2
Friday, August 8, 1980
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
By Philip
Slomovitz
The Confessional of a Communist Pentitent Whose Fraternization
With Comrades in the Soviet Union Is Greeted With Sneers and
Anti-Semitic Slurs Emphasizing Betrayal of the Social 'Ideals'
A Hard-Line Communist Is Forced to Remember Her Heritage
"Am I a Jew? A Radical's Search For an Answer," is the
title of an article in the July 12 issue of the Nation that
touches upon the most serious social challenge that has
ever confronted liberalism.
It is the soul-searching result of an experience that is
common, yet has seldom been tackled with as much sincer-
ity resulting from rebuke and shock experienced from her
radical friends in the Soviet Union.
The author is identified in this footnote:
"Peggy Dennis is a freelance journalist whose ar-
ticles have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive,
In These Times, Socialist Review, Feminist Studies
and, before leaving the Communist Party in 1976, in
Political Affairs. She is the author of a recent book,
`Autobiography of an American Communist: A Per-
sonal View of a Political Life' (Lawrence Hill/Creative
Arts Books) and is currently working on another
book, Love and Politics in the McCarthyism Years."
The author's background is not unusual. It had many
counterparts. She was raised in an atmosphere of Socialism
which led to her becoming a Communist. The Forward,
when it was a Socialist organ and Freheit, which is still the
newspaper of the Yiddish-reading handful of Communists,
were the newspapers read in the home, "not because they
were Yiddish, but because they were the newspapers of the
revolutionary movement."
As a child she learned the Yiddish spoken in her home,
the language she apparently later forgot. She recited Yid-
dish poems at public meetings. The Socialist and ultra-
radical views were not imposed on the grandparents who
were observant Jews. Their religiosity was respected.
For an understanding of the approach to the agonies
experienced by the former Communist on visits in Russia,
the intolerable burden imposed on her will best be under-
stood by the quotation of the opening explanatory para-
graphs in the article:
Synagogues and Matzos
"Synagogues and matzos. These were the two
words I got again and again when I asked party and
government officials in Leningrad, Moscow, Odessa,
Tbilisi and Kishinev about the state of Soviet Jewry
after Joseph Stalin's death.
"It was the summer of 1961 and I was on a two months'
vacation-travel stay in the Soviet Union. I was there not as
a tourist or as a member of a delegation but as a privileged
guest of the Central Committee. My husband, Gene, had
been head of the American Communist Party for a number
of years at the time of his death six months earlier. I was a
lifetime Communist whose writings had been reprinted in
Soviet literary and women's magazines.
We had lived in Moscow and worked abroad for the old
Comintern in 1930-1935, 1937 and 1941. Now I was offi-
cially welcomed back, after 20 years, as nash bryat (literal
translation: our brother; common usage: one of us). I
traveled alone with personal interpreter, following
itineraries arranged for me by my hosts according to my
requests. I asked questions as one of the family, not as an
outsider critically inspecting the furniture for dust.
"All questions were permissible and answered can-
didly. Except one. The atmosphere quickly chilled when I
asked about Soviet Jews. Each time, I was given the same
terse reply: Since Stalin's death, synagosues are open and
Passover matzos are available, so there no longer are any
problems. Each time, I countered, But comrades, I have
never been in a synagogue in my life and I don't eat matzos.
Yet I am a Jew. Surely, there are nonreligious Jews here
too. What about - their Lenin-defined 'national-in-form,
socialist-in-content' ethnic rights?' The subject was politely
changed.
"I confess that I surprised myself at the time with
my rather combative declaration of my Jewishness.
For the truth is that, save for a few rare instances in
my life when it was forced upon me by external
events, I have never felt myself to be a Jew and, until
fairly recently, I have not even been interested in the
subject.
"On those occasions when specific circumstances pro-
voked me belligerently to declare my Jewishness, I acted
more out of political conviction than ethnic identification."
Miss Dennis lived by the principles under which she
grew Up in a radical home. She inherited an ideal and she
pursued it until she experienced the rebukes and insults
from people she had believed to be comrades. She followed
the Russian line, favored Palestinianism for the Arabs and
embraced Communism in its totality, until the time of
testing.
Let it be _amembered that the liberal - radical -
Socialist - Communist - Humanist forces traditionally of-
fered succor to the oppressed, an end to persecutions of
Jews. The fulfillment was betrayal of the social idealism,
an emergence of bigotry in the ranks of those who were
handing out liberation for the sufferers from pogroms and
humiliations.
Even from the Communist areas, where Jews were
among the leaders, hape for the oppressed vanished. Karl
Marx wrote anti-Semitic essays. The Kremlin became the
center of anti-Semitism.
Commenting on the respect for the observant
grandparents and the observances pursued in the
traditional revolutionary fashion, Peggy Dennis has
this to say in regard to her activities during the child-
hood days in the party spirit:
"From' my grandmother's Passover table we would
rush off to the meeting hall where we Young Communists
conducted a public Red seder in which we ridiculed the
imagery of all religions.
"The stories Mama and Papa told of the Old Country
were not so much about pogroms against the Jews in the
segregated shtetls but more about their illegal revolution-
ary activity against czarism, their first Leninist circles,
their life in the prisons, the final escape across the border as
political refugees. Not gentile racism but the hunger and
the poverty were the emphasis of their stories.
"We children scorned both Hanuka and Christmas. We
had May First and International Women's Day and No-
vember 7, the anniversary of the the Russian Revolution.
These were meaningful, socially significant milestones on
the road to world revolution, the road to the future.
"Insulated in the radical community, I experi-
enced no anti-Semitism in that outside world, which
actually was limited to school and the Communist
children's and youth movements. On the fringes of my
social consciousness it was not anti-Semitism but
anti-Mexican and anti-Asian discrimination that
penetrated my awareness; it was vitriolically inherent
in the politics and socioeconomic pattern of Califor-
nia living.
"The first time I confronted the problem of my ethnic
identificaiton was when I entered junior high school at the
age of 11. I remember pondering the question on my regis-
tration card that asked for parents' nationality. I knew that
Papa and Mama, like their parents before them, were born
in Russia and spoke Russian to each other when they didn't
want my sister and me to understand them.
"I knew that Italians came from Italy, Germans from
Germany, Poles from Poland and so on. But I knew that my
parents, coming from Russia, were not Russians. They were
not born in Palestine. They were militantly and demon-
stratively not of the Judaic religion: Yiddish was their
language, but revolutionary politics and not Yiddish cul-
ture was their commitment. Yet I knew that they were
Jews, and therefore I was. I could not explain why this was
so, but I knew we were Jews.
Jewish, Born in Russia
"My standard reply to all questions on my parents'
nationality became "Jewish, born in Russia"; and for my
own nationality, "Jewish, born in New York City." Each
time I wrote those words I knew they were neither an
adequate nor accurate definition, but it was my perfunctory
concession to that outside world, so alien to my own."
Miss Dennis, on a Comintern assignment in
Berlin in the early years of Hitler's assumption of
power, who "by this time had been a full-time Com-
munist party activist for eight years," was warned to
avoid speaking Yiddish.
She had suddenly become a Jew, "an angry but
frightened and silenced Jew."
She became aware that "the master plan to destroy the
Jewish people was being perfected." -
Returning to the U.S., as an activist in Wisconsin, then
New York and Washington, she commented on the turn of
events:
"In conversations with strangers and from the
speaker's platform, I belligetently identified myself
as a Jew. For a brief time I wore a small Star of David.
Overcoming my lifetime aversion to religious imag-
ery, I imbued that symbol with a different meaning. If
Hitler was forcing Jews to wear this identity badge,
then, I declared, brand me too, for "ich bin a Jew.' "
During the McCarthy period, her husband, like her a
Communist activist, was jailed for five years. She enrolled
her nine-year-old son in a Yiddish school. Thus she exposed
her son with pleasuer to his Jewish heritage. Her husband
had his Irish pride.
Then, back in Russia°, she felt infuriated over the Sta-
lin anti-Semitism. She admired the Freiheit editor Paul
Novick in resisting the Communist anti-Jewish prejudices.
In 1961, associating with the staff of the Communist
Party's West Coast weekly newspaper People's World, she
defended Israel's "right to nationhood, even though I felt no
personal emotionalism or ethnic bonds with the capitalistic
state. I was repelled by the fact that the Holocaust victims
had built their nation at the expense of the national inter-
ests of the Palestinians."
Stalinist Anti Semitism in 1972
In Russia again, in 1972, she was confronted by a
-
new atmosphere: "Jews queued not for food but for
emigration visas. Dissidents were being arrested .. .
Old Stalinist views once vehemently rejected had re-
surfaced."
And this is the core of the new experience when she met
with her friends in the USSR at that time: "The personal
conversations of these bright, young party activists were
punctuated with casual anti-Semitic remarks and jokes.
The very casualness with which they were told indicated
these comments had become ordinary.
"I sat stunned. I protested. My attempts to provoke
Marxist discussion on the significance of what I heard were
met with shrugs .. .
"Then older friends began to recount their tragic 'ex-
periences, the anti-Semitism they confronted, some being
jailed, spat upon. Incredulous, I protested. There is a law
here against anti-Semitism. Haven't you filed specific co
plaints?-"
`Anti Semitism Does Not Exist'
-
One of her friends explained that "officially anti-
Semitism does not exist in our country. If you charge it
does and that you are a victim of it you will be
threatened with slander of the Soviet Union law."
Another interesting comment to her was, "As long as
there is no anti-Semitism, there can be no ideological and
educational campaign against it "
She traveled on buses and was shoved around with
slurs about Jews, apparently having been recognized as
such. And here follows Miss Dennis' shocking indictment:
"I left Moscow depressed and disturbed. My agitated
thoughts were not so much those of a Jew but those of a
Communist. All my life, for the sake of the ultimate good, I
had, like others, eulogized only the achievements of Soviet
society — the visible economic growth, the tanigible im-
proved living standards, the security of jobs and health
care, the Soviet role in furthering detente and peaceful
coexistence, the only possible road to world survival.
"Back home, I began to read data and facts emanating
from the Soviet Union with a more critical eye, yet it would
be some time before I could even cautiously write of what I
had seen and felt. Again and again I read of books and
articles published in the Soviet Union which fabricated
historical fact, twisted interpretations and propagated the
worst canards of anti-Semitism.
"I recognized in this ongoing barrage the official
legitimization of the anti-Semitism I had witnessed in Mos-
cow. In 1978, I wrote an article on these Soviet writings, in
which I pointed out that all Soviet media are government
and party controlled, that an official glavlit (censor) at each
institution and publishing house initials the contents of
everything published and that nothing is published 'acci-
dentally' or as an expression of 'independent' views, par-
ticularly on sensitive subjects.
.
Anti Semitism in the U.S.
-
"Here at home, local Ku Klux Klan groups and the
American Nazi storm trooper party emerged within the
mainstream of the Carter Administration's shift to the
right. From Long Island to San Francisco, synagogues are
desecrated. Jewish bookstores are bombed and burned.
Blacks are killed legally by trigger-happy police and
sniped at in the dark of night. Swastikaed Hitlerites and
white-hooded Klansmen-hold public rallies and marches,
calling for the physical annihilation of Jews and blacks to
preserve the white race.
"Less dormant in recent years, my old Jewishness
stirs again. Yet, as in the past, it is quickly channeled
into political rather than ethnic responses. I read and
listen in almost cynical amusement as liberals, leftists
and Communists debate the First Amendment rights
of racists. And, legally, the Federal civil rights of Jews
and blacks are violated only after the Klansmen and
Nazis succeed in shooting or killing them, not before.
Even then, the victim has to prove in court that the
attempt was racially motivated.
"Eugene Debs wrote, defining his personal and social
credo: 'While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is
a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul
prison, I am not free.' I guess the answer to my confusi._
over my ethnicity lies in adding one further phrase to Deb's
words: While anti-Semitism and ethnic discrimination
exist anywhere, I am a Jew."
As a summary of an assimilationist experience, of t
liberal delusion, this is a very important statement. It is r _
new. It is an old lesson of being fooled by the promise of the
revolution solving all ills.
This is how many who suffered the shock of rejec-
tion by the comrades they embraced and the social
theories that were betrayed suddenly became aware
of legacies abandoned which clamored for renewed
acceptance.
Therefore, the Dennis statement is more than a confes-
sion. It sounds a warning to those who betray their trust,
who fail to acknowledge their heritage, that assimilation
and false hopes in a revolution won't help. There is greater
glory in the self-respect of being loyal to one-self. Let this
lesson sink in!