Once upon a time, Birobidzhan was a name to conjure with. Today, few know what the word stands for.

In brief summary: a 1928 decision taken by the Communist-party leadership of the Soviet Union provided for the establishment of a “Jewish autonomous region” along the banks of the Amur River in the far east, close to the Chinese border. The underlying purpose was to solve the Soviet version of the “Jewish question,” or at least to contribute toward such a solution, by treating Jews like other ethnic or national minorities in Russia that had been similarly assigned their own autonomous regions in the patchwork of Soviet “republics.” ...

My own first encounter with Birobidzhan goes back a very long time, almost to boyhood. The year was 1937, the place my hometown of Breslau in what was then Nazi Germany. We in the younger Jewish generation, without belonging to any specific party, had been politicized early on, if only because it was clear to us that our future was not to be in the country of our birth. But where were to turn?

As it happens, one of our local gurus mentioned Stalin’s plan to solve the “Jewish question” by resettling Soviet Jews in Birobidzhan. For further information, he referred us to a book by one Otto Heller, an Austrian Communist, that had been published just before the Nazi takeover. But to obtain a copy of this work, even through underground channels, was impossible. Nazi censorship had been at work in a sweeping way, eliminating from circulation all works by Jewish authors or suspicious on other grounds.

I had an idea, however. Heller’s book was titled Der Untergang des Judentums. The German word Untergang connotes much more than decline; it is a synonym for downfall or collapse. It occurred to me that a book with such an attractive title, “The Downfall of Judaism,” might possibly have escaped Nazi censorship. My friends were skeptical, and so was the guru, but I resolved to try my luck at the nearby municipal library where I had received much of my early political education.

My intuition proved correct; the book was handed to me, and I began to read it the very same day. In his potted survey of Jewish history, Heller argued that the Jews had always been traders, even when they were nomads. But now in the USSR, thanks to the blessings of socialism, trade had been rendered redundant—and with it, Judaism itself. Released from the shackles of their odious religion, the Jews as a people would realize their true calling in the Jewish autonomous region that had been established for them in Birobidzhan. The very last sentence of the book quoted the final line of the Passover seder: l’shanah haba’ah biyrushalayim, “next year in Jerusalem.” Heller corrected it: “Next year in Birobidzhan.”

It was a terrific slogan—and indeed Heller’s book, more than any other, had served to make Birobidzhan popular outside Russia. But by the time I read it in the late 1930s, reality, as I noted earlier, had already intervened and Heller’s dream had flopped. ...