The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History

The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History

Author: Antony Polonsky

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 711

ISBN-13: 1789624835

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A very readable and comprehensive overview that examines the realities of Jewish life while setting them in their political, economic, and social contexts.


Survival on the Margins

Survival on the Margins

Author: Eliyana R. Adler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0674988027

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Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.


Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959)

Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959)

Author: Katharina Friedla

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1644697513

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Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.


The Jews in Poland and Russia

The Jews in Poland and Russia

Author: Antony Polonsky

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9781800341067

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Each of the three volumes of this work provides a comprehensive picture of the realities of Jewish life in the Polish lands in the period it covers, while also considering the contemporary political, economic, and social context. This volume, from 1881 to 1914, explores the factors that had a negative impact on Jewish life as well as the political and cultural movements that developed in consequence: Zionism, socialism, autonomism, the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Jewish urbanization, and the rise of popular Jewish culture.


The Jews of Pinsk, 1881 to 1941

The Jews of Pinsk, 1881 to 1941

Author: Azriel Shohet

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-01-09

Total Pages: 794

ISBN-13: 0804785023

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The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 at www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1442.


Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia

Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze

Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Published: 2013-12-03

Total Pages: 665

ISBN-13: 1611684552

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This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.


Shelter from the Holocaust

Shelter from the Holocaust

Author: Mark Edele

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2017-12-04

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 081434268X

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This pioneering volume will interest scholars of eastern European history and Holocaust studies, as well as those with an interest in refugee and migration issues.


Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46

Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46

Author: Norman Davies

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1991-12-02

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1349217891

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This book is the first to deal with the impact on the Jews of the area of the sovietization of Eastern Poland. Polish resentment at alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets between 1939 and 1941 affected the development of Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi rule and in the USSR. The role of these conflicts both in the Anders army and in the Communist-led Kosciuszko division and 1st Polish Army is investigated, as well as the part played by Jews in the communist-dominated regime in Poland after 1944.


The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story

The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story

Author: Ellen Friedman

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2017-11-13

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0814344143

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A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive—the largest population of Jews who endured—for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven—a name given to them by their fellow refugees—were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Storybrings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors’ accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author’s reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory—one that is sure to resonate with today’s exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.