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Authors: Anya Von Bremzen
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allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being “Russian”? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?
In the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their own choice—without anguish they renounced Judaism for Bolshevism.
One such Jewish convert was Mom’s Grandpa Yankel. He too became a New Soviet Man, albeit a short, potbellied, docile one. But he was a fanatical proletarian nevertheless, a blacksmith who under Stalin would become a decorated Hero of Socialist Labor.
Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.
The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commandedby one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.
At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.
But there was a catch.
Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.
The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.
The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly
ethno-national
terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the
Soviet
Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”
In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat inPeresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and
forshmak
(chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.
Then one Friday Liza returned from school and sat
In the early 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their own choice—without anguish they renounced Judaism for Bolshevism.
One such Jewish convert was Mom’s Grandpa Yankel. He too became a New Soviet Man, albeit a short, potbellied, docile one. But he was a fanatical proletarian nevertheless, a blacksmith who under Stalin would become a decorated Hero of Socialist Labor.
Yankel came to Odessa in the early 1900s from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—the zone where since 1772 the Russian Empire’s Jews had been confined. Though within the Pale, the port of Odessa was a thriving melting pot of Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Russians as well as Jews. Here Yankel married Maria, began to flourish. And then in 1905, he returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War to something unspeakable. Over four October days, street mobs killed and mutilated hundreds in an orgy of anti-Jewish atrocities. Yankel and Maria’s firstborn, a baby boy, was murdered in front of them.
The civil war revived the pogrom of 1905 with anti-Semitic marauding by counterrevolutionary Whites. The Red Army—commandedby one Lev Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky—vehemently denounced the violence. Jews flocked to the Reds. Too old for combat now, Yankel cheered from the sidelines.
At first the revolution was good to the Jews. The official birth of the USSR in 1922 brought them rights and opportunities unprecedented in Russia’s history. Anti-Semitism became a state crime; the Pale was dismantled. Jews could rise through the bureaucratic and cultural ranks. At the start of the decade Jews made up one fifth of the Party’s Central Committee.
But there was a catch.
Like the Russian Empire before it, the Soviet Union was vast and dizzyingly multiethnic. For the Bolsheviks the ethnic or “nationalities” issue was fraught. In Marxist terms, nationalism was reactionary. Yet not only did ethnic minorities exist, but their oppression under the czar made them ripe for the socialist cause. So Lenin, along with the early Bolshevik nationalities commissar, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, contrived a policy of linguistic, cultural, and territorial autonomy for ethnic minorities—in a Soviet format—until international socialism came about and nationalities became superfluous.
The USSR, in the words of the historian Terry Martin, became the world’s first affirmative-action empire.
The catch for Jews? Jewishness was now defined in strictly
ethno-national
terms. The Talmud had no place in building the Radiant Future. Reforming and modernizing the so-called “Jewish Street” fell to the Yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. They worked savvily. Religious rituals were initially semitolerated—in Sovietized form. Passover? Well, if you must. Except the
Soviet
Haggadah substituted the words “October Revolution” for “God.”
In 1920s Odessa, the Soviet supporters Yankel and Maria Brokhvis continued to light candles on Shabbos at their one-room flat inPeresyp—but without mentioning God. Maria saw no wrong in gathering their three daughters around Friday table; she was a proud Jew. As the terrible times of the 1921 famine gave way to NEP’s relative bounty, she shopped every week at Odessa’s boisterous Privoz market for the pike for her famous gefilte fish. It was her second daughter Liza’s favorite. Maria made challah bread too, and
forshmak
(chopped herring), and bean tzimmes, and crumbly pastries filled with the black prune jam she cooked over a primus stove in the courtyard.
Then one Friday Liza returned from school and sat
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