Patrioten und Kosmopoliten: Juden im Sowjetstaat 1941–1953 (review)

This book by Frank Grüner was originally a doctoral dissertation, “The End of the Dream of Jewish Soviet Men? Jews and the Soviet State, 1941 to 1953,” completed at Heidelberg University. Focusing on the period from Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to the anti-Semitic “Doctor’s Plot” in 1953, the book traces what it argues were the most important years in the transformation of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union.

The book consists of three parts that discuss the impact of key events on Soviet Jewish identity. The first, titled “Between Annihilation, Persecution, and Self-Assertion,” examines the period from 1941 to 1948, focusing on the Second World War and the activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). The second part examines anti-Semitism and the Holocaust during and after the war, with chapters on the formation of a Jewish national identity, the attempts to establish a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union and the founding of Israel, and the role of Jewish religion. The third and final part of the book examines the relationship of Jews and the Stalinist regime, showing how the regime initially saw Jews as the ultimate Soviet patriots but later came to revile them as “rootless cosmopolitans,” a transition reflected in the title of the book. In tracing the evolution of a Jewish national consciousness in the Soviet Union, Grüner relies on a content analysis of a rich array of memoirs, letters, public speeches, and other primary sources produced by Soviet Jews who lived in this period, ranging from prominent figures such as Ilya Ehrenburg to ordinary citizens of Jewish background.

One of the major themes of the book is “assimilation,” highlighting the resistance of some Jews to Soviet attempts at assimilating them, in contrast to the views of others like Ehrenburg who welcomed assimilation (pp. 285ff). The book opens with a letter from Aleksandr Markovich Lifich to the JAC, thought to be written sometime between 1942 and 1948 (p. 1), and it ends with the statement that by 1953 Jews were left with two options: emigration or accepting an assimilated, “non-Jewish” existence as a Soviet citizen (p. 511). This sets apart the story of the Jews from many other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. Assimilation was anathema in official Soviet ideology and in most cases was not sought after in practice, as is evident from many Soviet policies ranging from assigning territories to ethnic groups, supporting their languages, and applying positive discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. Why were Jews eventually targeted for assimilation when most others were not? The material presented in this book suggests that the failure to provide territorial autonomy for Jews within the USSR and their eventual association, in the eyes of Soviet authorities, with a foreign nationalism (Zionism) and state (Israel), as was the case with some other Soviet nationalities (Germans, Koreans, etc.) help to explain this outcome.

The book also demonstrates, however, that assimilation and discrimination, which were so pervasive by 1953, did not characterize the Soviet state’s policies during most of the 1940s. Crimea was contemplated as a potential homeland and autonomous territory for the Jews, both in the 1920s and again in 1944 (pp. 307–316), but when that plan failed to materialize, attention shifted back to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) established in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East in 1934 (pp. 314– 316), an entity that still exists today. However, the JAO never attracted more than an insignificant fraction of Soviet Jews, making Israel, the newly found Jewish state in Palestine, the most successful and attractive project of Jewish state-building for the Jews in the USSR (p. 316). The rise of a Jewish nationalist identity in the Soviet Union is therefore in need of explanation, which this book attempts to provide.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact, which Grüner refers to as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, “the alliance with the ‘fascist arch-enemy’ that obviously had a greater...