Michael Beizer - Böcker

A Time to Sow offers a glimpse into the unofficial Jewish life in 1980s Leningrad, shaped by numerous long-term refusals from authorities to grant exit visas to Jews seeking to migrate to Israel. The book reveals how the lives of the "refuseniks" were marked by a continuous struggle for the right to emigrate, as well as by the formation of an informal community. It traces how the community provided mutual assistance in times of distress, particularly offering support to imprisoned activists and their families. The community also maintained contacts with co-religionist supporters visiting from abroad, engaged in Hebrew teaching, facilitated religious revival, celebrated Jewish holidays as a group, disseminated samizdat publications, conducted popular lectures on Jewish history and culture, and pursued Jewish studies. The book divulges how all these activities took place in private, despite the ban and persecution by the authorities.Drawing from analyses of historical sources, rare archival materials, as well as personal experiences including interviews with activists, the book provides a rich and nuanced understanding of this unique period. Ultimately, A Time to Sow presents a critical, non-apologetic perspective to uncover a distinctive, little-known chapter of Russian Jewish history in Leningrad, one of Russia’s most important cities.

Doba-Mera Medvedeva belongs to a vanishing group of memoirists who are neither elite nor highly literate, but whose observations from the ground cast a vivid light on a lost world. A born story-teller whose first language was Yiddish, Medvedeva kept Russian-language notebooks to preserve her past for her Russian-speaking grandchildren. We see in the book the quarrelsome underside of shtetl life—family divisions in a time of scarce resources—and also her attempts to break free, through work, revolution, and, eventually, marriage. She lived through pogroms and two world wars, but she endured, remembered, and wrote.