Dreams and Reality

Dreams and Reality, originally published in Yiddish in 1979, recounts Shifra Lipshitz's (1898–1984) nearly fifty-year sojourn in the Soviet Union that began as idealized infatuation and ended with radical disillusionment. Born in Poland, Lipshitz became a leftwing activist, fleeing to the Soviet Union illegally in 1923. A believer in Bolshevik ideology, she lived and worked in Soviet Ukraine before migrating to Birobidzhan in 1934 as one of the thousands of volunteers who set out to build the Jewish Autonomous Region deep in the Siberian swamp. She taught at a Yiddish teachers' college until her arrest in 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges, and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor in a camp in the northeast of Russia. After her release she became an internal exile until the Soviet authorities allowed her to emigrate to Israel in 1972. Dreams and Reality offers the reader a glimpse into life on the Soviet periphery during the tumultuous twentieth century. Very few gulag memoirs were written by women and even fewer manage to combine a gulag narrative with the Soviet-Jewish experience.

Cornell University Press is pleased to announce that we will be publishing a translation from the Yiddish of Shifra Lipshitz's 1979 book, Khaloymes un virklekhkeyt: Biro-bidzhan un arbets-lagern [Dreams and Reality: Birobidzhan and Labor Camps], first published by the Israeli publisher Eygens. The Cornell edition, translated and edited by Julia Zarankin, will be available in Nov. 2026.