A Holocaust Survivor

In 1943, in his essay Uchytel istorii (A History Teacher), Pervomais’kyi wrote of his protagonist: “The war stepped down from the history textbook and was marching through the roads of his motherland.”⁸² In 1941, Pervomais’kyi volunteered for the Red Army.

The Russian military documents issued to “Pervo- maiskii-Gurevich Il’ia Shlemovich” in 1942 testify that he was appointed “a literary instructor of Front Radio on the Southwestern Front.”⁸³ Together with the retreating troops, Pervomais’kyi moved eastward into Russia, leaving the southwestern region, in other words, Ukraine. It was a bitter experience. On leaving Ukraine, Pervomais’kyi took with him a small piece of earth, a reminder of the land and country to which he belonged. Shortly thereafter, he wrote:

I picked a piece of earth on the road,

Washed by the autumn rains.

Heavy and dark, it was running cold,

Like a poor heart drained of blood.

The darkness behind us waved with fires.

The horn has called. I rushed to the trucks.

Forward we moved, as commanded,

But I could not throw back on the road

A small piece of your earth, Ukraine.⁸⁴

The poem that told this story was one of his most patriotic poems and reflected his deepest empathy toward, and identification with, Ukraine. His feelings were epitomized in the image of “a small piece of Ukrainian earth” picked up “on the road,” the last remnant of what once was for him “the road of the... promised land of humanity, already approaching and shining.”

Written in the genre of a ballad, the poem juxtaposed the minutiae of wartime routine with the bitter feelings and utmost hopes of the author:

This was all that remained with me

For memory about the days of my youth The land, where I grew up and matured, About my native steppe, rivers, and hills, About an old trunk of a grey willow That leaned over the current Of my past...

A piece of earth!

It constantly lies on my heart,

Uniting my anger and my pity

Into one stream with you, Ukraine!

The repetition of the image of a piece of land in each of the stanzas turned the poem into a powerful lament for the fate of Ukraine. On hearing the poem recited by Pervomais’kyi in ice-cold Moscow in the winter of 1942, Pavlo Tychyna was reported to have been left speechless and Maxim Ryl’s’kyi to have exclaimed, “What a language!”

The collection of poems Zemlia (The Land, 1943), which included among others “A Small Piece of Your Earth,” brought Pervomais’kyi the reputation as one of the best Soviet poets and earned him the 1946 Stalin Prize. Il’ia Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman were among those who shared Pervomais’kyi’s belligerent patriotic stance and identification with the land and people that had been conquered and humiliated by the enemy: there is evidence that at the front the author of “A Small Piece of Your Land” befriended both. Pervomais’kyi spent all four years as a war correspondent: his 1945 documents listed him as “Major Pervomaiskii—Gurevich Il’ia Shlemovich, on active military service as Pravda military correspondent.”⁸⁵ Praising the stamina and stoicism of the rank-and-file soldiers during the war, Pervomais’kyi retreated with the army from Kyiv to Stalingrad and then moved westward through Romania, Austria, and Hungary.⁸⁶ He experienced neither the ordeal of living under the Nazis in the occupied territories nor the fate of a POW in a concentration camp. Before the Nazis entered Kyiv, Pervomais’kyi managed to move his Jewish family— Evdokiia Pevsner, his wife; Susanna Hurevych, his only daughter; and Berta Pevsner, his mother-in-law—out of town and send them to be evacuated. It is hard to know at what point he came across the Jewish experience in World War II, but the Holocaust came to occupy a salient place in his writings.

Pervomais’kyi was anything but an epic narrator of the World War II experience.

To convey what happened to his brethren, he eliminated distance between himself and his images, imagined himself at the edge of a freshly dug pit, and portrayed himself as a Holocaust victim. In his poetry on the Holocaust, Pervomais’kyi saw himself point-blank through the eyes of the East European Jews at the last moments of their lives. His own voice was reaching out to him from the crematoria and mass graves, appealing to his conscience, and scaring his poetic imagination. By the same token, Il’ia Ehrenburg, a Kyiv-born poet and writer, wrote in a 1944 poem on the Babi Yar massacre: “I hear how from every pit you are calling me.”⁸⁷

What was the second-person plural for Ehrenburg became first-person singular for Pervomais’kyi, who introduced lyric propinquity instead of epic distancing. He was calling himself from a pit, as if his guilty conscience and his executed Jewishness were talking to his well-protected Ukrainian self-conscience. Sometimes his Holocaust verse reads as Iliusha Hurevych crying out to Leonid Pervomais’kyi, or as a voiceless Jew addressing his articulate Ukrainian alter ego. To distance himself from the Holocaust was treason: contrary to what he had actually undergone, Pervomais’kyi incorporated the mass murder of Jews into his personal experience. The recurrent Holocaust theme in Pervomais’kyi’s prose and poetry suggests that he was reidentifying himself not only as a Ukrainian poet concerned with the Nazi atrocities but also as a Holocaust Jew guilty of survival.

Pervomais’kyi’s attitude to the Holocaust is best illuminated in his perception of the poetry and life of Miklos Radnoti (b. Miklos Glatter, 1909 -44), a Hungarian poet of Jewish descent. Although in the wake of mass executions of Hungarian Jews, Radnoti converted to Catholicism, he was deported from Budapest to the forced labor camp at Heidenau and shot together with twenty-one other people by a squad of Hungarian police.⁸⁸ When the mass grave was exhumed two years later, a notebook was found on him containing the poems he continued writing until the last hours of the trip.

The widow of Nikolai Chu- kovskii recalled: “After the death of Nikolai Korneevich they published a book of poetry of the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, translated by L[eonid] Martynov, D[avid] Samoilov, and N[ikolai] Chukovskii. I sent it to Pervomais’kyi. He wrote back a letter full of excitement. The tragic fate of Radnoti executed by the retreating Nazis, stirred his imagination, and he dramatically described in the letter the last hours of the poet’s life.”⁸⁹

Pervomais’kyi wrote back with gratitude and admiration:

Radnoti has two lines that are worthy his ordeal through all the circles of hell, and he articulated them for all those who remained voiceless, who died silently, with the same idea in mind:

And I will be murdered because I am not cruel

And because I am not a murderer.

Ifhe had written only these lines, it would have sufficed for him to be among the purest hearts of humankind, who preferred to die rather than to stoop to falsehood and violence.⁹⁰

Pervomais’kyi’s interest in the figure of Radnoti resulted in his implicit identification with the Hungarian poet. Pervomais’kyi translated some of Radnoti’s later verses and then incorporated one of their key motifs—that of “either be murderer or be murdered”—into his own poetry and into his own predicament. He inserted it into the Holocaust framework. He argued that in the midst of destruction and mass executions, when the dreadful noise is still heard from the ravines and the smoke lifts human ashes to heaven,

A privilege the poets retain

Rejecting any other claims:

To stay with those who are slain,

And not with those who coldly slay.

Miklos Radnoti’s final words fit with Pervomais’kyi ethical credo, as if it were he, Leonid Pervomais’kyi, who had been taken to Heidenau camp on foot and shot. Perhaps Pervomais’kyi knew that Radnoti, like himself, was a Jew who, like Per- vomais’kyi, retained his dual identity.

There were probably other reasons why Pervomais’kyi identified with Rad- noti, to the extent that he turned Radnoti’s intimate soliloquy into an imperative for the members of their common guild.

Yet there was an even more crucial reason. Picking up a line from a murdered Hungarian-Jewish poet and making it into his own credo, Pervomais’kyi continued to develop one of his key ideas: the voice of a speechless victim is the voice of the ultimate truth; a poet must decipher, create, or articulate this equation. To understand Pervomais’kyi’s appropriation and universalization of Radnoti’s ethics of nonviolence, one should compare and contrast his treatment of Radnoti with that of David Samoilov, a Russian poet and translator neglected in the West who referred to the Hungarian poet in his “Fantazia o Radnoti” (Imagining Radnoti). In it, a rank-and-file soldier on the front in World War II comes across a wagon of gypsies somewhere around Oranienbaum. In the wagon is an old and decrepit man, most likely insane, who introduces himself as “the great Hungarian poet, Radnoti Miklos.”⁹¹ Samoilov points out that he only later realized that “Radnoti had died very young in a Serbian camp,” thus ex post facto emphasizing the madness of a senile old vagabond. Samoilov reiterates that he remembered accurately how the old man had been shouting out that he had been Radnoti Miklos, yet his surprise and disbelief distance him significantly from the old gypsy. Paradoxically, this fictitious image of a madman who contrary to the obvious presented himself as a poet who had perished in the Holocaust to some extent parallels Pervomais’kyi’s tacit solidarity with Radnoti.

Be that as it may, for Pervomais’kyi the Holocaust in general and the Babi Yar massacre in particular became the key element in redefining his identity. The Babi Yar events still challenge the imagination and present an insurmountable obstacle for anyone who tries to present artistically the bloody massacre of some 35,000 Jews during the last two days of September 1941. Unlike a number of poems by Ukrainian-Jewish literati, such as Abram Katsnel’son, dedicated to the Babi Yar, Pervomais’kyi does not depict the massacre from a safe epic distance and does not curse the Nazis. Perpetrators of the violence have no right to be heard or talked about.

Instead, Pervomais’kyi composes the monologue of a father who turns to his son at the very last moment of their lives with his last lullaby:

Stay near me, my son, here, my son

I will close your eyes with my palm

You will see not your death—

Just the blood on my fingers under the sun.⁹²

Here, too, Pervomais’kyi resorts to a bitter self-identification with a victim of violence. On the edge of the grave he establishes his new family ties, thus humanizing the execution. What he does in the poem is reminiscent of the Holocaust episode in Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate (which Pervomais’kyi would have had no chance to read), in which Sofia Levinton, a childless woman from a mixed marriage, dies in a gas chamber with the orphaned boy David, pressing his body to hers thus preventing the boy’s prolonged suffocation, and as Grossman points, “becoming a mother” at that very moment.⁹³

The discussion of the Babi Yar tragedy continues in Pervomais’kyi’s prose, in which he, as before, portrays the encounter of Ukrainians and Jews under the most unusual and unpropitious circumstances: Kyiv on the eve of the Babi Yar massacre. For his “Vulytsia Mel’nykova” (Mel’nykov Street), Pervomais’kyi chose a perspective close to that of Boris lampol’skii, who in his short story “Ten Lilliputians on One Bed” depicted the relations between ten circus Lilliputians (most probably, Russian Orthodox) and their denationalized Kievan landlord on the eve of the Babi Yar mass execution as the relations between the Jews and the non-Jews during the Holocaust.⁹⁴ Contrary to lampol’skii, Pervomais’kyi’s plot unfolds in a different, if not opposite perspective. On the eve of the war, Mosia, a young Jewish man from Korostyshiv, and Klava, a Ukrainian girl from a village in Sumy District arrive in Kyiv in search of work, find each other at a dance hall, and fall in love. But “Mel’nykov Street” is not a trivial love story bringing together a former shtetl Jew and a Ukrainian village girl. Klava becomes pregnant and in his story Pervomais’kyi has her labor coincide with the final day of the Kievan Jews. Mosia has already been drafted into the Red Army and left town. And Klava has already seen and understood the meaning of the German orders for the Jews posted on Kyiv’s streets. Frightened by her premonitions, she vainly looks for her beloved curly-haired Mosia amid the Jewish crowd that is slowly moving through the streets toward the Babi Yar. Fear for Mosia’s life and for her own labor pain encircles and strangles her. She arrives at the home of “aunt Nas- tia,” her landlady, and reveals to her the nationality of the would-be child, giving her landlady sufficient pretext to inform on her and for the Nazis take her. When her birth pangs reach a climax, Klava’s fears crystallize: a Nazi soldier and three policemen in charge of passport control appear at the threshold of her rented apartment.

The appearance of the new baby, Ukrainian-Jewish by origin, proves a moment of truth. Only few hours before the event, landlady Nastia had rebuked Klava for her recklessness, distanced herself from Klava, and not without overt fear, observed Klava’s “Jewish” pregnancy. But when the Nazis are searching the apartment, she pretends Klava is her niece—who is not Jewish but of genuine Russian Orthodox creed and who has in her passport a pristine Ukrainian last name. The moment the baby boy is born and the policemen leave her premises, an ugly and grudging Nastia suddenly becomes an iconic Ukrainian Madonna with a Jewish child. By way of contrast, in lampol’skii’s “Ten Lilliputians” (which Pervomais’kyi could well have known when writing his own story), the landlord does not know what to do with his lodgers, who are abandoned by their circus entrepreneurs in the wake of the occupation of Kyiv: he doubts they are Russian Orthodox and to be politically correct he hands them over to those in charge of preparing the Babi Yar site for mass murder. Pervomais’kyi offers the opposite decision for his finale: motivated either by a feminine solidarity or by feelings that transcend barriers of nationality and creed or by both, Nastia does not turn the boy over to the Nazis. She even pretends the baby is her own and nicknames him in an unforgettable Ukrainian diminutive whose Yiddish underpinnings are easily recognizable: “They thought we would hand him over.... That we would hand them our boychik, our shnotty one [shmarkachyk]. But we will not!”⁹⁵ Nastia’s final reply delineates the subversive message of Pervomais’kyi’s story: whatever the real number of righteous gentiles in Kyiv in 1941, the most important lesson one may draw from “Mel’nykov Street” is that marginalized individuals can and should actively oppose violence. Significantly, women are among the first to actively undertake this risky enterprise.

Pervomais’kyi also introduced the Holocaust theme into his much acclaimed novel Dykyi med (Wild Honey, 1963), based on historical circumstances preceding Russian preparations for the Kursk tank battle that, according to Soviet historiography, was one of the key events that dramatically altered the course of World War II. Here he brought together—under unusual circumstances—a Jewish sniper, Shreibman, and a female military photographer, Varvara Kni- azhych, the representatives of two groups marginalized in popular imagination as useless soldiers. Pervomais’kyi, to be sure, was not able to challenge openly the widespread bias that “Jews fought in Tashkent,” a town far away from the front, yet he places his Jewish soldier in the forward trenches so that the context itself would prove the falsehood of received wisdom. In contrast, Pervomais’kyi portrays Varvara confronting military men who are reluctant to assist her in her mission and who treat her with a semi-concealed condescension, if not with hidden scorn.

Varvara Kniazhych arrives at the front on the eve of the battle secretly commissioned to photograph the Tiger tank (known as Panzerkampfwagen VI), a brand new heavy weapon that Hitler planned to use in his 1943 advance and unknown to Soviet military intelligence. The narrative rotates around this photograph, emphasizing Varvara’s role as an artist who creates visual images—to some extent Pervomais’kyi’s double. While on her mission, Varvara meets two frontline marksmen (nicknamed “the armor-piercers”), Guloian, an Armenian, and Shreibman, a Jew. A former shoe-factory worker in Kyiv, Shreibman brings Varvara to no man’s land, provides cover for her while she is taking pictures, and pays with his life for the success of her mission.⁹⁶ For Pervomais’kyi, however, Shreibman is not just an example of a Jew in the front trenches. Pervomais’kyi uses Shreibman to direct his reader’s attention to the similarity between the fate of a woman and a Jew at the front. Consider the following abridged dialogue between General Kostets’kyi and Varvara that accompanies the report about the awards given to war heroes:

“Private Shreibman has been killed, comrade General.” Kostets’kyi replied not to her but to his own thoughts.

“The Order of the [Great] Patriotic War of the First Rank will be dispatched for preservation to Shreibman’s family.”

“Shreibman’s family is in the occupied territory,” she said, swallowing a new jumble of tears overpowering her.

“... it will be granted to the family of the awardee after the liberation of the occupied territories.”⁹⁷

Varvara knows well what it implies for Jews to remain in the occupied territory. She realizes that no one is capable of defending the posthumous memory of the Jewish soldier, nor does anyone needs to have his memory defended. Shreib- man’s solitude is absolute. Even the local war journalist does not want to mention Shreibman in his article, leaving him voiceless and also nameless: Shreib- man disturbs him, and “he mentioned him among other things, without naming him. ‘Anyhow, Shreibman is dead and does not need any glory.’”⁹⁸

Unlike this male journalist, Varvara, a non-Jew and a woman, fully identifies with Shreibman, with his most likely murdered family, and with the victimized Jews. Varvara raises her voice for the voiceless, a task Pervomais’kyi usually took upon himself but in this novel delegates to his female protagonist. A woman in the military, scorned by some officers who grudgingly cooperate with her, Varvara seems to know better than anybody else what it was to be a Jew in the military. And although she manages to suppress the “male” opposition to her mission thanks to its secrecy, this does not imply that she turns a deaf ear to the two non-Russians who helped her to accomplish it.

A female war journalist vis-a-vis the male-dominated army, Varvara recognizes her comrade-in-distress. Shreibman saved her mission and perhaps her life, and Varvara comes to redeem Shreibman, whom the biased military doomed to oblivion and dishonor. Unexpectedly, the anticolonialist ethical principles of both Pervomais’kyi and his Varvara became apparent during the editorial travails of The Wild Honey, when the consistent democrat Aleksandr Tvardovskii refused to publish the Russian version of the novel in his much-acclaimed Novyi Mir because he could not tolerate a woman as the main character of a war novel! Did Tvardovskii realize that Varvara challenged his imperial-based principles and, consequently, the limits of the ideology of the shestidesiatniki, the generation of the thaw of the 1960s? Be that as it may, Pervomais’kyi’s close focus on the Holocaust and Jewish themes in the 1940s to 1960s is particularly astonishing, given that the poet himself became a victim of the anti-Jewish persecutions of the late 1940s and for the first time in his life appeared among the humiliated and persecuted with whom he was trying to identify metaphorically throughout his career.

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Source: Petrovsky-Shtern Yohanan. The Anti-Imperial Choice. The Making of the Ukrainian Jew. New Haven; London: Yale University Press,2009. — 384 p.. 2009

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