More Than Pogrom Victims And Socialists

The writings of Akim Volynsky (1860-1926), one of Russia’s greatest critics, have recently been translated. Volynksky was born in a shtetl, but was proudly Russian, too. Below, a picture of the new book, “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom,” translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz.

The writings of Akim Volynsky (1860-1926), one of Russia’s greatest critics, have recently been translated. Volynksky was born in a shtetl, but was proudly Russian, too. Below, a picture of the new book, “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom,” translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

Ask yourself, “What was life like for Russia’s Jews before Stalin?” and one word probably hits you first: pogroms. Think a little longer, and you’ll probably come up with another: socialists, yes, many Jews became socialists.

Don’t worry, both are true. For more than a century before the socialists took over, Jews were subject to random murders, riots, and arrests in the annexed hinterlands to which they were already confined, the Pale of Settlement. As these pogroms increased in number and intensity, many Jews turned to socialism. In effect, it offered them a way out of czarist oppression, and helped them join the growing ranks of disgruntled Russians, Jewish or not, who wanted to overthrow the imperial regime. And eventually they did, in

1917, with Lenin and Trotsky (aka Lev Bronstein), among them.

If that’s your basic understanding of Russian Jewry, it wouldn’t be wrong, just incomplete. The current show at The Jewish Museum, “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” and several new books, are quietly challenging this narrative and bringing into focus the wider range of Jewish life in Russia. While Chagall is already famous — notably, for those nostalgic shtetl scenes — it’s his lost mural paintings for the Jewish avant-garde theater that cast him, and Russian Jewish history, in a whole new light.
Chagall, like the artists, actors and writers with whom he collaborated, saw himself as a secular modern Russian, who was also a Jew. Contrary to history’s broad strokes, they were neither shtetl bumpkins nor red-eyed revolutionaries, but hyphenated Jewish-Russians who sought a place in the empire’s great capitols, be they Slavic- or socialist-ruled.

There were some, like the great ballet critic Akim Volynsky (1861-1926), who virtually created the canon for modern ballet, who at first rejected their Jewishness only to later question their assimilationist airs. Volynsky’s writings have just been translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz and collected in “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom” (Yale University Press), which has been receiving rave reviews.

There are other varieties of Jewish “worldniks” too, a term the historian Jeffrey Veidlinger coins in his forthcoming book “Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire” (Indiana University Press), out next month. In it, he brings to light several secular modern Jews who tried to bring their Jewish brethren up to speed with modern Russian culture.

And in a book due out later this year, scholar Brian Horowitz will take on a similar task, highlighting Russian Jewish intellectuals who fought for Jewish causes: lawyers, for instance, who created organizations to sue on behalf of pogrom victims. These Jews “put their hopes in a Russia that would be transformed and become a rule-of-law state,” Horowitz writes in “Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th and Early 20th Century Russia,” to be published by Slavica Publishers. “Desiring neither full assimilation, as occurred in Western Europe, nor isolation, as some religious authorities advocated, Jewish liberals sought a third way.”

This new look at Russian Jewish history is what lurks behind the Chagall exhibit, and what makes it such a fascinating one. For years, Chagall has been situated among the great Western European modernist painters — Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and Derain — and not wrongly so. He left his native Vitebsk, part of the Pale, for Paris, in the early 1900s. And that’s where he learned the Cubist geometries of Picasso, the bold coloration of Derain and Cezanne, the flat forms of Matisse. But until the early 1920s he still kept Russia as his main residence, where his artistic rival was another great, but less known artist, Kasimir Malevich. It wasn’t until 2003 that Malevich had his first major U.S. retrospective, at the Guggenheim, and his influence on Chagall, while familiar to art scholars, is still largely unexplored in the broader culture.
If you know a little about Piet Mondrian, you can probably picture works by Malevich. Just imagine Mondrian’s primary colors and strict geometric patterns re-shaped into black spheres, darting red triangles, or skinny yellow-looking matchsticks. Now tweak those shapes and colors a little more, don’t make them so abstract and construct them into a triangle-shaped rabbi’s beard, a round seder plate or the purple oval cap of a shtetl peasant, and you’ve got Chagall’s Russian work.

Of course the parallels between Chagall and Malevich, and Chagall and Picasso, could be easily swapped. Both the Russian Malevich and the Spanish Picasso were inspired by the same driving idea behind 20th-century “modern” art: that painting, like society, could be broken down, re-ordered, and reconstructed into a newer, better reality. By placing Chagall back in a Russian context, though, the show invites viewers to reconsider the artist’s past. And, lo, there were many, many more Russian Jews like him: Natan Altman, Robert Falk, Ignaty Nivinsky, all artists who tried to push Jews into the vanguard of modern Russian culture.
The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, or GOSET, is what these artists painted for. And it’s the biographies of the company’s main members that reinforce the rich and complicated lives of so many of these overlooked Russian Jews. GOSET’s founder, Aleksei Granovsky, for instance, was born in Moscow in 1890. But after his family and the 30,000 other Jews living in Moscow were expelled from the city in 1891, he moved to Riga, near the German border. It turned out to be a boon, since he met the pioneering German director Max Reinhardt there and eventually brought back to Russia the knowledge he had accrued.

Granovosky founded GOSET in 1919 to help bring modernity to Russian Jews through the common language of Yiddish theater. He wanted Jews to be thoroughly modern, and his plays, many of them highlighted at The Jewish Museum, held back nothing in their critiques of Jewish social mores. One early play, “Uriel Acosta,” took its hero in the eponymous historical figure, a rationalist philosopher critical of religion, much like his contemporary, Baruch Spinoza.

“At Night In the Old Marketplace” (1926) parodied Jewish belief even further — “Dead your God ... He is bankrupt!” two wedding jesters taunt at the play’s end. Indeed, not even the most cosmopolitan of Jews, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, who saw the play on a visit to Moscow, could stand such abrasiveness. In his diary, he called the play “fairly anti-Semitic.”

But it’s not so simple. That fairly crude assessment has been challenged at least since 2002, when Benjamin Nathans’ much discussed “Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia” (University of California Press) won the Koret Book Award for Jewish History, among other honorifics. Nathans highlighted the cosmopolitan Jews living outside the Pale and within Russian cities. He called them “exceptions,” to be sure, since Jews were by and large restricted to Pale territories until the Bolshevik revolution. But Jews were permitted to attend universities and law schools, even if harsh quotas restricted them.

More recent histories have also evolved the story of Jewish-Russian acculturation. Olga Litvak, for instance, argued in “Conscription and the Search for Modern Jewry” (Indiana University Press, 2006) that military service helped evaporate the divide between Russians and Jews. ChaeRan Y. Freeze, in “Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia” (University Press of New England, 2001), added a feminist twist, saying that civil marriages enabled Jewish women to circumvent male-dominated rabbinic courts, thus warming them to Russian authority.

There have been several other recent academic books tackling the subject, much of which can be attributed to access to former Soviet archives. But with the new Jewish Museum exhibit, the Volynsky book, and others forthcoming, the general public can see for itself. The history of hybridized Jewish Russians shouldn’t obscure the bigger picture of Russian Jewish history. Nor should the ending to the acculturated Jewish story be left untold: GOSET, for instance, may have had Lenin’s official endorsement, but eventually Stalin ended it. He demanded all ethnic identities pay sole allegiance to the Soviet Union, and by 1949, he had its founder assassinated and the company liquidated.

Still, there were hopeful alternatives before that. How full the Jewish-Russian embrace of either part of that identity really was is still an open question. After all, what do we make of Volynsky’s own dissonant views? He once wrote of Jewish girls from his shtetl back home that their “unswerving gait with its sprightly step in the Jewish style haven’t the slightest hint of graciousness.” But he also praised a Russian choreographer for his combination of “epic Semitic features with the refined erudition of Aryan decadence.” There you have it, the supreme expression of ballet beauty composed of all the world’s varieties. A multiethnic Leviathan if you will; or, if you like, Golem.

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