Becoming Soviet Jews: Interview with Elissa Bemporad

On June 16, 2013, Elissa Bemporad spoke at YIVO about her new book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press), a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement. The book reveals the ways in which Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. But Jews also remained committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, and religious practices such as circumcision and kosher slaughter. In fact, most Jews attempted to walk the fine line between accepted Soviet behavior and social norms and expressions of Jewish particularity.

Elissa Bemporad holds the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in Eastern European Jewish history, and is assistant professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. She was trained in Russian studies at the University of Bologna, and in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She received her PhD in history from Stanford University. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk has been awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary history as an outstanding work in twentieth-century history.

She was recently interviewed by Yedies editor Roberta Newman.

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Watch video of the event.

RN: Let me just start with asking you why you chose to focus on Minsk instead of some other city?

EB: I guess there are two main reasons. One is kind of personal: My roommate in Stanford University was a Jew from Minsk who came to the U.S. when she was ten, and also a Soviet historian. And so we talked a little bit about Minsk, and I think that I had that interest in the back of my mind.

But the more historical reason, of course, is that Minsk is such an excellent choice for a case study because, first of all, it’s such a Jewish city, a historic Jewish center that goes back to the late sixteenth century. And under the Soviets it becomes a capital of a republic. So you have this unique combination of a Jewish city, with Jewish institutions, with a Jewish past, with a Jewish present that becomes the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In other words, while remaining a Jewish center demographically speaking, it also becomes a hub of communist institutions, of communist bureaucracy, where Jews of course come to play an important role.

RN: Minsk was a city in the Pale, and Jews were already permitted to live there so there was already a sizeable Jewish population,unlike Moscow where, in tsarist times, you had to have special permission to live. So, there was already a large Jewish community in Minsk, unlike some other cities you could’ve looked at.

EB: Yes, I knew that I wanted to pick a place in the Pale of Settlement. Odessa would’ve been another interesting case study, but Odessa emerged as a Jewish center much later, compared to Minsk.

Minsk is actually very similar to Vilna, another major center of Jewish life. But Vilna didn’t become part of the Soviet Union. There’s a Yiddish saying about the relationship between Vilna and Minsk, that it’s like a shtub mit a kamer. It’s like a house with a chamber. Which of course gives you a sense of the hierarchical relationship between the two cities, meaning that Vilna is the house and Minsk is the chamber. So Minsk is, in a way, culturally part of Vilna, meaning that it developed in the same litvish tradition. Like Vilna, Minsk was an important center of Jewish learning, with well-known rabbinic figures and yeshivas. It later became a center of the Haskalah and of Zionism and Jewish socialism. After Vilna, Minsk was the largest center of the Bund in tsarist Russia.

In other words, this is a very Jewish city, not only from the vantage point of religious life and demographically, but also as far as Jewish political life goes. And so I was very curious to look at how the Soviet experiment impacted Jewish life and how it changed Jewish life in such a Jewish city. The process was very different from what happened in Moscow or Leningrad. Let’s remember that even by the eve of World War II, the large majority of Soviet Jews lived in the former Pale of Settlement. They didn’t live in Moscow and Leningrad, as some might assume. They lived in the former Pale of Settlement.

RN: What promises did the Russian Revolution make good on for the Jews, and in what ways did it betray them?

EB: From the vantage point of civil equality and Jews being able to participate in political life and social life, the Revolution did keep its promises. But it did exclude religious leaders, Zionists, and Bundists who refused to (allegedly or not) renounce their beliefs. They were branded “lishchentsy” and stripped of their voting rights, thus becoming second-class citizens.

But for those who were committed to Yiddish, the Revolution did keep its promise, in Minsk more than in other places. Here, Yiddish shared the same rights as Polish, Belorussian, and Russian. In many ways, Minsk became the capital of Yiddish in Eastern Europe in the interwar period. You have the language being displayed in public spaces in a way that you don’t have anywhere else in Europe at the time. And you have institutions of higher learning where Yiddish is the language in which the students learn.

However, in 1938 the Soviet Yiddish schools are closed down, and they’re closed down specifically in the Soviet Belorussian republic and not in the Ukrainian republic. They're closed down in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic because of the relative success of the Yiddish experiment here, because of the idiosyncratic nature of Belorussian nationalism, which, compared to Ukrainian nationalism was a new phenomenon, in many ways created by the Revolution.

So, what went wrong? I don’t think that things went wrong only for the Jews. As I discuss in my chapter on the Great Terror, things went wrong for all extraterritorial national minorities. Let’s remember that the first minority to be targeted at the time of the Great Purges are not the Jews, but the Poles. Soviet Polish schools are closed down several months before Soviet Jewish schools are closed down. And the Jews will continue to have their own newspaper, Oktyabr (October), and their own theater until the Germans enter the city in 1941.

RN: It’s interesting to hear that there was such unevenness in the suppression of Yiddish in different places – that it wasn’t just across-the-board repression everywhere.

EB: Minsk was specifically targeted by the authorities during the Great Terror also because of its geographic position. And this, in turn, had an impact on the existence of the Jewish institutions in the city. Jewish and Polish schools are shut down in the context of the Great Terror, in the context of Stalin saying “Enough with these extraterritorial national minorities who have so many rights! Now it has to be only about Russian, and the main language and culture of each republic!” So it’s only Russian and Belorussian. Yiddish and Polish are no-nos, especially in the context of the 1930s, with the perceived threat of “Polish fascism.” Stalin knows that more than 3.5 million Jews live right across the border. And Minsk is right there, near the border. We know Stalin conveyed a clear message to the local authorities: “We need to keep a close eye on what is going on in Minsk.”

RN: Can you talk about how the Jews were both the objects of Sovietization, but also the agents of it as well. Because there certainly were, for instance, Jews who held high positions in the party and local government.

EB: Exactly. Jews were both agents of the Revolution and objects of the Revolution How do they become agents? Who was literate at the time of the Revolution? Mostly Jews. And who could the Bolsheviks trust, politically? Mostly Jews, of course, who never would have supported the Tsar. So you have higher rates of literacy  and you have a potential political trust that you can put in Jews, who are welcomed into the new Soviet bureaucratic and state machine.

So the Jews become very much agents of Revolution, and in Minsk for example, you see Jews who are members of the central committee of the Belorussian Communist Party. Izzy Kharik, a Yiddish poet and a prominent public figure on the Jewish street, was also a member of the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party. So we do have Jews who become very prominent, become powerful. And they exercise their power, not only through the Evsekstiia (the Jewish section of the Communist Party), but through the different state and party institutions.

Of course, so many of those who became an integral part of the system believed in the Revolution. They believed that the Revolution was heading in the right direction. They probably believed this until the early 1930s, and by the second half of the 1930s whether you believe or you don’t believe, you have to pretend you do anyway, right? You really have no choice.

Speaking of the Evsektsiia and the question of  agency, let me mention an example. The largest underground yeshiva in the Soviet Union was in Minsk. It existed until 1931 and its rabbi, Rabbi Yehoshua Horodner, was very committed to maintaining religious life and passing Jewish education on to the next generation. On the eve of the Sabbath he would go from store to store and warn the Jews who worked there, “The Sabbath is about to begin, the Sabbath is about to begin.” And we know that members of the Evsektsiia were aware of him and what he was doing. But there was a degree of leniency, reflecting the fact that the leaders of the Evsektsiia are in power on the Jewish street. Granted, they did not know that Horodner was running the largest underground yeshiva in the Soviet Union, in Minsk but they knew that he was trying to keep Jewish tradition and Jewish religion alive, and they didn’t stop him. So there is a degree of agency. They decided not to stop him. And nobody else intervened.

Historiography has focused a lot on the JewishJews as the victims of the Revolution. But the picture you get from studying this period is much more nuanced. You have ordinary Jewish men and women, students, workers, mothers, former Zionists or Bundists, teachers, shoykhetim (ritual slaughterers). Some welcome the Bolsheviks and the empowerment that goes with the support. Others reject them, or don’t identify with them, but they are still forced to participate in the system. Daily life circumstances and practical concerns made participation inevitable for Jews and non-Jews. Many had a voice and enjoyed a degree of agency in the revolution.

So the Revolution wasn’t just built from above, but was built also from below. Jews were not just the victims, they were also the agents, and this is one of the tragedies of the Revolution for everybody, not only for the Jews: the Revolution fed on the voices that supported it. That’s how it kept itself alive.

RN: This is a much more complex picture than the one that is usually presented.

EB: I think that’s one of the reasons why my book is so significant, besides the fact that nobody has ever before looked at the archival material that I consulted.

I started out at YIVO, as every respectable historian of east European Jewry should! And then, of course, I went to Moscow. Then, from Moscow I went to Israel, to the Central Archives of the Jewish People. And then I spent almost one year in Minsk. That's three continents. In Minsk, I used the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus. But the most exciting archival materials I found, especially for the social historian I am, were in the regional archives, in Minsk – the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Minskoi oblasti Archiv. So you do have the Communist Party collections, but they’re really Communist Party collections about the individual institutions. You can look at collections about one cooperative store, or about one particular school in Minsk. This is something that you will rarely find in the National Archives, where you have you have the documentation produced from above, from the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party. I know it’s hard to believe, but doing research in Minsk was one of the most exciting periods of my academic career. And the two most exciting chapters in the book to write? The one on women and the gender revolution on the Jewish street; and the one on the Great Terror. You must read them!

Transcribed by Alix Brandwein.
Interview edited for length and clarity.