“Abhorrent Zionism, Israel are not the Solution”: Dialectics of the Soviet and the National in Ego-Documents of the 1970s–80s

Abstract

Drawing on late-Soviet Jewish ego-documents: memoirs, diaries and letters, primarily on a corpus of (auto)biographical essays on the life of a Leningrad journalist, the author explores her protagonists' obsessive reflections on anti-Semitism and Zionism, evoked by the acute dissonance between their sincerely internalised communist ideology of internationalism and the widespread practice of anti-Semitism, as well as between Soviet patriotism and Jewish memory, Jewish solidarity and the temptation of emigration to Israel. The study of “ordinary” people’s ego-documents not intended for publication enables one to penetrate into their inner world and to extrapolate the obtained observations onto Soviet Jewish majority; in addition, it allows to explain the position of prominent Soviet authors of Jewish origin, such as playwright and publicist Tsezar Solodar, poet and editor-in-chief of Sovetisch Heymland Aron Vergelis, author of critical popular books on Judaism Moisei Belenkii, and others, who stigmatised Judaism and Zionism. Ego-documents allow for tracing not only Soviet, but also Jewish origins of late-Soviet anti-Zionism, which went back to the position of the poor strata of shtetl society, who, while leaning towards socialism, associated Zionism with the hostile bourgeoisie. The paper partly polemicises, partly complements the existing historiography on late Soviet Jewish identity, which is based mainly on post-Soviet interviews or the émigrés’ experience and therefore tends to simplify the picture, reducing the diversity of identities, attitudes and behaviours to two binaries, either to “thin culture”/“symbolic ethnicity”, or to hidden emigration aspirations presented as natural and self-evident.