I Need My Blood

The Soviet Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer, born to a poor Jewish family in the Ukrainian city of Shpola in 1900, spent most of his life in pursuit of revolutionary ideals. At age 17, he joined the Jewish Labour Bund, a secular, socialist party that sought to unite Jewish workers in alliance with the wider movement for a socialist and democratic Russia. At 19, Feffer enlisted in the Red Army. That same year, two separate anti-Bolshevik factions—the White Army led by General Anton Denikin and a Ukrainian nationalist militia led by Nikifor Grigoriyev—carried out brutal pogroms in his hometown.

During the Russian Civil War, between 1919 and 1923, as many as 200,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms. Perhaps it is these antisemitic massacres that Feffer’s speaker references in “ikh darf mayn blit” (“I Need My Blood”), written around 1925, when he proclaims, “I will not spill my blood for naught.” It is not the bloodshed but the threat of meaninglessness that haunts Feffer’s speaker. Indeed, awakened by the “hot bell”—the call of the Soviet dream—he is willing to die for the Soviet future.

Over the next two decades, Feffer, a prolific, prominent figure in the world of Soviet Yiddish poetry, advocated both for the Soviet cause and for Jewish safety. He served as vice chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed during World War II to galvanize global support for the Soviet Union’s fight against Hitler. For Feffer, solidarity with the Jewish people and allegiance to the Soviet Union were synonymous. In his well-known 1941 poem “ikh bin a yid” (“I am a Jew”), Feffer wrote: “ikh bin a yid vos hot getrunken / fun Stalins vunder-kos fun glik (“I am a Jew who has drunk up / joy from Stalin’s wonder-cup”). But his loyalty was not reciprocated. In 1948, Feffer, along with other leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was arrested and falsely charged with “counterrevolutionary crimes,” including treason and espionage; “ikh bin a yid” was used as evidence against him. He and 12 other Soviet Jewish cultural leaders—poets, novelists, translators, editors, scientists—were executed on August 12th, 1952. This date, which came to be known as “the Night of the Murdered Poets,” has loomed large in Jewish memory; it was commemorated annually by activists in the movement for Soviet Jewry. As a result, in the English-speaking world the facts of Feffer’s murder are far better known than the facets of his poetry. Reading “ikh darf mayn blit” now allows us to spend time in the texture of Feffer’s Soviet idealism and Yiddish revolutionary fervor, inviting us to be present with a past in which a multiplicity of futures is still possible.

– Moriel Rothman-Zecher