Session Transcript
Clive James: Let me introduce myself. My name is Clive James and I’m glad
to say you’ll be hearing very little from me tonight. My job is to
marshal the traffic and I’ve been honoured by The Times Literary
Supplement and Anne Webber to be asked here to be
with our distinguished guests, and I’ll try and inject an element of organisation
into a basically tricky evening, because there are people you all want to hear
from.
Two of them are present and one of them is
not going to be present bodily and that is Nathalie Babel because she had an
accident in Washington during the week and broke some ribs. She is in bed, but
she is in bed with a microphone. The bed is actually in a BBC studio and she
is going to communicate to us direct from Washington by radio. My attempt to
run this end of that will probably be the comic turn of the evening. I
apologise in advance.
We’re not really here for comedy.
We’re here for something much more serious. We’re here for: one
way of putting it is the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death,
and Stalin’s presence will loom large tonight because the Soviet Union
affected the lives, in every sense, of the three writers we are going to talk
about.
Nathalie Babel, of course, is the daughter
of the great Isaac Babel who was executed in 1940. Sitting beside me here is
Shimon Markish, who is the son of the great Yiddish poet Peretz Markish who was
executed on 12th August 1952, along with many other Yiddish writers.
I think about thirteen of them were rounded up and the news didn’t get
out for years afterwards. But that’s what happened.
On this side of me is Eugene [Evgeny]
Pasternak. The name we are going to be talking about there, of course is his
father Boris, and we are going to hear reminiscences and readings from these
two gentlemen. We are going to talk with Nathalie Babel and, to my great relief
and honour, some of the readings from the works of the people who are present
with us through their children will be read by the great actress Janet Suzman.
I have very, very little to say at any time
during this evening but let me start by saying some of the things that I hope
will emerge. We have a big, big story here. Not just in the story of the
Jews, but in the story of world politics. The story of the Soviet Union. It
is still going on and one of the questions is: What were the expectations of
the Jewish writers, intellectuals and artists since the Soviet Union began?
What happened later? When you consider the fate of so many of the Soviet
intelligentsia, what was the place of the Jews within that? Did anything
happen to them that didn’t happen to the others?
But it was all so awful with a special
category, the thing that they had every reason to dread most, especially as
what looks now to history like an unlimited pogrom was getting under way just
before Stalin’s death and it’s more than possible that only
Stalin’s death stopped it. I’m sure that question will be raised.
Before we do anything else or talk to
anyone, Janet Suzman will set the pace of the evening and the tone by reading,
from the great Isaac Babel, a paragraph about Odessa [from the story Odessa].
Janet Suzman: And I ask immediately your indulgence about my Russian accent.
‘Odessa is a
horrible town. It’s common knowledge. Instead of saying “a great
difference”, people there say “two great differences” and
“tuda I syuda” [here and there] they
pronounce “tudoyu I syudoyu”! And
yet I feel that there are quite a few good things one can say about this
important town, the most charming city of the Russian Empire. If you think
about it, it is a town in which you can live free and easy. Half the
population is made up of Jews, and Jews are a people who have learned a few
simple truths along the way. Jews get married so as not to be alone, love so
as to live through the centuries, hoard money so they can buy houses and give
their wives astrakhan jackets, love children because, let’s face it, it
is good and important to love one’s children. The poor Odessa Jews get
very confused when it comes to officials and regulations, but it isn’t
all that easy to get them to budge in their opinions, their very antiquated
opinions. You might not be able to budge these Jews but there’s a whole
lot you can learn from them. To a large extent it is because of them that
Odessa has this light and easy atmosphere.’
That’s it, Clive.
Clive James:
Well I hope if the technicalities have worked that Nathalie Babel was
listening to that in Washington and I hope her voice is about to become
manifest. Nathalie Babel, are you there?
Nathalie Babel: [via radio link] Are you speaking to me? I am feeling that someone is speaking.
Can you hear me?
Clive James: Hello Nathalie Babel. Yes, we can hear you. We’ll leave
Nathalie for the moment until we sort out the technicalities about the line and
we’ll move on to what was going to be next on the bill. We’re
going to Shimon Markish. But before we do that, Janet is going to read for us
from one of his father’s poems, Peretz Markish’s poem A Mirror
on a Stone.
Janet Suzman:
‘Now that my
sight comes back to me again,
I see, and feel it
with my body’s every part,
that, like a
mirror on a stone breaks up to bits,
so, breaking with
a bang, did break my heart.
Each of the pieces
surely does not cease
to be a witness to
my being till I’m gone.
Don’t
trample on me yet in judgement Time,
until I have
picked up the splinters, one by one.
I’ll pick
them up and piece them, bit by bit,
together till my
fingers hurt with blood.
However I may try
my art, to make them fit,
they will show up
my face forever cracked.
Now only, in my
sadness, as I comprehend
the painful
process, I begin to feel the pain
of wanting once to
see myself reflected whole in these,
the scattered
splinters cast upon the seven seas…’
Clive James:
Shimon, can I ask a difficult question straight away.
Shimon Markish: Yes, sure.
Clive James:
Why did your father – he was out of the Soviet Union, wasn’t he?
Why did he go back?
Shimon Markish: Hm. My father went back to the Soviet Union in 1926. I was born
in 1931, so I don’t know exactly what answer to give to this question.
But there are general considerations which were not only for my father but for
many eminent Jewish writers and poets who returned from emigration to Moscow
and to other cities of Russia and Ukraine, and that was the miracle as they saw
it, and actually it was a mirage, not a miracle, of the resurrection of Yiddish
culture in the country of Soviets. It turned out that it was very short,
because already in the ’30s the repression of Yiddish began, and then it
finished, as you know unfortunately quite well, in 1952 with the assassination
of 13 Jewish writers, not only writers, also people who were active in other
branches of Jewish culture and, not only them, but also a lot of other ordinary
Jews.
This is an answer which could be given, but
whether it is the real answer or not, only God knows why he returned.
Clive James:
Did it have anything to do with the possibility that people of Jewish
background in general thought they would have a better chance of justice under
the Soviet Union than had ever been true under the Czars? Surely that was a
legitimate hope? And for a while, the Soviet Union didn’t disappoint
that hope.
Shimon Markish: I think that it is a wrong supposition. You find it in different
books of historians, but first of all the revolution which liberated the Jews
was not the October Revolution but the February Revolution and we have to
memorise it once and for all. The February Revolution destroyed the Pale of
Settlements and gave all the rights to Jewish people in Russia. Secondly, we
should remember that the Revolution destroyed the social tissue of Jewish life
all over the Russian empire, and Jews became beggars and extremely poor
immediately after this Revolution of Bolsheviks.
So we have at least to understand one
important thing, that to extol the October Revolution as something extremely
favourable for Jews is wrong.
Clive James:
What sort of audience are we talking about for his poetry and Yiddish poetry
in general? And was there a supposition in the minds of the Yiddish poets that
their work would be translated into Russian and have a general audience? In
other words, was it aimed at a minority?
Shimon Markish: Well, he was translated into Russian. He was published in
Russian. Up to the beginning of the Second World War, for us, ex-Soviets and
Soviets … Well I think that my old friend Mr Pasternak will not say
differently. We both belong to the Soviet people which existed really and
concretely. So for us the Second World War began in June 1941, and up to this
moment my father was a respectable poet belonging to the Soviet people, writing
in Yiddish and published broadly in different languages of the Soviet Union,
also and mostly in Russian in translations. But, once again, please
don’t believe people who say that the antisemitism began after the war.
It began during the war, from the very beginning of the war. We have now
enough testimonies which show that.
Let us take the example of my Dad, blessed
be his memory, zichrono levrocho. My father,
already in August 1941, at the very beginning of the war, he came to the Pravda newspaper where one of his poems had to be published in Russian
translation. The editor-in-chief of this newspaper said to him: ‘To
publish you now is a question of high politics.’ And that was that.
That was the beginning of antisemitism, I mean official antisemitism.
Now, his audience. He wrote for Jewish
people first of all. All the translations were important for him, and there
were a lot of very good and even brilliant translators, among them one of the
great boys whose name was Bagritzky. But all the translations were nothing as
compared to the message which he sent to his people, to Jewish people. I
don’t know whether this answers the question?
Clive James:
It certainly does. Can we talk about you and how this heritage affected your
life? Obviously the first big effect was that you went into emigration?
Shimon Markish: Yes. I emigrated more than 30 years ago, almost 35 now. You know,
the problem is that I prepared a small speech in which all these questions were
touched on, but now you’ve pushed me to destroy the speech! OK.
Clive James: No, do the speech.
Shimon Markish: No, no, no! [Laughs] But, if you permit me. Let me begin with
an episode from Life and Faith, the novel
well-known now by Vasilii Grossman written in 1950 through 1960. The novel was
arrested by the KGB and published 20 years later in Switzerland. In English,
the book was published in 1986 in this country and the episode is the following.
There is a Jewish mother in the ghetto of Berdichev and she writes a letter to
her son. Somehow she is convinced that the letter will arrive and this old
Jewish woman writes the following:
‘I have
never felt myself Jewish. I grew up in a purely Russian milieu and when our
family intended to emigrate to South America, I said to my father, ‘I
will not leave Russia. Rather I will drown myself,’ and never I left.
And now, in these terrible days in the ghetto, my heart is filled with motherly
tenderness for Jewish people. I never knew this love before. It reminds me of
my love for you, dear son.’
We often, maybe too often, speak about
Jewish self-hatred, and Jewish self-hatred is well-known and thoroughly
described. But much less we speak, it seems to me, about Jewish self-love, selbstliebe, because the self-hatred is the translation of the original term
invented by a German philosopher, Lessing, at the beginning of the last
century. So it is self-hate, selbsthas. Und selbstliebe I call it for myself, mind, it’s strictly for myself, I call
it ahavat Yisrael and I consider it, once again
strictly personal, one of the most important commandments, a kind of parallel
to what you speak about at the beginning and at the end of the second
benediction before the Shema, both in the
morning and in the evening services. You say Ahava raba ahavtanu adonai eloheinu. And you
say Baruch ata adonai habocher be’amo Yisrael be’ahava.
Hence, Blessed art thou O Lord who lovest
thy people Israel, but also, Blessed is the love of a Jew for his people
Israel. This blessed love one feels, or at least I feel and felt always, I
felt immediately when I opened for the first time a wonderful book which
everyone, Jewish or non-Jewish has to read. This is the correspondence of
Isaac Babel, edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel, under the title The
Lonely Years. Every line of this correspondence is
imbued with this love for Jewish people and for Jewish life.
This is the blessed book, I would say. The
book of Jewish worlds and Jewish affection. Here I have a small fraction of
the same warmth if all my life long I keep love for my brethren, for everything
Jewish, this ahavat Yisrael I am talking about.
I owe it to him, to my father. I have got it from him. I hope you will forgive
me if I quote myself, a very small ‘particle of my article’ which
was published twelve years ago in this blessed city of London, in the Jewish
Quarterly. I am very happy being the author of
this article. Maybe if I am proud of something in my old age already, this is
this article about my love and awe of my father.
‘My father
did not teach me to pray, and I remained an unbeliever, an agnostic. He
didn’t teach me faith but he taught me faithfulness - faithfulness to the
Jewish past and the Jewish future. This is the centre that holds my life
together, and it was secured by his hand. I know I am only a weak spark from
his generous flame. But I am from him and am turned towards him: I look back
at him constantly and forever. Not so long ago I heard from the French- Jewish
philosopher Emanuel Levinas that memory is already a kind of prayer. My God,
how true that is! Forty years and now fifty years have passed since I began to
pray, not even realizing it - I pray for my father, about my father and about
myself, a small portion of my father. And when, as an unbeliever, I join
believers four times a year at the memorial Yizkor service and ask the Almighty to remember the soul of my father and
teacher who departed into eternity, I am not lying or being hypocritical. He
did more than give me life; he placed me on the path that I am following to
this day. And this memory of him, my prayer, I would like to share with
everyone on earth and prolong to the edge of time.’
That’s what I wanted to tell you
about my father and my humble self. Thank you very much for listening.
Clive James:
Can I just ask one question before we move on, and it’s a question about
what happened next? As I recall, after Stalin’s death and after the 20th
party congress in 1956, Khrushchev graciously allowed the revival of Yiddish
literature and there was even –
Shimon Markish: Khrushchev? Never ever! Never ever! He didn’t care about
Jewish culture, about Yiddish culture. No. Khrushchev, never!
Clive James: It never happened?
Shimon Markish: It never happened. Never, ever.
Clive James:
I think I may have just made the biggest mistake of my career! Anyway, we can
assume from your answer.
Shimon Markish: Khrushchev, he was a ‘great specialist’ in many
realms, not so great a specialist as Comrade Stalin, cursed be his name forever
and ever! But Khrushchev, as far as I know, when somehow in emigration they
asked him about antisemitism, he said flatly that we have nothing like that in
our country, no! But maybe I am wrong, you know, I am not a historian of modern
Russia. But as far as I know, he never ever spoke about Yiddish culture and
Yiddish writers.
Clive James:
What was Jewish life like then in the Soviet Union when you left? Was it
extinguished, or..?
Shimon Markish: The Jewish life to my mind didn’t exist simply. There was a
monthly Sovietische Heimland published by the
Union of Writers and the editor-in-chief was a scoundrel whose name was Aaron
Vergelis, and now you find in the publication of which Evgeny Pasternak brought
me today an issue, they have the monthly with the title L’Chaim. Ok. L’chaim. And there was
an article there by somebody of whose name I never heard and he defends
Vergelis as the great hero of the Jewish people. But Vergelis was neither a
great hero of the Jewish people, and no hero at all. It was the man who, for
instance, dared to say that my mother was never the wife of my father. He
published this wonderful news in his commentaries in his reviews of …
That was the only place where Jews could publish something in Yiddish. So
could you say there was Jewish life in the Soviet Union? Not I.
Clive James:
I think it’s a question we might come to later when we have a general
discussion, which we will after this. But it’s time to move on and
I’m going to introduce Eugene Pasternak. Before that happens, Janet
Suzman is going to read for us a poem but Eugene Pasternak is going to read it
first in Russian: this is a bonus!
Evgeny Pasternak reads poem in Russian.
Clive James:
Well my Russian isn’t what it was! And in fact it never was to that
extent. But, as T. S. Eliot once said, poetry can communicate even before you
can understand it. I think the beauty of that is obvious. To discern what it
means, there is a translation by Lydia Pasternak Slater and Janet Suzman is
going to read it. It’s called O had I known…
Janet Suzman:
‘O had I
known that thus it happens,
When first I
started, that at will
Your lines with
blood in them destroy you,
Roll up into your
throat and kill,
My answer to this
kind of joking
Had been a most
decisive ‘no’.
So distant was the
start, so timid
The first approach
- what could one know?
But older age is
Rome, demanding
From actors not a
gaudy blend
Of props and
reading, but in earnest
A tragedy, with
tragic end.
A slave is sent to
the arena
When feeling has
produced a line.
Then breathing
soil and fate take over
And art has done
and must resign.’
Clive James:
Eugene Pasternak has prepared a document for us and he is going to read from it
and it will be punctuated in the middle by another poem. But we will get to
that in a little while.
Evgeny Pasternak: My father was born in Moscow into a cultured family. Both his
parents had been educated in Germany and both were artists by profession. When
they settled in Moscow they soon became known as promising young talents. His
mother Rozalia was a wonderful pianist; his father Leonid a well-known painter.
Through being a university graduate, he [my
father] had the status of honorary citizen which entitled him to reside outside
the Pale of Settlement; so the decree of 1891 expelling Jewish tradesmen from
Moscow did not apply to him. All the same, the Pasternaks could not remain
indifferent to the misfortunes surrounding them. Leonid talked about it in
letters to his wife, describing his walks with fellow-painter Isaac Levitan
through the city streets, discussing the endless miseries of the Jewish
population.
In Moscow the Pasternaks belonged to the
circle of so-called middle Moscow intelligentsia. They acquired the habits of
that milieu, giving an annual party at Christmastime, and painting eggs for
Easter. When, however, Leonid Pasternak was invited to join the teaching staff
of the Moscow College of Art, which was under the authority of the Imperial
Court, he sent a reply declining the post if it meant accepting baptism.
Despite this, he was appointed to the post and he taught in the Moscow art
school for 20 or 22 years before the Revolution.
In Doctor Zhivago, Boris described his childhood perception of what it meant to be a
Jew. He called it “a feeling of preoccupation” which this identity
imposed on people. He acknowledged this “inherited trait, and watched
himself with nervous obsessiveness for signs of its manifestation.” It
always surprised him how “despite a common language and customs one could
still be different from the rest of society, and indeed be something which
appealed to few and was widely disliked. He couldn’t understand a
situation in which, if you are less good than others, you can’t improve
yourself and become better. He was sure that when he grew up he would be able
to sort all this out.”
In the register of new students at the
University of Marburg Boris Pasternak entered himself as “Jew”
(“Jude”), whereas his brother
Alexander, who came to visit him, was described as no religious affiliation
(“Freigläubig”). When Leonid Pasternak requested Hermann
Cohen to pose for a portrait, the celebrated philosopher responded by demanding
that the painter produce proof of his Jewishness. Boris writes about this to
his father (19 June 1912):
“I confess
I’m not too keen on your coming here just for that; there’s
something off-putting about it. He’s right: neither you nor I,
we’re not Jews; even though we not only bear voluntarily and without the
slightest hint of martyrdom everything which this piece of fortune imposes on
us (in my own case, for example, the impossibility of earning my living in the
very faculty to which I am most drawn), we not only put up with this, but I
shall continue to put up with it and regard evasion of it as despicable; but
that in no way brings me closer to Judaism.”
Boris Pasternak wrote in Russian. He did
not know Yiddish and Hebrew. In the family and in his university years, he was
taught German, French, English and Greek and Latin. But the Jewish was not
something which he saw as part of his artistic career.
But when he began to write, he encountered
an attitude of disapproval and pedantry towards his language. His Russian
friends talk about their apothecary jargon. Partly on account of hints of this
direction, in 1914 he challenged Julian Anisimov to a duel; and in 1933 he
wrote to Gorky that the “winds of antisemitism” had never touched
him, but his ancestry had been a barrier to freedom for him in the matter of
language: “After all, they used to follow even Pushkin around with their
grammar books open and their ears shut - what an example!”
The removal of ethnicity restrictions in
the wake of the 1917 Revolution and the preaching of internationalism brought
nothing fresh into Pasternak’s life. Barriers were not removed, but
rather made stronger than before, and the mere fact of belonging to this or
that nationality acquired ever greater significance. The bestiality of fact, as
Pasternak calls it.
He quickly recognised the similarity
between Russian Communism and German Nazism. In March 1933, soon after
Hitler’s election to power, he wrote to his father in Germany.
“Strange as
it may seem to you, we here and you there are fearing one and the same form of
oppression. It stems from the fact that these movements are not Christian but
nationalist, that they are equally prone to descend to the bestiality of fact,
equally distant from the ancient and gracious tradition imbued with promises of
transformation to a better world, as opposed to the sudden ravings of insanity.
These are twin movements, on an equal level, each called forth by the other,
which makes it all the sadder. They are the right wing and left wing of a
single materialistic night.”
Clive James:
There is going to be more of that fascinating document in a minute but Janet
Suzman is going to read a poem by Boris Pasternak called The Grown Marksman.
Janet Suzman:
‘A tall
strapping shot, you, considerate hunter,
Phantom with gun
at the flood of my soul.
Do not destroy me
now as a traitor,
As fodder for
feeling, crumbled up small!
Grant me
destruction rising and soaring,
Dress me at night
in the willow and ice.
Start me, I pray,
from the reeds in the morning,
Finish me off with
one shot in my flight.
And for this lofty
and resonant parting
Thank you.
Forgive me, I kiss you, oh hands
Of my neglected my
disregarded
Homeland, my
diffidence, family, friends.’
Clive James:
And now Eugene Pasternak, if you could go on with that fascinating document.
Evgeny Pasternak: I would say that the terror began in Russia not in the 1930s but
rather in the 1920s just after the Revolution. But in the 1930s the terror was
not more revolutionary. It was something which had one sense, to destroy
people, to destroy the Russian peasantry, to destroy the Russian
intelligentsia, to destroy the Russian army. And it was because Stalin was
chief of a criminal band, and the one thing he thought seriously was to divide
and to rule.
My father was struck by this. When the
opposition was destroyed in 1929, he spoke with his friends of a …
state, because he understood that a state if it is not tyrannical it has to
have an opposition. It has to be strong by the force of natural talking,
natural – by the democracy, if you please.
A big influence on this had Bukharin who
was very close to Stalin at the time and had begun to publish Pasternak’s
poems and translations in Izvestia and to
commission articles from him, although admittedly he didn’t always print
them. And it was to Bukharin that Pasternak went when he heard about the
arrest of Mandelshtam, also a Bukharin protégé. We have
Bukharin’s description of the intervention, at the end of a letter to
Stalin: “I mention Mandelhstam also because Boris Pasternak is quite
beside himself over Mandelstam’s arrest - and nobody knows
anything.” In the margin of that letter Stalin wrote: “Who gave
them the right to arrest Mandelstam? Disgraceful!’
Stalin told Pasternak that Mandelshtam will
be released. It was a lie. And [Stalin said] that with Mandelshtam all is
good. But then he began to investigate my father about his own relationship
with Mandelshtam. And Stalin’s statement that “Pasternak was
defending his colleague badly. Now, if he, Stalin, were in Pasternak’s
place…”. This was deeply painful to Pasternak. After all, we now
know how Stalin treated his “colleagues”. Stalin’s question,
“Was Mandelshtam a good craftsman?” raised the ambiguity to a new
pitch: if he was a great craftsman, did that mean that he must not be arrested,
and if he was not, that he could be? [In reality it was at that moment that
Pasternak became acutely aware that Stalin was trying to discover whether he
know the cause of Mandelshtam’s arrest, whether he knew
Mandelshtam’s verses about Stalin – and so Pasternak deliberately
took the initiative to move the conversation in another direction.] And
Pasternak interrupted the sequence of questions with the words: “Why are
you going on and on about Mandelshtam. I wanted to speak to you of other
things.” “What things?” asked Stalin. “About life and
death,” said Pasternak. Stalin put the receiver down and it was a great
chance to my father because if he had begun to tell Stalin his own views about
the criminality, about the terror and the rest, he would be finished.
[I have to state that Pasternak did know
those verses of Mandelshtam and had warned him of their suicidal, and not
poetical, character. He urged him not to read them to anyone. Mandelshtam not
only ignored the advice and continued to read them, but at his interrogation
named those to whom he had read them, including Pasternak. So Stalin knew very
well what he was trying to get out of Pasternak.
We know the date of the review of
Mandelshtam’s case: 13 June 1934. From one of Pasternak’s letters,
that was just after Pasternak’s telephone conversation with Stalin…
We know that Pasternak sent money to Mandelshtam in his Voronezh exile.
Moreover, he went together with Akhmatova to see the Public Prosecutor about
Mandelshtam, as usual reinforcing his plea for the latter’s release with
the request: “Well then, arrest us as well!” For which he was
indignantly rebuked by Akhmatova: “Thank you very much, I don’t
want them to arrest me.”]
But that was in 1936, after
Pasternak’s intervention on behalf of Akhmatova’s husband and son,
who had both been arrested in autumn 1935. Akhmatova at that time travelled to
Moscow and stayed with Pasternak. Her letter to Stalin and Pasternak’s
were sent in the same envelope. “You once reproached me with
indifference to the fate of a comrade,” wrote Pasternak. On
Akhmatova’s letter Stalin wrote the order: “to be released, and
report compliance.”
In gratitude “for this wonderful
release” Pasternak sent Stalin a volume of translations of Georgian
poets. In his covering letter he also explained how gratified he felt at
Stalin’s description of Mayakovsky: “Mayakovsky was and remains the
best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”
The recognition of Mayakovsky relieved
Pasternak of the terrible duty to replace him as first court poet and to
compose a poem about Stalin (in place of Mayakovsky’s about Lenin). He
told friends that proposals of this nature were being made to him at the time.
His letter to Stalin included the same words about love of life in its prosaic
reality, “away from the glittering mirrors of an exhibition
window,” that he had written to his parents in the letter quoted earlier.
Looking back in 1956 at these events,
Pasternak noted that it was the year 1936 which had a decisive impact on his
views and on their ultimate nature. His former sense of unitedness with the
times turned to resistance, which he did not conceal.
Pasternak reads the poem Hamlet in Russian.
Janet Suzman:
‘The murmurs
ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying,
standing in the door,
To discover in the
distant echoes
What the coming
years may hold in store.
The nocturnal
darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is
focused onto me.
Take away this
cup, oh Abba, father
Everything is
possible to thee.
I am fond of this
thy stubborn project,
And to play my
part I am content.
But another drama
is in progress,
And, this once, O
let me be exempt.
But the plan of
action is determined,
And the end
irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round
me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk
across a field.’
Clive James:
This is certainly one of the great nights of my life, sitting here with the
sons of the two great poets and there are questions I’d like to ask them
and questions they might like to ask each other. But, before we do that,
I’ve just been notified by a subtle surreptitious note that Nathalie can
actually hear us in Washington and we’d like to test out the system and
see if we can get a two-way communication going.
Nathalie in Washington, can you hear me?
Nathalie Babel: Yes, now I can!
Clive James:
Hooray! And I hope the roar of applause that went up here did not unbalance
the sound equipment.
Nathalie Babel: Hi folks!
Clive James: Nathalie, can you tell us about Paris? Because for the final part
of your father’s life, that’s where you were with your mother, were
you not?
Nathalie Babel: Yes. Can I tell you about Paris? Is that what you asked me?
Clive James:
That’s the question, yes. And your communication with your father and
how you learned what had happened. I particularly want to ask you about when
Ilya Ehrenburg came to Paris just after the war, and told you that your father
was still alive and he’d died in the Lubyanka four years before, hadn’t
he?
Nathalie Babel: This is a real bees’ nest. It’s really complicated to
answer that. You want to ask me about Paris?
Clive James:
I want to know what Ehrenburg thought he was up to telling you such a thumping
lie?
Nathalie Babel: Well, when he came, immediately after the war, immediately, in 1946,
he was obviously under instructions to say that Babel was alive. Now the
Communist Party in France was very strong at that time and great writers were
members of it, and so it would have looked pretty bad to admit that he had
disappeared. And the way we learned of that is that, through the grapevine if
you like, he asked my mother to come and see him. And she probably wanted to
do that too. And then he said that Babel was in exile and that he was alive
and well.
So my mother was very happy to hear that
and was misled for another few years and then, ten years later, he came to
France again and he again let my mother know that he wanted to speak to her.
Now in the meantime, the American Joint and various organisations had pretty
much understood that Babel was dead, that he had disappeared for good. But
here, at the beginning of the ’50s, and my mother, in fact it is in 1956,
my mother went to see him. Unfortunately I was not with her. I was young, but
still, you will never guess where I was! I was in London, studying English!
So she went by herself but she took another Russian lady with her.
Anyway, during that interview he told her,
(1) that Babel was dead; (2) that one had absolutely no information about it;
(3) that he had had a new family in the Soviet Union, he had been remarried and
had a child. And (4) would she sign a declaration to the effect that they had
been divorced. That is the story of my mother that I am telling you now.
Now she, as I said, was not feeling well.
She had known Ehrenburg for a very long time and they disliked each other and
they disliked each other for a very long time. And they had disliked each
other. Nevertheless, she had come to see him of course because he was persona
grata. I mean he really knew what was going on.
So when he informed her about this, she spat into his face and she fainted.
I know for a fact of course that my parents
were never divorced. I mean it’s something I would have known. I was in
my twenties then. And what happened is that he went back to the Soviet Union,
and a few weeks after he helped ‘my father’s companion’, if
you like, to obtain papers as a ‘unique descendant’ or
‘unique heir’ of Babel. It’s a little complicated story.
Why did he do that? Why did Ehrenburg do that?
You know, there are questions that you
cannot answer very well. Maybe they had a personal dislike. Two, he was under
orders and three, he much preferred to help Mrs Pirashkova who had been with my
father over the last four years of his life. She was a Soviet and maybe he
much preferred to help her than an elderly émigré.
So there are a number of hypotheses like
that.
Clive James:
Ok. Nathalie, can I just break in there? The reason I was keen to raise Ehrenburg
is that he was such an example of what a writer had to do to please the regime
if he wanted to stay alive. Or at least that is the way he thought about it.
And that is the general discussion I would like to get to in a minute.
But I have to ask you one crucial question
about Paris. That is, you and your mother were registered on what, on Soviet
passports? But were you registered as Jews? Why were you not picked up? Can
you tell us that?
Nathalie Babel: By the Nazis, you mean? By the Germans? Oh, she was picked up. Well, I only recently wrote about all this for the
first time, because it’ss buried so deep, and it’s so difficult.
But, first of all, we were not registered as Jews in France because that did
not exist. Nobody was registered as Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or
what-have-you. Secondly, we were not in Paris during the war. At the moment
of the exodus, my mother took me, I was about nine years old, and her own
mother, who was very old, to, well, with the exodus they really didn’t
know where they were going. But anyway, they stopped in a French city called
Niort and that’s where my maternal grandmother died and that’s
where we spent the war. In fact more than the war, because at the end of the
war, let’s say 1944 or 1945 it was, we had nowhere to go.
Now when the Germans and the Soviets
stopped being allies, when the German-Soviet pact broke, there were many
repercussions and all the Russians, no matter what and where they came from,
were to be arrested. And they were. But in that small city – it was not
so small but I mean, it was a city maybe of half a million inhabitants at that
time – and there were very few Russians. In fact, I cannot remember any
Russian men. I remember only the Russian ladies. And there was a group of
elderly or not so elderly Russian women who had found themselves there also
during the exodus for one reason or another. My mother and I were the only the
only ‘Reds’. All the others were old immigration and my mother was
the only one to have a Soviet passport. Why did she have a Soviet passport?
Well, that’s a very long parenthesis.
Clive James:
Nathalie, can I just break in there? A lot of this story is told in your
marvellous memoir which I know hundreds of people here ..
Nathalie Babel: It’s not my mother’s memoir. It’s mine!
Clive James:
That’s what I meant! They’re going to go rushing off to purchase
it straight after. There’s a big book fair here. We’re right in
the middle of it.
Nathalie Babel: So this is what I wrote about finally, yes. You want me to tell
the story?
Clive James: No, I just wanted to congratulate you on that story and ask you, beg
you, if you’ll stay on the line while we start a general discussion here.
And if I can just suggest a point which might break everything open.
It’s the old point that Eugene raised when he graphically outlined the
unique chain of circumstances, many of them accidents, by which Pasternak did
not have to write a poem in praise of Stalin. Ehrenburg, of course, wrote many
volumes in praise of Stalin, and Mandelshtam, after he wrote this poem in
‘dis-praise’ of Stalin, tried to restore his position by writing
poems in praise of Stalin. But it was too late. And later on even Brecht, who
was in no real danger in East Germany, wrote in praise of Stalin. It was more
than a duty. It was a condition of survival as a writer and very few people
escaped it and I think, if I dare to say it, that might even include Peretz
Markish? Was that right? Did he have to please the regime?
Shimon Markish: The regime, no. But he wrote a poem in honour of Stalin, yes,
that was a fact. I don’t deny it.
Clive James:
It’s hard to imagine a worse fate for a poet. Except the next fate
which of course was very, very easily courted by refusing to cooperate. I know
that this subject must loom large in the life of the Pasternak family. Eugene,
could you say more about it? What it was like.
Evgeny Pasternak: There were two poems which Bukharin wanted my father to write and
the first part of the Book of …., these
poems, is about himself. And the second, about Stalin, as the opposition of an
artist, as a man of some deed, some action and that these are two polar
opposites which, as we know, are close one to another because the polar
opposites are closer than any one to another.
So it was the history of the two poems
which my father wrote, and soon Bukharin was arrested and when he was under
arrest, my father wrote to him, “No power on earth can make me believe
that you are a traitor”. Bukharin’s widow told us that when he
received this letter, he wept and said: “But he is putting himself in
peril.”
Clive James:
But it was the condition of all writers, intellectuals, even engineers in the
Soviet Union, that their behaviour had to be geared towards the regime and
maintain some kind of favour, or else the alternative was extinction. And this
is true from quite an early date. The question here for us, or to put it
another way, for you – because all I can hope to play here is ‘the
writer’s gentile’ – is was it a question of the
regime’s fear of a subsidiary and possibly inimical culture, or separate
set of morals that threatened the state’s hegemony? Was that the
beginning of the specific repression against Jewish intelligentsia? And did
that, especially after World War II, deepen into something more sinister or, as
I think as he might put it, simply reveal itself as out-and-out racism? Which
was it? Was it both, and where and when?
Shimon Markish: First of all, Pasternak did not belong to the Jewish intelligentsia.
There is no sense to discuss it in these terms.
Clive James:
Ah, but you see Hitler would have. He would have said to Pasternak: It makes
no sense of you to say you’re not a Jew, you’re a Jew, because
it’s in your blood. And the question is if Stalin was doing the same
after 1952?
Shimon Markish: Never ever Stalin considered people who were born Jews and became a
part of Russian intelligentsia as Jewish. Never. You don’t find it in
Stalin’s writing.
Clive James:
But if you don’t find it in his writings, you find it in his actions
towards the end. What else is ‘the doctors’ plot’?
Shimon Markish: Actions? But the doctors’ plot has nothing to do with Jewish
intelligentsia.
Clive James:
Well they were doctors.
Shimon Markish: Yes, but they were not writers.
Clive James:
They were Jews. The thing that united them is that they were Jews.
Shimon Markish: But we are talking about writers, aren’t we?
Clive James:
All right. But why would the writers have escaped? And, after all, how many
Yiddish poets were rounded up, thirteen of them?
Shimon Markish: No, there were much more than thirteen who were sent to the camps.
But at any rate I protest absolutely when you put on the same level people who
wrote, created in Yiddish on the one hand, and people who were of Jewish
origins and wrote in Russian as Pasternak.
Clive James:
I was only saying that Stalin might have been keen to put them on the same
level. That’s all.
Shimon Markish: No. No. No.
Clive James:
No racism then? That wasn’t the problem? What do you think?
Evgeny Pasternak: I think that it was not racism. It was something which he wanted
to do to make another attempt to divide people and to destroy a part of them.
But this was only the beginning of this deed, because he died in time. And
this is what we have to say now, that it was the great event of our life, the
date of jubilee, of Stalin’s death and that in Russia when people need
this day, they tell that he may not arise.
Clive James:
I think the evening is drawing towards an end and the discussion, I think, is
only drawing towards a beginning. It will go on for a long, long time.
It’s been an honour to participate.
Nathalie, have you got anything you’d
like to add just at the end?
Nathalie Babel: Yes, yes. On a personal note I would like, number one, to thank
you very much for inviting me and, number two, apologise very much for not
being there. It just didn’t turn out, I mean I wasn’t able to do
it.
Clive James: You’re here in more than spirit.
Nathalie Babel: So that is really important for me to say. And of course the
resurrection, so to speak, of Babel in the last few years and what is going on
now, I have just heard of, oh my goodness! I have just heard of a person who is
writing a novel as if it were Babel writing it! I mean, you know, you will
hear a lot of things now. People are just fascinated. It’s difficult to
understand, but I think one should ask oneself why does one writer stay and
another does not? In the case of Pasternak, it is perfectly clear. I mean he
was there and his genius was recognised of course.
But in the case of those who disappeared so
mysteriously, and with the waste, really, a waste, how come now there is kind
of a renaissance and I think that’s what makes you … the person
who can touch the human fibre, no matter whether it’s Jewish or
non-Jewish, Russian, American, English. It’s the human condition, I
think, that is expressed in some of those writings and that is how I explain
the renaissance which is taking place now: theatre, movies, novels and a
biography written by a German journalist, a young man. It is going to appear
this summer and there is a professor who is a Slavicist of high repute who
decided now he would devote his time and knowledge etc., his research to Babel.
He is the one who did the chronology in my book. I’ve asked him to do
the chronology. And he came the other day to Washington and he told me:
‘I am so glad that you asked me to do that chronology because by now I
have 126 pages of it!’ He is full of the life, step by step by step.
So … in a way it’s very
comforting to know that that man has survived, so to speak, at least in spirit.
| 
