The Destruction of Dubova

Haunting and horrifying. Faygnberg meticulously documented the genocidal pogroms of the Russian Civil War at a human level through the story of a single town, Dubova, and the complete destruction of its Jews and their community. A century later, English readers can read her important account for the first time. The editor and translators have helped to recover the traumatic memory of the single worst episode of anti-Jewish violence in modern history before the Holocaust. * Polly Zavadivker, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, University of Delaware, USA *

Born in the Belarusian shtetl Lyuban in 1885, Rokhl Faygnberg witnessed and wrote about many of the defining events of modern Jewish history—wars, pogroms, and the birth of the State of Israel. She became the first professional Jewish female author who earned a living from writing novels and penning essays for the Yiddish and Hebrew press. After the pogroms of the civil war in Ukraine 1918-1921, which she powerfully chronicled in her work, she moved to Poland and eventually settled in Mandate Palestine in 1933, where she published largely in Hebrew under the name Rakhel Imri. She died in Tel Aviv in 1972.

Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. Her most recent book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019), also won a National Jewish Book Award. Elissa is also the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018, with Joyce Warren); and Pogroms: A Documentary History of Anti-Jewish Violence (2021, with Gene Avrutin). She is editor of Jewish Social Studies and is currently working on a biography of Ester Frumkin.