Book Reviews 229

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds. Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Borderlines: Russian and East European Jewish Studies) (Brighton, ma: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 270 pp., $69.00 (hb), isbn 9781618113139.

This well-produced volume contains revised versions of five papers about Soviet Jews during World War II that were presented at an international con- ference at New York University in 2008, four other articles, and three trans- lated memoirs. Part I deals with histories and includes essays by Mordechai Althuler (Israel), Joshua Rubenstein (us), Oleg Budnitskii (Russia), Gennady Estraikh (us), and Arkadi Zeltser (Israel). Employing as always an impressive range of sources, Altshuler concludes that “for a fair number of Jewish [] combatants, the direct encounter with , on the one hand, and the eruption of anti-Jewish hatred, on the other, brought about a change in their attitude toward their own ethnic identity.” Their previously strong faith in the Soviet dogma that there was no Jewish national identity was “seri- ously undermined,” “at least at the subconscious level.” It seems to me that this conclusion is plausible but has little support in the sources, and quite some evidence to the contrary. Altshuler himself acknowledges that correspondent Lazar’ Brontman and “many” others saw nothing special in the massacres of Jews. Altshuler writes also that the Soviet regime during World War II continued to deny that a Jewish nation existed. In contrast, Joshua Rubenstein in his text says that the public calls by Jews such as Ilya Ehrenburg meant that the denial was over. Rubenstein argues a point that is rapidly gaining support: “it is a fal- sification of the historical record to claim that the press did not cover [the Holocaust] at all.” He also argues that Ehrenburg was special, for this man who tried hard to alert the world “may well have been the first person, outside of the German High Command, to grasp the full magnitude of the Holocaust.” Rubenstein’s observations are followed by translations of Ehrenburg’s key pub- lications on the topic: “To the Jews” (August 1941), “Jews” (November 1942), “The Triumph of a Man,” on the poet Abram Sutzkever (April 1944), “On the Eve” (August 1944), and “To Remember” (December 1944). All texts were already available in English elsewhere, but it is useful to have them here together. Oleg Budnitskii analyzes the diaries written by Jewish Red Army soldiers. They wrote them despite a ban (which never seems to have been formalized, in an official document). It is surprising to find that the ban remained “quite open to interpretation.” In the case of the military interpreter Irina Dunaevskaia, for instance, Soviet military counterintelligence warned her not to disclose

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/18763324-04202007 230 Book Reviews military secrets but stopped short of saying she had to stop writing a diary altogether. The diarists analyzed by Budnitskii were all “hardcore Soviet patri- ots,” he notes: they knew exactly how they did not resemble but differed from the Jews in the new Soviet lands, those first annexed in 1939. They were and remained “Soviet people first and foremost,” even though they encountered plenty of among their comrades in arms. (People from Central Asia and the Caucasus were hated even more, Budnitskii adds.) “The authors of the diaries… did not draw any farreaching conclusions from such unpleas- ant incidents.” Budnitskii also finds evidence that despite the diarists’s experi- ences and the Soviet propaganda against the as a people, the diarists did not fully dehumanize the Germans. As for the issue of a growth or decline in their identity as Jews, Budnitskii notes cautiously that “some” considered their Jewishness innate, but they found it neither a hindrance nor valuable. There is no evidence that the war and the Holocaust greatly affected their identity. This is quite a contrast to Altshuler’s findings. Gennady Estraikh describes a surprising theme of Soviet prewar and war- time writing: friendship between Jews and Cossacks. He argues that the trope served the purpose of presenting each group as changed for the better thanks to Soviet policies: the Jewish collective farmers were unlike shtetl Jews, and the Cossacks had overcome antisemitism. Estraikh also argues that the Soviet glo- rification of Bohdan Khmelnytsky stemmed purely from a wish to curry favor with the Ukrainians; antisemitism had nothing to do with it. At the time, in 1943, foreign Jews thought otherwise: the New York-based daily Forverts, for instance, was outraged. Arkadi Zeltser analyzes the Soviet Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt and finds plenty of Jewish pride there, including even the equivalent of the phrase “great Russian people,” and “great Ukrainian people”—the “great Jewish people.” (There were also ambiguous references to “our people.”) Contrary to the inten- tions of the communist party bureaucracy, Zeltser writes, Eynikayt became a Jewish newspaper. Jewish heroism quickly became a prominent theme there, after the Jewish Antifascist Committee decided in May 1942 to systematically collect materials about Jews at war. Even late in the war, Zeltser notes, specific analogies to Jewish heroes of the distant past, such as Bar Kochba, passed the censor. All this was to change quickly when the war was over. Zeltser also argues that criticizing Nazi antisemitism was also a way to implicitly denounce Soviet anti-Semites. It was written, for instance, that not only the Nazis called Jews cowards, but also their “hangers on.” Zeltser cites a text by Ehrenburg in praise of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto; he calls it an article, but cites only an archival record, which raises doubt whether it ever appeared in print. And he seems to contradict himself

the soviet and post-soviet review 42 (2015) 223-243