‘where The Jews Aren’t,’ By Masha Gessen

A few years ago Russo-American journalist Masha Gessen was back living in Moscow, having returned there to report on Russia’s cyclically oppressive politics. Like her parents in the 1970s, who faced relentless persecution as Jews in the Soviet Union, Gessen decided that her home had become too dangerous, too threatening. Everyone, at least for a short time, seemed to agree that the Jews, that enterprising people, could turn Birobidzhan into a homeland where the language would be Yiddish and the Jewish difference could flourish without disturbing the Soviet Union’s agenda. The Yiddish writer David Bergelson was one of those who celebrated the prospects of the new homeland — albeit from the comfort of cities far, far away from the autonomous region and its harsh conditions. [...] Hitler’s solution to the Jewish problem was to be final, so marshaling support for Soviet Russia was crucial for saving Jewish communities from annihilation. After the war, thousands of Jewish survivors, having been liberated from concentration camps, returned to their homes to face vicious violence from former neighbors who had taken over their properties. Bergelson’s wartime efforts to rally support for Jews fighting against fascism was recoded as a “nationalistic” mistake, although Jews could still be persecuted for having no allegiances, for their “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Yiddish language books were burned at Sholem Aleichem Library to show comrade Stalin that these poor souls understood their “bourgeois nationalist mistakes.” In any case, her real interest is less the homeland than the writers, like Bergelson, who can never feel at home — those who must always wonder when it’s time to leave, who must decide when to run, when to stick it out. Bergelson, says Gessen, was “trying to square the circle of Jewishness in a world that did not want Jews, protecting the seeds of a religion he did not practice, and insisting on his right to try to keep alive a dying language.” Why Liberal Education Matters and Memory, Trauma and History: