Documentary Fiction of the Pogroms of the Civil War

Itsik Kipnis's 1926 Yiddish novel Months and Days: A Chronicle, was one of the first literary accounts of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War. Although it reads like fiction, the text includes the names of real-life perpetrators and victims and also provides other factual information about what took place in Slovechno, Ukraine, in July 1919. Kipnis's novel is not only about facts. It is intensely personal: the young author had just gotten married when the pogroms in his region began. The larger narrative thus consists of two seemingly incongruous components: a love story, and a story of neighborly violence. Kipnis weaves together the emotions of love, tenderness, and care with fear, rage, resentment, and bitterness. What emerges is a deeply experiential account of the history of violence in Eastern Europe after World War I.