Posted on 12/07/2001 10:15:51 PM PST by madrussian
Many of the Jewish immigrants who reached the United States during the great immigration of 1881-1914 were believers in socialism, and ardent supporters of trade unions and other pro-labor organizations. The Russian Revolution in 1917 strengthened their communist fervor: Quite a few were convinced that the "days of the messiah" had come and a just society would soon arise in the Soviet Union where Jews could fulfil their duty as Soviet citizens.
And yet hardly any of them went so far as to return to their land of birth. Most preferred to continue their pursuit of the American dream, according to which every immigrant laborer could get ahead, establish himself financially, and give his American-born children an education that would enable them to be president of the United States one day. For the majority, the dream of financial prosperity vanished within a decade, as the Great Depression left tens of thousands of people dying of hunger and created unemployment on a scale unknown since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
This was the atmosphere in which Mary Leder's parents decided to return to the Soviet Union and try their luck in the Jewish autonomous republic of Birobidzhan. The Leders were devoted communists, and their daughter, Mary, born in the United States, joined the American communist movement at the age of 15, after the family moved from the East Coast to California in search of employment.
In October 1929, more than a year before the Wall Street stock market crash, the Leders were already feeling the pinch. The father, a builder by profession, was finding it difficult to sell houses. By 1931, it was clear that the move to California was not a success. Mary's parents envisaged a brighter future in the Jewish socialist homeland Josef Stalin was anxious to establish in the eastern republic of Birobidzhan.
Mary's reaction was one of shock: What connection did she have with a faraway country whose language she did not speak? As a girl who had grown up without any formal ties to Judaism, what interest could she possibly have in any kind of Jewish homeland, even a socialist one? Although she was a supporter of the Soviet Union and communism, Mary, who had dreamed of going to college and becoming a journalist, was devastated. Realizing that she could not remain alone in the United States, the teenager informed her parents that she would accompany them, but not for long. When she turned 18, she said, she would go back to America.
This book is a kind of diary kept by Mary Leder from the day she set sail for Japan in the company of her parents, en route to Soviet Russia, until her return to the United States 30 years later. After several weeks with her family, she decided that Birobidzhan was not for her. She asked to stay with relatives in Moscow, hoping to learn a profession there. Not wanting to be a burden to her aunt and uncle, she ended up joining a commune of young people, with whom she lived and worked for several years.
Meanwhile, her parents in Birobidzhan decided to wind up the Soviet chapter of their lives and go back to the United States.
Mary, now 18, chose to stay behind and become a Soviet citizen as a first step toward finding employment. Hoping that Mary would soon rejoin them, her parents and younger siblings departed for America. Towards the end of the 1930s, Mary went to work for a foreign language publishing house, where the Soviet authorities took advantage of her skills and those of other foreign citizens residing in the Soviet Union. Later, she even received spy training, but the project through which she was being sent to America was cancelled at the last minute.
After returning to her former job, Mary married Abraham, a Jew from Rostov, and gave birth to a daughter. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Mary and Abraham fled to a small town in the Volga region together with many other families. During that time, their young daughter became ill and died. When the couple eventually moved back to the capital, they encountered blatant anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that began to affect their personal and professional lives. These trends intensified in the 1950s, although Stalin died in 1953.
When Abraham succumbed to a serious illness in 1959, Mary applied for an exit visa: The time had come to reunite with her parents in the United States. It took several years before her dream came true. In 1965, at the age of 45, Mary returned to the land of her birth, where she lives until today.
Leder's book is built on contradictions and dissonance. The equation is supposed to balance out in the end, but it doesn't. Right from the beginning, we have the family's high hopes with respect to the communist world, where everyone is equal and has the same opportunities, regardless of religion or class. But the author is soon disappointed with Stalin's "Jewish republic," and before long, her parents are, too.
Next, the author decides that by joining a commune in Moscow, she will be able to move ahead in the Soviet system. Again, she sobers up quickly, her hopes for collectivism soon dashed. At spy school, as Leder dreams of using her fluent English to aid her new homeland, up pops an officer and advises her that when she gets to the United States as a Soviet agent, she should defect. Go live with your parents, he says. You aren't cut out to be a spy, and anyway, life in America is so much easier.
During World War II, Leder is fired by the hope that the Soviet nation is fighting fascism. In reality, she finds that Soviet society has turned its back on her due to anti-Semitism. Finally, she believes that she will be cared for by the communist system, that citizens will be provided with everything they need in the way of food, medical care and education. The truth is that she cannot even obtain the simple drugs that might have saved her husband's life.
Mary Leder's story is both fascinating and sad. It is written in a flowing style, without the abundance of detail that often makes memoirs hard to read. Reading this book, one cannot help reflecting on the courage of this girl, who embarks on the adventure of living apart from her parents in a foreign country and makes no special effort to join them when they pack up and go home. On the one hand, we gasp at the temerity of a 16-year-old who joins a commune in an unfamiliar land where she doesn't speak the language.
On the other, it is hard to accept her passivity with respect to returning to the bosom of her family. She does make several attempts to leave the Soviet Union, but one can certainly think of some channels she hasn't tried, and the same goes for her family. Is she harboring a secret anger at having to accompany her parents to the Soviet Union in the first place? Has she become swept up in an adventure that is more than she bargained for?
In a country where parents equip their kids trekking to the Far East with international cell phones and beg them to drop into an Internet cafe at least once a week to "touch base," the story of a family that moves from the United States to the Soviet Union and sends a 16-year-old daughter alone to the capital, ultimately saying goodbye for close to three decades - that is certainly a story worth reading and thinking about.
Of great importance were the events in Germany. After Hitler took power, mass persecutions of Jews started, among whom there were also some 50,000 Polish subjects living in Germany. This resulted in official protests from the Polish consulates and embassy which took various steps to help the persecuted. However, the Polish authorities were afraid that this persecution would reduce the Polish Jews living in Germany to such poverty that they would be forced to return to Poland where they would not find any means of subsistence. Many employees of the Polish consulates-as reports sent to Warsaw indicate-intervened on behalf of Jews for purely humanitarian reasons, since they wanted, at least to some degree, to alleviate the difficult situation of the persecuted Jews.The same paragraphs can be found also here. I like this version much better because it seems to be approved by the Polish Jews (those who know the facts). I'd leave the propaganda works for local neocommies, Übermenschen, Spinnmeisters and G. Will.
These interventions stopped the Third Reich from applying against the Polish Jews all repressive measures which were used against the German citizens of Jewish origin. However nothing could change radically the situation of Polish Jews in Germany. In the years 1938-39 more and more often Polish Jews, leaving behind all their property, were hurried across the border to Poland under threat of death. Particularly harsh measures were applied in the last days of October 1938 when some 13,000 were forced in this way out of Germany (according to data of the Polish consulates). For several days the victims stayed in the open air, between the two border points, before they were allowed back to Poland. Here, having no means of subsistence, they waited for many weeks in transit camps near the border.
All these events made the picture of the future really gloomy. Poland faced a direct danger. Those who were preparing for departure from Poland had one more reason for doing so. The others, the overwhelming majority, who had no such possibility nor wished to leave Poland which they considered their motherland, awaited anxiously what the future had in store for them.
In the face of threat from the Third Reich the Jewish community in Poland demonstrated great self-sacrifice in the cause of defending the Republic. They contributed to the state loan for defensive purposes and collected funds for the army. This sacrifice manifested itself also during September 1939. The outstanding scholar Emanuel Ringelblum wrote the following about the sentiments prevailing then in Warsaw: ''The Warsaw Jews were overcome with enthusiasm which recalled the year 1861, the era of fraternity., During the siege of Warsaw, Jewish organizations took an active part in civil defense and assistance to victims. The historian Bernard Mark recalls an unusual demonstration of Jews through the streets of Warsaw: ''In the first line there marched five well-known rabbis in long, silk black coats and sable hats... They were followed by students of the rabbinical college, each carrying a spade on his shoulders.'' Many Jews helped to dig earthworks even on holiday, Saturday. Others took up arms and fought the common enemy. The defeat of the Polish army in the September campaign opened a new, tragic period in the common history of Jews and Poles.
Well, where were we? (Let's hope he doesn't jump in with Gacynski© links now...)
I NEVER treat cleaning ladies with disrespect. I am insulted that you would even suggest such a thing.
Someone has obviously kidnapped CommiesOut and is typing pro-Jewish messages on his computer. I'm concerned.
The most important result of the Evian Conference was that it undermined the illusion that forced emigration could really solve the Nazis' "Jewish problem." Later in the year, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would succinctly sum up the situation for Hitler by recalling a conversation with Georges Bonnet, Ribbentrop's French counterpart. Bonnet had insisted that France did not want to receive any more Jews from Germany, and in fact wanted to ship 10,000 Jews elsewhere. Ribbentrop told Hitler that he had replied to Bonnet "that we all wanted to get rid of our Jews but that the difficulties lay in the fact that no country wished to receive them."
Tell me now, if all of the countries did not want to receive the Jews, why should Poland do so? So that later on the same Jews could kiss the Soviet tanks invading Poland?
1) to hide their own shameful behaviour of not helping the Jews in Europe during the WWII in general.
2) to hide the fact that there were patriotic Poles of Jewish heritage to whom Poland was their country, first and foremost.
The only Jews Poland was asked to accept were those who held Polish citizenship. The Poles refused.
By the way, the 1938 law revoking the citizenship of Polish Jews living outside Poland revoked the citizenship of Georges Charpak. Of course, after Charpak won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1992, the Poles began claiming him as a "Polish" Nobel Prize winner!
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