Since the middle ages Vilna (also known as Vilnius or the Jerusalem of Lithuania), was one of the main centers of Jewish cultural, religious, social and political activity in the Diaspora. At one time, close to half of all the city inhabitants were Jewish. Today the Jewish community of Vilnius is a faint shadow of its glorious past. No more than 4,000 Jews, or less than one percent of its total population, remain in the city. Most of the former Jewish residents of Vilnius were murdered during the Holocaust, and many of those who managed to survive moved to Israel, or other Western countries.

Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno), the capital of Lithuania, is almost 700 years old. Since the middle ages it has been one of the main centres of Jewish cultural, religious, social and political activity of the Diaspora. At one time, one half of the city inhabitants were Jewish. Everything changed during the Holocaust. The Jewish community was destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators. But there were those who refused to surrender without a fight.Witenberg and Sheinbaum were the leaders of the Jewish underground resistance organizations in the Vilnius ghetto. Gens was the Jewish Head of the...

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought about radical changes in the Russian literary world. With the state's relinquishment of control over literary production, writers acquired freedom of expression and publication. State publishing houses, now self-supporting enterprises, stopped printing money-losing books and turned to foreign detective novels and erotic literature, effecting a considerable shift in popular taste. The writer, no longer a producer of ideology, has been recast as a struggling competitor in a free-market environment.

Focusing on the current Russian literary...