Håkan Blomqvist

Socialism in Yiddish Håkan Blomqvist

Opposition became the Bund's condition of existence, but not opposition

for its own sake. The Bund was founded on the conviction that the

"Jewish question" could only be resolved through the liberation of the

international working class from all forms of oppression on its way to

establishing a world of equality, welfare and democracy without borders

- a socialist social order. There, the broad strata of the population would

rule, rather than capitalist elites or communist party apparatchiks.




The Bund was one of the losers of history. The once deeply-rooted movement

was crushed during terror and genocide, dispersed into exile, driven

into its shell by overpowering political forces and undermined by assimilation

as time wore on and the world changed. The following story is about

that process at the micro-level, in a place on the edge of the world.




In this unique account Håkan Blomqvist relates a largely unknown

chapter in both the historiography of the Swedish labor movement and

in Swedish-Jewish history, that of the non-Zionist Jewish Arbeter Bund

among refugees in Sweden during and after World War II.