Becoming a Cold Warrior: The Peregrinations of a Soviet Jewish Defector

Until September 1938, when the Soviet authorities began disassembling the system of Yiddish-medium education, most young entrants to literary careers were graduates of teachers’ training institutions. The life story of Hershl (Grigory) Vinokur, aka Herschel Weinrauch/Vaynroykh, stands out among the writers of that cohort. After graduating in Odesa as a Yiddish teacher in 1932, he worked as a journalist on Yiddish newspapers in Birobidzhan, the Jewish territorial unit in Russian Far East, and in Bialystok, annexed to Soviet Belorussia in 1939. His collections of Yiddish stories came out in Moscow and Minsk. A war veteran, he settled in Chernivtsi in 1944, worked as a teacher at one of the last remaining Yiddish schools, but in 1946 used counterfeit documents to emigrate to Poland, then Germany, and arrived in Israel together with Jewish displaced persons. Vinokur’s articles began appearing in Forverts (The Forward), the New York Yiddish daily, which helped him move to the United States. There he acted as an authoritative expert on Jewish life in the Soviet Union. His 1950 heavily autobiographical book Blut oyf der zun: Yidn in Sovet Rusland (Blood on the Sun: Jews in the Soviet Union) is referred to in scholarly and other publications. This article represents the first attempt to trace Vinokur’s tempestuous life and his input to the McCarthyist discourse of the 1950s. Although Vinokur had never become a major figure in the world of literature, culture, or politics, his life linked uniquely together important developments and moments in Jewish history of the twentieth century.