The Book Smugglers, page 19
A committee was formed to care for Jewish orphans, who wandered about the city without proper housing, food, medical care, or education. The committee was headed by Tzivia Vildshtein, an educator who had graduated from the pedagogical faculty of Wilno University. Shmerke, Sutzkever, and Aba Kovner joined as members.
In late September, the authorities granted permission for the committee to establish a Jewish school, kindergarten, and orphanage, all in a single building that was called the “Jewish Children’s Combine.” The school followed a Soviet curriculum with Yiddish as the language of instruction. There were no religious subjects or observances, but it did teach Yiddish literature. The museum donated copies of textbooks and children’s literature to the “Children’s Combine.”3
By the fall of 1944, the two thousand Jews in Vilna had a modest institutional infrastructure: a synagogue, a secular school, and a museum. But there was no municipal Jewish committee, as Shmerke and Sutzkever had envisioned. The authorities nixed that idea.
The three institutions faced restrictions, harassment, and outright hostility from local officials, many of which were holdovers from the previous administration, under the Germans. The synagogue was prohibited from receiving a shipment of clothing sent to it from America. And it could not host Sabbath meals, or offer religious classes. In the USSR, places of worship could engage only in worship, not in philanthropy, social gatherings, or religious instruction. And since Saturdays was a workday, attendance at Sabbath services was modest. The Jewish Children’s Combine was forced to relocate twice during its first year, as the authorities repeatedly assigned its facility to other schools. The Commissariat of Education even closed the school down midyear but reversed that decision after receiving a protest telegram from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow.
And the museum limped along as a commission that had no budget.4
Beyond that, Jewish life was hamstrung. Shmerke and Sutzkever appealed to the authorities to allow publication of a weekly Yiddish newspaper. Initially, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania, Antanas Snieckus, replied via Henrik Ziman (the only Jew in the party leadership) that it was premature to talk of a newspaper, but there would be support for a literary almanac. Then Snieckus changed his mind—the idea of an almanac was “not timely.” Meanwhile, newspapers and periodicals began to appear not only in Lithuanian and Russian, the state languages, but also in Polish, the language of another ethnic minority. Why could the Polish population have a newspaper but Jews could not? The question was left hanging.5
No one even asked the authorities to fund a standing Yiddish theater or a Jewish workers’ club, the Soviet equivalent of a community center.
Shmerke, the seasoned activist and perennial optimist, found some cracks in the system. He gave weekly lectures for parents at the Jewish school; he persuaded the leadership of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union to establish a Yiddish writers’ section, and became its chairman; he organized Yiddish concerts (of recitations, song, and music) in the Vilnius municipal theater “Lutnia,” under the auspices of the Yiddish section of the Writers’ Union.6 But even with these initiatives, Jewish life in the liberated Soviet Vilnius was clearly struggling against bureaucratic strangulation.
The city’s Jews clung together in circles of friends that met in private homes in the evening. No one could ban that. Shmerke had his circle—a motley crew of former ghetto inmates who survived in hiding, in the forests, or miraculously, in the Estonians camps, plus a few discharged Red Army soldiers and refugees who returned from central Asia. Like Shmerke, they were all in their late thirties. Couples started getting engaged and married, and at the dinner parties to celebrate those occasions, Shmerke was the first to strike up a tune and bang out the song’s beat on the table. But everyone bore their searing pain just underneath the surface—they were all young widows and widowers, many of whom had lost children.
Shmerke was still buoyant and energetic when in the company of these friends, but deep down he was lonely. Sutzkever left for Moscow in early September, and no one in Shmerke’s circle belonged to his prewar gang. It wasn’t Young Vilna. The women weren’t like Barbara (his murdered wife) or Rachela Krinsky (who, from what he heard, was languishing in a German labor camp).
In his spare time, Shmerke collected and wrote down the songs that inmates sang in the Vilna ghetto. He compiled a draft manuscript with forty-nine songs, some from the ghetto theater and some written by martyred poets. In a short introductory essay, he argued that the victims should be remembered in their own words—the words of the songs in which they expressed their determination and fear, hope, and despair.7 Those songs now became a part of his repertoire. But even the defiant and optimistic ones, such as his own “Youth Anthem” and his marching song “Jewish Partisan” now had a bittersweet flavor.8
The Commission to Collect and Process Documents of Jewish Culture faced a new jolt when Sutzkever decided to leave for Moscow shortly before the High Holidays, on September 10. The poet was eager to return to his pregnant wife and to his literary projects, now that the retrieval operation was in full gear and the museum (or commission) had a building.9 Sutzkever asked Kovner to take over as chairman of the commission, with Shmerke as his deputy. Everyone assumed that Sutzkever would return in a month or two, but he ended up staying in Moscow for close to a year.10
Before he left, Sutzkever drafted the text of a promotional brochure about the commission’s work, which listed some of its unearthed treasures: letters by (and to) the early nineteenth-century mystic Rabbi Eliyahu Gutmakher (“the only Hasidic master in Germany”); the manuscripts of early Yiddish theater plays by the father of Yiddish theater, Abraham Goldfaden; writings by S. J. Abramowicz, the grandfather of Yiddish literature; ten pinkasim (record books), including the record book of the synagogue of the Vilna Gaon; rare sixteenth-century Hebrew books published in Venice, Cremona, Cracow, and Lublin; sculptures by Mark Antokolsky; and the Vilna ghetto archive, with the records of the ghetto administration, placards, diaries, and photographs.11
Not mentioned in the draft brochure was one of the commission’s most important discoveries: the handwritten diary of Theodor Herzl from the 1880s. In the Soviet Union, possession of a document by the founder of political Zionism wasn’t something to publicize or boast about. Lenin had vilified Zionism, and the movement was banned in the USSR since the 1920s.12
But the absence of the Herzl diary from the brochure ended up not mattering. Because the brochure never appeared. The Censorship Bureau referred its text to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which refused to approve publication.
As soon as Sutzkever left, Shmerke and Kovner began feuding. Shmerke resented the fact that Kovner was titular head of the commission, while he, the person who had risked his life smuggling the treasures, and who had been the first to retrieve them, was his subordinate. Shmerke also loathed Kovner’s lengthy absences from the museum to engage in other activities—rebuilding the Shomer Ha-Tza’ir movement, organizing acts of revenge against known Nazi collaborators, and planning illegal emigration to Palestine. What kind of museum director was that?
Ideological factors also fueled the tensions: Shmerke was a Communist who, in the fall of 1944, still put his faith in the Soviet system. Kovner was a socialist Zionist who rejected the prospect of rebuilding Jewish life in Vilna, in the USSR, or for that matter anywhere in Europe. And Shmerke was jealous of Kovner’s cool air of authority, and . . . his success with women.13
But the retrieval work continued as before, and in October, Shmerke made a monumental discovery: he found Herman Kruk’s ghetto diary in the bunker on Shavel Street. (Sutzkever had discovered a few dozen pages back in August and taken them with him to Moscow, but Shmerke found several hundred more.) Kruk, the librarian, had hidden three copies of his great chronicle in different parts of the city, but only the copy buried in the Shavel Street bunker survived the ravishes of war.
The typescript was in total disarray. Kruk had placed it in a sealed metallic canister, but the people who lived in the bunker after the ghetto’s liquidation opened the canister in search of valuables. The diary’s pages were strewn across the bunker, crumpled and torn, amid papers of all kinds. It took weeks to gather the pages and reassemble the diary.14
Even more miraculous was the discovery of Kruk’s notebooks from the Klooga camp in Estonia. Kruk had buried them in a little ditch at Lagedi in the presence of six witnesses, on the day before he and four hundred other inmates were executed. One of those six witnesses, Nisan Anolik, survived. He returned to Lagedi after the liberation, recovered the notebooks, and handed them over to the Jewish Museum.
Kruk’s dream that his writings would survive for future generations came true.15
The diary eventually reached YIVO in New York, which published the original Yiddish text, with copious notes and indexes, and a lengthy biographical introduction by Kruk’s surviving brother Pinkhas. When the Kruk diary appeared in English translation, it was hailed by historians as “one of the world’s great wartime memoirs” and “a one-person Ringelblum archive about the Vilna ghetto, which is simultaneously a literary masterpiece.” The dean of Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, called it “one of the essential documents from that tragic era.” Shmerke and Sutzkever made sure that the words of the murdered head of the “paper brigade” would live.16
Just as Shmerke was savoring his Kruk discovery, an existential crisis burst forth. In late October 1944, an institution in Moscow known as the Personnel Policy Commission rejected the application by the “Commission to Collect and Process Documents of Jewish Culture” for state funding; it ordered the commission dissolved. The consequences were felt almost immediately. The staff’s privileges—food rations and exemption from the military draft—were revoked, and their identification cards were invalidated.
Kovner and Shmerke joined forces, their mutual hostility notwithstanding, to rescue the commission, or as they still called it, the museum, from destruction. Kovner went straight to Juozas Ziugzda, the commissar of education, and did not mince words: Moscow’s decision was the direct result of the Lithuanian authorities’ failure to support the Jewish Museum. He warned Ziugzda that once news of this decision would spread outside the USSR, it would be interpreted as an antisemitic act by the Lithuanian government.
Kovner shot off a letter to Sutzkever with urgent instructions: ask the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to intervene; Ilya Ehrenburg must help; and meet with the top Lithuanian leadership (Snieckus, Justas Paleckis, and others) who were reportedly in Moscow. “You must demand that they preserve this Jewish cultural institution and not aid the destruction of that which the Germans didn’t manage to destroy!”17
Meanwhile, Kovner decided to up the ante. In a memo to the authorities, he demanded that the commission be reconstituted as the Institute for Jewish Culture of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. There was such an institute in Soviet Kiev, and before the war there had been one in Minsk, so why not also in Vilnius? Kovner asked for a staff register of twenty employees.18
Kovner met with Ziugzda three times, but the minister’s position hardened with each meeting. He was firmly opposed to the museum’s revival, whether as a commission, museum, or institute. The documents in its possession could be forwarded to Lithuanian archives; the books to the state library; the works of art to the national museum; and scholarly materials to the Academy of Sciences. Kovner characterized Ziugzda’s position in evocative terms, especially for a ghetto survivor: “He wants to turn us into ashes.”19
Kovner and Shmerke assumed that the Lithuanian authorities were responsible for the commission’s dissolution, as well as for the ban on Yiddish publishing and the harassment of the Jewish school. What they didn’t know was that the Lithuanian leadership was under severe pressure from Moscow to take these steps and more. The man who was responsible for the pressure was Stalin’s special emissary to Vilnius, Mikhail Andreievich Suslov, the head of the Lithuanian Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR.
Suslov, as coldhearted and brutal a Soviet official as there ever was, virulently opposed the existence of Jewish cultural institutions in Lithuania, or for that matter, anywhere in the European USSR. He insisted that the Jews could either assimilate or migrate to Birobidzhan, the miniscule Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East, near the Chinese border. In Birobidzhan, which was home to ten thousand of the 2.2 million Jews in the Soviet Union, Yiddish was an official language. Elsewhere, Suslov pressed, Jewish cultural activity should be considered “nationalism,” a dirty word in the Soviet lexicon.
When a representative of the Vilnius Jewish school met with him to ask for state resources on the school’s behalf, Moscow’s man threw the representative out of his office and accused him of being an agent of Jewish nationalism.20
Inspired by Mikhail Andreevich’s position, officials in the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow wrote a formal memorandum to their top boss, Georgy Malenkov, blaming the Lithuanian Communists for their “improper approach to the Jewish question.” They attacked the Lithuanian leaderships for “acceding to the demands of the Jewish community” and approving the establishment of a separate Jewish school and museum. The authors complained that Jewish Communists in Vilnius “are . . . not explaining to the Jewish population the falseness and harmfulness of creating special Jewish organizations. They are in fact actively defending these institutions and are essentially their organizers.” This was a broadside at Shmerke and others like him.21
Suslov and his followers took the extreme position that Jewish cultural institutions should be prohibited in Lithuania, at a time when there were many such institutions in Moscow: the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Yiddish publishing housing The Truth (Der Emes), the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, the newspaper Unity (Eynikayt), the literary journal Homeland (Heymland), the Yiddish department of Moscow Radio, and so forth.
The party leadership in Vilnius responded to the sharp criticism from Moscow by withdrawing their initial support for the Jewish Museum.
Kovner warned the Lithuanians that liquidation of the museum would have political repercussions. It “will awaken an unpleasant feeling throughout the world and is likely to be misinterpreted.”22 Translation: It would reinforce the view that Lithuania was thoroughly infested with antisemitism, even under Soviet rule. This was an image that Snieckus, Paleckis, and others wanted to avoid.
But when the storm quieted down, and Suslov turned to other more pressing issues, the Lithuanian authorities found a clever device by which to sneak the museum past the gray eminence from Moscow. On November 9, the Council of People’s Commissars of the Lithuanian SSR issued an order opening thirty-four museums. Buried in the list as number eighteen was the Vilnius Jewish Museum.23 In reality, the thirty-three other museums were opened on paper only. They had no staff, no facilities, and no activities. The memo was a statement of intent and a ploy to give the Jewish Museum a legal standing.24
Shmerke and Kovner celebrated. Shmerke, the party member, was appointed director and wrote to Sutzkever in Moscow that he was keeping the director’s seat warm for him until he returned. The other staff positions were two conservators (Avraham Ajzen and Shmuel Amarant), a graphic artist (Kovner), a secretary (Noime Markeles), a bookkeeper named Rubinshtein, and two maintenance workers (Kaplan and Vitka Kempner).25
From Shmerke’s perspective, the title Jewish Museum was just a name. He didn’t intend for the institution to follow the norms and practices of the museological profession. Only a tiny part of its collection consisted of art and artifacts, and there were no plans to mount exhibits. Amarant and Ajzen weren’t actually working as curators, and Kovner wasn’t a graphic artist. The Jewish Museum was a library, an archive, and, perhaps in the future, a research institute. Above all, it was a monument to the memory of the lost Jerusalem of Lithuania.
Shmerke still hoped that the museum, with its eight-member staff register, would be a temporary holding pen until the authorities approved the establishment of an institute for Jewish culture. “I am sure that we will be made equal with others,” he wrote to Sutzkever. This was yet another dream of Shmerke’s that did not come true.26
Even with the new official status, everyday work was difficult and frustrating. There were no allocations for transportation and the refurbishing the building. Shmerke wrote to Sutzkever, “You understand my dear Abrasha. In order to get three meters of glass [to install windows], I need to go request it twenty times. And that’s only if I go. If someone else went, he wouldn’t get anything.”27
The months between July and November 1944 were a war of nerves between stubborn Vilner determination (“if you only will it, you can be a Gaon”) and Soviet bureaucratic obstructionism and inertia. But in November 1944, the Vilners prevailed. The Jewish Museum was an official reality.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tears in New York
IT WAS MAX WEINREICH’S good fortune and heavy burden to be the only member of the Vilna YIVO’s leadership who was spared from the ravages of the war. He was en route to a linguistics conference in Denmark on September 1, 1939, and remained stranded in Copenhagen for the next few weeks. When his close friend and YIVO colleague Zalmen Rejzen was arrested by the Soviets on September 18, Weinreich decided not to return home. Rejzen was never heard from again. He died in Soviet detention.
With the outburst of war in Europe, the American branch of YIVO became the institute’s temporary headquarters, and its first act was to arrange for Weinreich’s immigration to the United States. He arrived in New York on March 18, 1940, became director, and began to rebuild.
