Ken Kalfus
New Yorker, Feb. 1, 2016
“The dictator did, in fact, die at his dacha at the height of the anti-Semitic campaign, in the first week of March. A generation of Soviet Jews would come to believe that they were saved by Stalin’s sudden stroke.”
Even at the height of summer, Moscow would have been a pretty forbidding place in the early nineteen-fifties. Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship continued to fill the gulag with its political enemies, real and imagined. The economy had yet to recover from its wartime privations, with shortages of basic consumer goods, including housing. The winter of 1953, however, was especially dark and ominous, especially for the city’s Jews. On January 13th, Pravda announced the discovery of the Doctors’ Plot, a supposed conspiracy by high-ranking Jewish physicians to murder important Kremlin officials. The report launched a vicious anti-Semitic media campaign that played on long-standing Russian fears and hatreds. By the end of February, Jews across the country believed in the imminence of a pogrom that would murder thousands of them and exile the survivors to concentration camps in the Soviet Far East.
“The Yid,” a new novel by the , opens in Moscow just days before the coming genocide. Several aging Jewish veterans of the Red Army and Moscow’s once vibrant Jewish theatre realize that they’re about to be arrested. They band together to stop the pogrom. Goldberg’s tale incorporates comedy, some of it of the Borscht Belt kind, and fantasy, some of it of the wishful-thinking variety: the alter kockers intend to penetrate the security around Stalin’s dacha and kill him. As they gather their forces, they move through a tensely expectant capital that’s preparing for the Jews’ extermination. The depiction of a city bent on wholesale slaughter and expulsion may be historically accurate—or it may be fiction. Or, more precisely, it may be based on a grim, enduring myth.
Ken Kalfus’s novel “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” was a finalist for the National Book Award. His newest book is “Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories.”
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