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Yiddish in the USSR
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To the Editor:
Although I have already written one letter concerning David G. Roskies’s article, “ ‘There Go Our Little Jews’ ” [April 1990], I feel it necessary to make some further remarks on the sinister exchange of attacks between Mr. Roskies and Bernard Choseed in your November 1990 issue [Letters from Readers]. As one who is deeply involved in several activities dealing with the problem of the survival of Yiddish in the Soviet Union (I am an editor of Yungvald magazine, a student of Shimon Sander, the author of Yiddish Self-Taught, and am also active in a joint Soviet-American educational and archival project), I see the problem being discussed in a different light. Unfortunately, both Mr. Choseed and Mr. Roskies are wrong in their treatment—the one fervently defending, the other fervently accusing—of the Communist Yiddish cultural model in the Soviet Union, simply because that model has already ceased to exist. Mr. Choseed’s advocacy of Birobidzhan cannot help to restore even that level of Jewish culture which existed there until 1948, and in any case it is clear now that Birobidzhan as a Jewish Autonomous Region is doomed due to the present wave of emigration. Nor is Mr. Roskies right in his completely derogatory evaluation of Birobidzhan as a Potemkin village. Such a judgment is incorrect in light of the culture that did exist there until it was cruelly exterminated by Stalin in 1948 (almost all Jewish activists were imprisoned, books were burned, schools closed down, etc.).
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