In the Shades of Spain: Gor′kii’s Last Legacy to Hebrew Literature

Abstract

The ideological rivalry between two modern Jewish literary cultures in Soviet Russia, resolved shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution by the expulsion and ostracism of the Hebrew and the official empowerment of the Yiddish, is dramatically resurrected in an unknown episode of the mid-1930s. Recorded in the documents of the publishing house “Academia” that I examined at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art are the detailed plans, initiated in 1936, for publication ‐ in 1938, no less ‐ of a Russian anthology of selected works of the Hebrew poets, prose writers, and philosophers of the Golden Age of Muslim Spain from the 10th to the 13th century. 1 Texts as distant from the edicts of the Proletkul¢t as lehayims of the brimming wine cup resurface in these “Academia” proposals, contracts, assignment of lines, and handwritten copies of projected