Any Minute! Red Cavalry is Coming!
- Yiddish Shmoozers in Translation
- Aug 11, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 3, 2022
Sunday, September 11, 2022, 3:00-4:30 pm

"By far, the best-known 'chronicler' of the Polish-Soviet War was the Odesa-born Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. . . ."
SEE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS BY THE TEAM OF WHITE AND JERNOW BELOW!
Babel, the bespectacled twenty-something writer "fought in the ranks of Budenny's First Cavalry Army and kept a diary that he later used to write a collection of short stories titled Red Cavalry. The collection, which Budenny criticized for distorting the heroic image of his soldiers, describes the brutality of war, the violence of Red cavalrymen, and the tragic plight of the Jewish population of Ukraine in conditions of permanent warfare. With numerous armies fighting one another for almost three years, constantly changing front lines, the civil population of Ukraine suffered new terror and destruction without having had a chance to recover from the devastation of the first world war that had . No group fared worse than the Jews, who became subject to attack from all sides, by Reds, Whites, Ukrainian armies, and warlords."
--Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine


"In April 1920, Polish and Ukrainian forces advanced toward Kyiv from the north, beginning what came to be known as the Polish-Soviet War. Their goal was to challenge Bolshevik ascendency in the region and reclaim the historic lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. . . ."
-- Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Yiddish Schmoozers Andrea White and Judith Jernow will be our guest facilitators and offer the topics below for thought and discussion. You will recognize great minds at work in the questions they crafted.

Dear Schmoozers . . . Remember! . . . You can drop your comments here! Gelya 😎