RUSSIA: Visit to a Promised Land

“In the middle of the Siberian nowhere, a shawled, frail woman herds passengers aboard a plane with the shout: ‘Let’s go, comrades, we are Russians! Let’s hurry. We must be first, first in everything.’ “

Having been allowed to tour remote Siberia for two weeks, the New York Times’s Moscow Correspondent Max Frankel, 29, wrote so straightaway a report, drawing sympathetic parallels between the winning of the Soviet East and the American West, that the Communist newspaper Izvestia reprinted his first article complete.

But in the last of his five dispatches last week, Reporter Frankel managed to send through Moscow’s censors a far soberer picture—a picture of an old Soviet propagandists’ paradise, the rarely visited Jewish Autonomous Province of Birobidzhan on the northern border of Manchuria. Founded with great fanfare in 1934 as “an empty plot on which the Soviet Jews were to pioneer without getting mixed up with Zionism,” Birobidzhan is today, as Frankel describes it, a sad little whistle stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that “jet planes, hope, energy and momentum pass by.”

Faded Star. Its Jewishness has been systematically squelched. There has been no significant influx of the Soviet Union’s 2,500,000 Jews since World War II. The total population of an area twice the size of New Jersey is barely 160,000, “half Jewish, two-thirds urban.” Young Jews leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere; Frankel met one in the train who spoke with “contempt” of the city of Birobidzhan (pop. 60,000) as “a city of three streets.”

In a five-hour walk among the city’s “few central brick structures” and along the “muddy lanes” beyond, Yiddish-speaking Reporter Frankel “heard no more than four or five Yiddish conversations.” He found Yiddish disappearing from the street signs, as it has already from the schools and the movies.

“The visitor,” wrote Frankel, “notes the absence of youngsters, at the movies and in the streets, even before he hears a sociological explanation for their exodus: they aspire to assimilation, to opportunity alongside the Russians. They might rebel against Yiddish culture even if it were sanctioned.

“No youngster ever shows up at the shack that serves as a synagogue. Friday nights and Saturdays, on the Jewish Sabbath, Cantor Kaplan (there is no rabbi) leads prayers for 30 persons, more women than men. Last Yom Kippur, the most important Jewish holiday, 400 worshipers walked to the little house, about half a mile from the paved city center.”

“Really Busy on Sunday.” “Jewish farmers are said to do as well as most farmers in the region. Still, more meat and eggs are badly needed in Birobidzhan. Even city dwellers keep chickens. At the market on Friday, as a dozen peasants sell garlic, Indian nuts, onions and a few eggs, the visitor is told that it is really busy on Sunday.

“People are dressed, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, darkly, adequately. In Birobidzhan locally produced shoes and accessories are perhaps a bit more stylish. The Trans-Siberian stops for ten minutes four times a day in each direction, and as the traveler waits for the train at the little station, a local culture official asks whether there are vegetables to be had in America.”