Allured by the trope of the wandering Jews, Jewish historians have given little thought to Jews' geographic attachments. Let me say this in a different way: The central drama of the Jewish people is in its striving to return home, yet because that home is so ethereal and metaphorical, historical narratives of the Jewish people have tended to focus on movement and migration. What Rebecca Kobrin tells us is that Jews thought a great deal about the physical space of their existence. When they left one place for another, they remained attached to their old homes. They understood themselves as living in a state of diaspora, dispersed, even exiled, from places quite remote from Zion.

In 1995, Matthew Frye Jacobson coined the term “diasporic imagination” to describe the ongoing ties that European immigrants to the United States maintained to the Old World. Drawing on Kerby Miller, Jacobson persuaded this reader, anyway, to pay more attention to the emigrant experience. Yet try as one may, most historians are drawn to write about immigrant life in the New World and only synoptically reference what immigrants left behind and how they felt about it. Kobrin's book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora steps into that relative void, arguing that Bialystoker Jews experienced a “new type of Jewish exile” (1) when they left their homes in Eastern Europe. Far from an abstract yearning to return home, their new exile manifested itself in the ways that Bialystoker Jews organized their lives whether they landed in New York City, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, or Tel Aviv.

Navigating her way fluently through source material in Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Spanish, and Hebrew, Kobrin forces the reader to linger in Bialystok—almost to forget the eventual fate of the city and its Jews. Bialystok at the end of the nineteenth century was a thriving Jewish city. As Kobrin explains with useful maps and statistics, the Russian state encouraged Jews to settle in Bialystok and, indeed, Jews made Bialystok into a city. The city's main industry—textiles—was manned by Jewish workers, and, though she does not spend much time on the cultural life of the city, Kobrin implies that Jews were likewise central in that realm. Still living in Europe, Bialystoker Jews honed the skills that would enable them to create a cohesive network beyond Bialystok. Philanthropic and political activism served as the organizing structure for Bialystoker Jews, giving them a sense of responsibility for one another and a commitment to a collective future.

Kobrin masterfully suspends the reader in these moments of relative normalcy and, as such, portrays Bialystoker Jews as active agents. These individuals made decisions about whether to leave the Pale of Settlement and where to go. Yet Kobrin also argues that upon leaving Bialystok, many Jews felt a deep sense of longing for their old home. Can one feel exiled if one made the decision to leave a place? Kobrin never confronts this question head on, though she explains that Bialystoker Jews imagined themselves empire builders. Thus, even as they moved away from Bialystok, they believed they were extending it.

With her characteristic attention to local context, Kobrin traces the moves that Bialystoker Jews made and explains how each new community understood itself as a Bialystok satellite. She draws her evidence from the print culture of the communities, predominantly newspapers, and also from the philanthropic ventures in which these communities participated. Language and money were the ties that bound expat, if I may, Bialystoker Jews to their past home.

Here things get rather complicated. Is the sum of the words Bialystoker Jews wrote about Bialystok and the money these Jews sent back to Bialystok equal to a longing to return home, that is, to Bialystok? Kobrin acknowledges that the calculation is not so straightforward. About Bialystoker Jews in New York City, she writes, “No longer was Bialystok the primary point of reference to which émigrés turned to define themselves; rather the United States was an equally central touchstone for their self-perceptions” (105). Indeed, the New York Bialystoker community increasingly served as the center of Bialystoker Jewish activity, transforming itself into possibly more Bialystok than Bialystok. Following these strands of evidence, we could assume that Bialystok as a real place fell away in favor of the imagined Bialystok in New York City. Yet throughout her analysis Kobrin also insists that Bialystok—the city in Eastern Europe—remained a concrete pole of Bialystoker Jewish identity. Add to this analysis Bialystoker Jews' Zionism, and the entire project of defining Jewish diasporic identity becomes multilayered.

As more scholars of modern Jewish history take up the task of transnational scholarship, we will gain access to new sources through which to understand the dimensions of Jewish spatial identity. Kobrin's analysis suggests that historians need to be attentive to the gap between rhetoric and reality. In a chapter titled “Rewriting the Jewish Diaspora,” Kobrin attempts to trace the various ways that Bialystoker Jews represented Bialystok in the press. The chapter catalogues a rich body of material and concludes that the representations of Bialystok show an ongoing physical attachment to the city. Yet once again Kobrin equivocates on this conclusion—and rightly so. After all, as she explains, most of the Jews' writing about Bialystok used Bialystok as a conceit, writing about it “to reflect upon their visions of themselves, their feelings of longings for former homes, and their own displacement” (206). Still, Bialystok existed in space and time. Real Jewish men and women lived there, too, and Jews living abroad communicated with them. So a framework of purely imagined space would be overly reductive.

Even after the destruction of World War II, Bialystok did not simply contract into a space of pure imagination. As Kobrin documents, Bialystok experienced a brief renaissance as a Jewish city. The extraordinariness of this is marred only by its colossal failure. A transnational Bialystoker community supported the effort to rebuild Bialystok, though one wonders about the psychological motivations behind this. What fueled the desire to remake Jewish Bialystok: willed ignorance, scorching guilt, desperate helplessness, or true sanguinity? In 1946, several episodes of violent antisemitism took the lives of area Jews and convinced the remaining community to “embrace an ideology of emigration (particularly to Palestine) as the only solution to the Jewish quandary in Poland” (221). Bialystoker Jews believed that they could make Palestine, and, even more so, the newly established State of Israel into their true home. This did not mean assimilating to a uniform model of Zionist national identity; rather it involved creating a multicultural Zionism, one that would allow for Bialystoker expressions of identity. Though the photographs do not reveal how Bialystoker Jews went about trying to create this new kind of home in Israel, Kobrin demonstrates the considerable fundraising efforts that Bialystoker Jews pursued to mark Israel as, on some level, Bialystoker space.

In her concluding thoughts, Kobrin observes, “[S]tate borders rarely coincided neatly with the boundaries of Jews' cultural identities” (247). Not a new observation, this is still one that bears repeating. Jews have been slow to embrace established state boundaries, in part, because they have been excluded from decisions about where those boundaries lie. Yet as Kobrin so skillfully illustrates, Jews' lack of connection to state boundaries did not translate into a detachment from the physical spaces of their existence. The reason it is so difficult to parse the reality of Bialystok from the metaphor of yearning for Bialystok is because Jews themselves did not draw a sharp division between those two modes of thinking about home, place, and identity.