died in prison; and the remaining thirteen were sentenced to death (one month before the trial began) and shot on the same day (one month after the trial ended). Most of the accused—especially the fiction writers David Bergelson, Isaak Fefer, Leiba Kvitko, and Perets Markish—were Communist true believers who had dedicated most of their lives to promoting Stalin’s “socialist content” in Yiddish “national form.” Such had been the official Party policy toward the formerly abused nationalities in general and the long-suffering Jewish people in particular. According to Fefer, “I wanted my people to be like all the others. . . . It seemed to me that only Stalin could correct the historic injustice committed by the Roman emperors. It seemed to me that only the Soviet government could correct this injustice by creating a Jewish nation.” He was right, of course. The Soviet government had made a serious effort to make the Jews “like all the others” and had amply rewarded those who had helped lead the charge. As Fefer said at the trial, “I am the son of a poor teacher. The Soviet government made me a human being and a fairly well known poet too.” And as Kvitko said a few days later, “Before the revolution, I lived the worthless life of a miserable stray dog. Since the Great October Revolution, I have lived thirty wonderful, soaring, useful years filled with happiness in my beloved homeland, where every blade of grass smiles on me.” 133 And then, for reasons they could not quite understand, the same Soviet government had reclassified the Jews from a would-be normal nationality comparable to the Ukrainians or Mordvinians to a potentially disloyal nationality similar to the Poles or Greeks. The Jewish national form had become the symptom of a hostile bourgeois content. Saying in public that your mother’s name was Hannah had become a nationalist act. Some refused to go along. As Solomon Lozovsky put it, “My mother’s name was Hannah too; so what, am I supposed to be ashamed of it? What kind of strange mentality is that? Why is it considered nationalism?” And as for the attack against Yiddish, “if you write for a Yiddish newspaper, you write in Yiddish. But when Bergelson says that this constitutes nationalism, then what is on trial here is the Yiddish language itself. This defies comprehension. You can write in a Negro language if you want. It’s up to you. What matters is what you write, not what language you write in.” 134 Such missionary universalism had long since stopped being the official Soviet policy, and most of the accused, especially those who had championed the idea of Jewish settlement in areas that had been vacated by the summarily deported Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, knew it only too well. The question was