molly crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country drew a split verdict because it is both a wide-ranging reconstruction of the Jewish Labor Bund and, in one reviewer’s view, a book that tilts hard in its politics. The work tracks almost 130 years of history through family papers, memoirs, and documents, making the book more than a memoir-driven retelling.
Sam Rothbord and the Bund
Crabapple uses her great-grandfather Sam Rothbord as the guide into that history, building the book from photos and papers preserved by her family. Rothbord was born in Volkovysk, now in Belarus, joined the Bund as a young man, later came to America, and became an artist; his first exhibit was held at the former headquarters of the Forward on East Broadway.
The cast of Bund figures is broad: Vladimir Medem, Arkady Kremer, Raphael Abramovitch, Mark Lieber, Sophie Dubnova-Erlich, Henryk Erlich, and Viktor Alter all appear. That list signals the book’s ambition, since it reaches beyond a single family story to place the movement’s leaders inside one continuous political narrative.
1905 to 1917
The book moves through the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War I, the establishment of the Polish republic, and the Holocaust. Crabapple also compares her own experience as a left-wing activist with radicals around the world today, which keeps the book in the present tense even as it moves through older history.
The Forward called the book “a captivating read” and said Crabapple is well-versed in Marxist theory, which she learned from her father, a professor of political economy. It also said she clearly explains the ideological differences between the Bund and other leftist parties, so the book does real interpretive work even when it is being judged for bias.
Ideology and accuracy
The friction point is factual, not stylistic. The same review said Crabapple’s relationship to historical facts is occasionally loose, pointing to her treatment of Nicholas I and to a passage in which she wrote that “Tsar Nicholas I wrote his policies with the declared aim of forcing a third of Jews to die, a third to emigrate, and a third to convert to Christianity.”
That matters because the review says Nicholas I died in 1855, never declared that aim, and strictly prohibited emigration from Russia; it also notes that the percent norm was first introduced by Alexander III in 1887. Read together, those corrections show why the book can be vivid and still argue from a hard political line instead of a neutral one.
For readers, the book now sits in two places at once: as a substantial source on Bund history and as a work that should be read with care where its polemics sharpen its history. The strongest way to approach it is as a politically committed reconstruction, not a detached reference book.
