By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Blood is Blamed is the title of a book by the Jewish-born Soviet writer Alexander Borschagovsky about the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a Soviet social organization whose 13 members were convicted of “a counter-revolutionary crime against the state, expressed in carrying out espionage work, as well as in the deployment of widespread propaganda of bourgeois nationalism among the Jewish population of the USSR” and executed on August 12, 1952.
This was an action of state antisemitism, which was blamed on Jewish blood. One of those executed in this case was the Jewish poet David Hofstein. The author of a book about this case, Borschagovsky, is a friend of my father. He, along with my father, was accused in 1949 of belonging to the “homeless cosmopolitans,” that is, the Soviet Jewish creative “anti-patriotic” intelligentsia. This campaign was also an act of state anti-Semitism. Borschagovsky and my father survived, Hofstein was killed.
David Hofstein was born in 1889 in the town of Korostyshev in the Kiev region. He studied in a cheder and with private teachers. While serving in the army (1912-13), he passed the exams for the gymnasium course as an external student. Because of the percentage norm he was not admitted to the university and entered the Kiev Commercial Institute.
Hofstein wrote poetry from the age of nine in Hebrew, later also in Russian and Ukrainian, from 1909 in Yiddish. His first poems and essays were published in 1917 in Yiddish in a Kiev newspaper. Hofstein perceived the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks as the realization of biblical ideals of justice, as the deliverance of Jews from national oppression.
In 1920 he moved to Moscow and became one of the editors of the Yiddish literary monthly Shtrom (Stream). In 1923, Hofstein’s collected works were published, after which he became one of the most prominent Soviet poets.
The Jewish poet Shlomo Roitman wrote: “Hofstein is the most harmonious of our major poets. He was a surprising phenomenon even in the great pleiad of his twentieth-century poet brethren. In the midst of wars, revolutions, coups, pogroms and ruptures, he remained whole and proud, never betraying the ancient Jewish culture. He will go “with a new, broad, own, not yet walked step”, but also “with the heritage of his grandfather, with an ancient staff.” Who else, who has traced the course of Jewish blood “all the way to Babylon,” has retained so much warmth and joy? He has even “the day dies, leaving a light shadow”.
In 1924, Hofstein signed a protest against the persecution of the Hebrew language, for which he was suspended from editing issues of Shtrom, which was soon closed. That same year he traveled with his second wife to Berlin, where he met and befriended the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. In April 1925, the poet came to Eretz Israel, where he wrote poems in Hebrew in the newspapers Haaretz and Davar. There he was warmly received from day one by the Israeli poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg.
Hofstein recalled his stay in the land of Israel with excitement. In 1940, in a conversation with the literary scholar Eliezer Podryadchik he said: “I was in the Land of Israel for a total of one year, from Pesach 1925 to Pesach 1926, but I will always remember the flavor of that year. Spiritually, I never left there. Some of my poems bear witness to this. You can find in them threads that stretch directly from there.”
A year later he returned to Kiev for the sake of his two young sons, whose mother, the poet’s first wife, had died. His second wife Feiga later joined him with a daughter born in Israel in 1929. The poet gave Hebrew names to his children: the sons are named Hillel and Shamai after famous Jewish legislators, the daughter’s name Levi means “joining” or “calling” in Hebrew and symbolizes commitment to God and his laws.
In 1927 Hofstein was elected to the bureau of the Jewish section of the All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers, and in 1928 he became a member of the editorial board of its journal Prolit. At the end of 1929, Hofstein was accused of “petty-bourgeois views” because of his disagreement with the campaign against Lev Kvitko, a Jewish Soviet poet who wrote in Yiddish, and was expelled from the writers’ union. Later, Hofstein regained one of the leading positions in the leadership of Jewish literature; during World War II he was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and active in the Jewish section of the Union of Soviet Writers.
My father, who worked as head of the literary department of the central Ukrainian magazine Vitchizna (Motherland), often met the poet on the street where they both lived after returning to Kiev after the Nazi occupation. Hofstein would take walks on this street, going up from his house to the Opera and Ballet Theater, near where his father lived.
My father recounted how Hofstein enthusiastically welcomed the formation of the State of Israel and how he showed him the manuscript of a poem whose main characters were Stalin and the then Israeli ambassador to the USSR, Golda Meir. His wife recalled: “David was very enthusiastic about the establishment of the State of Israel. Being at that moment at the resort in Kislovodsk, he immediately sent a telegram to the president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences with a proposal to open a seminar on the study of Hebrew. He could not stay in Kislovodsk, interrupted his treatment and returned home.”
In the book Blood is Blamed Borschagovsky describes the poet as follows: “Those of his poems that I have had the opportunity to read in the best translations, […] – poetry of a high level of thought and feeling. He saw the world, traveled around Europe, did not chase fashion and did not swallow vaunted book novelties, but those few hundred volumes that make up the treasury of mankind, starting with the Old Testament, passed through himself, finding forever not quotations, but knowledge and wisdom. In Kiev there was no connoisseur of Jewish antiquity, the richness of the Hebrew language, equal to him.”
Hofstein was a lyric poet, but his work of the first post-revolutionary years included unhappy pieces related to the anti-Jewish pogroms during the Civil War. Tristia (Sorrow) is one of Hofstein’s strongest works, in which the poet deeply embodied the theme of the tragic loss of innocent victims of the pogroms. He did not suspect that he himself would become a victim of an anti-Jewish pogrom organized by a country whose regime he sincerely loved.
At the insistence of Ukrainian poet Maxim Rylsky, the first posthumous edition of David Hofstein’s poems in Russian was published in Moscow in 1958. In the preface Rylsky wrote: “He was loved by all who appreciate in a man purity of soul, nobility of feelings, clarity and breadth of thoughts. He was loved for the indomitable vivacity of character, for the light simplicity of speech and for the utmost sincerity … He loved people, but hated all falsity, indirectness, insincerity and rudeness.” All that the poet hated, he found in the servants of the Soviet punitive system that destroyed him.
*
Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.