Abstract
Most scholars of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam believe that he was alienated from his Jewish roots and had no interest in Jewish culture. This image was partly created by his wife, who came from a family of Jewish converts to Christianity. As a close reading of Mandelstam’s four essays on Kiev in 1926 (the two‐part essay “Kiev,” “Mikhoels” and “Berezil”) against the background of his relationships with Kiev Jewish artists and activists of the Jewish cultural association Kultur‐Lige demonstrates, Mandelstam was engaged in a complicated intrigue aimed at preserving the Moscow State Jewish Chamber Theatre, which was at that time directed by Alexander Granovsky. Mandelstam’s depictions of Kiev betray his close familiarity and fascination with everyday Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement as well as his alienation, as an assimilated Russian Jew from St Petersburg, from Jewish “provincialism.”
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