EAJS Conference Grant Programme 2022/23
Report
Symposium: Commemorating the “Night of the Murdered Poets”: History and Afterlife
Jewish Museum Berlin
August 14, 2022
Organizers: Jewish Museum Berlin; Miriam Chorley-Schulz (University of Toronto); Tal Hever-Chybowski (Maison de la culture yiddish – Medem bibliothèque)
Event Rationale
The 12 August 2022 marked the 70th anniversary of the so-called “Night of Murdered Poets,” the climax of the Stalinist persecution of Jewish intellectuals. The murder of Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko and others meant the death of the most important Soviet Yiddish literary figures. At the behest of the Soviet government, they founded the Jewish Antifascist Committee in 1942. When the committee was dissolved by the Stalinist regime in 1948, its members were persecuted, arrested, and in some cases murdered after a secret trial in 1952 on charges of treason, bourgeois nationalism, and anti-Soviet activities.
The one-day symposium of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the “Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Literature” organized by Maison de la culture yiddish – Medem bibliothèque was dedicated to these poets and the Yiddish culture they created and represented both inside and outside the Soviet Union. It revisited the “Night of the Murdered Poets” as both a historical and memorial event and tested new ways of understanding it beyond Cold War dogmatism for a broad Berlin audience in two consecutive panels. Five renowned scholars of Soviet-Jewish culture and history coming from Germany, the US, and Canada drew on their latest research to tackle the following central research questions amongst others:
- How did it come to the events of 12 August 1952?
- What do we know about the history of commemorating this event both inside the Soviet Union and in the West?
- What does the name “Night of the Murdered Poets” signify?
- What were its legacies in research on Soviet Yiddish culture during the Cold War and up until today?
- What are the literary legacies of the murdered writers?
Section Overview
The first panel “The Night of the Murdered Poets – History and Legacies” included (1) newest scholarship on the successes, tragedies and legacies of the Jewish Antifascist Committee and (2) the creation of the “Night of the Murdered Poets” and the memorial culture surrounding it during the Cold War.
Gennady Estraikh gave the keynote and provided a comprehensive history of the Jewish Antifascist Committee from 1941 to 1952. He is a clinical professor at NYU for Soviet Yiddish culture and history and the director of the Shivdler Project A Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union. As the foremost expert on the Jewish Antifascist Committee, he provided cutting-edge scholarship on the creation and workings of the committee as well as on its demise and brutal dissolution. The keynote address was followed by Dr. Miriam Chorley-Schulz (neé Schulz), the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Chorley-Schulz works on Soviet Yiddish culture, antifascism and Holocaust memory as well as the “Jewish Cold War.” She addressed the memory of August 12, 1952 up until “The Night of the Murdered Poets” was created as an annual memorial day as part of the burgeoning Soviet Jewry Movement in the United States in early 1970s and how this memory culture rewrote Soviet Jewish history to serve political purposes during the Cold War.
In the discussion part, Estraikh and Chorley-Schulz discussed the memory of August 12, 1952 in the Soviet Union itself and dug deeper into the legacies of the Jewish Antifascist Committee – much of which has been so far overlooked because of the historiography that centers on its demise. Indeed, August 12, 1952 was a decisive break within the history of Soviet Yiddish culture that Soviet-Yiddish speakers and cultural producers hardly ever recovered from. It also changed everything for the telling of Soviet Yiddish culture in Western historiography. With the wounds of the Jewish catastrophe under Nazism so fresh, the budding totalitarian paradigm suggested that Stalin’s assault was nothing less than a ‘second Holocaust.’ The combination of Stalin’s crimes with dogmatic anti-communism in the West had an impact on the writing of history of such proportions that it set in motion a process, per David Shneer, that made a reading of Soviet Yiddish culture any other than backwards from the purges a matter of utter impossibility: suggesting instead an unavoidable teleology of the romance between Jewishness and communism. They also foreclosed any non-imperialist understanding of Soviet Yiddish culture and perpetuated the idea that this culture indeed ended in 1952 – in a way giving Stalin a posthumous victory. Estraikh and Chorley-Schulz came up with ideas for an alternative memory culture – as exhibited through the symposium itself.
During the second panel, the audience encountered newest scholarship into Soviet Yiddish culture and the Jewish Antifascist Committee conducted within the joint interdisciplinary project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature” by the Leibniz Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin and the Professorship for Slavic Jewish Studies at the University of Regensburg. This cooperative project takes the “Night of the Murdered Poets” as the point of departure and researches Yiddish literature and culture in the Soviet Union between 1917 and the 1970s. During the symposium, affiliated scholars Professor Dr. Sabine Koller (University of Regensburg), Dr. Alexandra Polyan (University of Regensburg), and Jakob Stürmann (Leibniz Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow) presented and discussed their research.
Prof. Dr. Koller presented a new edition of selected works of Dovid Bergelson in German translation. Bergelson is one of the most famous Soviet Yiddish writers that were murdered on August 12, 1952. As part of the interdisciplinary project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature,” Koller is working on German translations of selected works of Bergelson’s entire lifespan. So far, if at all, Bergelson scholarship usually focuses on and celebrates his pre-Soviet period. Koller intervenes by presenting his oeuvre as a whole. Dr. Alexandra Polyan presented on the wartime writings of Peretz Markish, another famed Soviet Yiddish writer who was murdered in August 1952. She specifically compared different Holocaust plays Markish wrote during the 1940s as the gruesome events of the Holocaust were still unfolding. A specific focus was the treatment of Germans within the plays and how it evolved over time. Finally, Jakob Stürmann revisited the fateful North America tour of Shloyme Mikhoels and Itsik Fefer, two representatives of the Jewish Antifascist Committee that made up the Soviet Yiddish delegation. He zoomed in on the conditions that made this tour possible in the year 1943 and its immediate and later tragic outcome.
The Q&A focused on the ways in which the trial and assassination of 1952 continues to hold a sway over the individual research into Soviet Yiddish culture explored against the backdrop of revolution, civil war, and emigration, as well as the experience of Stalinism and the Holocaust as well as the new insights that are being gained in defiance of well-established narratives.
Output
The one-day symposium on August 14, 2022 looked at the role August 12, 1952 has played and continues to play in shaping narratives about Soviet Yiddish literature and culture. It was not merely a day of mourning. Rather the symposium was a celebration of Soviet Yiddish culture despite the history of violence it endured and suggested ways in which to commemorate this event in new and innovative ways to a broad Berlin public. To revisit the Stalinist regime, the early days of the Cold War, and the question of Jewish vulnerability is of special importance at a moment that witnesses nothing less than a new/old Cold War in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The audience left the Jewish Museum Berlin with both a new understanding of the events leading up to and following the “Night of the Murdered Poets” and of Soviet Yiddish culture itself. The symposium itself is available online in the form of video recordings in Yiddish, English, and German on the Jewish Museum Berlin website: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/symposium-night-of-murdered-poets
Final Program
Panel 1, 14-16:30, The Night of the Murdered Poets – History and Legacies (in English)
- Keynote: Gennady Estraikh (NYU, professor of Soviet Yiddish culture and history, director of the Shivdler Project A Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union) spoke about the successes, legacies and tragedy of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 1941–1952.
- Miriam Chorley-Schulz (Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow 2021-23, Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies | Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, University of Toronto, was Research Assistant for the Shivdler project A Comprehensive History of the Jews of the Soviet Union) spoke about the memorialization of the trial/assassination during the Cold War, the creation of the “Night of the Murdered Poets” and the birth of the Soviet Marrano, 1952–2022.
- Followed by a conversation between Estraikh and Chorley-Schulz about the meanings and legacies in East and West until today.
- Q&A
Panel 2, 16:30-18:00, The interdisciplinary cooperation project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature” and the “Night of the Murdered Poets” (in German)
- Sabine Koller (Professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies, University of Regensburg, researcher in charge of the interdisciplinary cooperation project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature”) presented a new edition of translations of Dovid Bergelson’s work into German.
- Alexandra Polyan (University of Regensburg, postdoctoral fellow of the interdisciplinary cooperation project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature”) presented on Peretz Markish’s Holocaust plays of the 1940s
- Jakob Stürmann (Dubnow-Institut, postdoctoral fellow of the project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature”) – revisited the North America tour of the delegation of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the fateful year 1943
- Q&A