Between Separation and Symbiosis: South Eastern European Languages and Cultures in Contact, edited by Andrey N. Sobolev

The living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease scale was successfully adapted for use in Southern European (Italian and Spanish) and Eastern European (Russian) cultures

Due to proceeding globalization processes, involving a rise in mobility and international interdependencies, the frequency and relevance of intercultural contact situations increases. Consequently, the ability to deal effectively with intercultural situations is gaining in importance. However, the majority of studies on measures of intercultural competence focuses on Western Europe and the United States or cultures of the Far East. For the present study, previously understudied Eastern European (former communist) cultures were included, by sampling in Hungary, Serbia, and the Czech Republic, in addition to (the Central or Western European country) Germany. Thus, this study enabled comparisons of scale characteristics of the cultural intelligence scale (CQS), the multicultural personality questionnaire (MPQ), as well as the blatant and subtle prejudice scales, across samples from different cultures. It was also examined how the CQS and MPQ dimensions are associated with prejudice. To analyse scale characteristics, the factor structures and measurement invariances of the used instruments were analyzed. There were violations of configural measurement invariance observed for all of these scales, indicating that the comparability across samples is limited. Therefore, each of the samples was analyzed separately when examining how the CQS and MPQ dimensions are related to prejudice. It was revealed that, in particular, the motivational aspect of the CQS was statistically predicting lower prejudice. Less consistently, the MPQ dimensions of open-mindedness and flexibility were statistically predicting lower prejudice in some of the analyses. However, the violations of measurement invariance indicate differences in the constructs' meanings across the samples from different cultures. It is consequently argued that cross-cultural equivalence should not be taken for granted when comparing Eastern and Western European cultures.

Reviewed by: The evolution of the Slavic dual: A biolinguistic perspective by Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff Boštjan Dvořák Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff. The evolution of the Slavic dual: A biolinguistic perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield), 2019. 212 pp. [Studies in Slavic, Baltic, and Eastern European Languages and Cultures.] ISBN 978-1-4985-7924-7 (hardback), 978-1-4985-7925-4 (eBook). Indo-European comparative grammar offers many fascinating and complex language phenomena for synchronic and diachronic analysis. The dual number is undoubtedly one of the most puzzling and intensively discussed items among these. Almost all ancient IE languages had a dual in addition to singular and plural. But most of the modern languages have lost their dual in the course of their history; no IE language has gained a new dual. In the book under review, Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff gives a methodologically highly elaborated presentation and excellent analysis of how this grammatical category must have developed in the Slavic language group from a prehistoric stage through to the modern spoken languages, drawing on a large set of IE and non-IE languages for comparison. We see it as both a thrilling scholarly read and an indispensable example of methodology for many other fields of analytic language science. Starting with a panoramic overview of the grammatical category of dual in a general perspective against a background of typology and universals, the author passes to a selection of sources from the newer history of Slavic languages. She focusses on these and considers them in the light of several insightful theoretical approaches—Humboldt 1827, Jespersen 1965, Plank 1989, Corbett 2000, Cysouw 2009—followed by a thorough step-by-step analysis and explanation of the difficult, apparently unsolvable and paradoxical linguistic problem of why the dual number is conserved in just a few of the contemporary Slavic languages while it has been entirely lost in the rest of them under seemingly identical conditions. Her new account involves a reinterpretation of Chomsky’s concept of language as a biological and economic organism (Chomsky 2005, 2008 etc.), constantly changing with the purpose of improving its system of grammatical relations, oppositions, and rules, proceeding [End Page 71] from a given stage to another that appears to speakers to be as consistent and appropriate as possible. If we analyze the early Slavic system of singular/dual/plural as [+singular –augmented], [–singular –augmented], and [–singular +augmented] respectively (p. 114), the dual turns out to be the most marked. This excess of markedness can simply be eliminated by “impoverishment”, as most of the Slavic languages have done in creating their singular vs. plural systems. Or it can become less marked as a “reanalyzed dual” through the principle of Morphosyntactic Feature Economy, yielding [–singular] [–augmented] expressed by two separate exponents (p. 115ff). Upper and Lower Sorbian add -j to their dual forms, and Slovenian adds dva ‘two’ to its inherited dual pronouns (e.g., ona > onadva). Therefore, as excellently demonstrated by Slobodchikoff, the different final results in the respective languages—a full three-number-system (singular, dual, and plural) in pronominal, verbal, and nominal inflexion in Slovenian and Lower and Upper Sorbian, opposed to the reduced two-number-system (singular and plural) of the pronouns, nouns and verbs in Old East Slavic and Kashubian—are due to the same driving wheel of change, the gradual appearance of a syncretism in a group of personal pronouns, as can be traced mainly to the 2nd and 1st person forms for dual and plural number, inherited from the well documented, common former language stages. Against the background of the universal rule of systematization, speakers using the respective idiom are forced to reinterpret the asymmetry of the deficient system, and to either add or remove the critical forms in order to repair it. Thus, the tendency for systematization can be considered as the motivating force of almost any step of change within a language system—with irregularities revealing remnant elements of former stages of a changing whole, at the same time usually causing its “improvement”, the direction and extent of which depend on the interpretation by the speakers. The methodical fidelity to Chomsky’s principle of biological economy can lead...

Previous research has extensively examined the relationship between student socioeconomic status (SES) and their reading literacy. However, few studies have explored how the different facets of perceived teacher social support (TSS) moderate the SES-reading literacy link, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. The present study utilized data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, which encompasses 515,170 students across 70 countries and economies. These countries/economies were grouped into eight distinct cultural clusters based on Cultural Value Orientation Theory: African and Middle Eastern, Confucian, East-Central European, East European, English-speaking, Latin American, South Eastern, and West European cultures. Employing structural equation modeling, we found a consistent positive correlation between SES and reading literacy across all eight cultural contexts. Distinct TSS facets (i.e., teacher support, teacher emotional support, and teacher feedback) exhibited varying moderating effects on the SES-reading literacy relationship across different cultures. Furthermore, the variations in effect size across the eight cultural clusters are explicable by cultural values. Our study underscores the necessity of differentiating the TSS facets and the importance of cultural context in assessing the interactions among the investigated variables.

This article discusses overlaps and dissimilarities between eastern Europeans’ and Africans’ subordinate position in relation to imperial powers from the perspective of a South African writer who lived in Poland. Lewis Nkosi’s subtle and ironic style outlines the burden of colonialism and cultural marginalization shared by Poles and South Africans, but also reveals the paternalism and condescension disguised by socialist slogans of solidarity with Third World nations. The complex relation between (post)colonial and eastern European cultures is informed by the Cold War.

Eastern Europe encompasses a huge area with different ecotones settled non-uniformly during Mesolithic from c. 10,400–9,200 bc. The end of the Mesolithic in eastern Europe corresponds to the beginning of the Atlantic period when pottery spread over vast areas rather rapidly (c. 6,000–5,600 bc). The Mesolithic strategies increasingly relied on the exploitation of aquatic resources, waterfowl, edible plants, and hunting of animals adapted to the forest and forest-steppe environments. The development of effective use of aquatic resources allowed breaking through ecological barriers posed by large bodies of wetlands and turn them to transport routes and as source of food. Different eastern European Mesolithic cultures were formed on the basis of the local Palaeolithic cultures or under the influence of neighbouring cultures, which resulted in the formation of a number of different technocomplexes. Substantial changes in the social organization of Mesolithic groups are marked by the appearance of large ‘communal’ cemeteries and new forms of art, restricted to several smaller areas within the forest zone of eastern Europe. The Late Mesolithic is characterized by cultural diversity manifested through diversification of complexes.

This essay focuses on representations of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe in U.S. homophile periodicals from 1953 to 1964. Extending the application of Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism to the Cold War period, the essay examines 128 articles and other items that were published in ONE, Mattachine Review, and The Ladder and demonstrates that these periodicals often engaged in homonationalist discourses when constructing the Russian, Soviet, and Eastern European “other.” Negative constructions of these regions were sometimes used to affirm the political alignment of the homophile authors with the American nation. At other times, negative constructions were used in comparative assessments that critiqued both the United States and the Soviet and Eastern European regions. In contrast, positive constructions of Russian, Soviet, and Eastern European peoples and cultures were used as evidence that non-heteronormative desires and bodies had legitimate places in many “primitive” cultures and existed across all nations and periods.

This unprecedented reference work systematically represents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews from their first settlement in the region to the present day. More than 1,800 alphabetical entries encompass a vast range of topics, including religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature, places, organizations, intellectual movements, and important figures. The two-volume set also features more than 1,000 illustrations and 55 maps. With original and up-to-date contributions from an international team of 450 distinguished scholars, the Encyclopedia covers the region between Germany and the Ural Mountains, from which more than 2.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1920. Even today the majority of Jewish immigrants to North America arrive from Eastern Europe. Engaging, wide-ranging, and authoritative, this work is a rich and essential reference for readers with interests in Jewish studies and Eastern European history and culture.

The COURAGE Registry is a digital research tool that allows exploring the legacy of cultural opposition in former Eastern European socialist countries by cataloging and describing relevant collections on dissident culture across Eastern Europe and worldwide. The linked database reveals a great variety of nonconformist cultural practices that were formerly largely unknown and promotes comparative research of similar phenomena in Eastern European societies and cultures. The researchers on the project tended to treat visual sources as traces of the past equally as important as written documents. Images were not only illustrations of the given narratives but, in some cases, visual documents were the only sources that preserved the memory of the alternative or underground activity, while in other cases, it was the act of taking pictures that resulted in the confrontation with official cultural policy. This article aims to provide insight into the basic dilemmas and issues that the project faced dealing with images for the database through three examples. Firstly, we focus on the photo documentation of an exhibition of the Hungarian art group Inconnu that was made by the secret police following the destruction of the artworks. Secondly, we show how photos were also taken by official photographers who operated in the so-called “grey zone.” Finally, our third example refers to Fortepan, a unique public initiative that focuses on the digital preservation of private photographs created between 1900 and 1990.

The Maikop culture in the Northern Caucasus

From the "Jerusalem of the Balkans" to the Goldene Medina:Jewish Immigration from Salonika to the United States* Devin E. Naar (bio) Who are these strangers who can be seen in the ghetto of the East Side, sitting outside of coffee-houses smoking strange-looking waterpipes, sipping a dark liquid from tiny cups and playing a game of checkers and dice, a game that we are not familiar with? See the signs on these institutions. They read: "Café Constantinople," "Café Oriental," Café Smyrna," and there are other signs in Hebrew characters that you perhaps cannot read. Are they Jews? No it cannot be; they do not look like Jews; they do not speak Yiddish. Listen; what is that strange tongue they are using? It sounds like Spanish or Mexican. Are they Spaniards or Mexicans? If so, where did they get the coffee-houses, an importation from Greece and Turkey? -Samuel M. Auerbach, "The Levantine Jew" (1916)1 Writing in The Immigrants in America Review, Auerbach offered an image of "Levantine Jews" as "strangers" within the context of a predominantly Yiddish-speaking, eastern European Jewish culture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the first decades of the twentieth century. Auerbach, like his contemporaries writing in English or Yiddish, provided a perspective that he felt would resonate with his readership.2 Subsequent accounts of American Jewry have echoed descriptions [End Page 435] such as Auerbach's insofar as they have treated Jews from the eastern Mediterranean-described alternatively as "Levantine," "Oriental" or "Sephardi"-as marginal figures in their narratives. Others have omitted completely from their accounts the experiences of these Jews, who stray far from the mold of "normative" American Jewry. In addition to differences in language, culture, geographic origin, and religious traditions (minhagim), the relatively small demographic weight of Jews from the eastern Mediterranean also has contributed to their marginalization in American Jewish historiography. Perhaps as many as sixty thousand Jews from the eastern Mediterranean arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1924, whereas over two million largely Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe arrived during the same period.3 As a result, Jews from eastern Europe often have stood symbolically for American Jewry of the early twentieth century.4 Recent works, such as those issued in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of Jews in America, pay scant attention to Jews from the eastern Mediterranean. They do begin their narratives of American Jewish history with the tale of the twenty-three refugees who fled from the Inquisition in Recife, Brazil, and settled in New Amsterdam in 1654.5 These "Old Sephardim," however, constituted a group distinct from those Jews who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean during the early twentieth century, and whom scholars have labeled the "New Sephardim." Some members of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue of the "Old Sephardim" in New York, initially argued in the 1910s that [End Page 436] the newcomers should not be categorized as "Sephardim" at all. Rather, they advocated labels such as "Levantine" or "Oriental," both terms with derogatory connotations, so as not to muddy their own reputation as the "noble," well-established "Sephardim," the true heirs to the legacy of the Spanish golden age.6 Contributors to the Ladino and Anglo-Jewish press in America debated and polemicized over the terms "Levantine," "Oriental," and "Sephardi," some distinguishing among the Jews from the eastern Mediterranean according to linguistic community-Ladino, Greek, and Arabic-and viewing only Ladino-speakers, the perceived descendants of medieval Iberian Jewry, as "Sephardim" in a strict sense.7 The only terms of identification not contested during the early twentieth century were those based on city or town of origin that the newcomers gave themselves and utilized internally. A few scholars have succeeded in giving voice to the Jews from the eastern Mediterranean who lived in early twentieth-century America. They have filled important lacunae by focusing on the efforts of these [End Page 437] immigrants at communal organization, their interactions with the "Old Sephardim" and "Ashkenazim," and their creation of a Ladino press in New York.8 Such scholars point out city-based identity but often represent it as a source of conflict and an obstacle...

Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern European literature and culture in the current academic climate? This essay defends the centrality both of literary and Eastern European studies in the twenty-first-century curriculum.

My chapter examines three anecdotes about western European perceptions of eastern European cuisine and culture in order to explore how western Europeans tried to link eastern Europe to the larger “East” in Asia and Africa, as well as how eastern Europeans responded to such characterizations. These anecdotes were written by western Europeans in the context of the crusades, and both deal with the issue of what happens when you transplant peoples to different regions and as a result alter their natural diets. The first anecdote comes from Pope Honorius III in response to Duke Leszek the White of Poland allegedly petitioning the pope to allow him to fulfil his crusading vows in Prussia rather than in the Holy Land because the diet he would have to endure there would be deleterious to his health, for in those “remote parts,” he would be unable to drink his native beer and mead and would instead be forced to drink wine or water. The second anecdote was written by the Teutonic Knights, who, although largely German, portrayed themselves as heirs to the Maccabees in the Holy Land. Because of this heritage, the Teutonic Knights supposedly were able to thrive in the wilderness of the Baltic littoral, while the native inhabitants, the Prussians and Lithuanians, perished in their own lands because the diet of the wilderness was unsuitable for them. These two anecdotes have traditionally been interpreted as jokes by modern scholars. And, while they do indeed appear humourous to a modern audience – and might also have been viewed as such by medieval audiences – they also reveal a great deal about how people in the Middle Ages viewed their own and others’ places in the world. The deadly serious third anecdote makes the centrality of food in medieval views of health, culture, and identity even clearer.

Marc Chagall: On Art and Culture, edited by Benjamin Harshav, translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 225 pp. $49.50. Marc Chagall and His Times, A Documentary Narrative, by Benjamin Harshav, with translations by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 1026 pp. $39.95. The two volumes constitute a major ingathering of the verbal culture of Marc Chagall across the twentieth century. In pursuit of his subject, Professor Harshav collected every scrap of letters, poems, essays, notes, autobiographical writings, musings, bills, etc. in Yiddish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and English. He also harvested letters and private communications from Chagall's wives, friends, daughter, collectors and art dealers with the intention of illuminating the complexity of a major plastic artist of the twentieth century. Professor Harshav's own multicultural life shadows in its way the geographical movements and cultural growth of Chagall as the artist moved physically, psychologically and culturally through traditional and secularizing Eastern European Jewish life and culture, Russia of the Silver Age and the Soviet Union, France of the Belle Epoque, the Inter-war years, Vichy, and post World War Two. Harshav pursued the Chagallian pilgrimage to Mandate Palestine and later Israel and even followed to America and captured Chagall's wanderings among the Yiddish cultural emigre milieu in New York and the elite Anglo-American world. Harshav's tireless labors have brought together in chronological order the written artifacts of Chagall's verbal communications. He and Barbara Harshav have cleanly translated them into English and published most of these manuscripts for the very first time. They have performed thereby a most notable accomplishment as Kulturtraegers opening to cultural historians, art historians, post-colonial comparatists, Jewish Studies specialists, etc., the scattered writings of Marc Chagall and his contemporaries. The volume, Marc Chagall: On Art and Culture, gathers together in chronological order 1. the public addresses and communications of the plastic artist and 2. the translation of the first published critical study by Efros and Tugenhold on Chagall's art, written in Russian, which attempted to contextualize Chugall's works as the unique expression of the Jewish Imaginary of Eastern European Jewry. This important short study provided European critics in the Inter-War years -- via German translation -- some fuzzy perspective on Chugall's art without much iconographic help. In the Introduction of On Art and Culture, Harshav provides a biographical overview of Chugall's life and then proceeds to contextualize and interpret his presence in terms of the Eastern European Jewish world in flux just before the Revolution. Then Harshav proffers his explication of Chugall's multicultural personality. From Part i to Part 6, following the chronological order, Harshav presents before each selection a short authoritative commentary which guides the reader to observe in the text what Harshav considers important. This scholarly approach follows the style of positivist literary history manuals which dominated lycees and Gymnasiums in pre-and post-World War One Europe. The presentation of facts is generally unerring. References are minimal and often allude to other scholarly essays on Chagall by the editor himself. Harshav has a perspective that brooks little contradiction. He presents himself as the authorative figure with his knowledge of all these languages, his own life experience as one of the last native Yiddish speakers from Vilna, the crown site of Yiddishism, his own Hebraic and Slavic cultural experiences, and his intuitive understanding -- himself a published poet and distinguished scholar of poetics and linguistic theory. Harshav, therefore, considers himself a guide to a lost world of which he holds the keys (any previous interpretative efforts being comparative failures), and, given this plethora of new documents, implies that his presentation should be taken as authoritative. …

As in other Eastern European Countries, film industry and culture were of central interest for the newly established socialist Yugoslav state after the Second World War. Besides the institutionalisation of a professional and profitable film industry, amateur cinema clubs were inaugurated all over the Yugoslav republics for educative purposes in the field of technical culture. Due to a prevailing underestimation of their activities and the specific, relatively liberal Yugoslav socialist path, some of these clubs became hubs of an experimental and critical film scene. This article discusses the film ‘Ships don’t come ashore’ (1955) which Mihovil Pansini – one of the leading figures of Yugoslav experimental film – made in Cinema Club Zagreb in his initial years as a film maker. It is discussed as an early example of a filmic counterpoint to political ideologies and mainstream film themes. A detailed analysis reveals that the dissent of the film, with its story of a person’s impossible escape from an island, comes in three dimensions: the individual stance, the artistic experiment, and the political message.