Besprozvannaya, Polina; Rogachevskii, Andrei; Timenchik, Roman (eds) Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 354 it really happened’ and more ‘what is the nature of history and memory as narrative processes’. The fourth chapter consolidates this claim by examining the works of authors who apparently have little in common — Danilo Kiš and Antonije Isaković, for example — and demonstrates how fruitful a reading can be when it is no longer under any obligation to focus on the immediate link between literature and current political events. The fifth, sixth and seventh chapters examine the literary production of the 1990s which accompanied the Wars of Yugoslav Succession: here Norris demonstrates how the reality of war, over and above any mimetic code of representation and explicit messages, can be presented through the tension between the narrative requirement to tell a coherent story and the essential incoherence which expresses the chaos and senselessness of events. As the literature of the preceding decade all but discredited any idea of an official narrative of the Second World War and put into question the logic of coherent narrative representation of complex historical events, the literature of the 1990s could not but follow in its steps. In the fictional narratives which accompanied the wars in the 1990s, Norris sees, in addition to the uncanny motifs which mark the whole period examined, ‘wry laughter challenging the official pronouncement of all sides’. Norris also places all his findings in a larger comparative context, and shows that Serbian literature in this period was in line with global literary trends. This is a remarkable study, which accomplishes a lot more than a brief review can mention. One of its greatest merits is the convincing and coherent narrative which strings together a large number of apparently disparate works around an axis which is at one and the same time a literary one — the uncanny and its Gothic repertoire — and extra-literary: searching for meaning in both recent past and in contemporary events. Admirably well researched, Haunted Serbia offers an invaluable insight into a turbulent though fruitful period of Serbia’s literary history, which up until now was uncharted territory. UCL SSEES Zoran Milutinović Besprozvannaya, Polina; Rogachevskii, Andrei; Timenchik, Roman (eds). Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography. Stanford Slavic Studies, 47. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2016. 222 pp. Notes. Appendix. Price unknown. The contents of this three-part volume are much more varied and much more interesting than its very dry title suggests. In part one, ‘A Vanishing Archipelago?’, Andrei Rogachevskii describes the Israeli Russian-language mass media (print, online, radio and television, but not book production) and REVIEWS 355 makes a sober prediction of their quantitative, and perhaps also qualitative, decline in the foreseeable future, if only because another large immigration of settlers from the former Soviet Union (fSU) is unlikely, while most of the children and grandchildren of earlier Russian-speaking immigrants are more ‘at home’ in Hebrew and English. This is a result of the ‘adaptationassimilation -integration’ process, and is consistent, incidentally, with the expectation that the use of Russian worldwide will continue to go down. The author suggests that there are now approximately one million Russophone Israelis, some 40 per cent of them from Russia, 40 per cent from Ukraine and 20 per cent referred to here as Bukharan Jews, making up about one fifth of their new country’s population and providing about one sixth of the members of the Israeli parliament. Of course, many Jews who left the USSR and the fSU either never went to live in Israel or settled there for a time and then moved again to reside permanently elsewhere (including those who went back to the fSU). Surprising to this reviewer is the suggestion (see pp. 35–36) that as many as 300,000 of the Russian-speaking Israelis ‘are not even Jewish’. Naturally, this does not prevent many of them from having a ‘sense of common destiny’ with their new homeland and from being completely loyal Israelis. Part two, modestly called a ‘skeleton’ bibliography of Russian-language periodicals in Israel, compiled by Polina Besprozvannaya and Rogachevskii, does have some flesh on its bones, and a few of the entries (e.g., on ‘Vremia i my’, ‘Dvadtsat´ dva’, ‘Sion’ and ‘Slavica Hierosolymitana’) will be...