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20th-century Jewish history.

The Road To Birobidzhan

Former Detroiter Yale Strom chronicles his compelling journey
to Stalin's Jewish Autonomous Region.

GEORGE ROBINSON
Special to the Jewish News

H

istory has played some
pretty strange tricks on the
Jewish people, but few
were more peculiar than
Josef Stalin's decision to create a "Jewish
Autonomous Region" in the swamp-
lands of Birobidzhan, an Asian flyspeck
nearer to Pyongyang than Moscow.
Stalin bestowed this unlooked-for
largesse on Russia's Jews in 1928, when
Russian Jews were encouraged to move
east, young comrade, to
grow up•with the only
country (officially estab-
lished in 1934) in the
history of the world in
which Yiddish was one
of the official languages.
And still is, oddly
enough.
Papa Joe's motiva-
tions weren't altruistic;
he hoped to populate
the Chinese front and
to funnel Zionist dol-
lars into the U.S.S.R.
But at least 40,000 Jews made the
grueling, 5,200-mile journey to build
a Yiddish mecca in waist-deep mud
and snow. They were in part successful
until Stalin's purges closed most
Yiddish institutions and sent residents
off to gulags from 1948 to 1953.
No one has explored this bizarre his-
torical side road on film before, but Yale
Strom — who grew up in a traditional,
socialist-Zionist home in Detroit where
he was riveted by his father's tales of a
Jewish state founded 20 years before
Israel in a Siberian swamp — has ably

filled that gap with his adroit new docu-
mentary, L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!.
The Detroit Film Theatre will show
the film 7:30 p.m. Monday, March
31. Strom — who attended Vernor
School and went with his father to the
Stoliner Synagogue on Linwood and
Elmhurst — will be in town to intro-
duce the film and discuss it with the
audience following the screening.
Musician-filmmaker Strom —
whose documentaries about vanishing
Jewish culture have carved a niche in
the Yiddish revival movement —

Klezmert the History the Music, the
Folklore ,(A Cappella; $28), was featured
at the Jewish Book Fair in November, is
hardly a novice filmmaker — this is his
fourth documentary feature. But
L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin! is his most
accomplished and inventive filth to date.
A complex tapestry of elements, its
contents range from rare 1930s footage
(including clips from the egregious
Soviet propaganda film Seekers of
Happiness) to interviews with local Jews
to conversations between the filmmaker
and his ex-KGB translator, Slava.

Left to right:

Former
Detroiter Yale
Strom will
speak about
his film at
the DFT on
Monday.

A scene from
"L'Chayim,
Comrade
Stalin."

retraced the journey made by the Jews
of the J.A.R. when he boarded the
Trans-Siberian railroad and made the
weeklong trek to Birobidzhan in 2000.
He alighted in the world's only rail-
road station with Yiddish-language
signs, although finding Yiddishkeit
proved elusive in a region where only a
few thousand Jews remain.
Eventually, he visited the local syna-
gogue, the Yiddish newspaper and the
capital's main thoroughfare, still called
Sholom Aleichem Boulevard.
Strom, whose latest book, The Book of

In a supreme irony, Slava, a voluble
and affable anti-Semite, turns out to
be the grandson of Mikhail Kalinin,
the high-ranking Soviet official who
originated the idea of a Jewish
Autonomous Region.
Therein lies a clue to the question
Strom asks everyone he meets in a
wonderfully self-effacing bit of faux
naivete: Why did Stalin place the
Jewish Autonomous Region so far
away from everything?
The answer, which gradually
becomes apparent as the troubled his-

tory of persecution of inhabitants of
Birobidzhan unrolls, is the same one
would get if asked why Hitler put the
death camps in Poland — precisely
because they were far away, far away
from the prying eyes of the few
philosemites who might protest, far
away from the eyes of other Jews who
might grow suspicious.
Did Stalin plan to eventually slaugh-
ter all of the Soviet Union's Jews?
Strom hints at the possibility but
leaves it an open question, a dark echo
of the title card reading "The Jewish
Question" that flashes several times
during the film in a trope reminiscent
of Jean-Luc Godard.
This device combines with a thought-
fully- worked-out structure in which
Strom merges the trains of the past with
the one carrying him east to the J.A.R.,
the past of the pioneers of Birobidzhan
with the casual anti-Semitism of his
traveling companions in the present.
While historical speculation into
Stalin's thought process has its fascina-
tion and helps give the film a forward
motion as relentless as the Trans-
Siberian trains that carried the Jews to
Birobidzhan (or, as we are inescapably
aware, the German ones with more
sinister destinations), it is not the pri-
mary source of the film's interest and
its not inconsiderable charm.
Those, rather, reside in the stories of
the families that tossed over stable
lives in the United States, Argentina,
Lithuania, France and countless other
nations to come to the Soviet would-
be utopia to build a Jewish homeland
with socialist ideals expressed in
Yiddish words.
A surprising number of survivors of
the Birobidzhan experiment are still
around, and Strom seems to have
found the most articulate and amusing
ones for the film, including a woman
whose father, an electrical engineer,
was asked to install an electrical power
generating plant only to discover that
no one had sunk a foundation on
which to put it.
BIROBIDZHAN on page 72

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2003

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