Russians should learn from England, which is constantly gaining strength by introducing the services of wise and energetic Jews into its political and social order, Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, says in to-day’s “Isvestia”, condemning the antisemitism which exists in the Soviet Union. The article is written in reply to a correspondent who had written to him pointing out that there are a number of Soviet authors who are showing antisemitic tendencies, mentioning in this connection such writers as Boris Pilnick, L. Ostrover and Bonch Bruevich.
Gorki exonerates Bonch Bruevich, who was a close friend of Lenin’s, of the charge of antisemitism, but says that he is a poor and tactless writer. With regard to the others, he admits that antisemitism is in evidence in modern Soviet literature, and that the bias against Jews can be proved. The policy of the Communist party and the Soviet Government, however, is such, he claims, that antisemitism can find no hold now in Russian soil. In the land of the Soviets where the foundations have been laid for the brotherhood of all nations, he concludes, the shameful stigma of antisemitism must not be allowed to find a place in life, and above all there must be no room for it in Soviet literature.
Maxim Gorki has all his life been a fierce antagonist of antisemitism and has repeatedly denounced it in public, both in the days of the Czar and under the Soviet regime. Towards the end of 1929 he published a violent attack on antisemitism in the “Pravda”, complaining of the slackness of the methods of fighting it in the Soviet Union. I ask myself how can it be possible, he wrote, that in the thirteenth year of the Revolution such disgusting filth as antisemitism can exist. Is the fight being conducted with sufficient zeal and are we using the right method against its.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
