A Jewish Woman in Stalin’s Moscow: The Life and Work of Ester Frumkin in the 1930s

• In Event: (Forgotten) Lives of Jewish Women in Stalin’s Soviet Union

Abstract

This talk will focus on the life and work of Ester Frumkin, a former member of the Jewish socialist party (Bund), and throughout the 1920s and 1930s an authoritative figure among the Communist Yiddish elites. By analyzing Frumkin’s speeches, correspondence, and the political and cultural writings she penned from 1929, the year of the liquidation of the Evsektsiia, to 1938, the year of her arrest and purge, this talk will piece together an important chapter in the final years of her life. In particular, by using new archival material and memorial literature, this talk will explore Frumkin’s role as rector of the Communist University of National Minorities of the West, and trace her relationship with the young cadres of Communist Jews enrolled at the university. This study will help us rethink some of the challenges inherent in narrating the life of an extraordinary Jewish woman caught between her allegiance to Yiddish and Communism in the 1930s.

Author

• Elissa Bemporad, CUNY Queens College / CUNY Graduate Center