HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY : THE STORY OF THE JEWISH BUND

By Molly Crabapple

Bloomsbury. 453 pages. £25. ISBN  978-1-5266-2889-3

Reviewed by Jim Burns

The Jewish Labour Bund was established in 1897 in what was then known as The Pale of Settlement, the area of Russia where Jews were allowed to live. It was in some ways an organisation like a trade union, with its aims being to represent the interests of the Jewish working-class. But it went much further than that and one of its principles, in particular, made it stand out from other organisations. It was profoundly anti-Zionist at a time when Zionism, the creation of a Jewish state, was very much in the air and was beginning to attract the attention of many Jews who had grown tired of restrictions on their movements and activities, and of being constantly in fear of pogroms and other anti-semitic actions.  

The Bund had a Marxist base and promoted the idea of working-class unity which would, as they saw it, cross the boundaries of nationalism. Writing about Vladimir Medem, a leading Bund theoretician, Molly Crabapple says: “In response to both Zionism and the demands of European societies that Jews assimilate completely to earn acceptance, he defined the Bund’s philosophy of diasporic nationalism, in which Jews would preserve their culture in the countries where they lived, rather than building a far-off ethnostate in Palestine”.  

As regards the question of a Jewish state, another Bundist, Henryk Erlich, stated : “If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalism of other nations…..No, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalism of all the other nations”.

The founding conference of the Bund took place in October 1897, and already the organisation was under police surveillance. An activist, Pati Kremer, was arrested, while her husband, Arkady Kremer, was hiding in a safe house. In March 1898, the Bund joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), though insisting on being recognised as “an independent organisation for the Jewish proletariat”. The police were not slow to act against both the RSDLP and the Bund. When it came to the latter they seized its printing presses at two locations and rounded up “at least forty five members”.  But the Bund responded, “increasing its fame through strikes, illicit handbills, and newspapers in Polish, Yiddish, and Russian, with propaganda, sandwiched in between stories by popular writers”. It was probably around this time that Crabapple’s great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, then aged fifteen, encountered Bund ideas and practices, one of them being the self-defence groups that the Bund created to protect Jews against marauding locals. There was an incident in  Volkovysk, where Rothbort lived, when two policemen “led a crowd hunting for Jewish stalls to plunder”. Both were killed. Crabapple doesn’t know if her great-grandfather was directly involved in their deaths, but she says, “a few months later, Sam smuggled himself out of the empire”.  

It was inevitable that the Bund would be caught up in some of the major events of twentieth century Russian history. According to Crabapple, “By 1902, the Bund was the largest revolutionary party in Russia, with thirty thousand members”. But Lenin was beginning to make a mark, and as Crabapple puts it, “In his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done, (he) spelled out his belief that only a ruthlessly centralised party of obedient professional revolutionaries had a chance of seizing power in Russia”. It was a policy that was bound to clash with the Bund idea of “a decentralised coalition of autonomous groups”.  In 1903, when the RSDLP met in London, the Bund delegates withdrawal over a point of principal allowed Lenin to triumph in a vote about whether it was to be a “mass party of workers” or “the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed”. He labelled the losing faction, “Mensheviks”, and his own group, “Bolsheviks”.  Communists tended to have long memories when it came to those they had clashed with, and both Mensheviks and Bundists would suffer harassment, imprisonment and worse in later years when the Communist Party came to power.

The Bund was always at its best when dealing with practical matters: ”The Bundists, however, were comfortable wielding power over neighbourhoods they controlled. In cities throughout the Pale, they levied taxes and used the money to fund soup kitchens for strikers. They forced bosses to close early, creating an eight-hour day in practice where it didn’t yet exist in law. In many towns, the mere mention of the Bund’s name was enough to make an employer fold”.

By 1913, or so, Bund ideas had spread to New York, thanks to the large number of immigrants from the Pale. They dominated the Workmen’s Circle, “a socialist mutual aid society”. With a large membership in the USA and Canada, it  “catered to every aspect of life – cultural, economic, and social. They provided medical insurance, old age homes, and burial plots. Thousands of children studied in their secular Yiddish schools”.  It’s worth noting that two leading trade union bosses had been Bund activists before moving to America. Sidney Hillman was head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, and David Dubinsky led the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Bundists like Henryk Erlich also had “prominent roles in the Menshevik party”, and Crabapple describes him as “a party man” and adds, “Politics was his life”. His wife, Sophia Dubnova, on the other hand, “lived the delicious but sometimes contradictory life of an artist revolutionary”.  She was well-educated, had spent time in Paris, was “sharp eyed and bohemian” and “shunned revolutionary asceticism”. Crabapple also says that “Marxist dogmatism fit Sophie like an itchy dress. She was a socialist aware of the movement’s absurdity, and an artist who couldn’t resign herself to the injustice of the world”.

There were difficult days for the Bund during the First World War, and after, when the Bolsheviks began to assert their control following the events of 1917. If at first it seemed that a variety of political parties would flourish in the new Russia, it soon became obvious that the Bolsheviks were determined to destroy, by one means or another, their opponents, even if they had assisted in the overthrow of the old regime. Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bundists. They were all eventually eliminated, their leaders imprisoned, their institutions abolished.

It was in Poland, with its large Jewish population, that the Bund began to re-establish itself as a significant organisation, despite the high level of anti-semitism that existed in the country. In Crabapple’s words, “Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other”. She points to how “Bund teachers dominated the new, secular Yiddish school system…..These schools directly challenged the traditional cheders that my great-grandfather endured…..The Bund helped transform Yiddish, the language of the Jewish Street, into a vehicle for transnational literary culture. When they fled disaster, Yiddish became a portable homeland that Bundists carried on their tongues. Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together, until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions”.

There was another side of Jewish life in Warsaw, “a rough place by any measure, with enough crimes to fill the pages of the city’s hundred Polish and Yiddish newspapers”. Anxious to protect Jews generally, and to keep young people from being drawn into criminality, the Bund called on Bernard Goldstein, who had organised the Kyiv militia. He was what can best be described as a hard man: “Since youth, Bernard had been an enforcer. He got on easily with thugs, like the teamster brothers known as the Seven Lions of Praga…….At the thieves synagogue behind the Gesia Cemetery, Bernard chatted up back porters (lawless men who hauled the city’s goods in huge wicker baskets lashed to their shoulders). He converted them to Bundism one by one, until his party dominated their union”. Goldstein’s name occurs frequently in Crabapple’s book as he helps develop defence units against would-be anti-Jewish elements in the wider population.

In 1920 Bund members voted to join the Communist International (Comintern), a Russian creation of “an international organisation of labour parties intended to replace the discredited Second International”. Not everyone agreed with this decision. Vladimir Medem had fallen out with Lenin in 1903, and was no admirer of  the Communist Party generally: “He had predicted that the terror they used against their enemies would soon  turn inward, to be used against each other….Few wanted to listen….The Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was a living socialist state. Most Bundists wanted to be its ally”. It probably didn’t surprise Medem when, in 1921, “the Soviet government ordered the liquidation of the Bund”.

The Polish Bund continued with its practical work for the Jewish community. It opened the Medem Sanitarium, designed to help children from deprived backgrounds. It also “set up daycare centres, libraries, and drama clubs”, not to mention “two hundred schools, from kindergartens to a teachers’ college, to night schools for Jewish workers barely into their teens. In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, ‘The Bund was your union, your education, your church’ ”.

“At the Comintern’s sixth world congress, which closed in 1928, Stalin announced a new theory called social fascism”. Thus put forward the idea that “democratic socialist parties were as bad as, if not worse than, the real fascists who currently ran Italy. These socialists worked as fascism’s handmaidens, leading workers away from communism…..They were the main obstacles to worldwide revolution and needed to be destroyed”. With this in mind, says Crabapple, the Jewish communists in Poland attacked the Bund in both ideological and physical ways. They broke into Bund night schools, interrupted meetings, and called wildcat strikes in unions to try to force them to split. There was a communist attempt on the life of Bernard Goldstein, and “In the years that followed, communists would murder several Bundist workers”. It all seems tragic, Jew fighting Jew, while fascism continued to spread. In Germany, it was the policy of social fascism that prevented any co-operation with social democrats, and so eased Hitler’s rise to power.

When the Germans, and then the Russians, invaded Poland in 1939, Bund members enrolled in the defence of Warsaw, and when the city fell they formed underground cells to co-ordinate resistance to the Nazis and support for their fellow Jews. They took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, fighting with very few weapons and against overwhelming odds. The Polish Home Army provided only minimal support, and the Russians none. In fact, two of the best and brightest of Bund leaders, Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich, had been arrested by the Russians, though it does not appear that they were ever charged with any crimes. But they were kept in prison. Erlich committed suicide in May 1942 by hanging himself from the bars of his cell, and Alter was shot by the NKVD in February 1943.

Crabapple comments that “The Bundists emerged into a postwar world that had little room for them”. Those who had survived the Holocaust were “scattered from Buenos Aires to Shanghai” if they weren’t in Soviet labour camps. And, though matters in the Middle East were still turbulent and unsettled, it would only be a matter of time before the State of Israel would be officially established. The Nazis had murdered 90 per-cent of Polish Jews, and as was pointed out by the observant, and events demonstrated, many Poles tended to view the return of Jews as an invasion. Pogroms could and did occur post-1945. Forty-two Jews were killed in Kielce in 1946. In 1947 the “Soviet backed Polish government decided it was done with democratic charades. The government forced the Polish Socialist Party to merge with the communists and arrested its recalcitrant leaders…..The Bund was next. Under extreme pressure, the party voted to dissolve itself in 1949”. Some members retreated into private life, while others managed to find ways to leave Poland.

There’s an old saying that I’m fond of, “Give flowers to the rebels failed”, and I can’t help thinking of it in connection with the Bund. Were they too idealistic for their own good? Their opponents, the Zionists, could build up a strong case for a Jewish homeland when one considers the treatment Jews received over the centuries and which might be seen as culminating in the Holocaust. But I’ve always been attracted to the idea that “Here Where We Live is Our Country”. And the Bund theoreticians had a point when they said that Jewish nationalism can be just as nasty and violent as any other. We only need to look at the Middle East today to see the reality in that assertion.

Molly Crabapple has produced a vigorous, well-researched and informative book which can move from the humorous and colourful to the dark and tragic. Her story has many aspects to it and by telling it largely through individual experiences, with a background of world events, she brings it alive. She has a direct way of writing and isn’t afraid to use colloquialisms, and contemporary slang, to provide variety in the narrative. There are plenty of notes and a useful bibliography.