The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I (review)

When the First World War began in August 1914, the effects were not the same for everyone. For the Jews living in small towns in Austrian Galicia, the invasion by the Russian army was particularly devastating. Powerful groups within the tsarist government, including the tsar himself and the general staff of the army, hated Jews and believed that their presence in the war zone posed a danger. Many Jews (along with ethnic Germans and other suspect groups) living near the border within the Russian Empire were deported east. On the other side of the border, in Galician Jewish towns, when the Cossacks perpetrated pogroms—raping, murdering, looting, holding hostages for ransom—the authorities looked the other way. But even while the Russian authorities deported hundreds of thousands of their own and enemy civilians, Russian citizens formed voluntary organizations to feed, clothe, and shelter the refugees. In particular, when the wealthy Jews within the Russian Empire realized what was happening, they raised relief money not only for the refugees pouring east but also for the Austrian Jews who remained behind Russian lines in devastated Galicia.

The authorities did not make this task easy, strictly limiting the flow of information out of the war zone and the entrance of aid workers into it. But no barrier was too great for S. An-sky. Born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport (1863–1920), he was a successful journalist and editor in Russian and Yiddish, a fervent revolutionary (among the founders of the Socialist Revolutionary party), and a pioneering ethnographer who had spent the summers of 1912 to 1914 leading expeditions to the hasidic towns in the Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia and Podolia. An-sky possessed an unusual set of skills: the ability to speak comfortably with traditional Jews in Yiddish; accentless Russian, and an array of contacts among the Russian intelligentsia; great organizational skills; a love of travel; and tremendous courage. When the war broke out, he decided to go to the war zone and agitated until he received permission. He spent much of 1915, then from December 1916 through March 1917 there, keeping a detailed diary in Russian and periodically publishing articles and pamphlets about the horrors he witnessed. After the first Russian revolution of 1917 broke out in February, he rushed to Petrograd to join in, but when the Bolsheviks took over in October, he had to flee, first to Moscow, then Vilna, then Warsaw. There, at the end of his life, he transformed his wartime diaries into a three-volume memoir in Yiddish, titled The Destruction of Galicia: The Jewish Destruction in Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina, from a 1914–1917 Diary (completed in 1920). Now this remarkable book—abridged to half its original length—is available in English.

The memoir tells a set of three interlocking stories. First, of course, there is the story of An-sky's own travels, the difficulties he undergoes, the terrible scenes he witnesses, and the surprising escapes. For instance, at one point he agrees to take 20,000 rubles in coins—a forty-pound box—from Lvov back to Kiev at considerable personal risk. He leaves his train car for a moment, only to have the train misrouted to another city. After hours, he manages to chase down the missing train and retrieve the miraculously untouched case of money.

The second layer of the memoir is the picture it provides of the oral landscape. Everywhere that An-sky went, he listened to the people he met and he wrote down their stories: impossible rumors about Jewish attempts to help the Austrians defeat the Russians (by smuggling money to the Austrians or using telephones to provide them information about the movements of the Russian troops); hasidic legends about the imminent arrival of the Messiah; survivors' accounts of their torments; the musings of educated Russian officers about the...