I meant to write this note on August 12th – the anniversary of Stalin’s murder of a number of literary figures including the poets Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish, David Hofshteyn and Itzik Fefer, the novelist David Bergelson and others. The event – in 1952 – became known by the title of this blog entry.
I’ve been working with Joseph Sherman on a book of Soviet Yiddish writers in translation – mostly fiction rather than poetry – which will come out next February. The book will feature work from 1917, when Yiddish writing flourished with state encouragement after the Russian revolution, until 1947 when Stalin closed the remaining outlets for Jewish cultural expression, and arrested most of those around the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Other writers and artists had already been arrested and shot, or in the case of the theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, had been killed in a staged car accident.
I’ve spoken to old Jewish communists who said it was 12th August 1952 that caused them to break from “the Party”, not the usual “Hungary in 1956” rupture. Although at the time most of these writers were known and read internationally in Yiddish little has appeared in English.
Poetry is of course still a dangerous game, but few events in literature have been so catastrophic, and so forgotten.