Once Stolypin had achieved his goal of a right-wing, conservative State Duma with a change in the electoral law in June 1907, many of those who had been politically active in Jewish parties and movements turned to cultural, communal, and economic organization-building, the so-called "organic work."181 As in many localities, Jewish life in Kiev in this period took on added dimensions with the establishment or revival of a number of nationally and culturally oriented organizations. Over the previous decade, there had been talk of the need for a new Jewish library and plans to create one, but it never materialized.182 Now, the Kiev branch of the OPE opened the long-awaited Jewish library.183 A branch of the Jewish Literary Society was founded.
The first Zionist ball in Kiev, held in 1908, was an opportunity for Kiev's Jewish nationalists to demonstrate their strong Jewish spirit and opposition to assimilation. Though the event was the last of the series of Jewish charity balls traditionally held in Kiev in March and thus seemed to be just another event of Jewish Kiev, its content was intended to distance "national Jews" from those lacking national consciousness. A local Zionist noted with scorn that the Concordia Club, while Jewish, refused to host a dinner for a number of prominent visiting Hebrew poets because, not being sugar brokers, card sharks, or stock exchange bigwigs, they did not correspond to the measures of "greatness" of Kiev's acculturated Jews. The ball was intended to reinvigorate the discouraged Zionists with national spirit: the hall was decorated with Zionist flags, pictures of scenes of life in Palestine, and portraits of Zionist leaders. An "oriental" fountain was installed to enhance the illusion of a Jewish-Palestinian enclave in the heart of the Russian Empire. Because of restrictions on the use of Hebrew in public events, the performances were in Russian, but were national in content nonetheless: Bruch's Kol Nidre (op. 47), and readings by poets Leib Jaffe and Simon Frug, the latter greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. Reinforcing the national feeling of Kiev's Jews was particularly important, wrote the Zionist, because of the overwhelming Christian character of Kiev and its assimilating influence on Jews. Assimilation was not an ideology for Kiev's Jews, he explained, but it took its toll nonetheless. "The influence of Russian culture devours the inner Jewish 'I' to such an extent that he unconsciously begins to look at everything through the eyes of a cultured Russian man."184
As this quotation reveals, Kiev's Jewish intelligentsia was concerned with its distance from "authentic" Jewish life and creativity, what Steven Zipperstein has called "cultural slippage."185 As early as the 1890s, educational activists in the OPE had become concerned with the marked lack of Jewish identity or sense of belonging among the new generation of secularly educated students. The pendulum had swung too far: the first maskilim had pressed the importance of a Russian education upon Jews, but now Jewish children were in danger of losing Jewishness altogether. For the OPE, the question of "national education" now became how to make Jews Russian and European "while preserving the essence of an authentic Jewish culture."186 Just as some pedagogues looked for succor to what they saw as the locus of authentic Jewish education, the heder, Jewish kulturtrdger became convinced that modern Jewish culture had to draw from the wells of "living" culture, presumably as it existed in the shtetlekh of the Pale, uncorrupted—as it were—by modernity.
Inevitably, this vision of culture led to accusations of "inauthenticity" as one organization after another was founded and then declared to be lacking in true Jewishness. The Kiev branch of the Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language (Hovevei sefat ever) was reestablished in 1908 (it is unclear when the first incarnation of the society became defunct) under the leadership of Zionist activist Hillel Zlatopol’skii.187 At the first meeting, Zlatopol’skii criticized the educational commissions of the Representation for Jewish Welfare and the OPE, respectively, for neglecting the cause of Hebrew: the language was not flourishing at any of Kiev's Jewish schools, nor was there a clear plan for its instruction at the high schools or institutes. The teaching of Hebrew at the Commercial Institute, it was charged, was limited to the Mourner's Kaddish. He urged that Hebrew be introduced at Kiev's sixty-odd municipal schools, and evening courses, lectures, and informal conversation groups were needed as well. The unkind disposition of the tsarist authorities in the southwest region toward Zionism and Jewish cultural activities, however, cast a dark shadow over these plans; even the society's aspiration to hold its meetings in Hebrew was unlikely to meet with approval by the authorities (similar requests by groups in Kiev province had previously been rejected).188
Soon—almost immediately, in fact—the Society of Lovers was, in turn, censured for its amateurish approach to the cause of Hebrew (in a pun on the society's use of the word "amateur" in its name), and a new organization dedicated to Hebrew language and literature was founded.189 Members of the new organization would pledge to use Hebrew in daily and communal life and devote themselves to disseminating Hebrew literature. Despite its rapid growth and large membership—it reached almost a thousand members less than two years after its founding—the Jewish Literary Society (Evreiskoe lit-eraturnoe obshchestvo) was also criticized for a superficial approach to Jewish culture.190 (Here, too, there was a struggle for power, this time between Zionists and Yiddishists, with the former winning out in what some called a "usurpation" of power.)191 At the same time, a Jewish National Student Group was established at Kiev's Polytechnical Institute.192 According to its charter, the group's aim was "the unification of all nationally minded Jewish students in order to awaken Jewish life at the Institute and satisfy their national-cultural needs."193
Students were a good gauge of trends in cultural affinities. Like other big cities, Kiev was a place where young people were known to shake off traditional ways quickly—if they had not come there to be rid of them in the first place. Once a Hasidic child had run off to become a student, as did the son of the Rotmistrovker rebbe, chances were that he or she would not return to observance. Students were the archetypal apikorsim, heretics and freethinkers: they were reported to sit in cafes on Sabbath rather than attend synagogue, and ate nonkosher food at cheap dining halls before the founding of the Jewish student cafeteria.194 Crown Rabbi lampol’skii's lecture series in 1899 was meant to draw Jewish students back to their heritage, while even the activist Jewish youth who established a Hebrew language society in Kiev did not, apparently, know the language particularly well.195 Now, a number of observers noted the "return" of Jewish students to Jewish culture with satisfaction; OPE board member L. Dynin, for example, wrote in Raszvet that even nationalist students—let alone assimilated ones—were far removed from their heritage and knew little about Jewish culture or history. Things were changing.196
Kiev was now a major hub in the Russian and European Zionist and Hebraist movements. The Association for Hebrew Culture and Language, founded in Berlin in 1909, held a major (though secret) conference in Kiev in 1911, attended by dozens of leading figures from Moscow, Odessa, Vilna,
Warsaw, and provincial cities and towns; only the last session of the conference was open and, according to Moshe Rozenblat, was attended by so many thousands of Kiev Jews that people had to be turned away at the door.197 The gathering bore witness to a debate about the impact of the organization. Hillel Zlatopol’skii, the chair, argued that much progress had already been made and that one could hear Hebrew being spoken on the streets of Kiev and throughout the province; but an interlocutor contended that everything that was truly new, exciting, and spiritually sustaining in the Jewish world was being created by the Zionist movement and especially by the yishuv in Palestine. What impact, he seemed to be asking, could an organization in Kiev really have?198
Perhaps another manifestation of the desire to create a Jewish cultural existence that would be closer to its roots was the call to increase the number of Yiddish books in the OPE's library while moving it to Podol. In the society's report of 1907, the audit commission suggested dryly that the library commission purchase books with the reading public in mind: the acquisition of a 50-ruble Hebrew dictionary and several volumes of past years of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-magid was inappropriate considering that less than 3 rubles had been spent on literature in yiddish.199 L. Dynin noted in 1909 that there were only 250 yiddish volumes in the library versus 1,400 Russian books and 3,400 in Hebrew. If the library commission wanted workers and clerks to use the library in addition to "so-called intelligenty," there needed to be more yiddish works in an accessible location.200 The library's location and collection are also poignant testimony to the distance of Kiev's Jewish educated classes and communal leaders from the Jewish masses.
Among the obstacles to "authentic" Jewish cultural life in Kiev were the restrictions placed on the use of languages other than Russian. In an example of the heights of absurdity that were sometimes reached, when the yiddish writer I. L. Peretz was the guest of honor at the Jewish Literary Society, his works were read in Russian translation.201 Similarly, a jubilee celebration of Sholem Aleichem had to be postponed because the authorities would not let it take place with the planned yiddish readings; Russian translations had to be substituted.202
A communal critic writing under the pseudonym Wladeldo charged that Kiev Jewry, despite its concentration of talented intelligenty, was unable to produce "authentic" or "living" Jewish culture.203 Many of these intellectuals, wrote Wladeldo, were totally russified and active in the city's Russian cultural and public life; they were unaware of the new Jewish national life, and continued to be ashamed of their ancestry. But even Jewish organizations were far from authentic. The Kiev OPE was still a maskilic institution, as yet ignorant of Jewish nationalism and its new culture. Its annual gala was Jewish, yes—but only because its organizers and audience were; featuring Italian aria and Russian folk songs, the concert itself contained nothing Jewish at all. The Jewish Literary Society, while officially Zionist in orientation, was unable to achieve anything of substance; for example, nothing had been done for the jubilee of Yiddish writer Mendele Mokher Sforim. As for the student organization, Wladeldo remarked that its members were simply not Jewishly knowledgeable enough to keep it alive.
The only bright spot for Wladeldo was Demievka, a Kiev suburb officially outside the city limits that served as a kind of "model shtetl" (not his term) cheek-by-jowl next to the bright lights of the big city. There, one could hear "living Jewish speech" and genuine expressions of Jewish culture—signs of "healthy. . . national life." But here too there were problems: the primitivity associated with small-town life, a lack of cultural aesthetics and talented individuals. Back in Kiev, hundreds of Jews packed the local Merchants' Club for a concert of Jewish folk music that included renditions of Hasidic melodies. "The diverse audience was united in its desire to hear a native [Jewish] song, and was in rapture, demanding more and more." Some Jews who were hearing their national music for the first time were converted to the national cause. The result, concluded the writer, was gratitude to those in St. Petersburg engaged in the creation of Jewish national culture, and shame that such activity was not taking place in Kiev. Actually, this was inaccurate: Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister (Pinhas Kahanovitch), Nakhmen Mayzel, and other Yiddish writers were active in a small circle that came to be called the Kiev Group; these writers strove to create a new style of secular Yiddish literature and "sought from Russian and European literatures the techniques of impressionism and symbolism for their prose."204 Members of the group produced the journal Der yidisher almanakh; another literary journal out of Kiev was the miscellany Fun tsayt tsu tsayt (which featured the work of Bergelson and Mayzel, among others), which appeared in 1911 and 1912. Although the other center of Yiddish modernism at the time was hoary Vilna, it may be that the Kiev modernists found their city, which could not boast a specific Jewish literary tradition or a Jewish "literary marketplace," particularly suited for their needs; after all, they wished to create something quite new in the field of Yiddish letters: "a new literary tradition, a new literary school," as Der Nister remembered it three decades later.205 Other Hebrew and Yiddish writers, such as Uri Nissan Gnessin, had also spent time in the city but, like Gnessin, were often isolated and unnoticed, and in any case would certainly have not caught the attention of Jews who only read Russian.
For Wladeldo, national culture could only be created by modern Jews, educated in contemporary methodologies of music, art, and literature, who were also in direct contact with the authentic life of the nation as it existed in the Pale of Settlement. If "indifference" and "a lack of ideals" could be overcome, Kiev—a modern metropolis in the heart of the Pale of Settlement— could be an ideal center for the creation of Jewish national culture. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that a modern Jewish culture and way of life was indeed being created in Kiev, but mostly not in the self-conscious manner envisioned by Wladeldo. Like other cities on the cutting edge of modernity in the Russian Empire such as Odessa, Kiev's very contradictions, its freedoms and restrictions, communal structures in the midst of the anonymity of the metropolis, physical proximity yet psychological distance from shtetlekh such as Demievka—all of these created an environment ripe for experimentation in Jewish modernity, as each individual Jew developed his or her own brand of Jewishness, collectively creating a Jewish future unlike any that could be envisioned by a single individual.206
World History
