The Human Touch

All the Russian Jews whom the Soviet is trying to transplant onto the land are not in the Far Eastern Province of Biro-Bidjan; there are 25,000 of them on the collective farms of the Crimea, as we learn from an article in the latest issue of the Moscow News to reach New York, an article bearing perhaps the too optimistic headline, “Jewish Settlers Prosper on Crimean Farms.”

The data is perhaps not con###ncing and the few items of incontrovertible fact are rather sketchy, but I think that Jews everywhere, whatever may be their social point of view, will share in the wishful thinking which dictated the title of the article. Since Jews were forbidden to own land under the old regime and forbidden, under the new regime, from engaging in such non-productive activities as trade, barter, banking and similar middleman pursuits, the Soviet began in 1924 the attempt to take “the people of the air,” as these unadjusted were termed, and put their roots into the soil.

In that year, under the Counoil of Nationalities, was formed as perhaps you may know a Committee for Setting Jews on the Land, better known as Komzet, which in cooperation with the Agrojoint (American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation) spent something like twenty-seven and a half million rubles in the task of transporting, adjusting and teaching Jews how to work the rich soil of the Crimea. In addition to routine farming many of the transplanted Jews developed vineyards, rarely before seen in that part of the world, and manifested a particular flair for chicken farming, a branch of farming in which, I believe, they are particularly at home in the United States, or, at least, along the Eastern seaboard.

A LITTLE PRIVATE PROPERTY

The writer of the Moscow News article makes a point of the fact that the rigors of the original Communist laws against private property have been relaxed so that Jews being transported to the land may take with them somewhat more than the clothes on their backs. A group of 250 persons who arrived at the transfer point in the Crimea known as Djan-Koi required forty-five cars to bring their animals and household goods. The incentive to private property has not perhaps the sharp edge in Russia that it has in other parts of the world, but even Communism can’t do away with it entirely.

From B. N. Mandelshtam, Komzet’s representative in the Crimea, who is quoted in the Moscow News, we learn that about half the Jewish farms are on their feet and that the chief concern of Komzet is to put the remaining 55-60 percent of the farms in that province on an independent basis. The chief tasks of Komzet consist in bringing more settlers to those farms, increasing the livestock and putting up additional buildings. So much has been done in Russia since 1917 that it is not too much to expect that perhaps the Russian Jew, or some part of him, will learn to become a farmer. The Jews of the world need a little more soil than has Palestine, even with Transjordania added, and not overlooking Biro-Bidjan.

Trained farmers are put in charge of groups of Jewish settlers to teach them what they know about the land. To the Russian gardener in charge of the Crimean farm known as the “Novaya Zarya” the Moscow News correspondent put the question: How good are these Jews a farmers? And the Russian answered:

“I’ll tell you uthe truth. There are good farmers among Jews and good farmers among Russians. There are bad ones among both.”

NO STANDARD OF MEASUREMENT

I suppose this is supposed to be fraught with Russian philosophic suspense. But to me it sounds like an evasion. If Rome wasn’t built in a day, the Russian Jew need not be expected to become a farmer in one generation. In “How Odd of God,” Lewis Browne tells us that the chief cause which fosters anti-Semitism is that the Jew is a city, and not a country, person. If the Russian Jew is no better farmer than the Russian on the land, he ought to consider himself an outright failure or redouble his efforts. I shall not be ready to believe that the Russian Jew has dug his roots in Russian soil until their guides and mentors are ready to report to Moscow News correspondents that the Jewish farmer is far superior to the non-Jewish farmer, Isn’t this a rather small concession to make to my Jewish chauvinism?

Incidentally, I myself have never known a Jewish farmer who could live off the land, exclusively. Usually he takes in boarders. Come to think of it, I have never known a Gentile farmer who could live off the land, exclusively, for all those I have known live for the greater part of the year on their summer boarders, Jews as often as Gentiles. The most successful farmer I know is a writer who pays his father and a hired man to kook after his Iowa hogs and wheatlands and cornfields, while he spends’ his time in New York and Westport writing, and selling, short stories and novels. Our hats should be off to anyone who can make his living off the land, in the Crimea or anywhere else.