Paul Robeson

No matter what you’ve heard, the man was no hero or saint. Oliver Kamm shares this, from historian Harvey Klehr, referring to a favourable bio of Robeson by Martin Duberman:

In 1949 Robeson arrived in Moscow in the midst of Stalin’s notorious anti-Zionism campaign. Uneasy at his inability to find old Jewish friends, he asked to see Itzik Feffer, the noted Yiddish writer. Feffer was brought from prison to Robeson’s hotel, where he silently communicated that their conversation was being bugged. Other Jewish cultural leaders, he was able to convey, had already been purged; drawing his hand across his throat, he indicated what was to be his own fate as well. Robeson’s response was to include a tribute to Feffer during his last Moscow concert. Duberman extenuatingly suggests that the gesture was “all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer’s life,” but that life was doomed anyway; more telling is that on his return to the United States, Robeson vehemently denied the existence of Soviet anti-Semitism.

As Oliver notes, Feffer was shot in 1952.