To Be in Central Asia Was Already to Be Free?: Weinberg, Yudakov, and Postwar Antisemitism

• In Event: Music and Liberation III: Musical Responses to Political Changes

Abstract

Within Soviet Holocaust historiography, there is increasing attention to the plight of evacuated Soviets as a dimension of Holocaust survival, and conservative estimates from the Russian Red Cross evacuation numbers as high as six or seven million people. Among these evacuees were thousands of Jews and Jewish cultural institutions who continued to work in Tashkent throughout the war. Furthermore, Holocaust narratives have largely excluded conversations about solidarity among evacuated Ashkenazi Jews with their Bukharian counterparts already living in Central Asia Relative safety in evacuation coupled with rising postwar antisemitism combined in dangerous ideas like “The Jews fought the war from Tashkent” while ignoring the perils of evacuation and sole survivorship, evacuees who were also in the Gulag, and most importantly the large number of Jews who served in the Red Army. Regardless, as Figes suggests, the artistic terror Zhdanovshchina (1948) began with the victory of the Red Army in 1945. The arrests and suppression of composers and folklorists like Weinberg and Beregovski reveal the entanglement of Soviet antisemitism with cultural restrictions and links the Soviet experience of the Holocaust including evacuation to denunciation and artistic terror. In a microcosmic analysis of two violin works from the immediate postwar – Weinberg’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 1 dedicated to Mikhoels, and Yudakov’s Eastern Poem I perform and discuss how both composers expressed a Jewish aesthetic and cultural idioms, and why community knowledges would remain cloaked after liberation in 1945. What did liberation mean for Soviet Jews no longer threatened by the antisemitism of National Socialism, but under the renewed threat of Stalinist antisemitism?

Author

• Alexandra Birch, Columbia U