HAIFA, Israel — “Kleptomania” in Greek is a morbid craving for theft, “kleptocracy” is the power of thieves, “kleptopatria” is the theft of the homeland, the taking away of the country from people born and raised in it, whose ancestors have lived in it for generations, people brought up on its culture, whose native language is the language of the dominant nation.
After the end of World War II, Soviet Jews were convinced that the victory in that war was also their victory and that that war was domestic for them as well. The great expectations of Jews after the great victory were replaced by great disappointments. I had no expectations and could not have been disappointed, because I was born in Kiev after the end of that war, on July 14, the day of the capture of the Bastille, the national holiday of France. I have an unusually high number of impressions of France — family stories, long years of academic work in this country, the language I learned as a child. My grandmother spoke French with my father. Dialogue in this language was a means for them to shield themselves from unwanted listeners. Voices heard in childhood often sound involuntary, unexpected, and not always harmonious later on. My father and uncle read to each other the poems of the German poet Heinrich Heine in the author’s native language. They did this quietly, so that outsiders did not hear the language that a few years ago was associated with the Enemy.
Less and less often they spoke the poet’s native language, preferring the language he spoke during the last 25 years of his life in Paris. They wanted to shelter, fend off and protect themselves from an alien world that they often and mistakenly took for their own. Not Yiddish, which many people understand, but French, which they have spoken since childhood with their mother, the language of their secret communication. Only not Yiddish, the language of the ghetto and places of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, but the melodious, beautiful language favored by Russian aristocrats. Only to feel human when one persecution campaign succeeds another all around: the “cosmopolitan” case, which struck my father and aunt (1949), execution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, writers, poets, and actors who wrote and acted in Yiddish (1952), the case of “murderers in white coats,” “poison doctors,” doctors of Jewish origin (1953), which struck my uncle, whose wife was a doctor.
On March 8, 1949, my father Yakov Gordon, Professor of French and German Literature at Kiev University, and my mother’s sister Leah Khinchin, Professor at the Kiev Academy of Music, Head of the Department of the History of Russian Music and Dean of the Vocal Faculty, were declared “rootless cosmopolitans” and dismissed from their jobs. Two of the four adult members of our family simultaneously lost their jobs, were subjected to extrajudicial persecution, prosecuted at meetings, condemned in newspapers, fired from their jobs, and expelled from Kiev. Their family life was shattered and their professional careers suffered.
France played a major role in the life of the man who determined the fate of my father: the German poet Heinrich Heine, whose work my father had been engaged in all his life, who had published several books about Heine in Russian, German and Japanese, found refuge in France. While doing research in Germany in 1998, I took my son up to the house on Bolkerstrasse 53 in Düsseldorf and, pointing to the door, said: “Here was born and raised the man who ruined my parents’ family life and robbed me of my father.” My father and I parted ways after he fell victim to the persecution of the “cosmopolitan” cause in 1949. He was declared an “agent of foreign intelligence,” fired from his job and actually deported from Kiev.
My mother and I stayed in Kiev due to the total uncertainty of my father’s future employment prospects. My father led a double life as a Jew who wanted to be like everyone else but could not do so. But also an independent thinker, one of the wittiest men in Europe, Heinrich Heine led a double life as a German and a Jew. Heine was loved and hated by the two nations to which he belonged. The Germans loved his lyrics and disliked his political poetry. Jews loved to credit his genius and disliked his conversion to Protestantism, which he often joked, “What do you want? I found it impossible for me to belong to the same religion as Rothschild without being as rich as him.” Heine was a doctor of law. The German poet was baptized to become a lawyer, but Germany did not give Dr. Heinrich Heine the right to practice her laws, and he began to describe its lawlessness. Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich deemed Heine unworthy to be a professor of German literature, and he became its creator.
What is the connection between Heine and my father? At the end of the 1940s my father published a number of articles and defended a dissertation on the influence of Heine on the poetry of the famous Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka. And although Lesya Ukrainka herself wrote about this influence and translated into Ukrainian from German about 100 poems by Heine, my father was declared a foreign, “petty-bourgeois” cosmopolitan for claiming the influence of a foreign, “petty-bourgeois” poet Heine on the national poetess. In his memoirs, my father wrote: “My Achilles’ heel was Heine.
In articles devoted to me, the pathos of denunciation of Heine and I was somewhat muted, but in oral speeches, it was very strong. Not a single orator-writer forgot to mention that Heine was a Jew and that I dared to speak about the influence of a third-rate German poet on the great poetess Lesya Ukrainka: “He cared about Heine, but our national poets are alien to him.” One of the main pogromists, the poet Ljubomir Dmyterko, said: “Among them, the most aggressive aesthete and cosmopolitan is Yakov Gordon.” Dmyterko demanded that the “weevils” be removed from Ukraine. In the literal sense they meant pest beetles, but it was clear that they were talking about Jewish noses.
In the certificate of the Secretary of the Party Committee of the Kiev University Machikhin from March 24, 1949, there is this “conclusion: “An active cosmopolitan, Gordon slandered the work of Lesya Ukrainka, belittling her role as a national poetess.” In the newspaper “For Radyanskiye Kadri” (“Soviet Personnel”) it was said that “only Gordon alone had the audacity not to admit the accusations that the people had brought against him.” My father was fired from Kiev University, from the editorial office of the literary magazine “Vitchizna” (“Homeland”) and was forced to look for work far from Kiev — Chernivtsi, Bukhara, and Dushanbe. He had two congenital vices — a heart defect and Jewishness.
The authorities were not wrong in branding my father a cosmopolitan. He was a cosmopolitan. Even though my father knew he was a cosmopolitan, he rushed to prove the opposite to the authorities. He was saved from final destruction by the same man who had unwittingly caused his misfortune — Heine. The “cosmopolitan” Heinrich Heine was mobilized to clear my cosmopolitan father of the charge of cosmopolitanism. Marx was a friend of Heine, and Lenin was an admirer of his almost revolutionary poetry. In 1844, on Heine’s 47th birthday, Engels published the following message in an English newspaper: “The great poet Heinrich Heine has joined us and published a collection of political poetry preaching socialism.” To count Heine among the revolutionary socialists was an exaggeration of the twenty-four-year-old Engels. Heine, poet, journalist, satirist, never had any doctrine. He did not join any political current. In those years, however, attempts were made to portray Heine, a student of Hegel at Berlin University, as the “mediator” between Hegel and Marx, trying to make him the “John Baptist” of “Jesus” Marx. Heine was too complicated a person and too profound a personality to be painted in a single, red color.
My father managed to prove, with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that Heine was a great revolutionary poet who could influence the national poets of the Soviet republics as well. After months of effort, he received a certificate from the ideology department of the CPSU Central Committee that he was not a cosmopolitan. In his memoirs he writes about this event: “Dear comrade, to whom my memoirs may reach in one form or another! You do not have a certificate that you are not a cosmopolitan like your friends, relatives, teachers, teachers of their teachers. Probably none of the 180 million Soviet citizens have it. Only I have it.”
On October 28, 1949, the Higher School Administration under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR issued my father a document of rehabilitation, which contained the following conclusion: “In the critical articles and works of Yakov Gordon we should note his desire to promote the achievements of Russian and Soviet literature, to assist young poets and prose writers in their work, the development of Soviet patriotism, the heroism of the Soviet people, the heroism of socialist labor, etc. In connection with the above, the Office believes that the doctor of philological sciences Gordon, despite a number of serious mistakes in his work, which, however, are not anti-patriotic or cosmopolitan in nature, can be used for teaching work in higher education in the department of general literature.”
This certificate, probably the only one of its kind, brought my father back to Kiev. And then it turned out that they did not want to reinstate him. It was not a matter of cosmopolitanism, which my father had disavowed with the help of the hard-won certificate. He had brought a certificate from Moscow stating that he was not a cosmopolitan. But he did not bring a certificate that he was not a Jew, a certificate that Heine had after his baptism. Therefore, he was not rehabilitated in Kiev. Heine could not find work as a lawyer because of his political views and had to emigrate from Germany. My father could not be reinstated to work and stay in Kiev and had to “emigrate” from Kiev because of the indelible stain of Jewishness. After two years of exile in Chernivtsi, where he was spied on, recording his lectures, he found himself in Central Asia, which became for him a haven of freedom, tolerance and internationalism — something like France for his beloved Heine. But the Islamic revolution in Tajikistan shattered his eastern fairytale and brought him to Moscow. My father wrote a number of books about Heine, some of them published in West Germany and Japan. One was published in Heine’s hometown of Düsseldorf in his native language (1982). My father died on February 17, the same day as his idol.
Jewish writers, branded as “cosmopolitans,” were assimilated Jews, patriots of the USSR, experts in the literature of the republics in which they lived. They were educated people, well acquainted with foreign literature. They were robbed of their socialist fatherland, which they sincerely loved and with which they felt close to. People without a fatherland, whose people had suffered genocide in the recent war, were robbed of their right to represent the art of the peoples of the USSR. “Rootless cosmopolitans” introduced, in the opinion of the authorities, “foreign” and “polluted” the “pure,” “authentic,” art of the peoples of the USSR. The Soviet ruling international-socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into national-socialists. Socialists, who, by definition, were supposed to be internationalists, proletarian internationalists, in the USSR turned into possessors of the only truth and pretenders to the “right”, “just” power over the world, the Vladimirs, (Vladimir translated as “rule over the world”).
The first ruler of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin proclaimed the conquest of the world by means of a permanent world socialist revolution. The Soviet ruling International Socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into National Socialists, for they asserted the superiority of the “Soviet nation,” while the Jews were perceived at times as an “anti-Soviet nation” and at times as a second-class citizen nation unfriendly to the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities blamed the blood. The notion of “rootless cosmopolitans” was inaccurate: cosmopolitanism is usually associated with broad-mindedness, tolerance, and is contrasted with narrowness of nationalism. In the 1940s, Jewish cultural figures were connoisseurs and patriots of local art, but they were deprived of the right to represent it, so they were “rootless patriots”, “stateless patriots”. Their homeland was stolen from them. This was a phenomenon that could be called in Greek “kleptopatria.” Their high expectations were crushed.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.