The Destruction of the Dubova Shtetl: Chronicle of a Dead City

Written by Yiddish writer Rokhl Faygnberg, The Destruction of the Dubova Shtetl is a powerful account of the elimination of the Jewish community of one shtetl during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1921.

Based on her personal interviews with survivors, Faygnberg presents a detailed description of the evisceration of the vibrant Jewish community of Dubova, which, after enduring torture, killings, and destruction-was ultimately wiped off the map of Ukraine. In this unique memorial book, translated into English here for the first time, Faygnberg chronicles the demise of a typical shtetl, which like so many others at the time, was caught up in the genocidal violence of the civil war, a period that is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the Holocaust that took place in these same lands some twenty years later. The biographical details of the Jewish community members of Dubova provide a moving portrait of the familiar and neighborly relations, as well as of the pettiness of everyday life on the eve of destruction, made of conflict, class tension, and intermarriage. Faygnberg’s narrative also captures the extreme violence of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, by dwelling on the perpetrators’ actions and motivations, and on the intimacy of genocide made of neighbors killing neighbors, and by bringing to life the Jewish community’s desperate attempts to resist and survive the brutality.

By building on the most recent historiography on the Russian Civil War and anti-Jewish violence, Elissa Bemporad expertly contextualizes the destruction of the shtetl of Dubova within the political and military events of 1918-1921 in the volume’s introduction. Bemporad explores both the perpetrators’ motivations and the victims’ responses to the pogroms, as well as examining the original writing produced by Rokhl Faygnberg, whose genre straddles between a historical chronicle based on witness accounts, and a work of literature. Lastly, the introduction discusses the fascinating history of Faygnberg’s text, uncovering the different political and cultural purposes it served at different times and what it can tell us about anti-Jewish violence today.

Born in the Belarusian shtetl Lyuban in 1885, Rokhl Faygnberg witnessed and wrote about many of the defining events of modern Jewish history-wars, pogroms, and the birth of the State of Israel. She became the first professional Jewish female author who earned a living from writing novels and penning essays for the Yiddish and Hebrew press. After the pogroms of the civil war in Ukraine 1918-1921, which she powerfully chronicled in her work, she moved to Poland and eventually settled in Mandate Palestine in 1933, where she published largely in Hebrew under the name Rakhel Imri. She died in Tel Aviv in 1972.

Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. Her most recent book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019), also won a National Jewish Book Award. Elissa is also the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018, with Joyce Warren); and Pogroms: A Documentary History of Anti-Jewish Violence (2021, with Gene Avrutin). She is editor of Jewish Social Studies and is currently working on a biography of Ester Frumkin.