A Jew's Fate in Eurasian Space: Between Hatred and Misunderstanding. Role of Mikhail Vygon's Legacy in Understanding Persecution of Jews in Crimea in Twentieth Century

Abstract

Mikhail Josifovich Vygon (1924-2011) was a prominent writer, educator and public figure of the Jewish origin. He was born in Rudnya (Smolensk district, USSR) but spent his childhood in Mayfeld, a little Crimean hamlet near Jankoy. In the city of Yalta (Crimea) he has been working for the chief part of his life. A witness to bloody crimes against the Jewish nation during Great Patriotic War years, later he became a victim of the Soviet political persecution of Jews. His oeuvres remain mainly unpublished nowadays. In my paper, I study his literary inheritance, including his novel Jewish Happiness in Steppe near Jankoy published in Israel шт 2004, as well as a number of his unpublished works and memoirs, to conceptualise his views on the fate of Jewish people in Eurasia in the twentieth century. In his works, Mikhail Vygon gives detailed evidence of Nazi crimes against Jews in Mayfeld in 1942, where 1,500 Jews were murdered by Wehrmacht and SS forces with direct aid or remissness of Russian and Ukrainian neighbours. The majority of Mayfeld's population was Jewish in ethnic composition since 1920s, but many Russians and Ukrainians entered it as refugees from Ukraine during the Golodomor period in 1932-1933. Almost universal hatred to Crimean Jews prevented new Russian and Ukrainian inhabitants of Mayfeld and the rest of Jankoy region to give any aid even to one of these 1,500 slaughtered people. No child or aged person was spared, while the property of the executed Jews was expropriated mainly not by the Germans but by the Russian and Ukrainian citizens of Mayfeld. Vygon's testimony refutes a well-known Soviet myth about the absence of Jews at the Soviet battle fronts during the Great Patriotic War. Vygon's incomplete list of Mayfeld secondary school former students of the Jewish origin, that perished at the battle fronts as soldiers, includes: 1. Bogorad, Matvey, student of Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute. 2. Maria, Krichevskaya, a technical college student, a partisan who died in the Bryansk forests. 3. ...