The First World War and its aftermath disabused Jews in east central Europe of long-standing practices of accommodation to the central imperial state they had followed in exchange for protection and the pursuit of their personal well-being. The shiny brass military uniform buttons oxidized, food supplies ran short, refugees sojourned at the train stations, and violence spiraled. Urgent local everyday needs and concerns consumed their contracted energy. Many felt that the “empire had failed its Jewish citizens” (152). Who would step up to defend, shelter, and care for them? In a world of tumbling hierarchies and social transformation, east central European Zionists did, and they formed a mass movement in the region (287–88).
Jan Rybak is right to bundle these six long years of war and revolution together, eschewing conventional periodization, to establish the continuity of experience that directly shaped the improbable rise of the Zionist movement to a leading role in post-World War I Jewish politics. Rybak's aptly titled book, Everyday Zionism in East Central Europe, is an exceptional study of how the movement achieved political agency pragmatically and locally, rather than ideologically and remotely, in an overdetermined national environment. It advances our understanding of the appeal of a Zionist answer to existential security questions in relation to other strategies, including, above all, the liberation promised by socialist revolution.
Rybak argues that Zionists proved throughout the war that they were the ones able to quickly respond to critical need, and gained Jews’ trust that they would continue to do so in the war's tumultuous wake. Zionists turned nimbly on a double eagle-headed Austro-Hungarian krone early in the war from traditional work related to acquiring and building a Jewish national home in Palestine to using that money for self-help, refugee care, welfare, and relief efforts in the region. Grassroots relief efforts took precedence over ideological visions (34). Rybak organizes his discussion thematically, as a prism, each chapter illuminating key features of the regionally-focused movement: its national mission, welfare and relief program, childcare and education, anti-Jewish violence and self-defense, national representation, and situating the appeal of local Zionism in relation to the Russian Revolution and to Palestine.
The work departs from related recent scholarship on the early twentieth century political, social, and cultural history of Jews in east central Europe in its expanded geographical scope, including lands of both the Central and Entente powers, and consequently broader archival examination in its consideration of questions of security in the radically transformed European environment. Rybak delineates his region of study as a territory extending “from Vienna to Wilno (Vilne/Vilnius/Wilna/Vilna)” and “from Prague to Pinsk,” or the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary and parts of the Kingdom or Poland and the Russian Empire that Germany occupied during the war (2). The Kingdom of Hungary and its successors, however, are notably absent from the story, save for a brief cameo appearance, without explanation. This is nevertheless a masterfully researched study, drawing on materials from thirty-one archives in six countries in German, Hebrew, French, and Polish, in addition to a broad examination of the relevant periodical literature.
Particular strengths of the book include Rybak's compelling attention to nuances of geographical context, age, class, gender, and rights as decisive factors in shaping a transformed mass Zionist movement in east central Europe. For example, he explains how Zionists during World War I established their own organizations in opposition to traditional Jewish community leadership in the Generalgouvernment, while in the Ober Ost they gained an administrative foothold in existing structures, and in East Galicia their efforts were chiefly local and individualized (96, 84, 97). He shows how those who had expressed the greatest enthusiasm for the war, namely young middle- and upper-class urban men, comprised the core demographic of the pre-war Zionist movement, and their conscription into the army ended the traditional variety of Zionist activity (30–31). This opened up space for a “New Zionism” built by women's activism, including childcare, welfare efforts, and refugee aid (67). Rights form a constant organizational theme throughout, as Zionists, similar to other nationalist movements in the region, built their nations on platforms of cultural and education rights, autonomy, and political voice in civil society spaces (5).
This is not “a story of triumph,” Rybak concludes, but it is one “in which activists fought to change the world and the fate of the Jewish people” (245). This book helps us to understand ways they sought to navigate “that colossal madhouse,” and maybe make the world a bit better.
