Today is the 70th anniversary of the so-called Night of the Murdered Poets, when 13 Soviet Yiddish writers and cultural activists were executed in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison during a Stalinist purge. We introduced this in last week’s installment, but there’s much more to be said, including the fact that the mass execution’s popular name is really a misconception. Only four of that night’s victims were poets; among them was Itzik Feffer, who wrote today’s poem. The rest were writers, translators, editors, and Jewish cultural activists of various stripes.
They were united by their work with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), an organization founded to boost international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. During the war, Stalin and other Soviet leaders had encouraged the JAC’s activities; after the war, when the JAC worked to document the genocide that had taken place, and to foster the preservation of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, its members had outlived their use to Stalin’s regime, and he came to see their international connections and Jewish allegiances as a threat.
This is, of course, a very cursory overview. If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and Stalin’s purge thereof, or into the relationship between many great Yiddish artists and Soviet Communism, you might check out Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, or In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism.
Today’s poet, Itzik Feffer, was born in the small Ukrainian town of Shpola, and moved to Kiev as a young man, where he was involved in the modernist Yiddish literary collective called Vidervuks (Regrowth). He was also, like Peretz Markish, a passionate believer in Soviet idelogy: Feffer volunteered for the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, joined the Communist Party in 1919, and rose through its ranks from there, all the while writing Yiddish poetry and prose for the Jewish masses in and beyond the Soviet Union.
He became among the most well-known and well-respected cultural leaders in the Yiddish communist scene, and—as the Yiddish Leksikon, the comprehensive biographical dictionary of modern Yiddish writers, puts it—“there was in the Soviet Union virtually no single [Yiddish] literary journal, literary collection, or almanac of which he was not a member of the editorial board or co-editor.”
During World War II, Feffer was appointed vice-chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, under chairman Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Together they led, in 1943, a major fundraising tour of the United States, to benefit the Soviet war effort. Here they are with Einstein during that trip; Feffer is on the left:
They met many other celebrities on that trip—Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin—and befriended the actor, singer, and radical political activist Paul Robeson.
Growing up, I knew Robeson exclusively as “the guy who sings Ol’ Man River.” But he was a complicated and fascinating figure. In 1949, when the communist Robeson traveled to perform in the Soviet Union, he did not forget his friendship with the then-disappeared Itzik Feffer. Mikhoels had already been murdered on Stalin’s orders, and rumors were spreading internationally about a purge of Soviet Jewish intellectuals.
Robeson insisted that he meet Feffer face to face, and Feffer was taken from prison into supervised medical care, until he regained enough of his health to visit Robeson. Accounts of their meeting vary, sometimes significantly, but it seems that Feffer told Robeson—through notes and gestures, because their meeting place was bugged—that he was in prison, that he would likely be murdered, that the rumored purge was indeed taking place. After Robeson and Feffer parted ways, Feffer was returned to Lubyanka.
I’m moved and astonished by Robeson’s public response to this meeting. On June 14, he gave a major concert at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall. Thousands attended, and the performance was broadcast live across the Soviet Union. Martin Duberman, in his biography of Robeson, describes the end of the concert:
Asking the audience for silence he announced that there would be only one encore for that evening. He then spoke of his deep cultural ties between the Jewish peoples of the Soviet Union and the United States, and of how that tradition was being continued by the present generation of Russian-Jewish writers and actors. He then referred to his own friendship with Mikhoels and Feffer, and spoke of his great joy in having just come from meeting with Feffer again. Robeson then sang in Yiddish, to a hushed hall, “Zog Nit Keynmol" the Warsaw Ghetto resistance song.
The courage, audacity, and integrity of this act are unfathomable to me. I think it’s likely that I can’t quite understand the sheer boldness of praising Feffer and Mikhoels—the former incarcerated, the latter assassinated, both on Stalin’s orders—so publicly in Moscow, in 1949, and of singing a Yiddish resistance anthem at a time when the legacy of Yiddish resistance was being purged from the Soviet collective consciousness.
Here is Robeson’s rendition of an English/Yiddish adaptation of that Warsaw ghetto resistance song:
I wonder if Feffer ever knew that this had happened. I hope that he did, and that it gave him even a small moment of comfort and connection within the hell of Lubyanka Prison.
The following by Feffer comes from the excellent anthology of Soviet Yiddish writing, A Shpigel oyf a Shteyn (A Mirror on a Stone). In this poem, as historian Antony Polonsky puts it, Feffer “revels in his emancipation from Jewish life.” (I’m grateful to Raphael Finkel for digitizing the text; I’ve taken it from his phenomenal online Yiddish resource.)
I Have Never Lost My Way I have never lost my way in my short and happy life. I laugh to myself each time I recall that I bear a rabbi's name. I'm named after the holy Rabbi Itzikl of Skver, in accordance with my grandfather's wishes. He hoped that I would pray, sing hymns, and put on tallis and tefillin. That I might be my shtetl's richest man, with the best homemaker for my wife. And the days and nights would pass, the simple years would flow into each other... But the sun has blessed my body bronze, battles and songs course through my life. I laugh so hard when I recall that I bear a rabbi's name.
I have to wonder: what’s so funny? Why is it laughable to be named after a hasidic rabbi?
(The rabbi in question here, Reb Itzikl of Skver, is a real and influential figure, the founder of the Skver Hasidic dynasty, whose descendants run the village of New Square in New York.)
I should admit, before I try to answer these questions, that Feffer’s writing doesn’t generally do much for me as poetry. I’m fascinated by him. But he doesn’t usually move me, doesn’t make my body thrum, in the ways that I want art to do.
Part of this perhaps is that I just don’t know how to read him. “I have never lost my way / in my short and happy life.” What kind of a statement is that? It’s so flat, so boring. I want it to be ironic—I can’t quite make sense of it, can’t translate it into my own experience, unless it’s ironic—but I worry that irony would be a misreading. I think it’s worth comparing this poem to last week’s by Peretz Markish, in which the starting point is that the poem’s speaker has absolutely lost his way, and doesn’t seem to have a way at all.
So, anyway, what’s the joke here? On the simplest level, it seems to be funny to Feffer that his name places him in a lineage of old-world, pre-modern Jewish piety, and of the shtetl’s rigid, materialistic class structures, when his life belongs to the revolutionary, atheistic ardor of communist struggle and proletariat hymns. That, at least, is how I read it. The disjuncture between his namesake and his reality is so great that he can only laugh, and revel in the distance he’s placed between him and the bourgeois religious values of his ancestors.
The sun has blessed his body bronze. That word, “blessed,” must be a deliberate subversion of the religious language and values of the Hasidic world he has rejected.
But I’m reading a more complicated story into this poem, even if it’s my own projection. Perhaps I just instinctively distrust such an unsubtle statement of contentment as the one with which this poem opens.
A perfectly happy person doesn’t need to announce how perfectly happy they are, after all. Someone who’s never lost his way doesn’t waste much time proclaiming that: their contentment is wordless, and if they try to convince us of how perfectly satisfied they are, we become suspicious that they’re really trying to convince themselves.
So despite the straightforward, peshat reading of this poem, it seems to me to be deeply unhappy1, in a quintessentially modern way. When the values of our ancestors collapse before us, and we trade them in for new values, for belief in a new world, as Feffer and Markish and so many other Soviet Jews did, where do we turn when that world too reveals its hollowness? Perhaps we suspected its hollowness all along, and didn’t want to admit it to ourselves.
I think this poem bespeaks Feffer’s subconscious but profound discontent with the new world he is working to create, and to usher others into; with the world he insists is, or soon will be, perfect.
It’s too easy to read this exclusively as a commentary on the transition from Jewish life to communist ideology. It is that, but it’s also about all of us reveling in our modern freedom, celebrating our emancipation from the values and strictures our ancestors believed in. This poem forces me to pause and wonder, then: what ideologies am I working hard to convince myself are true, in order to justify my relatively secularized and materialistic American life, and to stave off the discontent of having left the world of my ancestors behind?
As always, there’s much more to say here, but thanks for reading this for and for being a part of this project; I look forward to hearing your thoughts in comments or by email.
It might also be fruitful to compare the laughter and self-satisfaction in this poem with Nietzsche’s take on laughter, in The Will to Power: “Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful.”