The Exodus motif in Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s

In 1917, the Jewish people's dream of a Jewish settlement in Palestine and desire for a more equal society in Russia came true. For Zionists or Jews involved in the building of a new country, two territories, Eretz Israel and the USSR, embodied the fulfillment of their respective messianic hopes. Several literary works of the 1920s developed the Exodus motif to illustrate the return to the Promised Land or the settling of Jews in agricultural colonies in Ukraine. However, if the Jewish and Russian landscapes coexisted in the works written just after the Revolution, the biblical theme was later used for ideological purposes to illustrate the victory of Zionist thought or, on the contrary, of Soviet ideology. Thus, at the end of their journey in the Egyptian desert, the Jews found themselves in the Negev desert or in the Ukrainian steppe. The radicalization of Soviet society from 1929 resulted in the closing of all Jewish organizations and an intensification of the struggle against Zionism. Some Soviet works were devoted to the description of the failure of the Zionist experience in Eretz Israel and the return of the pioneers to the Soviet Union. The journey led them to Birobidzhan, which these works depicted as the last stop of a journey from Egypt toward freedom.