2024-01-16 19:07:36
The Russian Jewish poet Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein, who died on January 14 at the age of 76, proved that Jewish life in Russia revolves around increasingly deadly patterns in recent years.
As noted by art historian Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, Rubinstein once claimed that his underground artistic milieu in the Soviet Union of the 1970s consisted “mainly of Jewish people who lacked any sense of belonging to Jewish culture.”
Rubinstein attributed this to relentless persecution in a memoir cited by researcher Irina Aristarhova. Rubinstein’s grandmother, whom he described as “a very kind person,” was terrified of Russians as an ethnic group, including his childhood classmates who visited their family’s apartment to play.
He later discovered that decades earlier, during at least four pogroms, Russians ransacked the Rubinstein family home, stole furniture and other items, and warned the Jewish victims that they should “be thankful” for being alive.
Recent world events have reawakened in some memories a sense of the presence of pogroms against Jews, but this perception was a constant in Rubinstein’s literary career. Media scholar Anastasia Denisova highlighted how in 2014, Rubinstein publicly alluded to how the seemingly traditional machismo in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea overshadowed memories of past pogroms.
Putin’s soldiers “hijacked” Crimea in a manly, thuggish way, Rubinstein said, “but I saw it as a typical robbery during a fire.”
Rubinstein’s memory of his grandmother’s house being set on fire repeatedly before the looting began, harked back to an earlier phase of Russian anti-Semitism. As a young literary aspirant, Rubinstein was inspired by earlier Russian Jewish poets who suffered various forms of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
Osip Mendelstam, of Polish Jewish origin, was sentenced to a “corrective labor” camp in the Soviet Far East and died in 1938 in a transit camp near Vladivostok. During the Stalinist era, Boris Pasternak suffered a more prolonged conflict with the authorities over his poetry and prose.
As for Rubinstein, during his day job as a librarian at the Sixth Lenin State Library of the Soviet Union in Moscow, since 1992 part of the Russian State Library, he concocted poems based on bureaucratic-sounding instructions offered on catalog cards.
The next one Catalog of comic novelties contained a subversive search for identity that one would expect from a Jewish poet taught a lifelong association of Judaism with abuse. This shape-shifting is a backdrop for contemporary horror in verse, such as Walter de la Marais reinvented with bitter experience of how ladylikeness is treated in a bigoted society:
“1 Who is it in the yellow mist/ Coming closer and closer? / 2 Now like shadows on the screen, now like air, now like water?/ 3 Who is it in the yellow mist/ Rushing forward, rushing headlong? / 4 Is he trapped in Nirvana/ Is he even Do you know yourself?”
Far from the caricature of the stiff, orderly librarian, Rubinstein would arrive at public events with a carelessly piled stack of cards as if reveling in the utter mess of the samizdat publications. After use, each would be thrown aside like a rag
Although recently praised by international arbitrators such as Bloomsbury Guide to Electronic Literature, Rubinstein was somewhat confused by the decline in the contemporary Russian mentality. As he saw it, tyrannical leadership’s watchful attention to poetic pronouncements declined. This disregard for poetry, Rubinstein noted, represents “an essentially new situation” for Russia, where “at all times a tradition of enchanted treatment of the word was very stable.”
In the bad days of Russian Jewish poets, “people were persecuted and were rewarded for their words”, remarked Rubinstein, before concluding: “today, they are persecuted and rewarded for completely different things”.
Paradoxically, this official disregard for poetry may have had the positive effect of allowing Rubinstein to reach the age of 76. He died nearly a week after being hit by a car in Moscow on January 8, according to news agency reports.
Moscow’s Ministry of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development is routinely quoted as saying that “the driver did not slow down” while Rubinstein was crossing the street, adding that the offender “was involved in 19 traffic offenses in 12 months.”
If this bureaucratic confusion, like the official language that Rubinstein destroyed in his work, was intended to increase plausibility, it failed, at least to informed observers.
Dr. Naftali Kaminsky from Yale School of Medicine comparing Rubinstein’s death to the Stalinist murder of the Russian Yiddish actor Solomon Michuals almost 76 years ago.
Dr. Kaminsky reminded his readers that Mihols’ assassination “was treated like a car accident.” But this careful staging of death, when Stalin ordered Mihols’ body to be placed on a highway, recalls a bygone era of the Russian state’s more rigorous murderous art.
True, for high-ranking political opponents who were feared, typical Russian methods of elimination such as poisoning, protection, imprisonment and exile are still used. Rarely, however, are these methods extended to Jewish poets such as Rubinstein.
Instead, more blatant, pogrom-like fates are reserved courtesy of the KGB thug school that has long ruled Russia.
Any poetry lover who revels in Rubinstein’s gentle humane presence and fiery lyricism as heard in a reading in 2020 at Hunter College in New York and two years earlier, at the Oslo Poetry Center, can understand why Russia did not prioritize poets in building the catacombs of rival politics.
Rubinstein, always an individualist, joined together with the conceptualist movement in Moscow that began in the early 1970s, led by the Jewish artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Malamid.
The group’s goal was to oppose socialist ideology by using conceptual art strategies as a response to state-sanctioned socialist realism.
As Russian Jewish pianist Vladimir Platzman would later recall, Rubinstein and similar Jewish creative types were crammed into cramped communal apartments, another legacy of generations of Soviet-style social experiments that necessarily punished Jews and other minority groups.
Cultural historian Maria Tomarkin alluded to Rubinstein’s perception of shared housing in Moscow as an essentially medieval urban concept, like a form of ghettoization. “Long before collective farms and gulag camps,” declared Rubinstein, “a communal apartment embodied the rapid mutation of utopia into anti-utopia.”
In an interview from 2020, Rubinstein modestly opined that in his circle of Jewish friends in the 1970s and 1980s, poetry “was not a means of resistance as a means of personal salvation.” As a private means of spiritual survival for Jews and others oppressed by the regime, words offered a source of strength and seclusion.”
“There was no air to breathe,” Rubinstein said in summing up the period, “but the poet made a hole in the wall to breathe.”
In a place where historical horrors are constantly amplified in various permutations, Jewish readers may marvel at the strength and power of Lev Rubinstein’s still-breathing literary example.
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