Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and
the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those
resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast
expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the
Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of
Jewish communities with a combined population of 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
taught to respect religious tradition, but were 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.
Revolutionary Yiddishland - Sylvie Klingberg & Alain Brossat
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