Birobidzhan railway station with menorah, Photo by Andshel, 2007
When I did book club visits in 2020 for my historical fiction novel The Nesting Dolls, I would end by asking my audience a question: What was the first independent Jewish state of the twentieth century?
Most listeners remained silent. They suspected a trick. Inevitably, one hand would go up, half in confusion, half isn’t‑it-obvious, and they would say, “Israel.”
Hardly anyone ever said, “Birobidzhan.”
Except that was, in fact, the first independent Jewish state of the twentieth century.
Birobidzhan, located on the border between Soviet Russia and China, was the first Autonomous Jewish Region of the twentieth century, predating Israel by almost two decades.
How did that happen?
In 1926, the fledgling government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was advised that “Jewish agricultural settlements (have) called forth a sharply heightened anti-Jewish mood.”
Translation: Communism took away land from Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic peasants and redistributed it among all Soviet citizens, which included Jews. Also, Jews who did not want to farm came pouring into the cities, competing with other unskilled laborers for the already limited pool of menial work.
Both of these developments vexed the farmers and the non-farmers alike. Since antisemitism had been officially outlawed by the newly formed, self-proclaimed workers “paradise” of the USSR, it annoyed those in charge that it still existed. It was an embarrassment to them and they decided that something needed to be done.
Their thinking was this: If you removed the Jews from the cities or the countryside, then you also eliminated the antisemitism.
But where to send them?
The Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on Land filed an eighty page report stating that the Jewish community would accept any piece of land the USSR decided to put them on. Except for Birobidzhan.
Why not Birobidzhan? Firstly, the territory was mostly swamp land, covered in gadflies and mosquitos. Locals burned fires to keep insects away from the cattle, and covered themselves in repelling ointment and netting. Secondly, the area was already populated by Koreans who’d migrated years earlier, and was frequently visited by Chinese warlords who crossed the border to check on their poppy (opium) fields. Additionally, the area was the new home of many Cossacks who’d fled East after the revolution. None of them would likely appreciate the sudden incursion of the relocated Jewish community.
Naturally, after reading the report, the Soviet government decided their newly created Jewish Autonomous Region would be in Birobidzhan.
In April 1928, 540 Jewish families and 150 individuals made the trek to Birobidzhan. There was no infrastructure for them. They lived in holes in the ground, dealing with the tail end of the rainy season. By May 1928, two-thirds of the settlers had returned to where they’d come from.
Nonetheless, during that same summer, the first Jewish collective farm in Birobidzhan was established. Called Birofeld, the farm subsumed the Cossack village of Alexandrovka, the first recorded incident of a Jewish community overtaking a Russian one.
Birobidzhan, located on the border between Soviet Russia and China, was the first Autonomous Jewish Region of the twentieth century, predating Israel by almost two decades.
In May 1934, the Communist Party granted Birobidzahn its official status as the Jewish Autonomous Region, proclaiming, “For the first time in the history of Jewish people, its burning desire for a homeland, for achievement of its own national statehood has been fulfilled.”
Fast forward to 1970s Odessa, USSR, where I grew up.
I never heard a word about Birobidzhan. My parents said that after World War II they’d come across stories of when some Jewish refugees moved there rather than returning to their bombed and occupied cities. My grandparents remembered when talk of Birobidzhan began, concurrent with Josef Stalin’s Great Terror. In between The Night of the Murdered Poets and The Doctors Plot, very few Soviet citizens were leaping out of their seats with enthusiasm to self-identify as Jews. It was bad enough their internal passports classified them as such under Nationality.
I first learned about Birobidzhan when I started researching the setting for my recent historical fiction, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region. My primary source was Masha Gessen’s Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region.
I also made use of Swarthmore College’s fabulous online archive, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion.
But one of my most fascinating finds came when my mother remembered she’d once seen a Russian language propaganda film starring the director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, Benjamin Zuskin, called Seekers of Happiness.
Released in the USSR in 1936, it told the tale of a disenchanted Jewish family settling in Birobidzhan. There, the land was rich and fertile, the livestock happy and fat, the fish so plentiful they literally leapt into nets, and – most importantly – life was so wonderful that everyone could work for the benefit of the state. In this film, the characters even found time to fall in love; sometimes with fellow Jews, sometimes with neighboring Russians.
Against all odds, my mother and I found Seekers of Happiness on YouTube. This film, more than anything, illustrated how the Soviets wanted potential immigrants to think life in Birobidzhan was, versus what Gessen described in their book, what the Swarthmore archives showed, and the truth documented in other first-hand accounts.
As my fictional characters learn in My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region, survival in (real-life) Birobidzhan was a very precarious and often unlikely thing.
Alliances were constantly changing. Political views deemed compulsory one day could be grounds for execution on the basis of treason the next.
One such example came after Lazar Kaganovitch, secretary of the Central Committee, Commissar of Communications, and colloquially known as the most powerful Jew in the USSR, visited Birobidzhan in February of 1936. He had dinner with the local party head, and praised his wife’s delicious Jewish cooking.
By August of 1936, that same party head was removed on charges that he’d been “unmasked as untrustworthy, counterrevolutionary, and a bourgeois-nationalist conspiring to create a murderous, Bundist, Nazi-Facist organization.” And the party head’s wife was accused of trying to poison Kaganovitch with gefilte fish. Possibly the most Jewish criminal charge ever filed.
This is the setting that Regina, the heroine of My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region, finds herself in when she flees from Moscow to Birobidzhan after she, too, is accused of being a traitor. The character is fictional. But the place and the consequences of seeking asylum there are, tragically, all too real.
Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her latest historical fiction, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region chronicles a little known aspect of Soviet and Jewish history. Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1977. Visit her website at: www.AlinaAdams.com.
