In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) made a trip from Moscow to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors. The present study examines this journey as an original protest against the conformism of the majority of Soviet Jewish activists. In his travel notes, Der Nister described the train as the "modern Noah's ark," heading "to put an end to the...
In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der Nister (Pinkhas K...
