In the summer of 1952, a collection of the Soviet Union’s most luminous Yiddish writers of prose and poetry lived out their final days in the gloom of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison, caught in the gears of Joseph Stalin’s state security mechanism.
The writers were arrested in the late 1940s in Stalin’s anti-Semitic purge, which specifically targeted the Yiddish language. He shuttered Yiddish newspapers and publishing houses and banished leading literary intellectuals to factory jobs. A group of 15 were held incommunicado deep inside Lubyanka.
“This was no random pogrom,” Joel Sprayregen, a Chicago attorney and activist, later wrote. “Stalin believed he could crush the Jews of Russia with one stroke of mass murder by destroying their culture and language in the darkness of one Moscow night.”
That one night was 66 years today, Aug. 12, 1952, memorialized as “The Night of the Murdered Poets.”
A New York broadsheet said the victims “constituted the flower of Yiddish literary culture in the Soviet Union.”
They included David Bergelson, who has been compared to Anton Chekhov and was regarded as the leading Yiddish novelist in the Soviet Union.
Another was the poet Peretz Markish, a human case study of the treacherous whimsy of the Soviet political winds.
Markish had been an esteemed Yiddish poet dating to the early 1920s. “Gang,” a volume of his work published in Paris in 1924, was illustrated by Marc Chagall. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1939 and the Stalin Prize in 1946. He was a member in good standing of the Soviet Communist party, penning epic odes to Stalin, including one (“War”) that marched along for 20,000 words.
In fact, most of the Yiddish arrestees were loyal Communists who had railed against German fascism during World War II. But for Stalin, ethnicity trumped ideology.
Another of the victims was the poet Leib Kvitko, who was banished from his job at a Soviet magazine when the purge commenced.
Kvitko had begun writing verse as an adolescent in a Ukrainian shtetl.
“It came not from a Hebrew school or from any private lessons, but from the air surrounding me that pulsed with secrets, massacres, chaos and terrible interesting events,” he wrote.
He took on serious subjects, including a collection of pogrom poems, “1919,” published in Berlin. He also wrote volumes of folk poetry that mused over his shtetl roots — poems that “revealed the sadness of the world,” as one admirer put it.
But he was best known for Yiddish nursery rhymes and children’s poetry, which revealed a kindredship with America’s Dr. Seuss, who published his first children’s book (“If I Ran the Zoo”) while Kvitko was imprisoned.
Like Seuss, Kvitko used tales of talking animals to deliver life lessons — the ills of gluttony and glories of moderation, for example.
In “Der Groyser Knish (The Big Knish),” a boy whines because his grandmother makes tiny versions of his favorite food — "Always little ones!” One day an elephantine knish materializes, but when he takes a bite blue-beaked birds emerge from the dough and taunt the boy: “Karkar, karkar karkar, kar/Here you go — here’s your big knish!”
Kvitko became one of Russia’s best-selling writers of children’s rhyming books — in translation from Yiddish, with his first name Russianized from Leib to Lev. Many children are said to have learned to speak Russian through Kvitko’s translated words.
Yet the poet was arrested in December 1948, along with Bergelson and others. Markish and another group joined them a month later. All were charged with espionage and treason. Witnesses said they were mercilessly beaten until falsely confessing.
After several years of confinement, the 12 men and three women were placed on trial in May 1952 before a panel of three judges. The trial lasted two months — an eternity amid the usual swift and sure Soviet injustice. Some say the chief judge slow-played the trial while privately lobbying the Kremlin to save them. If so, he failed.
On that horrible August night, 13 defendants faced a firing squad in the Lubyanka basement. They ranged in age from Emilia Teumin, 47, a dictionary editor, to Solomon Lozovsky, 74, former director of the Soviet Information Bureau.
Witnesses noted only the plaintive final words of novelist Bergelson: “Earth, oh earth, do not cover my blood.”
Kvitko left a poem, “Prison Romance, 1952,” written in his final months. It begins, “No, my dear friend/We are not destined to meet/The cold has gripped my door’s corners/And it is difficult to break free, believe me...”
Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953, eight months after the executions. The writers were officially “rehabilitated” in 1955 and declared victims of undue prosecutions.
Yiddish culture outlived the Soviet strongman but was left crippled, said Dr. Zackary Berger, a Baltimore physician, poet and Yiddish translator.
The Holocaust, Stalin’s purge, Jewish assimilation and the official dominance of the Hebrew language in Israel “collaborated perfectly to finish off Yiddish literary culture with its roots in Eastern Europe, which is but a shadow of its former self,” Berger told the Justice Story.
Today, the world has just 2 million Yiddish-speakers, a decline from as many as 13 million before World War II. A small group of Eastern European poets continue to ply their craft in Yiddish, a language a writer once described as “a warm blanket.”