Word: birobidzhan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last of his five dispatches last week, Reporter Frankel managed to send through Moscow's censors a far soberer picture-a picture of an old Soviet propagandists' paradise, the rarely visited Jewish Autonomous Province of Birobidzhan on the northern border of Manchuria. Founded with great fanfare in 1934 as "an empty plot on which the Soviet Jews were to pioneer without getting mixed up with Zionism," Birobidzhan is today, as Frankel describes it, a sad little whistle stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that "jet planes, hope, energy and momentum pass...
...Jews since World War II. The total population of an area twice the size of New Jersey is barely 160,000, "half Jewish, two-thirds urban." Young Jews leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere; Frankel met one in the train who spoke with "contempt" of the city of Birobidzhan (pop. 60,000) as "a city of three streets...
...Really Busy on Sunday." "Jewish farmers are said to do as well as most farmers in the region. Still, more meat and eggs are badly needed in Birobidzhan. Even city dwellers keep chickens. At the market on Friday, as a dozen peasants sell garlic, Indian nuts, onions and a few eggs, the visitor is told that it is really busy on Sunday...
...People are dressed, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, darkly, adequately. In Birobidzhan locally produced shoes and accessories are perhaps a bit more stylish. The Trans-Siberian stops for ten minutes four times a day in each direction, and as the traveler waits for the train at the little station, a local culture official asks whether there are vegetables to be had in America...
Siberia, Yiddish signs, schoolbooks and newspapers are no longer to be seen. Anything but reassuring, Khrushchev's reply raised a fresh outcry from Jewish leaders in Paris, New York, Tel Aviv. The Soviet boss baldly labeled Birobidzhan a "failure" and in laying the blame on Jewish "individualism" and "intellectualism" seemed to single out the Jews as an element unfitted for Soviet collectivism...