Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (The Modern Jewish Experience)
"[T]his is an excellent book, offering a fascinating case study of how a Soviet-Jewish identity in a particular Soviet city came into being." —The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928"This is a very important study. It does not follow the well-trodden paths, and does not employ the phraseology frequently found in books on Soviet Jewry. This study opens up vistas for additional work that will be written in its spirit. It successfully analyzes the deep social and cultural processes that took place in Soviet Jewry." —Mordehai Altshuler, Hebrew University"This well-written, thoroughly researched book is a superb case study of the complex and contradictory effects of the Soviet regime in one of the most important centers of Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Russia.... A major contribution to understanding a crucial aspect of modern Jewish history in eastern Europe.... Highly recommended." —Choice"[A] book that is highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights... Becoming Soviet Jews is a rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place." —H-Judaic"Bemporad has written an important study of Minsk’s Jewish community in the period of Sovietization.... She convincingly shows that Sovietization was a complex and often tense process of negotiation, with Red Army soldiers eating kosher meat, fist fights breaking out after synagogue confiscations, and men wondering if their wives were secretly circumcising their children. A great contribution." —David Shneer, author of Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust"This book is built on a rich source base of archival materials.... Bemporad does not simply rehearse archival material for its own sake. Rather, she brings a wealth of sources to support each of herarguments.... There is a lot that is new in Bemporad’s study. Most important, the focus on daily experience complements other approaches and offers a fuller understanding of Jewish Minsk during the first two decades of Soviet rule." —Jewish History"Challenging traditional interpretations of Jewish life under Soviet rule as one of continuous oppression, stagnation, and deterioration, Bemporad's book instead demonstrates the complexities of the Soviet Jewish experience." —Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire"An original study that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the history of Soviet Jewry. Bemporad modifies old stereotypes about the rapid assimilation of Soviet Jews in the interwar period. This is wonderful book that is clear, well-argued, and beautifully written." —Samuel D. Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive"This thoroughly researched study illustrates the tenacity of Jewish identity in the face of significantrepression." —The Russian Review"Becoming Soviet Jews opens a window into the almost entirely forgotten wealth of Soviet Yiddish life.... Bemporad’s detailed focus on the city of Minsk gives a much deeper sense of what communism and Yiddish culture meant in the 1920s to thousands of individual Jews, in all the diversity of their politics, beliefs, gender, and class backgrounds." —New Politics"Elissa Bemporad has deepened and enriched our understanding of the social transformations Soviet Jews experienced in the two decades after the revolution. Mining hitherto inaccessible archives, she deftly links larger historical processes to the changes in the lives of ordinary—and some extraordinary—Jews in one of the great centers of Yiddish culture and Judaism. Judiciously using photographs and the prose and poetry of the time, Bemporad vividly shows that tradition exerted a powerful influence even in Soviet times but was eventually defeated by the combination of attractive new opportunities, in intensive resocialization, and terror." —Zvi Gitelman, author of A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present