David Shneer Research Articles

David Shneer. Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph.

The postmemorial landscape of World War II has been shaped by well-known photographs. Endlessly reproduced, they crystallize the narratives of violence, conquest, and loss into a single image. Yet these iconic visual objects also have life stories of their own. In Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, David Shneer brings to life one such biography. The photograph at the center of his book shows the aftermath of mass executions, in early December 1941, of the inhabitants of Kerch, a port city in Crimea. Shortly after the city fell to the Germans on November 16, 1941, about seven thousand of the city’s Jews were rounded up and shot in an antitank trench in nearby Bagerevo. The focal point of the Kerch photograph is a female figure with arms outstretched, leaning toward a corpse of a man. When the photograph was first published in March 1942, in a photo essay in the Soviet publication Ogonek (Огонёк), the woman was identified as “P. I. Ivanova, discovering the body of her husband.” Around her is a frozen landscape strewn with corpses—the last victims of the Aktion were shot in the open field along the edge of the ditch. A woman’s body contorted in a posture of grief, her countenance hollowed by sorrow, is a familiar trope that conveys the ravages of war, the eternally feminine face of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. The titular grief in the photograph is amplified by the image’s ambiance created by portentous dark clouds in the background, which we now know were spliced into the original picture.

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, by David Shneer

The late David Shneer’s final monograph is an ambitious project: he focuses the entire book on a single iconic image and writes a ‘biography’ of that photograph, beginning with the events leading to its production and examining its continuing significance, from its first printing to the present day. The photograph at hand, simply titled ‘Grief’, depicts the aftermath of a Nazi mass killing following their occupation of Kerch, in Ukraine. ‘Biography’ summarises well Shneer’s approach to this image, as he emphasises the role of its creator, Dmitri Baltermants, in examining its interpretation throughout the twentieth century. Whether taking this photo, editing it or shaping its place in later exhibitions, Baltermants is rarely out of sight in the book. The result of this approach brings together the historical and the personal to provide a full picture of this image at different points in history. Shneer begins his biography before the creation of ‘Grief’ itself, looking at Baltermants’s approach to photography and relevant influences on his work. These include aesthetic and technical aspects of Soviet photography as well as the role and reach of photographs in an early twentieth-century Soviet context. In this framework, Shneer notes how newspapers formed the platform for photographic reports.

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph by David Shneer

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph by David Shneer

David Shneer (1972–2020)

David Shneer (1972–2020)

In Memoriam: David Shneer

In Memoriam: David Shneer

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph by David Shneer

Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph by David Shneer

On Slucki, Finder, and Patt's Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust

On Slucki, Finder, and Patt's Laughter After:Humor and the Holocaust Elyce Rae Helford Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust. Edited by David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 352 pp., ISBN 978-0-8143-4438-6 (pb), $34.99. I begin with a confession: I laugh at Holocaust-themed humor. From the Nazibashing wit of Mel Brooks to the taboo-breaking excess of Sarah Silverman, I find the subject of comedy after the Shoah fascinating and important. Thus, I share the interests of the editors of and contributors to Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust: the power and problematics of post-Holocaust humor are compelling and worthy of scholarly attention. Today, as survivors die and antisemitism (including denialism) raises its dangerous head once again, understanding the politics of laughter is vital. Conventional wisdom and traditional scholarship have posited that we must present the Holocaust seriously and realistically. Anything else, the argument goes, will demean, devalue, and potentially lead to denial. Such a supposition neglects problems with claims of authenticity and the limits of verisimilitude. Representations are all and always artificial. Moreover, post-Holocaust humor can point to the limits—even the failures—of Holocaust tragedies and melodramas. As Slavoj Žižek posits, comedy, unlike dramatic realism, "accepts in advance its failure to render the horror of the Holocaust."1 [End Page 259] The 1990s brought debates over the place of post-Holocaust humor in response to films including Train de vie (1998) and Jakob the Liar (1999) but especially Life Is Beautiful (1997). As the editors state, Roberto Benigni's picture "marked a turning point, if not in humorous representations of the Holocaust, then at least in discussions about the ethics and functions of such humor" (6–7). The collection Laughter After is possible, they argue, because the distance of twenty years have seen the "explosion of Holocaust humor on television, in stand-up comedy, and in literature in the Americas, Israel, Europe, and Australia" (7). Indeed, the volume offers valuable international and generic diversity, from Yiddish humor in Europe to Latin American caricaturas. One can only wonder what the editors might have concluded about the impact on Holocaust humor studies of the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit (2019). The editors divide the book, semi-historically, into two sections: "Aftermath" and "Breaking Taboos." "Aftermath" contains three chapters focused on Yiddish humor in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Netherlands and then shifts to post-Holocaust writing and film in two additional chapters about US texts dating from 1939 to 1972. "Breaking Taboos" contains nine chapters, all post-Holocaust in focus, from the 1960s to the present, in texts from Latin America, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States, including literature, film, television, stand-up comedy, newspaper comics, and shared jokes. If I am a bit unsure of the rationale for and effectiveness of the book's structure (there are no section introductions), I am entirely engaged by the wideranging content of the chapters themselves. Although the "classics" are covered in several chapters—for example, The Great Dictator (1940), The Producers (1969), and so on—the collection's linchpin is its trio of chapters on Yiddish humor. Anna Shternshis begins with "Hitler Hanging on the Tree: Humor and Violence in Soviet Yiddish Folklore of World War II." She presents a compelling archival study that interrogates the mobilization of communist ideology in jokes and stories collected between 1941 and 1947 by Soviet Yiddish journalists. Her goal would have been to compare such official discourse with uncensored Yiddish jokes, but these are available only via previously collected and published volumes. In this context, Shternshis posits that the Soviet collection reveals "an attempt by the state to use Yiddish humor as a weapon against fascism" (17). In "Too Soon? Yiddish Humor and the Holocaust in Postwar Poland" and "Is It Still Funny? Lin Jaldati and Yiddish Satire Before and After the Holocaust," [End Page 260] authors Marc Caplan and David Shneer consider additional Yiddish texts. The former analyzes the "conflicting imperatives of Yiddish humor and Holocaust commemoration" (40) through Moyshe Nudelman's 1947 volume Laughter through Tears, the Polish film Undsere kinder (1948...

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, written by David Shneer

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, written by David Shneer

David Shneer. Review of "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath" by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels.

David Shneer. Review of "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath" by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust by David Shneer (review)

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust by David Shneer (review)

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, David Shneer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 304 pp., cloth $39.95, paperback $32.50.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, David Shneer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 304 pp., cloth $39.95, paperback $32.50.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust by David Shneer (review)

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust by David Shneer (review)

Through Soviet Jewish eyes: photography, war, and the Holocaust

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust. By David Shneer. Jewish Cultures and the World. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. xiii, 282 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $39.95, hard bound.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust. By David Shneer. Jewish Cultures and the World. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. xiii, 282 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $39.95, hard bound. - Volume 70 Issue 4

David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

Specialiste de la culture yiddish des debuts de l’URSS, David Shneer signe avec cet ouvrage une passionnante histoire des photographes reporters juifs sovietiques qui participerent a la couverture de la guerre, et notamment de l’Holocauste en Union sovietique. L’etude depasse largement le cadre de la guerre pour offrir un portrait de groupe qui suit les protagonistes depuis leur lieu d’origine, souvent des villes du sud et de l’ouest de l’ancien Empire russe, jusqu’aux emplacements des massac...

Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture by Valerie A. Kivelson , Joan Neuberger (review)

REVIEWS 72I undermarketeconomy,the changingrole of literary organizations and of literary journals,and thegrowing impactofInternet publishing. PartTwo surveys a largenumberofliterary works published intheperiod in question.It looksat workswritten in Soviettimeswhichweresuppressed and re-published inthe1990s,suchas Pasternak's Doctor¿Qiwago and novelsby Nabokov,and on theimpactthatthereturn oftheseworksto theirnative milieuhad on thepost-Soviet reader.It looksat the role of anti-utopia in post-Soviet literature, represented bothbythere-publishing ofdissident works such as Nabokov'sInvitation toa Beheading and Zamiatin'sWeand by postSovietanti -utopias suchas Makanin'sLaz andTolstaia'sKys. Revisionist views ofhistory arediscussed atlength usingVladimov'sanalysis ofVlasov'srolein theGreatPatriotic Warin TheGeneral andHisArmy. Thispartofthebookgoes on to discussthehistorical detective novelsofAkuninand thewaytheyportraynineteenth -century tsarist Russia.The booktheninvestigates alternative viewsofhistory as wellas fantasies on historical themes, mainly in theworks of Sorokinand Pelevin,forexampleanalysing the mix of Civil War and contemporary hallucinations in Pelevin' s Chapaev andPustota. PartThreeisdevotedtoan overview ofparticular historical figures inpostSovietRussianliterature . The first halfofthissection is devotedtodepictions ofStalinand Stalinism inworks ranging from thefiction ofAksenov, Makanin and P'etsukhto Russian and Western(translated) biographiesof Stalin and historical accountsoftheStalinist period.The secondhalfofPartThree coversthethemeofRussia and theWestin post-Soviet literature, a theme actuallymore prominentin filmsof that period than in literature but indeedmaking a smallappearanceinworkssuchas Pelevin'sLifeofInsects or Generation P. Although thetitle ofthebookis oriented onlytowards literature, thissectionof thebook coversin some detailthe themeof theWest and Russia'srelationship withWestern culture infilm and television. Marsh'sbookwillbe a valuabletoolforstudents and teachers ofRussian contemporary literature and culture.It surveys muchoftheliterary output ofpost-Soviet Russia in theyearsin question,and morein-depth studiesof particular writers or themes wouldsurely buildon thisinitial investigation. Department ofLiterature, Filmand Theatre Studies University ofEssex Anat Vernitski Kivelson, ValerieA. and Neuberger, Joan(eds).Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture. Yale University Press,New Haven,CT and London,2008. xv + 284 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology.Selectedbibliography. Index.$45.00:£30.00. In compilingthiscollectionof fifty essaysthe editorshope to encourage readersto thinkmorecarefully about theirapproachto visualcultureand theimagesthey encounter; ctothink aboutimagesas images' (p. 1).Specifically, thisbookexplores thevariouswaysinwhichRussians- from medievaltimes to the presentday - have constructed, receivedand reacted to their 722 SEER, 88, 4, OCTOBER 2OIO nationalvisualculture. This is an ambitious taskfora single-volume workto undertake, butitis one thisanthology does remarkably well,withessaysby theeditorsand thefollowing: SimonFranklin, David M. Goldfrank, A. V. Chernetsov, Donald Ostrowski, Daniel Rowland,NancyKollmann,Michael S. Flier,LindseyHughes,ErnestA. Zitser,Gary Marker,Douglas Smith, ThomasNewlin,David L. Ransel,RichardStites, Laura Engelstein, Richard Wortman, AlisonHilton,Christopher Ely,WillardSunderland, StephenM. Norris,CatherineEvtuhov,Christine Ruane, Nadieszda Kizenko,Mark D. Steinberg,Louise McReynolds,James Cracraft,William G. Rosenberg, Christina Kiaer,RobertWeinberg, Francine Hirsch, DouglasNorthrop, Erika Wolf,Emma Widdis,AdrienneEdgar,Mike O'Mahony,EvgenyDobrenko, Karen Pétrone, David Shneer,MarkBassin,Susan E. Reid,Josephine Woll, Lilya Kaganovsky, Jane A. Sharp,PollyMcMichael,Roy R. Robson and Elena B. Smilianskaia, Helen Gosciloand Michael Kunichika.The chronologically -ordered and concisecontributions covermostareasofvisualculture including: books,icons,paintings, architecture, photography, cinema,applied arts, prints, maps,posters and advertisements. Although a numberofauthors refer tothetechniques employed inthecreation oftheir subjects, theprimary concernofmostiswith'theinteraction betweenproducers and consumers of thevisual'(p. 2) and thesubjective natureoftheact ofseeing.There is not the opportunity here to commenton each essay,therefore the following remarks drawattention tojusta fewand withreference to one ofthetrends thatrunsthroughout the book, the manifestation in visualcultureof £the interaction betweenRussiaand theWest'(p. 7). Kollmann examinesan earlyvisual reactionto Westernreligiousand politicalinfluence in theformoftheCap ofMonomakh.She notesthatthe alterations to itsoriginaldesignand the sixteenth-century mythassociated withit'linksRussiawith[. . .] Western heritage' (p. 38),rather thanwiththe Cap's truebirthplace, theMongolEmpire.The effects ofPetrine reforms on Russianimagemakingis thefocusof Hughes'sinsightful comparisonof a portrait ofTsar Alekseiwithone ofPeterI. Hughesspeculates at ourability todaytocorrectly readtheseportraits and thuscarefully dissects thedepiction ofeachruler. WhereasAleksei isportrayed as thepiousOrthodoxtsar, Peter's portrait emphasizesmilitary successand presents theviewerwith'Europe's vision of Peter' (p. 54). Smith'sstudyof an eighteenth-century snuffbox observes thegrowing influence oftheWeston thehabitsandbehaviour ofthe Russianelite.His thoughtful scrutiny ofthissmallobjet d'art considers notonly thenobility's adoptionof Europeanfashions, but theinvolvement ofsome, including the ownerof the snuffbox, in Freemasonry. Ransel discussesthe portrayalof nineteenth-century Russian merchants, concludingthat this professional group definedthemselves throughthe rejectionof European modes of portraiture, preferring an 'authentic Russian culturalexpression' (p. 80). The roleofconsumer culture, often identified withtheWest,is first raisedin Sunderland'sfascinating observations on theethnic,religious and culturaldiversity of the Russian Empire.He drawsattention to itsvisual presence inrestaurants, shops,prints and evenporcelain figures, arguing that REVIEWS 723 fortheordinary Russian'theexperience ofempire[. . .] was a matter ofthe...

Probing the Limits of Documentation

Probing the Limits of Documentation David Shneer (bio) Estoniia: Krovavyi sled natsizma 1941-1945. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniiakh estonskikh kollaboratsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny [Estonia: The Bloody Legacy of Nazism, 1941-45. A Collection of Archival Documents about the Crimes of Estonian Collaborators in World War II]. 266 pp. Moscow: Svobodnaia Evropa, 2006. ISBN 5973900878. Frank Grüner, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, eds., "Zerstörer des Schweigens": Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa ["Destroyer of Silence": Forms of Artistic Memory of National-Socialist Racial and Extermination Policy in Eastern Europe]. 552 pp. Cologne: Böhlau, 2006. ISBN-13 978-3412361051. €59.90. Latviia pod igom natsizma: Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov [Latvia under the Yoke of Nazism: A Collection of Archival Documents]. 344 pp. Moscow: Svobodnaia Evropa, 2006. ISBN 5973900770. Aron Shneer and Pavel Polian, eds., Obrechennye pogibnut´: Sud´ba sovetskikh voennoplennykh-evreev vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine. Vospominaniia i dokumenty [Destined to Perish: The Fate of Soviet Jewish POWs in World War II. Recollections and Documents]. 574 pp. Moscow: Novoe izdatel´stvo, 2006. ISBN 5983790692. Tragediia Litvy, 1941-1944 gg.: Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniiakh litovskikh kollaboratsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny [The Tragedy of Lithuania, 1941-44: A Collection of Archival Documents about the Crimes of Lithuanian Collaborators in World War II]. 398 pp. Moscow: Svobodnaia Evropa, 2006. ISBN 5973900827. On 5 October 2007, the New York Times profiled a French priest named Father Patrick Debois, who has spent the last ten years of his life searching the countryside of Ukraine for the burial sites of Jews murdered by Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.1 The story was noteworthy not because it was about the Holocaust, since the Holocaust routinely makes it onto the pages of this august newspaper. Rarely, however, has the newspaper's coverage of the Holocaust touched on the former Soviet Union. It seems that it took more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union for public discussion about the Holocaust in the East to become mainstream. Scholars from around the world have been studying how the Holocaust unfolded in the Soviet Union since the late 1990s, including the Russian Holocaust historian Il´ia Al´tman, the German historian Andrej Angrick, the American Israeli historian Amir Weiner, and the American political scientist Zvi Gitelman. Kritika has also devoted considerable attention to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union in the past five years.2 Finally, the steward of Holocaust Studies in the United States, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), has put the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to the front of its research agenda with two symposia dedicated to the subject in the past four years.3 Simultaneously, in Moscow, Al´tman's Holocaust Center, founded in 1992 as a center for education and research about the Holocaust in general and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union in particular, grows each year with training seminars for teachers, new publications, and conferences to bring together teachers and scholars from throughout the former Soviet Union.4 Gennadii Kostyrchenko continues to scour the archives for his important works on Stalin-era antisemitism, some of which relate to the Holocaust.5 [End Page 122] Why the new interest in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union? The simple and not completely satisfying answer is that the archives are open and the Soviet Union has fallen. The opening of archives has allowed people to research the subject in more depth; the end of communism means that Russian scholars can now put the Holocaust on their research agendas. A secondary effect of the fall of the Soviet Union was the migration of dozens of talented Russian, and often Jewish, scholars, who now make their homes in universities across the world and are bringing their research agendas and methodologies with them. First, they put Russia at the center of their research on Jewish history, not at the margins. Second, when it comes to World War II, they bring their post-Soviet understanding of the war and the Holocaust to their scholarship. They...

<i>New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora</i> (review)

Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora, by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer. York: York University Press, 2005. 214pp. $18.95. Buses whisked a group of Jewish college students from Ben Gurion airport to the room where the first Prime Minster of signed the Declaration of Independence in 1948. Welcome Home, the trip leader called out to the disoriented and exhausted participants in a Birthright program. As one of the counselors on this trip several years ago, I looked around to see how the students would respond. Even as a Jew who felt very strongly connected to Israel, I wondered whether the language of reflected my own understanding of the Diaspora-Israel relationship. I expected that the young adults wearing baseball caps and sweatshirts with college logos would find this message of homecoming even more bewildering less than two hours into their first trip to the country. I was reminded of this experience while reading David Shneer and Caryn Aviv's provocative study, Jews: End of the Jewish Diaspora. authors' argument that the State of no longer represents the central address for a new generation of contextualized my own response in the Hall of Independence as part of a larger trend. Contemporary Jews, Shneer and Aviv argue, feel increasingly at home and fully settled all over the world from San Francisco to Moscow. This phenomenon is transforming the role that plays in the construction of personal and communal Jewish identity among this population, whom they label the New Jews. No longer burdened with a sense of inferiority, outside the homeland have created locally nourished expressions of Jewish life and de-centered networks that render the dichotomy between and of questionable descriptive value. Subtitling the book The End of the Jewish Diaspora reflects the authors'conviction that the cultural, religious, and geographic hierarchies encoded within the concepts of Israel andDiaspora belie the experiences of the New Jews. Aviv and Shneer support their bold claims by providing ethnographic reports of thriving Jewish centers. These case studies illuminate overlooked corners of the Jewish world. We tour Crown Heights with the Hasidic Discovery Center, pray with a group of American tourists in neo-Hasidic synagogues in Safed, and visit with the first female rabbi of Russia. One particularly fascinating chapter, Castro, Chelsea, and Tel Aviv, explores how queer create different expressions of Jewish and queer identities in America and Israel. At the same time, queer also maintain global communities that transcend geography. Focusing on this rarely studied community provides an effective lens for clarifying the importance of considering local milieu in the formation of identity, the prevalence of multiple transnational Jewish networks each built around shared interests and concerns, and the give-and-take nature of the dialogue between Israelis and living elsewhere in the world. Other chapters, however, suggest that there remains a significant gap between the authors' ideal typology of New Jews as fully settled in their respective communities and the realities they encountered in their research. For instance, Let My People Stay, the first chapter in the book, sets out to replace perceptions of the Russian Jewish experience as moribund with images of a secure and thriving community which parallels patterns of North American Jewry. Yet the long discussion of the prevalence of antisemitism in Russia, particularly the disturbing popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, left me with more, rather than fewer, questions about the long-term viability of Russian Jewish life. …

Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 David Shneer Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, by Anna Shternshis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 252 pp. $24.95. The law of unintended consequences defines Anna Shternshis' fascinating new book, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet government enacted policies to eliminate perceived injustices from the tsarist regime and to turn its multiethnic empire into a Soviet nation. Soviet Jews were some of the biggest beneficiaries of these new policies. Old pre-revolutionary laws that restricted Jews' mobility and access to education were eliminated; this change caused a social revolution, with Jews migrating, both physically and metaphorically, to the centers of power. At the same time, the government engaged in a cultural revolution to create a new kind of Soviet Jew. Several scholars have examined this cultural revolution, which took place primarily in Soviet Jews' designated native language, Yiddish, and have looked at the who, what, where, when and why's of Soviet Jewish culture. But Shternshis asks a different question—what the results of this social and cultural revolution were. How did Soviet Jews understand Jewish culture? What did being Jewish mean to those targeted by this cultural revolution? Historians are notoriously bad at answering questions like these. In general it is much harder to find out what consumers of culture thought, and much easier to look at what and how culture was produced. Most everyday theater goers, newspaper readers, and music listeners don't leave materials in archives explaining their motives. So Shternshis went directly to the source and conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews on three continents over four years to find out just what it meant to those who grew up in interwar Soviet Union to be a Soviet Jew. She focuses on the interwar period when there was a concerted state effort to transform, in her words, "Jews into Soviets," to eliminate old forms of Jewish culture and identity and create new forms of positive identification with the state. Shternshis complicates the standard narrative of Soviet Jewish history that says that Jews identified as Jews only through identities ascribed to them—by the state, in their passports (which had a line for nationality), and through state and social antisemitism. Shternshis finds that this generation of [End Page 176] Soviet Jews identified as Jews because of Soviet Yiddish culture, by listening to certain musicians, seeing certain movies and being together as Jews, even if, according to Shternshis, this was not what the government intended. An example from Soviet Yiddish culture—the Yiddish secular schools established by the government were, according to Shternshis, established to propagandize to Jewish children, teaching them the evils of Judaism, the class problems of major Jewish holidays, and the way the rabbinic elite oppressed Jews. In fact, most of her respondents do not positively identify with Judaism, suggesting that the schools were a success. But her students also remember feeling very Jewish about attending the schools, in which nearly all the students were Jewish, where different schools' sports teams played one another, pitting Jews against Ukrainians, and in which they learned about Yiddish literature and developed an appreciation for writers like Sholem Aleichem. Shternshis sees this as Jews "on the ground" complicating the intentions of those in Moscow. An example from Russian-language Jewish culture—an overwhelming number of her respondents talked about the 1936 Russian-language film Seekers of Happiness as the most important Jewish film they remember seeing. The film depicts a Jewish family coming to the Soviet Union to develop a communal farm in Birobidzhan, the far eastern territory designated the "Jewish autonomous region" in 1934. What struck Shternshis in her interviews was that her respondents identified with the film's negative character, a stereotype of the "old" Jew in the film named Pinya, and not with the "new" Soviet Jews, who were building the commune. Pinya is nervous, talks about money, can't work collectively, and spends the whole movie searching for gold rather than laboring. And yet, most of her respondents remember some...

Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930 Harriet Murav Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918-1930, by David Shneer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 300 pp. $45.00. The study of Russian-Jewish culture in the twentieth century is undergoing a major revision. Scholars are increasingly moving away from the tragic view of Jewish victimization that long dominated the field, and are instead developing alternative approaches that give greater emphasis to what Russian Jews created and built as members of Soviet society. Among recent studies that take this revisionist stance may be included, for example, Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish [End Page 153] Century, Gennady Estraikh's In Harness, and Jeffrey Veidlinger's The Moscow State Yiddish Theater. David Shneer's Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture makes a significant contribution to this new trend by offering in the place of the standard tragic narrative of Soviet Jews a fresh picture of the creation of a culture that was both Soviet and Jewish, but Jewish in a new way, with crucial changes to Jewish models of time, space, and identity. The Yiddish language itself was key to the Jewish intelligentsia's view of the possibilities for Jewish peoplehood in the new classless society. In focusing on Yiddish print culture in particular, including, graphic and visual material, the book tells the story of Soviet Jewish culture differently from the way it has been told before, and offers a detailed explanation as to why it should be told differently. One of the most crucial points Shneer makes has to do with the self-creation and self-regulation of secular Soviet Jewish culture in Yiddish. The standard picture of the tragic opposition between the Soviet state and the Yiddish writer is false, according to Shneer, because Jews were part of the Soviet state and controlled their own cultural activity, at least in the period in question. Unlike other studies that focus on nationality policy from the perspective of the center, Shneer offers a detailed and cogent picture of the people, institutions, publication venues, literary groups, ideology, major battles, and literary works that were central to Soviet Yiddish print culture in the early years of the Soviet Union. The work provides an in-depth history of Yiddish, which, while focusing on the modernization of Yiddish in the Soviet period, also contextualizes the Soviet-era controversies in light of the nineteenth-century trajectory of Yiddish and the language wars of the earlier period. By providing a detailed explanation of the Yiddish publishing industry, its internal censorship apparatus, and the numerous Yiddish writers' groups, framed by a discussion of the parallel Russian literary circles, Shneer offers a densely textured narrative of the history of Yiddish literature as an institution, providing, in addition, some discussion of comparable developments of other so-called national literatures. Finally, the book gives portraits of the great writers and critics of the era, focusing particularly on the poet Izi Kharik. It is in his discussion of Kharik that Shneer is particularly successful in demonstrating that Soviet Yiddish literature was not merely "national in form, socialist in content" but was instead deeply engaged with Jewish literary forms and tropes, Jewish tradition, and with current trends in Russian literary modernism. Not political zealotry, but ambivalence, specifically between yearning for the new society and mourning the loss of the old, dominated Kharik's work. Kharik, according to Shneer, offers a window into the "simultaneous psychological process of self-creation an self-destruction" that was so characteristic of Yiddish writers of the era (p. 184). [End Page 154] All students of Soviet Yiddish interested in revising the lachrymose view face the problem of telling the end of the story of Soviet Yiddish culture. Instead of the conventional conclusion, Shneer offers a reflection on this central question in the afterward of his study. He points out that the centralization of control over culture in the early 1930s did not mean the end of Soviet Yiddish. Shneer also emphasizes the ambivalence with which the Jewish intelligentsia regarded their own project. The question may be raised, however, as to whether Shneer in some way ends up embracing the tragic...