Out of the Ghetto

Pervomais’kyi began as a Ukrainian-Jewish prose writer. The earliest collection he published, Den’ novyi (The New Day, 1927), containing short stories penned in the mid-1920s, vividly portrays the decay of the old shtetl and the birth of the generation of new Jews who once and for all abandon their native shtetl, whose religious obscurantism they find old-fashioned.

If not for Isaac Babel, Pervomais’kyi’s imaginary shtetl Jewry could have been different. The dense imagery of traditional life in the former Pale of Settle­ment in Babel’s The Red Cavalry had a long-lasting impact on Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian writers. Thousands of readers memorized stories from The Red Cavalry in the 1920s, so that even Jorge Luis Borges, writing about Babel for the Buenos Aires women’s journal, El Hogar, was aware of Babel’s popularity.²⁹ The irresistible Red Cavalry Cossacks made the reader absorb the imagery of Babel’s Jewish shtetl dwellers, although shtetl Jews were not as salient in The Red Cav­alry as the Jewish gangsters in his Odessa Stories. In contrast to the robust, jovial, and brutal Cossacks, the Jews of Babel’s Ukrainian and Polish shtetls were por­trayed as decrepit, old, and agonizing. The towns that emerged on the pages of The Red Cavalry—Zhitomir, Kozin, Novograd-Volynskii and the like—smell of imminent death.

Babel’s pattern, dominant in the mid-1920s and in the 1930s, turned into a sine qua non for those depicting traditional East European Jewry. Il’ia Ehren­burg accepted it at face value when taking his picaresque adventurer Layzik Roitshvanets from godforsaken provincial Gomel to the country’s capital. In his Ukrainian Notes of a Consul, perhaps also under Babel’s impact, Ivan Kulyk compared the poverty and agony of the Indian reservations in Canada to a mori­bund Jewish shtetl in Poland. In the 1920s in Jewish schoolbook illustrations, the shtetl appeared as a narrow and stiff room in which an ever-yelling long-bearded Jew is bent over the pages of the Talmud, surrounded by yawning, crying, sleep­ing, joking but always shabby children. Following Babel’s lead, such Soviet Yid­dish writers as Leyb Kvitko, Natan Zabara, and Avrum Veviorka celebrated ro­bust, physically adept, and hard-working Jews who abandoned the shtetl, moved to the newly established agricultural colonies in southern Ukraine, and began working the arable land. Izi Kharik, a Soviet Yiddish writer and poet, instead of reiterating his incantation “Shtetele, disappear!” began celebrating the new Jew­ish peasants’ “day of harvesting.”³¹

Yiddish writers identified as losers those Jews who were stuck in the past and preferred to remain behind the counter of their devastated shtetl stores.

Pervomais’kyi’s first significant Jewish composition, the Ukrainian novel Zemlia obitovana (The Promised Land), was written in 1926, published in 1927 in the Molodniak journal, and later reappeared three times in various book edi- tions.³³ Like the narrator of Babel’s Red Cavalry, Pervomais’kyi portrayed a shtetl, a decayed and filthy town governed by economic oppression, poverty, and Judaism and doomed to oblivion and death: “The shtetl went to sleep early, lulled by the evening song, switched off its lights and then it became quiet, as if the day’s noise never existed and as if the virgin land of the steppe was not lit­tered by the rubbish of crooked and broken huts of the crippled shtetl artisans who lived like moles in their holes, amidst dirt and tribulations.”³⁴

At the center of Pervomais’kyi’s epic plot is a character called Ierukhim: a name that in Russian-Jewish and Yiddish literature signified an unhappy shtetl Jew whose life is but one single calamity caused by his Judaic rites, as in Grigorii Bogrov’s novel Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew, 1871-73).³⁵ Pervomais’kyi entirely recasts the traditional Jewish pattern. To celebrate the liberation of his teenaged Ierukhim from the ever-growing pressure of Judaism, Pervomais’kyi places his main character within a traditional Jewish family framework, perhaps not too different from his own.

But the “fanatic and drunkard” Avrum-Iankel is also a dreamer. The Land of Israel, the land of his forefathers, the Promised Land is constantly on his mind and, since he is permanently drunk, it is also on his tongue. “Revolution,” laments Avrum-Iankel, “Oh, those sheydim [devils]. If not for them, I would have long been in Palestine. Money I had already saved, but now—neither money, nor Palestine.” He addresses his son: “Listen, Ierukhim: you will grow up and will leave for Palestine. You will not stay among those goyim [gentiles], you must leave. So far I have been beaten by a district policeman, and by a town policeman, and by the haidamaks and the Germans, by the Bolsheviks and Denikin and again the Bolsheviks.... Who knows who’s gonna be next to beat us?”³⁶

Painstakingly reproducing his shtetl couleur locale, Pervoimais’kyi intro­duces many Jewish religious notions into his Ukrainian, mostly in their Yiddish version, and even provides systematic explanatory notes. Yet while discussing Avrum-Iankel’s dream, he avoids using the commonly accepted Eretz Yisroel, Yiddish for the Land of Israel, and uses Palestine instead, as if to merge Zionist political references with the traditional Jewish ones, seen by socialist atheist propaganda as identical—and identically bad. Even at his son’s Bar Mitzvah, Avrum-Iankel delves into a depressing song about a wailing Jew moving to Pales­tine, instead of joyously celebrating his son’s becoming an adult bound by the entirety of Judaic divine commandments.

Ierukhim does and does not fulfill his oath. In search of his own promised land, he runs away from the fastidious synagogue-centered shtetl, which physi­cally abused him, mercilessly suppressed his voice, and disdained his visionary self. His escape triggers the premature demise of his mother and the progressive paralysis of his father and turns Ierukhim into a vagabond beggar. Soon he joins a gang of railroad muggers, ever-hungry and penniless teenaged boys, who feed him but humiliate him as a Jew. Although the description of Ierukhim’s ordeals as an unlucky pickpocket is construed as the inversion of the Christian Oliver Twist, who found himself in the motley company of the Jew Feigin, Ierukhim’s adventures should not distract the reader from the terrifying passages focused on the country’s famine. Pervomais’kyi succinctly sketched the atmosphere of over­whelming fear that makes parents abandon their children, leaving them to the good will of the famine-stricken society. Pervomais’kyi reminds the reader at the outset that the action takes place around 1921, when the Bolsheviks had started planning the New Economic Policy, making sure that the donations from the West, and from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in particu­lar, would help them to feed the hungry nation and rebuild the war-ravaged economy.

And yet, given the later context of the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, it is dif­ficult to disassociate the events depicted in The Promised Land from the catastro­phe that wiped out several million Ukrainians in the early 1930s, particularly since Pervomais’kyi, in a poignant prophecy, talks about the unprecedented magnitude of the tragedy.³⁷ Some direct references to the catastrophic effects of the Ukrainian famine may also be found in Pervomais’kyi’s play The Shtetl Lade- niu. Perhaps these very references to an altogether prohibited theme, and not merely the abundance of Jewish ideas and metaphors, made both texts, The Shtetl Ladeniu and The Promised Land, quite impossible to print in the Soviet Union after 1933. That Pervomais’kyi raised the issue of famine—he was finish­ing The Shtetl Ladeniu in 1933 when it was in full sway—allows us to place him, together with Osip Mandelshtam, among those very few who dared raise their voice in favor of the Ukrainian victims of the famine in the midst of the deafen­ing and unanimous silence reigning in the contemporary Soviet literature.³⁸ Pervomais’kyi’s reference was not inconsistent with his unwritten motto: to identify with the victimized, colonized, oppressed, and doomed.

Driven by famine to crime, Ierukhim finds himself in a colony but eventually makes his way out, becomes a typesetter at a printing press (remember Pervo- mais’kyi’s empathy for “living” letters), and joins the Komsomol. No longer a shtetl Jew—the shtetl dwellers dub him a goy and a gazln, Yiddish for a non-Jew and a thief—Ierukhim goes back to his native town. His return manifests his fi­nal rupture with Jewish tradition. Not only does Ierukhim eloquently articulate his own vision of the non-Judaic and nonreligious Promised Land in his conver­sation with his dying father, but he is also eloquently silent when tradition im­poses on him the recital of an obligatory mourning prayer at his father’s grave.³⁹ Although the story of Ierukhim may or may not have referred to the author’s personal story, Pervomais’kyi charged his main character with the task of pro­nouncing what may be viewed as the early Pervomais’kyi’s response to the Jewish tradition, but by no means the final one.

To demonstrate that Ierukhim—as well as his author—was intimately fa­miliar with this tradition, Pervomais’kyi crammed his text with such Judaic no­tions as maftir, the privilege to read the final excerpt of the weekly Torah reading; the bimah, a table-like elevation on which the scroll is placed; and the oren ha- koydesh, the holy ark in which Torah scrolls are placed. Yet he made Ierukhim indignant about Judaic restrictions imposed on Jewish-gentile interaction— Jewish xenophobia that East European rabbinic authorities imposed on the com­munity in response to millennia of gentile hatred and persecution of Jews. This is Pervomais’kyi’s Ierukhim, a double of the runaway Troianker or Kulyk and perhaps of Pervomais’kyi himself, articulating his response to spiritual, psycho­logical, and physical violence:

He started to realize that his running away was a sort of a protest, unskilled, senseless, yet the protest of a child against a blue synagogue dome sprinkled with golden stars, against the trade taking place under that dome for the privilege of maftir, for honors, for what else? For all sorts of things. From out there, from that bimah emanated the conservative spirit of a rabbinic sermon instilling the fear of a terrible god, the merciless yehovah, a degenerated grandpa. A Jew is not al­lowed to do anything. You would like to do this?—No! You may want something else?—No! Because from under the synagogue dome the Jewish god closely watches you singing his painful melody:

(a Jew must be a Jew, a Jew must sing psalms, love his wife,

go to the synagogue and eat challah and gefilte fish on Fridays... and a Jew— whoever he becomes—must think about Palestine, the land of his forefathers).

Oh, the Jewish god! He looks very much like Jehudah-Leyb Yirkhin, the manu­facturer of white buttons and starched collars. Nu, yes! The Jewish god does not need human love. He needs the love of a Jew to a Jew! Do not buy from a goy, do not befriend him, do not walk with him. A Jew must know who he is, hence the latter. Oh, that narrow-mindedness of a Jewish ghetto! How many geniuses and talents have you brought forth? How many more could you have produced if not for your painted dome or for the antique synagogue and for the toothless one­eyed Jehovah threatening with his fist from the “oren ha-koydesh”?⁴⁰

Recall one of the “negative” commandments that both the grown-up Pervo­mais’kyi and his characters flatly rejected: the ban on the rapprochement with the Other, in this case with the surrounding Ukrainian people. It was his sympa­thy for non-Jews and non-Jewish culture, in this case Ukrainian culture, that shaped Pervomais’kyi’s imagery and pushed him away—at least for the time be­ing—from his early ethnocentric prose.

Like Troianker’s parting with the shtetl, Pervomais’kyi’s departure from Ju­daism in The Promised Land is ambiguous. He uses a good deal of fusion imagery firmly rooted in Judaic tradition to convey his rift with it. Direct and implicit Jewish references make Pervomais’kyi’s old shtetl world not only rejected but also appropriated by the reader.⁴¹ Wittily, Pervomais’kyi did not footnote the fi­nal conversation—heavily based on the Judaic subtext—between Ierukhim and Avrum-Iankel, yet one can easily reconstruct it. Appealing to his father’s back­ground, Ierukhim claims to have found what he had sworn to find: “The land?” Ierukhim’s entire body leaned forward. “The promised land? Probably I have found it, dad.... It is not overseas, no.... Do you understand?” The reader might not understand, but his father certainly does. Ierukhim cites the weekly Torah chapter Nitsavim from Deuteronomy 30:12, which underscores the hu­mane side of the Jewish tradition, indicating that the Torah is about interper­sonal, social, and cultural relations, rather than about a vague awe before a dis­tant celestial authority. Lo ba-shamayim hi ve-lo me-ever la-yam hi—“It is not in heaven and it is not overseas.” Pervomais’kyi translates Judaic notions into metaphors: his Promised Land is Ukraine, his chosen nation is the people of this land, and his Pentateuch, “life” as it is. Ierukhim, whose voice had always been suppressed, wins by rejecting the homiletic monopoly over the Bible and boldly claiming his own right to understand and interpret the sacred text.

Pervomais’kyi is not entirely satisfied when Ierukhim rediscovers his own voice. The shtetl is full of voiceless Ierukhims; everybody is a Ierukhim in a shtetl. To foster the collective emancipation of the shtetl Jews, Pervomais’kyi de­cides to take them out of the shtetl and integrate them into the Ukrainian envi­ronment, replicating the decision of the Bolsheviks to resettle impoverished Jews on farmland in southern Ukraine and the Crimea. Pervomais’kyi under­took this experiment in his much-acclaimed play The Shtetl Ladeniu, nowadays completely forgotten. Whereas his other plays enjoyed a mixed reception, The Shtetl Ladeniu, as Pervomais’kyi mentioned in his brief autobiography, “enjoyed universal success.”⁴² Ladeniu, an imaginary Jewish town in Belorussia, is a charged name: it conveys either harmony (from the Slavic lad) or kindness (from the Ukrainian lado) or Pervomais’kyi’s indictment of the Jewish past (from the Yiddish lodn, to sue). Its diminutive Yiddish suffix also emphasizes the author’s irony and sensitivity toward his Jews’ attachment to their native shtetl.

Pervomais’kyi starts The Shtetl Ladeniu exactly where he left off in The Promised Land: at a graveyard. While a small group of religious Jews obsessively prepares for the burial of Kargman, the synagogue beadle, others are preparing for the exodus to the newly established collective farm in Kherson Province in southern Ukraine. With the glorious future on the horizon, they do not want to be part of the prayer quorum: let the dead bury their dead! They have other things to deal with. They decide what to do with the Passover flour sent to them from America and vote for the list of the agricultural commune members on which, at the last moment, the poor Riva manages to include her father, Elya, the cemetery caretaker and gravedigger. Like the protagonist of The Promised Land, Riva and Elya, the poorest Jews from the lowest level of shtetl society, decide to part with their traditional past. Once the list of the Jewish colonists is approved and the “capitalist” Passover flour sent back to America, there appears in the shtetl a certain Iosef-Itse Kargman, the son of the deceased synagogue beadle, a former industrial worker, and a military man. He comes, as he says, to “bury the shtetl” and to lead the Jews to their happy agricultural future.

The newly established Jewish collective farm exposes class antagonisms in both Jewish and Ukrainian societies. The Jew Kusher, of bourgeois origin and now the keeper of the storehouse, and the Ukrainian Korchma, a former kulak whose land was expropriated, for various reasons dislike Jewish colonists. Both names are significant: Kusher is the Ukrainian Yiddish for “proper” (kosher), korchma the Ukrainian for “inn.” Both names refer to what Soviet ideology clas­sified as the “opium of the people,” the relics of the accursed tsarist past. Korchma cannot reconcile himself to the loss of land: he wants Jews to fail and does not spare any means to hasten their failure. He prophesizes: “Jews have settled on the land, and the signs of draught have already become visible.”⁴³ Korchma finds support in Kusher, who takes every opportunity to scold Jews for betraying their traditional occupations, to encourage their return to the shtetl, and even to incite local Ukrainian peasants against the Jewish ploughmen.

Their scheming falls on fertile soil, for there is no unity among the Jewish colonists. It is easy to get the Jews out of the shtetl yet difficult to get the shtetl out of the Jews. Pervomais’kyi mocks the religious parochialism, which contin­ues to shape Jewish mentality and makes them wonder: What should they name their collective farm, “Jewish Luck” or “The Third International”? Why is Marta, the wife of their leader, Kargman, not Jewish? Should they, Jewish agri­cultural settlers, cover themselves with prayer shawls and pray for good rain, abundant crops, and the safe birth of a new baby boy even if they are no longer in the shtetl? Since Kargman is in no hurry to return from the provincial center with a tractor—just as Moses was in no hurry to descend from Mount Sinai with the Tablets—the corrupt colonial past has the upper hand for a short period. Kushner provokes a fight among the Jews, makes them elect him the new head of the collective farm, urges them to consider leasing their land to Korchma, and has them dispatch an invitation to the melamed, Shimon Gets, still residing in Ladeniu, to come and again teach Judaism to a repentant flock. Here the class struggle gains momentum, making one of the main characters proclaim that “nations do not fight, classes do.” Socialist providence triumphs at the end: the golden harvest fills the barns; the plotters are arrested; Kargman comes back with prizes for the best agricultural workers; the Ukrainian peasants reconcile their differences with the Jewish colonists; and the sudden arrival of Shimon Gets, demanding the teaching position that had been mistakenly offered to him, makes the end of the play not only happy but also funny.⁴⁴

Yet the charm of Pervomais’kyi’s dramatization of the collectivization pro­gram is in its innovative style, language, and imagery rather than in its unsophis­ticated Marxist plot. In the play, Pervomais’kyi elucidates his grand metaphor: his “life,” his Jewish collective farm, and his Ukraine become one. There is no need to seek the Promised Land anywhere beyond Ukraine: Ukrainian socialist and agricultural utopia is the Promised Land. The Ukrainian village furnishes an unparalleled rapprochement between the formerly oppressed Jews and Ukrainians. The integration of the moribund and impoverished Jews into Ukrainian peasant culture brings the rise of a new Jew—robust, optimistic, and speaking pure Ukrainian. To emphasize this equation, bordering on the mythi­cal, Pervomais’kyi realizes that the more recognizable his myth, the more signif­icant its effect. He pens a socialist travesty of the book of Exodus, articulating the necessity to get Jews out of the shtetl and resettle them on the land. In accord with his new myth, the shtetl Ladeniu and its economic bondage and hardships becomes the new Egypt, and Ukrainian agricultural settlements embody the postcolonial land flowing with milk and honey. Shtetl and petty trade symbolize prison, slavery, and death, while Ukraine and village acquire the taste of the sal­vation.

Underscoring the supreme value of this solution, Pervomais’kyi introduces a certain Pinia Schneerson: he had left for colonial Palestine and become a worker in a quarry. It is easy to imagine, Pinia was constantly suffering from the British- orchestrated Arab-Jewish clashes. While the Holy Land is a subjugated British colony, the Ukrainian-Jewish agricultural colony is a liberated Holy Land. In­deed, Pervomais’kyi was not alone in this attempt to rework the outdated Judaic myths along Soviet propaganda lines. Soviet Yiddish mass culture used the same hybridization of socialist imagery and old Judaic liturgical or biblical references, constructing a new genre of Jewish musical folklore. For example, in the popular Soviet Yiddish song “Ven bolshevikes volt kumen,” the form of Dayyenu (It Would Have Sufficed!) from the traditional Passover Haggadah, the key text re­cited over the Passover seder, with its emphasis on gratitude toward and the mercy of the Almighty, was juxtaposed to the economic and social innovations of the merciful Bolsheviks: the 1920s references mock the Exodus myth, whereas the Exodus story helps mythologize the 1920s as a new era of collective redemp­tion. Both Bolsheviks and the Almighty share grace, about which Jews should feel greatly excited.⁴⁵ Pervomais’kyi fits well into this new Yiddish-Soviet fu­sion, yet his principal character is not ideology.

Pervomais’kyi’s early prose on Jewish themes effectively utilizes the linguis­tic experiments of Isaac Babel, making them utterly Ukrainian. In Babel’s Odessa Stories and in his play Zakat, one finds an attempt at a Russian-Jewish language that comprises Ukrainian colloquialisms, Yiddish syntax, Hebrew-Aramaic phraseology, Midrash (homiletic narrative) stylistic devices, and Russian prison slang. The plenitude of international merchandise that Odessa porters smuggle into the town is tantamount to the abundance of foreign derivatives that Babel introduces into his Russian language. Indeed, the succinct and aphoristic dia­logues of Odessa Stories make Babel’s language experiment contagious. Pervo- mais’kyi gladly picks it up. He introduces Jewish conversational constructs by combining rhetorical questioning, aphoristic replies, and brisk intonation shifts like the following: “Where is the shtetl going? Where are you going, Naftali, when you take the Friday night train while every honest Jew goes to the syna­gogue? To the Kherson collective farm!” In dramatic situations, his personages comically use Yiddish prepositions literally translated into Ukrainian: “Don’t talk to me for the socialism...” (ne hovory meni za sotsializm).

Sometimes Yiddish subordinate clause makes a “serious” Ukrainian sen­tence into a hilarious one: “He talks in such a way that one gets what to think about, indeed.” His Naftali uses personification to describe Soviet power, a car­ing and reliable kin: “Your American relatives think about you on the Passover, whereas Soviet power wants you to live the whole year as a human being.” Like Babel in “Konets bogadel’ni” (The End of the Poor House), Pervomais’kyi makes his characters into petty philosophers who constantly ponder existential questions while simultaneously showcasing their lowly cultural level: “We do not want to think about death. We are clutching to life.” Consider this brief mono­logue of the gravedigger, a positive philosopher: “When someone talks all his life to the dead, his first words to the living are insane. Who are you? Doctors and professors? Bring then your prescriptions and shovel them into the mouth of someone who has started to talk to the living!” Some elements of Pervomais’kyi’s Ukrainian-Jewish language have no way of being conveyed in English since they entail elements of untranslatable village dialect: his peasants for example, call Jews iavrei. For Pervomais’kyi, as well as for Babel, words have weight and form: “I am a stove-maker. I use words as bricks,” says one of the hard-working Jews.⁴⁶ Note the image of Kargman, the head of the collective farm, who like Babel’s Li- utov served during the civil war in the Red Cossacks regiment (of peasant origin) rather than in the revolutionary infantry, mostly proletarian.

This linguistic hybridization notwithstanding, Pervomais’kyi immediately abandons it once his Jews leave the shtetl. Settled on the land, most Jews turn to the clear, grammatically perfect and dramatically uplifting Ukrainian language, even when they talk about Jewish issues. Consider, for example, the Jewish colonists who gather to write a letter to their former rabbi, who is now more dis­tant for them than the Turkish sultan for the Cossacks: “ ‘To the spiritual Rabbi Schneerson.’ Have you written? Write this: ‘We are writing to you a letter on the day of our great holiday, when our collective farm has stood on both legs, the col­lective farm about which you said that there could not be a Jewish collective farm, you, old and staunch antisemite.’” Among other things, the linguistic change that occurs with Jews has a liberating, if not redemptive, effect. One of the characters wants to put it in black on white in the letter to the rabbi: “And also write that my husband, who was afraid to open his mouth in public, and who was silent for the entire ten years, and with whom I live and whom I know, so that my husband—started to talk!”⁴⁷ Since this person started to talk in Ukrainian, Pervomais’kyi thus argues for the Ukrainian acculturation of Jews through agri­cultural labor and class modification, which would make former fusion-lan­guage-speaking petty traders into full-fledged literate Ukrainians of Jewish ori­gin. Moreover, this change helps the formerly oppressed and voiceless Jew regain his voice!

By successfully settling Jews on the land, the socialist Enlightenment ac­complishes what Tsar Nicholas I failed to do: assimilate the Jews through pro­ductive, predominantly agricultural labor. Once this is done, Pervomais’kyi seems to argue that Jews would undergo a major shift, acquiring a new identity based on a new environment (village), new productive labor (agricultural), and a new culture (Ukrainian). This transformation on the basis of class identity and occupation is all the more important since the negative personages, such as Stepan, a declasse puppet of Korchma, use the Russian-Ukrainian concoction known as surzhyk, a language of Ukrainian village dwellers trying to integrate into the urban, Russian-speaking milieu.⁴⁸ For the early Pervomais’kyi, direct Russian borrowings in Ukrainian and the inability to suppress Russianisms in conversational Ukrainian is a negative sign entailing a triple treason: betrayal of agricultural labor, the village milieu, and Ukrainian culture. In short, not only is Ukraine a better promise than Palestine but Jewish settlers are better Ukrainians than the Ukrainian outcasts. Ultimately, Pervomais’kyi argues for the speedy in­tegration of the Jews into a Ukrainian peasant culture, an astonishing solution for the Jews with their millennia-long urban-dwelling track record and the three hundred years of Ukrainian-Jewish animosity carved in the cultural memories of both people.

The critics praised Pervomais’kyi’s treatment of Jewish themes. Some liked the author’s warmth and empathy toward his Jewish shtetl images. An anony­mous critic of The Promised Land grasped some important features of Pervo­mais’kyi’s criticism of the traditional Jewish utopia. He noted that amid pogroms, persecutions, hardships, and continuous mockery, the shtetl-based paupers in the former Pale of Settlement sought redemption in a magic word: Palestine. Although Pervomais’kyi rejected old-fashioned obscurantism, he still loved his Jewish ghetto, which obstinately cleaved to its worn-out Torah, its ru­ined synagogue, and its frightening God, long abolished by the October Revolu­tion. Quite commendably, argued the critic, Pervomais’kyi’s characters came to appreciate the value of the “incomparably beautiful life, radiant as the sun,” so much more real than the visionary Palestine.⁴⁹ Other critics, for example A. Kloch- kia, noted in his review of Pervomais’kyi’s book A New Day, entitled “A Shaky Bridge” (1927), that “the description of the poor Jewish shtetl” betrays in Per­vomais’kyi “a profound connoisseur” of the shtetl life and emphasized that the writer is capable of constructing an original plot and vivid characters against its backdrop.⁵⁰ In addition, the critics praised Pervomais’kyi’s symbolism—the death of the old shtetl elaborately intertwined with the burial imagery of his play—and found plausible Pervomais’kyi’s portrayal of the “unlucky and ex­hausted people [the Jews] whom the proletarian revolution transformed into strong selfless fighters for the shining life of labor.”⁵¹