Review of As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine by Harriet Murav

In the years of the Russian Civil War, between 1918 and 1922, approximately 40,000 Jews were killed in pogroms and related violence. This fact remains marginalized in popular historical consciousness, despite significant research on the topic in recent years. ^{1 1} For example: Elissa Bemporad, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets, Illustrated edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, Illustrated edition (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021). Nonetheless, Harriet Murav wastes no time upbraiding readers for their relative ignorance on the scale of pogroms in this tumultuous period. Rather, she offers a creative, thoroughly researched account of Yiddish and Russian writers who committed themselves to witnessing these atrocities through poetry, prose, documentation, and interviews. Before delving into the specifics of the many significant literary and historical contributions of As Dust of the Earth, a word on methodology is in order:

As the field of Yiddish Studies expands and diversifies, I find an increasing tension between books that emphasize the particular, culturally-embedded concerns of Yiddish life at a given time and place, versus those that prioritize the theoretical frameworks of contemporary scholarship. To borrow terms from anthropology, it is a tension between emic (the language, concepts and assumptions of the people we are studying) and etic (the language of an outside observer, often of an academic nature). So many scholars and students of Yiddish are drawn to the field by a deep curiosity and connection to the rich fabric of yiddishkayt, its intricate webs of religion, politics, memory, humor, multilingualism, and artistic references. Yet, focusing too heavily on this emic material can sometimes crowd out conceptual analyses and forgo connections to other cultures. Thus, we have seen a movement toward more theoretically-oriented Yiddish research: Over the past decade and a half, scholars have shown that Yiddish texts offer fertile grounds for testing out the most sophisticated literary, psychoanalytic, queer, or political theories. Thankfully, it is no longer iconoclastic to theorize Yiddish. Yet, when pushed too hard, this etic approach risks forcing the worlds of Yiddish into anachronistic categories that we happen to like today and obscuring the rich modes of interpretation and daily life that come from within Yiddish letters.

Given the difficulties of negotiating this tension—between letting yiddishkayt speak in its own idiom and bringing that idiom into current scholarly debates—I am full of admiration for Harriet Murav’s newest book. In the Introduction and first chapter, Murav invites us into an analytical framework that is both emic and etic, historically authentic and theoretically significant in 2024. Her key tool in building this bridge is the term hefker, a Yiddish and Hebrew word, which can translate roughly as “abandoned.”

About this key term, Murav writes, “Originating in Jewish property law, the term hefker refers to unclaimed, ownerless objects.” In the context of anti-Jewish violence after the Russian Revolution, Murav argues, many Jews understood that they had become hefker. “They were expendable and could be abused with impunity” (1). Taking us on a tour of rabbinic debates, folk-expressions and literary references to hefker, Murav enables us to hear the term in all its profound significance—as Jews facing pogroms at the beginning of the twentieth century would have heard and used it. For them, hefker was a way of naming the particular breed of torment they endured: “It’s not merely that someone wrongs and harms you. It’s that no one will recognize the wrong and harm” (229). Murav then places the Yiddish-Hebrew “hefker” in conversation with the notion of “bare life” in the political theory of Georgio Agamben. The overlap is highly illuminating: It shows, on the one hand, how pogromized Jews were not alone in being cast outside of the systems of justice, but part of a wider phenomenon that Agamben would call essential to modern politics. On a more basic level, the hefker-bare life connection also shows the degree to which the Yiddish emic is full of theoretical acumen if studied carefully: pogromized Jews in Ukraine and Russia were as sophisticated as Agamben in analyzing the violence they witnessed. More broadly, Yiddish and neighboring Russian texts should not only serve as the empirical grounds for testing out someone else’s theory, but be mined for their own theoretical insights.

In the seven chapters that follow, Murav delivers on this methodological promise. The first section of the book is dedicated to poetry, focusing on David Hofsthteyn and Leyb Kvitko. While there have certainly been insightful literary studies on both of these poets, they remain known mostly for their Soviet political profiles and their brutal execution at the hands of Stalin in 1952. Taking us inside their poetry in a new way, Murav focuses on how Hofshteyn and Kvitko re-activate the senses as a way to counteract social abandonment and loss. With a focus on listening and sound, Murav shows how Hofstheyn’s notion of hefker involves a wild, modernist emptying—a purposeful type of abandonment—that enables healing to begin. Kvitko’s poetry is much more explicit than Hofstheyn in depicting pogrom violence, with verses such as:

In a minute
houses would be torn down
turned to hulking stones,
big and heavy,
homeless (af hefker)? (95)

For Kvitko, hefker entails literal homelessness. Kvitko displays a kind of hyper-attunement in response to the pogroms: He “combines touch, sight, and sound in an all-embracing synesthesia of violence” (90).

In the second half of the book, Murav switches gears, leaving behind close poetic readings for a section entitled “Documentation.” Though the works she analyzes here also include interesting artistic and expressive choices, they come closer to factual chronicles than Hofshteyn and Kvitko’s poetry. Here, her analysis of Viktor Shklovsky’s Russian language memoir, Sentimental Journey, is especially striking. In this work, Shklovsky uses his famous literary theory of estrangement (“to make a stone feel stony”) to awaken the readers’ capacity to witness atrocities of the Civil War period. “He deploys his own technique of estrangement to make the violence that had become shockingly ordinary in the revolutionary period unfamiliar and disorienting. This was not estrangement from the world, a turning away, but rather ‘estrangement for the world,’ a return to it” (151). For Shklovsky, the concept of ‘hefker’ appears in a close Russian equivalent “na sharap” or “up for grabs.” While getting to know a new ethical and real-world side of Shklovsky in this chapter, we also learn about his Jewishness. In presenting his Jewish genealogy, Shklovsky tells of his own family’s history of pogrom victimization. Thus, the book’s initial proposal to connect lived historical experience with literary and political theory, emic and etic, proves fruitful on multiple levels in Shklovsky’s case.

The final content chapter of the book, “Children,” is trenchant both for the testimonial projects it recounts as well as its broader message about literature. Seeing the thousands of children orphaned as a result of the Russian Civil War, two Soviet Jewish writers aimed to elicit, record, and transmit testimonies of these children. Doyvber Levin visited Jewish orphanages in Leningrad, listening to children’s stories and publishing them in a Russian-language volume, after his own stylized editing. Fischel Schneersohn, a Hasidic rabbi, novelist, and psychologist, studied the influence of the pogroms on young children, publishing his discoveries in a Yiddish language book that explicitly uses the word “hefker” to describe the “‘great army of children’” who had been left abandoned by the war. As Murav puts it, “This chapter is not about great works of art by Yiddish poets. It is focused instead on the great work of care in which art plays a key role in repairing a hefker world” (206). In focusing on questionnaires and writers who gather the words of others, the chapter highlights that literature is not merely about glittering output; literariness should be a mode of exchange, a platform for making new types of speech and listening possible.

Within this thorough and expansive book, there was one discussion that I felt could have gone deeper—that on the meaning of the term “testimony” and its companion, “witnessing.” These concepts seem to be the force binding the diverse genres included in Murav’s discussion—poetry, chronicle, questionnaire, and novel. While people often assume that “testimony” refers only to first-person prose or oral, legal recounting, this is a historically and culturally contingent definition, which Murav’s book in fact shows. Unveiling the commonalities between chronicles and Kvitko’s explicit pogrom poetry, I was reminded of Aristotle’s reflections that some people access the truth through the display of empirical facts, while others need the truth told through a poet (Metaphysics, 2.995a). In the midst of one chapter, Murav does reflect briefly on witnessing as an ethical act: to declare oneself a witness is to enable the speech of another, who may have previously been voiceless (148). Still, I felt that this discussion could have been integrated quite effectively into the overall framework of the book: witnessing as counteraction to a hefker position, and testimony—in its many generic expressions—as the undoing of abandonment.

The sophisticated method, the humane subject matter, the bold interpretations and the careful historical research all make Dust of the Earth a potent model for contemporary scholarship—in Yiddish Studies and beyond. In a moment when an increasing number of people across the globe find themselves in a political and social state of hefkeris, up for grabs and abandoned by their allies and leaders, Murav shows us that literature offers one small, but powerful path back to humanity.