The Soviet Gulag. Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison. Ed. by Michael David-Fox. [Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.] University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh (PA) 2016. xi, 434 pp. ill. $49.95.

Abstract

Goldstein tells the story of the Bund from the street level up. As a union organizer, he often worked with the toughest segments of the Warsaw Jewish proletariat, including slaughterhouse workers and porters. As an organizer, and as head of the Bundist party militia, he also came into contact with members of the underworld and underclass, who often overlapped with his official constituency. As Sherer notes, Goldstein does not deal with ideology or (much) with party congresses. Of course, the Bund never had the chance to institute the kind of socialist society it dreamed of. Even so, as Goldstein conveys vividly, the Bund improved the lives of its members and constituency on an everyday basis. It won occasional material improvements for the workers, and it defended all Jews against anti-Semitic attacks. It also raised its members' cultural and intellectual horizons, providing them with the tools to understand their world and their predicament. To its members the Bund provided a close comradely community, with a family feeling that had always been the Bund's hallmark. Goldstein conveys the difficult conditions of Jewish working-class life in Poland between the wars. He describes the poverty, the anti-Semitismwhich ranged from efforts to force Jewish workers out of the slaughterhouses to the institution of "ghetto benches" in the universitiesand the political repression. The Bund militia busily battled anti-Semitic hooligans and, occasionally, the police. It was also constantly at war with the communists, who for much of the period under discussion regarded the Bundists as "social fascists" in accord with Comintern policy, and once even launched an armed attack on the Medem Sanitarium. It might surprise some how often gunfire is mentioned in a memoir of interwar Jewish life. Significantly, Goldstein also frequently notes cooperation with the Polish Socialist Party, especially when it came to battling anti-Semitism. The Bund's ability to reach out to Polish comrades, even when relations between the parties were sometimes tense at the top, was one of its chief appeals during its election victories. Other Jewish parties simply did not have that connection to counterparts in the majority population. On the other hand, the Bund's relations with the Zionists were hostile, but do not seem to have erupted into violence. Zuckerman provides a fluid and, for the most part, accurate translation of the original, as well as good notes and a glossary explaining unfamiliar terms, and identifying individuals and organizations mentioned in the text. Twenty Years in the Jewish Labor Bund is published as a "Shofar Supplement in Jewish Studies", and it would make good reading for students of East European Jewish history, modern Jewish politics, or the history of socialist movements, or, indeed, for anyone else without access to the original.