Unmasking Ideology: Depicting Soviet Deportation in the USSR and GULag Internment in Avrom Zaks 'Knekht zenen mir geven'

• In Event: Representations of War Crimes and Political Violence in Eastern European Literatures, Films, and Arts

Abstract

Avrom Zaks novel “Knekht zenen mir geven” (“We were slaves”, 1956) was published in Buenos Aires in the series “Dos poylische jidntum” (“The Polish Jewry”, 1946 - 1966) dedicated to the Polish Jews, who were murdered by German fascists and their collaborators in the Shoah. In the series “Dos poylische jidntum” Avrom Zak’s novel stands amongst Yiddish literary works by cherished Jewish writers and activists such as Chaim Grade, Sholem Ash and Emanuel Ringelblum, who focus on the lost heritage of the Polish Jewry in the Second World War and the Shoah.
In “Knekht zenen mir geven” Zak describes how, having fled from the Germans from Warsaw to his hometown Grodno, the NKVD arrested, incarcerated and eventually forcefully deported him and many others to a GULag in the ASSR Komi in Northern Russia. The paper illuminates how Zak’s literary account of Soviet war crimes in the Second World War differs from non-Jewish Russian and Polish GULag and deportation literature and tracks the poetic forms and strategies used. For example, the novel’s title, “We were slaves”, places the documentation of Zak’s experience of Soviet violence into the context of the Passover Haggadah, the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt.

Author

• Eva Hückmann, U of Potsdam (Germany)