Yenta Mash’s “A Seder in the Taiga”

In this interview with Yenta Mash, conducted in the early 1990s, Mash describes why she didn’t begin to write in Yiddish until her immigration to Israel. The interview is featured in the documentary, Fridays at Leyvik House (2015), beginning at 31:57 and ending at 35:54.

Suggested Activity: Watch the clip with your students and ask them to discuss their reactions. Why do they think Mash is often asked about beginning to write at an advanced age? What does that tell them about cultural expectations for the typical trajectory for a writer’s career, and why Mash didn’t follow that typical trajectory? In her response, Mash discusses the long-lasting impact of her traumatic experiences on her ability to express herself. Ask your students what Mash means when she says that “Siberia persecuted me” long after she had left the prison camp. In what ways was she persecuted and how did that impact her life? How do your students think that writing about her past from a distance of time and space might have shaped her work?

In this excerpt from her oral history interview, Molly Fogarty discusses her family’s history, including exile to Siberia from Soviet-occupied Poland.

Suggested Activity: You can use this testimony as a starting point to contextualize Mash’s story, supplementing the testimony with additional background information about the gulag under the Bolsheviks (see the Reading and Background section of this kit). 

Watch the interview and ask your students to record a list of details they hear in the testimony. Ask them in what ways the details they hear in this testimony are consistent with the details in Mash’s story. Does hearing the testimony change your reading of the story in any way? How did you feel hearing Fogarty’s second-hand account of a long period of her father’s life, versus reading Mash’s first-person (semi)-autobiographical narrative recounting one particular moment in the gulag? What did each experience add to your understanding of this episode in history?

Nina Gagen-Torn (1900-1986) was a Russian and Soviet poet, writer, historian, and ethnographer. During and after the Great Purge (the Soviet Union’s campaign of political repression lasting from 1936 to 1938 and involving widespread surveillance, imprisonment, and executions), she spent the years 1936-1942 in Kolyma labor camps and 1942-1943 in exile, as well as serving prison time in 1947-1952 in Mordovia. She was permanently exiled to the Yenisey River region in 1948 and amnestied in 1954.

Gagen-Torn was an accomplished ethnographer who had served as a researcher at the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, taught Russian and Ostyak languages and geography at the Institute of the Peoples of the North, and researched for the Institute for the Study of the Peoples of the USSR, Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography prior to her internment. She applied her ethnographer’s eye to her dire experiences during her time in exile. This excerpt was taken from Memoria, a compilation of diary entries and letters she originally wrote during her exile. In the passage, she describes different expressions of faith (political and religious) among Siberian prisoners. After her exile, Gagen-Torn  returned, with much difficulty, to scholarly work, and was a pioneer in the fields of ethnography of the peoples of the Soviet Union, Russian and Bulgarian folklore, and the history of Russian ethnography.

Suggested Activity: Ask your students to discuss: What does this excerpt reveal about the relationship between the prison authorities and the idea of religion? How does that further illuminate the Mash story for your students?

Gagen-Torn writes that she would like to paint the scene that she describes. Invite your students to draw or paint either Gagen-Torn’s scene, or a moment from Mash’s story that they feel shares aspects of Gagen-Torn’s scene. Ask them to explain what emotions they are trying to convey through their artwork.

After the French Third Republic surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, the Nazi-allied Vichy government began interning Jews who were deported from Belgium and Germany in several detention camps, among them the Gurs camp located in the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France. There, internees lived, and many died, under conditions of disease and deprivation. In the spring of 1941, a small group of Jews in the camp worked together to produce a Haggadah, the text that sets forth the ritual of the Passover Seder, to celebrate Passover at the camp.

The document, five handwritten pages long, was composed largely from memory by Aryeh Ludwig Zuckerman over many months and under harsh conditions. Rabbi Leo Ansbacher arranged an addendum of Hebrew songs and hymns typed in Latin characters. The Haggadah was used during the 1941 celebration of Passover in the camp. While the Haggadah closely resembles traditional Haggadahs and does not make reference to the circumstances of living in the camp within the body of the text, testimony from survivors attests to its special significance to the camp’s prisoners as an assertion of their own humanity in the face of the dehumanizing conditions they endured. These two images show the first page of the Haggadah and the first page of the Latin-alphabet addendum.

Suggested Activity: In Mash’s “A Seder in the Taiga,” a group of women prisoners in a Soviet gulag improvise to perform the ritual of the Passover Seder under nearly impossible circumstances. The Haggadah from the Gurs Camp represents a similar dedication to the ritual at a moment when mere physical survival seems improbable. Have your students examine the image of the Haggadah and note details that demonstrate the care taken to create this object. Why was it so important to the prisoners in the Gurs camp to have a physical Haggadah, when some prisoners had the text memorized? How might ritual, and ritual objects, be of particular importance in dire circumstances? Ask your students to consider the artifact in relationship to the Seder described in Mash’s story. In what ways do they see the two improvised Seders as emerging from a similar impulse, however your students might understand that impulse (to evoke holiness, to maintain something like normalcy, to connect the present to the past, to imbue the passage of time with meaning)? How do they see these rituals as different?

Also, ask your students to consider: What are the gendered dimensions of these two improvised rituals? What impact might Aryeh Ludwig Zuckerman’s upbringing as a man in a traditional Jewish environment have had on his creation of the document? What are the ways that traditional gender divisions are disrupted or upheld through this artifact and through Mash’s story?

In “A Seder in the Taiga,” Mash discusses the women’s matzah as a Siberian “bread of affliction.”  This is a reference to a declaration in the Passover Haggadah, recited at the start of the magid, or retelling, section.

Suggested Activity: Ask your students to consider the idea of “bread of affliction” in the context of Mash’s story. What are the resonances between the women’s situation in the gulag and the Exodus story they are retelling? Ask your class to divide in half for a debate—one side argues that the tiny, misshapen matzahs are not authentic matzahs, and the other side argues that the matzahs are more authentic because they were produced at a time of suffering.

Yenta Mash’s “A Seder in the Taiga” references the singing of “Khad gadyo,” an Aramaic-language cumulative song traditionally sung toward the end of the Passover seder. In the song, a small goat is pursued by predators, culminating in the Angel of Death. Those unfamiliar with the song can find lyrics here, and can listen to versions of the song in many Jewish languages here.

The avant-garde artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941) made illustrations of the traditional Passover song “Khad gadyo” early in his career, when he immersed himself in the Jewish cultural renaissance that flourished in Russia from roughly 1912 to the early 1920s. This illustration depicts the final verse of the song, when the Angel of Death arrives to slay the butcher who killed the ox that drank the water that extinguished the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat, an ultimate end to a grisly tale.

Suggested Activity: Although the song “Khad gadyo” has been interpreted in many ways, one common interpretation is allegorical—comparing the goat to the Jewish people, the father who bought the goat to God, and the other characters to nations who conquered Israel, ending with God coming and liberating the Jewish people from its persecutors. In “A Seder in the Taiga,” Mash uses the narrative “Khad gadyo” to offer criticism against God for intervening only after the Angel of Death has brought the story to the ultimate destruction. God comes to liberate, but only after the destruction has been too great for such salvation to be any consolation.  

Ask your students to examine the illustration and discuss what they see. How is Lissitzky representing and interpreting “Khad gadyo” and specifically the Angel of Death? Does Lissitzky’s visual interpretation match the way Mash interprets the song in her story?