Kishinev and History’s Non-Non Sequiturs

[additional-authors]

Gershon Hepner

July 28, 2022

Victims of Kishinev Pogrom Monument (Photo by Andrei Anghelov/Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.)

While Putin wages war against

Ukraine, Moldova’s now afraid,

since, having of its Jews dispensed

in pogroms. Kishinev, which made,

in nineteen-three and nineteen-five,

two I regret may be repeated

by Putin, willing to connive

what once was by the gentiles meted

on Jews by gentiles, a pogrom

like Kishinev’s two savage ones,

in sequiturs which are not non,

with rockets, not with knives or guns.

These methods, treated once perhaps

as history, may be de trop,

Putin’s maga-manic maps

like Lenin’s traded twisted rope,

and Kafka’s tightrope, that’s designed

to trip up all the acrobats

who’ll be crestfallen, undermined

by fallacies of bureaucrats.

The fate of Jews in nineteen-three

and five may well befall the goyim.

Tell Putin my sad prophecy,

although I doubt it will annoy him,

because reality is not

a state that he’s prepared to choose,

preferring a sad end to plot

for foes who will cause him to lose.

On 7/24/22, Fareed Zakaria on CNN interviewed Natalia Gavrilița, the Prime Minister of Moldova. In describing the present population of Moldova the existence of what may be as few as 4,000 Jews or as many as 20,000 she was totally oblivious.

Regarding the Kishinev pogroms, Wikipedia writes:

The Kishinev pogrom was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev (modern Chișinău, Moldova), then the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, on 19–21 April [O.S. 6–8 April] 1903. A second pogrom erupted in the city in October 1905. In the pogrom of 1903, which began on Easter Day, 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, a number of Jewish women were raped, over 500 were lightly injured and 1,500 homes were damaged. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help, and assisted in emigration

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.