How the Soviet Jew Was Made

by Sasha Senderovich

Overview

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist

A close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire's western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew—not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674238190
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2022
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,161,268
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, and Irina Reyn.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration and Translation ix

Introduction: Dispersion of the Pale 1

1 Haunted by Pogroms: David Bergelson's Judgment 20

2 Salvaged Fragments: Moyshe Kulbak's The Zelmenyaners 74

3 The Edge of the World: Narratives of Non-Arrival in Birobidzhan 123

4 Back in the USSR: The Wandering Jew on the Soviet Screen 168

5 The Soviet Jew as a Trickster: Isaac Babel and Hershele Ostropoler 218

Epilogue: Returns to the Shtetl 273

Notes 285

Acknowledgments 329

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

Senderovich doesn’t reheat old material. He provides fresh insight, as well as material few have seen.

Jerusalem Post - Paul Goldberg

Wonderful…Tells the story of the development of the unique cultural type of the Soviet Jew during the first two decades of the Soviet Union’s existence.

Studies in American Jewish Literature - Brett Winestock

Senderovich follows the Russian Jews as they navigated across space and time on their journey to becoming Soviet. In richly erudite readings of the most significant interwar works of Soviet Jewish literature, journalism, and cinema in Yiddish and Russian, he explores the convoluted creation process of a new Soviet Jewish identity and makes a strong case for a more nuanced and better informed understanding of the fluid relationship between the two components of this ambivalent hybrid formation.

Mikhail Krutikov

Those willing to put in the effort will get a lot out of How the Soviet Jew Was Made.

Mosaic - Gary Saul Morson

[How the Soviet Jew Was Made] is a story of enormous creativity in both Russian and Yiddish, which revealed the tensions inherent in being a ‘Soviet Jew’. This victimized figure may have needed ‘saving’ by the West during the Cold War in the form of safe passage out of the USSR, but Senderovich’s meticulous study is less interested in how the Soviet Jew was viewed from outside the USSR than in the struggle that his chosen writers and film-makers underwent in the attempt to make sense of their post-revolutionary selves.

Times Literary Supplement - Bryan Cheyette

With incisive exegesis, Senderovich develops a new reading of Soviet Jewish identity formation and expands the canon of twentieth-century Jewish writings in the process. This book establishes Senderovich as an important and original voice in Jewish literary studies.

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Powerlessness, insecurity, and trauma suspended the Soviet-Jewish figure in a hesitant middle ground. Senderovich’s achievement is in deftly illustrating the tensions of this moment, when speculating on the outcome of the revolution for eastern European Jewry could provoke both great hope and visceral dread in a single text.

The Pickle (Vashti Media Ltd.) - James Benjamin Nadel

A deeply researched book that explores literary and cinematic representations of Jews in the USSR between 1917 and the 1930s…[Senderovich’s] comparative approach offers a wider view of the Soviet cultural landscape, where Russian and Yiddish richly interacted with each other. By extension, Senderovich’s book is also an invitation to further expand the scope of Yiddish studies through multilingual approaches.

In Geveb - Nobuto Sato

Presents urgent perspectives for any post-Soviet Jewish American who has ever entertained the question: What made my parents the way they are? What accounts for their dark view of the world, their elevated sense of humor and irony, and, perhaps most poignantly for this particular group, their unquenchable anxiety?

New York Review of Books - Gary Shteyngart

An extraordinary overview of the serious scholarly writing on the multiple dimensions of Jewish life in the Russian/Soviet space.

Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews

An erudite exploration of how Russian and Yiddish writers imagined a totally new kind of person, the Soviet Jew. Senderovich shows how war, revolution, and the first years of Soviet power made it possible to construct a Jewish figure and assign it competing ideological meanings. In that way, the Jews were like the Soviet Union itself. Disciplinarily wide-ranging and original, this book will excite readers.

Gabriella Safran

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former empire. Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life, all embodied in the novel cultural figure of the Soviet Jew. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew as a particular kind of liminal being as he offers a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

Alice Nakhimovsky

Senderovich focuses on the texts of several Jewish writers of the early Soviet period that depict the experience of Jews from shtetls who found themselves under Bolshevik rule. His subtle literary analysis takes in novels, short stories, and films.

Foreign Affairs - Maria Lipman

Through its intensive engagement with works of post-revolutionary Jewish literature, Senderovich's monograph offers a new reading of Jewish-Soviet literature of the interwar period that enriches the debate about Jewish creativity and identity in the young Soviet Union…An innovative examination of the complex processes that shaped this identity.

H-Soz-Kult - Leonie Rogg

Maps a fascinating landscape of Jewish literary expression in Eastern European Jewish life during the period between the Russian Revolution and the emergence, over the next few decades, of the Soviet Union…Senderovich’s study is indispensable for understanding this rich segment of Jewish creativity. The book charts how a generation of Jewish writers and filmmakers explored, and sought to demystify, the meaning of ‘becoming Soviet’ in response to an emergent Soviet empire demanding ideological consensus among its newly emancipated, deterritorialized Jewish citizens.

Jewish Book Council - Donald Weber

How the Soviet Jew Was Made makes an eloquent case for Yiddish-language works being part of Russian/Soviet literature…A deeply researched work, with insightful, often brilliant analyses.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Yelena Furman

In this compelling book, Senderovich describes the new Jewish narratives that were born with the Soviet Union. Caught between the excitement of revolutionary messianism and the tragedy of mass violence, Soviet Jewish writers in both Yiddish and Russian created new Jewish archetypes that built on humor, folklore, and music and engaged with debates in Marxist philosophy. Two Jewish literary languages, in dialogue with one another, came to define a new Jewish culture with its own touchstones and ciphers.

Amelia M. Glaser

An extraordinary overview of the serious scholarly writing on the multiple dimensions of Jewish life in the Russian/Soviet space.

Association of Jewish Libraries