The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines by Marat Grinberg explores a scholarly area many are unfamiliar with. The book has just arrived in Brandeis University Press’s The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, alongside biographies and examinations of particular eras. Grinberg has long thought about this topic and the nuances of Jewish portrayal in Soviet fiction. As he observes in the introduction, “My long and deep ancestral roots are in Ukraine, in the Podilia region, where, surrounded by both Russian and Ukrainian, I spent the first sixteen years of my life prior to coming to the United States in 1993.”

There’s lots of context, considering what the authors here might have read, like Kafka, and what was happening in politics and world history. Soviet Jews, “the single largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the us for most of the twentieth century” spent decades silenced, unable to communicate with the west, or often within their own culture if their writing was banned as subversive. As specifically Jewish writing was prohibited, readers clung to it and hid it, keeping this last trace of Jewish identity intact.

The book is divided into five chapters, beginning with the 1960s historical novels of German author Lion Feuchtwanger with a print run of 300,000 copies. This series essentially became the Soviet Jewish scripture and main sources of Jewish historical and cultural knowledge. The significantly lengthy second chapter explores more direct Soviet Jewish writing of The Thaw mid-1950s to the 1970s and early 1980s, as the culture began to stagnate. In the context of the time, the author considers Isaac Babel, the best known, along with Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov’s duology, The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, in which the characters dodge bureaucrats and pre-Revolution survivors, all terribly corrupt. As Grinberg observes:

“In The Golden Calf, there is a quip that in the Soviet Union there are Jews, but there is no Jewish question; this quote was frequently on the Jewish reader’s mind and tongue. While ostensibly it signaled assimilation and eradication of antisemitism, it was meant to be read in reverse: Jewishness in the Soviet context is always there, hidden behind the curtain.”

Soviet Holocaust remembrance grew at this time, amid specifically canonized texts, also discussed here. Poems like “Babi Yar” by Evgeny Evtushenko allowed Soviet authors to express their grief, while Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), Vasily Grossman (1905–1964), Anatoly Kuznetsov (1929–1979), and Masha Rolnikaite (1927–2016) wrote prose on this darkest of subjects. There’s an additional section on children’s books by Lev Kassil (1905–1970), Samuil Marshak (1887–1964), Valentin Kataev (1897–1986), Alexandra Burshtein (1884–1968), Boris Yampolsky (1912–1972), and Alexei Svirsky (1865–1942), in which naïve young characters wonder about Jewish identity.

The third chapter focuses on translations, as Soviet authors adapted books from Yiddish and Hebrew, also asking the question of whether Jewish authors could authentically write in Russian. Chapter four explores how Jewish knowledge was generated, encrypted, and interpreted in the culture of the time. Passed through black markets as subversive culture, it allowed Soviet Jews an insight into their forbidden religion. Some biblical sources were available, while even anti-Zionist literature could offer clues about their lost heritage.

The essays end with the Strugatsky brothers – a search on Russian Jewish science fiction turns them up nearly exclusively. The author cleverly points out the Jewish references in their massive collection with quotes and details, though they’re subtle and carefully deniable. There are several viscerally dystopian Holocaust scenes, but placed in fantastical settings. Jews appear but are more obvious as the wise but shunned “Clammies” of The Ugly Swans, defended by Doctor Golem. In an era of censorship and repression, science fiction of far future worlds offered a path to satirize the foibles of daily life and persecution offered by the government. Yuri Trifonov with his “city prose” wrote in a similar style.

All in all, this academic book offers deep insights into decades of Soviet Jewish culture, considering how they read, and what they wrote, all under the deep blanket of repression.

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