A Jew's Fate in Eurasian Space: Between Hatred and Misunderstanding. Role of Mikhail Vygon's Legacy in Understanding Persecution of Jews in Crimea in Twentieth Century

Mikhail Josifovich Vygon (1924-2011) was a prominent writer, educator and public figure of the Jewish origin. He was born in Rudnya (Smolensk district, USSR) but spent his childhood in Mayfeld, a little Crimean hamlet near Jankoy. In the city of Yalta (Crimea) he has been working for the chief part of his life. A witness to bloody crimes against the Jewish nation during Great Patriotic War years, later he became a victim of the Soviet political persecution of Jews. His oeuvres remain mainly unpublished nowadays. In my paper, I study his literary inheritance, including his novel Jewish Happiness in Steppe near Jankoy published in Israel шт 2004, as well as a number of his unpublished works and memoirs, to conceptualise his views on the fate of Jewish people in Eurasia in the twentieth century. In his works, Mikhail Vygon gives detailed evidence of Nazi crimes against Jews in Mayfeld in 1942, where 1,500 Jews were murdered by Wehrmacht and SS forces with direct aid or remissness of Russian and Ukrainian neighbours. The majority of Mayfeld’s population was Jewish in ethnic composition since 1920s, but many Russians and Ukrainians entered it as refugees from Ukraine during the Golodomor period in 1932-1933. Almost universal hatred to Crimean Jews prevented new Russian and Ukrainian inhabitants of Mayfeld and the rest of Jankoy region to give any aid even to one of these 1,500 slaughtered people. No child or aged person was spared, while the property of the executed Jews was expropriated mainly not by the Germans but by the Russian and Ukrainian citizens of Mayfeld. Vygon’s testimony refutes a well-known Soviet myth about the absence of Jews at the Soviet battle fronts during the Great Patriotic War. Vygon’s incomplete list of Mayfeld secondary school former students of the Jewish origin, that perished at the battle fronts as soldiers, includes: 1. Bogorad, Matvey, student of Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute. 2. Maria, Krichevskaya, a technical college student, a partisan who died in the Bryansk forests. 3. Rappoport, Abram, a student of Institute of Chemistry and Technology, died in 1942 in a partisan detachment in the Crimea. 4. Ingman, Shimon, a student, died in 1941. 5. Ryzhikov, Samuil, a student of Odessa Institute, died in a partisan detachment in 1942. 6. Khaikin, Boris, a zootechnician, died in the summer of 1941. 7. Ryzhikov, Lazar, an agronomist, went missing in 1942. 8. Voskoboynikov, Vladimir, a student, died in 1942. 9. Abramovich, Mishura, a 1941 graduate, died in Crimean mountains in a partisan detachment in spring 1942. 10. Balshin, Abram, a nineth-grade student, died in the Crimean partisan forests in autumn 1942. 11. Zaretsky, Yakov, a 1941 graduate, died as a Crimean partisan along with his father Mendel Zaretsky in 1942. 12. Garfshtein, Girsh, a 1941 graduate, died at the battle front in 1943. 13. Neuhman, Mikhail, a 1941 graduate, died in the battles for the Caucasus in 1942. 14. Dubin, Matvey, a 1941 graduate, died in battle for Novorossiysk in 1943. 15. Delevi, Boris, a 1938 graduate, died in the battles near Smolensk in autumn 1941. 16. Sorokin, Alexander, a 1938 graduate of a naval school, died near Leningrad. 17. Weinstein, Israel, graduated from nine classes in 1941, died on the outskirts of Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942. 18. Daniman, Israel, who finished nine classes in 1941, died in November 1943 while forcing the Dnieper near Kiev. 19. Rosenberg, Mikhail, graduated from school in 1941 and went missing in 1943. 20. Wolfson, Heel, finished nine classes in 1941, went missing near Rzhev. 21. Levin, Zyama, finished nine classes in 1941, died in a partisan detachment in Belarus. 22. Dekhtyar, Abram, finished nine classes in 1941, died at the front in 1943. 23. Shuhr, Mikhail, finished ninth grade in 1941, died at the front and went missing. This is the only testimony of Jankoy’s Jews participation in military actions during World War II, that survived the later Soviet destruction. After the Great Patriotic War, Crimean Jews faced a new threat of mass political persecution by Soviet authorities. Nobody was allowed to leave the country for the newly formed Jewish state of Israel. It was accompanied by the everlasting hate against Jews and misunderstanding of their motives to leave Soviet Union. Mikhail Vygon provided ample evidence about social and political activities of Iosif Kerler, his compatriot, famous poet, hero of the Great Patriotic War, who spent a part of his life in Stalin’s penal servitude. It was Kerler who wrote the well-known open letter to Alexey Kosygin, prime-minister of Soviet Union in 1970, where he asked Council of Ministers and personally Kosygin to allow the Soviet Jews to leave USSR for Israel. Mikhail Vygon formulated political views on the future fate of Jewish nation in Eurasia. According to him, only in the state of Israel the Jews may become the masters of their own destiny due to the presence of state force and will defending the interests of individual representatives of the Jewish people that remained scattered for the most part even in the second half of the twentieth century, being accumulated in new ghettos, e.g. in the Soviet Union or East European countries. He regarded establishing Israel in 1948 as a pivotal Eurasian socio-political event that ended almost two millennia of Jewish genocide in different countries of Eurasia. Though his works are not known widely, Mikhail Vygon must be regarded as a Zionist theoretician along such prominent figures as Theodor Hertzl, Moses Hess or Vladimir Zhabotinsky