This evocative book is a wonderfully written synthesis of disparate sources and topics relating to the history of Russia’s Jewish population during World War I. I left it full of admiration for Polly Zavadivker’s vivid prose, skill in building on existing scholarship, and adding value through her own original research in several languages. In clear and efficient prose, she tells the macro story of the Russian Army’s violent mass expulsions of Jews from the front zones, the resettlement of these involuntary refugees in the Pale of Settlement, and—by summer 1915—beyond the Pale, highlighting the ways in which Jewish civil society organizations performed heroic work to aid the refugees.

Zavadivker masterfully weaves in individual cases and biographical sketches, without ever losing sight of the larger story. Her most original argument is that the refugee crisis stimulated a dynamic activation of Jewish civil society on a national scale. As Peter Gatrell and others have argued, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, and others formed new national organizations during the war to help their displaced co-ethnics. This mobilization—supported by the Russian civilian authorities—helped to nationalize communities in the Russian empire; something the regime had long tried to prevent in peacetime. Zavadivker presents strong evidence and a convincing argument that the Russian Jewish community underwent a comparable wartime transformation. She shows how Jews from across the empire raised funds to support Jewish refugees on “an exponentially greater scale” (99) than for the 1903–06 pogroms or any other prior crisis. The mobilization created an unprecedented “national infrastructure for Jewish welfare” that transformed Jewish civil society in lasting ways. One was a rapidly secularized “culture of community service” that “became nationalized, moving beyond local spheres” (88–89). Interestingly, she stresses that this was not entirely against the imperial state, but ironically, although the Army created the crisis, the state provided more than half the budget for the Jewish Committee for aid to war victims, and the organization’s head, Genrikh Sliozberg, had a seat on the board of the Imperial Tatiana committee for refugees. The book is full of insightful details about how all this worked out on the ground. One interesting example is her analysis of how nearly 100,000 Yiddish-speaking refugees from the Pale suddenly appeared in more established and assimilated Jewish communities beyond the Pale (121). While differences were obvious, Zavadivker shows that through effort, sacrifice, and concrete actions, these communities rapidly “imagined” and constructed a fairly unified sense of Jewish identity in the crucible of the wartime crisis.

Chapters 4–5 provide the best and most complete single account of the ambivalent end of the old system of restrictions on Jewish residence known as the Pale (119–71). An excellent chapter focuses on the experiences of Jewish women during the war. Roughly a third of Jewish men of working age were called up for military service, leaving the remaining civilian population heavily skewed towards women. Zavadivker provides heart-wrenching accounts of mothers divided from children and husbands during the mass expulsions and teases out of the sources the underreported wave of sexual violence committed by soldiers against Jewish women in the front zone.

Women’s entry into the public sphere through volunteer work and paid employment was another way the war transformed Jewish life. Zavadivker ends a book full of tragic stories on a bit of a positive note, showing how Jewish communal mutual aid and assistance during the war helped change the position of women in education and society and generally how the “achievements of Jewish war relief laid the foundations of a Yiddish civil society in interwar Poland, Lithuania, and the Global diaspora” (252). This eloquent, moving, and important book will be of interest to scholars, students, and broader audiences.