My Great-Grandfather the Bundist

October 7, 2018 7:36 AM

Molly Crabapple explores the history and ultimate tragedy of the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (General Jewish Workers' Union), an early-twentieth-century political movement devoted to a radical, secular, diasporic Jewish identity. Bundists celebrated Doykeyt or Hereness, the belief that Jews should stay in Eastern Europe and fight to build a society in which they could thrive.

When the Bund is acknowledged at all today, it is often characterized as naive idealism whose concept of Hereness lost its argument to the Holocaust. But as I watch footage on social media of Israeli snipers’ bullets killing Palestinian protesters, I think that Bundism, with its Jewishness that was at once compassionate and hard as iron, was the movement that history proved right.

posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious (10 comments total)

Anti-Zionists frequently accuse Zionists of propaganda, yet are blind to their own biases. Nationalism is apparently good enough for everyone (including the Arab states) except for the Jews. I share the Bundists’ distaste for nationalism, yet it is hard to reconcile diasporism with history: 9 out of 10 Jews in Poland perished during the Holocaust. Humanism, culture, and cooperation are important, but you can’t work towards them when you’re dead.

But despite the jabs at Zionism, I enjoyed this story. Many diaspora Jews, such as myself and the author, have lost our traditions, language, and stories, and we struggle to uncover any small trace of what our ancestors did and believed. The grandfather’s artwork is stunning.
posted by shalom at 9:07 AM on October 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

Nationalism is apparently good enough for everyone (including the Arab states) except for the Jews.

Not to speak to the present day, but from that particular time period, there were many people on the left who thought that nationalism was disastrous for everyone. Joseph Roth (who was of Jewish descent but whose family were recent Catholic converts) was particularly dismayed by what he saw as the superior Jewish cosmopolitanism and international solidarity falling under the sway of the vicious and thuggish phenomenon of nationalism.
posted by praemunire at 10:36 AM on October 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

I had a kind of similar reaction, shalom, although not necessarily because of the potshots at Zionism. It's just that in order to think that the Bund was "right," you have to only value abstract principles and completely devalue Jewish lives and Jewish culture. They obviously weren't right, because the people who stayed in Poland pretty much all died, and their culture died with them. The people who were right, if you care at all about Jewish survival, were the people like her great-grandfather, who got the hell out of Poland before other countries closed their borders. But having said that, it's a fascinating piece of history and a really good read. And I guess that my experience, as someone who had a fairly conventional Reform Jewish education, is that diasporic, non-Zionist aspects of European Jewish history didn't get a lot of attention, in ways that I think really distorted my understanding of where I came from, politically and culturally.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:50 AM on October 7, 2018 [6 favorites]

This was very moving for me and beautiful. Molly Crabapple knows the power of narratives and of how history is told. I loved this.
posted by latkes at 4:45 PM on October 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not to speak to the present day, but from that particular time period, there were many people on the left who thought that nationalism was disastrous for everyone

At that same time period, there was also a heavy streak of "Thereness", for lack of a better word, on the Zionist side of the divide, the idea of building a Jewish community in a pluralistic setting in the Middle East. And what's more, it made a ton more sense than trying it in Eastern Europe. You could migrate to the Ottoman Empire to be among people who are feuding over disputes which they will explain in terms of events happening in the 1840s [*] Or you could stay in Europe where people talk about Emperor Basil the Bulgar SLayer as if it was just last week that he took action to earn that nickname. Yeah, I'd also take a steerage ticket to Jaffa. Back then. And all I have to do is eavestrop on Romanians talking about their Magyar minority and still think it makes more sense today.

The Bundists and Zionists differed less about politics than about things like the Yiddish language. And that made the split that much more bitter inside the Tribe.

[*] The Ottoman Empire's far-too-late attempts at modernization causing a power vacuum in the region.
posted by ocschwar at 8:18 PM on October 7, 2018

Bundism always had a whiff of Underpants Gnome logic about it: they were Jews talking to other Jews about the admitted beauty of universalism, when the people they needed to convince were the gentiles. I don't think any degree of Jewish resistance would have ultimately saved the Jews of Poland, but the Bundist search for class-based solidarity between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles was not only doomed to failure (race trumps class) failed; it was arguably self-defeating.

There are still Bundists in Melbourne (as the author mentions) because a lot of Holocaust survivors ended up here. I don't know what doikeyt even means when you're a refugee, but Bundists never seemed to lose their habit of hectoring other Jews. I can't help thinking that there'd have been more survivors if Bundism had been less popular in Poland, though. It was precisely the wrong message for the time.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:21 PM on October 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wait a second, are you saying Bundists died because they failed to flee Poland, or are you implying Bundists were responsible for large numbers of Polish Jews dying in the Holocaust, because they sent "the wrong message"?? Come on man, talk about hectoring other Jews..

Jews died because of Nazis. No one knew the future and we can only benefit from learning more about our idiologically diverse history.
posted by latkes at 11:15 PM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

Bundism is a hopeful ideology; Zionism and Communism are pessimistic. If Polish Jews had been less willing to believe in the possibility of reconciliation between the peoples of Poland they might have been more willing to either emigrate or to prepare for a national crisis. I say this with the benefit of hindsight; there's no way that they could have anticipated the extension of Nazi rule to Poland, and its lethal consequences. But Holocaust or no, Polish antisemitism was huge and profound and hasn't even dissipated today.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:32 AM on October 8, 2018

If Polish Jews had been less willing to believe in the possibility of reconciliation between the peoples of Poland they might have been more willing to either emigrate or to prepare for a national crisis.

What does "prepare for a national crisis" even mean in this context? It seems from this essay, and some other things I've read, that they did a LOT to prepare for, or at least respond, to the crisis of the Nazis. But they were all marked for death the moment the Nazis rolled in, and its not like their nation (Poland) was going to help them.
posted by lunasol at 7:48 PM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

What does "prepare for a national crisis" even mean in this context?

Post WW1 Poland was a new nation, created after a 100+ year interregnum as part of the European reorganisation. It was very unstable, and in fact the Second Polish Republic fell to an internal coup in 1926. Polish society was (and is) incredibly antisemitic, probably even more so than Germany before Hitler rose to power. As things turned out the Bundists were never going to gain significant popular support for a multi-ethnic society and it might have been a good deal better for Poland's Jews if they had acknowledged this. Maybe more of them would have emigrated, maybe they'd have supported a further reorganisatiion in conjunction with other ethnic Polish minorities.

This is all a counterfactual, though. Who knows, maybe the exemplary loyalty shown by Bundists protected Polish Jews from even worse persecution during the pre-WW2 period. It was mostly a moot point after the early 1930s because the doors to immigration were rapidly closed in Jews' faces. As Chaim Weizmann put it, they were the ones "for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live, and places where they cannot enter". For their hindsight to have been effective, they'd have had to have lost hope in the early 20s, before they really had a reason to do so.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:45 PM on October 11, 2018