Yiddish humour makes light of Soviet Jewish travails

Despite all the trauma that Jews went through during World War II, they were still able to joke and create humour.

Professor Anna Shternshis from the University of Toronto told the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre recently that during the years 1941 to 1945, Jews living within the Soviet Union used humorous songs and jokes as a weapon to live through the darkest period of modern Jewish history in Europe.

“Humour doesn’t age or travel well. It’s not universal, yet it gives us a slice of what people were going through,” Shternshis said.

Twenty-seven years ago, a group of librarians at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine found a load of boxes deep in their archive filled with documents written in Yiddish. It turned out they were the work of Moshe Beregovsky and Ruvim Lerner, who preserved Yiddish music, stories, and jokes from Jews in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust, when 2.5 million Jews were killed within Soviet borders, usually within a few kilometres from their homes.

Said Shternshis, “We had Jews who were creating poetry, music, and art that made sense of these experiences. So, when they were collecting these materials, they were hoping to publish them in a book. They collected about 300 original texts, and they wanted to publish them in a volume called Soviet Jewish Creativity during World War II.”

However, before they could get the book published, Beregovsky and his colleague were arrested by Stalin’s government because of the project, and they died thinking that their work had been lost forever.

Shternshis said that many of these documents were recorded with the help of children. This is because at the time when Beregovsky was looking for survivors to speak to, they were still under the rule of Stalin, and survivors were scared to share their stories. Instead, Beregovsky interviewed children, because children “cannot lie”. “A lot of documents are written on children’s schoolbooks, and by children themselves,” she said.

Shternshis showed a song written by Shifra Perlina, titled The Execution of Hitler: The Brown Haman. Perlina fled Lithuania when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. She was welcomed as a refugee in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where she wrote this song in 1943, describing her fantasy about the death of Hitler and his inner circle. According to the lyrics of the song, “On the right side will hand Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Frick. From the left side will lull Rosenberg and Ribbentrop. Flying right with the head down into the soil. And we will bury you so deep in the soil, from your corpse, the ugly one there will be no stink.” Said Shternshis, “It honestly reads and sounds like commentary in Soviet publications.”

One of the problems many Jews in the Soviet Union faced, particularly in the ghettos, was the infectious disease typhus. Relly Blei, a teacher living in a ghetto, created a song titled I am a Typhus Louse in 1942 to make things less scary for the children she taught. The song is written from the perspective of a louse which carries typhus, and the louse is happy because there’s a lot to do in the ghetto. Set to an upbeat tune, the song explains that though typhus is seen as the enemy within the ghettos, the real enemy is the Germans, and the typhus louse wants to target them. The lyrics, “But to tell you the truth, I’m afraid of the Germans. Oy the Germans, Oy the murderers and the Cossacks,” show that even the typhus louse, which has killed many, has its sights set on something bigger.

Shternshis said that one such songwriter, Yakov Sternshis, “was in jail when the war started. And by 1945, he was a very sick man. He had tuberculosis. He had lost all his teeth. He had a few months to live, so they let him out on compassionate grounds and sent him to Almaty, Kazakhstan. And kids, probably the kids of Polish Jewish refugees or maybe other kids, were making fun of him, throwing rocks at him. And at some point, he started yelling back in Hebrew.”

The children reported the incident to their parents, saying that there was a beggar who had yelled at them in Hebrew. Some of the parents went to investigate who the yeller was, found out that he was a teacher, and hired him to teach those kids how to read in Hebrew.

“And as he was teaching the kids, he had a notebook where he wrote every song and joke he heard from those children. Now, he didn’t know who was scarier – Stalin, who put him in jail, or Hitler, who was very far away,” she said. This is where the song Purim Gifts for Hitler (From a Simple Jew) came from. Said Shternshis, “The words say that Hitler tried to kill us, but others tried before him. Haman; Tomás de Torquemada, the head of the Spanish Inquisition; or the Krushtevan, who wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They all tried, but nobody succeeded, and Hitler won’t succeed either.”

The original lyrics of this song ended with the saying, “Am Yisrael Chai,” but it was crossed out by Russian censors because it went against Soviet ideology,” Shternshis said.