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Murdered Poets

Continued from Page 7

bringing Jews out of the nar-
row, hostile world into which
they had been forced by
Czarist Russia.
In time, due to the absence
of other Jewish institutions
during the traumatic war-
time period, Soviet Jews
came to look upon the com-
mittee as the symbol of
Jewish consciousness in the
USSR. Under the impact of a
shattering wartime ex-
perience, the writers began to
employ Jewish historical and
religious themes. The strug-
gle of Soviet Jews against the
Nazis was portrayed in terms
of the tradition of the Jewish
will to survive against power-
ful oppressors. The public
meetings of the committee
and the pages, as well as the
very title of its journal,
Eynikayt (Unity), provided a
forum for expression of
Jewish sentiments, emphasiz-
ing the unity of Soviet Jews
with world Jewry, which
would have been considered
unthinkable before the war.

Mikhoels
addressed
"Brother Jews" throughout
the world. Peretz Markish
said, "We are one people, and
now we are becoming one ar-
my." Colonel Itzik Feffer
recalled Ezekiel's vision of a
mighty nation arising from
the valley of dry bones. A
committee manifesto was ad-
dressed to "our Jewish
brethren the world over."
Mikhoels and Feffer were
dispatched on an official mis-
sion to the United States.
They were heard in many dif-
ferent cities by about half a
million Jews, urging and
receiving moral and financial
support for the Soviet war ef-
fort, and promising that
"firm brotherly relations"
would persist among Jews
throughout the world after
the war. More than $3
million was collected in the
United States.
Soviet Jews, hearing such
expressions from committee
members, turned to the com-
mittee for assistance with
many kinds of problems, par-
ticularly those of refugees
and evacuees. Ilya
Ehrenberg, the assimilated
Jewish writer who wrote in
Russian and frequently serv-
ed, in the postwar period, as
a spokesman for Stalin's
strictures against Jewish na-
tionalism, recalled in his
memoirs: "After the victory,
thousands of people went to
Mikhoels for help because
they saw him as the wise rab-
bi, the defender of the op-
pressed."

But by 1948, Jewish
solidarity, which had been so
important in the Soviet strug-
gle against fascism, was no

12

FRIDAY, AUG. 14, 1987

longer needed or desirable. It
was viewed as divisive to a
regime characterized by Rus-
sian chauvinism.
The solution to this
"Jewish problem" was to be
the suppression and oblitera-
tion of all traces of Jewish
culture. The reign of destruc-
tion began with Solomon
Mikhoels.
Mikhoels had been sent to
Minsk oh an official mission
as a member of the Stalin
Prize committee.' Late at
night on Jan. 13, 1948, he
was summoned from his hotel
room by a Communist Party
official. The next morning,
his bruised and bloody corpse
was found near the railroad
station. The reported "ac-
cidental death" was eventual-

The Cold War
created a fear of
anything Western
and an effort to
prove everything
that was Soviet
was best.

ly discovered; the Soviet
secret police had killed
Mikhoels by running him
over with a truck. A Jewish
theatre critic who had accom-
panied him, Golubov-
Potapov, suffered the same
fate.
The murdered Mikhoels
was given a magnificent
funeral in Moscow by the
government. His body lay in
state at the Jewish State
Theatre, and tens of
thousands of Jews came to
pay their last respects in
death. The dishonesty of the
official report of "death by ac-
cident" swiftly became ap-
parent. A Jewish detective
who began his own investiga-
tion of the "accident" disap-
peared and was never seen
again.
On Sept. 21, 1948,
Ehrenberg writing in Pravda
delivered the opening blows
of the new campaign. He
warned Soviet Jews that
their identifying with Jews in
other countries would prove
their disloyalty to the Soviet
Union. The last issue of
Eynikayt appeared on Nov.
20, 1948 and the Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee was
disbanded. There followed the
liquidation of the Yiddish
Ernes publishing house, the
bimonthly Heymland, a Yid-
dish newspaper in Kiev,
Jewish libraries, the last two
Yiddish schools, professional
theaters and amateur artistic
groups. Jewish books disap-
peared into "restricted collec-
tions" in libraries.
What was left to the

