Tracing the Scholarly Legacy of I.M. Pul’ner: A Detour through the Pages of Sovetish Heymland

Abstract

This article explores the scholarly legacy of I.M. Pul’ner, director of the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad from the late 1930s until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and considers the significance of material culture for Soviet Jewish ethnography during the interwar period. It also traces the rediscovery of Pul’ner by Soviet Jewish intellectuals in the 1970s, and the global journey of a long-lost archival document, which is now preserved at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.