A review by littlemiao
Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region by Masha Gessen

challenging dark informative slow-paced

4.5

Birobidzhan, the official Jewish Autonomous Region of the Soviet Union, was from its start an absurdity and an impossibility. It was a source of false hope and fatal betrayals. Gessen does not give us a systematic overview of the history, people, and geography of Birobidzhan. Rather, they tell one facet of the story of Soviet Jews through the “cracked and crooked mirror” of Birobidzhan. The book focuses in large part on David Bergelson, a Yiddish writer who, backed into a corner, tried, and failed, to make Birobidzhan a lifeboat for himself, for the Yiddish language, and for the Jews of the Soviet Union. In the author’s words, this is a book about “the concept of home, and knowing when to leave.”  It is the story of Jews trying, and mostly failing, to survive. But the frame of the book, the author’s own experience, brings a hopeful note: to escape is to survive, and they escaped.

I hoped for more of the author’s observations in Birobidzhan itself. Yet that would have been the retelling of absurdities and absences in multiple iterations of the same sad facts. A museum of early Birobidzhan history featuring photos from a random shtetl in the Pale of Settlement. A pork schnitzel as a restaurant’s “Jewish” menu. A Jewish region with practically no Jews.

One of the most chilling images that the book leaves me with is the 1949 book burning at the Sholem Aleichem Library, where tens of thousands of Yiddish books were burnt in an effort to purge the region of Jewish culture. The books were written by the same authors who, at the behest of the Soviet state, had served as propagandists for Birobidzhan. These same Yiddish writers also faced imprisonment, labor camps, and execution.

The Wikipedia entry for Birobidzhan reads like promotional advertising. One wonders what, other than absolute desperation, could draw more Jews to make this tragic, haunted, “ridiculous” place their home.
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