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In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp
hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der
Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) made a trip from Moscow to
Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East.
He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a
thousand Holocaust survivors. The present study examines this
journey as an original protest against the conformism of the
majority of Soviet Jewish activists. In his travel notes, Der
Nister described the train as the ""modern Noah's ark,"" heading
""to put an end to the historical silliness"". This rhetoric
paraphrasing Nietzsche's ""historical sickness"", challenged the
Jewish history in the Diaspora, which broke the people's mythical
wholeness. Der Nister formulated his vision of a post-Holocaust
Jewish reconstruction more clearly in his previously unknown
manifesto. Without their own territory, he wrote, the Jews were
like ""a soul without a body or a body without a soul, and in
either case, always a cripple"". Records of the fabricated
investigation case against the anti-Soviet nationalist grouping in
Birobidzhan reveal details about Der Nister's thoughts and real
acts. Both the records and the manifesto are being published here
for the first time.
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