This book, third in a six-volume history of Soviet Jewry, covers only six of the years between 1917 and 1991. But the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the war on the Eastern Front, and the Holocaust made that period “arguably both the most difficult and the most consequential in the entire history not only of Soviet Jewry but of the Soviet Union overall” (xv). The literature on Jews in the USSR has in the past been politicized and myopic, in that it was often unconnected to broader domestic and international contexts. This series, David Engel and Gennady Estraikh write in their Forward, aims to synthesize the “massive documentary record” that emerged in the last three decades with “a degree of accuracy, inclusion, understanding, and refinement unachievable even a generation ago” (xiii).

This volume fulfills that ambition, and resoundingly so. Each of the six chapters in the book are at once authoritative, judicious, and analytical. Each author incorporates recent strides in the post-Soviet historiography into broad narratives that incorporate each author’s own illuminating primary evidence, some of which may be familiar to specialists from previous publications but which is now skillfully embedded in a new synthesis.

Engel made the most significant contribution as author of three of the book’s six chapters: the first on Jews in the new Soviet territories annexed as a result of the Pact in 1939–41, the second on the Holocaust on Soviet territory, and the third, “Spaces for Survival,” on Jewish lived experience during the period of German mass murder and racial colonization.

Concisely and lucidly, Engel’s chapters capture the international forces and high-level politics driving the partition of Poland, Sovietization in the new western territories, and the Holocaust. This is balanced with fine-grained analysis of the divisions and attitudes among the Jewish population shaping responses to successive stages of the Final Solution. The Nazi killing campaign ultimately led to the “disfigurement” (the term used as the title of Ch. 2) of the Soviet Jewish population, one of the world’s largest, but not its destruction.

Engel draws on his knowledge of the Generalgouvernement and the western parts of Poland annexed by Germany in 1939 to augment his analysis of Jews under Soviet rule. Sources and literature in Ukrainian and Russian might have amplified the coverage of the Ukrainian and Russian SSRs, as well as such topics as the Jewish experience in the partisan movement. But no one can do everything. Engel’s three chapters are more analytical and wide-ranging than the encyclopedic, handbook-like work of Yitzhak Arad (which still rightly figures prominently in Engel’s footnotes). In my mind, they represent the best concise treatment of the Jewish experience of the Pact and the Holocaust in the western borderlands of the USSR. Along with the other chapters, they would make marvelous assignments for both undergraduate and graduate audiences.

Oleg Budnitskii’s fourth chapter, “The Front,” is impressive in different ways. If Engel sums up attitudes and responses of different segments of the Jewish population, Budnitskii relies on his unparalleled command of diaries and memoirs from among the roughly 400,000 Jews in the Red Army to delve deeply into Jewish identities. As he shows, these changed dramatically over the course of the war. Most of those fighting at the front were “new Jews” who named Russian, not Yiddish, as their mother tongue and came from areas east of the former Pale of Settlement (143). Budnitskii dissects their identification with the broader Soviet people (narod) and their resultingly complicated sense of Jewishness. In a series of finely crafted case studies, he illustrates how during the war these assimilated Soviets “developed new understandings of themselves as Jews” (146). They grappled in a variety of ways with the Nazi genocide, a spike in popular hostility toward them on the Soviet side, the Soviet state’s greater unwillingness to punish antisemitism, and their own encounters with the devastation of Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities as they marched west. If the Holocaust led to the disfigurement of Soviet Jewry, the war irrevocably changed its sense of self.

In Ch. 5, Estraikh deftly dissects the origins and activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Launched as a result of the Soviet existential wartime crisis in 1942, the selected intellectuals and elites making up the organization (there were sixty-four members in 1944) navigated between their mission to win support from many parts of world Jewry previously highly suspicious of the Soviets and watchdog Stalinist authorities suspicious of any trace of Zionism and Jewish “nationalism.” Estraikh calls his chapter “Leadership” because the Anti-Fascist Committee, despite obstacles and complications, parlayed successes in fundraising and garnering key Jewish support abroad to emerge, if only for a fleeting moment, as a de facto “central Jewish organization” (193). It was surely overdetermined that this short-lived success was cut off by a party-state never prepared to allow it to “represent Soviet Jewry as a particular interest group within Soviet society” (193).

If Budnitskii used autobiographical written sources to discuss issues of identity and popular antisemitism, Anna Shternshis bases the last chapter on her deep investigation of oral histories, many of them her own. Front and center in this chapter, therefore, is her sympathetic yet critical investigation of Jewish perceptions and memory. One focus is the rumors and information surrounding evacuation and flight to the east, which in the absence of Soviet policies prioritizing ordinary civilians and the elderly often led to the trauma of parents left behind. The second focus of the chapter is the rich Jewish cultural life in places like Tashkent and Almaty, where Jews made up 63% and 62% of evacuees, respectively. In Central Asia, many Jewish evacuees were the first Jews that locals had ever seen. Many did not find the stereotypes they encountered offensive, but rather “interpreted them instead as a sign of backwardness” (254).

One big topic all the chapters touch on in one way or another is the way the six traumatic years between 1939 and 1945 irretrievably changed Soviet Jewry—a multi-faceted transformation symbolized by the contrast between the large quantity of Jewish “enthusiastic supporters” of the Soviet order in the interwar period and the burgeoning Jewish exodus from the USSR in its last three decades (xii). The authors of this important book can only discuss this great shift in passing. Undoubtedly, the completion of the series will bring into focus the long-term consequences of 1939–45 as the hinge period in the history of Soviet Jewry.