Jews Under the Hammer and Sickle

The author, Dr. David Goldberg, is a well known writer and lecturer who has recently returned from his third visit to Russia in recent years.

At the outset I will say that if I bring in dissonance into the “Eli, Eli” melody built up about the existence of the Russian Jews, it is not that I have found them actually enjoying three square meals a day, or that they are at liberty to follow their traditional communal life which centered about the Cheder, the yeshivah, and the shool, or that they are by now so well integrated in the Communistic millieu that They have the profoundest respect their former life habits and are no longer suffering spiritually.

The Russian Jews are still facing, in common with the rest of the population, stark realities. They have the profoundest respect for a piece of bread; butter and meat are still luxuries, and even an ordinary herring mightily tickles their palate as though it were a juicy slice of “gefuelte fish.” And American Jews far and wide should know and remember it well that a dollar sent from here to a relative or friend is like dew falling on a sun parched soil. At the December, 1933, Torgsin prices, the dollar was equivalent to about 12 lbs. of granulated sugar, or about seven lbs. of meat, or five lbs. of creamery butter. In a country which is still groping with the problem of adequate supply of the barest necessities of life, it can be easily imagined what a restorer of life the dollar is in the hands of its possessor.

PEOPLE BORN ANEW

Nor will I say that there is no longer spiritual depression among certain Jews in the Soviet Union. When the premises of life are so completely changed around as they had been in Russia, the people must be viewed as being forced back into embryonic condition, to be born anew, and certainly, the middle aged person rarely is capable of being born anew.

So life is not yet a picnic in Russia and many there are in each community who still remember “the fish they ate in Egypt” in more than one sense. But to paint a picture of utter dismay without bringing into perspective the great joy which is theirs that they are no longer the permanent underdogs and pariahs they had been under czardom, but, to the contrary, are steadily marching with the whole of the Russia population towards the great goal of liberation, is tantamount the painting a false picture. There is as little truth in the account which minutely depicts the travail of Russian Jewry but does not reveal the sources that give them the strength to endure it, as there is in an account describing the tears of sowing without reference to the song of reaping.

I will illustrate this more concretely. Fully one half of my first visit to the Soviet Union, in 1930, I spent in the newly formed Jewish Kolkhozi (collective farms), in the Homel district, White Russia. It is the province of my childhood and my early youth, and I recognized among the new fangled peasants the “melamdim,” the peddlers, and even the rich grain and lumber dealers I knew of yore.

BEWILDERED BY CHANGE

They recognized me too, and opened their hearts freely. They were “Lishentsi,” declassed and disfranchised by the Revolution on account of their petty bourgeois occupations in the past. The soil was strange to them, and they did not know how to care for their cattle. Life for them was just one process of attrition on the top of another, and they were not the kind of people who would take solace in the far fetched goals of the Revolution. The latter had only a catastrophic meaning for them, and no other. Naturally enough, their tales were only fit for a Book of Lamantations.

But there happaned to be among them one whom I knew intimately in my boyhood days, and I also knew the girl he had married. They were the children of the two richest Jews of a small town in the Pale I used to visit, and their present setting was testimony without words to the great distance downwards traversed by the “liquidated” bourgeoisie since the days of the Revolution. It was tragic to behold the erstwhile pretty and petulant belle who had one maid to button her shoes and another to lull her into sleep with pretty stories from fairyland, now transformed into a buxom peasant woman, mother of four, barefooted and with red kerchief for headgear, scrubbing washing, cooking and baking the heavy Russian loaves, all alone and under the most primitive conditions prevailing in the Russian villages.

LIFE STILL GOES ON

If you only remembered the past you couldn’t help being overwhelmed with compassion for the great misfortunes that overtook the lives of this idyllic couple. I noticed, however, that the woman was still fair and buxom and she held a suckling infant to her breast. Life, then, must go on in the hut of the peasant as well as in the palace of the king.

On account of our previous connection, they became my natural hosts during my stay in that vicinity, and it served me to good purpose, for in Russia, as well as elsewhere, one must learn to penetrate far beyond the words of the people in order to understand their lives and problems, and the surest way of achieving it is to live with them as they themselves live.

My boyhood friend, an intelligent man, supplied me the perspective which was wanting in the lamentable tales of his neighbors, and I could see the picture clearly enough. Things, he told me, were in a bad way in the Pale of Jewish settlement long before the Revolution, and they weren’t any more the prosperous family I imagined them to be. The war had drained the very marrow of the people and the earth itself had dried up. A few crafty ones managed to get rich through speculation, but the great bulk of Jewry grew poorer and poorer with each passing month.

FELT WRATH OF POLES

And my friend himself had seen trench warfare, had been in Austrian captivity, and returned in the nick of time to experience the wrath of the Poles who were then the masters of White Russia. Ah, what a memory, the Poles! They took what they pleased from Jewish households without reckoning, and tore Jewish beards and spat into Jewish faces for the sheer fun of it. Every young Jew was in their eyes a Bolshevic, and every old Jew a dog. If only one could believe that those were not human beings at all, but only beasts from the jungle carrying human masks! It would go so much easier with one’s faith.

“But it is remarkable,” interjected my hostess, “that they should have spared the Jewish women, and they even protected them in cavalier fashion. They wouldn’t let a Jew pass without cracking the whip on his back, but the ladies they would take by the arm and lead safely across. And they weren’t at all ceremonious with the shikses, mind you.”

After the Poles came the Whites who, like their predecessors, saw in every Jew a Bolshevic and treated him accordingly. Then came the Reds who treated every Jew like a bourgeois. So, between the devil and the deep sea the Jew was tossed alternately, fleeing from one enemy camp into another, escaping the snare only to fall into the trap. My friend was just one of the lot and there was nothing singular about his record.

PEACE, YET NO PEACE

Peace at last descended upon earth, for the Reds had become the acknowledged masters of the land. But for my friend and his class there was no peace, since they were still to be liquidated. All the suffering he had gone through was in vain, since in the eyes of the Revolution he was still an unredeemed bourgeois. Redemption could only come through “liquidation of class,” a process much more easily spoken of than endured. So my friend was “declassed,” ruled out of the new order without there being an old order to cling to, just a stray log in a turbulent stream carried swiftly no one knows where….