1971: a view of Sholem Aleichem street, Birobidzhan. (c) V. Voloshenko / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.In the days after Donald Trump’s election victory, Masha Gessen wrote two urgent articles in the New York Review of Books about the dangers of accommodating and collaborating with demagogues. In the first, Gessen refers to the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, one of the protagonists in Where the Jews Aren’t, her extraordinary account of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s Siberian “homeland” for the Jews. As lethal forces engulfed Europe, Dubnow sought sanctuary in neutral Latvia, a country sandwiched between two tyrannies. But he was murdered by the Nazis in Riga: “Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it”. Gessen’s book, which draws on the personal insights of her own double-exile, is about being attuned to the danger, and the possibility of carving out a place of safety that one can call home.
“Birobidzhan would be, nominally, one of the world’s two Jewish states — the one where the Jews did not live”, she writes. The inside front cover is illustrated with comparative tables showing why, in climate and terrain, Birobidzhan is a less appealing prospect than Israel. A map in the prologue underscores that this settlement, on the border with China, is firmly part of Asia: less than 1,000 miles from Tokyo but 3,750 from Moscow, as far from Tel Aviv as it is from Los Angeles (~5,000 miles). Gessen describes Birobidzhan, later formalised as the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR, a name it retains today), as “perhaps the worst good idea ever” — born of a rational premise, but resembling an exile more than a homecoming.
A very Soviet Zion
During the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution, nearly 200,000 Jews had been killed and half a million displaced, mostly by the anti-communist White Army and by Ukrainian nationalists.
