The concert where Paul Robeson was warned not to sing in Yiddish
When Soviet government leaders invited the singer to give a concert, he did something they didn’t expect.
Paul Robeson in Moscow in 1949 Photo by AFP via Getty Images
[In honor of Martin Luther King Day, we bring you a story about the renowned African-American singer and political activist Paul Robeson who played an important, yet tragic, role in Yiddish literary history.
In 2018, Jordan Kutzik wrote about the time that the Soviet government invited Robeson to perform at a great hall in Moscow, and the bold action that Robeson took on stage. Below, Igor Mazin describes how his own mother, a Soviet citizen in Moscow listening to the live concert on the radio, reacted to Robeson’s actions.]
The year was 1949. A year before, the well-known Russian-Jewish actor and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered by Stalin in a staged car accident, and many prominent Jewish cultural figures were arrested. At the same time, Stalin had begun his virulent antisemitic campaign that culminated in the Night of the Murdered Poets in 1952 and the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” in 1953.
Soviet Jews were bracing for hard times. During World War II, the Soviet government encouraged Jewish efforts to raise funds in the West in order to fight the Nazis. Three Soviet Jewish luminaries, including Mikhoels and a leading Soviet Yiddish poet, Itzik Feffer, traveled all around the United States and the United Kingdom to raise the money. It was in the U.S. that they met the actor and singer Paul Robeson, an admirer of the Soviet Union and a great friend of the Jewish people.
Robeson was fluent in Russian and many other languages. He loved singing Yiddish songs and recorded several of them. He soon became close with Mikhoels and even more so with Feffer.
In 1949, Robeson was invited to the USSR as an honorary guest of the Soviet government, with great fanfare. He was immensely popular in the Soviet Union, so his main concert took place in the recently built Tchaikovsky Hall with 1,500 seats, and was to be broadcast live on the radio to the entire country.
My mother remembered that day well. Born in Moscow in 1926, she was employed as an electronic engineer in a military institution working on radars. The condition of her employment was joining the Communist Party and she remained a member till the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2000 we all moved to Fairfax, Virginia, where she died in 2013.
Regarding the Robeson concert in Moscow, my mother often told me that according to rumors circulating then among Moscow’s Jews, Robeson supposedly showed the Soviet managers of the concert tour what he planned to sing, including two Yiddish songs. One was a satirical song about the Czar called “Vi azoi lebt der keyser?” (How does the Czar live?) and the other was “Shlof mayn kind” (Sleep my child) that bemoans the unfair lot of the poor as the wealthy keep getting wealthier. His list also included spirituals like “Ol’ Man River.”
Obviously, the Party had the last word on the program, so the two Yiddish songs were stricken out, with the explanation given that too few people spoke Yiddish in Russia anymore.
According to the legend, Robeson sarcastically remarked: “Of course! The Russian public will understand Negro spirituals much better.” But he didn’t argue with them. He did inquire though, why his good friends Mikhoels and Feffer didn’t come to see him. “Mikhoels died of a heart attack and Feffer is on vacation” was the answer. Feffer wasn’t vacationing, though; he was in prison.
According to a biography of Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman, Robeson detected that something was wrong. “I’m sure Feffer could interrupt his vacation to see his American friend,” Robeson said. Soon, Feffer was extracted from the gulag where they had imprisoned him. He was fed, washed, clothed and dropped off at Robeson’s hotel suite.
While the two of them talked loudly in Russian, Feffer was able to communicate through gestures and pieces of paper, that Mikhoels had been murdered, and that he, Feffer, and others would be executed soon as well.
Robeson didn’t say anything to his Soviet managers, but the next day, at the grand Tchaikovsky Hall concert, after performing the approved list of songs, he announced that he would sing an encore dedicated to his friend Mikhoels “who tragically passed away last year,” as well as to Feffer and the entire Jewish people.
My mother, listening on the radio, froze in her seat. She felt, she told me, as if she would be arrested that very minute just for listening to these words. And then Robeson sang the Partisan Hymn, “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg” (Never say you’re walking your last road), following it with his own Russian translation.
The next day, Robeson left for the States, and didn’t return to Russia until 1958, five years after Stalin’s death. While he never told the public about his conversation with Feffer, he did tell Feffer’s son, who made it public years later.
What Robeson did do, though, was to convince other prominent Western Communists including Howard Fast (the author of the novel, Spartacus) and Nobel laureate Frederic Joliot-Curie, to sign a personal letter to Joseph Stalin. Many historians believe that, thanks to this letter, Feffer and his co-defendants were granted three more years to live. They were all executed on Aug. 12, 1952.
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