Gelfand, Wladimir. Tagebuch 1941-1946/Presse

Oleg Budnitskii, David Engel, Gennady Estraikh, Anna Shternshis: "Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945"

	* Publisher : NYU Press (December 20, 2022) * Language : English * Hardcover edition : 440 pages * ISBN-10 : 1479819433 * Hardcover : $39.95 * Paperback : $40.00 * Ebook : $35.00 * ISBN Hardcover : 9781479819430 * ISBN Ebook : 9781479819454 * ISBN Ebook : 9781479819447 * Hardcover edition : 440 pages * Item weight : 816 g * Dimensions : 15.88 x 3.18 x 23.5 cm

Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II

At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s.

Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community.

Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.

Press reviews

"This is an inspired and inspiring history of Soviet Jews, what they contributed, and what they suffered. A necessary book." -- Robert Service, Emeritus Professor of Russian History, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

"Authoritative, comprehensive, impeccably researched. . . . Offers the definitive history of Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Compiled by an international group of distinguished scholars, this masterful work tells the story of tragedy, heroism, repression, and, ultimately, the birth of a new Soviet Jewish consciousness." -- Lynne Viola, author of Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine

"It is hard to find adequate positive words for a book that tells a story of unprecedented horror. But this new synthetic history of Soviet Jewry in the years between the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Great Fatherland War is a model of clarity and incisiveness. . . . The concise, readable text confronts head-on the controversies, the myths, and the silences, fulfilling the authors’ aim to write Soviet Jewry into both the history of the Soviet project and the history of Judaism." -- Juliane Furst, Head of Department of Communism and Society, Leibniz Centre of Contemporary History, Potsdam

About the authorship and other contributors

Oleg Budnitskii is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow. He is the author of seven books, including Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites (1917-1920).

David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of seven books and more than 100 scholarly articles on various aspects of Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gennady Estraikh is Professor of Yiddish Studies, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin.

"Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939–1945"

Slutskii’s notes reveal that ongoing complaints about the Jews’ collective military record came together in his mind with meetings with Jews who had survived the Nazi Holocaust both within the USSR and without, and especially with their descriptions of the behavior of Soviet non-Jews toward them, to crack for him the framework of proletarian internationalism that had marked the outlook of his early years. However, they did not break the framework altogether. Slutskii used poetry to confront hostile stereotypes while affirming membership in a Jewish group that he saw as part and parcel of the Soviet fabric. Other soldiers, by contrast, responded to offensive comments by consciously concealing their Jewishness. Nineteen-year-old Sergeant Vladimir Gelfand saw combat action around Kharkov and Stalingrad and spent several months in a military hospital recovering from wounds in late 1942 and early 1943.49 There, he recounted in his diary, “The people (not all, to be sure) blame the Jews for everything.” “I am attacked the most,” he complained; “they take out their anger on me and shout ‘kike’ (zhid) at me with derision, curse me and never give me a chance to speak or to say a word while they defecate on my bed and soil it.”50 He had experienced similar affronts, along with several beatings, even before being drafted and had evidently developed a strategy for dealing with them.51 Noting that his “appearance and speech do not betray the Jew in me,” he preferred not to betray it voluntarily.52 His experience following induction reinforced the wisdom of that approach: whenever he shared feelings of shame and humiliation with fellow soldiers he found himself facing even greater unpleasantness, sometimes even genuine suffering. On one occasion, some two months after joining the army, he even introduced himself as the child of a Georgian mother and a father who claimed to be Russian.53 Jewishness, it seems, was becoming an increasing source of pain. “Why am I a Jew?” he wrote after leaving the hospital for an officers’ training course. “Belonging to the Jewish nation is my consistent scourge, my unending torment, from which there is no salvation.… Why do I, like so many others, find myself sometimes having to hide my origins?”54

One year younger than Gelfand, Private Yakov Forzun, a machine gunner, suffered repeated severe wounds, spending more than a year in hospitals between his August 1942 conscription and his medical discharge in early 1945.55 During his final six-month hospital stay, in Furmanov, northeast of Moscow, he found himself mistaken for a Ukrainian and heard the usual talk about Jews not fighting. His response, told to an interviewer from the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the History of the Great Patriotic War (the so-called Mints Commission)56 around the time of his discharge, resembled Gelfand’s:

While I was in the hospital, they told me that Jews were not visible at the front, that the Jews were hiding. I didn’t raise any objection to them, because … if you tell them anything, they’ll kill you in the first battle. So for that reason I decided not to tell them anything. In that respect it was very bad in the hospital. I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the conversation there was all the same: the Jews don’t want to fight. The patients conducted themselves badly. They didn’t know my nationality, and they began to say that the Jews did not want to fight, only to hide in the rear. They talk[ed] and I remain[ed] silent; I ma[d]e no response.

Forzun was not a timid man; in combat he had distinguished himself for bravery. Indeed, his exploits on the battlefield eventually spoke for him in a manner available only to a few. At the time his final hospital stay began, he had been nominated for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, he explained, “I kept waiting for news of my award to arrive; then they would see whether Jews wanted to fight or not. After the order for my award was read out, everyone shut up. No one said anything any more.” Absent the prestigious decoration, however, he appears to have been intimidated by “the many criminals who had been released from prison,” who had “ended up at the front and later in the hospital.”57

Forzun and Gelfand reacted similarly to similar situations, but their backgrounds were hardly similar at all. Gelfand, raised in Dnepropetrovsk, was in all respects a typical “new” Soviet Jew. Forzun, by contrast, was the product of a shtetl (Korostyshev, near Zhitomir). He described his upbringing as one of extreme poverty, exacerbated by the great Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, which, he told his interviewer, had left him and his sister swollen from hunger. He had studied only in Yiddish-language schools through the fourth grade, first in his native town, later in Stalino, where his father had moved in search of work. Although he eventually learned to read in Russian, he reported having had few books to read. In short, the opportunities for upward mobility that so many young Soviet Jews of his generation enjoyed appear to have passed him by.58 Yet for all of the differences between his early life and Gelfand’s, their respective brushes with prejudice did not move either man to a more assertive self-identification as a Jew. Gelfand, better educated and with future literary aspirations,59 expressed his aversion to such identification in an unmistakable internationalist idiom: “Why do nations exist at all?”60 Fozun was less articulate; he accepted his lot as is, without complaint. For him, the Red Army had offered a way out of a life that he described simply as “bad.” After the war he went to work as a plant foreman in Zhitomir, joining the Communist Party in 1961.61

Other Jewish soldiers, though, looked askance at such a reaction. Sergeant Boris Komskii, an infantryman from Kiev, of the same age cohort as Gelfand and Forzun,62 kept a diary while fighting in some of the war’s bloodiest engagements, including the hellish Battle of Kursk in July and August 1943, in which virtually all of his comrades were killed.63 In early January 1945, in the small Polish village of Nowe Malinowo, just west of the September 1939 Boundary and Friendship Treaty line,64 he met a middle-aged former partisan who, recognizing Komskii as a fellow Jew, confided that “terrible antisemitism” (zhutkii antisemitizm) among his comrades-in-arms had induced him to hide his nationality. Komskii disapproved; the soldier’s effort, he admonished him, was useless:

His name is Ilia Cherepakha, from Byelorussia. That’s where the Germans caught up with him. His entire family, 35 people, had perished. He himself had been shot twice,65 but he had remained alive and had crawled out from under the corpses at night. His wife was a Ukrainian. She [then] married a Vlasovite.66 The two of them went around pillaging; later they left for Germany. He himself had joined a partisan platoon: “We drank their blood. I avenged my family in full.…” [He said that] there was a lot of antisemitism among the partisans as well. A Jew who had held an officer’s rank wouldn’t be appointed to a [command] post. Only once the front got closer did the situation begin to change. He related many facts about his life in the partisans as well as about now, in the army, and I regretted telling him [that he was concealing his identity] in vain.
What moral right do I have to lecture and to judge the actions of a person who has seen and experienced a thousand times more than I have? I cannot justify people who deny their own nationality. But still, “A person is given life only once.…”67 And he had lost it twice.68

Komskii had heard derogatory remarks about Jews earlier, including recently from his direct superior.69 Nevertheless, this Communist Party member, who as a schoolboy had written for a newspaper of the Party children’s organization, Pioneer, found “absolutely no reason” to hide that he was a Jew.70 After the war he remained in the army as a journalist, publishing widely on military and patriotic themes. After retiring with the rank of colonel, he became editor of a Russian-language Jewish newspaper in post-Soviet Ukrainian Lviv.71 Until his death in 2011 he bemoaned the demise of the USSR.72 Still other soldiers came through the war with feelings and observations that made them even more difficult to place on a Jewish-internationalist spectrum. In his diary entry for 19 November 1943, for example, twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Naum Rosenberg, a combat engineer from Pavlograd, near Dnepropetrovsk, who had fought on the southwestern, Don, and Stalingrad fronts,73 expressed concern over “how far this hatred and contemptuous attitude toward the Jews has eaten its way” into Soviet society.74 Over the next six months, as he proceeded westward with the advancing Soviet forces, he encountered disdain many times. “There is a widespread opinion among the people (narod) that all Jews are afraid of death, afraid to fight, in a word—cowards,” he wrote in early March 1944.75 Six weeks later, after taking part in driving German forces from Krzemieniec, where he found no Jews remaining out of the fifteen thousand who, he thought, had lived there before the war, he was even more emphatic: “Hatred and scorn for the Jews flows in the blood of the Russian people.”76 He did not report trying to conceal his own identity, but neither was he proudly defiant. Instead, he sought an explanation that would help him rebuff the prejudice he encountered and bear the insult he felt acutely, yet allow him to go on not only fighting but believing in the Soviet experiment:

The mere fact that there are such [biased] opinions is painful. But it is even more painful to admit to myself that to a certain degree they are true. Deprived of a fatherland (otchizna) … , torn away from their maternal soil, not having to give their lives for their soil, for their Motherland (Rodina), for more than two thousand years, the large majority of Jews have ceased to be brave people. Having had to struggle for its existence within other nations for two thousand years, having withdrawn within itself, [having endured] the contempt and fear of other peoples, dislike and hatred toward them— these are the elements (far from all) that have formed the characters [sic] of the Jewish nation (natsiia). History shows that those Jews who found a homeland for themselves or who made transforming the state their goal in life—those Jews proved themselves worthy of their ancestors at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem Jerusalem and their dispersion across the globe. This cannot be denied.77

Such worthy Jews might not dispel prejudice, he averred: even though more than a hundred of them had been named Heroes of the Soviet Union, partisans had still refused to accept Jews into their ranks. “Obviously,” he deduced, “they [the partisans] were afraid of [the Jews’] abilities.”78 Nevertheless, his understanding of Jewish history guided him to a clear operative conclusion:

To live simply and honestly and to fulfill my obligation to Stalin—he is my Motherland. I am a man of the world, but maybe I don’t belong to this world. I was accepted into the party as an equal; to my mind I too belong to it and to no one else. It’s hard not to have a motherland and a people (space on earth and a tribe of one’s own), but for me Russia is a good place to find shelter, while the Jewish nation is not entirely native. I was brought up in a semi-Jewish family, on Russian soil; the party—the Central Committee—is my Motherland and my people (narod).79

After the war Rosenberg became a career officer in the Red Army, retiring in 1974, aged fifty-two, with the rank of colonel.80

englisch

Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts lebten im Russischen Reich mehr Jüdinnen und Juden als in jedem anderen Land der Welt. Nach der Shoah blieb die Sowjetunion – neben den Vereinigten Staaten und Israel – eines der drei bedeutendsten Zentren jüdischen Lebens weltweit. Während die Geschichte und Erfahrungen des jüdischen Volkes im 20. Jahrhundert in den USA und in Israel gut dokumentiert sind, ist über die Erfahrungen der sowjetischen Jüdinnen und Juden weit weniger bekannt. Doch das Verständnis der jüdischen Gemeinschaften unter sowjetischer Herrschaft ist entscheidend, um die Dynamiken der jüdischen Geschichte in der Moderne nachvollziehen zu können.

Nur wenige Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler sowie die letzte Generation sowjetischer Jüdinnen und Juden, die diese Zeit selbst erlebt haben, verfügen über ein umfassendes Wissen über diese Geschichte. Jews in the Soviet Union, eine neue mehrbändige Darstellung, stellt ein in seiner Art einzigartiges und grundlegendes Projekt dar. Die Reihe, deren Bände in den kommenden Jahren erscheinen werden, basiert auf seltenem Zugang zu Dokumenten aus sowjetischen Archiven und ermöglicht eine umfassende Darstellung jüdischen Lebens in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis in die frühen 1990er Jahre.

Der dritte Band der Reihe widmet sich der Zeit zwischen dem Abschluss des Nichtangriffspakts mit dem nationalsozialistischen Deutschland im August 1939 und dem sowjetischen Sieg über die deutsche Wehrmacht im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Er untersucht die Auswirkungen dieser dramatischen politischen und militärischen Entwicklungen auf das Leben der rund fünf Millionen Jüdinnen und Juden, die zu Beginn dieses Zeitraums unter sowjetischer Herrschaft lebten. Etwa drei Millionen von ihnen kamen ums Leben. Die Überlebenden bildeten eine stark dezimierte, aber weiterhin bedeutende jüdische Gemeinschaft in der Nachkriegs-Sowjetunion.

Die Mehrheit der jüdischen Bevölkerung erlebte den Krieg in einer oder mehreren von drei grundlegend verschiedenen Situationen: unter deutscher Besatzung, als Soldaten oder Sanitäterinnen in der Roten Armee oder als Evakuierte im sowjetischen Hinterland. Die Autorinnen und Autoren analysieren die sich wandelnden Lebensbedingungen in diesen drei Kontexten und beleuchten, wie die jüdische Bevölkerung auf diese Herausforderungen reagierte, sie deutete und in ihren Alltag integrierte. Zugleich untersuchen sie die Beziehungen zwischen jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Nachbarn, die Rolle des sowjetischen Staates bei der Formung der Wahrnehmung und der offiziellen Reaktion auf das jüdische Schicksal sowie die innerjüdische Differenzierung: zwischen den Bewohnern neu annektierter Gebiete, der städtischen Elite, traditionellen Kleinstadtgemeinden, älteren Generationen mit Erinnerungen an die vorrevolutionäre Zeit und jüngeren Menschen, die ausschließlich unter sowjetischen Bedingungen aufgewachsen waren.

Dieser Band stellt eine bedeutende Quelle dar für das Verständnis einer oft übersehenen Geschichte einer großen, vielfältigen und durch den Krieg tief geprägten jüdischen Gemeinschaft in der Sowjetunion.

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Über die Autorenschaft und andere Mitwirkende

Oleg Budnitskii ist Professor für Geschichte an der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften und Direktor des Instituts für fortgeschrittene sowjetische und postsowjetische Studien an der Nationalen Forschungsuniversität – Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moskau. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in der Geschichte des russischen Judentums, des Ersten Weltkriegs, des russischen Bürgerkriegs sowie der Geschichte von Gewalt und Ideologie im 20. Jahrhundert. Er ist Autor zahlreicher Monographien, darunter das international rezipierte Werk Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920, das die komplexe Rolle jüdischer Akteure im Russischen Bürgerkrieg analysiert.

David Engel ist Greenberg-Professor für Holocaust-Studien sowie Professor für Hebräisch, Judaistik und Geschichte an der New York University. Seine Forschung umfasst weite Bereiche der jüdischen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts mit Schwerpunkten auf dem Holocaust, der Geschichte des Zionismus und der jüdischen politischen Ideengeschichte. Engel ist Verfasser von sieben Büchern und über 100 wissenschaftlichen Artikeln. Zu seinen bekanntesten Werken zählen The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews und Zionism (im Rahmen der Reihe "Short Histories").

Gennady Estraikh ist Professor für Jiddische Studien am Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies der New York University. Er ist einer der international führenden Spezialisten für die Geschichte der jiddischen Sprache und Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, insbesondere im Kontext sowjetischer Kulturpolitik, Exilliteratur und jiddischer Publizistik. Er war viele Jahre lang Redakteur der Zeitschrift Sovetish Heymland und veröffentlichte grundlegende Arbeiten zu sowjetischem Jiddischismus, darunter Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development.

Anna Shternshis ist Al- und Malka-Green-Professorin für Jiddische Studien sowie Direktorin des Anne-Tanenbaum-Zentrums für Jüdische Studien an der Universität Toronto. Sie beschäftigt sich mit jüdischer Kulturgeschichte in der Sowjetunion, mit Fokus auf populärer Musik, Alltagsgeschichte und mündlichen Überlieferungen. In ihren Arbeiten verbindet sie Archivquellen mit Oral-History-Ansätzen. Zu ihren bekanntesten Publikationen zählen Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 und When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin, das auf Interviews mit sowjetischen Juden basiert und neue Perspektiven auf jüdisches Leben unter repressiven Bedingungen eröffnet.

	* Verlag : NYU Press (20. Dezember 2022) * Sprache : Englisch * Gebundene Ausgabe : 440 Seiten * ISBN-10 : 1479819433 * Hardcover : $39.95 * Taschenbuch : $40.00 * Ebook : $35.00 * ISBN Hardcover : 9781479819430 * ISBN Ebook : 9781479819454 * ISBN Ebook : 9781479819447 * Gebundene Ausgabe : 440 Seiten * Artikelgewicht : 816 g * Abmessungen : 15,88 x 3,18 x 23,5 cm