LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Writer and artist Molly Crabapple learned to paint from her mother.
MOLLY CRABAPPLE: And my mother learned how to paint from her grandfather, a post-impressionist painter named Samuel Rothbort.
FADEL: Crabapple grew up surrounded by his work. Her favorite was a watercolor painting of a young woman in a skirt, her hair pulled back, and she was throwing a rock through a window.
CRABAPPLE: And this painting was titled "Itka The Bundist Breaking Windows." I thought, Bundist? What's that?
FADEL: So she decided to find out and spent seven years researching the Jewish Bund, a labor party born in the 19th century in the Czarist Empire. She learned Yiddish and traveled to Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine to dig through archives and find answers.
CRABAPPLE: And the more I read these amazing books and letters and newspapers, the more I felt like I was doing necromancy, like I was speaking directly to the past, to my ancestors.
FADEL: Crabapple's latest book is "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story Of The Jewish Bund." I started our conversation by asking her what she found. What was the Jewish Bund?
CRABAPPLE: The Jewish Labour Bund was a revolutionary political party born in 1897 in the Czarist Empire that was secular, that was socialist, that was defiantly Jewish.
FADEL: Bundists believed in the idea of hereness. How do you describe hereness?
CRABAPPLE: What they believed was that you shouldn't have to go to somewhere else. And you should be able to have a beautiful, free life right there where you lived. Hereness was a defiant promise that they would fight to stay on their land, despite everything that the state could use against them.
FADEL: And when you start to look into it, what felt like, OK, I need to revisit this movement from so long ago and write about it now?
CRABAPPLE: Well, I went to Palestine in 2015 as a guest of the Palestine Festival of Literature. And I think anyone who reports from Gaza, they come out with a profound - I'll put it mildly - a profound critique of the system that put millions of Palestinians in an open-air prison. And one night, I was Googling about the Bund, as I sometimes do. And I learned that not only were they a socialist group, not only were they Jewish revolutionary group, but also that they were anti-Zionist. And once I heard that, I started to wonder, why has this group that has been there for so many of the key moments of 20th century history - why has it been so erased from history?
FADEL: What made it anti-Zionist?
CRABAPPLE: In the start, they felt that Zionism was an extremely silly idea. They did not think that millions of Jews were going to leave their homes in Europe to become collective farmers in the Levant. But after Zionism got the backing of the British Empire with the Balfour Declaration, the Bundists opposed it for another reason, and that was an ethical one. They saw Zionism as a handmaiden of British imperialism. But there is another reason as well. When Bundists saw the racist Polish government screaming Jews to Palestine and then they saw Zionist leaders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky also saying Jews to Palestine, they saw this as submission to their enemies. They saw this as letting bigots win.
FADEL: They were born around the same time, these two movements, right?
CRABAPPLE: 1897.
FADEL: I didn't know anything about the Bundists. Why?
CRABAPPLE: Like all of the Jews in Poland, the Bund were murdered in the Holocaust. Nazis murdered 90% of Poland's Jews. And not only were Jews murdered, but an entire world was destroyed. But there's another sort of erasure that the Bund suffered, and that is because Bundists and Zionists were always enemies and because Bundists leveled a profound and prophetic moral critique of Zionism, Zionists hated Bundists, too. And as the Zionist movement created the state of Israel and as this grew more important in Jewish communities, the Bund was deliberately marginalized. You can even see this anger today in the responses that writing about the Bund will get you, in the real anger that even a historical book about the Bund provokes.
FADEL: What type of anger have you received or seen as you started writing this - well, seven years of writing this - and now that the book's out?
CRABAPPLE: I mean, I receive hundreds of messages every day from people who send me pictures of Jews murdered in the Holocaust and tell me that they're Bundists and the Bundists deserved it for daring to stay in their homes.
FADEL: What is that like?
CRABAPPLE: It's a desecration of our ancestors, right? It's a desecration of the memory of the 6 million Jews that were murdered by the Nazis.
FADEL: Sorry, I'm just taking that in. That's awful. There is, though, the argument that the Bundist way failed because they insisted on staying, and so they were killed. And I wonder how you think about that, how you tackled that.
CRABAPPLE: The Nazis were the most powerful and brutal war machine of their moment. And so I feel like the idea that any Jewish group - and I don't just mean the Bundists. I mean any Jewish group from communist to Zionist to rich to poor, that any Jewish group could have held back the Nazis is ridiculous. The thing that kept the Jewish community in Palestine safe was not that there was a magical force field around them. It was that Palestine was a British colony at that time and that Britain was able to stop the Nazi forces in Egypt. And so I don't think it's right to deduce ethics out of the accidents of history.
FADEL: Molly Crabapple is the author of "Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story Of The Jewish Bund." Molly, thank you for speaking with us.
CRABAPPLE: Thank you so much, Leila. That was wonderful.
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