Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a work of impassioned historical excavation. Classified primarily as historical nonfiction, the book nevertheless variously reads like an adventure, a Shakespearean tragedy, and a contemporary memoir. A horror story lurks in its pages, too; Molly Crabapple chronicles, in prose that is emotionally charged but never melodramatic, no fewer than a dozen pogroms committed against European Jews between 1870 and 1946. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the fact of European antisemitism before the Holocaust, yet encountering the scale and relentless recurrence of the massacres is incredibly affecting. “Everyone killed Jews,” Crabapple writes, in a chapter that summarizes the thousand pogroms that took place around Lviv between 1918 and 1921. “Everyone raped Jews, burned their houses, threw them out of trains.… Pogromists — drunk, singing, laughing — slit open their neighbors’ bellies, burned their children’s babysitters alive, forced their classmates to dig their own graves.” Reading about pogrom after pogrom might sound grim, but Crabapple’s narration remains lively and engaging, in part because she never leaves her protagonists stranded in victimhood. She insists on a depiction of Jews as heroes who fight, improvise, and build to resist their subjugation, thereby dignifying their lives rather than rendering them a tragedy.
While primarily about the Jewish Labor Bund, Crabapple’s book also serves as an effective survey of the history of socialism, beginning in the Pale of Settlement and continuing through World War II. Lenin and Trotsky appear as vividly drawn human beings in its pages, intersecting and sparring with Bundist leaders as their movement evolves and splinters into competing factions. The book revives a moment in history when millions came to believe that human beings could consciously remake society and build a fairer, more equitable world.
In the hands of a lesser author, a book of such vast scope might falter on the level of narrative tension, but Crabapple holds her readers’ attention with a swashbuckling gusto worthy of the larger-than-life Bundists who populate her pages. Her prose is supercharged, her shifts in register and leaps through space and time exhilarating. The book is rife with unforgettable characters: rebels, anarchists, labor organizers, smugglers, self-defense volunteers, and idealists who cross paths again and again across continents and decades. Crabapple gives us the scar-faced Bernard Goldstein, “a quiet bruiser who spoke in a mangled mixture of three languages,” who, in 1918, ran a paramilitary in Kyiv; in the 1920s, organized union workers into self-defense militias to protect Jews from pogroms; in the 1930s, became Warsaw’s best-known benevolent gangster; and, finally, in the 1940s, survived the Warsaw Ghetto. Sophia Dubovna, artist and revolutionary, is portrayed helping prisoners’ wives plead their husbands’ cases in the 1920s, writing articles on the ethics of love and sex in the Bundist press in the 1930s, and ending her revolutionary career in the civil rights movement in New York City.
Crabapple’s Bundists are not merely colorful and long-lived, of course. They are on a shared quest — some may say a quixotic one — for “hereness”: Jewish safety in the just and equitable Europe they endeavor to create. Of course, there is no shortage of dramatic irony at play here. The reader knows well before the Bundists do just how devastatingly their story will end.
Any work of history is inevitably shaped by the moment in which it is written. In her postscript, Crabapple makes the case that the Bund’s anti-Zionism serves as a powerful model for today’s anti-Zionist Jews. She also suggests that these same anti-Zionist activists will redeem Bundist ideas. “History,” she points out, “is never settled. Bodies rot, but ideas remain.”
For the most part, however, Crabapple is not polemical in her book. She allows the story of the Bund to speak for itself. And that story lends itself to various readings, including one sympathetic to those who rebuilt their lives in a Jewish homeland. A sobering paradox lies at the heart of Crabapple’s book: the more vividly she reconstructs the world that produced the anti-Zionist Bund, the more starkly readers are confronted with the conditions that made Zionism the recourse for millions of dispossessed exiles.
Basia Winograd, a New York City – based writer and filmmaker, teaches creative writing at Hunter College. She was awarded a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for her novel in progress.
