WHERE Masha Gessen on a Planned Jewish Homeland in Soviet Russia

BOOK REVIEW

WHERE THE JEWS AREN’T
The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region
By Masha Gessen
170 pp. Schocken. $25.

By Steven Zipperstein

In the summer of 1932 Birobidzhan, some 4,000 miles from Moscow and near the Chinese border, was pummeled by plagues — floods, dead cows, the collapse of hastily constructed buildings. Worst of all were the bugs, including mosquitoes and other bloodsucking insects. During winters, which lasted much of the year, temperatures sometimes fell to 30 degrees below zero.

Yet Jews throughout the world, particularly in the Yiddish-inflected left, yearned for this remote spot, designated by the Soviet government as a Jewish autonomous region. Enthusiasts from as far away as Los Angeles and Buenos Aires moved there. David Bergelson, perhaps the finest Yiddish stylist of his time, visiting Birobidzhan a few short months after its dreadful summertime deluge, rhapsodized about its “myriad rivers gleaming in the sun, valleys narrow and wide, expanses of taiga and mixed fields,” its “marvelously lofty skies.” Soon he would announce his plan to settle there.

This would never happen, and in many respects neither really would Birobidzhan, named for the nearby rivers Bira and Bidzhan. Very few Jews actually came, and of those who did barely any remained. By 1935, there were some 14,000 Jews, 23 percent of the population, in a vast, mostly empty terrain inhabited largely by Cossacks and a sprinkling of ethnic Koreans. “To complicate things further,” the journalist Masha Gessen writes, “marauding gangs of ethnic Chinese known as the honghutzu — literally the red-bearded ones — terrorized the locals, especially the Koreans, who cultivated opium poppies, the local currency of choice.” ...

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