THE JEWISH NEWS

Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951

Member American Association of Fsglish-Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Aneoclation, National Editorial Amoels-
tion. Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17515 W. Nine Mile. Suite 565, Southfield, Mich. 46075.
Second.Ciam Postage Pall at Southfield, Michigan and Additional Mailing Offices. Subscription 1111 a year. Foreign Id

PHILIP SLOMOVITZ

Editor and Publisher

CHARLOTTE DUBIN

CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ

City Editor

•usinsuis Manager

DREW LIESERWITZ

Advertising Ma

Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the 16th day of Elul, 5732, the following scriptural selections

will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Deut. 26:1-29:8. Prophetical portion, Isaiah 60:1-22.

Candle lighting. Friday,

VOL. LXI. No. 24

AUg.

25. 7 p m.

Page Four

August 25, 1972

Imperative Action for Justice in USSR

A noted Soviet scientist, Benjamin G.
Levich, who had been honored with many
grants and with the right to travel wherever
he wished, has been demoted and the privi-
leges he had are being denied to him, for
one reason: he had applied for a visa for
himself and his family to go to Israel.

He is denied the right to accept an Ox-
ford University visiting fellowship in phys-
ical chemistry and is prevented from attend-
ing the convention in Stockholm of the Inter-
national Electro-Chemistry Society of which
he is Nice president.

While the Levich experience is one of
many reported from the USSR, it is a unique
case because the professor's son, Evgeny, also
is being persecuted, and although he suffers
from stomach ailments he is being forced into
military duty.

Mrs. Levich made a challenging comment
regarding the renewed imposition of prej-
udiced policies upon the Jewish population.
She said: "It's amazing how magically you are
transformed into a pariah, a non-person."

At the root of the horror that marks the
inhumanities Jews experience in the USSR,
l'rof. I.evich and his family are one inStance,
the Markishes are among the notable similar
cases of injustice that do discredit to a
nation that has chosen to perpetuate the
anti-Semitism of the Czars.

Peretz Markish was among the Jewish
writers who were executed in the mass mur-
der of intellectuals engineered by Josef Stalin.
While there has been a partial vindication of
this martyr and of many of the others who
were murdered in the Stalin purges, the per-
Secutions continue and the Markish family is
. suffering from the prejudices imposed on
Jews who insist on the right to emigrate and
to settle in Israel.

Peretz Markish's widow, Esther, and his
son, David. who, like his father, is a poet of
note, are suffering from the bias that has
been imposed on those who dare protest in-
dignities and to ask for visas to emigrate.
David was imprisoned for some months and
Esther is suffering from ailments that are
aggravated by the persecutions.

A telephone conversation has just been
reported from Russia. Mrs. Markish was
speaking. She reported that OVIR, the Rus-
sian bureau in charge of issuing visas, had
again rejected her and her son's applications.
Then she commented over the phone with
a renewed appeal for help, stating:

"What do they (the Soviet authorities)
need us for? They have taken away our
work. David is working as a porter. Of
what use can we be to them? Why are
they holding us back? What will happen
now? Perhaps help will come from you"
(the free world.)"

Indeed, what do the Russians want of
these people? They have glorified Russia
with the labors in many fields. David Mar-
kish, like his father, enriched Russian poetry.
But he had begun to expose the Soviet crimes
and therefore is being additionally punished.
Ironically, because officially the USSR out-
laws anti-Semitism, he has even been charged
with being an anti-Semite

His indictments are impressive. He has ex-
posed one of Russia's major crimes: the im-
prisonment of innocent people on the charge
of insanity. Has this been the fate of the
hero in the war against Nazism, the Swedish
Christian Raoul Wallenberg? Here is his poem

"The Insane Asylum" in a translation
Joel Harris:

Come, sweet slavecamp,
scream me to sleep,
anything's heaven
but the drug-needle deep,
With a hangman for
doctor
and a spy for a nurse
it's a hospital heaven
I'd exchange for a curse.

Their lectures on
homelands
are classic and clear —
I'm convinced that I
have one
but it's nowhere near
here.
With a hangman for
doctor
and a spy for a nurse,
I'm a ship-wrecked
survivor
who's drowning of thirst.

by

In a forest of needles
you must sing such a
dirge
to resist all betrayal,
so strong is the urge.
In the thousands of
needles
it's hard to see home,
to remember sweet Zion
in the somnolent foam.

But the needle-point
ocean
where I thrash in the
brine
will not drown my re-
membrance
of this promise of mine,
of the dry-land encounter
with Jacob of old,
who limps toward me
now
through the needle marsh
cold.

Fiedler Views Hutzpa and Joy
in Shakespeare, Shylock Role

Prof. Leslie A. Fiedler of the State University of New York lets
it be known, in his preface to "The Strangers in Shakespeare," a Stein
and Day publication, that he had written the book primarily for him-
self: "to bind my past to the present and to refresh my soul by im-
mersing myself for a little while in a
stream of living words and images."
He makes the added comment: "To-
ward what Sinai I thought I was advancing
In a glut of lost
I
find
it difficult to remember. Perhaps it
homelands
was always Shakespeare, though I did not
my saviours declare
know
it."
In his uneven footstep
their Siberian Zion
"Nonetheless," he declares, "I consider
is the path I will go
impaled in the air.
till the forest turns ocean this study not an act of self-indulgence but
But I'll dance the barbed
rather one of ascesis, since anyone con-
the desert turns snow,
wire
fronting Shakespeare begins with hutzpa
till the face of my father and joy but ends in humility and terror."
and scream them to
and lover and kin
Fiedler shares his delight with his
sleep
all return to that place
readers and makes them equally more
if it saves me from
conscious
of the power of the combined
where
redemptions
madness
Shakespearean themes.
begin.
and drug-needle deep.
He has some interesting views on the
theme, and he analyzes "the cur-
The voice of the free people of the world Shylock
rish Jew" most interestingly. He states
must not be stifled—in the current outcry inter alia:
against the perpetuation of the crimes of 20
Dr. Fiedler
"There is only one stranger in 'The
years ago that were perpetrated by the Stalin Merchant of Venice' whom Portia does not vilify in great detail, and
regime, and in demands for the release from that is—disconcertingly—Shylock, the Jew. But surely this is be-
bondage of the Markishes, the Leviches and cause Shakespeare assumed that his characteristic faults were already
known to everyone, as well as exposed in the plot, and that therefore
all who seek haven in Israel.
there was no need to itemize the catalogue: usuriousness, avarice, lust
Governor Nelson Rockefeller implied in for vengeance, and hostility to music, masquing and young love. For
his report on the Nixon visit in Russia that all of this, in Shakespeare's day, the unmodified generic epithet 'Jew'
there may be an understanding for an open- would serve; and so Portia calls Shylock either 'Jew' vocative, when
door policy to permit Jews to leave Russia. they are face to face, or else, in the distancing nominative, `the Jew.'
her back on him to discuss him with her fellow Christians as
Whatever the secret agreements, the need turning
though he were a creature in another realm of being."

is for unprejudiced and unlimited grants to
those who wish to leave the USSR.

In his masterful account of Shakespeare and his time, of the
environment in which Shylock is depicted in "The Merchant,"
Dr. Fiedler explains that "the range of insults for Jews seems
pitifully limited in Venice." Additionally interestingly the author
of "The Strangers in Shakespeare" comments: "Like all forms of
obscenity, the abuse bred by prejudice is notably monotonous, so
that reading over the anti-Semitic tirades of 'The Merchant of
Venice,' one thinks somehow of Bedier's comment after years
of editing the fabliaux (those rhymed dirty jokes of the Middle
Ages, themselves based on vilification of women and clerics) about
'the incredible monotony of the human obscene.' "
Jessica also is under analysis, and Fiedler believes "the archetypal

Coupled with these demands must also
go protests against oppressions and a de-
mand for just rights for Jews who choose
to remain in the USSR. There are 3,500,000
Jews in Russia—contrary to claims by the
Kremlin of a million less. Even if half a
million choose to - leave, there will be millions
who will remain in Russia. For them—for
those among them who demand it—there daughter remains at least a daughter, though the incest motif is
must be religious and cultural rights and an camouflaged in other ways."
end to the ban on newspapers, the outlawing
In its totality, this is a magnificent commentary on Shakespearean
of Hebrew and the prevention of establishing themes.
Jewish schools.

The newest revelation by Prof. Levich
that Russia now demands sums of from
$5,000 to $25,000 for visas, on the claim that
education attained by the emigres at USSR
expense must be repaid, is another form of
tyranny against which the civilized world
must protest. What about the services educat-
ed Jews have rendered and continue to render
to Russia? Outrage piles up on outrage in
Soviet Russia.

The battle goes on. The evidence is piling
up against the USSR. The need for action
by the Jewries of the world becomes more
imperative with time.

'Ha-Rikud—The Jewish Dance'

With two major national Jewish groups as co-publishers, a unique
book on the "Jewish dance" techniques and an anthology on the
dance as performed by and for Jewish groups has just been issued.
"Ha-Rikud—The Jewish Dance," by Fred Berk, has been issued
by the American Zionist Youth Foundation, together with the Union
of American Hebrew Congregations.
Richly illustrated with a special section devoted to steps outlined
at length for 23 popular Israeli folk dances that are often presented
in this country, this volume explains the origins of the Jewish dance
from the time of David, Yemenite and hasidic dances, leaders' guides
and points for teachers.
While this book can well serve as an indispensable textbOok for
dancing classes, those interested in the art will be enchanted also by
merely reading the work to acquire information about a popular art
and its many unique developments.

