Looking at the title of this book one asks oneself whether there could exist such a well-defined entity as “the Soviet Jew,” given the almost 70-year history of the Soviet Union. Sasha Senderovich clearly had this question in mind when he wrote the Introduction. In it he explains that while the chronology of his work is mainly limited to analyses of the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s, “the figure of the ‘Soviet Jew’ as such would become prominent only decades later after its formation” (5). Senderovich writes a “cultural prehistory” (6) of the figure of the Soviet Jew that became familiar to the English-speaking reader in the second half of the twentieth century. The definition of the Soviet Jew itself is a descriptor used historically not by the Jews of the Soviet Union themselves but rather by those who were looking into the country from outside. Spatially, the figure of the Soviet Jew in this investigation is limited to Ashkenazic Jewry, who resided on the territory of the former Pale of Settlement. The book usefully opens with two maps of the Soviet Union, one showing western borderlands of the USSR 1922–39 with a shaded area indicating pre-1917 imperial Russia's Pale of Settlement. The maps help readers to narrow down geographically the notion of the Soviet Jew under Senderovich's exploration.
The book traces the figure of the Jew in literary and filmic texts and through the historical and cultural context in which it was produced, coined, and circulated. In Senderovich's own formulation, the Soviet Jew is “a figure of indeterminacy that emerged from within the Soviet project, was defined by it and, on occasion, defined it in turn” (8). In terms of language and Russian-Jewish interaction, Senderovich approaches his sources not as separately Russian or Yiddish but as always Russian/Yiddish. He notes that during the interwar period, Yiddish became a language with a number of centers of literary production, which included Minsk, Kiev, and Moscow, as well as Warsaw, Berlin, and New York. This Soviet Jew of the period evolved, in part, in the context of global literary discourse. While Senderovich studies mostly textual and filmic material, it should be noted that a number of Soviet Jews of the former Pale spoke other languages apart from Yiddish and Russian, and that a significant number of the older generation could not write or read.
Five chapters of the book consist of analyses of sources written in Russian and Yiddish, and the first chapter is dedicated to the work of acclaimed Yiddish writer David Bergelson. Bergelson's real life spatial trajectories parallel Senderovich's main postulate of the multidirectional mobility and liminality that formed the figure of the Soviet Jew. Born in Ukraine, Bergelson moved to Berlin with its thriving Yiddish literary scene in the 1920s, returned to the Soviet Union, wrote about Jewish colonists in Birobidzhan, became a member of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee, was arrested for “anti-Soviet crimes,” sentenced to death, and shot in 1952. His expressionist leanings resisted the pressure to write in socialist realist mode, further contributing to the paradoxical dynamic of belonging and marginality. The next chapter introduces a Yiddish-language novel by Moishe Kulbak, The Zelmenyaners, in the historical context of First Five-Year Plan. It shows authorial irony in the tale of a Jewish courtyard and its inhabitants in Minsk. While the courtyard is erased in the construction of the Soviet city, its scattered dwellers ostensibly remain a “breed into themselves” (80). This text allows Senderovich to write about proste yidn, simple and often illiterate Jews, who collectively are distinct from Jewish elites in the Soviet system. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the texts and films that relate to the theme of Soviet Jewish people moving to new territories, which include Siberia and Birobidzhan. Some of these narratives rework the stereotypical “Wandering Jew” who not always victoriously arrives to Birobidzhan but continues his/her wanderings across the USSR and around the world. The final chapter revisits the decades of the 1920s and 30s and presents Isaak Babel΄'s stories about the folkloric trickster Hershele Ostoloper as a cipher for the Soviet Jew.
This well-researched book convincingly demonstrates that the figure of the early Soviet Jew characterized by both modernizing and preservationist tendencies is distinct from the figure of the Jew as a New Soviet Man.
