Being Jewish in the USSR: a general overview.
The years 1960–1970 were marked in the USSR by the formation of a vast movement of opposition to the regime, generally described in the West as “dissident.” In reality, this revolt of minds, which began to emerge as early as Stalin’s death in 1953, soon took on a protean character. While “historic” dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov located their struggle within society rather than against it, in order to obtain the full and complete application of Soviet legislation in the domains of political and religious freedoms and the free movement of ideas and people, during the Brezhnev period — from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s — confrontation with the authorities expressed itself, at least within the intellectual elites, through a rediscovery of history and an interpretation of the past at odds with the official doxa.
The “retro” wave that swept the USSR in those years was not merely a fashion phenomenon and the collecting of icons or old photographs; it found a political expression in the feeling, on the Russo-Russian side, of the loss of a cultural identity grounded in the Orthodox faith. This existential crisis of values was heightened by the dawning awareness of an unprecedented ecological devastation of the Russian land. This association between the quest for an original culture unperverted by foreign influences and the protection of an “authentic” Russian landscape took concrete form in the 1970s with the emergence of a neo-rural, Great-Russian nationalist movement whose leaders were “peasant writers” and prominent figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The search for roots brought about a “drift of national sentiment” and the slide from an open, humanist patriotism toward a “closed, fearful, exclusive nationalism, defining the nation by the elimination of intruders — Jews, immigrants, revolutionaries; a collective paranoia, fed by obsessions with decadence and conspiracy.1” This evolution, of which the current situation in Russia is the direct emanation, culminated in a confrontation between the Russian nation and the “little people”2 of the stateless Jews, who were themselves likewise incited to define their own culture and their own history.
After several decades of voluntary assimilation — at least as concerns the first period of building a new Soviet society — followed by forced integration and discrimination under Stalin, Jewish identity was, according to the Israeli writer Rani Aren, no more than a “dissonance” and nothing more than vague “ancient memories.”3 Various factors arising from Soviet domestic policy, such as the ban on religious instruction in Hebrew and the elimination of the greatest representatives of Yiddish culture during openly antisemitic campaigns, together with external factors such as the war between 1939 and 1944 in the territories west of the USSR where a large part of the Jewish community lived, explain this impression of emptiness that gripped the Jews of the USSR when they sought to reconnect with their past. To evoke the situation of his coreligionists, Rani Aren speaks of an “infamous belonging”4 of which they knew nothing, or almost nothing. He also mentions the boredom that gnawed at an entire generation of students, for whom access to higher education was restricted following the establishment of a mechanism of “national leveling” that concealed an unofficial numerus clausus.5 Pushed to the margins of Soviet society, the Jews were able to devote themselves to cultural activities that allowed them to restore a certain coherence to their identity.
This informal community was traversed by two main currents. The first brought together Jews who wished to renew themselves religiously. They were aided in their quest by former Zionists taken prisoner by the Soviets at the time of the annexation of Lithuania in 1939.6 It was around them that, from the mid-1950s onward, study circles (ulpan) were formed in Leningrad and the first unofficial publications (samizdat) were distributed.7 In the 1960s, and above all from the Six-Day War of 1967, which pitted Israel against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the circles and seminars became spaces of encounter and exchange for Jews wishing to make their Aliyah or “ascent” to Israel.8 To a large extent, these agents of the Zionist revival and of religious practice in the USSR drew inspiration from the approach of their Russian counterparts, who had preceded them in the rediscovery of traditional Russian culture.
The second current was composed of people who for the most part belonged to the cultural elite while standing at the margins of official culture. They worshipped knowledge and wielded provocation. For the Soviet authorities, they were necessarily “Jews.”9 The social ostracism that struck poets such as the future Nobel laureate in literature Joseph Brodsky was certainly painful and dangerous. Many intellectuals suffered this ostracism and were condemned to stays in camps or psychiatric hospitals. But, paradoxical as it may seem, there was also in this discrimination a certain form of implicit recognition. The most eminent personalities of the cultural world — such as the children’s writer Korney Chukovsky, the musician Dmitri Shostakovich or the poet Anna Akhmatova — were considered “Jews” or “Judaized” according to the principle of “osmosis,” which made it possible to include non-Jews on lists composed mostly of Jews in order to avoid accusations of antisemitism. Anna Akhmatova in particular was considered “Jewish” on account of the role of “protectress” she played for many young Jewish and/or homosexual artists and writers in Leningrad. For them she embodied the permanence of the Russian culture of the Silver Age, and in a certain way she showed these young Jews, hungry for knowledge, the path they should follow in order to reconquer their identity: they had to cultivate themselves and protect their difference.
Among these intellectuals, distinct attitudes can be distinguished. The most superficial, in terms of their adherence to Judaism and Jewish culture, confined themselves to the vague illusion of a sartorial and musical nonconformism. In a uniform society where consumer goods were difficult to acquire, a few accessories were enough to give oneself the air of an “opponent.” This was the era of the first portable tape recorders and of recordings by bards — almost all of them Jewish or of Jewish origin: Aleksandr Galich, Aleksandr Vysotsky, Aleksandr Rozenbaum — who were listened to and copied with the thrill of transgression. Others opted for a form of intellectual marranization. In order to circumvent the prohibition that struck, in literature, the expression of any Jewishness — whether through the presence of a Jewish character or the evocation of Jewish culture — certain writers, in particular authors of science-fiction works such as the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, composed heavily coded works containing allusions to the situation of the Jews in the USSR.10
The Strugatsky brothers were not isolated cases, and other intellectuals opted for this device of coded writing. This was the case in particular of the translator, philologist and specialist in ancient literature Shimon Markish, whose path as a man and as a writer makes it possible to follow precisely the process of intellectual reappropriation of Jewish identity — or, more exactly, of one aspect of that identity. In contrast to the numerous studies on the great movements of resistance and opposition to general Sovietization in the context of de-Stalinization in the 1960s and then of dissidence in the decades of 1960–1980, individual trajectories and personal cases of “re-Judaization” have not yet been the object of in-depth analysis.
Markish: from Erasmus to Russian-Jewish literature
The name of Shimon Markish is well known to specialists in “Russian-Jewish” literature. Indeed, from the time he settled in the West at the very beginning of the 1970s, Markish wrote important studies on the great names of this field of literary creation, and in particular, for the most famous of them, on Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg. While Markish did not invent the concept of Russian-Jewish literature to designate literary creation in Russian by Jewish authors, he was certainly the first to give a precise definition of its characteristics. According to his conception — a conception he set out at the beginning of practically every one of his works after 1970 — a Russian-Jewish writer is a man of letters who is Jewish according to the halakha (Jewish Law), thus at least of a Jewish mother, who consciously shares the destiny of his community, which he evokes from the inside in his works. The language used, according to Markish, is not a relevant criterion of belonging. Since the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews have lived in diaspora and speak foreign, non-Jewish languages, which does not prevent them from writing and composing “Jewish” poems or novels. These parameters, which imply an arbitrary distinction between content and form and which presuppose not only a case-by-case appraisal of a writer’s works but also the conception of a united Jewish world, have been the object of many discussions. These should not obscure S. Markish’s significant contribution to the (re)discovery of the great names of Jewish literature in the Russian language in Europe. Moreover, the question of the intellectual and personal path that led to the creation of such a grid for identifying Russian-Jewish authors and their works has not yet been addressed.
The fact is all the more remarkable in that Markish’s interest in Russian-Jewish literature corresponds to a turning point in his life. Indeed, before defending, in 1983, a thesis in French on Russian-Jewish literature — and, more broadly, before writing reference articles on this same subject, one of them published in France in 1985 in the Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique — he had never broached this question. The fact may be explained by the censorship that affected the Jewish domain in the USSR. However, the rapid transition from the activity of translator pursued by Markish in the USSR — an activity conducted alongside that of a specialist in the cultures of the ancient world and the Renaissance — toward the field of Russian-Jewish literary creation, and this from the very moment of his arrival in Western Europe, suggests that there is a continuity and a certain coherence among these different disciplinary fields. The validity of this hypothesis is confirmed by the title of the work Érasme et les Juifs (Erasmus and the Jews), which he published in Switzerland in 1979 and whose binary composition illustrates the explicit conjunction of two axes, the first of which (Erasmus) referred to his past in the country he had just left, the USSR, and the second (the Jews) to his research to come. The complementarity — or, still more, the possible adaptation — of Erasmus’s “philosophy” to the situation of the Jews in the USSR was, moreover, already implied in a popularizing work published in 1966 and intended for children, whose title, reproducing the Latin motto of the humanist from Rotterdam, Concedo Nulli,11 appeared as a barely concealed metaphor for Markish’s affirmation of a resistance to Soviet power. The various events organized in the USSR in 1969, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of Erasmus’s birth, as well as the publication of new corrected or previously unpublished translations of certain works such as The Colloquies, In Praise of Folly and the Correspondence (by Markish alone or in collaboration), were so many opportunities to transmit, by transposing them to the Soviet context, the great principles of universalism and tolerance of the master thinker of the European Renaissance. In 1971, Markish was already residing in Hungary when his last work on Erasmus, An Encounter with Erasmus, appeared in the USSR — a book different in form and content from that of 1966, revealing a deep knowledge of the work and personality of the Dutch humanist thinker.12 But Markish was already considered a “traitor to the homeland”; no review was devoted to this last publication, and his name disappeared from the bibliographical entries of Soviet libraries.
Before this blacklisting, Markish had the time to build up a genuine body of work, rich in numerous monographs and translations, whose overall thematic coherence corresponds to a double process of “Judaization” and “individualization” highlighted by the historian Jules Margolin in his presentation of Érasme et les Juifs. Thus, commenting on Markish’s affirmation — “Erasmus and Erasmianism, which play so important a role in the history of the tolerance of our time, belong to the history of the Jewish people in Europe, whatever the scope of Erasmus’s opinions on the Jews” — Margolin warns against the (excessive) “integration” of Erasmus into Jewish history and underscores the personalization of the subjects addressed by Markish who, “through the problem he has set himself to treat,” “settles his own accounts with the Jewish question.13” Finally, Margolin notes Markish’s original approach, which did not content itself, in his view, with taking up commentaries already stated, but returned to the very texts of Erasmus’s essays and correspondence. Markish himself, in a movement recalling the spirit of rediscovery of sacred texts characteristic of the Renaissance, reaffirms in his writings the necessity of not being deceived by the vulgate and of effecting a return to the sources. Likewise, he affirms time and again the personalization of his writings, for example in his presentation of an article on the revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky.14 The account of his own memories of the Soviet period, or the dedication of his books to the memory of his father,15 make possible an immediate connection between the content of his work and his real life, marked by the tragic disappearance of his father, the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish.
At the origins: the family and cultural milieu
S. Markish received a double education, both Jewish and Soviet. For him, “being Jewish” was just as obvious and natural as “breathing or loving one’s grandmother.”16 His parents belonged to a generation of Russian Jews who had already broken with an assiduous practice of religion. His mother, Esther (Ester), née Lazebnikova in 1912 in Baku, had grown up in a well-off family. Esther’s father was an entrepreneur in the oil industry, and her mother, like many young Jewish women of her time, had pursued medical studies in Paris before her marriage. In 1921–1922 the entire Lazebnikova family left Russia for Palestine before returning to the USSR in 1923. The father indeed considered that the context of the NEP was favorable to his business. It was in Moscow in 1929 that Esther Lazebnikova met the Yiddish poet Peretz (Perets) Markish (1895–1952), who, after a stay in Western Europe, had also decided to return to the USSR in order to take part in the building of a new society where Yiddish-Jewish culture might find fertile ground for intense and harmonious development. As if to legitimize this approach, his two sons — Simon, the elder, and David, the younger, who would later become an Israeli writer in the Russian language — often emphasized the sincerity of the sentiments that had led their father to put his talent at the service of the communist regime and to become an official and recognized poet (he was the first Jewish poet to receive the Stalin Prize in 1939).
Peretz Markish arrived in Moscow crowned with glory and preceded by a reputation as a great seducer. Esther was then barely sixteen. He was a little over thirty and embodied the future of the Soviet Jewish world. His friends were the great names of Jewish-Yiddish arts and culture: Solomon Mikhoels, Veniamin Zuskin, Ilya Nusinov, Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Samuil Galkin, Ilya Ehrenburg. Akhmatova too was part of the circle of the Markish family’s acquaintances (she translated a few of Peretz Markish’s poems in the 1930s), even if she was not a close friend. It was she, however, who sponsored Shimon Markish’s entry into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1952. Though he passes over this poetic anointing in modest silence, Shimon Markish nonetheless recounts, in his rare reminiscences, his few encounters in the 1950s and 1960s with the Russian poet.
All these representatives of the Russian intelligentsia constituted a state at the margins of the state, with its own laws and codes, a Republic of beautiful souls distinguished from the rest of the population by its very high cultural level. This form of elitism of the spirit was already cultivated in the home of Peretz and Esther Markish. The father enjoyed a material situation enviable for the time, yet he continued to live in that material simplicity which had been that of his parents, originally from the shtetl of Polonnoye, located not far from Berdichev, which at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the great centers of Jewish-Yiddish culture, traditional and popular. In spite of this cultural heritage, and in spite too of the father’s vocation, the only language used at home was Russian. The great Jewish authors of the Hebrew language, such as Chaim Bialik, were read in Russian translation and not in Hebrew or Yiddish.
The image of the father preserved by S. Markish is relatively imprecise.17 He devoted, moreover, only rare and terse articles to his childhood memories. A severe, towering father, whose tragic disappearance — he was arrested in 1949 and executed in 1952 — broke a chain of transmission that his two sons would try to reconstitute through writing: through fiction for David, and through scholarship and a return to the sources of European cultures for Simon, who in the 1950s “chose” to pursue university studies in the field of ancient languages, Greek and Latin.
In February 1953, in a climate of antisemitic hysteria, Simon and his mother were sentenced, as ChSIR, members of the family of a traitor to the homeland,18 to ten years of forced residence in the Kzyl-Orda region (Kazakhstan). After Stalin’s death, the family returned to Moscow in 1954. While publishing works on the great names of ancient literature, Markish began a career as a translator for the prestigious publishing house Khudozhestvennaya literatura and directed a specialized journal on translation studies, Masterstvo perevoda. The unanimously acknowledged quality of his translations was emphasized in particular by the poet Joseph Brodsky, who described Markish as a “brilliant translator.” In 1970 he married, in a second marriage, a Hungarian mathematician and, unlike his mother and his brother, who made their Aliyah to Israel, he settled in Budapest. In 1973 he traveled to the USSR for the last time. In one and the same movement, he abandoned the field of ancient culture and languages, returning to this subject only episodically — on the occasion, in particular, of a retrospective article and of another article on the poetics of Joseph Brodsky. The title of this study — “Judean and Hellene? Neither Judean nor Hellene?” — as well as its content reflect the multiple moral and artistic values from which certain (Jewish) Russian intellectuals, and among them S. Markish, drew inspiration in their quest for identity.
The ancient world and the contemporary world
The choice to join the department of ancient languages, Greek and Latin, answered, according to Esther Markish, her son’s desire to find a field of study remote from contemporary reality. These remarks are confirmed by S. Markish, who specified in interviews that at the very moment of his father’s arrest, in 1949, he decided to abandon the field of the humanities to undertake a university course in classical studies in Greek and Latin, in order to be less exposed and also in order to return to the “pure” word, neither perverted nor worn out by Soviet propaganda.19 This return to the “word” was also a means of reconnecting with the “classical” Russian culture that had undergone an intense development throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, studies of the ancient world were regarded in Russian academic circles as the foundation of the humanities — with a predominance of studies of the Greek world (more than of Roman civilization), which is explained by the influence of Byzantium on Russia as well as by the historical ties between Russia and the Greek Orthodox world. The Silver Age represented an apotheosis of the rediscovery of Greek thought and literature and, in general, of mythic thought set against the rationalism of the second half of the nineteenth century. Before 1917, the research of Russian scholars in philology, history, sociology and archaeology was of a scientific level comparable to that of the great European countries.
After the Revolution, the disappearance of an urban and bourgeois intelligentsia, bearer of the ideas of classicism, and the abolition of classical studies in secondary education brought about a notable fall in interest in the learning of Greek and Latin. In higher education, research on the Greco-Roman world shifted from the domain of ideas, languages and arts toward the historical analysis of socio-economic relations and the class struggle. The separation between ancient history and philology led, in the mid-1930s, to the creation in a few universities of departments of ancient philology relegated to the “backyards of research in the humanities.” That of Leningrad was entrusted to Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955), the cousin and first great love of Boris Pasternak.
These changes on the structural and ideological front also concerned teachers and researchers. Eminent specialists emigrated, while others perished as victims of the repression and purges of the 1930s.
From the second half of the 1950s, then, one of the principal tasks of the young historians was to reconstitute the spiritual links with the works of the specialists of the preceding generation and to restore the luster of a classical culture tarnished and perverted by Stalinist neoclassicism.20 Thus Markish borrowed, for an article, the title of one of V. Buzeskul’s works, The Ancient World and the Contemporary World,21 written in 1913, that is, more than half a century earlier.22 A first version of this article was submitted as early as 1966 to the journal Voprosy literatury, but the text was refused on account of its insufficient quality. It was nonetheless published in Novy Mir on the condition that the passage in which Socrates refuses to flee prison and the punishment imposed by his judges be removed, for the passage was considered to echo too closely the situation of the Jews in Poland. On the other hand, by Markish’s own admission, the quotation of a sentence uttered by Tacitus after the assassination of the cruel and suspicious emperor Domitian, which referred directly to Stalinism, was retained, for it had gone unnoticed. The sentence in question was the following: “We have truly given proof of a very great patience! If the past went to the farthest limits of freedom, we, for our part, have known the extreme limits of slavery. The omnipresence of informers deprived us of the faculty of speaking and of listening. […]”23
Let us note, on the subject of the connections between past and present, that a not inconsiderable part of the historical works — in particular those of the series Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudey (The Lives of Illustrious Men) and the monographs devoted to Pushkin, to the great revolutionary figures and, first and foremost, to the Decembrists — were invested with a message of sincerity, altruism and fidelity to the humanist and universalist ideas that referred the reader back to the origins of a “romantic” and revolutionary thought led astray by the Soviet regime. As concerns the Jewish domain, the deciphering of contemporary reality in the mirror of the history of Greek and Roman civilizations had already been tried in Russia at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Further upstream, this coordinated approach to understanding Jewish history and writing it in the spectral light of studies of the ancient world had already been adopted in Germany, in the mid-nineteenth century, by the scholars of Judaism. It was Greece, as a cultural entity, that made it possible at that time for the Jews to conceive the object of their own history and to declare themselves “Greeks,” effecting a virtual syncretism of Hellenic philosophy and the Bible. The adoption of the Hellenistic model made it possible for the German Jews of the nineteenth century, then for the Russian Jews of the second half of the twentieth century, to associate election with disciplinary excellence and to distinguish themselves from the “others” — from German and European Christianity for the former, from the organs of the state, the party and the Russian people for the latter.24
In most of the articles or text commentaries written by Markish, or in collaboration with him, the correspondence between the ancient world and Soviet society is affirmed. Most often the allusions are transparent. In her presentation of the Apology and the Metamorphoses of the African Platonist philosopher and rhetorician Apuleius,25 Maria Grabar-Passek brings out the “cosmopolitan” dimension of Greco-Roman civilization in the second century A.D.26 A few years after the accusations brought against the “white coats” and the denunciation of “the deleterious influence of (Jewish) cosmopolitans on the great Russian culture of Pushkin” (an accusation made by Nikolai Tikhonov in 1948), the positive use of the term “cosmopolitan” was anything but innocent. But it is perhaps the content of Apuleius’s texts, published in 1959, that is most revealing of a reading of the present in the light of the past. In the Apology, Apuleius defends himself against the attacks brought against him: he is considered a magician, because a poet. He is from a region located on the borders of Numidia and Gaetulia and, despite his perfect mastery of Greek and Latin, he is reproached for his African (foreign) origin. Apuleius must not only prove that he is a good citizen like the others, but also that he is not a malevolent and harmful being. He demonstrates that he is not in possession of maleficent objects, that he does not manufacture poison from dried fish, and, finally, that he has not bewitched a child in order to make him pronounce prophecies under hypnosis. Here again, the formulation and the content of these accusations could be brought together, by a Soviet reader, with historical facts such as the Beilis affair, named after that Jew of Kiev accused in 1911 of having killed an Orthodox Catholic child in order to use his blood to make unleavened bread. It is more than probable that the evocation of these slanderous accusations echoed the parodies of trials and the affair of the famous plot of the “White Coats” which, as soon as Stalin died, soon proved to have been fabricated out of whole cloth in order to eliminate Jewish doctors and to prepare a great wave of deportation of the Soviet Jewish population.
In Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Markish translated nearly two-thirds of the texts), it is likewise a question of double culture and of syncretic cosmopolitanism. As in The Glory of Bygone Centuries, which is a fictionalized form, by Markish, of the life of Plutarch and of certain isolated portraits of the illustrious figures presented in the Parallel Lives. The spirit of (European) cultural unity sought through the compared destinies of a Greek and a Roman, which seduced thinkers and writers such as Rabelais and Montaigne, but also Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph de Maistre, Erasmus and, later, Stefan Zweig, is preserved, even if the essential “message” in Markish bears on the description of Plutarch’s dwelling. This dwelling, by its cultural centrality, recalls the apartment of his father, Peretz Markish, where Soviet intellectuals gathered. The emphasis is also placed on the cruelty of the reign of Domitian (Titus Flavius Domitianus, 51–96), marked by numerous deportations, by its atmosphere of denunciation and of hunting down the enemies of power, and among them the philosophers and the writers. The double scope — “present (essentially Stalinism, as in the previous case) — past” — is also perceptible in the presentation of Livy’s narrative, The War against Hannibal, a narrative which, Markish specifies, was withdrawn from the libraries under the reign of the emperor Caligula, along with all the works of the Roman historian. Quickly the recall of the context of the war against Hannibal and of the battles with Scipio Africanus drift toward reflections on good and evil, on reason of state, and even on the causes of the defeats of the Roman regiments, which are a direct allusion to the first days of the German invasion in June 1941 and to the responsibility of the Soviet general staff.
In the works and studies devoted to Homer, the transposition from the past to the present is likewise carried out through a subtle — but evident — play of references and allusions. However, the tonality is more personal and, above all, more “Jewish.” In the introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (in a translation by Nikolai Gnedich), Markish reproduces the words of an actor in Hamlet who, reciting the monologue of the Trojan Aeneas, reflects on the cruelty of the victors and the sufferings of Queen Hecuba, wife of Priam, king of the Trojans. The actor grows pale and bursts into tears. Hamlet then asks: “What is he to Hecuba? And what is Hecuba to him? / And he sobs.” Markish gives the text in Russian in a translation by Boris Pasternak, whose evocation is associated both with Mandelstam affirming the inviolability of human values27 and with the Talmudist Hillel, author of the famous aphorism “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”28
The reconstituted filiation of the poets, Shakespeare and Mandelstam-Pasternak (whom Markish does not yet reject as non-Jewish writers, as will be the case later), culminates in an identification between the father of poetry, Homer, and all the representatives of world poetry, and most particularly the father, the father of a family, the father of Yiddish-Jewish poetry, Peretz Markish. In Homer and His Poems, it is certainly a question of the structure of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of the narrative thread, but also and above all of the grief of a wife who could not bid farewell to her husband. The tone is of an avowed and combative subjectivity: “It is as indisputable, as human and as strong as the inconsolable sorrow of a wife who has lost her husband without having been able to say goodbye to him: ‘From your deathbed, alas! you could not stretch your hands toward me, your lover; / You did not pronounce those testamentary words, those words of which eternally / I would have remembered day and night while shedding tears.’” Markish cites here the Iliad, 24, 743–745.
Further on, Markish devotes his analysis to the speech of Andromache (Two Lamentations, 22–477 and 24, 725). Hector’s wife mourns the past and screams her pain thinking of the future — not her own, nor that of her husband, but that of their son, who will remain an orphan. Finally, in the final prayer of Penelope, who, it is recalled, was married very young to a handsome, vigorous man much older than herself (an obvious evocation of Sh. Markish’s parents), one hears the voice of Esther Markish evoking her fidelity to a husband she will see no more.29
From the Renaissance to the Jewish renaissance
The passage — or, more exactly, the concomitant interest — in the ancient world and the Renaissance, and most particularly in Rabelais, Von Hutten and Erasmus, was, all in all, logical.30 Indeed, well before the Soviet era, the European Renaissance had been marked by a rediscovery of the original Christian spirit, which had been accompanied by a return to texts in Greek and Hebrew. The treasures of antiquity, once shut away in coffers, began once again to circulate. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. It is, moreover, a “return to the sources”31 that must, according to Markish, make it possible to preserve, in the sieve of thoughts, not so much the Erasmian search for the purity of the image of Christ as the affirmation of the inviolability of being and the critique of a ritualized practice of faith encouraged by a Church led astray and perverted in the luxury and gilding of palaces. It is therefore fitting to rediscover the world by cleansing it of the dross of medieval obscurantism.
All things considered, for a Soviet citizen of the 1960s, the Soviet Thaw and the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance could present a certain number of similarities. These two eras were distinguished, indeed, by the transition from a world closed in upon itself to a universe open to new discoveries that called into question the very teaching of the Church and the State. The discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the expeditions of Vasco da Gama, and, correlatively, the conquest of the cosmos and the development of radio and television transmissions modified the perception of the dimensions of the world and, in the case of the 1950s, of the validity of the balance of power and of the impermeability of the Iron Curtain.
In his writings on Rabelais and Erasmus, Markish establishes time and again a barely veiled parallel between the Middle Ages and Stalinism, the Renaissance and the Thaw.
In this system of oppositions — Luther-Erasmus, Middle Ages-Renaissance, Church and totalitarian State against humanist thought and culture — Markish defines his place by identifying his father with Erasmus. This cultural rapprochement finds its Jewish legitimacy in the very characterization of the enlightened minds of the Renaissance and their disciples, who in their time had been accused by the authorities of the Church of paganism and of Judaism because they devoted themselves to the study of Greek, a language reputed to be that of the schismatics of the East, and to the study of Hebrew, the language of the Jews. Finally, the very action of Von Hutten, who in the Letters of Obscure Men takes up the defense of the humanist Johann Reuchlin, accused by the Inquisition of Cologne of defending the Jews, and the stances taken by Erasmus against anti-Jewish hatred,32 contribute to the inclusion of Peretz and Shimon Markish, father and son, in the system of European values inherited from the Renaissance and the ancient world. The Jews who had considered themselves Greeks at the time of the Enlightenment could in the same way describe themselves as Erasmians or Rabelaisians in the Soviet era.
From one language to another: translation
The translation of foreign works was also a means of escaping literary regimentation and of opening a window onto another space, that of the West and of American literature in particular. Thus, according to Markish, if in the 1920s and 1930s translation had been the livelihood of very cultivated and polyglot “old ladies,” the last representatives of the Russian culture of the Silver Age, from the 1950s onward this activity became a refuge for the children of intellectuals who had hardly any other means of subsistence and who took impertinence and the spirit of independence for their banner.33 This autonomy, Markish specifies in an article written well after his departure from the USSR, was quite relative. The works to be translated were determined according to a plan drawn up each year by the editors of the publishing houses, who had to justify that the texts were “useful for the edification of the masses.” However, even the translation of very classical authors conforming to Soviet criteria, such as Hemingway, Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, Faulkner, could provide the occasion for an opening onto the West and elsewhere. This could be the case, for example, of a book on the seabeds of the Mediterranean or, in a totally different register, of the works of Edgar Poe. Markish took part in the first postwar publication of the American author’s stories, who was considered a decadent and deleterious writer. Indeed, one of Poe’s texts translated in the 1950s was included in a collection that did not come out until 1970.34
The choice to translate could also simply be motivated by the love of literature and writing and could become a political gesture. Thus, starting from a historiographical digression on the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the journal Masterstvo perevoda, Markish explained that the translations which placed the reader in the same position as an Athenian citizen discovering Homer’s poem in the original had his preference. The good translator, according to Markish, had to restore to the text its original freshness, and this enthusiastic search for purity makes translation a revolutionary act, opposed to the trivialization of slogans and grand discourses bearing a worn-out ideology. Beyond their intrinsic quality, for many texts translated by Markish, their very content presents a definite interest. Thus, in a quite innocent story, The Invasion of the Huns by Conan Doyle, a hermit warns an advanced post of the Roman army of the imminent arrival of a horde come from the East. In the context of the Cold War and the events in Hungary, this invasion could easily be brought together with the danger represented by the Soviet army. The text The Contest, recounting the challenge thrown down by Pericles to Nero, who prides himself on possessing a great talent as a poet and singer, reactivated the question of the relationship between the poet (the shepherd Pericles) and power (Nero). But of all the authors translated, Lion Feuchtwanger is certainly the one who had the most influence on Markish and on the Jews of his generation. The destiny of the German-Jewish writer, a fellow traveler of the Party, forced to flee Germany when Hitler came to power, could not leave Soviet Jewish intellectuals indifferent. But still more it was his work that was to hold their attention, and most particularly Jew Süss (1920–1922), the account of his journey to Moscow, Moscow 1937, in which Lenin is compared to Caesar and Stalin to Augustus, and above all his trilogy, The Jewish War, The Sons, The Day Will Come (1931–1942). In these three novels Feuchtwanger recounts the trajectory of the military commander of Galilee, the historian Flavius Josephus, at the heart of the troubled period of the destruction of the Temple, in the first century A.D. If the historical landscape is firmly planted, the deliberate use of anachronisms — in the designation of military ranks, for example — serves to recall that the main theme is the very character of Flavius, Jew and Roman, torn like Feuchtwanger between two cultures. If in the first volume Flavius makes the choice to serve Rome by becoming the official historian of Vespasian, in The Sons, the appearance of his first Jewish wife and of their son Simeon will place Flavius before the necessity of choosing between his desire for integration and his culture of origin. Finally, in The Day Will Come, translated by Shimon Markish into Russian, Flavius writes a text, Against Apion (Contra Apionem), in which he defends the Jews and Judaism against the accusations of the grammarian and sophist Apion and underscores the antiquity of the people of Israel. But it is above all the encounter with Akavia, a self-taught shepherd become a fine scholar and a defender of the Jewish people, that changes the course of Flavius’s life. Akavia invites him to celebrate the Jewish Passover. The scene has a high symbolic scope. Flavius accomplishes a “passage.” He understands the illusion of his militant cosmopolitanism and becomes “Jewish” again. He is killed on his way home by Roman soldiers, having reconnected with the nationalism of his youth.
This narrative reproduces the personal path of Feuchtwanger, who from 1940 onward campaigned for the creation of the State of Israel. For Markish and for the Soviet Jews, the German writer’s trilogy reproduced the path followed by a great many of them in the re-creation of their Jewish identity through literature, through the study of texts on Antiquity and the Renaissance and their reasoned adaptation to the Soviet context. From the moment Markish left the USSR, he never again returned to the study of the texts of the Greek thinkers and philosophers. He took up translation again only very late, in order to make known to the Russian reader the works of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész. On the other hand, he was able to devote himself totally and openly to Jewish literary creation in the Russian language without, however, making the choice to settle in Israel. Shimon Markish never really expressed himself on his decision — entirely respectable — not to live in the Promised Land. However, it is in our view possible that his very strict definition of Russian-Jewish literature was for him a kind of guarantee of inscribing himself within a Russian Jewishness existing only in his writings and not in “real” Israeli life. This culmination of an identity trajectory structured essentially by writing and the book did not correspond to a scientific approach but to an existential one, realized in writing and reading. By composing for himself a “paper identity,” Markish was the worthy heir of his father and an enlightened representative of a Jewish tradition grounded in study and knowledge.
Notes
Michel Niqueux, “La dérive du sentiment national chez les écrivains venus de la campagne,” in Michel Niqueux, La Question russe. Essais sur le nationalisme russe, PUF, 1992, p. 174.↩︎
The notion of “little people,” present in the writings of Augustin Cochin, was used by the antisemitic Russian nationalist mathematician and intellectual Igor Shafarevich: I. Shafarevich, “Russofobija (Russophobia),” Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary), Moscow, 1989, pp. 162–192. The text had circulated in samizdat well before this date; see: S. Kunyaev, “Legenda i vremja (The Legend and the Time),” 22, Tel Aviv, no. 14, 1980, pp. 136–156.↩︎
Rani Aren, “V russkom Galute (In the Russian Galut),” 22, Tel Aviv, 1981, no. 19, p. 136.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
On boredom as a factor in the rediscovery of their identity by Russian Jews: Grigorii Freiman, “Okazyvaetsia ia evrei (So I Am a Jew),” 22, 1979, no. 9, pp. 80–106; E. Angenic, “Spusk v bezdnu (The Descent into the Abyss),” 22, 1980, no. 15, pp. 166–177; Aleksandr Etermen, “Tret’e pokolenie (The Third Generation),” 22, 1986, no. 47, pp. 123–143; Danielle Sorper Perez, L’Intelligentsia russe en Israël, Une rassurante étrangeté, CNRS, 1998; Aleksandr Voronel, Po tu storonu uspekha (On the Other Side of Success), Tel Aviv, 1986; Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union, ed. by Yaacov Ro’i and Avi Beker, New York, London, New York University Press, 1991.↩︎
David Maajan, “Puti i sud’by leningradskikh sionistov (Paths and Destinies of the Leningrad Zionists),” 22, 1986, no. 50, pp. 101–134.↩︎
See the whole collection of Evrei i evreiskii narod (The Jews and the Jewish People), anthologies of Jewish dissidence from 1972 to the Perestroika.↩︎
Yaacov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.↩︎
Georges Nivat, “Vyzov i provokatsia kak esteticheskaia kategoria dissidentstva (Challenge and Provocation as an Aesthetic Category of Dissidence),” Sintaksis, Paris, 1978, no. 2, p. 104.↩︎
The importance of the Strugatsky brothers’ work in the process of self-identification of the Russian Jews is evoked by Aleksandr Voronel, “Torjestvo voobrajenia (The Triumph of the Imagination),” Neva, Saint Petersburg, 2002, no. 4, pp. 149–163.↩︎
Sh. Markish, Nikomu ne ustuplju (I Yield to No One), Moscow, Detskaya literatura, 1966.↩︎
Sh. Markiš, Znakomstvo s Erazmom, Moscow, Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1971.↩︎
Simon Markish, Érasme et les Juifs, introduction by Jules Margolin, Lausanne, l’Âge d’Homme, 1974, pp. 22, 13.↩︎
The subtitle of this short text grants its author the right to speak not only of the object of his love, but of himself, for which the author [Shimon Markish] apologizes in advance, in Šimon Markiš, “Žabotinskij: 50 let posle končiny. Ob’jasnenie v ljubvi,” Evrejskij Zhurnal, 1991, p. 64.↩︎
“To the unforgettable memory of my father” (with “My father” set in capital print and in large letters) in Gomer i ego poemy, Moscow, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Khudožestvennoj literatury, 1962; “To the memory of my father, as always and everywhere” on the title page of Nikomu ne ustuplju, op. cit.↩︎
Shimon Markish, “My Father Peretz Markish,” Jewish Currents, July–August 1986, p. 28.↩︎
Shimon Markish, “My Father Peretz Markish,” Jewish Currents, July–August 1986, pp. 28–31; “Interv’ju s Ivanom Tolstym na radio svoboda,” 10/03/2003, http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/transcript/24200059.html↩︎
They were designated by the acronym ChSIR (Chlen Sem’i Izmennika Rodiny) [member of the family of a traitor to the homeland].↩︎
Š. Markiš, “Sovetskaja antičnost’. Iz opyta učastnika,” Znamja, 2001, http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2001/4/itogi-pr.html↩︎
In the early 1950s, Russian schoolchildren and university students had at their disposal a Latin-teaching textbook dedicated to comrade Stalin.↩︎
Antičnost’ i sovremennost’↩︎
Frolov, op. cit., p. 355.↩︎
Š. Markiš, “Antičnost’ i sovremennost’,” Novyj Mir, 1968, no. 4, p. 230.↩︎
Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Entre hellénisme et judaïsme : la vision de l’Antiquité chez les philologues et historiens juifs du XIXe,” Écriture de l’Histoire et identité juive. L’Europe ashkénaze XIXe-XXe, Paris, collective work, Les Belles Lettres, 2003, pp. 229–249.↩︎
Stories annotated and commented by Š. Markiš, Zolotoj Osiol, kommentarii k poeme, ili Reč’ v zaščitu samogo sebja ot obvinenija v magii, perevod S. Maršaka, M. A. Kuz’mina, Moscow, izd. Akademija Nauk SSSR, 1956. The afterword written for this book by M. Grabar’-Passek was reprinted in Apulej, Apologija, Metamorfozy, Floridy, Moscow, Nauka, 1993, pp. 357–372.↩︎
M. Grabar’-Passek, Apulej, op. cit., p. 357.↩︎
“There exists a firm rock of values / Rising above the wearisome errors of the centuries (Est’ Cennostej nezyblemaja skala / Nad skučnymi ošibkami vekov).”↩︎
Š. Markiš, “Put’ k Gomeru,” Vstupitel’naja stat’ja k proizvedenijam k Gomeru, Odisseja, Illiada, trans. Nikolaj Gnedič, Moscow, Khudožestvennaja literatura, 1967, pp. 7–28.↩︎
Š. Markiš, Gomer i ego poemy, op. cit., p. 47.↩︎
In the USSR, Erasmian studies and studies of Renaissance literature underwent an important development in the 1950s and 1960s.↩︎
“nazad k istočnikam”↩︎
Is being a good Christian defined by one’s animosity toward the Jews? Erasmus asks in Nikomu ne ustuplju, op. cit., p. 177.↩︎
Š. Markiš, “O perevode,” Ierusalimskij žurnal, 2004, no. 18, pp. 193–206.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎