“She considered most of her life to have been a mistake.”

Yuri Slezkine about his Soviet Jewish grandmother, Brokhe Kostrinskaia

In 1926, David Bergelson, arguably the most important Yiddish prose writer of his generation, published “Three Centers”, an essay that divided the world into three ideologically distinct Jewish cultures. Blazing a path into the Jewish future was the Communist Soviet Union, a country whose ideology, Bergelson thought, would build a modern Jewish culture for the modern Soviet Jewish nation. In America, his second center – and here he was really talking about New York – Bergelson envisioned a country driven by wealth and social mobility, a world in which one’s Jewishness would soon become irrelevant. As an ideological system, capitalist America could not ensure a bright Jewish future. It encouraged assimilation, rather than a progressive Jewish identity. Finally, Poland (note that for Bergelson the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine of the 1920s was not yet worthy of the name “center”), was the land of a decaying economy, primitive nationalism, and a passé ideology, a place in which Jewishness was stale and quickly becoming ossified and parochial. Neither Poland nor the United States, let alone Palestine, were places with a shining Jewish future. Bergelson eventually voted with his feet and moved back to the Soviet Union in 1933 as Hitler came to power in Germany. He chose Communism, an ideology that, as Yuri Slezkine shows, eventually turned against its most vociferous supporters. Bergelson’s Communist center – the land that, through universalism, would save Jews and Jewishness – killed him in 1952.
In 2004, Yuri Slezkine, professor of history at University of California, Berkeley and Soviet (Jewish) émigré published a book arguing that Bergelson’s 1920s Jewish map was not so far off. Like Bergelson, Slezkine argues that the twentieth century was divided up into an ideological map with three centers each representing the apotheosis of a particular ideology. Each center’s ideology was a response to modernity, to an age when the traditional boundaries between groups broke down and new boundaries formed.
Bergelson lived and wrote in the middle of this ideological revolution that Slezkine writes about from the vantage point of hindsight. Bergelson was himself ideological, still passionate about examining the possibilities of a Jewish future in an age when anything seemed possible. His work, written in Yiddish for an exclusively Jewish audience, is strident and, like all polemic essays that force people to think, overly simplistic. Slezkine writes in English after the ideological revolution, and writes with irony about the choices of people like Bergelson. He is not especially interested in the possibilities of a Jewish future, because he believes that future has already been decided. For Slezkine, the Jewish century is over.
But why did the Jewish century happen when it did? Slezkine relies on Greek typology to describe what changed in the modern world. He uses the figures of Apollo – rooted in the soil, agricultural, tribal, territorial, and physical, – and Mercury – god of ideas, movement, and trade – as foils around which to examine modern history. In Slezkine’s paradigm, modernity was about the slow decline of the Apollonians, the real (not imagined) rise of the Mercurians, and the Apollonians’ subsequent violent response to this real shift in power. Twentieth-century ideologies – like Communism, nationalism, Freudianism, and liberal capitalism – were all responses to this transfer of power. Some ideological responses celebrated the evaporation of boundaries; others recreated old tribal boundaries in new modern guises.
Slezkine argues that Jews themselves, the quintessential Mercurians, propagated these ideologies. He brilliantly shows how the twentieth century, what his publishers call “The Jewish Century”, was a time of new ideas, new places, and new senses of self. And most importantly, the twentieth century was a time when Jewish Mercurianism came to rule the world, despite the most violent attempts of Apollonians to end Mercury’s reign.
The Jewish century (the time, not the book) opens with the largest population of Jews in history, Eastern European Jewry at the end of the nineteenth century, on the move, a very Mercurian act. In Slezkine’s three centers’ scheme, these Jews-on-the-move-once-again had three potential destinations, which were not merely physical places but were also spaces occupied by particular ideological responses to modernity. He explains these migratory choices using the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s canonical story about the end of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe – “Tevye the Milkman.” The story is about the effects modernity has had on the imagined Jewish past and on Sholem Aleichem’s typical Jewish literary family. Slezkine’s own final chapter is a long epilogue to the Tevye story – what happens to Tevye the Milkman’s daughters, each of whom chooses a different path from the Jewish past into the Jewish future?
One daughter chose to remain in Tevye’s small Jewish town. This was Tsaytl’s choice. Her story ends with the Holocaust.
Another daughter, like Slezkine’s grandmother, followed the path of urbanization in Russia and moved to Moscow, the capital of Communism and became Russian. Her story ends with the World-War-II revolt of ethno-Stalinism against universal Mercurian Communism, and the crushing of her dreams of “being Russian.” This was Hodl’s choice. She hangs her head in shame for her failed choice. Her children then rebel, in the form of the Soviet dissident movement, and in the 1970s-1990s, looked for refuge from the children of Hodl’s wiser Jewish sisters who chose different paths in the Jewish century. Slezkine’s epilogue to the Tevye story is titled “Hodl’s Choice,” because he believes it is her story that has been left out of the history of 20th century Jews.
One daughter, Slezkine imagines, rejected her father’s life and “returned home” by migrating to the land of Apollonian Jewish nationalism, Israel. Her story ends with the 1967 Six-Day War, the occupation of Palestinian territories, and the end of the Zionist dream. As Slezkine reads the text, this was Chava’s choice. She now speaks Hebrew, welcomes Hodl’s children to Israel, but at the same time considers moving to the United States for better work opportunities and less potential for violence.
Finally, the last daughter, Beilke, like my grandparents, rejected naked ideology entirely and moved to the Mercurian United States, the land that embraced modernity, non-ethnic nationalism, and celebrated capitalism. Unlike Hodl’s children, who spurned their mother’s decision; unlike Chava’s children, who serve in the Israeli army, often bitterly, and prefer to work for an internet company than on a kibbutz; Beilke’s children celebrate their parents’ choice. They have a house, two cars, a membership in a synagogue, and simultaneously saved Soviet Jewry, memorialized the Holocaust, and almost singlehandedly funded the Zionist dream. They have succeeded in the United States beyond their parents’ wildest imagination by being both the most integrated and successful of Mercurians, while also playing the Apollonians’ tribal game by marking themselves as the most victimized group among American ethnic groups. This was Beilke’s choice, and it is not a coincidence that she and her children are the ones nostalgically propagating Tevye’s story. (And perhaps it is not a coincidence that I, one of Beilke’s grandchildren, am writing a more idealistic Jewish response to one of Hodl’s more pessimistic émigré grandchildren.)
Slezkine’s vision of twentieth century Jewish history is not entirely new. He acknowledges his indebtedness to Karl Marx’s vision of Jews as the pre-modern bearers of capitalism and to Israeli scholar Benjamin Harshav, whose book “Language in Time of Revolution”, suggests, like Slezkine, that the 20th century was nothing less than a “modern Jewish revolution.” It marked the moment in history when the traditional position of Jews in other peoples’ societies changed dramatically as modernity and capitalism (or in Slezkine’s words the Mercurians) came to rule the world. Slezkine goes one step further and argues that the 20th century is not just a revolution for and among Jews, but that this world revolution is a Jewish revolution.
Harshav and Slezkine however part ways on determining the winner in this ideological battle. For Harshav it is in Israel that the Jewish future lay, for its resurrection of linguistic and cultural boundaries between Jews and the rest of the world, a division marked by the Hebrew language and Hebrew culture. For Slezkine, only in America, the land that went all the way in embracing modernity in the form of Mercurianism, does a Jewish future thrive, because it followed and embraced the trend of history unlike Zionism which tried to overthrow and revolt against history. When reflecting on the failure of the Nazis’ genocidal Apollonian revolt against the Jewish Mercurians and the postwar reaction against European Apollonian nationalism, Slezkine writes, “Only Israel continued to live in the European 1930s: only Israel still belonged to the eternally young, worshiped athleticism and inarticulateness, celebrated combat and secret police, promoted hiking and scouting, despised doubt and introspection, embodied the seamless unity of the chosen, and rejected most traits traditionally associated with Jewishness” (P. 327). Israel was a place out of time. It was Apollonian when the rest of the world was becoming Mercurian. It was becoming “non-Jewish” at the same time that the rest of the world was becoming Jewish.
It is upsetting for many Jews to read some of Slezkine’s well-argued and highly polemical conclusions that suggest a real rise in Jewish power in the twentieth century to which Apollonians responded:

1) that Jews were deeply involved and invested in the Communist Revolution in Russia
2) that Jews were overrepresented in the Soviet secret police
3) that Jews were not more oppressed than the rest of the Soviet population, but they simply felt more humiliated “because of their peculiarly exalted and vulnerable position in Soviet society,” as being the quintessential Mercurians
4) that Jews were overrepresented in the American Communist Party
5) that Jews were and are the most successful, privileged, upwardly mobile American minority of the 20th century
6) that just as they were becoming upwardly mobile, American Jews situated themselves as the most historically oppressed ethnic group in the United States, and they did this by placing the Holocaust at the center of their collective identity
7) that Israel’s guiding Apollonian ideology was parochial and out-of-step with the ideological trends that became popular in those countries to which Israel compares itself.

In the final chapter, in my mind the most important, Slezkine makes the seemingly shocking revelation that the Soviet Union was incredibly Jewish, arguing that in 1932 “Jewish and Russian were virtually interchangeable.” At the same time, he makes the equally polemic statement that in the same period, in many Americans’ minds Jewish and Communist were virtually interchangeable.
Rather than seeing these statements or the arguments above as anti-semitic stereotypes propagated by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover in the U.S., fascists in Europe, or the conservative Russian émigré community after the Russian Revolution, Slezkine takes these claims seriously. What if it were true that Russian and Jewish were interchangeable in the first decades of the Soviet Union? What if statistics showed that most Communists in the U.S. were, like Ethel Rosenberg, Jews?
Slezkine shows that it was in the Soviet Union and the United States, the two beacons of Mercurianism, that Jews thrived. But the U.S. and the Soviet Union part ways in how each society responded to Jewish success: “In both places, Jews had entered crucial sectors of the establishment: in the Soviet Union, the Jewishness of the elite members was seen by the newly Russified state (and eventually by some Jews too) as a threat and a paradox; in the United States, it appeared to be a sign of perfect fulfillment – both for the liberal state and for the new elite members” (P. 327). Using his sharp ironic wit, Slezkine states that in the 1950s and 1960s, “The United States began to catch up with the Soviet Union in the realm of Jewish accomplishment at the very same time that the Kremlin set out to reverse the Jewish accomplishment in the Soviet Union. Within two decades, both had achieved a great deal of success” (P. 318). When the Soviet Union pushed Jews out of the Mercurian revolution, Soviet Jews turned to liberalism and nationalism, and to two paths of emigration – the U.S. and Israel.
Slezkine believes that the era of ideological revolutions is over. Communism lost, liberal capitalism with a hint of nationalism won. In his words, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tevye’s daughters had three promised lands to choose from. At the turn of the twenty-first, there are only two. Communism lost out to both liberalism and nationalism and then died of exhaustion. The Russian part of the Jewish Century is over. The home of the world’s largest Jewish population has become a small and remote province of Jewish life; the most Jewish of all states since the Second Temple has disappeared from the face of the earth” (Pp. 359-360). Slezkine’s conclusion that capitalist America, and secondarily nationalist Israel, triumphs in the war of ideologies is not a new idea. It is in fact a deeply conservative conclusion that echoes the conclusions drawn by people as diverse as Sovietologist Martin Malia and liberal theorist Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed the End of History with the end of Communism. In many ways, Slezkine is proclaiming the end of Jewish history. (Again, as one of Beilke’s grandchildren, this does not sit well with me.)
Slezkine quotes Tsafira Meromskaia, who maudlinly supports the conclusion that Jewish life in Russia, the birthplace of the Jewish century and Slezkine’s own birthplace, is dead. “I lived in Moscow for more than forty years. I loved it as passionately as one loves a human being. I thought I would not be able to live a single day without it. And yet I have left it forever – consciously, calmly, even joyfully, without a chance to see it again or any desire to return. I live without nostalgia, without looking back. Moscow, such as it is, is gone from my soul, and that is the best proof of the correctness of my decision” (P. 359). Well, such was Meromskaia’s choice, and perhaps Slezkine’s choice, but it does not mean the end of Jewish history.
Take journalist Masha Gessen, whose recent book, “Esther and Ruzya”, explores Hodl’s choice with more empathy and less irony than Slezkine. The teenage-émigré Gessen chose to return to Moscow in the early 1990s, because she thought it was a great place to live for a young Jewish writer and journalist, not unlike Bergelson’s choice to return to Moscow in the 1930s, because he thought it would provide him a bright future as a writer. I make this analogy not to suggest that Gessen’s and Bergelson’s circumstances were similar. Bergelson left Depression-era Europe, Gessen left wealthy liberal America. Nor do I want to suggest that Gessen is deluding herself into thinking that there is a positive Jewish future in Russia. Let’s hope, no let’s presume, that her story does not end like Bergelson’s. I draw the comparison to show that in writing history, we already know how the story ends, and at the same time, we must be humble in not knowing what the future of Jewish life in Russia may be. Bergelson did not think he was deluding himself in 1926, otherwise he would not have written “Three Centers”. To presume that future stories will end the same way as past ones is to risk playing Cassandra. I am generally suspicious of ends to stories that are constantly unfolding, though I am perhaps too much the optimist.
Looking at some of the latest statistics about Israeli émigrés to Russia, with more people going to Russia from Israel than the other way around, provides yet another reason to envision a future Jewish life in Russia. Or the fact that Jewish organizations – especially those connected with the most visible propagator of global Jewish identities, Chabad Lubavitch Hasidism – are springing up throughout the former Soviet Union, especially in the economically vibrant capitals of Moscow and Kiev.
Slezkine is correct that the forms of Jewish identity (or lack thereof) propagated by the Yiddish poet Bergelson, the Russified intelligent Meromskaia, and the fictional Hodl are doomed to the trashbin of history, and Slezkine is correct that liberalism and nationalism have proved more lasting than ethno-Communism. But in a global (Jewish) world, in which Hodl’s Russian-speaking grandchildren have completely transformed what it means to be Israeli and are now the largest Jewish émigré population in the United States, there are also opportunities to bring their American and Israeli selves back to Moscow to build new Jewish lives. This post-ideological moment allows us to abandon the idea of ideological centers in favor of a more Mercurian approach to Jewish identity in the twenty first century.