When a bird flies into a Lower East Side apartment in Bernard Malamud’s story, “The Jewbird”, its first words are, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” In Annie Hall, the Woody Allen character says that his grandmother would never have had time to knit anything like Annie’s tie because “she was too busy being raped by Cossacks”.
American Jews could joke about them, but for more than 40 years Russian Jews were terrified by the threat of pogroms, especially as Easter approached. Shops were looted, women were raped, people were killed. In his diary for 1920, Isaac Babel describes witnessing one such outbreak: “they cut off beards, that’s usual, assembled 45 Jews in the marketplace, led them to the slaughteryard, tortures, cut out tongues, wails heard all over the square.”
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