Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation

By Maya Balakirsky Katz

In the American imagination, the Soviet Union was a drab cultural wasteland, a place where playful creative work and individualism was heavily regulated and censored. Yet despite state control, some cultural industries flourished in the Soviet era, including animation. Drawing the Iron Curtain tells the story of the golden age of Soviet animation and the Jewish artists who enabled it to thrive. 
 
Art historian Maya Balakirsky Katz reveals how the state-run animation studio Soyuzmultfilm brought together Jewish creative personnel from every corner of the Soviet Union and served as an unlikely haven for dissidents who were banned from working in other industries. Surveying a wide range of Soviet animation produced between 1919 and 1989, from cutting-edge art films like Tale of Tales to cartoons featuring “Soviet Mickey Mouse” Cheburashka, she finds that these works played a key role in articulating a cosmopolitan sensibility and a multicultural vision for the Soviet Union. Furthermore, she considers how Jewish filmmakers used animation to depict distinctive elements of their heritage and ethnic identity, whether producing films about the Holocaust or using fellow Jews as models for character drawings.  
 
Providing a copiously illustrated introduction to many of Soyuzmultfilm’s key artistic achievements, while revealing the tumultuous social and political conditions in which these films were produced, Drawing the Iron Curtain has something to offer animation fans and students of Cold War history alike. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813577029

Book preview

DRAWING THE IRON CURTAIN

DRAWING THE IRON CURTAIN

Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation

MAYA BALAKIRSKY KATZ

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Katz, Maya Balakirsky, 1973–

Drawing the Iron Curtain : Jews and the golden age of Soviet animation / Maya Balakirsky Katz.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-7701-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-7662-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-7702-9 (e-book (epub)) — ISBN 978-0-8135-7703-6 (e-book (web pdf))

1. Animated films—Soviet Union—History and criticism. 2. Animation (Cinematography)—Soviet Union—History. 3. Jews in the motion picture industry—Soviet Union. 4. Kinostudiia Soiuzmul’tfil’m (Soviet Union)—History. I. Title.

PN1993.5.R9K385 2016

791.43’34—dc23

2015024452

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Maya Balakirsky Katz

Second printing, 2018

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by US copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of my mother Dina Levinson (1947–2008), Keeper of Stories

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Puppeteering a Self in the Soviet Union

1. Behind the Scenes: Jews and the Studio System, 1919–1989

2. Black and White: Race in Soviet Animation

3. The Brumberg Sisters: The Fairy Grandmothers of Soviet Animation

4. Big-City Jews: Setting and Censoring the Modern Fairy Tale

5. Tropical Russian Bears: Cheburashka’s Jewish Roots

6. The Pioneer’s Violin: Animating the Soviet Holocaust

7. Cartoon Cosmopolitans: Drawing Jews into Soviet Culture

8. Tale of Tales: The Rise of the Jewish Auteur Director

Conclusion: Tell-Tale Signs and Soviet Jewish Animation

Notes

Filmography

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Soviet animation is a group sport. I thank the children, including the adult ones, who watched hours of animation with me and shared their observations with me: Daniel Chechik, Eugene Fedushenko, Jordan Hirsch, Menachem Katz, Ilan Katz, Yair Katz, Talia Katz, Shai Katz, Lauren Pine-Bildner, Milana Isakova Shalumov, Oleg Shalumov, Olga Segal, Roman Yablonovsky, and Lana Yablonovsky.

I would not have been able to immerse myself in the institutional life of a now-defunct Soviet animation studio had it not been for several rising American and Israeli institutions. I will always be grateful to Marlie Wasserman and her staff at Rutgers University Press for believing in this project when it was only a vision and shepherding it through the processes of bookmaking. I thank copy-editor Pam Suwinsky for her skill and patience. I am most grateful to Touro College, which has long been my intellectual home. Dean Stanley Boylan and Dean Marian Stoltz-Loike have enabled me to travel to Moscow, conduct interviews, and bring home the riches of RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) with a generous sabbatical, as well as the indefatigable Simcha Fishbane, who helped facilitate my access to Moscow curators. I am grateful to Dean Michael Shmidman at Touro College Graduate School in Jewish Studies, who provided me with a generous subvention grant that made the images in this book possible and, more generally, for nurturing a dedicated community of scholars at the graduate school. I especially express my gratitude to my ingenious graduate student Lana Yankovich, who reintroduced me to Soviet animations in my course on Jews and Media. I am grateful to the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry for making my research in Moscow possible and for their support for innovative perspectives on the Soviet Jewish story. In Israel, I am grateful to art historians Ilia Rodov, Mirjam Rajner, and Sara Offenberg for inviting me to present my material to the lively and knowledgable audience at the conference Constructing and Deconstructing Jewish Art and, to quote Cheburashka, for building, building, building, hurrah! a department of Jewish art at Bar Ilan University that serves as a model for scholars around the world.

Although there is a shortage of scholarship on the topic of Soviet Jewish animation, there is a wealth of primary material scattered in thematic plans, practical manuals, Art Council meetings, photographs, scores, memoirs, and press clippings. Without the librarians who made my bibliography available to me, I would be a writer with nothing to say. Mary Ann Linahan and Alex Ratnovsky at Yeshiva University, Tova Friedman at Touro College, and Anna Romanenko and Goryaeva Mikhailovna at RGALI provided me with the sources that constitute my bibliography. I also express my gratitude to editor Katelyn Chin at Brill Press, who granted me access to additional RGALI archives and dozens of mass media publications through the database BrillOnline Primary Sources.

I am grateful for the conversations and support that individuals have offered me along the way: Dmitry Astrahan, Giannelberto Bendazzi, Olga Bogolyubov, Georgii Borodin, Steven Fine, David Fishman, Marcin Gizycki, Susan Goodman, Gabrielle Greenlee, Mikhail Gurevich, Batsheva Goldman-Ida, Moishe Indig, Anna Khoroshkina, Moshe Khusid, Clare Kitson, Shalom Krischer, Itella Maustbaum, Margaret Olin, Michael Popkin, Pavel Shvedov, Maya Turovsky, Natalia Venzher, Lecia Voiskoun, and Menachem Wecker. I am especially grateful to the magnificent Alexandra Sviridova, whose generosity of spirit extended far beyond the immediate subject that brought us together.

I wish my mother Dina bat Isaak (1947–2008) would have seen me rediscover her childhood in the films that constitute this book, but her voice guides much of my thinking on the subject of Soviet culture. My husband, Menachem Katz, and our children are the reason I have a story to tell.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

I use a simplified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system: I did not use diacritical marks, which I find alienates readers. In addition, I used standard Anglicized spellings for names and terms that have become established in English (glasnost, Chagall, Mayakovsky, Tchaikovsky, and so on). I generally italicize transliterated Russian words with the exception of common proper nouns, such as Soyuzmultfilm or Komsomol. In citations, I retain the original spellings, and the reader will invariably encounter more than one system of transliteration.

Russian names consist of first name, patronymic, and surname, and there is a lot of social etiquette attached to the use of each of these and in combination with each other, most of which would be meaningless to English-language readers. I have simplified names by including only first and last name. The first reference to a Soyuzmultfilm employee is accompanied by life dates.

DRAWING THE IRON CURTAIN

Introduction

Puppeteering a Self in the Soviet Union

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet government reassigned a magnificent Moscow building—a Russian Orthodox church that had been nationalized into an antireligious museum in the early 1920s—to its state animation studio Soyuzmultfilm (fig. I.1). Few know of the studio outside of the former Soviet Union, but the films that the studio produced were as embedded in Soviet culture as Disney’s were in American culture.¹ The Soyuzmultfilm studio became the largest and most prestigious animation operation in Eastern Europe, producing the majority of children’s media in the country and becoming so pervasive in the broader national ethos that scholars have analyzed the medium as one of the Soviet Union’s national programmes for identity.² Animated feature films, shorts, and advertisements modeled socialist values and behaviors. Many animated films were later adapted for radio, theater, home projector, and books, and were also made the subject of countless theatrical performances, public sculptures, toys, stamps, and collectible medals.³

The people and the projects of Soyuzmultfilm were perhaps unparalleled in their influence on domestic audiences, and the internally focused field also eventually came to make a significant mark on the history of world animation. Although the majority of Soviet animation was geared to the nation’s children, Soyuzmultfilm was among the first studios in the world to seriously experiment with allegory and abstraction and expand the range of animation to address serious philosophical and aesthetic concerns. What is even more remarkable about the innovations of Soviet animation is that the industry bloomed only after the state’s imposition of socialist realism—a style marked by working-class concerns, narrative clarity, accessible realism, and optimism.⁴ This atypical timeline makes Soviet animation one of the rare forms of cultural vitality during those heavily regulated years and, thus, an essential source for understanding the little-studied cultural scene during the Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev administrations.

FIG. I.1   Soyuzmultfilm, 23-a Kaliaevskaia Street, Moscow. Photograph taken by author, 2014.

Yet, as far as this book is concerned, one of the most astonishing aspects of the institutional development of the Soyuzmultfilm studio is the unusual demographics of the studio’s labor force. Throughout its history, Soyuzmultfilm and Soviet animation in general attracted a disproportionate number of artists and technicians from Jewish backgrounds. Beginning as early as the 1920s and enabled by the korenizatsiia policies (the promotion of non-Russian Soviet citizens), Jewish-born artists from former Pale of Settlement towns (shtetlekh) as well as disparate cities outside the Pale, such as the Uzbekistani Tashkent in the South and the Uralic Perm in the East, migrated to the newly established trick-film departments in the Soviet capital of Moscow. As more Jewish artists attained stable positions in animation on the eve of the medium’s industrialization in the mid-1930s, the field developed a hospitable character toward Jewish-born artists who found the fine arts (for example, sculpture, architecture, and painting) highly restricted by proleterization policies. The studio’s labor force, which peaked at six hundred in the 1960s, was so disproportionately populated by Jewish-born employees that the studio may be as close to Jewish integration as any Soviet cultural industry achieved during the entirety of the Cold War.

What big historiographical revisions am I hoping to advance with so narrow a study of cartoons? To begin with, the institutional course of Soyuzmultfilm, in both its exceptional upward trajectory and its atypical workforce, throws new light on Jewish engagement in Soviet culture. Because Jews have been seen as a litmus test for Soviet nationality policies both within the Soviet Union (referred to as the Jewish question) and abroad (where Jews were seen as a disenfranchised minority that undermined the promises of communism), understanding the creative role that a disproportionately Jewish workforce played in the formation of Soviet popular culture has broad significance.⁵ Although they aimed to create technically and aesthetically sophisticated national films, Soyuzmultfilm animators also significantly engaged Jewish material in ways that the Soviet live-action industry found impossible and in conscious opposition to Disney constructions of Jewishness, such as the Yiddish-inflecting peddler characterization of the Big Bad Wolf in Disney’s original Three Little Pigs (1933). If indeed a multicultural and multilingual group of civilian employees mined their own non-Russian traditions of the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Lithuanian peoples (narodnost’) to create one of the most popular forms of Soviet culture, then the staid image of a Russo-centric Soviet culture requires substantial revision.⁶

Conventional histories of Soviet Jewish culture are partially skewed by the scholarly willingness to credit American Jewish avant-gardism to what is seen as a specifically Jewish type of secularism and simultaneously to discredit Soviet Jewish artists on the basis of their secularism.⁷ The application of this double standard to Cold War Jewish culture is not an academic trope insidiously directed against Soviet Jewish artists but, at least partially, a consequence of American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jews in the communist bloc on the platform of religious intolerance.⁸ Jewish studies titles on Soviet popular culture have largely been shaped by global Jewish institutions during a period of activism on behalf of those whom human rights activist Elie Wiesel coined the Jews of Silence.⁹ Although Wiesel later qualified and ultimately regretted this phrase, claiming that he was actually referring to the indifference that American Jews showed their Soviet brethren, the trope of silence became firmly associated with the Soviet Jewish condition.¹⁰ Avram Kampf, one of the pioneers of Jewish art history, imported this attitude into the field when he ended his landmark 1975 catalog on Russian Jewish art with what he saw as the fated emigration of Jewish artists after the 1917 Russian Revolution: Whether they were still clinging to their faith in Jewish art or whether they had a change of heart, they could all agree that it could not have taken place in Soviet Russia.¹¹ Kampf’s curatorial discourse remained unchallenged for the remainder of the twentieth century even as Soviet Jewish animators were reaching their creative height.¹² In a post-Soviet retrospective on Russian Jewish art, historian Michael Stanislawski reiterated Kampf’s narrowed scope but postponed the demise of Jewish culture by another fifteen years: Beginning in 1930 and 1931, all attempts at creating a Soviet Jewish Culture were all but smothered in the general obliteration of artistic and cultural creativity throughout the Soviet Union.¹³ Film historian Peter Kenez took a more expansive view, dating the Jewish cultural demise to Stalin’s liquidation of Jewish theaters in the late 1930s, after which, and for as long as the Soviet Union lasted, Jewish themes had no place in Soviet cinema.¹⁴ In his study of Jews in Soviet film, Russian film scholar Miron Chernenko confirmed these conclusions by demonstrating that on the rare occasions Jewish characters appeared on Soviet screens after the late 1930s, they took the form of stock characters in vulgar roles.¹⁵ The recent boom in revisionist scholarship on Soviet Jewish culture has added much-needed nuance to the assertions that public Jewishness disappeared from Soviet society, yet even in her groundbreaking study on the Soviet representation and repression of the Holocaust in film, historian Olga Gershenson firmly drew the line in the late 1960s, after which no Jews were allowed on screens . . . whether in war or in any other kind of film.¹⁶

That Jews were at the center of Soviet animated film from the 1920s to the 1980s, including throughout the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, when Soviet state culture was relatively unproductive in general and repressive for Jewish artists in particular, offers a rare opportunity to study the Jewish voices that did emerge in official—rather than underground—Soviet culture. This book not only moves the markers on the historiographical timeline, but also claims that as the animation field developed apart from the live-action film sector, it evolved its own modes of communication that proved conducive to Jewish cultural expression. Although it is obvious that animators from Jewish backgrounds did not belong to any kind of unified artistic movement, many Jewish animators persistently explored self-reflexive ethnographic material and sought to represent themselves in an atmosphere when the very notion of Jewish culture was a matter of significant national debate. Filmmakers in the live-action sector, charged with the creation of a proud national image, were tightly restrained from pursuing overt Jewish themes, whereas animators, charged with the moral education and emotional consciousness of the nation’s ethnic minorities and children, were able to push the boundaries of self-representation with relative impunity even during the Stalin years.

Some of these efforts only came to be recognized during the foreign release of Soviet films or at the international venues in the late 1950s made possible by the work of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA). Growing awareness of early Soviet animation, for example, led to the late recognition of the influence that Aleksander Ptushko’s New Gulliver (1935) played on Disney’s witty combinations of live-action and animated elements as well as Lev Atamanov’s The Snow Queen (1957) as a predecessor to Disney’s adaptations of literary masterpieces. It must have been exhilarating for Soviet animators to see the world discover their art and see how their life’s work measured against international standards. Festival insider and scholar Giannalberto Bendazzi described the international animation festivals as a kind of Olympic game and a festival prize as akin to an Olympic medal: During the Cold War, it was a matter of pride.¹⁷

It was especially a matter of pride to Jewish filmmakers who survived the purges of the late Stalin years. As Jewish animation director Iosif Boyarsky (1917–2008) gleefully reported in his memoir, Jewish director Yuri Norstein’s (b. 1941) philosophical meditation Tale of Tales (1979) came in first place in an ASIFA poll for best animated film of all time that was organized for the Olympiad of Animation in conjunction with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.¹⁸ We didn’t find out right away about the prize, recalled freelance scriptwriter Alexandra Sviridova (b. 1951) who was in the room when officials at the Cinema Museum handed the director a slip of paper with the Olympiad results two years later. Norstein asked if he could keep that paper as a memento, recalled Sviridova, "but they needed it back for their records. I remember how Norstein turned to the rest of us and said: ‘This is proof of how far our own (nashi) have reached around the globe.’ Norstein’s pronouncement may appear an odd locution today, but Sviridova explained that it was clear as day" to the other Jewish filmmakers in the room that nashi referred to Jews: A Jew made the greatest Soviet animated film: he knew; we knew; they knew.¹⁹

That the honor went to a Jewish artist working in a state studio during the intolerant Brezhnev years—rather than Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1935), England’s Yellow Submarine (1968), or Japan’s Dojoji Temple (1976)—confirms the need for a careful reexamination of our current understandings of both the undervalued objects of socialist realism in art history and the image of Soviet Jews as silenced in Jewish studies. This book is not the animation version of Great Jews in Sports. Norstein’s Tale of Tales is not a film that just happens to have been written by a Jewish scriptwriter, designed by a Jewish artist, directed by a Jewish director, and in which other Jews can take pride in as evidence of the Jewish contribution to progressive culture. Rather, Tale of Tales is a film that consciously engages with Jewish themes within the animated text—a criteria that all the films discussed at length in this book meet. In the nonlinear format of Tale of Tales, an alienated and misunderstood Little Gray Wolf serves as subject and courier of Russian folklore as he tries to find his own place within it. He is a character who, according to Norstein and meticulously chronicled by British animation critic Clare Kitson, was based on Norstein’s memories of his own Jewish postwar childhood in the dilapidated Jewish neighborhood of Maryina Roshcha on the outskirts of Moscow.²⁰ Norstein’s film and its reception as a highly autobiographical account of a Jewish auteur exemplifies the radical performative experiments that took place in the state studio Soyuzmultfilm and the Jewish voices that emerged and reached around the globe.

In Russia today, the Jewish presence in national animation has not been articulated as much as it has been understood. One of the best examples of the perception of Soyuzmultfilm as Jewish in character came as recently as 2012 after the Russian government announced the return of part of the studio property to its original occupier, the Orthodox Church. A mob of sword-wielding religious activists gathered at the former studio following the announcement and publicly burned the studio’s puppets and erected Orthodox crosses in the courtyard. Members of the mob justified their actions with the explanation that they were exorcising the satanic puppets animated with the blood of Christian babies, a loaded claim that evokes the pernicious antisemitic history of blood libel accusations to any Jewish citizen who grew up in the Soviet Union.²¹ The sacking of the studio, although seemingly surreal, is fundamentally characteristic of the post-Soviet negotiation between what happened and what was said to happen in the Soviet past. Revolutionary and religious ideologues, intermittent squatters, and bitter former employees have rendered the Czarist-era red brick building and its Soviet-era pale yellow concrete façade an unfaithful monument to what was once a thriving creative hub of artists and intellectuals of all stripes. We have yet to understand the studio’s role as a socialist institution that was also a site for the transformation of religious imperatives, or comprehend its return to religious signification in a more democratic society, for that matter. What is clear is that emotions continue to run hot on the markedly secular role that animation played in Soviet life and continues to play in post-Soviet national identity, especially in relation to religious and ethnic identity. This book seeks to explain the roots and rootedness of this emotional energy beyond the nostalgia for Soviet popular culture by exploring the unrecorded histories behind some of the Soviet Union’s most popular films, when Jewish artists helped to shift the status of animation to the top of the communist cultural hierarchy.

Jews of Silence: Puppeteering Invisibility

The relationship between Soviet culture and Jewish artists is complicated by the snare of definitions that have long trapped art history and Jewish studies into tedious if heated debate.²² With all the complexity those two polysemantic words Jewish artist engender both independently and in combination, I have struggled to find less distended terms to describe those artists whose work bewitched me into writing a book about them. Soviet civil servants with Jewish national designation? Soviet artists of Jewish extraction? These tortured amalgams serve only to expose the discomfort that the identification of Jewishness gave rise to in the Soviet Union, an evoked feeling with which I am intimately familiar, having emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979 and raised in American Jewish communities during the Reagan years. The only concrete conclusion that I can draw from these semantic exercises is that it is no longer comme il faut to define Jews or Jewishness and perhaps nowhere more so than in the context of Soviet multinationalism.

Although some Jewish animators spoke openly—at least after retirement, emigration, or the collapse of the studio—about their Jewish pedigrees, filmmakers were not in the business of producing work that might be understood as a Jewish genre.²³ In fact, Jewish artists went to great lengths to deny the existence of a Jewish genre in any medium, accepting and promoting the illusion of Jewish invisibility when at the helm of their own media productions.²⁴ When the would-be director of the Cinema Museum, the Bukharian Jew Julius Kaveenschikov, first came to Moscow, he expressed amazement at how well the local Jews camouflage their original middle name! Haimovich and Isakovich become Arkadieviches and Ivanoviches.²⁵ Like their literary counterparts, Soviet artists passionately—perhaps obsessively—sought to establish their artistic roots in Russian soil (even if they hailed from the Soviet Union’s other republics). In his blunt description of what his Jewishness meant to him, Soyuzmultfilm scriptwriter Michael Lipskerov (b. 1939) illustrates the tautological logic of Soviet Jewish identity: You know who I wanted to be as a child? Russian! Jewish memory is in me at the genetic level—there’s no getting around it. But actually I am more Russian than any other Russian. . . . All my books are written on behalf of the Russian Jew who considers himself a representative of Russian culture.²⁶ Contemporaneous animation critics in the main Soviet newspapers Izvestia and Pravda and the specialized Muscovite film journals Iskusstvo kino, Kino i zhizn’, and Kino-front provide little additional commentary on the subject of Jewish identity in the Soviet animation industry. Although critics hyped the role of cinema in the Sovietization processes, they diligently sidestepped any noticeable Jewish references (even as review articles often grouped Jewish filmmakers together).

This pervasive attitude toward the identification of Jewishness defined my early attempts to speak candidly on the subject of artistic identity with industry insiders. Maya Turovsky, a Russian Jewish filmmaker who wrote one of the most sensitive Soviet live-action film scripts on Jewish themes, told me that she never considered the nationality question in relationship to the domestic animation industry and, while encouraging my inquiry, could not imagine what my research would unearth.²⁷ In one of the most typical responses I received from former industry insiders, animation researcher Natalia Venzher explained that maybe we knew who was Jewish, but it was completely irrelevant to the work and, for us, the work always came first.²⁸ Venzher followed this sentiment with a detailed account of her own difficult decision to officially identify with her mother’s Russian Orthodox roots rather than her father’s Jewish status for professional considerations.²⁹ Director Yuri Norstein likewise told me that the question was irrelevant because we were all filmmakers and then went on to list exactly who was Jewish, half-Jewish, and a quarter-Jewish on his film crews over the past forty years.³⁰ One of the leading Soviet animation critics, Mikhail Gurevich, told me, You have to understand. This conversation is unintelligible if not impossible.³¹

Despite these obscure evaluations on the irrelevance of Jewish identity by those active in the business, I have found that the communication modalities of animated film allowed their authors to express themselves in ways that they could not articulate in polite conversation. As many theoreticians of animation have pointed out, the creation of new identities through seemingly independent objects (of one’s own making) offers both an escape from the self and a way to project the self. In the early 1940s, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein maintained that the plasmatic quality of animation, by which he meant the ability to forge a transformable body, evoked a profound artistic and social liberation from fixed categories.³² Semiotician Yuri Lotman made a key distinction between puppet theater, where the connection between puppet and man is inescapable, and puppet film, where the puppet replaces the live actor and thus its ‘puppetness’ comes to the fore.³³ For Lotman, the essential property of live performance is the illusion of reality, while animation operates with signs of signs, a twice-removed process that liberates its creator to remain quasi-invisible on screen and makes this type of cinema particularly suitable for the transmission of various shades of irony and for the creation of an allegorical text.³⁴ Looking back on a career that began in film acting and culminated in animation directing, Jewish Soyuzmultfilm director Garri Bardin (Bardenshteyn, b. 1941) extends Lotman’s observation by insisting animation triggers a magical fantasy world of perception and the moment the viewer begins to believe that the shapes on the screen move of their own accord, the animator achieves the illusion of invisibility.³⁵

In contrast to Eisenstein’s and Lotman’s celebration of animation for its capacity to throw an invisibility cloak over the self and reality, Jewish-born writer Sergei [Seymon] Ginzburg (1907–1974), the first serious theorist of animation in the Soviet Union, railed against animation being reduced to its magical qualities and expounded instead on animation’s inability to conceal the reality of the artist and of the times.³⁶ In his classic volume on animation used for decades as a standard text in Soviet training courses, Ginzburg insisted that the dreams, transformations, and subversions of fantastical creatures and events in the animated text held a mirror up to the most impulsive aspects of the animator’s consciousness, which was necessarily bound up in his specific historical moment. Whether we take the view of Eisenstein and Lotman or Ginzburg, it is the unstable in-betweeness of the medium—the ability to occupy both the real and the fantastic and the medium’s flexibility in artistic self-actualization and dematerialization—that offered an added draw for national minorities. As historian Paul Wells posits, the dialectic between authorial absence and presence in a film-text allows seemingly irreconcilable contradictions in ethnicity, gender, and class to coexist.³⁷

Although invisibility or quasi-invisibility is inherent to the poetics of animation, it is necessary to qualify its application to popular media, in relationship to Soviet Jews whose invisibility was a matter of political significance. Beginning with Lenin’s castigation of antisemitism—broadcast on film-trains around the country and thus bound up in the forms of the film medium—Soviet officials routinely condemned and denied Jewish difference in the communist social structure.³⁸ This message, disseminated through the cinematic apparatus, resulted in the development of an official silence around the discourse of Jewishness in the public sphere with a Soviet-specific set of aesthetic and social practices.³⁹ In addition to the sense of invisibility that Jewish animators adopted for their public appearances, especially on screen, the nation’s filmgoers also longed for anonymity. As early as 1929, Jewish media historian Abram Gelmont celebrated the national program of cinefication for the ways that the cinema apparatus in the new theater halls socialized ethnic populations within a broader multinational communal experience.⁴⁰ In other words, scholars have not simply overlooked the Jewish presence in Soviet animation but conformed to a political platform of invisibility directed toward and embraced by Soviet Jewry.⁴¹

This mediated silence surrounding the discourse of Jews further complicates definitions of Jewish visual culture, but the methodological limitations that arise from the realities of Soviet media practices should not lead to a denial of the agency that Jewish artists exercised in representing themselves. Moshe Khusid (born Mikhail Aleksandrovich), a Jewish director active in Soviet puppet theater in the 1970s and 1980s, is a good example. Although Khusid and many other Jewish puppeteers were forced to work in relative exile in the Soviet Far East, Khusid describes his career in puppet theater as a space in which he was able to fully express himself within the pliable distortions of theatrical mannerism. After immigrating to the United States, Khusid turned to overtly religious Jewish texts in his animated film Purim: The Lot (2012), explaining that while such sources were unavailable in the Soviet Union, his integration of a vast archive of Jewish homiletic tales and rabbinical commentary in America was entirely based on the Soviet school of animation and predicated on an intimacy with the Russian ethos of folklore.⁴² Khusid recalled that although they were not always attuned to Jewish content within the Soviet animated text, he and his colleagues were acutely aware of which filmmakers and actors were Jewish on the Soviet screens, facilitating networking throughways and professional opportunities.⁴³ Whatever assimilation hopes media critics, such as Abram Gelmont, may have poured into cinefication in the 1930s, one Jewish émigré from Stavropol described the Jewish ritual of waiting for the credits to roll in order to watch the Jewish names scroll over our national icons. We didn’t have to say anything. We just knew who was who.⁴⁴ For him and countless other Soviet Jewish filmgoers, the cinematic experience offered the security of an invisibility cloak but one with the satisfaction of a Jewish brand label.

If interpreting Jewish presence in a film-text is complicated by state policies toward public displays of Jewishness, this reality is coupled by the 1932 institutionalization of internal passports and the concomitant legislation that imposed the identification of a nationality (natsional’nost’) on the infamous Fifth Point of all internal passports.⁴⁵ I did not know right away that I was a Jew, wrote director Garri Bardin in a part of his memoir that he bluntly entitled The Fifth Point. When I found out, I won’t say that I was very happy about it. When I forgot about it, others reminded me. One time we were playing in the school yard during a long break and, all of a sudden, one of my classmates pointed his finger at me and said that his father revealed to him the secret to all our troubles. ‘All trouble comes from the Jews,’ which is why everyone always says: ‘Beat the Jews and save Russia!’ They immediately set to saving Russia right there in the yard.⁴⁶

The Fifth Point concretely identifies the ethnic status of those that were supposed to be publicly invisible, but it is only one part of the designation Jewish artist. The same year as the directive on the Fifth Point was put into effect, the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) imposed artistic status as well by issuing the directive On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations, which dissolved the existing Soviet artistic organizations in favor of official workers’ unions. As part of this major overhaul of the art world, the CC directive mandated that officially employed artists were required to join the Union of Artists. Pairing these concurrent pieces of legislation is fundamental to whatever definition of Jewish artist we ultimately arrive at, because it is the combination of nationality and artistic status that defined the Jewish artist in the Soviet context. Although the films that I discuss in this book were made by Jewish artists who consciously shaped the Jewish material in their films, it is important to understand that personal anecdotes of former Jewish Soyuzmultfilm employees, such as those of Lipskerov and Bardin, were primarily expressed to narrate their artistic development rather than their ethnic identities. Narratives of political marginalization make up an integral component of many twentieth-century artistic autobiographies around the world, but the legal categorization of Jewish difference was especially relevant in a country that made ethnicity part of one’s official artistic status.

Although Jewish art history is rarely so simple a task as following the trail of Jewish influences on art, the Soviet case is more complex than usual. In the context of Soviet artistic policies, the directionality of influence goes both ways: one’s artistic vision and practices proved especially constructive of one’s Jewish identity. Perhaps the most useful example of the constructive role that art plays in the identification of Jewishness is the ways that the externally defined rubric of Jewish artist implicates non-Jews as well. Those who escaped the infamous Fifth Point on their passports due to intermarriage, bureaucratic maneuvering, or because they simply were not Jewish but were singled out as Jews for their foreign influences, cosmopolitanism, or intellectualism—exemplified by the infamous cases of film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich—still worked at the nexus of ethnic and professional identifications.⁴⁷ It goes without saying that external labels are a poor litmus test for identity, but it is also true that the Soviet designations of nationality and vocational categories reinforced ethnicity within the structures of professional civilian employment. Because Jewish artists were bound together by legal and social impositions, their private sentiments as Jews are not as helpful to this project as were their public declarations as artists. How artists understood art and constructed the professional categories of the art-making industry have been formative to the self-definition of Jewish civilian employees. In short, I am not interested in ferreting out private religious affiliations in the lives of Soyuzmultfilm employees or reconstructing family trees, but rather in understanding how animators, who have been identified ethnically as Jews in their professional activities, performed themselves in their work and in doing so created one of the most populist forms of Soviet culture.

Tying art to the cultures that produced its artists is particularly apropos to industries that developed and flourished under the ideologies of Marxism. Correlating the golden age of Soviet animation to the Jewish backgrounds of its participants makes intuitive sense for the study of this newly emancipated class of people whose exit from their traditional communities was often predicated on their entry into the arts.⁴⁸ The functional relationship between Jews of the former Pale of Settlement and the visual turn of modernism has led performance scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and historian Jonathan Karp to provocatively wonder "whether the ‘modern Jewish experience’ has in some