Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering by Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (review)

A quick glance at the title of this impressive new edited volume can be deceiving. The juxtaposition of Soviet Jews and World War II immediately calls up images of mass shootings. This volume does not treat the Holocaust per se, however. Rather, it offers a selection of new and interdisciplinary works about Soviet Jews’ participation in the war effort as well as their responses to the unfolding genocide. As such, it both fills a lacuna and provides a bridge. Scholars of the Holocaust are increasingly aware of the diversity of wartime experiences and the importance of integrating them into a larger history of the war and its consequences. This work is thus a welcome addition to the bookshelves of scholars and students of the Holocaust, World War II, and Soviet history.

The first section of the volume, entitled “Histories,” contains several interesting contributions, although not all of them are strictly historical in disciplinary perspective. Oleg Budnitskii’s “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front” not only offers an insightful look at newly discovered sources, but also provides a number of thoughtful methodological and historiographical points. As a result of their high level of literacy and their literary aspirations, Jews may have been more likely to keep diaries at the front; yet Budnitskii concludes that, unlike later testimonies and published autobiographies, the diaries show their authors to be more Soviet than Jewish.

Soviet narratives of the war, especially with regard to the creation of heroes, are taken up in the two following essays. Gennady Estraikh’s “Jews as Cossacks: A Symbiosis in Literature and Life” and Arkadi Zeltser’s “How the Jewish Intelligentsia Created the Jewishness of the Jewish Hero: The Soviet Yiddish Press” examine the creation and evolution of the Jewish war hero in Russian- and Yiddish-language literature and journalism. Estraikh examines the refinement of actual prewar historical events, as well as images from Babel and others, into an acceptable postwar narrative of heroism and the “brotherhood of the peoples.” Zeltser’s contribution traces the careful efforts of Jewish journalists writing in Russian and Yiddish to find acceptable models and methods for praising Jewish heroism at the front.

The second section of the work, devoted more explicitly to representation, opens with an illuminating article by Marat Grinberg on Boris Slutskii’s early poetry. Slutskii’s poems, written to a love interest in 1940 and 1941, were published only in 1993 in an obscure Israeli Russian-language journal. Grinberg offers the original Russian, as well as a translation into English and a sensitive and somewhat radical reading. Although the first two poems were written before the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the third and final one only two months after, Grinberg presents all three not only as deeply Jewishly engaged but also as seemingly aware of the looming tragedy. The poems, which are touching in their own right, are enhanced by Grinberg’s forceful analysis.

Olga Gershenson’s “Between the Permitted and the Forbidden: The Politics of Holocaust Representation in The Unvanquished (1945)” traces the fascinating life and afterlife of one of the first films to depict the Holocaust. As Gershenson’s careful research demonstrates, the censors were flummoxed by a film touching on so many difficult issues and completed precisely at the moment when official standards were in flux. The Unvanquished was released in 1945, and even received some positive reviews, but as the official narrative of the war gained ascendency the film quickly disappeared. Gershenson shows that although the central scene depicting the mass murder is historically inaccurate, it has been excerpted in numerous films—including documentaries—from the time of the Thaw up until the present.

In “From Photojournalist to Memory Maker: Evgenii Khaldei and Soviet Jewish Photographers,” David Shneer uses photographs and historical documents to illustrate Khaldei’s multiple careers. A popular Soviet photojournalist during the war, Khaldei was also, albeit less publicly, documenting the Holocaust...