educated, and so eager to become cosmopolitan (by way of secularization, intermarriage, and language shift) that Soviet nation building seemed either irrelevant or counterproductive (to both the Party and most Jewish consumers). Commendably but also dangerously, the Jews seemed much more Soviet than the rest of the Soviet Union. Moreover, those Jews who had stayed behind in the old shtetls as traditional traders and artisans did not fit into either the new Soviet economy or the peasant-into-worker-into-New-Man Marxist progression, whatever language they spoke. And so, in the name of equality and in order to deal with the threat of anti-Semitism on the one hand and capitalism on the other, the Party supported Yuri Larin in his attempt to turn at least 400,000 urban Jews into farmers—an attempt that, according to Larin’s opponent Kaganovich, contained “elements of Zionism,” and that, however one looks at it, was the mirror image of both Marxist theory and Soviet practice. 64 Larin and most of his supporters (including the ones in the United States, who provided most of the financing) wanted to locate the center of new Jewish agriculture—and eventually “the national Jewish republic”—in northern Crimea and in the adjacent areas of the Kuban and southern Ukraine. This plan, and the early phases of its implementation in 1926–27, proved a serious political challenge because of strong resistance on the part of local officials, especially the head of the Crimean Autonomous Republic Veli Ibraimov, who claimed to speak on behalf of the Crimean Tatar population and was lobbying for the return to the Crimea of hundreds of thousands Tatar exiles living in Turkey. In October 1926, Larin wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Party accusing Ibraimov of inciting pogroms, defending kulak interests, and “serving the nationalist-chauvinist aspirations of the part of the Tatar bourgeoisie that advocates a Turkish orientation.” Larin’s complaint may or may not have been a factor in Ibraimov’s 1928 execution on charges of espionage for Turkey; either way, the demise of the Crimean project’s most determined foe came too late to prevent the demise of the Crimean version of Jewish Apollonization. On March 28, 1928, the Soviet government approved the creation of a Jewish agricultural settlement in a remote part of the Soviet Far East not assigned to any other ethnic group (the local hunting and gathering population had no clout in the capital and no apparent intention to engage in agriculture). In 1930, Birobidzhan was proclaimed a Jewish National Region; in 1931, my grandparents arrived there from Buenos Aires by way of Hamburg and Leningrad; in 1932, their first daughter froze to death; later that same year, they moved to Moscow (leaving my grandmother’s sister and her family behind). The idea of settling on the land— especially such inhospitable land—made little sense to most Soviet Jews, less