East European Jewish Affairs "Review of Dnevnik 1941-1946, by Vladimir Gel’fand"

 
 

	Review of Dnevnik 1941-1946, by Vladimir Gel’fand
	East European Jewish Affairs 48, 1  Kiril Feferman Published online: 24 May 2018 ISSN: 1350-1674 (Print) 1743-971X (Online) Journal DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2018.1456057   Dnevnik 1941–1946, by Vladimir Gel’fand, edited with an introduction by O. V. Budnitskii, Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2015, 751 pp., $28.00, ISBN 978-5-8243-1983-5
	The history of the Great Patriotic War is a complex subject, especially as seen by those Red Army rank-and-file who were engaged in the fighting. Over the years, a number of factors combined to discourage historians from turning the spotlight on this issue. Many official Soviet records, such as the documents of the Red Army Main Political Directorate, were classified and remained off limits to scholars. Published collections of documents were invariably skewed toward the official Soviet war narrative.1 In this respect, letters written by Soviet soldiers and officers (even though read by censors), and especially personal diaries not intended for publication, possess a special value.2 However, wartime Red Army personnel were discouraged from keeping such diaries (even though there was no official ban). Furthermore, the mortality rate was very high for Soviet troops, particularly among those in ground combat units, which made it almost impossible to produce a record spanning the whole war. This is the background against which one can analyze the diary kept during 1941–1946 by Vladimir Gel’fand, a frontline soldier and officer. At first sight, by virtue of being “too Soviet,” the diary might seem to add little to our understanding of how rank-and-file Soviet soldiers and junior officers perceived the war. Moreover, this is a very long book, sometimes tedious to read because of a multitude of everyday issues and personalities involved. But those willing to plough through to the end are rewarded with important insights. An excellent prefatory article by Oleg Budnitskii, who in recent years emerged as one of the most knowledgeable experts in the subject of the Red Army and wartime Soviet society in general, is particularly helpful in guiding the persistent reader. The author of the diary had fully imbibed the officially propagated value system and remained an ardent Soviet patriot before, during, and after the war. When things went wrong, even disastrously, Gel’fand duly recorded the situation, but the ground did not crumble beneath his feet. For him the problem was that many Soviet citizens had not internalized Soviet ideology and practice. With the exception of his discontent over military awards, nowhere did he blame the system, but only shortcomings of individual commanders and soldiers. Yet even so, Vladimir Gel’fand walked a tightrope because his diary, if revealed, could easily be held against him by censors as well as by political and security officers. Several salient themes in the diary must be noted. One is the author’s Jewish identity. Even though he was only a half-Jew (on his father’s side)* and even though by his own admission he actually knew nothing about Jewry and Judaism, he perceived himself as Jewish. One of the factors that prevented him from blending into the predominantly Slavic surroundings was his Jewish family name. The other was the anti-Semitism that permeated among the masses of Soviet military personnel and civilian population, which frequently pressured Gel’fand to pass himself off as a non-Jew. To those versed in the field, the latter phenomenon comes as no wonder. Here a personal note is in order: this reviewer’s own grandfather, conscripted in 1942 in Leningrad, was told by another soldier drafted from that city that he would kill him during the fighting because he was a “Zhyd.” Fortunately, in the first engagement my grandfather was “only” severely wounded whereas his “comrade-in-arms” was killed. Yet the all-pervasive scope of antisemitism and its egregious nature, as recorded by Vladimir Gel’fand, surpasses common understanding. This raises the issue of how little Soviet Jews knew about the society in which they lived. For years, many of them, like Gel’fand himself, clustered in big cities and indulged in imagining that antisemitism had shown signs of tapering off. But with the outbreak of war, Jews had to leave these seemingly friendly islands and navigate the real Soviet world, freer than ever because the regime was preoccupied with its own survival. Another theme of the diary that Gel’fand frequently raises is the “gender question,” considered by Oleg Budnitskii in his introductory article and worthy of the reader’s close attention. A complex and changing relationship existed between men and women in wartime Soviet society, especially between male servicemen and women in the hinterland. The diarist corresponded with many women. Such exchanges were not only about raising the fighters’ morale; they were how some Soviet people prepared for postwar life. It appears that at the beginning Vladimir Gel’fand’s shares in this specific “stock exchange” were not particularly high and the few women who wrote to him did so more out of compassion. Even though he was a very well educated man for a Soviet soldier and relatively handsome, what mattered most for his female correspondents were his survival chances. The situation changed gradually as of 1944 when Gel’fand got promoted to a junior officer rank but, most importantly, managed to remain alive against all odds and without major injuries. That tipped the balance in the relationships with his female correspondents. Now he was the one who could choose. This dramatic change, even if reflected only in letters, is indicative of the changing gender dynamics in Soviet society due to the war. In conclusion, Gel’fand’s diary is a very welcome contribution to the literature. Oleg Budnitskii, in his capacity as the book “enabler” and the author of a remarkable introduction, should be lauded for making another important wartime source available to the wider readership. Scholars of World War II, wartime Soviet society, and the Red Army, as well as general readership are well advised to consult Dnevnik.
	Notes 1. One of the good examples of carefully considering the “Soviet factor” is Merridale, Ivan’s War. EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH AFFAIRS 95 2. Of special note in this respect is the multi-volume project by the Russian Holocaust Center (Altman and Terushkin, eds., Sokhrani moi pis’ma) and the first volume in the project of the Blavatnik Foundation (Chervinsky, Lives of the Great Patriotic War).
	* Both the father and mother of Vladimir Gelfand were Jewish: his mother was Nadezhda (Khuma) Vladimirovna Gorodynskaya (25.04.1902 – 08.10.1982), and his father was Nathan (Tevel-Nuson) Solomonovich Gelfand (01.05.1894 – 03.06.1974)
	Bibliography Altman Ilya, and Leonid Terushkin, eds. Sokhrani moi pis’ma. Sbornik pisem i dnevnikov evreev perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. 4 vols. Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” 2007–16. Chervinsky, Julie, Aaron Kreiswirth, Leonid Reines, and Zvi Gitelman, eds. Lives of the Great Patriotic War: The Untold Stories of Soviet Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army During WWII. Vol. 1. New York: Blavatnik Archive Foundation, 2011 [Russian and English]. Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006
	Kiril Feferman Ariel University, Ariel, Israel kiriru14@hotmail.com © 2018 Kiril Feferman https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2018.145605

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