Zina Gimpelevich bases her argument that “anti-Semitism in general isn't a stain on the Biełarusian conscience” (ix) on the work of a dozen writers, writing primarily in Belarusian, mostly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She uses writers’ biographies, detailed summaries, and translations of poems to show that Jews were viewed as an integral element of the Belarusian landscape. During World War II, some 90% of Belarus's Jews were murdered, while 50% of the total population was killed or forcibly relocated, making the region, as Timothy Snyder notes in Bloodlands (2010), “the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944” (cited in Gimpelevich, 32). Most of the surviving Jews and their descendants emigrated by the early 2000s, and these absent Jews have become symbols of a lost past of ethnic tolerance, communal warmth, and Belarusian cultural autonomy.
Gimpelevich's argument is strongest for recent texts. Her final chapter addresses Georgii Musevich's 2009 Narod, kotoryi zhil sredi nas (People Who Used to Live among Us), which focuses on the cities of Kamianiec-Litoŭsk and Vysoka-Litoŭsk. Relying on written sources, his own prewar childhood memory, and interviews with current residents, Musevich described this area's Jewish history, Jewish migration, migrants’ return visits, and locals’ memory of Jews. Gimpelevich concludes on an elegiac note, hoping that once Musevich's readers “understand the truth about the common past of Biełarusians, they will want to preserve it and to pass it to future generations” (338). The penultimate chapter considers a similar work, the poet Ryhor Baradulin's 2011 Tolki b habrei byli! Kniha pavahi i siabroustva (If Only Jews Were Here: Book of Respect and Friendship), with essays about individual Jews (some of whom he knew), poetry translations from Yiddish into Belarusian, and original poems. Gimpelevich translates additional Baradulin poems in an appendix, including one with these lines:
Even the shtetl dogs have stopped responding to Yiddish.
Sparrows do not chirp in Yiddish.
Now even they don't remember: the sparrows have forgotten
That Biełarusians jokingly called them Jews.
No more Jewish schools,
No more students.
Just a few words dropped along the road
Found their way to the warm hands of the Biełarusian language (375).
This image of abandoned Yiddish words recuperated by Belarusian evokes the remarkable 928-page Yiddish-Belarusian dictionary published by Aliaksandar Astravukh in 2008, recent evidence of the Jewish-Belarusian cultural connection that Gimpelevich describes.
Does this material support Gimpelevich's argument against significant antisemitism in Belarus? Like other east European places where Jews once lived, Belarus knew pogroms and blood libel trials, microaggressions and genocide, as well as peaceful coexistence and cultural synthesis. While an argument can be made that Belarus saw fewer pogroms than Ukraine and Jews there were more readily accepted into partisan units during World War II, Gimpelevich devotes little space to these details. A Jew wanting to take offense could do so based on the material she examines, including depictions of Jews as untrustworthy merchants or victims needing to be rescued; Jewish women as exotic love objects for Christian men; Jewish characters instrumentalized as opportunities to philosophize about Christianity. Gimpelevich asserts repeatedly that if there is evidence of antisemitism in Belarus, non-Belarusians—Russians, Poles, the Soviet as well as the Nazi regimes—are to blame. She conflates earlier descriptions of Jews with recent ones and asserts that the notion of Jews’ cultural and social isolation is “a fiction that was concocted by tsarist and Soviet historiography” (14), as though Jews too had not produced a historiography that notices isolation. She does not use Hebrew or Yiddish sources, and confuses some Yiddish terms (for instance, she presents “Bund” as an acronym). It is a pity that she did not devote even more attention to a phenomenon she describes sensitively: the appeal of the memory of Jews to Belarusian linguistic activists who, as she notes about herself, became “converts” to the revivalist cause through the writing of authors such as Uładzimir Karatkievič and Vasil Bykaŭ (235). One might assume it was a lack of strong local nationalism in Belarus that accounted for its relative absence of antisemitism; in that context, Gimpelevich could reflect at greater length on the surprising connection between Belarusian linguistic nationalism and tolerance in her own experience and that of her generation.
These quibbles, though, are minor. Overall, Gimpelevich has produced a useful study that provides access to rich, interesting texts that readers of English, and Russian, are unlikely to know.
