Yiddish and the Cold War: How the YIVO Archives Revealed a Communist Plot

Gennady Estraikh

Jennifer Young, YIVO’s Director of Education, interviewed Gennady Estraikh, YIVO’s inaugural Albert B. Ratner Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish Literature, about Prof. Estraikh’s upcoming Ruth Gay Seminar at YIVO, Farewell to Communism: Howard Fast and Soviet Yiddish Writers, on Tuesday, October 7, at 7:00pm. YIVO Members have the opportunity to get to know Prof. Estraikh, other members, and the YIVO staff at a Members-Only reception at 5:30pm - RSVP today!

JY: You write about Howard Fast (1914-2003) in your 2008 book, Yiddish and the Cold War. Was it here that your research into him began?

GE: It was, yes. I was surprised to come across Howard Fast in my research for this book, actually. Everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union grew up as a reader of him—he was a household name, especially for people slightly older than me. But he wasn’t my character. He actually became my character when I was sitting here at YIVO, some years ago. I was looking at the papers of Paul (Pesach) Novick (1900-1988) editor of New York’s Communist Yiddish daily newspaper, the Morgn Frayhayt. I don’t remember if I had even ordered it, but I saw Fast’s letters with Novick there in the box and I was surprised. The correspondence between Howard Fast and Pesach Novick is a very interesting one, especially because both sides of the conversation are preserved—Novick wrote his letters initially in Yiddish, and then someone translated them into English, so both Novick’s and Fast’s letters ended up in Novick’s archive.

Fast was very detached from anything that was really part of contemporary Jewish culture. He didn’t know any Yiddish; he grew up in a different cultural environment. He became the Communist Party of the United States’ number one Communist intellectual. He became a major public figure because of his many books, and because of having been in prison. And he had received the Stalin Prize, so he was internationally recognized in the Communist movement. For American Jewish Communists, as well as for Yiddish-speaking Communists, it was nice to have a Jewish guy [as a Party figurehead].

But for me, I read this correspondence in part as a story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), a Soviet Jewish organization founded in 1941. And I found in the letters a sort of explanation for some episodes in the story of the JAC that didn’t make sense before. Suddenly this correspondence brought some element of logic to this story. The Soviets were trying to sell Fast an explanation as to why the JAC had been shut down. So Fast’s letters to Novick expose the story that Soviet agencies had created to cover up their real actions. The JAC was made up of such prominent Soviet Jewish writers as Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, and Solomon Mikhoels, to encourage Western support for the Allied war effort. Fefer and Mikhoels even took a tour to the United States in 1943. But after the war, the climate changed. Stalin held the JAC committee responsible for provoking Jewish nationalism in the Soviet Union. By January 1948, Mikhoels was dead, murdered in a staged car accident in Minsk.

JY: And the Novick-Fast correspondence helps shed light on this episode?

GE: Yes, it’s very interesting. Mikhoels was sent to Minsk on official business in January of 1948. He was ostensibly supposed to be inspecting the Yiddish theater and the Belorussian theater there, as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee. And suddenly one morning, in his hotel, Itsik Fefer appeared. And we know this, because Mikhoels made a telephone call to his wife or daughter back home, and he said, “Fefer is here.” It was noteworthy, because Fefer couldn’t explain what he was doing there. There are various stories about Fefer’s role there at this time. Why would he have been sent to Minsk? And why did he seem embarrassed to be there, without a ready explanation for his presence?

I hadn’t been able to explain this.  But it turns out, according to the Novick-Fast correspondence, that, prior to the murder, the Soviet regime had concocted a story to explain Mikhoels’ death and about who was responsible for it. The story was this: When Mikhoels and Fefer came to the US in 1943, the American government recruited Fefer as a spy—but they had not managed to recruit Mikhoels. And when Fefer came back, he in turn recruited virtually all of the members of the governing committee of the JAC—including Bergelson and Markish. And the only person who remained loyal to the Soviet regime was Mikhoels. When Mikhoels realized that Fefer was organizing this sort of underground, he told him, “Look, I’m not going to tolerate this.” So, when Mikhoels went to Minsk, according to the script, Fefer followed him there, and planned his death. This was the official Soviet storyline—but it hasn’t been known to scholars until now.

So my reading of this story was that the scriptwriters of the secret police created this scenario before Mikhoels’ murder, and, in order to justify this scenario, they dispatched Fefer to Minsk. And Fefer himself, even though he was an agent of the secret police, didn’t understand what he was doing there. In other words, he certainly had nothing to do with planning the murder. But his presence there ostensibly made the whole explanation for the murder plausible—the story would have some kind of logic.

So Howard Fast related this to Novick and to some others. He had heard the story while he was in Paris in April1949, at the World Peace Congress. Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union, had clearly been fed this story in order to tell it to Fast. With this narrative being circulated, those who wanted to continue to believe in the Soviet regime had an explanation: “Fefer was a spy. All of them were spies.” I was very excited when I read this.

Of course, we know now that Fefer was arrested in 1948, with the other members of the JAC, and was executed, alongside Bergelson and Markish, on August 12, 1952. But Fast and Novick would not find this out until the revelations first appeared in the Polish Yiddish newspaper Folks-Shtime, in April 1956; Novick reprinted this information almost immediately in the Morgn Frayhayt, and then it was widely disseminated in English.

JY: When Fast heard this story, do you think he really believed it?

GE: Yes, he [initially] believed it. Everyone believed it. They were tuned in to this “believing” frequency.

JY: But in his correspondence with Novick, in the 1950s, he had ceased to believe it?

GE: Yes, he had stopped believing it.  It was in this correspondence that Novick essentially said, “Look, you told us this tall story. And now you are taking it back?”

It was actually a correspondence of accusations—Fast accused Novick and Novick accused Fast. It was quite bitter. Polite, but still bitter. Novick initiated the correspondence only once Fast announced his departure from the Communist Party in the New York Times [on February 1, 1957]. And then it was published in the Soviet Press that Howard Fast had defected. Only once it was made public did Novick begin his real correspondence with Fast—he wrote to tell him how disappointed he was.

JY: Does Novick display any of his own doubts about the Communist Party in this correspondence? This would have been a time when he would have been doing his own soul-searching about his own role in the Party, would it not? Especially after the revelations of the murders of the JAC by the Soviet regime, which he himself published? 

GE: Yes. Later, in one of his last interviews, at the end of his life, Novick explained why and how he had become transformed from a die-hard pro-Soviet guy into a Communist of a different kind—and he mentioned Howard Fast’s departure as one of the most important elements of this transformation.

So this is how I will try to tell a Yiddish story of Howard Fast, a person who had nothing to do with Yiddish literature—and yet ended up playing a very influential role in this realm. I believe Fast’s departure played a major role in pushing not only Novick but also others in his circle out of the Party sphere.

At the same time, for Fast himself, the persecution and execution of the JAC members played a central role in his decision to break from the Communist movement.

JY: For those who haven’t spent much time with these issues before, what would you say is the most interesting or significant take-away from your research?

GE: It’s a page of history, of American Jewish life; that is important. Fast’s departure from the Party was headline news in the New York Times.  It wasn’t just casually reported, it was more or less serialized: front page news. This was seen as part of the story of the decline of Jewish Communism. The bulk of people were leaving the party at this time—it was the end of the Party as a mass phenomenon, especially for Jews. At this time, about 50% of the Party was Jewish, and the Morgn Frayhayt had a similar circulation to that of the Daily Worker. So in the story of this decline, the role of Howard Fast was central, not only to Yiddish-speaking Communists but for Soviet sympathizers in the American Jewish community as a whole.

This interview has been edited for clarity, context, and length.