BORIS PARAMO OV
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country writing was to pay homage
to
the realities of Russian life, and yet
the result of failing to see the monstrosity of the substitution they have for–
mulated is to promote further ignorance of those very realities. To explain it
fully requires a move away from ideology to psychology. It seems to me
that we are dealing here with a typical example of a psychological defense
mechanism: projection. It is unbearably hard, and embarrassing, to come to
terms with the realization that the disasters of communism were not the
work ofJews, especially when one considers that it was the Russians them–
selves who suffered the most under communism. In our perception, and cer–
tainly in the perception of the country writers, suffering tends to lessen guilt,
if
not to write it off completely. This is where the search for some external
enemy begins. But if there is such an enemy, it is to be found in the Russian
obsession with "great leaps," from Peter the Great's "window into Europe"
to Stalin's "Five Year Plan." In communism, Russians once again saw the
quickest way towards Westernization, towards overcoming the proverbial
Russian backwardness. Socialism in Russia suffered the fate of all big fads
that get exaggerated in the provinces.
A film that takes up some of the still-thriving Russian cultural assump–
tions about Jewish character,
Kommissar,
shelved in Russia for twenty-one
years, has appeared recently in the United States. It sharply juxtaposes the
restless Russian spirit against the profound Jewish rootedness
in
domestic and
naturalistic realities, reversing the Soviet cultural stereotypes that treat the
Jew as the disrupter, the destroyer of the organic qualities of the countryside.
In the film, the character Klavdia Vavilova, a female commissar in the Red
Army, during the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution, becomes
pregnant and is housed with the large family ofaJewish artisan. It is she, a
Russian, who leaves her child behind with the loving, nurturing Jewish family,
to rejoin the fight for the "bright future of humanity," abandoning her own
offspring in search of an elusive ideal.
Perhaps if they were to see this film, the country ideologists would re–
alize that the privilege of being "rooted in soil" does not belong solely to the
Russians but also to the Jews, though the latter are by definition a homeless,
wandering people. Perhaps the country writers even would concede that
"loyalty to the earth" is a characteristic that may be more Jewish than Rus–
sian. After all, it is the Russians who are famous for their ancient habit of
burning their villages every hundred years and going to the other end of the
earth in search of a better life.
