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By Pierre Van Paassen Reuben Brainin, the Zionist This is written exclusively for The Southern Israelite by Pierre Tan Paassen, eminent foreign correspondent, just back from a thorough investigation of Jewish conditions in the USSR. -X W HEN I told a prominent Bostonian Zion ist, who is also a member of the National Administrative Committee, that I intended to visit the Jewish agricultural colonies in the USSR and possibly the Jewish Autonomous Soviet Republic of Biro-Bidjan, he gave me the following advice: “Remember, no matter how good you find Biro-Bidjan, it is no good anyway!” With this he meant that regardless of the fact that masses of declassed Jews might eventually find a home and live an honorable human life in agriculture in the Soviet Union, the experiment stands forever con demned from a Zionist; i. e., from a Jewish na tional point of view, because Biro-Bidjan is not Eretz Israel, and never can take the place of Eretz Israel in Jewish life. “Palestine is the central reality of Jewish life,” he went on, “and the efforts of world-Jewry should be directed towards one thing: the upbuilding of a puissant center of Hebraic culture in Eretz Is rael so that ultimately this center may radiate new life into the arteries of the dying Diaspora.” Without examining here in what measure pres ent-day Eretz Israel answers to the Herzlian ideal, or is ever likely to fulfill Zionist hopes of a Com monwealth in which Jew's are to give direction to all the manifestations of life, we must neverthe less make the observation that the facile statement of Palestine being the central reality in Jewish life today is a grotesque and cruel myth. In Poland, the central reality of Jewish life is bread. This may sound prosaic and uninspiring, but it is the sober truth. That Bialik may one of these days burst forth in a new Hebraic chant means absolutely nothing to the destitute and doomed Jewish masses of Kattowitz and Lodz and Warsaw. That the Mosul pipeline is soon to be built to Haifa makes no difference to the starving Jew ish children of Lemberg and Vilna. They are going to perish, pipeline or not. They are doomed whether there is a new real estate boom on Mount Carmel and in Haifa Bay or not. Let us at least try to keep a sense of proportion. What are 4,500 Palestine immigration certificates in a Jewish pop ulation of three millions, as in Poland? Cannot the Zionists see that to speak of Pales tine as the central reality of Jewish life at this moment is a cruel mockery to the millions of ragged and hungry Jews of Eastern Europe? What good is it to Jews who see their hollow’- eyed children whimpering around an empty cup board—and of such Jews there are millions—that the Hebrew' University releases its first graduate class, or that Potash, Ltd., is about to .start opera tions on the Dead Sea, that ten million dollars are to be invested in the pipeline or that Dr. Sokolow makes an inspiring speech at Tel Aviv? I have no intention of belittling the Palestine undertak ing, but I w’ant to keep a sense of reality. Pales tine may indeed prove a haven of refuge for a limited number of small American Jewish capital ists w'ho have managed to save something out of the general collapse. 'This in fact is what is happening at the present moment. But what of the millions of Jews in America who are being declassed under the impact of the economic blizzard? To tell them that Palestine is the central reality in Jewish life, amounts to the same thing as saying that the moon is made of green cheese. 'I'lie central reality of Jewish life everywhere is the precarious, if not hopeless, economic condition of the Jew's. Why deny it? Why let ourselves be deluded by exalted talk about a spiritual rebirth? I do not deny that the Hebrew Renaissance is a beautiful idea, fascinating and inspiring. But so is the millennium. It means nothing to me that I have been promised a front seat in heaven when I must hunt for a crust of bread on earth. It is with our own economic situation that we are concerned at present, not with spiritual values, which once made a delightful subject for discussion at copious complimentary banquets in prosperity times. Let us ask ourselves the question pure and sim ple: whether Palestine can ever, under the most favorable circumstances, rehabilitate the twelve or fourteen million Jews who are at present, in vary ing degrees of gravity, feeling the pinch of the times? What the Jewish people need today, in my es timation, is a new' Herzl, a man with the cour age and candor to tell the truth, unvarnished and unsugared. Such a man, it is true, would inevit ably be ostracized and ridiculed. He w'ould be ac cused of treason to the Jewish people and he w'ould ultimately be hounded out from the community of his brethren, but he would do the Jewish people the greatest favor that can be rendered at the present moment. For only the truth will make us free. And we will be free the moment we see things with clarity, stripped of nebulous idealogies and wordy embellishments. The Thousand and One Nights lie behind. We are right in the midst of the Thousand and Second Night. The book of Fairy Tales is out. The new economic juncture has appended the last word to that chapter: “Finis.” No man would be happier than I if Eretz Israel could indeed bring a ray of light in the unimagin ably dark economic night which reigns over East ern Europe, but when, after careful looking into the matter, I see that, with the best will in the world and with all the circumstances favorable, Palestine does not hold out such a hope in reality, am I to be called a traitor, a Goyish turncoat, a deserter from the ranks of the friends of Israel? The treatment that was meted out to Reuben Brainin ought indeed to make a man think twice before he ventures to say about Jewish life what he actually believes to be the truth. One of the pioneers of modern Zionism, a participant with Herzl in the first Zionist Congress at Basle; a tireless propagandist of the Jewish national philos ophy for forty years; an advocate of his people’s cause in the intellectual circles of Europe’s capi tals; publisher of Zionist magazines in Hebrew; REUBEN BRAININ, ... he dares to speak the truth . . . -*1 : I one of the initiators of a center of Hebraic learn ing in Jerusalem; dean of Hebrew literature in America; a gentle soul; a universalist thinker; a Jew, first, last and all the time; a Jewish nation alist of such intense feelings that nothing, literalh nothing, in Jewish life was strange to him, thi* man was in the eventide of his life driven ouf the congregation of Israel, maligned, mocked and even dubbed a traitor to his people’s cause. Why was this done? Why was this cruel and unworthy treatment meted out to Reuben Brainin 5 I will tell you. Reuben Brainin, driven by that restless urge to explore every angle of Jewish life, went back to the country of his birth, which i* Russia, to see the effects of the Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet power on the life of the three million Jews in that country. Thi* was seven years ago. And even then, seven yean ago, when it was much more difficult to gauge the significance of the transformation of Jewish life in the USSR than it is at present, Reuben Brainir saw clearly that for the Jews of the Soviet Union under the new regime there was hope, there was ar economic future and a solution of their social prob lems in agriculture. It is no “Kunststuock’ to say this now. Dozens of capable observers ha\e since confirmed Brainin’s view*. Seven years ago | when Reuben Brainin made his announcement 4 from Russia in a series of articles in “The Day. the news came as a startling revelation. Immediately a conspiracy of silence formed around the man. His crime was not that he M seen, observed and understood the meaning of the 1 new tendencies of Jewish life in the USSR. crime was that he had spoken out. His crime w* that he, Vice-President of the Zionist Organize tion of America, had said openly and frankly that there was another way out from Czarist miser' for the Jew's of Russia besides transferring them “en masse” to Palestine, which is a physical i®* possibility anyway. It would have been much easier for Reuben Brainin to keep silent. Nobody would have re proached him from the (Please turn to page ^ it THE SOUTHERN ISRAEL^ [6]