As the Dust of the Earth

"During the chaos of the Civil War, Russian and Ukrainian Jews experienced a traumatic abandonment by state and society that left them helpless and vulnerable before predators of all sorts.  Harriet Murav's study of the written record of this experience through imaginative literature, memoirs, interviews with survivors, and stories written by children sets the book apart from other accounts of the era's pogroms. Murav analyzes and translates the works of Yiddish poets such as David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Itsik Kipnis. She presents an emotional landscape that contextualizes the works of Marc Chagall, Isaac Babel, and the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, who merits a whole chapter. Murav treats her subjects with tenderness and respect to bring their anguish and fear to the page. Rarely does a work of history generalize so eloquently and poignantly implicitly to evoke the shared experience of others similarly abandoned without protection of law, public service, and societal norms of decency. Read this work to sympathize with those who suffered in a bygone era and to weep for those whose torment is ongoing now."—Jeffrey Brooks is the author of The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks