A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia’s Jews during this time. A Nation of Refugees uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them.

The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia’s Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution.

Polly Zavadivker is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the multi-volume series Russia’s Great War and Revolution.