By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The Red Army liberated Kiev from German forces on November 6, 1943. My father was not conscripted because of a congenital heart condition. Because of his illness, he was always breathing heavily. His breathing became even heavier when he and my mother, returned to Kiev after two and a half years of half-starved life in the Urals, 2,000 kilometers away from Kiev.
My parents’ house on the central street of the city, Khreshchatyk, was blown up before the German occupation of Kiev by retreating Soviet troops. My father had no home or job in Kiev. A half-starved existence in the Urals continued in Kiev. As a researcher, my father wanted to find a job at one of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In April 1944 he came to the admissions committee of such an institute, which was headed by his old acquaintance, a Ukrainian named Shulga. Before the war, Shulga had been rector of the University of Chernivtsi, where my father sometimes lectured. He recalled friendly conversations with Shulga before the war. When my father went into the office of Shulga, who was then one of the heads of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, to ask for a job, he found that Shulga was not alone but surrounded by members of the admissions committee. Recognizing his father, Shulga did not invite him to sit down, but dryly asked:
– What do you want?
– Do you have a job for me? – Father asked.
– Why have you come? – Shulga asked.
What did that question mean? The Ukrainian Shulga asked a Jew, a native of Kiev, a graduate of Kiev University, who had a home and family in that city, why he returned to his city after the war, after a long forced absence. The father was confused. He suddenly began to justify his return to Kiev: he was born here, studied here, lived here for a long time, and worked here.
“There is nothing for people like you to do here,” said Shulga to the approving cheers of the other members of the admissions committee who were sitting in the room. As he left the room, the father, dejected, upset and disappointed, heard some antisemitic remarks about him. In Kiev, where most of the Jewish population had been exterminated by the Nazis with the help of the Ukrainian collaborators at Babiy Yar, there was no place for a Jewish survivor in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences! But in pre-war Chernivtsi my father knew not only Shulga, but also the former editor-in-chief of the Chernivtsi newspaper, the Ukrainian Nosenko. Unlike Shulga, Nosenko needed qualified workers, and he hired my father as a literary worker in the newspaper Kievskaya Pravda (“Truth of Kiev”) and gave my parents two rooms, which were above the printing press of the newspaper. My father became deputy executive secretary of the newspaper’s editorial office. Apparently, there was no one to work at Kievskaya Pravda, since a number of employees were fired because of their cooperation with the Nazi newspaper published in Ukrainian at this location, Novye Ukrainskie Vesti (New Ukrainian News). My father read the issues of the Nazi newspaper preserved in the newspaper’s editorial office, and learned from them how the Ukrainian population warmly welcomed the German occupiers. He was shocked: among the collaborators was Shulga, who did not want him to return to Kiev, which had been liberated from the Nazis.
My father worked at Kievskaya Pravda in 1944-1945. In 1945 he went to work in the main Ukrainian literary magazine Vytchizna (Fatherland), where he became head of the department of literary criticism. He worked in the magazine until 1948. 1948 was a difficult year for Soviet Jews: in January Solomon Michoels, the famous actor of the Moscow Jewish Theater and public figure, a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was murdered by order of Stalin; the State of Israel was established in May, taking the side of the West and not fulfilling Stalin’s hopes of moving the Jewish state into the camp of his supporters. The famous poet David Hofstein, who wrote in Yiddish, a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, with whom my father sometimes communicated in the magazine’s editorial office, responded enthusiastically to the creation of the Jewish state, writing a poem with Stalin and Golda Meir as protagonists. At this time, the scientific secretary of the Cabinet of Jewish Culture, Chaim Leutzker, doctor of philological sciences, linguist, Yiddish specialist, brought the father an article about Hofstein’s life and works for publication in the magazine.
In the article, Leutzker mentioned a year of Hofstein’s life in Palestine in 1925-1926. The father asked Leutzker to explain this “business trip” of the poet and return the clarified article to him for publication. In September, Hofstein was arrested. A frightened Leutzker asked my father to return his article about the poet, but the article was already in the hands of the executive secretary of the editorial board, who handed it over to the Soviet political police. On March 5, 1949, Leutzker was arrested. In the ruling for his arrest, it was written: “Among his entourage, Leutzker systematically expressed hostile views on the issue of national policy of the Soviet Union.” The arrested David Hofstein testified that Leutzker was “sneaking terrible nationalism” into the Jewish textbooks. This was an obvious lie: there was no more nationalism in the Yiddish language and Jewish literature textbooks written by Leutzker than in those in Ukrainian or Russian. Beaten, tortured by the investigators, and following their orders, Hofstein incriminated Leutzker.
On March 18, 1949, the scientist was indicted under Articles 54-10 part. 1 and 54-11 of the Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code. Leutzker was accused of being an enemy of the Soviet authorities, of grouping Jewish nationalists around him for many years, and of conducting active hostile activities against the Communist Party and the Soviet government. To make matters worse, Leutzker was accused of communicating with foreigners and passing them information of a spying nature. My father learned the news of Leutzker’s 15-year sentence when he himself was already classified as a “rootless cosmopolitan”, a “supporter of the bourgeoisie,” and an “agent of foreign intelligence”.
Father perceived Hofstein and Leutzker as strangers, immersed in the world of Jewry. Both of these men wrote in Yiddish. He considered this way of expressing feelings and thoughts to be something amazing, exotic, incompatible with the socialism he believed in. Although he knew Yiddish, he preferred to read and write Russian, Ukrainian, German and French. It seemed to him an incomprehensible “oddity” for Hofstein and Leutzker to express themselves in Yiddish, even though they were both Jews. It did not seem strange to him that he, a Jew, did not express himself in Yiddish. When Jews reading and writing in Yiddish were arrested, my father took this fact as something sad, illegal, but understandable because of the distance between Hofstein and Leutzker and the spirit of socialist and international literature. When he himself was called an enemy of the Soviet people, he perceived the attack as something out of the ordinary: how could he, a lover and connoisseur of German and French literature, that is, a representative of world culture, be a traitor in the eyes of the heirs of the great Russian literature? My father was stigmatized as a “rootless cosmopolitan,” a “capitalist mercenary,” and a “foreign intelligence agent,” because he noted the great influence of Heinrich Heine on the Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka. I remember that when I first heard my father’s story about the persecution of Hofstein and Leutzker and his indignation that he, an internationalist, was considered a stranger and hostile to the Soviet authorities, I told him:
“You did the same thing that Leutzker did,” he praised the Jewish poet Hofstein, “and you praised the Jewish poet Heine. The difference is that Hofstein denounced Leutzker, while Heine could no longer denounce you.”
How Soviet ideologists could reasonably combine two incompatible accusations — of cosmopolitanism and Jewish nationalism in the same people — became understandable only in view of the zoological, irrational hatred of Jews. The same explains the contradictory accusation of Jews in cosmopolitanism, i.e. tolerance, belonging to the world of universal values and alienation from Soviet society. All the contradictions became clear when one recalled the deep anti-Semitic tradition of the Russian and Ukrainian people. In the summer of 1949, my father discussed the problem of anti-Semitism with Ilya Ehrenburg at the Moscow apartment of the famous writer. Upon learning that my father was from Kiev, Ehrenburg, according to my father, “spoke unflatteringly of the bad traditions of this city, emphasizing that they come from Shulgin and Petlyura,” that is, from the Russian Black Hundreds and Ukrainian pogromists.
Ehrenburg knew Kiev well. He was born in Kiev, and in the fall of 1919 he lived in the city through a terrible Jewish pogrom organized by the White Volunteer Army. When the writer saw before him a “cosmopolitan” and “anti-patriot” in the person of my father, he reacted to what had happened to him this way: “After pausing, he suddenly, with a hand, said: ‘They cut the blood vessels of world literature, world social thought,’ that is, they contrast Soviet literature with foreign literature, which is considered reactionary. An article in the newspaper Pravda of January 28, 1949, one of the first publications against “cosmopolitans”, said: “The sense of national Soviet pride is alien to them”. For the sake of such an occasion, the “proletarian internationalists” invented the “Soviet nation” and, accordingly, the “anti-Soviet nation”. Soviet ideologists, who considered themselves internationalists and socialists, in the anti-Jewish campaign of 1949 behave as national-socialists following the example of the recently defeated German ideologists.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.