Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

This deeply affecting account from journalist and artist Crabapple (Drawing Blood) explores the largely forgotten history of the Bund, a secular Jewish labor party influential in Eastern Europe before WWII. In the 1890s, a group of young Jewish Marxists in Vilna set up free classes for Jewish workers, who were otherwise denied education. The group became the foundation of the Bund, which began organizing strikes and winning better treatment for a class of workers—mainly employed in cottage industries like garment-making—who were otherwise ignored, and sometimes vilified, by the international socialist movement. Zionism likewise “made its global debut” in the 1890s, and Crabapple notes that the two movements could not have been more different: “while the Bund’s first congress comprised a few fugitives in a Vilna attic, the inaugural Zionist congress filled a posh Swiss casino.” The Bund considered Zionism a “submission” to antisemitism, and “the two groups tussled on the lecture podium and in the streets.” By the 1920s, as Zionist leaders began to ally themselves with European fascism, the Bund was vowing to “fight for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived,” eventually becoming leaders of the partisan movements resisting Nazi occupation. Writing with lyricism and great depth of feeling, Crabapple movingly presents the principled Bund, decimated by the Holocaust and sidelined postwar by Soviet socialism on one side and Zionism on the other, as “a candle to illuminate the tumultuous present.” Readers will be rapt. (Apr.)