Where The Jews Aren't: The Sad And Absurd Story Of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
by Masha Gessen /
2017 / English / PDF
161.8 MB Download
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.
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.