For young Jewish workers in Eastern Europe, the period spanning the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries was, in the Dickens phrase, the best of times and the worst of times.
It was the worst of times. Capitalism and imperialism ruled the world, and created a hellscape of brutal factories, armed repression of strikes and protests, colonial slaughter and wages that hovered just above minimal subsistence levels. On top of these horrors inflicted on all workers, Jewish communities faced entrenched racism and vicious pogroms; lethal rehearsals for the impending Holocaust that squatted like a monstrous toad across the middle of the century.
And yet, it was also the best of times. Around the world, young people dreamed the dreams of socialism and anarchism, and envisioned a new life imbued with the “necessity of human solidarity,” referred to by the artist, activist and author Molly Crabapple in the quote that opens this review.
In Eastern Europe, many of these young dreamers joined the Jewish Bund, a secular Jewish body that grew to become the largest labour organization in Russia, an explicitly Marxist group that played a significant role in the evolution of revolutionary impulses under the autocratic Romanovs and across eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Ukraine.
Young members of the Bund (like the author’s great grandfather Sam Rothbort) gathered in the forest, waved the red banner of revolt and sang their anthem The Vow, which closed with the resonant lines “Heaven and earth will hear us/the bright stars will bear witness,/an oath of blood, an oath of tears- /We swear, we swear, we swear.”
The history of the Bund, Crabapple, argues, is in a real way the history of workers in the European 20th century. Bund activists fought in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, battled against pogroms, built up worker run schools, self help circles and unions, helped defend the Warsaw Ghetto from the final Nazi attack and went on to play important roles in the North American labour movement.
Bundists were early and prescient critics of the Zionist movement, issuing dire warnings that the Zionist project was racist and would lead to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. And yet now these heroic workers and intellectuals are almost completely forgotten, erased from history.
Crabapple’s splendid book is a tribute to these valiant rebels and an attempt to reverse that erasure. It is a vital read for anyone who cares about social justice, the history of the labour movement and whatever scant hope we may still have of realizing their luminous dreams and creating the world of shared human solidarity they envisioned. In a real way, we should all be Bundists now.
Sam Rothbord joined the Bund as a teenage apprentice and participated in its activities until he escaped to America. He then honed his skills as a painter with an enormous series of what he called “memory paintings” that celebrated his remembered life in Volkovyst, one of those tormented Eastern European cities in what Timothy Snyder calls “the bloodlands,” a town that saw war, revolution and chaos shift its name and slaughter its residents with every new conquest.
Although Sam died before Crabapple was born, he was a compelling presence in family memory and in the rich artistic legacy he left behind. One of his memory paintings, Itka the Bundist, which shows a young woman in a long dress with her hair pinned up throwing a rock through a window, first sparked Crabapple’s interest in the Bund and led to her seven year long labours to create the book here under review.
This is a book of enormous erudition and moving eloquence. Crabapple taught herself Yiddish to access Bund archives and seems to have read everything available about the Bund and the other revolutionary movements it jostled with in eastern Europe, especially Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
One of the book’s many impressive, if tragic, set pieces details how Lenin out maneuvered the Bundists and essentially drove them out of what became his movement and party. Another tells in excoriating detail the story of the final defence of the Warsaw Ghetto, when Bundists, Zionists and Communists finally set sectarian tensions aside to form the Jewish Combat Organization and hold back the final Nazi assault on the Ghetto for nearly a month.
But this is not a book given over entirely to blood and loss. The author draws on her own experience as a radical organizer in the Occupy Wall Street movement to suggest parallels, some very funny indeed, between the radicals of the Bund and her own contemporaries.
Two passages stand out in this regard, the first a reflection on bad radical boyfriends and the young women who try to “save those boys through the energetic bounty of their love. You can’t rescue the world one man at a time, I told my friends when they fell in love with New York’s angry radicals- the mean, Derrida-quoting grad students, the pouty anarchists fresh out of lockup, the supposedly brilliant writers who preferred video games to writing- but they fell hard anyway. It seldom ended well. Trysts in squats left them covered with spider bites. The boys drained their bank accounts for experimental magazines that never materialized, then hopped freight trains down South to disappear into the latest protest encampment. Sometimes, more dangerously, they stayed.”
The second brilliant, bittersweet comic set piece, called “Meetings” evokes an experience that will resonate for many readers who have spent time in the successive new lefts of the last decades, with its image of grad school radicals shouting at each other while they debate a basis of unity statement no one will ever read. “it is hour three. The air is hot. ‘Stack’ Comrade A screams. His Adams apple bobs with fury. Point of order ! hisses Comrade B. I want to squeeze through the walls and escape into the clean sunlight.” And yet, for all her wry recognition of the ways our organizing can be heartbreaking and sometimes a bit ludicrous, Crabapple continues to value it immensely, and her book amounts to a tribute to the organizers of the past and a moral demand that we learn from and extend their efforts in this time of capitalist crisis and live streamed genocide. It is a demand we all should heed.
Highly recommended.
Vancouver readers have a chance to hear Crabapple speak at the Vancouver Writers’ Fest October 24 . Here is the link.
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/74-molly-crabapple
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