Guttering Flame

Through the centuries, the rulers of Russia, czar and commissar alike, have made sporadic attempts to stamp out the small but stubbornly burning flame of Russian Jewish culture. No man came closer to succeeding than Joseph Stalin. In 1948, the birth of Israel stirred up Stalin's lifelong suspicion of Soviet Jewry, and he launched a massive purge that erased nearly every trace of Jewish culture. Three Yiddish journals were banned; a Yiddish publishing house was closed; four Yiddish theaters went by the boards; 450 Yiddish writers, painters, actors and musicians were slaughtered. Only a pallid, two-page newspaper published twice a week in remote Birobidzhan on the Manchurian border kept the dim flame from guttering out. Last week that flame got its first fuel in 13 years as 25,000 copies of a new bimonthly Yiddish literary magazine, Sovietish Heimland (Soviet Homeland), came off the presses in Moscow.

The magazine is Nikita Khrushchev's reply to persistent criticism of the Kremlin's ill-concealed antiSemitism. For years, the Soviet Premier argued that Russia's Jews were really not interested in Jewish culture, but the 1959 Soviet census destroyed his argument. Of 2,268,000 Russian Jews, nearly half a million listed Yiddish as their native tongue. Almost as if he were admitting his error, Khrushchev authorized the publication of Sovietish Heimland.

Politics of Survival. That the magazine will merely parrot Soviet policy--in Yiddish--seems clear on almost all 130 pages of its first issue. Obscure Yiddish writers are represented, but the magazine's tone is set by excerpts from Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's autobiography, sentimental songs about Cuba and the Congo, and a poem celebrating the wonders of a Siberian hydroelectric project.

Russian Jews view Editor Aron Ver-gelis, a short, stocky man with a shadowy background, with deep distrust. They suspect him of having worked for Stalin's secret police during World War II, and of holding the job of political commissar. One of the few Yiddish writers to escape interrogation, torture, and death during the Stalin purges, Vergelis got right to work at the politics of survival during the thaw that followed Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin. After the Suez invasion, Vergelis dashed off a Yiddish poem furiously attacking Israel. "We will force our enemies to surrender their antiSoviet armor," said he, in a bitter attack on all anti-Communist Jews outside the Soviet Union.

Natural Atheist. Vergelis was an obvious choice to run Sovietish Heimland.

So was one of the men who helped get the project started: Jewish Novelist Ilya (Out of Chaos] Ehrenburg, another man with a decided talent for landing on his feet. Although Stalin liquidated nearly every member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ehrenburg was spared; it was even rumored that he personally fingered fellow members as Zionists.

Those who thought the magazine might turn into a genuine forum for Jewish thought were swiftly disabused of that notion. At a press conference last week, Vergelis blandly described himself as a "natural atheist," pledged that his editorial policy would be antireligious.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.