Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity

by Steven J. Zipperstein

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295802312
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	11/21/2013
Series:	Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and the Taube Director of Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Among his previous publications are the award-winning books The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History and Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha am and the Origins of Zionism. He is the editor of Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsPrologue

1. Shtetls There and Here: Imagining Russia in America2. Reinventing Heders3. Remapping Odessa4. On the Holocaust in the Writing of the East European Jewish Past

NotesBibliographyIndex

What People are Saying About This

Chaim Potok

This remarkably insightful work . . . takes us, with stylistic clarity and scholarly self-control, into a startlingly new and challenging landscape of Jewish history and history writing.

Hillel J. Kieval

This splendid book consists of a sustained, and self-consciously personal, reflection on the themes of memory, nostalgia, and forgetting as they relate to narratives of Jewish life in Russia that have been produced both here and in Europe since the era of the great migrations.