When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (3 page)

Mendelevich was a shy, withdrawn boy with pale, pimply skin and thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Most days when he wasn't in school he was alone inside his parents' house in a poor section of Riga. The outside world entered mainly through its brutal noises—the shouts of his Latvian neighbors stumbling home full of vodka; glass breaking; drunken fathers beating their children. Like any sensitive teenage introvert, he found his home, his only comfort, in his imaginings. In Yosef's case, the world he escaped to in his mind was a real place, though a rather fantastical destination for a young Soviet boy. It was a country so far away, so obscured and unknown, it might as well have existed under a different sun. That place was Israel. And he constructed his idea of it with what he had at hand. His aunt Fanya, one of the rare Soviet citizens allowed to immigrate in the late fifties, had once sent a color postcard of a swimming pool at Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in the northern Galilee. Mendelevich took a magnifying glass to it, counting all the people, scrutinizing the shape and shade of every tree. The sight of so many Jews gathered together wearing swimming trunks seemed unreal. Fanya had also written his family a letter in which she recounted the history of the one-armed Joseph Trumpeldor and his last stand at Tel Chai, not far from Kfar Giladi, where he was killed in 1920 while defending the settlement from local Arabs. He became a legend for his famous dying words: "Never mind, it is good to die for our country." At night, Mendelevich's father would tune their shortwave radio to Kol Israel, the Voice of Israel, and hold the receiver close to his ear, translating the news from Hebrew to Russian. Before the war, his father had studied in a
cheder,
a Jewish religious school, and so he understood the language. But to Mendelevich the sounds were unfamiliar, a mystical, warm tongue from a better place, one he knew little about but felt, even as a teenager, that he was destined to go to.

Mendelevich didn't exactly trust the person who'd first told him about Rumbuli, a boy who sat next to him at the college he attended at night and who seemed to be a bit of a daydreamer. Still, if what the boy whispered to him was true, that young people were gathering on Sundays to clean up Rumbuli and make it a proper memorial ground, then Yosef wanted to go. So the next weekend, he set out with a friend.

What he found there, at the place he began referring to as Little Israel, startled him. Jews, most of them young but some in their sixties, were on their knees, digging their hands into the earth, lifting it up and dumping it clump by clump into homemade crates. Others were filling in the spaces with sand from two enormous mounds. Dozens of people with shovels and pails, rakes, and baskets, working. Some of the men had their shirts off.

In the middle of it all, static amid the activity, stood a huge wooden obelisk, taller than a man, painted pitch-black with a splattering of red at its top. On the obelisk's face, framed and behind glass, hung what looked like a large photograph of an oil painting. In somber browns and grays, it depicted a long line of tearful women, babies clinging to their breasts, followed by ashen-faced, downtrodden men, all marching under a threatening sky—Jews being led to the slaughter.

The scene actually before him was altogether different. The only time Mendelevich had ever witnessed so many Jews in one place was when he'd gone with his father to the synagogue on Peitaves Street in the old town. But those were old men. Here were young people, young Jews, sweating together under the sun. One man in particular caught his eye. He was tanned, strong, straight backed, just what Mendelevich thought an Israeli would look like. In the shock of the moment, he was willing to believe that such a miracle—an Israeli in Riga—might have occurred.

Mendelevich quickly grabbed a crate, got down on his knees, and began moving the earth with his bare hands.

He rarely missed a Sunday after that. He would spend the week looking forward to Little Israel and to the bus rides from Riga. The group of young people grew through 1963 and into 1964, and eventually they took up almost all the seats on the bus leaving the city. And they sang. Mendelevich learned Israeli songs, such as the rousing anthem of the Palmach, the scruffy, pre-state paramilitary force in British Mandate Palestine:

All around us the storm rages
But we will not lower our heads
We are always ready to follow the orders
We are the Palmach.

From Metulla to the Negev
From the sea to the desert
Every fine young man to arms
Every young man on guard.

Though he understood not a word of the Hebrew, for the first time in his life, Mendelevich felt like part of a group. And when he listened to himself singing along with the whole bus filled with Jewish youth, he also felt, strangely, like a fighter.

Passengers faced with a busload of young Jews singing vociferously in a foreign language would often get off. One day, the driver stopped Mendelevich as he was exiting the bus. "Where do you come from like this?" he asked with a mixture of shock and contempt. Mendelevich didn't answer. He knew that the driver was bewildered and perhaps a little threatened by the loud group. Jews did not generally comport themselves like this, unabashedly strident and unafraid. But on the way to Rumbuli, they did.

It was strange but not entirely unexpected that in the early 1960s the Jews of Riga felt compelled to claw at the earth in search of their recent past. Most people living in the Baltic States were afflicted with a deep nostalgia. Until the summer of 1940, when they lost their independence and were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had spent over two decades as free, prosperous, and democratic countries. The devastation of the war and then the total subjugation by Moscow's overbearing regime made for a defeated and demoralized population. In the early 1960s, most middle-aged people had a strong memory of and longing for the world they had lost.

For Jews, this tear through history was even more brutal and dramatic. They had seen their entire universe erased, and what they'd lost was a diverse and rich Jewish life.

To judge from population and emigration numbers, the interwar years were good ones for Jews in Latvia. Riga's Jewish population nearly doubled between 1920 and 1935, going from twenty-four thousand to forty-four thousand. Even at the height of the Zionist movement's popularity, few of these Jews opted to go to Palestine—only seventy-five went in 1931. Latvia, which gained its independence and established a parliamentary democracy following World War I, accepted and even to some extent encouraged a Jewish presence. Jews served in the army and in government and formed a wide range of political parties—from religious to socialist Zionist—that were represented in the hundred-seat Saeima, Latvia's parliament. The Jewish bloc won six seats in the first election, in 1920. And among the socialist and communist opposition, it could be said that Jews predominated, many even volunteering to fight in Spain with the International Brigades against Franco.

As far back as 1840, Riga was home to a Jewish secondary school that taught secular studies. In the 1920s, cultural groups named after two of the great Yiddish writers of the day, Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, multiplied. The state even subsidized some Jewish activities, such as the Jewish Educational Society on Baznicas Street, which ran vocational schools for Jews who wanted to become craftsmen and workers in Latvia or Palestine. Its library was filled with books in dozens of languages, and the society held readings and discussion groups for the local intelligentsia. One such event, on March 30, 1935, was an elaborate ball and lecture to commemorate the eight hundredth birthday of Maimonides.

One of the speakers that evening was Simon Dubnow. With his pointy white goatee and round spectacles, Dubnow was Riga's most famous Jewish intellectual. By the time he moved to Riga, in 1933, escaping Berlin and Hitler, he was already well known for his ten-volume
Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes
(World History of the Jewish People), published from 1925 to 1930, the most comprehensive such history ever written. He had settled in the northern Mezaparks district of the city in an apartment lined with his vast collection of books. His years in Riga were spent translating his magnum opus from German to Hebrew and Russian and condensing it into one volume,
History of the Jewish People for Work and Home,
intended primarily for children.

Riga had a society of Jewish physicians and a society of Jewish outer-garment tailors; it had Jewish mutual aid groups and sports clubs. A Jewish hospital with internal medicine, neurology, and surgery departments was established in 1924. A professional Jewish theater opened in 1927. And on the radio throughout the 1930s, one could hear the songs of Oscar Strok, the Jewish "King of Tango," who became famous when Peter Leschenko crooned his romantic ballad "Chorne Glaza" (Black Eyes).

Yiddish was in the street; the first newspaper in the language,
Nationale Zeitung,
was published in 1907, and a rich array of others followed:
Yiddishe Stimme, Weg, Das Folk,
and
Frimorgn.
Riga had fourteen synagogues, including the Altneie Schul, built in 1780, and the imposing Gogola Street Synagogue, built in Renaissance style in 1871 and famous throughout Eastern Europe for the vibratos of its cantors.

But it was the number and diversity of Zionist youth groups that provided the strongest proof that Jews felt at home here—young people dressed in uniforms, marching, singing, learning Hebrew, preparing themselves to be farmers and soldiers in Palestine. Hashomer Hatzair, the oldest and most popular group, was affiliated with the Labor Zionist movement. Its goal was twofold: to encourage emigration to Palestine and to defend the interests of the proletariat. At the movement's peak, in 1927, its Riga branch had three thousand members. At the other end of the political spectrum was a group whose influence began to eclipse Hashomer Hatzair's as World War II approached: Betar. The name was both an acronym in Hebrew for the "League of Joseph Trumpeldor," a tribute to the fallen Zionist hero, and an allusion to the last suicidal battle of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans in 135 CE. In their brown shirts and shouting military songs, the members of Betar represented a Zionism of blood and fire.

Betar had sprung from the mind of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a journalist, prolific essayist and translator (he even rendered Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in Russian and Hebrew) who provided Zionism with its unaccommodating, proud, and sometimes violent right flank. Born in Odessa, Jabotinsky, jug-eared and bespectacled in owlish round glasses, lamented the loss of Judaism's ancient muscle. He was fiercely opposed to the dominant Labor Zionism; he thought the group was more concerned with the class struggle than it was with the tough job of wrenching Palestine from the Arabs and the colonial forces who controlled it. His political philosophy became known as revisionism, as he was determined to "revise" what he saw as the Zionists' complacent relationship with the British occupiers. He preached Jewish militarism, a cult of bravery and sacrifice. The world had never lifted a finger for Jews, went Jabotinsky's teaching—which was passed down to his followers and formed the basis of their ideology—so Jews had no choice but to rely on themselves and their strength alone.

Jabotinsky did more than just write and lecture. He put his ideas into action, organizing Jewish self-defense units throughout Russia following the devastating pogroms of the 1900s and later establishing a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British in World War I. Betar was a critical part of his vision. It was started in December 1923 by a group of students in Riga who had heard Jabotinsky deliver a fiery call to arms, a speech titled "Jews and Militarism." Branches of the group soon proliferated in cities all over Russia and Eastern Europe, and Jabotinsky eventually claimed the movement as his own. In a 1932 essay, he defined its goals: "[Betar], as we think of it, is a school based on three levels in which the youth will learn how to box, to use a stick, and other self-defense disciplines; the youth will learn the principles of military order; it will learn how to work; it will learn how to cultivate external beauty and ceremony; it will learn to scorn all forms of negligence, or as we call them, poverty or ghetto-life; they will learn to respect older people, women, prayer (even that of a foreigner), democracy—and many other things whose time has passed but are immortal."

Betar and its radical nationalism continued to play a role in Riga long after the world that had cultivated it disappeared. Many of those middle-aged Jews who gathered at Rumbuli in the 1960s had been Betari youth. Ezra Rusinek, the man Mendelevich mistook for an Israeli, had been a member. As a young boy, Rusinek marched in the brown shirt and neckerchief of Betar, saluting by slapping a clenched fist against his chest and belting out "Tel Chai," the name of the settlement Trumpeldor had died defending.

Anti-Semitism, of course, did exist in this prewar world, especially among the members of the local National Socialist Party. And the 1934 coup by the authoritarian Karlis Ulmanis made life more difficult for Jews. Leftist Zionist youth groups like Hashomer Hatzair were outlawed (Betar, whose mission the Fascists at least respected, was left untouched). Businesses were nationalized, which affected many Jewish entrepreneurs. But given the alternatives—Stalin to the east and Hitler to the west—Latvian Jews felt comfortable and settled. After all, it was to Riga that Simon Dubnow had fled when he left Germany in 1933.

Then came August 23, 1939. Molotov and Ribbentrop shook hands, sealing the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin and placing the Baltic States in the Soviet "sphere of influence." By early October, the Soviets were mobilizing thirty thousand troops on Latvian ground. The following summer, Moscow had concocted a border incident that gave it an excuse to bring a hundred thousand troops into Latvia and call for new parliamentary elections from which all but the Working Peoples' Bloc were disqualified. The newly elected Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic then duly asked to be annexed by the USSR. As soon as it was, on August 5, 1940, the Kremlin outlawed all non-Communist groups, which meant the immediate end of Jewish organizational life.