Jewish Anti-Israel Leftists Should Remember the Night of the Murdered Poets

“It seemed to me that I could smell the fumes and the fire."

“There is a day that falls in August when the Temple of Solomon was burned,” David Bergelson told a Soviet tribunal. “On this day all Jews fast for twenty-four hours, even the children. They go to the cemetery for an entire day and pray there ‘together with the dead.’ I was so immersed in that atmosphere of that temple being burned—people talked about it a great deal in the community—that when I was six or seven years old it seemed to me that I could smell the fumes and the fire.”

The writer had bungled the date of Tisha Ba’av or the Fast of the Ninth of Av which in 1952 had instead come in late July, but he was right to smell ‘the fumes and the fires’ since his three year ordeal of torture and interrogations would soon end with a bullet to the head in the cellars of the KGB’s Lubyanka fortress on an August evening known as The Night of the Murdered Poets.

By then there were other ‘fumes and fires’ from the mass burning of Yiddish books at the Sholom Aleichem Library in Birobidzhan: once the center of the hopes of Jewish Communists like Bergelson for creating a ‘Jewish’ culture that would replace Judaism with Communism, replace the Bible with Das Kapital, and would jettison Hebrew and replace it with Yiddish

“As a Jew, I feel more intensely in Birobidzhan,” Bergelson had argued less than two decades before his murder. “In Birobidzhan I will help build a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content, which can serve propaganda purposes… I wish to partake of those fascinating, delectable juices of life that our Soviet regime bestows upon me.”

On The Night of the Murdered Poets, the Soviet regime withdrew the “delectable juices of life” from Bergelson and the other victims of the massacre as it had from millions of others.

Some of those Jewish writers, poets and doctors killed on The Night of the Murdered Poets had at least questioned the regime, with Peretz Markish warning that “the time will come that the snake wrapped around our necks will choke us”, but Bergelson appeared to have remained a loyal Communist and for his devout allegiance, his support for the previous Stalinist purges of Jewish figures, Bergelson was taken away, beaten and forced to confess to the worst crime.

Zionism.

The story of Bergelson and the cohort of ‘Yiddishist’ pied pipers is once again relevant as anti-Israel groups propose to follow in the footsteps of the ‘Bundists’, who ended up serving as the ‘Yevsektisa’, the brutal ‘Jewish Section’ of the Bolsheviks, targeting synagogues and rabbis, before, like Bergelson, being killed off by Stalin, now circulating around ‘Jewish Currents’, the online Beinart site that revives the old Communist newspaper Morgen Frayhayt, which was boycotted by most Jews for its support for Muslim massacres of Jews and the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

The media recently took to touting a book by ‘Molly Crabapple’, aka Jennifer Caban, the daughter of a Puerto Rican father arguing for a revival of the Socialist ‘Bund’ movement as the alternative to Israel through a “radical vision of solidarity.” Calls for ‘solidarity’, by which the anti-Israel Left mean Jews allying with Communists, racist identity politics groups and Islamists to destroy Israel and America, are the Left’s solution to antisemitism.

Anti-Israel activists, some Jewish and some not, dig up Jewish ancestors, real or imagined, stumble through some awkward phrases in Yiddish and call for the destruction of Israel.

‘Solidarity’ with antisemites around a common hatred of traditional Jews never works out.

After having championed a ban on Hebrew, shut down synagogues, murdered countless Jews for the crimes of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, the Yevsektsia and the Yiddishists were themselves purged in the 1930s, followed by growing crackdowns on Yiddish literature, and any Jewish Communists in America who could swallow the idea that their old friends had really been spies and terrorists, soon had to also swallow the alliance between Nazism and the USSR.

“How much pain and strain were required in the last ten years to maintain at least a shred of faith that everything going on in Moscow meant redemption,” Menahem Boraisha, a Yiddish poet who had left the Morgen Frayhayt, the Communist paper that had helped lure Bergelson and many others to their doom, when it cheered on the Muslim massacre of Jews in Hebron. “Iron dictatorship, concentration camps… socialists labored to find a vindication for all this, stifling their own conscience, explaining away through rationalization and casuistry, and with tooth and nail clinging to one consolation… still, Socialism is being built there.”

By then, anyone with a fraction of humanity in his soul, who had been misled by ideological enthusiasm, had left the Morgen Frayhayt, leaving behind only complete monsters. Jewish newspaper sellers refused to sell the paper. Members of its staff were threatened in the street.

After a brief pause, when the Hitler-Stalin pact collapsed with the Nazi surprise attack, the USSR resumed its crackdown on the Jews culminating in the Doctors Plot and the larger plan to exterminate the Jews of the USSR of which The Night of the Murdered Poets was only one minor incident, but which mostly came to an end with Stalin’s nearly miraculous death.

The Birobidzhan delusion never gained much of a Jewish population and existed only as a kind of ‘Anti-Israel’ for Jewish Communists to build a cultural house of cards around. The actual Israel became a primary target of the Soviet Union and its allies, who helped create modern Islamic terrorism, the practice of airline hijacking, and also invented the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

That’s the manufactured cause in whose name modern anti-Israel activists of Jewish ethnic origin want to destroy Israel.

The old joke about the Communist experiment is that no amount of failures are ever enough. Next time, it’ll be managed the right way. Jewish Communists have learned nothing from the fate of their forebears which is a shame because if David Bergelson died for anything, it was that. It is hard to know what was in the Communist’s mind when he invoked the fall of the Temple at his trial as a self-indictment, but it is easier to guess the meaning of his last words.

“Earth, oh earth, do not cover my blood!” The quote did not come from Marx or Lenin, it was not the hideous slogan, “Long live Stalin” adopted by loyal Communists being put to death, but came from Job 16:18. It was not as transcendent a moment as the death of Dovid Hofshteyn that same night, a talented poet and reluctant Communist, who underwent a religious revival in captivity, reciting the psalms from memory in his cell and going to his death joyfully singing.

But it was a powerful statement that should resonate with the Jewish anti-Israel Left.

In 1926, Bergelson had expressed his repentance for opposing the ‘Yevsektisa’ and its crackdown on Hebrew and Judaism, claiming that “I have fairly deserved my exile, and I am suffering now for misunderstanding the difficulties with which the Yevseks had to contend at the period I opposed them.” The letter was printed in Der Emes: whose editor would also be killed.

Facing death, Bergelson’s last words were Jewish religious ones, a quote from the Bible so reviled by the Communists he had belonged to, and a call that his murder be remembered. Today, it is not the earth that covers his blood, but those who claim to follow in his footsteps, who fantasize about reconciling the irreconcilable paradox of Jewish identity and Communism.

That act of treason can only end in murder and death today as it did in the USSR.

Bergelson began verse 18 of Job 16. He never reached Verse 19: “Even now, behold my Witness is in heaven and He Who testifies for me is on high.”

For now, if there is any testimony of the consequences of the evil road he followed and that the anti-Zionist radical movement wants to follow again, it will have to be here on earth.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.