A familiar narrative would have us believe, Molly Crabapple writes, that Jewish history up until 1945 was merely the prelude to the gas chamber and that the European Jewry and Jewish culture truly came into their own circa 1948, with the founding of the Jewish nation-state, Israel. Until that golden milestone was reached, the Jewish community was presumably the flotsam and jetsam of great European civilisation, a few honourable exceptions aside. Crabapple’s recent book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, energetically dismantles this project of obfuscation, in which the Israeli state is hugely invested.Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing.In doing so, Crabapple delivers a tour de force of history, personal memoir and imaginative reconstruction, tracing the thought processes, emotional turbulences and ethical conundrums of vast swathes of Eastern European Jews who lived through some of the most seismic events of the 20th century, often as active participants. The accompanying monochrome drawings – character studies, in the main – add a quaint period flavour to the narrative. In all his years of reading books, this reader has scarcely encountered the sui generis charm that Molly Crabapple brings to her storytelling here. This book is, quite simply, unputdownable.It chronicles the life and death of one of the most significant progressive political movements of 20th-century Europe: the Jewish Bund or the Jewish Labour Bund, bund being Yiddish for “union”. The word “movement” is used advisedly rather than “party” or even “organisation,” because the Jewish Bund was a melange of trade unions, mutual aid societies, literary societies, theatre groups, soup kitchens, medical clinics, adult education hubs, sports associations, entertainment clubs and, simultaneously, a militant workers’ party. In inter-war Poland, it also ran with great success the renowned Vladimir Medem sanatorium for poor children at risk of tuberculosis, which doubled as an outstanding juvenile educational facility. At its peak, the bund was the largest socialist political formation in the Russian empire, dwarfing even the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, whose Bolshevik faction went on to lead the 1917 October Revolution. The bund was secular, socialist, internationalist and defiantly Jewish, proudly championing the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. (Zionists, and later the state of Israel, deliberately rejected Yiddish, opting instead to resurrect and privilege Hebrew, an essentially liturgical language, over the East European Jew’s primary language and its rich literary culture.) The bund’s motto was doikayt (hereness) which signified its credo that Jews, like every other nationality, had the right to live, prosper and fight for equal rights wherever they happened to be residents: “here where we live is our country.” The bundist Weltanschaung was anchored in a belief in “solidarity across difference,” in the conviction that the Jews’ only hedge against persecution was the struggle alongside every other oppressed community for a more equal future for all humankind. In that struggle, Jews would not surrender their identity and instead continue to treasure and promote their own culture and living traditions while fighting side by side with the broader society they were part of. Their concerns and priorities would align with the progressive elements of all those societies, but they would not dissolve their cultural particularities at any point. In other words, they would form the Jewish vanguard in humanity’s struggle for a better future. Versus zionismThe contrast with Zionism leaps to the eye. Zionism craved a Jewish homeland where, and only where, Jews could thrive and be safe. In time, Zionist predilections converged with imperial Britain’s blueprint for a Europe free of Jews and Zionist leaders began to clamour for Jews to relocate en masse to their biblical homeland – Palestine. In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced his government’s support for a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, thereby handing Zionism its prime weapon against the bund and its message of doikyat.A 1918 Yiddish poster of the Jewish Bund in Kyiv reads: “There, where we live, there is our country!” Photo: Wikimedia Commons.Bundists derided Zionism for embracing what they called was dortikayt (thereness), an ahistorical and retrograde longing for an exclusionary nation-state to be founded “there.” Aside from asserting the seeming impracticality of uprooting 10 million European Jews from countries and communities where they had struck deep roots to an idealised ‘homeland’, the bund had serious ideological and moral reservations about the Zionist project. In 1938, its leader Henryk Erlich articulated those reservations with prescient clarity:“The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and to make the Arabs second-class citizens…. If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the eternal enemy (Arabs), eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the eternal enemy (Arabs)…”Uncompromisingly anti-colonial, bundists understood that a new nation-state in Palestine could only be built on ground soaked with Palestinian blood and they abhorred the idea. They also castigated Zionists for acting as handmaids to antisemites who wanted nothing more than to banish Jews from sight. No wonder Zionism harboured a strong animus against the bund. As early as 1903, Chaim Weizman, future first president of Israel, identified the bund, and not violent nationalists and antisemites who regularly ran brutal and bloody pogroms against East European Jews, as the Jewry’s worst enemy: “Our hardest struggle everywhere is conducted against the Jewish Labour Bund,” he said. Promptly, the bund returned the compliment, declaring Zionism “the most evil enemy of the organised Jewish proletariat.” These furious ideological battles sometimes spilled over into open hostility with ruinous consequences, as when Zionists relentlessly harried and tormented bundist Holocaust survivors in post-war Europe’s displaced persons’ camps, branding them “Nazi thugs” and driving some traumatised bundists to suicide. In one of history’s great ironies, the bund and Zionism emerged as near-conjoined twins, their births separated by mere weeks in 1897. Crabapple reminds us, however, that the circumstances could not have been more different, perhaps presaging their radically different trajectories. The bund was established in a secret safe house in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire, in early October, by a small group of young revolutionaries hounded by the Tsar’s secret police. Zionism’s founding conference, by contrast, was held in August in a glitzy casino in Basel, liberal Switzerland, with half of Europe’s liberal press in attendance and cheering. Europe seemed ready to bless Zionism at birth but did not want anything to do with the ‘subversive’ bund.The bund’s storyFrom those obscure beginnings, Crabapple traces the bund’s journey through her book’s four largish sections: “Underground,” “Revolution,” “The Alternate World” and “Fire,” with postscript – “History Never Ends” – where she reflects on what drove her to write the books. Her point of departure, however, is the life of her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbert, a bundist Jewish refugee to New York from the shtetl town of Volkovysk in Belarus, but then part of the Pale of Settlement, the territory demarcated by the Russian empire to confine its Jewish community. More precisely, perhaps, the point of departure was a painting. Sam was a self-taught but talented painter and sculptor and one work in particular seized Crabapple’s imagination. The painting features a young woman on a twilit street throwing a rock through a window while her boyfriend waits at the canvas’s margin, more rocks in hand, ready to resupply her. Sam captioned it “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows.”“Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows,” Sam Rothbert, Photo: Instagram/@mollycrabapple. The painting intrigued young Molly to no end: Who was Itka? Why was she doing something reserved for tomboys while looking so respectable? And, most of all, who are, or were, the bundists?The work was one of some 600 ‘memory paintings’ that Sam had left behind, in which he had tried to reconstruct his childhood and young manhood in far-away Volkovysk, touching upon every aspect of that life: the sacred, the profane, the funny, the serious, the profound and the absurd. Rabbis, the Torah, marketplaces, pogroms, Mayday marches and workers’ strikes looked out at the viewer from those watercolours, with the bund’s exploits appearing every now and then. But, looking around her, Crabapple could not relate bundists to any lived experience she recognised. She could not rest easy until she had found out about them. That is what impelled her to write this book, a project that took seven years, countless trips around half of the world, research in archives, libraries and second-hand bookshops and learning Yiddish, without which most of the primary documents remained inaccessible. Here Where We Live Is Our Country is the end-product of that monumental effort. Sam Rothbert’s life story serves as a recurring refrain throughout the broader narrative: his early years in a deeply insular Jewish community; his growing-up with an awareness of the wider world and its myriad contradictions; his joining the bund as a factory worker and organiser; his first major labour strike and the waves of repression that followed; a killing of policemen he was likely involved in and his eventual flight to New York. These vignettes weave in and out of the wider story of the bund’s rise, its triumphs, defeats and incredible fortitude under the most existentially dangerous situations and its infinite capacity to regroup after shattering setbacks – and, eventually, its slow but ineluctable decline after the Nazi Holocaust, when triumphant Zionism mocked bundist convictions of “hereness” and convinced Europe’s battered Jewish survivors that Palestine was their only hope. Crabapple offers a scrupulously granular account of the build-up to the twin Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but keeps her focus squarely on the bundist perspective, not shying away from critiquing the movement’s occasional ideological inflexibilities that blinded it at crucial junctures. She paints in luminous colours the bund’s many remarkable achievements in inter-war Poland, where it had moved base after Lenin’s Bolsheviks insisted that it either merge with their party or quit the Soviet Union. These achievements are all the more exceptional given the unrelentingly hostile political climate. It was precisely at this point that the bund’s membership exceeded one hundred thousand. Then came the Second World War, the Nazi occupation and everything that came after. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the broader Warsaw rebellion of 1944 are etched in vivid and telling detail. Crabapple delivers a moving portrait of the death-defying courage with which bundists faced those unending nightmares. And, then came the Holocaust. Young bundists in inter-war PolandMolly Crabapple, Photo: mollycrabapple.comAn accomplished painter and graphic artist herself – Crabapple’s work is featured in New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection – she fleshes out every member of her staggeringly large cast with great flair. Whether it is the bund’s stern co-founder Arkady Kremer or his irrepressibly lively wife Pati; Odessa’s Anna Lipshitz, known as “The Fury” for her fiery speechmaking; poetess and sex columnist Sophia Dubnona; New York’s Meyer London, labour lawyer, rousing orator and two-term socialist Congressman; Marek Edelman, deputy commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising or the brilliant, arrogant and dandyish Leon Trotsky. Crabapple’s pen summons them all to life before the reader’s eyes. It is a stunning portrait gallery from socialism’s storied past.The genocide in Palestine is a theme running across the narrative’s background. Crabapple reminds us how even after their dream of “hereness” had crumbled to dust, broken bundists did not abandon their struggle for justice and fairness. The Bund Bulletin observed in June 1949:“At present, when more than half a million displaced Arabs are demanding permission to return to their former homes… how the State of Israel could cope with a Jewish immigration without the ‘miracle of the vanished Arabs is beyond anybody’s imagination.”“Themselves veterans of countless exiles,” Crabapple points out, “these Bundists saw the Nakba for what it was: the foundational crime of the Zionist endeavour…Israel’s own violence would poison it and the cancer would metastasise, until there was nothing else left.”Coda In the postscript, Crabapple asks herself:“So why did I write this book about the bund – who lost, who were failed – and not about victorious killers?Because I am sick of monsters – whether they belong to my group or any other. Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall. Because I want off the samsara wheel of atrocity, and the bund’s demand of solidarity across difference is the only way to get there.”This reader, for one, cannot imagine a better reason for writing a book today. Can you? Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.