The Flight From Jewish Peoplehood

During the interwar era, Zelig Hirsch Kalmanovitch (1885-1944) - Yiddishist, Diaspora Nationalist, public intellectual, philologist, and co-director of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna - watched with consternation as one colleague after another moved to the Soviet Union to build its official proletarian Yiddish culture. Having briefly lived under Soviet rule during the Russian Civil War, he experienced firsthand how Jewish Communists suppressed all forms of Jewish culture that did not jibe with their internationalist vision. Concluding that the Soviets had "destroyed the Jewish soul more than all of the pogroms," Kalmanovitch wrote to his fellow Yiddishist scholar Shmuel Niger that he abhorred "the whoredom of conscience" that compelled those who had once been paragons of Yiddish culture to praise the Soviet Communists and the ersatz Jewish culture they promoted.