Yiddish culture has not entirely disappeared, but it was sentenced to death twice, and each time the sentence was carried out. On the eve of World War II, millions of Yiddish speakers inhabited Jewish communities from Holland through Germany and Poland into the heart of the Soviet Union. Hitler did his best to annihilate every Jew his armies controlled. Individual Jews survived his onslaught, but their communities and unique culture were destroyed. Ironically, the country that saved millions of Jews and not so incidentally played the decisive role in stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union had its own solution to the Jewish problem.
Stalin, like Lenin, expected that Soviet Jews would gradually disappear as the regime offered the carrot of modernization with the stick of forced assimilation. But by the end of his life Stalin could no longer constrain his murderous anti-Semitism and began a systematic assault on the leaders of Yiddish culture who were the primary vehicle for Jewish identity in the country. This campaign culminated on August 12, 1952 with multiple executions in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison.
Jewish communities across America have increasingly marked this event on August 12 of each year as the "Night of the Murdered Poets." Convicted at a secret trial in the summer, all the defendants, except for the biologist Lina Shtern, were executed on a single night - twenty-four writers and poets (so it was believed), all men (so it was said) cut down by Stalin's executioners in the basement of the notorious Lubyanka prison.
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