On September 18, 1944, a special report titled “On Antisemitic Manifestations in Ukraine” was sent to Nikita Khrushchev, then Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR. The lengthy NKGB document covered not only antisemitism but also included absurd conclusions about the alleged spread of “provocative” rumors by the Jewish population. One of the so-called “provocateurs” was identified as a writer from Moscow who had recently arrived in Chernivtsi: Yakub Isaakovich Serf. The writer’s real name — Naftali Herz Kon — was never mentioned in Soviet records; instead, his Soviet alias functioned as a kind of pseudonym.

Naftali (locally known as Naftole) Herz Kon was born in March 1910 in the town of Storozhynets, in the Duchy of Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Itzik Kon, was a watchmaker, and his mother, Rokhl Serf, ran a small inn in Storozhynets. When the boy was around ten years old, his mother filed for divorce due to his father’s gambling addiction. According to some biographers, after the divorce Naftali Herz and his younger brother Yakov stayed with their mother and grandmother. Others suggest the children were separated — Naftali remained with his father, while Yakov stayed with their mother.

What is certain is that from a very early age, Naftali Herz showed a strong inclination toward literature. While still studying in cheder, he began writing poetry in both Yiddish and German — languages he mastered equally well. In his teenage years, he found himself alone, without parents or family, in Chernivtsi, where he took a job at a factory. Despite working during the day, he had the strength and will to attend school in the evenings. The young poet quickly became part of the city’s vibrant literary life. Inspired by the popular lyric poets of Chernivtsi, Naftali Herz, at age 19, published his poems in the newspaper Chernovitser Bletter (“Chernivtsi Pages”). His work was praised by older writers.

And indeed, interwar Chernivtsi offered no shortage of poetic material — not only romantic themes common to young poets or the beauty of the native landscape, but also political turmoil. Like many of his Jewish peers living in the Kingdom of Romania, Kon was drawn to leftist ideas. Even back in his hometown of Storozhynets, he began distributing anti-government leaflets — much to his mother’s distress. Sympathetic to the communist movement, he ignored the call to serve in the Romanian army and chose instead to flee to Vienna. There, he met none other than Stefan Zweig, who advised him to shift from writing in German to writing in Yiddish — thus resolving a creative dilemma that had long troubled the young poet.

In the Austrian capital, the deserter managed to purchase forged documents under the name Yakub Serf (Yakub — after his brother; Serf — his mother’s maiden name), and using those, he traveled to Poland. In Warsaw, the Yiddish writer and photographer Alter Kacyzne offered him shelter. In the Polish capital — then the global hub of Jewish culture — Naftali Herz Kon began publishing his poetry in Bund-affiliated newspapers, as well as in literary journals like Literarishe Bletter (“Literary Pages”) and Literarishe Tribune, the organ of “Revolutionary Writers and Journalists” connected to the underground Communist Party of Poland. He published under his real surname — turning it, in effect, into a literary pseudonym.

Naftali Herz married Elizaveta Goldman, an intelligent young woman from a well-off Warsaw family who worked as a teacher. But their family life was short-lived. The Polish counterintelligence service and political police — the Defensywa — soon took an interest in the poet, who was living illegally in Poland. In 1931 and again in 1932, he was arrested and held in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison, each time threatened with deportation to Romania.

During his second imprisonment, Naftali Herz’s first 60-page collection of poems and verse, Trot nokh trot (“Step by Step”), was published — and immediately confiscated by the Polish police for its anti-government content. The question of deporting the “revolutionary poet” to Romania was practically settled. However, help arrived in the form of two prominent figures: Bund leader Henryk Erlich and the Jewish poet and essayist Melech Ravitch. Thanks to their intervention, Naftali Herz Kon was exchanged — through MOPR (the International Red Aid, a communist equivalent of the Red Cross) — for a Polish spy serving a sentence in the USSR.

Together with his family, the Jewish poet arrived in Kharkiv, which was then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In the USSR, Kon was well received and offered work almost immediately, despite speaking only Yiddish, German, and Romanian. In 1934, he was accepted into the Soviet Writers’ Union and granted opportunities to publish both in Moscow and Kharkiv. In 1935, his first Soviet book was published in Minsk — a revised and doubled version of the same Step by Step that had once been banned by the Polish authorities.

A perceptive and deeply honest man, Naftali Herz Kon quickly saw through the false promises of the Soviet system. He was shocked by the aftermath of the Holodomor famine: peasants who had fled to the city were dying in Kharkiv’s courtyards, and the local authorities were incapable of even clearing away the corpses in time.

The material poverty of both the working class and the creative intelligentsia also stunned him. Yakov Kalnitsky, a Soviet writer arrested in June 1938 and charged with belonging to an “anti-Soviet Zionist spy organization,” testified that Kon was constantly complaining about financial hardship: “…he kept telling everyone that it was impossible for an honest writer to survive in the Soviet Union.”

Before long, Kon himself was arrested — in the autumn of 1938, shortly after Kalnitsky. Under pressure, the poet was forced to sign an investigator-written confession stating that, during his time in Romania and Poland, he had engaged in provocative activity, had been a member of the Bund, and had been recruited by Polish intelligence before moving to the USSR. In 1937, such confessions were a death sentence. But since Kon was arrested during one of the purges of the security apparatus itself, he survived. In late 1939, he retracted his forced testimony. The case was reexamined, but his anti-Soviet statements were confirmed by numerous witness accounts. In the end, he was sentenced to “only” three years in the GULAG.

In March 1941, Naftali Herz Kon returned from the labor camp to Kharkiv. Before he had time to celebrate his wife’s graduation from the Kharkiv Medical Institute, he was forced to leave the city again. During the Great Patriotic War, he evacuated to Kazakhstan with his wife Elizaveta and their two young daughters, Vita and Inna. While in exile, Kon — at the invitation of writer Itzik Feffer — began collaborating with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

His next round of troubles with the authorities began shortly after the liberation of Soviet Ukraine from German occupation. In early September 1944, on assignment from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Kon traveled to Chernivtsi. His task was to investigate the flood of complaints and rumors that had been reaching the Committee from the city.

Local residents claimed that Jewish refugees returning to Chernivtsi were being forcibly mobilized to work at industrial sites in the Urals and later in the Donbas. In some cases, people were denied residence registration in their hometown or even deported from Chernivtsi, despite having secured jobs.

There were also completely unbelievable rumors — that women sent to the labor front were being forced into prostitution. Such talk often led to serious incidents. In one Chernivtsi military enlistment office, where documentation was being processed for those mobilized to work, six women, fearing shame, jumped from second-story windows onto the pavement.

The atmosphere was also inflamed by letters from locals who vividly described living conditions in Soviet Russia and the treatment of “Westerners.” Unaccustomed to the harsh realities of communist construction sites, residents of Chernivtsi fell into panic. The local Jewish community sent complaints to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, particularly about antisemitism among local officials — especially the chairman of the Chernivtsi City Council, Koshevoy.

Naftali Herz Kon and the Jewish poetess Riva Balyasnaya, who had arrived in Chernivtsi to collect materials for a book, encountered this atmosphere immediately. The writers decided to visit a family who had received a shocking letter from the Urals, to verify its contents firsthand. They quickly found the apartment and knocked. The door was unlocked, but the hallway and living room were empty. In the middle of the room stood a table, and on it lay the very letter in question. The writers, confused, read the letter — but no matter how much they called out for the residents, no one appeared.

After checking in at the “Palas” hotel, Naftali Herz Kon went out to scout the city again. There, by chance, he learned that his childhood friend, the poet Yankev Fridman, had returned from Bershad (where he had been deported by the Romanians during the war) and was now living in Chernivtsi. Kon went to Fridman’s apartment — and again encountered a scene reminiscent of the earlier visit: the apartment was silent, but this time, the doors were locked.

Neighbors who came out after hearing the knocking said that no one named Fridman had ever lived there. Completely bewildered, Kon stepped outside and began pacing near the entrance. Suddenly, a woman approached the building and asked who he was looking for. After a lengthy conversation, during which she made sure the writer truly knew Fridman personally, the woman identified herself as Fridman’s wife and led Kon into the very apartment he had just been knocking on. After she said a coded phrase in Yiddish — “It’s all right, you can come out!” — a worn and haggard Yankev Fridman emerged from a hidden compartment deep inside the apartment. As it turned out, he had been hiding in a concealed space for days. People in Chernivtsi were truly afraid to go outside, fearing police raids and forced deportation into the Soviet interior.

Having witnessed the lawlessness unfolding in the city, Kon and his companion Balyasnaya went to speak with the head of the Chernivtsi Regional Executive Committee, Dydyk. The official received them coldly — and essentially showed them the door.

The First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee, Zelenyuk, was much more welcoming and even allowed the poets to organize a special rally for the Jewish population on September 7, 1944. The event, conducted in Yiddish, drew a large crowd—about 2,000 people attended. After Kon and Balyasnaya spoke with city officials and held the rally, the labor mobilization was suspended.

Deeply outraged by what he had witnessed, the poet submitted a detailed report to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In it, he vividly described how Jews from the eastern provinces of Bukovina—which had remained under Romanian control after the 1940 agreement—were wandering through Bessarabia because no one would register them or grant them legal status. In the USSR, without registration (propiska), it was impossible to get a job, meaning that former Romanian citizens were barred from returning home and had no way to legalize their presence in the Soviet Union.

He also criticized the Chernivtsi authorities, who had blocked Jews returning from the Transnistria camps at the Zhyuchka suburb near the bridge over the Prut River, refusing them entry into the city. Native residents of Chernivtsi who had survived Romanian camps were not allowed back into their hometown. According to Kon, everything could only be resolved through bribery.

“Soon, people were suddenly seized on the streets, at night in their apartments, or near police stations while waiting to register,” the poet wrote furiously. “They were taken to the district council building and, after being held for several days in detention-like conditions—without food, without clothing—were loaded into railcars and sent to the Urals, and later to the Donbas. If someone presented a work certificate or an official exemption from mobilization, those documents were confiscated or simply torn up.”
He also reported that Jews from Eastern Bukovina—foreign nationals—were being grabbed and sent to work in Sverdlovsk, and in some cases, families were forcibly separated: children left in Chernivtsi, their mothers exiled eastward into the USSR.

Being a courageous and straightforward man, Kon included his own analysis in the report: “…this isn’t mobilization at all—it’s a deliberate attempt to change the demographic composition of the city.” He had ample grounds for this conclusion: unskilled laborers were being brought to Chernivtsi from the remotest parts of the USSR, while skilled Jewish professionals were being pushed out.

At the end of the report, the poet proposed a comprehensive set of measures to normalize the situation in the city. He emphasized that everyone who had been unlawfully expelled from Chernivtsi must be immediately allowed to return. One of his key demands concerned culture: he called for the creation of a Jewish library, Jewish artistic groups, the launch of a Yiddish-language newspaper, and the development of Jewish schools.

Kon remained in Chernivtsi and soon moved his family there, settling in the city center. The general atmosphere remained tense. In December 1944, members of the Chernivtsi clergy and intelligentsia were arrested by the MGB and accused of involvement in an underground Jewish organization.

After Naftali Herz Kon’s public criticism of injustices toward Jews, he came under surveillance. Now living in Chernivtsi, the poet became a subject of an undercover investigation titled “The Bundists,” which also included other members of the city’s Jewish intelligentsia: writer Hershl Vinokur, poet and playwright Moyshe Pinchevsky, and lawyer Esfir Bershtein.

The Chernivtsi MGB had intelligence indicating that during a conversation with members of the city’s rabbinical leadership—who were later arrested—Kon had called the local party and Soviet officials antisemitic. When one rabbi asked about the possibility of Jewish repatriation to Palestine, Kon replied optimistically: “Roosevelt has expressed the view that Bukovina and Galicia should belong to Eastern Europe, and therefore the Jews living there will have the opportunity to emigrate to Palestine.”