“Kleptomania” in Greek is a morbid craving for theft, “kleptocracy” is the power of thieves, “kleptopatria” is the theft of the homeland, the taking away of the country from people born and raised in it, whose ancestors have lived in it for generations, people brought up on its culture, whose native language is the language of the dominant nation.

After the end of World War II, Soviet Jews were convinced that the victory in that war was also their victory and that that war was domestic for them as well. The difficult postwar years were a time of great expectations for Jews. The expectations were replaced by great disappointments. I had no expectations and could not have been disappointed, because I was born in Kiev two years after the end of that war, in the year of the abolition of ration cards, on July 14. I have an unusually high number of impressions of France—family stories, long years of academic work in the country. The language I learned as a child was almost native to my loved ones. I have friends, relatives and colleagues there. For some members of my family France became a second homeland, for others French became the language of secret communication in the USSR. 

My grandmother spoke French with my father. Dialogue in this language was a means for them to shield themselves from unwanted listeners. Voices heard in childhood often sound involuntary, unexpected, and not always harmonious later on. My father and uncle read to each other the poems of the German poet Heinrich Heine in the author’s native language. They did this quietly, so that outsiders did not hear the language that a few years ago was associated with the Enemy. Less and less often they spoke the poet’s native language, preferring the language he spoke during the last 25 years of his life in Paris. They wanted to shelter, fend off and protect themselves from an alien world that they often and mistakenly took for their own. Not Yiddish, which many people understand, but French, which they have spoken since childhood with their mother, the language of their secret communication. Not Yiddish, the language of the ghetto and places of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, but French, the melodious, beautiful language favored by Russian aristocrats. My family wanted to feel human when one persecution campaign succeeded another all around: the Cosmopolitan case, which struck my father and aunt (1949), and led to the execution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, writers, poets, and actors who wrote and acted in Yiddish (1952); the case of “murderers in white coats,” “poison doctors,” doctors of Jewish origin (1953), which struck my uncle, whose wife was a doctor. 

On March 8, 1949, my father Yakov Ilyich Gordon, Professor of French and German Literature at Kiev University, and my mother’s sister Liya Yakovlevna Khinchin, Professor at the Kiev Academy of Music, Head of the Department of the History of Russian Music and Dean of the Vocal Faculty, were declared “homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless cosmopolitans” and dismissed from their jobs. Two of the four adult members of our family simultaneously lost their jobs, were subjected to extrajudicial persecution, prosecuted at meetings, condemned in newspapers, and expelled from Kiev. The wanderings began. Each of them changed seven cities. Their family life was shattered and their professional careers suffered. After 1949, my aunt wore black, mourning clothes, for a number of years every March 8 to commemorate the repression. When congratulated on International Women’s Day, she shuddered, recalling with disgust the Kiev Academy of Music, where she had been slandered, humiliated, and expelled from, leaving her without her favorite job and livelihood, forced to begin a life of uncertainty away from her hometown and family.  

France played a major role in the life of the man who determined the fate of my father: the German poet Heinrich Heine—whose work my father had been engaged in all his life, who had published several books about the poet in Russian, German and Japanese—found refuge in France. While doing research in Germany in 1998, I took my son up to the house on Bolkerstrasse 53 in Düsseldorf and, pointing to the door, said: “Here was born and raised the man who ruined my parents’ family life and robbed me of my father.” Harry Heine (he received the name Heinrich when he was baptized at the age of 27) was born on December 13, 1797. My father was born on June 14, 1913. My father and I parted ways after he fell victim to the persecution of the “cosmopolitan” cause in 1949. He was declared an “agent of foreign intelligence” (it was not specified which one), fired from his job and actually deported from Kiev. My mother and I stayed in Kiev due to the total uncertainty of my father’s future employment prospects. In the early 1990s I used my own funds to publish his autobiography, Confessions of a “Foreign Intelligence Agent.” My father led a double life as a Jew who wanted to be like everyone else but could not do so. 

Also an independent thinker, one of the wittiest men in Europe, Heinrich Heine led a double life as a German and a Jew. Heine was loved and hated by the two nations to which he belonged. The Germans loved his lyrics and disliked his political poetry. Jews loved to credit his genius and disliked his conversion to Protestantism, about which he often joked, “What do you want? I found it impossible for me to belong to the same religion as Rothschild without being as rich as him.” 

Heine was a doctor of law. The German poet was baptized to become a lawyer, but Germany did not give Dr. Heinrich Heine the right to practice her laws, and he began to describe her lawlessness. Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich deemed Heine unworthy to be a professor of German literature, so he became its creator.

Heine had his own understanding of history. He believed that Germany and the Germans were degenerating. While Hegel regarded Prussia as the ideal state, Heine believed that all of Germany was backward and reactionary. According to Hegel, the Jews, who created Christianity, must disappear, for the new religion is universal and more reasonable than the old Jewish religion. 

My father had his own understanding of history. He treated the Jews as the English historian Arnold Toynbee treated fossils or petrification. The fallacy of Toynbee’s grand historical concept can be seen in the light of what happened to the Swedish biologist Linnaeus. He was against evolution. Having classified all the plants and all the animals that, in his opinion, had always existed, he suddenly saw an insect during a walk, whose existence contradicted his classification and argued in favor of evolution. What did the scientist Linnaeus do? Admit his mistake? Reconsider his views? No. He crushed the insect! What did Toynbee do when he realized that, according to his theory, the Jews should have disappeared in the second century AD, but they did not? He declared the Jews a historical fossil or petrification. 

What is the connection between Heine and my father? At the end of the 1940s my father published a number of articles and defended a dissertation on the influence of Heine on the poetry of the famous Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka. And although Lesya Ukrainka herself wrote about the influence of Heine on her work  and translated into Ukrainian from German about 100 poems by Heine, my father, living in Kiev, was declared a foreign, “petty-bourgeois” cosmopolitan for claiming the influence of the foreign, “petty-bourgeois” poet Heine on the national poetess. In his memoirs, my father wrote, “My Achilles’ heel was Heine. In articles devoted to me, the pathos of denunciation of Heine …  was very strong. Not a single orator-writer forgot to mention that Heine was a Jew and that I dared to speak about the influence of a third-rate German poet on the great poetess Lesya Ukrainka: ‘He cared about Heine, but our national poets are alien to him.'” 

One of the main pogromists, the poet Ljubomir Dmyterko, said, “Behind this group of cosmopolitan critics were a number of their accomplices and henchmen. Among them, the most aggressive aesthete and cosmopolitan is Ya. Gordon.” Dmyterko demanded that the “weevils” be removed from Ukraine. In the literal sense they meant pest beetles, but it was clear that they were talking about Jewish noses. Michael Mitzel’s book quotes a note from the secretary of the communist party committee of the Kiev University, Machikhin, dated March 24, 1949, which contains this “conclusion”: “An active cosmopolitan, Gordon slandered the work of Lesya Ukrainka, belittling her role as a national poetess.” 

My father behaved with courage. In the newspaper For Radyanskiye Kadri (“Soviet Personnel”) it was said that “only Gordon alone had the audacity not to admit the accusations that the people had brought against him.” Other “cosmopolitans” repented, but it did them no good: they were denounced for incomplete, insincere admission of their sins. My father was fired from the Kiev University, from the editorial office of the literary magazine Vitchizna (“Homeland”), and from the Theater Institute, and he was forced to look for work far from Kiev: in Chernivtsi, Bukhara, and Dushanbe. He had two congenital vices—a heart defect and Jewishness.       

The authorities were not wrong in branding my father a cosmopolitan. He was a cosmopolitan and proud of it, yet rushed to prove the opposite to the authorities. He was saved from final destruction by the same man who had unwittingly caused his misfortune—Heine. The “cosmopolitan” Heinrich Heine was mobilized to clear my cosmopolitan father of the charge of cosmopolitanism. Marx was a friend of Heine, and Lenin was an admirer of his almost revolutionary poetry. In 1844, on Heine’s 47th birthday, Engels published the following message in an English newspaper: “The great poet Heinrich Heine has joined us and published a collection of political poetry preaching socialism.” To count Heine among the revolutionary socialists was an exaggeration of the twenty-four-year-old Engels. Heine—poet, journalist, satirist—never had any doctrine. He did not join any political current. In those years, however, attempts were made to portray Heine, a student of Hegel at Berlin University, as the “mediator” between Hegel and Marx, trying to make him the John the Baptist of Jesus Marx. Heine was too complicated a person and too profound a personality to be painted in a single, red color. 

My father managed to prove, with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that Heine was a great revolutionary poet who could influence the national poets of the Soviet republics as well. After months of pounding the high doorsteps of Moscow, he received a certificate that he was not a cosmopolitan. In his memoirs he writes about this event: “Dear comrade, to whom my memoirs may reach in one form or another! You do not have a certificate that you are not a cosmopolitan like your friends, relatives, teachers, teachers of their teachers. Probably none of the 180 million Soviet citizens have it. Only I have it.” On October 28, 1949, the Higher School Administration under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR issued my father a document of rehabilitation, which contained the following conclusion: “In the critical articles and works of Gordon Ya. I. we should note his desire to promote the achievements of Russian and Soviet literature, to assist young poets and prose writers in their work, the development of Soviet patriotism, the heroism of the Soviet people, the heroism of socialist labor, etc. In connection with the above, the Office believes that the doctor of philological sciences Y.I. Gordon, despite a number of serious mistakes in his work, which, however, are not anti-patriotic or cosmopolitan in nature, can be used for teaching work in higher education in the department of general literature.” 

My father received this extraordinary certificate while concealing from the authorities Heine’s attitude toward the Communists. In 1855, in the preface to the French edition of “Lutetia” Heine wrote, “If the Republicans represented for the correspondent of the Augsburg Gazette [i.e., Heine himself] a very touchy subject, then an even more touchy subject was represented by the Socialists, or let us call the monster by its real name—the Communists. […] This confession that the future belongs to the communists, I made with infinite fear and longing. […] Indeed, it is only with disgust and horror that I think of the time when these grim iconoclasts will reach power.” 

The certificate my father received seemed like a miracle, and rumors spread that the miracle worker was the famous writer Ilya Ehrenburg, whom Father met in Moscow in the summer of 1949. From my father’s autobiographical book, however, it is clear that Ehrenburg did not even let him tell the story of his persecution: “Well, hang in there, Professor. […] It’s good that you didn’t tell me anything about your epopee.” Indeed, although Ehrenburg was a famous writer, he was very much afraid of the Stalinist regime. He was afraid of being overheard by the KGB listening devices installed in or around his home. So, he thanked my father for not telling him about his persecution and any anti-Soviet sentiments in case he, in turn, might have been overheard by the KGB.

This certificate, probably the only one of its kind, brought my father back to Kiev. And then it turned out that they did not want to reinstate him. It was not a matter of cosmopolitanism, which my father had disavowed with the help of the hard-won certificate. He had brought a certificate from Moscow stating that he was not a cosmopolitan. But he did not bring a certificate that he was not a Jew, a certificate that Heine had after his baptism. Therefore, my father was not rehabilitated in Kiev. This was a local initiative, not a directive from Moscow. Heine could not find work as a lawyer because of his political views and had to emigrate from Germany. My father could not be reinstated to work and stay in Kiev and had to “emigrate” from Kiev because of the indelible stain of Jewishness. After two years of exile in Chernivtsi, where he was spied on, his lectures recorded, he found himself in Central Asia, which became for him a haven of freedom, tolerance and internationalism—something like France for his beloved Heine. But the Islamic revolution in Tajikistan shattered his eastern fairytale and brought him to Moscow. My father wrote a number of books about Heine, some of them published in West Germany and Japan. One was published in Heine’s hometown of Düsseldorf in his native language (1982). My father died on February 17, the same day as his idol.

Jewish writers, branded as “cosmopolitans,” were assimilated Jews, patriots of the USSR, experts in the literature of the republics in which they lived. They were educated people, well acquainted with foreign literature. Yet they were robbed of their socialist fatherland, which they sincerely loved and with which they felt close to. People without a fatherland, whose people had suffered genocide in the recent war, were robbed of their right to represent the art of the peoples of the USSR. “Homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless cosmopolitans” introduced, in the opinion of the authorities, “foreign” influence and “polluted” the “pure” and “authentic” art of the peoples of the USSR. The Soviet ruling international-socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into national-socialists. Socialists, who, by definition, were supposed to be internationalists, proletarian internationalists, in the USSR turned into possessors of the only truth and pretenders to the “right,” “just” power over the world, the Vladimirs (Vladimir translated as “rule over the world”). The first ruler of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed the conquest of the world by means of a permanent world socialist revolution. The Soviet ruling International Socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into National Socialists, for they asserted the superiority of the “Soviet nation,” while the Jews were perceived at times as an “anti-Soviet nation” and at times as a second-class citizen nation unfriendly to the Soviet Union.  

One of the heroes-victims of the “cosmopolitan” harassment, writer Alexander Borschagovsky, my dad’s friend, wrote: “they blame the blood.” The notion of “homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless” was inaccurate: cosmopolitanism is usually associated with broad-mindedness, tolerance, and is contrasted with narrowness of nationalism. In the 1940s, Jewish cultural figures were connoisseurs and patriots of local art, but they were deprived of the right to represent it, so they were “homeless patriots,” “rootless patriots,” “stateless patriots.” Their homeland was stolen from them. This was a phenomenon that could be called in Greek “kleptopatria.” Their high expectations were crushed.