безродный космополит

I have at long last been exposed as a "rootless cosmopolite." I should have seen this coming. As far back as March, an anti-Semitic hack from the West Coast attacked my "Zionist NDP blog." The dogs had begun to bark.

Well I remember the latter days of Stalinism, and the denunciations that flowed against citizens of the world like myself,

unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitans, profiteers with no roots and no conscience… Grown on rotten yeast of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, decadence and formalism… non-indigenous nationals without a motherland, who poison with stench… our proletarian culture. --"About one antipatriotic group of theater critics," Pravda, January 28, 1949

Occasionally, pundits like F. Chernov went too far:

Appearing as messengers and propagandists for bourgeois ideology, the rootless-cosmopolitans fawned over and groveled before decadent bourgeois culture. Defaming Soviet socialist culture, they praised to the heavens that which was found in the emaciated and decayed conditions of bourgeois culture. In the great culture of the Russian people they saw echos and rehashings of Western bourgeois culture.

I must chide Comrade Chernov here. A little decadence, like salt in a stew, goes a long way. No rootless cosmopolite can live on salt alone.

At length, in any case, the official denunciation came. In a stroke of genius, I was condemned, not by a heroic proletarian defender of the Motherland, but by a commenter at the blogsite of someone posing as anti-Communist, Russian and Jewish. That, Comrades Stalin and Chernov, if I may say so, outdoes your relatively feeble efforts at curbing dangerous cosmopolitan tendencies. To be denounced as a rootless cosmopolite in the very home of another notorious rootless cosmopolite carries its additional sting:

There are rootless intellectuals like this Dr. Dawg fellow who move from country to country, acquire different citizenships, but pride themselves on their sense of detachment and look condescendingly on those who have a strong sense of attachment, heritage, family history and feel it's their prerogative to completely reengineer and redefine the social relationships in this country, to throw open our borders and call anyone and everyone a Canadian, irrespective of whether they want to be, what they identify themselves as, whether they have any attachment and commitment to this country.

Like Ilya Ehrenberg, I now numbly await the knock on the door.