During the Russian Civil War, the perpetrators of the pogroms that killed up to 40,000 Jews created horrifying spectacles to show that ordinary expectations about care no longer applied, as in May 1919 in Uman´, where they positioned a living infant nursing at the breast of its murdered mother. And care continuing after atrocities could startle witnesses: Itsik Kipnis’s 1926 Yiddish novel, Khadoshim un teg: A khronik (Months and Days: A Chronicle), ends with “a very strange sight”: children whose parents had been killed in the July 1919 Slovechno pogrom, and children of pogromists executed by the Red Army, eating together at a feeding station. Harriet Murav’s As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine asks how writers in Russian and Yiddish made sense of the shocking pogrom landscape (115, 126, 146). She reads poems, documentary prose, and relief agency reports as describing a time and place where the human lives of Jews and others were expendable and thus did not need to be protected. The book’s key term is “hefker,” which refers to an abandoned object in rabbinic property law but is used in Yiddish to mean abandon and abandonment in other senses.

A prolific specialist in Russian and Yiddish literatures, Murav writes here as elsewhere about understudied modern writers and how ideas take on meaning in specific historical moments. Her first chapter compares hefker to Giorgio Agamben’s, Michel Foucault’s, and Achille Mbembe’s definitions of biopolitics and necropolitics. These thinkers explain how sovereign power determines that some will live while others are relegated to a state of exception and can be killed, while when state and non-state groups vie for power, they all claim the right to kill. Hefker is about abandonment more broadly: being abandoned to die, or being open to learning, not being safe, or not accepting limitations. By dwelling on the multiple meanings of hefker in Jewish law and in the work of individual writers, and delineating it from more familiar ideas about power and violence, Murav juxtaposes the situation that interests her to others even as she uses ideas from the thought-world of her subjects to analyze their cultural production.

Chapters 2 through 5 address three Soviet Yiddish writers who wrote about the violence of the Civil War and regularly used the term hefker. Dovid Hofshteyn’s poetry celebrates the joy of freedom even as it attends to the terror of Kyiv in 1919. Leib Kvitko, who experienced abandonment as a child, wrote poems depicting pogrom victims as undifferentiated wounded flesh. Kipnis’s Months and Days combines depictions of his honeymoon and the Slovechno pogrom; although this text is fiction, Murav includes it in the part of her study dedicated to chronicling and argues that his account of his narrator’s emotions documents something left out of other sources (126).

The last three chapters center on writers further removed from the pogroms. Murav situates the literary theorist Viktor Shklovskii as a half-Jew whose war memoirs register the human lives whose random destruction reveals the hefker quality of the disintegrating empire. Aid organizations, she shows, documented pogrom destruction systematically in hopes of bringing perpetrators to account; they deliberately avoided making Jews objects of pity. The final chapter compares the pogrom orphans’ stories gathered by Doyvber Levin, an avant-garde Russian writer, and a study of such children’s storytelling by the Hasidic rabbi Fischel Schneerson: both resolutely insist on young survivors’ capacity to create and to heal the world.

It is striking to compare this book to David Roskies’s classic Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Jewish Literature (1984), which looks at Jewish texts of destruction from the Bible to the Holocaust. Roskies notices that writers feel angry at God and parody liturgy; they connect the killing they witness to ancient archetypes and understand that it portends apocalypse. Murav sees something different: instead of despairing or dreaming of a messianic future, her subjects hope to recreate order on this earth. Of course, it makes sense that Soviet writers would not openly reference the apocalyptic textual legacy that Judaism shares with Christianity; the Jewish textual resource that matters more to them stems from Talmudic law, with its concern about assigning responsibility for damages, so that people can live together and reestablish institutions and habits of care in the aftermath of terrible crimes. Murav’s enlightening study feels especially necessary in our own war-torn time.