Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand

Abstract

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

Chapter 4. Jews as Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life

“…In his analysis of Rybakov's novel, Gary Rosenshield comes to the conclusion, "The uncle achieves what the narrator of Babel's Cossack stories can only dream of: the ability to ride a horse like a Cossack, a guarantee of never being mistaken for a Jew. " 58 It echoes the remark made by one of Isaac Babel's characters: "A Jew who mounts a horse ceases to be a Jew and becomes a Russian. " 59 My own experience of growing up with an uncle (also an Uncle Misha, or Meir), who was a career officer and by the end of the war led a regiment in the elite Kantemirov Guards Division, and of meeting many other career officers of that generation, did not leave me with an impression that any of them sought to hide their Jewishness.…”

The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern European Cultures

“…Western literary critics such as Gary Rosenshield and Eppelboin and Kovriguina criticize Rybakov for this device. SeeRosenshield (1996), and Eppelboin and Kovriguina (2013, 249). For an extensive discussion of Rol'nikaite's textual strategies for creatinga memorial form for representing the Shoah in the Soviet Union seeTippner (2019).…”