Советская гениза. Новые архивные разыскания по истории евреев в СССР. Том 1

Chapter 6. Was The Bloody Hoax Ever Banned in the USSR? Observations on the History of Sholem Aleichem’s “Extraordinary Novel”

Alexander Frenkel

Sholem Aleichem was writing his novel Der blutiker shpas (The Bloody Hoax) in 1912, under the impact of the notorious Beilis case. Critics of various stripes and at various times wrote off the novel as the writer’s creative failure. In post-Soviet academic discourse, however, The Bloody Hoax

has gained a reputation as a significant literary achievement, banned in the USSR because Soviet censorship ostensibly considered it ideologically unsuitable. With the view to dispelling the mythology built up around the novel, the author of this chapter reconstructs the history of its creation and publication, as well as of its Russian translations. The attachments contain excerpts from the internal correspondence of the State Publishing House of Belles-Lettres, or Goslitizdat, covering the period from 1959 to 1970. The documents published here show clearly that Soviet ideologues did not have a problem with The Bloody Hoax and that the limited page-count of the publication was the only reason for not including the novel in Sholem Aleichem’s six-volume Collected Works that were published in Russian three times in the post-war years.

About the Authors

Victoria Gerasimova — a research fellow at the Fyodor Dostoevsky Omsk State University, where she heads the Laboratory for the Study of Jewish Civilization. Her publications focus on Jewish-Christian relations in the Russian Empire and the history of Jews in Siberia. She lives in Omsk, Russia.

Efim Melamed —

the academic editor of the handbooks Documents on the History and Culture of Jews in the Archives of Kyiv (in Russian, 2006), and Documents on the History and Culture of Jews in the Regional Archives of Ukraine (in Russian, 2009, 2014). His works on Russian history and history of Russian and Soviet Jewry include the books George Kennan against Czarism (in Russian, 1981), and The Russian Universities of George Kennan (in Russian, 1988). He lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Alexander Ivanov —

a research fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies, European University at St. Petersburg, and the academic editor of the handbook Documents on the History and Culture of Jews in the Archives of St. Petersburg (in Russian, 2011–2018). He is also the co-editor of The Hope and the Illusion: The Search for a Russian Jewish Homeland: A Remarkable Period in the History of ORT, 1921 to 1938 (2006), and Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-skys Ethnographic Expeditions (2009). His works focus on Jewish visual culture in the Soviet Union. He lives in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Gennady Estraikh — a professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. His books include Soviet Yiddish

(1999), In Harness: Yiddish Writers Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), Yiddish Literary Life in Moscow, 1917–1991 (in Russian, 2015), The Culture in Yiddish (in Ukrainian, 2016), and Transatlantic Russian Jewishness (2020). He lives in London, UK, and New York, USA.