In the Soviet Union, the feuilleton was a popular newspaper genre. It could be a satiric piece mildly criticizing certain aspects of Soviet life, or militant political satire aimed at foreign or domestic personalities who were at that moment considered enemies by the Soviet regime. “On the One Side, and on the Other” by Oskar Strelits combines both features. It is set during the anti-religious campaign that was launched by the Communist Party in the late 1920s. The campaign combined persuasion – such as public lectures – with more violent actions such as closure of religious buildings, confiscation and destruction of property of religious organizations, imprisonment and execution of clergy.

The situation described by Strelits was part of the annual “anti-Easter campaign” aimed at preventing people from observing the holiday. The irony of that situation is the fact that the propagandist, who tries to convince his presumably Christian audience that Jesus had never existed and therefore could not have been crucified and resurrected, is Jewish. In reality, the active participation of Jewish communists in anti-Christian campaigns did create a great deal of resentment among the general population and led to a rise of antisemitism, which at that time was considered a crime punishable by prison. Strelits exposes the two-facedness of the professional atheist Hurvitsh who eagerly condemns Christianity but has no qualms about participating in the Jewish Passover ritual with his family and friends. His hypocrisy is masterfully revealed in the punchline, pronounced by the non-Jewish worker: “Well, Comrade Hurvitsh, it seems that the Jewish Jesus existed after all.” Had this piece been published in Russian, it might have been perceived as antisemitic, but in Yiddish such satire was permissible.

This feuilleton is dated April 1929, a year known in Soviet history as “The Year of the Great Break.” Having crushed the Trotskyist opposition, Stalin launched an aggressive policy of collectivization and industrialization which changed the life of every Soviet citizen. The characters in Strelits’s feuilleton already feel the coming changes. They nostalgically recall the period of the New Economic Policy which allowed a certain degree of economic and ideological liberty. This sentiment exposes them as “petty-bourgeois elements,” to use the Soviet parlance of that age, who will be soon declared the main “enemies of the people.”

Most of Jewish communists - members of the Evsektsiia (Jewish Sections of the Communist Party) - were sincerely committed to the cause. Their ideological leader was Moyshe Litvakov (1875/80-1939), a shrewd literary critic and the editor of Der Emes, who executed the ideological control over Yiddish culture. In the preface to Aropgerisene maskes Litvakov formulated the task of the feuilleton in Soviet literature: “Literature is an ideological weapon in class struggle […] and feuilleton is in this sense a sort a light cavalry which is meant to strike swift and deep” (p. 3). Litvakov valued Strelits’s feuilletons for their psychological subtlety and “lyricism” but found his satire insufficiently aggressive in its attack at class enemies (p. 13). Like many of their fellow communists, both Litvakov and Strelits were themselves declared class enemies and perished in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.