Henry Abramson. A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 1999. xix, 255 pp.
Henry Abramson has chosen an appropriately ambiguous title for his study of the short-lived alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, a rapprochement which owed both its hopeful beginning and its violent end to the fate of Ukrainian independence in the crucible of war and revolution that b...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
2002
|
| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2002, Volume: 26, Issue: 1, Pages: 157-159 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
|
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Henry Abramson has chosen an appropriately ambiguous title for his study of the short-lived alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, a rapprochement which owed both its hopeful beginning and its violent end to the fate of Ukrainian independence in the crucible of war and revolution that brought down the tsarist empire. Revising the pogrom paradigm prevalent in much of the scholarship on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, Abramson argues that following the fall of the Romanovs leaders of Jewish parties justifiably invested their hopes for civic and political emancipation in the autonomous regional government of the Ukrainian Rada, formed in 1917 under the liberal auspices of Russia's newly established Provisional Government. Ironically, the dream died a brutal death in the course of its own realization. The Russian withdrawal under the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk opened a window of opportunity for the fulfillment of Ukrainian national aspirations. The ensuing period between the German withdrawal and the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic by the Bolsheviks saw the transfer of power to a conservative regime, increasingly beleaguered by the chaos of Civil War, socio-economic dislocation, and the excesses of local Cossack rule. In the duration of the short and troubled existence of the Republic, its new government, headed by Symon Petliura, a man whose name still carries its association with Ukrainian anti-semitism, proved unable to exercise effective control over the violence raging throughout the former Pale of Settlement. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009402410045 |