Out of a maelstrom

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I employ the term “Jewish‐Russian literature” to refer fundamentally to the same body of texts as the one Zsuzsa Hetényi and Shimon Markish call “Russian‐Jewish literature”: literary works written in Russian by Jews and displaying some Jewish/Judaic thematic and formal characteristics. 2. Her survey includes detailed discussions of Osip Rabinovich (1817–69), Lev Levanda (1835–88), Grigory Bogrov (1825–85), Yakov Rombro (pseud. Philip Krantz, 1858–1922), Ben‐Ami (1854–1932), N. Naumov (Kogan, 1863–93), Sergei Yaroshevsky (18??–1907), S. An‐sky (1863–1920), Aleksandr Kipen (1870–1938), David Aizman (1869–1922), Semyon Yushkevich (1868–1927), Isaac Babel (1894–1940), Andrei Sobol (1888–1926), Lev Lunts (1901–24), Semyon Gekht (1903–1963), Mikhail Kozakov (1897–1954), and Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940). 3. Consider the example of Simon Frug (1860–1916). Frug was revered by his Jewish‐Russian contemporaries as a “national poet” (Shimon Markish’s subsequent assessment), but his verses have left no trace in the history of Russian poetry. 4. The 2008 edition does cite post‐2000 books, which means the bibliography has in fact been updated. 5. The conspicuous omissions include the contributions made by Kornei Chukovsky in the first decade of the twentieth century, by Iosif Kleinman, and Joshua Kunitz in the 1920s, by I. Kisin, and Marc Slonim in the 1940s, by Vera Alexandrova, Grigory Aronson, Sofia Dubnova‐Erlich, and Andrei Sedykh (Yakov Tsvibak) in the 1960s, by Danilo Cavaion, Viktoria Levitina, and Ilya Serman in the 1980s and by Vladimir Khazan, Aleksandr Kobrinsky, and Roman Timenchik in the 1990s. 6. It should be noted that the translator’s genderless rendering of the English title, Pioneer, hardly does justice to the Russian title, Pionerka, referring to Yaroshevsky’s female Jewish‐Russian protagonist. 7. Gekht’s cardboard treatment of Zionism in the novel, incidentally, would have provided an ideal juncture to speak of a more complex and artistically compelling novel about Jewish‐Russian halutzim, Scorched Land (Opalennaia zemlia, published as a book in 1933–34) by Mark Egart (1901–56)

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