After Kenneth Moss's widely acclaimed Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, Joshua Karlip's The Tragedy of a Generation: the Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe offers yet another important recent contribution to Russian Jewish historiography. While Moss focuses on Yiddish artists and literati during the Russian Revolutions of 1917, Karlip tells a fascinating story of Yiddishist ideologues and activists and their struggles to adapt to the dramatic political changes between the Revolution of 1905 and the Holocaust. More precisely, Karlip's book focuses on the second generation of Diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism, represented by Yisroel Efroikin, Zelig Hirsch Kalmanovitch, and Elias Tcherikower—men who came of age by 1905, forged their ideologies at the time of the Revolution, and faced major ideological challenges in the 1930s. Karlip masterfully describes their ideological trajectory from optimism about building Jewish national autonomy in a democratic environment to despair and a call to retreat to a “premodern ghetto” under an oppressive state. By doing so, he poses broader questions about the relationship between Jewish nationalism, religious tradition, and modern Jewish identity.

Karlip builds his narrative chronologically, guiding his readers through particular historical moments and their impact on the ideological trajectory of Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower. In Chapter 1, Karlip begins just before the Revolution of 1905 when the three protagonists joined a group of young Russian Jewish Marxist nationalists, Vozrozhdenie (Rebirth), in their ideological commitment to “the synthesis of socialism with maximal Jewish nationalism” (91). With the outbreak of the Revolution, Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower could finally translate their ideology into political action. When the Revolution failed and political reaction intensified, the three ideologues retreated from political revolutionary activity to engage in “organic” or cultural work or, to use Karlip's words, “toward the creation of a modern Jewish public culture largely centered on Yiddish” (33–4). This turn toward organic work marked the beginning of their political transformation from socialist nationalists into folkists and Yiddishists or “from Russian Jewish intellectuals to members of the Yiddishist intelligentsia” (38). They understood that in order to become true “national representatives of the Jewish people in Russia” (58), they needed to move from socialist class-based constraints toward a more populist message (Efroikin) and the messianic tradition (Kalmanovitch) embedded in Yiddish language and culture.

In Chapter 2, Karlip describes Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower's activities during the first three years of World War I, but it is in Chapter 3 (1917–1921) that his narrative peaks. Karlip's discussion of his protagonists’ trajectory from euphoria to despair during the Russian Revolutions of 1917 is one of the most poignant passages in the book. The year 1917 started with the abdication of Nicholas II, progressed to the establishment of a new democratic Russian regime, the emancipation of Russian Jews and the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, and ended with the Balfour Declaration. After the February Revolution, Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower were euphoric and hopeful about a Jewish national rebirth within the newly liberated and democratic Russia. They may have argued about the details of their visions of national autonomy but they all agreed that national redemption was near. “Within a three-year period, however, the initial euphoria of most Russian Jews had turned first to despair and then, at best, to a sober realism” (133). Anarchy, civil war, and consolidation of the Bolshevik regime eventually shattered the hopes of Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower for Jewish national autonomy in postrevolutionary Russia but, as Karlip poignantly argues, “[they] remained so invested in the events of 1917 that they refused to allow the messianic fervor to die even as reality often contradicted their dreams” (173). They retreated into utopianism and secular messianism, refusing to give up their ideals.

In Chapter 4, Karlip shows that whatever ideological dreams survived the Bolshevik terror were destroyed by the rise of Nazism and the spread of violent antisemitism all over Europe. The political crisis of the 1930s prompted the three intellectuals to revisit their ideological stance. “Return to the ghetto” or a turn to “the internal sources of Jewish cultural strength” (205) became their new call. As the Haskalah, emancipation, secularism, and assimilation seemed to fail, Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower embraced the ideology of counteremancipation or the return to the pre-emancipatory condition of romanticized national cohesion, self-sustenance, and religious tradition. They believed that the survival of the nation had precedence over the preservation of individual rights or, in Efroikin's words, “… it is then better for us to be half citizens as long as we remain complete Jews” (205). One by one they also came to the conclusion that Jewish national life had no future in the Diaspora, ending their ideological transformation from Diaspora nationalism through collectivist nationalism to more (Kalmanovitch) or less (Tcherikower) overt Zionism. The experience of Nazi genocide (Chapter 5), which took the life of Kalmanovitch, only strengthened their ideologies of counteremancipation that had been shaped in the 1930s.

At the heart of Karlip's book is his call to break down the assumption that “secular Jewish nationalism's break with traditional religious Judaism proved total and irreversible,” suggesting instead a more complex relationship between Diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism, on the one hand, and religious tradition, on the other (3). Karlip argues that, for the three Yiddishist ideologues, the attitude to religious orthodoxy was an ambivalent one that ranged from antipathy to inspiration, depending on political developments. Even in the best of times, he suggests, many of their “meta-historical beliefs,” as well as their convictions about the transcendent value of their work and Jewish exceptionalism, stemmed from “the very religious tradition that they sought to uproot” (307). In the worst of times, they found themselves longing for the religious tradition: “if they could not have Judaism in modernity, then they would have Judaism without modernity” (308). Although they could not completely “return” to the world of faith of their parents, they created their own synthesis of the two worlds. Karlip argues that one of their greatest disillusionments was “the inability of the next generation of Yiddishists and Diaspora nationalists to replicate their own unique, angst-filled synthesis of traditional Judaism and secular national Jewish culture. In the end, such a synthesis proved a one-generation phenomenon. Only those steeped in the religious tradition that they had rejected could return to it time and again for inspiration for the creation of their new culture” (310).

This sophisticated reading of the interplay between the religious and the secular in Jewish nationalism is Karlip's most important contribution to modern Jewish historiography, in particular, and literature on nationalism, in general. Some might argue that the trope Karlip describes is not new or unique, that as early as the 1860s–1890s a young generation of Russian Jews went through a similar path or “the road back”: from the excitement of integration through continued disillusionment with a hostile environment to a return to the old Jewish identity in a necessarily new guise (see Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881, Philadelphia 2006). Yet Karlip does more than just read this familiar trope into the history of Diaspora nationalism. He examines the interface between Jewish nationalism and religious Orthodoxy and, by doing so, he successfully goes beyond a simple model of rejection and return to religious tradition, and thus beyond a simple dichotomy of the religious and the secular in modern Jewish politics. He shows that secular politics did not simply supersede religion but rather that the two remained in a constant if tense relationship.

The strength of Karlip's argument stands on his rich contextualization and masterful analysis of primary texts, which allow him to successfully historicize and scrutinize the ideological trajectory of his three protagonists. What contributes to the rich texture of Karlip's book is his impressive source base in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew, covering the vast cultural production of Efroikin, Kalmanovitch, and Tcherikower over a few decades (numerous newspapers, scholarly journals, and published and private papers mainly from YIVO archival collections). All of this makes The Tragedy of a Generation an important achievement in recent east European Jewish historical writing.