Name: Deviant Women
Brand: Sharon A. Kowalsky
Price: 30.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Sharon A. Kowalsky

Deviant Women

$30.00

Deviant Women, first examines the emergence of the discipline of criminology in early Soviet Russia, tracing the development of principles and theories—particularly that of female deviance—and highlighting the ways in which criminologists, a diverse cohort of jurists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and forensic experts, conducted innovative social science research under the constraints of Bolshevik ideology. It then turns to criminologists’ analyses of female crime, exploring their attitudes concerning sexuality, geography, and class. Concluding with a close study of infanticide, the most “typical” crime committed by women, Deviant Women discusses the social attitudes revealed through the professional discussions of this crime. Throughout, Kowalsky focuses on the position of women in early Soviet society, revealing criminologists’ understandings of female crime and how their attitudes helped shape the development of social and behavioral norms in revolutionary Russia.

Lilia Kaganovsky

The voice of technology

$30.00

As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically altered the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the “Soviet Voice.”

Jillian Porter

Economies of Feeling

$30.00

Economies of Feeling offers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that set the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition in motion. Jillian Porter compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic France and post-Decembrist Russia and argues that the dissonance between foreign and domestic understandings of this economic passion shaped the literature of Nicholas I’s reign (1825 —1855). Porter shows how, for Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Faddei Bulgarin, ambition became a staging ground for experiments with transnational literary exchange. In its encounters with the celebrated Russian cultural value of hospitality and the age-old vice of miserliness, ambition appears both timely and anachronistic, suspiciously foreign and disturbingly Russian—it challenges readers to question the equivalence of local and imported words, feelings, and forms. Economies of Feeling examines founding texts of nineteenth-century Russian prose alongside nonliterary materials from which they drew energy—from French clinical diagnoses of “ambitious monomania” to the various types of currency that proliferated under Nicholas I. It thus contributes fresh and fascinating insights into Russian characters’ impulses to attain rank and to squander, counterfeit, and hoard. Porter’s interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars of comparative as well as Russian literature.

Karine Rashkovsky

An Improbable Life

$20.00

Just how improbable can one man's survival story be?

From evading the KGB and disassembling a downed American plane to narrowly escaping a life sentence in Siberia, Reuven Rashkovsky’s story is a gripping tale of coming of age, searching for belonging, and daring to escape the tightly controlled Soviet regime. Relayed in his point of view by his daughter, Dr. Karine Rashkovsky, An Improbable Life tells the story of a man who has been at the center of some of the most dramatic and tumultuous events in modern history, from World War II to the Six-Day War to the collapse of the USSR, providing insight into the world of Soviet Jewry and the almost insurmountable obstacles to getting out. Filled with quirky, revealing anecdotes, An Improbable Life is a valuable historical resource for anyone intrigued by culture and identity in the Soviet Union from the last days of Stalin to the Brezhnev era and the paradox and perils of being outcast—and possibly heroic—in that time and place. With the return of a totalitarian, imperialist Russia, Rashkovsky’s story is all too relevant to today’s struggles. Here is an improbable true story of what can indeed, be possible.

Smola D. Shrayer Klavdia Smola Smola Edited by Roman Katsman

The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov

$30.00

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov

Emanuela Barasch Rubinstein

Intimate Solitude

$25.00

"Barasch Rubinstein... does a marvelous job of bringing to vivid life the political and cultural landscape of Israel during terribly turbulent years." — Kirkus

In the 1980s, two childhood friends from Jerusalem establish a medical equipment startup. Their hunger for success propels them to professional heights but erodes the emotional affinity between them. While the firm grows and does exceptionally well, personal conflicts between the two, symbolic of a social change, threaten to undermine their achievements. Spanning from 1968 until 2016, the plot follows the two entrepreneurs against the backdrop of Israeli history. Tensions between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Israelis, military conflicts, and, most importantly, the profound consequences—both positive and negative—of embracing capitalist values shape the lives of the protagonists. Intimate Solitude offers a distinct perspective on the changing nature of Israeli society, uncovering social and political undercurrents.

George Breslauer

Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders

$30.00

How did Gorbachev and Yeltsin get away with transforming and replacing the Soviet system and its foreign relations? Why did they act as they did in pushing for such radical changes? And how will history evaluate their accomplishments? In this unique and original study, George W. Breslauer compares and evaluates the leadership strategies adopted by Gorbachev and Yeltsin at each stage of their administrations: political rise, political ascendancy, and political decline. He demonstrates how these men used the power of ideas to mobilize support for their policies, to seize the initiative from political rivals, and to mold their images as effective problem solvers, indispensable politicians, and symbols of national unity and élan. Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders also compares these men with Khrushchev and Brezhnev, yielding new insight into the nature of Soviet and post-Soviet politics and into the dynamics of “transformational” leadership more generally. The book is an important contribution to the analysis and evaluation of political leadership. It is exceptionally well written and accessible to the nonspecialist.

Amelia Glaser

Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands

$30.00

Studies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser’s book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.

Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands

Emanuela Barasch Rubinstein

Intimate Solitude

$150.00

"Barasch Rubinstein... does a marvelous job of bringing to vivid life the political and cultural landscape of Israel during terribly turbulent years." — Kirkus

In the 1980s, two childhood friends from Jerusalem establish a medical equipment startup. Their hunger for success propels them to professional heights but erodes the emotional affinity between them. While the firm grows and does exceptionally well, personal conflicts between the two, symbolic of a social change, threaten to undermine their achievements. Spanning from 1968 until 2016, the plot follows the two entrepreneurs against the backdrop of Israeli history. Tensions between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Israelis, military conflicts, and, most importantly, the profound consequences—both positive and negative—of embracing capitalist values shape the lives of the protagonists. Intimate Solitude offers a distinct perspective on the changing nature of Israeli society, uncovering social and political undercurrents.

Dirk Uffelmann

Der erniedrigte Christus (Volume III)

$30.00

EN

This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor’kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

RU

This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor’kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

Anne Lounsbery

Thin Culture, High Art

$30.00

In Russia and America a perceived absence of literature gave rise to grandiose notions of literature's importance. This book examines how two traditions worked to refigure cultural lack, not by disputing it but by insisting on it, by representing the nation's (putative) cultural deficit as a moral and aesthetic advantage. Through a comparative study of Gogol and Hawthorne, this book examines parallels that seem particularly striking when we consider that these traditions had virtually no points of contact. Yet the unexpected parallels between these authors are the result of historical similarities: Russians and Americans felt obliged to develop a manifestly national literature ex nihilo, and to do so in an age when an unprecedented diversity of printed texts were circulating among an ever more heterogeneous reading public. Responding to these conditions, Gogol and Hawthorne articulated ideas that would prove influential for their nations' literary development: that is, despite the culture's thinness and deviation from European norms, it would soon produce works that would surpass European literature in significance.

Ed. by Michael David-Fox

The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison. Pittsburgh

$45.00

The metaphor of an “archipelago” in the Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus was intended to bridge the veil of silence that surrounded the camp system, much like water surrounds enclaves of land. Since then, this deeply influential metaphor has prompted historians and readers alike to think about the GULAG as network of island-camps separated from the rest of the Soviet Union. This book brings together leading international researchers on the history of the GULAG from Russia, Europe, and North America who are advancing both new archival and conceptual findings. Perhaps the book’s most unique and suggestive contribution is to consider the GULAG in the context of other camps and systems of internment. Chapters are devoted to the British concentration camps in Africa and India, the tsarist-era exile system in Siberia, Chinese and North Korean reeducation camps, the post-Soviet penal system in the Russian Federation, and the infamous camp system of Nazi Germany. This not only reveals close relatives, antecedents, and descendants of the Soviet GULAG—it sheds light on a frighteningly widespread feature of modernost’.

The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison. Pittsburgh

Roman Katsman

The Sublime Lightness of Creation

$30.00

In the third volume of his studies in Russian-language Israeli literature (the first two were Nostalgia for a Foreign Land, 2016, and Elusive Reality, 2020), Roman Katsman discusses its fundamental mythologems, while suggesting a new approach to myth-creation. This is a book about how literature preserves its significance by addressing the main questions of our time through the imagination of miraculous encounter and everyday holiness, catastrophe and salvation, victim and foundation, cities and empires. The book dwells on the most famous as well as the less known but no less bright novelists: Efraim Bauch, Alexander Goldshtein, Linor Goralik, Daniel Kluger, Leonid Levinson, Anna Likhtikman, Elena Makarova, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, Victoria Reicher, Dina Rubina, Yakov Shechter, Nekoda Singer, Dennis Sobolev, Alex Tarn, Yakov Tsigelman, Naum Vaiman, and Mikhail Yudson. This book is for everyone who is interested in modern Russian and Israeli literature and culture, theoretical problems of modern literature, mythopoesis, issues of Russian and Jewish emigration and mobility, the history of twentieth century literature, and literary processes in the twenty-first century

Irene Masing-Delic

Abolishing Death

$30.00

The idea of abolishing death was one of the most influential myth-making concepts expressed in Russian literature from 1900 to 1930. In this book Dr. Masing-Delic finds the seeds of this extraordinary concept in the erosion of traditional religion in late-nineteenth-century Russia. Influenced by the new power of scientific inquiry, humankind appropriated various divine attributes one after the other, including omnipotence and omniscience, but eventually even aiming toward the realization of individual, physical immortality, and thus aspiring to equality with God. This aspiration, expressed in the ideas of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Fedorov and in the renewed concepts of Gnosticism, brought such different writers as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Fedor Sologub, Nikolai Ognev and Nikolai Zabolotsky together in a single space of the myth of the final victory over death.

Jane Costlow

Heart-pine Russia

$30.00

The essays in this book explore the myriad ways in which forests figure in nineteenth century Russian culture. Associated with national identity and religious tradition, with peasant lifeways and generations of rebels, Russia’s forests in the nineteenth century also became cause for increasing scientific attention and environmental concern, as landowners, agronomists and public officials came to understand the rapaciousness with which these iconic woodlands were being cut down. Jane Costlow’s study explores the intersections of scientific thought and artistic imagination, constructions of identity and articulations of an ecological ethic. Individual chapters treat the work of Turgenev, Mel’nikov-Pechersky, Korolenko and Nesterov, with additional consideration of a rich array of figures, from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Repin to the naturalist Dmitrii Kaigorodov and the foresters of the St. Petersburg Forest Academy. Heart-Pine Russia won the 2014 USC Award for Best Book in Literary and Cultural Studies.

Valerie Kivelson

Desperate Magic

$30.00

In early modern Europe, thousands of women were burned as witches during the period of the witch hunts. From the court records of seventeenth-century Russia a very different picture emerges. The great majority of those accused of witchcraft were men. Broadly comparative, Desperate Magic by Valerie Kivelson is the first sustained study of seventeenth-century Russian witch trials. The book uses trial evidence to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history. The routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions raises methodological and moral questions with continuing resonance in the world today. A major finding of this book is that witchcraft was not a marginal practice in early modern Russia. It was practiced by all ranks of society, from serf to tsaritsa at the same time that it was severely condemned and punished. Testimony from these cases lets us see into the emotional lives of illiterate women and men of the Russian past. This analysis shows how the State and relations of power were inscribed into everyday practices, and magic was used as a defense by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world.

Edith Clowes

Russia on the Edge

$30.00

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book.

Eugene Avrutin

The Velizh Affair

$30.00

On April 22, 1823, a three-year-old boy named Fedor finished his lunch and went to play outside. Fedor never returned home from his walk. Several days later, a neighbor found his mutilated body drained of blood and repeatedly pierced. In small market towns, where houses were clustered together, residents knew each other on intimate terms, and people gossiped in taverns, courtyards, and streets, even the most trivial bits of news spread like wildfire. It did not take long before rumors emerged that Jews had murdered the little boy. The Velizh Affair reconstructs the lives of Jews and their Christian neighbors caught up in the aftermath of this chilling criminal act. The investigation into Fedor’s death resulted in the charging of forty-three Jews with ritual murder, the theft and desecration of church property, and the forcible conversion of three town residents. Drawing on an astonishing number of newly discovered trial records, historian Evgeny Avrutin explores not only the multiple factors that caused fear and conflict in everyday life but also the social and cultural worlds of a multi-ethnic population that had coexisted for hundreds of years. This beautifully crafted book provides an intimate glimpse into small-town life. The case unfolded in a town like any other town in the Russian Empire where lives were closely interwoven, where rivalries and confrontations were part of day-to-day existence, and where the blood libel was part of a well-established belief system.

Helena Goscilo

Starlight and Stargazers

$129.00

Celebrification has thrived for centuries in literature, theater, music, and other cultural spheres, as vividly illustrated by Byron, Sarah Bernhardt, and Paganini. It especially effloresced in cinema after the symbolically named Lumière brothers pioneered movies as light-projected “moving life” to be contemplated and shared in the intimate darkness of theaters. Actors and actresses such as Valentino and Garbo acquired the status of divine beings whose life on and offscreen stimulated fascination and a passionate devotion most frequently invested in religious figures. The recent explosion in social media has only amplified immeasurably the scale and intensity of that adulation. Yearning for the seemingly transcendent, fans as mere mortals seek contact with celebrities as objects of worship that, like nocturnal stars, are simultaneously remote yet accessible. Starlight and Stargazers examines the multifaceted nature and specific manifestations of film celebrification in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Poland, Soviet Russia/Russia, and Ukraine before and after 1991.

Saulius Sužiedėlis

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania

$149.00

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania’s national communities before World War II and the international and domestic crises which led to the destruction of the Lithuanian state in 1940. The author describes in detail the process of the mass persecution and murder of the country’s Jews during the Holocaust, the role of Nazi and collaborationist forces, acts of resistance, as well as the society’s responses. The book concludes with an examination of the postwar struggle within Lithuania to confront this legacy of unprecedented violence.

Cover image for Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania, isbn: 9798887194905

Alexandra Grabbe

The Nansen Factor

$19.95

“A compassionate rendering of acclimation and its many challenges.” — Booklist

This bold debut collection of stories follows the lives of those displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution and their descendants, shining a light on the lasting impact of displacement and the resiliency of the human spirit.

Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen created a passport for stateless persons used by refugees as a valid travel document from 1922-1937. The world is all too aware of what has happened to Russia in the century since then—Lenin, Stalin, and now Putin with his iron-fist policies and invasion of Ukraine. But what about the aristocrats whose ancestors governed Russia before Communism? How did they fare in displacement? Civil War, Red Terror, and Bolshevik rule caused over one million to flee Russia. Written by the daughter of one such émigré, The Nansen Factor traces the lives of these refugees and their descendants across a century of upheaval and displacement. From the turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution to the echoes of the past in modern-day America, these interconnected tales vividly portray the resilience of individuals uprooted by history at a moment when migrants are once again on the move in search of refuge, highlighting how the pain of losing one’s homeland may fade, but the injury to the psyche is slow to heal.

Andriy Sodomora

The Tears and Smiles of Things

$150.00

An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraine’s “voice” of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time.

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.

Sandra Alfers

Traces of Memory

$150.00

The remarkable, untold story of one Holocaust survivor's resilience against all odds, discovered through a chance encounter with a collection of her wartime poetry.

Originally from Nuremberg, Germany, Else Dormitzer dedicated much of her life to combating antisemitism in a city that became synonymous with Nazi propaganda and spectacle in the Third Reich. Drawing on materials from the family’s extensive personal archive, Traces of Memory follows her life from pre-war Nuremberg to war-torn Amsterdam, from the confines of the Theresienstadt ghetto to post-war life in London. The result is a deeply personal story of a woman at the margins of memory. Accompanied by historical photographs, the book includes Dormitzer’s original poetry collection from Theresienstadt and three testimonial accounts of her Holocaust experience to keep alive the work and story of a singular woman.

Sandra Alfers

Traces of Memory

$19.95

The remarkable, untold story of one Holocaust survivor's resilience against all odds, discovered through a chance encounter with a collection of her wartime poetry.

Originally from Nuremberg, Germany, Else Dormitzer dedicated much of her life to combating antisemitism in a city that became synonymous with Nazi propaganda and spectacle in the Third Reich. Drawing on materials from the family’s extensive personal archive, Traces of Memory follows her life from pre-war Nuremberg to war-torn Amsterdam, from the confines of the Theresienstadt ghetto to post-war life in London. The result is a deeply personal story of a woman at the margins of memory. Accompanied by historical photographs, the book includes Dormitzer’s original poetry collection from Theresienstadt and three testimonial accounts of her Holocaust experience to keep alive the work and story of a singular woman.

Ewa Herbst

Visionaries from Lviv

$35.00

Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv presents the hospital’s history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Lviv.

The volume also details the history of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia prior to the hospital’s founding, Jewish access to the medical profession, and the impact of Jewish doctors on the path to modernity. It also shows the struggle of women to become doctors. A moving and timely book with contributions from leading historians, scholars, and medical professionals, Visionaries from Lviv is an ode to the once thriving Jewish community in Lviv and a testament to how one person’s dream and commitment can impact the lives of so many.

This publication was made possible with support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Gesher Galicia.

Dominique Méda

Réinventer le Travail (Reinventing Work in Europe)

$30.00

This book looks at the history of work and the meanings that are attached to it over time. Taking as its basis a number of international surveys and interviews conducted in Europe, the authors consider. The significance of work for Europeans today. Over the years the meaning of work has changed. It has become more highly diversified, and it is today invested with high expectations that conflict with organizational developments and the changing nature of the labour market. The authors use a generational perspective to explore whether it is possible to reconcile the contemporary “ethos” of work, especially with regards to women and young people, with organizations that are increasingly under pressure to be profitable and productive. Reinventing Work in Europe will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of sociology of work, employment and organizations, labour studies, digital economy and political economy.

Réinventer le Travail (Reinventing Work in Europe)

Ian Campbell

Knowledge and the Ends of Empire

$30.00

This book investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about the unfamiliar environment and population of the steppe. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their environment to the tsarist state. Because tsarist officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able to be part of these debates, at times influencing the policies that were pursued. By the early 20 th century, though, the tsarist state’s pursuit of a policy of mass peasant colonization of the steppe region closed this space for debate. The same local knowledge that Kazak intermediaries had used to negotiate tsarist rule became, with this, a language of resistance.

Julie Curtis

The Englishman from Lebedian'

$30.00

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia’s northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day with great shrewdness.

Carol Apollonio

Dostoevsky’s Secrets

$30.00

When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a “realist in a higher sense,” it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts—the text—of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in “Poor Folk”? Does “White Nights” ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost—and what is won—in “The Gambler”? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in “Crime and Punishment”, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in “Demons,” is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their unaesthetic effect. Apollonio’s readings show how Dostoevsky’s paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

Roman Katsman

Elusive Reality

$30.00

A hundred years is the period long enough to talk about Russian-Israeli literature as a historically consistent, though quite an indeterminate community. Not being a historical study, Roman Katsman's new book subtly outlines one of the magnetic lines of this community—the search for an answer to the main question of modernity—“what is reality?”, as well as the search for the real, which makes the core of the Jewish existence. Today, just like a hundred years ago, the success of this search depends on how well Russian-Israeli literature can overcome fears and temptations of the Russian melancholy and the Israeli marginality. Fighting for its existence in unique conditions, it chooses sophisticated forms of transforming its double cultural unbelonging into the paradoxical philosophical realism that can be perfectly comprehended only today, with the benefits of postmodernism appropriated and left behind. At the same time, despite its peculiar nature, Russian-Israeli literature shares the fundamental trend of the world literature, namely its transition to virtual, web-based, augmented reality.

Caryl Emerson

Essays in Russian Literary and Musical Culture

$45.00

The volume contains essays and reviews written over thirty years, linked loosely by three themes. First is the global resonance of Mikhail Bakhtin as moral philosopher, theorist of dialogue, and cultural totem. How does his worldview complement that of his friendly rivals the formalists (and later semioticians), and which aspects of his value-system have been most cogently criticized? Second is an application of Bakhtinian principles of transposition to successive musicalized Russian classics (among them Pushkin’s and Meyerhold’s Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky’s and Prokofiev’s Eugene Onegin, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Pushkin’s and Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka). A final theme is the creative—or capricious—reading of one literary master by another master, much later in time: Tolstoy’s reading of Shakespeare, Nabokov’s reading of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Krzhizhanovsky’s reading of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Great writers, like great composers, absorb and transform earlier greatness into a new synthesis, and it is this activity that is commemorated in this volume.

Essays in Russian Literary and Musical Culture

Andriy Sodomora

The Tears and Smiles of Things

$19.95

An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraine’s “voice” of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time.

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.

Debby Koren

Responsa in a Historical Context

$30.00

A Winner of the 2024 Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

This book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. This collection will acquaint the reader with Jews who, following their expulsion, settled in the Ottoman Empire, in Palestine under the Mamluks, in Amsterdam and in Brazil. The period of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was a tragic time in Jewish history, but the revitalization of the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish communities in new locales is testimony to the human spirit and determination.

The volume includes eight chapters, each built around one responsum from one of the great halakhic authorities of the time. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more.

Read a sample: bit.ly/koren-sampler

Alexei Parshchikov

I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava

$129.00

Longlisted for the 2024 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, this prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023.

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.

Thérèse (Terri) Masson

My Kaddish

$129.00

“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.

Joseph Shatzmiller

Collected Studies (Volume 1)

$85.00

In Collected Studies (Volume 1): The Jews of Provence, Joseph Shatzmiller, the foremost expert on Provençal Judaism, offers a comprehensive overview of the medieval history of the Jews in Provence. Through an analysis of community regulations, tax distribution, rabbinic leadership, and everyday life, Shatzmiller provides a rich and powerful mosaic of Jewish society in Provence. This masterful work sheds light on the diverse experiences of Jews in the region, from their interactions with Christian neighbors to their internal conflicts and struggles. With its insightful analysis and meticulous research, The Jews of Provence is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of Jewish communities in medieval Europe.

“The collection of studies that these four volumes offer is the result of more than sixty years of commitment to scholarship. Like many colleagues, I relied in the beginning on printed material in books that dealt with law, religion, and secular literature. Then, as a disciple of George Duby, I discovered the world of archives and hand-written Latin manuscripts. The present collection relies, to a great extent, on previously unknown information discovered during years of search in the archives of Southern France, mostly on those of the county of Provence. They are situated in the cities of Marseille and Aix-en-Provence as well as the town of Digne. The legal registers of the High Middle Ages (1250-1350) as well as those produced by the counties’ administration introduce us to the ordinary people of the region, to their daily life and to their preoccupations; their names are spelled out, the dates are recorded and the localities in which they were active are designated. At times these documents encourage us to endorse information found in contemporary literary sources and to overcome our hesitation and excessive caution concerning their value as historical evidence.”

— Joseph Shatzmiller

Rina Lapidus

Russian Ideational Roots of Jewish Thought and Hebrew Literature

$109.00

This book demonstrates how the Russian thought and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. Through a comparative analysis of an extensive corpus of writings by renowned Russian and Jewish thinkers, the book reveals how ideas regarding the need for a national awakening penetrated from Russian to Jewish thought. The Jewish thinkers who embraced these notions adapted them to the reality and experience of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Likewise, portrayals of an individual’s quest for the authentic and just God in Russian literary works gained purchase in ideological Hebrew literature, where the hero searches for a true path to achieve spiritual, social, and national well-being for the Jewish people. Absorption of ideological influences is a universal phenomenon that is instrumental to progress and cultural development, and it is accepted in Jewish culture as well.

Russian Ideational Roots of Jewish Thought and Hebrew Literature

Stewart Gabel

How Dehumanization Leads to Murder and Genocide

$119.00

This book discusses psychological aspects of dehumanization and of the human tendency to dominate, control and potentially murder those considered less than or “other” by the dominant group. It explores how increasingly severe dehumanization resulted in the genocide of six million Jews in the second World War. Psychological and behavioral strategies Nazi aggressors and ordinary citizens used to mislead themselves during this process are described. Understanding the sequence of events from dehumanization to murder has implications for the apparent tendency of human beings to harm and potentially kill those who appear “different”, or who are made into the “other”. Efforts to prevent genocide should actively challenge dehumanization of weaker populations whenever possible, even when dehumanization appears mild, “insignificant,” or “innocuous.”

How Dehumanization Leads to Murder and Genocide

Eugene Korn

Israel and the Nations

$35.00

Israel and the Nations: The Bible, The Rabbis, and Jewish-Gentile Relations explores the Jewish theology and law (Halakhah) relating to non-Jews. It analyzes biblical, talmudic, medieval, and contemporary Jewish writings about gentiles and their religions.

The Bible challenges the Jewish people to be “a blessing for all the families of the earth.” Yet throughout history, Jewish experience with gentiles was complex. In the biblical and talmudic eras most gentiles were assumed to be idolators. In the Middle Ages most rabbis considered their Christian neighbors idolators, and Christian enmity sharpened the otherness Jews felt toward their Christian hosts. Muslims were monotheists, but Jewish-Muslim relations were sometimes positive and at other times difficult. With the advent secular tolerance in modernity, Jews found themselves in a new relationship with their gentile neighbors. How should Jews relate to gentiles today, and what are the bounds of Jewish tolerance and religious pluralism?

The book will interest both Jewish laypersons familiar with Jewish tradition as well as scholars of theology and interfaith relations

Maurus Reinkowski

The History of Turkey

$139.00

A comprehensive, readable history of the Republic of Turkey that gives equal weight to all periods in the first century of the Republic of Turkey.
The republican order of Turkey seems not to have changed much since its foundation in 1923, but there were dramatic transformations: From Atatürk’s modernization dictatorship in the 1920s and 1930s, over the massive migration into the cities and the military coups in the second half of the twentieth century, up to Recep Tayyip Erdoğans electoral autocracy since the 2010s. This book makes us understand Turkey’s historical trajectory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the fate of its various communities and ethnic groups—in particular Alevis and Kurds—and argues that a particular trait of Turkish political culture is its constant fluctuation between confidence and contention, grandeur and grievance.

Cover image for The History of Turkey, isbn: 9798887192161

Roman Dziarski

How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis

$129.00

“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.

Diana Lobel

Faith and Trust

$119.00

This broad-ranging study, the first full-length investigation of conceptions of faith and trust in the Judeo-Arabic tradition, explores a family of related concepts—faith (imān, emunah), conviction (i‘tiqād), and trust/reliance (tawakkul/ittikāl)—in Saadya, Baḥya, Halevi, Maimonides, Abraham Maimonides, and the Egyptian pietist circle of Abraham he-Ḥasid. The work points to a rich spectrum of conceptions of faith and trust—from the purely cognitive to the experiential and affective. What emerges are themes of faithfulness, loyalty, experiential certainty, and trustworthiness, expressed in devotion to a way of life that embodies these ideals. The virtue of trust expresses steadfast commitment to the truth.

This study vividly illustrates the “Jewish-Arab symbiosis,” highlighting the shared spiritual language and rich, intertwined worlds of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, theology, and mysticism.

Cover image for Faith and Trust, isbn: 9798887193977

Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn

The Shochet (Vol. 1)

$150.00

“An impressively researched and surprisingly accessible portrait of Jewish life in the mid-19th century.” — Kirkus Reviews

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughter) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making the treasure trove of information contained in these pages accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn

The Shochet (Vol. 1)

$25.00

“An impressively researched and surprisingly accessible portrait of Jewish life in the mid-19th century.” — Kirkus Reviews

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making this treasure trove of information accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

David Cratis Williams

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Volume 3

$139.00

In Volume Three of this four-volume series, we examine the rhetorical development that occurred during the first two terms of Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president of the Russian Federation. Initially, Putin appeared to follow in the path set by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, vowing that Russia was, at heart, a European nation and would be a westward facing democracy going forward. He even mentioned partnering with the EU and NATO. Eight years later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin excoriated the West for, in his words, attempting to create a “unipolar world” in which NATO expansion threatened Russia’s security, the United States acted as the world’s sole “hegemon,” and Europe simply followed orders, relinquishing any sense of agency in its own affairs.

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Volume 3

Joseph Shatzmiller

Collected Studies (Volume 2)

$85.00

In Collected Studies (Volume 2): Christian Majority—Jewish Minority, Joseph Shatzmiller, the preeminent scholar of the Jews in Provence, examines the complex relationship between Christians and Jews during the Middle Ages. Through a careful analysis of historical documents and primary sources, Shatzmiller sheds light on the diverse experiences of the Jewish minority in Provence, from their legal status in Christian courts to the persecution and violence they faced during times of crisis. This book provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Christians and Jews in medieval Western Europe, and the role of the Jewish community in shaping the social and political landscape of the region.

“The collection of studies that these four volumes offer is the result of more than sixty years of commitment to scholarship. Like many colleagues, I relied in the beginning on printed material in books that dealt with law, religion, and secular literature. Then, as a disciple of George Duby, I discovered the world of archives and hand-written Latin manuscripts. The present collection relies, to a great extent, on previously unknown information discovered during years of search in the archives of Southern France, mostly on those of the county of Provence. They are situated in the cities of Marseille and Aix-en-Provence as well as the town of Digne. The legal registers of the High Middle Ages (1250-1350) as well as those produced by the counties’ administration introduce us to the ordinary people of the region, to their daily life and to their preoccupations; their names are spelled out, the dates are recorded and the localities in which they were active are designated. At times these documents encourage us to endorse information found in contemporary literary sources and to overcome our hesitation and excessive caution concerning their value as historical evidence.”

— Joseph Shatzmiller

Roman Katsman

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

$65.00

This collection of essays covers a hundred-year history of Russian-language literature in Israel, including the pre-state period. Some of the studies are devoted to an overview of the literary process and the activities of its participants, others—to individual genres and movements. As a result, a complex and multifaceted picture emerges of a not quite fully defined, but very lively and dynamic community that develops in the most difficult conditions. The contributors trace the paths of Russian-Israeli prose, poetry and drama, various waves of avant-garde, fantasy, and critical thought. Today, in Russian-Israeli literature, the voices of writers of various generations and waves of repatriation are intertwined: from the "seventies" to the "war aliyah" of the recent times. Both the Russian-Israeli authors and their critics often hold different opinions of their respective roles in Israel’s historical and literary storms. While disagreeing on the definition of their place on the map of modern culture, Russian-Israeli writers are united by a shared bond with the fate of the Jewish state.

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Zev Yaroslavsky

Zev's Los Angeles

$25.00

A LA Times Bestseller

“…[A] compelling history of our city’s last half century, as conveyed through the life of one of our most impactful leaders. …”
— Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

This is the story of Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. His memoir charts the journey of a young social activist who battled to free Soviet Jews before becoming one of the most consequential elected officials in Southern California. Fiercely independent, he combined an activist’s passion with a seasoned politician’s skill to challenge the region’s power brokers. He fought the Los Angeles Police Department’s excessive force and political spying policies, led the effort to ban local taxes from funding the 1984 Olympics, teamed with President Clinton to avert a catastrophic county bankruptcy, helped develop L.A.’s modern transit system, won a bruising battle with real estate interests to save the Santa Monica Mountains from rapacious development, and was pivotal in the development of Walt Disney Concert Hall and the modernization of the iconic Hollywood Bowl. “I may be part of the establishment,” he said on the day he was first sworn into office, “but the establishment is not part of me.”

Zev Yaroslavsky

Zev's Los Angeles

$35.00

A LA Times Bestseller

“…[A] compelling history of our city’s last half century, as conveyed through the life of one of our most impactful leaders. …”
— Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

This is the story of Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. His memoir charts the journey of a young social activist who battled to free Soviet Jews before becoming one of the most consequential elected officials in Southern California. Fiercely independent, he combined an activist’s passion with a seasoned politician’s skill to challenge the region’s power brokers. He fought the Los Angeles Police Department’s excessive force and political spying policies, led the effort to ban local taxes from funding the 1984 Olympics, teamed with President Clinton to avert a catastrophic county bankruptcy, helped develop L.A.’s modern transit system, won a bruising battle with real estate interests to save the Santa Monica Mountains from rapacious development, and was pivotal in the development of Walt Disney Concert Hall and the modernization of the iconic Hollywood Bowl. “I may be part of the establishment,” he said on the day he was first sworn into office, “but the establishment is not part of me.”