1
" It took me another few hours to realize that I had just spent an entire day at a Jewish museum that made no mention of the Holocaust. It was as if the Jews of the shtetlach from that first display case had just vanished, disappeared into history for no apparent reason. It was as though there had been no reason for the new influx of Jews after the war. It was as though history, and Birobidzhan itself, had just happened.
That view of history is the post-Soviet condition. What happened to people - to families that still carry the memory, whose physical and psychic scars are plainly visible - was so enormous and so inexplicable, and, worst of all, the victims and their executioners were so intimately entangled, so indistinguishable at times, that, following a brief and torturous period of examination, the country's population has conspired to treat it as a force of nature. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
2
" It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend.
The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences.
I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my people milling outside the synagogue (we never went inside, where old men in strange clothes sang in an unfamiliar language), a few old Yiddish songs and a couple of newer Hebrew ones were added to my non-story. Finally, I had read the stories of Sholem Aleichem, which were certainly of a different world, as distant from my modern urban Russian-speaking childhood as anything could be. In the end, my Jewish identity was entirely negative: it consisted of non-belonging.
How had I and other late-Soviet Jews been so impoverished? Prior to the Russian Revolution, most of the world's Jews lived in the Russian Empire. Following the Second World War, Russia was the only European country whose Jewish population numbered not in the hundreds or even thousands but in the millions. How did this country rid itself of Jewish culture altogether? How did the Jews of Russia lose their home? Much later, as I tried to find the answers to these questions, I kept circling back tot he story of Birobidzhan, which, in its concentrated tragic absurdity seemed to tell it all. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
9
" To me, being Jewish was the shape of my nose, the color of my eyes and my hair, and the notation in my documents, all of which kept me from being like other people. For my parents, it was the source of their greatest fear - that their children would be kept from becoming who they could be and, more immediately and more to the point, that their children would get hurt. My parents knew precisely what they feared: both of them had been blindsided by college admissions committees that had rejected them for being Jewish. For both of them, Jewish was what they were and what they did not want to be. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
10
" The question everyone asked me before I went to Birobidzhan and after I returned was: Are there any Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region? I posed it to Valery Gurevich, the deputy governor responsible for everything Jewish in the region, from the children's song-and-dance ensemble to the statues of imaginary shtetl figures all over the city - a series of illustrations to Sholem Aleichem stories cast in bronze. I felt ridiculous asking a Jew in Birobidzhan if there were Jews in Birobidzhan, but was a master at answering this question. His answer was "Well . . ."
He tried to avoid giving me any figures at all - I had to fill them in later - but the gist of his story was this: Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the census placed the percentage of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region at a bit over four, which was about four times the percentage of Jews in the general population of the Soviet Union. In absolute figures, that was about nine thousand Jews. But these figures were based on answers people gave to the census taker, an official, in a country where if one had a choice (for example, if one of one's parents was not Jewish), one did not choose to call oneself Jewish. Just ten years before the last Soviet census, the percentage of Jews in the region's population had been three times higher - suggesting that it had been diluted by intermarriage but the number of people who had some Jewish roots was a lot higher than the official nine thousand.
So it should come as no surprise that the number of people who emigrated to Israel when this became possible, at the turn of the 1990s, far exceeded the official number of Jews in Birobidzhan. And there were still some Jews left - a couple thousand, give or take as many.
Of them, roughly five people - including Iosif Bekerman, Maria Rak, and Valery Gurevich - were engaged on an ongoing basis with Jewish culture. Of them, only one - Bekerman - spoke Yiddish. There were no Yiddish writers left in the Jewish Autonomous Region. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
11
" A synagogue had been established in Birobidzhan in 1929, a small wooden building constructed by some of the first settlers. Twenty years later, everyone who attended the Rosh Hashanah services was arrested; the rabbi was sentenced to death. Jews returned to the wooden building in the late 1950s, but with the end of Khrushchev's Thaw, gathering there became too risky again and services moved to private apartments. In the 1970s, when the air in the Soviet Union once more grew a bit lighter, services at the synagogue resumed. But the last of the occasionally observant Jews were old, and by the mid-1980s a minyan - a quorum of ten Jewish adults - became impossible. The wooden building was repurposed. There was no synagogue in the Jewish Autonomous Region for the next twenty years - until American Jews had given enough money to erect two small stone buildings on Lenin Street, one for the synagogue and one for the Freud Jewish community center, both protected by a single metal fence. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
13
" Then the pogroms started. Not that they had ever stopped. Still, the Jews had not seen brutality on this scale in nearly four centuries. During the civil war of 1918-22, the different entities that called themselves the White Army, each led by its own general, attacked the Jews for their perceived support of the Bolsheviks and disloyalty to the czar. The self-proclaimed Ukrainian national army, commanded by Symon Petlyura, attacked the Jews for being Jews. The anarchists, led by Nestor Makhno, engaged in random violence, as did a long list of what were essentially roaming gangs. In all, more than two thousand pogroms were carried out in the three years following the Bolshevik revolution, killing nearly two hundred thousand Jews and leaving half a million homeless. "
― Masha Gessen , Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region
Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region