Soviet Jews Appeal for Legal Action Against Anti-semitic Poet

Jewish sources in the Soviet Union reported that 13 Minsk Jews, including Col. Yefim Davidovich, and “Red Army heroes” Naum Alshansky and Lev Oysitcher, have appealed to the Soviet Prosecutor-General, Roman Rudenko, to start legal proceedings against the anti-Semitic Byelorussian poet, Maxim Luzhantin, whose new collection contains yet more anti-Semitic poems echoing the tone and contents of Nazi war-time propaganda.

In their letter, the 13 protestors point out that Luzhantin does not actually use the word Jew, but transparently substitutes for it a similarly sounding “khari” (polecat in Byelorussian). The “kharis” are then described as “base and fiendish.”

“If you spit in their faces, they will wipe it off; spit again and they turn the other cheek, and when you give them what they’ve asked for, they run off and bark at you like a dog,” Luzhantin writes. In fact, the author queries, how did these “kharis” manage to survive the war? “I thought that they would all burn in the fires of the war and their ashes would be scattered by the wind.”

Davidovich and the other signatories to the letter point out that “everyone knows that in the Soviet Union the state publishing houses publish only what has been approved by senior governmental authorities,” so that some such senior authority must be involved in this case. The 13 signers are:

Yefim Davidovich, war veteran, wounded five times, awarded 15 medals; Naum Alshansky, war veteran, awarded 13 orders and medals; Klara Alshansky; Leonid Zubarev; Lev Ovsitcher, war veteran, wounded in Stalingrad, awarded 15 orders and medals; Grigory and Elena Hess; Leonid Yoffe; Aron Zevin; Solomon Goldin, invalid of the “Great Patriotic War”; llya Goldin, Alexander Millman and Bronya Gaunyakh, wife of an officer killed at the front. They also ask that their letter be published in “Literaturnaya Gazetta” the organ of the Soviet Writers Association.