Reinventing Tradition: Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction

Klavdia Smola

Published by Academic Studies Press 2023

Reinventing Tradition

Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction

Klavdia Smola

In the series Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy

https://doi.org/10.1515/9798887191911

Overview
Contents

About this book

Klavdia Smola explores how the Jewish tradition was reinvented in Russian Jewish literature after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust and decades of Communism. The process of reinventing the tradition began in the counter-culture of Jewish dissidents, in the midst of the late-Soviet underground of the 1960-1970s, and it continues to the present day.

Author / Editor information

Smola Klavdia :

Klavdia Smola is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Dresden. She (co-)edited among others The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2022); (Multi)national Faces of Socialist Realism: Beyond the Russian Literary Canon (special issue of Slavic Review, 2022), and Russia – Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (special issue of Russian Literature, 2018).

Klavdia Smola is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Dresden. She (co-)edited among others The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2022); (Multi)national Faces of Socialist Realism: Beyond the Russian Literary Canon (special issue of Slavic Review, 2022), and Russia – Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (special issue of Russian Literature, 2018).

Reviews

“The reader, thanks to the author’s deep dive into the literary works she brings forward to make her case, will come away from this book with a recognition and appreciation of the work of a number of well-regarded (although not widely known) authors, whether resident in Russia, Israel, the US or elsewhere, concerned with Jewish identity as shaped and perceived through Soviet and Russian experience. … Reinventing Tradition is a distinguished contribution to the understanding of this revitalization and rediscovery, looking to make the search by Soviet and Russian Jewish authors more widely known and a source of insight and wisdom to be brought near.”

— Mindy C. Reiser, AJL News & Reviews

“It is well known that a driving force for the formation of underground cultures in former republics of the USSR was the national revival. In her excellent monograph, Klavdia Smola, a prominent scholar of the Soviet nonconformism, focuses on underground literature born by Jewish national revival—a decentralized process that engaged Jews from all republics and regions of the Soviet Union. She meticulously reconstructs a cultural dimension of the political movement for Jewish immigration from the USSR and through the analysis of Russophone Jewish underground literature, traces the development of its main myths and discourses, from their emergence in the 1960s prose of exodus to their ironic deconstructions in postmodernist writings of the 1980s-90s and essentialization in neo-Zionist narratives in the 2000s. This book will be invaluable not only for students of Jewish cultural history but also in courses on national revival in the late Soviet Union and on Russophone literature as a growing new field of studies. Klavdia Smola’s book is pioneering in all these directions.”

— Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University

“Klavdia Smola’s superbly researched and deeply illuminating book is a must have for anyone interested in the pathways of Jewish creativity in Russian during the late Soviet and post-Soviet epochs. Especially noteworthy are Smola’s intricate readings of the little known writers who were part of the underground scene in the Soviet Union and later immigrated to Israel. With its breadth of the material covered and innovative theoretical approaches, Smola’s volume makes an invaluable contribution to the study of Russian Jewish literature and culture.”

— Marat Grinberg, Professor of Russian and Humanities, Reed College, Author of The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity between the Lines

“The course of Russian-Jewish literature never did run smooth: not when most Russian-speaking Jews were forced by the Tsars to live within the Pale of Settlement; not under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev et al.; not after the collapse of the Soviet Empire—how much less so with the successive waves of mass Jewish emigration to Israel, Germany, and North America. Only an expert cartographer like Klavdia Smola, therefore, could see what no one else has seen: that it was through prose fiction and storytelling that three generations of Russian-Jewish writers have constructed their own ‘bridge of longing’ across the historical abyss. As this densely argued book demonstrates, the story doesn’t end with those who experienced corporate Jewish life first-hand. Rather, through all the tricks of the literary trade and by drawing creatively from a century of modern Yiddish writing, they succeeded in fashioning a complex new identity and a new Jewish mythology.”

— David G. Roskies, Emeritus Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture, the Jewish Theological Seminary

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1.Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
2. Research Approaches Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
3.Russian Jewish Literature as a Bicultural Phenomenon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
4.Jewish Dissent of the Late Soviet Era: Underground, Exodus, Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
5. Prose of Exodus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
6. Axes of Nonconformist Jewish Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
7. Negated Dichotomies: The Failed Utopia of Aliyah Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
8. Time and Space Structures in Nonconformist Jewish Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
9. Reinvention of Yiddish Storytelling Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
10. Aftermath and Impact of Jewish Counter-Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
11. Russian Jewish Literature after Communism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
12. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	369
Index of Names Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	413

Language: English
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 428
Keywords: Literature of Aliyah; Exodus; Soviet Jews; reinvention of tradition; Russian-Jewish literature; late Soviet underground; post-memory; Yiddish literature; post-Soviet Jewish literature

eBook

Published: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798887191911