Becoming Soviet Jews

Elissa Bemporad

Description

The Soviet regime's impact on Jewish life in Minsk

Watch a video of the author discussing the Mendel Beilis trial at the YIVO Institute. Read the YIVO Institute's interview with the author.

Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with prerevolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers' Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Historical Profile of an East European Jewish City
2 Red Star on the Jewish Street
3 Entangled Loyalties: The Bund, the Evsekstiia, and the Creation of a "New" Jewish Political Culture
4 Soviet Minsk: The Capital of Yiddish
5 Behavior Unbecoming a Communist: Jewish Religious Practice in a Soviet Capital
6 Housewives, Mothers and Workers: Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution
7 Jewish Ordinary Life in the Midst of Extraordinary Purges: 1934-1939
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• General officer
• Russia
• Bolshevik
• General
• Bolchevik
• Minsk
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 29 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253008275
• Langue: English

Extrait

A HELEN B. SCHWARTZ BOOK IN JEWISH STUDIES
 
 
THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenbit, Editors Paula Hyman, Founding Co–Editor
BECOMING SOVIET JEWS
The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk
Elissa Bemporad
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
Becoming Soviet Jews has been awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History as outstanding work in twentieth-century history.
Published with the generous support of the Helen B. Schwartz Fund for New Scholarship in Jewish Studies of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405–3907 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders         800-842-6796 Fax orders                    812-855-7931
© 2013 by Elissa Bemporad
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of paper for printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bemporad, Elissa.     Becoming Soviet Jews : the Bolshevik experiment in Minsk / Elissa Bemporad.         pages ; cm. — (Helen B. Schwartz book in Jewish studies)     ISBN 978-0-253-00813-8 (cloth : alk. paper)     ISBN 978-0-253-00822-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)     ISBN (invalid) 978-0-253-00827-5 (ebook)     1. Jews, Soviet—Belarus—Minsk—History. 2. Jews—Belarus—Minsk—Social life and customs—20th century. 3. Jews—Cultural assimilation—Soviet Union. 4. Jews—Soviet Union—Identity. 5. Communism and Judaism—Belarus—Minsk. I. Title. II. Series: Helen B. Schwartz book in Jewish studies.     DS135.B382M563    2013     305.892'40478609041—dc23
2012049483
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
 
 
 
 
 
 
PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK
IS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM
Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1  Historical Profile of an Eastern European Jewish City
2  Red Star on the Jewish Street
3  Entangled Loyalties: The Bund, the Evsektsiia, and the Creation of a “New” Jewish Political Culture
4  Soviet Minsk: The Capital of Yiddish
5  Behavior Unbecoming a Communist: Jewish Religious Practice in a Soviet Capital
6  Housewives, Mothers, and Workers: Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution
7  Jewish Ordinary Life in the Midst of Extraordinary Purges: 1934–1939
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Figures
   1. Map of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, ca. 1900 .
   2. Distribution of shoes to children of Jewish homes by the Joint Distribution Committee, Minsk, ca. 1923 .
   3. Map of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), 1926–39 .
   4. On Nemiga Street, 1923 .
   5. The Minsk Central Train Station, 1930s .
   6. At a parade celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Minsk, 1927 .
   7. Physics class in Yiddish at the Jewish section of the Unified Professional School, Minsk, 1928–29 .
   8. At a kosher market stand, Minsk, 1924 .
   9. “My wife's aunt came and carried out the bris. Of course the father isn't too happy about this.” Oktyabr , April 17, 1927 .
10. Students of the Jewish Pedagogical Training College learning to shoot, Minsk, 1925 .
11. View of Lenin Street, from Freedom Square to Sovetskaia Street, 1930s .
12. Belorussian State Jewish Theater, 1930s .
13. Detail of the Belorussian State Jewish Theater. Performance poster featuring Sholem Aleichem's Motl Peysi dem Khazns (Motl, the cantor's son) .
14. From Avrom Goldfadn's play The Witch , staged by the Belorussian State Jewish Theater in 1939 .
Acknowledgments
I AM MOST GRATEFUL to all my colleagues, friends, and family, who, in different ways and in different countries, supported me through the ups and downs that the researching and writing of this book entailed. First, I would like to thank Steve Zipperstein, who saw this project through its initial stage and who gave me the support and encouragement to become a better writer of Russian Jewry. I am grateful for his mentoring, his rigor, and above all his generosity. It is a pleasure to thank others who guided my training in Jewish history and Russian history: Valerio Marchetti, who, in my years at Bologna University, first showed me where Russia and Jews meet; Aron Rodrigue, who made me think broadly about issues of emancipation, acculturation, and national minorities in multinational empires; Amir Weiner, who helped me sharpen my ideas about the Bolshevik experiment and who was ultimately responsible for my shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century when, during a graduate seminar on Soviet historiography, he said to me, “Don't you see how much more interesting Soviet Jews are?”; and Terrence Emmons, with whom I had some of the most engaging conversations on Russian society and historiography of my career. I thank Avrom Nowershtern, David Roskies, David Fishman, and Samuel Kassow, for showing me the exceptional richness of Eastern European Jewish life and culture.
Over the years, a number of individuals have offered useful comments on different sections of this book, or discussed other relevant issues with me that informed my views. Among the many scholars who in many different ways contributed to the making of this book, warm thanks to Evelyn Ackerman, Natalia Aleksiun, Mordechai Altshuler, Eugene Avrutin, Zachary Baker, Yaacov Basin, Elisheva Carlbach, Igor Dukhan, Gennady Estraikh, Olga Gershenson, Zvi Gitelman, Harriet Jackson, Laura Jokusch, Naomi Kadar z ” l , Mikhail Kalnitskii, Joshua Karlip, Ben-Tsion Klibansky, Rebecca Kobrin, Misha Krutikov, John Champagne, Cecile Kuznitz, Leonid Katsis, Efim Melamed, Misha Mitsel, Kenneth Moss, Jess Olson, Eddy Portnoy, Alyssa Quint, Per Anders Rudling, Robert Seltzer, Sasha Senderovich, Anna Shternshis, Nancy Sinkoff, Julia Sneeringer, Barry Trachtenberg, Shelly Tsar-Zion, Sarah Tsfatman, Amir Weiner, Debby Yalen, Vital Zajka, Arkadii Zeltser, and Carol Zemel. My heartfelt appreciation to Marion Kaplan (no one has ever read my work as closely as she has), Olga Litvak (the most brutal and brilliant critic on the Russian Jewish street), David Shneer, and Jeffrey Veidlinger, for their comments and suggestions.
The research for this book was enabled by support from a number of institutions, including the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Center for Jewish History in New York City, the Mellon Foundation, the American Councils (ACTR/ACCELS) for International Education Title VIII Research Scholarship, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. I also owe a debt of appreciation to Jerry and William Ungar for generously sponsoring the chair that makes possible my presence at Queens College.
The research for this book involved more than a dozen archives and libraries on three different continents. In Minsk, I am indebted to the archivists and staffs of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, the State Archives of the Minsk Province, the Belorussian State Museum and Archives of Literature and Art, the Belorussian State Archives of Film and Photography, the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, and the National Library of Belarus. I wish to thank Inna Pavlovna Gerasimova, head of the Jewish Museum in Minsk, who was generous in sharing her knowledge with me. In Moscow, I am grateful to the staffs of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political Research, Former Party Archives to 1945, and the Russian State Library. In Jerusalem, warm thanks are due to the staff of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Oral History Division at Hebrew University, the Central Zionist Archives, the Yad Vashem Archives, and the Jewish National Library. In New York, I thank Misha Mitsel, senior archivist at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Last but not least, I am immensely grateful to the staff of the YIVO Archives and library, and I wish to thank in particular Marek Web, Krisha Fisher, and Jesse Aron Cohen, all of whom offered their assistance.
I would like to thank my editor at Indiana University