The Jewish Hullabaloo: Antisemitism in Mikhail Goldis’ “Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine”

• In Event: Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union after the Second World War

Abstract

While much has been written about antisemitism in the Soviet Union, there still remains many gaps regarding the post-Stalinist period and how antisemitism functioned in various professional venues. The genre of egodocuments, which includes memoirs and diaries, is particularly important in filling in these gaps. Mikhail Goldis’s “Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney,” who worked as a detective and district attorney in Soviet Ukraine for more than 30 years, starting in the mid-1950s, provides rich testimonial and historical information about what it was like to survive as a Jew in the halls of Soviet power in the atmosphere of ubiquitous antisemitism. The talk will present Goldis’ memoirs and its main interwoven threads and preoccupations—Soviet, Jewish, Ukrainian, moral, and professional—paying special attention to the instances of antisemitism in his career and his commentary on them as both a witness and a narrator.

Author

• Marat Grinberg, Reed College