I have to fully own that I was somewhat biased against this book from the beginning, and that I never overcame that bias while reading it. It was highly recommended to me, but I felt that a book about the Bund, while interesting, would never convince me that the Bund was "correct" or anything but misguided. I feel like history proved that Bundism was a failure in Poland and Russia. Moreover, the book was really more of a vehicle for anti-Zionism. While I am sympathetic to criticism of Israel, Here Where We Live Is Our Country started with a quote from Mahmoud Darwish, which was the first indication that this book was not really about the Bund. Moreover, it didn't really deliver on the author's tie-in to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, who moves from Volkovysk to the United States long before the Holocaust. I think the "right answer" for the Jews of Poland was probably just to get the heck out, or that there was no right answer at all.
I think that the biggest strength of the book is Crabapple's contextualization of the Jewish situation in Russia/Poland in the 19th century, when she briefly goes over the history and delineates three competing ideologies: assimilationists, Zionists, and socialists/Bundists. However, she mostly ignores the religious political parties that were also influential Jewish interest groups. The Bundists were similar to the assimilationists in that they believed in staying put in Europe, and similar to the Zionists in that they supported socialism. You could make a venn diagram. The book is similarly strong into the early 20th century, discussing the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the 1905 strike in Lodz. Crabapple points out that the people of Lodz still don't like Jews very much, and rival soccer fans call each other "Jews" as an insult.
As the book gets deeper into the 20th century, it gets harder to follow. Crabapple introduces countless names of leaders to remember, and they became impossible for me to tell apart, so I just had to glide through the book, letting them replace each other in my head since I didn't dedicate the concentration to keep them apart. What was clear was that the Bund peaked around 1906, when it had 30,000 members, whereas it dropped to 609 by 1910 due to state repression in Russia and emigration. The Bundists who were left in WWI come off more like spoiled rich kids than a real movement. Crabapple doesn't really explore this, even when she discusses Sophia Dubnova: "She agitated in small towns under false identities, smuggled pamphlets between cities by taping them to her body to mimic a pregnant belly, and incited mutiny in the Grodno army garrison. (Her soldier boys were later shot.)" I found that line to be very careless. It romanticizes the life of the anarchist upper-class girl (her dad was a historian) and throws away the lives of the people who she hazarded in her little adventure. I don't doubt Sophia Dubnova's sincerity, but I think that was something that should have been explored more. I know that if I convinced someone to mutiny and they were killed for it, I would feel horrible after. Crabapple keeps it light.
By 1920, the Russian Bundists were trapped in an impossible situation, and dissolved to join the Bolsheviks. It's easy to call this a bad choice now, but Poland didn't want the Jews, especially not socialists, and they didn't know what was coming in the USSR. But the result was that the Bund was dissolved in Russia. In Poland, the Bund continued, but never became a serious contender in national because the Polish Socialists wouldn't work with a Jewish party. The Bund did get lots of votes in local elections, becoming the majority Jewish party, but not a majority in government. This was probably just a feature of Jewish parties cannibalizing votes from each other.
The whole irony of the book is that over and over again, events prove that the Jews needed to escape from Poland and Eastern Europe, and the situation was getting bad. Even moreso, it shows how there were not many options besides Israel--Crabapple goes straight from championing the Jews staying in Poland to wondering what they should do after the Evian Conference ends with no country willing to take Jewish refugees. Israel was left as the only option for Jews to escape as the world closed its doors in the 1920s. But Crabapple can't really criticize the rest of the world when her favorite Bundists agreed with them and wanted the Jews of Poland to stay put. Even where Bundist socialism won--the USSR--the Bund was dissolved into Bolshevism and then Jews were systematically purged from the party in the following decade.
My biggest ugh moment with this book was towards the end. Crabapple describes the fall of Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to the Nazis on June 25, 1941, and how the Nazis sawed through the neck of a famous rabbi. Visiting near the site, Crabapple has this thought: "The only thing that lifted my mood was a bright little dosa shop that an Indian immigrant had opened. I bought five packs of cigarettes to support him. Only you can fix this place, I thought. It needs new blood. Please, bring your cousins." This was so weird. First of all, random Indian immigrants are not responsible for improving the imagined moral degeneracy of the grandsons of people who collaborated with Nazis. It has been 80 years and the people of Kaunas are not responsible at this point for what happened in 1941. The Indian immigrant also definitely isn't responsible for somehow making them better, as if he would even be aware that is it job. And then the whole "bring your cousins" comment is just bizarre, and is literally implying that there should be a replacement of people, feeding into the worst conspiracy theories. She had completely lost me by this point.
I'll just finish by saying that even though I strongly disagreed with the argument of the book, I think that it is creative and that emphasizing the role of the Bund in European history is a good thing, since it is often forgotten. We will just have to agree to disagree. For Crabapple, the Bund is a morally righteous organization, and for me it is more of a cautionary tale.
Miscellaneous:
- I thought this quote by Meyer London, who became a politician in New York, was interesting: "Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives ... for liberty? They ... pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt."
