Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance

"This is a scrupulously researched history of Yiddish literature in Ukraine. It charts an evolution that began under the Ukrainian People's Republic, when the promise of national-personal autonomy for Jews fueled dreams of a high culture in Yiddish. It then describes the fate of Yiddish-language writers in the 1920s, drawing parallels with the fate of Ukrainian-language writers: a brief flowering strangled by forced compromises with the demands of 'proletarian culture' and by Stalin's repression of writers. Eventually Stalin dismantled almost all Jewish institutions. The final act in this history was the long, gradual, but incomplete 'rehabilitation' of writers that followed the dictator's death. Some surviving figures were allowed to return to literary life, without being allowed to describe their persecution or to publishing in Yiddish. Gennady Estraikh tells this story masterfully. Focusing initially on Kyiv as the fountainhead of Yiddish writing in post-revolutionary years, a time when the Kultur-Lige developed its remarkable network of institutions, he then moves to narrating the biographies of five writers -- Avrom Abchuk, Hirsh Bloshteyn, Chaim Gildin, Itsak Kipnis and Rive Balyasne. Based on materials culled from Ukraine's archives, each of these makes a fascinating story of interaction with secret police informers, adaptation to Soviet demands, intense enthusiasm for literary creativity, and contacts with centres of Yiddish cultural life outside Ukraine -- including Warsaw, Moscow, Minsk and Vitebsk. The book explores the logic of Stalinist repression, the paranoia that generated ubiquitous accusations of nationalism, Zionism and anti-Sovietism. It introduces readers to a remarkable, long ignored and important episode in Jewish and Ukrainian cultural history, one that enriches our understanding of the Soviet experience, of how Yiddish and Ukrainian writers interacted, and how the dream of national modernism inspired literary creativity in the twentieth century."