Here Where We Live Is Our Country

An award-winning writer and illustrator follows the story of her grandfather’s involvement in a freewheeling group of Jewish revolutionaries to question whether the world was ready for their vision of multiracial solidarity—and whether we are today.

Molly Crabapple first discovered the story of the Jewish Bund when her mother showed her a trove of her grandfather's old paintings and letters. Sam Rothman was a rough-and-tumble kid who worked at a tannery deep in the Pale of Settlement in 19th century Russia. He discovered that he was an artist--a brilliant interpreter of life in his Jewish village--and soon after that he was a revolutionary, enlisted in the strikes, street fights, and study groups of the Jewish Bund.

Molly saw herself not just in his career but in his revolutionary inclinations--Molly spent much of her life in revolutionary enclaves around the world, marching in the streets and dancing till morning. In the Bund, she discovered a movement of artists, philosophers, working people, and street fighters who had a utopian vision for the world. As Jews--a people always on the margins--they understood themselves as a people who needed special protection. But as Marxist revolutionaries, they also saw themselves as part of an international solidarity that rejected all forms of ethnonationalism. They fought for this vision in the parlors, cafes, battlefields and prison camps. Their ideas sparked the Russian Revolution, which soon swept them aside. They fought with the emerging nationalist movements sweeping Europe. And they battled Zionists over the destiny of the Jewish people, believing that Jews could never find peace by becoming colonizers themselves. Their last stand was against the Nazis--they led the largest Jewish resistance movement, culminating in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a dramatic and tragic climax to their story.

In retelling the history of the Bund and its extraordinary cast of characters during one of the most politically and culturally vibrant moments in European history, Molly is also exploring her own revolutionary life. Her narration is tinged with an almost desperate need to understand whether the Bund failed because their idea was unworkable--or if the world failed the Bund, whose movement could've saved us from the violence of Russian Communism, Nazism, and Zionism. This dynamic, tragic story, is driven by that urgent question--and offers a new lens through which to see our contemporary struggles for solidarity in the face of tribalism.