The story of Russia's Jews in World War I is one of paradoxes. Whereas Russian military authorities persecuted Jews and expelled them from frontline areas, Russian civilian authorities permitted and financed Jewish war relief organizations and their activities. During the war, the Jewish population experienced both the first government-orchestrated pogroms and its eventual emancipation from the Pale of Settlement and liberation from discriminatory laws. The war brought about the devastation of Jewish homes and sacred spaces in Russia's periphery, but also the augmentation of Jewish employment and educational opportunities in the center. A Nation of Refugees invokes these paradoxes to demonstrate how Russia's wartime destruction of its Jewish communities strengthened Jewish national identity and civil society.

Because the Eastern Front was coterminous with Russia's western borderlands, the war displaced many of the empire's national minorities. Unlike their Slavic counterparts, however, Jews were designated by the Russian military as “enemy aliens,” a designation they shared with Russia's German, Austrian, and Muslim subjects. According to Polly Zavadivker, Russia's Jews were thus “doubly marginalized”—as non-Slavs and as internal enemies—a circumstance that accounts for Russian forces’ brutal deportation and, in some instances, ethnic cleansing of between 500 thousand and 1 million Jews over the course of 1914–1915 (4). Many Jewish deportees from frontline shtetls sought refuge in the Pale's major cities, where Jews constituted the third- or second-largest minority. As Zavadivker explains, the traditional Jewish practices of collective responsibility and of charity as a sacred duty increased refugees’ expectations and chances that they would be accommodated by Jewish communities in urban centers. Additionally, civilian officials in cities such as Vilnius and Kaunas protected their Jewish residents from deportation on the grounds that doing so would irreparably disrupt the local economy, of which Jewish-owned businesses were an essential part. The Russian army's Great Retreat of 1915 made it impossible for the tsarist regime to confine the displaced Jewish population to the Pale, so it opened three central European Russian provinces to Jewish resettlement: Tambov, Voronezh, and Penza. The influx of Jewish subjects into this so-called “New Pale” fundamentally altered the objective and scope of Jewish war relief work, from providing humanitarian aid to (re)building the Jewish nation (120).

The primary organization undertaking Jewish war relief work was the Jewish Committee for Aid to War Victims (EKOPO). Created as a voluntary society to help the families of mobilized Jewish soldiers, EKOPO quickly evolved into an empire-wide network of regional committees devoted to Jewish welfare, operating in 300 locations and funded by the Russian government and by international Jewish philanthropy. Zavadivker argues that EKOPO, as “the first and last social institution of its kind in imperial Russian Jewish history” (88), introduced a new category into modern Jewish life: the “professional community organizer” (7). The young professionals who constituted EKOPO's leadership tended to hold socialist or nationalist political views and embraced the opportunities that aid work offered to bring about Jewish national autonomy (89). To do so, they advocated replacing charitable donations to war victims with contracts and loans, encouraging Jewish refugees to learn new industrial skills, and providing refugee children with a secular education. These methods were sometimes at odds with the desires of the refugees themselves, who missed the traditions of the Pale and longed to return there after the war's end.

The records of EKOPO and similar organizations and published journalistic and memoir accounts of aid workers (and, less often, of refugees) form the evidentiary basis for this book. The writings of S. An-sky, a Jewish writer and activist who undertook several relief expeditions to the Pale during the war—and whose 1915 diary the author has translated—feature particularly prominently. Cognizant of the historical record's tendency to portray war refugees as either passive victims or public health threats, Zavadivker endeavors to use these eyewitness testimonies to recapture the subjective experiences of refugees. The author's choice to include the experiences of Jewish refugees from Russian-occupied Galicia in a book about Russia's Jews is a bit puzzling. As part of the Habsburg, not Russian, Empire, Galicia's Jews were enemy subjects, which makes a comparison between Russian soldiers’ violent treatment of Jews in Galicia and Jews in the Pale difficult. Also requiring further explanation is the tsarist regime's willingness (indeed, eagerness) to sanction the coordinated relief efforts of Jewish voluntary associations when it was reluctant to permit similar coordination among Russian zemstvos or cooperatives engaged in war relief. In two places, the book mistakenly identifies the start of the war according to the Julian calendar as 17 July rather than 19 July, an error that the publisher should have caught.

This study builds on Peter Gatrell's work on refugees in Russia during the war (A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I: Indiana, 1999) and Eric Lohr's work on Russia's wartime campaigns against enemy aliens (Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens in Russia During World War I: Harvard, 2003). Its discussion of the ways in which the plight of Jewish refugees, particularly of hungry and homeless women, generated anxieties about the future of the Jewish nation intersects nicely with William Rosenberg's recent analysis of the themes of scarcity and loss in the war and revolution in Russia (States of Anxiety: Scarcity and Loss in Revolutionary Russia: Oxford, 2023). The author's treatment of Jewish civil society's relationships with the Russian state, on one hand, and with ordinary refugees, on the other, are reminiscent of arguments made by Peter Holquist (Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921: Harvard, 2002) and Yanni Kotsonis (Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914: Palgrave, 1999), respectively. This book's greatest contribution to Eastern European Jewish history is that it uncovers the origins of Jewish activism and resiliency in the interwar and World War II eras in Jewish responses to the Russian refugee crisis in World War I. Although Zavadivker concludes that Russia's more than 5 million Jews emerged from the war a more fractured group than they had entered it, she shows that they applied the lessons they learned and the tools they developed in 1914–1918 to safeguard Jewish welfare in a political landscape increasingly defined by the right to national self-determination.