Russian Pogroms in Arts and Literature
In 1903, Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote the poem In the City of Slaughter in response to the Kishinev pogrom.
Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God depicts Jews fleeing a pogrom and setting up a fictitious "trial of God" for His negligence in not assisting them against the bloodthirsty mobs. In the end, it turns out that the mysterious stranger who has argued as God's advocate is none other than Lucifer. The experience of a Russian Jew is also depicted in Elie Wiesel's The Testament.
A pogrom is one of the central events in the play Fiddler on the Roof, which is adapted from Russian author Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman stories. Aleichem writes about the pogroms in a story called "Lekh-Lekho". The famous Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof showed the cruelty of the Russian pogroms on the Jews in Anatevka in the early 20th century.
In the film An American Tail, set during and after the 1880s pogroms, Fievel and his family's village is destroyed by a pogrom (Fievel and his family are mice and cats are their Cossack attackers).
The novel The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their homecountry and who emigrate to Canada after losing two sons to the riot and barely surviving themselves. The loss and murder of the sons haunts the entire story.
Mark Twain gives graphic descriptions of the Russian pogroms in Reflections on Religion, Part 3, published in 1906.
Joseph Joffo describes the early history of his mother, a Jew in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II, in the biographical, 'Anna and her Orchestra'. He describes the raids by Cossacks on Jewish quarters and the sometime retribution inflicted by Anna's father and brothers on the Cossacks who murdered and burnt homes at the behest of the tsar.
Read more about this topic: Anti-Jewish Pogroms In The Russian Empire
Famous quotes containing the words russian, arts and/or literature:
“In certain respects, particularly economically, National- Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Women hock their jewels and their husbands’ insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)