This work examines the ways in which Dostoevsky's adoption and reinvention of the medieval Russian holy fool in Russian Orthodoxy, a person who feigned madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation, serves as a locus for a critique of his culture's increasing reliance on the scientic paradigms of Claude Bernard's physiology, and as a source of formal narrative innovation in his novels. The author first explores the paradoxical hagiography of the holy fool, whose saintly acts are disguised under the mask of demonic folly. She then traces the rise of medical science in the 19th...

Identity Theft focuses on the life and writing of Avraam Uri Kovner. As one of the fiery Jewish nihilists of his generation, variously a critic, author, and bank embezzler, Kovner embodies the problem of identity as a series of translations across cultural boundaries. Kovner, who initiated modern Hebrew criticism, published two novels in Russian as well as a weekly column in a widely read Russian newspaper. He forged a bank check and became notorious in the Russian press as an example of the danger integration of the Jews represented to Russian society. From prison, and later in exile,...

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe--one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to...

John Doyle Klier's pioneering publications on the relations between Jews and the Russian social order--on topics such as public opinion, governance, conversion, Russification politics, antisemitism, and pogroms--have influenced an entire generation of new scholarship. Jews in the East European Borderlands, a collection of essays honoring Klier's life and work, brings together some of the most innovative scholarship in the field. Focusing on the complex, often violent, entanglements between Jews and Russians, historians and literary scholars critically reassess the artifacts of high culture,...

This volume discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both...