David Prashker's Book Of Days: August 12

Trot fun doyres (“Footsteps of the Generations") by Perets Markish

1952

Other writers, other bloggers, will focus on their personal history, their ancestry, the loyalties and tribalisms and especially the traumas they inherited by accident of birth; I am focused upon mine, but also recognise that the ones worth the recording can only be so if they are also universal. Every people in the world has its own version of what follows; I offer it as allegory, and not just as history.

It took place on August 12th 1952 (the great cellist Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was celebrating his 25th birthday at exactly the same moment), but it is also taking place today, in Russia still, in Iran, in Burma, in Turkey, in Israel, ("Index on Censorship" conducted a survey of all the places where it is happening, in advance of the 2014 World Cup; you can read it here). This particular occurrence was known as "The Yiddish Writers' Plot", though it has come to be known, quite erroneously, as "The Night of the Murdered Poets". As a rule, the date and name are all that history bothers to record: an incident, a date, no commentary, neither factual nor emotional nor ideological - and this is another reason why I am including it: lest it be forgotten. Let me then try to do better.

First the facts. There were twenty-six of these writers, and they were shot on Stalin's personal orders. But they were only the culmination of a process (I am using that last word in Kafka's multivalent sense: "Der Prozeß" is not just "The Trial") by which Yiddish-Jewish culture was systematically destroyed by the Soviets.

The twenty-six were mostly (but alleged at the time that they were all) members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose leader Shlomo Mikhoels had been assassinated by the Cheka in 1948, at the same time that the JAFC was dissolved by decree and its leaders arrested. A press campaign against "cosmopolitans" prepared the ground for their show-trial, but it never took place; they were simply murdered in their prison cells. The charges against them were, first, a conspiracy to detach the Crimea from the USSR (ironic in the light of future events); second, Zionism; and third, support for American imperialism. Their execution took place in secret, and was followed, on January 13th 1953, by the Jewish Doctors' Plot, a further attack on Jewry by the Great Leader that was thwarted only by his own death in March.

Жизнь и творчество Льва Квитко

(The Life and Work of Leib Kvitko, by с ьнзйж)

Twenty-six dead Jewish intellectuals, killed by the Soviet Union. In 1987 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and it became possible to tell the tales of its calumnies. So google Yiddish Writers' Plot and see what you find. I will save you the trouble. You will find that it has been renamed "The Night of the Murdered Poets", though in fact only four of the executed writers were poets, and actually not all of the twenty-six were writers of any sort, unless shopping-lists and work-memos. And it is very clear in the falsified histories: there were only thirteen of them, not the twenty-six claimed by fellow... etceteras. You can find their names:

Peretz Markish, David Hofstein, Itzik Feffer, Leib Kvitko, Dovid Bergelson, Solomon Lozovsky, Benjamin Zuskin, Joseph Yuzefovich, Leon Talmy, Ilya Vatenberg, Chaika Vatenburg-Ostrovskaya, Emilia Teumin, Solomon Bregman, Boris Shimeliovich, Lina Stern.

Which makes fifteen, even by the poor standards of Soviet mathematics or wikiproof-reading.

The last two names, Boris Shimeliovich and Lina Stern, are key to explaining this mystery. There was a show-trial, where fifteen defendants were called (a 16th died in prison before the trial opened). All were tortured and thirteen confessed. The 14th, Boris Shimeliovich, refused to confess, and was found not guilty for lack of evidence. The 15th, Lina Stern, was given a jail sentence followed by exile. Rightly or wrongly, history now records that there was a trial, that legal judicial process was undergone, and so the wrongful killing of these people may be condemned, within the accepted terms of morality. Yes it happened. No it should not have. Here is truth and reconciliation. Now we can forgive and forget and move forward. So history operates. But there were twenty-six dead Jewish intellectuals, these thirteen, or fifteen, as you prefer, plus the unnamed one who died in prison under torture, and the twelve who were simply murdered in their homes or in the street, and whose names are not recorded, anywhere at all.

What shocks me into writing this entry is not the event itself, which is a banality among the thousands of comparable banalities both in the Soviet Union then, and throughout the world still today. What shocks me is our capacity to absorb the lie until it becomes history. Even the website of the National Library of Israel maintains the lie, accepting it as truth:

"On August 12-13, it will be sixty years since the clandestine execution of thirteen Jewish intellectuals in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The thirteen individuals executed were writers and poets, active in various cultural realms. Their execution, in August of 1952, following a trial behind closed doors, was one of Stalin’s last acts of persecution. He died less than a year afterward."

(http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/digitallibrary/gallery/jewish/Pages/Jewish-Victims-USSR-1952.aspx).

The blurb on Google for Wikipedia's entry reduces it to "There were five Yiddish writers among these defendants..." though to be fair they do get it right inside the encyclopaedia.

It appears, then, that the names of the other thirteen are lost, though I am hopeful that either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden may yet have a clue to the whereabouts of any secret list.

Troyer – (Sadness), David Hofstein

Of those who died, there are several about whom no information appears to be findable, others for whom it is simply not easy to find, and several which I have not linked here because they are decidedly questionable. A blog called "Pilfering Apples", for example, will give you the links to some of these people on Wikipedia - I am not assisting their pilfering by giving you the link, and as anyone familiar with my books and blogs will know, I always advocate against using any website that simply gathers all the information that there is by Bot without the means of verifying every piece of it; it is highly likely to be unreliable, and since you are going to have to verify it for yourself anyway, why add the extra level of probable inaccuracy? Below is what I am able to discover, substantiated, about the known.

Of the serious writers, Peretz Markish (1895-1952) was the outstanding Jewish literateur of his day (Mandelstam was already dead, Pasternak had not yet published "Dr Zhivago"). He came from Volhynia but worked in Kiev as a poet, novelist and playwright. Along with David Hofstein (1889-1952), or Hofsteyn, and Leib Kvitko (1890-1952), both of whom were also executed in the Writer’s Plot, he formed the so-called "Kiev lyric triumvirate", a group of modernist writers who celebrated the Revolution vociferously. Hofstein was involved with the Jewish settlement in Birobidjan; Kvitko was regarded as a master of children's verse. Markish must have been astonished to be arrested, given the sycophancy of his praise for Stalin in his epic poem "Milkhome" (a Russianised pronunciation of the Hebrew "milchamah = war"). If remembered at all ("the goal is oblivion" Borges once said; Markish arrived early, as this link confirms) it will be for "Brider" and "Dor Oys, Dor Ayn". But most probably for Gur Nischt* (and for his son David, who became one of the prominent "Otkazniks" two decades later - what we call the "Refuseniks" in English, those Jews who were persecuted for seeking legal exit visas for Israel: see my novel "Going To The Wall").

David Bergelson was born in the Ukraine in 1884. He wrote his early books in Russian and Hebrew, then switched to Yiddish; those books include novels, plays, stories and criticism; the early ones are accounts of Jewish life in the stetls, the latter an attempt to expedite the dictats of Socialist Realism. After the Revolution, which he did not support, he moved to Berlin, which he used merely as a base for widespread travel (so the charge of cosmopolitanism was valid - indeed, he wore it as a badge). He returned to Moscow in 1934, the date that marks the change in his output. He was officially "rehabilitated" in 1961.

Itzik Feffer (1900-1952), was one of the most prominent members of the JAFC during the war against Hitler, and such a staunch follower of the Communist Party line that he really did not deserve to be included in the minyan of Yiddish writers, both because he was such a good Communist, and because he was scarcely a writer.

Solomon Lozovsky was by far the most prominent of the defendants, having served as a deputy foreign minister at one stage, and been expelled by the Bolshevoks, not once but twice, because he was far too left-wing even for them, believing as he did in independent trades unions. More than anyone Lozovsky makes nonsense of the notion of 'The Night of the Murdered Poets' - he never wrote a poem in his life, but did pen such lyrical odes as "Infantile Diseases of French Trade Unionism" (1922), "Fundamental Problems of the World Trade Union Movement and the Fifth Congress of the Comintern" (1924), and "Foreword to Problems of Strike Strategy" (1929).

Benjamin Zuskin, or Venyamin as he preferred, was an actor not a writer, and also a director at the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Known as "The People's actor of the Russian SFSR, he was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946.

Joseph Yuzefovich, whose last name was actually Shpinak, was a Pole not a Russian, the Warsaw correspondent for both the major Communist newspapers, Zvezda and Pravda, until he was arrested and jailed for four years by the Tsarist police for revolutionary activity. He later moved to Moscow, where he partnered with Lozovsky in founding a social-democratic group, before being re-admitted to the Communist party and spending the next thirty years as a leading trades union activist, including two years in the United States promoting trades union activity there. He later became an informant for the KGB, responsible for keeping an eye on significant Jewish cultural figures, while simultaneously working as an editor on the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, specialising in texts about workers and professional movements. He left behind no written works beyond these.

Leon Talmy - no information available on the man; click here for the list of his known writings.

Ilya Vatenberg was a close friend of Talmy. He was born in Stanislav, Galicia, which in those days was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A member of Po'alei Tsion rather than the Bund, he advocated both for revolution in Russia and emigration to Palestine, though it was the USA that his family chose when they did emigrate. He qualified as an attorney at Columbia - he is listed among the alumni as Elias Watenberg - and joined the American Communist Party, visiting the USSR twice, in 1926 and 1929, and returning permanently in 1934.

And of the others, almost nothing that I can find. Chaika Vatenburg-Ostrovskaya (1901-1952) was the wife of Ilya Vatenberg, and is best remembered as a translator, rather than as a writer herself (the linked article also mentions her husband, and Leon Talmy, as significant translators). Emilia Teumin (1905-1952) was also a translator. Solomon Bregman and Boris Shimeliovich and Lina Stern - or probably Shtern - come up as names on the list, but nothing more.

The stenographic report of the trial was published in 1994, albeit in a highly edited form - you can read most of it here. At the same time it was revealed that Khrushchev had issued a posthumous pardon to all the executed members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee, stating that the trials were conducted in "flagrant violation of the law".

The National Conference on Soviet Jewry, based in New York, published a splendid book in 1972, to commemorate the murdered poets, and including both some of their poems, and several written in memoriam to them. You can read it in full here. I am struck that the historical foreword insists that there were twenty-four victims of the plot (my twenty-six, but without Boris Shimeliovich or Lina Stern, which is acceptable as an equivalent to the acquittal of the former, the exile of the latter). The Argaman Press was planning a re-issue of that booklet in 2022, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first edition, but sadly this has had to be placed on hold.