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Jewish History (2014) 28: 237239 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 DOI: 10.1007/s10835-014-9208-z
Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. By Elissa Bemporad.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp. 276. $28.00. ISBN: 9780253008220.
BRIAN HOROWITZ
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
This books title has two key words that reect the authors primary interests in the history of the Jews of Minsk: becoming and experiment. Bemporads goal is to study movement, change, and mobilization in Jewish lifein family, education, workplace, home, and so on. Although Bemporad does not say so explicitly, she wants to show lives unfolding in the 1920s mainly by presenting large numbers of valuable snapshotssnapshots of Jews involved in buying and selling kosher food, looking for work, deciding what educational institution ts their needs, interacting with the authorities, and more.
There are many dimensions to the transformation of Jewish Minsk in the early 1920s: changes from Jewish to Soviet, bourgeois to Soviet, Bundist to Soviet. Although all avenues lead to the same end point, the nal result is not the focus here. Bemporads project is to trace change. And for Minsk the capital of Belarus (Belorussia at the time)that means the processes by which Jews were transformed into Soviet citizens, Yiddish transformed into a state language, academic scholarship on Jewish culture given the respect of the state, Jewish women turned into political actors, and then all of this destroyed by the same state apparatus that initiated these changes in the rst place. It is a whirlwind story. To trace this history as it unfolded, rather than taking a xed glance back, is to see more than tragedy: during the rst two decades of Soviet rule, Jews in Minsk conducted an intense experiment to remake their culture, their language, their society, and themselves.
To accept this version of the story of Jews in the Soviet Union, one needs to break with the...