Revolutionary Yiddishland Read online

  REVOLUTIONARY

  YIDDISHLAND

  REVOLUTIONARY

  YIDDISHLAND

  A History of Jewish Radicalism

  Alain Brossat and

  Sylvia Klingberg

  Translated by David Fernbach

  This work was published with the help of the French

  Ministry of Culture – Centre national du livre

  Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français

  chargé de la culture – Centre national du livre

  This paperback edition first published by Verso 2017

  First published in English by Verso Books 2016, 2017

  First published by Balland in 1983 as Le Yiddishland révolutionnaire.

  This English translation is from the second edition published by Éditions Syllepse in 2009, which was revised by David Forest with the addition of new editorial notes and references

  © Balland 1983

  © Éditions Syllepse 2009

  Translation © David Fernbach 2016

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-607-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-608-3 (US EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-609-0 (UK EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardback Edition as Follows:

  Names: Brossat, Alain, author. | Klingberg, Sylvia, author. | Fernbach,

  David, translator.

  Title: Revolutionary Yiddishland : a history of Jewish radicalism / Alain

  Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg ; translated by David Fernbach.

  Other titles: Yiddishland râevolutionnaire. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Verso, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016023967 | ISBN 9781784786069 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jewish radicals – Europe, Eastern. | Holocaust, Jewish

  (1939-1945) | Jews – Soviet Union – History. | Soviet Union – Ethnic

  relations.

  Classification: LCC DS135.E8 B7613 2016 | DDC 320.53092/3924047 – dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023967

  Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

  Printed in the US by Maple Press

  For Ian

  Contents

  Preface to the 2009 Edition

  Introduction

  1The Immense Pool of Human Tears

  2Rally Round Our Flag!

  3The Spanish Sky

  4Silent Starry Night

  5The Song of the Revolution Betrayed

  6I Am Tired of Defeats

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface to the 2009 Edition

  In the quarter of a century since this book was written, most of the faces who appear in it are no more. This fading of individual memory comes on top of the weaknesses of collective memory – the ‘black hole’ that swallowed up revolutionary Yiddishland, a world that is more than lost, being actually denied, even unpronounceable today with the new policing of discourse. As Kurt Tucholsky sarcastically noted, any revolutionary energy that does not find the means to inflect and alter the course of history is condemned to be ‘realized’ in culture, finding here retroactively a form of domesticated inscription. Having failed to achieve its hopes, its utopias, its political programmes and strategies, broken on the rocks of twentieth-century European history, Yiddishland survives, in the account of the past, as a culture, a lost treasure entrusted to antiquarian remembrance. The history of the victors has done the rest, by imposing its retrospective certainties: if all those whose testimonies are gathered in this book belong to the camp of the vanquished, this is because, in the common sense of a certain ‘historicism’ referred to by Walter Benjamin, they were politically misled; they had linked their fate to the grand narrative of working-class emancipation, fraternity between peoples, socialist egalitarianism – rather than to that of a Jewish state solidly established on its ethnic foundations, territorial conquests and realpolitik alliances.

  On more than one count, therefore, a new edition of this book goes against the current. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, its features of ‘untimeliness’ have only become more pronounced. In 1983, it was still conceivable to write a book on the Jewish world of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, focused on its historical condition, and organized around the major theme of revolution rather than Shoah – which in no way implies that the mass exterminations carried out by the Nazis hold a secondary place here, as will be abundantly clear. In 1983 it was still possible, with memory not yet governed by disciplinary regulations and a speech police established at the heart of the media and close to the executive and judicial powers, to write a book of this kind from a point of view decidedly different from any form of Zionist teleology. In 1983, a book whose guiding thread was basically the notion of ‘terrorist’ history (to refer here to Kojève); whose collective characters were revolutionary parties, mass organizations, workers’ councils; whose striking scenes were workers’ insurrections, civil wars, movements of armed struggle, still spoke a language intelligible to a section of its potential readership, and described events whose experience was capable of arousing empathy.

  Since this time, a dense layer of ash (ideological, discursive, as you prefer) has covered up the systems of self-evidence or connivance that this book appeals to in the very way it is written. Today, as soon as such subjects are tackled, historical reason is expressed only in declarations of principle concerning the unassailable character of the state of Israel; more generally, any account of this history of molten lava that places at its heart such figures as that of the revolutionary militant, the worker resisting and struggling, arms in hand, is immediately revoked by those newly sanctified as morally correct – the human rights campaigner, the humanitarian firefighter, the tireless and non-violent promoter of democratic values and forms …

  In this sense, rereading this book today requires, for its authors above all, a stimulus to reflect on the conditions imposed by what Foucault called the order of discourses. Revisiting these pages in our present time, we are struck by an indefinable but persistent sense of foreignness: everything is familiar, but we are separated from this very familiarity by an irrevocable sense of distance; we directly perceive the rigorous conditions by which discourses, simply in their continuous flux, become heterogeneous to the very people – including ourselves – whom they traverse and envelop. It is impossible for us, therefore, to step back into the era of this book, even if we see no reason to ‘deny’ a single line, a single statement. The determining factor is not so much that ‘the world has changed’ since we wrote it, or that almost all the people whom we interviewed have disappeared; it is rather, in a far more disturbing fashion, that the very conditions of speaking about such subjects have changed and shifted. Even if we had not budged an inch from the positions that defined the arrangement and orientation of the book, we would not be able today to find the ‘manner’ in which it was written, we would have lost the ‘secret’ of its way of speaking – a fact that, on rereading, has the effect of arousing violently shared feelings (‘God, what energy, what passion!’ on the one hand; and ‘What certainty, what
poetic excesses’ on the other).

  In other words, what is at issue here is not so much the inevitable growing distance of a ‘world of yesterday’, but rather a loosening of connection from what appears today as a ‘lost world’. And once again, this is not simply due to the fact of Auschwitz and the mass graves of summer 1941, but for another reason as well: since we wrote Revolutionary Yiddishland, a change of era has set in, surreptitiously rather than manifestly. A change that leaves completely open and uncertain the question of the conditions of the reception of this book in the world today.

  Two points of contention can serve here to shed light on this issue of the difference between one era and another, and the effects of a break in intelligibility that this produces: the question of communism, on the one hand, and that of collective memory, on the other.

  ‘Communism’ is a signifier that runs right through this book, in all the ‘chapters’ of history evoked by the militants to whom it gives voice. In their memories, this word is far more than simply a political label, a programme or a form of organization. It is a kind of constant perspective in which the notion of another possibility is embedded, a field of radical heterotopies in the face of a present condemned to disaster (exploitation, misery, political terror …). In this sense, ‘communism’ is a reference that mobilizes and inspires our witnesses well beyond the limits of belonging to a particular milieu – the communist movement or communist parties. There is in fact this perspective of communism, both practical and non-practical, in each of the great ‘scenes’ in which they variously participated: the Russian Civil War, the building of the USSR, resistance in the camps, the war in Spain, the armed struggle against Nazism, the formation of ‘socialist’ states in Eastern Europe, emigration to Palestine, etc. ‘Communism’ is, in this general sense, the word used for a politics with the ambition to establish social justice and apply egalitarian principles. The fact that this perspective was most often blocked by defeat, calculations of realpolitik, the strategic blindness of bureaucracies, etc. in no way changes the fact that this article of faith is embedded at the core of the hope of these men and women, in their activity on every front of struggle: another world is possible, and the generic name of this other possibility is ‘communism’. A distinct philosophy of history gives this term consistency: it is possible to be radically different from the present (of oppression, misery, injustice) inasmuch as the mass of humanity inhabit history, which presents itself as a field of action in which they possess the capacity to produce decisive shifts, bifurcations. History is open, the future is the surface on which the human possibility of emancipating itself from the present is inscribed. And once again, ‘communism’ is not simply the name of this unbounded freedom, but its master signifier.

  However, what is precisely epoch-making in our present is the horrified rejection of any such presupposition and the historical sensations that accompany it. We have entered the age of the supposed universality and eternity of the democratic paradigm, in such a way that any notion of a sidestep decided outside the conditions of present historicity now appears as a promise of inevitable disaster and unreasonable exposure to multifarious risks. An ideal of ‘immunitarian’ democracy has replaced the perspective of that social refoundation which, for those who attached themselves to it, implied full exposure to the winds of history. It is not simply because the collapse of the Soviet bloc created a wide gulf between our present and the historical sequence that was the very milieu in which our characters acted, the twentieth century of sound and fury, that their ‘world’ has become enigmatic in the eyes of the great majority of our contemporaries. It is, more radically, and in a manner less reducible to ‘particular circumstances’, because the horizon on which their rebellion against the existing order was inscribed has grown misty, with the effect that the signifier ‘communism’ has lost all its power and shrunk to the dimensions of a pejorative signifier, synonym of everything that, in the past era now rejected, bears the mark of the unreasonable and monstrous.

  The same type of observation is needed when the question of collective memory arises. When this book was being written, there was a rage for ‘voices from below’, as witness the great success of the Maspero collection ‘Actes et mémoires du peuple’. René Allio outbid Michel Foucault with his film I, Pierre Rivière … acted by peasants in a Norman village, etc. And so we were hardly original in considering that rescuing the memories of these militants who came for the most part from the poorest sectors of the ‘Jewish street’ in Eastern Europe was part of a genuine process of regeneration – rediscovered memory supposed to lead, not principally to a better knowledge of the past, but rather to a better capacity to inform the struggles of the present. This was indeed for us the amazing actuality of these diffracted accounts, their intact power to transmit a revolutionary ‘legacy’ that, preserved against wind and weather by these survivors, came down to us as the most precious of deposits … But things turned out rather more complicated: the theme of collective memory has effected a complete about-turn, to become, in the hands of ‘elites’ happy to turn anything to their advantage, a privileged instrument for the government of the living (ritualizing of memory, obsession with commemoration, ‘duty of remembrance’, victimological cult of the ‘terrible’ places of the past, religion of ‘traumatism’, etc.).

  The beginnings of this turn can be seen already in the film Les révolutionnaires du Yiddishland, made by Nat Lilenstein and partly inspired by our own research. This is a monument, a sumptuous cenotaph erected to the memory of those whom it celebrates, yet it only rekindles the flame of what it celebrates the better to facilitate its transition to the status of cultural object: a page is turned, that of the album of memories, while a supposedly implacable reality principle tends to impose itself. ‘Bundism’, which was indeed an immense militant epic, attested to in our book by its last survivors washed up in Israel, has meanwhile become a kind of memorial tourist agency (specialized in teaching Yiddish language and culture) – but solidly moored to the communitarian establishment and the fate of the Hebrew state.

  In this twilight hour when the French president seeks to promote the ‘adoption’ of a child of the Shoah by primary schools today, as one plebiscitary ruse among others, it seems hard to understand the ‘utopianizing’ of the memory of the defeated that was our main impulse in embarking on the quest for these survivors, inspired by a strong enthusiasm, even the sense of fulfilling a mission. We could even recall here that our sense of having collected a folder of almost sacred words was so strong that we delivered to our editor, Françoise Adelstein, an initial version of the book consisting of a pure and simple montage, without commentary, of ‘words’ gathered – so convinced were we both of the intrinsic power of these testimonies, and of the incongruity of any irruption into this untouchable text. Collective memory was then our fetish, and self-effacement before its speech our credo. We were at first quite stunned by the refusal of our editor to endorse this cult – and we had to go back and play the tapes again in order to start actually writing this book.

  In our day, in ‘our’ part of the globe, it is almost impossible to understand these revolutionaries of yesteryear, ready to put their lives in peril for a ‘cause’ – the most eloquent example of this being the Spanish Civil War – or to penetrate what inspires those men and women who, in other parts of this same globe today, are ready to die to promote their ‘cause’. Let us say with Zygmunt Bauman that our liquid society, which promotes the interests of consumers and manufactures celebrities, is at the opposite extreme from the hero who sacrifices a personal present in the name of a collective future.

  Most of the individuals who found their way into this book were unknown to us before our field study in Israel, in the early 1980s, led us to meet them and conduct the interviews that form the basis of this book. And we lost sight of most of them after completing this work, sometimes learning of the death of one or the other. However, a few exceptions to this general ‘ingratitude’ (familiar enough to
researchers practising oral history) must be mentioned: Yankel Taut, a Trotskyist militant since the earliest time and a political friend of Sylvia Klingberg, active together with her in the 1960s in the Israeli organization Matzpen, and Hanna Lévy-Hass who settled in Paris in the 1980s, and whose Journal de Bergen-Belsen Alain Brossat published in French.

  But to end this preface, we would like to mention the case of a ‘hidden’ witness, who appears in this book under the pseudonym of Isaac Safrin (the only person, in fact, whose name had to be changed).

  We interviewed Marcus Klingberg in Tel Aviv in 1981 and, at his request, referred to him by the name of his great-greatgrandfather, Isaac Safrin. In the same interest of concealing his identity, we changed his profession of epidemiologist to that of surgeon. Some two years later, on 24 June 1983, his daughter Sylvia handed him a copy of our book, in the presence of his wife and grandson, under the strict surveillance of a colonel of the Shabak, the Israeli counterespionage agency, and a flanking acolyte. This scene took place in the prison at Ashkelon, a seaside town some sixty kilometres from Tel Aviv. The prisoner was then registered under the name of Abraham Grinberg, and described as a publisher.

  At the time when we interviewed him, we thought that this imposture indicated a certain cowardice unworthy of this man, who concealed himself and kept silent about a past that was precious to him – as we could hear from his voice, which trembled with emotion. Regretting the lost Jewish world of Central Europe, remaining nostalgic for the ‘exile’ condition, and above all glorying in having fought in the Red Army, albeit in the Second World War – all that was viewed poorly in Israel. The combination of fidelity to Yiddishland and attachment to the Soviet Union was seen as improper, even suspect, all the more so on the part of a man who managed to carve out a position in the high realms of the state.

  Marcus Klingberg, alias Isaac Safrin, alias Abraham Grinberg, was arrested on 19 January 1983, and condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment for spying for the USSR. For more than a quarter of a century, from 1950 to 1977, he regularly transmitted information on the highly confidential work that was conducted first of all in the army, then in the context of the Israel Institute for Biological Research at Ness Ziona, where he had long occupied the post of deputy scientific director. He was tried and imprisoned in secret, and for the first ten years of his detention kept away from almost all contact both within and outside the gaol. When the news got out, there was a shock wave across the country, and the press, with rare exceptions, mobilized its whole palette of invectives against this ‘traitor to his country’. The divulging of this case of espionage cast a ray of light on the work conducted at the Ness Ziona institute. Though the list of the ‘ten plagues of Egypt’ (or maybe twenty or thirty …) manufactured in its laboratories remains undisclosed, the business it conducts is today an open secret: chemical and biological weapons.