Content area
Full Text
Yiddish culture has not entirely disappeared, but it was sentenced to death twice, and each time the sentence was carried out. On the eve of World War II, millions of Yiddishspeakers inhabited Jewish communities from Holland to Poland and into the heart of the Soviet Union. Hitler did his best to annihilate every Jew in the lands that his armies controlled. Jews survived his onslaught, but their communities and their culture were destroyed. The country that saved millions of Jews, and, not so incidentally, played the decisive role in stopping Hitler, was the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union had its own solution to the Jewish problem.
Stalin, like Lenin, expected that the Jews would gradually disappear as the regime offered the carrot of modernization with the stick of assimilation. By the end of his life, however, Stalin could no longer constrain his murderous antiSemitism, and he began a systematic assault on the leaders of Yiddish culture, who were the primary vehicle for Jewish identity in the country. This campaign culminated in multiple executions on August 12, 1952. (Among contemporary Jews, the date has come to be marked as "the Night of the Murdered Poets.") Convicted at a secret trial in the summer, all the defendants, except for the biologist Lina Shtern, were executed on a single night, twenty-four writers and poets (or so it was believed), all men (or so it was said), cut down by Stalin's executioners in the basement of Lubvanka Prison.
Their trial was held in secret, and for decades the regime refused to confirm what actually happened. Thus many rumors obscured the nature of the case, and the identity and the number of the defendants. Now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the availability of previously closed archives (including the transcript of the trial, which was published in Moscow in 1994), and the tireless research of Russian scholars (notably Alexander Borshchagovsky, a writer in his late 80s who was given access to all forty-two volumes of the material surrounding the case) and Israeli scholars, the details of Stalin's anti-Semitic starchamber can be plainly and accurately described.
The trial did not involve twenty-five defendants. There were fifteen defendants, all falsely charged with a range of capital offenses, from treason...