Download or read book Where the Jews Aren t written by Masha Gessen and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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)
Download or read book Where the Jews Aren t written by Masha Gessen and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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)
Download or read book Stalin s Forgotten Zion written by Robert Weinberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-05-25 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dreams of Nationhood written by Henry Felix Srebrnik and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Jewish Autonomous Region written by David Bergelson and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My Life in Stalinist Russia written by Mary M. Leder and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-13 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The thoughtful memoirs of a disillusioned daughter of the Russian Revolution. . . . A sometimes astonishing, worm's-eye view of life under totalitarianism, and a valuable contribution to Soviet and Jewish studies." —Kirkus Reviews "In this engrossing memoir, Leder recounts the 34 years she lived in the U.S.S.R. . . . [She] has a marvelous memory for the details of everyday life. . . . This plainly written account will particularly appeal to readers with a general interest in women's memoirs, Russian culture and history, and leftist politics." —Publishers Weekly In 1931, Mary M. Leder, an American teenager, was attending high school in Santa Monica, California. By year's end, she was living in a Moscow commune and working in a factory, thousands of miles from her family, with whom she had emigrated to Birobidzhan, the area designated by the USSR as a Jewish socialist homeland. Although her parents soon returned to America, Mary, who was not permitted to leave, would spend the next 34 years in the Soviet Union. My Life in Stalinist Russia chronicles Leder's experiences from the extraordinary perspective of both an insider and an outsider. Readers will be drawn into the life of this independent-minded young woman, coming of age in a society that she believed was on the verge of achieving justice for all but which ultimately led her to disappointment and disillusionment. Leder's absorbing memoir presents a microcosm of Soviet history and an extraordinary window into everyday life and culture in the Stalin era.
Download or read book The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture 1917 1937 written by Jörg Schulte and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the impact on Jewish culture in Western Europe of the migration of Russian Jews following the 1917 Revolution as they enabled the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora.
Download or read book Stalin s Forgotten Zion written by Robert Weinberg and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 00 Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule. Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.
Download or read book Fragile Empire written by Ben Judah and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautifully written and very lively study of Russia that argues that the political order created by Vladimir Putin is stagnating” (Financial Times). From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has traveled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir Putin’s friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens. Fragile Empire is the fruit of Judah’s thorough research: A probing assessment of Putin’s rise to power and what it has meant for Russia and her people. Despite a propaganda program intent on maintaining the cliché of stability, Putin’s regime was suddenly confronted in December 2011 by a highly public protest movement that told a different side of the story. Judah argues that Putinism has brought economic growth to Russia but also weaker institutions, and this contradiction leads to instability. The author explores both Putin’s successes and his failed promises, taking into account the impact of a new middle class and a new generation, the Internet, social activism, and globalization on the president’s impending leadership crisis. Can Russia avoid the crisis of Putinism? Judah offers original and up-to-the-minute answers. “[A] dynamic account of the rise (and fall-in-progress) of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” —Publishers Weekly “[Judah] shuttles to and fro across Russia’s vast terrain, finding criminals, liars, fascists and crooked politicians, as well as the occasional saintly figure.” —The Economist “His lively account of his remote adventures forms the most enjoyable part of Fragile Empire, and puts me in mind of Chekhov’s famous 1890 journey to Sakhalin Island.” —The Guardian
Download or read book Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia written by Robert Weinberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “riveting history . . . brings us face to face with this notorious trial” of a Russian Jew who was framed for ritual murder in 1913 (Jewish Book World). On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. It is a gripping narrative culled from trial transcripts, newspaper articles, Beilis’s memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time.
Download or read book Bears in the Streets written by Lisa Dickey and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **One of Bustle's 17 of the Best Nonfiction Books Coming in January 2017 and Men's Journal's 7 Best Books of January** "Brilliant, real and readable." —former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright **A USA Today "New and Noteworthy" Book** Lisa Dickey traveled across the whole of Russia three times—in 1995, 2005 and 2015—making friends in eleven different cities, then coming back again and again to see how their lives had changed. Like the acclaimed British documentary series Seven Up!, she traces the ups and downs of ordinary people’s lives, in the process painting a deeply nuanced portrait of modern Russia. From the caretakers of a lighthouse in Vladivostok, to the Jewish community of Birobidzhan, to a farmer in Buryatia, to a group of gay friends in Novosibirsk, to a wealthy family in Chelyabinsk, to a rap star in Moscow, Dickey profiles a wide cross-section of people in one of the most fascinating, dynamic and important countries on Earth. Along the way, she explores dramatic changes in everything from technology to social norms, drinks copious amounts of vodka, and learns firsthand how the Russians really feel about Vladimir Putin. Including powerful photographs of people and places over time, and filled with wacky travel stories, unexpected twists, and keen insights, Bears in the Streets offers an unprecedented on-the-ground view of Russia today.
Download or read book Languages in Jewish Communities Past and Present written by Benjamin Hary and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.
Download or read book PU 239 and Other Russian Fantasies written by Ken Kalfus and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed short story and novella collection by “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life”—and the basis for the HBO film PU-239 (The New York Times). Ken Kalfus traverses a century of Russian history in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he attempts to hawk plutonium in Moscow’s black market. In “Budyonnovsk,” a young man hopes that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. Set in the 1920s, “Birobidzhan” is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world’s first Jewish state. The novella, “Peredelkino,” which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political. In these and other stories, Kalfus captures the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Download or read book Voices of Jewish Russian Literature written by Maxim D. Shrayer and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 1164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, a leading specialist in Russia’s Jewish culture, this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people’s history. A living record of the rich and vibrant legacy of Russia’s Jews, this reader-friendly and comprehensive anthology features original English translations. In its selection and presentation, the anthology tilts in favor of human interest and readability. It is organized both chronologically and topically (e.g. “Seething Times: 1860s-1880s”; “Revolution and Emigration: 1920s-1930s”; “Late Soviet Empire and Collapse: 1960s-1990s”). A comprehensive headnote introduces each section. Individual selections have short essays containing information about the authors and the works that are relevant to the topic. The editor’s opening essay introduces the topic and relevant contexts at the beginning of the volume; the overview by the leading historian of Russian Jewry John D. Klier appears the end of the volume. Over 500,000 Russian-speaking Jews presently live in America and about 1 million in Israel, while only about 170,000 Jews remain in Russia. The great outflux of Jews from the former USSR and the post-Soviet states has changed the cultural habitat of world Jewry. A formidable force and a new Jewish Diaspora, Russian Jews are transforming the texture of daily life in the US and Canada, and Israel. A living memory, a space of survival and a record of success, Voice of Jewish-Russian Literature ensures the preservation and accessibility of the rich legacy of Russian-speaking Jews.
Download or read book Soviet Jews in World War II written by Harriet Murav and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The History of Birobidzhan written by Gennady Estraikh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Soviet Zion written by Allan L. Kagedan and published by New York : St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
