Overview
This volume is devoted to the extreme challenges faced by the Jewish family during the years of World War II. Considerable attention is paid to the everyday choices involved in family survival strategies, the banalization of death, responses to Nazi anti-Jewish policies and mass murder, and adaptation to conditions of hunger and disease. The destruction of Jewish families through the loss of their members in the Holocaust led to the emergence of new forms of quasi-familial relationships, including among children who found themselves in Jewish partisan units.
The fact that Germany and its allies succeeded in occupying only part of the USSR significantly broadens the scope of the volume. It addresses decisions regarding evacuation to the Soviet rear and family life in evacuation, in particular the experiences of families of Jewish officers in the Red Army. Jewish families in besieged Leningrad formally lived in the Soviet rear, yet the personal choices of their members’ behavioral strategies under conditions of extreme hunger and cold recall the challenges faced by Jews in the occupied territories.
The theme of the family during the war is closely intertwined with questions of Jewish identity, as manifested in everyday and imagined contexts, as well as in heroic and religious forms. The problems of ethnic choice are most vividly articulated in Yiddish literature. Overall, the volume focuses on the Soviet Jewish family within the borders of the USSR on the eve of World War II. In addition, it includes a chapter on members of Jewish families who were refugees from Poland, whose correspondence testifies to a complex psychological transformation under Soviet conditions.
The contributors to the volume include Tanja Penter, Kiril Feferman, Anna Shternshis, Anika Walke, Polina Barskova, Tatiana Pozdniakova, Gennady Estraikh, and Mikhail Krutikov.
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