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3.5 

Where the Jews Aren't

By Masha Gessen
Where the Jews Aren't by Masha Gessen digital book - Fable

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Publisher 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) 

13 Reviews

3.5
“Fascinating book about a group of Soviet Jews I've heard about for years and never read into. I love the way Masha Gessen intertwines her own family history into this narrative. She was coming of age in a Soviet Union full of anti-semitic practice and policy. Her parents saw the only option for her future in coming to America (which in and of itself was a difficult task as the movement of Soviet Jews was limited). The only other option was Israel, which the young Masha preferred, her logic was "why leave a place where Jews are a minority for another place Jews are a minority?". This sets up the premise of the book. There was once, for a brief period of time, another option for Soviet (and other) Jews. An autonomous Jewish region within the USSR where Yiddish was to be the official language. In the 1930's this movement was seen as a preferable option to many given the anti-semitism in the USSR, the question of assimilation, the fascist threat from Germany to the west, and the belief that Zionism had both a reactionary nationalist element while simultaneously being a pipe dream with not a lot of chance success. This book paints a picture in tragic detail of how this Jewish project fell victim to the violent and paranoid schizophrenia of the Stalinist era and the repercussions that had for further generations of Soviet Jews. This time period coincided with the holocaust and the theft of the property and land of Jewish holocaust survivors by their former gentile neighbors. Thus paving the way for immigration both to North America and British Mandate Palestine (and then Israel). The book exposes the reader to a number of interesting Jewish writers of the era and the intellectual and political debates of the time along with the outright political insanity of the Soviet system. I highly recommend.”

About Masha Gessen

MASHA GESSEN’s previous books include The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy and the national best seller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She has immigrated to the United States twice—once, as a teenager, from the Soviet Union and again, more than thirty years later, from Putin’s Russia. She lives in New York City.

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