Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

Olga Litvak. Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. xv, 273 pp. Bibliography. Index. Cloth.Excepting anti-Jewish violence in the form of pogroms, perhaps no other trauma became as ingrained in the collective memory of the Jewish experience in the Russian empire as the conscription of Jewish child recruits for service in the tsar's army. Olga Litvak's Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry traces this episode, lasting from 1827 to 1855, came to embody for later maskilim (enlightened Jews) both the peril and promise of Jewish emancipation. This book is not about the historical experience with conscription, but rather, as Litvak states, how the treatment of history in Jewish literature has shaped the history of the Jewish imagination (p. 2). Litvak's literary analysis is sophisticated and creative and she probes many often conflicting and countervailing trends in the literature. Yet two themes continually appear throughout the book. The first relates to the unfulfilled state reforms initiated by Nicholas I continued to reverberate in shaping the Jewish consciousness of the post-emancipation maskilim under Alexander II and III. The second relates to the continuously ambiguous responses to secularization among the purveyors and descendents of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment). As Litvak ably demonstrates, the maskilim remained deeply ambivalent about the breakdown of communal religious authority (and therefore also emancipation), as well as the impact of modernization on Jewish life in the tsarist empire.Jewish conscripts faced an anomalous legal situation within the tsarist empire, as Jews freed from the religious control of the official Jewish community. On the one hand, this situation gave rise to the first individual and non-religious expressions of Russian Jewishness, and created a set of individuals, both converts and non-converts, who saw no contradiction between their Russian and Jewish identities. On the other hand, beginning with the earliest conscription story, Osip Rabinovich's Penal Recruit, published in 1 859, conscription literature was marked by a deep insecurity about the loss of religious faith and communal authority (p. 75). Rabinovich's literature, while critical of the piecemeal nature of Nicholaevan reform, conveyed a hope for transition to genuine Jewish emancipation under Alexander II. In the 1 870s, maskilic authors such as Isaac Meir Dik, Grigorii Bogrov, and Judah Leib Gordon moved conscription literature into the realm of what Litvak considers conservative family romance. Unlike Rabinovich, these authors held no illusions about the impending emancipation of Jews as a collective, and as such, used conscription literature to critique the Jewish embourgeoisement - of marriage and gender roles especially - associated with selective integration. …

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