ABSTRACT
On 12 August 1952 thirteen members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) in the Soviet Union were executed in Moscow, victims of what Joseph Sherman has aptly described as ‘acts of judicial murder’. On 12 January 1948 Shloyme Vofsi, the great Yiddish actor, director of the State Jewish Theatre, and head of the JAFC, better known by his stage name Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered while on a trip to Minsk to interview nominees for the Stalin Prize. Markish’s listeners would have been quite familiar with the facts: the Gestapo blew up the city’s ghetto after first loading all the remaining Jews on trucks and taking them away to be shot. Yiddish was the quintessential deterritorialized, minor language even before its speech community was decimated by what can only be described as a cultural equivalent of the Hitler–Stalin pact, and marginalized further by the ideological forces of anti-Yiddish Hebraism on the one hand, and conformist Americanization on the other.
