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THE JEWISH NEWS

Friday, SepTerrtlier 15, 1944

LeGingham 1111°11,se Soviet Jewry in the Past Year,

Portrait of an American Woman

Pioneer in Palestine
‘I By
By JULIAN MELTZER i Cvoerwr e s? o rnir nTimes t he in

I

Palestine

I

HAVE ALWAYS CHERISHED an apoph-
thegm about the soil, and the most striking
is that beautiful line from Keats in his
"Grasshopper and the Cricket" which says: "The poetry of earth
is never dead".

Think for a moment of the pulsating aliveness of life on
the soil. The peasant attached to his land; his brow furrowed
by the wind and the sun and the rain of his outdoor life; his
face seamed by the weather of all seasons; his hands gnarled and
stained by The toil of the earth, the honorable marks of his
calling. Think of the highly cultured and intelligent peasant of
Eretz Israel, tilling the national soil of his people, whose patri-
mony it has become once
again through the collective
efforts of his brethren in
exile: and, as he works, the
thought of that background
of richly-endowed traditions
and inherited realities of the
national soil husbandry
which have become inter-
woven with the vision and
the d r e a m until they are
well - nigh indistinguishable.
The poetry of abundance, the
pleasant lines of a bumper
harvest, the rhyme and the
rhythm of a bountiful crop,
and for melody the clear
sparkling lilt of gushing ir-
rigation channel that so
This sturdy, eager, progressive
vividly contrasts w i t h the
soil-tilling woman of \Eretz Israel
age-old aridity of this land:
is typical of the Yishuv's pioneer-
these are all of the substance
ing womanhood which has made
of
peasantry and poetry.
so salient .a contribution to the.

-

war effoll and to the up-building
of the Jewish National Home.

It is in a mood ,such as this
that I like to think of Rose
•
Schwartz. That is not, of
course, her real name but she is a person who lives and
works and plays and dreams in Eretz Israel. When I first
saw her some years ago, she had come ..from a comfort-
able, middle-class existence in the United States of the sort
known to hundreds of thousands of young Jews. She first came
here on 'a mission—to study, Palestine on behalf of her fellow-
Zionists. But the country conquered her—and she deserted her
erstwhile colleagues abroad to acquire a new set of experiences,
an environment and pursuits as utterly divorced from the past
as the climates of her old domicile, and the new. She was in
shorts and a gingham blouse; and her occupation at the time I
visited the collective village on Kerin Kayemeth land in which
she was a tyro, was nothing more romantic nor less prosaic than
yodelling "Chick, chick, chick" to the poultry as she prepared
to feed them with grain out of a deep tin bowl mounted askew
her -waist.

SUPREMELY HAPPY THERE
She was supremely happy, smiling radiantly at the scram-
bling chicks and hens. Her attachment to the village had none
of the conventional or customary influence of what, in the films,
'is glamorized as a heart-throb for some particular person.

We drifted into conversation. I asked the obvious question.
She was emphatic in her response. "I shall never go back to the
City,'? she said. "This is., the life I shall always live. I am only
sorry I wasn't able to come into Hachshara (training) sooner, as
I would have been more useful now. I have ,a lot to make up."

Rose had been assigned by the Central Committee of the
party to undertake a piece of work in Jerusalem which would
keep her away from the village for some months, perhaps longer.
She was, because of her previous training and her knowledge of
Hebrew as well as English, more suited for this assignment than
any other, and perforce accepted the work out of paity loyalty.

"But it doesn't suit me at all," she confessed. "I miss the
Kibbutz. I've apparently grown out of urban life, the rush and
tumble and shallowness of the city. It's going -to be hard to get
through this interlude until I get back there."

"I always thought you looked happy in that gingham blouse

o f yours," I remarked with a smile. "It was like a challenge to

the metropolis."

She -nodded and smiled back. "I have it here with me, in
my wardrobe," she said. "When I'm feeling particularly blue,
I take it out and look at it. It's my symbol of what lies ahead
not only for myself but for all of us. That's why I made it of
course stuff; it was such a workaday thing.

"But I'll be wearing it soon again, and after all—isn't that
what matters most in this life? To know that you are going
back to do something that you think is really worthwhile and
for which you can endure even the drawbacks of 'exile' in the
city!"

B LEI-B KVITKO

Noted Yiddish Poet,
Director of Jewish Soviet Press Agency'

T

HE GENERAL outlines of
Jewish life in the Nazi-oc-
cupied territories of the
U.S.S.R. are too well known to need any
relating here. The details, on the other hand,
are only now slowly emerging in all their
sordidness as the Red Army has liberated
new areas and assembles the evidence for the
forthcoming war-atrocity trials of the Nazi
beasts. It is sufficient to summarize the
tragedy by pointing out that such dense Jew-
ish - population centers as Kiev, Minsk, Ka-
menetz-Podolsk and Vitebsk afe now almost
totally • devoid of their Jewish residents. Ex-
cept for those that had managed to evacuate
before the Nazis deluged these areas, few
have survived.

At the last conference of the Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee held in Moscow last April,
an exhibit in pictures and diagrams told of
Jewish heroism in the Soviet Union. Of the
1,500,000 officers and men in the Soviet's
armed forces that received awards for dis-
tinguished war services in the past year, there
were 32,000 Jews. Claslifying the heroes ac-
cording to their nationalities, the Jews take
fourth place on the list of persons that have
been cited or have received awards for dis-
tinguished services, and third place among the
900 heroes who have received the highest
distinction — Hero of the Soviet Union.

These figures compare with 500,000 Red
Army men who received awards a year ago,
of whom 10,000 were Jews, recipients of the
Lenin Order of the Red Flag, Medals of the
Soviet Fatherland War, etc.

JOINED DURING REVOLUTION
Lt. Gen. Jacob Kreiser, who enlisted with
the Red Army in the days of the revolution,
learned military tactics, even as the Red
army did —

He commanded Russian forces at Sevasto-
pol. He was the first Soviet Jewish general at
whose hands the Nazis suffered defeat and
was ,for a while the subject of all the propa-
ganda leaflets they showered on the Soviet
forces in the neighborhood. "Russian sol-
diers," one of their circulars read, "do you
know that your general is a Jew? Do you
expect Jacob to beat the powerful German
forces?"
•
Jacob did beat the German forces. Then

came many others. Lt. Gen. Jacob Kreiset
holdS the Suvorov Order.

Major Caesar Kunikov, former editor of *
Moscow newspaper, commander of a fleet
unit, managed to land with 200 sailors in the
rear of the enemy and take a toll of 2,000
surprised Nazis, and also capture large quan-
tities of materiel.

Hayim Diskin was born and raised on the
Crimean Jewish collective farm "Kadimah,"
Hebrew for Forward. He fought at Moscow
where his entire division perished. With 14
bullet wounds in his body and bleeding pro-
fusely, he crawled, crouched and destroyed
five tanks.

Capt. Israel Fizanovich is the captain of a
Soviet submarine that has to its credit 14
German craft in the Baltic.

Among the heroes of thejSoviet Air Corps
is the Jew Michael Plotkin, member of the
first Soviet squadron to drop bombs on
Berlin.

JEWISH PARTISANS' LEADER
Heading the list of Jewish partisans, if for
no other reason than his age, is Hayim Aaron
Chazanov. ,An ultra-Orthodox Jew, a scho-
chet, he fled his home town of Klimavtchi
• after the Nazis began their massacres. Eight
hundred Jews perished. Old Chazanov may
be the only survivor. With the cries of his
townspeople giving him no peace and prod-
ding him to avenge their death, Chazanov
joined the partisans and participated in the
demolition of five bridges ,and the derailing
of five German troop trains which cost sev-
eral thousand Nazi lives.

April 6, 1944, marked the second confer-
ence of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee,
with the participation of war heroes, parti-
sans, writers, artists and Rabbi Shiffer of
Moscow. Several hundred. delegates partici-
pated. It was decided to issue, jointly with
the World Jewish Congress; the Vaad Leumi,
Jewish Palestine's National Council; and the
American Committee of Jewish Writers, Ar-
tists, and Scientists, a Black Book on Nazi
atrocities against the Jews. This will comprise
the evidence to be presented before interna-
tional bodies when the Jews sue for reara-
tions and demand punishment of the Nazi
murderers.

Copyright by Independent Jewish Press Service. Inc.

Lighting the Road Back

As the New Year brings promise of liberation
for millions of homeless and oppressed Jews of Eu-
rope, American Jews are providing for relief, re-
habilitation and resettlement of thosel being freed by
the Allied armies, through their contributions to the
United Jewish Appeal for Refugees, Overseas Needs
and Palestine. The year 5705, expected to mark the
transition from war to peace, also will bring a
greater challenge to U. S. Jews to attain the
$32,000,000 goal set the UJA, The Detroit War Chest
provides funds for the UJA program.

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