Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Welcome, everybody. It's my great pleasure to introduce today's program. I'm Jonathan Brent, Executive Director and CEO of the YIVO Institute. Our programs reach people all over the world, as is in evidence today from the fact that we have people from the Czech Republic from all over the United States joining in to listen to this subject of a nation of refugees, Russia's Jews in World War I, by Pauli Nabativka. This is a cover of the book. I think Polly will show the book a little bit later. I would like to begin today's program and the reason that I'm personally announcing it, introducing it, is that this is a book I definitely want to read and I'm going to get. And whoever of you out there wishes to purchase this book, we will. I understand it's somewhat expensive, as all such scholarly works are. You can get it through the YIVO store at a 20% discount and we will be very pleased to make that available. Polly is Associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of the 1915 diary of S An Sky, a Russian Jewish writer at the Eastern Front, a subject of tremendous importance not only because of the history that is recorded in that diary, but because of what it tells us of an ski and of his exploration not only of the Jewish world, but also of the ravaged Russian world at the time. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook and the multi volume series Russia's Great War and Revolution. Polly's interlocutor, Eliana Adler is Professor of East European Jewish History at Binghamton University with a particular focus on Poland and the ussr. Her first book in her the Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia examined the history of education. And her second book, Survival on the Margins, Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, followed the experiences of a group of Jewish refugees in the midst of the war and the Holocaust. Currently, she is working on a project about post Holocaust Jewish memorial books. There's a lot more I will say, but you don't want to hear from me. You want to hear from Polly and Eliana. So with that said, over to you.
- [03:08]
C
Thank you so much, Jonathan. Hi everyone. It's amazing to see the attendance. I'm Polly Zavadifkar and I just wanted to start off this by mentioning my gratitude both to Ivo and to Jonathan particularly and to Eliana. I started this project over 15 years ago. I was a fellow at YIVO. Professor Bernard Hossied Fellow. And so some of the work. I will show you a couple of images. Not too many, but some of these images were taken from Yivo, and the archival research was done at Yivo. And I'm so grateful to be speaking with Eliana. Her work has influenced me, both her work on Jewish girls in the Russian Empire and her more recent work on refugees, all really present in my work as well. So thank you. I'll show you the COVID of the book. And I was really fortunate to find this image in the Jewish Museum of New York. It represents so much of what the book is about. My main question was to explore how Jewish civilians, including women and children, experience the Eastern Front, what has often been called the forgotten front of World War I. Two thirds of world jewelry was part of it. A front zone, living in a front zone, and among them, almost 6 million Jews in Eastern Europe in both the Habsburg Russian and Russian empires. And I wanted to show you a map just to situate where the book takes place. It really is a book that covers the entirety of the Russian Empire, both the Pale of Settlement, which you see in gray here, and the biggest cities of the Pale, as well as the shtetls around them, but also how the Jewish population at the home front in Petrograd and wartime Moscow and many, many other places across the Empire organized aid and mobilized to help not just Jewish refugees, but all civilians and the Russian war effort more generally. This was a study about the largest concentration of Jews on earth caught up in a major front zone. And the story that I wanted to tell as I made my way through the sources was one that I had not read before. I felt it was a gap in the historiography of both East European Jewry and in modern Jewish history as well. And so that's the gap I set out to fill, especially by telling the stories of how people, ordinary people, responded. And I'll say much more about it in our conversation. But for now, I just wanted to show you a few images that I found at Yivo to give you a sense of what some of the topics are. This was really a treasure find for me. It's a memorial, a photographic memorial to men who were taken hostage by the Russian army during the war. And it has their names in the caption. This was a major part of the Jewish experience of the war, being accused of espionage or attempts to aid the German and Austrian enemies. And this is an important visual artifact of that. This is another very different aspect of the book. Noam Stieff was a Yiddish critic who many of you may know of his writings, but During World War I, he was also an aid worker and he traveled with the Central Jewish Aid Committee, Jacopo, and wrote these enormously interesting reports from the field. And so one major theme that I discuss in the book is Jewish nationalism and Jewish relief work and the dynamic between responses to wartime violence and persecution and the Jewish experience of those phenomena. So I think I'll stop there and turn it over to Eliana and really look forward to our discussion and any questions that may arise.
- [07:51]
A
Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone for Yivo, for making this possible for all of you for coming, and particularly to Holly for writing this really remarkable and important book. I learned a great deal from, and I'm sure that all of you will also. So we're going to have a conversation for about a half hour or so, and then we will take questions, your questions later on. I think you can put them in the Q and A if you have questions along the way. All right. So one of the things that I really appreciate about this book is that although much of it is very difficult, you don't focus on just on victimization or on Jews as victims, but also are really most interested in their active responses to the situations they found themselves in. And in particular, I was taken with your point about philanthropic aid coming from a somewhat nationalist sentiment. So I'd like for you to tell us more what you mean by that. And is this a Jewish nationalist sense, a Russian nationalist sense, Something both. Neither.
- [09:12]
C
Yeah, absolutely. That's a hugely important thread through the whole entire book. And a theme. So what I was trying to explore and what I found was that in the wartime Russian Empire, the catastrophe of mobilizing for a total war really was what would bring the empire down. But it also created this inadvertent opening and opportunity of. For civil society, and particularly for the educated class to mobilize in the support of the Russian war effort. This was a theme earlier in a pattern in Russian history, earlier times of famine. For example, in 1891, you had societies of doctors and statisticians applying their expertise to problems of real, urgent problems for the empire. And this resurfaced again with the kind of a burgeoning civil society during. During the war time years. The other thing that's important about Russian philanthropy and public service is that it really influenced the Jewish version of philanthropy and public service in that it became increasingly secularized over the decades before, before World War I. Sort of moving out of that religious framework, for example, of nursing, to a more professionalized science. Based, evidence based and very rational program for providing relief and public aid. And so the Jewish organizations that I write about were, you know, most of them existed for decades and in some cases just years before the war began. But they were very much influenced by the European, the Russian traditions of philanthropy and public service. For example, one of the things I really found is that even before the war began, so Jewish philanthropy had largely been collective responsibility, organized in the local context, either the shtetl or the city, and very much under the framework of religious charity. That had begun to change. And the impact of Jewish nationalism was very, very evident. Even before the war. You had Jewish activists who were attempting to influence philanthropy, education, labor, healthcare, along lines that really reflected larger European developments. And for them, it was very much tied to national. A sense of national Jewish renewal. And so one organization, I think that's really interesting in the book, is ORT, the Society for labor and Arts that formed in 1881 to help provide vocational training and loans and support for artisans and crafts and agriculture. But before World War I, it had been rather marginal in Jewish life and sort of scorned as a place that helped the unemployed. But during the war, it was completely expanded into an organization of empire wide importance. They opened labor bureaus and exchange bureaus, not just in the Pale of Settlement, but way outside in all these places that refugees resettled in the Russian interior provinces. It became a necessity for Jews, this public service, because of the wartime era. And so you had this merging of the earlier traditions of sacred support. Right. Or relief work as a sacred duty with the national element of Jewish renewal, but also the imperial framework of civil society marshaling its support for the war effort. So, yeah, this was really fascinating for me to trace these kind of through lines for trends in Jewish philanthropy that existed before the war, but rapidly changed and expanded and grew as a result of the wartime crisis.
- [13:48]
A
Yes, thank you. And we would talk a lot about those. Another thread that goes throughout the book is antisemitism, which is also something that continues to be spoken about and felt, of course, but in very different ways. And one thing that interested me, and I hope you can talk a little bit about, is the sort of the difference between top down and grassroots antisemitism and where there are confluences between them, how that affects Jews.
- [14:24]
C
Yeah, that's a very important dynamic in the book. In some ways, I think the military view of Jews and the state perspective on Jewish civilians who were in front zone areas. It had a deterministic quality. And the army was drawing on these earlier views of Pseudoscientific language that Simeon Goldin has really, this pioneering work, has researched this language of military statistics, what they believe to be the likelihood of populations to be loyal or disloyal in a time of military crisis. And the language of Jews being unreliable and disloyal and prone to spying and espionage in ways big and small was really so much a feature of official discourse. And it was published in military press, in government circulars and elsewhere. That image I showed you of the hostages, the Jewish male hostages, that was part of the Jewish experience of being at the front was that official designation as an internal foe. And that experience was exacerbated anytime there was the arrival of the army or the retreat in particular, there was often that confluence of arriving armies, abandoning armies and attacks on Jews. What I found that I guess I was not surprised was how much the army's presence, the presence of the Russian army in these towns had an impact on the local populations. I mean, they often the popular hostility toward Jews was sort of permitted or enabled and exacerbated by the arrival of the army. And it changed, right, that people who were, might have been friendly neighbors the day before in some cases I read reports of know. Often they would spread rumors about Jews, false rumors, you know, as well toward to the army, claiming that Jews had. Had spied or had done, had done subversive things and that they kind of came to expect that that would trigger violence and they could then share, for example, in property of Jews that might have been spiritual stolen or taken as a result of riots or expulsions. So the population, local population stood to benefit from some of that top down official antisemitism. The other thing I think that was important though was there was a number of cases where local people also defended Jews. So it wasn't. There was not a monolithic, you know, hatred and persecution of Jews on the part of the. Either the soldiers or the local people, soldiers as well, who stepped in to try to defend Jews. But I think there were cases of, for example, Russian Orthodox priests that vouching for the good name of Jews and many, many other examples like that people physically defending synagogues with their bodies to protect their Jewish neighbors. So I do want to stress it wasn't a monolithic responses to persecution. And then the other thing that was very, very important for me to stress in the book is that violence, persecution, antisemitism are part of the story. This is not the entirety. And I was trying to push back against this idea that this is all there is to tell. This is the best Known, I think part of the story of World War I that has come down to us. But for me, it was very important to stress, for example, all the creative ways that Jews resisted the violence, try to maintain dignity, and in some cases, very rarely practice self defense, physical self defense, or other ways of. Of defending their property and their. And their bodies and their lives. So again, it's the. I tried to keep this tension in the book between what was telling what was done to Jews, but then showing, on the other hand, how Jews responded and navigated and dealt with this very complicated hostility coming at them, both from that grassroots level, but also the official structures of the army and the state.
- [19:41]
A
I think that's something that tension that you really did an excellent job of. There's so many voices and names in this book of people living their lives, many of whom aren't famous. Aren't the elites just people? So I'd actually love to talk a little bit about sources, memoirs, letters, documents from the state, various states governments, and also from philanthropies. Okay. Those are things that we all use. I was very fascinated by these reports that you included from delegates, from people who were sent out from these philanthropic organizations to bring aid and to gather information. And can you tell us more about both what you found in those documents, but also sort of how you evaluate and use them?
- [20:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, this is one of them. As a historian, these were really exciting archival finds. Every time I found something a relief worker had written, I was really excited. So I guess it's important to say I started with An Ski. As Jonathan said in the introduction, I had translated An Ski's war diary from Russian. And then the other very, very well known account from the war was his memoir, Corben Galicia in Yiddish. And so I was very interested in just An Ski's perspective on the war. But from him I found my way into so many others, far less known chroniclers, relief workers, activists and elite philanthropists who were working alongside him, but much, much less known than An Ski was. So, for example, two real treasure sources for me were autobiographies that Noham Stieff had written in Yiddish. Shmuel Nieger, also both Yiddish critics, but who became important relief workers during the war. Shmuel Nigger's papers are at Yivo. Steve published his autobiography in a Yivo Annual. And they traveled extensively. They reported from the field. They also interacted with very well known people like An Ski and figures like, for example, Genre Sluisberg, the Russian Jewish lawyer who became the director of the Jewish Committee for aid in Petrograd. Semyon Dubnov was another important source with his diary, and he chronicled what it was like to live in Petrograd. And he read voraciously the Jewish press of the time. So he was just so aware of what was happening. But I really was most interested in the perspectives of relief workers. Again, it was over a period of many, many years of searching different types of sources. There was a fantastic article that Sam Kassow published in a YIVO annual where he explored the Pinkassim Yiddish Chronicles and these big encyclopedic accounts of Jewish aid organizations that were published in vilna during the 1920s. And there I found also autobiographies, people like Yitzhak Kitterman, Herman Crook, who in retrospect, wrote about their wartime experiences. The two other, I would say, most important sources that I worked my way through. One was the archival reports. So I think what you were mentioning, the reports that people like Steve wrote from the field, those were contained in the Jacopo, the Jewish Committee for Aid Relief archive in St. Petersburg. And again, they just contain these incredible details about the interaction between relief workers and local populations, their attempts to provide aid on the spot, not quite knowing if it will work or not, the kinds of reactions that different people, both civilians and also displaced civilians, refugees, had toward different types of aid work. So these archival reports were critical for me and the wartime press. I was very lucky to find entire sets of Jewish weekly newspapers, for example, in Russian and Yiddish, both at yivo. But also the Blavatnik Archive has important sources that are really detailing relief work and the plight of refugees and civilians in real time. So I had, I think, a very good picture of what was happening on the ground. And then it was interesting to think about, you know, the limits of being able to work with these sources and what, what kind of biases they reflected for the aid workers. I mean, those who went out to the field to help Jewish civilians, you can really see their ambiguity toward relief work. They want to help people on the one hand, and they understand that people are traumatized, people are shocked, they need, you know, they need food, they need shelter immediately. But they're also so influenced by these European norms of what rational philanthropy should look like. And this idea that, you know, there should be, you should not give handouts to people, you should help them become productive and self sufficient. And so there's this tension in the relief work reports that you see that reflects these larger debates that are happening about relief work, both in the sphere of Jewish nationalism. And Jewish relief work, but also reflecting pre war debates on these subjects. So that was interesting. And just accounting for the biases of the relief workers, I thought was something that I tried to do. A lot of the accounts were also written in retrospect, which was another problematic but interesting challenge. You've had these accounts that, for example, Steef or Guiterman had written several years after the war, and they represented themselves, they sort of self fashioned themselves in, in a very particular way as these kind of savior figures stepping in, you know, where Jewish society had been abandoned, for example, and really denigrating the role of rabbis or wealthy people who they almost invariably represented as having absconded from the front. So this, this is very prevalent in an ski's memoir, for example. So it's a lens through which they viewed their wartime service and relief work as being significant, but also, again, not necessarily corresponding to historical realities. And then I would say the other major limit I encountered was the gender and that the perspective of those accounts that I found written were 99% written by men. But we know, and I found evidence of women working in small numbers, but nonetheless being present in all of these different capacities as relief workers and nurses, teachers in soup kitchens, working with children as translators. And so I, you know, gender became an interesting challenge in terms of the sources and trying to piece together perspectives of women and families. So I would say again, like, there was such an abundance of sources, archival and published and, and otherwise, but whose perspectives were they representing? That was something I really kept in mind as I was writing.
- [28:38]
A
Yeah, thank you. So actually, let's, you know, stopping on gender for a moment. Some of what you found and what you write about is surprising, maybe not what people would expect the gendered perspective of this time and place to bring. So can you tell us a little bit more about what you found?
- [28:59]
C
Yeah, sure.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah.
- [29:01]
C
So gender was something I decided to tackle in a separate chapter because I just kept coming across women in such a marginal way and yet feeling that they were somehow completely central to the story of Jewish experience during the war as civilians, as refugees, as soldiers, wives, and that I wanted to tell their story, but I had to kind of find my way to them through all of these different tropes and ways of being represented. So the chapter that's about women, it's called Women Without Men. And that trope of women being alone and abandoned, the weeping woman with very much tropes that were present in all belligerent countries during World War I, that mobilized populations to fight and tried to mobilize Philanthropy, for the purposes of helping women. That was something I had to contend with. So that was one trope that was used on the one hand, in the press. I found images of women victimized, you know, everywhere, and these representations of women being with children and with the elderly, but no men, no male refugees in many of these, the ways that they were depicted in the press. But as I dug deeper and I caught the picture became more complex. I did find evidence of male refugees who had not gone off to the front or stayed at home to hold down the fort. They were simply not written very well into the record and their presence not really acknowledged. The other thing was that a lot of the ways women were represented in kind of ideal terms, depicted them very negatively. So there was the weeping woman on the one hand. Then there was. It's the opposite, which was the woman who had had a breakdown, who could no longer function, who could no longer. Longer take care of her children and family. And I read that as the Jewish press and the Jewish organization's way of sort of channeling anxieties. Will Jews survive the war? Will they survive resettlement and displacement if the home has been uprooted, if women and men can no longer take care of their children? And so, again, I was sort of battling and rubbing against all of these tropes and portrayals of women. And what I found was, yes, there were aspects of those that experience of suffering, of abandonment, of mental illness, that there was evidence of that in the records. But there was also much more complex understanding of how women responded to wartime challenges. The ways that they, for example, sought out relatives who had been lost during deportations or expulsions, who wrote to politicians to try to, you know, have them intervene on their behalf, who organized medical aid and who worked with refugees in all different kinds of ways or tried to help women who try to prevent women from falling into prostitution, for example. Women entered the public sphere during the war in all these interesting ways, some of them very dangerous, some of them even at the front. Piecing all of that record together was very, very important to me. But again, it was this dynamic of looking at the representations of women, the images of women, and contrasting that with the complexity of their experience that showed, you know, women were not without men. They were. It was women with men, but in extremely complex ways.
- [33:16]
A
And continuing on this sort of the refugee theme, a lot of this book is about movement, both forced and voluntary. And even voluntary is, you know, flight. It's not migration precisely. But a lot of Jews ended up much further east, into the interior of The Russian Empire. And you write about some of the encounters there with different types of Jews and also with non Jewish populations who hadn't been used to as large percentages of Jews. So I'd love to hear more about that.
- [34:00]
C
Yeah, I would say almost the second half of the book, I trace the paths of these refugees. Many of them were deported, mass deportations outside of what had been the Pale of Settlement. And the Pale, actually the imperial government temporarily abrogated the pale in August 1915, allowing this really huge concentration of Jews to move outside of the. The war zone. And so many went to Kharkiv, for example, was an important destination because it was very close to the border with the Pale. But I found Jewish communities resettling in large numbers as far east as Chita and Irkutsk and Tomsk and Omsk, and many Galician Jews also being deported from Galicia to these river valleys, for example, near Tomsk, and having to resettle there. And so the Jewish press sent reporters like Yaakov Leshinsky and many, many others to these places, following refugees to see how they were faring. And I think one of the things I was surprised to find is that the encounters between, for example, the settled Jewish populations, who were fairly small in number, as you said, greeting this sort of influx of people from the Pale who arrived traumatized, often with nothing, needing everything, with their arms outstretched, as the saying went, they were ambivalent, much the same way that Jews in Vienna were ambivalent toward the refugees who arrived there from Galicia. And you could draw parallels also with American Jews greeting East European Jewish immigrants before the war. On the one hand, they felt somewhat responsible for the fellow Jews as Jews, but they were enormously fearful and expressed that the presence of these Jews from the shtetls would compromise their relations with their Christian neighbors and sort of undo the integration that they had experienced over the previous decades of having lived outside of the Pale in the Russian interior for so many years, in some cases. So that was definitely one element of the encounter, I would say, in this other diaspora of Russian Jewry is the coming together of these two very different populations, one from the Pale and one from outside the Pale. Non Jews, interestingly noted that they viewed the reception of Jews by their fellow Jews to be really positive, in some cases noting that the Jews received each other so much better than, for example, Polish communities or Ukrainian communities who did not have that same kind of support, communal support, when they arrived. So that was interesting. But my favorite aspect of the story was really tracing how Jewish communities displaced, resettled, and in some Cases. I mean, in some cases, they completely gave up, just waited out, bided their time, wanting to go home. Such strong yearning to go home to the world they had known. But there was also a lot of resilience. I found, and these accounts of people, that the town of Samargon was very important in my studies. Samargon was destroyed by Pogroms in September 1915. The population that fled there ended up in large numbers in Kharkiv and in Nizhny Novgorod. And they became sort of legendary for recreating yeshivas and heders and the kind of thick culture that they had known in their shtetls and even their industry. They were known for their leather industry, which they managed to reconstruct in Nizhny Novgorod, which was. They were drawn to that city because of its centrality in leather production in the Russian Empire. So seeing that kind of movement, one thing that it clued me into is that these war years before the Revolution, all of these patterns that became much more accelerated, much more intensified with the revolution and after, of Jews becoming more urbanized Jews moving into places outside of the Pale or to cities within the Pale, these were processes that were really accelerated as a result of the war already and simply kind of given this additional boost by the revolution. So a lot of the instability, a lot of the kind of uncertainty of the war years really set the tone for everything that followed. The violence, but also the opportunities afforded by the revolution, the ways that Jews navigated their environments, very much informed by wartime experience. And that was sort of the hope with the book, that it would show the war as an event in its own right, not just sort of the coda to the empire, the end of one era, and not just the beginning or the prologue to the revolutionary era, but really war as an event that fundamentally shaped and had this transformative and generative effect, as well as destructive effect on, in this case, in East European Jewish life.
- [40:16]
A
Yeah, I think we have time for one more quick question from me, and then I'm going to take some of the questions from the Q and A for you. So the book, I mean, as you say, you're trying to show this distinct period. Spoiler alert. It doesn't have a happy ending. And you talk about these kind of ongoing reverberations of this war. And so I just want to see if you want to say something about, we find ourselves right now, three years just about exactly after the start of another war, taking place in many of the same locations in Ukraine. And if you see any ways in which this World War I experience of Jewish refugees. Is related to what's going on now.
- [41:17]
C
Yeah, well, one thing, as I was writing, finishing the book in 2022, 2023, I was struck by how the descriptions of the Russian army's invasion of Galicia in 1914, 1915, and then a second time in 1916, 17, the way that their occupation of Galicia so much, which is today western Ukraine, had parallels with the Russian army invading invasion of Eastern Ukraine and northern Ukraine and Kyiv,
- [41:56]
A
the
- [41:56]
C
imperialistic attempt to punish Ukrainian and Polish and Jewish cultures in 1915. You see parallels with that in the ways that Russia has attempted to erase Ukraine's identity as a sovereign state. And of course, I mean, I think refugees, wherever you find them in large numbers historically, they share so much in terms of their experiences. Whether, for example, in the period that I'm studying, it was really interesting to see the way that Jewish organizations, because of that prior culture of collective responsibility and resources being devoted to public welfare, they were almost ready in a way to expand and adjust to wartime realities of supporting fellow Jewish refugees. And I think that was rather true for the Jewish refugees of Ukraine in the current war as well. The ways that organizations in Israel and on the ground there really marshaled to support Jews, whether they wanted to stay in place or emigrate. So that was an interesting parallel to see. But again, the first images that we saw of the refugees were of women and children fleeing in the trains, however they could get out. And I was very mindful of thinking about them as more than images and thinking about them and really trying to humanize them as people and not just as symbols of the men at the front and the women fleeing with children. So that's been important, but that's important for every single conflict where there are refugees, not to lose sight of the people's humanity, to give them voice. And so I've been really heartened to see a lot of projects that are attempting to work with refugees from Ukraine that, for example, work with photography, work with language, work with memoir, documenting their experiences and really trying to create an archive and a chronicle of what they've been through for their own memory. So that experience is not lost. But they need to return. They need to rebuild and we shouldn't. I think it's very important not to idealize the refugee experience or romanticize it. It's not the way it should be, and there should be a swift capacity for them to return and rebuild in Ukraine.
- [44:58]
A
Thank you so much. I have lots more questions, but you and I, we speak with some frequency. Let me now Turn to some of the questions that people have posted in the Q and A, and I'm going to combine some of them. So there are a couple questions about pogroms. One person asked, how typical were they? And someone else asked similarly, what kinds of violence? Was there any warning who perpetrated them, when and where and when did they stop?
- [45:28]
C
Okay, so, yeah, pogroms. Important aspect of the book, largely the subject of the second chapter. Pogroms occurred throughout the war, but there was certain combination of factors that made them much more likely. And that was in both Galicia, occupied Galicia, and then in parts of the Pale that were contested between the armies. Whenever an army arrived, there was a potential for kind of anarchic rioting. And so a lot of violence tended to occur at that point. The greatest concentration of pogroms and the region where they took place was in Galicia, in what's now western Ukraine, and then in Lithuania between sort of south of Vilna, all around Vilna, parts of what is now Latvia, northern Poland, for example. I mentioned Samargon, near Minsk. Those were destroyed by pogroms during the period when the Russian army was retreating in the summer of 1915, right up through about September of that year. Often this was the sort of stereotypical image of the pogroms, but Cossack soldiers were advance units in the Russian army, and they were. Were known and had this reputation for being ruthlessly brutal with Jewish populations. And so there are accounts in my book of Cossacks robbing Jewish homes and sort of throwing material, throwing clothing, throwing objects out of houses and giving them to the local resident, local neighbors who had come for that reason to receive them. So the Cossacks were important as perpetrators. But again, I have to say there was an anarchic element to the pogroms. It was not military policy in any way. It actually went against military policy. Why they happen is that officers chose to look the other way and allowed them. Some did not allow them. Some stood up to the soldiers and said, we are going to be disciplined. There will not be violence here. And they maintain the discipline of the soldiers. But it's where the soldiers knew they had free rein and no possibility of punishment, that the pogroms were very, very likely.
- [48:09]
A
Thank you. We also have a couple questions about deportations, and one of them is about why. Why did the Russians bother? Why not just let the Jews fend for themselves? And other questions about sort of the experience of deportation. Yeah,
- [48:33]
C
why did the Russian army bother? They, at some level, the highest ranking people, at the level of generals believed that Jews posed a threat and that preemptively they should be removed from entire regions. And they use the language of cleansing, what we would call ethnic cleansing today. That was the exact language in Russian that they used so to prevent any subversive activity. And the Russian army in many of the places where Jews were deported from Lithuania, Latvia, those were some of the worst kind of worst deportations and the largest deportations in spring of 1915, those were places that the Russian army had lost earlier in the war and were about to lose again in the summer of 1915. And so it's from those places, places that they felt the army could not defend, that they expelled Jews. And as I mentioned, there was an earlier belief that Jews were this inherently incapable of loyalty to the Russian Empire or to the army, which was completely factually incorrect. And there were half a million Jewish soldiers that served in the Russian army. Not all willingly, of course, but many went with pride. And this was extensively documented in the Jewish press, the experience of soldiers. So there is also important work that was done by Oleg Budnitsky on to what extent were these rumors about Jews true, about espionage among Jews. And he found that Jews were no more likely as a people to spy or commit any kind of sabotage than were Polish people or Ukrainian people or the other large populations in those regions. So, yeah, I mean, it's that region, the same region that Napoleon overran in 1812 and was overrun again in 1915 and would be again 1941. These were those really sensitive areas in which the late Imperial army of late Imperial Russia just did not believe Jews should be there. Excellent.
- [51:03]
A
And you also answered two other questions that came in, in that very answer, because people had asked about Jews being accused of being traitors and also about military service. So this is a different. A less directly historical question. Somebody points out that this is a massive labor of scholarship. But are there any questions you couldn't find the answers to and that you hope to go back to?
- [51:33]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would love to do. Because I was working on the level of the empire, which is Eurasia, and the size of a continent, I could not do a deep dive into a lot of locations. You know, I was. I was left using examples that were recorded in the press or wherever I could find multiple people having visited the same place. And I could corroborate sources. But I would really love to dig into the stories that I found much more deeply of, you know, Jews who built villages from scratch, for example, that had been deported from Galicia, ended up in Siberia. And managed to survive for several years there. I would be very, very interested also to pursue the question of the Jewish communities. Jewish displaced people who ended up staying in places to. To which they had been deported. Some of them became very active in revolutionary movements. That's something I didn't talk too much about. But many of the displaced workers, for example, went right into the arms of the Bund and the Bolsheviks and other social democratic parties as a result of being displaced and needing work. And. And so I would be very curious to follow their paths in greater depth. There were just so many trajectories of different populations moving and movement that I tried to bring together in some coherence. But basically any aspect of the book, I think a lot more could be done.
- [53:35]
A
There's actually a lot of questions about individual places. Just what you're saying now that it's hard to talk about everything and I can't ask about all of them. I want to encourage people to write to Polly at University of Delaware if you have specific questions. But just one more, somewhat more general question from the Q and A. There's a few different questions about the sort of philanthropic innovation and. And does it carry forward. Does this have an influence on Jewish philanthropy or more generally?
- [54:09]
C
Yeah, I found that these organizations that grew as a result of the war. I mentioned the ord, also the oz, the Society for the Population of the Health of Jewish Population. Yeah, Jewish health. These outlasted the war. They continued to operate for years in some cases. And Ort is still around today, as is the JDC, which was founded in the United States in 1914 as a result of the war. But the JDC began in its first years by helping Jews in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But in the Russian Empire itself, these organizations and the relief workers. One of the most fascinating things for me was to trace the path of the relief workers after the war. I mentioned Yitzhak Gitterman. He was aiding Jews in Ukraine for five, six years, even through the Russian Civil War pogroms. And afterward he had so much experience doing that the JDC appointed him to be head of operations in Poland. And he worked there until 1943. And he. And he was sent to Treblinka. But that's an example of someone, you know, this whole cadre of relief workers who were really trained in innovating relief work during World War I, who continued, who didn't stop because the needs didn't stop, unfortunately, after the war had ended. But that was. Something was really important for me to have shown was their significance and the influence well after the war years had ended.
- [55:54]
A
Thank you so much. There are many more questions. I also encourage people to read the book. It's really it's also because of all the stories in it, it's a pleasure to read, although also difficult. And it's very clear. And there's just a lot of sense of attention to the, the people who were there. So with that, I think we're going to thank everyone for being part of today's program, for listening and for contributing your questions and your interest.
- [56:33]
C
And I want to add my thanks to Eliana, to Jonathan, and to Yivo and Julia for hosting us. This was really, really special for me. And please send me questions. Sam.