On May 25, 1926, in the heart of Paris, the Ukrainian Jew Scholem Schwarzbard murdered the Ukrainian political leader Symon Petliura in broad daylight, eliciting a frenzied domino effect throughout the Ukrainian and Jewish exile communities. These events impinged on, and even shaped, Ukrainian-Jewish relations for decades. Less than twenty years after the murder, in the midst of World War II, in German-occupied L΄viv, Ukrainian police and peasants carried out a brutal pogrom framing the violence as the “days of Petliura.” More than 2,000 Jews were killed over a three-day period; many perpetrators justified the violence as an act of revenge for the death of a Ukrainian national leader at the hands of the Jews. In a unique linguistic tour-de-force, David Engel selected and translated documents from more than a dozen archives across western Europe, Israel, and the United States pertaining to the 1926 assassination and to the ensuing trial in 1927. Translated into English from Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish (the documents in French and German are reproduced in the original only), these records reveal the extraordinary complexities and intricacies of inventing national narratives.
The Jewish response to the murder was largely influenced by the unprecedented violence of the pogroms unleashed during the Russian Civil War, which, especially in Ukraine, became genocidal. The violence wiped out entire Jewish settlements, and was often carried out by troops ostensibly led but not always controlled by Petliura, who as of February 1919 had become the head of government and state in Ukraine. Many Jews throughout the world heeded Schwarzbard as a national hero, whose action was not only understandable but also a necessary act of revenge. On the other hand, Petliura became the best known Ukrainian public figure beyond the borders of Ukraine, and remained a passionate advocate of Ukrainian independence even after he fled to Paris following the Bolshevik victory in 1920. The murder turned him into a national martyr for the Ukrainian cause. Engel's introduction superbly contextualizes the systematic politicization of the events. He chronicles the reception of the murder, the trial, and the acquittal in the international arena, capturing the echoes of these events in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, New York, Bucharest, and Prague. Both the ongoing economic crisis and the debate over immigration weighed heavily, for example, in French society, in an affair where both murderer and murdered were foreign-born.
The volume places thus Petliura and Schwartzbard at the center of world events, revealing how and why their names became intermittently famous and infamous, were ensnared by the left and the right, and generated both admiration and hatred. Despite some genuine attempts by Ukrainian and Jewish leaders to diminish the rift caused by the assassination and achieve political cooperation, diplomacy failed miserably. If Schwarzbard became a Soviet agent (he had indeed served in the Red Guard and fought on behalf of the revolution in Ukraine) and a national avenger of the Jewish people killed by Petliura's troops; Petliura became “the pogromchik par excellence,” whose “bones should be ground to dust” (170–71); while for the other side a symbol of the desperate struggle for Ukrainian independence against Bolshevik rule. The two national myths that emerged, and the literary responses they engendered, could never harmoniously converge. What is missing in the introduction is a discussion of the impact that the Schwarzbard affair had on the dangerous myth of Jewish Bolshevism, which often defined the relationship between Jews and non-Jews from the late 1920s well into the post-World-War-II years, and still reverberates across eastern Europe today. The extensive press coverage of the murder and the trial inevitably promoted the lie of Judeo-Bolshevism, which in many contexts served as the chief trigger for collaborating with the Germans in murdering the Jews. In Soviet Ukraine, for example, as recorded by existing reports by the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, the discussion of the trial, and its outcome exacerbated ethnic tensions between Ukrainians and Jews: they enhanced anti-Jewish feelings among those Ukrainians who resented the Bolshevik experiment and identified it with Jewish “power and secrecy.” Engel's comparison between the reception of Alfred Dreyfus and Schwarzbard also seems somewhat unpersuasive. The unreserved acclamation of the Ukrainian Jewish avenger as a national Jewish martyr versus the reluctance to adopt Dreyfus as a Jewish hero some thirty years earlier stems from the extraordinary violence of the pogroms of the Civil War, compared by many contemporaries to the Armenian genocide. This exceptional volume brings together some unique sources that remind us of the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the politics of memory in twentieth century Europe, where narratives of victimhood and victimization coexisted, clashed, but rarely intersected.
