This slender volume of twelve articles heroically updates the understanding of the lived experience of Jews under communism. Focusing on “people at the bottom” after 1945 and employing a wide variety of sources (from period sociological surveys to copious oral histories compiled over the last decades), the authors cover space from East Berlin to Birobidzhan to explain how individuals’ strategies for survival occurred amid omnipresent hostility from above.
The first section, “Center and Periphery,” surprises with Jews flourishing on the margins of socialist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine. Both Kamil Kijek and Kateřina Čapková (writing on the first and second of these countries, respectively) see Jewish migrants from spaces newly annexed by the Kremlin reinvigorating Jewish life on lands ravaged by the Holocaust. Valery Dymshits adds that Jews in Ukraine's Vynnitsa Oblast (having survived relatively benign wartime Romanian occupation), like those in the industries of northwestern Bohemia, also profited amid regional economies operating outside the center's attention. Not surprisingly, though, given our current experience of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of articles in this collection show how interwar antisemitism and the subsequent Nazi occupation bonded Jews together and continued to do so even as the secularization of identities accelerated into the 1980s. Still, it is refreshing to hear that unreformed Jewish workers hailing from the shtetls of eastern Europe maintained strong religious identities while thriving within the nuances of a completely planned economy.
A longer second section, “Perceptions of Jewishness,” returns the focus to elites and here the picture is not so encouraging. Diana Dumitru's helpful primer on the Soviet state and its Jews after the Holocaust reminds us that any mention of antisemitism by the state would have legitimized Jewish claims of discrimination during the postwar years. Anna Shternshis's collection of fifty-eight oral histories with elderly, post-Soviet Jewish physicians fleshes out life during and after the Doctors’ Plot, but like Dumitru she does not comment on the difficulties of survival in an economy of shortage during the ensuing post-war decades. With official antisemitism through quotas in education and the workplace unassailable and the Kremlin's aversions to any Israeli policy decision unchangeable, the everyday aftermath of this Jewish predicament is ground for further research. Agata Maksimowska's deep dive into Jewish life in Birobidzhan does reflect the aftermath of official marginalization—at least for the seven-tenths of one percent (14,269 people as of 1959) of the Soviet Union's Jews who lived in the Jewish Autonomous Region of eastern Siberia. For the Jewish minority residing there especially, she concludes, “. . . the Soviet system not only failed to fight popular antisemitism, but even enabled its survival in everyday interpersonal relations” (142). Circumstances were much improved in the postwar German Democratic Republic (GDR) chronicled by Anna Koch; a few Jews there (all immigrants or returnees) could openly embrace their religion as the second world in East Berlin at least remained focused on the defense of socialist internationalism.
A shorter third section, “Transnationalism,” opens with the late David Shneer's innovative look at communist Jews in the German Democratic Republic and their ties to a global Jewish communist community. Again, for a very small group of people, East Germany seems to have been a progressive bastion compared to other locales. Shneer writes of a state-sponsored April 1963 concert by a “relocated Dutch Communist Yiddish-singing Auschwitz survivor,” Lin Jaldati, at the Babylon Theatre on Rosa Luxembourg Platz in the heart of East Berlin: “. . . The first major East German commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was thus presented simultaneously through socialist, Jewish, and Polish memories of Nazi atrocities” (159). Together with the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht a few months later, brought to fruition by the GDR state secretary of church affairs, Jaldati's concert unleashed decades of Jewish communists’ cooperation with the GDR in the name of anti-fascism. As these events continued through 1988 (with Erich Honecker's blessing), one is left wondering whether there were other reasons for the arrival of these Jewish artists from around the world? The transnationalism evident in the volume's other articles by Marcos Silber (on Poland) and Gennady Estraikh (on the USSR) is less soothing, as with a Jewish man hoping to return to Poland after mistakenly emigrating to Israel in the 1960s, or an effort to convince the authorities in Moscow—a city with 240,000 Jews around the same time—that publishing in Yiddish for local readers might also further the cause of socialism following Nikita Khrushchev's opening to the world.
A final section entitled “Dissidents” discusses resistance, but given the context described above, such actions are few and far between. For Hungary, Kata Bohus chronicles the work of one Jewish intellectual, György Gadó, on the fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust, who argued that Jewishness should be “defined according to historic, cultural and ethnic factors,” instead of strictly religiously, if Hungary were ever to successfully transition to democracy (239). When it comes to life in Soviet Russia, it is difficult to equate the bravery of Gadó with the refusenik experience chronicled by Galina Zelenina at this collection's end. She interviews Jews who once lived in the heavily Jewish dacha settlement of Malakhovka on Moscow's eastern side in the 1970s and 80s and finds the idea of emigration to Israel—with perestroika well underway—failing to attract followers even as country houses were inundated with refuseniks on summer weekends. Taken together, the granular details of Jewish life under communism presented here make this volume's articles indispensable knowledge for those attempting to chronicle what life after 1945 was actually like under the Kremlin's fist.
