Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus and his novel “Birobidzhan”: In the Siberian whisper

During his studies, Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus took a summer language course: Yiddish. When boredom plagued him in class, he pulled out his phone from under the table and secretly typed: “Where is Yiddish the official language?” He was sure he knew the answer: nowhere. The search engine surprised him. In Birobidzhan, she replied, a Jewish autonomous republic in eastern Siberia.

Birobidzhan is the only place in the world where Yiddish has ever been declared an official language. Although Yiddish was the native language of his grandparents who survived the Holocaust, Dotan-Dreyfus had never heard of Birobidzhan. He was fascinated by the story of the shtetl between the Bira and Bijan rivers in the most remote corner of Russia, which nobody in his family or circle of friends knew.

Birobidzhan, the debut novel by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus, was published eight years later. On a Sunday morning in March, he rubs his eyes grumblingly during a Zoom call. The last time he slept was before Lailah was born a year ago. His partner works on her opera productions, he takes care of the baby. They alternate every few months. When he talks about it, it sounds natural. But what is that?

For a long time it was uncertain that “Birobidzhan” would see the light of day. Again and again he tinkered with the first 20 pages, sent them to agencies, knocked on doors. No publisher was willing to sign him. Then came Voland & Quist.

Dotan-Dreyfus’ native language is Hebrew. But he wrote his novel in German. There are pragmatic and emotional reasons for this. In German he can let off steam like a child on a playground, but that would feel strange in his native language. He didn’t learn German until he was in his early twenties, when he moved to Berlin. Today he is in his mid-thirties.

When he speaks and writes, funny neologisms creep in. “Censored” becomes “censored,” “whisper” becomes “whisper.” He only knows of one other Israeli who writes German prose. They both have the same first name: Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus one, Tomer Gardi the other. At the book premiere of Birobidzhan in Berlin, Gardi stood at the bar and mixed drinks for the audience.

As if the language wasn’t enough of a headache, Dotan-Dreyfus is also anti-Zionist – a political stance not particularly popular in his adopted homeland of Germany or in Israel. His double name also bears witness to this attitude. Dreyfus had been his father’s surname, which his parents discarded shortly before Tomer was born.

As a commitment to Zionism, they gave themselves the Hebrew name Dotan. The adult Tomer Dotan saw this decision as a violent encroachment on his Yiddish roots, on the memory of the life his grandparents had led in the diaspora. He decided to return to Dreyfus.

Many consider Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus a controversial figure. On social media, he rages against the Israeli state and German-Israeli relations, which he attests to an obsession with the Holocaust, which he believes has degenerated into a blind legitimation of Israeli politics by the German side.

A closed settlement in Siberia

“I hope that ‘Birobidzhan’ will be read, that the political can be separated from the artistic,” he says. With the novel, he has created a work that is worth reading, although not suitable for the masses, that can, but does not have to, be interpreted politically. Perhaps a mirror of Jewish life as he would like it to be.

After the 1917 revolution, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Province (JAP) near the Chinese border, eight hours by plane and four hours by train from Moscow and ten thousand kilometers from Kyiv. Jews were to be made “useful members” of society in a closed Siberian settlement that consisted of three quarters taiga, swamp and floodplain.

The first 624 people arrived there in the late 1920s, believing that hundreds of thousands from across the Soviet Union would follow them. But the “remarkable gift” from the Soviet government, complained the later President Khrushchev, was badly thanked by the Jews. The resettlement attempt failed. Almost half of the resettlers returned due to the unbearable climatic conditions. Those who had no money for the way back stayed.

In Soviet anti-Semitic parlance, people complained that Jews should go to Birobidzhan. That’s where they belonged. The town is still there today, even though less than one percent of the population is now Jewish. The situation is completely different in Dotan-Dreyfus’ “Birobidzhan”, which he tells in the Yiddish tradition of magical realism.

In an alternative reality, spanning multiple generations and leaps in time, Dotan-Dreyfus sketches a kind of socialist study of society: a Judaism without anti-Semitism, without Israel as a point of reference, without nationalism. What could such an identity look like? The author’s Birobidzhan people, whom according to their statement “no one outside Birobidzhan is interested in”, remain isolated from world events. They live, die, hallucinate, philosophize, demonstrate, deceive and love each other in the Siberian whisper with great diasporic self-evidence – which will always remain fantasy.

One day, says Dotan-Dreyfus, he wants to be able to live off his novels. When Lailah sleeps today, he transcribes eyewitness interviews with Holocaust survivors to earn money, “a bunch of traumata”. The work depresses him, which is why he applied for a teaching position as a career changer. The only subject he is allowed to teach after completing his comparative studies: German.

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