Where the Jews Aren't : : the sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region

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Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / Europe / Russia, 957.7 Ge
On Shelf At: Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / Europe / Russia	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	957.7 Ge	4-week checkout	Due 05-07-2024

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

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Ok, not the greatest submitted by Zekicmom on July 21, 2018, 3:49pm I had never heard of Birobidzhan before and was very curious when I started reading this book. Maybe it's just me, but I found it to be a bit confusing. Perhaps the author was trying to give a sense of what influenced the founding of the community and the players involved, but I had trouble keeping track and would have liked to have learned more about actual life in the "Jewish Autonomous Region". A lot was covered in a very short book, yet somehow, I don't feel like I could explain any of it.