In this well-crafted study, Rebecca Kobrin explores the complex relationship between Jewish emigrants from Bialystok—principally those who settled in New York, but also those in Melbourne and Buenos Aires—and the city they left behind in Eastern Europe. Habsburg specialists and other readers who might wonder why a book on Jewish emigrants from Bialystok is being reviewed in a journal devoted to Habsburg history will discover from the outset that this illuminating case study sheds useful comparative and conceptual light, first and foremost on the notions of transnationalism and colonialism and the relationship between homeland and diaspora. Throughout the study, the author lays out the conditions that would eventually preserve and strengthen the connection to Bialystok among the Jews who left.

This powerful connection, the author notes at the outset, should not be taken for granted. The simple fact is, unlike the (less surprising) connection that other East European Jewish emigrants expressed for a village or town where they and their families had lived for generations, Jews who left Bialystok retained an equally powerful sense of nostalgia and a remarkable attachment to a place where they and their families had lived for a comparatively short time. The large Jewish community of Bialystok, which by the eve of World War I approached 80,000 and comprised more than 60 percent of the total population of the city, was itself formed through (what Hungarian historian Vera Bácskai termed) the “in-migration” of Jews within the Russian Empire. Thus, the author notes, Jews who left Bialystok at the end of the nineteenth century for America or some other destination were not abruptly uprooted from a place where their families had lived for centuries; rather, they were leaving a town where their families had lived, at most, for two or three generations. The tenacity of their connection to Bialystok, the author points out, resulted in part from the contours and character of Bialystok and its Jewish community and in part from the self-conscious efforts of a handful of Bialystoker Jews, notably David Sohn. As the author describes, Sohn and others cultivated and preserved this connection through the writings of a circle of Bialystok emigré intellectuals and the social cohesion provided by the Bialystoker Jewish Landsmenschaft (which the author succinctly and aptly translates as “hometown association”).

Like other parts of Eastern and East Central Europe, Bialystok passed back and forth between multiple rulers and multiple dominant cultures—in this case, Polish, German, and Russian—all of which allowed Jews to meander from one vernacular culture to another without becoming overly or inexorably attached to any. Combined with the powerful presence of Jewish communal life, this facilitated the cultivation of various forms of Jewish culture—some traditional, but others increasingly secular. This was hardly unique to Bialystok and rather common elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement, Galicia, and Romania. In addition, as Bialystok emerged as a leading industrial city, Jewish culture and communal life took on a working-class character by the turn of the twentieth century, which further encouraged a sense of solidarity among Bialystok's Jews. This, too, had its parallels elsewhere in East Central Europe. The Jewish community of Lwow, for example, also lived in an industrial town, though the Jewish community was significantly smaller. Thus, Bialystok combined, uniquely perhaps, the very real insularity of a Jewish community that was large enough and numerous enough to be economically and socially self-sustaining with the Jewish feel of a shtetl. This was a world where the air that one breathed was Jewish, so to speak, and that was difficult if not impossible to recreate in the far more diverse and less overwhelmingly Jewish world of New York City. This helps explain why Jews who left Bialystok remained so attached.

This sense of connection was maintained in New York and elsewhere by the Bialystoker Jewish Landsmenschaft. Generally presented as ad hoc associations that Jewish immigrants from a particular part of Eastern Europe organized in their new home to ease the transition from the old world to the new, it appears here as a means of preserving and even fortifying the connections between the enclaves of “Bialystoker” Jews scattered around the world. In this way, Kobrin recasts the relationship between the Jews who left and those who stayed as both ongoing and as a two-way street.

The author draws on a variety of sources, most notably the records of the Bialystok Center in New York, founded in 1919 and headed for almost fifty years by its founder, David Sohn, and the Bialystoker Stimme, which Sohn published from 1921 onward. In less capable hands, juxtaposing the cultural output of a circle of intellectuals with the social dynamics of an association might result in an awkward amalgam of social and cultural history. In this case, Kobrin combines the two hermeneutical approaches to forge a highly cohesive narrative. This, along with the author's ability to navigate between history and historiography, keeps the reader engaged. As with most books, there are minor points that one might criticize, such as the somewhat awkward and forced inclusion of Buenos Aires and Melbourne when, in fact, this is above all a study of a subcommunity of Jews in New York. Yet such minor quibbles do not detract from a probing study that is also a point of departure to reexamine the dozens of enclaves of Jewish and non-Jewish emigrants from East Central Europe who relocated to new locales and maintained ties to the old world.