'What Are You Selling There – Despair?'

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 Jews – “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. Dovid Margolin writes in “The Exiled Rabbi and the Executed Poet: A Soviet Jewish Story,” published at Chabad.org: 

“After their arrests, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee activists were cruelly interrogated and tortured, with Markish’s treatment among the worst. He was interrogated two or three times a day, questioned all day, and then again from 11:30 p.m. until 5 the next morning, 96 times in all. Under torture at the hands of one of the MGB’s most sadistic officers, Markish signed a confession of guilt (he was accused of treason), effectively signing his own death sentence. On Aug. 12, 1952, after a sham secret trial at which they were all found guilty, 13 of the 15 defendants were executed with a bullet to the back of the head—a crime that has since become known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.”

 

Markish was born in 1895 in Polonnoye, then in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. He served in the Russian army during World War I and published his first collection of avant-garde poems, in Yiddish, in 1919. After a series of pogroms in Ukraine in the early 1920s he moved to Warsaw, where he coedited with novelist I.J. Singer (brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer) an expressionist literary anthology. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 as a celebrator of the Soviet regime. He co-founded the Soviet School of Writers, in 1939 was awarded the Order of Lenin and in 1946 the Stalin Prize.

 

Markish published “Chatyr-Dag” (literally, “Tent Mountain”), named for a massif in Crimea, in 1920, revised and expanded in 1931. This is the opening quatrain from Jordan Finkin’s translation:

 

“Chatyr-Dag. With footsteps marking your wandering paths

I approach the hem of your cloud-patched cloak.

You recluse of stone with almond trees overgrown,

What lapidary tidings do you await from world’s end?”

 

And this from an untitled 1919 poem translated by Amelia Glaser:

 

“Hey, what do you deal in – sorrow?

What are you selling there – despair?”

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 Markish and the other defendants and closed the case.