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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2006
The year 1926 was a very good year … if you were a Yiddish writer passionate about communism. By that year, the communist utopia had turned the corner economically and socially, making the Soviet Union increasingly attractive to those who believed in a revolutionary future. The Soviet Union in 1926 was also a great place to be a socialist Jew, as the state had lifted all prerevolutionary restrictions on Jews' movement, employment, education, and residence while providing financial and political support to a whole network of Jewish social, cultural, and political institutions. Yiddish writers who had left Russia after the devastation of world war, civil war, revolutionary war, and ideological war began to trickle back. They saw the Soviet Union as a place where a Yiddish writer had respect, could earn a living, and had the power of the state at his fingertips (yes, it was primarily men's fingertips doing the communist Yiddish writing).