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

Harriet Murav; Gennady Estraikh

Open Access Published by Academic Studies Press 2014

Soviet Jews in World War II

Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program

In the series Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy

In the series Borderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618116864

Overview
Contents

About this book

This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history.

Author / Editor information

Estraikh Gennady :

Gennady Estraikh is a Clinical Professor at New York University. He received a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1996, and has worked at the Oxford Institute of Yiddish Studies and London University. He is Director of the Shvidler Project for the History of the Jews of the Soviet Union at NYU, and Senior Scholar at the Moscow Higher School of Economics.Gennady Estraikh is associate professor of Yiddish studies, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), In Harness: Yiddish Writer's Romance with Communism (2004), Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (1999) and the co-editor of Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics, and Art (2012) and 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013).

Reviews

“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.”

—Robert Dale, Newcastle University, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

Naya Lekht, University of California Los Angeles, Slavic and East European Journal 60.4 (Winter 2016):
The perpetrator-bystander-victim model that has by and large dominated Holocaust scholarship is challenged by the appearance of Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, a collection of essays that examines the role of Soviet Jews as heroes during what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. Although the essays in the book cover different types of texts, they are united by a similar set of concerns ... demonstrating that in addition to the breadth of essays present here on the subject of the Holocaust in the Soviet context, the entire Soviet epoch ... is a treasure-trove

Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto):
“One of this volume’s most significant achievements is that it contains material that will help educators teach about the Soviet Jewish experience as part of undergraduate courses on the Holocaust. Beautiful translations of Erenburg letters, Selvinskii’s and Slutskii’s poems, and Mikhail Romm’s accounts . . . are among the most valuable key texts, which will change the way the Holocaust is taught in North America. The combination of thorough analysis of new sources with the publication of primary materials make this volume a must-have for anyone interested in Soviet Jewish history and the Holocaust.”

Sheldon Kirshner, The Times of Israel, 5 Feb 2017:
"The essays range far and wide."

“An impressive introduction to new sources and groundbreaking methods in the study of Soviet-Jewish experience during the Second World War. The studies combine an impressive range of critical and historical approaches with solid learning.”

"This collection tells stories of Jews in World War II which are practically unknown in the West. These stories are not about the Warsaw Ghetto or Auschwitz, but about Soviet Jewish soldiers, partisans, intellectuals and artists, men and women who fought in the bloodiest battles that the world has known. Drawing on a wide variety of little-known sources, such as private letters, archival documents, memoirs, newspaper reports, novels, poems, photographs and film, this book paints a vivid and dramatic picture of human suffering and heroism."

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	1
Table of Contents Open Access Download PDF	5
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	6
Preface Open Access Download PDF	7
Part 1: Histories
Chapter 1. Jewish Combatants of the Red Army Confront the Holocaust Mordechai Altshuler Open Access Download PDF	16
Chapter 2. Ilʹia Ehrenburg and the Holocaust in the Soviet Press Joshua Rubenstein Open Access Download PDF	36
Chapter 3. Jews at War: Diaries from the Front Oleg Budnitskii Open Access Download PDF	57
Chapter 4. Jews as Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life Gennady Estraikh Open Access Download PDF	85
Chapter 5. How the Jewish Intelligentsia Created the Jewishness of the Jewish Hero: The Soviet Yiddish Press Arkadi Zeltser Open Access Download PDF	104
Part II: Representation, Documentation, and Interpretation
Chapter 6. Foreshadowing the Holocaust: Boris Slutskii’s Jewish Poetic Cycle of 1940/41 Marat Grinberg Open Access Download PDF	130
Chapter 7. Poetry After Kerch': Representing Jewish Mass Death in the Soviet Union Harriet Murav Open Access Download PDF	151
Chapter 8. Between the Permitted and the Forbidden: The Politics of Holocaust Representation in The Unvanquished (1945) Olga Gershenson Open Access Download PDF	168
Chapter 9. From Photojournalist to Memory Maker: Evgenii Khaldei and Soviet Jewish Photographers David Shneer Open Access Download PDF	187
Chapter 10. Memoirs Boris Slutskii, Mikhail Romm and Anatolii Rybakov Open Access Download PDF	208
Chapter 11. Afterword Soviet Jews in World War II: Experience, Perception and Interpretation Zvi Gitelman Open Access Download PDF	251
Index Open Access Download PDF	264

Language: English
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 270

eBook

Published: December 17, 2017
ISBN: 9781618116864