My son was playing with his friend, their family, rather Irish looking although the kids are half Polish by descent, has a Polish nanny. (This being Chicago, those are who the nannies are, we had three, four actually, one only lasted a week.) Polish nanny comments to my friend, Joel's friend's mom, Joel is Jewish, isn't he? Ellen bristles. Yes, and? Well, says nanny rather stiffly. He's very nice anyway.
I guess this is is the place for the story about my friend Irena, daughter in law of the well known Soviet-Russian novelist Anatoly Ryabakov. One time closer to the fall we were talking about goings on in the Writer's Union, when they had one, under or near the time of Perestroika, when the slavophiles, conservative opponents of Gorbachev, etc. were attacking the liberals for being Jew-lovers if not out and out yids themselves. Irena told me, without a trace of self-consciousness or self (or other-) awareness, that at one such meeting she stood up and proudly said, I am a RUSSIAN, not a Jew, and I am proud to be a liberal! Her FiL Ryabakov wrote a very good and at the time controversial novel, Heavy Sand, about the Nazi massacre of the Jews at Babi Yar in what was then the Ukrainian SSR. She wasn't being consciously antisemitic. It was just so much in the air that the thought that Jews might be Soviets, much less Russians, and might feel excluded (even
in my case my proxy) and being informed by assumption that they were not and could not be did not occur to her.
I'm not Holocaust wallower and I hate what some Jews have done with the holocaust and parading their victimhood, etc., but I guess a recent trip to Auschwitz left a deeper mark on me that I might have thought. Be that as it may, Ex-bloc and historical Slavic anti-semitism is real, persistent, widespread, pervasive, deep, and hard to uproot, and it's ignorant and dangerous to deny that.
--- On Mon, 8/4/08, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, August 4, 2008, 6:23 PM
> I got the idea that Solzhenitsyn was not terribly
> representative of much Russian opinion after he returned
> from exile, and felt somewhat out of sorts with the new
> Russia, so I am not so sure what his attitudes tell us. My
> brief brush with the 'dissident' Russian diaspora
> showed me that the their Western handlers were always
> wincing at the default attitude of the epatriate
> intelligentsia towards extreme reaction. Solzhenitsyn was a
> bit of an old curmudgeon in the US, where he was out of
> sorts with modern America, and seems to have been so on his
> return.
>
> I think the question of east european attitudes towards
> Jews and other ethnic minorities is easy to get wrong. I can
> remember an excruciating holiday in (then) Czechoslvakia
> with an Indian friend (who was often taken for a gypsy).
> All of our party were astonished not at the prejudices -
> coming from London you could hardly say that we had no
> experience of race prejudice against Indians. But what was
> unexpected was the bluntness with which the prejudices were
> expressed. On the other side of the iron curtain, there
> never was that politically correct veneer of apology
> covering up the hostilities underneath (or if there was it
> was discredited, being associated with authorities that were
> without authority). I do hear Russians and Poles in London
> express a kind of casual anti-Semitism that shows that they
> do not understand the minefield of western race relations.
> But whether it represents an endemic anti-Semitic movement
> in those societies, I doubt.
>
> Also, you have to control for the ideological presentation
> of East Europeans as anti-Semites in western accounts. There
> is an expectation among west Europeans and Americans that
> east Europeans are anti-Semitic and racist. It is in fact
> itself a racial caricature, a western prejudice against
> people from east Europe and Russia.
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