The Night of the Murdered Poets

Today marks the 58th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, a brutal and tragic moment in Jewish and Yiddish history, when, after being held in prison and tortured for two years, 15 Yiddish poets and intellectuals who were bearers and leaders of their cultural tradition were falsely charged with capital offenses including being cosmopolitan, nationalistic spies who were working against the Soviet regime, and were executed in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.

Five of those killed were Yiddish poets who represented the hope for the continuation and rebuilding of Yiddish creative and intellectual life in Eastern Europe. All five had been members and leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which was a propaganda vehicle organized by the Stalinist government to support the Soviet regime during World War II. The committee, made up of Yiddish actors, writers, and cultural activists, reached out to Jewish communities internationally asking them to support the Soviet war effort against Germany. Itsik Fefer (poet) and Solomon Michoels (actor) famously visited England and the US to drum up support for their cause. As World War II progressed and Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were decimated, the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee changed its direction toward rebuilding Jewish communities, and they became symbols of the potential future for Jewish life in Eastern Europe. As Stalin's policies toward minorities shifted from allowing minority cultures to flourish as long as their cultural production was of a specifically Communist nature to eliminating national differences entirely, and as anti-Semitism in the USSR increased with the creation of a Western-leaning Israel, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded in 1948 and many of its members were arrested and accused of being Zionist spies. Michoels was killed in 1948 in a staged car accident, and others included David Bergelson, Itsik Fefer, Perets Markish, David Hofshteyn, and Leib Kvitko, were arrested, tortured, and, on August 12, 1952, were murdered.

You can read an interesting article written by Joseph Sherman for Midstream Magazine about these murders here. And this is about Paul Robeson's last meeting with Itsik Fefer. And this is a youtube video with a song with lyrics by David Hoffstein.

We commemorated this day by reading the works of these Soviet Yiddish poets in class and in a short memorial ceremony after classes.