Jewish Writers Under Fire in Moscow; Charged with “playing into Hands” of Enemy

A double-barrelled campaign against “cosmopolitan” and “bourgeois nationalist” influences in Soviet literature is under way here with Jewish writers and the editors of the glossary of the new Soviet Encyclopedia the latest to come under attack.

The campaign, spearhead of which is the Literary Gazette, is aimed against “rah-rah cosmopolitanism,” which is termed the ideology of American expansionism, and against all brands of “bourgeois nationalism”–with Ukrainian, Kazakh, Moldavian and Jewish specifically cited.

Currently, the well-known Soviet writer, Lev Nikulin, has published a denunciation of seven Jewish critics and writers–Yuzovsky, Gourvich, Altman, Levin, Subotsky, Danin and Goltsman whose “spiritual fathers,” he says, “were arch-reactionaries of the type of Eichenwald and Burenin, who were active in the pre-revolutionary Black Hundred Press,” The “Black Hundred” was a violently anti-Semitic organization which flourished under the Czarist regime.

The Literary Gazette this week demands that all writers maintain closer ties with the people of this country and assails the “rashly abhorrent cosmopolitanism” shown by the literary editors of the glossary of the new edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia. “The cosmopolitan objectivity of the editors was shown up particularly by the names included under Jewish literature which was given as much space in the glossary as Uzbek, Kazakh and Georgian literature combined,” the publication declared.

“The authors of the glossary,” the publication added, “deride the principle of party adherence and Soviet patriotism. They take ‘the whole Jewish literature’ without distinction as to country or state system and are playing into the hands of enemies of the Fatherland. They drag out the palaver about the existence of a supposedly ‘world-wide’ Jewish literature. On their list, Soviet writers stand in the same position with hardened, modern businessmen of America, Palestine and other countries, their views are nothing less than servile complaisance to bourgeois nationalism”