Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 273 pages.

Abstract

Many American Jew are convinced that their ancestors fled the Russian Empire in the 1880s to flee pogroms and forced conscription, even of young Jewish boys. But as historians have long pointed out, forced conscriptions of young Jewish boys had ended decades before mass emigration. And yet in Jewish memory, the khapers (“grabbers”: Jews who captured and handed over Jewish lads to the tsarist recruiters) and conscription continue to loom large among tsarist Russia’s most cruel antisemitic po...