Imagining Russian Jewry

Author : Steven J. Zipperstein
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295802316
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Russian Jewry written by Steven J. Zipperstein and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including novels, plays, and archival material—Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures. Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof. In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

Author : Leonid Livak
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804775621
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

Author : Benjamin Nathans
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520208307
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond the Pale written by Benjamin Nathans and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-08-29 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nathans's deeply researched and meticulously argued book takes us into the drawing rooms and offices of successful Jews of St. Petersburg and greatly enhances our understanding not only of Jewish intellectual, political, and professional leadership but of Russian politics and society as well."—Richard Stites, author of Russian Popular Culture "The work of an extremely talented and intelligent historian. It breaks new ground both conceptually and substantively."—Michael Stanislawski, author of Zionism and the Fin de Siècle "Ben Nathans moves in this remarkable book well beyond the standard spatial as well as conceptual boundaries typically associated with prerevolutionary Russian Jewry. It is the work of a splendid historian who negotiates brilliantly the borders of Russian and Jewish history, and manages to link the two persuasively in an original, lucid narrative."—Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Imagining Russian Jewry

Author : Olga Litvak
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253000777
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry written by Olga Litvak and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." -- Benjamin Nathans Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Author : Evan R. Chesler
Publisher : Behrman House Publishing
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Russian Jewry Reader written by Evan R. Chesler and published by Behrman House Publishing. This book was released on 1974 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the history of Jews in Russia, particularly since 1917, through newspaper articles and excerpts from contemporary literature and discusses the position and specific problems of the Jewish people in Soviet society.

Author : Orbach
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004672753
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Voices of Russian Jewry written by Orbach and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1980-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611684552
Total Pages : 665 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia written by ChaeRan Y. Freeze and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.

Author : Nathaniel Deutsch
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674062647
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jewish Dark Continent written by Nathaniel Deutsch and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive—what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite—which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish—exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies—the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky’s project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity.

Author : Union of Russian Jews
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 502 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Russian Jewry: 1860-1917 written by Union of Russian Jews and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Maria Stepanova
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811228843
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.