On Pogroms
From Jews to transgender people, scapegoating political violence on an entire minority population is extremely dangerous
I’m back to feeling how I felt twelve months ago, and back to writing a short story that I started twelve months ago, about the conditions that forced my great-great-grandparents to flee Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, the forces that propelled my family ultimately to America (after pit stops in Western Europe and South America), and that led to this moment in 2025 in which I am now facing a similar crisis.
In 1881, in Odessa, Ukraine (then part of the vast Russian Empire) a spasm of anti-Jewish mob violence swept through the city. It was a pogrom. Every pogrom in Eastern European history—and there were many—had some sort of inciting incident; in this case, it was the assassination of the Russian Emperor Alexander II.
There were many radical activists involved in the assassination of the emperor, but the actual facts about who they were and what they believed were not as important as the pre-conceived notion that the Jews must be responsible. And so the investigators went about trying to find any evidence of a Jewish tie-in with the assassination. And in a twentysomething Jewish woman, a radical activist who had assisted the assassins in a minor way, they found their Jew.
Across Eastern Europe, in the so-called Pale of Settlement—the geographic region where Jews were allowed to reside—the pogroms spread like wildfire. The mob violence in Odessa was only one example.
I write about Odessa because that’s where my great-great-grandfather Joseph was born. He was twenty years old at the time of the pogrom. Sometime after the Odessa conflagration, which he survived, he fled the Russian Empire and ended up, somehow, in Marseille, France, where he then met my great-great-grandmother, a Sephardic Jew, with whom he eventually migrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, seeking a safer life across the ocean.
Last fall, fearing the rise of fascism in the United States, I started writing a story about Joseph, a story in which I tried to make sense of his experiences of antisemitism and what propelled him to leave his home and flee to a different country. I ask myself these questions because I want to know: when will it be time for me to flee this country, and how will I know it?
144 years since the assassination of the Russian emperor, and the unabashed scapegoating of the Jewish people for his assassination, and the spasmodic antisemitic violence—the pogroms—that followed, and the emigration of some of my ancestors from those sites of violence, a political assassination has occurred in the United States, and the people in power have sought to blame this act on transgender people even before they knew all the facts, and they ultimately found a way to connect this violent act to transgender people—or to “transgender ideology,” as some put it—which seems perhaps likely to lead to a further anti-transgender crackdown.
As I write these words, we have not seen today’s story evolve to that next stage—of the pogrom—and God forbid that it ever does. But if it does, I will be confronted with the same question that confronted my great-great-grandfather 140 years ago: is it safe to stay in this country, or it is time to flee?
A final word…
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Similar tracks! My grandfather’s family went from the pogroms in Minsk to Marseille to New York, and my grandmother’s from Minsk to Buenos Aires after being turned away from Ellis Island. 40years after yours, but the same stories and routes.