This is the first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed. Drawing on a collection of family letters, Kiril Feferman provides a history of the Ginsburgs as they debate whether to evacuate their home of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and are eventually swept away by the Soviet-German War, the German invasion of Soviet Russia, and the Holocaust. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Soviet Union, presenting one Soviet region as an illustration of wartime social and media politics.

“It is… a challenge to turn a collection of letters into a compelling narrative. … It is thus a great credit to his scholarly and compositional skills that Feferman manages to draw the reader into the Ginzburg family’s slowly unfolding tragedy. … The Ginzburg letters offer an intimate approach to the Holocaust in the USSR. … Feferman, whose previous book was The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (2016), does an excellent job of explaining the intricacies of the war, evacuation policies, and the Holocaust in this region. The book also includes a useful timeline. … Ultimately, it is [the] very human drive toward hope— and the desire to shield loved ones from worry— that comes across in the letters. As such, they provide us with a critically important window into the daily lives and concerns of Jews during the Holocaust. Through his careful translation and presentation of these letters, Feferman offers readers invaluable insight into ordinary lives under excruciating circumstances.”

— Eliyana R. Adler, Pennsylvania State University, Studies in Contemporary Jewry

“Kiril Feferman’s recent monograph is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Soviet Jewry during the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust. This volume takes the innovative approach of focusing on the correspondence of a single family in order to address several important questions which have been raised in the scholarship... Feferman’s analysis lays bare the ways in which Soviet policies, censorship, lack of clear information, economic privations, and fear of displacement sealed the fates of millions of Soviet Jews months after the Nazis had initiated a full-scale genocidal campaign against Soviet Jewry. Thus, Feferman’s monograph enriches our understanding of the ‘choiceless choices’ Soviet Jews were forced to make.”

– Natalie Belsky, University of Minnesota Duluth, AJS Review, Vol. 46 No. 1

“The author successfully ‘combined in his book the history from above and history from below, general description of the Soviet-German War, the evacuation experience and the Holocaust’ with the history of the Ginsburg family. … The book is very well written, but it is hard to read emotionally, because you know from the beginning the tragic fate of the family. Feferman’s work explains the factors that influenced the decisions of Soviet Jews whether or not to go into evacuation, and it shows in detail the enormous difficulties which faced Jews during the evacuation. The monograph also brings to light many aspects of the Soviet-German War in North Caucasus and the Holocaust.”

—Victoria Khiterer, Millersville University, Russian Review

Kiril Feferman teaches at Ariel University and is the head of Ariel’s Holocaust History Center. He has more than fifteen years of experience researching Holocaust history, contemporary Jewish history in the broader East European region, and the Second World War and has published extensively on these topics.