A Citizen of Yiddishland : Dovid Sfard and the Jewish Communist Milieu in Poland

This pioneering study shows what brought Yiddish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia to the Communist movement in the interwar years.They believed that Communism is not only a way to solve the Jewish problem but also to save the Yiddish culture.Biography of the central protagonist of the book, a Yiddish writer Dovid (David) Sfard, is just a pretext to show a full range of Jewish Communist activists (such as Hersh Smolar, Bernard Mark, Szymon Zachariasz, etc.) and their life choices.This relatively small milieu influenced and controlled the Jewish life in post-war Poland until the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968.Their lives, reconstructed thanks to sources in several languages, make up a panorama of Jewish Communist experience in 20th-century Eastern Europe.