New Books In Russian And Eurasian Studies

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire’s western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetlekh, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life. This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew – not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In his monograph How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard University Press, 2022), Sasha Senderovich finds this new cultural figure through close readings of post-1917 Russia/Yiddish literature, films, and reportage. Suddenly mobile after