Two years ago I submitted a review to a journal (which I won’t name), but which has still not appeared and I doubt it ever will.  Given that the publishers allow you to post the review on your own website immediately, that is what I am doing, in the hope it will be of some use here.

Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (Eds)

Boston, MA.: Academic Studies Press, 2014,

270 pp., $69.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-61811-313-9.

This excellent volume explores the important role that Soviet Jews played as combatants, journalists, writers, poets, film-makers and photo-correspondents waging war against the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War. Rather than focusing on the Holocaust’s victims, these essays tell the stories of soldiers who fought on and survived the frontlines, and cultural figures who helped frame the Soviet narrative of the war. By highlighting Soviet Jewish martial achievement this book raises awareness of the Jewish contribution to Soviet victory, and counters the wartime and postwar slanders that Jews sat out the war safe behind the lines. It also draws attention to a wealth of previously unknown or neglected sources, including diaries, memoirs, newspapers, poetry, prose and archival documents.

The chapters are neatly divided into two sections. In the first part the essays examine individual and collective histories of the multiple ways in which Soviet Jews experienced the war and Holocaust. Mordechai Altshuler explores how young sovietised Jews serving in the Red Army responded to their encounters with the Holocaust in their letters, memoirs, poetry and prose; experiences which often shaped their future identities. Joshua Rubenstein’s contribution reminds readers how Il’ia Ehrenburg, one of the Soviet Union’s most influential war correspondents, documented the extermination of the Jews, and reproduces five of his most important articles. The frontline diaries of Jewish soldiers are the focus of Oleg Budnitskii’s essay. These sources, many of them unknown in the West, reveal what everyday life was like on the front for “Private Abram”. Gennady Estraikh examines how Jewish authors depicted Jewish wartime heroism by appropriating imagery of Cossack martial behaviour. The focus on the construction of Jewish heroism continues with Arkadi Zeltser’s study of how Jewish writers in the Yiddish language newspaper Eynikayt created recognisably Jewish heroes.

In the second part of the volume the focus shifts towards the representation and documentation of the Holocaust, revealing a Soviet Jewish literary and cultural response that has frequently been ignored. Marat Grinberg’s and Harriet Murav’s essays both deal with poetic responses focusing on the work of Boris Slutskii and Il’ia Sel’vinskii respectively. Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, in contrast, offer chapters focusing on visual representations. Gershenson analyses The Unvanquished, the first Soviet feature film to deal with the Holocaust, a fascinating source because of its rare depiction of Jewish suffering. David Shneer deals with Evgenii Khaldei’s acclaimed photographs. He examines what they reveal about the relationship between the Soviet and Jewish elements of Khaldei’s identity, and postwar and post-Soviet collective memory. In a final afterword Zvi Gitelman puts the themes of the collection into context.

One of the key contributions of this volume is to demonstrate the ways in which experiencing the war and encountering the Holocaust, as a combatant or witness, problematized Soviet Jewish identity. The Stalinist state’s encouraged greater ethnic identification during the war, which fed into many individuals’ growing sense of themselves as Jews, albeit in complicated and subtle ways. Its value also lies in making available sources in translation for teaching as well as research. Included in chapter 10 are selected passages from the memoirs of Boris Slutskii, the film director Mikhail Romm, and the novelist Mikhail Rybakov. Soviet Jews in World War II takes an inter-disciplinary approach, and will therefore be of interest to a wide potential audience, including scholars of both Russian and Jewish studies with historical, literary and cultural interests.

Robert Dale

School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Newcastle University

robert.dale@ncl.ac.uk

I’ve had my first couple of days working in the Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress. Aside from getting set up on new systems, registering for passes and cards, actually doing some work, and getting terribly lost in underground basements looking for coffee, I’ve enjoyed a brilliant tour of the Libraries buildings, and the Capitol.  Something, however, in today’s tour stuck in the mind, even more than splendours of the building, the private reading rooms for congressmen, and seeing Woodrow Wilson’s private library.  At one point we were pointed towards a sofa (perhaps I should write couch) were the previous Librarian of Congress used to take power naps, or sometimes bunk down in the building.  This I thought could only have been James Billington, the previous Librarian of Congress who retired at the end of September 2015, after twenty-eight years in the post.

I’ve been telling people at home that really my trip was thanks to Billington, and that he was to blame for my three month trip.  Which in some respects this is true, but in others perhaps a convenient anecdot, much like the one about Billington’s couch.  I’d assume that the reason who the Library of Congress has so much useful material for my research, was that Billington must have prioritised purchasing Russian and Soviet materials.  This, of course, might still be true, and I won’t dismiss my fantasy entirely.  But, when I didn’t quite appreciate before getting here is the enormity of the Library of Congress machine.  Apparently it receives 22,000 new items a day, and that there are a series of warehouses holding materials across Virginia. Indeed, the Library of Congress maintains offices across the globe (including Jakarta and Nairobi).  It struck me as we made our way through the stacks, and basement corridors (at one point descending to where books are processed via a semi-hidden door in the main reading room) that my being being here is also thanks to the huge army of staff cataloguing, preserving, digitising, and moving items.

But, in one final way I am perhaps here because of Billington.  The Icon and the Axe, James Billington’s landmark study of Russian cultural history, first published in 1966, was a really important book for me long ago.  It was a book that I think was on the recommended reading for Lindsey Hughes’s fantastic course of Russian visual culture, and using images as historical sources, which I took in my MA in 2003/4.  If I remember correctly, this was a book that was recommended before the start of the MA, and I read it at home that year.  It certainly made a big impression on me, although not as big as Lindsey.  Her module was one of the best things about my MA at SSEES, and although I didn’t know Lindsey well, being taught by her was always one of the highlights of the week!  The Icon and the Axe, then, was almost an induction into the new world of Russian culture that Lindsey helped open up for me and my peers.  Enabling me to do what I now do.

Billington’s The Icon and the Axe, first published in 1966.