Jewish Music and Soviet Evacuees to Central Asia During the Great War

With the outbreak of the Second World War in the USSR, millions of civilians were evacuated to the Soviet interior, including Jewish artists and intellectuals from prominent institutions like Moscow’s State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET). While the decision and ability to flee the Nazi advance was often a matter of good luck, of advantageous passportization and language skills, or of simply being on the correct side of the border, Central Asia was a unique and ancient site of refuge in Jewish consciousness. In a critical reevaluation of oral histories, the evacuation during WWII is contextualized within a broader Soviet framework of deportation and removal from large cities to the “periphery.” Through the lives of two composers, Suleiman Yudakov and Mieczysław Weinberg, we can better understand Bukharan-Ashkenaz relations during the war, and postwar priorities for cultural preservation within rising antisemitism intertwined with unvalorous Soviet narratives about evacuees. This provides an illuminating look at cultural exchange and life in Tashkent during the war, secondhand Holocaust trauma, evacuation as a category of survivorship, and the relationship between evacuation and postwar Stalinist antisemitism.

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Host or Publisher Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies