ABSTRACT
In 1961, when Sovetish Heymland was launched in Khrushchevian Moscow, its prosaists and poets were preoccupied with contemporary topics, such as space exploration and its heroes, cosmonauts, or the development of the Virgin Land in Kazakhstan. Fidel Castro's Cuba inspired the Soviet Yiddish muse. Soviet literary authorities took literally the basic Marxist-Leninist idea about literature having to be an instrument for social change, for expressing the needs and desires of large masses of people. As part of the campaign of pernicious demonization of Israel in Soviet media, virtually all central and republican literary periodicals became receptacles of anti-Zionist. In post-Stalinist Russia, the Soviet Jews' identity was, to borrow the words of the historian Arcadius Kahan, 'left only as a mythical, almost mystical quality incomprehensive to their environment and one that could become incomprehensible to themselves'. According to Petr Vail and Aleksandr Genis, the historians of Soviet culture, 'Jews were virtually the main secret of the Soviet Union.
