The title of novelist Dara Horn’s new collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From A Haunted Present, says it all and hints at Horn’s thesis that stories about Jews which receive the most traction are ones in which we are dead.
A number of stand-alone essays were first published in magazines and newspapers before they were compiled into this book; the commonality is the theme of the book’s title. Several chapters deal with antisemitism in the United States and one is devoted to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Her widely-cast net extends to Asia and the book cover even shows a snowy photo of the Chinese city, Harbin, a city she (somewhat dismissively) prefaces with “… like most Chinese cities you’ve never heard of…”.
Horn is drawn to Harbin from TripAdvisor photos of the famous Ice Festival and also because of its Jewish history: the city, she writes, was “built by Jews”.
Jews have lived in China for more than a thousand years, which is as long as they have lived in Poland. But the story of the Jews in Harbin, and of Harbin itself, begins with the railroad—because before the railroad, Harbin did not exist.

This is not meant to be a history qua history about Harbin, the Chinese Eastern Railway or the triangle of Russian, Chinese and Japanese relations; this becomes in Horn’s hands, an entirely Jewish story. She explains that the railroad developers didn’t trust Russians to build a new city along the new railroad line, nor did it trust Chinese in that area. So, Horn posits, the developers enlisted entrepreneurial Jews to come to this outpost in Manchuria. This was at a time when Jews were trying to leave Russia in droves because of state-sponsored pogroms, or murder sprees. A new life in Harbin would offer a quick way to escape.
The Jewish community in Harbin started in 1898 and built schools, a hospital, kosher butcher, matzah bakery, ritual mikveh bath, theaters, clubs, and magazine and newspaper publishers. The city was also a hub of Zionist activity—decades before the State of Israel was established—that included youth and sports groups, conferences, and parades. This was not to last.
You already know this story has to end badly. Like almost every place Jews have ever lived, Harbin was great for the Jews until it wasn’t—but in Harbin, the usual centuries-long rise-and-fall was condensed into approximately thirty years.
By the early 1930s, “White” Russians who fled the Bolshevik Revolution burned down a synagogue in Harbin and the Japanese invaders used these émigrés to help take over Jewish businesses. Some in the Jewish community were sent to gulags after the Soviets liberated the area in 1945. When the Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, the remaining Jews of Harbin left for Israel, with a couple stragglers staying until the 1960s and 1980s.
Horn’s version of the story implies that Jews were singled out by the Japanese and the Communists, but Chinese residents of Harbin suffered just as much. Horn dwells on traces of the former Jewish community that are today promoted as tourist attractions, including a new synagogue built solely for the visit of Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose parents found refuge in Harbin after the Bolshevik Revolution. Horn writes that there are certainly Jews living as expats all around China these days, yet the Judaism that’s celebrated in China derives from this former enclave that no longer exists.
Harbin was not entirely unique. Although Horn doesn’t mention this, Jewish communities in East Asia like Shanghai, Kobe and Manila left in the 1940s after losing their livelihoods. Most of these communities started because of colonial endeavors in those areas, although older Jewish communities like the ones in Kerala and Kaifeng, continue today.
It would be impossible to write a book about dead Jews without including the Soviet Union and Horn digs deep into the former USSR’s troubled history in this regard. For example, Horn describes how Marc Chagall and other Russian Jewish artists spent time outside the Soviet Union, yet were lured back home by the government’s promise to allow them to live in peace as Jews.
In the 1920s and ’30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government.
This did not last very long. The Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews—a population that is for the most part gone from today’s Russia—would have lasting consequences. Unlike in China, there’s not much in the former Soviet Union that celebrates Jews.
Horn is a compelling writer and her essays are for the most part engaging and thought-provoking. Her thesis is not however particular to Jews—Native Americans might detect similar preferences in the stories told by the dominant population. And at least as far as Asia is concerned, there is interest in stories of Jewish lives, from the Sassoons and Kadoories to the so-called “Lost Tribes” in India.
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