'In the City of Slaughter': The Hidden Voice of the Pogrom Victims

The potential contribution of this exposure is the better understanding that it may possibly give rise to of the threat of a pogrom as a constituting trauma in the collective Jewish and Israeli memory. [...]the long-term impact of the Kishinev pogrom and of Bialik's poetic response to it may be understood as emerging not only from the political agenda that it successfully advanced and from its role in creating the ethos of self-defense, but also from the contradictory aspects of it-namely, the silenced presence of the pogrom as a sudden and unexpected chaotic event, which is, by definition, impossible to predict and defend against. The agenda of the former may only be guessed: the victims probably needed opportunity for catharsis, as well as human empathy and emotional support, which they hoped would also be transformed into financial support in the form of compensation for losses. Since Bialik was asked by the Kishinev Jewish community to help survey property damages while interviewing the victims for his own purposes, the testifiers were possibly led to believe that the reception of such compensation might very well be dependent on their cooperation with the interviewers (Goren 1991: 48). First and foremost, what emerges from their stories, when they are read against the order and logic imposed on them by the external, omnipresent narrator, is their opposition to the basic assumption regarding their prior knowledge of the catastrophe. The testimonies thus highlight the fact that profound disorientation was a fundamental experience of the Jews living among Gentiles not only in times of riots. [...]rumors about a forthcoming pogrom during Passover, though suggesting a concrete threat, were taken for granted and did not necessarily put their potential victims on alert.