Lit NYC, the podcast all about the ABCs of arts, books and culture in New York City, debuts as its own show with writer and artist Molly Crabapple discussing her new book, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” how her New York City family history led her to tell that story and learn Yiddish in the process, and much more.
Molly talks with hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel about a movement that, she recounts, was started by young Jewish Marxists troublemakers in 1897 in Russia, probably the most wretched and miserable place to be Jewish in the world… Jewish workers there were oppressed… as workers and as Jews… They were basically oppressed as a race and a class…
https://feeds.fireside.fm/litnyc/rss?bund
The Bund came up in a world that was violent, where people were routinely sent to Siberia for having book clubs, where there was an elite mounted police called Cossacks which would slash open people’s faces… Baruch Charney Vladeck, the father of public housing in New York City, had a scar across his face from getting his face slashed open by a Cossack.
It was a place where pogroms were a regular occurrence, and where a certain level of violence within families was normalized, like parents beating their kids, bosses beating their workers and masters beating their apprentices…
One of the things that the Bund did in this violent time was armed self defense against pogroms. Where traditional Jewish communities would try to pay the local government strongman to make sure these attacks weren’t going to happen, the Bund felt that was really humiliating… Instead, they armed themselves to defend their communities against these pogroms. And it was not something that just men participated in. Young women also took part in it. I found one young woman named Nadia Grinfeld who led the self defense brigades in Odessa in 1905 and when you read about these testimonies, it really is an act of self recreation… a refashioning of who they are and their right to exist as equals, rather than just supplicants to power.
By 1903 they’d become the most popular revolutionary party in the czarist empire — not the most popular Jewish party but the most popular revolutionary party. They’re a mass organization. They combine… militant self defense… with these labor unions, with this huge cultural arm… secular Yiddish schools… elevating Yiddish… into this proper literary language…
What the Bund wanted to do was… overthrow the czar, bring democratic socialism to Russia and for Jews to be able to live in the land where they were born… and not just to survive and eke out a miserable living but to flourish — to have beautiful lives with their own language, with their own culture, with their own institutions…
Lit NYC comes out weekly, usually on Fridays. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, through RSS or wherever podcasts are found, or listen to all the episodes right here at The City.
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