This book can break your heart. Rina Lapidus commemorates the brief lives of fifteen Jewish poets under the age of 35 who served in the Soviet military during World War II and uses their individual stories to personify the mass deaths, Jewish and non-Jewish, of that dark time.
The individual biographies vary. Whole-heartedly committed to the Bolshevik revolution or ambivalent, from somewhat observant homes or totally assimilated, from cultured backgrounds or virtually unschooled, urban or rural, poor or comfortable, married or still too young for much romantic or erotic experience—a few snapshots suggest the variety: Hennikh Shvedik, who began writing in the new autonomous Jewish region of Birobidzhan, translated Anton Chekhov into Yiddish, and marched as the “leader of song” at the head of his battalion; Aron Kopshtein, who triumphed over his miserable childhood as an impoverished orphan to publish six volumes of Ukrainian poetry; Jack Althausen, a widely popular...