“Що американці бачать і не бачать у радянській Україні?”

This review discusses the impressions of the Jewish emigrant Mendel Osherowitch about his journey to the Soviet Union and Ukraine in early 1932. As an employee of the New York-based Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts, he took detailed notes during his journey, which were published in 1933 after his return to the USA. This book complements the set of already published memoirs of foreigners about their trips to the USSR at the beginning of the 1930s. These individuals, wanting to see with their own eyes the results of Soviet industrialization and collectivization, became eyewitnesses to the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, the Holodomor. Unlike other representatives of the Western intelligentsia and foreign specialists, who during their travels in the Soviet Union were under the control of the authorities, the author of the reviewed book had the opportunity to explore the country, which resulted in a more critical perception of the Soviet reality. In addition to a short trip to Russia, the author visited a number of cities and villages in Ukraine, including his native Trostianets’, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Tulchyn. Mendel Osherowitch’s account of his trip to the Soviet Union is a valuable source for studying the results of the “socialist transformations” of the 1920s-1930s, and, in particular, the famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine. The materials pertaining to his observations complement the existing studies on social hierarchies and inequalities in early Soviet society, the everyday life of various social groups, and the Jewish ethnic community.