Russian authorities are calling the death of a prominent Jewish poet an ‘accident’ — his compatriots say it was an assassination
Lev Rubinstein in Paris, circa 2004. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry January 16, 2024
The Russian Jewish poet Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein, who died Jan. 14 at age 76, proved that life for Jews in Russia has circled in ever-more lethal patterns in recent years.
As the art historian Lola Kantor-Kazovsky has noted, Rubinstein once claimed that his underground arts milieu in 1970s USSR consisted “predominantly of Jewish people who lacked any sense of belonging to Jewish culture.”
Rubinstein attributed this to relentless persecution in a reminiscence cited by researcher Irina Aristarkhova. Rubinstein’s grandmother, whom he described as “a very kind person,” was terrified of Russians as an ethnic group, including his childhood classmates who visited their family apartment to play.
Later he discovered that decades earlier, during at least four pogroms, Russians had looted the Rubinstein family home, stealing furniture and other items, and warned the Jewish victims that they should “be grateful” for being left alive.
Recent world events have reawakened in some memories a sense of the ubiquity of pogroms against Jews, but this perception was a constant in Rubinstein’s literary career. Media scholar Anastasia Denisova has underlined how in 2014, Rubinstein publicly alluded to how the traditional-seeming machismo in Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula overshadowed memories of past pogroms.
Putin’s troops “nicked” Crimea in a quintessential thuggish male way, Rubinstein said, “but I saw it as a typical robbery during a fire.”
Rubinstein’s memory of his grandmother’s home being set alight repeatedly before the looting commenced hearkened back to an earlier phase of Russian antisemitism. As a young literary aspirant, Rubinstein was inspired by previous Russian Jewish poets who had suffered different forms of state-sponsored antisemitism.
Osip Mandelstam, of Polish Jewish origin, was sentenced to a “corrective labor” camp in the Soviet Far East and died in 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok. During the Stalinist era, Boris Pasternak endured a more prolonged clash with authorities over his poetry and prose.
As for Rubinstein, during his day job as a librarian at Moscow’s V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR, since 1992 part of the Russian State Library, he concocted poems based on bureaucratic-sounding instructions offered on catalogue cards.
The ensuing Catalogue of Comedic Novelties contained a subversive quest for identity that might be expected from a Jewish poet who had been taught a lifelong association of Judaism with maltreatment. This shape-shifting is a background to contemporary horror in verse, like a Walter de la Mare reinvented with bitter experience of how Yiddishkeit is treated in a bigoted society:
“1 Who’s that in the yellow fog/ Coming closer and closer?/ 2 Now like shadows on the screen, Now like air, now like water?/ 3 Who’s that in the yellow fog/ rushing forward, rushing headlong?/ 4 Is he trapped in a nirvana/ Does he even know himself?”
Far from the caricature of the fussy, tidy librarian, Rubinstein would arrive at public events with a stack of cards piled sloppily as if relishing the sheer messiness of samizdat publications. After use, each would be tossed aside like a shmatte.
Although praised recently by international arbiters such as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, Rubinstein was a bit perplexed by the decay in contemporary Russian mentality. As he saw it, a formerly vigilant attention by tyrannical leadership over poetic pronouncements had declined. This obliviousness to poetry, Rubinstein observed, represented an “essentially new situation” for Russia where “at all times a tradition of fascinated treatment of the word was very stable.”
In the bad old days of Russian Jewish poets, “people were persecuted and awarded for words,” Rubinstein commented, before concluding: “Whereas today, they are persecuted and awarded for completely different things.”
Paradoxically, this official obliviousness to poetry may have had the positive effect of allowing Rubinstein to reach the age of 76. He died almost a week after being hit by a car in Moscow on Jan. 8, according to news agency reports.
The Department of Transportation and Roadway Infrastructure Development of Moscow is quoted in the dispatches that “the driver did not slow down” as Rubinstein was crossing the street, adding that the offender “had been involved in 19 traffic violations in 12 months.”
If this bureaucratic blather, much like the official language Rubinstein demolished in his work, was intended to boost plausibility, it failed, at least for informed observers.
Dr. Naftali Kaminski of the Yale School of Medicine likened the death of Rubinstein to the Stalinist murder of Russian Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels almost exactly 76 years ago.
Kaminski reminded his readers that Mikhoels’ assassination was “covered up as a motor vehicle accident.” Yet this careful staging of a death, with Stalin ordering that the corpse of Mikhoels be placed on a highway, is redolent of a former age of more painstaking homicidal artistry by the Russian state.
True, for much-feared high-profile political opponents, typical Russian methods of elimination like poisoning, defenestration, imprisonment, and exile, are still employed. Yet these methods are rarely lavished on the likes of Jewish poets such as Rubinstein.
Instead, blunter, pogrom-like fates are reserved, courtesy of the KGB school of thuggery that has long been regnant in Russia.
Any poetry lover who relishes the gently humane presence and lilting lyricism of Rubinstein as heard at a 2020 reading at New York’s Hunter College, and two years earlier at an Oslo poetry center, can see why Russia has not prioritized poets in building a hecatomb of political opponents.
Always an individualist, Rubinstein has nevertheless been grouped together with the Moscow conceptualist movement that started in the early 1970s, spearheaded by the Jewish artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.
The goal of the group was to oppose socialist ideology by using conceptual art strategies as a response to state-approved socialist realism.
As the Russian Jewish pianist Vladimir Feltsman later recalled, Rubinstein and other like-minded Jewish creative types would huddle in cramped shared apartments, still another legacy of generations of Soviet-style social experiments that inevitably punished Jews and other minority groups.
The cultural historian Maria Tumarkin alluded to Rubinstein’s perception of shared Moscow housing as an essentially medieval urban concept, like a form of ghettoization. “Long before collective farms and Gulag camps,” Rubinstein stated, “a communal apartment embodied the rapid mutation of Utopia into anti-Utopia.”
In a 2020 interview, Rubinstein modestly opined that in his circle of Jewish friends during the 1970s and ’80s, poetry was “not a means of resistance as much as a means of personal salvation.” As a private means of spiritual survival for Jews and others oppressed by the regime, words offered a source of strength and seclusion.”
“There was no air to breathe,” Rubinstein said in summing up the era, “but the poet made a hole in the wall in order to breathe.”
In a place where historical horrors are constantly redoubling back in different permutations, Jewish readers may marvel at the strength and power of Lev Rubinstein’s still-breathing literary example.
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