Ashkenazic Jewry between Poland-Lithuania, Russia and the US
In the early modern period, the majority of the world’s Jews lived in the Commonwealth of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This now forgotten realm extended from what present is Latvia and Estonia in the north to present-day Moldova in the south, and from central Poland in the west to east Ukraine in the east. In English the polity is known under the shorthand name of Poland-Lithuania, while in most successor polities it is dubbed the “Commonwealth” or Rech Pospolita in Slavic. The only exception is Poland, where the Commonwealth is claimed exclusively as part of the current national master communicative under the anachronistic designation of (pre-partition) Poland.
In the late 18th century, Russia – alongside the successor polity of Prussia and with the Habsburgs’ participation – partitioned Poland-Lithuania. The Commonwealth was erased from the political map of Europe. The lines of division changed during the Napoleonic Wars before stabilizing in the wake of the legislature of Vienna (1815). As a result, Russia effectively annexed over four-fifths of Polish-Lithuanian territory.
In turn, without leaving their hometowns of almost 1 millennium, most of the globe’s Jews found themselves within the Russian Empire. As a result, nowadays it is popular to mention to Ashkenazim as “Russian Jews”. Yet, it is simply a misnomer. First of all, they are members or descendants of the Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. Following the annexation of the majority of Poland-Lithuania, St Petersburg created the light of Settlement, which Jews were prohibited to leave. This territorial ghetto coincided with the Polish-Lithuanian lands within the Russian boundaries, including the northern Black Sea littoral seized then from the Ottomans and the Crimean Khanate. Jews – as “foreign infidels” (innorodtsy) – had to be prevented from defiling the confessional purity of Russia’s canonically Orthodox hinterland, or the tsarist empire’s metropole.
The light survived until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Unlike Poland-Lithuania, this territorial ghetto offered no protection against the government and the Christian population’s antisemitic excesses. The Christian churches’ two-millennia-long run of anti-Jewish propaganda, married with modern forms of warfare and population control, resulted in successive waves of unprecedented pogroms during the 1880s. With the tsarist authorities inciting or at least turning a blind eye, Christians regularly roughed up, robbed and even killed their judaic neighbours across the breadth and dimension of the pale.
From pogroms to the Shoah
In search of safety, justice and prosperity, survivors left en masse for Western Europe and the Americas. They went especially to the United States. As a result, in the 1920s, fresh York became the world’s largest judaic city. At that time, Jews constituted a plurality of all fresh Yorkers. The more concealed antisemitism of WASP (an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Americans caught up with Polish-Lithuanian Jews in the wake of the large Depression. recently introduced restrictive immigration quotas that besides covered Jews remained in place for 4 decades. erstwhile the nazis persecuted Jews during the 1930s and carried out the Holocaust in the first half of the subsequent decade, the globe’s leading democracy turned a cold shoulder to Jews.
Prior to the Holocaust, the 2 totalitarian powers of the 3rd Reich and the russian Union forged an alliance in 1939. On this basis, Hitler and Stalin conquered and partitioned Central Europe. As part of this totalitarian alliance, the Soviets readily adopted antisemitism from Germany. In the russian empire Jews were not to be exterminated but authoritative distrust led to the mass expulsions of Jews to Siberia and Central Asia, especially from the conquered territories. This punitive (or in the russian propaganda’s vocabulary, “re-education”) measurement paradoxically saved these judaic expellees from the Holocaust, provided they survived the privations of exile and gulag concentration camps.
After the Second planet War, Holocaust survivors and the aforementioned judaic expellees attempted to recreate their Yiddish-language communities and cultural life in the russian Union and across the russian bloc, that is, especially in Poland. The light shadow of the prewar vibrant “Yiddishland” tightly coincided with the Polish-Lithuanian lands. Moscow allowed for a feeble revival for a couple of years in the russian Union itself. But, at the turn of the 1950s, the country’s Yiddish-speaking judaic elite were executed, while many low-ranking judaic officials were sentenced to decades in the gulag camps. Following the russian example, akin “anti-Zionist actions” followed in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. The very last of these antisemitic actions, in 1968, extinguished the eventual flame of Yiddishland that inactive persisted in communist Poland.
Mercurian people
Yuri Slezkine is an American historian of judaic extraction who defected from the russian Union. In his 2004 monograph The judaic Century, he proposed that Jews were 1 of the “Mercurian peoples” of a globalized modernity, alongside the Armenians, overseas Chinese and the Roma. As an archetypic middleman, through commerce, education and financial services these Mercurian peoples have connected the world’s another nations into today’s global community. For instance, many customs and practices of academic research, banking, entrepreneurship, trade and marketing first emerged in judaic shtetls, be it in the yeshiva, marketplace squares or within transnational networks of judaic merchants and bankers that erstwhile thrived across Yiddishland.
Prior to the Holocaust, specified networks extended from the desperately mediocre judaic peddler in a distant shtetl to the rich judaic investor given to holidaying in the French Riviera. At the tallness of the first age of globalization, before the large War, this vibrant web of individualized economical and cultural connections allowed for the exchange of ideas, goods and investment from the farthest reaches of the Russian Empire to Western Europe, North America, many Latin American states, Mandatory Palestine, South Africa, Kenya and Australia.
The Holocaust eradicated Yiddishland and its inhabitants. Yet the networks they had created and run for centuries remain. Now they are staffed with newcomers of another cultural backgrounds who learned (and frequently stole without acknowledging) modernity from Jews. Nowadays, in the Global North, practically all the populace are highly educated and acquainted with the methods of global commerce and communications. All became members of the worldwide Mercurian guild of modernity. The same is actual of the elites in the Global South, alongside increasing numbers of people with full simple and further education.
Science fiction or observed reality?
Science fiction as a defined genre with self-aware writers emerged in the interwar period, mostly in the United States. The 2 post-war decades heralded the golden age of discipline fiction, including the spread of this genre to Britain and Western Europe. This period is powerfully associated with the prolific American author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). In 1942 he began penning stories that spawned his trademark Foundation book series (1951-1993), which chronicles the emergence and fall of galactic empires. What is more, in the iconic communicative collection I, Robot (1950), Asimov formulated the 3 laws of robotics. To this day these laws constitute the core of discussions on the ethics and improvement of robots and AI.
From the position of the russian dogma of socialist realism, discipline fiction was a fishy genre in the socialist bloc, irrespective of its technological optimism shared with the main ideological tenets of Marxism-Leninism. In the period of the political thaw that followed the authoritative end of dogmatic Stalinism in 1956, discipline fiction was cautiously embraced as part and parcel of a future-oriented russian imagination of worldwide communism. Despite rather a fewer russian writers who tried their hand at this genre, from the position of readers and global observers of “belles lettres”, russian discipline fiction became synonymous with the Strugatski brothers, namely, Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012). In their haunting 1972 fresh Roadside Picnic, the tandem prefigured the subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction. But more importantly, this book is now read as a foretelling of the Chernobyl atomic disaster (1986), which decisively contributed to the breakup of the russian Union.
Last but not least, discipline fiction became accepted as part of mainstream literature during the 1960s and 1970s. This accomplishment materialized mostly thanks to the Polish discipline fiction author Stanisław Lem’s (1921-2006) body of work. His most renowned fresh Solaris (1961) is constructed and written in a non-genre manner with the conscious usage of artistic prose. It showed that non-genre writers could compose discipline fiction or embrace its elements in their works. A akin service to planet literature was performed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez who in what became “magical realism” de facto espoused fantasy for highbrow literature.
In his discipline fiction writings, Lem offered fully-fledged characters and did not shy from pessimism about the future. Both traits are characteristic of mainstream literature and aptly reflect the human condition. This direction of literary improvement did not endear Lem to communist controllers of “cultural production” in Poland. After all, the communist future was propagandized to be a workers’ paradise. Lem warned that it was going to be a fool’s paradise or any “cloud cuckoo land”. This realization was yet another step toward literature and distant from the genre ghetto of discipline fiction.
Lem’s pessimism showed up in Solaris as the impossibility of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. It became a leitmotif of his books, which encouraged the Strugatski brothers on the way toward their masterpiece Roadside Picnic.
Hiding in plain sight
In his classical work Holocaust and Modernity (1989), the Jewish-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), expelled from communist Poland in 1968, warned “we know what we did not know in 1941; that besides the unimaginable ought to be imagined.” Asimov, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers did precisely that. And for that matter, decades before Bauman formulated his celebrated admonition. The question arises whether these 4 creators and innovators of global discipline fiction in the 20th century had something in common with Bauman and each other.
At first glance, this looks unlikely, apart from Lem and Bauman sharing for a while the same communist Poland as their homeland. But let us look more closely at the household background and lived experience of these iconic discipline fiction writers. Asimov was born in the tiny village of Petrovichi, nowadays in Russia, to Yiddish-speaking judaic parents. They registered the baby with the gentile authorities in Russian as Isaak Iudovich Azimov (Исаак Юдович Азимов). In their Ashkenazi shtetl, the boy was known in Yiddish as Yitskhok Azimov (יצחק אַזימאָװ). The area was contested between then briefly independent Belarus, Bolshevik Russia and Poland. To escape the hopelessness and uncertainty of the large War that seemed to proceed there unabated, in 1923, the household took leave of Europe and emigrated to the United States.
Today, local historians of culture and literature, forgetful of antisemitism, claim Asimov both for Belarus and Russia. The region of Smolensk, where Petrovichi lies, belongs to the historically cultural Belarusian lands. The family’s surname clearly indicates that they stemmed from a Belarusian-speaking area. It means “winter grains” or азіміна in Belarusian. In contrast, in Russian this word is озимина and the same in Polish, ozimina.
Stanisław Lem was besides born to judaic parents but full assimilated with the Polish-speaking elite in Lwów (at present, Lviv in western Ukraine). His father Samuel was a wealthy ENT medical doctor. Before the large War life was good for his household in the regional capital of the crownland of Galicia in Austria-Hungary. Yet, the increase in political and popular antisemitism convinced Samuel to alter the spelling of his surname from Lehm to Lem. The first form was a clearly German word for “clay”. But in the social and cultural context of Galicia, it was interpreted as an apparent sign of Jewishness, the surname stemming from the Yiddish word leym (ליים) for “clay”.
Dropping the offending “h” allowed for deniability of his judaic origin. The argument came useful during many pogroms at the end of the First planet War and in its immediate aftermath, including the antisemitic bloodbath in Lwów in November 1918. This horrific pogrom took place erstwhile the independency of the Polish nation-state was proclaimed. Hence, Lem’s parents did not take chances and endowed their boy with an utterly un-Jewish first name. Stanisław is simply a clearly Slavic name, most popular among gentile Poles. At school in interwar Poland, Lem attended spiritual instructions in the judaic religion. But the future author survived the subsequent russian and German occupations of Lwów on false “Aryan” papers, which identified him as a Catholic.
When the household realized that the Allies had agreed to the incorporation of the east half of interwar Poland into the russian Union, they moved to Galicia’s second-most crucial city that remained within postwar Poland, that is, Kraków. During the war and immediately afterward they experienced the privations and indignities of russian regulation and made certain to steer clear of it.
Unlike Asimov in fresh York, Lem elder and junior had to conceal their judaic background as a precaution. It was the sine qua non precondition of endurance in the times of active antisemitic persecutions and extermination. Nothing changed in this respect either in communist or in post-communist Poland. Lem stayed clear of any questions or discussions about the judaic origin of his family. The 1968 expulsion of Jews and the near-official probe that was to confirm the non-Jewish origin of a presidential candidate in 1990 confirmed Lem’s fears that it was better to say nothing about his judaic background. The celebrated author stayed silent on this subject until his death.
The Strugatsky brothers besides knew that they should avoid revealing their judaic origin. Like in communist Poland, Jewishness was a serious social and political liability in the russian Union. The brothers’ father Nathan was born in the judaic village of Dubovychi, close the historical town of Hlukhiv in present-day Ukraine’s region of Sumy. Now, this area is dangerously close to the Russo-Ukrainian front. Nathan intended to follow in the footsteps of his father Zalman from Kherson (today’s Ukraine), who had gained a university education and become a lawyer. But the large War, the Bolshevik revolution, the civilian war and organization work plotted to keep Nathan distant from fulfilling his dream. He persevered, attending extramural and evening courses whenever an chance appeared.
Political purges and ethnically designed repressions convinced Nathan (who wisely married a Russian Orthodox girl) to give his sons clearly un-Jewish first names, popular among cultural Russians. Thanks to Zalman’s earlier decision, the family’s surname was already unobtrusively Slavic. The word struh (струг) in Ukrainian or strug in Polish stands for the conventional woodworking tool known as a drawknife. The household knew well about the Holodomor in russian Ukraine and the Holocaust. On top of that, they lived through the siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg). alternatively of surrendering this city to the Germans, the russian authorities defended it at the cost of genocidal-scale losses among its inhabitants, who suffered rife starvation. The city’s pre-war civilian population of 3.5 million was reduced to a tenth of this number. Staying low, and not sticking out ethnically or otherwise from among the docile Russian masses was instrumental to endurance in the russian Union. This kind of conformity is again the required norm in the present-day warmongering and neo-imperial Russia.
However, in the russian Union it was hard to hide one’s origin effectively, due to the bureaucratic request of having to uncover the name of the father in one’s own name. The request for a patronymic compelled Arkady and Boris to append “Natanovich” to their names. Yet, the brothers cleverly avoided this necessity, choosing to be known on the covers of their co-authored books, simply as the “Brothers Strugatsky” (Братья Стругацкие) or alternatively as Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Аркадий и Борис Стругацкие). Otherwise, erstwhile an antisemitic censor insisted, the writers resorted to the acronyms AN and BN in addition to their shared surname. Spelling out this “N” was out of question.
Vicious circle: between mercury, antisemitism and genocide
Do Asimov, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers have something more in common than a vague recollection of their judaic origin? All these world-renowned writers stem from the lands of the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1 way or another they were Polish-Lithuanian Jews. During the 1930s and 1940s, this region became Europe’s notorious “Bloodlands”, where the russian and German totalitarian regimes’ genocidal projects and occupations spatially overlapped in fast succession. Lem and the Strugatsky brothers experienced the exigencies of this lethal situation in full force and had to navigate the narrow way to success in the post-war russian bloc.
Asimov was spared this hard fate, thanks to his parents’ propitious decision to leave for America. Yet, from the press; discussions with his judaic relatives and acquaintances; and as a serviceman in the US army, Asimov learned in item about the Holocaust and the extermination of European Jewry under German occupation. Subsequently, the post-war russian persecutions of the country’s Jews time and again made it to the front pages of the US press.
All 4 discipline fiction authors observed or personally experienced modernity and technology at its most murderous cutting edge. Thanks to this poisonous knowledge, they learned how to “imagine the unimaginable” before even Bauman formulated his dictum. Like the writers, this sociologist belonged to the same social, ethnic, post-confessional milieu of Poland-Lithuania’s Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews. In 1989, lecturing at the University of Leeds in Britain, Bauman could safely state that modernity as we know it present produced the Holocaust and, too, became a product of the Holocaust. Part and parcel of this process is the West’s curious absentmindedness regarding the near-instantaneous disappearance, during the Second planet War, of the full-fledged Yiddish-language European culture, with 12 million speakers worldwide.
Holocaust survivors managed to establish their Central European nation-state of Israel in the mediate East. Nazi Germany and its programme of the Final Solution were resoundingly condemned at the Nuremberg Trials. Until late it was unacceptable to openly voice antisemitic sentiments in the West, especially in Germany. Now, unfortunately, the taboo appears to be over. It seems that there was nothing but education and morality to halt people from whispering into 1 another’s ear that “Hitler was a large leader” and “the Jews deserved their fate”.
In the post-war United States, initially, there was no marketplace for books on the Holocaust. In the russian bloc censors did not let open discussion on the Shoah. alternatively – consciously or not – Asimov, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers smuggled this bitter cognition under the glittering guise of discipline fiction. In the writers’ books, if the reader observes closely, the ghettoization and dehumanization of targeted groups, pogroms, cultural cleansing and acts of genocide are meticulously portrayed. These 4 authors knew about the future from their lived present. Unfortunately, this present refuses to be consigned to the past. Instead, it keeps becoming our future. Let us be clear-minded about the situation, it is us who are “people who doom people to this fate”.
Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and east European past at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His fresh volumes include Politics and the Slavic Languages (Routledge 2021), Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia (Routledge 2021), Languages and Nationalism alternatively of Empires (Routledge 2023), Politika gjuhësore dhe gjeopolitika (Littera 2023), Rreziqet e neoimperializmit rus (Kristalina 2024) and Papusza / Bronisława Wajs: Tears of Blood (Brill 2024). His mention Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (CEU Press 2021) is available as an open access publication.
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