The Jews In Poland And Russia

A very readable and comprehensive overview that examines the realities of Jewish life while setting them in their political, economic, and social contexts.

This book is the first to deal with the impact on the Jews of the area of the sovietization of Eastern Poland. Polish resentment at alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets between 1939 and 1941 affected the development of Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi rule and in the USSR. The role of these conflicts both in the Anders army and in the Communist-led Kosciuszko division and 1st Polish Army is investigated, as well as the part played by Jews in the communist-dominated regime in Poland after 1944.

In his three-volume history, Antony Polonsky provides a comprehensive survey - socio-political, economic, and religious - of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe from 1350 to the present. Until the Second World War, this was the heartland of the Jewish world: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, while nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and many of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, their history there is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing and stereotypes that fail both to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization which emerged there and to illustrate what was lost. Jewish life, though often poor materially, was marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and creativity. Antony Polonsky recreates this lost world - brutally cut down by the Holocaust and less brutally but still seriously damaged by the Soviet attempt to destroy Jewish culture. Wherever possible, the unfolding of history is illustrated by contemporary Jewish writings to show how Jews felt and reacted to the complex and difficult situations in which they found themselves. This first volume begins with an overview of Jewish life in Poland and Lithuania down to the mid-eighteenth century. It describes the towns and shtetls where the Jews lived, the institutions they developed, and their participation in the economy. Developments in religious life, including the emergence of hasidism and the growth of opposition to it, are described in detail. The volume goes on to cover the period from 1764 to 1881, highlighting government attempts to increase the integration of Jews into the wider society and the Jewish responses to these efforts, including the beginnings of the Haskalah movement. Attention is focused on developments in each country in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. Volume 2 will cover the period 1881-1914; Volume 3 covers 1914-2005. *** Winner of the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies, awarded by the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. *** "Highly recommended for all academic libraries with a Jewish studies program". - AJL Newsletter, February/March 2011 *** ". . . an excellent synthesis of recent research on Eastern European Jewish culture and history". - Journal of Folklore Research, January 2012 *** ". . . exemplary and formidable three-volume work of historical synthesis . . ." - Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2012 *** "Stupendous". - David Frum, The Daily Beast, September 26, 2012 *** "Polonsky's magisterial The Jews in Poland and Russia is one of those rare works that can hope to bridge the gap between specialist and "intelligent general reader". . . No one interested in Jewish, Polish, or Russian history can afford to be without these volumes . . . will long remain the standard work on this crucial Jewish community . . . The most important thing one can say about Antony Polonsky's The Jews in Poland and Russia is: get it and read it!" - Theodore R. Weeks, The Polish Review *** "The Jews in Poland and Russia contains a meticulously crafted synthesis of existing historiography, and yet also goes far beyond. Antony Polonskyâ??s particular scholarly achievement lies in the fact that he combines a masterful grasp of Jewish history with that of Eastern Europe. . . . these beautifully narrated volumes should not only be seen as a staple for university courses, but also as a must-read for anyone attempting to understand any aspect of modern Jewish history and religious tradition, wherever it may be playing out. It all originates in Eastern Europe, Antony Polonsky reminds us, and without understanding our collective past, how can we understand our present." - Eur

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Each of the three volumes of this work provides a comprehensive picture of the realities of Jewish life in the Polish lands in the period it covers, while also considering the contemporary political, economic, and social context. This volume, from 1881 to 1914, explores the factors that had a negative impact on Jewish life as well as the political and cultural movements that developed in consequence: Zionism, socialism, autonomism, the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Jewish urbanization, and the rise of popular Jewish culture.

The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.