Huge thanks to Ed Durbin for his feedback on an earlier draft of this post! This is another rather long read. If you’d prefer to download it and read offline, a PDF copy can be found here. A lesson text resource and PowerPoint presentation accompany this post, and can be found here.
What makes stories in History
powerful?
A few weeks ago, I suggested in a
post on Trotsky that the personal is political in History
teaching, by which I meant that those individuals whose stories are told in our
lessons are given enormous power over our narratives.
Now, I’d like to reverse the
equation to suggest that we should try to make the political personal.
What I mean by this is that,
rather than telling the history of politics and power through state policy and
statistics, we should try to tell it through the words and experiences of individuals
who lived through, were impacted by, and in their own ways helped shape it.
These stories are, I believe,
powerful. They can both bring potentially dry History to life and empower
people whose experiences deserve to be told, but are often overlooked. At the
same time, I will argue that the power of individuals’ stories also lies in the
ways we choose to narrate them.
There’s nothing particularly
original in what I’m suggesting; and I’ll flag up a number of important works
by other History teachers and educators to show where my thinking is really
coming from.
At the same time, I also want to
take the opportunity to bring to light a fascinating and almost entirely
overlooked story. This is the story of the Jewish homeland no-one has heard of:
Birobidzhan. And it is also the story of one of its most prominent
proponents and activists, a long-forgotten Yiddish writer called David Bergelson.
 |
| David Bergelson with his son, Lev. By user:Elisheva Kitrossky - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33572590 |
Part
1: Birobidzhan, The Jewish Homeland No-One Has Heard Of
In 1928, the Soviet government
made a startling announcement. In the far-east of Siberia, snug to the border
with China, amid swamps and dense forests, a national territory for Soviet Jews
was to be established. Six years later, this territory would be given the
status of a Jewish Autonomous Region, a title it holds to this day. It has
become known (by those who had ever heard of it) by the name of its main town, Birobidzhan.
When teaching Russian and Soviet
History in schools, Birobidzhan has been almost completely forgotten. Our KS5
course textbooks pass over the Jewish Autonomous Region with barely a comment.
The longest textbook entry on Birobidzhan I could find in our three exam-board
approved textbooks comprises a sweeping approximately half-dozen line summary
of the region, which it does not actually name, almost every line containing
its own factual error:
“…in 1926,
Soviet Jews were given a special ‘national homeland’ settlement in which they
could maintain their cultural heritage [Birobidzhan was in fact established in
1928]. This was in part of the far eastern province, which became an
autonomous republic in 1934 [neither the Soviet far east, briefly a republic from
1920-22, nor Birobidzhan, which never became an autonomous republic, were given
this status in 1934]. In 1941, about a quarter of that region’s
population was Jewish [the figure by 1939 was one sixth and falling].”
A shame it should be passed over
in such a perfunctory manner, because in recent years, historians and writers
on Russia and the USSR have devoted considerable energy in recent years to
bringing Birobidzhan to life.
Some have been sympathetic but
pessimistic. Russian journalist Masha Gessen, now living in exile from
Putin’s regime, described Birobidzhan in their wonderfully vivid 2016 book as
“the worst good idea ever”.
Others have honed in on the
historical significance of Birobidzhan. Two superb short histories in
particular have been written by historians specifically the region. In the
first, written by Robert Weinberg with an introduction by Zvi
Gitelman in 1998, the project was framed as “one of the most exotic and
controversial attempts to solve what was perceived as a ‘Jewish problem’ in the
Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union”. The second, written
by Gennady Estraikh in 2023, places Birobidzhan in the wider context of
Soviet nationalities policies and the experiences, arguing it was “a product
and quintessence of the Soviet state’s policy towards its Jews as well as a
part of the general nationalities policy.”
It is these framings of
Birobidzhan, as a potential window into both Soviet policy towards Jews and
wider Soviet nationalities policies, in particular under Stalin, that fascinates
me.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet
leaders aspired to a policy which would – within strict limits – empower
non-Russian nationalities and ethnic minorities. A number of non-ethnically-Russian
“peoples” were given their own territories, corresponding to regions where they
comprised a majority of the population, some gaining the exulted status of
“Soviet Republic” (a level above the “autonomous region” status given to
Birobidzhan).
These peoples were encouraged to
promote their “national” language and, for those with no written language, were
aided in codifying one. National dress, customs, and culture – again within
strict limits – were celebrated. Once established as fully-fledged and
conscious nations, the peoples of the USSR would then be in a position to help
build socialism. The Soviet Union, thus, was to become a “brotherhood of
peoples”.
It is possible to write off this
line of policy, summed up by the slogan “national in form, socialist in
content”, as a disingenuous ploy to keep the subject peoples of the USSR in
check. Indeed, national Soviet republics were expected – and forced – to follow
broad policy directives from Moscow, usually exercising only nominal autonomy. Yet,
as the Terry Martin and other historians of Soviet nationalities policies
have argued, there are good reasons, given the efforts to which Soviet leaders
went to structure their state along ethnic and national lines, to see it as a
serious attempt at nation-building.
And the extraordinary example of
Soviet attempts to build a Jewish homeland can illuminate as well as any other
the complex interplay of hope, aspiration, fantasy, and repression on which
this policy rested.
Jews were recognised in the USSR
primarily as a national and ethnic, rather than religious group. This conceptualisation
suggested they could progress, like Uzbeks, Ukrainians, or Azeris, into a
fully-fledged autonomous nation. Yet unlike the more populous peoples of the
USSR, Jews faced the almost unique challenge of having no territorial homeland
in which they were a clear majority.
Russian Jews had been confined
for decades prior to the Russian Revolution to the Pale of Settlement,
in the west of the Russian Empire; yet this area comprised parts of other
national territories with their own national-majority populations, including
Ukraine and Belarus. By the late-1920s, the lands of the former Pale might have
been home to a great many Jews, but it could not, following the logic of Soviet
nation-building, have become a Jewish homeland.
If it could be settled by enough
Jews, therefore, Birobidzhan, sparsely populated and underdeveloped as
it was, could rectify Soviet Jews’ territorial problem. But it would also have
to serve the purpose of a socialist Jewish homeland, which would be
acceptable to Communist leaders.
In the eyes of Soviet planners, amongst
them leading Jewish activists, Birobidzhan was to be secular, proletarian, and
politically loyal. Jewish religious culture (like that of other religions)
would be repressed. Hebrew, the language of Jewish religion, was shunned
in favour of Yiddish, the vernacular language of most lower-class Jews,
and centres of secular socialist culture were prioritised over synagogues. The
distinctly un-kosher pursuit of pig farming was encouraged in local
agriculture. As it was settled, factories and collective farms were to be
established, ensuring its population’s integration into a new, industrious,
socialist collective. Birobidzhan’s political leaders would work under the
broad supervision of the Kremlin; in the final years of the 1930s, when anyone
in positions of state and party authority fell under suspicion, they would be ruthlessly
purged during the Great Terror.
Alongside its numerous Jewish
specificities, all the key features present in the wider Soviet nation-building
project are present in Birobidzhan. By honing in on the Jewish Autonomous
Province as one example amongst many, it is therefore possible, as Claire
Holliss has urged we do, to illuminate the bigger picture, giving a better
“sense of period” for Stalinist nationalities policy, while at the same time representing
Jews as a group deserving the power of historical recognition.
So, how to do this? This takes us
back to the question of powerful stories.
Part
2: Powerful Stories
The power of narratives,
especially those built around particular individuals, is foundational to
History teachers’ approaches to telling stories about the past and has been
brilliantly summarised by Christine Counsell in her recent discussion
of the stories that underpin the new Connected Worlds textbook
series.
Stories themselves have power.
In the first instance, they are
central to what Mike Hill has termed “world building”, enabling students
to construct their own “imagined past” through their vivid imagery.
More specifically to the question
of representing diversity, something that has really occupied me when thinking about telling Jewish history, personal stories can help to draw
out the inherent differences within groups by revealing the varied
experiences of members of groups who might otherwise be portrayed as
more-or-less homogeneous.
This idea has been explored by
both Ed Durbin and Maia Stevenson and Molley-Ann Navey, who
demonstrate that personal stories can be used to examine the experiences
between and within groups of people, providing students with a platform to
think critically about questions of “typicality” and similarity and difference
as disciplinary concepts.
Further to this, though, a
carefully crafted personal story can be used to extend beyond the lived
experience of the individual in question. The past portrayed through one
person’s experience and perspective doesn’t just have to represent the
individual alone; it can bring into play others who are important to
understanding the wider narrative. One person can encounter others, sharing or
challenging their perspectives, and engaging in dialogue with those other
people and their perspectives. They can also be compared and contrasted, for
the purposes of the wider narrative, with those whose experiences were similar
or different, even if they did not directly encounter them.
This is not to say that an
individual story can tell the whole story. As Mike Hill has
pointed out, the “secondary worlds” we want to enable students to construct
“always extend beyond the narratives set within them”. But I’d like to gently
push back against his further suggestion that “stories only shed light on the
sections of the world that are instrumental to advancing the story itself.” If
we set out to tell a personal story in a way that engage with the wider
narratives we want to tell our students of the past, we might instrumentalise that
story itself to wider sections of the world we are building (something I tried
to do when using the story of the Russian anarchist, Anatoly Zhelezniakov,
as a way of exploring the wider political polarisation seen in the Russian
Revolution of 1917).
In other words, when framed by
their wider context, personal stories can illuminate events well beyond
themselves.
Part
3: Bergelson’s Life as a Powerful Story
In any case, when thinking of
Birobidzhan and the wider context of Soviet Jewish and nationalities policy,
the story of David Bergelson is certainly a powerful one.
David (or, to give him his
Yiddish name, Dovid) Bergelson was in some ways highly representative of, and
in other ways very different from, the wider Jewish population of the Russian
Empire and USSR. He was born to a prosperous and religious family in the shtetl
of Okhrimovo in 1884, at a time when pogroms were raging across
the Pale of Settlement. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917,
he had begun to forge a career as one of the country’s leading Yiddish-language
authors.
In 1921, however, he left Russia and
would spend more than a decade living in emigration, mainly in Berlin. Bergelson
would only return to settle in his native land (by now renamed the USSR) in
1933. From the late 1920s onwards, he had begun to develop a keen interest in the
efforts of Jewish activists and Communists to establish a Soviet Jewish
homeland in Birobidzhan. His life story illuminates not just his own
extraordinary experiences, but also the fate of the Jewish Autonomous Region.
Bergelson actively promoted
Birobidzhan through his literature and journalism, despite never fully settling
in the region itself. Shortly after his first visit to Birobidzhan in 1932, he gave
his vision for the future of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which in his eyes
would centre on “a big, noisy city with a lot of factories on the outskirts, a
completely socialist city in a classless society”.
It was a vision of a Jewish
communist utopia.
It was a vision that would never
be realised.
Had Bergelson chosen to settle
permanently in Birobidzhan, he would have witnessed first-hand the myriad difficulties
the Jewish Autonomous Region and its people faced in establishing themselves,
from an inhospitable climate to undeveloped infrastructure, ramshackle housing
with inadequate heating to the swarms of blood-sucking insects known locally as
gnus.
By the late-1930s, Bergelson’s
involvement in Birobidzhan had been dampened by the Great Terror, which saw
many of the region’s leaders arrested. Bergelson himself survived this
turbulent period and lived on through the Second World War and the horrors of
the Holocaust. During the war he participated in the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, an organisation of leading Jewish public figures focused on rallying
Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany.
Once war had ended, however, Soviet
support for Jewish activism and with it the project to construct a Jewish
homeland in the USSR stalled. Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust on
Soviet territory was suppressed by the Soviet regime, which felt it
detracted from its master narrative of wider Soviet sacrifice and suffering.
With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Soviet Jews came
under suspicion in their own country for their alleged loyalties to a foreign
state which had not existed when Birobidzhan was first established.
Bergelson’s story would end in
1952, on the “Night of the Murdered Poets”. He was one of thirteen
Jewish figures tried and executed on trumped-up charges of treasonous
activities – some connected to their efforts to promote Birobidzhan as a Jewish
homeland.
The Jewish Autonomous Region lives
on to today, but in a form which would have bitterly disappointed Bergelson.
Its Yiddish culture has all but disappeared, Jews comprise a tiny minority of
its population, and it remains one of Russia’s most economically undeveloped
regions. In many ways, its failure is the failure of Bergelson’s dream from
1932.
Part
4: Telling a Personal Story, Powerfully
While Bergelson’s story is
powerful in its own right, it also deserves to be told in a powerful way.
Having gathered my information on
Birobidzhan and Bergelson from a range of sources, I had to think about how I
wanted to tell is. Two of my most important considerations were tense and
perspective.
The narrative I composed is told
in the third person and almost entirely in past tense(s).
I haven’t always done this;
earlier narratives I wrote for lessons sought to tell individuals’ stories in
the first person and present tense. But I’m increasingly convinced of the power
of telling narratives in the third person and the past tense.
This is for two reasons.
Firstly, I’ve found that, writing
in the first person, personal narratives can become a little too
personal, turning into a kind of internal monologue where the author attempts
to convey (and so more or less speculatively imagine) the inner thoughts
of the individual whose story they tell. On a few occasions we might be fairly
sure of what a person from the past was thinking at a particular moment, but I doubt
we can ever be certain enough to faithfully reflect this in a story told, and
seen, through their eyes. By contrast, telling a story in the third person allows
the story to view its protagonist sidelong, observing them through their concrete,
verifiable actions. In the end, after all, History is a fact-based subject.
Secondly, I would argue that the
past tense should be protected as a temporal setting for telling stories. History
is the study of the past, and students need to understand, intuitively as well
as analytically, that they are studying people whose lives were previous to ours.
By drawing a firm distinction between past and present through use of tenses, we
can immerse students in engaging and fascinating worlds whilst demonstrating
that ours is subsequent to, and temporally separate from, those worlds.
From a storytelling perspective, writing
in the past tense also offers us a powerful tool: dramatic irony.
Knowing a story is being told with the benefit of hindsight allows us to bring
in temporal perspectives that were not available to the individual in the
moment of the narrative. Put more simply, whereas the people whose lives exist
in the past tense cannot know their own futures, we can and do: their futures
are also part of our past.
Part
5: Telling Bergelson’s Birobidzhan
The narrative I have tried to
tell of Bergelson’s Birobidzhan proceeds from the principles set out above, and
inevitably from the very good ideas I’ve borrowed from others. It can be found
in full here.
I begin the narrative, as Christine Counsell and Jonathan Grande have recently advocated, with one moment
of huge significance for the individual: Bergelson striding off a train and
onto the soil of Birobidzhan for the first time. Fragments of his thoughts and
dreams for Birobidzhan can be reliably reconstructed through his own words, written
in a later novel, in which he projects his vision of the “big, noisy…socialist
city in a classless society.” Thus framed, his story might proceed in one of
two directions; either towards or away from the realisation of his vision.
To help students place the
narrative in its wider historical context and significance, I have opted (after
reading Sarah Jackson-Buckley’s marvellous recent blog post) to
weave “big questions” through the text, which I envision being read aloud by
the teacher. Appearing at several strategic points throughout the text, these
are less specific than simple comprehension questions and are intended instead
to open up students’ wider understandings of the story through “global
inferences” into its meaning. The questions themselves represent suggested
pause points for the teacher to briefly halt their reading of the narrative and
invite discussion within the class; they are not questions requiring students’
written answers.
The narrative itself proceeds as
much as possible through the perspective of Bergelson, the individual, tracing
his life and intimate experiences connected to Birobidzhan. At certain moments,
however, it breaks away from Bergelson, drawing in others. This provides an
opportunity to introduce an element of dramatic irony by revealing, through
others’ divergent experiences, what Bergelson did not, could not, or perhaps chose
not to see for himself, contrasting his dreams for Birobidzhan with its harsh
reality. So, while Bergelson confidently proclaims a vision for an ultra-modern
socialist utopia, the reality of many Jewish settlers on the ground was a city
with no cobbled streets, lacking running water, sewerage, and central heating.
Subtle shifts in tense are
used in order to give a sense of time and space which revolves around Bergelson
himself, whilst simultaneously illuminating in flashes what lies before and
after his story.
Bergelson’s direct experiences
are set in a past in which he was living in real time, denoted by use of the past
simple, the tense in which the narrative opens (“David Bergelson strode off
the train”).
Experiences and events prior to
this are told in the past perfect, indicating things that have been
already completed or set in motion by this point (“His journey had taken him
thousands of miles…”; “… the Soviet government had announced a plan to Soviet
Jews in a territory in the far east…”).
Those experiences and events yet
to happen in Bergelson’s present are denoted the verb “would”, as the past
participle of “will”, indicating things that lie in Bergelson’s future but remain
in our (the readers’) past. This again serves as a device to draw out the
dramatic irony of situations for which we know the outcome but are still
unknown and unknowable to Bergelson, in particular those that will confound his
original vision for Birobidzhan (“New arrivals would complain of corrupt
Communist officials”; “There would be no cobbled streets until 1937”;
“Birobidzhan would become engulfed in the “Great Terror”).
The story remains anchored in a
present situated in 1932 until its final paragraphs, when Bergelson’s dream
begins to rapidly unravel, starting with his settling in the USSR in 1933 and
progressing through to his arrest, trial, and execution in 1952.
It finally resolves in our
present, shifting in its final sentence into the present tense to reveal what
has become of Birobidzhan, and Bergelson’s vision, today: “Birobidzhan still
exists today as a ‘Jewish autonomous province’, a remnant of Bergelson’s and so
many other Soviet Jews’ dreams – and of their disappointments. Of its
population of around 150,000 people, 837 are Jewish.”
Selected
Further Reading (Birobidzhan, Bergelson, and Soviet Nationalities Policy)
Gennady Estraikh, The History
of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia, Bloomsbury
(2023)
James von Geldern, “Birobidzhan”,
post in Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/birobidzhan/
(retrieved 13.11.24)
Boris Kotlerman, “‘Why I am in Favour
of Birobidzhan’: Bergelson’s Fateful Decision (1932)” in Joseph Sherman and
Gennady Estraikh (eds), David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism,
Routledge (2007)
Mike Klein, “Go East, Young Jew,
Go East”, blog post in Library of Congress Blogs: https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2020/09/go-east-young-jew-go-east/
(retrieved 13.11.24)
Masha Gessen, Where the Jews
Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous
Region, Shocken Books (2016)
Terry Martin, Affirmative
Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-39,
Cornell University Press (2001)
Sasha Senderovich, How the
Soviet Jew was Made, Harvard University Press (2022), ch. 3, “The Edge of
the World: Narratives of Non-Arrival in Birobidzhan”
Robert Weinberg, with
introduction by Zvi Gitelman, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making
of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, University of
California Press (1998)
“The Birobidzhan Album”, Library
of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:the+birobidzhan+album
(retrieved 13.11.24)
Selected
Further Reading (Powerful Stories)
Christine Counsell, “Stories, Voices
and Text in Secondary History”, webinar recording for Hodder Education (June
2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDE84cxOJsY
(retrieved 13.11.24)
Ed Durbin and Maia Stevenson, “Triumphs
Show 192: Balancing Micro- and Macronarratives of the Holocaust”, Teaching
History 192 (October 2023)
Jonathan Grande, “Why I Teach
Pupils Things I Don’t Need Them to Remember Forever: The Role of Takeaways in
Shaping a History Curriculum”, Teaching History 192 (October 2023)
Mike Hill, “Curating the Imagined
Past: World Building in the History Curriculum”, Teaching History 180 (October
2020)
Claire Holliss, “Illuminating the
Possibilities of the Past”, Teaching History 185 (December 2021)
Sarah Jackson-Buckley, “Reading
in the History Classroom: Why, What, and How?”, blog post in Metaphors and
Meanings Blog (22 September 2024): https://metaphorsandmeanings.co.uk/2024/09/22/reading-in-the-history-classroom-why-what-and-how/
(retrieved 13.11.24)
Molley-Ann Navey, “Teaching Years 8 and 9 to Write Analytically About Similarity and Difference”, Teaching History 196 (September 2024)
