ABSTRACT
In May 1960 Aron Vergelis wrote to Nikita Khrushchev claiming that it was imperative to create a Soviet Yiddish forum for literature and propaganda. Vergelis remembered Vladimir Mayakosky's poetic lines that became the Soviet slogan 'Lenin lived, is alive and will live forever'. Since the mid-1950s, when Vergelis worked in the Foreign Commission of the Writers' Union, he had acquired a taste for cultural diplomacy and was happy that he rather than Birobidzhan functionaries became the one-stop Soviet Jewish figurehead during the Cold War. Sovetish Heymland, 'the most discussible literary journal in the history of Yiddish literature', became a significant political phenomenon. The binary division of Soviet Yiddish writers into victims and denouncers became part and parcel of western journalism. Isaac Bashevis Singer repeated it in his review of Sovetish Heymland, dismissing the journal as a 'wild mushroom' that had 'sprouted' 'on the graves of those who destroyed others and themselves in the name of socialism'.
