Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.” A comprehensive account of the Bund threaded with personal history, the book chronicles a vanished organization that few now remember. Yet the people, ideas, and conflicts it describes are still relevant today, as are the questions it compels us to ask: what we believe, why we believe it, and what we are willing to live and die for.
Founded in 1897 and reaching its peak in interwar Poland, the Bund was, in Crabapple’s words, a “sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish.” Bundists “fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions.” She’s written the Bund’s story to resurrect its legacy and proffer its ideology as a righteous alternative to the Zionism many Jews still believe is necessary to their survival. Although the Bund was “largely obliterated” by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, she writes, its opposition to Zionism “better explains its absence from current consciousness.”
Crabapple is the proudly anti-Zionist great-granddaughter of the Bundist artist Samuel Rothbort. Her admiration for the Bund is refreshingly pure and frank, but it doesn’t blind her to the flaws and limitations of the organization or its members. The book, which features her artwork as well as her words, does what all great works of history aspire to do: it reanimates the dead. She writes as vividly as she draws, and the thoroughness of her research is clear — she spent years poring over archives, learning Yiddish, reading Bundists’ memoirs, hiring translators, and tracking down members’ descendants. In doing so she has transformed the Bund from forgotten heroes, dusty banners, and out-of-print newspapers into a movement so dynamic, thrilling, and palpable that a person living today can imagine joining. Because her subjects are her ideological and literal forebears, she conjures them in careful and loving detail.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country shows how we could build a world in which Jews and all people can thrive in safety where they live, and move freely if they can’t. Crabapple credits the Bund with creating networks and institutions — summer camps, youth groups, sports clubs, a top-of-the-line facility for working-class young people at risk of tuberculosis — that prefigured such a world without downplaying the obstacles to sustaining it. From 1897 to 1948, the main period the book covers, Nazis and other antisemites slaughtered Jews en masse, regardless of their politics. Crabapple believes the Bund was defeated not by its own faults and errors, but by opponents and purported allies who turned their backs on Bundists, and all Jews, in their time of need. The Bund did not fail, she writes; it lost — to the greater force posed by “vast armies of organized killers” and the genocidal indifference of the West, which “paid lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might” and “played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable.”
Crabapple draws parallels between the Bund and contemporary organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and the resurgent-since-2016 Democratic Socialists of America. But these groups do not advocate violence, and part of what she admires about the Bundists is their willingness to fight their oppressors with brass knuckles, iron bars, homemade explosives, and guns. She is outraged by the erasure of their contributions to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Of Polish Bundist Marek Edelman, who led the uprising after Mordechai Anielewicz died, she writes, “Though he was fêted across the world, Israel never forgave him [for refusing to endorse Zionism]. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin traveled to Poland to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, the uprising’s commander was not permitted to speak.”
Though she wants the Bundists to be remembered and recognized for their courage, Crabapple questions the usefulness of their sacrifices. “Death is not glorious,” she writes. “It is pain, then nothing. There was no grand moral, just the dissolution of an irreplaceable self.” Philip Larkin made a similar point in his 1977 poem, “Aubade,” which is not about martyred revolutionaries but horror at the inescapability of death: “Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Yet as Crabapple points out, whether or not it spares anyone from death, courage can be a form of service to others. She recounts that in 1943, when the Bundist Pati Kremer — then around 76 years old — was rounded up and later murdered alongside other Jews and radicals, she suggested that they sing the Bund’s anthem: “Then death will not seem so terrible.” Edelman, who led an armed uprising, said it was more difficult to accept the inevitability of dying at the Nazis’ hands than it was to resist it. In 1976, he told the writer Hanna Krall that those killed in Nazi gas chambers “went quietly and with dignity. . . . It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.”
It’s difficult to commend those who bravely resist oppression without glorifying or excusing violence, but Crabapple is subtle enough to manage it. Like other political groups that were at times driven underground, the Bund had militias and enforcers who beat and killed their enemies — most often, in their case, in self-defense. But oppressed people are also capable of cruelty. As Crabapple writes, “We all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.” Here is how she describes a Bundist attack on a rival group that had been violently assaulting Jews and Bundists in Warsaw: “They were not tailors and porters anymore but conduits of vengeance, and the ruined faces of their adversaries did nothing to assuage their rage. . . . [Bundist enforcer] Bernard Goldstein ordered his men to finish, but they didn’t want to. They were enjoying it too much.”
Later she asks, “So why did I write this book about the Bund — who lost, who were failed — and not about victorious killers?” Though she is referring here to Zionists, not Bundists, the answer is telling: “Because I am sick of monsters — whether they belong to my group or any other.”
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a tribute not just to the Bund, but to the beauty and necessity of upholding the ideal of global solidarity across differences. “Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed,” Crabapple writes, “but it is all we have.” The book is so blunt about the difficulty and cost of defending this ideal, and so unflinching in cataloging its violent suppression, that it can be painful to read. A number of passages caused me to flinch.
The Bundists were prescient and often right. Henryk Erlich warned in 1938 that “if a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs), and eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs).” Fascists and butchers overpowered them anyway. Yet it’s impossible not to be moved by their stubborn conviction that they owed it to all of us to keep fighting, no matter how dire the conditions or high the cost, for a world where all people could live freely and fully where they are, without sacrificing their language, culture, identity, or religion.
Crabapple relates that when W. E. B. Du Bois visited the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, he credited the ghetto fighters’ “deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain” with having “reinforced his commitment to universalist socialism.” Like the fighters they led in the uprising, the Bundists were surrounded by enemies throughout their existence, from the tsar to viciously antisemitic neighbors to traitorous ex-comrades, well-armed Nazis, and paranoid communists. But they never stopped believing in the fundamental brotherhood of man, nor succumbed to the delusion that one group of people can achieve safety and freedom only by destroying another.
This book will do for Crabapple’s brand of anti-Zionism what the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto did for Du Bois’ socialism. “The Bund was a Jewish group,” Crabapple writes, “but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity.” At the book’s end, she declares that history is “never settled”: “Bodies rot, but ideas remain. They resurface like land mines or buried gold.” Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings roaring back to life ideas some tried to bury forever. Others will use them to rewrite the future.
Raina Lipsitz is the author of The Rise of a New Left. Her work has appeared in The Appeal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic.
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Thank you so much for this startling and revelatory essay!