Academic Studies Press

Jewish Partisans of the Soviet Union is a classic compilation of original Russian and Jewish sources on the anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe. 

It is rooted in decades of research motivated by a desire to set the record straight on Jewish participation in resistance movements, a phenomenon often overlooked when not actively concealed. 

As the son of Jewish partisans in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, Jack Porter presents here the result of his decades-long research: first-hand accounts and interviews with survivors and partisans, as well as some of their original work, and a seminal English translation of Partisan Brotherhood, a historical document gathered by Russian-Jewish intellectuals in 1948 at the height of anti-Semitic hysteria, written mainly by non-Jewish Soviet partisan commanders recounting the deeds of the Jewish fighters in their units.

This book explores three schools of fascinating, talented, and gifted scholars whose philosophies assimilated the Jewish and secular cultures of their respective homelands: they include halakhists from Rabbi Ettlinger to Rabbi Eliezer Berkowitz; Jewish philosophers from Isaac Bernays to Yeshayau Leibowitz; and biblical commentators such as Samuel David Luzzatto and Rabbi Umberto Cassuto.

Running like a thread through their philosophies is the attempt to reconcile the Jewish belief in revelation with Western culture, Western philosophy, and the conclusions of scientific research. Among these attempts is Luzzatto’s “dual truth” approach.

The Dual Truth is the sequel to the Ephraim Chamiel’s previous book The Middle Way, which focused on the challenges faced by members of the “Middle Trend” in nineteenth-century Jewish thought.

“Elegant yet shattering… Rendered in plainspoken yet devastating prose, Masson’s historical narrative is intercut with startling present-day moments… This is haunting.” — Publishers Weekly

“This heart-wrenching recollection views the traumatic events and close calls that punctuate the author’s memories… A brief, rare, and powerful testimony.” — Library Journal

This short, beautifully-written memoir is a rare first-hand account of a child’s life in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The author weaves together memories from her wartime childhood, reflections on the burdens and damages she carried into her adult life, and accounts of her travel to contemporary Warsaw seeking to find traces of the past. Written vividly and honestly, this unique tapestry of time and perspective not only stands out in the vast literature that discusses the Holocaust, but also appeals to anyone interested in the lasting impact of childhood trauma, as well as the human potential for resiliency.

Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.

“Extraordinary storytelling about unfathomable horror.” — Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] worthy tribute to the extraordinary bravery of a remarkable woman.” — Publishers Weekly

In World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination.

Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic rescues, escapes, and ultimate survival. A true story of hope amid horrifying tragedy, How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis illustrates how war brings out the worst and the best in people, and how true humanity and heroism of ordinary people are revealed by their willingness to risk everything and help others. This story is about being human under the most inhumane conditions.

A 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist in the Anthologies Category

This anthology, the first of this kind in twenty-five years, collects eighteen astounding works of Jewish fiction.

This volume is an annotated collection of original, informative, and moving photographs of the twins who survived the brutal medical experiments conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (1943-1945). The experiments were conducted by the infamous physician, Josef Mengele. These never-before-seen photographs were taken by the author (Segal) at the 40th anniversary of the camp’s liberation (January 27, 1985) and the public hearing on Mengele’s crimes at Yad Vashem (Hand and Name) in Jerusalem that followed. Other memorable moments, captured in photographs include traveling to Krakow, visiting Warsaw and hearing survivors’ testimonies. The photographs are organized into ten sections that unfold chronologically—each section is accompanied by a brief essay to provide compelling context and each photograph has an informative caption.

Translated for the first time in English, Lev Levanda's brilliant coming-of-age story of Russian Jewish students on the cusp of modernity in their struggle against religious chauvinism and an oppressive government.

Despite being Russia's best Jewish writer of the nineteenth century, Lev Levanda (1835–1888) is barely known in the English-speaking world, with some of his most famous works, like the 1873 novel Seething Times, having yet to be published in their entirety. Another such work is An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s), which appears here in English for the first time, translated with elegance by Hugh McLean and edited by Brian Horowitz and Conor Daly. A classic in Russian-Jewish literature from 1882, An Amateur Performance describes the rush by Jews to government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment, while also revealing the struggles of these Jewish students on the cusp of modernity, including keen observations on their lack of preparation, their confusion over the new ideas, and their confrontation with the repressive power of the Russian government. In short, it’s a brilliant sociological study of Russian Jewry in the 1850s as remembered by a writer who fought for progress and Jewish integration. 

A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis Prize

Landes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists, academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda as news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as news (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead, to stand down before an invasion.

A 2022 Green Bag Almanac & Reader Exemplary Legal Writing Honoree

The book traces the history of lawyer campus presidents from the 1700s to present, exploring dozens of topics such as: where lawyer presidents went to law school; the percentage of lawyer presidents serving at public, private, community, HBCUs, and religiously affiliated institutions; geographic concentrations of campuses led by lawyers, women lawyer presidents, pathways to the presidency for lawyers, commonalities in backgrounds, and more. The author explores reasons for an exponential increase in lawyers serving as campus leaders examining the growth of legal education and myriad legal and regulatory issues confronting higher education.

The Biblical narrative is usually very terse and cryptic. Over the millennia, Jewish scholars often painted a patriarchal picture with women "in their place." Yes, ancient Middle Eastern society was patriarchal, but matriarchs had power as well. Yes, kings ruled, but the king’s mother had major influence over him. Powerless women existed, but so did female prophets and judges. The narrative describes real people, with human weaknesses as well as strengths. There are love stories and lust stories, as well as stories of the dangers of favoritism, greed, and envy. This book puts these women—some are role models—into the context of an ancient society, bringing them imaginatively from the sidelines onto center stage.

Named one of 12 of the Best Jewish Books of the Year by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, New York Jewish Week, & Jerusalem Post

2023 International Book Awards Finalist in the Humor/Comedy/Satire Category

From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for his American future.

 In this poignant literary memoir, internationally acclaimed author and Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer (Waiting for America) explores both material and immaterial aspects of immigrant baggage. Through a combination of dispassionate reportage, gentle irony, and confessional remembrance, Shrayer writes about traversing the borders and boundaries of the three cultures that have nourished him—Russian, Jewish, and American. The spirit of nonconformism and the power of laughter come to the rescue of Shrayer’s autobiographical protagonist when he faces existential calamities and life’s misadventures.

 The aftermath of a dangerous ski accident in Italy reminds the memoirist of history’s black holes. A haunting, Soviet-era theatrical affair pushes the émigré protagonist to the brink of a disaster in a provincial Russian town. Attempting to collect overdue royalties from a Moscow publisher, the expatriate writer tips his hat to Kafka. The book’s six interconnected tales are held together by the memorist’s imperative to make the ordinary absurd and the absurd—ordinary. Shrayer parses a translingual literary life filled with travel, politics, and discovery—and sustained by family love and faith in art’s transcendence.

Told through essays, memoirs, and other musings, this is the story of a radical Jew, academic, and educator from his birth in Ukraine during the Holocaust through the radical 60s and 70s, to the present day as he fights anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, xenophobia, and hate.

Internationally known in Holocaust, genocide, and Jewish studies, Jack Nusan Porter was born in Maniewicz, Ukraine to Jewish Partisans in the 1940s. Through this engaging and thoughtful memoir, we follow Porter as he recounts his personal journey from a DP camp in Linz, Austria to an idyllic childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he attended Hebrew day school under Reb Twersk. Porter masterfully details his radicalism in the politically and sociologically turbulent 1960s which would later influence his academic work on genocide, Holocaust studies, and international human rights. Constantly re-inventing himself, readers are treated to engaging anecdotes as they navigate through Porter's highs, lows, and in-betweens.

The Society for Textual Scholarship Richard J. Finneran Award, Honorable Mention, 2023. 

For the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during 2021-2022.

Beginning with Tolstoy’s first extant records of his written œuvre, this anthology assembles seventy-seven unabridged texts that cover more than seven decades of his life, from 1835 to 1910. It constitutes the most complete single-volume edition to date of the rich variety of Tolstoy’s philosophical output: apothegmatic sayings, visions, intimate sketchbook and day notes, book reviews, open letters, dialogues, pedagogic talks, public lectures, programs and rules for personal behavior, fictions, and reminiscences. Most of these newly translated and thoroughly annotated texts have never been available in English. Among the four reprinted translations personally checked and authorized by Tolstoy is the text titled “Tolstoy on Venezuela,” an archival restoration of an authentic first publication in English of “Patriotism, or Peace?” (1896) that had been deemed lost. In the inaugural piece, a seven-year-old Tolstoy describes violent but natural animal life in contrast with the lazy life of a peaceful barnyard in the countryside. The last entry in the anthology written by an eighty-year-old Tolstoy for his grandchildren provides a lesson on vegetarianism and non-violence that a hungry wolf teaches a hungry boy during their conversation when both are on their way to lunch.

It was the insolvable, the “scandalous,” problems of philosophy that never gave Tolstoy any rest: freedom of the will, religious tolerance, gender inequality, the tonal shape of music, the value of healthy life habits, the responsibilities of teaching, forms of social protest, cognitive development, science in society, the relation between body and mind, charity and labor, human dignity and public service, sexual psychology, national war doctrines, suicide, individual sacrifice, the purposes of making art. And always: What are the sources of violence? Why should we engage in politics? Why do we need governments? How can one practice non-violence? What is the meaning of our irrepressible desire to seek and find meaning? Why can't we live without loving? The typeset proofs of his final insights were brought to Tolstoy for approval when he was already on his deathbed. The reader will find all the texts in the exact shape and order of completion as Tolstoy left them. No matter their brevity or the occasion on which they were written, these works exemplify Tolstoy as an artistically inventive and intellectually absorbing thinker.

From fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto and living underground to fighting for social justice in 1960s’ Seattle and helping smash the communist system in 1980s’ Poland, this is a narrative that erupts into critical moments in Jewish, Polish, and American history. It is also a story of the hidden anguish that accompanies and courses through that history, of the living haunted by the dead. The story is told through a conversation, often contentious, between Michael Steinlauf, historian of Polish-Jewish culture and child of Holocaust survivors, and the anthropologist and artist Elżbieta Janicka. It is illustrated with scores of photographs and documents.

This is the first-ever English language anthology of zenithism, an eclectic avant-garde movement unique to the Yugoslav region that existed 1921–1927. Zenithism’s founder Ljubomir Micić envisioned the movement as a fusion of futurism, dada, constructivism, expressionism, and proto-surrealism, driven by what he called the “barbarogenius.” A hallmark of the movement was its embrace of cross-genre writing, from Ljubomir Micić’s ciné-poem Rescue Vehicle and Branko Ve Poljanski’s lyric novel 77 Suicides to MID’s lyric philosophic treatise The Sexual Equilibrium of Money. The zenithists promoted their ideas through their journal Zenit and press Biblioteka Zenit. Reaching American readers for the first time, this anthology sheds light on an untapped chapter in European modernism ideal for the general and academic reader alike.

Zvi Preigerzon wrote memoirs about his time in the Gulag in 1958, long before Solzhenitsyn and without any knowledge of the other publications on this subject. It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the harsh reality of Soviet Gulags. Even after the death of Stalin, when the whole Gulag system was largely disbanded, writing about them could be regarded as an act of heroism. Preigerzon attempted to document and analyze his own prison camp experience and portray the Jewish prisoners he encountered in forced labor camps. Among these people, we meet scientists, engineers, famous Jewish writers and poets, young Zionists, a devoted religious man, a horse wagon driver, a Jewish singer of folk songs, and many, many others. As Preigerzon put it, “Each one had his own story, his own soul, and his own tragedy.”

Crime and Punishment: A Reader’s Guide focuses on narrative strategy, psychology, and ideology. 

Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder Raskolnikov gives as he confesses to Sonya, Dostoevsky debunks rationality-based theories. Finally, the question of why Raskolnikov and others, including the reader, focus on the murder of the pawnbroker and forget the unintended murder of Lizaveta reveals a narrative strategy based on shame and guilt.

Inspired by seven photographs of WWII refugees in an old album, the author embarked on a quest to uncover the story behind each portrait. Had the refugees been rescued by the diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing Japanese transit visas? Searching for the identities of the people in the photographs, the author scoured historical records and interviewed numerous fascinating individuals, including Sugihara visa recipients and their descendants. While solving the mystery of the people in the photographs, the author uncovered more hero diplomats and new details about Sugihara visas. This account of the author’s investigation supports the legacy of Chiune Sugihara and highlights other WWII saviors, such as the Dutch diplomat Jan Zwartendijk. 

The Kahans from Baku is the saga of a Russian Jewish family. Their story provides an insight into the history of Jews in the Imperial Russian economy, especially in the oil industry. The entrepreneur and family patriarch, Chaim Kahan, was a pious and enlightened man and a Zionist. His children followed in his footsteps in business as well as in politics, philanthropy, and love of books. The book takes us through their forced migration in times of war, revolution, and the twentieth century’s totalitarian regimes, telling the story of fortune and misfortune of one cohesive family over four generations through Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France, and finally on to Palestine and the United States of America.

Habsburg Sons describes Jewish participation in the Habsburg Army, 1788-1918, concentrating on World War I. 

Approximately 300,000-350,000 Jews fought in the Austro-Hungarian Armies on all fronts; of these, 30,000–40,000 died of wounds or illness, and at least 17% were taken prisoner in camps all over Russia and Central Asia. Many soldiers were Orthodox Ostjuden, and over 130 Feldrabbiner (chaplains) served among them. Antisemitism was present but generally not overt. The book uses personal diaries and newspaper articles (most available in English for the first time) to describe their stories, and compares the experiences of Jews in German, Russian, and Italian armies.

Dovlatov and Surroundings is a literary ode by one of the most consequential late 20th-century Russian writers, Alexander Genis, to another: Sergei Dovlatov. Though the book’s focus is ostensibly the man himself, the text unfolds as a comprehensive look at the Soviet, post-Soviet, and American cultures that shaped him and which he shaped. Dovlatov and Surroundings constantly, but effortlessly shifts its focus from the intimate to the sweeping, as Genis’s reflections on his friendship with Dovlatov organically give way to recollections about diaspora life, which transition smoothly into analyses of language, culture, politics, and literature. Characterized by Genis as an obituary, this book makes plain the significance of Dovlatov to Russian literature and the nuances of the Soviet cultural heritage.

It is human nature to want to fit in. The lengths people have gone to do so have provided creative minds with material for centuries. This book explores the consequences of being marked an outsider in the Russian-speaking world through a close study of several seminal works of Russian literature. The author combines the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and sociology to illuminate what prompted Christof Ruhl, an economist at the World Bank, to comment, about Russia, “On a very broad scale, it’s a country where people care about their family and friends. Their clan. But not their society.”

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. 

Amid ethnic violence, political corruption, and petty professional intrigue, an artist tries to live free of lies.

Set during the last years of the Soviet Union, Stone Dreams tells the story of Azerbaijani actor Sadai Sadygly, who lands in a Baku hospital while trying to protect an elderly Armenian man from a gang of young Azerbaijanis. Something of a modern-day Don Quixote, Sadai has long battled the hatred and corruption he observes in contemporary Azerbaijani society. Wandering in and out of consciousness, he revisits his hometown, the ancient village of Aylis, where Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris once lived peacefully together, and dreams of making a pilgrimage of atonement to Armenia. Stone Dreams is a searing, painful meditation on the ability of art and artists—of individual human beings—to make change in the world.

Kurt and Sonja Messerschmidt were among the last Jews deported from Nazi Berlin. They were among a handful of couples who were married in Theresienstadt, and are possibly the only pair who lived to describe their wedding. 

They survived Auschwitz, and unimaginable slave labor in other camps. Kurt was one of two survivors of a group of death marchers in southern Germany. They found each other again after liberation, and eventually emigrated to the United States. As told to Steve Hochstadt as part of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine's project to record and preserve individual experiences of Holocaust survivors, this book captures Kurt’s and Sonja’s separate but always intertwined stories. Their accounts, as improbable as they are moving, tell from both sides how a loving relationship formed in persecution became an element of survival in the Holocaust.

Diane Tuckman and Cecile Spiegel fled religious persecution with WWII conflicts at their heels. Separately, from Egypt and from Germany, each leaped continents, cultures, and languages as a refugee before finding a new home in the United States. Hiding in plain sight in France, Cecile eluded capture by the Nazis, but lost many dear to her. Diane came of age there, far from the Mediterranean idyll of her childhood in Egypt. They relied on family, faith, and resilience to overcome the otherness felt by displaced peoples. As they dictated their memoirs to one another, Diane and Cecile discovered the anatomy of their friendship in their parallel odysseys and the optimism of 20th-century American womanhood.

When the Turkish government demanded the cancellation of all lectures on the Armenian Genocide at Israel's First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, and that Armenian lecturers not be allowed to participate, the Israeli government followed suit. 

This book follows the author’s gutsy campaign against his government and his quest to successfully hold the conference in the face of censorship. A political whodunit based on previously secret Israel Foreign Ministry cables, this book investigates Israel’s overall tragically unjust relationship to genocides of other peoples.

The book also closely examines the figures of Elie Wiesel and Shimon Peres in their interference with the recognition of other peoples’ genocidal tragedies, particularly the Armenian Genocide. Additional chapters by three prominent leaders—a fearless Turk who has paid a huge price in Turkish jails (Ragip Zarakolu), a renowned Armenian American who was one of the earliest writers on the Armenian Genocide (Richard Hovannisian); and a Jew, who was responsible for the selection of all the materials in the pathbreaking U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington (Michael Berenbaum)—provide added perspectives.

A fantastical propaganda play depicting an armed revolt financed the purchase of the yacht Abril and its conversion to an “illegal” immigrant passenger ship renamed the Ben Hecht. The plan was to evade the British naval blockade and bring Holocaust survivor refugees to Palestine.

Henry Mandel volunteered aboard the Ben Hecht, a converted yacht that challenged the British blockade of Jewish immigrants to pre-state Israel. Captured and detained in Acre Prison, Mandel aided the efforts of prisoners planning an escape. After release, Mandel helped set up a secret bazooka shell plant in New York, which he helped to reassemble in Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Mandel was an Orthodox Jew whose reminiscences provide a uniquely illuminating perspective on the creation of the Jewish state. Mandel’s story is explicated in a running commentary that includes the personal narratives of other members of the Ben Hecht crew as well as historical background.

A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis Prize

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe’s borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its aftermath, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland’s landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

While trying to revive Jewish national life by teaching Hebrew and Judaism in the Soviet Union, Ephraim Kholmyansky is arrested and threatened with long years of imprisonment and exile. In response, he declares a hunger strike. Supporters throughout the world rally to pressure the Soviet government to release him. A race against time begins...

Ephraim Kholmyansky was born in Moscow in 1950. In 1979, he initiated an underground network for dissemination of Hebrew, Jewish tradition and Zionist values ​​throughout the peripheral cities of the USSR. He was arrested in 1984 when the KGB planted weapons in his apartment in order to stage a show trial and intimidate Jewish activists. Kholmyansky held a prolonged hunger strike while kept in prison. Thanks to his hunger strike and major international solidarity campaign, he received a relatively short sentence. This is an exceedingly rare case of victory over the KGB. This book documents this trying episode of his life and provides a unique perspective from inside the USSR.

Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. 

It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist masterpiece “The Nose.” Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer’s wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer’s contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.

The book, based on memories of a native son and the research of a scholar, is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer’s reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and its vicinity. The author describes the “court” of the Hasidic Rabbis of Aleksander, with which his family was affiliated, the rival camps of Hasidim and Zionists, industrialists and laborers, struggles with the Polish authorities, and more. Detailed chapters are dedicated to a description of studies at a modern Jewish-Zionist high school (Gymnasium) – its exhilarating goals, directors and teachers, to the Lodz poet Yitzhak Katzenelson before and during the Holocaust, and to life in a small Polish shtetl.

The concluding chapter “Return to Poland” examines the cities and towns described earlier in the book, as well as Breslau-Wroclaw, where the author had completed his rabbinic and university studies in 1933, as they appeared to him during his visit in 1982, nearly fifty years after his departure from Europe for Israel.

The author's aim was to produce a portrait, sympathetic, intimate, but also knowledgeable and critical, of a generation that did not have the time to take stock of itself before its obliteration. He has thus rendered palpable the experiences and quandaries of many of his contemporaries. 

Jews lived in Egypt for centuries, since biblical times; nevertheless, Jewish life in medieval Islamic Egypt was for many years an obscure and understudied theme. This book offers the reader a wide-ranging picture of Jewish life in medieval Egypt as depicted by the most recent scholarship. Starting from the last phases of the Byzantine era and ending with the Mamluk period, the book presents a scholarly yet vivid description of Jewish communal organization, judiciary, economic frameworks, family life, and lingual practices, as well as religious and literary activities of the medieval Jews of Egypt.

The Jewish intellectual tradition has a long and complex history that has resulted in significant and influential works of scholarship. 

In this book, the authors suggest that there is a series of common principles that can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad, even life-changing, implications for individual and societal achievement. These principles include respect for tradition while encouraging independent, often disruptive thinking; a precise system of logical reasoning in pursuit of the truth; universal education continuing through adulthood; and living a purposeful life. 

The main objective of this book is to understand the historical development of these principles and to demonstrate how applying them judiciously can lead to greater intellectual productivity, a more fulfilling existence, and a more advanced society. 

“A brilliant story of the three-decade-long collaboration of Joseph Brodsky and his loyal translator. Cynthia Haven draws a vivid portrait of George Kline—an intellectual, a friend, a war hero. These never-before-told stories, collected and painstakingly edited by Haven, fill in the glaring lacunae in Brodsky studies.” —Yuri Leving, author of Iosif Brodsky v Rime

Brodsky’s poetic career in the West was launched when Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published in 1973. Its translator was a scholar and war hero, George L. Kline. This is the story of that friendship and collaboration, from its beginnings in 1960s Leningrad and concluding with the Nobel poet's death in 1996.

Kline translated more of Brodsky’s poems than any other single person, with the exception of Brodsky himself. The Bryn Mawr philosophy professor and Slavic scholar was a modest and retiring man, but on occasion he could be as forthright and adamant as Brodsky himself. “Akhmatova discovered Brodsky for Russia, but I discovered him for the West,” he claimed.

Kline’s interviews with author Cynthia L. Haven before his death in 2014 include a description of his first encounter with Brodsky, the KGB interrogations triggered by their friendship, Brodsky's emigration, and the camaraderie and conflict over translation. When Kline called Brodsky in London to congratulate him for the Nobel, the grateful poet responded, “And congratulations to you, too, George!”

From Darkness to Light is a compilation of personal testimonies of six Holocaust survivors, written in a short story format. 

The book walks readers through their life experiences before and during the Holocaust, their liberation, and their new life in Israel. Each story is told in their own words, culled from hours of personal interviews with them and their children, so the world can have first-hand knowledge of what happened during that darkest time of our history.

These survivors came from different parts of Europe, and not one story is like the other. Now in their eighties and nineties, they still recall in detail their darkest memories. Amid immense pain and suffering, they managed to overcome every hurdle they encountered under the Nazi regime. When these stalwart individuals were liberated, no matter what further anguish and obstacles they faced, they realized their dream to make aliya to Israel. They settled in the Holy Land as visionaries and pioneers to build the Jewish state, which itself was undergoing conflict and difficult economic times. Their love for the Jewish homeland and their creation of families with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren exemplify how Hitler’s aim to annihilate the Jews was nullified.

“Printed in English for the first time by Academic Studies Press, Palestine for the Third Time is an engaging, empathetic and often perceptive account of the Zionist project in the ancestral homeland of the Jews.” —Sheldon Kirshner, Times of Israel

Palestine for the Third Time is a book of reportage originally published in Poland in 1933 by Ksawery Pruszyński, a young reporter working for a Polish newspaper, who went to Mandate Palestine to see for himself whether the Zionist dream of returning to Eretz Yisrael had a chance of turning into reality. 

Travelling widely and talking to people he happened to meet on his way—Jews, Arabs, committed dreamers and the disaffected—he was trying to explain to his readers what he was seeing. This book is a unique firsthand account of the early stages in formation of the state and nation of Israel. But it's not just a nostalgic vignette. It resonates powerfully today, linking Tony Judt, Edward Said, and Amos Oz, illuminating the hotly debated questions of modern Israel.

Jack Nusan Porter’s writings date back to 1966, during the height of the Vietnam War. He describes the anguished struggle against war, racism, and poverty, as well as the radical groups and individuals involved—Jewish socialists, radical Zionists, radical Jews, Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, the counterculture, liberals, and conservatives alike. In addition, his writings vividly recount the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and revolutionary terrorism of the times. Here, Porter draws from the past in an effort to explain the present, walking the precarious bridge between allegiance to Israel and the Jewish people and the universal rights of all people. This collection of older and newer essays combines theory, sociology, film studies, literary criticism, post-modern thought, and politics.

This bilingual Ukrainian-English collection brings together the most interesting experimental works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the major Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. 

As he moved from futurism to neoclassicism, symbolism to socialist realism, Bazhan consistently displayed a creative approach to theme, versification, and vocabulary. Many poems from his three remarkable early collections (1926, 1927, and 1929) remain unknown to readers, both in Ukraine and the West. Because Bazhan was later forced into the straitjacket of officially sanctioned socialist realism, his early poetry has been neglected. This collection makes these outstanding works available for the first time.

“This is a rich col­lec­tion that pro­vides a win­dow into many of the key debates that have raged, and still rage, in the Jew­ish world. It rais­es many provoca­tive ques­tions about the nature of con­tem­po­rary Judaism and its future.” —Martin Green, Jewish Book Council

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a period of mass production and proliferation of Jewish ideas, and have witnessed major changes in Jewish life and stimulated major debates. The New Jewish Canon offers a conceptual roadmap to make sense of such rapid change. With over eighty excerpts from key primary source texts and insightful corresponding essays by leading scholars, on topics of history and memory, Jewish politics and the public square, religion and religiosity, and identities and communities, The New Jewish Canon promises to start conversations from the seminar room to the dinner table. 

The New Jewish Canon is both text and textbook of the Jewish intellectual and communal zeitgeist for the contemporary period and the recent past, canonizing our most important ideas and debates of the past two generations; and just as importantly, stimulating debate and scholarship about what is yet to come.

Can one individual influence the course of history? In the example of Churchill and the Middle East during post-World War I, the answer is an irrefutable yes. Winston S. Churchill, first as Secretary for War and Air, and then as Colonial Secretary, both formulated and enacted the British imperial mandate policy for Iraq and Palestine, thereby laying the groundwork for issues that are still relevant today including conflicts in Israel, internal political upheavals in Iraq. The complicated historical intricacies of the postwar period combined with a variety of personal and political confrontations are at the core of Churchill’s decisions and finally his parliamentary successes.

While most books on Churchill attempt to cover the course of his political and personal career, this volume exclusively focuses on the Middle East during the formative years of 1919-1922 and explores the foundations of some of the Middle East's most problematic issues today.

Could a religiously observant Jew, in good conscience, run as a libertarian candidate, promoting a libertarian platform? Or, would doing so betray fundamental Jewish values? 

Running in Good Faith? Observant Judaism and Libertarian Politics considers the seemingly irreconcilable values and political commitments of Judaism and libertarianism. The latter prizes individualism, self-ownership, private property, and freedom, whereas the former emphasizes community, charity, and service of God. But are these differences so sharp? This book seeks to determine if this is an essential clash or merely an apparent one, and to stimulate a broad discussion of Judaism, values, politics, and political philosophy in order to call into question what people think they know, about both Judaism and libertarianism.

Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow’s artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002 and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses in his dystopian novels of the 2000s and 2010s, making him one of the fiercest critics of Russia’s “new middle ages,” while remaining steadfast in his dismantling of foreign discourses.

In On the Genesis of Thought and Language, linguist Alexey Koshelev explores fundamental questions of how human concepts arise in a child, why concepts appear in a child before words, the genesis of language, and why there are so many languages. 

Chapter One introduces the fundamental dichotomy “visual (exogenous) vs. functional (endogenous)” cognitive units; these units are used to give non-verbal definitions of mental representations of various objects, actions, and situations. In particular, definitions of such concepts as GLASS, CHAIR, BANANA, TREE, LAKE, RUN, and some others are given. 

Chapter Two discusses how children form concepts, hierarchical relationships, and propositions (conceptual ‘utterances’). It is shown that the initial units of the child’s representation of the world are pre-conceptual cognitive units—mental representations of whole situations. In the course of two consecutive cycles in the child’s cognitive development, these units transform into (a) primary notions—object and motor concepts, and (b) binary role relationships. Together, they constitute the elementary language of thought which, in the process of thinking, is used to build conceptual structures—propositions. It is further demonstrated that, immediately after the formation of thought, the child begins to develop his native language in which concrete and motor concepts become initial meanings of nouns and verbs, while propositions become the meanings of the child’s expressions. The chapter concludes with a contrastive analysis of the proposed approach and Aristotle’s and Chomsky’s views on thought and language. 

Chapter Three analyzes how a community’s culture affects its language. It is demonstrated that the progress of a community, the main constituent of the civilizational component of its culture, enhances the development of the content component of language by extending the range of its lexical and grammatical meanings. In the context of this analysis, Daniel Everett’s (2008) hypothesis that culture affects language structure is discussed. 

In the subsequent sections, models of the development of human and social activity are offered. These models comprise three components: Activity (main component), Thought, and Language (auxiliary components that ensure the successful realization of activities). The models are illustrated with examples of some concrete societies.

Trapped by Evil and Deceit is a historical account of true events that reads like a political thriller.

When the Holocaust broke out in Europe, Hansi and Joel Brand were joined by Israel (Rezső) Kasztner to launch an organized effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts, which involved playing a dangerous bluffing game against the Nazi regime, helped to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds with the political machine of the young state of Israel. Politicians wanted the public to believe that there was nothing they could do, a sentiment which many still believe to this day. This cover-up led to Israel’s first politically-motivated homicide.

Cinemasaurus examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. 

 Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume’s contributors—the new generation of US scholars studying Russian cinema—examine four issues of Russia’s transition: 

• Its imperial legacy 
• The emergence of a film market and its new genres 
• Russia’s uneven integration into European values and hierarchies 
• The renegotiation of state power vis-à-vis arthouse and independent cinemas. 

“The Jewish Metropolis gives readers a fascinating whirlwind tour of Jewish New York from the 1620s to the 2020s. Every essay is enlightening, erudite, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Tyler Anbinder, author of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. It provides an introduction to many facets of that history, including: 

• The ways in which waves of immigration shaped New York’s Jewish community
• Jewish cultural production in English, Yiddish, Ladino, and German
• New York’s contribution to the development of American Judaism
• Jewish interaction with other ethnic and religious groups
• And Jewish participation in the politics and culture of the city as a whole

From the translator of Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth, winner of the 2019 TLS-Risa Domb/Porjes Prize

In this unique memoir, now in English for the first time, Israel’s first Poet Laureate Avigdor Hameiri details a trip to Europe in 1930 from the perspective of a Hungarian Jew who had served in the Habsburg Army. Upon visiting Austria, Hungary, Romania (including parts of ceded Hungarian Transylvania), and Czechoslovakia (including his Carpatho-Ruthenian homeland), he sees Europe in flux on the brink of an unknown disaster. Austria and Hungary are full of youth whose philosophy is “eat, drink and be merry; tomorrow we die.” There is fear of Bolshevism from without, but the unfelt danger is German Fascism. Jews (especially in Hungary) are assimilated but cannot escape from their Jewishness: some are Zionists. Romania is corrupt and antisemitic. In Carpatho-Ruthenia, Hameiri has two premonitions warning him to return to Israel, a prediction of the destruction soon to befall Europe. 

Hameiri also gives accounts of the artistic and cultural scenes of 1930s Europe, as well as the world of Carpatho-Ruthenian Hasidism, which was soon to be destroyed by the Holocaust. From the growing danger and confusion surrounding inter-war Europe, in prose at once compassionate and bitingly sarcastic, comes a sweeping account of Jewish life in 1930 from one of Israel’s prolific writers.

"When the River Ice Flows, I Will Come Home is a moving memoir that lovingly recreates the lives of Elisa Miller’s father and his family as Jews in the dying years of the Romanov dynasty." —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

Shortly after her father’s death, Elisa Brodinsky Miller uncovered a cache of letters among his belongings. Written in Russian and Yiddish, with datelines in Tsarist and early Soviet Russia, the letters detail eight long years (1914-1922) during which Elisa’s father, his five siblings, and their mother spend apart from Elisa’s grandfather who had left for America, believing their separation would be short.

Miller, a Russian affairs specialist, learns bit by bit with each translation about the family she knew so little about, and the eight years of history they lived through, enabling her for the first time to connect her own experiences with those who came before her. This captivating memoir bridges the past with the present, as we learn about her grandparents’ struggles to escape Tsarist Russia, her parents’ hopes for their marriage in America, and her own reach for meaning and purpose: each a generation with dreams—first theirs, now hers.

Breaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. 

What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. 

Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova’s subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and—by extrapolation—their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.

She Animates examines the work of twelve female animation directors in the Soviet Union and Russia, who have long been overlooked by film scholars and historians. 

Our approach examines these directors within history, culture, and industrial practice in animation. In addition to making a case for including these women and their work in the annals of film and animation history, this volume also makes an argument for why their work should be considered part of the tradition of women’s cinema. 

We offer textual analysis that focuses on the changing attitudes towards both the woman question and feminism by examining the films in light of the emergence and evolution of a Soviet female subjectivity that still informs women’s cinema in Russia today.

When the Menorah Fades is a fictionalized account of the town of Hadiach, Ukraine, a small Jewish community destroyed by Nazi occupation during World War II. 

Based on interviews with the surviving residents of Hadiach, Zvi Preigerzon imagines the everyday experiences of ordinary Jewish people during the war. Interweaved with Hebrew and Yiddish expressions and songs, biblical metaphors, and Kabbalistic spiritual elements, a story emerges: resistance in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

A former prisoner of Stalin’s Gulag, Preigerzon wrote this book in complete secrecy, even hiding its existence from his own family. It was originally published under a pen name in Hebrew in 1966 and now appears in English with an introduction by the author’s grandson.

Debora Vogel (1900-1942) wrote in Yiddish unlike anyone else. Yiddish, her fourth language after Polish, Hebrew, and German, became the central vehicle for her modernist experiments in poetry and prose. This ground-breaking collection presents the work of a strikingly original yet overlooked author, art critic, and intellectual, and resituates Vogel as an important figure in the constellation of European modernity. Vogel’s astute observations on art, literature, and psychology in her essays, her bold prose experiments inspired by photography and film, and Cubist poetry that both challenges and captivates invite the reader on a journey of discovery—into the microcosm of the talented thinker marked by tragic fate and the macrocosm of Jewish history and Poland’s turbulent twentieth century.

“An epic tale of Bernstein’s passionate search for Magda Nachman, an artist whose life was an achievement on the order of her marvelous painting. Biography at its finest, Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile draws the reader along on a gripping and rewarding saga that takes the teller from Russia to Berlin to London to Bombay, to find an artist who persevered in her art despite almost insurmountable odds...” — Mary V. Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography and Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim

The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg at the close of the nineteenth century, artistic studies with Léon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Zvantseva Art Academy, and participation in the dynamic symbolist/modernist artistic ferment in pre-Revolutionary Russia to a refugee existence in the Russian countryside during the Russian Civil War followed by marriage to a prominent Indian nationalist, then with her husband to the hardships of émigré Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist and a mentor to a new generation of modern Indian artists.

“Academically detailed yet esoterically fun.” —Kirkus

Few written works examine the tradition of prayers in government. This new angle will appeal to students and lovers of American history, Congress, American Jewish history, and religion. It’s a welcome, important addition to our understanding of Congress and Jewish contribution to America.

“‘Jewish identity’ is such a complex idea—neither simply a religious, nor cultural, nor ethnic ‘identity,’ but all of those things combined (and more). This important volume rejects narrow definitions and resists the way that ‘identity’ has been oversimplified and flattened in Jewish communal contexts. Along the way, it offers new paths for other communities struggling with concepts of identity to follow as well.” — Felicia Herman, Executive Director, Natan Fund

There is something deeply problematic about the ways that Jews, particularly in America, talk about “Jewish identity” as a desired outcome of Jewish education. For many, the idea that the purpose of Jewish education is to strengthen Jewish identity is so obvious that it hardly seems worth disputing—and the only important question is which kinds of Jewish education do that work more effectively or more efficiently. But what does it mean to “strengthen Jewish identity”? Why do Jewish educators, policy-makers and philanthropists talk that way? What do they assume, about Jewish education or about Jewish identity, when they use formulations like “strengthen Jewish identity”? And what are the costs of doing so?

This volume, the first collection to examine critically the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish identity, makes two important interventions. First, it offers a critical assessment of the relationship between education and identity, arguing that the reification of identity has hampered much educational creativity in the pursuit of this goal, and that the nearly ubiquitous employment of the term obscures significant questions about what Jewish education is and ought to be. Second, this volume offers thoughtful responses that are not merely synonymous replacements for “identity,” suggesting new possibilities for how to think about the purposes and desired outcomes of Jewish education, potentially contributing to any number of new conversations about the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish life.

This collection of Russian short stories from the 21st century includes works by famous writers and young talents alike, representing a diversity of generational, gender, ethnic and national identities. Their authors live not only in Russia, but also in Europe and the US. 

Short stories in this volume display a vast spectrum of subgenres, from grotesque absurdist stories to lyrical essays, from realistic narratives to fantastic parables. Taken together, they display rich and complex cultural and intellectual reality of contemporary Russia, in which political, social, and ethnic conflicts of today coexist with themes and characters resonating with classical literature, albeit invariably twisted and transformed in an unpredictable way. Most of texts in this volume appear in English for the first time. 21 may be useful for college courses but will also provide exciting reading for anyone interested in contemporary Russia.

“Epic Journey is indeed an epic journey, a sad, tragic, and ultimately inspiring tale of oppression, defeat, flight, and salvation that addresses the very essence of the human condition. But Epic Journey is also an important addition to the small, but steadily growing, body of memoirs that give voice to the Ukrainian encounter with catastrophe in the twentieth century. As such, it sounds a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism, fanaticism, and intolerance to all people of good will.” —Alexander J. Motyl, Rutgers University-Newark

Wasyl Andreievych Kushnir was born in Ukraine in 1923, and was witness to the tragedies and horrors of the early years of collectivization under the Soviet regime in his homeland. His father fought in the Ukrainian National Army against the Russian Bolshevik invasion and ultimate occupation of Ukraine, and his grandfather was murdered by Chekist Bolsheviks. Early in Wasyl's life, his family's home and all personal possessions were confiscated by the communist authorities, and both parents were exiled, his father to Siberia, and mother to a prison in Mariopol. His uncle Danylo was also arrested and exiled to forced labor in Siberia, and then to Komi SSR. 

 During this period, Ukraine experienced genocidal famine, and Wasyl himself suffered hunger during the Ukrainian Holodomor, in which millions perished. Upon the escape of his parents from prison camps, the family reunited, only to be torn apart again during World War II when Wasyl was taken by the Nazis as a slave laborer to Germany. At the war's conclusion, Wasyl drove trucks for the American Army in Germany, and married his wife, Maria, also a forced labor survivor, who bore him two sons. The family ultimately emigrated to Mississippi, and then Chicago, Illinois where two other children were born. Wasyl pursued the American dream, sought an education, and was ultimately successful in business, retiring in Florida where he spent his last years.

“Aside from his excellent prose, Stonov’s book contains precious details about an era whose features are barely discernible today. The Raskin Family paints a picture of the fate of an entire generation standing at the historic threshold that began with great hopes and ended with those hopes crushed. This autobiographical novel has outlived its author and will no doubt remain not only on library shelves but also in the grateful memory of the upcoming generations.” —David Markish, author of To Become Lutov

Meyer Raskin is a wealthy Jewish entrepreneur running a large agricultural estate in Belarus on the western outskirts of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. His wife Chava feels out of place and yearns for the quiet life of a Jewish shtetl. Together they have six children, some of whom help their father on the estate, while others are more interested in pursuing education or getting involved in revolutionary politics. Their lives are interrupted first by the Russian revolution of 1905 and later by World War I, which eventually turns them all into refugees. This is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s family.

This biographical history follows the iconoclastic career of John R. Friedeberg Seeley, pre-eminent “Pop Sociologist” and Mental Health Activist of the 1950s. 

Seeley’s "strange journey" began as a British Home Child, estranged from his cosmopolitan German-Jewish family. Seeley progressed through the ranks of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, and the University of Chicago, to achieve prominence as the author of Crestwood Heights, a defining work of postwar social science. 

He led an ambitious mental health project in Canadian schools, and was a founding father of York University. However, Seeley’s struggle with mental illness and Jewish identity brought him into conflict with the Canadian establishment. His career ended in academic exile, but his dream of a mental health revolution still resonates. 

“A quietly powerful addition to the canon of émigré literature” —The Moscow Times

No longer at home in Russia, but not quite assimilated into the American mainstream, the daily lives of Russian immigrants are fueled by a combustible mix of success and alienation. Simon Reznikov, the Boston-based immigrant protagonist of Maxim D. Shrayer’s A Russian Immigrant, is restless. Unresolved feelings about his Jewish (and American) present and his Russian (and Soviet) past prevent Reznikov from easily putting down roots in his new country.

A visit to a decaying summer resort in the Catskills, now populated by Jewish ghosts of Soviet history, which include a famous émigré writer, reveals to Reznikov that he, too, is a prisoner of his past. An expedition to Prague in search of clues for an elusive Jewish writer’s biography exposes Reznikov’s own inability to move on. A chance reunion with a former Russian lover, now also an immigrant living in an affluent part of Connecticut, unearths memories of Reznikov’s last Soviet summer while reanimating many contradictors of a mixed, Jewish-Russian marriage.

Told both linearly and non-linearly, with elements of suspense, mystery and crime, these three interconnected novellas gradually reveal many layers of the characters’ Russian, Jewish, and Soviet identities. Vectors of love and desire, nostalgia and amnesia, violence and forgiveness, politics and aesthetics guide Shrayer’s immigrant characters while also disorienting them in their new American lives. Set in Providence, New Haven and Boston, but also in places of the main character’s pilgrimages such as Estonia and Bohemia, Shrayer’s book weaves together a literary manifesto of Russian Jews in America.