Customer Reviews

A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Presentsecond, Expanded Edition

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4 star:		(1)
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I didn't have high hopes for this book, in fact as soon as I received it I put it away in the back of a bookshelf and up until a few days ago forgot I even had it. Deciding I haven't read anything on Jewish history in a while I gave this title a try after rummaging through various bookshelves and coming upon this title. I was not disappointed, well, to be honest, I was only disappointed in two aspect. Overall this book is very well written. The text is interspersed with pictures of Jewish life within Russia throughout the time period(s) being discussed. This is not a boring read, the author does an excellent job of moving the reader through Jewish religious, cultural, social and political history within the Russian Empire and what would become the Soviet Union. Additionally, there is some discussion about Jewish presence within the Russian army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but this is where I was somewhat disappointed. There is little to no discussion of individual Jews within the Russian army throughout WWI. For example, we are told in general terms that half a million Jews served but little detail is given about what these Jews actually did on the front lines. Secondly, this book is sorely lacking in endnotes. There is a lot of fascinating information which I was pleasantly surprised to learn about but I have no idea where to trace this information to! Thus the four star rating. In the end this is an interesting read and will undoubtedly teach both the novice and the expert something new. Yet still, this becomes a narrative that could have presented a more meaningful account if the time was taken out to source all the information being presented.

This is a beautiful, terrible book. I have a romantic attachment to the heroic past of my mother's Ukrainian family. She was born in Elizavetgrad, a couple of hundred miles northwest of Odessa in 1908. My grandmother, Riva, was born around the year the serfs were freed. My grandpa, her second spouse, may have served the required 25 years for Jewish draftees in the Russian Army, including the war with Japan. Rich Jews, among whom he wasn't, either bought substitutes for their sons or Shanghaied poor Jewish kids. Survival in the army was not assured. There was only one Jewish officer prior to WWI. Grandpa was blond and an overseer on a farm. An old Russian saying goes, "Scratch a Russian, find a Cossack." Ukrainians or White Russians obvious injected genes into the family.

Trotsky was born 17 years after my grandma on his father's farm near Elizavetgrad. Trotsky's father was one of the Jewish colonists from the Pale whom the Russian government recruited to fill the southern Ukraine after its conquest from the Ottoman empire. Most Jewish agricultural colonists failed. Having been beggars and petty trades and craftsmen, they made lousy farmers. Given my family history I found the pictures and descriptions of the era fascinating. The elegant synagogue in Elizavetgrad defies the family stories of the town as a stettl of mud hovels. And the Shul in Odessa, with its organ and choir, compares to German reform temples. It was Orthodox whom I thought prohibited instruments out of mourning for the destruction of the Second Temple. Although I could find none, I scrutinized the pictures for my mishpochah. After Jews were tied to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the pogroms of the 1880s began in Elizavetgrad. Family stories claim our only defense against the Cossacks was garlic?

My confusion comes from what I consider a general problem with ethnic histories. When the focus is on groups in a complex society, it is often hard to tell how much of what a group experiences is part of a more widespread historical trend or peculiar to that group. Many ethnic histories fall into what has been called by the Genocidal Olympics by the Native American writer Alexie Sherman. "Do you want to participate in the Genocidal Olympics? Whose tragic history has more breadth and depth and length?" This is not to diminish suffering or to deny its historical importance, but it requires the ethnic historian to put their group in the context of what else is going on at the time. Yes, Russia/the Soviet Union and the "Jewish Problem" are important but looking at that alone gives little sense of the significance of that problem within its historical context. On this score Gittleman gets a B+ among histories of Jewish suffering, most of which deserve D's, because they assert Jews are gold medalists in the Genocidal Olympics and use that assertion as justification for compensation and a rationale for injustices which Jews in turn impose. Even in Gittleman's book, I could not help thinking, what other choice had the Jews but Zionism. But as the author of a recent book on temples in Hungary and southern Poland (Upon The Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today) notices when talking with an young Israeli Holocaust tourist being indoctrinated, for her co-respondent Jewish history began with the Holocaust. The tourist could not conceive of the fact that Jews had lived in Europe for two thousand years before WWII. After slavery in the New World in which Africans survived hundreds of years in death camps, (c.f. The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies) they still had a life---with prejudice, yes but they haven't chosen leaving. So Aliyah need not be the only option.

The Jewish experience in Russia and the Soviet Union was very much within the context of their history. Before the Revolution Jews were subject to both traditional Christian anti-Semitism and the particular virulence of Tsar Nicolas I. Russia's acquisition of eastern Poland left it with millions more Jews. Nicolas couldn't understand why these low class people's wouldn't assimilate. They were frozen in the only livelihoods they were allowed, migrant peddlers, petty craftsmen, merchants, and beggars. He restricted their residence to the Pale. His successor loosened the bonds somewhat but the reaction to his assassination unleashed terrible revenge on the Jews not only by Cossacks, but by locals, particularly Ukrainians. And here is where we begin the challenge of putting what happened to Russian Jews in the context of general ethnic conflict. Gittleman only casually mentions other ethnic conflicts which are taking place. Ukrainians often suffered at the hand to both the state and Russian overlords. Peter and Catherine's extension of the Russian empire came at the expense of conquered peoples. Before, and especially during, the Crimean war Muslims were brutally driven from the Caucuses and other groups were forced to submit. Russian immigrants were given land and privileges. Ukrainians were pushed around especially by the Soviet state. And Stalin first supported then suppressed nationalities. During WWII he exiled the Tatars, Chechens, people of German ancestry, etc..

In the 19th century, enlightenment from the West began to infiltrate Russia. Jews picked up socialists ideas, and secular education allowed by Alexander II liberated Jews from the narrowness of tradition and ritual. Yiddish secularism and Hebrew Zionism began to compete among the educated. Jews became socialists and revolutionaries and some saw agriculture as the road to Zion, were it to be somewhere in Russia or Palestine. Uncle Teva was picked up in a railway station with a pistol after the 1905 Revolution which precipitated a terrible reaction and more pogroms. His imprisonment and escape led to the emigration of the family to Canada, but by then he and some of his siblings had received secular education in Yiddish or Russian high schools. Odessa was the most radical city in Russia. Was it there they were transformed? I don't know or why my grandfather was totally cynical about traditional Jewish religion. Of the hundred of thousands of Jews that left after the 1880s' pogroms most went to the US, Canada, and South America, very few to Zion.

The Russian Revolution liberated the Jews and led to their assimilation even more rapidly than had happened in Germany in the late 19th Century which Amos Elon claims was the most rapid assimilation and upward mobility of any peoples. Gittleman thinks that Jewish identification with the Revolution was not because of its ideology but because the pogroms initiated by White counter-revolutionaries and Ukrainian nationalists gave the Jews no options. The Communists rejection of anti-Semitism to the point of punishing its own troops for such acts made the Revolution the only refuge for the Jews. Of course we are talking piecemeal here starting with educated Jews. The triumph of the Revolution and its bias against mercantile occupations was followed by large migration of Jews into cities, education and the Party. Communist repression of all opposition forced the Jewish Bund into the Party. Such charismatic Bundists as Esther Frumkin joined the Party as a way of temporizing only to be swallowed by it. Only 4% of the total population, by the late 30s Jews made up 20% of higher education and a similar percentage of the Party. Jewish religion suffered from Communist anti-religious drives but not as much as did other religions. The few synagogues destroyed or converted to state institution compared to thousand of Russian Orthodox churches. As Party members Jews took an active part in anti-Christian campaigns but because of restrictions on anti-Semitism non-Jewish Party operatives restrained from attacks on Judaism. Yiddish secular culture waxed and waned according the changes in polices towards Nationalities.

Gittleman does not discuss the hostility towards the Communists that grew from collectivization beginning in 1933 or the suppression of Poles and Ukrainians in the Great Terror before WWII. A weapon in the first was starvation and the second execution. The first chance that these peoples had to get their revenge came with the German conquest. Since Jews were very visible among Party operatives who condemned people, seized crops and carried out murders, they were hated by those who were being oppressed but who also had a history of anti-Semitism.

In post-Revolutionary Russia Jews advanced rapidly and were urbanized, Many identified with the goals of the Revolution. Some Jewish Communists were the most aggressive in wanting to repress traditional Jewish culture. So to be a Jew in the pre-WWII Soviet Union was to become a professional, a factory worker, a Party operative and even an army officer. They identified themselves as Soviet citizens, some wanting a distinct Yiddish identity. There were also a few collective farmers. The photos of Jewish Kolkhozes in the Caucuses show happy, healthy peoples. Part of the ambivalence in the title of the books comes from the welcome of Jews into Soviet society. This history is often left out by Zionists and others who claim victory in the Ethnocidal Olympics. As the author points out Jews suffered disproportionably in the ideological swings from left to right and Party purges because they occupied those offices (including "the dreaded secret police") disproportionately, not because they were Jews.

So what went wrong. Stalin blew it. Here you had a powerful people who were enthusiastically melting into Soviet society. From intermarriage to disinterest in tradition, Jews were active members of the Communist revolution and, as in America today, were less interested in Jewish identity. For Gittleman Jewish alienation began in WWII. But I think it began earlier. It may have been in anticipation of conflict with Germany that Stalin, justifiably unsure of the loyalties of some Nationalities, came down hard on Ukrainians and Poles in the West. And possibly wanting to appease the Nazis began to remove Jews from Party positions. Nonetheless Jewish commissars were complicit in the Great Terror visited upon Ukrainians and Poles. Hundreds of thousands were killed or exiled.

In Nazi occupied Soviet territories the Holocaust was truly horrendous. With the Molotov-Ribbentropf treaty the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland and the Baltic which they began to swallow by killing officers, political opponents, cultural figures and entrepreneurs. Jews in these countries often regarded Soviet invaders as liberators from local fascism and anti-Semitism. This added to the locals' hatred. When the Germans conquered these countries, some locals participated in the elimination of Jews. During the war in the East, Jews were part of the Soviet army and participated in the Resistance. There is debate whether, knowing of Nazi anti-Semitism, the Soviets gave Jews priority in evacuations. Besides those evacuated as professionals, industrial laborers and Party members, the rapidity of German advance caught many Jews in towns like Minsk. The Soviets also sent some Jews from occupied eastern Poland to Siberia as unreliable. This ironically saved their lives. Unmentioned by Gittleman, after Soviet reoccupation of Nazi conquered areas, the Soviets restrained Jews from reclaiming their houses etc. in the Ukraine and White Russia, not wanting to upset the local populations who because of their cooperation with the Germans were also regarded as having only tentative loyalty to the returning Soviet state. In fact underground resistance to the Soviets existed into the 1950s. Starting in the late `30s and accelerating during the War Stalin identified Sovietness with Russian nationality. During the War there was almost no mention of the special cruelty the Nazi visited upon the Jews or of Jewish heroism.

It was Stalin's anti-Semitic paranoia after WWII that drove Jews out of Soviet society and into the arms of Zionists. Between 1948 and Stalin's death in 1953 attacks on Jews ending in the Jewish doctors' plot gave Jews no place to hide simply because their nationality of Jew was stamped on their identity card. Being loyal members of the Party made little difference. When it became clear that Israel was an outpost of Western imperialism, being a Jew in the Soviet Union became synonymous with "Cosmopolitanism," a cardinal offense. With Khrushchev's expose' of Stalin, things eased up but acceptance of Jews never went back to what it had been. Alterations of the Party line and changes in geopolitics around Israel and the Arab world led to opening and closing of emigration which became more and more an option as Jews were excluded from advancement in Soviet society. Internal emigration as it was called, retreat into private life, led some Jews to seek solace in religion. Khrushchev was succeeded by Brezhnev who reacted against the loosening of Soviet society, and Brezhnev's senility along with that of the Party gave way to Gorbachev. Unfortunately Gittleman's book was published just before the collapse of the Soviet Union when opportunities for the Jews had not significantly expanded although by then a few hundred thousand had already been allowed to emigrate. Many chose the West rather than Israel. What happened after the collapse and what percentage still remain, I don't know. Certainly the Soviet Jews who were heretofore non-religious became reactionaries in Israel.

Except for those of the Holocaust, I love the pictures in Gittleman's book. I entertained a 93 year infirmed friend of mine with them. The Mountain Jews and those of the Caucuses and Central Asia fascinate me. They led a completely different existence than Russian and European-Soviet Jews. They also massively emigrated to Israel having never assimilated into Soviet society. They looked like the locals among whom they lived. How they got along with Soviet Jews and now get along with secular Soviet-Israelis would be interesting to know.

I loved reading Gittleman's book. The pictures make the people more real. Thank you, especially for the balance of your text. Others would have tilted the history in a more Jewish-centric, self-justifying way. And except for the Holocaust executed by the Nazis, of the massive cruelty that Stalin visited upon various Soviet peoples the Jews got off much lighter than some others.

Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

A well written and nicely illustrated book on the history of Easter Europe's Jews, from their days with the Czar (starts with 1881) to their days under the Soviet Union including their brief terror under the nazis during the Great Patriotic War.

A good read.