Polly Zavadivker's "A Nation of Refugees"

Polly Zavadivker is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the multi-volume series Russia's Great War and Revolution.

Zavadivker applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, and reported the following:

A Nation of Refugees describes how the world’s largest Jewish population experienced World War I and its violent epicenter in Eastern Europe. Page 99 falls within a chapter entitled “A Sacred Duty,” which explains the war relief campaign organized in 1914 by Jews in Russia’s capital cities for millions of civilians in front zones. It details how the Russian-language Jewish press publicized emergency relief work efforts during the first months of the war. Tens of thousands of homeless civilians had fled their homes in mortal fear during early battles between the German and Russian armies in what is now Poland and Lithuania. Writers in the press represented philanthropy and war relief as national and patriotic duties, as well the secular equivalent of the sacred obligation to give charity, a law passed down through generations that originated in ancient biblical laws of tithing.

The campaign generated great success, drawing millions of rubles in donations from nearly 500 different Jewish communities throughout Russia, including distant corners of the empire such as Baku (now in Azerbaijan) and the Pacific port city Vladivostok. I explain the novelty of this effort—that Jews dispersed across a continent-wide empire expressed solidarity with their beleaguered brothers and sisters, sometimes at a geographic remove of thousands of miles:

Rarely in the recent past had so many Jewish communities in the Russian interior raised funds for distant causes. In notable exceptions before the war, local communities sent dues to the world Zionist organization, and to support victims during the pogrom outbreaks of 1903–1906 in Bialystok, Odesa, Kishinev, and elsewhere. Mobilization for war relief in 1914–1915 occurred on an exponentially greater scale.

I wouldn’t say that page 99 provides a microcosm of the book, but it does present one of its three core themes, which include state and military violence, civilian experience, and the humanitarian campaign for war victims. The contents of page 99 convey the latter topic, with only passing reference to violence or the plight of civilians. Now, page 100, on the other hand…

Learn more about A Nation of Refugees at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue