New Communities and Fraught Encounters: Jewish Refugees on the Soviet Home Front

Herman Carmel, a Jewish professor from Czechoslovakia, fled in 1939 to Latvia where he taught German at the Institute of Foreign Languages. Shortly after the outbreak of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Carmel and his family fled to the Soviet interior and spent the war years in the small town of Tamak in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, located between the Volga River and Ural mountains. As Carmel’s memoir (Black Days White Nights, 1984) details, his family’s survival in Tamak, like that of thousands of other Central European and Eastern European Jewish refugees who fled to the Soviet interior in the wake of the Nazi invasion, was predicated on the relationships they forged with local residents and other evacuees and refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish. My paper examines the relationships that emerged between Central and Eastern European Jewish refugees and Soviet Jewish evacuees who were displaced to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia during the war. I consider the networks of support among the displaced Jews as well as the tensions and conflicts that emerged due to distinct interwar experiences and backgrounds. As Carmel describes, the backwater town of Tamak (and towns like it) saw the creation of a Jewish community, made up of Soviet, Baltic, Polish and Central European Jews, and the growth of Jewish culture. These wartime interactions made an important impact on how individuals understood their Jewish identity and how they related to others within their community. I will argue that these wartime experiences played an important role in shaping notions of Jewishness in the immediate postwar period. Moreover, wartime displacement and migration led to transformations of local communities and culture on the Soviet home front as well as to expansion of the geographic imaginary of the Central and East European refugees.