Ber Boris Kotlerman: In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of “Soviet Jewish Statehood”, (1934–49). Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. XIV, 302 pp. ISBN 978-0-89357-347-8

Ber Boris Kotlerman: In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of “Soviet Jewish Statehood”, (1934–49). Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2009. XIV, 302 pp. ISBN 978-0-89357-347-8.

On 7 May 1934, the Soviet Union established the “Jewish Autonomous Region” (JAR) in the Far Eastern Territory, seemingly relegating Jewish culture to the periphery. Ber Boris Kotlerman’s study, however, shows us that this was not the case. Along with the JAR, the Soviet Union created the Birobidzhan State Yiddish Theater (BirGOSET), which, at first, strengthened the hierarchy of State Yiddish Theaters by following the creative lead of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. By 1936, Birobidzhan was declared the center of Soviet Jewish Culture. By 1937, according to Kotlerman, BirGOSET was the primary State apparatus disseminating Jewish/Yiddish culture, national pride, and Soviet ideology. Fundamental to Kotlerman’s study is the repositioning of Birobidzhan from periphery to the center of Yiddish, read Jewish, culture in the Soviet Union. The process by which this shift took place is made most clearly, according to Kotlerman, when politics and culture are read together.

Kotlerman’s study is rooted deeply in theater, newspaper, and literary archives housed in Birobidzhan, Moscow, Frankfurt, and New York. He also conducted several interviews with those close to the primary protagonists (BirGOSET’s directors, playwrights, and actors) in this story. Using this combination of sources, Kotlerman cleverly reconstructs the development of BirGOSET as a series of six “acts.” Kotlerman’s most successful analytical theme rests on his claim that scholars of Birobidzhan are blinded by its geographical remoteness and focus only on politics. The shortcomings present in these studies, argues Kotlerman, are that they do not engage with the particular overlaps among politics, culture, and nation that Birobidzhan and its State Theater represented to the Soviet Union, specifically after 1937. In mid-1930s Soviet Union, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, culture was politics and politics was transmitted through culture. It should be no surprise, then, that BirGOSET was at the center (regardless of its geographical location) of genuine Jewish national culture.

To coincide with the third anniversary of the establishment of the JAR, BirGOSET theater director Moishe Goldblat’s staged “Boytre,” which the “Birobidzhaner Stern” lauded as a correction to MosGOSET’s mistakes. Mistakes, which Lazar Kaganovich, a close ally of Joseph Stalin, member of the Politburo and part-time theater critic, claimed lay in MosGOSET’s inability to recognize and present Birobidzhan within its rightful place in Jewish history. According to Kaganovich, Birobidzhan represented a “heroic” Jewish present – the direct successor of the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba. This was a turning point and, according to Kotlerman, enabled the transformation of BirGOSET “into something more than a high-quality Soviet Yiddish theater, in a national theater, the theater of ‘Soviet Jewish statehood’” (p. 99). “Against the background of increasing political repression,” argues Kotlerman, “the theater suddenly became practically the only open expression of the national distinctiveness of the Jewish Autonomous Region” (p. 85). As mass arrests occurred in Birobidzhan against Jewish activists, the move towards Yiddish culture hegemony through the theater did not stop. The theater was the constant force in the quest for Jewish national autonomy in Birobidzhan.

Kotlerman does an excellent job of re-casting Birobidzhan’s role as central within Soviet Jewish history, however, his study would have benefitted from a serious engagement with the secondary literature on the history of Birobidzhan. This would widen the scope of the potential reader as well as help place the significance of Kotlerman’s argument that it was the so-called periphery of Jewish life that became the center of Jewish (Yiddish) culture in the Soviet Union. To emphasize this point within broader Soviet scholarship, Kotlerman could have also made larger use of the historiography on the relationship between Moscow and the various peripheries entangled in the nationalizing campaigns of the mid-1930s. This would only add to the impact and significance of his argument.

“In Search of Milk and Honey,” with its twenty-one pages of photographs and detailed descriptions of the actors and directors involved in the nationalizing project of BirGOSET, brings an important and under-evaluated aspect of Jewish and cultural history to life. It also repositions Birobidzhan to the center of the Soviet Jewish cultural milieu and does a remarkable job of avoiding teleology in its construction. If you travel to Birobidzhan, you will still see signs in Yiddish, but these are relics of an abandoned project. In 1979, the census counted approximately 10,000 Jews living in Birobidzhan: only 1,500 declared Yiddish as their everyday, spoken language. Ber Boris Kotlerman reminds us that Birobidzhan was at the center of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and that, at one time, there was political and cultural power behind saying, as they did in the play, “Er iz fun Birobidzhan” (He is from Birobidzhan).

Nick Underwood, Denver/USA