8-THE BULLETIN-Thursday, January 19, 1978
DR. ARNOLD AGES WItlTES
covers
MEMBERS of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry "greet" the Soviet Georgian Dancers' who performed at famed Carnegie Hall in New York, by demonstrating for Antably Sharansky, Leonid Slepak, Drs. Isai and Grigory Goldstein and other Russian Jewish activists under pressure. The SSSJniks called on the "Georgian in the White House" not to yield trade credits to the Kremlin until harassment of Soviet Jews ends.
—Jon Michaeli photo
Grove of the Bool Shem provided with monument
ELIZABETH, N.J. — Rabbi Pinchas M. Teitz reported that he recently received a phone call from Kiev, informing him that a monument on the grave of the Baal Shem, founder of the Chassidic movement, has been restored with a brief and simple inscription on it : "Here rests the Ball Shem Tov, Z'tzl."
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Rabbi Yisroel Baal Shem Tov died on the first day of Shavuos in 1760.
This, Teitz said, culminates three years of activity since his visit to the Soviet Union in 1974, when he received special permission f rom Ukrainian.uthorities to visit the city of Medzibuz, 200 Idlomet)ies from Kiev.
There are now three Jews remaining in the city which once was the centre of Chassidic life in all of Russia, Teitz reported.
Eliyahu Lapitsky and his son, Hillia, both Soviet engineers, were engaged to restore the burial site which had deteriorated due to neglect Lapitsky phoned Teitz to inform him of the completion of his work.
During Teitz's last visit to the Soviet Union in August, 1977, he met with the Lapitskys and final plans were drawn for placing a monument on the Baal Shem's grave and also restoring the graven and monuments of three other Chassidic giants: Rabbi Moshe Chaim Efraim, author of the Chassidic classic 'Degel Machne Efraim,' a grandson of the Baal shem, who died April 29,1801; and the Rabbi of Apta, Poland, known as the 'OhevYisrael,' Rabbi Avrohom Yehoshua Heshel, who died March 24, 1825.
THE LONG RETURN By Esther Markish Laffont, 375 pages.
ESTHER MARKISH is the wife of the martyred Yiddish poet, Peretz Markish, who was assassinated by the KGB Aug. 12, 1952. Recently his widow, on a stopover in Toronto, gave this writer the French version of her autobiography. (The English translation of this extraordinary document will be available within the next few months from Ballantine Books.)
I cannot praise highly enough this memoir which deals with a phase of Soviet Jewish life that has hitherto been veiled through censorship and terror. Esther Markish's autobiographical recollections fill in the "hidden years" of Soviet Jewry.
The author was the daughter of a wealthy Baku merchant who was the envy of Jew and Gentile before the Bolshevik revolution. Even after the upheavals, he managed by dint of business acumen to serve the Soviets in an administrative post under the new economic project initiated by the Communists .during their more experimental days before doctrinaire practices were introduced.
As a young girl of 15 she met and was captivated by the dashing Yiddish poet Markish, whose sensitive soul was niatched by an equally sensitive physical exterior. A year kter Esther^ was this princely writer £tnd the two tried to make a life together in Moscow. Esther pursued her career in French linguistics while Peretz wrote intensely lyrical and moving verses celebrating both Jewish peoplehood and Communist achievements.
Esther does not attenipt to hide her husband's infatuation with the Communist regime. He believed,. in the initial stages, that the Soviet
Significant New Book Reviewed by Dr. Ages, Professor off Romance Languages and Literature, University of Waterloo.
ESTHER MARKISH
revolution had brought untold benefits to mankind in general and to the Jews in particular. The encouragement given to Jewish arts in book publishing, music and the theatre, especially in the decade and a half after the Bolsheviks came to power, convinced Markish and his generation that Communism Was indeed the bounteous wave of the future. -
The benefits conferred uiwn J(S)vish society iii^ tfie Soviet Union were not to last. Esther Markish's book details the insidious growth of anti-Semitism which manifested itself in the thirties, was dissipated somewhat during the war years but reappeared with new venom in the late forties. ^
Her husband chose to ignore the tell-tale signs of terror and per-_ secution. When his friends were ai-rested and disappeared, Markish tried to continue his writing as'if nothing had happened. It is to the writer's credit that nowhere does she cosmetize her husband's posture with regard to the strangulation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union.
In 1952, in the wake of the infamous doctor's plot and the increasing dementia of Stalin — and the arrest of all their close friends among the coterie of Yiddish writers who had served on the anti-Fascist committee — Peretz Markish too, was the victim of Soviet brutality. He was carted off one night at midnight by agents of the KGB and was never heard from again.
Esther learned only of his death. several years later. lii the interim there was no communication.
Next Esther herself became the target of Soviet "justice". Along with her two sons she was sent into exile into Siberia as^the wife of an "enemy of the state".
: Back in Moscow in the sixties, Esther tried to resume a new life and at one point obtained work with a celebrated .Russian microbiolo^st.
But her Jewish loyalties were percolating within her. In the wake of the Six-Day War, Esther Markish along with hundreds of other Soviet Jews found that their fear of the Communist tyranny had departed. Once that had occurred they began a series of protests and demonstrations that had never before been seen in the Soviet Union.
Esther picketed the Supreme Soviet; She sent denunciatory
letters requesting immediate departure for Israel; she publicly renounced her Soviet citizenship. In 1972 in a reaction to the Munich massacres, Esther and a group of dissidents marched in protest around, the Lebanese embassy in Moscow. After three refusals from the bureaucratic OVIR office, the Markishes were finally given permission to be repatriated to the ancient homeland.
Since 1972 Esther has lived in Israel where she mamtains contacts with her Soviet Jewish colleagues still languishing in the vast territorial prison that is Soviet Russia;
Her memoir is brutally frank in its reflections on the docility which Yiddish writers exhibited towards their Communist masters. Esther singles out one. Feffer in particular for his obsequiousness towards the Soviet regime.
But along with the recriminations her book retells ^ with much charm the warmness that informed the gatherings of Yiddish writers. Esther's descriptions of such luminaries as theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, and, party-liner Dya Erenbourg, are full of wisdom and insight despite the fact that they represent portraits of several decades ago;
What makes "The Long Return" an especially poignant document is the author's compassionate chronicles of the suffering her family experienced under Communism.
Her father died as a result of callous treatnient in a Soviet prison. Her brother was also incarcerated. Her husband never returned from his imprisonment. But it is the delineation of fear — pervasive and paralytic — which emerges from this docunient. To live as a Jew during the Stalin years, was, as Erny Levy remarks in"TheLastof the Just": 'simply impossible.'
In the closing years of the-seventies, Esther Markish's testimony to Soviet cruelty is an extremely important work. Her husband, Peretz Markish was executed under the mendacious, v charge that he was an enemy of the state. This is the same charge now being levelled against Anatoly Sharansky as he now awaits a show trial in Moscow.
Esther Markish told us that when her husband was dragged off to his fate nothing could be done because no one knew anything.
But the world is much more open now and Jews should yse every lever available to force the Soviet government to stOp its new pogrom against Sharansky and against Soviet Jews.
That is why Esther came to Toronto -r- to rally support for someone who may be spared her husband's fate.
for winraer
Prize
BUENOS AIRES — The 1977 Human Rights prize of the Latin Aiherican ' Jewish Congress has been ^warded to Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, for his defence of human rights generally and his denunciation of the denial of human rights to dissidents in the Soviet Union and the hypocrisy of the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. Llosa is president of the International Pen Club.