstein with the prize, he noted that “although he [Norstein] belongs to Russian culture, he cannot forget the education given to him by his mother and father.”44 Likening art to Chanukah candles, Posner noted that art and, by extension, Norstein’s films “burn, disperse darkness, and immortalize the memory of the One who created the light.”45 Award recipients were presented with a sculpture of a fiddler on the roof designed by the Israeli sculptor and dollmaker Frank Meisler specifically for the event. According to the spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities, Boruch Gorin, the award sculpture “is a symbol that communicates that, despite all circumstances, a person must remain a violinist in spirit, to remain above it and continue to play his violin.”46

Filmmaking: Scoring Audience Reactions In situating the post facto reception of the film and its director within its Cold War context, I am not suggesting that the film attracted unwarranted critical attention because of turning political tides. In fact, Tale of Tales has only solidified its reputation over the years. Of all the post-Soviet accolades the film has garnered, it is sufficient to note that Tale of Tales repeated its 1984 coup for the title of “Best Animated Film of All Time” in an even larger Zagreb poll in 2002.47 What I do hope to gain from isolating Norstein’s reception as a semiindependent or partially repressed Jewish artist is the opportunity to see the more complex Jewish themes that Norstein developed in the film during the three years it took to make.48 In turning to the Jewish material within the twenty-nine minutes of the film’s running time, Norstein’s treatment of the sensual stands out as the most conspicuous element at work. It is tempting to locate the sensuality of the film, and the embodied responses they evoke in the viewer, in Norstein’s non-conformism, but the single biggest influence on Norstein appears to be the 1976 directive that Soyuzmultfilm’s Artistic Council issued concerning the revision of all literary scripts from the summary of plot to the outlining of emotional affects.49 Norstein and Petrushevskaya took the directive literally, subordinating linear action for a systemized account of the film’s emotional states.50 The very structure of Tale

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of Tales naturalizes a gamut of emotional states within the physical world: a dimly lit, impoverished communal lifestyle in the autumn season; a poet’s idyllic picnic set in a Chagallesque summer paradise; a young boy’s winter season in a luminescent white park; and the dark forest of the Gray Wolf (figs. 8.4–8.7). In order to achieve the film’s seductive emotive landscapes, Norstein and his cameraman Aleksander Zhukovsky resurrected the prewar multiplane rostrum camera to create an illusion of depth as popularized by Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and allowed dust to settle on the multiple glass planes to achieve an atmospheric quality suggestive of memories or dreams.51 Norstein then coupled the throwback in camera technique with a range of cinematic modes associated with the inner life such as nonlinear narratives, time distortions, dream states, associative linking between objects, and psychoanalytically-inspired symbols such as a burning light, a green apple moist with condensation, and a breast dripping with milk. Figs. 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 The Seasons. Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok, 1979). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Film stills. 8.6 (right) is a detail.

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Given Norstein’s embrace of the studio’s directive, it is more useful to evaluate Norstein’s cinematic radicalism as a sincere response to the new ideas introduced by the Artistic Council (in which many of Norstein’s colleagues served and Norstein would later join) than as a goading of the state (however Goskino may have reacted). Rather than expressing an inaccessible personal perspective of the director, as Norstein would later claim, Norstein’s and Petrushevskaya’s revised 1976 film treatment begins in a conversational tone that invites the prospective film viewer to share in the meaning-making of the film: “I don’t know how it was down your way,” and continues this form of engagement throughout its text: “In the film, childhood will be there as part of an enormous and magnificent life of the whole world at all times. What we need to grasp is not so much that children hold the secret of happiness—but that we also hold that secret. Each of us has this, his own, secret, but we often keep it secret from ourselves.”52 This shift from the director’s identity to the viewer’s self-discovery of the timeless unconcious invites an analysis that was relatively unimportant to Norstein’s international admirers at the time—the film’s effects on the spectator. Whatever Jewish themes surface through Norstein’s post-production earmarking of autobiographical content, Jewish themes also reside in the film’s instigation of emotional effects on the beholder, a mode of representation that many art theorists situate as the basis of the religious experience with art.53 For historian C. Stephen Jaeger, for example, “the sublime and its close relative the charismatic verify their existence by their effects, by the response of the recipient far more than by any definable qualities inherent in the sublime object or the charismatic person.”54 The film’s arousal of the senses is nowhere more distinct than in its aural qualities, a view Norstein underscored when he stated that to him the title of the film was always Song of Songs because the words “sounded right—the echo of it, even the intonation.”55 With the repetition of the classic Russian lullaby “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come” at both ends of the tale, the film assumes a typical type of folktale within the genre of a cante fable that illustrates the origin, development, migration, or magical qualities of a well-known song.56 Through the film’s renditions of the lullaby “The Little Grey Wolf will Come”— the most popular lullaby of the Soviet era that would have been familiar even to the youngest viewers from their own mothers and grandmothers—the film shapes a culturally engaged spectatorial position that shifts with each performance.57 The first performance of the lullaby begins in a soft voice, presumably that of the mother, with a closely framed portrait of a mother and child. As the only recognizable words in the whole of the movie unfold, the scene assumes a more saturated use of a gold-hued palette and a heightened luminosity often described as an aesthetic sacredness reminiscent of the religious Baroque.58 The baby’s suckling pulsates in rhythm to the heaving maternal breast as the lullaby induces the baby to sleep:

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On the edge you mustn’t lie, Or the little gray wolf will come, And nip you on the tum, Tug you off into the wood, Underneath the willow-root. The Little Gray Wolf, both subject and object, faces the myth of the childsnatching wolf through what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the “mirror stage,” in which the subject identifies with an external image of himself as belonging “to the whole world at all times.” Lacan theorized the enactment of the mirror stage through a series of perceptual registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.59 Norstein visualizes Lacan’s metaphysical registers in tangible representational modes. Norstein is meticulous in his attention to technologies that will simulate Lacan’s description of wholeness that the pre-verbal child experiences. Besides the reality effect of the passing of the four seasons and the representation of a full emotional spectrum, the film also projects an identification with “the whole world at all times” with a score that reaches for comprehensiveness by including a Russian folk lullaby for the opening and closing scenes, the Prelude and Fugue No. 8 from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for the Eternity Scene, Mozart’s Harpsichord Concerto for the Winter Scene, and the war ballad “Weary Sun” (Utomlennoe solntse) for the outdoor Autumn Dance. After the wolf catches a glimpse of himself in a reflective hubcap of an abandoned car and recognizes himself in the image of the lullaby-wolf, the wolf immediately initiates Lacan’s “Imaginary order,” a pre-verbal process in which the subject creates narcissistic fantasies to support the image of himself as belonging to a state of wholeness and perfection despite his fragmented existence (fig. 8.8). In a scene Norstein calls the “Eternity Scene,” we enter the Little Gray Wolf’s “Imaginary order,” where his narcissistic fantasy turns out to be a life of art, replete with a Picassoesque bull and a Roman poet composing lyrics. In the wolf’s Imaginary, a family invites a stranger to dine over polite conversation. The instrumental composition that accompanies the scene was inspired by Boulat Okoudjava’s “Georgian Song,” whose lyrics Norstein performs by heart in interviews: “I’ll call my friends together and tune my heart to love. . . . Otherwise what is there to live for on this eternal earth? Guests, come together and enjoy my food and drink, tell me directly to my face how you feel about me. The Lord of Heaven will send me forgiveness for my transgressions. . . . Otherwise what is there to live for on this eternal earth?”60 It is indeed a sublime world, bathed in an unearthly atmosphere that Norstein achieved by using high-contrast, lightsensitive paper and adding additional white paper on lower planes that his cameraman purposely overexposed.61 However, as in Lacan conceptualization of the Imaginary, the brilliant self-image created by the wolf’s Imaginary is inherently

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Fig. 8.8 Little Gray Wolf Looking into a Hubcap. Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok, 1979). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Film still.

false, which explains the catfish that nonchalantly swims across the sky of the pastoral landscape. The wolf’s narcissistic fantasy is swiftly undermined by his real-time confrontation with the conflicting social order represented by the words of the lullaby. Even as the Little Gray Wolf dreams of a life of art, language (and its institutions) makes him aware of his identity as the treacherous wolf that is capable of stealing a child and carrying it off into the woods. The wolf’s attempt to synthesize the pre-verbal idealized self with that of the social world of the lullaby throws the wolf into what Lacan calls the “Symbolic order,” or the synthesis of the ideal, whole self and the experiential, fragmented self.62 If the non-verbal and irrational “Eternity Scene” visualizes Lacan’s Imaginary, the scene that follows visualizes Lacan’s “Symbolic order” by adhering to the form of classical tragedy with its Aristotelian reversals and recognitions. Torn between the self-image he recognizes in both the hubcap and the lullaby, the Little Gray Wolf musters the courage to steal a page of poetry from the edge of the poet’s candlelit table in an effort to sublimate his fated evil within his idealized world of art. He absconds with the page, running across a busy highway and into the woods, a fairy-tale setting as well as a symbol for Lacan’s “Real,” a state of being that remains out of reach to the Imaginary order and unprocessed by the Symbolic order. Upon arrival to the forest, the wolf struggles to maintain his Imaginary order when he is forced to confront the Symbolic order, enacted

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when the page of pilfered poetry suddenly morphs into a swaddled baby (figs. 8.9–8.11). At a loss for what to do with the crying infant in his arms, the wolf plays out the tensions between his idealized self-image and the social order. In a series of anxious fits and starts, the wolf abandons the baby under a willow root, retrieves the baby in an awkward embrace, and then tries to placate the baby by singing the lullaby to which both he and the Christian child (and the viewer) have grown accustomed (fig. 8.12). It is difficult to escape the hermetic system that Norstein has created, for it is the Little Gray Wolf’s desire for art that turns him into the predatory wolf of the lullaby in the first place and it is his humanity that forces him to repeat the refrain of his own evil nature. The wolf’s identity work is just a pretext for the film spectator’s embodied response to the film. As in Aristotle’s classic definition of tragedy, the Little Gray Wolf’s tragic reversals and recognitions arouse both pity and fear in the viewer who must situate her subjective response to the wolf.63 In evoking the reactions of pity and fear in the viewer toward the ambiguous character of the Little Grey Wolf, Norstein’s engagement with Jewishness comes to the surface as the film viewer must bring her own social constructions to bear on her evoked feelings toward a childhood lullaby that characterizes the wolf as the conventional much-maligned villain of Figs. 8.9, 8.10, 8.11 Top, Poetry-Baby. Middle and bottom, Swaddled Baby. Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok, 1979). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Film stills.

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Fig. 8.12 Singing Lullaby. Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok, 1979). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Film still.

Eastern European folk culture. Historian Leonid Livak points out that, among the real dangers that wolves signified in Russian national literature, in “Belorussian incantations wolves are actually called ‘the jews,’” a Christian Orthodox association underscored by the Baroque handling of light and the Christian motif of the mother and child during the first performance of the lullaby.64 In a poignant slippage between his experience with antisemitism and his characterization of the paper-cum-baby, Norstein told his biographer: “I was literally swaddled in Jewishness. You couldn’t take a step without someone, especially old women and children, saying you crucified Christ and that you season your matzos with the blood of murdered babies [blood libel].”65 Norstein’s use of the term swaddled to refer to his own experience of antisemitism slips into his image of the “swaddled” baby, whose fate between life and death rests with the wolf. The relationship between the Little Gray Wolf and the missing haloed baby raises the provocative history of blood libels, one of the most radical manifestations of European antisemitism and one that the Bolsheviks claimed to have uprooted in the early stages of Sovietization.66 If the Little Gray Wolf is a “border crosser” who appears in all four distinct settings but remains on the periphery of society, the viewer must organize the wolf’s fragmented identity as a loner, a dreamer, a mute, a singer, a nurturer, a kidnapper, a philistine, a poet, unfairly loathed, a self-loather,

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and an observer. Is the central dreamer of Tale of Tales the wolf who imagines an idealized world where a stranger is invited to share a bowl of soup or the beleaguered poet who summons the wolf through his lyrics? This is no simple riddle and Norstein offers no definitive solution. Rather, both the Little Gray Wolf and the poet summon the viewer (the outside world) toward their inner worlds. The film’s impenetrable tautology renders a single answer impossible, but the question, posed in a variety of dense and conflicting formulations, makes the meaning of the cinematic text ultimately depend on the subject-position of the film’s viewer. The sheer range of interpretive choices forces the film spectator into an ethical quandary that draws upon the fear associated with the cultural discourses of antisemitism and the empathy associated with the world of art. Norstein shapes the viewer’s conflicting emotions by carefully crafting an ambiguous cinematic sensorium through the use of a single voice for both the lullaby singer and the wolf. Interestingly, Norstein casted Aleksander Kalyagin, a well-known Jewish actor, for the role of the wolf and directed him to “think about his childhood and about his childhood fantasies” in his performance.67 Initially, the lullaby appears to be a diegetic song, which means that the characters in the film and the film viewer are aware that a song is being performed and know who is singing it within the action of the film. In the case of the opening lullaby, however, the characters appear aware of the performance of the song because the baby is lulled by the sound and the wolf’s eyes widen in fear, but the viewer cannot be certain of its source because the camera zooms in on the mother’s breast, leaving her face outside the frame. Furthermore, the shared response of the baby and the wolf complicates the rational identification of the singer since the mother’s voice would be inaudible to the wolf outside the house and the wolf’s voice would be inaudible to the baby inside the house. When the camera pans out, we see that the scene of the mother and child assumes the perspective of the Little Gray Wolf, who stands outside the warmth of the communal flat in rapt fascination with the meaning of the lullaby lyrics. Having misidentified the singer as the mother, the film viewer must accommodate a new interpretation in which the singer assumes the role of an omniscient narrator and, in the form of the traditional cante-fable, invites the listener to join in its final rendition. However, the lullaby at the conclusion of the film is clearly performed by the wolf, forcing the film viewer to recognize the voice as the same voice as the performer of the first lullaby. This reattribution to the wolf necessitates another revision on the part of the viewer who initially assumed that the mother was the lullaby singer and that the wolf was the subject of it. I am suggesting that Norstein’s treatment of the two performances of the lullaby works as something of a demonstration of these oscillating stages of perceptions and meaning-making on the spectator. If the wolf in the plot negotiates Lacan’s psychoanalytic triad on an individual level, his performances of the

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lullaby enact how society embodies these stages en masse, a version of Lacan’s theories as they apply to institutions that was popular among media theorists in the 1970s.68 The first performance of the lullaby enacts a process that media theorist Louis Althusser calls “interpellation,” a process in which the viewer internalizes the ideological values of the cinematic text without recognizing the mechanisms at work. The viewer’s interpellated response enacts the film’s representation of the response of the suckling pre-verbal child, who does not understand the implication of the lullaby’s words and is lulled to sleep by the rhythm and cadence of the lullaby. The wolf’s second performance of the lullaby makes the viewer aware of the hitherto subconscious process of interpellation and therefore allows a counter-interpellation to take place.69 The viewer’s counter-interpellated response enacts the film’s representation of the response of the literate Little Gray Wolf, who confronts the morbid warning of child violence in the lyrics with horror. The dissonance between the emblem of maternal nurturing and the presence of the arch-villain of the fairy tale casts the viewer’s conditioned responses toward the malevolent wolf and the nurturing mother into high relief. If the first performance of the lullaby sought to mask the space between the objective reality and its representation, the spectatorial reinterpretation during the second performance forces the viewer to attend to the representational process and to recognize the ruptures between objective reality, subjective representation, and the production of perception. Together, the wolf’s response to the meaning of the words alongside the baby’s response to the palliative tones of its nonverbal performance describe the range of interpretive models available to the viewer. The camera zeroes in on the wolf’s eyes, which widen with fear as the lyrics unfold, cutting to the baby’s eyes as they slowly droop to the rhythmic incantations. The film spectator must negotiate between these two listening modes—pre-verbal aural sensation and linguistic understanding (Lacan’s Imaginary and the Symbolic)—to either make sense of the film or arrive at the limits of representation and perception (Lacan’s Real). In the circuitous world of this cante fable—so slippery at the edges that it defies logic—the viewer must reorganize all the familiar elements of her own childhood experience with the lullaby to supply an interpretation that will either accept the stultifying effects of the lullaby or see through the meaning of the lyrics (and its reverberations in social institutions more generally). Norstein prevents the viewer from developing full-throated sympathy or revulsion for the wolf, choosing instead to pull the viewer between visual attraction and aural distaste. In those moments when the film’s visual field evokes sympathy in the viewer, Norstein uses sound to disengage the beholder from the image on the screen. Norstein isolates non-linguistic sounds—such as the nailing of death notices, the squeaks of the rotating sewing machine, the skipping of a record as men are called away to war, and the revving of car engines—from

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both the underlying musical phrases and action on the screen in order to cue an upcoming visual.70 These sounds are riddles to be solved and even silence is “the kind that does not immediately grant a person the answer to the question.”71 In the opening scene of the mother and child, the efflorescence of the imagery is keyed to a string of pleasant sounds, such as the baby’s oblivious suckling of the heaving breast and the soft static of rainfall whereas the sounds connected to the Little Gray Wolf often agitate, even occasionally nauseate. Norstein’s orchestration of dissonance between sight and sound is most emphatic in scenes that require the film viewer to form an opinion of the wolf. The scene in which the Little Gray Wolf eats hot potatoes with a host of breathy slurping, blowing, and swallowing provokes a feeling of disgust and, when the Little Gray Wolf runs away with the swaddled baby, the sound of a baby’s cry makes for a disturbing soundtrack. When the Little Gray Wolf makes a sound, the familiar and comforting classical score abruptly stops and is often followed by a profound silence before an unpleasant and momentarily mysterious sound breaks the silence. Without the beauty of the visual experience, the soundtrack would be absolutely grating on the ear. The audience visually sympathizes with the soft contours of the Little Gray Wolf, but the auditory presentation provokes a visceral response that is meant to unnerve the listener.72 The alarming sensorium surrounding the wolf and the baby may invite an emotional transference between viewer and baby, but the scene is much more enrapt in the animal’s reality. When it comes to the wolf, the film’s sensorium cues fragmented and contradictory reactions, pulling the viewer from disgust to curiosity. By forcing the viewer to analyze his subjective reactions to the character in relationship to what he thinks he knows and what the film is projecting about the nature of the wolf, the film forces the viewer to take account of his automatic, reflexive judgements to populist—and antisemitic—media. In a letter that he wrote in 1993 on the nature of antisemitism, Norstein focused on the reflexive messages inherent in everyday, street-level antisemitism: “The kind you get in your flat or your kommunalka, or at school from your contemporaries. It was automatic, mindless, a reflex action. But how can any country that has brought up a whole generation on nationalism and antisemitism avoid those poisons seeping into the population?”73 Again and again, the viewer of Tale of Tales is led to make a social judgment on the wolf’s character, but in order to pursue an alternative state of consciousness, the viewer must recognize his own interpellated response to the lullaby of his childhood and reject kinship with “old women and children” who “swaddle” Jewish children in antisemitism and spread tales of blood libel. The viewer must make certain choices: Is the wolf a murderer of Christian babies or an empathetic nurturer? Does he belong to the Belorussian incantations that call cast-off wolves “Jews” or to the Civilization of Man?

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In theory, the viewer can resist what he has come to “know” from his engagement with literature and popular culture and grant the wolf his place in the transcendent world of art. Whatever side the wolf comes out on, it is the filmspectator’s identity that is ultimately at stake. The viewer must make “sense” of Tale of Tales on her own terms without pretending to be entirely dissociated with or disaffected from negative sensual reactions, but to see and hear how one’s perceptions measure up to lingering superstitions of “popular” Christianity and Soviet-style antisemitism. In an interview conducted in the year of the film’s international release, Norstein did not appear as concerned with his ability to express himself as an artist as he was in the audience’s ability to understand art. He emphasized the difference between the reflexive emotional response and the engaged artistic experience: “The picture of a killed child will always move the public, but this is not necessarily an artistic experience. An artistic experience occurs when a film contains definite mutual relations perceived by the spectator, relations that make him think. The same scene with a killed child will then make a different impact.”74 In another interview, Norstein complained “We’ve destroyed our sense of hearing. Before the freedom of speech you must have the freedom of hearing. . . . Not every person manages to sense the beautiful freedom or joy that comes from an ability to think. . . . He’ll much sooner feel his kinship with the crowd. And he wants to feel it. I see that kinship from two points of view. You can communicate with the world, nature and the cosmos. That’s one form of communication or complicity. The second form is that type of kinship with the crowd that comes about much more easily.”75 The inability of the spectator of Tales of Tales to reconcile the various discordant clues that cinema conditioned viewers to rely upon renders the reflexive emotional responses that the wolf elicits insufficient in establishing a stable subject-position. In allowing these multiple levels of consciousness to coexist in the film, Norstein was tapping into Lacanian psychoanalysis and the related field of spectatorship theory that conceived of cinema as either a manipulative form of mass culture or an art form capable of initiating a critical awareness of conditioned responses. If Norstein described elements of his film, such as his juxtaposition of the marginalized wolf and the redemptive power of art, as expressing his experience as a Jew and an artist in the 1980s, he was giving voice to his experience as a member of the creative class in his specific time and place, but aesthetically speaking, Norstein was engaged in the growing development of spectatorship theory of the late 1970s. When I asked Norstein about the role censorship played in his film, he rebuffed the suggestion by launching into a history lesson on Khrushchev’s reforms at the 20th Party Congress, but when I asked him about his treatment of Jewishness in the film, he turned to a philosophical discourse on the nature of antisemitism, concluding, with a demonstrative motion of a hand wiggling

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through an imaginary sea, that “it’s a matter of how one looks at things, how one sees the world. I never let it blind me.”76 Norstein describes the role that “Jewishness” plays in the Soviet artistic enterprise as a matter of perception and vision, which he made the central themes of his Tale of Tales. The director and the modes of expression available to him come up against the modes of interpretation available to the film viewer. In identifying the murky sensorial terrain between the director’s representational capacities and the audience’s perceptual ones, Norstein advanced a counter-interpellated approach to nationalist media.

Conclusion Tell-Tale Signs and Soviet Jewish Animation

T

his book has told the story of industry and media development at a time when Jews were first seeking to exit the former Pale of Settlement and, then, having acquired a foothold in art academies, were restricted from careers in the traditional artistic fields of painting, sculpture, and architecture. I have traced how the introduction of the vaguely defined yet urgently enforced movement of socialist realism in the 1930s and the expansion of the state’s doctrinaire purview over literature, music, and theater further pushed independently minded intellectuals to the relatively unregulated medium of animation. Although restrictions in the traditional arts are relevant to the relationship Jews have nurtured with popular media around the world, the Jewish entry into Soviet animation offers a unique perspective if only because the animation studio operated as an official organ of the Soviet state. Thus, the external channeling of Jewish intellectuals into Soviet popular media did not result in a minority culture bent on delegitimizing the center but, rather, a Jewish cultural center committed to legitimizing the artistic status of animation. Although it is a testament to the men and women who devoted their lives to animation that the medium rose to become one of the Soviet Union’s most recognized art forms at a time when the fine arts fell into international disrepute, my research into the careers of Jewish-born animators and their work was not motivated by the desire to record this upward trajectory. Rather than taking up the didactic task of correcting the disciplinary marginalization of either Jews or animation, I have sought to explore the far more interesting relationship between the two. I have wrestled with the question of how Jewish-born animators broadened the conventional paths of cultural engagement within the political, aesthetic, and social realities of a state media industry. As I labored to understand the relationship between Jewish-born artists and animation, I grew acutely aware of the ways that animated films provided their creators with both a national stage and a political haven. I have sought to understand not only how H 227 H

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Jewish-born artists contributed to the socialist ideal but also how they engaged with their medium to create stable employment conditions, an integrated work space, an inclusive outlet of mass communication, a commercially viable industry, a centre d’art, a political refuge, and a social club. Although the films I have chosen to analyze were largely driven by my personal taste, understanding the artists’ diverse (and overlapping) goals required different (and interdisciplinary) analytic approaches. Thus, the final selection of the films I have discussed in these chapters was motivated by my desire to employ a range of methodologies—including those of visual culture, folklore studies, institutional history, communication models, response theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, among others—to demonstrate the wealth of available approaches to readers who wish to see what is often hidden in the reputedly demonstrative and accessible socialist realist image. As Jewish-born artists assumed significant roles in what became one of the state’s most popular mass mediums, their presence on the Soviet screen—especially in the aftermath of the Second World War—hinged on the political and cinematic constructs of Jewish invisibility. Jewish-born animators performed themselves and defined their national culture under the Bolshevik promise of Jewish invisibility, a concept articulated by Vladimir Lenin and popularized by the state cinema apparatus in the early years of Soviet rule. Under the premise (and conceit) of this ideological construction, Jewish-born animators curated a flexible presence through the technologies of trick film, the use of characters and settings as proxies for self-representations, and the rhetorical devices and conceptual approaches available to animation. In focusing on the discursive practices of Soviet Jewish “invisibility,” I have come to differentiate the Anglo understanding of Soviet Jewish invisibility from both the Soviet state version and the Soviet Jewish self-image. Indeed, whatever Elie Wiesel’s intentions, his phrase “Jews of Silence” became the most common Anglo metaphor used to describe the Jewish condition in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist years and the Cold War. State-employed Soviet Jewish animators, on the other hand, were more apt to describe the prism of self through which they projected the cinematic realization of Sovietness as “untranslatable.” This sense of untranslatability—of being incapable of articulating a self without the mediation of art—may strike the reader as a projection on the part of an eager art historian. Yet, the notion of “invisibility” assumes that Jews have assimilated into the national fabric to such a degree that they have ceased to exist and the notion of “silence” assumes that Jews would express a full-fledged Jewish culture if it were not for the fact that they were being forced into silence. Soviet Jewish Soyuzmultfilm artists would reject both of these versions of themselves. Rather, I have found that former Soyuzmultfilm animators define their Jewish identity as part and parcel of their artistic identity. The sentiment that

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Jewish identity can only be expressed in mediated form permeates the conversations and the personal correspondences I exchanged with Jewish Soyuzmultfilm alumni. Thus, I have kept this sense of “untranslatability” close at hand as I sought the cinematic presence that Jewish-born animators advanced to perform themselves, while keeping the Soviet insistence on Jewish invisibility and the Anglo conceptualization of Jewish silence mostly in check, bringing the latter out only to understand the domestic and international reception of Soviet animated films. In part because of the success of the discursive practices of Jewish invisibility and Jewish silence, I have found that the disparity between what was said and what was heard has sometimes been jarring (but always instructive). In the rich analytic waters of untranslatability and misinterpretation, I grew convinced that sustained attention to the untranslatable and misinterpreted Jewish presence in Soviet animation challenges the dual impression of an assimilated Jew bent on disappearing into Soviet society and a defiant Zionist bent on emigration. Rather, a very different and more complex portrait emerges of a partially exposed Jewish artist whose work in a state-sponsored medium and a government institution helped shape both the Jewish creative professional and the state studio into inclusive sociocultural forces. Even if some of my observations on specific films fall short—and I cannot predict where different readers will identify these places—I hope that the book as a whole has convincingly demonstrated that the relationship between Jewish-born artists and national animation has been mutually constructive. A more nuanced understanding of the Soviet Jewish artist also raises provocative questions in the disciplines of art history and Jewish studies: How were the practices of visibility and invisibility more dependent on identity politics than the contested aesthetic principles of socialist realism and non-objective art? How did Jewish-born artists embed their personal or particularistic perspectives into what were identified as the universal or socialist aspects of “Sovietness” and as anti-Jewish today? How did films rooted in the anti-religious political realities of their time communicate spiritually and even religiously? And, how did Jewish artists embed metaphorical yearning for sacred space, traumatic landscapes, and Jewish homeland in their representation of Soviet geography? Rather than advance an impossible theory of Jewish representation, this book has treated its human subjects as culture-makers invested in creating a nationally recognized “Sovietness” even as it has also treated its film subjects as expressing the “Jewishness” of its creators. I have pointed, in a series of close readings of specific films, to the rich variety of ways that Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees have made themselves present even as they focused all of their energy on creating nationally recognized classics. Whether engaging in demagoguery, propaganda, or auteurship—and I consciously minimized such distinctions—Jewish-born artists have had their hand in themes as varied as Soviet multiculturalism and

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statelessness, modern mobility and immobility, the revolutionary spirit, and the politically dispossessed intellectual. Even a sampling of the themes adopted by Jewish-born artists inevitably evokes a broad range of ways that animators produced personally relevant and nationally significant films under the cloak of invisibility. In the early years of the medium, for example, Jewish-born animators took part in the country’s system of categorization of “peoples” in ways that reflected their own worldviews, experiences, memories, desires, and fears. With the growth of professional workshops and the consolidation of the animation industry in the 1930s, Jewish-born animators labored to establish the modalities of socialist realism and to find their place in the national fabric despite such thinly veiled racist slogans such as “friendship of the peoples” and “unity through diversity.” After the Second World War, Jewish intellectuals turned to the symbolic yet expressive properties of animated animal fables to heal the nation’s wounds, but in ways that expressed their personal experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust. Likewise, as Soviet animation entered its golden age in the 1960s, filmmakers adopted diverse lenses—from the fractured fairy tale to the urban nightlife of modern Moscow—to reexamine their past and shape a new reality. With the 1970s return to cultural conservatism, Jewish artists expressed themselves in complex and coded ways through the genres of children’s entertainment, the modes of socialist realism, and the trends of historicism or “retro.” In adopting a number of various critical lenses, I have found the censorship lens of use only in the sense that it cleared a path through the dense obfuscations of previous histories of Soviet and Jewish art. I have found that the classic methodologies involved in the study of censorship are structurally inappropriate when the focus is a subgroup of employees in a state studio. Pursuing the role of censorship may make sense in a study that assumes divides between the state and its citizens or an administrative body and a creative labor force, but Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees influenced the content of films on every level and in every department of the studio, as well as in its governing parent institutions. Some Jewish personnel belonged to the liberal intelligentsia and some to the upper echelons of the Party. Thus, I have been attuned to redressing the tendency to give significantly more weight to repressive state policies by focusing on the public expression of Jewishness that succeeded in coming out through official channels. Despite the overrepresentation of unofficial Soviet art in the international museum world (partially a consequence of the Anglo discourse on Soviet Jewish “invisibility”), the vast majority of Soviet artists, including Jewish artists, were neither dissidents nor propagandists. This was particularly the case in animation because the reliance on institutional structures was more central to the complex process of animation than other art forms. Although the film and hand-held cameras that photojournalists required might be purchased on the black market by shrewd individuals, the technology to mass produce animation

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technology, such as commercial film cameras and stands, was available only to members of the unions, which made animated film impossible to produce outside the auspices of official civilian employment. Simply, there was no such thing as animated-samizdat. Indeed, understanding Jewish-born animators as state-sponsored producers of Soviet culture is necessary to make sense of the Jewish imprint on “Sovietness” as much as any expression of “Jewishness.” Stalin’s attempt to control the national image has been amply documented, but the quasi-invisible hand of the civilian animator, redoubled by the ideological proposition of the supposed invisibility of the Soviet Jew, provides a view into Cold War Russia in which Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev sit in the audience and the animators step out from behind the Iron Curtain. Although animators relied on the institutional apparatus in order to work at all, most Soviet animators spent their energy on concerns that had little to do with state policies. Because Soviet animators were far less accountable to and dependent on market forces than their Anglo counterparts, they took a narrower and more personal view of professional payoffs within the structures of a studio career. The choice and completion of certain projects, for example, were sometimes only a pretext for the formation of personally meaningful project teams. Even more than national loyalties or aesthetic proclivities, familial and social ties seem to have drawn more animators to the studio and to the task of raising animation in the Soviet cultural hierarchy. The state’s prohibition of organized religion created isolated and short-lived Jewish groups that functioned at the margins of society, but media allowed Jewish-born artists to establish new and more stable social communities in the center of the nation’s capital. Through a network of professional and personal contacts, many Jewish animators labored to expand the agency of the studio’s creative departments and the careers of freelance employees. By the same token, those freelance artists at the helm of permeable employment categories were able to develop new relationships to the national media. Through the formation of director groups, the battered members of Moscow’s intelligentsia found ways to develop new social and professional arrangements. Soyuzmultfilm operated in a labyrinth of elaborate labor structures and multidirectional authority lines, making the mapping of the processes of the administrative arm useful for understanding creative life. In reading student files, Artistic Council minutes, Soyuzmultfilm employee memoirs, and watching hundreds of the films that the country’s animation start-ups and its state studio Soyuzmultfilm produced from the 1920s to the late 1980s, my research has revealed that animation professionals learned to strategize and sometimes harness the censoring mechanisms inherent in the industry for their own creative work, career development, and social life. Sympathetic editors could collude to insert problematic material that would eventually find its way out on the editing table as a

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way to receive deadline extensions without financial penalties. Artistic Council members could, in turn, log a record of diligence by ordering the removal of these materials. The in-house enterprise to self-correct during the filmmaking process (rather than facing expensive problems post-production) provided young artists with opportunities to develop relationships with older and more experienced directors. These processes, while determining much of the content that we see in the release versions of the films, also served as a back door to being selected for future projects and promotions. Young artists were invited to speak at the meetings, gaining a rare opportunity to demonstrate their technical and conceptual mastery in front of senior animation directors. I have found the censor just as pertinent to my understanding of the Jewish presence at the studio and the insertion of Jewish content into Soviet animation as the creators and their characters. We cannot know, in exact terms, what role censorship played in the final version of a film, but where we can find and accurately trace strains of negotiations and collaborations, we get something at least as historically informative as the free expression of the individual mind. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatization of the media industries, a number of former Soyuzmultfilm animators banded together in an attempt to lobby the government to restore state support for the medium. Their argument was simple and straightforward: commercial concerns limited free expression, aesthetic experimentation, and production quality. True to their doomsday prophesies of what would happen to the venerated animation tradition in a free market, none of the countries that belonged to the former Soviet bloc managed to produce a viable animation industry. I leave it to other scholars to unravel how a highly administered and regulated industry in a totalitarian state produced one of the most independent and innovative film movements in the world, but it is my hope that I have convinced the reader that the encounters between artists, administrators, cultural critics, and audiences have enormous critical value in writing new histories of Soviet art history, the international reception of socialist realism, Soviet Jewry, and the Cold War.

NOTES

Introduction 1 For a heated but informative outline of the studio’s final years, see Georgii Borodin, “Proshchai, ‘Soiuzmul’tfil’m’!: Svidetel’skie pokazaniia,” http://www.animator.ru/articles/article.phtml?id=28. 2 Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution 1881–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5–7. 3 Animation scripts occasionally appeared in collectable folio volumes illustrated by a selection of full-color frames and copies of original drawings. See, for example, the volume of collected animation scripts in Mul’tpanorama-2 (Kiev: Mistetsvo, 1984). See also the books that appeared annually in the Fil’my-skazki series. 4 Natalia Krivulia, Labyrinty animatsii: Issledovanie khudozhestvennogo obraza rossiiskikh animatsionnykh fil’mov vtoroi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Graal, 2002). See also Vladimir Nilsen, The Cinema as a Graphic Art (1937; rpt. New York: Garland, 1985). In the only two English-language books on Soviet animation, Laura Pontieri provides an invaluable map of the role that politics played in the industry, and David MacFadyen renders the emotional content of animated films more transparent. See MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since World War II (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2005); Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 5 On Soviet nationality policies and processes, see the still-relevant study by Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). See also Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 6 For a primary-source discussion on animation and its “profound relationship to the art of the people,” see Sergei Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana. Esteticheskie problemy sovremennoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 279. Also see his far more condensed article on animation in the leading Soviet film journal: S[ergei] Asenin, “Sovremennye volshebniiki e’krana,” Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 1962): 68. 7 For example, on Meyer Schapiro’s secular Jewishness, see Linda Seidel, “Shalom Yehudin!: Meyer Schapiro’s Early Years in Art History,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.3 (Fall 1997): 559–594; Donald Kuspit, “Meyer Schapiro’s Jewish Unconscious,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200–217. On Clement Greenberg’s Jewishness, see the chapter “C[lement] Hardesh (Greenberg): Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity,” in Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 157–178.

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234  H  notes to pages 3–6 8 See Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority, Soviet and East European Studies 62 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry since the Second World War: Population and Social Structure (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987). 9 Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, trans. Neal Kozodoy (1966; rpt. New York: Schocken, 2011). For a discussion on the museological and archival approaches to the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States and Israel, see Maya Balakirsky Katz, “Collecting the Exile: The Jewish National Movement in the USSR, 1967–1989,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 3 (2009): 119–128. 10 Robert Franciosi, Elie Wiesel: Conversations (Literary Conversations Series) (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 53-57. 11 Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), 47. For other seminal exhibitions that adopted this attitude toward Soviet Jewish artists, see Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ed., Tradition and Revolution (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987); Susan Tumarkin Goodman, ed., Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, 1890–1990 (Munich: Prestel, 1995). 12 See my discussion on Kampf’s exhibition in the context of the Soviet Jewry movement in Maya Balakirsky Katz, “Staging Protest: The New York Jewish Museum and the Soviet Jewry Movement,” American Jewish History (2010): 61–78. 13 Michael Stanislawski, “The Jews and Russian Culture and Politics,” in Goodman, Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, 23. 14 Peter Kenez, “Jewish Themes in Stalinist Films,” Journal of Popular Culture 31.4 (1998): 168. See also, Shimon Chertok, “Tevye the Milkman,” Sovetish Heymland 10 (1966): 155–156; J. Hoberman, “The Crooked Road of Jewish Luck,” Artforum 28 (September 1989): 122–125. 15 Miron Chernenko, Kinematograficheskaia istoriia Sovetskogo evreistva, 1934–1941 (Moscow: Evreiskoe nasledie, 2001); Miron Chernenko, Krasnaia zvezda, zheltaia zvezda: Kinematograficheskaia istoriia evreistva v Rossii, 1919–1999 (Vinnitsa: Globus, 2001), 111. 16 Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 59. See also Valérie Pozner and Natacha Laurent, eds., Kinojudaica. Les représentations des Juifs dans le cinéma de Russie et d’Union soviétique dans les années 1910 aux années 1980 (Paris: Cinemathèque de Toulouse Press—Nouveau Monde Editions, 2012). In addition to these critical works, scholars James Loeffler, Harriet Murav, David Shneer, and Anna Shternshis have spearheaded the revisionist efforts on Soviet Jewish culture and opened myriad avenues for new research. 17 Personal communication, Giannelberto Bendazzi, July 2, 2014. 18 Iosif Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi, 2nd ed. (1996; rpt. Moscow: Memoirs, 1998), http://www.pereplet.ru/text/boyarskiy.html. 19 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. 20 Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 18. For a personal reflection on Maryina Roshcha visà-vis the film, see Mikhail Gurevich, “Dream of Eternity, Lullaby of Re-Birth: Notes on Re-reading Tale of Tales,” in Animation—A World History, ed. Giannalberto Bendazzi, 3 vols. (Waltham, MA: Focal Press, 2015), 2:309–311. 21 Alla Bossart, “3D-Sosiska,” Novaia Gazeta, March 22, 2010, http://www.novayagazeta. ru/arts/4386.html. For an illustrated blog on the history of the building, see Georgii Borodin, “I snova khram,” http://george-smf.livejournal.com/26432.html. 22 On the issues surrounding the definition of “Soviet Jews,” see Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53.2 (Summer 1994): 414–452; Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

notes to pages 7–9  H 235 23 For a summary of the debates revolving around the category of Jewish art, see Avram Kampf, “In Quest of the Jewish Style in the Era of the Russian Revolution,” Journal of Jewish Art 5 (1978): 48–75; Seth L. Wolitz, “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia,” in Apter-Gabriel, Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art 1912–1928, 21–42; Alina Orlov, “First There Was the Word: Early Russian Texts on Modern Jewish Art,” Oxford Art Journal 31.3 (2008): 383–402. 24 On the unreliability of Soviet autobiographical writings, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also, Aleksander Kantor, “Sovetskii ‘evrei’: popitka avtoportret,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1992): 42–44. For a useful discussion on the term “nonJewish Jews,” see Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Jewish Identities 4.1 (January 2011): 130–132. 25 Iulii Solomonovich Gusman, “Ia-Evrei!” http://professionali.ru/Soobschestva/rossiya/ gusman-julij-solomonovich-ya-evrej/. 26 Interview with Michael Lipskerov in Sonia Bakulina, “Samyi russkii Evrei,” Jewish.Ru, March 23, 2012, http://www.jewish.ru/culture/events/2012/03/news994305990.php. See also the interview with Jewish artistic director Max Zherebchevsky in Mary Tereshchenko, “Ia ot strakha delaiu vsiakie chudesa,” Peoples.RU, August 30, 2012, http:// www.peoples.ru/art/painter/maks_jerebchevskiy/. 27 Maya Turovsky, personal communication, July 2014. 28 Natalia Venzher, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 18, 2014. Venzher worked as a secretary at Soyuzinformkino from 1975 to 1989 and created the media information group Double-D. She was instrumental in the compilation of the animation.ru database, which was indispensible to my research. 29 Natalia Venzher, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 18, 2014. 30 Yuri Norstein, in conversation with the author, Venice, July 2013. 31 Mikhail Gurevich, in conversation with author via phone, July 2014. 32 See Jay Leyda, ed., Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986). 33 Yu[ri] Lotman, “On the Language of Animated Cartoons,” trans. Ruth Sobel, Film Theory and General Semiotics, Russian Poetics in Translation, ed. Lawrence O’Toole and Ann Shukman (Oxford: Holden Books, 1981), 38. 34 Lotman, “On the Language of Animated Cartoons,” 38. For a spirited critique of poststructural interpretations of animation, see Andrew Darley, “Bones of Contention: Thoughts on the Study of Animation,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2.1 (2007): 63–76. 35 Garri Bardin, “Zhivem kak v skazke,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1997): 71. On the dissociation between the artist and the puppet on the screen, see Richard Weihe, “The Strings of the Marionette,” in Animated Worlds, ed. Suzanne Buchan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 39–48; Alan Cholodenko, ed., The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991). 36 Sergei Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi fil’m: ocherki razvitiia sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsionnoi kinematografii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 27. 37 Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 26–59. On anthropomorphic ambivalence in Soviet animation theory, see Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana, 31. 38 Yuri Larin, Evrei in antisemitism v SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1929). On film trains, see Aleksander Deriabin, “Kinopoezd: Katalog fil’mov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 49 (2000): 115–145. 39 On the denial of antisemitism in Soviet nationality policies, see Erich Goldhagen, “Communism and Anti-Semitism,” in The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Anti-Semitism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 380-391. 40 Gelmont includes photographs of children in a theater, including children with Bukharian skullcaps, reacting to various emotional moments of a film with communal fear and

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51

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laughter. Abram Gelmont, Kino-deti-shkola: metadicheskii sbornik po kino-rabote s detmi (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia 1929), 86, 120; Abram Gelmont, Izuchenie detskogo kino-zritelia (Moscow: Roskino, 1933), 51, 53. No mention of Jewish identity appears in the following encyclopedic projects: Annotirovannyi katalog mul’tiplikatsionnykh i kukolnykh fil’mov (Moscow: Mosgorkinoprokat, 1982); Sergei Kapkov, ed., Entsiklopediia otechestvennoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Algorithm, 2006), and the related online project www.animator.ru. Moshe Khusid, in conversation with author, Detroit, June 19, 2015. Moshe Khusid, in conversation with author, Detroit, December 27, 2013. Roman Yablonovsky, in conversation with author, Baltimore, April 26, 2013. See Albert Baiburin, “Rituals of Identity: The Soviet Passport,” in Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, ed. Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91–109. Employee nationality statistics are difficult to attain. Many personnel files on Soyuzmultfilm were not included in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) archives, including those of such key figures as Aleksander Ivanov, Evgenii Migunov, Kirill Maliantovich, Boris Stepantsev, and Lev Atamanov. Garri Bardin, I vot nastupilo potom . . . (Moscow: Tsentr knigi rudomino, 2013), 43. See, for example, Herbert Marshall, Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (New York: Routledge, 1983), 200–202. The relationship between art and commodity is at the center of the studies on craft industries. For a particularly relevant discussion on the participation of the serf class in the artistic culture in Russia and the consequent categorization of art as trade, see Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 283–382. I thank Olga Litvak for clarifying this point at the Touro College conference “Rabbis and Rebbes—Artists and Intellectuals,” Center for Jewish History, New York, NY, March 9, 2008. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, eds., The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2. KirshenblattGimblett and Karp not only assert this shift in Jewish representation of self but explore its implications in practice. David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 20. For a review essay on the current scholarship on the affinity between religion and art, see David Morgan, “Religion and Media: A Critical Review of Recent Developments,” Critical Research on Religion 1.3 (December 2013): 347–356. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Whishart, 1990), 222. On the dynamics of studying “minority culture” as in opposition to “majority culture,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature,” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–27. On the use of visual images in the field of history, see James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003); Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion, 2001); W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinary and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77.4 (December 1995): 540–544; Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What Is Visual Culture?,” in The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1999). In an interview with Fyodor Khitruk in the documentary Spirit of Genius, dir. Otto Adler (1998). For a fuller discussion on the use of autobiography in animation, see Maria Lorenzo Hernández, “Through the Looking Glass: The Self-Portrait of the Artist and the Re-start of Animation,” Animation Studies 5 (2010): 41–50. On animation as the ultimate auteurist cinema, see Steve Schneider, That’s All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 30. See also Terrance R. Lindvall and J. Matthew Melton, “Towards a Post-Modern Animated Discourse: Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and the Cartoon Carnival,” Animation Journal 3.1 (Fall 1994): 44–63; Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower, 2002), 72–111.

notes to pages 12–18  H 237 53 Interview with Sergei Olifirenko in Larisa Maliukova, “Moi kukly pokhozhi na menia,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1997): 80–81. 54 Quoted in Mieczylaw Walasek, “Just art: l’art tout court,” Animafilm 5 (1980): 42. 55 For the director’s account of the production of Film, Film, Film!, see Fyodor Khitruk, Professiia-animator, 2 vols. (Moscow: Graal, 2007), 1:183. On Khitruk’s use of prototypes, see Dmitri Gusev, “Persona: Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia,” Moskovskii Komsomolets, June 8, 2001, 6. 56 For the obituary of L.I. Milchin, see D. Vinitsky, A. Dikhtyar, et al., “Pamiati tovarishcha,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (April 1988): 102–103. 57 See comments by Leonid Shvartsman at the exhibition on his puppetry at the Moscow gallery Na Solyanke. http://www.jewish.ru/news/culture/2011/04/news994295727.php]. 58 Quote by Yuri Norstein in N. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia v strane Mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Kluch-S, 2010), 11. 59 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 60 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” in O. T. Nesterovich, ed., Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (part II) (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1979), 24. 61 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, Iskusstvo kino 9 (September 2010): 138. 62 On Soviet in-tourism, see Anne E. Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 63 Sergei Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: Volka ia vstreitil eshche v 1941 godu,” Gazeta 143 (August 9, 2004), 10. 64 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” Architecture, Motion, Continuity 5 (1984): 46–49. See also Francine Hirsch, “Getting to Know ‘The Peoples of the USSR’: Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923–1934,” Slavic Review 62.4 (Winter 2003): 683–709. 65 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 29. 66 Ibid., 30. 67 Aleksander Lipkov, Indiiskoe kino: Sekret uspekha: razmyshleniia, interv’iu, vstrechi (Kiev: Mystetsvo, 1990), 7. 68 See the description by Jewish artistic director Leonid Shvartsman in Sergei Kapkov, “Mastera durakovalianiia,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 237. Gr. Chahihirvan, “Zolotaia antilopa,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (December 1954): 101–103. The discourse was mutually used; on the “friendship” between India and the Soviet Union on film as expressed by an Indian film director, see K[hwaja] A[hmad] Abbas, “Druzhba nashikh stran—zalog mira vo vsem mire,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1954): 117; Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, “Novye raboty indiiskikh kinematografistov,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1956): 86–89. 69 Ruben Simonov, S Vakhtangovym (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959). Other Vakhtangov actors who found work at Soyuzmultfilm include Boris Karavaev (1931–2005), Nikolai Olimpievich (1912–1979), Yakov Smolensky (1920–1995), Yury Volintsev (b. 1932), and Yuri Yakovlev (1922–1995). 70 For application, literary scenario, and minutes of Art Council meetings on The Golden Antelope, see Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Fond (f.) Soyuzmultfilm 2469, opus (op.) 1, inventory file (d.) 262. 71 See N. Abramov’s script in “Fil’my-skazki,” Stsenarii risovannykh fil’mov 3 (1954): 221–240. 72 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, Isskustvo kino 10 (October 2010): 159. 73 Aleksander Ivanov, “Risovannyi fil’m,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (February 1940): 77–78. 74 On the policies and procedures surrounding the editing of film scripts, see RGALI Fond Gosudarstvennyi komitet po kinematografii 2944, op. 4, d. 2772. Dmitri Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993); Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). See also E. Anthony Swift, “Fighting the Germs of Disorder: The Censorship of Russian

238  H  notes to pages 18–22 Popular Theatre, 1888–1917,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 18 (1991): 1–49. 75 On censorship specifically in Soviet animation, see Natalie Kononenko, “The Politics of Innocence: Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation on Folklore Topics,” Journal of American Folklore 124.494 (Fall 2011): 272–294. See also Aleksander Prokhorov, “Arresting Development: A Brief History of Soviet Cinema for Children and Adolescents,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129–152. For a broader but highly informative discussion on children in Soviet film, see Frank Beardow, “Soviet-Russian Cinema: From Adolescence to Alienation—The Representation of Youth,” Rusistika 21 (2000): 19–25. 76 Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi fil’m, 164; 187. 77 See Georgii Borodin’s articles on censorship at Soyuzmultfilm: “V bor’be za malen’kie mysli. Neadekvatnost’ tsenzury,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 73 (2005): 261–309; “Kastratsiia begemota (part I),” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 210–236; “Soiuzmul’tifil’m. Nenapisannaia istoria,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 149–152; “Kastratsiia begemota (part II),” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 81 (2007): 140–167. For a collection of documents related to music censorship, including for film, see Leonid Maksimenkov, Muzyka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitory i muziykanty v Strane Sovetov, 1917-1991 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2013). 78 Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (London: Routledge, 2011), 79. 79 Jewish political activism on behalf of Soviet Jews played a decisive role in how Jewish institutions treated official Soviet culture. Notably, contemporary Soviet Jewish art and film first came to American museums through protest organizations. See Twelve from the Soviet Underground (San Francisco: Bay Area Council on Soviet Jewry and Judah Magnes Museum, 1977). See also, the politically inflected Soviet Jewry-era exhibition catalog, Elie Wiesel and Pinchas Shaar, Pinchas Shaar: Let My People Go (New York: Jewish Museum, 1975), exhibition brochure. 80 William Moritz, “Narrative Strategies for Resistance and Protest in Eastern European Animation,” in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling (London: John Libbey, 1997), 38–47. 81 For a discussion of shelved films, see Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kie mysli,” 261–309. 82 For the file on Glass Harmonica, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 607, II. 83 For a contemporaneous discussion of the film by a critic who had seen the film prior to its shelving, see Lotman, “On the Language of Animated Cartoons,” 36–39. 84 See the memoirs of Lydia Sooster, Vremya Yulo Soostera, Zerkalo/Mirror 5/6 (2011), http://zerkalo-litart.com/?p=3189. 85 Ibid. 86 Lotman never mentions the “banning” or “shelving” of the film. 87 Khrushchev attacked director Gennadii Shpalikov for his film I Am Twenty (Mne dvad­ tsat’ let, 1965). 88 See translated transcript of Khrushchev’s speech at the Menezh Gallery (December 1, 1962) in Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–64 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 101–105. 89 For the shooting script, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 183. For a justification of the film, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 184. On the political context of artistic endeavors of the period, see Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, especially 1–89. 90 Mary Tereshchenko, “Ya ot strakha delayu vsyakiye chudesa.” 91 Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts. 92 Sooster, Vremya Yulo Soostera. 93 Ibid. 94 Sergei Asenin, Mir mul’tfil’ma: idei i obrazy mul’tiplikatsionnogo kino sotsialisticheskikh stran (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), 45. See Grigorii Roshal, “Nasha Mul’tiplikatsia,” in Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, ed. Grigorii Roshal (Moscow: Kinofotoizdat, 1936), 1–14.

notes to pages 23–31  H 239 95 Even so, the Aleph artists hardly embraced the abstraction and formalism of the New York School; only two artists, Leonid Bolmat and Olga Shmuilovitch, could be called abstract artists. Also see Denise Youngblood, “Repentance: Stalinist Terror and the Realism of Surrealism,” in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, ed. Robert A. Rosenstone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 139–154. On the reception of stylistic modernism at Soyuzmultfilm vis-à-vis these specific films, see A[lexander] Volkov, Khudozhniki Sovetskogo mul’tfil’ma (Moscow: Sovetskii khodozhnik, 1978). 96 Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Benjamin Harshav, The Moscow Yiddish Theatre: Art on Stage at the Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 97 Georgii Borodin, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 21, 2014. 98 On Soviet film in the 1930s, see Rostislav Iurenev, Sovetskoe kinoiskusstvo tridtsatykh godov (Moscow: VGIK, 1997). Former Jewish theater actors who provided the music and distinctive voices for some of the Soviet Union’s most iconic animated films include Vladimir Etush (b. 1923); Boris Andreyev (1915–1982); Gennadii Dudnik (1924– 1993); and Boris Livonov (1904–1972). 99 Soyuzmultfilm employees with previous experience in the Meyerhold Theater include Michael Astangov (born Ruzhnikov) (1900–1965), Osip Abdulov (1900–1953), Maria Babanov (1900–1983), Aleksander Baranov (1914–1995), Nikolai Bogolyubov (1899– 1980), Erast Garin (born Erast Gerasimov) (1902–1980), Zinovii Kalik (1908–1994), Alexei Konsovskiy (1912–1991), Abram Room (1894–1976), Dmitrii Shostakovich, Lev Sverdlin (1901–1969), and Yelena Tyapkina (1900–1984). 100 On Goskino’s preference for Soyuzmulfilm over regional productions, see Vladimir Golubev, “Zapiski kinomana,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 64 (2003): 303–307. 101 Interview with Andrei Khrzhanovsky as recorded in Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’ky mysli,” 267. 102 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 103 Aleksander Tatarsky, “Delat mul’tfil’m,” Yunosti (1986): 93–99. English translation, http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/9422.html. See also Yuri Norstein’s comments about the Artistic Council in interview with Larisa Maliukova, “Kuda prishli my?” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2006): 74. 104 Mikhail Gurevich, in conversation with author, New York, August 31, 2015

1. Behind the Scenes 1 Leonid Shvartsman, “Shkola iziashchnogo iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 28. For an example of a relevant employee memoir/instructional manual, see Dmitrii Babichenko, Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964). 2 Interview with Leonid Shvartsman in Soyuzmultfilm: Fairytales and True Stories, ed. Natalia Lukiyn, episode 3 [television episode]. 3 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 2010): 155. 4 Garri Bardin, I vot nastupilo potom . . . (Moscow: Tsentr knigi rudomino, 2013), 86–90. 5 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, Iskusstvo kino 9 (September 2010):142. 6 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 159; Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. 7 In the growing body of scholarship on the Soviet live-action film industry, scholars Denise Youngblood and Jamie Miller have given substantial weight to horizontal structures. For an analysis that considers horizontal structures, see Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Youngblood, Movies for the Masses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010).

240  H  notes to pages 32–36

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

For a discussion specifically focused on animation that takes some horizontal structures into consideration, see Natalia Krivulia, Labirinty animatsii: Issledovanie khudozhestvennogo obraza rossiiskikh animatsionnykh fil’mov vtoroi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Graal, 2002). Sergei Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’niyi film: ocherki razvitiia sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsionnoi kinematografii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), chapter 1. On film trains, see Aleksander Deriabin, “Kinopoyezd: Katalog fil’mov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 49 (2000): 115–145. John Halas and Roger Manvell, The Technique of Film Animation (New York: Focal Press Limited, 1959), 263. O. Krivtsun, “Khudozhnik v istorii russkoi kul’tury: Evoliutsiia statusa,” Chelovek 1 (1995): 119–138. On Bushkin, see Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 22. Aleksander Bushkin, Triuki i mul’tiplikatsiia (Moscow: Kinopechat, 1926), 24. On the history of the emerging profession, see Fyodor Khitruk, “Poniat’, dazhe to, chto trudno voobrazit’,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1986): 19. Aleksander Bushkin, “Kadro-s”emka,” Kinozhurnal ARK’ 2 (1926): 21. Yuri Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsilia nachinalas’ tak,” in O. T. Nesterovich, ed., Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 125. Ibid. Jan Tschichold, “Display That Has Dynamic Force: Exhibition Rooms by Lissitzky,” Commercial Art (1931), quoted in “The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus,” http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/03/01/el-lissitzkys-soviet-pavilion-at-the-pressa-exhibition-in-cologne-1928/. On Vertov’s use of animation, see Aleksander Deriabin, “Vertov i animatsiia: Roman, kotorogo ne bylo,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 132–144. On Vertov’s reflection of the realpolitik of the period in relation to the non-Russian nationalities, see Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 110. Aleksander Ivanov, “Vremya propagandy: reprezentatsii evreyskoi zemledel’cheskoi kolonizatsii v sovetskoi dokumental’no-publiticheskoi fotografii 1920–1930-kh godov,” in Voprosy evreiskoi istorii: Materialy nauchnykh konferentsii tsentra Sefer, eds. K. Burmistrov, A. Vorobyev, V. Mochalova, V. Petrukhin, and E. Rozenblat (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2008), 383–412. See Mihaela Mihailova and John Mackay, “Frame Shot: Vertov’s Ideologies of Animation,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 145–166. Mikhail Iampol’skii, “Chuzhaia real’nost’,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 10 (1991): 137–149. Although these artists succeeded in the Russian avant-garde they sometimes also exhibited as Jewish artists. See exhibition catalogs, e.g., Lissitzky, Altman, Chagall, Bakst et al., Katalog vystavki kartin i skul’ptury khodozhnikov-evreev (Moscow: Jewish Society for the Endowment for the Arts, 1917); Natan Altman, Marc Chagall, and David Sterenberg, Kul’tur-liga. Vystavka rabot Natana Al’tmana, Marka Shagala, Davida Shterenberga (Moscow: n.p., 1922). Nikolai Khodataev, “Iskusstvo Mul’tiplikatsi,” in Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, ed. Grigorii Roshal (Moscow: Kinofotoizdat, 1936), 15–100. For background on the early animators, see G. K. Elizarov, Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia: Spravochnik (Moscow: Gosfil’mofond, 1966). See also Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak,” 124. Aleksander Ivanov, “Risovannyi fil’m,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (February 1940): 77; Aleksander Ivanov, “Zadachi Sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsii,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1936): 45–46. Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak,” 124. A[leksander] Volkov, Khudozhniki Sovetskogo mul’tfil’ma (Moscow: Sovetskii khodozhnik, 1978), 4. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in

notes to pages 37–42  H 241 Documents 1896–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 109. 28 See Peter Bagrov, “Ermler, Stalin, and Animation: On the Film The Peasants (1934),” KinoKultura, http://www.kinokultura.com/2007/15-bagrov.shtml#6. 29 Like other startups, Ptushko’s studio also included Jewish artists, such as literary theorist and screenwriter Victor Shkovsky (1893–1984), Dziga Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufmann (1897–1980), puppet maker and designer Sarah Mokil (1906–1984), as well as no longer identifiable operators with classically Jewish names such as Ilya Minkovetsky, Samuil Rubashkin, and Boris Shulman. On the film industry during the first Five-Year Plan, see Vance Kepley Jr., “The First Perestroika: Soviet Cinema under the First Five-Year Plan,” Cinema Journal 35 (1996): 31–53. 30 On contemporaneous essays on the role of Disney in Soviet animation, see Roshal, Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, 15–100. 31 For the influence of Disney on Soviet film, see the chapter “Eisenstein Shakes Mickey’s Hand in Hollywood,” in Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 219–251. For a case study of Sergei Eisenstein’s use of Disney, see Anne Nesbet, “Inanimations: Snow White and Ivan the Terrible,” Film Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 1997): 20–31. 32 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, 137. 33 M. Cheremukhin, “Naivnye Simfonii’ uolta Disneia,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1936): 39; V. Garin, “Novye raboty mul’tfil’ma,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1939): 34–35; M. Bobloian, “Ob”emnaia mul’tiplikatsiia,” Iskusstvo kino 1–2 (February 1940): 73–76. 34 A. Karpov and F. Kravchenko, “Graficheskaia mul’tiplikatsiia i ee nedostatki,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1940): 54. 35 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 136. 36 Smirnov promoted several hires in the technical departments this way, such as Boris Dezhkin (1914–1992) and Gennadii Filippov (1910–1952). 37 See Kirill Maliantovich, “Animatsii Soiuzmul’tfil’m,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 81 (2007): 170. 38 Ia. Smirnov, “Lenfil’m v 1937 godu,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1937): 46–47. 39 For listing of regional animation operations, see V., “Istoricheskaya spravna,” Literaturnaia gazeta, December 2, 1934, 4. 40 M. Tsekhanovskii, “Dnevniki,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 54 (2001); no. 55 (2001); no. 57 (2002). See also N. Khotataev, “Puti mul’tfil’ma,” Sovetskoe kino 4 (April 1935): 46–48. 41 On the number of employees at Soyuzmultfilm, see Ivanov, “Risovannyi fil’m,” 77–78. On the large presence of Jews, see Kirill Maliantovich, “Kak na Soiuzmul’tfil’me poluchali Stalinskuiu premiiu: zapiski starogo mul’tiplikatora,” Kinograf 9 (2000): 191. 42 Studio head Nikolai Kiva’s (1902/3–1985) memoirs, preserved in Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) Fond (f.) Filmmakers Archive 3013, opus (op.) 1, inventory file (d.) 92 (September 1983), list the names of heads of departments and divisions. Published in Nicholas Kiva, “Soyuzmultfilm: Nachalo puti publikator,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 153–173. On Kiva, see Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom, 97. 43 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, 136. 44 Ibid., 138; Iosif Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi, 2nd ed. Moscow: Memoirs, 1998 [1996]. http://www.pereplet.ru/text/boyarskiy.html. 45 Bardin, I vot nastupilo potom . . . , 86. 46 Jamie Miller, “Soviet Cinema, 1929–41: The Development of Industry and Infrastructure,” Europe-Asia Studies 58.1 (2006): 109–110. 47 Khitruk, Professiia-animator, 1: 44. 48 See memoir of student days at Alma-Ata published in Evgenii Migunov, “O, ob i pro . . . Alma-Ata. Studencheskie gody (1941–43),” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 62 (2003): 276–301. 49 Fyodor Khitruk, Professiia-animator, 2 vols. (Moscow: Graal, 2007), 1:44. 50 The majority of films were devoted to specific topics such as physical fitness, traffic laws, fire safety procedures, public health initiatives, and social etiquette. International

242  H  notes to pages 42–44

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

65

organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), commissioned educational films, which in turn helped Soyuzmultfilm sustain a large employee base. For materials on the cartoons commissioned by international organizations, see RGALI Fond Soyuzmultfilm 2469, op. 5, d. 474–475. For the focus on children, see thematic plans for all four quarters of 1948, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 71–74. See thematic plans for 1949, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1076. Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (New York: Harper, 2008), 20. Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi. National organizations such as the Komsomol Central Committee weighed in on what measures should be taken at Soyuzmultfilm to improve production. For these correspondences, see, for example, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 2 (August 1, 1944); op. 1, d. 3 (September 16, 1944). For statistics concerning the general film industry in the Soviet Union in the decade of the 1930s, “Sovetskoe kino v tsifrakh,” Iskusstvo kino 1–2 (February 1940): 82–83. Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi. See Boyarsky’s personal file in RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 12 (June 16, 1960–July 1979). As described by Soyuzmultfilm designer Marina Leskov in “SM Nomer adin 20” (May 22, 2008), http://baikalpress.ru/sm/2008/20/014001.html. Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 84. Personal records are available only through archival record, but the orders for hires suit statistical purposes. For year 1945, for example, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 12, order numbers 1–312. Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. Dmitry Astrahan, in conversation with author, New York, March 28, 2015. Freelance Jewish employees that eventually directed their own films at Soyuzmultfilm include Vladimir (Wolf) Baker (1927–1990); Roman Davydov (1913–1988); Efim Gamburg (1925–2000); Roman (Ruvim) Kachanov (1921–1993); Mikhail Kaminetsky (1924– 2006); Nathan Lerner (1932–1993); and Georgii Natanson (b. 1921). Sergei Kapkov, “Mastera durakovalianiia,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 237; Marina Lisakovskaia, “Nezamechennyi avangard. Khudozhniki v kino,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 99 (2012): 26–34. Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. See also E. Egrova, “Kogda otkryvaesh’ ‘novyi’ stsenarii,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1968): 113–119. Jamie Miller, “Educating the Filmmakers: The State Institute of Cinematography in the 1930s,” Slavonic and East European Review 85.3 (2007): 462–490. Some of the most beloved Soyuzmultfilm films were written by or based on Jewishborn writers, including Evgenii Agranovich (1919–2010), Yaakov Akim (1923–2013), Ovsei (Shik ben Shik) Drize (1908–1971), Vladimir Dykhovichniy (1911–1963), Yuri Entin (b. 1935), Oleg Erberg (1898–1956), Lev Kassil’ (1905–1970), Arkadii Khait (1938–2000), Yuri Kirshon (1928–2001), Yaakov Kostyukovsky (1921–2011), Boris Laskin (1914–1983), Aleksander Kostinsky (b. 1946), Yakov Kostyukovsky (1921– 2011), Aleksander Kurliandsky (b. 1938), Lazarus Lagin (1903–1979), Michael Lipskerov (b. 1939), Samuil Marshak (1887–1964), Yunna Moritz (b. 1937), Genrikh Sapgir (1928–1999), Natalia Sats (1903–1993), Evgenii Shvarts (1896–1958), Maurice Slobodskoy (1913–1991), Vladimir Suteev (1903–1993), and Boris Zakhoder (1918–2000). Many Jewish actors did significant freelance work for Soyuzmultfilm, including Osip Abdulov (1900–1953), Vsevolod Abdulov (1942–2002), Rolan Bykov (1929–1988), Gennadii Dudnik (1924–1993), Valentin Gaft (b. 1935), Aleksander Kalagin (b. 1942), Efim Katzir (b. 1937), Mikhail Kozakov (1934–2011), Aleksander Levenbuk (b. 1933),

notes to pages 45–48  H 243

66

67 68 69 70

71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Bernhard Levinson (1919–2000), Valentin Nikulin (1933–2005), Simon Samodur (1911–1991), Lev Sverdlov (1901–1969), Vladimir Vinokur (b. 1948), and Zinovi Vysokovsky (1932–2009). Semi-official Soyuzmultfilm composers include Vyacheslav Artymov (b. 1940), Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998), Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906–1975), Victor Suslin (1942–2012), Mieczyslaw (Moissei) Weinberg (1919–1996), Aleksander Varlamov (1904–1990), and Andrei Volkonsky (1933–2008). Jewish composers, many of whom graduated from the Moscow Conservatory and had backgrounds in Yiddish, hazzanic, and Jewish folk traditions, worked on a per-project basis at Soyuzmultfilm, including Isaak Dunaevsky (1900–1955), Sigismund Katz (1908–1984), Iosif Kovner (1895–1959), Lev Shvarts (1898–1962), Mikhail Meerovich (1920–1993), Yan Frenkel (1920–1989), and Vladimir Yurovsky (1915–1972). Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi. Ibid. See Ivan Ivanov-Vano, “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (October 1947): 22. On the purges in the Soviet film industry, see Anatolii Latyshev, “Stalin i kino,” in Surovaia drama naroda, ed. Iurii Senokosov (Moscow: Izdanie politicheskoi literatury, 1989): 489–511; Arkadii Bernshtein, “Sochli vragami naroda,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1993): 92–99. Reprinted in “A Speech by Mikhail Romm,” Commentary (December 1963): 433–437. Kirill Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami’ na Soiuzmul’tfil’me’,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 191 [191–196] (special issue on animation). The subsequent quotes from this episode are from this same source. For a contemporaneous article that reviews the shortfalls of Soviet animation in 1948, see V. Balashov, “Na putiakh k’bo’shomu iskusstvu,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (October 1948): 17–19. Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami’,” 191. Ibid.,” 192. Evgenii Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 197–205. The allusion to Bambi appears strangely specific in his indictment of Disney, but this was likely meant as a reference to director Sergei Eisenstein, who was implicated as a cosmopolitan at the same meeting, as he had singled out Bambi as the “crown” of Disney.” Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?,” 198. Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami’,” 194. Ibid. It also did not help that Vano Muradeli composed the score for the film. Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom, 97. See chapter “How Walt Disney Became Walter Distler: Snow White for Greater Germany,” in Rolf Giesen and J. P. Storm, Animation under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012), 12–25. Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom, 97; Khitruk, “Poniat’, dazhe to, chto trudno voobrazit’,” 19. Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?,” 198. Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom, 80. Ivanov-Vano, “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” 21–25. See “Kosmopolity v kinokritike i ikh pokroviteli,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 16, 1949, 2. Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?,” 204–205. Ibid. “Prikaz Ministerstva Kinematografii SSSR,” March 28, 1949, reprinted in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 49 (2000): 84–85. Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?,” 197–198. Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi. For another memoir account of the unemployed actors and directors in Moscow in 1948, see Natalia Fokina, ed., “Lev Kulidzhanov,”

244  H  notes to pages 48–54 Kinovedcheskie zapiski 64 (2003): 125–166. The available personal accounts of freelance employees in the year 1950 are catalogued in RGALI f. 2469, op. 12, d. 43 (267 sheets). Compare to the list of studio employees compiled for the year 1949–1950 in RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 645 (213 sheets). 91 Georgii Borodin, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 21, 2014. 92 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. 93 Related to me by Alexandra Sviridova, personal correspondence (January 19, 2014). 94 The brief memorandums published annually in Iskusstvo kino on the state of the studio have been helpful in charting the growth of Soyuzmultfilm. For example, see the memo published the year that The Golden Antelope was released “Na studii Soiuzmul’tfil’m,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1954): 122–123. 95 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 160. 96 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 160. 97 On the restructuring of Soyuzmultfilm in 1959, see Evgenii Migunov, “Novatoram dostayetsya ne tol’ko p golove . . . Zamechaniya o perestroyke tvorcheskogo protsessa, 1959,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 188–191. 98 Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw: Not Only for Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 99 Ilya Kopalin, “Nashi fil’my smotrit Parizh,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (December 1964): 91–95. 100 Aleksander Tatarsky, “Delat mul’tfilm,” Yunosti (1986): 93–96. Translation by Niffiwan, http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/9422.html. 101 Mikhail Valkov in Asifa Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (March 26– April 2, 1974), 100. This volume, preserved at the book archive of Mosfilm, contains the transcript of papers and talks delivered “on the problem of animation cinematographic art,” 103. I am grateful to Georgii Borodin for granting me access to the archive. 102 See Maliantovich, “Kak na Soiuzmul’tfil’me poluchali Stalinskuiu premiiu.” See IvanovVano, “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” 22. 103 See Kirill Maliantovich, “Vospominania o kursakh,” Kinograf 11 (2002). See Igor Golomshtok, “The History and Organization of Artistic Life in the Soviet Union,” in Soviet Émigré Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States, ed. Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Igor Golomshtok, and Janet Kennedy (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 16–59. See also Vance Kepley Jr., “The Origins of Soviet Cinema: A Study on Industry Development,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1985): 22–38. 104 Bobloian, “Ob”emnaia mul’tiplikatsiia,” 74–75. 105 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, 143. 106 Vycheslav Kotenochkin, Nu, Kotenochkin, Pogodi! (Moscow: Algorithm, 1999), 112. 107 On the groups that formed around particular directors, see Eduard Nazarov, “Dom na Kaliaevskoi,’” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 40–43. 108 Khitruk, “Poniat’, dazhe to, chto trudno voobrazit’,” 20. 109 Nazarov, “Dom na Kaliaevskoi,’” 41. 110 Interview with Yuri Norstein in Larisa Maliukova, “Kuda prishli my?” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2006): 72–74. 111 On the antagonism between Lamis Bredis and Migunov and Dezhkin, see Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?,” 197–205; on the rivalry between Khitruk and Dezhkin, see Malyukova, “Kuda prishli my?”; on the rivalry between Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Aleksander Ivanov, see Fyodor Khitruk, “Moi Soiuzmul’tfil’m,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 37–38. 112 Khitruk, “Moi Soiuzmul’tfil’m,” 39. 113 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, 138. 114 Kapkov, “Mastera durakovalianiia,” 237. 115 Mikhail Gurevich, in conversation with author, New York, August 31, 2015. 116 Malyukova, “Kuda prishli my?” 72. 117 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, 142.

notes to pages 54–58  H 245 118 Sergei Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: Volka ia vstreitil eshche v 1941 godu,” Gazeta 143, August 9, 2004. 119 Evgenii Migunov, “Rabota v kukol’noy mul’tiplikatsii,” http://old-crocodile.livejournal. com/26268.html. Theodore Bunimovich (1908–2001), a respected Jewish battle cinematographer who covered the German invasion from the front lines, started at Soyuzmultfilm in 1957 as an operator and was able to move on to directing his own films in a very short period. 120 Elena Gavrilenko, Iurii Batanin, et al., “Shkola iziashchnogo iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 21. 121 Ibid. 122 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 165. See the termination order of Brumberg sisters (No. 520) in RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 14 (July 15, 1936–October 10, 1975) and the personal file of Zinaida Brumberg in RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 15 (July 15, 1936–October 10, 1975). 123 For minutes to intermittent Artistic Council meetings from 1945–1962, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1069–1211.

2. Black and White 1 On Mezhrabpom, see Boris Pavlov, “Animation in the ‘Russian Hollywood’ of the 1920–1930s,” Animation Journal (Spring 1998): 16; Jean-François Fayet, “VOKS: The Third Dimension of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 37–38; Vance Kepley Jr., “The Workers’ International Relief and the Cinema of the Left, 1921–1935,” Cinema Journal 23.1 (Fall 1983): 12–19. 2 See Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) Fond (f.) Georgii Grebner 2014, opus (op.) 1, inventory file (d.) 16: 3. 3 On the film in relationship to Mayakovsky’s poetic legacy, see A. Fevral’skii, “Maiakovskii i kino’,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1936): 57–59, as well as the more theoretical discussion by Mikhail Gurevich, “Animatsiia veshchi i oveshchestvleniye maski. O nekotorykh chertakh kinopoetiki Maiakovskogo,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 33 (1997): 172–182. Langston Hughes’s translation of Mayakovsky’s “Black and White” is preserved in Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, 1909–1999, Special Collections and Archives, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University in Atlanta, GA, Box 18, d. 16. 4 Steven Sunwoo Lee, Multiculturalism vs. Multi-nationalness: The Class of American and Soviet Models of Difference (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2008), 28–29. 5 Ibid. 6 Jack El-Hai, “Black and White and Red,” American Heritage 42.3 (1991): 87. 7 In a spirit of self-congratulation, the Soviet press published photographs of the “negro troupe” alongside a group of Soviet colleagues. For one photograph of the film cast and crew, see A. Solits, “Teatral’nye zametki,” Izvestiia 178, June 29, 1932, 4. 8 See Louise Thompson Patterson, “With Langston Hughes in the USSR,” Freedomways 8 (1968): 152–158; Louis Thompson, “The Soviet Film,” Crisis 40 (February 1933): 37; Langston Hughes, “Negroes in Moscow: In a Land Where There Is No Jim Crow,” International Literature 4 (September 1933): 78–81. 9 Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander [1956], vol. 14 in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 96. 10 Ibid., 101. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 103–104. 13 Ibid. 14 For Grebner’s 1949 notes on the making of Black and White, see RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 166. 15 For the file on the cancelation of the film, see Russian State Archive of Socio-Political

246  H  notes to pages 58–61

16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31

32

History (RGASPI), Fond Arkhiv kominterna (f.) 495, opus (op.) 72. For the document that lists the reasons for the cancelation of the film, see RGASPI, f. 495, inventory file (d.) 201, II, 266–267. For an account that places the cancellation on American pressure, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 133–148. El-Hai, “Black and White and Red,” 87. Thompson, “The Soviet Film,” 37. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 100. For example, “Say Race Bias Here Halted Film,” New York Times, October 5, 1932, 26. See RGASPI, f. 495, op. 72, d. 201, I. 198. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 120–121. Grebner’s live-action literary scenario translated the title into Russian in the early phases. See RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 61 (1930–February 1931). Mezhrabpom even transliterated the short’s title from the English as “Blek end uayt” rather than translating it into Russian as “Chernyy i belyy” in accordance with the spirit of the original project. Because of its semi-private status during the New Economic Policy and its connection with Germany, the Moscow branch of Mezhrabpom often fell victim to bureaucratic interference in the Soviet Union. For documents on the notes of the party purge commission at Mezhrabpom from 1929 to 1933, see RGALI Fond Glavnoe upravlenie kinofotopromyshlennosti 2496, op. 2, d. 13. Yuri Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak,” in O. T. Nesterovich, ed., Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 131. Early advertisements for the film still listed Amalric as a designer. See Sovetskoe iskusstvo, October 21, 1932, 4. The same ad ran in Literaturnaia gazeta in the third week of October. In Sovetskoe iskusstvo, Amalric is listed as a co-director five weeks later. See V. Bloom, “Opit Zvukovoy Mul’tiplikatsii,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, November 27, 1932, 4. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 104–105. See Faith Berry, Before and Beyond Harlem: Langston Hughes, a Biography (New York: Citadel, 1992), 156; Langston Hughes, “Moscow and Me: A Noted American Writer Relates His Experiences,” International Literature 3, July 3, 1933, 60–66; Louise Thompson, “The Soviet Film,” Crisis 40.2 (February 1933): 37. On the representation of race in American animation, see Christopher Paul Lehman, “African American Representation through the Combination of Live Action and Animation,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 252–263. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 104–105. For Grebner’s 1952 notes concerning the scenario, see RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 16. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 103. Georgii Borodin, interview by author, Moscow, August 21, 2014. For a self-review of the Mezhrabpom studio in the year 1932, see RGALI Fond Vsesoiuznogo gosudarstvennogo kinofatooby”edineniia “Soiuzkino” 2497, op. 2, d. 21 [December 26, 1932]. Statistics on television offerings compiled by Natalia Venzher, interview by author, Moscow, August 18, 2014. For examples of the placement of the film as a Soviet “classic” in various decades, see Ivanov-Vano, “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” 21–25; V. Balashov, “Na putiakh k’bo’shomu iskusstvu,” 17–19; Dmitrii Babichenko, “Predostavit’ slovo satire!,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1955): 89–97; interview with Boris Stepantsev by Aleksei Khaniutin, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zritel,’” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 1981): 85–99. Bloom, “Opit Zvukovoy Mul’tiplikatsii,” 4. See also Nikolai Izvolov, “Iz istorii risovannogo zvuka v SSSR,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 53 (2001): 292; Anatolii Volkov, “Mult’iplikatsiia,” in Kino: politika i liudi, 30-e gody: K sto-letiiu mirovogo kino, ed. L. Kh. Mamatova (Moscow: Materik, 1995), 110–122. See, for example, the self-congratulatory album put out by the studio, V. Miuntsenberg, Kino i revolyutsiya (Moscow: Mezhrabpom, 1925). See the Plenum of the Central Committee regarding Mezhrabpom delivered in March 1929, reprinted by A. Hook, “Dokument solidarnosti trudiashchikhsia,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1961): 129–131. Also see Mezhrabpom’s in-house paper Rot-fil’m: gazeta iacheiki VKP (published in

notes to pages 62–68  H 247 Moscow), published during the years 1933–1936. 33 On the development of sound in early Soviet animation, see Nikolai Izvolov, “From the History of Graphic Sound in the Soviet Union; or, Media without a Medium,” in Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, eds., Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 21–37. 34 Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), 274; A. Volkov, “Neissiakaemaia fantaziia khudozhnika,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1975): 119–120. 35 On the animation of Mayakovsky with reference to Black and White, see S. Asenin, “Sovremennye volshebniki e’krana,” Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 1962): 62–63. On Mayakovsky’s connection to the live-action script, see Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 240 n.104. 36 Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 101. 37 RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 61: 3. 38 Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964), 25. RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 61: 3. 39 See example of darkened photograph in Boris Bek, “Chornye i beliye,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo (July 3, 1932): 4. 40 Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 103–104. 41 Khrisanf Khersonskiy, “Lektsiia o mul’tiplikatsii,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 159. Dmitrii Babichenko, Mastera sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), 150; Efim Gamburg, Tainy risovannogo mira (Moscow: Sov. Kudozhnik, 1966), 18–20. On “crowd symbols,” see Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 75. 42 Georgii Grebner had originally identified these sources as prototypes for the liveaction film. See RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 61 (1930–February 1931): 3. See letter on the “Mezhrabpom movie” in RGALI f. 2014, op. 2, d. 149 (1931). For notes and material on Black and White (including the shooting script), see RGALI Fond Soyuz pisateley SSSR (Writers’ Union of the USSR) 631, op. 3, d. 2, 1.6; 1.37. On an essay that explores Rodchenko in the context of politics of representation in the early 1930s, see Erika Wolf, “The Visual Economy of Forced Labor: Alexander Rodchenko and the White Sea-Baltic Canal,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 168–174. 43 Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak,” 131. 44 Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61 (Spring 2002): 30–43; Francine Hirsch, “The Soviet Union as a Work in Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses,” Slavic Review 56.2 (1997): 251–279. 45 Television statistics provided by Natalia Venzher, interview by author, Moscow, August 18, 2014. 46 Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 104–105. 47 Ibid. 48 Eugene Bauder, “Kontsert dlia violoncheli Gr. Gamburga,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo (December 1, 1937), 4. 49 See advertisement, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, October 21, 1932, 4. 50 Bloom, “Opit Zvukovoy Mul’tiplikatsii,” 4. 51 Leyda, Kino, 308. 52 Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 630. 53 Marlene Park, “Lynching and Anti-Lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 162.

248  H  notes to pages 68–75 54 The scene would change in a few years in New York with the support movement on behalf of the Bill for Negro Rights and Suppression of Lynching. 55 For reprints of preparatory drawings, see S. Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi fil’m (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 124. On the reception of stylistic modernism at Soyuzmultfilm vis-à-vis these specific films, see A. Volkov, Khudozhniki Sovetskogo mul’tfil’ma (Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1978), 30. 56 Park, “Lynching and Anti-Lynching,” 162. 57 Rashid Iangirov, “Evrei’skoe kino Rossii: v poiskakh identichnosti, 1908–1919,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1992): 27. 58 See David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 124–125. 59 RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 61: 29. 60 For example, Gamburg composed the Jewish-themed Song of Songs (1926). 61 Robeson recorded a version of the song in 1926, when he was already known for his African American music concerts. The first recording date for Robeson’s performance is listed as January 7, 1926, in the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings, matrix BE-34077 (piano arrangement by Lawrence Brown). 62 Though the first animated Black and White short successfully avoided the stereotypical Hollywood black roles of the shoeshine boy, happy-go-lucky slave, and noble savage, the resynchronized short with Robeson’s voice led to another Hollywood cliché that film critic Robert Stevens identified in 1935 as that of the “benighted prisoner intoning the ubiquitous spiritual in the death house while the hero is being prepared for his walk along the ‘last mile.’” Quoted in Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (New York: Kennsikat, 1948), 8. 63 “Stat’ya Polya Robsona ob iskusstve SSSR,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo 2 (January 10, 1938), 4. 64 Interview with Paul Robeson by Julia Dorn, “Paul Robeson Told Me,” Theater Arts Committee (TAC), July–August 1939: 23, reprinted in Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, and Interviews (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978), 131. 65 Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 22. Aleksander Bushkin, Triuki i mul’tiplikatsiia (Moscow: Kinopechat, 1926), 97; 129. 66 V., “Istoricheskaya Spravna,” 4. See also the article in Mezhrabpom’s paper, “Kinofa­ brika ne dlia kinos”emok?” Rot-Fil’m (September 1934). 67 Leyda, Kino, 345. 68 S. Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana. Esteticheskie problemy sovremennoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 279; Asenin, “Sovremennye volshebniki e’krana,” 68. 69 For one of Grebner’s treatises on the fairy-tale genre, see RGALI f. 2014, op. 1, d. 113.

3. The Brumberg Sisters 1 On the appellation of “the grandmothers of Russian animation,” see interview of Lana Azarkh by Sergei Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: Grymzy iz akademii pedagogicheskikh nauk govorili, chto deti nashi fil’my ne poimut,” Gazeta 133 (July 26, 2004), 10. For other collegiate examples of personal reminisces of the Brumbergs as “grandmothers,” see Evgenii Migunov, “Iz vospominaniia,” Kinograf 8 (2000), 4; Anatolii Volkov, “Mul’tiplikatsiia,” in Kino: politika i liudi, 30-e gody: K 100-letiiu mirovogo kino, ed. L. Kh. Mamatova (Moscow: Materik, 1995), 120–121; Irina Margolina and Natalia Lozinskaia, eds., Nashi mul’tfil’my. Litsa, kadry, eskizy, geroi, vospominaniia, interv’iu, stat’i, esse (Moscow: Interros, 2006), 28–33; 59; Efim Gamburg, Tainy risovannogo mira (Moscow: Sov. Khudozhnik, 1966), 18–20; 57; 68. 2 On Stalin and fairy tales, see Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairytales (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).

notes to pages 75–79  H 249 3 Vera Tulyakova Khikmet, Poslednii razgovor s Nazymom (Moscow: Vremia, 2009), 13. 4 On Valentina’s birth certificate, her father is listed as a soldier, and on Zinaida’s as a doctor and a soldier, making it likely that he ended service in the year 1900–1901 and began working as a doctor. For a copy of the birth certificates of Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, see Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) archives, Fond Moskovskoe vysshee khudozhestvenno-promyshlennoye uchilishche (Moscow Higher School of Industrial Art) (f.) 677, op. 1, d. 1124; f.677, op. 1, d. 1123. 5 Mark Vishniak, Dan’ proshlomu (New York: Izd-vo im Chekhova, 1954), 17. 6 First published as Samuil Vermel’, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk deiatel’nosti moskovskogo otdeleniia obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshchennia mezhdu evreiami v rossii (Moscow: n.p., 1917), available at http://www.universalinternetlibrary.ru/book/23042/ ogl.shtml [Last accessed March 18]. On Jewish life in Moscow in the early twentieth century, see K. Iu. Burmistrov, ed., Moskva evreiskaia (Moscow: Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2003), 436; Anatolii Rubinov, Takova evreiskaia zhizn’ (Moscow: Vremia, 2007). 7 Vermel’, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk. 8 See Brian Horowitz, “Partial Victory from Defeat: 1905, Jewish Liberals, and the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews: A Turning Point?, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn and Stefani Hoffman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 117–141. 9 Brumberg is listed as the editor of the Zionist weekly Evreiskaia zhizn’ (1915–1917) in N. A. Portnova, ed., Byt’ evreem v Rossii: Materialy po istorii russkogo evreistva, 1900–1917 (Jerusalem: Center for the Study of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 2002), 8. See also Artur Klempert and Iurii Snopov, eds., Evrei v Moskve: sbornik materialov (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 2003), 358; 381. U. G. Ivask and Iu. B. Gens, Evreiskaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v Rossii: materialy dlia istorii evreiskoi zhurnalistiki (Tallinn: Society of Friends of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1935), 54. It is probable that Brumberg’s name served as a cover for other editors, such as Leib Jaffe. After June 25, 1917, the paper changed its name to Razsvet. 10 Semyon Brumberg, “1-e Maia: Velikim teniam,” in Pravda, May 3, 1917, 5; republished in Revoliutsionnye motivy v russkoi poezii, ed. V. L’vov-Rogachevskii (Tula: Gos. Izdvo, 1921), 224. 11 Quoted in Joshua S. Walden, Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature in the Jewish Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 141. For an issue on Hebrew-language poet Haim Nahman Bialik in support of the concept of Jewish culture, see A. Sobol, Evreiskaya zhizn’ 14–15, 1916, 28. 12 Sh. Brumberg, “Blizhaishie zadachi,” Evreiskaia zhizn’ 15, October 1915, C-5–6. When Vladimir Harkavi, the foremost leader of the Jewish community of Moscow, passed away in 1911, Brumberg helped to organize a chamber music concert in his memory. 13 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” in O. T. Nesterovich, ed., Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (part II) (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1979), 7. 14 Ibid. She refers to her father only as a “factory doctor.” The elder, Aleksander Brumberg (1893–1975), followed after his father in the medical profession and the younger, Daniel Brumberg (1903–1966), became a design engineer. 15 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 5. For the student file of Valentina Brumberg, see RGALI 677, op. 1, d. 1124. For the student file of Zinaida Brumberg, see RGALI f.677, op. 1, d. 1123. 16 For the announcement of Shimon Brumberg’s death, see Izvestiia, January 24, 1919, 6. On Jews in Moscow in those years, see Burmistrov, Moskva evreiskaia. 17 On Merkulov’s claim that it was his conversation that convinced the Brumbergs to explore the industry, see Yuri Merkulov, “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak,” in O. T. Nesterovich, ed., Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), 126–127. 18 See introduction by Dov Noy in Shaul Ginzburg and Pesach Marek, Yiddish Folksongs in Russia (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1991).

250  H  notes to pages 79–83 19 Felix J. Oinas, “The Political Uses and Themes of Folklore in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Folklore Institute 12.2/3 (1975): 157. 20 Quoted in ibid., 158. 21 Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 114. 22 See the transcribed conversation on the retrospective on Soviet silent animation mounted at the 2013 Pordenone in Peter Bagraov and Viktor Kapterev, “Soviet Silent Animation, Part 2,” Antti Alanen: Film Diary, posted October 8, 2013, available at http://anttialanenfilmdiary.blogspot.com/2013/10/soviet-silent-animation-part-2.html. 23 For the definition of animation by one of the earliest practitioners, see Nikolai Khodataev, “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, ed. Grigorii Roshal (Moscow: Kinofotoizdat, 1936), 15–100. See also G. Roshal, “Narodnoe i professional’noe iskusstvo,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (January 1937): 42. 24 Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 22. Aleksander Bushkin, Triuki i mul’tiplikatsiia (Moscow: Kinopechat, 1926). 25 Dmitrii N. Babichenko, Mastera sovetsko mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), 62; Natalia Sats, Sketches from My Life, trans. Sergei Syrovatkin (Moscow: Raduga, 1985), 111–112. 26 V. Victorov, Muzyka, teatr, deti (Moscow: Sovetskii Kompozitor, 1977), 106. 27 Miller, Folklore for Stalin, 7. 28 See the listing of the “director’s group” in the Mezhrabpom in-house paper as “I. Vano, V. Brumberg, Z. Brumberg,” in “nekhvatayet kompozitora,” Rot-film 2, August 8, 1933, 2. 29 See, for example, S[ergei] Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana. Esteticheskie problemy sovremennoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 9. 30 V. Garin, “Novye raboty mul’tfil’ma,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1939): 35. 31 Ibid. 32 See Ptushko’s crediting of Mokil’s contribution to The New Gulliver (1935) in A. Ptushko, “Kak sozdavalsia Novyi Gulliver,” Sovetskoe kino 3 (March 1935): 50–58. 33 RGALI fond Soyuzmultfilm 2469, op. 6, d. 14 (July 15, 1936–October 10, 1975) and the personal file of Zinaida Brumberg in RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 15 (July 15, 1936– October 10, 1975). The sisters were hired under one order. For a copy of “Order No. 80/6,” see RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 14. They were also fired under one order number (Order No. 520) on October 10, 1975. 34 Some of this independence may be attributable to industry practices as the idea of collective authorship was more important in the 1920s then it was after 1936. Sergei Asenin, Mir mul’tfil’ma: idei i obrazy mul’tiplikatsionnogo kino sotsialisticheskikh stran (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), 43–44; 48; 50–51. On the relationship between the sisters, see O. Abol’nikov, “Valentina i Zinaida Brumberg,” Mastera sovetsko mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972). 35 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, Iskusstvo kino 9 (September 2010): 137; Khrisanf Khersonskiy, “Lektsiia o mul’tiplikatsii,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 153. 36 Editors, “V Soiuzmul’tfil’me,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (December 1945): 47. The journal had only recently resumed publication after a four-year gap, and this editorial note was meant to offer a brief update on the rehabilitation of Soyuzmultfilm production after a similar gap in fairy-tale films. 37 Aleksander Ivanov, “Zadachi Sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsii,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1936): 46. Khersonskiy, “Lektsiia o mul’tiplikatsii,” 156, ftnt 50. For a contemporary description of the various technologies, see S. Bugoslavskii, “Risovanniie (mul’tiplikatsionnyye) zvuk,” in Roshal, Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, 276–286. 38 V. Brumberg, “Kak ozvuchivaiutsia fil’my Disneia,” Kino, June 22, 1935, 4. Compare with the English Adrean Stokes, who wrote about the psychology of Silly Symphonies the same year: Adrian Stokes, Tonight the Ballet (London: Faber and Faber, 1942). 39 V. Brumberg, “Zvukovaia mul’tiplikatsiia,” Proletarskoe kino 2 (March 1931): 63; Ivanov-Vano, Kadr za kadrom, 64–80.

notes to pages 84–89  H 251 40 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 20. 41 Ibid. 42 Vermel’, Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk. 43 Ibid. 44 “Faina Ranevskaya,” Soviet Jewish Encyclopedia 7:71–72, http://www.eleven.co.il/article/13438. 45 Interview with Leonid Shvartsman, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: pochemu-to nash popughai ‘stal smakhivat’ na Vladimira Il’icha,” Gazeta 123 (July 12, 2004): 10. 46 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, Isskustvo kino 10 (October 2010): 156. 47 RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 14 and 15. 48 Veteran director Fyodor Khitruk praised the film’s moral depth, film scholar Birgit Beumers analyzed the main thrust of the film’s dramaturgy, and animation critic Sergei Asenin singled out its stylistic innovations. See Fyodor Khitruk, “Poniat’, dazhe to, chto trudno voobrazit’,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1986): 20; Birgit Beumers, “Comforting Creatures in Children’s Cartoons,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (London: Routledge, 2008); Asenin, Mir mul’tfi’lma, 50–51. See also Babichenko, Mastera sovetsko mul’tiplikatsii, 64–67; 74–76. See Ivanov-Vano’s comments in Kadr za Kadrom, 137; 153–154. See L. Kh. Mamatova, Kino: Politika i liudi (30-e gody): K 100-letiiu mirovogo kino (Moscow: Materik, 1995), 120–121. 49 Z. Brumberg, “Lyubimaia rabota,” 20. 50 Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma,” 10. 51 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 20. 52 Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma,” 10. 53 On directors’ rewriting of classic tales for the scenerio, see M. Bobloian, “Ob”emnaia mul’tiplikatsiia,” Iskusstvo kino 1–2 (February 1940): 74. 54 Georgii Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kie mysli. Neadekvatnost’ tsenzury,” Kinovedche­ skie zapiski 73 (2005): 270. 55 Z. Brumberg, “Lyubimaia rabota,” 21. 56 Istoria sovetskogo kino, vol. 3 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), 176. For a review that celebrates the fantastical elements of the film, see S. Sergeev, “Stsenarii risovannykh fil’ma-skazki,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (1954), 98. 57 Compare shooting script RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 513 to final script with RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 661. See also the 1947 application and literary scenario by Mikhail Volpin and Nikolai Erdman for Fedya Zaitsev, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 512. See the modified tale in B. A. Voronov, Fil’my-Skazki: Stsenarii mul’iplikatsionnykh fil’mov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 174–190. 58 On the scriptwriters, see Georgii Borodin, “Nikolay Erdman i animatsiia,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 61 (2002): 184; 191. On Zinaida Brumberg’s description of Erdman, see Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 20–23. For the correspondences with the General Directorate for the production of feature films, including Fedya Zaitsev, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 122 (January 14, 1948–December 27, 1948). 59 Elena Gavrilenko, Iuri Batanin, et al., “Shkola iziashchnogo iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 28. 60 Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma,” 10. Writing in 1976, Zinaida Brumberg recalled how she and her sister frequented the Meyerhold Theater “in their student days,” but apologetically softens her appreciation for Meyerholdian conventions by writing that “a lot of contemporary works are devoted to Meyerhold and his mistakes are obvious now.” Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 7. 61 After his role for Fedya Zaitsev, Garin went on to provide the voice for many other animations, such as Mandarin in the film Brothers Liu, Martin the Goose in The Enchanted Boy (1955), Eeyore in Vinni-Pukh (1969), and the narrator in many other films. 62 On Garin’s close relationship to Erdman, see Andrei Khrzhanovsky, ed., Uchenik charodeya. Kniga ob Eraste Garine (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2004), 360–382.

252  H  notes to pages 89–97 63 Critics carefully avoided making the connection between the film and Meyerholdian influences for several years after the film’s release. See Asenin, Mir mul’tfil’ma, 50–51. 64 Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen, 1995); Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, trans. G. Petrov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981). 65 On Fedya Zaitsev, see Sergei Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi film: ocherki razvitiia sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsionnoi kinematografii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 184–185; 189–200, 255. 66 For a description of the theatrical skills that the voice-over actors brought to Fedya Zaitsev, see Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma,” 10. 67 Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 159. 68 Sergei Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma,” 10; Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 159. On a contemporaneous argument that sounds suited animation more organically than speech, see, S. Boguslavskii, “Muzyka i zvuk v mul’tiplika-tsionnom fil’me,” in Roshal, Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m, 259–286. 69 The animated character bears similarities to the role Garin (who plays the school teacher in Fedya Zaitsev) played as Podkolesin in the film Marriage (1936), which was banned during the campaign against “formalism” in 1938. Written and directed by Garin, Marriage survives only through film stills, advance advertising, photographs shot on location, and artistic sketches that present Garin’s role in various dramatic conventions in simplified form. Garin’s role as a dandy in top hat and neck scarf presents a simplified figure who casts a serious countenance much like Yanshin’s Little Man. 70 See minutes of meetings of the Art Council to discuss the film script for Fedya Zaitsev, the conclusion, etc. (December 10, 1946–October 21, 1948), in RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 513. Also see minutes of meetings of the Art Council to discuss the film after completion in RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1072 (January 3–September 23, 1948). 71 Z. Brumberg, “Liubimaia rabota,” 20–21. 72 Kirill Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami na Soiuzmul’tfil’me,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 194. 73 Evgenii Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 198. 74 RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 14 and 15.

4. Big-City Jews 1 On the use of the fairy tale in Soviet animation, see Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (London: Routledge, 2011), 89–96. On the use of folklore in Soviet film, see Valerii Fomin, Pravda skazki. Kino i traditsii fol’klora (Moscow: Materik, 2001). 2 See the discussion on the educational reform that animated children’s film should adopt after the Second World War in Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) archives, Fond (f.) 2469, opus (op.) 1, inventory file (d.) 2 (August 1, 1944); op. 1, d. 3 (September 16, 1944). 3 Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, 91. 4 On the use of literary adaptations in both live-action and animated film, see Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski, eds., Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). 5 One contemporary film critic celebrated Fyodor the Hunter for “the importance and timeliness of its topic,” which in his estimation earned Ivanov “a prominent place among animated films.” See V. Garin, “Novye raboty mul’tfil’ma,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1939): 35. 6 On the naming of Ivanov as a cosmopolitan, see the memoirs of two Soiuzmu’ltfil’m animation directors: Kirill Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami na Soiuzmul’tfil’me,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 191–196; Evgenii Migunov, “Ia— Kosmopolit?” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 197–205.

notes to pages 97–103  H 253 7 Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990). 8 On the copy of the declaration by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, see “Obrashcheniye,” Pravda 17, January 17, 1957, 2 (where corn-growing policies are specifically discussed). 9 Kirill Maliantovich, “Animatsi Soiuzmul’tfil’m,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 81 (2007): 181. For an article that calls for more topicality in animated films with specific reference to the style of The Miracle Maker, see Editors of Iskusstvo kino, “Smelee iskat’ novoe v mul’tiplikatsionnom kino,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1959): 93–100 [article illustrated with portraits of Soiuzmul’tfil’m directors by Boris Dezhkin and Evgenii Migunov]. 10 See Irina Margolina and Natalia Lozinskaia, eds., Nashi mul’tfil’my. Litsa, kadry, eskizy, geroi, vospominaniia, interv’iu, stat’i, esse (Moscow: Interros, 2006), 84–87. For the minutes to the Art Council meeting to discuss the shooting script, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1142 (December 1–December 28, 1956). For collected in-house opinions of the script and reviews for The Miracle Maker, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 535 (August 19, 1955–January 1957). 11 See Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, 82–112. 12 On the use of contemporary material in Soviet animation, see Sergei Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi fil’m: ocherki razvitiia sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsionnoi kinematografii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 183. 13 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part I, Iskusstvo kino 9 (September 2010): 143; S. I. Yutkevich, Kino (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopedia, 1986). 14 On the reestablishment of the puppet department see memoirs of Evgenii Migunov (1921–2004), reprinted as Evgenii Migunov, “O, ob i pro . . . VGIK, 1939-y i drugie gody,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 68 (2004): 324. 15 Asenin, “Sovremennye volshebniki e’krana,” 63. 16 Simplified scenario published in “Fil’my-skazki,” Stsenarii risovannykh filmov 7 (1962): 139–149. 17 Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairytales (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 13. For a thorough analysis of the image of Baba Yaga in Russian and Soviet culture, see Andreas Johns, The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004). 18 Highly acclaimed regional studios that absorbed Jewish labor include Tallinnfilm in Estonia, Permelefilm in the Ural, and the Sverdlosk Film Studio. 19 Iosif Boyarsky, Ia vspominaiu (Moscow: Memoirs, 2004). See Ia. Boyarskii, “Novyi zritel’—novyi teatr,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo (December 26, 1933). 20 Ibid. 21 Mikhail Gurevich, in conversation with author, New York, August 31, 2015. 22 For Boyarsky’s half-hearted attempts to apply for Party membership, see RGALI Fond Boyarsky 3283, op. 1 (documents cover 1913–2005). Boyarsky’s personal file at Soiuzmul’tfil’m is stored at RGALI f. 2469, op. 6, d. 12 and covers the years 1960–1979 (locked, but archival letter available). 23 On Boyarsky’s non-membership in the Party, see quote by Yuri Norstein in http://www. russia-ic.com/news/show/5953/#.UqhtasRDt8E. 24 On the representation of Jews in agricultural contexts between the wars, see Jonathan Dekel-Chen, “New Jews of the Agricultural Kind: A Case of Soviet Interwar Propaganda,” Russian Review 66 (2007): 424–450. 25 On the antireligious work of Soviet ethnography of Gleb Snesarev, see S. S. Alymov, “G. P. Snesarev i polevoe izuchenie ‘religiozno-bytovykh perezhikov,’” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 6 (2013): 69–88. 26 For original literary screenplay, see A. G. Snesareva, Adventures of the Goblin [original title], RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 346. 27 See intermediary shooting script at RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 347, 30–37 (1960).

254  H  notes to pages 104–112

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

Compare with Snesarev’s two-part scenario sent to Iskusstvo kino for publication in the journal Iskusstvo kino, preserved in RGALI, Fond Redaktsiya zhurnala “Iskusstvo kino” 2912, op. 2, d. 102 (1960). RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 347. Georgii Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kie mysli. Neadekvatnost’ tsenzury,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 73 (2005): 271. The Artistic Council took issue with the insertion of the song at various intervals, claiming that the song’s placement made it confusing as to which setting it referred: the black morass or the farm village. See RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 347. See intermediary shooting script at RGALI f. 2469, op. 2, d. 347. Susan Goodman, Chagall and the Arts of the Russian Jewish Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1. For a discussion of the role that the Artistic Council played in the film End of the Black Morass, see Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kie mysli,” 261–309 [quoted material on p. 270]. For the minutes of Artistic Council discussion on Snesarev’s literary scenario, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1176 (November 10–18, 1959) (discussed in conjunction with the Brumbergs’ remake of Fedya Zaitsev). See another Artistic Council discussion on the film, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1180 (February 2–25, 1960). See Steven Zipperstein, “Jewish Historiography and the Modern City: Recent Writing on European Jewry,” Jewish History 2.1 (1987): 73–88. Since Zipperstein’s article, a whole field has grown up around Jewish conceptions and experiences of space. See a review of the field in Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conception and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11.3 (2005): 1–8. See entry by Natalia Venzher in Margolina and Lozinskaia, Nashi mul’tfil’my. In the census of 1959, Jews made up 4.7 percent of Moscow, which did not account for Jews who declared themselves as “Russian” under nationality. For demographic analysis, see Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Centre for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, 1993); for demographic statistics after the Second World War, see Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union, 264. Robert Porter, “The City in Russian Literature: Images Past and Present,” Modern Language Review 94.2 (1999): 476–485. For literary scenario and minutes of Arts Council, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 272 (December 26, 1960–August 16, 1962). Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 28. See also Anon., “The Golden Age: Russian-Soviet Animation of the 1960s–80s,” Russian Life 46.6 (November/December 2003): 26–30. Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 101–102. On the Soviet-specific term culture, see also Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 210–230. See also David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 10–11. David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since World War II (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2005), 144. S. Asenin, “Nakazanie smekhom,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (April 1963): 102. Sergei Kapov, “Fedor Khitruk: ‘Kogda vy prinosite radost’, vy ne ustaete,” Untro.ru, available at http://www.utro.ru/articles/2007/04/28/644924.shtml. Lindvall and Melton, “Towards a Post-modern Animated Discourse,” 44–63. This simple act of stepping out of a frame becomes the subject of another of Khitruk’s films, Man in the Frame (Chelovek v okno, 1966), in which his congested protagonist is unable to do anything in the whole of his life. See the discussion on shared responsibility in “Delo fil’ma Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia,” RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 272; op. 2, d. 80.

notes to pages 112–118  H 255 47 Listed as Silence in Ivan Ivanov-Vano, “s chem my prikhodim k etomu postanovleniyu,” [1961] reprinted in full in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 192–236. 48 Nikolai Izvolov, “Iz istorii risovannogo zvuka v SSSR,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 53 (2001): 292. 49 Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, trans. Antonia W. Bouis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 78. 50 Goldovskaya’s story takes place in 1976 and it is quite possible that she elided Mamedov’s generalized antisemitism toward Gerdt with his typecast roles playing stereotypical Jewish characters in the following decade. On the typecasting of Jewish characters, see Miron Chernenko, Krasnaia zvezda, zheltaia zvezda: Kinematograficheskaia istoriia evreistva v Rossii, 1919–1999 (Vinnitsa: Globus, 2001), 181–182; 245. 51 Quoted in Christina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Ti Larisa Maliukova mes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 20. 52 Ivanov-Vano, “s chem my prikhodim k etomu postanovleniyu,” 192–236. 53 Larisa Maliukova, “Kuda prishli my?” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2006): 74. 54 Aleksander Tatarsky, “Delat mul’tfilm,” Yunosti (1986): 93–96. Translation by Niffiwan available at http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/9422.html. 55 Dirs. Yonaton Zur and Masha Zur, Magia Russica (YMFilms, 2004). 56 Exhibition dedicated to the 75th Anniversary of Soyuzmultfilm “Soyuz-Mul’t-Shedevry,” Library of Cinema, 2011. 57 For Rusakov’s quote, see Sergei Kapkov, “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: Volka ia vstreitil eshche v 1941 godu,” Gazeta 143 (August 9, 2004). 58 Gennadii Frolov, “Viacheslav Kotenochkin: S’ prokata ‘Nu, pogodi!” Moskovskaia pravda (June 6, 2000). 59 When the episodes were released, they were “rented out” for exhibition throughout the country and, in several months, they were broadcast regularly on television. Just You Wait! continues to be the most popular Soviet-era animation on Russian television. In the past twenty years, the episodes appeared on the majority television stations 1,865 times. Statistics taken by Natalia Venzher. 60 On the discussion of the characters of Nu, Pogodi as purposely elusive and gender bending in the context of the Cold War, see Lilya Kaganovskaia, “Nu, Pogodi: Gonka vooruzhenii, transgender i zastoi: Volk i Zaiats v kon/podtekste kholodnoy voiny,” in Veselye chelovechki: Kul’turnye geroi sovetskogo detstva, ed. Sergei Oushakine (Moscow: Noveye Literaturnoye obotzreniye, 2008), 378–392. 61 For description of travel restrictions in Soiuzmul’tfil’m, see Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, Isskustvo kino 10 (October 2010): 163. For a discussion on the geography of Uncle Fyodor, see Elena Baraban, “Troye iz Prostokvashino: filmov utilitarist,” in Oushakine, Veslye chelovechki, 440–457. 62 Zur and Zur, Magia Russica. 63 MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges, 107. For studies that adopt this approach to Soviet film, see Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993); Nikolai Abramov, “Mul’tfil’m: politika, filosofiia, poeziia,” in Mify i real’nost’: zarubezhnoe kino segodnia. Sbornik statei; vypusk6, ed. M. Shaternikova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 192–211. 64 Zur and Zur, Magia Russica; Alexei Kotenochkin, interview with Sergei Kapkov, “Otets nikogda ne delal fil’mov s figoi v karmane,” Gazeta 109, June 20, 2007, available at http://www.animator.ru/articles/article.phtml?id=245. 65 Maria Kostiukevych, “Kto skazal ‘Nu, pogodi!,’ Moskovskii Komsomolets, November 20, 1999. 66 Kapkov, “Otets nikogda ne delal fil’mov s figoy v karmane.” 67 Elena Baraban has shown that animation of Jewish writer Edouard Upensky’s fictional village of Prostokvashino was used to create “situations” between the idyllic place and

256  H  notes to pages 118–126

68 69 70

71

the pragmatic protagonists. See Baraban, “Troye iz Prostokvashino,” Veselye chelovechki, 440–457. Kostiukevych, “Kto skazal ‘Nu, pogodi!’” Frolov, “Vyacheslav Kotenochkin: S’ prokata ‘Nu, pogodi!” “Felix Kamov-Kandel, Famous Soviet Jewish Writer, Told He Can Emigrate,” JTA: The Global Jewish News Source, September 18, 1977, available at http://www.jta. org/1977/09/19/archive/felix-kamov-kandel-famous-soviet-jewish-writer-told-he-canemigrate. Also, see “Three Jewish Filmmakers in Moscow Stop Their Strike,” Davar, October 27, 1974, 3. Kostiukevych, “Kto skazal ‘Nu, pogodi!’”

5. Tropical Russian Bears 1 See “Minkul’tury odobrilo spisok 50 mul’tfil’mov dlia shkon’nikov,” Izvestiia (February 11, 2013). http://izvestia.ru/news/544638. 2 Statistics compiled by Natalia Venzher, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 18, 2014. 3 Anon., “The Golden Age: Russian-Soviet Animation of the 1960s–80s,” Russian Life 46.6 (November/December 2003): 27. 4 N. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia v strane Mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Kluch-S, 2010), 44. On Soviet popular culture, including the place of animation in the Soviet imagination, see Birgit Beumers, Pop Culture Russia!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2005), 99–104. 5 See, for example, “Papa Cheburashki proigral sud ‘Soyuzmul’tfil’mu,’” Finance, June 21, 2010. http://www.finansmag.ru/news/76185; Svetlana Subbotina and Vladimir Dergachev, “Soiuzmul’tfil’m vykupit original Cheburashki,” Izvestiia 241, December 20, 2012, 2. 6 For short biographies on some of these Soiuzmul’tfil’m employees, see Irina Margolina and Natalia Lozinskaia, eds., Nashi mul’tfil’my. Litsa, kadry, eskizy, geroi, vospominaniia, interv’iu, stat’i, esse (Moscow: Interros, 2006). 7 On the Jewish demographics of Smolensk, see Michael C. Hickey, “Revolution on the Jewish Street: Smolensk, 1917,” Journal of Social History 31.4 (Summer 1998): 823–850. 8 See interview with Roman Kachanov by Sergei Asenin, “Napravlenie poiskov,” Iskus­ stvo kino 2 (February 1984): 45–54. 9 For interviews on Kachanov by many of his colleagues, see Dir. Michael Horn, Roman Kachanov: Luchshiy drug Cheburashki, 2011. http://tvkultura.ru/brand/show/brand_ id/29049. 10 Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia, 40. 11 On Milchin during the war, see his obituary in D. Vinitsky, A. Dikhtyar, et al., “Pamiati tovarishcha,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (April 1988): 102–103. 12 On the use of fairy tales in Soviet animation, see Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (London: Routledge, 2011), 82–112. On Stalin-era Soviet film, see André Bazin, “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Culture,” in Movies and Methods 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29–40; Evgeny Dobrenko, “Creation Myth and Myth Creation in Stalinist Cinema,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1.3 (2007): 239–264; Richard Taylor, “But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter: Towards a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical,” in 100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology?, ed. Diana Holmes and Alison Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 11–26. 13 Eduard Uspensky, Krokodil Gena i ego druz’ia, illus. V. Alfeevsky (Moscow: Detskaia Literatura, 1966). Compare with the shooting script, available at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Fond (f.) Soiuzmul’tfil’m 2469, opus (op.) 4, inventory file (d.) 332.

notes to pages 126–130  H 257 14 Edouard Uspensky, “Kak povavilsya Cheburashka,” Novaya Gazeta 5 (January 25, 2007). When the same attribution story is told in Komsomol’skaia pravda, Uspensky’s story is cast as an admission of Cheburashka’s female gender and KamovKandel’s name is excluded. See Irina Bystrova, “Cheburahka okazalsia devochka,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 157, October 21, 2006, 3. 15 Sergei Petrov, quoted in Anon., “Krayeved i pistatel’ sporyat o Cheburashke,” BBCRussian.com, posted June 29, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/entertainment/newsid_5129000/5129044.stm. 16 A Chronicle of Current Events 47 (1978): 99; “Felix Kamov-Kandel, Famous Soviet Jewish Writer, Told He Can Emigrate”; “Three Jewish Filmmakers in Moscow Stop Their Strike,” Davar, 3. 17 Michal Oren, “The Seven Species and the Orange—Nostalgia and Jewish National Identity,” Faculty Forum 8.5 (January 2010), http://www.schechter.edu/facultyForum. aspx?ID=79. 18 Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority, Cambridge, Russia, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63. Moscow Radio denounced the interview as a “provocative forgery,” but the statement itself reflects a common association between the Soviet Union and oranges. For an example of an image of the Jewish orange plantation in Russian Jewish literature, For Mark Egart’s 1932 short story Scorched Land see Egart, Opalennaia zemlia: kniga vtoraia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1934), 25-40. 19 Israel Goldstein, My World as a Jew: The Memoirs of Israel Goldstein (New York: Cornwall Books, 1984), 2:132. See also the description of the orange market in the travel essay to Israel, Martti Aarni, “Chto ya videl v Izraile,” Literaturnaia gazeta 5 (January 31, 1973), 14. 20 See Steven Jaffee (with the assistance of Peter Gordon), Exporting High-Value Food Commodities: Success Stories from Developing Countries (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1992), 77–79. See P. Osipova, “Stat’i. Iz istorii anglii’skogo upravleniia palestinoi,” Voprosy istorii, December 31, 1948, 67–88. 21 On the history of the Citrus Marketing Board, see Abraham Melamed, “The Citrus Marketing Board of Israel,” in Agricultural Marketing Boards—An International Perspective, ed. S. Hoos (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1979). 22 On the changing of his name to “Israel,” see interview with Leonid Shvartsman [conducted by Mariia Kostiukevich], http://www.mk.ru/print/articles/397035-klassik-poimeni-lelya.html . On the Jewish movements in Minsk, see Chaim Lavshai (Lifshitz), “Minsk—Jerusalem of White Russia,” trans. Jarrold Landau, Memorial Anthology 2:148–151. http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/minsk/minsk.html. 23 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, September 8, 2014. 24 On the enmity toward foreigners in Soviet film, see Julian Graffy, “Scant Sign of Thaw: Fear and Anxiety in the Representation of Foreigners in the Soviet Films of the Khrushchev Years,” in Russia and Its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue, ed. Steven Hutchings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 27–46. See also, Stephen M. Norris and Zara M. Torlone, eds., Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 25 Beumers, “Comforting Creatures in Children’s Cartoons,” 153; Sergei Kuznetsov, “Zoo, ili fil’my ne o lyubvi,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (January 2004): 76–79. 26 Sergei Asenin, “Cheburashka,” Soviet Film 1 (1973): 22. See also Asenin, Mir mul’tfil’ma, 60–61. 27 For a discussion of the disparity between representations of childhood and the experiences of children, see Alla Sal’nikova, Rossiiskoe detsvo v XX veke: Istoriia, teoriia i praktika issledovaniia (Kazan: Kazan State University, 2007), introduction. 28 Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia. 29 For a discussion of the use of the child to represent national interests in Israeli visual culture, see Maya Balakirsky Katz, “Drawing Israel: Child’s Play in Israeli Political Cartoons,

258  H  notes to pages 130–140

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

1948–1977,” Israel Studies 18.1 (2013): 1–30. For a discussion on innocence in Soviet animation, see Natalie Kononenko, “The Politics of Innocence: Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation on Folklore Topics,” Journal of American Folklore 124.494 (Fall 2011): 272– 294; Aleksander Prokhorov, “Arresting Development: A Brief History of Soviet Cinema for Children and Adolescents,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129–152. Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 112–124. For a discussion of the child idiom in Big Troubles, see Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 85–99. See Andrei Krasniasichikh, “Igraem v kino,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 2005): 77–85. For a list of “Cheburdotami.” http://www.uspens.info/state/AC:-1.1600306360/ Quoted in Hickey, “Revolution on the Jewish Street,” 826. Sergei Oushakine, ed., Veselye chelovechki: Kul’turnye geroi sovetskogo detstva (Moscow: Noveye Literaturnoye obotzreniye, 2008), 9–11. See, for example, the 1966 telephone booth photograph in Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See Asenin, “Cheburashka,” 22. On the double life of Crocodile Gena, see Ben Hellman, Fairytales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People, 1574–2010 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 550–551. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia, 26. See “Khudozhnik Aleksei Kuznetsov: Seriya Cheburaki,” http://www.liveinternet.ru/ users/intereska/post264061581/, posted March 5, 2013. Alice Kogan, in conversation with author, New Jersey, June 3, 2014. “The Cheburashka Project.” http://cheburashkaproject.com/about/. “Lion and Lamb Play Together,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, July 11, 1933, 4. Vera Chaplina, Kinuli (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1965), introduction [unpaginated]. First appeared in Russian as V. Chaplina, Kinuli (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo zooparka, 1946). In the mid-1960s, Chaplina’s memoir was published in English and used in elementary schools throughout America to teach children about the socialist way of organizing life. See also, Vera Chaplina, True Stores from the Moscow Zoo, trans. Estelle Titiev and Lila Pargment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970). Demaree Bess, “Lions and Lambs in Moscow,” Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 1935, WM2. Chaplina, Kinuli, 17. Chaplina and Kinuli starred in the documentary film Kinuli (1935), produced by Mostechfilm. Chaplina appears with a variety of animals, including Kinuli, in Sovkinozhurnal 16 (February 1936) [newsreel]. For newspaper articles, see Izvestia, November 20, 1935, 6; Izvestia, March 15, 1936, 4; Izvestiia, May 30, 1936, 4; G. Stepanov, “Ploshchadka molodnyka. Rasskazy o moskovskom zooparke,” Pioner, October 4, 1936. For the minutes to the Arts Council meetings in which Chaplin’s Forest Travelers (revised by Erdman) was discussed, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 319. Ella Agranovskaya,” “Puppets Know a Lot about Us People,” Soviet Film 4 (1981): 34–35. Kachanov and Asenin, “Napravlenie poiskov,” 47. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia, 44. Interview with Leonid Shvartsman in Soiuzmul’tfil’m: Fairytales and True Stories, ed. Natalia Lukiyn, episode 3 [television episode]. Abramova, Klassik po imeni Lelia, 52. Ibid., 12. See interview with Shvartsman, http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/234/kalashnikova.htm. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 133.

notes to pages 140–147  H 259 53 Other Jewish writers who regularly wrote scripts for Soiuzmul’tfil’m often used Hebrew and Yiddish for names of characters and towns, such as the live-action film Old Man Hottabych (1956) based on a story by Lazar Lagin (1903–1979), which named the town Bakbuk (Heb. Bottle) and the ugly character Tsfardeya (Heb. Frog). 54 Kachanov and Asenin, “Napravlenie poiskov,” 47. The melody is a stylized version of Jewish composer Vladimir Shainsky’s original film score. 55 See the volume based on the author’s passionate speech at the Congress, E. W. Tschlenow, Sion i Africa na shestom kongressie (Moscow: Tip. A. P. Poplavskago, 1905). 56 Hillel Kazovsky, “Artists: Russia and the Soviet Union.” http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/ article/artists-russia-and-soviet-union. For a discussion on the intersection between Jewish art in the context of “the colored races,” see John E. Bowlt, “Jewish Artists and the Russian Silver Age,” in Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890–1992, ed. Susan Tumarkin Goodman (Munich: Prestel, 1995), 41–42. 57 Korney Chukovsky, Crocodile, trans. Richard Coe (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). 58 On Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” in The Expanding Discourse, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 313–329. 59 The movie Lev Left Home (Lev ushol iz doma) features the lion raised by the Berberova family in Baku, in accordance with the theories of Lysenkoism; Vera Chaplina played the animal role. 60 Yuri Yakovlev, “Lev ushol iz doma (1971),” in Serezhiny sny (Moscow: Detskaya Literatura, 1973). 61 Ibid., 157–158. 62 Arie Olmany, “Popugay-kosmopolit i lev-antisionist,” Booknik, posted January 22, 2008. http:// http://booknik.ru/authors/are-olman. 63 Yakovlev, “Lev ushol iz doma,” 193. 64 Olmany, “Popugay-kosmopolit i lev-antisionist.” For a study on the impact of immigration on Jewish identity in the Soviet Union conducted in the early 1980s, see Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 65 Yakovlev, “Lev ushol iz doma,” 202. 66 See Anatoly Partashnikov, “Soviet Philosophy of Biology Today,” Studies in Soviet Thought 14.1–2 (March–June, 1974): 1–25. 67 See, for example, Bernard J. Shapiro, The Battle for Eretz Yisrael, Jews, God, and Israel (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011), 48; Douglas J. Feith, “Of Lions, Lambs, and Ostriches,” Jerusalem Post (March 23, 1990). 68 Peter Rodman, “The Press and National Security: The Lion and the Lamb,” Journal of National Security Law (December 1997). For a similar version of this story but set in the Leningrad Zoo, see Kenneth L. Adelman, “Address to Chicago Bar Association,” Chicago (January 22, 1987),” World Affairs 149.3 (Winter 1986–87): 157. 69 Ben Frank, A Travel Guide to Jewish Russia and Ukraine (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2000), 170. See memoir account of attendance at the commemoration at Babi Yar, Jews in Eastern Europe 5.1 (April 1972): 40–42. 70 Iosif Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi, 2nd ed. (1996; rpt. Moscow: Memoirs, 1998). http://www.pereplet.ru/text/boyarskiy.html. On the naming of cosmopolitans at Soiuzmul’tfil’m, see the memoirs of two Soiuzmul’tfil’m animation directors: Kirill Maliantovich, “Kak barolis’ skosmopolitami na Soiuzmul’tfil’me,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 191–196; Evgenii Migunov, “Ia—Kosmopolit?” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 52 (2001): 197–205. 71 For a compendium of songs from the episode, see Cheburashka: pesni i muzyka iz mul’tfil’mov (Moscow: Sov. Kompozitor, 1984) 4. For Shainsky’s Yiddish recordings, see “Shainsky, Vladimir.” http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/freedman/ lookupartist?hr=&what=8516. 72 See interview with Leonid Shvartsman in Yelena Kalashnikova, “Leonid Shvartsman:

260  H  notes to pages 147–153

73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

‘Ya tol’ko seychas rastu’,” Lechaim.ru 10.234, posted October 2011/Tishrei 5772. http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/234/kalashnikova.htm. See the write-ups on Cheburashka in the Pioneer’s paper, “Cheburashka i ego druzia,” Komsomolskaia pravda, August 31, 1973; “Cheburashka zhivet na Arbate,” Komsomolskaia pravda, January 12, 1975. RGALI Fond Gosudarstvennyi komitet po kinematografii 2944, op. 4, d. 1883a. For studio correspondences about Crocodile Gena, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 334 (January 16, 1968-April 1969). For a summary of Goskino’s reception of the film, see Georgii Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kiye mysli. Meadekvatnost’ tsenzury,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 73 (2005): 276–298. See interview with Iosef Boyarsky in the documentary by Dirs. Yonaton Zur and Masha Zur, Magia Russica (YMFilms, 2004). RGALI f. 2944, op. 4, d. 1883a. Ibid. L. Zakrzhevskaya, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zhdet dramaturga,” Iskusstvo kino 7 (July 1973): 90. RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 334: 4. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 11. See the summary of scholarship on the demonstrations in front of Moscow Choral Synagogue and its influence on Soviet policy toward Jewish national consciousness in Nati (Anatolii) Kantorovich, “Vvedeniye,” in Park sovetskogo perioda: Sovetsko-Izrail’skie otnosheniia v zerkale politicheskoi karikatury, ed. Boris M. Sandler and Igor B. Sandler (Moscow: Mosti Kulturi, 2009), 14–15. Kantorovich led me to the useful A. D. Epshtein, “Narodnaia diplomatiia i ee nosledstviia: poslannik Izrailya Golda Meir v Moskovskoy khoral’noi synagogue v sentyabre-oktyabre 1948 goda,” in Moskovskaia khoral’naisy sinagoga: 100 let, ed. A. Ye. Lokshina (Moscow: Dom yevreyskoy knigi, 2006), 12–15. On the Moscow Choral Synagogue, see E. N. Ulitskii, Istoriia Moskovskoi ievreyskoy obshchiny: Dokumenty i materialy (XX—nachalo XX v) (Moscow: KRPA, 2006). RGALI f. 2944, op. 4, d. 1390. Zakrzhevskaia, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zhdet dramaturga,” 90.

6. The Pioneer’s Violin 1 With the notable exception of the Warner Brothers in Hollywood. For a study on American film including animation against Hitler in the 1930s, see Michael Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History and Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 2 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998). The Jewish duo Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg received such military awards for their wartime films. 3 See brief portraits of many of the documentary filmmakers (including those in the animation industry) in memoir essay of frontline cameraman Michael Poselskiy, “Svidetel’stvo ochevidtsa. Vospominani frontovogo operatora,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 72 (2005): 99–140. See also David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 4 Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960), 385. See also Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–46 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), esp. 6.

notes to pages 153–159  H 261 5 Rolf Giesen and J. P. Storm, “How Walt Disney Became Walter Distler: Snow White for Greater Germany,” Animation under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012). 6 Not from a lack of knowing. Jay Leyda recorded in his diary in 1934 that Mezhrabpomfilm was “attempting to shelter and employ the film refugees from Germany.” Leyda, Kino, 304. See Jan-Christopher Horak, “German Exile Cinema, 1933–1950,” Film History 8 (1996): 373–389; Guenther Agde, “Iskusstvo v emigratsii i fil’m Bortsy,” trans. into Russian by Lydia Maslova, Kinovedcheskie zapiski 59 (2002). 7 Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust, 58. 8 Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes. 9 Leyda, Kino, 366. See the second volume, “Fascist Barbarians,” in the CD anthology Animated Soviet Propaganda, Jove Films, 2006. 10 Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (London: Routledge, 2011). 11 The director’s script states this graphic division explicitly: see Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) Fond (f.) Soiuzmul’tfil’m 2469, opus (op.) 1, inventory file (d.) 413, 19. 12 See review and description of film in G. Popov, “Mul’tiplikatsionnyye fil’my,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, January 7, 1950, 3. 13 Joshua Rubenstein, Ilya Altman, and Yitzchak Arad, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). On Ukrainian collaboration during the war, see John A. Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Modern History 40.3 (1968): 396–410. In the Polish context, see Friedrich Klaus-Peter, “Collaboration in ‘a Land without a Quisling’: Patterns of Cooperation with the Nazi German Occupation Regime in Poland during World War II,” Slavic Review 64.4 (Winter 2005): 711–746. 14 Georgi Derluguian, “Recasting Russia,” New Left Review 12 (2001): 30. 15 For the literary script with Barnet’s “reworking,” see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 412 (1948–1949); for Ivanov’s shooting script, see f. 2469, op. 1, d. 413. 16 RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 412, 7. 17 On Barnet’s representation of Jewish persecution, see Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 36–37. Barnet’s A Priceless Head (1942) was a Holocaust-themed film that managed to get made. 18 Quoted in B. Eisenschitz, “A Fickle Man, or Portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet Director,” in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (Soviet Cinema Series), ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1994), 159. 19 RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 412, 3. 20 Ibid. 21 Quoted in Eisenschitz, “A Fickle Man,” 157. 22 On the Russification and Judaizing of his name, see David Fanning, Mieczyslaw Weinberg in Search of Freedom Hofheim am Taunus, Germany: Wolke Verlag, 2010), 23. 23 See the shooting script with musical thematic plan and durations in RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 413. 24 On the mass murders carried out by German and local forces in Operation Reinhard, see Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 274–285. 25 Fanning, Mieczyslaw Weinberg in Search of Freedom, 62. 26 James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Tatiana Egorova, Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic, 1997). 27 Daniel Elphick, “Lines That Have Escaped Destruction: Weinberg and ‘The Passenger,’”

262  H  notes to pages 160–163

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39

40 41

42

43

44

paper presented at the Festival Voix Etouffees Colloque “Music and Concentration Camps,” Strasbourg, Austria, 2013, www.academia.edu. On Weinberg’s “creative response” to Mikhoel’s assassination in his 1948 Sinfonietta, see Fanning, Mieczyslaw Weinberg in Search of Freedom, 63–64; Joachim Braun, Jews in Soviet Music (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1977), 55. See shooting script, RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 413 for Weinberg’s chart of exactly how many seconds each musical movement would last. See the explication of musical phrases that focus on the generic “struggle” in RGALI f. 2469, d. 412. For shooting script with descriptive musical notes, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 413. RGALI f. 2469, d. 412. Fanning, Mieczyslaw Weinberg in Search of Freedom, 86. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 143. On the role that the Holocaust plays in Jewish consciousness, see Zvi Gitelman, Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust, 59. A reassessment of the exceptionalism of the Jewish tragedy within the war required new aesthetic strategies from the ones developed during the Great Patriotic War. See Efim Gamburg, Tainy risovannogo mira (Moscow: Sov. Hudozhnik, 1966). On the argument that Russian war film was a site for challenging official views of Soviet history, see Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). On the subject of war in Soviet film, see Frank Beardow, “Soviet Cinema—War Revisited (Part I),” Rusistika 15 (1997): 19–34; Rusistika16 (1997): 8–21; Rusistika 17 (1998): 11–24. Yuri Luzkov, “Master i vremia,” in Boris Efimov: Uroki istorii XX veka v karikaturakh (Moscow: Skanrus, 2007), 4–5 [exh. cat.]. See, for example, Boris Efimov, Desiat’ desitatiletii: O tom, chto videl, perezhil, zapomnil (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000). See Sandler and Sandler, Park sovetskogo perioda. For examples of Efimov’s work, reprinted for its antisemitism, see M. Decter, Israel and the Jews in the Soviet Mirror (New York: Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews, 1968); J. Vogt, “Old Images in Soviet Anti-Zionist Cartoons,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 5.1 (1975): 20–38; Baruch Hazan, Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1976); Soviet Antisemitic Propaganda (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1978); Abraham Cooper, Portraits of Infamy: A Study of Soviet Antisemitic Caricatures and Their Roots in Nazi Ideology (New York: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1986). On a summary of Efimov’s reception history, see the publication that accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Novy Manezh: Genrikh Borovik and Boris Efimov, Boris Efimov: Uroki istorii XX veka v karikaturach (Moscow: Izd-vo Skanrus, 2007). “Smelee iskat’ novoe v mul’tiplikatsionnom kino,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1959): 94. Efimov’s participation in Soiuzmul’tfil’m was not limited to topical political material, such as his work on the award-winning adaptation of Pushkin’s story Tale of the Priest and His Workman Blockhead (1956). For one of Efimov’s reviews that provides some details on his own role in the studio, see Boris Efimov, “Ozhivshie graviury,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (December 1964): 18–19. For an example of an application and materials associated with one of Efimov’s film proposals, see RGALI f. 2469, op. 1, d. 595 (1951). Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, 160. On the burial of Mikhail Koltsov (and the murder of Meyerhold’s wife Zinaida Raykh), see Valentin Ryabov, Ogonek 15 (April 1989): 11–12 [translated and reprinted in JPRS Report: Soviet Union, Political Affairs (June 12, 1989): 16–21. They also served together on the Artistic Council. See their support for Jewish director Roman Kachanov’s Jewish-themed puppet film series in RGALI f. 2469, op. 4, d. 334: 4.

notes to pages 164–171  H 263 45 For the “disappearance” of Boyarsky, see David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), 163. 46 Ibid., 13. 47 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 48 RGALI f. 3281, op. 1, d. 63, 9. 49 See Efimov, “Ozhivshie graviury,” 18–19. 50 For a more comprehensive discussion on the official Soviet image of the Great Patriotic War than can be covered in this study, see Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 51 Alice Nakhimovsky and Aleksander Nakhimovsky, eds., A Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei (New York: Aperture, 1997). 52 Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes. 53 Ibid, 184. 54 Ibid. 55 Lev Arkadiev and Ada Dekhtyar, “The Unknown Girl: A Documentary Story,” Yiddish Writers’ Almanac 1 (1987): 204. For the documents that Lev Arkadiev compiled and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, see Masha Bruskinska collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Accession Number 1997.A.0401. 56 Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 217. 57 On the illustrated magazine as a predecessor to film, see Maya Turovsky, “Legko na zerdtse, ili kraft durch Freude,” in Sovietskaia vlast i media, ed. Hans Günther and Sabine Hänsgen (Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006), 242–261. 58 See Stephen M. Norris, “The Sharp Weapon of Soviet Laughter: Boris Efimov and Visual Humor,” Russian Literature 74.1–2 (2013): 50. On Khaldei’s story of the editing of his wartime imagery by TASS editor Nikolai Palgunov, see the documentary, Dir. MarcHenri Wajnberg, Evgueni Khaldei—Photographer under Stalin (2000). 59 Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust, 58. 60 On using animation to represent the Holocaust, see Jessica Copley, “Modes of Representing the Holocaust: A Discussion of the Use of Animation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Orly Yadin’ and Sylvie Bringas’ Silence,” Opticon 1826 9 (2010). Charlotte Salomon, Life? Or Theatre?, trans. Leila Bennewitz (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1998). 61 Marcin Gizycki, Polish Animated Film (Telewizja Polska, 2003). 62 See Jerzy Gizycki, “Apel,” Kamera 5 (1971): 24; See Andrej Kossakowski, Polski film animowany 1945–1974 (Warsaw: Ossolineum, 1977). On the rise of Polish animation, see Steve Weiner, “Jan Lenica and ‘Landscape,’” Film Quarterly 45.4 (Summer 1992): 2–16. 63 For the two brief mentions, see L. Zakrzhevskaia, “Yazikom Mul’tiplikatsii,” Pravda 251, December 21, 1973, 3; Zakrzhevskaya, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zhdet dramaturga,” 86–96. 64 Fyodor Khitruk, “Pamiati tovarishcha: BP Stanatsev,” [obituary] Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 1983): 135–136. 65 For materials in connection to The Pioneer’s Violin, see RGALI F. 2469, op. 5, d. 787. 66 On the genre of young Pioneer martyrs, see M. I. Agapova and K. Shadskaia, Pionerygeroi. K 50-letiu pionerskoi organizatsii im. V. I. Lenina (Moscow: Tsentral’naia gordskaia pionerskaia biblioteka imM. Svetlova, 1972). 67 Zakrzhevskaia, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zhdet dramaturga,” 86–96. 68 Anon., Izvestia, February 21, 1968, 6. See also the brief notice of the installation of a plaque in the school that Pinkenzon attended in Izvestiia, February 21, 1968, 6. See reports published by the Union of Soviet Writers at the Sixth Congress of Soviet Writers in Stenograficheskiy otchet 6 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1978), 334–335. See also Gershon Shapiro and S. L. Averbukh, Ocherki evreiskogo geroizma (Kiev: Pry spryianni Kyivskoi ievreiskoi miskoi hromady, 1994), 397–398.

264  H  notes to pages 172–178 69 See Yad Vashem archives 5975/3. http://archive.is/MxIn7. 70 Interview with Boris Stepantsev by Aleksei Khaniutin, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zritel’,” Iskus­ stvo kino 8 (August 1981): 88. 71 Georgii Borodin, in conversation with author, Moscow, August 21, 2014. 72 For the Union file on Yakovlev, see RGALI f. 631, op. 41, d. 1903. He also authored the Jewish-themed Lev Left Home in 1971. 73 Personal correspondence with Yakovlev’s son Ezra Hovkin, January 26, 2014. 74 Included in the collection, Yuri Yakovlev, Izbrannoye (Moscow: School Library, 1992). 75 See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 126–158. 76 Mirjam Rajner, “Chagall’s Fiddler,” Ars Judaica 1 (2005): 117–132. 77 “Skripka pionera’,” RGALI f. 2469, op. 5, d. 311 (February 12, 1970–April 2, 1971). 78 Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation, 219. See also Avraam Ben-Eli, “Evreiskaia skripka’ Moshe Vainberga,” Menora 25 (1984): 110–12. 79 See Volodymyr Shukhevych, Hutsul’shchyna, vol. 5 (L’viv: Naukove Tovarystvo imeny Shevchenka, 1902): 70–77. I found this enlightening source in the following dissertation, which is itself highly relevant to the current study: Joshua J. First, “Scenes of Belonging: Cinema and the Nationality Question in Soviet Ukraine during the Long 1960s” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008). 80 Mordechai Altshuler, “The Unique Features of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Roi (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995), 171–188. 81 Gershenson, Phantom Holocaust, 1–12. 82 Mordechai Altshuler, “Antisemitism in Ukraine toward the End of World War II,” in Gitelman, Bitter Legacy, 161. 83 Saul Itzkovitz, Musia Pinkenzon: Rasstreliannaia skripka (Moscow: Pioneri-geroi, 1981). 84 Shapiro and Averbukh, Ocherki evreiskogo geroizma. 85 Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. http://db.yadvashem.org/names/nameDetails.html?itemId=1462901&language=en#!prettyPhoto%5Bgallery2%5D/2/. On the transformation of children into Soviet Pioneer heroes, see Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005). 86 For essays on the art made by inmates at Auschwitz, see David Mickenberg, Corinne Granof, and Peter Hayes, eds., The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz (Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Museum, 2002). 87 See testimony of Elizaveta Sviridova, University of South Carolina Shoah Foundation. Interview code 28846. 88 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 89 Ibid. 90 For his memories of the school, see Iosif Boyarsky, Pravdopodobie neveroiatnogo. K sorokaletiiu VKSR (Moscow: VKSR, 2003). For his file of manuscripts that never made it to production, see Iosif Boyarsky, Do vostrebovaniia. Sbornik stsenariiev dlia animatsii (Moscow: n.p., 2006). 91 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 92 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, August 8, 2014. 93 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 94 An. Vartonaov, “Don Kihot oderzhivaet pobedu,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (January 1986): 72–76. 95 It was in America that the word Holocaust was reattached to the film. When the film toured in America in 1996, journalist Patricia Kowal called it “one of the most engaging films ever made about the Holocaust.” Patricia Kowal, “Short but Sweet,” Los Angeles View (June 14–28, 1996). 96 Interview with Marina Kurchevsky in E. Vysokovskia, “Interv’iu s molodymi masterami mul’tiplikatsii,” Iskusstvo kino 9 (1985): 60.

notes to pages 178–197  H 265 97 Kurchevsky, “Interv’iu s molodymi masterami mul’tiplikatsii,” 61. 98 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 99 Fyodor Khitruk, Professiia-animator, 2 vols. (Moscow: Graal, 2007), 1:44. 100 Ibid. 101 On use of sculpture as sign of empire, see Naum Kleiman, Kinovedcheskie zapiski 1 (1988): 91–110; Mikhail Iampol’skii, “Razbityi pamiatnik,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 33 (1997): 6–10. 102 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 103 Ibid. 104 Vartonaov, “Don Kihot oderzhivaet pobedu,” 72–76; see also the review I. Obutin, “Cinerama,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1985): 152–158. 105 Ibid. 106 Alexandra Sviridova, in conversation with author, New York, January 15, 2014. 107 Vartonaov, “Don Kihot oderzhivaet pobedu,” 76. 108 Ibid. 109 See James Young, “The Rhetoric of Ruins: The Memorial Camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz,” in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 119–154.

7. Cartoon Cosmopolitans 1 Lev Atamanov, “Protiv naturalizma,” Iskusstvo kino 5 (May 1959): 123–124. 2 See Birgit Beumers, Nikita Mikhalkov: Between Nostalgia and Nationalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). 3 John E. Bowlt, “Some Thoughts on the Condition of Soviet Art History,” Art Bulletin 71.4 (December 1989): 542. 4 Quoted in Natalia Krivulia, Labyrinty animatsii: Issledovanie khudozhestvennogo obraza rossiiskikh animatsionnykh fil’mov vtoroi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Graal, 2002), 76. 5 See description of animation of this period in A[lexander] Volkov, Khudozhniki Sovetskogo mul’tfil’ma (Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhkhnik, 1978), 16. 6 Jean Baudrillard, “History: A Retro Scenario,” in Simulcra and Simulation, 11th ed., trans. Shiela Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 44. 7 For a short introduction to these two animators in relationship to the intellectualization of Soviet animation, see Mikhail Iampol’skii, “Norstein and Khrzhanovski: The Space of the Animated Film,” Afterimage 13 (1987): 104. On the “intellectualization” of Soviet animation and its “increasing irony,” see Sergei Asenin, Volshebniki ekrana . Esteticheskie problemy sovremennoi mul’tiplikatsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974), 208–240. 8 S. Esenin, “Andrei Khrjanovski: Animation Navigates between Literature and Painting,” AnimaFarm 2 (1985): 21. See also Mikhail Gurevich, “Pokadrovoe chteni: literaturai animatsiia,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 6 (1990): 100–111. See Khrzhanovsky’s 1969 “Classical Literature in Images of Classic Fine Art” (“Klassicheskaia literatura v obrazakh klassicheskogo izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva”) in Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Fond (f.) Soiuzmul’tfil’m 2469, opus (op.) 4, inventory file (d.) 743. 9 “Dla poiska,” Sovetskaia kul’tura, April 4, 1967, 3. Also see listing in “Fil’mografiia,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1966): 157. 10 S[ergei] Asenin, “Mudrost’ vymysla,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1968): 49. 11 Baudrillard, “History: A Retro Scenario,” 44. 12 For a discussion of this frame, see Laura Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw of the 1960s: Not Only for Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 143–146. 13 Shimon Redlich, “Khrushchev and the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 34.4 (October 1972): 343–353. 14 Borodin, “V bor’be za malen’kiye mysli,” 287. 15 Kenneth Silver, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945 (New York: Universe Publishing, 1998).

266  H  notes to pages 197–205 16 In his film One and a Half Rooms (2012), Khyrzhanovsky uses a more exacting version of Natan Altman’s silhouette of Anna Akhmatova. 17 See description of Khrzhanovsky’s legacy vis-à-vis There Once Was Kozyavin in Leonid Shvartsman, “Shkola iziashchnogo iskusstva,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (June 1996): 22. 18 For an argument that the film primarily addresses censorship, see Pontieri, Soviet Animation and the Thaw, 144. 19 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Babi Yar,” translated by Ben Okopnik, http://www.ess.uwe. ac.uk/genocide/yevtushenko.htm. 20 James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 217. 21 Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 38. 22 Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 135. 23 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 204–209. 24 Iosif Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi, 2nd ed. (1996; rpt. Moscow: Memoirs, 1998), http://www.pereplet.ru/text/boyarskiy.html. 25 Norstein’s various lectures on the film are compiled in Yuri Norstein, Sneg na trave, 2 vols. (Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshad, 2008). For example, see Norstein, Sneg na trave 1:58–86; Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 38; Boyarsky, Literaturnye kollazhi. 26 Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (2001): 116. 27 For Norstein’s account of the film, see Sneg na trave 1, 58–86. Jack Zipes identifies Norstein’s recourse to Chagall in his other films as well, such as in his masterpiece Tale of Tales (1979), with its affinity to Chagall’s use of surrealistic montage and the dancing figures on roofs. See Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of FairyTale Films (London: Routledge, 2011), 330. 28 See David Kowalewski, “Protest for National Rights in the USSR: Characteristics and Consequences,” Nationalities Papers 8.2 (Fall 1980): 179–195. 29 Baudrillard, “History: A Retro Scenario,” 43–47. 30 Yuri Norstien, “Sneg na trave,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (2001): 116. 31 On overt Jewish themes in the music of Shostakovich, see Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 267–269. 32 Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 228–235.

8. Tale of Tales 1 See M[ikhail] Iampol’sky, “Prostranstvo mul’tiplikatsii,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1982): 84–99; M[ikhail] Iampol’sky, “Palitra i ob’ektiv,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1980): 94–104. 2 Giannalberto Bendazzi, “Book Review: ‘Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey,” Animation WORLD, posted September 19, 2005, t http://www.awn.com/ animationworld/book-review-yuri-norstein-and-tale-tales-animator-s-journey. See also Zagreb ’80 (Zagreb: Executive City Council of Zagreb, 1980). 3 Bruno Edera, “Zagreb-Ottawa-Annecy 1980/81: The State of the Art of Animation,” Graphis 37.215 (September–October 1981): 254–263. 4 Museum of Modern Art, Press Release 53 (1980). For pdf, see http://www.moma.org/ pdfs/docs/press_archives/5847/releases/MOMA_1980_0050_53.pdf?2010. 5 Clare Kitson, in conversation with author, July 1, 2014. 6 Clare Kitson, in conversation with author, July 1, 2014. MoMA archives preserved clippings of short media articles of the events in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, Queens, NY, Collection Film, Series File 633. See “Zagreb Animation Fest Doings,” Variety (July 2, 1980); Gene Moskowitz, “Zagreb Animation Fest Top Prize to Soviet, More Naturalistic Fare,” [clipping, source missing], July 2, 1980.

notes to pages 205–211  H 267 7 Interview with Boris Stepantsev by Aleksei Khaniutin, “Mul’tiplikatsiia zritel’,” Iskus­ stvo kino 8 (August 1981): 85–99. 8 For one of the best (and earliest) overviews of reception theory, see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 9 Bendazzi, “Book Review.” 10 Ibid. 11 Clare Kitson, in conversation with the author, July 1, 2014. 12 Efforts to chronicle the Soviet Jewish movement in particular cities have produced both independent and commissioned works of scholarship, but these works generally neglect the role that the Soviet Jewry movement played in the local art scenes. 13 Olympiad of Animation (Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1984), exhibition catalog. 14 Michael Mallory, “Remembering the Olympiad of Animation,” Animation, http://www. animationmagazine.net/top-stories/remembering-the-olympiad-of-animation/. Also see interview with Fini Littlejohn, one of the organizers of the festival by Harvey Deneroff, “The Olympiad of Animation: An Interview with Fini Littlejohn,” Animation World, http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.4/articles/deneroffini1.4.html/. 15 “Soviet Animators’ Visit Could Lead to Festival,” Globe and Mail (Canada), November 23, 1987. See also Richard Johnson, “Animated Talk of the Town,” The London Times, June 12, 1991. For the record of a conversation with Charles Samu in preparation for the MoMA exhibition, see the Museum of Modern Art Archives, Queens, NY, Collection Film, Series File 633. 16 See, for example, “Highlights of the Day at Filmfest DC, Washington Post, April 30, 1988, C4. 17 Richard Harrington, “The Animator’s Ideal: The U.S.S.R.’s Yuri Norstein, Reawakening Traditions,” Washington Post, April 30, 1988, C1. See also, William Fisher, “Gorbachev’s Cinema,” Sight & Sound (Fall 1987): 238–243. 18 Karen Rosenberg, “The Worldview of Youri Norstein: From a Small Flat in Moscow,” Animator 28 (1988): 15; Harrington, “The Animator’s Ideal,” C1. 19 Harrington, “The Animator’s Ideal,” C1. 20 For Yermash’s general attitude, see Filip Yermash, “O khode vypolneniia reshenii XXV s”ezda KPSS po usileniiu roli kino v ideinom, nravstvennom i esteticheskom vospitanii trudiashchikhsia, po povysheniiu ideino-khodozhestvennogo urovnia vypuskaemykh kinofil’mov i uluchsheniiu kinoobsluzhivaniia naseleniia,” Iskusstvo kino 7 (July 1978): 4–21. 21 Kitson, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 109. 22 Ibid., 18. Letter dated November 17, 1993. 23 Maria Dementyeva, “Snimal: ‘Shinel,’” Ogonek 43 (1988): 18. Quoted in Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 109. 24 Mikhail Gurevich, in conversation with author, New York, August 31, 2015. 25 Noel Burch, “Film’s Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response,” October 11 (November 1979): 77–96. 26 Yuri Norstein, “Zanovo otyskat’ prostotu . . . ,” Isskustvo kino 3 (March 1997): 76–79. See also Yuri Norstein, “Metafory I,” Iskusstvo kino 7 (July 1994): 109; Yuri Norstein, “Metafory II,” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 1994): 92–94. 27 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 98. 28 See review of exhibition by Victoria Nikiforova, “Norsteina v tumane,” Segodnia, March 16, 2000. 29 Norstein, Sneg na trave, 2 vols. 30 Quoted in Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 17. 31 Yuri Norstein, “Dvizhenie,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (April 1989): 111; Larisa Maliukova, “Vyrashchennyi Mar’inoi roshchei,” Novaya gazeta, October 1, 2001.

268  H  notes to pages 211–216 32 Yuri Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” part II, Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2003): 94–107; Dementyeva, “Snimal i ‘Shinel,’” 17. 33 On auteur theory in animation, see Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower, 2002), 72–111. 34 Norstein, “Metafory I,” 94. 35 See interview with Francesca Yarbusova, “Vyshel yozhik iz tumana,” posted October 13, 2014, http://femunity.livejournal.com/68466.html. 36 Quoted in Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 4. See also Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, “Rezhisser Yuri Norshteyn,” Sovetski film 7 (1986): 9. 37 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 98. 38 Norstein, “Metafory II,” 94. For another discussion of how he worked with Meerovich, see Yuri Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2003): 94–107. 39 Lana Azarkh, “Mul’tiplikatory,” part II, Isskustvo kino 10 (October 2010): 169. For the file on Norstein’s State Prize, see Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) Fond (f.) Komitet po Leninskim i Gosudarstvennym premiyam SSSR v oblasti literatury, iskussstva i arkhitektury pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR 2916, opus (op.) 3, inventory file (d.) 286. 40 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 19. 41 Ibid. 42 For media coverage of Norstein as a “Jewish artist,” see Bendazzi, “Book Review”; Barry Davis, “Animation across the Great Wall,” Jerusalem Post, August 3, 2012, 3. “Evrei Rossii vruchili premi Chelovek Goda,” Novorossia.ru, December 18, 2008, http://novorossia.ru/2010–08–28–07–16–27/260—qq-qq-/. 43 On the demise of the studio, see Yuri Norstein, “Priznani masteru,” Iskusstvo kino 8 (July 1987): 74. 44 Semyon Charny “Chelovek Goda 5768,” aen.ru, December 19, 2008, http://www.aen. ru/index.php?page=article&category=tradition&article_id=1350. 45 Charny, “Chelovek Goda 5768.” 46 “Laureatami premii Federatsii evreyskikh obshchin Rossii stali Valentina Matviyenko, Yuri Norstein i Armen Dzhigarkhanyan,” newsru.com, December 19, 2008, http://www. newsru.com/religy/19dec2008/feor.html. 47 The former Soviet Union has also recognized Tale of Tales as one of the highlights of the Soviet era. See 2000 assessment of Soviet animation classics by Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in RGALI Fond 3192, op. 28, d. 8. 48 N. Buriaev, “Face the Audience,” Soviet Film 4 (April 1985): 23–24. 49 For a study that argues emotional content is the primary method of communication in Soviet animation more broadly, see David MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges: Russian Animated Film since World War II (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2005). 50 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 57. 51 Natal’ia Balandina, “Tiaga vetra,” Iskusstvo kino 7 (July 2005): 73–83. 52 For an English translation of the full 1976 treatment, see Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 125–130. 53 For a groundbreaking study of the embodied experience and a discussion of the academic resistance to this line of thought, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 54 C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 4. 55 Norstein, “Zanovo otyskat’ prostotu . . .” 76–79. Norstein, “Metafory II,” 94. For another discussion of how he worked with composer Mikhail Meerovich, see Yuri Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” part II, Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2003): 94–107. See also Sergei Ginzburg, Risovannyi i kukol’nyi fil’m: ocherki razvitiia sovetskoi mul’tiplikatsionnoi kinematografii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), 5. On the visual leit-motif, see Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 2001): 116.

notes to pages 216–225  H 269 56 On Yiddish cante fables from Eastern Europe, see Meir Noy, East European Jewish Cante Fables (Haifa: Haifa Municipality Ethnological Museum and Folklore Archives, 1969). 57 On the role of the lullaby in Russian culture, see Valentin Golovin, Russkaia kolybel’naia pesnia v fol’klore i litererature (Abo, Finland: Abo Akademi University Press, 2000). See also Norstein’s discussion of the performance of the lullaby in Alexandrov’s Circus (1936), especially the significance of Mikhoel’s performance of a Jewish lullaby in Yuri Norstein, “Sneg na trave,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 2003): 132–144. 58 On Christian themes in his art, see interview with Yuri Norstein by Tatiana Jensen, “V pote litsa,” Iskusstvo kino 12 (December 2000): 33. On the negative Russian image of Jews in the postwar period, see Henrietta Mondry, Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture since the 1880s (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), chapters 5–7. 59 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 1997), 197. 60 Quoted in Rosenberg, “The Worldview of Youri Norstein,” 14. 61 Rosenberg, “The Worldview of Youri Norstein,” 16. 62 Lacan, Ecrits, 197. 63 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For the application of Levinas’s theory of alterity in Jewish art, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Pissarro’s Passage: The Sensation of Caribbean Jewishness in Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge, 2000), 63–64. See also Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 223–279. 64 See Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 75. 65 Ibid., 19. 66 The Beilis Affair is the most famous of the modern blood libel cases. See Robert Weinberg, The Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 67 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 98. 68 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (1971; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 171. For a classic discussion of spectatorship theory, see Christian Metz, “History/Discourse: A Note on Two Voyeurisms,” in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge, 1986), 225–231. For the relationship between Lacan and spectatorship theory, see Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 69 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 55 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 24–40. 70 On the role of sound in animation, see the special issue of Animation Journal 17 (2009); MacFadyen, Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges, 156–157. 71 Norstein, “Metafory II,” 94. On the emotional effect of what he calls “intonational music,” see Iulii Kremlev, “Intonatsiia i Obraz v Muzyke,” in Intonatsiia i Muzykalnyi Obraz, ed. Boris Iarustovskii (Moscow: Muzyka, 1965), 35–52. 72 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 361-73. 73 Kitson, Yuri Norstein, 17–18. 74 Quoted in Mieczylaw Walasek, “Just art: l’art tout court,” Animafilm 5 (1980): 42. 75 Quoted in David MacFadyen, “Skazka skazok,” in Russia and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Birgit Beumers (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 190. Yuri Norstein, “Shag sdelan iz Kieva v Odessu,” Kommersant-Daily, September 23, 1993. 76 Yuri Norstein, in conversation with author, Venice, July 2013.

FILMOGRAPHY

About a Mammoth (Pro Mamontenka). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1983. The Adventures of Buratino (Prikliuchiniia Buratino). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Dmitrii Babichenko. Soyuzmultfilm, 1959. The Adventures of Red Scarves (Prikliucheniia krasnykh galstukov). Dir. Vladimir Pekar and Vladimir Popov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. Aelita. Dir. Iakov Protazanov. Mezhrabpomfilm-Rus, 1924. Bambi. Dir. David Hand. Walt Disney Productions for RKO, 1942. Battle of Kerzhenets (Secha pri Kerzhentse). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Yuri Norstein. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1925. The Bench (Skameika). Dir. Lev Atamanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. Black and White (Blek end uait). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Leonid Amal’rik. Mezhrabpomfilm-Rus, 1932 (recut and rereleased in 1933). Boniface’s Vacation (Kanikuly yonifatsiia). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1965. The Brave Five (Piaterka otvazhnykh). Dir. Leonid Martynyuk. Belarusfilm, 1970. The Bremen Town Musicians (Bremenskie muzykanty). Dir. Inessa Kovalevsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1969. The Bride (Nevesta). Dir. Borislav Sajtinac. Yugoslavian, 1971. Brothers Liu (Brat’ia Liu). Dir. Dmitriii Babichenko. Soyuzmultfilm, 1953. Cine-Eye (Kino-glaz). Dir. Dziga Vertov. Goskino, 1924. Cheburashka. Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. Cheburashka Goes to School (Cheburashka idet v shkolu). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1984. China Aflame (Kitai v ogne). Dir. Zenon Komissarenko, Iurii Merkulov, and Nicolai Khodataev. GTK, 1925. Circus (Tsirk). Dir. Grigori Aleksandrov. Mosfilm, 1936. Commissar (Kommissar). Dir. Aleksander Askoldov. Gorky Film Studio, 1967. Comrade Abram (Tovarishch Abram). Dir. Aleksander Razumnyi. Russia, 1919. Crocodile Gena (Krokodil Gena). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1969. Deniska-Denis. Dir. Marina Goldovskaya. Ekran, 1976.

H 271 H

272  H  filmography Dojoji Temple. Dir. Kihachiro Kawamoto. Japan, 1976. The Dolls Are Laughing (Tojinebi itsinian). Dir. Nikolos Sanishvili. Georgia, 1963. Dream (Mechta). Dir. Mikhail Romm. Mosfilm, 1943. The Eaglet (Orlenok). Dir. Vitold Bordzilovsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968. The Elephant and the Ant (Slon i muravei). Dir. Boris Dezhkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1948. Elephant and Moska (Slon i mos’ka). Dirs. Sazonov Pateleimon and Lamis Bredis. Soyuzmultfilm, 1941. Emergency Service (Skoraia pomoshch’). Dir. Lamis Bredis. Soyuzmultfilm, 1949. The End of the Black Morass (Konets chernoi topi). Dir. Vladimir Degtyarev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1960. Fascist Boots on Our Homeland (Ne toptat’ fashistskomu sapogu Nashei Rodiny). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov and Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Soyuzmultfilm, 1941. Fedya Zaitsev (Fedia Zaitsev). Dir. Valentina Brumberg and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1948. Felix (series). Paramount Pictures, 1919–1921; Margaret J. Winkler, 1922–1925; Educational Pictures, 1925–1928; First National Pictures, 1928–1929. Film, Film, Film (Fil’m, fil’m, fil’m). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968. The Flying Proletarian (Letaiushchii proletarii). Dir. Iosif Boyarsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1962. Forest History (Lesnaia Istoriia). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov and Lev Prozdneev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1956. Forest Travelers (Lesnye puteshestvenniki). Dir. Mstislav Pashchenko. Soyuzmultfilm, 1951. The Fox and the Hare (Lisa i zaiats). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Soyuzmultfilm, 1973. The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam. Dir. Dale Kase and Robert Mitchell. USA, 1971. Fyodor the Hunter (Okhotnik Fedor). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1938. The Girl in the Circus (Devochka v tsirke). Dir. Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1950. The Glass Harmonica (Stekliannaia garmonika). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968. The Golden Antelope (Zolotaia antilopa). Dir. Lev Atamanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1954. The Golden Key (Zolotoi kliuchik). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Soyuzmultfilm, 1959. Good Fellow (Slavnyi malyi). Dir. Lev Milchin. Goskino, 1942. Granddaughter Is Lost (Poterialas’ vnuchka). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1966. Great Troubles (Bol’shie nepriiatnosti’). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1961. Hallelujah! Dir. King Vidor. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929. Happiness Isn’t in the Hat (Ne v shliape schast’e). Dir. Nikolai Serebriakov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968. Hedgehog in the Fog (Ezhik v tumane). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Soyuzmultfilm, 1975. His Excellency (Ego prevoskhoditel’stvo). Dir. Grigori Roshal. USSR, 1928. Hot in Africa (V Afrike zharko). Dir. Dmitrii Babichenko and Aleksander Beliakov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1936. I Am Twenty (Mne dvadtsat’ let). Dir. Marlen Khutsiev. USSR, released in 1965. I Am Waiting for a Bird (Ia zhdu ptentsa). Dir. Nikolai Serebriakov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1966. The International (Internatscional, 1932). Dir. Eric Wilhelm Steiger. 1932 (no copies). Interplanetary Revolution (Mezhplanetnaia revoliutsiia). Dir. Zenon Komissarenko, Iurii Merkulov, and Nikolai Khodataev. Mezhrabpom, 1924.

filmography  H 273 In the Thicket (V lesnoi chashche). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov and Lev Pozdneev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1954. It Was I Who Drew the Little Man (Chelovechka narisoval ia). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1960. Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi). Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1944. Ivashka and Baba Yaga (Ivashko i Baba Yaga). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1938. Just You Wait! (Nu, Pogodi!). Dir. Vyacheslav Kotenochkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1969–1993. The Katzenjammer Kids. Dir. Gregory La Cava. International Film Service, 1916–1918. Kid and Karlson (Malysh i Karlson). Dir. Boris Stepantsev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968–1970. Lefty (Levsha). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Soyuzmultfilm, 1964. Legend of Salieri (Legenda o Sal’yeri). Dir. Vadim Kurchevsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1986. A Lesson Not Learned (Urok ne vprok). Dir. Valentin Karavaev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. Lev Left Home (Lev ushol iz doma). Dir. Rasim Ismailov. Azerbaijanfilm, 1977. The Little Black Boy and the Monkey (Negritenok i obez’iana). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1927. The Little Organ (Organchik). Dir. Nikolai Khodataev. Moskovskogo Kino-Kombinata, 1933. Little Red Riding Hood (Krasnaia shapochka). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1937. The Lost Letter (Propavshaia gramota). Dir. Lamis Bredis, Zinaida Brumberg, and Valentina Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1945. The Magic Swan (Gusi-lebedi). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov and Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaia. Soyuzmultfilm, 1949. A Man from the Shtetl (Chelovek iz mestechka). Dir. Grigorii Roshal’. VUFKU, 1930. Man in a Frame (Chelovek v ramke). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1966. Marriage (Zhenit’ba). Dir. Erast Garin and Khesia Lokshin. Lenfilm, 1936. Meza (Mezha). Dir. Vyacheslav Kotenochkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Son v letniuiu noch’). Dir. A. Bergengrin and Eric Wilhelm Steiger. Mezhrabpom, 1935. The Miracle Maker (Chudesnitsa). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1957. The Mitten (Varezhka). Dir. Lev Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. Moidodyr. Dir. Maria Benderskii. Mezhrabpomfilm-Rus, 1927. The Monkey and the Robbers (Obez’ianki i grabiteli). Dir. Lev Shvartsman. Soyuzmultfilm, 1987. Mother (Mama). Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1972. Murzilka in Africa (Murzilka v Afrike). Dir. Semen Guetsky and Yevgeny Gorbach. Ukraine The Mystery of the Third Planet. Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1981. New Gulliver (Novy Giulliver). Dir. Aleksander Ptushko. Mosfilm, 1935. New Tales of the Soldier Schweik (Novye pokhozhdeniia Shveika). Dir. Sergei Yutkevich. Soyuzdetfilm, 1943. Old Man Hottabych (Starik Khottabych). Dir. Gennadii Kazansky. Lenfilm, 1956. Old Photo (Staraia fotografiia). Dir. Vladimir Tarassov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. One and a Half Rooms (Poltory komnaty, ili Sentimental’noe puteshestvie na rodinu). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Shar Studio, 2009.

274  H  filmography On the Forest Bandstand (Na lesnoi estrade). Dir. Ivan Aksenchuk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1954. Passion of Spies (Shpionskie strasti). Dir. Efim Gamburg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. The Peasants (Krest’iane). Dir. Fridrikh Ermler. Lenfilm, 1934 [released 1935]. The Pioneer’s Violin (Skripka pionera’). Dir. Boris Stepantsev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1971. Plan for Great Works (Plan velikikh rabot). Dir. Abram Room. 1930. Political Journal (Zhurnal politsatiry). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg and others. Soyuzmultfilm, 1938–1941. Polkan and Shavka. Dir. Vycheslav Kotenochkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1949. Post (Pochta). Dir. Mikhail Tsekhanovskii. Leningradskaia fabrika Sovkino, 1929. A Priceless Head (Bestsennaia golova). Dir. Yakov Aron and Boris Barnet. Mosfilm, 1942. Prophets and Lessons (Proroki i uroki). Dir. Vycheslav Kotenochkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. The Puppet House (La Maison du fantochel). Dir. Émile Cohl. AGC, 1921. Purim: The Lot. Dir. Moshe Khusid. Reserve Palace Productions, 2012. Puss in Boots (Kot v sapogakh). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1938. Robbery (Ograblenie Po . . . ). Dir. Efim Gamburg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1979. The Roll-Call (Apel). Dir. Ryszard Czekala. Poland, 1971. The Rumiantsev Affair (Delo Rumiantseva). Dir. Iosif Kheifits. 1955. The Samoyed Boy (Samoedskii mal’chik). Dir. Nikolai Khodataev, Olga Khodataev, Valentina Brumberg, and Zinaida Brumberg. Sovkino, 1927. The Scarlet Flower (Alen’kii tsvetochek). Dir. Lev Atamanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1952. Senka the African (Sen’ka-Afrikanets). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Iurii Merkulov, and Daniil Cherkes, Mezhrabpomfilm-Rus, 1927. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Teni zabytykh predkov). Dir. Sergei Paradzhanov. Dov­ zhenko Studio, 1965. Shapokliak. Dir. Roman Kachanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1974. Silly Symphonies. Walt Disney Productions, 1929-1939. Sindbad the Sailor (Sindbad-Morehod). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1944. The Snow Queen (Snezhnaia koroleva). Dir. Lev Atamanov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1957. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. David Hand. Walt Disney Productions for RKO, 1937. Song about a Young Drummer (Pesnia o iunom barabanshchike). Dir. Vyacheslav Kotenochkin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1972. Song of the Falcon (Pesnia o sokole’). Dir. Boris Stepantsev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1967. Soviet Toys (Sovetskie igrushki). Dir. Dziga Vertov. Goskino, 1924. Stateless. Dir. Michael Drob. Story Tailors, 2014. Steamboat Willie. Dir. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. Walt Disney Animation Studios, 1928. The Stolen Sun (Kradenoe solntse). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Soyuzmultfilm, 1944. Story of a Crime (Istoriia odnogo prestupleniia). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1962. Story of a Doll (Istoriia odnoi kukly). Dir. Boris Ablynin. Soyuzmultfilm, 1985. The Street of the Youngest Son (Ulitsa mladshego syna). Dir. Lev Golub. Belarusfilm, 1962. Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Soyuzmultfilm, 1979. Tale of the Priest and His Workman Blockhead (Skazka o pope i rabotnike ego Balde). Dir. Anatoly Karanovic. Soyuzmultfilm, 1956.

filmography  H 275 The Tale of Tsar Saltan (Skazka o tsare Saltane). Dir. Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1943. Tanya, Tyavka, Top, and Nyusha (Taniusha, Tiavka, Top i Niusha). Dir. Viktor Gromov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1954. There Once Was Kozyavin (Zhil-byl Koziavin). Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky. Soyuzmultfilm, 1966. 38 Parrots (38 Popugaev). Dir. Ivan Ufimtsev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1976–1991. Three Fat Men (Tri tolstiaka). Dir. Valentina Brumberg and Zinaida Brumberg. Soyuzmultfilm, 1963. Three Little Pigs. Dir. Burt Gillett. Walt Disney Productions, 1933. Tip-Top in Moscow (Tip-Top v Moskve). Dir. Aleksander Ivanov. Third Factory of Sovkino, 1928 [no longer exists]. Twelve Months (Dvenadtsat’ mesiatsev). Dir. Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Soyuzmultfilm, 1956. 25th—The First Day (25-e—pervyi den’). Dir. Yuri Norstein. Soyuzmultfilm, 1968. Vasilisa the Beautiful (Vasilisa prekrasnaia). Dir. Aleksander Rou. Soyuzdetfilm, 1939. Vultures (Sterviatniki). Dir. Panteleimon Sazonov. Soyuzmultfilm, 1941. Waltz with Bashir. Dir. Ari Folman. Israel, 2008 [distributed by Sony Pictures Classics]. We Beat, Are Beating, and Will Beat (Bili, b’em i budim bit’). Dir. Dmitrii Babichenko. Soyuzmultfilm, 1941. Wild Swans (Dikie lebedi). Dir. Mikhail Tsukhanovskii. Soyuzmultfilm, 1962. Window (Okno). Dir. Boris Stepantsev. Soyuzmultfilm, 1966. Winnie-the-Pooh (Vinni-Pukh). Dir. Fyodor Khitruk. Soyuzmultfilm, 1969. Yellow Submarine. Dir. George Dunning. United Artists and King Features Syndicate, 1968.

INDE X

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Ablynin, Boris, 13, 176–187 About a Mammoth, 13, 187 Academy of Fine Arts (Leningrad), 124 “Ach, du lieber Augustin” (song), 170, 174, 188 The Adventures of Buratino, 15 The Adventures of Red Scarves, 170 advertising, animation and, 34, 128 Aelita: Queen of Mars, 36, 59 Africa, as setting, 64–65, 81, 132–133, 141–143 agitki, 36 Akhmatova, Anna, 197, 197, 266n. 16 Akimov, Nikolai, 39, 45 Aleichem, Sholem, 140 Aleksandrov, Efim, 46–48 Aleph Group, 19, 23, 239n. 95 Alexeïeff, Alexandre, 128 Alimov, Sergei, 106, 108 “All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings” (song), 66 All-Union National Institute of Cinema. See VGIK Altman, Natan, 195, 197, 200–201, 240n. 21, 266n. 16 Amalrik, Leonid, 52, 60–61, 63, 64–65, 68, 69–70, 74 American animation, 32, 60, 246n. 25. See also Disney Angry Lazar (play), 73 Animal of Unknown Breed (fictional character), 87, 89 animism, 78–79 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, 50, 169 An-Sky, S., 77, 79 annual thematic plans, 73, 208

anticosmopolitan campaigns, 46–47, 49, 94, 97, 146 antifascist aesthetics, 153 antisemitism: denial of, 9, 26, 45; denouncement of, 172, 198, 203, 223–224; employment and, 42, 45, 210, 213; institutionalization of, 9, 102, 105, 113, 156, 196, 213; motif of, 71, 73, 172, 208, 210, 220, 224. See also anticosmopolitan campaigns anti-Soviet tales, 20, 88–89, 92–93, 157, 190 Ariel, Moshe. See Zherebchevsky, Max Aronson, Boris, 190 Art Institute of Chicago, 206 artisanship, 32–33, 76, 79, 123 Artistic Council, 24, 97, 172, 177, 203, 208, 214, 216, 231; censorship and, 25, 102–104, 106, 117–119, 203, 231–232; Jewish members, 25, 140, 141, 163, 173, 235; meetings, 12–13, 24, 55, 102, 116, 148–149, 199, 235 Asenin, Sergei, 22, 61, 107, 130, 132, 193 ASIFA, 4–5, 50, 172, 189, 206, 207, 212 Askoldov, Aleksander, 20, 208 Atamanov, Lev, 4, 13, 17, 25, 51–52, 54, 96, 114, 124, 189 audience: Anglo, 207–208, 212; adult, 97, 136; child, 89, 143, 149; domestic, 1, 7, 50, 189, 204–207, 229; Jewish, 172, 178, 213; illiterate, 32, 34; interaction, 12, 71, 73, 116, 223–225; international, 72, 205, 208; Party, 120, 231; popular, 120, 202; representation of, 90, 111, 117, 195–200. See also response theory aural elements, 26, 72, 89–90, 161, 216, 222 auteurship, 5, 26, 54–55, 114, 156, 204– 205, 211–213, 229, 236n. 52

H 277 H

278  H  index authenticity, 32, 56–57, 62, 71 autobiographical animation, 5, 12, 18, 159, 210–211, 216 avant-garde theaters, repression of, 16, 23, 25, 87, 89–90, 92, 194 Azarkh, Lana, 18, 27, 30, 39, 49, 51, 54, 85, 87–90, 163 Babichenko, Dmitrii, 44, 54, 96, 124, 153 Babi Yar: poem, 172, 198; massacre, 198; symphony, 187, 199, 202–203; Ukraine, 172, 176 Bakhtyn, Mikhail, 190, 192, 250 Bambi, 46, 243n. 75 Bardin, Garri, 8, 10, 40 Bar Kokhba, 45 Barnet, Boris, 42, 58, 61, 156–158, 160, 168, 172, 181, 192 Bashkirov, Nikolai, 27 Batanin, Yuri, 54 Battle of Kerzhenets, 205 Battleship Potemkin, 61 Baudrillard, Jean, 191, 194, 202 Beilis, Menachem, 72 Belaya Tserkov, 104 The Bench, 114 Bendazzi, Giannalberto, 4, 205–206 Benderskii, Mariya, 83 Benderskii, Samuil, 44 Bendina, Vera, 89 Bialik, Haim Nahman, 84 The Birth of a Nation, 60 Black, Lala, 88 black America, motif of, 56–57, 60, 66–67, 71–73 Black and White: animated short, 59, 61–65, 67–73; live-action film, 25, 56–61, 66, 74; poem, 56, 62–63, 67 The Black Book (Ehrenburg and Grossman), 159, 198 blood libel, motif of, 6, 72, 220, 223 Board of Veterans, 41, 42 Boniface’s Vacation, 141, 162 Bordzilovsky, Vitold, 115 Borodin, Georgii, 19, 48, 88, 102, 172 Boyarsky, Iosif, 5, 13, 39, 42, 45, 48, 102–105, 119, 146, 148–149, 163– 164, 166, 168, 177–178, 191, 200–201, 208 Boyarsky, Yaakov, 102, 163–164 Brandenburg Gate (Berlin), 165, 166, 167 The Brave Five, 170 Bredis, Lamis, 46–48, 52 The Bremen Town Musicians, 21

Brezhnev, Leonid, 1, 4–5, 20, 49–50, 121, 163, 189, 192, 201, 231 The Bride, 169 Brodsky, Joseph, 44, 192 Brothers Liu, 96, 251n. 61 Brumberg, Shimon, 75–78, 80 Brumberg, Valentina, 13, 25, 36, 44, 46, 50, 54, 75–96 Brumberg, Zinaida, 13–15, 25, 36, 44, 46, 50, 54, 75–96 Bruskina, Masha, 167 The Bund, 163 Bunimovich, Teodor, 122, 125, 245n. 119 Burov, N. N., 45–47, 94 Bushkin, Aleksander, 32–35, 37 Bykov, Rolan, 23 celluloid, 13, 37, 48, 168 censorship: accusations of, 102, 149; analytic model of, 18–25, 114, 119, 230; apparatus, 55, 97–98, 102–103, 117–118, 125, 232; artistic use of, 26, 55, 105, 189, 198, 224, 231; damage of, 118, 149; denial of, 88; role of, 18–25, 97, 102. See also Artistic Council Center Screen, 206 Central Committee, 10, 18, 40, 44, 74, 97–98, 114, 125, 154 Central Museum of History of Religion and Atheism, 1, 103–104, 106 Chagall, Marc, 197, 200–201 Cheburashka, 26, 102, 120–122, 125, 126, 128, 146–149 Cheburashka Goes to School, 120, 129–130, 147 Chekhonin, Sergei, 65 Chekhov, Anton, 93 Chekhov, Aleksander, 28 Cherkes, Daniel, 36, 65, 74, 141 Chernenko, Miron, 4 Children’s Hour (television program), 120 Children’s Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization. See Proletcult China Aflame, 36 Chukovsky, Korney, 141 Cine-Eye films, 34 cinefication, 9 cine-magazine, 115 Cinémathèque Québécoise, 206 Circus, 269n. 57 circus, motif of, 21, 23 citizen collaboration, motif of, 154–159 Clay, Henry, 62–63 close-up shot, 178, 183, 185, 196

index  H 279 Cohl, Emile, 86 Cold War, 2–4, 19, 143, 168, 213–214, 228, 231–232 collective garden (Multfilm), 29 collectivization, motif of, 98 Comintern, 58, 63 Commissar, 20, 208 Commissariat for the People’s Education, 82 The Commissar Vanishes (King), 164 Committee for Cinematography. See Goskino Communist Party of the Soviet Union. See CPSU Composers’ Union, crackdown of 1948, 159 Comrade Abram, 80 consolidation, 38–40, 230 Constructivist cinematography, 167 corn, character of, 97–99 cosmopolitans, 43–45 CPSU, 10, 37–38, 40, 42, 75, 82, 102–103, 125, 164 Crane, Alexander, 66 Crocodile Gena (episode), 120–121, 126, 129, 130–140, 142, 144–146, 150–151 cut-outs, 36, 79, 108, 169 Czekala, Ryszard, 169, 174 Daily Worker (newspaper), 62 Degtyarev, Vladimir, 98–103, 114 Delaunay, Sonia, 197 Deni. See Merkulov, Yuri Deniska-Denis, 113 Derluguian, Georgi, 156 Der Stürmer (journal), 163 de-Stalinization, 18, 49, 97, 189 Dezhkin, Boris, 46, 52, 54, 241n. 36, 244n. 111 directors’ groups, 25, 85–88, 93, 95, 213 Disney, 1, 5, 215; association with Germany, 47; adaptation of literature, 4; constructions of gender, 18; constructions of race, 3, 60; multimedia approach, 4, 37, 83; opposition to, 37, 46–48; production model, 4, 37–38, 83; sound, 60, 83; style, 39, 47–48, 50, 82, 90, 97, 154, 157; techniques, 37, 62. dissident culture, 21–23, 118, 157, 176, 230 Dobuzhinskiy, Mstislav, 80 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 198 Documentary Film Studio, 153 Dojoji Temple, 5 The Dolls Are Laughing, 43 Dorogomilovskaya Jewish Cemetery, 78 Dream, 85

Dreyfus, Alfred, 198, 203 Dubnow, Simon, 84 dynamic graphics, 32 The Eaglet, 115, 200 éclair. See rotoscoping editing: pre-release, 24–25, 36, 66, 102, 157–158; post-production, 201, 203, 231. See also censorship Efimov, Boris, 25, 115, 149–150, 162–168, 196 Eggert, Konstantin, 59, 66, 72, 74 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 159, 189, 192, 195–196, 198 Eisenstein, Sergei, 8, 11, 37, 46, 58, 61–62, 67, 85, 191, 201 The Elephant and the Ant, 46 Elephant and Moska, 153 Eliseev, Leonid, 117 Emergency Service, 48 The End of the Black Morass, 98–105, 114, 119 Entin, Yuri, 21 Erdman, Nikolai, 88–93, 157 Ermler, Fridrikh, 37 Estonian animation school, 22, 52 ethnographic expeditions, 65, 79 Etlis, Semyon, 54, 122 Eugene Onegin (opera, Tchaikovsky), 110 evacuation, wartime, 40, 84, 153, 170, 179, 210. See also Samarkand Evrei v SSSR (journal), 118 Evreiskaia zhizn’ (journal), 77 fairy-tale: characters, 96–99, 104–106, 160; ethnographic, 17, 23, 82, 103–104, 141; genre, 19, 96, 114, 154, 209; scripts, 74, 82; settings, 14, 96–100, 105, 218; Stalinist, 97, 103, 156 Falk, Robert, 84 Fascist Boots on Our Homeland, 153 Fedya Zaitsev, 86–96, 108 Felix, 60 Fifth Point, 10–11, 164 Filippov, Gennadii, 46, 241n. 36 Film, Film, Film, 12, 18 Film Forum (movie theater), 206 film trains, 9, 32; trains, as motif, 97, 133–134, 148, 210 Filonov, Pavel, 192, 201 First All-Union Festival of Puppet Theater, 73 Fleischer Brothers, 37 The Flintstones (television series), 120

280  H  index The Flying Proletarian, 191 Folman, Ari, 208 Forest History, 162 Forest Travelers, 138 Formula of Revolution (painting, Filonov), 201 The Fox and the Hare, 205 Foucault, Michel, 14 frame-shooting, 32 freelance employees, 21–23, 42–45, 47, 49, 51, 85, 176, 231, 242n. 60, 242n. 65, 244n. 90 friendship of the peoples (slogan), 139–140, 142, 144, 161, 230 full-time employees, 38–39, 43–44, 48–49, 74, 83, 85, 88, 181 The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam, 169 Fyodor the Hunter, 96, 252n.5 Gaidar, Arkadii, 93 Galich, Aleksander, 23 Galkin, Samuel, 45 Gamburg, Grigorii, 59, 66, 72, 74, 156, 158 Gamburg, Efim, 28, 41, 121, 122, 190 Gandler, Bezalel, 175 Garin, Erast, 89, 251n. 61, 252n. 69 Gauguin, Paul, 141–142 Gelmont, Abram, 9, 235n. 40 Georgian animation, 52 Gerdt, Zinovii, 113, 255n. 50 Gershenson, Olga, 4, 154, 162, 174 Ginsburg, Saul, 79 Ginzburg, Sergei, 8, 18 The Girl in the Circus, 13 Giroux, Henry, 18 Gitelman, Zvi, 161 Gladkoff, Gennady, 21 The Glass Harmonica, 20, 190 Glavlit, 18 “Go Down, Moses” (song), 66 Golden Age of Soviet Animation. See under periodization The Golden Antelope, 15–17, 244n. 94 Goldstein, Israel, 127 Golomb, Iosif, 122, 125, 140, 144 Good Fellow, 12 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 143, 162, 204 Gorin, Boruch, 214 Goscilo, Helena, 99 GOSET. See Jewish theaters Goskino, 12, 18, 20, 34–35, 84, 114–115, 117–118, 125, 151, 170, 201, 204–208, 210, 212, 216 Goskino Film Advertising, 34–35

Goskino Ukrainian SSR, 50 Gosvoenkino, 37 Granddaughter Is Lost, 13 The Great Friendship (opera, Muradeli), 86 Great Patriotic War. See Second World War Great Troubles, 130 Grebner, Grigorii, 56, 60, 62–64, 71, 74 Griffith, D. W., 60 Grobman, Mikhail, 22 grotesque, in animation, 17, 155, 178, 203 Gurevich, Mikhail, 8, 25, 53 Gutyansky, Binyomin, 73 Ha-Am, Ahad, 84 Halas, John, 32 Halkin, Shmuel, 159 Hall, Stuart, 11 Hallelujah!, 57 Hanna-Barbera, 120 Harkavy, Vladimir, 84 Harpsichord Concerto (Mozart), 217 Hedgehog in the Fog, 205 His Excellency, 22 Hollywood. See Disney: opposition to Honored Artist, title, 46, 124, 177 horizontal structures, 25, 31, 55, 239n. 7 Hot in Africa, 141 Hughes, Langston, 57–62, 64–66, 68, 70–72 “Hymn of the Soviet Union” (national anthem), 172 I Am Twenty, 238n. 87 I Am Waiting for a Bird, 23 Iangirov, Rashid, 71 Ilf, Ilya, 22 industrialization, 2, 37, 79, 107 institutionalization, 10, 18, 23, 38, 54 International Animated Film Association. See ASIFA “Internationale” (national anthem), motif of, 170–172, 188 International Labor Defense, 67 Interplanetary Revolution, 36, 59 In the Thicket, 138 Iskusstvo kino (journal), 7, 47, 178 It Was I Who Drew the Little Man, 86, 94 Itzkowitz, Saul, 175 Ivanov, Aleksander, 36, 52, 96–98, 102, 114, 124, 154–158 Ivanov-Vano, Ivan, 36, 46–48, 52, 59–72, 74–75, 83, 114, 149–150, 203, 205–206 Ivan the Terrible, 85 Ivashka and Baba-Yaga, 82, 99–101

index  H 281 IVVOS, 75, 83 Izvestia (newspaper), 7, 162, 171 Jaffa Oranges, 127–128 Jewish Antifascist Committee, 159 Jewish artist, definition, 3–7, 10–11, 18 Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, 175–176 Jewish question, 3, 25, 56, 71–72, 81–82 Jewish theaters, 4, 16, 23, 45, 49, 85–86, 102 Jews of Silence, 3, 6, 18, 228 Jones, Chuck, 115 Just You Wait!, 54, 114–120, 300n. 59 Kabakov, Ilya, 22, 191 Kachanov, Roman, 13, 14, 30, 114, 120, 122–126, 128–134, 136, 138–142, 144–146, 148–152 Kalyagin, Aleksander, 209, 212, 221 Kamov-Kandel, Felix, 115–116, 118–119, 126, 134, 257n. 14 Kampf, Avram, 3 Karp, Jonathan, 11, 236n. 49 Kashtanka (Chekhov), 93 The Katzenjammer Kids, 60 Kaveenschikov, Julius, 7 Kazakh animation, 52 Kelly, Catriona, 130 Kenez, Peter, 3–4 Khait, Arkadii, 115 Khaldei, Yevgeny, 165–168 Kheifits, Iosif, 111 Khitruk, Fyodor, 12, 18, 23, 40–41, 50, 52–54, 106–114, 141, 169, 179, 206, 208 Khodataev, Nikolai, 33, 39, 61, 79–80 Khodataev, Olga, 79, 80, 153 Khronika (journal), 145 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1, 18, 20–21, 49, 97–98, 106, 127, 163, 169, 189, 196, 198, 204, 224, 231, 238n. 87 Khrzhanovsky, Andrei, 20, 24, 26, 53, 190–199, 201–203, 205, 208 Khrzhanovsky, Yuri, 21 Khusid, Moshe, 9 Kid and Karlson, 114 Kiev Academic State Puppet Theater, 73 King, David, 164 The King’s Wife (painting, Gauguin), 141 Kino i zhizn’ (journal), 7 Kino-front (journal), 7 Kinuli, 137–138, 140 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 11 Kitson, Clare, 5, 107, 200, 205–207, 209, 213

Klein, Tsitsiliia, 76 Komissarenko, Zinon, 36 Komsomol’skaia pravda (newspaper), 68 Kononenko, Natalie, 18 Kostyukovsky, Yakov, 23 Kotenochkin, Vyacheslav, 115, 117–118 Kovalenko, A., 59 Kozlov, Grisha, 13 Kramer, Lucille, 37 Kreynin, Miron, 84 Krokodil (journal), 162 Kuleshov, Lev, 157, 192, 201 Kulikov, S., 39, 119 Kurchevsky, Marina, 177–178 Kurchevsky, Vadim, 30, 177 Kurliandsky, Aleksander, 115 Labor Zionist Movement, 123, 163 Lacan, Jacques, 217–218, 221–222, 224, 228 Lagin, Lazarus, 192 Last, James, 115 Lazar, Berel, 214 Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, 76 League of Struggle for Negro Rights, 68 Lefty, 203 Legend of Salieri, 177 Lenin, Vladimir, 9, 33–34, 63, 71, 172, 203, 228 Leninkhronica, 37 Leningrad Art School, 124 Lenkinokhronika, 37 A Lesson Not Learned, 164–168, 188 Levina, Tanya, 134, 135 Lev Left Home, 142, 259n. 59 Leyda, Jay, 62, 67, 153, 261n. 6 Lille International Animation Festival, 205 limited-animation, 49 Lipkov, Aleksandr, 15 Lipskerov, Michael, 7, 10, 118 Lissitzky, El, 33, 190–191, 201 The Little Black Boy and the Monkey, 81 Littlejohn, William, 207 The Little Organ, 61 Little Red Riding Hood, 82 Livak, Leonid, 220 Livanov, Vasily, 122, 146 Loeffler, James, 199, 234n. 16 Los Angeles Olympics, 5, 207 The Lost Letter, 96 Lotman, Yuri, 8, 20 Lunacharsky, Anatolii, 36 lynching, motif of, 68–70, 248n. 54 Lysenko, Trofim, 136; Lysenkoism, 142

282  H  index MacFadyen, David, 107–108, 116, 135 The Magic Swan, 97 Malevich, Kazmir, 192, 201 Maliantovich, Kirill, 38, 45–46, 48, 94, 98 Malyshev, Konstantin, 60, 74 Mamedov, Georgii, 113 Mandelstam, Osip, 113, 210 Manege exhibition, 20 A Man from the Shtetl, 22 Man in a Frame, 23 Manvell, Roger, 32 March Slav (Tchaikovsky), 160 Marek, Pesach, 79 Martinson, Sergei, 89 Mashkov, Ilya, 78 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 56, 62–63, 67, 71, 79, 191, 201 Maze, Yakov, 84 Meerovich, Mikhail, 45, 212 Meisler, Frank, 214 Mendelevich, Danill, 119 Merkulov, Yuri, 33–34, 36, 39, 65, 78, 190–191 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 89–90, 102, 199 Meyerhold Theater, 23, 87, 89–90, 115 Meza, 14 MGM studio emblem, 121 Mickey Mouse (fictional character), 26, 37, 46, 60, 122 Mickey Mouse Magazine (journal), 47 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 74 Migunov, Evgenii, 46–48, 52, 54, 94, 158 Mikhalkov, Sergei, 156–158, 172 Mikhoels, Solomon, 42, 45, 159 Milchin, Lev, 12–13, 124, 208 Ministry of Cinematography, 18, 148–149, 158, 205 Ministry of Culture, 15, 18, 21, 24, 96, 205 The Miracle Maker, 97–99, 102 The Mitten, 12–14 Modigliani, Amedeo, 197 Moidodyr, 36 Mokil, Sarah, 83, 241n. 29 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 164 The Monkey and the Robbers, 13 Moritz, William, 19 Moscow Art Theater, 88–89, 102, 115, 191 Moscow Automobile Plant, 45 Moscow Children’s Theater, 81 Moscow Choral Synagogue, 150–152 Moscow Cinema Museum, 5, 7, 210 Moscow State Jewish Theater, 23, 45, 49, 85, 102 Moscow State Jewish Theater School, 49

Moscow Zoo, 26, 29, 135–139, 141–144 Mosfilm, 37–38, 49 Murzilka in Africa, 141 music, in animation, 21, 45, 66–67, 72, 89–90, 92, 110–111, 115, 140, 146, 158–161, 168, 170, 173–174, 181, 188, 194–195, 199, 202, 223. See also aural elements The Mystery of the Third Planet, 144 Naryshkin, Zenaida, 21 New Economic Policy, 34, 246n. 21 New Gulliver, 4, 22 New Tales of the Soldier Schweik, 89 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper), 62 Nikitin, Victor, 172–173 Nolyev-Sobolev, Yuri, 20 Novyi Mir (journal), 195 Oberhausen International Animation Festival, 205 Ogonek (journal), 208 Oinas, Felix, 79 Okoudjava, Boulat, 217 Old Man Hottabych, 259n. 53 Old Minsk—Memories of Childhood (paintings, Shvartsman), 140 Old Photo, 170 Olesha, Yuri, 13, 15, 88, 191 Olifirenko, Sergei, 12 Olympiad of Animation, 5, 207 One and a Half Rooms, 266n. 16 On the Forest Bandstand, 162 On the Uprising of Slaves in Babylon (Crane), 66 OPE, 76–79, 82, 84 Oransky, Victor, 89, 191 Ottawa International Animation Festival, 205–206 Oushakine, Sergei, 131 Pale of Settlement, 2, 11, 34, 76, 103, 105, 108, 123, 208, 227 Palphot Postcard Company, 128 Paneri, Vilnius, 176 Papanov, Anatoly, 117 The Passenger (opera, Weinberg), 159 Passion of Spies, 190 Pasternak, Boris, 195, 198 Paustovsky, Konstantin, 198 The Peasants, 37 peoples (narodnost), 3, 65, 77, 79, 81, 105, 139–140, 142, 144, 181, 230

index  H 283 People’s Artists of the USSR, title, 51 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), 156 People’s Minister of Education, 18 Peretz, I. L., 159 periodization: Golden Age of Soviet Animation, 11, 49, 188, 230; stagnation, 49–51, 189, 192; thaw, 49–50, 106, 189, 192, 196 Pershin, Misha, 51–52 Petrov, Evgeny, 22 Petrov, Sergei, 126 Petrushevskaya, Lyudmila, 23, 211–212, 214, 216 Pinkenzon, Avram, 170–175 Pinsker, Leon, 84 Pioneer Heroes—CCCP, 175 Pioneer Palace, Moscow’s, 146 pioneers, motif of, 120, 135, 146–147, 149, 170, 175 The Pioneer’s Violin, 169–174, 187 Plan for Great Works, 59 Political Journal (journal), 153 Polkan and Shavka, 154–161, 168, 172, 174, 181, 188 Pontieri, Laura, 107, 196 Portrait with Seven Fingers (painting, Chagall), 197 Posner, Vladimir, 214 Post, 61 Pravda (newspaper), 7, 68, 77, 162 A Priceless Head, 261n. 17 professional categories, 11; actor, 39, 43–44, 60, 85; animator, 38–39, 51; artist, 21–23, 39, 44, 51, 53, 60, 85, 177; cameraman, 38, 40, 43; composer, 23, 39, 44, 51, 85, 159; designer, 54, 60; director, 39, 43, 51, 54–55, 114, 205, 213; editor, 44, 53, 85, 231; inker, 38, 44; projectionist, 38; renderer, 38–39, 44; replicator, 38, 44; scriptwriter, 22, 39, 44, 51, 59, 85; soundman, 43–44 Proletcult, 79 proleterization, 2, 76 Promotion of Enlightenment among Jews in Russia. See OPE Prophets and Lessons, 115, 164, 200 Ptushko, Aleksander, 4, 38–39, 98, 108, 241n. 29 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 58, 61, 192 Pugachova, Alla, 115 puppet animation, 12, 32, 98, 103, 151, 185 The Puppet House, 86 puppet theater, 8–9, 73, 147, 184 Purim: The Lot, 9

Pushkin, Alexander, 79, 172, 177 Puss in Boots, 82 radio, 1, 120, 137, 178–180, 188 Ranevskaia, Faina, 85 residency permits, 88, 108, 129, 131 response theory, 214, 216, 219, 221–224, 228 retro, use in animation, 162–163, 165–168, 189–191, 194, 197, 200, 201–202, 230 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 115 Robbery, 121–122, Robeson, Paul, 72–73, 248n. 62 Rodchenko, Aleksander, 64, 247n. 42 Rodman, Peter, 143 The Roll-Call, 169 Rombuli, Riga, 176 Romm, Mikhail, 45, 85 Room, Abram, 59 Roshal, Grigorii, 22 Rossiya Theater, 50 rotoscoping, 16–17, 44 Rousseau, Henri, 195–197 Rumiantsev Affair, 111 Rumnev, Aleksander, 21 Rumyanova, Klara, 130 Rusakov, Svetozar, 14, 41, 54, 115–116 Russian State Art and Technical School. See VKhUTEMAS Russian Telegraph Agency (Rosta), 32, 201 Ruttmann, Walter, 112 Ryback, Issachar, 190 Sadoul, Georges, 158 Sal’nikova, Alla, 130 Samarkand, 40, 84, 153 samizdat, 118, 145, 231 The Samoyed Boy, 79–82 Samu, Charles, 207 Sanishvili, Nikolas, 43 Sasaki, Sadako, 173 Sats, Natalia, 81 Savicheva, Tanya, 173 Sazonov, Panteleimon, 75 The Scarlet Flower, 74, 96, 124 Schnittke, Alfred, 20 The School of Athens (painting, Raphael), 195 Schulz, Bruno, 185 Scottsboro case, 67, 71 Second World War, 108, 123, 154, 166; animation and, 1, 21, 26–27, 39–40, 51, 154, 162, 230; employment during, 27, 39–42, 45; employment after, 84, 98, 106, 153, 228

284  H  index Secret Service, 60 Self-Portrait with Palette (painting, Rousseau), 195 Senka the African, 65, 141 Sforim, Mendele Moher, 84 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 174 Shainsky, Vladimir, 122, 146 Shapokliak, 120, 134, 140, 144, 146, 148 Shiryaev, Aleksander, 31 Shneer, David, 11, 154, 165–167, 234n. 16 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 46, 198–200, 202–203 Shpalikov, Gennadii, 20, 192 shtat. See full-time employees shtatniye sotrudniki. See full-time employees Shternshis, Anna, 79, 234n. 16 Shvartsman, Leonid, 12–13, 16, 27, 85, 122–126, 128, 130–131, 136, 138–142, 144, 146–147 Shvartze tum’a, 104 Siege of Leningrad, 124 Silly Symphonies, 83 Simon, Paul, 197 Simonov, Ruben, 16–17 Sindbad the Sailor, 84 Sinfonietta No. 1, Op. 41 (Weinberg), 159 Sinitsyn, Aleksander, 39 Six-Day War, 26, 128, 161, 166 Sixth Symphony (Weinberg), 174 Sketches of Jewish Heroism (3-volume series), 175 Sklyut, Iosif, 59 Smirnov, Victor, 37–39, 241n. 36 Smirnov, Andrei, 28 Smith, Samantha, 173 Smolensk, 123, 131, 144 Snesarev, Arkadii, 98, 102–103, 105, 119 Snesarev, Gleb, 104 Snesarev, Nadia (Sooster), 28 The Snow Queen, 4, 13–15, 54, 74 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 5, 215 Society for the Aid of Indigent Writers and Scientists, 186 “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (song), 72–73 Somov, Konstantin, 65 Song about a Young Drummer, 170 Song of the Falcon, 23 Sooster, Ülo-Ilmar, 20–22, 28 southern spirituals, motif of, 66, 72–73 Soutine, Chaim, 197 Sovetskoe iskusstvo (journal), 61, 72, 73 Sovietization, 7, 36, 76, 81, 165, 198, 220 Soviet Toys, 33–34, 35

Sovkino, 37 Soyuzdetfilm, 42, 74 Soyuzdetmultfilm, 38 speech, Jewish, 94, 104 Stalin, Joseph, 4–5, 17–18, 26, 37, 47, 49, 74, 77, 83, 89, 99, 156, 159, 161–165, 168, 172, 177, 190–192, 196, 199, 231 Stanislawski, Michael, 3 Starevich, Vladislav, 31–32, 98 State Film Technicum (GTK), 35–40, 78 Stateless, 143 Steamboat Willie, 60 Steiger, Erich-William, 60, 74 Steinberg, Arkadii, 22 Stepantsev, Boris, 171–175, 205–206 The Stolen Sun, 153 Story of a Crime, 106–115 Story of a Doll, 176–187 Street of Crocodiles (Schultz), 185 The Street of the Youngest Son, 170 Sugar King (fictional character), 62–63, 67–69 suitcases, motif of, 125, 134, 142, 152 Suteev, Vladimir, 36 Svetozarov, Yakov, 42 Sviridova, Alexandra, 5, 13, 23, 30, 43–44, 49, 128, 164, 176–178, 181–183, 185–187 The Tale of Red-Haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Comissar Bloch (Utkin), 45 Tale of Tales, 5, 26, 204–209, 214, 215–225 Tale of the Priest and His Workman Blockhead, 262n.41 Tale of Tsar Saltan, 77–78, 85 Tanya, Tyavka, Top, and Nyusha, 162 Tarbut (journal), 118 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 198 TASS, 165 Tatarsky, Aleksander, 24, 50, 114 Tatlin, Vladimir, 201 television, 15, 66, 110, 120–121, 137, 210 theatricality, 89–90, 92 thematic plan, 18, 40, 73, 208, 242n. 50 There Once Was Kozyavin, 53, 192, 193–194, 196, 198–199, 200–202 “Thirteenth Salary,” 24 38 Parrots, 13, 102 Thompson, Louise, 57–58, 62 Three Fat Men, 15, 191, 202 Three Little Pigs, 3 Timur and His Gang, 93 Tip-Top in Moscow, 36

index  H 285 Tom and Jerry, 207 Trauberg, Leonid, 22 Trawniki Concentration Camp, 159 Trotsky, Leon, 34, 162, 172 Trud (newspaper), 68 Tschlenow, Jechiel, 84 Tsekhanovsky, Mikhail, 59, 61 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 198 Turgenev, Ivan, 185–186 Turin, Arkadii, 115, 200–203 Turovsky, Maya, 7, 49 Twelve Months, 162 25th—The First Day, 102, 115, 200–201, 203 typage, 17 Union of Children’s Animated Film. See Soyuzdetmultfilm Uspensky, Edouard, 122, 125–126, 130, 134, 136, 141 Utkin, Joseph, 45 Vainberg, Moisey. See Weinberg, Mieczyslaw Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 89 Vakhtangov Theater, 16 Valkov, Mikhail, 39, 50–51, 54–55, 114– 115, 125, 149, 213 Vasilisa the Beautiful, 99 Velvet Revolution, 20 Venzher, Natalia, 7, 84, 209, 235n. 28, 246n. 30 Vermel, Samuil, 76, 84 Vertov, Dziga, 33–34, 35, 112, 167, 190– 191, 201 veterans, Soyuzmultfilm, 40–42, 123, 125 VGIK, 40, 43, 48, 51, 78, 98, 103, 124, 164, 177, 192, 196, 203, 210 Vishniak, Mark, 76 visibility, in filmmaking, 7–9, 18, 229 visual culture, discipline of, 9, 65, 228 Vitebsk, 108, 113 VKhUTEMAS, 36, 78, 84 vneshtatnye. See freelance employees voice-over, 40, 60, 90, 113, 115, 130, 192

Voinov, Nikolai, 75 Volkdeutsche, 156 Volkov, Anatolii, 61 Volpin, Mikhail, 88, 92–93, 108, 157 volumetric animation. See puppet animation Vultures, 153 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 117–118 Waltz with Bashir, 208 “Weary Sun” (song), 217 We Beat, Are Beating, and Will Beat, 153 Weber, Max, 197 Weinberg, Mieczyslaw, 156–162, 168, 172, 174, 198 Wells, Paul, 8 The Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach), 217 White, Walter, 68 Wiesel, Elie, 3, 228 Wild Swans, 22 Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, 115 Window, 173 Winnie-the-Pooh, 162 workshops, animation, 35, 36, 230 Writers’ Union, 23 Yakovlev, Yuri, 142, 173, 175 Yampolsky, Mikhail, 204 Yankilevsky, V., 22 Yanshin, Mikhail, 87–90, 94 Yellow Submarine, 5, 21 Yermash, Filip, 207–208 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 172, 175, 198, 203 Yunghans, Karl, 66 Yutkevich, Sergei, 11, 89, 201, 208 Zagreb, 50, 214; 1980 festival, 205, 206; 2002 festival, 214; Grand Prix, 204 Zherebchevsky, Max, 21 Zhukovsky, Aleksander, 122, 209, 215 Zionist, definition, 76–77, 128 Zionist youth culture, 16, 123 Zipes, Jack, 19, 96 Ziv, Mikhail, 122, 173

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maya Balakirsky Katz, PhD, is a professor of art history at the Lander College for Women of Touro College and on the faculty of Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies in New York City. She has written on the intersection of religious identity and media in journals, essay collections, exhibition catalogs, and encyclopedias. She is editor of Revising Dreyfus (2013), coeditor of the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and the author of the book The Visual Culture of Chabad (2010).