When I speak to book clubs, synagogues, and Sisterhoods about my 2020 historical fiction novel, The Nesting Dolls, I like to end with a question: What was the first Jewish autonomous state of the 20th century?

Most remain quiet; they figure there’s a trick involved. The few who do venture an answer, tentatively ask, “Israel?” already suspecting that’s not what I’m looking for.

And they’re right.

My reason for asking the question is a roundabout way of introducing my November 2022 book, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region.

Because the answer to—What was the first Jewish autonomous state of the 20th century?—Is… Birobidzhan.

Never heard of it?

Don’t feel bad.

As indicated above, most haven’t.

Birobidzhan, the first Jewish autonomous state of the 20th century, was established in 1931, on the border of Russia and China. Inside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. With the support of no less than Josef Stalin, himself.

In 1926, a “sharply heightened anti-Jewish mood” in the USSR, as described by Masha Gessen in their meticulously researched book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, led to the suggestion that the newly Soviet Jews might be happier in a settlement of their own—where they won’t keep annoying the general population due to existing.

The Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on Land (OZET) filed an 80-page report against Birobidzhan becoming that settlement, disparaging the arid land, the gadflies, mosquitos, and midges, as well as the local populace of hostile Cossacks, ethnic Koreans and Chinese terrorists called the “hong tzu” (red-bearded ones), who made regular forays over the border to protect their poppy fields for the opium trade.

Birobidzhan was what they were given, nonetheless.

In April 1928, 504 families and 150 single Jews made the trek East to begin settling their new home. Two-thirds of them turned back by May.

Living conditions were simply too brutal. They dug literal holes in the Earth, called zemlinkas, with only sod thrown over the top to keep out the rain. The barracks which were eventually built had no running water, or windows, yet plenty of cracks to let in the wind.

In 1932, all of the crops they’d planted were flooded out. Then the cattle died from a lack of hay.

That didn’t stop the Central Communist Party of the USSR from proclaiming Birobidzhan the official new homeland for the Jews of the world in May 1934. Comrade Stalin boasted, “For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, its burning desire for a homeland, for the achievement of its own national statehood, has been fulfilled.”

By 1935, over 8000 pioneers had arrived to help build the first modern Jewish homeland. Most came from other parts of the Soviet Union, but there were also immigrants from Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, South America, Palestine, and even the United States.

Each was convinced that this was the place where they would finally be safe.

After all, how could anything go wrong?

Birobidzhan had the full support of Lazar Kaganovitch, Secretary of the Central Committee, Commissar of Communications, the most powerful Jew in the USSR!

Kaganovitch visited Birobidzhan in February 1936, singing the praises of this collective farm which also had a Five Year Plan to put three-fourths of the population to work in industry. Stalin loved Five Year Plans! Stalin loved Kaganovitch!

Kaganovitch, for his part, loved the gefilte fish he was served by the wife of the Head Village Soviet. He pronounced it the best he’d ever tasted!

Alas, by August of that same year, Stalin no longer loved Kaganovitch. Stalin announced that he personally had unmasked the man as an “untrustworthy, counter-revolutionary, and bourgeois-nationalist… conspiring to create a murderous, Bundist, Nazi-Fascist organization” in the USSR to undermine Stalin’s rule.

Kaganovitch was removed from office and arrested. As was the Head Village Soviet who had welcomed Kaganovitch to Biobidzhan six months earlier.

As was the Head Village Soviet’s wife. Her crime? Attempting to poison a Communist Party official… with her gefilte fish.

It is into this exact power struggle that Regina, the heroine of My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region stumbles into.

Regina grew up dreaming of moving to Birobidzhan where she could contribute to the building of socialism in a Jewish homeland. She read books about it. She listened to stirring speeches about it. She met with those who’d (briefly) visited Birobidzhan and couldn’t stop waxing poetic about its fertile farmland, its rivers full of fish, and its happily grazing, plump cows.

Her immigration there gets moved up when the friend who first told Regina about Birobidzhan is rounded up in one of Stalin’s many Great Terror purges. Regina flees to Birobidzhan, looking for a safe haven.

But how does she know whom to trust?