When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia’s Jews during this time. A Nation of Refugees uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them.
The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia’s Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution.
Nonfiction
A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I
January 16, 2023
Discussion Questions
In the century since the end of the First World War, historians have documented the cataclysm in countless volumes that seem to have covered every aspect of the Great War. Hence, it is striking that Polly Zavadivker uncovers a story of major significance for both modern Jewish and European history that has not been studied systematically until the publication of this book: how did the five million Jews in the Russian Empire experience the war and its violence on the Eastern Front? How did Jewish civilians and activists work to provide assistance for the Jewish communities displaced multiple times over the course of the war? And what was the impact of mass Jewish displacement and the creation of international Jewish relief organizations on subsequent Jewish political, social, and economic development? Based on meticulous research in archival collections in New York, Russia, and Ukraine, along with an analysis of the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, political and cultural leaders, Polly Zavadivker documents the impact of the war on East European Jewish civilization and the grassroots organization of a humanitarian campaign that would endure long after the war and the revolution.
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