Chutzpah and Naïveté: An American Graduate Student Bursts Through the Iron Curtain to Do Research in Bulgaria

By Xlibris US

Chutzpah and Navet is about my experiences in Bulgaria as the first American graduate student to do research there after the resumption of relations, and thirty years of research and teaching in the country until the fall of Communism in 1989.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499044409

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Chutzpah And Naïveté:

An American Graduate Student Bursts Through The Iron Curtain To Do Research In Bulgaria

Frederick B. Chary

Copyright © 2014 by Frederick B. Chary.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 07/11/2014

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In Memory of my parents and James F. Clarke

F irst of all I must state that I have no family connections with Bulgaria. My paternal grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine early in the twentieth century. My dad was born in Canada and raised in Winnipeg and Philadelphia. He had an eighth grade education and spoke no language other than English, not even the native Yiddish of his parents. My mother, Norma Zilberkweit, was born in Vilna (Vilnius). Her native language was Yiddish, and she never quite mastered English. Furthermore, although during the tumultuous years from 1917 to 1920 when her grammar school came under new administrations and languages of instruction including, at one time or another, Russian and Polish, she could not speak or understand any Slavic languages. An orphan, she immigrated with her little brother to Philadelphia in her teens to be with her aunt. My uncle Abe, twelve years old, was sent back to Vilna, part of Poland by then, because of a spot on his lungs. He later lost a leg as a tank sergeant in the Battle of Leningrad and was awarded a medal of Lenin. He came with his family to America in the late 1950s when Poland was happy to have their Jews leave for Israel or wher ever.

Although my parents did not have much education themselves, like all Jews, they loved books and learning, so my childhood was filled with literature, which I absorbed like a sponge. My sister and I were the first in our immediate family to go on to higher education. I won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, so I remained at home and attended Penn as a commuter student. At first I studied engineering, but preferred history, so I changed majors and extended my undergraduate days by a year. While studying medieval history, I was impressed by the cosmopolitan nature of the Balkans and particularly by the influence of Jews in the Second Bulgarian Empire. I have to reiterate that up to this time, my knowledge of Bulgaria was hazy. I did not know a word of any Slavic language or read Cyrillic and, up to that time, would have had difficulty locating Bulgaria on a map. My interest in the country peaked when I read in a Time magazine article on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel a comparison list of Jews in European countries in 1939 and 1945, showing the devastation of the Holocaust. Bulgaria had two thousand more. I knew by that time that Sofia was an ally of Berlin during the Second World War, and I wanted to find out why there was a population growth.

When I went on to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh to study Balkan (not necessarily Bulgarian) history, the survival of the Bulgarian Jews was at the top of my list of possible dissertation topics. The Balkan specialist at Pitt was Dr. James F. Clarke, part of the Clarke family well-known for their missionary work in Bulgaria. When I introduced myself to him, he asked my family background. I told him my mother was born in Vilna, and he immediately said, You know my field is the Balkans, not the Baltic. I assured him I knew the difference, and he agreed that my study of the Holocaust in Bulgaria would be a good topic.

Dr. Clarke insisted that I apply for an Inter-University Grant, which administered travel of professors and graduate students to do research in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Grants for Bulgaria had just begun the year before after Dr. Clarke and Nikolay Todorov, of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN), had laid the groundwork. As yet no graduate students had been sent. I did not even have a master’s degree yet, but Clarke insisted I try for it. I flew to New York from Pittsburgh, the first time I had been on an airplane in my life. The interviewers were giants of East European scholarship, including S. Harrison Thompson. They clearly saw I was not yet ready for the grant and told me to reapply later.

Two years later, I finished my course work and received my MA. Pitt awarded me a Mellon Fellowship allowing me to move to Washington to work in the National Archives and Library of Congress. In the archives, I chiefly used captured German War documents, which were still not completely indexed. Robert Wolff, the curator, brought me tear sheets that I needed as they popped up. I also had some access to classified American State Department records. Here I was required to show my notes before exiting the closed cages where they were kept. That would not be the first time I would have to go through such a procedure.

I also visited the Bulgarian embassy, and they assured me that I could go to Bulgaria to work on my dissertation. Therefore I reapplied for the Inter-University Grant administered by Indiana University. My application was rejected based on my previous interview, but I wrote back that I intended to do research in Sofia and asked for a nonpaying letter of recommendation. Having no other applicants, the selection committee decided to give me another interview. During the intervening period, I had married Julia Grimes, an English and French teacher from upstate Pennsylvania. She was working for her master’s degree and, like me, was a teaching assistant at Pitt. In fact, we met because one of her sections of English composition was next to my Western civilization class. The committee brought both Julia and me to Bloomington. They agreed to send me. Professor Barbara Jelavich received the other grant for work on her History of the Balkans.

They had asked my wife in her interview who was the most famous Bulgarian. She did not know. So they told her to brush up on Bulgaria. On the way home when she told me about the interview, I informed her it was Georgi Dimitrov, the man who had embarrassed Hermann Goering at the Reichstag Fire Trial in 1934 and set off worldwide counter trials against the Nazis. Dimitrov then became general secretary of the Communist International. He was later Bulgarian prime minister and when he died was embalmed and placed, like Lenin in Moscow, in a mausoleum erected in the center of Sofia across from the palace of the former king.

When I was accepted, Charles Jelavich cryptically warned me in no uncertain terms that if anyone approached me to do work for them, I should report it to the committee immediately. Surely enough, a few days after I arrived back in Pittsburgh, a former fellow grad student who had dropped out told me that the CIA was willing to pay me fifty dollars a day for the whole time I was in Bulgaria. This would have been over three times my annual fellowship. I told him to forget it and would report him to the committee if he asked me again.

Despite the assurance I had from the Bulgarian embassy in Washington and my official status from the Inter-University group (soon to be renamed the International Research and Exchanges Board [IREX]), Sofia was reluctant to receive me. The question of Who saved the Bulgarian Jews? was just then becoming a hot topic in Bulgaria. Renewed interest in the Holocaust appeared in the wake of the Eichmann trial and the recent publication of several important scholarly works including Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution. There were tens of thousands of Bulgarian émigrés in Israel, and Bulgaria was trying to renew its relations with the West. The government wanted to stress the official story that the Communist Party had saved the Bulgarian Jews. Particularly they wished to have the world believe that King Boris III was not responsible as anti-Communist monarchists claimed. The Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov happened to be a commissar in the Yuch Bunar Jewish ghetto in World War II, and the Communist Party claimed he was heavily involved in protecting the Jews.

The State Department and the Inter-University committee pressed my case, and since Sofia was anxious that Bulgarian scholars especially scientists come to the United States, I was given permission to participate in the exchange. At that time, like many Pitt students in summertime, I was working on the labor gang at Pittsburgh’s Jones and Laughlin Steel Works waiting for the reply. When I told the guys in the gang I was quitting to go to Bulgaria, one of them incredulously asked, Isn’t that behind the Iron Curtain? I congratulated him on his knowledge of geography and observed the amazement and suspicion of the group. According to the rules of the company and posted signs around the plant, Communists were forbidden to work there, although one of my friends was an old Czech immigrant who had no qualms about expressing his admiration for socialism.

Julia and I left for Europe and Israel that fall. I spent several weeks in West European libraries and archives. In Frankfurt I interviewed the former German ambassador to Sofia Adolf Heinz Beckerle, who was under house arrest waiting to stand trial for war crimes. He had already served some time in prison but was being brought up before the court on additional charges. Because of illness, the process was never completed. He tried to convince me that he had been instrumental in saving the Bulgarian Jews. However, the captured German documents I researched demonstrate otherwise.

Next we went to Yugoslavia, where I saw some important material especially in the Macedonian archives at Skolpje, which was still recovering from the 1963 earthquake. We then made our way to Greece on our way to Israel. We spent several days in Athens viewing the sights. I even had a chance to sit in Pericles’s seat at the base of the Acropolis. Then armed with cheese, bread, some cold meat, and a bottle of Ouzo, we booked deck class on an off-season cruise ship from Piraeus to Haifa. Fortunately, after the first cold night sleeping on the deck, we were able to sneak into an unused cabin, which was in disrepair. The crew knew we were there but did not bother us. A friend we met on board even allowed us to use her shower. At Cyprus the boat picked up a number of Israelis returning home. One woman tried to get us to smuggle some goods into Israel so she would not have to pay duty fees. We wisely refused. The Dutch girl whom she convinced to do it was caught.

We stayed in Israel for four months. For the first two months, we lived in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, where I encountered a familiar question. All my life, as long as I can remember, people in Philadelphia would ask if I was related to Rabbi Elias Charry of Germantown, the famous reformed rabbi. My family belonged to conservative synagogues, and we were not related. One day I came home after my work and Julia told me that the neighborhood grocer wanted to know if I was related to Rabbi Charry of Germantown. I could only fall in my chair and start laughing. It turned out his daughter was our neighbor. Although she had been my classmate at Penn, I had never met her. She was a city planner working in Tel Aviv, and her husband was a reformed rabbi with a congregation to which the grocer belonged. We attended one of his services, which was in both English and Hebrew and accompanied by an organ. The Israeli government, in deference to the Orthodox parties that have to be included in most ruling coalitions, have refused to recognize Reformed Judaism