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A familiar narrative would have us believe, Molly Crabapple writes, that Jewish history up until 1945 was merely the prelude to the gas chamber and that the European Jewry and Jewish culture truly came into their own circa 1948, with the founding of the Jewish nation-state, Israel. Until that golden milestone was reached, the Jewish community was presumably the flotsam and jetsam of great European civilisation, a few honourable exceptions aside. Crabapple’s recent book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, energetically dismantles this project of obfuscation, in which the Israeli state is hugely invested.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing.

In doing so, Crabapple delivers a tour de force of history, personal memoir and imaginative reconstruction, tracing the thought processes, emotional turbulences and ethical conundrums of vast swathes of Eastern European Jews who lived through some of the most seismic events of the 20th century, often as active participants. The accompanying monochrome drawings – character studies, in the main – add a quaint period flavour to the narrative. In all his years of reading books, this reader has scarcely encountered the sui generis charm that Molly Crabapple brings to her storytelling here. This book is, quite simply, unputdownable.

It chronicles the life and death of one of the most significant progressive political movements of 20th-century Europe: the Jewish Bund or the Jewish Labour Bund, bund being Yiddish for “union”. The word “movement” is used advisedly rather than “party” or even “organisation,” because the Jewish Bund was a melange of trade unions, mutual aid societies, literary societies, theatre groups, soup kitchens, medical clinics, adult education hubs, sports associations, entertainment clubs and, simultaneously, a militant workers’ party. In inter-war Poland, it also ran with great success the renowned Vladimir Medem sanatorium for poor children at risk of tuberculosis, which doubled as an outstanding juvenile educational facility. At its peak, the bund was the largest socialist political formation in the Russian empire, dwarfing even the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, whose Bolshevik faction went on to lead the 1917 October Revolution.

The bund was secular, socialist, internationalist and defiantly Jewish, proudly championing the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. (Zionists, and later the state of Israel, deliberately rejected Yiddish, opting instead to resurrect and privilege Hebrew, an essentially liturgical language, over the East European Jew’s primary language and its rich literary culture.) The bund’s motto was doikayt (hereness) which signified its credo that Jews, like every other nationality, had the right to live, prosper and fight for equal rights wherever they happened to be residents: “here where we live is our country.” The bundist Weltanschaung was anchored in a belief in “solidarity across difference,” in the conviction that the Jews’ only hedge against persecution was the struggle alongside every other oppressed  community for a more equal future for all humankind.

In that struggle, Jews would not surrender their identity and instead continue to treasure and promote their own culture and living traditions while fighting side by side with the broader society they were part of. Their concerns and priorities would align with the progressive elements of all those societies, but they would not dissolve their cultural particularities at any point. In other words, they would form the Jewish vanguard in humanity’s struggle for a better future.   

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