Yiddish in the Cold War

Yiddish in the Cold War PDF Author: Gennady Estraikh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351194453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Yiddish-speaking groups of Communists played a visible role in many countries, most notably in the Soviet Union, United States, Poland, France, Canada, Argentina and Uruguay. The sacrificial role of the Red Army, and the Soviet Union as a whole, reinforced the Left movement in the post-Holocaust Jewish world. Apart from card-careering devotees, such groups attracted numerous sympathisers, including the artist Marc Chagall and the writer Sholem Asch. But the suppression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union radically changed the climate in Jewish leftwing circles. Former Communists and sympathisers turned away, while the attention of Yiddish commentators in the West turned to the conditions for Jewish cultural and religious life in the Soviet Union and Poland, Jewish emigration and the situation in the Middle East. Ideological confrontations between Communist Yiddish literati in the Soviet Union, United States, Canada, Poland, France and Israel are in the centre of Gennady Estraikh's pioneering study Yiddish in the Cold War. This ground-breaking book recreates the intellectual environments of the Moscow literary journal Sovetish Heymland (the author was its managing editor in 1988-91), the New York newspaper Morgn-Frayhayt and the Warsaw newspaper Folks-Shtime."

Yiddish in the Cold War

Yiddish in the Cold War PDF Author: Gennady Estraikh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351194453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Yiddish-speaking groups of Communists played a visible role in many countries, most notably in the Soviet Union, United States, Poland, France, Canada, Argentina and Uruguay. The sacrificial role of the Red Army, and the Soviet Union as a whole, reinforced the Left movement in the post-Holocaust Jewish world. Apart from card-careering devotees, such groups attracted numerous sympathisers, including the artist Marc Chagall and the writer Sholem Asch. But the suppression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union radically changed the climate in Jewish leftwing circles. Former Communists and sympathisers turned away, while the attention of Yiddish commentators in the West turned to the conditions for Jewish cultural and religious life in the Soviet Union and Poland, Jewish emigration and the situation in the Middle East. Ideological confrontations between Communist Yiddish literati in the Soviet Union, United States, Canada, Poland, France and Israel are in the centre of Gennady Estraikh's pioneering study Yiddish in the Cold War. This ground-breaking book recreates the intellectual environments of the Moscow literary journal Sovetish Heymland (the author was its managing editor in 1988-91), the New York newspaper Morgn-Frayhayt and the Warsaw newspaper Folks-Shtime."

O Powerful Western Star!

O Powerful Western Star! PDF Author: Peter Golden
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House Ltd
ISBN: 9652295434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Get Book Here

Book Description
American Jews, Russian Jews, and the Final Battle of the Cold War.

Survival on the Margins

Survival on the Margins PDF Author: Eliyana R. Adler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

"Soviet Anti-semitism"

Author: Hyman Lumer
Publisher: New York : Political Affairs Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Antisemitism
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Get Book Here

Book Description


Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes PDF Author: David Shneer
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548845
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Der Nister's Soviet Years

Der Nister's Soviet Years PDF Author: Mikhail Krutikov
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
A critical look at the later work of the Russian Jewish author in the Soviet Union and its significance to Russian and Jewish history. In Der Nister’s Soviet Years, author Mikhail Krutikov focuses on the second half of the dramatic writing career of Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister, pen name of Pinhas Kahanovich (1884–1950). Krutikov follows Der Nister’s painful but ultimately successful literary transformation from his symbolist roots to social realism under severe ideological pressure from Soviet critics and authorities. This volume reveals how profoundly Der Nister was affected by the destruction of Jewish life during WWII and his own personal misfortunes. While Der Nister was writing a history of his generation, he was arrested for anti-government activities and died tragically from a botched surgery in the Gulag. Krutikov illustrates why Der Nister’s work is so important to understandings of Soviet literature, the Russian Revolution, and the catastrophic demise of the Jewish community under Stalin. “Krutikov’s book on Der Nister will serve an important function, offering a strong, well-researched, and well-organized analysis of six significant periods in Der Nister’s writing. I expect it to inspire a great many new readers of Der Nister, inside and outside of academia.” —Amelia M. Glaser, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop “Among Soviet Yiddish writers, Der Nister occupies a unique place in literary history. Mikhail Krutikov’s meticulous analysis follows the transformation of the writer under the pressure of the Soviet ideological environment.” —Gennady Estraikh, author of Yiddish in the Cold War

Soviet and Kosher

Soviet and Kosher PDF Author: Anna Shternshis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253112156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kosher pork -- an oxymoron? Anna Shternshis's fascinating study traces the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. The cultural transformation of Soviet Jews between 1917 and 1941 was one of the most ambitious experiments in social engineering of the past century. During this period, Russian Jews went from relative isolation to being highly integrated into the new Soviet culture and society, while retaining a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This identity took shape during the 1920s and 1930s, when the government attempted to create a new Jewish culture, "national in form" and "socialist in content." Soviet and Kosher is the first study of key Yiddish documents that brought these Soviet messages to Jews, notably the "Red Haggadah," a Soviet parody of the traditional Passover manual; songs about Lenin and Stalin; scripts from regional theaters; Socialist Realist fiction; and magazines for children and adults. More than 200 interviews conducted by the author in Russia, Germany, and the United States testify to the reception of these cultural products and provide a unique portrait of the cultural life of the average Soviet Jew.

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone PDF Author: Gal Beckerman
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547504438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 801

Get Book Here

Book Description
The “remarkable” story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union (The Plain Dealer). At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue. Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist “hooligans,” and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. Beckerman also makes a convincing case that the effort put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. This “wide-ranging and often moving” book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats (The New Yorker). This “excellent” multigenerational saga, filled with suspense and packed with revelations, provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history (The Washington Post).

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pluralism

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pluralism PDF Author: Jennifer Vannette
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antisemitism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Yid

The Yid PDF Author: Paul Goldberg
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250079047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
A DEBUT NOVEL OF DARING ORIGINALITY, THE YID GUARANTEES THAT YOU WILL NEVER THINK OF STALINIST RUSSIA, SHAKESPEARE, THEATER, YIDDISH, OR HISTORY THE SAME WAY AGAIN Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg's THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.