UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48x3j58s Author Zavadivker, Polly Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ BLOOD AND INK: RUSSIAN AND SOVIET JEWISH CHRONICLERS OF CATASTROPHE FROM WORLD WAR I TO WORLD WAR II A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Polly M. Zavadivker June 2013 The Dissertation of Polly M. Zavadivker is approved: ______________________________ Professor Nathaniel Deutsch, Chair _______________________________ Professor Murray Baumgarten _______________________________ Professor Peter Kenez _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Polly M. Zavadivker 2013 Table of Contents Table of Contents iii Abstract iv Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction Witnesses to War: Russian and Soviet Jews as 1 Chroniclers of Catastrophe, 1914-1945 Chapter 1 Fighting 'On Our Own Territory': The Relief, Rescue and 54 Representation of Jews in Russia during World War I Chapter 2 The Witness as Translator: S. An-sky's 1915 88 War Diary and Postwar Memoir, Khurbn Galitsye Chapter 3 Reconstructing a Lost Archive: Simon Dubnov and 128 'The Black Book of Imperial Russian Jewry,' 1914-1915 Chapter 4 Witness Behind a Mask: Isaac Babel and the 158 Polish-Bolshevik War , 1920 Chapter 5 To Carry the Burden Together: Vasily Grossman 199 as Chronicler of Jewish Catastrophe, 1941-1945 Conclusion The Face of War, 1914-1945 270 Bibliography 278 iii Abstract Polly M. Zavadivker Blood and Ink: Russian and Soviet Jewish Chroniclers of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II This study is about three wars that took place in Eastern Europe between 1914 and 1945 and how Russian and Soviet Jews wrote about them. It focuses on the figures S. An-sky (1863-1920), Simon Dubnov (1860-1941), Isaac Babel (1894- 1940), and Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). During the First World War, An-sky provided humanitarian relief to Jewish civilians along the Eastern Front, and Dubnov was a historian and Jewish national rights activist. In 1920 Babel was a propagandist with the Red Army during the Polish-Bolshevik War. Throughout World War II Grossman served as a frontline reporter with the Red Army. Each figure witnessed and wrote about Jewish populations that suffered from military violence in the multi- ethnic frontier between historic Poland and Russia that became sites of fighting in each war. This is the first study to compare Russian and Soviet Jewish war writing from 1914 to 1945 from a historical perspective. It explores: 1) How the experience of war in the twentieth century has correlated with the expression of Jewish identity; 2) The multiple influences and constraints, including Russian and Jewish cultural values, political goals, and wartime censorship, that have shaped the representation of Jewish war history; 3) How different generations of Jewish intellectuals depicted Jews as a people, or nation, in a time of crisis; and 4) The ways that each of the writers' iv individual efforts to make sense of war related to their contemporaries' representations of Jewish civilians. The sources for this study are non-fictional texts written in Russian and Yiddish during wartime or immediately after, including diaries, memoirs, letters, documentary anthologies and journalism. Russian and Soviet Jewish war chroniclers are viewed as active participants in the histories that they sought to describe. Their writings are interpreted as chronicles, or first drafts about the catastrophic events that they witnessed. This study's main finding is that these chroniclers helped to forge a distinctly Russian Jewish historiography of war that preceded and encompassed the period of the Holocaust. This finding contributes to the study of historiography, modern Jewish history, and national groups in Imperial Russia and the USSR. v For my father, Phil Zavadivker, and in memory of my mother, Maryana Zavadivker (1949-2007) vi Acknowledgements It is an honor to thank everyone who has supported me in graduate school: I am most grateful to my advisor, Nathaniel Deutsch, for his encouragement over the years. He has provided a model of intellectual innovation that I hope to carry forward. I profoundly appreciate Murray Baumgarten for all of the wisdom and incisive scholarly advice he has shared with me. I also wish to thank Peter Kenez for imparting his broad knowledge of European and Jewish History, and for his legendary dark humor. It has been my good fortune that Harriet Murav agreed to serve on my committee after we met while studying Yiddish at Tel Aviv University. She continually inspires me with her groundbreaking work. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Bruce Thompson and Jonathan Beecher of UC Santa Cruz for encouraging this study in its early stages. For the illuminating conversations I had at Stanford, I thank Gabriella Safran, Gregory Freidin, Steven Zipperstein and Amir Weiner. I wrote the majority of this dissertation in Philadelphia, and would like to thank Benjamin Nathans for welcoming me to the vibrant Russian History scene at the University of Pennsylvania. It is also a pleasure to thank Robert Weinberg for inviting me to give a paper at the Delaware Valley Seminar in Russian History, where I received valuable feedback on Chapter 3. I am deeply grateful to Carol Avins for sharing sources related to Babel's war diary and for commenting on my translation of An-sky's war diary. I thank Robert Chandler, Pietro Tosca, and John and Carol Garrard for sharing Grossman-related documents and creating finding aids that allowed archival work to go more quickly. I vii thank Grossman's son Fyodor Guber for discussing memories of his father with me. For generously opening her home to me in Kiev during a research trip in 2011, I am grateful to Lilia Kisilevskaia. And I am profoundly indebted to Irina Paperno for teaching a captivating (and what turned out to be) haunting course on "the Soviet experience" that I took as a student at UC Berkeley. For invariably interesting conversations and e-mail exchanges, I wish to thank Kiril Feferman, Karel Berkhoff, Patrick Finney, Gennady Estraikh, Adam Teller, Arkadii Zel'ster, Wendy Lower, Yuri Slezkine, Olga Litvak, Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, James Clifford, Omer Bartov, Nancy Sinkoff, Paul Glasser, Eric Lohr, Benjamin Nathans, Simon Rabinovitch, Peter Holquist, and David Engel. I offer thanks to the knowledgeable librarians and archivists at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive in Washington, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Slavic Reference Services at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Jewish History in New York, and University of Pennsylvania's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. A special word of thanks goes to Vadim Altskan of the USHMM, and Bella Noham of Yad Vashem. At UC Santa Cruz I received greatly appreciated financial support from the Program in Jewish Studies, the Lisa and Ernst Auerbach Family Fellowship in Jewish Studies, the Institute for Humanities Research, the Graduate Division, and the Department of History. I am also grateful to the following private foundations and organizations for these awards: the Targum Shlishi Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship, the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust viii Studies, the Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Fellowship in Jewish Culture from the Center for Jewish History. I could not have finished graduate school without my family's help. The tremendous amount of support they have given me exceeds the credit I can possibly give them here. It is with great affection that I thank my sister Allison Gervis, my brother-in-law Jason Berman, and my parents-in-law Barbara and Phil Berman. Finally, I am above all grateful to my husband Jeffrey Berman for his love and inspiration. He has also rescued my own documents from the electronic dust bin of history more times than he probably cares to remember. Our daughter Miriam doesn't yet know what the piles of books in our house are all about, but completing this dissertation would have been far more difficult without the joy she brought me. I began graduate school one year after the untimely death of my mother, Maryana Zavadivker. I felt compelled to write about Vasily Grossman in part because he attempted through writing to come to terms with his mother's death. In very different circumstances from Grossman's, writing this dissertation became a way for me to honor my mother's memory, and move beyond the pain of her death. My father, Phil (Yefim) Zavadivker, has unconditionally supported my goal to become a historian. He and my mother, who in 1979 emigrated from Kiev to the United States, shared memories with me that sparked a fascination with Soviet and Jewish history. This fascination evolved into the intellectual journey that led to graduate school. I dedicate this work to them, with love and gratitude. ix Introduction Witnesses to War: Russian and Soviet Jews as Chroniclers of Catastrophe, 1914-1945 "The time for writing "War and Peace" will come in the future. Now is a time of War without quotation marks—not a novel, but life." -Il'ia Erenburg, 19411 This study is about three wars that took place in Eastern Europe from 1914 to 1945 and how Russian and Soviet Jews wrote about them.2 These writers witnessed and survived World War I, the Polish-Bolshevik War, and World War II, respectively. These wars, like all wars, were contests that caused extraordinary amounts of damage to people and places.