Survival on the Margins

Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union

Survival on the Margins
Eliyana R Adler
RRP:
NZ$ 130.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 110.50
Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 456pg
27 Nov 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780674988026
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler' s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe' s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.
This intriguing, well-written social history is the most detailed treatment to date in English of the Polish Jews who spent the war years in the USSR, either because they fled the Germans or because they were arrested and deported. One of the book' s major achievements is Adler' s mastery of an impressive array of personal interviews and testimonies from various archives in Poland, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. -- Samuel D. Kassow, Trinity College An ambitious and deeply researched book about the relatively unknown Polish Jewish refugees who spent some or all of World War II in Soviet territory. Adler is scrupulously fair in assessing the Soviet Union' s role in ' saving' these refugees, accurate about what we know and cannot know about Stalin' s intentions, and sensitive to the nuances of Polish antisemitism and anticommunism. This sophisticated, elegantly written work will expand the boundaries of Holocaust studies. -- Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University The largest group left after the Holocaust of interwar Europe' s biggest Jewish community survived the Nazi era in the eastern reaches of the Soviet Union. This important, extensively researched book documents the experiences of this important segment of Polish Jewry during the Second World War. -- David Engel, New York University Lovingly written and meticulously researched, Survival on the Margins plumbs a history that scholars only sketched before. A landmark study, it brings a singularly significant chapter of the Holocaust into sharp focus. Situating Polish Jewish refugees in the broad sweep of the wartime Soviet Union, Adler deftly negotiates both the large political picture and the immediate social environment, while never losing sight of the individuals whose lives were shaped by their flight east. -- Deborah Dwork, Clark University
Eliyana R. Adler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia, winner of the Heldt Prize, and coeditor of Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780674988026
Published: 27 Nov 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 456

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information