ABSTRACT
Fascism, it was maintained, had menaced all 'peaceful Soviet citizens' equally, so Jewish suffering was not acknowledged as qualitatively and quantitatively different from the suffering of other ethnic groups. Stalin was concerned about the extent to which the war had aroused national self-consciousness among the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities. He saw incipient nationalism as a threat to the unity of the communist empire. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, David Bergelson among them, who had privileged access to information, knew well that a central aim of the German attack on the Soviet Union had been the annihilation of Eastern Europe's Jews. In traditional Jewish life, a 'sculptor' — working in two rather than three dimensions — is primarily the creator of tombstones commemorating the dead. In 1947 the censorship gave permission for Der emes, the official Yiddish publishing house in the Soviet Union, to publish what was to be Bergelson's last complete book.
