"An estimated 40,000 Jews were murdered during the Russian Civil War. How did Jewish poets and investigators in the 1920s make sense of such organized acts of violence (pogroms)? Brilliantly weaving together narrative fiction, poetry, memoirs, newspaper articles, and documentary reports, Harriet Murav argues that poets and pogrom investigators were doing more than recording the facts of violence and expressing emotions in response to it. They were interrogating what was taking place through a central concept familiar from their everyday lifeworld-hefker, or abandonment. Hefker shaped the documentation of catastrophe by Jewish investigators at pogrom sites impossibly tasked with producing comprehensive reports of chaos. Hefker also became a framework for Yiddish writers to think through such incomprehensible violence by creating new forms of poetry. Focusing less on the perpetrators and more on the responses to the pogroms, As the Dust of the Earth offers a fuller understanding of the seismic effects of such organized violence and a moving testimony to the resilience of survivors to process and cope with catastrophe"--

Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Comparative and World Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Russia's Legal Fictions, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia, and David Bergelson's Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Poetry
1. Hefker and Abandonment
2. David Hofshteyn Listening
3. Leyb Kvitko's Poetry of Abandonment
4. Enfleshment
Part II: Documentation
5. Chronicling a Hefker World: Itsik Kipnis's Months and Days
6. Victor Shklovsky's Archive of Abandonment
7. Counting
8. Children
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index