Status
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
"The story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia as told through the strange history of the Soviet solution to the Jewish question. In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. In the late 1920s and early 1932, tens of thousands of Jews moved to Birobidzhan, chased from the shtetl by poverty, hunger, and fear. Birobidzhan was written about breathlessly by a small group of intellectuals who envisioned a home built by Jews for Jews--a place where Jews worked the land and where Yiddish would become the common language of a post-oppression Jewish culture. The short period of state-building ended in the late 1930s with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite. After the Second World War, Birobidzhan, now called the "Jewish Autonomous Region," received a new influx of Jews. These were the dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, and most of them had lost families in the Holocaust. They had no one and no place to return to. Once again, in the late 1940s, a wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, frightening the Jews into silence and making them invisible. WHERE THE JEWS AREN'T is the story of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became a nightmare. In Masha Gessen's haunting and haunted account, Birobidzhan becomes the cracked and crooked mirror that allows us to see the story of the history of absence and silence that is the story of Jews in twentieth-century Russia"--… (more)
Awards
Language
User reviews
I thought this book would be a travelogue. It is not, although author Masha Gessen does take a trip to Birobidzhan in the final chapter. Throughout the book, the focus is on Bergelson, who is portrayed as an ambiguous figure. Seeing the dark shadows that were falling across Europe in the 1930s and gifted with a strong survival instinct, he cast his lot with the Soviets, despite Russia's well-documented antisemitism. He cooperated with Stalin's regime, but he was later branded a "rootless cosmopolitan" (a common charge against Jews) and executed by firing squad during Stalin's last purge, "The Night of Murdered Poets" (Aug. 12-13, 1952).
The tale this book tells is indeed "sad and absurd". It is also well worth reading.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a Jewish problem partly of its own making. Jews had been confined to the Pale of Settlement and forbidden to own land. The remaking of the Soviet economy wiped out the livelihoods of 40% of Jews, and Soviet leaders wanted them to turn to collective farms--but there was no prospect of that in the Pale, where locals despised Jews.
The solution was a very Soviet one: they decided to create a Jewish territory. And they did so along the border with Manchuria. At the time the Soviet leadership believed in a form of limited cultural autonomy, and used secular Yiddishists as a means of promotion. They advertised Birobidzhan as a place of Yiddish culture. Not of nationalism or religion, which were unacceptable in Soviet thought, but of language and culture. As with so many grand Soviet projects, it was a poorly managed flop, but against the run-up to the Holocaust, a peculiarly tragic one.
Birobidzhan itself is not much of a place and its history is predictable. Gessen is interested in what it says about history and the people who backed it. It reflected the policies of the moment, from the autonomy movement to its quashing and then to Stalin's purges. Today, it reflects the post-Soviet attitude towards history, and the book is just one small record of the crushing of European Jewish culture.