The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War at 100: New Trends, New Sources Edited by Elissa Bemporad, Thomas Chopard
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War at 100: New Trends, New Sources edited by Elissa Bemporad, Thomas Chopard Issue n. 15, August 2019 QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC QUEST N. 15 Editors Guri Schwarz (Università degli Studi di Genova, Editor in chief), Elissa Bemporad (Queens College of the City University of New York), Laura Brazzo (Fondazione CDEC),Tullia Catalan (Università degli Studi di Trieste), Cristiana Facchini (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna), Gadi Luzzatto Voghera (Fondazione CDEC), Dario Miccoli (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Michele Sarfatti (Fondazione CDEC), Marcella Simoni (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Ulrich Wyrwa (Universität Potsdam). Editorial Assistants Matteo Perissinotto (Univerza v Ljubljani, Managing Editor), Sara Airoldi (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), Chiara Renzo (Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia), Piera Rossetto (Centrum für Jüdische Studien, Universität Graz). Book Review Editor Miriam Benfatto (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna) English Language Editor Elen Rochlin Editorial Advisory Board Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University), Paolo Luca Bernardini (Università dell’Insubria), Dominique Bourel (Université de la Sorbonne, Paris), Michael Brenner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Enzo Campelli (Università La Sapienza di Roma), Francesco Cassata (Università degli Studi di Genova), Marco Cuzzi (Università degli Studi di Milano), Roberto Della Rocca (Dipartimento Educazione Cultura e Cultura- Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane), Lois Dubin (Smith College, Northampton), Jacques Ehrenfreund (Université de Lausanne), Katherine E. Fleming (New York University), Anna Foa (Università La Sapienza, Roma), Ada Gigli Marchetti (Università degli Studi di Milano), François Guesnet (University College, London), Alessandro Guetta (INALCO, Paris), Stefano Jesurum (Corriere della Sera, Milano), András Kovács (Central European University, Budapest), Fabio Levi (Università degli Studi di Torino), Simon Levis Sullam (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Germano Maifreda (Univesità degli Studi di Milano), Renato Mannheimer (ISPO, Milano), Dan Michman (Yad Vashem, Jerusalem), Michael Miller (Central European University, Budapest), Alessandra Minerbi (Fondazione CDEC, Milano), Liliana Picciotto (Fondazione CDEC, Milano), Marcella Ravenna (Università di Ferrara), Milena Santerini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano), Perrine Simon-Nahum (EHESS, Paris), Francesca Sofia (Università Alma Mater Studiorum di Bologna), David Sorkin (Yale University), Emanuela Trevisan Semi (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Christian Wiese (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main). QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History Journal of Fondazione CDEC ISSN: 2037-741X via Eupili 8, 20145 Milano Italy Reg. Trib. Milano n. 403 del 18/09/2009 P. IVA: 12559570150 tel. 003902316338 fax 00390233602728 www.quest-cdecjournal.it [email protected] Cover image credit: Manuil Shechtman, Settlers, 1929 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Settlers_(Manuil_Shechtman).jpg) II QUEST N. 15 Contents FOCUS Elissa Bemporad, Thomas Chopard Introduction p. V Polly Zavadivker Contending with Horror: Jewish Aid Work in the Russian Civil War p. 1 Pogroms Harriet Murav Archive of Violence: Neighbors, Strangers, and Creatures in Itsik p. 49 Kipnis’s Months and Days Valérie Pozner Pogroms on Screen. Early 20th Century Anti-Jewish Violence and the p. 74 Limits of Representation Christopher Gilley Beat the Jews, Save...Ukraine: Antisemitic Violence and Ukrainian State- p. 111 Building Projects, 1918-1920 Thomas Chopard Ukrainian Neighbors: Pogroms and Extermination in Ukraine p. 139 1919-1920 Brendan McGeever Red Antisemitism: Anti-Jewish Violence and Revolutionary Politics in p. 171 Ukraine, 1919 III QUEST N. 15 REVIEWS James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. A Shared History? by Arturo Marzano p. 196 Yifat Gutman, Memory Activism. Reimagining the Past for the Future of Israel-Palestine by Tamar Katriel p. 200 Alan Mintz, Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S. Y. Agnon by Dario Miccoli p. 206 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams. European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century by Alyssa Reiman p. 210 Michal Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks. The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel by Avihu Shoshana p. 214 Sibilla Destefani (ed.), Da Primo Levi alla generazione dei «salvati». Incursioni critiche nella letteratura italiana della Shoah dal dopoguerra ai giorni nostri by Martina Mengoni p. 221 Shira Klein, Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism by Gadi Luzzatto Voghera p. 226 David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel C. Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodziński, Hasidism: A New History by Ira Robinson p. 230 Sunaina Maira, Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine by Jacob Eriksson p. 234 IV QUEST N. 15 – FOCUS The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War at 100: New Trends, New Sources Introduction edited by Elissa Bemporad, Thomas Chopard On June 16, 1919, following a violent pogrom during the night, a medical team was dispatched to the shtetl of Kitaigorod (Kytaihorod), in the Podolia region in Ukraine. The team set up a makeshift infirmary to provide relief and medical treatment for victims. It also collected information about the unfolding of events during the preceding night and recorded the numbers of casualties. To assess the real extent of damage, injuries, and loss of life, the medical team inspected the homes of the shtetl’s inhabitants, most of whom were too traumatized to venture outside. The team noted the shattered glass in the windows and the broken doors of the buildings, which had been emptied of everything, even of the least valuable things. There were no samovars left – all had been looted – and therefore no water could be boiled to use in tending the wounded. “Traces of bullets are seen on the walls and ceilings of many homes. But most importantly,” wrote one of the medical team’s members, “there is blood everywhere… Kitaigorod is literally covered in blood. There is clotted blood on the pavements, on the walls, on the street…”1 In the official report he sent to the nearby larger Jewish community of Kamenets- Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi), the same writer emphasized how uncommon what he had witnessed was. His report cites the high proportion of casualties; he notes the fact that the number of the dead exceeded that of the wounded; and he remarks upon the unusual brutality of the pogrom, in which families had been massacred in their entirety and children killed before their parents’ eyes. The report concludes with these words: “We have reached the tragic conclusion that the carnage in Kitaigorod is unparalleled, even in the history of anti-Jewish pogroms.”2 But the events in Kitaigorod actually constituted only one of the thousands of pogroms that overwhelmed the Jewish population of the hundreds of towns and cities of the former Tsarist Empire, all as part of an unprecedented wave of violence 1 YIVO Archives, Tcherikower Collection, RG 80, folder 360, p. 32863 (Memorandum about the pogrom in Kitaigorod, June 19, 1919). According to the report, 72 of the approximately 400 shtetl residents had been murdered during the pogrom. Unlike the outcome of most outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of the murdered surpassed the number of the wounded. 2 Ibid., pp. 32864-5. V Elissa Bemporad, Thomas Chopard against civilians unleashed during the Russian Civil War (1917-1921).3 Because of their death toll, their intentional focus on killing and annihilation, their degree of destruction, and their scope of sexual violence, in their extent and impact the pogroms of the Russian Civil War are overshadowed only by the Holocaust.4 Like the writer from the medical team in Kitaigorod, victims of the violence also perceived the stark difference between earlier instances of anti-Jewish outbreaks and the pogroms of the civil war. In order to convey their experience and the intensity of violence, witness accounts in Yiddish preferred the term khurbn, or “destruction.”5 In the Russian- language accounts, the terms “slaughter” (reznia) and “blood bath” (krovavaia bania) came to replace “pogrom.” Some victims tried to find a standard of comparison for the events by comparing the violence to the Armenian genocide of 1915.6 The historian Elias Tcherikower, who devoted most of his life to the meticulous collection of witness accounts and documents about the pogroms of the civil war, referred to the violence as one of the worst catastrophes in Russian Jewish history.7 The Russian Civil War was a chaotic and ruthless conflict among a spectrum of more or less organized, more or less well defined troops and armies striving to gain political and territorial control after the downfall of the Tsar and following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Red Army fought in the name of Bolshevik rule, and faced the White movement, a coalition of anti-communist forces trying to take over post- 3 More than 1,200 pogroms took place in more than 800 localities in lands of the former Russian Empire. 80 percent of these took place in Ukraine. See Kniga pogromov. Pogromy na Ukraine, v Belorussii i evropeiskoi chasti Rossii v period grazhdanskoi voiny 1918-1922 gg. Sbornik dokumentov, ed. L. B. Miliakova, (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), XXVIII. 4 On mass rape during the civil war pogroms, see Irina Astashkevich, Gendered Violence: Jewish