The Fall of Berlin

When I was a student in Warsaw some years ago, I volunteered with the Jewish community and was matched with Pan M., a man nearly 100 years old, whom I would visit with on occasion. Though bedridden and losing his hearing, Pan M. had a sharp memory, and would often tell me about his time in the Red Army. A Polish Jew from Kalisz, he and a brother escaped the ghetto and fled to the Soviet Union, where they were soon conscripted. He returned to Poland not as a victimized Jew but as a victorious soldier who helped liberate Warsaw from the Nazis.Mendel Mann's The Fall of Berlin, available for the first time in English translation by Maurice Wolfthal, highlights a similar story of what might be termed “alternative Jewish World War II narratives.” These depart from stories of Jewish victimhood in ghettos and camps and instead highlight the activities of Polish Jews on the front lines with the Red Army, in which over a half million served. Mann (1916–1975), who was active in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw beginning in 1938, managed to escape from Poland in the autumn of 1939. He ended up deep in the USSR where he was mobilized. Like his protagonist, Menakhem Isaacovitch, Mann was witness to the Battle of Moscow, and he later marched into Berlin in May 1945. After the war, Mann became an active cultural figure in Łódź, where he was instrumental in establishing a new postwar Yiddish cultural system as part of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. In the wake of the Kielce Pogrom, however, Mann moved to Regensburg. There, he began a Yiddish daily newspaper. In 1948, he moved to the young state of Israel and became an active member of the literary movement Yung Yisroel (Young Israel), headed by well-known partisan and poet Avrom Sutzkever.In spite of his major contributions to postwar Yiddish culture, Mann's work has been overlooked until recently. Heather Valencia's 2016 translation of Mann's short story collection, Seeds in the Desert, published by the Yiddish Book Center's White Goat Press, brought new attention to this important author. In that collection of short fiction, Mann's stories about the vagaries of life in the new Jewish state reflect an ambivalence toward the Zionist project, rather than a full-throated embrace. This characteristic nuance is also present in his novel, The Fall of Berlin, which is the third in an epic trilogy about the experiences of a frontline Polish Jewish soldier in the Red Army in the final days of the war.At its core, the novel is an account of the end of war and how grand narratives of national victory run up against the lived experience of frontline soldiers. Mann is chiefly concerned with the ease with which moral lines are crossed by victors who had previously maintained a high ground. Though the plot at times has a meandering quality, the epic narrative captures the magnitude of the historical event, and Mann's strengths lay in his vignettes and short passages. Moving from one battle-ravaged scene to the next, the plot unfolds between characters and their short exchanges, with special attention to how Jewish soldiers, in their new positions of power, interact with defeated Germans. “It was evening,” writes Mann matter-of-factly. “It would be a night of drunkenness, of soldiers out of control, a night of plundering, of anarchy in that city of anarchy, of raping the women of the ‘master race.’ The next morning a young Pole said to Menakhem: ‘The Germans murdered us. The Ukrainians tortured us. And I'm gonna rape those blond, blue-eyed ‘Aryans.’ I'm gonna do everything that Hitler forbade. Their women are calling you. They stand at corners, at the courtyard gates” (p. 175). But Mann takes care to depict Jewish soldiers differently; will they give in to their human urge for revenge, like others in their unit? In a rare moment of direct address, Mann's narrator calls out to God: “why do you erase the fine line between the conquerors and the conquered? How similar they are! How the distinction between them is fading!” (p. 175). Mann's is a wish for justice, that the Germans be brought to trial and found guilty of their crimes against both heaven and man.Translator Maurice Wolfthal anticipates that most readers will not have read the first two volumes in this trilogy before picking up The Fall of Berlin. Therefore, he includes plot summaries of the first two as part of the introductory paratexts that foreground this novel. However, in spite of this explanatory foregrounding, I found certain aspects of the plot, such as the relationships between main characters, to be a bit confusing. The first two volumes build out the world that Mann's characters inhabit as well as their complicated, intertwined histories. Nevertheless, one should not dismiss this book should the first two volumes be unavailable (only the first, At the Gates of Moscow, has been translated into English). Wolfthal argues that The Fall of Berlin can be read on its own, rather than as a grand climax of a set, and this claim does hold up, depending on what expectations the reader brings to the experience. Mann captures the deeply personal motivations of many Jewish soldiers in the Red Army as they fought back against a genocidal force that had already destroyed their world. Mann's protagonist “had stood on the other side of the river then, powerless as the city lay dying. His home was now ashes. Where was he going? West! He was going to destroy Berlin. He had to be there! In Warsaw he had realized the evil did not reside in Berlin alone. It was all around” (p. 40). Readers hoping to understand this moment in history from this perspective will find much to appreciate.Maurice Wolfthal has done a service to the fields of Yiddish and Polish studies by making The Fall of Berlin newly available in English translation. As one of the few accounts of this wartime experience written in Yiddish, it speaks both to the hunger for new literature in Yiddish after the war as well as to the presence of these Jewish voices within the Red Army. The Fall of Berlin would not only be a welcome addition to a syllabus on Holocaust literature, but it would also be an important reading for a variety of courses, including those that address the multi-ethnic dimensions of the Red Army, the tumultuous immediate postwar era, or, more broadly, the dilemmas facing victors at the end of war.