Few people have heard of Birobidzhan, the erstwhile Jewish autonomous republic created nearly a century ago in the Russian Far East by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Even the name sounds fantastical, like a mash-up of Shangri-La and a Yiddish joke. Which, in a way, is what it was.
In “Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan,” her slim volume of 147 tersely written pages, Russian American author Masha Gessen continues her critical take-down of Soviet and post-Soviet totalitarianism, best exhibited in her earlier works on Vladimir Putin (“The Man Without a Face”) and the punk-rock girl band Pussy Riot.
But in turning to the story of her own people — the Jews of Russia, a people whose fate it is never to be fully at home — her tone, while no less biting, is more melodic, softer, if still unforgiving: Tevye’s fiddler on the roof wearing a commissar’s cap and grinning wickedly.
Gessen will be speaking about her book, and the history of Russia’s Jews, on Monday, Nov. 14 at the JCC of San Francisco, in conversation with this reporter.
Briefly, Birobidzhan was a lonely, muddy, godforsaken area close to the Chinese border, nine time zones east of Moscow, set aside in 1929 by Soviet authorities as a homeland for its Jews — not an independent state a la Israel, but a so-called autonomous region where Jewish culture, as expressed in Yiddish, could flourish safely within the political construct of the Soviet socialist enterprise.
Needless to say, it was a total disaster. Tens of thousands of Jews from all over the globe did settle there, including hundreds from the United States. Some came voluntarily, particularly in the early days; others were shipped there straight from the concentration camps of Nazi Europe because they had nowhere else to go. Decimated by Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges right up to his death in 1953, Birobidzhan has a tragic narrative that has been recounted elsewhere, often with a kind of “if only” nostalgia.
What Gessen brings to the conversation is fresh information, borne of years of research into Soviet archives, as well as her own unblinking perspective as a child of the failed Soviet Jewish experiment of the late 20th century. A fun read? Not really, and not one all readers will appreciate. But her work adds immeasurably to the corpus of intellectual exploration of Soviet Jewish aspirations.
Even reading the book’s title out loud makes one laugh.
“That’s the intended effect,” Gessen said in a phone interview last week from her home in New York. “Birobidzhan was a great idea — having Jewish cultural autonomy in a place where Jews already lived, they wouldn’t have to spend money on a military. I love the idea more, in many ways, than the idea of Israel.”
Unlike most writers on Birobidzhan, Gessen glosses over the motivations and personal experiences of the “ordinary” Jews who answered Stalin’s call to build a socialist Jewish homeland. She focuses, instead, on the lesser-known stories of two Jewish intellectuals key to its development, early 20th-century historian Simon Dubnow, who opposed Theodor Herzl’s Zionist solution to the Jewish problem, and peripatetic Yiddish writer David Bergelson, whose flowery paeans to Birobidzhan in the 1930s are rendered grotesque through the mirror of his 1952 execution in the notorious “Night of the Murdered Poets,” Stalin’s last attack on the Jewish spirit he could never quite extinguish.
“To understand the appeal of this idea to Dubnow, you have to go back to the time of the emancipation of the Jews [throughout Europe], which stripped them of their ethnic and religious identities,” Gessen said. “A nation that cannot threaten other nations by force, where unity comes from a [flourishing] of culture, of Yiddish — that’s where the nostalgia comes from. Nostalgia for a poetic ideal.”
Poetic ideals, by their definition, cannot come to pass. But that can give poignancy to their recounting, as Gessen does in this book. Yes, the title makes one laugh. And so can Birobidzhan today, because it is no longer threatening to anyone.
Gessen visited the city in 2009, on the occasion of its 75th anniversary, and was able to chuckle at its kitschy trappings — the Yiddish and Hebrew signs on the renovated railroad station, the Sholem Aleichem statue in the main square, the “schnitzel a la Birobidzhan” she was served in one restaurant, made of pork. There’s a fancy new synagogue, built by Chabad for American tourists, and a Jewish community center opened a decade ago by the Joint. All this in a city of 75,000, where barely 2,000 people claim any Jewish heritage.
To cap it all off, someone had the bright idea to make the rainbow flag, commonly associated with the LGBT movement, the new flag of post-Soviet Birobidzhan. To a woman who fled Moscow for the United States as a child in 1981, and who then fled Moscow again in 2013 when Putin cracked down on the gay community, this must have particular irony. It does, she admits.
“The funny part is that there’s this place called the Jewish Autonomous Republic, and it’s flying the rainbow flag,” Gessen said. “And there are no Jews there.”
Masha Gessen in conversation with Sue Fishkoff at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14 at JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. $28. Also livestreaming online. www.jccsf.org/arts-ideas