Founded by young revolutionaries in 1897 in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania, the Bund was \u201ca sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish,\u201d as writer and artist Crabapple has it. Descended from Bundists and Puerto Rican radicals, Crabapple (n\u00e9e Caban) immediately connects the Bundist experience with modern leftist struggles: \u201cThe Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions.\u201d Yet the Bund itself has disappeared. Some of its early proponents were scattered to what Crabapple calls \u201cExileland\u201d in the \u201crevolutionary diaspora\u201d that followed pogroms, tsarist oppression, Cossack attacks, and the like; a few converted early on to Zionism and left for Palestine. More went there in the wake of the Holocaust, with the Bundist-led Warsaw Uprising having led to its own slaughter: \u201cTheir party had given them fairy tales,\u201d Crabapple writes of the survivors. \u201cZionists offered a place where they could rebuild their lives.\u201d In a sweeping narrative that urges anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation while being, yes, defiantly Jewish, Crabapple follows in the Bundists\u2019 path, finding herself in Lviv, Ukraine, wondering at the absence of Jews when the city was once a major Jewish center. \u201cThings change,\u201d a friend replies. So they do, but the same spirit that animated anti-tsarist revolution, union organizing in the new shtetls of New York, solidarity with other oppressed peoples, a profound commitment to self-improvement and learning, and a burning sense of justice clearly lives, at least in possibility: \u201cThe past is not dead. \u2026It holds tight to our eternal present, sometimes invisibly, but ready to be reclaimed by those who need it.\u201d Thanks to her book, richly illustrated with her own artwork, that reclamation is ready to hand.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Founded by young revolutionaries in 1897 in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania, the Bund was \u201ca sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish,\u201d as writer and artist Crabapple has it. Descended from Bundists and Puerto Rican radicals, Crabapple (n\u00e9e Caban) immediately connects the Bundist experience with modern leftist struggles: \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}