Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (review)

Focusing on an area of Holocaust representation largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, this meticulously illustrated volume provides a wealth of information about individual Soviet Jewish photographers and their work. Shneer's analysis integrates the work and the complex identities of photographers who documented both the construction and devastation of Soviet society, Axis atrocities against Jews and other Soviet civilians, and the Soviet defeat of the invaders. The governing rubric of the book, the "Jewish eye," entails the question whether the Jewishness of the photographers had an impact on the content of the photos. In the end this "Jewish eye" emerges not from any social critique or traditional Jewish content of the images, but from the complex hybrid identities Shneer indentifies in the photographers.

Part One establishes the background of Soviet photojournalism and Jewish photographers' roles in it. Shneer argues that the field was more welcoming to Jews than others were; it offered "a means for Jews to gain access to power without being part of power" (p. 15). Jewish photographers had documented Russia's expanding empire and its increasing ethnic diversity in the late nineteenth century, gained permission to stay in the capital (they otherwise had been excluded from St. Petersburg), and helped establish the market for photography. While the Revolution and Civil War slowed the development of photojournalism, the "ideological imperative" (p. 25) of Soviet socialism ensured the survival and growth of illustrated journals, including Ogonëk (Little Flame), a turn-of-the-century upper-class magazine resurrected as a mass medium. Jewish itinerant budding photographers made it or related publications their first stop in the new capital, Moscow. This group "gave birth to Soviet photojournalism" (p. 30), the distinctive trait of which was promoting socialism. In the 1930s they were joined by a "second generation" of socialist-realist photojournalists born after the 1905 Revolution; their work developed alongside the rapid technical innovations of the era: flight, modern communications, and better cameras such as the Leica. The ideological purpose of socialist realism led to ongoing debates about staging photographs, while Soviet support for the "progress" of ethnic minorities put Jews on both sides of the camera, for instance documenting the Birobidzhan experiment in creating "new Jews."

Part Two brings the reader to World War II and the Holocaust. Photojournalists deployed a "dual narrative strategy of celebrating Soviet heroism and publicizing Nazi atrocities [in order to] visually [define] the war for the Soviet population" (p. 96). It wasn't until January 1942 that Jewish photojournalists, as Soviet liberators in the southern city of Kerch, documented the mass murder of Soviet Jews at the hands of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen; but the victims' Jewishness was largely overlooked in the service of the pan-ethnic ideal of the Soviet state. Shneer details the involvement of photojournalists in the battle for Stalingrad and then "the ambivalence of liberation" in late 1943 and 1944 with images and essays that were not unambiguously positive, but rather tempered the depiction of triumph "with images of the violence and destruction that had defined the German occupation" (pp. 124-25); these images thenceforth fueled the case for vengeance. As the front moved toward Germany, the narrative focus shifted to the anticipated occupation and reconstruction of Germany, even as photojournalists sustained the interest in vengeance, though now directing it against only the "Hitlerites" and not all Germans.

Chapter 5 discusses Soviet photography dealing with the Holocaust, beginning with the context of the Extraordinary Commissions, whose work intensified after Stalingrad and whose findings supported the first war crimes trials in 1943. By then, Shneer notes, a new photographic genre had been born: "the Nazi atrocity photo essay" (p. 143). With the liberation of Kiev in late 1943 and the discovery of the killing site at Babi Yar, photojournalists participated in creating "the biggest and most lasting symbol of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union," surpassing even the extermination camps on occupied Polish soil (p...