When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (15 page)

Later that year, Shpilberg visited Riga. He found Blum and discovered, for the first time, a truly unabashed Jew—open, free, and unafraid. Blum taught him how to dance the hora and gave him a few Israeli albums. He promised to send more material to Shpilberg and his friends in Leningrad. And he helped with another problem. Shpilberg had not been circumcised. This was not uncommon for Jewish men in the Soviet Union. Mohels, the traditional circumcisers, were scarce and were allowed to function only under very tight supervision. Many parents didn't want to bring undue attention to their children. Like calling a child Grisha instead of Hillel, not circumcising an infant boy was a way to avoid future problems. But Shpilberg wanted to have the procedure done. Blum said he would try to find him a mohel; there was more likely to be one in Riga than in Leningrad.

In the spring, Blum fulfilled the first part of his promise: a young woman, Margarita, arrived at Shpilberg's home with a copy of Dubnow's history. This was invaluable to the group. Shpilberg began an affair with Margarita that would lead to a marriage proposal within a few months. In the summer of that same year, 1966, Shpilberg went to Riga to see about the other part of the promise, the mohel. With no legal permit to stay in the city, he set up a tent in its forested outskirts. Blum introduced him to the old man. But a few days after Shpilberg's arrival, Geula Gill came to town, and in the riot that followed Mark Blum was arrested and detained.

The mohel, who was not legally registered to practice his trade and who had used his knife on an adult only once, was nervous about circumcising Shpilberg. He wanted to find a place far outside the city. Luckily, a friend knew of a dacha in the countryside that was not being used. She gave the mohel the keys, and, together with a medical student who carried a small black suitcase filled with anesthetic, they left for the country. Shpilberg wasn't sure what the medical student did wrong, but after a dozen shots, Shpilberg could still feel when the mohel began to cut. He just closed his eyes and squared his large jaw and let the tears fall. When it was done, and Shpilberg sat there with his pants off and a white bandage wrapped around the wound, there was a knock on the dacha door. The husband of the woman who had given the mohel the key was doing his army reserve service nearby and, after drinking with his friends, had decided to stop by the dacha. When he saw Shpilberg with his pants down, he yelled at the men to get out. The mohel and the medical student, both afraid of getting caught for illegal activity, hurried out, holding up Shpilberg between them. They took the train back to the city, and only then was he bandaged properly.

For the next month, Shpilberg lived in the tent and went to Riga every day to have his bandages changed by the mohel. He saw Margarita and told her what he had done. She gave him a Star of David pendant made out of scrap metal. He asked that she no longer call him Arkady. From then on he wanted to be known by a new, Hebrew name: Aron.

One can imagine that these Leningrad Jews had to take such extreme measures because they were up against a conquering ideology that had worked hard to erase their Jewishness. But in truth, the Soviets never knew exactly what to do with their Jews. The Marxist ideal
was
to create one single, socialist society that would eliminate all national, religious, and even ethnic attachments. But in practice, the Soviet Union's attitude about nationalities, and Jews in particular, was schizophrenic. On the one hand, from the Bolshevik Revolution onward, Jews were viewed as a people who would soon assimilate into nonexistence and were therefore denied any real opportunity to flourish as a separate culture. On the other hand, the Soviet state never stopped reminding Jews that no matter how assimilated they became, they were still somehow foreign. It was a paradox that the Soviet leaders perpetuated. By mandating a separate nationality in the internal passport, which needed to be displayed every time one applied for a job, registered at a university, or enlisted in the army, they ensured Jews had a feeling of otherness. If the Soviets had simply eliminated the fifth line of the internal passport, they could have assimilated hundreds of thousands of Jews who had no other reason than that line to think of themselves as Jews. Stalin clearly believed, as he stated in his 1913 essay "Marxism and the National Question," that Jews did not constitute a unique people, but he also set up the ill-fated Jewish autonomous region in the far eastern Birobidzhan as a Soviet promised land for his Jews, and in 1932 he enshrined the internal passport law, making Jews as separate from Russians as Ukrainians were from Latvians. It seemed the desire to integrate Jews was weaker than the totalitarian state's need to control its populations—and to do this, the Soviet bureaucracy needed to keep tabs on everyone.

The paradox of Soviet Jewish life wasn't always so clearly etched. Large numbers of Jews had enthusiastically taken part in the Bolshevik Revolution with hopes that the new egalitarian social order might make their lives easier. It was a generation marred by memories of the violent czarist-era pogroms at the turn of the century. Men like Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (later known as Leon Trotsky) thought the only way to prevent explosions like the 1903 Kishinev massacre—in which dozens of Jews were killed by mobs that were driven by the belief that Jews were ritually murdering Christian children for their blood in order to use it in making matzo—was to abandon Jewish identity for international proletarian struggle. Liberation from provincial religious identity, Marxism preached, would open people's eyes to the only meaningful human distinction: that between workers and owners. And once the Soviet Union became a reality, a space did open up for secular Jewish culture. Stalin initially encouraged national expression. In fact, there was an effort to create a culture that was, in Stalin's words, "socialist in content, national in form." The new Jewish section of the Communist Party, the Evsektsii, cracked down hard on Zionism, Judaism, and Hebrew, all perceived as remnants of the Old World. But Yiddish was allowed, and by the 1930s, there was a flourishing of Yiddish theater and newspapers. One of the greatest Jewish actors of his time, Solomon Mikhoels, the heart of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, could be seen onstage as King Lear. Famous Jewish poets such as Itzik Fefer were allowed to write and publish in Yiddish, producing work such as the poem "So What If I've Been Circumcised": "So what if I've been circumcised / With rituals, as among the Jews? / Field winds have tanned my middle-sized / Pale, dreaming feet to darker hues." During the war, Stalin formed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and made Mikhoels its head; together with Fefer, Mikhoels embarked on a celebrated tour of the United States, urging political and financial support for the Soviet Union.

But before Jews—or any Soviet citizen, for that matter—could become too comfortable in this Communist paradise, everything changed, brutally and swiftly. In the late 1930s, Stalin undertook a bloody purge that would end the lives of hundreds of thousands of his imagined enemies—most of the Party leadership; the military; the intelligentsia; and the kulaks, small landowners. The Jewish Bolsheviks, like all the other revolutionaries, were taught a cruel lesson during those years, and many wound up dead or in the Gulag. But it was the period after the war and just before Stalin's death, in 1953, that was darkest for Soviet Jewry in particular. In January of 1948, a few months before the birth of Israel, Mikhoels was murdered by the KGB, his death made to look like a car accident. The same year, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved. Hundreds of Yiddish actors, writers, and journalists were sentenced to long prison terms. By 1950, Stalin had established a full-scale campaign against what he called "rootless cosmopolitanism." Nothing captured Russian anxiety about Jews more perfectly. They were perceived as an unnatural presence. Russia was not their motherland, and they were trying to influence, pollute, somehow outsmart everyone else. Newspapers were filled with accounts of Jews as traitors and subversives; accused currency speculators and embezzlers were publicly tried and executed. On the night of August 12, 1952, fifteen people connected with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including the poet Itzik Fefer and four other Yiddish writers, were tried for various trumped-up crimes; thirteen of them were shot in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This frenzy of anti-Semitism came to a head in the first months of 1953 when Stalin, increasingly paranoid, arrested a group of Jewish doctors and accused them of plotting to poison members of the Soviet political and military leadership. The initial arrest included thirty-seven physicians but the numbers soon grew. Other "doctors' plots" proliferated. And though it has never been conclusively verified, there is evidence that Stalin was using these plots to justify a wide-scale deportation of the entire Jewish population to Siberia. Rumors of long lists of deportees spread through Jewish households in Moscow and Leningrad. Then, miraculously, Stalin died, and the plotters were re-leased. Jews, however, had already suffered months of newspaper articles and public pronouncements portraying them as sinister elements, poisoning the water supply and killing babies.

Stalin was long dead by the 1960s, but he cast a dark and menacing shadow for decades to come. Whenever Jews began to feel safe, normal, he was the terrible reminder that things could always change. He was the potential of brutality, the coiled threat of physical harm, that lay in the backs of Jewish minds when they looked at that fifth line of their passports. The twenty- and thirty-year-olds growing up during the thaw had been impressionable children in the dark days of the Doctors' Plot. They had watched their mothers taunted and called
poisoner
on the subways, heard the hushed talk of deportation lists, remembered their doctor fathers abandoned by all their fearful patients in one day.

In the terror of his last years, Stalin
had
succeeded in crushing Jewish identity. A Jew in Leningrad or Moscow in 1964 thought of himself as a Jew simply because an anti-Semite said he was or because the state made him declare it every time he had to show his passport. But it did not mean much else to him. Jewish boys were not circumcised. Bar mitzvahs were nonexistent. There was no legal way to teach Hebrew. Other than a few old men who went to the remaining synagogues, and even then more out of habit than love, Jewish life had been completely gutted.

By the time the generations raised in the 1960s came of age, little of Jewish substance remained—maybe a Yiddish lullaby, a pair of silver candlesticks, a grandparent who still fasted on Yom Kippur. Jewishness was a negative identity, a reminder of avenues that were closed. Being Jewish meant that there were certain universities one couldn't hope to attend, certain jobs that were for all practical purposes forbidden. Being Jewish was a natural disadvantage, a handicap, like being born deaf or missing a limb, and it meant you would just have to work harder to overcome it. The Jew of this generation growing up in a big Soviet city had a different culture: Russian. The books he loved were Russian and the only language he knew was Pushkin's. And yet, that he was different was as inescapable as the nose on his face. The dichotomy was difficult to live with. What turned men like Butman and Shpilberg into Jewish nationalists was the realization that they no longer wanted to try.

When the two small groups in Leningrad decided to join and become cells of a larger entity, they immediately faced the problem of any merger: reconciling their various visions. The ultimate goal was never in question. They had settled on that in Pushkin. But the question of how to get there was very much up for debate. To start, would it be an open struggle or a clandestine one? Would they challenge the regime loudly and directly or focus on quietly planting seeds and cultivating in Jewish young people the desire to leave?

Butman was eager to do something big. And already in the first few weeks of 1967, not long after the organization was formed, he called a meeting of all eight members (both groups had been missing a member on the day they'd met in Pushkin). He wanted to write the Kremlin a letter. In it, he would describe what it meant to be forcibly assimilated, how he thought the Soviet Union's treatment of Jews was a violation of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He proposed a very public statement to be signed by all eight members and presented at a press conference. Soviet citizens wrote to the government to ask for help all the time, a tradition that went back to the czars. But the letters were a form of begging—asking for an exemption from military service or for a pension to be paid in advance. What Butman proposed was a letter of protest, something altogether new and dangerous. He managed to convince his own group, but Shpilberg and his group were opposed. The authorities would quickly crack down, and the organization would be squashed before it even got on its feet.

The lack of unanimity killed the idea, but the tension remained. Butman and Dreizner's group wanted to make noise, while Shpilberg and his friends opted for the slow build, the raising of awareness, the recruiting of soldiers. Before long, though, another question arose, this one potentially more divisive: whether the group should align itself with the growing, but still fairly isolated, dissident movement.

The thaw had opened up a small place in Soviet society for all thinking people—not just Zionists—to start imagining an alternative reality without fearing arrest and death. The liberalization loosened the restraints on culture, allowing books like Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of life in Stalin's Gulag,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
to appear in the literary journal
Novy Mir
in November 1962—unimaginable a decade before. And in the late 1950s, Khrushchev had given mass amnesty to millions of people in prison and in Siberian exile. Their detached gazes and beaten bodies were living proof of the regime's inhuman core. Its unintended consequence was that, especially in big cities like Moscow, a desire for further openness, for further reform, arose among a young intelligentsia. Already in the summer of 1958, students were meeting at Mayakovsky Square in Moscow for open-air poetry readings that included increasingly subversive work. In September of 1965, a year before Butman's and Shpilberg's groups came together, Andrei Sinyavsky (who wrote under a Jewish pseudonym, Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (who actually was Jewish) were arrested for publishing essays and satirical novels and stories that were perceived as critical of the Soviet Union. Protests were organized on their behalf, and more dissidents were arrested in the following months. When their trial was held, in February of 1966, the government used the writers' published work as evidence that they were guilty of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Both were sentenced to years in prison camps. This outraged the members of the new dissident movement. Petitions and letters of protest reflected a new willingness to confront the regime head-on. But the arrests signaled that Khrushchev's thaw had reached its limit.