In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Jewish socialist movement called the Bund organized workers across the Russian Empire with a radical vision that rejected both assimilation and Zionism in favor of cultural autonomy and solidarity wherever Jews already lived. Molly Crabapple, an artist and journalist, recovers the history of this largely forgotten movement and the world it inhabited — the Yiddish-speaking communities of Eastern Europe that were almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust. The book is built around the life and memory paintings of Sam Rothbort, an artist who emigrated from the shtetl of Radziwillow to New York and spent decades painting scenes of the community he had left behind — images of marketplaces, synagogues, and neighbors that existed nowhere else after the war. Crabapple weaves Rothbort's story together with the broader history of the Bund, from its founding in Vilna in 1897 through its role in organizing strikes, building schools and cultural institutions, and resisting both Tsarist oppression and the rising tide of fascism. The Bund's central argument — that Jews should fight for justice in the countries where they lived rather than seeking a homeland elsewhere — placed it in direct conflict with Zionist movements, a debate that reverberates in Jewish political life to this day. Crabapple writes with the passion of someone who sees in the Bund's vision a model of radical solidarity that remains relevant, and Rothbort's paintings, reproduced throughout the book, give visual form to a vanished civilization.