Kerri P. Steinberg. Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 232 pp (original) (raw)

AJS Review, 2016

Abstract

is a vanishingly small part of the latter. The difference between what was observed by Westerners and what was experienced by Jews is also important for the people who are the subject of this book. After September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, about a quarter million Jews fled to eastern Poland. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, these people found themselves under Soviet rule. When asked if they would take Soviet citizenship, most Jews declined since they expected to return to their lives in Poland after the war. In June 1940 about 60,000 Polish Jewish refugees from Nazi rule were deported to the gulag for declining Soviet documents. Polish Jews who were native to eastern Poland had already been deported to the gulag that February and April on other grounds. After the Soviet NKVD murdered over a thousand Jewish officers of the Polish army at Katyn and four other sites, their wives, children, and parents were deported to the gulag. All in all perhaps 85,000 Polish Jews were deported the gulag, chiefly to Kazakhstan and Siberia. At the end of the war, Jews who had been Polish citizens were unwelcome in the USSR. Stone is right that the Soviets and their Eastern European clients wanted more Jews in DP camps since this put pressure on the British to open Palestine to Jewish settlement, an objective of Soviet foreign policy. The “largest influx of Jews” to the DP camps, as Stone records, were “Polish returnees from Soviet exile” (180). It seems possible that more Jews in the DP camps had a Soviet experience of war than a German one. Stone catches an element of that Soviet story when he notes that, upon returning from the USSR to their prewar homes, Polish Jews were often met with violence. The particular sadness of this is that such people realized simultaneously that their family and friends had been killed and that they themselves were not welcome. Yet since their Soviet wartime experience is missing, a chapter of the Jewish history of liberation remains to be written.

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