Revolutionary Yiddishland
Subtitle: a history of Jewish radicalism
By: Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg ; translated by David Fernbach
Contributors: Klingberg, Sylvia, author; Fernbach, David, translator
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781784786069
Subjects: Jewish radicals; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Jews; Ethnic relations; History
Work titles: Yiddishland révolutionnaire
Description: "They were on the barricades from the avenues of Petrograd to the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto, from the anti-Franco struggle to the anti-Nazi resistance. Before the Holocaust, Yiddishland was a vast expanse of Eastern Europe running from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and featured hundreds of Jewish communities, numbering some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and respect for religious tradition, but were then caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions--a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century"--
Notes: "This English translation is from the second edition published by Édition Syllepse in 2009, which was revised by David Forest with the addition of new editorial notes and references."--Title-page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.