THE MOSCOW STATE YIDDISH THEATRE: JEWISH CULTURE ON THE
SOVIET STAGE
(Nov
/ Dec 2005)
THE MOSCOW STATE YIDDISH THEATRE: JEWISH CULTURE ON
THE SOVIET STAGE
Jeffrey Veidlinger. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2000.
According to author Veidlinger, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (hereafter MSYT) was the central cultural institution of Soviet Jewry. The most significant Soviet Jewish-identified writers, actors, painters, and musicians were all involved in its work. As such the story of the theatre is not only fascinating in its own right, but its story is also the story of Soviet Jewish artists and of the Soviet Yiddish cultural experiment. The tragic state-orchestrated murder in 1948 of the theatre's long-time director and star actor, Solomon Mikhoels, foreshadowed the tragic murder of many other Yiddish writers, and the ultimate demise of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union.
Veidlinger explains that until recently material on the MSYT was very scarce. In 1953, after closing the theatre, the Ministry of State Security ordered the theatre's archives destroyed. A massive bonfire was lit and large segments of the theatre's records were destroyed. However, after the inspectors left, the fire was extinguished and whatever records had survived were hidden. After glasnost, these documents became available and are analyzed in this book for the first time.
Veidlinger interweaves events in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, the twists and turns of Soviet policy, and the responses to this policy on the part of the Yiddish theatre. He provides an in-depth study of the workings of the theatre, including detailed plot analysis of the theatre's repertoire, the internal and external power struggles that affected the theatre, and the practical and financial challenges that beset it.
Veidlinger's starting point is a critique of existing scholarship on the Soviet regime's behaviour toward Jews and Yiddish culture. According to Veidlinger, many scholars have "overemphasized Jewish victimhood under the pre-war [World War Two] Bolsheviks." Veidlinger feels that Soviet anti-Semitism in the period up to the end of World War II was the result of "residual popular anti-Semitism and Soviet persecution of religious institutions and alternative centres of power in general rather than ? any preconceived plan by the authorities to target Jews in particular." I'm reminded of a comment made by my cousin: "Stalin was an equal opportunity killer."
From Veidlinger's point of view, it is important to see that Soviet policy towards Yiddish culture shifted and changed. He points to the flourishing of secular Jewish cultural life in the early years of the Soviet Union. The state supported Jewish writers and poets. Yiddish-language printing presses were one of the largest in the world. Yiddish folk singers and klezmer bands toured the country. Jewish research institutions, libraries, and museums were established in Kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Leningrad, Moscow, Georgia, Birobidzhan, and Samarkand.
The MSYT had an importance in Soviet life that is difficult for twenty- first century Canadians to imagine. During a tour of Leningrad in the spring of 1940, the theatre played to over 50,000 people in a period of less than a month. The Soviet state apparatus kept itself apprised of all aspects of the MSYT, increasingly interfering in its work. In contrast, theatre in Canada is barely noticed by anyone outside the small segment of the population who attend. It is not surprising to learn that when the director of the MSYT, Solomon Mikhoels, toured the United States in 1943, he was disturbed by what he saw as the pitiful state of theatre and art. He was dumbfounded by the inordinate attention given to the personal lives of actors.
The Soviet state apparatus interfered in all aspects of the theatre's workings, from the choice of repertoire to staffing and performance and touring schedules. This was not particular to the MSYT, but was increasingly a fact of life for Soviet artists. At the base of the struggles between the MSYT and the Soviet state was the tension between the demands of the socialist state on the one hand and the desire to create a specifically Jewish theatre on the other. With the tightening of the Party's grip on all cultural organizations, and increased Russian national chauvinism during and following World War II (which de facto excluded Jews and other minorities in the Soviet Union) this balancing act became impossible.
In the early years of the theatre, under the direction of Aleksandr Granovsky, it was relatively free to choose its own repertoire. Immediately after the revolution, the state had not organized itself sufficiently to do much interfering in cultural endeavors. There was no clear vision of what Soviet art should be. This thankfully left artists free to explore their own visions. Plays based on the writings of Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim were performed. These plays satirized Jewish life in the shtetlach and were seen as an encouragement to Jews to give up their antiquated ways and integrate into the Soviet system. Jews were being encouraged to leave the small shtetlach and either come to larger cities to become factory workers or else join collective farms.
However, from the late 1920s onward, demands were placed on cultural and artistic organizations in the Soviet Union, including the MSYT, to stop satirizing the old and to begin to depict the new. These organizations were called upon to depict the "New Soviet Man" (sic)-to glorify the gains of the revolution. Unfortunately the type of plays being demanded by the state had yet to be written. This was a problem not only for the MSYT, but for all cultural institutions in the Soviet Union.
However the show must go on, and plays were produced. According to Veidlinger, the MSYT responded to the new directives by presenting material in which the theatre's "Jewishness was forced beneath the surface. The depiction of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and their vanguard against the evil forces of capitalism ? was balanced with Jewish archetypes and structures underlying the manifest text. To the casual observer, these plays displayed no elements of Jewish form other than language ?. But beyond the text lurked powerful images of Jewish nationalism."
For example, in the fall of 1931, the theatre premiered Four Days by M. Daniel. The play tells the story of Iulis Shimeliovich who, in 1919, along with eight other Bolshevik activists, committed suicide in the city of Vilna. Ostensibly it is the story of the struggle within Vilna between the Bolsheviks on the one hand and the Bund and the Polish Socialists on the other. However, according to Veidlinger, although "mass suicide under siege was hardly the type of heroism required of committed Bolsheviks," Kiddush ha-shem (sanctification of God's name, or martyrdom) is a well-recognized motif in Jewish literature and history, one that would have struck a chord with Jewish audiences in the Soviet Union at the time. The story of Masada, with its mass suicide, was a popular Zionist symbol.
Fortunately for the MSYT, Soviet censors were unfamiliar with Jewish life and culture. The theatre was required to hire translators to translate plays into Russian so that the censors could read them. However the very existence of the censors, and the threat they posed, led to fear and an effort to comply with state directives.
In June 1941 the Soviet Union was invaded by the Nazis. The country was desperate for money, and a decision was made by Soviet leaders to try to raise funds among non-Soviet Jewish organizations. For the first time since the revolution, Jewish leaders in the Soviet Union began speaking openly as Jews, pleading with their Jewish brothers in other lands to help in the war effort. In May of 1943, Solomon Mikhoels was dispatched to tour the United States and raise money as chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). Mikhoels spoke openly as a Jew, addressing other Jews.
Clearly the state had its reservations about Mikhoels. To accompany him they sent Itzik Fefer, a Yiddish poet and future secret police informant. (Fefer's story is a book in itself. If he thought his collaboration with the Soviet state would save his own skin, he was wrong. He was murdered in 1952 along with other Soviet Yiddish writers.)
The Soviet Union was at war. The earlier ideology of international brotherhood was being replaced by Russian national chauvinism, which excluded Jews and other national minorities. This was to prove fatal not only to Mikhoels personally, but to the Yiddish cultural experiment in the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile the MSYT was reorganized to bring it more firmly under the control of the Communist Party, and then evacuated to Tashkent in Central Asia, far from the direct effects of the war. This resulted in interesting cultural collaborations-well documented by Veidlinger-between the Yiddish theatre and Uzbeki artists.
The Soviet state refused to acknowledge the specific genocidal war against the Jews, instead depicted international co-operation against the common fascist enemy. The MSYT performed plays which exemplified this distortion. For example, in Peretz Markish's 1942 An Eye for an Eye, both Poles and Jews experience the brutality of Nazi violence. In response, they band together in the partisan struggle to fight for the victory of communism over fascism. There is no mention of the fight for the survival of the Jewish people.
On his return to the Soviet Union in December 1943, Mikhoels continued to direct the MSYT, now in Tashkent. Mikhoels also used his position as chair of the JAC to undertake specifically Jewish projects, for example, documenting Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Once the World War was replaced by the Cold War, this behaviour became highly suspect. Furthermore, Mikhoels' wartime tour of the United States now placed him under suspicion. Anyone with contacts in the West was demonized. Usually the skillful tactician, Mikhoels made the error of publicly expressing his Zionist sympathies.
In January 1948, Mikhoels was instructed to travel to Minsk as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee. He phoned his family in Moscow from Minsk to tell them he had seen Fefer, which he knew to be an ominous sign. Mikhoels' body was found lying in the snow on a deserted Minsk road. The official story was that he had been hit by a car; an accidental death. There is now conclusive evidence that Mikhoels was murdered as a result of an official plan by the Soviet state.
This was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Yiddish cultural experiment. In 1952 the surviving Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union were murdered by the state. In 1953 the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre was shut down.
When I put this book down, I was filled with a deep and inconsolable sadness. In its early years, the Soviet Union offered such promise for Yiddish culture. Yiddish writers from all over Europe moved to the Soviet Union, where they were honoured. Seven state Yiddish theatres entertained audiences nightly. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish students were educated in Yiddish. Yet between the establishment of the Soviet state in 1917 and the murder of Mikhoels in 1948 only three decades had passed-three decades in which so much promise reaped so much tragedy.
Veidlinger's book The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre: Jewish Culture on
the Soviet Stage, begins to answer the question, "How did this happen?"
The book is an extremely ambitious undertaking and reading it requires
both intellectual focus and commitment. However, for anyone interested
in this fascinating and ultimately tragic era in Yiddish culture, the
book offers great rewards.