A Jewish writer who survived the GULAG and became the voice of a vanished shtetl


Authors: Tatyana Andronatii, Anna Nevzlin

Alexander Mikhailovich Lizen (real surname — Lizenberg) was born on July 20, 1911, in the village of Haidamaky, Podolsky district, Vinnytsia region — in the very heart of the Jewish Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. His youth was spent in the shtetl of Kupel in Volhynia, where he grew up in a traditional Jewish family. No one could have imagined then that this boy would become both a witness to and a chronicler of the tragic fate of Soviet Jewry, go through the war, and emerge as one of the most remarkable Jewish writers of postwar Ukraine.

Lizenberg began writing poetry in Yiddish as a teenager, but his literary career was long interrupted by arrests and the war.

At the age of fourteen, in 1925, Israel Lizenberg (as he was known in Yiddish) became active in the Zionist movement and soon headed the local branch of the Jewish youth organization Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair (“The Young Guard”) in Kupel. It was a time when the Soviet authorities, intent on eradicating all manifestations of religiosity and national consciousness among Jews, relied on yevsektsii — Jewish sections of the Communist Party — which carried out systematic pressure, manipulation, and coercion. On Jewish religious holidays, the yevsektsii organized secular events in youth clubs with entertainment or propaganda programs, forcing schoolchildren to attend under threat of punishment, in an effort to tear Jewish youth away from the traditions of their ancestors.

The young Zionists were not willing to surrender without resistance and devised their own forms of defiance. Some groups took turns remaining in the club hall while others secretly slipped out to celebrate the holiday at home; others demonstratively left in the middle of events, provoking the fury of yevsektsiya officials. On one occasion, members of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair decided to sabotage a party organized by the yevsektsiya. Among the initiators of this bold act were Israel Lizenberg, Hana Kimelfeld, Rakhel Ruberman, and several other activists. They volunteered to participate in the concert — with the intent to disrupt it.

Alexander Lizenberg, known for his talent in recitation, was to perform first. After the officials finished their opening speeches, he began reading a poem about a soldier fallen in battle, but after several lines he pretended to forget the text and hastily left the stage under the puzzled gaze of the audience. Next, Hana Kimelfeld abruptly stopped her song mid-phrase, and Rakhel Ruberman “tripped” and fell during a dance. The event collapsed into chaos. Enraged yevsektsiya members, realizing they had been tricked, reported the incident to the district branch of the OGPU. Soon, searches were conducted in the homes of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair members, the activists were interrogated, and a case was opened — only to be closed later because, as it turned out, all the “defendants” were students of a Ukrainian, not a Jewish, school, which formally placed them outside the yevsektsiya’s jurisdiction.

By the late 1920s, as repression against Zionists intensified, some members of the movement publicly renounced their views by publishing so-called “declarations” in newspapers — earning the contemptuous nickname “declarants.” The young Alexander Lizenberg wrote a biting poem mocking these turncoats, which drew the attention of the movement’s leadership. The talented youth was sent to Moscow, where he joined the central committee of the Gdud branch.

In 1930, in Moscow, the central committee of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair, together with the cultural-educational movement Tarbut and with the support of Gdud, established an ulpan — an intensive training course for Zionist activists. Among the students was Alexander Lizenberg, who studied Hebrew, Jewish history, the history of the Zionist movement, literature, and other general subjects alongside his comrades Hillel Kaplinsky, Mikhail Glezer, and Boris Ginzburg. Their instructors included Avraham Krivoruchko (Kariv), Tsapman, and another teacher who remained anonymous for reasons of secrecy — one of the few Hebrew writers still remaining in the Soviet Union.

At that time, many young Zionists wrote poetry in three languages — Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew — dreaming of a future aliyah to Eretz-Israel.

The ulpan program was designed for one year but was interrupted by another wave of arrests in 1931. Because of his activity, Lizenberg also came under OGPU surveillance. According to MGB documents, in 1928 Lizenberg was a member of the headquarters of the illegal youth Zionist organization Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair and a member of its “party court” in the former Proskurov district. In 1929, at only eighteen, he was imprisoned for his active Zionist work. During one interrogation, an incident occurred that vividly revealed his temperament: when the investigator called him a “zhid” (a slur for “Jew”), the young man grabbed a water pitcher and hurled it at the OGPU officer. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but because he was underage, he was held in custody only until he turned eighteen.

From 1930 to 1933, Lizenberg was imprisoned in the Chelyabinsk political isolator — one of the most feared prisons for political detainees. It held Zionists, Trotskyists, Mensheviks, and other so-called “enemies of the people.” After his release in 1933, Alexander was sentenced to an additional three years of exile.

Upon completing his term of exile in 1936, Lizenberg returned home and worked as an accountant at the Kyiv Shoe Factory, trying to live a quiet life far from politics. But the calm did not last long. On September 1, 1939, World War II began, and on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. Thirty-year-old Alexander Lizen was drafted into the army and served in the 145th Artillery Brigade. He took part in the liberation of Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, and Romania, fought on the Bryansk, Voronezh, and 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, witnessed the horrors of war, and helped liberate territories where the Nazis had annihilated the Jewish population. After the war, his unit was disbanded, and in 1946 he was demobilized.

After demobilization, Lizenberg lived in Moscow and, according to MGB documents, maintained contact with the head of an anti-Soviet committee and the Jewish religious community, working among Jewish youth to involve them in activities of the Moscow synagogue.