As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine

An estimated forty thousand Jews were murdered during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1922. As the Dust of the Earth examines the Yiddish and Russian literary response to the violence (pogroms) and the relief effort, exploring both the poetry of catastrophe and the documentation of catastrophe and care.

Brilliantly weaving together narrative fiction, poetry, memoirs, newspaper articles, and documentary, Harriet Murav argues that poets and pogrom investigators were doing more than reco...