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    Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
    Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
    Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
    Audiobook5 hours

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

    Written by Masha Gessen

    Narrated by Christina Delaine

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 9, 2017
    ISBN9781541473508
    Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
    Author

    Masha Gessen

    MASHA GESSEN is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of numerous books, including The Future is History, which has been nominated for the National Book Award. 

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    Reviews for Where the Jews Aren't

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      A history of a little known slice of Jewish life in Russia. Sad and tragic but ultimately revealing of Jewish life in the USSR.
    • 4/5
      A good book; narrator can't pronounce anything Yiddish or Hebrew.
    • 4/5
      The ill-fated story of Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish region, could be just a footnote in Soviet history--and Masha Gessen's book is less than 200 pages long. But it's a side note that's deeply connected to other strands of Jewish and Soviet history. The project married two stories: The Jewish national debate and the Soviet nation-building story. Secular Zionists, secular Yiddishists, and religious Jews argued over the Jewish future against the background of European antisemitism.

      Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a Jewish problem partly of its own making. Jews had been confined to the Pale of Settlement and forbidden to own land. The remaking of the Soviet economy wiped out the livelihoods of 40% of Jews, and Soviet leaders wanted them to turn to collective farms--but there was no prospect of that in the Pale, where locals despised Jews.

      The solution was a very Soviet one: they decided to create a Jewish territory. And they did so along the border with Manchuria. At the time the Soviet leadership believed in a form of limited cultural autonomy, and used secular Yiddishists as a means of promotion. They advertised Birobidzhan as a place of Yiddish culture. Not of nationalism or religion, which were unacceptable in Soviet thought, but of language and culture. As with so many grand Soviet projects, it was a poorly managed flop, but against the run-up to the Holocaust, a peculiarly tragic one.

      Birobidzhan itself is not much of a place and its history is predictable. Gessen is interested in what it says about history and the people who backed it. It reflected the policies of the moment, from the autonomy movement to its quashing and then to Stalin's purges. Today, it reflects the post-Soviet attitude towards history, and the book is just one small record of the crushing of European Jewish culture.
    • 4/5
      Basically equal parts history, biography, memoir, and travelogue, Gessen is essentially looking at the fate of Russian Jewry through the lens of David Bergelson, a Yiddish-speaking man of letters who you can either view as being something of a confidence man or a martyr to a certain idea of cultural Judaism. As for Gessen herself she was the daughter of Soviet Jews who managed to get out of the USSR back in the bad old days of 1981, but who went back to Russia, only to find herself moving her family out of Russia again, due to the fear that, as part of a same-sex marriage, the current regime might strip Gessen of her children. You can also call this book a commentary on how Russia is far from overcoming the social and psychological damage wrought by the Communist experience.
    • 4/5
      "Where the Jews aren't" is Birobidzhan, a region in the far east of Russia, beyond Siberia and close to the Chinese border. After the Russian Revolution, this area was proposed as the site of an autonomous Jewish homeland within the Soviet Union. This very cold and swampy place was not well suited to settlement, and early efforts at farming and industrialization were not successful. Nonetheless, propaganda from the pen of Yiddish writer David Bergelson (1884-1952) lured waves of dispossessed and/or idealistic Jews to Birobidzhan to try their luck there. Most fled to Israel or other countries as soon as the opportunity arose. Today, only about one percent of the population of this so-called Jewish homeland is of Jewish descent.I thought this book would be a travelogue. It is not, although author Masha Gessen does take a trip to Birobidzhan in the final chapter. Throughout the book, the focus is on Bergelson, who is portrayed as an ambiguous figure. Seeing the dark shadows that were falling across Europe in the 1930s and gifted with a strong survival instinct, he cast his lot with the Soviets, despite Russia's well-documented antisemitism. He cooperated with Stalin's regime, but he was later branded a "rootless cosmopolitan" (a common charge against Jews) and executed by firing squad during Stalin's last purge, "The Night of Murdered Poets" (Aug. 12-13, 1952).The tale this book tells is indeed "sad and absurd". It is also well worth reading.