Scratch a Good American: Anti-Semitism in the USSR (1988)

[Watching the horrifying news coming out of Ukraine brought back vivid memories of the short time I spent there in summer 1988 — the year before the Berlin Wall came down, and just three years before Ukraine and Belarus declared their independence and the former Soviet Union collapsed.

The specifics of my trip are detailed in the essay below. My mother, Frances Coleman, already suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, invited me and a long-time family friend to accompany her on what turned out to be a melancholy pilgrimage by (mostly) geriatric U.S. lefties to the ruins of their dreams.

The group flew from New York to Moscow, changed planes there for a domestic flight to Odessa, then boarded a “luxury” (by Soviet standards) cruise ship and sailed up the Dneiper, stopping along the way at Kherson, Cherkasy, Zaporizhzhia, and other river ports before disembarking at Kiev. We spent a couple of days in Kiev, including a visit to Babii Yar, before taking a train back to Moscow, passing a few more days there sightseeing before the flight home.

So, even if briefly and long ago, I have set foot in some of the places now under attack by Russia’s mad king Vlad and his minions. Which makes watching the unfolding horrors all the more painful to bear. I can only hope that the Ukrainian people prevail.

Oddly, I don’t have the publication specifics listed in my database. If memory serves, I published this essay in a short-lived, oversized west coast magazine named A Critique of America (later Arete), of which I can barely find a trace online. If so, it would have come out in fall/winter 1988 or spring 1989. Otherwise it is previously unpublished.

The mysterious Oriole referred to at the essay’s beginning and end, my late friend and colleague Richard Kirstel, earned his nickname by long-term residence in Baltimore, where he worked for decades and taught at the Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA). — A.D.C.] 

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Scratch a Good American:

Anti-Semitism in the USSR

“Scratch a good American,” my friend the Oriole says, “and you’ll find a good German.”

It was June 13, 1988. Along with almost two hundred other Americans, I was on a people-to-people peace cruise along the Dneiper River in the Ukraine, a trip sponsored by a coalition of U.S. peace groups (primarily the Gray Panthers and SANE/Freeze), in conjunction with their Soviet counterparts. Finally, at the end of our river voyage, we had reached Kiev.

That morning, during our official tour of the city, we had stopped at Babii Yar, site of a mass grave for 200,000 Kievites — roughly one-quarter of them Jewish — slaughtered by the Nazis during their two-year occupation of the city. The monument, only a few years old, is stark and powerful: a crowd of men trying bravely but in vain to defend a nursing mother who gives her infant a farewell kiss. The monument is surrounded by a man-made ravine, intended to evoke the natural ravine nearby that the Nazis used as a dumping site for the bodies of their victims.

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The construction of the monument took place only a few years ago. Indeed, the site was not commemorated until well after the war — and then only after Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, wrote a poem declaring himself to be one with the martyred dead there. Written during the Khrushchev era, published in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta on September 29, 1961 — the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement — “Babii Yar” begins like this:

No monument stands over Babii Yar.

            A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

            I am afraid.

                                    Today I am as old in years

            as all the Jewish people.

It ends:

I am

                        each old man

                                                here shot dead.

            I am

                        every child

                                                here shot dead.

            Nothing in me

                                                shall ever forget!

            The “Internationale,” let it

                                                                                    thunder

            when the last antisemite on earth

            is buried forever.

            In my blood there is no Jewish blood.

            In their callous rage, all antisemites

            must hate me now as a Jew.

            For that reason

                                                I am a true Russian!

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The poem became, overnight, the center of a firestorm, raising the issue of Soviet anti-Semitism both past and present. Its publication and the furious public debates it engendered were taken as signs of an attempt at what is now called glasnost. (After all, Stalin’s crimes finally were being brought to light and acknowledged under Khrushchev; indeed, that same year, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in a specific ritual of dishonor.)

More than a quarter-century after the poem was first printed, the problem of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union has hardly been resolved. In some ways, the monument at Babii Yar — and the official treatment of it — can be said to epitomize this dilemma. There is nothing noticeably Semitic about any of the people depicted in the monumental tableau, or any annotation that specifies it as a killing ground for Jews.

Indeed, our tour guide took great pains to point out that more than half of those interred there were not Jewish — that it was a grave for people of many faiths, nationalities and ethnic derivations. Despite its international fame, the monument was not mentioned in the official guidebook supplied to us by Intourist. [Note: The 1976 memorial at the Babii Yar massacre site only recognised Soviet victims, despite the killing there of at least 34,000 Jewish people. In 1991 a memorial specifically commemorating the Jewish victims was installed nearby. — A.D.C.]

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Yet the monument does stand, towering and resonant. It is unguarded and undesecrated. People, many of them — and not only foreign tourists like ourselves — were there to pay respects or bear witness, obviously unconcerned with being observed. Some of us walked down into the ravine. It was a very silent place, but if you put your ear to the ground you could hear the earth screaming.

The youngest of our group — I’ll call him Ari — was fourteen years old. He had rapidly become the surrogate grandchild of everyone on the cruise (most of whom were over the age of sixty), and a significant ambassador for peace in his own right. Adept at making friends, Ari demonstrated a gift for sensing the right gesture, boundless good humor, all that exhausting teenage energy, and an open heart. In ten years he’ll be a heartbreaker — but I suspect he’ll be a mender too.

He reminded me much of my own son at that age; and, seeing him so without peers in his own age group among us, I had (with the blessing of his grandmother, with whom he was traveling) tucked him under my wing, serving as a kind of big brother/surrogate father. He and I and a young potter from Boulder — I’ll call her Dina — had taken to hanging out together. As a result, her father (who’ll be Jerry here) was also in frequent contact with the boy, and had been treating him in a fatherly manner.

Ari had relatives who died at Babii Yar. The previous evening, his grandmother had told him of Babii Yar and of the fate of the members of his family. Our visit there was a solemn one for him, and he clearly bore the burden of memory. He laid a flower and a stone on the simple marker at the foot of the monument.

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Later that day, a small group of us left the tour to stroll around Kiev. Among us were Jerry and his daughter, both of whom had so far struck me as politically naïve but otherwise decent, sensitive people; Will, a sweet, shy therapist from southern California; Viktor, a Soviet journalist, who was serving as our guide; Ari; and myself.

We were having a terrific time, but Viktor was being so much the host that it was becoming embarrassing. He wouldn’t let us pay for anything ourselves; records, scarves, knicknacks — we no sooner eyed something than he’d bought it and pressed it on us. Was he on some kind of expense account? We didn’t know, felt it would be rude to ask, but Ari and I were feeling uncomfortable, so we agreed to put an end to it as soon as we could, as tactfully as possible.

At one point, we stopped for espresso in a crowded little coffee shop lodged in a passageway underneath the main plaza. Viktor commandeered tables for us, then blustered his way to the front of the line to get us food and drink. When he finally returned, he distributed the refreshments, then sat down and began talking to Jerry and Will.

Ari, remembering our decision, half-rose from his seat, reaching for his wallet, and called over to Viktor, “How much was the coffee and ice cream?” Before Viktor could reply, Jerry grinned at Ari, gave him a knowing wink, and called back, “Always thinking about money — just like a Jew,” rubbing the fingers of his right hand together all the while.

His daughter paid no attention. I could not believe my ears. Our Soviet guide, a Muscovite, was astonished: “Do you say this in your country? Here we think it is an insult!” Our other companion, Will, said quietly, “It’s an insult in America too.”

Ari had turned away suddenly, as if he’d been slapped. I was still unable to believe I’d heard this. I put my hand on Ari’s back. He was shaking underneath his jacket. “Did I hear him say what I think I heard?” I asked. “Yes!” Ari answered. I could see his face reddening and swelling; I knew he was on the brink of tears. “Let’s go outside,” I suggested. He nodded hurriedly, and we left.

Outside the shop, I pulled him to me, cradling his head against my shoulder. He put his arms around me and burst into tears. “That sonofabitch,” he said over and over again, weeping against my chest.

I did not know what to say, so I stroked his head until he began to calm. “Ari, it’s a poison, and it’s in so many people who don’t even know it’s in them — it’s insidious and evil and everywhere. It’ll never occur to him that there’s any connection between his attitude and anything else, that it’s ghastly he could visit Babii Yar this morning and say what he just said this afternoon.” I knew this was no comfort even as I said it. I decided to tell him a story.

“When I was a boy your age, back in the late 1950s, my parents — God knows why — decided to buy a summer house on Main Street in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. You know where that is?” He nodded against my chest. “Martha’s Vineyard was still largely old-line New England WASP territory, and Edgartown was the waspiest of all. We went there each summer for years, but while I managed to make friends from other parts of the island I never found a friend in Edgartown. It took me several years to discover — accidentally, through inadvertent eavesdropping — that we were known in town as the Main Street Jews.”

Ari nodded again. He had stopped crying. But when he lifted his head I saw the look in his eyes. I know that look: you learn to recognize it in the visage of everyone from scapegoated minorities. I’ve a theory about the origin of the word peon — that it evolved because everyone needs someone to pee on. Ari had just learned that, for this forester who had otherwise been so friendly to him, he was a peon. His face, still soft with baby fat, was a shade harder than it had been five minutes earlier — a shade harder than it needed to be. He would, from now on, be a touch more suspicious of gentiles, a nuance more self-protective, would feel himself by some tiny but not meaningless increment set slightly apart from others, watchful, wary, unsafe in the world.

I quoted the Oriole to him. He nodded, a sarcastic smile on his lips. “I can’t handle it when anyone says anything about my family or my religion,” he told me. “Anything else I can deal with.” We walked back to the ship together. En route, we stopped by the fountain in the plaza. Our forester wanted a videotape of all of us together, asked us to pose. Ari resolutely kept his back turned, talking to me. “I can’t,” he said, “I just can’t.” “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Ari,” I responded.

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As we neared the ship, the daughter said — apropos of what I can’t recall — “Most homeless people in America are homeless because they’re lazy.” I asked if she were joking; she assured me she wasn’t. She resides in Boulder, Colorado, cleans other people’s houses for a living, and works as a potter.

When we reached the ship, I took the forester aside, asking to have a few words with him. Instantly, before I said anything else, he apologized. I told him that the problem was not so much me as Ari — that he had wounded the boy deeply, and would do well to look inside himself to see where that remark had its source.

Jerry replied that he now saw that his words were insensitive, though it was an “innocent comment.” I corrected him: it might have been casual, even inadvertent, but it was not innocent — it was an anti-Semitic statement, and there was no other way to interpret it. He bristled, clearly unwilling to accept that description of his act. Then he said that Ari needed to learn to be less sensitive, since he’ll run into a lot of this kind of banter in the world.

I could cheerfully have strangled him, but this was a peace cruise. “Don’t you stand there and tell me, Jerry, that a fourteen-year-old boy should desensitize himself to anti-Semitism. He’ll learn about it, painfully, from the casual, unconscious bigotry of people like yourself, but I hope he never becomes inured to it, because there may again be times when his survival depends on that sensitivity.”

The forester, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation, cut it short with a promise to try to make amends to Ari. (He never did. Dina would subsequently tell me that the whole thing was an attention-getting device on Ari’s part — despite the responses of Will, Viktor and myself. Both of them were determined to blame the victim.) I went to my cabin to write the incident down.

A few minutes later, Ari came in complaining of a splitting headache, asking for a couple of Tylenol. I gave them to him, let him stretch out on my bed, then covered him with a blanket. He seemed embarrassed, insisted he didn’t want to disturb me while I was writing. I hushed him up, told him to close his eyes. In a minute he was asleep. I could hear him breathe each time my fingers paused on the keyboard. His face and hands twitched from time to time. He was so innocent still, though a bit less so than he’d been a few hours earlier.

“Scratch a good American,” says the Oriole,” “and you’ll find a good German.” Ari had just scratched a good American.

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[Postscript, March 5, 2022: Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jewish comedian, as its president in 2019, and now considers him a national hero on a fast track to legendary status due to his courageous stand against Russia’s criminal attack on the country. That fact may signify a page decisively turned in Ukraine’s historical relationship to Jews.

Ukraine has a small neo-Nazi element today, some of it embedded in the very military now battling Russian troops. And we should never forget that antisemitism was rife in Ukraine going back well before the Nazi slaughters of the 1940s at Babii Yar and Lviv, in which Ukrainian auxiliaries and private citizens participated enthusiastically. Indeed, it goes back even before the pogroms of 1918-21 in Zhytomyr and elsewhere, and the 1905 Chernobyl pogrom.

With that said, the Russian Orthodox Church, like its source the Catholic Church, has always fostered the blind hatred of Jews. And since the Orthodox Church, a powerful force in Russian politics past and present, has always entwined itself in dictatorial Russian regimes, with Putin’s only the latest thereof, an antisemitic subtext runs through this invasion, claims to “denazification” notwithstanding.

This qualifies as, at best, the pot calling the kettle black. As Jason Stanley wrote recently in The Guardian, Putin, a fascist, is “the leader of Russian Christian nationalism, has come to view himself as the global leader of Christian nationalism, and is increasingly regarded as such by Christian nationalists around the world, including in the United States.” Since antisemitism remains commonplace in Russia (if not tacit official policy, as was the case during the Soviet era), dissemination of its tropes proves acceptable on Russian state media today.

And Russia has its own neo-Nazis, with their sympathizers and enablers, not a few of them powerful. No moral high ground there for Russia, sad to say, Yevtushenko’s remarkable poem — and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, based on it — notwithstanding. — A.D.C.]

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Translation of “Babii Yar” by George Reavey, from The Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (October House). Copyright 1965, George Reavey.

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