Abstract In the first half of his career, Der Nister (“the Hidden One,” Pinkhas Kaganovitsh, 1884–1950) created a sequence of densely allusive literary fairy tales, drawing from a cosmopolitan range of symbol systems to bypass prior Yiddish fiction’s focus on traditional Jewish life. Upon returning to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, however, he saw that this avant-garde aesthetic had to be replaced with state-mandated Realist, proletarian fiction. The second phase in his writing begins with a sequence of travel writings, Hoyptshtet (“Capital Cities,” 1934). Here, realistic descriptions of Kharkiv, Leningrad, and Moscow blend with phantasmagoric digression. This combination of travel writing with fantasy calls upon a hybrid aesthetic analogous to Parisian Surrealism. Through this comparison, it becomes clear that Hoyptshtet is both Symbolist and Realist, Soviet and Surrealist.