Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. Market-driven publishing companies have pushed serious domestic prose to the fringes of their output and few people have money to buy books. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 led Russian society to become polarized between an increasingly prosperous minority and a very poor majority. This divide is also mirrored within the writing community, with some writers supporting conservative, nationalist pro-Soviet thinking, and others, liberal, democratic, pro-Western thought.

N.N. Shneidman, in the tradition...

Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. Market-driven publishing companies have pushed serious domestic prose to the fringes of their output and few people have money to buy books. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 led Russian society to become polarized between an increasingly prosperous minority and a very poor majority. This divide is also mirrored within the writing community, with some writers supporting conservative, nationalist pro-Soviet thinking, and others, liberal, democratic, pro-Western thought.

N.N. Shneidman, in the tradition...

A significant new work by the renowned literary critique and historian N.N. Shneidman of University of Toronto.This volume examines contemporary literary texts in which Jewish characters appear, or Jewish issues are discussed, written in the Russian language and published in Russia proper, in the years between 1991 and 2006, by writers currently residing in that country. I investigate how Jews view themselves in the new post-Soviet era, how they are perceived by their Russian neighbors, and how these attitudes have changed with the demise of the Soviet state. (from the Introduction) This is...

Life is full of extraordinary happenings and adventures so asserts Norman Shneidman to begin The Boxing Medal. The story of a survivor of the Vilnius Ghetto, and the most unlikely story of the rediscovery of a relic from his pasta sports medal awarded to him in May 1943 for his participation in a boxing competition which took place in the Vilnius Ghetto under Nazi control. One late fall day, November 26th, 2006, two Lithuanian friends of Professor Shneidman, went out with metal detectors to seek hidden metal objects in a Lithuanian forest, a pleasant way to pass their time. They were in a...