The first stanza of Anna Ahmatova’s poem,

perfectly captures the paradox of fervent hopes and bitter experience at the heart of Elissa Bemporad’s book (https://ruverses.com/anna-akhmatova/all-is-traded-betrayed/9116/). The first volume in a series, Bemporad’s vivid, comprehensive survey stretches from the former Pale of Settlement to Uzbekistan, small shtetlakh to big cities, and ancient Dagestani villages to new Crimean agricultural settlements. Revolutionaries, impoverished peddlers, rising NEPmen, newly-educated youth, craftsmen, and farmers people its pages. Bemporad is to be especially lauded for her attention to women, both those bound fast by tradition and those running toward a new life.

Bemporad opens with the pogroms of World War I and the Civil War, which displaced at least one-third of the three million Jews residing in the Russian Empire, and wreaked massive havoc on their communities. White armies and Ukrainian and Polish militias were responsible for most of the plunder, rape, and murder. The memory, which “remained intensely alive and haunted survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses,” produced an outpouring of art and literature (59). Some fled the villages for cities where they faced unemployment and starvation, while others returned to reclaim their looted property. Much like the period after WWII, issues of restitution exacerbated tensions between Jews and Ukrainians.

Yet despite “the flash of death’s black wing,” the state advanced unprecedented opportunities for education, freedom, and mobility. Millions of Jews embraced socialism and its ideas, and, in comparison with their percentage of the overall population, were overrepresented in the leadership of the Communist Party and the soviets. They seized new educational opportunities, and by 1926, constituted fully ten percent of senior enterprise managers, almost 25 percent of clerical workers in trade, industry, and state institutions, and 13.6 percent of scientists. They entered military academies and the officer ranks of the Red Army. They had a higher percentage of members in the state and party elites than any other ethnic group with exception of Russians (69–72).

Party leaders understood that the prominence of Jews “impeded the efforts to expand their base,” but refused to pander to prejudice (127). Following Lenin’s lead, the state launched, in Bemporad’s words, “the largest campaign against antisemitism in modern European history” (124). In the early 1920s, out of the 100 books and pamphlets published nationwide, almost half focused on combatting antisemitism (135). People were fired and party members reprimanded or expelled for antisemitism. The campaigns worked, and violence against Jews dropped sharply (141).

In accordance with nationality policy, the state funded an “extraordinary array” of Yiddish organizations and publications. Yiddish was the language of instruction in Jewish schools, although many Jews sent their children to Russian schools to learn “the language of politics, scholarship, and economic mobility” (241). Jews in Crimea, Georgia, Dagestan, and Bukhara also received support for their non-Ashkenazi cultures and languages. While Moscow and Kiev became centers for Yiddish cultural activists, the state funded popular agricultural colonies that preserved religious observance and Zionist ideas.

Most strikingly, the state’s policy of korenizatsiia (indigeneity), established to staff republic-level soviet and party organizations with native people, was applied to Jewish communities. According to law, Jews had the right to establish a national soviet and conduct activities in their mother tongue in any town with at least 500 Jewish inhabitants. Adjacent national soviets could establish an autonomous district. More than 100 Jewish village soviets were organized in Ukraine and Belorussia using Yiddish as the official language (269.)

Yet many questions about policy and identity remained unresolved. The state strongly discouraged any Jewish identity constructed around religious practice, Jewish history, the Bible, Hebrew, or Zionism. Under these restrictions, and amid trends away from shtetl life, religion, Zionism, or the use of Yiddish, the Evsektsiia, or Jewish section of the Party, struggled to define Jewish identity (260). Much like the Zhenotdel, the women’s organization of the Party, the Evsektsiia captured the tension between representation of a disadvantaged group and the Party’s goals. The Evsektsiia understood its mission as preserving Jewish national identity, while the Party viewed it as “sovietizing” Jews. Bemporad notes that it played “a crucial role in hastening the demise of independent Jewish life,” at the same time that it promoted a new secular Jewish culture and Yiddish cultural institutions (101–2). While the state confiscated synagogues (along with Orthodox churches and mosques), and arrested or exiled hundreds of rabbis, its policies remained fairly tolerant. Arrested Zionists were quickly released and many Bund members entered the Party.

The revolution gave rise to new antisemitic tropes. Anti-communists, fascists, and Russian nationalists derided the October revolution as a Jewish conspiracy, while antisemitic populists identified NEPmen with a new Jewish bourgeoisie. Bemporad’s narrative, despite the hope it conveys, presages many issues of the postwar Stalin years. The state once again confronted a Jewish tragedy, this time in the fiercest “pogrom” of all: the Holocaust. The property claims of Jewish returnees exacerbated popular antisemitism among those who remained under occupation. The creation of a Jewish state heightened fears of Jewish nationalism. This time the state responded differently. It refused to combat popular antisemitism, abolished Yiddish cultural institutions, and reduced Jewish “over representation” in all leading fields. Facing similar problems as it did in the 1920s, it abandoned the remarkable cultural and social efforts that Bemporad so powerfully describes.