Written by Yiddish writer Rokhl Faygnberg, The Destruction of Dubova is a powerful account of the elimination of the Jewish community of one shtetl during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, 1918-1921. Based on her personal interviews with survivors, Faygnberg presents a detailed description of the evisceration of the vibrant Jewish community of Dubova, which was ultimately wiped off the map of Ukraine, during a period that is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the Holocaust that took place in these same lands some twenty years later. The biographical details of the Jewish community members of Dubova provide a moving portrait of the familiar and neighborly relations, as well as of the pettiness of everyday life on the eve of destruction, made of conflict, class tension, and intermarriage. Faygnberg's narrative also captures the perpetrators' actions and motivations, the intimacy of genocidal violence made of neighbors killing neighbors, and the life the Jewish community's desperate attempts to resist and survive the brutality.

By building on the most recent historiography on anti-Jewish violence, Elissa Bemporad expertly contextualizes the destruction of the shtetl Dubova within the political and military events of 1918-1921 in the volume's introduction. Bemporad also examines the original writing produced by Rokhl Faygnberg, whose genre straddles between a historical chronicle based on witness accounts, and a work of literature. Lastly, the introduction discusses the fascinating history of Faygnberg's text, uncovering the different political and cultural purposes it served at different times and what it can tell us about anti-Jewish violence today.

Born in the Belarusian shtetl Lyuban in 1885, Rokhl Faygnberg witnessed and wrote about many of the defining events of modern Jewish history-wars, pogroms, and the birth of the State of Israel. She became the first professional Jewish female author who earned a living from writing novels and penning essays for the Yiddish and Hebrew press. After the pogroms of the civil war in Ukraine 1918-1921, which she powerfully chronicled in her work, she moved to Poland and eventually settled in Mandate Palestine in 1933, where she published largely in Hebrew under the name Rakhel Imri. She died in Tel Aviv in 1972.

Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA. Her most recent books include Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford, 2019), and Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life (NYU, 2025).