Reinventing Tradition: Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction 9798887191911

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Reinventing Tradition Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College)

Editorial Board Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite Paris IV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) David Shneer (University of Colorado at Boulder) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/ jewsofrussiaeasterneurope

Klavdia Smola

Reinventing Tradition Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction

BOSTON 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smola, Klavdii︠a︡, author. Title: Reinventing tradition : Russian Jewish literature between the Soviet underground and post-Soviet deconstruction / Klavdia Smola. Other titles: Wiedererfindung der Tradition. English Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2023. | Series: Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005152 (print) | LCCN 2023005153 (ebook) | ISBN 9798887191904 (hardback) | ISBN 9798887191911 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9798887191928 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature--Jewish authors--History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PG2998.J4 S56513 2023 (print) | LCC PG2998.J4 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/8924--dc23/eng/20230321 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005152 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005153 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Copyright © 2023, Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9798887191904 (hardback) ISBN 9798887191911 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9798887191928 (epub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Memory, by Michail Grobman (1965). Reproduced by the artist’s permission. Published by Academic Studies Press Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgments  1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Introduction 1.1. Tradition and Innovation in Judaism—Text and Commentary 1.2. Semantics of the Posthuman Era: The (Re)Invention of Jewishness 1.3. Semiotic Context 1.4. Cultural-Historical Context 1.5. Poetics of (Anti-)Imperial (Anti-)Assimilation Research Approaches 2.1. Research Trends and Research Deficits 2.2. State of the Art 2.3. Perspective and Boundaries of the Study 2.3.1.  Above the Ground  2.3.2.  Refocusing Jewish Studies 2.3.3.  Literary History, Poetics, and Cultural Studies 2.3.4.  Text Selection: Time and Geography  Russian Jewish Literature as a Bicultural Phenomenon Jewish Dissent of the Late Soviet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature 4.1. Soviet Jews: Collective Images and Myths 4.2. Jews as Translators: Literary Mimicry 4.3. Political Context and Literary Reflections of Jewish Counter-Culture: An Overview 4.4. Emigration, Literary Institutions, and Readers Prose of Exodus 5.1. “The Excitement of Memory”: Efrem Baukh’s Jacob’s Ladder 5.2. The Martyrdom of Refusal: David Shrayer-Petrov’s Herbert and Nelli 5.3. Mysticism of the Exodus: Eli Liuksemburg 5.3.1.  “The Third Temple”  5.3.2.  The Tenth Hunger 5.4. Education of the New Jew: David Markish’s Preamble 5.5. Late Soviet Exodus Novels: Poetics and Message 5.6. Bipolar Models: The Zionist and the Socialist-Realist Novel Axes of Nonconformist Jewish Literature 6.1. Iuz Aleshkovskii: “Carousel”

1 3 3 9 15 22 27 31 31 36 45 45 52 53 55 59 65 65 76 90 98 103 104 110 122 122 130 145 160 165 173 174

6.2. Grigorii Vol′dman: Sheremetyevo  6.3. Feliks Kandel′: The Gates of Our Exodus and Semen Lipkin: Pictures and Voices 6.4. Iakov Tsigel′man: The Funeral of Moishe Dorfer 6.5. Iuliia Shmukler: “This Last Day” 7. Negated Dichotomies: The Failed Utopia of Aliyah  7.1. Efraim Sevela’s Zionist Counter-Narratives  7.2. Iakov Tsigel′man’s Novel-Palimpsest  8. Time and Space Structures in Nonconformist Jewish Literature  9. Reinvention of Yiddish Storytelling  9.1. Jewish Narrative and Semiotics of Yiddish 9.2. Shlemiels and Rogues: Efraim Sevela’s The Legends of Invalidnaia Street  9.3. An Old Jewess in a Monologue with the Reader: Filipp Isaak Berman’s “Sarra and the Little Rooster” 9.4. Conclusion: Yiddish as a Quote 10. Aftermath and Impact of Jewish Counter-Culture  10.1. Neo-Zionist Essentialist Narratives  10.2. Jewish Revival  11. Russian Jewish Literature after Communism 11.1. (Post)Memorial Literature: Palimpsests, Residuals, Reinvention  11.1.1.  (Post)Memorial Jewish Writing 11.1.2. Memory as Obsession and Fragment: Izrail′ Metter’s “Family Tree”  11.1.3. (Post)Memorial Topographies: Grigorii Kanovich’s “Dream about the Disappeared Jerusalem”  11.2. Jewish Deconstruction of the Empire  11.2.1. Archaic Language of the Dictatorship: Mikhail Iudson’s Dystopia The Ladder onto the Closet  11.2.2. Postcolonial Mimic Man: Aleksandr Melikhov’s The Confession of a Jew 11.2.3.  Oleg Iur′ev’s Hybrid Poetics: Peninsula Zhidiatin 11.2.4.  Iakov Tsigel′man’s Postmodern Midrash: Shebsl the Musician 12. Conclusion 

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Bibliography  Literary Works Research Literature Index of Names

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180 188 196 203 206 210 215 225 226 230 244 249 253 255 259 263 263 263 268 280 290 292 316 328 344 365

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Acknowledgements

This book is the translation of my 2019 German-language monograph (Wiedererfindung der Tradition: Russisch-jüdische Literatur der Gegenwart [Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau-Verlag, 2019]). I would like to thank my colleagues in Germany and abroad, who accompanied me for a short or long period of time during these years and shared their expert knowledge with me. Their comments and suggestions, as well as our cooperation within research projects and on collective publications on related (and unrelated) topics—in short: the intellectual micro-climate in which ideas sometimes arose in quite unexpected situations and moments—were crucial not only for the development of argumentation in this study, but also for my scholarly progress in general. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Beizer, Mieczysław Dąbrowski, Eva Hausbacher, Zsuzsa Hetényi, Ulrike Jekutsch, Aleksandr Kantor, Leonid Katsis, Roman Katsman, Vladimir Khazan, Ann Komaromi, Walter Koschmal, Ber Kotlerman, Mikhail Krutikov, Ilya Kukulin, Mirja Lecke, Mark Lipovetsky, Hartmut Lutz, Magdalena Marszałek, Cornelia E. Martyn, Christina Parnell, David G. Roskies, David Shneer, Maxim D. Shrayer, Christian Suhm, Olaf Terpitz, Dirk Uffelmann, and Mikhail Weiskopf. The conversations with some authors who are featured in this book, especially with David Shrayer-Petrov, David Markish, and Filipp Isaak Berman, showed

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me that the academic knowledge about the epoch sometimes differs very much from narrated memories and emotional testimonies. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Technology University of Dresden for its generous financial support, without which the translation and editing of this book would not be possible. All translations from French, Polish, and Yiddish are mine, if no other source is indicated.

1. Introduction

What survives even when the storyteller gets the material in translation [. . .] is the paradigm of rebellion, loss, and negotiated return. David G. Roskies [1995: 342–343]

1.1. Tradition and Innovation in Judaism—Text and Commentary In this book, I ask: How do contemporary East European Jewish literatures (in my case, the Russian Jewish) deal with the Jewish tradition? Within such texts, the period after the Shoah and the decades of communist politics resulted in the loss of its former cultural reference system and its lively connection to the reader. In the era of postmemory [Hirsch 2008] devices and practices that deal with reconstruction as well as reinvention of the past become prevalent.1 The tendency of folklorizing and “virtualization” [Gruber 2002] of Jewishness—an inevitable consequence of the ever-increasing temporal disconnection from the

1 See the terms “reinvention” and “re-creation” in Roskies 1995: 5. On the phenomenon of “inventing of tradition” cf. also Hobsbawm 1983.

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lost culture—explains the emphasis on performativity and autoreflection in writing and artifacts. Art and literature become tropes in their own right; they represent, in a complex way, the state of tradition in the present. While postwar East European Jewish literatures produce very different poetics, they all reflect on the breach of tradition as their point of origin and, to a large extent, the condition of their own existence. Their treatment of the Jewish tradition is conceived or staged as a new recreation after destruction, a beginning after an end. The impossibility of a “natural” continuity, however, is not solely a consequence of historical breaks and catastrophes; it is also a characteristic of secularized postmodernism.2 In the era of plural historiographies, literature uses poetic strategies that demonstrate the failure of the hermeneutic understanding of the past. Paradoxically, however, the cultural practices of radical reimagining of the tradition up until the postmodern dispersion of meaning come close to the origins of the Judaic tradition, in particular to its undogmatic relationship between text and commentary. “Jewishness has lived and lives with an open and permeable canon without ever denying its core” [Gelhard 2008: 1]. This principle of Jewish thought arose with its beginnings in rabbinical literature and has been articulated again in recent decades by researchers of Jewish literature on various continents. The range, diachronicity, and historically conditioned semantics of renewal in Jewish literatures in various languages are topics that always refer to the dialectic of proximity and distance to the Jewish tradition. These topics seem to be of increasing interest today, in time of blatant heterogenization and de-essentialization of the Jewish worlds, literatures included. The connection to the Talmudic heritage, and, at the same time, the neverending intellectual practice of interpretation, questioning, and subversion of authority, which is also rooted in the Talmud—what one might call the tradition of questioning the tradition—are the most striking features of Jewish religious thought. After the Haskala, they coin the Jewish secular thought as well. Dorothee Gelhard evokes this dialectic of following and denial, connection and questioning to the point of negation when she points out that “the Hebrew word for the past is ‘lefanim, lifne,’ [. . .] which means ‘front,’ ‘face,’ or ‘in front of the face.’ In this model, the past stands not behind, but ahead of us” [ibid.: 3]. Therefore, a brief digression into the rabbinic exegesis will help us to discern the specifics of later literary processes. 2 The polyseme concept of postmodernism is here—in contrast to chap. 11.2—not discussed in terms of literary history, but in the philosophical sense of Lyotard’s time diagnosis and in the sense of the poststructuralist negation of any purposeful ideological narrations.

1. Introduction

The Jewish practice of unorthodox continuity has been discussed in several important works of literary criticism in the last decades. In her book quoted above, Dorothee Gelhard asserts the inexpressibility and concealment (immateriality) of God in Judaism, which lead to the intangibility of the truth, of the last sense of scripture. This becomes the basis of exegetical freedom and the reason for the symbolic charge of language “as a link between God and the humankind.” “The written Torah [means] the mere potentiality, the possibility of reading and understanding”) [ibid.: 5–6]. From this, Gelhard derives the principle of symbolic reading, which, instead of the direct literal meaning of the Torah (peshat), emphasizes its semantic potentiality, polyvalence, associations, and distant connections (derash).3 Gelhard transfers this distinction of exegetic methods not only to literary theories, such as that of intertextuality, but also to the literary texts themselves and their relationship to tradition. The development of Jewish literatures and of individual literary works thus follows the history of the Jewish commentary on the book. In his investigation of “interlacings” in Jewish literatures Dan Miron looks at the works of the famous Hebrew writer Achad Ha’am and his heretical, Zionism-inspired “psychologization” of the divine. In his essay “Moses” Achad Ha’am equates the flames of the burning thorn bush, the symbol of revelation, with the moral zeal of Moses as a national leader. This drastic reinterpretation of the divine was unacceptable for the critics of that time. “However, this dualism, characteristic of Achad Ha’am’s philosophy, the secularization of the sacred and the sacralization of the secular, presaged the entire development of contemporary Hebrew literature” [Miron 2007: 94]. To this day, imagination in Jewish literatures is often founded by the symbolic act of bringing the sacred down into the real world, its humanization, “sacrificing” the doctrine to the divided historical world. Often, the commentary on the “original text” of the tradition is constructed by the means of poetics, literary forms, and devices. Just as modern Hebrew poets routinely use postbiblical traditions as the main source for the development of their national literatures—Miron mentions imitations of psalm poetry, quasi-biblical legends, literarization of the Talmudic Aramaic, lyrical “prophecies,” adaptation and translation of Talmudic and midrashic legends, and the reinvention of the Hasidic novella [ibid.: 96–101]—Russian Jewish authors referred and continue to refer to certain genres, figures, plots, and linguistic features in order to continue the creative “genealogy” of Jewishness or to confirm its loss. Literary symbolization becomes that “act of mediation, negotiation and translating” [Slezkine 2004: 20], which connects eras as well

3 Gelhard refers to [Goodmann-Thau 2002] and [Kilcher 1998]. See [Gelhard 2008: 4–9].

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as cultures, and uses the past to explore the present. In this respect, cultural translation in the broadest sense means a creative, reflexive, and highly semantic re-reading and re-actualization of the book—an action that among other things, stands in for the tradition of the midrash, only the entirety of a lost Jewish culture here takes the place of the Hebrew Bible as the object of reference. The poststructuralist research on the method of text interpretation in the midrash, which flourished in the United States in the 1980s and the 1990s, deals above all with the question: “How does one mediate the past for the world of the present?” [Holtz 1992: 377]. In this regard, the realization of the fact that the activity of the midrashists extended far beyond the interpretation of passages from the holy scriptures, and became the creation of literature, of primary texts, is both symptomatic and relevant.4 This conclusion opens up a broad field of reflection on the methods of text analysis that can be relevant to Jewish Studies in the period of academic postmodernism, as well as the use of Jewish tradition in literary texts. Characteristic of the midrash are the borderless semanticization of the original text, the meticulous interpretation of the words and letters— Holtz speaks of “hyper-intensive reading” and “rabbinic microscope” [ibid.: 384]—and, above all, the principle of an a-contextual, associative, highly intertextual reading of the Torah. This tradition inspires literary practices of the reinterpretation of the past and sets in motion mechanisms of cultural renewal. Engaged in a potentially endless intertextual activity5 of interpretation and rewriting (two strategies that, according to Geoffrey H. Hartman, have a symbiotic relationship), the midrash makes the notions of originality and origin particularly problematic: “Originality shifts its meaning or doubles its locus. The canon is [. . .] extended by an intertextual reflection that has accepted the task of memory and preservation while adding a spacious supplement [. . .]” [Hartman/Budick 1986: xii].6 In its interpretation of the past, the midrash employs the cultural codes of its time and uses quotations from the Torah to refer, above all, to itself and its era. Boyarin carries over the poststructuralist negation of the fixed signifier/signified attribution to the history of Jewish biblical exegesis, which (again) strips the rabbinic reading of its exclusive, timeless authority and opens the scripture to the “strong reader.” The rabbis, thus, are the early readers, who are competent

4 “[. . .] midrash itself becomes a first-order body of work, A LITERATURE—indeed a sacred text—in its own right” [ibid.: 379]. Daniel Boyarin traces this view of the midrash using the works of various authors from Maimonides to Isaak Heinemann (1974) [Boyarin 1990: 1–11]. 5 For the history and the most important concepts of intertextuality see [Smola 2004: 13–42]. 6 As already mentioned, Gelhard also establishes a connection between Jewish hermeneutics and the theory of intertextuality, yet without mentioning Boyarin’s work [2008: 7–8].

1. Introduction

and yet limited by the context of their time, as they attempt to fill the gaps in the meanings of the Torah, which is itself endlessly intertextual and dialogical: The Torah, owing to its own intertextuality, is a severely gapped text, and the gaps are there to be filled by strong readers, which in this case does not mean readers fighting for originality, but readers fighting to find what they must in the holy text. Their own intertext that is, the cultural codes which enable them to make meaning and find meaning. [Boyarin 1990: 16] This newly discovered connection between biblical comments, such as midrash and aggada, and fiction accompanied a productive turn in the study of Jewish literature(s) and their relationship to tradition. Works of Jewish literature were examined as forms of modern midrash in the broader sense, and the literary process, as a constantly updated exploration of the scripture and religious texts. In this way, David C. Jacobson views the key texts of twentieth century Hebrew literature as an integral part and an afterlife of the Jewish exegetic: “In calling this study Modern Midrash, the term midrash is used to refer to the Jewish tradition of the interpretive retelling of biblical stories that began within the Bible itself, developed in the rabbinic and medieval periods, and, I believe, has continued in the present” [1987: 1]. Thus, literature—as midrash—was able to provide a response to the various crises of Jewishness, such as the revision of the Hasidism as a result of the split during the Haskala [ibid.: 4–9]. In his monograph A Bridge of Longing. The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling [1995] (a title that already hints at the idea of a constructed connection with the past, David G. Roskies narrates7 the emergence of Jewish folk culture and, in particular, of the Yiddish storytelling, out of religious legends and folklore: “The Torah was the book of life, the source of law and lore. [. . .] The story could never be fully ‘emancipated’ from the Book of Books” [Roskies 1995: 21–23, italics in the original].8 According to Roskies, Yiddish literature from Rabbi 7 I deliberately use this verb, which is associated with literary activity, since Roskies masterfully recreates his research object while turning his own writing into a fascinating gesture of storytelling. 8 Founded in 1981 by David Roskies and Alan Mintz, the literary journal Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History has a programmatic title. The central concept, “prooftexts,” which combines biblical and literary traditions and interprets literature in the broadest sense as a comment on scripture, is explained on the cover page of each issue: “PROOFTEXTS: The scriptural passages used by the Rabbis to legitimate new interpretations. As the title of a journal of Jewish literature, PROOFTEXTS indicates a concern with the significance of both literary traditions and contemporary issues of textuality. PROOFTEXTS encompasses literary approaches to classical Jewish sources, the study of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, American and European literature, and Jewish writing in other languages.”

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Nachman of Bratslav to Isaac Leib Peretz to Isaac Bashevis Singer developed out of the violation of tradition and partial oblivion. The artistic rebellion of individual influential authors against the constraints of tradition, as well as the gaps caused by forgetting, changed the Jews’ knowledge of their own traditions and legends. The result was a folklorization of literature, for example, by Eisik Meir Dick or Sholem Aleichem, and thus the fusion of various sources and layers of time in what was now perceived in the popular consciousness as authentic folk culture. Roskies expresses the historically evolving dialectic of continuity and innovation, which is very important for my book, with a concise phrasing in which “creative betrayal” becomes the key term: The Jews who occupy that middle ground, seeking to synthesize old and new, form the subject of my book. Their attempt to address contemporary concern in the language(s) of tradition I will call “creative betrayal”. The focus of my book [is on] writers, artists, and intellectuals who choose to reinvent the past because [.  .  .] they are removed from the folk, its stories and songs. [Roskies 1995: 5] The poststructuralist reinterpretation of the midrash genre in categories of contemporary literary criticism is meaningful not least because it connects the midrash to the postmodern practices of Jewish prose writing. Thereby it explicates both the significance of Jewish tradition for the present and, conversely, the reforming effect of contemporary literature on the Jewish tradition. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick describe this shift and blurring of genre demarcations in the following provocative sentence: “So it is, we might say, with the midrashic exegeses of Rabbi Akiva, Reb Derrida, Reb Kermode; as with Reb Milton, Reb Agnon, Reb Borges: pseudepigrapha all” [Hartman/Budick 1986: xi, italics mine—K.S.].9 Reflections on literature as a type of midrash are becoming even more relevant when applied to the texts that explicitly make this genre and the traditions of Jewish hermeneutics the subject of their imagination. In this case, literature turns into a metatext and plays with its own task of creating fictions.10 Today, authors seem to know everything about the theories of poststructuralism, 9 Characteristic for this collection is Myrna Solotorevsky’s essay on Borges’s subversive commentaries on the Bible [Solotorevsky 1986: 253–264]. 10 See the analysis of Iakov Tsigel′man’s novel Shebsl-muzykant (Shebsl the musician) in chap. 11.2.4.

1. Introduction

which gives them the opportunity to incorporate the newest interpretations of Jewish sources into their performative (meta)reflections—in all seriousness and ironically at the same time.

1.2. Semantics of the Posthuman Era: The (Re)Invention of Jewishness The literary resurrection of the Jewish tradition, which I discuss in this study, refers to the period to which David Roskies dedicates the last chapter of his monograph. It is the time of memory after/of oblivion that started, at the latest, after the Shoah. In Jewish literature this new period is marked, among other things, by a change in the status of the author and the narrator. The “hidden tradition” [Arendt 1976] of Jewish knowledge, from which literature drew, cannot be evoked with the earlier self-evidence. The once living meanings and contexts now require a (cultural-)historical explanation; the civilizational break caused by the Holocaust and the consequences of the communism rule still slow down the impulses of renewal and emphasize the necessity of preserving the heritage—a literal conservatism. The tendency towards reconstruction, collection of traces, explanation, and canonization transformed narration into a form of reminiscence of the past. In fact, Jewish literatures constituted a new poetics that has heavily influenced their intertextuality. The author or the narrator assumes the position of a commentator or a historian, a cultural archaeologist, and an ethnographer, a keeper of the memory archive, an artist of stylization, or a director staging the past, who always remains aware of the artificiality or theatricality of this undertaking. This last situation exposes the play of proximity and distance and opens up a special space for the “creative betrayal”: a device that illustrate the illusion of the literary return to one’s roots. In what follows, I will concentrate, among others, on the texts that find ways to modernize the Jewish tradition with a radical de-trivialization or destruction of the literary form. Here, affirmative or, bluntly said, positivist practices of reconstruction and imitation are questioned, and tradition, in the form of the canon, undergoes a renewal and joins the (epistemic) revaluations of the present. In her vast historical analysis of cultural memory practices, Aleida Assmann asserts the “current crisis of empiric memory” and the “unstoppable process of forgetting” [1999a: 13–14]. She explains, with the help of Pierre Nora’s and Maurice Halbwachs’s theories, the phenomenon to which I refer as “posthuman” memory. I use the term “posthuman” to emphasize the separation

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of memory from its biological carrier and the metaphorical afterlife of memories that are based on the testimonies of the (sometimes living, but more often deceased) witnesses or, without any witnesses, on culturally coded knowledge and “normative texts” [ibid.: 13]. Whether knowledge was transmitted initially by means of immediate communication (for example, inside the family), or mediated by culture, the word “memory” here describes a compensatory action that is less and less bound to reality and experience. Symptomatically, Assmann relates this new type of memory to the cultural rupture caused by the Shoah, which demands that “the empiric memory of contemporary witnesses must be translated into the cultural memory of posterity” [ibid.: 15]. This translation, in which the tradition is revived and, at the same time, partially lost, is explored by Marianne Hirsch in her analysis of “postmemory” [2008]. Hirsch focuses on time “in the aftermath of catastrophe” [ibid.: 104] and thus describes a phenomenon that ultimately extends far beyond her immediate field of investigation, namely the perception of the past by the second generation—the children of Shoah survivors. Hirsch’s approach potentially encompasses the use of and reflection about all artistic means in the situation of biological and cultural loss, which I call “posthuman” in a wide sense of the word. With this, I designate a totality that can be applied to explore a large variety of devices and semantics used in literature, visual art, or performative practices that name or symbolically embody the loss. Hence the importance of Hirsch’s definition of postmemory, which emphasizes the general state of “belatedness” and thus the combination of continuity and rupture [ibid.: 106]. This expanded interpretation is viable when applied to describe symbolic responses not only to a catastrophe that has happened in the relatively recent past (still present in one’s family memory), but also the rupture of tradition in general, which is resurrected by the media because, in some way or other, it regains a living meaning in the present. The recourse to the long forgotten, which again becomes a source of identity as a result of historical and political changes, is even more open to the processes of recreation than commemorative work with the lingering consequences of a trauma. The distance makes the above-mentioned phenomena of folklorization and virtualization of Jewishness possible in the first place, as it offers broader and more daring possibilities of reinterpretation to the artist. Another important component of Hirsch’s reflection is her observation about the increasing medialization of references to the past. She mentions “the practice of citation and mediation” [ibid.], the “archival” knowledge, and the institutionalized remembrance—official images, actions, and narratives—that

1. Introduction

deform or even replace individual memory.11 The inevitable dwindling of the (albeit pretended) authenticity of memory is compensated in the culture of postmemory through empathy, longing for the past, and individualization of the neutral and generally available documentary knowledge. This results in a paradox that combines testimony and imagination, fidelity and ignorance. The authors whose works I analyze in this book often acquire their knowledge about Jewish culture only from written sources. Thus, the question of how collective “memory” affects the structure of individual remembrance is supplanted by a larger issue: all references to tradition are, of necessity, mediated by literature. So, my focus will not only be the (fictionalized) memory, but rather the artistic mediation of tradition, that is, literature as a comprehensive, selfexplanatory trope of memory. It is at this point that the paradigm of cultural memory most closely aligns with that of cultural semiotics. For semiotics, the text as a sum of its literary devices becomes the symbolic and iconic sign of memory. With reference to Iurii Lotman, Renate Lachmann understands the cultural space “as a space of a ‘common memory’ [. . .] in which ‘certain common texts can be stored and updated.’” “The memory is therefore not a passive storage unit, but a complex text production mechanism” [Lachmann 1993: xvii]. Here, the “desemiotization and resemiotization of cultural signs” creates cultural dynamics. Lachmann speaks of the “movement [of signs] into latency” or their “reactualization” and distinguishes between informative and creative memory. Creative memory in particular is capable of making “the total text repertoire of a culture potentially active” [ibid.: xvii]. In an earlier study, Jan Assmann describes some landscapes as topoi that can regain their symbolic character and actuality under certain circumstances: “they are elevated [.  .  .] as a whole to the status of a sign, i.e. semiotized” [Assmann 1992: 60]. Below, I will show to what extent and under what historical circumstances certain strata and topoi of cultural tradition were resemiotized in the period of the late and post-Soviet Jewish renaissance, and how the attempt to “return to one’s roots” was related to the Jewish traditional paradigm of memory. The resemiotization of Judaistic constants was at the core of the late Soviet aliyah12 culture and literature (see chap. 5). Political implications of the Jewish

11 Cf. Aby Warburg’s generalizing expression “pre-established forms” [Hirsch 2008: 120], used to describe remembering “only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” [ibid.: 106]. 12 The word aliyah, Hebrew “ascension,” in the Bible referred to the way to the Jerusalem Temple, which was located on Mount Zion. After the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, the word aliyah was used to describe the return of Jews in exile to Eretz Israel, and today it mostly refers to the

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national movement and of the entire Jewish underground culture in the Soviet Union, which was dominated by struggle for emigration and Israel idealism, evoke Jan Assmann’s concept of “hot memory.” Unlike “cold memory,” hot memory is called upon to bring about “break, rupture, and change” [Assmann 1992: 70]. Biblical origins, the topos of the Holy Land, the destroyed Jewish Temple and the galut13 suddenly gain a tremendous explosive power in the secular here and now. The remote past becomes the present and paves the way for the longed-for future. In this context, collective memory rises to become a historical event, according to Lucian Hölscher, who claims that “historical interpretations, as they are made in memories and aspirations, are themselves historical events” [1995: 166]. Interpretations of the past in the spirit of the new Zionism and sometimes also of Jewish messianism, as they appear in exodus literature, become a part of not only cultural and literary, but also political history. Often used in this context is the metaphor of awakening from the long sleep of amnesia—a mythological and folklore motif: “The danger of forgetting arises from the attack of a demonic power, it is the the strategy of hostile cunning. [. . .] Man is held with power and deceit in a world in which he does not belong [. . .]” [Assmann 1999a: 169]. The communist regime appears in the mystical exodus prose such as Efrem (Efraim) Baukh’s Lestnitsa Iakova (Jacob’s ladder) or Eli Liuksemburg’s Desiatyi golod (The tenth hunger) as a hypnotic state, a somnium, a slumber, which is only overcome by turning to Judaic knowledge and the subsequent “return” to Eretz Yisrael—a “gnostic drama” that includes a new version of “every alienation story” [ibid.].14 As we will see below, the aspirations reflected in exodus literature combine ahistorical messianic hopes of redemption with the real political vision of Zionism. The Judaistic discourse of awakening is linked to the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis: “The anamnesis is the return of the soul to its own eternal origin and the reassurance about what is given to it from there” [Folkers 1991: 365]. The “anamnesis” of one’s origins, which is necessary in the Egyptian captivity of the Soviet Union, is constituted as a thorny path, full of hardships, which leads through the simulacra of the present to pure knowledge, a laborious breaking

repatriation of Jewish emigrants in Israel. Often synonymous with this is the term “exodus,” which also refers to the exodus of Jews from Egypt and their liberation from slavery, described or invented in the Book of Exodus. Generally, “exodus” refers to the Jews leaving the country of exile. Both terms connect the Jewish emigration today with biblical “origins.” 13 The Hebrew galut (Yiddish golus) corresponds to the Greek word “diaspora” (“dispersion”), but denotes the situation of banishment or exile, a primary notion of Judaism, in short: not home. 14 Aleida Assmann writes that the metaphors of sleep and awakening have become the traditional element of political rhetoric of revolutionary and national movements since the nineteenth century [Assmann 1999a: 169–171].

1. Introduction

through a thick layer of coincidence and falsehood: the anamnesis is a “cleansed memory” [ibid.]. Thus, Horst Folkers finds in Walter Benjamin’s thought a synthesis between Plato’s anamnesis theory and the Judaistic dogma stating that the “memory” of liberation from slavery is always present for a religious Jew [ibid.: 364–366]. In the heyday of global postmodernist writing, with its skeptical, subversive, or playful treatment of the traditional Jewish topoi, late and post-Soviet aliyah literature—an anachronism of a kind—(re)produced idealistic, retrospective models of Jewish topography and identity. This literature became both a counter-script and an unintended projection, a mirror image of communist and socialist-realist teleology (cf. chap. 5.6). In my book, the specific literary forms of mediation, “a bridge of longing” [Roskies 1995], will be analyzed in the context of the Jewish revival—a phenomenon that extends far beyond Eastern Europe. The renaissance of Jewish culture began in the United States and Western Europe after World War II. In Eastern Europe it went on, in the underground and in semi-official circles of Jewish intelligentsia, starting from the 1960s, before it became mainstream after the fall of the communist regimes. It can, as indicated above, hardly be explored without taking into account the issue of the destroyed Jewish identity. The paradox of the vibrant presence of the reconstructed, museified, or staged Jewish past, combined with a very small quantity of traditionally living Jews, has attracted the attention of researchers in recent decades and produced a number of synonymous terms: “virtually Jewish” [Gruber 2002], “le Juif imaginaire” [Finkielkraut 1980], “Imagining Russian Jewry” [Zipperstein 1999], “the constructed Jew” [Gantner/Kovács 2007], “(in)visible Jews” [Rüthers 2010]. The associated ambivalence of Jewish identity—supported by Jews as well as by non-Jews—makes the problem of stereotypization, cultural unification, i.e. the blending out of internal differences, and (positive) ascriptions of alterity to Jews more relevant. In early 1980s, Alain Finkielkraut had the courage to raise the issue of the “imagined” or conceived Jew in his autobiography, where he analyzed his own Jewishness as part of the collective fantasy that he had internalized as a child, as a fiction of unique individuality. This individuality is based on the notion of sublimity and exclusivity of Jewish victimhood: the tragic experience of the past remains the foundation of identity for generations of Jews who—for Finkielkraut, in the Western European context—ignore the growing complexity of the present and live in an eternal anachronism: [. . .] with Jewishness, I received the best present a child after the Holocaust could dream of. I inherited the suffering that I have not experienced. The persecuted gave their image to me, but I

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have not endured the persecution. I could enjoy my exceptional destiny completely at ease. [Finkielkraut 1980: 13] Finkielkraut’s analytical confession was followed by studies on the constructions of Jewish identity in the media, museums, popular culture, literature, and art. Summarizing the results of this research under one term, is becomes apparent that the performativity15 plays a key role here. Steven J. Zipperstein observes, for example, a shift in the perception of East European Jewish life in the United States in the 1950s, which provoked the creation of a bright, coherent, and nostalgic image of the Jewish past, in particular of the cozy and pious shtetls. To the aspiring, successful American Jews, this image was supposed to offer a “proof for continuity” of Jewish culture before and after the Shoah [Zipperstein 1999: 5ff., 16–39]. The shtetl utopia produced a topographical myth that related to the spiritual needs of the present. The myth of the vanished Yiddish civilization was “a mythic home, not one that they [American Jews] want to return to but one that they want to bear witness to. It is a land of Jewish ghosts and of lost cultures” [Aviv/Shneer 2005: 8]. Ruth Ellen Gruber interprets the enormous popularity of everything Jewish in Europe over the last three to four decades of the twentieth century as showing a tendency towards alternative and, in Eastern Europe, often nonconformist self-identification. Judaism or Jewishness became a characteristic component of counter-culture, while Jewish history and culture as well as the Jews themselves became the object of mythologization, often based on half-knowledge [cf. Gruber 2002: 3–30]. The performative role of Jewishness, as a universalized product of external projections, consisted in it being a fluid, “metaphorical symbol” that fitted many trends and phenomena, “filling in the blank spaces” [ibid.: 9].16

15 I derive my understanding of performativity from the context of the cultural studies debates of recent decades, which draw from John L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (cf. most recently [Yurchak 2014: 62–69; 74f.]: Yurchak refers to Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu and analyses, above all, the performative rituality of Soviet reality). Important is the concept of culture as the emergence and exchange of constantly changing symbols and attributions of meaning. According to the ethnologist Clifford Geertz, cultural meanings are staged and inscribed into dynamic social contexts (cf. [Bachman-Medick 2004: 26–30]): “Culture is produced and reproduced by representing” [ibid.: 28]. 16 A prominent example of the collective construction of Jewish identity informed by distance and belonging is the phenomenon of the East European Jew, Ostjude. Since the end of the nineteenth century in both Western and Eastern Europe this image has become either a negative, or an idealized, projection of Jewish culture in the process of dissolution. Monica Rüthers [2010] describes this work of the collective imaginary, which was promoted by intellectuals such as Semen An-skii and Martin Buber as well as by the broader intellectual public, up to Polish post-communist period with its multimedial culture of Jewish revival. Rüthers also draws attention to the importance of “media translation” of the image of the

1. Introduction

At the end of the communist era, quite a few Russian Jews sought to return to the relieving circular, mythical-religious sense of space and time their grandparents had rejected at the beginning of this period in the first third of the twentieth century. Both eras were motivated by the desire for breakout and liberation. The hope of escaping from the small world of the pious Jews into world history, which united the Jews during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 [Krutikov 2001: 115–117],17 was followed by disillusionment and a new revolt. However, the late Soviet turn of the spiral in the process of collective Jewish selfdiscovery was, to a large extent, already part of the internalized Soviet utopia. Despite the shared dialectics of the loss of tradition and the approach to it, return and invention, differences between collective and popular culture processes, on the one hand, and literary and artistic developments, on the other, are obvious and important. Literature and art more often address problems and disparities, ironies, paradoxes, or criticisms. They channel not only empathy and individuality of the references to tradition, which Marianne Hirsch observes in the practices of postmemory and which can be manipulated by the media. They also demonstrate the awareness of complexity that “fends off ” idealizations and stereotyping and sometimes makes them the object of artistic reflection. Jewish literatures, moreover, carry within themselves the—possibly resistant and negating—memory of the Torah and its exegesis, as has been previously mentioned. The “double situation of the secularization of the sacred and the sacralization of the secular,” as phrased by Dan Miron, the questioning return to the origins, and the exploration of the distance between epochs form the essential impulse for the creation of these literatures to this day.

1.3. Semiotic Context The renaissance of Judaism in the late Soviet Union, on the one hand, marked the emergence of Jewish underground culture and, on the other hand, replicated in some of its most important trends the mythological, (sub)religious paradigms of thought that structured and energized the official culture of the Soviet period. Thus, exodus literature proved to be both a counterpart and a structural and ideological reflection of the socialist-realist doctrine. I consider the new shtetl, for example in Roman Vishniac’s photo albums of the 1940s: “This world is not differentiated in itself, but homogeneous, timeless, and directed entirely towards the spiritual” [Rüthers 2010: 84]. 17 Mikhail Krutikov describes the changes brought by the 1905 revolution for the Russian Jews and especially for Yiddish writers as the transition from the “cyclical sequence of seasons and religious festivals” to the “rapid and straightforward linear development” [2001: 115].

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Zionism-inspired exodus prose, either unofficial or created during emigration, as a symbolic expression of the duality that Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii formulated for Russian culture in general: “[. . .] the new [is] understood not as a continuation, but as an eschatological replacement of the whole” [1977a: 3]. The “regeneration of archaic forms” [ibid.], from which the Soviet power and culture of the socialist-realist canon drew its ideological potential, was directly inherited by the Jewish resistance literature: both were inspired by collective spiritualism. The thesis of cultural semiotics about a mechanism of mythological coding of historical events, activated especially in times of violent upheavals and ideological shifts [Lotman/Uspenskii 2004], proves itself once again in the revived Jews’ approaches to Judaism. The Jewish movement charged contemporary political events with the symbolic power of biblical tradition, drawing on both the legendary layers of the past and distant geographical spaces. This appropriation of the past had the power to create an alternative identity for a large community, while remaining under the influence of the Russian-Soviet collective myths. This situation corresponds to the well-known model of the (here synchronous) “double culture” (dvoinaia kul′tura), which was developed by Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii [1977, 1977a] and recently revised.18 As a structural quantity, double culture means an ensemble of dualistic-binary codes of social behavior, textual and iconic practice, and various sign types: Here the structures determined by censorship and counter-censorship are conceived as the oppositions of official/unofficial, open and dialogical/closed and monological, hierarchical/anti-hierarchical. [Lachmann 2012: 114] Evgeny Dobrenko explores Soviet cultural discourse as a “metaphor of power” (metafora vlasti) and interprets the concept of myth, following Roland Barthes, Ernst Cassirer, and Iurii Lotman, in relation to the communist art canon (here also with recourse to Andrei Siniavskii) as a metaphorical transformation or distortion of language. For the authorities, linguistic manipulations were a tool that could be used to create a model of reality and to legitimate it aesthetically [1993b: 31–39]. The politically charged substitution of reality with symbols has an inherent historical teleology that gives the created figures of the canon a symbolic, abstract, and hyperbolic character. In socialist realism, both the power

18 See the anthology edited by Susanne Frank, Cornelia Ruhe, and Alexander Schmitz in 2012 and in particular the contribution by Renate Lachmann.

1. Introduction

of the protagonist, a “common man,” and that of their antagonist is boundless: “[. . .] socialist realist art [. . .] becomes the iconography of ideological forms, the pure naturalization of the symbols of the language of power” [ibid.: 42]. In his structuralism-inspired study of Soviet architecture, written in the late 1970s, Vladimir Papernyi defines the semiotic orientation of Soviet totalitarian culture—culture 2 (kul′tura 2) as follows: “It mythologically identifies the signifier and the signified” [1996: 283]. From here, Papernyi derives the fundamental principle of kul′tura 2: “the image and its original are the same thing, therefore the distortion of the image threatens the existence of the original” [ibid.].19 I will read the turn to Judaism, conceived as departure and return, the discovery of self in the “origins” of the Hebrew Bible20 and, finally, the utopian, often mystical images of the Promised Land in the texts of Jewish nonconformist intellectuals, against the backdrop of socialist realist mythmaking. The sacralization of Jewish history and its exclusion, together with Jewish topography, from the historical context, often refers to its (unwanted) rootedness in the Soviet culture permeated by para-religious symbols.21 The studies on mass aesthetics and the canon culture of communism, which were developed in the last three to four decades both in Russia and in the West, mark the beginning of the (de-)constructivist and performative turn in Soviet and Russian studies. If Dobrenko sees in totalitarian cultures a symbiosis of the “transformed religious consciousness” [1993b: 58] with collective mythology, his question is guided by the impetus to uncover the signification practices of the regime and thus the philosophemes that were used to create the “second reality”

19 This thought marks one of the main threads in Papernyi’s monograph and is also reflected in other observations. Thus, the fusion of the signifier and the signified in the culture of Stalinism is shown in its magical belief in proper names [1996: 182–191] as well as in anthropomorphisation of architectural objects (ibid.: 193–194). “Culture 2 is to a certain extent also the culture of the Book” [ibid.: 230]. 20 Papernyi metaphorically describes the artefacts produced by culture 2 as Bible interpretations that complement each other (cf. ibid.: 228). Dobrenko also draws this parallel [Dobrenko 1993b: 231]. 21 Cf. on Soviet culture as (quasi-/para-)sacred, ritualized aesthetic practice [Clark 1981/2000], [Günther 1984], [Papernyi 1985/1996], [Groys 1988/2003], and [Uffelmann 2010 (especially chapter 8)]. According to Epshtein’s psychoanalytical interpretation, the religious subconscious in Russian communism reached a special depth under the pressure of prohibitions; atheism included and promoted new, sublimated forms of faith [1999: 347]. “The atheistic society literally seethes with religious allusions, symbols, references, substitutions, and transformations” [ibid.: 355]. This transformed religiosity led directly to the “dogmatic ignorance” of the post-Soviet Christian Orthodox Renaissance (cf. [ibid.: 380]). Whether the religious continuity under official socialism was “functional” or “genealogical” in nature is discussed in [Uffelmann 2010: 727 ff.].

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of Soviet everyday life.22 The conception of Soviet culture as an original aesthetic construct—a “work of art in its totality” (Gesamtkunstwerk) [Groys 2003]— also inspired Mikhail Epshtein’s famous attempt to connect its ideological and historic aspects with the hyperreality-creating art of postmodernism.23 What makes the two cultural formations fundamentally comparable for Epshtein is the production of self-referential (aesthetic) signs detached from reality, systems of simulacra, to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s expression: “Soviet ideology [. . .] aimed towards a complete semiotization of the entire reality, its transformation into text” [Epshtein 2005: 71].24 Even more important in the context of my study is Epshtein’s thesis stating that this mechanism of substitution was set in motion in Soviet Russia long before the emergence of Western European postmodernism, and that it led to the restoration of premodernism—a “new Middle Ages” [ibid.: 91].25 The sacralization of space and the creation of topographical myths in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and especially in the 1930s accompany the development of archaic patterns of thought. For Katerina Clark they are related to the idea of Soviet nation-building [Clark 2003: 5] and represent another major component of collective signification, which is crucial for understanding the alternative concepts of space in late Soviet counter-culture. The bipolar tension of the center and the periphery as well as the temporal-spatial binaries derived from this relation—“high/low—past/future—profane/sacred” [cf. Clark 2003]26—are reflected in the specific way in which the culture of the 22 On cultural-semiotic coding and signification processes see [Posner 1991]. Roland Posner takes as his starting point the opposition between center and periphery promoted by the Moscow-Tartu school and explains the dynamics of the interchanging “semiotizaton and desemiotization of a segment of reality” [ibid.: 57]. All of this forms the background against which alternative spatial concepts of the late Soviet counter-culture are to be viewed [ibid.: 57]. 23 See the chapter “Sozdanie giperreal′nosti” (“The Creation of a Hyperreality”) [Epstein 2005: 69]. 24 See also Tanja Zimmermann’s formulation: “The more life was constructed, the more real the artwork became” [2007: 18]. 25 In the end of the 1980s, Boris Groys explored the same mechanisms of semiotic substitution in the art of Russian conceptualism, to which he ascribed a great proximity to poststructuralist ideas, namely the thought of Derrida. For Groys, “утопизм советской идеологии и заключается, если угодно, в ее постмодерности . . .” [2003: 135] (“the utopianism of Soviet ideology lies, if you will, precisely in its postmodern nature . . .”). For Il′ia Kabakov “быт и идеология совпали в бесконечном тексте” [Kabakov 2008: 111] (“everyday life and ideology merge into an infinite text”). See also Mark Lipovetsky’s literary-historical statement: “Paradoxically, Russian postmodernism emerges within a totalitarian culture [. . .]” [2008: ix]. 26 On architectural and cinematic representations of Moscow as the symbolic and sacral center of the communist space in the 1920s and 1930s cf. [Papernyi 1985/1996: 107–115] and [Boym 2001: 97–98].

1. Introduction

Jewish dissent appropriated spatial structures long handed down in Judaism. Increasingly important becomes the opposition between Israel—the center of future-oriented utopia and a sacred place of reunification—and the Soviet Union (especially its power metropolis, Moscow) as a spiritually outdated space of collective amnesia and oppression. Moreover, the Jewish underground culture absorbs not only the vertical, but also the horizontal topographic axes of Russian and Soviet culture. In Russian debates on the historical opposition between the West (the Occident with the idealized attributes: “freedom,” “enlightenment,” “civilization”) and the East (the Orient with its counterattributes, “slavery,” “isolation,” “barbarism”),27 which were actively taken up by dissidents, the aliyah discourse occupies a characteristic position: Israel does not become the third space, an additum [Kissel/Uffelmann 1999: 24] between two poles of values, but takes the structural space of the West, the role of the better other. This projection is, in its turn, refuted in skeptical anti-Zionist emigration narratives, in which the now tangible Israel often embodies the negatively connoted, stereotypically conceived Orient (cf. chap. 7). In any case, the duality of the topographical cultural models is preserved. It can be traced back to the “гибридный характер советской модерности” [Lipovetsky 2008: xvii] (“hybrid character of Soviet modernity”), which makes possible both radical progress and a retreat into the archaics. The effects of the “internalization” of politically canonized cultural forms in emancipatory movements, resistance and minority cultures have so far only been investigated selectively. Oleg Kharkhordin addresses this mutation of power matrices in his vast study of collective Russian mentality (in particular, its political and administrative aspect): [.  .  .] the dissident milieu seemed to share the same principle as the wider Soviet society. Mutual animosity created ideas that opposed the official discourse, but that became a dogma in their own right; it was as if the dissidents played the same game, only that their ideals were an opposite of the official ones. [Kharkhordin 1999: 315] Serguei Oushakine examines the forms of protest associated with political dissent in the Soviet Union within the framework of the symbolic field preformed and marked out by the authority. Oushakine uses Foucault’s thesis about the

27 See, for example, [van Baak 1995] and [Wolff 1995]; for a summary of research situation and debate on this topic, see [Hausbacher 2009: 67–87].

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discursive connection between authority and resistance: “It is only possible to become involved in a discourse by entering the discursive field that is already there, that is, only by accepting the existing discursive conventions. [. . .] The dominant and the dominated draw on the same vocabulary of symbolic means and rhetorical devices” [2001: 206–207]. The historian Malte Rolf also argues: “[. . .] the fixation on a counter-canon does not leave canonical thinking behind, and the orientation to the only right thing reflects the bipolar thinking of the official cultural industry under different conditions. [. . .] The Soviet symbolic cosmos was the framework within which cultural practices were appropriated, reinterpreted, and ultimately usurped” [2010: 184–185]. The participation of nonconformist Jewish literature in the constitution of the Soviet counter-canon was expressed, among other things, in the establishment of the unofficial publishing system, the Jewish samizdat and tamizdat, which existed for several decades parallel to various non-Jewish samizdat and tamizdat institutions (cf. chap. 4). This very particular niche of dissident culture reacted to the widespread tabooing of Jewish content in the official sphere. Just as the general samizdat “took over” the “important function of the amputated cultural memory” [Kissel 2010: 166], the Jewish samizdat and tamizdat took up the compensatory task of resurrecting or reinventing a specific part of that culture. It was a highly symbolic activity that would be unthinkable without opposition to the regime. In this regard, my work is an attempt at a new contextualization of poststructuralist re-construction and deconstruction practice, an analysis of hidden dependencies and a revision of collective (self-)definitions. To quote Judith Butler, who follows the pathos of Michel Foucault’s “critical genealogy,” I ask: “Is there a history [. . .] that might expose the binary options [for Butler, of the sexes—K.S.] as a variable construction?” [2006]. How could the new Judaism speak for itself from the center of the repressive system it negated? How was the repatriation discourse perceived by its actors and especially by its writers and poets? And how did the new Zionism build its own metaphysics?28 Applying Butler’s analysis of gender identities to this case, late Soviet Jewishness turns out to be highly performative, “i.e., it constitutes itself the identity it is supposed to be” [ibid.]. The energy of cultural return and spiritual discoveries,29 typical of the intellectual milieu of the late Soviet period, allows the cultural meanings 28 The new Judaism and the biblically inspired model of repatriation relates, of course, not to the entirety of Russian Jewish emigrants and “returnees,” but to a part of them, and, above all, to the cultural discourse produced by this part. 29 Il′ia Kabakov associates “the air of the 70s” (“vozdukh 70-kh godov”) with a special inclination of the intellectuals to the metaphysical and transcendent [2008: 89–90].

1. Introduction

of the unofficial, which emerge from the vacuum and the tautologization of Soviet ideology, to be clearly recognized as a construct, as the projection of nostalgic longing related to the past and to geographically distant spaces. As is generally known, all collective memory is based on various ideological and historical conventions. As Per-Arne Bodin notes, using a comparable example, the idealized image of the Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet period arises from the need for nostalgia and detachment from the recent past—and, at the same time, through the traditional association of Russian Orthodoxy with the imperial, conservative, and often xenophobic national discourse [Bodin 2009: 31]; the new Orthodox cult served and still serves the restoration of a “medieval monoculture” [ibid.: 56]. These considerations seem to follow up with Svetlana Boym’s earlier investigation, which distinguishes between “restorative” and “reflexive” nostalgia and regards the former as the basis for the emergence of all national retrospective movements. The restorative nostalgia emphasizes nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not even think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia defends the absolute truth, and the reflexive nostalgia questions it. [2001: xviii] The dual cultural mechanisms, which Boym discovers across epochs and Bodin demonstrates by means of the strengthened Orthodox faith in today’s Russia,30are also of importance for the investigation of the unofficial Jewish culture, in particular its prose. The Judaistic aspirations of the writers, who had been, for the large part, educated as atheists, were fueled by the same desire for mystical life designs, for a living miracle. As a form of restorative nostalgia, they sought to “conquer and spatialize time” [Boym 2001: 49]. The Jewish dissent was oriented towards the poles of tradition vs. subversion, as determined by the formative Soviet culture, and continued the activity of myth production.

30 See also a critical remark by Boris Groys: “The unified utopia of classical [. . .] Stalinism was replaced [. . .] by a multitude of private, individual utopias [. . .]” [2003: 102].

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As will be shown in the last chapters of this study, the reproduction of mechanisms of semiotic substitution of reality, as described above, only ceases in the Jewish literature of late and post-Soviet postmodernism (above all, in the texts of Mikhail Iudson and Oleg Iur′ev). In texts that I approach as postmodernist, these mechanisms are explicated, alienated, and analyzed by linguistic means. Here, the “postmodern” activity of communism, as defined according to Epshtein, is transferred to the metalevel of postmodernist literary discourse and thus subjected to a symbolic revaluation. In the ironic, highly (self-)reflexive negation of totalizing rhetoric and narratives, which fall apart into absurd fragments, this literature evades the language of dictatorship and overcomes it discursively. Literature becomes a medium for overcoming bipolar patterns insofar as it attempts to liberate language itself from the “metaphysics of presence.”

1.4. Cultural-Historical Context Apart from the structural and discursive dependencies that a deconstructive analysis can expose, this work is also going to shed light on the culturalhistorical complexity and hybridity of non-conformist, “parallel” cultures that oppose structuralist simplification.31 The “mythology of the late Soviet period” [Savitskii 2002: 8] drew on heterogeneous sources and reflected the pronounced discursive plurality of the 1960–1980s Russia. Jewish literature of this period also emerges from the polyphony and diversity of its intellectual environment, in which, in addition to Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity, parapsychology and the Kabbalah, the (neo-) avant-garde and existentialism, and Western European modernism were rediscovered (cf. [Vaiskopf 2001b: 242], [Savitskii 2002: 82], [Kabakov 2008: 89–90], [Sabbatini 2011: 344–345], [Yurchak 2014: 314–315]). As a common denominator for the coexistence of intellectual subcultures, especially in the Leningrad underground, Marco Sabbatini names the “alternative approach to culture” [2011: 341]. As noted in Mikhail Epshtein’s scientific mystification Novoe sektanstvo. Tipy religiozno-filosofskikh umonastroenii v Rossii (70–80 gg. XX v.) [1994], the interest in the alternative—the resistance against the spiritual 31 According to Alexei Yurchak [2014: 74–75], this hybridity—accompanied by development of alternative spaces—had to do with the almost completed ritualization and standartization of official rhetorical formulas and visual culture in late socialism [2014: 74–75]. Dobrenko, for example, describes the late Soviet military discourse as an “absoliutnai[a] pobed[a] tavtologii” [1993b: 226] (“the absolute victory of tautology”).

1. Introduction

canon of atheism—was expressed, among other things, in the appearance of various parareligious associations and sects in the late Soviet period.32 It was precisely the ideocratic, quasi-sacral character of state power that encouraged the emergence of alternative forms of religious consciousness.33 The softening or loosening of the Soviet literary canon since the 1960s, which has been much better researched than the underground spiritual movements and which I will discuss further below, forms a broader background for the emergence of nonconformist minority literatures. In this context, the influence of the alternative topographical designs of village prose on Jewish literature cannot be overlooked.34 Galina Belaia ascribes the derevenshchiki’s longing for the Russian periphery and the pre-1917 period to the atmosphere of their time, when the creation of new essentialist identities was supposed to save people from the spiritual crisis of late communism.35 Under different, sometimes opposite, national and historical premises, neo-Slavophiles and Judaisminspired intellectuals all formed their concepts of cultural return,36 memorative

32 On the “reorganization” of religious networks in the space of the unofficial and on the role of local religious leaders under communism see also the illuminating essay by Alexander Panchenko [2012]. 33 In her influential essay “Pravoslavie i postmodernizm” (“Orthodoxy and postmodernism”) written on the eve of the perestroika, Tat′iana Goricheva characterizes alternative, polupodpol′nye (semi-official) cultures of late socialism as vertical and transcendent: “The genesis of a ‘second,’ semi-forbidden culture in the Soviet Union is a new attempt to fill the void. From the very beginning, this second culture opened up to the transcendent, verticalaxiological dimension of existence” [Goricheva 1991: 15]. 34 Below, this influence is discussed in relation to David Markish’s Zionist youth novel Priskazka. Later, a parody of the village prose appears in Mikhail Iudson’s deconstructivist, metadiscursive novel Lestnitsa na shkaf (cf. chap. 11.2.1). 35 Cf. “[. . .] the idea of the historical link between different times [. . .] manifested itself as the natural and organic world-view” [Belaia 1992: 16]. And “[. . .] the phenomenon of the village prose itself is important not only for historians of literature but also for future historians of the mythological consciousness and its tenacity in the art of totalitarian countries in the twentieth century” [ibid.]. 36 Since the 1960s, the literature of other ethnic minorities has been filled with the pathos of the literal return to the old homeland. One example is the literature of the Crimean Tatars, who were deported from the Crimea to Central Asia in 1944 under cruel conditions. In the late Soviet Union, both Crimean Tatar literature and literature about them circulated in the samizdat. In her dissident novel Zelenyi shater (2011, see the chapter “Miliutinskii sad”), Liudmila Ulitskaia fictionalizes the protest movement of the Crimean Tatars who fought for their return to the Crimea. It is the task of future research to study the nonconformist literatures of other ethnic minorities, less known than the Jews, under late communism. In Ulitskaia’s novel, the polyphony of the late Soviet protest culture is expressed in the episode of the farewell with the fictional dissident and poet Mikha Melamid, who took his own life: “В Ташкенте его почтили татары, отслужили заупокойную службу по мусульманскому обряду. В Иерусалиме единоверцы Марлена заказали кадиш, и десять евреев прочитали на иврите непонятные слова, а в Москве Тамара [. . .] заказала панихиду в Преображенском

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reconstruction, and intellectual continuity.37 Similar to the Russian village, the Jewish shtetl—“the capital of Yiddishland” [Ro’i 2012a: 29]—has increasingly functioned since the 1960s as an alternative memory space, located in the past or in the periphery. From the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Jews began to explore their Jewish origins in the space of the semi-official and the unofficial. They discovered a past that explained their present and led to the future. The new knowledge not only served their direct goal—the emigration to Israel—but also led to the emergence of the Jewish cultural underground, which existed until the political changes in the end of the 1980s. The Jewish nonconformist culture developed mainly in the large Russian cities, but it also existed in the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Social networks, spread over multiple zones of contact, produced collective activities such as the performance of Jewish religious rites, meetings near synagogues, private seminars and guided tours, production of Jewish underground press, and the organization of artistic circles and exhibitions in private homes. Recent research that reconstructs the communication system, knowledge, institutions, and actors of samizdat and tamizdat (see [Komaromi 2012a], [Kind-Kovács/Labov 2013], [Valieva 2013], [Alber/Stegman 2016]) has paid little attention to the social niche of the Jewish unofficial culture. Although significant testimonies, overviews, chronicles, and historiographical studies have appeared since the 1970s,38 there is few studies on the interaction of the Jewish and the non-Jewish unofficial networks, the contents and character of Jewish unofficial publications, specific features of the alternative public sphere(s) that arose from the refusenik39 movement and the context of emergence of Jewish artefacts from the spirit of collective communication. The cultural production of the “new Jews” in the Soviet Union raises the question of which literature, Jewish or non-Jewish historical texts, and art they received and through which sources, institutions, and Jewish or non-Jewish mediators they did so.40 The

храме” [2011: 542] (“In Tashkent the Tatars commemorated him; they held a mass for the dead according to the Muslim rite. In Jerusalem, Marlen’s fellow believers ordered a Kaddish, and ten Jews read unknown words in Hebrew. And in Moscow [.  .  .] Tamara ordered a [Orthodox] mass in the Transfiguration Church”). 37 On the retro-utopian literature of the (post-)Soviet North from the postcolonial perspective see [Smola 2016] and [Smola 2017]. 38 See chap. 2. 39 Also otkaznik (from the Russian otkaz meaning “refusal”): Soviet Jews who were denied emigration to Israel. 40 The authors of the collection The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, edited by Yaacov Ro’i [2012], made an important contribution to sociocultural research of the unofficial Jewish culture.

1. Introduction

Jewish cultural public sphere, as well as the other unofficial and semi-official exchange spaces, emerged from private contacts and jointly discovered sources. It consisted of small but intellectually significant groups of participants. Due to the rarity of the traditional Jewish culture,41 the Jewish cultural renaissance was primarily based on the study of accessible heritage and was therefore, in a completely different, non-Jewish sense, a culture of the book—of Bible, fiction, written history, painting, and photographic image.42 Stefanie Hoffman, who researches Jewish samizdat, states: “People searched bookstores and private collections for rare copies of pre-Revolution Jewish books in Russian, which were generally no longer available in public libraries” [Hoffman 1991: 90]. However, since access to Jewish sources was limited and the socialization of most refuseniks was non-Jewish,43 another important quality of this culture should be featured: its synthetic and often eclectic character. The knowledge about Judaism and Jewish past was drawn from various historical periods and places, often accessible only in fragments, and/or ran through non-Jewish or secondary sources. Thus, in the end of the 1950s, the poet Anri Volokhonskii found the treatise Kabbala by the French occultist Papus in the Leningrad State Public Library, which also contained a translation of the book of Genesis and the cosmological work Sefer Yetzirah. Volokhonskii copied the translations by hand and, as he stated, used them as a source for his scientific theories and poems [Kukuj 2013: 236]. It is remarkable that Volokhonskii studied these Judaistic writings in order to later “decipher” with their help the Revelation from the New Testament [ibid.]. Certainly, in this intertextual and inter-iconic approach to Judaism,44 late Soviet Jewish intellectuals were hardly unique. As shown in chap. 1.2, ongoing assimilation and emigration processes as well as the disaster of the Shoah meant that Jewishness in Europe and America was reinvented rather than reconstructed from steadfast memories from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Underground Jewish intellectuals received access to Jewish culture under quite different and often accidental circumstances. The painter Mikhail Grobman drew his inspiration from the Bible and Hasidic stories, which he knew 41 On Judaism in the late Soviet Union see [Charny 2012: 304–333]. 42 Characteristic is the testimony of the nonconformist Jewish painter Alek Rapoport, which came down to us in retelling: “Rapoport says that his teachers were not people, but libraries— the State Library and the Art Academy Library” [Gazanevshchina 1989: 223]. 43 The gentile upbringing of Jewish intellectuals in the metropolises and their assimilation to the majority urban population were also the reasons why the Jewish underground often showed no particular interest in the “living” Judaism ( Jewish holidays and rites, common prayer, visits to the synagogue), even though it was, while rare, yet present and accessible. 44 On Jewish unofficial art see [Smola 2018a; Smola 2018b].

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from the pre-Revolution Russian translations available in the Lenin Library, and also from his mother [Kantor-Kazovsky 2008: 109]. However, Grobman was a rare example of the family transfer of Jewish traditions and knowledge. Another example was Leonid Lamm: as Matthew Baigell, who had had several conversations with the artist, testifies, Lamm got his first knowledge of the Jewish Kabbalah through his grandfather, a cantor, and his father, a Jew educated in religious matters. The conversations with them had a direct influence on Lamm’s cabbalistic paintings and art theories [Baigell 2010: 259–260]. Fifteenyear-old Grisha Bruskin received a Talmud as a present from a friend’s mother and later read Kabbalistic texts in a book that had been smuggled out of Israel [ibid.: 261–262]. The writer Eli Liuksemburg came to know Judaism under the influence of Rav Chaim Zanvl Abramowitz, a famous Hasidic tzadik from Rybnitsa (Moldova); according to his own testimony, he experienced a real spiritual rebirth before emigrating to Israel in 1972 (cf. chap. 5.3). Following his mother’s wish, the prose writer Efraim Baukh was taught Hebrew and Kaddish in his childhood and had the books of Isaiah and Ecclesiastes explained to him by a rabbi.45 Some memories also bear witness to the fact that the refuseniks were taught by the older Jews, who had already served long prison sentences for their Zionist activities in the 1920s [Ro’i 2012a: 33]. The memoirs of Jewish activists, which only recently came under the attention of researchers, provide information about the topics, authors, sources, and plots that took on an educational function for the new Zionists. These were the biblical stories about the kings David and Solomon and the enemies of ancient Israel, the exile, the captivity in Egypt and the exodus [Hoffman 2012: 235–236], as well as the publications of the Jewish samizdat, especially its cultural branch: they included Russian translations of the works of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Leon Uris, Shimon Frug, the World History of the Jewish People (Die jüdische Geschichte) by Simon Dubnow, My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast, The Last of the Just (Le Dernier des justes) by André Schwarz-Bart, as well as Israeli journals such as Ariel and Shalom ([Hoffman 1991: 90]; cf. also chap. 4.3). Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958) was probably the most influential “educational novel” among the Soviet Jews [ibid.: 91], first and foremost, because Jewish identity was inscribed there in a teleological narrative of liberation and return, interpreted nationally, and gave birth to heroic figures. The essay “Samizdat” in Elektronnaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia (Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia) gives a chronologically annotated list of literary, historical,

45 “Dve zhizni Efraima Baukha,” La-belaga [blog], October 11, 2015, https://la-belaga. livejournal.com/821989.html, accessed January 4, 2023.

1. Introduction

philosophical, political, and religious works that appeared in Jewish unofficial periodicals from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. Among others, the authors Ephraim Kishon, Chaim Weizmann, Ka-Tzetnik (Yehiel Dinur), Nelly Sachs, and Martin Buber are mentioned there—but also Vladislav Khodasevich, Eduard Bagritskii, Mikhail Svetlov, Il′ia Erenburg, and Boris Slutskii. There are also literary studies such as Lev Kopelev’s biography of Heinrich Heine and memoirs such as Veniamin Zuskin’s book Nash Michoels (Our Michoels) translated from Yiddish. The state of Israel, the Holocaust, the Jewish question in Russia, and Judaism are the most important political and historical issues of the Jewish underground [“Samizdat”]. The fictional testimonies of the late Soviet aliyah are also interesting. David Shrayer-Petrov’s samizdat novel Gerbert i Nelli (Herbert and Nelli, 1984) lists the authors read by the refuseniks in editions produced by the publishing house Aliyah Library (Biblioteka-Aliia)46: Bashevis Singer, Zhabotinsky, Bialik, Bernard Malamud, David Markish, Leon Uris, and Natan Alterman [ShrayerPetrov 1992: 235]. In Efraim Baukh’s novel Lestnitsa Iakova the protagonist reads Zohar and Sefer ha-Chinuch; in Eli Liuksemburg’s novel Desiatyi golod Hasidic legends and kabbalistic knowledge are evoked. Baukh, Liuksemburg, Feliks Kandel′, or David Markish also use numerous allusions to individual chapters of the Pentateuch, psalms, prophecies from the book of Nevi’im, and aggada. This educational and communicative context of Jewish underground literature will be significant later on in this book, as it conditioned the cultural references, the intertextuality, and sometimes also the multilingualism of its texts. The particular poetics of its prose works results from the varying degrees of its authors’ detachment from the Jewish tradition, the different selection of (non-)Jewish pretexts, and the different forms of appropriation of what has been handed down.

1.5. Poetics of (Anti-)Imperial (Anti-)Assimilation The process of Jewish cultural and literary “archeology of the self ” described above were preceded by a long history of acculturation. In the 1930s and the

46 Biblioteka-Aliia (Aliyah Library) was the Russian-language Zionist-oriented book publishing house founded in Israel in 1972, which among other things published the essential texts of the late Soviet aliyah literature. Some books produced by the Biblioteka-Aliia were smuggled into the Soviet Union and thus known to the Russian(-Jewish) readers.

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1940s, the readers of Russian Jewish texts were expected to know Jewish living and traditions, which still belonged to the everyday life or to the recent past. At the same time, the Jewish life was already often presented and interpreted in terms of Soviet internationalist utopia. Boris Iampol′skii obviously addresses his early novel Iarmarka (Fair, published in 1941) to a reader who has a knowledge of Jewish and especially Tanachic tradition, who can understand the numerous allusions to Judaistic writings and Jewish folklore, who knows Yiddish expressions and words, and will be aware of the references to Babel′’s texts with their mystical subtext of the Russian Revolution. At the same time, in Iarmarka Iampol′skii constructs a narrative in which the archetypal Ostjuden—the East European Jews, who have experienced much suffering and deprivation—are contrasted with the industrious and lively “new Jews” from the same shtetl—the children of the young Soviet state. In the traditional plot of the Jewish quest for happiness, the happiest shtetl inhabitants are the physically strong ones who work simple jobs and have no interest in Talmud studies. These new laborers are presented in the style of early Soviet constructivism—their images are oversized, colorful, schematic, apsychological; and their tools and production are aestheticized: Шли маляры с зелеными и красными кистями, обещая заказчикам и рай и ад; и грузчики с веревками на шее, готовые все перенести, и, если встречали телегу, смотрели нa нее как на пушинку, и дровосеки [. . .] с большими топорами и длинными пилами, готовые рассечь и распилить все, что угодно: на лес пойдут, и леса не станет—только небо и земля! [Iampol′skii 1995: 45] They walked past: the painters with green and red brushes, who promised their customers heaven and hell, and the carriers with the rope around their necks, ready to carry everything, and when they met a cart, they looked at it as at a flake of down; and the lumberjacks [. . .] with big axes and long saws, ready to chop up and saw everything: When they attack the forest, the forest disappears in an instant, only the sky and earth remain! In the imperial space of the comparatively young Soviet Union, Iampol′skii translates the cultural language of his ethnic community into the supranational Soviet lingua franca. At the same time, he can still present the colorful UkrainianJewish “original” text to the reader in the same narrative without much lexical

1. Introduction

and thematic censure, explanations, or commentary. From the early Soviet time onwards, Jewish authors started developing techniques not only of translating Jewishness in the new language, but also of self-censorship—from de-ethnicization to bilingualism or implicit ambiguity of their writing (cf. chap. 2.3.1). As a counter-strategy, the Jewish cultural renaissance since the 1960s, mostly in cultural underground and in emigration, produced devices of “backtranslation,” lexical remembrance, and “Judaization” of the literary material. In this way, poetics of (anti-)assimilation emerged, which became a peculiar canon in Jewish post-Soviet prose loaded with Judaic allusions, hybrid styles, and details of Jewish material environment. Such tendencies towards reethnization and autoethnography47 are explained not only by the loosening or termination of state censorship, but also by a feeling of loss. Literature becomes a space of education and historiography; authors become cultural historians and translators of their own peoples’ life. As mentioned in the previous section, the same thing happens in other ethnic branches of the crumbling or already imploded institution of the “multinational Soviet literature.” We are thus dealing with the literary embodiment of intertwined imperial and post-imperial processes—the processes of assimilation and dissimilation that have been underway to varying degrees among different ethnic groups since the 1920s and have not always been chronologically distinct. The literary idiom became an iconic sign of the oscillating movement of the canon. These oscillations shifted the cultural borders: from the local to the universal (which often turned out to be merely a neutralization of the non-Russian) and back, accompanied by varying degrees of “cleansing” or hybridization of language. The movement from the periphery to the center of the literary system was often linked to the geographical relocation of authors to the metropolises of Moscow and Leningrad, where they studied in renowned educational institutions such as the Moscow Literary Institute. It was precisely this schooling, with its contradictory emphases on multinationalism, Russification, and ideological control, that from the very beginning held the possibility of cultural subversion

47 The concept of autoethnography goes back to the poststructuralist understanding of ethnological and anthropological knowledge, represented in the second half of the twentieth century by scholars such as Clifford Geertz and James Clifford, as well as to postcolonial studies and, first of all, to Edward W. Said [1978] with his central idea of orientalism. This concept was introduced by Mary Louise Pratt in 1992 and describes a situation in which the subject and the object of ethnographic writing coincide, that is, they are embodied by one and the same person, cultural community, or institution. The writer thus unites the perspective of an outside researcher, who claims to be objective, and the perspective of a member of the native culture, the insider. This may lead to a split and a duplication of narrative subjectivity, which is of interest for postcolonial studies (cf. [Smola 2017]).

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and a way back to local values. The subsequent movement from the center to the periphery—to the margins of the state and its literature—ranged from a cautious modification of the socialist-realist model to the counter-imperial and post-imperial “writing back.”

2. Research Approaches

2.1. Research Trends and Research Deficits Scholarly research on Russian Jewish prose of the past several decades is still rather limited. One of the reasons for this lack of coverage is the recent date of origin of these texts. The important paradigm shift, which accompanied the transition from the Jewish underground culture of the 1960–1980s to the political breaks and geographical dispersion of the literature of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, has for now escaped detailed consideration, in particular in the form of a monograph. To date, increased attention has been paid to literature that emerged around the Russian Revolution, during the Second World War, and in the first postwar years, in particular the works of Isaak Babel′, Il′ia Erenburg, and Vasilii Grossman. The most notable studies, in chronological order, are: [Nakhimovsky 1992 (chapters 3–5)], [Genzeleva 1994 and 1999 (chapter 1)], [Sicher 1995 (chapters 3 and 6)], [Markish 1997], [Koschmal 1997], [Dohrn 1999], [Wisse 2000], [Grübel 2002], [Tippner 2008]. Tellingly, Ruth Wisse, in her monograph on the modern canon of Jewish literature, published in 2000, called the chapter on her Russian-language material “Literature of the Russian Revolution.” In addition to the Yiddish-language prose of Moyshe Kulbak, she analyzes the “canon” texts by Babel′, Erenburg, and Grossman. Odesskie rasskazy

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(Stories from Odessa) and Konarmiia (The cavalry), Burnaia zhizn′ Lazika Roitshvanetsa (The stormy life of Lazik Roitshvanets) and Zhizn′ i sud′ba (Life and fate) are approached as important milestones in Russian Jewish literary history in general.1 In works about Jewish literature written in non-Jewish languages the interest in concepts of identity and images of alterity characteristically prevails over the analysis of language and poetics. The Jewish tradition of poetic commentary on the Torah and Talmud-inspired thought in the diaspora prose of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is attracting more and more attention, but it is still overshadowed by the studies of the Jewish other(ing), history, and memory. To illustrate this dominant trend, it suffices to cite a few titles of works written in the recent decades: Russian Jewish Literature and Identity .  .  . [Nakhimovsky 1992]; “Jewish Experience and Identity in Vasilii Grossman’s Novels Za Pravoe Delo and Zhizn’ i Sud’ba” and Puti evreiskogo samosoznaniia [Genzeleva 1994; 1999]; Erinnerung um die Jahrtausendwende. Vergangenheit und Identität bei jüdischen Autoren der Nachkriegsgeneration [Lorenz 2002]; “Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction” [Krutikov 2003]; Odcienie tożsamości. Literatura żydowska jako zjawisko wielojęzyczne [Adamczyk-Garbowska 2004]; “Evrei v kul′ture russkoi emigratsii: problema identichnosti” [Demidova 2004]; “Russkii Ierusalim. Postsovetskie modeli identichnosti v proze Diny Rubinoi” and “Emigration und Heimkehr. Identitätserzählungen in der russisch-jüdischen Literatur der diaspora” [Parnell 2004a; 2006]; “Identität durch Literatur. Über den Begründer der modernen jiddischen Literatur: Mendele Mocher Sforim” [Gelhard 2005]; “Bewegung und Benennung. Jüdische Identität bei Il’ja Erenburg” [Tippner 2008].2 During the cultural turn in literary studies, Russian Jewish topographies attracted much scholarly attention, in particular the regions and cities associated with the emergence and development of multilingual and multicultural Jewish literature in the first third of the twentieth century, the time of a Jewish cultural renaissance in Eastern Europe: Galicia, Odessa, Vilnius, Lviv, Kyiv, Berdichev, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow. Alongside the studies on Jewish cultural geography that fail to deal with literature, or deal with it only marginally,3 there

1 The prose of Babel′ and Erenburg, deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, receives in Wisse’s book the same attention as Grossman’s novel, where Jewishness mainly functions as a reflection of the Holocaust and Soviet antisemitism. 2 Among the numerous historical and sociological (and not related to literary studies) contributions to the study of Jewish identity, cf. [Gitelman 1991, Zipperstein 1999, Jasper 2004, Gladilina/Brovkine 2004, Adoni/Caspi/Cohen 2006, Remennick 2004 and 2007]. 3 See, for example, the volumes of the Göttingen Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts: Yvonne Kleinmann, Neue Orte—neue Menschen. Jüdische Lebensformen in St. Petersburg und Moskau im

2. Research Approaches

are also works that address the specificity and the poetics of Jewish literature, in particular its topographical and geo-cultural aspects.4 Below I will illustrate this using the works on Babel′ as an example. Walter Koschmal [1997] introduces the term “(Babel′’s) Odessa poetics” based on the theory of urban semiotics developed by the Moscow-Tartu School in the 1980s, which examined the “Petersburg text of Russian culture” (cf. Vladimir Toporov’s paradigmatic study Peterburg i peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (Petersburg and the Petersburg text of Russian literature) [Toporov 2003, first published in 1984]). According to Koschmal, Babel′’s Odessa text accomplishes a unique synthesis of the Russian and Jewish traditions of writing and disrupts the binary oppositions between cultural codes of Petersburg and Moscow, and between Russia and the West, which had been implicitly accepted in numerous literary texts. The important characteristics of Babel′’s Odessa poetics are the orientation towards orality, the carnivalesque “diversity and mixture of languages,”5 the use of “Jewish-Ukrainian bandit jargon,” and Jewish humor. Rainer G. Grübel emphasizes the following features of Babel′’s prose, born from the Odessa culture: the imitation of skaz, the use of Hasidic narratives, with their “inclination towards the concrete, the material and the perceptible,” the aestheticization of the cruel, and the proliferation of the anecdotal (meaning the small and the everyday) [Grübel 2002]. Although not always in connection with the Odessa topos, Verena Dohrn also analyzes in Babel′’s prose Jewish features that she calls “scraps of Jewish tradition”: a stylistic mimicry such as the skaz and a specially constructed image of the narrator, as well as intertextual references to Judaic texts [Dohrn 1999]. Along with the research of Jewish topographies and identity, the cultural turn has also triggered the growing scholarly attention to Jewish cultural memory over the last several decades.6 In recent works, the study of space and geography

19. Jahrhundert, 2006, and Alexis Hofmeister, Selbstorganisation und Bürgerlichkeit. Jüdisches Vereinswesen in Odessa um 1900, 2007. 4 See several volumes that relate the topographic approach to the cultural and the literary ones: Jewish Topographies. Visions of Space, Traditions of Place [Lipphardt/Brauch/Nocke 2008]; Jewish Spaces. Die Kategorie “Raum” im Kontext kultureller Identitäten [Ernst/Lamprecht 2010]; Jüdische Räume und Topographien in Ost(mittel)europa. Konstruktionen in Literatur und Kultur [Smola/Terpitz 2014]. 5 “The Odessite Tower of Babel′” is made up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Italian, Polish, and Russian” [Koschmal 1997: 326]. 6 See [Yerushalmi 1988], [Schatzker 1995], [Münz 1996], [Zipperstein 1999], [Lorenz 2002], [Heftrich/Grüner 2004], [Banasch 2005], [Grüner 2006], [Woldan 2006], [Sandberg 2007], [Lipphardt 2008].

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is usually linked to the issues of local identity and location-bound memory (cf., for example, [Woldan 2006]).7 In the numerous studies on the history, sociology, and culture of the Soviet Jewry,8 literary texts from the last three to four decades are sometimes touched upon. Among other reasons, the predominant interest in politics and culturalsociological issues in literary texts is due to the fact that assimilated Soviet Jewry was less a primordial-ethnic phenomenon, and more a part and a mirror of the social and political life in the Soviet Union. In the studies created from the 1990s onwards, researchers analyze, for example, the degree and manner of how Jewishness was tabooed by the Soviet authorities. They also describe situations where Jewish cultural milieu mirrored the Soviet regime. For instance, how Jewish institutions became propaganda tools of the official ideology is documented by the history of the Yiddish journal Sovetish heymland.9 These studies also address what forms of resistance Jewish intellectuals took against the (anti-)Jewish Soviet cultural policy. Literature is seen as a kind of “litmus test” that reflects all changes and fluctuations of the regime. In this context, the following topics are en vogue: Soviet policy of Holocaust memory ([Al′tman 2006], [Grüner 2006], [Lipphardt 2008]); Soviet cultural policy in its relationship to Jews and Judaism ([Gitelman 1991], [Chernin 1995], [Estraikh 2008 and 2009], [Ro’i 2012b]); Jewish cultural life in the Soviet underground—the Jewish samizdat and tamizdat ([Pinkus 1994], [Beizer 2004 and 2018], [Komaromi 2012b]); antisemitism and the Jewish question in Russia and the Soviet Union ([Tsigelman 1991], [Govrin 1995], [Kagedan 1995], [Krupnik 1995], [Friedgut 2003]); the Jewish national revival of the 1960s–1980s in the Soviet Union ([Tsigelman 1991], [Genzeleva 1999], [Fürst 2012], [Smola 2011b and 2014]), Jewish emigration of the 1970s–1990s (exemplified by [Markowitz 1995]), and Jewish culture in emigration (for example, [Remennick 2007]). This “sociological” tendency can be illustrated by four articles written by scholars from different countries that are nevertheless easily comparable with one another. They analyze the climate of cultural policy in the late Soviet period based on the literature by Jews and about Jews. The first text is an essay by Benjamin Pinkus, in which he provides an overview of both institutionalized

7 Alois Woldan investigates Lviv “as a place of memory in Polish and Ukrainian literature.” At the beginning of his work Woldan diagnoses the increasing interest of historians and cultural scientists in places of remembrance, in particular in Eastern Central Europe [Woldan 2006: 323]. 8 See, for example, [Gitelman 1991 and 2003], [Krupnik 1995], [Blank 1995], [Friedgut 2003], [Armborst 2004], [Beizer 2004], [Ryvkina 2005]. 9 See, inter alia, [Shmeruk 1991], [Pinkus 1994], [Chernin 1995], and [Estraikh 2008].

2. Research Approaches

and unofficial Jewish culture in the period from 1945 to 1988 [Pinkus 1994]. Among the officially published texts of the 1940s, Pinkus names Gody zhizni (The years of life) by Isaak Bakharakh (pseud. A. Isbakh), the poetry of Pavel Antokol′skii, Margarita Aliger, and Il′ia Sel′vinskii, of the 1950s, Ottepel′ (The Thaw) by Il′ia Erenburg, of the 1960s and 1970s the novels Tsimbalisty (The cymbal players) by David Galkin, Tiazhelyi pesok (The heavy sand) by Anatolii Rybakov and Dikii med (The wild honey) by Leonid Pervomaiskii as well as individual poems by Semen Lipkin and Boris Slutskii. Pinkus shows that many of these authors address the issue of Jewish suffering and struggle in the Second World War, with varying degrees of explicitness, provided certain ideological boundaries were not crossed. Among the authors published in tamizdat, Pinkus names Govorit Moskva (Moscow speaks) by Iulii Daniel′, and among the Soviet samizdat, long and short poems by Iosif Brodskii, Aleksandr Galich, and Naum Korzhavin, as well as Semen Lipkin’s prose piece Kartiny i golosa (Pictures and voices). The second study is Frank Grüner’s examination of Soviet policy of Holocaust memory (from the postwar period to the 1980s). As an example, he uses massacre at Babii Iar [Grüner 2006]. Against the background of the official silencing of the Holocaust10 in the Soviet Union, Grüner dives into taboo-breaking territory with works such as Lev Ozerov’s poem “Babii Iar,” the poem of the same title by Evgeny Evtushenko, and the novel of the same title by Anatolii Kuznetsov, Naum Korzhavin’s “Poema sushchestvovaniia” (“Poem of existence”) and Aleksandr Galich’s “Pesnia iskhoda” (“The song of exodus”). The third study is Shimon Markish’s “Russkaia podtsenzurnaia literatura i natsional′noe vozrozhdenie (1953–1970),”11 in which he observes how Jewish themes—previously suppressed by the authorities—have been “smuggled” into official Soviet literature starting from the period of the Thaw and which publications were permitted by censorship, sometimes by chance [Markish 1997]. Markish mentions the first part of Konstantin Paustovskii’s autobiography Povest′ o zhizni (A story about life)—Dalekie gody (Distant years, 1945), Istoriia moei zhizni (Story of my life, 1947) by Aleksei Svirskii, Ottepel′ (Thaw, 1954) and Liudi, gody, zhizn′ (People, years, life, 1960–1965) by Il′ia Erenburg, the poems “Soiuz” (“Union,” 1967) and “Zola” (“The ashes,” 1967) by Semen Lipkin.12

10 For more details, see [Gitelman 1998]. 11 This article was written in 1983, and published for the first time in Russian in the book Babel′ i drugie (Babel′ and others, 1997). 12 Markish’s recapitulation has a special aspect: In his essays he often appears as a contemporary witness and conveys the genuine atmosphere of the Soviet literary scene, especially the

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Fourth, an analytical overview of Jewish themes in Soviet literature was written by Maurice Friedberg in the early 1970s. Friedberg [1972] starts with the early Soviet period, in which the Jewish topics were under strong restrictions and shtetl Jewry was portrayed primarily as part of the outdated reality with negative connotations (at the same time, Erenburg’s Burnaia zhizn′ Lazika Roitshvanetsa and Babel′’s Konarmiia complicated and challenged this ideologically shaped image). Among the authors who were active after the period of Jewish “silence” that ended in the 1950s Friedberg names Boris Slutskii, Il′ia Sel′vinskii, Evgenii Evtushenko, Anatolii Kuznetsov, Iosif Brodskii, and Andrei Remezov, as well as Abram Terts and Iulii Daniel′.13 In Friedberg’s contribution, as well as in many other works, governmental antisemitism in the Soviet Union forms the main context of the analysis. Thus, the Jewishness of the important semi-conformist and nonconformist authors appears ex negativo as a reflex of political coercion. Since the end of the 1980s, new works appeared, which deal with Jewish cultural life in post-perestroika Russia and post-Soviet emigration: [Torpusman 1993], [Blank 1995], [Markowitz 1995], [Schoeps/Jasper/Vogt 1996], [Waldhans-Nys 1996], [Gitelman 2003], [Rossman 2002], [Oks 2004], [Fialkova/Yelenevskaya 2004], and [Remennick 2007].

2.2. State of the Art The Jewish prose in Russian language from the late Soviet period to the 2000s has been the subject of important monographs. I will mention four of them here.14 The first one was published in 1992 by the American Slavist Alice S. Nakhimovsky (Russian Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel′, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish); the second work, by a Russian-Israeli scholar, came out in 1999 (Rita Genzeleva, Puti evreiskogo samosoznaniia [Ways of Jewish self-understanding]); the third was authored by an Austrian scholar and published in 2008 (Olaf Terpitz, Die Rückkehr des Štetl. Russisch-jüdische characteristic oscillation between what is allowed and what is concealed or not pronounceable, which is hardly measurable from the outside. 13 In addition, I would like to refer here to the essay by Klaus-Peter Walter [Walter 1985] in which Jewish topics in Russian literature are consistently traced from the pre-Revolution period up to the 1980s. Walter includes names such as Semen Iushkevich, Semen An-skii, Iurii Libedinskii, Aleksandr Fadeev, Isaak Babel′, Il′ia Erenburg, Mikhail Kozakov, Matvei Roizman, Valentin Kataev, Anatolii Kuznetsov, Anatolii Rybakov, David Markish, Efraim Sevela, Feliks Roziner, and Vasilii Grossman. 14 I only name the monographs that deal with more than one or two authors.

2. Research Approaches

Literatur der späten Sowjetzeit); and the fourth again in the United States, in 2011 (Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train. Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia). Except for Terpitz’s study, the period since the 1960s forms only a part of a chronologically more comprehensive investigation.15 Since the 2000s, several monographs on individual authors have also been published: Proza Efraima Sevely. Iz istorii russkoi literatury tret′ei emigrantskoi volny (The prose of Efraim Sevela. From the Russian literary history of the third wave of emigration [2004]) by Andrzej Jankowski, Dina Rubina vchera i segodnia (Dina Rubina yesterday and today [2003]) by Ioanna Mianovska and “I am to be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left.” The Poetics of Boris Slutsky [2011] by Marat Grinberg. These studies provide an important reflection on the heterogeneous cultural and political processes of the transitional period in which Jewish literature existed between the allowed and the banned, between samizdat and tamizdat, and between life in the Soviet Union and life in emigration. They address the complexity of a period that is not yet over, in which the “hyphenated literatures” and cultures, sometimes completely Russified and Sovietized, were in the process of an ethnic revival, became part of anti-assimilationist movements, or took alternative paths of self-empowerment. Below I will present the first three monographs in their essential theses, which are methodically or contextually relevant for my research. Nakhimovsky discusses the topic of Jewish identity in Russia in the period from the 1910s to the 1980s: from Vladimir Zhabotinsky to David Markish. Analyzing texts that span almost a century, she shows how Russian Jewry, in the course of its assimilation history, increasingly forfeited the ethno-cultural characteristics of its ancestors and took on the intellectual “physiognomy” of the Russian intelligentsia. While Osip Mandel′shtam, for example, was still able to rebel against his Jewish origins, Jewish intellectuals in Soviet Russia, starting from the 1950s, lost their cultural specificity almost completely and could not conceive even a partial distance from the Soviet culture. After experiencing Bolshevism and the Holocaust, Jewishness only had “little internal meaning” [1992: 37] for the postwar generation; while assimilation and, later, new Christianization or Zionism represented alternatives. Many Jewish intellectuals also joined the larger dissident movement.

15 Already after the original German version of my work was completed, Roman Katsman’s monograph Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel [Katsman 2016] was published. See my review of this work: [Smola 2018c].

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The fact that Jewish literature has been largely Russified since Vasilii Grossman’s generation is prevalent in Nakhimovsky’s analysis: “[. . .] Grossman never becomes a Jewish writer in either an ethnographic or a spiritual sense. [. . .] Grossman did not know Jewish traditions, and never seemed to have any interest in them” [ibid.: 108]. Nakhimovsky maintains that, as a writer socialized in the spirit of Marxist internationalism, Grossman perceives his Jewish identity as externally imposed and primarily as a consequence of the Holocaust and state antisemitism. For Grossman, the fate of Russian Jews is a part of Russia’s tragic history, along with collectivization and Stalin’s purges. In Feliks Roziner’s Nekto Finkel′maier (A certain Finkel′maier, 1975), the autobiographical protagonist is a thoroughly Russian intellectual, a poet persecuted by the regime, suffering the typical fate of a Soviet dissident, in many respects comparable to Iosif Brodskii. His Jewishness is limited to the strange sounding, stigmatizing name “Aaron-Khaim Mendelevich Finkel′maier,” a few self-ironically used Yiddish words, his unusual, clumsy figure as well as his vulnerable personality. He is much more mentally attached to his fellow Russian nonconformists than to his Jewish family. However, as a Jew he is doubly vulnerable because he is exposed to government xenophobia. He is not allowed to study at the university nor to publish under his own name. Typically, Finkel′maier has outstanding knowledge of the Russian language and literature and in this aspect he contrasts sharply with the patriotic Russian poet Prebylov, who insists on his connection to the “people.” “Finkel′maier, in sum, is a Russian poet with a Jewish name and a Jewish fate. It is possible that the whole of the artistic and literary intelligentsia has a Jewish fate, in the sense that it is isolated and vulnerable to persecution” [ibid.: 190]. Nakhimovsky’s observations on Jewish writers and fictional characters of the late Soviet period form an important background for my analysis of the Jewish “second culture.” I regard the paradoxical (self-)Judaization of the assimilated Jewish intellectuals as a characteristic element of a comprehensive cultural and spiritual reinvention of tradition in the time of the Soviet dictatorship. Rita Genzeleva’s monograph pursues a similar goal, namely to explore the “paths of Jewish identity” from the 1930s to the 1990s based on the works of selected authors, such as Vasilii Grossman, Izrail′ Metter, Boris Iampol′skii, and Ruf ′ Zernova. She notes that the period of the Jewish cultural renaissance following the Six-Day War in 1967 was the result of Jewish assimilation as traditional ethnic Jewish characteristics (“primordial ethnicity”) were increasingly replaced by non-traditional factors such as antisemitism, passport entries, and a common historical fate (“instrumental ethnicity”). Soviet Jewry was thus defined by social, psychological, and professional attributes, rather

2. Research Approaches

than by ethnic ones [Genzeleva 1999: 7–15]. Soviet Jews’s “self-understanding” (samosoznanie) was therefore painfully ambivalent because their orientation towards Russian culture clashed with their Jewish historical experience (Boris Pasternak’s tense attitude toward his origins is mentioned as a prominent example).16 In Genzeleva’s diachronic approach to Jewish identity, which, like Nakhimovsky’s, is based on a combination of literary sociology and close text reading, two points are of particular importance. On the level of text analysis, the natsional′noe samosoznanie of the writers is determined on different text levels: in the choice of material, the structure of the fictional characters, the leitmotifs, the vocabulary, and the subtext. In terms of cultural history, the mode of depiction of Jewish topics shows a significant change in the extraliterary—social, political, and geographical—context in which they originated. This approach is particularly effective when it comes to the striking evolution of the “Jewishness” inside the body of work produced by one author. For example, in his 1930s story “Konets detstva” (“The end of childhood”), Izrail′ Metter did not yet avoid portraying some Jewish protagonists negatively because he did not expect antisemitic reactions from his readership. This changed by the 1960s, when his “Piatyi ugol” (“The fifth corner”) was created, the open discussion of hostility towards the Jews was no longer an option, and negative portrayal of Jewish characters would have confirmed the public stereotype of Jews being cowards and parasites. In addition, the explicit linking of the Jewish theme in this text with the critique of totalitarianism corresponds to the initial phase of the Jewish national movement in the Soviet Union, with its new demands, political protest and partial de-tabooization [1999: 125].17 Genzeleva compares the text and the context of ethnic writing, analyzing the narrative style, reference system, and thematic-poetic structure of the texts. Her reading intimately combines historical identity and poetics. This method of imprinting literary poetic with cultural history and politics shall also be useful for my book.

16 Both Genzeleva and Nakhimovsky see Grossman’s clear affinity to Russian grand national consciousness (especially on the basis of his key text Zhizn′ i sud′ba), as long as it does not degenerate into chauvinism. Jews are no closer to Grossman’s implicit author than Tatars, Kalmyks, Germans, or other national minorities. It is the deforming effect of Soviet antisemitism that reduces the personality of the outstanding scientist Viktor Shtrum to his appearance, violating his human dignity, and it is the tragedy of the Holocaust that surprisingly leads Sofya Levinton to become one with her Jewish fellow sufferers on the death journey. Thus, Grossman’s Jewish protagonists experience their ethnicity only in unnatural and painful circumstances. 17 On comparable developments in Boris Iampol′skii’s work see [Genzeleva 1999: 157-207].

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In contrast to Nakhimovsky and Genzeleva, Olaf Terpitz deals exclusively with the Russian Jewish prose of the late Soviet period: the authors Anatolii Rybakov, Boris Iampol′skii, Grigorii Kanovich and Oleg Iur′ev. Terpitz emphasizes the relevance of literature for historical studies. Literature can “provide clues about the social ‘place’ of Jews in the late Soviet period, about their process of interculturation [. . .]. Literary texts and their reception thus have an epistemological potential for historiography as well” [2008: 9]. Indeed, the topos of shtetl is, for Jews, the best illustration of the “experienced history” and its “rupture in the twentieth century” [ibid.: 15]. For Terpitz, the shtetl is a point where various theories, scholarly methods, and models of knowledge converge: Terpitz combines “historic, ethnographic and literary-scientific works”; postcolonial studies with their concept of hybrid subjectivity; and the intercultural approach to diaspora literatures [ibid.: 22–25]. As with Genzeleva, here too the chronological order of authors and texts helps Terpitz to draft a historical periodization. Thus, the late Soviet period becomes a point of cultural change and produces ambiguous concepts. For example, Rybakov’s novel Tiazhelyi pesok still contains an idealism committed to communist principles: even as victims of the Holocaust, Jews here are above all an example of Soviet heroism. Rybakov makes use of the official monumental culture of remembrance of the Soviet state [ibid.: 164] and contradicts his own self-declared intention to show the special nature of Jewish fate from the preRevolution period to the Holocaust. The early work of Boris Iampol′skii, whose biography was much more linked to Jewish traditions, continues the spirit of Yiddish short story with its specific narrative techniques, the poetics of self-irony, and figures such as shlimazl and shlemiel (as in his early novel Iarmarka, 1941) [ibid.: 180–181]. However, in the late Soviet “Tabor” (“Gypsy camp,” 1971) the shtetl is already a “lost place,” and the text about it has become a requiem [ibid.: 195]. Iampol′skii reflects on the guilt of his own generation who have turned their backs on the world of the shtetl that was considered outdated after the October Revolution, and on the amnesia of communism. Only Kanovich’s work of the same period, for Terpitz, challenges the “Soviet drive for unification,” as it raises the “question of the national identity of the Jewish minority in Lithuania” [ibid.: 247].18

18 The assumption that Kanovich breaks through the “system of values” of socialist realism by appealing to Jewish cultural memory [ibid.: 248] is questionable or at best limited. Typical for Kanovich’s prose is the emphasis on timeless, general human values (“conditio humana” [ibid.]), which, according to the author’s intention, are supposed to produce goodness that will eliminate national differences, the moralizing note, and often the division of characters into good and evil—whereby the problem of the moral choice of a protagonist is central.

2. Research Approaches

The growing poetic, historical, and ideological heterogeneity of the images of the shtetl was a consequence of cultural changes in the late Soviet Union. Terpitz connects this pluralization of versions of the past to the new possibilities of cultural translation and the transfer of meanings from the Soviet system of references to the Jewish cultural one. Jewish literature is read as a multisemiotic system of allusions to a collectively constructed past and present. My study is to be understood as a further development of this extended methodological approach. Among the large quantity of published articles, the German Slavist Christina Parnell [2002, 2004, 2004a, 2004b, 2006] addresses the problem of the Jewish self and alterity by weaving Jewishness into the complex interrelationship of other  identity categories—“of gender, social grouping, religion, or ethnicity” [Parnell 2002: 213]. She analyses prose works written by Grigorii Kanovich, Liudmila Ulitskaia, Maria Iuzefovskaia, and Dina Rubina using selected philosophical ( Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Ryklin, Valerii Podoroga), psychoanalytical (Sigmund Freud), and postcolonialist (Homi K. Bhabha, Sander Gilman) concepts. The linking of philosophy and structuralism allows Parnell to view the Jewish component as a relational, anti-essentialist value, which, in a systemic connection with the other aspects of identity, determines the basic conditions of the protagonists in those works to varying degrees. Parnell links the specific nature of the post-Soviet literary worldview to “crisis of meaning and loss of identity” as well as to the challenging of “dichotomous polarizations” after the collapse of the powerful political system [2002: 205]. In this way, “a non-divisive way of thinking and perceiving” is formed, which allows for the “acknowledgement of difference” [ibid.: 207], including ethnic differences. In this period, two short stories—Ulitskaia’s “Vtorogo marta togo zhe goda” (“On the second of March of the same year,” 1994) and Iuzefovskaia’s “Kamni” (“Stones,” 1993)—create contrasting models of Jewishness. Ulitskaia questions the essentialism and static nature of Jewish identity by placing it in an ambivalent context with the other identities: “Jews and Russians, girls and boys, upper class and lower class meet, which means that different qualities influence personal identity from different directions” [ibid.: 213]. At the end of the narrative, two characters who have initially been antagonists—Lilia, a Jewish girl chased by her classmates, and Bodrik, her tormentor—approach each other through physical suffering. Through their return “to the biological origin,”

These features connect Kanovich’s work with Soviet literature and especially with socialist realism. All this despite (and hardly in contradiction with) the fact that the Jewish people are Kanovich’s only object of representation.

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social and cultural boundaries are eliminated. Iuzefovskaia’s protagonist, who survived the hell of the occupation, perceives her Jewish identity as a burden and a danger: “Her system of ‘identity’ has been so massively pressured by the annihilating influence of other systems (the fascist racial laws and Soviet state ideology as law) that it has not been able to form an identity-creating quality of difference.” [ibid.: 221]. It is only in Dina Rubina’s emigration prose that Parnell [2004a] observes the gradual formation of a positive hybrid identity, which had been impossible in the Soviet context and, following the concept of postcolonial studies, is understood as a “third space.” Here, this third space is the “Russian JewishIsraeli” location of Jerusalem19—in which the self and the foreign organically merge. The relevance of the formerly insignificant differences within Jewry (such as the differences between the Sephardi, the Ashkenazi, and the Chinese Jews) can be regarded as signs of hybridity. Conflicting polarities are thus also overcome here, even if not immediately. The protagonists are still supposed to go through the phase of renouncing the authentic belonging they expected to discover in the spiritual homeland Israel (cf. also Parnell 2006: 147). The longed-for ‘purity’ and completeness of “one’s own” Jewishness proves, as Parnell shows, to be historically conditioned and constructed. In particular, for the emigrants from the Soviet Union—the country with predominantly bipolar thought structures—repatriation provokes a longing for one single “authentic identity” [ibid.]. The Austrian scholar Eva Hausbacher approaches Russian migration literature through the postcolonial analysis of the categories of identity and alterity. Hausbacher’s rather general criteria for postcolonial and transcultural types of literature are their topographical character, “the uncanny oscillation between different positions,” the “unsettling splitting of the ego,” the work with stereotypes, the ambivalence and doubling of such categories as time, homeland, and family [2006: 251], and the dissolution of “fixed cultural identities” [2009: 57]. She applies this criteria also to the Russian Jewish emigration literature of the recent decades. In the chapter on Vladimir Kaminer’s prose, Hausbacher

19 On the other hand, in Grigorii Kanovich’s post-emigration prose, Russian-Lithuanian and Israeli culture oppose each other: “Israel almost always plays the role of the wrong place for his protagonists” [Parnell 2006: 163]. However, in her earlier essay [2004b], dedicated specifically to the work of Kanovich, Parnell shows that the writer also associates his “authentic” homeland, Lithuania, with death and the nostalgic world of memory, mostly preserved by old people. The central topos of the cemetery and the recurrent motif of the conversation with the dead as well as the disappearance of the real world in favor of the remembered one confirms an idea that one often finds in Kanovich’s prose—that the Jewish people are universally homeless.

2. Research Approaches

asks, “Are Russian Jews postcolonial?”20 Oliver Lubrich’s thesis affirming the postcoloniality of contemporary Russian Jewish literature, however, cannot be properly discussed on the basis of Kaminer’s prose. This is because, as Hausbacher and even Lubrich himself rightly note, the “significance” of Jewishness in this author’s work is “absolutely secondary” [2009: 259]. The question here is to what extent analytical criteria such as emigration, diaspora, and (post) coloniality are applicable to understanding Jewish literature or whether they dissolve its specific features.21 The danger of the typological postcolonial approach is that it will offer a similar reading of the very diverse phenomena that can be categorized under the generic term “transculturality.” So, the term “postcoloniality”22 should be defined in a very specific way for each author and each text. For instance, many contemporary Jewish author’s understanding of home, their own collective space, fluctuates between the longing for a collective historical place of origin and its absence or precariousness in the present. For Jewish literature, the shift of geographical paradigms towards the “in-between space” concept of the global migration era has become very important. The methods of analysis that assume the penetrability of cultural borders are applicable, in the first place, to the texts where the categories of belonging and tradition are relativized (see above concerning assimilation). In my study, postcolonialist tools are applied only to the texts where the Soviet literary heritage is explicitly conceived as quasi-colonial (cf. chap. 11.2.2). Common tropes would include the orientalization of minorities, assimilation of subjugated ethnoses and imperial hegemony. Among from Oliver Lubrich’s criteria, my focus is therefore on the third one: that “Soviet culture as a product of Russian imperialism was a colonial culture” [Hausbacher 2009: 259]. Still, some essential characteristics of “migration poetics,” defined by Hausbacher, can also be traced in Jewish (and not only migration) texts. Among these features are the creation of “counter-stories” that “trigger a canon revision” [ibid.: 141], heteroglossy, and linguistic-stylistic hybridity [ibid.: 139–144]. With a much smaller array of theories, the Russian-American scholar Mikhail Krutikov approaches the issue of identity in the prose works by Iurii Karabchievskii, Aleksandr Melikhov, Dina Rubina, Liudmila Ulitskaia, Ol′ga Beshenkovskaia, Grigorii Kanovich, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, and Vladimir Sharov. According to Krutikov [2003], Russian Jewish identity today is much 20 The section, however, almost exclusively deals with Lubrich 2005, the title of whose essay is alluded to here. 21 I explore this in [Smola 2013a]. 22 Hausbacher contrasts the term “postcoloniality” with “postcolonialism” as a “metaphorical” and “ahistorical” designation of contemporary migration literature.

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more characterized by a new eclecticism and postmodern intermixing than by the nostalgic memory of the lost shtetl culture. These observations also determine the starting point of my own study, in which the new differences that became visible in the late and post-Soviet period can be traced back, on the one hand, to the opposition of the official and the unofficial, and, at the same time (as we come closer to perestroika), to the blurring of bipolar models and the new poetic-ideological richness of postmodernist minority literature. At the same time, Krutikov echoes Nakhimovsky’s and Genzeleva’s main thesis concerning the complete Russification of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews, which is also reflected in literature. He sees traditions of classical Russian literature at work in two autobiographical bildungsromans, Karabchievskii’s Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera (The life of Aleksandr Zil′ber, 1975) and Melikhov’s Ispoved′ evreia (The confession of a Jew, 1993), in particular the combination of the style of the realistic psychological novel with the theme of social injustice coming from the Soviet state and everyday antisemitism. The isolation of young people growing up in a totalitarian environment also goes hand in hand with their strong affinity for Russian culture and literature. The Jewish collective identity, fuelled by the traditions of the Torah and knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew, is embodied in Karabchievskii’s novel by the grandfather figure, and fully lost for the assimilated Aleksandr Zil′ber. According to Krutikov’s conclusion, the Jewishness of the new Russian Jewish prose is nourished not by Jewish culture or Judaism, but rather by Russian literary tradition. “The texts of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov—and even of the New Testament, rather than those of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Dubnow or Bialik, let alone Rashi or Maimonides, serve as major points of reference for Russian Jewish writers’ search for their Jewishness” [2003: 271].23 Against the background of the approaches discussed above, Shimon Markish’s often-cited conclusion—most concisely articulated in his essay “O rossiiskom evreistve i ego literature” (“On Russian Jewry and its literature,” 1994 [Markish 1997])—seems to convey a sad certainty: The “authentic” Jewish culture has died out in Russia as a result of European assimilation, German national socialism, and Russian communism [Markish 1997: 198]. The last generation to retain “живое представление o еврействе” [ibid.: 203, italics in the original] (“a living idea of Judaism”) is that of Boris Slutskii and David Samoilov; those born in the 1930s, on the other hand, are the “дети интернационалистской утопии” [ibid.] (“children of internationalist utopia”) and have already lost their double

23 Krutikov excludes only Grigorii Kanovich from the circle of completely assimilated JewishRussian authors (cf. [Krutikov 2003: 265–267]).

2. Research Approaches

cultural affiliation. Russian Jewish literature met its tragic end with the death of Isaak Babel′ in 1940. Markish is not particularly convinced by the post-Soviet revival of Jewish culture: together with Grigorii Kanovich, he sees the task of the “remainder” only in “собрать уцелевшие остатки культурного наследия” [ibid.: 206] (“collecting the surviving remnants of the cultural heritage”).24 Markish laments the loss of a unique cultural tradition, which in this form could only arise and bear fruit within the now lost “этническ[ая], социальн[ая], цивилизационн[ая] структур[а]” [ibid.] (“ethnic, social, civilizing structure”). The extensive substitution of ethnic Jewish identity by a new sociocultural identity25—accompanied by numerous narratives of loss—has become a common place, a kind of banality in Jewish studies and therefore a platform for argumentation that needs to be put into perspective. In my study, I will use it primarily as a presumed starting point, from which new processes of ethnicization, individualization or folklorization can be examined. My aim is to explore how the return to tradition merges in the period of post-assimilation with its reinvention and to what extent Jewishness is subjected to a process of revival and de-museification.

2.3. Perspective and Boundaries of the Study 2.3.1. Above the Ground My work is focused almost exclusively on literature that could not be officially published in the Soviet Union or was created after the perestroika. However, during the Second World War and in 1950s–1980s, Jewish books were published in the Soviet Union, in Slavic languages as well as in Yiddish.26 Important recent studies have presented a very diverse history of the Jewish literatures that found

24 Russian Jewish emigration literature, according to Markish’s nostalgic conclusion, has been transplanted to a new cultural soil and therefore creates something new rather than continuing the old traditions. He asks provocatively about the work of Fridrikh Gorenshtein, whom he holds in high esteem: “[.  .  .] в какой мере принадлежит к русско-еврейской литературе берлинский обитатель еврейского происхождения, пишущий по-русски?” [ibid.: 208] (“[. . .] to what extent does a Berlinian of Jewish origin who writes in Russian participate in Russian Jewish literature?”). 25 Sergei Dovlatov’s pointed formulation expresses this symptom: “В сущности, еврей—это фамилия, профессия и облик” [Dovlatov 2003: 437] (“A Jew is basically nothing else than the last name, the profession, and the appearance”). 26 See [Estraikh 2008 and 2009] on the revival of Yiddish literature after Stalinism and [Murav 2011] on Russian-language Jewish and Yiddish literature of the Soviet period.

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their way into the public sphere in Soviet Russia. For example, Harriet Murav’s recent study is motivated by an effort to reflect Jewish literature as a particular, integral part of Soviet culture, despite undisputed restrictions and lacunae. In this context, “the categories ‘Jewish’ and ‘Soviet’ could coexist” [2011: 2]. As Benjamin Pinkus’s and Shimon Markish’s studies show, the counter-culture that emerged in the circles of Jewish nonconformist intellectuals, with its relatively well-developed samizdat system and a network of unofficial educational institutions, was therefore not the only expression of the Jewish cultural revival and the new national self-confidence. David Galkin’s Tsimbalisty (1967) and Anatolii Rybakov’s Tiazhelyi pesok (1978), as well as Grigorii Kanovich’s Lithuania-published novels Svechi na vetru (Candles in the wind, 1979), Slezy i molitvy durakov (Tears and prayers of the fools, 1983), and I net rabam raia (Slaves do not have a paradise, 1985) did not break any ideological taboos. Nevertheless, as Olaf Terpitz points out with reference to the village and war prose of the late Soviet period, these texts “oscillated between official, semi-official, and unofficial literature” and, consequently, participated in a contamination, a breaking up of the “absolute supranational space” represented by the Soviet socialist literary canon [2008: 34]. As mentioned above (cf. chap. 2.2), Terpitz shows that in Anatolii Rybakov’s groundbreaking novel Tiazhelyi pesok, which was one of the first texts to focus on the history of Jews in Russia, the idea of Jewish destiny is strongly subordinated to the Soviet ideal image of the human. “Displacement, superimposition, and rejection” are Rybakov’s writing strategies in the Soviet Jewish context [ibid.] Works like Tiazhelyi pesok require a reading method that interprets the signifiers of the text as “markers” of a given historical and political context and acknowledges a gap between the author’s intentions (with varying levels of Soviet-Jewish subjectivity in each case), (self-)censorship, and fluctuating limits of what can be said: “[. . .] in Soviet literature a special language (of coded expressions and allusions) developed, [. . .] which oftentimes only people of that epoch were able to understand” [“Sovetskaia literatura” 1996]. In this section, I turn to several examples of officially published Jewish literature to explore their position within the field of what was allowed to be expressed and published at the time. The works discussed below are of varying degrees of artistic mastery, but their aesthetic quality can become a performative symbol of their time. As Gennady Estraikh puts it, “[f]or historians of Soviet culture, mediocre literati may even represent more value than real talents, because in the work of feeble writers, the ideological scaffolding remains much more visible than in masterpieces” [Estraikh 2005: 134].

2. Research Approaches

In his late 1960s novel Tsimbalisty, David Galkin describes sometimes satirical, and sometimes nostalgic episodes of Jewish life before the October Revolution and in the interwar period. The Soviet policy towards the Jews is presented as difficult but necessary enlightenment efforts. As part of the socialist-realist plot, the initial rejection of communist cultural and economic policies by the traditionally educated older Jews dissolves in the course of the humane Soviet re-education. The representatives of the “old” way of life are either caricatured or, after some hesitation, admit that they have been wrong. The new regime appears relatively tolerant. Thus, old Jews willingly join a newly founded craftsmen’s cooperative after being allowed to take a day off on Saturday. The new, exemplarily organized Jewish kolkhoz “Emes” demonstrates that Jews under Soviet power have finally become capable agricultural workers. When the old tailor Lazar′ feels uneasy about the decision to open a youth club in the building of the Hasidic synagogue, his wife Fira tells him: “Старая синагога—такой здоровенный сарай, что туда можно загнать целый полк. Ничего, поместитесь” [Galkin 1970: 206] (“The old synagogue is such a huge stable that one can accommodate a whole regiment there. That’s okay, the place will be enough for everyone”). Although Fira also belongs to the older, tradition-conscious generation, she does not even object to her children eating pork. Despite its canonical narrative and the glorification of the early Soviet nationality policy—an example of socialist reeducation inspired by the Soviet Jewish literature from the 1920s to the 1940s,27 Tsimbalisty is a cautious attempt to present traditional Judaism as a naive and outdated yet likeable old world and thus make it understandable to the Soviet reader. Jewish children’s literature could use the simplified worldview of the socialist realist plot, with its infantilizing approach to the reader, for its intended purpose. The Jewish world was presented by an uncorrupted child narrator and, at the same time, it reflected the constructs of the Soviet ideology. At the same time, the innocence of the limited childlike perception, which enlarged separate fragments of reality, allowed the authors to convey historically authentic images. In this way, the ideology was subtly “corrected” by various narrative means. This happens in Mnukha Bruk’s autobiographical novel Sem′ia iz Sosnovska (A family from Sosnovsk, 1965), in which the little girl Musia Levin tells of her life

27 For example, the following novels: Kogda reka meniaet ruslo (When the river changes its course, 1927) by Leon Ostrover, Granitsa (The border, 1935) by Matvei Roizman, V stepi (In the steppe, 1938) by Semen Levman or Deti evreiskoi kommuny (Children of the Jewish commune, 1931) by Lina Neiman.

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in the shtetl before the Revolution. The annotation preceding the text ensures a politically correct reading: Много печального в этой повести, потому что жизнь еврейской бедноты до революции была безрадостной. В семье Левин много детей и очень мало денег. Дети хотят учиться, но это недоступно для бедняков: в местечке нет гимназии. [.  .  .] Но [м]аленькая Муся никогда не унывает [.  .  .]. И не так уж плохо ей живется, потому что ее окружают добрые, отзывчивые люди. [Bruk 1965: 2] There is much sadness in this story, as the lives of the poor Jews were joyless before the revolution. The Levin family has many children and very little money. The children want to go to school, but that is not possible for the poor: there is no secondary school in the shtetl. [. . .] But the little Musia never lets her head down [. . .]. And she is not doing so badly, because she is surrounded by good-hearted, helpful people. The contrast between the bad political order and the positive attitudes of the lower class marks the general pattern of interpretation, within the boundaries of which various things can be depicted. There is the father, who is well versed in Talmud, the loving description of Sabbath and Passover customs, the older brother Tev′e, who studies in the yeshivah and wants to become a rabbi (which would guarantee prestige and prosperity for the family), the tradesman Iosif, whose whole family died in Kishinev (Chișinău) during the pogrom of 1903 (Iosif blames the tsar and his ministers, while also venting about rich greedy Jews, including rabbis), as well as numerous ethnographic realia, such as prayers, Jewish marriage and burial rites, and Judaistic terms, such as Talmud Torah, seder, and aggada. The neighbourly friendship between the Russians and the Jews living in the shtetl, who are united by their poverty, finds its parallel in the compassionate comparison of the literary characters the children read about— Chekhov’s Van′ka Zhukov and Sholem Aleichem’s Little Motl. In the course of the narrative, Musia’s older sister, Risia, joins the young revolutionaries, and Tev′e shaves off his peyes and beard and gives up Talmud studies in order to attend a university. Musia is influenced by the rebellious brother Shliomka and loses her childlike faith in God: a closer look at the Torah stories shows her (to the great frustration of her pious mother) that they are full of injustice and that God is nothing but a villain.

2. Research Approaches

Boris Gal′perin’s (Ber Halpern) collection of short stories Moia rodoslovnaia. Rasskazy (My family tree. Stories, 1983), translated from Yiddish by Grigorii Kanovich, is an even more remarkable example of the Soviet-Jewish fusion.28 Similar to Mnukha Bruk, in the story “Moia rodoslovnaia” the description of the narrator’s childhood in a Lithuanian shtetl combines Soviet system of characters with Jewish realia: the simple, unsentimental, robust, and hardly educated Jewish workers know nothing about religion, and the intrepid, cheerful grandfather earns his living as a raftsman and loves nature more than God.29 Written in the style of late social-realism, similar to the prose by the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov or the Khanty Eremei Aipin, Gal′perin’s story combines the humanist idea of international friendship with a new attention to ethnic differences, mild nostalgia, and subtle evaluations. It offers straightforward but no longer completely hermetic interpretations of history. In the story “Vremia” (“The time”), the old sleepy wall clock moves the time in the shtetl with difficulty—“часы [. . .] с трудом тянули время” [Gal′perin 1983: 150]—and Samuil Gozhanskii remembers his ancestors, who for centuries argued about whether an egg laid on a Saturday was kosher or tried to cut the tallit (prayer shawl) they found into equal pieces [ibid.: 151]. Samuil himself becomes an engineer and takes part in the construction of the Kaunas hydroelectric power plant; his sister Shneidl graduates from the philological faculty, becomes a translator, travels around the world, and buys a car. However, in the communist narrative of emancipation, prosperity, and education there is also place for pride in the great-grandfather Avrom-Ber, a wise man with knowledge of the Talmud, admired by the community, who married the daughter of a simple blacksmith and “смешал свою жидкую кровь талмудиста с густой кровью работяги-кузнеца” [ibid.: 154] (“mixed the thin blood of a Talmudist with the thick blood of a hardworking smith”). In the story “Spustia gody” (“Years after”) Velvl Reznik narrates Jewish “folklore” to his inquisitive friend during the war: he recounts the legends about the twofold arrival of the Messiah and about Rabbi Akiva. The mutual penetrability of the Soviet and the Jewish is also evident here: Velvl calls Bar Kochba the “commander” of the uprising against the Romans, and Rabbi 28 I do not discuss Yiddish originals of the texts named in this chapter, which probably could challenge our understanding of the Soviet Jewish prose. Rather, I am interested in the doublecoded Russian versions that maintained a more subtle relationship towards the Soviet canon and that were accessible for the majority of Soviet readers. 29 As we have seen already, and will see later, this image is reversed in nonconformist and post-Soviet Jewish prose: in the texts by Iurii Karabchievskii, Mark Zaichik, or Liudmila Ulitskaia, the Jewish grandfather who received a religious education becomes the key figure in the process of returning to Jewish values and traditions, which is of great importance for the protagonists.

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Akiva his “commissar”—and thus translates biblical tradition into the language of Soviet war patriotism [ibid.: 174]. One of the central topics in another book, Samuil (Shmuel) Gordon’s collection of prose Domoi. Povesti i rasskazy (Home. Novels and short stories),30 also translated from Yiddish and published in Russian in 1973, is the new Jewish homeland in Soviet settlement areas, the image of which is endowed with the characteristic ideology of the Soviet local patriotism. For example, in the story “Domoi” (“Home”), an “ancestral peasant” (“потомственный крестьянин”) named Shimen returns to the Crimea with his family and livestock after evacuation. Hitler has destroyed many Jewish farmers in the Crimea, he says, but fortunately the Red Army occupied the Kuban area and saved his relatives. Shimen loves his now destroyed homeland above all else and quotes—replacing the praise of God with the prase of his motherland—a Jewish prayer: “Как там говорится в наших молитвах? ‘Ашрей йошвей вейсехо’—‘Благо тому, у кого есть дом’” [Gordon 1973: 222] (“How do you say in our prayers again? ‘Ashrei yoshvei veitecha’—‘Happy is he who has a home’”).31 In “Gorodok na Tunguske” (“A town on Tunguska”), the radical renewal of the Jewish way of life in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan is shown in comparison to the pre-Revolutionary shtetl: the new large houses and their cheerful, self-confident inhabitants contrast with the pre-Revolution Jews. In the new homeland, the former train driver Iankl, who lost his whole family in the war and was in despair, and the carpenter Simkha, formerly a melamed, find a new job in the furniture factory—a kind of social therapy and a worthy replacement for the previously sad Jewish existence with the weekly Sabbath feast as the only consolation. Gordon scatters fragments of historical truths in his ideologized descriptions: he makes mentions of the Holocaust, and discreet references to the pre–1917 Jewish culture—he lists traditional professions, adds quotations from the Holy Scriptures, and shows episodes from everyday Eastern Jewish life (cf. the stories “V piatnitsu vecherom” [“On Friday evening”] or “Pereulok Bal′shema” [“Ba’alshem lane”]). In addition, in Lithuania and Russia, from the late 1950s onwards, Jewish prose works in Russian and Lithuanian were published (some of them translated from Yiddish), which took up the semi-tabooed subject of the Shoah, such as Nich′ia dlitsia mgnovenie (The draw lasts only a moment, 1963, Russian, 1965) and Na chem derzhitsia mir (What the world rests on, 1965, Russian, 1966) by 30 The publishing house Sovetskii pisatel′ produced the Yiddish edition three years before publishing the Russian traslation: Shemuel Gordon, Friling. roman, dertseylungen, rayze-bilder (Moscow, 1970). 31 Literally: “Happy are those who live in Your house.”

2. Research Approaches

Itskhak (Icchokas) Meras or Maria Rolnikaite’s diaries Ia dolzhna rasskazat′ (I have to tell, 1963, Russian edition 1965). There was no frozen demarcation between the officially published works and the Jewish literature of the “anticanon.” Some conformist authors published from time to time also in the literary underground, and the samizdat writers managed to find a place in state publishing houses or journals. A transition from official to samizdat writing or a parallel literary existence was not uncommon. Before David Shrayer-Petrov became a samizdat author, for example, he published his first volume of poetry Kholsty (Canvases) in 1967 and two collections of essays in the 1970s. Like many other nonconformist writers, he was also a member of the Soviet writers’ union. Feliks Kandel′, later one of the most visible activists of the aliyah movement, printed his humoresques in the renowned Soviet magazines Novyi mir, Iunost′, and Krokodil. For decades, Izrail′ Metter had been writing his prose criticizing antisemitism “for the drawer” (his story “Piatyi ugol” [1966, published in 1989] was received more widely), but from the 1940s onwards he published stories and plays, some of which not only achieved great popularity but were also filmed in the 1960s. A few authors were acclaimed writers before their underground activities in the 1970s and emigration: Efraim Sevela and Feliks Kandel′ achieved great fame as screenwriters and humorists this way. However, a complex and holistic picture of Jewish literature in the Soviet Union, which would reveal crossings, transitions, and possible influences between the “above” and the “under” ground, the “within” and “beyond” the official framework,32 is not the goal of my research. Moreover, the “semi-official” publications would shift the focus to other aspects of Jewish cultural subjectivity and other types of self-articulation; they would expose complex practices of navigating the contradictions that cannot becontained by the binary divison of literary production and communication under a dictatorship. However, the diversity and the range of unofficial Jewish literature have a common denominator: they reveal, first of all, the long tradition of clandestine writing that is located on the periphery of the public sphere or, in case of emigration, on the outside culture. 32 A recent example of research that acknowledges this complexity is Marat Grinberg’s comprehensive study of Boris Slutskii’s literary work [Grinberg 2011]. Although Grinberg opens up the hidden (until now, to a large extent also hidden from the readers) universe of Judaism in Slutskii’s works, his approach presupposes a holistic view of the poet’s oeuvre and thus aims to find a connection between his official—often explicitly Soviet—texts, and unpublished (partly anti-Soviet) ones. This perspective reflects precisely the specifics of Slutskii’s double creativity: as Grinberg’s chapter on Ian Satunovskii demonstrates, Slutskii was read by the writers of the Lianozovo circle as a link and a mediator between the underground and the public spheres [ibid.: 355–376].

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2.3.2. Refocusing Jewish Studies As the research overview showed, the prevention of free development generated a culture in which the political counter-writing that opposed the totalitarian narrative became one of the most important components of Jewishness. Therefore, studies that view the subject matter from a political and sociological perspective also dominate the research. The “Judaization” of the Soviet Jewry, which began in Jewish underground culture and the aliyah movement, has made possible the pluralization of the conceptions of ethnicity in many spheres, including art and literature. This process of diversification reached its peak with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Transgressing the boundaries of the historical, documentary, or ethnographic writing, and the rediscovery of a symbolically coded dialogue with the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, Jewish mysticism and philosophy, Judaistic historical discourses and geographical myths, have signalled the reawakening of the “withered” (to use Shimon Markish’s metaphor) and visibly flattened tradition. These changes require(d) a new orientation of researcher paradigms. My book is conceived as a contribution to the analysis of developments in literature, which show a new complexity of interpreting Jewishness and Judaism in Eastern Europe and in the countries of immigration, despite—or because of—the fact that direct links to the old tradition are no longer available. As discussed above, different cultural turns [Bachmann-Medick 2010] became apparent in the increased interest of researchers in Jewish topographies, practices and philosophemes of Jewish collective memory, religious rites and Jewish materiality in Eastern Europe. Studies on diasporic Jewry have been incorporated into interdisciplinary research on foreignness (xenology) that flourished in the 1980s. This research works with the categories of cultural alterity and identity, of autostereotypes and heterostereotypes, of interculturalism and multiculturalism. Similarly, concepts developed by postcolonial studies—such as hybridity, exoticism, orientalization, or the “third space” of culture—are becoming more and more attractive in this context.33 The  typical methodological overlaps and fusions manifest themselves, for

33 One of the more recent examples is Dorothee Gelhard’s study [2008]. In its final chapter, postcolonialist concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and the third space are applied to the texts of the German-Jewish authors [ibid.: 190–225]. [Brunotte/Lüdewig/Stähler 2015] could also be mentioned, with its focus on German antisemitism as an expression of orientalism and in particular the chapters by Jay Geller, Daniel Wildmann, Laurel Plapp, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Tatjana Peltzer et al. (See there the current bibliography of Jewish studies, which take up and question postcolonial approaches.)

2. Research Approaches

example, in the integration of the spatial component into discussions of transcultural and postcolonial phenomena, cultures of translation, or cultural transfer (cf. [Smola 2013a]) and, all in all, in the fact that older concepts are tested and rephrased within the framework of the newer theories. Traditional concepts of Jewish studies—migration, biculturalism or multiculturalism, and border theories—merge with postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial paradigms and inspire reflections on categories such as displacement, mimicry, othering, or cultural hegemony. Russian Jewish literature of the second half of the twentieth century provides excellent material for hybrid theories that arise due to the interaction of various cultural turns [Bachmann-Medick 2010]: in these texts, cultural belonging and otherness are, at least, double-coded, and references to many cultural contexts appear on various narrative levels. Thus, the analysis falls in line with contemporary developments in the humanities, because “recently, interest has increasingly focused on the border crossings between nations, cultures, and literature and on the phenomena of disunity, diversity, interconnectedness, and mixture” [Hausbacher 2009: 23].

2.3.3. Literary History, Poetics, and Cultural Studies My book makes a triple heuristic claim, based on the interpenetration of methods, theories, and disciplines: it focuses on literary history, poetological features, and macro-cultural changes. From the perspective of literary history, my study is intended to attract scholarly attention to authors of Russian Jewish literature written in recent decades, who have yet received little or no recognition. Furthermore, I propose that Russian literary history, which has up until now still been written and received mainly in terms of national culture, is to be understood as a syncretic phenomenon drawing from manifold sources and geographical contexts. Finally, the so-called “hyphen,” composite literatures also raise the question of the cultural affiliation of texts written in different countries but in the same language—thus updating the problem of national literary historiography(s) once again. Many texts that this study examines belong both to Russian and to multilingual Jewish literature(s), meaning that they have are a part of a double or even multiple literary history. Moreover, the topic of unofficial or—more generally—nonconformist Jewish literature makes the notion of the Soviet anti-canon more complex. The discursive and symbolic dependence of the simplistically defined “protest literature” on the official discourse can question the assumed divisive view

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of literary history. At the same time, the field of dissident literature is to be changed and expanded through the analytical positioning of Jewish samizdat and emigration works. Since this study is limited to literature, I will leave aside the extremely noteworthy medium of Jewish underground art, which has, by now, also been very little explored. I refer, among others, to the sophisticated Jewish paintings of the artists of the “second Russian avant-garde” (Grisha Bruskin, Mikhail Grobman, Oskar Rabin, Dmitrii Lion, Alek Rapoport, Vladimir Iankilevskii, Meir Tsvi, Eduard Shteinberg, and others). The Jewish renaissance in the late Soviet Union in its pronounced hetero-, multi-, and intermedial nature must be the subject of a separate study.34 My other aim is to scrutinize, from a poetic and poetological point of view, to what extent contemporary Russian Jewish literature has produced a particular poetics inspired by the Jewish tradition and what forms (including forms of self-reflexivity) have emerged from this development. It is about much more than just the narratological exploration of the perspective and focalization of the Jewish Other: the alternative point of view is generated through participation in historically transmitted Jewish writing and/or reference to Jewish intertextuality. Tracing the specific character of this literature means exploring whether it finds a connection to the tradition of the Yiddish storytelling, which emerged in the nineteenth century, or whether the late Soviet aliyah prose can be read as a continuation of “classical” Jewish travel narratives (cf. chap. 7). In addition, the “share” of the Jewish cultural tradition is very different in different periods and texts, as will be shown. The perspective of cultural studies will be used in my book to inscribe Russian Jewish literature of the 1960s–1980s into the macrocultural context of that time. I will look into problems of collective myths, postmemory, topographical constructions that paradoxically draw on the mythic-religious and real-historical at the same time, postmodernist discourse, semiotics of Jewish communication and, in general, cultural practices and historical motivation of ethnic revival. Of particular interest here is the transformation of (socio)cultural phenomena into poetic devices and, as a result, the poet(olog)ic potential of cultural analysis. For instance, mimicry as a forced social-psychological behavioral pattern of Soviet Jews “reincarnates” into a subversive literary technique and a poetics of irony: the imitation of hegemonic speech unfolds into a politicial antiphrasis, sometimes encompassing the entire text (chap. 11.2.2). Palimpsest—a mnemonic technique of culture and an established 34 The approaches to such an investigation are detailed in [Smola 2018b].

2. Research Approaches

epistemological metaphor—is translated into a spatial trope of memory and forgetting, as it is used to structure covert layers of tradition and processes of its rediscovery and “restauration” (chap. 11.1.1). And the post-Soviet cultural narrative of return (always a nostalgic utopia, and so partly a failure) creates a poetics of defective memory that is torn and filtered through metafictional insertions (chap. 11.1.2). In this sense, my study draws on scholarly works that approach geographically, ethnically and culturally multilayered literatures by linking a poststructuralist, deconstructive close reading with traditional hermeneutics, including Jewish ones, and the macrocontext of a cultural period.

2.3.4. Text Selection: Time and Geography The period of Russian Jewish literary history selected for my study is noticeable because discussions about, and reflections on, Jewish identity, religion, culture and history became increasingly significant in the unofficial, semiofficial, and official publications approximately since the mid-1960s. The beginning of the aliyah struggle and the first Jewish wave of emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s mark the moment of emancipation and ethnic dissidence. Importantly, the Jewish movement developed not only in the Soviet Union, but also in emigration. In the end of the 1980s, literary as well as historical, political, and journalistic texts of this wave gradually began appearing in Russia as well and became part of the newly established, institutionalized Russian Jewish culture in post-communist Russia, which was in part burdened with its own ideologies. Taking up the approaches of memory research, we can also speak of a collective “memory project” [Assmann 2007: 55] undertaken by the Russian Jews—who had, until recently, been the “Jews of silence” (Eli Wiesel)—starting from the postwar period and up to the present time.35 Those born between the 1920s 35 The Russian Jewish authors of the last forty or forty-five years have been working on a Soviet historiographical counter-canon: their texts create an image of a history that is often autobiographical or marked as family history, and the official historical narrative is revised by documenting other events related to Jews: pogroms and a systematic unwritten policy of discrimination; the failed Birobidzhan project; the introduction of the “fifth paragraph” in the Soviet identity cards (ethnicity/nationality) in the 1930s; the founding and the bloody liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; the arrest and murder of the most important Yiddish poets in the late 1940s; the complete closure of Jewish schools and Jewish cultural institutions in the 1950s; the campaign against “cosmopolitism”; the “doctors’ trials” and the history of emigration with its two major phases in the 1970s and the 1990s. This literary historiography often covers a broad historical period: it ranges from the lives of Russian Jews, often the (great-)grandparents of the author/narrator, long before the Revolution, their precarious existence under the early Soviet regime, through the war and the Holocaust to the

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and the 1960s will gain their voice: due to similar historical experiences, their books perform a common “collective biographical identity work” [ibid.: 53]. However, differences between their texts do not result solely from belonging to the prewar or postwar generation, although the variations in degrees of closeness or distance to Jewish traditions are also conditioned by the time. I also deliberately refrain from focusing on individual geographically determined fields of literature such as Jewish emigration literature per se, because I am interested in tendencies and poetics that have a geographically overlapping effect and make the Russian Jewish prose of recent decades understandable as a unique, but not homogeneous, cultural and possibly ideological macrotext. Therefore, I aim to avoid “ethnographically” oriented literary research, which has received most of its material thanks to emigrations—namely the studies of Jewish literatures in Israel, Germany, or the United States, which concentrate on local everyday life and are consequently different from each other. The texts I analyze were written in Russia, Israel, Germany, France, and the United States, but despite this geographical diversity they are often diegetically not unsimilar because of the detachment from their immediate local setting. The selection of primary texts in this study does not provide a panoramic picture of late and post-Soviet Russian Jewish prose. As can easily be seen, this is not a claim of complete research of a very diverse literary production, which was by no means completely unofficial in Soviet times (cf. chap. 2.3.1). It has also not come close to catching up with the diversity of literature created on the territory of the Soviet Union since its dissolution. Some important unofficial authors have had to be omitted. The bibliography, which includes the names of Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Arkadii L′vov, Ruf ′ Zernova, Mark Zaichik, Dina Kalinovskaia, Inna Lesovaia, Margarita Khemlin, Mariia Iuzefovskaiia, Rada Polishchuk, Dina Rubina, Miriam Gamburd, and Boris Khazanov, gives a more complete picture of this literary period. Moreover, I will not explore the rich and still strongly understudied field of Russian Jewish poetry and drama that was inspired by the aliyah movement. And yet, this study analyzes the currents and tendencies significant for the given period, which either became a part of or arose as the consequence of the last (or the penultimate) great Jewish cultural revival in Eastern Europe. What they have in common is the attempt to reinvent Jewish tradition after a long period of repression and amnesia.

late Soviet period. Historical reflections always include “the confrontation with the [. . .] past, which has long been kept under lock and key” [Heftrich/Grüner 2004: 25], while the texts written during the Soviet era broke “the regime’s monopoly on interpreting the past” [Grüner 2006: 91].

2. Research Approaches

In the exodus prose this impetus produces the restoration of genealogical myths and the creation of “imaginary communities,” but also the emergence of documentary and testimonial literature that accurately represents the everyday life and the art of the otkazniki. In other texts, there emerges a special poetics of stylization and parody, narrative disguises and creative simulation. Starting from the 1990s, literature often refers to posthistorical understanding of tradition, engendering postmemorial and deconstructivist models of Jewishness. The formation of myths and communities is replaced there by their linguistic-discursive analysis.36 All in all, literature tackles different poetics of the exegesis, in a wide sense, of a culture that is no longer part of the present. While the artistic level of some nonconformist works is of less importance than their representative and documentary significance such as their belonging to a large literary movement,37 for other texts aesthetic innovations are central. Can this study give rise to classificatory statements or trend suggestions? If we take into account the temporal distance, a tentative literary-historical framework can be applied, first of all, to the late Soviet texts. Post-Soviet texts, which often each have their own tendency, can only partly be assigned to one genre, contemporary poetics, or context, such as transnational writing, postmodernism, postcoloniality, or postmemorial literature. The structure of the third chapter—the most extensive in this work— requires a brief explanation. After a preliminary historical examination of the bicultural nature of Russian Jewish literature (chapter 3), I move on to late Soviet nonconformist prose. A reflection on the historical, cultural, literary, and political background of the period is followed by the actual analyses of literary texts (chapter 4). The next chapter is devoted exclusively to the prose related to Jewish emigration to Israel (exodus), and chapter 6 examines Jewish nonconformist literature beyond the aliyah myth as well. Chapter 7 then deals with a negation and reversal of the Zionist models represented in what I call “counter-exodus literature.” In chapter 8, the space-time structure of the nonconformist texts is explored in addition to the analysis of these topographic (counter-)fictions. The analysis of a specific subgenre of Jewish unofficial or

36 As chap. 10.1 shows, some texts emerging in recent times show a backward movement towards the closed, past-oriented models of Jewish national and religious identification. This may be seen in the context of the right-wing conservative political turnaround of the 2000s and the 2010s. 37 The first history of uncensored Russian Jewish literature and its anthology in which, for example, the exodus literature is treated as an independent literary movement is the Englishlanguage volume published by Maxim D. Shrayer in 2007 [Shrayer 2007].

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emigration prose—the reinvented Yiddish storytelling—follows in chapter 9, after which I explore the meaning and impact of nonconformist Jewish literature on subsequent literary development in chapter 10. Finally, chapter 11 deals with post-Soviet prose.

3. Russian Jewish Literature as a Bicultural Phenomenon

Is postwar Russian-language Jewish literature a part of Jewish or rather of Russian literary history? Which of the texts written in Russian can and may1 (also) be assigned to Jewish culture? By which criteria can they be differentiated? What does the hyphen in “Russian Jewish” mean: does it describe a formal feature such as the language of the text, while the content is irrelevant, or does it refer to the hybridity and the double/multiple cultural affiliation of this literature? The attempt to position every new study in the context of this discussion has already become commonplace in research literature. What is clear, however, is that these questions gradually lose their connection to the present, and the dilemma becomes less problematic. The pronounced richness of the Jewish “component” in the literature written over the last four decades by the authors who perceive themselves as Jewish—and the multilayered references to Jewish poetics in their texts—speak for themselves. The emphasis on the ethnically and culturally Jewish varies from one author to another, but in many texts, and in many different ways, both the Russian and Jewish cultural traditions generate

1 This restrictive formulation is intended here to indicate the sometimes sceptical and even pessimistic undertone of the (still) current discussion: the fundamental doubts about the existence or survival of the once exterminated and suppressed Jewish culture in contemporary Russia.

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meanings. Their merging or crossing testifies to the continued existence of Russian Jewish literature at the border between cultures, fuelled by two powerful cultural traditions that are strongly intertwined due to their shared history. A closer examination of this border phenomenon could add a new dimension to the above-mentioned debate, soften some strict attitudes, and even bring about a theoretical turn. In the previous chapter, I cited the monographs written by Alice S. Nakhimovsky and Rita Genzeleva, who observe a continuous, historically conditioned restraining and flattening of ethnically traditional Jewish content in Soviet Jewish literature. Since literature reflects the changing self-image of Jews living in Russia [Nakhimovsky 1992: x], Nakhimovsky considers it to be part of Jewish culture—even if that literature is dominated by Russian tradition. The result is an anti-essentialist, but rather unproblematic and broad understanding of the texts in question. The sharp decline of Jewish and Judaistic influences on Russian Jewish literature in the second half of the twentieth century does not prevent Nakhimovsky from considering it an integral part of the Jewish tradition. Shimon Markish’s work, which also dates back to the early post-Soviet period (the beginning of the 1990s) and where he attempts to draw the borders of Russian Jewish literature, is the best known and at the same time the most rigid. It is thus also a counterpart to Nakhimovsky’s solution. His considerations are based on the above-mentioned pessimistic conviction, steeped in the historical feeling of tragedy: that the roots of the Jewish culture in Eastern Europe have been destroyed and that the “усыхающая ветвь” (“withered branch”) can no longer produce living offshoots [Markish 1997: 189]. Assuming that the revival of Russian Jewish literature has failed both in Israel and in Eastern Europe [Markish 1995: 223–224], he highlights the following qualities that should testify to a writer’s authentic integration into the Jewish cultural tradition: (1) the Jewish perspective or “взгляд изнутри” [ibid.: 185] (“the view from within”), which requires the reader to have a deeper knowledge of Jewish “civilization”; (2) the ability to represent the point of view of the Jewish (not only religious) community; and (3) a dual cultural belonging that precludes conflict or disruption between the two cultures [ibid.: 185–187]. Especially the second condition shows that Markish bases his considerations on a sociocultural situation that has not existed in Russia since the 1950s at the latest. As Markish himself notes in several essays, the former Jewish community has long since disintegrated. However, he excludes all literati who “broke out” of this community from the circle of Jewish culture. The meaning of the word “broke

3. Russian Jew ish Literature as a Bicultural Phenomenon

out” (“выломившихся”), which gives Markish’s argumentation an unwanted partisan character, remains unclear here.2 Markish’s judgment has entered several subsequent studies, including reference works,3 and has become programmatic. For this reason, later researchers often turn to his criteria to take a stand on the problem or set their own limits to the phenomenon in question. Christina Parnell adheres to the following criteria set by Markish: biculturalism, inner Jewish perspective, and Russian language [2004: 120]. Mikhail Krutikov does not comment on the difference, adopted by Markish, between Jewish themes in Russian literature, on the one hand, and Russian Jewish literature, on the other, and uses both these names as synonyms (cf. [Krutikov 2003]). Thus, the title of his essay is “Constructing Jewish Identity in Contemporary Russian Fiction” (italics mine—K.S.), but he also uses the term “Russian Jewish writing” in the text. For Krutikov, the “Jewishness” of Russian texts apparently has a gradual and not an asserting value, which is why he speaks, for example, of “the most Jewish works of contemporary Russian literature” [ibid.: 271, italics mine—K.S.]. Olaf Terpitz traces, following Nakhimovsky, the reconciliation between Russian and Jewish cultures on the territory of the Russian Empire since the Haskala and points to their mutual productive interaction [2008: 62]. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the combination “Russian Jewish” has meant a lively and rich interrelation of two neighboring cultures, which only ended in the 1930s. Without specifically going into the plausibility of different attempts at definition,4 Terpitz describes Russian Jewish literature as that which “participates in at least two semiotic systems.” He is following the postcolonial terminology of Homi K. Bhabha as he mentions a dynamic “‘third space’ in which the respective dominances, the crossovers are constantly renegotiated” [ibid.: 63]. As a result, Terpitz is less concerned with delimitation than with weighing the effect of both components within specific literary-historical contexts. In this sense, he also negates Shimon Markish’s scheme, which he criticizes for its anachronistic research perspective5 and an essentialist longing for a Jewish national literature.

2 The positions of Nakhimovsky and Markish in this debate are critically discussed by Markus Wolf [1995]. 3 See the articles “Russko-evreiskaia literatura” (“Russian Jewish literature”) in Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia and in Elektronnaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia. 4 Except for Markish’s concept (see below). 5 Cf.: “As ambitious as these criteria are, they only capture the exceptions in post-Revolutionary Russian Jewish culture” [Terpitz 2008: 67].

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A similar, rather undogmatic understanding of the Russian Jewish literature can also be found in Maxim D. Shrayer [2008]. He captures the ambivalent position of a Jewish author writing in Russian in an intentionally paradoxical definition: “A Jewish-Russian writer has always been and remains both an in-looking outsider and an out-looking insider” [ibid.: 5]. This paradox makes it clear that Russian Jewish intellectuals are not only “insiders” with regard to their own culture of origin, but also outsiders since the Jewish Enlightenment and the beginning of Jewish assimilation. This is especially due to the fact that their cultural identity is always located on the border and therefore rather difficult to define. Shrayer thus pleads much more for the inclusion of numerous problematic phenomena than for their exclusion. He agrees with Alice S. Nakhimovsky’s anti-scholastic approach when he establishes the relevance of the individual identity for each writer as the main criterion for their belonging to Russian Jewish culture. However, the topics of writing are also important: “Here the necessary criterion must be applied: engagement of Jewish subjects, themes, agendas, or questions in the writing” [ibid.: 21]. As the editor of a twovolume anthology of Russian Jewish or “Jewish-Russian” literature covering the broad period from 1801 to 2001 [Shrayer 2007], Shrayer performatively denies Markish’s refusal to extend the history of this literature to the period after the 1930s. For Shrayer, the combination of topics and views (“the author’s identity, Jewish or Judaic aspects and attributes, such as themes, topics, points of view, reflections on spirituality and history, references to culture and daily living” [2008: 24]) plays a decisive role in the cultural positioning of the author, but these two points are not enough. Shrayer searches for the presence of Jewish poetics in the work, which, according to Vladimir Nabokov, is “not to be found in the text, but in the texture.” However, the attributes of this poetics remain undefined in Shrayer’s essay and even appear as something mystical and intangible (like a meaning half-revealed between the lines). In addition, the term “Jewish-Russian literature,” proposed by Shrayer, in which the two components of the compound trade places, seems questionable. This change means a shift of semantic emphasis onto the word “Russian.” The attribute “Jewish” then becomes a supplementary quality of texts belonging to another national literature, and the problem of a multilingual Jewish (diaspora) literature is left in the shadows. In the introduction to her monograph on the beginning and development of Russian Jewish literature in 1860–1940 [Hetényi 2008], Zsuzsa Hetényi emphasizes the heterogeneous character of this cultural phenomenon: “Russian Jewish literature is a borderline phenomenon, a literature with dual cultural roots”

3. Russian Jew ish Literature as a Bicultural Phenomenon

[ibid.: 2, italics in the original]. Both Hetényi and Shrayer discuss the question in its literary-historical diachrony as they look back at the history of critical reflection on the character of Russian Jewish literature since the last third of the nineteenth century. They quote critics such as Mikhail N. Lazarev, Saul Chernikhovskii, Vasilii L′vov-Rogachevskii, Arkadii Gornfel′d, Joshua Kunitz, Mark Slonim, Iulii Aikhenval′d, Vera Aleksandrova, and, finally, Shimon Markish. Hetényi also draws on more recent concepts that take into account different phases of influence in the history of Russian Jewish literature. For example, Itamar Even-Zohar highlights the period of Hebrew influence before 1860, the period of Russification of Jewish literature from the 1860s to the 1920s, and the “Soviet Russian period” that lasted until 1950 [ibid.: 13]. The reference to the historicity of both literature itself and the attempts at its interpretation is highly instructive. Nevertheless, for Hetényi, Russian Jewish writing cannot be characterized in any clear-cut way, so that in the end only the following general statements retain their undisputed validity: Russian Jewish prose remains a foreign body in all national literatures, its relationship to the two cultures that support it can only be determined through detailed analysis. The origin of the authors and the language they use are not sufficient to reveal the cultural specificity of their writing. The question of the dual cultural affiliation of Russian Jewish literature has become a complicated concern only in the twentieth century [ibid.: 28–31]. Taking into account the historical changeability of Russian-language Jewish literature, I tend to view it as a relational and gradual cultural phenomenon, which is constantly subjected to processes of (re)negotiation. It contains a flexible internal structure in which the relationship between the two or more complementary components involves both quantitative and qualitative criteria. From this point of view, simply stating that this culture participates in different cultural systems would still be insufficient, because it would not answer the question of the specific role of each reference system. It is undisputed that the “Jewishness” of texts written in Russian by authors of Jewish origin cannot be measured in a simple way. Cultural and historical factors influence not only the “how much” or “how intensively,” but also the “in what way.” They determine whether Jewishness functions exclusively as an object of representation or whether it also penetrates the text’s structure; whether the writers limit themselves to criticizing antisemitism and mourning the loss of Jewish cultural heritage, or whether a profound poetic reflection on this now absent tradition is initiated. It can be noted that the more “object-oriented” and discursively isolated the literary reflection of the Jewishness is, the closer it becomes to historiography—right down to looking like a document or an imitation of facts. A counter-example would be a text in which Jewish figures of

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thought, humor, tropes, intertextuality, style, and rhetoric are linked to Jewish philosophy and referential dimension (diegesis).6 The viability of tradition is directly related to the complexity of its processing in literature. In the last third of the twentieth and in the twenty-first centuries, many texts written in Russian address the consequences of the Shoah, the antisemitic Soviet policy, and Jewish emigration, while at the same time having no poet(olog)ic relationship to Jewish cultural tradition. A famous example, which has been mentioned in previous chapters, is Vasilii Grossman’s novel Zhizn′ i sud′ba, followed by the prose works of Anatolii Rybakov, Irina Grekova, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and many others. The works of Efraim Sevela, Izrail′ Metter, Eli Liuksemburg, Grigorii Kanovich, Efrem Baukh, Mikhail Iudson, Iakov Shekhter, Oleg Iur′ev or Iakov Tsigel′man participate in Jewish writing in many more—and yet very different—ways. Shimon Markish’s criteria retain their plausibility, though not without reservations, precisely because they make it possible to differentiate Russian Jewish literature today. Indeed, how is Jewishness rediscovered in literature after decades of oblivion, Aesopian language, and cultural sublimation? I take up Jewish literature where it rediscovers its traditions or tries to position itself in relation to them. The problems of reinvention, postmemory, the posthuman revival of tradition, self-reflexivity, and the creation of a new mythology take on a constitutive meaning.

6 As a paradigmatic example of this, Isaak Babel′’s works are often cited. But also, late Soviet literature, such as the work of Boris Slutskii, sometimes revealed, as a recent study has shown, its belonging to Jewish cultural imagination—in “quotation, interpretation of sources, rereading, reaccentuation, allusion, intertextuality, and memorialization” [Grinberg 2011: 29].

4. Jewish Dissent of the Late Soviet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature [. . .] if there is one place in the world where the State of Israel is regarded not as a territorial unit operating according to its own laws and within its own borders, but as a distant dream filling the veins of reality with sacred blood, that place is the Soviet Union. Elie Wiesel [2011: 66]

4.1. Soviet Jews: Collective Images and Myths The fact that late Soviet Jewry, which was both strongly assimilated and (semi-) tabooed, was not very visible ethnically hardly contradicted the formation of stereotypes and dealing with Jews as Others. This circumstance also shaped the character of Soviet Jewry itself, which often defined itself through external projections. It is no coincidence that antisemitism is the central theme of a majority of late and post-Soviet Jewish prose texts.1 Collective images, which will be discussed in this chapter, are of considerable complexity because, in the situation of veiled exclusion, they show quite different degrees of truth or reality and, in their extremes, can reflect anti-Jewish (or, more rarely, pro-Jewish) stereotypes as well as value-neutral phenomena or Jewish self-perception.2 Typically, a cliché comes from a wrong or one-sided interpretation of a fact. “[. . .] historically determined factors [are] declared to 1 The novel Ispoved′ evreia by Aleksandr Melikhov analyzes on a sociopathological level how this externally forced view of the Jews influenced their self-perception in the Soviet Union. The protagonist’s chronic urge towards self-concealment is counteracted here by using the literary genre of confession, which presupposes a complete and unconditional self-revelation (see chap. 11.2.2). 2 For the theory of heterostereotypes and autostereotypes see [Hahn 2007].

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be alleged characteristics and character traits” [Garleff 2002: 198]. Sometimes, however, collective knowledge about Jews simply points to facts or objectified conditions (such as the fact of antisemitism itself). The attempt to approach the characteristics of Soviet Jews, and especially the paradoxes of their collective image, stumbles at the old phenomenon of the “collective imaginary,” through which, from generation to generation, the ideas of the national “collective body” and thereby also of the Jewish “foreign body” are handled down. Christina von Braun, who analyzes the “fantasies of the collective body” using the example of women and Jews in Christian Europe, is concerned with the “unspoken, unwritten and subliminal discourse” that exists in the alliance with the historically changing media and knowledge systems [2001: 9–10]. Leonid Livak refers to this symbolic phenomenon when he distinguishes “the imaginary Jews” [Livak 2010: 3] from the real ones; the name of the former group is always given in quotation marks and small letters (“the jews” [ibid.: 4]). The Soviet society, which had modernized very rapidly and in many respects only superficially from the 1920s to the 1940s, dealt with the Jews in a way that combined traditional myth of “Russian” community, nourished by the Orthodox faith and age-old superstition, with rational, manipulative strategies of power supported by the media and the ideology. The Russification of the Jews in no way eliminated the dominant attitude that postcolonial research links to the phenomenon of orientalization and homogenization of the minority groups. The fact that the assimilated Soviet Jews were indistinguishable from the majority provoked collective unease and the desire for (forced) identification. This combination of belonging and foreignness imitated familiar patterns of perception that evolved in the history of Jewish assimilation and emancipation in Europe: As the Jews were granted full civil rights and many of them voluntarily shed the traditional features of visible otherness such as caftan, beards, and curls, the motif of the “simulating Jew” emerged: the swindler hidden behind the mask of the good citizen. [.  .  .] Precisely because of its new “invisibility,” this [.  .  .] “Other” was considered particularly dangerous. The need to make the “invisible Jew” “visible” again contributed to the formation of theories about the Jewish race, with which the Jew was to be assigned a physiologically “different” nature. [von Braun 2001: 33–34]

4. Jew ish Dissent of the Late Sov iet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature

Accordingly, Andrea Heuser observes that Jewish assimilation in Germany was accompanied by the growing collective need to invent the Jew as the Other, whether physiologically or spiritually: “‘The Jew’ as an imagined ‘inner enemy’ first had to be reinvented, made visible by means of a juxtaposition, and distinguished from the collective ‘self ’ [. . .]” [2011: 43]. The Soviet totalitarian system inherited essential features of a theocratic state: like the secularized post-Christian European states, it shared the internalization of religious ideas that it outwardly rigorously rejected—the “‘sacralization’ of national communities and the secularization of religious thought structures” [von Braun 2001: 438].3 We will see below that the spirituality of Jewish dissent draws ex negativo from the religious substance of communist ideology, with which it shares legitimizing reference to biblical sources. Seen in this light, the antisemitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” at the end of the 1940s with the “unmasking” of Jewish cultural workers and intellectuals, appears as a symbolic national cleansing ritual. It was accompanied by an insistent effort to reveal their true Jewish names hidden behind Russian pseudonyms. Homi K. Bhabha’s reinterpretation of the Freudian uncanny as a repression and projection of the inner fears onto the long assimilated colonized outsider, which becomes dangerous precisely because of this displacement, is realized here in an exemplary way.4 The colonial interdependence here is not based on the concept of cultural superiority of the colonizer, but precisely on the fear of one’s own seeming fragility and unworthiness. The totalitarian society fears its own division, which it projects onto the stereotypically understood others. Certainly, such stereotypes about Jews were already rooted in the popular belief in the Middle Ages: Jews were seen as inconceivable,

3 Religious or archaic roots of Soviet communism have been sufficiently investigated in recent decades (see introduction to this book), among others in [Etkind 1998] and [Weisskopf 2001]. Aleksandr Etkind, who examines sekty as an expression of religious dissent, contextualizes the apocalyptic-eschatological, revolutionary-chiliastic spirit of Soviet totalitarianism, inspired by the idea of collective salvation under charismatic individual leadership, in the long history of radical religious dissent in Russia. Russia’s intellectual thinking has been characterized by this spirit for centuries; it found its expression, for example, in the philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov with his idea of resurrection and immortality (cf. [Etkind 1998: 23–24]). 4 Ilya Kukulin summarizes the phenomenon of the incorporation and metaphorization of the Jews (as strangers who belong) in the Russian-Soviet collective consciousness: “The Jewish identity was suppressed and perceived differently from the national self-images of many ‘united and autonomous republics’ [. . .]. The taboo on debates about ‘Jewish problems’ was (and is) understood as a problem mainly within Russian culture, while almost all other taboos in national self-identification were located at the borders of this culture. Jewry as a persecuted minority became the source of a metaphor that is relevant for the totality of Russian culture [. . .]” [Kukulin 2003].

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flickering, and ever-changing.5 However, attitudes to Jews were historically very flexible: stereotypes function here as an ambivalent symbiosis of repression and domestication through the reappropriation of the “stranger.” The “visibility of the separation” [Bhabha 1994: 118] between the “I” and the other must thereby repeatedly guarantee the purity of the “I” and support the power regime. In addition, there is a long tradition of imagining Jews as feminine, another projection of the alien. This connection has already been examined in scholarly literature using many examples from European culture (for details, see [von Braun 2001, esp. 447–466]). For instance, the collections Jewish Culture and Femininity in Modernity [Stephan/Schilling/Weigel 1994] and Anti-Semitism and Gender [Gender-Killer 2005], in particular [Hödl 2005] and [Günther 2005], examine the interdependencies of the collective constructions of the Jewish and the female since the beginning of Jewish and female emancipation. In Otto Weininger’s early work Gender and Character [1917], “woman and Jew [. . .] are the scale of self-definition, the ‘non-me,’ in which the ego measures itself [.  .  .]” [von Braun 1994: 24]. The parallel projections of ambiguity, indefinability, and simulation on women and Jews [ibid: 26–27] increase in the period of assimilation: “The political age of emancipation and assimilation with its demand for the adaptation of Jewish appearance, language and morality to the European bourgeois code of conduct paradoxically leads to the production of the Jewish” [Frübis 2005: 139]. The official imperative proclaiming the equality of all Soviet citizens, which was combined, in practice, with the marginalization of the “aliens who belonged,” unleashed an immense, inherently contradictory, potential of imagining the Jews: “This nation in Russia is accompanied by an intertwined complex of myths [. . .]. Jews are the people who force others to define their relationship with them” [Vail′/Genis 1996: 298]. Marina Mogil′ner’s study of the history of physical anthropology testifies to the trend toward homogenization, demarcation, and normalization, alongside with the integration of Jewish population in the multiethnic Russian empire— the predecessor of the Soviet state. In the studies on the Jewish “physical type” at the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of scientists (including Jewish ones) confirmed the presence of certain anthropological characteristics of the Jews and thus evoked the already old construct of the “Jewish physiognomy”:

5 On the construct of the “internal other,” developed by Tzvetan Todorov, and on the connection between sexuality and nationalism see also [Weigel 1994]. For general information about the connections between Jewishness and the feminine, see [Schößler 2008: 41–42].

4. Jew ish Dissent of the Late Sov iet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature

Ignored thereby was the real heterogeneity of Russian Jewry. [. . .] Also ignored was the internal conflict between the ideals of acculturation and the preservation of national identity. Paradoxically, political recognition of the Jews’ equal rights in this situation turned into a tacit consensus on Jewish “specialness,” because the Jews were integrated into Russia’s “family of nations” under special conditions, namely without prior resolution of a multitude of internal problems and contradictions. Despite its inclusiveness and its universalizing potential, the anthropological model of imperial diversity contained structural preconditions for a [. . .] latent exoticization and distancing of the Jews [. . .]. [Mogil′ner 2012: 396] The marginalization of Jews in the Soviet Union was not based on any racial principles or the “scientificization” of discourse about Jews. Its origins were socio-cultural. Soviet totalitarianism’s fear of the presence of the concealed foreigner manifested itself in several antisemitic reveal campaigns. These included adding the nationality field to Soviet passports, or spatial isolation, that is, resettlement, of the Jews (as was purportedly intended in the course of the “doctors’ plot” shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953).6 One consequence was that the Soviet Jews went back to thousand-year-old mimicry techniques, which had a lasting impact on their identity and promoted the well-known symptom of Jewish self-hatred. These ranged from crypto-Jewry in the periphery to namechanging and the drive for hyper-assimilation in the big cities. Today’s knowledge about the phenomenon of “Soviet Jews” draws from historiography, memoirs, and cultural-historical analyses, as well as from documentary fiction. The sources and attitudes, which are reliable to varying degrees, are all intertwined—even if they are produced by those (cultural)

6 As Aleksandr Melikhov’s critical analysis in his essay “Birobidzhan—zemlia obetovannaia” (“Birobidzhan, the Promised Land”) shows, this intention was also expressed in the idea of creating the Jewish Autonomous Republic in Birobidzhan: “[. . .] because romantic Bolshevism wanted to nip in the bud any expression of national resistance from Moscow to the periphery in the 1920s and the 1930s, [. . .] it sought to assimilate and isolate the Jews simultaneously. Up to the attempt to find a new Zion not in the Near but in the Far East and to provide the Jews with a new socialist homeland—Birobidzhan—so that the scattered Jewry could become an ordinary national unity, such as Chuvashia or Karachay-Cherkessia” [2009: 8–9]. Melikhov’s observation regarding the obsessive desire of the Soviet authorities to “normalize” and “adapt” the Jews by creating a republic in the Far East is significant [ibid.: 9]. It makes explicit the ideas of control, discipline, spatial demarcation, and homogenization of the minority, which are essential for postcolonial analysis.

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historians, contemporary observers, and actors who themselves come from the Soviet-Jewish context. As testimonies—a kind of engaged, autobiographical, or literary historiography—the latter ones are of particular interest. Moreover, the earliest analyses of Soviet Jewish collective images, clichés, and myths often belonged to intellectuals active in the Jewish resistance movement (such as Efraim Sevela, Aleksandr Voronel′, or Vladimir Lazaris), which inspired many Jews to engage with their own culture and origins. Below I list attributes and collective images of late Soviet Jews, supported by references to historical statements and documentary texts by contemporary witnesses and participants. (1) The first of these is the above-mentioned lack of traditional ethnic and cultural characteristics such as religion, customs, and language (especially Yiddish and Hebrew). This can be traced back to the continuous, state-ordered Russification and Sovietization of the Jews after the October Revolution of 1917. Being Jewish was limited to a number of formal and socio-cultural characteristics such as the indication of nationality in the passport, the “typical” profession, education, everyday habits, behavior, or humor (see below, 4, 5, and 6).7 In sociology such a ‘secondary’ ethnic identity is called a ‘thin identity’: “‘Thin’ identities are more fluid and are based on shared experience, culture, values, understandings and sensitivities. In this sense, the ethnic Soviet-Jewish identity was ‘thin’ from the beginning” [Krutikov 2002: 5]. Gennady Estraikh speaks of “an intrinsic rather than a manifested Jewishness” when he characterizes Soviet Jews of the 1950–1960s as “the new Jew” [2008: 105–106]. If one takes up Yuri Slezkine’s cultural-anthropological criteria—even though he is somewhat mythologizing the image of the Jew himself—Soviet Jews have lost the essential characteristic of a “Mercurian” people: their “secret language,” which marks their special status as mediators and maintains diasporic exclusivity: “These languages [. . .] do not fit into existing ‘families,’ however defined. Their raison d’être is the maintenance of difference, the conscious preservation of the self and thus of strangeness” [Slezkine 2004: 19].8

7 The self-description of European Jews born after the Shoah corresponds to these characteristics in general, as the statement by Maxim Biller, among others, testifies: “But our Jewishness had no substance of its own, our Jewishness was merely a certain way of laughing, thinking, contradicting, it was storytelling and tea-slurping through a piece of sugar cube” (quoted from: [Heuser 2011: 115]). 8 Slezkine metaphorically divides peoples into “Apollonic” (majority, living from agriculture, animal keeping, and warfare) and “Mercurian” (minority, active in trade in goods and services). Historically, the Mercurian way of life (especially that of the Jews) was characterized by its mobility, and its representatives, by their ability to benefit from their own education and flexibility.

4. Jew ish Dissent of the Late Sov iet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature

Even in the scholarly works of recent years one comes across the assertion that Jews do not exist as an ethnic group (they have “dissolved,” mainly among the Russians). At the same time they are quite perceptible because they exhibit a number of specifically Jewish characteristics. The problem of the “intangible presence” of Jews has long been present in the Soviet world model. [Kantor 1999: 251–252] Vladimir Lazaris notes, “[. . .] without having the desire or the opportunity to be Jews in the Soviet Union, they were forced, however paradoxical this may sound, to be listed as such in their passports, countless questionnaires, and censuses [. . .]” [Lazaris 1981: 168].9 (2) Connected to this is the marginalized status of Jews in the Soviet Union, which also may seem paradoxical because there was a large degree of official recognition. State antisemitism ranged from mass arrests, agitations, and executions in the Stalin era to the later restrictions in education and employment. A significant nuance of the social disadvantage of Jews was the fact that their presence in Soviet society and history was concealed; this secrecy manifested itself in the non-mention of the Jewish nationality of war heroes, in the tabooing of the Holocaust, or in the covering up of the Jewish origins of historical or public figures: “[. . .] the impression arises that if we did not speak Russian so well [. . .] and, say, wear long peyot, the Russians would show us more tolerance. In this case they would feel that we do not claim ownership of Russian culture and of the national shrines” [Voronel′ 2003b: 188]). After the war, Soviet Jews, according to the psychologist Aleksandr Kantor, “lost” all forms of real ethnic existence and self-expression: All forms of real ethnic existence and self-expression: from towns and districts with a Jewish majority up to educational institutions, the press, etc. [. . .]. However, the social notoriety of the Jews, who were only recognized by public opinion as individuals (“a good person, albeit a Jew”), forced them to 9 This combination of facts and attributions also manifests itself in the self-analysis of the former Soviet Jews, to which the recent publication Jewish Life Stories from the Soviet Union [Arend 2011] bears witness. This is how Jan Arend, the editor of this collection, comments on the biographies told by his interview partners: “The awareness of one’s own Judaism is here attributed to the experience of social and political hostility towards Jews. It is described as determined by the environment and not as an inner disposition. The contrast between selfdetermined internal and foreign-determined external Judaism forms the semantic structure of the stories” [ibid.: 49].

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repress their ethnic characteristics and again brought to light the pre-Soviet type of an anxious Jew with a fragile, vulnerable, narcissistic self-perception, who always sought confirmation and support for his individual, socially weak “I.” [Kantor 2000] Significant in Kantor’s description is the turning point that took place in Jewish self-perception after perestroika: “Even the fact of the social reanimation of the word ‘Jew’ is a signal of important cultural changes. This overcomes the negative mode of Jewish self-identification [the word ‘Jew’ used to sound, as I[osif] Brodskii remarked, like the mention of a venereal disease [. . .]” [1999: 257]. (3) In pre-Revolutionary Russia and later in the Soviet Union, the Jews (despite or thanks to their high degree of assimilation) were considered to be a deviant political force; Russian Jews were considered revolutionaries, leftists, eternally dissatisfied. They were said to represent such attitudes as nonconformism, a tendency to think outside the box, to doubt and protest, and a preference for uncomfortable discussions in everyday life. As a proof of these ideas, two historical events were used in the twentieth century: the active participation of Russian Jews in the October Revolution of 1917 and later the Zionist dissident movement of the 1960–1980s. Even though such implications belong, in the first place, to antisemitic discourse,10 in other contexts they can become a neutral or a positive stereotype referring to a common cultural origin. With reference to Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Christina von Braun speaks of the formation of Jewish collective characteristics as a “shift of ‘Jewish thinking’ [. . .] to a secular level” [2001: 441]. According to this somewhat essentialist thesis, the “exercise in patient expectation,” which is seminal for the Jewish religion and stands in contrast to the Christian “religion of ‘fulfillment,” projects itself onto the attitude of Jewish intellectuals and thinkers in the modern age—namely, the tendency to doubt and question [ibid.: 452]. Andrea Heuser also discusses such general attributions as she comments on the German intellectual reception of Jewish identity: “a culture of outsiders, disturbers of the peace [. . .]. What all these terms have in common is their relativeness. They define identity not out of itself, as was the case with the concept of the ‘people of the book,’ but through a deviation from basic reference value, in contrast to which being Jewish is set as being different” [Heuser 2011: 83].

10 Cf. Hödl [1997: 158–160] on the common features of potential subversiveness attributed to Jews and vagabonds in the fin de siècle—“the allegedly non-existent patriotism and the missing idea of an authority” [ibid.: 159].

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According to Vladimir Lazaris’s Zionist assessment, Soviet Jews were attracted “to every oppositional movement that promised them equal rights and the opportunity to live like everyone else. And without realizing it, they fell out of the thousand years of Jewish history and began to make Russian history” [1981: 33]. Much later Maksim Kantor concluded: “The restless energy of the Jews found its expression both in he the red commissars who wanted to impose happiness on all mankind and in the ideologists of Zionism who wished a single people to have this happiness” [2008: 352]. Aleksandr Voronel′’s self-deprecating characteristics are: “Their tendency to insist on their rights provokes general displeasure precisely when it is not connected with any practical interests” [2003a: 36]; the Jew “always represents the nonconformist and mobile element” [ibid.: 44]. (4) Antisemitic prejudices in the population, reinforced by state propaganda, were at the same time the cause for the development of specific psychosocial characteristics and attitudes, such as insecurity, introversion, feelings of guilt and shame, and low self-esteem. Harriet Murav takes up the concept of “the melancholy of race” [Cheng 2001] when she analyses the identity problems of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews in Aleksandr Melikhov’s prose.11 The term “Jews of silence” coined by Elie Wiesel turned into a cliché that reflected not only the political and cultural passivity lamented in his essay, but also the everyday behavior of Jews in the Soviet Union.12 This was the reason why Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War and the Jewish protest movement in the Soviet Union triggered by it marked a turning point in the Soviet collective consciousness, as they challenged the popular notion of a weak and cowardly Jew: “[. . .] Jews were inoculated with a national inferiority complex. Their psyche, the soul of a human being, was deformed. Many began to be ashamed of their nationality, to hide it, they changed their family and first names into Russian, and if it worked, also their nationality” [Sevela 2007a: 171].13 (5) The Jews had, or were supposed to have a special appreciation for education, art, abstract knowledge, and written culture. Jewish intellectuals attributed it to centuries of Torah and Talmud studies, as well as to musical 11 See chap. 11.2.2. 12 Symptomatically, in his testimony of Soviet Jewish life, Wiesel conspicuously often uses psychological and emotional descriptive terms such as “ne reint pas” (“don’t laugh”), “ne se confient pas” (“don’t trust anyone”), “ne se réjouissent pas en public” (“are not happy in public”) [1966: 25], “la tristesse” (“grief ”) [ibid.: 33], “la solitude” (“loneliness”) [ibid.: 79]. Only the feast of Simchat-Torah is an oasis of joy and freedom for the Jews in his book [ibid.: 50–62]. 13 The psychologist Aleksandr Kantor writes about the “learned helplessness” of the Jews and long-term psychological affects such as depressions or fundamental existential fears [Kantor 2000].

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education, often pursued in the century-long diaspora, which led to choosing professions associated with music. They also had, on average, a higher level of education than the majority Russian-Soviet population and had more prestigious intellectual professions, were more proficient in Russian, and were better represented in the academic and cultural spheres: “[. . .] Jews have been active in science, education, medicine, law, culture and art, as well as engineering and managerial positions in industry, construction and transport” [Krutikov 2002: 3]. Recorded in numerous documentary and fictional documents of the time are dislike and even hatred of the poorly educated, ideologically manipulated “proletarian” masses against the intellectuals, especially Jews, the bespectacled intelligentia. Benjamin Harshav refers to the connection between the traditional status of the Jews as the “fallen aristocracy of the mind” and their intellectual discourse, which since the nineteenth century stood in contrast to their poverty in Eastern Europe. He also mentions the historical consequences of this special privilege: The Jews were poor but, at the same time, they were, in their own eyes, a fallen aristocracy of mind, conscious of their history, of their mission, and of ideological attitudes in general. This is why it was relatively easy for a Jew of lowly origin to rise to the highest levels of general society and culture: mentally, he did not have to overcome vertical class barriers [. . .]. And this is also why sincere anti-Semitic revulsion toward Jews involved objections to their behaviour rather than to their intellect. [Harshav 1990: 96]14 The communist regime adopted the old prejudices with remarkable consistency. Soviet Jews were systematically prevented from working in their “typical,” that is, intellectual, fields. This was also ensured by a generally known but unofficial numerus clausus for all Soviet citizens identified as Jews at universities. However, even in the times of the worst Jew-baiting, the crimes of the “class enemies” were never publicly associated with their nationality. Efraim Sevela remembers how, during a “pogrom meeting” in the newspaper editorial 14 Yuri Slezkine mentions that “cunning intelligence”—“the most potent weapon of the weak”— emerged as a characteristic of the Mercurian peoples, prototypically represented by Hermes, Mercury, or Odysseus [2004: 27]. The “cunning intelligence” here is both a construct of a foreign attribution and a self-image. It refers to “Mercurians” because of their ability (which also turns out to be a survival strategy) to convey and exchange intangible or not quite tangible exchange values such as knowledge or money: “[. . .] Mercurians use words, concepts, money, emotions, and other intangibles as tools of their trade” [ibid.: 28].

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office where he worked in the late 1940s, “no one uttered the word ‘Jew.’ It had been replaced by ideological descriptions that had become fashionable, such as ‘homeless cosmopolitans,’ ‘vagrants without passports,’ ‘people without homes and relatives’” [2007a: 86]. The “popular” ideas about the level of Jewish education are also instructive: The “Jewish intelligence” is positively assessed by the broad Russian masses, the “erudition” of the Jews is emphasized (“they have thought up so much”)—but the Jewish tendency towards the so-called “clean” work is assessed negatively (“there are none of them among the workers in the factory,” “they are always only engineers”; “they are teachers and doctors”; “talking and writing with their pens—yes, ploughing—no”). Such opinions, apart from social realities (the prevalence of urban professions among the Jews), also reflect differences of a cultural nature. [Kantor 1999: 254] (6) The fear of foreigners, reinforced by the anti-Zionist propaganda that began soon after the founding of the State of Israel, attributed to Soviet Jews such characteristics as impenetrability and insincerity, a tendency to restrained mockery and “cowardly,” ironic criticism of Soviet reality, negative practical thinking fueled by self-interest or greed. This concept was opposed to the myth of Russian openness, honesty, unselfishness, and courage. The otherness of the Jews was often reflected in stereotypes about their everyday behavior. It was “known” that Jews did not drink alcohol and that they avoided conflicts. A typical Jewish child read a lot, played a musical instrument, was physically underdeveloped (weak or unathletic),15 did not take part in brawls, and was therefore often disliked and labeled a mama’s boy. It is thus not surprising that, for the Zionist (literary) discourse, these ascribed features became a foundation for the counter-images of the diaspora Jews.16 Outwardly little noticeable, Jews were recognized by the behavior and the way of thinking: “I was everywhere taken for a Jew, just because I did not drink, did not smoke . . . a miser, therefore,”—complained one worker to the author of this essay. And in an anecdote, an applicant to the militia is suspected 15 On the semiotics of the collectively imagined Jewish body in Europe (such as the meaning of “eyes,” “physique,” “hair,” “smell,” etc.) see [Livak 2010: 88-101] and [Hödl 1997: 105-232]. 16 Cf. the discussion of David Markish’s bildungsroman Priskazka in chap. 5.4.

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of having Jewish origin because he knows the answer to the question “How much is two times two?” [Kantor 1999: 253] In research, antisemitic collective images of the late Soviet period are sometimes traced back to the old Christian Judeophobic models. Worth mentioning are the Shylock motif, “the theme of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy,” and “the equation of Jewry with capitalism” [Bland-Spitz 1980: 182]. It becomes clear that the Soviet state antisemitism took advantage of traditional conceptions and metaphorically revived the old accusation of well poisoning, which was often advanced against Jews in medieval Europe.17 In all their liveliness and complexity, however, the facts and ideas described are conveyed in literary texts. The Russian Jewish prose of recent decades is often realistic, critical of the system, and autobiographically oriented. It becomes a true compendium of everyday situations that illustrate, differentiate, and at the same time typify the Jewish situation in the Soviet Union. Fictional conventions allow the authors to visualize the diversity and individuality of their experiences on an imaginary and yet factographic level. It is therefore no coincidence that these texts have a series of recurring points, the sum of which creates the panoramic image of an epoch. In my book, however, these mimetic topoi primarily form the context that is necessary to understand the narrative positions of Jewish authors.

4.2. Jews as Translators: Literary Mimicry The term mimicry in its modern usage goes back to biology18 and describes the ability of some species to imitate characteristics of other species. During the twentieth century, the term became polysemous and was applied to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Lacan, and, more recently, postcolonial studies theorists, in particular Homi K. Bhabha, relate the phenomenon of mimicry to human behaviour, 17 Cf. [Bland-Spitz 1980] and especially the quote from L. Leneman [ibid.: 190]. On the dissemination of mythical images of the Jews in the oral and written media of ancient Russia see Livak: “Beyond the Gospels, clergymen propagate the image of ‘the Jews’ in didactic tales [exempla], sermons, hagiographies, apocrypha, and anti-Judaic tracts [the adversus Iudaeos genres]” [2010: 12]. 18 This is despite the fact that the connection of the word “mimicry” to “mimesis” and the cultural and especially artistic connotations resonating since antiquity usually prevail over the naturalscientific (biological) meaning (cf. on the “dialogue between disciplines” in the theoretical use of the terms “mimesis/mimicry” in Becker/Doll/Wiemer/Zechner 2008: esp. 12–13).

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appearance, and thinking or subconsciousness (see [Becker/Doll/Wiemer/ Zechner 2008]).19 As a technique of adapting, concealment, and creation of illusions, mimicry is more and more often discussed within cultural and literature studies. As Claudia Breger points out, the meanings of otherness and cultural exclusion that usually accompany mimicry can be traced to another concept, that of “imitation” (Nachahmung), or, pejoratively, “aping” (Nachäffung), developed in the late eighteenth century. In his treatise “On the Origin of Language” (1772), Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, distinguished creative imitation or mimesis from meaningless, non-reflective imitation, which he associated with monkeys. Breger comments: “The Other [Opposite] of man, symbolized by this monkey, is also ‘naturally’ the [. . .] ‘non-human’ or ‘semi-human’ people: savages, ‘gypsies,’ sometimes women” [Breger 1999: 179]. In the context of the Jewish diaspora this term has special connotations. Here, mimicry is conceptualized as a forced strategy of adaptation, which will have disasterous consequences for the further development of Jewish identity. It originated from social, cultural, and political exclusion of the Jews and meant that the big project of emancipation and acculturation of the Jewish diaspora was doomed to failure. The paradigm of such reflections is indicated by Hannah Arendt’s much-cited essay “The Hidden Tradition” (first published in 1948), in which the “temptation of foolish mimicry” of the Jews is contrasted with “genuine amalgamation” [Arendt 1976: 51, 58]. Although the term is mentioned only casually by Arendt, she anticipates its later use in several reflections on the subject.20 In Dorothee Gelhard’s view, the phenomenon of mimicry, which becomes an important topic in contemporary German-Jewish literature, is an indication of the failure to overcome the “old dichotomous patterns of thought”

19 The phenomenon of mimicry has become a focus of interdisciplinary research in recent years. For example, see the project “Imitation—Assimilation—Transformation” at the University of Zurich (2010–2014). The project examined, among other things, “double assimilation, images of assimilation, religion, and nation among Polish-speaking Jews” (https://lit.ethz. ch/en/research/completedprojects/imitation-assimilation-transformation.html, accessed January 4, 2023). One major section of this project was dedicated to the topic “Mimicry, Authenticity and Political Emancipation: Controversial Assimilation Discourses in Colonial India (ca. 1860–1930)” (see: https://gmw.ethz.ch/en/research/abgeschlossenequalifizierungsarbeiten.html, accessed January 4, 2023). However, already in 2005 a conference on the topic “Mimicry/Mimese. Dangerous Luxury between Nature and Culture” was held at the University of Frankfurt/Main in 2005, which resulted in the publication of a volume of the same name in 2008 [Becker/Doll/Wiemer/Zechner 2008]. 20 The scholarly discussion on the secret or double identity of diaspora Jews, opened by Hannah Arendt, has been prominently taken up by Sander L. Gilman in his study Jewish Self-Hate. Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews [1986].

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in the times of multiculturalism, and thus a subversion of the hybrid identity concepts dreamed of by postcolonial theory [2008: 192]. For the Jewish protagonists of the texts interpreted by Gelhard, mimicry is nothing else but a painful concealment of their authentic features resulting from anticipation of non-acceptance in their environment, a “hyperassimilation.” “In attempts to hide parts of the self like a ‘blemish,’ [. . .] the characters produce different simulacra of themselves [. . .]” [ibid.: 205, 214]. In her book Experiment on the Swindle (Versuch über den Schwindel), which was mentioned in the previous chapter, Christina von Braun addresses the “collective imaginary” [2001: 10] when she speaks of the Jewish body as a social and cultural construction—“paradigms of seeing and becoming invisible, of simulation and deception” [ibid.: 33] became increasingly evident in the course of Jewish assimilation. I define mimicry as adaptation that is used as a conscious strategy aiming either to conceal “one’s own” or—in art and literature—to emphasize and playfully reveal it.21 Consequently, mimicry can appear in a tragic or comic version. Gelhard emphasizes the first option when she articulates two basic techniques of mimicry—dissimulatio and simulatio: “Dissimulation consists in the deception regarding one’s own, simulation, in the deceptive appropriation of the foreign” [Gelhard 2008: 203]. The problem of pretending, of modern Crypto-Judaism or “marranism,” and of changing names reveals the traumas and the hidden layers of identity of a person who expects to be defined as an alien, marked by borderline experiences. In nonconformist Jewish prose, mimicry repeatedly unmasks the myth of a harmonious, ethnically open-minded Soviet family of peoples. At the same time, it is often associated with the problem of translation. The Jewish ability to adopt, transmit, and translate foreign cultural and political values has historically functioned as a powerful heterostereotype that makes Jews suspicious.22 At the same time, as Yuri Slezkine [2004] points out, it is a characteristic that has developed throughout Jewish history. In the Soviet Union, the translation work of Jews—but not only of Jews—turned out to be a literal survival strategy. The nominal and often real non-existence of Jewish culture in the public sphere, together with the disposition of the assimilated Jews for intellectual occupations, often forced them into the niche of mediators. Literary translation, an ephemeral and sometimes Aesopian field of self-expression, became a symbol of the tragic non-essentiality, or, better say, 21 For more details, see [Smola 2011c]. 22 This led, among other things, to political trials (see, for example, “delo perevodchikov” [the “translators’ trial”] in 1938 [Murav 2011: 290].

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invisibility of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Jews had almost lost their “secret language of the Mercurian trades,”23 which could have ensured their (hidden) unity and distinctiveness. The use of the Aesopian language in the Soviet Union increased especially since the second half of the 1950s. After the partial political transformation of the Thaw, censorship guidelines were inconsistent and in part contradictory, and the space of what could be officially published was expanded. At the same time, the experience of relative freedom made it possible to reestablish the practice of clandestine literary language—a literary mimicry—and master it in the subsequent period of Stagnation. Encryption techniques (a coded author-reader communication), on the one hand, and the extension of the official sphere, on the other, became the sign of the times. In the context of the gradually dissolving political system, literary translations often marked the grey areas of the semi-official.24 The general line of Soviet cultural policy was directed towards promoting and developing the literature of the “brother peoples.” In different periods, attempts were made to incorporate national and ethnic differences into the RussianSoviet culture, which was, by definition, more developed [Terpitz 2008: 33]. Remarkably, in the first decades after the war, this hardly affected Jews.25 The Soviet definition of the nation as a territorial, economic, administrative, and linguistic community on the basis of Stalin’s formula supported the totalitarian policy of the state, because it maintained solid, transparent structures and facilitated control from the center. But if these conditions were not fulfilled, the state demanded the dissolution and assimilation of the ethnic group (cf. [Kantor 1998: 154]).26 From memoirs, autobiographies, and fiction that reflect the late Soviet cultural scene, it can be seen that Russian—and an above-average number of

23 The fictional nature of these designations from Slezkine’s monograph remains to be seen. 24 In his well-known study of the Aesopian language in Russian literature, Lev Loseff [1984], unfortunately, pays little attention to the issue of translation. 25 Besides Jews, the nations persecuted and discriminated against by the Soviet regime include Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, and Chechens, who were subjected to repression and deportation in the first postwar years. Efim Etkind, for example, mentions the following in reference to Stalin’s unfulfilled intention to deport Jews to Siberia in the 1950s: “One has already had experience: two million Volga Germans, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and Ingushs had already been deported to Siberia” [2002: 17]. In his novel Dekada, which will be discussed below, Semen Lipkin reflects on the concept of multinational Soviet literature, first of all, the Soviet days of national cultures, against the background of the mass deportations of the minority peoples of the Caucasus. 26 The particular case of the Jewish “Republic” in Birobidzhan will be discussed in detail below.

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Jewish27—writers and literary scholars made a living as translators of poetry and prose created in the Soviet republics, often not recognized as writers themselves and without any hope of publishing their own texts. For this purpose, they received a raw translation (podstrochnik), so that the knowledge of the language of the original text was usually not necessary.28 The phenomenon of podstrochnik becomes in late and post-Soviet literature a popular metaphor for the asymmetrical relationship between center and periphery, the medium of an—often failing or simulated—cultural transfer. This situation is reproduced, with much tragedy, in the samizdat novel Nekto Finkel′maier [1975] by Feliks Roziner: the assimilated Jew and highly talented poet Aaron-Chaim Finkel′maier “smuggles” his poems, which do not fit into the picture of official Soviet literature either aesthetically or ideologically, into literary magazines by passing them off as translations of poems by a certain Airon Neprigen, a poet from the Siberian Tongor people. As such, they are enthusiastically received by cultural officials, and the newly discovered poet from Siberia becomes the star of multinational Soviet literature. On the contrary, Finkel′maier, a Russian intellectual of Jewish origin, cannot be considered a representative of a Soviet minority ethnic group.29 As a nonconformist Russian 27 See Nakhimovsky: “As a matter of historical fact, the resulting system of values led many writers, especially Jews, to work on translations and even on occasion to use them as a screen for original work” [1992: 183]. A contemporary witness, the translator Viktor Toporov, writes ironically: “[. . .] неевреи в своей совокупности составляли в переводе нацменьшинство или, если угодно, образовывали ‘малый народ’” [1999: 177] (“[.  .  .] the total number of non-Jews in the translation industry made up an ethnic minority, or, you could say, a ‘small nation’”). 28 Above all, mastery of the Russian literary language was required: after all, the literature of the minority nations was to demonstrate its high artistic level and become an integral part of Russian-Soviet literary production. 29 After the October Revolution, Jews were granted the status of a Soviet national minority alongside other peoples of the newly founded Soviet Union. In the early Soviet period, the Bolsheviks made several attempts to “tie the Jews to the land” in certain territories such as the Crimea, Ukraine, and Belarus, where Jewish settlements were created and to induce them to develop socialist culture in the Yiddish language in specific regions (see Weinberg 1995). Zvi Gitelman mentions that Mikhail Kalinin even warned Jewish resettlers during a conference appearance against mixing with other peoples, such as marrying non-Jews, because this could prevent the development of their own Jewish culture [Gitelman 1988: 150]. In 1928 Soviet Jews were given their own territory in the Far East, in Birobidzhan, where the “Jewish Autonomous Region” was proclaimed in 1934—“a nominally Jewish territorial entity” [ibid.: 160]. The development of a national Jewish culture was impossible there, if only because many Jewish leaders were declared enemies of the people, arrested, and murdered during the Stalin purges of the 1930s. The stifling atmosphere in the Birobidzhan “Jewish Republic,” the decline of Jewish culture under the Soviet dictatorship, the hypocrisy of the declarations of Jewish autonomy were exposed by Iakov Tsigel′man in his novel Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera [1981] (cf. chap. 6.4). Almost from the outset, the Birobidzhan project was at odds with the authorities’ efforts to level national differences in Soviet Union and, among

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poet—a virtuoso of the Russian language—and, in addition, burdened by a last name, which clearly marks his ancestry, Finkel′maier is condemned to silence, but he obtains his “own” voice for a short time thanks to his literary deception. In the novel, the situation is succinctly formulated by a like-minded person in the following statement: Ни Финкельмайеру, ни Иванову ни за что эти стихи не опубликовать—они оторваны от действительности, внесоциальны, идеалистичны, пантеистичны, и к тому же в них нет ни русской поэтической традиции, ни новаторства советской поэзии. Так тебе скажут в любой редакции. Но, к счастью, вновь открытый нацпоэт судится по иным меркам! [1990: 122] Neither Finkel′maier nor Ivanov will ever succeed in publishing these poems: They are unrealistic, asocial, idealistic, pantheistic, and, moreover, neither they are set in the context of Russian poetic tradition nor do they demonstrate the innovative power of Soviet poetry. They’ll tell you that in every publishing company. But a newly discovered [small] nation poet is, fortunately, measured by other standards! Another Russian Jewish prose writer, Efraim Sevela, mentions this paradox of Soviet national cultural and educational policy in his well-known satirical novel Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! (Stop the plane—I’m getting off!, 1975). It was written at the same time as Roziner’s novel and presents in anecdotal form a similar “fraud,” a case of Jewish mimicry, of forced “concealment” and “behaving inconspicuously” [Dohrn 1999: 190],30 which saved Jewish intellectuals from other things, to assimilate the Jewish population. Jews remained scattered; the trend toward Jewish urbanization, assimilation, and acculturation, which began with the Haskala, increased even further in the Soviet Union. This development contributed, among other things, to the emergence of a special type of Soviet-Jewish intellectual rooted in Russian culture, which Feliks Roziner has captured in his novel in the figure of the poet Aaron Finkel′maier. In this context, Nakhimovsky describes the identity of a Soviet Jew as that of an often nonconformist Russian intellectual (cf. chap. 2.2). 30 In her analysis of Isaak Babel′’s poetics, Verena Dohrn writes about voyeurism and “selfmystification up to mimicry.” She explains this tendency by historical conditions: “There was a tradition of hiding among Russian Jews. They had to hide because of tax collection, military recruitment, settlement restrictions in Tsarist Russia [. . .] and—in the Revolutionary Soviet Union—the all-knowing political control” [1999: 190]. I will analyze another example of Jewish concealment in David Shrayer-Petrov’s novel Gerbert i Nelli (Herbert and Nelli), where a Karaite woman refuses to admit her affinity to Judaism and instead emphasizes her proximity

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financial hardship. The self-ironizing Jewish narrator Arkadii Solomonovich Rubinchik portrays this with grotesque exaggeration, while the author Sevela inscribes his plot, based on the Jews’ adventures with transformation and mimicry, into the tradition of Jewish picaresque literature:31 За последние полвека любой самой маленькой народности создали по указанию сверху свою культуру. Как говорится, национальную по форме и социалистическую по содержанию. Живет себе племя где-нибудь в тайге, еще с деревьев не спустилось. Только-только научилось огонь высекать. [.  .  .] Посылают к этому племени парочку ученых евреев. Почему евреев, я потом объясню. Добираются туда евреи [.  .  .] Прислушиваются, принюхиваются и начинают создавать культуру. Алфавит составляют, как правило, на базе русского. Бедный немногословный язык туземцев обогащают такими словечками, как колхоз, совхоз, кооператив, коллектив, социализм, капитализм, оппортунизм. [. . .] У малых, забитых при царизме народов [. . .] исполнители называются [. . .] что-то вроде ашуг-акын [. . .] Одного такого ашуга я сам лицезрел. Его переводчик [.  .  .] выдумал, этого ашуга, сотворил из ничего, писал все сам, выдавая за перевод с оригинала. И огребал за это денег несметное количество. А ашугу—слава на весь СССР. Ему ордена и медали. Его—в пример советской национальной политики. [Sevela 1980: 81–82] Over the past fifty years, even the tiniest nations have been decreed to make their own culture. From the top. National in form, socialist in content, as you call it. So there is a tribe living in the middle of the taiga, still sitting, so to speak, in the trees and it has only just learned how to make fire. [. . .] Some learned Jews are sent there. Why Jews of all people, I’ll explain later. These Jews are now making their way to the people. [. . .] They are asking around, sniffing around, and finally start tinkering with a culture. Invent an alphabet and enrich the to Muslims: “А караимов не расстреляли, потому что караимы—не евреи. Мы ближе к туркам. Что-то вроде мусульман,”—says the old woman from Trakai. [2006: 120] (“The Karaites were not shot because they are not Jews. We are closer to the Turks. Something like Muslims”). 31 Cf. on this tradition chap. 9.

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natives’ sparse language, poor in words, with vocabulary such as kolkhoz, sovkhoz, cooperative, collective, socialism, capitalism, opportunism. [. . .] Among these small nations, which tsarism let wither away in such a harmful manner [. . .], performing artists have names like ashug-akyn. [. . .] I have seen such an ashug with my own eyes. His translator [. . .] has invented this ashug. Out of thin air. He wrote everything by himself and sold it to the people as a translation of an original. In this way, he virtually made a fabulous fortune. And brought laurels of glory, medals, and decorations for the ashug. The ashug became the star of the Soviet national policy. Arkadii Rubinchik, the satirical alter ego of the author, explains the reason for the special position of the Jews: А теперь я отвечу на вопрос, почему именно евреи бросились по всем окраинам бывшей царской империи создавать письменность и культуру малым народам и народностям. [. . .] чтоб у всех была культура—таков был лозунг революции. У всех! У всех? Вот именно! За одним исключением. Вы, кажется, догадались. Конечно. Кроме евреев. Нет такой нации и нет такой культуры. Это обнаружил Сталин, когда проник в глубины марксистской философии. Сделав свое гениальное открытие, он во избежание всяческих кривотолков уничтожил чуть ли не всех еврейских писателей, поэтов, артистов, певцов [. . .]. И школы закрыл, и театры прихлопнул, а сам язык объявил запрещенным. [. . .] евреи [. . .], утерев слезы, бросились по зову партии создавать культуру другим народам, кто никогда ее прежде не имел [. . .]. Начался расцвет многонациональной культуры. В Дворянском гнезде появились десятки и, пожалуй, сотни так называемых переводчиков с языков братских народов. Фамилии свои они поменяли на псевдонимы [. . .]. [Sevela 1980: 83–84] And now I want to explain to you why it was the Jews of all people who rushed to the furthest corners of the former tsarist empire and who gave careful thought to providing tiny little nations and tribes with writing and culture [. . .] everyone must have a culture, that was the motto of the revolution. All of them!

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All of them? Aha, here we are! With one exception. Right—you guessed it. Of course. Except for the Jews. Such a nation does not exist, so it does not need any culture. Stalin found this after he had penetrated the abysses of Marxist philosophy. Once he made this genius discovery, and to prevent any superfluous debate from the start, he [. . .] made almost all Jewish writers, actors, and singers disappear. Then he closed schools, boarded up theatres, and declared the Jewish language forbidden. [. . .] The Jews [. . .] wiped away their tears and followed the call of the party. They swiftly set about tailoring cultures for other, still untouched peoples. [. . .] The multinational culture began to sprout. Dozens, hundreds of these so-called translators, who worked for the benefit of our brother nations in the USSR, appeared in the Nobleman’s Nest. [.  .  .] They had exchanged their family names for pseudonyms. [. . .] The term “avtory-teni, avtory-prizraki” [Sevela 1980: 85] (“shadow authors, ghost authors”) metaphorizes the situation of the intellectual “underground” and practices of intellectial mimicry of the Jews in the Soviet state. Semen Izrailevich Lipkin, born in 1911 in Odessa, translated the so-called “Eastern” (vostochnaia) epic poetry into Russian as early as the 1930s and became famous for his free translations from Akkadian, Kalmyk, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Balkan, Kabardinian, and Tatar. The first book of his own poems was published in 1967, heavily censored, when he was already fifty-seven years old. Considering the sum of his achievements as a recognized translator and a nonconformist writer, Lipkin is a good example of the two-sided literary establishment in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, he fit into the image of a Soviet translator transferring literature of Soviet peoples and republics into the language of the “colonial empire” via podstrochniks and thus participated in the highly doubtful endeavor of creating the multinational Soviet literature. On the other hand, he was one of those poetically talented intellectuals who were convinced of the humane spirit of multiculturalism and were guided by an interest in cultural translation as he helped to transfer the “peripheral” and the “backward”32 centerstage. More precisely, he took seriously the humanistic internationalism in the spirit of classical Russian literature (cf. [Gould 2012]), which the Soviet cultural programme claimed to have inherited. As a

32 On the term perezhitki (“remnants”) in the field of Soviet (cultural) policy in Central Asia and the Caucasus, see [Abashin 2015: 11ff.].

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nonconformist thinker, Lipkin criticized the reductionist cultural practice of mono-directional multi-nationalism in its Soviet version. At the same time, as a successful translator, he propagated its cultural norms. Nevertheless, even in his official capacity as translator Lipkin was repeatedly suspected of political subversion.33 Thus, literary translation was an institutional practice that embodied, supported, and—especially since the 1960s—also infiltrated and exposed the concept of multinational literature. It often proved to be an ideological and cultural simulacrum, and at the same time—especially in the case of Semen Lipkin and others like him—a highly productive, dynamic activity of cultural transfer within the large Soviet state. I describe the Soviet podstrochnik translations as a special kind of mimicry, which makes clear the (post)colonial implications of the term, as defined by Bhabha: in a situation of cultural asymmetry, mimicry triggers an always partial, never complete adaptation or subordination that produces a fatal ambivalence: it acts in line with the mechanisms of power, but at the same time it reveals the flaws of the cultural hegemony from inside it. Lipkin used the technical means of multinational Soviet literature—the raw translations—to increase the visibility of the periphery culures, mostly Muslim ones, for the Russian-Soviet center. In doing so accurately and critically, he questioned the Soviet concept of modernization and “education” of the provinces. Semen Lipkin fictionalizes the suspicion of those in power towards the Jews in the literary and especially in the translation business in his novel Dekada (Decade, 1980). In this text, General Semisotov, who is sent by Stalin to one of the Central Asian republics to prepare the resettlement of an entire (fictional) people, Tavlary, to Kazakhstan, becomes suspicious whether the talented translator of the Tavlarian poetry into the Russian language, a Moscow poet named Stanislav Bodorskii, might be Jewish: “Тот Бодорский—не русский? Еврей?” [Lipkin 1990: 22] (“This Bodorskii is not a Russian? Is he a Jew?”). This episode repeats itself when Bodorskii proposes a younger colleague for the translation of the works of another small people, Gushany: Matvei Zinov′evich Kaplanov is Jewish and Bodorskii tries to make this fact more “compatible” for a responsible party functionary: “Не беспокойтесь, Даниял Заурович, в Союзе писателей к Капланову относятся неплохо, в космополитизме не обвиняют” [ibid.: 100] (“Don’t worry, Daniial Zaurovich, Kaplanov is liked in the Writers’

33 In his memoirs, Lipkin recounts that in 1949 the writers’ association accused him of sympathy for the deported “traitorous peoples” on the basis of his translations of Turkic-language epics. He was “merely” admonished, just because the influential writers Aleksandr Fadeev and Konstantin Simonov supported him (see [Lipkin 1997] and [Nemzer 2008: 703]).

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Union, he is not accused of cosmopolitanism”). However, an inflammatory article about Jewish writers hiding behind Russian pseudonyms, written by the influential writer Mikhail Sholokhov, will complicate the young translator’s career. Bodorskii himself writes poems, which are never printed, and for years, he has felt an “insatiable, insane thirst to publish his own works” (“неутолимую, бeзумную жажду печатать собственные вещи” [ibid.: 171]). In the course of time, his successful job as a translator in the service of the ideology leaves less and less room for his passion and destroys his literary gift, and he considers his life a waste, dreaming of a true, creative activity in the underground scene, of the lonely, but grand writing “for the drawer” (“v stol” [ibid.]) that is not possible for him anymore. However, Lipkin treats the phenomenon of Jewish translators as the invisible poets of the empire only as a background for the problematization of colonial (literary) policy in the Soviet East. In addition to describing the reprisals and harsh modernization practices that the state employs against the peoples of Central Asia who still preserve patriarchal, religious ways of life, Lipkin also shows that the “literatures of the East” (“literatury Vostoka”) are made entirely subordinate to the state. The Soviet officials commissioned national epics, in order to propagate a version of history that would not discredit the Great Russian dominance: “Татарам, поcкольку они двести лет владели Русью, просто указывалось начинать свою свою историю с октября 1917 года [. . .]” [ibid.: 98] (“Since the Tatars ruled over Russia for two hundred years, they were simply ordered to record their history only from October 1917 onwards [. . .]”). According to Rebecca Gould, Lipkin was one of the few Soviet intellectuals to achieve the Soviet utopia of world literature, which in practice was often perverted: “More than any European model, Lipkin strove through his translations to craft a true republic of letters” [Gould 2012: 421]. Lipkin’s sometimes open, sometimes encoded plea for the reciprocity of cultural transfer between center and periphery refers to the grand project of transcultural cooperation, which, due to the asymmetries and multiple falsifications, only came about to a very limited extent in the Soviet context. In Dekada, Lipkin defines successful translation as a sensitive cultural transfer, which demonstrates awareness of the specificity of a foreign culture and is based on the recognition of both equality and difference. The Russian Jewish author Lipkin exposes the imperial cultural exploitation of Muslim peoples and, among other things, tries to understand and explain the non-Slavic alterity of their literary thought. In the case of the fictional Gushanian author Khakim Azadaev, whom Bodorskii is to translate, the adaptation of foreign stylistic features to European literary tradition means a “correction” making the plot more explicit and an imposition

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of linear development of events. Ethnographic descriptions, reflections on the world view of Sunnis and Shiites, rhymed etymological studies are to be deleted, “the fascinating lengthiness” (“ocharovatel′n[ye] dlinnot[y]”) is to be suppressed [Lipkin 1990: 111]. The narrator laments the intellectual contempt for the foreign aesthetic laws, also against a background of the metropolitan intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the “stars” of the West, such as Proust, Joyce, or Hemingway. It is no coincidence that, at the time of the Jewish resistance movement, Lipkin addresses the arrogance of a colonial power by denouncing its “translator barbarians, translator bone setters” (“переводчик[и]-варвар[ы], переводчик[и]-костоправ[ы]” [ibid.: 112])—a meaningful reversal of colonial stereotypes, degrading the cultural mediators as barbarians. Lipkin, who became known for his unintentional plea for the Jewish people and the state of Israel,34 implicitly articulates in Dekada the privilege of the Jews: a gift of recognizing difference and—literally—of giving voice to other marginalized cultures. Thus the work of a translator is defined not only as a forced substitute activity, but as a mission of mediation, which also implies the possibility of rediscovering one’s own, Jewish national identity.35 34 The extent to which the subject of internationalism in the Soviet Union was sometimes pushed to the edge of the canon is shown by a much-cited episode from Lipkin’s biography. In 1967 he published a poem titled “Soiuz” (“The Union”) in two well-known magazines. In this text he praised an unknown minority people from Asia called “I.” The poem appeared in the Soviet press at the time of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and the fierce anti-Zionist agitation. Lipkin was subsequently accused of Zionist propaganda and persecuted. He recalls: “Черт попутал меня прочесть сборник эпических поэм Южного Китая. Среди создателей поэм был народ, чье название меня поразило: И. Подумать только, целый народ вмещается в одну букву! Я написал стихотворение ‘Союз.’ [. . .] Но газета ‘Ленинское знамя’ заявила, что речь идет об Израиле. Меня обвинили в сионизме. Газету поддержали книги вроде ‘Фашизм под голубой звездой.’ Возражения синологов, что на юге Китая действительно существует народ И (кстати, гонимый тогда Мао Цзедуном), [. . .] не могли ни в чем убедить моих преследователей, [. . .]” (“For no good reason, I once read an anthology of South Chinese epics. Among the creators of these poems was a people whose name impressed me: I. Who would have thought that an entire people could fit into a single letter! And I wrote the poem titled ‘The Union.’ [. . .] But the newspaper Lenin’s banner claimed that my poem was about Israel. I was accused of Zionism. The newspaper was supported by books such as Fascism under the blue star. The objections of the sinologists that a people called ‘I’ [who, by the way, were persecuted by Mao Zedong at that time] actually existed in the south of China [. . .] could not convince my persecutors [. . .]”). [Semen Lipkin, Stranichki avtobiografii, http://www.rulit.me/books/stranichki-avtobiografii-read-31635-3.html, accessed January 4, 2023]. A poem in which Lipkin romantically praised a largely unknown ethnicity, thus expressing in his own way the Soviet policy of promoting small peoples and cultures, was read as subversive, “typically Jewish” mimicry expressing forbidden political views. 35 Under the sign of cultural and intellectual change, from about the second half of the 1960s, Russian literature, both underground and in officially published works, problematized the cultural existence of “small” or non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union. The first stories

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Authoritarian culture as a collective simulacrum and the fiction of statecommissioned cultural production combine the themes of mimicry and the invisible Jewish translator in Dekada with the theme of pseudo-translation. Cultural phantoms reveal themselves as an ideology generating force, as the festive “decade of literature” and the deportations reflect each other in a creepy way in Lipkin’s text. The “adjustment” of the Turkic epic by removing “reactionary” Muslim elements at the beginning of the 1950s under Stalin, which at the same time functions as a historical allusion to the anti-Jewish incitement and planned expulsion of the Jews, is described by Lipkin as a problem of translation that engages in mimicry. Susanna Witt analyses how the halfimginary, myth-generating figures of the Soviet akyns and ashugs (the national folk bards) such as Dzhambul Dzhabaev or Suleiman Stal′skii, who have been celebrated during the decades, were born out of the phenomenon of fictional podstrochnik translations [2011: 154–164].36 At some point, the production of translations of the (half-)invented originals was no longer controllable and the phenomenon of the “secondary original,” which only came into being on the basis of translations [cf. ibid.: 164], created a system of unreliable attributions, depictions, and distortions of a simulated origin text. At the same time, Lipkin presents a world in which the thousand-year-old culture of the East is confronted with the civilising impetus of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the novel, the Tavlary’s worldview is based on the values of dynasty, not state; Muslim laws, religiousness, headscarves, the sanctity of of the Crimean Tatar author Ervin Umerov, fictionalized accounts of persecution and deportation of the Crimean Tatars, were written in the 1960s and published in the 1990s. Famously, the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov in his novel I dol′she veka dlitsia den′ [1981] undermines the general line of socialist realism by contrasting the primordial ethnic memory of the Kazakh people and the general amnesia of late Soviet society. At the same time, the Russian author Anatolii Pristavkin writes his novel Nochevala tuchka zolotaia (A golden cloud did sleep), in which he deals for the first time with the expulsion and forced resettlement of the Chechen people to Kazakhstan and Central Asia at the end of the Second World War, in 1944 (this text was published in the late 1980s). Long after the fall of communism, in the second half of the 1990s, the novel Bozh′ia mater′ v krovavykh snegakh (Mother of God in the bloody snows) by the Khanty/Ostiak writer Eremei Aipin (Ostiaks is the former name of the Finno-Ugric minority people Khanty in Western Siberia) was written and published. Aipin tells of the Ostiaks’ revolt in 1933–1934, which was brutally crushed by the Red Army, and the almost complete extermination of this people (cf. [Smola 2016 and 2017]). These texts and their authors stand in different temporal, structural and stylistic relations to the dogma of socialist realism and nevertheless form an emancipatory context within the given period of literary development. The subversion and softening of the canon, as well as the reflection on the topic of alienness, occurs here in various ways and with different ideological connotations. Galina Belaia describes the 1960s and 1970s in this sense as a period in which Soviet literature began to destroy itself (“self-destruction”) [1992: 1]). 36 On Dzhambul Dzhabaev as a Soviet Gesamtkunstwerk see [Bogdanov/Nicolosi 2013].

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cemeteries remain almost untouched by the fact that people work on collective farms and the portraits of Stalin are placed in public spaces. The long digressions of various narrators into the history of the peoples living in the Caucasus show that the Soviet state rule is one of the many in the long chain of conquests, but the first to sweep entire peoples off the face of the earth. Ideological postulates are inverted in Dekada in the spirit of nonconformist literature: while in the communist discourse on nationalities, the Sovietization of the Eastern peoples meant their historicization (they are only “born” as historical peoples by entering the Soviet history), Lipkin shows that these peoples have a much older history than the Russian or, even more so, the Soviet one. The concept of Jew as translator in Dekada is directly linked to some postSoviet literary constructions of the Jewish identity. The Jew as a cultural border crosser, mediator, and—contrary to the negative connotation of this term in the history of Soviet antisemitism—as an intellectual cosmopolitan is embodied in the central figure in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s novel with the programmatic title Daniel′ Shtain, perevodchik (Daniel′ Shtain, the translator, 2006). Daniel′ Rufaizen, a survivor of the Shoah and a Jew converted to Christianity, is a translator in the spirit of ethnic and religious universality, a symbolic figure of a righteous person. He fights against the irreconcilability of individual denominations and declares the lack of understanding between people to be the greatest tragedy of humanity.37 Mimicry as a stylistic device—a subversive narrative practice, which undermines the official or collective-imaginary system of opinions, symbols, and depictions—forms a contrast to the distortion of Jewish identities discussed in this section, that is, mimicry on the level of literary figures and plot. I will demonstrate these forms of simulation—a playful, ironic deception on the level of literary discourse in the chapters on Jewish literature after the fall of communism.

37 This chapter was based on my article [Smola 2011c]. Furthermore, I refer to the chapter “Translating Empire” in Harriet Murav’s monograph of the same year [Murav 2011: 285–318]. Murav’s analysis of Semen Lipkin’s translation of the Kyrgyz epic Manas (1948) is significant for my interpretation of Dekada as a covert testimony of late Soviet Jewish counter-culture: “Lipkin sees in Manas the influence of the exodus story via the Koran. [. . .] His interpretation [. . .] reveals his own affiliation with the Zionist ideal, and yet at the same time it is as a Jew that he is in an affinity with the Kirgiz epic. Translating Manas into English is a way of translating his own Jewish concerns into the literary form that is available to him” [2011: 305]. From this perspective, Lipkin’s translational and literary activity can be interpreted as one of the numerous articulations of Aesopian language in Soviet culture.

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4.3. Political Context and Literary Reflections of Jewish Counter-Culture: An Overview Arno Lustiger calls the epoch beginning in the second half of the 1960s in the Soviet Union a Jewish cultural revolution [1998: 311]. This national reawakening, which is unique since the Jewish cultural renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century (cf. [Koller 2012]), is traced in research literature to certain historical events, which will be outlined below.38 Its immediate trigger was the Six-Day War in 1967,39 in which, against all expectations, the Israelis had a quick victory over the Arab forces supported by the Soviet state.40 The victory provoked a wave of enthusiasm among the Soviet Jews and gave the impetus for developing a cultural and political underground movement and for the first efforts to emigrate to Israel.41 Even if most Jews remained unaffected by these processes, they were unprecedented in a dictatorial state.42 Later historical events—the Jewish mass emigration in the early 1990s—were significantly influenced by them, too. The real cause for the emergence of a Jewish national movement, however, lay in the sum of historical factors, of which the experience of a relative intellectual freedom during the Thaw played an important role. Irena and Nati Cantorovich reflect upon the alternation between the partial cultural liberation practiced by the regime since the mid-1950s (such as the translation of Anne Frank’s diaries published in 1960 or the publication of Il′ia Erenburg’s memoirs Liudi, gody, zhizn′ [People, years, life]) and the continuing tabooization of the Jewish self-expression as precisely the medium required for the awakening of a national self-reflection [Cantorovich/Cantorovich 2012]. The incomplete 38 In describing the socio-cultural processes in the Soviet Union after 1953, I will limit myself to the essential points, because this period has already been outlined and analyzed in several studies (see inter alia [Gitelman 1988: 268–294; Nakhimovsky 1992: 32–38; Terpitz 2008: 29–59; Ro’i 2012]). 39 For an overview of research literature reflecting the impact of the Six-Day War on the identity of Soviet Jews, see inter alia [ Cantorovich/Cantorovich 2012: 133; and Ro’i/Morozov 2008]. 40 Yaron Peleg sees the Six-Day War as a turning point in the formation of the ideal of a “new” Israeli masculinity, a “process of masculinization”: “[. . .] the military, aggressive traits of the New Jewish man, which were cultivated already in Europe, and migrated to Israel with the Zionist pioneers, [. . .] finally came to epitomize Israeli manhood more than any other trait” [2015: 184]. 41 Nakhimovsky points out, however, that Jewish samizdat activity, especially in the Baltic republics, which were more distant from the center of power, began as early as the late 1950s (1957 in Riga); books by Vladimir Zhabotinsky and Shimon Dubnov, among others, were distributed there [1992: 34–35]. 42 Yaacov Ro’i [2008] describes the change of worldview among Soviet Jews after the Six-Day War.

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departure from the canon of socialist realism under Nikita Khrushchev opened up the path for an alternative view of history and charted a revision of the past. These trends are expressed, most famously, in the texts of village prose and in the literature of the shestidesiatniki (the generation of the 1960s). The end of this period is marked by the development of the existing underground movements and counter-cultures, and the emergence of new ones. In this sense, the Six-Day War merely marked the climax of a more general development as it solidified the gradual individualization of the Jews in the semiofficial and unofficial spheres: “The Six-Day War completed the process of making Jews ‘visible’ in the Soviet society” [Vail′/Genis 1996: 303]. The phenomenon of a cultural and political double life in the 1970s was the consequence of an obvious discrepancy between the official and the unofficial culture and of the increasing slackness, tautologization [Dobrenko 1993b: 226–227], and rituality [Yurchak 2006: 22–26] of the dogmatic communist rhetoric.43 Non-conformism became an institution, or, more precisely, a plurality of institutions,44 which manifested itself in the increasing heterogeneity of the samizdat and tamizdat and in an ever-expanding spectrum of artistic underground trends, including, at different times, the second Russian avantgarde, conceptualism, neomodernism, and the punk and rock culture. The Jewish counter-culture was an important part of the general late Soviet protest movement. And yet, Jews made up a distinct group because they pursued special goals and sought their own minoritarian niche in the dissident world. The Jewish counter-culture did not lose its idea of stigmatized alienness as it entered the essentially supranational culture of the Soviet dissent. The political rebellion of the intellectuals who criticized the regime received additional motivation and legitimacy, as the Jewish dissidents were the victims of covert discrimination and still had fresh memories of the antisemitic campaigns and executions of the 1940s and 1950s. This was reinforced by the fact that Israel’s victory in 1967 triggered, as mentioned above, an aggressive anti-Zionist and a de facto antisemitic propaganda, which unmistakably reminded the Soviet (and especially the Jewish) intelligentsia of the last years of Stalin’s rule. Zvi Gitelman writes in this context about the “threat of a second Holocaust.” [1988: 270]. The writer and Jewish activist Efraim Sevela confesses in his non-fiction book Poslednie sudorogi neumiraiushchego plemeni (The last cramps of a people not 43 Cf. the chapter “1970-e gody—zabvenie kommunisticheskoi perspektivy” (“1970s: forgetting the communist perspective”) in Ekaterina Sal′nikova’s monograph [2014: 284–293]. 44 In contrast to non-conformism as an attitude, which is much more flexible because it oscillates between the official, semi-official and unofficial areas (cf. Yurchak’s in-depth study 2006/2014).

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wanting to die, 1975) that his Jewish self-consciousness has awakened under the influence of anti-Israeli propaganda: Я—офицер-резервист и против моей воли могу быть брошен в бой, и меня вынудят уничтожать моих соплеменников, те жалкие остатки еврейства, уцелевшие после гитлеровских лагерей смерти. Такая перспектива была для меня абсолютно неприемлемой [. . .]. [2007: 54] I am a reserve officer and I can be thrown into battle against my will, I can be forced to kill my fellow tribesmen, those meager remnants of Jewry, which remained after Hitler’s death camps. This perspective was absolutely unacceptable for me. [. . .] The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism45—a reminder of the early Soviet period—caused a “geopolitical” shift in the Jewish self-conception as well. The Soviet Jews now increasingly identified not as Russian-Soviet citizens but as potential Israelis, “translating” their origin into new cultural and spatial categories. New biographical writings emerged, which were primarily inspired by a topographically projected Judaistic cultural tradition. The ambiguity of the Jewish situation in the Soviet Union, described in previous chapters, resulted in the fact that the Jewish counter-culture represented the view from the center of one’s own (Russian) culture and from its periphery at the same time. Gitelman grasps the paradoxical social in-between space of Soviet Jews as follows: “Thus, Soviet Jewry was highly acculturated but weakly assimilated. They were deprived of Jewish culture but not admitted to Russian society. They lost their Jewish religion and culture but not their Jewish identity” [Gitelman 1994: 40].46 Although the accuracy of the terms “assimilation” and “acculturation” used in this formulation can be doubted,47 they nevertheless convey the ambivalence and uncertainty that characterize the

45 “It is without question that Soviet Jews were associated in the mind of their non-Jewish neighbors with Israel” [Ro’i 2008: 256]. 46 Cf. also Elie Wiesel’s formulation: “Soviet policy with regard to the Jews is thus doubly strange; its two contradictory stratagems produce the same undesired result. Jews remain Jews. In the central Russian republic (RSFSR), the authorities are displeased because the Jews [. . .] interfere with the process of Russification backed by the Kremlin. In the Ukraine, in Belarus, and in Lithuania, the complaint is just the opposite. Jews are much too Russian” [2011: 78]. 47 With regard to Soviet Jewry, the term “assimilation” is more often used to emphasize the loss of ethnic traditions. Jewish intellectuals regarded themselves as highly assimilated, as can be concluded from the testimonies of Efraim Sevela (see below), and others.

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Jewish situation.48 Their own Jewish identity, perceived by many urban, highly educated, and intellectually active Jews as a burden, now triggered the processes of reethnicization as an escape. This is exemplified by the autobiographical analysis of Efraim Sevela: Нынче я с абсолютной уверенностью могу сказать, что еврейское движение в СССР [.  .  .] родилось как форма протеста и неприятия советской действительности в первую очередь в социальном плане, а уж потом в национальном [. . .]. Государственный антисемитизм, обрушившийся с 1948 года на уже почти ассимилированные еврейские головы, сумел остановить этот процесс и пробудить в болезненной форме национальное самосознание. [Sevela 2007a: 53–54] Today I can say with absolute certainty that the Jewish movement in the USSR [.  .  .] was a form of protest against and aversion to the Soviet reality that arose primarily on a social, and only afterwards on a national level. [.  .  .]. The state’s antisemitism, which has hit the almost assimilated Jews since 1948, managed stop this process [of assimilation] and awaken the national selfconfidence in a painful form. Sevela’s passionate references to the biblical and medieval history of the Jewish people are characteristic for the time when his book was written. The heroic or martyr narrative of the Tanakh permits Sevela to identify the otkazniki with the chosen and persecuted people who now hear the call of Israel once again. However, this imagined connection points to real historical events. The 1960s saw the revival of the public discourse about the “Jewish homeland”— above all, the discussions about the possibility of a resettlement to Palestine,

48 The referential and historical connection between the works of very different Jewish authors is expressed in the fact that they often mention similar events and experiences such as discrimination at university on the basis of the protagonists’ Jewish origin, as noted in their passports and recognizable by their names and/or outward appearance; agitation against Jews on the streets, in public transport, or at school before and during the 1953 doctors’ trial; harassment at their places of work, which they experienced after applying to leave for Israel. Texts that record this situation include Irina Grekova’s Svezho predanie (1962), Izrail Metter’s “Piatyi ugol” (1967), Feliks Roziner’s Nekto Finkel′maier (1975), Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s Psalom (The psalm, 1975), Efraim Sevela’s Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! (1975) and Mama. Kinopovest′ (1982), David Shrayer-Petrov’s Gerbert i Nelli (1984), Efrem Baukh’s Lestnitsa Iakova (1984) and Oklik (The call, 1991), and Aleksandr Melikhov’s Ispoved′ evreia (1993).

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which was a popular topic in the early Soviet period, as well as the “return of the dispersed people” to the Promised Land in a religious context. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified themselves as the people of the galut, and the Soviet Union, as a place of exile. The course of the Jewish struggle for emigration was widely chronicled in documentary texts and in fiction. The secret study of the Hebrew language, petitions and collective letters, contacts with Western journalists and human rights organizations, the publication of illegal Jewish magazines and the organization of underground seminars—all this became the subject of a broad corpus of research and memoir literature.49 The further the epoch of Jewish unofficial culture recedes into the past, the more it becomes an object of historical research for understandable reasons. In addition, memoirs,50 literary works, and film adaptations contributed to the birth of a myth about that time, its actors, and heroes.51 In 1980, Vladimir Lazaris hoped that “уникальный опыт жизни в отказе [. . .] преврати[тся] в романы и повести” [1981: 111] (“the unique experience of life after the otkaz [. . .] would be transformed into novels and stories”), and wondered whether such books would be written still in Russia or already in Israel. Indeed, already at the early stages of the aliyah movement, there appeared texts that became the core of late Soviet exodus prose with its most important genre characteristics—the new interest towards Jewish spirituality, Jewish historical consciousness, and Israeli topographies, and the effort to record the experiences in the collective Jewish memory. In this sense, even those works that tell of the living present are in a way historical, because their authors regard the events described, the motives for action, and the psychological processes as symptomatic components of Jewish history (including East European Jews) and of the ongoing Jewish struggle for survival in the galut. At the same time, these writers were convinced that this history was part of an important continuity that had lasted for thousands of years, and that the present was permeated by living symbols of the past. The new Zionism and the struggle for exodus were regarded as a continuation of newly rediscovered historical patterns—an attitude that left

49 See, among others, [Shcharanskii 1999], [Lazaris 1981], [Bland-Spitz 1980], [Armborst 2001 and 2004], [Pinkus 1994], [Govrin 1995], [Rabbi J. Telushkin 1997: 383–392], [Friedgut 2003], [Beizer 2004], [Gitelman 1988: 268–292]. The volume The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union [2012] edited by Yaakov Ro’i deserves special mention. 50 Studies of the autobiographies and memoirs of Jewish activists and otkazniki appear in scholarly literature only recently (cf. Hoffman 2012). 51 The history of the otkazniki movement is documented in Laura Bialis’s film Refuseniks (2007), in which participants, witnesses, and scholars of the exodus struggle have their say. In this film, the romantic-transfiguring, heroic note is strongly perceptible in the portrayal of the time and its actors.

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little room for the formation of an intellectual meta-position concerning the tradition. Nevertheless, a self-analysis linking the Jewish past with the current concerns of the present was an important aspect in the political-cultural program of the Jewish samizdat, including the journal Evrei v SSSR (Jews in the USSR), first published in October 1972. In it, “разрабатывались проблемы ассимиляции советских евреев, взаимоотношений еврейского и русского народов, истоков и корней антисемитизма, в прозе и поэзии прослеживалась связь евреев с русской культурой и ставился вопрос о будущем евреев в России” [Lazaris 1981: 102] (“the assimilation problems of Soviet Jews, the relations between the Jewish and Russian people, the origin and the roots of antisemitism were dealt with, the Jewish connection with the Russian culture was pursued in prose and poetry, and the question of the Jewish future in Russia was raised”). As Lazaris, one of the editors of the journal, documents, it increasingly became a literary almanch in which, among others, works of authors such as Feliks Kandel′ and Boris Khazanov were published, until finally a new literary edition called Tarbut (Hebrew: “culture”) was founded in 1975 [ibid.: 109].52 Last but not least, the Jewish resistance circles discussed the problem of cooperation with non-Jewish dissidents. While solidarity with the democratic dissident movement was important and openly declared at the beginning, with time, the differences between “democrats” and “nationalists” became the focus of attention. The conflict of interests intensified especially with regard to the concept of aliyah as a form of political protest: many Jewish resistance fighters broke away from the general dissident activities because they considered it inconsistent to improve the reality of a country they wanted to leave.53 “In contrast to the general Soviet dissident movement, which aimed at transforming the system, most Jewish activists merely demanded their right to a self-determined Jewish life and cultural activity within the framework of existing laws [. . .]” [Lustiger 1998: 310]. In this aspect, the Jewish movement seems comparable to a number of other late Soviet national emancipation movements, such as those of the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Germans, and Georgians. Dina Zisserman-Brodsky has examined numerous samizdat testimonies that reflect solidarity and cooperation as well as mutual separation strategies of different minorities [2003: esp. 59–67]. This comparative sociological analysis reveals, above all, the similarity of claims and motifs: territorial, 52 The development of the Jewish samizdat is described by Stefani Hoffman [1991], Benjamin Pinkus [1994] and Ann Komaromi [2012]. 53 The dilemma is addressed, among others, by the protagonist of the novel Gerbert i Nelli analyzed below—the long-time “martyr” of the otkazniki movement, Gerbert Levitin.

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cultural, linguistic, and religious disadvantages were equal reasons for political mobilization and organized protests. Historical-mythological and religious motifs legitimized the resistance. In addition, Soviet assimilation policy also propelled the formation of Russian national-conservative movements. While, for example, the Jews resorted to the Tanakhic legends and the biblical story of the chosenness of Judaism, the Russian “separatists” conceived the Muscovite Rus, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the struggle against the “Westernization” of the past centuries as the basis for their “historical privilege.” The collective memory brought to light stories of victims and heroes—a competition between discourses of roots and origins in the service of a political struggle for national and ethnic rights [Zisserman-Brodsky 2003: 157–168]. Concerning ethnic groups such as Russian Germans and Jews, whose historical homeland was situated outside the Soviet Union, their demands for repatriation were similar to the secessionist claims advanced by other ethnicities: in the course of time, demands of political and territorial autonomy tended to replace the desire for equal rights inside a multinational country. Even if various dissent groups, including national ones, had many similarities and maintained common platforms and communication channels, as Zisserman-Brodsky’s study shows, it would be incorrect to speak of a coherent and coordinated resistance front. Ann Komaromi argues against the concept of heroic opposition to the communist regime and proposes the model of unofficial and often incompatible “multiple publics.” Following Nancy Fraser, she offers a view of underground cultures as a multifaceted contradictory complex of “competing counter-publics,” and subjectivities pointing in different directions [Fraser 1992; Komaromi 2012a]. In Jewish art and literature, this situation found its expression not only in the specific characters of the goals supported by collective biblical symbols, or in the creation of one’s own cultural alternatives, but also in the convergencies with, or developments parallel and similar to, other movements. This is evidenced by textual references to the history of other ethnic groups and the otkazniki’s debates on many various questions related to the problem of nationality. Another point of similarity consists in the fact that the national longing was projected towards the past or the periphery. For example, the shtetl, was a topographic double of the Russian village, the Kazakh steppe kishlak, or the Georgian mountain settlement. Open political activities were rarely successful and usually resulted in drastic punitive measures. Nevertheless, the history of the Jewish resistance movement is an alternation between impositions and loosening of state restrictions. The harsh sentences of Jewish activists at the 1970 Leningrad trials (the so-called

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airplane affair) were followed by an unexpected exit permit given to most of the twenty-four Jews who occupied the reception of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in Moscow in 1971. In 1978, Anatolii Shcharanskii was sentenced to thirteen years in prison, at the same time as Anatolii Rybakov’s novel Tiazhelyi pesok was published. Memoirs and journalistic texts by former activists and contemporary witnesses document trials against Jewish demonstrators, conscientious objectors,54 and politicized performance artists. The punitive measures were often much harsher than the committed offences and ranged from fifteen days of detention to several years of exile, prison, and camps. The reasons for the severity of the punishment, and for the otkaz itself were kept secret in many cases. The fluctuations of the Soviet government in matters of emigration policy were due to the changing foreign-policy course of the state and its sometimes more or less acute need to secure Western economic support. In the 1980s, the Jewish emigration was put on hold, and the outward movement of the Soviet Jews stopped almost completely. This led to a significant increase in Jewish cultural and educational activities. Gitelman describes the growing interest in Judaism and Hebrew, Jewish customs, festivals, and literature during this period as a shift towards inner emigration: the “energies that were formerly devoted to demonstrations, sit-ins, petitions, and jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the emigration process were directed toward study and the exchange of ideas and knowledge” [Gitelman 1988: 289]. In the Jewish samizdat as well, more and more historical and cultural works, original and translated research and reviews appeared at that time.55 Whereas the early period of the Jewish samizdat (1968–1972), represented by the periodicals Iton and Vestnik iskhoda, focused on the struggle to emigrate to Israel and, above all, published political or politicizing documents (such as reports on the Six-Day War or arrests of activists, articles on the Warsaw Uprising, and excerpts from Elie Wiesel’s Jews of Silence), the journals Evrei v SSSR and Tarbut, which appeared later, included a broad range of literary, essayistic, and historical texts that problematized the Jewish question and promoted a historical 54 As Vladimir Lazaris, among others, describes, Jewish activists often refused to serve in the Soviet army because they knew that this could become an additional reason for their first (or renewed) refuse of the requested departure to Israel. Soviet authorities justified the refuse by saying that, in the course of their previous employment or military service, the applicants had had access to important state secrets, which they could betray to foreign secret services [Lazaris 1981: 76 ff]. 55 Benjamin Pinkus mentions in this context the historical research on the Jews of St. Petersburg, synagogues, and Jewish cemeteries there [Pinkus 1994: 31].

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interpretation of contemporary events [Hoffman 1991]. Michael Beizer, for example, reports on the longstanding and extremely diverse cultural activities of Soviet Jewish experts in the Leningrad underground of the 1980s [Beizer 2018]. In the 1980s, the academic Jewish studies in Russia also grew rapidly: works on Yiddish literature, the Hebrew language, and Jewish philosophy were published [Gitelman 1991: 18–19]. Jewish efforts for national recognition were “internalized” as they moved into the spiritual and intellectual sphere. Lazaris’s 1980 opinion is a good example of the atmosphere of that time—half political and cultural slogan, half Zionist instruction for action: “A task such as national self-identification and the awakening of Jewish self-confidence cannot be solved by mere political means. First Jewish education and upbringing, and only then Zionism, as an ideology and practice” [Lazaris 1981: 31]. Lazaris thus expressed his concern that assimilated Soviet Jews were not prepared for Israel—a fear that was not only entirely justified with regard to the emigrants of the first Zionist wave, but also anticipated the problems of Jewish repatriation in the 1990s.56 Towards the end of the 1980s, the Soviet otkazniki communities—the core of Jewish cultural revival—developed into a complex, geographically branched, and dynamic inter-communicative network, which formed alternative institutions [Khanev 2011: 83]. This was evidenced both by the relative differentiation of the employment sectors, which embraced culture, religion, politics, education, and economics, as well as the geographic variety of underground publishers, which now were active in cities such as Minsk, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Kuibyshev, and Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro) (see [“Samizdat”]).

4.4. Emigration, Literary Institutions, and Readers The Soviet Jewish underground literature was not limited to samizdat. There was also a network of institutions and relations in the countries of immigration. They laid the foundations for a readership that included both Soviet Jews and the Russian-speaking minorities on the other side of the geopolitical border. Thanks to translations and multilingual journalism, these readers also became 56 As Yaacov Ro’i writes: “A group of Moscow refusenics—Vladimir Prestin, Pavel Abramovich, Veniamin Fain, Yosef Begun, and Leonid Volvovsky—has proved that it is ‘illusion to think it is enough for the gates to be opened and [. . .] two million Jews would then go to Israel. [. . .] We concluded that in order to raise Jewish identity among the assimilated Jews, we had to conduct educational work among them. We began spreading Jewishness by circulating samizdat, books, cassettes, and so on’” [2012: 108]. This is a quote from Benjamin (Veniamin) Fain’s article titled “Background to the Present Jewish Cultural Movement in the Soviet Union,” which was published in the volume Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union, 1991.

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a link between Russian literature and the literature in the respective foreign language. Information on the literary activities of Russian Jewish emigration in the late Soviet period is still quite scarce. It consists of disparate data in a few encyclopedic articles and, above all, of participants’ testimonies. The best documented and at the same time the most diverse publication activities took place in Israel. Among the earlier social-literary periodicals are Vestnik Izrailia (Israeli Messenger, 1959–1963) and Shalom (1963–1967), published by Aleks Eizer (Aleksandr Evzerov). The most important literary journals Sion (Zion, 1972–1982) and 22 (1978–2017?) appeared later on. Among publishers who formed the literary public space in the Soviet exodus, the most important and the longest active company was Biblioteka-Aliia (1972–2002?), followed by Moskva-Ierusalim (1977, headed by Aleksandr Voronel′ and Rafail Nudel′man).57 In 1971, the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel was founded. In various periods, it was headed by Icchokas Meras (1977–1981), Efrem Baukh (1981–1982, 1985–2014), David Markish (1982–1985), and others. Sion was the first “thick” literary journal (tolstyi zhurnal) that brought together a considerable number of Russian Israeli authors in the 1970s, including writers formerly active in the Jewish samizdat. Due to ideological differences, a group of editors and authors split off in 1978 and the new journal 22 (named after the number of the current issue of Sion) was created. It aimed to turn away from the strictly Zionist course proposed by Sion and broaden its readership with regard to Israeli literature in languages other than Russian, the non-Jewish literary underground in the Soviet Union, and other emigration literatures. The biographies of most nonconformist Jewish writers, which will be discussed below, are linked to literary institutions and public bodies established in Israel in the 1970s and the 1980s. Whether their works were able to reach a broader and a more heterogeneous readership depended largely on the history of their publications and translations. Thus, Eli Liuksemburg’s first story “Tretii khram” (1975) was published by Biblioteka-Aliia in Jerusalem and was subsequently translated into Hebrew and English. His novel Desiatyi golod (1985) was printed in Russian in London and later in French and Italian (the second Russian edition was published in 1990 by the Israeli publishing company Shamir). Thanks to this, Liuksemburg gradually received international recognition. Efraim (Efrem) Baukh and David Markish established themselves in Israel not only as successful and well-published novelists and translators, but also as heads of recognized printing organs and national cultural offices: 57 See the list of periodicals and publishers in [“Russkaia literatura v Izraile”].

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for many years both of them were editors of Sion and chairmen of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. Markish’s highly acclaimed prose was published not only in Israel but also, in several languages, in England, Germany, France, Sweden, Brazil, the United States, and Switzerland.58 Efraim Sevela owes its worldwide reputation to several factors: on the one hand, to his entertaining satirical writing style and the explosive nature of the historical and political themes of his prose and journalism; on the other hand, to the pronounced heroic (activist), highly cosmopolitan, and even adventurous components of his biography, which he fictionalized in various genres and even adapted for the screen. In addition, at the time of his emigration he was a well-known Soviet film director and screenplay writer. His first work Legendy invalidnoi ulitsy (Legends of the Invalidnaia street, 1973) was enthusiastically received in the United States, where it was published, praised in the newspaper The New Haven Register, and then reprinted in England, Germany, Japan, and Israel, sometimes by renowned publishers. Sevela’s nomadic life with temporary settlements in various countries led to an unheard-of thematic diversity of his books, scripts, and films and to a growing popularity, culminating in Russia of the perestroika and post-Soviet period.59 Feliks Kandel′, another respected Soviet screenplay writer and author before his repatriation, also became a prominent figure of political and literary exodus. Together with two fellow writers, he created, among other things, the scripts for the Soviet animated series Nu, pogodi! (Well, just you wait!), which soon become a classic, and was the editor of the cinema journal Fitil′ (The wick). After several years as a Jewish activist in the otkaz (1973–1977), when he edited the samizdat magazine Tarbut (1975–1977), Kandel′ started working at the radio station Kol Israel. His works were published in the magazines Kontinent, 22, Grani, Sion, Vremia i my, as well as in the newspapers Russkaia mysl′ and Novoe russkoe slovo. Before the fall of the Soviet Union his essays and novels appeared in various countries: Vrata iskhoda nashego (The gates of our exodus, 1979) in Jerusalem, published by Biblioteka-Aliia; Pervyi etazh (First floor, 1982) in London; Na noch′ gliadia (As the night draws near, 1985) in Frankfurt upon Main.60

58 See “Pisatel′ David Markish: ‘Chitaite literaturu, a ne makulaturu . . . ,’” STMEGI, June 21, 2018, https://stmegi.com/posts/59862/pisatel-david-markish-chitayte-literaturu-a-nemakulaturu-/, accessed January 4, 2023. 59 For more details, see “Efraim Sevela—pisatel′, kinematografist i grazhdanin mira,” Cogita.ru, August 30, 2013, http://www.cogita.ru/pamyat/in-memoriam/efraim-sevela-2013-pisatelkinematografist-i-grazhdanin-mira, accessed January 4, 2023. 60 See “Kandel′, Feliks,” in Elektronnaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, https://eleven.co.il/jewishliterature/in-russian/11948, accessed January 4, 2023.

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Iakov Tsigel′man’s name is also linked to Sion, where his Birobidzhan novel Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera (The funeral of Moishe Dorfer, 1977) was published— as well as to 22, the publishing company Biblioteka-Aliia and the radio station Kol Israel. His most famous novel, Ubiistvo na bul′vare Ben-Maimon (The murder on Ben-Maimon Boulevard) was first published in 1980 in 22, which he coedited, and then by the publishing company Moskva-Ierusalim in 1981. Later, Leonid Kelbert, the Leningrad director of the Jewish underground theater, used this novel as a basis for his play Pis′ma iz rozovoi papki (Letters from the pink folder).61

61 See [Toporovskii 2010].

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The literary works of the Soviet-Jewish exodus reflect a poorly known stage of unofficial literary development, and at the same time they are unique fictional documents of a particular historical period. As part of Russian dissident literature and, in a broader sense, of the Soviet counter-culture, on the one hand, and Jewish literature, on the other, they participate in the creation of the alternative canon of Russian literature, but they also form a double cultural— and as a part of the Zionist world literature,1 also national—belonging. The exodus story from the book Shemot of the Jewish Bible becomes the leading poetic, philosophical, religiously or politically loaded metaphor of liberation and return for writers whose works are analyzed below. With this, they also inherit the tradition of the early Russian Palestine prose of the chalutzim, prominently represented in Mark Egart’s novel Opalennaia zemlia (Scorched land, 1933/34),

1 The concepts of Zionist and Jewish world literatures is part of the debates about the concept of world literature that are being conducted for the last twenty years or so (cf., for example, the conceptual publications [Damrosh 2003] and [Thomsen 2008]). For me, the term is always somewhat metaphorical. Applied to Jewish literatures, its most important features are transnationality and heterolinguality of writing, which was created and distributed for centuries in various languages and on various continents, and developed comparable motifs, tropes, and plot elements, which problematized the issues of belonging and alienness. On Slavic translingual literatures as world literatures cf. most recently [Hitzke/Finkelstein 2018].

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which will be referred to later. In this chapter, I will discuss the novels Lestnitsa Iakova by Efrem Baukh and Gerbert i Nelli by David Shrayer-Petrov, which were both written in 1982–1984, Eli Liuksemburg’s story “Tretii khram” (1975) and his novel Desiatyi golod (1985) as well as David Markish’s novel Priskazka as representative examples of late Soviet exodus literature.

5.1. “The Excitement of Memory”: Efrem Baukh’s Jacob’s Ladder Efrem Baukh (1934–2020) is one of the most prolific authors of Russianlanguage Jewish literature: he is the creator of numerous volumes of prose and poetry, translations, historical works, and essays. The novel Lestnitsa Iakova was written seven years after his emigration to Israel and represents an extended reflection on the spiritual and mental reorientation in the Jewish intellectual circles in the second half of the 1970s. These events lead to the protagonist’s departure to Israel in the end of the novel. The narrative follows the gradual inner transformation of the well-off Moscow psychiatrist Emmanuil Kardin, who begins to remember his Jewish roots under the influence of some of his patients treated in a closed institution and thus achieves a difficult emotional liberation. This process is directly connected with the awakening of his “Jewish memory,” which Kardin, who observes himself with scientific detachment, interprets as a collection of anamnesis, a gradual restoration of an individual’s inner past. Kardin increasingly perceives the Soviet society as “amnesiac.” It forgets its history, suppresses its own crimes, drives them away from the collective consciousness, and transforms itself into the realm of the spiritually dead. The more Kardin immerses into the world of his patients—apparently Jewish intellectuals receiving a compulsory treatment— the more alien he feels in his stable and “healthy” environment. This goes on until Kardin rediscovers the Hebrew language, which he has almost forgotten since his childhood, and old Jewish books (especially the Kabbalistic teachings and their main work, Zohar). In the course of this metamorphosis, Kardin is overwhelmed by the memories of his parents and ancestors, and the history of the diaspora Jews, of which their fates are a part. The memories don’t let go of him: Kardin describes his condition, a sign of inner restlessness, using the scientistic term “перевозбуждение памяти” [Baukh 2001: 73] (“extreme excitation of the memory”). At another point, he also calls this situation “обострение памяти” [ibid.: 125] (“sharpening/inflammation of the memory”), and compares it with the “inflammation” of conscience. However, the effort

5. Prose of Exodus

of remembrance anchored, as he argues, in the suppressed collective memory reveals even deeper layers of the past: Kardin goes back to the thousand-year-old Jewish history, the source of his mysterious bond with the whole Jewish people. Following the rediscovery of his belonging to the Jewish collective, embodied in the prophetic-magical letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Kardin distances himself from his family and breaks old ties. The journey to his home town becomes for Kardin a literal return to his own roots, an effort to redeem his apostasy. This faraway place still harbors the remainders of Jewish spirituality, embodied in the figure of Kardin’s old, frail teacher Rebbe Pruzhanskii, and now doomed to decay. The joint reading of the Zohar and the memories of Kardin’s grandfather, who once taught him to read the Torah, lead to a complete spititual renewal and finally, to his departure for Israel. The inner transformation of the assimilated Jewish intellectual is influenced by Judaistic writings, so that the key event, the “rise” of the aliyah, suggests not only a political, but rather a spiritual decision.2 The narrative is imbued by references to the Kabbalah and Talmudic texts, which permeate the protagonist’s consciousness: the sacred books (sforim) become his spiritual educators speaking from the past. The fateful, at the beginning only latent effect of the ancient Hebrew letters on Kardin’s life and the recognition of their meaning, which set in motion the process of anamnesis and hermeneutic exploration, can be traced back to the Kabbalistic interpretation of the letters. The threatening contours of these letters are a reminder to the forgetful. These letters are, as Kardin’s patient Plavinskii puts it, hooked sticks, spits, forks. Hell—the Gehenna—is hidden behind every letter; and apocalyptic visions appear: Вы привыкли относиться к древнееврейскому, как к любому другому . . . О, как вы ошибаетесь . . . Играете с огнем, да, да, 2 This mystical understanding of the aliyah, which Baukh presents in most of his texts (for example, it becomes the central concept of his later novel Oklik [1991]), is contrasted with the aspirations of other Jewish emigrants, who are oriented towards economic prosperity: “В ОВИРе соплеменники Кардина толпились, уточняя сроки отъезда. Крикливое большинство делилось между собой сведениями об Америке, Канаде, Австралии, выбирая будущее место жизни по принципу базара. На отъезжающих в Израиль смотрели с жалостью и даже несколько свысока” [Baukh 2001: 533] (“In the visa and registration office, Kardin’s tribe relatives crowded as they tried to find out the dates of their departure. The largest and the noisiest group exchanged information about America, Canada, and Australia, choosing their future domiciles like wares at the market. On those who were leaving for Israel they looked with pity mixed with some contempt”). In contrast, Baukh’s protagonists are driven by a romantic impulse to share the fate of Israel, even to sacrifice themselves. On the deromanticization of the Soviet aliyah in works by Russian-Soviet emigrants, see chap. 7.

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в буквальном смысле . . . [. . .] вот—“гимель”—“‫—”ג‬багор, “далет”—“‫—”ד‬крюк, “вав”—“‫—”ו‬кол, “ламед”—“‫—”ל‬виселица, глядите, глядите—“мем”—“‫“—”ם‬капкан”, а дальше—“аин, цади, каф, хоф, реш”3—“‫—”עצקבר‬крюки, крючья, “шин”—“‫—”ש‬вилы . . . [. . .] Это язык геенны огненной, которая каждый миг жизни нас жечь должна, если хотим людьми остаться. . . . [Ibid.: 30–31]4 You are accustomed to treating the ancient Hebrew language like any other. Oh, how wrong you are . . . You play with fire, yes, yes, literally . . . [. . .] There is “gimel”—“‫—”ג‬a hooked stick, “dalet”—“‫—”ד‬a hook, “waw”—“‫—”ו‬a stake, “lamed”—“‫—”ל‬a gallows, look, look, “mem”—“‫—”ם‬a trap, and then—“ayin, tzade, kaf, chof, resh”—“‫—”עצקבר‬these are hooks, “shin”—“‫—”ש‬a fork . . . [. . .] This is the language of the fiery Gehenna, which must burn us every moment of our lives if we want to stay human. . . . To “stay human” means to remember. Consequently, Kardin’s “humanization” is a gradual recovery of belonging to the collective Jewish memory contained in the Tanakh, the Mishna and the midrash, as well as the Kabbalistic books such as Sefer Yetzira, Sefer ha-Bahir, and the Zohar. The blurred signs, lines, and texts that have faded since childhood come now back into Kardin’s consciousness. He begins to understand that contemporary reality represents only an upper layer of a palimpsest. Today’s ideologies appear as deceptive simulations of biblical stories (for example, the communist ascent into the “bright future” is a perverted variant of Jacob’s ladder); The tragic events of the twentieth century are already foreseen and interpreted in the Ethiopian Book of Enoch; the sufferings of the perished and the imprisoned are the new embodiment of the regions of hell described in detail in the First Book of Enoch and afterwards by Virgil, Dante, and Milton. Kardin links the “sins” of the Russian history after the October

3 The Hebrew characters (“аин, цади, каф, хоф, реш” [ayin, tzade, kaf, chof, resh]) are read according to the rules of Hebrew script from right to left. This is why they are reproduced here by the following series of letters: ‫רבקצע‬. 4 Baukh recalls here the meaning of the outlines of the Hebrew letters, which is also important for the Christian Kabbalah that, according to Marina Aptekman, was characterized by “linguistic mysticism” [Aptekman 2011: 29]. “[. . .] Most Christian kabbalists of the sixteenth century believed that Hebrew was the divine language of creation, and that it possessed the creative power hidden in letters and sounds, which ordinary people could not understand. When the creative meaning of this letters is revealed, [. . .] the world will be united and enjoy spiritual peace” [ibid.: 28].

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Revolution of 1917 with the seven regions of the underworld described in the Zohar, that is, the seven deadly sins: the killing of the innocent (in the Soviet penal camps), robbery (confiscations and dispossessions of peasants), creation of idols (Stalin’s personality cult), blasphemy (persecution of religion under official atheism), and so on. In the fictional “biography” of Emmanuil Kardin, memory as an act of resistance is opposed to an “alliance of domination and forgetting” [Assmann 1992: 72]. The hooked sticks, spits, and forks of the Hebrew letters metaphorically refer to the Last Judgement—eschatology becomes, as it did in the (recent) historical past, an “ideology of [a] revolutionary resistance movement[s]” [ibid.] in which political issues are interpreted in terms of memory.5 An almost obsessive preoccupation with Jewish texts conveys to Kardin the perception of a spatial discontinuity based on Jewish tradition (home vs. exile) and, in various ways, the idea of the necessity of returning to Eretz Israel. Thus, a quotation from the Sefer ha-Chinuch suggests that life in exile is equivalent to death, and Rabbi Yochanan in the Zohar says that all dead Jews will return to the Promised Land by underground ways.6 Kardin also recalls the words of his grandmother—a Yiddish saying expressing the many hardships of East European Jews: “Lang vi der idisher goles” (“Long as the Jewish galut”). For Kardin, the communist Judeophobia, among other things, stands in the context of Jewish Bible with its key historical events such as the exodus from Egypt or the victory over Haman.7 And Kardin makes the topographies of the eternal city of Jerusalem accessible to himself not by using travel guides and maps, but by reading the prophets [Baukh 2001: 485]. The reference to the story of the patriarch Jacob in the title of the novel is elaborated into a structural analogy. Just as Jacob struggles with God before entering Canaan, his homeland, and wins, Kardin has to fight long battles against his own doubts and the burden of the life in exile. In this process, he is supported by a biblical image—the metaphor of the ladder as an ascension to God [ibid.: 519–520]. Jacob’s ladder is consequently an iconic interpretative formula for the entire text.

5 As an example of the “alliance of domination and forgetting” in modernity, Assmann characteristically cites George Orwell’s novel 1984, with the quote: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right” [1992: 72]. 6 The final return of Jews to the Holy Land, made possible by the will of God, is mentioned many times in Jewish prophecies. The vision of the resurrection of the dead of the “house of Israel” and their resettlement from the foreign land “to the ground of Israel” is found in the book of the prophet Ezekiel [Ezek 37:1–14]. 7 The time before Stalin’s death is often associated by Jewish authors with the Esther story about the miraculous rescue of the Jews. For example, see the story “Vtorogo marta togo zhe goda” by Liudmila Ulitskaia [1994] or Mark Zaichik’s novel V marte 1953 goda (In March 1953 [1999]).

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Efrem Baukh’s novel is, on several levels, a fictional document of its time. This is evidenced by the evolution of the protagonist who gradually accepts his being a Jew, by the Jewish intertexts that determine the narrative, by the Judaistic concept of the late Soviet aliyah, which goes back to the real biography of the author,8 and the reflections on the historical interrelation between Russian and Jewish culture, whereby the former one is understood as only a superficial level of the cultural palimpsest, and the latter is the deep and real layer, which has been violated and concealed. Kardin critically examines the Russian culture through the Jewish lens and concludes that the tragic betrayal of Judaism is inherent in the Russian spirit and characterizes the biographies of its “noblest” representatives. For example, his reflections on the personality of the poet Boris Pasternak illustrate the concept of the palimpsest that is fundamental to the novel: И Кардин думал [.  .  .] о трагедии еврея, ставшего христианским апостолом, о том, как искренне гениально предают корни своего существования, предают с пылом [.  .  .] И вот—разрыв, едва и незаметно предательство материнства и отцовства: христианство, выходящее из “ребра” иудейства, использует отцов своих, чтобы их же отринуть, чтобы одолеть скуку первичных скрижалей. (О, этот вечный страх перед оригиналом) [. . .] И смотрит иудаизм с трагической печалью и знанием [.  .  .] на “блудного сына”, зная, что не всегда верна сказка о его возвращении. [Baukh 2001: 299] And Kardin thought [. . .] about the tragedy of a Jew who became a Christian apostle, about the brilliant sincerity with which one betrays the roots of one’s own existence, betrays with zeal [. . .]. And so a rift develops, a barely noticeable betrayal of mothers and fathers: Christianity, born from the “rib” of Judaism, uses its fathers to cast them out, to overcome the boredom of the table of origin. (Oh, that eternal fear of the original) [. . .] And Judaism 8 The epoch of the aliyah struggle has fostered the emergence of new biographical writing, which have been shaped and inspired by the idea of spiritual and geographical transition. In his essay on the literature of Russian emigrants in Israel, Baukh analyses his own works and those of his colleagues as stories of self-discovery and self-understanding after the great upheaval of repatriation [Baukh 1983]. The essay has the characteristic title “Moment of Truth”; the guiding principle of his reflections is conveyed by expressions such as “overcoming an inner break,” “another fate, a new life,” “to build oneself anew,” and the like [ibid.: 220–221]. In the context of these reflections, the fictional biography of Emmanuil Kardin seems very close to his author’s story.

5. Prose of Exodus

looks with tragic melancholy and knowledge [. . .] at the “prodigal son,” aware that the story of his return is not always true. The knowledge of repressed divergences and overwritten splits in Russian culture condemned to uniformity (amnesia means only being able to read the surface) positions the protagonist as the Other, the one who must go forward or, in other words, return in order to prevent a global destruction of memory. Here, the realization of the overwhelming effect of the “iudeistvo” (an antiquated, elevated expression for “Judaism” or “religious Jewry”) plays a central role. No Jew can escape it as soon as they are able to open themselves to this source of information, which they believe is “genetic.” Baukh refers to Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious in an essentializing way when he lets the famous psychologist say in a dialogue dreamed up by Kardin: “[. . .] вы обыкновенный человечишко, но сквозь вас просвечивает [. . .] сверхличное коллективное бессознательное, не только историческая, но и духовная подпочва—иудейство .  .  .” [Baukh 2001: 425] (“[.  .  .] you are an ordinary little man, but through you [. . .] the supra-individual collective unconscious shines through, not only the historical but also the spiritual basis—Judaism .  .  .”). Kardin’s commitment to Judaism thus proves to be a kind of culturalbiological predestination, and Jewish culture is read as a culture of origin, of the all-encompassing cultural genesis and, in comparison to the Soviet one, as a culture of always more developed knowledge. Baukh’s novel is also a testimony to the late Soviet Jewish counter-culture: in its final chapters, its protagonist declares an embittered war on the dictatorial state. After Kardin has openly stood up for his new ideas and held an ardent protest speech at an international conference, the ordeals of dissident life begin for him. He is put in an unknown, remote psychiatric institution and has to undergo a grueling compulsory treatment himself.9 The staff of the secret service who interrogate Kardin is narratively linked to the underworld and the dead. This is made clear by epithets such as “rykhlyi” (“wabbly/brittle”), “odutlovaty[i]” (“bloated”), “gnilostn[yi]” (“rotten”), “obriuzgshee” (“limp/ withered”) in the description of the civil servant to whom Kardin is assigned [ibid.: 435]. In addition to semantics portraying death, this ecphrasis also

9 The fact that the former regime-conformist and highly positioned psychiatrist is now himself declared mentally ill, imprisoned, and subjected to coercive treatment is intended to expose mechanisms of power and evokes (even in the smaller details of the description) Anton Chekhov’s story “Palata №6” (“Sickroom No. 6”). The Chekhov intertext emphasizes the long tradition of abuse of power in Russia and thus underpins the central idea about the disastrous course of Russian history.

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includes an animalistic and mask-like theatrical element, which, on the one hand, conveys the repulsive naturalism of the events, and, on the other the artificial and ephemeral nature of the Soviet power discourse: “Это и вправду был странный, несколько сюрреалистический спектакль одного зрителя и одного актeра [. . .] наружу вырывалось этакое обрюзгшее, распоясавшееся в прямом и переносном смысле животное, лаяло, рявкало, пило, захлебываясь, вино, и чавкало, давясь шоколадом” [Baukh 2001: 436] (“This was indeed a strange, somewhat surrealistic show for one spectator and one actor [. . .], an obese animal came out of it, which let itself go in the direct and figurative sense, barked, roared, drank wine greedily and smacked its lips while forcing down chocolate”). The speech of an aged investigator “v serom” (“in grey”) cynically illustrating the idea of the human unwillingness to recognize the truth evokes the Grand Inquisitor’s sophisticated philosophical argumentation in Fedor Dostoevskii’s Brat′ia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov), above all the justification of the necessity of evil. The half-dead old man is a vampire with a strange-looking youthful face, who has sucked up the numerous victims of the bloody regime. Ignorant of his fate until the last moment, Kardin is finally thrown out of the car in the middle of the woods. The following, last phase of his existence in the Soviet Union is marked by unemployment, which is taken for granted, and efforts to leave the country. Kardin is finally able to do that after he has explored all worlds of hell—similar to the numerous heroes of mythology and literature alluded to in the novel.

5.2. The Martyrdom of Refusal: David Shrayer-Petrov’s Herbert and Nelli The poet and prose writer David Shrayer-Petrov (born 1936) was an otkaznik for over eight years. After his 1979 application to emigrate, he lost his senior academic position as a research microbiologist, was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and was subjected to severe harassment by the Soviet regime. His aliyah prose is partly based on autobiographical experiences. With the dawn of perestroika in the spring of 1987, Shrayer-Petrov and his family were given permission to leave and emigrated to the the United States.10 I will analyze the

10 My conversations with David Shrayer-Petrov in December 2012 in Ramat-Gan and in December 2018 in Boston helped me to visualize the atmosphere of otkaz, its dramatic longterm effect on the author’s family and the period when the novel was written.

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first two parts of David Shrayer-Petrov’s trilogy of refusenik novels, Gerbert i Nelli: Doktor Levitin (Doctor Levitin, 1979–1980) and Bud′ ty prokliat, tol′ko ne umirai (Cursed be you, just don’t die, 1982–1984).11 The novel’s protagonist, Gerbert Anatol′evich Levitin, is a physician, just like Emmanuil Kardin, the central character in Baukh’s Lestnitsa Iakova. Like Doctor Kardin—and like thousands of other members of the Jewish-Soviet intelligentsia—Doctor Levitin is a descendant of religious shtetl Jews; this world of traditional Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement had already become alien to his parents. The historical path from traditional Judaism to assimilation and secular studies—often in the field of medicine—highlights a pivotal period in Doctor Levitin’s family history and in Jewish-Soviet history as a whole, the exploration of which is crucial for both authors. In the 1930s, Levitin’s father moved with his young wife from a remote Belarusian shtetl to Moscow to study medicine in the “New World” (“в новый мир”): they “could no longer confine themselves to the old environment, rife as it was with ornate disputations, doubts, and the odor of mothballs”12 (“не могли оставаться в старой, пропахшей словопрениями и сомнениями, пронафталиненной среде”13). Here, the topoi of the early Soviet modernisation discourse, enthusiastically adopted by many Jews of the former Russian Empire, are reproduced. The above-quoted description of the shtetl world—critical to the point of disdain—echoes a tradition of writing about the shtetl as antiquated and obsolete. Similar repudiatory images, often laden with olfactory associations, appear in the poetry of Eduard Bagritskii and Iosif Utkin, as well as earlier autobiographical prose of Osip Mandel′stam. This intertextual passage is a meaningful historical link, which helps to understand the narrated present of the novel, that is, the Jewish revival in late Soviet Russia. Levitin is raised in a family of Moscow intelligentsia, for whom their Jewishness is merely a family background, a “thin identity” in an internationalist Soviet multiethnic state. In the “black year” of 1949, Levitin’s father is suspended from his military hospital duties without any plausible cause. In early 1953, he is arrested in the course of the “doctors’ plot.” Unable to cope with the humiliation and the open state-sponsored antisemitism, Levitin’s father dies shortly after 11 Maxim D. Shrayer describes the history of the novel’s publication as following: “In 1984 the manuscript of Part One and Part Two was clandestinely photographed by a trusted photographer, and the negatives were smuggled out of the USSR to the West. [. . .] In 1986 an abridged text of Part One appeared in Jerusalem under the title V otkaze (Being an otkaznik), in a volume of the same title, comprised of writings by and about refuseniks and published by Biblioteka-Aliia ([Shrayer 2018: 278]). The third novel of the trilogy, Tret′ia zhizn′ (The third life), was written and published following Shrayer-Petrov’s emigration to the United States in 1987. 12 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 39]. 13 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 39].

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his rehabilitation. At the start of the novel, Levitin’s own outward Jewishness is largely limited to the annual visit to the Moscow Choral Synagogue on the day of his father’s yahrzeit. However, when he is there, he always feels an inner, albeit transient, bond with his Jewish ancestors: [. . .] это было временное, закономерно возвращающееся, как память о родителях, приобщение себя к понятию еврейства. То есть он, оставаясь русским интеллигентом, внезапно, но совершенно определенно открывал в себе еще одну важную черту—еврейское происхождение.14 [.  .  .] it was more temporary, naturally determined—like the memory of his parents—his return or reattachment to the notion of Jewishness. That is, as a member of the Russian intelligentsia, he would suddenly yet very tangibly rediscover in himself another prominent quality: his Jewish heritage.15 Levitin’s first impulse to leave the country comes at the very beginning of the text, as his family is harshly confronted with state-sponsored antisemitism. The Levitins’ only son, Anatolii, fails the entrance examinations to the medical school where his father is a full professor of medicine. This occurs, just as his Jewish father and his Russian mother anticipated, due to his Jewish origin, which the examiners instantly detect and act upon. As a result, Anatolii suffers a severe nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, more and more friends and acquaintances of the Levitin family emigrate on Israeli visas. Shrayer-Petrov depicts the exclusion of Jews in the late Soviet Union as a multi-layered phenomenon. The whole variety of Judeophobic attitudes can be found here: from the almost biological aversion on the part of the otherwise honest and humane non-Jewish-Soviet citizens all the way to the ideological targeting of Jews as potential “enemies of the people” and “Zionists” by the party officials and the KGB. In the attitude of Levitin’s own father-in-law, Vasilii Matveevich, towards the Jews, the centuries-old mistrust of simple villagers towards strangers16 is mixed with political suspicion on the part of an average homo sovieticus, who has internalized the formulas of communist propaganda.

14 [Ibid.: 43]. 15 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 36]. 16 It finds its biological expression in the well-known Russian proverb “The goose is no friend of the pig” (“Гусь свинье не товарищ”).

5. Prose of Exodus

Vasilii Matveevich is, as Shrayer-Petrov’s narrator explains, not an antisemite, but “he didn’t love Jews”17 (“он не любил евреев”18). Grandfather Vasilii Matveevich uses anti-Jewish clichés, which are expressed in singular pejorative expressions (for example, he calls Levitin “long nose”) and prejudices (he is surprised that Levitin, as a Jew, has no practical sense and has not managed to find a way out of his son’s predicament). Strikingly, in his own nuclear family, Levitin encounters old collective phobias that go beyond the political and the stereotypical and culminate into notes of racial prejudice. His Russian wife Tat′iana, for example, finds the idea of emigration to Israel scary and fears that the typical Semitic physical traits of her husband—“elongated cranium,” “kinky hair,” “dark eyes,” “beaked nose”—may have been transmitted to her. Doctor Levitin’s physical alterity, which his son Anatolii inherits, is considered a stigma. The fact that this otherness is also perceived suspiciously by one’s own close family members marks the tragic insurmountability of ethnic divisions and highlights the long traditions of Russian ethno-religious xenophobia, which largely draws its vitality from the poor education of the broad strata of the country’s population. The desire to leave the country and the awakening of Jewish self-awareness of the male protagonists trigger, in Shrayer-Petrov’s and in Efraim Baukh’s novels, the Judeophobic moods of their non-Jewish wives. In Lestnitsa Iakova, Kardin’s wife Lena is of Cossack descent, which is no coincidence in the context of the novel: the Cossacks are depicted as proverbial enemies of the Jews. The more Kardin turns to Judaism, the greater the abyss between him and his wife. Similar to Tat′iana Levitina, Lena Kardina also tries to shake off the “pernicious” influence of the Jewishness: “И опять рассказывает еврейские анекдоты в компании, и сквозит в этом болезненное желание приобщиться к ‘своим’, доказать, что не совсем ожидовилась”19 (“Yet again she tells anecdotes about Jews to her friends, and one notices in it a painful desire to be closer to ‘her owns,’ to prove that she is not yet completely ‘Jewified’”). The passionate revelation of antisemitism becomes one of the most important components of Gerbert i Nelli, augmenting its affiliation with the late Soviet culture of Jewish protest. The power of reflection as well as the effect of the political invective increase because the flow of the novel’s fictional narrative is repeatedly interrupted by autobiographical digressions of the authobiographical first-person narrator. The impression of authenticity in these digressions evokes

17 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 26]. 18 [Shraer-Petrov 2014b: 33]. 19 [Baukh 2001: 297].

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the conventions of ego-documentary narrative genres such as memoirs and diaries, further complicating the textual structure. The narrator, a Jewish-Russian writer, analyzes his existence as a Soviet Jew in fragments from his childhood to the present—“историю больших и малых обид”20 (“a story of offenses large and small”21). He reconstructs a private encyclopedia of discrimination, the confession of an outcast.22 From this double narration, a thematically multidimensional structure emerges in a network of similarities and allusions, a play with personal proximity and fictional distance. Parallels arise between Levitin’s fate and that of the authorial narrator as a victim of Judeophobia. The excerpt from the 1961 indictment of Adolf Eichmann by the Israeli Attorney General illustrates similarities between German national socialism and the postwar Soviet communism: (“. . . ТОРГОВЛЯ СВОБОДОЙ ЕВРЕЯ СТАЛА ОТНЫНЕ ОТНЫНЕ ОФИЦИАЛЬНОЙ ПОЛИТИКОЙ РЕЙХА”23 (“. . . TRADING IN JEWISH FREEDOM WAS FROM THAT TIME ONWARD THE OFFICIAL POLICY OF THE REICH”24). Finally, the journey to Trakai, which Anatolii and his beloved Natasha undertake during a visit to Lithuania so as to see what has remained of Trakai’s Karaite community, becomes the pretext for the authorial narrator to deploy a travelogue of his own similar journey.25 As a historical reference, Anatolii and Natasha’s excursion to Trakai testifies to the renewed interest in Jewish culture among young people in the late Soviet Union.

20 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 97]. 21 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 86]. 22 Irina Grekova’s novel Svezho predanie (Hard to believe, 1962, pub. 1997) was one of the first works of fiction to offer a comprehensive indictment of Soviet antisemitism. Written by a non-Jewish author, it anticipated the Jewish revival in Russia by a number of years. In its incredibly candid depiction of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, this text by far surpasses the novel Zhizn′ i sud′ba (Life and fate) by Vasilii Grossman, written three years earlier than Grekova’s novel and published in 1988. The more recent Russian prose trend against antisemitism culminates in the post-Soviet novel Ispoved′ evreia (The confession of a Jew, 1993) by Aleksandr Melikhov. 23 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 97]. 24 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 86]. 25 In the nonconformist Jewish-Soviet literature, the place of repressed or hidden Jewish religious observance or culture is often the Soviet periphery, or Soviet republics: the shtetl once abandoned by the protagonist, Lithuania, Caucasus, or Central Asia. Since the Jewish traditions had been preserved to a greater extent in the borderlands, the peripheral often appears as a space where meaning is produced, a space of living memory and of the last remnants of tradition. Charged with living memories, the geographic edge of the empire reflects ex negativo the empty space of the center. So Baukh’s Kardin travels to his home town to experience this journey as a revelation and a literal return to his own roots. Eli Liuksemburg, who grew up in Uzbekistan, portrays in Desiatyi golod the Central Asian Jewry of Bukhara. In Markish’s Priskazka, the place of exile—Kazakhstan—is regarded as a substitute Palestine: a space of freedom, which functions as the site of Zionist self-education and precursor of aliyah.

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At the same time, the narrator’s metareflection gives the novel an opportunity to report on the fate of the Karaites as part of the tragic Jewish-Soviet history. The old Karaites of Trakai, whose religion had branched off from Judaism, conceal their affinity to the Jews and do not want to be associated with or even mistaken for Jews for fear of persecution. For this reason, the questions posed by the probing narrator sound perilous and harassing to them, and they react in a defensive and unfriendly fashion. The narrator tries to penetrate their secrecy and the resulting oblivion by further investigating the history of the Karaites, visiting their synagogue (kenesa) and the museum in Trakai. At the same time, the narrator believes that he can hypothesize about the Semitic ancestry of the beloved Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin: Пушкин получил свои поэтические гены от Давида и его сына Соломона, поскольку род Ганнибалов восходит к династии эфиопских царей через Соломона и царицу Савскую [.  .  .]. Прослеживается чёткая генеалогическая и потому—генетическая линия: Давид—Соломон—Христос—Пушкин.26 Pushkin received his poetic genes from David and his son Solomon. The ancestors of Pushkin’s mother—the Hannibals—descended from the Abyssinian royal dynasty through King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. [. . .] A defined genealogical, and therefore a genetic, lineage may be traced: David—Solomon—Christ—Pushkin.27 Like other spiritually awakened protagonists of aliyah prose, Shrayer-Petrov’s narrator seeks to uncover the hidden Jewish layers of a cultural Russian palimpsest. The reflection of Russian (cultural) history against the backdrop of Jewish culture is telling here. A particular concept of historicity emerges, one that questions the continuity and homogeneity, the ideological content, even the claim to existence of a grand national-historical narrative that overwrites or even erases the concerns and aspirations of the minorities, in particular the Jewish one.28

26 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 189]. 27 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 174–175]. 28 This goes so far that the reader sometimes detects an authorial desire to attribute a primordial mystical meaning to the Jewish component in Russian culture and to rewrite the cultural “high achievements” of the Russian nation as Jewish contributions.

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Guided by the passion to rescue through memory the genealogies and links fallen into oblivion, Shrayer-Petrov’s narrator, and, together with him, the implied author become a historian of his culture. The history of the Levitin family thus becomes part of the great history of the Jewish people in the East European and especially in Soviet diaspora. The fate of the Karaites, the mention of the poet Il′ia Se′lvinskii with his early crown of sonnets about Bar-Kokhba, and the discussion of then recent research on the history of the Khazars: all of this conveys the intellectual zeitgeist and self-reflexively points to the real circumstances that led to the birth and creation of Shrayer-Petrov’s novel. In this respect, the text becomes a sort of a testimonial (non-)fiction, an autobiographically and critically substantiated research into Jewish history and culture with the elements of Jewish education and ethnography.29 At the center of Gerbert i Nelli lies one of the most striking facts of the JewishSoviet protest movement—the destiny of the otkazniks. The life of the Levitin family changes rapidly after they have applied for permission to emigrate to Israel. Levitin is forced to give up his work as an academic and a professor. In a detailed and realistic manner, the narrator depicts the harassments that fell onto the heads of those Jews and their families who declared their desire to leave the country. For instance, Levitin needs a special paper from his place of employment in order to submit the visa application at the Visa and Permissions Office (OVIR). However, once his intention to leave the country becomes known at his medical school (and this happens very quickly), Levitin, now branded a dangerous Zionist, becomes the object of hatred and open ostracism. The necessary prerequisite for issuing the necessary document is his voluntary resignation. Levitin’s nomenclature boss Professor Baronov, the department chair of general internal medicine at the medical school, calls Levitin “nothing but a typical ungrateful Jew, who was given everything here: education, respect, ideas. Even your wife you got from Russia, and now you spit on that which is most holy!”30 (“просто-напросто типичный неблагодарный еврей, который получил здесь все, что возможно: образование, почет, идеи, даже—жену— получил из России, а теперь плюет на все самое святое!”31). The justification for having been refused his visa, which Levitin struggles and strains to get out of the authorities, shows the blatant arbitrariness of power and the opacity of the emigration policy of the Soviet state. The capitalised words “ПРИЁМНАЯ”

29 A subtle ethnographic undertone appears in the novel when, for example, the story behind the Hanukkah celebration is told in detail or Jewish customs are described and explained. 30 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 52]. 31 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 61].

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(“waiting room”) and “ОЧЕРЕДЬ” (“queue”) in the OVIR become symbolic topoi of the bleak everyday life of otkazniks and Jewish diaspora. Crowded together in the queue are Jews for whom waiting for the permission to emigrate has become a way of life: Никогда ещё Герберт Анатольевич не слышал подряд такого разнообразия еврейских фамилий. По этому перечню можно было, как по этнографическому путеводителю, проследить историю и географию еврейской диаспоры.32 Never before had Herbert Anatolyevich heard such a great variety of Jewish last names recited in a row. One could use this list as an ethnographic guide, tracing the history and geography of the Jewish diaspora.33 The subsequent long list of Jewish surnames and their etymological commentary again tells the story of the origin, migration, and adaptation of the people living in the galut: Jewish history in the light of hope for exodus and homecoming. The documentary dimension of the novel increases again and again when the second, autobiographical level of narration is continued. The fictional narrative becomes a direct parallel to the events experienced by the author as well as to the petitions, visa applications, and open letters documenting the Jewish emigration in the 1970s and 1980s: Я—отказник, пария, бесправный гражданин имярек. Меня лишили естественной возможности самовыражения: работать по специальности, а потом отняли писательское удостоверение. Всё, что я пишу, наверняка пропадёт, затеряется.34 I’m a refusenik, a pariah, a disenfranchised citizen. They first deprived me of the natural means of self-expression—to work in my field—and then they took away my writer’s identification

32 Ibid., 229. 33 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 211]. 34 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 232–233].

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card. Everything that I write will most probably be lost, disappear.35 Contemporary facts are also reflected in the novel as the authorial narrator mentions the emigration of the writer Vasilii Aksionov and critiques the indifferent attitude of the poet David Samoilov towards refuseniks. The decisive question of the connection of Soviet Jews to their origins is raised: What is it that holds together people standing in the queue of the OVIR—“[н]еужели только кровь наших загубленных предков?”36 (“Is it only the blood of our slaughtered ancestors?”37). For the still inexperienced otkaznik Levitin, the rejection is a pure shock, the reasons for the otkaz appear obscure. Medical, biological, and life sciencerelated metaphors convey the impenetrable border between the existence of the family before and after the rejection—a kind of narrative essentialization of the cognitive and social processes, which are also characteristic of the excessive tropes in works by other aliyah authors: “[.  .  .] вся жизнь [.  .  .] сжималась, сокращалась, как тельца одноклеточных животных, превращающихся в цисту, чтобы сохранить самую основу жизни [. . .]”38 (“[. . .] their lives [. . .] were contracting, becoming smaller, like tiny bodies of single-celled animals forming a cyst in order to preserve the mere foundation of life [. . .]”).39 The tragedy strikes when Anatolii is drafted to serve in Afghanistan and is killed in action. The family disintegrates; Tat′iana dies of grief and guilt (for her infidelity and for not having been able to rescue her son), Levitin becomes a mentally broken person and is disfigured beyond recognition after a fire: a symbolic stigma of alterity and martyrdom incised onto his body. The fire is set by Levitin himself: out of desperation, he takes revenge on an old woman whom he phantasmagorically regards as simultaneously a dispenser of mysterious powders in the homeopathic pharmacy and a receptionist in the OVIR. Plagued by a growing paranoia, the professor half-imagines the old woman as a disgusting gray owl. For Levitin, the owl embodies the evil of this world, as the usurious old pawnbroker did for Rodion Raskol′nikov in Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment. The motif of madness, latent at first, becomes explicit 35 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 215]. 36 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 234]. 37 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 216]. 38 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 221]. 39 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 204].

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in the finale of the first part of Shrayer-Petrov’s refusenik trilogy, when Levitin recognizes in the OVIR waiting room the organized activity of dark mystical forces, and his thinking ceases to be sober, rational, and scientific. In this key episode, the discourse of a psychic and metaphysical border—a reflection of the geographical border (exit, escape, emigration)—is introduced, crucial for aliyah prose as a whole. Particularly in the prose by Eli Liuksemburg, the insanity of the male protagonists blurs the boundary between the reality and the spiritual realm. Levitin’s last vision before the outbreak of the fire is followed by poetic lines from Psalm 22 (Psalm 21 in the Russian Orthodox tradition), steeped in the deep tragedy of being abandoned by God and in the psalmist’s despair: Я пролился, как вода; все кости мои рассыпались; сердце моё сделалось, как воск, растаяло посреди внутренности моей! Сила моя иссохла, как черепок; язык мой прильнул к гортани моей, и Ты свёл меня к персти смерти, ибо псы окружили меня; скопище злых обступило меня; пронзили руки мои и ноги мои.40 My life ebbs away: all my bones are disjointed; my heart is like wax, melting within me; my vigor dries up like a shard; my tongue cleaves to my palate; You commit me to the dust of death. Dogs surround me; a pack of evil ones closes in on me, like lions they maul my hands and feet.41 In the second part of the novel, Bud′ ty prokliat, tol′ko ne umirai, Levitin dives deeper into the otkaznik milieu and experiences a great love for the younger Nelli. But the finale delivers the last failure: the death of his beloved and the return of the phantasmagorical Owl, whom Doctor Levitin attempted to kill at the end of part one, in the episode that epitomizes the protagonist’s final mental breakdown. As a particular version of ethnically ( Jewish) rooted emancipatory literature, or minority literature, the aliyah novel recursively uses real, historical figures,

40 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 295–296]. 41 [Shrayer-Petrov 2018: 274].

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and at the same time evokes their legendary biblical prototypes, which ultimately fulfil a symbolic function in the Zionist teleology. The telos of return, which gains a universalist philosophical meaning and a metaphysical dimension, is expressed in passages like this one: “[. . .] нынешнее существование Герберта Анатольевича, жизнь его витающей над землёй души, было направлено только в один мир, одну вселенную—Эрец Исраэль”42 (“[.  .  .] the present existence of Gerbert Anatol′evich, the life of his soul hovering above the earth, was aimed toward a single world, toward a single universe—to Eretz Israel”43). Furthermore, Levitin’s seventy-five year old uncle Moisei (Moses), a socialist and an idealist, fled to Palestine at the age of sixteen and, together with the other chalutzim, helped build the Jewish state. For Levitin, Uncle Moisei embodies the strong, new Jew, whose courage only emphasizes the sluggishness and insecurity of his mentally shrunken descendants, the Soviet Jews, by his own example of life: “[. . .] Герберт Анатольевич тянулся к дяде Моисею, как тянется чахлый росток к солнцу—в надежде выжить и включиться в цикл божественной энергии, эманации, перелиться во вселенную родного народа”44 (“[.  .  .] Gerbert Anatol′evich yearned for his uncle Moisei like a stunted sprout yearns to reach the sun—hoping to survive and to enter into the cycle of divine energy, an emanation, and to be included into the universe of his own people”). Levitin’s uncle, named after the central figure of the biblical exodus, enriches the parallelism structures in the novel by infusing the fundamental opposition “Russian-Soviet” versus “Jewish-Israeli” with a historical and a legendary dimension. Indeed, according to some otkaznik characters in the novel, humility was a genuinely Russian and Christian trait. It had been implanted in the Jews in the course of assimilation and contradicted the primordial paradigm of Judaism: “Эта покорность противоречит иудаизму”45 (“This humility contradicts Judaism”). The celebration of Jewish holidays in the milieu of the spiritually awakened Jews also contributes to the network of associations based on biblical models and references—such as the celebration of Hanukkah, which evokes the history of the Maccabees’ uprising.46 Dudko, a top OVIR official, is referred to as the “dictator” who tried to “suppress the rebellious slaves who wanted to taste the air of freedom” (“подавляя восставших рабов, пожелавших глотнуть

42 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 357]. 43 Here and hereafter my literal English translations from the Russian of Bud′ ty prokliat, tol′ko ne umirai (K.S). 44 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 357]. 45 [Ibid.: 369]. 46 [Ibid.: 375–376].

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воздух свободы”47). When contextualized this way, this reference creates a historical continuity that spans two thousand years: “Ничего не изменилось, хотя прошло две тысячи лет”48 (“Nothing has changed, although two thousand years have passed”). In his recurrent digressions and detours from the main plot, the narrator references the destinies of numerous otkazniks in Doctor Levitin’s circle of acquaintances so as to illuminate the extent and the specifics of a collective phenomenon hidden from the Soviet public. The object of a focused depiction is the academic underground elite: the author, himself a medical scientist and writer, describes the achievements of the researchers (both real and fictional) who are detained, punished, and belittled in the Soviet Union. These disenfranchised Jews have to survive by working menial jobs: such is the case of the biochemist Vol′f Izrailevich Zel′din or of Aleksandr Efimovich Khasman, ethnographer and expert on the old Kingdom of Khazaria. This factual, politically underpinned authenticity is even further amplified by episodes such as the celebration of Jewish holidays, meetings outside the Moscow Choral Synagogue during the Simchat Torah celebration, and controversial debates about the fate of the aliyah conducted in private homes (the proverbial Soviet kitchens as places of dissent). In their kitchens, refuseniks discuss the typical topics of their milieu: for example, they talk about the passivity of the assimilated and oppressed Soviet Jews and doubt their ability to assimilate the values of their “home” state Israel. Like some other important novels of the time (such as David Markish’s Priskazka, which will be discussed below), David Shrayer-Petrov’s refusenik trilogy is a new version of the bildungsroman. The genre of bildungsroman is supported by the novel’s focus on books, which are read and discussed by the refuseniks: they literally constitute an “aliyah library” and represent a mimetic reference to the intertextually lived Jewish and Zionist history. The library with the Russian translations of books by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Zhabotinsky, Hayim Nachman Bialik, David Markish, Leon Uris and Natan Alterman is a metonymic sign of spiritual belonging and political solidarity, of Soviet Jewish intellectualism, and of common suffering. However, when this list is recited by one of Levitin’s refusenik friends, Mikhail Gaberman, Levitin notes: “Но я еще и Герцена перечитываю. Очень полезное чтение для нас”49 (“But I also read Herzen again and again. It is a very useful read for us”). This comment can be interpreted as a latent critique of the one-sided, sometimes 47 [Ibid.: 482]. 48 [Ibid.]. 49 [Shrayer-Petrov 2014b: 367, italics mine—K.S.]

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narrow-minded Zionist or Jewish self-education in the circles of the aliyah movement. The mention of Aleksandr Herzen’s autobiography is an allusion to the beginning of the leftist movement in Russia and to its bitter historical disillusionments. Apparently, Levitin has doubts about the future of emigration, which is remarkable in a novel saturated with a passionate plea for Jewish homecoming.

5.3. Mysticism of the Exodus: Eli Liuksemburg 5.3.1. “The Third Temple” Eli Liuksemburg (1940–2019) was born in Bucharest and grew up in Tashkent. He became known as a boxer and sports coach in the Soviet Union. Already in the second half of the 1960s, he applied for emigration, belonged to the otkazniks for several years, and left for Israel in 1972. Liuksemburg’s engagement with Judaism, his conversion, and his studies of Kabbalah before repatriation are intensely reflected in his texts. He always views the exodus, as well as the entire history of the Jewish people, in connection with faith and providence, and is therefore considered a “religious writer-mystic” [Liuksemburg Eli]. A key motive in Liuksemburg’s prose is the psychiatric discourse, which plays an important role in the works of Jewish and non-Jewish dissidents—on the one hand, it refers to the obscure, Kafkaesque punitive mechanisms and the irrationality of the overpowering state, and on the other hand, to the real fragility of the person rebelling against it. The yearning desire of the protagonists of “Tretii khram” and Desiatyi golod to escape the Soviet “Empire of Evil” and to reach Israel results in an irreversible damage, an illness, which creates a second, magical reality based on faith and fantasies, so that the question whether what happened to them was real and where it began ultimately remains unanswered. The story “Tretii khram” is staged in a mental institution in Tajikistan. Isaak Fudym, from whose perspective the story is mainly told, suffers from paranoia and hallucinations. At the time of telling the story he has almost completed, in his mind, the construction of the third Temple on the Mount of Zion and is convinced that he lives in his beloved fatherland of Israel. His roommate Natan Ioshpa is also obsessed with the idea of reaching the Promised Land. In his recurring dreams, he fails to get onto the departing plane; and every morning, when the effect of the injection administered to him before sleep weakens, he wakes up crying and desperate. He cannot make his wish come true, because he lacks imagination, as Isaak contemptuously concludes: “В своем желании поселиться на родине он

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не дошел, очевидно, до последних границ отчаяния” (“In his desire to settle in his homeland, he has obviously not yet reached the final limit of desperation”).50 The figure of the medical professor Kara-khan appears as a caricature. The professor regards Isaak as an interesting object of research and tries in vain to hypnotize him. Kara-khan’s participation in the punitive medicine of the Soviet police state is made clear by the fact that he conducts research in the field of the mysterious illness, Palestinomania,51 from which he hopes to cure Isaak using the innovative method of psychoanalysis. The dichotomy of the doctor’s and the patient’s points of view is emphasized by the fact that Isaak’s true ambitions remain inaccessible to the professor, for whom Isaak’s idea of the construction of the temple is a strange, yet unrecorded complex. He broods over Isaak’s interest in “some Jewish Temple that fell to pieces twenty centuries ago” (“какому-то Иудейскому Храму, павшему двадцать веков назад” and was long forgotten “by the whole progressive world” (“во всем прогрессивном мире и память изгладилась”). In his paranoia, Isaak considers the conversations with Karakhan interrogations and easily misleads him, giving false clues to the doctor. The association of the hospital with the underworld is shown in a series of allegories. Thus, Slavik, the brutal, muscular warden, appears in Isaak’s imagination as a biblical reptile, a strong constrictor snake with the degenerate face of an idiot and a bad breath. The narration of “Tretii khram” is characterized by a special dualism, as it alternates between a seemingly objective narration and the view of its mentally ill protagonist. In the middle of the desolate surroundings of the clinic, the magic, surreal, and magnificent reality of the ancient biblical Judea is born in all its glory, unnoticed by the other characters: “Храм сооружался во дворе лечебницы, как раз между отхожим местом и скотным двором. Никто, понятно, Храма его и в глаза не видел. Храм этот строился в одном воображении гениального зодчего, который в любую погоду, в зной и стужу, пропадал на строительной площадке” (“The construction of the Temple took place in the courtyard of the hospital, right between the privy and the cow yard. Of course, no one has ever seen the Temple. It was solely created in the imagination of the ingenious architect who worked on the building site in all weathers, no matter if frost or heat”). Characteristically, the view of Isaak’s masterpiece is obstructed for him by a high wall of barbed wire. A categorical, demonstrative dichotomy, a division of reality into the polar spheres of the high and the lowly evokes the 50 Here and elsewhere I quote from the later, elaborated version of the text available at https:// eliluksemburg.wixsite.com/luksemburg/---c40d, accessed January 4, 2023. 51 Palestinomania can be interpreted here as a paraphrase of Zionism, which was again used as an abusive word in the Soviet press after the Six-Day War.

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romantic theme of an artist with unlimited creative power who has passed into the world of his sublime visions, or, as the final consequences, become insane. In addition, there is also a closer literary reference—to the neo-romantic dualistic structure of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita, 1939). There, too, the tortured and paranoid Master, persecuted by the totalitarian Soviet state, escapes into (an apparent?) madness. The magical coexistence of two levels of time and events—the distant, biblical-parabolic level created in the Master’s imagination and the real, grotesque and satirical level of the present—is recreated in Liuksemburg’s novel. Like the secret novel of Bulgakov’s Master, Isaak’s fantasies are described in detail and with an epic tone, which gives them a quasi-real or seemingly ontological status. The visions of the Temple are “legitimized” as they acquire narrative autonomy: И вправду, стоял на Святой Земле трудный месяц ияр, самый неудобный для тех темпов, с какими строили иудеи свой Третий Храм. Свистели, крутились по стране песчаные хамсины вперемежку с дождем и градом. И размыты были дороги, тяжело приходилось многочисленным обозам одолевать на пути в Иерушалаим смрадные болота с ползучими библейскими гадами, кручи над пропастью в больших и малых горах. And indeed, in the Holy Land, it was the difficult month of Iyar, which was least suited for the pace at which the Jews were building their Third Temple. The sandy khamsin howled and chased, mixed with rain and hail, through the country. And the paths became mud, and it was difficult for the numerous loaded carts on their way to Yerushalaim to overcome the foul-smelling swamps with creeping biblical reptiles and the steep slopes over abysses in the great and little highlands. At the same time, the descriptions of Judea in Isaak’s imagination always show signs of an interior monologue, so that they are never completely separated from his consciousness: К тому же великое множество проходимцев и шарлатанов являлись под стены Храма, выдавая себя Бог знает за кого! То это были современники царя Соломона, то люди

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Нехемии-пророка, люди Второго Храма. И льстили зодчему: “В наши дни не знали подобного энтузиазма!” In addition, a large number of swindlers and charlatans who pretended to be God knows who was attracted to the walls of the Temple! Sometimes they were contemporaries of King Solomon, sometimes people of the prophet Nehemiah and the Second Temple. And they flattered the master builder: “You never saw such enthusiasm in our days!” Isaak repeatedly insists that most people, real as well as imagined ones, either have a delusional identity disorder or are swindlers. This ironically reflects his own condition. Isaak’s tragedy becomes increasingly evident by the fact that his idea of the third Temple, thought out to the last detail, testifies to his outstanding creativity, a deep sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and an impressive knowledge of Jewish history. In his vision, millennia-old Jewish aspirations come true—the Ark of the Covenant with Moses’s Tablets is to be brought back into the Temple’s Holy of Holies again; the new Temple is modelled on the first two destroyed Temples, thus restoring the interrupted historical and religious continuity, and it also recounts, by means of architecture, the whole sorrowful history of Jewish diaspora, using modern art styles. The Hall of Sacrifices is to be dedicated to the catastrophe of the Jewish people. Symbolic decorations depict man passing through the hellish ordeal of the concentration camps and finding the truth. On its walls, the sheep, which allegorically stand for the enslaved diaspora Jews, pass through the barbed wire and are transformed into lions—the Jews who “wander across postwar Europe to their homeland” (“пробира[ли]сь на родину через всю послевоенную Европу”). The parable of the sheep and the lion is important for understanding the figure of Isaak himself. It is transparently linked to his biography, which is gradually assembled in the novel out of individual fragments. With the intention of misleading the professor, Isaak tells him a fabricated dream in which he is sheltered in the desert by a flock of unsuspecting sheep that are fattened and gradually disappear one by one. The shepherd and the Alsatian dogs keep a close watch over the herd and prevent any attempt to learn more about the fate of the disappearing sheep. One day, after the herd reaches the edge of the desert, the control is increased. At the same time, the narrator sees a lion telling him that he has been cheated and asking him to stand up in order to look at his reflection in a puddle. Isaak, trembling with fear, now sees in the water that he is not a sheep,

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but a lion. This is how the dream ends. The professor then speculates, not badly at all, that the sheep lost in the desert represent the wanderings of the Jewish people and that Isaak’s real attempt to escape to Israel across the Afghan border is represented as the events at the edge of the desert. It turns out that Isaak’s madness, his visions, and this parable all draw their mythical repertoire from the trauma that Isaak has experienced and can be deciphered revealing an intense guilt complex and a desire for atonement. Isaak Fudym, once an artillery captain of outstanding merit in the Soviet army, was one of the liberators of a concentration camp near a place called Wulfwald in May 1945. Leivik, a Jewish prisoner, recognizes in Fudym a “tribesman,” a Jew, and makes a request to him. Fudym should help Leivik and a small group of other liberated Jews to flee to Palestine and thus to fulfil their dream, which was born out of unimaginable suffering. Without particular enthusiasm, Fudym, who is afraid of the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Committee), declares his willingness to help, but he looks down upon the “ragged” men (“oborvantsy”) and the “Muslims” (“zhalkie dokhodiagi”).52 Later, he starts going to the Jews and talking with them. Leivik, imbued with a prophetic belief that he has chosen the right way, tries one evening to persuade Fudym to flee together “to the fatherland” during the night. Fudym, who at that time believes in a beautiful and fair life in the Soviet Union after the victory, refuses. When Leivik tells him that the Cheka have already registered the forbidden contact between them, Fudym getting into a panic pulls out a pistol and shoots Leivik. After years of sentence “for treason” in the Siberian labor camp, Isaak tries to escape across the Afghan border to Israel, is captured and brutally beaten up by young border patrolmen. From that time on, Isaak has been suffering from incomplete memories and headache. Since that time he has also become obsessed by the idea of rebuilding the Temple, of bringing it in his soul home to Jerusalem and of accomplishing the “ascent” (in Hebrew, aliyah) together with Leivik, whom he is hoping and longing to see alive again. Isaak’s obsession can be ascribed to Leivik’s words: “Ты и я, мы встретимся дома, на нашей родине [. . .]. Построим мы Храм, восстановим его во всем великолепии и славе. Мы найдем наши утерянные

52 Gelhard writes in her analysis of Daniel Ganzfried’s novel Der Absender (The sender) that typical expressions such as “Muslim” (Muselmann), “camel” (Kamel), “cretin” (Kretiner), “swimmer” (Schwimmer), or “cripple” (Krüppel) were used in the concentration camps to refer to prisoners who “gave up, lost their ability to communicate, and were only present as shadows. By other prisoners, and thus also by those who survived, these completely starved figures [. . .] were punished with contempt” [2008: 136]. By cynically voicing these stigmatizing labels, Isaak Fudym commits a crime against the Shoah victims, so that he symbolically assumes the role of the executioners—both the German and the Soviet ones.

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скрижали” (“You and I, we’ll meet at home, in our fatherland [. . .]. We will build the Temple, restore it in all its glory and magnificence. We will find our lost tablets”) and to the spiritual transformation that Isaak experiences in the detention camp. In the camp, he exchanged with like-minded persons his knowledge of biblical history, the history of the diaspora, theology, and literature and “completed the studies of his own people” (“кончал факультет своего народа”). In the camp he looked into the puddle and saw his reflection. Now, like Leivik—his unattainable ideal and the personification of his tormented conscience—Isaak has survived captivity and has tried in vain to reach Palestine. Isaak regards the meeting with Leivik as a turning point and a trial sent by God, which he did not pass. In the (un)reality of the novel, Isaak manages to escape from the hospital. Outside the hospital, an old man follows him. Isaak first thinks that the old man is an informant for professor Kara-khan, then—after a conversation on the bus—a madman, and, finally, a guardian angel. The old man is called Avraam (=Abraham), and he holds a lamb on his lap, so that Isaak identifies him with the patriarch of Israel. The stranger conceives his mission based on the biblical connection: he is to climb the mountain with his son Isaak in order to pass God’s trial. Finally, the lamb is to be sacrificed to atone for Isaak’s mortal sin: The old man intends to avert the harsh punishment of the divine court for the murder of Leivik, which is planned for Isaak. Therefore, it is Isaak’s trial, not Avraam’s. The fact that Avraam is part of the imagined biblical reality and is well informed about Isaak’s guilt concerning Leivik allows for the possibility that he is a phantasm of the sick person’s imagination. However, the fact that Isaak’s own parents, whom he no longer recognizes, are called Avraam and Sarra lends an element of reality to this mysterious father-son encounter. As Avraam mentions Professor Kara-khan on their way through the mountains, Isaak firmly decides that he is a spy sent by the doctor. In his panic, he kills the lamb with a stone: “Смерть жертвенного агнца потрясла Авраама суеверным ужасом. В смерти этой открылось ему решение Всевышнего Суда” (“The death of the sacrificial lamb filled Avraam with superstitious fear. This death revealed to him the decision of the divine court”). With the second stone, Isaak strikes his father Avraam. Full of euphoria, Isaak climbs up the mountain and formulates the new commandments to be written on the Tablets in the rebuilt Temple: “Не будь сторожем брату своему! Пусть к каждому придет лев и возьмет его в братья! Пусть каждый окончит факультет своего народа” (“You shall not be a guardian of your brother! May a lion come to everyone and become his brother! May each one complete the studies of his own people!”). But a large black cloud

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grows incessantly above his head, which in Isaak’s eyes embodies the wrath of God, and in vain, he calls for his “brother” Leivik:

Сверкнула молния и ослепила зодчего. И громовой голос пронзил его насквозь. Дрогнули колонны Храма, зашевелилась свинцовая кровля [.  .  .] И чтобы спастись от этой катастрофы, он бросился бежать от этого места. Не отдавая себе отчета, ослепший и оглохший, он достиг края площадки и сорвался вниз. A lightning flashed and blinded the architect. A thunderous voice pierced him. The columns of the temple trembled, the leaden roof moved. [. . .] And in order to save the temple from this catastrophe, he ran away. Unconscious, without seeing or hearing, he reached the edge of the plateau and fell down. The finale brings together several layers of meaning in the text. If “Tretii khram” is read as a political allegory, Isaak’s insanity and death can be interpreted as a tragic failure of the Soviet aliyah in the struggle against the Leviathan, the dictatorial state. The transparent message of the parable of the sheep and the lion and Isaak Fudym’s programmatic commandments of faith as well as his biography—the difficult spiritual development from a communist to a Zionist—transform the novel into a political manifesto of the times. Isaak’s first commandment rebels against violence perpetrated by the state; the second one calls for mutual support and enlightenment; the third commandment points to the importance of a national (self-)education for the people who have lost their traditions and roots. The lack of national consciousness that once prevented Isaak Fudym and Natan Ioshpa from seizing their chance to return home can be explained from a historical perspective: “Разве их это вина, что выросли они такими слепцами, лишенные национального воспитания?” (“Is it their fault that they grew up like blind people without national education?”). The concept of the historical chosenness of Israel in the novel follows the Jewish tradition: with it, God tests “предстоящее слияние границ и народов на земле древнего Ханаана” (“the imminent merging of borders and peoples in the ancient land of Canaan”) and therefore Israel fulfills a special task of suffering. The assembly of the dispersed Jews is given a concrete political meaning only with regard to the young Jewish state.

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On a deeper level, the novel also tells of the tragic historical guilt of the Russian-Soviet diaspora Jews in relation to their own people: out of fear, ignorance, and a compulsion to adapt, Isaak commits the murder of a survivor of a concentration camp, whose ordeal he is unable to recognize, and thus—according to his own later judgment—betrays his “Jewish fatherland.” For the aliyah author Liuksemburg, this episode highlights the disastrous self-estrangement of the galut Jews—Isaak burdened by this guilt, and he should never reach his homeland.53 In addition, the murder of a Shoah victim is also connected with the idea of a serious collective offense—of the Soviet antisemitism and the Holocaust taboo. Arrested immediately after the murder of Leivik, Isaak himself becomes a victim of Judeophobia: “Пошарьте жидовскую падлу поглубже, он еще что-то прячет,—завизжал лейтенант.—Пошарьте, ребята, по-настоящему! Они все заодно!” (“‘Search the Jewish sow very well, he is still hiding something,’ the lieutenant shrieked. ‘Give him a good pat-down, fellas! They’re all in the same boat!’”). The finale, on the other hand, indicates Isaak’s purification and redemption, which he accomplishes through his suffering, repentance, and death. His story is a reversed version of the biblical narrative, as not only the lamb but also Isaak himself give his life to atone for the committed sin. In a key scene, his old father Avraam scatters the ashes of Isaak’s burnt clothes on his head and asks God to give peace to his son’s soul. Like the whole novel, which makes no difference between objective events and the inner life of the protagonist, Isaak’s figure is characterized by ambivalence, too. He is the madman who, in his fatal blindness, like the tragic heroes of the antiquity, considers his own father to be his enemy and injures him with a stone. But he is also a brave loner, a wise man, before whose mind’s eye a wonderful utopian reality unfolds, the realm of spirit and faith. The narrative structure thus suggests a mystical polyvalence of the plot, generating the concept of the irrational as a source of meaning. At the same time, the novel shows Jewish knowledge and faith condemned to a secret, shadowy, ephemeral, merely notional existence under Soviet power. Thus, the essence of Jewish religious tradition is understood in a particularly tragic way: the idea of a spiritual Israel, which is not linked to a real territory or a material Temple, and the internalization of the holy fatherland, which has been identity-establishing for Judaism since the beginning of the diaspora, is reduced now to absurdity.

53 Liuksemburg thus refers back to the Jewish religious concept of history, in the context of which the catastrophes of the present are attributed to the guilt of the “apostate and forgetful people of Israel” [Assmann 1992: 203].

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The cult finally loses touch with reality and acquires autistic and delusional traits, because it is hopelessly and completely excluded from the collective.54 However, Isaak’s creation against all reason and his persistent remembrance of his origins function as a kind of inner resistance against this loss. Meanwhile, the third Temple, which is named in the title of the novel, becomes a key symbol for the whole text. On the top of the mountain, Isaak wants to pass the last trial of faith and thus represents—like the patriarch Abraham in the Jewish Bible—the whole people of Israel. The motif of temptation, which is a central theme for “Tretii khram,” has a strong connection to this image. Just as the experience of the Babylonian exile and the associated destruction of the second Temple play a decisive role in the exegesis of Abraham’s story, the galut fate of the Soviet Jews (and other Soviet people) is a constitutive element of the narrative plot here. In Eli Liuksemburg’s literary retelling of the myth,55 the temptation and the sin of the apostate Jewish people are cathartically overcome by a spiritual act of heroism—erecting the new Temple—and by death. At that, the destruction of the third Temple, which is ruined together with its creator Isaak, is not only the highest price for the loss of faith, it also dialectically questions the possibility of return and forgiveness: God in “The Third Temple” is shown exclusively in his “Old-Testament” image, bringing anger and retaliation. The loss of Jewish continuity in the diaspora, symbolized by the shooting of the Jew Leivik—marks an insurmountable break that might negate the existence of Jewish religious and historical life after Holocaust and communism. And yet, the passion, the spiritual power of creation, the bold Judaistic visions and the penance that characterizes Isaak’s way to himself as a Jew, let a glimmer of hope arise for the future exodus.

5.3.2. The Tenth Hunger Eli Liuksemburg’s novel Desiatyi golod (The tenth hunger) is a religiousphilosophical work leaning towards a crime novel, which marks the climax of his artistic reflections on the subject of the late Soviet exodus. As in “The Third Temple,” Liuksemburg here uses a technique of narrative encryptions, playing with the linearity of the narrated story and the remembered time and questioning the verifiability of the reconstructed events. The narrative consists

54 See [Assmann 1992: 213–214]. 55 On the distinction between structural (including plot) and material intertextuality see [Plett 1991: 7]; a similar analysis of intertextual relatons of contiguity and similarity is given in [Lachmann 1990: 38–39].

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of aporias, which are produced by the subjectivity of the narrative perspective and intensified due to a particular ambiguity of the text, caused by numerous interwoven streams of intertextuality. Desiatyi golod shares with “Tretii khram” its key themes: the loneliness of a mentally ill person overwhelmed by the idea of a religious mission, guilt, betrayal of faith, and the Jewish struggle with the Soviet system as well as the concept of mystical dualism. They also share some characters such as the father of Isaak Fudym, Avraam, who himself has lost his mind after the events of the previous novel and now believes that he will find his son alive in Israel again. The text represents the notes made by Ieshua Kalantar, consisting of remembered fragments, records of current events, interior monologues, religious and philosophical trains of thought, and spiritual revelations. Ieshua is in the psychiatric department of the central police facility in Jerusalem, where a group of doctors examines him carefully. His arrival in, or rather his way to, Jerusalem shook Israel and triggered off a flood of newspaper articles with the headlines such as “Иешуа из преисподней” [Liuksemburg 1992: 19] (“Ieshua from the underworld”) or “Служившие Богу ногами” [ibid.] (“Those who served God with their legs”). His name, his doctor is assured, will go down in the history of Zionism. But Ieshua is mentally broken and physically exhausted, his sickroom resembles a prison, and the constant medical observation he is subjected to is agonizing (the discomfort caused by numerous tubes attached to his body becomes the leitmotif of his confession). The strict control has other than medical reasons. Ieshua, who has reached the Holy Land underground from Uzbekistan, is suspected of spying for the Soviet and/or Arab intelligence.56 The discrepancy between the protagonist’s spiritual mission and the geopolitical conflicts in which he is forced to participate forms the decisive

56 On his website, Liuksemburg describes how the Soviet secret service read the manuscript of the novel, considered this fictional event to be a real plot, and tried to elicit relevant information from the author: “Смешно вспоминать, самым серьезным образом пытали меня по поводу тайной группы евреев, пытавшихся под землей, пещерами бежать в Израиль. Когда я им говорил, что это сюжет сюрреалистического, мистического романа, существующего в моем воспаленном, больном сознании, они мне не верили. К счастью, через много лет, этот роман написался, и вышел в Израиле несколькими тиражами, получив целый ряд престижных премий, был переведен на ряд языков” (“I feel like laughing when I remember how they interrogated me in all seriousness about a secret group of Jews who tried to flee underground, through caves, to Israel. When I said that this was the subject of a surrealistic, mystical novel that existed only in my incited, sick consciousness, they did not believe me. Fortunately, this novel was written many years later, it was published in Israel in several editions, received a number of prestigious awards and was translated into several languages”). “Eli Liuksemburg,” http://loveread.ec/biography-author.php?author=Eli-Lyuksemburg, accessed January 4, 2023.

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conceptual opposition of the novel. This is why the same topographical places are always double coded in the novel. An important example of this duality is the image of Israel as a real state and the holy land of the patriarchs, without any hope of connection between these two concepts of place that are central for the Israeli history. Ieshua’s memories, which are puzzling due to their incompleteness, make up the story of a unique undertaking: a group of Jews from Bukhara, led by the Polish Hasid, Kabbalist, and Shoah survivor Rabbi Vandal, decides to emigrate to Jerusalem via a secret cave tunnel. The rabbi’s charisma is explained by his comprehensive religious knowledge and spirituality, which manifests itself, among other things, in his freedom from the rulers and in the gift of miracles.57 The fateful encounter with the rabbi inspires Ieshua to make the painful way home. For the few emigrants around Rabbi Vandal, Jerusalem embodies a spiritual site made sacred in the Judaistic tradition. The new exodus and the return of the dispersed people are therefore, from the perspective of the narrator Ieshua, woven into a dense network of connotations that refer to the original texts of the Bible and Jewish mysticism. Indeed, the tradition and the parable regain their importance through the mystical experiences of the protagonists. The miraculous events of a directly experienced present confirm the spiritual continuity, the permanence of the old faith. In the secret tunnel deep underground, Ieshua sees a number of shining incorporeal figures that pass them by: Они плыли мимо в жутком фосфорическом свете, а я воскликнул испуганно: Ребе, что это, ребе?—Души евреев,— сказал он спокойно.—Где бы еврей ни умер, его душа идет в Иерусалим, ибо в день Воскрешения мертвых там вострубят в трубы, и каждый будет судим. [Liuksemburg 1992: 16] They passed by, surrounded by an eerie phosphorus light, and I exclaimed full of fear: “Rabbi, what is this, Rabbi?” “These are the souls of the Jews,” he said calmly. “Wherever a Jew dies, his soul comes to Jerusalem, because the trumpets will resound there on the day of resurrection of the dead and everyone will be judged.”58 57 Among other things, Rabbi Vandal prevents the shooting of the inmates of the concentration camp in which he was interned during the war, and rescues Ieshua from Soviet custody, when he is detained as part of a murder trial and manipulated by the antisemitic state authorities. 58 This motif is taken up in the post-Soviet Jewish prose by Oleg Iur′ev; cf. his novel Novyi Golem, ili voina starikov i detei (The new golem, or the war between the children and old people, 2003). See also [Krutikov 2004: 5].

5. Prose of Exodus

The image of the souls of the dead as sparks of light can be traced to the Jewish Kabbalah: “[. . .] in Judaism, and thus also in the Kabbalistic language, the individual soul is called a spark of light that comes (emanates) from the ‘upper’ light” [Maier 1995: 225]. The motif of underground travel to the Holy Land also alludes to Jewish popular belief, to the midrashic stories59 and to Hasidic legends. Haya Bar-Itzhak mentions that this motif can be found, for example, in the origin legends of Polish Jews: there it conveys the idea of a secret geographical connection between the Polish diaspora and the sacred space of Israel; such a connection legitimizes Poland as a space of Jewish life chosen by God: “[. . .] the spatial connection between Poland and the Land of Israel is via a subterranean passage that leads from synagogues in the diaspora to the Land of Israel, or through the medium of stones from the Holy Temple that are incorporated into the walls of the local synagogue” [Bar-Itzhak 2008: 170]. In a Hasidic legend transmitted by Martin Buber, Ba’al Shem Tov sets off for the Holy Land at the suggestion of Carpathian robbers: the robbers lead him “on a very special path, through caves and holes under the earth, to the land of Israel.” But when Ba’al Shem sees “the flame of the circling sword,” which “denied [him] the next step,” he turns back (“With the robbers,” in [Buber 1949: 120 and Buber 2006: 65]). Viktoriia Mochalova also mentions a Polish legend of the “White Rebbe,” who walks into a forest cave leading to Israel and disappears forever [2008: 38]. In Hasidic literature, the motif of the divine ban on travel to the Holy Land and the associated obstacles and suffering is well known [ibid.: 39]: Liuksemburg draws on this motif when he portrays the underground path of his protagonists to Israel as a daring spiritual-religious conversion and an extremely painful, loss-threatening undertaking. Thus, the gorge to Israel is damp and filled with mud in the Buber legend, and in Desiatyi golod Ieshua describes the cave as “гибл[ое] подземель[е], разяще[е] склепом и сыростью” [1992: 73] (“a deadly canyon that reeked of sepulchre and moisture”). Ironically, Ieshua gives a positive answer to the question of the Israeli security service about whether he found treasures and gems in the caves by telling the story about the noble, pearl-like souls of dead Jews he saw there [Liuksemburg 1992: 274]. The living miracle always collides with the cynical reason and a military-focused and profit-oriented mentality of an all-embracing police system here, in Israel, as well as there, in the Soviet galut. The subjects and figures

59 Viktoriia Mochalova mentions that in the Midrash Vaechi, there is a story about underground tunnels, which God created for the journey of the souls of deceased Jews to Eretz Israel: “Only in the Holy Land the resurrection awaits every member of the people of Israel” [Mochalova 2008: 43].

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mentioned in Ieshua’s conversations with the doctor, which form a paradigm for the Jewish religious thinking—the liberation of the Jewish people from the Egyptian captivity by Moses, Rachel’s grave near Bethlehem and the mother’s lament over her children—evoke the primal scenes of Jewish exile and loss, but also the hope of a successful resistance and the grace of God. The central topos in Liuksemburg’s world of ideas—mortal sin, crossing of moral and religious borders, crime, and betrayal (of faith)—is reflected in reference to Cain’s bloody deed. Before Ieshua is taken to hospital, he is found lying unconscious in a cave where, according to the legend, the biblical fratricide took place. The motif of betrayal becomes apparent later. The narrative perspective of the novel pointedly leaves no place for rational knowledge or the values of modernity. So, the world of the novel is cleft in two irreconcilable halves. The real and the holy Jerusalem, the real and the spiritual war, the material wealth of enemy states and the wealth of the spirit, the world of unquestioned evidence and of invisible, spiritual events oppose each other. In this dichotomy, the occult, kabbalistic sphere is reserved only for a chosen few. However, these keepers of the hidden knowledge may, under certain circumstances, intervene in the material realm. The seeker hero, Ieshua, on the other hand, is torn between light and dark. His life becomes a moral test, almost in the sense of a medieval mystery play, a battlefield of good and evil. Liuksemburg creates an exceptional personality in the figure of Rabbi Vandal who succeeds in spiritually resisting the monstrous state powers and dares to leave, just like Moses once did. On the level of narrative morphology, Rabbi Vandal is a helper and a donor [Propp 1928] in a plot of the protagonist’s adventures, journey, and education.60 The topos of the way, which is both a geographical and a mental movement, once again takes on the symbolic meaning of ascension, the aliyah. The underground travel explicitly takes place in memory of and by analogy with the biblical exodus—the Rabbi convinces his followers to do without the equipment prepared for the risky and difficult, almost impossible journey, because “легион помощников” [Liuksemburg 1992: 72] (“a legion of helpers”) will come to their aid: “Разве тащили мы что-нибудь на себе, когда шли из Египта? Все предметы, все вещи переносило Чудесное Облако. [.  .  .] вещи всегда будут с вами, вы их найдете,

60 In an interview with Khaim Venger, Liuksemburg’s statement testifies to the fact that the figure of Rabbi Vandal is inspired by a real person: “[. . .] позже я ввел в роман ребе Вандала, прообразом которого послужил мой спаситель, ребе Хаим-Занвиль Абрамович” (“[. . .] later I introduced [the figure of] Rebbe Vandal, whose prototype was my savior, Rebbe KhaimZanvil′ Abramovich”). Khaim Venger, “Pevets vozvrashcheniia,” https://eliluksemburg. wixsite.com/luksemburg/----c3br, accessed January 4, 2023.

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когда хотите!” [Liuksemburg 1992: 71–72] (“Did we carry anything on our shoulders when we left Egypt? All objects, all belongings were entrusted to the Miraculous Cloud. [. . .] Your things will always be with you, you’ll always find them when you want!”) The Rabbi, sitting on a sack of ashes, mourns for the destroyed Temple, as once did the witnesses of the catastrophe—the prisoners of Titus—and later, his teacher, the famous Galician Tzaddik, who learned this custom from his own teacher, the Gaon of Bavaria [ibid.: 64]. The memory of the biblical events and the continuity of faith are not only identity-establishing for the rebels, but also life-sustaining: the mad old Fudym manages without any outside help to clear the exit of the cave, which is blocked by huge stones, because he firmly believes that his son Isaak used to move “hundred-ton blocs” when he built the third Temple all by himself. As a result, a miracle happens and the stones roll aside by themselves [ibid.: 75]. In the figure of Rabbi Vandal, allusions to the Jewish folklore and to HasidicKabbalistic tales can be seen clearly. The reference to the tradition of the aggada, to Jewish hagiography, and Hasidic legends with their central motif of miracles performed by the tzaddikim functions as a counterweight to the world of political battles and nuclear wars—a reappearance of the anti-Maskilic pathos of Hasidic suprarational logic. The apparent “irrationality” of the Rabbi’s thought evokes numerous stories about Hasidic leaders who made strange decisions because they were guided by a hidden logic. The anachronistic, alienating effect of this world in a time of military technocracy and highly developed secret intelligence creates a contrast that is relevant for the apocalyptic concept of the novel. The present is the time of spiritual amnesia that is approaching a global catastrophe. As in Lestnitsa Iakova, warnings of the ancient past—the Torah and the prophets—invade the amnesiac present. The (last) days of spiritual desire, of the tenth hunger begin. The complex structure of Judaistic references in the text points to the intellectual background of its creation—the underground studies of religious writings in the circles of late Soviet Jewish intelligentsia—but it also reflects other topographical and biographical factors. Liuksemburg, who grew up in Uzbekistan, evokes in his novel the image of the so-called “oriental,” Central Asian Jewry, which lived in Bukhara and was still able to preserve its ethnic and religious traditions. For the nonconformist intellectual Liuksemburg, the remaining faithful Jews who still exist in the periphery of the former USSR become an oasis of the Jewish culture that has been almost completely destroyed in other places and an object of nostalgia, just as the Karaites are for David Shrayer-Petrov or the old cheder teacher in the former shtetl is for Efrem Baukh. However, by confronting the “isolated” Bukharan Jews, among them the parents

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of Ieshua, with the religious zeal and the historical fate of the Polish Hasids, embodied in the figure of Rabbi Vandal, Liuksemburg reveals insurmountable intellectual discrepancies. The Jewish community of Bukhara, seen as backward and passive, resists the Rabbi’s efforts to organize emigration and ultimately remains in the “foreign country.” The encounter of the two lines of Jewry, both of which had experienced the Holocaust and the hardships of the communist dictatorship, does not lead to the desired union, which could trigger a large emigration of Soviet Jews according to the novel’s ideological conception.61 The spiritual path of Ieshua therefore is a lone one until the end. Again and again, Ieshua returns in his thoughts to the moment of departure and associates the Rabbi’s “call” with “смерть[ю] и [.  .  .] обновление[м] одновременно” (“death and [.  .  .] rebirth at the same time.” The compulsive inner necessity to dare the exodus is emphasized by the image of the caves as the open vagina of the earth out of which the travelers will be born a second time around, causing pain to themselves and to their mother [Ibid.: 161].62 This symbolism of a shared autochthonous origin and collective body made of soil, which refers to the archaic-mythical plane, culminates in the metaphor of the tenth hunger. Ieshua recounts to his father a Jewish legend to explain why he is willing to follow Rabbi Vandal unconditionally: “При сотворении мира Господь назначил десять времен голода: девять из них состоялись уже, а вот десятый! Десятый будет духовный, самый жестокий, будем искать божьего слова [. . .]” [ibid.: 197] (“When God created the world, he commanded ten 61 In this, a Jewish dissident’s criticism of the Jews “tamed” by the Soviet regime, who lack national consciousness and for whom consolidation and political action are impossible, is clearly visible. Historical research records the differences and contacts within Soviet Jewry, represented in Liuksemburg’s novel, as follows: “[Among the Jews of Transcaucasia and Central Asia] Jewish identity, the relationship to Israel, etc. is not primarily determined by national, but by religious feelings. [. . .] Jewish life there experienced an upswing during the Second World War, when Jewish refugees from the territories occupied by the Nazis were evacuated to these areas” [Bland-Spitz 1980: 264]. The novel briefly mentions this short-lived revival of Jewish life in Bukhara thanks to the arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe: “Четверть века назад прибыли в Бухару первые эшелоны эвакуированных—истерзанные евреи из Польши. [.  .  .] Заброшенные, разрушенные, веками необитаемые ‘памятники старины’ стали жилплощадью [. . .] И вот мало-помалу унылые наши развалины ожили, обновились, а еще через несколько лет—опустели: война окончилась, ‘поляки’ уехали . . .” [Liuksemburg 1992: 92] (“A quarter of a century ago the first squadrons of evacuees—tormented Jews from Poland—came to Bukhara. [. . .] The dilapidated, destroyed ‘monuments of antiquity,’ which had been uninhabited for centuries, were turned into a useful living space [. . .] And so our desolate ruins gradually came to life and a few years later they became empty again: the war was over, ‘the Poles’ drove away . . .”). 62 However, Liuksemburg’s prose, which is both fantastically colored and psychologically accentuated, transforms figurative elements from various levels of its reference structure into “real” ones, or ones that oscillate on the border between myth and reality.

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famines. Nine have already passed, but the tenth one! The tenth will be the hardest one, because it will be the hunger of the spirit and people will thirst for God’s word”). The tenth hunger, to which Ieshua himself falls prey, is the longing of the exiled Jews—“мысль [. . .]—коллективная, страстная, исступленная” [Liuksemburg 1992: 203] (“a collective, passionate, fervent [.  .  .] thought”)—for homecoming and liberation. Ieshua believes that once the Jews get free, this longing will acquire the power of telekinesis and remove all material obstacles on the way to Palestine: this is how the secret cave passages to Jerusalem are created. The leitmotif of the novel is the connection, perceivable by the spiritually attuned characters, between the state of galut and the idea of injury, violence, acquired passivity, and general incompleteness. According to Rabbi Vandal, the dispersed people are like raped and crippled ones [ibid.: 55]. Life in exile is a lethargic sleep, following the expression of the Kabbalist Rabbi Zakhariia Bibas [ibid.: 296]. This all-embracing metaphoric contrast develops into the extreme antithesis of life and death. By turning the biological into the spiritual, the choice in favor of life results in the separation from one’s own parents and the loss of everything previously acquired. But the separation, as mentioned above, has a tragic nuance because only few Jews decide to do so. The first awakening of Israel [ibid.: 183]—the first exodus attempt Rabbi Vandal dares to make—is doomed to failure from the very beginning. Only a few years later, Ieshua learns about the actual aliyah movement of Soviet Jews from two young ex-Soviet repatriates who question him, the survivor of the cave wandering, in the Jerusalem clinic. To that, he replies: “[.  .  .] ведь мы первыми вышли [.  .  .] вышли-то первыми, а дошли последними. Можно сказать, совсем не дошли! Один только я, да и то полумертвый, Господи” [Liuksemburg 1992: 183] (“[.  .  .] we were the first who set off [. . .] we set off first and arrived last. Actually, we didn’t arrive at all! God, I did it all alone, and I’m half dead.”). From here on, the recurrence to the biblical story of the exodus takes on a counterfactual and, at the same time, an esoteric character: Like Moses, Rabbi Vandal never reaches the Promised Land. This is only achieved by his unwitting “successors,” the Jews of the real aliyah. However, they do not know anything about their predecessor and will never arrive in the true, spiritual Israel. They all suffer a great historical-religious defeat: the true exodus, enlivened by Jewish spirituality and tradition and accompanied by the living miracle, that is, by the presence of God, misses its target. In the end it is only handed down by a witness whom nobody wants to believe. The exodus thus returns to the sphere of legend and tradition and again becomes part of a myth—according to Ieshua’s account, the air bore the travelers’ baggage, food was found all by itself, and the Rabbi

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always emanated a miraculous light. On the other hand, the real, political Jewish aliyah movement brings about tangible results, but fails to achieve the metaphysical goal that was originally planned. Consequently, for Ieshua the arrival to Israel means transfer to a new prison and finally death: he is blown into the abyss by a violent gust of wind near his second birthplace, the “blood cave.” In his novel, Liuksemburg reimagines the idea of a spiritual exodus and a spiritual Israel that goes back to Jewish mysticism, “the exodus from the inner Egypt” for every human being, of which Gershom Scholem speaks [Scholem 1993 and 2004]. This idea is projected onto the real late Soviet exodus as well as onto the real Jewish state of Israel in a questioning, even skeptical way. Fictitious events are placed in a real historical context and critically compared with the revelation of the biblical tradition described in the Torah. The dichotomy inherent in the world of Liuksemburg’s novels proves to be tragically insurmountable, because knowledge is again doomed to be hidden and forgotten. The new tradition, which should come alive in the time of the tenth hunger, is rejected by future generations because it is not recognized. The repatriated “счастливчики” [Liuksemburg 1992: 183] (“lucky fellows”) suspect that there is a political mission associated with state secrets behind Ieshua’s story and take Rabbi Vandal for a fraud and adventurer. The last remnants of Hasidic spirituality are irretrievably lost when the Rabbi and Ieshua die. The tzaddik, Rabbi Vandal, tragically remains the secret righteous man (lamed-waw tzaddik), but he is not able to save the world. The last of the twenty chapters of the novel consists of medical and legal documents that expose the narrated events to suspicion once again—reports by Israeli Security Agency staff and experts sent to Ieshua to question him and learn the truth about the secret mission, as well as the doctors treating him. The doctor of the Security Agency, Dr. Asher, concludes that the late Ieshua Kalantar was involved in “Operation Golgotha” organized by the KGB and was trained in the Soviet-Arab terrorist camp Madrasa Sam-Ani, where he had sworn mortal combat against Zionism and Israel and signed a contract about that [ibid.: 303]. The medical report documents severe physical and mental disorders, claiming that the patient suffered from hallucinations and talked to himself. According to Dr. Asher, Ieshua’s notes are meaningless scribbles, “дикие иероглифы” [ibid.: 304] (“wild hieroglyphics”) and therefore not decipherable. The old Arab parchment Musanna with a plan of underground routes to Jerusalem, which Ieshua had with him, is unanimously dismissed as a forgery by a group of experts. But their views diverge, which makes a clear interpretation of what happened impossible. To her surprise, Ilana Sluch, who interrogated Ieshua, now dreams at night that she takes part in the secret wandering, the reality of which

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is evident to her inner eye. Ilana and Rabbi Zakhariia Bibas from the Kabbalah Institute are now inexplicably able to read the incomprehensible scribbles and even blank pages from Ieshua’s notebook and understand their meaning. Thus, the certificates, which were meant to present an objective picture of Ieshua’s personality and to reconstruct the events that he remembered or withheld, reveal an insurmountable discrepancy between factual evidence and subjective views. However, the novel’s structure of ideas is not an absolute aporia because the last word goes to Kabbalist Rabbi Bibas, for whom the Ieshua’s path a wonderful omen of the Shekhinah63 and Ieshua himself is the highest proof of God’s existence: the wise men foretold that the Promised Land will only be truly inhabited again if the Jews head there with all the strength of their souls. Rabbi Bibas postulates the polarity of Jewish spirituality and science as follows: Понятно, что никакой пещерной системы в Иерусалим с других частей суши—в так называемом научном понятии—не существует! Но души сюда идут, идут постоянно, ибо сей путь был сотворен Богом в сумерки шестого дня—накануне первой субботы, как письмена, как радуга, как манн, как червь шамир, как говорящие уста ослицы нечестивца Билама, как первые клещи, как пасть земли, поглотившая скопище Кораха, как овен для Авраама и Ицхака, как чудесная гробница Моше. [Ibid.: 306–307, italics in the original]64 There is no doubt that there is no cave system of paths from other continents to Jerusalem in the so-called scientific sense! But the souls move here, they come incessantly, because this way was created by God at the end of the sixth day, on the evening before the first Saturday, like the scriptures, like the rainbow, like the manna, like 63 Shekhinah means in Judaistic thought “God’s dwelling place on earth,” and also the presence of God in the midst of the Israelites or the divine power/majesty itself. It is the most important term of the Jewish Kabbalah. In the Lurian Kabbalah, Shekhinah is the last (tenth!) sefira and the female emanation of the divine. 64 Rabbi Bibas quotes here the tract of the Mishnah titled Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers) 5:6 in the order Nezikin. Cf.: “Ten things were created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight, and these are they: [1] the mouth of the earth [Num. 16:31], [2] the mouth of the well [Num 20:7-11, 21:16], [3] the mouth of the donkey [Num. 22:28], [4] the rainbow [Gen. 9:13], [5] the manna, [6] the staff [of Moses], [7] the shamir [Num. 28:21], [8] the letters, [9] the writing [on the tablets], [10] and the tablets [Ex. 32,16]. And some say: also the demons, the grave of Moses, and the ram of Abraham, our father. And some say: and also tongs, [because tongs can only be] made with tongs” (Pirkei Avot, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/ Pirkei_Avot.5.6?lang=bi).

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the worm Shamir, like the talking donkey of the sinner Balaam, like the crack in the earth that devoured Corah and his sons, like the ram prepared for Abraham and Isaac, like the legendary tomb of Moses. Despite the tricky narrative organization and numerous complex references to Islam, the Jewish tradition, on which the novel’s plot is based, produces a transparent fabula that amounts to instruction and admonition. The “tenth hunger” and the exodus take place against the background of (Eastern) European Jewish history of the twentieth century—the terrors of the Holocaust and the communist rule. The figure of Rabbi Vandal stands for the almost completely destroyed Polish Jewish spirituality: “Четверть века назад прибыли в Бухару эшелоны эвакуированных—истерзанные евреи из Польши” [ibid.: 92] (“A quarter of a century ago the first groups of evacuees—tormented Jews from Poland—came to Bukhara”). This phrase is the first precise indication of when the events in the novel take place: it is the second half or the end of the 1960s, the beginning of the Jewish national movement in the Soviet Union. Ieshua who works as a taxi driver in Bukhara is denounced as a Zionist by his colleagues and persecuted by the state. In his notes, Ieshua mentions the interrogation to which he is subjected by Ibn-Mukla, an official of a Soviet-Arab security agency, and the details of his life as a Jewish dissident pop up—protests against anti-Israeli propaganda, the secret purchase of the picture of Theodor Herzl, of Magen Dovid, and of Jewish literature in a second-hand bookshop, and the secret listening to the radio station Kol Israel. The interrogation with Ibn-Mukla becomes Ieshua’s greatest trial. Ibn-Mukla, who is characteristically endowed with demonic features, embodies the ideological insidiousness of Soviet secret services and, more generally, moral vice. He is an intellectual, unscrupulous, inscrutable, charismatic, and addicted to sex and drugs. He and the powers behind him are revealed as the new Amalekites, the archetypal enemies of Israel.65 Ieshua’s moral-religious failing is twofold and disastrous: Ibn-Mukla makes him write a diatribe against Israel in the name of Allah and swear mortal combat against the Jewish state, and also seduces him sexually. The denial of his own faith links Ieshua with another one of Liuksemburg’s characters who committed a fateful crime: Isaak Fudym: “И я струсил в решающий час судьбы, отрекся от всех святынь!” [Liuksemburg 1992: 124] (“I, too, was a coward in the crucial moment of my life. I denied everything that is holy!”) This

65 Johann Maier writes of “a demonization of history” [1995: 259] in the Jewish tradition; he mentions that in rabbinical literature “the historical enemies of Israel, above all the hostile world empires, were given a supernatural-demonic character” [ibid.: 36].

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reference to “Tretii khram,” an intertextual allusion based within Liuksemburg’s oeuvre, foreshadows the protagonist’s tragic atonement in the finale and points towards a common philosophical structure within Liuksemburg’s oeuvre, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Ieshua becomes a fighter for the Islam,66 a follower of Gamal Abdel Nasser and evidently even a member of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, but it is clear that he uses this activity merely as a cover to gather useful information for Israel. Thus, nobody but Ieshua suddenly perceives the unbearable smell of decomposition emanating from the portrait of the Egyptian leader Nasser during a meeting on the occasion of Nasser’s death.67 Rabbi Vandal reveals to Ieshua the deeper meaning of the Six-Day War in the following way: “Насер [.  .  .] оказал нам одну из величайших услуг: мы получили обратно Храмовую гору, получили обратно древний Хеврон с могилами праотцев, Синай, Голаны . . . Вчетверо больше земли, чем купили когда-то за деньги. [. . .] даже злодеям Господь дает долю в добрых делах!” [Liuksemburg 1992: 164] (“Nasser [. . .] rendered us one of the best services— we have regained the Temple Mount, we have regained the ancient Hebron with the tombs of the patriarchs, Zion, the Golan Heights . . . Four times the land we once got for money. [. . .] our God gives the will to do good deeds even to the wicked!”). With a kabbalistic interpretation, the exodus and the gathering of Jews in the Holy Land become, despite the tragical plot of the novel, a predetermined event. As Rabbi Bibas concludes: И все-таки Исход состоялся—а Шехина здесь! [. . .] А этот юноша из Бухары, ребе Иешуа бен Нисим,—истинный герой этого подвига. Волею своей души он заставил идти и дух ребе Вандала, и этот дух ему помогал, вопреки законам и порядку преисподней. [Liuksemburg 1992: 308, italics in the original] 66 Apart from the cultural coloring of Liuksemburg’s texts due to the Muslim-dominated environment of the Jewish minorities in Central Asia, his demonization of Islam is also a contemporary historical reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the consequences of the SixDay War in 1967. At that time, for Soviet Jews, the concept of the enemy embodied not only the Soviet metaphorical “Egyptians” but also real Muslims (both seen as “biblical” enemies of Israel). In addition, it is also a reference to the rise of antisemitism, especially among Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus, following the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War and the massive anti-Zionist incitement in the press (cf. [Ro’i 2008: 256; 264–265]). 67 This magical projection of inner qualities onto the material plane, recognizable only for “chosen ones,” is quite interesting here. On the whole, Liuksemburg likes to make use of the cabbalistic idea of the secret connection between the spiritual and the material in his work, using as a starting point the “assumption that everything outside serves as a cipher for something ‘inside’ and ‘higher’ [. . .]” [Maier 1995: 247].

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And yet, the exodus has taken place—and the Shekhinah is here! [. . .] And this young man from Bukhara, Rabbi Ieshua ben Nisim, is the real hero of this feat. By the will of his soul, he forced the spirit of Rabbi Vandal to come with him, and this spirit helped him despite the laws and rules of the underworld. The bloody deed of Cain, whose guilt and responsibility is transferred to all Israelites, marks not only the initial appearance of Ieshua on the surface in Jerusalem, but also his final departure. As mentioned above, it introduces the motif of the Fall. Ieshua, torn between two irreconcilably separate and yet secretly linked worlds in the novel and exposed to all kinds of temptations,68 represents both the criminal and the sacrificial victim. Ieshua’s suffering and mysterious death—he is thrown into an abyss near his “birth cave” by a gust of wind [ibid.: 306] caused by the wingbeat of a huge bird (which, however, is only visible to Rabbi Bibas and Ilana Sluch)—link his figure to the archetype of Abel: “Кавиль, убив брата, тащил и тащил его, покуда не сбросил в пещеру” [ibid.: 17] (“Kabel dragged his brother after he had killed him until he threw him into the cave”). Within the structure of Judaistic references in the novel, sometimes obvious and sometimes encoded,69 this scene apparently contains a reference to the Zohar as well: the violent gust of wind and the huge bird that bring death to Ieshua evoke the scene of the divine judgment after death as described in the main work of the Kabbalah: It is taught that on that day, so violent and terrible for a man, when his time comes to leave the world, the four winds of the world sit in judgment and awaken judgments from the four sides of the world, and four bundles of strife and disputes are among them and they are divided, each one to its side. [.  .  .] If he is innocent, all worlds are glad because of him, and if not—then woe to this man and his fate! [. . .]

68 It is worth mentioning the leitmotif of Ieshua’s struggle with his own passions, including his fateful love for a woman named Mir′iam, who is compared to the “заблудшая дщерь Сиона” (“lost daughter of Zion”) and Mary Magdalene [ibid.: 162], and his syphilis disease. It is obvious that with the inscrutable, dubious, disreputable character of the central female character in the novel, Liuksemburg directly alludes to the Kabbalistic attribution of demonic qualities to women. 69 It should be noted that these references do not always lead to real pretexts, because some of the legends cited in the novel are invented by Liuksemburg.

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It is taught: At that time, when the herald comes out and calls out, a flame comes out from the side of the North. [. . .] And this flame touches the wings of the black cock and strikes its wings, and the cock calls out at the entrance between the gates [. . .]: The day [of the YHW’’H] cometh, that shall burn as an oven etc. (Malachi 4:1). ([Zohar I: 218b–219a])70 In addition, the crime of Cain—the genetic precursor of all Israelis—also raises the settling guilt and punishment in the present. The invention of metalworking, ascribed to Cain’s family, and the related elaboration of methods of killing, still result in destructive wars thousands of years later. Before Ieshua returns to the “blood cave” and dies there, he already sees the black abyss in his mind’s eye and foresees his imminent death: “Я увидел [. . .] себя в центре мрачных сил преисподней и вечного распорядка неба [. . .]: что-то упорно мне говорит, что я [.  .  .] последний раз делаю эти записи” [Liuksemburg 1992: 298–299] (“I saw [. . .] myself in the center of dark forces of the underworld and of the eternal order of heaven [. . .]: something keeps telling me that I [. . .] am making my notes for the last time”). At the same time, Ieshua is overwhelmed by the feeling of happiness associated with returning home, which he has painfully missed until now: the exodus as liberation and the arrival of the Jews in the Promised Land becomes an act of individual transcendence, the last, no longer geographical, border crossing. Thus, the idea of arrival in Jerusalem is not supported but rather substituted by the concept of man’s final salvation. In addition, Rabbi Bibas’s conviction that Ieshua led the Shekhinah from exile to the Holy Land [ibid.: 293] further connects the exodus with the idea of the eschatological salvation of mankind—an association that is often suggested in rabbinical Bible interpretations, the midrash,71 and the Kabbalah. This eschatological approach supports the idea that the exodus has failed in the historical present. In the final episodes of the novel, the medieval split of Ieshua’s personality between the “dark powers of the underworld and the eternal order of heaven” is transferred to the present: it is a struggle for the soul of the apostate and the martyr, and, at the same time, for the future of Jewish state, due to the traditional “analogy between the fate of the individual soul and the fate of Israel.”72 Ieshua Kalantar assumes the meaningful role of a ba’al tshuva, a Jewish sinner who has

70 Quoted from [Maier 1995: 242ff.]. 71 See, inter alia, [Stemberger 1989: 116-123]. 72 See [Maier 1995: 273].

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returned to God and atoned for his guilt with great suffering. Only the ba’al tshuva, who has experienced the depth of the fall, will be able to achieve the final spiritual heights. Accordingly, Ieshua’s path takes on a meaning that far exceeds that of his teacher, the miracle-worker Rabbi Vandal.73 The world can be saved, according to the message of Desiatyi golod, by suffering, violence, self-denial, and (physical and mental) illness that are understood as stations on the way to purification. This long predetermined process will begin in the near future, and Israel will be in the midst of it. The novel is saturated with an atmosphere of dissonance and the fatal but not eternal separation of man from God, which, especially in the finale, is linked to the rabbinical and kabbalistic conception of the Shekhinah forsaking the people of Israel. Gershom Scholem interprets the Judaistic concept of dissonance in the world order, which is vividly recreated in the novel, as follows: In his original paradisiacal state, man had a direct relationship with God. [.  .  .] It was only the Fall, on the essence of which Jewish mystics brooded endlessly, that destroyed this direct contact between God and man. [.  .  .] Adam [interrupted] the stream of life that flows from sphere to sphere and brought separation and isolation into the world. Since then there has been [. . .] a mysterious split, not in the substance but in the life and functions of the divine. This idea led to the appearance of another concept, which the Kabbalists call the “Exile of Shekhinah.” Only at the time of redemption, when the harmony between the worlds is restored, [. . .] and will become true and ultimate—as the Bible says, “shall there be one Lord, and his name one” (Zechariah 14:9).

73 Cf. the description of ba’al tshuva by Rabbi Nissan Dovid Dubov: “A tzaddik has never erred; he always does the will of God. The ba’al tshuva had lost the right path. He feels very disappointed because of his distance to God, and longs for closeness. His striving upwards is much more powerful than that of the tzaddik. It might seem that his descent into sin was caused by his evil inclination, but in fact, this descent was for the purpose of ascension. When a person makes tshuva out of love for God, his sins are transformed into merits. The descent through sin becomes for the ba’al tshuva a springboard, catapulting him from darkness to the heights of spirituality. The tzaddik lacks the longing of the ba’al tshuva. When the Machiach comes, the tzaddik will see that, even if he has never consciously committed any wrongdoing, his service lacked some passion, and he will also have the longing of the ba’al tshuva” [N. D. Dubov, “Tschuwa,” Jüdische.Info, http://www.de.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/471972/ jewish/Tschuwa.htm, accessed January 4, 2023].

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Now, when the world is not redeemed, the split, which makes the constant connection between God and the Shekhinah impossible, is mended and fixed thanks to the religious act performed by Israel: Torah, commandments, and prayer. The eradication of the blemish, the restoration of harmony, this is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun, which the after-Zohar Kabbalists use to describe the task of man in this world. But in times of redemption “there will be perfection, above and below, and all the worlds will be united in one.” [Scholem 1993: 251–254] Ieshua’s sorrowful strife aims towards “eradication of the blemish,” which can be achieved thanks to the fall and the self-sacrifice of the chosen one. However, in the historical present it remains a utopia.

5.4. Education of the New Jew: David Markish’s Preamble David Markish’s (born 1938) Zionist path reveals a special genealogy: as the son of the renowned Yiddish poet Perets Markish, who was murdered in 1952, he grew up with the Jewish cultural tradition from birth and very early became a victim of antisemitic politics of the Soviet regime. As a family member of a “traitor of the fatherland” he was exiled to Kazakhstan together with his mother and his siblings shortly before Stalin’s death and returned to Moscow only two and a half years later. The tragic memory of his father, remembered as a romantic model, played an important role in forming the writer’s identity, as Alice S. Nakhimovsky notes [1992: 199]. Markish attempted to illegally emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel as early as 1957. Two years after the first rejection and the following otkaz experience, he succeeded in emigrating and repatriating in 1972. Markish’s first novel Priskazka,74 based on the experience of his Kazakh exile as a teenager, and is a bildungsroman to an even greater extent than the works analysed above, because it focuses on the inner development and maturation of 74 David Markish wrote the novel before his emigration to Israel. Before the first publication of the text in Russian was made in Israel, translations into Hebrew, English, Portuguese, and Swedish appeared abroad (see the introductory note “Ot redaktsii” [“From the Editor”] in [Markish 1991: 1]). In this chapter I am basing myself, inter alia, on my conversation with Markish in December 2012 in Ramat-Gan.

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the young Jewish protagonist. Already in the first episode, the central collision becomes apparent in an ironic way. In a Moscow school in the Stalin era, during a lesson on the constitution of the USSR, which, the teacher insists, emphasizes the principles of liberalism and humanism, two students are talking about the arrest of a comrade with the Jewish name “Rosen.” We learn from the narrator’s comment that one of the students is called Simon Ashkenazi and that his father was also arrested three years ago. The author’s family history is invoked in the dedication to the novel: “Посвящается памяти Переца Маркиша, расстрелянного в Москве 12 августа 1952 года” (“Dedicated to the memory of Perets Markish, who was shot in Moscow on August 12, 1952”). This epigraph is a call for the duty of remembrance and struggle, which paratextually attests the semi-autobiographical character of the entire text. The conflict between the dogmas of the Soviet state and the truth about the dictatorship the young people experience firsthand indicate the dichotomy between power and individuals that is characteristic of dissident literature. This vertical dichotomy is supplemented by a horizontal one, with the antisemitic insults on the part of classmates, which lead to a brawl after class. Thus, the ethnically Russian student Taratorin says: “Евреи, гады, всегда воду мутят, а мы потом отвечай [. . .] Наш хлеб жрет и ещe недоволен. Езжай к себе в Израиль!” [Markish 1991: 11] (“Jews, these scoundrels, always stir things up, and we have to face the music [. . .] He eats our bread and is still dissatisfied. Go to your Israel!”). Simon’s answer points to the aliyah discourse, which was only just beginning at that time, several years after the foundation of the state of Israel—namely the futile attempts of Soviet Jews to emigrate: “И поеду!—выкрикнул Симон.—Все мы поедем! Только что же вы нас не отпускаете, гады, гады!” [ibid.] (“And I will go there, too!” cried Simon. “We all will go there! But why don’t you let us out? You rogues, rogues!”). Simon is taught his first painful and humiliating lesson when the stronger Taratorin knocks him to the ground with one punch. His dignity is restored to some degree when his friend Egor successfully defends him. The beginning of the novel’s plot is marked by the atmosphere of the last months before Stalin’s death—the time of the “doctors’ plot,” massive antiJewish propaganda, and the reemergence of Zionism in a new historical situation. The topographies modelled in the text are an interesting example of the resemiotization, as formulated by Jan Assman, of the Holy Land: it becomes a memory encouraging a (symbolic) way to the future.75 When Simon hears about the exile his family is facing, he sees Kazakhstan as an unknown, beautiful and free, empty and sunny country, populated by simple people who herd their 75 See chap. 1.2.

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sheep and goats in endless valleys. In the boy’s imagination, this is an idyllic place, far away from state power, which embodies human values, but can by no means replace Palestine—it is already clear to Simon that the Jews will always remain strangers, “whether in Moscow, Siberia, or Kazakhstan” (“будь то в Москве, в Сибири или в Казахстане” [ibid.: 15]), unless they reach their own country. The dream of Israel and the passionate hatred for the ruler Stalin are decisive components of Simon’s character building. The exile to Kazakhstan is a redeeming alternative to big city life, which represents the repressive Soviet state discourse. Simon’s romanticisation of the steppe inhabitants—“Он даже завидовал им: они жили в грязных кибитках на великом просторе земли [. . .]” [ibid.: 32] (“He even envied them: they lived in dirty kibitkas in the vastness of earth [. . .]”)—is connected to Kazakhstan’s role as a substitute Palestine, a promised land of peace and brotherhood. The founding of the State of Israel a few years earlier, which roughly coincides with the time when Simon’s father is murdered in Soviet prison, evokes the idea of settling and cultivating one’s own land, of simple rural activity inspired by the spirit of nation-building. It is no coincidence that Simon repeatedly projects the barren Kazakh landscape surrounding him onto imagined topographies of Palestine. Simon’s youthful zeal draws on the Zionist myth about the land and the ideas propagated by the early Jewish settlers in Palestine, the yishuv. Yael Zerubavel describes how landscapes took on a highly symbolic and mythical meaning in the yishuv culture: For example, the desert, which was to be settled, represented the innocence of nature and the return to the tradition of the patriarchs. The soil of Israel was animated by the remembrance of glorious biblical events and figures—the “ancient” Jews such as the Maccabees or Bar-Kochba. These memories inspired writers to compose romantic poems and “mnemonic” travelogues of the desert. The symbolic appropriation of the landscapes took place on different levels of written and oral culture. Not least, it was intended to sharpen the patriotic spirit of adolescents and create ritual patterns of action: In the yishuv’s emergent Jewish culture, the desert served as a mythical space imbued with memories of ancient forefathers and hence a territory that made it possible for Jews to reconnect with that past. Hebrew teachers regarded traveling in the land as critical for the education of the youth and believed that these experiences would help them reclaim their authentic native identities. Traveling, and especially the physical experience of hiking, were considered an effective venue for mnemonic

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socialization and a means to instill in youth the love of the homeland and intimate knowledge of its landscape. [Zerubavel 2008: 211–212] Considering these parallels—the key terms “education,” “authentic native identities,” “mnemonic socialization,” and “youth” are particularly noteworthy76 in the quote above—Markish’s Priskazka can be read as a Zionist youth novel in which didactic implications of Simon Ashkenazi’s fictional socialization process are obvious: the novel recounts the formation of the exemplary new Israeli man.77 Priskazka also includes other, not only Zionist, influences. Its image of an alternative provincial homeland is inherited from Russian literature that developed after the beginning of the Thaw, in the first place the so-called village prose (derevenskaia proza). From the village prose Markish takes the attention to “natural” values, combined with patriotism, nostalgia, idealization of the old peasants, and the urge for a new oproshchenie (“becoming simple,” in the Russian cultural context closely linked to the philosophical doctrine of Lev Tolstoi). But these concepts undergo a significant shift of ethnic, cultural, and political accents in his novel: the nostalgic longing shifts from the Russian to the Jewish people with the accompanying projection of the dreamed-of land onto the Middle East region beyond the geopolitical border. The image of Palestine and Israel with its radical nonconformist underpinnings, which was a rigorously tabooed subject in the Soviet context, sets the Zionist dissident prose of the late Soviet period against the literary production of derevenshchiki. Nevertheless, Markish’s character development, ideological, and stylistic patterns resemble the texts of the “soft” socialist realism of its time.78 Thus, Markish presents a glorified, stylized image of the old Russian peasant couple, who accomodate the newly arrived Ashkenazi family in exile. The dominant traits of Mar′ia Petrovna and Sergei Vasil′evich Utiugovy are honesty, hospitality, sense of justice, and compassion for the disadvantaged, in this case, the exiles. The Utiugovy have also suffered under the Soviet regime, because Sergei Vasil′evich had been arrested as a kulak and now exiled to Kazakhstan. These figures proclaim the author’s ideal of a multinational coexistence outside the otherwise omnipresent official doctrine: “У нас здесь, в Джеты-Су, кого только нет!—рассказывала Марья Петровна [.  .  .] И русские, и хохлы, и корейцы, и греки, и чечены 76 On the suggestive connection of the land of Israel with the Bible and its educational significance in bridging the historical gap for the chalutzim and the sabras see also [Gurevitch/ Aran 1994: 199–203]. 77 On the connection of late Soviet exodus prose to the tradition of Zionist prose, cf. chap. 5.6. 78 On the parody of these literary discourses in the prose of Mikhail Iudson cf. chap. 11.2.1.

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[. . .] и турки есть, и казахи эти, и один даже итальянец есть” [Markish 1991: 41] (“Lots of different people live here in Dzhety-Su,” Mar′ia Petrovna said. [. . .] “We have Russians, Ukrainians, Koreans, Greeks, Chechens [. . .] we also have Turks, Kazakhs, even an Italian.”) Transferred into the context of resistance literature, the figures of the wise peasant couple reproduce late Soviet discourses of patriarchal harmony. Not unexpectedly, Markish’s unofficial writing often adopts idealizing poetics from the Soviet literary canon. As Georg Witte notes in his structuralist study, the kolkhoznaia proza of the Zhdanov era presents an “undisturbed unity harmonized in all aspects” with a system of norms that is binding for the entire semantic space of the text [Witte 1983: 99]. “The authenticity of this integration structure is based on the fact that natural, moral, and social characteristics are treated as one. Social relations are essentialized” [ibid.]. The reduction of the variety of viewpoints and the largely uniform spacetime structure that Witte postulates for this text type [ibid.: 100, 104–118] is manifested in Priskazka in a relatively uncomplicated division of perspectives according to the “friends vs. enemies” scheme and in the absolute solidarity of the narrator’s point of view with that of the young Simon. The constant threat from outside, which is already implied in the situation of being exiled, and the plot-constructing antagonism between the political power and the community of the exiles can also be linked to the village prose as they reproduce the popular opposition “center vs. periphery” or “city vs. village.” A proud awareness of his own foreignness as a Jew, an uncompromising attitude, and a love of freedom characterize Simon’s exceptional personality and foreshadow his future—the relentless struggle for the right to emigrate. However, the maturation of the character and the overcoming of obstacles on his way to the goal represent the development not only of a single protagonist, but also of the Jewish movement in general and the birth of a new personality type.79 Against the background of the new discrimination against Jews, the late Soviet version of Zionism invokes values and ideas that have inspired the Zionist movement since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. One of the most important components of the Zionist ideology is the need to promote the education of resilient, “environmentally resistant,” and fearless people, the “muscular Jew,” who would counteract the traditional image of a diaspora Jew. In his study on body images and their interpretations in Jewish history, Sander L. Gilman speaks of the Zionist ideal of the “new muscular Jew” (quoting the famous statements of the first vice-president of the Zionist Congress in 1900,

79 Considering the time when the novel was written, Simon Ashkenazi is to become one of the already numerous Jews who will drive the Soviet exodus in the 1960s–1980s.

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Max Nordau) as an “antidote to centuries of Jewish degeneration [. . .], which occurred on the physical and spiritual level ‘within the narrow limits of the ghetto’” [1998: 69]. According to Gilman, Zionists used antisemitic and later national socialist rhetoric to revise the negative images of the “sick” diaspora Jew. “The image of the resistant Jew in Israel, the sabra, corresponds to this idea of a healthy, beautiful body [. . .].” In Israel “the transformation of weak, ‘unproductive’ merchants and intellectuals into tough Jews has already taken place” [ibid.: 70, with quotations from: J. Hoberman, “Never Again,” The Village Voice, January 31, 1995, 45].80 From birth, Simon demonstrates the inclinations and tastes of the “new Jewish man.” As a child, he learned horsemanship against his mother’s will, and rigorously refused to learn playing the violin, a traditional education for Jewish children in Europe. He feels an aversion to trade as an occupation unworthy of an Israeli Jew. His (self-)education basically consists in the development of already existing characteristics, first and foremost in gradual self-hardening. To progress on this path, he encounters teachers and has to go through a series of initiation events. In this type of fabula, meetings with friends and adversaries as well as special material attributes are necessary companions of the protagonist, which reflects Vladimir Propp’s scheme of the magic fairy tale. At the same time, the plot of Markish’s novel follows the model of the socialist-realist bildungsroman with reversed ideological premises. One of the initiation steps constitutes a taboo-breaking act—the killing of a pig that is meant to bring some meat to the family. The symbolic attributes include an old postcard from his father, Feuchtwanger’s novel The Jewish War (Josephus), and a flower from the surroundings of the kibbutz Kiriat Shalom in Palestine, also a gift from his father. Representatives of other peoples deported by Stalin act as Simon’s likeminded protectors. For example, the friendship with a Chechen boy, Kalu, and his brother Usam develops into a community of the persecuted: together they swear revenge on their “big brother.” In a trustful conversation around an evening campfire near the river bank—the scene is written in a youthfulromantic style—Simon and Usam tell each other the history of expulsion of their peoples. As Simon perceives it, the two-thousand-year-old Jewish diaspora history—combined with the recent deportation history of the Chechen people—takes on the character of an immediately experienced catastrophe:

80 Klaus Hödl [1997: 275–314] analyses in detail to what extent the antisemitic argumentation was adopted by the Zionists. “The construction of a new Jewish masculinity by Zionism” and the associated deconstruction of Israeli discourses on masculinity in the research of Daniel Boyarin in the 1990s has recently been examined by Yaron Peleg [2015].

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—Нас тоже выселяли,—сказал Симон.—Почти две тыщи лет назад. —Откуда?—спросил Усам заинтересованно.—Кто? —Римляне, суки такие,—объяснил Симон.—Они захватили нашу землю—Израиль, а мы все время бунтовали. Тогда они нас всех выселили. [Markish 1991: 116–117] “We have also been evicted,” said Simon. “Almost two thousand years ago.” “From where?” Usam asked with interest. “Who?” “The Romans, these sons of bitches,” explained Simon. “They occupied our land, Israel, but we rebelled all the time. Then they drove us all away.” Semen Lipkin’s novel Dekada ([1980], see chap. 4.2) is also about a cruel forced resettlement of an entire small people of Central Asia, who are accused by Stalin of collaboration with the Germans and thus of treason. This text, which only touches on the problem of Jewish discrimination, describes above all the state violence against the small ethnic groups of the Soviet East that have been declared “backward.” Soviet-communist values and symbols penetrate into the remote villages in the mountains and with much difficulty join the old customs and the Muslim faith of their inhabitants. As in Priskazka, the figure of Alim, a young man from the suffering Tavlar people, a fictional ethnicity from the Caucasus, becomes the mouthpiece of the author’s thought: by researching the history of his people and their neighbours, who have all been exiled, Alim revolts against Stalin. Articulating the prevalence of ethnic and religious ties over the state and seeking to rediscover the history of the East “overwritten” by Russia, the Russian Jewish poet Lipkin implicitly contextualizes his text in the tradition of Jewish resistance and the Jewish national “rebirth.” A scene that obviously confirms the novel’s belonging to this tradition is the episode in which the proud mountain Jew (tatskii evrei) Avshulamov defends his people from a young Tavlar who calls Jews despicable traders: Твой народ еще имени своего не имел, когда мой народ владел виноградниками и садами, у нас был храм [. . .] и не имевшие себе равных цари—Шаул, Дауд и Сулейман. Здесь нас горсточка на ладони земли, но мы всегда знали, что мы народ. [. . .] мы разговариваем по-татски, но наши старики молятся на языке, на котором пророк Моше беседовал с Богом. В рассеянии мы остались народом. [Lipkin 1990: 70–71]

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When my people had vineyards and gardens, your people did not even know their own name; at that time, we had our own temple [.  .  .] and kings, who had no equals—Shaul, Dawud, Suleiman. We are only a handful of people here on earth, but we have always known that we are one people. [. . .] We speak Tat, but our elders pray in the language in which the prophet Moshe spoke to God. In dispersion we have remained one people. Like the Karaites of Trakai for David Shrayer-Petrov, the Mountain Jews for Semen Lipkin represent a small, unassimilated Jewish group that has preserved its ethnic substance in the diaspora—the remainders of a lost authenticity. A significant difference from Shrayer-Petrov’s Zionist novel, however, is that in Dekada the (mountain) Jews, in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, suffer under the Communist regime alongside other peoples of the Caucasus. Like Priskazka, Dekada is, symptomatically, a novel of youth and education, if we look at the story of the intellectual Alim, who is still young in the finale. In contrast to Markish, however, the Tavlars’ exile to Kazakhstan is only presented as a great misfortune and a violent separation of the people from the graves of their ancestors and their millennia-old history. In the imagination of an urban Jew the barren, hungry Kazakh province can still form a poetic alternative to the totalitarian center of power, but for uprooted primordial peoples it is the place of exile and death. In Priskazka, Jewish history appears as a perpetual present and the dispersion as a keenly perceived injustice that is to be overcome in the near future. The novel’s driving idea is not the apocalyptic-messianic and mystical concept of aliyah presented by Efrem Baukh and Eli Liuksemburg, but rather a political one that is inspired by the idea of continuity of Jewish history from its beginnings to the present time. At that, Jews are portrayed less as a religious and cultural community, and more—after their expulsion from Palestine after the destruction of the Second Temple—as a community of the persecuted people. The Soviet Union is therefore merely a new captivity, just as Stalin is a reincarnation of the countless enemies of the Jews such as Amalek and Haman.81 Events like Stalin’s 81 Alek Rapoport’s painting “Avtoportret kak maska Mordekhaia” (“Self-portrait as mask of Mordechai,” 1989) bears witness to the new importance of biblical stories, including the Megillat Esther, for the nonconformist Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. See [Bernshtein 2004]. That the biblical interpretation of Stalin’s death was widespread in the collective consciousness of Soviet Jews is proven by biographic testimonies and memories. One of the interviewees in the research project on the life of Soviet Jews, Anna Matskina, says the following about this period: “[. . .] apparently God helped us here, just as He helped us once

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death are therefore interpreted and recoded not as a part of Russian-Soviet history but of the much older Jewish one. As mentioned above, in many texts of Russian Jewish prose the “black years” of the Soviet Jews, 1948–1952, and Stalin’s death in 1953 are associated with the salvation story from the book of Esther, which is read and celebrated at Purim. The government official Haman at the court of the Persian King Ahasuerus has become the prototype of all enemies of the Jews all and modern antisemites, including Hitler and Stalin; in biblical tradition he is executed for the planned murder of the Jews. The joyous celebration of Purim falls on the month Adar (February/March) of the Jewish calendar and corresponds to the time of Stalin’s death. The joy of the Jews over Stalin’s death, which also appears in David Markish’s Priskazka, signifies the secret triumph of the historical dynamic that is tabooed in the communist context, but is nevertheless “true” and predicted by Holy Scripture, over the false mythology of the Soviet regime, which has usurped historical collective memory. The new communist pseudocanon, which is nourished by a collective historical amnesia, is opposed by the tradition of the Torah and, accordingly, the ancient commandment of memory.82 Markish’s novel presents a vision of history that is very close to other exodus writings of that time. In four metadiegetic plots, the narrator shows key episodes of Jewish history—stories of expulsion, mimicry, and struggle, as well as visions of return. These episodes became accessible to the young protagonist through “далеки[е] воспоминания” (“distant memories”) and “память поколений, неповторяем[ая] память” (“the memory of generations, the unique memory”) [Markish 1991: 175]. Simon, who is already writing his first poems, records them on paper. His still limited horizon of knowledge is retrospectively linked with the “adult” parts of the narrative through this anthropologizing view of cultural Jewish memory spanning over persons and epochs. The first section, “Vozvrashchenie” (“The return”), describes the arrival of the Ashkenazi family in their original homeland. Legendary landscapes, dancing girls, and newcomers crying with joy are all part of the utopian scenery. On his way to the city wall made of bright stones, Simon meets a boy like him—a reflection of himself. However, the second Simon never left Palestine, and his father was killed not by the Russians but by the Romans. He explains to Simon that they are both several thousand years old, just like a friend of his, also called before. Yes, on Purim, when the Jews were saved from annihilation. That was in the fifth century before our era. That’s how it happened here too, because the blow hit Stalin the night before Purim. And that is why we Jews say that God is with us nevertheless” [Arend 2011: 110]. 82 For more details, see my essay [Smola 2013b].

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Simon, whose father was burnt in Spain and whose uncle, Admiral Lorenzo Lakish, discovered the island of Zanzibar. “Тебе многое надо вспомнить, чтобы жить,” he tells him [ibid.: 177] (“You have a lot to remember in order to live”). Immediately afterwards, Simon sees his father and learns from the boy that the dead, too, have reached the Holy Land thanks to the arrival of their sons. The biblical prophecy of the gathering of the people of Israel comes true in this dream, but remarkably, the will of God does not play any role in it, and the return happens in the present, as the image of the airport and the landing planes indicate. With the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, the whole Jewish history becomes condensed into a single moment in which all returning Jews are integrated. It is a Zionist reinterpretation of the “last days,” the end point of wanderings and search. The messianic concept of Judaism is given a new interpretation in terms of a real claim on the ancestral land. Before the end of exile, the past concentrates in a single possible place. History ends because, from now on, the present only knows the future. The second section, entitled “P′er Lebo,” shows the successful Russian Jewish poet Pinkhas Ashkenazi—Simon’s father—in the Parisian bohemian society in the early 1920s.83 He saves himself, “как свиток Торы” [ibid.: 180] (“like a Torah scroll”), from the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, while synagogues are burning in his homeland and the “progressive” Jews who survived the pogroms leave the Pale of Settlement as they believe in the possibility of assimilation and in equal rights in a new Soviet state. “Надев галифе с лампасами и сев на коня, Коган полагал, что теперь он Иванов, что трын-трава—это неоспоримая реальность и что не позже чем завтра наступит всеобщее благоденствие” [ibid.: 179] (“Having put on his striped military trousers and mounted his horse, Kogan thought that his name was Ivanov from now on, ‘I couldn’t care less’ was an irrefutable truth, and that general prosperity would come no later than tomorrow”). Pinkhas Ashkenazi, however, is planning a journey to the place of his origin—to Palestine, to “земля, [. . .] сочащаяся библейским медом и молоком” [ibid.: 180] (“land [. . .] where the biblical honey and milk flow”). In a café, a friend introduces him to a boy from Pinkhas’s shtetl who survived the pogrom. Pinkhas decides to take the boy with him on his journey: the boy, whose name is Simon, also dreams of Palestine, where there will be no goim (Gentiles). Despite the objections of his Parisian friends and the near-achieved literary fame, the poet leaves the enlightened Europe behind and goes to the Promised Land with the Jewish child who was orphaned right there, in Europe. 83 This and some other details of the episode represent a reference to Perets Markish’s biography. During his stay in Paris, Markish, together with Oizer Varshavskii, edited the expressionist almanac Chaliastre.

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“P′er Lebo” stages an alternative, counterfactual historical scenario of a fatherson reunion that takes place in the realm of imagination. The striking equivalence of the father’s figure with Palestine suggests a paternalization establishing the natural, genetic continuity of the geographical location. In the third episode, “Zanzibar,” the time of action shifts to the year 1502, to the ship of the admiral of the Portuguese Royal Fleet, Lorenzo Lakish. Lorenzo is a Crypto-Jew, a Marrano, who attained his high position through adaptation, secrecy, and mimicry. In a dark, well-hidden room in his house in Lisbon, he keeps silver menorahs, tefillin, tallit, and a Torah scroll belonging to his grandfather who was stabbed to death by Catholics in a massacre forty years ago. Lorenzo’s brother, Shmuel, has recently become a victim of the Inquisition, and his pregnant wife Debora subsequently commits suicide. Their orphaned fifteen-year-old son Simon is taken in by Lorenzo and accompanies him on his expeditions. Lorenzo avidly interrogates a captured Arab merchant, asking questions about Palestine and Jerusalem, and forbids the Arab, threateningly and with contempt, to call Jerusalem “their” (Islamic) holy city. The Arab, trembling with fear, shows Lorenzo on the map the fabulous, rich land of Ophir, where King Solomon sent his sailors to collect gold. But Lorenzo rejects Simon’s enthusiastic suggestion to go to Ophir, the dreamed-of Palestine, for fear that the Portuguese will punish the Jews who stay at home. Before he disembarks on the island of Zanzibar at the end of the episode and goes into battle for the city of Bububu, where he will most probably die, Lorenzo passes on the Arab’s map to Simon—hoping the boy will fulfil their common dream. This third story, especially the pejorative remarks by the positive character Lorenzo about “эти грязны[е] араб[ы]” [ibid.: 192] (“these dirty Arabs”) and his passionate desire to liberate Palestine from Islamic rule, to “reconquer” it, reflects the political context of Markish’s writing. The author’s irreconcilable pro-Israeli attitude is also visible in Lorenzo’s plan to build an effective Jewish army and fleet.84 The Inquisition as the driving force behind the gathering of Iberian Jews in Palestine is an obvious allegory of the Soviet power. In the fourth section, “Stena placha” (“The Wailing Wall”), the story goes to the moment of origin of the Jewish diaspora—the battle between the Jews and the Romans for the city of Jerusalem. A teenager named Simon brings a meager lunch to his severely wounded father Lakish ben Itzhak, who, exhausted, leans against the western wall of the city—the future Wailing Wall. Before he dies, Lakish ben Itzhak commands his son to remember what he saw and heard: this will become the most important task of the Jews from now on. Simon listens 84 In 1973 David Markish, who had repatriated a year earlier, took part in the Yom Kippur War.

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spellbound to the last instructions of his father: Jews are the only people who have recognized the value of wisdom, he says. While other peoples ensured their survival through cruelty and sought the truth in science, the Jews knew that truth was not tangible and was the privilege of God. They therefore left violence behind. The imminent fall of Jerusalem will teach the Jews caution and wisdom, they will come to know and hate their enemies and traitors, and so they will stick together. After the death of his father, the boy looks at the Wailing Wall and thinks about the task of survival they are facing. The four stories expand the range of topics of the novel and place the events of the main plot into a global context of Jewish history. They represent a belief in a predestined, anticipatory repetitiveness of historical events, so that history is understood as monological, transparent, and purposeful; and scenes from different times and places are seen as directly comparable and thus synchronous, as they are taken out of their specific geographical and political environment. And yet, this classic memory paradigm of religious Judaism is reimagined in a new, Zionist, way. In his study of Jewish culture of remembrance, Jan Assmann points to the non-linear interdependence between collective memories and their social context, which selects the events to be remembered, interprets them, and directs the content of memory [Assmann 1991: 347–348]. The Jews have maintained vivid “memories” of past suffering (such as the wanderings in the desert) or past liberation (the exodus from Egypt) for over two thousand years with the help of special mnemonic practices that include religious rites, regular reading of the Torah, and numerous commandments: The Jews [.  .  .] have managed, over a period of almost two thousand years, scattered in all parts of the world, to keep alive as a kind of hope the memory of a country and a way of living that were in strongest contradiction to their respective present: “this year slaves, next year free; this year here, next year in Jerusalem.” Such a utopian memory, which finds no support or help in any “frame of reference” of respective contemporary experiences, we will define, using Thießen’s term, “contrapresent” memory (Thießen 1988). [Assmann 1991: 349] A connection between memory and historiography in Judaism has already been analyzed in several studies, chiefly in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory [1982]. With reference to Yerushalmi’s concept, Bettina Bannasch and Almuth Hammer note that “all historical events

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in the Middle Ages and in early modern times, even the expulsion from Spain and the numerous pogroms committed in Poland and Russia in the eighteenth century” were “interpreted as prototypically prefigured in biblical events of salvation or disaster” by rabbinical Judaism [2005: 278]. Simon Ashkenazi shows strength of character in a series of collisions with his antisemitic environment. The conflict with a Russian classmate, Dimitry Anikanov, who is an Orthodox old-believer and hostile to foreigners and especially to Jews, expands the circle of villains in the novel beyond the Soviet communists and thus presents a wide range of antisemitism in Russia. Anikanov repeats the old Christian accusations against Jews: “[. . .] мало того, что они распяли Христа,—они, во-вторых, в семнадцатом году разрушили и сокрушили православие, на котором испокон держалась русская земля . . .” [Markish 1991: 213] (“[. . .] it is not enough that they crucified Jesus Christ, in 1917 they also destroyed and erased the Orthodox faith on which the Russian country has always rested . . .”). Anikanov confidently lists the Kazakh Dzhety-su (the Seven-River Country), where the Ashkenazi family has been exiled, among Russian territories and considers all other ethnic groups populating the country to be strangers, pejoratively called chuchmeki. In the novel, Dmitrii represents the imperial-Orthodox spirit, which was, as can be concluded, inherited by the Soviet state. When Anikanov is stabbed to death by Simon’s Chechen friend Kalu in revenge for an ethnically degrading remark, Simon admits to himself, despite some regret, that he would also be prepared to kill his offenders. In fact, at the end of the novel, he is given the opportunity to prove his courage and defend himself: without hesitation, he stabs one of the thieves who try to attack him. Simon reflects with passion about the characters of Leon Feuchtwanger’s work The Jewish War, which offers a fictional model for his own life building: “Сердце Симона Ашкенази не желало знать жалости” [ibid.: 249–250] (“Simon Ashkenazi’s heart did not want to show mercy”). The news about the rehabilitation of his family and the imminent return to Moscow does not impress Simon very much: as a new man, he despises the putative “liberation” in Soviet slavery. In a final conversation with his friend, Simon declaratively denies the well-known tradition of the galut Jews to travel to Israel at the end of their lives in order to be buried in the holy earth: “Теперь туда живым надо ехать” [ibid.: 342] (“Now we must go there alive”). The allusion to the Russian proverb, which precedes the novel as an epigraph, stresses that at the end of the text the young man stands on a threshold of a new life: “Кто нови не знает, тот и стари рад” (“He who does not know the new is also glad about the old”).

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Priskazka is the first part of David Markish’s trilogy Legkaia zhizn′ Simona Ashkenazi (The easy life of Simon Ashkenazi), which, as the title suggests, explores the life of one protagonist. Of the other two parts—Chisto pole (The open field) and Zhizn′ na poroge (Life on the threshold)—the second was published in 1980, but only as a translation to Hebrew and Swedish. The trilogy was planned to present a biographical “project” that develops a key metaphor: with the allegoric-prototypical name “Ashkenazi,” the eponymous hero symbolizes the fate of European Jewry and the new path it should or will take. This is an intertextual reference to a famous predecessor—the Yiddish writer Israel Joshua Singer and his novel Di brider Ashkenazi (The brothers Ashkenazi, 1937). Singer’s monumental work follows the lives of two brothers from a Hasidic family in Łódź, Simche Meir and Jacob Bunin, which represent the fate of the diaspora Jewry and the tragic decline of an entire culture in the time from the last third of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War and shortly afterwards. The two brothers, though very different, both take the path of assimilation, gather great wealth, and acquire prestige as textile manufacturers. Due to the low social status of Jews in Eastern Europe, they have to face humiliation and obstacles from the very beginning; the ambitious, ruthless, and highly intelligent Simche Meir in particular finds it difficult. After the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 antisemitism increases and reaches a critical stage in the independent Poland of the postwar years. Jacob Bunin is shot dead when he tries to defend himself against a Polish officer who humiliates and maltreats the brothers in the presence of his comrades. Simche Meir dies shortly afterwards, broken and financially ruined after bankruptcy and several months in a Bolshevik prison in Petrograd. All his intellectual and economic achievements have been wiped out, according to Simche Meir’s bitter stock of his life in the novel’s finale. For the first time in his life, he plans to move to Eretz Israel, which his Zionist friends suggest to him: after the failure of his life project, he feels that his native Łódź and all of Eastern Europe are foreign to him and dreams of building his own country. At that, he gradually returns to the original Jewish values and repeatedly refers to biblical figures such as the patriarch Jacob. But in the end, Simche Meir decides against emigration, overcoming his own arguments by the conviction that the strength of the Jews does not lie in violence and retaliation, but in understanding and wisdom. Because of Poland’s antisemitic policy, his final attempt to recover financially is extremely difficult. In the last months of his life, he watches Jews leaving for Palestine and America—the chalutzim leave with hope and enthusiasm, others, with concern and resignation. Before he dies, Simche Meir reads the book of Job, a model of his own life and a prototypical story of defeat, but unlike Job, he has no hope for God’s grace.

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The explicit reference to this novel in the title of Markish’s text suggests a reading of Priskazka as a story of Jewish decline, which is now explored at a later time, in the Soviet-Russian context. Again, it is a consequence of unconditional Jewish assimilation. However, Markish counteracts the pessimistic finale of his pretext with his young hero’s uncompromising hope for a future life in Israel. Simche Meir’s hesitation over whether to leave or not and his subsequent decision not to emigrate constitute a negative starting point for the newborn generation of exodus Jews. Singer’s sceptical view regarding the emigration to Palestine in the finale of Di brider Ashkenazi—rather a destination for refugees than a land of arrival—contrasts with the defiant and romantic view of Markish’s protagonist (and with the explicit authorial position). The passionate Zionist pathos of David Markish’s early prose can be perceived as an antithesis of, and, at the same time, a reflection of, the revolutionary communist zeal of the early Soviet generation of Jewish writers, including Perets Markish. The son’s disappointment with the communist utopia, the victims of which his father and other Yiddish poets became, resulted in a total reversal of ideals. At the same time, Soviet Jewish history created a precedent for an uncompromising break with the past.85 It is significant in this context that already the early Soviet Jewish literature reinterpreted the topos of the Promised Land and the biblical exodus story and projected them onto the new epoch and the new space of communist ideals.86 Moreover, the type of a “muscular Jew” constructed by David Markish follows not only Nordau’s theories, but also the early Soviet pathos of transformation and “rebirth” of the Jewish body. The parallel between the Zionist and the early Soviet Jewish ideal body image is due, as mentioned above, to their shared desire to renew the “outdated” historical type of Jew: “The Soviet [.  .  .] project and the Zionist movement shared similar goals and methods to achieve them: the remaking of the Jewish body by means of resettling the Jew on land that was marked as Jewish national territory” [Murav 2011: 67]. In this way, Harriet Murav interprets the theme of the transformation of a pre-Revolution diaspora Jew into a new Soviet worker Jew in Perets Markish’s novel Eyns af eyns (One to one, 1934). Perets Markish was only one of many authors who portrayed in their works the revolutionary “maturation process” of Jewish characters.

85 Yuri Slezkine describes this situation using the theory of types of mentality: “The children of the most devoted Soviet citizens had become the most alienated intellectuals who criticized the regime” [2004: 336]. 86 See [Vaiskopf 2004]. On the derivative trope of “red Zion” cf. chap. 6.4.

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But an even closer analogy to David Markish’s novel is the early children and youth Soviet literature. In texts such as Matvei Burshtyn’s Cheder [1931], E. Shraiber’s Chernye semena (Black seeds, 1932) or Iosif Utkin’s Miloe detstvo (My sweet childhood, 1933) Jewish children, who have been harassed and humiliated by their Christian contemporaries, succeed in their emancipation under the new regime.

5.5. Late Soviet Exodus Novels: Poetics and Message Morphologically, the late Soviet exodus texts analyzed above have many similarities. Together, they can be said to form a unified ideological and structural macrotext. At the center of the plot, there is an autobiographical character who is a Jew, sometimes an adolescent, and a nonconformist intellectual. The narratives are often structured around the supposed or real mental illness of the protagonist and the associated psychiatric or insanity discourse. Such stories express mimetic critique of the system, because they reflect on the punitive mechanisms of the Soviet state,87 while at the same time illustrating in the spirit of modernist neoromanticism—especially in Eli Liuksemburg’s texts—the unbridgeable discrepancy between the subjective, alienated world view of the pariah with his ecstatic or sinister visions, and his one-dimensional, narrow-minded environment, which torments the protagonist. The central motif of mental derangement reflects ideological and philosophical dichotomies characteristic of dissident literature, a kind of perceptive dualism. The conflict with the state irreversibly splits the protagonist’s life in two: departure for the Promised Land in the case of triumph, or mental illness/death in the case of defeat (however, this opposition is sometimes made ambiguous and questioned on an ontological level, as in Liuksemburg’s Desiatyi golod). A prominently place in the texts is occupied by Jewish and Judaistic cultural realia, information about Jewish history and culture, and ethnographical data. Their aim is to revive cultural memory and remind of the lost “Atlantis.” The references to Judaism are part of biographical narrative of development and education, described as an irreversible spiritual or even a biological process with the metaphor of rebirth/awakening or death/sleep. There is also a leitmotif of 87 On the history and problems of punitive medicine and especially psychiatry in the Soviet state, cf. the groundbreaking study by dissident Aleksandr Podrabinek, Karatel′naia meditsina (Punitive medicine, 1979); the latest publication on the subject is [Werkmeister 2014] with its comprehensive bibliography.

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alienation and, finally, the convert’s break away from the traditions of the galut (Markish) and from family (Baukh, Shrayer-Petrov, and Liuksemburg).88 The programmatic rejection of hybridity and the longing for a pure origin, indeed, for the untroubled perfection of the Jewish logos manifests itself in the separation of the main characters from the family they created in “exile,” especially from their spouse. In the process of rebirth, the perceptions of one’s own and of alien identity change drastically: the matrimonial unions of the two Jewish protagonists, Kardin and Levitin, with “Cossack women” signify the sublimated and unrealizable wish to merge with the majority, whereas their break away from their wives comes along with the liberation from the assimilation disease and the inferiority complex. Kardin even refers to his children using a historical oxymoron, as “подрастающее еврейское казачество” [Baukh 2001: 141] (“the young Jewish Cossacks”). On the performative level of the text, the inclusion of Jewish studies (ethnography, history, or culture) into fiction is a sign of intellectualism and self-reflexive atmosphere within the Soviet Zionist circles. That is why this autobiographic and factographic prose often looks like a historical document. Another characteristic feature is a specific concept of (cultural) historiography, which questions the continuity, homogeneity, ideological contents, and even the claim to existence of the great Russian national history, because it silences plurality, eliminates cultural liminalities, and conceals or overwrites minorities. Jews are sometimes ascribed an original, mystical meaning in the Russian cultural context. In this case, the nonconformist longing for a diversity of voices gives way to the idea of a single suppressed origin, which has to be found again—a teleological concept, which, in its consequences, aims for a radical change of power.

88 Cf. Mikhail Vaiskopf ’s formulation: “Как всякая революция, сионизм стремился к пересозданию человека. Из обновленной земли прорастал и новый сионистский Адам, идущий на смену своим обветшалым галутно-местечковым предшественникам” (unpublished fragment of [Vaiskopf 2001b], received by the author) (“Like every revolution, Zionism strove to recreate man. Out of the renewed earth sprouted the new, Zionist Adam, who was to replace his frail galut and shtetl predecessors”). And further: “Поскольку отъезд почти всегда трактуется как инициация, РИЛ изобилует метафорамии метонимиями смерти—она передается как травма, увечье, болезнь героя, его обморок, гибель кого-то из близких—например, ребенка, развод и т. п. Во многих текстах отъезжающий герой как бы расстается со своим собственным телом, со своим прежним, упраздненным ‘я’ [. . .]” [2001b: 244] (“Departure is almost always interpreted as initiation, so that RIL [RussianIsraeli literature] is teeming with metaphors and metonyms of death. Death is conveyed as trauma, injury, the protagonst’s illness or fainting, as the death of a friend or a relative, for example, a child, as divorce, etc. In many texts it is as if the departing protagonist was saying goodbye to his body, to his old, suspended ‘I’ [. . .]”).

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The new, late Soviet form of Zionist prose shares many features with the texts of Jewish “world literature,” or multilingual Jewish literatures, related to the concept of the Promised Land as the primary projection of contemporary aspirations. Indeed, Russian exodus literature adopts the motives of literary texts written during the long centuries of exile, which fictionalize the specific, involved view of Palestine and Israel held by the Diasporic Jewry.89 Zionist texts share with the Jewish tradition the vision of Israel as a topos of homeland imagined both retrospectively (with reference to the biblical Promised Land and the conquest of Canaan) and prospectively (return and redemption). But famously, they stand out against this tradition because they transfer expectations of salvation from religious to secular history; the symbols in these texts relate to the living, “almost achieved” contemporary reality. Thus, literary Zionism breaks with the old Jewish tradition of “poetically inhabiting makom,”90 which Amir Eshel describes as follows: “Indeed, Jewish writers across the generations of exile were not so much obsessed with the urge to return to Zion—a notion many of them regarded as messianic—but were motivated by the desire to inhabit their dwelling place poetically” [2003: 124–125]. The deterritorializing model of the Jewish homeland, which has been established in the diaspora for centuries, constituted Jewish literary history: “The homeland was [. . .] removed from geography into a spiritual category” [Zeller 2003: 5]. Once again in Jewish history, this tradition was revised in the late Soviet dissident milieu. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi also writes about “textual repatriation” in the Jewish poetics of exile: “In its most radical form, this is an imaginative license that has no geographical coordinates: it is an affirmation and reconfiguration of the Jewish word as nomadic exercise and Jewish exile as a kind of literary privilege” [2000: 10]. In the diaspora, the eternally postponed return and redemption and the tradition of the written, symbolic home as makom—Jacob’s Bet-El, house of God—become an indispensable source of Jewish literary inspiration [ibid.: 10–15]. “Utopian desire is the very fire of fiction [. . .]” [ibid.: 18]. This thought is developed by Philipp Theisohn, who sees in Zionism “a return of the text to that space that knows no representation”—a radical poetic break with Judaism as “a form of life committed to the culture of substitution” [2005: 50]. As Theisohn points out with reference to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “the withdrawal of Zion” has led to “ritual and compulsive sign production”—a practice that is annihilated by the Zionist “transfer” of signs “into a space [.  .  .] in which the significant and the significant are always one, signs of origin always also become signs of 89 A prominent example of this literary genealogy are the Shire Zion, the Zion Songs of Yehuda Ha-Levi (1075–1141). 90 Makom, or, with the definite article, ha-makom, means in Judaism the holy, “good” place, the place of the presence of God. At the same time, it is one of God’s names.

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arrival” [ibid.]. It is interesting to consider, against the background of Theisohn’s semiotic retelling of the Judaistic concept of the destroyed Jewish temple as an inaccessible space of representation, the concept of the third Temple that appears in the consciousness of the insane character in Liuksemburg’s “Tretii khram.” Paradoxically, this tradition is also confirmed in late Soviet exodus prose because Israel is represented there as an ideal, utopic construct, always oriented towards the future. The reinvention of Jewish tradition is closely intertwined with changes in the identity of the authors who begin to see themselves as belonging to the Jewish diaspora. Emigration is conceived as exodus (liberation and flight) and as aliyah (ascent) at the same time. Thus, the desire for an absolute renewal conveys the idea of another, alternative continuity. Mikhail Vaiskopf has put these tendencies in a nutshell in an ironic way: In the new Exodus, [.  .  .] history itself took on characteristics of a monotonous consistency, almost of a tautology. [.  .  .] Drawing its inspiration from sacral precedents, the literature of the new Exodus, which was created [. . .] not only in Israel, but also in Russia, before the move, organically gravitated towards the mythical, the epic, and the rituals that depicted the change from death to life, [. . .] Familiar models radically changed their historiosophical and socio-cultural nature, as they were saturated with biblical and national-historical symbols as the Black Sea and the Dead Sea, the underground Jerusalem, salt, glowing dust and fire in the desert, grapevine, etc. [. . .]. [Vaiskopf 2001b] Emigration takes on a special mystical and religious, or at least, as in David Markish’s work, a symbolic meaning through the comprehensive system of literary references to Judaism—to the exodus narrative of the book of Shemot; to the vision of the gathering of the people of Israel in the Holy Land after the arrival of the Messiah, as it is conveyed in Jewish prophecy or in the Kabbalistic legend about the underground return of the souls of dead Jews to Jerusalem; and to the story of Jacob’s ladder from the book of Bereshit. With the religious transcendence of contemporary events, aliyah is taken out of its contemporary context and “legitimized” within the framework of the Jewish tradition. Within a mythological model of reality, demonic features are attributed to Soviet power institutions91 and politic conflicts are extended to the metaphysical

91 In Ei Liuksemburg’s Desiatyi golod, magic-demonic powers and abilities are also attributed to Arab-Islamic institutions and their representatives.

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level. The disastrous course of history evokes apocalyptic predictions—concepts of an imminent revenge and the settlement of debts. Ideas of temptation, repentance, conversion, and deliverance, biblical images of fratricide and redemption appear as warnings. Thus, the Soviet ideology in Lestnitsa Iakova is represented as an apocalyptic beast, a Leviathan with its seven heads that symbolize the seven deadly sins (“Зверь идеологии” [“The Beast of Ideology”], [Baukh 2001: 377]). Here, too, fiction speaks the language of tradition: No other diasporic group attaches an equivalent eschatological meaning to its return, and this premodern origin of the Jewish diaspora affects even the politicized version of exile and homeland as envisioned in Zionism [.  .  .] From the very beginning of this tradition, the political and spiritual dimensions of exile are joined. [Zeller 2003: 2 ff.] Or in another, more philosophical formulation: “To break through the reality of the galut in an act of self-reflection, to acquire and transform the world in an act of sovereignty, this is precisely the messianic mission the agent of which Zionism claims to be” [Theisohn 2005: 26ff.]. However, the dichotomous perspective of Jewish dissident literature reproduces an ontological division of the world into the divine and the real planes. The real politics ultimately means turning away from the divine order and finds parallels in Jewish apocalyptic literature, including the book of Daniel. The state that bases its authority on false premises, like those of Islam and communism, brings history to disasters and ultimately to the end of the world. According to eschatological thinking, the dualistic “opposition of God and world” arises because “the world empires [. . .] embody evil, godlessness, and animosity towards God, [. . .] [they are] an expression of self-assertion and an excessive claim to power” [Hahn 1998: 34]. Messianic motifs in the Zionist novels of Baukh and Liuksemburg also reveal obvious parallels to the ideas of religious Zionism, and Rabbi Vandal from Desiatyi golod invokes the charismatic figure of Rabbi Abraham Isaak Kook. Rabbi Vandal’s tolerance even towards the “enemies of Israel” and his firm belief that defeats, deviations, and setbacks are part of a single divine plan, the ultimate goal of which is the redemption of the people of Israel in Palestine, allow cautious conclusions to be drawn about the connections between the literature of the aliyah with the religious movement of Zionism and its spiritual leaders. Interestingly, the texts discussed in this chapter revive the hierarchical oppositions that have been archetypal for Jewish culture and history since the

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destruction of the second Temple and the dispersion, such as homeland vs. galut/diaspora, Jewish vs. non-Jewish, spiritual vs. secular.92 The new Zionist paradigm updates these ideas, which were handed down in the Talmud and which regard Judaism as a community of origin and blood and the Jews of the diaspora as a community of the persecuted. While the aliyah texts draw on Jewish pretexts such as stories from the Torah or aggada, and on Judaistic concepts of the biblical memory, diaspora, and antisemitism, they also borrow symbols, as will be shown below, from the traditions of Russian and Western European prose.

5.6. Bipolar Models: The Zionist and the SocialistRealist Novel Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii describe “dual structures” in Russian cultural history as a diachronic, historical, and moral-religious phenomenon. In the system of Russian Middle Ages, the basic cultural values (ideological, political, religious) are set in a bipolar value field, which is divided by a clear line and allows no neutral axiological zone. [. . .] So, the secular power could be interpreted as divine or as diabolical, but never as neutral with regard to these concepts. [Lotman/Uspenskii 1977a: 2–3] Lotman and Uspenskii also note a similar historical-cultural dynamics of development in later epochs, in the context of which “the new is understood not as a continuation but as an eschatological change of the whole” [ibid.: 3]. For the analysis of Jewish nonconformist culture, which often opposes the Soviet ideological system essentially by following these traditional scheme, it is important to note that such a development “leads to the regeneration of archaic forms” [ibid.: 21], such as, for example, ahistorical interpretations of the past.93 In relation to the medieval worldview, Lotman and Uspenskii comment on this phenomenon as follows: “The view that the movement forward is a return to the lost truth (the movement into the future is a movement into the past) was 92 Cf. Ursula Zeller: “The theology of the Land established a hierarchical relationship between centre and margin, between sacred space and spiritual deprivation, which has a secular analogue in the polarity between authenticity and (self-)alienation” [2003: 2]. 93 Cf.: “A decided anti-historism is expressed as a turn to artificially constructed utopias of the past” [Lotman/Uspenskii 1977a: 37].

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[. . .] widely held” [ibid.: 21]. The idea that dependence on, or liberation from, memory received different and sometimes contradictory evaluations in different epochs [ibid.: 22–23, 37] is also relevant to our understanding of contemporary Jewish dissent: the explicit recovery and “recapture” of collective memory had to herald the advent of a new historical period and lead to important changes of identity. How did Jewish nonconformist prose work within the framework of this development? To what extent was its structure related to that of the literature promoted and propagated by Soviet state ideology? What did it borrow from this literature, even as it declared its opposition to the Soviet canon? Apparently, the new ideology of exodus and of collective remembrance was a reaction to the sacral and parareligious traditions in state socialism itself. In her much-cited monograph The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981), Katerina Clark notes that dissident literature has inherited the formal patterns and didacticism of the Soviet canon: Most samizdat and tamizdat publications [. . .] are not markedly different from the sort of writing being published in the Soviet Union. They also resemble official literature in being heavily didactic. [.  .  .] Recent Soviet fiction (and much unofficial writing) grew out of, rather than away from, the traditional, that preceded it. [. . .] Even when writers advocate values they believe to be opposed to Stalinist values; they often articulate them against the old patterns. [Clark 1981: 235–236] At that, the exodus texts are not just a rewriting of socialist-realist literary production. They often present a more complex, philosophically and aesthetically enriched (counter-)version of the canon. As a whole, they are based on the European educational novel and its Soviet variants as well as on the genre of the “roman prozreniia” (“novel of insight/revelation”), a crucial trend-setter in Russian realist literature of the nineteenth century. In their search for ideological and topographical alternatives, these texts also resemble Zionist education novels, created in the first third of the twentieth century, the village prose, and the youth novels of the Thaw. The biographical plot of the exodus prose describes a path towards revelation, similar to paradigmatic narratives by Fiodor Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoi, and Anton Chekhov. Finally, the protagonist’s rejection of old ties and sympathies is strongly reminiscent of the works of Russian realists, where the central moment of the plot is the spiritual awakening of the protagonist, who now sees the familiar living environment in a new light. There, the protagonist (usually a male)

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typically discovers his true self after a long and difficult spiritual search.94 The metamorphosis of the doctor Emmanuil Kardin or of the artillery captain Isaak Fudym from a conformist Soviet citizen to a religious Jew follows the typical paths of epistemic insight tread by the Russian intelligentsia, as canonized in the simplified version of the realist paradigm, the novel Chto delat′? (What is to be done?, 1863) by Nikolai Chernyshevskii.95 Moreover, the structural elements borrowed from the canonical socialist-realist novel include the process of maturation and (self-)education; the motif of trial/initiation and martyrdom, which certifies the protagonist’s conversion; a strict separation between “positive” and “negative” characters,96 which is supported by topography, and the convert’s rigorous separation from the old way of life.97 Apart from that, the exodus prose recreates the idea of a martyred hero, typical for realist, early socialist (Chernyshevskii), and socialist-realist texts. As Dirk Uffelmann has pointed out,98 this motif goes back to the powerful kenotic tradition in Russian culture. In particular, the dissident tragedies created by Liuksemburg, Baukh, and Shrayer-Petrov inherit not only Christian, but, first and foremost, another hero type, which is closer to them in time and culture. It is linked to a very specific literary code.99 “[.  .  .] it is the suffering of a transition”—Uffelmann notices regarding Nikolai Ostrovskii’s hero, Pavka Korchagin [2010: 763]. This conclusion is even more applicable to the aliyah heroes, who have to cross a spiritual and geographical borderline and start living in a new era. While socialist realism secularizes the sacral, as noted by Uffelmann (and before him by Hans Günther and Katerina Clark), the exodus prose transfers that secularized, para-religious structures back into the new Judaism. 94 Some well known examples of such “pereotsenka tsennostei” (literally: “reevaluation of values”), which follows a character’s mental crisis, include Tolstoi’s P′er Bezukhov (War and Peace) and Ivan Il′ich (The Death of Ivan Il′ich), but also Dostoevskii’s Rodion Raskol′nikov (Crime and Punishment) and Chekhov’s Nadia in his novella “The Bride.” 95 On the development from European bildungsroman to the “Russian socialist novel of education” such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s Chto delat′? and then to Gor′kii’s Mat′ (The mother) and Nikolai Ostrovskii’s Kak zakalialas′ stal′ (How steel was hardened), see [Günther 1990: 207]. 96 In a comparative study of the totalitarian literature—of the Stalinist and national socialist novels—Hans Günther notes the same plot elements and motifs I emphasized for the exodus texts as designating the genre. These are “martyrdom as a central theme,” “the motif of ideological immortality,” “a dichotomic principle, which polarizes the characters” [1990: 201–203]. According to Günther, both variants of the totalitarian novel pervert and trivialize the idea of inner development that underlies the European bildungsroman. 97 In the case of a religious transformation, also important is the reference to Christian transfiguration motifs of repentance, penance, and rebirth in Dostoevskii’s novels. 98 See the subchapter “Christology of the Revolutionary” [Uffelmann 2010: 618 ff., 726 ff., 756 ff.]. 99 On the martyred hero in early Sovet literature see [Günther 1993: 179].

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It is a kind of a cultural return, an “Old Belief ” (staroobriadchestvo) purging of decayed traditions. This revision of ideas is not carried out metareflexively; it is performative, it happens on the levels of the text’s structure and poetics. While socialist realism fights against “[t]he genealogy of its own topics” (see [Uffelmann 2010: 725]), the closer—understandably unwelcome—genealogy of dissent works remains in them a “silently speaking” structural element.100 Although the Zionist reheroization of the Jew in exodus texts allows to apply the Christ parallel to their protagonists only to a limited extent, it still lurks among the suffering figures of the texts. Clark calls the concept of history in Stalinist novels a “divine plan of salvation,” as she speaks of “translating history into symbolic form” [2000: 159–160].101 The historical model of salvation vs. apocalypse characterizes the literature of the Revolution and later became part of the totalitarian art in the Soviet Union (and other countries). In the new Jewish literature, the negatively connoted communist-religious totality is superseded by the Judaistic or Zionist one. The former utopia turns into a dystopia, while another effective utopian construct takes its place. What they have in common are chiliastic hopes for a soon-to-come collective salvation and the bodily-physical102 (sectarian-like: cf. [Etkind 1998]) vision of the future: the Revolution and Zionism both aim for a total transformation of reality through a restructuring of space and a radical renewal of humanity. Juliane Fürst shows how strongly the alternative intellectual search, in particular the new Jewish spirituality, in the late Soviet Union was still inspired by the ideals that the education in a socialist society had imprinted on the dissidents: Their identity [of Soviet refuseniks] was formulated by two guiding stars. Behind the Star of David, which expressed their 100 U  ffelmann also describes the antihero of late Soviet dissent as a “ramification of Christimitation” [ibid.: 792] because of his “more or less pronounced topology of suffering.” His example is the autobiographical hero from Venedict Erofeev’s poema Moskva—Petushki. 101 In his study Kommunizm kak religiia (Communism as a religion), Mikhail Ryklin writes of the communist “[в]ера в историческую неизбежность выхода за пределы истории” [2009: 31] (“belief in the historical inevitability of transcending history”). 102 It is significant that the exodus literature often emphasizes the ephemeral, unreal, literary utopian nature of the Soviet system. In Lestnitsa Iakova Emmanuil Kardin reflects on his former infatuation with the literary simulacra of the system: “Идиотская в юности любовь к этим тусклым, тоскливо-мертвым книгам. К ‘Что делать’ Чернышевского. К ‘Городу Солнца’ Кампанеллы” [Baukh 2011: 42] (“The idiotic youthful love for these pale, melancholy dead books. For Chernyshevskii’s What is to be Done? For Campanella’s City of the Sun”). In Baukh’s novel, the recurring motif of sleep and dreams stands for the shadowiness and unreality of Soviet existence as well as the whole of life lived up to now, before the insight.

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desire to emigrate to the Holy Land, the red star of socialism remained clearly visible—both as a vision of a better society and as a symbol of the realities of Soviet life. [Fürst 2012: 139]103 The general crisis of faith, caused by the successive decline of communist values, by the contrast between collective dreams and reality, and by the experience of state antisemitism, triggered off the longing for another meaningful idea, for an alternative utopia (“a crisis that could only be solved through the discovery or rediscovery of ‘truth’” [ibid.: 143]).104 Finally, Jewish (literary) dissent also absorbs topographical sacralization practices of the Soviet state: the topoi of Israel and Jerusalem adopt the auratic attraction the communist capital Moscow had, especially in the early Soviet period:105 “В 20-е и 30-е годы века Москва стала плоскостью проекции необычайной силы: что бы ни происходило в новой Мекке, все преображалось, превращалось в часть ее завораживающей силы” [Ryklin 2009: 32] (“In the 1920s and 1930s, Moscow became a projection screen that radiated a tremendous energy: whatever happened in the new Mecca, everything transformed there, everything became a part of its magic”). The “pilgrimages” of Western intellectuals to Moscow after the October Revolution gave rise to a literary genre of “return from the USSR” as Jacques Derrida put it in Moscou aller-retour (cf. [ibid.: 37]). Moscow became a transrational place of spiritual metamorphoses (cf. [ibid.: 38]), and Clara Zetkin even called the Soviet Union a Holy Land [ibid.: 40].106 The autobiographical and literary fantasies of Israel among the new Jews are full of the ideas of the return to oneself, the space-specific 103 A  paradoxical interweaving of the Israel and Judaism discourses with the communist socialization of the new Soviet Jews was documented in the 1960s by Elie Wiesel: “Les membres du Komsomol qui vont à la synagogue pour Kol Nidré. Les jeunes qui, élevés dans des écoles marxsistes-léninistes, semblent retourner au judaïsme sans savoir ce que c’est” [1966: 99] (“Komsomol members, who go to the synagogue to hear Kol Nidre. Young people, whose school education was infused with Marxism and Leninism, now seem to be coming back to Judaism, even though they do not know what it is). 104 Fürst reflects, for example, on the search for alternative utopias in late Soviet neo-Leninism, Christianity, and other forms of collective faith (cf. [Fürst 2012: 144–152, 161–162]). 105 With reference to the Soviet topography of the 1930s, Vladimir Papernyi speaks of “процесс вертикализации, то есть перемещения границ из социального пространства в географическое” [1985/1996: 107] (“process of verticalization, that is, the shifting of borders from the social space to the geographical one”). The emphasis on Moscow as the “center of the universe” and the increasing hierarchization of various cities become, for Papernyi, the distinguishing features of the Stalinist kul′tura 2 [ibid.: 107–115]. 106 Dina Khapaeva reconstructs the concept of the socialist capital of the 1930s and 1940s as an “urban utopia” in which architectural glory was closely linked to the teleology of terror (“[the] intimate link between Moscow’s archtectural beauty and political terror” [Khapaeva 2012: 174]).

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eschatology, messianism, and the utopia made real [ibid.: 44–45]—echoing everything that was projected onto Moscow by the ecstatic tourists. Moscow, which in the post-Revolutionary years had a unique pull for Jews [Freitag 2004: 76],107 becomes for the now fully assimilated and urbanized late Soviet Jewish intellectuals a topos of a new slavery and the loss of memory imposed on the people of Israel. In contrast to early Soviet communism, the new Jews could make direct use of biblical pretexts and images, reviving their symbols in art and literature. The references to the sources represent here a reclaiming of the Judaistic symbols and allusions reappropriated by the language of the Soviet ideology. In his study of the religious roots of Bolshevism, Mikhail Vaiskopf analyses Lenin’s rhetorical emphasis on topography: in one of the numerous examples, the Soviet leader makes a clear reference to Joshua bin Nun, as he announces the imminent entry of the working class into the “socialist Canaan” [2001a: 135]. This also includes the metaphor of “Marxist Moses” [ibid.: 150–151], which was common among Jewish socialists and popularized by Dem′ian Bednyi. Characteristically, the Bolshevik rhetoric with its dense and denominationally inconsistent intertextuality (Vaiskopf speaks of an “allusive system” [ibid.: 136]) condemns the Menshevik “Old Testament” faithfulness to the “dead letter” of the Revolution, while the Bolsheviks burn with its living spirit. Thus, the new Bolshevik religion reproduces the old Christian reproach of pharisaism, directed against the opposition (see [ibid.: 136–137]), which is conceived (only allegorically, at the time) as Judaism superseded by the Bolshevik “New Testament.” Decades later, the counter-reformation brought about by the Jewish nonconformist intellectuals and otkazniks shows a certain historical logic and bears systemic ideological traits as it reappropriates this language. If we consider the well researched eschatological-messianic expectations, with which the Russian Jewish intelligentsia approached the Revolution,108 and, at the same time, the later Soviet state antisemitism,109 the Jewish spiritual dissenters seem a kind of Old Believers, who avenge the sin of distorting the true sources of the religion in the name of the persecuted minority.

107 O  n the migration of Russian Jews to Moscow in 1917-1932 and the influence of urbanization on the assimilation processes, see [Freitag 2004]. 108 Cf. Efraim Sicher on Judaistic-apocalyptic references in Babel′’s prose, which encoded the moods of Jewish intellectuals in Russia at the time of the Revolutionary turmoil [2012: 85–106; 141–144]. 109 As Vaiskopf shows, already in early Bolshevism there appear evident references to Christian Messianic Judeophobic traditions, above all to the writings of the apostle Paul [2001a: 136–137, 154].

5. Prose of Exodus

When researching the near and far genealogy of the exodus novels, their Jewish predecessors should not be ignored. It is primarily the Russian Zionist prose of the 1920 and the 1930s, which emerged from the chalutzim movement. In its first, not yet self-censored version, Mark Egart’s novel Opalennaia zemlia (1933–1934) fictionalizes both ardent Zionist ideals and their absolute failure. It is a literary utopia, which describes an agricultural, soil-related, biological rebirth of the Jewish nation (“Сионистская утопия, которой одержим герой,—это утопия аграрного, почвенного, биологического воскрешения нации” [Vaiskopf 2004: 149] [“The Zionist utopia by which the hero is obsessed is the utopia of an agricultural, land-related, biological resurrection of the nation”]).110 The pathos of cultivating one’s own land in Palestine, and, consequently, the idea of naturalizing Jewish space is particularly meaningful for David Markish’s novel, in which a new Jewish personality is born topographically. Visions of national, earthbound autarchy already inspired early Soviet Jewish writers whose dreams were projected not on Palestine but on the Crimea, Birobidzhan, Siberia, and the Far East. Some examples are the essays “Dorogi. Po evreiskim kolkhozam Kryma” (“The ways. Through the Jewish collective farms of the Crimea,” 1931) by Semen Bytovoi and “Evrei na zemle” (“Jews on the land,” 1929) by Viktor Fink, or Matvei Roizman’s novel Eti gospoda (These gentlemen, 1932). These texts provided topographical matrices, which enabled the 1970s and 1980s literary counter-projects of the new Zionists.111

110 V  aiskopf also mentions Abram Vysotskii’s novel Tel′-Aviv (Tel Aviv, 1933). 111 In Poland, too, a number of Zionist educational novels were written in the interwar years by authors such as Bernard Zimmerman, Rubin Feldszuh, Henryk Adler, and Jakub Appenszlak. They expressed the intellectual reorientation of the Jewish intelligentsia and its new awareness to national values in the period of great disillusionments. See [Prokop-Janiec 2008: 278–280].

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Nonconformist literature of the “Jewish national revival” was not limited to exodus prose. In this chapter, I take a close look at the following works: “Poslednii noneshnii denechek” (1975) by Iuliia Shmukler, Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera (1977) by Iakov Tsigel′man, “Karusel′” (“Carousel,” 1979) by Iuz Aleshkovskii, Vrata iskhoda nashego (1980) by Feliks Kandel′, Kartiny i golosa (1986) by Semen Lipkin and Sheremet′evo (1988) by Grigorii Vol′dman. The poetics of these texts are very different: there is an affinity to journalism, lyrical essays, parables, and realism. At that, most of them have one common feature: even though they are written from the perspective of an aliyah participant or a resistant Jew, they represent Jewishness, in the first place, as a political category artificially constructed by the antisemitic state. They make no special emphasis on Jewish history, cultural tropes, on Judaism, and on the fate of the diaspora. They are mostly nourished by the tradition of Russian protest writing, the intellectual critique of the state, and the humanistic disagreement with the authorities—a prominent literary tradition, early representatives of which were Aleksandr Radishchev and Petr Chaadaev.1 However, some of these texts

1 This paradox finds a fictional expression in David Markish’s novel Pes (Dog, 1984). The protagonist Vadim is a Russian writer for whom his (factually non-existent) Jewishness is merely a stage in the search for his own identity, one of several ideologies that could give

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(by Kandel′, Tsigel′man, or Lipkin), without dwelling on the metaphysic of prophecy and redemption, also borrow images and metaphors from Jewish cultural contexts. This prose does not always demonstrate high artistic merits, rather, it is an important performative testimony of the literary assimilation of Russian Jewish civil disobedience. Without it, the story of Jewish cultural dissent would not be complete.

6.1. Iuz Aleshkovskii: “Carousel” A “de-ethnicized,” largely political affinity to Jewishness is characteristic of Iuz Aleshkovskii (1929–2022), an author and a screenplay writer, a samizdat satirist, and a Soviet labor camp intellectual, who became known especially for his perceptive self-composed songs and grotesque prose exposing the Soviet regime. In Aleshkovskii’s story “Carousel,” a witty and honest skaz narrator reflects on the late Soviet Jewish emigration. David Aleksandrovich Lange is, first and foremost, a Soviet citizen and only against the background of state antisemitism, a Jew—although he hardly perceives himself as such. Lange describes his national identity in the spirit of socialist internationalism and solidarity. He positions himself as part of the united history and sufferings of the Soviet people:2 Но если бы я был писателем, то я бы написал такое, что у вас фары (глаза) полезли бы на лоб, столько я всего пережил с 1917 года и в голодуху, и в чистки, и в энтузиазм 30-х годов, и в ежовщину, и на фронте, и в тылу, когда взяли врачей, дорогие вы мои. Только не думайте, что все это пережил я один. Миллионы пережили. И пусть у вас не будет мнения о пережитом исключительно одними нами евреями. Если бы, повторяю, я был писателем, я безусловно сочинил бы всего лишь одну толщенную книгу и назвал ее не иначе, как “Всеобщие страдания и переживания народов СССР”. [Aleshkovskii 1983: 7]

meaning to his emigration. Vadim never finds this meaning; his only reasonably stable identity is the nostalgically remembered belonging to a dissident minority in Moscow. Cf. on this novel [Nakhimovsky 1992: 200–207]. 2 Cf. chap. 4.1.

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But if I were a writer, I would write things you would not believe. Your blinkers (eyes), dear friends, would jump out of your head. I have experienced so much since 1917—during the famine, during the ethnic cleansings, during the enthusiasm of the 1930s, during the Ezhov period, at the frontline, and also in the rear, when they arrested the doctors. But don’t think it was only me who has experienced all this. Millions have experienced this. Not that you gain the impression that only the Jews have experienced this. I repeat: if I were a writer, I would write one single big book and give it no other title than “Universal Sufferings and Sorrows of the Peoples of the USSR.” Apparently, Lange internalized the communist doctrine together with the moral values of the Russian intelligentsia. The narrator’s position oscillates between the humorous solidarity with the likeable old worker, whose world is conveyed with the help of a coarse, quick-witted, sometimes obscene speak that performatively unmasks the Soviet system, and the irony of an outside observer. As it is often the case in Aleshkovskii’s texts, this suggests the partial correspondence of the two perspectives. David Lange is an honored factory worker in a Russian provincial town, a war veteran, and a decent man without any illusions about the humanity of the regime and the validity of its propaganda slogans. The story begins with a sad event in his family: David’s son Vova, together with his family, applies for an exit visa to Israel and persuades his father, if he does not come with him, at least to sign the required parental declaration of consent. Although David—aware of the harassment that would follow this step—is unwilling to give his consent before his approaching retirement, he is under increasing attack from the party officials at the factory and the KGB because of his son’s anti-Soviet remarks and open Zionism. The text consists of a number of letters written by David to relatives living in the United States and is, all in all, a mixture of an interior monologue, an emotional report about events, and memories that offer a glimpse of the Soviet past from the perspective of a common man (malen′kii chelovek). The framework of the plot is formed by the reference to the Jewish emigration movement. It serves as a starting point for many accusations set forth against the Soviet state—Stalin’s inhuman politics during the war, reprisals against soldiers who escaped from German captivity, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, genocide of his own people, economic crimes, corruption, and mendacity of the party officials. In a desperate situation, Lange reviews the Soviet history, and at the same time speaks about the recently experienced torments: in the course of

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the anti-Zionism hate campaign, he is interrogated, searched, threatened, finally beaten up and committed to a mental hospital. His decision to leave the country is a consequence of the persecutions, especially because he gained the insight that Jews are the only nation who is not granted the right of independence. David has no feeling of “kinship” with the foreign country in the Middle East. Vova’s new Jewishness, which is expressed in the fact that he wants to live in the country of his “progenitors” (“пращуров”), leaves David cold, while his son’s brilliant invective against the Soviet power, over a page long, moves him to tears: “Я согласен был со всем сказанным Вовой, хотя при упоминании о земле пращуров ничто не шевельнулось в моей душе, для которой самым любимым местом на земном шаре всегда была опушка старого леса на берегу Оки [.  .  .]” [Aleshkovskii 1983: 17] (“I agreed with everything Vova said, even though nothing stirred in my soul when the land of our progenitors was mentioned, the soul for which the meadow at the edge of the old forest on the bank of the River Oka was always the favourite place in all the world [. . .]”). In the course of the novel, David changes the tone of his statements about Israel somewhat, but his last word retains his appeal to his Zionist compatriots to refrain from harsh judgment about Jewish emigrants whose destination is not Palestine. For David, individual freedom is the highest value and its restriction, whether in the name of communism or Zionism, is violence. David repeatedly describes himself as a bad Jew, because his private fate is not good material for generalizations and conclusions about the history of Jews in the diaspora. (On the contrary, Vova’s biography lends itself well to a symbolic interpretation of the Soviet exodus.) The rejection of ideology inevitably implies a distancing from the most important principles of the aliyah movement: “[. . .] я считаю все же, что в этом вопросе не должно быть никакого руководства, граничащего с насилием над судьбой каждого еврея” [ibid.: 248] (“[. . .] I think, in spite of everything, that in this question there should be no authority that borders on the control of the fate of every Jew”). The first-person narrator David Lange writes his letters already from Vienna, which suggests a biographical proximity between his reflections and the views of the real author, who wrote “Carousel” first also in Vienna, then in Paris, and finally in Middletown in the United States, a place that was to become his new home. After a short stay in Austria, Aleshkovskii moved to the United States in 1979.

6.2. Grigorii Vol′dman: Sheremetyevo In the novel Sheremetyevo by Grigorii Vol′dman, all the events happen within two weeks in October 1972, and the plot ends with the emigration of the main

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characters as they depart from the Soviet Union’s most famous airport. In a halfdocumentary form, the novel recreates in detail the discussions of the Moscow otkazniks about the “Jewish question” (evreiskii vopros) in the light of the aliyah. The conversations mostly take place in the homes of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals and center around the figure of Anatolii Levin. The ideological heterogeneity of the late Soviet underground comes to light as a young Jewish activist collects signatures for the rights of Crimean Tatars and imprisoned mothers. This subcultural world, into which Levin has immersed himself since his otkaz half a year ago, is described as follows: [Левин] начал жить в мире вечерних встреч то в одной, то в другой квартире, в мире телефонных разговоров с Западом, в мире протестов, прошений, петиций и демонстраций, в странно-призрачном мире, который именовался “отказом” и существовал, подобно антимиру, в одном времени и пространстве с обычной советской повседневностью. [Vol′dman 1988: 48] [Levin] began to live in the world of evening meetings, sometimes in this apartment, sometimes in that one, in the world of telephone conversations with the West, in the world of protests, petitions, and demonstrations, in a strange shadowy world called otkaz, which coexisted—as an anti-world—in the same time and in the same space with the ordinary Soviet everyday life. Vol′dman’s novel, which is very close to David Shrayer-Petrov’s semiethnographical study Gerbert i Nelli, oscillates between a realistic, psychologically elaborated plot, made all the more believable by an intradiegetic point of view, and essayistic writing, which “channels” the author’s ideological standpoint. Typified biographies of the protagonists are placed near to the reproduction of (fictional?) contemporary documents (such as petitions, essays, and open letters)3 and the examination of the current political or historical events in conversations and monologues. 3 Such as the essay “Antisemitizm—kak politika” (“Antisemitism as Politics”), printed in a Russian newspaper in Tel Aviv, or the multipart text written by the protagonist, “Razmyshleniia Levina o dvulikikh Ianusakh” (“Levin’s reflections on the two-faced Janus gods”). These writings deal with the officially supported, even if not overtly propagated, antisemitism and negative stereotypes about Jews in the Soviet Union, examine the historical background of

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One of the representative life stories belongs to the unsuccessful poet Emil′ Vasserman, whose father was murdered during the purges of the 1930s and who nurses “холодная ярость” [ibid.: 58] (“a cold hatred”) of the regime. Emil learns Hebrew perfectly and then teaches it. He also writes and transfers to the West protest letters and information on new reprisals. After his application for an exit visa is rejected, he loses his job, tries to obtain permission to marry the American Jewish activist Judith, with whom he has fallen in love, and is persecuted by the authorities because of it. After a four-hour search during the night and the confiscation of papers and books, he is called up for military service by mail notification—a proven means of delaying, even preventing, his departure for several years. After Emil′ has been hiding at the dacha for two months, he is arrested, interrogated at a secluded location, and handed over to the court. His trial is an important episode in the novel. Another aliyah fighter is the elder Izrail′ Abramovich Tsunts, an outstanding expert on Hebrew, a former camp inmate, once a cofounder of Jewish kolkhozes in the Crimea. Tsunts has travelled around Palestine in his youth and left a family there. Other otkaznik figures attract attention because of their extraordinary appearance, nicknames such as “Pseudo-Herzl,” or surnames such as “Naftali” or “Balfur.” These are all signs that characterize these people as colorful individuals, and, at the same time, as a selection of a larger milieu, its onomastic political markers. Indeed, the nature of this community determines the remarkable material that is used in the narrative. Among other things, Vol′dman conveys that charm of the alternative, intellectually rich world created under dictatorship, which culminates in emigration. It is an imperturbable resistance stance, which lends the characters a heroic touch; the access to forbidden or hardly available good books that fill the dissidents’ home libraries; the general feeling that underground life is something special because it sets the characters apart from the grey mass of Soviet citizens; and the solidarity of the intellectual, free-thinking minority. This environment, in combination with the suggested significance of the historical moment, acquires idealized ethical characteristics when certain places and corresponding actions take on a ritual-symbolic meaning.4 For example, the façade of the notorious OVIR is popularly called the “Wailing Wall” (“[. . .]

the painful “Jewish question,” including Jewish participation in the October Revolution, the demand for assimilation, and the deceptions of the Birobidzhan project. Seen in this way, the fictional framework fulfils a merely decorative function: it is a simple illusion that hardly distorts the author’s journalistic intentions. 4 Here, everyday life aquires a mythical dimension, but only in the broader sense as noted by Roland Barthes [Barthes 2007].

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сюда приходили с надеждой в глазах и молитвой в душе, а вместо записок с личными просьбами приносили заполненные анкеты” [Vol′dman 1988: 81] [“[.  .  .] people came here with hope in their eyes and prayers in their souls; instead of pieces of paper with personal requests, they brought filled-in questionnaires”]). Arkhipova Street, where the Choral Synagogue is located, functions as a place for meeting like-minded people and for celebrating great Jewish festivals, so that it becomes an oasis of freedom and a topos of resistance: “Улица Архипова известна в Москве не менее, чем Красная площадь или МГУ. Место массового паломничества. Предмет постоянных забот милиции, дружинников и ГБ [. . .] Толпа [. . .] довольствовалась зданием синагоги как символом [. . .]” [Vol′dman 1988: 272] (“Arkhipova Street is as famous in Moscow as the Red Square or the MGU. A place of pilgrimage. An object of constant concern for the police, civil servants, and the KGB. [. . .] The crowd [. . .] was satisfied with having the synagogue building as a symbol [. . .]”). The episode when Tsunts and Vasserman talk loudly in exquisite Hebrew in front of the synagogue and the KGB men (their conversation is reproduced in the original language, but in Cyrillic letters) is not the only example of the visible, theatrical performance of non-conformity, when a political confrontation becomes similar to an exhausting duel between good and evil. Doubts about the role of the Jewish national component in the aliyah movement, articulated by various protagonists—“Вы смелые парни, демократы, [. . .] но вы не евреи” [ibid.: 217] (“You are brave lads, democrats, [. . .] but you are not Jews”)—dominate the identity debates in the novel and reflect, among other things, the self-image of Anatolii Levin. Early in the novel, Levin formulates his credo: he joins the Jewish movement because the Jewish activists’ dream of leaving Russia seems more realistic to him than the dissidents’ utopian plans to build socialism “with a human face.” He is not willing to share the spirit and also the fate of the Russian democratic intelligentsia, which follows Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and to continue the succession of social utopian projects in Russia. His opponent, however, soberly replies that most of the so-called Zionists have no independent ideology and consider the departure merely as a means of protest against the oppression. At the end of the novel, shortly before his departure, Levin dreams of Vienna, Venice, and of travelling the world with his lover, but hardly of arriving in the Promised Land. This cosmopolitan self-conception corresponds to the general concept of aliyah in the novel. Vol′dman’s text is a mimetic-documentary reproduction of remembered and intellectually processed reality; it does not produce symbolic, Judaistically charged structures of meaning. Where some authors tend to transform political realities into signs and parables, to produce

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extreme symbolization and transcend the Jewish history, other authors focus on the signified and choose literary journalism.

6.3. Feliks Kandel′: The Gates of Our Exodus and Semen Lipkin: Pictures and Voices The hybridization of literary genres in the aliyah texts, which often vacillate between fiction, poetry, journalism, and document,5 is also demonstrated in one of the once best-known works of the exodus period—Feliks Kandel′’s volume of essays Vrata iskhoda nashego, published in Tel Aviv in 1980.6 Kandel′ began writing these “Nine pages of history” (Deviat′ stranits istorii) before his repatriation to Israel in 1977—like many other, in the otkaz. Often using the pronoun “we,” in a critical, admonishing, confessing, cursing, and proud way he expresses the collective consciousness of a special “human kind,” the Russian-Soviet Jews, and explains the pronounced historical significance of the present, a break that marks the end of a long diaspora period. On the first pages, he gives a quick overview of the history of the Jewish diaspora in order to lead the reader up to the spiritual crossroads where today’s Jews are: he notes the sad ghetto existence of the “grandparents”—of East European shtetl Jews—and “скудную и беспросветную жизнь в тесных, скученных местечках Украины” [Kandel′ 1980: 1] (“the poor and hopeless life in the narrow, overpopulated shtetls of Ukraine”), mentions the last historical milestone—the “liberation” following the October Revolution and the longed-for integration into the Russian-Soviet society—and finally poses the question about the extent of loss and achievement in the course of assimilation, which has radically divided today’s descendants of the Eastern Jews. Without comment, Kandel′ lists a number of shocking contemporary documents—excerpts from protest letters, applications, and testimonies of Jews who wanted to emigrate, to which openly antisemitic statements full of contempt and menace by the militia, OVIR officials, and public prosecutors form a sharp contrast:

5 The emergence of such mixed genres can be traced back to the development of Soviet prose, which, since the Thaw, has been gradually moving away from the rigorously canonized forms of socialist realism, as well as to the literary context of the aliyah movement itself: the pathos of the new Jewishness, with its tendency towards the poetic and the mythical, converged, as already mentioned, with documentary poetics. 6 For Kandel′’s biography see chap. 2.3.1.

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Мы будем ждать месяцы и годы, если потребуется—всю жизнь. Но не отречемся от веры и надежды своей. Мы верим—молитвы наши дошли до Бога. [Kandel′ 1980: 11] We are going to wait months and years, and if necessary, our whole life. But we are not going to renounce our faith and our hope. We believe—our prayers have reached God. Еще чего захотел! Он думал, что им откроют школы и театры! Русский народ выделил вам Биробиджан, и поезжайте туда! [. . .] Отработайте сначала русский хлеб, который вы ели. . . . [Ibid.: 16–17] What’s he thinking? He thought that we would open schools and theatres for them! The Russian people has given Birobidzhan to you, so go there! [. . .] First work off the Russian bread you ate . . . The subjective message of Kandel′’s work—a succession of reflections, memoirs, autobiographical testimonies, and quotes from Soviet press articles as well as reports from court trials of Anatolii Shcharanskii and Ida Nudel′, famous Jewish dissidents who were close to the author—is composed of bitter conclusions about the effects of the once longed-for assimilation, which turned out to be similar to collective amnesia, or even apostasy in the broader sense. The result is a synthetic, suggestive writing, which here finds its most suitable mode of expression—that of an essay. As in Sheremetyevo, the author appears as an uncompromising advocate of the exodus movement with an insider perspective, a dichotomous separation between “we” and “they,” and a powerful historical generalization. Kandel′’s autobiographical narrator chooses the mode of moral questioning, critique, and accusations directed towards a whole generation, as he tries to understand the drastic cultural impoverishment and marginal social position of Russian Jews as a collective guilt of the Jewish people in the diaspora. He accuses the Jews of a tendency towards convenient subordination, mimicry, self-dissolution, and fatal invisibility, for example in indicating their nationality during the census (“Познакомьтесь: Владимир Израилевич Рабинович— русский. Семен Маркович Раппопорт—молдаванин. Илья Соломонович Лившиц—узбек” [ibid.: 48] [“May I introduce? Vladimir Izrailevich Rabinovich—Russian. Semen Markovich Rappoport—Moldovan. Il′ia Solomonovich Livshits—Uzbek”]) or in the depreciation of their own history

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(“Героев своих не помним. Не слыхали о могуществе и унижениях, о взлетах и падениях народа своего” [ibid.] [“We do not remember our heroes. We have heard nothing of the greatness and the humiliations, of the soaring flights and the falls of our people”]), or in the increasingly fragmentary or even erased memories of the customs of the parents and the grandparents (“Не знаю, что во мне осталось еврейского. Разве только в паспорте графа—‘национальность.’ [. . .] Я помню с детства мацу с ложечкой красного хрена . . . [. . .] Еще я помню волчок на Пурим” [ibid.: 63] [“I don’t know what is still Jewish in me. At the most, the entry in the passport under ‘nationality.’ [.  .  .] I remember, from my childhood, matzah with a teaspoon of red radish . . . [. . .] And the whirligig for Purim”). Zoological metaphors for the tamed and mutated Russian Jews, repeatedly crossed with other “species,” demonstrate—in a provocative (purposeful?) repetition of antisemitic stereotypes—the voluntary rejection of one’s own being: Вот и выросло новое поколение. Ручные евреи. Смирные. Покорные. Улыбчивые. Прирученные и одомашненные. Евреи на полставки. [. . .] Таких нужно показывать в зоопарке. “Кормить и дразнить разрешается.” [. . .] А еще через поколение: зубро-зубро-евреи, зубро-бизоно-евреи, зубро-медведе-евреи. [Kandel′ 1980: 212] And now a new generation has grown up. Trained Jews. Peaceful. Humble. Smiling. Tamed and domesticated. Half-time Jews. [. . .] Such Jews should be shown in the zoo. “Do feed and tease.” [. . .] And a generation later: bison-bison-Jews, bison-buffalo-Jews, bison-bear-Jews. Another example of biological interpretation of the ethnical is the literalized metaphor of uprooting:

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Есть особый способ выращивания овощей. Когда семена сажают не в землю—в специальный питательный раствор. Для получения удивительных результатов . . . Вот такие и мы, евреи. Нас оторвали от земли, от корней наших, нас насильно пересадили на особый идеологический раствор [. . .] и полезли, вдруг, диковинные растения с несуразными плодами, появились евреи-мутанты. У которых нет прошлого. [Kandel′ 1980: 143] There is a special method of growing vegetables. When the seeds are planted not in the soil, but in a special solution, rich in nutrients. For achieving amazing results . . . That’s the way we Jews are, too. We were torn out of the earth, away from our roots, forcibly transplanted in a special ideological solution [. . .] and suddenly strange plants with shapeless fruits began to shoot out of the earth, the Jewish mutants appeared. They had no past. Emphasizing biological markers of deformation and “denaturalization” of the Jewish people in the diaspora, Kandel′—on purpose or not—adopts the Zionist concept of a new, natural, and wholesome man, intended to replace the uprooted type of the galut Jew. In doing so, he affirms the Zionist biologization of Jews, which has formed, among other things, the ideological foundation for Israel’s citizenship concept.7 Characteristic is the reference to Jewish history, which goes through the whole text. This history is the source of many images that can be used for comparison: the heroic fate of the ancestors, who were tortured and burned for their religious resistance, is contrasted to the pitiful worries and fears of contemporary fellow travelers and conformists with their spiritual impoverishment, who persecute the small group that retained the ideals of the past. The concept of common memory, “память российского еврейства” [ibid.: 69] (“the memory of the Russian Jewry”), becomes a warning symbol that

7 In the manifold critical-ironic, subversive metaphors of the deformed (transplanted, crossbred, mutated, “healed” by memory or, on the contrary, terminally ill) Jewish personality, which recur in Jewish nonconformist literature, the popular motives of the new Soviet man are turned into the negative. In Efrem Baukh’s novel, which I discussed earlier, the psychiatrist Kardin calls such changes “изменение психического состава личности” [Baukh 2001: 163] (“a change in the psychical constitution of the personality”), which took place over the sixty years of Soviet rule. Often, this polemic essentialization of the ideology’s effects betrays the desire to return to an ideal, original, unspoilt state.

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links Kandel′ with other authors of the exodus wave. A misuse of memory is manifested in the erasure, misappropriation, or rewriting of Jewish gravestones at the Dorogomilovo cemetery, where Kandel′’s grandfather once lay: “Дошлые мужички стесывали с них старые надписи, бойко выбивали новые. Работа шла конвейером . . . Могилу моего деда мы не нашли. В войну на этом месте было неизвестно что. Говорят, полигон. Учили солдат” [Kandel′ 1980: 93] (“Clever lads scraped off the old headlines and quickly chiselled the new ones. It was like an assembly line . . . We did not find the grave of my grandfather. It was not clear what was at this location during the war. People said, a firing range. Soldiers practiced here”). The desacralization of Jewish memorial objects and sites and their use for practical, often military purposes become, as mentioned above, the locus communis of Jewish literature, whose authors are obsessed with the revision of the past. The erasure of the Holocaust crimes from the Soviet memorial canon is a common topos of this literature. In Semen Lipkin’s prose piece Kartiny i golosa, the narrator quotes an article about the city Auschwitz from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in which the extermination camps are not mentioned even once [Lipkin 1986: 45ff.]. Similarly, literature dealing with Jewish topics is increasingly moved from the public memory stores—the libraries—to the margins and finally locked away in the archives. The fate of the sixteen-volume Jewish Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, published in Russia in 1906–1913, became a popular motif of Jewish cultural memory that had been marginalized by the authorities or erased—voluntarily, out of fear—by the Jews themselves. In the story “Son ob ischeznuvshem Ierusalime” (“Dream about the disappeared Jerusalem,” 1996) Grigorii Kanovich describes how in 1953 Jewish books were destroyed or hidden by their owners: “Шестнадцать томов дореволюционной еврейской энциклопедии уносили в ночь, как шестнадцать гробиков. То были костры избавления от возможных улик, от вещественных доказательств вины, хотя виной была сама причастность к еврейству, сам факт рождения под еврейской крышей” [Kanovich 2002: 169] (“The sixteen volumes of the pre-Revolution Jewish encyclopedia were carried into the night like sixteen little coffins. They were pyres to remove possible evidence, the material evidence of guilt, although this guilt consisted already in belonging to the Jews, merely in being born under a Jewish roof.” The fate of the Jewish Encyclopedia is also a theme in Kandel′’s text: В больших библиотеках она стояла в открытом доступе, рядом с другими энциклопедиями: подходи и бери. Потом она перешла на самую нижнюю полку, у пола, где не всякий и заметит. Потом ушла во второй ряд книг, где не заметит уже

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никто. Потом сгинула в спецхранении, где выдавали далеко не каждому, а только со справкой с места работы, что требуется она для определенных научных исследований. [Ibid.: 142] In the large libraries it was at first in the general access, among other encyclopedias: come in and check it out. Then it wandered to the lowest shelf, just above the floor, where not everyone would notice it. Then it was moved to the second row of books, where no one could find it any more. Later it disappeared in a special depository, where it was not lent to everyone, but only against a certificate from the place of work that it was needed for certain research purposes. The shifting of the books downwards and backwards, and then from general access section to a special depository, which follows the gradual concealment of everything Jewish, serves as a spatial metaphor of progressive exclusion. In one episode, the narrator buys the valuable edition from a Jewish family who wants to use the money to buy a color television: a “symbolic” exchange that is supposed to characterize, according to Kandel′, Soviet Jewishness in general. “Говорят, что евреи Испании уносили в изгнание могильные плиты своих близких. [. . .] Все повторяется” [ibid.: 93, italics in the original] (“It is said that the Spanish Jews took the gravestones of their close relatives when they were exiled. [. . .] Everything repeats itself”). The allusion to one of the key events in European Jewish history—the exile of the Spanish diaspora in1492—shows the continuity of persecution and allows a broader contextualization of the Soviet policy of exclusion—Lenin’s solution of the question of nationalities, the executions of 1953, and the anti-Zionist hate campaign of the 1970s are foreshadowed by the pyres of the Middle Ages and the Beilis affair centuries later. The repeated references to Judaism become tropes of lyrical resemantization in Kandel′’s essay. In the chapter “Kadish” (“Kaddish”), the word otkaz is introduced with an epigraph from the Pirkei Avot8—the narrator laments the universal otkaz of the galut Jews. It is the denial of one’s own face, the flight, and the renunciation: “Отцы наши жили в вечном отказе. [. . .] В отказе от себя, от предков своих, от книг и от песен, от обычаев и обрядов, от Дома

8 The well-known saying attributed to Rabbi Tarfon is quoted: “Не на тебе кончить работу . . .” [Kandel′ 1980: 208] (“Not you will finish the work . . .”).

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постоянного, в котором светло и уютно” [ibid.: 209, italics in the original] (“Our fathers lived in the eternal otkaz. [.  .  .] In the otkaz [renunciation] of themselves, of their ancestors, of their books and songs, customs and rituals, of a stable Home where it would be bright and comfortable”). The chapter mentioned above, which is based on the Jewish mourning prayer Kaddish, describes in rhythmic prose the narrator’s walk to the synagogue in Moscow: the images of the city and the prayer house alternate with the words of the prayer for the departed and the living Jews. Through this walk, which draws a continuous line of thought and steps from the past to the present, the renunciation is transformed into self-empowerment, acceptance, liberation achieved with the exodus: “Разрешение шагнуть к самому себе” [ibid.: 210] (“The permission to take a step towards yourself ”). Speaking of sin, repentance, and redemption—a small-format and rather secularized echo of the apocalyptic visions created by Baukh and Liuksemburg—the author interprets the sufferings of the Soviet Jews as an outrageously low spiritual price for the possibility to return to oneself. In the here and now, the exodus means, first of all, to go away without return. This is made clear with the help of allusions to the Bible as well as to Greek antiquity: in the past, the Jews who looked back at their old fatherland in a foreign country, were transformed into pillars of salt, paralyzed by memories and longing [ibid.: 222]. This image evokes the story of Lot’s wife and thus suggests an identification of Russia with the biblical Sodom. The diaspora is understood as a place of sin, and staying there is tantamount to spiritual death.9 The flight to Israel from Sheremetyevo airport turns into the crossing over the dead River Styx, because the voice announcing the boarding is compared to the voice of the mythological ferryman Charon: “И Харон-перевозчик уже объявляет по радио посадку на самолет . . .” [ibid.: 224] (“And Charon, the ferryman, already announces the boarding . . .”).10 The polyvalent motif of repatriation as a 9 In Efrem Baukh’s Lestnitsa Iakova Jewish exodus also acquires meaning through intertextual references, but Baukh alludes to other biblical places: Kardin’s patient Plavinskii reminds him of the Jewish scholar Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, who fled from the besieged Jerusalem and, after the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the holy objects, founded rabbinical Judaism, thus saving the Jewish faith in other countries. This allusion to the Jewish models should help Kardin to interpret his “escape plans” positively and to answer the question: “Можно ли, не подлость ли—бежать из обреченного, но родного города?” [Baukh 2001: 197] (“Is it permissible, is it not vile to flee one’s own condemned city?”) 10 The heterogeneous nature of this intertextuality reflects the diverse intellectual interests, cosmopolitanism, and often eclecticism of the late Soviet aliyah movement. Only in a few cases the aliyah was connected with a serious or exclusively religiously motivated immersion in the Jewish tradition and the corresponding literary strategies. Usually, this movement was mixed with other intellectual alternatives to Soviet doctrine. Michail Vaiskopf speaks of

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miraculous transfiguration and, at the same time, death and rebirth is expressed in Kandel′’s text with the help of concise intertextual references. The prose piece by the Soviet Jewish poet and translator Semen Lipkin, Kartiny i golosa, published in 1986 in the samizdat in London, shows analogies to Kandel′’s essays, which point not so much to a direct influence, but rather to the shared cultural and literary contexts. Combining elements of fiction, essay, and drama, Lipkin reflects, in part autobiographically, on the sad fate of the East European Jews in the twentieth century. The visit to his native Odessa in 1969 gives the narrator an impetus to remember the Jews from his childhood who once populated this region: “Во мне не хотят умереть те, кто населял эту крикливую, плачущую, молящуюся и грешившую окраину, добровольное гетто” [Lipkin 1986: 10] (“Those who populated this noisy, crying, praying, and sinning periphery, this voluntary ghetto, don’t want to die in me”). In the prelude to this nostalgic text, Lipkin describes those people who lived on the legendary Moldavanka: they were poor, common, and dirty, and yet the narrator feels an attraction towards them because they are associated with the charm of the eternal loss. Lipkin’s lyrical prose is far from Kandel′’s radical renewal pathos. The main theme in Kartiny i golosa, however, is also the erasure of Jewish memory initiated by communism, the Holocaust, and by the Jews themselves as a fatal consequence of exile. As almost all the authors mentioned above, the narrator takes up a well-known symbolic version of history, and puts the murder of Jews in World War II down to an ur-event—the Babylonian exile, as he sees a foreshadowing of this catastrophe already in the vision of the resurrected Jewish dead in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. The authorial narrator identifies himself with all the displaced and tormented Jews—those of the Prague Ghetto, of Babylon, of the last war: “Во мне живут голоса тех перекочевок, и голоса гетто, и голоса войны [. . .]” [ibid.: 14] (“The voices of those resettlements, and the voices of the ghettos, and the voices of the war live in me [. . .]”). All Jewish victims, all the polyphonic structure of “pictures and voices” are forever imprinted in the writing self. It is a kind of quintessence of the humanistic, secularized late Soviet Jewishness, which states that Jews are “khaoticheskaia pestrota” (“chaotic colorfulness”), which shaped intellectual Soviet life in the 1960s–1980s and influenced Russian literature in Israel: “Тут смешивались остаточные культы Хеменгуэя и Сэлинджера, квазинаучная фантастика [. . .], Окуджава, Галич, надрыв Высоцкого, [.  .  .] контрабандный оккультизм журнала ‘Наука и религия,’ йога, почвенничество и православное возрождение, стимулировавшее возрождение иудейское [. . .]” [2001b: 242] (“The remainders of the cult of Hemingway and Salinger mixed here with the quasi-science fiction [. . .], with Okudzhava, Galich, the overstimulated singing of Vysotskiiy, [. . .] the smuggled occultism of the journal Science and Religion, with yoga, the ideology of the return to Russan roots, and the orthodox rebirth, which stimulated the Jewish one [. . .]”).

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a fateful community, dispersed and always persecuted. However, a discussion between the inmates of a Polish ghetto in chapter 19, “Kartina” (“The picture”), sheds light on the political context of the text’s creation: the period of aliyah. Gathered and isolated in the small space of the Jewish ghetto, the inmates debate whether the strength of European Jews lies in their traditional scholarship and mysticism or in the new resilience that will eventually pave their way to Palestine [ibid.: 62ff.].

6.4. Iakov Tsigel′man: The Funeral of Moishe Dorfer When the question of a Jewish homeland reemerged in the late Soviet Union, it promoted the emergence of literary texts that focused not only on the forwardlooking project of resettlement to Israel, but also the Soviet project of a “Red Palestine” in the Birobidzhan in the Far East—a “socialist variant” of “the Zionist idea of the gathering of the Jewish people” [Kuchenbecker 2000: 157]. In nonconformist prose, the assembly of Jews within the idiocratic space of the USSR functions as a negative, fictitious equivalence to the exodus, which for the first time would mean the crossing of an ideological borderline and thus liberation. Birobidzhan is an aggravation of the state of galut, a mimicry of exile, which contrasts with Palestine. Iakov Tsigel′man began his novel Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera in Birobidzhan, where he worked for the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern from 1970 to 1971 and observed the cultural life of the Jewish Autonomous Republic.11 It was created from the diaries, which he secretly kept there and later tried to transport from Leningrad to the West. Their dissident contents eventually led to his expatriation and emigration to Israel. After his repatriation, the diary notes developed into a prose piece, published in 1977 in the magazine Sion. As Soviet propaganda brochures and newspaper articles in the late 1920s and early 1930s show, the program of creating a Jewish Republic in Birobidzhan was designed by the communist party as both an antithesis and a reflection of 11 Cf. Tsigel′man’s memories of this period of his life in an interview with Ian Toporovskii: “Мне захотелось узнать, что такое Еврейская область, что в ней еврейского. И я поехал туда просто посмотреть. Просто понаблюдать. Я поехал посмотреть Биробиджан” [Toporovskii 2010] (“I wanted to know what the Jewish Republic represented; how Jewish it was. And I went there just to see. To observe. I wanted to see Birobidzhan”). It is significant that Tsigel′man, the nonconformist Jewish author, paid his visit to Birobidzhan in the time of the aliyah, as part of which he saw himself: “В те времена, в начале семидесятых годов, началась алия, а я всегда хотел уехать из Советского Союза” [ibid.] (“In those days, in the early 1970s, the aliyah began, and I always wanted to leave the Soviet Union”).

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the Zionist project. The Zionist rhetoric, the topoi and metaphors of the Jewish state in Palestine were reinterpreted and redirected at the “red Zion.”12 In the course of the korenizatsiia (rooting-down) policy, this design was combined for Jews with the hope of developing their own culture in the Soviet Union, while Zionist visions were to be transplanted into another space that belonged to the Jews: “Birobidzhan became a total substitute for the ‘Promised Land.’ Characteristics previously attributed exclusively to the Land of Israel were now used in literature in regard to Birobidzhan“ [Kotlerman 2009: 18]. In his study of the Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater from 1934 to 1949, Ber Kotlerman explores how Zionist images, such as that of the biblical land where milk and honey flow, influenced plays written by Perets Markish, Emmanuil Kazakevich, and Itsik Fefer. For example, the ideal of the new Jewish man, who has both feet firmly on his own ground and creatively redesigns his natural environment, was borrowed from the Zionist thought and found its way into the poetry of Perets Markish and Hirsh Dobin [ibid.: 19ff.]. To contextualize the images of Birobidzhan in the era of late Soviet Jewish nonconformism with its Israel-inspired idealism, it is important to mention the Zionist underpinnings of this project and the rhetorics of Birobidzhan as a better, a more just version of Zion voiced by Soviet functionaries and Jewish intellectuals. Decades later, during a new revival of their collective self-consciousness, Jews found it important to distance themselves rigorously from the Soviet regime, and interpreted the Soviet state as a perpetuation of the galut or as the new Egypt—an interpretation that offered the Jews the possibility of a different topographical identity and demanded a revision of Soviet sacred symbols, or, as we have seen, the return to their old, original, and “authentic” meaning. An attempt was made to reach the hidden original layers of the cultural palimpsest and to purge the later overwriting. The communist distortion of authentic Jewish topoi, primarily that central topos of the Promised Land, was to be unmasked, and Jewish tradition recovered. For the very reason that Birobidzhan simulated the myth of the Promised Land, it became a suitable counter-space for Jewish dissent, a projection of disappointed hopes, a negative foil of the Israeli utopia. In Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera, there is no explicit opposition of Birobidzhan and Palestine, but the novel would be neither possible nor understandable without this contrast. It expresses the bitterness and the revision of the Jewish collective dream of Birobidzhan, which could have appeared only in the context of active discussions about the history of Russian Jewish geography during the struggle for repatriation. 12 See also [Kuchenbecker 2000: 159–160].

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The title of the novel, in which the death of a (fictional) actor of the Jewish Theater is addressed, stands for the death or stillbirth of the Jewish culture in Birobidzhan and in the Soviet Union in general. The picture of cultural and spiritual decay is shown in fragments, loosely connected by the narrative axis, which represent random overheard conversations, monologues of the protagonists, the narrator’s train of thought, city descriptions, and biographies. As other writers do, Tsigel′man interprets the identity crisis of the Soviet Jews with the help of digressions into history that take up the question of guilt. Once again, self-denial, the compulsion to adapt, and forgetting become the key. Theater—the central theme of the narrative—provides suitable metaphors of illusion, deception, mimicry, and self-concealment: —Маска приросла. Маска, надетая для потехи, приросла, палач тоже убивает в маске. И не пробуй сдирать маску, она стала твоей кожей. [. . .] —Когда-то мы жили согласно с нашими убеждениями. Потом убеждения превратились в желеобразную массу— сомнения разрушили цементирующий восторг. Теперь мы уверенно убеждены, что убеждений нет. —А нужны ли убеждения? Сегодня я—один, завтра—я другой [. . .] [Tsigel′man 1981: 22–23] “The mask has stuck to our skin. The mask, which we put on for fun, has stuck, the executioner also kills while wearing a mask. And don’t try to scratch off the mask, it has become your skin.” [. . .] “Once we lived according to our convictions. Then the convictions became a jelly-like mass, doubts destroyed the cementing joy. Now we are absolutely convinced that there are no convictions.” “And do we need convictions at all? Today I am one person, tomorrow another.” [. . .] The image of the mask stuck to the face unmasks Birobidzhan, revealing that it is a theater performance, a play, or, more precisely, a tragicomedy—it is said of one of the adapted Birobidzhan Jews, Aba Vinokur: “Он—действующее лицо в трагикомедии ‘Еврейская жизнь в ЕАО’” [ibid.: 35] (“He is a character in the tragicomedy ‘Jewish Life in the JAO’ [ Jewish Autonomous Oblast]”). This implies the artificiality of the plan to found a Jewish “state” in a remote, almost

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uninhabitable place, and the pretense of the officially declared Jewish autonomy. Furthermore, the above-cited conversation of newspaper editors shows the process of degradation that leads from romantic belief of the Jews in the idea of their own land to the loss of values and conformity. The history of Birobidzhan in the story is told using the example of several individual plot lines, narrated by a polyphonic babble of voices. At the same time, the story is under the constant direction of an invisible prosecutor, the narrator. The reader learns the biography of the eponymous character, Moishe Dorfer, from a dispute between two Jews, one of whom refuses to place the Jewish symbol mogn-dovid, a Star of David, on Moishe’s grave. The other, an old friend of the deceased, who is horrified by the cowardice of his interlocutor, tells a young man who happens to be present about Moishe’s studies under the famous Solomon Mikhoels, the beginnings of his acting career in Brazil, and his romantic dream of the 1930s to let the “idishkait” (Yiddish culture) flourish in Birobidzhan. As one of the many Birobidzhan culture enthusiasts, Moishe came here from Latin America because he believed in the realization of the Soviet-Jewish project in the Far East. After the imprisonment of his wife Lyuba, who was sent to the camp as a “cosmopolitan” because she wrote poems in Yiddish, the closure of the Jewish theater (“Театр имени Кагановича закрыл сам Каганович!” [1981: 16] [“Kaganovich himself has closed the Kaganovich theater!”]), and the arrest of the actors, Moishe made his living as a tailor in a factory, ostracized as the husband of the enemy of the people. The relaxation of reprisals did not bring about a revival of the Jewish culture, but rather its erosion and unification: “туфта, халтура, эрзац. Ничего еврейского—только название” [ibid.] (“Swindle, bungling, ersatz. Nothing Jewish—just the name”). In addition to life stories marked by persecution, torture, executions, and trauma, there are biographies of conformity, party careers, and inner degradation. Itsik Bronfman, a former tractor driver, war soldier, and poet, now a mediocre, cautious journalist, becomes a member of the Writers’ Union and head of the industry department in the Birobidzhaner shtern. Aba Vinokur, intelligent, educated, and ironic, wrote a doctoral thesis on “The reactionary role of Judaism in the post-Revolutionary period” and several essays in the journal Science and Religion, and now he teaches history and aesthetics at the local teacher training college. Among his ancestors, the imagined author of the chronicle of the Vinokur family finds innkeepers, distillers, or even pious Hasidim, and later the members of the Evsektsiia—radical fighters against Jewish religious traditions in the time of the early Sovietization. Aba himself is a quiet functionary who has kept only the mask of Jewish skepticism. Abram Kravets is one of the many

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“invisible Jews”: he is a veteran who fought and accomplished heroic deeds in the World War II, later a convinced party member and an enthusiastic colonizer of Birobidzhan. He became quiet and indifferent only after returning from the prison camp, where he spent seven years after his arrest in 1949. The daily routine in the office of the Birobidzhaner shtern is conveyed by conversations: to refute the last “Zionist provocation,” the journalists need ready evidence proving that the Jewish culture is flourishing in Birobidzhan and a colleague who writes an anti-Zionist defamatory article. Leib Zalmanovich agrees, albeit out of desperation. In order to give the Zionists no grounds for “spiteful attacks” [Tsigel′man 1981: 32] (zlopykhatel′stvo is only one of the numerous words borrowed from the rhetoric of the Soviet propaganda), a text is to be published that covers up the antisemitic motives of an attempted murder. The public prosecutor has already done his part of the job, but weak protest can still be heard in the newspaper office. The Jewish employees of the Jewish newspaper should not emphasize or even show their Jewishness. They print articles in Yiddish, but only the Hebrew characters indicate this. Their Yiddish is free from hebraisms; it is composed of stereotyped propaganda formulas from the party newspaper Pravda and of borrowings from the German language—a dead language in a doubly figurative sense. Similarly, the Soviet-Yiddish literature is deprived of its unique stylistic and thematic characteristics. At the meeting of the prose section of the Birobidzhan Writers’ Union, the members discuss a short story, the national/ethnic characteristic of which is that the protagonists bear Jewish names: Jews must not differ from Russians. The spoken Yiddish, which was once supported by the authorities as the language of the Soviet Jews’ culture, degenerates into the secret language of the marginalized: —Ша! Тише! —Их рэйд дох аф идиш! . . —Эр вэйс идиш, эр лэрнт идиш! —Гевалт, идн! —Ша! [Tsigel′man 1981: 22–23] “Quiet! Keep your voice down!” “I do speak Yiddish! . . .” “He can speak Yiddish, he learns Yiddish!” “For God’s sake, you Jews!” “Quiet!”

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It is a secret language because most of the Birobidzhan cultural functionaries do not speak Yiddish “после знаменитой бойни 48–52 годов” [ibid.: 57] (“after the famous massacre of 1948 to 1952”), and it has mutated into a foreign language. In the quoted dialogue, the Jews warn each other about a colleague who is learning Yiddish and could therefore spy on and denounce them. Apart from the ideological role, however, Yiddish also fulfils a narrative function in the novel. Performatively, it generates new meanings. Yiddish segments, sprinkled without translation in the Russian flow of words, are not merely the remnants of the repressed culture: they mark the author’s affinity to this culture in the times of Jewish resistance against absolute Russification.13 At the same time, the hybrid text is able to express the latent bilingualism in which Russian and Yiddish merge into a special Jewish skaz. The hybridity is conveyed by phrases such as “Они на Западе думают, что если здесь я и Миллер, так уже есть у нас еврейская культура—а?” [ibid.: 19] (“They think in the West that if me and Miller are here, then we have Jewish culture—eh?”) or: “Я должен стыдиться?! [. . .] Га? [. . .] Как вам это нравится?” [ibid.: 15] (“I should be ashamed of myself?! [. . .] Ha? [. . .] How do you like it?”). The orality, idiomatic character, and dialogism of Tsigel′man’s text mark a special field of linguistic play, where Jewishness can still be expressed freely.14 While, on the thematic level, a total loss is documented, the narration shows that the Jewish culture have been partially preserved. In his representation of Jewish skaz, Tsigel′man uses the devices of mimic imitation, which Efraim Sicher calls “Yiddish interference” in his study of Babel′’s prose: “In both ‘Shabos Nakhamu’ and ‘El′ia Isaakovich and Margarita Prokof ′evna’ Yiddish idioms and sayings are calqued directly into the Russian text, producing an amusing Yiddish subtext [.  .  .]” [Sicher 1986: 73ff.]. This subtext, which conveys the ambivalence of Babel′’s narrative voice “between [the] Jewish past and the Revolution” [ibid.: 74], for Tsigel′man encodes the language contamination as a testimony to an almost lost cultural hybridity. Tsigel′man’s text incorporates Jewish elements as the language of the Other,

13 Tsigel′man is one of the few contemporary Russian Jewish authors who are familiar with the traditions of the East European Jewish culture and language from their family environment: “Я рос в еврейской семье, у нас говорили по-русски и на идише, знали и понимали, что такое ‘идишкайт’, праздновали еврейские праздники, и у меня была религиозная бабушка. А потому я знаю с детства о еврействе и о себе” [Toporovskii 2010] (“I grew up in a Jewish family, we spoke Russian and Yiddish, we knew and understood what idishkait was, we celebrated Jewish holidays, my grandmother was a believer. And that is why I have known about Jewishness and about myself since my childhood”). This knowledge enters his works not only diegetically but also on the level of poetics, as the analysis in chap. 7.2 will show. 14 On the semiotics of Yiddish, see [Harshav 1990 and 1994] and chap. 9 below.

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similar to Babel′’s hybrid prose, which brings together different linguistic and cultural codes on the level of signifiers, as well as behind it, in multifaceted connotations. In Babel′’s texts, Sicher notices “the borrowing or ‘importing’ of linguistic or cultural components stylistically marked as ‘other,’ ‘subculture,’ or ‘non-standard’ in the repertoire of the socio-cultural hierarchy” [Sicher 2012: 90]. However, while Babel′ in “Konarmiia” intrinsically ties the minoritarian position of the Jewish with the repressiveness of the ruling Russian “high culture” and thus points out the tragic ambivalence of the revolutionary epoch, this significant symbiosis is missing in the anti-Soviet literature of the 1970s. In a work that was not intended for publication in the Soviet Union, the “subtle referentiality and playful interference” [ibid.: 106] are absent. The Jewish skaz of the Birobidzhan Jews is a fragment of the former Russian Jewish multilingualism expressed with a theatrical, bitter, and isolated vividness. Nevertheless, Tsigel′man takes up the synthetic heritage of Russian Jewish culture and, above all, that of Babel′, in order to document the “continuity of Jewish national existence” [ibid.: 94] at the time of its extinction and posthistory. The central metaphor of decay and death is embodied in the topography of the city. Birobidzhan is a spatial palimpsest, a place of half-faded or obsolete signs, of worn-out symbols and cultural gaps. The traces of former life—the building materials and tools symbolizing the founders’ enthusiasm—lie buried under rubbish heaps. On his walk through the city, the narrator associates its backyards with cemeteries of history. Birobidzhan symbolizes oblivion, which seems natural and yet is evidently the consequence of a taboo, a decades-long prohibition of a culture. The plasticity of the hidden, deserted spaces such as old backyards, rubbish dumps, and small streets reveals the diachronous materiality of the historical tragedy.15 As he “seeks the truth about the city” in these degenerated spaces, the narrator becomes an archaeologist of the past: “[. . .] вхожу во дворы и ищу правду о городе, старую правду городской истории” [Tsigel′man 1981: 27] (“[. . .] I go into the courtyards and seek the truth about the city, the ancient truth of the history of the city”).

15 In Tsigel′man’s text, the prolonged, “natural” process of cultural decay is juxtaposed with the conscious strategy of reappropriation, concealment, and subordination pursued by the authorities—the technique of eradication, overwriting, and utilization of everything Jewish. This can be seen, for example, in the use of the gravestones from the Jewish cemetery as pavement material in a former Jewish shtetl after the war. Moishe Dorfer talks about this: “Я видел, что могильными плитами с еврейского кладбища выстланы теперь тротуары. Да-да, я шел по каменному тротуару и вдруг увидел! . .” [ibid.: 43] (“I saw that the sidewalks were now paved with the gravestones from the Jewish cemetery. That’s right, I was walking along the stone pavement and suddenly I noticed it! . . .”). Such actions were motivated not least by the economical idea that past culture was useless for the acute needs of the present.

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The poor, small metal monument of Lenin, “exiled” here from Kharkiv, is surrounded by the modern buildings of party organizations (“горком партии” [“City Committee of the Party”], “обком комсомола” [“District Committee of the Komsomol”], and others) [ibid.: 50], and the State Security (KGB). The faceless, gray architectural symbols of the regime, referred to as “коробки” [ibid.: 51] (“boxes”), mingle with low, dilapidated wooden houses and huts—the memory of the first Jewish settlements in Birobidzhan and the hardships of the construction time. The central Lenin Street and the dusty, dirty Sholem Aleichem Street—the latter a showpiece of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union—“creep” (“ползут” [ibid.: 50]) parallel to each other. The building of the former Jewish State Theater (GOSET) is half-destroyed and faded. On the wide asphalted courtyard in front of the building, the whole theater library was burned in the years of the state terror. The library, which bore the name of Sholem Aleichem, one of the few permitted Jewish classics, once comprised a huge collection of Jewish books from various cities and countries—“почти полмиллиона книг на разных языках мира” [ibid.: 52] (“almost half a million books in various languages from the whole world”)—all thrown in the flames. On the other side of the street, there is the dirty purple building housing the office of the Birobidzhaner shtern. The description of the city conveys the semiotics of the coexistence of different phases of Jewish history in the Soviet state—up to the almost complete dissolution in the present. At the same time, the close proximity and the partially overlapping identities of Jewish and Soviet spaces present an uncanny politicalcultural symbiosis, which has its origins in the 1920s. Now, it has finally failed and is captured in the decaying matter. Jewish signs—names of organizations, Yiddish plaques on the buildings—are symbols devoid of meaning on the surface of a unified and already agonizing culture. The iconic symbols of decay form a background for documentary and publicistic passages offered by other authors of the Jewish underground: the discussions about Jewish assimilation, antisemitism, and the responsibility of the Jews for their history. Analyzed or mentioned are the wide-spread arguments, which can be traced back to Christian anti-Judaism, and their adaptation into the communist model of the state, as formulated in the writings of Marx and Lenin: the concept of dangerous invisibility of Jews and especially of Jewish intellectuals; the image of Jews as destroyers, saboteurs, and adepts of bourgeois philosophy, capitalists and secret Talmud followers, insensitive to political reeducation; and, finally, the idea of the necessity to control and “normalize” the Jews through physical labor.

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Moishe Dorfer, whose conversations with his students take on the meaning of a tragic lesson, paradoxically interprets the dramatic art and thus the art of transformation as loyalty to oneself. From here, he derives the ethical justification of the autonomous value of Jewish diaspora culture: the price for the golus (the galut) is the creation of a cultural and spiritual fusion (“splav” [ibid.: 45]), the opposite of self-abandonment. Theater, associated with the hiding of the self behind a mask and the implicit “contagion” of real life with art, is thus reinterpreted as the true creative activity, which aims at connection and inclusion.

6.5. Iuliia Shmukler: “This Last Day” As mentioned previously, one of the central topics of the Jewish protest literature is the subversion by Jewish intellectuals of the ideological image of the culturally and ethnically open-minded family of Soviet peoples. Nevertheless, satirical devices of the Jewish samizdat and tamizdat still remain literally unknown.16 The conflict between malen′kii chelovek (“common man”) that was first reflected in Aleksandr Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik and then repeated by many of the great Russian prose writers, took a new, historically and culturally contextualized, form: the opposition of a powerless Jew, marginalized or forced underground, and the overpowering, depersonalized Soviet ruler. Nonconformist Jewish texts, often use the poetics of the absurd and the parody as well as what I call the genre of counter-panegyric in order to unmask the hypocrisy of the Soviet internationalism. The result is a highly ironic and tragicomic writing—the narrative inversion of praise for the Soviet dictators and party functionaries, first of all, Stalin as the most mythical and folklorized tyrant apart from Lenin.17 Remarkable here is the ritual, archaic, and parareligious character of communist homage, which the authors sarcastically revise and reverse: against the background of the officially prescribed collective prichitanie (“mourning”) on the occasion of Stalin’s death, the Jews saved by this very death

16 One of the rare publications on this topic is Rita Genzeleva’s article “Satira evreiskogo samizdata: Feliks Kandel′” (“Satire of Jewish Samizdat: Feliks Kandel′” [Genzeleva 2003]). 17 On the sacralization of rulers in Soviet culture, cf. the very comprehensive research literature, especially [Groys 2003, Klark 2000, Brooks 2000, and Garstka 2005]. In his fundamental investigation of Russian panegyric tradition, Christoph Garstka finds the origins of the “religiously founded relationship between ruler and subject” in the Byzantine tradition of the sacral ruler cult [2005: 81]. With regard to the worship of the communist rulers, he speaks of the return of the epidectic attitude that was weakened in the nineteenth century [ibid.: 291].

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secretly cheer (as, for example, in Mark Zaichik’s post-Soviet novella “V marte 1953 goda” [“In March 1953”]). The funeral service sometimes turns into a carnivalesque Purimshpil—a Jewish salvation ceremony. The funeral procession becomes a mad revel, a bizarre street party that reflects, in a distorted form, the “outbreak of a mass pathological irrationalism” [Luks 2010: 128] during the Stalinist mass celebrations. In the short story “Poslednii noneshnii denechek” (“This last day,” 1975), the author Iuliia Shmukler, who repatriated to Israel in the 1970s,18 creates an ingenious counter-panegyric, a counter-prichitanie based on the communist funeral ritual and a desecration of the posthumous cult of Stalin. The atmosphere of the story is created by the public persecution of Jews in Moscow shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953. The ironic narrator associates the Judeophobic, bloodthirsty atmosphere of the Russian “Orthodox” people under Stalin with the wild thirst for the pogroms before the Revolution: “Свободы очень хотелось, хоть свободы жидов бить” [Shmukler 1975: 23] (“People sorely missed freedom, even if it was only the freedom to beat Jews”). Thus, the Stalinist regime degrades into a dark banality: from the perspective of an educated Jew, the pogroms and deportations planned by Stalin shortly before his death can be placed in the history of Judeophobia throughout Europe. For the father of the schoolgirl Zhen′ka, the protagonist of the story, “средневековые ауто-да-фе были такой же реальностью, как киевский погром пятого года [. . .], Бабий Яр, где лежали бабушка и дедушка, как бараки Освенцима и будущие бараки Биробиджана” [ibid.: 24] (“the medieval autos-da-fé were just as real as the Kiev pogrom of 1905 [. . .], as Baby Yar, where Grandmother and Grandfather lay, as the barracks of Auschwitz, and the future barracks of Birobidzhan”). The grief panegyric begins when Zhen′ka’s school teacher Ksana officially informs the children of Stalin’s death: Она [. . .] дрожащим голосом начала: —Нашу партию, народ постигло великое горе . . . Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин, вождь всего прогрессивного челове . . .—Ксана закусила губу, [. . .] и закончила—болен. [Shmukler 1975: 32]

18 Unlike, for example, Grigorii Vol′dman, whose biographical background is almost unknown, Iuliia Shmukler’s life is recounted in her short autobiography: Iuliia Shmukler, “Avtobiografiia,” https://libking.ru/books/prose-/prose-rus-classic/213249-yuliya-shmukler-avtobiografiya. html, accessed January 4, 2023.

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She [. . .] began in a trembling voice: “Our party, our people have been struck by a terrible disaster . . . Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, the leader of the entire progressive mank . . .” Ksana bit her lips [. . .] and finished the sentence: “is ill.” The conventions of the funeral glorification are immediately subverted by the parallelism of the secret Jewish cheering and the official grief hysteria: Дома царило подпольное ликование. —Он, конечно, уже умер,—говорил папа,—иначе они не осмелились бы напечатать. Ты помнишь, Лиля, как он писал о Троцком? Собаке—собачья смерть. —Подожди еще,—сказала суеверная тетя Лиля,—Вдруг он встанет. —Не встанет,—сказал папа.—Лиля, есть в доме водка? [Shmukler 1975: 33] There was an underground rejoicing at home. “He is, of course, already dead,” said Father, “otherwise they would not have dared to announce it. Remember, Lilia, how he wrote about Trotskii? That dog deserves to go to the dogs.” “Wait,” said the superstitious Aunt Lilia. “Maybe he’ll rise again.” “He won’t rise again,” said Father. “Lilia, is there any vodka in this house?” The sacralization of Stalin in the Soviet collective consciousness is comically reproduced here in but the words of the naïve, superstitious Aunt Lilia, who is afraid that the dead man might rise again.19 The domestic space of Zhen′ka’s family, called “underground” in the above quotation, is contrasted—according to the famous semantic oppositions of space, as modelled by Iurii Lotman [1970]—to the public space of the school, where the hysterical mourning of the deceased leader takes place. Ксана тихо легла в обморок, как покойница. Ее подняли, посадили в президиум, и она глядела оттуда совершенно 19 On demonic attributes of Stalin in the collective unconscious see [Groys 2003: 93].

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безумными, припадочными глазами. Директриса [.  .  .] держала речь. Со времен Маркса не было такого гения,—сказала она [. . .] Спасибо товарищу Сталину за наше счастливое детство. Товарищ Сталин отдал жизнь борьбе за счастье народное, это был Вождь земного шара. Полководец, генералиссимус, отец родной . . . Директриса стала всхлипывать. В ответ заголосили со всех сторон. [Shmukler 1975: 33] Ksana fainted quietly, like a dead woman. They helped her to get up, sat her on the dais, and she looked from there with absolutely insane, epileptic eyes. The director [.  .  .] gave a speech. Since the days of Marx, there was no such genius, she said [. . .] We thank Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood. Comrade Stalin sacrificed his life to fight for public happiness, he was the Leader of the globe. A commander, the generalissimus, our dear father . . . The director began to sob. Then people started crying from all sides. Ksana’s funeral oration combines the propaganda rhetoric of the Stalin personality cult with the traditional Russian lament: after the death and subsequent canonization of Lenin, this ideological synthesis was part of the “refolklorization” of Soviet culture (cf. [ Justus 2000]). In her speech, she uses stereotyped epideictic formulas such as excessive hyperbolization, which was the main device of funeral panegyric, cosmogonic (“Вождь земного шара” [“leader of the globe”]) and folkloric (“отец родной” [“our dear father”]) tropes, as well as Christian sacralizing paraphrases (“отдал жизнь борьбе за счастье народное” [“has sacrificed his life for the public happiness”]), with which the ruler Stalin is exalted into transcendence. Together, these elements comprise a fixed ritual, meticulously worked out and canonized by the totalitarian culture. They are unmasked as such in the text, which focuses on the perspective of the radical alterity of the marginalized Jews. In the course of the story, the dichotomy of the official homage and secret vilification, grief and cheering undergoes a spectacular development and comes to an outrageous, theatrical climax. The walking of the girls, who are ordered to attend the funeral and to pass by the beloved leader’s coffin—and then gradually the entire funeral procession—become a taboo-breaking ecstasy of joy, a march of carnival-like obscenity. “День стоял сверкающий. Солнце шпарило с голубого неба, не считаясь с конъюнктурой [. . .] дул легкий, легкомысленный ветерок” [ibid.: 34] (“The day was brilliant. The sun shone from the blue sky,

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without paying attention to the official decrees [. . .] a weak and careless wind blew”). The girls see a tree decorated with many galoshes of different sizes; a lady sits on the fence, “являя миру обширный зад в лиловом трико” [ibid.: 35] (“showing the world a huge ass in purple tights”); one man is wearing a stocking on his neck instead of a scarf; there is lingerie on the ground, people are exchanging shoves and crude jokes. “Не смеяться было невозможно. Девчонки [. . .] совсем обезумели, носились, как молодые псы [. . .] как-то все забылось в этом фантастическом угаре веселья, греховного и потому особенно буйного” [ibid.: 35] (“It was impossible not to laugh [. . .] The girls completely lost control, they raced like young dogs [. . .] somehow they forgot everything in this fantastic euphoria, which was sinful and therefore particularly unruly”). This key episode reproduces Bakhtin’s model of the culture of laughter: a short, limited by a single day, but comprehensive and collective taboo-breaking occurs in a society dominated by repressive restrictions. The contrafaction of the mourning rite is marked with leitmotif expressions such as “опять смеялись” (“they laughed again”), “cмеялись до слез” (“they laughed till they cried”), “непристойное, неуместное веселье” (“dirty, inappropriate joy”), “безумный восторг” (“insane delight”), and so forth [ibid.: 36]. The text “gathers the power of carnivalesque laughter that undermines all orders and authorities” [Volkmann 1998: 33]. A temporary escape from the strictly standardized world is accompanied by coarse folk humor, as described by Bakhtin referring to Rabelais’s and Gogol′’s writings: this grotesque animalistic behavior, the compulsory disguises, brawls, and deglorification [Bakhtin 1965] produce the subversive semantics of a party in place of a funeral procession. Characteristically, the ecstasy of this folk festival unites Jews and non-Jews, and for a short time relativizes, even lifts, the previously irreconcilable antagonisms. The long suppressed need for freedom also liberates the archaic, dark, and barbaric instincts, that are unleashed in the finale. The euphoria ends up in a catastrophe: the mass of people turns into a murder machine, the ruler’s funeral becomes a bloodbath. The monstrous nature of the Soviet dictatorship reveals itself here as the irrationality of the Soviet collective unconscious. “[Женщины] задыхаясь, с вытаращенными глазами, лезли в [.  .  .] центральный поток [. . .] каждый издавал короткие панические вскрики [. . .] Это была смерть, неизбежная, чудовищная” [Shmukler 1975: 37–38] (“puffing wide-eyed [women] pushed their way into [. . .] the center column [. . .] everyone gave short panic-stricken screams [. . .] It was death, inescapable, terrible”). At the end, the narrator reports succinctly that more than two thousand people died in the crowd, and some girls from Zhen′ka’s school were crushed to death or disfigured.

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The hysterical mourning panegyric on the occasion of the dictator’s death is reversed in the text with the help of laughter and bodily obscenity, and later with collective horror. The secret Jewish festival of Purim thus ends with a posthumous revenge of Haman, and Jewish salvation remains an illusion. In this short-term liberation, in suffering and death, Jews and non-Jews briefly become the same, and the Soviet people becomes a single victim ambivalently blending with the perpetrator.

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7. Negated Dichotomies: The Failed Utopia of Aliyah

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi describes two types of Jewish travel narratives since the beginning of the galut. The first type is a teleological and linear journey to Zion, inspired by utopian visions and a desire to reach one’s goal. It includes not only traditional pilgrimage literature, but also Zionist texts starting from the end of the nineteenth century. The second type focuses on a failed arrival in the Promised Land, a random, circular movement, leading back to its starting point, which conveys the author’s skepticism about the idea of salvation and gathering of the Jews in Palestine. The stories of these second type, “though based on the model of pilgrimage, [. . .] are suffused with a modern skepticism and a form of critical thinking that refuses to take refuge in the promise of collective social or religious redemption” [2000: 28]. Both types of travelogues express in different ways the basic condition of the long alienated Jews, the never-ending dichotomy of foreign land and return. Ezrahi calls Sholem-Yankev (Yakob) Abramovich’s (Mendele Moicher Sforim) picaresque novel Masa’ot Binyamin ha-Shelishi (The travels of Benjamin the third, 1878) a paradigmatic example of the ironiccircular wandering in search of Zion. Benjamin, a naive Jew, a shlemiel, a shtetl Don Quixote, enthusiastically departs on his search for the lost tribes of Israel and the mythical river Sambation, but he never gets beyond the neighboring villages. This text is a parody of famous Jewish travel narratives, among others,

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the stories of Benjamin of Tudela (twelfth century) and Israel Joseph Benjamin (nineteenth century). Taking into account Ezrahi’s typology, we may say that Abramovich’s maskilic satire with its revision of Zionist utopism became the prototype of all skeptical travel fictions about Israel up to the twentieth century. Jewish repatriation produced a number of bitter-ironic plots of aliyah experiences, in more or less drastic opposition to the symbolic code of the Zionist literatue described above. The fact that both models of representing aliyah appeared at about the same time and, if written by one author, are only occasionally distributed to different periods of their creativity, shows that this phenomenon not necessarily reflects different stages of one process, but rather a synchronous plurality of opinions about Israel. It is also important that the two mutually opposing conceptions of return to the Promised Land both hearken back to a rich tradition of Jewish diaspora travelogues and revise it in their own way. Prose texts such as Grigorii Svirskii’s journalistic-autobiographical trilogy Vetka Palestiny (The branch of Palestine, 1970–1993) in three parts: Zalozhniki (The hostages, 1970), Proryv (The breakthrough, 1982), and Begstvo (The escape, 1993), Efraim Sevela’s Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! (1975) and Prodai svoiu mat′ (Sell your mother, 1982), Iurii Miloslavskii’s Ukreplennye goroda (Fortified cities, 1980), David Markish’s Pes (1984), or Iakov Tsigel′man’s Prikliucheniia zheltogo petukha (Adventures of the yellow rooster, 1986) produce a variety of poetics, but each time, their structure refutes the idea of the irreversible crossing of topographical and spiritual borders. An important motif in Russian-Israeli literature is the tautological reappearance of homelessness on the other side of the border and the bad infinity of wandering. The closest prototype of late Soviet and post-Soviet revisions of the Zionist utopia were the early Soviet anti-Zionist prose works, such as Opalennaia zemlia by Mark Egart (1933–34/1937)1 and Semen Gekht’s Parokhod idet v Iaffu i obratno (The steamer goes to Jaffa and back, 1936). Other important pretexts include Il′ia Erenburg’s novel Burnaia zhizn′ Lazika Roitshvanetsa (The stormy life of Lazik Roitshvanets, 1927), which is deeply rooted in Yiddish tradition, and Samuel Joseph Agnon’s famous Hebrew novel Tmol shilshom (Not so long ago, 1945). To a varying extent, these texts anticipate the Christian motif of the eternal Jew and the typical plot developments of later prose, consisting in the consecutive disillusionment of the idealist central character, as well as the

1 About this novel and its problematic, changing relationship to Soviet political ideology, which is evident from the comparison of the 1934 and 1937 versions, see [Khazan 2001, Vaiskopf 2004, and Shrayer 2011].

7. Negated Dichotomies: The Fai led Utop ia of A l iyah

detailed portrayal of material hardships, misadventures, and ethnic conflicts in Palestine. In Erenburg’s novel, the tragicomic figure of the Soviet-Jewish perpetual wanderer Lazik Roitshvanets alludes to the archetypal characters in the works of Mendele Moicher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem—the poor kleyne mentsheles from the shtetl and luftmenshn, the men of the air. This socio-critical and selfironic tradition of Jewish and especially of Yiddish literature still bears traces the maskilic enlightenment satire. These traces also make their way—through the reception of Erenburg’s Soviet-Jewish version—to Efraim Sevela’s texts in particular, but also to David Markish’s works. The Jewish tailor from the Ukrainian Gomel, repeatedly reprimanded and expelled by the Soviet authorities, lives through a series of “emigrations”: to Poland, Germany, Paris, London, and Palestine. Lazik’s humble goal is to survive, but that becomes a problem everywhere. He tries to adapt to the specific circumstances of the respective environment, to get into different characters: Erenburg grotesquely describes several failing assimilation attempts of an individual Jew. Under pressure, Lazik’s “self ” becomes extremely flexible, yet he becomes a bother to his environment again and again. Even in Palestine, where Lazik finally goes as his last resort, unpleasant things happen. There, Lazik meets his compatriot Adamchik, who tells Lazik that he was beaten first by the Arabs and then by the Jews. The Jews beat him twice: once for selling newspapers in Yiddish, the “jargon” despised in Palestine, and then another time because he was smoking on Saturday. As Adamchik complains, “Старые цадики, когда они приезжали в Палестину умирать, вовсе не были такими идиотами. Это здесь самое подходящее занятие” [Erenburg 1991: 196] (“The old tzaddikim who came to Palestine to die were no idiots. Here, this is the most suitable occupation”). In the Promised Land, Lazik is forced to beg, is beaten, sent to prison, and longs for his old homeland, Gomel′, in the face of his approaching death. Lazik is not even allowed to die on Rachel’s holy grave, because he is poor and disgraces the holy place with his presence, but above all because he scares off rich Jews willing to pay. Anja Tippner shows that in his novel, Erenburg sets in motion the “textual machine” of unstoppable movement through cities and countries, which is fueled by the ongoing labeling of the protagonist with omnipresent Jewish stereotypes as well as by Lazik’s own assimilation attempts that nourish these stereotypes. Finally, Lazik starves to death in unintentional imitation of the old Jewish tradition of dying in the Holy Land. The projections and “the demand for a normative identity” [2008: 339] never stop:

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However, the hope of finding himself in Palestine is lost. Above all, it fails because the protagonist is asked for one last act of adaptation he can no longer perform—the transformation from a Jew to a Zionist. Roitshvanets’s trip to Palestine is not a reverse movement, not a return to one’s own roots, as the migration of the East European Jews [Ostjuden] to Palestine is conceptualized in Zionism, but another stage of alienation. [Tippner 2008: 338] It is important to note that the arrival in Palestine and the motif of starvation signify an “emaciation” not only of the protagonist’s physical, but also of his “symbolic reserves,” “an exhaustion that makes further strength-sapping efforts to construct identities impossible for him” [Ibid.: 339]. The attempt to reassign new versions of identity and override the old ones, and the negation of previously meaningful geopolitical contrasts, are conducive to the demythologization of the aliyah concept in the late twentieth century as well. The abolition of dichotomies does not produce a new, hybrid identity, a symbol of the “third space” often idealized in postcolonialist thinking,2 but reveals an empty space that brings identity and space together in a negative way. Behind the pessimistic view of repatriation, there is another reference to tradition. Reflecting the literary reaction of Yiddish authors such as Shalom Ash to the hardships of revolutions and emigration, Mikhail Krutikov writes of the revival of the Jewish religious idea of kiddush ha-Shem.3 This concept “allows the author to incorporate the new phenomenon of immigration into the endless chain of catastrophes that befell the Jewish people in the course of their history. Taken to the extreme, this paradigm represents the immigration as a new form of the old kiddush ha-Shem motif in the same way it represents the revolution” [2001: 121].

7.1. Efraim Sevela’s Zionist Counter-Narratives In the novel Prodai svoiu mat′ (1982), Efraim Sevela, who was himself a prominent aliyah fighter a few years earlier, describes the futile and absurd search for the Jewish homeland. The narrator, a Russian Jewish emigrant, has 2 See the analysis of hybrid vs. dichotomic Jewish identity in Dina Rubina’s prose in [Parnell 2004]. 3 Krutikov refers to Shalom Ash’s eponymous 1921 novel (see Krutikov 2001: 157). Kiddush ha-Shem is translated as the “sanctification of the name [of God]” and means martyrdom accepted in the name of faith.

7. Negated Dichotomies: The Fai led Utop ia of A l iyah

left his “historical homeland” Israel, leaving behind his daughter Ruta. Ruta, a fanatical Israeli soldier, feels that her father has betrayed their homeland, and is especially grieved by the fact that he lives in Germany and has obtained a German passport. However, the national identity Ruta found is called in question simply because it is largely constituted and justified by the hatred for the Germans and the present enemies of Israel. Ruta divides the world into Jews, who live in Israel and fight for their land, and enemies. As a result, her Jewish identity is defined as a subject of struggle and ressentiment, as it was for Jews in the Soviet Union. Sevela is one of the Jewish authors who are not afraid of sobering historical and geopolitical comparisons, and for whom therefore any national or ideological mythologies become the object of artistic deconstruction. In Prodai svoiu mat′, the space of Israel enters into a three-fold relation to Europe. As a place of life, it is exotic and provincial for a Soviet Jew: “Для меня, европейца [. . .] это экзотическая, красочная страна, куда хорошо приехать туристом. И только” [2004b: 220] (“For me as a European [. . .] this is an exotic, colorful country that you can visit well as a tourist. But nothing more”). Secondly, in a disastrous way, it continues to reproduce Jewish ghettos in the diaspora, where Jews were huddled together, surrounded by enemies: “Во мне ещe слишком свежа память о каунасском гетто, где мы были скучены на крохотном пятачке и должны были в этой тесноте дожидаться, когда нас прикончат” [ibid.: 219] (“My memories of the Kaunas ghetto, where we were driven together on a tiny spot and had to wait in this narrowness until we were killed, are still too fresh”). And third, despite bloody experiences in Eastern Europe, Israel endeavours to achieve socialism. In that respect, it shows an ominous affinity to the abandoned Soviet “homeland.” Political differences are relativized, historical changes questioned. The traditional idea of return as “part of the future-related promise of salvation” [Banasch/Hammer 2005: 283] fails.4 In its place comes the guarantee of tragic historical continuity. It is important that—regardless of negative analogies—the idea of Israel remains untouchable for the narrator: as a Jew who has experienced antisemitism and genocide in the galut, he is prepared to die for Israel. Despite everything, Israel for him is the only home available to the Jews. As Erenburg before him, Sevela ironically revises the above-mentioned Jewish tradition, according to 4 Sevela undertakes a sharp and bitter analysis of Israeli conditions, and especially of Israel’s potential to become a home for ex-Soviet and other immigrants in a previously mentioned autobiographical book Poslednie sudorogi neumiraiushchego plemeni (1975). There he comes to the paradoxical conclusion that Israel is accelerating the assimilation of Jews to other peoples by killing every trace of their national feeling [2007a: 181].

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which the galut Jews came in their old age to the Holy Land to die. Sevela’s narrator is ready to die for the Jewish country, but not to live there. Prodai svoiu mat′ is one of several works by Sevela that refute the Israeli utopia, such as his earlier novel Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! (1975), which Andrzej Jankowski calls the reinterpretation of the legend of the Eternal Jew [2004: 141].5 Christian prototypes of the eternal Jew Ahasver and the prodigal son determine the semantic structure of Sevela’s (inter)texts. Characteristically, Sevela’s narrator, socialized in a secular Soviet environment, refers, most likely together with his author, to the well-known episodes of the New Testament. The general knowledge of the Soviet intelligentsia about Jews feeds on the much-quoted fragments of the Bible. In this rather stereotypical way, the parable of the prodigal son is reinterpreted at the end of the story: with a bitter self-contradiction, the narrator hopes that his daughter will later bring him, “the prodigal father” (блудного отца), back home to Israel. The idea of the chosenness of the Jewish people, either mystical or due to a special historical fate, which lends an idealistic foundation to the exodus prose, undergoes a radical reevaluation in Sevela’s work. Belonging to the Jewish people is a meaningless burden. Far from feeling any religious or spiritual ties to other Jews,6 in Prodai svoiu mat′ the narrator sees his Jewish inheritance as an unfortunate accident. The life conception of the “awakened” aliyah Jews, which essentializes the idea of Jewish national unity, is opposed, in Sevela’s text, by the conception of Jewishness as complicit perpetuation of external projections. In place of tragic messianic chosenness, he offers images of historically doomed lives: Мы от рождения несем на себе крест еврейства, взваленный на наши плечи не нами. И страдаем, и платим высокую цену за принадлежность к народу, который мы не избирали и получили в наследство от своих предков, вместе с тысячелетней давности счетами, которые человечество не устаeт предъявлять каждому поколению евреев. [Sevela 2004b: 222] 5 The motif of heat and stifling air that plague the protagonist of Prodai svoiu mat′ in Israel becomes a metaphor of spiritual thirst. The climate is a polyvalent symbol in both texts, standing for lack of intellectual freedom. In Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! Sevela uses the description of the Israeli “climate” to refer to the prevailing religious laws—the rules that call the immigrant Jews to obedience. 6 Sevela’s Soviet-Jewish protagonist attributes the inability to perceive Israel as a homeland to the lack of Jewish traditions in galut: “Ну какие же мы евреи? В Бога не верим. Еврейских традиций не соблюдаем. Языка своего не знаем” [2004: 222] (“Are we even Jews? We do not believe in God. We do not observe Jewish traditions. We do not know our language”).

7. Negated Dichotomies: The Fai led Utop ia of A l iyah

From birth, we bear the cross of being a Jew, which others made us carry. And we suffer, and we pay a high price for belonging to a people that we have not chosen, but inherited from our ancestors together with millennia-old bills, the bills humanity does not grow tired of having every new generation of Jews pay. Among the representations of failed acculturation in Israel, Sevela’s predecessor Il′ia Erenburg’s finds a very expressive image: his Lazik understands the Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine almost as little as the Arabs, because Hebrew for him is only the loshen koidesh, the language of his prayers, and is threatened by both. In the finale of Sevela’s novel Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! as well as in the final chapter of David Markish’s Pes, the longing of the protagonists—who have arrived in Israel—for the Soviet Union and their attempt to come back creates a narrative repetition, a circular movement that is not only spatial but also ideological. This, now second and real, return leads to a tragic dead end: on the flight to Soviet Union, Sevela’s protagonist naively tells his entire story to a camouflaged KGB employee, and Markish’s character dies when he tries to illegally cross the Soviet border near a guard’s post. In Markish’s text, too, the Soviet is equated with the Israeli, and the recognition becomes most painful for characters with weak connection to Jewish tradition and a fictionalized image of Jews.7 Markish’s protagonist, the nonconformist writer Vadim Solov′ev encounters in Israel what he calls “literary racism” [Markish 1984: 233]. His book is rejected by a literary commission because it does not include Jewish topics. “Получается, что весь мир застроен клетками [.  .  .]. И каждому писателю отведена одна-единственная клетка, и нельзя писать о другой,”— concludes Vadim [ibid.: 235] (“It turns out that the whole world is built with cages [. . .]. And every writer has a single cage assigned to him, and he is not allowed to write about any other”). The reversal of opposites only makes clear the similarities between the two countries, both dominated by party spirit, national exclusion, and intolerance. This is the bitter conclusion of the Russian anti-Zionist prose starting from the time of the chalutzim: while early anti-Zionist prose celebrated the return

7 As Alice S. Nakhimovsky notes, in Markish’s Pes, emigration destroys Vadim Solov′ev’s one-sided idealizing concept of the Jews—“a romantic view of the Jew as the prototypical intellectual—someone who rarely drinks, studies hard, and overcomes great odds to get in education” [1992: 201]. As a contrast to this ideal type of diaspora Jew, the novel presents fanatically religious Jews in Bnei Berak as well as Vadim’s provincial, profit-seeking fellow countrymen who are busy with the little things of everyday life.

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from Palestine to the young Soviet “Promised Land,” for the late Soviet Jewish political opposition, weary of all utopias and grand social projects, this act is the final self-deception. A distant echo of the maskilic parodic anti-epos, the Zionist counter-plots reproduce the disillusionment of a Jewish Don Quixote, a naive dreamer, and his inglorious return home or his death. The geopolitical and geocultural loss of faith, which has already found its expression in literature with the beginning of the aliyah, marked the end of the last utopias. They were succeeded by a growing pluralism and descreasing rigor and exclusivity within Russian Jewry. In this sense, the time after the collapse of the Soviet empire, characterized by the increasing heterogenization of the ex-Soviet Jewish diaspora, is a post-utopian period. The literary deconstruction of the spiritual opposition between Israel and the Soviet Union—a minus gesture that shakes the balance of dichotomies—can therefore be seen as the first stage in the formation of extra-hierarchical Russian Jewish identities, now developing in various countries and on various continents.

7.2. Iakov Tsigel′man’s Novel-Palimpsest Iakov Tsigel′man’s “novel-palimpsest” Prikliucheniia zheltogo petukha is an original, fantastic, and surrealist version of the skeptical travelogue—a plot focusing on a fictional journey that combines the parabolic narrative with an intertextual play and tells the history of emigration. The animal metaphor used in the title resembles the biological tropes of Jewish identity we have seen in the exodus texts, which problematize and ironically subvert Jewish assimilation, adaptation, and mimicry patterns.8 Here, it finds a literal expression in the image of the central character, a yellow rooster.

8 This interpretation of the animal metaphor in Russian Jewish prose requires some further literary-historical argumentation. As it is clear from the title, and from the structure of meaning, of David Markish’s novel Pes, the image of the dog is, first of all, a metaphor for the Soviet police and control system. But it is also a symbol of eternal wanderings and homelessness of a Soviet-Jewish intellectual. With it, Markish refers to a prominent predecessor—Shmuel Joseph Agnon—and his above-mentioned novel Tmol Shilshom. Agnon’s protagonist, Yitzhak Kumer, a descendant of an ordinary East European Jewish family and an ardent Zionist, moves from Galicia to Palestine and experiences a great disappointment there, although in the second part of the novel he is more or less able to adapt to life in the Holy Land. His mysterious doppelganger is the mad stray dog Balak, whom everyone curses and kicks away. In the end of the novel, Balak bites Yitzhak to death. Amir Eshel interprets this doubling of characters as representing the impossibility of reaching the holy space (makom) in the real country of Palestine: “In the figure of the wandering dog who becomes one with the gray Zionist Kumer, Agnon masterfully codifies the modern radicalization of the ancient tension

7. Negated Dichotomies: The Fai led Utop ia of A l iyah

The novel can be seen as an extended allegory of strangeness. The protagonist is the son of a hen and a canary and therefore is not loved by his mother. He is only able to grasp his misfortune when he happens to hear a canary singing and is able to answer in the same language. After that, he understands that he has only one option—to leave his birthplace. The problem of “split identity” becomes immediately apparent to the yellow cockerel—an intellectual among the simple folk: Кто я? Внешне никто не отличит меня от петуха. Но кто приглядится ко мне, тотчас обнаружит, что слишком я желт для обыкновенного петуха. А разве я кенар? Кто они и кто я? Немного я знаю про них, то есть про нас. Главное знание мое идет из каких-то моих глубин. [Tsigel′man 2000: 33] Who am I? On the face of it, I am nothing but a rooster. But anyone who looks at me closely will immediately realize that I am too yellow for a common cock. So what, am I a canary? What are they and what am I? I do not know much about them, that is, about us. My most important knowledge comes from the unclear depths of my nature. The human protagonist of the novel and the alter ego of the yellow rooster, AF, is also a hybrid. “Белокурый молодой человек с крупным носом” [ibid.: 37] (“a blond young man with a big nose”), he has the stereotypical characteristics of both the Slavic and the Jewish appearance. AF travels to Israel and takes the yellow rooster (as it turns out, a plush toy!) with him in his suitcase. In harmony with the hybridity of his characters, Tsigel′man creates a hybrid literary genre. Here, fiction is combined with historical digressions and literary analysis, which are sometimes quite long. The numerous quotes and allusions

between cosmos and makom” [2003: 132]. A fusion of the real space and the spiritual makom can only be achieved with death. In Markish’s novel Pes Vadim Solov′ev also searches in vain for his only home, until he dares to return to his native land, and is also bitten to death by a dog in the finale. Vadim’s inexplicable aversion to dogs and, at the same time, his repeatedly mentioned resemblance to one seem already anticipated in Agnon’s plot. It is significant that Agnon, deeply rooted in Jewish traditions, describes the problems of the Jewish settlement in Palestine and the inadequacies of the Zionist ideology from an insider’s viewpoint, as a fellow participant in the Zionist project. On the other hand, Sevela, Miloslavskii, Markish, and Tsigel′man are assimilated Jews, who inhabit a different socio-historical context and present an external perspective, which results in a radical rejection of Israeli reality.

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are often integrated into the flow of text, and the reader has to decode them. Through a variety of intertextual references, the discourse of emigration becomes a journey through the history of literature and culture: the reader finds here references to Nikolai Karamzin’s Pis′ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian traveler), Aleksandr Pushkin’s Puteshestvie v Arzrum (The journey to Arzrum), Afanasii Nikitin’s Khozhenie za tri moria (A journey beyond the three seas), Vasilii Tred′iakovskii’s Ezda v ostrov Liubvi (The journey to the island of Love), and the novels by Ivan Goncharov. The observations on travel narratives in Russian cultural context are supported by references to cultural historians and ethnologists. Thus, the yellow cock, from whom most reflections and sometimes entire inserted essays originate, forms the idea about the specific historical roots of the Russian emigration as a protest movement: the fact that journeys abroad have always been, and still are, a rare ocurrence in the life of Russian people triggers a revolt against state despotism that creates spatial isolation. The journey to Israel is thus staged as a cultural fact. This effect is produced not only by the insertion of different metatexts, but also due to stylistic archaization. Both characters of the novel, nourished by Russian high culture, often express themselves in rhyming phrases that evoke the sentimentalist Russian texts of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The yellow rooster, a somewhat melancholic and very sensitive young person, and a philosopher as well, resembles Karamzin and Zhukovskii’s characters. Against the background of contemporary realities, the antiquated, sophisticated language creates a comic effect. The imitation of various styles and epochs forms a pastiche-like patchwork. The repatriation to Israel is represented with the help of zoological or, more precisely, ornithological theories, which are initially interpreted in favor of Jewish autonomy. But after the failure of rooster’s travelogue project, the theories are again understood as an argument for assimilation. In the beginning, the yellow rooster finds in the course of his studies that the people of canaries have lived in foreign lands for centuries, so that they became weak and lost their original color, voice, and genetic memory. However, when he experiences a similar compulsion to adapt in Israel—thus, his preference for staying in dark forests makes other canaries suspicious that he might ally with their enemies—he changes his views. Here, he also has to follow the commandment: “Пой, как все поют!” [ibid.: 102] (“Sing as everyone sings!”). Only in Israel does he realize that he remains a rooster, just as he was, and will be, a canary in Russia, and the vicious circle of an outsider existence is complete. Now he insists that the Jewish diaspora culture derives its wealth from its fusion with other cultures. The diaspora has created unique conditions for the development of the diversity and individuality of the

7. Negated Dichotomies: The Fai led Utop ia of A l iyah

canary species and their song (which transparently stands for Jewish cultural production). Therefore, European Jewry will never become a natural part of the Israeli people because they are different biological species.9 The affinity between the old and the new homeland is emphasized by the fact that the yellow rooster ends up living in isolation in a “vnutrenn[iaia] emigratsi[ia]” [ibid.: 198] (“inner emigration”) in Israel, resurrecting the popular metaphor of passive resistance under dictatorship. He sinks into depression and finally leaves Israel, as he departs on a journey around Europe. Thus, emigration becomes for the yellow rooster, the living allegory of the Soviet Jews, a mode of existence and a method of discovering one’s own nature. His intellectualism and self-reflections are also signs of “inner emigration” that now accompanies him everywhere and is not limited to one country. Recurrent references to literary utopias from Plato to Chernyshevskii lend the whole travel adventure an artificial, metafictional, but also (sometimes pseudo-)scientific character. Embedded in a dense net of cultural associations, the rooster’s wanderings lose some of their fatefulness and appear rather as a repetition of long known trains (of thought), an intellectual construct built from elements of Russian culture.10 The author’s irony is aimed at the aliyah movement as a product of the utopic thought of the Russian nonconformist intelligentsia. It is confirmed by AF’s two recurring dreams,11 a reference to Chernyshevskii, and the vague, ideal picture of Israel that he had before his trip:

9 In the pessimistic versions of Zionist travelogues, there appear unattractive zoological equivalences with the processes of discipline and breeding (see above regarding Feliks Kandel′’s Vrata iskhoda nashego and Semen Lipkin’s Kartiny i golosa). In the above-mentioned novel Ostanovite samolet—ia slezu! by Efraim Sevela, the narrator describes his experience of repatriation as follows: “В Израиле есть целое Министерство абсорбции. Оно только тем и занимается, что превращает евреев в израильтян. Вольных, необьезженных евреев вылавливают из диаспоры, как диких мустангов из прерий, и пропускают через машину абсорбции, чтобы довести их до местной кондиции” [1980: 72] (“In Israel there is a whole Ministry of Absorption. It is constantly busy transforming Jews into Israelis. Free, untamed Jews are captured from the diaspora, like wild mustangs from the prairies, and let through the machine of absorption, to bring them in accordance with the local condition”). 10 Cf. Petr Vail′ and Aleksandr Genis on the Soviet aliyah: “Разочаровавшись в России, они увозили ее с собой. Утопия меняла лишь адрес, но сохранила признаки своего российского происхождения: веру в возможность осуществления царства Божьего на земле; веру в творческий коллектив свободных людей [. . .]; веру в равенство, братство и счастье—для всех и навсегда” [1996: 306] (“Disappointed by Russia, they took it with them [into emigration]. The utopia changed only its address, but retained all the characteristics of its Russian origin: the belief in the founding of the kingdom of God on earth; belief in the creative collective of free people [. . .]; the belief in equality, brotherhood, and happiness—for everyone and forever”). 11 See the chapters “Pervyi son AF” (“AF’s first dream”) and “Vtoroi son AF” (“AF’s second dream”) [Tsigel′man 2000: 67ff. and 214ff.].

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Но никакая достоверная информация не могла разрушить в душе АФ образ той страны. Он слышал смешанный шум голосов, автомобилей, музыки. Ему чудились светящиеся окна в домах неведомых городов, мелькали тени. Там собралась веселая толпа, происходил живой обмен мыслями; там живут легко, шумно и радостно. [Tsigel′man 2000: 51] Even reliable information could not destroy the image of that country in AF’s mind. He already heard the mixed sound of voices, cars, and music. He imagined illuminated windows of houses in unknown cities; shadows slipped by. A cheerful crowd gathered there, a lively exchange of ideas took place; life there is easy, loud, and happy. Tsigel′man’s novel-palimpsest, a postmodern parable with its central metaphor of an everlasting, exciting intellectual journey, praises cultural inclusion and open-mindedness, postulates hybridity as a natural state of mind, and deconstructs any attempt at essentialization of Jewishness through zoological metaphors. Thus, it indirectly also destroys the teleology of the rigorous re-Judaization in the aliyah movement. At the latest since the beginning of secularization, skeptical travel narratives in Jewish literature have dealt with a failed return, be it the return back to the shtetl or, more broadly, to the past abandoned in the diaspora, or the imagined utopian “return” to the Promised Land. Claudio Magris writes in his analysis of the homecoming novels by Joseph Roth about a “homeward journey after a defeat,” which tells “how one comes home or comes back to seek home” [Magris 1971: 27]. While Roth reflects on the first irretrievable losses of Jewish identity in a period of modernization, when assimilation led to alienation and the loss of one’s own, formerly holy space, contemporary authors show the impossibility of a posthistorical return to Jewish history and the Jewish space. The patterns of otherness that continue beyond the border(s), similar to Roth’s geographical alienation, testify to the withdrawal from history as such: “[. . .] the individual freed from all his ties now appears in his fragility and weakness” [ibid.: 33]. The Promised Land embodies the idea of space as a semantic gap, as an uninhabited, unholy place, an anti-makom.

8. Time and Space Structures in Nonconformist Jewish Literature

Jewish dissident literature drew its utopian potential from the symbolic conceptualization not only of topographical but also of temporal spaces. The intersection of time and space arose from the contrast of the land of the exodus, with its past and its present, and the space of the future, which was far away. The concept of exodus is thus reflected in the temporal and topical structure of the texts, while forging isomorphic relationships with their system of characters, the perspective of their narrators, and sometimes their language.1 Israel as a “poetic inhabitation” of Zion (Amir Eshel) or as “textual repatriation” (Sidra DeKoven)2 is one of those territories that are “described not only as real, geographical and physical spaces, and not only in symbolic terms. Rather, they are both real and symbolic at the same time and so they rise to a new level. They become ‘heterotopias,’ according to Foucault, ‘imaginary geography,’ as Said formulates it, ‘global ethnoscapes,’ as Appardurai refers to them, ‘thirdspace’ or ‘real-and-imagined places,’ as Soja puts it” [Bachmann-Medick 2010: 297 ff.]. In his analysis of the semantics of geographic spaces in the Russian Middle Ages, Iurii Lotman points out the “moral-religious” meaning of geographical

1 For example, some semantic spaces are assigned “high,” elevated language, while others are described in colloquial or everyday style. 2 See chap. 7.

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concepts and places: “[. . .] certain countries are considered righteous or sinful. Thus, every journey in the geographic space is also a movement on the vertical axis of religious and moral values, the highest point of which is in heaven and the deepest one is in hell” [Lotman 1996: 239].3 Lotman emphasizes symbolic and utopian features of the medieval landscapes and borders: “This specific conception of geography, which was not yet regarded as a separate scientific discipline, but rather resembled a religious-utopian classification system, is very characteristic for the Middle Ages. [. . .] The renunciation of sin was imagined as going away, as a spatial movement” [ibid.: 242].4 Kenneth White, the founder of geopoetics,5 refers to infantile hermeticsm of spatial ideas in Christianity: geography as a science found no place in the epistemological context of the Christian Middle Ages: “The Christian world is, without exception, closed, restrained, even infantile, connected by a symbolic cord to Jerusalem, umbilicus terrae. In the context of Christian epistemology, there was no place for geography” [2007: 18]. In this worldview, Jerusalem as umbilicus terrae (the navel of the earth) defined the spatial categories such as proximity or distance. These premodern space-time patterns with their mystical-messianic and moral-religious ideas are reinvigorated as new spiritual communities arise in the late Soviet Empire. Geographical movement becomes a moral ascension, and the images of the heavenly Jerusalem from the books of Jewish prophets once again become relevant (see [Eliade 1955: 8 f.]). It is certainly no coincidence that nonconformist exodus literature turns to apocalyptic and messianic ideas, which are rooted in Judaism. Aleida Assmann links the emergence of the book of Daniel to a new spiritual stance fueled by the Jewish resistance to Hellenization, and more specifically, by the

3 Igor Smirnov continues Lotman’s conception in his typological investigation of Russian culture, postulating a similar “conjunction” of the earthly and metaphysical worlds in early medieval thought. The transcendent is introduced directly into the empirical, perceptible reality. A good example are the concepts of space in old Russian literature, where paradise and hell are geographically localized, “[. . .] paradise and hell are housed in different parts of the earthly space, and the sojourn there is portrayed as a continuation of the earthly existence” [Smirnov 2000: 261]; “The early medieval world wished that the move to the beyond would not mean a disappearance from the physical space, that one and the same phenomenon would represent the thiswordly inhabiting the other world, and the otherworldly inhabiting this world” [ibid.: 263]. 4 A connection of certain places with sacred or demonic attributes and powers is, as Mircea Eliade pointed out in his much-quoted book, a fundamental characteristic of archaic cultures. Accordingly, geographic locations could only enter the worldview of the “archaic man” if they were assigned a divine origin and, correspondingly, an “extraterrestrial archetype” [Eliade 1955: 6–11]. 5 See also [Marszałek/Sasse 2010: 7–8].

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Maccabean Revolt: “the apocalyptic conception of history was developed by religious minorities facing an overwhelming political power. Their weapon against imperial expansion was of an ideological nature. They appealed to an authority even more powerful than earthly empires. They conceived a spiritual, transcendent kingdom [. . .]” [Assmann 1999b: 22]. Assmann describes Daniel as a “subversive spirit who [.  .  .] prepares the revolution from within” [ibid.]. Here and elsewhere, the apocalyptic conception of history “comes from socially marginalized opponents” of the earthly authority, who “transcend” the official historical concept “through a universalist history plan” [ibid.: 23]. In addition, “linear time [becomes] a destructive force in the judging hand of God” [ibid.: 24]. The same situation is described by Jan Assmann as turning circular time into a straight line: “The circle of eternal return becomes a straight line leading to a faraway destination. [. . .] Thus, Jewish apocalyptics is likely not the origin of this historical phenomenon, but merely the earliest existing historical evidence of a universal cultural-anthropological concept” [Assmann 1992: 80]. Literary resistance strategies employed by Jewish dissidents reuse the subversive apocalyptic space-time metaphor in order to counteract or invalidate the “imperial time” of the Soviet Union, which is no less teleological and eschatological [Assmann 1999b: 24]. In a new historical situation, Jewish intellectuals construct their radical opposition to the faith of the Soviet majority, revitalizing the Judaistic command to preserve the purity and exclusivity of diaspora Jewry. Referring to Jan Assmann’s theory of Jewish cultural mnemonics, Volker C. Dörr describes the Jewish diaspora as an “encapsulated, enclosed form of deterritorialization [. . .] with a textually coded cultural memory” [2009: 67]. The Jewish principle of the spiritual territory embodied in the written word, of the “portable fatherland,” as Heinrich Heine put it [Heine 1995a: 254; 1887: 310], as well as the conception of makom, central to Judaism,6 are all negated in favor of the idea of a final stability in a specific land, where religion becomes enshrined in space. Expressed herein is the utopian view that transforms the tradition of religious apocalypticism:

6 Amir Eshel explores this conception on the basis of Jewish literature and the specificity of its symbolic topographies. The key message of his research is: “The destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from their land significantly strengthened the interpretation of the makom as a linguistic marker of the idea that God can reveal Himself anywhere, that makom is first and foremost contained in the text” [2003: 124].

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“The return to the Land was intended to bring about a reintegrated Judaism—a reunification of Book, people and place” [Gurevitch/Aran 1994: 196].7 To better understand the Judaistic concept of space, ha-makom, this paradoxical  union of spiritual and spatial categories, let us quote Helga Völkening: “After the second destruction of the temple,” God “[.  .  .] now becomes homeless, loses His earthly place of residence and thus, according to Jewish ideas, shares the exile with His people of Israel. [.  .  .] The divine presence is therefore no longer thought to be permanently limited to a certain place, but updated over and over again. [. . .] The term makom was also used in rabbinical times in a figurative sense, meaning everywhere—certainly, because of its abstract, indefinite orientation. Finally, (ha-)makom (the one, specific place) contains every place, it can be anywhere. Accordingly, as the designation of God, ha-makom [. . .] was translated as one who is always now, who is omnipresent” [2007: 78–80, italics in the original]. On the duality of this term Gurevitch and Aran note the following: “Hamakom—‘the place’—has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it refers to a specific stretch of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean where modern Israel is located. On the other hand, it is an idea, a voice, a thought in relation to which the tangible place, as its earthly manifestation, is secondary” [1994: 195].8 The Six-Day War, which ultimately initiated an underground Jewish cultural renaissance, led to, and recorded, the spiritualization of the space of Israel, because the biblical territories were now “reconquered” by the Israelis, so that it was possible to see the victory as a grandiose divine plan. Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran describe the caesura of 1967 as the moment of unification of the geohistorical and metaphysical concepts of Israel and the remythologization of space and time: Within less than a week, Israel was cast back two or three thousand years [.  .  .]. To embark on this wondrous journey

7 The dialectical relationship between utopia and apocalyptics is formulated by Aage HansenLöve with reference to the “endgames and zero forms” of the Russian avantgarde: “On the one hand, utopia is apocalyptic because it describes the eschaton in this world, [. . .] on the other hand, utopia is anti-apocalyptic insofar as it operates with a model of time and action that is opposed to the (classical, biblical) apocalyptic. The utopian thinker brings the beyond into this world, putting the utopian design or project in place of prophecy [. . .]” [2005: 705]. 8 Arkadii Kovel′man also analyzes the shift of topographical terms into the universal, which is characteristic for Jewish writings. He shows, for example, how the land of Canaan in the Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin, becomes a metaphor of the eternity and at the same time of the kingdom come and, consequently, a special place of return for all Jews [Kovel′man 2008: 9–32, esp. 26].

8. Time and Space Str uctures in Nonconfor mi st Jew i sh L iterature

along the time axis, one needed only to travel several kilometers, sometimes only a few meters. [. . .] This reduction in distance and creation of a territorial continuum allowed for a telescoping of history. A biblical reality appeared to prevail in Judea and Samaria—visitors encountered a real situation that only yesterday was considered archaic or mythical. [Gurevitch/Aran 1994: 205] From a decidedly critical perspective, Uri Eisenzweig considers the “Zionist utopia” in Israel, which manifested itself particularly clearly in 1967, an example of the “l’imaginaire social israélien” [Eisenzweig 1980: 18] (“Israeli social imaginary”). In his book on the collective imaginary and the official Israeli Zionism, Eisenzweig confronts its mystical-religious projections—“the fundamental deception of the religious fable of the ‘return to Zion’” [ibid.: 16]—with the historical reality and the geographical environment. The clash of two spatiotemporal utopias—the communist one, which occupied a large part of Eastern Europe, and the Jewish one (mostly confirming to the socialist policy propagated by the state of Israel), which offered its own vision of a providential state in the Middle East—was telling. The dissidents developed their geographical utopias in the blank space that the communist ideology could no longer conceal. As an example, Petr Vail′ and Aleksandr Genis describe the travels to Siberia and the image of the faraway northern region in the 1960s as a source of metaphysics for the Soviet people, which was able to fill, for a short time, the historical emptiness and was therefore of great importance for the compensatory preservation of the Soviet “faith” [Vail′/Genis 1996: 84].9 By and by deprived of its idealistic implications and mythical power, the Soviet Union mutated into an empire [ibid.: 278–192]. In the late Soviet Union, the alternative dissident and semi-dissident circles reimagined the apocalyptic concept of time in its relation to the imperial one: Both temporal constructions, the imperial and the apocalyptic one, are eschatological. They are situated within the same framework of historical redemption [. . .]. Generally speaking, every apocalyptic movement is an uprising against Rome, and every Rome fights against apocalyptic zealots. The imperial time with its glorification of duration and the apocalyptic time with its waiting, hoping, urging correspond to opposite perspectives, 9 See the chapter “Geografiia vmesto istorii. Sibir′” (“Geography in place of history. Siberia”).

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from above and from below, but both within a common framework of history. The imperial time means the sacralization of power and the artificial slowing down of temporal change [. . .]. The apocalyptic time means the delegitimization of power and the destruction of the world [. . .]. [Assmann 1999b: 29] The introduction of a new calendar changes the relation between space and memory. For example, Jan Assmann defines certain landscapes “as a medium of cultural memory”: “they [. . .] are raised to the status of a symbol, i. e. semiotized” [Assmann 1992: 60; 2004: 63]. With reference to Maurice Halbwachs’s last work La topographie legendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte (The legendary topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land, 1941), Assmann describes the Holy Land as a classical “mnemotope” (“Mnemotop”) or “commemorative landscape” (“kommemorative Landschaft”). In addition, in the Soviet Union special relevance is attached to the counter-representative (“kontrapräsentische”) function of cultural memory [Assmann 1992: 79]—“the function of liberation through memory” [ibid.: 85], a powerful means in the struggle with the political present [ibid.: 85–86]. For the authors of the aliyah (as the movement and the culture), as well as for its real and imagined protagonists, Israel represents a “hot” memory, “which [. . .] extracts the elements of a self-image and a basis for hopes and goals from the reference to the past” [ibid.: 78]. As mentioned earlier, Yael Zerubavel examines the use of “hot memory” in the late yishuv culture. Before the founding of the state, the “symbolic bridge” [Zerubavel 2005: 116]) to the heroic biblical past helped to consolidate national consciousness and enabled the Palestine settlers to construct a coherent historical sequence for their own people: “This was indeed the challenge that Zionist national memory faced [. . .] in its attempt to form a sense of continuity between the ancient national past in the Land of Israel and its modern revival after a rupture of two thousand years in exile” [ibid.]. The selectivity of the updated memory was linked to space (here, Zerubavel also refers to Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of memory) and gave it a mythical ability to connect to the faraway. However, literary strategies of Jewish dissent are not limited by responding to the Israeli (u)topia. They are incessantly reproducing specific spatial structures and relations that form a dense network of textual meanings and create the chronotopes of resistance. The cultural and ethical values proclaimed in the texts acquire meaning through spatial tropes. At that, the following semantic spaces are constituted:

8. Time and Space Str uctures in Nonconfor mi st Jew i sh L iterature

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spaces of punishment and isolation: locked and guarded rooms such as the mental hospital, the prison, the pretrial detention facility, the camp, and the space of state instutions such as OVIR. The archive, which replaces the publicly accessible “memory space” of the library, also becomes a space of isolation and control for Jewish literature. The “banishment” of Jewish books and manuscripts into the archive has its structural counterpart: the imprisonment and subsequent isolation of Jewish intellectuals. imaginary spaces: spaces of insanity, fantasy, and dreams, which are often conceived as parallel worlds where the oppressed individuals can take refuge. These spaces include Jewish holy places, the land of Palestine, the shtetl that forever remained in childhood, the past epochs of Jewish history and experience of spiritual, occult, kabbalistic discovery. “Сама она не хотела ни в Париж, ни в Лондон, а только в Иерусалим. Один звук этого имени казался ей волшебным. Для нее это был не город, где пьют кофе и покупают мыло, а некоторая таинственная обитель, специально для духовных потрясений. Туда вела извилистая тропа, по древним, каменистым горам Иудейским; [. . .] и вдруг на одном из поворотов в открывавшемся проеме вставал Иерусалим, мистический город в поднебесье” (from Iuliia Shmukler’s short story “Ukhodim iz Rossii” [“We are leaving Russia”] [Shmukler 1975: 48]) (“She didn’t want to go to Paris or London, just Jerusalem. The mere sound of this name seemed magical to her. For her, this was not a city where people drank coffee and bought soap, but a mysterious refuge, specifically created for mental shocks. A meandering path led there through the ancient rocky mountains of Judea. [. . .] And suddenly, after the road turned, there opened up the view of Jerusalem, this mystical city right under the heaven.”) spaces of repression, erasure, and overwriting: here, the image of the palimpsest with its many layers becomes an effective structural metaphor for collective amnesia imposed by the authorities or committed by the Jews themselves. Among the recurring motives is the misuse of synagogues (as bread factories, warehouses, or horse stables)10 or the use of Jewish tombstones as building material. Sometimes this also means moving the stones to another place, for example, to a non-Jewish cemetery. It illustrates the practice of overwriting with a literal vividness: Jewish names and quotations from the Torah are removed and replaced by others, so that the Jewish objects are taken out of their syntagmatic order and placed into a different cultural and ideological frame of reference.

10 Cf. the documentary report on the usually no longer religious uses of synagogues in Russia (with examples of selected regions), published as late as 2001: [Belova/Petrukhin 2008: 165].

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Representative in this sense is the apocalyptic vision of the psychiatrist Emmanuil Kardin from the novel Lestnitsa Iakova. Kardin sees great works of art and ancient Hebrew manuscripts decay and vanish into thin air. His patient Plavinskii, who becomes Kardin’s spiritual teacher in the novel, mentions the river of oblivion, Styx, and prophesies that the memory “сотрут, как фрески Шагала со стен бывшего еврейского театра на Малой Бронной, как имена Кандинского, Татлина. Останется вот—светящееся табло—вершина урбанистической мысли .  .  .” [Baukh 2001: 199] (“will be erased, as Chagall’s frescoes form the walls of the former Jewish Theater in the Malaia Bronnaia Street, like the names of Kandinskii and Tatlin. Only this here will remain—the glowing screen—the epitome of urbanist thought . . .”). The glowing blank screen here is the metaphor of cultural extinction. As Plavinskii explains, the kabbalistic connection of the names, which can repel the dark powers, is in danger of being erased. Satan is responsible for “стирание имен” [ibid.] (the erasure of names). But, above all, individual humans become the sites of overwriting and oblivion: for Efrem Baukh, it is, among others, the spiritual convert Boris Pasternak; for David Shrayer-Petrov, it is the Jews with Russian and Ukrainian names, which they have adopted in the course of assimilation, and the Karaims who deny their Judaism out of fear. The theme of trace remainders, half concealed in the palimpsest, covered by new inscriptions, and yet partially visible, merges with the theme of Crypto-Judaism, of mimicry, and of the underground (later seen in David Shrayer-Petrov’s post-Soviet stories “Mimikriia” [“Mimicry,” 1996] and “Belye ovtsy na zelenom sklone gory” [“White sheep on the green hillside,” 2003]).11 In a global sense, the whole history of Jewish assimilation in the diaspora is interpreted as an “erasure of names.”

11 In “Belye ovtsy na zelenom sklone gory,” the first-person narrator comes to Azerbaijan where spends the night with his fellow writers in a locals’ house. At dinner, he asks whether the family is not accidentally related to the well-known surgeon Elizarov. There is a pause that no one dares to break, after which Suleiman, the landlord, replies that this is not the case because they are Azerbaijani, while Elizarov is a Mountain Jew. After dinner, Suleiman unexpectedly leads the narrator to a hidden room in the basement, which is located behind several locked doors. This small room proves to be a secret prayer space with a silver Shabbat chandelier and Tanakh lying on the tallit. Suleiman reveals to the narrator that his family was descended from Mountain Jews and was once forced to convert to Islam. “Но мы все равно остались евреями,”—he says [Shrayer-Petrov 2003: 297] (“But still we remained Jews”). In the idyllic environment around Suleiman’s house, the narrator sees the poetic landscapes of ancient Canaan, and then he seems to hear Abraham sacrificing a sheep so that God would eventually reconcile his two sons—Isaac and Ishmael.

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The place of repressed or hidden Jewish culture is often the Soviet periphery—the shtetl, once abandoned by the protagonist, or places in Lithuania and Central Asia that are remote from the center of power. Since the Jewish tradition has been better preserved there, the periphery often becomes a place where meanings are produced, where oral memory and legend still live. Thus, the geographic edge of the empire is semiotically charged and contrasted with the symbolic emptiness of the center. For example, Emmanuil Kardin travels to his home town where he experiences a revelation and literally returns to his roots. In ShrayerPetrov’s novel Gerbert i Nelli, the first-person narrator visits Trakai in Lithuania, where a few Karaims still live. Eli Liuksemburg, who grew up in Uzbekistan, describes in Desiatyi golod the Central Asian Jews of Bukhara. In David Markish’s Priskazka, the exile to Kazakhstan eventually becomes an alternative to Palestine—a substitute space of freedom and Zionist maturation, a preliminary stage of the aliyah. A similar substitute function is fulfilled by “oases” of Jewish faith and resistance in large cities such as the Moscow synagogue in the Arkhipova Street. In contrast, private apartments, where Jewish dissidents traditionally meet, are depicted as spaces of repressed and concealed Judaism. counter-spaces of Judaism: opposed to the Jewish movement in literary texts are the urban centers of Soviet life, which are often also the places where the nonconformist protagonists live. The cities symbolize the repressive ideological counter-discourse. Here, added to the opposition of the center and the periphery, is the contrast between the city life and the urban underground, which includes the closed spaces inside private apartments or dachas where the new Jews meet. In Iakov Tsigel′man’s Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera, the “red Zion” of Birobidzhan is described as a mirror image of Israel. Birobidzhan becomes a place of dystopia, an anti-place, a topographical simulacrum, a fake that distorts the Jewish dream of the Promised Land, and a place of collective deception. The central trope of the exodus prose is the association of upward movement with the aliyah and the crossing of an existential borderline. Here, the fairytale-mythological topoi of the path and the border are instrumental. As Vladimir Toporov notes, in mythopoetic narrative models the protagonists have to choose difficult, sometimes hopeless journeys in order to reach a high spiritual or even sacral level [Toporov 1994: 74–76]: “Meaningful and valuable is that which is connected with extreme efforts, a sacrifice, an ‘either-or’ situation. [. . .] The critical stage of the journey [. . .] falls upon the gap between two parts, which point to

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the crossing of the border [ . . .]” [ibid.: 79]. A topographical reflection, a kind of externalization of this spiritual effort, is, in exodus texts, the protagonists’ attempts to reach Israel through underground passages or by crossing the Afghan border (see Liuksemburg). Biblical protonarratives about journeys and crossing (or not crossing) borders, such as the migration of the Israelites through the desert, serve as examples for the travellers. Motifs of liberation and transgression undergo a tragic escalation when the journey happens in an imaginary space—in a dream or in the imagination of a mentally ill person. In “Tretii khram,” the protagonist fails in his attempt to cross the border and return, because he is tainted by murder committed in the past. Thus, the territory of the Holy Land becomes a sacred space of purity, which remains forever closed off to Isaak Fudym. The search for spiritual alternatives in the late Soviet society was expressed, among other things, in the rediscovery and expansion of the geographical and everyday space, and, if necessary, breaking through its borders. In one of its most radical forms, this tendency was evident in the political spirituality of the Jewish emigration movement. Less radical forms of spatial distancing from the regime were, as Juliane Fürst shows, excursions to the provinces, expeditions, and business trips to more distant Soviet republics, living at the dachas, in the cellars, and apartment kitchens: “The idea of emigration thus emerges as the ultimate extension of the flight from Soviet officialdom that had been characteristic of the critical intelligentsia in the late 1950s and the 1960s” [Prince 2012: 154]. Earlier, Alexei Yurchak named several “elsewhere” or “being vnye” spaces of late socialism, which he called “deterritorialized milieus” [2006: 127; 131; 158]. Before Yurchak and Fürst, Vail′ and Genis already gave examples of peripheral, alternative spaces where the Soviet intelligentsia could escape from the prescribed values and rituals. Their short list provides a diverse representation of spaces of displacement—exile, going underground, unemployment, homelessness, emigration: “Чтобы сохранить себя, [интеллигенция] должна была перебраться на окраину. Отныне ее место было в подвале истопника, в ссыльном поселке, в будке сторожа, в пригородном бараке, наконец, в эмиграции” [1996: 285] (“[The intelligentsia] had to move to the periphery so as not to lose itself. From now on, its place was in the basement of the stoker, in the exile settlement, in the guard’s house, in the suburban barrack, and finally, in emigration”). Obviously, Israel was among these spaces of alterity, sought after and found or invented by the critical intelligentsia. Depending on the context, such spaces were conceived as places of privacy, resistance, or freedom.

9. Reinvention of Yiddish Storytelling

The period of Jewish unofficial culture in the Soviet Union reactualized another literary tradition: the Yiddish storytelling. Plots and characters of Yiddish folklore and literature (which often merged) were transposed into the Soviet system of cultural coordinates. The reinvention of the Jewish skaz can be described as one of the most immediate, esthetically effective, and traditionally approved ways to make voices that have not been heard before part of the culturally “cleansed” society. To borrow from the wording of postcolonial theory, the use of skaz was, on the one hand, a poetical method that helped create a minoritarian agency in fiction, and, on the other, a narrative gesture of memory. In other words, reinventing the Jewish speech was a means of literary self-empowerment, which was the least loaded with ideologies. This chapter analyzes the works of Efraim Sevela and Filipp Berman, the artists who used this kind of performative self-identification in their attempts to break up the cultural amnesia.1 The characteristic fusion of historical authenticity, folklorization, and humor with its empathic mockery or satire are an easily identifiable marker of Yiddish storytelling, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, and also of multilingual Jewish literatures, which today

1 In Russia, Sevela and Berman’s works were mostly published after the perestroika; Sevela’s humorous prose became increasingly popular starting from the late 1980s.

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continue to reappropriate and revise this tradition. Idiosyncrasies of the Jewish oral speech, anecdotic plots, dialogism, irony and wit, the play with linguistic idioms, situational and verbal alogisms—this narrative poetics will be discussed below in regard to the origins of the Jewish short skaz and Yiddish semiotics.

9.1. Jewish Narrative and Semiotics of Yiddish The research dealing with multilingual Jewish literatures often addresses the characteristics of this heterogeneous phenomenon and tries to define the levels of narration where the Jewish tradition can be recognized and “grasped.” Can we speak of a Jewish world literature, which transcends the borders of national languages? In other words, is it possible to consider the variety of texts that we call Jewish as belonging to one culture? Is the assumed unity of this macro-text conditioned only by the presence of recognizable Jewish contents, or by certain writing strategies, poetics, rhetorical figures, and tropes, as well? This issue is well illustrated by a narrative that has gone far beyond its Yiddish origins and notably influenced the stylistic pecularities of various Jewish literatures. The connection of satire, enlightenment, and moral-religious instruction characteristic of the maskilic literature was used by Eisik Meir Dick and Isaac Leib Peretz to demystify and ridicule Hasidic “irrationalism” and the unconditional faith of ordinary Jews in the miraculous powers of the tzaddikim. Their prose marked the emergence of a special storytelling, which combined the descriptions of Jewish everyday life with desacralizing wit and mockery of Jewish customs. The favorite topics of Yiddish writers—the rituals and prayers of the shtetl Jews, earning one’s living, which was often linked to trade and travel, family customs culminating in the celebration of the shabes, anecdotes and stories of miracles that typically occur on the days of Jewish holidays, the world of Hasidim, and the relationship of the Jews to God—were also used to develop the kind of plot that had become “classic” and that combined satire with compassion, tragicomical and sometimes sentimental features. At a certain stage in the history of Yiddish literature, texts created by Mendele Moicher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem became the best known archetypes of such storytelling. Here, the connection of the sacred and the profane motivated a strategy of polyvalent narration, in which self-irony arises from the contradiction between the Jewish claim of chosenness and the misery of real life.2 The polyvalency of 2 See also Sanford Pinsker’s witty statement on the genesis of Jewish humor: “Perhaps Jewish humor started when somebody wondered if maybe, just once, God might choose somebody else” [1991: 9].

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the narrative becomes apparent in its specific texture, which spans the dense network of references to the Torah, the Talmud, and the works of the Kabbalah over the grid of Jewish everyday life. In this way, the Jewish story exacerbates the contrast between the two registers—the holy and the everyday. The mediator between the reader and the shtetl Jew is the narrator, who also comes out of the shtetl and represents, in his speech and thinking, features of Yiddish folk culture such as orality, religious erudition, and the tendency to instruct, characteristic of a magid (the itinerant preacher) or a pious rabbi, the naivety of a tam (the simple-minded) or shlemiel (the unlucky person), or the critical acidity of a badkhen (the buffoon and wedding fool).3 It is precisely the combination of these voices in a single narrator’s figure that creates the tragicomical effect (compare most-cited figures such as Abramovich [Moicher Sforim]’s bookseller Mendele or Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman). At that, a subtle balancing act between the insider’s and an outsider’s view on Jewish life always reveals the double intention of the author—whereas the narrator lives within the communication system of the shtetl world and speaks to the other inhabitants of this familiar environment, the concealed author observes the narrator with irony and engages in a hidden dialogue with the reader, who is aware of the double perspective and sensitive to the irony.4 It has often been noted that the Jewish narrator’s skaz conveys the specificity of Yiddish as the language of oral communication. In scholarly works concerning the influence of spoken Yiddish on the language of Jewish fiction, it is relevant to note the conclusion stating that this literature is largely conditioned by the idioms of spoken Yiddish, and the peculiarities of Jewish social communication. From the very beginning, Yiddish literature shows a tendency towards imitation, mimicry, theatricalization of the language, gestures, and comedy. In his 1941 analysis of Sholem Aleichem’s prose, Meyer Wiener names a kind of

3 Famous examples of these folk figures in Yiddish literature are shlemiels and tams such as Reb Kalmen (created by Eisik Meir Dick), Bontsha the Silent (created by Isaac Leib Peretz), or Gimpel the Fool (created by Isaac Bashevis Singer), and of course Tevye the Dairyman and Menachem Mendl (created by Sholem Aleichem). On the literary retelling of Jewish foklore, which inspired the work of several generations of Yiddish prose writers, see [Roskies 1995]. 4 Dov Sadan shows that the monologue in Sholem Aleichem’s works draws upon the tradition of the Haskala satire and at the same time transcends it [1959/1986: 58–60]. To the earlier maskilic writers, the narrator revealed his naivety and ignorance simply through the act of speech. Later, the satire was supplemented by social pity, shifting the accent from the ignorance of the narrator, often an am ha-aretz (an ignorant Jew, see [Loewe 1920: 41–43]) to the social ills. Sholem Aleichem combines the “identification with the mentality of the narrator” [ibid.: 59] with the ironic distancing from his or her point of view, inherited from the Haskala literature. It is precisely this ambivalent focal structure that has become the figurehead of East European Jewish storytelling. Transposed into the present, it is still used by many authors.

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verbalism the most important source of his humor. The narrator’s “verbosity” or “garrulousness” becomes, in the text, a poetic system of tropes, methods of stylization, and acoustic effects that follows its own internal logics and makes it possible for the author to recreate the points of view of different characters [1986: 46ff.]. In this way, the protagonists’ verbal re-action to the events overshadows the action itself. Very advanced for his time—in a proto-deconstructivist way— Wiener dares to claim that the psychology, the milieu, and the behavior of the people in Sholem Aleichem’s world are illusory and unreal in combination with the “verbosity, the talkativeness of his characters”—“[t]his verbosity, with all the by-products of such intense speech, repetition and digression gesticulation, voice modulation, facial expression” [ibid.: 48]. Anticipating later studies on the classics of Yiddish literature,5 Wiener regards intonation, puns, gestures, small semantic shifts, and neologisms as Sholem Aleichem’s central meaninggeneration device. An important part of the image of “the little Jews” is the dialogism of their speech (see Miron 1973: 82ff.). While Miron speaks of a tendency towards narrative “disguises” and theatricality in Yiddish prose [ibid.: 79–84], Benjamin Harshav in his study on the semiotics of Yiddish emphasizes the “translogical” and indirect speech, which found its way into the literature from folklore. Appellative and emotional formulas, in-between words and sounds, proverbs intended to visualize thought, answers employing parables or stories, quotes, riddles, and jokes—all these features, characteristic of Yiddish discourse, have transformed Yiddish into a metalanguage that often functions on the poetic level. The practices of Talmudic disputes and interpretation of the Torah have fostered in Jewish speech the attention towards the word and the language itself (metadiscursivity) and made the references to (sacred) texts a means of communication [Harshav 1990: 98–102; 1994: 145–154]. As mentioned above, the context of Jewish literary tradition includes not only the cultural realia and topoi such as Jewish festivals and ritual objects, or places of living such as shtetls, the markets, and the synagogues, but also characters such as the shlemiel and his relatives dos kleyne mentshele (little man), luftmensh (man of the air), and shlimazl (luckless man), the meshugener (madman), the tam (fool), the Jewish picaresque hero, the miracle-working rabbi, and the concealed righteous man. Like the linguistic features of Jewish literature, these archetypes came out of their original environment (nineteenth-centutry Eastern Europe), and received a makeover as they entered contemporary literature. Similar to

5 See also [Miron 1973: 67–69, 79–84; Baumgarten 1982: 74–76; Harshav 1990: 91 ff.; Wisse 1994].

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Jewish discourse itself, as described by Harshav, these characters display specific behavior and ways of thinking that can still be recognized as being part of the Jewish cultural tradition even following a radical recontextualization. As such, they are able to convey the tragedies that befell the Jews during the twentieth century, and the consequences oft he irreparable historic ruptures. Thus, in her work on the shlemiels as “modern heroes,” Ruth Wisse notes that the luckless Jew is strong in his weakness, because he ignores the military morale and the propaganda of violence and in this way resists them. [Wisse 1971: ix–x, 3–10]. Cultural references in contemporary Jewish texts can allude to certain plot structures and collisions that derive not only from the Talmud, but also from Jewish religious entertainment literature such as the popular Ma’asseh-buch (a collection of stories from the Talmud and the midrash, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish hagiography), and—primarily—from Jewish literature from the nineteenth century onwards. Some examples are the momentous and often tragicomical departure of the character from the familiar shtetl and, possibly, his inglorious return;6 the misadventures of a poor Jew who goes away for the difficult purpose of earning his living; his encounter—depending on the plot— with a devil, an impure spirit, a dead man, a dibbuk, a righteous man, a prophet, or an angel, followed by a casuistic conversation or by attempts to outsmart each other. Speaking of the literary reception of Jewish traditions, it is important to note that they have been mediated by literature, that is, it is a second-hand tradition. While David Roskies refers to the literarily updated and thus secondary forms of Jewish folklore, and the “renewed” Jewishness at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, late twentieth-century authors employ a much more complex intertextuality covering several generations of Jewish writers. Sometimes it directly touches the religious and oral sources, but, with a higher degree of probability, it will refer to the texts of the Yiddish classics, their successors, and those Jewish authors who developed the traditions of Yiddish literature under the influence of local cultures and in different languages (often in translations). For instance, the embodiment of the Jewish picaresque hero and shlemiel par excellence in the Russian Jewish cultural context is Lazik Roitshvanets, created in 1927 by Il′ia Erenburg—a figure deeply rooted in the Jewish folklore and in Yiddish “proto-literature.” It goes without saying that the use of Yiddish language elements in various Jewish literatures, and sometimes the general character of their heteroglossia, is not (or, in rare cases, not only) based on the personal memories and language experiences of the author, but on 6 On Mendele’s Benjamin the Third cf. chap. 7.

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the Jewish literary tradition in the corresponding language. Thus, Isaak Babel′’s literarization of the Odessite dialect with its polyglossia, the defective use of the Russian language, the rhythm, the sensuality, and specific phonetics had an important effect on later generations of Russian Jewish writers, many of whom were no longer capable of speaking Yiddish (see [Koschmal 1997: 320–327]).

9.2. Shlemiels and Rogues: Efraim Sevela’s Legends of Invalidnaia Street The fictional memories of the inhabitants of the Invalidnaia Street, the “legendary” homeland of the narrator in Efraim Sevela’s cycle of short stories Legendy Invalidnoi ulitsy (1971), which was written during his emigration in Paris, consist of anecdotal, sentimental, and satirical plots that draw upon the Jewish skaz tradition, mostly in the spirit of Sholem Aleichem. The “legend” genre points to the fictitious nature of the “recollections,” and emphasizes the fact that the events presented in these stories all belong to the past and will never become reality again. The synthesis of stylization, autobiographic sincerity, and an imagination fueled by intertextuality provides, for Sevela, the access to the already half-mythical Jewry of a prewar shtetl in Belarus. This combination of simulated historical authenticity, factographic writing, and explicit literariness (that is, allusions to literary pretexts) creates a folklorized Jewish past—an effect that, in many texts before Sevela’s, led to an idealized reception of the shtetl from before the Shoah and, according to Harshav, was first launched by the creators of Yiddish literature themselves: “[.  .  .] Yiddish classical literature used the iconography of the shtetl, its mythological behavior and language, as a microcosm of Jewish nature: these are the images of Mendele’s Kabtsansk and Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke” [Harshav 1990: 94, italics in the original]. In relation to Sevela’s prose, Andrzej Jankowski interprets this device as the creation of a new Jewish mythology after the genocide (such as the myth of the lost paradise): “Behind the specific interweaving of anecdote and half-legendary gossip, of historical facts and hagiographic life stories, there are figures of people who [. . .] become the object of the legends of the Invalidnaia Street, its peculiar myth” [2004: 36]. With his estranged, vivid, gesticulating language7 and his often immediate participation in the events, the narrator becomes a postfactum and postmortem

7 See the chapter “The Mimic Writer and his ‘Little Jew’” in Dan Miron’s 1973 monograph [Miron 1973]. Miron reconstructs the literary program, expressed, for example, by S. Y. Abramovich

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mediator between the Jews of the past and the reader, the living and the dead. However, the constant references to Yiddish literature sabotage this seemingly direct link with the past and reveal that this text is a work of fiction, nourished less by the personal and more by the cultural memory. In the story “Pochemu net raia na zemle” (“Why there is no paradise on Earth”), which I will examine below by the way of an example, the tragicomical effect is engendered precisely by this ambivalent narrative position, in which the subjectivity and the pathetic linguistic gestures of the narrator, a shtetl Jew, are combined with the irony and intense intertextual work of the author. In order to construct the “bridge of longing” [Roskies 1995 ] between the present and the past. He begins his story with an emphatic explanation about why the inhabitants of the Invalidnaia Street have several names and as many nicknames: На нашей улице еврей с одним именем—это не человек и даже не полчеловека. К его имени приставлялись все имена родителей, чтобы не путать с другим человеком, у которого может быть такое же имя. Но чаще всего давалась кличка и она намертво прирастала к имени и сопровождала человека до самой смерти. [Sevela 1991a: 74] In our street, a Jew with only one name is not human and not even a half-human. All the names of his parents were added to his name so as not to confuse him with a person who might have the same name. But most often he was given a nickname, and this nickname stuck to his name and accompanied him until his death. This and other passages with several digressions, assurances, and rhetorical questions directed to the reader are only necessary to explain why a Jewess from the shtetl was called Rokhl Elke-Khanes:8 “А  какой нормальный человек с (Mendele Moicher Sforim) and Micha Josef Berdyczewski, that defined the beginnings of Yiddish prose and all its further development. It held that the writer was required to become a stranger to himself, even forget himself, that is, to renounce the authentic authorial voice. The art of metamorphosis presupposed a narrative fusion with the world of “little people”: “[. . .] a Yiddish writer has to conceal his direct identity and to master a technique of self-alienation or self-elimination in his writing. For that, the writer has endowed with a gift of histrionic disguise and with a sure sense of the proper limitations of feigned innocence” [1973: 79]. 8 There is a similar episode in Sholem Aleichem’s story “Dray matones” (“The three gifts”), which Murray Baumgarten cites as a characteristic example of “linguistic action” and the “epic

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Инвалидной улицы назовет женщину по фамилии?” [ibid.] (“And what normal person from the Invalidnaia Street would call a woman by her surname?”). This dialogical narration is a reminder that Yiddish once used to be a medium of communication in a living Jewish community with their implicit rules and a system of allusions, so that a conversation built into the speech appeals to “the very deepest levels of a collective sensibility” [Pinsker 1991: 16]. All this is meant to create that imaginary space of trustful familiarity and interaction in which a common system of values is possible. The existential significance of the spoken word as a means of Jewish resistance and spiritual survival in the diaspora is explored by Ruth Wisse in her essay “Two Jews Talking: A View of Modern Yiddish Literature”: “The two Jews form a tiny island in the midst of the threatening or simply alien sea, and whether they are friends or opponents, strangers or relatives, contemporaries or separated by a generation, they provide for as long as they remain locked in the conversation the moral context within which everything else must be weighed and understood” [Wisse 1994: 129]. While the extension of one system of values on the whole world can often seem comical, Yiddish writers transform action into conversation and create an (ephemeral) oasis of collective safety rooted in the word of the Talmud, which is, for them, a fixture [ibid.: 132].9 However, in the contemporary context (that of Sevela), this position is ambivalent, because in the absence of a knowledgeable Jewish reader it always means a stylization and an anachronistical collision of the authentic inner perspective, in the style of proverbial Tevye the Dairyman, with the necessity of making the Jewish world culturally accessible to today’s readers, who know little about it. The fictional narrator, an (unreliable) guarantor of credibility, refers to tradition: “Так было принято при наших дедах, а может быть, еще и раньше и, как говорится, не наше собачье дело [это] отменять” [Sevela 1991a: 74] (“This is how we used to do it in the days of our grandfathers and maybe even earlier, and, damn it, it is not our job to get rid of [this]”). This tradition, evoked in the performative act of Jewish speech, is “captured” in the diegesis of the story in the moment just before its total annihilation. The Jewish customs of naming and addressing become outdated and change in the process of Sovietization. The Soviet style of addressing men and women by surname in the spirit of the new morals glorifying labor and equality clashes in a grotesque way with traditional Jewish terms and forms of address, which

of the Yiddish language”: “‘Now for the story. I hate long-winded introductions. Her name was Paye, but she was called ‘the young widow.’ Why? Here we go with whys! [. . .]’” [1982: 74]. 9 See also Murray Baumgarten: “[Language] is the only means by which the characters can maintain and articulate their own fragile cultural web” [1982: 76].

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tenaciously attempt to survive. Rokhl Elke-Khanes, a zealous activist who campaigns for the modernization of the shtetl, likes to be called “tovarishch Lifshits” (“comrade Lifshits”), but most of all, “madam Lifshits” (“Madame Lifshits”). This latter way of addessing is a striking remnant of the “bourgeois” world that Rokhl is supposed to be fighting, which reveals her dream of social aggrandizement. In general, the Soviet-style modernization of patriarchal life in the shtetl is always accompanied by the absurd. While the narrator represents an affirmative, proud attitude towards the world he describes—it is, after all, his native environment—the author smuggles into the text the bitter irony of historical comparisons. Narrative mimicry becomes an important device for the self-ironic Jewish story, with its subtext of political skepticism about the new conditions. As Sholem Aleichem did earlier, Sevela represents historical breaks and the destruction of the old world with a sad irony creeping into what can be called a domestic panegyric. The ‘naïve’ narrator puts on the proud and boastful mask of a shtetl’s native as he stages the poetics of the unique and the exceptional: Уж кого-кого, а рыжих у нас было полным-полно. Всех оттенков, от бледножелтого до медного. А веснушками были усеяны лица так густо, будто их мухи засидели. Какие это были веснушки! Сейчас вы таких не найдете! Я, например, нигде не встречал. [. . .] Одним словом, красивые люди жили на нашей улице. Таких здоровых и сильных, как у нас, еще можно было найти кое-где, но таких красивых—тут уж, как говорится, извини-подвинься. [Sevela 1991a: 78] If we had something in abundance, then it was the redheads. Of all shades, from pale yellow to copper. And the faces were so densely covered with freckles that one could think thousands of flies had defecated on them. What kind of freckles were these! Today you would not find such freckles! I never saw them again, for example. [. . .] In a word, beautiful people lived in our street. Such healthy and strong people as lived with us could still be found here and there, but not such beautiful people, tell me what you want. This is followed by an anecdotal episode of a failed child abduction by a childless couple from the Polish nobility. The episode proves that the Jewish children in the Invalidnaia Street were irresistibly beautiful and that their

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fathers—here, the grandfather of the narrator, the carpenter Shaya—never let themselves be humiliated, no matter by whom. After this incident, the haughty shtetl Jews started to ask the strangers with an air of bravado: “—И вы это нам говорите? Или:—И вы нам хотите что-нибудь доказать?” [ibid.: 79] (“‘And you tell us?’ Or: ‘And you want to prove something to us?’”). The comparison between the language of Sevela’s narrator and the one in Sholem Aleichem’s autobiographical novel Funem yarid (1916) is revealing: [. . .] velkhe shtot oyf der groyser velt, es meg zayn Odes, oder Paris, oder London, oder afile Nyu York, kon zikh barimen mit aza groysn, breytn mark un mit azoy fil yidishe kleytn un kleytlekh, tishn, tishlekh and shtelkhelekh, mit gantse berg frishe shtekedike eplekh un barlekh, dinyes un kavenes [. . .]. [Sholem Aleichem 1940: 8] [.  .  .] Which large city—Odessa, Paris, London, or even New York—can boast of such a large market with so many Jewish shops, stands and stalls, with mountainsful of fresh aromatic apples and pears, cantaloupes and watermelons? [. . .]. [Sholem Aleichem 1985: 5] This praise, which imitates the limited view of a tam or a shlemiel from the maskilic literature, is infiltrated by an outsider’s bitter irony that reveals the decaying fragility of the little world and documenting the entire Jewish diaspora history as in passing: Velkhe shtot farmogt aza alte ayngekhoykerte beys-medresh [. . .]? Inem dozikn altn beysmedresh, dertseylen alte yidn, hobn zikh undzere zeydes amol farshlosen far Mazepen, gezesn dray teg mit dray nekht ongeton in tales un tfiln un gezogt tehilim— un durkh dem nitsl gevorn fun toyt. [Sholem Aleichem 1940: 9] Which town has such an old, tumbledown bes medresh [. . .]? Old Jews say that our ancestors once locked themselves in this venerable bes medresh in fear of Masepa, may his memory be blotted out. They stayed there three days and three nights, wearing tallis and tefillin and reciting psalms. Only this saved them from death. [Sholem Aleichem 1985: 5]

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Not surprisingly, in Funem yarid, the praise of the old bathhouse ends with the mention of an anti-Jewish hate campaign, which followed the rumors that Jews had hanged a goy there: “Hot di shtot gehat oyf zikh nokh dem a pekl” [Sholem Aleichem 1940: 9] (“This caused the town a pack of troubles” [Sholem Aleichem 1985: 5]). And they still look for a treasure from the time of Khmel′nitskii, but find only the bones of the murdered Jews in the beautiful, large hill, “vos zayn shpits dergreykht biz der khmare” [Sholem Aleichem 1940: 13] (“so high its peak almost touches the clouds” [Sholem Aleichem 1985: 5]). Sevela’s narrator, too, proudly reports that a real Orthodox priest lived in his street, but, “как и полагается” [Sevela 1991a: 75] (“as it should be”), he was shot dead after the October Revolution. His widow, the old popad′ia, let the Bolsheviks dig an air raid shelter in her garden so as not to arouse suspicions of non-conformity. In a grotesquely exaggerated scene, she stands with her old headscarf, which she cannot take off because of her piety, and a gas mask, in front of the house and “hospitably” invites the Jews to test the shelter. With admiration, the narrator comments on the fact that Stalin opened a railroad for children in Moscow before the war, when people were queuing up to buy bread—and triumphed over the West: “Сталин—лучший друг советских детей, а заодно и советских железнодорожников, осчастливил московских пионеров, а про остальных забыл или у  него просто не хватило времени. Ведь он тогда вел всю страну к коммунизму” [ibid.: 87 f.] (“Stalin, the best friend of Soviet children and also of the Soviet railroad workers, made the pioneers in Moscow happy, but he forgot the others or he just had no time. After all, he was leading the whole country to communism”). Executions, hunger, and the “liquidation” of the churches in the course of the anti-religious propaganda form the historical background for the fabula of the Yiddish vundermayse, or Jewish picaresque story.10 In this way, Sevela, a dissident and a Jewish activist, relates the history of his people—a Jewish and a Soviet one—in his first text written in emigration.11

10 The ironic contrast between the enthusiastic speech of the narrator/protagonist and the poor, provincial environment that he admires, is also the central narrative device in “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” (1878) by Mendele Moicher Sforim. As already mentioned above, the simulated simplicity of the am ha-aretz figure from the Haskala literature has been used in many later Jewish texts. 11 As Sholem Aleichem’s researchers repeatedly stated, historical breaks, rupture of tradition, and the fate of Jews in the world that has changed irreversibly are the “actual subject” of “Tevye the Dairyman.” See Meyer Wiener: “At first glance, the subject of Tevye the Dairyman is a homely Jewish one, ‘the problem of child-rearing.’ Actually, this cycle of ‘portraits from private life’ depicts not simply the misfortunate ones of one family [. . .], but also the very way in which the foundations of society are eroded in a period of transition from one historical age

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The center of attention in the story is the figure of Berele Mats, the narrator’s childhood best friend. Berele is a rogue, tireless in his ideas and pranks and, according to the narrator, a selfless little hero who would make all the children in his street happy. Berele is not only a rogue, but also a shlemiel because he is mercilessly beaten for his pranks by his father, the porter Ele-Chaim Mats. The author portrays his protagonist as grotesque. While all the inhabitants of the shtetl are beautiful, tall, blond or red-haired, bright-eyed, and unspeakably strong,12 “Берэлэ Мац был плодом неудачного скрещивания” [Sevela 1991a: 79] (“Berele Mats was the product of an unfortunate breeding”). He is small,13 has wild black hair, one green and one brown eye, and huge protruding ears. This ridiculous appearance, marking his “subversive” hybridity, contrasts with an inexhaustible cheerfulness and energy: “Его оптимизм происходил от огромной силы таланта, причeм таланта разностороннего, который бушевал, как огонь, в маленьком тельце под узким, заросшим волосами, лобиком” [Sevela 1991a: 81] (“His optimism came from an immense power of talent, a versatile talent that was raging like fire in his fragile body, behind his narrow forehead overgrown with hair”). Berele is representative of those extraordinary, often tragicomic figures that are the most salient images in, and the spiritual focus of the Jewish story. He is an outsider and an altruist who, as the narrator states indignantly several times, was not understood and appreciated by people who surrounded him. With humorous dismay, the narrator quotes Berele’s ingenious ideas, which earned him nothing but a bad name and beatings. In order to realize a groundbreaking project of “cost-effective” dairy farming, which would not require cans and save the metal in this difficult time, the two friends catch the neighbor’s goat and try to milk it directly into Berele’s mouth (without any to another” [Wiener 1941/1986: 44]. Tevye’s biblical quotations are, according to Michael Stern, a genuinely Jewish means of arresting or at least interpreting the changes happening around the old man, of incorporating them into a familiar system of values: “He is powerless to stop these changes, and they can only do them in quotations and glosses [. . .]” [Stern 1986: 93]. 12 This striking portrait, a mirror inversion of the stereotypes about the shtetl Jews, can be interpreted as a provocative counter-reading of antisemitic stereotype. It is also possible to trace Zionist phraseology into the context of his fictional shtetl and to conclude that Sevela takes up the well-known tradition of “muscular Jews.” Sevela refuses to portray Jews as different in appearance; rather, they outperform their non-Jewish neighbors with seemingly non-Jewish characteristics such as physical strength, simplicity, and lack of education. Sevela’s heroes combine the Zionist and the Soviet ideal features. Such “muscular Jews” also inhabit, for example, Boris Gal′perin’s story “Moia rodoslovnaia” published in 1983 by Sovetskii pisatel′ (see chap. 2.3.1), in which strong, grumpy, uncouth Jewish craftsmen embody the austere ideal of Soviet workers. 13 Berele’s small stature is a literal reflection of the Jewish archetype of the kleyne mentshele (little man).

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particular success).14 Not expecting any thanks and with the certain knowledge of a speedy retribution, Berele keeps stealing money, first from his parents and then from his neighbors, to buy ice cream or Chinese balloons for all the children of the shtetl. Berele Mats can be interpreted as a child-sized version of the Jewish man of the air, such as Sholem Aleichem’s Menachem Mendl. For Ba’al Machshoves, Menachem Mendl’s extraordinary enterprising spirit and ingenuity are related to the fact that it was impossible for Jews to earn a living and achieve prosperity in the ways that were accessible to non-Jews: “As a result, a penchant for all kinds of exception, fantastic deals, and unusual undertakings was nurtured in the soul of the Jewish merchant. The Jew was in the same situation as the Spanish and Portuguese adventurer of the sixteenth century who was always dreaming of discovering new and unexplored territories, a kind of Pizaro or Vasco da Gama [. . .]” [1986: 9, italics in the original]. Berele’s roguish charm stems from his ability and desire to bring joy and a touch of luxury to the meager, distressed life of the prewar shtetl, to make things “out of nothing”—out of the air. Ba’al Machshoves’s ironic comparison of the Jewish luftmensh with the great explorers and travelers points to the true inspiration that fueled these undertakings, which were not all about the practical necessity. Early literary scholarship has already cited Sholem Aleichem’s interpretation of the little man as a Jewish Don Quixote, whose inexhaustible vitality is wasted for ephemeral purposes. Meyer Wiener writes: “The pettiness of their ideas is tragic in itself, but more tragic is the fact that their superhuman energies are expended in vain” [1986: 50]. In the Jewish “fools, shlimazls, dreamers, maniacs,” Wiener sees a “quixotic striving” and heroic traits [ibid.: 52]. Ruth Wisse [1971] and Sanford Pinsker [1991] also investigate how Jewish folklore and literature reinterpret the non-Jewish concept of the heroic: “If the Gentile world could boast of its armies and its political clout, shtetl Jewry could offer up sharp retorts by way of putting such ‘power’ into perspective. Jewish humor, then, was a way of exacting victories from the raw material of irony and skepticism” [Pinsker 1991: 13]. It is worth noting that the terms “army” and “victory” are associated here with the linguistic “weapons” of the Jews.

14 See Murray Baumgarten’s description of the Chelmer naronim (the wise men/the simple men of Chelm): “Here, when a problem must be solved, the Chelmites come up with a formula theoretically correct but practically absurd” [1982: 79]. In the contemporary situation, the new incarnation of the Hasidic resistance, which was directed against the self-isolation of Jewish scholarship and provided a lot of material for Jewish folklore, is the resistance against the Soviet reality, which was not well disposed towards Jews and non-Jews alike.

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Berele Mats, the narrator informs us, was an outstanding personality, whose calling was to make humanity happy, and a martyr whose achievements surpass those of Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. The admiration of the hero, following the tradition of the Jewish satirical popular books, stories about fools, and later picaresque novels, is again accompanied by a glimpse of the historical situation. Against the background of Stalin opening the children’s railway in Moscow, Berele’s doomed attempt to organize a “railway” for the little inhabitants of the Invalidnaia Street appears as an act of true humanity. He steals some money and buys an old weak horse, which is, for a while, able to drag the sledges with the children on it to their delight. Appealing to future historians to document the deeds of Berele Mats and not to be deterred by the fact that he was “unfortunately” a Jew, the narrator refers to the traditions of Soviet historiography: historians are supposed to remain objective, “не так, как в Большой Советской Энциклопедии” [Sevela 1991a: 87] (“not as in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia”). Moreover, the story about adventures of children who desperately break the adults’ rules, and are punished by the adults, draws upon Sholem Aleichem’s writing about children. Thus, Berele Mats is a direct descendant of the boy Sholem from Sholem Aleichem’s Funem yarid, already mentioned above. Sholem, the son of Nochum Vevikov, is a particularly clever and disobedient boy, “a sheygets un nisht gevolt vakzn in der heykh” [Sholem Aleichem 1940: 32] (“a little rascal who did not want to grow”). He gets plenty of slaps and punches from his cheder teacher, the neighbors, and his parents, but that does not deter him. Finally, the figure of Berele Mats in Sevela’s story hearkens back to an even older tradition of Jewish storytelling. Its roots go back to the “clever” fools, the proverbial Chelmer naronim and all the “rogues and fools with Jewish caps” [Loewe 1920].15 The story ends with an extermination, the dimensions of which go beyond the narrator’s understanding. Almost all the residents of the shtetl are murdered by the Germans, so that the once significant differences within this little world do not matter any more.16 The only survivor of the Mats family, Berele’s older

15 On the images of fools and rogues in Jewish folk culture see [Loewe 1920]. Already in the stories of Rabbi Nachman (especially in his famous A mayse mit a khokhem un a tam), the (Hasidic) simple-minded figures are truly wise because they can be happy in all circumstances and know no doubt or dissatisfaction. In this scale of values, the little man becomes great. See also the chapter “A Hasidic Fool” in the monograph by Ruth Wisse [1971: 16-24]. 16 Cf.: “[.  .  .] я никак не понимаю, как это выдержал земной шар, который продолжает по-прежнему вертеться, как ни в чем не бывало, а солнце так же всходит каждое утро, ни разу не покраснев. Уму не постижимо!” [Sevela 1991a: 95] (“[. . .] I cannot understand how

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brother, the war hero Grisha, is executed shortly before the end of the war because in his despair and revenge after visiting his destroyed shtetl he drove a tank into a column of German prisoners and killed many people. The topic of the Shoah also brings a change of style: the Jewish speech of the narrator and the characters comes to an abrupt stop, and literature—the eccentric Jewish picarsque mayse— gives place to history that eschews narrative. Such a revision of poetic tradition confronted with historical atrocities that exceed artistic imagination signals the starting point of a posthuman period of Jewish literature—a phenomenon that marks the development of Jewish literary history in various languages after the Shoah. In this context, David Roskies discusses Isaac Bashevis Singer’s image of the Jewish demon in “Mayse Tishevits” (“The tale of Tishevitz,” 1959). Previously, Jewish mystics considered the demon powerful, but now he has lost all power. A rabbi who has twice successfully resisted the demonic temptations has no further opportunity to compete or lose against the “dark side” for the decisive third time because “the Germans come and murder the Jews of Europe, leaving no one worthy of being tested. The demon’s work pales in comparison with the work of the human demons” [Roskies 1994: 126].17 The demonic narrator gives the readers to understand that the story he narrates, and the demon himself, have forever become a fairy-tale: I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced? I am the last of the persuaders. I board in an attic in Tishevitz and draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a leftover from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pablum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own. I don’t have to tell you that I am a Jew. What else, a Gentile? [Bashevis Singer 2011] In their own way, Jewish literatures concur with Theodor Adorno’s wellknown dictum that proclaims the impossibility of artistic creativity after the Holocaust. In Sevela’s text, the Holocaust has a special poetics, which becomes visible in the poet(olog)ic(al) and (meta)fictional treatment of the story’s finale. There, the style changes from skaz to a solemn historical report: “Берэлэ

the earth globe could bear it. This globe continues to spin as if nothing had happened, and the sun rises every morning. It did not blush even once. Incomprehensible!”). 17 On this, see also [Dauber 2004: 3].

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стал одной из шести миллионов еврейских жертв фашизма” [Sevela 1991a: 95] (“Berele became one of the six million Jewish victims of fascism”). Thus, storytelling becomes an iconic and poetic reflection of the plot that cannot be continued in its traditional form. And yet, in the finale of the story, the mimic writing characteristic of the mayse is recalled one last time as it joins the posthuman context. The official Soviet rhetoric of mourning, developed during the war and the postwar years (compare the phrase: “жертв фашизма” quoted above) merges with the very personal pathos of the narrator: И я потом ни разу не встречал людей по фамилии Мац. И видимо она не будет иметь продолжения. Я вас очень прошу. Если когда-нибудь вы встретите кого-нибудь с такой фамилией, не поленитесь черкнуть мне пару слов. У меня камень спадет с души. Значит, не все еще потеряно. И возможно через два или три поколения на земле снова появится со своим низеньким лобиком, большими ушами и вечной улыбкой новый Берэлэ Мац, и человечество снова сможет надеяться, что на земле, в конце концов, все же будет рай. [Sevela 1991a: 96] After that, I never met a single person with the surname Mats again. And apparently, this surname will not live on. I would like to ask you something from the bottom of my heart. If you ever meet a person with that surname, would you please take the trouble to write me a few lines. It will take a load off my mind. Because that would mean that not everything is lost. And maybe in two or three generations, then, a new Berele Mats would appear on earth, with his low forehead, big ears, and eternal smile, and humanity will again be able to hope that there will finally be paradise on earth. This metaleptic appeal to the reader, which transcends the borders of fictional illusion, is again intertextually charged because it imitates the already mentioned method of Jewish skaz narration, whereby the reader is engaged in a dialogue and thus included in the internal communication system of the narrative. This speech act unites the narrator, the characters, and the reader within an imaginary space of trust and friendly talk, and the space of the shtetl is semiotically doubled: it is both the signified and the signifier in this act of communication. Yiddish writers often used this technique to create an illusion of

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immediate communication with the readers. Thereby, each text offered a shared living space, within which information circulated and news were exchanged. For example, at the end of Mendele Moicher Sforim’s novel Dos kleyne mentshele (1864–1879), the narrator puts up a notice declaring that he is searching for one of the characters, Mr. Gutman, his good friend and business partner, who has gone missing. This fictitious announcement is addressed directly to the readers, as if they were supposed to know the missing person: A moydoe! Raboysay! Ver fun aykh veyst, vu ergets gefint zikh her Gutman, oder er vet zikh mit im ergets bagegenen, zol moykhl zayn mit im tsu reden, az er zol lemaanhashem teykef taki kumen keyn Glupsk, vu der Rebe kumt oyf im aroys, er zol ineynem mit im onfirn a barimte talmud-toyre mit a shul far balmeloches, un mesaken zayn dort nokh a sakh andere gute zakhn. Yisroel bney rakhmones, hot rakhmones un tut es tsulib oreme yidishe kinder! [Mendele Moicher Sforim 1913: 154] A notification! Gentlemen! If any of you know where Mr. Gutman is or meet him anywhere, please take the trouble to tell him that he should come immediately to Glupsk, where the rabbi is waiting for him to set up, together with him, an exemplary Jewish school and an educational institution for craftsmen, and otherwise do many good things there. You Jews, sons of mercy, feel pity and do that for the sake of the poor Jewish children! The closing monologue of Sevela’s narrator is a conspicuous reference to the finale of Mendele’s text,18 in which the request for help is sentimentally colored and presented as a good cause that will benefit the entire Jewish community. However, a reader who is sensitive to intertextual devices will quickly notice that there is a difference between these two texts. One of them is marks the beginning of the East European Jewish literary tradition, and the other—its end. Correspondingly, in Mendele’s fictional universe the search for the missing character definitely makes sense and can only be desemioticized as a

18 But also to a number of other Yiddish texts, including Sholem Aleichem’s Funem yarid, in which the narrator also speaks directly to the reader while seeking his childhood friend.

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literary device, but in Sevela’s text, a similar call to help find a missing person is immediately understood as a rhetorical figure. After the Holocaust, it is not possible to find any survivors from the Mats family, and the poetic gesture of addressing the audience becomes a commemoration of the poetics of the Yiddish story. In his prose cycle, Legendy Invalidnoi ulitsy, Efraim Sevela presents himself as a master of disguise and, at the same time, a literary dissident, who reflects on a tragic historical period distorted in the uptight Soviet consciousness. The connection between historicity and folklorization also characterizes the other stories in this cycle. Sevela creates here a multilayered Jewish intertext, which alone could make the subject of a scholarly monograph. A noteworthy example is the story “Shkaf ‘Mat′ i ditia’” (“The cupboard ‘Mother and child’”). Its central episode is a collectively organized marriage of two poor, lonely inhabitants of the shtetl—Shneer, the somewhat retarded, silent carriage-maker, and Stefa, the unsightly old spinster. For some time, the entire female population of the shtetl is engaged in the preparations for this celebration culminating in an unprecedented lavish wedding reception. Here, Sevela evidently refers to the Jewish custom of “cholera weddings” in Eastern Europe, which he transfers to the time of his childhood. He also alludes to Mendele Moicher Sforim’s story “Fishke der krumer” (“Fishke the Lame,” 1869). Mendele’s narrator mentions this custom when he says that even in times of cholera, Fishke was forgotten by the community of Glupsk and remained single [Mendele Moicher Sforim 1951]. During an epidemic, pious Jews organized weddings of beggars and disabled or injured people, which usually took place in the cemeteries, as they believed that the celebrations would avert the spread of the disease. In the context of Sevela’s structural allusion to Mendele also important is the fact that even the unfortunate Fishke is married later and almost without any involvement of his own, to a blind orphan, and that, during the celebration, its organizers, as well as the poor wedding guests, have a rare chance to eat their fill.19 Sevela moves the “epidemic” to the sphere of the political: the events in his story take place shortly before the war, during the period of mass arrests and Stalinist purges. Sevela also transposes Soviet history into the Jewish narrative tradition in another remarkable text—the military satire “Monia Tsatskes—znamenosets” (“Monia Tsatskes, the flag bearer,” 1977). The Soviet military propaganda with its veneration of the soldiers’ heroic acts, becomes totally useless here, because it is spread in a Lithuanian division, which consists of very unwarlike Jews who do not understand Russian very well. However, the apparently simple-minded 19 See also Jacob Rombro’s “Cholera wedding” (1890?).

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protagonist Monia Tsatskes manages to turn all difficult situations to his own advantage and possibly to that of his less fortunate comrades, and never lose. The story follows the subgenre of the anti-Soviet Jewish military satire, a picaresque plot in the wake of Il′ia Erenburg’s Burnaia zhizn′ Lazika Roitshvanetsa (1928). This little researched writing fills the niche of the Jewish literary anti-military canon, similar to Lev Larskii’s novel Memuary rotnogo pridurka (Memoirs of the regiment’s moron), which was very popular in the Soviet underground. The figure of the Jewish anti-hero, with his salacious adventures, innocent tricks, a tremendous will to survive, and an astonishing ability to undermine and ridicule the seemingly solid system of the overpowerful empire, anticipated the decay of the communist regime, or, at least it recorded its erosion in the 1970s and the 1980s. The Jewish pícaro exposes the shadowy phantasmagoria of the crumbling ideology, which turns out to be a phantom in comparison with the undisputed reality of famine or antisemitism in the army. The late Soviet Jewish picaresque novel inherits, in its own way, the bitterly ironic pathos of the classical models of the picaresque genre, which originated in sixteenthcentury Spain as a (distorted) reflection of the social situation, in contrast to chivalric novels (see Tomashevskii 1975: 8–13). At the same time, it revives the genealogy of tragicomical Jewish storytelling, using poetic devices such as archetypal characters, alogisms, irony, intertextual references, and paradoxes. The genre of Jewish military satire had a new surge of popularity with the writers who emigrated to Israel. There, its themes and issues were adapted to the life of the Israeli army. Besides several prose pieces by Sevela himself, in 1980, Vladimir Lazaris, whom I mentioned in chap. 4.1 as a witness and a participant of the aliyah movement, published a novel called Rezervisty (Reservists), which contains the characteristic features of a picaresque satire, based on his experience of military service after repatriation. It is not by chance that the leitmotif of the narrative is the ironical comparison of the army and of Israel’s entire political system with the too well-known realia of the Soviet Union. Lazaris’s novel destroys the myth of Israel created by the Jewish counter-culture. The very strict Israeli military censorship, which extends to the smallest details, the boasting and bluffing in the face of the visiting generals and high-ranking controllers, the ideological (re)education of the multiethnic army in the spirit of the new patriotism, and the ubiquitous propaganda rhetoric all remind the narrator of the Soviet past that he left behind. In one of the episodes, he cites one of the mandatory lectures for soldiers: “Сионизм как национально-освободительное движение и учение, призванное сплотить мировое еврейство, был и остается до настоящего времени . . . Теперь уже государство Израиль воплощает в жизнь бессмертные идеи Герцеля . . .” [1987: 94] (“Zionism is

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and remains to this day a movement of national liberation and a doctrine called to unite the Jews of the world .  .  . Now, the State of Israel is making Herzl’s immortal ideas a reality .  .  .”). Against the backdrop of this sad parallelism, the biblical allusions—such as the comparison of the Israeli soldiers with the legendary Maccabees—are revealed as (self-)deception for all the participants, and as an element of the reeducation program infused by the official ideology (see the chapter “Novye Makkavei” [“The new Maccabees”] [ibid.: 42–47]). In the light of a dual system of geopolitical references, the confession of the reservist Berni-Dov is important: “Когда я мечтал об Израиле, об этой армии, я думал, что буду тут настоящим солдатом, воином. Что-то вроде Бар-Кохбы. Но Бар-Кохбы из меня не получилось. Шлимазл. Шлимазл я” (“When I dreamed of Israel, of this army, I thought that I would become a real soldier, a proud fighter. Something like Bar-Kochba. But I never became a BarKochba. A shlimazl. I am a shlimazl”). The biblical reference to Bar-Kochba is replaced in this confession by the allusion to the shlimazl, a diasporic Jewish figure. Once again in the Russian-Israeli literature, the implicit narrator presents the Promised Land as a new place of diaspora with Jews slipping into the roles of its prototypical figures.

9.3. An Old Jewess in a Monologue with the Reader: Filipp Isaak Berman’s “Sarra and the Little Rooster” Filipp Isaak Berman (born in 1936) was offered to emigrate after he published, together with Vladimir Kormer, Evgenii Popov, Evgenii Kharitonov, Dmitrii Prigov, among others, the independent Moscow literary almanac Katalog in 1980, informed the authorities about the establishment of an “independent writers’ club,” and was arrested. In 1981, he left for the United States. He worked on his most famous story “Sarra i petushok” for almost ten years, from 1979 to 1988. Like many others, Berman is one of the authors who had their roots in Russian-Soviet literature—Iurii Trifonov and Iurii Nagibin were among his better-known patrons—who tried to publish their works mostly without success, and finally worked in the literary underground. Berman’s family socialization was less typical. His father was an observant Jew and visited the Moscow choral synagogue. They spoke Yiddish at home (see [Shrayer 2007: 1027–1028]). “I had an inner religious belief but I did not go to the synagogue. [. . .] We read [ Jewish classics], Avtorkhanov, Solzhenitsyn, Svirskii, Siniavskii,

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Daniel′, the whole samizdat, Israeli and American magazines”20 Berman’s prose texts attest to his Jewish knowledge: even though they often mimetically revive the Russian-Soviet-Jewish existence, they are obviously a part of the Jewish literature tradition due to their dense intertextuality. Many of his works, interwoven with biblical-Judaistic and Yiddish references, provide a Jewish “insider’s view” of the recent past. But, as in Sevela’s texts, this living insider’s position is, paradoxically, a “memorative” device, which characterizes the age of Jewish posthistory in the present. Old Perel, the protagonist of the story, tells about her life in a Soviet communal apartment, and also goes back to her past before the Revolution. As in Sevela’s texts, the reader is, from the first lines, immersed into the stylisticcommunicative world of Jewish orality, a monologue that is actually a dialogue: “Вы знаете, на старости лет я стала ашатхынты. Вы не знаете, что это такое. Это сваха по-вашему будет, а по-нашему, это значит по-еврейскому, это будет ашатхынты. Я вам хочу рассказать, как я стала сватать” [Berman 2013: 77] (“You know, in my old days, I’ve become a shadkhante. You don’t know what that is. In your language, it means a matchmaker, but in ours, in Yiddish, it means a shadkhante. I want to tell you how I started to pair people off ”). This folkloristic promise—the figure of the matchmaker, who is usually a comic character, is found in numerous Yiddish literary texts and folklore—is never fulfilled. Instead, one episode follows the other just as Abram, Perel’s husband, predicts right at the beginning: “[. . .] у нас, у евреев, так: если он хочет рассказать вам про пуговицу от пиджака, так он начинает сначала от шнурков про ботинки” [ibid.] (“[. . .] with us Jews, it is like this: if he wants to tell you something about a button on his jacket, he begins with the shoelaces on his feet”). Especially in the beginning of the text—semiotically marked as an “entry” into the Jewish world—there are many Yiddish words and expressions (with translations attached in a glossary) and indexical signs that convey gestures, all a kind of an intertextual code of the narrative. Perel, for example, reports on the miraculous gift of her husband as a child in the Jewish school, who knew the answers to all difficult questions of the Talmud earlier than the rabbi—and thus evokes the topos of a Jewish scholar admired by the whole community, a talmid-khokhem. But she refers, above all, to her lived experience, and her poetical naivety and directness finally transform the communist ideology into a cruel nonsense. Her vivid, idiosyncratic way of speaking, her repetitions and comparisons, become a unique medium that reveals the absurdity of the Soviet devotion to technology, military teleology, and the belief in the progress of knowledge: 20 From my electronic correspondence with Filipp Berman (20. 09. 2018).

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Они летают туда, они летают сюда, одним одевают ордена, другим одевают ордена, плескают руками туда, плескают руками сюда. Как они могут что-нибудь увидеть, если они не знают Бога? Зачем мы с вами живем на земле? Они знают, как убивать, они знают, как сделать бомбу, что они еще знают? Как из человека сделать калеку. Сначала были погромы, потом революция, потом опять погромы, потом опять революция. Потом были красные, потом были белые, потом были зеленые. [Ibid.: 79] They fly there, they fly here, some are given medals, others are given medals, they clap their hands there, they clap their hands here. How can they see something if they do not know God? Why do I and you live on earth? They know how to kill, they know how to make a bomb, what else do they know? How to turn a person into a cripple. First there were pogroms, then revolution, then pogroms again, then revolution again. Then there were the Reds, then there were the Whites, then there were the Greens. With her skepticism towards the Soviet space exploration, Perel follows Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye as she recites the historical disasters that struck the kleyne mentsheles in the twentieth century. Like Tevye, she “domesticates” the political order and the whole East European history, transferring them into her own system of knowledge and values. Like a number of other senior Jews in unofficial Russian Jewish literature, Perel articulates anti-canonical knowledge, rooted in a “simple” religious worldview, in a way that linguistically evokes Yiddish storytelling. Perel is a product of the literary tradition in which naive and uneducated characters often become the mouthpiece for nonconformist authors. So what happens to Tevye and Golda’s family after the end of Sholem Aleichem’s story? Perel’s brother Izya, the best tailor in town, becomes a communist by chance, after he gets drunk and is carried away by the Bolsheviks. Her second brother, Esif, an unspeakably strong stevedore, flees the parents’ house at the age of fourteen: “Когда один сын стал красным, а другой убежал из дома, так маме есть о чем переживать” [Ibid.: 80] (“If one son becomes a Red and the other flees the family, their

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mother has every reason to be worried”). In addition to pogroms and the Revolution that Perel’s literary ancestors experienced, now added are Stalinism and the doctors’ plot. Just like her predecessors, Perel also seeks the answers from the Jewish God as she reads the Jewish names of the “poisoners” in the newspaper: “Ой, готыню, [. . .] чем же мы у тебя провинились, что ты нам это посылаешь? [. . .] Шрек мир, готыню, но только не наказывай!” [ibid.: 81; 84] (“Oy gotenyu, [. . .] what are we guilty of that you send us this? [. . .] Shrek mir, gotenyu, but don’t punish me!”). This diminutive familiar address to God, which goes back to the “intimate” dialogical relations of the Hasidic Jews with their Creator, translates Stalin’s crimes into the old language of the Torah—the language of biblical guilt, grace, and retribution. The central episode of the story is a violent kitchen dispute between Perel and one of her flatmates, who goes into hysterics of antisemitic hatred after reading too much Pravda articles. This scene is the culmination of the story’s poetics, in which a balance is maintained between documentary realism and Jewish quotation. Berman humorously recreates what in folk tales would have been a quarrel between two Jewish women, usually market sellers, and at the same time he uses expressions that recognizably mark the historical epoch. The flatmate Zoika, also referred to as “banditka” (“the [female] bandit”), uses formulaic insults that have become clichés in Soviet everyday life in 1953: “[. . .] вот теперь всех евреев перережут ножами. Чтобы не отравляли наших вождей. Слава Богу, что хоть Сталин живой остался. Он вас к порядку призовет. А всех евреев, кто в живых останется, кого не дорежут, пошлют в Сибирь лес пилить. [. . .] Гитлер вас резал, не дорезал, теперь мы дорежем! Ну, где ваш Бог?” [ibid.: 83] (“[.  .  .] wait, now they will stab you Jews with knives. So you do not poison our leaders. Thank God, Stalin survived. He will keep you in line. And all the Jews who stay alive, who are not stabbed, will be sent to cut trees in Siberia. [. . .] Hitler did not manage to kill you, now we will finish it! Well, where is your god now?”). To this, Perel responds with angry curses from the Yiddish vernacular: “Ешьте нас, бандиты, но нашими костями вы подавитесь! [. . .] Когда они раздерут ваш желудок, то вы захлебнетесь в своей собственной крови от наших костей!” [ibid.] (“Eat us, bandits, but you’ll choke on our bones! [. . .] When they tear up your stomach, you will be suffocated by your own blood!”). The quarrel escalates until it ends with an act of retaliation: the enraged Perel hits the banditka’s head with a cast iron pot. At that, she looks rather like a biblical heroine than a housewife. This tragicomic episode evokes the topos of “Old Testament rage” and retribution—the state reached when the limit of the proverbial Jewish patience is exceeded. However, it will soon be replaced by the religious ethics, which prohibits murder and thus, in Perel’s opinion, distinguishes the Jews from the goyim: “И я уже говорю

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Богу. Спасибо тебе, готыню, что я не убила эту курву. [. . .] Потому что мы не так воспитаны, чтобы кого-то убивать” [ibid.: 85] (“And then I say to God. Thank you, goteniu, that I did not kill this whore. [. . .] Because we were not taught to kill someone”). The folklore motif of women’s quarrel is moved from the shtetl into a Soviet communal apartment, and literally becomes a Jewish “kitchen equivalent” of a political dispute. Just as the doctors’ plot is reflected in the tragifarce of the quarrel, so is the Soviet friendship amongst nations satirized in the promiscuous behavior of the Jew-hating “banditka.” Another neighbor, Marusia, who fights on Perel’s side, accuses Zoika: “[. . .] у тебя, хоть армян, хоть еврей, хоть наш Иван-дурак! [.  .  .] этому дала, тому дала. Давалка нашлась тут” [ibid.: 87] (“[. . .] you do not care if it’s an Armenian, a Jew or our fool Ivan! [. . .] you gave it to this one and that one. We have a giver here”). While the “banditka’s” otherwise lacking international attitude perfectly works in sexual terms, Marusia praises her own sexual exclusivity, which again finds a political parallel: “Да если бы я только захотела, то ко мне бы очередь стояла, [. . .] ко мне бы чернилом на руках писали, как за мукой стояли в войну. [. . .] К ней надо пропуск иметь, как на парад” [ibid.] (“If only I wanted to, they would be queuing for me, [. . .] they would write down their numbers in line on their hands, just as they queued to buy flour during the war. [. . .] As for her [her vagina—K.S.], you need to have a pass, it’s like a parade”). Similar to Iuliia Shmukler’s story “Poslednii noneshnii denechek,” a quarrel that takes place in the terrible time before Stalin’s death (or shortly after it) descends into an obscene carnival and an unrestrained massacre—here, on the linguistic-discursive level. Berman’s “physiological sketch”21 is becoming more and more metaphysical, for the Jewish skaz not only translates historical catastrophes into the language of an anecdote, but also has the potential to turn from the most ordinary episodes of everyday life to the great matters of life and death. The slapstick rescue of the banditka pursued by her jealous husband—Perel and Abram hide her in their room—prompts Perel to philosophical reflections about the fundamental human connections in the face of the common burden of life: “Один в одном киселе, другой в другом киселе. Потому что жизнь плывет над нами, а не мы над ней” [ibid.: 95] (“One is in this jelly, another in that one. Because life extends over us, and not we over it”). Stalin’s death announces itself in Perel’s enigmatic dream, which her old acquaintance Rakhil′ interprets for her: Perel sees the tyrant in his underwear standing on the roof of Lenin’s mausoleum with a red lollipop rooster

21 The term is borrowed from the context of the Russian “Natural School” (Natural′naia shkola) of the 1840s, which propagated critical realistic writing and a true reproduction of the character’s speech in literature.

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in his mouth and a rope around his neck. Rakhil′ tells Perel a story in which the dead men whose ashes are immured in the Kremlin rise at night, drink tea, eat Jewish lykekh (honey cake) and tell each other who has killed whom; they argue and dance freylekhs in circles around the “doll” lying in the mausoleum, then they disappear into the earth or into the wall. This political allegory is explained by Abraham’s story from the Bible: Abraham replaced the clay doll that the Jews worshiped with the true God who showed Himself to him and led His sheep into another land. The dream is followed by Perel’s address to God, a passage in rhythmic prose, interspersed with repetitions, alliterations, and color symbolism. As in the other texts discussed above, the message of Stalin’s death delivered by Rakhil′ becomes a part of the Jewish history of salvation. It is also linked with the trope of unrestrained springtime floods and an unprecedented blue sky: Тут же появилась Рахиль. Она шла ко мне сто лет. Когда же она пришла ко мне, это небо вошло ко мне, а не она. [.  .  .] Скоро много будет воды. Вода потечет ручьями по площадям, чуть не потопит всех. Тогда все напьются. [. . .] Вот такая это будет весна. Оттого, что сейчас такое голубое небо. От такого солнца и неба все могут утонуть. [Ibid.: 105–106] And there Rakhil′ appeared. She went to me for a hundred years. And when she came to me, it was heaven that approached me, not her. [. . .] Soon there will be a lot of water. The water will flow in streams in the streets, it will almost bury us all underneath it. Then, everyone will drink their fill. [. . .] This is how spring will be. Because the sky is so blue now. Everyone can drown in this sun and this sky. In a final surreal vision, all the characters eat of the dark sweet honey cake of life that Rakhil′ slices up for them. This universal love union, which abolishes all conflicts and the constraints of time, is described with the use of extensive paraphrases of the Song of Songs.

9.4. Conclusion: Yiddish as a Quote Efraim Sevela and Filipp Berman reinvent the “letter and spirit” of tradition more clearly and more demonstratively than most other Russian Jewish authors of the late Soviet period. As the Yiddish culture was fading, these authors

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created a new, cite-specific mythology for it using such traditional devices as the mask of the Jewish narrator who provided a special insider’s perspective, Jewish folklore, self-irony, and the tragicomical. Sevela’s and Berman’s main strategy of revival is mimicry: their writing imitates the oral gesture and extra-linguistic, situational details characteristic of the Jewish mono-dialogue in the tradition of Mendele and Tevye. It must have been this continuity, which caused the extraordinary success of the book Legendy Invalidnoi ulitsy in the United States and the Western Europe, and which explains Ida Chagall’s remark that Sevela is the last Jewish classic in this world [ Jankowski 2004: 30]. The stylized Yiddish speech was predominantly transported into the postwar Russian Jewish literature by Isaak Babel′. The late Soviet authors could hardly ignore the influence of his writing, interspersed with colloquial occasionalisms of the Jewish “jargon,” and remarkable disruptions of Russian linguistic norms. However, their use of language and focalization show an important difference between Babel′, who is rooted in the living Jewish cultural context and the Jewish heteroglossia, and the more (Sevela) or less (Berman) assimilated authors who write about the past from which they are irretrievably separated. In his Russianlanguage prose, Babel′ was able—as I have mentioned in the chapter on Iakov Tsigel′man—to maintain the balance between different cultural contexts, which made his texts accessible for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike [Sicher 2012]. Babel′’s readers lived in a multilingual society, where they spoke, read, or heard Russian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and sometimes Hebrew. So, they were capable of distinguishing between Babel′’s imitation of Odessa jargon and his own linguistic creativity, including skaz. The tragic vacillation of the narrator in “Konarmiia” (“Red Cavalry,” 1923–1937)22 between the Russian-Ukrainian and Jewish perspectives on the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and the Sovietization became, for the cultural consciousness of later generations, a symbol of a dissonant double cultural affiliation, which was ascribed to Babel′ himself and the Russian Jewish intelligentsia in general. Babel′ uses irony to play with his multilingual readers; he masterfully juggles his subtexts23 and offers the possibility of differing cultural interpretations (fittingly, Sicher called this “double bookkeeping” [2012: 24]).24 For Berman 22 On this, see Shimon Markish [1997: 17–21]. On splits of the narrator’s consciousness—“внутренней неслиянности роевого сознания с сознанием уединенным” (“inner incompatibility of the collective consciousness with the individual consciousness”)—in “Konarmiia” cf. also [Dobrenko 1993a: 54–101, the quote on 75]. 23 Among them, allusions to the Tanakh and the Talmud are used to the same degree as Russian and world literature (see, for example, [Zholkovskii 1994] and [Sicher 2012]). 24 “Aware of their Marrano status, writers like Babel′ could code their Russian with the covert language of the Other for those Jewish readers who were bilingually proficient in the ‘hidden language’ of the Jews—a kind of ‘double book-keeping’” [Sicher 2012: 24].

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and Sevela, this cultural situation was unimaginable. Sevela in particular derives his knowledge of Yiddish and the traditional Jews from literature and fragmentary memories. Berman paraphrases and interprets Yiddish words and expressions for his Russian reader, and even lists them in a glossary at the end of the text. Babel′’s subtle differentiation between various connotations and lexical meanings (for example, in this way he expressed the correlation between the Revolution and the messianic redemption), gives way to an idealized, nostalgic representation of the Jewish world, which seems homogeneous now, from a temporal and cultural distance. In the absence of living speakers, both writers use elements of Yiddish as a de-automatized mimetic device—as quotes. The relationship between artistic transformation of the tradition, and its reinvention, which Roskies noted in his analysis of the Yiddish writing up to the twentieth century, here shifts towards the latter option. It is therefore no coincidence that Sevela and Berman, as they incorporate Soviet Jewish history in their texts, refer to the beginnings of Yiddish prose—to Mendele Moicher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, whose most famous works generated collective mythologies for dozens of years.25 Such references provide a connection to a recognizable tradition, and help to compensate for its loss. It should not be forgotten that the “myth-maker” himself, Sholem Aleichem, created his characters in a period when the Jewish shtetl had already, to a large degree, became the domain of folklore. The Jewish readers had assimilated and many of them had emigrated to the New World. Sholem Aleichem’s images were, for them, a reminder about the past, either comical or nostalgic. So, Tevye’s Jewish “speaking voice” was already a quote (see [Butwin/Butwin 1977: 124]). However, there was still a semiotic connection between the author, the diegtically competent narrator, and the equally knowledgeable reader, which still ensured the successful mediation of linguistic references and cultural allusions (as reflected in the title of Ruth R. Wisse’s essay “Two Jews Talking” [1994]). In Berman’s and Sevela’s time these allusions have mostly lost their semiotic relevance, so that the new authors recreated the memory of the “proverbal, mythological space, a collective locus” [Harshav 1994: 147], long ago detached from the original context of the shtetl and now existing in language only. This gesture indicated the “transhistorical fate” of the Jews [ibid.: 158], which has hardly changed since Tevye the Dairyman’s days.

25 Mikhail Krutikov refers to Sholem Aleichem’s characters, such as Tevye, Menachem, or Motl, as the “embodiments of the Jewish ‘essence,’” which could offer grounds for positive identification in times of collective crises: “The characters of this type were very popular for the symbolic purpose of national representation” [2001: 212].

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The influence of the Jewish cultural movement of the 1960s and the 1980s on the later Russian Jewish culture is worthy of a special monograph. The Jewish underground has set in motion processes that anticipated and prepared the cultural upheaval of the perestroika. The characteristic synthesis between the agendas of memory and resistance, which developed in nonconformist literature, laid the path for Jewish prose from the end of the 1980s onwards, into the epoch when the archives were opened and the Jews left the Soviet Union for many other countries. This (semi-)documentary writing, among others numerous works of ego-fiction, aimed to make public the stories of extermination, repression and persecutions suffered by Jews before, during, and after the Soviets were in power. Such are the little-known Truba iskhoda (The trumpet of the exodus, 1999), by Pavel Sirkes; Ziama Fiskin, odnofamilets (Ziama Fiskin, the namesake, 2005), by Vladimir Perepletchik; Odesskaia istoriia (An Odessa story, 2006), by Iurii Eidelman; Zdes′, pod nebom chuzhim (Here, under the alien sky, 2006), by Mikhail Serebro; Prostaia istoriia (A simple story, 2009), by A. (sic!) Mar; Identichnost′ (Identity, 2017), by Leonid Podol′skii; I ugorazdilo evreia rodit′sia v glubokoi iame i vyrasti v nei (A Jew had the misfortune to be born in a deep hole and grow up there, 2018), by Eliezer Trakhtenberg; or

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Tam, gde my est′. Zapiski vechnogo evreia (Where we are. Records of an eternal Jew, 2018), by Lev Pevzner.1 The development of the Jewish counter-culture, and the struggle for emigration, not only accompanied the profound changes in the geopolitical and cultural situation of Soviet Jews, but were often a contributing factor. It is noteworthy that the new Jewish literature, written beyond the Soviet borders, was often (and is now) similar to the texts created in Russia. In the 1970s, emigrant authors, especially in the early days after leaving the Soviet Union, continued—or finally had the opportunity—to deal with subjects, motifs, and situations of their previous lives. In many cases, emigration therefore did not result in the creation of a transnational literature with new—Israeli, German, or American—cultural references, or a new—either global or the long hoped-for, “specifically” Jewish—worldview and poetics. Jewish prose written in Russian, whether in the late Soviet period, or after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but also in other parts of the world, maintains a largely unified hypertext with a number of recurring motifs, originating from a common historical situation, often with a similarly realistic or factographic narrative strategy. For example, there are multiple descriptions of the “doctors’ plot” and the atmosphere of hatred towards Jews before Stalin’s death in 1953, often from the perspective of a harassed Jewish schoolchild: see “Poslednii noneshnii denechek” by Iuliia Shmukler, published in 1975 in Tel Aviv, Liudmila Ulitskaia’s “Vtorogo marta togo zhe goda,” written in 1994 and published in Moscow, or Mark Zaichik’s “V marte 1953 goda,” which was published in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. The same historical episodes from the early 1950s, and the same topoi and tropes are found in Iurii Karabchievskii’s Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera, Grigorii Svirskii’s Vetka Palestiny, Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s Psalom (The psalm), or Izrail′ Metter’s “Rodoslovnaia” (“Family tree”). Just like the Holocaust for Jewish literatures in many languages, the suffering of the Jews under the Soviet antisemitism was the trauma that set in motion the production of (auto)biographical texts, as it triggered a repeated gesture of remembering and writing down, letting mimesis serve the poetics of resistance. In this sense, the subgenre of anti-antisemitic prose, which emerged in the Jewish underground culture, created a popular framework for the representation of Jews in post-Soviet literature. The line leads from Vasilii Grossman’s Zhizn′ i sud′ba (1959) and Irina Grekova’s Svezho predanie (1962) to such important texts as Piatyi ugol (1967) by Izrail′ Metter, Psalom by Fridrikh Gorenshtein

1 Intentionally, I only list works from the “second row” that are often artistically mediocre, but valuable as memory documents, as historical and biographical sources of the period.

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(1975), Ispoved′ evreia (1993) by Aleksandr Melikhov, and Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder onto the closet, 1998) by Mikhail Iudson. Paradoxically, Jewish underground activities and emigration gradually undermined or even contributed to the destruction of the dichotomous model of Jewish identity, on which these texts were based. The relativization of former political oppositions made the issues of belonging and alterity increasingly complex, and the unified geopolitical opposition gave way to many smaller and more “individual” relations. The “Other” is no longer identified solely with the totalitarian state and the antisemitic majority of the population, and not only those born as Jews are now “one’s own.” Differences arise between Russian and American Jews, or between them and the Russian Jews in Israel, or the observant Jews (the country of origin does not matter here) and the Jews “by blood.” These new inner differences, new concepts of Jewishness, which provoke new conflicts, also influence Russian Jewish literature, or, to be more precise, Russian Jewish literatures rooted in various countries and cultures. However, the promises of peaceful coexistence and acknowledgment of diversity that the perestroika entailed are only partially fulfilled. In the 1990s as well as in the 2000s and the 2010s, drastic political polarization and new nationalisms tautologically resurrected the old historical and topographical oppositions. I will give examples in the next section.

10.1. Neo-Zionist Essentialist Narratives The partial resettlement of Jewish literature abroad led to sometimes contradictory developments in the understanding of Russian Jewry. As we have seen, a problematic issue that polarized Jewish minds and Jewish literature was Israel itself. From a myth of unification it became, for many authors, a physical reality with its own set of questions. Thus, while some texts uphold the religious teleological view of Jewish history, others are bitterly skeptical, and yet others are neutral. For instance, a wave of disillusionment goes from Efraim Sevela, the author of Prodai svoiu mat′, to Dina Rubina,2 Miriam Gamburd, or Mikhail Baranovskii,3 with their dry humor and sad irony. At the same time, the literature of exodus, with its emphasis on spiritualreligious transformation, paved the road for what can be called the radical

2 Truth be told, Dina Rubina offers in her texts two opposing models of Israel—the satirical as well as the fateful-spiritual one. 3 On Baranovskii’s prose see [Smola 2011d].

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Judaistic-inspired prose, which interpreted the divine return of the “prodigal” Jews as a narrative of union by blood, soil, and faith. Such are the later works by Eli Liuksemburg, for example, “V poliakh Amaleka” (“In the fields of Amalek”) and Zapiski eshibotnika (Notes of a yeshiva student, 2000), stories by Arkadii Krasil′shchikov from the anthology Rasskazy v dorogu (Narratives for the journey, 2000), or Iakov Shekhter’s stories from the collection Kabbala i besy (Kabbalah and demons, 2008).4 In addition, there is also an echo of late Soviet Zionist prose in several autobiographical novels of the late 2010s, which, like some kind of narrative journalism, keep up the myth of Israel’s sacred territory, supply general historical information, and offer conservative, sometimes nationalist Jewish ideologies. It seems that their authors return (or is this their reaction to the restorative ideology of Netanyahu’s Israel and Putin’s Russia?) to a one-dimensional notion of Judaism shaped by premodern faithfulness to exclusive dogmas. However, their texts lack the historical energy of resistance that inspired the mythologies of dissident Jews at the time of the struggle for the aliyah and the rediscovery of Judaism. In Leonid Podol′skii’s transparently titled novel Identity (2017), the aged protagonist, who has moved to Israel after numerous hardships, reflects in the following way:5 [.  .  .] он был счастлив оттого, что похоронят его в родной земле, которую господь Б-г завещал праотцу Аврааму. Слова Тель-Хай, Мегиддо, Эль-Куней-Тра, Масада наполняли его грудь гордостью и заставляли чаще биться его сердце. [. . .] В отличие от Лени, [отцу] никогда не довелось [. . .] ступить на Землю Израиля. Он принадлежал к поколению, которое, повторяя судьбу дальних предков, снова оказалось во власти фараона. [2017: 9]

4 Thus, Eli Liuksemburg’s story “V poliakh Amaleka” is written from the point of view of an autobiographical narrator—an observant Jew who has emigrated from the Soviet Union. The narrator has developed an embittered and irreconcilable attitude not only towards the “antisemitic peoples of Eastern Europe” but also towards the Jews who have decided to stay there, that is, near the former sites of the awful destruction. The narrator defines as strangers, first, all non-Jews, then all non-observant Jews, and finally, all Jews who do not live in Israel. Here, the attainment (or the topographical completion) of a new Jewish identity by no means signifies a departure from a polarizing thinking. 5 The novel has an afterword by Lev Anninskii, who essayistically supplements the novel’s contemplations on national issues.

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[.  .  .] he was filled with happiness at the thought that he would be buried in his own land, which the Holy Lord left to his forefather Avraam. The words “Tel Chai,” “Megiddo,” “Al-Quneitra,” “Masada” filled his chest with pride and made his heart flutter. [.  .  .] Unlike Lenia, [his father] [.  .  .] was never allowed to enter the land of Israel: he belonged to the generation that, following the fate of their distant ancestors, once again fell into the hands of the Pharaoh. The life story of the protagonist follows the typical stages of an exodus plot, with recognizable characters and intertextual references. He remembers his grandfather Mendel whispering over the hieroglyphs of the ancient Jewish books and telling his grandson about the horrors of the Shoah, the Promised Land, and the biblical heroes. The grandfather says, through the mouth of the now converted narrator: “Болезнь началась давно, с Гаскалы [.  .  .]” [ibid.: 18–25] (“This disease started a long time ago, with the Haskala [. . .]”). The detailed documentation of the protagonist’s own life includes comparisons between Stalin and Haman or Shabtai, the retelling of the fateful ideas of the first olim ( Jews who repatriated to Israel), who followed the call of Abraham, and the synopsis of the Jewish world history, which inevitably leads to Palestine. Podol′skii adds to his book an appendix with 757 footnotes, in which he explains in detail even the most well-known notions related to Jews (such as kippah, the Talmud, or Jewish studies), as well as events from Jewish history, from the biblical period to the present. This excessive ethnographic practice is intended to educate the reader as it perpetuates the collective memory of the chosen people and their suffering. In the novel’s finale, the narrator laments the “generation of mankurts,” who grew up in the Soviet galut, in the “evil empire,” praises the contemporary Samsons—Shcharanskii and Edel′shtein [ibid.: 366–368], and finally adopts a lyrical, elevated style, imitating the biblical language with its anaphoras (still peppered with footnotes that reference his sources): “[. . .] и они вернулись, как возвращаются реки к истокам своим,755 и они взошли.756 [. . .] И сплелись ветви, тянувшиеся в разные стороны. И образовали единое могучее дерево: народ израильский” [ibid.: 370] (“[. . .] and they returned as rivers return to their sources755 and they rose up .756 [. . .] And the branches, which used to go in different directions, intertwined. And they merged into a single mighty tree—the people of Israel”; footnote numbers in the original).

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An even more impressive example of the neoconservative Zionist discourse is Eliezer Trakhtenberg’s autobiographical novel, awkwardly titled A Jew Had the Misfortune to be Born in a Deep Hole and Grow Up There (2018). The author insists on presenting himself as a scientist, philosopher, and logician, who is praised as a genius in the short introductions of his like-minded peers. He writes down his life story from his childhood in the Moldavian city of Chișinău to being part of an underground Zionist organization, his imprisonment in a Soviet camp, and his present life in the United States. First among his merits, he lists “[. . .] вывел свою семью из рабства в СССР” [2018: 17] (“[. . .] I led my family out of the slavery in the USSR”), because “еврей сегодня может вести нормальную человеческую жизнь только в суверенном еврейском обществе государства Израиль” [ibid.: 18, underlined in the original] (“a Jew today can live a normal human life only in the autonomous Jewish society of the State of Israel”). Surprisingly, the reader learns that the author-narrator, a fervent Zionist and a rigorous supporter of right-wing conservative Jewish morals, finds himself condemned to live in the “corrupt” West (also compared to the rich biblical Egypt), namely, in the United States: “И понял я, что такова уж моя доля здесь, в Америке, как была и в России: готовить евреев к Исходу” [“And I have understood that it is my fate, here in America, as in Russia in the past: to prepare the Jews for the Exodus”). Similarly, he delegates the strict fulfillment of religious commandments to his children and grandchildren—unfortunately, he himself is no longer able to do so [ibid.: 223]. In this text, too, the grandfather is a key figure. He a taciturn wise man absorbed in the study of Jewish books, who responds to his grandson’s atheistic affirmation—that the launch of the first artificial satellite proved that there was no god in the universe—with roaring laughter and thus teaches him the best lesson of his life [ibid.: 87–88].6 Another guiding star of the protagonist’s future Zionism is his grandmother who observes Jewish traditions and lives exclusively for her family. The bobtsi follows the Jewish calendar, and categorically rejects intermingling (especially marriage) between the Jews and the goyim. It was she who taught the narrator “чтобы я не пускал гоев в душу, не смешивался с ними кровью, отделялся от них” [ibid.: 94–95] (“that I should not let the goyim into my soul, not mix my blood with theirs, and keep away from them”). This argumentation structure relies on well-known essentialist tropes: for example, the narrator compares his beloved mother, whom he lost at an early age, to his desired homeland, Israel, and his stepmother, to the lands of the galut

6 Cf. a similar episode in Iurii Karabchievskii’s novel Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera (The Life of Aleksandr Zil′ber, 1975) (about this, see chap. 11.2.2).

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[ibid.: 50–51]. It finally leads to a triumphant geopolitical vision, in which Israel becomes an example for all people and the main bulwark in the fight against the evil, while Donald Trump is given the role of a founder king, such as Darius I the Great [ibid.: 285–286]. Trachtenberg’s complicated logical explanations result in conclusions such as: progress is motivated by envy, women can never be equal to men (and so the Talmudic sages correctly have the man study the Torah and let the woman work in the shop), or that Islam is dead simply according to its nature and history [ibid.: 24–31]. The neo-conservative Russian Jewish prose, full of artistic and spiritual platitudes and fueled by ideological dogmatism, indicates a partial return, during the 2010s, of the Cold War consciousness with its strict ideological boundaries. The exodus narrative is resurrected in bizarre forms. In addition, as demonstrated by Leonid Podol′skii and Eliezer Trakhtenberg, the revival of (anti-)communist Judaistic mythology is tightly connected to a new impulse for collective education and the legitimization of a nation’s history. Both authors insert into their historiographic tales abundant factual information7 as well as numerous quotes cited in the original.

10.2. Jewish Revival The rediscovery of Jewishness in the Soviet underground was a part of a much broader, transcontinental process of Jewish revival, which evolved in approximately the same time in various places and within many different ideological frameworks. I mentioned this development in (popular) culture in the beginning of this book. The new interest in Judaism in a world “without Jews,” is still waiting to become a subject of a study comparing the material from Europe and America. Ruth E. Gruber notes that, especially in a situation of social oppression in the communist Eastern Europe, Jewishness gained in symbolic, representative, that is, “virtual” importance: it was a way to satisfy the urge for freedom and cultural alternative [Gruber 2002: 95]. While the engagement with Jewish issues in the West offered the values that were missing in the world perceived as pluralistic, profit-oriented, and devoid of obligatory spiritual guidelines, and promised to regain the lost patriarchal authenticity, in Poland and Russia of the late Soviet period it became an important component

7 Something similar can be found in Lev Pevzner’s autobiography Tam, gde my est′. Zapiski vechnogo evreia (Where we are. Records of an eternal Jew, 2018).

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of protest culture, which was represented and created by Jews as well as nonJews.8 In total, the Jewish renaissance was a symptom, an attempt of cultural reconstruction adapted to contemporary needs. Speaking of the multilingual Jewish literature of the post-Holocaust period, researchers notice comparable processes and poetics. According to Roskies, Yiddish literature after the Shoah depends on citation, stylization, reminiscence, archiving, reinvention of the tradition, and other forms of cultural compensation [1995: 307–311; 2010: 508–513]. Shimon Markish mentions the irretrievable “loss of living imagination” of Judaism and declares, together with Grigorii Kanovich, that the only possible task and duty of the current generation is the collection of traces of the Jewish cultural heritage [Markish 1997: 203–206]. The term “creative betrayal” [1995: 4ff.], coined by David Roskies, marks the central and the most vulnerable point of contemporary archeology of the Jewish past. In general, creative betrayal is a productive strategy of transformation and reinterpretation, which accompanies every act of innovation that embraces the “language of tradition.” Roskies analyzes several key texts of Yiddish literature— from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav to Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer—and demonstrates that the most important Yiddish authors actually subverted Jewish folklore, religious tradition, and the principles of Jewish holiness. In this way they were able to create what later became the canon of “authentic Jewish” culture. At the same time, this canon was always responsive to the complexities of the present, which had place for multiple interpretations: My book is all about loss and reinvention. Its protagonists are modern Jewish revolutionaries, rebels, and immigrants, who tried to salvage for a nontraditional audience forms of the culture assumed to be traditional. Where the folk originals were no longer extant, accessible, or relevant, their stylized Yiddish

8 Gruber rightly points out that the longing for “authentic” Jewry and the desire to return to one’s roots were the product of Jewish assimilation in Europe and America, which began long before the Holocaust and communism, in the time of the Haskala. She also notes that the reinvention and mythologization of the Eastern Jewish cultural heritage by the Jewish intellectuals started already in the end of the nineteenth century [2002: 30ff.]. Monika Rüthers describes the following stages on the way to the past: An-skii’s ethnographic expeditions to Jewish shtetlekh, the renaissance of Hasidism—especially in Martin Buber’s writings—in the first third of the twentieth century; and the boom of photographs of the East European Jewish world in America in the 1930s—for example, the high popularity of Roman Vishniac’s photo albums [Rüthers 2010: 78–83]. The lost Jewish tradition was already at that time considered to an “opposition to the fragmented world of modernity” [ibid.: 83].

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folktales, monologues, ballads, lovesongs , lullabies, and Purim plays were the next best thing. [Roskies 1995: 5] This reinvention of tradition, based on the dialectic of cultural subversion and continuity, changes radically after the Holocaust. In the time when Jewish knowledge was rapidly obliterated, creative betrayal remained the only option for the Jewish authors because it was no longer possible to establish a more or less reliable link to the tradition. The special Yiddish intertextuality was lost, as well: biblical and Talmudic comments and the midrashim, aggadic stories and Hasidic legends were no longer a part of the Jewish communicative memory. The Jewish folk culture and the orality of the magidim, fools, jerks, musicians, and badkhanim now became the domain of historical research—and fiction. In public memorial events and mass culture9 the Jewish past is harnessed towards institutionalization, the selection of “convenient history”—for instance, for commemorative purposes—or a shock and a sensation. In the context of academic exhibitions, museums, encyclopedias, and in scholarly research, it becomes a source of information; it needs to be explained and reconstructed in the strict sense of the word. In fiction, the Jewish past is included in a symbolic, imaginary order where the distance between the represented world, the authors, and their readers is problematized. These facts are not quite new, but they are of utmost importance if applied to my research object. In their dealings with the lost tradition, the Russian Jewish authors oscillate between reconstruction of the past (creating an illusion of the living tradition) and attempts to dialectically integrate the Jewish memory into the actual present,10 even if such a reintegration inevitably reveals its artificial nature. The tension between these two attitudes produces an ambivalent effect: often, the stylization, with its theatrically staged, deceiving attention to fact, engenders an idealized, mythological image of the Jewish world. In every reconstruction, there is a gap that can no longer be filled. In addition, in the “posthuman” age, the writer often assumes the role of a cultural historian and commentator who undertakes the only appropriate task: to report adequately about the past. However, in a document-like fiction there is never a direct connection between the narration and the historical reality, the

9 Cf., for instance, the festival of Jewish culture in Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow (see [Gruber 2002: 46–49]), or the public commemoration ceremonies associated with specific dates. 10 In the best case, this becomes the productive “creative betrayal,” as David Roskies understands it.

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signifier and the signified. Thus, reporting also reveals the unreliability of the narrator and shows that the direct access to what is reported has been lost. The texts analyzed below are written in different countries and during various microperiods of the post-Soviet history of Russian Jewish literature. But they are all in a state of tension between cultural reconstruction and reinvention—be it in form of imitation, combination of tradition and contemporatry cultural discourses, playful subversion of imagined memory, or cultural and linguistic translation.

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11.1. (Post)Memorial Literature: Palimpsests, Residuals, Reinvention 11.1.1. (Post)Memorial Jewish Writing In chapter 8, I have focused on the connection between time, place and memory in Jewish nonconformist literature. In the post-Soviet period, Jewish literary topographies continue bearing semantics of anamnesis, becoming a kind of cultural mnemotechnics, recording of the loss and trauma. When speaking about this memory is no longer prohibited, the meaning of cultural spaces as lieux de mémoire only increases. At the same time, Jewish literature increasingly conceptualizes memory as a constructed phenomenon, that bases on ephemeral reminiscences is and imagination The half-oblivion of postmemory,1 the growing importance of established or popular culture as a source of Jewish memory, and the ever growing role of media in memorial practices—these are the developments that accompany or cause poetics of metafictionality and intertextuality, the topics of the fragmentary, and the configuration of fictional

1 For more about this term, see the introduction to this book.

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space as a palimpsest.2 These essential characteristics bring Russian Jewish literature before and after the fall of communism together as one symbolic field. Another important feature is compensatory nature of writing: the authors build their imaginary upon the assumption that all attempts of reconstruction failed. Now that the universal utopia has fallen, the “restorative nostalgia” with its global projects of collective return gives way to the “reflective nostalgia” of individual memories:3 If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. [.  .  .] Reflective nostalgia [.  .  .] is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins [. . .]. This defamiliarization and sense of distance drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future. [Boym 2001: 49–50] At the same time, literature created after the perestroika and after the fall of the Soviet Union reflects the destigmatization of Jewishness in its very texture: it is often (over)laden with Jewish religious and cultural terms, places, and objects, Hebrew and Yiddish words. Paradoxically, as I noted at the end of the previous chapter, the factuality of talking about Jewishness is dissolved when the authors focus on the poetics of the remainder, and the abundance of cultural references signalizes that the writers do not trust the facts they recount and the mnemonic objects they pick up from the past. The recreated entirety of the Jewish life before the war and the Revolution does not immediately provide an “illusion of recognition,” which accompanies every attempt to resurrect a myth. Instead, the texts demostrate the “bursts of melancholy” and the “postmodern skepticism” (see Dirk Uffelmann on late literary representations of the Galician myth [2008: 277–278]), when the fictional reality refers to forms, not facts, and turns out to be an iconic “discourse reproduction” [ibid.: 293]. As Susanne Düwell notes regarding autobiographical texts about the Holocaust, they are “strongly 2 Werner Wolf consideres the “unveiling of the artificiality of the narration the central method of metafictional art that aims to destroy illusion in the twentieth century [1993: 220]; but he also points that even during earlier periods of literary history art had a “narrative selfconsciousness” [Alter 1975]. 3 This concept is also addressed in the introduction.

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influenced by poetological and theoretical reflections [. . .], so that it becomes evident that writing can only refer to texts and to the level of representation” [Düwell 2004: 7]. Below, I will analyze the interaction of fictionalized recollections, imagination, and the references to a later, culturally coded knowledge. Starting from the late 1980s, (post)memorial texts recreate the spatial metaphors of the Jewish dissent, using the trope of the palimpsest to represent remembrance, forgetting, rewriting, and displacement of cultural signs. Archaeological metaphors such as remainders and excavations, (half-)erased script, the metonymics of waste as a residual product of selective “processing” of the past are employed today not only by postcolonial literatures of various continents, but also by Jewish prose, in order to describe the disintegration of memory that has long been prohibited. The palimpsest as a cultural trope has a long history.4 Importantly, it experienced an unprecedented popularity with the turn to postmodernism, when it became universally applicable: The palimpsest as a medium with more than one writing levels rises to the metaphor of culture as a whole. The plurality of the levels becomes a symbol of diversity that can no longer be part of a hierarchy, the emblem of thwarting every claim to absolute right through the discovery that there is another writing beneath every writing. [Kany 2009: 201]5 Aleida Assmann, who explores the metaphors of memory and their development since the classical antiquity, finds out that certain metaphors emphasize the “moment of [temporary] unavailability” of memory together with a possibility to be “deciphered and read” [Assmann 1999a: 156]: for example, the metaphors of excavations and the palimpsest. Various concepts of memory have included the spatiality of remembering and oblivion: “As mnemonic metaphors are related to space, or to landscape, so oblivion appears as a wasteland, a deserted space, or an alibi. The metaphor of the memory as a warehouse is related to the idea of forgetting as something hidden, unfathomable, dark, and sleeping, sometimes crypt or a tomb” [Butzer 4 On the development of this tradition from classical antiquity see [Kany 2009]. 5 One of the (ever increasing number of) monographs that analyze the urban space as a palimpsest is that of Moritz Csáky [2010], who uses the terms popular in humanities of the last three decades—traces, differences, hybridity, multiculturalism, and palimpsest—in his analysis of the cultural space of Vienna and the Central Europe as a whole.

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2005: 23]. “Wasteland,” or “hidden” spaces in literary texts indicate that literature here tries to analyze the time when the memory’s access to history, that is, hermeneutics, is pushed away, to the periphery or underground. In this way, forgetting and remembering become materialized, and space becomes an epistemological device, which gives an opportunity to understand the historical reality without encasing it in a totality. In the last twenty years, the increased interest in the semantics of fragments and traces has become apparent in literature, arts, and cultural studies. This trend is summed up in the preface to the anthology Remainders. Dealing with a marginal phenomenon (Reste. Umgang mit einem Randphänomen, 2005): the remainders are “indicators of discontinuities and breaks,” which “allow to imagine an alternative order. The remainder is a marginal phenomenon: its place is the periphery, the offside, the unknown” [Becker/Reither/Spies 2005: 7–9]. In the course of this epistemological turn, the focus of attention has shifted to the remainders and the waste, to the excluded and uncoded elements that are opposed to what is stored in the archive and included in the canon. Thus, for Aleida Assmann waste is, above all, a reliable “bearer of an unofficial memory” [1999a: 215], as she formulates using the example of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). We see here a large network of interrelated tropes that reveal what has been suppressed, concealed, scrapped, and so, gradually, desemiotized.6 The reading of the hidden “geological” layer thus has a potentially subversive effect: the writing that uncovers traces reveals the impossibility of return and recreation and in this way initiates a revision of history. Above, I have used several examples to show how Jewish cultural meanings and religious memories were pushed underground and to the background, overwritten with layers of non-Jewish characters, taken out of the old syntagmatic order and inserted into a new one or profaned and used for mundane purposes. With the literary reflection on these cultural practices, Jewishness is conceived as a lower layer of the palimpsest, which may still be visible in fragments and traces. The metaphor of the palimpsest here follows Heinrich Heine, who famously compared in his Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey) the face of an elderly woman to a “palimpsest where the half-erased verses of an ancient Greek love-poet peep from under the monastic black letters of a text by a Father of the 6 Tatjana Petzer analyzes Danilo Kiš’s work as an overall poetic attempt to create, using “geological” devices, an “archive of the unarchived,” that is, an archive that will contain what has been exterminated [2008: 165]. In this vein, the image of the landfill becomes important for Kiš: “The rubbish dumps of history become the starting point (the magma) of the creative act, they are transformed as they join the literary memory” [ibid.: 152].

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Church” ([Heine 1995b: 101–102], English translation from [Heine 1991]). Jewish authors seek to “disclose the preconditions of the misshapen present,” to become the “defenders of a marginalized tradition” [ Jacob/Nicklas 2004: 15–16]. They use the metaphor of overwriting, as Joachim Jacob and Pascal Nicklas show, in a way that resembles the cultural theories of the late twentieth century, and, above all, Michel Foucault’s idea of the interrelation between power and discourse and his conception of culture as a system of layers of “dominant and dominated texts” [ibid.: 23]. The cultural palimpsest not untypically appears in the wake of historical asymmetries, when power regimes change. It is often linked to concealment, mimicry, and (dis)simulation of the Jewish elements, which were discussed above in chap. 4.2. The human personality becomes the space of erasion and rewriting—a process that paradoxically gives to understand that externally ascribed (negatively connoted) Jewish characteristics become indelible in the course of the time and repeatedly come back to the surface. The resulting palimpsest became the subject of (self-)ironic or tragicomical representations, in the late Soviet as well as in the post-Soviet period. Below I analyze two examples. The protagonist of Efraim Sevela’s story “Osvedomitel′” (“The informant,” 1982), a Jew named Arkadii Poluboiarov, works as a correction artist in an editorial office of a Moscow newspaper and specializes in embellishing the photographs of the Soviet party leaders. He is a master of forgery and has a special talent for concealing defects. A completely inconspicuous figure, Arkadii is the only one who succeeds in processing an official photograph of Brezhnev, taken, unfortunately, with his eyes closed, so that, in the final version, the eyes seem open. In doing so, Arkadii saves the editorial office from inevitable punishment and becomes, for a short time, a respected person. However, soon afterwards, his colleagues once again forget to greet this little man, the Jewish reincarnation of Gogol′’s Akakii Bashmachkin. Arkadii’s Russian-Ukrainian name is a pseudonym taken to conceal his authentic name, Abram Perel′man, which he gets rid of by marrying an ethnic Russian woman. However inventive Poluboiarov/Perel′man may be, the imitation will never be perfect, because, ironically, Arkadii’s appearance is a grotesque reflection of popular Judeophobic clichés. He has thick lips, black melancholic eyes, and a long nose. His selfcorrection is always a self-exposure, a failed mimicry, and Arkadii only succeeds in creating the perfect simulacra in regard to the images of the Soviet icons of power.

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Eduard Shul′man’s volume of prose, published in 2008, bears the speaking title Evrei Ivanych, ili Tri psevdonima (The Jew Ivanych, or Three pseudonyms).7 In the section “Nasledstvo” (“The legacy”) from the novel Alleia pravednikov (The avenue of the righteous), the good citizen Al′tshul′ suffers under the “inconvenience” of his unpronounceable Jewish first name and patronymic— Gersh Peisakhovich. He feels that these names are stuck to him, even though he has already adopted a Russian equivalent—Grigorii Petrovich. In the next episode of this novel, which is stuctured as a series of fragments, a certain Zalman Koder visits his old acquaintance Aleksandr Kirillovich. The latter is outraged by the renaming of the Moscow streets after the October Revolution: “Зачем Остоженка—Метростроевская? . . [. . .] Остоженка—до чего наше слово! Остоженка, чувствуешь? . . А Пречистенка? Как они Пречистенку испоганили! . .” [Shul′man 2008: 176] (“Why is Ostozhenka now called Metrostroevskaia? . . [. . .] Ostozhenka—that’s our ancient word! Ostozhenka— do you feel that? . . And Prechistenka? How did they spoil Prechistenka! . . .”). An ethnic Russian and passionate Russophile, Aleksandr Kirillovich shows Zalman, in a fit of fatherly superiority and lenient ridicule, that not everyone may call Moscow his home: “. . . С какого года в Москве, Залман?—С восемнадцатого, Александр Кириллович.—А я—с четырнадцатого . . . Да не с года, не с года четырнадцатого! С четырнадцатого века! . .” [ibid.: 176] (“When did you start living in Moscow, Zalman?—In the year eighteen, Aleksandr Kirillovich— and I, in the fourteenth .  .  . But not the year, not the fourteenth year! The fourteenth century! . . .”). Here, the right to remember and to claim one’s old, authentic roots is exclusively assigned to the Slavic master culture. Together, the two episodes implicitly link the Soviet and the “authentic” Russian under the banner of Judeophobia, relativizing the opposition of the good old time before the Soviets and the bad new time, suggested by Aleksandr Kirillovich. Another implicit meaning of this episode is the connection between the two palimpsests: the tabooed Jewish names and the socialists’ renaming of the streets. Personal identity and space both suffer amnesia and repression.

11.1.2. Memory as Obsession and Fragment: Izrail′   Metter’s “Family Tree” With the gradual destigmatization of Jewishness in the late 1980s, the cultural paradigm of Jewish resistance, with its emphasis on an alternative collective

7 The book is compiled from the texts written during the last decades. The oldest ones were created in the 1950s.

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memory, moved to the officially published literature—to thick journals and books with a large print run. Memory became an official historical event in the sense of Lucian Hölscher’s term, as mentioned in the introduction to this book, a symbolic anchor of the new collective identity and new historiography. As mentioned above, poetology and self-reflection, when they are used to create a fictional reconstruction of the past, often indicate the impossibility of mimetic narration. Writing becomes a symptom, a short and unreliable moment of symbolic compensation. The obsession with memory, and the problem of the disintegrated self-image, become its driving force and its central motif. As recent studies on autobiographies show, metafictional devices can be used to articulate the tenuous connection between memories and the present. In particular after experiencing historical ruptures, and reflecting on a break in historical continuity, metafictionality helps to make the decisive cognitive move in autobiographical writing: to locate oneself in the present. Metafiction replaces linear narration, which could have guaranteed a continuous genealogy. Notable here is not only the acknowledgment of the fact that all memories are constructed once they are expressed in words—this has already become a commonplace assumption in the theory of memory and the study of (ego-) documents [Nünning 2007a: 41]—but also the connection of this illusiondestroying device with the needs of the specific present moment, “the persistence of the past in the present” [Nünning 2007b: 282]. “Memories are constructed based on the specific period of the present. Because of that, they say more about the present needs and concerns of the author of the memoirs, or the autobiographer, than about a past event [. . .]” [Nünning 2007a: 44]. The genre of “metafictional autobiography” or “meta-autobiographical novel,” examples of which Ansgar Nünning finds in contemporary English literature [Nünning 2007b], has a “pronounced tendency towards metaization and self-reflexivity.” At that, “the emphasis shifts from telling a life story to epistemological and methodological difficulties [. . .] that arise when an autobiography is written” [ibid.: 271, 277]. Izrail′ Metter’s (1909–1996) last novella “Rodoslovnaia” (“Family tree”), written in the early post-Soviet years (1992), is one of the most impressive illustrations of the Russian Jewish authors’ excessive return to the theme of their lost roots. The elderly narrator analyzes his sudden obsession with the past, and the split of his personality, with no possibility of its reconstruction or coherent self-identification. Metter’s text is a poetic and poetologic testimony to his own Jewishness, which could only appear after the collapse of the state regime. It is also an example of post-traumatic narration, which became one of the primary

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modes of Jewish writing after the end of communism, and its most important generating impulse.8 As Rita Genzeleva points out, the increasing nostalgia towards the lost world of the Jewish shtetls, and the “excited” (vzvolnovannyi) interest in Jewish knowledge, daily rites, and language, in one’s family background (literally, rodoslovnaia) are typical in the situation in which Metter wrote his story [Genzeleva 1999: 141–155]. The gradual remembering of the ethnical otherness of the narrator’s family, his pride in the old Jewish wisdom preserved by his grandparents, or his admiration for the weekly Sabbath rituals—all this distinguishes Metter’s novel from his earlier works such as “Konets detstva” (“End of Childhood,” 1935) and “Piatyi ugol” (1964): “The writer who was completely indifferent to Jewish religion thirty years ago, who [positively] contrasted the ‘religious climate’ of Polish and Russian churches and mosques with that of the synagogues, bitterly notes in the beginning of the 1990s that the age-old bond of his people to the Book ended with him” [ Genzeleva 1999: 147]. In “Rodoslovnaia,” the narrative of loss, which is of utmost importance for Jewish literatures, becomes a (meta)poetic device. Identity is not only the primary topic of the text, but also an integral part of its poetics. In Metter’s works, the “bridges of longing,” the ways to reinvent tradition, make way for gestures of cognitive doubt and metatextual intervention,9 which mark his writing as post-historical. With that, postmemory is expressed in Metter’s text as meta-memory: “Я родился давно. / Дело не в дате: сама по себе она лишена живописности—минувшее окрашивается не календарем, а приметами канувшей эпохи” [Metter 1992: 12] (“I was born a long time ago. / It’s not about the date of birth: in itself, this date is completely irrelevant—the past does not take on the color of the calendar, but that of the signs of the bygone times”). Even the fact of the narrator’s birth in the clinic of the Jewish doctor Arie is included in the narrative of disruption. The narrator never saw the doctor again, and his sister was born at home, on the large dining table, because in 1918, Arie disappeared without a trace. What remained is the mysterious feeling of a lifelong connection with the sign on the door of the maternity hospital [ibid.: 12–13]. The sign immediately evokes the semantics of writing as the main cultural attribute of memory. In the following lines, it is related to senile decline and—again—cultural overwriting: the narrator has visited Kharkiv, his native

8 See [Düwell 2004]. 9 About the notion of metatextuality see the foundational study by [Wolf 1993]. See also two definitions of this term, which supplement each other, in the classifications in [Genette 1982] and [Pfister 1985: 26–27].

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city, a few years before he tells the story to the readers, he has found Doctor Arie’s house, and saw “cracked double doors, sagging, repainted a hundred times, not closing properly” (“облупленн[ые] двустворчат[ые] двер[и], провисш[ие], сотни раз перекрашенны[е], незакрывающи[еся]” [ibid.: 13]). On both sides of the doors: [.  .  .] было не счесть вывесок, и каждая из них испещрена буквами русского алфавита, но в таком тарабарски-аббревиатурном сочетании, словно дюжина племен грядущей цивилизации захватила это здание и пытается в нем сожительствовать. [Metter 1992: 13] [. . .] there were so many signs that they were hard to count, and each sign was densely covered with characters of the Russian alphabet, but in such cryptically abbreviated combinations that the impression arose that a dozen tribes of a future civilization had conquered this building and now they tried to live together in it. In this quotation, the narrator interprets the later Russian words and phrases overwriting the older Jewish palimpsest layer—the doors have been repainted many times—as the triumph of barbarian invaders, “дюжин[ы] племен грядущей цивилизации” (“a dozen tribes of a future civilization”) over culture. This double reading—the immediate reading of what is written and the hermeneutic interpretation of the image/text—deconstructs the enlightenment claims of Sovietization. The abbreviated signs become illegible, lose their function as information medium in the late phase of socialism; the writing disappears in a feat of physical and ideological erasure. Telling here is the postcolonial trope of “writing back” [Ashcroft/Griffiths/Tiffin 1989], in which the knowledge canon, now perceived as foreign and imposed, is dethroned. Over years, the acculturated narrator has internalized the imperial writing, but now the Russian signs seem alien and cryptic to him. Furthermore, the fact that one older sign has been replaced with many new ones reflects the growing paucity and inflation of cultural and spiritual content, which has been literally diminished. Kharkiv, the hometown that the narrator attempts to read after many years, is conceived as a comprehensive mnemonic space, a place of broken cultural memory. This meaning is produced with the help of mnemonic metaphors that convey the spatial contiguity of what is remembered and forgotten (thus, doors stand in for the building, the building stands in for Jewish medical art and for Arie, the former founder of the hospital, and all together they reflect the

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repressed Jewish culture and civilization) as well as synecdoches that address the semantics of the remainders, the fractured parts and shards. The first metafictional “intervention” that casts the narrator’s reliability under suspicion ocurs in the the beginning of the paragraph describing the former hospital: “Это все я вспомнил или придумал, приехав в Харьков несколько лет назад” [Metter 1992: 13, italics mine—K.S.] (“I remembered or imagined all this when I came to Kharkiv a few years ago”).10 The narrator’s interest in “генеалогическ[ое] древо моего рода” [ibid.] (“the genealogical tree of my lineage”) awakened twenty years ago, when he was almost sixty years old, upon seeing a photograph of his great-grandfather dressed in clothes such as traditionally worn by Jews in Eastern Europe. The great-grandfather’s hand lay on a book: “А книга означала, что мой род грамотен с незапамятных времен” [ibid.] (“And the book meant that my family has been capable of reading and writing from time immemorial”). Apparently, the narrator’s newfound interest in his ancestors appeared in the beginning of the Jewish “national revival” in the Soviet Union, in around 1967 (see in regard to this indirect dating in [Genzeleva 1999: 144])—a time reference pointing to the connection between the late Soviet and postcommunist “thawing” of memory and the continuity of memoir narratives. The photograph, a classic visual carrier of family memory, here becomes a starting point for the postmemorial reconstruction: the remembrance is fostered by imagination based on cultural and not on personal memory (“Вот книга и распалила мое воображение” [Metter 1992: 13, italics mine—K.S.] [“And it was the book [in the picture] that fired my imagination”]). At the same time, the fragments of memories that activate imagination paradoxically create a personal feeling of belonging to a family community. Between the half-remembered facts and their retrospective interpretation stands a symbolic cultural mediator, a generalized image of an ancestor, captured in thousands of paintings and photographs, and in hundreds of texts the narrator has read—the grandfather with his beard and his Torah, also subject to translation and interpretation. A few pages further, the narrator returns to the photograph: “фотография моего прадеда возбудила во мне жажду самопознания” [ibid.: 18] (“The photograph of my great-grandfather aroused in me the thirst for self-knowledge”). This somewhat pathetic claim, however, is immediately followed by a self-mocking correction: “Я вглядываюсь в его глаза, в неприкрытую бородой часть лица,

10 See also immediately afterwards: “Отец окончил четыре класса городского училища в Минске. Я не уверен, что это точно—возможно, и три класса” [ibid., italics mine—K.S.] (“My father went to the municipal school in Minsk for four years. I am not sure that this is true, maybe it was only three years”).

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выискивая, угадывая и выдумывая сходство со мной” [ibid.] (“Attentively, I look at his eyes, at the part of his face uncovered by his beard and search, guess about, and imagine the resemblance to my face”). The longing for the past, a nostalgia under reflection, is joined by cognitive skepticism. The topos of being obsessed with memory, of the inevitable memory work, and the uncontrollable incursion of memories into the narrator’s present are what creates the very texture of the (counter-)narrative with its recurrent “selfanalysis“ and a poetics of destroying the illusion: Назойливо и властно врываются в мою старость детские воспоминания. Непонятно, как удалось уцелеть им под напором действительности. [.  .  .] Воспоминания лежат, как птичьи яйца в гнезде, душа долгие годы обогревала их, а сейчас они беспорядочно и беспощадно проклевываются. Ожил двор. Над ним, как в театре, поднялся занавес памяти. [Metter 1992: 13–14] Insistently and powerfully, childhood memories stormed into my age. Unbelievable how they managed to survive under the pressure of reality. [. . .] The memories lie like bird eggs in a nest, my soul has been warming them for many years, and now they are cracking the eggshell in a disordered and merciless way. The courtyard is revived again. Above it, as in a theater, the curtain of memory is raised. This passage is yet another example of the dense web of memory metaphors in this text. In it, recollections are natural and inevitable as birds hatching from eggs, their contents are fragile to the point of being ephemeral (the thin eggshell is the trope of time that causes forgetting), and at the same time this new life has a power that the person who begins remembering cannot control: after a long latent period the memories rush to the surface and break the silence like birds breaking the eggshell. The human soul appears as an insecure and yet a permanent place where the memories are kept. The soul as a nest of memory is one of the spatial tropes that Aleida Assmann describes as “images of the latent memory” (other examples include the metaphor of an attic or a storage room): “concepts such as ‘latent memory’ or ‘preservative forgetting’ can be classified under the category of storage memory, which holds at the ready a repository of disjointed memories, not incorporated into one narrative” [1999a: 161–162]. The “memory of experience” is contingent—“unsystematic, accidental,

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incoherent” [ibid.: 161]. Metter seems to respond to this theory when his narrator comments that “[б]луждая в потемках родословной [.  .  .], я натыкаюсь на всякую былую чепуху” [1992: 18] (“while groping around in the darkness of my family story [. . .], I find all sorts of meaningless bits and pieces of the past”). The contradictions between, or incongruency of, the memory tropes form a dialectic: contrasted to Assman’s attic or the darkness from the quotation above is the metaphor of the nest, that is, birth or creation. Indeed, the chaos of memories generates a tremendous energy of self-knowledge, which can reach out to another generation. In the spirit of this dialectic, the last phrase of the above quoted passage questions the ontological status of the remembrances because it metaphorically presents memory as a theater, that is, as something that produces illusions and not biological life: “The courtyard is revived again. Above it, as in a theater, the curtain of memory is raised.” Here, memory is an artistic practice, and therefore, ontologically unrealiable. This complex memory discourse, constantly revised and self-negating, transforms Metter’s fictional autobiography into a comprehensive reflection on the cultural processes at the beginning of the 1990s. In Metter’s text, the autobiographical element is a part of a reference structure linked to the period of the new, post-Soviet Jewish revival. His intensive evocation of Jewish religious and cultural realia, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish elements in episodes of family life (sometimes, depending on the context, accompanied by Russian translations), is a performative marker of the literary reethnicization that occurred during and after perestroika. The narrator does not simply quote Yiddish expressions— such as the grandfather’s favorite “Зай а менш!” [ibid.: 14] (“Be [a good] human being”)—but also connects his own lack of linguistic knowledge to the general amnesia of the present [ibid.]. The Minsk Choral Synagogue, where his grandmother’s family prayed, the kosher wine on holidays, the grandfather’s peisakhovka (Passover vodka), the cholent (ritual Sabbath dish), the services of the Shabbes goi, the celebration of Passover and the first evening of the Seder, the father’s tefillin, the mezuzah on the parents’ door, the Jewish burial rites, according to which his grandmother was interred—these Jewish topoi all have a mysterious aura, associated with the child’s curiosity and happiness, and convey a mythical picture of this early period in the narrator’s life. As in other meta-memorial and postmemorial texts (cf. below the chapter on Grigorii Kanovich), mythologizing the past is combined with ethnografic commentary, which explains aspects of Jewish tradition to the narrator’s own assimilated self and to the contemporary reader. Some of the already “illegible” Jewish terms are explained by paraphrasing [ibid.: 24]: cholent is “эт[а] ритуальн[ая] субботн[яя] пищ[а] малоимущих религиозных евреев” (“the ritual

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Sabbath dish for the penniless religious Jews”), Shabbes goi is “[. . .] плата за грех, от которого ‘шáбес-гой’—субботний иноверец—избавлял моих стариков” (“[. . .] the price for the sin from which the Shabbes goi—the Sabbath Gentile—redeemed my grandparents”), and “Илья-пророк” (“the prophet Elijah”) is “Элиёгу ганóви” (“Eliyogu ganóvi”). Others are translated directly: “[. . .] ‘тарбут’—в переводе с иврита на русский—‘культура’” [ibid.: 22] (“[. . . .] ‘tarbut’—the Hebrew word that in Russian means ‘culture’”); or explained through more comprehensive descriptions and explanations. Often, cultural translation emphasizes the difference between two types of knowledge: the “pure” one acquired in childhood and that of today, which is lost or perverted, thus discerning a hermeneutics of cultural loss: “‘Хýмош’—главный предмет в программе нашей гимназии. Теперь-то я знаю, что это библейский Ветхий завет. Но для меня это не одно и то же” [ibid.: 23] (“‘Chúmosh’ is the main subject in the schedule of our high school. Now I know that this is the biblical Old Testament. But for me that’s not the same thing”). The seemingly greater awareness of the adult narrator appears deficient. For example, he is used to interpreting the Torah in the sense of Christian tradition (the Old Testament)— this is the result of his minimal religious historical knowledge provided by the Soviet school education, which marginalizes Judaism. However, some terms in the text are not translated (such as tefillin, shechter, Kaddish)—this is the evidence of the narrator’s more or less natural belonging to Jewish culture or a limited possibility for him to exist equally in both cultural spaces. The poetics of designation and commentary, of folklorizing one’s childhood, and metatextual revision, of incomplete or unsuccessful mythologizing appropriation of the past is read in the context of what can be called the postSoviet mnemonic psychotherapy. In this sense, “Family Tree” is a (post)memorial narrative about the present: “. . . Почему эти старики, безразличные для меня в детстве, исчезнувшие из моего сознания навеки, внезапно ожили сейчас в самое непригодное для них и для меня время?” [ibid.: 17] (“. . . Why have these old people, to whom I was indifferent in my childhood and who disappeared from my consciousness forever, come alive again now of all times, in the most inopportune time for them and for me?”). Interestingly, this fragmented individual memory is, for the narrator, more valued than the objective historical knowledge—the supra-personal “storage memory,” as Aleida Assman terms it. He even refuses to enquire about Jewish customs: “Я [. . .] намеренно исхожу лишь из моих чудом уцелевших воспоминаний, источенных молью времени и подернутых пеленой забвения. Именно такими они мне и необходимы [.  .  .]” [Metter 1992: 17] (“I [.  .  .] consciously begin with my miraculously surviving memories, which the moth of time gnaws, which are covered with

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the veil of oblivion. Only in this way they matter to me [. . .]”).11 The historical knowledge could have given the narrator an illusion of fullness, but it would have taken away the personal experience of the past. Speaking about the divine feeling of participation and the inexplicable power of the suddenly revitalized family connections, he seems to attribute to memory the mystical power of anamnesis (on Platonic teachings cf. the introduction to this book). As in Jewish dissident literature of the Soviet period, memorial processes in the Jewish prose after the fall of communism are attempts of spiritual healing and of going back to a “purified” version of oneself, even though the post-Soviet authors are more keenly aware that memories are ephemeral and fantasy takes central stage. The fall into time means alienation. Every theory of alienation includes a vision of salvific unity. One of these theories is the gnostic interpretation of this myth as the drama of forgetting and remembering. Here, two mutually opposing memories fight each other: a deindividualizing one, that is, participation in the divine, and an individualizing one, which man has to use in his earthly life. The second memory is the forgetting of the first; the divine memory is darkened and repressed beyond recognition by the one acquired in this life. “Gnosis” means nothing else than the restoration of the first memory, the rediscovery of its faded traces. (See the chapter “Anamnesis: mystische Spiegelung” [“Anamnesis: mystical reflection”] in [Assmann 1999a: 109–110]) The narrator drinks from the clear fount of his childhood in order to rediscover, or imagine, himself. This is why he discards later fictional (actually more real and well preserved)12 layers of memory including the Soviet period

11 Cf. also “. . . Пробелы памяти неохота восполнять связующими домыслами. Гул времени сохранился осколками воспоминаний,—им противопоказана последовательность и даже достоверность. Из марева возникают звуки и миражи” [ibid.: 23] (“I do not wish to stitch the gaps of memory with fictions. The dull roar of time lives on as shards of memories—they cannot abide consequence or even reliability. From the mists, sounds and phantasms appear). 12 Thus he assigns characteristics of fictionality to the later history of (his own) sovietization and the officially ordered extermination of Jewish culture: “[. . .] это надо понимать не буквально, все это с нами как бы свершалось” [Metter 1992: 24] (“[. . .] this should not be taken literally, all this happened to us in the mode ‘as if ’”). On the other hand, the ‘unbelievable’ Torah stories about the miracles performed by Moses in the desert, learned by the narrator in the Hebrew grammar school, are attributes of another truthfulness. We have already observed this reversal of the levels of reality in the Jewish exodus literature.

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when Judaism fell into oblivion. He calls upon his writing to revert, at least partially, the “darkening” of the first knowledge and reacquire, or reinvent, the “faded traces.” In Metter’s text, the layers of the palimpsest, the hidden, the deposited, the residual, the previously sorted out and decayed with time—everything that gives the urban space of Kharkiv its semiotic charge in the beginning of the story— mark the memory processes as well. The material and mental levels of memory form an iconic unity. Flooded by the flow of oblivion, eaten by the moth of time, or covered by a veil—it is precisely in this less than perfect state that memories contribute to “шатко[e] равновеси[e] моего национального самосознания” [Metter 1992: 17] (“the wavering balance of my national self-confidence”). The semantics of vacillation, of partiality and indistinguishability reconciles the opposition of fact and fiction within the poetics of “creative betrayal”: “[. . .] мне даже по душе эта неопределенность: за мной всегда остается право непрерывного выбора. И я выбираю по-разному [. . .]” [ibid.] (“[. . .] I even like this insecurity: I always have the right of constant choice. And I choose differently [. . .]”). Regardless of this narrative skepticism, Metter revives the biblical paradigm of remembering as expressed in Jewish Soviet underground and emigration literature: a supra-personal genealogy inspires his narrator to work his way down to the oldest layers of Jewish memory as recorded in the Tanakh as he searches for his identity. The story of the exodus from Egypt and the forty-year travels under Moses’s leadership in the desert, which the narrator’s father recounted every year during Passover, seems to the narrator, in his old age, more real today than it did in 1921: “Пожалуй, сегодня я верю в реальность этой истории несравненно сильнее, нежели верил тогда, в одна тысяча девятьсот двадцать первом году. [. . .] Все это было вокруг меня, но не впитывалось мной [. . .]” [ibid.: 25] (“Today I believe in the reality of this story infinitely stronger than in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-one. [. . .] It was all around me, but it was not internalized [. . .]”). The narrator traces the threads that lead from Bar Kokhba’s uprising to the present [ibid.: 31] and, similar to many late Soviet aliyah authors, refers to one of the most heroic and, at the same time, tragic moments of Jewish legendary history (the Jewish resistance against the Romans with the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem and expulsion/dispersion). This proto-episode is included in the story about the Evsektsiia closing the Jewish high school “Tarbut” and the arrest of the beloved teacher Mr. Prakhovnik. The antisemitic violence links the faraway past with recent Jewish history, but in the twentieth century the ancient biblical heroism, which knew no ambiguity, is (self-)ironically relativized: the Jews actively participate in the destruction of

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their own culture in communism (this line is represented above all by the tragic figure of the old Bolshevik and literary scholar Efim Dobin). The motif of guilt pervades the structure of the story. The narrator’s rejection of Jewish tradition becomes the subject of one of the central episodes in the story: it is a kind of apostasy, desecration and fall. Even though his rejection of Judaism is presented as a part of the macrohistorical processes of Jewish assimilation and acculturation, this episode portrays a very personal “rite” of desacralization that refers to the universal constants of apostasy. On the eve of Passover, the adolescent narrator experiences a terrific humiliation: he slips on a cowpat and ends up in a pile of dung, all in the plain view of the girl he adores. He crawls behind an acacia bush and does not dare to return home for several hours: his mother finds him there in the evening. This disaster marks the first evening of the Seder: the boy no longer hears the answers his father gives to the ritual questions about the liberation of the Jews from slavery; and he is so ashamed that he is unable to fall asleep in the first night of Passover. It is during this night that he sees for the first time his father drinking the cup of wine left for the prophet Elijah. From his early childhood, he has always missed the moment when the prophet supposedly comes into the house and drinks the wine. But this night, he disovers that the year-long mystery is a deception, a lived experience of profanation and (a consequence of the) loss of faith. Desacralization (getting soiled with dung) and the loss of sacredness are symbolically linked, and they cement the boy’s ongoing rejection of the Jewish commandments of remembrance during Passover. The festival is now marked by an overwhelming feeling of shame. Childhood and adolescence experiences are arranged in “Family Tree” in such a way that the development of the autobiographic narrator determines and confirms the narrative of loss—a pessimistic emancipation and assimilation fabula deeply anchored in the Jewish literary tradition.13 Thus, the ego-narative is symbolically charged and structured as a linear fabula in spite of the problematic metatextual incursions that problematize the teleology of memory. Within the framework of the plot that shapes the present as a product of missed opportunities, uncorrected mistakes, and amendments that have never been made, the identity of the author-narrator-character seems to be shaped by the continuity of loss. It is this archetypal model of Jewish dispersion that makes possible his present-day self-identification in the categories of a fragmentary, imaginary, and still a return: “Хожу пешком, с котомкой для подаяния, в прошлое. В давнее. А минуя недавнее, зажмуриваюсь” [Metter 1992: 28] (“I walk, 13 See, for example, Claudio Magris’s monograph on Joseph Roth [Magris 1971].

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with my alms bag, into the past. Into the long bygone. And passing the recent past, I shut my eyes tightly”). Fabula revision techniques, (post)memorial tropes, and the increased “metaization” of the narration (to use Nünning’s expression) do not thwart Metter’s nostalgic design, and even support this new incarnation of the retrospective utopia of East European Jewry. As noted by Dirk Uffelmann with reference to Andrzej Kuśniewicz’s memoir prose, “he takes a strangely split position between an extremely backward-looking writing style [. . .] on the one hand and a postmodern skepticism about the documentary value of memory on the other” [2008: 278]. For Metter, the constant vacillation between these two narrative attitudes is rather organic: in his text, ambivalence becomes an integral part of (post)memorial reconstruction and deconstruction. In the second part of “Family Tree” the character’s memories refer no longer to the almost mythical Jewish childhood but to the “recent past,” which he passes with his eyes shut tightly. This is the character’s “adult” period, the Soviet Jewish history. Here, illusion-disrupting techniques move to the background because the new life after the oblivion allows a simple linear narrative. Personally experienced events replace the ambivalence of postmemory and meta-memory. Thus, a chain of events is constructed: Efim Dobin’s exclusion from the communist party because he has received a postal package from relatives living in Israel; the NKVD’s unsuccessful attempt to recruit the narrator as an informant in 1941; the funeral meeting of the Moscow Writers’ Union on the occasion of Stalin’s death and the feeling of anxious uncertainty; the biography of a good friend, Daniil Semenovich Danin, an intellectual who was accused of cosmopolitanism and Zionism and excluded from the party in 1950; the father’s phone call during a night in April 1953—“не было никаких врачей-убийц . . . Евреи никого не убивали . . .” [Metter 1992: 39] (“There were no killer doctors . . . Jews did not kill anyone . . .”). The father, for whom religion still plays a role, wants to say the Kaddish for everyone who has been innocently murdered in the course of the doctors’ plot.14 Shortly after the fall of the dictatorship, Metter creates a nostalgic novella where the autobiographical narrator is placed outside of the (un)reality he is remembering so as to stage an irrecoverable loss: “The history of life is correlated with the genesis of literary activity. Autoreflexivity [. . .] is driven up to a point where it [. . .] is linked to the rejection of one’s own life story” [Düwell 2004: 41–42].

14 State antisemitism in the Soviet Union is one of the most important topics in Metter’s works. Cf., above all, his story “Piatyi ugol” (1967), which was published only at the end of the 1980s; about this text see Rita Genzeleva [1999: 125–140].

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11.1.3. (Post)Memorial Topographies: Grigorii Kanovich’s “Dream about the Disappeared Jerusalem” Grigorii Kanovich (1929–2003) is one of the most famous and productive Jewish Russian-language writers and journalists. From the 1950s onwards, he consistently creates what can be called an epic literary work dealing with the past and present lives of the Jews of his motherland, Lithuania. As mentioned at the beginning of this book, in the Soviet years Kanovich already became a respected and comparatively well-published author, as he cast the half-tabooed memory work into the molds of a soft socialist realism with a humanistic tinge. After the perestroika, Kanovich became a figurehead of the new Lithuanian memorial and cultural policy, and a model speaker for the nostalgic restoration of the lost East European Jewish culture. In 1989–1993 he headed the Jewish community in Lithuania; he received the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 1995, as well as other official Lithuanian awards. In 1993, he emigrated to Israel. In his story “Son ob ischeznuvshem Ierusalime” (1994) Kanovich reconstructs the world of his childhood and youth. The oscillation between the poetics of memory and the poetics of imagination and reinvention consists, as with Metter, in the simultaneous recourse to personal and family memory as well as to the collective knowledge transmitted through centuries via books, pictures and historiography. The workings of postmemory are evident in the fusion of testimony and fiction, and in the intertextual structure of the autobiographical story, densely populated with literary prototypes. In the middle of the text, the Jewish narrative is destroyed (again, as in Metter) by the intrusion of later history: the fabula based on the Yiddish mayse is replaced by an egodocument, the writing of extinction and decay. The object of nostalgia in “Dream about the Disappeared Jerusalem” is Vilno, first, an object of desire for the child narrator and his family, who in the 1930s live in a shtetl nearby. In the second half of the story, the city is shown through the eyes of the adult narrator, already after the war. The Jewish myth of Vilno appears in his subconscious very early, before any individual experience. But in the very first sentence, the semantics of death and finale are evoked: Он, кажется, снился мне еще в колыбели—задолго до того, как я впервые увидел его наяву; задолго до того, как в сорок пятом он принял меня в свои кровоточащие, задымленные войной объятья; задолго, как в нем вырос могильный холмик

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[.  .  .] под ним нашла (нашла ли?) успокоение моя мама. [Kanovich 2002: 157] It seems to me, I have already dreamed [of the city] in the cradle—long before I saw it for the first time when awake; long before it held me in its arms, still full of blood and smok from the war, in 1945; long before it grew the grave-mound [. . .] there my mother was laid to rest (if she did find that rest). The topography of the city picks up many poetic topoi of the Yiddish Jewry. The primary method of poeticization is drawing comparisons between poverty, work, and everyday life of the Jews in the interwar years, and the sacred attributes of Jewish piety and the biblical past of the people of Israel. Every paving stone in Vilnius is like “облом[о]к Моисеевой скрижали” (“a fragment of Moses’s tablet”); in the market, “[. . .] торговцы напоминали древних пророков: на ветру развевались их седые космы; глаза горели [. . .]” (“traders looked like the ancient prophets with their burning eyes and long hair fluttering in the wind [. . .]”), while their shouts sounded like the psalms; street children bore royal names such as Judith, Ruth, Solomon, and David; and “от картофельной бабки пахло [.  .  .] жертвенниками, разложенными на вершинах Иудейских гор” (“the potato pie smelled [. . .] of sacrificial altars set on the tops of the Judean mountains”) [ibid.: 157–158]. Here, the coming together of the opposing registers—the earthly and the sacred one—evokes the practice of sacralizing poverty, traditional for shtetl Jews, and the sanctity of simple, pious life. In this culture, which fostered Hasidism, the different levels of life change places, and the divine is expressed in the smallest things. In this world, the Jewish suffering is also sanctified—this motif refers to the experience of exile and depicts the Jewish life in the diaspora in categories of expectation, hope, and humility: “Мне снились его улицы и переулки, узенькие, как веревки, на которых веками сушилось еврейское белье—не просыхающее от пролитых слез, засиненное синькой несбывшихся надежд [. . .]” [ibid.: 157] (“I dreamed of its streets and alleys, narrow as the ropes on which the Jewish laundry was drying for centuries—it was never dry because of all the tears, and blue with the laundry bluing of unfulfilled hopes [. . .]”). In this way, Vilno is placed in the context of the collective myth, the narratives of national chosenness and the covenant of memory, as recorded in the Torah. The old hopes for redemption form “образ Города городов, еврейского острова в бурном океане ненависти и чужести” [ibid.: 159] (“the image of the City of cities, a Jewish island in the stormy ocean of hatred and alienation”).

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Kanovich’s lyrical prose, with its structure of motifs, rhythm, lexical and syntactical repetitions and compassionate metaphors, is pervaded by an acrid reverence for the lost Jews of Eastern Europe in the era after the catastrophe. In the image of Vilno, the childhood visions are joined with the present-day mourning, and the city itself appears at the same time alive and impossibly far away, closed in its mythical wholeness and yet fragile, as if foreseeing the catastrophe. The Shoah is foreshadowed on the stylistic and poetic levels, and yet, the uniqueness of the future extinction finds no place in this Vilno—as well as in the religious tradition of the Jewish suffering and exile. Important in this sense is the opposition “truth vs. lie,” which is used in the text in various ways. The narrator does not dare to tell the dead Jews, who suddenly became the distant ones, the people of the past, the truth about the extermination: Я не могу сказать ей, моей бабушке, Боговой невесте, правду о Большой Синагоге. Я не могу сказать об этом ни одному из более чем двухсот тысяч евреев, погибших во Второй мировой войне в Литве,—ни младенцу, заживо брошенному в яму; ни старику, бормотавшему не то в огне, не то под огнем затверженное с детства “Шма, Исраэль”. Мертвые, как и живые, не верят в правду, не оставляющую им надежды. [Ibid.: 160] I cannot tell her, my grandmother, the bride of God, the truth about the Great Synagogue. I cannot tell this to any one of the over 200,000 Jews who died in Lithuania in the Second World War—not the baby, who was thrown into the pit alive, not the old man, who, in the fire or in a fever, kept repeating the words “Shema Israel” that he learned in his childhood. Just like the living, the dead do not believe the truth if it gives them no hope. It only becomes possible to tell about the Shoah on the extradiegetic level, in the literary communication with the reader—and on the level of poetics, as will be shown below. Born from the stories told by the dwellers of the shtetl, the image of Vilnius is inserted into an imaginary frame and thus becomes a part of a traditional Jewish mayse. The mayse, a Yiddish fairy-tale or miracle story, has its roots in the Eastern Jewish folk culture. Kanovich explicitly associates it with the Passover Haggadah. Traditionally, it brings hope and eases the troubles of the poor Jewish people. At the same time, the mayse is a tall tale, a deception; it is a wonderful

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and unforgettable lie. In the story, it marks the sad irony related to the unreality of the Jewish past. The italicized words in the paragraph below convey the semantics of the imaginary, emphasize the fictionality of the Vilno chronotope and its belonging to the oral Yiddish tradition: [.  .  .] сновидения [here and hereafter, italics are mine—K.S.] о нем, об этом удивительном и недосягаемом для меня городе, навевались бесконечными томительными рассказами домочадцев—бабушки и дедушки, дядьев и теток, никогда и никуда не выезжавших за пределы нашего местечка, но знавших обо всем на свете не меньше, чем сам Господь Бог,— вымыслами наших многочисленных соседей, словоохотливых и скорых на выдумку (выдумками мои земляки день-деньской вышивали серую холстину жизни), голодных странников, забредавших к нам на берега Вилии и щедро расплачивавшихся за ночлег и пищу всякими байками (“майсес”). Их неспешные повествования, их долгие, растягивавшиеся до рассвета истории будоражили воображение, как пасхальная Агада. Господи, Господи, сколько хмеля было в том порекрасном, в том незабываемом вранье, в ошеломляющей, благодатной полуправде! [Ibid.: 158, italics mine—K.S.] [.  .  .] my dreams about this wonderful unreachable city came out of the endless wistful tales told by my family—my grandmother and grandfather, my uncles and aunts who have never traveled anywhere out of our shtetl, but who knew no less about everything in the world than the Lord God himself—the fantasies of our many neighbors, talkative and inventive (my countrymen used inventions every single day to embroider the grey cloth of their life), hungry pilgrims who ended up on the banks of the Vilia and who paid for a place to sleep and some food with all sorts of fairy tales (“mayses”). Their calm tales, their long stories, which only ended with the dawn, stirred the imagination like the Passover Haggadah. God, what a thrill lay in these wonderful unforgettable lies, in this overwhelming, pleasant half-truth! The irony of this passage lies in the fact that the creators of these mayses, the poor shtetl Jews from the narrator’s childhood, are, for the author and

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the reader, themselves (half-)fiction, as they represent the world of tall tales, where one fiction lives inside another. Aunt Khava dreams of a love marriage in Vilnius; Uncle Leizer imagines that he has been chosen as the head of the Great Synagogue and will one day lie buried next to the Gaon of Vilnius; the baker Rakhmiel sees himself as the owner of the cake shop opposite the Great Synagogue, his buns with cinnamon and raisins smell of paradise; the narrator’s grandfather, Shimen Dudak, a shoemaker, assures that God himself made the shoemakers’ awls in Vilnius; and the shtetl lunatic Motele claims that everyone in Vilnius is mad. Kanovich revives the characteristic Jewish figures, realia, beliefs, superstitions, professions,15 prayers, tastes, the shtetl gossip, and generally the sound of the Yiddish language itself, but he always recurs to the folkloric, stereotypic Jewish topoi, which questions the reliability of his own narration. He constructs a “Russian doll” narrative with a double frame. This well-known metanarrative device transmits the ontological instability of the events he describes, which is also confirmed by the titular motive of a dream: the “Dream about the Disappeared Jerusalem.” Just as Metter’s “Family Tree,” Kanovich’s story demonstrates a nostalgic abundance of Jewish realia and signifiers. Similarly, the vacillation between simultaneous being outside and inside the lost tradition is manifested in the use of Yiddish words and Judaic terms. The Yiddish words and expressions that denote well-known realia (such as food) are given in Cyrillic letters and without Russian translation: “Кугл! Хейсе бейгелех! Фрише фиш!” [ibid.: 157] (“Kugl! Kheisse beigelekh! Frishe fish!”). In other cases, Yiddish passages are translated or paraphrased (for example: “Гот из а татэ. Бог—наш отец,—наплывало откуда-то благое утешение” [ibid.: 163] [“Got is a tate! God is our father!— the merciful comforting words came floating from an unknown place”). However, while “Yerushalaim de Lita,” the Jewish name for Vilno, the first words of the prayer “Shema Israel,” or the term aron koidesh remain without a comment or translation [ibid.: 160–162], another commonly used term, Litvak, is periphrastically explained [ibid.: 159]. The inconsistency of the translation marks the narrator’s double position: on the one hand, he is a commentator who mediates between two cultures, and on the other, he is not bothered to give explanations to the readers or encourages the them to expand their own

15 The narrator recounts the dreams of “торговок рыбой, повивальных бабок, портных и сапожников, шорников и столяров, лавочников и лудильщиков” [Kanovich 2002: 160] (“fishwives, midwives, tailors and shoemakers, saddlers and carpenters, shopkeepers and tinkers”). The long list of Jewish professions clearly has a mnemonic, or, better yet, memorial function.

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knowledge of Jewish life and traditions as the author performatively reminds them about the lost bilingualism of the East European Jews.16 When the Shoah happens, the waiting for the Messiah and the Jews’ prayers in the Great Synagogue of Vilnius become an illusion, a lie: the synagogue is razed to the ground. The static image of the mythologized Vilno, which seems to keep existing in the eternal past of a collective dream, is blown away with the beginning of the Second World War. It gives way to the linear movement of a train journey, as the narrator flees with his mother to Kazakhstan. Whereas so far, the narrator—once again, similar to Izrail′ Metter—used predominantly Jewish folklore and literary topoi, the next part of the story is autobiographical writing based on personal memories that come to life with, or after, the destruction. Interestingly, the moment of historical rupture is accompanied by a change of cultural references: intensive Jewish tropes give place to the recurrent motif of the Russian snowstorm, the symbol of forgetting. The snowstorm, which in Russian cultural memory is associated with the expanses of inconquerable space, as well as Russian and later Soviet history, devours, buries, and overwrites the signs of the Jewish Yerushalaim de Lita, adding a new layer to the palimpsest: “[. . .] вьюга на полустанке заметала не только дорогу назад, в Ерушалаим де Лита, но и сам Ерушалаим де Лита; она укутывала в саван его черепичные крыши” [ibid.: 162] (“[. . .] the snowstorm at the small station blew away not only the way back to Yerushalaim de Lita, but also Yerushalaim de Lita itself, and wrapped its tiled roofs in a shroud”). The blizzard is not just the “sea of oblivion” (“море забвения” [ibid.: 163]) but also an obvious metonymy of the politics of violence: “[. . .] кто мог подумать, что вьюга—русская, немецкая, литовская—окажется сильней самого Господа?!” [ibid.] (“[. . .] who could believe that the snowstrom—Russian, German, or Lithuanian—would prove stronger than the Lord God himself!”). The topic of crypto-Jewishness, which is linked to the trope of palimpsest in another way is given in the figure of Aron Grinblat, a devout, educated Jew from Vilno who secretly teaches Jewish traditions and the Hebrew language to the refugee children in Kazakhstan. The head of the kolkhoz naively takes Grinblat’s kippah for a Kazakh skullcap. The motif of Jewish mimicry (see chap. 4.2) returns

16 Olaf Terpitz draws on Gershon Shaked’s concept of social semantics when he analyzes the heterogeneous translation strategies in Kanovich’s work: the cultural alterity of the texts is contrasted with the cultural horizon of the reader [Terpitz 2008: 244]. This situation is reflected in the “naming of realia,” which are given sometimes more and sometimes less complete explanation or translation in Russian. In this way, the readers find themselves in the border area between two cultures, at the intersection of the insider’s and the outsider’s perspectives.

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together with that of cultural concealment and layering. As a shared semantic element, the latter connects the metaphor of the blizzard, the motif of Marranism, and, in the final episodes of the story, the Soviet occupation of Vilno. By telling the children about his hometown and its Jewish culture, Aron Grinblat embodies the trope of the historical memory that is about to disappear. His sudden death far from home and the fact that the Jewish mourning prayer, the Kaddish, cannot be said over his grave, take on a symbolic meaning. In February 1945, when the narrator returns home, the defaced, half-ruined, “alien” Vilno is a tragic contrast to the former fairy-tale oasis of Jewish life. The repeated enumeration of monuments, buildings, and names hearkens back to the beginning of the text—it is a poetic gesture of mourning, which translates the ritual (Kaddish) into lyric and transforms the text into a symbolic instrument of remembering the dead. The echoes of a mourning prayer or a lament for the dead are heard in the repeated rhetorical questions: Где она, Большая Синагога? Где оно, кладбище, на котором покоится прах Гаона? Где они—Лейзеры, Хавы, Рахмиэли, Шимшоны, Мотэле, где они, девочки и мальчики со звучными царскими именами—Юдифь и Руфь, Соломон и Давид? Кругом только снег, только снег, только снег. [Ibid.: 166] Where is it, the Great Synagogue? Where is it, the cemetery in which the remains of the Gaon are buried? Where are they, those Leisers, Khavas, Rakhmiels, Shimshons, Moteles, where are they, the boys and girls with the melodious royal names—Judith and Ruth, Solomon and David? All around, there is only snow, only snow, only snow. The word “snow,” which is repeated three times in the last sentence, characterizes the image of postwar Vilnius. It recalls the already familiar metaphor of amnesia: “the Soviet oppression has surpassed the Egyptian [. . .] for there is no more terrible oppression than living without a memory and in oblivion!” (“Советская неволя превзошла египетскую [. . .] ибо нет страшней неволи, чем беспамятство и забвение!” [ibid.: 167]). The allusion, as well as the comparison of the emigrating Jews with the Maccabees17 are echoing the

17 “Евреи с настойчивостью и решимостью, достойной маккавеев, спешили в ОВИР, в отдел выдачи виз и регистрации, как когда-то на молебен в Большую Синагогу” [Kanovich 2002: 169] (“The Jews hurried with tenacity and determination worthy of the Maccabees

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Russian Jewish Soviet Jewish underground imagery and emigration literature, which reached into the post-Soviet 1990s. Another marker of this genealogy is the commemorative character of the text as a whole. Telling is the description of the hegemonic cultural practices that the Soviet authorities apply in regard to the Jewish heritage: liquidation, rewriting, or leaving to decay. The yeshivas, “где над разгадкой тайны мироздания и предназначения Человека столетиями бились юные маймониды, разместились советские учреждения, занимавшиеся сбором [. . .] утильсырья” [ibid.: 167] (“where the young Maimonideses struggled for centuries to discover the secrets of the universe and the destiny of man, now hosted the Soviet institutions that collected [. . .] used materials”); in former Jewish schools, “безликие” [ibid.] (“faceless”) Soviet clerks issue Soviet passports and check the reliability of citizens; Jewish printing houses, seized by the Bolsheviks, print Stalin’s works and party newspapers. As for Jewish writings, they quickly become metaphors for the human victims of the antisemitic regime: in the “страшн[ом]” [ibid.: 168] (“terrible”) year of 1953, people carried [и]з еврейских домов, как покойников, [. . .] еврейские книги. Наспех, в сумерках, на пустыре недалеко от Лукишкской тюрьмы наши насмерть перепуганные соседи сжигали все еврейское, начиная от невинного, прекраснодушного Мапу и кончая хмурым и суровым Давидом Бергельсоном. Шестнадцать томов дореволюционной еврейской энциклопедии уносили в ночь, как шестнадцать гробиков. [Ibid.: 168–169] [.  .  .] Jewish books, like deceased people, out of the Jewish houses. Hurriedly, in the twilight, in the open spot near the Lukish prison, our neighbors, scared to death, burned all things Jewish, from the innocent, esthetic Mapu to the gloomy and strict David Bergelson. The sixteen volumes of the pre-Revolutionary Jewish encyclopedia were carried into the night, like sixteen little coffins.

to the OVIR, the Office for Registration and Issuing of Visas, as they once did to the Great Synagogue”).

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This quote brings together the burning books and the dead people, as a reminder of the mass burning during the Shoah and a symbol of affinity between the two antisemitic dictatorships. This example demonstrates the flexible metaphorics of annihilation, which consistently blurs the referential framework: the interchangeability of the semantic components in the word pairs “burning/death” and “books/Jews” wipes away the difference between biology and culture, creating an image of global extinction. The whole text becomes an expanded “stock-taking“ of the topographically anchored Jewish memory as it brings to the foreground the figures of remainders and traces. These include the last Jewish orphanage that houses the surviving children, the not yet closed Jewish school, and the Jewish museum that is “обречен на скорую гибель” [ibid.: 167] (“doomed to fall soon”), which is symptomatically housed in the former prison that the Nazis opened in the ghetto. Once again transferring the meaning from people to objects, the narrator compares the museum director Gudkovich and his few employees with the last remaining museum exhibits. Here, the Jews themselves metonymically become the archived or museumized—dusted, dead—memory of Jewry, surviving remainders. Several times in the text, the semantics of a cultural palimpsest extends to people. The young people who return to Vilno, including the narrator, are Russified, have forgotten the Yiddish language, and have insufficient knowledge of the Jewish tradition. Their stories are a milder correspondence to the communist methods of erasure and overwriting: Почти обрусевшие, говорившие на изуродованном чужбиной идише, выброшенные смерчем войны в иные пределы, где в слове “жид” умещались все познания о нашем народе, мы, его молодая, озябшая, изголодавшаяся поросль, бегали на еврейские литературные вечера, устраиваемые в послевоенном Вильно [. . .]. [ibid.: 168] We were almost Russified, we spoke a Yiddish language distorted by our living in a foreign land; the turmoil of the war had swept us to places where the word “Yid” contained all our knowledge of our people. We, its young, freezing, and hungry shoot, rushed to the Jewish literary evenings that took place in the postwar Vilnius [. . .].

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These parallelisms are further increased in a process of excessive metaphorization, which is typical for Kanovich’s writing—the books burned by the Jews, Yerushalaim de Lita, and the narrator’s self merge into a single object of symbolic cremation:18 “Тогда я еще не осознавал до конца, что горела не бумага, а город моих снов—Ерушалаим де Лита, и что я сам был не более чем головешка, в лучшем случае—тлеющий уголёк” [ibid.: 169] (“Back then, I had not fully understood that it was not the paper that was on fire, but the city of my dreams—Yerushalaim de Lita—and that I was at best no more than a charred piece of wood myself—a smoldering piece of coal”). Basing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, Uilleam Blacker identifies urban spaces in post-communist Europe as places where the access to the past is, on the one hand, full of nostalgia and empathy, and on the other, culturally medialized to the highest degree. Vilnius, Lviv, Warsaw, and Krakow become pilgrimage sites that allow us to connect with “memories” recorded in literature, fixed in memoirs, history books, yizker bikher, or photographs. They are framed as spaces of national remembrance, or, as Pierre Nora calls them, lieux de mémoire. The “revival” of spatial memory and the new, postmemorial appropriation of these spaces compensate for the “emptiness, as well as deadness” [Blacker 2013: 174–175] that came after the historic ruptures as they work with non-processed taboos and traumas. The “program of mnemonic cleansing” [ibid.], to which these cities were subjected under communism, has made them into spaces of palimpsest. Blacker mentions that the Soviets used the synagogues as sport halls and warehouses, or that after the war in Western Polish cities German names, signs, and monuments were replaced by Polish ones. According to Blacker, East European literatures also participate in the postmemorial reinvention of the lost topographies, presenting the cities as multi-layered historical structures—as, for example, in the works of Boris Chichibabin, Iurii Buida, Stefan Khvin, and Iurii Andrukhovych: “Across Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian literature, cities appear as layers of text, both metaphorically and literally. [.  .  .] We see authors creating a post-memory of others through the imaginative appropriation of the textual, topographical, and material traces of those others” [ibid.: 180–181]. The trends described by Blacker are visible everywhere in Grigorii Kanovich’s prose written in the post-Soviet period. In “Dream about the Disappeared Jerusalem” Kanovich treats Jewish urban topography as a palimpsest and inscribes (post)imperial history into the poetics of the nostalgic imagination.

18 The word “Holocaust”—the term for the total annihilation of Judaism—means, translated from ancient Greek, “completely burned.”

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He reflects on memories that are mediated by culture, but at the same time, he creates a textual artifact that itself becomes an element of postmemory. The image of the past nurtured by myth, Judaistic constants, and Yiddish fiction from the first part of the story disappears when the world as it was before the war is destroyed. It is replaced by a recording of facts, including, among others, the memories of readings by Perets Markish, Avrom Sutskever, and Girsh Osherovich, of the doctors’ plot and the emigration of the last Jews from Vilno to Israel. And yet, at the end of Kanovich’s story, there is a final lyrical reference to the Jewish tradition. It is his Kaddish for Vilno, which, the narrator confesses, he does not want to pronounce yet, and still he does: Я не хочу хоронить его улицы и переулки—узенькие, как веревки, на которых веками сушилось еврейское белье,—я развешиваю на них свою горечь и печаль; я не хочу хоронить его черепичные крыши, по которым кошки расхаживали, как ангелы, и ангелы, как кошки [.  .  .]; я не хочу хоронить его мостовые, где каждый булыжник подобен обломку Моисеевой скрижали—я вмуровываю в них свой памятный камень, который будет жечь каждую стопу и напоминать о Резне, о гибели тысяч и тысяч ни в чем не повинных жизней. [Kanovich 2002: 191] I do not want to bury its streets and alleys, narrow as the ropes on which Jewish laundry had been drying for centuries—I hang my bitterness and sorrow on them. I do not want to bury its tiled roofs, where cats strutted about like angels, and angels like cats [. . .], I do not want to bury its cobblestone streets, where each stone resembles a fragment of Moses’s tablets—I embed in them my memorial stone, which will burn under every footsole and remind of the Slaughter, the extinction of thousands upon thousands of absolutely innocent lives.

11.2. Jewish Deconstruction of the Empire According to Manfred Schmeling, the figure of the labyrinth is a fundamental narrative model, which is “characterized by a particularly high degree of ‘semioticism’” [Schmeling 1987: 13]. In modernist and postmodernist literature, the labyrinth is often not just a part of the diegesis or a structural topos, but also

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an epistemological device. Thus, in Thomas Bernhard’s prose the “labyrinthine topology of the lime works” sets in motion the “tautological movements in space,” “the endlessness of speech, reflecting, analyzing,” the “compulsive repetition and losing oneself ” [ibid.: 197]. In labyrinthine texts, this semantics is expressed as “the ironic interplay of comedy and tragedy, the references to mask, or doubles, [. . .] to everything non-linear, perverted, fractured, tangled” [ibid.: 246]. The texts that are analyzed below are similar to postmemorial prose in that they respond to the collapse of the Soviet empire with poetics and poetology of decay and rupture, but they are best understood as postmodern deconstruction: they are the masterpieces of narrative “iconology,” that is, a textual reflection of a failed system of values, rhetorics, and language itself. The structural elements of this poetics ‒ repetition; contradiction (the splitting of the self, the indistinguishability between subject and object, between the inside and the outside); a state of uncertainty regarding various possibilities of interpretation; (self-)reflexivity (intertextuality that undermines the history and the plot, parallelisms) [ibid.: 287–307]—are woven into the narrative analysis of political ideologies, collective imaginary, and historical myths. The text becomes a coded compendium of history, an esthetic carrier of memory about the no longer existent political and/or cultural system. In many cases, the labyrinth correlates with other esthetic and philosophical features of postmodernism: for instance, when irony, travesty, and parody, the blending of narrative levels and points of view, the diffusion of linguistic registers (such as elevated and trivial languages), the contamination of genres and styles result in ideological fragmentation or in compulsive seriality (see [Grabes 2004: 68–82]). A skepticism regarding narrative claims for truthfulness or wholeness, characteristic of literature after the collapse of a dictatorship, is expressed as interest in narrativization and metaization, which create a space of playing, arbitrariness, and aporia. It is also possible to speak of a “catalog of ‘practices of formlessness’” (“каталог ‘приемов бесформенности’”), which includes duplication, iteration, substitution, enumeration or seriality, and false or duplicated finals ([Lipovetsky 2008: 12] following [Fokkema 1997]). The Jewish culture, with its rich tradition of story(telling), self-irony, and Talmud-inspired intellectual games, being a treasury of half-forgotten cultural realia, is a perfect breeding ground for a playful auto-referential fiction and encyclopedic historical reflections. It is this immeasurably liberal dealing with the past that becomes, for the Jewish authors analyzed in this chapter, a literary lieu de memoire and often a means of coping with historical and personal trauma. The deconstructivist shift, or postponement of the signified does not refer here

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to the philosophically perceived artificiality of reality in general, but rather to the no more existing Jewish—and Soviet—reality: the performance of emptiness conceals the longing for presence. Thus, postmodern subversion of the form becomes a cultural self-therapy that sets in motion the mechanisms of liberating pastiche writing and brings grief and laughter together.

11.2.1. Archaic Language of the Dictatorship: Mikhail Iudson’s Dystopia The Ladder onto the Closet The boom of the dystopian genre in the post-Soviet Russia was a part of the global cultural and political destigmatization of the 1990s: the Russian-Soviet history and its integral part—the “Jewish question”—were the subject of a radical artistic deconstruction. This coincided with the flourishing of Russian literary postmodernism.19 The unleashing of language, characteristic for postmodernism, the use of language as an epistemological instrument and a medium of discursive (self-)analysis is also manifested in this period in the text written from the perspective of cultural and ethnic minorities—in our case, the Jewish Other. As noted in the introduction to this book, a number of authors use critical linguistic reflection to break down, in an ironic way, the totalizing rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox, Soviet, and post-Soviet “great narratives.” Central to this is Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, which Mikhail Epshtein [2005] and Boris Groys [2003] use to analyze the culture of socialist realism as postmodernism: the past and present reality is revealed as linguisticideological construct, a macabre substitution of the real world.20 In regard to the use of archaic language matrices21 in the new Russian dystopias, which has been gaining popularity since the 1990s and which I will address below, it is important to remember Epshtein’s claim that the socialist-realist “‘постмодерн’ обернулся реставрацией ‘предмодерна’—‘новым средневековьем’”

19 On the Russian version of European postmodernism cf. [Chernetsky 2007: 3–55] and [Lipovetsky 2008: 1–69]. 20 Aleksandr Chantsev investigates the phenomenon of Baudrillard’s simulacrum in the dystopian prose of the 2000s, primarily in Olga Slavnikova’s novel 2017. Since all historical acts and debates in this text are initiated not by the people, but by impersonal authorities, they become a mere simulation of political activity, secondary and staged [Chantsev 2007]. 21 Cf. the following publications that analyze Vladimir Sorokin’s acclaimed novels Den′ oprichnika and Sakharnyi kreml′ (Day of the Oprichnik and Sugar Kremlin): [Chantsev 2007]; [Lipovetsky/Etkind 2008]; [Krier 2011]; [Aptekman 2013].

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[2005: 91] (“postmodernism” brought about “a restoration of the premodern era—a ‘new Middle Ages’”).22 I will use the term discursive dystopia to define the subgenre of dystopian writing that emerges from linguistic reflection about reality. Obviously, it appeared in Russia not in the 1990s (rather, with the postmodern dissident literature of the late Soviet period, such as in Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia) but in the 1990s and the 2000s it became a characteristic part of the literary canon.23 Mikhail Iudson (1956–2019) emigrated to Israel in 1999. He was an editor of the journal 22 and later published the journal Artikl′ together with Iakov Shekhter. In 2013, his novel, Lestnitsa na shkaf: Skazka dlia emigrantov (The ladder onto the closet. A fairy-tale for emigrants), the first part of which is set in Russia, and the second, in Germany, was republished with an additional third part set in Israel. Before moving to the analysis of Lestnitsa na shkaf, which was written in 1998 (the first two parts were published as a book in 2005), it is worth to note that Iudson’s main literary device is the artful compression and hybridization of rhetorical practices from various eras—from the Middle Ages to the present—and often, of different cultures as well. Thus, the text offers a comprehensive exploration of politics by becoming a kind of a linguistic laboratory of power. The repetition of linguistic ideological patterns refers to the incessant production of myths about national unity and collective purification, which are staged as discourses in the text. At the same time, the never-stopping machine of collective imagination generates its own folklore—a mixture of archaic xenophobia, mystical salvation visions, apocalyptic scenarios, and the dreams of the national mission of the great empire. At that, the Jewish Other is presented not as a dissident, but rather as a victim and therefore an indispensable part of the total repressive system. In Lestnitsa na shkaf, the late and post-Soviet reality are anachronistically transferred to the old Russia, the country of pious zealotry, living archaics, and xenophobic hate towards the foreign-borns. Both temporal levels—the Russian Middle Ages and the present—overlap not only with regard to the depicted realia, but above all in a discursive and rhetorical way. The first part,

22 On the “new Middle Ages” in the Russian prose of the 2010s, for example, in Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Lavr and Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluriia, cf. [Kasper 2014]. 23 One more example is Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii. Natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The conquest of Moskovia. A national-linguistic novel, 2012). As the subtitle suggests, Gigolashvili gives a kind of linguistic and historical diagnosis of Russian reality. In his novel, archaic and contemporary language discourses are combined and collided. Additionally, Ingunn Lunde [2006: 66ff., here 67] describes how “the linguistic crisis is turned into an epistemological crisis” in Tat′iana Tolstaia’s novel Kys′ (2000).

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titled “Москва златоглавая” (“Gold-headed Moscow”), is given an epigraph: “Как на беленький снежок / Вышел черненький жидок. Детская считалка” [Iudson 2005: 7] (“On the white snow, / the little black Yid came. A children’s counting rhyme”). The combination of the two paratexts brings together the national historical mythology with its Russian-Orthodox24 colouring and the xenophobic or, more precisely, Judeophobic (children’s) folklore. Another element of the counting rhyme is the diminutive word zhidok, which refers to a depreciating name for Jews that has been widespread in Slavic regions since the eighteenth century. With this designation, the Jewish stranger is domesticated and humiliated at the same time; the “black Yid” is easy to spot on the “white snow.” Finally, Moscow here is the center of power and, at the same time, a symbol that combines the rhetoric of unity and segregation. Iudson’s protagonist, a young Jew called Il′ia wakes up in his room and looks around at the habitual misery of his everyday life: the home-made oven that is already cold, the broken light bulb, the pail he uses instead of a toilet (the only available toilet is shared by the residents of the whole house). Pulling away the old furs he was using as bedcovers, Il′ia puts on his traditional felt boots. This material world implies a decay of civilization, combined with Old Church Slavonic wording. For example, the barely functioning boiler house is called “Свято-Беляевская котельная” [ibid.], the “Holy Beliaevo boilerhouse”—a witty toponymic hybrid of Beliaevo, a district at the outskirts of Moscow, and a reference to the traditional model of naming Russian Orthodox monasteries.25 Il′ia’s thoughts, conveyed as indirect speech, are full of folk and Old Russian or Slavic Orthodox idioms, some of which he passes off as quotes from the Bible. Thinking about his soon-to-come first practice lesson as a student teacher, Il′ia reviews his lesson plan, which he has written “песцовым [sic] перышком” (the archaic word pistsovyi—belonging to a scribe—is replaced with pestsovyi—belonging to an arctic fox) and anxiously imagines the ominous greeting of his students: “Очередной отец Учитель пришел!” [Iudson 2005: 8] (“The next Father Teacher is here!”). In this expression, which evokes the ways of speaking used among the (Old) Russian clergy, and everywhere else in Iudson’s novel, the archaic aspect oscillates between the bizarre realm of language and the recognizable post-Soviet reality, which immediately casts doubt on the credibility and the consistency of the hybrid diegesis. For example,

24 The spatial metonymy Moskva zlatoglavaia transfers the color of Orthodox church domes to the toponym “Moscow.” 25 The most famous equivalent is the Sviato-Troitskaia Sergieva Lavra (Holy Trinity Monastery of Sergiev Posad).

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Il′ia contemplates the bleak environment “[с] высоты третьего этажа терема” [ibid.: 9] (“from the height of the third floor of the terem”),26 but this scene is evidently an example of a language game in which the historic term is simply a stand-in for a Soviet multi-storey house. A political irony is also implied in the designation of the (post-)Soviet army, where Il′ia was harassed and tortured because of his Jewishness: “Войско Русское” (“Russian Warriors”) and “Могучая Рать” (“Mighty People of War”) [ibid.: 12–13]. The game of signifiers creates an epistemological uncertainty, which localizes the meaning in between linguistic ambivalence and unreliable narration.27 The portrayal of antisemitism as an everyday ritual legitimized by language itself is used in Iudson’s hybrid text to reflect on the historical present, with the temporal contradiction inherent in this concept. Il′ia, a typical outcast, possesses the features of a pious Jew from the novels and stories about the shtetls. At that, the Judaistic details are partly ethnographic, and partly fictitious. Il′ia washes his fingertips with drinking water; he has a mezuzah at his doorpost; he wears earlocks and hides a tattoo on his left shoulder showing a Sabbath candlestick and the inscription: “Житель Иорданской Долины” (“Resident of the Jordan Valley,” the first letters of the Russian phrase make up the word “ЖИД”—ZhID, meaning “Yid”).28 When leaving the apartment, he notices that the mezuzah has been scratched with a nail, and the same nail was used to carve the following sentences into the door: “‘Сивонисты чесночные—прочь, вон отсель! И будет так . . . ,’ ‘Здесь живет Жид’” [ibid.: 9] (“‘Garlic Ziwonists, leave, go forth! And this is how it should be . . . ,’ ‘Here lives a Yid’”). The incorrectly written, vernacular form “Ziwonists,” the coarse jargon, and the religious rhetoric of exorcism result in a discursive mixture that bundles up the threads of ignorance 26 Terems were upper storeys of a home in old Russia, often with a pitched roof. 27 Notably, Iudson uses such epistemologically flickering signifiers several years before the appearance of Vladimir Sorokin’s much more famous discursive dystopias. See Marina Aptekman: “Both Day of the Oprichnik and Sugar Kremlin are characterized by their broad use of a particular type of everyday archaic language that utilizes folk and Old Russian morphological forms, aphorisms, and verbal expressions” [2013: 285]. On the hybridity of the linguistic diachronism she states: “At a closer glance, however, the etymology of most of these Old New Russian words is contemporary. [. . .] Sorokin’s Old New Church Slavonic language [here and hereafter the italics are in the original—K.S.] exists at the border between linguistic cultures. The author replicates pseudo-folk discourses from post-Soviet neo-patriotic literary works and media, and combines them with the New Russian slang, primarily the criminal argot, post-Soviet concepts such as kiberpanki, and Soviet idioms” [ibid.: 285–286]. Similar observations cf. also in the essays by Dirk Uffelmann [2009b: 160–161] and Anne Krier [2011: 178, 194]. 28 Il′ia is officially “registered” in Palestine, so he only has a temporary residence permit for Moscow. This restriction is reminiscent of the settlement zone given to Jews in preRevolutionary Russia, as well as the Russian laws for immigrants and refugees.

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and superstition among common Russian people through a diachronic linguistic analysis. The second sentence is a gesture of stigmatization passed on in Europe since the Middle Ages, through verbal or nonverbal marking on Jewish houses. The gallery of traditional Judeophobic practices is complemented by a drawing in the stairwell, which shows Il′ia as a hunted arctic fox in a cleverly set trap, surrounded by the triumphant house occupants armed with axes. In the city, Il′ia observes the bleak details of the post-Soviet reality—the lights of McDonald’s restaurants and advertisements of a “Supra-World Bank” called “Сам Сунь” (“Sam Sun′,” a parody of the brand name “Samsung,” which makes up a Russian phrase “Stick in [your penis] Yourself ”) against the background of the grey Moscow subway, people searching for food, and the rundown architectural symbolism of Orthodoxy: Справа вдоль трассы тянулись жилые многоэтажки с обвалившимися балконами, ржавыми водостоками, вывешенными за окно авоськами с приманкой, дряхлыми покосившимися крестами на крышах. Слева на пустыре дико чернело заброшенное здание древнего собора—некогда, по преданию, там, в лабиринтах, Ожиревший Поп, икая, порол любезных сердцу девок. [Iudson 2005: 18] To the right of the driveway, there were the endless multi-storey residential buildings with cracked balconies, rusty gutters, baited29 shopping nets hanging out of the windows and old crooked crosses on the roofs. To the left, an old dilapidated black cathedral towered wildly in the middle of an open space— according to a legend, there, in the labyrinthine corridors, the Fattened Priest, hiccuping, whipped the heart-warming wenches. The backwardness of Moscow’s life30 is a foil for the flourishing of mythical images, semifictional collective memories, and mystical legends, which are double coded as they are transmitted in the “internal” language of Moscow’s

29 The hunt for arctic foxes (pestsy) is a recurrent theme throughout the text, as the animal becomes a paradigm-forming symbol of the victim. 30 This is the main difference between Iudson’s text and Sorokin’s anachronistic discourse, which relates to a later period: Sorokin’s retrofuturistic regime is based on the combination of archaic models of power with the high technologies of the present, while Iudson makes the focus of his fantasies the chaos and collapse of civilization.

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residents, often by way of allusion. As soon as Il′ia leaves the house, he is drawn, together with the reader, into a space of xenophobic linguistic creations, which seem to be a part of the bizarre living oral canon. In conversations in the street, where folk patriotism is combined with apocalyptic prophecies, Jews are given the characteristics of reptiles (with the attributes “damp” and “slimy”) and demons.31 Two people drinking tea in a subway train agree that the sufferings of the holy Russian land are due to “проклятые недоверки” [ibid.: 22] (“the cursed faithless ones”).32 In a flight of incessant collective inspiration the people produce anti-Jewish sayings and poems, perpertuating the chain of folklore texts. A grandmother tells her grandson a story in which the epic “Богдан-богатырь” (“warrior Bogdan”) descends into a forest cave, where he finds “еврейчата [. . .] пищат, поганцы” [ibid.: 32] (“dirty Jewish pack [. . .] squeaking”); then “Богдахан-батыр” (“Bogdahan-batyr,” a Turkic variant of the hero’s name that combines batyr, the Mongol title for a strong warrior, with the old Russian word bogdykhan, also borrowed from Mongol and used as a title for Chinese emperors) crushes them and returns home with a treasure (iasak, a word of Turkic origin reminiscent of the Tatar-Mongol invasion).33 Pagan beliefs are inherent in the everyday (Old?) Russian Orthodoxy presented in the

31 The demonization of the Jews is part of a long tradition of Russian demonology, which draws its motifs and subjects from folklore. It is still present in the (post-)Soviet era. The prominent place taken by the figure of the Jew in the Slavic folk demonology is analyzed by Ol′ga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin [2008: 451–498]; Leonid Livak lists the “archetypal associations” between the Jews, the devil [2010: 57–73], and the animals [ibid.: 74–87]. Tellingly, Boris Groys calls the art of socialist realism “hagiographic” and demonological [2003: 85, 88]. 32 On the historical myth of “holy Russia/Rus′” (sviataia Rus′), which is often evoked in Iudson’s novel, and the term inovertsy (people of other faiths) see [Hellberg-Brain 1998: 101-104]. In Iudson’s text, the term inovertsy is replaced by a derived pejorative term nedoverki, where the prefix nedo- conveys the meaning of something imperfect, incomplete, inadequate, and ultimately wrong. 33 Iudson often makes use of bestialization, or animalization, of the Jew—it is a strategy of alienation, an ironic mimicry, the internalization of the Judeophobic perspective. In an episode in the novel, the members of a sect called “скопцы” (eunuchs) capture Il′ia and try to change his “окрас” [Iudson 2005: 109] (“coloring”), to scrape off his “колючую желтушную чешую” [ibid.] (“spiky, yellowish scale”). They define Il′ia as “жидец одногорбый чешуйчатоносный” (“monohumped scaly[-nosed] Yiddling”)—the “hump” refers to the curved Jewish nose, which is measured by the eunuchs. However, the scales, this fantastic bodily characteristic of the Jews, are described not as imagined or ascribed, but described as really existing, which gives the scene a humorous and absurd character. Similarly, Il′ia himself describes his hand as a furry paw [ibid.: 168]). In another episode, Il′ia wakes up after a robbery in a monastery, where he is enthusiastically examined by an interested surgeon who concludes: “Настоящий еврейский организм. Я думал, они у нас уже не водятся” [ibid.: 210] (“A true Jewish organism. I thought this kind does not exist here anymore”). These scenes are reminiscent of racial research in German national socialism, foreshadowing the sequel to the novel. At the same time, Jews are described in them as an “extinct race.”

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novel—a manifestation of the dvoeverie (double belief) practiced in Russia up to the present day and preserving “a parallel system of folklore genres [. . .] apart from the high Church Slavonic culture” [Kissel/Uffelmann 1999: 19]. In Iudson’s dystopia, the barbarism of the imagined regime is no longer hidden behind the rhetoric of “affirmative action” (Martin 2001). The beautiful words of the propaganda give place to undisguised linguistic obscenity, a language that naturalizes desecration and murder. The archaism of the language has conquered the present of the text, so that history in the novel is wound several centuries back. The official political memory cult in Iudson’s dystopian state prescribes naming the streets after famous criminals who led the anti-Jewish pogroms (for example, Purishkevich Street). During a routine patrol, the so-called “Армия Спасения Руси” (“Army for the Rescue of Russia”)—“дикие архангелы” (“the wild archangels”)34— immediately identifies Il′ia as a Jew and captures him; Il′ia is only able to save himself by a happy accident [ibid.: 17–20]. In the spirit of ironic hybridity, which combines intertextual and historical allusions, Il′ia respectfully addresses the leader of the archangel gang as “батюшка-двухсотник” [ibid.: 20] (roughly translated as “my father, the commander of the two hundreds”). Here, references to a Cossack rank (sotnik) and to the antisemitic Black Hundreds movement (chernaia sotnia) are combined in one word, dvukhsotnik. Both elements contain a reminder of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. But the word dvukhsotnik also refers to the members of the Soviet workers’ movement, active before and during the war, who committed themselves the “socialist competition,” pledging to increase their output to 200 percent of the planned production norm. With this witty language economy, the Russian history is compressed into a bundle of connotations, and the text itself becomes an instrument of political exploration. Such references often blur geographical and cultural boundaries. Thus, the text repeatedly evokes the anti-Jewish customs of other countries, such as the prescription to wear an identifying label. Thus, an “enlightened” antisemite asks Il′ia a question that points to the old practices of segregation: “Где ваш обязательный капюшон с колокольчиком? Который предупреждает о вашем зловонном приближении?” [ibid.: 36] (“Where is your obligatory hood with the bell? The one that will announce your foul-smelling arrival?”). The question accumulates and blends features of real historical ordinances, for example, those adopted in the Muslim countries of ninth–twelfth centuries: “Around

34 An easily decipherable allusion to the pre-Revolutionary monarchist Judeophobic organization “The Union of the Archangel Michael” (“Союз Михаила Архангела”).

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807, the Abbasid caliph Harun Al-Rashid ordered Jews to wear yellow belts. Yellow hoods became mandatory over the next fifty years. By 1005, the labeling requirements were increasingly humiliating. In Egypt, the caliph ordered that Jews fasten bells on their belts.”35 In the Moscow subway, a literal underworld,36 a special sign points to the “Area for Waste and Jews” [ibid.: 21] (“Места для отходов и иудеев”). The common people there exchange news: [. . .] говорили о том, что лукавый, что ли, миром ворочает, ей-бо,—вот надысь в церкви Вынесения Всех Святых опять заплакала угнетенно чудотворная икона Василья Египтянина. А с малых губ Пресвятой Вульвы-великомученицы слетел вздох; [. . .] в Охряной Лавре же кой-какие мощи, источавшие по сей день благовонную мирру, запахли вдруг чесночищем. . . . [Iudson 2005: 22–23] [. . .] People said that, by the looks of it, the evil one did rule the world (God sees!)—that the other day, the miraculous icon of Vasilii the Egyptian in the Church of Carrying Out the Saints wept in torment again. And that a sigh escaped from the small lips of the Holy Martyr Vulva; [.  .  .] and that in the Maroon Monastery, the certain holy bones, from which the fragrant scent of myrrh emanated so far, suddenly began to stink of garlic. [. . .] This quotation is another complex historical allusion that parodies the mechanism of religious myth production. As the passengers pass on rumors about the foul-smelling (desecrated) bones, they evoke the apocryphal motif of the devil cunningly changing his appearance and posing as one of the saints.37 The 35 See A. Sander, “Juden und Muslime,” https://www.planet-wissen.de/kultur/voelker/ geschichte_des_juedischen_volkes/pwiejudenundmuslime100.html, accessed January 4, 2023. For the identification of the Jews in medieval Europe see [Hödl 1997: 28]. 36 The Moscow subway as a utopia reminds of the dark legends associated with its construction under Stalin and becomes increasingly demonic after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cf. [Grois 1995: 156–166]. Dina Khapaeva examines how Moscow becomes a monstrous topos of totalitarian memory and the setting for the stories about a “gothic” society in post-Soviet literature, for example, in the works of Viktor Pelevin and Sergei Luk′ianenko. These authors often create a nightmarish plot that takes place largely in the subway [2012: 178–187]. 37 In popular belief, demons are given the ability to create sacred objects and relics. The evil force manages to deceive innocent people, turning them away from the true faith, and force them to commit a sin. Boris Uspenskii, for example, mentions legends about icons that are, in fact, the depictions of demons painted over with images of saints [Uspenskii 1995: 242–243]. In

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idiomatic expression “Хоть святых выноси” (literally, “You could carry out the saints,” referring to actions that are considered indecent and unsuitable for the eyes of the saints’ icons in the room), almost in the spirit of Bakhtinian carnival, finds a way into the name of the church; and the profanation of the sacred is continued with the name of the icon that refers to the anatomy of the female genitals, playing with the homonymy of the word “lips,” which in Russian is also commonly used for the labia. Apart from the general semantic of desacralization, these and similar passages mock the practice of the encomium-like canonizations in the post-communist Orthodox Church and in religious communities outside the church.38 Finally, the image of the sighing and weeping icon reproduces the discourse of suffering and sacrifice that is central to the Russian Orthodox consciousness and that complements the concepts of the enemy.39 The fact that the next stops in the Moscow subway are announced by a iurodivyi (a holy fool) or a klikusha (a religious hysteric), who adds anti-Jewish warnings to the names of the streets and the squares, provides a sinister combination of the voice of the state authority (the officially announced communist-infused urban place names) and the collective superstition: “Осторожно, православные, двери закрываются!—выл вагонный кликуша.—Следующая станция—Площадь Жидов-та-Комиссаров! . . .” [Ibid.: 23] (“Careful, Christian people, the doors Iudson’s text, Jews are literally demonized by indirect metonymic attribution, that is, they are associated with the devil of the folk tales. The relics smelling of garlic also symbolize the fear of the foreigners’ entry into the national holy of holies (first of all, the Jews, who are firmly believed to smell of garlic). The foreign beliefs, including the Jewish faith, are often associated in the folk stories with a stench that these “infidels” spread (see [Belova/Petrukhin 2008: 139], for the European context of these ideas, see [Hödl 1997: 24–27]). Hödl mentions the so-called foetor judaicus, an unpleasant odor that was said to come from the Jews in medieval Europe, and the popular antisemitic mocking song of the 1880s, Praise to Garlic [ibid.: 24, 26]. 38 Per-Arne Bodin looks at the canonization—or veneration in some Russian communities—of the Grand Duke Dmitrii Donskoi (1350–1389) and Admiral Fedor Ushakov (1745–1817), Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Iosif Stalin, the victims of the Soviet repressions, or the murdered family of Tsar Nicholas II [2009: 38–39, 87–133]. Bodin connects the urge to create ever new saints with the mystical, anti-rationalist tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, the quest for “the presence of the divine on earth and the evidence of the existence of God,” which involved, in the post-communist situation, a return to older religious practices [ibid.: 35–37]. The connection between xenophobic patriotism, imperial claims, and religiosity, which Mikhail Iudson stages in a discourse, is analyzed by Bodin as “the restoration of medieval monoculture and monosociety” in present-day Russia [ibid.: 56]. 39 In the rebirth of the Christian Orthodox faith in the context of Russian “post-atheism” Mikhail Epshtein sees the signs of a neopaganism, which links the idea of the chosen Russian “Godbearing” people with the military endeavors of the state [Epstein 1999: 380]. “Orthodoxy in this context appears as a militant form of patriotism, destined, from time immemorial, to defend Holy Russia from the ‘heresies’ of Judaism, Catholicism, Freemasonry, and other ‘foreign contaminations’” [ibid.]. It is precisely this form of “Orthodox archaism” [ibid.] that Iudson reflects in his discursive dystopia.

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are closing!—howled the resident fool in the carriage.—Next stop is the Place of the Commie Jew-Inspectors!”).40 Iudson’s novel “accumulates” antisemitic rites, thought and language constructs of different epochs and sometimes countries, deforms and tangles them together. In this way, his text can be defined as a postmodernist cultural novel. Some of its passages have an immeasurable connotative density. This is evident, for example, when the school principal Ivan Lukich—a caricature of the mighty warriors from the Russian folk tales—recites antisemitic verses by “Taras Grigor′evich Skovoroda,”41 criticizes the numerus clausus as a half-hearted decision,42 describes Il′ia’s tongue as circumcized (allegedly, because Il′ia speaks incoherently),43 and asks him whether he prefers his matzah bloody44 or well done. Splashing saliva with impatience, he imagines how “шестиглав[ая] гадин[а]” [ibid.: 26] (“the six-headed beast”) will be crushed by a huge foot. At the same time, he threatens to submit a complaint to the Jewish Council (“юденрат”) if Il′ia does not “crawl” away to his equals. In a later episode, Ivan Lukich—a drug addict, as it turns out—tries to prove that Il′ia is afraid of his students: “Сдрейфил, бейлисрался?” [ibid.: 65]. The reader deciphers this question, which would be translated without the references hidden in it as “Did you falter, did you wet your pants?,” as a highly allusive hybrid that is linked to the two best-known anti-Jewish lawsuits in European history—the Dreyfus and the Beilis affair. With a pun, components of meaning are compressed within one single word. In his speech—a brilliant mixture of burlesque language inventions—the principal mentions “человекообразны[e] звер[и] в белых маск-халатах” [ibid.: 66] (“humanoid animals in white camouflage coats”) who eat children—the abusive rhetoric of the Jew-baiting at the time of the “doctors’

40 Boyan Manchev calls communism a “project of shifting the entire political potential into the community.” According to this, the communist utopia aspires to dissolve the state “in the common body of the people” [2005: 104]. In Iudson’s dark macabre world, the “pure immanence of the organic body” [ibid.: 105] of the people, which makes the existence of the political state virtually impossible, shows itself in the intuitive xenophobia aversion against “foreigners” that connects the state regime and the mass of the population. 41 This fictitious author is a mixture of Grigorii Skovoroda and Taras Shevchenko—two major national poets of the Ukraine, who in the post-Soviet period became the fetishes of the new nationalism. 42 An allusion to the unwritten law that restricted Jewish admissions to Soviet universities. Famously, the restrictions existed also in pre-Revolutionary Russia. 43 A mixture of two features that, as Christians claimed, could be used to identify the Jews: the circumcision and “mumbling”—a derogatory characteristic of the phonetic image of Yiddish. 44 A Christian superstition, according to which Jews would use the blood of Christian children to prepare the matzah.

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plot.”45 Next, the principal quotes the fictional writings of the Russian saint and holy fool, Basil the Blessed: Сладенький жидок. Жидки вообще сладенькие. Они вас облизывают. И вам так приятно быть под их теплым, мягким, влажным языком. Вы нежитесь. И не замечаете, что поедание вас уже началось. [Iudson 2005: 65–66] A sweet little Yid. These little Yids are generally so sweet. They lick you off. And it is so pleasant to be under their warm, soft, wet tongue. You enjoy it. And you do not realize that your consumption has already begun. The sexualization of Jews articulated here, which contains elements of feminization and animalization, evokes the connection between “images of femininity and rampant antisemitic stereotypes” [Schößler 2008: 41] from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, including the “stereotype of the effeminate Jew” ([Hödl 2005: 95], see also [Braun 2001: 447–466, Schößler 2008: 41 f., Livak 2010: 61 f., 67–73]). The fear of the seductive power of Jews was due to the image of their changeable, insubstantial, and therefore incomprehensible nature, which was also common in scientific discourse of that time.46 However, Iudson’s postmodern language play is much more than just political satire: his text “is a playful experiment celebrating the meaning-generating capacities of language” (Ingunn Lunde on Tolstaia’s Kys′ [Lunde 2006: 68]). Both the stylistic and the diegetical intertextuality in Iudson’s work breaks the boundaries of indictment and ends in a carnival. “Субботник” (“subbotnik,” in Soviet Union, a day of unpaid work, traditionally scheduled on Saturdays)

45 Here, the phrase “убийцы в белых халатах” (“killers in white [doctors’] coats”), which circulated in the Soviet press at the beginning of 1953, is supplemented by the word “mask”— among other things, it is a reminder about the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign of the late 1940s when the Jews were stigmatized as spoilers and traitors who hide under masks. 46 The school itself—“District church gymnasium named after Hieromonk Iliodor” (“церковно-приходская гимназия имени иеромонаха Илиодора” [ibid.: 40])—a combination of the Russian Old Believers’ prayer house and the typical Soviet school—is a parody of the post-Soviet school reforms. The teachers are grim older women in thick warm jackets and woolen headscarves with rough black working hands—a representation of the low-educated workers who filled Soviet schools and, more often, sovkhozes (farm cooperatives). They bully Il′ia, seeing in him a typical nerd in eyeglasses, a representative of a more “spiritual” class, intelligentsiia.

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becomes “шаббатник” [Iudson 2005: 187] (“shabbatnik”), a train ticket to Germany becomes a “шифс-карта” [ibid.: 260] (“shifs-karta,” from German or Yiddish Shiffskarte/shifskarte, “ship ticket,” a coded reminder of the Jewish emigration to America), the idiomatic phrase “Бог его знает!” turns into “Яхве его знает!” [ibid.: 205] (“God knows! → Yahweh knows!”), “черт побери” becomes the blasphemous “ребе побери” [ibid.: 13] ( “The devil take him!” → “The rabbi take him!”). The cultural oxymoron “Сретенье Успенья” combines two Christian feasts—the Presentation of Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple (in which Maria plays an active role) and the Dormition of the Mother of God, in the genitive case—to create an absurd feast that carnivalizes the Orthodox rites. A desacralizing carnivalesque effect is also achieved by the phrase “Пресвятая Дева Мария Поппинс” [ibid.: 97] (“the Blessed Virgin Maria Poppins”), in which the figure of the Mother of God is eclipsed by Mary Poppins, the protagonist of a popular Soviet children’s film. Other poetic experiments include the alliterative, consonant-rubbing paronomastic expressions such as “Протопить по-протопопову!” [ibid.: 126] (roughly, “Let’s heat in the protopresbyter style!,” which is also a Chekhov allusion), or the blurring of the borders between the words in the phrase “Шо, а? Ну, шоа?” [ibid.: 327]—a play on the dialectal “шо” (“what”) and the word “Shoah,” which tests the limits of ethical standards. When Il′ia finally decides to emigrate, he is confronted with the reality of the OVIR, which is described with the help of a modified quotation: “‘Врата Овира мрачны и замкнуты’. Облы, узорны. . . . Не лаяй, не кусаяй . . .” [ibid.: 165] (roughly, “‘The gates of OVIR are dark and closed.’ Gigantic, embellished. . . . Do not bellow, do not bite . . .”). This is a paraphrase of the epigraph to Aleksandr Radishchev’s well-known work Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (The journey from Petersburg to Moscow, 1790): “Чудище обло, озорно, огромно, стозевно и лаяй” (“A grim monster, savage, gigantic, hundred-mouthed, and bellowing”), which is itself a liberal retelling of two lines from Vasilii Tred′iakovskii’s epic poem Tilemakhida (1766). Radishchev’s use of this quote in his book has forever linked it in the Russian cultural consciousness with the criticism of the social grievances and the state authorities.47 In this way, the terrors of the bureaucracy, which the Soviet collective consciousness will associate with the OVIR, is given a double coding that connects the (post-) communist reality with cultural-historical mythologems and establish a continuity of violence in Russia. In addition, the phrase “врата Овира” (“gates

47 In this way, Iudson joins the culturally significant reception tradition of the Tred′iakovskiiRadishchev quotation. The multi-layered intertext is expressed as a quotation of a quotation (see [Smirnov 1983: 286f.]).

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of OVIR”) evoke the idiom “врата ада” (“gates of hell”) and add attributes of a transcendent horror to Il′ia’s unease about the application procedure. Together with the request for the authorities to be condescending, which is articulated in Tred′iakovskii’s archaic language: “Не лаяй, не кусаяй,” this lexical choice create a humorous effect. The hyperreality of Soviet language rituals in the novel disclose, again and again, their own emptiness and automatism.48 For example, during the farewell meeting organized by the OVIR authority after the passports had been issued, one of the officials gives the following speech: Вот, отщепенцы, и наступил этот волнующий день! Вот Бог, а вон там, видите, маргиналы,—порог . . . Мы желаем вашему выпуску всего самого, самого, самого! Перед вами теперь, бегуны, открывается большой мир! [Iudson 2005: 188] This exciting day has finally come, you renegades! A good riddance to you marginals . . . To everyone in your year, we wish everything, everything, everything! The wide world is now open for you, you runner-aways! Here Iudson merges together—and so brings to the absurd—the rhetoric of two situationally incompatible Soviet speech genres, the solemn inauguration or graduation party and the political show trial. Not only the discursive hybridity, but also the intertextuality of Iudson’s text turns “the satirical laughter into a liberating, self-referential laughter” [Peters 2000: 316]. The narrator characterizes Il′ia’s vain labor of love as “обыкновенная скучная история” [Iudson 2005: 16] (“a common boring story”), a phrase that connects two titles of Russian classical literature—Ivan Goncharov’s Obyknovennaia istoriia (A common story) and Anton Chekhov’s “Skuchnaia istoriia” (A boring story). However, only the first text deals with an unhappy love, so that the double intertext proves to be tautologically redundant due to the synonymy of the words skuchnaia (“boring”) and obyknovennaia (“ordinary, common”). Another example: the often hysterical principal Ivan Lukich describes the Jewish robbery of Russian property: “Блины—съедены!” [ibid.: 66] (“The pancakes are eaten!”), a reference to the absurd name of a village in Chekhov’s humoresque story “Pis′mo k uchionomu sosedu” (“A

48 On self-referential mechanisms and the “symbolic monotony” of Soviet cultural practices cf. [Rolf 2010: 174–182] and [Yurchak 2014: 74f.].

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letter to a learned neighbor,” 1880). Quotations from the works of Russian authors of various epochs, such as Petr Chaadaev, Nikolai Gogol′, and Velimir Khlebnikov,49 stylistically and graphially dissolved in Iudson’s text, are mixed with fragments of Hebrew prayers, allusions to the dystopian literature by writers ranging from Franz Kafka and George Orwell to Abram Terts, and witty philological commentary.50 In some cases, the intertext lends a parodic double coding to whole chapters of the novel, when the playful variation of plots and genres from the Russian and Soviet literary canon takes dozens of pages. This happens in chapter ten: a group of belligerent high school students—a sort of secret youth resistance organization who take Il′ia under their protection—lead him after classes into the woods, where an old farmer and his wife welcome them in their small house. In the course of the episode, the fairy-tale “пряничный домик” [ibid.: 84] (“gingerbread house”) and the hospitable, simple-looking elderly homeowners increasingly resemble the figures from the Russian broadsheet as well as the characters of the Soviet kolkhoz and village prose.51 Grandmother Pu’s words of welcome are pronounced in a saccharine folk style, which is soon undermined by excessive sweetness and recourse to a lower register: “Да что вы, внучатки, такое говорите, да мы ж вас всегда ждем не дождемся . . . Радость-то какая! Проходите в избу скорей, замерзли небось,—заголосила старушка” [ibid.:

49 To give some examples (all italics mine—K.S.): Il′ia’s exclamation at leaving Russia combines lines from Pushkin and Blok: “Боже, как грустна ваша Россия. Что ни прорубь—везде колдуны с мертвым взором . . .” [Iudson 2005: 236] (“God, how sad is your Russia. In every ice hole, you see magicians with their dead gaze”). The first italicized phrase (with nasha, “ours,” instead of vasha, “yours”) was allegedly said by Pushkin after reading Gogol′’s Dead Souls, while the second quotation references Blok’s poem Rus′, where Russia is said to possess “мутны[й] взор колдуна” (“the blurred gaze of the magician”). Another example is the enumeration of Moscow’s districts: “[.  .  .] Чертаново, Беляево, Неурожайка тож” [ibid.: 180] (“[.  .  .] Chertanovo, Beliaevo, also Neurozhaika”), where two real place names are joined by a quotation from Nekrasov’s Komu na Rusi zhit′ khorosho (Who lives well in Russia). There is also a reference to Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “Grasshopper”: “Дохлебал тюрю из кастрюльки [. . .] уложил в кузов пуза [. . .]” [ibid.: 219] (“[He] spooned the kvass soup out of the pot [. . .] put it in the belly-basket [. . .]”). The decontextualization of the quoted segments as well as their modification or reassembly can be semantically and culturally charged. Thus, the substitution of the word nasha by the word vasha marks the external position of the Jews against the Russian national discourse. At the moment of emigration, the imposed alterity becomes a conscious, ironic distancing. 50 The narrator seems, above all, to be interested in concepts of rhetorics: “Русское Ханство— экая катахреза!—а ведь было же . . . Так и Московская Синагога, сей злой оксюморон . . .” [ibid.: 150] (“The Russian Khanate—what a catachresis!—and yet it did exist . . . So too, the Moscow Synagogue, this evil oxymoron . . .”). 51 See what Igor Smirnov says regarding Vladimir Sorokin: “The text returns [.  .  .] from the present to the conquered, dead discursive past” [1999: 66].

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85] (“‘But what do you say, grandchildren, we are always waiting for you so much . . . What a pleasure! Come in quickly, you must be freezing’—the granny wailed”). Grandmother Pu embodies not only the positive topos of the Russian peasant woman, but also the peculiar, often parodized language creations of the dereveshchiki, village prose authors, in particular Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Бабушка Пу робко подала ладонь дощечкой, улыбчиво мелко кланяясь” [ibid.: 87] (“Grandmother Pu shyly held out her palm as a little plank of wood, and made several small bows, smiling all the time”). Her husband, a distinguished war veteran, a stern, but honest and kindhearted soldier, quickly turns out to be a fiery patriot and antisemite. He greets the guests with a rhyme: “Незваным гость придет когда / похуже будет он жида” [ibid.] (“When the guest comes uninvited, / He is worse than a Jew”), a parody of the Russian proverb “Незваный гость хуже татарина” (literally, “An uninvited guest is worse than a Tatar”).52 The grandfather immediately and almost intuitively recognizes a Jew in Il′ia and offers him pork bacon and considerations about the nature of the Jewish people. The more the war hero gets drunk, the more aggressive his abrupt, increasingly incomprehensible, and highly emotional words become. Recapitulating his wartime experiences—an ironic reminiscence of the soldier stories from the Soviet war prose such as Mikhail Sholokhov’s “Sud′ba cheloveka” (“The fate of man”) and the whole “military discourse” [Dobrenko 1993b:156] of Soviet totalitarianism—the old man gradually switches to direct invectives against Il′ia, licks the spilled liquor off the table, and finally falls down from his bench. As a precaution, the students carry him away into the storeroom, but even through the door he manages to wish that Il′ia would be sent to dig out anti-tank ditches—in the sense of reeducating the Jews as decent workers and soldiers: “На рытье рвов тебя, рыло!—внятно пожелал дедушка из чулана.—И на закапыванье!” [2005: 97] (“Go dig the ditches, you dumb mug!”—Grandpa told him clearly from the storeroom.—“And go fill them up again!”).53 The idealized images of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War and of the simple Russian people, as well as the pathos of returning to national Russian values in the village prose are discredited in Iudson’s parody

52 See [Belaia 1992] on the degradation of the village discourse in the 1980s–1990s with its transformation into a national-chauvinist ideology or a literary stylization. Iudson’s parody reacts specifically to these forms of obfuscation and ideologization of the literary genre. 53 Iudson reflects here the phenomenon that Evgeny Dobrenko characterizes as a hysteria of hate in official Soviet war literature and rhetoric—“пространство чистой аффектации, прямой истерики” [1993b: 275] (“the space of pure affectation, immediate hysterics”).

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as elements of national ideologies that promote xenophobia.54 Apart from the fact that old couple helps the students run a successful drug business (they grow hallucinogenic mushrooms on their property—a mockery of the innocent folk tradition of picking mushrooms in the forest), the students have once saved them from the admission to the old people’s home, where they would be used as cheap labor. Utopias of Soviet-Russian provenance are here situated back to back with the misery and the illegal activities typical of post-Soviet Russia. Mikhail Iudson’s Russia (Moscow) is an Orthodox dictatorship, which persecutes the numerous underground sects and condemns its members to ritual consumption. And yet, under the surface of the fictional authoritative power there teems a tempestuous heterodox energy. After today’s rulers have seized power, the heretics have dispersed in the forests surrounding Moscow. Il′ia briefly falls into the hands of skoptsy (eunuch) sect, the members of which literally hide under ground and forcibly convert, that is, castrate, the captured citizens. Other lesoviki (“forest dwellers”) or raznovery (those of a different faith) are raskol′niki (dissenters), ikonobortsy (ikon-breakers), samosviaty (a sect with self-ordaining priests), or odintsy (either followers of the god Odin or followers of the one god). Non-canonized saints live with their followers in the forests, such as “расстрига Радонеж-солнцевский” [ibid.: 117] (“the defrocked priest of Radonezh-Solntsevo”)—a pun on the name of St. Sergius of Radonezh and Solntsevo, a district of Moscow—and there are also holy fools, cripples, beggars, orphans, vagabonds, and sick people. Just as the other elements of the novel’s “reality,” this gathering of outcasts also embodies a discourse mediated by cultural tradition. It is a symbol of the Russian kenosis—a life full of tragic extremes, which is ascribed a special connection to the spiritual. The paradigmatic cultural text of the kenosis formed in Russia beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Slavophiles cultivated the myth of the Russian people. Iudson transfers the discourse of ascetic Russian spirituality55 54 On the parallels between the conservative ideology of the Russian village prose and the ideology of Stalinism cf. [Groys 2003: 103]. 55 This alternative spirituality of Russian reality and Russian Orthodox tradition reached a peak in the works of the painter Mikhail Nesterov (1862–1942). Dirk Uffelmann [Uffelmann 2010] writes about the metastasis of Orthodox (kenotic) patterns in the secular or parareligious cultural spheres (such as the Soviet communism) and mentions that “a template of holiness in Russian culture [. . .] is defined by means of segregation.” The “distance from the official church” sets in motion the “mechanism of exclusion among saints” [ibid.: 522]. Due to an extremely rigid persecution of the heretics in the Orthodox church, “the sects [formed] a very characteristic part of Russian religious history from the fourteenth century onwards” [ibid.: 539]. In Iudson’s text, the apostasy and the holiness of the underground form a sinister symbiosis, which accurately reflect the nature of (religious) authority: even or precisely at the height of its power, it always feels threatened.

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to the 1990s, the time of the new revival of the mystical ideas of a community and the dual models of collective consciousness that exists between the poles of damnation and sacredness. However, the colorful figures of the outcasts also allude to the motley collection of intellectual subcultures and religious circles of the late Soviet underground, which was discussed in the introduction to this book. It is parodically researched by Mikhail Epshtein [1994].56 Because of the incessantly perpetuated total or vertical power structures57 alternative forms of life and thought remain within the constraints of the religious underground or heresy, which, in the diachronic post-communism of the novel, possess an uncontrolled, threatening force—the promise of a new upheaval. Aleksandr Chantsev summarizes the trends of the Russian dystopian prose of the 2000s, which is characterized by a pessimistic negation of the concept of history as development and renewal, as follows: “Формирование нового общества из старых образцов, подобное сборке нового дома из гнилых досок, с использованием идеологем самых как на подбор кризисных эпох (в рассмотренных книгах—присоединение окраинных княжеств, опричнина, советские времена) чревато не только депрессией, но и вооруженными конфликтами, будь то восстания или войны, присутствующими почти у всех авторов” [2007: 293] (“The creation of a new society from the old molds, like building a new house with rotten planks, using ideologems of the most difficult crisis epochs (in the analyzed books these are the annexation of peripheral princedoms, oprichnina, and the Soviet times), brings about not only depression, but also military conflicts, such as rebellions or wars, which occur almost in all texts”). Chantsev interprets eschatological moods in Russian dystopias as a consequence of the impossibility of an open political confrontation in Russia. Thus, collective fears appear not as a reaction to real events, but as a transcoding of old phantasms. Together with the theme of emigration, which Il′ia considers more and more often, the reflection on the mutual cultural projections of Russia and Europe gains ever more relevance. As a key topos of Russian cultural history,

56 Eva Maeder also researches—using the example of the semeiskie sects—the secret religious practices of the Old Believers up to the post-Soviet period [2007]. See also [Panchenko 2012]. However, in Iudson’s text, the archaic religious rituals with their unity of the dogma and the rite [Maeder 2007: 296], the horror stories about punishment, redemption, and apocalypse, and finally the spread of pre-Christian magical incantations and practices [ibid.: 296–305] support the paradoxical symbolic symbiosis of the “right-believers” and the apostates, as well as that of the authorities and the (constantly divided) people. 57 In the ambivalent story of the reconstruction of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in the 1990s Moscow, Svetlana Boym sees an important continuity between the Russian pre-Revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet fantasies of power [2001: 100–108].

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the opposition between Russia and Europe, produces the next set of collective tropes in the novel. In Il′ia’s intellectual conversations with the high school students, the young dissidents who seek to justify the necessity of emigration in cultural-historical terms, numerous texts of Russian literature and philosophy come up for discussion. The student Ratmir ponders on the mythologeme of Russia as a geographical space dominated by an infinite, monotonous expanse, which condemns the Russian people to a kind of natural backwardness, cosy resignation and inertia—recorded in the “geoculturosophical” (cf. [Frank 2002: 65–69]) reflections of Petr Chaadaev, Sergei Solov′ev, and Nikolai Berdiaev— and proves that it is outdated: “[. . .] вдалбливали нам [. . .] что движенья нет, по сути, ибо пространство однородно—заснеженная Великая Степь, а к чему кочевать во Времени? . . Сиди на печи, а уж она едет!” [ibid.: 138–139] (“[. . .] it was impressed on us [. . .] that there is basically no movement, because space is homogeneous—the snowy Great Steppe, and why would you travel through time? . . . Sit tight on the stove, it will drive by itself!,” referring to the Russian fairy-tale about a magical stove that helped the lazy protagonist). Fedor Dostoevskii’s Christian prophecies about the fate of Russia and his messianic suffering pathos are dissolved in an ironic metaphor: “Вон стоялый праведник Федор Михалыч носил дома сначала по восемь кирпичей, а потом аж по пятнадцать стал перетаскивать! . .” [ibid.: 139] (“The proven holy man Fiodor Mikhalych carried houses on his back. First, he took eight bricks at a time, then he dragged fifteen bricks together! .  .  .”). The bonebreaking labor, which the former inmate Dostoevskii proclaimed to be the way of spiritual liberation and finding one’s own faith, is here presented as an exaggerated gesture of intellectual masochism: the great burden of fifteen bricks that the Russian thinker voluntarily drags on his shoulders is equal to the ever growing ethical mission that, in his moral universe, weighs heavily on all of Russia. Furthermore, the opposition of the rational, practical Germany, or the whole Western Europe, and the idealistic, spiritually superior Russia, is expressed in Iudson’s text with allusions to the names of characters from Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov: „Правда, штольц, обрести новые небеса и новую землю?—лениво размышлял Илья, ковыряя заплату на валенке.—На вывод, в дивное дикое поле [. . .]” [ibid.: 139–140, italics mine—K.S.] (“Shall I really discover the new heaven and land, do you think?—Il′ia pondered, pulling lazily at the patch on his felt boot.—Out, into the wonderful wild field [. . .]”). Here, the Russian phrase “что ль” (chto l′), which expresses Il′ia’s doubt, is replaced by the similar-sounding name of Shtol′ts, a figure from Oblomov, while Il′ia himself bears the name of the titular character. The dreamy visions of Goncharov’s Il′ia, which in the novel refer to the the Russian village Oblomovka, are soon projected onto the unknown and

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desired Europe. When Il′ia ponders over the Russian landscape through which his train passes on the way to Germany, the pig becomes the key image of Russia in his consciousness: “Тотем-то Руси-то—свинья! Не колокол-без-языка, как чудил скорбный автор ‘Философических писем’ [. . .] А—свинья-с!” [ibid.: 232–233] (“I say, the totem of Russia, it turns out, is the pig! Not the bellwithout-clapper, as the sad author of the Philosophical Letters imagined [. . .] but the pig!”). In this way, Il′ia seals his departure with a final, periphrastic reference to the philosopher Petr Chaadaev, who in his time located “the situation of Russia outside the world history” [Groys 1995: 22], and thereby inserts his final rejection of Russia into the cultural debates that shaped the Russian history. The pig as a symbol of Russia is a bitter and intertextually resonant description evoking the two-hundred-year tradition of Russian critical self-reflection (a well-known example of this tradition is Aleksandr Blok’s statement in his 1921 letter to Kornei Chukovskii: “Слопала-таки поганая, гугнивая родимая матушка Россия, как чушка—своего поросенка” [“The dirty, stammering, beloved Mother Russia has finally eaten her son, like a sow its piglet”]). In Iudson’s transnational dystopia, the nightmare of the murderous antiJewish hatred continues for Il′ia in the German emigration. On the other side of the geopolitical border the text still weaves a web of eerie mirror reflections charged with historical and literary allusions, without coming even close to the non-discursive reality. Il′ia enters the world of mutual German-Russian clichés, which are sometimes inflated into sinister hyperboles. The German consulate in Moscow is an oasis of accuracy, cleanliness, and petit bourgeois orderliness. This larger-than-life picture combines the image of the German villages in the days of Peter I with travelling impressions of post-Soviet tourists and the Russian reading of classic German texts: “Аккуратный ряд велосипедов у крыльца. Внутри—тепло и сухо [.  .  .] Из-за дверей вкусно, трогательно пахнет— ванилью, корицей, братьями Гримм—там явно печется штрудель!” [Iudson 2005: 216] (“A straight row of bicycles next to the house entrance. It is warm and dry inside [. . .] A delicious, lovely smell comes through the door—it smells of vanilla, cinnamon, the Brothers Grimm—of course, they are baking strudel!”). However, this idyll—a code for the Russian heterostereotype of “Germany”—is pervaded by attributes of another time: Дорожки расчищенные, мощенные щебнем со шлаком, прожектора по периметру. На вышках по углам гансы-пулеметчики. [.  .  .] Сопровождавшие нас сторожевые овчарки, добродушно помахивая хвостами, остались ждать на улице. [Iudson 2005: 215–216]

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The paths are cleared and paved with slag and gravel, floodlights are installed throughout the entire range of the area. Some boches with machine guns stand on the observation towers in the corners. [. . .] The German shepherds who accompanied us wagged their tails in a friendly manner and stayed outside. The conversations of the consulate officials with the applicants and the slogans on the walls reveal the references to a sinister “tradition” and expose the theatrical pretense of the Germans’ efforts to redeem their historical guilt (in Nuremberg, the emigrants are welcomed by a customs officer who relays an official penitential speech he has learned by rote): Там проходило собеседование, проверка документов (оттуда доносилось: “Мы сами установим, кто еврей .  .  . [.  .  .]”) и выдача, если повезет, визы. Надпись уже на этой двери гласила: “Консулят делает свободным”, детской рукой было добавлено: “от еврейчиков”. [Iudson 2005: 216–217] There they held the application interview and examined the documents ([Il′ia] heard coming from inside: “We’ll find out ourselves who is a Jew .  .  . [.  .  .]”) and, if you were lucky, the visa was issued, as well. The headline on this door read: “The Consulate makes you free,” and below it was added in a child’s handwriting: “from little Jews.” Similar to Russia, Germany turns out to be another realm of signs, with barbarism and the a-semiosis of violence and hatred hide under the civilized rhetorical surface.58 The shabby emigrant asylum is enclosed by a concrete wall with barbed wire, and Il′ia has a yellow star sewn onto his sleeve, so that he can always be brought back home if, as a freshly arrived emigrant, he gets lost in the city (according to the explanation of the immigration officer). He is also given a fixed number that identifies him as a Jew and not as a Russian German—a classificatory measure that is just one of many Holocaust reminiscences in the second part of the novel. The fact that the guards of the asylum bear archetypal 58 Such dystopian comparisons, of course, existed before Iudson. With reference to [Deutschmann 1998] and [Ryklin 1998], Wolfgang Kissel and Dirk Uffelmann mention, for example, Vladimir Sorokin’s “comparative psychopathology of German and Russian post-totalitarian mentalities” [Kissel/Uffelmann 1999: 35]. See also Tine Roesen’s analysis of Aleksei Slapovskii’s novel Oni (They, 2005) [Roesen 2009].

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German names—Fritz and Hans—adds stereotypical folklore associations to the German discourse, as it was with the Russian discourse earlier. These names also reproduce Soviet pejorative designations of Germans during and after the Second World War. At the same time, the dense narrative is complemented with realistic references to the miserable everyday life and the humiliating situation of the asylum seekers (cf., for example, the warning instructions for the asylum residents, written in a bad Russian, which betray among other things the German administration’s fear of the possible bad hygienic habits and criminality among the immigrants).59 Iudson’s Germany is thrown back into the national-socialist past:60 here, Jews are hanged in the elevator and frozen in the freezer, Il′ia’s neighbor wears a T-shirt with the the words “Welcome to Holocaust” (an allusion to the Holocaust tourism and the commercialization of the Shoah memories), and another neighbor wishes Il′ia a happy euthanasia. The Germans use Jewish children for medical research. The gloomy hybrid idiom “Obergauleiter for Refugee Affairs” (“верховный гауляйтер по делам беженцев” [ibid.: 263]) clearly shows the merging of historical discourses. In the final episode of the German part, Il′ia and the other rebel Jews go underground, where the city of Masada is hidden. The underground speaks Hebrew and organizes the attacks on the murdering “Siegfried-Richards.” By referring to the legendary fortress, Iudson creates the myth of a perpetual Jewish war, the end of which is set in the distant future. The concept of historical perpetuum mobile, which refers to Jewish, European, and world history, is articulated in Iudson’s text by means of excessive cultural coding and the diffusion of linguistic discourses. The author hides in the labyrinth of rhetorics, behind the language that is full of stylistic gestures, puns, and irony. The title—Ladder onto the Closet—implies a bitter-ironic allusion to the biblical metaphor of redemption, Jacob’s ladder: in the novel, there is no ascent to heaven and no redeeming transcendence either in the literal sense of crossing a border (emigration) or in the sense of moving to a higher plane of being—the imagined ladder leads up to the closet, which symbolizes the narrowness of the

59 Cf.: “[.  .  .] 4. Броссайте мусор только в муссорные контейнеры. 5. Не вешайте белье на балкон. 6. Не сажайтесь на умывальники. Они оторвутся и этот ремонт обойдется дорого. 7. Не берите с собой никаких предметов потребления [.  .  .] это воровство. 8. Пользуйтесь туалетами в коридорах. 9. Применяйте, пожалуйста, туалетные щетки” [ibid.: 276] (“4. Throw garbage only into the dumpsters. 5. Do not hang your laundry on the balconies. 6. Do not sit on the sinks. They will break away and the repair will be expensive. 7. Do not take any utensils with you [. . .] that’s theft. 8. Use the toilets in the hallways. 9. Please use toilet brushes”). 60 A dystopia that transfers the national socialism into the 1990s was already written in 1994 by Vladimir Sorokin: Mesiats v Dakhau (A month in Dachau).

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eternal underground.61 Only the final episode of the second part, which is just a few lines long, describes a liberation: dressed in white, Il′ia lies in a room where he can smell the sea and see a palm tree through the window. As the reader can gather from several details, he has come to the land of his ancestors, Israel. “Я вернулся. Много лет бродил я вдали, скитался в снегу и рассеивался под чужими дождями, много-много лет, тыщи две . . .” [ibid.: 389] (“I have returned. I wandered for many years far away, in the snow, and I dispersed in a strange rain, for many, many years, about two thousand of them .  .  .”). However, this vision is preceded by a battle scene in which Il′ia is involved as an underground fighter and in which he is apparently killed. Iudson’s text presents alterity as an ineradicable human (which is equal to Jewish) stigma. The initially suggested opposition of the “inside” (Russia = lack of culture, collective myths, symbiosis of the authorities and the people, xenophobia) and the “outside” (Germany or Western Europe = freedom, culture, humanism), which is rooted in the Russian cultural philosophy and the Westerners’ discourse, is resolved as a structural analogy and replaced by a new opposition that is expressed in allegorical language: “above” and “below” (underground). In the third part of the original dilogy, published in 2013, Iudson extends the concept of alienation to Israel and thus continues the very paradigmatic Jewish narrative of a failed return (from dispersion) and elevation (aliyah) (cf. chap. 7), with which authors such as Mark Egart, Il′ia Erenburg, Efraim Sevela, and Iakov Tsigel′man dealt across the epochs. The parallelism of the third (and by far the largest) part of the novel and its first two parts lies, first of all, in the repetition of meanings when the new cultural signifiers are attached to familiar or equivalent signifiers. Thus, the incessant process of attaching meanings to realia, based on cultural and political associations, again evokes images of concentration camps or prisons and the forced homogenization, disciplining, and exclusion of individuals. Metaphors of collective unity generate myths or folklore. As soon as Il′ia arrives at the airport of the “Middle Eastern Republic” (“Ближне-Восточная Республика,” abbreviated “BVR”), he receives a tattoo on his left wrist: the word vred (an abbreviation of vremenno dopushchennyi, “temporarily admitted,” the word also means “damage” or “spoiling” in the

61 Symbolic in this context is the image of the crack: as a soldier of the underground army, Il′ia lies “в кошерном нумерованном рву Пятой щели” [Iudson 2005: 371] (“in the kosher numbered trench of the Fifth crack”); the number evokes the spirit of military discipline and again the association with the concentration camp.

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Russian language) and a number because he, a Jew, has only come here to take part in a congress and is supposed to leave the country immediately afterwards. According to the instructions given to him upon arrival, Il′ia should stop walking as soon as the “галахический патруль-облава” [Iudson 2013: 197] (“Halakha patrol raid”) appears, hold the palms of his hands up, and, looking down, say aloud his name, the entry permission number on his wrist and “one of the thirtyseven comparisons of himself with dust.” If he tries to escape, he will be killed immediately [ibid.]. A few minutes after his arrival, Il′ia is detained and taken to an unfamiliar locked room with no windows, where a poster hanging on the wall says: “Ты—вред? Становись в ряд! Принеси на общих пользу!” [ibid.: 201] (“Are you a vred? Stand in line [in Russian, v riad, which sounds similar to vred]! Make some use on the common [basis]!”). Here, Il′ia undergoes a process of “reforging,” which successfully destroys in him all the stereotypical characteristics of a diaspora Jew—such as inaccuracy, an inclination to melancholy, lack of sporting prowess, and others. During a computer diagnostic examination, it is revealed that Il′ia possesses the “yellow gene” in the form of a yellow hexagonal star [ibid.: 223] (an allusion to the historical grounds for the Israeli repatriation law, which links the persecution of Jews in the diaspora [the yellow star] with genes). After genetic testing and identification, Il′ia finally becomes a tanned “guard” (strazh) with cold colorless eyes, a well-developed musculature, a generous curly beard, and secret hieroglyphs on his skull [ibid.: 226 ff., 232]. In the service of his new fatherland, Il′ia learns the basics of the Middle Eastern Republic’s geography, history, and language. On the map, the Republic is separated by a green line from the “chaos” of the despised and opposed “Arazers” (arazy is a fictitious ethnic name with a minimal sound deviation from araby, “Arabs,” and also a pun on azery, a pejorative Russian name for people of Azerbaijani or, generally, Eastern, origin). The following witty paraphrase is the “official” definition of the country: “[. . .] БВР—часть суши, со всех сторон окруженная аразами [. . .]” [Iudson 2013: 230] (“[. . .] BVR is the part of land that is surrounded on all sides by Arazers [. . .],” cf. the hackneyed definition of an island in Russian: “Остров—это часть суши, со всех сторон окруженная водой” [“An island is a part of land that is surrounded on all sides by water”]). The history of this republic dates back to the legendary izkhod (an archaic spelling of iskhod, “exodus,” written in Old Church Slavonic or Old Russian style), and stretches over fifty-four glorious years. Collective symbols, slogans, and myths tautologically revolve around the history of victories of the BVR army over the Arazers, who are demonized in the soldiers’ folklore: “И лучше не называть аразов вслух, а табуированно произносить—те самые” [ibid.:

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277] (“Better not to call the Arazers by their name, but to say carefully: ‘those ones’”). At the same time, the language of the powerful rabbinate consolidates the historical and geographical dogmas, which interpret the history of the state as arising from the biblical tradition: В раввинате существовал свой жаргон—в религу [sic!] не обращаются, а “возвращаются”, язык не учится, а “вспоминается”, в БВР не приезжают, а “поднимаются”, и чиновники не просто табельные советники, а “праведники”. [ibid.: 499] The rabbinate used its own jargon: you do not convert to the religs [“religion,” meaning Judaism] but “return” to it, you do not learn the [Hebrew] language but “remember” it, you don’t arrive at the BVR, you “rise” to it [a pun on the literal meaning of the word aliyah, “elevation” in Hebrew], and the officials are not just government advisors, but “righteous men.” Canonization of the Judaistic tradition in the real Israel as the source of national and religious identity and the use of the biblical narrative to legitimize Jewish statehood are the third and final target of Iudson’s bitter satire. The “imagined community” [Anderson 1983] of the BVR is just another variant of the archaic-Orthodox Moscow state from the first part of the trilogy. Both states close their space away from the real history and geography and cultivate a myth of national unity fostered by concepts of the enemy. The structural analogy with the national-socialist Germany and the medieval-contemporary Russia is reflected, as the reader might expect, in the linguistic syncretism of desacralizing cultural-historical attributes: compare such expressions as “канцелярские цадики в вицмундирах” [Iudson 2013: 212] (“office tzaddikim in state uniform”); “заветы легендарных ‘Рассерженных стражей’, которые еще в начале Изхода метили очистить жизненное пространство” [ibid.: 266, italics mine—K.S.] (“the legacy of the legendary ‘Angry watchmen,’ who have planned to clear the living space already at the beginning of the Egzodus”); or “монотоннотеизм” [ibid.: 385] (“monothonetheism”). It is not surprising that the novel’s finale addresses the underground ways to the true Jerusalem [ibid.: 487]. However, the old topos of the heavenly Jerusalem, which plays a key role in the texts of the Jewish dissidents, is mocked here. The subterraneous travel is a secret return to Russia: “О радость ухода—туда, где тихие монастыри в сугробах [. . .]” [ibid.] (“Oh, joy of exodus—to the silent monasteries that stand buried in snow [. . .]”). Thus, the circle of search and

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migration is complete: Iudson designs a circular movement in a geographical space, of the kind that Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi postulates as a basic feature of the skeptical type of the Jewish travel narrative (see chap. 7).62

11.2.2. Postcolonial Mimic Man: Aleksandr Melikhov’s The Confession of a Jew The Jewish rewriting of great narratives (the already mentioned writing back), was one of the many post-imperial (including nationalist) literary “counterdiscourses” of the 1990s. With their focus on the Soviet practices of othering and cultural asymmetries, on the trauma of exclusion, on the subaltern perspective, and generally with the exposing alienation of the imperial point of view, these texts can be classified as examples of literary decolonization and analyzed in the categories of postcolonial studies. Post-communist Jewish literature uses the poetics of provocation, self-orientalization, and mimicry in order to create an idiosyncratic language of a littérature mineure [Deleuze/Guattari 1975] and to revise the canonical concept of linear, selective history. This postcolonial revision of history is at its most fascinating when the poetics of the text is politicized: the poetics itself becomes a performance of minoritarian subversion [ibid.: 20–35]. In chap. 4.1, I discussed Russian-Soviet images of Jews as a phenomenon of the collective imaginary, using among others the analytical concepts of postcolonial studies. The paradox typical of the concepts of Jewishness were explained by the mechanisms of simultaneous integration and exclusion; the Russification of the Jews became the cause of what the postcolonial theorists call the orientalization and homogenization of the domesticated Other, symbolical as well as real. Homi K. Bhabha’s reinterpretation of the Freudian concept of uncanny [Bhabha 1994: 194, 206] helps to reveal the projection of regime’s fears about its own collapse onto the Jewish pariah. The hegemony of everything Russian turns out to be a neurotic self-cure attempt, which, however, could long remain camouflaged in the context of the Soviet “affirmative action empire.” The partial silencing (integration) of the differences and, at the same time, the “visibility of the separation” [Bhabha 1994: 118] between the self and the other, which was crucial for the preservation of the regime, structured the

62 Interestingly, Iudson’s statements in recent interviews contradict the ironic and anti-ideological pathos of his novel. In an interview with Inna Sheikhatovich for the internet resource Pravda. ru in October 2015, he answers using the witty, playful language of his prose, but only seems to express an anti-Muslim and anti-European nationalist pro-Israeli stance (see Mikhail Iudson, “Ghetto—eto malen′kaia zhizn′,” Pravda.ru, October 29, 2015, https://nasledie.pravda. ru/1280159-udson/, accessed January 4, 2023).

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well-known contradictions of the Soviet minority policies, which concerned the highly assimilated Jews as well as other ethnic groups and minorities. One of the consequences of these policies, as demonstrated in chap. 4.2, was the development of mimicry techniques, ranging from crypto-Judaism in the peripheral regions of the empire to hyper-assimilation in the cities. I approach the subgenre of the counter-narrative, which has already been examined in numerous individual analyses of the cultures of colonized or postcolonial regions, as a writing that, on the one hand, refutes the metanarrative or master-narrative of the Soviet ideological discourse and its historiographical and literary canon, and on the other, reappropriates the imperial discourse, either purposefully or unconsciously. The result is a negative reflection of the influential rhetorical and esthetic models, which is created from the perspective of the oppressed individual. For example, Lynne Violla examines the post-Soviet testimonies of rural expropriation victims (kulaks) as counter-narratives in the volume entitled Writing the Stalin Era: “The end of the Soviet Union presented them with an opportunity if not to reinvent themselves [. . .] then at least to reveal what had been hidden. [. . .] First-person narratives of dekulakization and special settlement constitute, with few exceptions, a kind of counter-narrative or counter-biography to official Soviet autobiographical writing” [Viola 2011: 87]. Some of the “stories of dekulakization” pick up structural features and topoi of socialist realist novels and autobiographies (“the earlier standard Soviet success stories” [ibid.: 96]) and reverse them to unmask the atrocities of the regime. In her analysis of Dalia Grinkevichiūte’s camp memoirs Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea, Jūra Avizhienis offers a further study of post-Soviet counternarratives. Avizhienis shows how the author “of the most widely recognized Lithuanian memoirs about Siberian deportation” [Avizhienis 2006: 187] uses the models of exemplary Soviet biographies to write her own, subversive version of history, one focusing on victims and not winners: [.  .  .] the rhetoric of Grinkevichiūte’s discourse is decidedly Soviet. Grinkevichiūte ingeniously deploys the socialist realist plot to critique and undermine the Soviet trajectory it was designed to trace and celebrate. The features most characteristic of this plot (e.g. a positive hero, the passage of selflessness, the always deferred realization of socialist goals) are twisted into an imperfect copy, rehearsing the failures, not the glories, of Soviet reality. [Avizhienis 2006: 189]

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Here, “using the very tropes of socialist realism” is a conscious method of resistance—a subversion characteristic of the imperfect imitation of the colonizer as discussed by Bhabha: “[it] becomes such a powerful gesture of ‘throwing the gift of empire’ back in the face of the giver” [ibid.: 197]. The postcolonial perspective helps become aware that the communist situation creates a specific type of a subaltern mimic (wo)man, which reveals the paradoxical simultaneous existence of an outward internationalism63 and the unspoken panic fear of political and ethnical contamination. Writers such as Irina Grekova, Dina Kalinovskaia, Iurii Karabchievskii, Feliks Roziner, Efraim Sevela, Grigorii Kanovich, Iuliia Shmukler, Izrail′ Metter, Boris Iampol′skii, David Shrayer-Petrov, Eduard Shul′man, Vladimir Khanan, Mark Zaichik, and Mikhail Berg64 participate in the successive decolonization of the “Jewish question” in the late Soviet Union and thereafter. However, I contrast their prose, a largely anticolonial critique of Soviet antisemitism, to the postcolonial writing of authors such as Aleksandr Melilkhov or Oleg Iur′ev. As I will show, the fragmentation of the postcolonial Jewish subject, which is reflected in the disintegration or reversal of the narrative perspective, in the always incomplete memories, or in stylistic and ideological mimicry, creates a more complex poetic and poetological form of dealing with the legacy of dictatorship.65 In his novel Vo imia chetyresta pervogo, ili Ispoved′ evreia (In the name of the four hundred and first, or The confession of a Jew, 1993),66 Aleksandr Melikhov (born in 1947) poetically deconstructs the empire with his ironic use of Soviet ideological tropes and communist rhetoric. The marginal, neurotic Jewish subject looks out from the “underground” of its own narrative perspective to expose the national mythology of the Soviet state by self-orientalizing. This novel is a personal revelation composed by the dispossessed and the subjected—the confession of

63 Cf. the reflection on the Soviet state as a colonial institution in Eva Hausbacher’s monograph: “While the Soviet Russian ideology of the people’s family has [. . .] superficial features that are reminiscent of transcultural model of the nation, at a second glance it turns out to be colonial and imperialist, inheriting the rhetoric of the womb integrated in the Russian national stereotype of Matushka Rus′ (Mother Russia), and [. . .] associated with the sacralization of the territory” [Hausbacher 2009: 39f]. 64 Cf. the list of titles in the bibliography of this book. 65 Eva Hausbacher sees a difference between postcoloniality, which is a discoursive phenomenon, and the historical postcolonial situation. In this way, she emphasizes, among other things, the deconstructivist impetus of the texts that are not necessarily connected with the historical postcolonialism: “Where the postcolonialism is furthest removed from its historical referentiality and socio-cultural foundations are used as a metaphor, it comes to a close correspondence with poststructuralist theorems. I will designate [this] postcolonial model with the term ‘postcoloniality’ [. . .]” [2009: 127]. 66 See the general description of this novel in [Grübel/Novikov 2008: 198-199].

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a subaltern. The colonial anti-hero—an undesireable concealed reflection of the dictatorship—reverses the official gaze of the system by placing at the center of contemplation the marginalized self, the Russian (or pointedly non-Russian?), little man,“ a Jew with a markedly foreign name, Lev Katsenelenbogen, which sounds ridiculous to the Russian ear and is unpronounceable for the Russian mouth. He confesses his hopeless love-hate relationship with the powerful Soviet state and the great Russian people. His quasi-autobiography contains a reflection on the system that has just collapsed—a description full of linguistic tricks, references to innumerable texts of Russian literature, self-abasing mimicry, and painful self-analysis. The primary device of mimicry recreates the “displacing gaze” of the colonized “double,” which “threatens” the “civilizing mission” [Bhabha 1994: 127]. “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” [ibid.: 130]. For Bhabha, the ambivalence is in the “partial representation/recognition of the colonial object” [ibid.]. His famous formula is: “The colonized should be similar to their colonizers, but they should not become equal to them: ‘almost the same, but not quite’” [Breger 1999: 183, italics mine—K.S.]. According to Eva Hausbacher, mimicry continues to be “a form of [discoursive] non-possession, a mode of behavior in which one can no longer distinguish between subjugation and the claim to power and whereby the authority of this power is undermined” [2009: 222]. Hausbacher observes how, in the Russian-language emigrant prose of the 1990s and the 2000s, the “subversion of the German cliches of Russia (heterostereotypes) [occurs] through satirical imitation” [ibid.]. Conceived in this way, mimicry organizes Melikhov’s entire novel: the narrator’s perspective constantly merges with that of the guardians of the national “unity.” However, this deceptive synthesis not only reproduces the foreign perspective, but also conveys the narrator’s changed, distorted, split perception of the self, which creates an unstable double view. The narrator proclaims his unconditional loyalty to the motherland; several times he states that he is an antisemite himself and repeats all kinds of trite Judeophobic expressions: “Евреи всегда уверены, что всем очень интересно слушать про их драгоценную персону” [Melikhov 1994:15] (“Jews are always sure that everyone would love to hear about their precious lives”); “[. . .] как видите, евреев следует держать в страхе Божием, иначе они на голову вам сядут: чем меньше их бьют, тем сильней они оскорбляются” [ibid.: 17] (“[. . .] as you see, Jews should always be frightened, otherwise they will eat you out of house and home: the less you hit them, the more they are offended”); “Евреи делают еврейским все, к чему прикасаются” [ibid.: 19] (“Jews make

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everything they touch Jewish”); “Евреи даже не помнят, на чьей культуре паразитируют” [ibid.: 42] (“Jews don’t even remember whose culture they consume”); “Наша цель—Единство, а не торгашеская еврейская правда” [ibid.: 85] (“Our goal is Unity and not the mercantile Jewish truth”), and so forth.67 The external gaze is partially internalized, as the narrator ponders: “[. . .] по сравнению с чистокровными еврейскими предками, все у меня, мулата, было (да и есть, есть!) очень сложно [. . .]” [ibid.: 16] (“[. . .] compared to [my] pure-blooded Jewish ancestors, everything concerning me, the half-breed, was [and still is!] very complicated [.  .  .]”). The protagonist—a half-Jew, a hybrid, educated in the spirit of the Soviet internationalism—perceives the Russian culture as his own, and the alterity projected onto him always remains partial. Because of this, he develops a neurotic tendency towards self-control, pretense, and hyper-assimilation. He experiences the self-alienation that was famously described by the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs [1952] regarding the colonized black subject. Fanon transfers Lacan’s model of mirror reflection to the social sphere and defines the Black person as “the Other formed by the white gaze” [Wolter 2001: 32, italics in the original].68 Precisely this kind of “social diagnostic psychiatry”69 is practiced by Aleksandr Melikhov who analyzes the effects of the internalized foreign perspective on the psyche of his first-person narrator after the collapse of the oppressive system. The ideological and cultural benefits of the majority, to which Lev Katsenelenbogen will never really belong, becomes an object of passionate desire: [.  .  .] обнаружилось, что я рожден носителем идеологии: общенациональные абстрактные символы (русские! русские!) немедленно становились для меня предметом самых интимных и пламенных переживаний. [.  .  .] Я был национально благонадежен на тысячу процентов, я, совершенно не задумываясь, как великолепно отрегулированный автомат, немедленно становился на сторону наших. [Melikhov 1994: 42 f.]

67 Neologisms such as zhidploshchad′ (derived from zhilploshchad′, “living space,” where the first element is substituted by zhid, “Yid,” resemble Mikhail Iudson’s subversive stylistic mimicry. 68 Fanon refers to Jean Paul Sartre’s “Reflections on the Jewish Question,” which closes the circle of our cultural-historical references. 69 Thus Bhabha defines Fanon’s use of Lacan’s concept for social criticism (see [Wolter 2001: 37]).

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[.  .  .] it turned out that I was a born ideology carrier: for me, abstract national symbols (Russian! Russian!) became immediately the subject of most intimate and passionate feelings. [. . .] I was nationally a thousand percent reliable, I immediately sided with “ours,” without thinking, like a perfectly adjusted machine. At the time of writing, the now postcolonial narrator sees assimilation as a symbolic suicide. In tsarist Russia, his grandfather was able to endure pogroms, restrictions concerning the settlement areas, expulsions, and humiliations precisely because they were, to his mind, organized by the members of another, foreign social and religious community. In contrast, the narrator himself develops a painful sensitivity to the slightest ethnically based injustice because the discrimination is carried out from within, from his own (or only adopted?) culture [ibid.: 17]. The character of Jewish alterity thus undergoes a significant change: the foreignness of the Jews is now motivated not by the life in the diaspora, with its roots in the Talmudic history of Jewish dispersion and galut, but by the totalitarian colonialism. In the new situation, the Other is deprived of his otherness and yet remains always ambivalent. The strategies of mimicry, as a practical, everyday technique of dissimulatio, include leaving one’s name behind. Lev’s father openly “proclaims” his Jewish name only after his death: “Янкель Аврумович Каценеленбоген”—сияет с мраморной [. . .] надгробной плитки—всю жизнь для удобства окружающих он проживал не под своим именем—вот и верьте после этого евреям! При этом мой бедный, несчастный папочка и законспирироваться толком не сумел: мы c Гришкой [.  .  .] обое Янкелевичи. [Melikhov 1994: 39, italics in the original] “Iankel′ Avrumovich Katsenelenbogen,” the inscription shines on the marble [.  .  .] tombstone: For the convenience of his neighbors, he spent his whole life under a stranger’s name70— you know you can never trust the Jews! And yet, my poor, unfortunate beloved father didn’t even manage to camouflage himself properly: Grishka and me, [. . .] we both carry his name: we are Iankelevichs.

70 This refers to the father’s Russified name, Iakov Abramovich.

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The incomplete or failed camouflage reveals the very nature of mimicry—it marks the impossibility of integration. Because of his Jewish patronym—the symbolic heritage of alterity—the narrator lives in constant fear of unmasking (for example, every time he has to present his identification to the militia). In order to get rid of this “inscription,” he tries to repress and cover up everything Jewish in himself. Thus, as he puts it, he commits murder of his own (family) history, like the Soviet child hero Pavlik Morozov. Today, he only finds in his memories meaningless fragments of the Jewish past, which consist of incoherent Yiddish words (“какие-то цимеcы, лекахи, пуримы .  .  .” [ibid.: 49] [“some tsimmeses, lekakhs, purims . . .”]) and stereotypical images, for instance, of the shtetl or of “козлобородого ребе, угадываемого мною через парижские грезы Шагала” [ibid.: 50] (“a rebbe with a goatee, whom I can only guess through the prism of Chagall’s Parisian dreams”). For Lev, Jewish culture is already a translation because it requires a cultural mediation before it can come to life.71 In his voluntary, passionate forgetting, Melikhov’s narrator admits his own symbiosis with the Soviet state and raises the question of complicity and guilt: Jews have internalized and reflected the complexes, the monstrosity, and the vulnerability of the Soviet dictatorship more than any other minority within the Soviet state. Because of their high level of cultural and academic competence, they became not only the victims, but also the carriers of the antisemitic ideology. The consequences of this ambiguous participation can be seen in the example of the narrator’s father, Iakov Abramovich. The father had first studied the Talmud, and then Marxism—and always remained loyal to the internationalist ideas of the Soviet communism. He was inclined to see the hatred against Jews as an exception and a deviation from the norm. When he realizes the systemic nature of the persecutions in the 1970s (during the anti-Zionist hate campaign), he compulsively begins to collect paper cards recording the historical evidence 71 Harriet Murav writes in this regard of the repression of the individual remembrances by the medialized, prosthetic memory. According to her, Melikhov “emphasiz[es] the prosthesis of mediation, transfer, and substitution.” In the Chagall quote, “[the] commodified image replaces the individual’s own living memory” [2003: 179]. The fragmentation of the (remembering) Jewish subject I examined above on the basis of Jewish (post)memorial literature is represented in the finale of Melikhov’s novel, which describes a rubbish heap on the Kirov Islands, the peripheral district of St. Petersburg. Murav interprets this final scene as a materialization of the ruined historical memory and the collapse of Soviet civilization: “The past is fragmentary, discarded, and outmoded; it is found in the trash heap, the incoherent list of objects that [. . .] function as signs of a civilization that is destroyed” [Murav 2011: 329]. According to Aleida Assmann, the discarded and the peripheral metaphorically represents everything that has not been stored in the official discourse and desemiotized in the course of time (cf. chap. 11.1.1).

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that Jews are only human just like everyone else and therefore they have played many different roles throughout history. This is what Lev Katsenelenbogen calls the “бунт на коленях” [ibid.: 72] (“a rebellion on one’s knees”). In the novel, the multinational Soviet state is compared to a healthy living body. To validate its sacred teleology—the establishment of paradise on earth— the dictatorship had, according to the narrator, to invent and subsequently to eliminate the strangers so as to ensure the illusion of complete homogeneity. This is the function of “люди-фагоциты” [ibid.: 31] (“human phagocytes”), which protect the immune system of the national organism by detecting and destroying foreign elements [ibid.: 31 f.]. Evidently, Stalin was a true leader of the people precisely because he brought to life the only dream that every nation has, something far more important than decent living conditions—an existence without intruders: “А потому еврей был неизмеримо более опасен, чем скромный убийца, ни на что серьeзное не покушавшийся” [ibid.: 44] (“And that’s why a Jew was incomparably more dangerous than a humble murderer who didn’t attempt anything serious”). For this reason, Jewry is perceived not as an ethnicity, but rather as a social role72 [ibid.: 13 f.], the performance of which guarantees the continued existence of the whole.73 With the help of the extensive metaphor of the regime as a coherent body, an organism, the narrator discards the idea that the communist party was at fault for the nationalist persecutions, while the people were innocent. This belief is presented, again, as Jewish and idealistic: “[. . .] верхушка не бывает антинародной” [ibid.: 61] (“[. . .] the [party] leadership cannot be hostile to the people”). As in Iudson’s novel, the protagonist traces the origins of the myth about Russian heroism and the bestialization as well the demonization of foreigners to the beginnings 72 Jewishness becomes a feature of social identification not only from the outside perspective, but also in the self-perception of the narrator: “Ведь даже меня, своего в доску, не удалось растворить до гробовой доски—все равно мне не удается вспомнить себя без книги [.  .  .]” [Melikhov 1994: 58] (“And even I, who was one of theirs to the very end, was not completely dissolved: despite everything, I cannot remember myself without a book in my hand [. . .]). This passage is a good illustration of the fact that I described in the beginning of this book: in the course of assimilation, the Russian Jews have reframed their primordial ethnic attributes as sociocultural characteristics (here, love for education). 73 To demonstrate the irrationality of the stereotypes, the narrator gives a list of opposing negative attributes assigned to Jews: “Для наивного взгляда разные еврейские свойства вообще исключают друг друга—я и сам в дальнейшем намереваюсь сыпать такими, казалось бы, противоположными этикетками, как ‘еврейская забитость’ и ‘еврейская наглость’, ‘еврейская восторженность’ и ‘еврейский скепсис’, ‘еврейская законопослушность’ и ‘еврейское смутьянство’” [1994: 14] (“For a naive observer, various Jewish characteristics are completely mutually exclusive—I myself will often use below such contradictory labels as ‘Jewish shyness’ and ‘Jewish rudeness,’ ‘Jewish exaltation' and ‘Jewish skepticism,’ ‘Jewish conformity’ and ‘Jewish rebelliousness’”).

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of the Russian statehood: he quotes the Old Russian chronicles (letopisi) and mentions the acclaimed Russian heroes, Stalin together with Aleksandr Nevskii: the continuity of xenophobia reveals a link between the first Russian historians, the modern dictatorship, and popular superstitions. At that, Jewishness as opposed to Russianness stands, in Melikhov’s text, in line with other alterity constructions: “[. . .] Америка для американцев, Европа для белых, Россия для русских, квартира для своих” [Melikhov 1994: 34] (“[. . .] America is for Americans, Europe is for whites, Russia is for Russians, one’s apartment is for one’s family”). In the very spirit of anti-colonial criticism, Lev Katsenelenbogen mentions historical concepts that legitimize ethnic exclusion as historical civilizing missions: “[. . .] англичанин-мудрец, несущий бремя белых, [.  .  .] гордый германец, желающий во имя справедливости освободить для своего народа жизненное пространство от славянских недочеловеков, чистый духом и телом имам [. . .]” [ibid.: 201] (“[. . .] the wise Englishman who bears the white man’s burden, [. . .] the proud German who, in the name of justice, wants to clear the living space for his people by destroying the Slavic subhumans, the imam, pure of mind and body [. . .]”).74 When the young protagonist loses his eye in the finale of the novel, his unemendable otherness reaches a symbolic escalation: it is now finally and irrevocably inscribed into his body, that is, self-ironically naturalized as his disability “completes” the stigmatization. During a visit to the capital of the “only” state, Moscow, the boy is overwhelmed by a reverent exaltation at the sight of the holy sites such as the Kremlin and the Mausoleum, and a sense of long-desired belonging to the “Unity.” In this episode, the contrast between the monstrous state power and its loyal subject, the outcast cripple, creates an eerie tragicomical picture that resembles the culmination of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman: Легкие готовы были лопнуть от непрерывного вдоха. Святыни были великодушнее, чем люди—они не возражали, что справедливо оплеванный Косой-Подавился Колбасой пялился на них уцелевшим глазом. [Melikhov 1994: 238] My lungs almost burst because of all the air I took in. The holy sites were more generous than the humans: they did not mind

74 Importantly, Melikhov’s satire also targets the Jews themselves, in particular their idea of Jewish chosenness and their stereotype of the barbarous, reactionary Russians (see [Melikhov 1994: 201]).

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the one-eyed boy staring at them, even though he deserved it to be spit at. Literary decolonization in Melikhov’s novel takes place on several levels. The miming imitation of the anti-Jewish clichés and the antisemitic abusive language (most often, the pejorative expressions zhid, zhidy, zhideniata [ibid.: 19, 23, 49]) is in fact “an act of linguistic anticolonial counter-violence,” which Dirk Uffelmann discusses with reference to Henry Louis Gates and the prose of Polish migrants [Uffelmann 2009a: 157–160]. At that, Melikhov’s narrator produces a text that performatively counteracts the alleged alterity of the Jew, for example, by demonstrating that he brilliantly masters the majority culture. His narration—the very text of the novel—characterizes Lev Katsenelenbogen as a typical representative of the Russian intelligentsia, and thus as an outsider who is “alien to the common people.” A relevant component of this performative testimony is its intertextuality—incessant, often covert references to Russian literature and history, which take a knowledgeable reader to decode, or reflect on the anti-Jewish intellectual discourse in Russia from Dostoevskii up to the present days.75 The “fundamental instability and an inner split,” which Hanne Birk and Birgit Neumann describe as typical of the postcolonial consciousness [Birk/ Neumann 2002: 126], makes the adult narrator in the post-communist present very unlikely to join any community or follow a higher idea. Even the unity of citizens against the communists during the August coup in 1991 cannot compete with this disgust, because the narrator sees in it the seeds of new nationalism and segregation.76 The neurotic language of Jewish self-hatred and the characteristic style of self-humiliating revelations in the sense of Dostoevskii’s “Zapiski iz podpol′ia” (Notes from the underground) connect The Confession of a Jew with Iurii

75 As we have seen in the previous subchapter, Fedor Dostoevskii also functions in Iudson’s novel as the voice symbolically expressing the Russian national idea and, consequently, as the founder of Russian nationalism. Melikhov reproduces and analyzes Dostoevskii’s antisemitic arguments, including his prophetic pathos of suffering—and ridicules him, imitating the writing style of this “изобретатель всемирной отзывчивости-с русского человека-с” [Melikhov 1994: 199–200] (“inventor of Russian man’s capacity for universal compassion”). 76 As Violeta Kelertas demonstrates, Lithuanian post-communist literature, in particular Richardas Gavelis’s novel Vilniaus pokeris (The Vilnius poker, 1989), presents a similar psychological topography of the postcolonial personality. Using irony, Gavelis disavows the return of national myths in the new independent state: “He refuses to yield to the typical myths of nationalism by being strongly critical of homo lithuanicus and by daring to attack the sanctity of Vilnius and its icons, such as the Gediminas Castle Tower” [Kelertas 2006: 258].

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Karabchievskii’s novel Zhizn′ Aleksandra Zil′bera (1975), even though the latter text was created almost two decades earlier. Karabchievskii’s novel reflects Fanon’s formation of the suppressed subject through the “white gaze” in the episode where the little Sasha Zil′ber catches his future tormentor Samoilov looking at him in the school bus and recognizes the sadistic anticipating look—without having seen Samoilov before—with the dead certain instinct of a victim [Karabchievskii 1991: 10–11]. The novel does not only describe the agony of a Jewish child, and later adolescent, in the late and post-Soviet Russia, but above all the psychological downside of the antisemitic Othering. Historia morbi—in the protagonist’s formulation, the history of “эт[а] странн[ая] болезн[ь]” [ibid.: 38] (“this strange disease”)—is a sequence of unsuccessful attempts of concealment, adaptation, and simulation, which result again and again in failure, shame, and episodes of self-loathing. The disgust for the self as an external projection is reflected in the fact that Aleksandr creates his own hated Other, using his stepfather, Iakov. Iakov’s image reproduces the centuries-old anti-Jewish stereotypes: Aleksandr is disgusted by his effeminate, ape-like body, his thick hairy fingers, his wet lips, his habit of counting money in Yiddish, and his impure Russian speech. For the young intellectual, nurtured by the Russian-Soviet culture, the Yiddish language metonymically reflects the internal inferior, harassed self. Repeating the traditional Judeophobic patterns, Aleksandr distances himself from the “parodic” [ibid.: 43] step-language of alterity: “Эйн-ын-цвонцик, цвей-ын-цвонцик, драй-ын-цвонцик .  .  . Эникибеники ели вареники . . . Кто же это в незапамятные времена обладал таким изощренным слухом, чтобы в кованом строе немецкой речи различить все черты местечкового балагана?” [ibid., italics in the original] (“Ein-yn-tsvontsik, tsvei-yn-tsvontsik, drai-yn-tsvontsik .  .  . One a penny, two a penny, hot-cross buns . . . Who had such a fine ear in the time immemorial as to perceive all the signs of the provincial farce in the iron order of German speech?”). The sociopsychological phenomenon of antisemitism becomes, for Karabchievskii, a pathological mirror of the external hate, a symptom of the victim’s idiosyncratic self-perception. Moreover, Karabchievskii’s narrator reproduces the internalized Jewish images in his earlier contempt regarding his zeide, his Jewish grandfather, which he has since come to regret. The grandfather is unclean, stubborn, seemingly irrational in his views, always dissenting, and his values from the pre-Revolutionary past are incomprehensible and culturally different. In his disputes with his grandfather, which Aleksandr hardly takes seriously, the grandson represents the superior point of view, that of a person with secular, Soviet education. Still, he is never able to defend his modern views: for example, he triumphantly believes that he

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can prove the non-existence of God when the first artificial satellite reaches the orbit and no God is found in space—but the grandfather, a learned Talmudist, is genuinely surprised by this primitive reasoning. For the young Zil′ber, his grandfather’s “backward” worldview and the colorful, completely untranslatable Russian-Ukrainian-Yiddish speech are signals of repelling “contamination,” but the adult narrator is filled with repentance and grief when remembering them. Anticipating the confession of Melikhov’s narrator, Zil′ber today admits the fatal loss of culture and his own guilt: “[. . .] тут же, рядом со мной, жил этот замечательный человек и [. . .] надо было только сидеть и слушать, и глотать, и впитывать, и запоминать . . .” [ibid.: 105] (“[. . .] this remarkable person lived here, right next to me, and [. . .] I just had to sit and listen, and swallow, and absorb, and notice . . .”). The traditional type of a nervous, neurotic, or hysterical77 educated Jew who looks at himself or herself from a mocking distance,—the psychoanalytically charged image of a broken Other—is analyzed before Melikhov not only by Karabchievskii but also by Feliks Roziner with the figure of Aaron Khaim Finkel′maier. Very telling is the sarcastic description, which Finkel′maier—a poet, an intellectual, and a desperate self-criticist—gives himself: “истерия, неврастенический тип, комическая внешность, [.  .  .] слюнявый идиот” [Roziner 1990: 14f.] (“Hysteria, neurasthenic type, comical appearance, [. . .] a slobbery idiot”). The Jewish counter-narrative of Karabchievskii and Melikhov continues in the autobiographical essay by the literary scholar and writer Mikhail Berg, The Bad evrei (The Bad Jew, 2010). However, Berg—a no-compromise dissident, for whom his Jewish roots have no meaning any more (Berg’s narrator could be seen as an anti-Soviet figure of the “new,” strong and self-confident Israeli type of Jew, but without any signs of the Zionist pursuits)—defines his perspective not by the neurotic identity split and the grief over the loss of self. What allows me to add Berg to the other authors described here is rather the topos and skaz of the sarcastic Jewish self-reflection (“the jew,” according to Livak [2010]), as a paradoxical social construct: a bespectacled member of the Russian intelligentsia with a “typically Jewish” appearance. In his invective against various forms of nationalism or colonialism (including those of the Jewish diaspora and Israel),

77 Klaus Hödl describes the archetypal European Jew as a “nervous antihero” [1997: 167]; in the (pseudo-)scientific discourse of the penultimate turn of the centuries, it was maintained that Jews were predisposed towards “female diseases,” that is, hysteria and neurasthenia ([ibid.: 202–205], see the chapter “The Hysterical Jew”). See also Moshe Zimmermann’s essay “Muscle Jews versus Nervous Jews” [2006].

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Berg largely inherits the anti-ideological style of another Soviet underground fighter of Jewish origin—Efraim Sevela.

11.2.3. Oleg Iur′ev’s Hybrid Poetics: Peninsula Zhidiatin Oleg Iur′ev (1959–2018), a poet, prose writer, playwright, and essayist, lived in Leningrad until his emigration to Germany in 1991. In the 1980s, he belonged to the unofficial circle around the poets Elena Shvarts and Viktor Krivulin and published his poems in the samizdat periodicals Chasy and Sumerki. Starting in the early 1990s, he published three novels: Poluostrov Zhidiatin (to be translated as Peninsula Zhidiatin or Yid Peninsula, 2000) is the first part of a trilogy, which also includes the novels Novyi Golem, ili Voina starikov i detei (The new golem, or the war of children and the old people, 2004) and Vineta (The Russian cargo, 2007).78 Peninsula Zhidiatin is an ingenious example of fiction that provides analysis of Soviet “civilization” taken during a moment of historical break, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in March 1985. The novel retrospectively describes the gradual demise of the Soviet era from the point of view of a Jewish teenager. The novel consists of two parts that represent one, or perhaps two different adolescent protagonists whose worlds are mirror reflections of each other. However, the two stories present incompatible diegetical and stylistic concepts. The book is designed in such a way that you can optionally start reading with any of the two stories. The boy lives with his family in a packhouse in a fictitious “border zone,” which is called the “peninsula Zhidiatin”79 and which is located near St. Petersburg and the Finnish border, at the Gulf of Finland. The borderland is the most important topos of the text; it pervades all levels of the text: the geographical, the historical, the religious and the cultural one. The border condition also characterizes the figure(s), the structure of space and time, and the connection between historical reality and Jewish tradition.

78 On Vineta cf. [Finkelstein/Weller 2012]. 79 In Russian, the name of the peninsula is derived for the word zhid, which in its current use is a derogatory designation of the Jews, but which had a neutral meaning in Old Russian (and still has it in other Slavic languages). In this way, Iur′ev’s hybrid text merges the archaic connotations with the antisemitic language of the present in a multi-layered system of double, flickering signifiers.

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Both protagonists are about to turn thirteen—the point of Jewish coming of age, bar mitzvah. As they lie in bed with fever on the eve of Easter,80 they mention, among other things, that, according to rumors, the neighbors’ son from the other half of the house disappeared a few days ago. Thus begins the game of mirrors81 and doubles. The first boy was born in a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad, whose surname is Iazychnik (“pagan”), while the second belongs to a family of crypto-Jews with the family name Zhidiata (also translatable as “little Yids”), who have kept their faith a secret for centuries.82 In the course of the narrated plots, the metonymy of neighborhood reveals a network of analogies that become a springboard for reflecting the Jewish existence in Russia from two very different perspectives that can be read—just like the book itself—from opposite ends. The two parts of the novel and the house, as well as both families, together make up the trope of Russian Jewry, and more, of Jewry in general. Furthermore, Jewishness, presented in the web of countless (inter)textual equivalences becomes a trope of Russian life and of the historical rupture.83 The flow of consciousness of the adolescent narrator from the Iazychnik family contains occasionalisms that reveal a fantastic but recognizable cultural syncretism, imitating the oral speech of a teenager who is socialized partially in a Soviet and partially in a Jewish environment. His world still contains the cultural “as well . . . as” or “in-between” that Aleksandr Melikhov’s narrator has almost lost completely. Thus, the terms and concepts of Soviet reality in the boy’s thought mark the vanishing semiotic space of the world of socialism: he briefly mentions the destroyer “Thirtieth Anniversary of Victory” (“миноносец ‘Тридцатилетие Победы’” [Iur′ev 2000: 8]); the newspaper Red star (“газета ‘Красная звезда’ [ibid.: 10]”); the Red baker association (“объединениe

80 The Christian Easter coincides with the Jewish feast of Passover, for the pious family of Zhidiata the central event of the religious calendar, which reminds of the Jewish exodus from Egypt—a temporal rupture that is echoed by the perestroika, the time when the novel is set. 81 The two parts of the novel are printed as inverted reflections, so that the reader has to turn the book over to switch to the other part—a self-reflective game thanks to which the text is doubled and reversed not only poetically and structurally, but also iconically. This game is illustrated by the title of one of the Zhidiata chapters—“Две скрыжали, на которых написано было с обеих сторон” [Iur′ev 2000: 54] (“Two tablets, with writing on both sides”). 82 On the (in my view barely clear) connection between the family Zhidiata and the so-called “heresy of the Judaizers” (“ересь жидовствующих”)—a fifteenth-century religious sect in Novgorod and Moscow, which split off from Russian Orthodoxy and, to some extent, adopted Judaism—see Lev Aizenshtat [2001], Valerii Shubinskii [2008], and Miriam Finkelstein [2013]. 83 Miriam Finkelstein interprets the slowly crumbling house as an allegory of the Soviet Union: “Metaphorically, the slow destruction of the building points to the future collapse of the Soviet Union” [2013: 239].

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‘Красный пекарь’” [ibid.: 18]); the kiosk “Cultural wares. Groceries. Kerosene” (“ларeк ‘Культтовары. Продукты. Керосин’” [ibid.: 21]); the newspaper Pioneers’ truth (“газета ‘Пионерская правда’” [ibid.: 23]), and so forth. This cultural space shapes the boy’s natural living environment, where the Soviet lexemes have no special ideological charge because they have been long ago absorbed by the everyday language, but outside the narrator’s consciousness they are parodied by the implicitly present author: for example, the narrator’s uncle Iakov Permanent renames “Красный пекарь” (the “Red baker”), “Пресный какарь” (the “Bland/Dull faker”) [ibid.: 20], an obscene paronomasia. The remnants of Russian Jewish bilingualism are manifested in the mix of Russian and Yiddish phrase and specific small words, most of which originate in the expressive, gesticulating speech of the elderly members of the family, especially from grandmothers and great-aunts: “Дрек мит фефер они умеют делать, а не гешефты!” [ibid.: 18, here and hereafter, italics in the original] (“They know dirt with pepper, but they don’t know doing business . . .”); “Ты ему да, он тебе нет, ты ему чeрное, он тебе белое, всe аф цулохес, настоящий цулохешник, до ста двадцати!’” [ibid.: 58] (“You tell him yes, he tells you no, you say black, he says white, everything to spite you, a real spiter, may he live a long life!”). The interweaving of Soviet and Jewish elements results in burlesque hybrids such as: “А ид а шикер эргер ви а гой а стахановец” [ibid.: 105] (“A Jewish drunkard is worse than a Goyish Stakhanovite”). This phrase wittily combines the self-irony of a Jewish joke and the mockery of the absurd Goyish (Gentile) power regime. Furthermore, the family’s Russian-Ukrainian-Yiddish language melange, such as Isaak Babel′ humorously represented in his Odessa Stories, signals that the East European Jewish culture is still living. For example, the great-aunt Basya comments on a relative’s husband: “Ли́твак, тю! Те же ли́тваки, у них же ж поhоловно нито кин сейхл. Двум поросям похлебку не разнесут! Тю!” [ibid.: 21] (“The Litvaks, pah! All these Litvaks, they have no sense in their heads. They won’t manage to share the fodder between two piglets! Pah!”). The term “Litvak” (referring to a Jew from Lithuania or the Western regions of Eastern Europe, who in the past typically stood for the Jewish Enlightenment and against Hasidism), has acquired here a pejorative sense. It presents a new degree of strangeness, highlighting the differences within the Jewish community, and marks a specific identity that in the post-Soviet situation remains alive in language only. In the hybrid language of the Jewish grandmothers, which is full of oxymorons and half-forgotten expressions, the present time is defamiliarized through memory. However, the glossary of Yiddish words and expressions attached to the text conveys the need for a cultural commentary, indicating that the East European

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Jewish civilization has, in fact, disappeared. The boy’s knowledge and worldview are shaped by several sources: the Soviet school, his Jewish family with its history and myths that are shared with the Jewish diaspora, the indiscriminate reading of an adolescent, and, not least, by the Judeophobic prejudices of the people in his immediate vicinity. His worldview84 demonstrates an idiosyncratic inclusion of many different features mixed together, which often produces a comical effect due to confusion: Бабушка Циля считает, что у них там, в офицерской бане, происходит полнейший Содом и Гоморра, пьяное безобразие и моральное разложение, сплошной упадок Римской Империи [. . .]. [Ibid.: 59] Great-aunt Tsilia thinks that it is the purest Sodom and Gomorrha there, in the officer’s bath, a drunk tohubohu and moral degradation, nothing but the total downfall of the Roman Empire [. . .]. The hybridity of Soviet-Jewish socialization,85 but also the hybridity of Soviet customs is reflected in the natural simultaneity of rituals. The young narrator celebrates the Day of the Revolution, November 7, and Victory Day, May 9, with a family relation, a doctor who is described as a “Bolshevikess” (“большевичка”), but who serves traditional Jewish food. At Easter/Passover, the family offers matzah to the non-Jewish neighbors, with whom they share an apartment in Leningrad, and receive painted eggs from them. The present time appears here as a cultural palimpsest, through the surface of which ever more layers of the tabooed or half-accepted past shimmer and expose the decay of the Soviet monoculture shortly before its collapse. For example, in the boy’s school, the members of the “TsK KPSS” (political bureau of the central committee of the communist party) are depicted on a wooden three-piece board, a sort of triptych directly imitating the pre-Revolutionary Orthodox iconostases. The 84 Miriam Finkelstein and Nina Weller describe the ship Vineta, the scene of Iur′ev’s third novel, as a “knowledge space”—a ship of memory and remembering [2012: 193]. The packhouse from Peninsula Zhidiatin, in which the two adolescents go through their thoughts and memories, is also a knowledge space, and the text itself is a cultural archive (a “packhouse” of cultural memory) for the surviving remnants of the Soviet Jewish microcosm. As we have seen above, in postmemorial and posthistorical literature the spatial metaphors of memory play an important role in the semantization of mental processes. 85 Cf.: “In his [Iazychnik’s] concept, Soviet space is formed by quasi-Jewish realities such as the newspaper Sovetish heymland, myths and everyday Soviet routine” [Terpitz 2008: 265].

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children learn that such boards are still manufactured following the patterns of expedition iconostases—from their teacher for political education, as a “top secret.” The increasingly visible heterogeneity reveals the hitherto hidden “colonized” cultural layers that are reappropriated in the new political situation. The image of a more and more porous ideology is accompanied by an ironic narrative degradation of Soviet attributes: for example, the “Battle Banner” in the corner of the classroom is compared with a broom, and the text of a song popular in the Soviet Union is filled with obscene lines. The family history of Iazychnik junior is a juxtaposition of ideological and rhetorical elements of different origins, the fragments of several discourses: Soviet historiography, the inner Jewish family tradition deviating from the official line, the Hasidic hagiography, and the Jewish izkor-bikher. The author stages the bizarre, semi-infantile ideological appropriation of Jewish history while, at the same time, playfully testing out various ways of narrating it—and the reader is confronted with its tragedy and vulnerability. The narrator states that all of his eight grandmothers and his paternal grandfather moved from “местечко, откуда суеверия” [ibid.: 47] (“the shtetl, where superstition has its origin”) to the big cities, “работать и учиться” [ibid.: 48] (“to work and learn”) after the Revolution. This Soviet-praising emancipatory writing meets the criticism of Stalin’s personality cult as the boy reports that the grandfather—“председатель Комитета еврейской бедноты” [ibid.: 47] (“chairman of the Committee of the Jewish Poor”), a well-meaning Soviet official—became the victim of illegal repressions. And yet, he immediately quotes grandmother Fira, who calls the grandfather a murderer: “в двадцать третьем году приходил нас разъевреивать, а мердэр” [ibid.: 48] (“in the year twenty-three, he came to de-Judaize us, a murderer”). This is the voice of Jewish tradition, of the marginalized culture, which perceives assimilation merely as colonizing violence. Again, without any transition or break, the boy boasts about his great-great-great-grandfather, the famous “silent tzaddik” in their village, whose thoughts were written down at night by nobody else but the prophet Elijah.86 However, the remembered Jewish history will only be preserved in the narrative of the novel because the boy does not speak either Hebrew or Yiddish, and considers the first language to be especially strange and confusing. And yet,

86 This family apocryph contains a parody of Hasidic stories, in which miracles and ambiguous sayings of the legendary tzaddikim play the central role. Thus, the silent tzaddik speaks for the first and the last time during a pogrom in 1905, when he is shown into the carriage driven with an old horse, which should take him away from the massacre. The phrase he says at that moment, which is subsequently interpreted throughout the Jewish world, is as follows: “Тпру-у, приехали” [Iur′ev 2000: 48] (“Who-a, we are there”). After that, he dies.

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he harbors the wish to write a book about his family, to record, in particular, the memory of his grandmother Esia who was murdered by antisemites in Leningrad in 1948 or 1949. Only the Jewish names in this story should be replaced by Russian ones, because the fact is, “про евреев нельзя печатать книжки без особого разрешения ЦК КПСС, иначе могут получиться погромы” [ibid.: 66] (you are not allowed to publish books about Jews without special permission of the central committee of the CPSU, because otherwise pogroms can happen”). In this naive phrase, the silenced history comes to the surface: the “black years” of the Soviet Jews in the end of the 1940s are directly related to the pre-Revolutionary pogroms—this is how they were perceived by the Jews themselves. The boy wants to write a kind of an izkor bukh, a Jewish memory book where the antisemitic acts of the Soviet regime will be listed together with other persecutions against Jews, primarily the Shoah. Telling is the fact that the narrator dreams of finding his family book that was publicly denounced by the Soviets and confiscated in 1923. In this book, his ancestors recorded their life stories in the Hebrew (“Jewish”) language: “в эту книгу было всe записано, что случилось с моей семьeй [. . .] за ближайшие полтысячи лет, или больше” [ibid.: 71] (“Everything that has happened to my family [. . .] in the last half a millennium or more has been recorded in this book”). This book will become the foundation of his own planned chronicle. The tragicomical review of Jewish history as presented by Iazychnik in Iur′ev’s novel also touches the topics of emigration and aliyah, whereby the anecdotal common places of this topic are combined with the sad ironic paradoxes of the late Soviet exodus concept: Перманент говорит, что лично бы он не смог существовать в этом Израиле, во-первых, потому что там жарко, а он человек европейской культуры, а во-вторых, потому что там все евреи—и милиционеры евреи, и сантехники евреи, и даже премьер-министр еврей. [. . .] Когда Израиль на нас нападет [. . .] неужели в самом деле папа будет стрелять в дядю Якова и в меня, если я к тому времени вырасту и сделаюсь офицером флота? [Iur′ev 2000: 35] [Uncle Iakov] Permanent says that he personally could not exist in this Israel, first of all because it is hot there and he is a man of European culture; and secondly, because everyone there is a Jew: the police officers are Jews, the plumbers are Jews, and even the prime minister is a Jew. [. . .] When Israel attacks us [. . .] will

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Dad really shoot at Uncle Iakov, or at me, if I will be grown up and become a naval officer by then? The incompatibility of the two historical conceptions and formations of Judaism—the diasporic and the Israeli one—is here reproduced in the form of a very common cliche: the heat and the “oriental” culture of the Middle East transform the aliyah, that is, the desired harmonious amalgamation of the sabra with the European Jews in Israel, into an idealistic construct—and finally, into an anecdote. Furthermore, the political and military antagonism between the Soviet Union and Israel makes enemies out of former fellow countrymen, friends, and even relatives. The difference between the diasporic and the Israeli Jews is expressed in another anecdotal story: on a bus, the narrator hears one drunk man explains to the other person why the Jews gain victories in Israel: “Ой, не сечешь, Толян, сонно отозвался второй из-под кепки: То ж не эти евреи, не наши. То—древние!” [Iur′ev 2000: 49] (“Man, you don’t get it, Tolia, the other said sleepily from underneath his flat cap: Those are not the Jews from here, not ours. Those are the ancient ones”). This episode mocks the biblically tinged claim for continuity of the Israeli statehood as well as the Zionist concept of the new aliyah Jew.87 In a moment of historical transition, the internal monologue links the elements not only of different cultures, but also of different epochs and times, of the modern and the archaic, and oscillates between tragedy and parody. This technique of syncretic history writing, also present in Mikhail Iudson and Aleksandr Melikhov’s texts, arises to a large extent from the authors’ transhistorical approach to the issue of antisemitism. Superstition and medieval accusations of ritual murder mix with gruesome stories about Jews told by the Russian underclass—“бескультурные люди, алкоголики, хулиганы, черносотенцы” [Iur′ev 2000: 27] (“uncivilized people, alcoholics, young louts, black hundreds”). Added to this are the blames of parasitism common in the Soviet ideological discourse and the rhetoric of the anti-Zionist propaganda of the 1960s and ’70s.88 A diachronic variety of xenophobic worldviews 87 Apparently, Iur′ev borrowed this anecdotal insertion from the dissident novel Ozhog (Burn, 1969–1975) by Vasilii Aksenov, written in the years of anti-Zionist agitation in the Soviet Union. There, too, an alcoholic in line in front of the beer kiosk proclaims: “В Израиле не наши евреи воюют, а древние!” [Aksenov 2000: 121] (“Not our Jews fight in Israel—those are the ancient ones”). Even more probably, both authors retell a popular anecdote. 88 At that, real socio-cultural characteristics of Soviet Jews and their stereotypical, antisemitic interpretation form a tragicomic unity during an episode in the pioneer camp when the boy corrects the misspelled word govno (“shit”) written next to his name, confirming the higher education level of Jewish children and also the proverbial Jewish inclination to doubt and

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condensed into several paragraphs takes on apocalyptic features shortly before the collapse of the Great Empire. The Judeophobic discourse gets rid of the modern nationalistic garments and resurrects archaic forms. For example, the disappearance of a Soviet schoolchild provokes rumors that the Jews are using the blood of Russian children to prepare their matzoth.89 The novel is set on the eve of Passover. Characteristically, Iazychnik does not understand these rumors because he no longer knows what matzah is [ibid.: 81–82]. The question whether accusations of ritual murder are realistic in late Soviet period is left open—but on mimetic level, the text resists realism. The period after Chernenko’s death and before Gorbachev’s appointment as the head of the state—the “interregnum”—gives rise to old Jewish fears, the reminders of previous regime changes in Russian history. With the use of key words, or tropes, such as “Dreyfus,” “Beilis,” “pogroms,” “Messiah,” the history of persecution is associated with eschatological expectations of earlier Jewish sects. The teenager’s stream of consciousness breaks off, but it is followed by an “appendix”—a scholarly commentary by a professor from Finland, Iakov Nikolaevich Gol′dshtein. Iur′ev’s factual self-commentary is a half-parodic, halfserious analysis of the just completed text. At that, this playful appropriation of literary studies discourse does not diminish the value of metareflection on the novel that is contained in this section. In fact, it expands the postmodern poetics of the novel, in which several styles of writing are closely combined, so that they always question each other. According to the enthusiastic academic, the book shows the moment when the death sentence of the empire is already signed (“приговор [.  .  .] уже подписан” [Iur′ev 2000: 127]) and it is on the verge of becoming a museified artifact. As Gol′dshtein states, the text is a historical work that, at the same time, represents the almost vanished Soviet-Jewish milieu from within. It is the last testimony of an irretrievably lost culture with the peculiarities of its language and its little mythology (“особенностями еe речи”; “маленькой мифологией” [ibid.: 129]). Oleg Iur′ev’s voice of “reflective nostalgia” (Svetlana Boym) is revealed not only in the fictional commentator’s ponder: “Теперь я уже сомневаюсь, правильно ли я это сделал, может, русским детям все же лучше знать, как на их родном языке пишется ‘говно’?” [Iur′ev 2000: 80] (“Now I’m not sure if I did it right, maybe the Russian kids know better how ‘shit’ is written in their mother tongue?”). 89 On the myth of Jewish ritual murder in Slavic cultures see [Belova/Petrukhin 2008: 205– 258]; on anti-Judaism and its “genres” in pre-Revolutionary Russia see [Livak 2010: 16–21]. Iazychnik’s comrades also tell horror stories about gypsies, who are said to lure little children and use their flesh to make pie filling [Iur′ev 2000: 75]. Children’s folklore is here a faithful tragicomical reflection of the adults’ fantasies.

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statement that this milieu is no longer reproduced by newer generations due to an advanced assimilation, but also in the bitterly ironic designation of the Soviet assimilation politics as “окончательное решение в изводе Карла Маркса” [ibid.: 128] (“final solution, in Karl Marx’s version”). The syncretic Jewish culture of the diaspora dies together with its oral language: “[. . .] когда заканчивается цивилизация, умирает еe речь” [ibid.: 131] (“[.  .  .] when a civilization comes to an end, its language dies as well”). In the other part of the novel, the reader immerses into the world of the old belief of the secret Jewish religious community. The young narrator comes from a family of Crypto-Jews, who are allegedly descended from the Spanish Marranos,90 and who have preserved their traditions to this day thanks to a mimicry practiced for centuries. The antiquated language of the narrator, with a strong Old Russian and Church Slavonic influence,91 corresponds with the 90 Biblical genealogies, which trace one’s own family history or that of one’s neighbors down to the first humans or the patriarchs, are anchored, among other things, in the mythical stories of common origin told by the Slavic village communities. Even today, some villagers still say that their Jewish neighbors are descended from the twelve tribes of Israel [Belova/Petrukhin 2008: 64–76]. For Iur′ev’s young protagonist, the thought of one’s own genealogical chosenness and the simultaneity of various time layers play the key role. 91 Cf. the narrator’s use of archaic words and neologisms that combine several roots or add specific suffixes to create a new meaning: velikodennaia (“long-dayed,” a composite neologism on the base of old or elevated word velikii, “great”), iskoni (“from the beginning,” archaic), devki (“girls” or “maids,” archaic form), kashevarit′ (“to porridge-boil,” a rarely used composite word), sukontse (“little cloth,” archaic root with a rarely used suffix), shkilet (a Germanized, historic use of the modern Russian word skelet, “skeleton”), poganskie (“pagan,” archaic), Lenin-Gorod (Leningrad, an imitation of Russian folklore), and phrases such as ob levuiu ruku (“at one’s left hand,” made to sound archaic), ispodnee nebo (“inner sky,” a combination with an archaic word of limited use), zakazano nakrepko (“strictly forbidden,” a combination made to sound archaic), russkaia zemlia (“the Russian land,” archaic or folklore) and others [Iur′ev 2000: 7-13]. The boy perceives the modern Russian language as foreign: “[. . .] загорóдная жерда на колесике, по-русски ‘шлагбаум’” [ibid.: 14] (“[. . .] a barrier stick with a cog, in Russian, ‘turnpike’”). The comism here lies in the fact that the German loanword shlagbaum is interpreted as Russian (that is, the “foreign” stranger is identified as the “near,” more familiar stranger—one of the many translations attempted by the young narrator). The word krestianstvo (“peasantry”) is written as khrist′ianstvo [Iur′ev 2000: 11]; cf. the Old Church Slavic “хрестиѩнинъ,” “хрьстиѩнинъ” for the Russian krest′ianin, “peasant.” Similarly, the word kresty (“crosses”) is written as khristy, so that it becomes a homonym for “Christs.” The obsolete spellings reveal the religious origin of these words, as language reflects the religious worldview. This lexicon and the archaic syntax correspond with the barren interior of the narrator’s home, which reproduces an Old Believers’ house. Zhidiata’s archaic, sacred view of world and language sometimes creates semantic traps. For example, the word angel′skii (“angelic”), due to homonymy, is also used to mean what the modern Russian calls angliiskii (“English”), and the boy hopes that learning English at school will help him to understand angels [ibid.: 93]. The angels are a part of his immediate living environment and are described in very specific details (see [ibid.: 17]). Overall, this performative language analysis in the novel demonstrates Iur′ev’s brilliant linguistic acumen.

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(sometimes ironically alienated) fragments of Old Hebrew prayers interspersed in the text, which are printed in Old Russian letters—the graphic counterpart of the archaic poetics of the text. In addition, the use of Old Russian also indicates the above-mentioned affiliation of the Zhidiata family with the “heresy of the Judaizers.” Here, the modern environment is merely a backdrop for the spiritual realm of cryptic rituals,92 prophecies, and incantations, memories of the expulsion and eschatological expectations (such as the underground return of every Jew, the living and the dead ones, to Jerusalem as prophesied in the holy Jewish books). The teenager’s geographical explanations reimagine the sacred topography: all major cities such as Helsinki are called “Erusalim” (an outdated spelling of “Jerusalem”) [ibid.: 12]; the biblical toponyms are transferred to geographic locations and celestial bodies: А дальше за тем [. . .] морем широким, раскинутым—и нету ничего, одна пустая вода, в нее же загибается небесная твердь, нижнее исподнее небо с Мойсеевой дорогой на нем. [.  .  .] И как только не скатываются крайние звезды за край?—не знаю, крепко-накрепко, видать, приколочены [. . .]. [Ibid.: 14] And further, after that [.  .  .] huge wide-spread sea, there is absolutely nothing, only the empty water, to which the heavenly firmament then bends, the lower inner heaven, with Moses’s way on it. [. . .] But why do the last stars there at the edge not roll over this edge?—that I don’t know, they are probably nailed down firmly [. . .]. This worldview reveals a hermetic conception of space such as Iurii Lotman and Kenneth White described in relation to the epistemological context of the Christian Middle Ages.93 Within the framework of the religious concept of geography, Jerusalem is defined as umbilicus terrae and determines the notions of closeness and distance, good and evil. At the same time, the boy’s description of “Lenin-Gorod” (Leningrad, here also called Rome) evokes the anti-Petrine folk stories paradigmatic for the early “Petersburg text of Russian literature” [Toporov 2003]: at the bottom of the river (Neva) “видимо-невидимо голокостых шкилетов [. . .] шкилеты те по пояс завалены каменным и железным

92 On the eve of his Jewish majority, the boy has to circumcise himself. 93 See chap. 8.

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хламьем, а сверх пояса волнуются, касаются и цепляются” [Iur′ev 2000: 11] (“there is a whole lot of bare-boned [or ‘Holocaust’] shkeletons [.  .  .] up to the waist these shkeletons are covered with stone and iron scraps, and above the waist they sway, touch, and hold”); dark clouds of many-colored smoke hang over the city; and the bronze monument of Peter I created by Falconet epitomizes one of the famous Russian cultural myths as it represents the biggest monster of them all: “самый же страшный—зеленый, вздутый, сердитый [. . .]” [ibid.] (“the most terrible one—he is green, bloated, angry [. . .]”). The green, bloated founder tsar resembles a vampire or a drowned man—the latter association is a metonymic reference to the victims of the ghost town and its literary protagonists. But here, too, parodic undertones creep into the Jewish eschatology, which is thus transformed into a hybrid, ambiguous, anachronistic paradigm: the rhymes about the Jewish wanderings through the desert are interchanged with the text of the popular Russian song Raskinulos′ more shiroko . . . (The sea lies wide) [ibid.: 20 and 41]. Ancient Egyptian—“фараонские” [ibid.: 58 f.] (“pharaonic”)— ancient Roman, Christian, and Soviet rulers meet in the narrator’s skaz, are conflated with each other,94 and become, in their totality, a multi-face image of the enemies of Israel who besiege “краденый город” (“the stolen city”) of Jerusalem [ibid.: 58]. With the approaching age of majority—bar mitzvah— the boy will pass through an initiation ritual and his high sacred destiny will be sealed, but he interprets this perspective quite trivially as a long-awaited possibility to do things previously forbidden. The inner eye, which should open at the age of thirteen, would finally permit him, the “prince,” to watch Soviet television programs and read newspapers [ibid.: 96]. The hybrid poetics of the novel manifests itself, among other things, in the boy’s writing/thinking, which paradigmatically structured and is saturated with connotations and parallellisms, and is sometimes very loosely tied to the perspective of a boy, revealing the lyrical voice of the poet Oleg Iur′ev. For example, the mention of the surname of the late Konstantin Chernenko—a “color-poetic” onomastic signal—“draws” to its immediate textual environment other lexemes with the root chern- (“black”): chernye podkovki (“little black horseshoes”) or chernogolovye khokhotuny (literally “black-headed laughers,” the Russian name of the birds known as “great black-headed gulls”) [ibid.: 11]. The transgression of the limited narrative perspective with its skaz orality

94 Thus, the boy speaks of the awaited establishment of communism “во всех Римских странах” [ibid.: 106] (“in all the Roman lands”); and in his story of the Jewish escape from Egypt, Egyptians also call themselves Romans.

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is also visible in descriptions that produce a complex associative texture. See such expressions as: “[. . .] заоконный свет [. . .] колесит, оборачиваясь вокруг себя, по комнате, убирает черный свет темноты, сразу же вырастающий за его спиной снова [. . .]” [ibid.: 33] (“[. . .] the light from behind the window [. . .] wheels through the room, turning around itself, and takes away the black light of darkness, which immediately grows again behind its back [.  .  .]”). The conflation of the author’s and the character’s voices, or better to say, the incursion of another, more expansive and sometimes “foreign” knowledge is also signaled by intertextual references: “[.  .  .] я ж ничего не разглашу, [.  .  .]—даже за мильон. Даже за мильон терзаний .  .  .” [ibid.: 40] (“[.  .  .] I won’t chatter [. . .] not even for a million. Not for a million of torments . . .”). The reference here is to the title of the famous critical essay “Million terzanii” (“A million torments”) by Ivan Goncharov (1872), which has become a part of the Russian and later the Soviet culture. Or: “[. . .] русская зима, белым-бело во все пределы” [ibid.: 42] (“[. . .] Russian winter, nothing but white and boundless”). This line contains a shortened and phonemically modified quotation from Boris Pasternak’s well-known poem “Zimniaia noch′” (Winter’s night): cf. the muchcited first line “Мело, мело по всей земле / Во все пределы” (“It snowed, it snowed across the world / At every turning”).95 Intertextual puns such as “мастер Маргарита из салона на улице Герцена” [ibid.: 73] (“the master Margarita from the barbershop in Herzen Street”)—a parodic paratextual evocation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita)—supplement Oleg Iur′ev’s self-ironic, ludic writing, which plays with cultural stereotypes. At that, intertextual references are not always or not unambiguously marked, which graphically enhances the texture of the polyphonic text: foreign traces and allusions often dissolve completely and have to be decrypted (similarly to Mikhail Iudson’s Ladder against the Closet). In other cases, the young narrators, who are not very sure of their Russian, commit comical language mistakes, such as: “При чем тут здесь?” [ibid.: 15] (“About what’s here there?”); “Едва я только что родился” [ibid: 34–35] (“As soon as I was just born”); “в течение через полчаса” [ibid.: 38] “In the course of after half an hour”; “Мне [. . .] нужно спешно одно спешное нужное дело справлять” [ibid.: 109] (“I [.  .  .] urgently need to do an urgent important thing here”). Declining nouns might also cause problems for the boys: “по Седьмым ноября и Девятым мая” [ibid.: 37] (“every the seventhes of November and the ninthes of May”). A comical effect is achieved by Iazychnik’s reflection about the others’

95 Boris Pasternak, “Winter’s Night,” transl. A. Z. Foreman, http://ruverses.com/ boris-pasternak/winters-night/26/.

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mistakes: “Правильно надо: наложить борщу .  .  . или борща?” [ibid.: 34] (“What would be correct: serve up borscht . . . or from borscht?”). Zhidiata’s carnivalesque mixture of historical contexts and meanings marks— just like his double’s stream of consciousness—the simultaneity or maximum condensing of time before an expected radical change.96 It also reflects a specific aspect of Jewish religious thought on the level of narrative perspective: various historical events are brought together to create one timeless context of suffering, preservation of religious unity, return, and redemption. In addition, the infantile conflation of differences discloses the hidden archaic-religious nature of the Soviet regime with its teleology of redemption. The religious boy takes his teacher’s promise that the best—communist—society will finally exist in the year 2000 for the prophecy about the arrival of the Messiah, only in other words: В двухтысячном году, ребята, мы построим коммунистическое общество. Вы счастливые люди, потому что [. . .] точно доживете до коммунизма и все своими глазами увидите! Я-то думал: просто они так называют по-забобонски иначе то же самое, те же яйца, только в профиль. [Iur′ev 2000: 106, italics in the original] In the year two thousand, dear children, we will have built the communist society. Your generation is happy because you [. . .] will actually live during that time and see everything with your own eyes! And I thought they actually talk about the same thing in their heathenish way, same shit, different verse. The reason for the centuries-old crypto-existence of the Zhidiata family in the novel is the Christian Orthodox Judeophobia—of the Russian people who propagate rumors as well as the clergymen such as father Georgy (Egor the

96 In the comment attached to the text, Professor Goldshtein, whom the readers already know, argues that the novel articulates the mythopoetic perspective of crypto-Jews, in which “иcтория существует [. . .] как бы одновременно” [ibid: 132] (“history exists [. . .] virtually at the same time”). “Приоритетная структура их сознания” [ibid.] (“the central structure of their consciousness”) breaks up the causal logic of the rationalistic age and proclaims the concept of relative time. The (sacred) time structure is determined by space, where “парадигматически несовместимые культуры” [ibid.: 133] (“paradigmatically incompatible cultures”) coexist. Both this comment and the following glossary have features of “hybrid humor” (see below), in which literary criticism is playfully mixed with parodic annotations and burlesque elements. In the glossary, for example, foreign language terms are translated into Russian or into English without any visible reason for the choice [ibid.: 144].

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priest) who gives antisemitism a theological expression. In contrast to the first part of the novel, the dichotomy of the Jewish and non-Jewish in the second part goes back to the pre-secular hatred towards Jews on the part of the Christian majority, and the Jews have preserved their traditions and beliefs, even though they go to church and commemorate their departed in the Christian Orthodox cemetery; their dead are not buried together with the Christians. In addition, the Zhidiata family pretend to be fully assimilated Soviet citizens. Time seems to stop and stood still for many centuries: two cleaning ladies in the church talk about how to recognize a perfectly camouflaged Jew: Jews are all big and fat, they can be recognized by their large noses, their correct but slightly mumbling pronunciation of Russian words, and the veiled mockery in their tone [ibid.: 27–28].97 The lost book with the Jewish law and the high words inscribed on both sides of the tablets is found and “saved,” and the boy—a “prince,” who traces his genealogy back to Moses, is to lead the faithful ones to Jerusalem and become the judge of peoples [ibid.: 78]. The sacred book is written in Old Church Slavonic—it is the Bible with the true Old and the false, “pagan” New Testament [ibid.: 63]. Oleg Iur′ev’s postmodern, postdictatorial, and postcolonial novel reinvents the hybrid features of the Russian Jewish language and thought. At the same time, Iur′ev constructs a literary space where the hidden Jewish minority deprived of its public voice can be heard. Hybridity and mimicry are two mirror reflections that represent the existence of the colonized individuals; the (internal or external) ghettoization of Jews creates the chronotope of the packing house on an imaginary peninsula in a border zone away from the center. Iur′ev reproduces or invents occasionalisms, macaronic oxymorons, and archaisms, stages an “underground” Jewish language with its syncretism and orality,98 and quotes

97 In the chapter “Folklornaia antropologiia: kak mozhno raspoznat′ evreia?” (“Popular anthropology: how can one recognize a Jew?”), the authors of the monograph on the Jewish myth in Slavic cultures [Belova/Petrukhin 2008] analyze folk conceptions that look related to this episode. The Jews are given unusual physical characteristics, often anomalies, a special smell, similarity and close connection to animals, a bad pronunciation, and a connection to the devil or other evil forces [ibid.: 262 ff., 293–295]. 98 The subversive imitation of orality (skaz) manifests itself in numerous obscenities, vulgar expressions, and deviations from the syntactic and grammatical language norms. Sometimes it creates a comical effect, for example, when the tautological anti-rhetoric of the young narrator comes to the foreground: “. . . Ну и ладно, а чего она?!! Сама как это самое, а думает—я ей этот самый?!” [Iur′ev 2000: 91] (“. . . So what? And why is she like that?!! She behaves like this, and she thinks I’m like this for her?!”). In this aphasic phrase, the semantically “empty” word sama (in other genders, samoe or samyi) stands in for different lexemes with independent meaning and thus conveys a purely expressive, asemantic message. In other

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the linguistic inventions of the collective Judeophobic unconscious. With these, he writes a politically charged, subversive, highly ironic minor(ity) literature that carries the Russian Soviet mythology to the extreme and reimagines it in a nostalgic and humorous way. The narrator’s inner language—translogical, semiinfantile, non-selective—“a schizophrenic mixture” [Deleuze/Guattari 1976: 38]) creates the alienation and intensity that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the characteristic writing style of a marginalized individual [1975: esp. 35–50]. The merging of words, languages, meanings, and language registers that produces new stylistic-semantic units has often been discussed in recent years as a poetics of “hybrid humor.” The “hybrid humor” is usually generated in texts that are presented as “marginal” or minoritarian, written by dissidents or migrants; in the spirit of postcolonial detabooization it connects or collides otherwise separated or opposing elements (see [Dunphy/Emig 2010: 7]): “The process of hybridisation may result in a confusion of identity [.  .  .], it is also possible for migrants to merge their cultures into a personal cultural mélange [. . .]” [ibid.: 9]. Iur′ev’s prose can be seen as a representative example of such a “humorous postcolonial intervention” [ibid.: 26], which infiltrates or breaks up the mononarratives. As we have seen above, the principle of reversal and deconstruction takes hold in the novel with the denial of the linear Soviet historiography. Parallelization, synchronicity, and de-hierarchization of several models of history, (anti-)Jewish power discourses and writing techniques all serve to revise the collectively created facts and simulacra. In numerous episodes, the texture of the novel creates a manic circling movement around the same texts, songs, paroemias, objects, and rituals that continually recur in the narrator’s speech.99 One of such manic repetitions is the ritual of going to the movies to see V dzhaze tol′ko devushki (Some Like It Hot). In this film, which is shown on different festive occasions—for example, on the day of the Soviet Navy—in the club of the

places, the narrator discusses slang: “Ну, я обтекаю, сказал бы Пустынников-Пуся. [.  .  .] Обтекает он не в прямом смысле, а в смысле ‘торчит’ или ‘тащится’” [ibid.: 92] (“Well, I dig it, Pustynnikov-Pussy would say. [. . .] He does not really dig anything, he means, he’s hooked on it, he’s hopped up on it”). The comical effect is due to the fact that the jargon phrases here are translated not into the standard language, but into other words of the jargon, that is, they remain within the same teen sociolect. This failed attempt at translation is an ironic, self-reflective representation of the non-translatability of the novel’s language. The narrator’s occasional excursions into his own physiology, the vulgar sexual terms, the motifs of urinating, and the passages about genitals complete the breaking of cultural taboos. 99 Psychologically speaking, the manic monotony of the writing is related to the hallucinations of the feverish narrator.

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Baltic Fleet, the dancing star with her full bosom, Marilyn Monroe, the 1950s sex symbol of the West, becomes a frozen artefact, a horrible, dead idol, a mask: На отличников боевой и политической подготовки стекает уже с экрана страшный, кондитерский запах смерти. А меня так от этой вечной Мерилин Монро уже просто тошнит!— просто передергивает и сводит челюсти от этих ее скачущих невозмутимых сисек, от этих ее толстых, заходящих одна за другую ног, от пергидрольной белизны неподвижных волос [. . .]. [Iur′ev 2000: 109] The gruesome cake shop’s scent of death flows down from the screen upon the boys who have aced the military and political training. Anyway, I’m already just sick of this eternal Marylin Monroe! It just makes me shudder and pulls my jaws shut, these unfeelingly bouncing tits of hers, her thick legs, one winding in front of the other, the peroxide blonde of her rigid hair [. . .]. The recurring glamorous image of Marilyn Monroe resembles the endlessly reproduced redacted images of the senile Soviet leaders:100 the representative faces of public life are frozen like mummies, announcing the imminent collapse of the outdated system. Thus, Chernenko’s death finds its media counterpart not only in his commemorative picture, which is posted on every corner, but also in the never-aging cult figure of the capitalist world during the Cold War. Similarly, the popular song Raskinulos′ more shiroko . . . becomes in the novel an empty form, a casing that is filled with new, largely inappropriate lines. The obsessive automatism of quoting sometimes is carried into parody: “Зараза-жиличка, сломала ты все, сказал кочегар кочегару . . .” [Iur′ev 2000: 98] (“The tenant sow, you smashed everything, the stoker said to the stoker .  .  .”). Vulgar proverbs and absurd rhymes complement the semantically and intertextually overloaded, associative, hermetic writing (see, for example, ibid.: 101). The texture of the novel is woven from serial or cyclical repetitions and variations, as it conveys the irrational, psychotic consciousness of the narrators, the impossibility of linear

100 C  ombined here are the literary reference to pop art, in particular, Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreen Marilyn Diptych (1962), which also symbolizes the moment of death and the medial reproduction of symbols, and to sots art.

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movement and the exhaustion of old semantic connections. The “broken,” repetitive text becomes an iconic mirror101 of historical reality. The doubling and mutual reflection of the narrative perspective(s) in the two parts of the novel reveal the “vacillation between different positions” and the “unsettling split of the ego” [Hausbacher 2006: 251], which Eva Hausbacher points out regarding postcolonial literary identities: “[. . .] a double or multiple personality [is a] paradigmatic motif of postcolonial literature,” accompanied by an “inescapable link between present and past” [ibid.]. Precisely the hybrid or— if one considers the two inner monologues as parts of a whole—split narrative perspective conveys different and differently limited ideas of the Russian (Soviet) Jewishness, which makes it impossible to give a fixed interpretation, either of the novel’s story or of the Jewish history. The play with discourses and historical as well as cultural (counter)facts, together with techniques such as irony, parody, and metafiction,102 reveal the tendency to deconstruct fixed narratives and forms, a general characteristic of postmodern and postcolonial writing. In fact, the object of the novel’s analysis is the “system of knowledge and representation”: “deconstruction itself [.  .  .] turns out to be a process of intellectual decolonization” [Bachmann-Medick 2010: 190].

11.2.4. Iakov Tsigel′man’s Postmodern Midrash: Shebsl the Musician The disappearance of the former cultural frame of reference and the living connection to the reader in East European Jewish literatures became the driving force for the creation of new poetics, in particular starting with the late 1980s. The situation in which the loss of historical memory and tradition became the main subject of literature produced, as I have already mentioned in the introduction to this book, different and at times contradictory tendencies— those towards archiving and documentation, on the one hand, and those towards imaginative compensation and sometimes radical reinvention, on the other. In this way, postmodern poetics with its palimpsest structure, eclecticism, 101 Th  is mirror is represented, for example, by the labyrinthine attic of the house: “[. . .] с ума съедешь, потеряешься” [Iur′ev 2000: 8] (“[. . .] you lose your mind, you’re lost”). In the same way, the readers lose themselves in the rhizome narrative structure of the novel, the poetics of which corresponds to the spatial metaphor of the “labyrinthine discourse” (see above the quotation from [Schmeling 1987]). 102 On the metafictional level, this is, first of all, the explanatory appendix to the novel. But a similar effect is produced by the self-deprecating intertextuality of the text as a whole, the mirror structure of the book, and the play with iconicity, which is characteristic of Iur′ev’s poetics.

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intertextual antipathos, authorial position dissolved in the texture, and its emphasized discursiveness becomes the trope of remembering. In doing so, this literature—not unlike the Jewish midrash—performs an exegesis of the past: it translates tradition into the idiom of the present. In the novel Shebsl-muzykant, published in 1996, Iakov Tsigel′man103 updates Jewish cultural heritage by staging its Talmudic interpretation. In an ironic, empathic, unembarrassed and passionate way, he reproduces the methods of Jewish hermeneutics while demonstrating that the traditional approach to Jewish culture and to centuries-old Hebrew scholarship can only completely fail today. However, the treasures of Jewish wisdom (not without irony) celebrated in the text set in motion the practice of cultural appropriation precisely because they speak in the novel the complex language of the present with its flickering signifiers and continually question their own dogmatic interpretation. Mikhail Vaiskopf notes in his review that Tsigel′man’s novel is written in the form of midrash, the scholarly comment on a fragment of the Tanakh [Vaiskopf 1999: 105]. The story about the musician Shebsl, which is told at the beginning of the text, consists of 271 parts, but many of them only contain one short sentence, so that the plot itself only takes twenty-two pages; and the remaining almost 300 (!) pages are commentaries on this story written by some interested, well-read Hasidic Jews seized by the spirit of the Talmudic dispute. The tendency of these rebbes to scrupulously interpret the textual details is one of the conventions of the genre: in the classic midrash, according to Leo Rosten, not only the scholars “but also engaged ‘laymen’ [.  .  .] [discovered] complicated meanings even in the simplest verses, in every point and comma of the Bible. [. . .] The midrash claims to understand the ‘spirit’ of this or that biblical fragment and to offer a non-obvious interpretation (which, however, is not often convincing)” [Rosten 2008: 375]. Tsigel′man plays with midrash, using its characteristic features such as “sophisticated analysis, retelling, and exegesis of the Scriptures” [ibid.: 374], as he makes his Jews discuss every little detail of the grotesque, sometimes uninterpretable story, with its mix of profane and mystical contents. Elements of the Talmudic doctrine and the Kabbalah, as well as detailed historical information about the world of the shtetl and about Jewish ethics are juxtaposed with lengthy explanations of insignificant everyday episodes, so that the line between seriousness and parody is blurred.

103 I akov Tsigel′man (1935–2018) grew up in Leningrad and lived there until he emigrated to Israel in 1974. In 1970–1971 he worked in Birobidzhan, the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Regions (on his Birobidzhan novel Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera see chap. 6.4).

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The text owes its artistic power precisely to this ambiguity: the ludic, humorous treatment of Jewish topics betrays the urge for an intellectual affirmative revolt. In contrast, the minute commentary and the numerous facts reveal the attitude of a cultural historian, a committed archaeologist of culture. This makes it clear that Jewish writing without historical comments is no longer possible and that Judaistic exegesis can reach today’s reader only if it succeeds in resurrecting the context of its appearance—the world of the exegetes. The sentences and paragraphs that make up the story (they are numbered as in Judaic texts) only occasionally come together to form a plot. Mostly, their order does not make any sense in terms of context or chronology. Tsigel′man’s idea to eschew a smooth syntagmatic structure is not simply an expression of the postmodern desire to break the illusion. He reveals in an interview: И как бы мне в руки попала история этого Шебсла. Но в книжке—лакуны, вытертые места, оборванные места в страницах и тому подобное. Поэтому этот текст и читается, мягко говоря, с удивлением: почему вдруг абзац обрывается? почему где-то всего одна строчка? А потому, что очень старая, потрепанная книжка, что-то из текста вырвано, вырезано, выдрано, выжжено . . . А теперь давайте попробуем восстановить. И мы пытаемся. . . . [Toporovskii 2010] It is as if the story of this Shebsl happened to fall into my hands. But in the book, some lines are unreadable, others are blurred, some pages are torn off, and so on. Therefore, you read this text, mildly put, with astonishment: Why does this paragraph suddenly end? Why is there only one line here? It’s because the book is very old and well-thumbed. Some parts have been torn out, cut out, burned . . . And now let’s try to reconstruct. And so we try. . . . In accordance with Tsigel′man’s declared intent, the novel reflects not only the structure, but also the historical fate of Jewish books—their materiality, the damage they suffered during their existence, and their finality. At the same time, thanks to the imagined lacunae, the author has the opportunity to recreate the features of the midrash in fiction: the borderless semantization of the text it interprets, and the principle of acontextual, associative, intertextually charged

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reading oriented towards working out the meaning.104 To comment also means to make assumptions, to supplement, and to continue what is written. Another clue in the above-cited interview concerns the genre of the novel: Существовал такой жанр литературы на идише—“майсэ бихл”, то есть “книжка историй”, можно так перевести. Эти книжки рассказывали жизненные, как говорится, истории, истории из жизни. Или это были какие-то фантастические истории вроде сказок. [Ibid.] There was a special genre in Yiddish literature—mayse bikhl, that is, a “book of stories,” as you can translate it. These books told, you might say, life stories, stories from life. Or maybe they were fantastic stories, like fairy-tales. Tsigel′man uses not only the elements of the literary canon, but also the broad possibilities provided by its offshoot—the Jewish folk story, the mayse—and connects scenes from everyday life with the Hasidic fantastic story—the Jewish fairy-tale, vunder-mayse. Ulf Diederichs, who published the first German edition of old Yiddish mayse (mayse-bukh), emphasizes in his preface the connection of the ma’assim with the “beginning of all Jewish storytelling in modern times,” they are “fed by Talmudic stories, the midrashim, and the Ashkenazi tradition” [Das Ma’assebuch 2003: 7–8]. The ma’assim originated from the aggada (Aramaic for “narration”)—“the general term for that part of the oral Torah, which does not contain normative doctrines or the laws of religion (halakha). The aggada includes the biblical interpretations produced by the rabbinic Judaism [. . .] as well as many midrashim. [. . .] The aggada is not authoritative, it is characterized by playful narrative imagination” [ibid.: 8]. Thus, Tsigel′man refers to the origins of Yiddish literature, which bear the spirit of the East European Jewish tradition and preserve the knowledge of the Jewish life. In Tsigel′man’s novel, the “playful narrative imagination” inherent in this tradition is congenially combined with the also playful aesthetics of postmodernism.105 Paradoxically, in the spirit of David Roskies’s “creative betrayal,” intellectual freedom and subversion make

104 O  n the interpretation of the Torah using the method called d(e)rash, see the introduction to this book. 105 In Tsigel′man’s novel, the Jewish practice of biblical interpretation is combined with the postmodern poetics of extensive fictitious commentary that continue telling the story, for example, in the footnotes to the text: cf. [Lunde 2006] on the “over-explicit, almost naïve, commentary” in Evgeny Popov’s Podlinnaia istoriia “Zelenykh muzykantov” (The true story

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possible the connection with the tradition and create an exciting dialogue with it. Tsigel′man took the figure of Shebsl and the chronotope of the old Kamnitz from Mayne zichroynes (My memories, 1913–1914) by Yekhezkel Kotik.106 In his memoirs, Kotik describes Kamnitz, his home shtetl, and dedicates some paragraphs to a certain vunder-klezmer called Shebsl: Derhoypt hobn zikh in yene tsaytn oysgetseykhnt di klesmer fun Kobrin mit reb Shebslen in der shpits, velkher hot nor keyn notn nit gekent. Nor er hot mit zayn shpiln gekont makhn, az der gantser oylem zol zikh tseveynen. Di ziskayt fun zayn shpiln iz eyn-leshaer. Der Shebsl iz gevorn aza mefursem, az es hot dergreykht zayn nomen biz Paskevitshn, dem poylnishn namestnik. Yener hot geshikt nokh im, un Shebsl hot geshpilt aleyn mit zayn fidl. Paskevitsh iz iberrasht gevorn un hot im forgeleygt zikh toyfn. Un bald hot er im gefregt tsi kon er shpiln oyf notn. Shebsl hot umshuldig geentfert: —Ikh kon nisht. —Nitshevo—hot im Paskevitsh ongepatsht in pleytse, ikh vel dikh oyslernen notn, nor du zolst zikh toyfn. Demolt hot shoyn reb Shebslen fardrosn, un er hot gezogt, az ven men zol im makhn far a firsht, volt er es oykh nisht gevolt. Paskevitsh hot im dokh opgekhaltn ba zikh dray teg. Ale ovnt flegt er farbetn tsu zikh di fornemste gest, un Shebsl hot geshpilt tsum mitog bam tish a tsvey, dray shoen.

of “The Green Musicians,” 1999) and in Viacheslav P′etsukh’s stories [ibid.: 75–79, here 78]; Lunde speaks of the cliches of the postmodern “footnote literature“ [ibid.: 79]. 106 Cf.: “Шебсл-музыкант кратко описан в книжке Иехезкеля Котика, которая называется ‘Зихройнэс’ (‘зихронот’—воспоминания). Эта книжка до недавнего времени была только на идише, недавно переведена на русский язык. Я когда-то делал переводы каких-то кусков для себя. А потом, копаясь в своих бумагах, нашел там своего героя, Шебсла, и краткую историю его встречи с царским наместником” [Toporovskii 2010] (“Shebsl the musician, was briefly described in Yekhezkel Kotik’s book called Zichroynes [zichronot—‘memories’]. This book was only available in Yiddish until the recent time when it was translated into Russian. I translated some passages once for myself. And then I found there, in my papers, my character Shebsl and the story of his meeting with the tsarist governor”).

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Keyn vayn, keyn shnaps hot Shebsl nisht gevolt ba im farzukhn, esn hot Paskevitsh geheysn brengen far im fun a idishn restoran. Az Paskevitsh hot derzen, az er kon mit im gornisht makhn, hot er im gegeben toyznt rubl mit a diplom, vu er hot geshribn, az Shebsl hot a getlikhn muzikalishn talent, nor er iz nisht gelernt. Bam gezegenen hot er im gezogt, az er volt im forgeshtelt dem keyser un Shebsl mit zayn familye voltn geven gliklekh, un efsher dos gantse folk Yisroel. Nor Shebsl hot zikh aroysgemakht and iz besholem avekgeforn. [Kotik 1922: 38–39] Back then, the klezmer from Kobrin became especially famous, and the first among them was Reb Shebsl, who could not read music but made the whole world cry with his playing. The sweet sounds of his playing cannot be described. Shebsl became so famous that his name worked its way through to Paskevitsh, the Russian governor of Poland. He sent for him and Shebsl played the violin for him. Paskevitsh was impressed and suggested to him to get baptized. And immediately he asked him if he could read music. Shebsl replied guiltily: “No, I can’t.” “That does not matter,” Paskevitsh tapped him on the shoulder, “I’ll have you taught, but you’ll have to get baptized.” At this point, Reb Shebsl felt upset and said he was not willing to do that even if he was made a prince. Nevertheless, Paskevitsh kept him for three days. Every evening he invited the most distinguished guests, and Shebsl played for two or three hours at their table during lunch. Shebsl did not want to taste any wine or any vodka at his place, and Paskevitsh had food brought for him from a Jewish restaurant. When Paskevitsh saw that he could not achieve anything with him, he gave Shebsl a thousand rubles and a diploma in which he wrote that Shebsl had a divine musical talent, even though he had not studied anywhere. When he left, he told him that he would like to introduce him to the tsar, so that Shebsl would live happily with his family, and with them perhaps the

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entire Jewish people. But Shebsl refused and drove home in peace. This episode forms the core out of which Tsigel′man’s mayse unfolds. At the same time, the fragment itself represents one type of the Jewish mayse, an edifying story in which a Jew knows how to assert his dignity, independence, and faithfulness to Judaism over the diaspora’s authorities. In the context of Kotik’s memoir, the episode has a significant ethical meaning because Kotik describes the countless humiliations and sufferings of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Surrounded by realistic episodes, this legend presents an ideal of Jewish steadfastness in the galut. Added to it is the motif of extraordinary talent, which is incompatible with secular, non-Jewish categories—here, the professional course of study in music. The Hasidic provenance of this mayse, in which the effect of music eludes human rationality and marks the relationship to God, cannot be overlooked. Jewish and non-Jewish values stand here in a sharp contrast. Iakov Tsigel′man develops this Hasidic pretext in the age when the internal Jewish perspective of Yekhezkel Kotik’s narrator has already become part of the historical past. Tsigel′man’s authorial perspective, which is hidden behind a plurality of voices, alternates between proximity and distance to these voices. This perspective, in which the historical approach is combined with lively, almost nostalgic participation, is also expressed in the specific axiological way of representation of the situation he describes: the low social position of the Jews in the Russian Empire after the division of Poland (cf. the expression “имперская колониальная политика” [Tsigel′man 1996: 35] [“imperial colonial policy”]), their trials and persecutions are represented with many details and facts, and, at the same time, in the center of attention are the ethical alterity of the (then) not assimilated Jews—above all, their equanimity towards the secular authority structures, as in Kotik’s pretext. The latter comes to light, for example, in the explanation that the secular concept of honor does not exist in Jewish languages [ibid.: 38] or about the economic activity of Jews in the diaspora in response to enforced restrictions [ibid.: 86]. The novel tells about a famous klezmer Reb Shebsl, who lived in a shtetl in Kamnitz, and how the great general Ivan Paskevich107 sent for him. The first paragraph quotes the corresponding episode from Kotik’s memoirs almost literally: “1. И был реб Шебсл, камницкий клезмер, так знаменит, что слава

107 I van Fedorovich Paskevich, a historical figure, was awarded the title of the Prince of Warsaw by the Russian emperor Nicholas I because he put an end to the Polish uprising in 1831.

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его, посетив все местечки края, дошла и до покорителя Польши, Паскевичанаместника. И Паскевич-наместник послал за Шебслом своего мешуреса” [Tsigel′man 1996: 3] (“1. And Reb Shebsl, the klezmer from Kamnitz, was so famous that his name was heard in all the shtetls in the region. It was also heard by the conqueror of Poland, Paskevich the governor. And Paskevich the governor sent his meshures [aide] to bring Shebsl to him”). Imitating the communicative structure of oral Jewish “internal” narration, the narrator immediately has the reader join the community of fictional neighbors and acquaintance from the shtetl, in which Jews are addressed by their nicknames and professions, and news spread at lightning speed: 2. Мешурес Паскевича еще только начал скакать, пыль столбом, а к Шебслу эта новость уже пришла в туфлях Шимкеводовоза, который получил ее из туфлей Дудке-коробейника, куда она поступила от Хацкеля-жестянщика, получившего сведения от Авремеле-лекаря. Авремеле-лекарь сам слышал про это от Хаимке-мамзера, который болтался во дворе, когда мешурес Паскевича садился в карету. [Ibid.: 3] 2. Paskevich’s meshures has just started riding, the dust rising in columns around him, when this news came to Shebsl in the shoes of Shimke the water carrier, who got it from the shoes of Dudke the peddler, where it came from Hatskele the tinsmith who received the information from Avremele the healer. And Avremele the healer heard it from Haimke the mamser who was hanging around in the yard when Paskevich’s meshures got into the carriage. The closed world of the shtetl and the insider position of the narrator are staged using the Jewish terms meshures and mamser as if they did not require an explanation as well as Yiddish phraseology: the message comes in the shoes of the shtetl residents. The mild humor of this description evokes the intertextuality of Mendele and Tevye—and with them, the almost folkloristic representations of the Jewish world. The translation and explanation do not follow immediately: only several pages later, in their commentaries to the text, the rebbes tell how the “Jewish slipper post” originated and worked in the diaspora [ibid.: 25]. The highly talented musician Shebsl is to show himself to His Excellency and later play at a wedding. Paskevich sends his meshures to the remote shtetl of Kamnitz with an order to bring Shebsl to Varshe (Yiddish for “Warsaw”).

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From the short chapters we learn about the behavior of the Kossacks who are accompanying the meshures: they laugh at Yoske the innkeeper and do not pay him for the food. The scenery changes several times: for example, the text describes a ball game in the gallant Polish aristocratic society and abruptly introduces completely new protagonists such as the Countess Branitskaia or the Adjutant Balashov. The epic narrative style is mixed with naive amateur rhymes such as “Слуга Камилл был очень мил” [ibid.: 5] (“the servant Hood was very good”), and some passages evoke the absurd poetics of Daniil Kharms: “23. Мешурес Паскевича поднял левую бровь” [ibid.: 4] (“23. Paskevich’s meshures raised his left eyebrow”) or “240. Долгожительница Надя служила здесь портовой крысой” [ibid.: 21] (“240. The aged Nadya was here in service as a harbor rat”). In the end, the numbered passages are more and more often reduced to unfinished and therefore enigmatic sentences such as “А Шебсл вышел в рощу и увидел” [ibid.: 16] (“And Shebsl went out into the grove and he saw”), “И Шебсл бросил” [ibid.] (“And Shebsl threw”), or “И было” [ibid.] (“And it was”). According to the author’s intention, such fragments mark the textual lacunae,108 but they also parody the endless semantic potency of the Scriptures. The microcosm of the shtetl—the Jewish customs, the language, and the cycle of religious life—is revived in the episodes of the celebrating the Sabbath evening and in the ritual linguistic formulas, which remain, once again, untranslated, such as “Likht benchn! Benchn likht!” (“Make light” or “Light candles!”) or “Gut shabes!” (“Good Sabbath!”) [ibid.: 9]. Already at the beginning of the story, Shebsl is presented as a magician, a Teacher, and a Hasidic tzaddik, which makes a big impression on the young meshures. He observes, for example, how Shebsl’s hands start shimmering, filling the room with a golden and blue flame [ibid.: 11–12]. Just by being there, Shebsl makes the meshures suddenly feel shame and give Yoske the innkeeper an appropriate payment for receiving his retinue. A bizarre, fantastic journey follows, the course is only partially explained to the reader from later commentaries. Incredible events happen: mythical animals speak; a dragon devours the carriage; a philosophical dispute between the crocodile and the bull named Sho ha-Bor (actually, the transformed badkhen Todros) ends with

108 Th  e short section “142. А Шебсл уж вступил” [ibid.: 150] (“142. And Shebsl already entered”) is interpreted by the masterful commentator Reb Dovidl as follows: “[. . .] куда он вступил? Он вступил в отношения с кричавшими ‘Стой!’” [ibid.] (“[. . .] where did he enter? He entered into a relationship with those who shouted ‘Stop!’”). Not only is an action freely invented here, but the verb “to enter” (vstupit′) is assigned a figurative meaning—a zeugma is created. Similarly, entire lines of reasoning in the commentaris are based on connotations, allusions, or intertextual analogies (see, for example, [Tsigel′man 1996: 158]).

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a battle;109 the travelers discover a tribe of warlike red-faced Jews—the lost tribes of Israel, who despise the European Jews and their diaspora existence.110 Unknown figures perform strange actions: “255. Князь Чак откинул жемчужный полог” (“255. Prince Chak pushed the pearl veil aside”) or “260. Марго вязала колдовские сети” (“260. Margo wove the magic nets”) [ibid.: 22]. The story seems more and more irrational; obscure allegories cannot always be deciphered even after detailed explanations; and the commentaries often don’t interpret the story any more, but continue it. The narrative is made more complex by the inclusion of numerous intertextual codes, which either presuppose a profound knowledge of the Jewish sources or refer to nonexisting texts. At that, sentences or groups of sentences apparently constitute representative fragments of various literary genres such as adventure, romantic, or aristocratic novel, oriental fairy-tale, chivalric novel, battle epic, mystical fable, and finally their proto-text, the Bible—a “refined ‘patchwork’ of textual ingredients” as Dagmar Burkhart defined the postmodern Russian pastiche, in particular, in Vladimir Sorokin’s texts [Burkhart 1999: 14]. Intertextuality here appears as a series of “agrammatisms,” to use Michael Riffaterre’s term, which disrupt the surface of the text and can only be deciphered with the identification of another text, linked to the first one by the foreign “intertextual body” [Riffaterre 1977: 97]. Tsigel′man’s agrammatisms are often a result of a switch between stylistic codes (on stylistic interference indicating a quote see [Plett 1985: 85]). At the same time, the mismatched parts of the text are nothing more than a series of literary cliches that ridicule the genres to which they allude. Cf. “224. Предметом его захватывающей страсти стала Дашенька, падчерица графа-наместника” [Tsigel′man 1996: 20] (“224. Dashen′ka, the stepdaughter 109 Th  e high density of miraculous events parodies the plot of a Hasidic vunder-mayse with its spiritual and entertaining narraton. For example, when Shebsl flies into the count’s office, the count transforms into a Buddhist deity, is enveloped by a cloud, and then Shebsl begins to shine [ibid.: 259]. 110 The image of the red-faced Menashe ben-Yosef from the lost tribes of Israel, whom the travelers encounter during their journey, is an ironic allusion to the new Israeli military discourse and the type of the “muscle Jew.” At the same time, Menashe has features of a crude Russian Ivan or a folklore warrior. He wears a fur cap and a belt with a lion’s head, and holds in his hand a steel pitchfork; wild animals and reptiles hide from his voice. He praises his tribe’s heroic victories over the pagan enemies that surround the red-faced Jews on all sides, and tries to persuade Shebsl and his companions to leave the pitiful diaspora existence and stay with them. However, Shebsl rejects the offer to be “healed.” The dispute between Menashe and Shebsl evokes the two concepts of Jewish history that have been competing since the emergence of Zionism: the life in time (in the Jewish diaspora with its hope for salvation) and the life in space (gathering in the Holy Land and the abolition of the sacral time), see [ibid.: 53]. In the end, Menashe defeats the dragon and saves the travelers’ horses: at the very least, this mutual help testifies to Jewish solidarity.

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of the count governor, became the subject of his overwhelming passion”) or “81. Весь облик графа выразил отчаяние” [ibid.: 10] (“81. The whole figure of the count expressed despair”). The metafictional, surreal character of these fragments gains some psychological support from the motif of the dream that pervades the entire story (the protagonists fall asleep and dream again and again).111 In the end, Shebsl dies a tragic death in the fight with evil embodied in the figure of a “robber nihilist” who is not able to believe in the living miracle. The historical and cultural dimension of Tsigel′man’s text becomes apparent or, better to say, is added only in the commentaries, because the highly educated exegetes are largely concerned with throwing light on the habits of Jewish life in the shtetl, the organization of the Jewish community, Jewish manners, customs, and ethics, as well as Judaistic concepts. For example, they discuss the meaning of the words klezmer, bal-krie, oylem, or balabatim, the difference between the understanding of the universe in Greek philosophy and Jewish worldview, the Jewish religious hygiene laws, the prejudices against Jewish innkeepers in Eastern Europe, or the definition of ekphrasis by Aphthonios of Antioch. The commentaries also include a detailed recipe for the preparation of a poppy-seed strudel [ibid.: 32–33], interesting facts concerning the history of drinking water supply in Europe [ibid.: 44], or about Italian wines [ibid.: 62–63]. The text shows a multilingualism that includes not only Russian but also Polish, Ukrainian, French, and especially Yiddish and Hebrew elements. Thus, Shebsl returns from shakhres (morning prayer) [ibid. 1996: 25], he is well again after the rosh-khodesh (the first day of the month in the Jewish lunar calendar) [ibid.: 26], the voice of the melamed (teacher) is coming from kheder (primary school) [ibid.: 27]. The simulated naturalness of using these terms seems to make the need for cultural translation superfluous, because the scholars and, with them, the author presuppose the corresponding knowledge of the reader. Included in the Russian text are characteristic Yiddish particles: “[. . .] чего он стоит, эпэс?” [ibid.: 26] (“[. . .] why is he standing there, epes [nothing/what on earth]?”); “Весьма возможно! Давке! . .” [ibid.: 50] (“That’s very possible! Davke [that’s it]! . . .”). Hebrew expressions in turn lead to the principles of Jewish religious 111 In their attempt to analyze the dreams of the protagonists of the mayse, the rebbes refer to medical knowledge, the Freudian dream interpretation, Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, the brain researchers Robert McCarley and J. Allan Hobson (incorrectly cited in Russified spelling in Latin letters as “Gobson”), Judaistic treatises, and especially the Kabbalah [ibid.: 230–233]. At an earlier point, the commentators accuse the author of having stolen the dream motif from Jorge Luis Borges. In response, the author claims that he has never read Borges [ibid.: 76]. The reference to Borges and his texts connects the dream discourse with the practice of intertextuality, and at the same time with the practice of the Jewish exegesis known as d(e)rash, another fundamental pretext of the novel.

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ethics, so that language is revealed to the reader as a part of the cultural universe that has once existed in the past: “Обманывать гоя—это хилул а-Шем! Нельзя использовать для своей торговой выгоды ошибки нееврея!” [ibid.: 49] (“To cheat the goy is chilul ha-Shem [profanation of the name of God]! It is inadmissible to use the faults of a non-Jew for one’s own trading profit”). Other Hebrew expressions refer to the practice of Talmudic interpretation, more precisely to the halakhic exegesis, for example: “Ихо ле-мифрах! И возражу вам [. . .]” [ibid.: 61] (“Ika l’mifrach [this term means the transfer of halakhic laws from one case or object to a similar one]! I will object [. . .]”). And also in: “Ал тикрей—‘стук’, читай—‘стук’!” [ibid.: 160] (“Al tikrei [do not read]—‘knock,’ read—‘knock’!”).112 The last quotation is a parodic tautology: the correct and incorrect readings are indistinguishable. Not only do the Yiddish and Hebrew expressions often remain untranslated or uninterpreted, but Russian words are sometimes translated into Yiddish or Hebrew by way of explanation: “‘Суббота’—что это? Это шабес” [ibid.: 98] (“‘Saturday’—what is that? That is shabes”); “Сказал р. Довидл:—Бастард— что это? Это мамзер” [ibid.: 83] (“And R. Dovidl said: Bastard—what is that? That is a mamser”); “Доносчик означает ‘мосер’” [ibid.: 60] (“‘informer” means moser”); “Вот что значит ‘Уже?’! ‘Уже?’ значит ‘Шойн?’” [ibid: 43] (“But what does ‘already?’ mean?” ‘Already?’ means ‘Shoyn?’”). But here, too, the author is at liberty to add variations—the liberty to either provide the translation to the reader or withhold it. The text is full of double designations such as “парнасим-попечители” (“parnassim the curators”), “тувим-почетные граждане” (“tuvim the honorary citizens”), “габоим-старосты” (“gaboim the community elders”) [ibid.: 53]. In addition, the complex phenomenon of translation itself becomes a subject of reflection. When reb Moishe Treister comments on the translation of the phrase “ойб ду вилст, рук зих цу” [ibid.: 51] (“oyb du vilst, ruk zikh tsu”— literally, “if you want, get closer,” but here meaning “if necessary, we can work something out”), he refers to the untranslatable nuances of Yiddish language and communication, which humorously reflect features of the Jewish mentality— in this case, the habit of saying things indirectly. The discussion about the difficulties of adequate translation is followed by a comment that explains the natural multilingualism of Jewish narratives (another sign of self-referentiality):

112 “ The midrashic Hebrew concept al-tikrei means literally ‘don’t read,’ which is an abbreviation of the sentence ‘don't read (the text) like this, but through a switching or changing the letters in the biblical text read the verse or word in a different way with a different intent.’ There are about 180 al-tikreis in the talmudic and midrashic literature” [Rotenberg 2009: 29].

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“В общем-то, евреи часто хорошо знали языки. Ввиду участия в международной торговле” [ibid.: 50] (“In general, Jews often spoke foreign languages well. Due to participation in the world trade”). In this way, historical features of European Jewry become a part of the novel’s metafictional poetics. The far-reaching Jewish knowledge of the ficticious interpreters produces numerous references to the Tanakh, the Mishnah and the Gemara and particularly to texts of the Jewish mystic teaching, that is, Kabbalah. At that, halakhic laws and aggadic traditions are applied even to the smallest details of the narrated story, sometimes adding the history of the interpretation of a concept. For example, just to explain the boastful pose of the badkhen Todros, the rabbis use the tractates on humility from the Torah portion Shoftim ( Judges), the Mishnaic tractates Nedarim (Vows) and Sota (literally, “Unfaithful wife”) and on ridicule from the book of Isaiah, the book of Mishlei (Proverbs) and the Mishnaic tractate Avoda Zara (Idolatry) [ibid.: 79–80]. In addition, they relate the mayse about the obedient woman from the tractate Nedarim.113 The slow walk of the shtetl Jews on their return from the synagogue on Sabbath is explained using the interpretation of the creation in the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) and the midrash Bereshit Rabba [ibid.: 104]. In some cases, the accumulation of quotations, Hasidic parables, and supercommentaries makes the exegetes forget the original text (see [ibid.: 233–239]). However, the central position in the novel is given to Hasidic-kabbalistic stories and interpretations. The Sabbath candles lit by Shebsl’s wife Rokhl reveal the power of the good (white) and evil (dark) fire [ibid.: 98–99]. The intervals between the notes in Shebsl’s music express the divine order of the celestial bodies [ibid.: 278–279], and his shining hands convey the sacred meaning of the Hebrew letters and their connection with the parts of the human body and human qualities [ibid.: 118–120]. Stories about the rabbi of Lublin and the Magid of Zloczew114 together with the sayings of Ba’al Shem Tov explain why 113 See this story in [Das Ma’assebuch 2003: 297–298]. 114 The list of the tzaddikim—the spiritual teachers of the Hasidim—who come from neighboring or distant regions to attend an important event also indicates the internal Jewish perspective that understands geography using the Jewish holy places. Cities and shtetls became wellknown among Jews and acquired a special character precisely for the reason that spiritual “teachers” lived in these places or visited them, and thus also as sites of different traditions or schools of Hasidism. See the following speech gestures: “Приехал Турийский ребе со своей свитой хасидов! Турийские хасиды замкнуты, угрюмы и необщительны! [.  .  .] Вот Чернобыльский ребе приехал! [. . .] Едет Оcтрожский ребе! Он поражает своим молитвенным пафосом! [. . .] И Миропольский цадик едет! [. . .] Вот он, Бердичевский ребе, ходатай пред Всевышним за каждого еврея и за всех евреев вместе!” [Tsigel′man 1996: 221] (“Here comes the Turiisk Rebbe with his Hasidic retinue! The Turiisk Hasids are reticent, grim, and uncommunicative! [.  .  .] Now the Chernobyl′ Rebbe has arrived!

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Paskevich’s meshures had to go on alone, without Shebsl [ibid.: 238–239]. Filth and humiliation—following the Hasidic interpretation of the divine—lead to an edifying fairy-tale by Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav. Struggling to get out of the stinking mud, in which they have fallen on their way through a cave,115 Shebsl and Todros tell each other the story [ibid.: 163–165], in which the knowledgeable reader recognizes Rabbi Nachman’s tale of “The Lost Princess.” Its much-cited finale promises a mysterious release and the return to one’s own or to the right way (teshuva): “И он вывел ее! А как вывел—не поведал! В конце же—вывел ее!” [ibid.: 168] (“And he led her out! But how he led her out, he did not reveal! But in the end, he led her out!”). The exegetes agree on the kabbalistic interpretation of this story, according to which the sons of the tsar symbolize six of the ten divine sefirot, the tsar’s daughter is the Shekhinah, and the evil empires are the downside of the world, Sitra Achra. The disappearance of the princess means the exile of the Shekhinah in the galut after the shvirat ha-kelim (the breaking of the sefirot vessels in the Lurianic Kabbalah) [ibid.: 166]. A similar interpretation of this tale is offered by David Roskies [1995: 33–35]. Rabbi Nachman’s kabbalistic reading corresponds, as Roskies explains, to the level of sod (literally, “secret”), the highest, mystical reading (of a sacred text) in the PaRDeS system: “Read as sod, kabbalistically, the Tales do double duty. For each cruel reversal on earth, for every arduous quest, there is a corresponding drama enacted simultaneously in the upper realms, and the two are mutually dependent. The tales are about worlds in collision and the forces of good and evil fighting it out. Each individual motif is the derivative of the divine configuration of sefirot, while the sum of the plot recapitulates—in whole or in part—the Lurianic myth of tsimtsum, shevirah, and tikkun” [ibid.: 32]. Apart from the chance to immerse into the history of the Jewish narrative art and exegesis and recount their paradigmatic works, Rabbi Nachman’s inserted tale is reflected back on the novel itself, with its excessive, eclectic intertext that ironically reproduces the practice of borrowing foreign plots and motfs in Yiddish folk books: “As for the Mayse-bukh itself, [. . .] a third [of the tales] were thinly disguised legends and novellas of international provenance [. . .]”

[. . .] The Ostrog Rebbe is coming! He overwhelms with the pathos of his prayers! [. . .] And the Miropol′ Tzaddik is coming! [.  .  .] And there he is, the Berdichev Rebbe, who advocates before the Creator for every Jew and for all Jews together!”). In this list of typical characteristics of various Hasidic centers, which looks like a playbill, one can also find an outsider’s ethnographic perspective (see below). 115 This episode may have been inspired by Benjamin the Third’s parodic journey to the Promised Land—see Sholem-Yankev (Yakob) Abramovich’s (Mendele Moicher Sforim) picaresque novel Masa’ot Binyamin ha-Shelishi (The travels of Benjamin the third).

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[Roskies 1995: 24]. The fantastic journey of the protagonists with its many bizarre events, which effectively come from different narrative sources, inherits features typical of a vunder-mayse, which absorbs world literature motifs and transforms them into a characteristic Jewish plot. The Judaized motifs borrowed from world folklore and literature that are found in Tsigel′man’s text include such “transgressive” travelers’ adventures as the crossing of the River Sambation and the encounter with the ten lost tribes of Israel: “[. . .] the vunder-mayse told of magic potions that changed a person’s face; of young men who turned into birds; of travelers who crossed the Sambatyon River to the Jewish Neverland wherein resided the Ten Lost Tribes; of seduction and abduction; of marriages made in heaven that were frustrated on earth” [Roskies 1995: 28]. Like the fairy tales by Rabbi Nachman and like all sforim (holy books, cf. [Roskies 1995: 30]), the volume of the book grows many times over with the addition of later commentaries. Not least, the novel demonstrates the long-lost multiculturality of the preRevolutionary Jews, while exposing the lack of the relevant knowledge of the potential reader. The Judaistic reconstruction work expected by the reader is hard to accomplish due to an immense wealth of sources, and the internal position of the midrash interpreter is, again, a game, because the rabbis obviously live in our time and can hardly be a part of this half-forgotten world, much less they can presuppose a knowledgeable reader. They quote Michel Foucault, Sergei Averintsev, Olga Freidenberg, Sigmund Freud, and other modern thinkers as Jewish and even rabbinical authorities, transforming the whole world into a Jewish universe:116 “Сказал р. Авром-Янкев:—Сказал М. Фуко: [. . .] Сказал р. Хаимке [. . .]” [ibid.: 29] (“R. Avrom-Jankev said: “M. Foucault said, [. . .]” R. Khaimke said [. . .]”).117 The confusion of various sources adds a comical effect as well as a certain arbitrariness of the resulting meanings. The juxtaposition of chivalric novel, cultural studies paper, and Talmudic commentary, with Jewish everyday jargon and Kabbalistic esotericism produces

116 Th  is implies more than simply a postmodern playing with cultural discourses: here, too, Tsigel′man evokes a specific feature of the Jewish mentality. Leonid Livak [2010: 282–283] cites an anecdote in which the Galician Rabbi Khaes learns of Goethe’s death and reads the Kaddish for “Reb Goethe” in the synagogue: “The gist of the anecdote lies in the appropriation of a Gentile cultural icon by a traditional Jewish community on its own terms [. . .].” 117 These quotes are sometimes invented; see the extensive “quote” from Michel Foucault that parodies the intricate writing style of the French philosopher. At the same time, Foucault is also credited with a naive sentence that resembles an ancient maxim: “В природе должна господствовать непрерывность” [Tsigel′man 1996: 29] (“There should be continuity in nature”).

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a text that does not only expose the illusory nature of fiction, but also ironically anticipates its literary analysis or professional criticism: Сказал р. Гдалье: —Поток цитат плохо привязан к тексту! [.  .  .] Автор выглядит площе собственного текста! Прием умнее автора! Не автор подчиняет себе прием, но прием подчиняет автора! [Tsigel′man 1996: 29] R. Gdal′e said: “The flow of quotes is very loosely bound to the text! [.  .  .] The author seems to be more shallow than his text! The method is smarter than the author! It is not the author who dominates the method, but the method that dominates the author!” Here, “postmodernist poetics,” which could be a suitable category for the analysis of the novel, itself becomes the target of mocking (meta)reflection: Reb Gdal′e, who is always nagging the text and the other commentators, mentions that the author has written “псевдокомментарий, который должен создать постмодернистскую ситуацию” [ibid.: 50] (“a pseudocommentary that is supposed to create a postmodernist situation”).118 He also criticizes the excessive explanations [ibid.: 34], the elevation of artistic method to a cult [ibid.: 86], and the love of intertextual effects: “Эта установка автора на нагромождение эффектных раскавыченных цитат мне решительно не нравится! Это самоцель!” [ibid.: 89] (“I really do not like the author’s strategy of piling up provocative quotations without using quotation marks! It becomes an end in itself!”). The textual debates relevant for the 1990s are again and again intertwined with the old task of Jewish hermeneutics: И все-таки мне кажется, что комментарий автора распадается на три части: истинный комментарий, объясняющий и углубляющий действие, затем идет псевдокомментарий, который должен создать постмодернистскую ситуацию, и чистая тавтология, где фиксируется очевидное. [Tsigel′man 1996: 50]

118 Th  is artistic “self-unmasking” of the literary text can be described as “irony regarding fiction,” which consists in “engaging the reader in the ambivalent game” [Wolf 1993: 236] on the border between fact and fantasy.

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And yet it seems to me that the author’s commentary consists of three parts: the true commentary that explains and deepens the fabula, then the pseudocommentary, which is supposed to create a postmodern situation, and the pure tautology, which records the obvious. Reb Gdal′e here attempts, in a modified form, to apply the criteria of the classic PaRDeS typology that distinguishes, in the orthodox Jewish interpretation of the Torah texts, four levels of understanding the Torah. However, the hierarchically structured levels of approaching the meaning of the Scriptures are transferred to the contemporary text and therefore defamiliarized. In Tsigel′man’s poststructuralist exegesis, even the characters of the mayse (such as the klezmer Shebsl or the badkhen Todros) become, in a metaleptic way,119 co-interpreters of the text: in the commentary, the remarks of the characters stand next to those of the exegetes, and the latter exchange their views with the former—a “prohibited” diffusion of narrative levels (see [ibid.: 161]), which produces a “destabilization of the ontological boundaries” [Wolf 1993: 349]. Literary illusion is also violated on another level: the rabbis discuss the (unfortunate) position of their own “maker,” the author and give the reader of the novel some useful advice: “Если читатель не понимает, читая прочитанное, он должен найти себе друга, читая с которым и обсуждая прочитанное, он мог бы соображать” [Tsigel′man 1996: 246] (“If the reader does not understand while reading what he is reading, he should find a friend with whom he can read together and discuss what they have read, and thus grasp it”). In the potentially infinite chain of reception, the ideal reader is also imagined as a ( Jewish) exegete of the novel, reproducing the situation of a Talmudic dispute. To demonstrate their theoretical expertise, the learned Jews refer to themselves the postulates of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault: Сказал р. Довидл: —Дело в том, что нас слишком много! [. . .] Не справляется с нами автор! Сказал р. Рувн: —И прекрасно, что не справляется! Зачем ему с нами справляться? Автор—это одно, а мы—это другое. [Tsigel′man 1996: 82] R. Dovidl said: 119 On the use of the term “metalepsis” (métalepse) cf. [Genette 1972: 244 f.].

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“The thing is we’re too many! [. . .] The author cannot cope with us!” R. Ruvn said: “And it’s a wonderful thing that he cannot cope with us! Why should he cope with us? The author is one thing, but we are another.” Different levels of the narrative120—the intradiegetic, the extradiegetic (according to Genette), and the extratextual—merge, overlap, and exchange places; and the lines between subject and object, text and metatext, writing and its exegesis, and finally between text and reality are removed once and for all. But it is precisely here that the method of deconstruction with its negation of the autonomous authorial position meets the Jewish practice of midrashic interpretation. Reb Dovidl describes both of them when he says: “Текст рождает комментарий, а комментарий часто и есть сам текст” [ibid.: 48] (“The text produces the commentary, but the commentary is often the text itself ”). Daniel Boyarin, who has discussed the affinity of midrashic and aggadic interpretation to the practices of literary writing and intertextuality121 (see the introduction to this book), considers the mutual penetration of the primary and secondary levels of interpretation to be the central feature of Jewish hermeneutics: “The Torah, owing to its own intertextuality, is a severely gapped text, and the gaps are there to be filled by strong readers [. . .]” [Boyarin 1990: 16]. In his novel, Tsigel′man stages the Jewish identity, about the lack of which Shimon Markish has complained regarding contemporary authors. Tsigel′man demonstrates that, today, “authentic” Jewish point of view can only be the object of an estranged, quoting, metafictional writing, fantasy, and cultural commentary. The auhor’s position here is characterized by special ambivalence, and the discrepancy between the inside and the outside is largely expressed by the fact that the recreated world of the Jewish past is actually an object of historical writing: Hasidic magic fairy-tales, quoted in full length, extensive quotations from Hebrew prayers, meticulously described Jewish dance called freylekhs (cf. [Tsigel′man 1996: 228–229]), or the complete recipe for a Jewish strudel demonstrate the (auto)ethnographic perspective of the Jewish writer as a cultural archaeologist in contemporary “posthuman” situation.

120 O  n “contamination of fiction levels”—a “narrative short circuit”—with examples from contemporary English-language prose see [Wolf 1993: 349–372]. 121 See the introduction into the so-called intertextual method of biblical exegesis, which was established some decades ago under the influence of poststructuralism, in [Seiler 2006].

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But instead of recreating a coherent and consistent story, this (pseudo) Talmudic exegesis produces a potentially infinite mosaic of further and further plots. This postulates a general openness of (each) subject for possible—even apparently profane—pretexts and interpretations, which the Jewish tradition playfully connects with global cultural heritage. The meaning of the novel itself eludes a binding, coherent interpretation. The reader (once more playing the role of an exegete) might conclude that the author frees his protagonist, the Jewish wonder klezmer from Kamnitz, from the power of the cruel historical reality: art, skill, and talent are able to stall, for a short time, the brutal mechanism of power in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Shebsl dies, but only to ascend to higher spheres. Here the novel continues not only the Hasidic tradition of storytelling, but also its well-known literary version in Isaac Leib Peretz’s prose cycles Folkstimlikhe Geshikhten and Khasidish (Folk stories and Hasidic stories). In Peretz’s works, musical subjects have a key position: the Hasidic belief in the creative power of music works miracles and brings people closer to the Lord. However, joy is closely connected with mourning in the Jewish culture. Thus, Shebsl’s violin transforms the world and tells about the tragic fate of the people of Israel: “И невидимый голос поет о разрушенном Храме, о бесприютности Шехины, о разогнанном народе” [Tsigel′man 1996: 225] (“And an invisible voice sings of the Temple in ruins, of the homelessness of the Shekhinah, of the dispersed people”). Like a Talmudist student who has conceived a brilliant trick, the author simulates the infinity, incompleteness, and redundancies of the interpretation of the (holy) text. He humorously recreates the atmosphere of a Talmudic dispute, during which the highly educated, quarrelsome, and at the same time somewhat naive Jews, for whom nothing in this world is without importance, enjoy the process together with their author and reader. Tsigel′man puts up a performance reinventing the Talmudic commentary: a postmodern midrash (over)loaded with global cultural heritage is born before the reader’s eyes. The polysemantic text of the novel can be described as a literary counterpart of the deconstructivist theory of the midrash because Tsigel′man purposefully destroys the borders between the text and the metatext. The radical unbounding of Jewish tradition marks the end of the traditional heritage with its exclusive rabbinic authority and, at the same time, opens this tradition to contemporary intellectual discourses: “So it is, we might say, with the midrashic exegeses of Rabbi Akiva, Reb Derrida, Reb Kermode; as with Reb Milton, Reb Agnon, Reb Borges: pseudepigrapha all” [Hartman/Budick: xi].122 The Jewish shtetl is made 122 Cf. this quote in the introduction.

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accessible and reimagined by means of multilingualism, which demonstrates the very process of cultural translation as well as its failure: the commentary always has a tendency to become parody. The hybrid texts by Mikhail Iudson, Oleg Iur′ev, and Iakov Tsigel′man work with discursive cultural practices and oscillate between tragedy and humor. Their poetics frames the loss of tradition as well as the possibility of performative connection to the past. From different perspectives, but always with the help of similar narrative methods, these authors reflect on the historical fate of East European Jews during the time of Jewish posthistory. However, it is not only the morbid staging of antisemitic discourses and rhetorics that makes up this literature, but above all the inclusion of museified, folklore, or (pseudo)ethnographic forms of Jewish culture. These texts reinvent tradition as they represent the connection between memory and forgetting that characterizes Jewish life today—a disrupted continuity. The dialectic of loss and persistence finds its expression in the dominant practices of metatextuality and intertextuality: both prove the impossibility of the former connection to Jewishness; and both allow to understand Jewishness as part of the living present.

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The new interest in memorial reconstruction and reinvention of Jewishness in Europe and the United States after the Second World War and the Holocaust also brought forth a remarkable cultural production in the (former) communist countries of Eastern Europe. The literature of the last few decades has played a significant role in the creation of emancipatory myths of tradition based on the model of unity and “restorative nostalgia.”1 Next, the image of Soviet Jews—the product of the “collective imaginary”—and the phenomenon of Jewish mimicry explain the specifics of the knowledge about Jews in Russia after decades of assimilation. In the course of Sovietization, these facts presupposed the dialectics of Jewish counter-culture in the Soviet underground and in emigration, which I discussed in the first chapters of this book. The Jewish counter-canon with its conception of an ethno-cultural minority and alternative religiosity appears in the Soviet Union starting from the 1960s, despite political and cultural (half-)prohibitions—and also thanks to them. Its ideas enriched literature above all on political and philosophical levels—the result of an intense study of Judaism in the intellectual circles of the underground, whose members grew up with the values of Russian and European

1 In Western Europe and North America, this attitude corresponds, among other things, to the nostalgic narrative of prewar life in the shtetls.

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cultures. This process that can be described as a neo-Judaization of Jewish culture. To a different extent, it influenced such writers as David Shrayer-Petrov, Efraim Baukh, Eli Liuksemburg, David Markish, and Feliks Kandel′. In exodus prose, genres such as the European educational novel or the Russian roman prozreniia (the novel of enlightenment) are infused with Jewish topics and intertextuality. In addition, the temporal and sometimes spatial position of the authors inside the communist regime is evident in the structural dependence of their texts on the canon of socialist realism. Plot and character systems, taken from the narrative-morphological repertoire of the canon, are transformed and enriched, symbols are exchanged, and (religious) ideas transposed to another teleology. Jewish aliyah literature confirms the thesis of the dissidents’ reproducing the discursive conventions of the authority. However, as I have demonstrated in this book, not all axes of nonconformist Jewish literature by far point in one direction. Its stylistic repertoire is rather heterogeneous: it includes journalistic writing, factography, mystical fantasy and lyrical essays (Vol′dman, Kandel′, Aleshkovskii). Analyzed texts join the stream of late Soviet cultural reinventive plots that reform or subvert the socialist realist canon and are inspired by such genres as village and youth prose, emancipatory ethnic narratives, works on esotericism and Buddhism, science fiction (nauchnaia fantastika), and the new travelouges in literature as well as film—in short, by all those movements that unfold on the borders between the official, half-official, and unofficial spaces of late communism (see [Yurchak 2006/2014]). Another artistic approach to the past, marked by what I call posthistorical, a-teleological, or discursive reference to the Jewish tradition, also encompasses a whole series of poetics and methods: narrative disguise in the name of Yiddish oral story (Efraim Sevela, Philipp Berman, and Iakov Tsigel′man); (post)memorial metanarrative (Izrail′ Metter and Grigorii Kanovich); the excessive evocation of Jewish realia, signifiers, and topoi, which constructs a “panopticon” of the Jewish universe—a kind of autoethnography (Kanovich, Metter, Tsigel′man); symbolic translation strategies (almost all authors); literary mimicry and parody (Sevela, Aleksandr Melikhov); and finally, hybridization and pastiche (Tsigel′man, Mikhail Iudson, and Oleg Iur′ev). Such prose works often engender a productive dialectic of irony and nostalgia, which rejects closed philosophical or ideological models of text and identity, be they retrospective or future-oriented (in particular, in the prose by Iur′ev and Tsigel′man). Based on research produced by David Roskies, Ruth E. Gruber, and Marianne Hirsch, I analyzed in this book various manifestations of cultural memory in literature: memorial strategies are not (only) noticeable in its themes or

12. Conclusion

structure of motifs, but, above all, in poetics—incoherent plots, metatextual narratives, the totality of intertext, or an inconsistent multilingualism. Memorial tropes, sometimes extended and occupying the whole text, often comprise the semantic dominant of Jewish literature: the metaphors of palimpsest, burning, erasure, and overwriting; figures of remainders, rubbish, and shards, impossibility or failure of reading, as well as spaces that are neglected, hidden, or buried in ruins. Whereas memorial tropes in Jewish resistance literature, which insists on making myth come alive, may have pointed to the possible success of cultural archaeology, posthistorical concepts signal the failure of the symbolic return and transform rememberance into a complicated, highly auto-reflexive literary form, where the movement into the past is lost among the signifiers. The fragmentary view of the past turns into the texture, the eikon of literary discourse. Perhaps for the first time after Isaak Babel′’s death—let’s follow Shimon Markish and say that the year 1940 was the symbolic end date of the Russian Jewish literary “civilization”—the Jewish underground and emigration literature begins to draw its images and ideas from various cultural sources. Not only Babel′ and Il′ia Erenburg, but also the maskilic satire, the Hasidic midrash, and the Jewish travel narratives become important reference texts, allusions to which become a sign of literary belonging. The concepts of cultural space developed by Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, Kenneth White, Mircea Eliade, Aleida and Jan Assmann, as well as several case studies on Russian-Soviet and Jewish cultural topographies help to understand the topos of Israel, which is highly meaningful for the Jewish literature of this period. In particular, remarkable is the combination of the Judaistic models of Palestine and communist topographical myths—two temporal and spatial projections of redemption. The era of geopolitical dichotomies and underground cultures is aesthetically reflected in the semantic structure of literary spaces with its typical bipolar oppositions such as center—periphery, “surface—underground,” “overt—covert,” “past—future.” In the postmodernist prose by Iudson, Iur′ev, and Tsigel′man, Russian and Jewish elements exist in a unique cultural-lingustic symbiosis, producing a hybrid poetics of horror and/or play. Collective myths become a macabre or bizarre linguistic reality, mutate into idioms, phraseological set expressions and grow into the literary texture. Here too, literature is an iconic and sometimes lyric reflection of Russian, Soviet, and Jewish cultural history. Hybrid writing, in particular in Tsigel′man’s case, often represents an elaborate recreation of the the historical past, an archaeological effort to resurrect a piece of Jewish knowledge and life, accompanied by unexpected and unreliable cultural discoveries. At the

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same time, it ingeniously reproduces the architecture of the Jewish “prototext,” the midrash. In this last case, the generic eikon becomes an elegant “signature” left by the author on the metalevel of the literary fiction. The attempt to revitalize the museified knowledge, driven by nostalgia, a joy of rediscovery, and subversive artistic energy, has become the main concern of Jewish literatures after the disasters of twentieth-century history, first of all the Shoah. In the millennia-old dialogue between Jewish writing and its commentaries, not only the Hebrew Bible, but East European Jewish tradition as a whole, with its everyday culture and its (not always holy) books, is now the original text. Thus, all its factual and fictional, traditional and (post)modern, serious and playful, affirmative and critical commentaries become the trope of memory and a performative act of (re)inventing tradition.

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411

Index of Names

A

Abashin, Sergei, 84 Abramovich, Pavel, 98 Abramovich, Jakob (Mendele Moicher Sforim), 203–204, 228, 321, 322, 357 Abramowitz (Abramovich), Rav Chaim Zanvl (Rebbe Chaim-Zanvel), 134 Achad Ha′am, 5 Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika, 32 Adler, Henryk, 171 Adoni, Hanna, 32 Adorno, Theodor W., 76, 239 Agnon, Samuel Joseph, 8, 204, 210–211, 362 Aikhenval′d, Iulii, 63 Aipin, Eremei, 49, 88 Aitmatov, Chingiz, 49, 88 Aizenshtat, Lev, 329 Akiva (Rabbi), 8, 49–50, 362 Aksenov, Vasilii, 334 Aleksandr Nevskii, 324 Aleksandrova, Vera, 63 Aleshkovskii, Iuz, 173, 176, 366 Aliger, Margarita, 35 Alterman, Natan, 27, 121 Alter, Robert, 264 Al′tman, Il′ia, 34 Andrukhovych, Iurii, 289 Anninskii, Lev, 256 An-skii, Semen, 14, 36, 260 Antokol′skii, Pavel, 35 Appenszlak, Jakub, 171 Aptekman, Marina, 106, 292, 295 Aran, Gideon, 148, 218, 219 Arend, Jan, 71, 153 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 77 Armborst, Kerstin, 94 Ash, Shalom, 206 Assmann, Aleida, 9, 10, 55, 216, 217, 220, 265, 266, 273, 276, 322, 367 Assmann, Jan, 11, 12, 107, 129, 130, 156, 217, 220, 367 Austin, John L., 14 Averintsev, Sergei, 358 Aviv, Caryn, 14

Avizhienis, Jūra, 317 Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman, 244

B

Baak van, Ian, 19 Baal Shem Tov, 356 Ba′al Machshoves, 133, 237+ Babel′, Isaak, 28, 30–33, 35–36, 45, 64, 170, 193–194. 230, 250–251, 330, 367 Bakharakh, Isaak, 35 Bachmann-Medick, Doris, 52, 53, 215, 344 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 200, 300 Bagritskii, Eduard, 27, 111 Baigell, Matthew, 26 Bannasch, Bettina, 156 Baranovskii, Mikhail, 255 Bar-Itzhak, Haya, 133 Barthes, Roland, 16, 178, 360 Baudrillard, Jean, 18, 292 Baukh, Efrem (Efraim), 12, 26–27, 64, 93, 99, 104–111, 113–114, 135, 152, 161, 164, 167–168, 183, 186, 222, 366 Baumgarten, Murray, 228, 231, 232, 237 Becker, Andreas, 76–77, 266 Bednyi, Demi′an, 170 Begun, Yosef, 98 Beizer, Michael, 1, 34, 94, 98 Belaia, Galina, 23, 88, 306 Belova, Olga, 221, 297, 300, 335, 336, 341 Benjamin of Tudela, 204 Benjamin, Israel Joseph, 204 Benjamin, Walter, 13,76 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 309 Bergelson, David, 287 Berg, Mikhail, 318, 327–328 Berman, Filipp Isaak, 1, 225, 244–245, 247, 251, 366 Bernhard, Thomas, 291 Bernshtein, Boris, 152 Beshenkovskaia, Ol′ga, 43 Bhabha, Homi K., 41, 61, 67, 68, Bialis, Laura, 94 Biller, Maxim, 70 Birk, Hanne, 325

414

R e i n v e n t i n g Tr a d i t i o n

Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 26, 27, 44, 121 Blacker, Uilleam, 289 Bland-Spitz, Daniela, 76, 94, 136 Blank, Naomi, 34, 36 Blok, Aleksandr, 305, 310 Bodin, Per-Arne, 21, 300 Bogdanov, Konstantin, 88 Borges, Jorge Luis, 354 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14 Boyarin, Daniel, 6–7, 150, 361 Boym, Svetlana, 18, 21, 264, 308, 335 Brauch, Julia, 33 Braun, Christina, 66–67, 72, 302 Breger, Claudia, 77, 319 Brodskii, Iosif, 35, 36, 38, 72 Bronfman, Itsik, 191 Brooks, Jeffrey, 196 Brovkine, Vadim, 32 Bruk, Mnukha, 47–49 Bruno, Giordano, 238 Brunotte, Ulrike, 52 Bruskin, Grisha, 26, 54 Buber, Martin, 14, 27, 133, 260 Budick, Sanford, 6, 8, 362 Buida, Iurii, 289 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 44, 124, 339 Burkhart, Dagmar, 353 Burshtyn, Matvei, 160 Butler, Judith, 20 Butwin, Frances, 251 Butwin, Joseph, 251 Butzer, Gunter, 265 Bytovoi, Semen, 171

C

Chaadaev, Petr, 173, 305, 309, 310 Campanella, Tommaso, 168 Chantsev, Aleksandr, 292, 308 Cantorovich, Irena, 90 Cantorovich, Nati, 90 Caspi, Dan, 32 Cassirer, Ernst, 16 Chekhov, Anton, 48, 109, 166, 167, 303–304 Chernenko, Konstantin, 335, 338, 343 Chernikhovskii, Saul, 33 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 167–8, 179, 213 Chagall, Ida, 250 Chagall, Marc, 222, 322 Charny, Simeon, 25 Cheng, Anne A., 73 Chernetsky, Vitaly, 292 Chernin, Velvel, 34 Chichibabin, Boris, 289 Clark, Katerina, 17–18, 166–168 Clifford, James, 29

Csaky, Moritz, 265 Chukovskii, Kornei, 310

D

Dąbrowski, Mieczysław, 1 Damrosh, David, 103 Daniel′, Iulii, 35–36 Dante, Alighieri, 106 Darius I the Great, 259 Dauber, Jeremy, 239 David (King), 26, 115, 168, 191, 281 Deleuze, Gilles, 316, 342 Demidova, Olga, 32 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 18, 41, 169 Deutschmann, Peter, 311 Dick, Eisik Meir, 8, 226, 227 Diederichs, Ulf, 347 Dmitrii Donskoi, 300 Dobin, Hirsh, 189 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 16–17, 22, 91, 250, 306 Dohrn, Verena, 31, 33, 81 Doll, Martin, 76–77 Dörr, Volker C., 217 Dostoevskii, Fedor, 110, 118, 166–167, 309, 325 Dovlatov, Sergey, 45 Dubnow, Simon, 26, 32, 44 Dubov, Rabbi Nissan Dovid, 144 Dunphy, Graeme, 342 Düwell, Susanne, 264, 265, 270, 279 Dzhabaev, Dzhambul, 88

E

Egart, Mark, 103, 171, 204, 313 Eichmann, Adolf, 114 Eisenzweig, Uri, 219 Eidelman, Yuri, 253 Eizer, Aleks (Evzerov, Aleksandr), 99 Eliade, Mircea, 216, 367 Emig, Rainer, 342 Epshtein, Mikhail, 17, 18, 22, 292, 300, 308 Erenburg, Il′ia, 27, 31–32, 35–36, 90, 204–205, 207, 209, 229, 243, 313, 367 Ernst, Petra, 33 Eshel, Amir, 162, 210, 215, 217 Estraikh, Gennady, 34, 45–46, 70 Etkind, Aleksandr, 67, 168, 292 Etkind, Efim, 79 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 63 Evtushenko, Evgeny, 35, 36 Ezrahi, DeKoven Sidra, 162, 203, 204, 316

F

Fadeev, Aleksandr, 36, 85 Fain, Benjamin (Veniamin), 98 Fanon, Frantz, 320, 326

Index of Names

Fast, Howard, 26 Fedorov, Nikolai, 67 Fefer, Itsik, 189 Feldszuh, Rubin, 171 Feuchtwanger, Leon, 150, 157 Fialkova, Larisa, 36 Fink, Viktor, 171 Finkelstein, Miriam, 103, 328–329, 331 Finkielkraut, Alain, 13–14 Fokkema, Douwe, 291 Folkers, Horst, 12, 13 Foucault, Michel, 19, 20, 215, 267, 358, 360 Frank, Anne, 90 Frank, Susanne, 16, 309 Fraser, Nancy, 96 Freitag, Gabriele, 170 Freidenberg, Olga, 358 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 67, 316, 354 Freudian, 358 Friedberg, Maurice, 36 Friedgut, Theodore H., 34, 94 Frubis, Hildegard, 68 Frug, Shimon, 26 Furst, Juliane, 34, 168–169, 224

G

Galich, Aleksandr, 35–36, 187 Galilei, Galileo, 238 Galkin, David, 35, 46–47 Gal′perin, Boris (Halpern, Ber), 49, 236 Gama, Vasco da, 237 Gamburd, Miriam, 56, 255 Gantner, Eszter B., 13 Ganzfried, Daniel, 126 Gaon of Bavaria, 135 Garleff, Michael, 66, Garstka, Christoph, 196 Gates, Henry Louis, 325 Gavelis, Richardas, 325 Gekht, Semen, 204 Geertz, Clifford, 14, 29 Gelhard, Dorothee, 4–6, 32, 52, 77–78, 126 Geller, Jay, 52 Genette, Gerard, 270, 360, 361 Genis, Aleksandr, 68, 91, 213, 219, 224 Genzeleva, Rita, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38–40, 44, 60, 196, 270, 272, 279 Gigolashvili, Mikhail, 293 Gilman, Sander L., 41, 77, 149, 150 Gitelman, Zvi, 32, 34–36, 80, 90–92, 94, 97–98 Gladilina, Nataliya, 32 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 358 Gogol′, Nikolai, 200, 267, 305 Goncharov, Ivan, 212, 304, 309, 339 Goodmann-Thau, Eveline, 5

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 328, 335 Gordon, Samuil, 50 Gorenshtein, Fridrikh, 43, 45, 56, 93, 254 Goricheva, Tatyana, 23 Gornfel′d, Arkadii, 63 Gould, Rebecca, 84, 86 Govrin, Yosef, 34, 94 Grabes, Herbert, 291 Grekova, Irina, 64, 93, 114, 254, 318 Grinberg, Marat, 37, 51, 64 Grinkevichiūte, Dalia, 317 Grobman, Mikhail, 25, 26, 54 Groys, Boris, 17–18, 21, 196, 198, 292, 297, 307, 310 Grossman, Vasilii, 31–32, 36, 38–39, 64, 114, 254 Grübel, Rainer G., 31, 33, 318 Gruber, Ruth Ellen, 3, 13, 14, 259–261, 366 Gruner, Frank, 33–35, 56 Guattari, Felix, 316, 341 Gunther, Hans, 17, 19, 68, 167, Gurevitch, Zali, 148, 218, 219

H

Hahn, Ferdinand, 65 Hahn, Hans-Henning, 164 Halbwachs, Maurice, 9, 220 Ha-Levi, Yehuda, 162 Hammer, Almuth, 156, 207 Hansen-Love, Aage, 218 Harshav, Benjamin, 74, 193, 228–230, 251 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 6, 8, 362 Harun Al-Rashid, 299 Hausbacher, Eva, 1, 11, 42–43, 53, 318–319, 344 Heftrich, Urs, 33, 56 Heine, Heinrich, 27, 217, 266–267 Heinemann, Isaac, 6 Hellberg-Brain, Elena, 297 Hemingway, Ernest. 87, 187 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 77 Herzl, Theodor, 26, 140, 244 Hetenyi, Zsuzsa, 1, 62–63 Heuser, Andrea, 67, 70, 72 Hirsch, Mariannem, 3, 10–11, 15, 289 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 92, 153, 247 Hitzke, Diana, 103 Hobsbawm, Eric JE, 3 Hobson, J. Allan, 354 Hodl, Klaus, 68, 72, 75, 150, 299–300, 302, 327 Hoffman, Stefanie, 25–26, 94, 95, 98 Hofmeister, Alexis, 33 Hölscher, Lucian, 12, 269 Holtz, Barry W., 6

415

416

R e i n v e n t i n g Tr a d i t i o n

I

Iampol′skii, Boris, 28, 38, 40, 318 Iankilevskii, Vladimir, 54 Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), в тексте Tsar Ivan the Terrible, 300 Iudson, Mikhail, 22, 23, 64, 148, 255, 292–316, 320, 323, 325, 334, 339, 363, 366–367 Iur′ev ( Jurjew), Oleg, 22, 40, 64, 132, 318, 328–329, 331–336, 338–344, 363, 366, 367 Iushkevich, Semen, 36 Iuzefovskaia, Mariia, 41–42

J

Jacob, Joachim, 267 Jacobson, David C., 7 Jankowski, Andrzej, 37, 208, 230, 250 Jasper, Willi, 32, 36 Jekutsch, Ulrike, 1 Jesus Christ, 115, 157, 162, 303, 308 Joshua bin Nun, 170 Joyce, James, 87 Jung, Carl Gustav, 109, 354 Justus, Ursula, 199

K

Ka-Tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur), 27 Kabakov, Il′ia, 18, 20, 22 Katsis, Leonid, 1 Kafka, Franz, 305 Kagedan, Allan L., 34 Kalinin, Mikhail, 80 Kalinovskaia, Dina, 56, 318 Kaminer, Vladimir, 42, 43 Kandel′, Feliks, 27, 51, 95, 100, 173, 174, 180–185, 187, 196, 213, 366 Kanovich, Grigorii, 40–46, 49, 64, 184, 260, 274, 280–282, 284–286, 289–290, 318, 366 Kantor, Aleksandr, 1, 71, 72 Kantor, Maksim, 73 Kantor-Kazovskii, Lola, 26 Kany, Roland, 265 Karabchievskii, Iurii, 43–44, 49, 254, 258, 318, 326–327 Karamzin, Nikolai, 212 Kasper, Karlheinz, 293 Kataev, Valentin, 36 Katsman, Roman, 1, 37 Kazakevich, Emmanuil. 189 Kelbert, Leonid, 101 Kelertas, Violeta, 325 Khanan, Vladimir, 318 Khapaeva, Dina, 169, 299

Kharkhordin, Oleg, 19 Kharms, Daniil, 352 Khazan, Vladimir, 1, 204 Khazanov, Boris, 56, 95 Khemlin, Margarita, 56 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 305 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 27 Khrushchev, Nikita, 91 Kilcher, Andreas, 5 Kind-Kovacs, Friederike, 24 Kissel, Wolfgang St., 19, 20, 298, 311 Kleinmann, Yvonne, 32 Koller, Sabine, 90 Komaromi, Ann, 1, 24, 34, 95–96 Kopelev, Lev, 27 Kormer, Vladimir, 244 Korzhavin, Naum, 35 Koschmal, Walter, 1, 31, 33, 230 Kotik, Yekhezkel ( Jecheskel, Echezkel), 348–350 Kotlerman, Ber B., 1, 89, Kovacs, Matyas, 13, 388 Kovel′man, Arkadii, 218 Krasil′shchikov, Arkadii, 256 Krier, Anne, 292, 295 Krivulin, Viktor, 328 Krupnik, Igor, 34 Krutikov, Mikhail, 1, 15, 32, 43–44, 61, 70, 74, 132, 206, 251 Kuchenbecker, Antje, 188, 189 Kukuj, Ilja, 25 Kukulin, Ilya, 1, 25 Kulbak, Moyshe, 31 Kunitz, Joshua, 63 Kuśniewicz, Andrzej, 279 Kuznetsov, Anatolii, 34–36 Khwin, Stefan, 289

L

Labov, Jessie, 24 Lacan, Jacques, 76, 320 Lachmann, Renate, 11, 16, 130 Lamm, Leonid, 26 Lamprecht, Gerald, 33 Larskii, Lev, 243 Lazarev, Mikhail N., 63 Lazaris, Vladimir, 70–71, 73, 94–95, 97–98, 243 Lecke, Mirja, 1 Lenin, Vladimir, 170, 185, 195–196, 199, 248, 336–337 Lesovaia, Inna, 56 Levman, Semen, 47 Libedinskii, Iurii, 36 Lion, Dmitrii, 54

Index of Names

Lipkin, Semen, 35, 79, 84–89, 151–152, 173, 174, 180, 184, 187, 213 Lipovetsky, Mark, 1, 18, 19, 291–292 Lipphardt, Anna, 33, 34 Liuksemburg, Eli, 12, 26, 27, 64, 99, 104, 114, 119, 122, 124, 129–138. 140–143, 152, 160–161, 163–164, 167, 186, 223–224, 256, 366 Livak, Leonid, 66, 75, 76, 297, 302, 327, 335, 358 Loewe, Heinrich, 227, 238 Lorenz, Dagmar, 32, 33, 154–155 Loseff, Lev, 79 Lotman, Iurii, 11, 16, 165, 198, 216, 337, 367 Lubrich, Oliver, 43 Ludewig, Anna-Dorothea, 52 Luk′ianenko, Sergei, 299 Luks, Leonid, 197 Lunde, Ingunn, 293, 302, 347, 348 Lustiger, Arno, 90, 95 Lutz, Hartmut, 1 L′vov, Arkadii, 56 L′vov-Rogachevskii, Vasilii, 63

M

Maeder, Eva, 308 Magris, Claudio, 214, 278 Maier, Johann, 133, 140–141, 143 Maimonides, 6, 44 Malamud, Bernard, 27 Manchev, Boyan, 301 Mandel′shtam, Osip, 37 Mao Zedong, 87 Mapu, Abraham, 287 Mar, A. (Anna), 253 Markish, David, 1, 23, 27, 31, 36–37, 75, 99–100, 104, 114, 121, 145, 146, 148–155, 157–161, 163, 171, 173, 204, 205, 209–211, 223, 366 Markish, Perets, 146, 189, 290 Markish, Shimon, 35, 44–46, 52, 60–64, 75, 250, 260, 361, 367 Markowitz, Fran, 34–36 Marszałek, Magdalena, 1, 216 Martyn, Cornelia E., 1 Marx, Karl, 195, 199, 336 McCarley, Robert, 354 Melikhov, Aleksandr, 43, 44, 65, 69, 73, 93, 114, 255, 316, 318325, 327, 329, 334, 366 Meras, Icchokas (Itskhak), 51, 99 Metter, Izrail′, 38, 39, 51, 64, 93, 254, 268–280, 284–285, 318, 366 Mianovska, Ioanna, 37 Miloslavskii, Iurii, 204, 211 Milton, John, 106 Mintz, Alan, 7

Miron, Dan, 5, 15, 228, 230 Mochalova, Viktoriia, 133 Mogil′ner, Marina, 68, 69 Monroe, Marilyn, 343 Morozov, Boris, 90 Münz, Christoph, 33 Murav, Harriet, 37, 45, 46, 73, 78, 89, 159, 322

N

Nabokov, Vladimir, 62 Nachman von Bratslav, 8, 238, 260, 357–358 Nagibin, Iurii, 244 Nakhimovsky, Alice, vi, 31, 32, 36–40, 44, 60–62, 80–81, 90, 145, 174, 209 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 141 Neiman, Lina, 47 Nemzer, Andrey, 85 Neprigen, Airon, 80 Nesterov, Mikhail, 307 Neumann, Birgit, 325 Nicklas, Pascal, 267 Nicolosi, Riccardo, 88 Nikitin, Afanasii, 212 Nicholas II, 300 Nocke, Alexandra, 33 Nora, Pierreл, 9, 289 Nordau, Max, 150, 159 Novikov, Vladimir, 318 Nudel′, Ida, 181 Nudel′man, Rafail, 99 Nünning, Ansgar, 269, 279

O

Oks, Volodymyr, 5, 36 Orwell, George, 107, 305 Osherovich, Girsh, 290 Ostrover, Leon, 47 Ostrovskii, Nikolai, 167 Oushakine, Serguei A., 19 Ozerov, Lev, 35

P

Panchenko, Alexander, 23, 308 Papernyi, Vladimir, 17–18, 169 Papus (Gerard Encausse), 25 Parnell, Christina, 1, 32, 41–42, 61, 206 Paskevich, Ivan, 350–352, 357 Pasternak, Boris, 39, 108, 222, 339 Paustovskii, Konstantin, 35 P′etsukh, Viacheslav, 348 Peleg, Yaron, 90, 150 Pelevin, Viktor, 299 Perel′man, Abram, 267 Perepletchik, Vladimir, 253 Peretz, Isaac Leib, 8, 226, 227, 362

417

418

R e i n v e n t i n g Tr a d i t i o n

Pervomaiskii, Leonid, 35 Peters, Jochen-Ulrich, 304 Peter I, 310, 338 Petrukhin, Vladimir, 221, 297, 300, 335, 336, 341 Petzer, Tatjana, 266 Pevzner, Lev, 254, 259 Pfister, Manfred, 270 Pinkus, Benjamin, 34–35, 46, 94, 95, 97 Pinsker, Sanfrod, 226, 232, 237 Pizaro, Claudio, 237 Plapp, Laurel, 52 Plato, 13, 219 Plett, Heinrich F., 130, 353 Podol′skii, Leonid, 253, 256, 257, 259 Podoroga, Valerii, 41 Polishchuk, Rada, 56 Popov, Evgeny, 244, 347 Posner, Roland, 18 Pratt, Mary Louise, 29 Prestin, Vladimir, 98 Prigov, Dmitrii A., 244 Pristavkin, Anatolii, 88 Prokop-Janiec, Eugenia, 171 Propp, Vladimir, 134, 150 Proust, Marcel, 87 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 115, 196, 212, 305, 324 Putin, Vladimir, 256 Pynchon, Thomas, 266

R

Rabelais, Francois, 200 Rabin, Oskar, 54 Rabinovich, Osip, 181, 375 Radishchev, Aleksandr, 173, 303 Rapoport, Alek, 25, 54, 152 Rashi, 44 Reither, Saskia, 266 Remennick, Larissa, 32, 34, 36 Remezov, Andrei, 36 Riffaterre, Michael, 353 Roesen, Tine, 311 Ro’i, Yaakov, 24, 26, 34, 90, 92, 94, 98, 141 Roizman, Matvei, 36, 47, 171 Rolf, Malte, 20, 304 Rolnikaite, Maria, 51 Rosen, Rhoda, 146 Roskies, David G., 1, 3, 7–9, 13, 227, 229, 231, 239, 251, 260–261, 347, 357–358, 366 Rossman, Vadim, 36 Rosten, Leo, 345 Rotenberg, Mordechai, 355 Roth, Joseph, 214, 278 Roziner, Feliks, 36, 38, 80–81, 93 Rubina, Dina, 37, 41–43, 56, 206, 255

Ruthers, Monica, 13–15, 260 Rybakov, Anatolii, 35, 36, 40, 46, 64, 97 Ryklin, Mikhail, 41, 168, 169, 311 Ryvkina, Rozalina, 34

S

Sabbatini, Marco, 22 Sachs, Nelly, 27 Sadan, Dov, 227 Said, Edward W., 29 Sal′nikova, Ekaterina, 91 Samoilov, David, 44, 118, 326 Sandberg, Beatrice, 33 Sartre, Jean Paul, 326 Sasse, Sylvia, 216 Satunovskii, Ian, 51 Savitskii, Stanislav, 22 Schatzker, Chaim, 33 Schmeling, Manfred, 290, 344 Schmitz, Alexander, 16 Schoeps, Julius H., 36 Schwarz-Bart, Andre, 26 Seiler, Stefan, 361 Sel′vinskii, Il′ia, 35, 36 Serebro, Mikhail, 253 Sevela, Efraim, 36–51, 64, 70, 73, 74, 81–84, 91–93, 100, 204–209, 211–213, 225, 230–236, 238–243, 245, 249–251, 255, 267, 313, 318, 328, 366 Shaked, Gershon, 285 Sharov, Vladimir, 43 Shcharanskii, Anatolii, 94, 97, 181, 257 Sheikhatovich, Inna, 316 Shekhter, Iakov, 64, 256, 293 Shevchenko, Taras, 301 Shmeruk, Chone, 34 Shmukler, Iuliia, 173, 196, 197, 200, 221, 248, 254, 318 Shneer, David, 1, 14, 242 Sholem Aleichem, 8, 44, 48, 195, 203, 205, 226–228, 230–231, 233–235, 237–238, 241, 246, 251, 260, 349, 357 Scholem, Gershom, 138, 144–145 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 86, 306 Shrayer, Maxim D., 1 Shrayer-Petrov, David, 27 Shteinberg, Eduard, 54 Shubinskii, Valerii, 329 Shul′man, Eduard, 268, 318 Shvarts, Elena, 328 Sicher, Efraim, 31, 170, 193–194, 250 Simonov, Konstantin, 85 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 8, 27, 227, 239, 260 Singer, Joshua, 158–159 Sirkes, Pavel, 253

Index of Names

Skovoroda, Taras, 301 Slapovskii, Aleksei, 311 Slavnikova, Ol′ga, 292 Slezkine, Yuri, 5, 70, 74, 78, 79, 159 Slonim, Mark, 63 Slutskii, Boris, 27, 35, 36, 44, 51, 64 Smirnov, Igor, 216, 303, 305 Smola, Klavdia, 6, 24–25, 29, 33, 34, 37, 43, 53, 54, 78, 88, 89, 153, 255 Sokolov, Sasha, 293 Solotorevsky, Myrna, 8 Solov′ev, Sergei, 209, 211, 309 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 244, 306 Sorokin, Vladimir, 292, 293, 295–296, 305, 311, 312, 353 Spies, Christian, 266 Stähler, Axel, 52 Stalin, Iosif, 38, 69, 79, 80, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 107, 145–147, 150–153, 166–169, 175, 196–199, 235, 238, 247–249, 254, 257, 259, 287, 299, 399, 317, 323, 324, 332 Stal′skii, Suleiman, 88 Stegman, Natali, 24 Stemberger, Gunter, 143 Stern, Michael, 236 Suhm, Christian, 1 Sutskever, Avrom, 290 Svetlov, Mikhail, 27 Svirskii, Aleksei, 35, 244 Svirskii, Grigorii, 204, 254

T

Telushkin, J. (Rabbi), 94 Terts, Abram (Siniavskii, Andrei), 36, 305 Terpitz, Olaf, 1, 33, 36, 37,40–41, 46, 61, 79, 90, 285–331 Theisohn, Philipp, 162–164 Thomsen, Mads R., 103 Tippner, Anja, 31–32, 205, 206 Todorov, Tzvetan, 68 Tolstaia, Tat′iana, 293, 302 Tolstoi, Lev, 148, 166, 167 Tomashevskii, Nikolai, 243 Toporov, Viktor, 80 Toporovskii, Ian, 101, 188, 193, 346, 348 Toporov, Vladimir, 33, 223, 337 Torpusman, Abram, 36 Trakhtenberg, Eliezer, 258, 259 Tred′iakovskii, Vasilii, 212, 303–304 Trifonov, Iurii, 244 Trotskii, Lev, 198 Trump, Donald, 259 Tsigelman, Ludmilla, 34 Tsigel′man, Iakov, 8, 64, 80, 101,173, 174, 188, 190, 192–194, 204, 210–211, 213–214,

223, 250, 313, 344–348, 350–354, 356, 358–363, 366–367 Turgenev, Ivan, 44 Tzvi, Meir, 54

U

Uffelmann, Dirk, 1, 17, 19, 167–168, 264, 279, 295, 298, 307, 311, 325 Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 23, 41, 43, 49, 64, 89, 107, 254 Umerov, Ervin, 88 Uris, Leon, 26,27, 121 Ushakov, Fedor, 300 Uspenskii, Boris, 16, 165, 299, 367 Utkin, Iosif, 111, 160

V

Vail′, Petr, 68, 91, 213, 219, 224 Vaiskopf, Mikhail [Weiskopf, Michael], 22, 159, 161, 163, 170–171, 186, 204, 345 Valieva, Juliya, 24 Varshavskii, Oizer, 154 Venger, Khaim, 134 Virgil, 106 Viola, Lynne, 317 Vishniac, Roman, 15, 260 Vogt, Bernhard, 36 Vol′dman, Grigorii, 173, 176–179, 197, 366 Völkening, Helga, 218 Volkmann, Laurenz, 200 Volokhonskii, Anri, 25 Volvovsky, Leonid, 98 Voronel′, Aleksandr, 70, 71, 73, 99 Vysotskii, Abram, 171

W

Waldhans-Nys, Claudia, 36 Walter, Klaus-Peter, 36 Warburg, Aby, 11 Weigel, Sigrid, 68, 80 Weinberg, Robert, 80 Weininger, Otto, 68 Weizmann, Chaim, 27 Weller, Nina, 328, 331 Werkmeister, Christian, 160 White, Kenneth, 133, 216, 337, 367 Wiemer, Serjoscha, 76–77 Wiener, Meyer, 227–228, 235–237 Wiesel, Elie, 55, 65, 73, 92, 97, 169 Wildman, Daniel, 52 Wisse, Ruth R., 31–32, 228–229, 232, 237, 238, 251, 299 Witt, Susanna, 88 Witte, Georg, 149 Woldan, Alois, 33, 34

419

420

R e i n v e n t i n g Tr a d i t i o n

Wolf, Werner, 61, 264, 270, 359–361 Wolff, Larry, 14 Wolter, Udo, 320

Y

Yelenevskaya, Maria, 36 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 33, 72, 156 Yurchak, Alexei, 14, 22, 91, 224, 304, 366

Z

Zaichik, Mark, 49, 56, 107, 197, 254, 318 Zechner, Anke, 76–77

Zeller, Ursula, 162, 164, 165 Zernova, Ruf ′, 38, 56 Zerubavel, Yael, 147, 148, 220 Zhabotinsky, Vladimir, 26, 27, 37, 90, 121 Zhdanov, Andrei, 149 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 250 Zimmerman, Bernard, 171 Zimmermann, Moshe I., 327 Zimmermann, Tanja, 18 Zipperstein, Steven J., 13, 14, 32, 33 Zisserman-Brodsky, Dina, 95-96 Zuskin, Veniamin, 27