Overview

In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 18841950) made a trip from Moscow to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors. The present study examines this journey as an original protest against the conformism of the majority of Soviet Jewish activists. In his travel notes, Der Nister described the train as the ""modern Noah's ark,"" heading ""to put an end to the historical silliness."" This rhetoric paraphrasing Nietzsche's ""historical sickness,"" challenged the Jewish history in the Diaspora, which ""broke"" the people's mythical ""wholeness."" Der Nister formulated his vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish reconstruction more clearly in his previously unknown notes (""Birobidzhan Manifesto""), the last that have reached us from Der Nister's creative legacy, which are being discussed for the first time in this book. Without their own territory, he wrote, the Jews were like ""a soul without a body or a body without a soul, and in either case, always a cripple."" Records of the fabricated investigation case against the ""anti-Soviet nationalist grouping in Birobidzhan"" reveal details about Der Nister's thoughts and real acts. Both the records and the manifesto are being published here for the first time.

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9781618115300

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Reviews

-In recent decades scholars have turned from descriptions and analyses of the dominant and mainstream in the study of Russia and the Soviet Union to examining the marginal and deviant. In their zeal to 'correct' the 'errors' of their predecessors, revisionists sometimes do not just challenge previously accepted truths but reject them reflexively and uncritically. However, as Hegel might have predicted, a third wave of analysis sometimes comes along and navigates a middle course between the old and new orthodoxies. This judicious book is a case in point. The book combines a description of Der Nister's journey to Birobidzhan, his own writings about it, and a transcript of the subsequent trial of the Birobidzhan 'conspirators, ' who were supposedly and incongruously organized by Der Nister. It provides several unusual angles of vision by which we can view the complexities of the immediate postwar situation of Soviet Jewry. Based on new archival research and personal interviews, this book brings the reader as close as possible to the realities of postwar Soviet Jewish life as it was lived by different kinds of people.- --Zvi Gitelman, Professor of Political Science and Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan -Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness makes a valuable contribution to what we know about the experiences of Soviet Jews immediately after World War II, the writings of prominent Yiddish authors, and the Kremlin's persecution of Jews during the last years of Stalin's rule. The book is much more than an analysis of Der Nister's writings and thoughts in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It succeeds in its effort to offer both a literary and historical analysis of the tragic fate of Yiddish writers who took seriously the Kremlin's overture to Birobidzhan as the future of Soviet Jewish life and culture. Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness will appeal to both literary scholars and historians and will make an excellent companion piece to Joshua Rubenstein's Stalin's Secret Pogrom.- --Robert Weinberg, Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College

In recent decades scholars have turned from descriptions and analyses of the dominant and mainstream in the study of Russia and the Soviet Union to examining the marginal and deviant. In their zeal to 'correct' the 'errors' of their predecessors, revisionists sometimes do not just challenge previously accepted truths but reject them reflexively and uncritically. However, as Hegel might have predicted, a third wave of analysis sometimes comes along and navigates a middle course between the old and new orthodoxies. This judicious book is a case in point. The book combines a description of Der Nister's journey to Birobidzhan, his own writings about it, and a transcript of the subsequent trial of the Birobidzhan 'conspirators, ' who were supposedly and incongruously organized by Der Nister. It provides several unusual angles of vision by which we can view the complexities of the immediate postwar situation of Soviet Jewry. Based on new archival research and personal interviews, this book brings the reader as close as possible to the realities of postwar Soviet Jewish life as it was lived by different kinds of people. --Zvi Gitelman, Professor of Political Science and Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness makes a valuable contribution to what we know about the experiences of Soviet Jews immediately after World War II, the writings of prominent Yiddish authors, and the Kremlin's persecution of Jews during the last years of Stalin's rule. The book is much more than an analysis of Der Nister's writings and thoughts in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It succeeds in its effort to offer both a literary and historical analysis of the tragic fate of Yiddish writers who took seriously the Kremlin's overture to Birobidzhan as the future of Soviet Jewish life and culture. Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness will appeal to both literary scholars and historians and will make an excellent companion piece to Joshua Rubenstein's Stalin's Secret Pogrom. --Robert Weinberg, Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College -In recent decades scholars have turned from descriptions and analyses of the dominant and mainstream in the study of Russia and the Soviet Union to examining the marginal and deviant. In their zeal to 'correct' the 'errors' of their predecessors, revisionists sometimes do not just challenge previously accepted truths but reject them reflexively and uncritically. However, as Hegel might have predicted, a third wave of analysis sometimes comes along and navigates a middle course between the old and new orthodoxies. This judicious book is a case in point. The book combines a description of Der Nister's journey to Birobidzhan, his own writings about it, and a transcript of the subsequent trial of the Birobidzhan 'conspirators, ' who were supposedly and incongruously organized by Der Nister. It provides several unusual angles of vision by which we can view the complexities of the immediate postwar situation of Soviet Jewry. Based on new archival research and personal interviews, this book brings the reader as close as possible to the realities of postwar Soviet Jewish life as it was lived by different kinds of people.- --Zvi Gitelman, Professor of Political Science and Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan -Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness makes a valuable contribution to what we know about the experiences of Soviet Jews immediately after World War II, the writings of prominent Yiddish authors, and the Kremlin's persecution of Jews during the last years of Stalin's rule. The book is much more than an analysis of Der Nister's writings and thoughts in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It succeeds in its effort to offer both a literary and historical analysis of the tragic fate of Yiddish writers who took seriously the Kremlin's overture to Birobidzhan as the future of Soviet Jewish life and culture. Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness will appeal to both literary scholars and historians and will make an excellent companion piece to Joshua Rubenstein's Stalin's Secret Pogrom.- --Robert Weinberg, Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations at Swarthmore College

Author Information

Ber Kotlerman is Associate Professor at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar Ilan University, where in 201114 he served as Academic Director of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies. His fields of interest include Jewish history in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Far East, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Jewish theater and cinema. He is the author of Disenchanted Tailor in ""Illusion"": Sholem Aleichem behind the Scenes of Early Jewish Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 2014), The Cultural World of Soviet Jewry (Raanana, 2014), In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of ""Soviet Jewish Statehood"" (Bloomington, IN, 2009), and Bauhaus in Birobidzhan (Tel Aviv, 2008); the editor of Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 2009 and 2011), Yiddish Theater: Literature, Culture, and Nationalism (Ramat Gan, 2009); and the co-editor of Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014)

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