skygiants | (no subject)

Last month a friend and I took a Zoom lecture series on the Jewish Labor Movement, which was ... not as full of specific detail as had been hoped, but it did remind me to finally read a book I'd had sitting on my shelf since I found it in a used bookstore a year or two ago: Revolutionary Yiddishland, a history of twentieth-century Jewish radicals constructed around a series of interviews conducted in the 1980s with survivors of the early twentieth-century revolutionary movements by Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg.

The interviewees were all militant activists in either a.) the Communist party, b.) The Jewish Labor Bund, or c.) Left Paole Zion (the Marxist branch). These organizations, while all radically left-wing, were ideologically opposed to each other in a variety of ways and members had very different experiences and perspectives on events such as the October Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Soviet Union's actions during World War II -- one interviewee, for example, describes being arrested and barely escaping execution as a member of the POUM during the Spanish Civil War, while another talks about being shown documents that 'proved' to them, at the time, that the POUM were collaborators, and completely accepting the necessity of liquidation.

The authors are clearly really interested in drawing out the complexities and the contradictions of these different experience, as well as the broader meta-contradiction of the fact that they as interviewers (and openly partisan radicals themselves who are pro-labor, anti-Zionist, and deeply critical of the state of Israel) specifically chose to interview only activists who are now living in Israel, many of whom were and are equally conflicted about the existence of the state of Israel and then-current affairs there. From the introduction:

It would be quite wrong to believe that, by confining our study to Israel, we sought to demonstrate the 'necessity' of this end of the journey. Quite the contrary. [..] By questioning witnesses who today live in Israel, most of whom, for the greater part of their lives, did not give a fig for a Jewish state [..] we focus yet again on the illogicality of history.

They then relate an anecdote about one of their interviewees, who chose to have his identity concealed under a fake name and profession. "We thought this imposture indicated a certain cowardice unworthy of this man, who concealed himself and kept silent about a past that was precious to him," write Brossat and Klingberg (which gives you, I think, a little bit of a sense of Brossat and Klingberg, who are certainly thoughtfully interested in complication and contradiction but not, like, un-judgy, as writers.) Anyway, two years later this person was arrested as a spy for giving Israeli bio-secrets to the USSR; Brossat and Klingberg's attitude about this is a not unreasonable take that "whether it's the people developing bio-weapons or the people selling bio-weapons, everyone sucks here," and --

-- okay hold the phone I have just discovered NOW while writing this BOOKLOG and noticing that the NAMES WERE THE SAME that Marcus Klingberg, the spy, is the FATHER of SYLVIA KLINGBERG, THE CO-AUTHOR?? This information is not contained anywhere within the actual text of the book??? "A certain cowardice unworthy of this man," WHO IS YOUR DAD. HOLY SHIT. I'm so sorry, everyone, I really was settling down to write a serious post about this book's merits as a document of a complex and important facet of history regardless of how closely aligned you are with the politics of the authors and what you think of the conclusions they draw from it, and now I'm just spiraling as I attempt to grapple with this new perspective. Her dad!

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From:

sovay

Her dad!

*bzzztpf~~~*

From:

skygiants

"Some two years later, on 24 June 1983, his daughter Sylvia handed him a copy of our book, in the presence of his wife and grandson." I think I was supposed to immediately realize at the time that this was the same Sylvia as SYLVIA, THE AUTHOR, REFERENCED IN 'OUR BOOK', but I SURE DIDN'T -

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