> --- Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> I get you some stuff on Zhabotinsky later.
OK, I did some surfing on the Russian Internet on Vladimir Zhabotinsky (or "Vladimir Hitler," as Ben-Gurion called him). There is stuff on him all over the place. Apparently in Odessa he was not working for Moskovskie Vedomsti -- which was a pro-government Slavophile newspaper -- but for the local Odesskie Novosti. Which is not to say that he might not have been doing some work for a Moscow newspaper during the pogroms.
Solzhenitsyn quotes him extensively and with some admiration for about 5 pages in a row. I'm sure as hell not going to translate the whole thing, but it's generally in this vein (translating at sight, quickly, not looking up words and preserving Russian punctuation mostly). Especially the last bit makes me a tad more sympathetic to Zionism:
He has no pity for people who wish to assimilate. "Many slavish habits have developed in our psychology during the period of Russification of our intelligentsia," "have lost hope or desire to preserve judaism unviolated and are leading it to disappear from the scene." The average Jewish intellectual is forgetting about himself, it is believed better not to utter the word "Jewish": "it's not the proper time"; they are afraid to write "we are Jews," but write "we are Russians" and often "our brother Rus" (CD: "rusak" -- I'm guessing at the meaning). "A Jew can be a Russian inhabitant of the first rank, but _Russian_ -- only second." "From the moment whan a Jew declares himself to be Russian, he becomes a second-class citizen," and besides "his soul still retains a certain 'accent'." -- An epidemic of useful baptisms are taking place, sometimes for small change, like a diploma. "30 silvers of equal rights." Leaving our faith does not get rid of our nationality. (Zhab., Feuilletons, p. 16, 62-63, 176-180, 253-254)
He wrote passionately: indeed we do not adjoin the Russian people, but know them through culture, "mainly, through their writers... the highest, purest expressions of the Russian soul," and we extent that judgement to the entire Russian world. "Many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, insanely and humiliatingly in love with Russian culture... the mad love of a swineherd for a tsarina." And we know Jewishness in everydayness, in mudanity (CD -- I _think_ this is what this word means". (Zhalb. Feueilltons, p. 9-11)
The situation of Jews in Russia at all times, and especially after 1905-06, is incredibly dark... "The very objective strength of the things in the name of which (??? -dunno this word) are today directed against our people, and we are without strength and powerless." "We earlier knew that we are surrounded by enemies.; "this prison" (Russia); "a howling kennel"; "the burned and cut to death body of a hunted man, surrounded on all sides by enemies, helpless Russian Jewry"; "in a deep whole are buried... 6 million [people]... an era of slow torture, a dragged-out pogrom"; and even, supposedly, "newspapers... supported by Jewish money" do not defend Jews in "this era of unprecedented torment." At the end of 1911: "Now already several years Jews have been under judgement," although we are not revolutionaries, we "did not sell out Russia to the Japanese," and we did not even, like Azef and Borgov; however about Borgove: -- "how he was! an unhappy youth in the amazing [!] hour of his torment... ten boors swore at him from the grave pit of the Kievan Black Hundreds," who wanted to satisfy themselvces in the fact of murder." (Zhab., Feuelletons, p. 26, 30, 75, 172-173, 195, 199-200, 205)
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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