Review of 'Revolutionary Yiddishland; A history of Jewish Radicalism' by Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg

 

I got so much more out of this book than I was expecting...to tell you the truth (and it's my blog, why shouldn't I?) I was prepared for a nostalgic wallow in how great the Bund was, and the tragedy of its eclipse by Zionism. But actually it's much more nuanced and clever than that. It started out as an oral history based on interviews with old lefties in Israel, and in the days when I used to go to Israel I met and enjoyed the company of many people like that...quite a few of them not Zionists, but more or less flushed into Israel or Palestine at the end of WW2. Kibbutz Yad Hannah, aligned with the Israeli Communist Party after some nasty factional splits in the Zionist movement to which it was tied, was a good place to meet people like that, and there was even an old Trotskyist there (and another bloke who had heard Trotsky speak at a rally in Russia).

The authors are fond of the Bund, but not blind to its deficits. Reading this I had a sense that the Bund's glory days were in the early C20th, and that its alignment with the Mensheviks in the post-revolutionary period put it on the wrong side of some important arguments...and as a result lots of its members abandoned it in favour of the Bolsheviks. And in inter-war Poland it seems to have been a regular Second International party, with a modicum of revolutionary rhetoric and iconography but also a bureaucratic form and a reformist agenda. My great-grandfather had been a Bundist, but he returned from Russia in 1923 as a devout Communist, and loved Stalin the rest of his days.

There's an honest recognition that Jews who were drawn to Left Poalei Tzion were, in Russia and Poland, genuine and sincere socialists with a revolutionary orientation, even though the role that Poalei Tzion played in Palestine - in the context of British colonialism, was anything but. Poalei Tzion's position on the national question as it related to Jews was of course Zionist and emigrationist, whereas the Bund was a belated convert to National Personal Autonomy. The Bolshevik/Communist position on this flip-flopped around, from opposing the nationalism of the Bund (and other Jewish socialists groups who wanted to organise Jewish workers) as reactionary, to supporting Jewish nationalism and the establishment of Jewish territorial colonies in the USSR, to eventually supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, with the weird reservation that this was 'too important a task to be left to Zionists'. Sometimes the Communists thought that Jewish workers would be absorbed into the working classes in the countries where they lived (and that this was a good thing) and sometimes they didn't. Getting caught out believing the wrong thing when the line changed - as it did, often - could be fatal.

There's great material on Jews in the Spanish Civil War (my dad had a cousin who died in the Battle of the Ebro, and his father organised collections for 'Arms for Spain', and somehow ended up with a CNT-FAI scarf which is now sadly lost), and on Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. There's a really good chapter on the way that Stalinism screwed its devoted Jewish followers over, again and again, and they kept coming back for more. 

It's a shame there wasn't more about the fourth pillar of the Jewish left, the Fareynikte...the United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party. I know least about this, though reading around the book (Wikipedia articles mainly) you get a feeling for some of the comic opera qualities of factions and splits and mergers, and the way in which all of these groups - including Poalei Tzion, and the Kombund split-off from the Bund, wanted to claim the Third International franchise and demanded that the other groups all be banned. I think the Fareynikte was actually the first group to take up the idea of National Personal Autonomy, which the Bund later adopted. It seems to have left very little trace.

A few things I didn't like...some of the language is impenetrable, particularly at the beginning when they seem to be establishing their academic credentials. Sometimes it might be the translation, though why the translator feels the need to use English words that I have never, ever encountered is a mystery to me. But I'll forgive it, because it's so good overall. A few curious things; one of the writers, Syliva Klingberg, is the daughter of one of the interviewees (his name has been changed) who has spent years in prison in Israel because he spied for the USSR - he was an epidemiologist who ended up working in the Israeli chemical and biological warfare program - and then her husband, like her a member of Matzpen, ended up in prison for allegedly spying for Syria. For a weird contrast, one of the interviewees in the film Madrid Before Hadita, about Jewish volunteers from Palestine in the Spanish Civil War, returns to his kibbutz, is welcomed as a hero (though they had forbidden him to go) and end up deputy head of the Mossad.