Hey, Zhonkoye (Thoughts about Crimea)
Peter Eisenstadt

What is my favorite Jewish Crimean song?  What is the only Jewish Crimean song I know? Its “Zhonkoye,” a little Soviet agit-prop ditty my ex-Communist parents used to sing when they wanted make fun of their former beliefs. Written sometime in the 1930s, in Yiddish, about a Jewish collective farm in the Crimea, it was Englished and recorded by Pete Seeger in the late 1940s, and it is his version that became well-known Here are the lyrics:

Zhonkoye

Now, when you go from Sevastapol

Not so far from Simferopol

Just a bit further down

There’s a little railroad depot

Known quite well by all the people

And it’s called  Zhonkoye, dzahn

Refrain

Hey dzahn, hey dzahkoye, hey dzhanvilli,  hey dzahnkoye

Hey dzahkoye, dzahn

Now if you look for paradise

You’ll see it before your eyes

Stop your search and go no further on

For here we have a collective farm

All run by husky Jewish arms

And its called Zhonkoye, dzhan

Refrain

Well, Aunt Natasha drives the tractor

Grandma runs the cream extractor

While we work we sing our songs

Who says Jews cannot be farmers?

Spit in their eye, who would so harm us?

Tell them of Zhankoye, dzhan.

Refrain

Needless to say,  the line that everyone remembers is the one about Aunt Natasha, the tractor, and the cream extractor.  Until this week, however, I never thought about the Crimean setting for the song.  If people think about Jewish agricultural settlements in the Soviet Union, they generally think of Birobidzhan , the autonomous Jewish region in eastern Russia, but the Crimea was also home to a number of  Jewish Soviet-era agricultural settlements. Its striking how much its sentiments are like so many of the kibbutz songs we used to sing at summer camp; Jews need to return to the land (anyone’s land, evidently), Jews need to discard their old traditions of weakness and pusillanimity in favor of a new masculine toughness, though a toughness that was open to both men and women.   Anyway, Zhonkoye is, like all, Soviet songs, a celebration of a lie.

What is the significance of Zhonkoye for today’s crisis in the Crimea?  I’m not sure, but I suspect the Soviet interest in settling Jews in the Crimea was part of an effort to increase the non-Tartar population of the Crimea. The Tartars were deported en masse in 1944, only to return after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Crimea has always been a borderland, a place where  Russia met the Turkish population of central Asia, and where Jews of various types (Khazars, Karaites,  rabbinic Jews) have found a tenuous home. The Crimea and Ukraine itself, has always been a complex ethnic mixture, and a tinderbox.

I guess my view of the current situation in the Crimea differs somewhat from Ayala. Putin is an aggressor, but there are chains and counter-chains of tension, and I don’t think any side’s behavior is above reproach. I’m not sure that a nation that has aggressively defended its right to a naval base in Cuba,  in complete indifference to the wishes of the Cuban people, and uses it as a prison for persons considered too dangerous to hold in the United States, is in a position to criticize another nation’s aggressively holding onto its naval assets. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by Putin’s playing great power politics with a situation on his doorstep.  The US, China, any great power,  would behave in exactly the same way.  We can debate how we got here; what is most important is not to go any further.

Nationalism and democracy, the two strongest forces in politics over the past two centuries, often makes strange and incompatible bedfellows.  The one thing you don’t ever want to be is an unwanted ethnic minority in a country that is controlled by a dominant ethnic minority.  As Ayala points out Palestinian Israelis are precisely in this position, with 20% of the population, and since, 1948, about 0% of its political power. I have no position, in the abstract, whether Ukraine should stay together as a single country, just as I don’t have a single opinion on the independence of Scotland, Catalonia, or Quebec. There are arguments on both sides.  I do know that the problem with ethnically defined states is that there are always ethnic minorities, and the problem with granting independence to smaller states is that there is never a fully just way of redrawing the boundaries.   And all the debates about Israel and Palestine, the one and two state versions of a future, are all attempts to deal with the toxic triangle of  ethnicity, nationality, and democracy, and as is always the case, it will not be possible to satisfy everyone.

So, if I am a bit more sympathetic to Putin than Ayala, it really doesn’t matter who started it, just as it really doesn’t matter who started, one hundred years ago this July, World War I.  All that matters is what happened,  and what happens. Putin is playing with fire, and the consequences can be dire. Zhonkoye aside, the most famous verse in English about the Crimea is of course from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Someone had blunder’d

Theirs not to make reply

Theirs not to reason why

Theirs but to do and die

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

I hope, in the days ahead, no one follows Tennyson’s advice.