By Alex Gordon in Haifa, Israel
After the difficult years of antisemitic repression in the 1940s and 1950s, Jews in the USSR disappeared from the media, from magazines, and from official documents; their existence was silenced. The state-sponsored antisemitism of the Stalinist era is a thing of the past. It was replaced by “silent” state antisemitism. It was keenly felt due to the restrictions placed on Jews in admission to universities and employment.
Before the Zionist movement began after the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews and state-sponsored antisemitism were in the shadows, their existence secret. This situation forced Jews to be more isolated and more alienated. My father’s mother spoke French to her sons. She was a supporter of socialism and an opponent of capitalism. She spoke the language of a bourgeois country because she needed to have secret conversations about all sorts of Jewish troubles, which were impossible in the local languages Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian, which were understandable to outsiders. But it seems this forced secrecy had such an impact on my father that he became a Francophile and a professor of French literature at Kiev University.
In our family, there was a cult of French literature. It was considered the best literature in the world. Excerpts from French literature novels were quoted in the house. The home library contained French books from the nineteenth century. During the height of state-sponsored antisemitism my father was dismissed from Kiev University and expelled from Kiev as an “antisocialist admirer of bourgeois literature.” My father left our family, but the old French books remained and provided me with fascinating reading.
After breaking up with my father, my mother continued to be passionate about French literature. When she remarried, she once again found herself in the atmosphere of the French court. Her second husband’s father received an engineering education in France because he couldn’t study at Russian universities due to tsarist state antisemitism, specifically the numerus clausus. (Numerus clausus, translated from Latin as “closed number,” is a method of limiting the number of students who can study at a university.) Her husband’s father also created a cult of France in his home. He longed for that beautiful country, the country of his youth, and infected his son with a love for France.
His son, my stepfather, was a physics professor and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He couldn’t have reached his high position if he hadn’t become a communist. He dreamed of participating in international conferences in his field, especially in France, which was dear to his father, but the Soviet authorities did not believe in my stepfather’s sincere devotion to communism and did not grant him permission to leave the USSR for Western countries. The authorities were afraid he wouldn’t return to the USSR, thus compromising his country and Soviet socialism, “betraying” it for capitalism, and they were right, because he was an anti-communist with a communist party card. Unlike my father’s mother, a fervent admirer of socialism, my stepfather disliked the USSR and dreamed of coming to France, if not permanently, then at least for a scientific conference.
In September 1968, an international conference on my stepfather’s scientific interests was held in Grenoble. A local professor, a French Jew whom I’ll call P. A., was one of the leading specialists in this field at the time. He invited my stepfather to participate in it. The stepfather was anxiously preparing for this conference, but at the very last moment, as had often happened before, the authorities didn’t let him attend it. He was not destined to break into the country that celebrates its national holiday on my birthday. I made his dream come true.
I worked in Grenoble for many years and once met P. A. there. He remembered my stepfather’s work and the story of his not coming to Grenoble. However, he didn’t share my outrage at the Soviet communists who wouldn’t let my stepfather attend the conference in the West, because he was a French communist. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a Nobel laureate in physics, called P. A. “a pillar of the Communist Party.” I don’t identify P.A further because our conversation was private.
After the story about my stepfather, we moved on to discussing antisemitism in France. P. A. stated that there is no antisemitism among the people he interacts with. And in general, in his opinion, there is no antisemitism in France. When a French Jew claims there is no antisemitism in his country, it doesn’t indicate his blindness, but his ideology: he is indifferent to the “Jewish question.”
I’m used to Soviet Jewish communists who were secret enemies of the Soviet regime. But in P. A., I met a true supporter of communism. A little earlier, I had already listened to speeches by some of my French communist colleagues at the institute where I worked. Their words reminded me of articles from the Soviet newspaper Pravda (truth). P. A. turned out to be a harsh critic of France.
P. A. told me, “France is gradually becoming an Arab country, not only in terms of population composition but also in its attitude toward work. We are ruled by soft bourgeois democrats, and people, lacking discipline, have forgotten how to work. Now they are difficult to teach. You know what you should do? To beat. Children need to be beaten. In elementary school, my teacher used to hit my fingers with a ruler. That was, of course, unethical, unaesthetic, but useful. I don’t need to tell you that teachers used to beat students in old Jewish schools. In Israel, children have also become completely spoiled. Jews cannot afford to let their children run wild. The people need discipline, without which work ethic is low. France doesn’t teach physics well. This profession requires hard work and is incompatible with fighting for the right to rest. Bourgeois democracy spoils people by caring for their rights instead of imposing iron discipline. Democracy fosters laziness, idleness, and weakness of character. Democratic France is falling into an abyss. It is weak, hypocritical, unable to fight the Arab invasion, idleness, and effeminacy. It will perish without a communist revolution.”
Yes, in capitalist France, I met a fighter against capitalism. And that revolutionary turned out to be a Jew. He was an example from the history of the Jewish people. The active participation of Jews in the communist movement was a result of their flight from their own tiresome and inconvenient Jewishness and a consequence of assimilation into a universal, non-Jewish world. Their break with national traditions turned them into radicals acting in the name of universalism and disregarding Jewishness. Identifying with no nation, Jewish communists were unconcerned about the consequences of their radical actions toward any nation, including the Jewish one. The sad history of the Jewish people could be studied thru the example of the Jewish physicist P. A.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 12 books.