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Jeffrey Goldberg On Ahmadinejad On Wiping Out Israel

By Daniel Koffler / June 19, 2008

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Jeffrey Goldberg steps into the debate over the nature of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's incendiary remarks about Israel, to call out Harvard Professor Stephen Walt of 'Walt-Mearsheimer' (in)fame(y) for downplaying the idea that Ahmadinejad is "inciting to genocide" (Walt's terms) in Israel. For reasons that a Persian speaker will readily comprehend (and a sufficiently deterimined non-sokhbako could figure out), I'm going to refer to the Iranian president by his nickname among his adoring people, 'Ahmaghinejad,' from here on out.

Goldberg's check and mate many times over is a tranche of Ahmaghinejad quotes, from the notorious "wipe off the map" comment of October 2005, to a statement just this month, all of which are variously loathsome vamps on the old "Israel must cease to exist" standard. I've noted here at Jewcy before that Ahmaghinejad's "wipe off the map" remark of October 2005 is a mistranslation; my objections to repeating it are 1) it offends me as a student of Persian and 2) given the enormous supply of sickening comments from Ahmaghinejad re: Israel, of which Goldberg usefully provides a small but still representative sample, there isn't even a pragmatic rationale for persisting in mistranslating the remark. (We have an idea of what Ahmaghinejad says about Israel publicly; imagine what he says in private.) I'd hope Goldberg would credit the idea that, however merited objections to Walt and Mearsheimer are, fealty to the correct use and translation of Persian doesn't entail being an apologist for Ahmaghinejad.

The question, of course, is how best to interpret the comments. It's not a straightforward task, since Ahmaghinejad's speeches are littered with quotes from the Ayatollah Khomeini and from medieval Persian poets that involve idioms that don't correspond to anything in English, so figuring out what he meant involves either learning the language, or doing some careful inductive guesswork and hoping for the best.

Although I haven't been able to track down the originals of all the quotes Goldberg reproduces (there might be links on the Ahmadine-blog, in case somebody is willing to pore through the archives), I've looked at a few, and they have a number of recurrent features. Ahmaghinejad rarely if ever refers to Israel by name, but rather as ???? ???????? (rezhim-e eshghalgar), the 'occupying regime', of which the first word is an obvious western import that only has a narrow, technical meaning referring to a particular governmental apparatus (generally, as in English, in pejorative tones). By contrast, the Persian words for 'country' and 'nation' in a broader, non-technical sense are ???? (keshvar) and ??? (mellat), respectively. Moreover, the stem of the key verbs in Ahmaghinejad's proclamations of Israel's doom (at least, in the ones I've looked at) is always ??? (shodan) rather than ???? (kardan). This is a major, not a minor semantic difference: the latter is used in active and indicative constructions; the former is used in passive and subjunctive constructions. Which means that, on strict semantics, Ahmaghinejad has been expressing either a belief that Israel will cease to exist or a desire that it will (or both), rather than stating a policy objective.

Now, none of this suggests for a moment that the narrow semantic values of Ahmaghinejad's declarations of the impending destruction of the state of Israel completely exhaust the messages he was communicating (that's the first lesson of practical linguistics). And the upshot of the fact that Ahmaghinejad, strictly speaking, fastened his attacks on the Israeli "regime" rather than Israel or the Israelis, and that he never explicitly signed on to the project of bringing about the destruction of that "regime," isn't that Ahmaghinejad was really talking about flowers and candy and has gotten a rough break in the Western press. On the contrary, it simply goes to show that a politician is a politician no matter where he's from, and what distinguishes even deranged racist ignoramus politicians from deranged racist ignoramus non-politicians is that the former will speak calculatingly, as the politicians that they are. So even though Ahmaghinejad isn't literally pledging the Iranian state to a policy of genocide, he is personally endorsing an event — the destruction of the Israeli government — that would very likely entail the slaying of large numbers of Israelis.

Furthermore, Walt's term 'incitement' is (unintentionally) spot-on. When a leader "incites violence," he or she seldom does so by literally telling those under his or her influence to go out and kill, injure or maim anyone (we would call that "ordering attacks," not "incitement to violence"). Rather, incitement standardly consists in pushing just the right buttons to spur violence while maintaining a veneer of deniability. And that, plainly, is part of what Ahmaghinejad has been communicating, i.e.: "While I, the terribly important president of this holy state don't have the time or inclination to get my hands dirty, it sure is about time somebody did something to remove the regime occupying Qods from the pages of time and history."

There's just no other plausible way of interpreting the comments while being simultaneously faithful to both semantics and to the pragmatic implications that enable us as human beings, rather than artificial intelligence, to communicate with one another. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that if, say, an Afrikaner politician mused about how black rule in South Africa is shortly coming to an end and pre-emptively endorsed a campaign of violence and intimidation against Africans without literally pledging to be a part of it, nobody would have a difficult time understanding what was up.

But the heinousness of Ahmaghinejad's incitements immediately raises the question of just what influence he has, and this is where I break with Goldberg. Permit me this Godwin's law violation, since I'm committing it only to strengthen the case I'm arguing against. Suppose that Hitler had had all the beliefs about Jews that he did in fact have, desired to exterminate the Jewish people, etc., but lived out his days as a penurious mediocre landscape painter in Munich never committing so grave a crime as jaywalking. His beliefs themselves wouldn't be any less vile under those circumstances, but in such a scenario, the fact that he held those beliefs just wouldn't be very important. Indeed, it's a matter of simple statistical probability that there have been untold numbers of people whose personal antisemitism and genocidal fantasies were more virulent than Hitler's on some sort of one-to-one comparison of beliefs, but we just don't and shouldn't care about such people. What made Hitler a menace was not only the evil of his ideology, which on its own couldn't do anything, but also his control of the most powerful war machine in world history up to that point.

That's why fretting over Ahmaghinejad's remarks about Israel is a waste of energy, even as it's good to stay alert to the casual antisemitism that excuses such remarks but would never countenance equivalent incitements against other groups . Maybe — maybe! — there are some irredentists in Gaza or the West Bank whose Shi'ism is strong enough to overcome the hatred of Persians they've been taught since childhood, who don't recognize what a laughingstock Ahmaghinejad is in Iran, and who take the clear message of his remarks to heart. But how many such people could there be, who will engage in terrorism against Israel because of Ahmaghinejad, but wouldn't have otherwise? I strongly doubt it would take very many hands to count them all.

As for the significance of Ahmaghinejad's remarks for the Iranian government and Iranian society, it's basically non-existent. Despite the fact that his title is "President" — as I'll continue to point out again and again — Iranian state power is completely in the hands of the small circle of clerics around Ali Khamenei. Any power Ahmaghinejad exercises is at Khamenei & co.'s discretion, and can be rescinded on a whim. Indeed, as observers of the Iranian political scene well know, Khamenei's loathing of Ahmaghinejad is nearly as strong as that of educated Iranian society at large. Khamenei has barely tolerated Ahmaghinejad's presence in the government because he represented a significant, boorish segment of the Iranian "electorate" — a term I bracket with scare quotes both because the pool of Iranian voters is not representative of the country, and the elections in which they vote do not have any practical effect on the composition of the real leadership. And now that Ahmaghinejad's buffoonery has destroyed whatever popular support he enjoyed, Khamenei and the clerics were swift to exclude him from the government in every respect except nominally.

To be sure, many of the interests the regime in Tehran is working to advance conflict with American interests, and the regime's suppression of liberal freedoms and abuse of women and homosexuals is abhorrent. Nonetheless, Khamenei et al., who do hold power, have demonstrated again and again that they are practitioners of realpolitik, unlike Ahmaghinejad, who is an apocalyptic fanatic but fortunately doesn't hold power.

And in fact, the United States and Israel have some significant interests in common with Iran. (Those Zionists who long for the days of the Shah can fill in the details of why Iran is Israel's only natural ally in the middle East.) American and Israeli strategic interests and security are threatened by militarized Sunni extremists; and so are Iranian strategic interests and security. Some of the worst disasters in western and central Asia that could befall the United States and Israel are the takeover of Iraq by Wahhabist fanatics, the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Talibanization of Pakistan, or any combination thereof; those would arguably be even greater disasters for Iran. And the Iranian regime wants to preserve its power, which in practice will mean delivering economic prosperity; likewise, the US wants Iran to scuttle its nuclear research and militarization, and holds important keys to helping Iran achieve prosperity. And just to conclude scratching the surface, the Iranian people themselves, whatever the positions of their government, are decidedly pro-Western and pro-American.

These features of Iran's polity and society and of the international relations picture by no means guarantee that diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic will be successful; but they do nonetheless come with some welcome sureties. As long as Iran is controlled by Ali Khamenei, the chances of a first strike on a nuclear power with massive deterrent capabilities (e.g. the US or Israel) are effectively null. Such a strike would be suicide, and the actual Iranian regime, as opposed to its court jester, is not suicidal. Moreover, the foundation already exists, and indeed has existed for decades, for engagement with Iran not merely at the highest strata of the government, but with the Iranian people themselves. Say what you will about Zbigniew Brzezinski — but don't dare say it about the recently departed, much beloved William Odom — they had exactly the right approach for dealing with Iran, and helpfully put Ahmaghinejad in his rightful, unserious place in the process.

As Brzezinski elaborated in a recent appearance on Morning Joe (sorry, no transcript available), applying the model of long-term cultural penetration through semi-official outreach like Radio Free Europe, encouragement of consumerism, exposure to the fruits of western liberties, etc., that was so successful in weakening the Iron Curtain, has even stronger prospects for success in Iran, where popular affinity for Western and indeed American values is pervasive. Iran certainly presents a major foreign policy challenge, and even if it poses no existential threats, its sponsorship of anti-Israeli terrorism is intolerable.

But stamping our feet won't do anything about that, and coming to a correct moral judgment about Iranian support for Hezbollah and Mahmoud Ahmaghinejad's eliminationist fantasies is not even the beginning, let alone the end, of policy to curb the Iranian threat. In particular, devoting vastly more attention than he deserves to an antisemitic circus act who can only be relevant to the future of US- and Israeli-Iranian relations if Americans and Israelis elect to make him relevant, threatens to obscure the full picture, in which engagement with Iran, in addition to being a challenge, is also an enormous opportunity.

Comments (23)

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By JP editor 6/27/08 at 10:48 a.m. UTC
"And NO ONE in <strike>Iran</strike> GERMANY takes<strike> Ahmadinejad </strike>HITLER seriously, most of them believe his nutcase statements on JEWS <Strike>Israel </strike> are red meat to his <Strike> hezbollah</strike> BROWN SHIRT supporters<Strike> (in Lebanon, much less in Iran)</strike> GERMANY and not something to be taken literally."

There I fixed it for you
By Anonymous 6/21/08 at 10:47 a.m. UTC
Next Thors will prove that Black Americans were responsible for slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc.

What is up with mathematicians'/computer programmers' mental requirements for a binary 100 % culpable/100% blameless standard when it comes to criticizing cultures and societies for the various conflicts that occur between and within them? Ted Kozinski had/has a similar mindset. People are not numbers and one statement, fact or work of literature is not the lynchpin of a proof. People like this simply must have some kind of deficiency whereby a compulsion for making mathematical formulae out of everything overwhelms their mind's capacities for moral reasoning and actually gathering the information that must be considered before plugging and chugging.
By Anonymous 6/20/08 at 5:47 p.m. UTC
By ThorsProvoni 6/20/08 at 11:42 a.m. UTC
The Myth of Jewish Powerlessness

Ethnic Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent German Jews were heavily involved in violent revolutionary activities, assassination and terrorism since the middle of the 19th century.

The three defining assassinations of modern Russia were planned and carried out by Jews:

1.) Alexander II,

2) Stolypin,

3) Nicholas II + family.

From the Russian revolution onward, ethnic Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Without this context, understanding both the mass murders of Jews during WW2 and also Zionist murderousness and genocidalism in Palestine is impossible.

The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine

The Jewish Century targets the popular audience more than scholars because a lot of the common beliefs that Yuri Slezkine debunks were long ago disproved in scholarly journals. The book is not really a detailed history, and it has some serious flaws because Slezkine, a history professor at UC Berkeley and specialist in the Soviet period, does not read Yiddish or Hebrew(+). The value of Slezkine's Apollonian/Mercurian interpretive framework is questionable, for it identifies Eastern European Ashkenazim and Eastern European Romany as anthropologically similar.

The book is a sort of extended essay or memoir-like reflection of the role of Soviet Jews (more precisely Soviet Ethnic Ashkenazim) during 20s and 30s when Russian Ethnic Ashkenazim became the quintessential Soviet nationality. They lost this privileged status after the establishment of the State of Israel because at that point Russian ethnic Ashkenazim could claim a homeland outside the Soviet Union just like Soviet Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Iranians, Koreans, Kurds, Latvians and Poles, who were all persecuted and deported internally during the 1920s-30s often under the supervision of Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi officials in an official policy of alienization.(++)

Slezkine clearly mourns the passing of the Golden Age of Soviet Russian Ashkenazim in 1948 and hates Zionism with obvious venom, for every reference in the book to Zionism and to any Zionist leader is full of scorn.

Yet, he clearly misses the fundamental similarity in thinking and behavior of Soviet Russian Ashkenazim and Zionist Russian Ashkenazim.

On p. 310-311 he tells the following story of the Markish family.

For the first time, the Soviet state had turned on some of its loyal and privileged subjects [Russian ethnic Ashkenazim] according to a clear — and apparently non-Soviet — principle. [Slezkine discusses the issue somewhat differently, but Stalin and other non-Jewish Soviet officials probably felt that they had been swindled by politically connected ethnic Ashkenazim into granting de facto recognition to the State of Israel.] For the first time, Hodl and her children [a reference to Sholem Aleichem's character Tevye the Milkman] found themselves among the aliens. For the first time, many of them began to doubt their Soviet faith — and the culpability of previous aliens. As Ester Markish put it,

Only our own grief made us realize the horror of our lives in general: not only the suffering of the Jews or the suffering of the intelligentsia, but the suffering of the whole country and all the social groups and peoples that lived in it. After the arrest of [Perets] Markish, our maid, who had lived in our house for more than fifteen years and had, in effect, become a member of our family, said to me: "You are crying now, but you did not mind when my father was being dekulakized, martyred for no reason at all, and my whole family thrown out in the street?"

Ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet officials played the main and leading role in dekulakization/collectivization. Very few (I can only identify one with certainty) have ever expressed regret for their actions, which lead to the death by starvation of approximately 7 million people (all non-Jews of course).

Just as the Soviet elite (often Russian ethnic Ashkenazim) made native populations of the Russian Empire aliens in their own country, stole everything they had, deported them, and murdered them, likewise Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim made the native population of Palestine aliens in their own country, stole everything they had, deported them, and murdered them.

We have here two levels of obliviousness: the inability of the author Slezkine to perceive the similarity of Soviet Russian ethnic Ashkenazim to Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim in their thinking and behavior as well as the complete unawareness of the Markish family about the true feelings of their maid.

I attended a panel discussion at Harvard on The Jewish Century and afterward spoke with Steven Zipperstein, who was one of the panel members. He is The Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Co-Director of Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

I described the reaction of the reviewer from the Israeli Paper Yediot Aharonot (Late News) to Hanna Elias' movie The Olive Harvest, which is a love story/family drama set in the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. One of the characters early in the movie remarks that the settlements are a cancer on the land. The reviewer completely missed the movie's story, and only expressed shock and outrage that Palestinians would actually say and believe that "we Israelis are a cancer on the land."

I would almost equate the reviewer's obliviousness to Palestinian hostility to the Markish family's lack of awareness of the maid's anger except that after working in Israel and the Occupied Territories for 10 years, I cannot believe that any Israeli would be surprised by the hatred of Palestinians. I have to consider the reviewer to have been posturing in order to portray Hanna as some sort of propagandist.

Zipperstein only remarked sarcastically that Slezkine gets the translations wrong and a reviewer from the Israeli paper Haaretz (The Land), would have agreed with the Palestinian character. The blindness of the Markish family and the convenient obliviousness of Zionists seems to persist as denial among ethnic Ashkenazi Americans like Professor Zipperstein.

(+) Because of his lack of Hebrew and Yiddish, Slezkine misinterprets the phrase Loshen Kaudesh, which is just one German Jewish pronunciation of Leshon Qodesh (Holy Language). The term is not a pun on the German dialect pronunciation of Kuh as Kau as Slezkine claimed. Cattle dealer jargon was usually called Loshen.

(++) The whining of American Ashkenazim and Russian ethnic Ashkenazim about mistreatment since the 1950s was somewhat hypocritical because treatment of Russian ethnic Ashkenazim was hardly unique in the Soviet Union. In fact after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Soviet Union applied a formula to Russian ethnic Ashkenazim that had for the most part been developed by Russian ethnic Ashkenazim for other nationalities within the Soviet Union. Russian ethnic Ashkenazim were angry that they were being hoist upon their own petard. It is hard to sympathize.

NOTE 1

Slezkine uses Tevye the Milkman's daughter Chava as a symbol for American Russian ethnic Ashkenazim and Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim. I may misremember, but I believe that Chava committed suicide with Tevye's help in a later short story. I guess there really is no going back, but as a non-Jewish relatively disinterested observer — who reads Yiddish — I consider the Yiddishists and Zionists just as much metaphorically patricidal as the first generation of Soviet Russian ethnic Ashkenazim. Tevye also has a tremendous anger toward traditional Eastern European Jewish culture, and I have the impression it is rather common in members of his generation even if they could not break from the tradition.

NOTE 2

While I was not impressed by Professor Zipperstein's sensitivity to Palestinian feelings, he is actually one of the better historians of Russian Ashkenazim. I can recommend his book entitled, The Jews of Odessa, A Cultural History, 1794-1881, with the qualification that his focus on the Jews of Odessa is sometimes too narrow. He describes the conflicts of Odessan Jews with other Odessan ethnic groups but never seems to have researched such conflicts from the standpoint of any group but that of the Jews.
By ThorsProvoni 6/20/08 at 11:10 a.m. UTC
Like Germans, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Rumanians, Greeks, etc.

Why should Jews be any different? Or are we racists that believe Jews are less subject to self delusion than other ethnic groups?

The Lies of Yiddish Studies

The Source of Jewish Callousness
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Understanding Zionist Jewish brutality, murderousness and genocidalism requires study of German Jewish and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi (Yiddish) history. Yael Zerubavel discusses the disdain of Zionist Jews for non-Zionist Jews in Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, p. 19:

"The highly negative perception of Exile often turned from shelilat hagalut (the repudiation of the state of living in exile) to shelilat hagolah (the condemnation of the people who live in exile), the product of its demeaning and regressive lifestyle.

Yet because in most situations Zionists were historically a tiny minority among Jews, the contempt rarely turned to violence except perhaps in the case of the public speaking of Yiddish at open Zionist political gatherings in Palestine. (In closed meetings, Yiddish served to exclude non-Ashkenazim from insider roles.)

Elizabeth Mitchell's essay below about the Yiddish author Der Nister makes an interesting admission about the much larger number (probably a majority) of Yiddish speakers that were sympathetic to the Russian revolution in the 1920s.

Der Nister witnessed … religious and political persecution during his lifetime, he must have been certain that this sect [Bratislaver Hassidim] would vanish for good, forever to be misunderstood. In the 1920s, the mainstream Jewish community had even turned on its own religious sects in the Soviet states, echoing the government's pogroms, and Der Nister's novel reflects that internal feud. As Book Two ends, the town seeks to drive out the sect, suspecting that somehow the group's strange habits have brought the curse of financial ruin upon everyone. [page 2, "The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist," below]

In other words, there was so much anger and violence among non-Zionist ethnic Ashkenazim that they were more than willing to commit pogroms against more traditional segments of the Jewish community.

A previous blog entry Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem discusses the destructive and violent tendencies within Eastern European Jewish (Yiddish) culture. A group so willing to abuse whole segments of its own population certainly would have no compunction about eradicating the traditional Arabic culture of Palestine.

Like much material in Yiddish studies the essay below is subtly dishonest as I have discussed elsewhere, but the key point in understanding Jewish self-deception about Jewish murderousness comes from the failure to identify the policing of the Soviet Jewish community and of Soviet Yiddish literature as an almost entirely Jewish activity.

Gennay Estraikh notes in Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development, p. 117:

It is safe to say that the Soviet Yiddish orthographical reform – which would be widely seen as a (or even the) hallmark of denationalized and moribund Jewish culture – had been actually instigated by a group of non-communist Yiddishist. In fact, by the time of the 1917 revolution there were no real Yiddish philologists and writers in the Bolshevik party. We know (see Ch. 2) that Soviet Jewish institutions had to start working by and large through former Bundists, Poale Zionists, anarchists, and members of other political currents. For these Yiddishists-monists of every stripe, the revolution formed auspicious conditions to eclipse the power of tradition and to put their plans into practice (See Holmshtok 1932; 49-50;Beznosik 1932:76).

Obviously Soviet Yiddishists were much more interested in Yiddish than they were in Soviet communism, and only Soviet Jews had any interest in Yiddish language or literature.

Non-Jewish communists paid no attention and were uninterested, but the Soviet Jewish communist leadership felt their status as the quintessential Soviet class threatened if non-Jewish communists ever realized that there was an autonomous Yiddish culture that existed beyond the Soviet Union and communism. This fear turned extreme after the creation of the State of Israel, and the concerns of the Soviet Jewish communist elite doubtlessly played a role in Stalin's decision to execute Der Nister and other Soviet Yiddish authors. The shooters were almost certainly Jewish.

The behavior of the Soviet Jewish elite feeling itself threatened should serve as a warning to Americans because the Zionist Jewish elite feels itself very threatened today by the discussion of the Israel Lobby and by a presidential candidate with Muslim family connections.

The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist

By Elizabeth Mitchell

One day in 1934, Pinchus Kahanovitch, a fifty-one-year-old Ukrainian writer of Yiddish stories, fairy tales, and criticism, decided he did not want to disappear. Within a group of novelists and short story writers that included David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, and Moyshe Kulbak, Kahanovitch had been something of an idol, having published in the great Y.L. Peretz's journal, Yudish, in the 1910s under the pen name Der Nister (meaning "the Hidden One"). The novelist Israel Joshua Singer later recalled a visit to Kiev around 1920 in which a member of the Culture League announced during a meeting that, "had writers of the whole world been given a chance to read Der Nister's work, they would have broken their pens."

The clique's reverence, however, provided little insurance for Der Nister in the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s. The Soviet government looked suspiciously on any group that set itself apart from the main social body. Though the government officially acknowledged Yiddish—mainly to show a peaceable face to the international community—as the language of a Jewish minority, libraries were throwing out Yiddish books, Yiddish schools and institutes were being shuttered, and newspaper presses stopped. In 1934, Der Nister explained to his brother in a letter, "The writing of my book is a necessity; otherwise I am nothing; otherwise I am erased from literature and from life."

The book Der Nister labored over would not be a revolt against the modern Yiddish literary tradition, but revolutionary in its adherence to that tradition during a time when Yiddish culture was under attack. That book, The Family Mashber, was conceived as an epic tale of at least three volumes, relating how a generally happy, successful Jewish family in the Polish-Ukrainian town of N (actually Der Nister's hometown, Berdichev) lost that happiness completely within one short year in the 1870s.

At least that is how the book ends now.

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The modern Yiddish literary movement had been flourishing since 1864, when S.Y. Abramovitsh published the first installment of his very popular "The Little Person" in the Yiddish newspaper supplement Kol Mevasser. The novella, enjoying the wide Eastern European circulation of the paper, offered a witty, masked social critique of corruption within the Polish and Russian power centers and the Jewish community itself. Yiddish fiction found its most famous voice in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who published his first stories in a Polish literary journal before immigrating to the United States in 1935. Book One of The Family Mashber appeared in Russia in 1939. (Book Two would be printed in the United States, also in Yiddish, in 1948.) The completed third volume disappeared when Kahanovitch did, on a Saturday in February 1949. Kahanovitch received the Soviet secret police at his door in Moscow with a smile. "Thank God you came at last," he is reported to have said, "I have waited for you for so long." When one of the arresting officers asked about the whereabouts of his manuscripts, he replied: "Forgive me, gentlemen, that matter is none of your concern. It was not for you that I wrote my manuscripts and they remain in a safe place." He was charged with conducting "hostile nationalistic activity" and thrown into Lefortovo prison. The following year he died, at age sixty-seven, of bleeding hemorrhoids in a labor camp.

In his lifetime, Kahanovitch had witnessed the worst of human nature. As a young man, he hid under assumed names to avoid czarist military service. In 1921 he escaped to Germany, but was lured back in 1927 by Stalin's false promises that Yiddish culture would be celebrated in the Soviet states. In Moscow, he lived and taught with a group of Yiddish artists, including his good friend Marc Chagall, at the Malakhovka children's colony, a school for orphans of the pogroms. There he tried to synthesize lessons in Jewish culture with Communist propaganda. In 1949, during Stalin's campaign against "Cosmopolitans," he saw many of his artist friends hauled away to prisons and labor camps, where they perished. In the months before his arrest he waited at home with his wife for the tragic ending he had imagined for himself to come to pass, and which indeed he had committed to paper—in a symbolic way—in the last pages of the second volume of The Family Mashber.

The first two volumes of The Family Mashber have just been reprinted in English, as a single paperback, by New York Review of Books Classics. (This translation, by Leonard Wolf, first appeared in 1987 as a Summit Books hardcover; in The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Wisse called it "a large, sprawling historical novel reminiscent of Dostoyevsky in its concentration on the human soul.") Although Kahanovitch fought for Yiddish works to be published in Yiddish, he might have been pleased to know that the memories he struggled to preserve would be carried forth in the minds of new American readers. In his preface to The Family Mashber, he writes, "The world depicted in this book—the economic base on which it rested, its social and ideological conflicts and interests—disappeared long ago. . . . In depicting those people, who are physically and spiritually extinct, I have taken pains not to contend with them, not to cry out that they are doomed. Rather, I have let them proceed quietly on their historically necessitated way toward the abyss."

PAGE 1 2 NEXT: The fall of its most successful citizen brings down the whole tightly intertwined community.
By Yaakov 6/20/08 at 8:44 a.m. UTC
Thanks Thor I have now have a greater appreciation for why my great grandparents and their families suffered from virulent and violent anti-semitism in Poland, Russia and Lithuania. And I thought it was just because the christians of that time and place didn't like Jews.