A few days ago, I turned in the manuscript for my book on the Jewish Labor Bund.
To say this book consumed me is an understatement. Ever since I first wrote about the Bund, almost six years ago, for The New York Review of Books, I have been obsessed with the defiant, Jewish revolutionary party that my great grandfather belonged to, as well as the reasons it had been mostly forgotten. After the children and grandchildren of Bundist leaders began to get in touch with me, I knew I had to write a book.
I learned Yiddish, so that I could read the Bundists’ words, without the mediation of historians or translators. I travelled to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine, during the Russian invasion, so that I could walk the streets did, even if those streets had been mostly destroyed by the Nazis, then the Soviets, then rebranded with the strident new nationalisms that came afterwards. I hunted down pamphlets so old they crumbled in my hands, to find out what Bundists thought about Zionism as it colonized Palestine. I got so obsessed with the Russian Revolution that me and my boyfriend could make specific dick jokes about all the different Bolsheviks, then ended up cutting most of this history from my manuscript. I did original research in ten languages, but research is not even the word. To write this book was an act of necromancy, an empathetic resurrection of the dead.
I lived so long with my characters. Bernard Goldstein, a scar-faced gangster for socialism, who ran the Bund’s self-defense militia in interwar Poland, bludgeoning landlords, nationalists and bosses in the pursuit of The Better and more Beautiful World. Sophia Dubnova, who in her youth incited a military mutiny in a provincial army garrison and smuggled illegal pamphlets by taping them to her body to mimic a pregnant belly, before becoming a poet and exile. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s greatest intellectual, whose father had baptized him as a Christian to free him of the legal restrictions that Jews endured in Tsarist Russia, but chose to live, fight, and be imprisoned as a member of the oppressed. walked to Ponar forest, to the vast green pits where all forty thousand Jews of Vilna were murdered by Lithuanian collaborators, and I lay flowers there for Pati Kremer, wife of one the Bund’s founders, who died there singing their anthem, The Oath.
A part of me never thought I’d finish the book. I probably wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for the Cullman Center, which let me lock myself into a little room and disappear into the text. I specifically didn’t think I’d hit send from a café in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I am now.
But the book is done, and I feel all the giddiness, emptiness, and drug like high of it being sent to other humans. It’s as if I’ve given birth or run a marathon.
Now that it’s done, maybe I can get back to the world.
Congratulations Molly. It is a true accomplishment and a blessing to your subject to not be lost to history. It is one of the things I admire about you. Looking forward to reading it!
Congratulations Molly!! This is great news 👏🏼🤩