• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

• The Palestine Papers keep on giving: In 2009, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that President Obama lost “credibility … throughout the region,” adding, “people in the Middle East are not taking Barack Obama seriously. They feared Bush, despite everything.” [JPost]

• The Qatari emir told Sen. Kerry about a year ago that now is the time for the United States to engage Syria, and that Hamas will accept a deal along the 1967 borders, though won’t say so publicly. This one’s WikiLeaks. [WikiLeaks]

• Her intentions aside, Anthony Grafton condemns Sarah Palin’s invocation of the term “blood libel” for the damage it does to history and to the memories of countless Jews who suffered because of it. [TNR]

• A new entry in the “who sucked more, Hitler or Stalin?” debate from Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder. Turns out that Stalin was more motivated by ethnicity than was thought … but that Hitler really did kill significantly more innocents. [NYRB]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Nicholas Noe argues that U.S. policy toward Lebanon since the 2005 Cedar Revolution was a colossal failure, only helping Hezbollah, and that the one way to head off a really bad confrontation with Israel would be to push Israel to make peace with Syria. [NYT]

• Gal Beckerman remembers the late Samuel T. Cohen, the little-known inventor of the neutron bomb whose memoir was called F*** You: Mr. President. [Forward]

• David Nesenoff, the journalist who asked the question that prompted Helen Thomas’s infamous response, has been appointed editor and publisher of Long Island’s The Jewish Star. [The Jewish Star]

• Hélène Grimaud is a courageous, amazing, and beautiful French pianist. So naturally she has to be Jewish, right? Wikipedia, take it away: “She is descended from Sephardi Jews from Corsica on her mother’s side and from Berber Jews on her father’s side.” God, French Jews are great. [NYT]

• Weekend reading: Two articles by the late Daniel Bell. [Dissent]

• The legendary Eric Hobsbawn tackles the strange tale of the Jews of San Nicandro, ably handled in Tablet Magazine by books critic Adam Kirsch. [LRB]

• Futurist-novelist William Gibson finds Stuxnet’s roots in the world of digital vandalism. [NYT]

30 Rock makes a joke about Tablet Magazine’s official Canadian Football League head coach, the tastefully named Marc Trestman (h/t Kaplan’s Korner):

Sure, there are good reasons to pair the Jew hating Richard Nixon with the Jew hating, but self-loving Henry Kissinger. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat go together like pastrami and kosher salami. But, deep down, you know it’s weird that Jews needed a chaperone until 2009, while Charles Lindbergh made the cut the very first time around in 1927.

Below, Time Magazine’s People of the Year who didn’t like, actively hated, or were, as we say, not very good for the Jews.

Charles Lindbergh (1927)
Pierre Laval (1931)
Wallis Simpson, duchess of Windsor (1936)
Adolf Hitler (1938)
Josef Stalin (1939)
Richard Nixon/Henry Kissinger (1972)
Ayatollah Khomeini (1979)
Yasser Arafat (1993)
You* (2006)

*Yes, you.
You could call more often.
What, do you want to kill your parents?

Person of the Year 2010 [Time]
Earlier: Jews Give It Up
‘Time’ Names Bernanke ‘Person of the Year’
Related: Why Kissinger Dismissed the Soviet Jews
Richard Nixon Explains Anti-Semitism
Why Rabin Shook Arafat’s Hand
Carl Paladino’s Betrayal of Reason

The same warning, I imagine, might apply to Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus, about the Battle of Stalingrad, the epic seven-and-a-half-month battle that devastated a Soviet city but halted the Nazis’ progress on the Eastern Front. The book, which revolves around a Soviet Jewish nuclear scientist and his family, draws parallels between fascism and Communism and the use of mass deportation, forced labor, and murder in both totalitarian regimes. Life and Fate was the second novel about Stalingrad by Grossman, who lived from 1905 to 1964, and he worked on it for a decade before submitting it for publication in October 1960, during the thaw that followed Stalin’s death. Three months later, the KGB “arrested” Life and Fate, confiscating copies of the manuscript from Grossman, his cousins, and his typists; even the typewriter ribbons were seized. Yet Grossman remained at large, even after he appealed in a letter to Khrushchev: “There is no sense or truth in my present position, in my physical freedom while the book to which I dedicated my life is in prison.” A decade after Grossman’s death, two hidden copies of the manuscript turned up. Life and Fate was microfilmed and smuggled out to the West, where it was published in Russian in 1980.

When I discovered last year that NYRB Classics had brought out Everything Flows—a much shorter, albeit unfinished, novel, which manages to tackle life in the Siberian camps, the state-orchestrated famine that killed millions in the Ukrainian countryside, and a disquisition on Lenin and human freedom into 270 pages—I was relieved to find a way to try Grossman without triggering my fear of commitment. For those who prefer even shorter works, NYRB followed up this fall with The Road, a collection that includes “In the Town of Berdichev,” a 1934 short story set in Grossman’s hometown that was his first literary success; fiction and reportage about the Holocaust, including “The Hell of Treblinka” (1944), Grossman’s pioneering reconstruction of what went on in a Nazi death camps; two letters from Grossman to his dead mother on the anniversary of her death and of the mass murder of the Jews of Berdichev; and other stories and essays. The Road appears to be a Grossman sampler, but it is full of illuminating commentary by its editor and translator Robert Chandler, who is also responsible for the recent translation of Everything Flows and for introducing English speakers to Life and Fate back in the mid-1980s.

After reading these two smaller volumes, and my e-mail exchange with Chandler (an edited version of which appears below), I feel ready to tackle Life and Fate—but I may wait until spring.

When did you first read Life and Fate? How did you come to translate it?

I first heard of Vasily Grossman nearly 30 years ago. I went to see my friend Igor Golomstock, an émigré Russian art critic. He held out a large volume—the first, Swiss-published edition of the Russian text of Life and Fate—and said, “Robert, if you want to establish yourself as a translator, you should translate this!”

In reply I simply laughed and said, “Igor, I don’t even read books as long as that in Russian, let alone translate them!”

Igor, however, is not someone easily deflected. A few weeks later he sent me the transcripts of four half-hour programs about Life and Fate that he had done for the BBC Russian Service. I read these and was gripped. I quickly discovered, as many other people have done since, that once I began reading Life and Fate—instead of just worrying about its length—I found the book surprisingly hard to put down. Grossman’s descriptions of the fighting at Stalingrad seemed extraordinarily vivid. I could sense a powerful intelligence behind the passages comparing Nazism and Stalinism. And the last letter written by the hero ‘s mother from a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, before her death in one of the massacres that were the first stage of the Shoah, was as moving as anything I had ever read.

And so I translated one chapter for the novel, and wrote a brief accompanying article, for the excellent journal Index on Censorship. Mark Bonham-Carter, a senior consultant for what was then Collins Harvill, was also on the editorial board of Index. He contacted me and eventually commissioned a translation of the novel.

How did you return to Grossman to translate Everything Flows and the stories, journalism, essays, and letters in The Road?

I first suggested I retranslate Everything Flows long ago, but my U.K. publishers did not think there would be enough interest. Four or five years ago I realized that interest in Grossman was growing very fast indeed, and so I spoke to Harvill Secker again. This time they agreed enthusiastically. And by then I also had an excellent American publisher who was interested in Grossman: NYRB Classics.

Why retranslate Everything Flows? How is your version different from 1972 version Forever Flowing, other than the title?

Grossman is not usually thought of as a great stylist, and so people often imagine he is not difficult to translate. My own experience, however, is that his later works, at least, are very difficult to translate indeed. Whether Grossman is telling a a story or conducting an argument, his thought seldom moves in a straightforward and predictable way. It zigzags about, often taking the reader by surprise. I myself found that in early drafts I had often failed to grasp the subtlety of his thinking. The previous translator, Thomas Whitney, seems to have been unaware of this difficulty. There are pages, especially in the historical-political chapters, when his translation simply doesn’t make sense.

Had any of the material in The Road been translated into English before?

There have been previous waves of interest in Grossman. Toward the end of my work on The Road I discovered to my surprise that the 1934 story “In the Town of Berdichev” had been first translated into English as early as 1936, in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing. Most of Grossman’s wartime fiction and journalism was translated into English quite promptly. The later stories, however, have never been translated before. The only exception is “Mama,” possibly the finest of all his stories. It is based on the real-life story of an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov, the head of the NKVD at the height of the purges, and his wife Yevgenia. Rachel Polonsky translated this story almost twenty years ago and submitted it to Granta. Astonishingly, Granta rejected this terrifying story on the grounds that it was “sentimental.” It is strange how often, even though Grossman does not seem in the least avant-garde or experimental, we all seem to appreciate his greatness only after much time has passed. Rachel Polonsky, by the way, was unable to find her translation of this story—and so eventually we translated it ourselves.

You organized The Road more or less chronologically, with extensive editorial notes. It reads almost as a biography. Was that your intent?

The book took shape only gradually. The first impulse behind it was my excitement four or five years ago when I first read “Mama” and the other masterpieces Grossman composed during his last years, between the “arrest” of Life and Fate in 1961 and his death in 1964. Then I looked at what he had written during the 1930s and during the war. I realized that the Shoah was going to constitute a major theme in the book. Since Grossman was so personally involved, and since the twists and turns of official Soviet attitudes toward writing about the Shoah were so complex, it seemed important that I include some of the biographical background to his stories and articles. And then, when we settled on the title The Road, I felt it might be possible to shape the book in such a way as to give the reader an overall sense of the path Grossman followed both as a writer and as a man.

Grossman, like Isaac Babel, was a Jewish writer who reported on the Red Army from the front lines. How did Babel influence Grossman?

Babel’s Red Cavalry stories are about the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20. Grossman’s first big success, the story “In the Town of Berdichev,” is set against the background of this same war. It is certainly influenced by Babel. There are the same elaborate metaphors; there is the same wish to startle the reader.

But Grossman also, in a way, turns Babel’s work on its head. Many of Babel’s stories are about an intellectual Jewish commissar being reluctantly initiated into a world of male violence. Grossman’s story is about a female commissar, passionately committed to the Revolution, who becomes pregnant and is reluctantly initiated into a feminine world—a world not of violence but of nurturing.

That nurturing world is also a Jewish world: Grossman’s commissar, who is neither intellectual nor Jewish, is billeted in the home of the Magazinik family. At one point, Beila Magazinik marvels at the commissar’s attention to her son: “In a word, she’s turned into a good Jewish mother.”

Does the Magazinik home resemble Grossman’s childhood home? Does Beila resemble Yekaterina Grossman?

Beila does not resemble Grossman’s mother, who was highly educated and who had lived for a couple of years in Geneva before the Revolution. The Magazanik home certainly does not resemble Grossman’s childhood home.

In The Road, you write that there are “several scenes in Grossman’s work that show a Jewish parent-or parent figure-and a child affirming their love during the last minutes of their lives.” Yet even in “In the Town of Berdichev,” written before Grossman’s mother was killed in the Shoah, the mother-son bond seems to be a central concern. What was Yekaterina like, and how did she and her son relate to each other?

I do not know a lot about her apart from what Grossman has written himself. Grossman’s stepson Fydor Guber has told me that the style and tone of “the last letter” in Life and Fate is very similar to that of letters written to Grossman by his mother.

“The Old Teacher,” which describes the mass execution of Jews in, as you say in your notes, “an unnamed town that seems like a smaller Berdichev,” is remarkable for being published in late 1943.

There was at that time no outright ban on mention of the mass murders of Jews, but the authorities’ preferred line was that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler. A frequently used slogan—all the more effective, no doubt, because of its apparent nobility—was “Do not divide the dead!”

With each year it became more difficult for Soviet writers and journalists to write about the Shoah. Grossman’s article about Treblinka was first published as late as November 1944 and it was republished the following year, but it is unlikely that he would have been able to republish “The Old Teacher” as late as that. Any discussion of the Einsatzgruppen massacres almost inevitably raised the question of the degree of collaboration on the part of Ukrainians or citizens of the Baltic States; it was therefore easier for a Soviet journalist to write about the death camps in Poland than about the massacres on Soviet soil.

Who was the audience for “The Hell of Treblinka”? If journalism is a first draft of history, how accurate is his report? How influential was it?

The audience for his article must have been considerable. It was first published in the monthly journal Znamya (“The Banner”). It was republished in Russian as a very small hardback book and in 1945 alone it was translated into English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, and Yiddish. There were Polish and Slovenian translations in 1946. There may have been others.

With regard to the general workings of the camp, Grossman was accurate and perceptive. But with regard to the numbers of victims he made some serious errors. His biggest mistake was to estimate that around three million people were murdered in Treblinka; the true figure was probably less than 800,000.

Toward the end of “The Hell of Treblinka,” Grossman writes:

What led Hitler and his followers to construct Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz, and Treblinka is the imperialist idea of exceptionalism—of racial, national, and every other kind of exceptionalism.

Is this what Grossman really believed? Or was this necessary to say to bring it in line with Soviet ideology?

I am certain that this is absolutely what Grossman believed. And, far from being conformist, the sentence may well contain a veiled criticism of Soviet ideology, which is, after all, based on an idea of class exceptionalism.

Grossman covered World War II from the front lines—his notes and reportage have been translated and collected in A Writer at War—and beginning in 1943, worked with Ilya Ehrenburg and others on The Black Book of the Holocaust, an effort to document the Nazi campaign against the Jews. But the Soviet government halted publication of The Black Book—and destroyed the printing plates.

How, after his experience during the war, his mother’s death, his work on The Black Book and its suppression, could Grossman have denounced the Jewish doctors who supposedly plotted to kill Stalin?

There are a number of possible reasons. Most simply, he had good reason to fear for his life. And he may have thought—not entirely unreasonably—that the doctors were certain to be executed anyway and that the letter was worth signing because it affirmed that the Jewish people as a whole was innocent.

But the way you put your question, Blake, doesn’t seem quite right to me. It contains an implicit criticism, and none of us have the right to make such criticisms. Very few people survived Stalin’s regime without, at the very least, signing some such denunciation. Several years later, in Life and Fate, Grossman was to write,

But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating. Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.

I am also reminded of the opening chapters of Everything Flows, where Nikolay, the scientist, weighs his moral compromises and occasional noble gestures as he awaits the arrival of Ivan, his cousin who has just spent thirty years in the Gulag. Ivan will not spend a night in Nikolay’s apartment. Nikolay comes off as sympathetically as he possibly can, but Grossman and Ivan are judging him, no?

Here Grossman is almost certainly judging himself. Nikolay and his wife are in many respects modeled on Grossman and his wife. Grossman was often fiercely self-critical.

In The Road, you include two letters Grossman wrote to his dead mother on the anniversary of her murder. Were these written as private or public documents?

They were written as private documents. They are deeply moving. The memory of his mother seems to have been an extraordinary source of strength for Grossman. A passage in Life and Fate based on Grossman’s signing the letter about the Jewish doctors ends with Viktor Shtrum (who has just signed a similar letter) praying to his dead mother to help him never to show such weakness again.

In The Road, you mention a dispute over where to bury Grossman: in Novodevichye, the Moscow cemetery where many Soviet writers and intellectuals were interred, or in a Jewish cemetery. Is this argument emblematic of a larger battle over Grossman’s legacy and how Jewish it is?

You’re probably right, but there simply isn’t a great deal of interest in Grossman in Russia at the moment—so it is hard for me to talk of a “larger battle.”

I myself struggled for a long time to establish where Grossman himself wanted to be buried; I failed. Different people say different things and there is no real evidence for their assertions. But Novodevichye itself was out of the question—only the highest of the elite were buried there, and by attempting to publish Life and Fate Grossman had excluded himself from that elite.

Some who have written about Grossman—his friend the poet Semyon Lipkin and the biographers John and Carol Garrard—believe that Grossman, as you put it, “was obsessed with questions of Jewish suffering and Jewish identity” toward the end of his life. On the other hand, Simon Markish wrote in Commentary that Grossman had “the voice of a Jew, but not a Jewish voice.” What’s your view?

Once again, different people say different things. If we stay with what Grossman wrote himself, I think we can say that the theme of Jewish suffering and Jewish identity does not sound particularly strongly in Grossman’s last short stories. Several chapters of the unfinished novel Everything Flows are devoted to the “Doctors’ Plot”—the first stage in what was to have been a major purge of Soviet Jews—but no less space is devoted to the Terror Famine that led to the death of several million Ukrainian peasants.

On the other hand, we do know for sure that Grossman chose not to publish “Good Wishes,” his account of two months he spent in Armenia in late 1961, rather than agree to his editor’s demand that he omit a single ten-line paragraph about anti-Semitism. All Grossman’s friends and colleagues, including Semyon Lipkin, tried to persuade him to agree to this omission, but Grossman was intransigent. It seems likely that he was trying to atone for agreeing to sign the letter denouncing the Jewish Doctors.

How is Vasily Grossman seen in Russia today: as a Russian voice, a Jewish voice, or both? Is he esteemed more in the West or in Russia?

He is very much more highly esteemed in the West. In Putin’s Russia, he has very little by way of a natural constituency. The human rights organization Memorial sponsored a traveling exhibition about Grossman and his work. And I have heard Arseny Roginsky, chairman of Memorial, refer to Grossman with great warmth as nash pisatel—(“our writer”), but Memorial—sadly—is now a rather small organization.

By the time your English translation of Life and Fate first appeared, it had become a best-seller in France. Why? Do they have a greater taste for 800-page novels?

I imagine that this was because the question of the possible equivalence of Nazism and Stalinism was more of a live issue in a country that still—in the early 1980s—had a strong Communist Party. Now, however, I think Grossman is at least as well known in the English-speaking world as he is in France.

Was Grossman an influence on Claude Lanzmann?

I wish I knew! All I can say is that there is no mention of Grossman in Shoah.

In his essays and in his fiction, Grossman expounds almost like a moral philosopher. What is the basis of his morality: His upbringing? His socialist ideals? Witnessing the devastation of war and the Shoah? Tolstoy and other literature? Some combination?

Grossman behaved with great courage in the late 1930s, at the time of the Great Terror, so I don’t think it is primarily a matter of his witnessing the war or the Shoah. His parents were involved with the revolutionary movement, and Grossman was certainly brought up with socialist ideals. The moral courage shown both by the Russian Populists and by such writers as Tolstoy and Chekhov remained important to Grossman until the end of his life.

Of the remaining writings left untranslated, what should be next to fill out our literary understanding of Grossman? Our understanding of Grossman’s Jewish consciousness?

I’m hoping to start work soon on Good Wishes, his travel sketch about Armenia. This is by far the most personal, the most intimate, of Grossman’s works. Although all the many different threads are very deftly woven together, it has an air of absolute spontaneity, as though Grossman is just chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia, his various planned and unplanned meetings, and even his physical problems. Grossman did not know this at the time, but he was probably already suffering from cancer.

And after Good Wishes, I hope to translate For a Just Cause. I am ashamed to say that I only recently read this “prequel” to Life and Fate for the first time. There are a number of somewhat dull historico-political chapters, but much of the novel—the chapters about the lives of the Shaposhnikov sisters and the descriptions of the fighting at Stalingrad and elsewhere—is in no way inferior to Life and Fate.

Soviet authorities destroyed the printing plates of The Black Book and “arrested” the manuscript of Life and Fate. Which of these was a bigger blow to Grossman?

There are many accounts of how deeply upset Grossman was by the “arrest” of Life and Fate. He himself said, “They strangled me in a dark corner.” But I have not been able to find any account at all of Grossman’s feelings after the destruction of the plates of The Black Book. All I can say is that what must surely have been a terrible blow did not prevent him from working. He seems simply to have carried on as if nothing much had happened, continuing with his work on For a Just Cause.

Imagine that when Grossman submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate in 1961, it had been published instead of suppressed. Unlikely, I know, but Solzhenitsyn was able to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich the following year. How would Grossman’s life have been different? His literary reputation? Our understanding of the Soviet Union?

Now you’re asking me to write a novel even longer than Grossman’s! I would like to think that Grossman would have at once become as famous as Solzhenitsyn and that we would have understood many things about the Soviet Union a lot sooner. But who knows? Everything Flows was published in 1972 and no one paid any attention at all. Even Life and Fate did not receive a great deal of attention when my translation was first published in 1985.

Each change of regime, each military campaign, brought death on a massive scale—from combat, but still more from imprisonment, massacre, deportation, and deliberate starvation. Between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed in this region. As Timothy Snyder emphasizes in his important new history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, $29.95), this fantastic figure does not include combatants, even though half of all the soldiers killed in the Second World War, on all fronts around the globe, died in Eastern Europe.

What it does include, of course, are the 5 to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, which took place exactly in the region that Snyder designates “the bloodlands.” Something like 40 percent of the civilians killed in the bloodlands were Jewish victims of the Germans and their collaborators. Or, as Snyder writes in another attempt to put the Jewish experience in perspective, “Jews were less than two percent of the population [of the USSR] and Russians more than half; [yet] the Germans murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.”

“Jews were in a category of their own,” Snyder goes on to write. The language of history reflects this: We speak of the Holocaust as a unique event, in some way different from the mass killing that took place all around it. One of Snyder’s major achievements in Bloodlands is to preserve this sense of the singularity of Jewish experience, even while showing its complex relationship to the terrible experiences of the peoples among whom Jews lived. This is notoriously a very difficult thing for historians to do, and the ground Snyder covers in this book has often been the source of controversy and recrimination. To Jews, any attempt to put the Holocaust “in context” can sound like an attempt to diminish its importance, to relativize it.

Jews have also been troubled by any emphasis on the suffering of other nations under Hitler—of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians—because collaborators of all these nationalities played a crucial role in the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust could not have happened without the participation of the Slavs. To take just one of the countless illuminating statistics in Bloodlands: In Lithuania, the German unit (Einsatzkommando) in charge of killing the Jews of Kaunas “numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four.” Yet between June and December of 1941, such small units managed to kill 114,856 Lithuanian Jews. Clearly, the work of killing was done mainly by native Lithuanians: The Nazis “had as many helpers as [they] needed,” Snyder writes.

Yet Snyder also does justice to the experiences of the Slavic peoples, which were often as terrible as the fate suffered by Jews. The first chapter in Bloodlands is titled “The Soviet Famines,” and it centers on Ukraine in 1932-33, where more than 3.3 million people died of starvation. This is half as many as died in the Holocaust; and while they died of hunger, rather than gassing or shooting, they were deliberately killed by Stalin just as surely as the Jews were by Hitler. Snyder explains why and how, “facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.”

The reason was, first, economic. Intent on industrializing the Soviet economy, the Communists seized food from the peasants of Ukraine—the Soviet Union’s “breadbasket”—in order to sell it abroad, thus earning the money to pay for foreign technology and industrial equipment. In other words, there was never really a food shortage in the USSR; Stalin could have stopped the famine simply by stopping food exports. Adherence to Marxist ideology—which saw the urban proletariat as a more revolutionary class than the rural peasantry—led Stalin to make war on one section of his own population. In this way, Snyder shows, Communism led to the same kind of ideologically inspired killing as Nazism, though the victims were defined more by class than by ethnicity.

Yet Stalin did also practice what Snyder calls “National Terror,” in addition to “Class Terror.” He persecuted the Poles of the Soviet Union because of his fear of Poland, against which the USSR had fought a war in 1920, and the secret police fed these fears by inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories about Polish espionage. In 1937-38, during the Great Terror, almost 700,000 Soviet citizens were killed; of these, 85,000 were Poles, even though Poles made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Soviet population. Similar atrocities were directed against Lithuanians, Koreans, and other peoples who could theoretically look to a foreign state as a protector. Snyder convincingly argues, in the last chapter of Bloodlands, that the resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism after 1948 can be seen as a late example of this kind of national terror. Once the Jews of the USSR could look to Israel as a homeland, Stalin began to see them as another potential threat. Before he died, in 1953, he encouraged the concoction of the “Doctors’ Plot,” which accused Jewish doctors of medically murdering high-placed Soviet officials—possibly as a prelude to another mass purge.

The relationship between Jews and Communism is probably the most explosive of all the subjects Snyder addresses, and here he benefits most from the strengths he shows throughout the book—deep learning, wide compassion, and clear, careful moral judgment. To this day, there are some in Eastern Europe who continue to minimize, or explain, or even justify the Holocaust by pointing to the atrocities inflicted on their own peoples by so-called Jewish Communists. Snyder shows the reasons why this line of argument has found adherents, especially in the war years. It was never true that most, or even many, Jews were Communists; but it is true that many prominent Communists were Jews. Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet foreign minister during the 1930s, was Jewish—Stalin dismissed him in 1939 when he made his alliance with Hitler, in deference to Nazi anti-Semitism. Lazar Kaganovich was one of Stalin’s most loyal enforcers and played a major role in both the Ukrainian famine and the Terror.

Jews were also disproportionately represented in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. There were historical reasons for this, which Snyder might have stated more explicitly: It was the experience of Tsarist anti-Semitism that led so many Jews to feel that Communism was their best hope. But in the 1930s, the association of Communism with Jews—fed by Hitler’s propaganda, which referred incessantly to “Judeo-Bolshevism”—made it dangerously easy for many Eastern Europeans to see patriotism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism as part of the same package. The fact that one of the last acts of the Soviet regime in Poland and the Baltics, before the Germans arrived in 1941, was to massacre political prisoners only added fuel to the flames. By the time the Nazis arrived, these conditions made many Balts and Slavs feel that killing Jews was somehow striking a blow for their national dignity.

While Snyder explains the feelings behind this view, he also scrupulously shows that it was factually baseless. There was, of course, no connection between massacring Jewish women and children and resisting Soviet power. What’s more, Soviet Communists were themselves active persecutors of Jews, especially in Poland. As Yehuda Bauer showed in his recent study The Death of the Shtetl, Soviet rule everywhere destroyed Jewish civilization: No one was more viciously opposed to Judaism and Jewish culture than Jewish Communists. And, of course, only a small fraction of Jews were Communists at any time, in any sense; more were socialists or Zionists. Still, the association of Jews and Communism lingered even after the war, when some of the Communist rulers imposed by Stalin on Eastern Europe were Jews.

Lithuanian or Ukrainian nationalists who helped the Germans kill Jews, hoping that it would serve their own causes, were quickly disabused. When Snyder turns from the Soviet to the Nazi side of the story, he shows that the Holocaust of the Jews was not the only genocide the Nazis had in mind. They had similar plans for the whole of Eastern Europe, involving the mass murder and starvation of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. In accordance with Nazi racial theory, these peoples were to be reduced to slavery, in the service of German settlers who would turn the whole of Eastern Europe into an Aryan agricultural empire. If the German Army had captured Moscow in the fall of 1941, knocking the USSR out of the war as Hitler intended, the Nazis planned to starve 30 million people to death so the invaders could feed themselves.

When the invasion stalled, the Nazis decided to focus on the one aspect of their “utopia” it was still in their power to achieve: the extermination of the Jews. “The Final Solution,” Snyder writes, “was the one atrocity that took on a more radical form in the realization than in the conception. Soviet Jews were supposed to work themselves to death building a German empire or be deported further east. This proved impossible; [so] most Jews in the East were killed where they lived.” Four of Snyder’s 11 chapters are devoted primarily to the Holocaust, a measure of how central it was to the fate of the “bloodlands.” Indeed, anyone who wants to fully comprehend the Holocaust—at least, as far as it can be comprehended—should read Bloodlands, which shows how much evil had to be done in order to make the ultimate evil possible.

To the small but influential group of his American admirers, Trotsky appeared as a kind of Soviet Garibaldi or George Washington, fighting for freedom against an evil empire. The problem, as Robert Service shows in his new biography Trotsky, is that Trotsky himself was one of the men chiefly responsible for that evil. In the October Revolution of 1917, he was second only to Lenin in leading the Bolshevik coup to success. In the years of civil war that followed, Trotsky, as commissar for the Red Army, designed the campaigns that inflicted horrific suffering on the civilian population of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. None of the Soviet leaders outdid him in zeal for collectivization and terror, or in his commitment to spreading the Communist revolution across Europe and the world. Service, one of the leading historians of the Soviet Union and the author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin, sums up his verdict on Trotsky this way: “He was close to Stalin in intentions and practice. He was no more likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism.… He reveled in terror.”

How, then, did Trotsky become a symbol, to some of the most intelligent American leftists, of a more humane and democratic Communism? In part, as Service writes (and the Farrell essay demonstrates), it was because of “their naivety. They were blind to Trotsky’s contempt for their values…. Like spectators at a zoo, they felt sorry for a wounded beast.” But for the Jewish intellectuals who clustered around Partisan Review, he was an especially irresistible figure, since Trotsky himself was the most powerful Jewish intellectual who ever lived. While this part of Trotsky’s legacy is incidental to Service’s book, it is a significant chapter in the political history of American Jews, and Trotsky helps explain both the allure and the danger of the mass murderer who was affectionately known to his followers as “the Old Man.”

He was born in 1879 as Leiba Bronstein—the name Trotsky was a nom de guerre, like Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) and Stalin (Iosif Dzugashvili). Bronstein’s parents, unusually for Jews in the Russian Empire, were farmers; they belonged to a colony of Polish Jews who had settled in the Ukraine, as part of a czarist project for dispersing and assimilating the Jewish population. As Service shows at the beginning of his book, this meant that Bronstein “did not have a life associated mainly with fellow Jews.” His parents were not devout, and Leiba was sent to a Lutheran German school in Odessa.

Very quickly, like many young, secular Jews of his generation, Bronstein was drawn to the Communist revolutionary movement—partly out of Marxist idealism, partly out of disgust at the reactionary and anti-Semitic czarist government. He was only eighteen when he was arrested, with other members of his small, amateurish revolutionary cell, and exiled to Siberia. As with so many Russian radicals, however, Siberia was less a prison for Bronstein than a kind of finishing school. Bronstein married a fellow prisoner, Alexandra Sokolovskaya—also Jewish, like several other members of his cell—and had two children. He made contact with other Communists, and began to read the clandestine newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which he received hidden in the binding of an innocuous book.

Iskra was edited from London and Geneva by a group of Communists including Vladimir Lenin, and Bronstein decided he had to join them. With surprising ease, Trotsky—as he was now known on his forged or stolen passport—escaped from Siberia and crossed Europe, presenting himself in London as a new recruit to the cause. (It is ironic that, compared to the later brutality of the KGB and the Gulag, the czarist police system looks like benign neglect.)

It soon became clear that Trotsky was a brilliant writer: at their first meeting, Lenin greeted him with the words: “Ah, the Pen has arrived!” And it was by his pen that he became to known to revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, writing for Iskra and other illegal, but widely read, publications. In 1905, when the first Russian Revolution broke out, Trotsky smuggled himself back into St. Petersburg, where he discovered that he was equally magnetic as a platform orator. Still just 25, he became head of the Petersburg council, or Soviet; when the revolution was crushed, he was arrested again and escaped again.

By 1917, Trotsky’s peregrinations and expulsions had led him to New York, where he arrived “to a hero’s welcome among emigrant socialist sympathizers from the Russian Empire,” especially Jews—he wrote a series of articles for the Forverts, the socialist Yiddish daily. Indeed, one of the ironic themes of Service’s Trotsky is the way the revolutionary kept finding himself in Jewish milieux, despite his adamant refusal to claim a Jewish identity. As Service explains, in his chapter “Trotsky and the Jews,” he followed an orthodox Marxist line on matters of nationality and religion: “In his own eyes, he had ceased to be a Jew in any important sense because Marxism had burned out the fortuitous residues of his origins.” He detested Zionism and the Jewish socialist Bund. Yet it is striking how many of Trotsky’s closest comrades were non-Jewish Jews, just like himself. One might even say, though Service does not pursue the subject this far, that the aggressive rejection of Jewish particularity was the form in which Trotsky, and many Jews like him, lived their Jewishness.

When the czar was overthrown, in February 1917, Trotsky immediately began planning to get back to Russia, and he arrived at Petersburg’s Finland Station on May 4, a month after Lenin. Service traces the complex, ever-shifting circumstances of that revolutionary year, the advances and feints and retreats of the Bolsheviks, until they finally seized the capital, under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, in October. Then came the years of triumph and power and cruelty; and then came the great fall, which turned Trotsky the commissar into the socialist martyr described by Farrell.

Starting in 1923, as Lenin was crippled by strokes, Trotsky and Stalin waged a bureaucratic and propaganda war over who was entitled to succeed him. Trotsky entered the battle with many advantages. His highly visible role in the Civil War had made him iconic; he was still a brilliant and popular writer. Most important of all, he was Lenin’s own choice. The ailing leader dictated a “testament” in which he warned that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had the potential to split the Communist Party, and he came down firmly on Trotsky’s side: “Stalin is too crude and this inadequacy…becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.”

The real question, as Service convincingly frames it, is why Trotsky, given all these advantages, allowed Stalin to outmaneuver him so decisively—to the point that, by 1928, Trotsky had been stripped of office, expelled from the Party, and finally exiled from the USSR. Service concludes that Trotsky, perhaps unconsciously, did not really want to replace Lenin as sole leader of the country; that is why he “lacked the decisiveness for a concerted advance on power.” While Stalin expertly manipulated the Communist Party apparatus, packing the Politburo with his supporters, Trotsky remained aloof, arrogant, inflexible. When it came to making speeches to big crowds or writing scorching pamphlets, no one could beat Trotsky. When it came to making friends and allies, he could not be bothered.

And there was one other factor in Trotsky’s failure of will. In 1917, just after the revolution, Lenin had wanted to appoint him as Commissar for Internal Affairs, which would have made him head of the secret police. Trotsky refused, on the grounds that “it would be inappropriate for a Jew to take charge of the police in a society pervaded by anti-Semitism. If Jews were seen to be repressing Russians, a pogrom atmosphere might be provoked.” For the same reason, he initially resisted taking charge of the Red Army, and rejected the invitation to become Lenin’s second-in-command in 1922. “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang,” Service writes, and “Trotsky continued to believe that his own prominence in government, party and army did practical damage to the revolutionary cause.”

If Trotsky allowed Stalin to get the better of him at the crucial moment, it may have been because he still feared the consequences of a Jew heading the Soviet government. Of course, such scruples made no difference to the enemies of the Jews. By the time Hitler took to power, thanks in part to the Germans’ fear and hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Trotsky had long since been made a non-person in Stalin’s USSR. The rabbi who made the famous quip was right: “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins who pay the price.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

It hasn’t been a great week for her cause: on Monday, House Republicans who had once appeared sympathetic to the birthers’ claims voted unanimously for a bill that stipulated that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961—which is what his, y’know, birth certificate says. Taitz told Tablet Magazine earlier this week that her real concern is that Obama could be some sort of “Manchurian candidate.” For whom, she wouldn’t say.

You can watch her appearance below.

Previously: In Doubt’s Shadow

Despite its title and a showstopping roomful of Chagall’s theater murals (which were on view in this space a mere seven years ago), this exhibit is really about the history of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, a troupe sponsored by the Soviet government from 1921 to 1949. With sets and costumes designed by Chagall and other equally talented Jewish visual artists, and performances led by the brilliant actor Solomon Mikhoels, the theater’s productions were among the most innovative in the Jewish world. Visitors to this exhibit are treated to costume drawings, set designs, photos, and film clips from dozens of productions, and will emerge with an immensely enriched understanding of a lost creative era. What they will not learn is precisely why that era was “lost,” and therein lies the problem—less with the museum’s approach than with the artists themselves.

Benjamin Zuskin and Solomon Mikhoels as Badkhonim in At Night in the Old Marketplace: A Tragic Carnival, by Robert Falk, 1925

The otherwise excellent exhibit ends abruptly in a darkened room, where we are told that these artists—including Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin (a famous character actor)—joined the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the 1940s to raise money for Soviet efforts against the Nazis—and that after World War II, their actions “caught the attention of Stalin.” Mikhoels died first, in a murder staged to look like a traffic accident, and received a grand state funeral. Nearly everyone else, except Chagall, was executed by 1952. But the antifascist committee didn’t “catch Stalin’s attention.” Stalin created the committee, using the Jews to his advantage and then disposing of them when it suited him. Visitors to the exhibit can be forgiven for thinking the regime abruptly enacted what the wall text calls “the brutal end of an extraordinarily creative era.” But the brutality was present from the beginning. What was extraordinary wasn’t the creativity (Jewish theater thrived elsewhere too), but the restrictions placed upon it.

It is appealing to imagine these artists as “dissidents” who openly conformed to the regime while secretly denouncing it. This exhibit suggests as much, but unfortunately it isn’t true. These artists were almost all loyal Communists who took the regime’s promise of support for Jewish “ethnicity” at face value, trading cultural integrity for the legitimacy and money the regime provided. The tragedy here is that these Jewish artists chose—some unconsciously, most with full complicity—to throw their talents behind a regime that would not, to use today’s catchphrase, “sit down with them without preconditions.” Every play was required to denounce religion as “backward,” ambition as “capitalist,” family closeness as “bourgeois,” Zionism as “treasonous,” and Jewish tradition as “nationalistic” and “corrupt.” This required nothing less than an evisceration of Judaism and its replacement with Communist values. As one critic at the time said of a film produced by the theater, based on a Sholem Aleichem story, “Sholem Aleichem is unrecognizable.”

Sholem Aleichem and other classic Yiddish writers, whose works the theater adapted for the stage, were themselves fiercely critical of Jewish life. But implicit in their work was an acceptance of Judaism as a civilization with the highest potential. These Soviet Jewish artists instead accepted their regime’s premise that Judaism was a nauseating failure, and mined it for material to underscore its demise. The theater’s production of I.L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace,” a surreal dream in which a town’s dead revive after nightfall, became in these artists’ hands a zombie story, where Judaism itself was the disgusting corpse threatening to devour the living. (The costume designer, Robert Falk, even made costumes based on visits to morgues.) Most of these plays, in one way or another, are zombie stories, and the attraction to morbid dybbuk-and-golem motifs is no accident—the plays were an autopsy of Jewish life. Ultimately, despite its immense creativity, this work suggests that the artists lacked conviction in their own culture’s unconditional right to exist.

Tailor Shop Workers and Rich Men (Costume designs for 200,000: A Musical Comedy), by Isaak Rabichev, 1923

By ending with a drawn dark curtain behind a photo of Mikhoels’s state funeral, the exhibit downplays the two real winners of the Soviet cultural game. One was Habima, a Russian Hebrew theater given generous attention early in the exhibit, which decamped for Palestine in 1926. Focused on tragedy, the visitor easily forgets that Habima is the success story here: refusing to compromise on language or culture, it persists today as Israel’s national theater. The second unspoken winner was, of course, Chagall.

The exhibit claims that Chagall’s departure for Western Europe in the 1920s came when he “saw the writing on the wall” concerning Soviet repression. In fact he was drawn by the wider market for his work in the West, where his shtetl surrealism was blessed with the appeal of the exotic. Despite enjoying Western artistic freedom, Chagall expressed little concern for his colleagues’ compromises, and his work ultimately became a nostalgic retreat from contemporary Jewish realities. Despite his genius, the comforting harmlessness of his paintings is what makes Chagall, rather than Soviet Yiddish theater, the box-office draw. The exhibit’s final film ends with the words “Theater is an ephemeral art.” It is particularly ephemeral when its artists are forced to deride their own origins—and even more so when they still end up dead.

The Jewish Museum has taken on a tremendous task in introducing the complexities of Yiddish theater to Americans, and this achievement is more than enough to deserve high attendance and great praise. Yet the exhibit’s hesitation in presenting disturbing truths comes at a price for American Jews, a community forever confronting questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of Jewish art, culture, and power. Yiddish culture is often evoked in America with nostalgia for a supposed authenticity and innocence lost. But it would have been even more evocative for American Jews to notice the lack of authenticity and innocence in the lost culture they so revere—along with the losses incurred by creating art on any terms other than one’s own.

Dara Horn is the author of the award-winning novels In the Image and The World to Come. Her newest novel, All Other Nights, will be published by Norton in April 2009.