Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018. 386 pp.
This chapter explores Arkadi Zeltser's Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (2018). Despite its modest title, Unwelcome Memory is a profoundly serious study that successfully engages with the many aspects of Jewish–Soviet relations in the postwar period, showing how both the Soviet regime and Soviet Jews came to terms with Holocaust memorialization. Zeltser's understanding of the complexities of this relationship is truly remarkable and this, coupled with the book's many illuminating photographs, makes it essential reading for students of Soviet and Soviet Jewish history. Unwelcome Memory also offers rich opportunities to reflect upon the issue of the postwar state response toward Holocaust legacy. To what extent was Soviet exceptionalism responsible for the state's response? It appears that owing to a unique alignment of circumstances, such as ebbs and flows in anti-Jewish bias at the state and local levels, and evolution of the general approaches toward war legacy and remembrance, Jews were occasionally able to find loopholes in the seemingly indifferent and omnipotent bureaucratic Soviet state.