Автор: Мелихов Александр Язык оригинала: русский Аудитория: взрослая Форма: жизнеописание Жанр: биография Тематика: -

Red Zion both looks back to the past and attempts to intervene actively in the present, in the construction of Jewish memory today. The hero of Red Zion, Bentsion Shamir, is a well-established Israeli writer and Red Zion is both his autobiography and the story of how he wrote it. As a young boy living in a town on the border of Poland and Russia in the 1930s, he had an ideally happy childhood with his brother and sisters, his mother, and his father, a doctor: "everything that surrounded him was not simply unique in its own way, but was the only possible way it could be". The Germans invade Poland, and Bentsion and his family flee east to the land of the Soviets. One sister is shot by the Germans, one dies on the transport train; the Soviet imposed forced labor leads to the father`s suicide; the brother is arrested for thieving, and Bentsion survives because his mother hits on the idea of abandoning him in an orphanage. 

As a boy, Bentsion befriends a hunchbacked Jewish shoemaker Berl, an ardent Stalinist, whose only desire is to go to Birobidzhan. Berl, who cannot quite pronounce the word "Birobidzhan" declares that "in ten years Bori ..Beri.. Birobidzhan will be the most important, if not the only custodian of Jewish socialist national culture."

After the war, Bentsion makes his way to Israel, where he serves as a young officer in the Israeli war of independence, he earns his Ph.D., marries, becomes a well-respected writer, and finally a cultural representative to Post-Soviet Russia. Along the way to his success, however, he loses his sense of purpose; there is no one around him with whom he could share his "myth." Only in Moscow, after suffering a heart attack does he experience a turning point. Berl had bequeathed to him a silver cigarette case containing his portrait and Bentsion decides to take Berl`s gift to Birobidzhan. The decision makes his life meaningful.

In Biroidzhan Bentsion accomplishes his goal. He discovers a tiny museum to a fictitious Soviet Yiddish writer, Meilekh Terlitskii, whose first name, of course, calls to mind the author`s own original name of Meilakhs. The last name "Terlitskii" is in homage to Aleksandr Melikhov`s real-life father, who came from the shtetl of Terlits. The famous Yiddish author in the novel is a fictionalized version of the real-life Yiddish author Buzi Miller (1913-1988) who lived in Birobidzhan and served as the editor of Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan star). Convicted on the charge of nationalism in 1949, during the outbreak of the anti-Jewish campaign of the post-war years, he spent seven years in the Gulag. In the novel, the so-called museum to the Yiddish writer is located in his apartment, lovingly maintained by his widow. The widow gives the hero her late husband`s stories to read, and the last 20 pages of Meilakh`s novel are given over to excerpts from Buzi Miller`s Birobidzhan stories. Miller`s works typify the socialist realism of his time. Bentsion decides to imitate the Yiddish writer and write something simple and noble, just as he did, and to call it Red Zion. He would create a piercingly sad and noble tale of an unrealized Jewish homeland.