Correspondence in Yiddish between personel in Red Army and their relatives during Soviet German war, 1941-1945

Abstract

Letters in Yiddish represent a special phenomenon in the war correspondence. They differed from the letters in the general flow of correspondence by a number of features. The fate of the Jews who after the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941 were put on the brink of extinction gave them an especially dramatic color. In the frontline and in the rear the Soviet Jews were experiencing anti-Semitism on the part of both the authorities and the local population. The correspondence in Yiddish reflects all these problems and gives a notion of the actual state of affairs. The article is based on several tens of letters in Yiddish written in 1941-1945 and sent from the areas of evacuation to the front and back.