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Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region (Jewish Encounters Series)

door Masha Gessen

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
1265215,209 (3.5)8
"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"--… (meer)
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Birobidzhan—a region in Russia's far east which during the Soviet period was the location for an ill-fated Soviet project to create a secular Jewish territory—is normally relegated to the rank of odd footnote to broader narratives of Jewish history. Masha Gessen uses the 20th-century history of the region, and the career of the Yiddish-language author and cultural activist David Bergelson, to look at the history of Russian Jewry. I think Gessen does a good job of setting out the kind of symbolic space occupied by the concept of Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Region for various groups, but I wished they had spent more time on the area itself. Even by the end of the book, I don't think I had more than a hazy sense of it and its population. ( )
  siriaeve | Mar 23, 2024 |
The ill-fated story of Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish region, could be just a footnote in Soviet history--and Masha Gessen's book is less than 200 pages long. But it's a side note that's deeply connected to other strands of Jewish and Soviet history. The project married two stories: The Jewish national debate and the Soviet nation-building story. Secular Zionists, secular Yiddishists, and religious Jews argued over the Jewish future against the background of European antisemitism.

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. ( )
  arosoff | Jul 11, 2021 |
Russia (and former USSR) had some of the most complicated internal top-level subdivisions of any country ever -- 4 separate levels of provinces, based on level of autonomy. The Jewish Autonomous Region is the most unique, most independent, and weirdest. This book is the story of that region, but is pretty scattered and personal, rather rather than a really clear account of the region. ( )
  octal | Jan 1, 2021 |
Basically equal parts history, biography, memoir, and travelogue, Gessen is essentially looking at the fate of Russian Jewry through the lens of David Bergelson, a Yiddish-speaking man of letters who you can either view as being something of a confidence man or a martyr to a certain idea of cultural Judaism. As for Gessen herself she was the daughter of Soviet Jews who managed to get out of the USSR back in the bad old days of 1981, but who went back to Russia, only to find herself moving her family out of Russia again, due to the fear that, as part of a same-sex marriage, the current regime might strip Gessen of her children. You can also call this book a commentary on how Russia is far from overcoming the social and psychological damage wrought by the Communist experience. ( )
  Shrike58 | Jul 13, 2019 |
"Where the Jews aren't" is Birobidzhan, a region in the far east of Russia, beyond Siberia and close to the Chinese border. After the Russian Revolution, this area was proposed as the site of an autonomous Jewish homeland within the Soviet Union. This very cold and swampy place was not well suited to settlement, and early efforts at farming and industrialization were not successful. Nonetheless, propaganda from the pen of Yiddish writer David Bergelson (1884-1952) lured waves of dispossessed and/or idealistic Jews to Birobidzhan to try their luck there. Most fled to Israel or other countries as soon as the opportunity arose. Today, only about one percent of the population of this so-called Jewish homeland is of Jewish descent.

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. ( )
3 stem akblanchard | Dec 15, 2016 |
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"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"--

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