In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk by Elissa Bemporad
  • Claire Le Foll (bio)
Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 276 pp., ills. Selected Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-00822-0.

This monograph is a fundamental contribution to the history of Soviet Jewry, and probably one of the most compelling attempts to revitalize it. Elissa Bemporad’s study, as modestly and briefly acknowledged in the introduction, has to be seen in the context of post–Cold War historiography. Bemporad’s book shares the new historical narrative born out of research based on documents found in the archives that opened in the 1990s, and distances itself from the preperestroika focus of historians on the rupture of 1917 and tendency to present the history of Soviet Jewry as a succession of tragedies (including the Bolshevik attempts to destroy Jews and Judaism). A new generation of historians (Arkadii Zel’tser, David Shneer, and Anna Shternshis, to name a few) underline “continuities,” the persistence of old Jewish practices and beliefs, and the emergence of new ones through the creativity of Soviet Jews. Bemporad demonstrates that it was possible in interwar Soviet Minsk to be a Jew and act like a Soviet citizen, and that Jews managed to keep some aspects [End Page 488] of their prerevolutionary way of life under the constraints imposed by the Bolsheviks. The study explores the “wide range of possible behaviors that existed vis-à-vis the Soviet system, fluctuating between active support and forced adjustment, deviance and defiance” (P. 7).

Besides the new approaches to Soviet Jewish history, this book contributes to and is a product of other historiographical trends. Regional studies, microhistory, and postcolonial studies have all inspired the author and converged to make this study convincing, nuanced, and sharp. Equally as important as Arkadii Zel’ter’s book on Jews in the Vitebsk region,1 this research uses the regional or local approach to reassess Jewish Soviet history in general, and adds a lot to our understanding of the history of Soviet Belarus, a quite neglected area of Soviet history. Focusing on a few “voices” and working on the “micro” scale, Bemporad lets us into the world of ordinary Jewish people (as the “microhistorian” Carlo Ginzburg did with Menocchio in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller) and introduces us to their social and mental environment, thanks to very lively and truly three-dimensional descriptions of the streets and institutions of Minsk. Finally, challenging the traditional “imperial model” that looked only at the relations between Jews and the state (here the Soviet state), she also integrates into her analysis the Belarusian perspective and looks at the horizontal relations between Jews and other groups of local population, as well as at the inverted relations between the new center of Jewish culture (Minsk) and the former imperial centers that now became its peripheries (Moscow, Vilnius). Thanks to a very animated and incisive tone and the use of a variety of sources, including archival documents, oral history, press, and statistics, Bemporad brings to life the transformation of “traditional Jews” into “Soviet Jews” in a stimulating and nuanced way.

The first chapter is a vigorous and pertinent summary of the history of Minsk. On the one hand, Bemporad argues that Minsk was a typical Jewish city of the Pale of Settlement, with about half of its population being Jewish, largely Yiddish-speaking, and engaged in crafts and trade. On the other hand, she shows the specificities of the city: its rapid modernization underscored by its status as an administrative center and previously modest scale of urbanization and industrialization; the “Russianness” of its Jewish community [End Page 489] and institutions; its mixed political identity that made it a center of both Socialism and Zionism at the turn of the century; and the nonideological use of all three languages (Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew) among Zionists and Socialists. She also situates Minsk on the Jewish map: an eternal rival of Vilna (Vilnius), its more prestigious “Litvish” counterpart, it became the new center of Jewish life after the geopolitical changes brought by World War I, only to begin...

pdf

Share