Russian Jew Research Articles

Anatole Litvak: a unique figure among émigré filmmakers in 1930s French cinema

ABSTRACT Anatole Litvak, a Russian Jew who began his career at Ufa in Berlin, was one of the German émigrés who settled in France after Hitler came to power. His case is little known, yet it is both singular and emblematic of the career of émigré filmmakers in France. Litvak established himself early in France, where he made four films between 1931 and 1935: Coeur de lilas/Lilac (1932), Cette vieille canaille (‘This Old Rascal’, 1933), L’Équipage/Flight into Darkness (1935) and Mayerling (1936), the triumph of the latter opening the door to Hollywood. Above all, his success was ‘curious’ compared to the difficulties faced by his colleagues: this first French period was one of the most fruitful of his career. This article looks back at Litvak’s career to highlight his unique place in French cinema in the first half of the 1930s.

The Romani Woman and the (non)Wandering Jew: Immigration, Dissociation, and The Search for Belonging

The author writes about growing up with her complex and enigmatic immigrant father, who lived many years as a stigmatized other, a Russian Jew in northern China. She focuses on the impact this personal family history has on her treatment with a female Romani patient from Eastern Europe, a more recent immigrant, who also lived many years as a stigmatized other. The author differentiates between the experience of one-time immigrants and migrants, the latter being haunted by generations of dislocation, which causes them to question their fundamental sense of safety and belonging. The author discusses the ways the personal and professional threads become interwoven in the work, impacting the bi-directional conscious and unconscious flow of the treatment. Together patient and analyst build toward a mutually transformative moment, following a clinical impasse.

Joseph Roth’s anti-American utopia

The article is devoted to the novel Job [Hiob] (1930), written by the Austrian Joseph Roth about the life of a Russian Jew named Mendel Singer. Upon his emigration to America, he is subjected to trials not unlike the long-suffering biblical character — a cruel test of faith followed by last-minute miraculous salvation. Roth’s narrative strategy rests on the substitution of the empirical picture of the world with the spiritual reality of a religious mind. By contrasting the poetics of realism with the truth of the eternal myth, Roth insists on an artist’s right to depict reality from the metaphysical perspective of the absolute future. This material provides the background for the article’s discussion of the conflict between social adaptiveness and culture, which not only are mutually conditioned but also tend to develop in stark contradiction with each other. Roth’s protagonist, who embodies the Jewish idea of becoming a society’s opponent, remains on the culture’s side. He survives America’s excruciating test, and it is only through the mythological model of Job at the core of the novel that the story has a happy ending — a triumph of a religious and aesthetic utopia.

Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia by Brigid O'Keeffe

Reviewed by: Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia by Brigid O'Keeffe Anna Vozna (bio) Brigid O'Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia ( New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 266 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-350-16065-1. Brigid O'Keeffe's book on the history of Esperanto is a fascinating read. Esperanto is an artificial language created more than a century ago by a Russian Jew, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, who was aiming to overcome his marginalization in the Russian Empire by creating a new language that would allow participation in a more accommodating reality through a new means of talking and writing. By telling this old story, the book addresses questions that are as relevant for sociolinguists today as they were at the dawn of the Soviet Union. Namely, scholars working on language and identity have long been preoccupied with exposing linguistic and cultural hegemony and looking for solutions to transcend it. The history of Esperanto, as laid out by O'Keeffe, may be informative in this regard for scholars, regardless of whether their methodological preference is primordialism or social constructivism. Approaches informed by primordialism include claims for the indigenous status of a language or the need for its revitalization. Similarly, Esperantists challenged the languages of cultural hegemons, or rather the very structure of linguistic hierarchy. They believed that this structure reflected and reproduced oppressive categorization and discrimination against languages deemed nonprestigious or subpar taxonomically as "vernaculars" or "dialects." At the same time, like the proponents of constructivism, Esperantists believed that a new, more accommodating language rooted in a more equalizing worldview can be constructed to overcome old cultural hierarchies. Today, this attitude is demonstrated by the World Englishes movement as a response to the hegemony of a normative version of the English language (such as British English), or other similar solutions, which I will further refer to as language localization. O'Keeffe's account of Esperanto adds to modern sociolinguistic knowledge about language variants that are localized or revitalized as a means of resisting linguistic and cultural hegemony. One of the generally accepted observations by modern scholars has been the tendency of the communities practicing those language variants to remain exclusive and restrict joining them by their declared "constituencies." More often than not, the logic of exclusion followed by these communities is rooted in the very categorization and hierarchization systems they [End Page 296] aim to overwrite. As the book suggests, the community of practice of Esperanto speakers was not very different in this regard. Its boundaries and membership characterized it as rather exclusionary in terms of Eurocentricity, elitism, gender biases, and even occasional antisemitism. According to the author, Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, firmly believed that his language would be truly international, easy for anyone to learn. As a Russian Jew who found himself on the boundaries of the mainstream community of practice of Russian speakers in the Russian Empire, he set out to create a new more inclusive language. The history of the origins of his idea is detailed in chapter 1, "A Universal Language for a Globalizing World." However, as O'Keeffe demonstrates in her account of the linguistic composition of the new language, Zamenhof's world was effectively confined to Europe. He constructed a new global language based on European ones, thus making it significantly more accessible for speakers of European languages and users of Roman script. Chapter 2, "Pen Pals, Dreamers and Globetrotters," and chapter 4, "Comrades with(out) Borders,"further detail the barriers faced by aspiring Esperantists, including those involving income and gender. For instance, all one needed for participation in epistolary exchange in Esperanto was money for stamps, making it relatively affordable across different income groups. But traveling to Esperanto conferences and other inperson communication opportunities was limited to those in possession of significant disposable income for travel. Similarly, in pen-pal communication, women and men had equal voices, but when it came to the in-person events, conventional gender roles limited women's input. Esperanto convention organizers restricted women to being translators and secretaries as opposed to holding leadership positions. Another, almost painfully ironic, exclusion was that of the anti-antisemitic ideology that fueled...

Chants of Indictment

Chants of Indictment Patricia Laurence (bio) My German Dictionary Katherine Hollander The Waywiser Press https://waywiser-press.com/product/my-german-dictionary/ 80 Pages; Print, $17.00 Katherine Hollander is both a poet and historian and this twinning shines through in her first collection of poems, My German Dictionary. In this volume that won the 2019 Anthony Hecht prize, she wears a "good travelling coat" and invites us to travel and dream back and forth in English and German with her. She begins, I couldn't be a good Jew, so I triedTo be a good historian. I couldn't beA good historian, so I wrote poems. Her poems hover over a historical landscape—the Great War, the Somme, World War II, Shoah, and Weimar Berlin, and are intertwined with an internal landscape of memory, loss, death and hope. The "travelling coat," she tells you, had … a fat gold tassel at the shoulderPull on it, and from the wide sleeve a littlecedar ladder nudges out, ready to take you away. And climbing down that ladder you are taken away to places that exist on maps—"Germany is green and Russia is pink and gold" as well as to spots of memory, feeling and history that ripple with a disquiet beneath. These are poems of conviction and bravery. In "Answers to the Question in Europe" in the first section of poems, we are presented with a narrator, "I," who is made of patches of Europe, "My mother was a Polish Catholic. / My father was a Russian Jew. … When I was sixteen, I was sent away / to the south of France." She travels, sleeps, dreams through the creation and destruction of nations, and is anointed by a poet in the poem to be a living voice and to "write a letter home." She does this throughout the collection and re-imagines the terrors of history in Europe. IV.I slept under a blanket of nations… At the foot of the bed, a ladywas sewing. How the borders achedwhere her needle pierced them! Disquiet enters, After a while, I couldn't sleep. The patchworkwas coming apart, letting in the coldFrom the wide-open window…Tiny eagles and airplanes Circled the airspace over my head. VI.I met a man in a café…He said I am every poetslaughtered, every revolutionary starved.… Now you are marked with my own seal,and every wordyou write will be a letter home…to my heart like a white valentine, my sister. Throughout the collection, she welds together an outer and inner landscape that has actual geography and history as well as a transcendental reality. In the moving poem, "Sophie and Escha, 1929," two sisters living in Berlin after the Great War lead quiet working lives. Hollander beautifully captures their appearance as they emerge from a certain cultural period: "They both wear black dresses and white / dickeys. They each have a pair of maryjanes the color of black / cherries, with a mother-of-pearl button on the strap /… They are both partial to the / feuilletons [part of newspaper devoted to literature] of Joseph Roth and the cartoons of Georg Grosz. Käthe / Kollowitz makes them cry." But history sits at their table where they take opposite sides and have great arguments, Esche reads Der Jude. Sophie reads Das Tagebuch. Yet tenderly, Hollander, brings the sisters together—their brother after all having died in the Great War—and in the end they link arms and go out to the movies or zoo or theater in Weimar. But the sorrows of war, the Great War, continue and are highlighted, as Hollander recounts how the young men going off are "anointed," … sleep nowin one another's arms in the damp trenchesdrugged with death.…And the dead come in, dragging their nextwar behind them. This is the theme of Section II that amplifies the futility of death in war, and the first poem, "War Suite" strikes a personal note with its dedication, "to my brother." The image of the brother, personal or historical, continues to surface. The narrator questions "Shouldn't we have families too," and...

Polish Jews, Russian Jews and the Transfer of the Social Imagery: the Polish Kingdom and Russia in the 19th Century

The article analyzes the process of making and the evolution of the terms „Polish Jew” and “Russian Jew”in the 19th century in the Polish Kingdom and the Russian Empire. The article shows how social imageries were transferred from the Polish Kingdom to Russia and in the opposite direction and how they were mutually influencing the defining of new Jewish identities created in relation to the countries in which the Jews lived. Finally, the article shows, on the bases of few biographical cases, how practically the transfers of social image ries we retaking place.

All the Exiles оf Irène Némirovsky

The success of the novel Suite francaise has again sparked interest for the opus of Irène Némirovsky, an author who wrote during the interwar period and produced around twenty novels and several collections of novellas. The life of Irène Némirovsky (Ирма Ирина Леонидовна Немировская, 1903-1942), a Russian Jew who lived as a stateless immigrant since the Russian Revolution until her tragic death in Auschwitz, has also attracted a lot of public interest. In this paper, our focus is first on the circumstances in which Nemirovska lived and wrote, as they had an essential impact on her fate and the themes that underlie much of her work. After that overview of the work of Irène Némirovsky, the analysis in this paper focuses on the novels in which the themes of exile, nostalgia and lack of belonging are evident, such as David Golder (David Golder, 1929), Snow in Autumn (Les Mouches d’automne, 1931), The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de solitude, 1935) and The Dogs and the Wolves (Les Chiens et les Loups, 1940).The theoretical basis for our analysis is found in the study The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym. In this study, Boym distinguishes between the two main subtypes of nostalgia: restorative and reflective and she identifies their characteristics. The analysis of the main characters’ actions and feelings in the afore mentioned Nemirovska’s novels show that reflective nostalgia is predominant in them; the characters show contradictory tendencies: on the one hand to fit in and integrate into the society, while on the other they are dominated by anxiety, sorrow and feelings of displacement and lack of belonging.

Homeless in the Fatherland: Xiao Hong's Migrant Geographies

Author(s): Iwasaki, Clara | Abstract: This article examines the multiple ways Chinese writers depicted the incorporation of female national subjects into the struggle to liberate Manchuria after it was annexed by Japan in 1932. Whereas male writers such as Xiao Jun (1907–1988) and Luo Binji (1917–1994) have integrated the multiethnic population of Manchuria, particularly foreign women, into the cause of liberation through marital and sexual relations, the female writer Xiao Hong (1911–1941) depicts the relationships of Russian Jewish, Korean, and Chinese refugee women as lateral friendships. Xiao Hong notes the presence of these three ethnic subjects outside the nation but does not seek to coopt them into China’s national cause, instead calling attention to a separate relationality, which literary scholars Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih term “minor transnationalism” (Lionnet and Shih 2005). They suggest that minor literatures and cultures are not always juxtaposed with major ones; instead, literary relationships can occur between minor cultures. Focusing on three friendships between minor subjects, this article analyzes and compares three short works by Xiao Hong—about a Russian Jew, a Korean, and Xiao Hong herself—and explores her problematization of diasporic nostalgia and the gendered incorporation of ethnic subjects into the cause of national liberation. Keywords: Chinese literature, Xiao Hong, Manchuria, minor literature, diaspora, gender

Leon Pinsker'sAutoemancipation!and the Emergence of German as a Language of Jewish Nationalism

AbstractThis article examines the role of the German language in early Jewish nationalism. It focuses on the publication, reception, and afterlife of the pamphletAutoemancipation!, published in 1882 by Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish doctor. The first Jewish nationalist pamphlet to be written in German by a Russian Jew, its rhetoric and terminology tapped into various Jewish and European discourses of emancipation. Pinsker not only challenged the legal-political conception of emancipation as it had been commonly used in German-Jewish discourse, but also mobilized its social and revolutionary connotations, which had been associated with radical European political movements since 1848. Moreover,Autoemancipation!marked a shift in Jewish political culture with regard to the potential function of the German language. Since the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, German had a controversial status in Central and Eastern European Jewish societies given its association with Jewish Enlightenment, religious reform, secularization, and assimilation. Pinsker was the first to use German as a transnational language aimed at promoting the Jewish national cause. In this respect,Autoemancipation!set in motion a process whereby German became the chief language of Jewish nationalist activism.

Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944) by Brenna Moore (review)

Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). By Brenna Moore. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xiii, 293. $30.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-268-03529-7.)Raissa Maritain (1883-1960) was a gifted poet, influential writer on aesthetics, and celebrated memoirist. Today, she is mainly known a small number of academics and a few Catholics outside of the academy as the wife of a renowned Thomistic philosopher and human rights advocate. The scant recent attention she has received has depicted her as archetype of suffering Catholic femininity or as a prospective candidate for sainthood along with her husband, Jacques. This new book by Brenna Moore situates her as a key figure in the early-twentieth-century French Catholic Revival. The renouveau catholique was marked by celebrated conversions and myriad contributions arts and letters. It also embodied culture clash in advancing a suffering-centered imaginaire (p. 3) that reinforced an association of Catholicism with femininity that was derogatory from the republican perspective (p. 68). This stigma-the alleged fetishizing of souffrance-still influences scholarly interpretations that, according Moore, exile women like St. Therese of Lisieux, Raissa Maritain, and Simone Weil to the ranks of the pathetic and the bizarre (p. 7), particularly in Richard Burton's study Holy Tears, Holy Blood (Ithaca, NY, 2004).Moore uses the oeuvre of Raissa Maritain answer a central question . . . why the fascination with suffering? (p. 3). She traces Maritain's life (rarely does one read a book in which Raissa is the default Maritain) from the eve of her and her husband's conversion in Belle Epoque Paris the end of their World War II exile in the United States. Born a Russian Jew, Raissa Oumancoff was raised in assimilationist immigrant family that encouraged her intellectual growth, and it was while pursuing scientific studies that she met her future husband. Repelled by the arid positivism of the Sorbonne and the laicizing French Third Republic, she and Jacques sought find meaning in defiance of a modern bourgeois culture that denied the reality of suffering and death. They turned a series of mentors, including philosopher Henri Bergson, poet Charles Peguy, and novelist Leon Bloy. The last of these luminaries served as godfather when the couple sought Catholic baptism in 1906 along with Raissa's sister, Vera. Bloy's focus on female and Jewish abjection greatly influenced Raissa, and both Maritains embraced his philosemitism, tainted as it was with supersessionism. Moore offers a nuanced interpretation of the renouveau catholique philosemitism that vied with antisemitism for the allegiance of French Catholics, drawing on recent work by Samuel Moyn and others in identifying even ostensibly pro-Jewish writings as trafficking in essentialism and stereotype (p. 13).The Maritains' remarkable openness Judaism, Russian Orthodoxy, and the artistic, literary, and musical avant-garde-all richly portrayed in Stephen Schloesser's book Jazz Age Catholicism (Buffalo, NY, 2005)-made their home in the Paris suburb of Meudon both a retreat center and a vibrant salon. Her own poetic gift was encouraged by Jean Cocteau and nurtured by friendships with, among others, Marc Chagall. …

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky by Galya Diment (review)

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky by Galya Diment (review)

Heroine, Reformer, Citizen: Novelistic Conventions in Antin's The Promised Land

In 1891, when Mary Antin immigrated from Polotsk, Russia, to Boston, “a number of eastern [US] intellectuals” had begun “to argue that the southern and eastern Europeans were not only socially dangerous, but also racially unassimilable” (Higham 40). By the time Antin published her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), these xenophobic beliefs had gained further political influence in legislative debates. In The Promised Land, Antin challenges contemporary anti-immigration arguments so forcefully that some critics have misread her autobiography as idealizing America and assimilation. Even as she asserts that Russian Jewish immigrants can become valuable US citizens, though, she also represents immigration and naturalization as profoundly unsettling processes. Antin’s ability to celebrate immigration and critique acculturation at a moment of national anxiety over these issues depends upon her skillful manipulation of literary genres. Michael P. Kramer, among other critics, has noted the significance of the various generic conventions Antin deploys in her autobiography, claiming that she draws on a broader tradition of American autobiographies and essays to represent her Americanization as “unproblematic” (128). This essay argues that a close attention to Antin’s engagement with fiction helps us to see that while she portrays herself as an Americanized woman, she nonetheless depicts her experience of immigration as fraught with conflict. Antin’s turn to multiple genres, including various types of novels, evinces the difficulty of her search for a form that will convey the complexities of her identity, as well as her need to fictionalize her life in order to render it legibly American. In particular, The Promised Land draws on the productive tension between two popular modes of fiction—sentimentalism and realism—to depict Antin’s development from Russian Jew to patriotic American and immigrant reformer. She modifies both modes and her own history to make them align more closely with one another; as she represents herself, Antin is both a participant in sentimental benevolence and a New Woman in a thickly described modern culture. Her largely unexamined engagement with the conventions of fiction allows her to rewrite familiar genres or modes of fiction that are both interrelated and defined against one another. Thus, Antin’s autobiography offers an illuminating example of how minority writers could revise dominant literary modes so as to make them more inclusive. Sentimentalism and realism prove important to Antin’s narrative because they sanction her exceptional transformation from a working-class immigrant to a middle-class woman and writer. Broadly speaking, antebellum sentimental novels center on the reform of an individual’s character. Over the course of such novels, the protagonist’s development of self-control and newfound commitment to the good of her community come to influence her country, and she is rewarded with a loving home. Though Antin acknowledges that these conventions can

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issueLiterature and Fine ArtsPolyakova, Olga A. Icons: Masterpieces of Russian Art (16th–19th Centuries, from the Collection of the Moscow State Integrated Museum‐Reserve at Kolomenskoye).Steiner, Lina. For Humanity's Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture.Diment, Galya. A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky.Roubakine, Alexandre. La Cité. Translated into French by Wladimir Berelowitch.Gillespie, Alyssa Dinega, ed. Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations.Frank, Siggy. Nabokov's Theatrical Imagination.Young, George M. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers.HistoryGruber, Isaiah. Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles.Davies, Richard, and Matilda Moreton. Wooden Churches: Travelling in the Russian North.Polunov, A. Iu. K. P. Pobedonostsev v obshchestvenno‐politicheskoi i dukhovnoi zhizni Rossii.Johnson, Emily D. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie.Evtuhov, Catherine. Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth‐Century Nizhnii Novgorod.Romaniello, Matthew P. The Elusive Empire and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671.Tomohiko, Uyama, ed. Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts.Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience.Baraban, Elena V., Stephan Jaeger, and Adam Muller, eds. Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines.Petrone, Karen. The Great War in Russian Memory.Lutz, Martin. Siemens im Sowjetgeschäft: Eine Institutionengeschichte der deutsch‐sowjetischen Beziehhungen 1917–1933.Dieckmann, Christoph. Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944. 2 vols.Chervinsky, Julie, ed. Lives of the Great Patriotic War: The Untold Stories of Soviet Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army during World War II / Sud'by v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Neopublikovannye istorii sovetskikh krasnoarmeitsev‐evreev, uchastnikov Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny.Boriak, Tetiana. Dokumental'na spadshchyna ukraïns'koï emigratsiï v Ievropi: Praz'kyi arkhiv (1945–2010).Andreev, A. I., and D. Savelli, eds. Rerikhi: Mify i fakty.Roman, Meredith L. Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937.Hudson, Hugh D., Jr. Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State: Surveillance and Accommodation under the New Economic Policy.Fedor, Julie. Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition from Lenin to Putin.Johnston, Timothy. Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939–1953.Jenks, Andrew L. The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherIanitskii, O. N. Semeinaia khronika 1853–2002 gg. 2nd ed.Satter, David. It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.Aalto, Pami, ed. Russia's Energy Policies: National, Interregional, and Global Levels.Panibratov, Andrei. Russian Multinationals: From Regional Supremacy to Global Lead.Hankivsky, Olena, and Anastasiya Salnykova, eds. Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine.Ališauskienė, Milda, and Ingo W. Schröder, eds. Religious Diversity in Post‐Soviet Society: Ethnographies of Catholic Hegemony and the New Pluralism in Lithuania.Zavisca, Jane R. Housing the New Russia.Roberts, Sean P. Putin's United Russia Party.Stewart, Susan, et al., eds. Presidents, Oligarchs and Bureaucrats: Forms of Rule in the Post‐Soviet Space.Shevel, Oxana. Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe.Cooley, Alexander. Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia.

Pevsner on Graphic Design: Transnationality and the Historiography of Design

ABSTRACTThis article explores the impact of art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's transnational background—as a German-born Russian Jew who was exiled in Britain—on his interest in and appreciation of graphic design in England. It argues that the uneasy fascistic-nationalistic atmosphere of German society under the reign of terror by the Nazis during the early 1930s galvanized Pevsner, a ‘transnational’ historian, into believing that it is the designer's social responsibility to pursue functional design for the good of society. In other words, Pevsner believed that design could be instrumental both in developing artistic faculties within the individual and in imparting instructive meaning through the work to a general populace, whose aesthetic sense and political awareness may have been limited. As for the role of the art historian, Pevsner was thoroughly convinced that art historians, through their use of historical knowledge, could and should make accessible to both designers and lay people the knowledge...

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: the life and times of Samuel Koteliansky

Samuel Koteliansky (1880-1955) fled the pogroms of Russia in 1911 and established himself as a friend of many of Britain's literati and intellectuals, who were fascinated by his homeland's more civilized side: the Ballets Russes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Kot, as he was known, soon became an indispensable guide to Russian culture for England's leading writers, artists, and intellectuals, who in turn helped introduce British audiences to Russian works. A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury looks at the remarkable life and influence that an outsider had on the tightly knit circle of Britain's cultural elite. Among Koteliansky's friends were Katherine Mansfield, Leonard and Virginia Woolf - for whose Hogarth Press he translated many Russian classics - Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, H.G. Wells, and Dilys Powell. But it was his close and turbulent friendship with D.H. Lawrence, with whom he had copious correspondence, that proved to be Koteliansky's lasting legacy. In a lively and vibrant narrative, Galya Diment shows how, despite Kot's determination, he could never shake off the dark aspects of his past or overcome the streak of anti-Semitism that ran through British society and could be found in many of his famous literary friends. A stirring account of the early twentieth century, Jewish emigre life, and English and Russian letters, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury casts new light - and shadows - on the giants of English modernism.

Colonia Mauricio. Two Complementary Visions

In 1891 Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association (J.C.A.), which was to become one of the largest philanthropic firms of their time, conducting a gigantic experiment in social welfare consisting in the organized immigration of thousands of people from the Russian Empire to Argentina and setting up agricultural colonies. Colonia Mauricio, close to Carlos Casares, in the Provincia of Buenos Aires, was established in 1891 on the first land acquired by the J.C.A. in Argentina and by far the most fertile. In the early 20th century, the prosperity of the colony reflected the ideal of Hirsch, who in 1892 had stated in an interview with the New York Wor1d: “These exiles are so poor that if they are given the means to work and they are taught to work the land, so that the harvest would be sufficient to feed their families and earn some profit as well, I have no doubt that they will make good use of the opportunity.” However, Colonia Mauricio rapidly disintegrated. For 1930 the colony was only a memory. What happened? In this paper we will reconstruct the history of Colonia Mauricio from two complementary primary sources: the memories of Boris Garfunkel, one of the first and more important settlers, and the historical review written by Demetrio Aranovich, the first Russian Jew who earned a Doctorate degree in Medicine in Argentina, who attended the health needs of the colony in the early 20th. We will evaluate the hypothesis proposed by Aranovich as responsible for the dissolution of the Colony, and we will collate it with the vision of Garfunkel on this event.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. By Galya Diment. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. xii, 438 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $59.95, hard bound.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky. By Galya Diment. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. xii, 438 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $59.95, hard bound. - Volume 71 Issue 4

Genocide and the Terror of History

The Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and...

The Russian Jew Osip Mandelstam and Jewish Kiev

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.”

Leon Botstein on Hannah Arendt and Max Weber

[MWS 10.1 (2010) 95-100] ISSN 1470-8078 Leon Botstein on Hannah Arendt and Max Weber Leon Botstein The following internet interview was conducted by Peter Baehr (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) in August 2009. Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, NY, since 1975, wrote an undergradu ate thesis on Weber at the University of Chicago in which Hannah Arendt took a personal interest. A PhD in European history from Harvard followed. Botstein is the author of Jefferson's Children: Edu cation and the Promise of American Culture, and a pioneer in linking American higher education with public secondary schools. He has been the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992 and was appointed the music director of the Jerusalem Sym phony Orchestra, the orchestra of the Israel Broadcast Authority, in 2003. He is the founder and an artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, now in its twenty-first year. PB: Can you tell readers of Max Weber Studies what motivated you to write your undergraduate thesis on Max Weber during your final year at the University of Chicago? Who was the supervisor of this thesis and what was it about? (The University of Chicago no longer has the thesis, it either being lost or destroyed.) LB: The subject of the thesis was the idea of value neutrality or objectivity in the social sciences as put forward by Weber. Given the era in which Weber wrote his extensive methodological essays, I was interested in the political and social implications of methods and ideas of research and analysis, characterization, and explanation in the writing of history. I was also interested in the more popular, less technical rehearsal of his ideas in the better-known speeches on politics, science, and scholarship as vocation. I was fascinated by his efforts to give the social sciences some truth value, for lack of a better term, without slavishly imitating the procedures of science. The significance of the observer and the complexity of evidence© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 96 Max Weber Studies and circumstance made the notions of the ideal type, explanatory adequacy, and multifaceted causality appealing. But more than anything, I was riveted as a young man by the complexity of Weber's capacity for tangential elaboration, his nearly unbelievable ability to integrate massive detail with synthesis and characterization. His was a convincing approach to understanding the static and dynamic facets of the social order and social action, and his grasp of the historical was frankly breathtaking, to me at least. My advisor was Christian W. Mackauer, who admired Weber deeply. It was he who encouraged me to work with Hannah Arendt and to consult her about the subject. PB: What role did Hannah Arendt play in the thesis? What com ments on it did she offer? What was your response to them? LB: Hannah Arendt's role in my life preceded the thesis. I first met her in 1963 after her lecture at the Oriental Institute on the Eichmann book. This was the time of intense controversy over that book. I was a first-year student at the University of Chicago, and my interest in the Eichmann book stemmed from the fact that my grandfather on my mother's side had been approached about being on the Jewish Council of Lodz immediately following the German conquest. Although a Russian Jew, he intuitively understood, having been educated in Heidelberg (he went to Germany in 1905 during the Revolution), that any position in a German-organized system would be dangerous both to himself and the Jewish community. He fled to the Russian side, ultimately surviving both ghetto and labor camp. After losing his entire extended family and one son, he emerged from the war destitute and a recipient of Germern reparations. He read widely in French, German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and Yid dish, and having been trained in philosophy and law, he was an acute reader of Holocaust analysis, which apart from literature was his most intense subject. When the New Yorker articles came out, my grandfather told me that Arendt's was the most impressive and truthful analysis of...