Author: Masha Gessen Publisher: Schocken ISBN: 0805242465 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)
Author: Gennady Estraikh Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350296260 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 153
Book Description
Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents.
Author: Robert Weinberg Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520209907 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
The history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry both to the "Jewish question" in Russia and to an exploration of the fate of Soviet Jewry under Communist rule.
Author: Henry Felix Srebrnik Publisher: ISBN: 9781936235117 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Henry Srebrnik began his research of the place of Birobidzhan in the ideological space of American Jews over a decade ago. I believe I have read the majority of his publications on this fascinating and little-known topic, and this new book, Dreams of Nationhood, is the best among them.-Gennady Estraikh, New York University Author of In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism.
Author: Joshua M. Karlip Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674074947 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 399
Book Description
The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Author: Gennadiĭ Ėstraĭkh Publisher: ISBN: Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
This first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union chronicles orthographic and other reforms from the state of the language in pre-revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the 1980s.
Author: Allan L. Kagedan Publisher: New York : St. Martin's Press ISBN: 9780312090951 Category : Jews Languages : en Pages : 157
Book Description
This book tells the remarkable story of the efforts by leading Russian Jews to secure a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union. Helped by an improbable alliance of Moscow revolutionaries and New York Jewish philanthropists, this attempt to remake a portion of Soviet Jewry into a prosperous peasant farmer class - and construct a nationality-based republic similar to other Soviet creations - gripped the attention of Jews everywhere. The scheme failed, both in Ukraine and the Crimea, and ultimately led to the creation of the implausible "Jewish Autonomous Region" of Birobidzhan, an enormously distant, infertile, and gloomy piece of the Russian Far East. However, as an attempt to create a Soviet alternative to the Jewish settlements in Palestine and as a cautionary tale about policy-making in a multi-ethnic state, this remains a fascinating and (until now) oddly neglected area of Jewish history.
Author: Matthew Baigell Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 9780813528694 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
Focusing on 19th-and 20th-century European, American and Israeli artists, the contributors explore the ways in which Jewish artists have responded to their Jewishness and to the societies in which they lived (or live), and how these factors have influenced their art, their choice of subject matter, and presentation of their work.
Author: Harriet Murav Publisher: Academic Studies PRess ISBN: 1618119265 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history.
Author: Masha Gessen
Author: Gennady Estraikh
Author: Robert Weinberg
Author: Henry Felix Srebrnik
Author: David Bergelson
Author: Joshua M. Karlip
Author: Gennadiĭ Ėstraĭkh
Author: Allan L. Kagedan
Author: Matthew Baigell
Author: Harriet Murav