Jewish Lives under Communism: New Perspectives

By Stephan Stach, Valery Dymshits, Diana Dumitru and 8 more

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism  by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978830813

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INTRODUCTION

KATEŘINA ČAPKOVÁ, KAMIL KIJEK, AND STEPHAN STACH

Thirty years have passed since the end of the Cold War, which makes it all the more surprising that the bulk of the historiography on Jews under Communism continues to use the rhetoric of the Cold War. State Communism was hegemonic, and therefore scholarship has focused on political elites and their relationship with the Jews, as well as on those Jews who held (mostly temporarily) important positions in the Communist political system. Only in the last decade can we observe a clear turn toward a more complex view of the Jewish experience under Communism.

Research on Jews in different parts of the former Soviet Union has provided the most inspiring and groundbreaking studies to date. In contrast, research on the history of the Jews in other European states under Soviet influence awaits such new approaches. The goal of this volume is to outline promising new research directions that, for the first time, bring together innovative scholarship on various aspects of Jewish life in the post-1945 period, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, and Hungary. It also aims to foster the integration of Soviet and East Central European Jewish Studies into the broader history of societies under Communism.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Elissa Bemporad, Anna Shternshis, Gennady Estraikh, David Shneer, and Arkady Zeltzer portray various groups within Soviet society not only as victims of the Communist system but also as agents who used the limited legal framework in a very creative way to achieve their own ideals and aims.¹ Moreover, they demonstrate how, although pre-1917 Jewish traditions had been shaken by the new political system, they continued to shape daily lives of Jews during the Communist era and affected such purely Communist historical processes as patterns of enrollment of Jews in Communist organizations, the daily functioning of the party, and Soviet Jewish identities.²

All of these studies of Jews under Communism focus on territories within the Soviet Union, and most only deal with the first two to three decades of the Soviet regime, as if the potential to interpret Soviet Jewish experience beyond the narrative of discrimination stops with the fatal final years of Stalin’s rule. And even though the first complex studies of pro-Soviet regimes and their societies outside the Soviet Union are available,³ a narrow political history still dominates the historiography of Jewish experience in East Central European countries. Jews are studied mainly as passive objects of policies issued by Communist regimes and as victims of popular or state antisemitism, on the one hand, or as members of a group allegedly overrepresented or uniquely engaged in the Communist power apparatus, on the other. Their history is dominated either by a teleology of waves of persecution and by subsequent waves of emigration or by narratives of Jewish engagement with Communism.

A perfect example of this characteristic approach and its overtly political, ideological, and teleological discourse is the Polish case. Arguably, in no other country in East Central Europe has Jewish postwar history been investigated so intensively as in Poland. Precisely for this reason, it serves as the best exemplar of the earlier mentioned limitations. Since 1989 the dominant line of historiography on Poland under Communism has emphasized the crimes of the Communist regime and the suffering it inflicted on the Polish nation.⁴ Consciously or not, this scholarship has embraced an overtly nationalistic narrative. In a dichotomizing discourse, authors present the Polish nation in opposition and resistance to Communism, which in turn is depicted as an alien ideology implemented from the outside. Such studies count Jews among the outsiders, serving as proof of the alleged truth of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism or, short of that, as a way to underscore an ostensibly unique Jewish preference for Far Left political movements.⁵ This narrow nationalistic perspective also largely defines the writings of liberal Polish historians, who reject these kinds of stereotypes, unfounded accusations, and simplifications but are also fascinated by the supposedly high number of Jews in the upper ranks of the Polish Communist Party and state apparatus, treating this topic as the most crucial problem of Jewish history in Communist Poland.⁶

American, Israeli, and the new wave of Polish scholarship mostly focus on anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland, the anti-Jewish policies of the Communist regime, the organization of the remnants of Polish Jewry directly after the Holocaust, and subsequent waves of Jewish emigration.⁷ All these facets of Jewish history in Poland and in the rest of East Central Europe are indeed very important, but these works generally fail to address issues of Jewish agency (individual and communal) under Communism, as expressed by various forms of Jewish resistance, accommodation, or adjustment to the Communist reality and the spaces in between. Exceptions to this pattern are the few notable works on the history of the Jewish community in the first years of postwar Poland, which concentrate on institutional history.⁸

DIFFERENT METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES

The need to investigate the Jewish experience under Communism with a focus on social and cultural history is therefore all the more urgent. This change of perspective informs Jewish Lives under Communism, which joins not only the earlier mentioned new scholarship on Soviet Jewish history but also the first innovative studies on Jews in other Communist countries.⁹ This new perspective brings with it the adoption of other methodological approaches, principally a turn from political history to research based on interviews, anthropological fieldwork, and on local archives where our authors find rich data about Jewish social history under state Communism. This research focuses on people at the bottom, rather than on political elites at the top. Such studies enable us to analyze the negotiations between heterogenous local Jewish communities and Jewish individuals and different levels of state and local administrations. For instance, as Diana Dumitru and Anna Shternshis show in their chapters on the postwar years up to the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953, such analyses reveal not only the social impact of discriminatory policies of the Communist regime but also the agency and different approaches of a diverse Jewish community to the new legal and political framework.

Instead of relying on official state documents and the Communist Party’s bureaucrats’ attitude to the Jewish population or their monitoring of activities of Jews, the contributors in Jewish Lives under Communism analyze documents produced by Jewish individuals, communities, or different organizations and also those in private hands, including photo albums, correspondence, diaries, and objects of memory. Oral history also plays a large role in the chapters by Valery Dymshits, Anna Shternshis, Galina Zelenina, Agata Maksimowska, and Kateřina Čapková. It allows them to show new forms of Jewish self-consciousness within the official Communist framework and a perspective enriched by a focus on family issues, choice of occupation, social networks, and leisure time. For instance, in her sociological microstudy, Zelenina analyzes the overlapping social networks of refuseniks, dacha owners, and religious Jews of Malakhovka in the suburbs of Moscow. An essential part of the Malakhovka experience is the location of the settlement on the periphery, on the outskirts of the capital’s center. Dymshits, Čapková, Kamil Kijek, and Diana Dumitru also focus on regions at the periphery of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Such research in many ways challenges the otherwise dominant interest in Jews in the capital cities and larger settlements in the center, where the central offices of Jewish organizations acted under the direct control of the state administration and where—as is often claimed—Jews underwent the process of assimilation.¹⁰

A new, more sophisticated understanding of Jewish life in Europe during Communism, combined with new methodological approaches, can be achieved by a transnationalism of sources; that is, by integrating archival and other documents produced not only by the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and Communist governments and deposited in local archives but also by Jews and Jewish institutions outside these territories and stored in Israeli, American. and West European archives or libraries. Juxtaposing and carefully triangulating sources produced in various countries in different discursive, ideological, and institutional contexts can help overcome their respective biases; for example, the impact of Communist ideology and censorship, the self-censorship of Jewish individuals and institutions in Eastern Europe, and Western convictions regarding the impossibility of Jewish life under Communism, which contributed to the denial of the very reality of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

LOCAL CONTEXTS AND CONTINUITIES

Our volume persuasively shows that a variety of differences in political, social, cultural, and economic life existed across various states and regions. Thus, it deconstructs the idea of a single Soviet model adopted in countries of East Central Europe. In the legal framework alone, we find substantial differences between Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany in comparison with Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In the first group of countries, Jews were acknowledged as a religious community only, whereas the latter group allowed not only religious communities but also state-funded nonreligious leftist Jewish organizations. When around 1950 Zionism became an alien ideology in the eyes of Communist governments, secular Jewish institutions struggled to sustain government recognition of the Jews as a nationality or ethnic minority. Because they were not religious, these institutions based their existence on a sort of secular Jewish ethnic identity combined mostly with interest in Yiddish culture and inspired by ideas of prewar Bundists and Folkists—even Left Zionist ideas of doyikeit (hereness).

These different institutional settings are not only a testament to the wide variety of Jewish experiences and identities under Communism but also suggest a greater level of continuity between the period before and after Communism than the historiography has been willing to admit. By the interwar period, the Polish and Romanian Jewish communities were especially known for their pronounced interest in Jewish nationalism of various kinds, not only the pro-Zionist variety. The persistence of nonreligious semi-national Jewish organizations in Communist Poland and Romania is therefore proof that Communist dictatorships understood the internal dynamics of the local Jewish communities and to some extent respected their local ideological and institutional framework (as was the case with other groups of people in society). It is also proof that, especially for leftist Jewish pre-Holocaust organizations, the arrival of state Communism in the postwar period was not always seen as a disaster but rather as a hope, a chance to achieve their own aims—a hope that soon faded with the rise of Stalinism.

To achieve its aim of instituting an overarching revolution in every corner of Europe, Communism had relied on established political, social, and cultural structures: it re-treaded older political strategies and many older cultural symbols. For example, the Communist struggle for the productivization of East European Jewry was a continuation of a much older discourse that had its roots in the ideology of the Enlightenment. Likewise, the idea of limited Jewish autonomy in postwar Poland, supported by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (1944–1950), would have been unimaginable without the decades-long struggle for Jewish autonomy in East Central Europe before 1939 or even 1917.¹¹ Interwar Jewish experiences of discrimination and violence, on the one hand, and leftist Jewish and non-Jewish cooperation and visions of change, on the other, shaped Jewish responses to various programs of the Communists or Communist-dominated coalitions in many East Central European countries after 1945. This is also what Kijek shows in chapter 1 in his micro-historical case study of Lower Silesia. The new Communist system did not completely eradicate older local traditions: they continued to influence social networks, rituals, popular and high culture, the way leisure time was spent, and various other aspects of daily life.

This approach, which does not look at the year 1945 as the beginning of everything but which is sensible also to continuities from before the Holocaust, has so far been most productively adopted in biographies of individual Communist or Communist-sympathizing Jewish intellectuals.¹²

THE PERSISTENCE AND TRANSFORMATION OF JEWISH IDENTITIES

The transition to Communist regimes in the countries outside the Soviet Union after 1945 did not cause a wholesale restructuring of law and society, as occurred in Soviet Union after 1917. For instance, in no country outside the Soviet Union were Jewish religious communities abolished. This had an unintended paradoxical effect in those countries where all Jewish organizations but religious ones were closed. Even though all pro-Soviet governments were officially opposed to religion and introduced repressive policies toward churches and synagogues, ironically, in countries where Jews were acknowledged only as a religious community, this restriction brought more Jews under the roof of the Jewish religious community. This is what Čapková shows in her study of Czechoslovakia (chapter 2), where all Jews who consciously wanted to raise their children Jewishly, even if they were not religious, had no option but to join the kehila (Jewish Community). In the pre-war period, Čapková argues that these secular Jews maintained their Jewish identity by participating in sports and cultural associations that had no religious dimension.¹³ Likewise, based on his unique ethnographic research in a Ukrainian province, Dymshits argues in chapter 3 that interconnected religious and social traditions continued to survive in formerly Jewish small towns or shtetls. These traditions shaped crucial and long-lasting patterns of stratification and social prestige among Jews and alternative forms of social and cultural identifications to those enforced by the state. In Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union’s Far East, which was established to showcase a Communist Jewish homeland in the late 1920s, Agata Maksimowska’s research shows that religious practice persisted even among those Jews who had taken part in this explicitly secular project (chapter 7). Yet an enhanced religious identification was experienced not only among members of Birobidzhan tiny religious community, the only religious Jewish Community officially registered in the Far East part of the Soviet Union (in 1946), which faced enormous hostility from the authorities. Many more Jews who never attended synagogue secretly held onto their religious traditions. Such studies challenge the reigning myth of Jewish assimilation under Communism.

The historiography of Jews under Communism tends also to consider Jewish institutions under Communism as artificial. According to such views, Jewish life in Communist countries after 1945 was no more than an echo of the past, which soon was silenced by state repression and emigration. Indeed, these communal ends or points of termination are usually connected to important caesuras in postwar Jewish history of a given country: either waves of emigration (whose representatives usually considered themselves the last Jews leaving their country of origin) or events connected to the suppression of layers of Jewish life, such as religion, a separate Jewish or Yiddish culture, and (real or imagined) Zionist activities.¹⁴

In contrast to a perspective that divides postwar Jewish history into brief segments based on political events, our volume focuses on Jewish lives that were certainly influenced by state policies while emphasizing continuities and the many different layers of a given life. Family and gender perspectives have mostly been neglected in the historiography of postwar Jewish history, and their omission results in a fundamentally distorted picture.¹⁵ Starting a new family life and finding even distant relatives and living with them were essential parts of Jewish postwar life. In most East Central European countries, only a small number of Jewish children survived the war. Most survivors of working age therefore sought to establish new families. In contrast to the surrounding non-Jewish society, in which the birth of children during the war was nothing exceptional, the demographic structure of the Jewish population was markedly different: most Jewish children were born between 1945 and 1950.¹⁶ As Čapková shows in chapter 2, this baby boom challenges the dominant assumption that the early 1950s were only dark years of political oppression. They were also years when most Jewish survivors (most of whom were young or middle-aged) were busy raising their children. Given the typical division of work among women and men at the time, it was Jewish women who were involved with, and often overwhelmed by, care for small children, especially because they could not rely on any assistance from relatives, most of whom had been killed during the war. This is why women in particular saw the postwar years primarily through the lens of family life.

The perspective of private life also reveals the crucial impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities. The historiography tends to treat the Holocaust and the Jewish experience under Communism as if they were two separate experiences. Given the recent tendency to include the immediate postwar years in Holocaust research, the overlapping experiences and the beginning of Communist dictatorships have gained new attention. Despite survivors’ differing relations to religion, tradition, and the idea of a separate Jewish culture, the memory of the Holocaust united Jews. Every Jew had lost at least some family members and friends, and the Holocaust reminded Jews of their Jewishness, even those who had rejected it or had been indifferent to it. In her case study of East Germany, Anna Koch in chapter 6 points out that even Jewish Communists redefined their relationship to Jewishness in response to the Holocaust. As a shared Jewish experience, it became a crucial and undeniable part of their identity.

By the same token, the Holocaust separated the Jewish (and Romani) experience of World War II from the experience of non-Jews, who had also suffered from the war and German terror but were often unable or unwilling to acknowledge the extent of Jewish (and Romani) suffering. Places like Theresienstadt or the Auschwitz memorial museums privileged the memory of non-Jewish victims of these camps over that of Jewish victims.¹⁷ Jews thus had to find strategies to integrate their memory of the war into the collective memory of their home country and to carve out spaces for Holocaust memory within its framework. In chapter 8 on the Yiddish singer Lin Jaldati, David Shneer points to her successful attempt to integrate the Holocaust experience into highly ideologized state commemorations of the antifascist struggle.¹⁸ Jewish efforts to integrate Holocaust memory into national memories, however, did not only address Communist governments but also, from the late 1970s onward, the emerging opposition movements.¹⁹ In chapter 12 on the Hungarian Jewish samizdat journal Magyar Zsidó, the Salom group, and their role in the dissidents’ debate, Kata Bohus presents a case that sheds light on both Jewish agency and the emergence of a self-conscious Jewish identity.

TRANSNATIONALISM

The networks between Jews in East Central Europe and their distant relatives and friends in different parts of the world bring us to the important topic of transnationalism. In contrast to the dominant image of Jews in Communist countries as living in isolation under the pressure of national assimilation, the perspective informed by social history and private sources offers a completely different picture. Jews—individuals and their organizations—and the new governments of the Communist countries were aware that the centers of Jewish settlement had changed because of the Holocaust and that the State of Israel and that U.S. Jews had become the major representatives and advocates of Jewish rights. Especially in the case of Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, the number of Jews who were born in those countries and later emigrated (mostly to the United States, Israel, or Western Europe) was several times higher than the number of those living under Communism. Dense networks between family members, friends, and colleagues across the Iron Curtain might have been restricted, especially at the beginning of the 1950s, but Jews under Communism were never totally isolated. They and their relatives or friends from abroad used any opportunity to maintain contact and to visit each other, although visits from abroad occurred more frequently than possibilities to leave Communist countries. As underscored by Marcos Silber’s chapter 10, Jewish emigration from these countries had much more complex motivations than simple politics; in some cases, emigres wanted to return after they left. Moreover, contact with Jewish organizations behind the Iron Curtain was maintained through Israeli embassies (up to 1967, except for Romania, which never cut diplomatic relations with Israel) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which renewed its activities in many East Central European countries after Stalinism.

Not only was the Iron Curtain permeable but also of key importance were Jewish activities among and between Communist states in several fields of common interest. Cooperation between the Jewish communities of East Central and Southeastern Europe existed because of needs for ritual objects—the distribution of kosher meat (or visits by a shochet (kosher butcher) from a neighboring country), matzah, or prayer books. In times of relaxed political restrictions like the 1960s and the 1980s, Jewish youth were allowed to take part in international Jewish summer camps financed by the JDC and organized mostly in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Moreover, at ceremonies commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, which mostly employed antifascist rhetoric, representatives of Jewish communities and Jewish leaders of antifascist organizations across East Central and Southeastern Europe could meet. Using the example of Lin Jaldati, Shneer argues persuasively that Jewish artists with an antifascist message were free to tour countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Gennady Estraikh in chapter 9 also shows attempts of the post-Stalin era Soviet government to promote itself by means of Yiddish cultural diplomacy; that is, allowing for some limited Yiddish and Jewish cultural production aimed primarily at Western but not Soviet Jewish audiences. Despite these kinds of instrumental motives of the Soviet government and the continued discrimination against Jews and their needs in the social, economic, and political life of the country, Yiddish cultural diplomacy gave rise to new opportunities for some Soviet Jewish intellectuals to develop contacts with their counterparts on both sides of the Iron Curtain (mainly in the United States, Israel, and Poland) and to advocate for the reappearance of Yiddish and Jewish culture in the official framework of the Soviet state.

This volume brings many new insights on various aspects and dimensions of transnationalism in the lives of Jews in East European Communist states—through the activities of various Jewish Western welfare institutions and agencies and contacts between friends and families across the Iron Curtain or between Jewish elites from different countries in the Eastern Bloc. Still, more research on this topic is needed. We know only little about contacts between Jewish citizens of various Communist states, especially family visits. Another important contribution to this topic would be an analysis of private correspondence between Soviet Jews and members of their families who, most often because of the great turmoil caused by the Holocaust, World War II, and changes in borders, were living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Also awaiting further research are the contacts, inspirations, and influences between Jewish anti-Communist dissidents in various countries of the Soviet Bloc.

The destruction of European Jewry during World War II was most drastic in East Central Europe. It therefore needs to be accounted for in every Jewish history of the region after 1945. Nevertheless, the totalizing focus on the Holocaust as an alleged end of Jewish history in East Central Europe—combined with the unfounded assumption that Jewish life under Communism was completely different from everything that took place after 1945 in Western Europe, the United States, Israel, and other parts of the Western world—has resulted in the marginalization and exoticization of Jewish history in the post-1945 Soviet Union, and even more so in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia.²⁰ Universal and global processes—such as metropolitization, professionalization, the evolution from nationalism to peoplehood, pluralism and the uncertainty of ethnic identities, ongoing globalization, the evolution from modernist ideological politics to postmodern or post-politics, the evolution from large to atomic families, and changing patterns of professionalization and education—also shaped Jewish history and the lives of East Central European Jewry. The editors hope that this volume is a first step in reintegrating the East Central European Jewish experience into a global Jewish history and important contemporary global historiographical discussions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research and editorial work of Kateřina Čapková and Kamil Kijek for this volume and their chapters and Stephan Stach’s work on the introduction were financed by grant no. 16-01775Y of the Czech Science Foundation, The Inclusion of the Jewish Population into the Postwar Czechoslovak and Polish Societies, carried out at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences. Research of Kamil Kijek for part of the introduction and chapter 1 was financed by grant no. 2018/31/B/HS3/00228 of the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki- NCN), The Last Polish Shtetl? the Dzierżoniów Jewish Community, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism, 1945–1950.

NOTES

1. Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, 1919–1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (London: Legenda, 2008); David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), and Arkadii Zel’tser, Yevrei sovetskoy provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki. 1917–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006).

2. This trend in historiography is not specific to the history of Jews. There are several key publications on Soviet history whose focus shifted from political history to various aspects of social, cultural, and economic life under Communism. See, especially, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stephan Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); see also the valuable book series Istorija stalinisma published by ROSSPEN in Moscow.

3. Sándor Horváth, Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Life in Stalin-City, Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1944–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). In the last two decades, several German studies have approached Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic through an actor-centered perspective, mostly based on the concept of Eigen-Sinn (stubbornness). For an overview, see Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 1999).

4. See, for example, the contributions of Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartošek in Stéphane Courtois et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Włodzimierz Biernacki et al., eds., Komunizm w Polsce: Zdrada, zbrodnia, zakłamanie, zniewolenie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Kluszczyński, 2005). For the best brief discussion on the limitations of this perspective, see Agata Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie: Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście (Kraków: Universitas, 2006), 19–26.

5. See, for example, Mirosław Szumiło, Żydokomuna’ w aparacie władzy Polski Ludowej: Mit czy rzeczywistość? Pamięći Sprawiedliwość 2, no. 32 (2018): 27–60; and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2003). In contrast to such studies, see the excellent analysis of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). For a broader evaluation of Jewish engagement in leftist politics, see Jack Jacobs, ed., Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism, and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

6. Paweł Śpiewak, Żydokomuna: interpretacje historyczne (Warsaw: Czerwone i Czarne, 2012); Andrzej Paczkowski, Żydzi w UB—próba weryfikacji stereotypu, in Komunizm. Ideologia, system, ludzie, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw: Neriton, Instytut Historii PAN, 2001), 192–204.

7. See, for example, Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records, 1944–1947 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); David Engel, Bein Shichrur le Bricha: Nitzolei ha Shoah be Polin ve ha Maavak al Hanhagtam, 1944–1946 (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1996) and Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946, Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 43–85; Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Hana Shlomi, Osefet Mehkarim le Toldot Shearit ha Plita ha Yehudit be Polin (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001); and Arieh Levi Sarid, Be Mivhan ha Enut ve Hapadut: Ha Tnuot ha Halutziot be Polin be Shoah ve le Ahareya, 1939–1949, vol. II (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 1997). For cases other than Poland see David Bankier, ed., The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries after WWII (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005); Dalia Ofer et al., eds., Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Okrzyki pogromowe: Szkice z antropologii historycznej Polski lat 1939–1946 (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2012) and Pod klątwą: Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego, vol. I–II (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2018); Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak, 2012); and Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Dom, którego nie było: Powroty ocałacych do powojennego miasta (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2016).

8. Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950) (Warsaw: Trio, 2002); Grzegorz Berendt, Życieżydowskie w Polsce w latach 1950–1956: Z dziejów Towarzystwa Społeczno-KulturalnegoŻydów w Polsce (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2006); and August Grabski, Centralny KomitetŻydów w Polsce (1944–1950): Historia polityczna (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2015).

9. Karen Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Hendrik Niether, Leipziger Juden und die DDR: Eine Existenzerfahrung im Kalten Krieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, A Citizen of Yiddishland: Dovid Sfard and the Jewish Communist Milieu in Poland, trans. Paul Glasser (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020); and Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

10. For criticism of this approach, see Kateřina Čapková, Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Second World War, Studia Judaica 1 (2016): 129–155.

11. Jolanta Żyndul, Państwo w państwie? Autonomia narodowo-kulturalna w Europieśrodkowowschodniej w XX wieku (Warsaw: DiG, 2000). Żyndul’s study is exceptional for its placement of the subject in the context of national cultural autonomy in East Central Europe in the twentieth century.

12. Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu; Piotr Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima (Warsaw: W. A. B., 2007); Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Katrin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2000).

13. For the interwar period, see Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews in Bohemia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); and Tatjana Lichtenstein, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2016).

14. A telling example of the difficulties of such an approach is Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Feliks Tych, eds., Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland 1944–2010 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), which recounts more than sixty years of postwar Polish Jewish history as a mere aftermath of the Holocaust.

15. Some exceptions: Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt; Auerbach, The House at Ujazdowskie 16; Joanna Michlic, Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017); Helena Datner, Children in the Polish-Jewish Community from 1944 to 1968, in Jewish Presence in Absence, 283–326; and Eliyana Adler and Kateřina Čapková, Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020).

16. Atina Grossmann has pointed to the baby boom in the Displaced Persons camps on the territory of postwar Germany, yet similar demographic growth could be found in all European countries that experienced the Nazi occupation. See Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

17. For early postwar Poland, see Zofia Wóycicka, Arrested Mourning: Memory of Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944–1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter, 2013); for Auschwitz, see Imke Hansen, Nie wieder Auschwitz: Die Entstehung eines Symbols und der Alltag einer Gedenkstätte 1945–1955 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015); for Theresienstadt/Terezín, see Peter Hallama, Nationale Helden und jüdische Opfer: Tschechische Repräsentationen des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

18. For additional attempts to integrate the Holocaust experience into the postwar antifascist narrative in Czechoslovakia, see Lisa Peschel, ‘A Joyful Act of Worship’: Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezín Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czechoslovakia, 1945–48, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 209–228; and Kata Bohus, Peter Hallama, and Stephan Stach, eds., Growing out of Antifascism’s Shadow: Holocaust Memory in Socialist Eastern Europe since the 1950s (Budapest: CEU Press, 2020).

19. Rachel Rothstein, ‘Am I Jewish?’ and ‘What Does it Mean?’: The Jewish Flying University and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Counterculture in Late 1970s Warsaw, Journal of Jewish Identities 2, no. 8 (July 2015): 85–111; and Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach, eds., Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,