Arkadii Zel'tser, Jews of the Soviet Provinces: Vitebsk and the Shtetls, 1917-41/Evrei Sovetskoi Provintsii: Vitebsk I Mestechki 1917-1941 (Book Review‪)‬

Arkadii Zel'tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki 1917-1941 [Jews of the Soviet Provinces: Vitebsk and the Shtetls, 1917-41]. 478 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006. ISBN 5824307814. In The Jews of the Soviet Provinces: Vitebsk and the Shtetls, 1917-41, a cleaning woman in a pharmaceuticals laboratory is cited as asking some Jewish employees to teach her Yiddish on the grounds that "they give Jews more bread than Russians, and if I could speak Yiddish [po-evreiski], then they would think I'm a Jew and give me more" (209). Her would-be tutors may well have found her rationale puzzling, for in all probability they counted themselves among the many Jewish parents in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic who bitterly resented the ideological pressure to educate their children in Yiddish. Whereas this low-level employee, presumably an ethnic Russian, detected a social advantage in Yiddish, a significant number of actual Jews perceived a social handicap. In fact, those Jewish parents attempting to maneuver their children into Russian-language schools in the Belorussian provinces during the interwar years included no small number of Yiddish school instructors. Meanwhile, Belorussian authorities viewed the promotion of Yiddish as a critical bulwark against Russification. The few Jewish educators willing and qualified to teach in Belorussian schools would find themselves marginalized by representatives of a titular intelligentsia eager to promote a new national culture by and for ethnic Belorussians (215, 286).