The Jewish colonies in Singer's The New Russia: History of a Lost World.
A man is traveling by train through the steppe. He is wearing a light gray suit, like a good old European from times gone by. He tries not to fall asleep because he fears his coat will be stolen. On his travels, he discovers and documents how Jews live in the Soviet Union. The year is 1926.
"After the cruel pogroms and civil war in Ukraine, the Jews left the devastated towns and villages and set out in groups in search of new lands. It was not an easy migration. These Jews - former merchants, middlemen, craftsmen, itinerant teachers, carters, tenants [...] invested what little money they had left in the purchase of horses and wagons, packed their last meager possessions - torn sheets, Shabbat candlesticks, religious books or pamphlets - and crossed the steppes of Ukraine, sad and discouraged, to settle in this land. "
A fascinating travelogue by I.J. Singer in The New Russia, recently translated from the English by Adelphi. The world that the Polish-Jewish journalist described nearly a hundred years ago in his reportage for the Yiddish-language New York daily Forverts no longer exists. The USSR no longer exists, nor do the numerous Ashkenazi communities in Eastern Europe and Russia, decimated by the Holocaust, Stalinist deportations, emigration to America, and what was then simply called Palestine. The Yiddish language spoken in the shtetls, or Jewish neighborhoods, is also nearly extinct. A language essentially derived from German, but written with Semitic characters, as well as the so-called Jewish-Roman language (giudaico-romanesco). In his autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), Amos Oz describes his parents and gives us an unforgettable impression of this German diaspora in Israel: "My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother could speak four or five languages and read seven or eight. They spoke Russian or Polish when I did not need to understand anything. (And most of the time they didn't want me to understand anything. […] For cultural reasons, they read mostly books in German or English, and I'm sure they dreamed their nightly dreams in Yiddish. But they only taught me Hebrew. Perhaps they feared that knowledge of foreign languages would also expose me to the temptations of wonderful and deadly Europe.”
But back to Singer. His account is a retrospective in vivid images that capture the life of Abraham's people in the land of the Soviets after the end of the Civil War. The journey begins in Moscow, with its "vast, huge, truly Russian and fabulously beautiful Red Square," and in Minsk, "supposedly a cheerful and lively city. It has retained the charm of the Lithuanian-Jewish border towns" and continues on roads through the countryside, where there are "no trees, no bushes, just steppe and more steppe"; to Kharkiv, "hard, industrial and unattractive"; to Kyiv, "in this absurd city I spent the bitterest and perhaps also the most beautiful days of my life"; and to the most remote places in the Crimea, which are "bathed in light and flowers". It is an off-the-cuff account, but a meticulous one. Singer describes the people he meets: Fellow travelers, waiters, coachmen, passers-by, farmers, peasants, elderly Jews with young wives: "I visited many cities and met Jews of all kinds: communists and the rich, the pious and heretics, merchants and craftsmen, workers and employees. The topic that occupied them most and that everyone talked about was the question of what should happen to the youth.”
There is something impressionistic about his portraits, a few simple brushstrokes rendering the sharp features of a person you meet on the street. In the casualness of the conversations, Singer tries to capture the hopes and aspirations but also the bitterness, disappointment, and sometimes despair of the inhabitants of the new Russia.
The story begins cheerfully. The train from Berlin to Moscow is pleasantly heated and full of interesting people excited about traveling to the Soviet Union to do business and generally experience a new, promising way of life. Basically, the best of all possible worlds. The journalist travels to Warsaw and immerses himself in a multitude of languages: German, Polish, French, English, and Russian. An afflato of old Europe that finds itself in its ultimate mass symbol, the train, as Elias Canetti said, engrossed in polite conversations between strangers in elegant clothes. A habit that R.D. Kaplan calls coffee culture in Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (2022).
At first, the chronicle is deliberately written in the style of a commercial. Moscow is described as a phoenix rising from the ashes, with the old symbols of the tsarist eagle merging with the hammer and sickle. With schools and orphanages in every alley, vocational schools for working class children who have known only doors slammed in their faces, and where women have the same rights and pay as their husbands, the city seems like a place where only the right things happen. Lenin's portraits are everywhere, they have become blessed icons and are revered as such. Moscow and its churches, whose evening bells ring out with the revolutionary songs of the marching Red Army. A poignant scene in which one imagines the snow on the towers of the Kremlin, the wind at thirty degrees below zero, old women with rosaries, and Eizenstein's films about the revolution, to quote Battiato's Prospettiva Nevski.
In passing, as if he had forgotten, Singer also describes the children living on the streets, wandering and plagued by venereal diseases, the inflated prices, the shopkeepers who barely make ends meet and are discriminated against because they do not belong to the proletariat and are therefore considered almost bourgeois. A few years earlier, in 1921, he had lived in Moscow during the period of war communism. The emotional depth of his portrait of the city betrays a personal connection. But the world he found was very different from the reality he knew. On several occasions, he confesses that he cannot believe his eyes and is astonished by the situation that has changed so radically in such a short time.
The subject that interests him most is, of course, Judaism and its integration into society. A passionate story about the dream of emancipation. At times, a messianic hymn to a new beginning. After the October Revolution, Russian Jews were granted citizenship and civil rights that had always been denied to them. Something similar happened in Italy when, after unification, Jews were granted citizenship and felt Italian, especially since many communities had actively supported the various movements of the Risorgimento. In Russia, the rights came after the terrible pogroms of the Tsarist era.
Citizenship gave many Jews access to jobs that had previously been closed to them, such as streetcar conductor, porter, postman, laborer, and telegraph operator. For others, it meant giving up commercial work in the city and starting a new life as farmers in the countryside. Singer illustrates this new beginning in particular.
His testimony is a valuable glimpse into a lost world, brought back to life for us readers through his eyes. This happens when he describes the many Yiddish institutions he finds in Moscow: Publishers, clubs, university departments, classes, and even a theater. All things that did not exist before the revolution. Tangible signs of the new social status. He proudly reports that the Belarusian Cultural Institute in Minsk has compiled a scholarly Yiddish dictionary. Or when he says that in the dirty alleys of Minsk "great ideas and smuggling, cowardice and frivolity, piety and heresy, modesty and debauchery, old and new live side by side, and this mixture is full of strength, restlessness, and hope. It is the image of a shtetl - the German Städtlein - a small, poor, religious settlement that usually belonged to a big fish in the community. A vanished reality in Eastern Europe. Some shtetls survive today in Haredim communities in the United States, especially in New York State (Kyrias Joel, New Square, and Kaser).
The image of the Jewish court that Singer visited in Minsk is equally haunting: an ordinary apartment where the table is covered with a red cloth and the portrait of Lenin takes pride of place. Cases are heard in Yiddish, the judge is a former farmhand, and the lawyers speak half Yiddish and half Russian. Singer goes so far as to describe the pieces of meat that were hung on the wall outside the front door so that the blood would drip off and make them kosher.
Singer covers a considerable area. The further south he goes, the more Jewish integration changes. At the time, the capital of Ukraine was Kharkiv, which Singer calls Kharkov in Russian. Although there were several Yiddish newspapers there, Jews and Ukrainians preferred to speak Russian. Thousands of Jews worked in the city's factories. They did not send their children to Yiddish schools, preferring Russian as their mother tongue. However, the children did not understand what was spoken in school.
Singer also tells how naturalization has led many Jews to abandon their traditional clothing. When the reporter goes to the synagogue to say Kaddish, he is surprised to see that no one is wearing a proper yarmulke, but rather bicycle caps, wool caps, and fur caps. The situation is similar in the countryside, where the farmers wear red fur coats and boots like the goy, the non-Jew. A relationship between Jews and non-Jews, old, difficult, unresolved, always permeated by mutual suspicion. As if through a crack, Singer gives us an archetype of this: "As in the old days, the Jews approach the peasants' wagons in silence, clutching their purses and chewing straw. As in the old days, the peasants, the poor Belarusian peasants, walk around with heavy steps, groping for goods at the Jewish stalls, just as the Jews grope for their sacks of grain. It seems that Jews and non-Jews limit themselves to this great groping - nobody buys anything.”
Now, in the new Russia, the Ashkenazim are secular and mingle with the gentiles. In the colonies they even go so far as to breed English pigs, and - how horrible! - to eat their meat. In the fields, the story becomes poignant and personal when he visits the Jewish settlements. The Jews themselves played a major role in the colonization of Soviet Russia, says Singer. They fled the Ukrainian Civil War and pogroms in search of new land.
They left the cities and villages and became farmers. In the beginning, they lived in tents. The first years were hard in this uncultivated land, where there was not a single tree, and everything had to be built from scratch. But they built wagons, which they lined with Shabbat blankets, and dragged boards and poles, which they bought from far away, to build their houses. They did not know how to harness or bridle horses, let alone operate plows or spades. With the help of international organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee, Gezerd, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, and other smaller organizations, the situation slowly improved. Singer still talks about the red-tiled roofs of the Jewish villages, so different from the thatched roofs of the Russian farms, about the hospitality of the settlers, who were happy to receive news from the outside world, and about their houses, which finally had a chimney.
The correspondent travels all over the steppe. By train, by car, and even in the settlers' cars. He visits villages and kolkhozes where Jews live in several families, but also those where young people do not marry because they hope to emigrate to the Holy Land one day. Each farm is described, good and bad, as each Jew Singer meets. These are stories of redemption, melancholy abandonment, and difficult farewells, and between the lines, you can feel Singer's pride in his brethren, their hard work, and their achievements.
Countless impressions are woven into this magnificent account of times past. One wonders what happened to all these people. Whether they were able to emigrate, whether they still speak Yiddish, whether they survived the deportations of the Nazis and later the Stalinists. Many of the regions Singer visited are the same ones at war today. The present destroys the past or, perhaps more likely, repeats it. An old story. In this case, Russian history has undeniably been intertwined with European history for at least 150 years.
Once the backbone of European society, the Jewish presence in the east of the continent has been erased, and its absence today prevents us from fully understanding Europe's cultural identity. It is a fact that the soul of Central Europe in the past - to paraphrase Claudio Magris in Danubio (1986) - was based on a total fusion of Jewish and German culture. The Shoah destroyed the Yiddish way of life in this part of the world, and today only the memory or, as Magris says, a certain idea of Central Europe remains. I would extend this notion to the whole of Europe.
I remember Hanna Arendt, who came from Königsberg, or Kaliningrad, after it was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1946. Arendt fled Germany in 1933, first to Paris, then to Lisbon, and finally to the United States. Her closest friends and the thinkers who inspired her remained German throughout her life. Jan Brokken recounts in Baltic Souls (2010) that the only book from her father's library that accompanied her to New York was the first edition of Perpetual Peace by her compatriot Immanuel Kant. For Arendt, "good old Kant" was Königsberg. In other words, her home. Today, there is hardly anything left of Arendt's birthplace. Another precious treasure of European culture that history has destroyed and of which only an echo can be heard in the distance. Just like the Italians in Istria, whose memory lives on in their close, almost parental relationship with the Slovenian community.
The legacy of the European empires up to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lies precisely in the often tragic coexistence of different languages, religions, and ways of life. A diversity that has led to cruel and protracted wars but also to an unprecedented interweaving of world views. Europe's social and cultural fabric has been based on this mixture for centuries. I think of Philippe Daverio, who once said in a television program that he spoke at least five languages as a good European.
Europe today seems to be striving for sovereign and identitarian illusions or, to quote R. Kaplan again, for mono-ethnic societies. This is a far cry from the spirit of the old continent, which was always based on the eclectic combination of elements of the most diverse kinds. Nationalisms that glorify individual ethnic affiliations are nothing more than abstract entities developed at a desk. They are incomplete, not to say shameless, narratives of reality that deliberately ignore history. Above all, they steer the continent in a direction contrary to its natural tendency. A direction that in the past has only cost Europe parts and influence. There is nothing to suggest that the present will be any different. "We are meowing in the dark," says Quelo. Lost worlds like the Yiddish communities, the East Prussians, the Italians in Istria, and Dalmatia, to name but a few, are an essential part of our history as citizens of this continent. Knowing them helps us to better understand who we are and in which direction we are moving. - Or not.
