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INTRODUCTION
H
emingway’s pronouncement about an unhappy childhood as the best early training for a writer is especially true for Friedrich Gorenstein. In fact, to call his childhood merely unhappy is a gross understatement. Gorenstein grew up during the time of two evil historical forces, which deeply affected him and left indelible marks on his character and his outlook. His tragic early life experience informed his future writing. Born in 1932 in Kiev, Ukraine, Friedrich was only three years old when his father, a professor of political economy, fell victim to Stalin’s Great Terror. Arrested by the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret police) and sent to one of the Far East hard-labor camps, two years later he was sentenced to death and shot. This development had a devastating effect on Gorenstein’s family, now the subjects of deprivation and further persecution, and pigeonholed as the “family of an enemy of the people.” Gorenstein’s mother, Enna Abramovna Prilutskaya, a teacher by training, did everything she could to hide from the watchful eyes of the secret police. First, she changed her surname from her husband’s back to her maiden name. She also managed to replace her son’s papers, not only changing his surname to hers but also giving him the name “Felix” instead of “Friedrich.” Ironically, in the spirit of the time, she and her husband, both ardent believers in the bright future of
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Communist ideas, had given their son the name in honor of the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels. Later on, as an adult, Gorenstein restored both his given name and his father’s surname. In addition, to distance herself and her son from the watchful eyes of the NKVD, Enna Abramovna escaped from Kiev with threeyear-old Friedrich. She took refuge in Berdichev, Ukraine, where she and her husband had been born. Jobless for several years, she had no place of her own, and moved from one relative’s or acquaintance’s home to another. Friedrich was only nine when, on June 22, 1941, the military forces of Nazi Germany, together with their allies, broke the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact.1 In the largest German military operation of World War II, code-named “Operation Barbarossa,” they crossed the Soviet border on a wide front stretching from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north. The attack took the Soviet forces by surprise and was thus highly successful. Stalin infamously treated information about a mortal danger to the country as “fake news” for months, dismissing numerous reports from the Western press as well as from Soviet intelligence about the high concentration of Wehrmacht troops and armament along a broad stretch of the country’s western border. The Soviet dictator treated such reports as malicious disinformation and provocation aimed at breaking up the friendship between the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union. In the first few hours of the invasion, Luftwaffe planes bombed major Soviet cities. A significant part of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground. Unprepared, lacking any direction from high command, the Soviet armies were overwhelmed and retreated en masse. Around four million Soviet soldiers were encircled and captured.
The sudden attack had a devastating effect on the civilian population in general, and on Jews in particular. One of the main reasons for this was that the Soviets blocked information regarding the true intentions of the German troops. After Hitler had come to power and before the signing of the German-Soviet pact of 1939, the policy of the USSR was anti-Nazi. The government produced antifascist films and published books critical of the Nazis’ handling of the German Jews. After the pogroms of Kristallnacht in November 1938, an antifascist rally was organized in Moscow, where the director of the State Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, spoke. However, in less than a year, Hitler and Stalin, yesterday’s ideological enemies, became allies and partners in the seizure of neighboring countries. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed a week before the outbreak of World War II. Poland was divided, and Hitler seized the countries of Europe one after another. In the occupied territories, especially in Poland, severe persecution of Jews began. Their property was seized, and they were driven into Nazi-organized ghettos. After the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets stopped publishing news of Nazi atrocities against Jews. Because of the Soviet information blockade, on the eve of the German invasion the overwhelming majority of the Soviet population was not fully aware of the threat posed by the Germans. As a result of this lack of information and the speed of the German offensive, most Jews in the western regions could not evacuate and were walled off in the ghettos and then killed in the extermination camps. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote that Nazi Germany’s main goal was to enlarge its living space (Lebensraum) at the expense of the eastern territories; in Hitler’s view it was equally important to annihilate members of the Communist Party and Soviet Jews, two components of the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to Germany. Therefore, the first order of business when capturing a Red Army unit was to Introduction
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cull Jews and Communist political commissars and shoot them, often on the spot. Procedures were also in place to deal with Jewish civilians. As the Nazi military advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units followed the troops. The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen, special mobile killing units of the Wehrmacht security police and the security service. Behind the front lines, they were charged with the task of annihilating Jews, Communists, and other people deemed to be dangerous to the establishment of long-term German rule on Soviet territory. The Einsatzgruppen initiated the mass murder of Jews and Gypsies but also Soviet state and Party officials. Unlike in the Nazi-occupied countries of Western Europe, where Jews had been deported and shipped to death camps primarily in Germany and Poland, Jews in the USSR were taken from their homes and shot on the outskirts of their towns. In the cities with relatively large Jewish populations, such as Lvov, Minsk, and Odessa, Jews were forced into local ghettos and then hauled off in cattle trucks to the death camps.2 Rumors about the deadly treatment of Jewish civilians by the rapidly advancing German troops caused mass panic, as there were no civilian evacuation plans in place. Contrary to the myth that some Americans still believe today, at the outbreak of war with Germany the Soviet government had not made special arrangements to save Soviet Jews from the rapidly advancing Nazis.3 The truth is that the Soviet authorities had been fully informed about the systematic extermination of Jews in the Nazi-occupied territories, but at the time of the German invasion, no government evacuation instructions of any kind were in place. The orders came from Moscow several days later; the only objective was to relocate to the rear of the country the raw materials, industrial equipment, and personnel needed to run the Soviet war machine. Along with many Jewish families who were threatened with mortal
danger,4 Gorenstein’s mother with her son rushed to the evacuation train. She managed to catch the last echelon leaving Berdichev. Often these cargo trains, filled with evacuees, traveled eastward under enemy fire. German warplanes shelled the wagons; many evacuees were killed or wounded.5 Malnutrition and unsanitary conditions on the trains facilitated the spread of infectious diseases. Medical help aboard these trains was scarce. To leave the echelon and seek help at a local hospital meant risking being left behind and falling into the hands of the rapidly advancing Nazis. Many evacuees did not survive the journey. One of them was Friedrich’s mother. When, after long weeks of riding in cargo trains, they finally reached their point of destination, the city of Namangan, the second biggest hub for refugee resettlement in Uzbekistan, Enna Abramovna fell ill and died of acute tuberculosis. Friedrich wound up in an orphanage, where he spent the rest of the war. After the war was over, his mother’s sisters, Zlota and Rachel, found him and brought him back to Berdichev. Friedrich began his working life as an unskilled laborer on construction sites. He later entered the Dnepropetrovsk Mining Institute, and upon graduation in 1955, he worked for several years as a mining engineer in Krivoi Rog, Ukraine. His writing life began in 1961 when he was accepted at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters in Moscow. Gorenstein wrote seventeen screenplays; five were produced as movies. Of these, the Western public is most familiar with Solaris (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky) and A Slave of Love (directed by Nikita Mikhalkov). Gorenstein also cowrote a number of movie scripts, although his name was not included in the credits.6 Despite his success, he treated scriptwriting as no more than a means of sustenance. In his novel, Traveling Companions, his alter ego, Felix Zabrodsky, a scriptwriter and vaudeville writer, recalls: “There were a lot of commissions, and I wrote a great deal because my dacha needed new plumbing or my wife needed a new fur coat. Introduction
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She would say, ‘Write a vaudeville or a movie comedy, so that I can buy a fur coat, and then go ahead and write your own stuff.’”7 His “own stuff ” is clearly a reference to his uncompromising literary work, free of the chains of censorship, which he saw as the sole purpose of his life. “The more time passed, the more I felt the chains on me,” Zabrodsky confesses. “I wanted to rip them off, particularly at night, even if it meant tearing out pieces of my own flesh, because the chains had fused with my skin. The older I get, the more my skin struggles to break free and run into the forest, perhaps to die under the eyes of the wolves, but at least with heart and soul naked and unchained.”8 Besides writing movie scripts, Gorenstein produced two fulllength novels, The Place (Mesto) and A Psalm (Psalom), several novellas and short stories, and three plays. His literary output was highly appreciated within the narrow circle of people he trusted. Among them were prominent cultural figures of the time, such as the filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, writers Yuri Trifonov and Vassily Aksyonov, playwrights Viktor Slavkin and Mark Rozovsky, and literary critics Benedikt Sarnov and Anna Berzer. However, except for one short story titled “A House with a Small Tower” published in the magazine Youth in 1964, nothing of his literary output appeared in print while he lived in the USSR. After his novel about miners, Winter of 1953 (Zima 53-go), was turned down by the most prestigious literary journal of the time, New World (Novyi mir), which published Solzhenitsyn’s work and that of other dissident authors, Gorenstein did not even bother to submit his work to any Soviet publishers. Tired of waiting for his work to appear in his native land, with the help of his friends and admirers, Gorenstein succeeded in publishing abroad. One of the admirers of his work, Margarita Sinderovich, retyped his manuscripts on cigarette paper, which made it possible for movie director Andrei Konchalovsky to smuggle them across
the Soviet border in his trousers.9 In 1978, having been rejected by leading Soviet literary outlets, his novel Winter of 1953 appeared in the Russian émigré journal Kontinent in Paris. In 1979, Gorenstein contributed his novella The Steps (Stupeni) to the literary almanac Metropol, a collection of uncensored texts by well-known writers, such as Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Vysotsky, and others. All almanac writers were subjected to persecutions of various kinds. (One out of a dozen typescript copies produced in Moscow was smuggled to the United States and published by Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Michigan.)10 In 1980, Gorenstein emigrated to Vienna, then moved to West Berlin, where he received the annual creative scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the first Russian writer to be honored by this program. Outside of his native land, he was no less productive. During his Berlin life, he wrote three more novels, several novellas and short stories, and a new play. His works were published by Russian-language presses outside of the Soviet Union—the New York-based publishing house Slovo, the Paris émigré journals The Continent (Kontinent) and Syntax (Sintaksis), and the West Berlin magazine A Mirror of Riddles (Zerkalo zagadok). Unlike some other Russian émigré writers, Gorenstein did not repatriate after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992, a year after three volumes of his selected works were first issued in Russia by Slovo, his novel The Place (vol. 1) was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. Gorenstein died in Berlin on March 2, 2002, after a long bout with cancer, just a few days before his seventieth birthday.
ɷɸɷ The fact that almost none of Gorenstein’s work appeared in print in his homeland during his Soviet lifetime is hardly surprising, Introduction
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considering the uncompromising nature of both his work and the author himself. Like other nonconformist Soviet writers of his time, having no hope that his work would see the light of the day in his lifetime, he wrote “for the desk drawer.” His writing pushed too many censors’ buttons. It could hardly have been more unlike a work of socialist realism, in which the world is depicted not as it is in reality, but in its “revolutionary development”—that is, in the way it is envisioned according to Party ideologists. Some of his contemporaries, including Solzhenitsyn and other liberal-minded authors, yielded to the editors’ pressure and made textual changes that eased the passage of their work to the printed page, but Gorenstein did not follow suit. And not without reason. A change here or there could hardly have made any difference. Gorenstein’s bleak world outlook was wholly unacceptable, even during the “Thaw,” a time when censorship was relatively relaxed following Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin’s crimes against humanity. Thus, when Gorenstein submitted his novel Winter 1953 (Zima 53-go) to the liberal-leaning journal Novyi mir, it was quickly rejected.11 The work was a full affront to the Soviet political system. It wasn’t even anti-Soviet, but a-Soviet; that is, it was written with complete disregard for what could or could not appear in Soviet publications.12 Written in 1967, his novel Redemption exemplifies the many taboos Gorenstein violated in his prose. The novel opens on New Year’s Eve of 1946, just a few months after the end of World War II. The world is still vibrating from the war; people seem to have forgotten what normal life is. Their hearts are still filled with mistrust and suspicion. The hardships of life—scarcity of food, a lack of housing, and indiscriminate arrests by the returning Soviet authorities— make them feel that they are still living in wartime. The novel’s theme—the aftermath of the Holocaust—grossly violated the information policy of the post–World War II era to hush
up the very mention of the Holocaust, especially the part that had taken place on Soviet territory. The fact that the victims of the Nazi atrocities were primarily Jews was hidden not only during the years immediately following World War II but also throughout the rest of the Soviet era. Even the slightest mention of the Holocaust was suppressed. It was part of Soviet government policy, which Paul Ricœur dubs “organized forgetting.”13 The government’s measures to suppress information about the specifics and scope of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in general, and Soviet Jews in particular, was in full force early on. Toward the end of the war, under the editorial guidance of two distinguished authors, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, a group of well-known writers and journalists—Viktor Shklovsky, Veniamin Kaverin, Margarita Aliger, and others—began to compile The Black Book (Chernaya kniga). This volume included stories of the Holocaust, complete with witness accounts, German execution orders, diaries and testimony of the executioners, as well as notes and diaries of Jewish survivors. The publication was banned, and many of those who worked on The Black Book were repressed.14 In 1952, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the only representative body of Jews in the USSR, was disbanded, and its most prominent members were put on trial. Among others who were arrested on trumped-up charges of spying, the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish was accused of attempting to promote Jewish nationalism, with his expression of grief over the Jewish victims of the Nazis as “proof.” (After being tortured, the accused were tried in secret proceedings and executed.) In the official Soviet view, the Nazis killed the country’s Jews because they were Soviet citizens, not because they were Jews. During the postwar period, in all the territories where Nazi atrocities had been perpetrated, local authorities closely supervised any attempts of surviving relatives to perpetuate the memory of Introduction
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the victims of the Holocaust—to ensure that the words “Jew” or “Jewish” did not appear on any grave or monument. These words were duly replaced with “civilians” or “Soviet citizens,” and a fivepointed Soviet star was substituted for the Star of David.15 Until the late 1970s, discussion of the Holocaust was taboo. At various times, it was branded as “anti-Soviet,” “nationalist,” or “Zionist” propaganda. In 1961, a short poem titled “Babi Yar,” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, managed to appear on the pages of the Literary Gazette. Devoted to the memory of Ukrainian Jews slaughtered during the war, it pointed to the fact that the place of the mass burial was devoid of any memorial. The poem brought about the wrath of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who accused the young poet of having lost his political vigilance. In 1964, the publishing house Young Guard (Molodaya Gvardiya) issued a documentary novel by V. R. Tomin and A. G. Sinelnikov, Return Is Undesirable (Vozvrashchenie nezhelatel’no), about the Nazi death camp Sobibór. Though the camp had been populated almost exclusively by Jewish prisoners from Poland, Holland, Germany, and Russia, the word “Jew” does not appear even once in its pages. The prisoners are identified as Poles, Dutchmen, Germans, and Russians—not Jews.16
ɷɸɷ The Soviet authorities exercised tight control over any information related to the Holocaust for several reasons. To begin with, they wanted to distance themselves from the responsibility of having aided and abetted Hitler in unleashing World War II when they signed the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Having full control of the media, the Soviet government made the country’s population believe that World War II started not with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but with their
incursion into Soviet territory on June 22, 1941. (From the first days of the war to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the attack was invariably characterized as being perpetrated “treacherously, without declaration of war.” This proved to be a lie, which was made public only in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet regime.t.)17 Moreover, the very notion of World War II was supplanted in the Soviet public’s consciousness with the term “the Great Patriotic War.”18 This term was coined to hearken back to the “Patriotic War of 1812,” which is how Russian historians refer to the military campaign against the invading army of Napoleon I. Thus, calling the fight against Hitler “The Great Patriotic War” presented the military confrontation of the invading German troops as part of Russian historical tradition. Such linguistic subterfuge aimed to downplay the fact that the Russian campaign was part of World War II, a conflict whose severity was exacerbated by the USSR’s earlier actions. The Soviets had not only fed the Wermacht with their grain and supplied the Nazi war machine with such strategic raw materials as oil, coal, iron ore, and ferromanganese (an alloy used in production of armor steel), but, while Hitler’s troops invaded several European countries, the Soviet Union annexed the eastern part of Poland and gobbled up three Baltic states and parts of Romania. They also unleashed (albeit unsuccessfully) a military campaign against Finland. Anti-Semitism grew both within the state apparatus and among the broader population during wartime and especially during the postwar years. State persecution took the form of a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” mostly Jewish intellectuals, who were accused of lacking Soviet patriotism. The state campaign culminated in the fabrication of the notorious “Doctors’ Plot,” in which a group of prominent physicians, mostly Jews, was accused of conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. This movement sapped further support for the notion of commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Introduction
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Finally, since one of the main ideological goals of the Soviet authorities was to propagate the notion of unity of the Soviet people, a separate memorialization of Jewish victims of the war could not be tolerated. Every effort was made to hide Nazi crimes against Jews and/or to replace the memories of the perished along ideological lines that treated them as simply part of the “civilian Soviet population.” This was particularly important to Soviet authorities, who wanted to suppress any growth of nationalism among Soviet minority populations, especially after the State of Israel was established.19
ɷɸɷ Gorenstein’s novel violated another taboo. It revealed Soviet citizens’ widespread collaboration with the enemy, which was common knowledge in the country but was suppressed in publications. In the post–World War II years, every job application in the Soviet Union asked, “Did you reside in the territory temporarily occupied by the enemy?” If the answer was yes, that fact alone made the applicant subject to mistrust and suspicion. Yet any public mention of collaboration with the Nazis during wartime had been under strict control of the censor. Upon entering the USSR, the Nazis found a large number of local residents eager to take an active part in not only rounding up but also carrying out the physical destruction of Jews. The most active Nazi collaborators were in the territories of Lithuania, Latvia, and Western Ukraine (which less than two years earlier made up the eastern part of Poland).20 The territories were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, as part of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. There was no shortage of such volunteers in the territories of other Soviet republics.21 The very fact of mass collaboration with the enemy was not only a sign of open defiance of the Soviet regime, a cause of embarrassment
to the political system, but also a signifier of nationalism, an attempt at independence from the power that had overrun its borders with tanks. Soviet power struggled with nationalists and did not want these problems to be debated in a discussion of crimes against Jews.22 In Redemption, Gorenstein questions the valor of Pavel Morozov, one of the most notorious Soviet propaganda-made heroes. In 1932, the thirteen-year-old Morozov became a hero-martyr for denouncing his own father to the authorities for illegal activities. Conditioned by the Soviet ideology to inform on one’s own parents for the sake of the greater good, Gorenstein’s young heroine, sixteen-year-old Sashenka, denounces her mother to the police for “stealing state property.” In reality, the mother had taken some leftovers to feed her famished young daughter and the starving homeless couple she had given refuge in her apartment. However, Sashenka does this not out of loyalty to the system and its proclaimed ideals, but because of her own teenaged misery. She does it to spite her widowed mother, who takes a lover instead of remaining loyal for the rest of her life to the memory of Sashenka’s father, who had perished during the war. Gorenstein also does not give a second thought to puncturing the myth of Soviet society as a society of equals, portraying it as highly stratified. Among many other signs of social inequality, he describes the rationing of food for ordinary people while the commanding officers of the police precinct enjoy a much better diet. At a time of excruciating poverty, a general’s son who courts Sashenka has access to luxury items like French perfume, which was not only unattainable but even unthinkable for regular Soviet citizens. The novel also reveals the existence of political prisoners in the Soviet state, among them a college professor of literature. To propagate the myth that the World War II victory was solely a Soviet achievement, the official propaganda suppressed any reference to assistance from wartime Allied countries to the struggling Introduction
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Soviets, specifically the American Lend-Lease Act. True to life, Gorenstein’s novel mentions American-supplied food items, such as egg powder, biscuits, Spam, and chocolate, which saved a significant part of the civilian population from starvation.
ɷɸɷ Though the plot of the novel revolves around the consequences of wartime atrocities committed by the local Nazi collaborators, it addresses a much larger issue—the effect of the Holocaust on humanity at large. No motive for the horrific locally committed murders is cited—or even hinted at—in the novel. The Holocaust is examined as the result of not ethnic tensions or racist Nazi ideology, but evil impulses nestled in the human heart. In fact, at the center of the novel is a philosophical discussion between the imprisoned professor and the surviving member of a Jewish family that perished. They tackle the biblical question of evil in human life. (The novel itself can be seen as a philosophical meditation on this subject.) Could such horrific crimes perpetrated on such a large scale ever be fully avenged? Could any human actions ever bring about redemption? This biblical reading of the real-life tragedy is foreshadowed by Gorenstein’s choice of the character who had perpetrated horrific murders. While atrocities committed by the German occupying forces are mentioned in passing only, at the center of the novel’s plot are the monstrous crimes carried out by one of the slain family’s neighbors, who had hardly any grievances or scores to settle. Since the action of the novel takes place in a small Ukrainian town, one might expect the murderer to be a Ukrainian. After all, while millions of Ukrainians joined the Red Army in fighting the Nazis, the participation of members of their community in the Holocaust, which took place during the German occupation, is well documented.23
However, in Gorenstein’s novel, the perpetrator of the bloodshed is an Assyrian, a member of a tiny minority. At the outbreak of World War II, they amounted to hardly more than twenty thousand people nationwide. Themselves refugees, they had settled in the Soviet territory comparatively recently, escaping the genocide carried out by the troops of the Ottoman Empire in the course of World War I. It is likely that Gorenstein eschews the narrative of majority Ukrainians murdering minority Jews to highlight the universality of the evil of the Holocaust. This went beyond historical grievance. Moreover, by making the murderer an Assyrian, Gorenstein references biblical accounts of the Assyrians’ assaults on ancient Israel (2 Kings 15:29; 2 Kings 18:9–12; Isaiah 36:1). The attackers are invariably characterized as being fierce and cruel, showing no mercy to the conquered (e.g., in 2 Kings 19:17, “Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands”). It is also possible that Gorenstein had in mind one particular use of the trope of associating biblical Assyrians with a culture of savageness. Specifically, reflecting on Stalin’s brutality toward the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, persecuted for writing an epigram ridiculing the Soviet leader, the poet’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, said in an interview, “You couldn’t find another beast like him [Stalin], Assyrian that he is.”24 This possibility is strengthened through the folkloric connection between the character of the murderer in the novel, an Assyrian boot cleaner, and the Soviet dictator. In the slang of Gulag prisoners, Stalin’s nickname rhymed with his acquired surname—Gutalin, “Shoe Polish.” The French researcher of the Gulag, Jacques Rossi, who interpreted this word as belonging to the criminal argot, explained its genesis: “Of short stature, dark-haired and pockmarked, speaking Russian with a strong Caucasian accent, Stalin was reminiscent of Caucasians-Assyrians, street boot cleaners, who traditionally used gutalin, a shoe polish.”25 This association of Stalin’s image Introduction
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with that of a boot cleaner comes from the widely known fact that the dictator grew up in a shoemaker’s family. By such associating the murderer in Redemption with Stalin, Gorenstein suggests that Stalin bears some responsibility for both the deaths of Jews in the occupied territories and for unleashing the post–World War II antiSemitic campaigns.
ɷɸɷ As the Russian literary critic L. Lazarev notes, Gorenstein does not believe in the healing power of suffering. In Gorenstein’s view, suffering does not soften a human soul—it hardens it. In one of his articles, he writes, “The first reaction of a person to freedom and goodness after having been crushed by injustice is not joy and gratitude, but resentment and anger over the years lived in fear and repression.”26 Yet one of the merits of Gorenstein’s work is that he finds kindness and humanity under the most inhumane circumstances. While the physical and moral climate that surrounds the action in Redemption is unutterably bleak, the novel does give us a glimmer of hope. Gorenstein sees good and evil as coexisting in the human soul. Because of the desperation and bitterness visited upon her young life, Sashenka denounces her own mother to the police, but the very same Sashenka falls in love with and saves from suicide the sole surviving member of a family that had perished during the Holocaust. Her self-sacrifice and self-abnegation make her love for a grown man feel like love for her own child. In fact, she expresses regret that she did not meet the young man when he was a three-year-old boy. Gorenstein goes to great lengths to convince the reader that at the core of a woman’s love lies her maternal instinct. He idolizes motherhood and considers maternal love the only hope for the
salvation of humanity and its redemption from wickedness and cruelty toward its brethren. In his view, such love does not demand reciprocity; it is blind and devoid of the torments and doubts often present in sexual love. For him, the selflessness of maternal love makes it akin to Christ’s love. The carrier of absolute good is a mother’s heart. Sashenka’s mother readily forgives her daughter’s betrayal; her child’s wellbeing is more important to her than her own suffering. A mass murderer’s aging mother does not mind walking miles on end, day after day, just in case the new guard of her jailed son has a kind moment and consents to pass on a food parcel. The wife of the perpetrator of the horrific murders of local doctors and their families is inconsolable in her grief during the funeral of her fiveyear-old son. Gorenstein suggests hope for the future by ending the novel with an emphasis on motherhood. In Sashenka’s household, three babies appear in the world, one after another. Not by chance, all of them are female, and thus have the potential to be mothers themselves.
ɷɸɷ Gorenstein’s work has been widely translated in Europe. Almost all of his work has appeared in French and German. Several of his plays have been staged in European theaters. At the same time, only one of his works, a short novel titled Traveling Companions, has appeared in English translation. With this publication of Redemption, Englishspeaking readers finally have the opportunity to further acquaint themselves with this remarkable writer. Emil Draitser Hunter College of the City University of New York
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NOTES 1. Anyone familiar with the ominous meaning of this date in Russian history will appreciate the macabre humor of the opening paragraph of Traveling Companions: “June 22, 1941, was the blackest day of my life. That day, at five o’clock in the morning, when I returned home from a trip, I found a rejection slip in my mailbox, from a Moscow theater, informing me that my play, A Ruble and Two Bits, had been rejected. The postman had delivered it the day before.” Friedrich Gorenstein, Traveling Companions, trans. Bernard Meares (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 1. 2. For more about the Nazis’ systematic destruction of the Jewish population in the occupied territories, such as Uman and Odessa (both Ukraine), and Minsk (Belorussia, see Emil Draitser, Shush! Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 228–29, 234–35, 248. 3. There is reason to believe that the myth was born in 1943, when members of the Soviet “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” organized on Stalin’s orders, visited the United States to raise funds for the Soviet war effort. 4. For example, see Draitser, Shush!, 38. 5. For an eyewitness account, see Draitser, Shush!, 42–45. 6. Gorenstein was also not credited for writing monologues for the lead character of Tarkovsky’s other masterpiece, Andrei Rublev. 7. Gorenstein, “Traveling Companions” (Poputchiki), in Iskuplenie (Redemption) (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2011), 380. 8. Gorenstein, Traveling Companions, 211. The original Russian “zheleznye kavychki” (iron quotation marks) makes it clear that he has in mind the literary handcuffs imposed by the censors. 9. Cited in Konchalovsky’s memoir, The Exalting Deception (Vozvyshaiushchij obman); see http://magazines.russ.ru/slovo/2007/54/po14.html (accessed January 15, 2018). 10. As cited in “Delo Metropolia,” one typescript of the almanac was taken out of the country by Raymond Benson, the head of the American embassy’s cultural and press offices (see http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/82/de14 .html; accessed February 20, 2018). 11. L. Lazarev, “O romane F. Gorenshtejna ‘Mesto’” (On Gorenstein’s novel The Place), in Fridrikh Gorenshtejn, Izbrannoe v trekh tomakh, t.1, Mesto (Friedrich Gorenstein, Selected works in three volumes, vol. 1, The Place) (Moscow: Slovo, 1991), 3. 12. In that respect, Gorenstein reminds one of the Russian-born Nobel Laureate in Literature, the poet Joseph Brodsky, who, in his Soviet life, “prefer[red] to act as if the Soviet regime [did] not exist.” See Ellendea Proffer Teasley, Brodskii sredi nas (Moscow: Corpus Books, 2015); quoted in Cynthia Haven, “The Unknown Brodsky,” in The Nation, April 11/18, 2016, 43.
13. See Ola Hnatiuk, “How the Soviet Union Suppressed the Holocaust to Fight ‘Nationalism,’” Odessa Review, November 16, 2007, http://odessareview.com /soviet-union-suppressed-holocaust-fight-nationalism/. 14. The Black Book was published in Russian for the first time in Israel in 1980. It was then published in Kiev in 1991, and only recently, in 2015, in the Russian Federation through a crowdfunding initiative. In English, the book appeared under the title The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, ed. Vasily Grossman (Piscataway, NJ: Routledge, 2003). 15. Well into the twenty-first century, a foreigner, a French Catholic priest, almost single-handedly excavated the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union (see Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008]). 16. Avraam Elinson, “Vmesto poslesloviia” (Instead of an afterword), in Dr. Itzhak Arad, “Vosstanie v Sobibore” (A mutiny at the Sobibor), trans. V. Kukuj, February 2009, http://berkovich-zametki.com/2009/Zametki/Nomer3 /Vilensky1.php. 17. The German memorandum was published in Russian in 1991 in the Military and Historical Journal (Voenno-istoricheskij zhurnal) under the rubric “For the first time in the Soviet press” (Vpervye v sovetskoj pechati), June 1991, http:// zhistory.org.ua/viz916ng.htm. 18. “How the End of the Great Patriotic War Appeared,” https://pikabu.ru /story/kak_poyavilsya_termin_velikaya_otechestvennaya_voyna_4911045 (accessed February 19, 2018). 19. On the lack of the wide public awareness of Holocaust in today’s Russian Federation, see the documentary film titled Holocaust—Is That a Wallpaper Paste? (2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfrnBQ3LGM. 20. As the newly published book by Rūta Vanagaitė titled Ours (Mūsiškiai) (Vilnius: Alma Littera, 2015) reveals, “Young illiterate Lithuanians . . . so diligently killed Jews that they were transported to Lithuania for destruction from other countries. Even [high school] children voluntarily participated in the murders, and the [local] Church indifferently watched the Holocaust, even absolved the murderers of all their sins. For the purity of the race and Jewish [made of silver or gold] dentures, about 200,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania.” Ruta Vanagataite, “The Holocaust in Lithuania: ‘These Were Ours,’ ” March 11, 2017, https://zihuatanexo.livejournal.com/1762836.html. 21. United States Holocaust Memorian Museum, “Collaboration,” (article in the Holocaust Encylopedia), https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId =10005466, accessed February 19, 2018. 22. See Hnatiuk, “How the Soviet Union Suppressed the Holocaust.” 23. See, for example, Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War: 1939–1945 (London: Penguin, 2009), 203–23; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews
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Introduction 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam, 1975), 171; Sol Litman, Pure Soldiers or Bloodthirsty Murderers?: The Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2003). 24. Cited in Nikolai Podosokorsky, “Nadezhda Mandelshtam o Staline: “Takogo drugogo zhovotnogo nel’zia bylo najti. Assiriets” (Nadezhda Mandelstam about Stalin: ‘You couldn’t find another beast like him [Stalin], Assyrian that he is), June 17, 2017, https://philologist.livejournal.com/9391445.html. 25. Vladimir Tol’ts, cited in “Kak u Diuma . . . Vospominania 1950-e . . . (2001– 2010гг.) (Like in [Alexandre] Dumas . . . Recalling 1950s . . . [2001–2010])”. Radio Svoboda (Radio Freedom), December 4, 2010, https://www.svoboda. org/a/2239863.html. 26. Quoted in Lazarev, “O romane F. Gorenshtejna ‘Mesto,’” 11.
“Set immediately after World War II in a Soviet town emerging from German occupation, Friedrich Gorenstein’s Redemption is a small masterpiece of post-Holocaust fiction. Vividly translated by Andrew Bromfield, this is a gripping book— full of searing psychological portraits threaded across intersecting social, political, and historical microcosms. Redemption startles the reader with its emotionally and philosophically vivid account of sex and violence and the strange horizons of love.” —VA L V I N O KU R , The New School “Bromfield’s translation of Redemption peels away the layers of the still underexamined archive of the Holocaust in the USSR. In the immediate aftermath of the war with Nazi Germany, denizens of a town in Soviet Ukraine begin to face the consequences of the wartime treatment of their Jewish neighbors. Official documents and witness reports crowd in on personal recollections of perpetrators, survivors, and their progeny in a narrative that shifts between stylistic registers as it challenges the contours of collective memory and individual responsibility. I’m thrilled that this work by an important Russian author is now available to the English-language reader.” —SA SH A S E ND EROVI C H, University of Washington, Seattle
“A master of episodic narration. . . . Gorenstein also proves to be a keen observer and radically critical chronicler of Soviet society.” —H EIN Z LUDWIG A RN OLD, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Friedrich Gorenstein (1932– 2002), born in Kiev, was a Soviet Jewish writer and screenwriter who collaborated with Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris (1972), among other works. His father was arrested during Stalin’s purges and later shot. Unable to publish in the Soviet Union, Gorenstein emigrated to Berlin, where he lived until his death. Andrew Bromfield is an acclaimed translator of contemporary Russian writers such as Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin. He has also translated Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A. Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
$14.95
ISBN: 978-0-231-18515-8
