Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928a 1996

This book is very informative, especially on the history of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in far east Russia. It tells the specifics of how the region was started under the auspices of sending Jews to a "homeland" within the Soviet Union, instead of letting them go to Palestine. There is a lot of history about the Jews in the former Soviet Union as a whole, but this book focuses on those who went by free will in the hope of having a place to themselves. It tells about the government's reasons for setting the region up and how they advertised to get people to go out there and the help they provided. It also tells about Jews around the world being involved in the Birobidzhan Project in various ways, and how some Jews from other countries believed in the Project so much that they moved there. The book is small,but it is packed with information and with black and white pictures from the past.

This book tells the tale of the Communist Party's attempt to take the Jewish population of the USSR and turn them into an agrarian and secular state in the Soviet far east. Since this was a from of social experimentation, and experimentation based on faulty information and logic, it was a doomed effort. The Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) sought to take Jews from the western frontier and resettle them in collective farms in Birobidzhan. It was hoped that by establishing a Jewish colony there would be an alternative for the urban Jews who had been made destitute by the policies of Czarist Russia. It would also allow the USSR to collect most of the Jewish population (which despite their "tolerance" the Russians saw as an alien presence) into one area, in theory promoting their language (in this case Yiddish) and their culture. In practice of course few of these people had any experience in agriculture and the JAR became a classic example of Communist incompetence and mismanagement. Birobidzhan was never a serious competitor to Palestine as a potential Jewish homeland. In fact, since the collapse of Communism many of the Jews in the region have opted to emigrate to Israel, putting an end to this chapter in Soviet history. Well illustrated and for the most part well-written.

Birobidjan of course failed to be the capital of Sovet Jewry(did Brighton Beach, Brooklin win this title?) The book is based onfacts, and facts usually can scare more than any fiction. I don't feel like the author makes the most of the facts. I do feel that the author is too soft in his judgement, I guess presenting the facts is always easier than providing a personal outlook.