Overview

In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews--those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan's Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren't is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia.

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9781665267588

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Masha Gessen's previous books include The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy and the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She has immigrated to the United States twice-once, as a teenager, from the Soviet Union and again, more than thirty years later, from Putin's Russia. She lives in New York City. Christina Delaine is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and accomplished stage actress. Her theater credits include Jewtopia, the longest-running comedy in Off-Broadway history, and the title role in Antigone at both Portland Center Stage and Kentucky Repertory Theatre. She holds a BA degree from Dartmouth College and an MFA in acting from Brown University.

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