'Off to Welter and Waste'

The Russian-Jewish poet Boris Slutsky (1919-86) was thirty-three years old on the Night of the Murdered Poets, and he wasn’t among them. In the final stanza of his poem “About the Jews” (trans. G.S. Smith), dating from the 1950s, Slutsky writes: 

“From the war I came back safe

So as to be told to my face:

‘No Jews got killed, you know! None!

They all came back, every one!’”

 

So grimly ironic a poem is uttered with a straight face. No appeals to sentiment. A footnote informs us: “By 1987 (when it was published in Russia) this poem had become folklore, Slutsky’s authorship largely forgotten.” Just another Jew, more fortunate than the others.

 

The Night of the Murdered Poets took  place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jewish – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use Stalin’s phrase. The others were intellectuals and scientists who had been active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, organized during World War II by the Soviet government to mobilize world Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. All were arrested in 1948-49 and endured beatings and torture before their executions by firing squad.

 

Leyb Kvitko was best known as the author of books for children. These lines are from his poem “Memory" (trans. Harriet Murav and Zackary Sholem Berger):

 

Like my countless ancestors

In welter and waste

will my memory fade.

And should blossoming mornings arise

From this creeping time

Mornings that gladden people and beasts—

Tell them I’m gone

Off to welter and waste.

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), in a chapter titled “The Wandering Jew,” writes:

 

“A remarkable thing about the Jews is that, apart from suffering the lot of their own people, they also have to share the misfortunes of those in whose country they have put up their tents. Even a Jew who publicly renounces his Jewishness still goes to the gas chambers with the others, or is sent to Kolyma, like any member of the alien tribe whose language he speaks.”

 

On November 22, 1955, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR ruled there had been “no substance to the charges” against the defendants and closed the case.

 

[Smith’s translation of Slutsky’s poem can be found in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, Penguin, 2015).]