“A Kind of Jew They Didn’t Know Existed”

If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to work as a Jewish district attorney in Soviet Ukraine during the post-Stalinist era, now’s your chance to find out. Marat Grinberg, a scholar of Russian and Jewish literature, culture and film at Reed College, has expertly translated the memoirs of his grandfather, Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020), who worked as a district attorney and detective in Ukraine for three decades and wrote his memoirs in the U.S. in the early 1990s.

The book is comprised of chapters devoted to different cases that Goldis is expected either to solve or preside over. In most instances his voice is technical; he plays the part of an observer rather than a critic. It’s clinical in some instances rather than passionate, but every scene to which he bears witness and every conversation in which he engages is worthy of attention. Each story is quickly engaging and often makes a profound or revelatory comment on the nature of being Jewish not only in the Soviet Union but also in the world in general.

It’s an interesting position to be in: a Jewish district attorney in Soviet Ukraine, a place known not for elevating Jews to important positions, but for massacring them at worst or suppressing Jewish life at best over the centuries. The history of the region is littered with instances of mass casualties of Jews and examples of repression. During the Cossack-Polish war of the mid 1600s, thousands of Jews were killed or taken captive. In 1821 there were anti-Jewish riots in Odesa—the beginning of anti-Jewish pogroms that would become a normal part of life in the region. During World War II over one million Soviet Jews were killed mostly in Ukraine because they resided in the Pale of Settlement, where they had been conveniently gathered by Catherine the Great in 1791. And the suppression of Jewish life and rampant antisemitism in the Soviet Union is well known. It’s no surprise that between the 1950s and early 1990s the majority of Jews left for places like Israel and the U.S.

But here, in this context, we have Mikhail Goldis: a Jew in a position of (somewhat) power. We learn, consequently, what it was like for a Jewish man to navigate the institution of Soviet authority. In some cases, it is not Goldis himself who demonstrates this but the object of his surveillance.

In Chapter 8, “A Mistaken Object,” Goldis describes a collective complaint that he investigates. Twelve contractors—a group of criminals—building a cement plant claim the foreman, Nikolai Rozbam (a Jew, despite the notably non-Jewish first name), assaulted one of their men, “beat him savagely and relentlessly.” The examination confirms that the victim was indeed beaten in this way. With no preliminary investigation, criminal proceedings against Rozbam are begun. Goldis, who knew Rozbam previously, remembers that he would often get in drunken fights, but can’t help but “admire his bravery, youthful exuberance, and athletic appearance.”

The admiration is prescient. It turns out that the contractors had attempted to force Rozbam to cheat the system and thereby raise their wages. When Rozbam refused, one of the contractors said: “Guys! He’s just a Jew! … Just an ordinary little Yid. We can break him in two seconds. These Yids are cowards—they’re like bunnies. I’ve seen them.” They devise a plan to threaten him with violence if he won’t do as they asked. But Rozbam ultimately outsmarts them and agrees to fight one of the men, knowing that he will emerge the victor. The two fight in the cellar and when Rozbam drops the men’s “defeated idol at their feet,” he follows it with, “The lunch break is over.”

The story reveals what we have known all along: there is always another version of the story. A man who has a history of drunken fights is not necessarily the perpetrator of this fight, though he is in fact the victor. But it is Goldis’s insight on the outcome that is most crucial: “They chose a Jew as their object because they thought Jews were weak. That’s the lie their environment had fed them their whole lives. But they tangled with someone very different—a kind of Jew they didn’t know existed. One who was strong in body and spirit; a man with pride and guts.”

“But they tangled with someone very different—a kind of Jew they didn’t know existed. One who was strong in body and spirit; a man with pride and guts.”

What remains unsaid here is what echoes most loudly: Jews are not weak. But it is not so much a statement as an aspiration. At the end of the previous chapter, which incudes a man accused of antisemitism (an accusation that was an “imperialist slander” given that the official position of the government was that there was no antisemitism in the Soviet Union) and a “proud Jewish kid who had defended his human dignity,” Goldis asks, “But what about me? How many times was I humiliated and dishonored just for being a Jew? And did I hit them in their hateful mugs? Did I say ‘How dare you!’ to any of them? Thank you, my fellow Jew, for giving me this lesson.”

Goldis may be in a position of modest authority, but while as a detective in the district attorney’s office he is entitled to a phone at home, “like many other privileges, [he] never got one.” And despite his success in his profession, he is at one point summoned to see his boss, who says that he has received a directive from the regional party committee to remove Goldis from his position because he is a Jew. They were “administering their policy of frenzied antisemitism.” He ultimately keeps his position, but the message is clear. It’s no wonder that his observations of tough Jews seem to impact him to such a degree.

As is the case with many Jews who lived within the Soviet regime, Goldis’s identity was complex: Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish. His parents were party members but still spoke Yiddish in private: a rebellion to say the least. But they also rebelled against their rebellion by rejecting the traditions of Judaism. Mikhail Goldis was named after Mikhail Frunze, who was a Bolshevik civil war hero. His grandmother would “walk through her neighborhood on Yom Kippur waving a pork sausage in protest.” It would seem that a history of contradictions is what coalesces in the memoirs of Goldis. He grew up at a sugar plant where there were few Jews, and consequently did not speak Yiddish himself. Perhaps he was more “intimately familiar with Ukrainian rural life,” and language, which was a benefit to him during his career as a detective and district attorney.

Previous to his career, he fought in battle and was wounded in 1944 near the Lithuanian city of Siauliai. In the hospital where he recovered, he experienced antisemitism for the first time. He began to sing along with the other soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian songs, and the nurse snapped at him: “You cannot be singing our songs. You’re a Jew.” As Goldis notes, antisemitism in the Red Army was not uncommon. It was the rule rather than the exception.

I can’t help but think continually of the idea of “a kind of Jew they didn’t know existed.” Many of Goldis’s stories are set in the early 1960s, before the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel proved that Jews are not weak, that they are “strong in body and spirit,” and that they have “pride and guts.” But some of his stories are set after this war of proof, in a time when it should no longer be necessary to prove such things. And yet it was, it is. But the paradox is this: When the Jewish people, long criticized for being weak, shed their weakness and vulnerability in exchange for strength and force, they continue to be criticized. It is an inescapable accusation. I think, after all is said and done, that I would prefer to be “a kind of Jew they didn’t know existed.”