Editors’ Introduction
In 2015, we were honored to welcome Molly Crabapple to the Palestine Festival of Literature. She toured the West Bank and ‘48 with the festival and wrote a deeply affecting dispatch for Vice News from Gaza. When she returned home, she began excavating her family’s history and her great-grandfather’s involvement with the Jewish Bund — a revolutionary movement that was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist that reached its zenith in interwar Europe.
Now, 11 years later, she is about to publish Here Where We Live Is Our Country, an epic history of the Jewish movement that refused Zionism’s pressure to colonize and subjugate another people. It’s been largely erased from history, Molly argues, because of its opposition to Zionism — and her new book is an attempt to ensure it’s not forgotten.
Subscribe to The Key at the Bookshelf tier today to receive Here Where We Live Is Our Country in the mail, along with this exclusive postcard with artwork by Molly herself.
Artwork postcard by Molly Crabapple featuring her illustration above an election flyer from Volkovsyk in 1938: “The Jewish masses must clearly and openly declare: We are not foreigners! We will not leave! We will fight for our freedom and rights, together with Polish workers and peasants. And if the Zionists … raise a hand to hinder our struggle, then we will kick them off the Jewish street.”
Foreword, by Molly Crabapple
During his elder years, my great-grandfather, the post-Impressionist artist Sam Rothbort, tried to paint back into existence the murdered world of his shtetl childhood. Amid the hundreds of watercolors that he called “memory paintings,” one stood out. A girl silhouetted against some cottages, her dress the same color as the crepuscular sky above. A moment before, she’d hurled a rock through one now shattered cottage window. On the painting’s margin, her boyfriend offers more rocks.
“Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows,” Sam captioned the work.
I may have been fifteen, seventeen, or twenty when I saw the watercolor, in my great-aunt’s sunbaked living room or my mother’s apartment; I don’t recall exactly. What sticks with me is the old-world awkwardness of the heroine’s name. Itka. I turned the Yiddish syllables on my tongue. And Bundist. What was that?
