whether the Jews would join the Crimean Tatars, who had been exiled to Uzbekistan, or the Uzbeks, whom the Soviet government had helped become a nation “like all the others.” As Fefer explained, “I was very jealous as I watched the Uzbek art festival. . . . I had fought for Jewish institutions as hard as I could.” That had been before the Cold War, however—back when the Party had not considered all Jewish institutions to be subversive and Fefer “had not believed that resisting assimilation was a form of nationalist activity.” Things were different in 1952. Fefer still “loved his own people” (“for who does not love his own people?”), regarded the Bible as “one of the greatest monuments of Jewish culture,” and maintained, under hostile interrogation, that no other nation had “suffered as much as the Jews.” Yet he was also a committed Party member and the designated agent provocateur whose job at the trial was to argue that the love of one’s own people was nationalism, that nationalism was treason, and that all the defendants were therefore guilty as charged. Leiba Kvitko, another committed Communist and professional Yiddishist, seemed to agree: The . . . thing that I consider myself guilty of—and what I think I am being accused of and feel responsible for—is this. Believing Soviet Yiddish literature to be ideologically healthy and genuinely Soviet, we Yiddish writers, myself included (I may be guiltier than anyone), did not raise the question of how we could contribute to the process of assimilation. I am talking about the assimilation of the Jewish masses. By continuing to write in Yiddish, we could not help becoming a brake on the process of assimilation. Insofar as the work of Soviet writers is ideologically and politically healthy in content, it has helped to bring about the assimilation of the majority of the Jewish population. But in recent years the Yiddish language has stopped serving the masses because it has been abandoned by the masses and thus became a hindrance. When I was the head of the Yiddish Section of the Union of Soviet Writers, I did not propose that the section be closed down. Of this I am guilty. To use a language that has been abandoned by the masses, has become obsolete, and is responsible for setting us apart not only from the larger life of the Soviet Union but also from the bulk of the Jewish population, which has already become assimilated—to use such a language is, it seems to me, a particular form of nationalism. 135 The Yiddish professionals and other self-described and state-appointed guardians of Jewish culture could be imprisoned or executed. There were very