Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature 9798887191867

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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN-ISRAELI LITERATURE

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) Editorial Board Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite Paris IV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Other Titles in this Series The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov: A Collection Published on the Occasion of the Writer’s 85th Birthday Edited by Roman Katsman, Maxim D. Shrayer, and Klavdia Smola Reinventing Tradition: Russian Jewish Literature between the Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction Klavdia Smola The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck: Eight Jewish Lives under Stalin Alice Nakhimovsky An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s) Lev Levanda Edited by Brian Horowitz Translated by Hugh McLean, with Conor Daly

The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline Cynthia L. Haven Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh “If we had wings we would fly to you”: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction, 1941–42 Kiril Feferman Where There Is Danger Luba Jurgenson Translated from the French by Meredith Sopher  Daughter of the Shtetl: The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva Doba-Mera Medvedeva Translated by Alice Nakhimovsky Edited and introduced by Michael Beizer and Alice Nakhimovsky Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921 Irina Astashkevich “A Double Burden, a Double Cross”: Andrei Sobol as a Russian-Jewish Writer Vladimir Khazan With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia Maxim D. Shrayer The River of Time: Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry Ian Probstein Brodsky Among Us: A Memoir Ellendea Proffer Teasley

Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness: The Post-Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister Ber Kotlerman with a foreword by Zvi Gitelman The Russian-Jewish Tradition: Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries Brian Horowitz with an introduction by William Craft Brumfield Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel Roman Katsman Thanksgiving All Year Round: A Memoir Gavriel Shapiro Jewish City or Inferno of Russian Israel? A History of the Jews in Kiev before February 1917 Victoria Khiterer Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination Edited by Holli Levitsky & Phil Brown From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds: The Memoirs of Irwin Weil Irwin Weil Compiled and edited by Tony Brown  Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 Theodore H. Friedgut with a memoir by Israel Mandelkern For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/jewsofrussiaeasterneurope

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN-ISRAELI LITERATURE Edited by Roman Katsman and Maxim D. Shrayer

BB O O SS TT O ON N 2023 Ac adem ic Studies Press 2023

Published with the support of the Isaac Akavyahu Foundation, Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar-Ilan University (Israel). This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 408/21).

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023002703 ISBN 9798887191850 (hardback) ISBN 9798887191867 (Adobe PDF) ISBN 9798887191874 (ePub) Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2023 Copyright © Roman Katsman, 2023 Copyright © Maxim D. Shrayer, 2023 All rights reserved Book design by PHi Business Solutions Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

From the Editors A Note on Transliteration and Spelling of Names

xi xv

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael (Basic Outlines and Authors) 1 Vladimir Khazan Julius Margolin and His Times 45  Luba Jurgenson Israeli-Soviet Literary Ties from the 1950s to 1980s: From Translations to Aliyah Library 78  Marat Grinberg Leaving Russia: Russian-Israeli Literature of the 1970s–1980s99  Aleksei Surin Paths of Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Israel 147  Maxim D. Shrayer Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s 194  Roman Katsman Russian-Israeli Prose in the Second Decade of the Twenty-First Century 258  Elena Promyshlianskaia Genres of Russian-Israeli Fantastic Literature 292  Elena Rimon The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s 338  Zlata Zaretsky From the History of Russian-Israeli Literary Criticism (On One Method of Delineating Literary Contacts between Russia and Israel) 362  Leonid Katsis About the Contributors Index of Names

385 389

From the Editors

The work on this collection began in the fall of 2021 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and ended in the spring of 2022 during the war in Ukraine, unleashed by Putin’s Russia. The lively interaction among scholars, international collaboration, and work in libraries and archives were initially hampered and then became well-nigh impossible. Thanks to the support of a Rector’s Grant, a group of researchers from various countries came together under the aegis of the Program for Russian-Jewish Literature at Bar-Ilan University to sketch out the pathways for creating a historiography of Russian-Israeli literature. The work of our research group culminated with a collection of essays in English and Russian, and we are very pleased to introduce this English-language volume.1 Our collection does not claim to offer a complete historical and chronological coverage of the subject: some authors, genres, periods, phenomena, and problems remain insufficiently addressed. There is also no conceptual unity in the collection. On the contrary, the contributors hold a variety of views on the phenomenon of Russian-Israeli literature. The authors of the essays collected in this volume belong to different generations and schools of literary criticism and cultural studies, and they base their views on a variety of theoretical, historiographical, ideological, and aesthetic premises. The collection nonetheless represents the first attempt at comprehending and characterizing the more than one-hundred-year history of Russian-Israeli literature as a unique, significant object of multifaceted and interdisciplinary scholarly research. In this we see our primary task since Russian-Israeli literature is, with few exceptions, little known not only to a broad circle of readers but even to specialists who are philologists and literary historians. It is for this reason that we wanted to demonstrate the unique, polyvalent essence that makes Russian-Israeli literature so interesting from a scholarly point of view and that distinguishes it within the context of Israeli literature and Jewish creativity in the Russian language. Historically and aesthetically significant Russophone literature in the Land of Israel begins with the first waves of emigration from the Russian Empire at 1

For the Russian-language volume see: Ocherki po istorii russko-izrail'skoi literatury, edited by Roman Katsman and Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023).

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the beginning of the twentieth century, enters a new stage after the founding of the State of Israel, and forms a large and complex literary community beginning in the 1970s and particularly after the Great Aliyah of Soviet Jews in the 1990s. Those one hundred years have witnessed many a change not only in the political climate but also in the literary environment where Russian-Israeli literature was created. The literary-historical realities that were the springboards for RussianIsraeli writers—against which they differentiated themselves—also changed more than once: Russian-Jewish literature in Imperial Russia, the Silver Age, the culture of the Russian emigration in Europe and the United States, Soviet literature, and the new post-Soviet culture. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 must now be added to this; it will take some time to comprehend the resulting rupture and its consequences. From its first days, RussianIsraeli literature seemed to its authors and readers alike to be a hopeless endeavor, doomed to a quick extinction. But in spite of the gloomy prophesies, despaired wailing, and epitaphs, this literature is alive to this day and, moreover, does not cease to amaze with the variety of its forms, genres, styles, themes, and ideas. The creation of a cohesive historiography of Russian-Israeli literature remains a task for the future. This collection presents works that examine the subject from a variety of points of view: historical surveys of individual historical periods (Vladimir Khazan, Aleksei Surin, Roman Katsman, Elena Promyshlianskaia), an analysis of the development of certain literary genres, forms, and movements (Maxim D. Shrayer, Elena Rimon, Zlata Zaretsky), and reflections on the role of key figures and phenomena (Luba Jurgenson, Marat Grinberg, the late Leonid Katsis, who passed away in October 2022). The large mosaic that emerges from the combination of these various pictures and perspectives presents RussianIsraeli literature as a living and complex literary process, one that is dynamic and in a sense chaotic. Many new tasks lie ahead of the students of RussianIsraeli literature. Today, when familiar theoretical and ideological attitudes are rapidly falling apart and new ones elicit in turn bemusement and hope, the tasks of researching Russian-Israeli literature become more and more fascinating and relevant. The experience of its emergence and development can serve not only as convincing and well documented evidence of the deep sociocultural processes of the past century but also as an emblematic example for other hyphenated, hybrid, global, transnational, and transcultural literatures. *** We would like to thank everyone who in one way or another supported the establishment of the Program for Russian-Jewish Literature of Bar-Ilan University and the work of our research group on the history of Russian-Israeli

From the Editors

literature and on the development, preparation, and publication of this collection (in alphabetical order): Amnon Albek, Marina Aptekman, Miriam Faust, Olga Fiks, Agnieszka Lenart, Mirosława Machalska-Suchanek, Alex Moshkin, Revital Refael-Vivante, Ilia Rodov, Klavdia Smola, Dennis Sobolev, Roman Timenchik, Vered Tohar. A separate thanks go to the excellent team at Academic Studies Press, which has for a number of years been the central platform for the publication of research on Russian-Israeli literature. And finally, we would like to thank all those whose names should appear here above all other names—our heroes, the Russian-Israeli writers without whom neither literature itself nor this collection would ever exist. October 2022 Roman Katsman (Givat Shmuel, Israel) Maxim D. Shrayer (Chestnut Hill and South Chatham, Massachusetts, USA)

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A Note on Transliteration and Spelling of Names

A modified version of the Library of Congress system for transliterating the Russian alphabet is used throughout the text of the essays included in this volume. Exceptions are Russian words and geographical and personal names that have gained a common spelling in English, such as Joseph Brodsky instead of “Iosif Brodskii,” Osip Mandelstam instead of “Osip Mandel′shtam,” Vladimir Jabotinsky instead of “Vladimir Zhabotinskii,” St. Petersburg instead of “SanktPeterburg,” and so forth. Bibliographical references, including authors’ names and titles of Russian-language periodicals, in the footnotes and the bibliography are rendered in the standard Library of Congress system of transliterating the Russian alphabet, without diacritical marks.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael (Basic Outlines and Authors)1 Vladimir Khazan If we are to reject the “centuries-old prototype”—that is, if we trace the origin of Russian letters in the Land of Israel not to Daniel the Immured, nor (greatly reducing the timescales) to the diaries of Antonin Kapustin (1817–1894), head of the Russian ecclesiastical mission to the Holy Land, nor (moving even closer to modern history, and taking the beginning of the twentieth century as our starting point) to the travel essays of Ivan Yuvachev (1860–1940), the future father of the OBERIU poet Daniil Kharms, about his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher; if we set aside the massive, multivolume corpus of pilgrim literature,2 as well as (turning to a very different thematic and emotional plane) that of Zionist literature, then the body of work comprising the Russian-language literature of the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael (henceforth: EY) sensu stricto turns out to be rather modest in size. Naturally, we cannot speak of some single or uniform literary process: the phenomenon of Russian-language literature of EY has a complex and peculiar discursive shape, resembling a motley blanket in which the texts written by authors living in EY are connected to the works of visiting Russian writers, poets, and journalists, by virtue of their common territory, language, and subject matter. Although this corpus, taken as a whole, is hardly stunning, either quantitatively or artistically, it nonetheless merits careful study. This subject has often been written about, and here we seem to touch on the central scholarly “nerve” of the problem: the contrast between this numerically scant 1

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Copyright © 2023 by Vladimir Khazan. The author would like to express his deep gratitude to his friends and colleagues, who have assisted him in working on this paper: Larisa Zhukhovitskaia (Moscow), Gil Weissblei and Zoia Kopel′man ( Jerusalem), Irina Berdan (Tel Aviv), Evgenii Soshkin (Modi’in), and Alyona Yavorskaya (Odesa). It also comprises literary-dramatic works, such as Vladimir Volkenstein’s play Kaliki perekhozhie (Wandering beggars), which depicts Jerusalemite pilgrims.

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and (on the whole) aesthetically unassuming literary corpus, on the one hand; and the much larger, broader, more extensive and polyvalent phenomenon that might be termed the “Palestinian text” (henceforth: PT), on the other. If we are to summarize the key insight that emerges from the study of PT, we can essentially reduce it to two seemingly contradictory theses. First, the literary works that can be assigned to the category of Russian-language literature in EY in the years preceding the establishment of the State of Israel are relatively few in number. The concept of the literary process—if we use this term to refer not to separate and occasional texts that manage to get into print, but to an established and organized movement of the literary-social consciousness, which is reflected and manifested in the individual artistic thought, and is then published and preserved for posterity—cannot be applied to this body of work. One aspect of this process that did exist—albeit in a weak and inchoate form, which did not go beyond private initiative—was what might be termed “author-reader” feedback: the relatively regulated social reception of literary works (book presentations, the public discussion of new titles, literary soirees, reader conferences, and so forth). However, there were no institutions of literary criticism, nor any reasonably regular periodicals dedicated to this subject.3 Conversely, the second thesis states that we nonetheless have every reason to speak of PT as a real phenomenon, which needs to be thoroughly investigated and described. The first thesis appears to be fairly self-evident, and, after the pioneering works of Roman Timenchik,4 several important scholarly-bibliographical

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This thesis was briefly formulated a quarter century ago, in an encyclopedic article on Russian literature in Israel: “In this period [that is, during the British Mandate], the country basically lacked a separate branch of Russ[ian] lit[erature], although there were indiv[idual] authors who used the Russ[ian] lang[uage] in their works.” See Roman Timenchik, “Russkaia literatura v Izraile,” in Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, addendum 2, ed. Yitzkhak Oren (Nadel) and Naftali Prat ( Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniiu evreiskikh obshchin, 1995), 323. 4 See Timenchik, “Russkaia literatura v Izraile,” 323–325; Roman Timenchik, “Samuil Kruglikov i ego kniga ‘V Krasnykh tiskakh’ (Iz istorii russkoi knigi v Izraile),” Ierusalimskii bibliofil: Almanakh 1 (1999): 51–52; Roman Timenchik, “Russkoe slovo o Zemle Izrailia,” Lekhaim 4 (2006); Roman Timenchik, “Detal′ dvoinogo naznacheniia,” Lekhaim 5 (2006); Roman Timenchik, “Glaz i slovo,” Lekhaim 8 (2006); Roman Timenchik, “Otvety na voprosy,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 26 (2008): 197–206; Roman Timenchik, “Tri pomety na poliakh novoi knigi,” in L. M. Turchinskii. Russkaia poeziia XX veka: Materialy dlia bibliografii (Moscow: Truten′, 2013); Roman Timenchik, “Piatye punkty liricheskikh geroev,” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 52 (2015): 209–221; Roman Timenchik, Angely—liudi—veshchi: v oreole stikhov i druzei ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2016), 767–790; Roman Timenchik, “V nachale. Pechat′ russkogo Zarubezh′ia ob Erets Israel′,” in Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography, ed. Polina Besprozvannaya, Andrei Rogachevskii, Roman Timenchik (Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies, 2016), 127–137.

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editions,5 the numerous introductory articles in Maxim D. Shrayer’s anthology of Jewish-Russian literature6 and in Roman Katsman’s book Neulovimaia real′nost′: Sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury (1920–2020) (The elusive reality: a century of Russian-Israeli literature),7 we can add little that is new (mostly information that has come to light thanks to the expansion of the personal-biographical and the general historical-literary contexts). By contrast, the second thesis, and the general conclusions arising from it, have yet to be substantiated. To this end, we need to study the evidence meticulously under the scholarly microscope, taking into account the various elements of which it consists. This, then, is the task of the present essay. First of all, we must establish the conceptual substrate of PT, sketching out its semantic boundaries, if only tentatively. In our opinion, the proper functioning of PT needs to satisfy at least three conditions. First, it must capture some reality specific to EY, in terms of content, theme, subject matter, and imagery. Second, the author must be physically present in this reality—either as a permanent resident or, at least, as a transient visitor (the union of the biographical and the artistic aspects). Finally, the work must be written in Russian, although this does not preclude the presence of Hebraisms—au contraire, the use of Hebrew terms is one of the stylistic markers of PT. See, for instance, the title of Iulii ( Julius) Margolin’s poem “Af-al-pi” (In spite of all), or the expression “Eize pele” (“What a miracle”) in his poem “Dobavka” (The addition); a more extreme example can be seen in his poem “Proshchanie” (Parting), which incorporates a Hebrew quote from a poem by Bialik, written in Hebrew characters and rhyming with the preceding Russian lines: Если к вам не вернусь я, Товарищ песню споет: —‫”קרה הדבר ברוסיה‬ ”‫היה איש—ואיננו עוד‬ “If I fail to return, / My comrade will sing you a song: / This happened in Russia—/ There once was a man, but he is no more” See Charles Berlin and Elizabeth Vernon, eds., Catalog of Israeli Russian-Language Publications in the Harvard Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Polina Besprozvannaya, Andrei Rogachevskii, and Roman Timenchik, eds., Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography (Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies, 2016). 6 Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007). 7 Roman Katsman, Neulovimaia real′nost′: sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury (1920–2020) (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2020). 5

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We must not lose sight of the fact that, like any other complex and dynamic system, PT subsumes a class of “hybrid” phenomena. An example is the written works of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940), whose deep connection to EY is obvious: he lived there for extended periods of time; as a political and military leader and one of the chief ideologues of Zionism, he fought for this land as the site of the future Jewish State; and—most importantly in the present context—he wrote both journalistic and literary pieces about it, such as his short story “Zhidenok” (The little Jewboy, 1923). We should add another important comment about the very texture and semantic content of the concept of PT. Its function need not be limited to the mere “stock-taking” of the rather modest literary “inventory” of EY. Rather, it should also serve as a reflection of sorts of the Russian-language spiritual/cultural/ intellectual life of the Jewish yishuv during the British Mandate, a life that was mostly restricted to the private and the semi-official spheres. Here are just a few illustrative examples, which could be multiplied at will. In March–May 1936, the philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938) was in EY on a lecture tour.8 In addition to lectures organized by the Histadrut (the Federation of Labor) in Jerusalem (given in German), Tel Aviv, and Haifa (given in Russian, with Hebrew translation), he delivered another lecture, on Leo Tolstoy, titled Iasnaia Poliana and Astapovo (in Russian, without a translation). The venue was the Tel Aviv residence of the philosopher’s sister, Elizaveta Isaakovna Mandelberg (1873–1947), and there was an audience of several dozen individuals. After Shestov’s departure, Evsei Davidovich Shor (on him, see below), a promoter and popularizer of his ideas, made an effort to create a Lev Shestov Society in EY, to be modeled after bodies such as the Kant Gesellschaft in Germany. There is virtually no doubt that, had such a society actually emerged, ninety percent of its members would have been Russian speakers. Unfortunately, this effort came to naught, as did many other similar plans, initiatives, and projects. However, the very attempt is interesting and remarkable, since it speaks to a desire to enrich and deepen the spiritual life of the Russophone colony in EY. Another example has to do with Lev Shestov’s sister, Fanni Isaakovna Lovtskaia (Lowtskaya, 1873–1965). After moving from France to EY with her husband on the eve of World War II, she made a successful career in this land as a

8

For more on this prominent philosopher’s visit to the Promised Land, see Vladimir Khazan and Vladimir Janzen, “The Marvelous Land of Palestine: Around Lev Shestov’s Visit to Eretz Israel in 1936,” in Russian Philosophy in Exile and Eretz Israel, part 2 ( Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 160–402.

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specialist in psychoanalysis.9 However, in parallel to her professional life, which involved psychological education and the training of teachers from schools and kindergartens, Fanny Lowtskaya also led another life, which enabled her, and other members of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia of the yishuv, to pursue their intellectual and spiritual interests. These interests touched on matters of philosophy, art, and literature, quite a few (and possibly most) of which were rooted in Russian culture. The satisfaction of these interests took place at collective gatherings that would be held at someone’s apartment, drawing audiences of several dozen (as in the case of Shestov’s lecture). These gatherings were more or less regular, but we lack even an approximate chronicle of such events, and this prevents us from fully reconstructing the day-to-day spiritual/cultural life of the Russian-speaking segment of the Jewish yishuv in those years. Before turning to a description of PT and its major figures, we should point out another crucial fact related to its genesis and the dynamic forms of its existence. It is the constant presence of a multilingual background (primarily the Russian-Hebrew bilingualism), which meant that almost all the Russianlanguage authors living in EY during the British Mandate were potentially able (and occasionally required) to abandon this language in favor of Hebrew or Yiddish. We must not forget that the choice of language was often determined not by the author’s personal feelings and linguistic preferences, but by the external pressure exercised by their new environment (the demand to renounce the languages of the diaspora and switch to Hebrew, the lingua franca of all Jews; the absence of Russian-language press venues, publishing firms, and so forth). These relatively clear-cut processes in the purely literary sphere should make us ponder the fascinating problem of the decay of the creative potential—the legacy of the traditions, schools, and other factors—that could have been developed by authors who began to write in Russia, but who, after moving to EY, were forced to conform to the general rules and norms that governed local literary life, and switch exclusively to Hebrew. Alongside the diminished opportunities in EY, which reduced the need for self-expression in Russian, the authors of PT occasionally exhibited the opposite tendency—trying to transcend the local Hebrew space and enter the broader expanse of Russian letters (or, at least, keeping this option open). In an attempt to find an outlet for their creative energy, these authors would apply to the organs of the Russian émigré press in the countries of the European diaspora.

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See Eran J. Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London: Katnac Book Ltd., 2012), index.

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Russian-Language Books Published in EY We should keep in mind that the majority of authors who published works in Russian in EY were also fluent in Hebrew, and could easily have done without the extra bilingual status in their literary careers. Russian became a parallel (and sometimes the primary) medium in which they wrote for the following major reasons. For some, the use of Russian language was a temporary measure at an early stage of their life in the country, when they had not yet acquired a fixed literary (and, more broadly, artistic and creative) identity—that is, before they joined the body of Hebrew-language authors (as in the case of Zina Weinshall [Zinaida Veinshal], see below). Next, it could become a linguistic-cultural code that connected the author with Russia, their country of origin, where their development and personal growth had begun, where their literary debut had taken place (as in the case of Avraam Arest,10 see below), or where they had acquired some experience as writers and/or journalists (as in the cases of Avraam Wissotzky,11 Iulii Margolin, Iakov Weinshall [Veinshal], and others). For some, the goal might be to emphasize the peculiarly dual nature of the artistic (and especially the poetic) consciousness, demonstrating one’s mastery of two modes of verbal creativity; a sort of “reflective instinct” of the imitation of Russian poetry (the case of Yehoshua Ankori; on him, see below). Finally, some writers felt that the representation of artistic ideas and images in the Russian language gave access to a broader readership and enabled them to transcend the boundaries of the purely “national” reception (the cases of Yehoshua Ankori, Avraam Vysotskii [Wissotzky], and others). For example, see the following poem by Lyova (Lev) Almi: “My Hebrew—the legacy of the prophets—/ Has a wealth of ominous and sad words, / but I would like these words to rush into your heart / In a Russian-language torrent!”12 See also the following declaration 10 As he wrote in his poem Mashber: “And this is why I write in Russian, / To recall the former breadth.” See Abram Arest, Mashber ( Jerusalem: I. A. Weisz, 1927), 3. 11 Avraam Wissotzky (on him, see below) even took a certain pride in the fact that, despite living in EY, he continued to write in Russian until the end of his days. In a letter to Avraham Liessin, editor of the Yiddish-language New York magazine Di Zukunft (dated September 15, 1926), he exclaimed: “Among the Jews, I am a Russian writer!” See Vladimir Khazan, Roman Katsman, and Larisa Zhukhovitskaia, “‘. . . Ia byl by schastliv naiti svoe malen′koe mestechko v russkoi literature . . .’: Pis′ma Avraama Vysotskogo Maksimu Gor′komu,” Literaturnyi fakt 1 (2020): 137. 12 Leva Almi, S russkim narodom razgovor na ty [A conversation on familiar terms with the Russian people] ( Jerusalem: Ba-Derekh, 1968), 4. It is no accident that the first of Almi’s poetry collections was fully bilingual: the Russian-language poems were paired with their Hebrew counterparts. His second book, a collection of Hebrew poems, includes one Russian text: his long Russian poem S russkim narodom razgovor na ty.

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of love for the Russian language in Lyova (Lev) Schneerson’s poem “I Love” (1959): “I love the polyphonic Russian speech, / The rich Russian speech [. . .] / I love to read Russian books / And the works of Russian poets; / And drown my soul in the bottomless depths / Of the sea of heartfelt testaments.”13 In reality, all these (and possibly some other) motives became mingled, creating the tangled psychological web of authorial linguistic choices and preferences.14 *** In 1927, the Tel Aviv printing house Ha-Poel ha-Tsair published a drama (described as “sketch in seven scenes”) titled V krasnykh tiskakh (In the red vice). Its author was Samuil Markovich Kruglikov, on whom we have scant biographical data.15 It tells of a Jewish agrarian colony near Odesa, whose members prepare to labor as pioneers in the land of their forefathers. However, the Zionist aspirations of these youths come into conflict with the Soviet regime: the leader of the He-Chalutz group, Vladimir Zilber, is sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at the Solovetsky Monastery (in the final scene, his body is interred), while the others are sent to Mandatory Palestine. The play follows a literary template that was common at the time: most of the plotline unfolds in Russia (in Kruglikov’s case, this is the setting of six out of the seven scenes), while the final episodes take place in EY (a similar structure can be seen in Wissotzky’s drama Krov′ Makkaveev (The blood of the Maccabees, 1925), whose first three acts take place in Russia, while the finale is set in EY). The year when Kruglikov’s play was published, 1927, also saw the publication, in Jerusalem, of Arest’s long poem Mashber, which came out as a separate booklet and bore two terse subtitles: From the Cycle “Maternaia Palestina” (The Obscene Palestine) and V dni khoser avoda (In days of choser avoda).16 It was written with outrageously provocative rudeness, recalling the spiritual longings of Sergei Yesenin’s Moskva kabatskaia (Tavern Moscow, 1924). The 13 Dept. of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem, Israel). L. Shneerson Coll. ARC. 4* 1504 05 82, vol. 2, p. 8. 14 For the sake of balance and objectivity, we should note the existence of the opposite process: poems written in Russian during the early period of life in EY remained unpublished, inevitably losing their social relevance; later, they were translated into Hebrew by the authors and published, thereby becoming facts of Hebrew literature. Such was the case of poem cycle Migdaliada (unspecified author was Zakharia Kliuchevich), on the Joseph Trumpeldor labor battalion. Unpublished at the time of its composition (1921), it finally came out translated into Hebrew by Lyova Almi as a separate book almost sixty years later. See Migdaliada: Zikhronot (Migdaliada: Memories), trans. by Lyova Almi ( Jerusalem: n.p., 1980). 15 See the article about him, and the play itself, in Timenchik, Samuil Kruglikov, 51–52. 16 Choser avoda (Hebrew)—“joblessness.”

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poem ruthlessly lampoons the ideal image of EY that was a central pillar of the conceptual and stylistic discourse of Zionism: Не стране, загаженной пейсами И пестрящей красным тарбушем, Я хотел расслезиться бы песнями И надрываться плачевным тушем, Не ты ли меня подпаивала, Опьяняя ручьями вина, Не ты ли, Страна Израилева— Матерная страна! It is not to a country befouled by peyos / And speckled with red tarbushes / That I would like to sing my tearful songs / And cry out my lungs. / Weren’t you the one who watered me, / Making me drunk on rivers of wine, / You, the Land of Israel—/ My Obscene Land!17 Abram (Abrasha) Arest was born in Moscow in 1906. He finished a Soviet school and attended the Faculty of Social Science of Moscow University. In 1924, he immigrated to EY, and moved to Jerusalem in 1927. He lived out his life in this city, dying in 1967. As a natural “mover and shaker,” he immediately became one of the leaders of the youth movement in EY. In 1939–1947, he served in the Security Department of the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) in Jerusalem, and later transferred to its Propaganda Department. In the latter capacity, he became one of the most prominent figures in the leadership of the Hagana (a Jewish paramilitary organization) in Jerusalem and of its clandestine radio station. After

17 Arest, Mashber, 3–4. This is a Russian-language pun that plays on the slippery semantic boundary between the adjectives maternyi (obscene) and materinskii (maternal), with an obvious bias in favor of the former interpretation. Something similar, albeit with the opposite authorial intent, can be seen in the Sonnet by the Parisian émigré poet Aleksandr Ginger (“I do not stretch out my begging hand . . .”), which was written in 1921 and published in 1922: “Oh fragrant one! Upon my knees, / I have returned a pauper to the materny bosom.” This sonnet was rejected by Sergey Makovsky, editor of the Parisian Rifma publishing house, when Ginger wished to include it in his collection of 1956 News, see Aleksandr Ginger, Stikhotvoritel′noe oderzhanie: Stikhi, proza, stat’i, pis’ma: V dvukh tomakh [Poetic obsession: Poems, prose, articles, letters: in two volumes], compilation, introduction, and notes by Vladimir Khazan (Moscow: Vodolei, 2013), vol. 2, 209–215; Sofiia Pregel, Razgovor s pamiat′iu: Poeziia, proza, ocherki i stat′i: v dvukh tomakh, compilation, introduction, and notes by Vladimir Khazan (Moscow: Vodolei, 2017), vol. 2, 498–500.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

the establishment of the State of Israel, he worked at the Kol Zion le-Gola radio station, which broadcast into the countries of the Jewish diaspora (his own broadcasts were addressed to Soviet Jewry). He was a member of the Jerusalem City Council, and in 1960–1965 he headed the Culture Department of the Jerusalem Municipality.18 As in the case of Arest, Lyova (Yehuda) Almi (né Shiputinovsky, 1899–1994), who moved from Soviet Russia to EY in 1921, also had to deal with a severe economic crisis. This crisis was equally painful on the mundane and the poetic levels. Almi’s mental anguish is reflected in his Hebrew-language poetry collection Ba-sha’ar (literally, “at the gates”; here used metaphorically in the sense of “on the eve”), which came out in the same year as Mashber, 1927.19 It is very important to note the simultaneous publication of poems written in two different languages, Russian and Hebrew, which not only draw on a common reality, but offer a similar ideological and emotional interpretation of that reality. Most remarkable of all is the fact that the linguistic roles of the two poets were fully “interchangeable”: Arest could easily have composed his poems in Hebrew, and Almi could have done likewise in Russian (incidentally, we should note that Almi did eventually publish Russian-language verse: as stated above, his poem S russkim narodom razgovor na ty came out in a bilingual edition in 1968). Here is some biographical information on Almi. After immigrating to Eretz Israel, he initially joined the Chavurat ha-Emek labor battalion and worked in road construction in the Jezreel Valley area, but by 1927 there was no more work for him, and he became permanently unemployed.20 He then decided to try his luck in Europe, and left EY in 1929, apparently still clinging to the possibility of returning to the USSR. However, after several years of wandering, having failed to find a place for himself in Europe, Almi was back in EY in 1933. On June 5, 1934, he wrote a letter to Maxim Gorky in Moscow, attaching several of his Russian-language poems. Almi asked the venerable author, whom he regarded as the paragon of proletarian humanism, to pass judgment on these texts. Apparently, he received no reply from Moscow: at the time Gorky was dealing with a severe depression caused by the death of his son Maxim, who had passed away several weeks earlier.

18 For more on him, see Avraam Arest, Be-tokh ami, be-tokh iri: Reshimot, zikhronot, maamarim (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1970). 19 Lyova Almi, Ba-sha’ar: Makhzor shirim [At the gate: A cycle of songs] (Tel Aviv: Strud, 1927). 20 According to some data, in the second half of 1927, at the peak of the unemployment period, a full third of the new Jewish arrivals in EY lost their jobs, see Dan Giladi, Ha-Ishuv be-tkufat ha-aliyah ha-reviit (1924–1929): bkhina kalkalit ve-politit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1973), 18.

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Almi, who was fired up with communist ideas of building a new society, was placed on the proscription list and deported from the country by the Mandate authorities, who feared the prospect of a Red revolutionary conflagration that would put the Jews and the Arabs on the same side of the barricades. In 1937, Almi disembarked from the deportation ship in Marseille. He lived through World War II in France, first as a conscript in the French Army, and then—after the dissolution of that army, the occupation of the country by the Germans, and a flight into the southern unoccupied zone with his family (by that point, he had a wife named Sarah, a fellow radical leftist deportee from EY, and two sons)—as a member of the Resistance. In 1950, Almi, who had not renounced his communist convictions, moved to Poland, as part of a wave of eastward repatriation (in all likelihood, his move was facilitated by the French authorities). He lived in Wrocław until 1957, working as a furrier. That year, he made his third aliyah to EY, where he stayed until the end of his long and eventful life. 1982 saw the publication of a volume of his Hebrew poetry, featuring a preface by the major Israeli critic and politician Dov Sadan;21 the collection ends with the abovementioned long poem S russkim narodom razgovor na ty.22 Almi also worked as a translator from Russian into Hebrew; one of his works in this area is a collection of journalistic articles by Ilya Ehrenburg, which came out in 1935.23 Unlike Arest and Almi, on whom we possess reasonably detailed and extensive biographical data, Yehoshua Ankori (1880–1962), the author of the nearly 300 pages-long volume Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems, 1930)24 and the poetry collection Napadenie (The assault, 1930),25 is, unfortunately, almost an absolute mystery. The former book was the subject of a brief favorable review in the Parisian Poslednie Novosti, the major liberal press outlet of the Russian diaspora in the interwar period. We have been unable to identify the reviewer, who used the initial S.26 and referred to Ankori’s largely feeble verses as “true poetry.” In all likelihood, the review had been commissioned by the poet himself, who

21 Lyova Almi, Shirim ve-poemot [Songs and poems] (Rehovot: L. Almi, 1982). 22 Ibid., 198–212. 23 Ilya Erenburg, Yesh Moskva be-olam: Reshimot [There is Moscow in the world: Notebooks] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1935). 24 Iekhoshua Ankori, Pesni i poemy, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1930). Its title page bears the subscript “volume 1”—but, as far as we know, the second volume remained unpublished. 25 Iekhoshua Ankori, Napadenie (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1930). The poems in this collection reflect the impressions of the bloody events of August 1929, when a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept over Palestine (with violence erupting in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and elsewhere). 26 See S., “[review of Ankori’s book of the poems ‘Pesni i poemy’] Tom pervyi,” Poslednie Novosti [Paris] no. 3585, January 15, 1931, 3.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

had entrusted this task to one of his friends in Mandatory Palestine.27 As stated above, Ankori was a bilingual poet, and, alongside poems in Hebrew28 and Yiddish,29 he also made some bold attempts to serve the Russian poetic muse, but his assays into this area were often clumsy and unskilled.30 In our opinion, the most plausible motive for the attempts of Ankori and his likes to make a name for themselves in the Russian poetic world was the desire to imitate the classical exemplars of Russian lyric poetry, copying it on the emotional level (the expression of anger or sadness, lovesick longing or rhetorical civic pathos, using the textbook examples of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, or Blok as models). It seems very likely that Ankori and his ilk shared the illusion that, by borrowing the means of expression of Russian poetry (and this was the reason for their “migration” into the Russian poetic world), they would be able to achieve better aesthetic results than in Hebrew or Yiddish. This is a paradoxical example of the opposite, negative, influence of Russian poetry on professionally inexperienced Jewish authors. Ankori dreamed of having some of his poetic works set to music. To this end, he contacted the “pioneer of the Hebrew song,” the pianist and composer Moshe Wilensky (1910–1997).31 Another relatively obscure figure is the poet, prose writer, and journalist Isaak Tsetlin32 (pseudonym: A. Arkadin; 1901–1988), whose first collection of prose, which was titled Rasskazy (Short stories) and dedicated to the author’s parents, came out in Berlin in 1924.33 This seems to indicate that he spent those years in the German capital, or had some connection to it;34 see also the dedicatory

27 The pseudonymous initial S. was used by several contributors to Poslednie Novosti: Georgy Adamovich, Sergei Volkonskii, Nikolai Kalishevich, and Iuliia Sazonova. See Manfred Shruba, Slovar′ psevdonimov russkogo zarubezh′ia v Evrope (1917–1945) (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2018), 349–350. However, these were all serious writers, who had no reason to praise the poetry of a mediocrity like Ankori. 28 See Yehoshua Ankori, Keshet [Rainbow] (Tel Aviv: Khanokh Ankori, 1935); Yehoshua Ankori, Meagilat hayisurim [The scroll of suffering] (Tel Aviv: I. Minkovsky, 1936); Yehoshua Ankori, Shirei ahava [Songs of love] (Tel Aviv: Y. Ankori, 1952); Yehoshua Ankori, Kav haruvin [Little and poor food] (Tel Aviv: Y. Ankori, 1956); Yehoshua Ankori, Tel Aviv: Poema [Tel Aviv: poem] (Tel Aviv: Moshe Kohen, 1957). 29 Yehoshua Ankori, Gezangen un klangen [Singing and sounds] ( Jerusalem: Rubin, 1933). 30 For an ironic reference to one such exercise, see Vladimir Khazan, Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh: K problematike i poetike russko-evreiskogo literaturnogo dialoga v XX veke ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2001), 190–191. 31 National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem), Dept. of Music, MUS 0069 E 005. 32 He spelled his last name in two different ways: Tsetlin and Tseitlin; the former spelling is used here. 33 See Isaak Zetlin, Rasskazy (Berlin: G. L. Rogov, 1924). 34 In the book by Oleg Budnitskii and Aleksandra Polian, Russko-evreiskii Berlin (1920–1941) (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2013), 478, Zetlin is conflated with his namesake, the poet, prose writer, literary critic, community leader, businessman, and art patron Mikhail

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inscription on a copy of the book that Tsetlin presented to the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow (which would later become the Lenin Library): “To the Rumyantsev Museum from the author. December 16, 1923; Berlin.”35 His second book, the poetry collection Sovremennye kolokola (Modern bells), was published in Brussels in 1927,36 and seven years later he published another volume of poetry in that city, titled Nastroeniia (Moods, 1934).37 This collection included satirical political pamphlets depicting the Soviet leaders: On the Death of Dzerzhinsky, At the Tomb of Dzerzhinsky, Zinovyev, Rykov, On Stalin, and so forth. In addition to engaging with topical political issues, the poetry of ArkadinTsetlin also gave voice to the Jewish theme (one of the poems in his collection Nastroeniia is actually titled Evreiskaia tema (The Jewish theme), and he gave the title Evreiskie temy ( Jewish themes) to one of his subsequent poetry collections). We do not know when exactly Tsetlin moved to EY. The biographical data scattered among the poems in Nastroeniia seems to indicate that this move took place before the publication of this volume (that is, before 1934). Some “clues” to this effect appear in the poems “Izrail′skii immigrant (Podrazhanie Bal′montu)” (The Israeli immigrant [An imitation of Balmont])38 and “Palestina” (Palestine), both of which are dated 1934.39 After dropping anchor in the Promised Land, Tsetlin lived there until the end of his days. In the second half of the 1930s, he was an occasional contributor to the Parisian Poslednie Novosti—see, for example, his article on the celebration of the centenary of Alexander Pushkin’s death in EY,40 and his essay about Arieh

35 36 37

38 39 40

Osipovich Tsetlin (pseudonym: Amari; 1882–1945), who never lived in Berlin. This book also gives the wrong year of publication of his collection Rasskazy: 1934 instead of 1924. The date written in the gifted copy indicates that Rasskazy came out in late 1923. A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Sovremennye kolokola (Brussels: Zarnitsy, 1927). The name of the publishing house that printed both of these poetry collections by A. Arkadin-Tsetlin is given as Zarnitsy (Brussels); many years later, the same name would feature as the publisher of one of his Israeli collections, see A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Russkie basni izrail′skogo dedushki [Russian fables of an Israeli grandfather] (Tel Aviv: Zarnitsa, 1966). This coincidence leads us to suspect that there never was such a publishing house. It seems that, in all three cases, the author financed the publication out of his own pocket, using the name of a fictitious publishing firm to conceal the (rather common) practice of self-publishing. A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Nastroeniia (Brussels: Zarnitsy, 1934), 33. Ibid., 37–38. A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], “Pushkinskie torzhestva v Palestine (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva),” Poslednie Novosti [Paris], no. 5860, April 10, 1937, 2. This article was read by Wassily Kandinsky. See Kandinsky’s letter, dated May 4, 1937, to Evsei Shor (who was featured in the article), Tel Aviv. Vladimir Khazan, “‘. . . Evreiskaia Palestina nuzhna, b[yt′] m[ozhet], vsemu miru, zhdushchemu novoe slovo’: Tri istoriko-kul′turnykh siuzheta na temu ‘Palestina/Izrail′ v evropeiskom/mirovom kontekste,’” in Semantizatsiia—kontseptualizatsiia—smysl: Sbornik

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Boevsky.41 Russian remained Tsetlin’s primary language of writing even after the establishment of the State of Israel. He kept his original pseudonym, which appears on several of his books of prose and poetry that came out in the 1960s and 1970s; in all likelihood, they were all self-published.42 In 1972, Tsetlin became one of the founders and the first chairman of the Union of Russian-Language Writers in Israel. In this capacity, he wrote an introduction about Arieh and Leah Rafaeli (Tsentsiper), who gave their name to a prize awarded to several Israeli authors hailing from the USSR—Boris Veksler, Icchokas Meras, and Felix Kandel′.43 The biographical data existing on the pedagogue and poet Wolf Ziman is somewhat more extensive. He was born in the town of Veiveriai (Lithuania) in 1872, and later moved to Kovno (Kaunas), from where he immigrated to EY in 1935, at a fairly advanced age. Following an unsuccessful cataract surgery back in Lithuania, he lost an eye, and shortly thereafter he lost sight in his second eye. Now completely blind, Ziman began to compose poetry in Russian, dictating it to his family. After arriving in EY and moving in with his son, who worked at Keren Kayemet le-Israel (the Jewish National Fund), Ziman experienced all the dramatic historical events taking place in the country. One such event was the construction of the Tel Aviv Port, whose opening in June 1936 is commemorated in his poem “Pervyi den′ v tel′-avivskom portu”44 (First day in the Tel Aviv port). Ziman passed away in 1956. Naum Isaakovich Shimkin (1879–1952)—an ophthalmologist and Doctor of Medicine (1917) who “moonlighted” as an amateur author—wrote both poetry

41 42

43 44

v chest′ 80-letiia Prof. Jerzy Faryno (Siedlce: Instytut Kultury Regionalnej i Badań Literackich im. Franciszka Karpińskiego, 2021), 537. A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], “Kapitan Boevskii (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva),” Poslednie Novosti [Paris], no. 5916 June 6, 1937, 3. See Arkadin [Tsetlin], Russkie basni izrail′skogo dedushki; A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Evreiskie temy: Stikhi [ Jewish themes: poems] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1968); A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Vtoroi sbornik basen izrail′skogo dedushki [The second collection of fables of the Israeli grandfather] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1974); A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Pravda ob Izraile: Rasskazy [The truth about Israel] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1976); A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Golodnye gody [The hungry years] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1977); A. Arkadin [Isaak Tsetlin], Liubov′ starika, ili Osenniaia vesna: Stikhi [Love of an old man, or Autumn spring: poems] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1979). Isaak Tsetlin (Dr. I. Tsetlin [Arkadin]), “Ar′e i Lea Rafaeli (Tsentsiper),” in Laureaty premii imeni Ar′e i Lea Rafaeli (Tsentsiper) za 1977, 1978 i 1979 gg. (B. Veksler, I. Meras, F. Kandel′) (Tel Aviv: Izdanie Fonda im. Ar′e i Lea Rafaeli [Tsentsiper], 1981). Vol′f Ziman, Prorocheskie stikhi (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1969), 4. This poem was published for the first time in the Harbin-based weekly Evreiskaia Zhizn′ 22 (August 1936): 3; prior to that, this weekly had published two other poems by Ziman. One of them, The Wailing Wall (Evreiskaia Zhizn′ 5 [February 1936]: 3), appeared with the editorial note: “This poem has been authored by a prominent Zionist activist from Kovno who currently resides in Palestine. Written for Evreiskaia Zhizn′.” The second poem was In the New Life—a stylized retelling of Mikhail Lermontov’s At the Feet of Jerusalem . . ., which was dedicated to the prominent Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin (Evreiskaia Zhizn′ 7 [March 1936]: 3–4).

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and dramas based on biblical stories. He was born in a small Ukrainian town near Ekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro), and attended the Faculty of Natural Sciences, and later that of Medicine, of Novorossiisk University (Odesa); in 1911–1912, he did an internship in Berlin. From his youth, he was active in the Zionist movement, attending several international Zionist Congresses—from the seventh to the eleventh. In 1913, he became head of the Zionist city committee in Odesa. During World War I, he served in the Russian Army as a physician. In March 1920, he emigrated from Odesa to Mandatory Palestine, initially settling in Jaffa. He later moved to Haifa, where, from 1922 to 1927, he headed the Haifa branch of the Hadassah medical organization.45 His second wife was Esther Ginzberg (after her previous marriage, she took the surname Krause; 1874–1949), sister of the prominent Jewish thinker Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927). The New York-based Novoe Russkoe Slovo published some mediocre poems by Shimkin, which seem to have gotten into print thanks to the patronage of his brother, Viktor Isaakovich Shimkin (1883–1967), the publisher of that newspaper.46 Shimkin also tried his hand at writing plays on biblical subjects47 and articles on similar topics.48 A street in Haifa has been named in honor of Shimkin the physician (not Shimkin the writer!).49 45 The Hadassah medical organization was established in 1912 in New York City to provide healthcare in Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem. During World War I, the Ottoman authorities suspected Jews of sympathizing with the enemy, and in 1915 the Hadassah nurses station was shut down. However, in 1919 Hadassah organized the first School Hygiene Department in Palestine to give routine health examinations to children and adolescents. See Naum Shimkin, “Hadassa i ee protivniki,” Rassvet 6 (February 1924): 8–9. 46 See, for instance, Naum Shimkin, “Ne zapugaete vy nas . . .,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no 13079, February 15, 1948, 3; Naum Shimkin, “Rodina moia,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13107, March 14, 1948, 8; Naum Shimkin, “My pobedim,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13253, August 8, 1948, 8; Naum Shimkin, “Mechta Izrailia,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13295, September 19, 1948, 8. 47 Naum Shimkin, Tsar′ Saul (religiia—narod—tsar′): istoricheskaia drama v 4-kh deistviiakh i 2-kh kartinakh (New York: n.p., 1937); Naum Shimkin, Tsar′ David: istoricheskaia drama v 2-kh chastiakh (s.l.: n.p., 1940); Naum Shimkin, Tsar′ Solomon: istoricheskaia drama v 3-kh deistviiakh i 2-kh kartinakh; [s avtorskin poslesloviem] “Blesk korony i mrak dushi tsaria Solomona: Istoriko-psikhologicheskii opyt” (Haifa: n.p., 1940). The Tel Aviv newspaper Ha-Boker ran an announcement about these plays. It said, in an undertone of amazement, that the plays were not only written, but even published in Russian (Ha-Boker, no. 1786, September 9, 1941, 2). 48 Naum Shimkin, Osviaschennaia nepravda (Liubov′ i prestuplenie tsaria Davida) (New York: n.p., 1939). The place of publication of Shimkin’s works is variously given as New York or Haifa, and sometimes it is left out altogether. Since the name of the publisher is consistently missing from his books, we can reasonably infer that they were printed at the author’s expense—and, ergo, these geographical nuances are of no practical significance. The important thing is that he wrote these works in Russian in Haifa, and at least the majority of them came out in that city. 49 On him, see B. Nisnboym, “Dr. Nahum Shimkin z”l (Shloshim le-ptirato),” Ha-Aretz, no. 10061, September 15, 1952, 3; Nissim Levy and Yael Levy, Rofeiha shel Eretz Yisrael

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Russian-language poems were also written by Lyova (Levi Yitzhak) Schneerson (1888–1975), who was an active member of NILI, the legendary Jewish espionage network (whose name was an acronym of the biblical phrase “The eternity of Israel will not lie,” 1 Samuel 15:29)50 that fought against the Ottomans during World War I. Lyova Schneerson, who was a descendant of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad movement, was born in the town of Toropets (which was part of the Pskov Governorate at the time; in the present-day Tver Oblast)51 in a wealthy family. His parents were Schneur Zvi Schneerson and Esther Gindina, daughter of the merchant Yaakov Gindin, one of the first members of the Chovevei Zion movement in Russia. Lyova came to EY for the first time in 1904, as a sixteenyear-old youth: his father, who had purchased a large estate near Hadera in 1891, brought his two sons over to live there. In 1906, Lyova returned to Russia, and he went on to attend the Institute of Jewish Lore (the “Jewish Academy”), which had been established in St. Petersburg by the prominent Orientalist, Hebraist, Arabist, writer, community leader, and businessman David Ginzburg. It was at this time that he first tried his hand at writing Russian verse. After forging ties with the anarchist movement and becoming the object of police surveillance, Schneerson was forced to leave the Russian capital, and then emigrate from Russia altogether. In 1910, after living in Königsberg for a time, he immigrated to EY, where he joined the abovementioned NILI network. He would describe the activities of this organization, and his own involvement in it, in his book Mi-yomano shel ish NIL’’I (From the diary of a NILI member).52 Schneerson’s Russian poems, which he apparently composed throughout his life, were finally collected and published in a rather hefty volume,53 but several additional volumes of his unpublished poetry (these include both manuscripts and typescripts with authorial revisions) are still held in his archive, which is kept at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. Thus, he may be said to share the predicament of those authors of PT whose works are hidden in private and public archival collections, and are therefore known only to a few experts (for more on this, see below).

50 51

52 53

1799–1948 (Zichron Ya’akov: Itay Bahur Publishing, 2012), 457; see also the notice of a memorial gathering on the tenth anniversary of his death, held by the Israeli Ophthalmology Society: “Pamiati doktora N. I. Shimkina,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo no. 18072, September 1, 1962, 5. He is commonly believed to be the one who came up with this name for the network. Toward the end of his life (in 1963), Schneerson would commemorate his birth town in the poem Bliz Toropetskikh ozer . . . (Near the lakes of Toropets . . .), Dept. of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem, Israel), L. Shneerson Coll., ARC. 4* 1504 05 82, T. 2, p. 47. Lyova Schneerson, Mi-yomano shel ish NIL’’I (Haifa: Renesans, 1967). Lyova Schneerson, Stikhi, vol 1 (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1965).

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When listing the poets who wrote in Russian in EY, we must mention the poet, artist, and translator Shlomo Khokhlovkin (1908–1978). He authored about a dozen poetry collections in Hebrew, consisting of both original poems and translations. The latter include both the works of famous authors such as Pushkin and Mayakovsky, and pieces by some much lesser known and less influential Russian poets (for example, Sergei Budantsev).54 Khokhlovkin’s works were published by the printing house owned by his father. This business passed to him after his father’s death in 1959. On March 30, 1961, Khokhlovkin filled out a form about himself and his works at the request of the Israeli bibliographer, writer, historian, and literary scholar Getzel Kressel. In the last item, he stated: “I began [. . .] to write (in Russian) in 1923. My style has not changed since then. I have published only a random fraction of my total output.”55 One puzzling aspect of this published “random fraction” of Khokhlovkin’s Russian poetry is the fate of his collection Zigzagi (Zigzags), which came out in 1938 under the pseudonym Ben-Bloria.56 On the one hand, there seem to be no reasons to doubt the fact of its physical existence (it appears in the volume of selected poems, essays, and drawings by Khokhlovkin published by his brother and sister after his death).57 On the other hand, there are no extant copies of it in any Israeli library collection that we know of.58 Khokhlovkin was born in Crimea (in the town of Bolshoy Tokmak), but he spent his childhood wandering the Ukrainian countryside with his parents— after living for a time in the Ukrainian settlement of Grishino in the Donbas region, the family moved to Taganrog; from there, they emigrated to EY in 1925. According to the recollections of his family, Khokhlovkin was a voracious reader, and he lived like a hermit and a recluse in an apartment that looked more like a book depository.59

54 See Shlomo Khokhlovkin, Targumim be-tor skitsot [Translation as sketches] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1947), 5. However, his last name is incorrectly transliterated there as Budantsov. 55 Dept. of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem, Israel), Gezel Kressel Coll., SARC. 4*1412/586. 56 S. Ben-Bloriia [Sh. Khokhlovkin], Zigzagi (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1938). 57 Shlomo Khokhlovkin, Ktavim [Collected writings] (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1983), 69–84. 58 The first reference to this collection in the Russian press is by Roman Timenchik. See Roman Timenchik, “Tri pomety na poliakh novoi knigi,” in his Russkaia poeziia XX veka: Materialy dlia bibliografii. L. M. Turchinskii (Moscow: Truten′, 2013), 5–6; Roman Timenchik, Angely— liudi—veshchi: v oreole stikhov i druzei ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2016), 208–209; Roman Timenchik, “V nachale. Pechat′ russkogo Zarubezh′ia ob Eretz Israel,” in Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography, ed. Polina Besprozvannaya, Andrei Rogachevskii, and Roman Timenchik (Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies, 2016), 131. 59 See Khokhlovkin, Ktavim, 5.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Ill. 1. Cover of S. Ben-Bloria, Zigzagi [Zigzags] (Tel Aviv, 1938).

One other person who composed Russian poems in EY is the Jewish national hero, the legendary Avraham Stern (1907–1942), the founder and leader of the clandestine organization Lehi (Lokhamei Cherut Israel—Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), which fought against the British rulers of EY from 1940 until the establishment of the state in 1948. The harsh and fearless image of “Yair” (Stern’s nom de guerre) stands in stark contrast to his lyric poetry, which celebrates love and the beauty of God’s world. Here is a fragment from his confessional poem about the mysteries of spiritual metamorphosis: Моя душа—дрожащая мимоза, Моя душа—сирени аромат, Моя душа—то царственная роза, Моя душа—весной цветущий сад.

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Моя душа—цветущая весна, Моя душа—то счастия улыбка, Моя душа—кровавая слеза, Моя душа—рыдающая скрипка. My soul is a trembling mimosa, / My soul is the fragrance of lilac, / My soul is the regal rose, / My soul is a blooming spring garden. / My soul is the flowery spring, / My soul is the smile of happiness, / My soul is the tear of blood, / My soul is the sobbing violin.60

Russian-Language Books That Were Written in EY, but Published Abroad Of the EY-based authors who chose to write in Russian, despite being fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish, the most notable is the prose writer and playwright Avraam (Avrum) Leibovich Wissotzky (Vysotskii, 1884–1949), a native of the town of Zhornitse (in the present-day Vinnytsia Oblast). After qualifying as a dentist in his youth (the diploma was issued by the Faculty of Medicine of the Imperial Kharkov University on February 28, 1907), he immigrated to EY in 1920. Settling in Tel Aviv, he opened a successful dentistry practice, which made him reasonably well-off. Along with his day job, he was also engaged in serious research, exploring new methods in dentistry: he published articles in the European scholarly press,61 wrote a brochure on the hygienic problems caused by dental disorders,62 and even came up with an effective treatment for pyorrhea (a gum disease)—which, according to the Harbin weekly Evreiskaia Zhizn′, “aroused great interest abroad.”63 Wissotzky’s oeuvre consists of novels, short stories, journalistic feuilletons, essays, and several plays (one of which, the four-act drama The Blood of the Maccabees, has been mentioned above). When speaking of Wissotzky’s literary

60 А[vraam] S[tern], Stikhi (Poems) (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1928), 7. 61 Avraam Wissotzky, “Behandlung der Paradentose mittels Hormonen,” Zeitschrift für Stomatologie [Vienna] 34, no. 20 (1936): 1256–1258. 62 Avraam Vissotzky, Ha-pe: Sha’ar ha-chaim ve-ha-mavet [The mouth: The gate of life and death] (Tel Aviv: Widislavsky and Moses, 1930). 63 “Vazhnoe otkrytie,” Evreiskaia Zhizn′, no. 32, October 11, 1935, 18.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

legacy, we should mention his stories published in Maxim Gorky’s magazines: “Ego rodina” (His homeland, 1916)64 and “V Palestine” (In Palestine, 1925),65 as well as the story “Nitka zhemchuga” (A string of pearls), which was published twice—in a triple issue of Vladimir Korolenko’s Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian wealth, 1918),66 and then in the Barnaul-based magazine Sibirskii rassvet (Siberian dawn, 1919).67 His short story Sinii Altai (Blue Altai),68 which appears to have been his literary debut, appeared in the Barnaul newspaper Zhizn′ Altaia (Altai life).69 Another story was published in the Tomsk newspaper Sibirskaia Zhizn′ (Siberian life).70 He was apparently the author of the story “Na travke” (Upon the grass),71 which was published in the Tomsk magazine Sibirskii Student (Siberian student)—as indicated by Nikolai Ianovsky, one of the most authoritative bibliographers of Siberia72 (a possible argument against his authorship is the fact that the initial of the patronymic in the table of contents is R.—that is, A. R. Wissotzky; however, this may be a mere typographical error). In the course of his life in EY, Wissotzky wrote three lengthy novels, which were published in Riga: Zelenoe plamia (Green fire, 1928),73 Subbota i voskresen′e

64 Avraam Vysotskii, “Ego rodina,” Letopis′ 7 ( July 1916): 50–72. 65 Avraam Vysotskii, “V Palestine,” Beseda 5 (1925): 122–159. This text is subtitled “an essay,” and it is precisely dated by the author: February 8, 1924. It is the first chapter, “The Last Harvest,” of his novel Zelenoe plamia (Green Fire, 1928). 66 Avraam Vysotskii, “Nitka zhemchuga,” Russkoe Bogatstvo 4/6 (April–June 1918): 164–187. 67 Avraam Vysotskii, “Nitka zhemchuga,” Sibirskii Rassvet 8 ( June 1919): 4–30. 68 Avraam Vysotskii, “Sinii Altai,” Zhizn′ Altaia, February 9, 1914: 3–4; and Zhizn′ Altaia, February 14, 1914, 3–4. 69 This newspaper went on to publish more of his stories. See Avraam Vysotskii, “S dorogi (Na parokhode),” Zhizn′ Altaia, July 6, 1914, 3; Avraam Vysotskii, “Na Obi,” Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 109, May 22, 1915, 3; Avraam Vysotskii, “Cherta,” Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 261, November 26, 1915, 3; Avraam Vysotskii, “Vospominaniya o lete (Iz povesti ‘Za rekoi’),” Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 276, December 13, 1915, 2–3. 70 See Avraam Vysotskii, “Krovavye sny,” Sibirskaia Zhizn, no 245, November 9, 1914, 5; Avraam Vysotskii, “Pervoe mgnovenie,” Sibirskaia Zhizn′, no 104, May 17, 1915, 3. 71 Avraam Vysotskii, “Na travke,” Sibirskii Student 7/8 (1915): 19–28. 72 See Nikolai Ianovskii, Materialy k slovariu “Russkie pisateli Sibiri 20 veka”: Bibliograficheskie svedeniia (Novosibirsk: Gornitsa, 1997), 42. 73 Avraam Vysotskii, Zelenoe plamia (Riga: Obshchedostupnaya biblioteka, 1928). See a review of it: S. Rozovskii, “Russkii pisatel′ v Palestine: ‘Zelenoe plamia’ A. Vysotskogo,” Segodnia, no. 208, July 20, 1931, 3. Before its publication in Russian, the novel was serialized in Yiddish translation, under the title Der Alter Kval (The old source), in the New York magazine Di Zukunft; its Hebrew translation came out simultaneously with the original, and the novel was translated into Ladino in 1933 (by Baruch Naeh).

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(Saturday and Sunday, 1929),74 and the “Palestinian” novel Tel Aviv,75 which was dedicated to “my friend, my wife.” His contribution to Hebrew letters was very modest; among his rare publications in that language, we can mention the short story “Ha-Tshuva ha-rishona” (The first answer, 1946),76 which dealt with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Some manuscripts by A. Wissotzky, such as the short story “Faizu” and the drama The Blood of the Maccabees, were not published in the author’s lifetime, and have remained unknown, even to scholars until recently. “Faizu” was published as an appendix to the edition of Wissotzky’s letters to Georgii Grebenshchikov,77 while The Blood of the Maccabees appeared as an appendix to his collected letters to Maxim Gorky.78 Despite their early endorsement by Gorky, Wissotzky’s works have failed to become part of the canon of Russian, Russian-Jewish, or Israeli literature. Only in recent years has there been some progress in elucidating this writer’s biography, as well as the genesis and poetics of his oeuvre.79 The city of Riga, where all three Wissotzky’s novels were published, was also the place of publication of the novel Doch′ professora (The professor’s daughter, 1934), by the poet and prose writer Dr. Sarah Marchevskaia-Golubchik.80 74 Avraam Vysotskii, Subbota i voskresen′e (Riga: Gramatu dragus, 1929). See reviews of it: F. S. [P. Pil′skii], “Roman iz evreiskoi zhizni,” Segodnia, no. 41, February 10, 1930, 6; Mikh. Os[orgin], “‘Subbota i voskresen′e,’” Poslednie Novosti, no. 3270, March 6, 1930, 3; M. Tsetlin, “[review of:] A. Wissotzky. Subbota i voskresen′e, 1930,” Sovremennye Zapiski 43 (1930): 496–497; Ben-Tavriia [Z. Kliuchevich], “‘Subbota i voskresen′e’ (o romane A. Vysotskogo),” Rassvet, no. 14, April 5, 1931, 8–9. The novel was translated into Dutch: Avraam Wissotzky, Sabbat en Zondag (Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie, 1936). 75 Avraam Vysotskii, Tel′-Aviv: Palestinskii roman (Tel Aviv: The Palestinian novel) (Riga: Prosveshchenie, 1933). See a review of it: Mikh. Os[orgin], “Tel′-Aviv,” Poslednie Novosti [Paris], no. 4544, August 31, 1933, 3. The novel was translated into Hebrew: Avraam Vissotzky, Tel Aviv, transl. Mordechai Krishevsky (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947). Two copies of the book, which are held at the National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem), bear dedicatory inscriptions: one is in Hebrew, and the copy was presented to the library itself (on July 3, 1934); the other is in Russian, and the copy was gifted to the musician D. S. Shor on the Jewish New Year: “09/20/1933. For the New Year, to my dear D. S. Shor. А. Wissotzky.” 76 Avraam Vissotzky, “Ha-Tshuva ha-rishona,” transl. from the Russian manuscript by Tamar Dolzhansky, Gilyonot: Le-dvarei sifrut, machshava ve-bikoret [Tel Aviv] 18, no. 12 (1946): 267–274. 77 Vladimir Khazan and Roman Katsman, “‘. . . Pero Vashe umeloe, mnogo serdtsa’: Iz perepiski Avraama Vysotskogo i Georgiia Grebenshchikova,” in Altaiskii tekst v russkoi kul′ture, vol 8 (Barnaul: Altaiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2019), 139–144. 78 Khazan, Katsman, and Zhukhovitskaia, “‘. . . Ya byl by schastliv naiti svoe . . .,” 115–174. 79 See Roman Katsman, “Neizvestnye rukopisi Avraama Vysotskogo i genesis romana ‘Subbota i voskresen′e,’” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 56 (Spring 2016), http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/56/ index.shtml. Katsman, Neulovimaia real′nost′, 83–92. 80 Sara Marchevskaia-Golubchik, Doch′ professora (Tel Aviv and Riga: Izdevnieziba “Grāmatnica,” 1934). The book’s cover and title page indicate two cities—Tel Aviv and Riga; the book itself was printed at the Star printing house in Riga (on 15 Kurmanovskaya Street).

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Much of the text is taken up with descriptions of EY: at first, the Zionist Berlitz tells to his beloved Clara Minzlova, the daughter of a Jewish professor, about this land (the setting is Germany on the eve of the Nazis’ seizure of power); the action then moves to EY, where the two protagonists meet. This novel was not Marchevskaia-Golubchik’s literary debut: it was preceded by her Hebrew novella Liza.81 Like Wissotzky, Marchevskaia-Golubchik (1882–1962) was a highly regarded dentist. A native of Chernihiv, she was the cousin of Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi (née Golda Lishansky; 1886–1979), the wife of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (né Shimshelevich; 1884–1963), the second president of Israel. In 1924, she moved to EY with her husband, Pinhas Marchevsky. After working for a time as a dentist, she became a trade unionist, eventually reaching the upper ranks of the Histadrut. The novel The Professor’s Daughter is her only Russian-language work; her poems, which would later be set to music, and her novel Aza mi-ahava (Stronger than love)82 were written in Hebrew.83 Riga was also the place of publication of the poetry collection Ogni na vysotakh (Fires on the heights, 1938)84 by the prominent Jewish activist, Zionist leader, poet, translator, publicist, editor, and publisher Leib (Lev Borisovich) Yaffe (1875– 1948). L. Yaffe immigrated to EY in early 1920s. There, he edited the Ha-Aretz newspaper (1921–1922), and from 1926 until his death he was head of Keren haYesod (a major fundraising body). Yaffe was killed tragically in an Arab terrorist bombing in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem on March 11, 1948.85

81 Sara Marchevsky-Golubchik, Liza (Tel Aviv: Herzliya, 1933). 82 Sara Marchevsky-Golubchik, Aza mi-ahava (Tel Aviv: Hertzliya, 1936). 83 See her obituary: I. Izenberg, “Dr. Sarah Marchevskaia-Golubchik Passed Away” [Heb], Ha-Boker [Tel Aviv], no. 7779, February 22, 1962, 2. 84 Lev Iaffe, Ogni na vysotakh (Riga: Židu mākslas un zinïbu veicināš, 1938). 85 For more on him, see Louis Bernhardt, “V. F. Khodasevich i sovremennaia poeziia,” Russian Literature [Amsterdam] 6 (1974): 21–31; Roman Timenchik and Zoia Kopel′man, “Viacheslav Ivanov i poeziia Bialika,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 14 (1995): 102–118; Brian Horowitz [Braian Gorovits], “Pis′ma L. B. Yaffe k M. O. Gershenzonu,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 2 (1998): 210–225; Zoia Kopel′man, Khodasevich, Vladislav. Iz evreiskikh poetov (Moscow and Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1998), 22–24; Zoia Kopel′man, “Iaffe Leib,” in Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 10 ( Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniiu evreiskikh obshchin, 2001), edited by A. Avner and N. Prat, 992–994; Brian Horowitz [Braian Gorovits] and Vladimir Khazan, “Iz istorii russko-evreiskikh literaturnykh otnoshenii: Pis′ma russkikh pisatelei k L. B. Iaffe,” Arkhiv evreyskoy istorii, vol 2 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), 407–438; Vladimir Khazan, “Dva fragmenta na temu ‘Sionizm i russkaia kul′tura,’” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 73 (2005): 100–108; Brian Horowitz, Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University and Slavica, 2009), 65–85; Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature.

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As the stories of Wissotzky, Marchevskaia-Golubchik, and Yaffe indicate, the publication of Russian-language works by EY-based authors in Europe was a fairly commonplace phenomenon. In 1929, the poetry collection Palestinskii al′bom (Palestinian album) was published in Berlin by the poet, actress, dancer, and director Zina (Hannah) Weinshall (née Kevesh; 1900–1990), the wife of Abram Weinshall (1893–1968)—a prominent lawyer, who was editor of the Haifa-based Revisionist newspaper Tzafon (1926–1927) and the brother of Iakov Veinshal (Yaakov Weinshall, on him, see below). Zina Weinshall was born in Bobruisk, and the family later moved to Baku, from where she and her husband immigrated to EY in 1920.86 Weinshall’s poems, which she had begun to compose back in Russia (Palestinian Album opens with the poem “Miss Mary” and ends with “Song of Songs”—both dating to 1918, and composed in Baku), now became closely connected with her new environment. This connection was repeatedly emphasized by invoking the nature of EY (the collection includes a poem titled “Khamsin”) and its topography (other poems are called “Acre,” “Nazareth,” “Hadera,” “Metula”; and the book’s subsections are titled “Haifa” and “Shfela,” or “plain,” the western region of EY, stretching from the Judean foothills to the Mediterranean Sea), and through references to biblical history (“Ecclesiastes”).87 Living in EY, Weinshall published her poems in the Parisian Russian-Jewish weekly Rassvet, and it is these poems that made up her Palestinskii al′bom (Palestinian album).88 She also authored two poetry collections in Hebrew.89 We should note that the poet did not include all the poems published in Rassvet in her collection. Some of them may have been excluded for falling short of its general lyrical rigor and high intonational register. Here is one such poem,

86 The encyclopedic reference work Russian Literature Abroad—which is plagued by a host of errors, inaccuracies, and false assertions—has this to say on Weinshall: “Zinaida Bentsionovna Weinshall, a poet. After immigrating to Germany, she authored the collection Palestinian Album (Berlin, 1929).” See Literaturnoe zarubezh′e Rossii: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik, ed. Evgenii Chelyshev and Aleksandr Degtiarev (Moscow: Parad, 2006), 168. Here, the city indicated on the cover is innocently mistaken for the author’s place of residence. We are also puzzled by the patronymic Bentsionovna, assigned to Weinshall by the authors of this biographical sketch; Zina’s father was named Shlomo (or Solomon, to use the Russian variant)—thus, according to the rules of Russian onomastics, she ought to be named Zinaida Shlomovna (or Solomonovna), and not Bentsionovna. 87 A review of Palestinian Album remarked that the bright orange cover of the collection was reminiscent of a “Palestinian orange.” See Kliuch [Z. Kliuchevich], “O stikhakh Zinaidy Weinshall,” Rassvet, no. 25, June 23, 1929, 13. 88 Zinaida Veinshal, Palestinskii al′bom (Berlin: n.p., 1929). 89 See Zina Veinshall, Esrim ve-khamesh shirim [Twenty-five songs] (Haifa: Ot, 1939); and Zina Veinshall, Ha-Makhrozet [The string] (Haifa: n.p., 1944).

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

titled “Emigrant (Biografiia)” (The Émigré [Biography]),” which must have been rejected because of its lightly ironic aura: Приехал палубой. (А встарь имел милльон!) Хотел пристроиться. Был дома—фабрикантом. Вид—нарицательный. Язык его—жаргон. (Жаргон—один из видов эсперанто.) Был ссажен на берег без смеха и без слез, Прошел чрез карантин, не заболев (счастливый!), И через месяц продавал газоз В «лев Тель-Авива». He arrived on the deck (despite having been a millionaire in the old days!). / He wished to find a job. He used to be an industrialist back home. / He looks generic, and he speaks the jargon.90 / (The jargon is a dialect of Esperanto). / He was put ashore without laughter and tears. / He passed through quarantine without falling ill (lucky for him!), / And a month later, he was selling gazoz / In “the heart of Tel Aviv.”91 It is no accident that Palestinian Album came out in Berlin: as a member of the Haifa-based theater group Chovevei ha-bimah ha-ivrit, Weinshall had studied stagecraft in the German capital in the first half of the 1920s. In 1921, her affinity to the world of theater led her to write the comedy Moi million (My million),92 which has recently been translated into English and published under the editorship and with an introduction by the author’s daughter—the artist Judith Weinshall Liberman.93 Judith has also written and published a reasonably complete biography of her mother.94 In contrast to this author of PT, whose personal and artistic life story has been thoroughly and lovingly told in a book format, another such author, Zakhariia

90 The common vernacular name of Yiddish. 91 Meaning, he sold carbonated water in downtown Tel Aviv—a common job for new arrivals in EY in those years. Zina Veinshal, “Emigrant (Biografiia),” Rassvet, no 6, February 7, 1926, 14. 92 Zina Veinshal, Moi million: Sharzh v 3-kh deistviiakh (Haifa: n.p., 1921). 93 See Zina Weinshall, My Million: A Satirical Play in Three Acts, transl. Arthur Gill, ed. with an introduction by Judith Weinshall Liberman (Westwood, MA: J. Weinshall Liberman, 2010). 94 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Zina: Selection from Her Poems and Photographs (Bloomington, IN: Universe, 2013).

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Solomonovich Kliuchevich—a journalist, poet, prose writer, translator, satirical cartoonist, playwright, and scholar of the Etruscan civilization—has remained quite obscure, despite his extraordinary artistic achievements, the impressive scope of his personality, and his wide-ranging pursuits (both literary and scholarly). There is not even a brief biographical sketch of him. Furthermore, until recently his authorship was hidden under one of his pseudonyms (Kliuch, Ben-Tavria, B.-T., Z. Ravich, Ma’ayani, and others) that he used for his numerous contributions to the abovementioned Rassvet—including feuilletons, essays, reports, reviews, interviews, journalistic portraits of Russian-Jewish writers, and even fragments from the novel Sasha Levin.95 Kliuchevich was born in Melitopol on March 18, 1899. His father, Shlomo (Solomon) Kliuchevich, was a merchant of the second guild. From September 1907 until April 1918, Zakhariia completed a full course of study at the commercial school of the Simferopol Merchant Society. Upon his graduation, he received the customary degree of Candidate of Commerce. In 1918, he enrolled in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Tavrida University (Simferopol); in 1921, he immigrated to EY, where he changed his last name to Ma’ayani96 (from the Hebrew ma’ayan—“spring, wellspring,” a translation of the Russian “Kliuch”). In the first half of the 1920s, he studied at the Bezalel art school in Jerusalem, and later attended the Jerusalem Teachers’ Seminary, from which he graduated in 1925. He went on to teach Hebrew and history at high schools in the city.97 From the second half of the 1920s, he lived and studied in France, at the École du Louvre and the Faculty of Arts of Paris University, where, in 1935, he defended a dissertation titled L’arbre sacré et le rite de l’alliance chez les anciens Sémites: Étude ragmen des religions de l’Orient ragment (The sacred tree and the rite of the covenant among the Ancient Semites: A comparative study of the religions of the Classical Orient). In the late 1920s, he became an employee of the

95 See Vladimir Khazan, “O nekotorykh psevdonimakh deiatelei emigrantskoi russkoevreiskoi pechati (parizhskie ezhenedel′niki ‘Evreiskaia tribuna’ i ‘Rassvet,’” in Psevdonimy russkogo zarubezh′ia: Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2016), 84–87. 96 Roman Timenchik has brought this fact to our attention, for which we would like to thank him. 97 Later, in the postwar period, Ma’ayani published a Hebrew textbook for beginners in Israel: Dr. Zekhariia Maaiani, Shalom! Ivrit dlia nachinaiushchikh ( Jerusalem: Izdanie Otdela informatsii pri Evreiskom Agentstve dlia Palestiny, 1949). The book was republished after his death, at the time of the Great Aliyah (Dr. Zekhariia Maaiani, Shalom! Ivrit dlia nachinaiushchikh [ Jerusalem: The Russian Bookshop Maler, 1990], which indicates that the text had not lost its pedagogical value and utility in the intervening years.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

abovementioned Rassvet.98 Despite physically residing in the French capital, he remained a denizen of EY, both spiritually and in terms of his official status. He kept returning to the “Palestinian” theme, examining it from various angles in his journalistic and literary oeuvre—from a series of travel essays (see Palestinskie pis′ma [Palestinian letters], which he published in the Parisian Poslednie Novosti for over a year, under the alias Z. Ravich; a total of twelve essays were produced)99 to the poems that he composed in Jerusalem (such as “Veter” [The wind]) and included in his poetry collection To, chto otkrylos′ na mig (Things revealed for an instant).100 Many of the mature poems he wrote in this city have remained unpublished and unknown to anyone, and they still languish in his personal archive. As can be deduced from direct and indirect evidence, Kliuchevich possessed considerable wit, having a propensity for jokes, biting lampoons, and satirical portraits. He used these gifts not only in his professional capacity as a caricaturist contributing to French periodicals, but also at the light-hearted amateur parties (or “teas,” as they were referred to) organized by the editors of Rassvet. A brief informative article on one such gathering reported that, “in addition to the regular program, we also watched a performance by our young employee

98 Some details of Kliuchevich’s life in Paris can be gleaned from a letter written by Ilia Fondaminsky to Mark Vishniak on June 13, 1930: “Dear Marochka, do me a favor: read the article attached hereto and try to get it published in some newspaper or other. It is rather coarse, but lively—as befits a journalistic piece. And the author deserves our full support. He is a young man of about thirty, a Jew who works at Rassvet. There, he has published essays about Algiers and Morocco under the pseudonyms ‘Kliuch’ and ‘Ben-Tavria.’ BerkhinBenediktov knows him well, too. For the last ten years, he has been barely able to scrape up a living, and suffers from extreme poverty. He used to work as a guide at a perfume factory for 400 fr[ancs] a month, but now he is out of a job. He seems a really nice guy. I got to know him by accident—he simply walked into my office. He would really like to write, and make at least a little money that way. His work for Rassvet is unpaid.” See Oleg Korostelev and Manfred Shruba, “Sovremennye zapiski” (Parizh, 1920–1940): Iz arkhiva redaktsii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011), 532. 99 Z. Ravich, “Palestinskie pis′ma,” Poslednie Novosti, no. 4595, October 21, 1933; and Poslednie Novosti, 4995, November 26, 1934. 100 Z. Ravich [Ben-Tavriia], To, chto otrkrylos′ na mig (Paris: Parabola, 1935), 22–23. The collection was dedicated to Jabotinsky and his wife Joanna. Its publication made no stir in the Russian expatriate literary world—to the best of our knowledge, the book was not reviewed in the press. However, the available evidence indicates that the author made considerable efforts to bring his work to the attention of genuine lovers of poetry: thus, he presented a copy to the Merezhkovskys, with the following dedicatory inscription: “To Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius, as a token of appreciation from the author. Paris, November 1935.”

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Ill. 2. Title page of the collection of poems by Z. Ravich (Kliuchevich), To, chto otkrylos′ na mig [What was revealed for an instant] (Paris, 1938). Inscribed to Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Ben-Tavria, who regaled us with his semi-humorous ‘rhyming sketches from the life of the young Palestine.’”101 However, some of Kliuchevich’s journalistic contributions also possess a bitingly sarcastic and mockingly satirical quality. See, for instance, his feuilleton (or, to use the genre indicated in the subtitle, In Lieu of a Feuilleton: The Remarks of a Forced Laborer) Letaiushchii medved′ (The flying bear, 1934).102 There, he parodies the “flying camel,” the symbol created by Alexander Evzerov (Alex Eizer) for his Palestinian fairs. Despite the serious political subject matter of the text (the feuilleton deals with A. Stavsky, who was suspected of assassinating Haim Arlosoroff, one of the leaders of the Palestinian Labor Party), the author makes liberal use of witty puns. Eventually, Kliuchevich returned to EY (probably in the second half of the 1930s), where he lived out his life. He died in Eilat on April 5, 1982, and was buried there. One other EY-based contributor to Rassvet, Iakov Vladimirovich Veinshal (Weinshall, 1892–1981), was primarily a physician. He combined his medical career with political activity (serving as chairman of the Central Committee of the Revisionist Party in EY until 1929), journalism, and literary work. Considering Weinshall’s busy life, his bibliography, which includes ten Hebrewlanguage novels, is stunningly long. Unlike many other journalists and novelists who lived and worked in EY, Weinshall could not boast of being fluent in Hebrew, although he had studied the language in his youth with a private tutor. His Russian was a good deal better, and he used this language for some of his works, especially the early ones (these texts would later be translated into Hebrew—or, at least, heavily edited). Weinshall was born in Tiflis (Tbilisi), but brought up in Baku, from where the entire Weinshall “clan”—his mother and father, Iakov Vladimirovich himself with his wife, and his brother Abram with his wife Zina (see above)—immigrated to EY in 1922.103 An ideological Zionist since his youth, Veinshal shared the predicament of many young Jewish people (male and female alike), who were denied admittance to Russian institutions of higher education because of the “Jewish quota.” In 1910–1915, he studied medicine at the universities of Munich, Geneva, Basel, and Derpt (present-day Tartu). In his student days in Germany, he set up a Zionist 101 “Chai ‘Rassveta,’” Rassvet, no 24, June 12, 1932, 14. 102 Ben-Tavriia [Z. Kliuchevich], “Vmesto fel′etona. A. Stavskomu. Letaiushchii medved′: Zapiski katorzhnika,” Rassvet, no. 13, July 31, 1934, 8. 103 On his mother’s side, Iakov Veinshal was the cousin of the major twentieth-century physicist and Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau, who was likewise a native of Baku.

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student organization named He-Chaver and joined its Central Committee. While in Geneva, he launched and edited a magazine for the self-education of Zionist students. During World War I, he served as a physician in the Russian Army on the Turkish Front. In late 1917, he returned to Baku, where, from 1920 to 1922, he worked at the propaedeutical clinic of Baku University—first as a fellow, and then as an assistant professor. It was there that he published his first medical papers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, having failed (or mostly failed) to make a name for himself as a Russian author in EY, Veinshal turned to writing his memoirs. With his mastery of the writer’s craft, he was able to produce a fascinating account of his eventful life, conveying the full range of emotions—from irony and mockery to sudden outbursts of lyricism and tenderness—and attaining the expressiveness characteristic of the Russian memoiristic tradition, where the narrator becomes less of an object and more of a tour guide, leading the reader through the winding byways of his/her memory. After languishing in his archive for many years, these memoirs were partially published).104 Among the few other literary texts by Veinshal that were published in Russian, we can mention the short story “Ierikhonskaia roza” (The rose of Jericho, 1959), which appeared in the magazine Vestnik Izrailia,105 on whose editorial board he sat. The story vividly brings to mind Ivan Bunin’s “Roza Ierikhona” (The Rose of Jericho, 1924).106 Judging by the available evidence, Veinshal never met Bunin in person, although he worshipped the Russian writer and made several trips to Paris where Bunin then lived. By the time he finally made up his mind to visit the famous Russian author, and had even secured a letter of recommendation to this end from David Knout (on him, see below), Bunin was already mortally ill and unable to receive any visitors. In addition to writing a commendatory letter, Knout also blessed Veinshal’s trip with the following lines of verse (which are published here for the first time): Ведь мы начало всех начал— Из древности сплетая нить, Скажите Бунину, Вейншал, Страна жила и будет жить!

104 See Iakov Veinshal, “Vospominaniia,” compilation, introduction, and notes by V. Khazan, Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 9 (2001): 213–262; Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 10 (2001): 232–279. 105 Iakov Veinshal, “Erikhonskaia roza,” Vestnik Izrailia 1 (1959): 22–25. 106 For a comparison between fragments from these stories, see Dovid Knut, Sobranie sochinenii v 2 tomakh ( Jerusalem: Evreiskii universitet, 1997–1998), vol. 2, 344.

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У всякой жизни век не мал И, не пытаясь ворожить, Скажите Бунину, Вейншал, Мы только начинаем жить! For we are the origin of all origins—/ A woven thread reaching back into antiquity, / Weinshall, tell Bunin / That the country used to live, and will live again! / Every life has its allotted span, / And, with no attempt at prophesying, / Weinshall, tell Bunin / That we are only just beginning to live! Unlike Veinshal, Miriam Ialan-Shtekelis (née Vilenskaia;107 1900–1984)—a poet, prose writer, and translator who wrote mostly for children—had a perfect command of Hebrew. She was born in the small town of Potoki, near Kremenchug. She attended gymnasiums in Berlin (1905–1910) and Minsk, and later studied psychology and sociology at the University of Kharkiv (1917– 1919). In 1920, she immigrated to EY, and settled in Jerusalem in 1921. She lived out her life in this city, except for a few years’ interlude in Europe, during which she studied Jewish history and philosophy in Berlin, and library science in Paris. For thirty years (1926–1956), she worked as head of the Slavic Department at the Jewish National and University Library. In 1929, Ialan married Moshe Shtekelis (1898–1967), who would become renowned in EY as a historian of the ancient world. The couple separated ten years later, and Miriam remained single until the end of her days: for her, poetry became a substitute for marital bliss and the joys of parenthood. In 1956, Ialan-Shtekelis was awarded the Israel Prize for her contribution to children’s literature. Ialan-Shtekelis was fluent in several languages: Russian, Hebrew, German, French, English, and Yiddish. From the artistic point of view, she regarded her multilingualism not as a divine gift, but as a forced adaptation that had alienated her from her own “mother tongue”: Happy is the author [. . .] who can write in her own single native idiom, which she has imbibed with her mother’s milk, assimilated with her father’s song, which has become embedded in the depths of her subconscious, artistic “I.” The vicissitudes of our 107 The last name Ialan (Yalan) is an acronym of the full name of her father, Yehuda Leib Nissan Vilensky (1870–1935), who was a prominent Zionist activist and member of the Jewish secret society Bnei Moshe.

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time, the fate of my people and of my own family, have conspired to deny me this simple and profound joy. I wrote not in one language, but in several.108 Be that as it may, in 1966 she selected all the materials that she had either originally written in Russian, or had translated into that language from Hebrew and Yiddish, and published them in a separate book.109 Most remarkably, the book includes not only texts composed in her youth (when she, as a young and littleknown author, had to use Russian “by default,” since it was the language of her childhood and youth), but also works written when she was already a famous and celebrated poet and writer, whose position in the Israeli literary pantheon was secure. See, for instance, her poem “Pis′mo russkomu poetu” (Letter to a Russian Poet) (1962), which is a verse epistle to Yevgeny Yevtushenko (“Comrade Yevtushenko! / You are indeed my comrade”).110 When reading Ialan-Shtekelis’s Russian-language poems, which were published several decades after being composed, one is bound to be struck by the realization that poetry, which is less tied up with the present moment, ages more slowly than prose, if it ages at all. This may provide a “consolation” of sorts to that layer of PT which did not see print in its own day, and which has survived only in archives. Some of these archives are known to scholars, while others have yet to come to light. The texts which they hold exist as a “potential” literary phenomenon.

Authors Who Left EY after Living There for a Time, but Who Dedicated Their Works to This Land The peculiar history of PT can furnish numerous examples of literary works that, despite perfectly fitting this text in all respects, nevertheless go on to join a different literary system, thereby becoming both historically and geographically distant from EY. Just such a fate befell the novel Opalennaia zemlia (Scorched earth), the first volume of which appeared in 1932 as a magazine version, and in 1937, volumes one and two appeared as a separate revised edition that emphasized the socialist realist poetics of the text. It was written by Mark Egart (a pseudonym of the author Mordekhai Moiseevich Boguslavskii, derived from

108 Miriam Ialan-Shtekelis, Vetvi: Stikhi i proza (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966), 10. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 76–79.

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his mother’s maiden name: Elgart; 1901–1956).111 Egart came to EY as part of the Third Aliyah (1919–1923)—thousands of young men and women who flocked there from Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. However, he was one of those settlers who, overwhelmed by the physical hardship, the social tensions, and the political crises wracking the land (the constant clashes with the Arabs and the British), decided to return to their countries of origin. The novel Scorched Earth became an artistic reconstruction of his life experience. It is one of the few Soviet novels to deal exclusively with the “Palestinian” theme. Among other Soviet novels that depict EY, Boris Pilnyak’s Povest′ o kliuchakh i gline (A tale of springs and clay),112 which recounts his experiences of a trip to the Middle East, does not make the country the ideological or thematic focus of the narrative because of the author’s very different goals and mindset;113 and Semen Gekht’s novel Parokhod idet v Iaffu i obratno (The ship sails to Jaffa and back, 1936) was written by a person who had never set foot on the soil of Palestine, and whose conception of this land was derived entirely from books. Scorched Earth was written in the Soviet ideological environment, by an author who at that time was already disenchanted with Zionist values. However, the inevitable tendentiousness of the way the novel attempts a gradual discrediting of Zionism is (somewhat) softened, especially in the first edition, by a (somewhat timid) resistance to the historical truth. As for the final edition,114 it is informed by the author’s chosen style—an impressionistic, quasi-journalistic report— which serves to strip the everyday labor of the pioneers of the 1920s Palestine, who were trying to make the harsh biblical desert bloom, of its romantic/ mythological aura. Perhaps it is this objective-realistic preservation of the humanist relationship between the value of the individual life and the grandiose project of building a new state in the land of one’s forefathers (a problem that would have landed Egart in the ranks of the dissidents if he had tried to depict it in the Soviet context), and not merely the ideologically obligatory anti-Zionist message, that explains the dearth of heroic and enthusiastic hues in the novel’s color palette. The raw statistical data suggests that the author did not simply try 111 See, respectively, Mark Egart, “Opalennaia zemlia,” Oktiabr′ 9 (1932): 49–76; Oktiabr′ 10 (1932): 75–120; Oktiabr′ 11 (1932): 97–130; Oktiabr′ 12 (1932): 53–97; Mark Egart, Opalennaia zemlia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1933–1934); Mark Egart, Opalennaia zemlia (Мoscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1937). 112 Originally: Rasskaz o kliuchakh i gline (A tale of springs and clay), 1926. 113 Pilniak was particularly fascinated by the metaphor of EY as a common land for all of humankind, the wellspring of the world as such. See Boris Czerny, “Le voyageur et l’émigré: Le motif de la sortie d’Égypte dans la littérature russe des années 1920–1930,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 52, no 4 (October–December 2011): 548. 114 Egart, Opalennaia zemlia (1937).

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to adapt his personal vision to the prevailing ideology; rather, his novel actually reflects the fairly complex and contradictory spiritual wanderings of “Russian” Jewry, which had become infected with the socialist virus. The Russian Jews’ wave of immigration to EY, which became massive in the early 1920s, began to abate sometime around 1925 because of the economic crisis. In 1927 and 1928, the number of emigrants leaving Mandatory Palestine exceeded the number of new arrivals. This conceptual point of view informs the novel, and it also explains the desacralization of Jerusalem, which fails to arouse religious awe in the hearts of Egart’s protagonists, who treat the city the same way they do everything else in the Promised Land—as a construction site, to be developed in the spirit of Russian communism. The novel’s ideological framework centers on the death of Lazar Dan as a Jewish pioneer, and his subsequent “resurrection” as an ideological assimilationist who returns to Russia. This framework determines the polemical “anti-Palestinian” development of the story—which, along with other ideological platitudes, was supposed to create the impression of an “enlightenment” in the protagonist’s worldview, particularly by the end of the novel.115 Among the less familiar authors belonging to this category, whose contribution to PT was much more modest, we should mention the Imaginist poet Leonid Grebnev (Yehuda Aryeh Leib Feinberg; 1897–1969), a friend of Sergei Yesenin.116 He translated the works of Gorky and Pasternak into 115 Of all the literary works that exhibit the semantic features of PT, Scorched Earth may have been subjected to the greatest number of scholarly analyses. See, for instance, Yehuda Slutsky, “Nefesh tzruvat-esh: Roman sovyeti al Eretz Yisrael be-yamei ha-aliyah ha-shlishit,” Shvut: Jewish Problems in the USSR and Eastern Europe 4 (1976): 94–100; Vladimir Khazan, “Moscow or Jerusalem? (Zametki k teme ‘Evreyskii vopros i sovetskaia literatura 20–30-kh gg.),” Slavica Orientalis 46, no. 3 (1997): 435–448; Vladimir Khazan, “The Theme and Image of Jerusalem in Early Soviet Russian Belles Lettres,” Jews in Eastern Europe 1/2 (Spring–Fall 1999): 39–43; Vladimir Khazan, “Neobetovannaia zemlia Marka Egarta,” Sonlechnoe spletenie 16/17 (2001): 154–157; Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], “Krasnoe plat′itse: Obraz geroini v antisionistskom romane Marka Egarta ‘Opalennaya zemlia,’” Solnechnoe spletenie 8 (2004): 148–155; Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, vol. 1, 398–412; Maxim D. Shrayer, “Mark Egart and the Legacy of His Soviet Novel about Halutzim,” On the Jewish Street/На еврейской улице: A Journal of Russian-Jewish History and Culture 1 (2011): 1–14; Katsman, Neulovimaia real′nost′, 93–116; Marina Aptekman, “To the Holy Land and Back: The Opposition of Two Zions in Russian-Jewish Literature of the 1930,” Iudaica Russica 1 (2021): 5–27. 116 Feinberg accompanied Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan on their trip to New York in January 1923. Many years later, in a letter to Boris Pasternak (February 2, 1959), Feinberg wrote that Yesenin had mentioned him along with Mani-Leib (M. L. Braginsky) “in his book about America” (RGALI. F. 379, op. 6, file 522). This is not the case: Yesenin’s Iron Mirgorod contains no references to Feinberg-Grebnev. However, in a letter to Mani-Leib from late January 1923, where Yesenin apologizes for making a scene in his home on the previous day, he asks his addressee to “give my best regards to Grebnev.” See Sergei Esenin,

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Yiddish and edited the Russian-language Jewish Anthology (1957). FeinbergGrebnev was a graduate of Moscow University—and, in the words of a contemporary who knew him, he “had been bewitched by Russian culture since his youth.”117 He came to EY in 1919, aboard the famous steamer Ruslan (a voyage that was to become the “opening salvo” of the Third Aliyah), and became one of the founders of Kiryat Anavim, a kibbutz near Jerusalem. His long poem “Liricheskii sad” (Lyrical garden, 1918–1920), which was at least partly composed in Jerusalem, was included in his collection Na paperti dorog (At the parvis of the roads, 1923).118 He later moved to New York and switched completely to Yiddish (incidentally, we should mention his remarkable novel Dovid Blank, which described the Jewish Odesa), although he did write occasional verse in Russian—for example, the following poetic response to Yevtushenko’s “Babii Iar”: Сорвав молчания печать, Поэт, разбив оковы зла и протестуя, Вдруг прогремел, как Лев Толстой: молчать, Народ мой русский, больше не могу я! Having torn off the seal of silence, / The poet, protesting and smashing the fetters of evil, / Suddenly thunders like Leo Tolstoy: My Russian people, / I can no longer hold my tongue! The “Palestinian” period in the life of Boris Grigor′evich Panteleimonov (1888–1950) has yet to be fully elucidated and described. Panteleimonov, who would go on to become a major Russian author, came to literature relatively late and failed to fully realize his considerable talent in this area. A chemical engineer by training, he decided to stay in the West after leaving the USSR on a work-related trip to Berlin. He was then invited by the engineer Moshe Novomeysky to work at the Palestine Potash Company on the Dead Sea. Panteleimonov’s arrival in EY cannot be dated with any precision; we only know that it took place no earlier than the beginning of 1929, when he sent a letter from Berlin to Maxim Gorky in Sorrento, offering to send materials on the subject of “using the enormous natural wealth of Russia—the brine of the

Sobranie sochinenii: V 6-ti tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1977–1980), vol. 6, 136. 117 Il′ia Trotskii, “Leonid Feinberg,” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 17870, February 11, 1962, 5. 118 Leonid Grebnev, Na paperti dorog (Berlin: Moscow, 1923).

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salt lakes.”119 His three letters to Gorky, which are currently held in the latter’s archive at the Institute of World Literature (Moscow), are dated December 27, 1928, and January 8 and 25, 1929, respectively. Roman Timenchik has suggested120 that it was Panteleimonov who authored the essay “Palestine,” which was signed by the initial P. and published in the Parisian newspaper Vozrozhdenie.121 If this conjecture is correct, he must have arrived in EY before the publication of the essay (that is, before August 31, 1931).

PT as an Archival Phenomenon One of the peculiarities of PT, which stems from its abovementioned functional difficulties, is its complete or partial elimination from the social space, and its transformation into a purely archival phenomenon—that is, an isolated, hermetically sealed structure; a “thing-in-itself.” The history of a large number of authors and texts belonging to PT is both fascinating and instructive—while we obviously cannot speak of their natural functioning, they are definitely worthy of attention as a potential cultural phenomenon. And (as the poet would say) they must not be consigned to oblivion. We should also note that some of the works that have landed in archives still manage to enjoy a certain limited circulation (being read by a few individuals, discussed, occasionally even prepared for publication, and so forth). Thus, their archival reclusion is not hermetic, and they can be promoted to the ranks of literature (with some reservations). Besides, the archival setting enables us to follow the elusive thread of the interaction between existence and everyday life, the individual and society, the causes and their consequences—the whole tangled web, which is not easily captured by the official sources, and which tends to be handed down to posterity, if at all, in a distorted form, having been mediated by numerous interventions and interruptions. Another author whose archive possesses great value is the abovementioned scholar of culture, translator, art critic, and musical pedagogue Evsei Davidovich Shor (1891–1974), son of the great pianist, musical pedagogue, 119 Quoted from Maksim Gor′kii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: v 24-kh tomakh, vol. 18 (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), 580. As a result, the magazine Nashi dostizheniia, which was edited by Gorky, published his article “Ispol′zovanie solianykh ozer” (The use of salt lakes). See Inzh[ener] B. Panteleimonov, “Ispol′zovanie solianykh ozer (Rapnye proizvodstva),” Nashi dostizheniya [Moscow and Lenungrad] 2 (1929): 128–135. 120 Roman Timenchik, “Russkoe slovo o Zemle Izrailia,” Lekhaim 4 (April 2006). 121 P. [B. Panteleimonov?], “Palestina,” Vozrozhdenie, no. 2281, August 31, 1931, 3.

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and community leader David Shor.122 It is true that Evsei Shor’s contribution lay less in the field of belles-lettres than in the area of the generation of philosophical ideas and the study of their history, and yet the archive left by him and his father123 is a veritable treasure trove for scholars of the spiritual-cultural life of EY or Israel in general, and its literary-artistic life in particular. Out of the hundreds of documents that it contains, we can cite, as a vivid illustration, a detailed Russian-language outline of a monograph by Evsei Shor about the philosophy of Lev Shestov. The book remained unwritten, despite being discussed on various levels and in various spheres, including the publishing world (this refers to the 1940s; the process dragged on for nearly a decade).124 Had such a monograph actually come out in Hebrew translation (it could not realistically have been published in any other language in EY at the time), it would have been several decades ahead of its time (on a global scale!) when it came to the study of the legacy of this major thinker. Another valuable source for our proposed study of PT (especially its journalistic aspect) is the epistolary corpus held in the archive of the prominent journalist, musical critic, and historian of music Gershon Mendelevich Svet (Swet, 1893–1968).125 A portion of his correspondence (with Ivan Bunin, Mark Aldanov, the daughters of Leonid Pasternak, and others) has recently been published.126 Swet settled in EY in late January 1935, having fled from Nazi Germany. Starting out as the foreign correspondent of Ha-Aretz, he eventually became one of the key contributors to this venerable Jewish newspaper in Palestine, and 122 The Shors, father and son, have by now become the subject of an entire scholarly library. The most comprehensive bibliography is listed in Vladimir Khazan, “Userdnyi tolkovatel′ shestovskoi bespochvennosti”: Adol′f Markovich Lazarev. Pis′ma. Stat′i o L′ve Shestove (Moscow: Vodolei, 2019), 10–11; Vladimir Khazan and Vladimir Janzen, The Marvelous Land of Palestine: Around Lev Shestov’s Visit to Eretz Israel in 1936, part 2 of Russian Philosophy in Exile and Eretz Israel ( Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021). 123 It is held at the Dept. of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the National Library of Israel ( Jerusalem). 124 For more on this, see Vladimir Khazan and Elena Il′ina, Istselenie dlia neistselimykh: Epistoliarnyi dialog L′va Shestova i Maksa Eitingona (Moscow: Vodolei, 2014), 238–250; Khazan and Janzen, The Marvelous Land of Palestine, 600–616. Although the book remained unwritten (and, ergo, unpublished), various fragments from it were published by the author as articles, became the subjects of his countless lectures (including in Russian), and were read aloud on the radio. Thus, in a certain sense the monograph did come out, albeit not in a book format. 125 The Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People. Gershon Swet Coll. ( Jerusalem, Israel). 126 Vladimir Khazan, “‘Ne znaiu, znakomo li Vam moe imia’: Gershon Svet i ego korrespondenty,” Novyi Zhurnal 303 (2021): 273–310; Novyi Zhurnal 304 (2021): 268–285.

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later a prominent Israeli newspaper, joining its editorial board and serving as chief of its Jerusalem office. He also became head of the Jerusalem Association of Journalists. During World War II, Swet joined the so-called League V, which was founded in 1942 to provide support to the Soviet Union (a special “Fund of Aid and Solidarity with the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which Are Waging a Heroic Struggle” was set up, based on a nationwide fundraiser).127 In 1943, League V published the collection Evreistvo Palestiny—narodam SSSR (Palestinian Jewry to the peoples of the USSR);128 the translation of its materials from Hebrew into Russian was entrusted to Swet, who also served as the book’s technical editor. Among other things, it described the exhibition The USSR and Jewish Palestine in the War, which had opened in Tel Aviv on July 18, 1943. As part of this exhibition, a special evening of Soviet music and song was held.129 A little over a month later, on August 27, the Soviet representatives Sergei Mikhailov and Nikolai Petrenko visited the Jerusalem Association of Journalists (the meeting took place at the editorial office of the Palestine Post newspaper). Swet, who attended the meeting as the representative of Ha-Aretz, greeted the visitors on behalf of the Russian-language Jewish journalists and gave them an overview of the present state of the press in Palestine.130 After the end of World War II, in 1948, Swet emigrated one final time, settling in New York, where he lived out the remaining twenty years of his life. He remained a prolific and multilingual contributor to numerous media outlets all over the world—the New York-based Novoe Russkoe Slovo, the Yiddishlanguage Forverts, and the German-language Aufbau; the Parisian Russkaia Mysl′, and the Tel Aviv-based Hebrew-language Ma’ariv newspaper and the Russianlanguage Vestnik Izrailia magazine. However, archival searches are particularly crucial for bringing to light works that, despite coming to our attention decades after their time, still serve to expand, enrich, and deepen our conception of PT. The study of archival artifacts gives rise to a predictable paradox: the part of the history of PT that has remained unrealized and sunk into oblivion may yet turn out to be more 127 In addition to material aid (through the efforts of League V, the Red Army received several sanitary vehicles and shipments of medicines, vaccines, and so forth from EY), we should also mention the spiritual-moral aid rendered through the medium of art: thus, the famed Palestinian composer Mark Lavri (Levin), who was based in Mandatory Palestine, wrote the orchestral poem Stalingrad, which was sent to the USSR (via the Soviet embassy in Tehran) and performed there on the occasion of the victory in the Battle of Stalingrad. 128 Evreistvo Palestiny—narodam SSSR: Sbornik Ligi V, ed. Glias Zarubavel ( Jerusalem: Palestinskaia Liga V pomoshchi Sovetskomu Soiuzu, 1943). 129 Ibid., 25–26. 130 Ibid., 97.

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numerically representative than the part of it that has materialized. This conclusion is predetermined by the very nature of PT, which was largely created in “the teeth” of the prevailing objective reality. This, then, is the general outline of the picture that preceded the current stage of Russian literature in Israel. We believe that, at present—in the absence of a serious scholarly analysis and a full inventory of PT, with individual files containing detailed information on each of its members—it would be premature to discuss the extent of the genetic influence of this epoch on subsequent literary (and, more broadly, socio-cultural) developments in the field that is identified by the term “Russian-Israeli literature.” However, one thing is clear: despite its sporadic and fragmentary nature, its unsystematic and “chaotic” essence, PT constitutes an objective historical fact, which is in need of a thorough and comprehensive study.

Bibliography Primary Sources Almi, Lyova. Ba-sha’ar: Makhzor shirim [At the gate: A cycle of songs]. Tel Aviv: Strud, 1927. ——— [Leva Almi]. S russkim narodom razgovor na ty [A conversation on familiar terms with the Russian people]. Jerusalem: Ba-Derekh, 1968. ———. Shirim ve-poemot [Songs and poems]. Introduction by Dov Sadan. Rehovot: L. Almi, 1982. Ankori, Yehoshua [Iekhoshua Ankori]. Napadenie [Attack]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1930. ———. Gezangen un klangen [Singing and sounds]. Jerusalem: Rubin, 1933. ———. Kav haruvin [Little and poor food]. Tel Aviv: Y. Ankori, 1956. ———. Keshet [Rainbow]. Tel Aviv: Khanokh Ankori, 1935. ———. Megilat hayisurim [The scroll of suffering]. Tel Aviv: I. Minkovsky, 1936. ——— [Iekhoshua Ankori]. Pesni i poemy [Songs and poems], vol. 1: 1929–1930. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1930. ———. Shirei ahava [Songs of love]. Tel Aviv: Y. Ankori, 1952. ———. Tel Aviv: Poema [Tel Aviv: Poem]. Tel Aviv: Moshe Kohen, 1957. Arest, Abram (Avraam). Be-tokh ami, be-tokh iri: Reshimot, zikhronot, maamarim. [Within my people, within my city: Notes, memoirs, essays]. Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1970. ———. Mashber: poema iz tsikla “Maternaia Palestina” (V dni khoser avoda) [Mashber: from the cycle “The Obscene Palestine” (In days of choser avoda)]. Jerusalem: I.A. Weisz, 1927. Arkadin, A. (I[saak] Ts[etlin]). Evreiskie temy: Stikhi [ Jewish themes: poems]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1968. ———. Golodnye gody [The hungry years]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1977. ———. “Kapitan Boevskii (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva)” [Captain Boevsky: A letter from Tel Aviv]. Poslednie Novosti [Paris], no 5916, June 6, 1937, 3. ———. Liubov′ starika, ili Osenniaia vesna: Stikhi [Love of an old man, or Autumn spring: poems]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1979. ——— [Isaak Tsetlin]. Nastroeniia [Moods]. Brussels: Zarnitsy, 1934.

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———. “Pushkinskie torzhestva v Palestine (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva)” [Pushkin celebrations in Palestine: A letter from Tel Aviv]. Poslednie Novosti [Paris], no. 5860, April 10, 1937, 2. ———. Pravda ob Izraile: Rasskazy [The truth about Israel]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1976. ———. Russkie basni izrail′skogo dedushki [Russian fables of an Israeli grandfather]. Tel Aviv: Zarnitsa, 1966. ———. Sovremennye kolokola [Modern bells]. Brussels: Zarnitsy, 1927. ———. Vtoroi sbornik basen izrail′skogo dedushki [The second collection of fables of the Israeli grandfather]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1974. А[vraham] S[tern]. Stikhi [Poems]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1928. Ben-Bloriia, S. [Sh. Khokhlovkin]. Zigzagi [Zigzags]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1938. Ben-Tavriia [Z. Kliuchevich]. “‘Subbota i voskresen′e’ (o romane A. Vysotskogo)” [“Saturday and Sunday” (about A. Wissotzky’s novel)]. Rassvet [Paris], no. 14, April 5, 1931, 8–9. ———. “Vmesto fel′etona. A. Stavskomu. Letaiuschii medved′: Zapiski katorzhnika” [In lieu of a feuilleton. To A. Stavsky. A flying bear. Notes of a convict]. Rassvet, no. 13, July 31, 1934, 8. “Chai ‘Rassveta,’” Rassvet, no 24, June 12, 1932, 14. Czerny, Boris. “Le voyageur et l’émigré: Le motif de la sortie d’Égypte dans la littérature russe des années 1920–1930.” Cahiers du Monde Russe 52, no. 4 (October–December 2011): 529–553. Egart, Mark. “Opalennaia zemlia” [Scorched earth]. Oktiabr′, no. 9 (1932): 49–76; Oktiabr′, no. 10 (1932): 75–120; Oktiabr′, no. 11 (1932): 97–130; Oktiabr′, no. 12 (1932): 53–97. ———. Opalennaia zemlia [Scorched earth], vols. 1 and 2. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1933–1934. ———. Opalennaia zemlia [Scorched earth]. Мoscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1937. Erenburg, Ilya. Yesh Moskva be-olam: Reshimot [There is Moscow in the world: notes]. Translated and edited by Lyova Almi. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1935. Esenin, Sergei. Sobranie sochinenii: V 6-ti tomakh [Collected works: In three volumes]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1977–1980. Evreistvo Palestiny—narodam SSSR: Sbornik Ligi V [Palestine Jews to the peoples of the USSR. A Liga V collection]. Edited by Glias Zarubavel. Jerusalem: Palestinskaia Liga V pomoshchi Sovetskomu Soiuzu, 1943. F. S. [P. Pil′skii]. “Roman iz evreiskoi zhizni” [A novel of Jewish life]. Segodnia, no. 41, February 10, 1931, 6. Ginger, Aleksandr. Stikhotvoritel′noe oderzhanie: Stikhi, proza, stat′i, pis′ma: V dvukh tomakh [Poetic obsession: Poems, prose, articles, letters: In two volumes]. Compilation, introduction, and notes by V. Khazan. Moscow: Vodolei, 2013. ———. Svora vernykh. Paris: Palata poetov, 1922. Gorky, Maxim [Maksim Gor′kii]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: V 24-kh tomakh [Full collected works: In twenty-four volumes]. Vol. 18. Moscow: Nauka, 1997. Grebnev, Leonid. Na paperti dorog [At the parvis of the roads]. Berlin: Moscow, 1923. Horowitz, Brian [Braian Gorovits], and Vladimir Khazan. “Iz istorii russko-evreiskikh literaturnykh otnoshenii: Pis′ma russkikh pisatelei k L. B. Iaffe.” In Arkhiv evreiskoi istorii, vol 2, 407–438. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005. Iaffe, Lev. Ogni na vysotakh [Fires on the heights]. Riga: Židu mākslas un zinïbu veicināš, 1938. Ialan-Shtekelis, Miriam. Vetvi: Stikhi i proza [Branches: Poems and prose]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966.

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

Khazan, Vladimir, and Elena Il′ina. Istselenie dlia neistselimykh: Epistoliarnyi dialog L′va Shestova i Maksa Eitingona. Introduction by V. Khazan. Moscow: Vodolei, 2014. Khazan, Vladimir, Roman Katsman, and Larisa Zhukhovitskaia. “‘. . . Ia byl by schastliv naiti svoe malen′koe mestechko v russkoi literature . . .’: Pis′ma Avraama Vysotskogo Maksimu Gor′komu.” Literaturnyi fakt 1 (2020): 115–174. Khokhlovkin, Shlomo [published anonymously]. Ktavim [Collected writings]. Compilation by Esther Khakhlili (Khokhlovkin) and Benjamin Khakhlili. Tel Aviv: Hakhlili, 1983. ———. Targumim be-tor skitsot [Translation as sketches]. Tel Aviv: Khokhlovkin ve-beno, 1947. Kliuch [Z. Kliuchevich]. “O stikhakh Zinaidy Weinshall.” Rassvet, no. 25, June 23, 1929, 13–14. Knut, Dovid. Sobranie sochinenii: V 2-kh tomakh [Collected works: In two volumes]. Edited and with notes by V. Khazan. Jerusalem: Evreiiskii universitet, 1997–1998. Khodasevich, Vladislav. Iz evreiskikh poetov [From Jewish poets]. Compilation, introduction, and notes by Zoia Kopel′man. Moscow and Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1998. Levy, Nissim, and Yael Levy. Rofeiha shel Eretz Israel 1799–1948 [The physicians of the Holy Land, 1799–1948]. Zichron Ya’akov: Itay Bahur Publishing, 2012. Maaiani, Dr. Zekhariia [Z. Kliuchevich]. Shalom! Ivrit dlia nachinaiushchikh. Jerusalem: Izdanie Otdela informatsii pri Evreiskom Agentstve dlia Palestiny, 1949. ———. Shalom! Ivrit dlia nachinaiushchikh. Jerusalem: The Russian Bookshop Maler, 1990. Marchevsky-Golubchik, Sara. Aza mi-ahava [Stronger than love]. Tel Aviv: Hertzliya, 1936. ——— [Sara Marchevskaia-Golubchik]. Doch′ professora [The professor’s daughter]. Tel Aviv and Riga: Izdevnieziba “Grāmatnica,” 1934. ———. Liza. Tel Aviv: Herzliya, 1933. Migdaliada: Zikhronot (Gdud avoda al shem Yosef Trumpeldor). [Migdaliada: Memoirs]. Trans. by Leva Almi. Jerusalem: n.p., 1980. P. [B. Panteleimonov?]. “Palestina” [Palestine]. Vozrozhdenie [Paris], no. 2281, August 31, 1931, 3. Panteleimonov, Inzh[ener] B. “Ispol′zovanie solianykh ozer (Rapnye proizvodstva).” Nashi dostizheniia [Moscow and Lenungrad] 2 (1929): 128–135. Pregel′, Sofiia. Razgovor s pamiat′iu: Poeziia, proza, ocherki i stat′i: v dvukh tomakh [Conversation with memory: poetry, prose, essays, and articles]. Edited, with introduction and notes, by V. Khazan. Moscow: Vodolei, 2017. Ravich, Z. [Z. Kliuchevich]. “Palestinskie pis′ma” [Palestine letters]. Poslednie Novosti, no. 4595, October 21, 1933; Poslednie Novosti, no. 4995, November 26, 1934. ——— [Ben-Tavriia]. To, chto otrkrylos′ na mig [What was revealed for a moment]. Paris: Parabola, 1935. S. “[review of Y. Ankori’s book of the poems ‘Pesni i poemy’] Tom pervyi.” Poslednie Novosti, no. 3585, January 15, 1931, 3. Shimkin, Naum. “Hadassa i ee protivniki” [Hadassa and its opponents]. Rassvet, no. 6, February 10, 1924, 8–9. ———. “Mechta Izrailia” [Dream of Israel]. Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13295, September 19, 1948, 8. ———. “My pobedim” [We will win]. Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13253, August 8, 1948, 8. ———. “Ne zapugaete vy nas . . .” [You won’t scare us]. Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13079, February 15, 1948, 3.

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———. Osviaschennaia nepravda (Liubov′ i prestuplenie tsaria Davida) [Hallowed untruth (The love and crime of king David)]. New York: n.p., 1939. ———. “Rodina moia” [My motherland]. Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 13107, March 14, 1948, 8. ———. Tsar′ Saul (Religiia—Narod—Tsar′): Istoricheskaia drama v 4-kh deistviiakh i 2-kh kartinakh [King Saul (religion—people—king): A historical drama in four acts and two events]. New York: n.p., 1937. ———. Tsar′ David: Istoricheskaia drama v 2-kh chastiakh [King David: A historical drama in two parts]. S.l.: n.p., 1940. ———. Tsar′ Solomon: Istoricheskaia drama v 3-kh deistviiakh i 2-kh kartinakh; [s avtorskin poslesloviem] “Blesk korony i mrak dushi tsaria Solomona: Istoriko-psikhologicheskii opyt” [King Solomon: A historical drama in three acts and two events; (with afterword by the author): King Solomon: The glimmer of his crown and the darkness of his soul]. Haifa: n.p., 1940. Schneerson, Lyova. Mi-yomano shel ish NIL'I [From the diary of a NILI member]. Haifa: Renesans, 1967. ——— [Leva Shneerson]. Stikhi [Poems], vol 1. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1965. Slutsky, Yehuda, “Nefesh tzruvat-esh: Roman sovyeti al Eretz Israel be-yamei ha-aliyah ha-shlishit” [A scorched soul: A Soviet novel about the Land of Israel at the time of the third Aliyah]. Shvut: Jewish Problems in the USSR and Eastern Europe 4 (1976): 94–100. Trotskii, Il′ia. “Leonid Feinberg.” Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no. 17870, February 11, 1962, 5. Tsetlin, Isaak. Rasskazy [Short stories]. Berlin: G. L. Rogov, 1924. ——— [Dr. I. Tsetlin (Arkadin)]. “Ar′e i Lea Rafaeli (Tsentsiper).” In Laureaty premii imeni Ar′eh i Lea Rafaeli (Tsentsiper) za 1977, 1978 i 1979 gg. (B. Veksler, I. Meras, F. Kandel′). Tel Aviv: Izdanie Fonda im. Ar′e i Lea Rafaeli (Tsentsiper), 1981. Tsetlin, M. Review of Subbota i voskresen′e, by Avraam Wissotzky. Sovremennye Zapiski 43 (1930): 496–497. “Vazhnoe otkrytie.” Evreiskaia Zhizn′ [Harbin], no. 32, October 11, 1935, 18. Veinshal, Iakov. “Erikhonskaia roza” [The rose of Jericho]. Vestnik Izrailia [Tel Aviv] 1 (1959): 22–25. ———. “Vospominaniia” [Memories]. Compilation, introduction, and notes by V. Khazan. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 9 (2001): 213–262; Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 10 (2001): 232–279. Weinshall, Judith Liberman. Zina: Selection from Her Poems and Photographs. Bloomington, IN: Universe, 2013. Weinshall, Zina [Zinaida Veinshal]. “Emigrant (Biografiia)” [The Émigré (Biography)]. Rassvet, no. 6, February 7, 1926, 14. ———. Esrim ve-khamesh shirim [Twenty-five songs]. Haifa: Ot, 1939. ———. Ha-Makhrozet [The string]. Haifa: n.p., 1944. ——— [Zinaida Veinshal]. Moi million: Sharzh v 3-kh deistviiakh [My million: A satirical play in three acts]. Haifa: n.p., 1921. ———. My Million: A Satirical Play in Three Acts. Translated by Arthur Gill, edited with an introduction by Judith Weinshall Liberman. Westwood, MA: J. Weinshall Liberman, 2010. ——— [Weinshall, Zinaida]. Palestinskii albom [Palestinian album]. Berlin: n.p., 1929. Wissotzky, Avraam. “Behandlung der Paradentose mittels Hormonen.” Zeitschrift für Stomatologie [Vienna] 20, no. 34 (1936): 1256–1258. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Cherta” [Line]. Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 261, November 26, 1915, 3. ———. “Der alter kval” [Old source]. Di Zukunft [New York] 1–12 (1927); Di Zukunft 1–4 (1928).

Russian-Language Literature in Eretz Yisrael

——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Ego rodina” [His motherland]. Letopis′ 7 ( July 1916): 50–72. ——— [Avraam Vissotzky]. Ha-Pe: Sha’ar chaim ve-mavet [The mouth: The gate of life and death]. Tel Aviv: Widislavsky and Moses, 1930. ——— [Avraam Vissotzky]. “Ha-Tshuva ha-rishona” [First answer] Translated by Tamar Dolzhansky. Gilyonot: Le-dvarei sifrut, machshava ve-bikoret [Tel Aviv] 18, no. 12 (1946): 267–274. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Krovavye sny” [Blood dreams]. Sibirskaia Zhizn′, no. 245, November 9, 1914, 5. ——— [Avraam Vissotzky]. Lehava yeruka [Green flame]. Translated by M. Nahman. Tel Aviv: Tarbut, 1928. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Na Obi” [On the Ob river]. Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 109, May 22, 1915, 3. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Na travke” [On the grass] Sibirskii Student 7/8 (1915): 19–28. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Nitka zhemchuga” [A string of pearls]. Russkoe Bogatstvo 4/6 (April–June 1918): 164–187. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Nitka zhemchuga” [A string of pearls]. Sibirskii Rassvet 8 ( June 1919): 4–30. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Pervoe mgnovenie” [First instant]. Sibirskaia Zhizn′, no. 104, May 17, 1914, 3. ———. Sabbat en Zondag [Saturday and Sunday]. Translated by Boris Raptschinsky. Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie, 1936. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “S dorogi (Na parokhode)” [From the road (On the ship)]. Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 149, July 6, 1914, 3. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Sinii Altai” [The blue Altai]. Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 33, February 9, 1914, 3–4; Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 37, February 14, 1914, 3–4. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. Subbota i voskresen′e [Saturday and Sunday]. Riga: Gramatu dragus, 1929. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. Tel′-Aviv: Palestinskii roman [Tel Aviv: A Palestinian novel]. Riga: Prosveshchenie, 1933. ——— [Avraam Vissotzky]. Tel Aviv. Hebrew translation by Mordechai Krishevsky. Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “Vospominaniya o lete (Iz povesti ‘Za rekoi’)” [Memories of summer (From the story “Beyond the river”)]. Zhizn′ Altaia, no. 276, December 13, 1915, 2–3. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. “V Palestine” [In Palestine]. Beseda 5 (1925): 122–159. ——— [Avraam Vysotskii]. Zelenoe plamia [Green flame]. Riga: Obshchedostupnaya biblioteka, 1928. Ziman, Vol′f. Prorocheskie stikhi [Prophetic poems]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1969.

Secondary Sources Aptekman, Marina. “To the Holy Land and Back: The Opposition of Two Zions in Russian-Jewish Literature of the 1930.” Iudaica Russica [Uniwersytet Śląski], no. 1 (2021): 5–27. Berlin, Charles, and Elizabeth Vernon. Catalog of Israeli Russian-Language Publications in the Harvard Library. Introduction by Evgeny Soshkin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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Bernhardt, Louis. “V. F. Khodasevich i sovremennaia poeziia.” Russian Literature 6 (1974): 21–31. Besprozvannaya, Polina, Andrei Rogachevskii, and Roman Timenchik. Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography. Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies, 2016. Budnitskii, Oleg, and Aleksandra Polian. Russko-evreiskii Berlin (1920–1941). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2013. Giladi, Dan. Ha-Yishuv be-tkufat ha-aliyah ha-reviit (1924–1929): bkhina kalkalit ve-politit. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1973. Horowitz, Brian. Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University and Slavica Publishers, 2009. ——— [Braian Gorovits]. “Pis′ma L. B. Iaffe k M. O. Gershezonu.” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 2 (1998): 210–225. Ianovskii, Nikolai. Materialy k slovariu “Russkie pisateli Sibiri 20 veka”: Bibliograficheskie svedeniia. Novosibirsk: Gornitsa, 1997. Izenberg, I. “Niftera D'r Sara Marchevsky Golubchik” [Dr. Sarah Marchevskaia-Golubchik passed away]. Ha-Boker, no. 7779, February 22, 1962, 2. Katsman, Roman. “Neizvestnye rukopisi Avraama Vysotskogo i genesis romana ‘Subbota i voskresen′e.’” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 56 (Spring 2016), http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/56/ index.shtml. ———. Neulovimaia real′nost′: sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury (1920–2020). Boston: Academic Studies Press, and St. Petersburg: Biblio-Rossika, 2020. Khazan, Vladimir. “Dva fragmenta na temu ‘Sionizm i russkaya kul’tura.’” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 73 (2005): 100–108. ——— “‘. . . Evreiskaia Palestina nuzhna, b[yt′] m[ozhet], vsemu miru, zhdushchemu novoe slovo’: Tri istoriko-kul′turnykh siuzheta na temu ‘Palestina/Izrail′ v yevropeyskom/mirovom kontekste.’” Publication and introduction by V. Khazan. In Semantizatsiia—kontseptualizatsiia—smysl: Sbornik v chest′ 80-letiia Prof. Jerzy Faryno, 501–546. Siedlce: Instytut Kultury Regionalnej i Badań Literackich im. Franciszka Karpińskiego, 2021. ———. “Moscow or Jerusalem? (Zametki k teme ‘Evreiskii vopros i sovetskaia literatura 20–30-kh gg ’).” Slavica Orientalis 46, no 3 (1997): 435–448. ———. “Neobetovannaia zemlia Marka Egarta.” Solnechnoe spletenie 16/17 (2001): 154–157. ———.“‘Ne znaiu, znakomo li Vam moe imia’: Gershon Svet i ego korrespondenty.” Novyi Zhurnal [New York] 303 (2021): 273–310; Novyi Zhurnal 304 (2021): 268–285. ———. “O nekotorykh psevdonimakh deiatelei emigrantskoi russko-evreiskoi pechati (parizhskie ezhenedel′niki ‘Evreiskaia tribuna’ i ‘Rassvet.’” In Psevdonimy russkogo zarubezh′ia: Materialy i issledovaniia, edited by M. Shruba and O. Korostelev, 54–89. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2016. ———. Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh: K problematike i poetike russko-evreiskogo literaturnogo dialoga v XX veke. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2001. ———. “The Theme and Image of Jerusalem in Early Soviet Russian Belles Lettres.” Jews in Eastern Europe 38–39, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1999): 25–43. ———. “Userdnyi tolkovatel′ shestovskoi bespochvennosti’: Adol′f Markovich Lazarev. Pis′ma. Stat′i o L′ve Shestove. Moscow: Vodolei, 2019. Khazan, Vladimir, and Roman Katsman. “‘. . . Pero Vashe umeloe, mnogo serdtsa’”: Iz perepiski Avraama Vysotskogo i Georgiia Grebenshchikova.” Altaiskii tekst v russkoy kul′ture, vol 8, 113–145. Barnaul: Altaiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2019: 113–144.

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Khazan, Vladimir, and Vladimir Janzen. “The Marvelous Land of Palestine”: Around Lev Shestov’s Visit to Eretz Israel in 1936. Vol. 2 of Russian Philosophy in Exile and Eretz Israel. Introduction by Vladimir Khazan. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021. Kopel′man, Zoia. “Iaffe Leib.” In Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 10, edited by A. Avner and N. Prat, 992–994. Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniiu evreiskikh obshchin, 2001. Korostelev, Oleg, and Manfred Shruba. “Sovremennye zapiski” (Paris, 1920–1940): Iz arkhiva redaktsii, vol. 1. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011. Literaturnoe zarubezh′e Rossii: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik. Edited by E. P. Chelyshev and A. Ia. Degtiarev. Moscow: Parad, 2006. Nisnboym, Baruch. “Dr. Nahum Shimkin z”l (Shloshim le-ptirato)” [Dr. Nahum Shimkin of blessed memory (Thirty [days] from his death)]. Ha-Aretz, no. 10061, September 15, 1952, 3. N. A. “Pamiati doktora N. I. Shimkina” [In memory of Dr. N. I. Shimkin]. Novoe Russkoe Slovo, no 18072, September 1, 1962, 5. ———. “‘Subbota i voskresen′e’” [“Saturday and Sunday”]. Poslednie Novosti, no. 3270, March 6, 1930, 3. ———. “Tel′-Aviv” [Tel Aviv]. Poslednie Novosti, no. 4544, August 31 (1933): 3. Rolnik, Eran J. Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity. London: Katnac Book Ltd., 2012 (translation of the 2007 Hebrew edition). Rozovskii, S. “Russkii pisatel′ v Palestine: ‘Zelenoe Plamia’ A. Vysotskogo.” Segodnia, no 208, July 20, 1931, 3. Shrayer, Maxim D., ed. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001. 2 vols. Edited, selected, and cotranslated, with introductory essays by Maxim D. Shrayer. Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 2007. ———. “Mark Egart and the Legacy of His Soviet Novel about Halutzim.” On the Jewish Street/На еврейской улице: A Journal of Russian-Jewish History and Culture 1 (2011): 1–14. Shruba, Manfred. Slovar′ psevdonimov russkogo zarubezh′ia v Evrope (1917–1945). Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2018. Timenchik, Roman. Angely—liudi—veshchi: v oreole stikhov i druzei. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2016. ———. “Detal′ dvoinogo naznacheniia.” Lekhaim 5 (May 2006). https://lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/169/timenchkik.htm. ———. “Glaz i slovo.” Lekhaim 8 (August 2006). http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/172/timenchik.htm. ———. “Otvety na voprosy.” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 26 (2006): 197–206. ———. “Piatye punkty liricheskikh geroev.” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 52 (2015): 209–221. ———. “Russkaia literatura v Izraile.” In Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia, addendum 2, edited by Yitzkhak Oren (Nadel) and Naftali Prat, 323–334. Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniiu evreiskikh obshchin, 1995. ———. “Russkoe slovo o Zemle Izrailia.” Lekhaim 4 (April 2006). http://www.lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/168/timenchik.htm. ———. “Samuil Kruglikov i ego kniga ‘V krasnykh tiskakh’ (Iz istorii russkoi knigi v Izraile).” Ierusalimskii bibliofil: Almanakh 1 (1999): 51–52. ———. “Tri pomety na poliakh novoi knigi.” In Russkaia poeziia XX veka: Materialy dlia bibliografii, edited by L. M. Turchinskii. Moscow: Truten′, 2013.

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———. “V nachale. Pechat′ russkogo Zarubezh′ia ob Eretz Israel.” In Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography, edited by Polina Besprozvannaya, Andrei Rogachevskii, Roman Timenchik, 127–137. Stanford: Stanford Slavic Studies Press, 2016. Timenchik, Roman, and Zoia Kopel′man. “Viacheslav Ivanov i poeziia Bialika.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 14 (1995): 102–118. Weisskopf, Mikhail [Mikhail Vaiskopf]. “Krasnoe plat′itse: Obraz geroini v antisionistskom romane Marka Egarta ‘Opalennaia zemlia.’” Solnechnoe spletenie 8 (2004): 148–155. ——— [Mikhail Vaiskopf]. “Krasnoe plat′itse: Obraz geroini v antisionistskoi proze 1930-kh gg. (Mark Egart. ‘Opalennaia zemlia’).” In Izrail′ glazami ‘russkikh’: kul′tura i sovremennost′ (Posviashchaetsia pamiati Barukha Kimmerlinga), 364–376. Moscow: Natalis, 2008.

Julius Margolin and His Times Luba Jurgenson “No, I was never anyone’s contemporary,” wrote Osip Mandelstam in his famous 1924 poem.1 Julius (Iulii) Margolin (1900–1971), who was a connoisseur and admirer of the poet, entitled his article in the Vozdushnye puti (Aerial ways) collection “My Brother Osip.” For many critics, both figures shared a certain commonality of fates and a complete absence of conformism. In the words of Roman Gul′: “Julius had something Mandelstamian in nature: he did not want to sit at the table with Pharisees.”2 We will not expand on the analogy here—especially since this translation of ethical questions into Christian terms characterizes Gul′ more than Margolin himself—but reflect on the time of Julius Margolin. First and foremost, poets and thinkers cannot be contemporaries of their time; the poet comes either “before every new century,” like Tsvetaeva,3 or, as the saying goes, ahead of their time—or behind it, which is by and large the same thing. Upon briefly discussing Margolin’s biography in “Popytka rekviema” (Attempt at a requiem), Anatolii Iakobson thus expressed his surprise: Israelis (native or otherwise), as well as Jews in general (but also non-Jews) need to be informed about him. [. . .] Must we all be informed about something as fundamental, primary, necessary—about a man who personified the beauty and pride of modern humanity? Yes, we all must. The fact is that Julius Margolin’s fate—happiest of fates by the way—was, in certain respect, tragic. He spoke to us, his contemporaries, in a manner 1 2 3

Copyright © 2023 by Luba Jurgenson. Osip Mandelstam [Osip Mandel′shtam], Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh [Works in 4 volumes], vol. 1 (Moscow: Art-Biznes Tsentr, 1993), 52. Roman Gul′, Odvukon′. Sovetskaia i emigrantskaia literatura [Odvukon′. Soviet and emigrant literature] (New York: Most, 1973), 215. Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh [Works in seven volumes], vol. 2 (Moscow: Terra, 1994), 315–316.

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that very few in the world could. [. . .] his voice had thundering power. And we, his contemporaries failed to listen to him. And we still do not know how to. What’s worse, our contemporaries (and in Israel, our compatriots) prevented him from speaking during his lifetime. And now, after his death, he gets little attention and piecemeal publication . . .4 Margolin, “an Israeli journalist and Russian Jew who lived in Tel Aviv,”5 was not unnoticed in his homeland; but his contemporaries passed him by. A mass aliyah of Soviet Jews, ready to share his opinion on the USSR, began only after his death. Vladimir Fromer’s essay “A Failed Encounter” illustrates how they went their separate ways.6 The reflection on Margolin’s work and biography began, in fact, in the 2000s.7 Vladimir Khazan, a specialist on Margolin’s work to whom we owe in particular an analysis of his correspondence, summarized this as follows: His life, activity and work have long been deserving of a major and comprehensive study. Such a study would have to [. . .] determine his place in camp literature and, no less importantly, put an end to the sort of arbitrariness that tends to thrive in the presence of biographical gaps and the absence of an artist’s inclusion into the “canon” of obligatory modern knowledge.8 This essay does not intend to fill in biographical gaps. My main contribution is to try and “define his place in camp literature.”9 Yet, Margolin cannot be distilled

4 Anatolii Iakobson, “Popytka rekviema” [Attempt at a requiem], Vremia i my 29 (1978): 120. 5 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], Parizhskii otchet [The Paris report] (Tel Aviv: MAOZ, 1970). 6 Vladimir Fromer, “Nesostoiavshaiasia vstrecha” [A failed encounter], in Puteshestvie v stranu ZEKA, by Julius Margolin (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, 2017, vol. 2), 313–323. 7 Leona Toker, Return from Archipelago. Narrative on Gulag Survivors (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana: University Press, 2000); Maxim D. Shrayer, “Yuli Margolin,” in An Antology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 1: 1801–1953 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), 484–487; Roman Katsman, “A Journey to the Land Zeka: A Poetic Enigma of Julius Margolin,” Slavia Orientalis 47, no 4 (2018): 611–629. 8 Vladimir Khazan, “‘Our object is to press, not to let you relax, continue the uncompromising fight against existing evil.’ Correspondence between Yuliy Margolin and Mark Vishniak,” part 1, Iudaica Russica 1 (2021): 29. 9 Luba Jurgenson, “Je ne mourrai pas tout entire,” in Voyage au pays des ZE-KA, by Julius Margolin (Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2010), 48–75; idem, Preface to Le Livre du retour, by Julius Margolin (Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2012), 13–33; idem, Preface to Le Procès Eichmann et autres récits, by Julius Margolin (Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2016), 9–25.

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down to his Gulag experience; he represents a significant phenomenon of the European and Russian-Jewish/Israeli culture. The purpose of this essay is to delineate the complex cultural space in which Margolin’s creative thought unfolded—from the Pale of Settlement to Eretz Yisrael, including some of his extended stays in “not so distant places.”10 More than forty years after Iakobson’s “Attempts at a Requiem,” the Italian edition of some of Margolin’s militant and political texts was published. The book is entitled Resoconto di Parigi (The Paris report) according to the title of the main text, written by Margolin after the Rousset trial (see below). Its subtitle is eloquent: “Una voce dai Gulag sempre soffocata dai ‘suoi’” (“A voice from the Gulag always strangled by ‘his own’”). The preface painted a portrait of Margolin as the “Illustre sconosciuto,” the famous stranger. At least this edition does exist, as well as many others; times are now gradually warming up to Margolin. Margolin was bound by blood to his century. This one enacted the collapse of empires, the Russian Revolutions, the expansion of National Socialism in Germany, Stalin’s terror, the Shoah (Holocaust), the birth of the State of Israel, the Eichmann trial . . . All Margolin could do was collect and piece together all the life material he had at his disposal and mark his time as a “borderland,” saying about himself that he “lived in a tragic transitional era—on the line separating life and death for the Jewish people.”11 Margolin experienced his various “ages” throughout the century; an observer, an eyewitness, a participant in its “earthly things,” he also suffered from its “fatal wound.”12 As a thinker, he belongs to the history of the Russian word—this is inevitable—and of the European thought. However, and for reasons which will soon become obvious, in order to try and seriously reflect on Margolin’s times, one must start the journey with his geography.

Margolin and Geography The temporal borderland (understood as a tragic transitional era) is linked to the spatial one. No book written by Margolin can dispense with geographical mapping. It is necessary. First, to understand the chaotic wanderings of a refugee

10 This expression, inherited from the tsarist bureaucratic language, means “camps,” “prison,” or “exile.” 11 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Kliuch k moei biografii” [Key to my biography], 1950, А536/51, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA), Jerusalem, Israel. 12 Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, vol. 1, 52.

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from German-occupied western Poland, who lived in his native Pinsk when the Soviet troops came to counter-occupy the eastern territories. Second, to imagine the journey that took him from Pinsk to places with horrifying names: Medvezhegorsk, Ertsevo, Kruglitsa, Kotlas (northern Soviet camps), Slavgorod (a place of exile), then all the way back to Łódż, and from there to Paris and then Marseilles and, on a steamship, to Tel Aviv. Throughout Margolin’s life, borders were constantly being redrawn—the maps of Europe, the USSR, and Israel were changing—but the borderline between life and death remained relevant. As between East and West. It is no coincidence that his book about his return from the camps was entitled Doroga na Zapad (The Road to the West).13 For Margolin, the West was not so much a geographical construct, as a political and existential one; his West extended to Israel, at least the Israel of which he dreamed of, first as a young Zionist, and then as a former prisoner, freed from the Gulag chains. Margolin’s West was defined in opposition to his East, the Soviet system, Nazism, and, more generally, undemocratic methods of governance and thoughts. Margolin’s time began in the outskirts of the Russian Empire, which, long before the advent of the “real twentieth century,” was ridden with pogroms, saw the emergence of Zionism, and the demise of Jewish shtetls: gramophones, cabbies, a waltz called “On the Manchurian Sands,” the death of Tolstoy—and a lament for him, for “traditional humanism,” that begins in the Jewish settlements, the “real twentieth century.” We children were stunned by our mother’s tears: Leo Tolstoy had died, and he was not even our relative. [. . .] We realized that a great misfortune had happened. [. . .] Many cried with her. [. . .] The nineteenth century was being brought to a close, its best spokesmen were disappearing. The traditional humanity and straightforwardness in understanding what constitutes the moral basis of history was coming to an end. The bloody dawn of a new century was rising over Russia, over Europe.14 And here is another date: 1914. “From 1914 begins the collapse of illusions, the decline of traditions and the way of life built upon them. Together with

13 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], Puteshestvie v stranu ZEKA [ Journey into the land of ZEKA] (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, 2017), 224–313. 14 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Kniga o zhizni” [Book of life], Novyi Zhurnal 82 (1966): 90.

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them came to an end [. . .] the harmonious and integral order of Jewish life [. . .] A great collapse is coming [. . .]”15 For Margolin, the century began in Sokoły, Łomża subregion, with an atlas of the world in an edition by the Il′in cartographic society that a Catholic priest named Kokoreko had given him. Having studied it by heart, the ten-year-old Margolin understood that the world was complete—and proceeded to create another one, of his own making, new and on paper. It would be called “the country of Nickelonia.” This small territory, of fifteen to twenty million inhabi­ tants, was located outside the existing geographical space. It was a purely imaginary place. “I didn’t assign it a place in the geographical atlas.”16 Margolin thus answered God’s eternal question to Adam: “where are you?” by replying: “nowhere.” At the same time, Nickelonia’s cities were growing and its landscapes expanding and spreading over; the child literally lived in it, in constant geographical ecstasy, creating more and more settlements, changing the scale. And he himself had become God, dissatisfied with unfinished drawings, constantly remaking his creation. Nickelonia certainly did not include Kotlas and Ertsevo. Yet, by calling his main work—a testimony about the Gulag—Journey to the Land of the Zeka,17 Margolin did not deviate from his seminal idea and inscribed the unforeseen in his life atlas. The camps constitute an invisible geography. As Katherine R. Jolluck, author of the introduction to the English version of the Journey writes, “The title of this book, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, suggests that it is a kind of travelogue to a mysterious place. Indeed, Julius Margolin, writing just after the Second World War, notes that the ‘country’ he describes ‘does not appear on a Soviet map nor is it in any atlas.’”18 And Timothy Snyder explains in his Foreword that “to become a zek was to lose the points of refe­rence that would make the experience intelligible to others.” The travelogue allows the

15 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], Evreiskaia povest′ [A Jewish tale] (Tel Aviv: Maaian, 1960), 13, accessed January 17, 2022, http://scriptum.cz/soubory/scriptum/%5Bnode%5D/ margolin-j-b_evrejskaja-povest_ocr.pdf. 16 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni,” 93. 17 This is the original title of Margolin’s book. It was modified in the English translation: Journey into the land of the Zeks. Zeka is the abbreviation of zakliuchennyi, a word for “prisoner” that was in use within the Gulag administration. In some camps, the inmates changed it to zek when they referred to themselves, a term used by Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago. Margolin, for his part, uses the form zeka. 18 See Julius Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back. A Memoir of the Gulag, trans. Stefany Hoffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), xix.

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staging of the act of recognition and orientation. “In this sense the title of this book is perfectly chosen.”19 When Margolin was a child, the future appeared to him as a geographical project. And his present times? As he wrote in his “Kniga o zhizni” (Book of life), in the first ten years of his life, young Margolin changed homes six times. Stolin, Kostopol, Varkliany, Kostiukovichi, Merech, Sokoły: “My childhood was lugged on trains.”20 His father, a local doctor who treated everything and everyone, delivered babies, pulled teeth, and took bribes in exchange for exemptions from military service, was a feisty man who never stayed anywhere more than two years. “He tormented himself and others, though it cannot be said that he was a burden to people for a long time: his conflicts and struggles with those around him usually came to an end as, after working in a place for a year or two, he would move to another.”21 The family moved all the time and the train stations soon became a substitute to home for the child. One morning I woke up with a cry: “Go! To the railway!” It was difficult to calm me down. It was a real crisis: everything around me was tormenting me, I was in the grip of nostalgia— not for home, but for wandering, I felt the need for an immediate change. “Let’s go,” I implored my mother, “I want to take the train!” But it was not time yet.22 The trains turned into destiny and the journey, into a leitmotif, the point from which life would happen. Margolin left his parents’ home and moved away from his tyrannical father and suffering mother, “without the slightest regret.”23 European education does not necessarily equate a happy family life. In 1923, he left for Berlin, where, six years later, he obtained his doctorate in philosophy: “Grundphaenomene des intentionalen Bewusstsein” (Basic phenomena of intentional consciousness). In 1929, he settled in Łódź with his wife Eva, a children’s book publisher, and their three-year-old son Efraim. In October 1936, the family made a trip to Mandatory Palestine. His wife and son remained in Tel Aviv, but circumstances compelled Margolin 19 Ibid., ix–x. 20 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Kniga o zhizni” [Book of life], Novyi Zhurnal 81 (1965): 69. 21 Ibid., 37. 22 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” (1966), 71. 23 Ibid., 54.

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to return to Łódź. There, he continued to work at a family-run publishing house named Print, hopeful for better circumstances that would lead to his final move, as we can read in a letter addressed to his sister: “What will happen by the end of 1938—we will see. It depends on the situation and our situation then: if it will already be possible to decide to liquidate ‘Print’ and move beyond the sea.”24 As we now know, the Nazis would take care of the liquidation of Print; for Margolin this extended stay in Łódź would turn into five years in the Gulag as of 1939: he did not return until 1946. Travel narratives are commonplace in Central European literature, and Margolin is not the only one to have developed a geographical motif in the Gulag story ( Jósef Czapski, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński . . . all also working in this genre). However, with Margolin it is not solely a tribute to the genre; it should be construed as a means to the construction of self, a modus existencia, with the train being its eidos, its concrete image, its form. This is how the train is depicted in Journey, even if it is described as a “wandering coffin.” This is also how the train appears in the later stories, in which Margolin came back to the roots of his “borderland.” Tolstoy, with his pathos of the wandering— isn’t the railroad game Margolin described in the chapter “Sokoly,” derived from Tolstoy’s Childhood?25—could hardly have foreseen what trains would conjure up in the twentieth century, at the age of deportation and “displaced persons.” However, in “The Berger Case” Margolin also wrote: “Leo Tolstoy said that ‘he who has not been in prison does not know what a State is.’”26 The Russian “departure” is multifaceted; it turned into a Jewish “exodus” from Russia, from galut to Palestine, it also turned into a journey to the Land of the Zeks. Margolin, 24 Inna Dobruskina, “Fakty iz biografii Iu. B. Margolina” [Facts of biography of Ju. B. Margolin], in Sobranie statei i vystuplenii, obrashchenii i pisem Iu. B. Margolina 1946–1957 gg. [Collection of articles and speeches, addresses and letters by Ju. B. Margolin, 1946–1957], 2002, accessed December 25, 2021, http://rjews.net/raisa-epshtein/articles/margolin/4.htm. 25 To compare: “We put the chairs in a row—it was a train. Alia was the passenger, and I was the locomotive and the conductor. [. . .] We’d go on the road” (Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” [1966], 85) and “In the long winter evenings, we had been used to cover an arm-chair with a shawl and make a carriage of it—one of us being the coachman, another one the footman, the two girls the passengers, and three other chairs the trio of horses abreast—and we were off on the road” (Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, trans. C. J. Hogarth, 2006, accessed December 30, 2021, https//www.gutenberg.org//files/2142/2142-h/2142-h.htm). Had Margolin already read Childhood, or was this a popular game? Margolin himself mentioned only Tolstoy’s tales “in the folk editions of the ‘Posrednik.’” After reading them, he tried to write poetry. His description of the anguish of creation also evokes a chapter from Childhood, but all children may have similar poetic experience. 26 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Delo Bergera” [The Berger case], Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, December 12, 1946, 183–192, accessed December 28, 2021, https://margolin-ze-ka.tripod. com/1946-1.html.

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upon retrospectively narrating his life, turned the displacement into a creative act, putting it on the map of the starry sky, which had been given to him along with the atlas.

Margolin and Languages of Jewishness The borderline may have sometimes been blurred, as the Jewish world is a palimpsest, where cultures and languages overlap. Within the diaspora, any language can become “Jewish.” In the Russian Empire, the Jewish languages were not only Yiddish and Hebrew, but also Russian and Polish, as well as French and German—the languages of emigration. Margolin grew up in a multilingual environment at a cultural crossroad. “Poland was in Pan Kulesha’s garden and house, Russia in Gogol’s volumes—and where was Jewishness? It surrounded me on all sides, a background against which my life was happening—the background of my life or its companion piece.”27 Although Yiddish was their native tongue, his parents spoke to him in Russian. “Polish, Lithuanian, and Yiddish floated in the air and fell on deaf ears; I only spoke, read, and wrote in Russian, the language my parents had passed on to me.”28 Margolin thus made it clear that the choice of language and culture was made for him by his parents. Nevertheless, in the same “Book of Life,” he indicated that there was a choice—but the person does not choose the language, the language chooses the person. I was fortunate—and I still consider it luck—that in a house where there were no books, no buying classics or new releases, [. . .] there were two frayed volumes of Gogol. [. . .] The fact that Russian became my mother tongue, I owe it more to Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol than anyone else. In those early years, I could have just as easily been enchanted by the Bible, Bialik, Mickiewicz . . . But they were not part of my environment.29 Margolin wrote this in the mid-1960s, upon looking back on the road he had traveled. However, in the 1950s, “Russification” had appeared to him as one of the destructive forces against the Jewish people, as he stated (in the third person as he often would): “his Pinsk childhood was marked by assimilation, which 27 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” (1966), 88. 28 Ibid., 66. 29 Ibid., 88.

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uprooted him from the Jewish tradition and galut folk culture. He took root in the Russian culture instead (his youth in Yekaterinoslav).”30 In the 1930s, Margolin was fascinated by Jabotinsky (who was fascinated by Poland). Łódż was a multilingual city, where at least three languages were spoken—Polish, Russian and Yiddish—but Margolin’s book The Idea of Zionism, written in Russian, was published in 1937 in Polish (translated by M. Olkowski). Polish romanticism and Zionist-Revisionism are kindred spirits. This romantic culture emerged in the struggle to build a national State, during the partition of Poland and under two pervasive cultures— Russian and German—both aspiring to be universal and with little interest for any sort of particularities. In this spirit, Abba Ahimeir, a Zionist-Revisionist leader who became one of Margolin’s close friends later on, wrote in 1941: “Goethe, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy poisoned us, sons of a people struggling for its national survival, while the superb writers and poets of Polish literature could have invigorated us.”31 Polish romanticism and its followers were part of the sources of Revisionist culture. Jabotinsky broke down literature into two distinct categories: contemplative and active (or engaged). He chose the latter form for himself—of which Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword can be viewed as a model. Margolin followed his steps and also chose to write active literature, though one can hardly classify his “Book of Life” as such—only insofar as he “resurrects” the long-gone Jewish settlements, a similar form of “action” performed by Jabotinsky in his novel The Five (about which Margolin wrote an essay that was published twenty years later), where he mentally returns to the Odesa of his youth. While Margolin’s prewar Zionism was closely linked to Poland, his camp experience is inseparable from the Russian language, and his testimony was written in Russian. Upon his return, Margolin worked with the émigré press; his activities to liberate Jewish Gulag prisoners from the camps relied heavily on the attention and support of Russian-speaking Israel. Hebrew as a modern language did not exist at the time. As such, when young Margolin was growing up, there was only “ancient Jewish”: There goes the train in the early sunny morning from Lapa station to Krushevo—and in the carriage a little girl chirps in

30 Margolin, “Kliuch k moei biografii.” 31 Abba Ahimeir, “Poland in Palestine,” Ha-Mashkif, January 24, 1941, reprinted in Yaakov Shavit, “Politics and Messianism: The Zionist Revisionist Movement and Polish Political Culture,” Studies in Zionism 6, no 2 (1985): 230

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Hebrew—in “ancient Hebrew,” as it was then called. Wonderful! She comes from Palestine—they speak that language there. And the Jewish passengers look at her fondly and listen to her as if she sang heavenly music.32 One does not expect heavenly music to be understandable. The relationship between Margolin and Hebrew reflects the experience lived by many children from semi-assimilated Russian Jewry. About the Sokoly synagogue, where, as a child, he would go with his father three times a year—on Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur ( Judgment Day), he wrote: “[. . .] I get confused by incomprehensible words, but I try to read as fast as others, I jump over lines to keep up—and gradually prayer turns into running—to keep up with the adults! They read incomprehensibly fast, they know everything by heart. [. . .]”33 Unintelligible words may not necessarily feel “foreign.” On the contrary, here, it was rather the opposite. “Here I am accepted. Here is where I belong.”34 Little Margolin knew the service very well. Adult Margolin, on the other hand, upon catching Jewish radio chatter from Jerusalem in Pinsk in 1940, hoped to know “what was happening at home.” “It is hard to convey with what feeling the people cut off from their own, the residents of Pinsk over whom loomed the shadow of destruction, grasped these sounds of native speech.”35 There and then, Hebrew was already described as native speech. Passover evening. We finished our Seder early and went outside with my father to walk and listen. And there is a lot to listen to! From behind the closed shutters of the wooden houses, a joyful buzz could be heard. The whole street is singing, everywhere, a Seder is going on behind every window, and we go from window to window and listen: here they have just started, and here the middle of the Passover meal and you can hear the clinking of plates and spoons, and in a third place, they are already at the end, with a deafening chorus of Chad-Gadya, a song about goats symbolizing the Jewish people, “God will take away the sword from death!”36

32 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” (1966), 88–89. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 Ibid. 35 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 49. 36 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” (1966), 89.

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This temporary “discordance” suggests that Passover prayers were recited in a different manner behind each window, sometimes in more detail and sometimes in haste. The Margolins were among the firsts to finish the Seder—the family was not religious. That being said, the Jewish street gave Margolin the child a sense of serenity; one of the rare moments of joyful communion with his father. “And I feel good and peaceful with my father—because it’s all my own, close, even though it’s festive only—not for weekdays.”37 During this holiday, in the same way as in the synagogue, Margolin felt like “a ship in my native port, in between one voyage and another that will carry me far, far away.”38 The Bible, Bialik, Mickiewicz—none left room for Yiddish. In Sokoly, Margolin wished he had made friends with the daughters of a housewife, “but they didn’t know Russian and I didn’t speak Yiddish.”39 Even later, in Israel, according to his son Efraim’s recollection, five languages were spoken at home: Russian, German, French, Polish, and Hebrew—but not Yiddish.40 Margolin’s youth took place during the heyday of the Yiddish Jewish avantgarde, but he did not mention it anywhere and was evidently not cognizant of the phenomenon—he did not experience it as its contemporary and only encountered it later. If he is to be believed, he discovered Yiddish literature while already in Pinsk, in 1939: “Lubliner [. . .] first brought me Zajwl rimer of Mendel Borejsza, In New York of Halperin, and the verse of Kulbak.” This statement was followed by this commentary: “Moshe Kulbak (1896–1937)—Yiddish poet from Germany, who fled from the Nazis to the Soviet Union and died before the war in Stalin’s camps.”41 Margolin was wrong: Kulbak was born in Smorgon, three hundred and fifty kilometers from Pinsk. He only lived in Berlin for three years, from 1920 to 1923— any chance encounter between them was missed—and returned to the USSR long before the Nazis came to power. Later on, in chapter four of Journey, Kulbak is already referred to as a familiar figure. “Suddenly I caught Kulbak’s name, a Jewish poet whom I knew as a friend of the Soviet Union living in Moscow. This was the first news of Kulbak in years: his name was on the index of banned books.”42 This gives the impression Margolin had a long-standing interest in Kulbak. Margolin worked in the OBLONO (Oblast Department of Public Education) of the city of Pinsk, annexed to the USSR, and was trying to save books earmarked 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 90. 39 Ibid., 84. 40 E-mail exchange with Ephraim Margolin, November 21, 2021. 41 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 51. 42 Ibid., 65.

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for destruction. Incidentally, the OBLONO was located in a former church, “a Catholic oasis surrounded by the streets of the Jewish city,” where, as a child, Margolin “timidly glanced into.”43 The fate of Kulbak, a Yiddish poet, became a symbol of the fate of the Soviet Jewry. Later on, when he made an appeal in “The Berger Case,” his open letter to the Jews of Israel and the diaspora, Margolin singled Kulbak out of the mass of the repressed, using his figure and fate to sway world opinion. In Soviet Russia, M. Kulbak, a Jewish poet of brilliant talent, a jewel of our literature, suddenly “disappeared.” Kulbak was not a Zionist. He was a friend of the Soviet Union and went there to live and work in the “homeland of all workers.” [. . .] Kulbak had the same idea of communism as our other naive fools living in a world of enthusiastic fantasy. Now his name is on the index, his works have been withdrawn, and he himself is “dead without a trace,” i.e., in one of the camps living the life of working cattle.44 This gives the impression Margolin was not aware of Kulbak’s fate yet, whereas in Journey, he wrote confidently of his death. Perhaps this was a ploy—he could not name the camp interns as they feared for their families, so a dead man was to be rescued. Kulbak was also mentioned in “Address to the Leaders of the Jewish Public.” One should also point out the fate of the famous Jewish poet M. Kulbak, a non-Zionist, who moved to Russia before the war. It is not known what happened to him, but his works are “on the index,” that is to say, banned in the Soviet Union, and he himself is missing, which means imprisonment in a camp.45 Margolin was not like Kulbak, deluding himself with the idea of a Jewish revival on Soviet land and the creation of a new Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in light of their shared past in the camps, this commonality of fates “posthumously” erases their language barrier, leading Margolin, the survivor, and Kulbak, the deceased, to speak the same language.

43 Ibid., 45. 44 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], Nesobrannoe [Unassembled] (Tel Aviv: Society for the Commemoration of Dr. Julius Borisovich Margolin, 1975), 104. 45 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Obrashchenie k rukovoditeliam evreiskoi obshchestvennosti 20.11.1946” [Address to the leaders of the Jewish public on November 20, 1946], 1946, А536/52, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel.

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In addition to Margolin’s “Jewish languages,” there was Latin. In the winter of 1944–1945, he found himself in Block nine of the camp’s hospital, among the dying, and diagnosed with “alimentary dystrophy”—a disease that (to quote a famous line by Vera Inber) “one who is neither a Latinist, nor a philologist defines in Russian as ‘hunger.’”46 Among other symptoms, the exhaustion he felt was expressed in his fading memory. I felt that I was sinking into forgetfulness while awake, and the past was leaving me in clusters. In that state of exhaustion, every day I felt divested of some memories, knowledge, and names . . . What are the names of my sister’s children? Who is the author of City of the Sun? I was losing my spiritual possessions, and every day I discovered that something else was missing . . .47 To resist the disintegration of his consciousness, Margolin repeated to himself his entire life and texts that he knew by heart. Among them was “Exegi monumentum aere perennius . . .” by Horace. “I would repeat the first six lines endlessly, lying on my back with eyes closed. But on the seventh, I failed: Non omnis moriar. Multaque pars mei . . . Vitabit . . . Libitin. . . .”48 Upon reading these lines, one cannot help but remember a moment described in chapter eleven of Primo Levi’s famous testimony about Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, where Levi tries to teach Italian to his French campmate by translating excerpts from “The Canto of Ulysses,” the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. And after “When I came?” Nothing. A hole in my memory. “Before Aeneas ever named it so.” Another hole. A fragment floats into my mind, not relevant: “. . . nor piety. To my old father, not the wedded love That should have comforted Penelope . . .”, is it correct?49 As we now know, there are elements of fiction in Levi’s description of this moment. Obviously, the account of Dante’s resurrection in Auschwitz—or of Dante’s descent into Auschwitz—was necessary to the documentary narrative in order to “translate” camp experience into universal language, for Dante’s hell is the cultural legacy of humanity. Margolin’s attempts to remember Horace’s

46 Vera Inber, Pulkovskii meridian [Pulkovo meridian] (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1944), 15. 47 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 525. 48 Ibid. 49 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man. The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), 119.

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famous poem are also given to us in a reconstruction (not in Journey, but in “Non omnis moriar,” a later story) in order to enculturate the experience of “dehumanization.” For obvious reasons, to this end, Levi chose a text he had grown up with, reciting it as if he were transported back to his native Italy. Margolin, on the other hand, turned to literary heritage that seems at first glance “alien” to the Polish-Russian-Jewish cultural sphere, even though the title of the story is very Russian. There is every reason to believe that he was familiar with Pushkin’s translation long before he learnt the Latin original. Nevertheless, he does not make reference to Pushkin. These Latin lines turned out to be his ticket to surviving and returning to his homeland, Palestine. On the verge of death, Margolin stayed faithful to the West, one of the hypostases of which was Eretz Yisrael; the West for Margolin was spelled out in Latin before being written in Hebrew. Then, with the exasperation and fury of a drowning man who is being carried away by the current, I promised myself that I would not die—non moriar!—before opening Horace and repairing the torn thread. That was my pledge. Two years later, already in Tel Aviv, I sought out a copy of his Odes, and my hands trembled while I read: “. . . usque ego postero Crescam laude recens. . . .”50 To fully restore his memory, and along with it reconnect to his times, it was necessary for him to return to Tel Aviv, where Europe, fleeing from itself, was reborn, and Western culture lived. This, Margolin and Levi did not have in common, as the latter was quite distant from Zionism. Even though Margolin’s The Road to the West is in some ways close to The Truce, which can be viewed as Levi’s road to the West—returning from Auschwitz to Turin via the USSR. In The Truce, there is an episode in which Levi tries to talk to a Polish priest at a market in Cracow; they cannot understand each other until they realize they share a common language: Latin.51

Margolin and Zionism To what extent did Margolin’s Zionism stand the test of Israel, the real state, the dream of which kept him going while in the camps and in exile? In June 1948, after the Israeli Navy attacked the Altalena,52 he wrote to Iakov Tsvibak (editor 50 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 526–527. 51 Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce, 222. 52 In mid-June 1948, at the beginning of the War of Independence for Israel, the ship Altalena (the name was a literary pseudonym used by Jabotinsky) was carrying a shipment of weapons

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of Novoe Russkoe Slovo [New Russian word] under the pseudonym of Andrei Sedykh): “Morally we have lost the Jewish state.” This led him to conclude: “I have a burning desire, as soon as the war is over, to leave this place.” In the margins, he added: “we have a gang in power.”53 Margolin wrote that he would like, at least temporarily, to get Vusya (Eva Spector) out and to New York. He was also ready to send his son to China to work as a teacher, because “there will be no life for him here, he will be weeded out.”54 This letter was a commentary on a declaration printed in Hebrew and published in the June 23, 1948 edition of the newspaper Ha-Mashkif, in which Margolin refused to recognize as his own the interim government that had shed blood in Netanya. This can be viewed as a complete failure; Margolin’s destiny may not have been to become a RussianIsraeli writer. How long had it been since this new homeland had appeared to him as a fairytale realm of justice? Crossing the sea from the old world to a new Homeland is like recovering from an illness. That is how it should be: between the old, corrupt world of sorrow and misery, hatred and injustice, and the new beginning on the land that awaits us like a bride, there lay several otherworldly days of azure sea and sunshine, solitude between the distant sky and the desolate sea—time for everyone to shake off yesterday’s dust, purify him or herself, and prepare for the future. This is not a simple change of place or movement in space and time! We broke away from one continent and arrived at another, separated by four seas, like in a fairy tale.55 Back to September 1946, with Margolin on a ship from Marseilles to Haifa; this was his recent past—but was it not viewed as such from the future? “Heliopolis,” the story about this journey, is not dated, but there is every reason to believe that it was written, like the other stories included in The Road to the West, somewhat later. It was published in the July 12–13, 1956 issue of

purchased by Irgun and a group of 940 new returnees to the port of Tel Aviv. As a result of Irgun’s refusal to hand over all of the weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces (Irgun was willing to hand over eighty percent), the ship was shelled and sunk on June 22, 1948. Margolin, like many of Begin’s supporters, considered this action to be a provocation by Ben-Gurion, the head of the interim government. 53 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Lichnoe pis′mo po povodu rasstrela Al′taleny” [Personal letter on the Altalena’s shooting down], 1948, A536/50, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. 54 Ibid. 55 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 568.

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Novoe Russkoe Slovo. By that time, “the Sinai events and disappointments were in the past.”56 Margolin never misses the opportunity to remind us that in Israel, there is always an awakening from the “dream” of the Promised Land. Israel was utterly real, concrete; there, under the influence of events, phenomena were experienced without the mediation of fiction. “Here, fiction does not operate and words do not deceive. Here, the truth of things is revealed, and the hunters of ‘uplifting deception’ and soothing illusions have their eyes opened as well.” “Israel is not a sanatorium. Upset nerves do not cure. People who come here in a bad mood run the risk of finding many reasons to add to their frustrations,”57 Margolin wrote. There would be many of these in Margolin’s Israeli lifetime. The first came immediately after his return, in November 1946. On his “Address to the Leaders of the Jewish Public,” about the Berger case, we can read a handwritten annotation: “None of the addressees saw fit to reply to this letter.”58 Among the addressees, there was Ben-Zvi—the future president of Israel. In 1954, however, Ben-Zvi visited the Jabotinsky Museum; “During a break I was introduced to the President, and to my delight it turned out that he had read Journey into the Land of the Zeka. ‘One of the few books in Russian that I have read in recent years. It explains a lot, clarifies a lot,’ Ben-Zvi told me.”59 It took the president years—both to read Journey and to “dare cross the threshold of the building in front of the sixth sycamore on King George Street.” This is understandable—the Jabotinsky House Museum had originally been established in 1937 as the Betar Museum.60 “But today, however, his visit signifies a tribute by the State of Israel to those who have sacrificed their lives for it.” Among the latter, there was the President’s son. “‘Palmach’—‘Irgun’—‘Lehi’— ‘Hagana’—leftists, rightists, socialists, nationalists, from north and south, east and west, death made them all equal and reconciled.”61 Does that imply Margolin was also reconciled with the real Israel—as it actually was? As we may recall, according to Hannah Arendt, one form of citizenship, of participation in the life of the community—the polis—is civil disobedience, through which responsibility emerges and the contours of public space are redefined.62 Margolin’s rebellion against the Ben-Gurion government did not mean that he

56 Margolin, Nesobrannoe, 7. 57 Ibid. 58 Margolin, “Obrashchenie k rukovoditeliam.” 59 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 80. 60 The Betar (born from the revisionist movement founded by Jabotinsky) was the political opponent of the Mapai party to which Ben-Zvi belonged. 61 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 80. 62 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections: Civil Disobedience,” New Yorker 12 (September 1970).

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did not identify with the New State and, over the years that ensued, did not positively respond to major events and took pride in Israeli achievements— “The port in Eilat is growing, the tonnage of the maritime fleet is booming (at the expense of German reparations).”63 If Margolin mentioned this detail, it is because he objected, in general, to the anti-German speeches flourishing within the Israeli public space and the boycott of German culture. He considered Nazism as an offshoot of Western culture, not an expression of its essence, and called on Israeli society to help Germany heal from it, especially through its young generation, and drew attention to the fact that Nazism had ceased to exist, while Stalinism was still rampant. While he justified policies toward the Arab population, he rebelled against the definition of Jewishness as a religion (referenced on the passport), visited kibbutzim, or simply travelled as a tourist through the country he aspired to know. His integration into Israel is expressed in texts. He writes “a concise history of the Jewish people”—Povest′ tysiacheletii (The tale of millennia)—and dedicates Evreiskaia povest′ (A Jewish tale) to the national hero Israel (Srolik) Epstein. To quote Maxim D. Shrayer, who introduced Margolin to the Englishspeaking audiences in his Antology of Jewish-Russian Literature: “Yisrael (Srolik) Epstein (1914–1946) was an activist of Betar. [. . .] After escaping from Poland in 1939, Epstein eventually arrived in Eretz Yisrael. In 1944, the National Military Organization (Irgun Zvai Le’umi), known in English as the Irgun, declared a revolt against British authorities. In 1946 Epstein came to Italy on in assignment from the general headquarters of the Irgun. Captured as part of widespread arrests mounted by the Italian police under Bristish pressure, he died attempting to escape from an Italian jail on 27 December 1946.”64 A Jewish Tale was met with hostility both by those who saw it as idealizing Betar, and by those who found Epstein’s image insufficiently heroic.65 Srolik is for Margolin a type of new Jew, ready to defend his right to be a Jew, and his novelized biography is an opportunity to reflect on the Polish component of Zionism, on the birth of Betar. His bitter and ardent responses to all the “grief ” that his new homeland gave him came our way. He was offended by the complete lack of reaction in the Israeli press to the trial of David Rousset, at which he was a witness in late 1950 63 Margolin, Nesobrannoe, 8. 64 Shrayer, “Yuli Margolin,” 486. 65 On the reactions to A Jewish Tale see Khazan, “‘Our object is to press,’” part 1; and Vladimir Khazan, “‘Our object is to press, not to let you relax, continue the uncompromising fight against existing evil.’ Correspondence between Yuliy Margolin and Mark Vishniak,” part 2, Iudaica Russica 2 (2021): 28–59.

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and early 1951. Rousset, a former prisoner in Buchenwald, who had set up a commission to inspect camps all over the world, especially Soviet camps, was accused by the Communist weekly Lettres Francaises of falsifying some of the information—he was allegedly passing off testimonies about Nazi camps as texts about the Gulag. Rousset won the defamation trial. “From the political standpoint, Rousset’s trial was a first-class information trial. It carried a revolt against the principle of the Iron Curtain and a protest against the silencing of one of the most terrible crimes of our times.”66 On my return from Paris, I wrote this “Report” for a presentation at a meeting of the MAGEN society, where I was invited to speak about this trial. Upon arrival, I was quite surprised to find a small room, in which a group of about ten to fifteen members of the MAGEN board was sitting. I had hoped for a larger audience, but there was none for me in Israel.67 Margolin wrote his report in Russian—would this explain the lack of audience? “At one time, kind compatriots muzzled Margolin, amicably blocking his word, artificially isolating him from all non-Russian speakers, that is, practically from the people, from the country.”68 Journey would not be published in Hebrew until 2013. But here we can dare insert a remark. It may be that isolation has always been a creative motor for Margolin. In A Jewish Tale, we read the following lines about his early book on Zionism: After the author [. . .] finished his book on the ways of the Jewish rebellion, he sent it to four hundred branches of the Polish Betar. He also invited the leaders of the movement in the city where he lived to a closed meeting of the few where he wanted to read excerpts from his book. He dressed in his best black suit and came to the meeting in a very solemn mood. And—don’t laugh, dear reader!—not one of those invited showed up to the meeting.69

66 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Evreiskii golos v protsesse Russe” [The Jewish voice in the Rousset process], Narodnaia Pravda 15 (1951): 27. 67 Margolin, Parizhskii otchet, 1. 68 Iakobson, “Popytka rekviema,” 121. 69 Margolin, Evreiskaia povest′, 38.

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When these lines were written, in the late 1950s, Margolin had probably constructed himself as “a voice clamoring in the wilderness,” making this lack of audience a strength of his commitment. Margolin’s Zionism and his former camp experience cannot be separated. Not only because, as a Zionist, in Pinsk, he was well on his way to become an enemy of the people: “In the first days after the Bolsheviks occupied Pinsk, I gathered and destroyed all copies that I found of my book about Zionism”;70 as we know, this did not save him from detention. And not only because he met former Zionist figures in the camp: “One of my astonishing experiences in the Soviet ‘underground realm’ was meeting people who had been buried alive for nothing less than the Zionism of their youth. Now, in front of me, stood old, broken people, without hope or faith.”71 But also, as we have already established, because Margolin was a man who dwelled in the border areas—spatial and temporal. “Home” and “coffin”—these two chronotopes, with the indicators “West” and “East” respectively, dominate not only the Journey, as Roman Katsman rightly notes,72 but Margolin’s entire mythopoetic space. The consequence of extreme experience is that the domestic and the otherworldly become intertwined. “Those who were no longer there were more real than the random passers-by. [. . .] I walked on the sidewalks of Łódź, and the kingdom of shadows swayed around me. There were more people close and dear to me in this shadow kingdom than among the living. And I realized that to the end of my days, I would not leave this circle of shadows; I would remain faithful to them; I would be more with them than with new friends.” One can think of other camp “non-returnees,”73 from the Nazi camps (Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi) or the Stalinist ones (Varlam Shalamov). Margolin is a non-returnee in a dual sense, for in addition to his time in the Gulag, he felt “we all [. . .] bear the stigma [of Auschwitz] in our souls.” This was written in 1961, during the Eichmann trial.74 Unlike former Soviet prisoners, Margolin had a “home,” which he sought to establish. Israel shared a borderline with the Gulag: the line between memory (which is not only the “present” of the past, but also its future) and dreams (which are the past of the future). For Margolin, the memory of the camp was, at the same time, a guarantee the dream of the Promised Land had come true, 70 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 81. 71 Margolin, “Delo Bergera.” 72 Katsman, “A Journey to the Land Zeka.” 73 In the sense that, while they survived the camp, they never quite returned from it mentally. 74 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Pamiati Mandel′shtama” [In memory of Mandelstam], Vozdushnye Puti 2 (1961): 102–109.

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and a source of bitterness, due to his main “grief ” towards the pro-Soviet stance of Israeli society. “In my opinion, the attitude toward the problem of Soviet camps is the touchstone in evaluating a person’s decency, just as is one’s attitude toward antisemitism.”75 After Journey—in 1948—Margolin wrote a book entitled Diamat,76 in which he analyzed the foundations of Soviet ideology. The question was: “why?” He understood perfectly well that “dialectical materialism” in the USSR, the Leninist-Stalinist ersatz of Marx’s doctrine, was a “technical means of discipline” and, accordingly, that it was pointless to criticize it. His book was addressed mainly to the Israeli youth, subjected to “systematic treatment,” and directed against the “lowest level party philosophy” with which Israel was flooded.77 Was his anti-Communism solely the result of his camp experience? In “The Berger Case,” Margolin claimed that, until the fall of 1939, he “took a position of ‘benevolent neutrality’” toward the USSR.78 Later texts reveal that, as a seventeen-year-old boy in Yekaterinoslav, he “immediately and without the slightest hesitation recoiled from the October Revolution when he saw its face—the face of blind rage and malignant executioner’s hatred.”79 “You don’t know how to forget; you don’t know how to be reconciled. And I foresee that for a very long time you will have to ward off the specters of the past. They weigh on you; they go with you on the Heliopolis to the West.”80 This was the diagnosis made by Margolin’s interlocutor, Dr. Falk, on the steamship, where he was writing his text-manifesto “The Berger Case,” in which one can read “like a person who has only one day of life left, and on that day, he must say what is most urgent and important!”81 The most important thing was to save Berger, a Lithuanian doctor, an activist in a Lithuanian Zionist organization arrested in 1941, who was dying in a Soviet camp. Of course, Dr. Falk was a fictional incarnation—Margolin often used the device of Socratic dialogue, creating his own opponents. This was not necessarily due to the Jewish tendency toward polyphony,82 but rather to the absence of opponents in real life. He did not 75 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 506. 76 Abbreviation of “dialectical materialism.” 77 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], Diamat: kritika sovetskoi ideologii [Diamat: criticism of the Soviet ideology] (Tel Aviv: MAOZ, 1971), 5–7. 78 Margolin, “Delo Bergera.” 79 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Piat′desiat let spustia” [Fifty years later], Vozdushnye Puti 5 (1967): 149. 80 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 577. 81 Ibid., 572. 82 The Socratic dialogue used by all polemicists from Dostoevsky to Jabotinsky is the model of journalism of the time. See Ze’ev Jabotinsky [Zeev Zhabotinskii], Fel′etony [Feuilletons]

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succeed in provoking the Israeli public into a discussion—about the Soviet Union, just as about the dead: speak no evil. “This book was written under the silent and patent disapproval of my milieu, and were it not for my personal experience and the force of conviction borne of five years of camp, I might have succumbed to the collective admonition as do other participants in the ‘conspiracy of silence.’”83 The real Dr. Falk would have hardly said “go to the West”—as such, the thesis about the “Western-ness” of Israel and Jewry is Margolin’s. And the story in which the doctor appears was written after his warning: “no one in our country is ready to accept such things. It will be very difficult to make people listen to you.” His prediction was right. “A dark premonition of calamity took hold of me. ‘My friend will die imprisoned,’ I thought. ‘He is too distant from them.’”84 Indeed, Berger died in the camp. Margolin owed his life to Berger, who saved him from starvation by sharing his own rations, as he mentions in “Block 9” of Journey.85 In addition, in Slavgorod, the Altai village where Margolin was exiled after the camp, Berger’s name opened the doors to the hospitable home of the Soloveitchiks, whose patronage helped him survive in exile.86 But “[t]his is not about Berger and his comrades. Come to think of it: this is about us. . . . ‘Helping Berger’ means ‘helping ourselves.’”87 This reference to the “we” meant the Jewish State, which could not be built on lies and silence. To that effect, Margolin would also write: “Zionism that does not lead with internal consistency to anti-Communism is unserious, unhealthy, not real. The seriousness of Zionism can be measured by its readiness to actively oppose the genocide taking place in the Soviet Union. [. . .] Medinat Israel cannot be built without millions of Russian Jews. Whoever threatens them threatens us as well.”88 As we know, in 1957, at the time these lines were written, Soviet Jewry was not under threat of genocide if it is understood as physical extermination; but Margolin probably construed genocide as the destruction of the Jews as a nation,

(St. Petersburg: Gerol′d, 1913), 181–194. But it can be noted that dialogicality is especially specific to the Jewish word—for obvious reasons: the habit of hiding, of changing identity, of speaking in another’s voice has led to special literary strategies. See Cécile Rousselet and Fleur Kuhn-Kennedy, eds., Les expressions du collectif dans les écritures juives en Europe centrale et orientale (Paris: Presses de l’Inalco and MéditerranéeS, 2018). The polyphony of Margolin expresses, of course, the democratization of thought, his Western-ness. 83 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 506. 84 Ibid., 578. 85 Ibid., 470–492. 86 Ibid., 511–519. 87 Margolin, “Delo Bergera.” 88 Margolin, Nesobrannoe, 235.

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the destruction of Jewish culture.89 Zionism, as he understood it after the camp, condemned him to loneliness—twice. As a follower of Jabotinsky, he was the embodiment of the losing party. As a former Gulag inmate, unwilling to forget his past, he was reminiscent of the realm of the dead. Again, twice: in this realm, those who died in the Gulag stood next to the victims of the Shoah.

. . . and the Shoah “[. . .] a black chasm had opened in my life across which I was unable to stride— neither then, in my first days after my return from the subterranean kingdom, nor now, when I am writing these lines.”90 Only in Łódź did Margolin, freshly returned from the camp, realize the frightening, to say the least, catastrophe from which he had been saved—what a scary thought—by the Gulag. Information was coming to him both in the Soviet camp and in exile in Slavgorod, where he encountered some of the exiled Jews who were able to receive news from the outside world. But it is one thing to know and another to see with your own eyes, if that is the most appropriate way to put it when it comes to disappearance. The Jewish population had not simply disappeared, more than this, any remnants of its life has been erased from the face of the city, and he himself had become a phantasmagorical figure in an unrecognizable, fantastic world. This is when Margolin and his time started to run their separate course and this began with a metamorphosis of the physical space. At the site of the Gothic synagogue in the center of town—one of the most monumental buildings in Łódź—there was nothing. This was so fantastic that I recoiled. Green grass was growing on the wasteland, and two horse-drawn cab drivers were dozing peacefully in the April sun. The synagogue had disappeared. It was not so much that I was surprised; I had been expecting this, but I experienced something similar to what a Parisian would have felt had he not seen Notre Dame in its place. There were not even ruins. Not the slightest trace remained. Now I went further, with the anxious awareness that I was moving in a semi-spectral

89 Raphael Lemkin, author of the term “genocide” and of the draft UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, included in this concept the destruction of the cultural values of a nation or community. 90 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 530.

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world; for me, the synagogue was standing as before in the empty space. I could not stop seeing it.91 Margolin experienced the Gulag years as a descent into hell. And then, after, it turned out that there was no exit from the Stygian spaces—only a transition from one realm of shadows to another. “After seven years of otherworldly sleep, I had returned to the starting point—and two different time frames, two worlds intersected inside me. In broad daylight, in the bright gleam of the sun, like a lunatic, I moved among shadows.”92 There is a chasm in the time separating the Margolin from the 1930s, living with the idea of a future Jewish State (in June 1939, he gave his book on Zionism to Jabotinsky) and the Margolin from the 1940s, surrounded by shadows. The fate of the European Jews finally confirmed in his eyes the rightness of Zionism. He was ready to blame the dead for not leaving the sinking ship in time.93 As well as for not resisting. But could they have resisted? Let’s look at them “‘with the eyes of a stranger,’ such as those of a peasant or an English tourist.”94 In another word, with the “defamiliarized”95 eyes of a goy (or that of a Zionist as, for them too, Jewish statehood must put an end to Jewish weakness). Narrow chests, gaunt, sinewless, deformed bodies, rounded backs, impotent and crushed, weary, wrinkled faces, a jumble of straggly ears, crooked noses, twisted lips, awkward or too fussy and restless movements. Crooked shoulders, everyone squints, looks back, or runs forward without looking ahead, and in every case, a screw is loose. Limping, bobbing figures, broken, worn down, wobbling people, tired before they were born, sickly and tragic eyes, black kapotes, the coat of idleness, flat black hats, the sign of the ghetto, women without charm, men without pride or calm strength.96 91 Ibid., 529. 92 Ibid., 531. 93 However, one did not need to be a Zionist to make the latter accusation. The opinion that the Jews obediently went to the slaughter was commonplace. See Hanna Yablonka, “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials,” Israel Studies 8, no 3 (2003): 1–24; Richard Middleton-Kaplan, “The Myth of Jewish Passivity,” in Jewish Resistance against the Nazis, ed. Patrick Henry (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 3–26. 94 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 535. 95 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (2015): 151–174. 96 Margolin, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, 535–536. Italics are by Margolin.

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Nowadays Margolin would not pass the test of political correctness. But even in 1946, he had realized he had gone too far. Enough! I dropped my pen. These people died—did I have the right to judge them? Can one judge the process of dying? But they began to die even before Hitler’s arrival. They were ready to fall under the knife or the gas . . . Doomed people! The person has not yet been born who could tell the truth about their end, hurl the angry story at their descendants and brothers without choking on his words, covering his eyes with his hand, or turning away.97 Among the dead, there was Margolin’s mother, killed in the ghetto of Pinsk. Margolin tried to imagine the end of the Jews of Łódź and attempted to recompose from it a picture of the demise of the Jewish world in general—hence the Jews of Pinsk. But this proved to be an impossible task: “In the summer of 1946, while awaiting my departure from Łódź, I began writing a story about what had happened in this city in the last months before the Holocaust. The very first pages, however, destroyed my mental equilibrium, and I felt that it was not yet the time for this truth.”98 This would be partially accomplished a few years later in “Galia,” which could not be accurately dated. “Galia” was published in The Road to the West; archival materials show that it was written at the same time as other stories featured in the collection, in the early 1950s. The story abounds in documentary elements and is written in the first person by a Jewish woman, survivor of Stolin. “There is a place on the Horyn, amidst the forests, far from the railroad.” As with many of his other works, this text has a fairytale motif:99 the place where Margolin’s childhood expired and turned into a fairy tale—but what occurred there would turn out to be a terrible true story. The heroine, a refugee from Warsaw, has found herself, like Margolin, in Soviet territory, obligated to adjust to Soviet life. These few pages give the reader a complex picture of the life and death of the shtetl, as well as of the course of the war. Poles, Jews, Russians, Belarusians, NKVD executions . . . Here, too, the Jewish 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Horyn, a river running in Ukraine and Belarus (in Russian, Goryn′), is a tributary of the Pripiat river. What gives this geographical detail a fairytale tone is the way the two words are associated: Goryn′-reka (Horyn-Ryver) and not Reka Goryn′. Moreover, the name of the river evocatively sounds like Gorynych, which is the name of a snake or dragon, guardian of the kingdom of the dead in Slavic mythology.

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diaspora finds itself unable to resist against violence. “[. . .] the Germans came to Stolin. There weren’t many of them: only four Germans in a car. And that was enough. Four Germans for the eight thousand Jews of Stolin.”100 The Jews tried to flee to the east. But they didn’t get far. At the Soviet border they were not allowed through. [. . .] After standing for half a day at the border, a cart filled with Stolin’s Jews drove back towards the German army. The wagons were slowly dragging through stone-deaf Belarusian villages, where peasants looked on at the procession with surprise. At dawn, they returned to Stolin and there was no trace left of the Bolsheviks. The Jews tried to take cover. Their homes were looted. The Germans were expected; it was just a matter of hours.101 Then, they were resettled in the ghetto. “Stolin, an old Jewish locality, became Aryan within the afternoon.”102 The villagers rejoiced at the disappearance of the Jews, but among them there was a righteous woman: Maka, a Polish girl. After the liquidation of the ghetto, Galia hid in her laundry basket. She tried to join the partisans and was not successful: they refused to welcome a Jew in their group. Then came General Vlasov’s soldiers, whom Margolin depicts with some pity. They ask, “Do you think it’s fun for us to go with the Germans against our own?”103 Galia opened the door to them by mistake. Exhausted by her life in the basket, she confessed to their commander that she was a Jew, but he gave her the cross he was wearing around his neck, and she was not touched. Margolin makes a connection between the Jews’ inability to resist Soviet terror (or at least to draw international attention to it) and Nazism. “This,” as he wrote in “The Berger Case,” “shows criminal passivity and numbness, which then came out so terribly when the ovens of Auschwitz started blowing their smoke and Polish Jewry went to its death, while the world centers of Jewish organizations ‘did not know,’ ‘did not believe,’ and therefore did not even take any available action.”104 The same motif can be found in Journey, in the chapter “Ilya the Prophet,” where Margolin wrote that the Jews of Pinsk, had they not lied and adapted to the Soviet authorities, would have been exiled to Kazakhstan and would have 100 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Galia,” Novyi Zhurnal 33 (1953): 111. 101 Ibid., 110. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 221. 104 Margolin, “Delo Bergera.”

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avoided mass extermination. It is also echoed in “Galia,” although there, the Jews are not denied a timid attempt at resistance: There were young people among us who wanted to collect weapons, to flee to the forest, to organize resistance. But it was too late. They wanted to, and they didn’t know how to, they couldn’t, they didn’t dare. [. . .] The Stolin rebbe decided otherwise. The Stolin rebbe, as the pillar of Israel, said: “Don’t you dare! As we lived, so we shall die. All is according to God’s will. The Jews have no place in the woods, are we wolves? Our place was and will remain in the house of prayer.”105 For Margolin, true Zionism was willing to defend Jewry from its enemies anywhere in the world by any means. But some others were of different opinion. Pondering on the same theme—the inaction of Jewish organizations during the years of the Shoah and their lack of response to the tragedy experienced by Soviet Jewry, Shabtai Beit-Zvi concluded that the reason is in the very character of Zionism, its “egocentrism,” its inability to really care about Jewish destinies outside of Palestine. His work on this subject was published in 1971 (in an edition the author paid for), after Margolin’s death—but was it not at his suggestion that BeitZvi founded the MAOZ, the Society for the Assistance of Soviet Jews in 1958? As we may recall, the idea of creating a Jewish State on the territory of Uganda was proposed at the Sixth Zionist Congress. According to Beit-Zvi, the proponents of the Palestinian project could not overcome their conflict with the “territorialists” and they only cared about saving Jews, as long as they could replenish the population of the New State. Margolin, too, like Jabotinsky, always defended the idea of a Jewish state on its historical territory. “Zionism has never been a territorial movement seeking to move the Jewish people anywhere,” he argued in 1938, referring to the Torah. “The promise made to Abraham, and with him to all the chosen people, is the basis of Jewish territorial claims.” Longing for the lost homeland is an integral element of the Jewish culture, which gave rise to the idea of a return to the lands the Jews inhabited hundreds of years before.106 Margolin remained faithful to this principle in all the debates on the borders of the Jewish State, while the fate of Soviet Jews remained his primary concern. His Zionism clearly did not fit Beit-Zvi’s scheme. 105 Margolin, “Galia,” 113. 106 Julius Margolin, Idea Sjonizmu [The idea of Zionism], translated from Russian into Polish by M. Olkowski (Warszawa and Łódź: Atid, 1938), 88.

Julius Margolin and Hi s Times

Beit-Zvi did not invite Margolin to join MAOZ. While not formally a member, Margolin had nevertheless been a regular contributor to the MAOZ samizdat107 publications since 1968, when Golda Yelin had become the head of the organization. The MAOZ archives, not yet well explored, have preserved many of his articles and speeches. From 1952, Margolin tried to establish the Israeli Association of Former Soviet Concentration Camp Prisoners, modeled on the associations of former prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps and Commissions of Inquiry into the Crimes of Nazism. Obviously, Rousset’s experience played a role in this decision. But unlike Rousset, Margolin focused on the specifics of anti-Jewish repressions in the USSR. The goal was to fight for the liberation of Jewish prisoners and to preserve the memory of the dead. Let’s compile lists of those who were in a Soviet camp and did not return, and those who were repressed, let’s collect testimonies, reports and memories. A lot of time has already been lost, which is why it is all the more important to use the materials we still have. We will create a library on the camps. Thus, our Documentation Center will eventually become an Information Center for everyone who wants to know the truth about the camps, for everyone who lost loved ones in the USSR and wants to find their trace.108 Margolin tried to combine his two identities, the Zionist and the ex-prisoner, but there was no place in the Israeli culture for such a hybrid. A public proclamation calling for the remembrance of “the fate of Russian Jewry in general and the fate of tens of thousands of Zionists in camps and exile in particular” was posted on the walls of Tel Aviv and torn down on the same day. “It so happened that some sort of ‘friendship with the Soviet Union’ meeting was scheduled at the end of last week. Colored posters were plastered all over the city urging the masses in Israel to protest against the Israeli government not giving visas to the Soviet delegation to the Communist Congress in Tel Aviv.”109 Despite this, we know the meeting of the Society of former Gulag prisoners had still 107 “Self-published.” 108 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Sud′ba odnoi proklamatsii” [The fate of a tract], 1954, А536/31, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. Such a center for documentation and information, not only about the Jews, but about all Gulag prisoners, will later become the International Memorial Society. As for the Jewish experience of the Stalinist camps, it is still insufficiently studied. 109 Margolin, “Sud′ba odnoi proklamatsii.”

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taken place in September: in October 1954 the newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo published a speech Margolin had made there. It is difficult to judge the activities of the society afterwards; the project of establishing a “Committee for the liberation of the Russian Jews” in 1957 was probably an attempt to resurrect it under a less ambitious form.110 The idea of creating an organization stayed with Margolin for the rest of his life: from the 1969 handwritten addition to his 1957 speech, it seems clear he then considered Golda Yelin’s MAOZ as a new chance to breathe life into a failed initiative: “Whether this Committee will be called MAOZ or otherwise, I will say—better late than never.”111 In Margolin’s later writings there were no rebukes to the galut. A woman who had miraculously escaped Pinsk was able to recount the last days of his mother, Olga Margolina (Galperina). This story is included in “Book of Life”: There, the old woman shared with all those condemned to death the agony of a slow death from hunger and cold, in her bed, in the corridor of someone else’s house. And there she rose to heroic firmness and serenity in the face of death. She was happy—if you can call it happiness—that her children and grandchildren were out of danger, far across the sea.112 How starkly different this image of the mother is to the description of Jewish Łódź! In the twenty years that separate “Non omnis moriar” from “Book of Life,” the idea of the diaspora and its demise experienced a radical change. Margolin was probably influenced by the Eichmann trial, which he attended as a correspondent for Novoe Russkoe Slovo and Russkaia Mysl′ (The Russian thought). By revealing details of the extermination mechanism, the trial shattered the myth of Jews going to slaughter.113 Unlike Hannah Arendt, who, following the trial, 110 Margolin, Nesobrannoe, 228–236. The idea of creating such a society arose after Margolin, together with I. Schechter, attended the NTS (National Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists, an exile organization) Congress in Frankfurt in September 1957. 111 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Vo imia sovesti i chesti (rech′ na sobranii 17 noiabria 1957 g.)” [In the name of conscience and honor (speech at a November 17, 1957 meeting)], 1957, A536/31, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. 112 Margolin, “Kniga o zhizni” (1966), 55. Margolin’s sister lived in Mexico with her family. His wife and son were in Palestine. The phrase “far across the sea,” which evokes the imaginary realm of tales, corresponds here to a geographical reality. In the case of Margolin himself, it refers to the world of the camps, which is somehow outside the real world. The expression “out of danger” is ironic with regard to him, and yet it reflects the fact that he escaped the Shoah. 113 This statement seems paradoxical. According to Hannah Arendt: “The contrast between Israeli heroism and the submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death—arriving

Julius Margolin and Hi s Times

condemned Eastern European Jewry for its submission, Margolin’s grievances were now only directed at Israeli justice: he opposed the death sentence for Eichmann, as he wrote to Mark Vishniak.114 He was even against his abduction: “I, for example, would never dare to give an order to bring him from foreign territory by force. This requires temper and impudence, which in other circumstances might certainly lead to many woes.”115 Margolin would be lying to himself if he thought otherwise: it was his faith in the law—not the laws of any particular country that would often justify lawlessness, but supranational law— that allowed him to endure the Gulag.

Memory (in Lieu of Conclusion) The boundary between life and death is not on a map. Margolin was all about the future, obsessed with the incompleteness of the world and creatively participating in its creation, which is an underlying element of the Jewish religion—but he struggled with the Communist ideology of “correcting” the world (which goes back to the same religious origins). In doing so, he was not willing to sacrifice the past—European culture. Margolin brought Europe with him to Palestine, Israel for him was Europe outside of Europe, Zionism was above all a matter of saving Europe from itself. He ideally conceived the revival of Jewry in the historical lands as a new lease of life for European culture as well, involving both Polish and Yemenite Jews in the same manner, as long as they aspired to the same democratic ideals. As the foregoing has shown, Margolin’s East was not a geographical, but an ethical and existential space, that coincided with Benjamin’s “barbarism.”116 But while Benjamin’s barbarism was part of culture, Margolin on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot—seemed a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, ‘Why did you not protest?,’ ‘Why did you board the train?,’ ‘Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,’ harped on it for all it was worth.” The answers to these questions partially explained the impossibility of resistance. Hannah Arendt herself admits: “But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or nonJewish people had behaved differently.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report of the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), accessed December 26, 2021, https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/arendt_eichmanninjerusalem.pdf. 114 Khazan, “‘Our object is to press,’” part 2, 61. 115 Ibid., 60. 116 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 696.

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believed that it was possible to separate the sheep from the goats, the West from the East, thanks to “collective honor and individual conscience.”117 Margolin was a collector of times, the future and the past, which partly explains his isolation. The collective concern (in Europe, in America, in Israel) with historical memory, without which—it has become commonplace—there is no future, would appear later, after his death. Here, too, he was ahead of his time. It is not easy to assemble times in which there are gaping “black chasm.” This requires a special and dynamic model of memory—and Margolin created just that. It was early dawn, the fog was hanging over the wet grass, buttercups were yellowing on the slopes of the track. The train was rushing past, and I was seized by pity and despair at the impossibility to grasp this life, ceaselessly losing itself, the doom of every creep in the wilderness—and I held my gaze for one long second, as the train passed, to a pebble that laid two meters from the track, and remembered it forever, forever.118 A pebble seen from a train window, deliberately chosen among the garbage flying “into the open window of memory” constitutes such a model, taking into account the discontinuity of time. Such a pebble is placed on a grave—including a common one. And if there are many of them, lost wanderers can use them to find their way home, just like Hansel and Gretel.

Bibliography Primary Sources Dobruskina, Inna. “Fakty iz biografii Ju. B. Margolina” [Facts of biography of Ju. B. Margolin]. In Sobranie statei i vystuplenii, obrashchenii i pisem Ju. B. Margolina 1946–1957 gg. [Collection of articles and speeches, addresses and letters by Ju. B. Margolin, 1946–1957]. 2002. Accessed December 25, 2021. http://rjews.net/raisa-epshtein/articles/margolin/4.htm. ———. “Kommentarii k ‘Proklamatsii byvshikh uznikov sovetskikh lagerei’” [Commentary on “Proclamation of former prisoners of Soviet camps”]. 2005. Accessed November 13, 2021. https://margolin-ze-ka.tripod.com/commentary08.html.

117 Margolin, “Vo imia sovesti i chesti,” 232. 118 Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “Vostochnoe vospitanie” [An eastern upbringing], 1954, А536/20, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel.

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Fonseca, Augusto. “Julij Borisovič Margolin: un illustre sconosciuto.” Preface to 1951 Resoconto da Parigi. Una voce dai Gulag sempre soffocata dai “suoi,” by Julius Margolin, 9–21. Lecce: DeltaEdit, 2014. Khazan, Vladimir. “‘Our object is to press, not to let you relax, continue the uncompromising fight against existing evil.’ Correspondence between Yuliy Margolin and Mark Vishniak.” Part 1. Iudaica Russica 1 (2021): 45–83. ———. “‘Our object is to press, not to let you relax, continue the uncompromising fight against existing evil.’ Correspondence between Yuliy Margolin and Mark Vishniak.” Part 2. Iudaica Russica 2 (2021): 28–59. Margolin, Julius [Iulii Margolin]. “Delo Bergera” [The Berger case]. Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, December 12, 1946, 183–192. Accessed December 28, 2021. https://margolin-ze-ka.tripod. com/1946-1.html. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. Diamat: kritika sovetskoi ideologii [Diamat: criticism of the Soviet ideology]. Tel Aviv: MAOZ, 1971. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. Evreiskaia povest′ [A Jewish tale]. Tel Aviv: Maaian, 1960. Accessed January 17, 2022. http://scriptum.cz/soubory/scriptum/%5Bnode%5D/margolin-j-b_evrejskaja-povest_ocr.pdf. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Evreiskii golos v protsesse Russe” [The Jewish voice in the Rousset process]. Narodnaia Pravda 15 (1951): 27–28. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Galia.” Novyi Zhurnal 33 (1953): 107–123. ——— Idea Sjonizmu [The idea of Zionism]. Translated from Russian into Polish by M. Olkowski. Warsaw and Łódź: Atid, 1938. ——— Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back. A Memoir of the Gulag. Translated by Stefany Hoffman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Kliuch k moei biografii” [Key to my biography]. 1950. А536/51, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Kniga o zhizni” [Book of life]. Novyi Zhurnal 81 (1965): 37–74. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Kniga o zhizni” [Book of life]. Novyi Zhurnal 82 (1966): 56–96. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Lichnoe pis′mo po povodu rasstrela Al′taleny” [Personal letter on the Altalena’s destruction]. 1948. A536/50, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. Nesobrannoe [Unassembled]. Tel Aviv: Society for the Commemoration of Dr. Julius Borisovich Margolin, 1975. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Non omnis moriar.” Novyi Zhurnal 35 (1953): 59–71. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Obrashchenie k rukovoditeliam evreiskoi obshchestvennosti 20.11.1946” [Address to the leaders of the Jewish public on November 20, 1946]. 1946. А536/52, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Pamiati Mandel′shtama” [In memory of Mandelstam]. Vozdushnye Puti 2 (1961): 102–109. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. Parizhskii otchet [The Paris report]. Tel Aviv: MAOZ, 1970. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Piat′desiat let spustia” [Fifty years later]. Vozdushnye puti 5 (1967): 149. ———. Podróż do krainy zeków. Translated from Russian into Polish by Jerzy Czech. Wołowiec: Czarne, 2013. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. Povest′ tysiacheletii [The tale of millennia]. Tel Aviv: Society for the Commemoration of Dr. Julius Borisovich Margolin, 1973.

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——— [Iulii Margolin]. Puteshestvie v stranu ZEKA [ Journey into the land of ZEKA]. Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, 2017. ———. Reise in das Land der Lager. Translated from Russian into German by Olga Radetzkaia. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Sud′ba odnoi proklamatsii” [The fate of a tract]. 1954. А536/31, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Vostochnoe vospitanie” [An eastern upbringing]. 1954. А536/20, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel. ——— [Iulii Margolin]. “Vo imia sovesti i chesti (rech′ na sobranii 17 noiabria 1957 g.)” [In the name of conscience and honor (speech at a November 17, 1957 meeting)]. 1957. A536/31, CZA, Jerusalem, Israel.

Secondary Sources Ahimeir, Abba. “Poland in Palestine.” Ha-Mashkif, January 24, 1941. Reprinted in Yaakov Shavit, “Politics and Messianism: The Zionist Revisionist Movement and Polish Political Culture.” Studies in Zionism 6, no 2 (1985): 230. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report of the Banality of Evil. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. Accessed December 26, 2021. https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/01/arendt_eichmanninjerusalem.pdf. ———. “Reflections: Civil Disobedience.” New Yorker 12 (September 1970). Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. Gul′, Roman. Odvukon′. Sovetskaia i emigrantskaia literatura. New York: Most, 1973. Iakobson, Anatolii. “Popytka rekviema.” Vremia i my 29 (1978): 118–135. Inber, Vera. Pulkovskii meridian. Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1944. Fromer, Vladimir. “Nesostoiavshaiasia vstrecha.” In Puteshestvie v stranu ZEKA, by Julius Margolin, vol. 2, 313–323. Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, 2017. Jabotinsky, Ze’ev [Zeev Zhabotinskii]. Fel′etony [Feuilletons]. St. Petersburg: Gerol′d, 1913. ———. The Five. Translated by Michael Katz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2005. Jurgenson, Luba. “Je ne mourrai pas tout entier.” In Voyage au pays des ZE-KA, by Julius Margolin, 48–75. Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2010. ———. “La métaphore de l’enfer.” In L’expérience concentrationnaire est-elle indicible?, edited by Luba Jurgenson, 141–223. Paris: Le Rocher, 2003. ———. Preface to Le Livre du retour, by Julius Margolin, 13–33. Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2012. ———. Preface to Le Procès Eichmann et autres récits, by Julius Margolin, 9–25. Paris: Le Bruit du Temps, 2016. Katsman, Roman. “A Journey to the Land Zeka: A Poetic Enigma of Julius Margolin.” Slavia Orientalis 47, no 4 (2018): 611–629. Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man/The Truce. London: Abacus, 1987. Mandelstam, Osip [Osip Mandel′shtam]. Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh [Works in 4 volumes], vol. 1. Moscow: Art-Biznes Tsentr, 1993. Middleton-Kaplan, Richard. “The Myth of Jewish Passivity.” In Jewish Resistance against the Nazis, edited by Patrick Henry, 3–26. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014.

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Rousselet, Cécile, and Fleur Kuhn-Kennedy, eds. Les expressions du collectif dans les écritures juives en Europe centrale et orientale. Paris: Presses de l’Inalco and MéditerranéeS, 2018. Shavit, Yaakov. “Politics and Messianism: The Zionist Revisionist Movement and Polish Political Culture.” Studies in Zionism 6, no 2 (1985): 229–246. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device.” Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (2015): 151–174. Shrayer, Maxim D. “Yuli Margolin.” In An Antology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry 1801–2001, in 2 vols., edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 1: 1801–1953, 484–487. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. With Fire and Sword. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and Fin de Siecle. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Toker, Leona. Return from Archipelago. Narrative on Gulag Survivors. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Tolstoy, Leo. Childhood. Translated by C. J. Hogarth. 2006. Accessed December 30, 2021. https// www.gutenberg.org//files/2142/2142-h/2142-h.htm. Tsvetaeva, Marina. Sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh, vol. 2. Moscow: Terra, 1994. Yablonka, Hanna. “The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials.” Israel Studies 8, no 3 (2003): 1–24.

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Israeli-Soviet Literary Ties from the 1950s to 1980s: From Translations to Aliyah Library Marat Grinberg -1The history of ties between Russian literature and Hebrew and Israeli writing is long and manifold, stretching from Russian influences on Hebrew poetry and prose to translations from Russian into Hebrew by such major figures as Leah Goldberg and Avraham Shlonsky. Much less well known and studied are the postwar Soviet translations of Hebrew Israeli literature into Russian. Despite the initial Soviet support of the Jewish state, the Soviet-Israeli ties were continuously strained, and only a few of such collections were published during the brief thaw in diplomatic relations between the two countries in the first half of the 1960s. After the Six-Day War in 1967 and the breakup of diplomatic relations, they would be expunged from library circulation and hidden deep within the readers’ private book cases. These books were an integral part of what I call the Soviet Jewish bookshelf, whose ingredients formed the basis of Soviet Jews’ makeshift Jewish heritage.1 In an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed and a public Jewish presence delegitimized, reading uniquely provided for many Soviet Jews an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. I would argue that studying the bookshelf and its Hebrew layer (albeit in translation), in particular, is crucial

1

Copyright © 2023 by Marat Grinberg. Marat Grinberg, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity between the Lines (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2023).

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for grasping the Soviet-Jewish national revival in the 1970s and how the tastes and proclivities of those who would go on writing and publishing in Russian as well as translating Hebrew literature after making aliyah were shaped by the contents of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf. This essay will offer an overview and analysis of these translations in order to understand how Israeli literature was covered in the ideologically conditioned Soviet environment, and how reading it bolstered the national consciousness of Soviet Jews.

-2The rare translations of contemporary Israeli literature were treasured by Soviet Jewish readers. Those who were able to obtain a copy seized upon the opportunity to derive whatever information they could about Israel from these slim volumes. The press runs of these editions were on the lower end by Soviet standards, ranging from ten to fifteen thousand at most, and did not frequently reach the periphery; the press runs of some volumes were not indicated at all. Undoubtedly, the most interesting among them was a collection of Israeli poetry, Poety Izrailia (Poets of Israel). None other than Boris Slutsky, a major poet, edited it when the Soviet publication appeared in 1963. The idea for the volume was initially conceived by the Israeli poet Alexander Penn, who then put it together and provided most of the initial literal Russian translations.2 A communist and a student of Russian poets, especially Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pasternak, Penn came to Mandatory Palestine from Soviet Russia in the 1920s and became a prominent figure in the Hebrew avant-garde poetry scene. In the 1950s and 1960s, the largely leftist, but hardly pro-Soviet Israeli literary establishment shunned him because of his communist allegiances. A great deal of apprehension and suspicion around the Israeli Communist Party had to do not with any economic or social issues, but rather its constant absolute subservience to the Soviet positions, including even during the antisemitic campaigns of the last years of Stalin’s rule, that is, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the Doctors’ Plot, and the first breaking of diplomatic relations between Israel and the USSR in 1953. Ironically, as the accusations against the doctors were overturned after Stalin’s death, Israeli Communist Party “members were distributing pamphlets . . . praising their trial. Forced to perform an about-face,

2

See Chagit Halperin, Tzeva ha-chayim: Chayav ve-yetzirato shel Aleksandr Penn (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 2007), 187–189.

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the party hailed the ‘excellence of socialist justice.’”3 Walking a tightrope between supporting Jewish self-determination, participating in Israeli politics and the Soviet pro-Arab attitudes and hostility toward Israel proved no longer feasible after the Six-Day War of 1967. The party broke into RAKAH, led by Meir Wilner, which “followed the Soviet line, demanding Israeli withdrawal,” and MAPAI, led by Shmuel Mikunis and Moshe Sneh, which “opted for Jewish nationalism . . . and justifying Israel’s position on the occupied territories in terms of self-defence.”4 Penn visited the Soviet Union in 1959 at the invitation of the Writers’ Union and managed to meet with Pasternak (apparently in secret) who was hounded by the regime after the scandal over the publication of Doctor Zhivago abroad and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pasternak. As recalled by Penn’s daughter, Sinilga, who was accompanying him in Moscow, he seemed to have aged by twenty years after seeing his beloved poet. According to her, Penn stamped his feet and screamed in Russian, “May they burn,” for what they (they being the Soviet regime) have done to the great writer.5 The issue of the Pasternak affair is curious because of its impact in both Soviet and Israeli contexts. (See also Leonid Katsis's essay in this volume.) In the words of Roman Katsman, “The major Israeli newspapers regularly reported the developments of the ‘Pasternak affair’; the documents and proclamations that appeared in the Soviet press were immediately translated and published.”6 Penn followed the affair closely and responded indignantly when he was asked his opinion on Doctor Zhivago, accusing the Israeli literary establishment of not caring about Pasternak earlier.7 The issue of Pasternak’s Jewishness was magnified in the Israeli response to it. According to Katsman, there were two main trends in this response, “first, warm empathy towards Pasternak as a Jew and victim (and sometimes as a Jewish victim), whatever his own relation to his Jewishness and to Judaism might have been . . . and second, the persistent intention to hold to the smallest element of Jewishness in Pasternak’s life and oeuvre.”8 Thus, for Penn too, an attack on Pasternak was an assault on a fellow poet and a fellow Jew. He, like the others, was willing to overlook Pasternak’s deeply 3 Sondra Miller Rubenstein, The Communist Movement in Palestine and Israel, 1919–1984 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 328. 4 Ibid., 353–354. 5 Halperin, Tzeva ha-chayim, 175. 6 Roman Katsman, “Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the Eyes of Israeli Writers and Intellectuals (1958–1960) (A Minimal Foundation of Multilingual Jewish Philology),” in Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Multilingual Literature, ed. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 642. 7 Ibid., 647. 8 Ibid., 671.

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Christological view of Jewish history and his hardly favorable understanding of his own Jewishness, prompted by his supercessionism (especially as articulated in Doctor Zhivago). Similarly to many among the Soviet writers and intellectuals, the Israeli Penn was split between his private and public personas and knew how to navigate the halls of power. Cursing the Soviets in private, he was singing their praises in public and proclaiming his ideological loyalty. These tactics paid their dividends. During Penn’s time in the USSR, a selection of his poems appeared in Literaturnaia Gazeta, along with a couple of poems by Shlonsky in Penn’s translation, under the heading “The Verse of Israeli Poets.” Penn’s poems, “Derev′ia” (Trees) and “Vecher v Ierusalime” (A Jerusalem Evening), were moralistic, anticlerical, and political, containing accusations against the imperialist West. At the same time, the image of the “splintered” city in “A Jerusalem Evening” was stark and evocative, describing a procession of the “silk of beards and sidelocks”: Стыли церкви, минареты, Вился шелк бород и пейс. Шла, одетая в запреты, Фанатическая спесь . . . Древний город—он расколот! В пальцах тропок и путей Был зажат лиловый холод Злоумышленных затей.9 Churches and mosques were in the cold / While the silk of beards and sidelocks was meandering. / There walked, dressed in prohibitions, / The fanatical haughtiness. / The ancient cityit is splintered! / The lilac cold of pernicious games / was squeezed in the fingers of / its paths and trails. This must have been the only time when the word peisy—sidelocks—appeared in this major and ideologically rigid Soviet publication. Shlonsky’s poems, “Blagodarenie” (Giving thanks) and “Zemlepashets” (Tiller of soil), were replete with biblical imagery and hardly political, at least in any simplistic manner. There were also two poems by Natan Poshut, a communist poet, both ideologically engagée. A short addendum to the poems,

9

Literaturnaia Gazeta 75 (1959): 4.

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perhaps written by Penn himself, presented Israeli poetry in deeply positive terms. It spoke of its richness and diversity and the ability to retain originality despite deep influences by Russian and English literatures. It stated, “Israeli poetry managed to preserve the specificity of its native speech and enriched the ancient Jewish language of Hebrew with the vocabulary of contemporaneity.” The Jewish element here was emphasized rather than shrouded in obfuscation, as would have been typical for a Soviet discourse. In 1965, Penn’s own collection of poems, translated from Hebrew, Serdtse v puti (Heart on a journey), came out from Khudozhestvennaia literatura, one of the main Soviet publishing houses, with a friendly preface by David Samoilov (Kaufman), a poet from Slutsky’s cohort and his frenemy. Penn urged Samoilov, whose own view of anything Jewish was often derisive, to write a more adulatory preface which he declined to do, commenting in his dairy, “I’ve been laboring all day over a letter to A. Pen [sic], a talentless Israeli versifier.”10 Penn never stopped composing poetry in Russian and always maintained an ambiguous relationship toward both Hebrew and his new “homeland.” In the words of Michael Gluzman, “Constantly torn between the USSR and Palestine . . . this new homeland is described in astonishingly negative terms” in Penn’s poems.11 True, he writes of succumbing to the temptation of Hebrew while maintaining his position of an outsider, and yet often professes his love toward this new homeland. The fact that after the split in the Israeli Communist Party in 1967, Penn did not side with the anti-Zionist camp points to his investment in the Jewish national project. The key is that Penn was also such an outsider/insider in the Soviet context. The deep echoes of Yesenin, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky in his verse, which Samoilov was regrettably unable to recognize, migrated to his Hebrew and back into Russian. In pledging allegiance to his two motherlands, the Land of Israel and the USSR (see his poem “Moledet chadashah”),12 he was also saying, “I’m not the one/who you take me to be . . .” (“Lo ani . . .”).13 In this painful and yet fruitful negotiation between his Russian/Jewish and Soviet/Jewish selves, the Israeli Penn was also behaving like a prototypical Soviet Jew. In the poem “Pgishah”

10 David Samoilov, Podennye zapisi (Moscow: Vremia, 2002), v. 1, 366. Letter from Samoilov to Penn, Archive of writers, The Laura Schwartz Kipp Center for Hebrew Literature and Culture, Tel Aviv University, 2:13. 11 Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 4. 12 Alexander Penn [Aleksandr Penn], Serdtse v puti (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 13–16. 13 Ibid., 49.

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(Meeting), which described his return to Moscow after thirty-two years of separation, he proclaimed, ,‫מוסקבה פורצת לעינים‬ ‫ובמאורי שבועה וברית‬ ,‫אני כורע לה עברית‬ .‫ולי בשפת לבה עונה היא‬ .‫מוסקבה פורצת לעינים‬ Moscow strikes me in the eyes. / I kneel with my Hebrew in front of her, / Holding the light of oath and covenant, / And she responds to me in the language of her heart. / Moscow strikes me in the eyes.14 The Russian translation of the poem by Vladimir Kornilov, a remarkable poet in his own right, who had a lot of trouble with the Soviet regime, was also included in the Heart on a Journey collection. The published version erased the “I kneel with my Hebrew . . .” line.15 To have the Soviet capital accept the gift of the Jewish language and thus begin to speak it must have seemed unacceptable to the Soviet censor, which Penn understood full well. An introduction to Poets of Israel on behalf of the publishing house, whose specific author was not listed, was most likely Penn’s creation. Written in the worst type of official Soviet jargon, it presented the history of Hebrew poetry from a purely class struggle viewpoint, criticizing what it called “Jewish poetry” for its apolitical nature and yet praising its humanistic character. The introduction did not voice a criticism of Israel as such and contained no veiled antisemitic overtones. Yet Penn was able to separate between good poetry and the ideologically correct one. Despite the directives of Shmuel Mikunis, head of the Israeli Communist Party, whose rigidity exceeded that of the Soviet censors, Penn managed to include in the collection the best of what Israeli poetry of the time had to offer. The great majority of poets selected in the volume played a formative role in shaping the history of Hebrew and Israeli verse. A number of Yiddish and Arab-language poets were in the collection as well, thus offering in fact an egalitarian and forward-looking view of Israeli literature. Penn’s volume provided the reader with a concise history of Hebrew poetry after Hayim Nahman Bialik (originally, he wanted to begin the collection with 14 Alexander Penn [Aleksandr Penn], “Pgishah,” Kol ha-Am, November 6, 1959, 4. 15 Penn, Serdtse v puti, 144–145.

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Bialik): the neo-symbolism of Avraham Shlonsky, Nathan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg (who visited Moscow in the 1950s);16 the ruggedness of the poets of the Palmach generation, such as Amir Gilboa and Chayim Guri; high modernists of the late 1950s, represented by Yehuda Amichai; the early female poets—Rachel and Yocheved Bat-Miriam—and other important figures. In total, the volume included some thirty Hebrew poets. Comparably, the well-known anthology of Israeli poetry and the main source on the subject for generations of students, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, published in 1965 in the United States and edited by the poet and translator Stanley Burnshaw, the scholar Ezra Spicehandler, and the Hebrew poet T. Carmi, had a similar content, from Jacob Fichman to Amichai. Unlike the American book, the Soviet collection omitted, however, Uri Zvi Grinberg, whose right-wing allegiances made him a persona non-grata. Penn’s antipathy toward Grinberg might have been also caused by Grinberg’s insistence that to engage with the Pasternak affair would be wrong for Israelis. He opined that reacting to it was “a kind of distraction from what is going on around us. This is fateful for us. I am not going to deal with the Pasternak affair.”17 Noticeably, short biographies of all the poets were appended at the end of the volume, indicating where they were born—mainly in the Russian Empire—and when they left for Palestine. A great deal of the poems addressed the Shoah (Holocaust), thus making the collection especially appealing for the Soviet Jewish reader. Some of the volume’s translations carried a polemical and even subversive meaning. For example, Alterman’s most programmatic Zionist poem, “The Silver Tray,” which was included in the collection, ends with the following coda: ‫אז תשאל האומה שטופת דמע וקסם‬ ,‫ והשניים שוקטים‬,?‫ מי אתם‬:‫ואמרה‬ ‫ אנחנו מגש הכסף‬:‫יענו לה‬ .‫שעליו לך ניתנה מדינת היהודים‬ ‫כך יאמרו ונפלו לרגלה עוטפי צל‬ .‫והשאר יסופר בתולדות ישראל‬ Then the nation, rinsed by tears and by magic, will ask: Who are you? And the two, silent till now,

16 See Natasha Gordinsky, “In Search of a Lost Past: Leah Goldberg’s Journey to the Soviet Union in 1954,” in Konstellationen, ed. Nicolas Berg, Omar Kamil, Markus Kirchhoff, and Susanne Zepp (Berlin: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 167–190. 17 Katsman, “Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the Eyes of Israeli Writers and Intellectuals,” 648.

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will speak: We are the silver tray on which the Jewish homeland is handed to you. So they say. And collapse at her feet, wrapt in shadow. And the rest will be told in the books of the chronicles of Israel.18 The Russian translation read: И народ, весь в слезах, спросит: «Кто Вы?» И хором cкажут оба пришельца, в крови и пыли: «Мы—то блюдо серебряное, на котором Государство иудейское Вам поднесли». Скажут так и падут. Тень на лица их ляжет. Остальное история, видно, доскажет . . .19 By calling the Jewish state “Judean,” the translation provocatively posits its historic and religious roots—evreiskoe ( Jewish) would have been better metrically and the Hebrew original is medinat ha-yehudim (the state of the Jews). Yet, the Russian, in line with the Hebrew original, also conveys tenuousness, inconclusiveness, and open-endedness—“history perhaps will tell”—which implicitly responds to the uncertainties of Soviet Jews’ present and future and the fact that they too might be included in that history, as indeed would happen with their emigration to Israel. Originally Penn was meant to be the sole editor of the anthology, but ultimately the publishing house decided to appoint a Soviet figure as the editor. The choice fell on Slutsky, but the initiative, as we shall see, might have come from Penn. Slutsky took interest in the Israeli poets while they took an interest in him. Omry Ronen, who was born in Odesa and spent his youth in Ukraine, subsequently studied comparative literature with Leah Goldberg at Hebrew University. Ronen recalls how Leah Goldberg, who visited the USSR as part of the delegation of women affiliated with the Left in 1954 and then in the early 1960s, asked her hosts to see Slutsky in Moscow.20 The request was denied and

18 Translated by David P. Stern, accessed August 2, 2021, https://www.hartman.org.il/ three-hebrew-poems. 19 Boris Slutskii, ed., Poety Izrailia (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1963), 51. 20 Omry Ronen [Omri Ronen], “Grust′,” Zvezda 9 (2001), accessed May 7, 2020, https://zvezdaspb.ru/index.php?page=8&nput=1896.

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she was offered to meet with Samuil Marshak instead. In the eyes of the authorities, Jewish figures were interchangeable. As the volume’s editor, Slutsky was naturally heavily involved in the collection. There are, however, no archival documents detailing the relationship between Slutsky and Penn. We do know that they met and that Slutsky inscribed a collection of his poems to Penn. A short article in the newspaper Ha-Aretz from 1959 talks about plans for the publication of the volume of Hebrew poetry in Russian and describes in detail Penn’s visit to the Soviet Union and his participation in the Writers’ Union congress, where he met Khrushchev, and the publication of his poems in Literaturnaia Gazeta. According to Ha-Aretz, Penn wrote in a letter to Israel from the USSR that he got in touch with the well-known Soviet poet Slutsky whom the article bizarrely and ironically misnames Boris Polevoi. It is clear that Penn is writing about Slutsky since he emphasizes that the poet is Jewish while Boris Polevoi was neither a poet nor Jewish. An author of such socialist realist classics as The Story of a Real Man (1946), Polevoi was also later the editor of the liberal journal Iunost′ (Youth), where Slutsky’s poetry was published. He assisted in the revival of Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death and was known in Israel because of his 1944 article on the liberation of Majdanek. The Ha-Aretz piece mentions that, per Penn’s vision, the poems to be included in the collection would be neither political nor Jewish in theme.21 Yet, as is clear from the “The Silver Tray” example, some of the crucial poems were indeed political (Zionist) and certainly Jewish. Most likely, Penn also knew about Slutsky’s involvement in denouncing Pasternak. Slutsky spoke briefly at the official anti-Pasternak meeting, where he stated that a poet must strive to achieve his people’s recognition and not try to find it in the foreign lands where only a disdain for Russia is felt. In the eyes of many fellow poets and readers, this speech overshadowed his entire career.22 While this could have left an imprint on Penn’s attitude toward Slutsky, one can hope that Penn also appreciated the depth and richness of Slutsky’s Jewishness, especially in regard to Hebrew. Slutsky, for instance, might have been involved in the publication just a few years later of the only Soviet Hebrew-Russian dictionary, edited by Felix Shapiro.23 He recalled Shapiro in his great poem “Relearning 21 “Milon ivri-rusi yofia be-Rusia. Tefursam gam antologiya shel shira ivrit,” Ha-Aretz, June 25, 1959, 1. 22 On Slutsky and Pasternak, see Marat Grinberg, “I’m to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 21–25. 23 Ivrit-russkii slovar′, ed. Feliks Shapiro (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo inostrannykh i natsional′nykh slovarei, 1963). On Shapiro, see Liia Prestina-Shapiro, Slovar′ zapreshchennogo iazyka (Minsk: MET, 2005).

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Solitude”: “I remember how I once ran into / a compiler of dictionaries of that ancient tongue / that was learned and forgotten by me.”24 There is a puzzle in the collection, which may hold the key to Slutsky as the reader of Hebrew poetry. One poet in particular seems to be mostly out of place in its pages—Yehuda Amichai. On the one hand, by 1963, Amichai was already a well-established and celebrated figure (his seminal collection, Poems 1948– 1962, was published in 1963). On the other hand, Penn and Amichai were in very different artistic camps. Amichai’s poetry, with its deliberate aversion to politics, minimalist aesthetics, and reliance on German and American modernist rather than Russian poetic models, had very little if anything in common with Penn’s bombastic Mayakovskian verse. In the collection, Amichai was represented by three poems, two of which, “God Full of Mercy” and “I Want to Die in My Own Bed,” were some of his most programmatic. Shmuel Mikunis, who objected to the inclusion of Amichai, wrote to Penn that his poetry represented nihilism in the mode of struggles and searches of the petite bourgeoisie.25 D. Arbel′ is listed as the translator of Amichai's “God Full of Mercy.” There is no evidence at all who he was; strangely, no other translations of his appear anywhere else. There is a great deal of affinity between Amichai’s and Slutsky’s minimalist poetry, especially in its take on war, which suggests to me that the poem was in fact translated by Slutsky, who took the pseudonym of Arbel′. Furthermore, Slutsky’s own poem, “My Style of Weaving Words,” appears to be a response to Amichai. Amichai’s statement from “God Full of Mercy,” “I, who use only a small part / of the words in the dictionary” (“/ ‫אני שמשתמש רק בחלק קטן‬ ‫)”מן המילים במילון‬26 was echoed in Slutsky’s “I am neither enamored with nor bewitched / by my own style of weaving words . . . Like a brooch to a military nurse’s uniform, / metaphor is not becoming to my line . . .” (“Своим стильком плетения словес / не очарован я, не околдован . . . Как к медсестринской гимнастерке брошка, / метафора к моей строке нейдёт . . .”).27 In the poem “I translate from Mongolian and Polish . . .” Slutsky does not mention Hebrew (or Yiddish, for that matter, which he translated multiple times), but he ends it with the following cryptic coda:

24 Grinberg, “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left,” 73. 25 Letter from Mikunis to Penn, September 2, 1959. Archive of Writers, The Laura Schwartz Kipp Center for Hebrew Literature and Culture, Tel Aviv University, 2:9–435. 26 Robert Alter, ed., The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 26. 27 Boris Slutskii, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), vol. 2, 267.

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Пучины разделяют страны. Дорога нелегка и далека. Перевожу, как через океаны, Поэзию в язык из языка. Depths of friction separate countries. / The path is long and not easy. / I translate, as if through the oceans, / Poetry into a language from a language.28 The fact that languages are not named in this cosmic portrayal of translation suggests that there’s a mystery involved, which perhaps contains also the mystery of D. Arbel. Poets of Israel was received very favorably in Israel. It was discussed in the Israeli press as the harbinger of new relations between Israel and the USSR;29 a collection of Bialik’s poetry in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s turn-of-the-century translations and the volume of Russian poetry in Hebrew were in the works,30 but everything fell apart after 1967. In Moscow, the reaction was also positive. Sovetish Heymland, the only Soviet Yiddish journal, ran an approving review of it.31 More importantly, Sergei Narovchatov, a poet of Slutsky’s generation, who was often tasked with writing on Jewish poetry, praised the collection with an almost Zionist pathos in Novyi Mir: “The ancient biblical land . . . The dry wind of the rocky deserts, fierce azure of the inflamed sky, the dried-up beds of rivers. But this is only where there’s no moisture. Where there does exist its nourishing force there rustle the olive trees, the mighty grape vines grow, the freshly plowed fields darken. This land has its poetry and its poets.”32 There is no doubt that Slutsky was pleased to see such an assessment of this poetry and its poets.

28 Boris Slutskii, Segodnia i vchera (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1961), 49. 29 Ezrah Zusman, “Shirat Yisrael be-Moskvah,” Davar, April 17, 1964, 6; Chayim Shorer, “Du-Siach al yehudim u-Brit ha-Moatzot,” Davar, March 27, 1964, 2. 30 According to a report in the newspaper Cherut, March 4, 1964, 2, the Soviet ambassador in Israel was presented with the first copy of the volume. 31 “Chronik,” Sovetish Heymland 2 (1964): 159. 32 “Korotko o knigakh,” Novyi Mir 10 (1964): 279.

Israeli- Sov iet L iterar y Ties f rom the 1950s to 1980s

-3In addition to Poets of Israel, there were also a few anthologies of Israeli prose, most notably Iskatel' zhemchuga: novelly izrail'skikh pisatelei (The searcher of pearls: Novellas of Israeli writers), published in 1966, and Rasskazy izrail’skikh pisatelei (Stories by Israeli writers), which appeared a year earlier. Their coverage of Israeli prose was also considerably broad and included such luminaries as Chayim Hazaz and Moshe Shamir, Shmuel Yosef Agnon and the young Aharon Appelfeld. Both volumes contained prefaces with overviews of the history of Hebrew literature; some of their claims, undoubtedly perceived originally as ideological biases, appear in hindsight accurate. The preface to The Searcher of Pearls stated: “Contemporary Israel is the main theme of the works of great many writers who grew up in the country. Israeli critics call them the “literature of anxiety and doubts.” The main leitmotif of this literature is the split between Zionist ideals and reality on the ground.”33 This indeed was one of the main thrusts of Israeli literature. Ilyin also pointed out what could not have escaped the readers’ attention: World War II, which was accompanied by the unprecedented racial hatred, factories of death, and ghettoes filled with millions of people, caused the emergence in Israel of the “literature of catastrophe and heroism.” And if in the initial stages, the notes of utter despair and pessimism prevailed in it, in the last years, more and more attention is given to the theme of heroism of ghetto fighters and the selfless struggle of the Jewish partisans.34 Despite the usual criticism of Israel, which the capable reader could easily plow through, these Soviet editions did not question the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state or its literature as an indelible part of millennia-old Jewish textual tradition. It is also significant that they almost universally used the term ivrit for Hebrew, rather than drevneevreskii (literally, “ancient Jewish”), which emphasized the immediacy and relevancy of the Jewish state. These volumes supplanted the materials, brought (or smuggled) by Israeli emissaries for the Soviet Jews, though hardly anyone outside of Moscow could have access to them. Much to the enthusiasm of Moscow Jews, prior to 1967 Israel took part in the international book fairs and youth festivals. Israeli films were occasionally 33 Lev Vilsker, ed., Iskatel′ zhemchuga (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 17. 34 Ibid., 15.

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screened at the International Moscow Film Festival, most notably in 1964, when the French-Israeli film about the Eichmann trial, The Glass Cage, was included in the festival’s main program.35 Aron Vergelis wrote a lengthy preface to The Stories of Israeli Writers, “Israeli Literature and Its Roots.” Vergelis, chief editor of the Yiddish periodical Sovetish Heymland, which began its run in 1961, and a poet and prose writer in his own right, was both an entrenched insider within the Soviet system and a clever outsider. While Sovetish Heymland was at times at the vanguard of anti-Israeli fervor, Vergelis appreciated and respected Hebrew literature, especially Bialik. In what was seen as the radical step at the time, he also reintroduced some Hebrew spelling rules, such as the usage of final letters, into the Yiddish orthography of Sovetish Heymland. These pro-Hebrew steps by Vergelis had their consequences. A denunciatory letter about Sovetish Heymland was sent to “Party authorities in 1976,” which “condemned the editors for ‘Hebraization of Yiddish’ . . . because its language was allegedly overloaded with Hebraisms and its spelling deviated from the 1928–32 reform, which excluded the word-final forms of consonants from all Soviet Yiddish printing.” The letter “also condemned the magazine’s ‘apologia for Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist poet and a significant leader of the international Zionist movement’. [It] reminded Party apparatchiks that it was the ‘fascist’ Vladimir Jabotinsky who translated Bialik’s poems into Russian.”36 Notably, in the early 1980s, Vergelis published in Sovetish Heymland selections of Yehuda Halevi’s unknown poems in the original Hebrew with Yiddish translations; the poems had been discovered by the Leningrad Hebraist Lev Vil′sker, who was also the editor of The Searcher of Pearls anthology.37 Perhaps most remarkably, in his own travelogue describing his journey to the West and countries of the Soviet bloc, Shestnadtsat′ stran vkliuchaia Monako (Sixteen countries including Monaco), Vergelis described his meeting with Shmuel Yosef Agnon in London after the Hebrew writer, whom he admired, received the Nobel Prize in literature. The piece was originally published in Literaturnaia Gazeta.38 Agnon was adamant about meeting with Vergelis despite protestations by the Israeli foreign ministry which saw Vergelis as a Stalinist and upholder of anti-Israeli Soviet policies. Agnon recalled a talmudic story about a rabbi who sinned by refusing to look at Jesus, adding, “I will not refuse to 35 See M. Kuznetsov, “O voine i o mire,” Sovetskii Ekran 16 (1965): 3. 36 Gennady Estraikh, “‘Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul-de-sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas,” East European Jewish Affairs 1 (1996): 29. 37 Leyb Vilsker, “Yehuda Halevi’s 198 lider fun an umbavuster redaktsie,” Sovetish Heymland 6 (1983): 135–151. 38 Aron Vergelis, “Vstrecha s Agnonom,” Literaturnaia Gazeta 16 (1967): 15.

Israeli- Sov iet L iterar y Ties f rom the 1950s to 1980s

see Vergelis,” thus drawing a parallel between Jesus, a Jewish renegade, and a Soviet Yiddish writer.39 Agnon avoided any political topics in their conversation, which was conducted naturally in Yiddish, and invited Vergelis to visit him in Jerusalem. Vergelis agreed, saying that he had been planning on visiting Israel for a while and hoped that it would happen in not too distant of a future. He also invited Agnon to the Soviet Union and even called him a great Russian writer, since his hometown, Buczacz, was now part of Soviet Ukraine. It is not surprising that these details were omitted from Vergelis’s account of their meeting. In trying to salvage Agnon for the censor and make acceptable for the Soviet reader, Vergelis presented him as a halting critic of Zionism and sympathizer of communism and the Soviet Union while also being unequivocal about his dedication to Hebrew and entrenchment in Judaism both as an observant Jew and a writer. Vergelis wrote, “Agnon writes in Hebrew. In Israel, he is spoken of as a classic. It’s enough to read just one of his books to understand that his “unshakable traditionalism” is not a conservative factor, but rather an intrinsically national one, even if it’s not devoid of archaisms.”40 In 1967, Vergelis published a few of Agnon’s stories in Sovetish Heymland in the Yiddish translation.41 There were also unsuccessful attempts to publish them in Russian in Literaturnaia Gazeta.42 It is not surprising then that Vergelis’s preface to The Stories of Israeli Writers straddled both the official critical line and his own fondness for and knowledge of the subject. His piece was learned and comprehensive, devoid of overt propaganda, on the one hand, but following the main guidelines of Marxist view of the development of literary processes, on the other. Vergelis reached back to biblical antiquity and the medieval Spanish period, which he called “archipelago on the bottom of the ocean,”43 and put the trajectories of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures side by side, thus foreshadowing, to an extent, Dan Miron’s idea of the contiguities of Hebrew and Yiddish traditions in modern Jewish literature.44 Indeed, overall Vergelis presented what was at that time the only serious discussion in Russian of the nature of Jewish literature. In the London section of

39 Dan Laor, Chaei Agnon: Biografiya ( Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998), 587. 40 Aron Vergelis, Shestnadtsat′ stran, vkliuchaia Monako: Putevye ocherki (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1982), 202. 41 See Sovetish Heymland 4 (1967): 96–109. 42 See Lev Frukhtman, “Ia, Agnon i Shestidnevnaia voina,” ISRAGEO, December 10, 2016, accessed December 5, 2021, www.isrageo.com/2016/12/10/agnonobel50. 43 P. Petrov, ed., Rasskazy izrail′skikh pisatelei (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 7. 44 Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

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Sixteen Countries, the one that contained the Agnon segment, Vergelis offered a harsh assessment of what qualifies one as a Jewish writer, which, on the one hand, was dictated by Soviet censorship, but, on the other, was a genuine expression of his philosophy. He writes, “For me, a Jewish writer is the one who writes in a Jewish language. Write in a Jewish language a novel about other people, say Uzbeks or Byelorussians, and you would still be a Jewish writer. On the other hand, it is certain that no one would call Isaac Babel or Lion Feuchtwanger Jewish writers despite the fact that their main works are about Jews. In England and other countries, this is seen differently. There Isaac Babel is a Jewish writer.”45 This is a fascinating statement in a number of respects. With it, Vergelis engages in one of the most intractable and long-lasting debates of modern Jewish culture about what constitutes Jewish literature, the debate that had a long pedigree in Russian Jewish critical thought, most memorably represented by the dispute between Kornei Chukovsky and Vladimir Jabotinsky at the turn of the century in Odesa,46 and continued to be pondered in the West. Indeed, in his 1955 introduction to the English translation of Babel’s works, Lionel Trilling presented Babel essentially as a Jewish writer, and so would later and more explicitly Saul Bellow.47 Vergelis parrots the Soviet regime which had always viewed hyphenated identities with suspicion and denied the validity and vitality of Jewish separateness in Russian in the present, but he also denigrates assimilation and wants to safeguard the Yiddish corner this regime had allowed him to carve out. He strives to ensure that this corner remain the only legitimate Jewish zone. It is important, however, that Vergelis uses the term “Jewish language,” which here does not seem to exclude Hebrew, especially keeping in mind again his multiple admiring comments on Bialik, a conversation with Agnon, his preface to the translation of Israeli prose, translations from Hebrew and the usage of Hebrew orthography in Sovetish Heymland. Vergelis also took a step toward acknowledging and embracing the polyglot nature of Jewish literature. In the Rome section of Sixteen Countries, he describes a meeting with an Italian Jewish writer, Nathalia Ginzburg, who insists that there can be Jewish literature in a non-Jewish language. Vergelis is flummoxed: “Does this mean that you and Bassani and Primo Levi—all of you are Jewish writers simply because you’re describing the tragedy of the Jewish people?” Ginzburg 45 Vergelis, Shestnadtsat′ stran, 193. 46 See Evgeniia Ivanova, ed., Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii: Istoriia vzaimootnoshenii v tekstakh i kommentariiakh (Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2005). 47 Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays (New York: FSG, 2000), 311–330; Saul Bellow, “On Jewish Storytelling,” in What is Jewish Literature, ed. Hana WirthNesher (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 15–19.

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responds, “Indeed. When the Italian reader is leafing through a book by a Jewish author, he needs no hint to understand that this author is Jewish. It could be the humor or the specific sadness that leads to this recognition; the habit of stopping in the middle of narration to philosophize and ‘twiddle fingers.’”48 Vergelis questions her about the translations from Yiddish and Hebrew into Italian and she shows him an anthology of twenty-nine modern Hebrew poets, which might have reminded him of Poets of Israel. Indeed, issue four of Sovetish Heymland from 1963 included an extensive selection of “progressive writers from Israel,” including Penn’s poems.49 Having reiterated earlier his unacceptance of the possibility of Jewish literature in a non-Jewish language, he begins to give some ground: Having recorded our conversation, I thought: literary scholarship has not yet given a precise answer to the question of what is Jewish literature, Jewish art, Jewish music . . . What determines exactly the national essence: the author’s identity or the nature of his imagery or the stylistic peculiarities or the national features of the material? And perhaps all of these have to be taken into account and even some other factors?50 This is a startling turnaround from Vergelis’s earlier rigidity which seems to invoke the “reactionary Zionist” Jabotinsky who wrote in 1908, “In our complex time, the “nationality” of a literary work is far from being determined by its language. . . . The decisive factor here is not language and not even… the author’s identity and not even the plot: the decisive factor is the author’s mood—for whom he writes, whom he addresses, whose spiritual needs he has in mind when creating his work.”51 Vergelis and Jabotinsky would have made strange, but paradoxically akin bedfellows. Vergelis, perceived by many as a servile hack in cahoots with the authorities, emerges here as a much more serious figure, offering a Jewish intellectual discourse on the pages of an ostensibly propagandist book and vying for the mind of the Soviet Jewry.

48 Vergelis, Shestnadtsat′ stran, 356. 49 Sovetish Heymland 4 (1963): 63–100. 50 Vergelis, Shestnadtsat′ stran, 357–358. 51 Ivanova, Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii, 145. For a discussion of these debates, see also Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literatrure: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, xxxii–xxxiv.

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-4Yet, even the most tendentious of the pre-1967 Soviet reflections on Israeli society and culture managed to inform the reader. In 1959, Grigorii Plotkin, a Ukrainian Jewish writer with impeccable ideological credentials—he would go on to coauthor a preface to the notorious antisemitic pamphlet Judaism Unadorned—published a book in both Ukrainian and Russian, Poezdka v Izrail′ ( Journey to Israel), technically the first Soviet guide book to the Jewish state. Describing Israel as an impoverished lackey of the United States and its Zionist ideology as incurably reactionary, it also contained a cautiously perceptive analysis of major Hebrew writers. Plotkin called Shmuel Yosef Agnon, mistakenly named here “Leyb,” the oldest Israeli prose writer whose works are filled with “marvellous religious prejudices,”52 and even identified Uri Zvi Grinberg as “talented” prior to his joining the right-wing “obscurantists”;53 evaluations of Grinberg by the main Israeli poetic scene were not that different. Plotkin praised Moshe Shamir’s novel about the Maccabees and naturally celebrated Penn. He was favorable toward Nathan Alterman and especially Avraham Shlonsky for his “masterful” translations of Eugene Onegin and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Despite the necessary ideological obtuseness and tendentiousness, Plotkin was perceptive and inadvertently looking ahead. In 1965, A. Belov (penname of Avraam Elinson), one of the few Soviet translators and scholars of Hebrew literature, whose translations were included in the prose collections I discussed above, published a lengthy essay on Shlonsky’s translation of Eugene Onegin in the prestigious Mastery of Translation almanac, edited by Kornei Chukovsky. Containing numerous quotations from Shlonsky’s Hebrew, transliterated in Cyrillic, Belov’s piece revealed how the Israeli poet not merely translated, but judaized Pushkin through the “virtuoso employment of traditional imagery of the ancient books—Psalms, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs—to recreate Pushkin’s images, thoughts, moods far removed from the Bible.”54 For the Jewish reader immersed in this highly valued publication, it undoubtedly felt remarkable to see the beloved Pushkin’s lines speak Hebrew. Shlonsky was deeply flattered by Belov’s piece and engaged in a rich long correspondence with him, also supplying him with materials from Israel.55 52 Grigorii Plotkin, Poezdka v Izrail′ (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Literaturnoi gazety,” 1959), 105. 53 Ibid. 54 A. Belov, “A. Shlenskii—perevodchik ‘Evgeniia Onegina,’” Masterstvo perevoda, 1964, ed. Kornei Chukovsky (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 315. 55 Avraham Shlonsky, Mikhtavim le-yehudim u-Brit ha-Moatzot (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1977).

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Many of their letters were devoted to Shlonsky’s translation of Babel’s stories which were widely praised and discussed in the Israeli press.56 Most notably, Leah Goldberg wrote a lengthy piece on Babel, which presented him essentially as a Hebrew writer. She wrote, “Who among the readers of Red Cavalry can believe that its stories were not initially written in Hebrew? The theme, style, and language of Shlonsky’s translation indicate that the Russian original in this case is a translation from Hebrew. Thanks to Shlonsky’s translation [Babel] has, as if, returned home.”57 In a way, this was a reversal of Penn’s idea of merging Hebrew with Moscow: Penn returned to his roots via a Russian translation of his Hebrew while Babel, in Goldberg’s eyes, returned to his “original” Hebrew via Shlonsky’s translation which elevated him to a status of Jewish national icon. In addition to this correspondence, part of Shlonsky’s fascination with Soviet Jewry was the collection he edited in 1962, My Spring will Come: Poems of a Soviet Jew, by an anonymous author in the original Russian and Hebrew translations. The anonymous author was I. Domalsky, the pseudonym of Mikhail Baitalsky, who spent years in the Gulag and was unable to make aliyah. Belov did emigrate to Israel in the 1970s where he continued to be a prolific translator and edited a notable volume, I Told Myself to the End: Verse of Israeli Female Poets.

-5Belov’s volume was published by Biblioteka Aliia (Aliyah Library), the press which played a very prominent role in Soviet Jewish history. Started in 1972 by the Society for the Study of Jewish Communities, part of Nativ (lishkat hakesher), the governmental agency responsible for supplying Soviet Jews with materials from Israel and encouraging aliyah, Biblioteka Aliia was both an enlightening and ideological enterprise. Its books were deliberately small so that they could be easily smuggled and hidden in one’s pocket. The catalogue of Biblioteka Aliia included translations from Yiddish, Hebrew, and English; contemporary Russian-language émigré writers; and early Russian Jewish figures, such as Jabotinsky. Accessible through samizdat and refusenik networks, mainly in Moscow and Leningrad, these books supplanted both the samizdat and officially sanctioned literature. Gradually, the content of Biblioteka Aliia grew, 56 See David Rozenson, Babel′: Chelovek i paradoks (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2015), 190–259. 57 Ibid., 248.

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with more books devoted to the Holocaust and diverse Jewish literature, from Saul Bellow to Thomas Mann.58 A major refusenik writer, David Shrayer-Petrov, encapsulated the significance of these books for the Jewish reading public in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the time of the development of political, cultural, and religious Jewish underground and the refusenik movement, accompanied by the regime’s attempts to stifle it, which led to the emergence of the Refusenik movement. In his novel, Bud' ty prokliat! Ne umirai . . . (Cursed Be You! Just Don't Die . . .), which is the second book of his refusenik trilogy, Shrayer-Petrov wrote, “And now who do we read—Singer, Jabotinsky, Bialik, David Markish, Malamud, Leon Uris, Nathan Alterman, Igal Alon, and many others, published by Biblioteka Aliia.”59 With the advent of perestroika reforms, the books of Biblioteka Aliia, now supplied by the Joint Distribution Committee, reached openly everywhere, dramatically enlarging all layers of Jewish knowledge available to Soviet Jews, from Hebrew translations to the religious, scholarly and historical sources. This new accessibility of Jewish materials throughout the Soviet Union was eye-opening. Leon Uris's Exodus, an epic novel about the creation of Israel, and previously a samizdat hit in Moscow, was one of the most read Jewish books throughout the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Exodus was the first book of the Biblioteka Aliia initial catalogue in 1973. Such classics of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship as Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Efraim Elimelech Urbach’s The Sages of the Talmud, and Louis Finkelstein’s Rabbi Akibah; the works of the French existentialist thinker Andre Neher and Milton Steinberg’s popular novel As a Driven Leaf about a talmudic heretic, Elisha ben Abuyah, all published by Biblioteka Aliia, filled the cramped libraries housed in the just opened Jewish community centers in Ukraine and Belarus. *** 58 Saul Bellow [Sol Bellou], Planeta M-ra Sammlera ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1978); Thomas Mann [Tomas Mann], O nemtsakh i evreiakh ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1990). 59 David Shrayer-Petrov [David Shraer-Petrov], Gerbert i Nelli (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2014), 366–367. For a discussion of Shrayer-Petrov’s trilogy, see Marat Grinberg, “Who is Grifanov? David Shrayer-Petrov’s Dialogue with Yuri Trifonov,” and Klavdia Smola, “David Shrayer-Petrov’s Aliyah Novels and the Epistemology of the Jewish Soviet Cultural Revival,” in The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov. A Collection Published on the Occasion of the Writer's 85th Birthday, ed. Roman Katsman, Maxim D. Shrayer, and Klavdia Smola (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021), 221–238, 285–304. Notably, an abridged version of the first part of Shrayer-Petrov’s trilogy was included in, and gave its title to, the collection Being Refused (V otkaze), published by Biblioteka Aliia in 1986. See V. Lazaris, ed., V otkaze ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1986), 147–242.

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The central questions posed in this essay are: what was the relationship between the Aliyah Library books and the earlier Soviet translations of Israeli literature? Are there more continuities or breaks in Soviet-Israeli literary ties? It would be natural to presume that there were more breaks, considering the very different goals and circumstances which surrounded the Soviet and Israeli publications. While this is undoubtedly true, my final proposition is that in one fundamental way Biblioteka Aliia was not a break with the Soviet editions of Israeli literature, but perhaps paradoxically an expansion and extension of them. True, the ideological framework completely changed, from tepid acceptance of Israeli literature and condemnation of its “reactionary” tendencies to encouragement and celebration of Zionism. Yet, the idea central to both Russian and Jewish thinking that literature cannot be divorced from ideology or ideas remained, making literary texts an indelible part of readers’ identities, be they in Moscow, Kyiv, or Jerusalem.

Bibliography Primary Sources Belov, A. “A. Shlenskii—perevodchik ‘Evgeniia Onegina.’” In Masterstvo perevoda, 1964, edited by Kornei Chukovsky, 304–325. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965. Narovchatov, Sergei. “Korotko o knigakh.” Novyi Mir 10 (1964): 279. Penn, Alexander [Aleksandr Penn]. “Pgishah” [Meeting]. Kol ha-Am, November 6, 1959, 4. ——— [Aleksandr Penn]. Serdtse v puti [Heart on a journey]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965. Petrov, P., ed. Rasskazy izrail′skikh pisatelei [Stories of Israeli writers]. Moscow: Progress, 1965. Plotkin, Grigorii. Poezdka v Izrail′ [ Journey to Israel]. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Literaturnoi gazety,” 1959. Samoilov, David. Podennye zapisi [Daily notes]. Moscow: Vremia, 2002. Shrayer-Petrov, David [David Shraer-Petrov]. Gerbert i Nelli [Herbert and Nelli]. Moscow: Knizhniki, 2014. Slutskii, Boris. ed. Poety Izrailia [Poets of Israel]. Moscow: Izdatel′stvo inostrannoi literatury, 1963. ———. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986. ———. Segodnia i vchera [Today and tomorrow]. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1961. Vergelis, Aron. Shestnadtsat′ stran vkliuchaia Monako: Putevye ocherki [Sixteen countries including Monaco: Traveler’s notes]. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1982. Vilsker, Lev, ed. Iskatel′ zhemchuga [The searcher of pearls]. Moscow: Nauka, 1966.

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Secondary Sources Alter, Robert, ed. The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Estraikh, Gennady. “‘Jewish Street’ or Jewish Cul-de-sac? From Sovetish Heymland to Di Yidishe Gas.” East European Jewish Affairs 26, no. 1 (1996): 25–33. Gluzman, Michael. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Grinberg, Marat. “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. Halperin, Chagit. Tzeva ha-chayim: Chayav ve-yetzirato shel Aleksandr Penn. Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 2007. Ivanova, Evgeniia, ed. Chukovskii i Zhabotinskii: Istoriia vzaimootnoshenii v tekstakh i kommentariiakh. Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2005. Katsman, Roman. “Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the Eyes of Israeli Writers and Intellectuals (1958–1960) (A Minimal Foundation of Multilingual Jewish Philology).” In Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Multilingual Literature, edited by Hilel Vais, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman, 638–680. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Laor, Dan. Chaei Agnon: Biografiya. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998. Rozenson, David. Babel′: Chelovek i paradoks. Moscow: Knizhniki, 2015. Rubenstein, Sondra Miller. The Communist Movement in Palestine and Israel, 1919–1984. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985.

Leaving Russia: Russian-Israeli Literature of the 1970s–1980s Aleksei Surin Introduction Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and the rise of institutional and social antisemitism in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s created a surge of national self-awareness among the Soviet Jews and intensified Soviet Jewry’s struggle for the right to repatriate to Israel. With support from the international community, the Soviet government was eventually pressured into permitting Soviet Jews to leave the country. According to demographic sources, approximately 165,000 people emigrated from the USSR to Israel between 1970 and 1988.1 Those repatriating in the 1970s and 1980s included a large cohort of literary people: fiction writers, poets, translators, and literary critics. Their arrival in Israel significantly enhanced and expanded the space of Russian-language literature that had already existed in Israel, albeit in sporadic form, since the 1920s, (see Vladimir Khazan’s essay in this volume), imbuing it with renewed intellectual vigor and finally forging a critical mass necessary for further development of the literary process. Another significant event that contributed to the development of RussianIsraeli literature was the official establishment, in 1973, of the Union of RussianLanguage Writers of Israel. The first chairman of the Union was the poet, fiction writer, and essayist Isaak Tsetlin (penname A. Arkadin, 1901–1988), who knew Hebrew perfectly but continued to write literature in Russian. The creation of the union legitimized the existence of Russian-language writing as equivalent 1

Copyright © 2023 by Aleksei Surin. Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (2013) is the title of Maxim D. Shrayer’s memoir. Mark Tolts [Mark Tol′ts], “Postsovetskaia evreiskaia diaspora: noveishie otsenki,” Demoskop Weekly 497–498 (2012), http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2012/0497/tema03.php.

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to Hebrew literature and bolstered opportunities for intellectual and creative practices in Russian. The union provided a significant support system for writers who repatriated in the 1970s, both in terms of organization and coordination and in terms of financial assistance. Through the union, newly arrived authors could receive a temporary stipend and a partial subsidy for the publication of their first book. The repatriation of a large number—by modest estimates, of about one hundred especially active and notable figures—of Russian-language authors and editors in the 1970s led to the increase (compared to previous years) of Russianlanguage journals, periodicals, and publishers. In the 1960s, only two Russian-language journals existed in Israel. One was Vestnik Izrailia (Israel herald, 1959–1963), mainly dedicated to social and cultural topics, where essays and articles were interspersed with poems and fiction by Russian-language Israeli authors. The other was the review Shalom (1963–1968). In the early 1970s the number of Russian-language periodicals grew considerably. The almanac Ami (My people) was published in Jerusalem in 1970–1973. Notably, Venedikt Erofeev’s “poem” Moskva-Petushki (published in English as Moscow to the End of the Line) appeared for the first time in Ami’s final, third issue.2 The literary-social magazine Sion (Zion), published by the Social Council of Solidary with Jews in USSR, appeared in 1972–1982 (the periodical halted publication in 1980–1981, and only one issue was printed in 1982). In 1978, a group of the employees of Sion, together with recently repatriated creators of the Moscow-based samizdat magazine Evrei v SSSR (Jews in USSR),3 established the magazine 22 (Dvadtsat′ dva [Twenty-two]). The internal rift among the editorial board of Sion occurred over the twenty-second issue of the publication, which is why the founders of the new journal selected this title. The internal divisions 2 The microfilm of the typewritten text of Moskva-Petushki was secretly transported to Jerusalem by physicist Boris Tsukerman, who had been granted permission to repatriate to Israel in February 1971. 3 The samizdat journal Evrei v SSSR. Sbornik materialov, posviashchennykh kul′ture i problemam evreev Sovetskogo Soiuza ( Jews in USSR: Collection of materials dedicated to the culture and issues of the Jews of the Soviet Union) was published clandestinely in Moscow from 1972 to 1979. The founders and first editors of the journal were physicists Viktor Yakhot and Aleksandr Voronel′. When Voronel′ (repatriated 1974) and Yakhot (repatriated 1975) received permission to emigrate to Israel, they were replaced at the helm by Rafail Nudel′man (repatriated 1975) and Ilya Rubin (repatriated 1976). They were followed by Vladimir Lazaris (repatriated 1977) and Emma Sotnikova (repatriated 1977). In 1977, after the departure of Lazaris and Sotnikova, Viktor Brailovsky, by then a refusenik for over five years, and Igor′ Guberman became the coeditors of the journal, serving in this role for two years. In 1979, Guberman was arrested and sentenced to five years behind bars; Brailovsky was arrested in 1980 and, after ten months of pre-trial detention, sentenced to five years of exile.

Leaving Russia

were caused by Sion’s editorial board’s political position, aimed at accelerating the “Israelization” the works of Soviet literary figures.4 Until 1994, the “social-political and literary magazine of Jewish intelligentsia” was led by Rafail Nudel′man (1931– 2017, repatriated 1975). In 1994, he was replaced by Aleksandr Voronel′ (b. 1931, repatriated 1974). Until the early 1990s, 22 remained a central literary and intellectual publication for the Russian-language repatriates with secular views. In 1975–1980, another monthly Russian-language magazine in Israel rose to prominence. It was Vremia i my (Time and we), whose founder and editorin-chief was Viktor Perelman (1929–2003, in Israel 1973–1981). The primary mission of the journal was, “amid vanity and absence of faith, in a world where brute force and deceit have become the norm for human relationships, [. . .] to help the reader make better sense of the times and of himself.”5 The magazine published Russian-language authors who repatriated to Israel as well as those who emigrated from the USSR to other countries. It was this periodical that first published Aleksandr Galich’s Bloshinyi rynok (Flea market),6 Naum Korzhavin’s Poema sushchestvovania (Poem of existence),7 and Sergei Dovlatov’s Nevidimaia kniga (The invisible book).8 From 1981 onward, the magazine continued its publication in New York, producing six issues per year. From 1988 to 2001, the journal was published quarterly. In January 1973 came out the first issue of Menora, whose founder was the writer and philosopher Pavel Gol′dshtein (1917–1982, repatriated 1971). This publication was aimed at spiritual-philosophical enlightenment and was intended for religious readers who practiced Orthodox Judaism. Between 1982, the year of Gol′dshtein’s death, and 1985, a few new issues appeared, with Arye Vudka (b. 1947, repatriated 1976), Mosha Barsela (1902–1986) and Avraam Elinson (1911–2000, repatriated 1974) serving as editors. The 1980s saw the publication of Narod i zemlia (People and land, 1984– 1988, eight issues), based on a digest with the same title, and Kinor (Violin), a social-political and literary periodical published in 1983–1985 (five issues). The following journals and almanacs were also published in the 1970s and 1980s: Klub (Club, 1974–1977), Krug (Circle, 1977–1992), Izrail′ segodnia (Israel

Mikhail Kopeliovich, “Zhurnal 22,” Kontinent 111 (2002), https://magazines.gorky.media/ continent/2002/111/zhurnal-22.html. 5 “Redkollegiia” [Editorial board’s mission statement dedicated to the first issue of the journal], Vremia i my 1 (1975): 3. Here and forthwith, all direct quotes are in Margarit Ordukhanyan’s literal translation, unless otherwise noted. 6 In Vremia i my 24 (1977) and 25 (1978). 7 In Vremia i my 1 (1975). 8 In Vremia i my 24 (1977) and 25 (1978). 4

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today, 1978, 1987–1988), Vozrozhdenie (Revival, 1973–1990), Salamandra (Salamander, 1987–1989), and Aviv (Spring, 1989–1994). In addition to journals and almanacs, in the 1970s there was a significant increase in the number of publishers who printed Russian-language books. The Society for Research of Jewish Communities in the Diaspora founded, in 1972, the publishing house Biblioteka Aliia,9 which soon became the largest among its kind. In existence until the end of the 1990s, Biblioteka Aliia published over 250 books on Jewish history, literature, philosophy, and religion, becoming an indispensable source of knowledge about Judaism and Hebrew traditions, both for the Russian-speaking Israelis and the Jews in the USSR, where the publisher’s books were secretly disseminated. The publishing house printed such books as the memoirs of leading Zionist activists, the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Nathan Alterman, the historical novels of Maks Brod and Howard Fast, the short stories of Isaac Babel, and the philosophical works of Martin Buber and André Neher. In 1973–1976, Biblioteka Aliia was led by Sima Kaminskaia (b. 1928, repatriated 1971), in 1976–1978—by Ella Slivkina (1926–2022, repatriated 1966), and from 1986 until 1996—by Margarita Shklovskaia (b. 1944). In 1973 Shamir, the Society of Religious Jewish Intelligentsia from USSR and Eastern Europe, headed by German Branover (b. 1931, repatriated 1972), a professor and researcher in the field of magnetic physics and a member of the Hasidic movement Chabad, founded in Jerusalem the publishing house Shamir, which specialized in Judaica literature: from Tanakh to a biography series titled “Jews in World Culture.” Additionally, in the 1980s Shamir published poetry and prose by Russian-language religious authors, such as the works of Eli Liuksemburg. Biblioteka Aliia and Shamir were followed by Moskva-Ierusalim, founded in 1977, whose editors in chief were Aleksandr Voronel′ and Rafail Nudel′man; and Tarbut, founded in 1977 and led by Feliks Dektor (1930–2020, repatriated 1976), the husband of writer Svetlana Shenbrunn. In 1982, philologist and linguist Mikhail Klainbart (b. 1946, repatriated 1972) launched the publishing house Leksikon. Initially, it focused on publishing thematic dictionaries, producing such titles as Ivrit-latinsko-angliisko-russkii slovar′ meditsinskoi terminologii (Hebrew-Latin-English-Russian dictionary of medical terminology), Ivritrusskii inzhenerno-tekhnicheskii slovar′ (Hebrew-Russian engineering-technical

9

For more on this, see Marat Grinberg’s essay in the present collection.

Leaving Russia

dictionary), and other similar ones. However, the publisher eventually added poetry and prose to its lineup of professional literature. For example, Leksikon printed the collected poems of Mikhail Gendelev, Rina Levinzon, and other Russian-Israeli authors. Other publishers active in the 1970–1980s were Cherikover, Panorama, Bumerang (renamed Izdatel′stvo Iakova Vaiskopfa), Kakhol-Lavan, Iakov-Press, Maler Publications, Moriia, and Effekt. The briefly mentioned phenomena of the literary life of “Russian” Israel of the 1970s—the increased number of Russian-language journals, the creation of new book publishers, the emergence of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel—all point to the fact that the authors who emigrated from the USSR, in contrast to the writers of the previous generations, found significantly more reasons to continue writing in Russian. The 1970s and the 1980s produced a significant number of Russian-language texts published in Israel. Their number was to grow further in the 1990s, but many of the books of the Great Aliyah began to also appear in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, whereas in the 1970s this was impossible for obvious political reasons. More importantly, Israel offered those who had left Russia in the 1970s not only a new home but also new legal opportunities—for some of the emigrants, for the first time in their lives, to create their art. The works discussed below were born owing to these new opportunities. In the following sections, we will offer the biographies of the authors who became the leading figures of Russian-Israeli literature of the 1970–1970s and who created the most prominent prose works of this time-period. While three of the authors discussed here were poets (Gendelev, Volokhonsky, and Vladimirova), the present study will analyze only their prose (see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in the present collection for a detailed discussion of the poetry of this period). *** The writers who repatriated to Israel in the 1970s can be broadly divided into two categories: 1) writers who enjoyed official recognition and publication opportunities in the USSR and continued their literary activities following their repatriation to Israel; and 2) authors who in the USSR either published in samizdat or worked in journalism, switching to literary works, and developed their professional literary careers only in Israel. In this category, we will also include those who engaged in literary work only after repatriation (Mark Zaichik). The following three factors determined the selection and inclusion of authors: a) the literary significance of their works within Russian-Israeli literature; b) their influence on other authors within Russian-Israeli literary society; and c) the presence, in their writing, of efforts to aesthetically render

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the challenges related to repatriation within the framework of Israeli life and culture. In the current work, the authors’ biographies are given in the order of their significance and influence on the development of Russian-Israeli literature. While identifying the key milestones in the literary lives of the selected writers and poets, we will briefly note important events in their personal biographies to contextualize their development as well as the intellectual “baggage” with which they came to Israel.

Authors Who Enjoyed Official Recognition in the USSR Efrem (Efraim) Baukh Efrem Baukh was born in 1934 in the Romanian town of Bendery (presently in Moldova). He spent the war years with his mother as an evacuee in the village of Baltser (current-day Krasnoarmeisk) in Saratov Oblast. Baukh’s father, Isaac, was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. In 1944, Baukh’s family returned to Bendery. Upon graduating from the Department of Geology of Kishinev State University in 1958, Baukh worked as a geological engineer at the Institute of Mineral Raw Materials in Crimea and as a speleologist during an expedition to Lake Baikal. Upon his return to Kishinev in 1960, he was hired as a journalist for the newspaper Molodezh′ Moldavii (Moldova’s youth). After the newspaper was shut down in 1962, he returned to working as a geologist. In 1967–1971 he headed the department of literature and culture in the newspapers Molodezh′ Moldavii and Vechernii Kishinev (Evening Kishinev). In 1971–1973 he attended the Highest Literary Courses of the Union of Soviet Writers at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. In 1975–1976 he was employed by the film studio Moldova-Film, where he wrote the script for the documentary film Tridtsataia vesna pobedy (The thirtieth spring of victory). In 1977, he repatriated to Israel, where he served as the editor of Sion (1977–1980) and Kinor (1980–1986). Twice, in 1981–1982 and again in 1985–2014, he headed the Union of RussianLanguage Writers of Israel. Baukh’s first poem was published in 1952. From the late 1950s onward, Baukh regularly published his poems in the magazine Kodry and in Molodezh′ Moldavii. In 1964, Baukh was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers, having published the previous year his first poetry collection Grani (Edges). Then came the author’s collections of poetry entitled Nochnye tramvai (Nighttime trams, Kishinev, 1965), Krasnyi vecher (Red evening, Kishinev, 1968), and poems for children and adolescents, Prevrashcheniia (Transformations, Kishinev, 1973).

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In 1965 Baukh published two fairy tales for children: “Goroshki i graf Triufel′” (Peas and Count Truffle) and “Puteshestvie v stranu Geo” ( Journey to the country of Geo). Within a year of emigrating to Israel, Baukh published in Jerusalem a collection of poems in Russian with the Hebrew title Ruach.10 In 1982, he published two novels: Kin i Orman (Kin and Orman) and Kamen′ Moriia (The stone Moria), the first two works in a seven-volume book series entitled Sny o zhizni (Dreams about life). Kin and Orman, which Baukh had written while still living in the USSR and which he originally titled Ostal′noe—molchanie (The rest is silence), captures the story of Jewish young man, Orman, a journalism graduate, who falls in love with a girl named Tania, the daughter of a man named Gleb Ilyich, who has destroyed Orman’s father. Another primary character of the book, a writer named Kin, writes an anonymous letter provoking Orman to avenge his father’s death. Thus, he opens the “Pandora’s box” and brings the young man face to face with the world of the Russian intelligentsia, hostile towards the Jews. In the novel The Stone Moriia, which adheres to the traditions of philosophicalpoetic prose, the protagonist finds himself in the “triangle of time”: in Rome in 1979, in Jerusalem besieged by Titus’s army in year 70, and in Moscow in the early 1970s. At the center of this triangle lie contemplations of the fates of Soviet Russian Jews such as Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and the lives of two Russian writers living abroad with disparate attitudes towards Jews: Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Bunin. The protagonist himself feels at home neither in the first Rome nor the “third,” since both these cities and their respective cultures are dead to him. Only Jerusalem stands before him like a “living truth”11 or “a shell pressed against the ear of the world.12 Only in Jerusalem can one understand who one is and why one has come into this world, pass “through the impassable fort of time—to yourself.”13 The next installment of the series, Lestnitsa Iakova ( Jacob’s ladder), was published in 1987. That same year, the book was published in Hebrew under the title Dante in Moscow, garnering Baukh Israel’s Presidential Award. The novel, widely considered to be among the most important ones in the writer’s oeuvre, is set in Moscow. The hero, a psychiatrist named Emmanuil Kardin, works at a privileged healthcare clinic for “positive victims of the regime”14—various stoolies

10 11 12 13 14

The Hebrew word ruach has several meanings: wind, soul, spirit. Efrem Baukh, Kamen′ Moriia ( Jerusalem: Moriia, 1982), 233. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 272. Efrem Baukh, Lestnitsa Iakova ( Jerusalem: Moriia, 1987), 165.

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and informants who have gone mad. At the peak of his career and wealth, while serving as the doctor for the Kremlin elite, Kardin at the same time feels a bottomless inner void, which he is eager to escape. For Kardin, this escape from the all-encompassing emptiness begins with his turn towards his Jewish roots, with the awakening of his Jewish “five-thousand-year-old memory.”15 The closer he comes to his Jewishness, the more his life, which has been comfortable so far, collapses around him. Kardin feels like an outsider in the vane and deceitful world of Soviet Moscow, which presents itself to him as a Dantean inferno. Thus begins his ascent on Jacob’s Stairs: through Hebrew, almost forgotten since childhood, through ancient Jewish books, through recollections of the lives of his parents and ancestors in the diaspora, and finally through his refusal to continue serving the Soviet system, he arrives at a spiritual renewal and eventually ends up moving to Israel. Like the biblical patriarch Jacob, who wins his struggle against God, Kardin survives a struggle against his fears and doubts. The biblical image, the metaphor of the ladder as an ascent to God, helps him with his private exodus from “slavery” in Soviet Egypt. Jakob’s Ladder in Baukh’s seven-book series Dreams about Life was followed by the novels Oklik (Call, Bat Yam, 1992) and Solntse samoubiits (The sun of suicides, Bat Yam, 1994). The sixth novel of the series, Pustynia vnemlet Bogu (The desert heeds God) was published in Moscow (2002), and the final, seventh book, Zavesa (Veil), in Israel in 2009. Baukh has translated, from Hebrew and Yiddish, Chaim Lazar-Litai’s Warsaw Ghetto Rising (1991), Itzhak Katzenelson’s Song about the Murdered Jewish People (1992), Uri Zvi Grinberg’s In the Middle of the World, in the Middle of Time (1992), Meir Uziel’s Demons of Khazaria and a Young Girl Named Debby, Yitzhak Shalev’s The Case of Gabriel Tirosh (2007), and Naomi Frankel’s Saul and Johanna. In addition to fiction and poetry, Baukh has translated from Aramaic into Russian one of the chapters of the Kabbalah tractate Zohar, Pinchas (1995). The foreword and introduction for this book was written by an American rabbi, dean of the worldwide Kabbalah Centre organization Philip Berg. Between 2000 and 2010, Baukh published a number of collected Russianlanguage essays and articles including Isk istorii (Claim of history, 2007), Iadro iudeistva (Nucleus of Judaism, 2015), Effekt babochki (Butterfly effect, 2015), and Perstami ruki chelovecheskoi: Fellini—Venetsiia—Fuko (With the fingers of the human hand: Fellini—Venice—Foucault, 2018). In 2011, together with Leonid Gomberg, Baukh published the book Apologia nebytiia. Shlomo Sand:

15 Ibid., 252.

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novyi mif o evreiakh (Apology of non-being. Shlomo Sand: a new myth about the Jews), in which he attempted to refute the theory of the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand that the historical layer of the Bible is a fiction created by authors living at the end of the first millennium CE and to prove that the Exodus from Egypt and the reign of Kings David and Solomon were a historical reality. The last book the author published before his death in 2020 was a collection of essays entitled Vremia besov (The time of demons, 2018).

Ruth Zernova Born Ruf ' Zevina in Odesa in 1919, Ruth Zernova was a fiction writer, essayist, and literary critic. During the Spanish Civil War, she worked as a military translator in the Soviet diplomatic mission in Spain. In 1947, she graduated from the Department of Philology of Leningrad State University. In 1949, together with her husband, philologist and literary critic Il’ia Serman, she was arrested and indicted on charges of “dissemination of anti-Soviet slanderous fabrications.” She was sentenced to ten years of correctional labor camps, and her husband to twenty-five. Both were released under an amnesty in 1954 and fully rehabilitated in 1956. Zernova gained her renown as a writer in 1955. She published in Soviet journals Novyi Mir (New world), Iunost′ (Youth), Zvezda (Star), Ogonek (Little flame), and others. She also authored collections of short stories and novellas: Skorpionovy iagody (Scorpion berries, Moscow, 1961), Svet i teni (Light and shadows, Leningrad, 1963), Dlinnoe-dlinnoe leto (Long-long summer, Moscow, 1967), Solnechnaia storona (Sunny side, Leningrad, 1968), Rasskazy pro Antona (Tales of Anton, Moscow, 1971), and Nemye zvonki (Mute phone calls, Moscow, 1974). Zernova also authored a memoir about the Spanish Civil War. She became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1964. In 1976, she repatriated to Israel. Zernova translated into Russian Eli Wiesel’s Legends of Our Time ( Jerusalem, 1982), Golda Meir’s autobiographic My Life ( Jerusalem, 1984), and George Sand’s novel Mont-Revêch (Vladivostok, 1989). In 1981, Zernova published her first post-emigration collection of short stories, Zhenskie rasskazy (Women’s tales, Ann Arbor, MI). In 1991, stories from this collection were included in English translation in Mute Phone Calls and Other Stories, edited and cotranslated by an American scholar of Zernova’s work, Helen Reeve. Most of the works included in Women’s Tales are autobiographic and recount stories of women living through personal tragedy in the bustle of Soviet humdrum everyday life, like Mila from the story “Chto vdrug?” (What if?), who gets pregnant late in life, or at a pivotal moment in Soviet history, like

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the protagonist of “Elizabeth Arden,” who is arrested during the Stalinist “battle against cosmopolitanism.” The writer herself defined this collection as “women’s literature,” created “by women about women.”16 In the author’s opinion, the essence of this concept is reflected in the words of Boris Eikhenbaum, who, at an evening dedicated to Anna Akhmatova in 1946, said: “A woman is destined to preserve and transmit memory, to preserve the connection between generations.”17 In Women’s Tales, the author’s efforts to preserve and convey the connection between generations forms a portrait of a “feminine spiritual experience,”18 upon which stands the effort to “locate the true, perhaps religious nature of things.”19 In other words, the female outlook in Zernova’s work is the outlook that is capable of preserving and conveying, with equal acuteness, both “eternal things such as love, loyalty, and death” and “transitory things such as war, treason, betrayal, fascism, antisemitism.”20 Zernova’s Zhenskie rasskazy was followed by Eto bylo pri nas (This happened on our watch, Jerusalem, 1988), Izrail′ i okrestnosti (Israel and its neighbors, Jerusalem, 1990), Dlinnye teni (Long shadows, 1995), and Na more i obratno (To the sea and back, Jerusalem, 1998). In 2004, three of her books were published posthumously: Ruf′ Zernova—chetyre zhizni. Sbornik vospominanii (Ruf ’ Zernova—four lives: Collection of recollections, 2011), Kniga Rufi. Proza Rufi Zernovoi. Pisatel′skie bloknoty (Book of Ruth. The prose of Ruth Zernova. Writer’s notebooks, 2011), and Inaia real′nost′ (Alternate reality, 2012). Her works have been translated into English, Italian, Polish, and Czech.

Felix Kandel Writer, playwright, and screenwriter Felix (Filipp) Kandel was born in Moscow in 1932. In 1956, he graduated from Moscow Aviation Institute and worked in the constructor bureau in the capacity of an engineer designing jet and rocket engines. His comedic play Peredai ulybku (Pass on a smile) was published in 1963, and Kandel subsequently dedicated himself fully to literary work. Until 1973, under the penname Feliks Kamov, he wrote short stories, novellas, plays, 16 Valentina Brio, “Chetyre zhizni Rufi Zernovoi,” in Ruf′ Zernova: chetyre zhizni (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011), 32. 17 Ibid. 18 Ruf ′ Zernova, Zhenskie rasskazy (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1981), Introduction. 19 Ibid. 20 Zernova, rasskazy, 16.

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screenplays, and stage sketches (in collaboration with Eduard Uspensky). His work was published in Novyi Mir (New world), Iunost′ (Youth), Literaturnaia Gazeta (Literary gazette), Krokodil (Crocodile), and other periodicals. He contributed to writing the screenplays for the popular Soviet animation series Nu, pogodi! ( Just you wait!). In 1973 he applied for permission to repatriate to Israel, after which the publication of his works abruptly ceased. He spent four years as a refusenik, during which he participated in hunger strikes and other protests demanding permission to leave for Israel. Following his repatriation in 1977, he published in such periodicals as Kontinent (Continent), printed in Paris, 22, Grani (Facets, published in Frankfurt am Main), Sion, Vremia i my, and others. In 1979, Kandel’s first book of prose was released in Israel. Entitled Zona otdykha ili piatnadtsat′ sutok na razmyshlenie (The zone of rest or fifteen days for contemplation), the book consists of two independent narratives that have no formal connections with each other. One part describes “Zone of rest of the Timiriazev region of the city of Moscow,” which houses a jail for people who are serving fifteen-day sentences. The author himself spent time inside this jail after participating in a protest march organized by Jewish activists demanding permission to leave for Israel. During those fifteen days, he shared his cell with people of all ages and professions: an artist and a musician as well as a street sweeper and a truck loader. With a touch of irony, Kandel describes their fates and their tribulations, oscillating between surprise at their indifference to the surrounding world and a combination of empathy and horror over their misfortunes and adversities. The second narrative is told from the perspective of a factory worker who tells of his friend, an irrepressible brawler Polutorka. Polutorka’s entire life revolves around looking for money to buy himself a drink after work: for a bottle of vodka, he and his buddies can solve a very complex technical problem or sell a dog that has been trained always to come back to its owner. Once drunk, Polutorka likes to daydream about how the entire state machine begins to function only for the purpose of providing drunks with free vodka, which they in turn proudly turn down. The short-lived and happy dreams about sober life of spiting the Soviet regime bring such inspiration that the friends once again get inebriated.21 Polutorka’s story ends with him getting fired from work and going to jail. Years of imprisonment turn the good-natured alcoholic man into a skeleton purchased from a character by the Academy of Science. The absurdity and incongruity of Polutorka’s fate, depicted in an often comical lubok style, exposes the horror of 21 Feliks Kandel′, Zona otdykha ili piatnadtsat′ sutok na razmyshlenie ( Jerusalem: Olshansky, 1979), 12–13.

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the lives of Soviet citizens, doomed by the authorities to a chronic lack of freedom, to “indifferent dumbness,”22 and to “growing accustomed to heinousness and violence.”23 Kandel followed Zone of Rest with Vrata iskhoda nashego (Gates of our exodus, 1979), a collection of essays about his struggle to gain permission to leave for Israel and about the tragic fate of the Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Kandel’s novel Koridor (Corridor), written in Moscow in the late 1960, was published in 1981. After this came a duology consisting of Pervyi etazh (First floor), published in London in 1982 and Na noch′ gliadia (On the eve), published in Frankfurt in 1985, as well as two novellas, Liudi mimoezzhie. Kniga puteshestvii (People passing by: A book of travels, Jerusalem, 1986) and Slovo za slovo (Word for word, Jerusalem, 1989), depicting the lives of Soviet Jews in Israel. Later, Kandel published the novels Ne proshlo i zhizni (Not even a lifetime later, Jerusalem, 1997), Smert′ gerontologa (Death of a gerontologist, Moscow and Jerusalem, 2001), Protiv neba na zemle (Against the sky on Earth, Moscow and Jerusalem, 2008), and a book of autobiographical prose Shel staryi evrei po Novomu Arbatu (An old Jew was walking down Novyi Arbat, Moscow, 2014). Additionally, Kandel authored a six-volume work on the history of Jews in Russia, titled Kniga vremen i sobytii (Book of times and events), along with a study of the history of the population and settlement of the Land of Israel, entitled Zemlia pod nogami (Earth underneath the feet). Kandel’s works have been translated into Hebrew, French, and German.

Mikhail Kheifets Writer, historian, thinker, and journalist Mikhail Kheifets was born in 1934 in Leningrad. He graduated from the department of literature of Leningrad Pedagogical University and taught high school literature and history between 1955 and 1966. From 1966 onward, he dedicated himself to literary work, publishing in such periodicals as Znanie—sila (Knowledge is power), Voprosy literatury (Literary issues), Zvezda (Star), Neva, and Koster (Bonfire). In 1968, the publisher Molodaia Gvardiia issued Kheifets’s novella Sekretar′ tainoi politsii (Secretary of the secret police) about the struggle of the members of Narodnaia Volia against the tsarist regime in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1974 Kheifets was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda for authoring the foreword 22 Ibid., 133. 23 Ibid.

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to a samizdat collection of Joseph Brodsky’s works as well as for the typesetting and safekeeping of two copies of dissident writer Andrei Amalrik’s essay titled “Prosushchestvuet li Sovetskii Soiuz do 1984 goda?” (Will the Soviet Union last until 1984?). Kheifets was sentenced to four years behind bars followed by two years of exile. During his imprisonment, Kheifets completed three books of documentary prose about his travails—Mesto i vremia (Time and place), Russkoe pole (Russian field), and Puteshestvie iz Dubrovlaga v Ermak (A Journey from Dubrovlag to Ermak). The books included his notes and contemplations about Russian and Jewish history. He managed to smuggle the first two books to the West, and they were published in Paris in 1978. The third book, written mostly during his exile in Kazakhstan, was included in the second volume of Kheifets’s collected works published in Kharkiv in 2000. Upon his return from exile in 1980, Kheifets repatriated to Israel, where he worked as a research associate at the Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1983, in Munich, Kheifets published Ukrainskie siluety (Ukrainian silhouettes), the book of his ideas on the leaders of the national movement in Ukraine and their struggle with the Bolshevik regime. Two years later, Kheifets published his novella titled Sekretar′ voennoplennyi (Secretary prisoner of war) about the Armenian dissident Paruir Hairikyan. It was followed, in 1989, by a book of the author’s commentary titled Gliadia iz Ierusalima (Looking on from Jerusalem), in which Kheifets recounts the history of Israeli cities, comments on the fate of the Jews who fought for the existence of the State of Israel and discusses the Palestinian question and the cultural life of the Russian-speaking repatriants. Kheifets strives to combine his heterogeneous comments into a general picture of life in Israel and demonstrate the “character traits of my people.”24 In the 1990s, Kheifets served as a columnist and commentator for the Israeli newspaper Vesti (News) and published a number of large historical works: Tsareubiistvo v 1918 godu (Assassination of the tsar in 1918, Tel Aviv, 1991, reprinted in Moscow in 1992), and Vospominanii grustnyi svitok (A sad scroll of memories, Jerusalem, 1996). In the 2000s, Kheifets published Sud nad Iisusom: evreiskie versii i gipotezy ( Jesus’s trial: Jewish versions and hypotheses, Moscow, 2000), Khanna Arendt sudit XX vek (Hanna Arendt judges the twentieth century, Moscow, 2003), Khanna Arendt: usloviia bytiia cheloveka na zemle (Hanna Arendt: A human’s conditions for existing on Earth, Moscow, 2000), and Kniga

24 Mikhail Kheifets, Gliadia iz Ierusalima ( Jerusalem: Kakhol-Lavan, 1989), 13.

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schastlivogo cheloveka (The book of a happy man, Moscow, 2010). The writer passed away in Israel in 2019.

Nina Voronel′ Nina Voronel′ is a poet, prose-writer, translator, playwright, and long-serving coeditor (with her husband Aleksandr Voronel′25) of 22. Born in 1932 in Kharkiv, she graduated from the department of physics and math of the University of Kharkiv, and then the translation department of the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. She translated western poets and authored two books of children’s poems and stories: Perekrestok (Crossroads, 1965) and Perepolokh (Ruckus, 1967). She repatriated to Israel in 1974. Voronel′s first play, Prochtite pis′mo (Read the letter, 1968) was banned after its opening performance in Perm, and the play’s director was fired. Following this incident, she no longer had the option of seeing her works published in the Soviet Union. In Israel, she composed eighteen more plays that were collected into the following books: Prakh i pepel (Dust and ashes, 1977), Kassir vechnosti (Cashier of eternity, 1987), Shest′iu vosem′—sorok vosem′ (Six times eight makes forty-eight, 1987), and Main liber Kats (Mein lieber Katz, 1998).26 Her works also include poetry collections Paporotnik (Fern, 1977) and Voronel′ (2001); a novel series Goticheskii roman (Gothic novel) comprised of Ved′ma i parashiutist (The Witch and the parachutist, 2000), Polet babochki (Butterfly’s flight, 2001), Doroga na Sirius (Road to Sirius, first published in the collection Goticheskii roman, 2005); and novels Tel′-Avivskie tainy (Tel Aviv mysteries, 2007), Glazami Lolity (Through Lolita’s eyes, 2008), V tiskakh—mezhdu Iungom i Freidom:

25 Aleksandr Voronel′ (b. 1931, repatriated 1975) is a scientist, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, editor, and publicist. Following the arrest of writers Andrei Siniavsky and Iulii Daniel in 1965, he, together with his wife Nina Voronel′, actively participated in the movement for their defense and for publicizing the details of their trial. In 1972, he was denied permission to leave for Israel, after which he founded a samizdat journal Evrei v SSSR, which he edited until 1974. In 1975, Voronel′ emigrated to Israel and worked as a professor at University of Tel Aviv until his retirement. He was one of the founders of the journal 22, and from 1994 until the journal’s closing in 2016, served as its editor-in-chief. In Israel, Voronel′ published three collections of his writing dedicated to problems of antisemitism and self-identity of Soviet and Russian Jews: Po tu storonu uspekha (On the other side of success, Tel Aviv, 1986), Ostalsia Iakov odin (Iakov is left alone, Tel Aviv, 1991), and V plenu svobody (Freedom’s captive, 1998). In 2003, a collection of his selected essays was published in Minsk under the title Vmeste i vroz′ (Together and apart). 26 For more on Voronel′’s plays, see Zlata Zaretsky’s essay in the present volume.

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dokumental′nyi roman, vol′naia rekonstruktsiia (In the grips between Jung and Freud: Documentary novel, freestyle reconstruction, 2013), Byloe i damy (The past and dames, 2016), Po tu storonu zla (On the other side of evil, 2019). In her autobiographic Bez prikras (Without embellishments), published in Moscow in 2003, Voronel′ shared her memories of Korney Chukovsky, Lilia Brik, Boris Pasternak, Andrei and Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei Siniavski, Yuli Daniel, Ilia Kabakov, David Samoilov, and other representatives of Soviet creative intelligentsia. The book’s release caused a controversy due to alleged inaccuracies in Voronel′s depiction of certain events. In 2004, Voronel′ followed up with another memoir, Kto esli ne ia (Who if not me), and in 2006, she released an expanded version of Bez prikras under the title Sodom tekh dnei (Sodom of those days).

Felix Roziner Writer, poet, essayist, and musicologist Felix Roziner was born in Moscow in 1936. He graduated from Moscow Institute of Printing Arts (1958), then studied violin at the conservatory. He worked as an engineer until 1967 before becoming a music critic and then joining a music orchestra. In USSR, Roziner published works on musicology, such as V domike starogo muzykanta (In the old musician’s hut, 1970), Rasskazhi mne, muzyka, skazku (Tell me a story, music, 1972), along with belletrized biographies of painter Mikalojus Čiurlionis as well as composers Edvard Grieg and Sergei Prokofiev. Roziner’s poems were published in the newspapers Znamia stroitelia (Builder’s flag) and Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow), and the collection Literaturnoie echo (Literary echo). In the late 1960s, Roziner participated in the seminars of poet Arseny Tarkovsky (1907–1989) and fiction writer Lev Slavin (1896–1994). In 1978, Roziner repatriated to Israel. Three years later, his novel Nekto Finkel′maier (A certain Finkelmaier), written by Roziner in the early 1970s with no hope of having it published in the USSR, came out in London. The novel recounts the fate of a gifted Jewish poet Aaron-Chaim Finkelmaier, forced by Soviet state-level antisemitism to publish his works using the identity of a Tongor hunter named Danila Manakin. Owing to the success of Finkelmaier’s poetry, the barely literate drunkard Manakin becomes an important official in the sphere of culture and a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. Having attained the status of a leading Soviet poet, Manakin appropriates Finkelmaier’s entire body of works, while the latter does not even attempt to defend his authorship because “in art all is beautiful that does not

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seek publicity.”27 The novel’s main story line ends with Finkelmaier’s arrest and trial that resembles in its degree of absurdity the trial of Joseph Brodsky for “parasitism” in 1964, followed by exile to Siberia and tragic death from Manakin’s bullet. The novel earned Roziner the Vladimir Dal literary award in Paris. Roziner’s books published during his time in Israel include a memoir Serebrianaia tsepochka (Silver chain, 1983), a creative nonfictional study of the life and fate of the large Jewish family of Roziner-Rabinovich over the course of seven generations from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1985, the writer relocated to the United States and spent his remaining years in Boston where he worked at the Russian Studies Center of Harvard University. In Boston, Roziner published a novella titled Lilovyi dym (Purple smoke), which was subsequently adapted for the stage and performed at the Hermitage theater in St. Petersburg. In the 1990s he published two collections of poetry: Rechitativ (Cantillation) and Vektor veka: Stikhi 1978–1996 godov (Century’s vector: Poems of 1978–1996). Roziner’s second novel, Akhill begushchii (Achilles running), published in St. Petersburg in 1994, was awarded the municipal Northern Palmira prize. The writer passed away in Boston in 1997.

Authors Who Had Their Start in the USSR in Samizdat or in Journalism David Markish David Markish was born in Moscow in 1938, to the family of the famous Yiddish poet Peretz Markish (1895–1952), executed during the liquidation of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. David is the younger brother of Shimon Markish (1931–2003), translator, philologist, literary scholar, professor at the University of Geneva, and a leading student of Russian-Jewish literature. In January of 1953, Peretz Markish’s family was arrested and exiled to the town of Kzyl-Orda (Kazakhstan). In 1954, David Markish, along with the rest of his family, returned to Moscow, where he attended Maxim Gorky Literary Institute (1957–1968) and the Higher Courses for Screenwriters and Film Directors (1967–1968). In 1972, after two years as a refusenik, he repatriated to Israel. Markish participated in the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the First Lebanon War (1982). In Israel, he wrote a column for the newspaper Maariv, and served as the editor-in-chief 27 Feliks Roziner, Nekto Finkel′maier (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1981), 553.

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of the journal Sion from 1975 to 1976. In 1982–1985, he presided over the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. He edited the newspaper 24 chasa (24 hours) in 1995–1998. From 1993 to 1995, he led the department of connections with Russian-language mass media for Israeli State Press Information Bureau. Markish is a recipient of various literary awards: British National Book League Award (1977), Arieh Dulzin Prize (Israel, 1980), Rafael Prize (Israel, 1981), International Literary Prize of Ukraine (1994), Ivane Machabeli Literary Prize (1995), and others. Markish’s first book was published in 1966 in the USSR. The novella, titled Piatero u samogo neba (Five people by the very sky) depicted the workdays and downtime of five people on a winter expedition in the mountains of Pamir. His first book published in Israel in Russian was Priskazka (Embellished tale, 1978),28 a novel that Markish wrote while still living in Russia, based on his adolescent experiences in Kazakhstan exile. The beginning of the novel is set during the last months of Stalin’s life, with widespread antisemitic propaganda characteristic for this time-period. The protagonist, a boy named Simon Ashkenazi, who lives in Moscow, is first bullied by his classmates because of his Jewishness and then learns that his family has been ordered to exile in Kazakhstan. In a small desolate settlement in the middle of a steppe he meets other dispossessed people like himself: Kazakhs, Chechens, Greeks, and through their sufferings better comprehends the pain of the persecuted Jewish people. In Priskazka Markish depicts Jewish history as an “endlessly continuing contemporaneity,”29 and the scattering of the Jews as “an acutely experienced injustice that must be righted in the nearest future.”30 Therefore, the Soviet Union for the Jews is another Egypt, and Stalin is the embodiment of the pharaoh, whose death, which in the traditional Jewish calendar coincides with Purim, is inscribed into the paradigm of ancient Jewish history and perceived as the liberation of the people from an enemy akin to Haman or Amalek. The unremitting reality of Jewish history is emphasized in the four stories that comprise the novel. The first, entitled “Vozvrashchenie” (The return), recounts the arrival of the Ashkenazi family in the Land of Israel, where Simon meets a boy, his double. However, the second Simon has never left Palestine, and his 28 Literally, the title of the novel in Russian means a short fable that precedes a longer tale. Prior to its publication in Russian, Priskazka was first published in Portuguese translation in Rio-de-Janeiro, and then in Hebrew in 1975. In 1976, the novel was published in English, in New York as A New World for Simon Ashkenazy, and in London as The Beginning. 29 Klavdia Smola [Klavdiia Smola], Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021), 186. 30 Ibid.

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father has perished at the hands of Romans during the siege of Jerusalem. The boy explains to the Russian Simon that they are both a few thousand years old and that behind them is the uninterrupted link of the Jewish generations. Simon’s double from ancient Palestine tells him, “You have to remember many things in order to live.”31 The next chapter, titled “Pierre Lebo,” moves the narrative to Paris and recounts the story of poet Pinсhas Ashkenazi, who, over his friends’ objections and despite being on the cusp of literary success, leaves Europe in order to live and work in the Land of Israel. In the third episode, “Zanzibar,” the narrative transports the reader to year 1502, onto the vessel of the admiral of the Portuguese Royal Navy Lorenzo Lachish, whose nephew, Simon, dreams of the Land of Israel and is gifted a map in hopes of making it to the cherished land. In the fourth episode, “Stena Placha” (The Wailing Wall), an adolescent boy named Simon brings a meager dinner to his gravely wounded father, Lachish ben Itzchak, who is defending Jerusalem from the Romans in year 70. On his deathbed, Lachish ben Itzchak asks Simon to remember that, no matter what catastrophes befall the Jews, the people “will keep living.”32 The novel concludes with the Ashkenazis’ rehabilitation, when the family is allowed to return to Moscow. However, to Simon this means nothing because for him the only true form of liberation is life in Israel. The author’s conception was to make Priskazka part one of a trilogy depicting the life of Simon Ashkenazi. The concluding book, which brings Markish’s protagonist to Israel, has never been written; the second, entitled Chisto pole (Оpen field) exists only in Hebrew and Swedish translations, both completed and published in 1980. The author refused to publish the novel in Russian because he failed to picture it outside the context of a trilogy, and Markish permanently abandoned the idea of creating the book cycle at the end of the 1970s.33 The plot of the novel Chisto pole covers the decade leading up to the beginning of the Six-Day War and continues the narrative of Simon Ashkenazi’s fate. In Shimon Markish’s words, Chisto pole is a “grotesque panorama of the underside of Soviet life,” with characters who are well-recognized figures, such as the writers Yuri Olesha and Boris Balter and KGB collaborator painter Ilia Glazunov (“Repin” in the novel). Just like Priskazka, this novel contains a Zionist message: a Jew has been and will forever remain an outsider in any national and social sphere. “In any situation, a Jew is an outsider, and the geographical homeland,

31 David Markish, Priskazka (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1991), 177. 32 Ibid., 199. 33 David Markish, Russko-evreiskaia literatura: Ot i do (Orenburg: Orenburgskoe knizhnoe izdatel′stvo im. G. P. Donkovtseva, 2020).

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the Soviet empire is nothing but an open field for him, or, as this idea has so aptly been reincarnated in Hebrew translation, a ‘wolf ’s steppe.’”34 In 1980, 22 published Markish’s novel Vershina Utinoi polianki (Summit of Duck Hollow) about the Moscow Literary Institute and the Soviet writers’ social circles. In 1986, the novel was published in book format, under the title Petushok (Cockerel). In 1983 in Tel Aviv, Markish published his historical novel Shuty, Ili khronika iz zhizni prokhozhikh liudei (1689–1738) ( Jesters, Or the chronicle from the lives of itinerant people [1689–1738]), which captured the era of Peter I and the fates of his Jewish advisers. Next year, Markish published the novel Pes (Dog) about a Moscow nonconformist writer Vadim Solovyov and his failed attempt to realize himself in emigration. That same year, Markish published his autobiographic35 novel Za mnoi! (Zapiski ofitserapropagandista) (After Me! [Notes of a propaganda officer]) about the 1982 Lebanon war. In 1986, he published a detective novel Granatovyi kolodets (Garnet well), in 1987—the novel Donor, and in 1989—the novel Poliushkopole (Song of the plains), a parable about three Jewish brothers whose life paths diverge during the years of the Russian Civil War. In the 1990s and during the first decade of the twenty-first century, David Markish continued to publish novels, most of them built around historical plots that he used as backdrops for elaborating on the theme of the lives of European Jews. Among his works written in the 2000s, one novel in particular stands out: Stat′ Liutovym (To become Liutov), which, in the author’s own definition, contains “freewheeling fantasies” on the theme of the life and death of writer Isaac Babel, named Iuda Grosman in the novel.

Eli Liuksemburg Eli Liuksemburg, born Il′ia Motelevich Liuksemburg in 1940 in Bucharest, spent his childhood in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he attended high school and then an irrigation mechanics vocational college. A competitive boxer, he was city and then republic champion in boxing and went on to win titles at the all-Soviet level. After graduating from Uzbekistan State Institute of Physical Culture, he worked as a boxing coach, taught high school physical education, and worked as a junior inspector at the Ministry of Education of Uzbek Soviet

34 Ibid., 385–386. 35 Markish participated in the 1982 Lebanon war and was commander of an artillery subunit with a 155-milimeter cannon.

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Socialist Republic. He sent his first short stories, composed in the early 1960s, for review to David Dar36 (1910–1980), a Leningrad-based writer and founder of the literary association “Golos iunosti” (The Voice of youth), which at various times was attended by Sergei Dovlatov, Dmitry Bobyshev, Aleksandr Kushner, and Viktor Sosnora. In 1964, Dar invited Liuksemburg to Leningrad, and in 1967, upon his return to Tashkent, Liuksemburg applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union. In 1972, after several years of being a refusenik, having “miraculously evaded camp imprisonment,”37 Liuksemburg repatriated to Israel. While still back in the USSR, influenced by Hasidic rabbi Khaim-Zanvil Abramovitz from Rybnitsy, Moldova, Liuksemburg began to practice Judaism and, by his own admission, underwent a genuine spiritual and religious rebirth. In Israel, Liuksemburg continued boxing and coaching. He resided in Jerusalem, where he oversaw the operations of the Boxing Club of Liuksemburg Brothers. In 1975, the publishing house Biblioteka Aliia in Jerusalem printed Liuksemburg’s first book, Tretii khram (Third temple), which contained a long short story of the same name describing the construction of the Third Temple as imagined by patients in a psychiatric ward in Tashkent, a novella Ze’ev Pas, as well as a few short stories written back in the USSR. In 1978, the book was translated into Hebrew and subsequently into English. The writer’s very first book established his distinctive aesthetics: the interweaving of the ancient Jewish people and modernity, of Zionism (“Let everyone graduate the department of his own people!”)38 and Kabbalistic mysticism. In 1983, Liuksemburg published a collection of short stories, Progulka v Ramu (A stroll to Rama), and in 1985—his novel Desiatyi golod (Tenth hunger), which is considered the pinnacle of the author’s work. Liuksemburg himself, in an interview with Asia Rozhanskaia, described this book as the most important one in his life.39 Desiatyi golod is a religious-philosophical parable presented to the reader in the guise of an adventure novel. In it, author continues to elaborate on topics he established in Tretii khram: the protagonist’s mental illness and his obsession with a spiritual and religious mission, Soviet Jews’ struggle for their right to emigrate to Israel, and a mystical understanding of reality. The plot is premised on an attempt by a group of Bukhara Jews from Uzbekistan, led by the 36 In 1977, Dar emigrated to Israel, published in a number of Russian-language periodicals, and served as an editor and reviewer for Biblioteka Aliia. 37 Eli Liuksemburg, Tretii khram (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975), 7. 38 Ibid., 77. 39 Leonid Kogan, V poiskakh istiny: Monograficheskii ocherk o tvorchestve E. Liuksemburga i V. Dobina ( Jerusalem: Leonid Kogan, 2006), 56.

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protagonist, Ieshua Kalantar, and a kabbalist, Rabbi Vandal, to find an underground route to Israel. They use, to guide themselves, an ancient Arabic parchment “Musanna” from a repository of parchments and scrolls that has somehow ended up in Kalantar’s hands. The author describes the underground journey to the Holy Land as a courageous, danger-packed spiritual and religious exodus of Jews from a New Egypt. For those going to Jerusalem, and for Ieshua above all, the biblical events are not myths of the past but the creative present, the miracle of faith transpiring in the here and now. However, their underground exodus, fed by “spiritual hunger” and a thirst for “the word of God,” fails; the only testimony about it comes from the sole surviving witness, Ieshua, who ends up at the psychiatric ward of the central police headquarters in Jerusalem and whom nobody believes. Thus, the exodus returns to the realm of parable and once again becomes a myth. In the years that followed, Liuksemburg published a novel, Sozvezdie Mordekhaia (Constellation of Mordechai, Jerusalem, 1987), based on his father’s journals. He also produced three collections of stories, Volchonok Itro (Wolf cub Itro, Jerusalem, 1988), V poliakh Amaleka (In the fields of Amalek, Jerusalem, 2000), and Vorota s kalitkoi (Gates with a side-door, Odesa, 2002). Liuksemburg passed away in Israel in 2019.

Iakov Tsigel′man Iakov Tsigel′man was born in Leningrad in 1935. He graduated from the Russian division of the Philology School of Leningrad State University. He worked as a school teacher, conducted city and museum tours, and earned money on the side doing odd jobs as a loader, locksmith, and handyman. In 1970, Tsigel′man relocated to Birobidzhan, where he began working for a Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern. While living in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Tsigel′man kept diaries detailing the falsity and hypocrisy of the Soviet-Jewish project. In 1971 the writer returned to Leningrad and attempted to smuggle the diaries to the West; however, the manuscript was intercepted by the KGB, which invited scrutiny from domestic intelligence services.40 In 1974, Tsigel′man repatriated to Israel. In 1977–1978 he was a member of Sion’s editorial, and in 1978–1922, of 22, as well as of Bibliteka Aliia. Between 1978 and 2000, under the pseudonym

40 Ian Toporovskii, “Iakov Tsigel′man s bul′vara Ben-Maimon,” Vesti [Tel Aviv], 2010, http://gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudi-i-teksty/454-s-bulvara-ben-majmon-yakov-tsigelman. html?pos=0.

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Yakov Ashkenazi, he edited and hosted Russian-language programs for the radio station Kol Israel. In 1977, the seventeenth issue of Sion published Tsigel′man’s novella Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera (Moshe Dorfer’s funeral), based on the author’s Birobidzhan experiences. The title metaphorically renders one of the novella’s main themes: the unviable, stillborn quality of the Jewish culture both in the Jewish Autonomy and the USSR overall.41 The variegated tragicomical fragments containing descriptions of Birobidzhan, the characters’ monologues, the narrator’s musings, the eavesdropped conversations come together to form the picture of the cultural and spiritual desolation hidden behind the theatrical mask of the “Jewish life in the JAO” project. The attempt to establish a Jewish autonomy within a totalitarian state results in a complete emasculation of Jewish culture, turning it into its “fake, ersatz”42 version. А staged Zion in the Far East is nothing but a play performed by conformists, “Jewish in the name only.”43 In 1980, the Tel Aviv-based 22 printed Tsigel′man’s novel Ubiistvo na bul′vare Ben-Maimon (Murder on Ben Maimon Boulevard). The following year, the novel, along with the novella Moshe Dorfer’s Funeral, was published in book format. Murder is a phantasmagorical polyphony of sketches describing, often in satirical tones, the lives of the repatriated Soviet intelligentsia in Israel in the 1970s. Later, Tsigel′man’s novel was adapted into a play, Pis′ma iz rozovoi papki (Letters from a pink folder), performed in Leningrad by Leonid Kelbert’s underground Jewish theater. Tsigel′man’s palimpsest novel Prikliucheniia zheltogo petukha (Adventures of the yellow rooster) was published in 1986 in a magazine and as a book in 2000. The novel is an account of a fictional journey; it combines the tone of biblical parables with postmodernist intertextual play, with countless references to travelogues in Russian literature, ranging from Afanasyev’s Khozhdenie za tri moria (A journey beyond the three seas) to Pushkin’s Puteshestvie v Arzrum (A journey to Erzurum). The novel’s two heroes, a rag doll named Zheltyi petukh (Russian for “yellow rooster”) and a man named AF, are both characters with a splintered identity, hybrids that are invariably foreign, strangers in relationship to the Other. The absence of a sense of belonging compels them to emigrate to Israel, but their attempt to assimilate in the Jewish state results in abject failure and forces them to set out on a journey once again.

41 Smola, Izobretaia traditsiiu, 229–230. 42 Iakov Tsigel′man, “Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera,” Sion 17 (1977): 77. 43 Ibid.

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In 1996, Ivrus published Tsigel′man’s novel Shebsl-muzykant (Shebsl the musician), which received high praise from literary critics. According to Mikhail Weisskopf, in this novel Tsigel′man successful recreated, in literary form, the genre of the midrash—an expanded and supplemented interpretation of the Torah.44 Shebsl’s own life story, told at the beginning of the novel, is comprised of 271 short chapters, many of which contain a single short phrase, so the entire fabula occupies a mere twenty-two pages. The other nearly three hundred pages contain interpretations of the main text by fictional rabbinical commentators. The narrative form forged by the author allows him to bring together, on the pages of his book, quotes from the Talmud and Kabbalah with descriptions of mundane, insignificant events, thus blurring the divide between Tanakhic solemnity and postmodernist irony. In the words of Weisskopf, “the plot constantly balances on the barely perceptible border between Hasidic allegory and blatant literary mystification energetically invaded by alien elements from other centuries and cultures.”45 As a result, Tsigel′man’s text becomes a “Purim carnival,”46 an interplay of fragments, and quotes torn mid-word from lines and lacunae. The author proposes that the reader use these fragments to “reconstruct”47 the Jewish cultural heritage, to re-create, even if in an ironic key, the spirit of Jewish tradition and Jewish thought. Tsigel′man confirmed his intention, saying about himself, “I am a Jewish writer because I am Jewish, I write about Jews, I am interested in Jews, and perhaps my manner of writing is a Jewish manner.”48 Shebsl-muzykant became the author’s last book; he passed away in Israel in August 2018.

Pavel Gol′dshtein Writer, philosopher, and essayist Pavel Gol′dshtein was born in 1917 in Essentuki. He graduated from the School of History and Philology of Moscow Pedagogical Institute and went on to become a secondary school history teacher. In November 1938 Gol′dshtein was accused of counterrevolutionary activity for sending Stalin a letter in support of the arrested stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold. After several months of interrogation under torture, Gol′dshtein was sentenced to five years, after which his sentence was extended several times. In 44 Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], “Roman-midrash, ili Predsmertnyi vzdokh karakatitsy,” Solnechnoe spletenie 4–5 (1999): 105. 45 Ibid., 106. 46 Ibid. 47 Toporovskii, “Iakov Tsigel′man.” 48 Quoted in Toporovskii, “Iakov Tsigel′man.”

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total, Gol′dshtein spent seventeen years behind bars. He returned to Moscow in 1955 and worked at the Literature Museum. In 1971, Gol′dshtein repatriated to Israel, where he founded and headed the religious-philosophical literary magazine Menora. In 1974, Gol′dshtein released his V Butyrskoi tiur′me 1938 goda (In Butyrskaia prison in 1938), the first book of his autobiographic trilogy Tochka opory (Fulcrum). Written while Gol′dshtein still lived in the USSR, the manuscript had made it to Israel before its author. It was smuggled out of the country on microfilm by an acquaintance of Gol′dshtein, Esther Lomovskaia-Mostkova. The second and third books of the trilogy, V Butyrskoi i Lefortovskoi tiur′makh 1939 goda (In Butyrskaia and Lefortovo prisons in 1939) and 17 let v lageriakh zhizni i smerti (Seventeen years in camps of life and death), were written in Israel. The second was published in Jerusalem in 1978; the last, unfinished one was published in 1982, a few months after Gol′dshtein’s death. In 1976, Gol′dshtein published Roman L. N. Tolstogo “Anna Karenina” v svete epigrafa iz Moiseeva Vtorozakoniia (L. N. Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” through the epigraph from Moses’s Deuteronomy), in which he analyzed Tolstoy’s famous novel through the prism of the biblical text. A collection of Gol′dshtein’s philosophical-religious essays and articles, Mir suditsia dobrom (The world is judged by goodness) came out in Jerusalem in 1980. The book posed questions about attaining spiritual freedom, the meaning of art as a way of serving God, the reasons for the existence of good and evil, as well as “life in the spirit of the Torah . . . , steeped in boundless love towards people and limitless indulgence towards their weaknesses.”49 That same year, he also published Dom poeta (The poet’s house), dedicated to Mariia Stepanovna Voloshina, a writer and the second wife of the Silver Age poet Maximilian Voloshin. In 1981, Gol′dshtein edited a volume entitled Izbrannoe (Selected), a collection of essays about Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, published in Menora.

Mikhail (Moshe) Landburg Prose writer and weight-lifter Mikhail Landburg was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania in 1938. He lived in Vilnius and graduated from the School of Philology of Vilnius Pedagogical University. He taught Russian language and literature in secondary school, competed professionally as a weightlifter (barbell), at some point winning the title of Lithuania’s feather-weight champion. He began writing short stories during his military service, even publishing one in an army newspaper. 49 Pavel Gol′dshtein, Mir suditsia dobrom ( Jerusalem: Grff-Press, 1980), 79.

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In 1972, he repatriated to Israel where two years later he came out with a short prose collection titled Takie dlinnye borody (Such long beards). His first novel, Upavshee nebo (Fallen sky) was published in Tel Aviv in 1978; it was followed in 1980 by a collection of novellas, S toboi i bez tebia (With you and without you), also published in Tel Aviv and translated into Hebrew shortly thereafter. In 1983, the publishing house Nord in Tel Aviv printed Landburg’s second novel, Mesiatsy saksofona (Months of saxophone), which was reprinted several times in the 2000s under the title Sem′ mesiatsev saksofona (Seven months of saxophone). The novel details the spiritual and intellectual evolution of a young Israeli painter, Asher Segal, who lives in Rishon le-Zion. He spends his days caring for his alcoholic mother, a famous pianist from Lithuania who has failed to find success in Israel, trying to sell his first finished paintings in order earn a living, painting portraits of people in whose faces he finds the reflection of the secrets of “days and nights lived.”50 In this whirlwind of life, Asher feels an emptiness, as if he has fallen into a “meat grinder”51 that senselessly breaks people and their lives. He then arrives at the conclusion that the only salvation is to grab onto something in life that makes one’s “soul itch,” “turns one inside out.”52 For Segal, this something turns out to be art, the creative act that allows him fully to express himself and his pain. In the 1990s and 2000s, Landburg published over ten novels and collections of novellas. He was awarded the Yuri Nagibin literary prize instituted by the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel for his 2011 novel Na poslednem seanse (At the last session). His novel Otrubi moiu ten′ (Chop off my shadow) received a silver medal at the Aleksandr Kuprin international competition in Russia. His novel Poslanniki (Envoys) was the runner-up at the Ernest Hemingway international competition in Canada. In recent years, Landburg published Prosti menia, syn (Forgive me, son, 2016), a confessional prose novel U-u-u-kh-kh (2018), which earned the golden distinction mark in the international competition “Her Majesty the Book!” (Germany-Bulgaria), a collection of novellas entitled Sledy (Tracks, 2018), a novel Drugoi baraban (Another drum), published in 2019 and awarded the silver award of the International Writers Guild “Her Majesty the Book,” as well as the novels Geran′ iz Gonolulu (Geranium from Honolulu, Rishon le-Zion, 2020), Otchego dozhd′ padaet vverkh? (Why does rain fall upward?, Rishon le-Zion, 2021), and I da, i net (Both yes and no, Rishon leZion, 2022). 50 Mikhail Landburg, Mesiatsy saksofona (Tel Aviv: Nord, 1983), 110. 51 Ibid., 163. 52 Ibid., 71.

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Iuliia Shmukler Writer and mathematician Iuliia Shmukler was born in Dnepropetrovsk (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine) in 1936. From 1939 onward, she lived in Moscow, where she graduated from the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering, focusing on cybernetics and statistical physics. Her first attempts at publishing her short fiction were unsuccessful. In 1972, her short story “Chudo” (Miracle) was published in samizdat. That same year, Shmukler repatriated to Israel, where she taught mathematics at University of Tel Aviv from 1973 until 1977. In 1980, she emigrated to the United States. Shmukler published only one book of short stories, Ukhodim iz Rossii (We are leaving Russia), printed by Biblioteka Aliia in 1975. The collection was favorably reviewed and was hailed as a new voice in Israeli Russian-language literature.53 Popular and government-sponsored antisemitism, repressions, friends’ and family members’ arrests, searches, humiliations, and rejections comprise the lives of the characters of Ukhodim iz Rossii. All ethnic Jews, they maintain a sense of humor, love, and empathy towards others despite being surrounded by hatred, with a menacing cloud of pogroms hanging over their heads. Nevertheless, they survive and remain true to themselves, each thanks to a miracle, a sudden saving turn of fate. A four-year-old girl who pretends to know how to read actually begins to read at the very moment when she is about to be exposed and humiliated. A ten-year-old adolescent girl who likes to “howl or bang away”54 while playing the piano once notices how a little mouse attentively listens to her play and suddenly begins to perform music with tenderness, feeling, and technical mastery. A young woman in a delivery room is about to lose her son due to the doctors’ negligence, but she still hears her baby’s cries that attest to the birth of new life. A school student caught in the crowd streaming towards Stalin’s coffin in March 1953 miraculously escapes being trampled in the terrifying stampede. In Shmukler’s stories, the opportunity to leave the USSR that suddenly became available to the Jews in the early 1970s is treated as one such miracle. For her characters, leaving Russia does not simply mean gaining freedom and identity and no longer being a permanent outsider. Leaving Russia also means breaking free of a savage crowd moving, entranced, towards the dead body of Stalin, the embodiment of a Russian Moloch demanding blood and sacrifices. Leaving 53 See, for example, A. Shonberg, “Vybor iabloni,” Dvoetochie 3 (1995), https://dvoetochie. org/2021/02/22/schoenberg-2/. 54 Iuliia Shmukler, Ukhodim iz Rossii (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975), 95.

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Russia means choosing life over death. Whether “Living through History”55 in the context of the 1937 repressions or the doctors’ plot or suffering personal dramas of betrayal and romantic entanglements, the Jews from Shmukler’s stories always choose life. In 1979, the title short story of the collection was included in Skopus, an anthology of Israeli prose and poetry. Following this, Shmukler took a long creative hiatus, interrupted in the early 2000s with the publication of a short story “Nekhama” in the literary journal 22.

Henri Volokhonsky Poet, playwright, philosopher Henri Volokhonsky was born in 1936 in Leningrad. He graduated from Leningrad State Chemical Pharmaceutical Institute with a degree in limnology and studied fresh-water reservoirs. Prior to his repatriation to Israel in 1973, he published only one work, a fable entitled “Kentavr” (Centaur, 1972) in the Leningrad magazine Avrora. In Leningrad underground circles he was known for belonging to the avant-garde club Verpa as well as for collaboration with poet and bard Aleksei Khvostenko (1940–2004). Following his aliyah, he lived in Tveria and worked in a laboratory dedicated to research and study of Lake Kineret. He also published in Israeli and Western periodicals. Before relocating to Germany in 1985, he published several collections of poetry: Deviatyi Renessans (The ninth renaissance, Haifa, 1977), Stikhi dlia Ksenii (Poems for Kseniia, Tveria, 1978), Chetyre poemy ob odnom (Four poems about one thing, Tveria, 1981), Stikhotvoreniia (Poems, Ann Arbor, MI, 1983), Tetrad′ Igreiny (Igreina’s notebook, Jerusalem, 1984), and Shkura bubna (Tambourine skin, Jerusalem, 1986). Volokhonsky’s novel Roman-pokoinichek (Novel-cadaver) about the Leningrad intellectual underground of the 1970s came out in New York in 1982. Balanced between modernism and post-modernism, the text simultaneously exists on three levels: a) the death of the novel as the imperialist literary genre; b) the fall of Rome (hence the interplay between the Russian word for novel, roman, and Rome) as the prototype of European imperialist culture; and c) the funeral of a Soviet party functionary Roman Vladimirovich Ryzhov.56 Volokhonsky

55 Ibid., 24. 56 Denis Beznosov, “Trekhknizhie Anri Volokhonskogo,” Novyi Mir 4 (2013), https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/2013/4/trehknizhie-anri-volohonskogo.html.

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describes a funeral procession that moves through the streets of Leningrad and eventually becomes a descent into the “dark regions of the underworld,” into Hades.57 As Denis Beznosov observed, “like Joyce combining the Hellenic subtexts with the topography of Dublin, Volokhonsky merges Soviet space with the space of the Roman empire in order to condemn both.”58 After leaving Israel in 1985, Volokhonsky served as news editor of Radio Liberty in Munich, continued to publish poetry, and recorded several music albums with Russian musicians Leonid Fedorov and Vladimir Volkov. Volokhonsky’s notable translations include the poems of Roman poet Catullus that were included in a collection Novye perevody (New translations, Jerusalem, 1982) as well as fragments of James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake published in Russian as under the title Ueik Finneganov (Wake of Finnegans, Tver, 2000). Volokhonsky’s poetry, permeated by the combined legacy of OBERIU’s and especially Aleksandr Vvedensky’s (1904–1941) absurdism and Velimir Khlebnikov’s (1885–1922) futurism,59 had a significant impact on Russian avant-garde poets of the 1980s and 1990s: Mikhail Gendelev, Konstantin Kuzminsky, Aleksei Khvostenko, Anatoly Zhigalov, Evgeniia Lavut, and GaliDana Singer.60 Furthermore, Volokhonsky’s influence comes through in the tendency of the Russian-Israeli poets of the 1990s to form literary associations, an environment of like-minded people within which new literary concepts were engendered.61

Mikhail Gendelev Poet and translator Mikhail Gendelev was born in 1950 in Leningrad. Upon graduating from Leningrad Sanitary-Hygienic Medical Institute, he worked as a sports doctor. He began writing poetry in 1967, published in samizdat and read his poems at underground literary events. Soviet state press did not accept

57 Henri Volokhonsky [Anri Volokhonskii], Roman-pokoinichek (New York: Gnosis Press, 1982), 60. 58 Beznosov, “Trekhknizhie Anri Volokhonskogo.” 59 Maxim D. Shrayer, “Henri Volohonsky,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature : Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 942. 60 Vladimir Tarasov, “Stupenchatyi svet. Esse,” LITERRATURA, July 28, 2019, https://literratura.org/criticism/3367-vladimir-tarasov-stupenchatyy-svet.html; idem, “Aktsenty iuzhnykh pesen. Esse,” LITERRATURA, April 8, 2019, https://literratura.org/criticism/3236-vladimir-tarasov-akcenty-yuzhnyh-pesen.html. 61 For more on Volokhonsky, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in the current volume.

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his works. He emigrated to Israel in 1977 and fought in the 1982 Lebanon War as a paramedic. Gendelev’s first publication was in the literary periodical Sion, which printed his long poem Diaspora in 1977. Gendelev’s first book of poems, V′′ezd v Ierusalim (Entrance to Jerusalem), comprised of works dating back to the Leningrad period of his life, came out in 1979. In 1981, Gendelev released a new book of poetry, Poslanie k lemuram (A Message to lemurs), which reflects the influence of Henri Volokhonsky, whom Gendelev met in Israel. It was in this book that Gendelev established his signature mark of writing poems shaped like butterflies. Echoes of Gendelev’s participation in the Lebanon War appear in his next poetry collection, Stikhotvoreniia Mikhaila Gendeleva (Poems of Mikhail Gendelev, 1984), published in Jerusalem. Gendelev’s fourth publication came in 1993; it was the collection Prazdnik (Celebration), comprising the short and long poems that he composed between 1985 and 1991. Two subsequent collections came out in Jerusalem in 1997: V sadakh Allakha (In Allah’s gardens) and Tsar′ (Tsar). From the 2000s onward, Gendelev’s books were published in Moscow: Nepolnoe sobranie sochinenii (Incomplete collected works, 2003), Legkaia muzyka (Light music, 2004), and Iz russkoi poezii (From Russian poetry, 2006). His poems were also published in such Israeli periodicals as 22 and Vremia i my, and in Paris in Ekho and Kontinent. Gendelev included his translations of medieval Hebrew poets Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, and Yehuda Alharizi in his collection Ukhodia iz Saragosy (Leaving Saragosa, 2012). Gendelev’s only novel, Velikoe russkoe puteshestvie (Great Russian journey), was published in Moscow in 1993 and reprinted, with some changes, in 2014 under the title Velikoe [ne]russkoe puteshestvie (Great [non]Russian journey). The novel was based on Gendelev’s impressions from his trips to the Soviet Union in 1987–1988. The poet was among the first “Russian” Israelis to visit the Soviet Union by special invitation four years prior to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, severed by the Soviet side in 1967. As Vasily Aksyonov notes, the novel, dedicated to Venedikt Erofeev, “spiritedly, cheerfully, and artfully”62 renders the hero’s submersion into the unrecognizable Soviet life of the Perestroika era, with its newspeak that must be translated into Hebrew in order to be understood, with its prohibition that seems nonsensical against the backdrop of constant drinking, with its poetry evenings of poets that only recently were still banned. In this country, which has become unfamiliar and foreign to the Israelite Gendelev,

62 Mikhail Gendelev, Velikoe [ne]russkoe puteshestvie (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2014), 303.

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he feels like an “interloper,” a “foreigner,” a “wonderer,” who arrives at the conclusion that one can “make oneself heard in Russia only upon returning from emigration.”63 In his reflections on emigration, Gendelev “breaks into a mosaic of puns,”64 and, according to Mikhail Weisskopf, submerges the reading into “chaos” and “the grotesque” in order to “weld into his prose . . . the ‘Apollonic,’ gloomily solemn and at the same time ‘insignificant,’ restlessly mundane” power of his poetry that strives to “make this world more human.”65 Weisskopf writes that Gendelev’s trip to Russia is “the soul’s momentary return to a previous, abandoned by it” and now foreign body—“the body of childhood that has been magically revived by laughter, by a harlequinesque marriage of languages and cultures.”66 Gendelev’s last book published during his lifetime was Liubov′, voina i smert′ v vospominaniiakh sovremennika (Love, war, and death in a contemporary’s memoirs). It was released in Moscow by Vremia publishing house in 2008, less than a year before the poet’s death. The collection included the previous two chapbooks, Legkaia muzyka and Iz russkoi poezii, as well as a selection of previously unpublished poems, Pamiati Pushkina (In memory of Pushkin), which consisted of works written during the final years of Gendelev’s life. Gendelev was the recipient of the Rosa Ettinger literary prize (1993) and the Tzaban Prize (1995) of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration of Israel.67

Mark Zaichik Writer and journalist Mark Zaichik was born in Leningrad in 1947 and repatriated to Israel in 1973, where he worked as a radio journalist. In the 1990s, he edited the newspaper Vesti, hosted a weekly show for the Russian-language TV channel Israel Plus, and was in charge of the cultural programming of the Jewish Agency in Russia. His works were published in such periodicals as 22, Kontinent, Ekho, and Menora. In 1985, the US-based publisher Ermitazh printed the first collection of Zaichik’s short stories, Fenomen (Phenomenon). Most of these stories depict the

63 Ibid., 80. 64 Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], Afterword to Velikoe russkoe puteshestvie by Mikhail Gendelev (Moscow: Tekst, 1993), http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/166-mikhailvajskopf-posleslovie-k-knige-velikoe-russkoe-puteshestvie.html. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 For more on Gendelev, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in the current volume.

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lives of people from Leningrad whose souls, full of bitter love for Jewish history, tradition, and faith, strive to break out of the “iron curtain” to Israel. Russia is presented as a space mired in deathly boredom and hopelessness, where “everything is fake,” illusory, and devoid of meaning.68 For the characters of Fenomen who have managed to repatriate, Israel and Israeli culture, by contrast, serve as the space of reality, fullness of life, where “truth hovers, completely accessible and attainable,”69 and one has to simply reach one’s hand to “capture” it.70 Zaichik’s first novel, Sdelano v SSSR (Made in the USSR), was published in 1988 in Jerusalem and subsequently reprinted in Russia. In the 1990s, the writer came out with two collections of short stories, Ierusalimskie rasskazy ( Jerusalem tales, Moscow, 1996) and Novyi syn (New son, Tel Aviv, 1999). In the 2000s, Zaichik continued to publish collections of short stories and novellas, and in 2017, his selected prose works were printed as a two-volume set collection entitled Zhizn′ prekrasna (Life is wonderful) and Tselui menia krepche (Kiss me harder), respectively.

Zinovy Zinik Zinovy Zinik, prose writer, critic, and publicist, was born in 1945 in Moscow. Growing up, Zinik studied art. He then attended Moscow State University and the courses of theater criticism affiliated with the magazine Teatr (Theater). He began publishing in Soviet periodicals as a theater critic in 1965. Zinik repatriated to Israel in 1975, where he ran and directed the Russian-language theater studio at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1976, he was offered a position at BBC Russian service and relocated to London. Shortly before his departure from Israel in 1976, the magazine Vremia i my published Zinik’s first novel, Izveshchenie (The notification), a modern-day adaptation of Wilhelm Hauff ’s fairy tale “Dwarf Nose.” The novel is set not in Germany but rather in Jerusalem, and the protagonist, a recent emigrant from the USSR, plagued by unremitting guilt over the death of his wife whom he had left behind in Russia, enters the service of an old woman whom he meets by chance. While at her house, he writes letters on behalf of various repatriants who have passed away in Israel after emigration. The “witch” sends these letters to the Soviet Union, to the wives of the deceased, in order to maintain a connection

68 Mark Zaichik, Fenomen (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1983), 19. 69 Ibid., 98. 70 Ibid.

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between them and their husbands who left them behind and moved to Israel. Some magic spell turns Zinik’s protagonist into an ancient man, unrecognizable to others. However, the intertextual parallels with Hauff ’s fairytale end here; instead of a miraculous deliverance, the novel’s protagonist finds only existential emptiness, a gaping hole left by emigration, one that he is unable to fill with anything. The world of Izveshchenie is split into “two universes that move parallel to each other on either side of a barbed border.”71 Nevertheless, by deploying the Doppelganger and mirror motifs, the author demonstrates that the universes of Russia and Israel reflect each other at a specific point: in both places, in order to become an “insider,” one has to wear a mask, live someone else’s life, adapt, become absorbed. By contrast, the desire to find one’s true self, “to crawl out of one’s own skin so as to confirm its existence and to look at oneself from the outside”72 leads to nothing but solitude and a draining “emigrant despondency.”73 After Izveshchenie, the magazine Vremia i my published Zinik’s three other novels that touched upon the topic of emigration: Peremeshchennoie litso (A displaced person, 1977), Nisha v panteone (An alcove in the pantheon, 1981), and Uklonenie ot povinnosti (Dodging conscription, 1982). Following his relocation to England, Zinik published eighteen books of prose that have been translated into a number of European languages. His novel Russofobka i fungofil (A Russophobe woman and a fungophile man, translated into English as The Mushroom Picker) was adapted for British television in 1993. In 1993, Zinik’s opera buffa Here Comes the Tiger was staged by Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London. In 2001, Zinik’s book of essays titled Emigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem (Emigration as literary device) was published in Moscow. In it, the writer analyzes émigré prose from the Iron Curtain all the way to the post-Soviet period and reminisces about his meetings with famous authors of the second half of the twentieth century including, among others, Anthony Burgess and Salman Rushdie.

Svetlana Shenbrunn Fiction writer, screenwriter, and translator Svetlana Shenbrunn was born in Moscow in 1939 in the family of the journalist, war correspondent, and writer Pavel Shenbrunn (penname Pavel Shebunin). In 1962–1964, she attended the

71 Zinovii Zinik, Izveshchenie, Vremia i my 8 (1977): 6. 72 Ibid., 15. 73 Ibid., 82.

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Higher Courses of Screenwriters and Film Directors and subsequently worked as a scriptwriter for Moscow television. She repatriated to Israel in 1975 and published in such periodicals as Vremia i my, Grani, Kontinent, and 22. She translated from Hebrew into Russian numerous works of twentieth-century Israeli writers, including classics of Hebrew literature such as the plays of Yosef Bar-Yosef as well as the novels and short fiction of Amos Oz, David Grossman, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, and others. In 1990, the Jerusalem-based publishing house Ekspress published Shenbrunn’s Dekabr′skie sny (December dreams), which included stories that she had written in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1991, the collection was republished in Moscow by Khudozhestvennaia literatura and by the Swiss publisher Noir sur Blanc, in French translation. Most of the stories in Dekabr′skie sny focus on exploring the question of the Other and the possibility of communicating with him. Employing a range of genres, including fantastic fiction, mysticism, realism, absurdism, and horror fiction, the author poses questions about what constitutes the Self and the Other and what mechanisms of our consciousness allow the Other to exist. For example, in the short story “Ostanovka” (The stop), which tells of the death of Gennadii Ignatievich Geraskin, a middleaged Soviet everyman, from a heart attack in a crowded Moscow subway car, Shenbrunn attempts to show that in the human consciousness the Other begins to exist only when “stepping over the threshold of his home or his workplace,”74 which is to say, when the Other enters an intimate circle of my interaction and becomes “an insider,” a close person. Until then, the Other has no identity, it is an unknowable and dangerous stranger—hence the indifference and cruelty to the Other, to the not-Self, as to a worthless object. It is this treatment of the Other as someone secondary to the Self that, in Shenbrunn’s opinion, conceals the root of everyman’s “evil”: the “astonishing indifference to someone else’s life and death.”75 Is it possible to teach people to stop fearing the Other and to recognize the Other as someone equal to the Self? In the short story “Brat moi” (Brother of mine), Shenbrunn answers this question in the negative. At the center of this particular work lies the story of Arkhars—people who have mastered the ability to fly and for this are cruelly persecuted by society. Doctor Trantsiminius, who has granted the gift of flight to the Arkhars, offers them to unite their forces and teach everyone else to fly, thus saving people from a lack of freedom and reason. He says, “If we help them rid themselves of fear, they

74 Svetlana Shenbrunn, Dekabr′skie sny ( Jerusalem: Ekspress, 1990), 102. 75 Ibid.

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will stop being cruel. Only then can we show them the road to happiness.”76 However, the effort to bring happiness to the world fails, and the protagonist, who has never believed in the success of the endeavor, returns to her life of a solitary person, content with her freedom and with her separation from the “earthly” world. The Jewish theme in Dekabr′skie sny is also exposed through the question of the Other. Here, Shenbrunn continues a long-standing tradition of describing the Jew as someone foreign, incomprehensible to society and therefore spurned by it, as seen in her short story “Spravka” (Certificate), for example. According to Shenbrunn, the power of the Jews lies in their ability to keep their individuality in any given situation, to remain an autonomous whole, like in her short story “Vse obety” (All the vows). Owing to their ability to treasure their distinctiveness, Jews maintain the ability to respect the lives of others while managing not to assimilate to masses or to any ideology, and sticking to their “own path in life.”77 Dekabr′skie sny were followed by a collection of short prose, Iskusstvo slepogo kino (The art of blind cinema), published in Jerusalem in 1997, as well as the novels Rozy i khrizantemy78 (Roses and chrysanthemums, Moscow, 2000), Piliuli schast′ia (Happiness pills, Moscow, 2010), and O, Marianna! (Oh, Marianna!), serialized in Ierusalimskii Zhurnal (Jerusalem journal) in 2016–2020. In 1999, Shenbrunn became one of the founders and members of the editorial board of Ierusalimskii Zhurnal, which soon established itself as one of the “thick” literary journals in Israel. Thus, Shenbrunn’s art became one of the links between different generations and historical periods of Russian-Israeli literature.

Vladimir (Zeev) Khanelis Writer, editor, and journalist Vladimir Khanelis was born in 1946 in Odesa. He held various jobs at a car depot, a puppet theater, and at a computer center. He completed his studies at the Institute of National Economy. In 1969, he relocated to Riga, where he worked as a writer for the factory newspaper VEFovets. In 1970–1971, he served in the Soviet Army as an army newspaper reporter and later headed the department of industry for the Riga-based newspaper Sovetskaia molodezh′ (Soviet youth). In 1977, he repatriated to Israel, where he

76 Ibid., 21. 77 Ibid., 143. 78 The book was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 2000.

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served in the Israeli Defense Forces and worked in the security service of the Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan. Starting in 1983, Khanelis served as an editor and, in 1988–1991, as editorin-chief of the international Jewish journal Alef, published in Tel Aviv and New York. In 1999–2002, he worked as the correspondent covering the former Soviet republics for the Israeli periodical Vesti, and then went on to work for the Israel bureau of the Moscow newspaper Izvestiia (The news) in 2002–2006. Khanelis’s first book, a collection of fantastic short stories titled Kosmicheskii eksperiment (Space experiment), came out in Tel Aviv in 1980.79 In the collection’s novellas, Cain turns out to be a space pirate who has murdered his brother in the course of an attempted arrest, the Jews’ passage through the parted waters of the Red Sea turns out to be the doing of a crashed pilot from a faraway planet, and the Exodus from Egypt—the result of a science experiment conducted by aliens in conjunction with an astronaut named Moshe. These and other similar plots function as vehicles for Khanelis to ruminate on the Jewish fate and the significance of the millenia-long Jewish history, as well as about the eternal philosophical questions such as life and death, good and evil, the knowability and unknowability of the world. Thus, each story in the collection becomes a short fable, an effort to reassess reality through the language of science fiction and fantasy, in the style of Ray Bradbury. Khanelis published two more books of short fiction in the 2000s: Tot, s kem proiskhodit chudo (He to whom a miracle happens, Jerusalem, 2003) and V nashem strannom gorode (In our strange city, Jerusalem, 2016). Khanelis also authored a two-volume collection Rodilis′ i uchilis′ v Odesse: materialy k entsiklopedicheskomu slovariu (They were born and educated in Odesa: Materials for an encyclopedic dictionary, Jerusalem, 2010 and 2013), which provided brief biographies of one thousand famous Odesites.

Eduard Kuznetsov Human rights activist, fiction writer, essayist, and publisher Eduard Kuznetsov was born in Moscow in 1939. Upon completing his military service, he enrolled in the Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University. In 1961, during

79 The book’s masthead indicates Israel as the place of the book’s publication and does not provide the year of the publication. Some sources claim that the book came out in 1983; however, the author identifies 1980 as the year of the publication. (See interview with Vladimir Khanelis, Isrageo, January 18, 2022, http://www.isrageo.com/2022/01/18/hanelis444/.)

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his second year of study at the university, Kuznetsov was arrested for anti-Soviet activities and for publishing the samizdat magazine Feniks (Phoenix). He was sentenced to seven years in a correctional labor camp. After his release in 1968, Kuznetsov lived in Vladimir Oblast, and in 1970 moved to Riga to join his wife Silva Zalmanson. At the same time, he also applied for and was denied permission to repatriate to Israel. Soon thereafter, a group of refusenik Jews including Kuznetsov and his wife hatched a plot to hijack an airplane in Leningrad and use it to escape abroad. The group was captured on the tarmac, arrested, and tried. Eduard Kuznetsov was sentenced to death; however, six months later the sentence was commuted to fifteen years of labor camps. While serving his sentence first in the Leningrad prison Kresty and then in Dubravlag in Mordovia, Kuznetsov kept diaries that he managed to smuggle to the West. In 1973, his book Dnevniki (Diaries) was published in Paris and soon translated into a number of European languages. In France, the book won the Gulliver award in the “best book by foreign author” category. Kuznetsov regained his freedom in 1979, when he was traded for Soviet spies arrested in the United States, and was finally able to emigrate to Israel. That same year, Kuznetsov’s second book, Mordovskii marafon (Mordovian marathon), written behind bars and clandestinely transported out of the USSR, was published in Jerusalem. The manuscript, restored by the publisher Moskva-Ierusalim with considerable difficulty, offers a clinical account of the inhuman cruelty of life in prison camps, against the backdrop of which the protagonist attempts to maintain his human dignity. Kuznetsov revisited the topic of prison camps in his next book, Russkii roman (Russian novel). Published in Jerusalem in 1982, the book recounts the history of three generations of one Soviet family that has been repressed by the Soviet authorities. The protagonist, a noble romantic named Dmitry, lands in a camp for ten years because of a staged provocation; following his release, he encounters an endless stream of misfortunes that finally break him. In addition to being an account of a free man’s tragic attempt to find spiritual self-realization in an unfree state, the book also serves as a contemplation on the emergence of totalitarian rule that positions itself “above God”80 and subjugates all levels of private and social life, including “both weather and nature.”81 In 1983, Kuznetsov relocated to Munich, where he worked as the news editor for Radio Liberty. In the early 1990s, he returned to Israel and became one of the founders and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Vesti, founded the publication 80 Eduard Kuznetsov, Russkii roman (Ramat Gan: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1982), 13. 81 Ibid.

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MIG-News in 1999, and then ran the Israeli literary almanac Nota Bene from 2003 to 2007. In 2000, Kuznetsov published Shag vlevo, shag vpravo (A Step to the left, a step to the right), a revised and expanded version of Dnevniki and Mordovskii marafon.

Iurii Miloslavskii Prose writer, poet, critic, and essayist Iurii Miloslavskii was born in Kharkiv in 1946. In 1972, he graduated from the School of Philology of Kharkiv State University. He was not published prior to his repatriation to Israel in 1973. He came to literature through poetry, switching to prose in the late 1970s. In 1977–1978, he was editor-in-chief of the newspaper Nedelia v Izraile (Week in Israel), and from 1979 to 1989 he served as the Middle East correspondent for Radio Liberty. While living in Jerusalem, Miloslavskii actively pursued an interest in Orthodox Christianity, extensively exploring the city’s Russian monasteries. Miloslavskii’s prose appeared in Kontinent and Ekho. In 1978, 22 published Miloslavskii’s novella Sobiraites′ i idite (Pack and go), which later became the first part of his 1980 novel Ukreplennye goroda (Fortified cities). Both the novella and the novel proved to be highly controversial. Translator and publicist Rivka Rabinovich (b. 1931, repatriated 1970), in articles in the Israeli newspaper Mahariv and in the journal Sion accused the author of antisemitism as well as of slandering both the Soviet Zionist underground and the Soviet repatriates in Israel. In turn, 22 energetically defended Miloslavskii, citing freedom of speech and the author’s right to creating his own artistic world, and described him as a genuine representative of Israeli prose.82 It bears noting that as early as in a 1982 interview, Miloslavskii declared himself a “Russian writer” and an “Orthodox Russian person,” repudiating any categorization of his works as Israeli or Russian-Israeli literature.83 At the center of Ukreplennye goroda lies the story of the relationship between a “simple” Moscow girl Anechka Rozenkrants and Sviatoslav Plotnikov, a dissident,

82 For more on this, see Mikhail Gendelev, “Samooplevyvanie svobody,” 22 6 (March 1979), http://www.gendelev.org/proza/o-literature/135-samooplevyvanie-cvobody.html; and Nataliia Rubenshtein, “Kontakta ne proizoshlo,” 22 6 (March 1979), http://www.gendelev. org/kontekst/teksty-i-konteksty/441-literaturnye-skandaly-gendelevskoj-epokhi.html. 83 For more on this, see Sergei Rakhlin, “Interview with Iurii Miloslavskii,” Almanakh Panorama [Los Angeles] 46 (February 27–March 5, 1982), http://www.gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudii-teksty/449-raskalennyj-lantset-yurij-miloslavskij.html.

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who is constantly tailed by the KGB. Practically everyone in the novel is surveilled; this includes surveillance on the part of the author who records every base, vile, abominable, and shameless action of his fictional (a fact that he repeatedly underscores) characters. Much like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with whom Joseph Brodsky compares Miloslavskii,84 the author of Ukreplennye goroda leaves a person no chance for courage, bravery, or dignity. Under the author’s gaze, even the right to an intellect turns out to be an act of either theatricality or philistinism. Miloslavskii’s characters are dissidents, Zionists, and refuseniks who use their halo of “fighters for freedom” and undergo their “journey to the edge of the night”—to debasement and violence, to betrayal and to humiliation of themselves and others, and to death. Zionists and dissidents are not the only craven and sick ones. Rather, it is the entire world. In the words of one of Miloslavskii’s characters, God “who has created heaven and earth, has broken me in half so that I can’t hear anything over the cracking in my backbone.”85 Miloslavskii’s novel, the “cracking of the backbone” of the entire world, is a naturalist description of life, portrayed as equally merciless in Israel and the Soviet Union. As Anna Latynina notes, Miloslavskii’s prose “does not interact with either the early 1980s Soviet prose, which is clearly demarcated in time, nor with the émigré literature of the same period.”86 Markish’s and Liuksemburg’s Zionist pathos give way to a complete denuding of the human weakness and the human longing for conformism. Miloslavskii prolifically deploys devices that literary theory later was to identify as postmodernist, such as literary play exposed by the author directly addressing the reader, intertextuality—with a mix of Russian classics and low-brow pop songs, as well as an ironic skepticism of overarching ideas and ideologies. Miloslavskii uses these to render a vision of the world in which everything is sold and bought, where the phrase “the people of Israel is alive” is nothing but an inscription on a plastic cap purchased at a Brooklyn sale, and “Zionism” and “heroism” are merely “big” words that hide “hatred and disgust.”87 In 1983, a collection of Miloslavskii’s poems, Stikhotvoreniia (Poems) was published in Jerusalem. A year later, Ardis in Ann Arbor printed his Ot shuma vsadnikov i strelkov (From the ruckus of the riders and shooters). In the late 84 Joseph Brodsky, Preface to Urban Romances by Iurii Miloslavsky [Yury Miloslavsky] (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1994), 5 85 Iurii Miloslavskii, Ukreplennye goroda (Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1982), 36. 86 Alla Latynina, “‘. . . I gliadet′—kak zhiteiskoe more vozdvigaetsia zria’: O proze Iuriia Miloslavskogo, Novyi Mir 12 (2011), http://www.nm1925.ru/Archive/Journal6_2011_12/ Content/Publication6_481/Default.aspx. 87 Miloslavskii, Ukreplennye goroda, 26.

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1980s, Miloslavskii relocated to the United States and in 1989 he joined the International Writers Workshop at University of Iowa. His first collection of short prose in English translation, Urban Romances, was published in 1994, with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky. Miloslavskii defended a doctoral thesis entitled Lexical-Stylistic and Cultural Characteristics of A. S. Pushkin’s Private Correspondence at the University of Michigan. Miloslavskii began publishing his works in Russia in the early 1990s. His collection of short prose, Skazhite, devushki, podruzhke vashei (Tell your friend, girls) came out in Moscow in 1993, followed by the collection Vozliublennaia ten′ (The beloved shadow) in 2011 and the novel Priglashennaia (The invited one) in 2014. In 2007, the New-York based almanac Novaia Kozha (New skin) printed Miloslavskii’s memoirs about Joseph Brodsky. Three years later, the rest of his memoirs about the Nobel laureate Brodsky appeared in the Russian magazine Chastnyi Correspondent (Private correspondent). Since the 2000s, Miloslavskii has been ordained as a hypodeacon in the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. In 2016 he won the Gorky literary award in the category “Russian world” for his nonfictional publication Chto my s nei sdelali (What we did to her).

Liia Vladimirova Liia Vladimirova is the penname of Iuliia Vladimirovna Khromchenko (née Dubrovkina), a poet and prose writer born in Moscow in 1938. In 1961, Vladimirova graduated from the Screenwriting Department of the State Institute of Cinematography. She wrote screenplays for movies and television and published two collections of stories and essays. In the Soviet Union, Liia Vladimirova published her poetry in such magazines as Molodaia Gvardia (Young guard), Iunost′ (Youth), and the newspaper Moskovskii Komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol member). She repatriated to Israel in 1973. Vladimirova’s works of poetry appeared in Kontinent, Sion, Menora, Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New York), and Vremia i my. Her first book of poetry, Sviaz′ vremen (Link of times), was published in Israel in 1975. It was followed by the poetry collections Pora predchuvstvii (Season of presentiments, 1978), Sneg i pesok (Snow and sand, 1982), and Stikhotvoreniia (Poems, 1988). In 1984, a collection of Vladimirova’s poetry came out in Hebrew translation under the title Iamim nesogim (Days running backwards). In 1985, Vladimirova published a book of prose, Pis′mo k sebe (Letter to self), which included two novellas: Strakh (Fear) and Pis′mo k sebe. The first novella,

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written in the epistolary genre, focuses on the paranoid fear that plagues the main character. The terror of being arrested or committed to a psychiatric ward because of her belonging to the dissident movement, born back in the USSR, does not abate after her repatriation. She constantly believes that her neighbors and local “community organizers” are spying on her and that she may be grabbed at the bus stop and taken somewhere or locked up in a mental hospital. The defenselessness against this fear leads the narrators to a state of unhealthy isolation and a feeling of the inevitability of punishment, although, much like Joseph K. of France Kafka’s novel The Trial, the protagonist of Strakh does not know what she has done wrong. The second novella, also constructed in the form of a letter, continues the theme of isolation, suffocation, loneliness, a listless detachment from the past, and an urge to rediscover oneself in Israel after emigration, to find in oneself “endless spiritual abilities . . . to love.”88 In 2001, Vladimirova published Zamety serdtsa: Tri esse o tvorchestve poeta Iakova Khromchenko (Notes of the heart: Three essays on the works of the poet Iakov Khromchenko). She passed away in Netanya in 2015.

Conclusion In the 1970s, Israel saw an influx of poets, prose writers, and translators, who either continued or began to create Russian-language literature in their new country. A dominant majority of these writers were in conflict with Soviet authorities and therefore either had lost or never had an opportunity to publish their works prior to their repatriation. By contrast, in Israel they found periodicals and publishers that were interested in printing their works. According to Mikhail Weisskopf, “there emerged a new and unique language art, separated linguistically from the broad Israeli literature and thematically—from Soviet culture.”89 Having left Russia, these authors nevertheless brought it with them: while published for the first time in Israel, many of the works of the “writers of the 1970s” were written back in the USSR or revealed their experiences living in the Soviet Union. Thus, for a stretch of time prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel became a large center of Russian-language protest literature, a

88 Liia Vladimirova, Pis′mo k sebe (Netanya: self-published, 1985), 241. 89 Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], “‘My byli kak vo sne’: tema iskhoda v literature ‘russkogo Izrailia,’” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 47 (2001), https://almanah-dialog.ru/archive/ archive_3-4_2/oe1.

Leaving Russia

place where former camp prisoners, refuseniks, and authors existing outside the official Soviet literary field or expelled from it, found their voices. However, as they relived their “tenth,” spiritual, hunger, the Russian-Israeli authors of the 1970s and 1980s not only described life in the absence of freedom, but also pointed to ethical and religious values that helped withstand this absence: the values of the Jewish people encompassed in its longing for an exodus from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from sin to holiness, from death to life. Weisskopf insists that, for the Soviet writers, repatriation served as an attempt to bridge their separation from their Jewish heritage that had been caused by historical cataclysms. Aliyah was linked with a return not only to a historical homeland, but “also into the bosom of Jewish history, into the lost paradise of national being.”90 A new myth was needed to overcome this catastrophic separation, and Exodus became this myth. As it was noted earlier, Markish in Embellished Tale, Liuksemburg in Tenth Hunger and Third Temple, and Baukh in Jacob’s Ladder all describe Jewish history as a living, continuous present. Such events as Rome’s siege of Jerusalem and the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492 are not dots on the continuum of Jewish history but actual dramatic events that unfold before the readers’ eyes. The main character of Liuksemburg’s short story “Pis′mo” (Letter) says, “The Exodus of our times is not the Egyptian Exodus, during which the people had an omnipotent leader who took responsibility for everything. Today everyone is his own Moses. Everyone has his own road to salvation.”91 This road is invented as a mythical or magical discourse with the “purpose of overcoming the existing . . . historical, cultural, and spiritual crisis.”92 In Markish’s Embellished Tale and Baukh’s Jacob’s Ladder, Jewish history is not a given but rather an entity in the process of being created, and these works’ characters become part of this process of creation. At the end of Embellished Tale, Simon criticizes the well-known tradition of galut Jews to journey to Israel at the end of their lives in order to be buried on the Holy Land: “These days, you should be going there alive.”93 These words sum up not the Zionist principle of returning to the land of Abraham and Jacob but a perception that Jewish history is a living present of open possibilities and true freedom, not as a monument or a tombstone.

90 Ibid. 91 Eli Liuksemburg, Pis′mo. Tretii khram. Povesti i rasskazy (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975), 177. 92 Roman Katsman, Neulovimaia real′nost′: Sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury (1920–2020) (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2020), 23. 93 Markish, Priskazka, 342.

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As Efrem Baukh writes, “Departure and return are the two poles that create the constant tension of the Jewish existence, Jewish tradition, Jewish literature. Jews always went to foreign lands and pined for their return home [. . .]. This tension between the two poles became part of the ‘collective unconscious of the people’ and persists to this day.”94 Presumably, “departure and return” are the two poles of tension that thematically defined the Russian-Israeli literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Without a doubt, the theme of Exodus was already significant at the dawn of Russian-Israeli literature and remained such during the years of the Great Aliyah, frequently in the form of an inversion, of “unmasking anti-Israeli rhetoric.”95 However, it was none other than the “writers of the 1970s” who made “leaving Russia” the foundation on which they erected the architectural vaults of their poetics. Borrowing the title of Feliks Kandel'’s book, one may say that the 1970s–1980s in Russian-Israeli literature are a “passage” through the “Gates of Exodus,” the selfreflection and documentation of a movement towards freedom, towards Jewish identity, towards living Jewish history being made in the here and now. This “ascent” through the “Gates of Exodus” concluded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrival to Israel of a new generation of Soviet and Russian Jews who drastically changed the history of the Russian-Israeli text in the 1990s. 

Translated from Russian by Margarit T. Ordukhanyan

Bibliography Primary Sources Baukh, Efrem. Apologia nebytiia. Shlomo Sand: novyi mif o evreiakh [Apology of non-being. Shlomo Sand: a new myth about the Jews]. Moscow: Biblioteka “Edinaia Kniga,” 2011. ———. Kamen′ Moriia [The stone Moria]. Jerusalem: Moriah, 1982. ———. Kin i Orman [Kin andi Orman]. Jerusalem: Moriah, 1982. ———. Lestnitsa Iakova [ Jacob’s ladder]. Jerusalem: Moriah, 1987. ———. Nitshe i nimfy: variatsii na temu zhizni Fridrikha Vil′gel′ma [Nietzsche and the nymphs: Variations on the Life of Friedrich Wilhelm]. Kefar Saba: Kniga-Sefer, 2015. ———. Oklik [Call]. Bat Yam: Moriah, 1992. ———. Pustnynia vnemlet Bogu [The desert heeds God]. Moscow: Raduga, 2002. ———. Ruach [Spirit]. Jerusalem: Cherikover, 1978.

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———. Mesto i vremia. Russkoie pole [Time and place. Russian field]. Paris: Tret′ia volna, 1978. ———. Tsareubiistvo v 1918 godu [Assassination of the tsar in 1918]. Ramat Gan: MoskvaIerusalim, 1991. ———. Ukrainskie siluety [Ukrainian silhouettes]. Munich: Suchasnist′, 1983. ———. Voennoplennyi sekretar′ [Secretary prisoner of war]. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1985. ———. Vospominanii grustnyi svitok [A sad scroll of memories]. Jerusalem: Beseder, 1996. Kuznetsov, Eduard. Dnevniki [Diaries]. Paris: Les Editeurs Reunis, 1973. ———. Mordovskii marafon [Mordovian marathon]. Ramat Gan: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1979. ———. Russkii roman [Russian novel]. Ramat Gan: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1982. ———. Shag vlevo, shag vpravo [A step to the left, a step to the right]. Jerusalem: Ivrus, 2000. Landburg, Mikhail. Drugoi baraban [Another drum]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2019. ———. Eshche net . . . [Not yet . . .]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2012. ———. Geran′ iz Gonolulu [Geranium from Honolulu]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2020. ———. I da, i net [Both yes and no]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2022. ———. Lilovyi ston [Purple moan]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1995. ———. Mesiatsy saksofona [Months of the sax]. Tel Aviv: Nord, 1983. ———. Na poslednem seanse [At the last session]. Tel Aviv: Kniga-Sefer, 2011. ———. Otrubi moiu ten′ [Chop off my shadow]. Moscow: Sodruzhestvo A. Bogatykh i E. Rakitskoi, 2005. ———. Otchego dozhd′ padaet vverkh [Why does rain fall upward]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2021. ———. Poslanniki [Envoys]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2015. ———. Posle polunochi [After midnight]. Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 2002. ———. Strazha g-zhi A [The guard of Mrs A.]. Tel Aviv: M. Landburg, 2003. ———. S toboi i bez tebia [With you and without you]. Tel Aviv: Effekt, 1980. ———. Sledy [Tracks]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2018. ———. Takie dlinnye borody [Such long beards]. Tel Aviv: Kariv, 1975. ———. Upavshee nebo [Fallen sky]. Tel Aviv: Krug, 1978. ———. Vverkh po lestnitse, vniz po lestnitse [Up the stairs, down the stairs]. Rishon le-Zion: Medial, 2009. ———. Za dver′iu [Behind the door]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1998. Liuksemburg, Eli. Desiatyi golod [Tenth hunger]. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1985. ———. Pis′mo. Tretii khram. Povesti i rasskazy [Letter. Third temple. Novels and stories]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975. ———. Progulka v Ramu: sbornik rasskazov [A stroll to Rama: A collection of stories]. Jerusalem, Shamir, 1983. ———. Sozvezdie Mordekhaia [Constellation of Mordechai]. Jerusalem: Shamir, 1987. ———. Tretii khram [Third temple]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975. ———. V poliakh Amaleka [In the fields of Amalek]. Jerusalem: Shamir, 2000. ———. Volchonok Itro: Rasskazy i povesti [Wolf cub Itro: Novels and stories]. Jerusalem: Shamir, 1998. Markish, David. Donor. Tel Aviv: I. Tversky, 1987. ———. Granatovyi kolodets [Garnet well]. Tel Aviv: Slovo, 1986. ———. Pes [Dog]. Tel Aviv: Slovo, 1984. ———. Poliushko-pole [A field side]. New York: Liberty, 1989.

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———. Priskazka [Embellished tale]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1991. ———. Shuty, Ili khronika iz zhizni prokhozhikh liudei (1689–1738) [ Jesters, Or the chronicle from the lives of itinerant people (1689–1738)]. Tel Aviv: Lim, 1992. ———. Za mnoi! [After me!] Tel Aviv: Slovo, 1984. Miloslavskii, Iurii. Ot shuma vsadnikov i strelkov [From the ruckus of the riders and shooters]. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984. ———. Priglashennaia [The invited one]. Moscow: AST, 2014. ———. Stikhotvoreniia [Poems]. Jerusalem: Maler, 1983. ———. Skazhite, devushki, podruzhke vashei [Tell your friend, girls]. Moscow: Terra, 1993. ———. Ukreplennye goroda [Fortified cities]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1982. ———. Vozliublennaia ten′ [The beloved shadow]. Moscow: AST, 2011. Roziner, Feliks. Izbrannoe [Selected works]. Moscow: Terra, 1996. ———. Lilovyi dym [Purple smoke]. Boston, MA: n.p., 1987. ———. Nekto Finkel′maier [A certain Finkelmaier]. London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1981. ———. Serebrianaia tsepochka [Silver chain]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1983. Shenbrunn, Svetlana. Dekabr′skie sny [December dreams]. Jerusalem: Ekspress, 1990. ———. Piliuli schastia [Happiness pills]. Moscow: Tekst and Knizhniki, 2010. ———. Rozy i khrizantemy [Roses and chrysanthemums]. St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 2000. Shmukler, Iuliia. Ukhodim iz Rossii [We are leaving Russia]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliia, 1975. Tsigel'man, Iakov. Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera [Moshe Dorfer’s funeral]. Sion 17 (1977): 65–127. ———. Prikliucheniia zheltogo petukha [Adventures of the yellow rooster]. Jerusalem: selfpublished, 2000. ———. Shebsl-muzykant [Shebsl the musician]. Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 1996. ———. Ubiistvo na bul′vare Ben-Maimon [Murder on Ben Maimon Boulevard]. Ramat Gan: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1981. Vladimirova, Liia. Pis′mo k sebe [Letter to self]. Netanya: n.p., 1985. ———. Pora predchuvstvii [Season of presentiments]. Tel Aviv: Krug, 1978. ———. Sneg i pesok [Snow and sand]. Tel Aviv: n.p., 1982. ———. Stikhotvoreniia [Poems]. Netanya: n.p., 1988. ———. Sviaz′ vremen [Link of times]. Tel Aviv: Rosh Pina, 1075. ———. Zamety serdtsa: Tri esse o tvorchestve poeta Iakova Khromchenko [Notes of the heart: Three essays on the works of the poet Yakov Khromchenko]. Jerusalem: Skopus, 2001. Volokhonsky, Henri [Anri Volokhonskii]. Chetyre poemy ob odnom [Four poems about one thing]. Tveria: Vymysel, 1981. ———. Deviatyi Renessans [The ninth renaissance]. Haifa: n.p., 1977. ———. Roman-pokoinichek [Novel-cadaver]. New York: Gnosis Press, 1982. ———. Shkura bubna [Tambourine skin]. Jerusalem: Maler, 1986. ———. Sobranie proizvedenii [Collection of works]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2012. ———. Stikhi dlia Ksenii [Poems for Kseniia]. Tveria: Vymysel, 1978. ———. Stikhotvoreniia [Poems]. Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1983. ———. Tetrad′ Igreiny [Igreina’s notebook]. Jerusalem: Maler, 1984. Voronel′, Aleksandr. Ostalsia Iakov odin [Iakov is left alone]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1991. ———. V plenu svobody [Freedom’s captive]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1998. ———. Vmeste i vroz′ [Together and apart]. Minsk: MET, 2003.

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Voronel′, Nina. Bez prikras [Without embellishments]. Moscow: Zakharov, 2003. ———. Kassir vechnosti [Cashier of eternity]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1987. ———. Main liber Kats [Mein lieber Katz]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1998. ———. Prakh i pepel [Dust and ashes]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1977. ———. Shestiu vosem′—sorok vosem′ [Six times eight is forty-eight]. Tel Aviv: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1987. ———. Sodom tekh dnei [Sodom of those days]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2006. Zaichik, Mark. Fenomen [Phenomenon]. Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1985. ———. Ierusalimskie rasskazy [ Jerusalem tales]. Moscow: Ostozhie, 1996. ———. Novyi syn [New son]. Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 1999. ———. Sdelano v SSSR [Made in the USSR]. Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1988. Zernova, Ruth [Ruf ′ Zernova]. Dlinnyie teni [Long shadows]. Jerusalem: URA, 1995. ———. Eto bylo pri nas [This happened on our watch]. Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1988. ———. Izrail′ i okrestnosti [Israel and its neighbors]. Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1990. ———. Na more i obratno [To the sea and back]. Jerusalem: URA, 1998. ———. Zhenskie rasskazy [Women’s tales]. Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1981. Zinik, Zinovii. Emigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem [Emigration as literary device]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011. ———. Izveshchenie [The notification]. Vremia i my 8 (1977): 3–83. ———. Nisha v panteone [An alcove in the pantheon]. Paris: Sintaksis, 1983. ———. Nisha v panteone: fragmenty iz romana [An alcove in the pantheon: fragments from the novel]. Vremia i my 63 (1981): 5–93. ———. Peremeshchennoe litso [A displaced person]. Vremia i my 22 (1977): 3–106, and 23 (1977): 5–93. ———. Russkaia sluzhba [Russian service]. Paris: Syntaksis, 1983. ———. Uklonenie ot povinnosti [Dodging conscription]. Vremia i my 69 (1982): 5–79.

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———. “Henri Volohonsky.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 942–948. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “In Search of Jewish-Russian Literature: A Historical Overview.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 61 (2008): 5–30. ———. “Ruth Zernova.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 1047–1055. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. Smola, Klavdiia. Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021. Soshkin, Evgenii. “Ocherk istorii russkikh knig i zhurnalov, izdannykh v Izraile.” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta 33, no. 15 (2014): 273–288. http://www.gendelev.org/kontekst/teksty-ikonteksty/696-jcherk-istorii-russkikh-knig-i-zhurnalov.html. Terrar, Toby. “Soviet Writings on Jewish Press Freedom: A Descriptive Bibliography.” Studies in Soviet Thought 28, no. 3 (1984): 201–228. Tolts, Mark. “Postsovetskaia evreiskaia diaspora: noveishie otsenki.” Demoskop Weekly 497–498 (2012). http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2012/0497/tema03.php. Toporovskii, Ian. “Iakov Tsigel′man s bul′vara Ben-Maimon.” Vesti, Tel Aviv, 2010. http://gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudi-i-teksty/454-s-bulvara-ben-majmon-yakov-Tsigelman.html?pos=0. Univerg, Leonid. “Ierusalim—stolitsa ‘russkogo’ knizhnogo dela v Izraile.” Paper presented on September 19, 2012 at a session at the House of Scientists and Experts of Rechovot. http:// rehes.org/avtor2/s_seminar16.html. Wakamiya, Lisa. “Zinovy Zinik’s Narratives of Cultural Dislocation.” Slavonica 12, no. 1 (April 2006): 41–55. Weisskopf, Mikhail [Mikhail Vaiskopf]. Afterword to Velikoe russkoe puteshestvie, by Mikhail Gendelev. Moscow: Tekst, 1993. http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/166-mikhail-vajskopf-posleslovie-k-knige-velikoe-russkoe-puteshestvie.html. ———. “‘My byli kak vo sne’: tema iskhoda v literature ‘russkogo Izrailia.’” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 47 (2001): 241–252. https://almanah-dialog.ru/archive/archive_3-4_2/oe1. ———. “Roman-midrash, ili Predsmertnyi vzdokh karakatitsy.” Solnechnoe spletenie 4–5 (1999): 105–106.

Paths of Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Israel Maxim D. Shrayer This essay attempts an aerial view of the landscape of Russian avant-garde poetry in Israel from the early 1970s to the early 2000s—roughly thirty turbulent years of the multifaceted Russophone literary culture created in Israel by the repatriates from the USSR and the post-Soviet states.1 I will explore the individual careers of seven poets, four of whom made aliyah in the 1970s, and three in the late 1980s. In taking stock of their individual destinies and artistic sensibilities, I will also underscore the idea of avant-garde Russian poetry in Israel as part of the larger, transnational Russian cultural avant-garde. In the pages that follow, I would like to investigate three principal questions. 1) What are the principal trends of Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry? 2) How do we measure the texture of Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry against the backdrop of late-Soviet poetry, Third-Wave Russian émigré poetry, FourthWave Russian-émigré poetry, post-Soviet Russian poetry, and, finally, modern Israeli poetry? 3) How do we study Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry within and without the Israeli geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts? An exploration of these questions will help us understand the reasons why avant-garde literary practices hold a relatively modest place in the context of Russian-Israeli literary culture and in Israeli literary culture as a whole.

1

Copyright © 2023 by Maxim D. Shrayer. All rights reserved. Individual poems copyright © by the authors. An early version of this essay was presented at the conference “Russian-Israeli Literature, A History,” at Bar-Ilan University on June 29, 2021. A Boston College Research Expense Grant partially supported the research for this paper. I would also like to thank Aleksandr Barash and Gali-Dana Singer for answering my queries.   Throughout this essay, where reliable literary translations are available, the latter will be cited. Otherwise, literal translations will be provided parenthetically following the Russian originals.

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For the purposes of this discussion,2 I propose to understand avant-garde poetry as poetic creation that is formally or gesturally experimental, radical, or polemical vis-à-vis the poetic mainstream that precedes or surrounds it, and also as poetic practice that may be accompanied or augmented by public acts of protest, challenge, or defiance on the part of the creators of avant-garde poetic texts. While avant-garde practices often constitute acts of nonconformism, not all avant-garde literature is by default nonconformist, and not all nonconformist texts are avant-gardist in their nature or thrust.3 Before I turn to the seven chosen protagonists of this paper, I would like to make two more prefatory observations. The first observation concerns the interactions between Zionism and avant-gardism. Fascinating research has been undertaken about the confluence of Zionist ideology and avant-garde arts and letters, notably Michael Stanislawski’s work on Zionism and fin de siècle.4 And yet, in the history of Jewish poetry cases of Zionist avant-garde are much more of an exception than they are a generalized tendency across boundaries of time, place, and language culture. Much more commonly, Zionism and avant-garde poetry make strange bedfellows. Specifically, the history of Russian-language poetry yields major articulators and propagators of early Zionism, be it political

For a classic study of the European avant-garde, see Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Moment of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); also see Perloff ’s recent essay, “Avant-Garde Community and the Individual Talent,” http://marjorieperloff.blog/essays/avant-garde-community-and-the-individualtalent/, accessed October 16, 2021; Wolfgang Asholt und Walter Fähnders, eds., “Die Ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation”: Die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997). For the Russian context, see Gerald J. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); S. E. Biriukov, Teoriia i praktika russkogo poeticheskogo avangarda (Tambov: Tambovskii universitet imeni G. R. Derzhavina, 1998); E. A. Bobrinskaia, Russkii avangard: Istoki i metamorfozy (Moscow: Piataia strana, 2003); S. L. Konstantinova, Russkii poeticheskii avangard: XX vek (Pskov: Pskovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet im. S. M. Kirova, 2007). For an edited volume on Jews and avant-garde arts and letters, see Mark H. Gelber and Sami Sjöberg, eds., Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde: Between Rebellion and Revelation (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), and, specifically, Steven E. Aschheim, “The Avant-Garde and the Jews,” 253–274. While students of Russian culture in Israel have touched on aspects of individual author’s creativity, I am not aware of separate studies devoted to the Russian poetic avant-garde in Israel. 3 For a study of Jewish nonconformism, see Roman Katsman, “Jewish Fearless Speech: Towards a Definition of Soviet Jewish Nonconformism (Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Felix Roziner, David Shrayer-Petrov),” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 1 (2018): 41–55. 4 Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

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or cultural. Think of Samuil Marshak’s early Zionist verse.5 Think even harder of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s poetry.6 Is it surprising that both Jabotinsky (1880–1940) in his hesped (funeral eulogy) “In the Memory of Herzl” (1904) and Marshak (1887–1864) in his cycle “Palestine” (1916) gravitated toward traditional classical versification? In this sense, blazingly experimental Judeocentric and—one might add—culturally Zionist poetry (in the sense of tziyonut ruchanit) such as what Valentin Parnakh (1891–1951) was writing in Paris in the late 1910s,7 prior to his return to Russia, and Matvey Royzman (1896–1973) was composing in the early 1920s Soviet Union,8 are by and large exceptions and deserve more attention by the students of Jewish letters. The second observation relates to the late Soviet decades, and, specifically, to the challenges of situating avant-garde activities within the history and culture of the great exodus of Soviet Jewry from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Students of Soviet culture of the post-Stalin decades know that there existed both official (sanctioned and tolerated), and unofficial (unsanctioned and undergrounddwelling), forms and figurations of avant-garde poetic activity.9 An emblematic example of the former would be the public life and texts of Andrey Voznesensky (1933–2010) within the cultural apparatus of the late Soviet decades, his verse aesthetics claiming the heritage of Russian Futurism. A commonly cited and adulated example of the latter would be the explosive poetry of Genrikh Sapgir

See Samuil Marshak, “Palestina,” in U rek vavilonskikh: natsional′no-evreiskaia lirika v mirovoi poezii, ed. Lev Iaffe (Moscow: Safrut, 1917), 129–135; “Palestine,” trans. Andrew von Hendy and Maxim D. Shrayer, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, 194–198. 6 Vladimir Jabotinsky [Vladimir Zhabotinskii], “Hesped,” Evreiskaia zhizn′ 6, no. 1 (1904): 8–10; “Pamiati Gertslia,” in his Doktor Gertsl′ (Odesa: Kadima, 1905), 4–5; idem, “In Memory of Herzl,” trans. Jaime Goodrich and Maxim D. Shrayer, An Anthology of JewishRussian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, 148–150. 7 See, for instance, Valentin Parnakh, “Sabbateiantsy” [1919–1922], in his Vstuplenie k tantsam. Izbrannye stikhi (Moscow: n.p., 1925), 50; idem, “Sabbateians,” trans. Diana L. Burgin, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, 224–225. 8 Matvei Roizman, “Kol Nidre,” in his Khevronskoe vino (Moscow: Vserossiiskii soiuz poetov, 1923), 3–12; idem, “Kol Nidrei,” trans. J. B. Sisson and Maxim D. Shrayer, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, 301–306. 9 About official and unofficial Russian poetic avant-garde on the post-Stalin Soviet scene, see Maksim D. Shrayer and David Shrayer-Petrov, Genrikh Sapgir: Klassik avangrda, 3rd ed. (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel′skie resheniia and Ridero, 2017), 3–6. 5

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(1928–1999)—who was always much bigger and artistically polyvalent than the so-called Lionozovo circle of nonconformist artists and writers. Does the landscape of Russian-Israeli poetry inherit features of official and unofficial Soviet avant-garde? While precise data of this sort has not been compiled, this much seems true: Of the Jewish-Russian poets in the avant-garde vein, who emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s, the majority did not make aliyah but rather settled in the United States and in Western Europe. This appears to be true for two generations of former participants in the officially sanctioned Soviet culture, such as the poet Viktor Urin (1924–2004, emigrated to USA in 1977), in his youth a follower of Velimir Khlebnikov and a disciple of Pavel Antokolsky, or the poet Lev Khalif (1930–2018, emigrated to USA in 1978), who in the late 1950s had been a protégé of Nâzim Hikmet (1902–1963), the Turkish avantgardist poet who lived in the USSR from 1951 until his death. This also appears to be the case or the poet Aleksandr Ocheretyansky (1946–2019, emigrated to USA in 1979), who in his pre-emigrated life in Kyiv had not been able to publish any of his free verse poetry, who for almost a decade following emigration was part of the New York circle of the poet and anthologist Konstantin K. Kuzminsky, and who was the founder and long-time publisher of Chernovik (Draft), an annual of avant-garde Russian letters. At the same time, among the poets who were involved in underground Jewish activism in the 1970s and made aliyah, few exhibited an orientation toward avant-garde verse aesthetics. Only after a having lived for some time in Israel did the texture of verse of some the Russian-Israeli poets begin to undergo a shift toward avant-gardism. (The path of Boris Kamianov, who was born in Moscow in 1945 and made aliyah in 1976, illustrates this trajectory.) In terms of the self-conscious adherence to avantgarde verse practices that was rooted in early Soviet poetry and continued to bear fruit in Israel, the eventful career of Savelii Grinberg (1914–2003, made aliyah in 1973), who as a teenager was part of the Mayakovsky “brigade” and for the rest of his life remained committed to avant-garde verse, offers a striking exception to the overall tendency. The avant-gardists who left as part of the great Jewish wave of the 1970s and 1980s (often referred to, imperfectly, as the Third Wave of émigré literature) righty regarded New York and Paris, not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, as centers of experimental and nonconformist arts and letters. Finally, in the 1970s, when Jewish emigration from the USSR attained massive proportions and was relatively unrestricted (although the specter of refusenikdom haunted potential visa applicants from the ranks of the intelligentsia), many Jewish members of unsanctioned—if not underground—Soviet literary circles did not seek to emigrate or did not consider emigration a viable option. Such was the case of the

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Moscow poet Lev Rubinshtein (b. 1947) and the Leningrad poet Elena Shvarts (1948–2010), both of whom were well known in underground and samizdat circles and attained public fame and acclaim during the early post-Soviet years. To visualize and further historicize this point, please consider in tandem two photographic images from the early 1970s. In the first image (Ill. 1), we see a refusenik protest outside the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow. Is it possible, is it not blasphemous to think of this refusenik protest as an act of heroic Zionist political avant-gardism? In the second illustration (Ill. 2), we see a largely bohemian crowd congregating outside the legendary café “Saigon,” located at corner of Nevsky Prospect and Vladimirsky Prospect in Leningrad.10 There is not much overlap between the people participating in the refusenik demonstration with the avant-garde protest slogan “Vizy v Izrail′ vmesto tiurem” (Visas to Israel instead of Prisons), and the crowd hanging out in the officially tolerated gathering spot for nonconformist artists, poets, and their admirers. The situation rapidly changed in the late 1980s with the (re)opening of the floodgates of Jewish emigration and the subsequent, mass aliyah of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Now the olim were likely to include members of the Jewish-Russian artistic intelligentsia who had

Ill. 1. Refusenik protest outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, 1973. Wikimedia.

10 See, for instance, “‘Saigon’ v Leningrade,” accessed October 17, 2021, https://marfanikitina4.livejournal.com/539427.html.

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Ill. 2. People congregating outside Saigon café, on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Vladimirsky Prospect in Leningrad, early 1970s. “‘Saigon’ v Leningrade,” https://marfa-nikitina4.livejournal. com/539427.html.

previously been disinclined or reluctant to emigrate and might have been given to unsanctioned artistic pursuits in the avant-garde unofficial circles. About a million olim came from former USSR to Israel in the late 1980s–2000s.11 In the early 1990s, largely due to the great influx of Jews and their family members from the former USSR, one observes a major diversification and transformation of Russian-Israeli literature. Roman Katsman speaks of the “demarginalization of Russophone literature” in Israel.12 One of the features of this transformation in the 1990s are the simultaneously, perhaps paradoxically, occurring processes of mainstreaming and sidestreaming

11 For data, see Mark Tolts, “A Half Century of Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union: Demographic Aspects,” Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, November 20, 2019, accessed January 12, 2022, https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/ half-century-jewish-emigration-former-soviet-union-demographic-aspects. 12 Roman Katsman, “New Literary Geography: Demarginalization of Contemporary Russo­phone Literature in Israel,” a lecture at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, October 11, 2017, accessed October 21, 2021, https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/ events/new-literary-geography-demarginalization-contemporary-russophone-literature-israel.

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of Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry—both a public recognition of the place of avant-gardism and a deliberate pursuit of artistic paths that departs from what the reading public perceived as prevalent or dominant aesthetics of RussianIsraeli verse. With those general observations in mind, I will now turn to the profiles of seven creative personae: Mikhail Grobman, Ilia Bokstein, Henri Volokhonsky, Mikhail Gendelev, Gali-Dana Singer, Aleksandr Barash, and Anna Gorenko. Collectively, they represent three generations and two aliyahs. Artistically, they betoken a fairly wide spectrum of avant-garde and experimental traditions and practices. Their composite image tells a compelling story of RussianIsraeli avant-garde poetry from the early 1970s to the early 2000s, where I will reluctantly have to stop—and where other investigators are presently doing the much-needed critical work.13

1. M   ikhail Grobman: In the Direction of Tel Aviv Conceptualism Mikhail Grobman, visual artist, poet, and memoirist, was born in 1939 in Moscow and began to write poetry around the age of thirteen or fourteen. His first Soviet publications of poetry date to the late 1950s, and his first tamizdat publications, both in New York and both under pseudonyms, to 1965, in the annual Vozdushnye puti (Aerial ways) and the quarterly Novyi Zhurnal (The new review). In the 1960s, Grobman was a prominent player on the Moscow nonconformist artistic scene (he allegedly coined the term “second avant-garde”14) and in the Moscow literary samizdat. In 1971 Grobman made aliyah, and in 1975 he founded the art group Leviathan in Jerusalem. Since 1983 he has been 13 See, for instance, Roman Katsman, “Razmyshleniia o poezii i vremeni,” review of Cherez [2020], by Dennis Sobolev, Iudaica Russica 2 (2020): 146–172. 14 On the “second avant-garde,” see, for instance, Mikhail Grobman’s own blog “Vtoroi russkii avangard,” Zerkalo, June 14, 2012, accessed October 16, 2021, http://zerkalolitart.com/?p=7580. On Mikhail Grobman’s poetry, see Shrayer, “Mikhail Grobman,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 981–982; Denis Ioffe, “K voprosu o radikal′noi estetike vtorogo avangarda. Poetika Mikhaila Grobmana: Zhivopis′, zhiznetvorchestvo i kinicheskii terror,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (2016), accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/ novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/140_nlo_4_2016/article/12078/; Roman Katsman, “Mikhail Grobman,” in his “Smelaia bezzashchitnost′ nonkonformizma (Il′ia Gabai, Mikhail Grobman, Genrikh Sapgir),” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 59 (2017), accessed October 22, 2021, http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/59/Katzman_59.pdf.

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living in Tel Aviv, where he has been very active in visual arts and in literary publishing.15 While Grobman’s visual art bears overt avant-garde formal and structural qualities, his poetry is hardly experimental or texturally avant-garde. Although Grobman the poet is not averse to free verse, he favors rhyming, syllabo-tonic versification. His poetry brings to mind the work of the Lianozovo circle, especially its master of multiple existential ironies Evgeny Kropivnitsky (1893– 1979), but also Ian Satunovsky (1913–1982) and Igor Kholin (1920–1999). There is reason to believe that it was from Kholin’s poetry that Grobman the poet learned the craft of deliberate crudeness of diction (in part to bare naked the visceral instincts of the Soviet everyman) and the art of deploying political subversiveness in and between the lines. Grobman brought these skills with him to Israel as part of his Soviet repatriate’s cultural baggage. Grobman’s formally traditional verse paradoxically throws into sharper relief his poetic Russian-Israeli pursuits by putting him in conversation with Russian nonconformist and avant-garde poets of the 1920s–1930s and of the 1960s–1980s, including OBERIU poets and a number of poets of the Moscow’s post-Thaw era literary scene. Consider the characteristic example of this 1984 untitled poem from Grobman’s collection Voennye tetradi (Military notebooks, 1992): *** Противны горы Самарии И неприятны облака А мне в ОВИРе говорили И не пускали дурака Зачем ломаешь ты карьеру Мне говорил майор Петрюк Он сионистскую холеру Уже тогда поддел на крюк Ах Боже мой как прав был также Полковник Борщ из КГБ Поступок мой назвал продажей Моей сочувствовал судьбе А я не верил опьянённый

15 Some of the information corroborated by Mikhail Grobman in a letter to Maxim D. Shrayer of September 12, 2002.

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Меня опутал капитал Своею щупальцей зловонной Он сионистов восхвалял И вот теперь лишённый блага Стою с ружьём я у ворот Из облаков стекает влага Я полон мыслей и забот Я не желал армейской жизни Я не желаю воевать Хочу я жить при коммунизме И мирно с Колей выпивать Но всё пропало всё исчезло Сломалось счастья колесо И то что было мне полезно Как дым исчезло и прошло Но залечу свои я раны И не поддамся я врагу Возьму семью и чемоданы И жить в Америку сбегу.16 *** Samaria’s hills are gross; you heard me The clouds so grim you wouldn’t believe Thus at OVIR they all assured me Refused to let the damn fool leave. Why ruin your career, you weasel? Major Petryuk conveyed his doubt. That Zionism spreads like measles Even back then he’d figured out. O Lord how right too was adrenal Old Colonel Borsch of the KGB

16 Mikhail Grobman, Voennye tetradi [Military notebooks] (Tel Aviv: Leviafan, 1992), 31.

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He called my motives frankly venal Though he sympathized to some degree. I could not hear, intoxicated; Capital wrapped around my brain Each tentacle sang unabated A constant Zionist refrain. Now at the gate I stand, my rifle Ready, the goods of life in shrouds I’m full of thoughts I try to stifle While rain flows off Samaria’s clouds I’d not viewed life through an army prism, The thought of combat leaves me wan, I long to live with Communism, Hang out drunk with my pal, Ivan. The wheel of happiness is broken All that is lost, gone with the years All that is useful, every token Gone like smoke that disappears But wounds will heal I’ll shun disgraces I’ll not submit to hostile fates I’ll grab my kids, I’ll pack suitcases And take off pronto for the States.17 Notably, the poem’s lyrical character is an ex-Soviet doing military service in the Israeli Defense Force. The poem showcases a poetics that Grobman developed in Israel—a poetics that runs parallel to that of Moscow Conceptualism, increasingly finding the most common ground with Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940–2007). The message of this texturally plain, performatively deliberate poem, subverts, from within and from without, both the Soviet anti-Zionist

17 Mikhail Grobman, “Samaria’s Hills are Gross . . .,” trans. Andrew von Hendy and Maxim D. Shrayer, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 984–985.

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rhetoric and the Zionist rhetorical justification of aliyah. In the context of Russian-Israeli literature of the 1980s, Grobman’s poem represents a self-conscious act of avant-gardism.

2.  Ilia Bokstein: Toward a Cabbalistic Trans-Sense A hermit by choice and by destiny, a true budetlianin of Russian-Israeli poetry, Ilia Bokstein18 (1937–1999) came to Israel from Moscow in 1972, already possessed of a unique poetic voice of his own, a voice formed more or less in isolation and further forged during the five-year prison camp sentence he had served in Mordovia. The young Jewish poet and intellectual had been sentenced to this term for having openly challenged the Soviet system to permit its poets what the Soviet constitution guaranteed every Soviet citizen. On July 24, 1961 Bokstein delivered a speech, “Forty-Four Years of a Bloody Path to Communism,” from the foundation of the monument to Vladimir Mayakovsky in Mayakovsky Square in Moscow.19 In Israel Bokstein produced a peerless body of verse originally published as a facsimile reproduction of a hand-written, illuminated manuscript—in the 1970s and 1980s already an avant-garde act of desperate freedom—and a “gesture of daring defenselessness”20—by a Russian-Israeli poet nostalgic for a pre-printing press culture.

18 About Bokstein, see Leonid Finkel′, “Material, iz kotorogo sdelany genii,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 2 (1999), accessed October 18, 2021, https://new.antho.net/wp/jj02-finkel/; Maxim D. Shrayer, “Ilia Bokshtein,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 962–963; idem, “Il′ia Bokshtein,” in Fantaziia strastei, by Ilia Bokstein, ed. Mina Lein, 2nd ed. ( Jerusalem: Skopus, 2010), xv–xvii; Aaron Cherniak, “Il′ia Bokshtein—Bozh′ei milost′iu poet,” in Fantaziia strastei, by Il′ia Bokshtein, ed. Mina Lein, 2nd ed. ( Jerusalem: Skopus, 2010), vi–xiv; Naum Vaiman, “Il′ia Bokshtein: Poeziia kak obraz zhizni,” OpenSpace.ru, November 12, 2010, accessed October 18, 2021, http://os.colta.ru/literature/events/details/18665/. 19 Ilia Bokstein [Il′ia Bokshtein], “Ploshchad′ Maiakovskogo—Tel′-Aviv” (interview with Liudmila Polikovskaia), in “My predchuvstvie, predtecha . . .” Ploshchad′ Maiakovskogo 1958– 1965, ed. Liudmila Polikovskaia (Moscow: Zven′ia, 1996), accessed January 12, 2022, http://old.memo.ru/history/diss/books/mayak/part4-10.htm. 20 I am using Roman Katsman’s term proposed for the study of nonconformism; see Roman Katsman, “Mikhail Grobman,” in his “Smelaia bezzashchitnost′ nonkonformizma (Il′ia Gabai, Mikhail Grobman, Genrikh Sapgir),” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 59 (2017), accessed January 12, 2022, http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/59/Katzman_59.pdf.

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Ill. 3. From Il′ia Bokshtein’s Bliki volny (Glints of the Wave, 1986).

Consider parts one to five and part ten of his “Afánta-Utóma” (“FantasiaJudaica”): Ч. IV. Афанта-Ютома (Фантазия-Юдаика) 1. Я—еврей не мадонной рожден не к кресту пригвожден и тоски мне не выразить всей цепи рода на мне скорбь народа во мне я застыл у безмолвных дверей 2. Я был как все я пас стада овец и коз но когда все пастухи отдыхали я думал о Боге и Бог вошел в одну из моих душ

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невинных утешать овец и коз 3. Я раб и господин я искупитель человечества и школьник у небесного учителя которого когда-то в пустыне одолел, и охромел, я жду того, кто уже был 4. Я ни на кого не походил, истине невидимой служил человечеству Единого Спасителя открыл А невидимая истина во мне от непроявленности плачет во плоти 5. Я был ревнителем Единого смотрителя Ягве я капища крушил, я идолов ломал, хоть некоторые— после доходило до меня— весьма красивы были. и от досады слишком поздней эстетизации своей носорожести всех скульпторов заставил поклониться невидимой и колоссальной рыбе [. . .]

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10. Каббалист чтоб упорядочить свою систему представлений о Вселенной в канон Священного Закона ввожу я греко-римский пантеон Богов а свой народ отдал под покровительство Сатурна— царя земли и времени людских путей невидимым вниманием запомниться земле на комнатном столе исследуя значенья мной выдуманных слов из тела улетаю к звездам21 Part IV Afánta-Utóma (Fantasia-Judaica): 1. I—a Jew not by Madonna born not to a cross nailed nor for me to express all my longing chains of the tribe on me grief of the people in me I have frozen at the speechless doors 2. I was like everyone I tended herds of sheep and goats but when all the shepherds were resting I thought about God and God entered one of my souls

21 Il′ia Bokshtein, “Afanta-Iutoma (Fantaziia-Iudaika),” in his Bliki volny. Kniga stikhov [Glints of the wave. A book of poems], facsimile ed. (Bat Yam: Moriah, 1986), 83–91.

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to console the innocent sheep and goats 3. I’m both slave and master a redeemer of humanity and a pupil of the heavenly teacher whom one time in the desert I overpowered and lamed, so I await the one who’s been here before 4. I did not look like anyone, I served an unseen truth discovered for humanity the One Redeemer but in me the truth invisible is weeping in my flesh from nondisclosure 5. I was jealous of the One overseer Yhwh I destroyed the pagan temples I broke the idols though some of them afterward would get to me they were quite beautiful and in distress at the belated aesthetization of their rhinocery they forced all sculptors to bow to an invisible and colossal fish [. . .]

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10. A Cabbalist to bring order to my system of concepts of the Universe into the canon of the Holy Law I introduce the Graeco-Roman pantheon of Gods I have surrendered my people to the protection of Saturn— ruler of the earth and time and human paths so that the earth recalls with invisible attention on the table in the room researching the meanings of the words I’ve thought up from my body I fly to the stars22 Just the loaded neologism nosorozhest′ (the English rhinocery cannot do it full justice) alone is worth its weight in gold! Here Bokstein encoded so much— Gogoloian absurdity “(The Nose”), the modern theater of the absurd (Ionesco’s Rhinoceros), the verbal echoes of the Russian word zhest′ (“tin” or “sheet metal,” in its normative use, and “something horrible,” in its slang use), and, possibly, even a Russo-Anglo-French pun nos-or-rogue-geste, meaning “nose-or-cheat-gesture.” A literary Cabbalist in his imagery and symbolism, an inventor of entire worlds within the words he invented or reinvented, in Russian-Israeli poetry Bokstein was one of the few postwar heirs to Khlebnikovian trans-sense (zaum′) in both of its principal dimensions: verbal meaning beyond conventional literary usage and cosmological significance beyond traditional Judaic cosmology.

3.  Henri Volokhonsky: Paths of Absurdist Lyric Born in 1936 in Leningrad, and writing poetry since the mid-1950s, Volokhonsky was known in the Leningrad literary underground. In 1963 he formed, with his longtime collaborator, poet and bard Aleksey Khvostenko (1940–2004) 22 Ilia Bokstein, “Afánta-Utóma (Fantasia-Judaica),” trans. Gerald J. Janecek, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 964–965.

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and with the participation of other authors and visual artists, the esoterically avant-gardist group Verpa. Volokhonsky’s texts circulated, as did many songs and several plays he had coauthored with Khvostenko. They jointly signed them A.Kh.V.; recordings of their songs subsequently became commercially available in the West and in post-Soviet Russia. In 1973 Volokhonsky made aliyah and lived in Israel until 1985. He subsequently moved to Germany, where he resided for over two decades and died in 2017.23 The prolific and protean Volokhonsky is simultaneously an heir to absurdists both Russian (especially Aleksandr Vvedensky [1904–1941] but also other members of the OBERIU) and Western (for example, Christian Morgenstern [1871–1914]). In his exalted diction and his penchant for exoticism and even manneristic flights of fancy, he is also a follower of Nikolay Gumilev (1886– 1921) and Igor Severyanin (1904–1940). Volokhonsky’s poetry displays verbal inventiveness and showcases a great variety of forms, from wreaths of sonnets to polymetric experimental media. Volokhonsky was also affected by the poetic experiments with the blues form on the Leningrad poetry scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s.24 Sometimes bordering on metaparody, Volokhonsky’s poems communicate a vitality and lyrical energy that is light, gentle, and humorous. There is a kind of loveliness and luminosity to his verse (he also translated excerpts from Zohar [Radiance], a cornerstone Cabbalistic text), a sense of an open-ended performative game, as illustrated by Volokhonsky’s “Galillee (A Song)”:

23 About Volokhonsky, see: Ilja Kukuj [Il′ia Kukui], “Zametki o poetike Anri Volokhonskogo 1960-kh gg.,” in “Vtoraia literatura.” Neofitsial′naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2003), 232–250; Maxim D. Shrayer, “Henri Volohonsky,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 943; Aleksei Viktorov, “Khimiia Anri Volokhonskogo,” Jewish.ru, April 10, 2017, accessed October 21, 2021, https://jewish.ru/ru/people/culture/175872/; Dmitrii Volchek et al., “Filolog gnal stada kentavrov,” Radio Svoboda, April 14, 2017, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.svoboda.org/a/24749861.html; Mikhail Vizel′, “Pamiati Anri Volokhonskogo,” Vedomosti, April 10, 2017, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.vedomosti.ru/lifestyle/articles/2017/04/10/684877-pamyati-volohonskogo; Aleksei Komm, “Poet ‘sploshnogo chuda’ v teni piterskogo andergraunda: Etiud o Volokhonskom,” Diskurs, December 6, 2018, accessed October 21, 2021, https://discours.io/articles/culture/ poet-sploshnogo-chuda-v-teni-piterskogo-andergraunda-etyud-ob-anri-volohonskom. 24 See, for instance, Ian Probstein’s discussion of the poetic experiments with the blue form in the works of David Shrayer-Petrov (b. 1936): Ian Probstein, “Drums of Fate: David ShrayerPetrov’s Poetics of Fractured Wholeness,” in The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov, ed. Roman Katsman, Maxim D. Shrayer, and Klavdia Smola (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021), 95–131.

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Галилея (Песня) Пою на флейте галилейской лютни Про озеро похожее на скрипку И в струнах голос друга или рыбы Да озеро похожее на птицу О озеро похожее на цитру Над небесами где летает небо Там голубая рыба или птица На берегах мой друг доныне не был Поёт ли ветер—это Галилея Ты слышишь голос—это Галилея Узнаешь голос друга—Галилея Привет поющей рыбы—Галилея. На дудке филистимских фортепиано На бубне голубого барабана Пою в огне органа Ханаана Под пьяный гонг баяна Иордана Молчи—то аллилуйя Галилеи Ты слышишь—Галилеи аллилуйя О лилии белее—Галилея О пламени алее аллилуйя О небо—галилейская кифара О колокол воды как пламень звонкий Поёт мне рыба голубого дара Да арфа птицы вторит в перьях тонких О лилии белее—Галилея Любви моей алее аллилуйя25 

25 Henri Volohonsky Anri Volokhonskii, “Galileia (Pesnia),” in his Stikhotvoreniia [Poems] (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1983), 155.

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Galilee (Song) I sing on flute of Galilean lute About a lake that duplicates a violin And in the strings a friend’s or fish’s voice A lake that duplicates a bird O lake that duplicates a zithern Above the heavens where the sky soars There a blue fish or a bird— My friend has not yet seen these shores If the wind sings—it’s Galilee You hear a voice—it’s Galilee You recognize the friend’s voice—Galilee A singing fish’s greeting—Galilee On fife of Philistine fortepianos On tambourine of sky-blue drum I sing with fiery Canaan’s organ To drunken gong of Jordan’s concertina Be quiet—it’s the halleluiah of Galilee You hear—of Galilee the halleluiah O whiter than the lilies—Galilee O redder than the flames a halleluiah O sky—a Galilean cithara O bell of water like a sounding flame The fish intones to me a sky-blue gift And the bird’s harp repeats in subtle feathers: O whiter than the lilies—Galilee O redder than my love a halleluiah.26 26 Henri Volohonsky, “Galilee (Song),” trans. Gerald J. Janecek, in An Anthology of JewishRussian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 947–948.

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Volokhonsky gave Russian-Israeli literature a body of lyrics deeply rooted in place (Israel old and new), gently exploring the boundaries of Judaic and Christian cultural identities, and ecstatically celebrating Jewish poetics that the poet regards as an unending literary tug-of-war between harmonizing and disharmonizing messages about history and civilization. In his poetry ancient biblical and mythological realia romantically abet the poet’s fresh impressions of modern-day Israel. Reading “Galilee” and Volokhonsky’s other jubilant Israeli poems accords a sensation of being enveloped by vibrantly alive myths, a sensation that one frequently experiences while visiting the land of Israel.

4. Mikhail Gendelev: A Journey Back to Futurism and Constructivism A medical doctor by training, Mikhail Gendelev was born in 1950 in Leningrad, came to Israel in 1977, and died in Tel Aviv in 2009.27 Gendelev, whose work has received a lion’s share of critical attention as compared to so many of his fellow Russian-Israeli poets, continuously fashioned and refashioned his public images and his poetic voices. And yet some of his most iconic public selfpresentations invite a comparison with the poets of Russian Futurism and Constructivism.

27 About Gendelev, see Dmitrii Segal, “Vitrazhi slova,” Nasha strana [Tel Aviv], August 28, 1990, accessed October 18, 2021, http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/255-dimitrijsegal-vitrazhi-slova.html; Viktor Krivulin, “Voina bez pobeditelei i pobezhdennykh,” Zvezda 12 (1990), accessed October 19, 2021, http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/242-viktorkrivulin-vojna-bez-pobeditelej-i-pobezhdennykh.html; Mikhail Gendelev, “‘Ia pishu to, chto nel′zia,’” (interview with Aleksandr Rapoport), Lekhaim 2 (1996), accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/166/lkl.htm; Anna Isakova, “Gendelev: Dendizm, nravstvennyi imperativ i prochie strannosti,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 98 (2009), accessed October 19, 2021, http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/391-anna-isakova-gendelevdendizm-nravstvennyj-imperativ-i-prochie-strannosti.html; Ilia Bokstein, “Ierusalimskaia poema Mikhaila Gendeleva” [1989], Dvoetochie 12, accessed October 19, 2021, https:// dvoetochie.org/2010/07/24/bockstein-gendelev/; Leonid Katsis, “Kratkii biobibliograficheskii ocherk,” in Nepolnoe sobranie sochinenii, by Mikhail Gendelev (Moscow: Vremia, 2003), 523–525; Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], “Teologiia Mikhaila Gendeleva,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 98 (2009), accessed October 19, 2021, http://www. gendelev.org/issledovaniya/389-mikhail-vajskopf-teologiya-mikhaila-gendeleva.html; Sergei Shargorodskii [Sergei Shargorodsky], “The Darkness of Babylon: A Russian-JewishIsraeli Experience in Visionary Journeys of Mikhail Gendelev,” in Jewishness in Russian Culture, ed. Leonid F. Katsis and Helen Tolstoy, trans. Elen Rochlin (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 185–203; Boris Ivaniuk, “Stikhotvorenie M. Gendeleva ‘Doktor Leto’: Zametki na oboikh poliakh,” Филоlogos 1 (2017): 29–38.

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Ill. 4. Mikhail Gendelev. 1980s. Photo from the archive of Mariia Shenbrunn-Amor.28

Ill. 5. Mikhail Gendelev. Ca. 2000s.29

28 Mikhail Gendelev’s personal website, accessed October 17, 2021, http://www.gendelev.org/ gallery/foto/4-80-ые_годы.html. 29 “Umer Mikhail Gendelev,” OpenSpace.ru, March 30, 2009, accessed October 19, 2021, http://os.colta.ru/news/details/8906/.

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As a detailed chronological analysis of his poetry will demonstrate, Gendelev tried many hats and many poetic strategies of self-(re)presentation, Joseph Brodsky being the influence he never was able to flush out of his veins—also a source of a Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” In the 1990s, as literary life burgeoned in Israel following the influx of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews, he turned his gaze toward the aesthetics of early Soviet avant-garde poetry.30 In phots, taken, respectfully, in the 1980s and the 2000s, Gendelev so strikingly resembles Vladimir Mayakovsky of 1920–1921 and Ilya Selvinsky of the 1940s (Ills. 4 and 5). But it is not just the public appearance or public behavior, but the texture of his verses that self-consciously recalls Russian (Soviet) Futurist and Constructivist poetics. Noteworthy is Gendelev’s long poem “Billiards in Yafo” from his collection Prazdnik (Celebration [or Holiday], 1993). The text is saturated with Gendelev’s dialogue (some of it, perhaps, not intentional) with Mayakovsky, Aseev, Kirsanov, Selvinsky and with his unresolved feelings toward Brodsky’s poetry. The poem’s title, while biographically referring to an actual apartment with a billiard (pool) table, which for a period of time Gendelev occupied in Yafo, also calls on the motif of the billiard table in Russian culture, a motif one could designate as “Billiards at Mikhailovskoe.” As literary mythology has is, at his manor house in Mikhailovskoe, Pushkin played at a billiard table he had inherited from Abram Gannibal, his African ancestor and an associate of Peter the Great. Pushkin wove the motif of the billiard table into the fabric of Eugene Onegin (chapter 4, stanza 44), and other poets took heed. Playing at Pushkin’s (poetic) billiard table, not in Mikhailovskoe but in Yafo, could be construed of as an allegory of the Russian poetic tradition at which—with which—Gendelev continues to play in Israel after so many previous poetic performances.31 Consider the first seven of the thirteen stanzas of Gendelev’s long poem:

30 Aleksandr Barash recollects that in the “early 1990s Gendelev kept insisting that I read a volume of the early poetry of [Semen] Kirsanov [1906–1972] (I had read it as a teenager . . . and its poetics were not at all my thing . . . but it was clearly very important to him.” Barash, electronic communication, October 19, 2021. 31 See Tat′iana Geichenko and Elena Shpineva, “Prikliucheniia bill′iarda,” in Mikhailovskaia pushkiniana, Materialy XVI Fevral′skikh nauchno-muzeinykh chtenii pamiati S. S. Geichenko (Sel′tso Mikhailovskoe: Pushkinskii zapovednik, 2013), 225–244, accessed October 20, 2021, https://ru-billiards.ucoz.ru/Books/2013_Pushkiniana.pdf.

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Бильярд в Яффо И. Р. I Был бинт горизонт на коем сукровица-полоса а день был как день покойник с видом на небеса на акваторию сирого порта сети и тех пустей мысль была о бессмертьи того же сорта что уловы сетей.   II В средиземии рифмуется как октябрь февраль он месяц макабр когда свет поджимается от озноба и бухнет в воде вода абсолютно когда купальни Водолея искусства для и осанку опальных имеют пальмы сардинского короля.   III Суб—в тропиках—холодина и зéмную лужу взахлеб пройдя баттерфляем до половины в средине

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я и очутил себя (здесь конец цитаты) здесь в струях шпиля несущего напрокат «не был-есть-не буду» всплывает «был ли?» и плывет как использованный предикат.   IV Здесь конец прогулки домой в кровать и на оборот ключа так наливается ветер рвать плащ с чужого плеча поддувая полы (добро приземист) плечо заголив —о нет!— а плечо в чешуи золотой экземе если смотреть на свет. V Свет истек куда как не в слюдяное окно просто стек вовне я не только бросил о смерти но и она обо мне я пожал плечами себя представив снаружи как мокрой природы часть и встал проверить щеколды ставен гости не ровен час.  

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VI Был дом где с одною марией я жил и поздно вставал а ежели моросило вообще не вставал огромен дом был через перила лестниц и галерей когда возникала нужда в марии «Мария!» кричал я ей.   VII И так в дому было ощутимо что никого в нем нет что полуседую скребя щетину я смотрелся в чужой портрет и спал темно без сновидений и пробуждения не просил и нам никто серебра и денег не нес и не приносил [. . .].32   Billiards at Yafo for I. R.

32 Mikhail Gendelev, “Bil′iard v Iaffo,” in his Prazdnik ( Jerusalem: Elia Capitolina, 1993), accessed October 18, 2021, http://www.gendelev.org/stihi/knigi-stikhov/6-prazdnik.html.

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I The horizon was a bandage / upon which / a stripe of lymph / and / it was a day like a day / a dead one / with a view of heavens / of the water basin of the orphaned port / nets / emptier than ever / the thought of immortality / was of the same sort / as the catch in the nets. II In Mediterranean / October rhymes / like February / it’s a month macabre / when / the light shrivels up from the chill / and / water thuds through water / absolutely when baths / of Aquarius of the arts / and / the palms stand straight like shunned courtiers / of the king of Sardinia. III Sub—tropical—damn cold / and having choked one’s way across the earthly puddle / butterfly half the distance / in the middle / here I found myself / (here the end of quotation) / here in the jets of the spire / carrying the leased words / “was not-am-will not” / comes up to the surface / “was her ever?” / and / swims like a spent predicate. IV Here the walk ends / home to bed / and / at the back side of the key / thus pours the wind ripping off / a raincoat once wore by another person / blowing under the laps (at least I’m short) / bearing a shoulder /—o no!—/ and the shoulder covered in a gold eczema of scales / if one looks at the light. V The light expired / anywhere but into the mica / window / simply flowed out / and not only did I let drop words about death / but she too / about me / I shrugged the shoulders imagining / outside / being a part of wet nature / and got up to check on the shutter locks / guests / could suddenly arrive. VI There was the house / where/ I lived with one maria / I lived / and got up late / and if it drizzled/ didn’t get up at all / the house was enormous / across banisters / of stairs and galleries / when a need of maria appeared / “Maria!” / I yelled for her.

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VII And in the house it was so / apparent / there’s nobody in it / that I scrubbed the half-gray stubble / looking into another’s portrait / and slept darkly / without dreams / or awakening / didn’t ask / and so no one brought us silver / and no one delivered / us money [. . .]. Gendelev’s verses betray three formal and textural principles: 1. egocentrism of graphic arrangement (this “butterfly” design constituted a special, self-centered revision of the Mayakovskian stepladder verse of Soviet poetry), 2. Futurist centrality of the poetic utterance as the structural unit of verse, and 3. Constructivist insistence on semantic “loadification” (gruzifikatsia) of artistic language.33 If we conduct a verbal experiment and rearrange Gendelev’s verses from the author’s version into the near-regular rhyming quatrains of taktovik (Russian tonic meter particularly associated with Russian poetry of the 1920s and 1930s) with some lines of dolnik (a tonic meter, another staple of twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry), and also change them from center-justified to leftjustified, the resulting form would further augment Gendelev’s affinity with Selvinsky’s poetry of the late 1920s and early 1930s (which, incidentally, had deeply affected young Brodsky): I Был бинт горизонт на коем сукровица-полоса а день был как день покойник с видом на небеса на акваторию сирого порта сети и тех пустей мысль была о бессмертьи того же сорта что уловы сетей.   II В средиземии рифмуется как октябрь февраль он месяц макабр когда

33 On “loadification,” see Kornelii Zelinskii, “Konstruktivizm i poeziia,” in Mena vsekh, by Kornelii Zelinskii, Aleksei Nikolaevich Chicherin, and Elii-Karl Sel’vinskii (Moscow: Konstruktivisty-poety, 1924), 21–26.

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свет поджимается от озноба и бухнет в воде вода абсолютно когда купальни Водолея искусства для и осанку опальных имеют пальмы сардинского короля. In this connection, the opening of Ilya Selvinsky’s epic poem Ulialaevshchina (The lay of Ulyalaev, 1935) comes to mind: Телеграмма пришла в 2:10 ночи. Ковровый тигр мирно зверел, Когда турецких туфель подагрический почерк Исчеркал его пустыню от стола до дверей. В окно был виден горячий цех Где обнажалось белое пламя . . . Комната стала кидаться на всех Бешеными вещами— И матовый фонарь, оправленный в кость, Подъятый статуей настольного негра, Гранеными ледышками стучался от энергий В крышку чемодана из крокодильих кож [. . .].34 (“The telegram came at 2:10 in the morning, / The carpet tiger peacefully grew wild, / When the gouty footprint of Turkish slippers / Criss-crossed its desert from table to door. Visible through the window was a hot factory shop, / Where a white flame was revealed . . ./ The room began to toss at those present / Mad objects— And the matte lantern, set in ebony, / Supported by the statue of a tabletop Negro, / Vigorously knocked its faceted ice cubes / Against the trunk top made of crocodile leather [. . .].”) 34 Ilya Selvinsky [Il′ia Sel′vinskii], Ulialaevshchina. Epopeia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1935), 5.

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The case of Gendelev’s avant-garde imperative offers important evidence of the longevity of Russian/Soviet avant-garde poetic traditions and of the dynamics of their transplantation onto the Israeli soil.

5. Gali-Dana Singer: Roads of Russian-Israeli Translingualism35 Gali-Dana Singer, poet, visual artist, translator, publisher, was born in Leningrad in 1962 and made aliyah in 1988 to settle in Jerusalem.36 Singer’s work is emblematic of what was earlier proposed as the process of simultaneous mainstreaming and sidestreaming of Russian-Israeli poetic avant-garde in the 1990s. Likewise, Dvoetochie (Colon, its title referring to a punctuation sign, not to a part of the digestive tract), the magazine of experimental arts and letters GaliDana Singer publishes with her husband, the writer, visual artist, and translator Nekod Singer (b. 1960), offers a window onto both the Israeli and the international Russophone avant-garde. Gali-Dana Singer has created impressive bodies of verse both in Russian and Hebrew and has collaborated with the American poet Stephen Ellis on poems written in alternating lines.37 The aspect of Gali-Dana Singer’s avant-garde poetics that clamors for investigation is her exploration of various possibilities of translingual textures of verse—not merely bilingual or multilingual, but one that lives and breathes “betwixt and between” (to borrow the expression from the poem “A Peril of Hope” from In the Clearing [1962] by the starkly monolingual Robert Frost). Let us take as an example Singer’s poem “v mordu smerti: merde . . .” (“death in the muzzle: merde . . .”) from the collection Chast′ tse (Part of who, 2005). 35 For a foundation study of literary translingualism, see Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); for a discussion of literary translingualism with a focus on Jewish writers, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Reflections of a Translingual Writer,” The Odessa Review, June 1, 2017, accessed October 24, 2021, http:// odessareview.com/reflections-translingual-writer/. 36 About Gali-Dana Singer, see Aleksandr Ilichevskii, “Iarusarim, ty vsia, ty ves′,” Lekhaim 10 (2010), accessed October 18, 2021, https://lechaim.ru/ARHIV/221/ilichevskiy2. htm; “The Poetry of Gali-Dana Singer,” TLV1, August 7, 2019, accessed October 19, 2021, https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/08/07/the-poetry-of-gali-dana-singer/; Roman Katsman, “‘Machshavti reeva’: Al shirata ha-ivrit shel Gali-Dana Singer,” The Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 31 (2020): 565–601. 37 See Gali-Dana Singer and Stephen Ellis, “Take Heart” [ll. 21–30] (collaborative poetic project between Gali-Dana Singer and Stephen Ellis. Poems written in alternating lines composed by Stephen Ellis and Gali-Dana Singer), accessed October 19, 2021, http://reigns. blogspot.com.

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In the title, tse (“who”) is the truncated tselogo (“of the whole”)—altogether an homage to the titles of the collection Chast′ rechi (A part of speech, 1977) by Joseph Brodsky and the collection Chasti chast′ (A part of a part, 1985) by Marina Temkina (b. 1948). *** в морду смерти: merde смерти в харю: ‫חרא מוות‬ хáра мáвет тоже мне мата хари ‫יתגדל ויתקדש‬ исгадáл вэискадáш изгадил китеж-град с лица земли изгладил в морду смерти как дашь? в морду смерти ка-ак дашь! он же любил восточные единоборства ты же любил восточную борьбу а она взяла моду: ей кадишь, а ей подавай кадиш когда ж она видала тебя в гробу твоё непокорство её рукоприкладство рукоположение во гроб да ведь и гроба-то не было только земля и молитвенное покрывало оно тебя покрывало а земля покрыла а я смерть крo´ю последними словами38 (“death in the muzzle: merde / death right in the kisser / ‫ חרא מוות‬/ chára mávet / mata hari my foot / ‫ יתגדל ויתקדש‬/ isgadál veiskadásh / he’s mucked it up / rubbed out the city of 38 Gali-Dana Singer [Gali-Dana Zinger], Chast′ tse (Moscow: Argo-risk; and Tver: Kolonna, 2005), 77.

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kitezh from the face of the earth / how to hit death in the muzzle? / now to hit death in the muzzle! / while he loved eastern martial arts / and you loved eastern wrestling / and she adopted a fashion: / you burn incense but she demands kaddish / when was it / she saw you dead / your obstinance / her ordinary battery / ordination into the coffin / actually there wasn’t any coffin / only earth and prayer shawl / sprawled over you / and the earth covered you / and I curse death / with the dirtiest of words”). Here the two poles of paronomasia (I am elaborating on the theory of Omry Ronen39), the ultrafuturistic-explosive (Khlebnikovian) pole and the Pninianpunsteristic (Nabokovian) pole are vigorously at work. The poem opens with a truly translingual segment, in which French, Hebrew, and Russian words and expressions vie for control of meaning. The Hebrew phrase ‫( חרא מװת‬chara mavet, “shit death” in translation) contains both a semantic play on the French merde (“shit”) and a semantic and phonetic play on the Russian smerti v khariu (“death right in the kisser”). Notably, here Singer writes Hebrew words and expressions in correct Russian transliteration (as though read from right to left) and as if they were Hebrew transliterations of invented Russian words and expressions (as it were, read left to right). Furthermore, Singer’s translingual chara mavet is, probably, a reference to Shit, Death (Chara, Mavet, ‫ מוות‬,‫)חרא‬, the title of the 1979 Hebrew collection by the Israeli poet, classicist, and literary translator Aharon Shabtai (b. 1939), some of whose poems Singer has translated into Russian.40 While Shabtai did not coin the Hebrew expression “shit, death” (in the sense of “o, death, you’re shit”), the catchy title of his collection may have contributed to its literary legitimization in the Israeli cultural mainstream. Be it as it may, a clash of the lofty and the base, of the metaphysical and the naturalistic, or sacred and mundane is apparent in the verbal play in which Singer engages the inserted opening of Kaddish (isgadál veiskadásh), the Judaic memorial prayer for the dead, here “mucked up” or besmirched—izgazhen—by the threat of the poet’s translinguslism. On October 16, 2021, replying to my query, Singer provided the following insight: “I read Aharon Shabtai in the early 1990s, we socialized a bit [. . .] but I never felt a particular closeness to his poetry and translated it more out

39 Omry Ronen [Omri Ronen], “Dva poliusa paronomazii,” in Russian Verse Theory. Proceedings of the 1987 Conference at UCLA, ed. Barry P. Sherr and Dean S. Worth (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989), 289–291. 40 Aharon Shabtai, Chara, Mavet ( Jerusalem: Akshav, 1979).

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of curiosity than out of love [. . .]. If we were to speak of an Israeli poet who is particularly important for me, it would be Avoth Yeshurun and still not so much in terms of poetics, but in terms of the lived experience.”41 Perhaps it was the poetry of Avoth Yeshurun (1904–1992)42, who was raised in Ukraine and Poland and arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1925, that inspired Singer to experiment with boundaries of language (Russian and Hebrew in Singer’s case, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic in Yerushun’s), to incorporate colloquial speech and slang in sophisticated ways, and to complicate poetic speech along the axes of translingualism. Richly orchestrated and syntactically contorted, mixing languages and registers of speech, and sometimes deliberately cacophonous, Singer’s poetry is most vibrantly alive where Russian and Hebrew, the two principal languages of the ex-Soviet repatriates in Israel, compete for the future of Russian-Israeli culture.

6.  Aleksandr Barash: In Search of the Mediterranean Note As we think about traversing the conventional language boundaries in poetic speech, the verse practices of Aleksandr Barash immediately come to mind. Barash was born in Moscow in 1960, came to Israel in 1989 after being active on Moscow’s poetry scene (poetry group Epsilon) then just gaining independence in the early perestroika years. In Israel he has made a name for himself not only as a poet working predominantly in free verse but as the principal Russian translator of the major Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000).43 41 Gali-Dana Singer, electronic communication, October 16, 2021. Aaron Shabtai [Aharon Shabtai], “Iz knigi ‘Liubov′,’” trans. Gali-Dana Singer, Dvoetochie 5 (1995), accessed October 18, 2021, https://dvoetochie.org/2021/07/05/aaron-shabtai/. I am also grateful to the insights about Shabtai that I received from the Israeli artist David Sharir, first cousin of my father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, during an in-person conversation in Tel Aviv in July 2021. 42 About Yeshurun, see, for instance, Lilach Lachman, “Yeshurun, Avot (1904–1992),” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross (article posted 2018), accessed January 14, 2022, https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/yeshurun-avot-1904-1992. 43 About Aleksandr Barash, see “Barash, Aleksandr Maksovich,” Wikipedia, accessed October 19, 2021, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бараш,_Александр_Максович; Il′ia Kukulin, “Prosvechivaiushchie goroda,” introduction to Obraz zhizni, by Aleksandr Barash (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017), accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.nlobooks.ru/books/novaya_poeziya/674/review/8781/; Kirill Korchagin, “O stranstvuiushchikh i puteshestvuiushchikh,” Booknik.ru, April 20, 2007, accessed October 18, 2021, http://booknik.ru/today/fiction/o-stranstvuyushchih-i-puteshestvuyushchih/; Vitalii Lekhtsier, “Poeziia kak fenomenologiia,” Vozdukh 40 (2020), accessed October 17, 2021, http://www.litkarta.ru/projects/vozdukh/issues/2020-40/lekhtsier/.

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To illustrate some distinct aspects of Barash’s poetic question, I will turn to the second section of Barash’s poem “Vremia tret′ikh dozhdei” (Time of the third rain, 1996) of the cycle “Istochnik v vinogradnike” (Source in the vineyard) from his collection Sredizemnomorskaia nota (Mediterranean note, 2002). On its surface, this poem is a fine example of Russian free verse. It is endowed with subtle wordplay and with a richness of Judaic spiritual and cultural references: Время третьих дождей (Из цикла «Источник в винограднике») Но и эта земля—равнодушна к тому что движется в промежуточном сейчас— словно пена тумана по гребням террас— между двумя ее зримыми слоями—почвой и небом— в воздухе взбитом как сливки писцом Эзрой и компанией До прихода Мессии ничто не может не только закончиться но и начаться Еще одно утро в квартире висящей над Эйн-Керемом «В Палестине два времени года дождливая осень и сухое лето Различаются три периода ранних дождей . . .»—Сегодня Десятое Кислева—время третьих дождей  Скоро придется закрывать окна от западного ветра включать камины и забиваться в аквариумы автобусных остановок как по соседству за горой— овцы в пещеры Скоро— ровно в двухтысячный раз—родится тот кого Иоанн крестил поблизости от Кумрана Скоро—Ханукка когда водяные мельницы зимней бури гонят пенные волны озноба по каменным спиралям улиц  с грохотом раскручиваясь

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в долинах Небо способно обрушиться на человека— сбоку пространство—снизу А за нежной роговицей окна— девятисвечник цветет справа налево Амен ---------Начало дня Включаем компьютер Он издает звук напоминающий самолет на старте Уцепиться в подлокотники— и продолжить полет—на уровне взгляда—над ЭйнКеремом Что будет дальше и кому это нужно – не имеет значения но играет роль44 Time of the Third Rain (from the cycle The Source in the Vineyard) And so this earth—is also indifferent to what moves in the transitional now— like foam of the mist alongst terraced ridges— between its two visible layers—soil and sky— in the air whipped like sweet cream by Ezra the Scribe and company Before the coming of the Messiah not only nothing can come to an end but also nothing can start One more morning in the apartment suspended above Ein Kerem “In the land of Palestine

44 Aleksandr Barash, “Vremia tret′ikh dozhdei,” in his Sredizemnomorskaia nota ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2002), 31–32. Cf. the same text with slight variations: Aleksandr Barash, “Doroga na Geraklion,” accessed October 18, 2021, http://www. vavilon.ru/texts/prim/barash1-1.html.

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only two seasons rainy autumn and arid summer Three distinct periods of early rain . . .”—Today The Tenth of Kislev—time of the third rain Soon we’ll have to shut the windows to westerly wind turn on the fireplaces and stuff ourselves into the aquariums of bus stops the way nearby just over the mountain— sheep in a cave Soon— for exactly the two thousandth time—he will be born whom John baptized in the vicinities of Qumran Soon—Hannukkah when watermills of the winter storm chase the chill’s foamy waves down the stony spirals of streets thunderously unraveling in the valleys The sky has a way of collapsing onto people— open space to the side—below And over the tender cornea of the window— a nine-light flowers right to left Amen ----Day’s beginning We start the computer It utters a sound resembling the airplane at takeoff To clutch the armrests —and continue the flight at eye level—over Ein Kerem What will come next and who needs it— does not matter but does play a part45 Barash’s poetry invites a serious scrutiny of the notion of the “Mediterranean note,” which Barash introduced and advanced jointly with the Russian-Israeli writer and literary critic Aleksandr Gol′dshtein (1957–2006, grew up in Baku; 45 Translated by Maxim D. Shrayer for this essay. I would like to thank Aleksandr Barash for his feedback on a draft of this translation.

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made aliyah in 1991). Gol′dshtein has also on occasion called this trend “Jerusalem note,” and the name hearkens back to the “Parisian note,” championed by Georgy Adamovich in Russian émigré poetry.46 However, more significant (and less belabored) is the alternative title for the literary project that Barash and Gol′dshtein jointly manifested, the former through poetry, the latter through prose: variant Kavafisa (literally “a variant—or a version—of Kavafy”). More deeply rooted in modernist poetics, this alternative title is linked neither to a region (Levant), nor a city ( Jerusalem), but rather to the name of the great Greek modernist poet Konstantinos Petrou Kafavis (Kavafy in the Anglicized spelling, 1861–1933), who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. (In the Western world, Kavafy’s great admirers and promoters included E. M. Foster and, more importantly for the generation of Barash and Gol′dshtein, Joseph Brodsky.47) The Russian-Israeli “Mediterranean Note/Variant of Kavafy” project seeks to endow the texts with a strong sense of place—the atmosphere and history of the Land of Israel and the Levant—and in doing so, favors cosmopolitan textual identities and literary forms unharnessed by traditional structures. Studded with biblical references, lyrical and open-ended, deeply self-reflexive, and deliberately embracing free verse, the poetry of Aleksandr Barash embodies this RussianIsraeli project most fully.

7.  Anna Gorenko: Celan’s Way It is, perhaps, fitting, to end this investigation with a discussion of the short, posthumously mythologized life of the talented Russian-Israeli poet Anna Gorenko. She was born Anna Karpa in 1972 in Bendery, a city in the eastern part 46 On the “Mediterranean note” in Russian-Israeli literature, see Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, “Neskol′ko slov prozy posle stikhov,” Ierusalimskii poeticheskii al′manakh (1993), accessed October 17, 2021, http://barashw.narod.ru/ipa/goldstei.htm; Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, “Aleksandr Barash” [About Aleksandr Barash’s collection Sredizemnomorskaia nota], back cover of Sredizemnomorskaia nota, by Aleksandr Barash ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2002); Aleksandr Barash, “Byla ideia russkoi literatury Izrailia” (conversation with Mikhail Ne-Kogan), Lekhaim 8 (2009), accessed October 18, 2021, http://www. gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudi-i-teksty/444-aleksandr-barash-byla-ideya-russkoj-literaturyizrailya.html; Il′ia Kukulin, “Prosvechivaiushchie goroda,” introduction to Obraz zhizni, by Aleksandr Barash (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017), accessed October 19, 2021, https://syg.ma/@kirill-korchaghin/alieksandr-barash-stikhi-iz-knighi-obraz-zhizni. In an electronic message dated October 19, 2021, Aleksandr Barash kindly clarified his role and that of Aleksandr Gol′dshtein as cocreators of the “Mediterranean note” project. 47 See Joseph Brodsky, “On Cavafy’s Side,” New York Review of Books, February 17, 1977, accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/02/17/on-cavafys-side/).

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of Moldova (formerly Bessarabia; Romanian name of Bendery is Tighina; presently in the unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic).48 Her paternal great-grandmother, Hannah Karpa, who lived in the Polish town of Żuromin, died during the Shoah in 1942. As a teenager Anna Gorenko made trips to Leningrad to visit her father, spent the summer of 1988 there, and moved to Israel in 1989. The poet died of a drug overdose in Tel Aviv in 1999.49 The very act of adopting as her penname the birth name of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), could be conceived of as a Jewish avantgarde gesture of defiance and of identity-remaking. (Apparently, Anna Gorenko insisted on pronouncing her adopted last name as Gorénko, not Górenko as was the stress in Akhmatova’s birth name, but this hardly changes the public perception of the gesture.) Gorenko, who allegedly spoke of herself as “a poet not so much Russian, but an Israeli poet writing in Russian,”50 also asserted

48 In a number of sources Gorenko’s birthplace incorrectly appears as Beltsy (Romanian spelling Bălți), a city in northern Moldova. 49 About Anna Gorenko, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Anna Gorenko,” in An Anthology of JewishRussian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 1163–1164; Evgenii Soshkin, “Ot sostavitelia,” in Stikhi, by Anna Gorenko ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka zhurnala “Solnechnoe spletenie,” 2000), 76–77; Danila Davydov, “Poetika posledovatel′nogo ukhoda,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 5 (2002), accessed October 18, 2021, https://magazines. gorky.media/nlo/2002/5/poetika-posledovatelnogo-uhoda.html, reprinted in Prazdnik nespelogo khleba, by Anna Gorenko, ed. Evgenii Soshkin and Il′ia Kukulin (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003), 5–15; Denis Solov′ev-Fridman, “Razbory ne bez chteniia No. 3. Telo Any kak nekonets nerusskogo Avangarda,” Topos, August 14, 2003, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.topos.ru/article/1493; Evgeniia Vezhlian, “Zametki na poliakh nevozmozhnoi knigi,” Lekhaim 1 (2011), accessed October 17, 2021, https://lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/225/vezhlyan.htm; Il′ia Kukulin, “Anna Gorenko,” in Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi. Stat′iu o sovremennoi poezii, by Il′ia Kukulin (Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2019), 562– 566; Evgenii Soshkin, “Ot adamova iabloka do Adamova iazyka: Territoriia Anny Gorenko,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 5 (2002), accessed October 20, 2021, https://magazines. gorky.media/nlo/2002/5/ot-adamova-abloka-do-adamova-yazyka-territoriya-anny-gorenko.html; Evgenii Soshkin, “Gorenko i Mandel′shtam,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 53 (2004): 73–129; Pavel Rybkin, “Anna Gorenko: ‘Ostanemsia doma,’” Prosodia.ru, April 4, 2021, accessed October 18, 2021, https://prosodia.ru/catalog/stikhotvorenie-dnya/annagorenko-ostanemsya-doma/; Elena Mordovina, “Sol′ zemli. O poete Anne Gorenko (Karpa) (1971–1999),” Pechorin.net, February 18, 2021, accessed January 12, 2022, https://pechorin.net/articles/view/sol-ziemli-o-poetie-annie-gorienko-karpa-1972-1999.   I would like to thank Aleksandr Barash and Evgeny Soshkin for sharing recollections of and providing me with information about Gorenko in electronic messages dated, respectfully, October 19, 2021 and October 20, 2021. I am also grateful to Grigorii Karpa, father of the late Anna Gorenko (Karpa), for clarifying details of her birth, ancestry, and early years, in an electronic message dated October 23, 2021. 50 Michael Weisskopf ’s comment quoted in Davydov, “Poetika posledovatel′nogo ukhoda.”

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that she “found a sister not in Russian, but in Israeli poetry.”51 The sister she referred to was the Israeli Hebrew-language poet and radical feminist Yona Volach (Wallach, 1944–1985), whose tormented and self-destructive life had ended prematurely. On the horizon of the new Russian-Israeli poetry of the 1990s, Gorenko shone like a bright star because of the freedom with which she manipulated language into near-surrender—bending syntax, disrupting meters, employing surrealist and primitivist techniques as she wrote about unloving, vulgarity, poshlust (Nabokov’s term), the human body, childhood, her oneiric visions. But even her playfulness and lightness have something foreboding and unsettling about it. If one considers Gorenko’s Jewish Bessarabian cultural pedigree in connection with her relationship to the residually conservative Russian poetic tradition, one may look to the example of Dovid Knut (1900–1955), who came from the town of Orgeev (Orhei) and brought his own “accent”—and his own freedom—to Russian Parisian poetry of the 1920s and 1930s; Knut subsequently lived and died in Israel.52 But even more so than Knut’s, Gorenko’s status as a Russophone poet in Israel may be clarified by turning to the example of another poet from the south-western borderlands of the Russian Empire (and the former USSR), Paul Celan (1920—1970), the great Jewish German-language poet who was born and raised in Czernowitz, North Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Celan lost his family in the Shoah, spent most of his postwar years in Paris, and committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. Celan’s Bukovinian accent in German was so much more than what came across as a German speaker’s “Eastern” pronunciation; it was a poetic freedom of being a Jewish outside and a stranger in the groves of postwar and post-Shoah German culture. Something similar may be said of Gorenko’s “Bessarabian accent” in her Russian poetry, especially manifest in the poet’s rebellion against normative Russian syntax and prescriptive Russian poetics. In the case of Anna Gorenko, who suffered from drug addiction throughout most of her literary career, surrealist practices of “automatic writing” represented much more than a staged literary experiment, were in fact a method of creating and undoing life.

51 See Vladimir Tarasov, [Commentary], in Anna Gorenko, Maloe sobranie [Small collected works], ed. Vladimir Tarasov ( Jerusalem: Alfavit, 2000), 117. 52 About Knut, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Dovid Knut,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 1, 446–449.

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I would like to examine Gorenko’s poem “Perevod s evropeiskogo” (Translating from the European), which strikes me as being in conversation with Celan. Like many of Celan’s poems, Gorenko’s poems enact a Jewish poet’s agony over being verbally alive in a non-Jewish language in the post-Shoah period—in her case especially poignant because she was writing in a slightly strange—estranged— Russian while living in Israel. Перевод с европейского А. Г. Словно Англия Франция какая Наша страна в час рассвета Птицы слепнут, цветы и деревья глохнут А мне сам Господь сегодня сказал непристойность Или я святая или, скорее Господь наш подобен таксисту Он шепчет такое слово каждой девице что выйдет воскресным утром кормить воробья муравья и хромую кошку из пестрой миски А в хорошие дни Господь у нас полководец И целой площади клерков, уланов, барменов На языке иностранном, небесном, прекрасном произносит такое слово, что у тех слипаются уши Господи, дай мне не навсегда но отныне мягкий костюм, заказанный летом в Варшаве, есть небольшие сласти, минуя рифмы изюм, например, из карманов, и другие крошки. Терезиенштадт, апрель 194353

53 Anna Gorenko, “Perevod s evropeiskogo,” in her Prazdnik nespelogo khleba [Feast of unripe bread], ed. Evgenii Soshkin and Il′ia Kukulin (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003), 99.

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Translating from the European to A. G. As if some England some France Our country at the hour of dawn The birds go blind, flowers and trees go deaf And today the Lord himself told me something scabrous Either I’m holy or else, more likely our Lord is like unto a taxi driver He whispers such a word to every maiden who comes out on a Sunday morning to feed a sparrow an ant and a lame cat from a motley bowl But on good days our Lord’s a great commander And to a square full of clerks, uhlans, bartenders In a language foreign, heavenly and splendid, he utters such a word that their ears burn Lord, give me not forever but from now on a soft suit, ordered in the summer in Warsaw there are small sweets, bypassing rhyme a raisin, for example, from the pockets, and other crumbs.54 Theresienstadt, April 1943 In the original Russian title, perevod means both “translating,” that is the act of (self-)translation, and “translation,” the product of this act. An early editor and commentator of Gorenko’s poems indicated that the addressee of the poem was Andrey Glickman, a friend of Gorenko’s.55 In most editions, the dedication

54 Anna Gorenko, “Translating from the European,” trans. Sibelan Forrester, in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, in 2 vols., ed. Maxim D. Shrayer (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 1166–1167. 55 In Maloe Sobranie, edited and annotated by Vladimir Tarasov, a poet devoted to Gorenko’s memory albeit not a reliable source of information about her and her texts, the dedication appears as “Andriushe Glikmanu” (To Andriusha Glikman); see Anna Gorenko, Maloe sobranie, ed. and comment. Vladimir Tarasov ( Jerusalem: Alfavit, 2000), 88. In a number of

Paths of R ussian Avant- Garde Poetr y in Israel

appears as the initials “A. G.” It is difficult not to think of “A. G.” as both the initials of the historical self of Anna Akhmatova (née Gorenko) and of the literary self of Anna Gorenko (née Karpa). Coupled with the possible self-dedication, the place and date that appear at the bottom of the poem, “Theresienstadt, April 1943,” accord Gorenko’s poem the status of her literary will and testament— especially so because it was composed during the very last days of her life. Anna Gorenko died fifty-six years later, on April 4, 1999. Why Theresienstadt? Different possibilities come to mind. Perhaps this is because a transport of Jews from Westerbork arrived at Theresienstadt in April 1943? Or is it, perhaps, a slanted reference to the transport of children from the Bialyastok ghetto that arrived in Theresienstadt in August 1943? The children would later perish in Auschwitz.56 (The suit from Warsaw also hints at the annihilation of Polish Jews during the Shoah.) Theresienstadt, initially set up by the Nazis as both a transit/labor concentration camp, functioned as a ghetto for the Jewish intelligentsia mainly from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany while serving as a Potemkin village of the Nazi obfuscation of the Final Solution.57 It is therefore possible that, in Gorenko’s last poem, “Theresienstadt” is the last abode of poets and artists, a poetic antechamber of death. To this end, the poem hearkens back to Gorenko’s earlier “prosypaisia umerli noch′iu poety vse-vse . . .”58 (wake up all the poets all died overnight . . ., 1995), thus revealing an even more devastating, paradoxical possibility. Gorenko’s poem practices anticipatory post-Shoah poetry composed before Auschwitz—at Auschwitz— rather than nach Auschwitz, as the case may be in Theodor Adorno often-quoted dictum.59 Like much of Paul Celan’s poetry, Anna Gorenko’s poems are laden with the verbal adoration of the imminence of death.

56 57

58 59

subsequent editions, the dedication appears as “A. G.”; see Anna Gorenko, Stikhi, ed. Evgenii Soshkin ( Jerusalem: Beseder, 2000), 74; Gorenko, “Perevod s evropeiskogo.” The information in Tarasov’s commentary regarding Gorenko’s relative who died in Theresienstadt appears incorrect; see Tarasov’s commentary to Gorenko’s Maloe sobranie, 123. See chronology in “Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Wikipedia, accessed October 22, 2021, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto”; see also Inge Auerbacher, “Theresienstadt,” accessed October 22, 2021, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt; Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Richard Brody, “The Holocaust Is Present,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2012, accessed October 22, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ richard-brody/the-holocaust-is-present. Anna Gorenko, “prosypaisia umerli noch′iu poety vse-vse . . .,” in her Prazdnik nespelogo khleba, ed. Evgenii Soshkin and Il′ia Kukulin (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003), 53. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, in his Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 19–34.

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In Closing This brief and selective investigation could not possibly do justice to the Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry scene. In addition to Savelii Grinberg, whose post-Futurist poetry I mentioned earlier in this paper, a detailed survey of Russophone avant-garde poetic practices in Israel would be incomplete without a discussion of these poets: Vladimir Tarasov (b. 1954; aliyah in 1974), Petia Ptakh (b. 1978; aliyah in 1988), Arye Rotman (b. 1954; aliyah in 1988), Mikhail Korol (b. 1960; aliyah in 1990), Evgeny Soshkin (b. 1974; aliyah in 1990), Dennis Sobolev (b. 1971; aliyah in 1991), and Asya Engele (aliyah ca. 2000–2001; returned to Israel 2007). Russian-Israeli poetry today is both a map and a mirror of Russophone poetry. Only the future will show which paths and which reflections of the Russian avantgarde this poetry will choose to claim for itself in twenty-first-century Israel.

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Isakova, Anna. “Gendelev: Dendizm, nravstvennyi imperativ i prochie strannosti.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 98 (2009). Accessed January 12, 2022. http://www.gendelev.org/ issledovaniya/391-anna-isakova-gendelev-dendizm-nravstvennyj-imperativ-i-prochie-strannosti.html. Ivaniuk, Boris. “Stikhotvorenie M. Gendeleva ‘Doktor Leto’: Zametki na oboikh poliakh.” Филоlogos 1 (2017): 29–38. Jabotinsky, Vladimir [Vladimir Zhabotinskii]. “Hespêd.” Evreiskaia zhizn′ 6, no. 1 (1904): 8–10. ———. “In Memory of Herzl.” Translated by Jaime Goodrich and Maxim D. Shrayer. In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801– 2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 1, 148–150. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “Pamiati Gertslia.” In Doktor Gertsl′, by Vladimir Jabotinsky, 4–5. Odesa: Kadima, 1905. Janecek, Gerald J.  The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Katsis, Leonid. “Kratkii biobibliograficheskii ocherk.” In Nepolnoe sobranie sochinenii, by Mikhail Gendelev, 523–525. Moscow: Vremia, 2003. Katsman, Roman. “Jewish Fearless Speech: Towards a Definition of Soviet Jewish Nonconformism (F. Gorenshtein, F. Roziner, D. Shrayer-Petrov).” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 1 (2018): 41–55. ———. “‘Machshavti reeva’: Al shirata ha-ivrit shel Gali-Dana Singer.” The Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 31 (2020): 565–601. ———. “Mikhail Grobman.” In his “‘Smelaia bezzashchitnost′ nonkonformizma’ (Il’ia Gabai, Mikhail Grobman, Genrikh Sapgir).” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 59 (2017). Accessed January 12, 2022. http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/59/Katzman_59.pdf. ———. “New Literary Geography: Demarginalization of Contemporary Russophone Literature in Israel.” Lecture at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, October 11, 2017. https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/ new-literary-geography-demarginalization-contemporary-russophone-literature-israel. ———. “Razmyshleniia o poezii i vremeni.” Review of Cherez, by Dennis Sobolev. Iudaica Russica 2 (2020): 146–172. Kellman, Steven G. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Komm, Aleksei. “Poet ‘sploshnogo chuda’ v teni piterskogo andergraunda: Etiud o Volokhonskom.” Diskurs, December 6, 2018. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://discours.io/articles/culture/ poet-sploshnogo-chuda-v-teni-piterskogo-andergraunda-etyud-ob-anri-volohonskom. Konstantinova, S. L. Russkii poeticheskii avangard: XX vek. Pskov: Pskovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet imeni S. M. Kirova, 2007. Krivulin, Viktor. “Voina bez pobeditelei i pobezhdennykh.” Zvezda 12 (1990). Accessed January 12, 2022. http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/242-viktor-krivulin-vojna-bez-pobediteleji-pobezhdennykh.html. Kukuj, Ilja [Il′ia Kukui]. ”Zametki o poetike Anri Volokhonskogo 1960-kh gg.” In “Vtoraia kul′tura.” Neofitsial′naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody, edited by Petr Kazarnovskii, 232–250. St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2013. Kukulin, Il′ia. “Anna Gorenko.” In his Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi. Stat′i o sovremennoi poezii, 562–566. Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2019. ———. “Prosvechivaiushchie goroda.” Introduction to Obraz zhizni, by Aleksandr Barash. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://www.nlobooks.ru/books/novaya_poeziya/674/review/8781/.

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———. “Prosvechivaiushchie goroda.” Introduction to Obraz zhizni, by Aleksandr Barash. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://syg.ma/@ kirill-korchaghin/alieksandr-barash-stikhi-iz-knighi-obraz-zhizni. Korchagin, Kirill. “O stranstvuiushchikh i puteshestvuiushchikh.” Booknik.ru, April 20, 2007. Accessed January 12, 2022. http://booknik.ru/today/fiction/o-stranstvuyushchih-iputeshestvuyushchih/. Lachman, Lilach. “Yeshurun, Avot (1904–1992).” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, edited by Stephen Ross. Article posted 2018. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://www.rem. routledge.com/articles/yeshurun-avot-1904-1992. Lekhtsier, Vitalii. “Poeziia kak fenomenologiia.” Vozdukh 40 (2020). Accessed January 12, 2022. http://www.litkarta.ru/projects/vozdukh/issues/2020-40/lekhtsier/. Mordovina, Elena. “Sol′ zemli. O poete Anne Gorenko (Karpa) (1971–1999).” Pechorin. net, February18, 2021. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://pechorin.net/articles/view/ sol-ziemli-o-poetie-annie-gorienko-karpa-1972-1999. Perloff, Marjoree. “Avant-Garde Community and the Individual Talent.” Accessed January 12, 2022. http://marjorieperloff.blog/essays/avant-garde-community-and-the-individual-talent/. ———. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Moment of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Probstein, Ian. “Drums of Fate: David Shrayer-Petrov’s Poetics of Fractured Wholeness.” In The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov, edited by Roman Katsman, Maxim D. Shrayer, and Klavdia Smola, 95–131. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. Ronen, Omry [Omri Ronen]. “Dva poliusa paronomazii.” In Russian Verse Theory. Proceedings of the 1987 Conference at UCLA, edited by Barry P. Sherr and Dean S. Worth, 289–291. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. Rybkin, Pavel. “Anna Gorenko: ‘Ostanemsia doma.’” Prosodia.ru, April 4, 2021. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://prosodia.ru/catalog/stikhotvorenie-dnya/anna-gorenko-ostanemsya-doma. Segal, Dmitrii. “Vitrazhi slova.” Nasha strana [Tel Aviv], August 28, 1990. Accessed January 14, 2022. http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/255-dimitrij-segal-vitrazhi-slova.html. Shargorodsky, Sergei [Sergei Shargorodskii]. “The Darkness of Babylon: A Russian-Jewish-Israeli Experience in Visionary Journeys of Mikhail Gendelev.” In Jewishness in Russian Culture, edited by Leonid Katsis and Helen Tolstoy, 185–203. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Shrayer, Maxim D., ed. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001 [in 2 vols]. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “Anna Gorenko.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 1163–1164. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “Dovid Knut.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 1, 446–449. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ——— [Shraer, Maksim D.], and David Shrayer-Petrov [David Shraer-Petrov]. Genrikh Sapgir: Klassik avangrda. 3rd. ed. Ekaterinburg: Izdatel′skie resheniia and Ridero, 2017. ———. “Henri Volohonsky.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 942–943. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “Ilia Bokshtein.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 962–963. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007.

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——— [Shraer, Maksim D.]. “Il′ia Bokshtein.” In Fantaziia strastei, by Ilia Bokstein, xv–xvii. 2nd ed. Edited by Mina Lein. Jerusalem: Skopus, 2010. ———. “Mikhail Grobman.” In An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, vol. 2, 981–982. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. ———. “Reflections of a Translingual Writer.” The Odessa Review, June 1, 2017. Accessed January 14, 2022. http://odessareview.com/reflections-translingual-writer/. Singer, Gali-Dana [Gali-Dana Zinger]. Chast′ tse. Moscow: Argo-risk; and Tver: Kolonna, 2005. ———. “The Poetry of Gali-Dana Singer.” TLV1, August 7, 2019. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2019/08/07/the-poetry-of-gali-dana-singer/. Solov′ev-Fridman, Denis. “Razbory ne bez chteniia No. 3. Telo Any kak nekonets nerusskogo Avangarda.” Topos. August 14, 2003. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://www.topos.ru/ article/1493. Soshkin, Evgeny [Evgenii Soshkin]. “Gorenko i Mandel′shtam.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 53 (2004): 73–129. ———. “Ot adamova iabloka do Adamova iazyka: Territoriia Anny Gorenko.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 5 (2002). Accessed January 14, 2022. https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2002/5/ ot-adamova-abloka-do-adamova-yazyka-territoriya-anny-gorenko.html. ———. “Ot sostavitelia.” In Stikhi, by Anna Gorenko, 76–77. Jerusalem: Biblioteka zhurnala “Solnechnoe spletenie,” 2000. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. “Theresienstadt Ghetto.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Theresienstadt_Ghetto. Tolts, Mark. “A Half-Century of Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union: Demographic Aspects.” Paper presented on November 20, 2019 at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/events/ half-century-jewish-emigration-former-soviet-union-demographic-aspects. Vaiman, Naum. “Il′ia Bokshtein: Poeziia kak obraz zhizni.” OpenSpace.ru. November 12, 2010. Accessed January 14, 2022. http://os.colta.ru/literature/events/details/18665/. Vezhlian, Evgeniia. “Zametki na poliakh nevozmozhnoi knigi.” Lekhaim 1 (2011). Accessed January 14, 2022. https://lechaim.ru/ARHIV/225/vezhlyan.htm. Viktorov, Aleksei. “Khimiia Anri Volokhonskogo.” April 10, 2017. Jewish.ru. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://jewish.ru/ru/people/culture/175872/. Vizel′, Mikhail. “Pamiati Anri Volokhonskogo.” Vedomosti. April 10, 2017. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://www.vedomosti.ru/lifestyle/articles/2017/04/10/684877-pamyati-volohonskogo. Volchek, Dmitrii, et al. “Filolog gnal stada kentavrov.” Radio Svoboda. April 14, 2017, Accessed January 14, 2022. https://www.svoboda.org/a/24749861.html. Weisskopf, Mikhail [Mikhail Vaiskopf]. “Teologiia Mikhaila Gendeleva.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 98 (2009). Accessed January 14, 2022. http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/389mikhail-vajskopf-teologiya-mikhaila-gendeleva.html. Zelinskii, Kornelii. “Konstruktivizm i poeziia.” In Mena vsekh, by Kornelii Zelinskii, Aleksei Nikolaevich Chicherin, and Elii-Karl Sel′vinskii, 12–29. Moscow: Konstruktivisty-poety, 1924.

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Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s Roman Katsman 1.  The Emergent Literary Community The history of Russian-Israeli literature is the history of the deminorization of the Russian-Israeli creative consciousness and the community based on it. To understand it, one must trace this development. In the following pages, I can only sketch a historiographic program and tentatively outline this field of historical-literary meaning, since the subject itself still needs to be brought into scholarly circulation. Russian-language literature in Israel during the one hundred years of its existence has traveled a difficult path. (For an overview of the Russian-language literature of the yishuv, see Vladimir Khazan’s essay in this volume.) After a start during the great changes of the 1920s, it almost disappeared in the years between World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, and became a trickle in the 1950s and 1960s. It finally turned into a flood during the brief but powerful aliyah of the 1970s following the Six-Day War, the renewal of antisemitism, the persecution of dissidents after the Thaw, and the developing battle for the rights of Soviet Jews to national self-determination and repatriation. It was during this period and in this ideological-political context that the self-awareness of Russian-Israeli literature was formed as one of the ways of fighting for the rights of and a place for the emerging Russian Jewish identity in the geopolitical and sociohistorical reality of the age of new wars both cold and hot. There was a sense that the very genotype of this literature is composed of elements of identity politics. By the end of the 1980s, the resources of a hero-victim identity ideology built into the Russian-Israeli literature had been formalized and exhausted. Everything changed with the beginning of the Great Aliyah of the 1990s, which



Copyright © 2023 by Roman Katsman.

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brought an end both to the two-hundred-year-old Russian Jewish minority and to the one-hundred-year-old Russian-Israeli marginality. The literature of the 1990s more comfortably and without conflict perceived itself simultaneously as Russian-Jewish and Israeli-Jewish—in effect, a nationally major literature of two countries at once. It gradually curtailed the auto-marginalization project in the context of Israeli culture, becoming an autonomous participant in a chaotic process that was independent of the system of social hierarchies and relationships of the cultural center and periphery. One part of it made significant efforts toward understanding and interiorizing Israeli culture, while another concentrated on its own place in Russian and world culture and literature; but in both cases, it stopped being essentially identity oriented, although questions of cultural belonging often continued to matter. These tendencies became still stronger during the aliyah of the 2000s and especially the 2010s; the aliyah continues as a narrower but constant stream to this day, when any group or identity politics can be placed in doubt due equally to the atomization and the globalization of literary processes. The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s were a watershed moment in the history of Russian-Israeli literature. The lifting of restrictions on repatriation from the Soviet Union and then its disintegration changed not only the geopolitical map of the world but also the inner conditions, the very nature of Russian-language writing in Israel. The new Russian-Israeli literature broke with its roots in Russian-Jewish literature. In a world of open borders and possibilities, it partially divorced itself from an émigré mentality, although it did not abandon the everyday and psychological representation of émigré existence. Finally, by the end of the 1990s, it was expanding and becoming self-aware enough to turn into a separate—although not always recognized as such—community with a complex identity. The literature of this period reveals with all clarity the fact that a community was forming around Russian-Israeli literature—a community that can be called “emergent,” that is, irreducible to the sum of its defining factors and consisting of an indefinite quantity of various elements and powers with variously directed vectors. An emergent community is not a group or a collective; consequently, terms like “group identity,” “identity politics,” or any other neoMarxist label are not applicable to it. Such a community is composed of many elements: writers, statements, works, books, and even the individual dynamic processes that arise in statements or due to them. Sometimes an emergent community looks like a set of points, as in the 1920s–1960s; sometimes it looks like a three-dimensional figure in which the points are connected by many curves, as in the 1970s–1980s. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly taken on the form of a strange attractor.

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The main thing that can and should be said about the Russian-Israeli literary “noncommunity” is that the meaning of the Russian-Israeli sign- and culturecreating process exceeds the simple combination of Russian and Israeli creative processes. This “surplus meaning” is what constitutes the symbolic and cultural capital being accumulated by Russian-Israeli literature. Although this literature is not a community, it employs a common cumulative capital that is not reducible to any one of its component communities and that does not belong to any one separately. Given that Russian and Israeli meanings constitute the reality of existence of this literature, its so-called boundary values, its surplus, emergent meaning arises from understanding, experiencing, overcoming, and appropriating this reality. Thus, only literature that produces surplus meaning is RussianIsraeli—it must comprehend and bridge Russian-Israeli reality. Such a literature, being Israeli, is not only Israeli but opposes its appropriation by the Israeli process; at the same time, it strives to overcome it. Being Russian, it does not allow Russian literature and the Russian language to appropriate it; instead, it fights with them. Maia Kaganskaia wrote in 1983: Russian-language literature already exists in Israel—it just has not been written yet. Writing it requires a courage and pride equal to, but different from, Nabokov’s. It is not a matter of changing the language, but of changing the themes and direction of the creative will [. . .]. Monolithic linguistic empires, like political ones, collapse in the twentieth century. Their emigrants settle in world cultures and create their metropolises in imperial languages in any part of the globe. A language is no longer tied to a land or to a mass of people who speak it; it does not hinder the writer, and a Jewish writer was not completely defined by it in the past either. For an artist working with Russian-language material, Israel presents unheard-of possibilities that Russian culture does not provide—individualistic and metaphysical possibilities.1 In another 1983 article—this time about the search for Russian-Israeli selfidentification (mainly in literature)—Nelli Gutina also consistently denied separate Russian, Israeli, Jewish, and cosmopolitan identities, and found a way out in the mutated inoculation of Russian-Jewish culture on Israeli soil. The

1

Maiia Kaganskaia, “Nerusskii roman,” 22 31 (1983): 165–178.

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mutation culture of immigrants could, in her opinion, develop independently of the metropolis and give rise to a new identity of “Russian-speaking mutants in Israeli culture.”2 Gutina did not believe that it was possible to get out, in her words, from the “labyrinth of identities.” However, as the development of her program in the next decade showed, it was possible for the “mutants” to escape. In the new historical moment—that is, after the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalism—multiple and fluid identities became acceptable. Indeed, there was an entire theoretical rejection of identity as a useful concept. The literature of the period under discussion will be examined below as an interweaving of various individual—nonidentical—processes. It is precisely the surplus, emergent meaning that serves as the point of crystallization of various phenomena within the noncommunity of Russian-Israeli literature—groups, journals, newspapers—and they participate in the literary process as “individuals” along with the individual creative works of writers. In this regard, it is necessary to mention a recent article by Dennis Sobolev, who defines Russian-Israeli literature in terms of “regional ontology,” which is understood as an affinity of forms of existence of individuals in the spatial-temporal—phenomenological and geographical—“region” of the Land of Israel and the State of Israel.3 Recognizing in principle the value of this idea of the nonidentical, it must be noted, firstly, that a phenomenological approach is able to blur the boundaries of any reality until it is completely unrecognizable and the boundaries of any concept until it is completely useless; and secondly, that establishing the dependence of literature on being, from the point of view of methodology, inevitably leads us (perhaps against the wishes of the scholar himself) to vulgar Marxism— and this is precisely what should be avoided if we want to understand a phenomenon in all its complexity and chaos. I am convinced that the further elaboration of Sobolev’s theory, as well as the elaboration of the emergent approach suggested here, will lead to a method that makes it possible to evaluate adequately and to analyze those literary processes in which the “unheard-of possibilities” that Kaganskaia wrote about in 1983 and which, apparently, are not limited to certain identity policies, are actually implemented. Let us take 1990 as an obvious starting point. In that year, the Scopus-2 collection, compiled by David Markish and Margarita Shklovskaia, was published. This text does not sum up the previous stage of Russian-Israeli literature (like

2 3

Nelli Gutina, “V poiskakh utrachennoi identifikatsii,” 22 29 (1983): 218. Dennis [Denis] Sobolev, “Russko-izrail′skaia literatura kak ‘regional′naia ontologiia,’” Artikl′ 18 (2021): 302.

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the first Scopus in 1979),4 but marks the beginning of a new era. It includes work by authors from both the previous and the new wave of aliyah. In 1990, Beg vremeni (Flight of time) was established and a weekly supplement to the newspaper Nasha strana (Our country, published since 1968)5 started coming out, edited by two women of the “seventies,” Nelli Gutina (b. 1946, repatriated 1972)6 and Irina Vrubel′-Golubkina. The latter was renamed Znak vremeni (Sign of the times) in 1991 and was edited by Vrubel′-Golubkina. In 1992, it was renamed Zven′ia (Links) and closed the same year. Irina Vrubel′Golubkina writes about the publication of the first issue: “The process took off, and the main thing was that a milieu started forming. . . . Znak vremeni was a symptom of the appearance of a new Russian culture in Israel in the 1990s.”7 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein adds, “We managed to develop the free speech of a free discussion of culture in the newspaper.”8 Indeed, “the process took off ” with other publications as well, such as, for example, the journal of the Jerusalem Literary Club Obitaemyi ostrov (Inhabited island), under the editorship of Sergei Shargorodskii (b. 1959, repatriated 1973), which lasted for three issues in 1991; the two issues (1992 and 1993) of the journal of the Van Leer Institute Stranitsy (Pages), under the editorship of Zeev Bar-Sella (b. 1947, repatriated 1973); in the issues of the journal Slog (Syllable), under the editorship of Ilia Zundelevich, Izrail′ Maler, and Vladimir Tarasov in 1993–1994; the two 1993 issues of the journal Aktsent (Accent), under the editorship of the researcher and Yiddish poet Velvl Chernin (b. 1958, repatriated 1990); and the journal Alef (Aleph), which came out in Israel from 1991 to 1997 under the editorship of Vladimir Khanelis, Pesakh Amnuel′, and David Shekhter (it came out as a

4 5

See Aleksei Surin’s essay in this collection. The following are used as reference material without further citation: Charles Berlin and Elizabeth Vernon, eds., Catalog of Israeli Russian-Language Publications in the Harvard Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Polina Besprozvannaya, Andrei Rogachevskii, and Roman Timenchik, eds., Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography (Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies,, 2016). 6 Nelli Gutina is the author of the remarkable book Zhurnal ( Journal, 1987), which in many respects anticipated the trends of the latest Russian-Israeli literature, both in the poetic plane (multi-genre, fragmentation, postmodernism, polyphony), and in terms of understanding its own features and its place in culture. Gutina is also the author of a novel about the work of the underground business in the USSR “Double Bottom” (1978), a book of journalistic essays Izrail′tiane. Sdelano v SSSR (Israel goes Russian, 2011), and numerous publications in periodicals. 7 Irina Vrubel′-Golubkina, Razgovory v zerkale (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2014), 473. 8 Ibid., 475.

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newspaper in 1981–1988 under the editorship of Bentsion Rubinson; it has been published in Moscow since 2000). Another important sign of the times was the appearance of joint Soviet (later Russian) and Israeli editorial projects. Thus, in 1990, the anthology Kovcheg (Ark) appeared, under the editorship of the literary scholar, translator, editor, and publisher Feliks Dektor (1930–2020, repatriated 1976) and Roman Spektor, the result of a cooperation between the publishers Tarbut (“culture,” in Hebrew) in Jerusalem and Khudozhestvennaia literatura in Moscow. Dektor started publishing the journal Tarbut in samizdat as early as 1975 in the USSR. In Israel in 1977, he founded the cultural association and publishing house Tarbut, which produced the periodicals Narod i Zemlia (The Nation and the Land)9 and Sabra: ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal dlia molodezhi (Sabra: A monthly periodical for young people, 1982–1996), which included the children’s magazine Arik. As we are informed in the introduction to the first issue of Kovcheg, the editors of Narod i Zemlia and the samizdat (Moscow) periodical Shalom “joined portfolios” in the almanac.10 The co-chairmen of the editorial board of Kovcheg were Icchokas Meras from Israel and Mikhail Chlenov from the USSR. The board also included Itskhak Oren, Ben-Zion Tomer, Grigory Kanovich, Velvl Chernin, and others. The four volumes of the almanac that came out up to 1994 published the works of Eli Liuksemburg, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Igor′ Guberman, and many others, translations from Hebrew, Yiddish, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and other languages, as well as essays in literary and culturological studies. Yet another vivid example of this kind of project was the editorial activity of Mikhail Grinberg (b. 1951, repatriated 1988). In 1990, he set up the Gesharim / Mosty Kul′tury (Bridging cultures) publishing house (its Moscow editorial office opened in 1998), which was intended to satisfy the increasing need for Jewish books and, in particular, to provide Moscow Jewish University, founded in 1992, with literature. In that year, Grinberg began to publish the scholarly journal Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve (Bulletin of the Jewish University in Moscow, 1992–2011; from 1999, Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta— editor-in-chief Israel Bartal). Later, in 2002–2005, the publishing house issued the periodical Evreiskii knigonosha ( Jewish book peddler), under the editorship of Leonid Katsis (in 2006–2011, it became a section in the Moscow periodical

Narod i Zemlia came out with the subtitle “A Quarterly Digest of the Israeli Press” between 1977 and 1980 and with the subtitle “A Periodical of Jewish Culture” from 1984 to 1988, when Icchokas Meras became the chairman of the editorial board and Dektor became the editor-in-chief. 10 “Ot redaktorov,” Kovcheg 1 (1990): 3. 9

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Lekhaim). This periodical, oriented toward a literary and bibliographic survey of Jewish literature, ran Roman Timenchik’s column “Russkoe slovo na zemle Izrailia” (The Russian word in the land of Israel). Grinberg’s publishing house, now rebranded as Mikhail Grinberg’s Library, remains to this day the largest Russian-Israeli publisher specializing in Jewish belles-lettres and popular-science literature. Also meriting mention among the undertakings of the early 1990s are the culturally and scholarly, although not literarily, significant projects of the publisher and editor Mikhail Parkhomovskii (1928–2015, repatriated 1990), who released a series of collections of articles Evrei v kul′ture Russkogo Zarubezh′ia ( Jews in the culture of the Russian abroad, 1992–96) and Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezh′e (Russian Jewry abroad, 1998–2011). The coeditors and compilers of several collections also included Leonid Iuniverg, Andrei Rogachevskii, Dmitrii Guzevich, Iuliia Sister, Ernst Zal′tsberg, Ariel Borshchevski, R. Parkhomovskaia, Konstantin Kikoin, and Il′ia Reznik. Members of the editorial board and authors over the years included Gleb Morev, Efim Etkind, Mark Amusin, Dina Rubina, Dora Shturman, Ruf ’ (Ruth) Zernova, Dan Kharuv, Lazar Fleishman, Il′ia Serman, Viktor Erlikh, Boris Nosik, Oleg Lasunskii, and other authors from various countries. The academic research center founded by Mikhail Parkhomovskii in 1997 is now called The Jews of Russia Abroad and in Israel and is named after him; it is headed by Iuliia Sister (b. 1936, repatriated 1990). *** The period of 1994–1998 was the most important and, in many respects, foundational moment in the history of the literature of the Great Aliyah. These years saw the rise of a series of literary periodicals, communities formed around them, and writers who had recently arrived, energetically embarked on their new projects, and enjoyed their first successes. This stage was characterized by two basic features: first, the vigorous growth of new periodicals and newspapers and the accompanying intensification of work in the essay genre and journalistic prose; second, the flowering of experimental—avant-garde and countercultural— literature. (On the avant-garde, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in this volume.) In terms of timing, it coincided with analogous processes in literature in the postSoviet space, and its historical context shared the same family features: intoxication with newly acquired freedom, cultural collapse (according to an incisive expression prevailing at the time, the whole country found itself in “emigration”), the reality of social and everyday disorder, and irresponsible political and economic experiments. In other words, the Great Aliyah experienced the “roaring 1990s.”

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

In 1994, the journal Zerkalo (Mirror) (no. 115) published the story “Zdes′ i teper′. U podnozhia tainogo ucheniia” (Here and now. At the foot of the secret teaching) by Moisei (Moshe or Mikhail) Vinokur (1944–2007, repatriated in 1973).11 He managed to reveal new, unusual possibilities of Russian-Israeli literature by combining criminal underworld themes and style with bold, obscene vocabulary, Hebrew diglossia, and multilingual slang, thus turning the Russian language into a special dialect of an Israeli-repatriate old timer—rusit (“Russian” in Hebrew), as he called it.12 In 1996, in the first issue of what became the new series of Zerkalo magazine, Vinokur’s short novel “Pesn′ pesnei” (Song of songs) was published, later included under the title “Dal′nie pastbishcha” (Distant pastures) in his collection of stories of the same name (1997). This was followed by other publications in the Zerkalo—“Sneg” (Snow, nos. 7–8 [1997]) and “Tri vospitona” (Three pupils, nos. 17–18 [2001–2002]). The collection Otobrannoe (Gathered) was published in Tel Aviv in the Library of Matvei Chernyi in 2000. And finally, in the journal Bul′var Rotshilda (Rothschild Boulevard, no. 1 [2016]), Vinokur’s story “Golany” (Golan Heights) was published. Vinokur was never prolific and eventually stopped writing altogether, but only delivered oral stories that his friends filmed (the videos can be found on YouTube). Scandalous, but subtly poetic philosophical prose, a larger-than-life personality, and a difficult, tragic fate, which included boxing, war, prison, and Jewish piety and ended with death by a killer’s knife—all this brought Vinokur fame as one of the most interesting, albeit controversial figures in Russian-Israeli literature. To some extent he paved the way for such masters of the new Russian-Israeli writing as Aleksandr Gol′dshtein and Mikhail Iudson. In 1997, Aleksandr Gol′dshtein’s first book, Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Parting with Narcissus) was published by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New literary review), a journal founded only five years earlier, but already prestigious and elite. This novel defined the significance of Gol′dshtein’s artistic and intellectual method: it simultaneously brought the author a Little Booker Prize (“to the author of a book dedicated to the historical-philosophical study of Russian literature”) and the antagonistic Anti-Booker Prize (in the category “Literary Studies and Literary Criticism”). The admired Moscow publication and the awarding of 11 Also note the 1990 publication “Literaturnye stranitsy” (Literary pages) by the publishing house Tamar, which has become a bibliographic rarity. It consisted of two stories by Vinokur: “Vetka pal′my” (Palm branch) and “Pari” (A bet), which were subsequently included in the collection Dal′nie pastbishcha (Distant pastures). 12 Moisei Vinokur, Otobrannoe [Selected] (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2000), 206. See also his: “Golany” (Golan Heights), 2002, http://www.lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ WINOKUR_M/golany.txt.

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two Russian prizes to a writer who was not known in the former USSR before his emigration, and who started his creative career in Israel, marked new horizons in the development of Russian-Israeli literature and its interaction with the Russian book market. In 1996, Dina Rubina began her path in Russian-Israeli fiction with the émigréapocalyptic novel Vot idet Messiia! (Here comes the Messiah!). The following year, in 1997, the novel Ierusalimskii dvorianin (A Jerusalem nobleman) by Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Iurii Nesis came out. The first in their series of Jerusalem novels, it determined for many years the main line of their novels. These works express the character of the literature of the aliyah of the new wave. They are redolent with newly acquired freedom and immersed in Israel’s turbulent reality—but not divorced from the memory of the Jewish and Soviet past; they are imbued with Jewish self-awareness, but are unmarked by national-Jewish or Zionist ideology; they drawing upon the poetic traditions of Russian and world literature, but strive to rediscover them in an effort to digest the depths of Israeli culture. The path this wave represents is especially noticeable in the context of another literary direction that strove to reinvent Jewish traditional (for example, the midrashic and talmudic) poetics within Israeli Russian-language literature—a direction seen most vividly in Iakov Tsigel′man’s writing, in particular his novel Shebsl-muzykant (Shebsl the Musician, 1996), and reinforced by the concept of Maiia Kaganskaia, in which she soon becomes disillusioned.13 In 1997, Grigory Kanovich’s novel Park zabytykh evreev (Park of forgotten Jews) came out in the Moscow periodical Oktiabr′ (October). It was written after he moved to Israel in 1993, and marks yet another “classical” Russian-Jewish line in the literature of the aliyah of the 1990s. In 1994, an epoch-making “changing of signposts” took place in one of the most important Russian-Israeli periodicals—22 (Dvadtsat′ dva [Twenty-two]). Rafail Nudel′man (1931–2017, repatriated 1975), who had been at the helm of the periodical from the moment of its founding in 1978 by his former colleagues at the periodical Sion (Zion), was replaced as the editor-in-chief by Aleksandr Voronel′ (b. 1931, repatriated 1974). These years saw the creation in Jerusalem of the avant-garde periodicals I. O. (1994) and Dvoetochie (Colon, from 1995), under the editorship of Gali-Dana and Nekod Singer and Izrail′ Maler (these periodicals will be discussed in greater detail below), as well as Solnechnoe spletenie (Solar Plexus, 1998, under the editorship of Mikhail Weisskopf and Evgenii Soshkin). Zerkalo (Mirror), the “Nezavisimyi ezhemesiachnyi daidzhest 13 “Interv′iu s Maiei Kaganskoi,” Simurg (1997), http://www.gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudi-iteksty/451-etu-kontsiptsiyu-pridumala-ya-majya-kaganskaya.html.

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russkoiazychnoi zapadnoi pressy” (The independent monthly digest of the Russian-language Western press), which came out from 1985 under the editorship of Grigorii Chelak (1925–2009, repatriated 1981), was transformed into the Ezhemesiachnyi illiustrirovannyi zhurnal (Illustrated monthly magazine), whose editor was be Irina Vrubel′-Golubkina, and from 1996 it became the “thick” Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi zhurnal (Literary-artistic journal). In 1994, Il′ia Voitovetskii, Elena Aksel′rod, and David Livshits created the literarycreative studio Sreda Obetovannaia (Promised milieu) in Be’er Sheva, where Mikhail Nosonovskii, Iurii Arustamov, Feliks Krivin, Renata Mukha, and the poet and prose writer Viktoriia Orti (Voitovetskii’s wife) were participants and teachers at various times. The studio published five issues of the almanac Obetovannaia Sreda (Promised milieu) and nine issues of the periodical Sreda (Milieu).14 These years also saw the publication of such almanacs as Roza vetrov (Rose of the winds, 1995–2002), under the editorship of Mark Kotliarskii, and Simurg (Simurgh, 1997), under the editorship of Evgenii Soshkin and Evgenii Gel′fand. The almost simultaneous appearance of several periodicals based on different aesthetical concepts, as well as periodicals that gathered around them writers’ communities in Israeli megapolises, created both an inner tension and a stability that are so indispensable for a literary community. An important factor in the formation of a new, and in many respects independent self-awareness of Russian-Israeli literature, was the rise of the internet and personal computers, in particular the appearance of a Russian literary segment of the web and its corresponding social networks and blog platforms. In 1994, an internet literary competition took place for the first time. It was called Teneta (“snare,” or “net,” also known as Art-Teneta or Teneta-RiNet), among whose organizers were Aleksandr Zhitinskii (1941–2012), the founder of the publishing house Novyi Gelikon (in 1991, called Gelikon-Plius from 1997), as well as the then-Israelis Leonid Delitsyn and Anton Nosik (1966–2017). The competition continued until 2002, and its laureates were often authors of RussianIsraeli literature—for example, Efraim Podoksik (1994), Linor Goralik (1998), Alexander Barash (1998), Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, and Iurii Nesis (2000). The collection Poety “Bol′shogo Tel′-Aviva” (Poets of “Greater Tel Aviv”) came out in 1996. Its compiler was Iakov Shekhter (b. 1956, repatriated 1987; see also Elena Promyshlianskaia’s essay in this volume), and its editor was Efrem Baukh. In the accompanying article, Anna Kisin and Iakov Shekhter write, “The encounter with the reality of another country [. . .] becomes the catalyzer—and 14 Sheiva Gol′tsman, “20-letie literaturnoi zhizni,” website of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel, 2014, http://www.srpi.org/news/139/.

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symbol—for the search for a goal, meaning, and purpose. [. . .] Geography acquires the meaning of a map of the soul; moving around the surface of this map or the draw toward a particular point on it is perceived as a change in the spiritual coordinate, as a touching of a spiritual high-voltage field, and to a certain degree as a reorientation.”15 In the same year, the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel established a prize for the best book of the year. (The union was formed in 1971–1973; its founders and members of the first management board were Isaak Tsetlin, Israel Zmora, Leon Lior [Libman], Arieh Rafaeli [Tsentsiper], Icchokas Meras, David Markish, Andrei Klenov, Viktor Perelman, and Zeev Gitelman, later joined by Efrem Baukh) The Jerusalem writers’ organization put out the first issue of the almanac Literaturnyi Ierusalim (Literary Jerusalem), timed to coincide with the three thousandth anniversary of the city and dedicated to the topic of Jerusalem. Efim Gammer (b. 1945, repatriated 1978), one of the authors and a member of the editorial board of the almanac, writes: Many of the authors in the first issue of the almanac are completely “fresh” repatriates in whom an Israeli essence has not yet emerged. But the line toward the acquisition of their own writer’s “I” in their own country, a unique view of the world through the magic crystal of Jerusalem and Israel, is already discernable. Say what you will about the paths of development of literature, but they have their own differences in every country.16 Gammer adds that he sees himself and his fellow writers as part of “international Russian literature.”17 Evgenii Minin (b. June 10, 1949, repatriated 1990) became the editor-in-chief. Later, Minin became the chairman of the International Union of Jerusalem Writers, founded in 2014. In 1997, Iakov Shekhter and the poets Petr Mezhuritskii (b. 1953, repatriated 1990) and Pavel Lukash (b. 1960, repatriated 1990) founded the Tel Aviv Writers’ Club (affiliated with the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel), and in 1998 Iakov Shekhter started putting out the club’s organ, the journal Artikl′ with the Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo publishing 15 Anna Kisin and Iakov Shekhter, “Opyt na sebe,” in Poety “Bol′shogo Tel′-Aviva,” ed. E. Baukh (Tel Aviv: Federation of Unions of Israeli Writers, 1996), 116–117. 16 Efim Gammer, “Izrail′: Mezhdunarodnyi soiuz pisatelei Ierusalima,” Avtorskii al′manakh “MagRem” i personal′nyi sait Efima Gammera, 2014, https://www.yefim-gammer.com/showtopicjourn.php?line=42 17 Ibid.

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house. (Another result of the cooperation between Iakov Shekhter and Matvei Chernyi was the book Levantiiskaia korona. Venki sonetov [Levantine crown. Wreaths of sonnets, 1999], in which the sonnets of a number of Russian-Israeli poets are interwoven with Shekhter’s prose texts.) The name Artikl′ is an acronym, deciphered in the subtitle, which was moved to the cover in the first issues of the journal: “Iz arkhiva Tel′-avivskogo kluba literatorov” (From the Archive of the Writers’ Club of Tel Aviv). On the editorial board of the journal, Mikhail Iudson was responsible for prose, Irina Mauler for poetry, and Dennis Sobolev for literary criticism (see below about these writers); the executive editor was Mikhail Sidorov. Artikl′ grew out of the 22 circle as an alternative to that periodical’s academicism and its vision of the Russian-Jewish question. Aleksandr Voronel′ saw Russian-Jewish literature as a conglomerate of Russian and Jewish cultural and ideological frameworks, dissimilar but mutually preconditioned (in the same way, for example, Jewish and Christian philosophies can be viewed as necessarily interconnected); Shekhter believed that “only” language remained Russian in this configuration, and that the world of culture, its forms of consciousness, and its themes were Jewish and self-sufficient, although still connected with the usual social and everyday threads to other cultures depending on life’s necessity. Many Russian-Israeli prose writers and poets were published in Artikl′. Among those who contributed—and who still contribute regularly—were Dina Rubina, David Markish, Vladimir Khanan, Aleksandr Karabchievskii, Leonid Levinzon, Alexander Ilichevsky, Dennis Sobolev, Anna Fain, Mikhail Iudson, Naum Vaiman, Eli Liuksemburg, Mark Zaichik, and Olga Fiks. For some poets, the periodical became the venue for prose works, as, for example, in the case of Irina Mauler (whose poems appeared as early as the first issues of Artikl′). Her novel Pod znakom peremen, ili Liubov′ emigrantki (Under the sign of changes, or The love of an émigré woman) came out in 2005, and her stories also started coming out in Artikl′ later on. The periodical also published the prose of Mezhuritskii and Lukash, who subsequently published the collection of stories To, chto doktor propisal (What the doctor prescribed, 2001). The prose works of the well-known poet Vladimir Khanan (Khanan Babinsky, b. 1945, repatriated 1996), a representative of the St. Petersburg underground of the 1970s–1980s and samizdat author, were published in Artikl′, as well as in other periodicals. From the beginning of the 2000s, the following came out as separate publications: Aura fakta (Aura of the fact, 2002), Vverkh po lestnitse, vedushchei na podokonnik (Up the staircase leading to the windowsill, 2006), the eBook Byt′ killerom (To be a killer—under the pseudonym Artemii Liuger, 2016), and other books.

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Regularly published in the periodical are the artistic and critical texts of Alexander Karabchievskii (b. 1959, repatriated 1992), a prose writer and playwright, and a contributor to the almanac Ponedel′nik (Monday). This publication, which has been coming out since 2017 under the editorship of Natalia Terlikova, has been bringing together the participants of the “virtual group” Ponedel′nik nachinaetsia v subbotu (Monday starts on Saturday). In his appearance at the launching of the almanac, Karabchievskii, who had been closely observing the Russian-Israeli literary process, said, The first thesis is that what you write in general, and featured in this almanac in particular are phenomena that are indispensable to literature in Russian, even if at a cursory glance this indispensability is visible only faintly. And the second is that what you write in general, and in this almanac in particular are things that are indispensable to all of Israel, the nation and the state, even if some of our functionaries do not yet understand this.18 In the first years of the Great Aliyah, a small but active circle of informal, countercultural artists formed in Jerusalem, in the then-neglected Lifta neighborhood, thereby introducing its name into the dictionary of the Russian underground. Among its main figures was the half-legendary trinity of Oss (Iosif Fridliand), Mukh (Aleks Mukh, aka Aleksei Kamyshnyi, b. 1972),19 and Pchel (Edichka Pchel, aka Eduard Semenov);20 the poets Petia Ptakh (b. 1978, repatriate 1988) and Anna Gorenko (Karpa, 1972–1999, repatriated 1989) also belonged to this group. According to the participants, by 1993 the Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem “crowds” had merged, along with the poets and punk rockers; later they were joined by the “northern wave” of  Sovushka, Adolf from Krayot, and Stepan.21 The development of a literary underground was signaled by the publication in 1994–1996 of the periodical Khomer: Svobodnoe anarkho-psikhodelicheskoe izdanie (Khomer: A free anarcho-psychedelic publication), whose editor-inchief was Aleks Mukh, and in 1997 of the almanac Nishtiak: proza russkogo literaturnogo podpol′ia (Cool stuff: Prose of the Russian literary underground). That 18 Aleksandr Karabchievskii, “Tselesoobrazno i svoevremenno. Rech′, proiznesennaia na prezentatsii al′manakha ‘Ponedel′nik’ v Rossiiskom kul′turnom tsentre v Tel′-Avive,” Ponedel′nik 8, www.kartaslov.ru/книги/Наталья_Терликова_Понедельник_№8/3. 19 Besprozvannaya, Rogachevskii, and Timenchik, Russophone Periodicals in Israel, 114. 20 “Edichka (Pchel) Semenov,” Fishka.og.il, 2021, http://fishka.org.il/ru/people/30/. 21 Aleksei Kamyshnyi, “Istoriia russkogo poeticheskogo podpol′ia v Izraile,” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 39–44, here 41.

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same year, the almanac Simurg (Simurgh, 1997) came out under the editorship of Evgenii Soshkin and Evgenii Gel′fand. These disparate attempts finally found expression in the establishing in 1998 of the periodical Solnechnoe spletenie (Solar plexus), with the subtitle “Molodezhny zhurnal” (Youth magazine). In the first issue, Mikhail Gendelev writes (under the pseudonym of Mikhail Slozin) about the almanac Nishtiak, “We, of course, are dealing with a literature that is local, trashy, but alive and responding to the reality and even the metaphysics of our—or rather, their—existence. In this light, authors are, after all, writers, for which they should be treated with attention and suitable respect.”22 The editors’ introduction states: “We invite Russian Israeli youth to participate in the making sense of and interiorizing our Israeli present [. . .]. We want to enter as equals into an open dialogue with today’s Israeli culture—not ingratiating ourselves with it but trying to understand it.”23 Part of the issue was the section “Podpol′e” (Underground), opening with two notations by Aleksei Kamyshnyi (one of them under the pseudonym Mukh) on the “history of the Russian poetic underground in Israel.” In his words, the goal of the editors is the “attempt to combine the concepts of ‘creative underground’ and ‘Russian-language Israeli literature.’”24 The first issue of Solnechnoe spletenie contained the prose of Anna Gorenko, the poems of Dennis Sobolev, an essay on Nikolai Zabolotsky by Henri Volokhonsky, an article by Chava-Brocha Korzakova about Yiddish poetry, as well as a translation of Joyce and an article about the role-playing games of Tolkienists—all this was sufficient evidence of the serious intentions of the editors. Mikhail Weisskopf was the editor-in-chief of the first issue, and the editorial board consisted of Aleks Mukh, Evgenii Gel′fand, and Evgenii Soshkin. It was indicated in the second and then the following issues that the editor was Weisskopf, his deputy was Soshkin, and the project director was Mark Galesnik. The “Underground” section disappeared as of the second issue, and Aleks Mukh stopped appearing in the publication after the third issue, which came out in 1998. Among the regular authors of the periodical were Petia Ptakh, Dmitrii Deich, Mikhail Gendelev, Vladimir Tarasov, Yoel Regev; articles by Maiia Kaganskaia and Elena Tolstaia and translations from Celan and Pavić and many others appeared there.

22 Mikhail Gendelev, “Eize reakh shel rusim, ili Apologiia baiana,” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 125. 23 “Ot redaktorov,” Kovcheg 1 (1990): 3. 24 Mukh (Aleksei Kamyshnyi), “Podpol′e. Vvodnaia stat′ia k rubrike,” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 38.

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In 1998, in the city of Natzrat Ilit (now Nof ha-Galil), under the aegis of the literary association Galilee, the thick literary journal Galileia. Literaturnokhudozhestvennyi zhurnal (Galilee. Literary-artistic journal) started publication under the editorship of Mark Azov (Aizenshtadt, 1925–2011, repatriated 1994). Azov, a well-known playwright, prose writer, and poet, was the chairman of the northern division of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel and the literary association Galileia (Galilee), which is now named after him; he was also an actor in the Galileia Theater, founded in 1998 (for details, see Zlata Zaretsky’s essay in this volume). Azov is credited with the collection of stories I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ (Laughter, prose, and love, 2003), I obrushatsia gory. Kniga otkrovenii i fantazmov (And mountains will fall: A book of revelations and phantasms, 2009), and Sochinitel′ snov. Otkroveniia i fantazmy (Composer of dreams: Revelations and phantasms, 2011), among other works. The periodical Galileia published poems and prose, essays and criticism, children’s literature and humor, translations and artistic photography. Among its authors were Efrem Baukh, Grigory Kanovich, Aleksandr Volovik, Rina Levinzon, Valentin Krasnogorov, and many others. The periodical also published many of Azov’s stories. After his death in 2011, the periodical ceased publication, and the literary association is now headed by Mariia Voitikova. The almanac Pod nebom Galilei (Under the sky of Galilee) came out under her editorship in 2018. In concluding the survey of the vivid period of 1994–1998, we must note the book Proroki v svoem otechestve (Prophets in their own homeland, 1998), a collection of interviews with Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking Israeli writers conducted by Khaim Venger (b. 1932, repatriated 1980), a prose writer and poet, editor of the periodical Rodina (Homeland, 1981–1982) and the newspaper Ierusalimsky ezhenedel′nik ( Jerusalem weekly, 1991–1997), and a regular writer for the newspaper Novosti nedeli (News of the week). Its pages are inhabited by Rina Levinzon, Efrem Baukh, Eli Liuksemburg, Dina Rubina, Grigory Kanovich, Yehuda Amichai, Haim Gouri, Yitzchak Oren, Aharon Appelfeld, and A. B. Yehoshua. Hence it expresses a program that dominated in the 1970s–1980s and by inertia sometimes carried over into the 1990s: the creation of a living interaction between Russian-Israeli and Hebrew literatures. *** The next significant period in the development of the literature of the aliyah of the 1990s was in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This was the period when universalist, frequently intellectual, and magical-realist novels flourished. In this decade, Aleksandr Gol′dshtein’s creative work achieved its peak and was tragically cut short, Dina Rubina’s novels struck a

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balance between cultural-historical and emotional-psychological poetic systems, and the most important novels of Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s Jerusalem cycle, as well as the novels of Iudson, Sobolev, and Nekod Singer, were written (we will discuss them below). Unusual essay collections by Mikki Vul′f also appeared.25 What unites these authors’ work is an extremely high tension between “the Russian” and “the Israeli,” which finds expression in the creation of new artistic forms, ideas, languages, and myths. Through experimental and fragmentary “in-lieu-of-novels,” “factions,” “bioautographies,” novels in novellas, stories, essays, novel-diaries, and internet novels, post-emigration RussianIsraeli literature participated in the search for new forms, contents, and ideas simultaneously with Russian literature in Russia and in other countries. It was not only a matter of poetic innovation, but also of preserving literature’s right to the intellectual, philosophical utterance act, the right to be what Gol′dshtein and Sobolev in their works call the literature of existence. The more the Russian and, more broadly, the post-Soviet printed and digital publishing and reading market opened up, the more poetically independent Russian-Israeli literature became. One more significant phenomenon is noticeable in this period: some of the repatriates who came to Israel in the 1970s and had some substantial experience of cultural and intellectual activity began to publish artistic prose with Israeli and Russian publishing houses and periodicals. So, for example, Miriam Gamburd (b. 1947, repatriated 1977), a sculptor and a teacher at the Bezalel Academy of Art, started to publish stories and essays in Zvezda (Star) and Ierusalimskii zhurnal ( Jerusalem journal) and assembled them into the collections of prose Dvukhfigurnaia obnazhenka (Two-figure nude, 2001) and Gargul′ia (Gargoyle, 2020). Gamburd’s texts combine features of narrative-historical and autobiographical-documentary prose, and qualities of the philosophical essay with the professional observations of an artist; her cultural interests extend from the Tanakh and Talmud to contemporary Israel. Another example of a “writer of the seventies” who took up serious literature in the 2000s is Anna Isakova (b. 1944, repatriated 1971), an essayist and journalist, a former refusenik, and one of the founders and editors of the newspaper Vremia (Time). Eduard Kuznetsov became editor-in-chief, and, according to Nelli Gutina, the media mogul Robert

25 Mikki Vul′f (Alexander Markovich Brodsky, b. 1942, repatriated 1992) is a writer, essayist, journalist, translator, author of the books Milky Way i drugie krovel′nye raboty (Milky Way and other roofing works, 2003), Nesvoboda nebosvoda (Unfreedom of the sky, 2008). A slim book of his stories Vstrechi v puti (Meetings on the road, 2010) appeared in the literary supplement to the newspaper Novosti nedeli, Roman-gazeta (Novel-in-newspaper).

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Maxwell “pulled out [Kuznetsov] of Radio Liberty at the suggestion of Natan Sharansky.”26 In 1992, the Vesti newspaper was founded by a group of journalists that separated from Vremia and moved to the competing media concern (lead by Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief). Isakova became the first editor of the supplement Okna (Windows), which from the day of its founding and until it closed in 2017 was one of the central scenes in which the Russian-Israeli literary process was being formed. Isakova was subsequently also the editor of the supplement Kontekst (Context) of the newspaper Novosti nedeli (News of the week). In 2002, she began publishing in Neva, Zvezda (Star), and other thick journals and internet prose and poetry publications. Her novel Akh, eta chernaia luna! (Oh, that black moon!) came out in 2004. Her editorials, which had been published in the Moscow magazine Lekhaim, were brought together in the collection Moi Izrail′ (My Israel, 2015). In 1999, “initially under the aegis of the Jerusalem division of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel,27 the Ierusalimskii Zhurnal ( Jerusalem journal) opened, dedicated, according to the editor-in-chief, the poet Igor′ Bial′skii (b. 1949, repatriated 1990), to “contemporary Israeli literature in Russian”:28 “We wanted to show that Israeli literature in Russian exists and to present this literature—in various aesthetic hypostases—to Jerusalem and the world, preserving while doing so not only intentions that are Jerusalem-centric and Zionist, . . . [and] also its connection with literature that is essentially Russian.”29 As the periodical’s website informs us, the founders, besides Bial′skii, were Semen Grinberg, Leonid Levinzon, Zinaida Palvanova, Dina Rubina, Roman Timenchik, Susanna Chernobrova (who “came up with the trademark lion that personifies the JJ”),30 and Svetlana Shenbrunn. One of the journal’s columns contained critical and scholarly articles by literary scholars and intellectuals from Israel, Russia, and other countries. In 1999, the series Library of the Jerusalem Journal was created under the aegis of the journal, which put out books of poems and prose by authors such as, in addition to those named above, Ilia Bokstein, Elena Aksel′rod, L. Dymova, Mikhail Ziv, and Ilan Riss. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Ierusalimskii Zhurnal arranged activities in the House of the Legacy of Uri Zvi Grinberg in Jerusalem (in which its associate 26 Nelli Gutina, Izrail′tiane. Sdelano v SSSR (Israel Goes Russian) (Tel Aviv: Merkur, 2011), 83. 27 “Redaktsiia. Ierusalimskii zhurnal,” Ierusalimskaia antologiia, 2021, https://new.antho.net/ wp/jj-editorial/. 28 Igor′ Bial′skii, “K chitateliu,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 1 (1999), https://new.antho.net/wp/ jj01-k-chitatelu/. 29 Igor′ Bial′skii, “Ot redaktora. Predvaritel′nye itogi,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 57–58 (2017): 5. 30 Ibid.

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Inna Viniarskaia participated).31 Bial′skii, along with Ze’ev Sultanovich, conducted translation seminars. The Workshop of Poetic Translation, which works on translations of Grinberg’s works, is functioning under the aegis of the House to this day. The editorial board of Ierusalimskii Zhurnal includes Iulii Kim (b. 1936, repatriated 1998), the well-known poet, playwright, bard, songwriter for films and plays, activist in the dissident movement of the 1960s, and one of the founders of Khronika tekushchikh sobytii (Chronicle of current events, 1970–1971). His novel Puteshestvie k maiaku ( Journey toward the lighthouse, Ierusalimskii zhurnal 3 [2000]) is dedicated, as is the whole section of this issue, to Kim’s wife, Irina Iakir (1948–1999). The prose writer, poet, and scriptwriter Feliks Krivin (1928–2016, repatriated 1998) was also a regular author in the Ierusalimskii Zhurnal; he was the author of many books, miniatures for the famous comedian Arkadii Raikin, scripts for animated films, and a winner of both the Golden Calf Award (1988) and the V. G. Korolenko Prize (1990). Issue no. 3 (2000) of Ierusalimskii Zhurnal published his “Skazki iz zhizni” (Fairy tales from life), in which the popular genre of the fairy tale for adults borders on philosophical parable. His final publication—a selection of poems, prose miniatures, and aphorisms under the title “Rezat′ tak rezat′” (Slash if you’re going to)—came out in Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 27 in 2008. The journal also printed works by such interesting, but not abundantly published, authors as Viktor Pane (b. 1954, repatriated 1990), the writer of the novels and tales Gospodin na dlinnom povodke (Gentleman on a long leash, 1992), Tantseval′nyi shag (Dance step, 1997), Chto vdokhnovliaet (What inspires, 2001), Narukavniki dlia zhuravlei (Armbands for cranes, 2008). He also contributed to the collection Al′ternativnaia antologiia prozy. Russkii Izrail′ na rubezhe vekov (Alternative anthology of prose: Russian Israel at the turn of the century, 2012), compiled by Vladimir Tarasov (the collection also included the works of Izrail′ Maler, Moisei Vinokur, and others). Such almanacs as Ierusalimskii bibliofil ( Jerusalem bibliophile) and Ogni stolitsy (Lights of the capital) also appeared during these years. Ierusalimskii bibliofil (since 1999), dedicated to works on bibliology, was created and edited by Leonid Iuniverg (b. 1945, repatriated 1990), the artistic editor of the Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia (Short Jewish encyclopedia) and founder of the Philobiblion publishing house (1997). Ogni stolitsy (2005–2012) came out under the editorship of the poet Boris Kamianov (b., 1945, repatriated 1976) and was the

31 Ibid.

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official publication of the Fellowship of Russophone Writers of Israel, known as Stolitsa, which was founded by Kamianov in 2004. Its editorial board also includes Nina Lokshina (Edelman), Zinaida Palvanova, Grigorii Trestman, and Vladimir Khanan. The ninth issue came out in 2017 and “reflects the changes that have taken place over the past several years.”32 Aleksandr Kucherskii, the critic, prose writer, and educator,33 published the pedagogical periodical Zven′ia (Links, 2003–2004), whose editorial board consisted of scholars from a number of countries. He later founded the publishing house Dostoianie (Heritage); since 2013, he has been publishing, among other things, the almanac Vremia vspominat′ (Time to remember), a collection of memoirs of individual people about themselves and about those close to them. His coeditor and deputy is the poet and translator Irina Ruvinskaia (b. 1955, repatriated 1996).34 The publisher’s website includes a reading room and a lecture hall, as well as a blog in which articles and presentations by Israeli writers, literary scholars, and columnists are published. *** The principal line of Russian-Israeli literature is composed of authors for whom the Russian-Israeli tension served and serves as a determining meaning-forming factor, as well as of those whose voices substantively enriched the literature of the 1990s–2000s and whose creative work in some significant part is linked to the dynamic of Russian, Israeli, Jewish, and universal factors. Many writers whose creative work flowered in this period remain outside my consideration; they are, however, mentioned in other essays in this volume. In the second part of this essay, I will trace the outlines of the basic historical-literary upheaval brought about by the new—post-Soviet and post-émigré—tension between the Russian and the Israeli cultural worlds, an upheaval that led to the greatest concentration of ideological-artistic effort to understand the new Israeli cultural reality and construct a new spiritual home. The third part is devoted to authors whose interest is directed not only and not so much at Israeli reality as at the past and present of European Jewry and its incessant spiritual and physical wanderings. 32 “Ot redaktsii,” Ogni stolitsy 9 (2017): 5. 33 Kucherskii is the author of the books Chelovek mezozoia: rasskazy (Mesozoic man: Stories, 1994), as well as Russkii uchebnik (Russian textbook) and Vziat′ i prochitat′: Uchebnik po russkomu chteniiu, kotoryi nado raskrasit′ (Take it and read it: A textbook of Russian reading that has to be embellished, 2009). 34 Ruvinskaia is the author of the books of poetry Kommunalka (Communal apartment, 1995), Poka! (So long, 1996), Naperechet (Very few, 2009), Mozhet, pomozhet (It might help, 2014), Kalankhoe (Kalanchoe, 2016), and Bukvy (Letters, 2018).

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Such a division is determined not by topic and not by poetics, but by the degree to which the writers’ creative awareness responds to the challenge of Israeli existence. At the same time, in each of the parts I will try, as far as possible, to follow the chronological order of events.

2.  The New Reality Dina Rubina (b. 1953, repatriated 1990) was one of the first to respond to the challenge of the new Russian-Israeli reality. Rubina writes about the significance of her move to Israel in her autobiography: “At the end of 1990, we repatriated. This was a biographical, creative, and personal milestone [. . .]. The thick journals recognized me from afar, from abroad; it was probably necessary to leave in order to break through the obstacle of Novyi Mir, Znamia, Druzhba Narodov. True, I did become a totally different writer in Israel.”35 In 1993, the collection Dvoinaia familiia (Duplicate family name) was published in Hebrew translation. In 1994, she was awarded the Sochnut Aryeh Dulchin Prize in literature. Dina Rubina’s first novel, Vot idet Messiia! (Here comes the Messiah!), came out in 1996. A fragment translated into English was included by Maxim D. Shrayer in his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature,36 several fragments went into anthologies of Russian-Israeli literature in Hebrew translation; the novel, like Rubina’s other works, has been translated into many languages. That same year, for the short novel Dvoinaia familiia (1990), Rubina received the French FNAS Prize in the category “Best Books of the Literary Season.” In 1997, she was granted the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel Award for Vot idet Messiia! (the award’s first season). She began to publish in the then recently launched Artikl′. Although subsequently (as of this writing) about thirty collections of Rubina’s short novels and stories have appeared, it is her novels that have become the basic benchmarks, the main centers of gravity of her creative work. Her fiction can be conditionally divided into three periods. The first period contains the novels Vot idet Messiia!, Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra (The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra, 1998) and

35 Dinа Rubina, “Biografiia,” Dina Rubina’s personal website, https://www.dinarubina.com/ biography.html. 36 See Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Jewish Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), vol. 2, 1168.

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Sindikat (The syndicate, 2004); they form a quasi-biographical cycle about her postemigration experience. The heroine overcomes the hardships of a new country and a new language, looks for appropriate work and living conditions, and attempts to understand the political situation and formulate her own opinion about it. Vot idet Messiia! fancifully combines universal, Jewish, Israeli, and Russian-Israeli eschatological expectations. It opens with a question: “Is it possible [. . .] for Russian literature to develop further in the conditions of the Middle East”37 while the million-strong “Russian” aliyah floods the country? All of Rubina’s subsequent creative work is an affirmative answer to this and other absurd challenges of the present day. Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra playfully combines neoromantic and postmodernist poetic strategies. Sindikat has as its biographical foundation Rubina’s three-year (2001–2003) posting to Moscow as the director of Sochnut’s cultural programs. In this book, which has the subtitle “A graphic novel,” Rubina experiments ironically and in a parodic key with such poetic devices as fragmentation, fictional sources, collage, the absurd, and magic. Behind the tragicomic and (post)modernist poetic hides the romantic conception of the writer as a messiah resurrecting the dead, a demiurge, or puppeteer, and sometimes even an executioner of her hero-victims. The second period in Rubina’s creative work includes her “international” novels: Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy (On the sunny side of the street, 2006), Pocherk Leonardo (Leonardo’s handwriting, 2008), Belaia golubka Kordovy (White dove of Cordova, 2009), and Sindrom Petrushki (The Petrushka syndrome, 2010). In these texts, what can be called the émigré note in Russian-Israeli literature that was emerging in the preceding period undergoes a definitive dismantling: it is completely replaced by a cultural and intellectual nomadism. Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy leaves the poetics of the tragic carnival of emigration in the past. This is the first of Rubina’s family epics in which she takes upon herself the “impossible” work, as Dostoevsky expresses it in The Raw Youth, of being the novel writer of a hero from a “random family.”38 And, as the classic indicates there, this effort consists in describing a chaos, behind which the desire for order hides. The variety of folklore stylizations and the imitation of slang and surzhyk (spoken mixture of Ukrainian and Russian) that echo the tradition going back to Babel and Zoshchenko—all that comprises a part of the recognizable character of Rubina’s prose—achieve depths of baroque chiaroscuro in this novel that are very different from the rococo flourishes in Sindikat. With this novel, 37 Dina Rubina, Vot idet Messiia! (Moscow: Ostozhe, 1996), 4. 38 Fedor Dostoevsky [Fedor Dostoevskii], Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1982), vol. 10, 379.

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Rubina entered the short list of finalists for the Russian Booker Prize in 2006 and in 2007 she received the Bol′shaia Kniga (Big Book) Prize (third prize) and the Readers’ Favorite prize. Pocherk Leonardo came out in 2008 and received an award at the International Assembly of Fantasy “Portal” (Kyiv) in the “Large Format” category. In that same year, Rubina became one of the first laureates of the Minister of Aliyah and Integration’s Yuri Stern Prize. In 2009, she received the Russian Prize for the novel Belaia golubka Kordovy in the category “LargeFormat Prose.” In 2008, for the story “Adam i Miriam” (Adam and Miriam, published in Druzhba Narodov 7 [2007]), which went into the collection with the same title (2010), Rubina was awarded a prize by the Oleg Tabakov Charitable Fund. Rubina’s popularity and presence on the Russian stage is rising quickly; critics eagerly await the publication of her books, and the number of academic studies of her works is growing. The third period of Rubina’s creative career (see Elena Promyshlianskaia’s paper in this collection for more details) includes her two long three-volume novels: Russkaia kanareika (Russian canary, 2014–2015), consisting of Zheltukhin, Golos (The voice), and Bludnyi syn (Prodigal son), which was longlisted for the Russian Booker for 2015; and Napoleonov oboz (Napoleon’s supply train, 2018–2019), consisting of Riabinovyi klin (The rowan wedge), Belye loshadi (White horses), and Angel′skii rozhok (Angel’s trumpet), which was among the finalists in the Big Book and Iasnaia Poliana Awards. During this time, such works as Babii veter (Old wives’ wind, 2017) and Odinokii pishushchii chelovek (The lonely writing man, 2020), as well as numerous short novels, stories, and collections also came out. The trajectory of Rubina’s fiction develops from a carnival model (in the first period), through a metaphysical one (in the second period), to a sentimentaldynastic one (in the third period). What direction this trajectory will take in the future, time will show. However, even now one can conclude that Rubina is managing to create a post-emigration novel at the time when Russian-Israeli literature emerges from its de-minorizaion (I would call this, after the term of Deleuze, “post-minor novel”). In her novels the fractured, dispersed, and disintegrated consciousness that is characteristic for our times, among other things, due to the multiple social practices of identity politics, is gathering anew into a single cultural-emotional experience. In this experience, new mechanisms of remembering, of historical thinking, of understanding and internalizing Jewish, Russian, Israeli, and other cultural and intellectual-emotional traditions are being assembled with the help of new narrative resources. She is managing what an émigré and nomadic literature rarely manages and what, in essence, deprives literature of these dubious characteristics: a reinvention of an integrated historical subject

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of a new generation. Rubina shares credit for this with authors we will examine further: Gol′dshtein, Sobolev, Iudson, Mikhaylichenko and Nesis, and Singer. *** Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Parting with Narcissus), the first book published by Aleksandr Gol′dshtein (1957–2006, repatriated 1990), came out in 1997. This work made Gol′dshtein one of the central figures of Russian-Israeli literature, its theoretician and practitioner. While being adept at using postmodernist aesthetic theories and while remaining an adherent of a universalist conception of Jewish literature and culture, he nonetheless created a world of myths and symbols that spread far beyond the limits of postmodernism and that returned to a national consciousness that bypassed both romanticism and modernism. Gol′dshtein grew up in Baku, graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Baku State University, and defended his candidate’s dissertation in Nizami Ganjavi Institute of Literature on “The Creative Work of M. F. Akhundov and the Tradition of the Prose of the European Enlightenment.” In Israel, he settled in Tel Aviv and later in Lod, which in part determined his creative and ideological preferences: participation in the Tel Aviv literary community, the distinct role the Mediterranean world had in the theory and history of literature, and the Tel Aviv urban landscape in a number of his works. Gol′dshtein collaborated with various periodicals, in particular in the newspaper Vesti (News) in its weekly supplement Okna (Windows). In 1996, Gol′dshtein joined Irina Vrubel′-Golubkina and Mikhail Grobman in the periodical Zerkalo. The introductory “From the Editors” in the first issue of the revamped periodical (no. 1–2) says, Israel today is one of the most animated intersections of cultures and mentalities. And Zerkalo wants to reflect all the complexity of the international creative work of today. Cultural crisis always brings with it the total truth of expression as a salvatory panacea, and our new Zerkalo will attempt to make its contribution to this life overflowing with an endless number of questions.39 These words can be applied in many respects to the creative work of Gol′dshtein himself. The issue opened with his most famous article, the programmatic 39 Irina Vrubel′-Golubkina, “Ot redaktsii,” Zerkalo 1–2 (1996), http://zerkalo-litart. com/?p=3473.

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“Literatura sushchestvovaniia” (Literature of existence), which was later included in the book Parting with Narcissus.40 In this article, belles-lettres are contrasted with the literature of deeds, fact, magic, and the sacrifice of those who “spill semen and blood in art.”41 Gol′dshtein’s writing, both literary and critical, combines elements of the intellectual essay, philosophical literature, and experimental poetic prose. Rasstavanie s Nartsissom. Opyty pominal′noi ritoriki (Parting with Narcissus: Essays in commemorative rhetoric, 1997) is a collection of texts on literature and culture. The style of the book can be designated as analytical stream of consciousness. Its subtitle is a reference to Montaigne’s Essays and to experiencing a fin de siècle crisis. Gol′dshtein notes in the preface that for him “the place where this book was written is fundamental: Israel, and specifically Tel Aviv, the city and house on the Mediterranean Sea.”42 In 2001, Gol′dshtein’s book Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Aspects of a spiritual matrimony) was published by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie’s publishing arm. In it, he moves from the analytical essay to a cycle of reflections with a personalized narrative character in the spirit of Pascal. In the fragment “O literaturnoi emigratsii” (About literary emigration), Gol′dshtein writes, Once again, the not very appetizing idea of the unity of literature has gained strength [. . .]. At the same time, imperial literature, which is what Russian literature is supposed to be, sees it fit to be drawn to alterization, the otherness of its manifestations [. . .]. The culture of empire displays power at the moment when it is successful in nurturing a full-fledged homonym expressing someone else’s content by means of the mother tongue.43 Gol′dshtein himself did not create models of such a literary “homonym,” nor did he put into practice the idea of a “Mediterranean note,” which, by analogy with the “Parisian Note,” could have become the foundation for a theorization of Russian-Israeli literature in the context of popular concepts of a transnational, multilingual, and multicultural Mediterranean region. Instead, he wrote his two novels Pomni o Famaguste (Remember Famagusta, 2004) and Spokoinye 40 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Rasstavanie s Nartsissom. Opyty pominal′noi ritoriki (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1997), 332–349. 41 Ibid., 338. 42 Ibid., 6. 43 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001), 313.

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polia (Quiet fields, published posthumously in 2006). They are nurtured not by imperial literature and dictated not by geopolitical needs but by a historical bewilderment in the face of violence and victimhood, passed through the torture of art as self-sacrifice. From novel-like essay writing (Rasstavanie s Nartsissom and Aspekty dukhovnogo braka were), he turned to the novel-essay. Pomni o Famaguste is an experimental fragmentary novel-chaos that participates in the work of contemporary literature on finding new definitions of boundaries and characteristics of the genre of the novel. Gol′dshtein kept fine-tuning his second novel, Spokoinye polia, right up to his death of lung cancer, from which he had suffered since 2004. There, the analytical stream of consciousness of a cosmopolitan intellectual merges with the stream of impressionistic pictures from the life of an Israeli writer; they are united by the author’s sad fantasies of Elysian fields and other cultural worlds, real and imagined. The battle with death, resurrection, and the creation of life is envisioned by Gol′dshtein as the essence of “magicaltheurgic art.”44 Gol′dshtein’s novels were received by the critics with great interest and enthusiasm. In 2006, Spokoinye polia received the Andrei Bely Prize in the category of prose. After the writer’s death, his wife, the essayist and journalist Irina Gol′dshtein, published the book Pamiati pafosa (In memory of pathos, 2009), bringing together his articles and interviews that came out in newspapers and magazines from 1993 to 2001, a large number of which had not been included in previous books. The back cover of the book features the words of Mikhail Shishkin: “There are writers whose significance starts to grow only after their death. Gol′dshtein is one of these. He will be talked about when many whose names are now on everyone’s lips will be forgotten.”45 *** In 1996, the same year Rubina’s first novel came out, Dennis Sobolev (b. 1971, repatriated 1991) started to publish in Israeli and Russian periodicals. His prose grows out of an existential effort to understand the new cultural reality being born in front of his eyes. Sobolev is a prose writer and poet, scholar and philosopher of culture, and a professor in the Department of Hebrew and

44 Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, Pamiati pafosa (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009), 116–117. 45 Ibid., back cover.

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Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa.46 In 2005, his first novel, Ierusalim ( Jerusalem), came out and was included in the short list of finalists for the Russian Booker Prize for 2006. Subsequently, his novels Legendy gory Karmel′: Chetyrnadtsat′ istorii o liubvi i vremeni (Legends of Mount Carmel: Fourteen stories of love and time, 2016) and Voskreshenie (Resurrection, 2022)47 were published, as well as the books of poetry Tropy (Trails/Tropes, 2017, second edition; first edition 1999) and Cherez (Through, 2020). Ierusalim consists of seven chapters, connected with each other neither by subject nor characters: it is a gallery of unreliable narrators. They are united only by their similarity to the author. They are émigrés from Russia who live in Jerusalem and try somehow to comprehend a reality that resists understanding, in which war and terror live side by side with spirits, vampires, angels, and mythological heroes. Individual sections are united by the idea of a fragmentary history of a certain—also fragmentary—geopoetical space,48 or, as the annotation to Sobolev’s book Evrei i Evropa ( Jews and Europe, 2007) puts it, an “island civilization.” Ierusalim and Legendy gory Karmel′ are, in the words Sobolev used when speaking about Walter Benjamin, an expression of the “flexion and fragmentariness” of the world, the “explosions and emptiness” of thinking.49 A universal subject matter is interpreted through the cultural material of Jewish (and not only Jewish) myths and fairy tales, as well as through stories born from the author’s mythopoeic consciousness reconceptualizing the legacy of Borges, Marquez, or Pavić. Ierusalim is the first equally Russian-Jewish and RussianIsraeli magical realist novel. The novel Legendy gory Karmel′ (2016) employs similar poetic strategies in the cultural space of Haifa and its environs. Both novels are directed at an intense intellectual and cultural growing into the Israeli ground—not in an ideological or political sense but in a magical and hermeneutic one. The metamorphosis of the personality and its being composes the essence of Sobolev’s mythopoesis in his Haifa fairy tales. They are populated with historical figures, pirates, ghosts, mages, and vagrants who experience a marvelous transformation in the

46 In 1999, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Counterpoint: Thought and Existence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” in the Department of English Literature at Hebrew University. Sobolev’s studies in Jewish culture and literature were collected and published in the book Res Judaica: Evrei i Evropa (Res Judaica: Jews and Europe, 2007), republished as Evrei i Evropa ( Jews and Europe, 2008). 47 Part of the novel was published in Neva 9 (2020) under the title “Na poroge” (On the Threshold). 48 Dennis Sobolev [Denis Sobolev], Evrei i Evropa (Moscow: Tekst, 2008), 402. 49 Ibid., 229.

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gravitational field of the history, landscape, and architecture of Haifa and the universe concentrated around it. The novel Voskreshenie (2022) is unlike Sobolev’s previous works in style: it is a realistic family epic about the establishment of a generation of Soviet Jews born at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. That said, it is similar to them in the most important respect: an archipelago of ideas and ideologies, actions and states emerges in it, not a single one of which, in the words of the novel, “has any justification.”50 Voskreshenie is a story of the guilt of previous generations, which deprived the generation of the 1970s of the “key”—the secret— and confidence in the authenticity of truth and honor. At the same time, on a vast canvas, the novel tells of the grand delusions not only of the fathers but also of the children who are hopelessly looking for what in the novel, as in the Kabbalah (or in stoicism), is called the Sphere of Valor. In concluding this survey of Sobolev’s creative work, it is essential to say a few words about his two books of poetry: Tropy (Trails/Tropes, 2017) and Cherez (Through, 2020). The poems that are included in Tropy were written in 1994–1997, not long before Sobolev started working on his Jerusalem fairy tales, which later became parts of the novel Ierusalim. A monistic philosophy is consistently built into Sobolev’s polysemic writing; his paths do not diverge but converge. Here, Atil, the capital of the Khazars, and St. Petersburg, Adam, and Golem come together in the idea of immortality, and this idea finds realization in the finitude of objects, which corresponds to the concept of the author’s “poetry of existence.” The concept of ontopoetics, understood in the phenomenological sense, can be applied to Sobolev’s writing (both his poetry and his prose): the aesthetic embodiment of the communication of everything with everything— people, things, cars, signs—both subjects and objects simultaneously, equally real and transcendental each in relation to another, as if calling each other by a manyfold mutual “thou.” These calls are the trails and tropes, expressed in the Russian homonym tropy that give the book its title. The poetical turning toward the world of things beyond the bounds of the orthodox modernist or postmodernist paradigm does not indicate a rebellion against metaphysics or ideology and does not express a crisis of culture. It is, rather, the opposite—in this way, Russian literature, by establishing itself and “making itself at home” in today’s Israel, actualizes an ontological turn towards comprehending the new reality. This tendency is intensified in the book Cherez, which includes poems from various years. Their rhetorical-cognitive style can be called cognitive realism. 50 Dennis Sobolev [Denis Sobolev], Voskreshenie [Resurrection] (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2022), 907.

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Its essence is the effort to cultivate a philosophy of consciousness out of poetry, and to cultivate poetry out of a philosophy of consciousness. In these poems, time is supplanted by the pulsation of consciousness, discreet leaps between being and nonbeing, timelessness and eternity, which is what gives birth to poetry. Like Pascal’s Pensées, Sobolev’s poems-thoughts, fragment after fragment, form a unique novel in verse about a new hero-philosopher of a new time. *** Mikhail Iudson (1956–2019, repatriated 1989, 1999), a writer, critic, and editor, brought about a quiet and not yet entirely understood revolution in Russian literature. In 1990, he published the novella God 5757-i (Year 5757)—from which his “revolution in language” begins—in the magazine 22 (nos. 73–74). From 1992 to 1999, Iudson lived in Russia, and then spent the year 1997 in Nuremberg, Germany. In 1996–1998, he wrote the first two parts of his magnum opus Lestnitsa na shkaf (Ladder onto the wardrobe), which came out in 2003; the events of the novel unfold in Russia, and Germany. From 1999, Iudson once again lived in Israel, in Tel Aviv. He contributed to various periodicals and newspapers in Israel, Russia, Germany, and the United States, wrote stories,51 reviews, and essays, published interviews with literary figures and intellectuals. He worked as the deputy editor of 22, under Voronel′, from 1999 right up to the closing of the periodical in 2016. In that year he became, together with Iakov Shekhter, a coeditor of Artikl′. A new version of the novel Lestnitsa na shkaf came out in 2013. It contains a third part, written in 2002–2010, where the action takes place in a fictionalized version of Israel. At its foundation is the novella God 5757-i, substantially changed and expanded, which now takes up two-thirds of the novel. In 2012, Iudson started to write and in 2015 to publish in periodicals the chapters of his new novel Mozgovoi (Braintine), which was finished and handed in to the publisher shortly before his untimely death in 2019. In that same year, the first chapters of his unfinished novel Chetvero (The four) were published in Artikl′ (no. 11). Unpublished fragments of his archive appeared in Artikl′, in the column “Publications” from the Archive of Russian-Israeli Literature of Bar-Ilan University, under the title “Ostatki” (Remnants).

51 Among Iudson’s published stories are “Vlast′ t′my, ili Registratsiia” (The power of darkness, or registration, 22 146 [2007]), “Novye prikliucheniia liliputa” (The new adventures of a lilliputian, 22 150 [2008]), “Zona Oz” (Oz zone, Neva 3 [2011]), “Na postposlednem beregu” (On the post-ultimate shore, Neva 4 [2012]), “Frantsuz” (The Frenchman, Sem′ iskusstv 8 [2013]), and the play Revizor-s (Inspector General, S[ir], Sem′ iskustv 3 [2012]).

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Iudson’s poetic prose expresses a polysynthetic consciousness, combining the identities of a vagrant poet, a troubled émigré, a lonely warrior, and a wandering philosopher. In terms of genre, Iudson’s earliest prose can be identified as anti-utopian; later, it develops into a more complex form that I would call surrealist picaresque. Later, in Mozgovoi, his writing takes on the form of hallucinatory urban poem-fantasy in a noir style. The writer’s aim is to create, from the conjunction of natural languages, a new language that, while remaining suitable for communication, make it possible to comprehend and become established in a new cultural reality, to succeed and realize oneself in it, without leaving the room, so to speak, that is, without abandoning (to use Iudson’s favorite expression), the “wardrobe” of one’s brain, and without losing, even for a moment, a single facet of one’s identity. Lestnitsa na shkaf unfolds in three basic psycho-cultural focal points of Jewish memory and unresolved complexes: a love-hate relationship with Russia, which immerses itself ever more into a new dark and icy Middle Ages; bondage to victimhood in Germany, which is gradually “healing” from the post-Holocaust syndrome; and the annoying cultural “secondariness” of Israel, which contrasts so much with the intrinsic “firstness” established in Jewish mythology—an Israel that tears itself apart between historical optimism and pessimism. Over the years, the social theme recedes in Iudson’s texts, as his writing acquires a more individualistic character. Instead of describing nomadism and the first stages of emigration, his prose now expresses the complex outlook of a settled émigré who has seniority, his own language, and his own ideas about his new homeland and its future. Iudson’s “Isrussian” (that is, “Israeli-Russian,”) literary language develops in the third part of Lestnitsa na shkaf. For Iudson, art was the highest value, and creating a new language was the only thing that could justify the life and work of an artist. His style is a hybrid confluence, a multilingual combinatorics on all levels of language from phonemes to the whole text. But, unlike the zaum of the avant-gardists or some of James Joyce’s texts, Iudson’s work does not stop being communicative and plot-driven. In the novel Mozgovoi, the development of personality that constitutes the essence of any myth takes place through the multiplication and selection of replicas of the “hero with a thousand faces,” his mental doubles. The myth turns out to be not a story, not a consistent narrative with a consistent plot but an experiential attainment of a multitude of states that require the deployment of a multitude of narrative-epistemological strategies. Hence the breakdown of the novel into several genre-ideological fragments. What remains common to them all is the rhetorical strategy of the relation to language—the strategy

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of uncovering the displaced contents of one language with the aid of another, the transference of the subconscious of language onto the level of the narrative speech. Such a disruption aims not to destroy the language, as would be the case with “minor” literature, but rather to “cure” the language of solipsism, of its neuroses and phobias—similia similibus. The cultural consciousness of the speaker of this language is also “cured” along with it—for example, the speaker is healed of the fear of Arab terror or a repetition of the Holocaust. In this way, Iudson’s prose destroys the foundation of Russian-Israeli duality at its very heart—inside language—and uncovers a path to the difficult, but necessary and fruitful, cultural work of the “literature of existence,” in the terminology of Aleksandr Gol′dshtein, bringing life and writing together. *** Elizaveta Mikhailichenko (b. 1962) and Iurii Nesis (b. 1953) repatriated to Israel in 1990, at which point they already had a trunkful of literary experience. But what was most important was that they had the openness to comprehending a new space and a new time, thanks to which they became the fearless rangers of the “Jerusalem text.” Fifteen books of poetry and poems belong to Mikhailichenko’s pen to date. As a painter, she is known by the name of Elisheva Nesis and Eli7. More than three hundred of her works are exhibited in museums and private collections in fifteen countries. In her painting, as in her writing, the agents that are reconnoitering the new land are cats, angels, mythical beings, and frustrated warriors. Mikhailichenko writes prose (a multitude of novels, novelettes, plays, scenarios) in coauthorship with Iurii Nesis. They were among the first to begin actively participating in the development of internet libraries, forums, and blogs and subsequently gave up paper publications altogether in favor of digital literature. The most important part of Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s creative work is the cycle of magical realist Jerusalem novels, which includes Ierusalimskii dvorianin (A Jerusalem nobleman, 1997), I/e_rus.olim ( J/e_rus.olim, 2003), ZY (translated into English as Preemptive Revenge, 2006), and Talithakumi, ili Zavet mezh oskolkami butylki (Talithakumi, or Testament between the shards of a bottle, 2018).52 52 Mikhailichenko and Nesis also created the following works: a cycle of humoristic detective novellas from the lives of repatriates—“Troe v odnom morge, ne shchitaia sobaki” (Three in one crypt, not counting the dog, 1991), “Akhmatovskaia kul′tura” (Akhmatova’s culture, 1999), and “Neformat” (Nonformative, 2007); philosophical stories about the “virus of the day”—“Slepoi i suka” (The blind man and the bitch, 2003), “Marsianka” (The woman from Mars, 2004), and “Povestka v Venetsiiu” (Summons to Venice, 2013); plays about the shifts of values at the turn of the century—Seksagonal′naia kaitarma, ili Liubovnyi magendavid

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Ierusalimskii dvorianin discloses with merciless directness the abyss that opens up in the consciousness of a Russian intellectual upon encountering the reality of terror and absurdity in post-Oslo Israel. The authors define with precision the typical character of that time—the inability both to accept the reality of violence and to respond to it with violence, the impossibility to choose between the roles of the hero and the victim. At the center of I/e_rus.olim is the victim as image, theme, and idea. Jerusalem is a city of victims, and those who “rise” to it, as if onto a sacrificial altar, become an “allergen of history.” The city rises before repatriates like the internet (hence the title of the novel in the form of a website address), predestined in all its endless complexity and dark depth to be experienced as a sacrificial offering. ZY (Preemptive Revenge) is prefaced with a dedication, “In memory of future victims,” and moves the writing about victims into a new continuum—that which is “after” (the letters ZY [ЗЫ] in the Russian keyboard layout correspond to PS in the English one, hence the title of the novel means “PS,” or “post scriptum”). The hero of the novel dedicates his life, as he explains, to the battle with political chaos and absurdity. In the attempt to forestall violence, he himself attempts to commit a “heroic” gesture of violence. But he is doomed to failure: his heroism remains, in the words of the novel, “someone else’s heroism,” and he remains nothing more than a weak observer and an adventurer who only finds defeat. Talithakumi, ili Zavet mezh oskolkami butylki is created in a new historical context, when the World Wide Web appears as a new testament, tying together the citizens of the global world. The heroes of the novel are at home in Israeli and universal cultural spaces. They are not émigrés; rather, they feel as if they were the heroes of adventure novels they loved since childhood. The book V real′nosti dochernei. Poeziia Allergena, virtual′nogo kota i poetanetneista (In a subsidiary reality: The poetry of Allergen, a virtual cat and poet-netneist, 2001), the author of which is listed as Allergen the Cat, makes a significant contribution to reflections on the modern state of culture and literature. This short book of poetry has a unique significance because it contains the “Manifesto of Netneism”—“the first art movement of the twentyfirst century”53—and because it is a part of an exciting project. The user called Allergen the Cat appeared for the first time in 1998 on the website of the internet poetry club Limbo. Allergen the Cat published his poems and essays on various internet platforms, edited the web magazine Antitenet, and kept a blog

(Sexagonal kaytarma, or Love star of David, 1999), Chertov razvod (The devil divorce, 2008), and Minus na minus (Minus on minus, 2011). 53 Elisheva Mikhailichenko and Iurii Nesis (as Kot Allergen), V real′nosti dochernei. Poeziia Allergena, virtual′nogo kota i poeta-netneista (St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2001), 5.

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on LiveJournal (Zhivoi Zhurnal).54 His poems were included in anthologies of internet poetry @intologiia, 2000 and Koshki-myshkoi (Cats-by-mice, 2004). He is also one of the main heroes of the novel I/e_rus.olim. After the novel was published in the internet, the writers organized a “de-virtualization” of Allergen the Cat in January 2004: a live art performance in which they publicly revealed themselves to be behind this avatar. The “Manifesto of Netneism” proclaims that [the] Net is a place for the activity of netneism and a new virtual reality that is being explored and populated by a creative consciousness [. . .]. Netneism is “not, no ism” [lit. in Russian: net, ne izm] [. . .]. “Not no” (net ne) is the negation of a negation [. . .]. The essence of netneism is in the total freeing of the creative source from its physical and social component. It is freedom from oneself, the loved one [. . .]. It is the total escape from passport data and any other givens.55 In 2003, a more developed and substantial version of the manifesto was published online under the title “Postmodernizm? Net, netneizm!” (Postmodernism? No, netneism!). The manifesto calls for moving from the “bubblegum” of postmodernism to “hyper-humanism” or virtual personalism when what is human— cultural and historical—is identified with the internet.56 Here, the mask becomes a hypostasis, an apophatic existential foundation, infinitely free and creative. Reflecting the key spiritual dilemmas of the turn of the century, netneism turns the surrounding world into a network, becomes a philosophical-poetic method for the authors to become a part of Israeli culture and to overcome postemigration syndrome. In their artistic careers, Gali-Dana Singer and Nekod Singer pursue this same goal, albeit by different paths. *** The poet and translator Gali-Dana Singer (b. 1962)57 and the prose writer, painter, and translator Nekod Singer (b. 1960) moved to Israel in 1988 and settled in 54 See Allergen’s blog, Livejournal, https://allergen.livejournal.com/. 55 Mikhailichenko and Nesis, V real′nosti dochernei, 7. 56 Elisheva Mikhailichenko and Iurii Nesis (as Kot Allergen), “Postmodernizm? Net, netneizm!,” Russkii zhurnal, March 16, 2003, http://old.russ.ru/netcult/20030316_allergen.html. 57 Gali-Dana Singer is a recipient of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration Award (1997 and 2000), the holder of the Poetry 2000 Prize, conferred by the poetry festival in Metula, and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award (2004).

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Jerusalem. There, they took up editing, publishing, and translating. The periodical they founded, Dvoetochie (Colon), has for many years been one of the centers of Russian-Israeli literature, as well as one of the publishing platforms for the Russian poetic avant-garde. It did not arise in an empty space. In the early period, avant-garde elements are found in the play Moi million (My million, 1921) by Zina Weinshall (1900–1990), in the poem “Mashber” (1927) by Abram Arest (1905–1967), in the poetry books of Lev Lior (Libman, 1907–1982), published in 1968, 1973, and 1981, and of Iakov Berger (1926–2002), published in 1965, 1968, and later in the 1970–1990s. By the time the Singers arrived in Israel, a number of significant avant-garde groups and authors were already in existence there (see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in this volume). Aleksandr Kobrinskii repatriated in 1987 (see below); Mikhail Grobman (b. 1939) has been living in Israel since 1971; Ilia Bokstein (1934–1999) has lived in Israel since 1972; Henri Volokhonsky (1936–2017), from 1973 to 1985. Vladimir Tarasov published (together with Sergei Shargorodskii) two issues of the almanac Salamandra (Salamander) in 1987 and 1989, which he describes as “a culturepromoting conceit through and through, in spite of the message of the obvious: Russian-language literature in Israel, if you please, is a non-émigré situation; we are worth something even without ‘your wing’ and so forth; in the first issue an emphasis was still placed on expanding the ‘cultural space.’”58 In 1993–1994, three issues of the periodical Slog (Syllable) came out under the editorship of Vladimir Tarasov, Il′ia Zundelevich, and Izrail′ Maler. Each of these publications in its own way became for the Singers a pole equally of attraction and repulsion. In 1994, the Singers, along with the writer, bookseller, and publisher Izrail′ Maler (1943–1998), founded the avant-garde periodical I. O., published in practice and concept in the form of samizdat. Nekod Singer recalls this period: It was a time of a growing number of clubs. Right after the Jerusalem Literary Club, which had already succeeded in becoming overgrown in bureaucratic superfluities, in Maler’s store, the Club of the Gloomy and Uncharismatic [Klub mrachnykh i nenakhodchivykh] also started up with our active participation, and individual creative evenings would be held there.59

58 Vladimir Tarasov, “Stupenchatyi svet” (Staggered world), Mikhail Gendelev’s website, 2017, http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/716-vladimir-tarasov-stupenchatyj-svet.html. This article was originally published on the website Znaki vetra. 59 Nekod Singer [Nekod Zinger], “Kak my pristupili k ispolneniiu,” Dvoetochie 35 (2001), https://dvoetochie.org/2021/02/12/nekod-singer-io/.2021.

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In the Russian Community House and in Nekod Singer’s Trouble Space Studio in Jerusalem, many of the journal’s evenings, “happenings,” and poetry readings took place.60 In 1995, after six issues, I. O. was renamed Dvoetochie (Colon), the title it has kept ever since. There was a brief closure in 2015, when the Singers started up, in place of Dvoetochie, the periodical Karakei i Kadikei (Karakeui and Kadikeui), but the new publication lasted only six issues; Dvoetochie reopened in 2016. The journal navigates between the narrows of postmodernism, neomodernism, metamodernism, and eclecticism. The editors put a lot of emphasis on forming a unique community of aesthetic and intellectual utterances, where they join the Russian and the Israeli, or the Western and the Eastern creative traditions, erasing all boundaries, including the limits of various arts and media. In 1997, together with Mikhail Korol, the Singers launch the children’s avantgarde magazine Tochka, tochka, zapiataia (Period, period, comma). It survived one year, during which six issues appeared. This was a platform for ludic prose and poetry, ostensibly written for children, but in fact created for adults, by such authors as Savelii Grinberg and Iurii Viner. In 2001, Dvoetochie was relaunched to become a bilingual Russian-Hebrew publication and it started a new series numbering. The “From the Editors” section, signed by the Singers, appears in the first issue. There, the editors explain the goal of their project: to establish a “two-sided mirror between what is written from the right to the left and from the left to the right,” which will serve as an “impediment on the path both to disorientation and to orientalism.”61 The periodical came out in two languages in 2001–2004 and in 2011–2015. The literary creative work of Nekod Singer crosses the boundaries of genres, styles, philosophical conceptions, and languages as well. In all his works, both literary and plastic, multilingualism forms the foundation of a neo-eclectic artistic method. As he says in one of his novels, his writing grows out of the move “from dream to reality in comprehending the place in which I abided and in which I intended to establish myself thoroughly.” Meanwhile, “behind every comprehension of place and time the no less real comprehension starts to shine through an awareness of the ephemerality of this comprehension, as if in a dream that has entered reality.”62

60 Gali-Dana Singer [Gali-Dana Zinger] and Nekod Singer [Nekod Zinger], “Izrail′ Maler i drugie: Fotografii iz al′boma,” Dvoetochie 22 (2014), https://dvoetochie.org/category/ двоеточие-22.2014. 61 Singer, “Kak my pristupili k ispolneniiu.” 62 Nekod Singer [Nekod Zinger], Chernoviki Ierusalima (Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2013), 7.

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In the novel Bilety v kasse (Will call, 2006), memoir becomes a breeding ground for the bountiful flowering of the grotesque and the absurd, of postmodernist irony and self-irony, as narratives and language disintegrate into the state of a molecular plasma. At the same time, the breakthrough from postmodernism in the direction of neomodernism and even neoromanticism becomes evident here (the editors of Dvoetochie themselves write on neoromantic tendencies in their work).63 The author’s translation of the novel into Hebrew was published in 2016. The second novel, Chernoviki Ierusalima (Rough drafts of Jerusalem, 2013), presents a succession of fragments that are simulacra of the literary embodiment of Jerusalem. The pseudographic fragments of Chernoviki Ierusalima are ascribed to well-known writers, such as E. T. A. Hoffman, Alexander Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as to invented authors, rewriting Russian classics in a Jewish context. From the deconstruction of the Jewish Novosibirsk in the first book, Singer jumped in the direction of the reconstruction of Russian Jerusalem. In 2012–2014, Nekod Singer published a series of notes titled “V te dni, v nashe vremia” (In those days, in our time) on the website Booknik.ru, which included translations of articles and feuilletons that appeared in the first Hebrew newspapers in the Land of Israel at the time of the Zionist settlement activity during the First Aliyah (1881–1904). From these notes, the eschatological novel-myth Mandragory (Mandrakes, 2017) was born. In this book, Singer’s writing shifts from fragmentariness and conceptual eclecticism to a new synthesis within the pseudo-canonical boundaries of a bicultural pseudo-retro novel. All of Singer’s novels are polystylistic. To the extent that we can judge by his new publications,64 his stylistic experiments are far from over. (See also his new novel Sindrom Notre-Dame [The Notre-Dame syndrome], which was published in 2022, after this essay was completed). However, it is already apparent that Singer is successfully transforming his existential and cultural-epistemic experience of Israel into a powerful instrument of aesthetic innovation. *** Aleksandr Kobrinskii (b. 1939, repatriated 1987), a prose writer, poet, and essayist, has been occupied his entire creative life with the search for innovative poetic methods. In the USSR, he was persecuted for his dissident and samizdat activity; he spent years as a refusenik (1978–1987). He is the author of 63 Singer, “Kak my pristupili k ispolneniiu.” 64 Nekod Singer [Nekod Zinger], “Doktor Tushka rekomenduet fotografirovat′,” Dvoetochie 33 (2019). https://dvoetochie.org/2019/12/24/nekod-singer-3/.

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numerous collections of poems, some written in traditional genres (for example, the sonnet) and some avant-garde (“visual poetry”).65 The earliest of Kobrinskii’s works placed on his website are dated 1970. Noteworthy among them is Povozka s igrushkami (A wagon with toys, unpublished, dated 1970),66 an avant-garde, beatnik novel about a hero—Christ or the Wandering Jew—who is incapable of reconciling himself to his times. The character’s life, beginning with his postwar childhood and up to the realities of a psychiatric hospital in the 1970s, is immersed in disconnected streams of fantasies, hallucinations, magical ramblings, and dreams. Plachushchii osel (The crying ass, 1993) is the autobiographical “novel-diary” of an “emrep,” an “émigré-repatriate,” a philosopher mopping the staircases—in the author’s words, an ass—and crying over the universe. The novel expresses the idea that, in order to decadently shut oneself off from the new reality, one must first understand it. And indeed, the main character immerses himself completely in Israeli reality. A substantive part of this reality consists of events from Russian-language literary life in Israel, represented by characters who bear the deformed but recognizable names of their real-life prototypes. In this way, the novel marks a path along which Khanaanskie khroniki (Chronicles of Canaan) by Naum Vaiman will go, with the difference that Kobrinskii is much more disposed to create the grotesque and the absurd. The later short play Fantomnaia real′nost′ (Phantom reality, 2017) expresses in a very clear-cut way the worldview foundations of Kobrinskii’s beatnik absurdism: one is not synonymous with oneself, one’s place and time, and therefore one is destined to wandering in a phantom reality where both oneself and one’s memories and perceptions become shadows engaged in a dialogue on a stage. It is for this reason that emigration also becomes an allegory of existence, the most unreal reality, insistently requiring the effort of learning. The language of

65 Kobrinskii is the author of books of poetry: My—mutanty (We are mutants, 1996), Estestvennaia rech′ (Natural speech, 2004), Chegorokaromio (2008), Stikhi (Poems, 2010), Trikaya (2014); and books of prose: Stolknovenie (Encounter, 1988), Plachushchii osel (The crying ass, 1993), Koleso (The wheel, 2006), Blagorodnaia smes′ (Noble mixture, 2009), Proza (Prose, 2012), Fantomnaia real′nost′ (Phantom reality, 2017), Ne oklikai sebia (Don’t call yourself, 2017); as well as short novels and stories published in the internet; he is the compiler of the collection Antologiia poezii. Izrail′ 2005 (Anthology of poetry: Israel 2005) and an electronic library, collected in which are the works of a number of Russian-Israeli and other authors and where his published and unpublished works are presented. He is also a translator of poetry from Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Latin and the author of philosophical and culturological essays. 66 Aleksandr Kobrinskii, Povozka s igrushkami, Aleksandr M. Kobrinskii’s website, http:// amkob113.ru/kobra/voz/.

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Kobrinskii’s prose (and that of his poetry to an even greater degree) overcomes the discordances between various generations of the avant-garde and, what is more, reconciles innovative experimentation with traditional poetic practices into a single and universal mythopoeic effort. *** The prose and essay writing of Aleksandr Liubinskii (b. 1949, repatriated 1989) is close to the aesthetic and genre-historical experiments of Nekod Singer and Aleksandr Gol′dshtein. The features of his style emerged distinctly as early as the collection Fabula (1997; a short novel of the same title is dated 1986), which combines lyrical poetic utterances (sometimes defined as “poetic prose”), intellectualism, notes of a hallucinatory dislocated vision, a tense narrative rhythm, temporal multilevelness, and an abundance of explicit and implicit quotations. The principle of Liubinskii’s literary and historical thinking is expressed metaphorically in the title of his collection Na perekrest′e (At the crosslines, 2007), the cover of which shows Heinrich Bünting’s map of 1581. which presents the world in the form of a three-leaf clover with Jerusalem at its center. The first part of the book is called “V gostiakh u Levanta” (Visiting the Levant), and an annotation characterizes it as “prose born of the undying culture of the Levant.”67 Liubinskii received the Russian Prize for 2010 for the novel Vinogradniki nochi (Vineyards of the night, 2011). The members of the jury panel, in speaking of this novel, noted that “the Russian-language writers of the world do not only reflect a foreign toponymy but also, with the help of a Russian soul, study the way topography and geography are perceived. They study not only the everyday life of the countries in which they live but also their own participation in this life, injecting much into the development of the Russian language.”68 In the novel, various spatial-temporal layers are superimposed on one another so that “it is as if there is no time or—all times are one.”69 The fanciful combination of chronotopes created by a lyrical voice that is saturated with poetry is inserted into the mythologem of a changed time, to motivate reminiscence and the historical cognition of reality in a neomodernist spirit. The alternating rhythms of this effort, the vicissitudes of the development of the story—these comprise the basic plot

67 Aleksandr Liubinskii, Na perekrest′e (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007), annotation. 68 “Sostoialas′ VI tseremoniia nagrazhdeniia laureatov konkursa ‘Russkaia Premiia,’” Russkaia premiia, April 27, 2011, http://www.russpremia.ru/news/000000072/. 69 Aleksandr Liubinskii, Vinogradniki nochi (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), https://libking.ru/ books/prose-/prose-contemporary/356438-26-Alexander-lyubinskiy-vinogradniki-nochi. html#book.

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of the novel. In addition to historical topics, the author frequently returns to the question of Russian-Israeli literature and carries on a dialogue with his penwielding colleagues, both living and dead: I am continuing our dialogue from the pages of my book, as he carries it on from the pages of his. And I am continuing—our— shared endeavor. [. . .] And so, because of the interwoven fates reflected in the word, a real, uncontrived literature takes shape, grasping with the stubborn roots of a fig tree into this scorched, dry, wounded land.70 In the short novels that went into the collection Teni vechernie (Evening shadows, 2015), the writer’s reflection on his searches for a new aesthetic is inserted into a historical-adventure plot. The characters are vagrants and literary figures, gradually settling into the symbolic spaces of Israeli cities, Jewish and Israeli history, in search of a new life and its new meaning. On the one hand, Liubinskii’s “real, uncontrived literature” returns to the ambitious aesthetic program of the Silver Age and, on the other, anticipates its own time, overcoming aspects of Zhdanovite identity politics, vulgar sociologism, and ideological populism present in many of todays “progressive” artistic programs. *** Naum Vaiman (b. 1947, repatriated 1978), a prose writer, poet, essayist, philologist, and translator,71 has for over two decades been writing the diary-novel

70 Ibid. 71 Naum Vaiman published the collections of poetry Iz oseni v osen′ (From autumn to autumn, 1979), Stikhotvoreniia (Poems, 1989), Levant (1994), Rassypannaia rech′ (Scattered speech, 2017); books based on the letters and diaries of the poet Mikhail Fainerman (1946–2003): Iamka, polnaia ptich′ikh per′ev. Pis′ma Mishi Fainermana (A burrow filled with birds’ feathers: The letters of Misha Fainerman, 2008), and Vesna. Stikhi. Pechali. Dnevnik Mishi Fainermana (Spring. Poems. Sorrow. The diary of Misha Fainerman, 2019); books about Osip Mandelstam and other poets of the Silver Age: Shatry strakha. Razgovory o Mandel′shtame (Pavillions of Fear: Conversations about Mandelstam, 2011), coauthored with Matvei Rubin (the pseudonym of the philologist Iosif Fridman) and shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2014, Chernoe solntse Mandel′shtama (The black sun of Mandelstam, 2013), “Liubovnoi liriki ia nikogda ne znal . . .”. Serebrianyi vek: Mandel′shtam, Akhmatova, Gippius, Merezhkovskii (“Love lyrics I never knew. . . .” The Silver Age: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Gippius, Merezhkovsky, 2015), Preobrazhenie Mandel′shtama (The transformation of Mandelstam, 2020). Vaiman’s collection of stories Pokhvala liubvi. Istorii i pritchi (In praise of love: Stories and parables) came out in 2021. A collection of stories and fragments in Hebrew translation, Shiioret (Scrap), was published in 2022.

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Khanaanskie khroniki (Chronicles of Canaan), in the center of which stands the life of a Russian-Israeli literary and intellectual community. Its characters are writers (including the autobiographical narrator), scholars, and politicians— real people, in addition to fictional ones. At the time of this writing, three volumes have come out: Khanaanskie khroniki (2000), Shchel′ obetovan′ia (The promise cleft, 2012), and Khanaanskie khroniki. Arkhiv tretii (Chronicles of Canaan: Third archive, 2019). The third volume originally came out as a twopart publication titled Novaia era (New era, 2019), before it was reprinted in St. Petersburg by Aleteiia. The time of the narration of the three volumes encompasses the period from 1993 to 2001. The literary life presented in the pseudo-diary seems ever more tense and significant from year to year, and the philosophical-anthropological problems that are brought up seem ever more urgent. The basic myth of the novel is the myth of the warrior who sacrificed himself. The narrator insistently attempts to convince the reader to the novel’s spiritual closeness with Vasily Rozanov’s works, particularly his late texts: Uedinennoe (Solitaria, 1912), Smertnoe (Mortal, 1913), and Opavshie list′ia (Fallen leaves, 1913–1915). They are, in fact, connected by a number of themes (literature, sex, religion, antisemitism), stylistic features (fragmentariness, diary, intellectualism, eroticism), and, most importantly, a deep sense of experiencing a fin de siècle crisis. However, in spite of this, a fundamental difference remains: unlike Rozanov’s voice, Vaiman’s narrator is almost unchanging and consistent in his conviction on the scale of the entire saga, even though he can be contradictory in individual fragments. There are other differences as well: Vaiman’s essential dialogism, the non“solitariness” of his writing; not a fictitious but an authentic polyphony, when more than a little space is given to the voice, texts, writings, articles of others; a reduction of “literariness,” and an intensified documentary style. In addition, Vaiman’s fragmentariness has a provisional character: he strings the fragments of his text onto the thread of a chronicle, the plot-forming line of a life, of becoming and aging. In his work, there is a development of images and the relationships between them, there is time and finality, unlike Rozanov’s aphoristic, extratemporal, and plotless fragmentariness. And finally, Vaiman’s writing is born of political nonconformism, of the cultural and social pathos of protest mobilization, of Socratically ironic philosophical opposition to reality that avoids cognizing and understanding, which distinguishes Vaiman’s position from Rozanov’s selfconfident omniscience. In summary, what emerges is a literature that is deeply and inextricably rooted in the conflict between the Russian and the Israeli (and also Jewish) foundations. It is embodied in confessional artistic forms, which makes both this

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literature and what it depicts an important evidence of the literary process of the 1990s–2000s and of that time in general. Like Liubinskii as well as Gol′dshtein and Arnold Kashtanov (see below), Vaiman, in spite of an aesthetic populism and fashionable ideological discourse, includes in his novel large philosophicalanthropological and culturological fragments, where he discusses, in much detail and without conclusion, victimhood and its role in the founding of cultures and in the centuries-long conflicts between civilizations. In this way, Vaiman’s prose acquires significance as a model of ideational nonconformism, which had almost disappeared with the ending of the Cold War and with the reign of postmodernism and the relativism of ideas and values. The nonconformist literary form is refined in nonconformist battles of ideas dictated, above all, by Israel’s political reality. *** In 1999, the first issue of Ierusalimskii Zhurnal published, “at the ardent recommendation” of Zinaida Palvanova,72 the article “Uspekh kak esteticheskii fenomen” (Success as an aesthetic phenomenon) by Arnold Kashtanov (Epshtein, 1938–2015, repatriated 1991). This was the beginning of his collaboration with the periodical and a new stage of his creative work, now focused on Israel.73 Kashtanov’s essays, as well as his novels Kan′on-a-Sharon (The ha-Sharon mall, Znamia 5 [2002]) and Khaker Astarty (The Astarta hacker, Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 33 [2010]), came out in periodicals. Kan′on-a-Sharon, partly autobiographical, was written at the height of a wave of Arab terror known as the Second Intifada (2000–2005). Feeling a threat to his own life, those close to him, and his new country, the main character attempts to understand what is “authentic” in himself and in Israeli reality and what is just empty “false words.” The philosophical-anthropological Khaker Astarty (2010), 72 Zinaida Palvanova, “Chitat′ Kashtanova i dumat′ o zhizni” [Reading Kashtanov and thinking about life], Ierusalimskii zhurnal 53 (2016), https://new.antho.net/wp/ jj53-zinaida-palvanova/. 73 Arnold Kashtanov’s stories and tales come out in Soviet periodicals in the 1960s–1980s, and the following books are published: Zavodskoi raion: Povest′ (Industrial district: A novelette, 1975), Moi dozhd′: Povesti i rasskazy (My rain: Tales and stories, 1982), Korobeiniki: Povesti (Peddlers: Novelettes, 1985), Epidemiia schast′ia: Povesti, rasskazy (An epidemic of happiness: Novelettes, stories, 1986), Luchshie gody (The best years, 1988), and Drugoi chelovek (The other man, 1989). Kashtanov wrote the comedy Ne stoi pod gruzom (Keep clear of the load, 1979), scripts for the films Antonina Bragina (released in 1978) and Obkhodnoi manevr (Evasive maneuver, 1985), and won the All-Union Competition for Best Screenplay in 1973. He subsequently published the book Zapiski rezhissera eroticheskikh filmov (Notes of an erotic film director, 1996, under the pseudonym German Arnold) and a long anthropological essay “Darovanie slez” (Gift of tears, 2006).

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which is also autobiographical in many ways, sums up the author’s thoughts on the sources and essence of culture and aggression, ethics and language, and, most of all, the code of love and independence that is so hard to break. In the face of his wife’s illness, decline, and death, the main character attempts to achieve peace with the help of an intuitive psychological theory of chaos. He builds on the work of such scholars as Henri Wallon (1879–1962) and Boris Porshnev (1905–1972). The character’s question about who he is, whether he is true to himself, whether he is a genuine person or a nobody, a predator or a victim, stands at the center of both of Kashtanov’s Israeli novels. Khaker Astarty is a new milestone in the direction of the development of philosophical-anthropological prose that is envisioned by Vaiman’s Khanaanskie khroniki. He weaves together significant fragments of culturological reflections that are free and unconstrained by genre and poetic conventions to create lyrical-dramatic texts penned by a seasoned realist writer. *** In concluding this section, let us acknowledge two authors who try to understand the new reality through the prism of satirical and humorous prose: Aleksandr Kanevskii and Mark Galesnik. Kanevskii (b. 1933) repatriated to Israel in 1991, when he was already a well-known author of humorous and satirical works, and had already written fiction, plays, scripts, television shows, and stage shows and won international prizes. The transitional stage in his creative work was marked by the publication of the novel Teza s nashego dvora (Teza from our courtyard). Its first part (1989) describes in warm lyrical-comic tones the life of a Soviet Jewish family in Odesa and in Leningrad from the postwar years to the 1970s, and the second part (2008) shows the new world, born at the end of the 1980s, namely through emigration to America and Israel. The novel is a continuation of the tradition of Russian-Jewish literature. Notably, it stays clear of both caricature and parody, and of romantic nostalgia. Kanevskii’s Goroda i liudi. Polnoe sobranie vpechatlenii (Cities and people: Complete collection of impressions, 1990) came out the year before his repatriation. It was republished in 2013 as part of the book Polnoe sobranie vpechatlenii (Complete collection of impressions), which also included new stories from the series Dvadtsat′ let spustia (Twenty years later), written in Israel, such as, for example, the cycle Moe otkrytie Izrailia (My discovery of Israel, first published in 1993). Kanevskii has continued to publish collections of stories, variety show texts, memoirs, plays, scripts, and vaudevilles, as well as a cycle of “tragicomic detective short novels.” He also organized the comedy theater Kakadu (Cockatoo, 2005–2009).

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Since moving to Israel, Kanevskii has worked with the Russian-language press. He contributes to the humor periodical Balagan, its children’s version Balagasha (1991–1997), the newspaper Nepravda (Untruth), organizes the International Festival of Laughter (1995) and various Israeli festivals, founded the International Center of Humor, also named Balagan. In the book Smeisia, paiats! (Laugh, Pagliaccio!), Kanevskii writes about Balagan: “I didn’t want to do a Russian periodical in Israel—the goal was to put out an Israeli periodical in Russian.” This approach demonstrates his common approach to the new cultural reality and the destruction of old frameworks—in other words, his effort to create what he calls “my Israel.” The autobiographical novel Smeisia, paiats!, dedicated to the memory of the author’s spouse, Maiia Kanevskaia, is a “tragicomic, adventurist, confessional narration,” which brought Kanevskii the Yuri Nagibin Prize (2009) from the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. It presents a portrait of a generation, the story of a Soviet variety show that is also a representation of a whole epoch, through family stories and photographs, as well as innumerable anecdotes about famous and unknown people. Kanevskii’s definition of his own writing as tragicomic is not accurate: it stays within the framework of lyrical and satirical comedy, rarely approaching the grotesque, and the genre conventions are in harmony with a view of reality that is good-hearted, harmonizing, filled with empathy but not naïve, and not disposed to political satire, unlike that of Mark Galesnik. *** Mark Galesnik (b. September 9, 1956, repatriated 1990), prose writer, poet, and satirical journalist,74 graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, then moved to Leningrad and worked in the newspaper Vechernii Leningrad (Evening Leningrad), where in 1986–1989 he authored the humor column

74 Galesnik is the author of the following books: Ugolok redaktora (Editor’s corner, 1997), a collection of dramatic pamphlets in verse that also came out in M. Riskin’s Hebrew translation in 2009; V kushche sobytii: Ne del′nyi kommentarii Tory (In the tabernacle [playing on the similarity with the Russian gushcha, “thick”] of events: An impractical [or “weekly”] commentary on the Torah, 2005); a collection of pamphlets Zria v koren′ (Looking to the root, 2007); the comedy Korol′ golyi. Da zdravstvuet korol′! (A narod-to golyi!) (The king has no clothes. Long live the king! [While the people have no clothes!], 2010) and other plays; as well as the novel Prorokov 48 (48 Prophets [street], 2011), which came out in Sara Koy’s Hebrew translation in 2014. He is one of the authors and the editor-in-chief of the collection Kratkaia, naskol′ko eto vozmozhno v dannom sluchae, evreiskaia entsyklopediia (A short, to the extent that is possible in this instance, Jewish encyclopedia, 2004).

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“NOS” (Neformal′noe Ob′′edinenie Satirikov, Informal Association of Satirists). In 1989, in affiliation with the Leningrad House of Satire and Humor, he published a satirical newspaper Eshche! (More!), which lasted ten issues. Galesnik repatriated in 1990, and already within a matter of months he founded Beseder?, a satirical periodical in Israel “for those who can still laugh,” which was a supplement to the newspaper Nasha Strana (Our country) until 1993; to the newspaper 24 Chasa (24 hours) in 1993–1994; to the newspaper Vremia (Time), as part of the supplement Kaleidoskop, in 1994–1996; and to the newspaper Vesti (News) from 1996 to 2010. From 1998, the periodical came out in internet publications produced by Anton Nosik: Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, and Vesti.ru. Still active, and starting in 2004 (with an interruption in 2011–2014), Beseder? has its own website. In 1994, at the St. Petersburg festival of humor, Golden Ostap, Beseder? received the main Golden Ostap Prize. In 1992, Galesnik founded the publishing houses Beseder and Bibliotechka Besedera; since 1993, they have published more than a hundred books by Israeli and foreign authors. From 2006, Galesnik has been writing the column “Zria v koren′” (Looking to the root), later called “Tochki nad ë” (Dots over ë), for the German newspaper Russkaia Germaniia (Russian Germany). Galesnik also organizes festivals of literary humor. In October 1994, the festival Beseder 94 took place with the participation of such eminent authors and performers as Aleksandr Ivanov, Igor′ Guberman, Klara Novikova, Efim Shifrin, Viktor Shenderovich, Renata Mukha, Igor′ Irtenev, and Semen Farada. Just as significant was Beseder’s Bar Mitsvah festival in 2004. The arts festival Ierusalimskaia osen′ ( Jerusalem autumn) took place from 2006 to 2009. Part of it was the regional festival called Pora smeiat′sia (Time to laugh), which subsequently became a separate event and was held regularly until 2009. The novel Prorokov 48 makes fun of virtually all the cultural types of “Russian” Israelis and, along with them, all of their other fellow citizens. The main target of the satire is the same complex that concerns such authors as Rubina, Mikhailichenko and Nesis, and Nekod Singer: Jerusalem syndrome, messianic expectations in combination with a bitter cynicism, an irrepressible cultural projection—together with the inability to finish what is started. Galesnik’s books and the periodical that he edited, in accordance with the conventions of the satirical genre, are directed at the comprehension and criticism of reality through laughter. For this reason, he was drawn from the start into Israeli cultural and political life without losing his journalistic and writer’s (as well as publisher’s) independence in the process and all the while maintaining a connection with the Russian-language communities in other countries. In doing so, he promotes in no small measure the rejection of cultural marginality and minority

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status, which became the main aesthetic vector of Russian-Israeli literature of the 1990s–2000s.

2.  Diaspora and Wandering A cultural-epistemic dominant, the guiding direction, can usually be delineated in the work of every author. For the authors under discussion in this essay, such a dominant is not Israel but European or Soviet Jewry. For them, Israel is not the soil where writing grows as a “literature of existence,” and not an absent space. Rather, it is a locus of historical and creative, real and imagined wanderings. This dominant is formed partly by the biography of the writer, particularly relevant for those writers who spent or are spending only part of their creative lives in Israel and those who found themselves in the country after having fully come into their own in the USSR. Among the latter is Anatolii Aleksin (Goberman, 1924–2017), who repatriated to Israel in 1993, with a long and rich writing career already under his belt. After emigration, he published, among other things, the novel Saga o Pevznerakh (The Pevzner saga, 1994; judging by the author’s dating, he started writing it in 1992). In this volume, Aleksin attempts to apply his artistic method in the context of Russian-Jewish and Russian-Israeli literature, its themes, and the cursed questions of antisemitism, Jewish identity, emigration, war, and terror—both Soviet and Arab—destroying families and lives. One of the central themes that leads literature into the context of the fates of European Jewry is, undoubtedly, the Shoah (Holocaust). *** The theme of the Holocaust occupies a central place in the prose of such authors as Grigory Kanovich and Elena Makarova, and in the works of Daniel′ Kluger it is interwoven with the theme of other historical catastrophes of the Jewish people. Whereas Kanovich works within the framework of traditional prose genres, Makarova (b. October 18, 1951, repatriated 1990), a prose writer, sculptor, artist, pedagogue, art therapist, and historian, accomplishes a deep reorientation in Russian Holocaust literature.75 In her works, various cognitive and poetic 75 In the USSR, she published the collections of short novels Katushka (A reel, 1978), Perepolnennye dni (Overfilled days, 1982), and Otkrytyi final (Open ending, 1989). Her novels Smekh na ruinakh (Laughter on the ruins, Znamia 3–4 [1995]), Fridl (Druzhba narodov 9 [2000]), Tsatsa zamorskaia (Foreign beauty, 2007), Vechnyi sdvig (Eternal shift, 2015), Glotok

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practices are connected by two axes: the first is a child’s bewilderment in the face of life and historical catastrophe, and the second is the ability to recreate and rebuild life and history with the help of art. In the novels Smekh na ruinakh (Laughter on the ruins; published in periodicals in 1995, separate edition in 2008) and Fridl (Friedl, published in periodicals in 2000, a separate edition in 2012), Makarova opens a new page in the literature about the prisoners of Nazi ghettos and camps. From 1988, she has worked on staging exhibits of children’s drawings from the Theresienstadt concentration camp and has published albums and books about cultural life in the ghetto, in particular a series of books under the joint name Krepost′ nad bezdnoi (Fortress over the abyss, 2003–2008) about art, music, theater, and education in the Theresienstadt concentration camp (together with Sergei Makarov, Viktor Kuperman, and Ekaterina Nekliudova) and the book Frants Peter Kin. Son i real′nost′ (Frantz Peter Kien: Dream and reality, 2009) about the artist and writer who was confined in the Theresienstadt ghetto and killed in Auschwitz. Here, experiments with forms of the narrative construction of events and memory of the Holocaust are combined with avant-garde experiments with stream of consciousness and playing with variations in narration, stylization, and parody, which bring the novels close to a postmodernist aesthetic. Makarova’s particular attention is drawn to the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist who was engaged in drawing with children in the Theresienstadt ghetto and was killed together with the other inhabitants of the ghetto in AuschwitzBirkenau not long before the end of the war. She managed to save hundreds of her students’ works. After the passage of years, exhibits and albums of the drawings of the children of the Theresienstadt ghetto, as well as Friedl’s notes and letters, immortalized her name as one of the founders of art therapy and an example of an unbending strength of spirit and humanity in the face of monstrous violence and inevitable death. The story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis lies at the foundation of Makarova’s “documentary novel” Fridl (2000), the aesthetic

shiraza (A sip of syrah, Zvezda 1 [2019]), and Putevoditel′ poteriannykh. Dokumental′nyi roman (A guidebook of the lost: A documentary novel, 2020) come out after repatriation. Makarova is the author of numerous works on child upbringing and art therapy. She has been awarded a medal by the Korczak Society; she is a laureate of the literary prize of Israel in the category of a book written not in Hebrew (1993), the laureate of the Russian Prize for the book Vechnyi sdvig (2016), and a laureate of the periodical Znamia in the category “Neutrachennoe vremia” (Time not lost, 2017). Makarova compiled and published Imia razluki (The name of separation, 2017), the correspondence with her mother, the well-known Russian poet Inna Lisnianskaia. Several of her books were translated into foreign languages.

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of which, adopted from the Bauhaus movement, consists in presenting art as teaching, a culture-building craft. Since the 2000s and particularly in the 2010s, artistic, documentaryhistorical, autobiographical, and philosophical-pedagogical genre elements in Makarova’s books have been interwoven to the point of being totally indistinguishable. In all her books of these years, thoughts about art and emigration are mixed in the consciousness of the characters with thought about ghettos and concentration camps, both Nazi and Soviet. The collection Vechnyi sdvig (Eternal shift 2015), in addition to stories, contains tales stylized as the diary of an émigré of the 1990s, an alcoholic phantasmagoria of a sculptor in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, a dialogue (more accurately a monologue) of a female writer who is a repatriate—the author’s double—with the Israeli writer Ben-Zion Tomer about Soviet and post-Soviet reality. Putevoditel′ poteriannykh (A guidebook of the lost, 2020) is a collection of stories about the author’s meetings with the survivors of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The artistic discourse about the Holocaust and its memory grow not only and not so much out of the survivors’ tales as out of the story of spiritual and material culture that was nearly destroyed but that survived and is woven anew into the new life of the author and her characters as it is recreated in the book. It is no exaggeration to say that this is a book about building an ordered life on the ruins of memory and culture, just as Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, which provides the title, serves to arrange order from the chaos of ideas and beliefs.76 Makarova’s poetic method is applied in full force in the novel Shleif (Trail), published in Zvezda 3–5 (2021) and released as a separate edition in 2022. Its main character, Anna, lives in Jerusalem during the period of COVID quarantine and does not remember who she is. But she is overwhelmed with the memories of other people about the events of the first quarter of the twentieth century in Russia, gleaned from suitcases containing old papers that she inherited. At the same time, she reads about the Holocaust, the diaries of the victims. Fragments of memoirs and biographies, books and diaries, newspapers and scientific articles, poems, the voices of historical and fictional characters are compiled into a complex multilevel mosaic. While the heroine wanders around 76 The book continues the cycle Krepost′ nad bezdnoi: Terezinskie dnevniki, 1942–1945 (Fortress over the abyss: Theresienstadt diaries, 1942–1945, 2003), Ia—bluzhdaiushchii rebenok. Deti i uchitelia v getto Terezin, 1941–1945 (I’m a straying child: Children and teachers in the Theresienstadt ghetto, 1941–1945, 2005), Terezinskie lektsii, 1941–1944 (Theresienstadt lectures, 1941–1944, 2006), and Iskusstvo, muzyka i teatr v Terezine. 1941–1945 (Art, music, and theater in Theresienstadt: 1941–1945, 2007).

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a half-empty city, meets real people, or communicates with her psychiatrist, many other people’s lives occupy her mind, which, according to the author, is life, chaim in Hebrew—a plural word. She seems to be hiding fragments of texts on her body, like those prisoners she is talking about. Moreover, her body itself consists of these scraps, as well as her soul, tormented by Jerusalem syndrome. This novel confirms Elena Promyshlianskaia’s observation that current RussianIsraeli literature finds itself in the transformation of geography into history (see Promyshlianskaia’s essay in this collection). *** Grigory Kanovich (1929–2023, repatriated 1993) was a well-known Lithuanian-Soviet prose writer and also the author of poetry collections, plays, and many film scripts. The major part of his work consists of long and short novels and short stories about the lives of Lithuanian Jews.77 The move of this prominent writer to Israel in 1993 is hardly reflected in the content and poetics of his work. Moreover, Kanovich is a representative of traditional—both in themes and in poetics—Russian-Jewish literature. He arrived in Israel at a time when Russian-Israeli literature was experiencing a shift toward a new self-awareness and was searching for new forms and a new view of the world. But after emigration Kanovich did not breathe the new life into his writings by making them his method of understanding the new cultural reality. Still, the appearance of such an author on the local Israeli scene could not remain unnoticed. He brought the authentic and powerful voice of the culture of the Jewish shtetl of the past

77 Before repatriating to Israel, Kanovich published the following novels: the trilogy Svechi na vetru (Candles in the wind), which includes the novels Ptitsy nad kladbishchem (Birds over the cemetery, 1974), Blagoslovi i list′ia, i ogon′ (Bless the leaves and the fire, 1977), and Kolybel′naia snezhnoi babe (Lullaby for a snowwoman, 1979); a cycle of novels that includes Slezy i molitvy durakov (The tears and prayers of fools, 1983), I net rabam raia (And there is no paradise for slaves, 1985), and Kozlenok za dva grosha (A goatling for two cents, 1987); Ulybnis′ nam, Gospodi (Smile upon us, Lord, 1989); and others. In 1989–1991 Kanovich served as a national representative (deputat) in the Soviet legislature. He maintained close ties with Lithuania and the Lithuanian cultural milieu even after repatriation, when his new novels and novelettes came out: Park evreev (Park of Jews), originally published in periodicals as Park zabytykh evreev (Park of forgotten Jews, 1997); Prodavets snov (Seller of dreams, 1998), Shelest srublennykh derev′ev (Murmur of felled trees, 1999), Liki vo t′me (Faces in the dark, 2002), Ocharovan′e satany (Enchantment of Satan, 2007), Shtetl romance (Mestechkovyi romans, 2013), and others. He was a third-degree member of the Lithuanian Order of Gediminas (1995). He was a laureate of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel Prize (1999) and of the National Prize of Lithuania in the category of art and culture (2014) for the novels Slezy i molitvy durakov and I net rabam raia.

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century, and the one before that, and became, along with Iakov Shekhter, one of the main representatives of contemporary Russian-Jewish literature, the center of which had definitively relocated from Russia to Israel. Its rise or, rather, return to its roots occurred at the end of the 1990s, coinciding with the search for a unique Russian-Israeli literature in the creative work of many different writers of the 1970s, from Iakov Tsigel′man to Efrem Baukh. Kanovich’s RussianJewish—but not Zionist—“traditionalism” of the late Soviet period accentuates the paths chosen by others: Tsigel′man’s neomodernism, Baukh’s philosophicalhistorical mythopoesis, Shekhter’s religious-mystical realism. On the thematic plane, unlike them and also unlike exodus and refusenik writers, Kanovich is occupied with immortalizing the memory of East European Jewry. His characters have very deep national and cultural roots, so they rarely confront problems of identity, unlike the characters of universalist writers such as Felix Roziner, Iurii Karabchievskii, David Shrayer-Petrov, Friedrich Gorenstein, and David Markish. Whether or not Kanovich’s arrival in Israel has had a direct influence on Israeli writers, he serves as a point of departure for the new, neither Soviet nor anti-Soviet, neither émigré nor Zionist, stage in the development of Russian-Jewish poetics in Israel. The novel Park zabytykh evreev (Park of forgotten Jews, first published in Oktiabr′ 4–5 [1997]) is an elegy for the disappearing world of East European Jewry, which managed to survive the wars of the twentieth century but became irrelevant and forgotten by the end of the 1980s. The novel Ocharovan′e satany (Enchantment of Satan, Oktiabr′ 7 [2007]) also describes the annihilation of the Lithuanian Jews in prisons, ghettos, camps, and small towns, during World War II, as well as after it. Resonating with it are the earlier novels Kolybel′naia snezhnoi babe (Lullaby for a snowwoman, 1979) and Kozlenok za dva grosha (Goatling for two cents, 1987). In the novels Shelest srublennykh derev′ev (Murmur of felled trees, Oktiabr′ 7–8 [1999]) and Mestechkovyi romans (Shtetl romance, Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 40 [2011]), Kanovich looks into the history of Lithuanian Jewry in the twentieth century as reflected in the fate of his family. The depiction of the father in them is so similar to the image of the main character in Park zabytykh evreev that these works can be combined into a single “family” cycle. Incidentally, the majority of Kanovich’s novels have common “family” traits and in some sense tell one story of one family—the family of vanished Lithuanian Jewry. *** Daniel′ Kluger (b. 1951, repatriated 1994), a prose writer, poet, essayist, translator, and performer of art songs, has enriched Russian-Israeli literature by combining popular genres, such as the detective novel, science fiction, and

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the literary fairy tale, with historical and cultural popular-science essay writing.78 He was one of the founders of and contributors to the periodical Miry, Izrail′skii zhurnal sovremennoi fantastiki (Worlds: Israeli magazine of modern science fiction), and also served as its editor. Four issues of the magazine came out in 1995–1996. The editorial board, besides Kluger, included Pavel Amnuel′ and Ilana Gomel. Leonid Reznik, Aleksandr Lur′e, Aleksandr Rybalka, Zeev Bar-Sella, and Rafail Nudel′man also published in the magazine. Along with Eli Liuksemburg, Dennis Sobolev, and Iakov Shekhter, Kluger is one of those modern authors whose writing, on the one hand, grows out of the broad contexts of Jewish history, culture, mysticism, literature, and folklore and, on the other, aims at an artistic, partly science fiction understanding of modern Israeli reality.79 He is one of the most prolific and popular authors of the genre

78 Kluger has been published since 1979 in such periodicals as Znanie—sila (Knowledge is power), Energiia (Energy), Iskatel′ (Searcher), and Vokrug Sveta (Around the world). He is the laureate of the competition for the best fantasy story dedicated to the one hundred twentyfifth anniversary of the periodical Vokrug Sveta (1986), the recipient of the Marble Faun Prize (in the category of literary studies) for the book Baskervil′skaia misteriia (The Baskerville mystery, 2005), and the Olive Tree of Jerusalem Prize for the poetic cycle Evreiskie ballady ( Jewish ballads, 2008). 79 The voluminous corpus of Kluger’s works includes the following: Zhestkoe solntse: Trilogiia o Mitridate Evpatore (Harsh sun: Trilogy about Mithridates Eupator, 1982–1988), a cycle consisting of three historical novellas; a cycle of science-fiction stories about the outer-space adventures of flight navigator Koshkin (1986–2006); a cycle of realistic detective stories about the Israeli private detective Nathanael Rozovski (2001–2017); the detective series Who’s to Blame? in the genre of historical fantasy (bordering on alternative history), one of the characters in which is the young Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), written together with Vitaly Babenko and published under the pseudonym Vitalii Danilin (2006–2007); Dela magicheskie (Matters of magic), a cycle of mystical detective novels about the Israeli sleuth Nitsan Bar-Ab (2008–2017); several works of Jewish Gothics—Tysiacha let v dolg (A thousand years borrowed, 2001), a kabbalistic fantasy novel written together with Aleksandr Rybalka, “a novel in ten stories” Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi (She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night, 2013), a historical-romantic fairy tale, which draws on folk ballads, and Gotika evreiskogo mestechka (The Jewish shtetl gothic), a collection of ballads described as; stories that were included in collective publication in detective and fantasy genres such as, for example, Akademiia Shekli (Sheckley academy, 2007), Geroi (Heroes, 2008, 2010), Strazhi poslednego neba. Russkaia evreiskaia fantastika (Guardians of the last heaven. Russian Jewish fantasy, 2012); collections of stories and essays, such as Iz Enska v Ensk i obratno (From Ensk to Ensk and back, 2018). Kluger also writes poetry: see his collections Molchalivyi gost′ (The silent guest, 1991), Razboinich′ia noch′ (Predatory night, 2009), and I vosstanet veter (And the wind will rise, 2018), as well as ballads on historical Jewish and other themes, performed by him on the guitar and released on audio disks. Finally, Kluger has also authored numerous popular-historical and scholarly articles, published as collections or individually, on topics such as Jewish history, “Pereshedshie reku” (Those who crossed the river, 2000); the history of the detective genre, “Baskervil′skaia misteriia” (The Baskerville mystery, 2005); prototypes of well-known literary characters, “Taina kapitana Nemo” (The

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

of “Jewish fantasy,” which, in his words, barely exists anymore (see also Elena Rimon’s essay in this volume).80 In his prose and poetry, written in the genres of literary fairy tale and ballad, Kluger represents the tragic horror of Jewish history. The stories that make up the book Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi (She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night, 2013) possess a series of traits that bring them close to the stories of Iakov Shekhter about demons and devils, the kabbalists and the righteous men. However, unlike Shekhter’s stories, in Kluger’s works, in accordance with balladic traditions, the forces of light and righteousness rarely win, and even in those instances when justice turns out to be reestablished in a mystical way, it is at a tragic cost. For Kluger, unlike Shekhter, the righteous ones and the rabbis do not possess the special wisdom and strength that is capable of chastening the world and healing the wounds of existence. Apart from this mystical direction, in the series Dela magicheskie (Matters of magic), Kluger develops the genre of Jewish fantasy in the direction of alternative reality in which magic turns out to be part of the everyday world of modern Israel. Despite demonic and fantastic elements, his stories present a picturesque portrayal of the culture, everyday life, ethos, and mentality of the Israelis. Finally, Kluger’s many historical ballads, both the fantastical and the realistic, are dedicated to the improbable and often tragic paths of Jewish history. Among Kluger’s eclectic prose works, of particular note are the novels in which adventures, national discourse, and philosophical-historical foundations merge most harmoniously. These include Poslednii vykhod Sheiloka (Shylock’s last act, 2006) and Mushketer, ili Podlinnaia istoriia Isaaka de Portu (The musketeer, or the True story of Isaac de Porthau, 2007), which, in accordance with the designation he uses in the introduction to Mushketer, belong to the genre of historical fantasy. The first novel describes events that take place in a ghetto during the Holocaust, and the second shows the Portuguese Jews of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seen through the prism of the figure of Porthos from The Three Musketeers. At the center of both novels is the problem of salvaging a Jewish identity and the survival of Jewry as a community in the face of historical catastrophes. The author paints the fears and complexes of European civilization, which are eschatological but relate to the present. From there, he develops the retro-futuristic parable of a Jewish state as a ghetto that is fated to repeat a

secret of Captain Nemo, 2010); and the history of private detectives, “Genii syska. Etiud v biograficheskikh tonakh” (Geniuses of detection. A study in biographical tones, 2019). 80 Daniel′ Kluger, “Vozmozhna li evreiskaia fentezi?,” Vesti [ Jerusalem], April 2, 2006, 38; also in Migdal-Times [Odesa] 77 (2006): 10–13, https://www.migdal.org.ua/times/77/6792/.

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“game of reality,” always ending in its tragic destruction. Here, Kluger’s voice blends into the tragic vision that is inherent in the literature of the middle of the 2000s, which responds to the bloody “second intifada,” in particular, such novels as Sobolev’s Ierusalim (2005), Mikhailichenko and Nesis’s Preemptive Revenge (2006), Tarn’s Pepel (Ash, 2006), Gol′dshtein’s Spokoinye polia (2006), and Rubina’s Sindikat (2004) and Belaia golubka Kordovy (2009). *** The works of such writers as Aleksandr Shoikhet, Arkadii Krasil′shchikov, and Grigorii Vakhlis focus on the fate of Russian and Soviet Jewry in the historical past and the Israeli present. Shoikhet (b. 1946, repatriated 1990), a prose writer, poet, and essayist, started to write “for his desk drawer” in the middle of the 1970s; his first collections came out in the 1990s, but his greatest and most significant works only started appearing in the middle of the 2000s.81 Vitrazhi (Stained-glass windows, 2006) is in many ways an autobiographical novel about exodus, about the fate of a Jewish intellectual who travels the path from a Soviet childhood in the 1960s, through his student youth and the dissident and Jewish human rights movements in the 1970s and 1980s, to a parting from Russia and repatriation to Israel in the 1990s. The main character of the novel, like many of his contemporaries, becomes a member of the underground and a warrior standing in defense of the Jewish people and humanistic values against their enemies—be they the USSR and the KGB or the Arab hordes annihilating the Jewish state in the anti-utopian war of the 2000s. In spite of his highbrow softness, it is just such a hero, to the author’s mind, that is the cornerstone of Jewish and Israeli endurance. Shoikhet’s magical realist novel Agasfer (Ahasuerus, 2009) also deals with Jewish endurance and Jewish powerlessness, the two key factors defining the nation’s history, as well as their sources. As in the previous novel, its main character has to fulfill a mission on which the fate of humanity hangs. And again, the events of the novel are written into a science-fiction and anti-utopian

81 Shoikhet is the author of the following books of tales and stories: Priekhali my v Izrail′ (We arrived in Israel, 1995), Tantsy na chuzhoi svad′be (Dances at someone else’s wedding, 1999), Legenda o lesorube. Sovremennye evreiskie skazki i istorii (The legend of a lumberjack: Modern Jewish fairy tales and stories, 2018); of the novels Vitrazhi (Stained-glass windows, 2006) and Agasfer (Ahasuerus, 2009); and a collection of journalistic writing Kogda gorit tvoi dom (When your house is burning, 2016). The collection Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Collected works, 2018) includes the two novels and much of his short prose. Shoikhet was awarded the Yuri Nagibin Prize by the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel in 2010 for his novels.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

framework: the Wandering Jew, the indefatigable “eternal warrior,” the last earthly “cultural hero,” has survived a new world war, the “Great Catastrophe,” yet now the main character writes a memoir recording the ages of Jewish history, from the siege of Masada to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, from Stalin’s death to Gorbachev’s perestroika. The picture of modern Israel, bogged down in the same age-old powerlessness, is also filled with bitter disillusionment and apocalyptic premonitions. In the cycle Puteshestiia strannogo cheloveka (rasskazy o gospodine N., o ego udivitel′nykh prikliucheniiakh v Rossii, Izraile i inykh mestakh) ( Journeys of a strange man [stories about Mr. N., about his wondrous adventures in Russia, Israel, and other places]), which was included in the book Legenda o lesorube. Sovremennye evreiskie skazki i istorii (The legend of a lumberjack: Modern Jewish fairy tales and stories, 2018), a complex picture emerges in a sequence of dreams, fantasies, recollections, letters, and diaries that document the disappearing culture of the twentieth century and the history of Soviet Jewry and emigration to Israel. Its main character, a double of Shoikhet’s personae, is simultaneously a folklore Jewish shlimazel and Russian bogatyr′, a hermit and warrior, the last authentic individualist, who, willingly or unwillingly, turns out to be the one who is capable, if only in his imagination, of saving the remnants of common sense when history is drowning in the madness of hatred, falsehood, and betrayal. Shoikhet’s prose raises the Russian-Jewish philosophical-political fairy tale and anti-utopia to a new level, thereby reacting to the new historical challenges of the beginning of the twenty-first century. *** Arkadii Krasil′shchikov (b. 1945, repatriated 1996) is a Soviet, Israeli, and Russian screenwriter and director.82 Eli Liuksemburg wrote the foreword to Krasil′shchikov’s collection Rasskazy v dorogu (Take-out stories, 2000) with the expressive title “Judaic Report in Russian”: “Arkady Krasil′shchikov is a Jewish

82 Krasil′shchikov is the author of the novelettes “Chas rasskaza” (Story time, 1997) and “Delo Beilisa” (The Beilis affair, 1999) as well as collections of stories and sketches Rasskazy v dorogu (Take-out stories, 2000), Navstrechu sud′be (Towards fate, 2003), and Rasskazy o russkom Izraile: esse i ocherki raznykh let (Stories of Russian Israel: Essays and sketches from various years, 2009). Kontrabanda Yakova: literaturnyi stsenarii (Yakov’s contraband: A literary screenplay, 2010) and Zametki o klassike (Notes on the classics, 2013) were published in the literary supplement Roman-gazeta (Novel-in-newspaper) to the Israeli edition of Novosti nedeli (News of the week).

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writer of the new type. I’m tempted to emphasize: ‘a writer of the return.’ He writes incisively, zestfully, and resoundingly about Russian Jewry in exile and in Israel.”83 Krasil′shchikov’s Rasskazy o russkom Izraile (Stories of Russian Israel, 2009) is dedicated, in the author’s words, to the “strangeness in the fate of man on behalf of which it is worth mucking up paper.” They are short, plot-driven sketches composing a motley mosaic of the personalities of Soviet Jews or Russian Israelis. What is noteworthy in the title of the collection is the concept of a “Russian Israel,” in which the community of repatriates from the former USSR figures as a self-contained cultural formation, distinguishable from the background of Israeli culture but also consistent with it and transforming it in its own image and likeness. *** Grigorii Vakhlis (b. 1952, repatriated 1990) began publishing stories, tales, and poems in 2013 in the periodicals Kreshchatik and Ierusalimskii Zhurnal. He is the author of the book Zolotoi vek (Golden age, 2016), a grotesque phantasmagoria about nonconformist artists in Kyiv during the late Soviet period; and of the collection of stories Konets zolotogo veka (End of the Golden Age, published 2017 under one cover with Zolotoi vek), a portrait of a deeply existential experience of both Israeli and Soviet reality. The observations and contemplations of its characters are simultaneously philosophical and lyrical, melancholic and permeated with a strength of spirit and reason. On the one hand, the novel and the stories are saturated with the same symbols of bitterness and disillusionment that are characteristic of émigré Russian-Israeli literature: a guard’s booth, the idea of magical flight, images of primitive Israelis, mindless work, and piles of trash. However, there is also a new voice, one that is not ironic and not nostalgic but pensive and prayerful, as if calling “from the depths,” de profundis, as one of his stories is titled. These discordant stories encompass the fate of Jews in the past hundred years. Some have the appearance of dreams, others resemble anti-utopian landscapes, and all are reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in atmosphere and rhythm and sometimes also in themes. They are transfused by a serene, almost stoic wisdom. The art of storytelling here almost achieves classical harmony and integrity. At the same time, the author demonstrates an ingenuity rooted in a multitude of sources, with manifold literary and philosophical allusions. *** 83 Eli Liuksemburg, “Predislovie,” in Rasskazy v dorogu, by Arkadii Krasil′shchikov ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2000, 3–6), 4.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

Jewish and universal topics combine in a poetic, psychological, and everyday lyricism in the artistic works of such authors as Mark Kotliarskii, Karine Arutiunova, Rimma Glebova, and Leon Agulianskii. Glebova (1942–2013, repatriated 1998)84 writes about warm, sentimental human relations against the background of both Russian-Israeli and Russian (and Soviet) or universal events. Her realistic prose represents her recollections of a Soviet past as well as the story of becoming part of a new Israeli reality. The cycle Misticheskie istorii (Mystical stories), published in the internet, represents the other side of Glebova’s creative work: magical realism with an element of the gothic, modern urban ballad, and sometimes science fiction with romantic overtones. The prose writer and playwright Leon (Leonid) Agulianskii (b. 1959, repatriated 1988)85 creates a complex picture of the historical reality of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, wars and terror, concentration camps and psychiatric hospitals. In these terrible situations, the fates of his characters—Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Russians—are freakishly interwoven without a coherent explanation. His works present brief and brittle human time, which persists in spite of all probabilities. The prose writer and playwright Mark Kotliarskii (b. 1956, repatriated 1990) is the compiler and editor of the almanac Roza vetrov (Rose of the winds, 1995–2002), as well as the eBook collection Na iskhode avgusta. Antologiia izrail′skogo rasskaza (In the end of August: An anthology of the Israeli short story, 2017), in which the texts of thirty-five Russian-Israeli writers are presented.86 The annotations to Kotliarskii’s books note his hybrid innovative prose, 84 Rimma Glebova published the collection Zhili-byli (Once upon a time, 2000), U sud′by na kacheliakh (Fate’s seesaw, 2003), and Khroniki liubvi (Chronicles of love, 2010). 85 Leon Agulianskii is the author of the adventure novel Nerusskaia ruletka (Un-Russian roulette, 2006), republished under the title Rezervist (The reservist) in 2010; collections of novelettes and short stories: Vizit v Zazerkal′e (The world behind the looking glass, 2008) and Parallel′nye krivye: povesti, rasskazy, p′esa (Parallel curves: Tales, short stories, a play, 2009), for which he received the A. P. Chekhov Prize, as well as Beg radi zhizni (Running to live, 2013); and popular-medical books Prostata i ee bolezni (The prostate and its diseases, 2007), which also came out in Hebrew in 2006 and Sredi kontsov. Nevydumannye istorii vracha-urologa (Among the ends: The uninvented stories of a urologist, 2020). 86 Mark Kotliarskii authored the following books of essays: Evrei i seks ( Jews and sex, 2005, together with Petr Liukimson), Zhizn′ zanimatelnykh liudei (The lives of engaging people, 2006), Evreiskaia Atlantida. Taina poteriannykh kolen ( Jewish Atlantis: The secret of the lost tribes, together with Alexander Maistrov, 2008), Tikhii Don Zhuan (Quiet Don Juan, 2011), and Putevodnaia pyl′ (The guiding dust, 2013). His book Volch′i vorota (Wolf ’s gate, 2008) was longlisted for the Bunin Prize. He published the collection of short stories Nepreryvnost′ teksta (Continuity of the text, 2011), Tot, kto ne chital Selindzhera (He who didn’t read Salinger, 2015), and Prizrak na poroge (Specter on the threshold, 2017). Kotliarskii published the following collections in the internet: Strannaia zhenshchina. Novelly (Strange woman: Novellas,

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the “genre of intersection,” “outside-ism” (vneizm). His narrators, for instance, in the collection Peresechenie snov (Intersection of dreams, 2017), compare it to “mauvism,” the style introduced by Valentin Kataev in his memoir-novel Almaznyi moi venets (My diamond garland). Kotliarskii’s style is distinguished by a dynamic combination of traditional psychological and romantic realism with features of fragmentary micro-prose, which have become so popular in the internet age, and with modernist techniques such as the stream of consciousness and the inclusion of poetic fragments in prose. The use of narrative forms that imitate letters or diaries can be considered very traditional. Yet, at the same time, he does not turn to ironic eclecticism, following instead the tradition of the poetics of sincerity. Brief plot-driven figurative lyrical sketches saturated with metaphoric imagery, comparisons, and cultural and literary quotations form the foundation of Kotliarskii’s prose in Volch′i vorota (Wolf ’s gate, 2008), Strannaia zhenshchina (Strange woman, 2016), and other cycles of miniature story-novellas. In Ved′mina gora (Witch’s mountain, 2020), as in his other texts, Kotliarskii attempts to bring internet life and thought back to the traditions of symbolism. With this goal in mind, he marks what can be called his “Israeli text” with symbolic otherworldliness, which transcends everyday forms of existence into a dreamlike elsewhere. Despite being an almost Facebook-like mix of fragments, plots, and images, his writing aims, following the vector developed by Milan Kundera, to infuse existence with a long-lost “deliberateness,” to return from the age of suspicion and disenchantment to a naïve enchantment with the image, music, and significance of the word. Out of intermittence, there is born a not-modern retardation, a deferral of gazing and gesturing. Combining almost unjoinable poetics, Kotliarskii adds an innovative freshness to traditional narration and reveals deep historical-cultural roots in his fashionable stylistic experiments. The writer and painter Karine Arutiunova (b. 1963, repatriated 1994)87 published her first book, Angel Gofman i drugie (The angel Gofman and others), in 2016), Vokrug menia, ili 100 pisem, izvlechennykh iz Feisbuka (Around me, or 100 letters extracted from Facebook, 2017), and the “small novels” Peresechenie snov (Intersection of dreams, 2017) and Ved′mina gora (Witch’s mountain, 2020). He is a recipient of the Yuri Nagibin Prize from the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel (2017). 87 In 2010, Arutiunova was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize in the category of prose for her collection of stories Angel Gofman i drugie (The angel Gofman and others, 2009). Her collection of stories, Pepel krasnoi korovy (Ashes of the red cow, 2011) was longlisted for the Big Book and NOS Awards for that same year. This was followed by the collections Skazhi Krasnyi (Say Red, 2012), Schastlivye liudi (Happy people, 2015), and Docheri Evy (Eve’s daughters, 2015). Arutiunova became a laureate of the V. G. Korolenko National Union of the Writers of Ukraine in 2017 with her book Tsvet granata, vkus limona (Color of pomegranates, taste

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

2009 under the pseudonym Merche. She immediately drew attention because of her masterful command of the genre of the sentimental short story, the freedom with which she recreated languages and depicted the images and manners of modern Israel, and that mixture of Jewish, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and other cultures, long gone into the past—the mixture that, for lack of a better word, has to be called Soviet. Arutiunova’s writing in her first collections is directed at a sentimental mastery of Israeli cultural reality but not much more so than of the Cuban or Roma life. She is attracted not so much by signs and symbols as by rhythms and forms, and her short stories are therefore permeated with Spanish, Roma, and Jewish folk music and singing, and even jazz on occasion. Some of her prose consists of poeticized confessional anecdotes or travelogues, thickly entangled with variations of the skaz, genre sketches, conversational speech, and diglossia. Another, more consequential element approaches modernist poetry with its ultra-lyrical, metaphoric symbolism. Her work is sometimes surrealist too. Most significant is the influence and the explicit presence of Federico García Lorca. The narrator’s immersion in the stream of recollections, perceptions, associations, and contemplations is marked by extremely long sentences with elaborate syntax, which evoke the poetics of Marcel Proust. Arutiunova draws the reader into reliving times and memories, as reality splinters into a multitude of parallel dimensions, forcing readers and characters to live through what is usually concealed beneath the dense veneer of everyday life. Often, proceeding from this same state of consciousness, her text falls apart into small fragments, shrinking to down to aphorisms and microprose forms. In the 2010s, Arutiunova’s publications diverged into various, although not fully separate, lines. The collections Schastlivye liudi (Happy people) and Docheri Evy (Eve’s daughters) can be characterized as, respectively, Kyivan and Tel Avivan. The collection Schastlivye liudi (2015), as well as Padaet sneg, letit ptitsa (It’s snowing, a bird’s flying, 2017), is engulfed by waves of nostalgia for the “holiday” of Soviet childhood, the peculiar feeling of a repatriate who has returned from Israel to her homeland after many years and discovers that both here and there “something is missing”—the spirit of Soviet Jewishness, old Kyiv courtyards and apartments, her childhood magazines and books. The narrator

of lemon, 2017). Later, she received the Ernest Hemingway Prize in the category of long prose for the book Moi drug Bendzhamen (My friend Benjamin, 2020). She also published the collections Padaet sneg, letit ptitsa (It’s snowing, a bird’s flying, 2017), Narekatsi ot Lilit (Narekatsi from Lilith, 2019), and Svet Bonnara. Eskizy na poliakh (Bonnard’s light. Sketches on the margins, 2021).

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returns to Israel in the collection Docheri Evy (2015), where nostalgic alienation and longing become the foundation of freedom. Israel appears in the fullness of life, in the “fullness of being in everything.”88 Adjoining the cycle of Israeli short stories in the book is a group of short Arutiunova’s stories following the life of a Jewish ghetto in Poland during World War II. Armenian themes, poets, artists, and temples come to the forefront in the collection Narekatsi ot Lilit (Narekatsi from Lilith, 2019). Particular significance in this text is given to the symbol of the “abandoned hearth,” which represents regret about leaving home and the country of one’s childhood that come after many years of homelessness. In the book Moi drug Bendzhamen (My friend Benjamin, 2020), fragments of lyrical monologues, impressions, and experiences are combined to create a pseudo-novelistic form that merges the voices of the dog Benjamin and its owner. Along with Arutiunova’s drawings, which are included in the book, the text creates a picture of a newly acquired house and a hearth where all times become one; the narrator and her friend acquire, once again, the natural energy that is, at the same time, universally human. Igor′ Guberman (b. 1936, repatriated 1988) is well known for his short aphoristic poems, or gariks.89 However, he started out as the author of book of popular science.90 Guberman participated in samizdat circles and publications (in particular, in the periodical Sintaksis), where the style of his gariks was forged. In 1979, he was arrested and imprisoned in a correctional-labor camp, from which he was freed in 1984. The book Progulki vokrug baraka (Strolling around the barracks, 1988), which depicts his years in prison, belongs to the genre of labor camp literature and the corpus of intellectual memoiristic fiction. Shtrikhi k portretu (Touches to a portrait, 1994) is an intellectual novel whose character writes a book about the multitalented Nikolai Bruni (1891–1938), about his ancestors and contemporaries, and reflects on art, the Silver Age, the Soviet terror and labor camps. In this book, Guberman tries writing serious prose with a complex construction of narrative voices enclosed one in another. In the books Pozhilye zapiski (Aged notes, 1996), Kniga stranstvii (Book of wanderings, 2002), Vechernii zvon (Evening bells, 2006), and Zametki s dorogi (Notes from the road, 2009), Guberman combines humorous stories from his own 88 Karine Arutiunova, Docheri Evy (s.l.: Ridero, 2015), http://loveread.ec/read_book. php?id=48126&p=2. 89 Usually pithy and aphoristic quatrains of verse, from the name Garik, a dimunitve of Igor′. 90 Guberman’s popular-science books include Tretii triumvirat (The third triumvirate, 1965), about bionics; and Chudesa i tragedii chernogo iashchika (Miracles and tragedies of the black box, 1969) and Bekhterev: stranitsy zhizni (Bekhterev: pages of life, 1977) about the secrets of the brain.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

life with parables, confessional and historical sketches, and the structures of genres such as travelogue, memoir, and the picaresque. This method is characteristic of his other books and collections of subsequent years, which sometimes include both gariks and prose. Such are Iskusstvo staret′ (The art of aging, 2010), O vypivke, o boge, o liubvi (About boozing, god, and love, 2014), as well as the series Ierusalimskie dnevniki ( Jerusalem diaries). Together with the well-known painter Aleksandr (Sasha)′ (b. 1949, repatriated 1979),91 he has written books that also make use of nonfiction elements: Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi zhizni (Book about a tasteful and healthy life, 2002) and Putevoditel′ po strane sionskikh mudretsov (Guidebook to the land of the Elders of Zion, 2009). Translated from Russian by Dobrochna E. Fire

Bibliography Primary Sources Azov, Mark. I obrushatsia gory. Kniga otkrovenii i fantazmov [And mountains will fall: A book of revelations and phantasms]. Jerusalem and Moscow: E.Ra and Letnii sad, 2009. ———. I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ [Laughter, prose, and love]. Haifa: Gutenberg, 2003. ———. Sochinitel′ snov: Otkroveniia i fantazmy [Composer of dreams: Revelations and phantasms]. Kharkiv: Maidan, 2011. Aleksin, Anatolii. Saga o Pevznerakh: roman s vyrvannymi stranitsami [The Pevzner saga: Novel with torn-out pages]. Bat Yam: Moriah, 2014. Al′ternativnaia antologiia prozy. Russkii Izrail′ na rubezhe vekov [Alternative anthology of prose: Russian Israel at the turn of the centuries]. Compiled by V. Tarasov. Jerusalem: YIVO, 2012. Arutiunova, Karine. Angel Gofman i drugie [Angel Gofman and others]. Kyiv: Nairi, 2009. ———. Docheri Evy [Eve’s daughters]. S.l.: Ridero, 2015. ———. Moi drug Bendzhamen [My friend Benjamin]. Kyiv: Nairi, 2020. ———. Narekatsi ot Lilit [Narekatsi from Lilith]. Kyiv: Kayala, 2019. ———. Padaet sneg, letit ptitsa [It’s snowing, a bird’s flying]. Kyiv: Kayala, 2017. ———. Schastlivye liudi [Happy People]. S.l.: Ridero, 2015. ———. Svet Bonnara. Eskizy na poliakh [Bonnard’s light. Sketches on the margins]. S.l.: LitRes, 2021.

91 Okun′ is also the author of the book Kulinarnyi midrash (Culinary midrash, 2000), and two books where he reflects on the art painting and its history: Roman s karandashom (Romance with a pencil, 2019) and Kstati . . . ob iskusstve i ne tol′ko (By the way . . . about art and other things, 2020). The variety of Okun′’s talents finds application in novel writing: he is the author of fantastic young-adult novel Platsebo (Placebo, 2008) and a satirical novel about art and an art academy, Kamov i Kaminka (Kamov and Kaminka, 2015).

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Galesnik, Mark. Kratkaia, naskol′ko eto vosmozhno v dannom sluchae, evreiskaia entsiklopediia [A short, to the extent that is possible in this instance, Jewish encyclopedia]. Jerusalem: Beseder, 2004. ———. Prorokov 48 [48 Prophets]. Samara: Dobrusich, 2011. ———. Ugolok redaktora [Editor’s corner]. Jerusalem: Beseder, 1997. ———. V kushche sobytii. Ne del′nyi kommentarii Tory [In the tabernacle of events: An impractical commentary on the Torah]. Jerusalem: Beseder, 2005. ———. Zria v koren′: Khronika pikiruiushchego pravitel′stva [Looking to the root: A chronicle of a nose-diving government]. Jerusalem: Beseder, 2007. Gamburd, Miriam. Dvukhfigurnaia obnazhenka [Two-figure nude]. Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 2001. ———. Gargul′ia [Gargoyle]. St. Petersburg: Zhurnal “Zvezda,” 2020. Gol′dshtein, Aleksandr. Aspekty dukhovnogo braka [Aspects of a spiritual matrimony]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001. ———. Pamiati pafosa [In memory of pathos]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009. ———. Pomni o Famaguste [Remember Famagusta]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2004. ———. Rasstavanie s Nartsissom. Opyty pominal′noi ritoriki [Parting with Narcissus: Essays in commemorative rhetoric]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1997. ———. Spokoinye polia [Quiet fields]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006. Guberman, Igor′. Iskusstvo staret′ [The art of aging]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2010. ———. Kniga stranstvii [Book of wanderings]. St. Petersburg: Retro, 1999. ———. O vypivke, o boge, o liubvi [About boozing, god, and love]. Moscow: AST, 2014. ———. Pozhilye zapiski [Aged notes]. Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 1996. ———. Shtrikhi k portretu [Touches to a portrait]. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1994. ———. Vechernii zvon [Evening bells]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2006. ———. Zametki s dorogi [Notes from the road]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2009. Guberman, Igor′, and Aleksandr Okun′. Putevoditel′ po strane sionskikh mudretsov [Guidebook to the land of the Elders of Zion]. St. Petersburg: Limbus-Press, 2009. Gutina, Nelli. Izrail′tiane. Sdelano v SSSR [Israel Goes Russian]. Tel Aviv: Merkur, 2011. ———. Zhurnal [ Journal]. Ramat Gan: Moskva-Ierusalim, 1987. Isakova, Anna. Akh, eta chernaia luna! [Oh, that black moon!]. Moscow: Vremia, 2004. ———. Moi Izrail′ [My Israel]. Moscow: Knizhniki, 2015. Iudson, Mikhail. “Chetvero” [The four]. Artikl′ 11 (2019): 9–68. ———. “God 5757-i” [Year 5757]. 22 73–74 (1990). ———. Lestnitsa na shkaf [Ladder onto the wardrobe]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2013. ———. Mozgovoi [Braintine]. Moscow: Zebra E and Galaktika, 2020. ———. “Ostatki” [Remnants]. Artikl′ 14– (2020) (continuos publication). Kanevskii, Aleksandr. Goroda i liudi. Polnoe sobranie vpechatlenii [Cities and people: Complete collection of impressions]. Moscow: Mysl′, 1990. ———. Polnoe sobranie vpechatlenii [Complete collection of impressions]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2013. ———. Smeisia, paiats! [Laugh, Pagliaccio!]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2006. ———. Teza s nashego dvora [Teza from our courtyard]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2008. Kanovich, Grigory [Grigorii Kanovich]. Izbrannye sochineniia v 5 tomakh [Collected works in 5 volumes]. Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 2014. ———. Kozlenok za dva grosha [Goatling for two cents]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1987.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

———. “Mestechkovyi romans” [Shtetl romance]. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 40 (2011). https:// magazines.gorky.media/ier/2011/40/mestechkovyj-romans.html. ———. “Ocharovan′e satany” [Enchantment of Satan]. Oktiabr′ 7 (2007). https://magazines. gorky.media/october/2007/7/ocharovane-satany-2.html. ———. “Park zabytykh evreev” [Park of forgotten Jews]. Oktiabr′ 4–5 (1997). https://magazines. gorky.media/october/1997/4/park-zabytyh-evreev.html. ———. Shelest srublennykh derev′ev. Nevymyshlennaia povest′ [Murmur of felled trees: An uncontrived tale]. Oktiabr′ 7–8 (1999). https://magazines.gorky.media/october/1999/7/shelestsrublennyh-derevev.html. Kashtanov, Arnold [Arnol′d Kashtanov]. Kan′on-a-Sharon [The ha-Sharon Mall]. Znamia 5 (2002). https://magazines.gorky.media/znamia/2002/5/kanon-a-sharon.html. ———. Khaker Astarty [The Astarta hacker]. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 33 (2010). https://magazines. gorky.media/ier/2010/33/haker-astarty.html. Khanan, Vladimir. Aura fakta [Aura of the fact]. Jerusalem: Lira, 2002. ———. Vverkh po lestnitse, vedushchei na podokonnik [Up the staircase leading to the windowsill]. Jerusalem and Moscow: Daat, 2006. Kim, Iulii. Puteshestvie k maiaku [ Journey toward the lighthouse]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 3 (2000). https://new.antho.net/wp/jj03-kim/. Kluger, Daniel′. Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi: Roman v desiati rasskazakh [She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night: A novel in ten stories]. Jerusalem: Mlechnyi Put′, 2013. ———. Mushketer ili Podlinnaia istoriia Isaaka de Portu [The musketeer, or The true story of Isaac de Porthau]. Moscow: Tekst, 2007. ———. Poslednii vykhod Sheiloka [Shylock’s last act]. Moscow: Tekst, 2006. Kobrinskii, Aleksandr. Fantomnaia real′nost′ [Phantom reality]. Jerusalem: Nachash, 2017. ———. Koleso: povesti i rasskazy [The wheel: Tales and stories]. Dnepropetrovsk: Sich, 2006. ———. Plachushchii osel. Roman-dnevnik [Crying ass: A novel-diary]. Jerusalem and Dnepropetrovsk: Region, 1993. ———. Povozka s igrushkami [A wagon with toys]. Aleksandr M. Kobrinskii’s website, 1970. https://thelib.ru/books/kobrinskiy_a/povozka_s_igrushkami.html. Kotliarskii, Mark. Peresechenie snov [Intersection of dreams]. S.l. Mul′timediinoe izdatel′stvo Strel′vintskogo, 2017. https://www.litres.ru/mark-kotlyarskiy-10392274/peresechenie-snov/ chitat-onlayn/. ———. Strannaia zhenshchina [Strange woman]. S.l.: Mul′timediinoe izdatel′stvo Strel′vintskogo, 2016. https://www.litres.ru/mark-kotlyarskiy-10392274/strannaya-zhenschina/. ———. Ved′mina gora [Witch’s mountain]. St. Petersburg: Limbus Press and Izdatel′stvo K. Tublina, 2020. ———. Volch′i vorota [Wolf ’s gate]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2005. Krasil′shchikov, Arkadii. Rasskazy o russkom Izraile: esse i ocherki raznykh let [Stories of Russian Israel: Essays and sketches from various years]. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2009. ———. Rasskazy v dorogu [Take-out stories]. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2000. Krivin, Feliks. Rezat′ tak rezat′ [Slash if you’re going to]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 27 (2008). https:// new.antho.net/wp/jj27-feliks-krivin/.

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———. “Skazki iz zhizni” [Fairy tales from life]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 3 (2000). https://new. antho.net/wp/jj03-krivin/. Levantiiskaia korona. Venki sonetov [Levantine crown: Garlands of sonnets]. Edited by Matvei Chernyi and Iakov Shekhter. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 1999. Lukash, Pavel. To, chto doktor propisal. Rasskazy i povesti [What the doctor prescribed: Stories and novelettes]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2001. Liubinskii, Aleksandr. Fabula: izbrannoe [Fabula: Collected works]. Jerusalem: Lira, 1997. ———. Na perekrest′e [At the crosslines]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007. ———. Teni vechernie [Evening shadows]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2015. ———. Vinogradniki nochi [Vineyards of the night]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011. https:// libking.ru/books/prose-/prose-contemporary/356438-26-Alexander-lyubinskiyvinogradniki-nochi.html#book. ———. Zapovednaia zona [Conservation zone]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2005. Makarova, Elena. Fridl [Friedl]. Druzhba narodov 9 (2000). https://magazines.gorky.media/ druzhba/2000/9/fridl.html. ———. Putevoditel′ poteriannykh: dokumental′nyi roman [A guidebook of the lost: A documentary novel]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2020. ———. Shleif. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2022. ———. Smekh na ruinakh [Laughter on the ruins]. Znamia 3–4 (1995). ———. Vechny sdvig [Eternal shift]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2015. Mauler, Irina. Pod znakom peremen, ili Liubov′ emigrantki [Under the sign of changes, or The love of an émigré woman]. Moscow: Vodolei, 2005. Mikhailichenko, Elizaveta, and Iurii Nesis. Ierusalimskii dvorianin [A Jerusalem nobleman]. Jerusalem: Dixi-Jerusalem, 1997. ———. I/e_rus.olim [ J/e_rus.olim]. 2003. https://issuu.com/mikhailichenko-nesis/docs/ book_jerusalem2. ———. “Postmodernizm? Net, netneizm!” [Postmodernism? No, netneism!]. Russkii Zhurnal, March 16, 2013. http://old.russ.ru/netcult/20030316_allergen.html. ———. Preemptive Revenge. Translated by Ethan Bien. Edited by Lidia Levkovitch. S.l.: Smashwords, 2006. https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/365032/0/preemptive-revenge. ———. Talithakumi, ili Zavet mezh oskolkami butylki [Talithakumi, or Testament between the shards of a bottle]. S.l.: Smashwords, 2018. https://www.smashwords.com/books/ view/890930. ———. V real′nosti dochernei. Poeziia Allergena, virtual′nogo kota i poeta-netneista [In a subsidiary reality: The poetry of Allergen, a virtual cat and poet-netneist]. St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2001. ———. ZY [Preemptive revenge]. S.l.: Smashwords, 2006. https://www.smashwords.com/ books/view/327778. Na iskhode avgusta. Antologiia izrail′skogo rasskaza [At the end of August: An anthology of the Israeli short story]. Edited and compiled by Mark Kotliarskii. S.l.: Izdatel′skie resheniia and Ridero, 2017. https://www.litres.ru/mark-kotlyarskiy-10985549/na-ishode-avgusta/. Okun′, Aleksandr. Kamov i Kaminka [Kamov and Kaminka]. Moscow: RIPOL-Klassik, 2015. ———. Platsebo: Istoriia dlia podrostkov raznogo vozrasta [Placebo: Story for teenagers of all ages]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2008. Okun′, Aleksandr, and Igor′ Guberman. Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi zhizni [Book about a tasteful and healthy life]. St. Petersburg: Giperion, 2002.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

Pane, Viktor. “Chto vdokhnovliaet” [What inspires]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 9 (2001). ———. Gospodin na dlinnom povodke [Gentleman on a long leash]. Jerusalem: Skinosa, 1992. ———. “Narukavniki dlia zhuravlei” [Armbands for cranes]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 28 (2008). ———. “Tantseval′nyi shag” [Dance step]. Zvezda 5 (1997). https://magazines.gorky.media/ zvezda/1997/5. Rubina, Dina. Babii veter [Old wives’ wind]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2017. ———. Belaia golubka Kordovy [White dove of Cordova]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2009. ———. Napoleonov oboz (Riabinovyi klin, Belye loshadi, Angel′skii rozhok) [Napoleon’s supply train (The rowan wedge. White horses. Angel’s trumpet)]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2019. ———. Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy [On the sunny side of the street]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2006. ———. Odinokii pishushchii chelovek [The lonely writing man]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2020. ———. Pocherk Leonardo [Leonardo’s handwriting]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2008. ———. Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra [The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra]. Jerusalem: Pilies Studio Publishers, 1998. ———. Russkaia kanareika (Zheltukhin, Golos, Bludnyi syn) [Russian canary (Zheltukhin. The voice. Prodigal son)]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2015. ———. Sindikat. Roman-komiks [The syndicate: A graphic novel]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2004. ———. Sindrom Petrushki [The Petrushka syndrome]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2010. ———. Vot idet Messiia! [Here comes the Messiah!]. Moscow: Ostozhe, 1996. Shoikhet, Aleksandr. Agasfer [Ahasuerus]. Moscow: E.Ra, 2009. ———. Legenda o lesorube. Sovremennye evreiskie skazki i istorii [Legend of a lumberjack: Modern Jewish fairy tales and stories]. Moscow: Letnii sad, 2018. ———. Vitrazhi [Stained-glass windows]. Moscow and Tel Aviv: Sodruzhestvo A. Bogatykh i E. Rakitskoi, 2006. Singer, Nekod [Nekod Zinger]. Bilety v kasse [Will call]. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2006. ———. Chernoviki Ierusalima [Rough drafts of Jerusalem]. Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2013. ———. “Doktor Tushka rekomenduet fotografirovat′” [Doctor Tushka recommends taking pictures]. Dvoetochie 33 (2019). https://dvoetochie.org/2019/12/24/nekod-singer-3/. ———. Mandragory [Mandrakes]. S.l.: Salamandra P.V.V, 2017. ———. Sindrom Notre-Dame [The Notre-Dame syndrome]. Jerusalem: Dvoetochiie, 2022. Sobolev, Dennis [Denis Sobolev]. Cherez [Through]. St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2020. ———. Evrei i Evropa [The Jews and Europe]. Moscow: Tekst, 2008. ———. Ierusalim [ Jerusalem]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2005. ———. Legendy gory Karmel′. Chetyrnadtsat′ istorii o liubvi i vremeni [Legends of Mount Carmel: Fourteen stories about love and time]. St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2016. ———. “Probuzhdenie” [Awakening]. Artikl′ 10 (2019): 94–130; 11 (2019): 96–136. ———. Tropy [Trails/Trops]. S.l.: Izdatel′skie resheniia, 2017. ———. Voskreshenie [Resurrection]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2022. Vaiman, Naum. Khanaanskie khroniki [Chronicles of Canaan]. St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2000. ———. Khanaanskie khroniki. Arkhiv tretii [Chronicles of Canaan: Third archive]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2019. ———. Novaia era. Chast′ pervaia. [New era: Part one]. S.l.: Ridero, 2017. ———. Novaia era. Chast′ vroraia [New era: Part two]. S.l.: Ridero, 2017. ———. Shchel′ obetovan′ia [The promise cleft]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2012. Vakhlis, Grigorii Vakhlis. Konets zolotogo veka [End of the golden age]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2016.

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———. Zolotoi vek [Golden age]. Kyiv: Kaiala, 2016. Vinokur, Moisei. Dal′nie pastbishcha [Distant pastures]. Ekaterinburg: Lavka, 1997. ———. “Golany” [Golan Heights], 2002. http://www.lib.ru/NEWPROZA/WINOKUR_M/ golany.txt ———. “Golany” [Golan Heights]. Bul′var Rotshilda 1 (2016): 4850. ———. Otobrannoe [Selected]. Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2000. ———. “Pesn′ pesnei” [Song of Songs]. Zerkalo 12 (1996): 3171. ———. “Sneg” [Snow]. Zerkalo 78 (1997): 2430. ———. “Tri vospitona” [Three pupils]. Zerkalo 1718 (2001–2002): 8595. ———. “Zdes′ i teper′. U podnozhiia tainogo ucheniia” [Here and now. At the foot of the secret teaching]. Zerkalo 115 (1994): 7281. Vul′f, Mikki. Milky Way i drugie krovel′nye raboty [Milky Way and other roofing works]. Jerusalem and Moscow: Gesharim, 2003. ———. Nesvoboda nebosvoda [Unfreedom of the sky]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008. ———. Vstrechi v puti [Meetings on the road]. Novosti nedeli. Roman-gazeta (2010).

Secondary Sources Belen′kaia, Natal′ia. “Lifta: Vzgliad so storony.” Booknik.ru, January 16, 2009. http://booknik.ru/ library/all/lifta-vzglyad-so-storony/. Bial′skii, Igor′. “K chitateliu.” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 1 (1999). https://new.antho.net/wp/ jj01-k-chitatelu/. ———. “Ot redaktora. Predvaritel′nye itogi.” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 57–58 (2017): 3–13. Berlin, Charles, and Elizabeth Vernon. Catalog of Israeli Russian-Language Publications in the Harvard Library. Introduction by Evgeny Soshkin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Besprozvannaya, Polina, Andrei Rogachevskii, and Roman Timenchik. Russophone Periodicals in Israel: A Bibliography. Stanford, CA: Stanford Slavic Studies. 2016. Dostoevsky, Fedor [Fedor Dostoevskii]. Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh. Volume 10. Moscow: Pravda, 1982. “Edichka (Pchel) Semenov.” Fishka.org.il. 2021. http://fishka.org.il/ru/people/30/. Gammer, Efim. “Izrail′: Mezhdunarodnyi soiuz pisatelei Ierusalima.” Avtorskii al′manakh “MagRem” i personal′nyi sait Efima Gammera. https://www.yefim-gammer.com/showtopicjourn.php?line=42. Gendelev, Mikhail [as Mikhail Slozin]. “Eize reakh shel rusim, ili Apologiia baiana.” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 123–125. Goltsman, Sheiva. “20-letie literaturnoi zhizni.” Website of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. 2014. http://www.srpi.org/news/139/. Gutina, Nelli. “V poiskakh utrachennoi identifikatsii.” 22 29 (1983): 209–218. Kaganskaia, Maiia. “Interv′iu s Maiei Kaganskoi.” Simurg (1997). http://www.gendelev.org/kontekst/lyudi-i-teksty/451-etu-kontsiptsiyu-pridumala-ya-majya-kaganskaya.html. ———. “Nerusskii roman.” 22 31 (1983): 165–178.

Prose of the Aliyah of the 1990s–2000s

Kamyshnyi, Aleksei. “Istoriia russkogo poeticheskogo podpol′ia v Izraile.” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 39–44. Karabchievskii, Aleksandr. “Tselesoobrazno i svoevremenno. Rech′, proiznesennaia na prezen­ tatsii al′manakha Ponedel′nik v Rossiiskom kul′turnom tsentre v Tel′-Avive.” Ponede′lnik 8, no. 3 (2020). www.kartaslov.ru/книги/Наталья_Терликова_Понедельник_№8/3. Kisin, Anna, and Iakov Shekhter. “Opyt na sebe.” In Poety “Bol′shogo Tel′-Aviva,” edited by Efrem Baukh, 116–128. Tel Aviv: Federation of Unions of Israeli Writers, 1996. Kluger, Daniel′. “Vozmozhna li evreiskaia fentezi?” Vesti [ Jerusalem], April 2, 2006, 38. Reprinted in Migdal-Times [Odesa] 77 (2006): 10–13. https://www.migdal.org.ua/times/77/6792/. Liuksemburg, Eli. “Predislovie.” In Rasskazy v dorogu, by Arkadii Krasil′shchikov. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2000. Mukh [Aleksei Kamyshnyi]. “Podpol′e. Vvodnaia stat′ia k rubrike.” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 38–39. “Ot redaktsii.” Ogni stolitsy 9 (2017): 5. “Ot redaktorov.” Kovcheg 1 (1990): 3–4. “Ot redaktsii.” Solnechnoe spletenie 1 (1998): 3. Palvanova, Zinaida. “Chitat′ Kashtanova i dumat′ o zhizni.” Ierusalimskii zhurnal 53 (2016). https://new.antho.net/wp/jj53-zinaida-palvanova/. “Redaktsiia. Ierusalimskii zhurnal.” Ierusalimskaia antologiia. 2021. https://new.antho.net/wp/ jj-editorial/. Rubina, Dina. “Biografiia.” Dina Rubina’s personal website. 2021. https://www.dinarubina.com/ biography.html. Shrayer, Maxim D., ed. An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801–2001 [in 2 vols.]. Vol. 2. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. Singer, Gali-Dana, and Nekod Singer. “Dvar ha-orkhim.” Nekudataim 1 (2001). www.nekudataim. wordpress.com/about. ——— [Gali-Dana Zinger and Nekod Zinger]. “Izrail′ Maler i drugie: Fotografii iz al′boma.” Dvoetochie 22 (2014). https://dvoetochie.org/category/двоеточие-22. ——— [Gali-Dana Zinger and Nekod Zinger]. “Ot redaktorov.” Dvoetochie 1 (2001). https:// dvoetochie.org/2019/01/23/about. Singer, Nekod [Nekod Zinger]. “Kak my pristupili k ispolneniiu.” Dvoetochie 35 (2021). https:// dvoetochie.org/2021/02/12/nekod-singer-io/. Sobolev, Dennis [Denis Sobolev]. “Russko-izrail′skaia literatura kak ‘regional′naia ontologiia.’” Artikl′ 18 (2021): 300–307. “Sostoialas′ VI tseremoniia nagrazhdeniia laureatov konkursa ‘Russkaia Premiia.’” Russkaia premiia. April 27, 2011. http://www.russpremia.ru/news/000000072/. Tarasov, Vladimir. “Stupenchatyi svet.” Mikhail Gendelev’s website. 2017. http://www.gendelev. org/issledovaniya/716-vladimir-tarasov-stupenchatyj-svet.html. Vrubel′-Golubkina, Irina. “Ot redaktsii.” Zerkalo 1–2 (1996). http://zerkalo-litart.com/?p=3473. ———. Razgovory v zerkale. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2014.

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Russian-Israeli Prose in the Second Decade of the Twenty-First Century Elena Promyshlianskaia The goal of this essay is to examine the Russian-Israeli literature by repatriates from the former USSR over the past decade (2010–2020). It is essential to note that repatriation from the former USSR took place against a background of local and global events and processes that found their reflection in literary creation. The collapse of the Soviet Empire, the dismantling of the iron curtain, and the later processes of globalization played an important role in the acculturation of the new repatriates arriving in Israel from the 1990s onward. Noteworthy at the local level are changes in relations between the center and the periphery and the spread of the politics of multiculturalism, which also influenced literary phenomena. One of the last of the processes described above was the distancing from the concept of territoriality in efforts to resolve conflicts connected with the problem of the characters’ self-identification. This approach in many respects goes against the foundational narratives of Zionism, which describe repatriation as a return to a historical homeland and which underline the unbreakable connection between the national rebirth of the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. This leads to the appearance of new ideological and poetic movements that set the literature of the latest aliyah—from the former USSR—apart from the previous ones. Chaviva Pedaya describes the basic premise of the literature of the previous generations of repatriates who arrived from the countries of Northern Africa and Asia as creating a symmetry between history and territory.1 In other

1

Copyright © 2023 by Elena Promyshlianskaia. Chaviva Pedaya, “Saretet hazeut: Omanut mizrachit—khronika ve-problematika,” in Shovrot kirot: Omanut mizrachit akhshavit be-Israel, ed. K. Alon and S. Keshet (Tel Aviv: Achoti, 2014), 62–65.

R u s s i a n - I s r a e l i P r o s e i n t h e S e c o n d D e c a d e o f t h e Tw e n t y - F i r s t C e n t u r y

words, the characters of these texts wish to start a new life on Israeli land and merge into the ranks of native Israelis (sabras), thereby moving away from the history and heritage of the past and creating a new history and a new image of the hero on the territory of the Jewish state.2 Similar motifs are also reflected in the literature of the new repatriates from Ethiopia.3 At the same time, Russian-Israeli literature chooses new paths and presents a different concept of history. A study of Russian-Israeli literature of the second decade of the twenty-first century also reveals a new approach to the issue of time and space. It not only creates an asymmetry between these concepts but also emphasizes the deep conflict between them as the basis of comprehending and reflecting reality. Returning to the past as a means of creating order at a new level in the present becomes one of the basic ways of fashioning a new depiction of reality. Time becomes the key moment in the process of self-identification and selfexpression of authors and their characters. This mechanism was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin4 as historical inversion: creative thought finds in the past concepts that define the condition of its subjects and their relation to the surrounding world. The resulting structure of temporal layers is transformed into a spatial structure, which forms the narrative background for the events of the plot and the characters and becomes one of the central means of describing and comprehending contemporary reality. It is important to note that the processes described above are not linear. Due to the multiplicity of interpenetrating temporal frames, the path of comprehension is like moving along in Borges’s “garden of forking paths.” The processes of understanding reality in Russian-Israeli literature of the latest aliyah can be described, then, as a metaphoric movement that goes through a combination of various times and spaces. A complex spatial-temporal dynamic underscores the stratified nature of the texts of Israeli literature in Russian. Characters typically claim that they have assimilated into the territory of their new home and thus completed the transition from the old life to the new one. But these claims turn out to be

2

3 4

Similar motifs can be seen in the works of such authors as Eli Amir and Sami Mikhael, who repatriated to Israel from Iraq. Sami Michael’s novel Naar ofanaim (The bicycle boy, 2019) vividly paints the character’s internal metamorphosis in line with the new realities of Israel. Eli Amir’s works Shavim ve-shavim yoter (Equal and more equal, 1974) and Yasmin (2005) examine the characters’ desire to fit into the new realities even at the expense of self-sacrifice. See, for example, Mangisto Grameo, Avraam Adaga, and Dalia Betolin-Sherman. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane,” in his Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 297.

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unrealized. As a result, attempts at self-identification create new planes that are defined, as a rule, by temporal frames. Being located in one or another temporal level and constantly moving between them turns out to be a fundamental feature of the processes of comprehension and self-expression. As a result, characters experience the fates of their ancestors or wage a constant battle with their doubles, as different historical periods are brought together. Reality comes to be known through the past, which is constantly there in the present and influences the fates of the characters. Moreover, a return to preceding epochs and events that becomes key to the resolution of conflicts in the present. *** An examination of the various paths of resolving the spatial-temporal conflict makes it possible to understand more fully the thematic and poetic features of the literature discussed in this essay. At the present time, we can name two groups of authors that can also be designated as literary generations. Their dates of birth and repatriation are the central criteria in determining whether an author belongs to one or the other generation.

1.  The Older Generation The first and probably the foundational group includes authors of the older generation, who repatriated to Israel as adults with a background that includes education and life experience in the USSR and a creative path that began in the 1990s or earlier, sometimes even before repatriation. Among these are authors who are known to a broad circle of readers: Dina Rubina, Leonid Levinzon, Iakov Shekhter, Aleks Tarn, Leonid Finkel, and many other writers, who are examined in Roman Katsman’s essay in this collection. This period also sees the continuation of the creative activity of authors who repatriated to Israel in the 1970s, such as David Markish, Mark Zaichik, Svetlana Shenbrunn, and others. However, the majority of the authors in this subgroup is not discussed in this essay. (Also see the essays by Aleksei Surin, Elena Rimon, and Roman Katsman in this volume.) Such authors as Nelli Voskoboinik, Elena Minkina-Taicher, and Leonid Pekarovskii should also be noted, despite the fact that their creative paths began in the 2000s. It is also important to mention writers who repatriated in the 2000s, whose Israeli period of creativity is a continuation of many years of literary experience outside the borders of this country—Igor′ Gel′bakh and Rubén Gallego, for example.

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a.  The World of the Character as a Mosaic of Times and Spaces The basic creative method for authors like Dina Rubina and Aleks Tarn is the unification and integration of spatial and temporal layers as a path to selfdefinition and to an understanding of historical and current realities. Dina Rubina (b. 1953, repatriated 1990) is one of the most famous authors writing in Russian in Israel. Her creative path started when she was seventeen, after the publication of her first story in the journal Iunost′ (Youth).5 She achieved literary acclaim after the publication of her story “Kogda zhe poidet sneg” (When will it start snowing), later included in the collection Astral′nyi polet dushi na uroke fiziki (Astral flight of the soul in physics class, 2008). Since then, Rubina has published long and short novels, short stories, and essays, which have been translated into many languages (on Rubina’s creativity in the 1990s–2000s, see Roman Katsman’s essay in this volume). This past decade is marked by the publication of several of her significant works. The trilogy Russkaia kanareika (Russian canary, 2014–2015) includes the novels Zheltukhin, Golos (The voice), and Bludnyi syn (Prodigal son). This trilogy combines several genres: family saga, thriller, and detective fiction. The events of the book encompass the history of practically the whole of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, during which an unusual hero is formed: an amazing singer who carries out a vital secret mission for the Israeli security services. Family traditions, an extensive musical education, and a rare vocal gift allow him to accomplish his task and defeat his enemies. Leon, the hero of the trilogy, is not a new repatriate who “stepped out of the sea,” erasing the whole past behind him as, for example, in Moshe Shamir’s novel Hu halakh be-sadot (He walked through the fields, 1947). He is a citizen of the world, a man who cannot unequivocally define his faith, his nationality, or his belonging to a specific territory. This gives him the power to move forward regardless of all the obstacles in his complex and dangerous path. The problem of life choices and overcoming the vicissitudes of fate is explored in another of Rubina’s trilogies, Napoleonov oboz (Napoleon’s supply train, 2018–2019), containing the novels Riabinovyi klin (The rowan wedge, 2018), Belye loshadi (White horses, 2019), and Angel′skii rozhok (Angel’s trumpet, 2019). In December 2020, the trilogy was honored with a prize for being the readers’ favorite in the Big Book competition in Moscow. Rubina herself defines

5

Dina Rubina, “Bespokoinaia natura” [Restless nature], Iunost′ 1 (1971): 107–109.

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the genre of this work as a love story,6 but in fact, it is a combination of several genres: historical fiction, family saga, and thriller. Historical inversion is one of the major devices for creating the meaning here. The novels deal with Russia’s distant history. The plot begins with the meeting of the two main characters, Aristarkh and Nadezhda, in a remote area of Russia. Allusions to Greek mythology are closely tied to Rubina’s strategies of going back to the past and dealing with multiple time periods, a technique typical of the literature of her generation. At the same time, delving into the past as a means of searching for new meanings produces ambiguity in the novel’s finale. On the one hand, the tragic fate of the hero who, like Orpheus, allows himself to look back into the past to save Eurydice forces us to wonder at the advisability of the decisions he makes. On the other hand, returning to a family past brings his son closer to the world of his ancestors and underlines the importance of even the most distant family ties and continuity of generations. Rubina herself describes the form of this trilogy as a “mosaic,”7 a definition that is also applicable to her previous trilogy. Some parts of this mosaic relate to various geographical and chronological spaces, leading the readers onto a fascinating trip during which they discover ever new layers in specific images as well as in metaphorical descriptions that define the meaning-laden framework. The complex paths of the characters culminate in a point in which all the layers of time converge, creating a single space that allows such multifaceted and diverse characters to find a means of self-expression. Thus, in the novel Russkaia kanareika, the voice of the main characters becomes a force capable of overcoming chaos, of unifying a multitude of disparate fragments of reality. Rubina’s characters constantly search for means of self-expression through the visual arts, music, and literature, which hold a very prominent place in their world. At the same time, in her second trilogy, Rubina also addresses the more problematic sides of contemporary culture and the changes that are taking place in the world of art under the influence of the market economy. This reflection continues in her non-fictional work Odinokii pishushchii chelovek (The lonely writing man, 2020). Together with the frank descriptions of her own creative path, Rubina mentions many famous authors, scholars, and philosophers and their opinions on various aspects of literary creativity. *** Natal′ia Lomykina, “Dina Rubina: ‘Tretii tom dolzhen byt′ prosto trillerom,’” Forbes [Moscow], September 22, 2018, https://www.forbes.ru/forbeslife/367179-dina-rubina-tretiy-tomdolzhen-byt-prosto-trillerom. 7 Ibid. 6

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Aleks Tarn (Aleksei Tarnovitskii, b. 1955, repatriated 1989) is one of the most well-known authors of the Russophone literature of Israel. This prose writer, playwright, translator, and screenwriter has been publishing since 2003 in and outside of Israel. Over the past several decades, at least fifteen of his novels and novellas have come out, along with journalism and essays.8 Tarn’s creativity reflects his thoughts about the fate of the Jewish people at the convergence of different historical periods. His basic strategy for reflecting the complex world of his heroes is the use of multiple of temporal streams and historical inversion, which emphasizes the symbolic and ideological connections between various periods of history and reveals the laws of historical development and the influence of history on the fates of his characters. Tarn’s first novel, Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov (The protocols of the Elders of Zion), came out in 2004. In many ways, it defined the thematic and poetic foundations of his work. The author himself designated its structure as a “nesting-doll novel.” As in a nesting doll, more and more little figures are revealed, so does the process of reading Tarn’s novel reveal ever newer levels of the plot with very different chronotopes. Parallel events relating to various temporal and geographical dimensions serve to give meaning to and to overcome existing ideological stereotypes and psychological attitudes, as well as a method for working out new directions in the development of the characters’ fates. For example, the basic symbol in the novel is a certain plan, according to which the characters’ fates develop in various temporal dimensions. As they fight against injustice and their harsh fate, the novel reveals the sources of existing ideological cliches. The multilayered structure of the action and the strategy of historical inversion are characteristic of Tarn’s subsequent work. His novels show a complex pattern of connections between historical events and his characters’ fates. The 8

Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004); Kniga (The book) (Moscow: Enneagon, 2010); “Khaim” (Chaim), Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 45 (2013); Stantsuem, krasivaia? (Odin den′ Anny Denisovny) (Shall we dance, my pretty? [A day in the life of Anna Denisovna]) (Moscow: AST, 2014); Ub′iu kogo khochu (I’ll kill whomever I want) (Moscow: AST, 2015); Killer s propellerom na motorollere (Killer with a propeller on a scooter) (Moscow: AST, 2016); “Povesti Iokhanana Eikhorna” (Tales of Yohanan Eichorn), Kreshchatik 75, no. 1 (2017); Mir tesen dlia inoplanetian (The world is crowded for extraterrestrials) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel—Isradon, 2018); Mezh trekh mirov (Amid three worlds) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019); Rytsari epokhi (Knights of the times) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019); Shabaton. Subbotnii god (Sabbatical year) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019); Obychnye liudi (Ordinary people) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2020); Reina, koroleva sud′by (Reina, queen of fate) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2020); “Shabaton,” Druzhba narodov 8 (2020); My ne liubim russkikh (We don’t like Russians) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2021); Devushka iz Dzhei-Ef-Kei (The Girl from JFK) (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2021).

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analogies between national history and individual stories become the basic methods of coming to understand the ideological dogmas and new attempts to search for meaning in history. Thus in the novel Reina, koroleva sud′by (Reina, queen of fate, 2020), the theme of the novel is already built into the title: it is a struggle with fate, which sometimes appears as a cruel sentence on the personal as well as the historical and national levels. The characters of the novel try to turn the course of history around, to return to the time of the Holocaust in order to change the fates of their ancestors and thereby to change their own fate in the present. In addition, they think up a plan of action in the present with the aim of changing the past. The similarities between the past and the present, their mutual interpenetration and influence, underlines the analogy between the characters’ fates in various historical periods, as it becomes the main method of comprehending reality. Not only does a stratification of the temporal frameworks of the action take place, but the heroes themselves undergo a process of stratification and generation of doubles, who become important characters that have a decisive influence on the novel’s events. In spite of great efforts, the characters come to the conclusion that their efforts were in vain. Not only were they unable to change the fate of their ancestors during the time of the Catastrophe, but they prolonged their suffering. They suffer defeat in their battle with the cruel fate because breaking through various layers of time turns out to be impossible. It is precisely at this moment of tragic realization that a new turn appears in the spiral of the action: at the end of the novel, it turns out that all the events that took place were only a dream. On the one hand, this saves the heroes from self-destruction and from committing serious crimes, but at the same time, such a turn of events underlines their helplessness in the face of fate. Among the novels published in 2020–2021, worthy of note are Obychnye liudi (Ordinary people, 2020), Devushka iz Dzhei-Ef-Kei (The girl from JFK, 2021), and My ne liubim russkikh (We don’t like Russians, 2021). As Tarn explains, these works constitute a trilogy whose goal is making sense of contemporary Israeli and global events.9 Obychnye liudi attempts to gain an understanding of the fate and worldview of the generation of the founding fathers of Israel. My ne liubim russkikh deals with the fate of a poet who finds himself in an incessant search for his individual path in spite of the rather harsh boundaries that are determined by culture and the political elite. This character’s prototype was the

9

Aleks Tarn, Vstrecha s chitateliami [A meeting with readers], July 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzXMWyDtmNg.

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Israeli poet Meir Ariel, who chose a unique path of self-expression and did not hide his personal opinion on the most important questions regarding the life of Israeli society, even when it went counter to those accepted among the cultural elite. The story of the formation of the distinctive personality of the poet is accompanied by notes from the fictional collection of Nathan (Toni) Soler (his name, not coincidentally, brings to mind the image of Salieri) on the poems of his closest friend and coauthor Ariel (Arele) Meiri. The loyal friend attempts to acquaint the public with the never understood world of the poet. These fantasies are an attempt to penetrate into the inner world of the poet so as to understand more deeply not only the sense of his works but the whole complexity of the process of creating symbolic worlds. *** Elena Minkina-Taicher (b. 1955, repatriated 1991) is a physician by profession. Her creative path started in the 2000s. The basic theme of her works is the distinct inner world of her heroes and their attempts to find paths of self-expression in the context of changing historical reality. Her first novel, Effekt Rebindera (The Rebinder effect), came out in 2014. The novel was longlisted for the 2014 Russian Booker Prize, the 2014 NOS Prize, and the 2015 National Bestseller Prize. Included in this family saga are such key events of the twentieth century as two world wars, repressions, and the Chernobyl catastrophe, which, like the Rebinder effect, created cracks in the inner world of the characters. Spiritual and general human values help the characters stand up to the blows of fate and preserve their dignity in spite of the destructive effect of these cracks. Tam, gde techet moloko i med (Where milk and honey flow, 2016), a collection of moving stories about eventful Jewish fates, came out in 2016. In that same year, Minkina-Taicher was awarded the Yuri Nagibin Prize. After that followed the collections of stories Zhenshchina na zadanuiu temu (Woman on a given theme, 2017), Beloe na fone chernogo (White on black, 2018), and the novel Vremia obnimat’ (Time to embrace, 2021). *** Igor′ Gel′bakh (b. 1943, repatriated 2010) was born in Samarkand and graduated from the Physics Department of Tbilisi State University. He lived in Sukhumi, Tbilisi, Riga, Moscow, and Leningrad; from 1989 to 2010 he lived in Melbourne, Australia, where he was a translator and journalist. His novel Priznaniia glinianigo cheloveka (Confessions of a clay man) came out in 2000, and Uteriannyi Blium (The lost Bloom) came out in 2004. He has been living in Israel, in Tel Aviv, since October 2010. Aleksei Balakin characterized Igor′

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Gel′bakh protagonists as people in whom the past and the future exist at the same time, and as eternal wanderers roaming the earth and their own souls.10 In Gel′bakh’s book Ochertaniia Gruzii (Contours of Georgia, 2012), the personal and the universal are united in one inimitable whole. The writer and critic Mikhail Iudson compared his style to “cooking blinis,” when the author throws a philosopher’s stone into the sea of the past and leads the reader along the circles running in all directions, so that the descriptions of the real spaces in the book merge with pictures on the walls of Plato’s cave.11 In that year, several of Gel′bakh’s other publications come out in the online periodical Zametki po evreiskoi istorii (Notes on Jewish history): Pod goroi Davida (Beneath David’s mountain), Zabytyi Sebastopolis (Forgotten Sebastopolis), and Sklon gory v sukhoi den′ (Mountainside on a dry day). The novel Muzeinaia krysa (Museum rat, 2018) expresses Gel′bakh’s worldview as developed in his previous works. The story begins with the description of a family heirloom, a seascape by Van de Velde the Younger depicting a ship that’s fighting the elements during a storm. Some of the sails are down, others are ripped by the storm, and mountains of water are threatening to overwhelm the ship at any moment. This painting symbolically defines the theme of the book, whose characters go through ordeals in the context of a fateful historical event. In 2020 a new novel by Gel′bakh, Opozdavshie (Latecomers), came out. *** Among the prose writers of the past decade, Leonid Pekarovskii (b. 1947, repatriated 1991) holds a special place. His stories describe his experience as a new repatriate to Israel. The stories were translated into Hebrew and drew the interest of Benny Ziffer, the editor of the literary supplement of the Israeli newspaper Ha-Aretz. Pekarovskii’s works were published in Hebrew translation in several issues of this supplement and are known to the broader public only in this language. In this way, Pekarovskii’s work expresses the individual world of the author and his subjective perception of Israeli reality but at the same time allows readers who do not know the Russian language to have a look into the world of repatriates from the former USSR. Three collections of Pekarovskii’s stories have come out to date: Matate ve-sipurim acherim (The broom and other stories; Russian title, Metla i 10 Aleksei Balakin, Igor′ Gel′bakh. Uteriannyi Blium (Igor′ Gel′bakh. The lost Bloom), Dossier 4 (2004). http://www.litkarta.ru/dossier/balakin-gelbah/dossier_1658. 11 Mikhail Iudson, “Novaia kniga Igoria Gel′bakha v Avstralii,” Edinenie, February 23, 2013, https://www.unification.com.au/articles/1670/.

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drugie rasskazy, 2012), Parabola shel atzlacha (Parabola of success; Russian title, Parabola uspekha, 2014), and Eser agorot (Ten agorot; Russian title, Desiat′ agorot, 2018). Pekarovskii’s stories are united by a single narrative voice. As a result of moving to Israel, his narrator, a scholar with a PhD in art history, becomes a guard in one of the administrative buildings in Tel Aviv. In order to overcome the bitterness caused by his loss of social status, he sets off on imagined trips to distant spaces and times. Temporal and geographical stratification allows the narrator to create his own world and thus preserve the sense of his own dignity in a complex psychological and social situation. In other words, his state of detachment from the present and immersion in the past allow him to define his new territory: the guard booth. At first glance, it symbolizes the possibility of entering Israeli society, but at the same time there is narrowing of perspective, which further emphasizes the narrator’s distancing from his surrounding reality.

b.  A Small Man in a Large World: The Personal and the Universal Another direction in making sense of reality for those authors who belong to several temporal periods at once, and also have to deal with the boundless spaces of the global world, is the creation of a picture of the world on the basis of episodes from one’s personal life and invented biographies. Among the authors who have chosen this direction, we should note Leonid Levinzon, Mark Zaichik, Leonid Finkel′, Svetlana Shenbrunn, and Nelli Voskoboinik. Leonid Levinzon (b. 1958, repatriated 1991) was born in Novohrad-Volyns′kyi. He graduated from a medical school in Leningrad. He is the author of the books of prose Leningrad–Ierusalim (Leningrad-Jerusalem, 1997), Deti Pushkina (Pushkin’s children, 2015), and Kolichestvo stupenek ne imeet znacheniia (The number of steps doesn’t matter, 2018), as well as a recipient of the Government of St. Petersburg Prize (2015) and of the Yuri Stern Prize (2017). Levinzon is one of the founders of the Ierusalimskii Zhurnal ( Jerusalem journal) and an active participant in the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. His stories have been published in the journal Artikl′ and online publications. Roman Katsman characterized Levinzon’s writing style of as a “virtuosic pharmacology of nostalgia.”12 The character of the story “Sobiratel′ samoletov” (Airplane collector) from Levinzon’s book Kolichestvo stupenek ne imeet znacheniia says to his friend, “You are a complicated person . . . In emigration you 12 Roman Katsman, “Leonid Levinzon i nostal′giia,” Artikl′ 13, no. 45 (2018), https://sunround.com/article/?page_id=2240.

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don’t have enough of a sense of nostalgia, and at home, not enough of a sense of belonging.”13 Komi—Afrika (Komi—Africa, 1997), one of Levinzon’s first works, begins with a short monologue, the meaning of which in many respects defines the basic topic of the author’s creative output: “What do I need this for? Here, in Israel? I’ve kind of set myself up with a job, bought a car. A real Jew. And I wanted to leave, so I left. But I can’t forget.”14 Levinzon’s characters are successful, to one degree or another, in making up their material losses connected with emigration, but at the same time they can’t make up for the symbolic and cultural ones. In the end, they “fly off ” on some fantastical rocket without having found themselves in Israeli reality, and their symbolic flight expresses a deep disillusionment and helplessness in the face of the new circumstances. The theme of the search for oneself in an intercultural space is also reflected in the stories that became part of the collection Kolichestvo stupenek ne imeet znacheniia. In these stories, one of the key poetical devices is the stratification of the characters’ world into various temporal planes. The story “U nas v Keisarii” (At our place in Caesarea)15 describes the attempt to go back in time and once again feel the unrepeatable atmosphere of celebrating the New Year. Filled with the recollections of this holiday and its traditions in the former USSR, the characters get together for a New Year’s party where they try to reproduce the setting of the past: “Polite company, we should say, with their wives, those who had them, champagne from the Russian store, chicken, good vodka.”16 The basic component of the holiday is the television transmitting familiar scenes of traditional festivities from distant, snow-covered Russia. In spite of all the external attributes that are present, the party doesn’t succeed. The characters are incapable of regaining the atmosphere they miss so much, or perhaps they don’t even miss it at all. Time falls apart into two strata: in the present, the characters attempt to bring back the world of the past and to experience the feelings they have forgotten but the past and the present are divided by an insurmountable emptiness. The characters attempt to unite the two very different time periods in their consciousness and see the world around them in a new way. To their profound disappointment, these attempts only intensify feelings of noninvolvement and loneliness. *** 13 Leonid Levinzon, Kolichestvo stupenek ne imeet znacheniia (St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2018), 195–200. 14 Leonid Levinzon, Leningrad—Ierusalim (Leningrad—Jerusalem) (Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 1997), 6. 15 Levinzon, Kolichestvo stupenek, 98–101. 16 Ibid., 98.

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A tight connection between the past and the present is the distinctive feature of the creative work of Leonid Finkel′ (b. 1936, repatriated 1992), a prose writer, essayist, and playwright. He started his creative path during the Soviet period, in Ukraine. An engineer by profession, Finkel′ also became the artistic leader of a youth musical theater, a musicologist, and later a newspaper editor. Between 1973 and 1986, not a single one of his articles was accepted for publication. However, in 1979 his first book, Zazhgi solntse (Light the sun) came out. Finkel′ was the first chairman of the Eliezer Stainbarg Society of Jewish Culture in the city of Chernivtsi, as well as the first editor of the Russian-language section of the paper Chernovitskie Listki (Chernivtsi sheets) and the supplement Moi Izrail′ (My Israel). He participated in the creation of the Pushkin Society and the All-Union Writers’ Organization Aprel′.17 From 1992, Finkel′ has been living in Ashkelon. He has continued his active social and cultural activity in Israel. From 1995 he is the responsible secretary of the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel and a member of the Israeli PEN club. He is the recipient of the First Yuri Nagibin Prize for RussianLanguage Writers of Israel. Finkel′ published more than ten books of prose: Pis′mo vnuku: povesti, rasskazi, esse (Letter to my grandson: Tales, stories, essays, 1994); Dorogami vechnogo zhida (On the roads of the Wandering Jew, 2003); Nedostovernoe nastoiashchee: kniga prozy (The unreliable present: Book of prose, 2006); Zolotaia pechal′ (Golden sorrow, 2011); Shalom Aleikhem (Sholom Aleichem, 2012); I za efes ego tsepliaiutsia rozy: Rasskazy, esse (And roses cling to his sword hilt: Stories, essays, 2017); Meblirovannaia pustynia (Furnished desert, 2017); Lakrimoza (Lacrimosa, 2020). The common theme of his books is coming to understand the intercultural and interlinguistic reality of new repatriates. The writer himself calls his stories “sad and funny tales about people who were Jews in Russia and came to be considered Russians in Israel.”18 *** Svetlana Shenbrunn (b. 1939, repatriated 1975) was born in Moscow in the family of a journalist, a war correspondent, and writer Pavel Shenbrunn (pseudonym: Pavel Shebunin). She studied at the Higher Courses of Screenwriting from 1962 to 1964, then she worked as a scriptwriter for Moscow television. In 1975, Shenbrunn repatriated to Israel where she continued her creative path. She worked in the editorial offices of Biblioteka Aliia, with the Russian-language periodical Arik and Sabra. She also published in Israeli Russian-language 17 See Leonid Finkel′’s personal website, 2021, http://www.ileknif.com/show/biogr/. 18 Leonid Finkel′, I za efes ego tsepliaiutsia rozy: Rasskazy, esse (Tel Aviv: Perakh, 2017).

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periodicals and since 1999 has been a member of the editorial board of Ierusalimskii Zhurnal. Even though Shenbrunn’s creative path began in Russia as early as the 1960s, she started publishing in Israel in the 1990s. Her first collection of stories, Dekabr′skie sny (December dreams), came out in 1991. It included stories written in the previous years. Her second collection of stories, Iskusstvo slepogo kino (The art of blind cinema), was published in 1997. The novel Rozy i khrizantemy (Roses and chrysanthemums) came out in 2000. The critic Anna Frumkina regards this book as an attempt to make sense of the Soviet period, the process of comprehending personal and family history in the attempt to overcome a sense of loss. In her opinion, this work is an expression of Shenbrunn’s disagreement with the idea that these generations lived in a period of timelessness and an attempt to find a support for moving on in a recreated past.19 Shenbrunn won a Smirnoff Booker Prize for literature for this novel. Another of Shenbrunn’s novels, Piliuli schast′ia (Happiness pills, 2006), was serially published in 2010. Chapters of her new novel, O, Marianna! (Oh, Marianna!) were published between 2016 and 2020 in Ierusalimskii Zhurnal. In addition, Shenbrunn translated many works by Israeli authors such as Amos Oz, Eli Amir, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and Aharon Appelfeld into Russian (on Shenbrunn see also Aleksei Surin’s essay in this collection). *** To conclude the survey of writers of the older generation, we turn our attention to Nelli Voskoboinik (b. 1951, repatriated 1991), who started writing rather late in her life. She grew up in Tbilisi and graduated from Tbilisi State University with a degree in physics. In Israel she worked at the Hadassah Medical Center. After the death of her husband, she started contributing stories to Ierusalimskii Zhurnal as well as to internet publications. Four of her books came out in the past few years: Ochen′ malen′kie tragedii (Very small tragedies, 2017), Korobochka monpans′e (Box of fruit drops, 2018), Vy budete smeiat′sia (You’ll laugh, 2019), and Bukvari i antikvary (Primers and antiquaries, 2020). Voskoboinik’s characteristic style appears in her first book, Ochen′ malen′kie tragedii, and develops in all her following collections. These are compelling stories, in which the authorial narrator is vividly present. The autobiographical nature of Voskoboinik’s works has a lyrical character and opens a personal, unique world for her readers. At the same time, she creates striking personalities 19 Anna Frumkina, “Segodnia. Zavtra. Vchera. O romane Svetlany Shenbrunn ‘Rozy i Khrizantemy,’” Novyi Mir 6 (2001), 186–191.

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that are depicted in the context of historical and everyday events. Vladimir Gubailovskii called Voskoboinik a “master of the episode.”20 In his opinion, this episodic narration allows her not only to bring readers closer to her world but also to express broader general human ideas.

c.  Jewish Tradition as a Path toward Self-Awareness The stratification of time and the turn toward Jewish cultural and religious sources as a way of self-expression and self-identification are important devices in the work of Iakov Shekhter (b. 1956, repatriated 1987). Shekhter’s first book, Esli zabudu (If I forget, 1985), composed in collaboration with Vladimir Raizom, came out in Jerusalem in 1985, before the author’s repatriation. This is a documentary story about the destruction of a small Jewish town in Lithuania during the Holocaust. After his repatriation, Shekhter became a prolific writer and editor. He is the editor-in-chief of the Tel Aviv literary periodical Artikl′. The characters of his works move around in time, as they relive the events of distant past and strive to understand a new culture and, first and foremost, themselves. Shekhter’s first novel, Vokrug sebia byl nikto (There was no one around oneself, 2004), belongs both to the historical-adventure and socialpsychological genres. This multilayered and multigenre work describes the path of self-knowledge of a Jewish mystic-kabbalist, a so-called ‘psychometrician,’ who wants to solve the conflict between faith and creativity. The main character returns to his home city, Odesa, in order to solve the riddle of the names of the dead psychometricians. This search becomes a part of a gradual reconstruction of his identity in the context of the changes that took place during the years of his absence from the city. The character observes places so well known to him, feels the touch of familiar air, perceives smells not yet forgotten, gazes at well-known landscapes, and distinctly understands that he has left all this in the distant past. The city as he sees it now produces a feeling of alienation, which reflects the impossibility of return. However, the attempt to go back in time allows the character to rethink his place in his current reality. Shekhter’s novel is a vivid example of the stratification of time. His character enters the “garden of forking paths” as a symbol of his search for the secrets of the universe. He sees himself as descending a deep pit, crawling from cave to cave in search of the roots of a tree, but he finds nothing. There is no end to his 20 Vladimir Gubailovskii, Master epizoda, Novyi Mir 11, no. 6 (2017), http://www.nm1925.ru/ Archive/Journal6_2017_11/Content/Publication6_6771/Default.aspx.

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disillusionment, and this exacerbates the relentless problems such as making sense of the relation between the creator and the world he created, and the challenges of choosing faith or creativity as a method of comprehending reality. Shekhter’s second novel, Astronom (Astronomer), came out in Rostov-onDon in 2007. Its plot is a labyrinth of historical periods and geographical spaces. The reader is taken back hundreds of years, crosses the boundaries of the real and the magical, and attempts to penetrate into the deepest layers of history in search for the meaning of existence. Shekhter’s multivolume Golos v tishine (Voice in the silence, 2008–2017) is a unique project combining a detailed study of a cultural legacy and insights into contemporary realities. It is composed of translations and retellings of Hasidic stories collected by Rabbi Shlomo-Yosef Zevin. The book Kabbala i besy (Kabbalah and the devils, 2008) is, according to the author, an esoteric journey into the secret world of Judaism and the Kabbalah. Petr Liukimson and Anna Fain also took part in this project, and their commentaries accompany the stories. In 2019, Shekhter published another book connected to kabbalistic themes, Samouchitel′ Kabbaly (A self-study guide to Kabbalah, 2019), also accompanied by Anna Fain’s commentaries. In 2011, he published the novel Potselui bol′shogo zmeia (Kiss of the large snake, 2011), which became the first volume of the trilogy Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia (The second coming of the teacher from Qumran). The novel elicited a rather terse reaction since it attempts, yet again, to understand the secret of Jesus Christ’s origins. Shekhter’s colleagues at Artikl′ praised this novel highly. Mikhail Iudson noted that on the surface it resembles J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, but in its depths can be compared to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.21 In 2016, the second edition of the novel came out together with two new volumes of the trilogy: Idoly pustyni (Idols of the desert) and Kometa nad Kumranom (Comet over Qumran, 2016). Iakov Shekhter was awarded the Yuri Nagibin Prize in 2009 for his multifaceted creative work. In 2012, Vtoroe Prishestvie was longlisted for the Yeltsin Russian Prize. *** Among authors writing on religious themes, Ezra Khovkin should be mentioned (b. 1948, repatriated late 1980s). Khovkin is the author of a book of “stories about the Hasids,” Mudrets-izvozchik (The Wise Cabby, 1996); Svecha na 21 Mikhail Iudson, “Put′ Shua,” Chastnyi korrespondent 2 (2012), http://www.chaskor.ru/ article/put_shua__26563.

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snegu (Candle in the snow, 1998), a collection of stories about the founder of Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer known as the Baal Shem Tov; and a book about the life of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Nepokorivshiisia (The unsurrendered one, 1998). In the 2000s, Khovkin publishes Stranstviia Borukha (Boruch’s wanderings, 2000), a retelling of the stories of the Lubavitcher Rebbes; Malakhovskii parovoz: detskaia skazka dlia vzroslykh (The Malakhovka steam engine: A children’s fairytale for grownups, 2002), a contemporary ironic fairytale, which tells about the life of a Jewish religious community of refuseniks in the Moscow suburb of Malakhovka; and a retelling of Hasidic stories titled Skazki dlia vzroslykh (Fairy tales for grownups, 2010). The combination of artistic retelling and translation of Hasidic stories with literature that recreates the traditions of Jewish religious aesthetics and rhetoric—often as a fairy tale, a children’s tale, or a young adult story, but also emulating detective and adventure novels—becomes a characteristic feature of Russian-Israeli religious literature. One other of its important features is also the combination of fairy tales and legends with a real historical context, as, for example, in the books Svecha na snegu and Skazki dlia vzroslykh.

d.  Language as a Mirror of the Soul and of Culture Among writers of the older generation, it is important to acknowledge Anna Fain (b. 1963, repatriated 1991), who was named above as a participant in Iakov Shekhter’s kabbalistic stories project. She was born and grew up in Moscow. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, she taught English and then, clandestinely, Hebrew. After repatriating to Israel, she has been living in in the city of Bnei Brak and working in Bar-Ilan University. Fain published a collection of stories, Khroniki tret′ei avtopady (Chronicles of the third autofallda, 2004). In addition, her works are published in the periodical Artikl′ and on the website of the Jewish center Migdal. In 2005, the story “Tret′iakovskaia baldareia” (Tretyakov balldery, 2003) won first place at the second stage of the Janusz Korczak literary competition for prose writing. This story is an attempt to understand the events during the wave of Arab terror of 2000–2005 in Israel, known as the Second Intifada, and a search for methods of poetic self-expression in the face of the human tragedy and a general state of paralyzing horror. With this aim, Fain constructs a new language, built of already known words that have changed their original meaning and appear in a completely new role. For example, the title of the story “Tret′iakovskaia baldareia” refers to the Tretyakov Gallery (in Russian, Tret′iakovskaia galereia), one

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of the central collections of art in Russia, and the measured and ordered atmosphere of museum life. At the same time, the word “gallery” metamorphoses and acquires a new form linked to the colloquial verb baldet′ (to party or zone out). This transformation emphasizes the state of disbelief and clouded consciousness in which the main character finds herself. This newly formed expression points to the complexity of the situation described in the story and the deep perplexity of the character who faces horrors that are impossible to understand and describe in normal language. In Fain’s other stories, the symbols of Russian and world culture undergo a similar transformation, which expresses the schism that takes place in the world of the characters under the influence of the violence around them. Fain’s stories under the shared title Pod flagom Gambrinusa (Under the flag of Gambrinus, 2020) were published in Roman-gazeta (Novel-in-newspaper), a supplement to the newspaper Novosti nedeli. The title of the collection alludes to the well-known story “Gambrinus,” by Aleksandr Kuprin, which is set in Odesa between the two Russian revolutions, in a tavern called Gambrinus. Kuprin emphasizes the deep connection between people and their culture, as his characters attempt to overcome the difficult situations in their lives by means of art. Fain also addresses the conflict between contemporary reality and the spiritual and historical heritage of the Jewish nation. For example, in her story “Goriachee pivo Krakova” (Cracow’s hot beer), republished in the journal Artikl′ (2020), a journey to Cracow turns into an attempt to comprehend the past and the present simultaneously. The symbolic name of Cracow elicits a complex reaction for every Jew, and it leads to a stratification of the character’s world. The character attempts to fathom the roots of the events that took place in the city during the Holocaust and comprehend the legacy of the generations of Cracow Jews where only stones and ruins remain. The dissimilarities between the past and the present produce a profound bewilderment. A journey around the city intensifies her inner conflict and the feeling of confusion in relation both to the events in Cracow, in a city that is foreign to the character, and to her everyday life in Israel. The story ends on a pessimistic note and emphasizes the danger of distancing oneself from spiritual and religious traditions that define the individuality of the Jewish people. *** Among authors who devoted much attention to the problem of language and to comprehending the processes of meaning formation in interlinguistic space, it is important to mention Arkan Kariv (Arkadii Karabchievskii, 1963–2012, repatriated 1989), the son of the well-known poet and prose writer Iurii Karabchievskii. After repatriation, he worked as a journalist and broadcaster on Israeli television. One of his central projects was the column “Slovo za slovo” (Little by little,

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1994–1995) in the newspaper Vesti and also an original show on studying Hebrew Ivrit Katan (Little Hebrew). The combination of Kariv’s literary skills and artistic talent made this project very popular among new repatriates. A distinctive feature of Kariv’s presentation of the language was his attitude toward it as a part of a broader historical and social context. For him, discovering Israeli cultures was a key to understanding the language. Born from this work was a handbook of Hebrew in three volumes, also called Slovo za slovo (1994–1995). Together with Anton Nosik, Kariv also published the book Operatsiia “Kennedi” (Operation “Kennedy,” 1996). His novel Perevodchik (The translator) appeared in 2001, and the novel Odnazhdy v Bishkeke (Once upon a time in Bishkek, 2014) came out posthumously. Kariv’s stories and essays were also published in periodicals such as Snob, Lekhaim, Sakvoiazh, Druzhba Narodov, and others.

2.  The Younger Generation The second group of Russophone writers in Israel can be said to consist of the younger generation of repatriates who came to Israel in their childhood or youth (the so-called generation 1.5).22 Regardless of their social background and level of competence in the local culture and language, these writers chose to work in Russian. Despite social, cultural, and linguistic differences from the writers of the older generation, generation 1.5 also write about understanding reality amid the clashes of space and time. They choose artistic devices that are already familiar to us from the literature of the older generation, such as the (a)symmetry between time and space as a way of creating new meanings. However, this device takes new forms in their writings. We can already distinguish several basic directions in the younger generation’s attempts to solve the conflict between here and there, or now and then. They continue the tendencies chosen by the older generation, but they also mark out their own creative paths.

a.  Repatriation to Israel as the “Beginning of a New Life” In the work of the younger generation of repatriates, there is a tendency to create a symmetry between geography and history. Their characters usually open a new page in life after their repatriation to Israel. Their movement to the new country 22 Larisa Remennick and Anna Prashizky, “Generation 1.5 of Russian Israelis: Integrated but Distinct,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18, no. 1 (October 2018): 1–19.

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also changes their inner world and worldview in a fundamental way. For them, the past becomes a distant memory, the overcoming of which heralds success in their new life. *** Alisa Bial′skaia (b. 1969, repatriated 1990) studied at Tel Aviv University after her repatriation and graduated in 1996. So far, two of her novels have been published: Legkaia korona (A light crown, 2011) and Opyt bor′by s udush′em (Struggle against suffocation, 2018). The former was commended by critics. In the foreword to the novel, Lyudmila Ulitskaya wrote, “Her talent is unquestionable; few are able to retain an adolescent intonation, honesty, and sincerity that are not yet stained by contact with the ‘demands of life.’”23 Bial′skaia’s novel allows the reader to go back in time, to look anew at events and people during the collapse of the USSR, and through this to understand the world of the young repatriates more deeply. The book was translated into Hebrew in 2014, and in 2020 it was included in the list of the best literary debuts of the past twenty years in Israel. Bial′skaia’s second book, Opyt bor′by s udush′em, also returns the reader to the years of perestroika and reflects on the atmosphere of that time, the chaos and mayhem that ruled in all spheres of life and that in many respects determined people’s fates. As in the first novel, the action takes place on two temporal planes. The reader falls into the world of young people of the late 1980s, but at the same time the voice of the grownup narrator is heard as she assesses events through the prism of the passage of time and of her life experience. This voice is heard already in the title of the novel, borrowed from a poem by Joseph Brodsky, “Ia vsegda tverdil, chto sud′ba igra . . .” (I said fate plays a game without a score . . . , 1971): A loyal subject of these second-rate years, I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, and may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.  I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.24

23 Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Liudmila Ulitskaia], “Predislovie,” in Legkaia korona, by Alisa Bial′skaia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011). 24 Translated by Howard Moss. See Joseph Brodsky, “Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky,” Lithub. com, May 12, 2020, https://lithub.com/two-poems-by-joseph-brodsky/.

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These lines express grief at the fate of the generations that grew up in the darkness of the Soviet system, which turned people into second-rate goods and deprived them of hope for a better future. When Bial′skaia’s characters attempt to crawl out of this pit, their efforts are doomed to failure; only a fundamental change in life can save their future. Repatriation to Israel gives birth to a new person, who has overcome the destructive past and is capable of creating a new world in a new land. If, for the writers of the older generation, Israeli reality is a part of a global process that intensifies their characters’ problems, for the younger generation the move to Israel is often seen as a solution to all questions—a means of overcoming the inner and the outer chaos in the lives of the characters. In other words, Bial′skaia’s novels are a new direction for the Russophone literature of Israel. She creates a symmetry between place and time, defining the geographical borders of Israel as the territory for her characters’ new, happier life. *** In 2018, Viktoriia Roitman (b. 1981, repatriated 1990) published the novel Ierve iz Assedo (Ierve from Assedo) under the pseudonim Rene Bel′ski. The title is a pun: it contains the phrase “Jew from Odesa” (evrei iz Odessy) with the words Odessa and evrei spelled backwards. The novel describes the repatriation of the teenaged girl Zoia Prokof ′eva from Odesa to the distant Jerusalem. Zoia’s voyage starts with opposition to her parents and ends with a cardinal change in her self-identification and in her understanding of life’s fundamental values. Parallel to searching for herself amid all the changes, Zoia writes a novel about Duke Keizegal y Jerve, reminiscent of the journey of Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza. Saturated with symbols of Russian and Soviet culture, this story captures the chaos of Zoia’s internal world. But Zoia’s writing is also a healing practice: it mediates her new experiences. It creates a symmetry between her consciousness, formed by Soviet sociocultural reality, and the world that has opened up before her after repatriation. At the end of the book, she decides to destroy her work as a sign of overcoming the past and aspiring toward general human values. In this way, Zoia finds a way to unify the past with the present, her new personality and her new land, and thereby establishes a place in Israeli reality. *** The novels of Alisa Bial′skaia and Viktoriia Roitman demonstrate the appearance of a new genre in the Russian-Jewish literature of the younger generation—the Bildungsroman. These texts describe the development of their young characters in the late 1980s–early 1990s in the former USSR and in Israel. The characters’

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coming of age is linked with a symmetry between place and time, between history and geography that forms in their consciousnesses. In this context, we should also mention Dennis Sobolev’s last novel, Voskreshenie (Resurrection, 2021).25 The situation of Mitya, Sobolev’s main character, is ambiguous. After returning to the city of his childhood, Mitya understands that the Leningrad he knew and the people who were close to him no longer exist. He is deeply conflicted. While he searches for traces of the past, he also attempts to embrace contemporary reality and join the life around him. The path toward self-knowledge leads Mitya to the banks of the Lena River, whose power is comparable in his eyes with Jerusalem. His difficult and dangerous wandering along the banks of the Lena with the aim of discovering the secret of a family legend forces Mitya to revise his values and to see his life afresh. Coming close to death leads him to realize the divine power described in the Revelation of John: “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die’” (John 11:25 [NIV]); “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Rev. 21:6 [NIV]). The character’s coming of age is compared to a resurrection, that is, to the death of the past and the beginning of a new life, defined by eternal values. Sobolev’s novel represents the process of coming of age not only as a problem of personal choice but also as a deep philosophical search for one’s path in the context of a complex reality. *** The work of Viktoriia Raikher (b. 1974, repatriated 1990), a prose writer, poet, and essayist, is an interesting and unique phenomenon in Israeli Russophone literature. In her first book, Ioshkin dom (Ioshka’s house, 2007), she deals with universal motifs. But in her second book, Nalevo—skazku govorit (Left for a fairy tale, 2020), one can detect a tendency to approach Israeli reality. Raikher’s primary profession is that of a psychologist, and she is occupied with psychodrama. Many of her stories are linked to her professional experience, making an extremely interesting gallery of human characters and relations. Raikher’s characters include repatriates from the former USSR and from Ethiopia, native Israelis, children and adults, and very elderly people. They all overcome everyday problems and the fear of loneliness; they search for paths to self-identity and self-expression. The variety of characters also determines the broad spectrum of Raikher’s work: she writes realistic prose, draws on allegory and symbolism, and produces journalistic essays. 25 For more information about Sobolev’s works, see Roman Katsman’s essay in this volume.

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Raikher received wide renown after the publication of her humorous story “Khatul-Madan” (Cat scientist, 2020); in her latest collection, this story is titled “Nalevo—skazku govorit.” The story is about the tragicomic situation that takes place during the intake meeting of a new recruit from Russia at an Israeli army induction center. The recruit’s unsuccessful attempt to translate a quote from Pushkin’s poem baffles the army psychologist and underscores the complexity of finding a language that matches one’s surroundings and that can overcome cultural and language barriers. Raikher’s first collection of stories, Ioshkin dom, was published in 2007. The title of the book, which is also the title of its first story, walks the boundary between normality and madness, the past and the present, the world of children and that of adults, languages and cultures. The definition of territory in Raikher’s world passes far beyond geographical coordinates. Territory is seen in terms of linguistic and cultural legacy, instead, and is the first step towards comprehending reality. The book Nalevo—skazku govorit contains Raikher’s most recent stories. One of the basic themes of this collection is the search for ways to understand the multicultural and multilingual reality people experience after repatriation. Thus, the story “Iazykovoi bar′er” (Language barrier) takes up the problem of life in a foreign-language sphere and the principal difference between utterance and dialogue, between “saying” and “understanding.”26 Another important theme in the collection is that of coming of age and aging. “Min′ian” (Minyan), for example, follows the residents of a home for the elderly in the city of Rehovot. Their everyday cares, illnesses, relations, memories, and hopes reveal an amazing kaleidoscope of human characters. All the characters strive, no matter what, to remember the meaning of life and ultimately the meaning of death. Like most representatives of the younger generation, Raikher celebrates the search for self in Israeli reality by discovering a symmetry between place and time. Yet her writing also include overlapping territorial and temporal boundaries and touches upon universal themes.

b.  Philosophy and Literature as Forms of Self-Awareness The theme of comprehending intercultural and interlinguistic reality is poignantly expressed in the work of Alexander Ilichevsky (b. 1970, repatriated 1991). Unlike the previous authors of the younger generation, Ilichevsky takes a philosophical and metaphysical path in his reflections on the relationship

26 Viktoriia Raikher, Nalevo—skazku govorit (Moscow: Tekst, 2020), 81–89.

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between time and space, and distances himself from straightforward geographical and chronological definitions. Ilichevsky was born in Sumgait, Azerbaijan. He studied physics in Moscow. From 1991 to 1998 he was a physics researcher in Israel and California. He returned to Moscow in 1998, and since 2013 he has been living in Israel.27 His writing ranked highly in various literary competitions, and in 2005 he received the Novyi Mir Prize and the Yuri Kazakov Prize for best short story, as well as being a laureate at the Fourth International Voloshin Literary Competition. In 2007, Ilichevsky was the recipient of the Russian Booker Prize for the novel Matiss (Matisse, 2007); in 2010 he was awarded the Big Book National Prize in Literature for the novel Pers (The Persian, 2010); in 2020, he received the Great Book Prize and was nominated as author of the year for Chertezh N′iutona (Newton’s drawing, 2020). Ilichevsky’s basic theme is self-discovery and self-expression in the age of global culture. His characters move between a multitude of spaces in search of themselves amid constantly changing religions, cultures, languages, social systems, and political movements. Pers explores self-definition in a multicultural and multireligious world, where Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Western and Eastern cultures, the fight for national independence and terrorism are all interwoven. Chertezh N′iutona tells the story of the main character’s journey between Nevada, Pamir, and Jerusalem in search of his father. At the same time, the protagonist is occupied with the problem of dark matter, which, in his opinion, is identical to human consciousness. It occupies all of space, but no one has yet been able to localize it. On his physical and spiritual journey, there are two paths towards comprehending reality: one is the spiritual and cultural legacy connected with the image of his father; the other is that of scientific formulas and theories. Both paths lead to Jerusalem, to the Holy Temple, whose construction symbolizes the universe. The character becomes involved in the creation of a hologram of the new Temple, which makes it possible to define its contours in space. At the same time, his work emphasizes the problematic nature of physical characteristics and their dependence on other external factors. In other words, the rational path does not allow for the creation of symmetry between place and time. In the end, the search leads the character to the central part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies. In this traditionally empty space, the secret of creation hides and all forms of cognition converge. Ilichevsky’s writing is a powerful example of philosophical-symbolic literature. Time and space become projections of his characters’ inner worlds, and 27 “Aleksandr Ilichevskii,” tag-ilichevskiya/.

Ierusalimskii

Zhurnal,

2021,

https://new.antho.net/wp/

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creating symmetry between them makes it possible for them to find new meanings determined by external reality. *** Another writer in the philosophical-symbolic vein is Dmitrii Deich (b. 1969, repatriated 1995). He published his first book, Avgust nepostizhimyi (Incomprehensible August, 1995), in Donetsk. It was followed, after his repatriation, by publications in the periodicals Dvoetochie, Solnechnoe Spletenie, and Vozdukh (Air), as well as in collections and anthologies of short prose. Deich is the author of Preimushchestvo Griffita (The advantage of Griffith, 2007), Skazki dlia Marty (Fairy tales for Marta, 2008, longlisted for the National Bestseller Prize of 2009), Zima v Tel′-Avive (Winter in Tel Aviv, 2011), Preliudii i fantazii (Preludes and fantasies, 2012), and Zapiski o probuzhdenii bodrstvuiushchikh (Notes on the awakening of the sleepless, 2014). He is the director of Xuanxue, a school for the inner arts.28 Deich writes short and micro-fiction, in which he absorbs and overcomes postmodernist influences as he searches for nonconformist ways to express “enlightened” or altered states of consciousness. His aesthetic aspirations resemble those of Linor Goralik and Viktoriia Raikher, although his preference for a philosophical style of thought, rather than a sociological or psychological one, departs from them. Fashionable experiments in the genre of the fairy tale for adults are also characteristic of his creative work. At the same time, the philosophical fairy tale is for Deich a traditional form for capturing the ideas of Chinese spiritual and physical practices, of which he is an expert teacher. Preimushchestvo Griffita is a cycle of surrealist sketches about a lonely individual, lost and falling apart in a world of chaos and absurdity. In a series of scenes, which kaleidoscopically replace each other, the protagonist allows all imaginable and unimaginable, real and fantastic stereotypes of the West to pass through him, turning them into a bitter parody of themselves. In Skazki dlia Marty, things, animals, plants, and even concepts live and suffer, tell their stories and interact, create and suffer moral dilemmas—like people. In Preliudii i fantazii, a cycle of micro-fiction stories, the characters and narrators turn out to be not only fictional but also historical figures, such as Mozart and Socrates, or, in texts styled as children’s memories, the author’s grandparents. Music and composers form a central motif. The collection Preliudii i fantazii contains other previously published stories, as well as new texts: fairytales, 28 See the website of Dmitrii Deich’s school, Taitszitsiuan′ i meditatsiia v Tel′-Avive, 2015, https://www.telaviv-taiji.com.

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magical and demonic stories, and mad dreams and fantasies, including retellings of Hasidic legends. Zima v Tel′-Avive consists of cycles of genre scenes, urban stories linked through shared characters and topics. Deich peoples the city with oddballs, intellectuals, and simpletons, in this way contributing to the growing Russian Tel Aviv body of literature. In this way, he joins Leonid Levinzon, Iakov Shekhter, and Marta Ketro. Zapiski o probuzhdenii bodrstvuiushchikh was published in Deich’s blog freez.livejournal.com in 2003. A later version appeared in Dvoetochie 12 (2009). This cycle is a collection of literary etudes based on dreams, written within the framework of Buddhist yoga practices. Here, the basic foundations of Deich’s creative work come through more explicitly than in his other cycles. The title of the cycle defines existence as an opposition, as a dream within a dream; and the texts embody the idea of literary myth formation as a mutual identification of consciousness, things, and words when there are no longer any spatial, temporal, or semantic boundaries. The published edition also includes the cycle Iavleniia (Phenomena), which consists of microprose sketches that investigate everything that falls within the phenomenological field of the observing writer. Deich compiles a chaotic catalogue of being, which demonstrates an effort that is opposite to the attempt to erase boundaries. In his texts, he constructs a miniature cultural community with its own language, mentality, habits, and, most importantly, cognitive strategies.

c. The Theme of Wandering in the Works of the Younger Generation The younger generation also includes authors who do not live in Israel continuously or have left the country entirely, but who nonetheless continue to write on Jewish and Israeli themes and publish in the Israeli periodical press. Notable among such authors are Marta Ketro, Keren Klimovski, and Linor Goralik. A tendency to return to motifs of wandering between the geographical and metaphorical spaces that are central to the older generation of writers of the Great Aliyah can be seen in their creative work. Characteristic of this tendency is the split or rupture between time and space and, consequently, an asymmetry between history and geography. *** Inna Pozdnysheva (b. 1981, living in Israel since 2014) is well known to Russian and Israeli readers, and publishes under the pseudonym Marta Ketro. Her first

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books came out in Russia. Journalism and online work have also affected her literary creativity. Her first novel, Khop, Khop, ulitka (Hop, hop, snail, 2006), came out in Moscow, followed by her next novel, Zhenshchiny i koty, muzhchiny i koshki (Women and male cats, men and female cats, 2007). This novel is a thematic continuation of the previous one and resembles it in many respects. The problem of relationships between people and their ambiguity in the context of general chaos constitute the basic theme of Ketro’s creative work. In 2014, Marta Ketro moved to Israel, where she continues to develop her work on alienation and the problem of the relationship between the sexes. For example, the collection Khoroshen′kie ne umiraiut (The pretty ones don’t die, 2017) reflects on the influence of internet culture, which intensifies the divide between individual and geographical space. For example, in the novella “Pis′ma bestsennomu M.” (Letters to priceless M.), the life of the heroine takes place in both the real world and online. Carrying on an online correspondence with an unknown addressee, she creates a completely new system of relations in which the text replaces both participants in the “dialogue” and determines the relationship between them. At the end of the story, this link breaks, and the character expresses satisfaction that they did not go beyond the boundaries of online correspondence. In other words, the creation of a parallel world of doubles (which provide the opportunity of hedonistic and fleeting self-identification) becomes a way to overcome alienation. Marta Ketro’s writing combines themes popular in contemporary literature— making sense of Israeli cultural and linguistic reality—but the experience of emigration adds a new dimension. In the collection Khoroshen′kie ne umiraiut, the theme of a nomadic life is supplemented by the question of self-definition and takes on a tragic form, where wandering is tied to the loss of a connection between geographical space and the character’s self-identity. For example, the story “Mezhdu vremenem” (Between time) follows the changes in the character’s self-definition as she transforms from a tourist in a spice paradise into a new repatriate who attempts to find her place in the strange, incomprehensible, and sometimes even dangerous reality of Israel. The novella “Tel′-Aviv” (Tel Aviv) follows the character’s wanderings in time and space in an attempt to overcome a sense of alienation. She describes her ramblings around Tel Aviv, an unknown city inhabited by strangers who speak a language she doesn’t know. Due to her feeling of alienation, the character becomes an otherworldly observer who has no real possibility of overcoming internal barriers and entering into a dialogue with the surrounding world. She refers to herself as a “drifter” and a “loner,” thereby expressing her inner state and relation to the world surrounding her. In order to express her relation to the territories that comprise her world, the

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character turns to Jerusalem, the eternal symbol. She is no longer able to use the name of the city in Russian, since the Russian language cannot fully express her inner world anymore. Simultaneously, using the name in Hebrew does not allow her to feel a belonging to this place, so she chooses the English name, whose foreignness expresses her inner state. Ketro’s latest (as of the day of writing this essay) book, Rasseiannaia zhizn′ (Scattered life, 2021), also takes up the universal subject of human relations along with attempts to get close to Israeli reality. She carefully chooses Israeli settings and uses Hebrew terms in a Russian-language text. *** The creative biography of Keren Klimovski (b. 1985, repatriated 1990) is also closely tied to Israel. She was born in Moscow, then her family repatriated to Israel, but she soon left the country, studied in Minsk and St. Petersburg, and later graduated from Brown University with a double major: theater and comparative literature. She received a PhD in statistics from Brown University. Klimovski started publishing her works at the age of fifteen in Russian, Israeli, and American periodicals. Her poems, stories, plays, and translations came out in such periodicals as Neva, Novaia Iunost′, and Ierusalimskii Zhurnal. She now lives in Sweden and approaches the theme of Israel from a different perspective than that of the younger-generation writers examined above. Repatriation and life in Israel in Klimovski’s prose is closely tied to trauma, loss, and destruction. In the story “Bananovyi rai” (Banana paradise, 2013), repatriation is presented as a traumatic event, an exile from the paradise of childhood and innocence. Israel is a foreign place, which underlines the character’s helplessness in the face of her circumstances. Although the title of the story symbolizes the embodiment of a dream, it is evident from the first sentence that there is a rift in the character’s world. The cause of the rift turns out to be the loss of her doll Tania, which symbolizes home, the comprehensible world, confidence, and a feeling of belonging. What defines the world of the child is wiped out along with the doll that disappeared during the move to Israel. Besides the doll, the character loses other important components of her life: her beloved home, a familiar room, her language, and her faith in grown-ups. Her attempt to become acquainted with her contemporaries turns into an embarrassment and ends in total failure. In order to fill the emptiness created by the changes in her life, she eats a huge number of bananas. But the child’s body rejects this exotic fruit, and the “banana paradise” becomes a horror of loneliness and hopelessness. The story would

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later become part of the novel Koroleva Anglii kusala menia v nos (The queen of England bit me on the nose, 2016). Klimovski’s later novel Vremia govorit′ (Time to speak, 2020) follows the teenage character’s coming of age in a family of repatriates in Israel, underlining all the complexity of the younger generation’s self-definition in an intercultural and crosslinguistic space. In terms of style and topics, there is a certain similarity between Klimovski and Alisa Bial′skaia. Both authors convey with great subtlety their characters’ inner processes as they describe the world of teenagers who live at the juncture of times and cultures. The symbols they use reveal an additional level of understanding of the situation and elucidate the position of the adult narrator. *** Linor Goralik (b. 1975, repatriated 1989) was born in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro). She has been living in Israel since 1989, graduating from Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, in computer science. She worked as a programmer in internet technology and marketing. In the early 2000s, Goralik left Israel and moved to Moscow—in her words, to study Russian.29 She returned to Israel in 2014. Goralik’s multifaceted work encompasses a variety of genres: short and microfiction stories, tales, novels, poetry, comics, and journalistic essays. Among her many books are: Nedetskaia eda (No child’s food, 2004), Govorit (They say, 2006), Nedetskaia eda. Bez sladkogo (No child’s food: Without dessert, 2007), Koroche (In brief, 2008), Agata vozvrashchaetsia domoi (Agata returns home, 2008), Valerii (2011), Bibleiskii zoopark (Biblical zoo, 2012), Putevoditel′ po Izrailiu (Traveler’s guide to Israel, 2013), . . . Vot skazhem (. . . Let’s just say, 2015), Vsenoshchnaia zver′ (The all-night beast, 2019), Kholodnaia voda Vinesany (Vinesana’s cold water, 2019), and Vse, sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie (All those capable of breathing breath, 2018)—the novel that brought Goralik an award of the Critical Academy of the NOS Prize. At various times Goralik has been a regular contributor to Russian-language periodicals and websites such as Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Teoriia Mody, the Russian version of Vogue, Buknik.ru, Grani.ru, Russkii Zhurnal, Ezhenedel′nyi Zhurnal, and others. In addition, she translates stories of the popular Israeli writer Etgar Keret into Russian. Vse, sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie takes place in Israel. Goralik uses Hebrew words and phrases in her text, such as ason (catastrophe), busha ve-cherpa (shame and disgrace), and baal dibur she-eyno ben adam (a speaking creature 29 Alla Gavrilova. “Linor Goralik o vezenii i boli, ob Izraile i Rossii,” NEWSru.co.il, August 11, 2019, https://www.newsru.co.il/rest/09aug2019/linor_501.html.

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that is not a human). The reader leaves a specific territory, and reading turns into an endless voyage between philosophical, religious, and cultural spaces. The novel describes a time after a global catastrophe (in Hebrew, ason) that has brought about irreversible changes: new diseases, destroyed cities, and homelessness. The catastrophe also gives rise to a new phenomenon: storms called busha ve-khirpa (from Hebrew busha ve-cherpa, “shame and disgrace”), which cause an acute sense of shame. The most important change, however, is that animals have acquired the gift of speech, which allows them to express their feelings and thoughts thus come closer to the human world. Goralik herself describes the novel as a test of her characters’ empathy: “their main work and their main trial is to be good.”30 The validation of general human values is based on a dialogue between various cultures. In her description of ason and its inescapable consequences, the voices of the prophets can be heard, particularly Isaiah’s famous words: “Then the wolf will live with the lamb [. . .]. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:6–9 [NIV]). The prophet points to the fundamental changes that will take place between all living things at the end of time. The title of Goralik’s novel is also an allusion to Andrei Lazarchuk’s antiutopian Vse, sposobnyie derzhat′ oruzhie (All those capable of bearing arms, 1997), which describes a world in which the Soviet Union was destroyed by Nazi Germany and the Third Reich stretches to the Urals. A war against the conquerors to restore the Russian Empire begins, one of the main methods of which is psychological manipulation. Goralik carries on an ideological dialog with Lazarchuk’s work and thereby presents the challenges of choosing between humanity and empathy, on the one hand, and dehumanization, on the other. *** During the past decade (2010–2020), Russian-Israeli literature experienced one of the most vital periods of its history. A multitude of authors, a variety of topics, and a constant search for new literary forms are turning this literature into one of the most interesting and nuanced phenomena in Israeli and post-Soviet culture. It reacts to historical and cultural events on a local and worldwide scale, while also considering attempts to create new worlds, distant in space and time, as a way to comprehend reality and construct one’s own identity within it. One of the central themes of this literature is the problem of an individual’s relationship

30 Linor Goralik, Vse, sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie (Moscow: AST, 2018).

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to a territory. Simultaneously, it underlines the processes of moving away from specific geographical space and replacing it with a metaphysical one. Notably, historical inversion becomes one of the most important mechanisms of meaning formation. These features underline the uniqueness of Israeli Russophone literature compared to the works of other groups of repatriates in Israel. Translated from Russian by Dobrochna E. Fire

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———. Esli zabudu . . . [If I forget . . .]. Jerusalem: Shamir, 1985. ———. Golos v tishine [Voice in the silence]. Moscow: Knizhniki, 2017. ———. Kabbala i besy [Kabbalah and demons]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2008. ———. Samouchitel′ kabbaly. Sbornik rasskazov [A self-study guide to Kabbalah. Collection of stories]. Odesa: Astroprint, 2019. ———.Vokrug sebia byl nikto [There was no one around oneself]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks. 2004. ———. Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia. Potselui bol′shogo zmeia [The second coming of the teacher from Qumran. Kiss of the large snake]. Moscow: Vremia, 2011. ———. Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia. Idoly pustyni. Kometa nad Kumranom [The second coming of the teacher from Qumran. Idols of the desert. Comet over Qumran]. Odesa: Astroprint, 2017. Shenbrunn, Svetlana. Dekabr′skie sny [December dreams]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991. ———. Iskusstvo slepogo kino [The art of blind cinema]. Jerusalem: n.p., 1997. ———. O, Marianna! [Oh, Marianna!]. Ierusalimskii zhurnal 53, 55, 60, 63 (2016–2020). ———. Piliuli schast′ia [Happiness pills]. Moscow: Tekst, 2006. ———. Rozy i khrizantemy [Roses and chrysanthemums]. St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2000. Sobolev, Dennis [Denis Sobolev]. Voskreshenie [Resurrection]. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021. Tarn, Aleks. Devushka iz Dzhei-Ef-Kei [The Girl from JFK]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2021. ———. “Khaim” [Chaim]. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 45 (2013). ———. Killer s propellerom na motorollere [Killer with a propeller on a scooter]. Moscow: AST, 2016. ———. Kniga [The book]. Moscow: Enneagon, 2010. ———. Mezh trekh mirov [Amid three worlds]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019. ———. Mir tesen dlia inoplanetian [The world is crowded for extraterrestrials]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel—Isradon, 2018. ———. My ne liubim russkikh [We don’t like Russians]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2021. ———. Obychnye liudi [Ordinary people]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2020. ———. “Povesti Iokhanana Eikhorna” [Tales of Yohanan Eichorn]. Kreshchatik 75, no. 1 (2017). ———. Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov [The protocols of the Elders of Zion]. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004. ———. Reina, koroleva sud′by [Reina, queen of fate]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2020. ———. Rytsari epokhi [Knights of the times]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019. ———. “Shabaton” [Sabbatical]. Druzhba narodov 8 (2020). ———. Stantsuem, krasivaia? (Odin den′ Anny Denisovny) [Shall we dance, my pretty? (A day in the life of Anna Denisovna)]. Moscow: AST, 2014. ———. Subbotnii god [Sabbatical year]. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2019. ———. Ub′iu kogo khochu [I’ll kill whomever I want]. Moscow: AST, 2015. ———. Vstrecha s chitateliami [A meeting with readers]. July 30, 2021. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HzXMWyDtmNg. Voskoboinik, Nelli. Bukvari i antikvary [Primers and antiquaries]. Moscow: Vremia, 2020. ———. Korobochka monpans′e [Box of fruit drops]. Jerusalem: Ridero, 2018. ———. Ochen′ malen′kie tragedii [Very small tragedies]. Jerusalem: Ridero, 2017. ———. Vy budete smeiat′sia [You’ll laugh]. Moscow: Planzh, 2019.

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Secondary Sources “Aleksandr Ilichevskii.” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal. 2021. https://new.antho.net/wp/tag-ilichevskiya/. Balakin, Aleksei. “Igor′ Gel′bakh. Uteriannyi Blium”. Dossier 4 (2004). http://www.litkarta.ru/ dossier/balakin-gelbah/dossier_1658. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane.” In his Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 234–407. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975. Frumkina, Anna. “Segodnia. Zavtra. Vchera. O romane Svetlany Shenbrunn ‘Rozy i Khrizantemy.’” Novyi Mir 6 (2001): 186–191. Goralik, Linor. “My zhivem v mire, v kotorom zhdesh′ katastrofu kazhdyi den′.” Afisha Daily. November 2018. https://daily.afisha.ru/brain/10478-linor-goralik-my-zhivemv-mire-v-kotorom-zhdesh-katastrofu-kazhdyy-den/. Gubailovskii, V. Master epizoda. Novyi Mir 11, no. 6 (2017). http://www.nm1925.ru/Archive/ Journal6_2017_11/Content/Publication6_6771/Default.aspx. Gavrilova, Alla. “Linor Goralik o vezenii i boli, ob Izraile i Rossii.” NEWSru.co.il. August 11, 2019. https://www.newsru.co.il/rest/09aug2019/linor_501.html. Iudson, Mikhail. “K radosti, ili Iasnye sny (O sbornike rasskazov Marka Zaichika ‘Novyi syn’). 22 117 (2000). http://www.sunround.com/club/22/zaichik.htm. ———. “Novaia kniga Igoria Gel′bakha v Avstralii.” Edinenie. February 23, 2013. https://www. unification.com.au/articles/1670/. ———. “Put′ Shua.” Chastnyi korrespondent 2 (2012). http://www.chaskor.ru/article/ put_shua__26563. Katsman, Roman. “Leonid Levinzon i nostal′giia.” Artikl′ 13, no. 45 (2018). https://sunround. com/article/?page_id=2240. Kheifets, Mikhail. “Taina vybora ‘psikhometrista.’” Lekhaim 159, no. 7 (2005). https://lechaim. ru/ARHIV/159/n4.htm. Lomykina, Natal′ia. “Dina Rubina: ‘Tretii tom dolzhen byt′ prosto trillerom.’” Forbes, September 22, 2018. https://www.forbes.ru/forbeslife/367179-dina-rubina-tretiytom-dolzhen-byt-prosto-trillerom. Pedaya, Chaviva. “Saretet ha-zeut: Omanut mizrachit—khronika ve-problematika,” 57–101. In Shovrot kirot: Omanut mizrachit akhshavit be-Israel, edited by K. Alon and S. Keshet. Tel Aviv: Achoti, 2013. Remennick, Larisa, and Anna Prashizky. “Generation 1.5 of Russian Israelis: Integrated but Distinct.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18, no. 1 (October 2018): 1–19. Ulitskaya, Lyudmila [Liudmila Ulitskaia]. “Predislovie.” In Legkaia korona [A light crown], by Alisa Bial′skaia. Moscow: Eksmo, 2011.

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Genres of Russian-Israeli Fantastic Literature Elena Rimon Introduction Fantastic literature is a unique literary mode that spans a multitude of genres, including those common in other forms of literature. Darko Suvin, a student of Russian Formalism and a pioneer of the theory of fantastic literature, identified innovation, or novum, as the distinguishing characteristic of this literature. Novum is the author’s invention of the basic premise of the plot, the fantastic assumption that separates the world depicted in the work from the world as readers know it from experience. Suvin therefore defined fantastic literature as a “literature of cognitive estrangement.”1 Innovation specific to fantastic literature serves as an alternative to realist invention, which depicts “what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity,” as Aristotle put it. An author of fantastic literature depicts precisely the impossible (or even what may be possible and probable but is nevertheless nonexistent) as an alternative to reality. The broad categories of these impossible (or plausible) alternatives can be enumerated and categorized. Russian authors of fantastic literature Dmitrii Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhenskii classified the alternatives (novums), or “assumptions,” the term invented by the authors themselves, as falling into the following three broad categories:

1

Copyright © 2023 by Elena Rimon. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1979), 3. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), stated that “Few critical concepts have had greater influence on science fiction theory than the novum, introduced by Suvin in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction” (47). See also Edward James, “Before the Novum: The Prehistory of Science Fiction Criticism,” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

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1) scientific assumptions (novums)—elaborate inventions and the discovery of completely new laws of nature explained one way or another by scientific research experiments (science fiction); 2) futurological assumptions—plots set in the future (utopia, dystopia, apocalypse, and so on);2 3) assumptions that introduce into fictional reality fantastic creatures, objects, and events that have little in common with science and are either borrowed from existing mythology (magic realism) or present a mix of his mythology and the products of the author’s own imagination (fantasy).3 The present study proposes the addition of a fourth category: literary assumption. For instance: what if Nikolai Gogol, in his early collections Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod, both set in Ukraine, wrote not about Ukrainians but about Jews, and not comically but instead empathetically and tragically? What if the story of the antisemite Taras Bulba and his sons was conveyed from the perspective of Yankel the Jew? What if Alexander Pushkin had included stories about the life and ideological conflicts of present-day Israel in his The Belkin Tales? The “fourth assumption,” a Jewish rewriting of Russian literature, is a specific area of Russian-Israeli fantasy, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been described before this paper. Fantastic appropriations of 2

3

Literary critics and theorists diverge in their opinions of the distinction between utopia, dystopia, and fantastic fiction. Thomas Moylan describes science fiction as a separate area of literature that exists alongside utopia and dystopia in Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (New York: Routledge, 2018). Suvin, by contrast, insists that “Precisely speaking, utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction.” See Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 61. Fredric Jameson supported this definition in his Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Many other literary scholars adhere to it as well, such as Anindita Bannerji, who included utopia and dystopia in the list of fantastic fiction in her We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012); and scholar of fantastic literature Borin Lanin in “Razmyshleniia nad knigami: russkaia utopia, antiutopiia i fantastika v novom sotsial′no-kul′turnom kontekste,” Problemy sovremennogo obrazovaniia 1 (2014): 161– 169. While discussing the delineation of genres, it is important to consider their historical evolution, as does Gregory Claeys in Dystopia: A Natural History: A Study of Modern Despotism, Its Antecedents, and Its Literary Diffractions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Clayes notes that utopias and dystopias written before the beginning of the twentieth century used few elements of science fiction. By the middle of the twentieth century, utopias and dystopias were completely subsumed by fantastic literature, including the relatively “science-fiction” type, but in the second half of the century the “science” component begins to dissipate in fantastic fiction overall and in utopia and dystopia in particular. Henri Lyon Oldi [Genri Laion Oldi, pseud. of Dmitrii Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhenskii], “Master-klass: Fantasticheskoe dopushchenie,” Mir Fantastiki 54 (2008), accessed May 3, 2022, https://www.mirf.ru/book/chto-takoe-fantasticheskoe-dopuschenie/.

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classical works of Russian and sometimes, though rarely, world literature, will be discussed in the final section of our study. In our overview of Russian-language fantastic literature in Israel, we will discuss modes of “acceptable” fantastical worlds (fantastic fiction, utopias and dystopias, and “magic realism” and fantasy) as well as the common genres (Bildungsroman, travel novel, short story collections and archipelago-novels), comparing Russian-Israeli fantastic literature with its two contiguous literatures: Russian and Hebrew. Russian-Israeli fantastic literature is connected to Russian fantastic literature through the umbilical cord of language, but its plots develop largely in other spaces (in Israel or the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe), within the paradigm of different history ( Jewish) and in the context of alternate mythology (Tanakh and Jewish medieval demonology). By contrast, Israeli fantastic literature in Hebrew shares territory, history, religion and mythology with the Russian-Israeli one, but the two are divided by a language barrier. As we will see later, it is not only language that separates them; works of fantastic literature created in Israel in Hebrew and Russian, respectively, also differ in terms of both their genre preferences and their historical-philosophical context.

The Multiple Worlds of Pavel Amnuel′ Pavel (Pesakh) Amnuel′ was born in Baku in 1944 and moved to Israel in 1990. He is an unmistakably novum author, and he is probably the only Israeli writer (writing in Russian or Hebrew) who has remained loyal to the scientistic problematics and the cosmopolitical conventions of twentieth-century Russian and American fantastic literature. Amnuel′’s work is marked by his consistent use of his favorite original chronotope. Regardless of the setting of his works—be it in twentieth-century Boston and Stockholm or nineteenth-century Venice,4 in modern-day USA,5 in Holland,6 in Israel,7 in Moscow at the end of the twenty-first century,8 or in a Buddhist temple,9

4 5 6 7 8 9

Pavel Amnuel′, Mest′ v domino [Revenge in dominoes] (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom—Veche, 2010). Pavel Amnuel′, Smeshchenie [Displacement] (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2021). Pavel Amnuel′, Monastyr′ [Monastery] ( Jerusalem: Zvezdy Mlechnogo puti, 2011). Pavel Amnuel′, Liudi Koda [The code people] (Rehovot: Miry, 1996). Pavel Amnuel′, Trivselennaia [Triuniverse] (Novomoskovsk: PP Shirokova N. Iu., 2004). Pavel Amnuel′, Udar gil′otiny [Guillotine strike] ( Jerusalem: Zvezdy Mlechnogo puti, 2011).

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a common theme connecting them is the existence of multiple interacting alternative worlds. Amnuel′’s numerous fantastic detective novels and short stories are constructed around the principle of multiplicity of worlds, or multiverse.10 The plot-level conflict in these novels is formulaic: detectives, lawyers, judges, police officers and other regular people, bent on following the traditional conventions of criminal investigations and criminal justice, default to looking for trite human motives (envy, jealously, greed, fear, and so on), as well as logic and patterns of causality in mysterious crimes. By contrast, philosophers, scientists, and writers strive to comprehend the fundamental laws of the universe and the depth of human consciousness that extend far beyond the limits of banal laws of causality. In the end, the intellectual, who normally happens to be the suspect, begins explaining to the simpletons, the investigators and law enforcement officials, that they are dealing with the effect of little understood but perfectly objective phenomena (“splice” in Goluboi Al′tsior [Blue Altsior],11 “dark matter” in Monastyr′ [Monastery]), symbiosaurus—a symbiosis of the consciousness of all the beings in the Galaxy—in his novella Probuzhdenie (Awakening), and in the end everything connects to the multiverse, which consists of an endless number of variations of each fate. A trite detective story becomes a philosophical epiphany: “Chief inspector, please understand: there is no [. . .] past or future, there are no causes, no effects, there is only an endless number of puzzle pieces, movie images, or whatever else you’d like to call it [. . .]. Our brain selects the image that create the illusion of cause and effect [. . .].” “God forbid we would have to live in such a world [. . .]. Such a world would make criminal investigation and justice impossible.”12 Within the space of intersecting and converging paths of the multiverse, not only justice, but also logic, morality, and common sense turn out to be irrelevant 10 See, for example, Pavel Amnuel′, “Probuzhdenie,” in Chas uragana [Hurricane hour] (Moscow: AST-Liuks, 2005); Pavel Amnuel′, “Povodyr′” [Guide], “Ostrov” [Island], and “Chisto nauchnaia ekspertiza” [Purely scientific expertise], in his Problema nabliudatelia [Observer problem] ( Jerusalem: Mlechnyi Put′, 2017); Pavel Amnuel′, Ukhodiashchie v temnotu [Leaving into the darkness] ( Jerusalem: Mlechnyi Put′, 2014). 11 Pavel Amnuel′, Goluboi Al′tsior [Blue Altsior] ( Jerusalem: Zvezdy Mlechnogo puti, 2010). 12 Amnuel′, Udar gil′otiny, 330.

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and impossible. In Amnuel′’s later novel Smeshchenie (Displacement), the multiverse becomes incompatible not only with morality and logic but with the very existence of the universe.

Utopias and Dystopias within the Repertoire of Literary Genres A distinguishing characteristic of Amnuel′’s above-listed works is the fact that they contain characters that attempt to solve the mysteries of the universe on their own. The plot is structured in an entirely different way in two other forms of fantastic literature—utopia and dystopia. These usually treat the collective fate of people, nations, or planets as the backdrop to the protagonist’s actions. It should be noted that, within these two categories, there is significant variation in the genre range between Russian, Israeli, and Russian-Israeli literature. In Russian literature, utopias were quite popular in the era of socialismbuilding, then they vanished for about twenty years and reappeared during the Thaw (this period produced the outstanding works of Ivan Yefremov and Strugatsky brothers), and all but disappeared again during the era of socialism’s decline. Russian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries does not contain any thematically and structurally traditional utopias. They were replaced by other genres that were similar to utopia in their positive experiencing of reality but different in their essence. One of them is alternative history, which depicts the future with a considerable dose of mysticism and magic.13 The second genre, which is even closer to utopia, is the quasi-historical fantasy epic, the so-called Slavic fantasy. While the genres of utopia and Slavic fantasy are obviously different, here it is important to note their shared compensatory function. According to sociologists, through these texts Russian readers satisfy their need for positive self-identification, which suffered during the collapse of the great empire.14 The plots in Slavic fantasy develop against the backdrop of Eurasian history, with fictional historical and geographical particulars. Since the 1990s, over three hundred books belonging to this genre were published in Russian in enormous circulation. A representative text belonging to this genre is Mariia Semenova’s expansive six-volume series entitled Volkodav

13 A representative example of this genre is Viacheslav Rybakov’s novel Gravilet Tsesarevich (1994). 14 Marina Abasheva and Olga Krinitsyna, “Problematika natsional′noi identichnosti v slavianskoi fentezi,” Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 332 (2010).

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(Wolfhound),15 which contains an elaborate history, geography, and mythology as well as fictional maps and chronologies. Another book worth mentioning is Andrei Valentinov’s monumental alternative history of Russia, Oko sily (Eye of might),16 in twelve volumes. This genre includes or incorporates alternative historical narratives that promulgate the myth about the Slavs as the true Aryans, and about Russia as a supremely harmonious civilization, the “golden middle ground” between East and West.17 In this respect, the Slavic epic fantasy departs farther and farther from its prototype, Tolkien’s fantasy epic. In stark contrast, there is a marked absence of monumental fantasy epics in Hebrew literature.18 If in Russia the need for fantasy epics may be driven by the collective need for mental compensation in the face of tremendous historical calamity, in Israel the absence of this need may be determined by incredible historical success—the creation of the Jewish state, an event that still requires comprehension. Perhaps for the same reason the genre of quasi-historical epic is also absent in Israeli literature written in Russian. Modern Israeli history has its own problems: the repeated failure to establish peace between Jews and Palestinians, and the tensions within Jewish society between religious and secular groups, between the right and the left. This convergence of historical and political reasons—the successes of the past and the failures of the present—gave rise to the unique phenomenon of Israeli fantastic literature at the turn of the century. In comparison with its Russian counterpart, Israeli fantastic literature is incomparably more self-critical and oriented towards the future rather than the past. The most prolific genres in Israeli fantastic literature written in Hebrew of the past two decades are dystopian novels and the very similar post-apocalyptic novels. Utopias, by contrast, are entirely absent. The number of dystopian literary works in contemporary Israeli literature is quite significant even when compared to the Russian one, considering the fact that the Hebrew readership is twenty

15 Mariia Semenova, Volkodav (St. Petersburg: Terra—Azbuka, 1995–2014). 16 Andrei Valentinov, Oko sily (St. Petersburg: AST—Terra Fantastica, Moscow: Eskmo, 1996–2011). 17 See, for example, Iurii Nikitin’s twenty-three-volume Troe iz lesa (The three from the forest), Ol′ga Grigor′eva’s seven-volume Slavianskii tzikl (Slavonic cycle), and others. 18 The primary text of the Jewish world is the Tanakh, the Bible. It occupies a central place in Israeli culture, so it would be difficult to imagine an ancient historical epic that that would present a version alternative to the Bible. The sole exception is the mystical and allegorical children’s book by Erez Moshe Doron, Lochamei ha-tmurot [Warriors of transformation] (Mevo Horon: Lev Dvarim, 2007), to this day the only religious fantastic epic of its kind in Hebrew, about a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. However, the plot develops in fictional time and space that have nothing in common with the Near East.

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times smaller than the Russian. Notably, the prolific output of dystopian literature spiked in Russian and Hebrew literature at almost the same time, in the 1990s.19 The vast majority of Hebrew-language Israeli dystopias depict the same apocalyptic event: the collapse and fall of the Jewish state as a result of the radical right’s victory and of religious ascendancy. The exceptions are few.20 While the most popular genre of Russian fantastic literature—epic novel about a utopian past—not only lovingly revives national beliefs and mystical traditions but also invents new onesin the same vein, the most popular genre of Israeli fantastic literature—dystopia—stands out mostly for its extremely critical and hostile attitude towards national traditions and religion. The genre repertoire of the Russian-Israeli fantastic literature differs both from its Russian and Israeli counterparts. Firstly, it contains both utopias and dystopias. Secondly, while there are very few examples of either, all of them are important, significant works. Thirdly, in most of these works, Jewish traditions and religion either play no significant role at all or are presented in moderate and even sympathetic terms.

Alternative Future in Pavel Amnuel′’s Utopia Many scholars of utopian fiction have underscored the fact that the utopian world is not real or unreal, but possible.21 For Pavel Amnuel′, utopia is one of the dimensions of the multiverse. Thirty-five years before his almost-apocalyptic 19 Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1992); Danielle Dotan, Anarkhia motek [Anarchy honey] (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1999); Benjamin Tammuz, Pundako shel Yirmiyahu [Yirmiyahu’s inn] (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1984); Amos Kenan, Ha-Derech leEin Charod [The road to Ein Charod] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984); Yitzhak Ben Ner, Malakhim ba’im [Angels are coming] (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1987); Nir Baram, Machzir chalomot [The remaker of dreams] (Tel Aviv: Keter, 2006); Shimon Adaf, K’for [Frost] (Kineret: ZmoraBitan, 2007); Yehuda Israeli and Rave Dor, Mesopotamia: Shtikat ha-kochavim [Mesopotamia: The silence of the stars] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2020); Yali Sobol, Etzbaot shel psantran [Pianist’s fingers] (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 2012); Avivit Mishmari, Zaken hishtagea [Old man went crazy] (Tel Aviv: Chargol, 2013); Yehonatan Geffen, Keter zmani [Temporary crown] (Tel Aviv: Chargol, 2013); Ilana Berstein, Ha-ir ha-mizrachit [The eastern city] (Tel Aviv: Yediot Sfarim, 2013); Yishai Sarid, Ha-Shlishi [The third] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013). 20 Amichai Shapir’s dystopia Yom ha-Din [ Judgment day] (Tel Aviv: Chalonot, 2002) depicts the tragic consequences of the united Arabic parties’ victory over the Israeli army; Asaf Gavron’s Hydromania (Kineret: Zmora-Bitan, 2008) depicts the life in Israel during a period of catastrophic water shortage. 21 See Darko Suvin, “Locus, Horizon and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990). See also José Pedro Zúquete, “Another World is Possible? Utopia Revisited,” New Global Studies 5, no. 2 (2011).

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Smeshchenie, Amnuel′ published the utopia Liudi Koda (The code people, 1996), in which the multiverse functions not as the end of the world but rather as the geulah.22 The novel’s protagonist, a physicist from Moscow called Il′ia Kuprevich, analyzes the text of the Torah with the aid of a computer and decodes a hidden cypher, which launches a genetic restructuring of the human body. What follows is the Great Exodus of the people of the code from Israel into other worlds in the universe, without any technical intervention, solely through the power of their spirit. Having shed the shackles of space and time, the characters in the novel merge into one multidimensional being that simultaneously inhabits all the times and spaces of the universe, and finally recognize themselves as the new reading of the Torah and the Third Temple. As time, causality, and distinctions between different characters disappear, relationships weaken, so do their hatreds, and other passions. It would be erroneous to look for political allusions in this utopia: rather, it contains, in nascent form, the ontological and psychological ideas that in the twenty-first century come to form the most important premise in Amnuel′’s novels and stories: the multiplicity of worlds transforming into each other as well as the multiplicity and fluidity of human individuality.

Israeli Russian-Language Mini-Dystopias As of today, Amnuel′’s large-scope utopias, Liudi Koda and Trivselennaia (Triuniverse), published at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, respectively, are the last representatives of the genre in Israel. They have been replaced by dystopias written both in Russian and Hebrew. There are important traits that distinguish contemporary Russian-language Israeli dystopias from the Hebrew ones. They share their key distinguishing characteristic—in contrast to utopia, they depict undesirable future. However, they differ from the Hebrew-language texts in important structural aspects. Almost all (though not all) of them are short and treat only a single episode, sometimes not only of undesirable future, but also of undesirable past.

22 Geulah (Hebrew for “liberation,” “redemption,” “deliverance”) in Judaic eschatology signifies salvation, the messianic liberation of the Jewish people and the entire humanity, the antithesis of galut (exile, scattering).

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Second, most of them are not set in Israel. And third—and perhaps the most important—they are exceedingly rare. Daniel′ Kluger was born in 1951 and has been living in Israel since 1994. His short novel Chaiki nad Kremlem (Seagulls over the Kremlin, 2007) presents an alternative history in which Hitler’s Germany has defeated the USSR. Former Moscow is now a manmade sea created by Adolf Hitler. A guide explains to visitors: A small island has been preserved in the center of the artificial sea—part of the so-called Red Square, with blood-red walls the color of dried blood and a church that looks ridiculous to a European’s eyes. It is to this artificial island, the symbol of the defeated Orient, that our tour will now head.23 Aleks Tarn (Tarnovitskii) was born in 1955 and made aliyah in 1989. One of the novellas comprising Tarn’s “interactive novel” Oblordoz24 also elaborates on an unrealized vector of history: Stalin has not died in early 1953 and has had time to execute his plan of forcibly resettling Jews from the European part of the USSR to Siberia. The protagonist, one of the few survivors of the resettlement, recalls his childhood memories of his journey to Siberia, when his family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families, was given the status of “voluntary passengers being relocated, under guard, to a place that is sufficiently protected from the righteous ire of the working people.”25 “From afar, I noticed a lonely hut and people tanning next to it on the slope.”26 The adults explain to the child that these are mannequins, and he, along with them, buries the dead and washes the train cars. The boy manages to survive and make it to the camp in the Siberian taiga, where he is to spend the next fifty-seven years of his life, until one fine day the guards vanish, abandoning the few remaining inmates to their devices in their barrack in the middle of the taiga. In all of Russian-Israeli literature, there are very few dystopias set in Israel. All of them, as mentioned earlier, are short, and all of them recount some form of terror. Such, for example, is Sofiia Ron’s novella Perezhit′ faraona (To outlive the pharaoh, 1995),27 which depicts the political terror that grips the country after 23 Daniel′ Kluger, Chaiki nad Kremlem, in Antologiia al′ternativnoi istorii, ed. Vladislav Goncharov (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 251. 24 Aleks Tarn, Oblordoz (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel—Isradon, 2019). 25 Ibid., 210. 26 Ibid., 212. 27 Sofiia Ron, Perezhit′ faraona (Kyriat Arba: n.p., 1995).

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an ultra-leftist party led by a politician named Yossi Harid comes to power. Sofiia Ron (Sofi Ron-Moria) was born in 1967 and came to Israel in 1988. Unlike the characters of Ron’s dystopia, who are all brave and rebellious, the characters of Anna Fain’s mini-dystopias composed between 2000 and 2012 are so-called “regular Israelis,” who meekly accept wars, Arab terror, destitution, hunger, and humiliation. Anna Fain was born in 1963 and has been living in Israel since 1991. The state of quiet insanity as a reaction to terror is creatively embedded into the linguistic texture of her works. In the short story “Tret′iakovskaia baldareia” (Tretyakov balldery, 2004) Israeli Jews patiently wait for the suicide bombers’ explosions to eventually come to an end because statistically by year 2050 the entire population of the autonomous territory is set to have committed suicide, leaving only the surviving Jews, who in the meantime live on antidepressants and gradually lose their ability to think and speak.28 In the short story titled “Pis′mo na golubom kartone” (Letter on blue cardboard, 2002), a Jew humbly begs the “holy mufti of the city of Al-Quds” ( Jerusalem) for permission to pray at the Wailing Wall, insisting that he is the true heir of the people of Israel and citing his lineage as proof.29 With an elaborately and elegantly comical mixture of Russian, Hebrew, and other foreign words and names, the story presents an extremely funny and witty blend of historical events and kabbalistic myths, Hasidic legends about Baal Shem Tov, and children’s poems by Russian-Jewish poet Samuil Marshak. This waggish mixture becomes a tragic evidence of the Jewish loss of political independence, reason, and memory.

Complete Dystopia The only large-scale Russian-Israeli dystopia set in Israel is the monumental 550-page novel Lestnitsa na shkaf (Ladder onto the wardrobe) by Mikhail Iudson (1956–2019; repatriated in 1999).30 However, this dystopia also differs from the classical representatives of the genre.

28 Anna Fain, “Tret′iakovskaia baldareia,” in Khroniki tret’ei avtopady (Chronicles of the third autofallda) (Odesa: Studiia ʻNegotsiant,’ 2004). 29 Anna Fain, “Pis′mo na golubom kartone,” accessed May 2, 2022, https://feinanna.livejournal.com/2531.html. 30 Mikhail Iudson, Lestnitsa na shkaf: Skazka dlia emigrantov v trekh chastiakh (Moscow: Zebra E, 2013).

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According to Klavdia Smola, Canonization of the Judaic tradition in the real Israel as the source of national and religious identity and the use of the biblical narrative to legitimize Jewish statehood are the third and final target of Iudson’s bitter satire. The [. . .] BVR [an acronym for Blizhnevostochnaia respublika, or Near-Eastern Republic, the stand-in for Israel in the novel] is just another variant of the archaic-Orthodox Moscow state from the first part of the trilogy. [. . .] The structural analogy with the national-socialist Germany and the medieval-contemporary Russia is reflected [. . .] in the linguistic syncretism of desacralizing cultural-historical attributes: compare such expressions as “канцелярские цадики в вицмундирах” [Iudson 2013: 212] (“office tzaddikim in state uniform”); [. . .] or “монотоннотеизм” [ibid.: 385] (“monothonetheism”).31 It is difficult not to agree with this reading of Iudson’s text. The same senseless and inhuman chaos rules supreme throughout his entire novel, in Russia, in Germany, in Israel, and in the entire universe alike. Therefore, Iudson’s dystopia is not only and not so much anti-Zionist as deeply anarchic and irreparably hopeless. In dystopia, the plot is usually constructed along the lines of an existing order, however bad it may be. In Iudson’s world, by contrast, there is an absolute absence of order, so it could be categorized more aptly as phantasmagory rather than fantastic. The novel’s plot revolves around a closed circle. In the first part, set in the city named Moskvalym,32 the protagonist Il′ia attempts but fails to enter university, serves in the military, graduates from a teachers’ college and happens to complete his teaching practicum in a very sympathetic graduating class. He gets along wonderfully with the pupils, but the overall poverty and ruin, hooliganism and antisemitism all force him to emigrate from this hell to Germany. In the second part of the novel, having settled in Germany, the protagonist languishes, oppressed by idleness, loneliness, and his distaste for the society of emigrants among whom he finds himself. Then he joins a guerilla group and rescues children from a concentration camp. The German adventures conclude

31 Klavdia Smola [Klavdiia Smola], Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literaturа (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021), 200. 32 A hybrid of the toponyms “Moskva” (Moscow) and “Kolyma” (a region in the Russian Far East and former home to the brutal Gulag camps of the Soviet era).

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with him blissfully resting. “I am lying in a quiet white room, by a window, on a tall bed. [. . .] The white-rimmed blue wave softly catches me [. . .], I close my eyes and commence my Ascent.”33 It is here, in the course of his aliyah (“ascent”) that the protagonist faces his real trials. He arrives at the BVR as a respectable scientist invited to a professional symposium, but during a routine passport check at the airport he is beaten up, degraded through a barrage of exclusively Russian prison slang, and shipped off to the desert to join the “guards,” which is to say, the military. After he is wounded in battle, his military comrades get him a sinecure, and Il′ia finds himself in Lazaria, the capital of BVR, working as the steward for the nobleman Kormilets (literally, “breadwinner” in Russian) and lover of the Il′ia’s wife Ira. But, on the shores of the warm sea, he pines after his Moskvalym. I feel the urge to get out of everywhere and go back there, into chaos. And to long unrequitedly. It seems I have already picked up the Gush, have gotten used to living among the ragheads, the total Niums and Monias in the monoethnic monolith BVR [. . .]. But no [. . .]. There are nights when the moment I hit the sack, my bed swims straight to Kolymoskva!34 Then, Il′ia finds himself in Kolymoskva-Moskvalym, and the Russian reality drags him along the same old circle. The protagonist once again becomes Il′ia Borisych, returns to teaching, is once again expelled from work and kicked out of his flat. He starves and freezes, he is pursued by antisemitic thugs, and then he suddenly ends up on a green glade, where he is joyously greeted by the now grown students from his former tenth grade. The bliss of his bucolic rest ends abruptly when Il′ia discovers that his misfortunes in Moskvalym were deliberately planned: . . . so that you lost all the alternative roads, so that you only had one path remaining [. . .]. Far-far away, in the Near East, there exists a blessed abbreviation, BVR. [. . .] They have one Book [. . .] for everyone, sunny cities, flower plazas, baby boys and baby girls, know-it-alls and amateurs [. . .]. Their Wise Men have a mushroom bomb [. . .] with a molten kernel. [. . .] And right around the same time the dumbstruck Kolymoskva is struck by a terrible freeze . . . The Last Unimaginable Winter will dawn [. . .].

33 Iudson, Lestnitsa na shkaf, 320. 34 Ibid., 370, an ironically altered quote from Nabokov’s poem.

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And your compatriots, I.B., could land a hand. What a bomb it is, eh! You just drop it, the pretty little thing, and go party, sweets— no more ice [. . .]. You just have to convince your buddies, father teacher, to not be Jewy, to do the kind deed and drop it! [. . .] You, you will be our savior! [. . .].35 In his afterword to Lestnitsa na shkaf, Russian writer and critic Dmitrii Bykov asserts that “Iudson writes about the way the world pushes man into those higher spheres where the protagonist finally escapes.”36 It is difficult to imagine a more inattentive reading of the novel’s ending, which is fairly straightforward despite its seeming intricateness. There are no “higher spheres” in Iudson’s novel, and the protagonist does not “escape” anywhere; rather, he rejects the disastrous flight and remains on earth. Bykov’s absurd reading is part of his attempt to force onto the novel his own favorite idea about the innate fallacy of “national identification” as the only possible moral conclusion. Bykov writes: Iudson has written one of the most important books of our time, a book about the crash of all national (and generally any external) identities, [about the fact that] the most important thing for any real person is to step outside these inevitabilities, the origins, the givens, ignoring the howls of the nonentities who do nothing but cling to these primitive concepts.37 This moral maxim can elicit different reactions, but it bears no relevance to Iudson’s novel. Iudson’s protagonist does not “step out” anywhere; mentally or morally he does not move at all. For him all “national identifications” are equally absurd and unacceptable from the very beginning and until the very end. Il′ia’s vacillations between his beloved, frozen and hungry Kolymoskva and the warm, abundant but intolerably boring BVR have no philosophical or psychological underpinnings. Compelled to mediate between the worlds, in each of them the protagonist is exhausted and oppressed, and the only place where the character and the reader feel happy iss the idealized supraspatial worlds between worlds—the hospital or the “green glade” with his former students. And only in these blissfully utopian chapters can the reader rest a little from the author’s

35 Ibid., 479. 36 Dmitrii Bykov, afterword to Lestnitsa na shkaf: skazka dlia emigrantov v trekh chastiakh, by Mikhail Iudson (Moscow: Zebra E, 2013), 555. 37 Ibid., 556.

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frustrating language games for which the plot of the novel serves as a formal frame.

“Attempts at Creating Paradise”: Dystopian Utopias Nikolai Berdyaev once noted that “utopias appear to be a good deal more realizable than was previously thought. And today we are faced with an alarming question of a different nature: How to avoid their complete realization?” According to the Russian philosopher’s aphoristic statement, “every attempt at creating paradise on earth is an attempt to create hell.”38 Less than ten years after the publication of Berdyaev’s essay “Democracy, Socialism, and Theocracy,” Aldous Huxley chose a quote from this article for his Brave New World, a novel about a utopia turning into a dystopia. In Russian-Israeli literature, the incestuous proximity of utopia and dystopia is treated in Aleks Tarn’s novels. At the center of his recent novels lie demiurge figures inhabiting abstract spaces who attempt to create beautiful and happy worlds and suffer defeat.39 In his novel Khaim, a nameless computer genius creates a super-game: a perfect world known as Khaim (“life” in Hebrew), which contains no death, illness, poverty, disfigurement, insecurities, grudges, or loneliness. The players, along with the game’s creator, dream of executing a great coup planned by Programmer—the relocation into the virtual fictional world of the players themselves, “for the purpose of returning to Eden [. . .] of everyone living and suffering—the entire humanity, lost in misery and rasping in pain.”40 But real life follows closely at the players’ heels: death and illness, mafia and the police are all equally ruthless to the dream of a perfect world and eventually catch up to each character one by one.

38 Nikolai Berdiaev, Demokratiia, sotsialism, i teokratiia (Berlin: Novoe Srednevekov′e, 1924), 121–122. 39 As Galina Kul′tiasova has already noted, many of Aleks Tarn’s characters have occupations in which they create both imaginary and actual reality. Among them are the ghost writer Shlomo from Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov (The protocols of the Elders of Zion); the radiojournalist Shaya ben-Amots from Zapiski kuklovoda (Notes of a puppeteer); the translator from the short story “Istoriia odnogo perevoda” (History of one translation); the camera man of a reality TV show, Selifanskii, from the novella Poslednii Kain (Last Cain); the “unwilling writer” Boris Shokhat from the novel V poiskakh utrachennogo geroia (In search of a lost hero); and many others. Galina Kul′tiasova, “Zametki dotoshnogo chitatelia,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 50 (2015) 180–186. 40 Aleks Tarn, “Khaim,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 45 (2013): 154.

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Aleks Tarn’s novella Zapiski kuklovoda (Notes of a puppeteer)41 contains several hints at historical events (Rabin’s assassination), but here, too, the plot unfolds in a deliberately fictional time and space. A puppet-master creates puppets and endows them with some independence. He has the best intentions but keeps losing control of the puppets’ actions. As a result of a backroom power struggle, a politician is assassinated at an election rally, and, in the ensuing stampede, the chaotic crowd kills a beautiful woman named Eve, whom the puppeteer has created to fulfill his wish of making a perfect and happy human being. At the beginning of our century, critics remind us with increasing frequency that hybrid fantastic literature erases the “Manichaean distinction between utopia and dystopia.”42 Such are the hybrid novels about hybrid creatures—humananimals and animal-humans—of Linor Goralik, a cosmopolitan writer who was born in 1975, made aliyah in 1989, and used to split her time between Israel and Russia. The novel Net (No), coauthored by Goralik and Sergei Kuznetsov,43 depicts the cosmopolitan world of the future, in 2060. In the world of the novel, people not only have the ability to change their gender, but this ability has become too commonplace to be exciting. People of the future can also become half (or any desirable percentage) beaver, tiger, lizard, fish, and so foth. Erotic relationship with such a creature produces new feelings instead of the standard hetero- and homosexual ones. Hybridity introduces variety; it is fashionable, glamorous, and expensive. Because of this, the hybrid creatures become stars of pornographic films. The main characters of the novel are the decent workpeople of the pornographic industry. One possible interpretation of the novel Net is that it is a utopia of gendercorrectness. But in another respect it is not quite a utopia. There is some inconsistency in the plot: the peace between the Jews and the Arabs has been reached and the Arab civilization has finally won the upper hand. So what drives the

41 Aleks Tarn, “Zapiski kuklovodа,” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 27 (2008), https://magazines.gorky. media/ier/2008/27/zapiski-kuklovoda.html. 42 The lack of “Manichaean distinction between utopia and dystopia” in the “hybrid fiction neither plain utopian nor dystopian, but an exploration of the differences between the two modes.” Douwe Fokkema, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 346. Fokkema cites Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed as an example of this type of utopian-dystopian fiction. See also Gregory Claeys, “Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia,” in Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, ed. Fátima Vieira (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 43 Linor Goralik and Sergei Kuznetsov, Net (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2014). The novel was written neither in Israel nor in Russia, but in Prague, a cosmopolitan “third space” that seemingly alleviates the burden of the authors’ connection with both Russia and Israel.

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need for periodic terrorist attacks? The authors mention that the terrorists are the ultraorthodox Jewish religious fanatics. No further explanation is required: it is self-evident that still there are the “bad guys” who make troubles for decent folk, and these “bad guys” are, of course, the orthodox Jews. But they are the exception, the anomaly, whereas the “normal people” willingly and effortlessly transform into animals, and, as a result of the society’s moral progress, what is valued above all is that they do not get in each other’s way of doing just that. However, there is room for an alternative interpretation of Net’s plot. The workdays of the humble workers of pornographic movie shoots and film festivals remind one of the biblical verse: “[. . .] God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth” (Genesis 6:12).44 The midrash interprets the text “for all flesh had corrupted its ways” as referring to unusual and forbidden forms of copulation, when animals and humans mate with beings of other species: “horse with donkey, snake with bird.”45 Zohar specifies that living creatures were thus trying to subvert the act of Creation46 (perhaps this explains the title of the novel Net). In Genesis, a world that resembles the one described in the novel Net is doomed. It is noteworthy that Net does not end in a catastrophe; in fact, there is something resembling a happy end. However, in one of Goralik’s later novels written after her return to Israel, the plot develops precisely against the backdrop of an apocalyptic catastrophe. Goralik’s novel Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie (All those capable of breathing breath)47 depicts a post-apocalyptic world. The reasons for the catastrophe are unknown, nor do we know if it is retribution, and if so, then for what. What matters is that those who survive it will survive after the end of the world. The title of Goralik novel parodies the title of the fantastic novel Vse sposobnye derzhat′ oruzhie (All those capable of bearing arms) by the Russian writer Andrei Lazarchuk. Lazarchuk’s novel is about the mobilization, for the purposes of fighting a war, of all psychological, social, and material resources in different worlds and in different timestreams. Goralik’s novel is also about mobilization, but of all living creatures for the purposes of survival. It is a novel about preserving the ability to breathe, about the fragility of life that is more important than any state

44 Hereafter, all biblical quotes are in the New International Version translation. 45 See, for example, Midrash Tanchuma (Noach 12). See also Rashi’s comment to this verse: “Even cattle, beasts and fowl consorted with dissimilar species. [. . .] Wherever you find lewdness and idolatry upheaval (androlomusia, lit. “disorder”) comes upon the world killing the good and the bad.” 46 Zohar, Noach, 192–193. 47 Linor Goralik, Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie (Moscow: AST, 2019).

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and even humanity, as it turns out. After all, all living creatures breathe—be it soldiers or civilians, Jews or Arabs, humans or animals. Just as Net, this novel does not contain one unified plot; it is a compilation of chapters constructed as internal monologues in the first and third person (in free indirect discourse), mostly in Russian, with frequent insertions of Hebrew, including neologisms of the author’s own invention, such as badshab, the abbreviation of baal dibur she-eyno ben adam (“[a being] capable of speech who is nonhuman”), among others. The speakers discuss and contemplate their relationships with their parents, spouses, lovers, friends, enemies, and then suddenly the reader notices that some of them mention such body parts as tails, hoofs, and claws. Gradually, out of the miscellaneous textual material that includes confessions, dialogues, excerpts from textbooks and brochures, newspaper articles and so on, emerges the broad plot involving all these different creatures. It is a postcatastrophic world described with the Hebrew word ason. Presumably ason comes as an unexpected consequence of a war (with whom and for what reason is unclear). As a result of this war, combustion engines and the internet have stopped working, most of Israel has turned into ruin, people have perished, the infrastructure is in shambles, Israeli cities and highways are destroyed and almost all the survivors have been placed in refugee camps. It is possible that the same is happening all around the world, but little is known about this. Laws of nature have changed. There are no more seasons; they have been replaced by strange “tiered storms” that bring with them torturous pangs of guilt. A new mysterious disease causes attacks of intolerable headaches in animals and humans alike. Reviewers have noted that this novel, which consists of stories told by humans and animals, resembles Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgment, where all the characters have suddenly gained the gift of speech.48 It seems that this would be yet another post-apocalyptic story of life after the end of history, when all the regular human connections are severed, when anarchy and brute force reign supreme and an all-out war rages for the last remaining resources (like in Steven King’s The Mist, Cell, and The Stand, John Windham’s The Day Of the Triffids, and others). However, this Russian-Israeli postapocalyptic chaos is regulated and contains a certain order. From the very beginning, a benign force rises to the occasion, taking responsibility for order—the procurement and distribution of food and medicine, the treatment of the sick and wounded, the care and education of the 48 Darya Conmigo, comment on Linor Goralik’s Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie, Goodreads. com, December 6, 2018, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43062512.

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children, the organization of daily life, cultural events, and even amateur theater. It is easy to surmise that this benign force is the best organized structure in Israel—the army. The only books published in the new reality of Goralik’s book are educational brochures, teacher guides and “materials for children’s reading,” published by the army’s printing house. Individualists and misanthropes who do not wish to live in camps for survivors organized by the army are not abandoned; instead, the military delivers food and medication to whatever location these individuals have chosen for their residence. For one, the creation of social life out of chaos that ensues in the aftermath of the catastrophe is made easier by the fact that animals and humans alike have completely lost their appetite for meat, everyone has become vegetarian, and nobody hunts each other anymore. Moreover—and this may be the most significant change in the world—animals have acquired the gift of speech, and it turns out that they have much in common with humans. It is easy to imagine a dystopia in which this kibbutz of humans and animals ruled by the army would resemble a concentration camp. But the novel’s plot contains factors that make violence impossible. Instead, these factors demand responsibility, empathy, mutual understanding, and cooperation of all beings. The main factor is pain—bouts of headaches that afflict all the living creatures in the aftermath of the catastrophe. It is impossible to exist in this new world without Rokacet49 tablets. Pain brings everyone together; nobody can remain indifferent when faced with a child, a cat, a bird or a soldier complaining: “My head, my head hurts.” The most important thing that the army has managed to arrange is the manufacturing and orderly distribution of Rokacet, which is indispensable in the new reality. The relationship between animals and humans is rearranged around Rokacet—animals need humans more than ever, and the soldiers, aided by volunteers, distribute Rokacet evenly between humans and animals. However, as it turns out, the humans need the animals as much as the animals need the humans. Once combustion engines fail, it becomes very important to convince—not force, but convince—the horses, donkeys, and camels of the need for their assistance in transporting cargo and people. Once again, like back in the Garden of Eden, creatures are given names, not as species, like the original Adam did it, but separately, individually—all living creatures, including homeless cats and beetles, now have proper names. Since the basic necessities of all the living creatures are more or less taken care of, the need for love and meaning of life takes a front seat. This is something that

49 Rokacet is an over-the-counter pain relief medication widely available in Israel.

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the army cannot provide for everyone (even though it does attempt to occupy the humans and the animals by organizing amateur theater clubs, schools for children and lectures for adults, by supporting the initiative of a woman who offers collective meditation sessions for the animals, and so on). In the novel Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie, as well as in the novel Net, characters fall in love, but now this love is considerably more traditional, according to their biologic species. As for the meaning of life, the wisest and most elevated-thinking creature in the novel turns out to be a baby snake who conducts philosophical-theological conversations with a rabbi and considers performing a traditional giyur, conversion to Judaism, in strict adherence with all halakhic rules. In Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie, this situation serves as an ironic tikkun50 of the plot from Genesis: the serpent is no longer the “most cunning” (Genesis 3:25) but the “most intelligent” of all living creatures, and his intellect is now directed at attaining the knowledge of God. Not only this episode but also the main premise of the novel, the peaceful coexistence of humans and animals and the animals amongst themselves—the carnivores with the herbavores, the wild and the domestic ones—elaborates on a central theme of Jewish eschatology, and first and foremost Isaiah’s prophesy about the messianic age in Israel: “The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 11: 6–7). The rejection of flesh as food by humans and animals, also points to the advent of the messianic era.51 The streams filled with lemonade or basil-flavored soda and the trees that grow fruit resembling bread and pastries are also well-known signs of geulah, according to the Talmud.”52 Could all these be signs of the messianic age, Gog and Magog’s war, and the return to Eden? If that’s the case, it is a rather miserable Eden: barracks, shower lines, hot water available on schedule from five to eight o’clock, and the obstinate creatures’ endless bickering. Even the way of telling the story of this unusual Eden is strange; it is a plotless chaos of tiny chapters, each of which presents the situation from a different point of view: a lizard, a parrot, a soldier, an elephant, 50 Tikkun (Hebrew for “amending” or “fixing”) is a Kabbalah term that refers to the process of mending the universe. 51 According to a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Halakha experts, in the messianic times people will reject consumption of meat of their own free will, returning to the primordial paradise of Eden, and only vegetable offerings will remain in the rebuilt Third Temple. Such was, in particular, the opinion of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, the founder of religious Zionism. A review of these concepts is available in Hagai London, Al harmonia, tsimkhonut ve-shalom [On harmony, vegetarianism, and peace] (Tel Aviv: Rosh Yehudi, 2008). 52 “In the future, the Land of Israel will grow pies” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30:2). In other words, there will no longer be a need to work in the fields, or to mix and bake the dough; instead, various baked goods will grow like crops from the ground.

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a general, a rabbi . . . None of them is capable of evaluating the big picture and realizing that the end of times has arrived. But each of them is very capable of tediously complaining about the neighbors, about the bosses, about the sugary taste of the river streams that contain carbonated drinks, or the fact that the lizards put in charge of the conveyer belts that sort medication have the brains of ten-year-old girls and that they constantly fight, giggle, and gossip. In the absence of an omniscient narrator, the readers could take it upon themselves to figure everything out and recognize dystopia as utopia (or as a caustic parody of messianic-era utopia). But the readers, too, struggle to say anything definitive in this regard. What we have is a post-modernist diffusion of apocalypse and utopia that swings in opposite directions every few pages.53 There is no unity, but a complex world of variegated voices that constantly mix utopia and dystopia.

Magic Bildungsroman Texts The characteristics that distinguish fantastic Bildungsroman texts from utopia and dystopia are the ones that define the genre of the realistic Bildungsroman as well. First, in the fantastic Bildungsroman, much like in its realistic counterpart, the key players are neither societies nor countries but rather individuals (in Belinsky’s definition, the novel is the “epic of private life”). Second, fantastic Bildungsroman novels, like their realist counterparts, normally describe the present or the past, unlike utopias and dystopias that depict a possible future. Third, the setting in these novels is usually realistic as well, situated in actual geographical coordinates. Fourth, the characters of fantastic Bildungsroman novels experience fantastic events that frequently, though not always, echo mythological storylines. And finally, most of these novels in the fantastic mode are told from the first-person perspective. Much like in Hebrew-language fantastic literature novels, such as Saharah Blau’s Yetzer lev ha-adamah (Desire of the earth’s heart), depicting the main character’s youth in Bnei Brak, or Ortsion Bartana’s Ha-Makom she-bo ha-kol matchil (The place where it all begins), which describes the protagonist’s puberty against the backdrop of the streets and squares of Tel Aviv, in Russian-Israeli novels the

53 In this respect, I disagree with Roman Katsman who unequivocally identifies the novel Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie as a depiction of an apocalypse. See Roman Katsman, Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia: Sleduiushchie sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021), 304–308.

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Israeli cities and settlements, as the locus of the action, influence not only the characters’ upbringing, but also the uniqueness of the miracles that happen to them. In this respect, the Russian Israeli Bildungsroman fantasy novels are quite similar to their Hebrew counterparts. Ol′ga Fiks was born in Moscow in 1965 and repatriated to Israel in 2006. In her Temnoe ditia (Dark child),54 the protagonist, a young, divorced woman named Sonia, moves from Moscow to Israel. As she settles in Jerusalem, in an apartment bequeathed to her by her late stepfather Sasha, Sonia suddenly discovers mysterious creature residing there. It turns out that after divorcing Sonia’s mother and moving to Jerusalem, where Sasha attended a yeshiva for kabbalists, Sonia’s stepfather fell in love with a demoness Agrat,55 with whom he fathered a daughter. In his will, Sasha named this strange creature “The Dark Child.” Having discovered a demigirl-demidemoness living in the apartment, Sonia feels a genuine attachment to her, as to a young sister or even a daughter. She tenderly calls this “dark child” Tema (from the Russian temnyi, “dark”) and cares for her in the best traditions of the Russian Jewish family: buys her children’s books and pretty dresses, teaches her school material, rules of cultural behavior, and hygiene habits, fosters in her a sense of responsibility, takes her to Sabbath and festive dinners to a rabbi who was her late father’s teacher and a family friend. Paradoxically, this conscientious human nurture is directed at somebody that is not entirely human. It proves to be a challenging task, since Tema constantly disappears or transforms into various creatures—a dog, a squirrel, a moth, and so on. In medieval Jewish literature, the demons (shedim in Hebrew) are described as consisting of two elements—fire and air, in contrast to humans who are comprised of four—air, fire, water, and earth. The demons strongly resemble humans: they can eat like people (although they can go for long stretches of time

54 Ol′ga Fiks, Temnoe ditia, Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 59 (2018), https://magazines.gorky.media/ ier/2018/59/tyomnoe-ditya.html. 55 Agrat (Igrat) is a female character from Jewish demonology. Sometimes she is identified with Adam’s infamous first wife, Lilith, who refused to submit to her husband and befriended the evil archangel Samael and spawned multiple demon children. In the Zohar, Agrat is one of Lilith’s daughters. In other sources, Agrat and Lilith are Samael’s wives and angels of prostitution. See Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 21. Later sources dating from the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries establish Agrat as the illegitimate daughter or granddaughter of Adam’s first son, Ishmael, from a certain Egyptian sorceress. See Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Rabbi Shimon Lavi, Ketem Paz: Perush al ha-Zohar Bereshit [Golden spot: A commentary on Zohar Bereshit], vol. 1 ( Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 2021), 24:1.

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without food), and they can get sick and even die (rarely, when their two basic elements are separated from each other). However, unlike humans, demons are to a lesser degree bound by the laws of the material world; they possess the ability to fly or transport themselves through space using special mysterious methods, they have the gifts of eternal life and divination, and they can transform into various animate and inanimate objects. They are able and sometimes eager to follow Jewish commandments and traditions; they pray and love studying the Torah; sometimes fall in love with humans, start families with them, and produce demihuman children who possess superhuman abilities. This has been the case with Tema’s mother, Agrat. In texts on Jewish demonology, Agrat is often referred to as “Machalat’s daughter.” The Hebrew root ‫( מחל‬m-ch-l) may be interpreted both as “dance” and as “disease”—which is to say that Agrat not only dances56 but also can cause sickness.57 However, Meir Badkhan (whose book, by Ol′ga Fiks’s admission, was her primary source of information) notes that Agrat, unlike other she-demons, does not seduce men with the purpose of torturing them to death with her love, although sometimes she does punish them for indecent behavior—which is to say that she is fairly kind to people.58 In Fiks’s novel, Agrat is a complex, interesting, and sympathetic being. During their first meeting, Sonia sees Agrat as nothing but a fickle and irresponsible beauty; since she herself is a serious young woman, Sonia finds no common ground with the demoness. It takes her time and experience to understand that demons have a different perception of time than humans. I had nothing to talk to her about. She found a way to change all my words. “How could you have abandoned your child for two years?” “Has it really been two years? Wow, time flies!” “You should have at least written to me. I would have immediately . . .” “Why fuss? Everything happens in its due course. [. . .]

56 For instance, she is described as “the mad dancer Agrat” in Dennis Sobolev’s novel Ierusalim (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2005), 51. 57 Rabbi Shimon Lavi, in his Ketem Paz, says of Agrat bat Machalat that she sends sickness upon children. Ketem Paz, vol. 1, 24:1. 58 Meir Badkhen, Evreiskaia chertovshchina (Moscow: Gesharim, 2006), refers to the second volume of Rabbi Shimon Lavi’s Ketem Paz. In the electronic edition of this book’s second volume (Livorno, 1795) I was able to access, I could not locate this text.

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“But she is still just a child! The devil knows what could have happened to her! She could have flooded the neighbors, burnt the house down, she could have gotten hurt or lost her mind from anguish.” “Yes, she is a rather resourceful child.” “How did it happen that this child lived by herself in the apartment for two years? She must have worried, cried, thought that everyone had forgotten about her . . . [. . .] “The solitude suppressed her human nature? So be it, it’s not much good anyway.59 Later, however, it turns out that Mendel-Khaim, a buddy and a classmate of Agrat’s late husband, has driven the widow out of the house by means of a kame’a60 containing a powerful spell, and then has repeatedly lied and attempted to appropriate the apartment. In the upscale Jerusalem neighborhood where the fictional flat is located, real estate is astronomically expensive indeed, but Mendel-Khaim has been after not so much the apartment as Agrat herself. The scheme he has cooked up exploits a particular quality of demons: they “for their own existence need some attachment to a material object: a place, a structure, a tree.”61 For Tema, this material object is her home in Jerusalem. Mendel-Khaim has been trying to extort the mother’s love by threatening the life of the child. In the end the swindler suffers a doubly humiliating defeat: during a court hearing, the rabbi unmasks his schemes and returns the apartment to its lawful owners, Tema and Sonia, while Agrat makes Mendel-Khaim a subject of public ridicule. Combining mythological themes with naturalistic details for the purpose of creating the effect of comical estrangement is not a groundbreaking new device in fantastic literature.62 But in Temnoe ditia, the mythological character, in many respects, is truly just an ordinary girl who undergoes daily transformations not only because she is capable of magic but for a simpler reason that she is growing up. At the end of the novel, Tema’s mother regrets that Sonia tried too hard to nurture the “human component” of Tema, which has compelled the demonic

59 Fiks, Temnoe ditia, 50. 60 Kame’a (Hebrew) is an amulet, a talisman that usually consists of a sheet of paper or parchment with a written blessing, names of angels, or letter combinations from sacred texts. 61 Badkhen, Evreiskaia chertovshchina, 52–53. 62 See, for example, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, Ponedel′nik nachinaetsia v subbotu (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003), 75: “‘Briareus has broken his finger.’ ‘How did he manage that?’ ‘Well, he did. On his eighteenth right hand. He was picking his nose and made an awkward turn—they are very clumsy, those hecatoncheirs, you know.’”

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girl to form human relationships.63 But then, Sonia has also learned much from Tema—the latter, unlike Sonia, is born in Jerusalem, knows the Jewish traditions in depth, and therefore can help her sister navigate the new city and its reality. The novel wonderfully captures the atmosphere of various Jerusalem neighborhoods. The transition from everyday life to magic in these spaces comes off as seamless and organic. After all, Jerusalem is truly a magic city, and in each child there truly lives a small imp. Just as naturally and organically, traditional Jewish demonology combines in this novel with the tradition of the European Bildungsroman (in particular, through the chronotope of home). Iakov Shekhter was born in Odesa in 1956 and has lived in Israel from 1987. Education and self-education also form the center of Shekhter’s novel Vokrug sebia byl nikto (There was no one around oneself),64 except that in this case they fail. The central figure of the novel is the narrator-protagonist who hears the confessions of two women. Both have spent their youth searching for their human and feminine essence, and this search has pulled them into strange and unsafe societies that force them into sexual rituals and difficult trials, demanding a rejection of “self ” in exchange for a promised communion with cosmic energies. Loneliness and a yearning for meaning in life gradually lead these young women into full submission to the leaders and important members of these societies. For both women, the attempt to undergo esoteric initiation results in a complete crisis. Alongside the confessions of the women who find themselves in a dead end in their quest for love and meaning of life, the novel presents embedded stories where men are the main characters. Their stories are pierced through with lust, cruelty, fear and rage, meaningless human endeavors that, from generation to generation, lead to catastrophic outcomes: wrecked lives, ruined castles, destroyed cities, unborn children. The modest and virtuous life within the society of the adherents of the “psychometrist” movement, to which the narrator belongs as well, seems to offer an alternative to these tragic stories about reckless pursuits of miracles. In fact, the narrator has traveled from the town of Rehovot to his childhood town with lectures about the movement, and it is in his capacity as the movement’s representative that he receives the two women’s confessions. Unlike the newly minted sects that play with the powerful forces of the cosmos and the human subconscious (in the end these forces become unmanageable and crush the sect members), the society of “psychometrists” is more reliable and less prone to scandal. It is not new, its history dates back to antiquity, 63 Fiks, Temnoe ditia, 144. 64 Iakov Shekhter, Vokrug sebia byl nikto (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2004).

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but at the same time it is not esoteric, its traditions are modest and full of dignity, and they demand not ascetism but deep consideration and responsibility. In a word, for Shekhter, “psychometrism” is something like Orthodox Judaism with some Masonic touches, plus the mystical practices like reading others’ minds, minus the study of Torah, celebrations of Sabbath and so on. But does reality correspond to this ideal? The confessions that the narrator has received, coupled with his own memories, compel him to question how closely his own life adheres to his society’s ideals. An honest answer to this question proves disappointing.

The Jewish Fantasy in Russian If the works of Pavel Amnuel′, discussed earlier in this overview, present the extreme scientistic pole of Russian-Israeli fantastic literature, then Ol′ga Fiks’s novel, the short stories and novels of Iakov Shekhter, Anna Fain, Daniel′ Kluger, Aleksandr Rybalka, Bezalel Ariel, Eli Liuksemburg, and Iakov Tsigel′man tend towards the opposite modus, fantasy, which characteristically deploys motifs from fairy tales and mythology that blur the borders of the real and unreal. Certain theorists draw a distinction between fantasy and its special subtype, “magic realism.” Both are new types of fantastic literature that developed alongside science fiction and gradually came to displace it in the second half of the twentieth century. In all the subcategories of fantasy, unusual events are caused not by scientific discoveries but magic. However, in magic realist texts, the elements of myth and magic observed by the characters may be explained as superstition, schizophrenia, unbridled imagination and so on, in contrast to fantastic literature and fantasy, where there always exists a clear explanation for the special rules of the world created by the author.65 This is what sets magic realism apart: it relies on existing mythology that the reader may know very well, while a regular fantasy invents new mythology (such as the mythological systems in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ring and Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber). Magic realism, with

65 For Isaac Asimov, these were the laws of robotechnics (I Robot); for J. K. Rowling, in the Harry Potter novels, the laws of magic (for example, drinking water can be created out of nothing by means of magic, but food cannot), and so on. See David Dalton, “Science Fiction vs. Magical Realism: Oppositional Aesthetics and Contradictory Discourses in Sergio Arau’s A Day without a Mexican,” in Companion to Latin American Science Fiction, ed. Silvia Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel de Rosso (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 43–53; José Manuel Losada, “Editorial: Myth, Fantasy and Magic,” Amaltea, Journal of Mythocriticism 10 (2018): 1–6.

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its embrace of national mythology, is often contrasted to the western rationalistic perception of the world and often serves as a distinguishing trait of cultures that exist on the periphery of European literary traditions. There are few works in Russian-Israeli literature that can be confidently categorized as “magic realism:” perhaps, Eli Liuksemburg’s novels,66 Iakov Tsigel′man’s Shebsl-muzykant (Shebsl the musician), Ol′ga Fiks’s Temnoe ditia, Dennis Sobolev’s Ierusalim (Jerusalem) and Legendy gory Karmel′ (Legends of Mount Carmel), some of the novellas from Iakov Shekhter’s collections Kabbala i besy (Kabbalah and demons) and his novel Astronom (Astronomer), and Daniel′ Kluger’s Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi (She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night). The rest should be categorized as fantasy (or “magic romanticism,” if such a term existed). Nevertheless, it bears noting that since the end of the 1990s Russian-Israeli fantasy literature has drawn more frequently and more masterfully from the motifs of Jewish mythology and mysticism. A new generation of Russian-language Israeli writers has emerged, one that is rooted in Jewish culture but has not severed its ties with works of Russian and world classic literature (in Hebrew, they say in such cases that the person ne’ene mi-shnei olamot, “enjoys both worlds”). As has been noted, at the turn of the new millennium, Jewish magic realism deploys a wide range of genre models, especially the Bildungsroman. To this genre belong the novels Temnoe ditia and Vokrug sebia byl nikto. Notably, all Bildungsroman novels are written from the first-person perspective of the protagonists who undergo the process of education or self-education, whereby they become the learner and the educator simultaneously. This is the model that Iakov Shekhter follows in his three-volume novel Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia (The second coming of the teacher from Qumran),67 which describes in detail a magician’s upbringing in a perfectly structured society of the Essenes who have settled in the underground spaces of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea following the destruction of the Temple. The first two volumes of Vtoroe prishestvie bear some resemblance to the Harry Potter novels. It is the story of education and personal growth of a young man who has been destined for an esoteric mission since birth. The chronotope

66 See Klavdia Smola [Klavdiia Smola], Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021), 85–89, for the role of Jewish mysticism in Eli Liuksemburg’s novels Tretii khram (Third temple) and Desiatyi golod (Tenth hunger). 67 Iakov Shekhter, Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia (Odesa: Astroprint, 2016).

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is similar to Harry Potter’s as well: an isolated school located in a space that is inaccessible to regular humans. However, the Essene training in the undergrounds of the Dead Sea is incomparably stricter and more ascetic than the education of wizards in J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts: they live on bread and water, except on Saturdays; they have minimal interaction with people from the outside world, especially women and girls; they receive demanding training that stimulates the discovery of various paranormal abilities (seeing in the dark, walking on water, reading others’ minds, curing wounds by mental exertion and so on); and, most importantly, the constant orientation of thoughts and feelings towards the Source of being. Shua, the hero of the novel, is a young man endowed with rare magic abilities that are honed and developed at the Qumran school. Shua triumphs in the numerous challenges, which positions him to assume the role of the society’s leader. However, on the eve of assuming this role, he voluntarily turns it down; for him, the teachings of Qumran have strayed too far from everyday human life and have stopped regenerating. Therefore Shua, accompanied by loyal friends, leaves the society to seek new ways of serving. The theme of education and self-education in the works of Iakov Shekhter repeats in his collection of novellas Samouchitel′ kabbaly (A self-study guide to Kabbalah).68 The collection is akin to a textbook or a book of problems: each fantastic novella is accompanied by assignments that are intended to deepen not just the understanding of the texts but also the reader’s own self-knowledge.

Magic Travel In contrast to the Bildungsroman of Olga Fiks and Iakov Shekhter, the fantasy novel coauthored by Daniel′ Kluger and Aleksandr Rybalka (1966–2022; repatriated 1993), Tysiacha let v dolg (A thousand years borrowed)69 draws on the structural and thematic aspects of the “travel novel,” for which the central chronotope is not the house but the road. In Kluger and Rybalka’s novel, the hero’s journey passes through the underworld.70 68 Iakov Shekhter, Samouchitel′ Kabbaly (Odesa: Astroprint, 2019). 69 Daniel′ Kluger and Aleksandr Rybalka, Tysiacha let v dolg (Moscow: Armada-Press, 2001). 70 The narratives of journey through hell form a longstanding tradition in European literature, beginning with Lucian of Samosata and continuing through Dante’s Divine Comedy to the satires of Francisco de Quevedo, one of the authors of the picaresque novel (first half of the seventeenth century), and so on. Then this tradition continues in the picaresque novels,

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The protagonist, Semen, a Jerusalem yeshiva student, finds himself in hell by happenstance. In a bookstore in the Old City, Semen, who dreams of seeing the palaces of the higher worlds with his own eyes, chances upon an ancient book called in Russian Kniga zalov (Book of halls), about which he has heard only hours earlier at a lecture in his yeshiva. In this book, he finds a detailed technical description of the soul’s transition into other worlds. Semen naïvely assumes that the book is talking of higher worlds but, having performed all the required incantations, he finds himself in the underworld, in the world of Tehom (the name is a Hebrew word meaning “abyss”) created by an evil angel, Teomiel. This world is populated by the descendants of the lost ten tribes of the ancient Israelits, whom Teomiel has lured into a part of the real world that he has stolen and that is now ruled by evil demons. Searching the seven regions of hell, Semen must find seven pieces of a broken tablet that contain the Almighty’s forty-two-letter name. Only then will the generations of kidnapped Jews regain their freedom. Semen travels the world of hell, meeting with demonic princes that rule over its various regions. He manages to befriend the most influential of these, Samael, who accompanies him on the hardest parts of his journey and assists with explanations and advice. With the help of local Jews and Samael’s support, Semen manages to escape the world of Tehom and free those imprisoned there. This is not the ultimate geulah because the source of all evil has not been destroyed, but a deliverance nevertheless. The novel comes with a glossary of Jewish demonology written by Aleksandr Rybalka. It might be more accurate to say that the novel is an addendum to the glossary because the otherwise unsophisticated characters and formulaic plot of the novel are memorable only for its vivid descriptions of demons and she-demons.

Intellectual Sandwich: Russian Classics and Jewish Fantasy Quite possibly, the most innovative achievement of the Russian-Israeli fantasy of the twenty-first-century is its unique appropriation of Russian classics. This is a special mode of fantastic literature, a sort of fourth assumption, an alternative which, despite depicting life on earth, have Satan playing the central role of the protagonist’s teacher and guide (Luis Vélez de Guevara and Alain-René Lesage’s The Lame Devil, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and so on). In Hebrew, an extensive description of the seven parts of the underworld and their respective sinners is provided in the book Reshit chokhma (The beginning of wisdom, 1578) by the kabbalist Elijah ben Moses de Vidas. Hebrew literary descriptions of hell can be found in such works as Immanuel the Roman’s Machberot Immanuel (1320).

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Jewish-Russian literature. What would have happened if Taras Bulba were told from the perspective of Yankel the Jew?71 What if Gogol wrote his fantastic novellas based on not Ukrainian but Jewish legends? Or if Pushkin and Bunin borrowed the plots for their stories from the quotidian life of orthodox Jews circa early twenty-first century? This combination of the traditions of Gogol’s prose with the life of a Jewish shtetl and traditional Jewish demonology forms the basis for Kluger’s collection of loosely connected stories under the title Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi.72 The characters of these stories are the inhabitants of a small Jewish town of Yavoritsy who are brought face-to-face with menacing otherworldly forces: Asmodeus, the king of demons; Sartiya, desecrator of dreams; a nameless dybbuk; and the demoness and succubus Lilith. Unlike Fiks, in whose books the demonesses and baby-demons that interact with humans are unusual but largely likeable and harmless creatures, Kluger portrays Lilith and her human offsprings in stark and bleak colors that are consistent with their traditional depictions. Much like in Fiks’s Temnoe ditia, in Kluger’s book the rabbi summons the demoness to a court hearing. But unlike the situation in the Fiks’s novel, in Kluger’s plot the court sides with her. “I have summoned you here to Din Torah, the Court of Justice. Answer me: why have you come here and by what right have you assumed ownership of the empty house?” “By the right of heredity,” Lilith retorted proudly. “My children have the right to their late father’s property. Oh, I know, you can tell me: we were not married, and besides, I have a husband, more than one at that, and that makes my children,” she extended her ghostly semitransparent arm towards the silent, repulsive demons, “illegitimate mamzerim. But you, who knows the Law, who knows the Torah, you must admit that, since the times of Rambam, mamzerim have the same claim to the possessions of their deceased father as the legitimate children.”73

71 See a sketch of such a novella in Daniel′ Kluger, “Chert po imeni Yankel′” (A devil named Yankel), Lekhaim, November 2020, https://lechaim.ru/events/chert-po-imeni-yankel/. 72 Daniel′ Kluger, Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi ( Jerusalem: Mlechnyi put′, 2016). 73 Ibid., 151–152.

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In another story, Lilith’s love brings the local mohel (circumciser) to the brink of death. Lilith’s role in his demise is obvious because the mohel looks decimated, “but it is impossible for a person in a matter of hours to lose that much weight that he is reduced to skin and bones. [. . .] But most importantly because he has such a strange expression frozen on his face—seemingly of horror but also of unspeakable, unearthly pleasure.”74 In the concluding story of Kluger’s book, however, Lilith is depicted as genuinely in love, even though here, too, her role in the lives of people remains tragic and devastating. When the rabbi forces the tortured and barely alive lover of Lilith to abandon her, she takes the remainder of her lover’s life with one final kiss, and then says to the rabbi in parting: “You wanted to drive me out, so I am leaving. But he died because I am leaving. Only the pleasure I gave him kept him in the world of the living. So I am not the one to blame for his death, you are. And you know this. Know this too, then: my children will take vengeance on you and the likes of you. Beware! [. . .]” And it also seemed to the rabi that during the funeral, while he was reading the “Baruch Dayan Emet,” among the familiar faces of the Jews of Yavoritsy, there appeared another face, a woman’s, incredibly sad. And that the woman stood a little apart from the rest, in black mourning clothes, and held a child in her arms.75 Many years later, during the civil war in Ukraine, a commissar on horseback enters the synagogue, and the aged rabbi recognizes in his facial features Lilith’s child from the doomed lover. The commissar says to the rabbi: “My mother promised you that I would pay you back. You and the likes of you, rabbi. There are many like me, who have human blood flowing in our veins but have no human soul. And so I have come, rabbi. I have come to take my revenge.” [. . .] But there were no shots fired. The terrifying squad that had descended upon Yavoritsy like a storm, flew away, and with them, in a machine-gun cart or just through the air—their birdlegged commissar, a half-demon in a leather trench coat with a red star on his chest. And the rabbi raked his brains over why this 74 Ibid., 220. 75 Ibid., 345–346.

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commissar, the son of the she-devil Lilith [. . .], whose calling it was to murder and pillage, just like hundreds or even thousands, or maybe tens of thousands like him, why did he spare him? [. . .] Because it couldn’t have possibly been because of that brief instant when he, looking at the [. . .] she-devil Lilith, suddenly felt a pang of pity—not towards her, but towards the recently born son of Fishke the soldier.76 Kluger defines the genre of his book as a “novel in ten stories.” At first sight, this description appears strange: the book contains no singular main character or unified plot line. Only towards the end does the reader begin to comprehend that this character is the entire Jewish community, fighting against evil from generation to generation. In the first story, “Staryi shinok i ego zavsegdatai” (The old inn and its regulars), two young Zaporizhzhian Cossacks ride through the remains of a Jewish shtetl leveled during Khmelnitskyi’s uprising, and in the morning they find themselves at the old cemetery, where his victims are buried. In the tenth, final story, the rabbi passes through a “settlement that has been burned more times than there are fingers on our hands, and just set on fire again, either out of mischief or malice.”77 That is how the unity of the plot is established: through the images of Ukrainian Jews’ struggle for survival, from one catastrophe to the next. The two young Zaporizhzhians, one of whom is named Taras, remind the reader of Taras’s sons from Taras Bulba. Another similarity to Gogol’s novella lies in the singsong intonations of the first and the last stories that frame the book. The book also contains direct quotes from Viy, which, together with Taras Bulba, was included in Gogol’s Mirgorod. The Cossaks, as if bringing Gogol’s novella back to its folkloric roots, talk amongst themselves: One seminarist-philosopher once went to spend a night with a wench, and she turned out to be a witch. At night, she turned into a young village woman and then she up and starts riding him through the air! She almost rode him to death . . . Or he rode her. Anyway, that doesn’t matter; what matters is that she set all kinds of evil spirits on him, and they ate him alive.78

76 Ibid., 349–351. 77 Ibid., 351. 78 Ibid., 19–20. In Gogol’s novella Viy (1835), the old mistress of the house where the young student spends the night saddles him and rides astride him over the fields. The tortured

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Each of the stories comprising Kluger’s book has a designated epigraph from Gogol’s Ukrainian works. The setting of the works itself, Ukraine, is also made conspicuous. But while in Gogol’s works the Jews are almost always mentioned in a mockingly humorous tone (even when they are being murdered), the overall tenor of Kluger’s stories is serious, dramatic, and tragic. The contradiction between Kluger and Gogol remains in place from the beginning to the end. This creates what Heinrich Plett has termed “interference of text and context,”79 Roland Barthes—“the stereographic space of the combinative play,”80 and Mikhail Bakhtin—“double-voiced discourse.”81 The “rewriting” of Gogol’s texts in a deliberately Jewish context is a vivid example of the fourth assumption of fantastic literature, that is, the literary assumption, mentioned in the introduction to this paper and quite characteristic in the Russian Jewish fantastic literature of the twenty-first century. The two opposite poles of Russian-Israeli fantastic literature’s intertextuality, Russian classics and medieval Hebrew texts, showcase their “hybrid identity”82 that has reached maturity and balance. This situation echoes a proverb from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 7:18): “It is good to grab hold of the one and not let go of the other.” Similar dual intertextuality distinguishes Iakov Shekhter’s collection of novellas entitled Kabbala i besy (Kabbalah and demons).83 In a story included in the chapter “Pul′sa dе-Nura,”84 the main narrator, a synagogue gabbai, Rabbi Wolf, tells a story that structurally and textually resembles the story “Vystrel” (The shot) from Pushkin’s The Belkin Tales, well known to Russian reader. Shekhter’s use of almost literal quotes from “The Shot” generate a complex effect, at first comical (the yeshiva Jews of the twentieth century express and comport themselves like Russian officers of the nineteenth century), and later, dramatic. In Pushkin, “The life of an officer in the army is well known. In the morning, drill

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student prays, breaks the spell, jumps astride the old woman and rides her forward, hitting her with a log. In the morning, the beaten-up witch turns into the proprietor’s young beautiful daughter and drops dead. Heinrich F. Plett, “Intertextualities,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich Plett (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 11. Roland Barthes, “Theory of the Text,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 31. Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000), 96. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 119–125. Iakov Shekhter, Kabbala i besy (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2008). From Aramaic expression pulsa dе-nura (“the lashes of fire”), the name of a kabbalistic ceremony in which the destroying angels are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness of the subject’s sins, allegedly causing all the curses named in the Bible to befall him, which results in his death.

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and the riding school; dinner with the Colonel or at a Jewish tavern; in the evening, punch and cards.”85 Compare this to Shekhter’s “The life of a yeshiva student is well known: in the morning, a long prayer, then studies until two o’clock in the afternoon, dinner at the yeshiva cafeteria or sandwiches in your room, a short nap and more studying, until dark. In the evening, a prayer, dinner, a short stroll around the yeshiva and again study, each as much as he can.”86 In both novellas, the protagonist is an enigmatic older person who stands out in the society of young men. In Pushkin, his name is Silvio; in Shekhter—Livio. In both novellas, this person receives a mysterious letter and disappears, but first he shares with the narrator a story about his past, one that contains an unpunished offense and delayed retribution. In Pushkin, the cause of the offense is wounded pride; in Shekhter, it is historical and ideological. This is an event that is still hotly debated in Israel: the destruction of Yamit. Livio confesses a young yeshiva student about the evacuation of Yamit, which became for him a psychological trauma that determined his whole life:87 On the day of the evacuation, we barricaded ourselves on the roof of the yeshiva [. . .]. If they want to evacuate us, let them drag us by force. First, they tried to convince us by using megaphones, then by firing at us from water cannons, then a crane lifted to the roof a huge basket filled with police officers. The commanding officer was standing by the open door eating sunflower seeds. The sunflower shells fell directly onto the roof, on our heads. His indifference infuriated me. I don’t even know how, but I found myself directly in front of the basket, and shouted to the officer: “Just dare to set foot on the roof—I will curse you!” He only smirked. “Curse away, I am always at your service.” [. . .] The officer spat out the shells and gave a signal with his hand for the police to disembark. The rest you already know. We were 85 Alexander Pushkin, “The Shot,” trans. T. Kean, in The Short-Story: Specimens Illustrating Its Development, ed. Brander Matthews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 122. 86 Shekhter, Kabbala i besy, 104. 87 Yamit (in Hebrew, “of the sea”) was an Israeli settlement created during the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula at the end of the Six-Day War in 1967. In 1982, this part of Sinai was handed over to Egypt in accordance with the terms of the peace treaty signed in Camp David in 1979. The settlement itself was demolished, and all its inhabitants were forcibly relocated to Israel. Part of the residents left the city voluntarily, but others barricaded themselves in their homes, which turned the evacuation into a violent clash between the residents and the military.

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dragged off the roof and taken to a police station, and bulldozers turned into ruins a blooming garden built on bare sand. [. . .] Not a day has gone by since then that I haven’t thought about revenge. Today,” he smirked bitterly, “I can make good on my promise. So my hour has come . . .” Livio extracted from his pocket the morning letter and gave it to me to read. Someone (must have been his executor) was writing from Tel Aviv that a certain known someone had a firstborn son, and that the brit-milah [circumcision ceremony] was to take place on such-and-such a date (which was today’s date) at seven in the evening. “You can guess,” said Livio [almost word for word repeating the remark of Pushkin’s Silvio], “who this certain someone is. I am going to Tel Aviv. Let’s see if he will be as indifferent before his son’s circumcision as he was back then on the roof.”88 The plotlines of the two novellas continue to develop similarly. While visiting a resort called Kinar on Kinneret Lake, Shekhter’s narrator, Rabbi Wolf, meets Boaz, a young high-ranking officer who has only recently returned to Jewish traditional Orthodox way of life. After he happens to mention Livio in conversation with Boaz, Rabbi Wolf, like Pushkin’s Belkin, becomes the interlocutor of a second confession. In both novellas, a man from the past visits his offender at the happiest moment of the latter’s life. In Pushkin’s short story, this is marriage. In the Jewish version, this is the ceremony of brit-milah (circumcision). Boaz recounts how Livio has showed up to the brit-milah ceremony of his firstborn son and unexpectedly handed him an envelope, saying: “My congratulations to you and your newborn.” The devil only knows what vile thing this yeshiva scholar could pen, what ancient curse to bring back to life with his writings. I instinctively hid my hands behind my back. He smirked, “Don’t worry, the envelope contains a kame’a, a letter of protection for your family.” I found his smirk offensive. “Keep in mind,” said I, “if anything happens to the child, I will find a way to pay you back for your curse.” He smiled,

88 Shekhter, Kabbala i besy, 105–106.

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“I won’t curse you. I see that you believed in the power of the curse. This is enough for me. I leave you to your conscience.”89 From this point onward, the plots of the two respective novellas diverge. Pushkin’s plot is practically complete, whereas, in Shekhter’s text, miracles begin to happen. Upon the completion of the brit-milah ceremony, the child continues to bleed, and the mohel (circumciser) is unable to stop the bleeding. The young parents rush the child to the hospital where tests are performed to check for suspected hemophilia. A nurse whose nametag reads “Malakhova”90 suggests that the parents, who are waiting for the results of the tests in a state of great agitation, support the child by prayer and reading the Psalms. The young parents are embarrassed: as secular people, they carry neither a prayer book nor the Psalms. Suddenly Boaz feels, in the pocket of his blazer, the envelope with the kame’a given to him by Livio. Boaz reads the Psalms written in the kame’a over and over again until the nurse returns with the news that the hemophilia tests were negative, and that the child is out of danger. The promised curse has turned to be a blessing. The happy parents address the doctor: “Please convey our tremendous gratitude to nurse Malakhova.” “Malakhova?” asked the doctor, surprised. “Nobody by that name works here [. . .].” “That night, something turned in my head. Both mine and my wife’s. That was when we began our road to spirituality, until we arrived,” here Boaz once again smoothed out his beard and fixed the black yarmulka on his head, “where we’ve arrived.” “In Kinar” continued Rabbi Wolf, “I learned the end of the story [. . .] whose beginning had once made such a deep impression upon me. The hero of it I never saw again, but with Boaz, we have been friends to this day. It is said that Livio commanded a detachment of reservists and was killed during the anti-terrorist operations in Jenin.”91

89 Shekhter, Kabbala i besy, 109. 90 Malakhova is not an uncommon Russian last name, derived from the Hebrew name “Malach” or “Malakhia,” meaning “messenger of God,” angel. 91 Shekhter, Kabbala i besy, 110. Compare in Pushkin: “In this way I learned the end of the story, whose beginning had once made such a deep impression upon me. The hero of it I never saw again. It is said that Silvio commanded a detachment of Hetairists during the revolt under Alexander Ypsilanti, and that he was killed in the battle of Skoulana” (Pushkin, “The Shot,” 135).

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As Anna Fain notes in her afterword, “Pushkin’s Silvio symbolically kills his adversary by making him demean himself and violate the dueling code. Shekhter’s Livio, by refusing to exact revenge, gives his offender a chance at spiritual rebirth.”92 It bears noting that there is another adaptation of The Belkin Tales in RussianIsraeli literature: Aleks Tarn’s Povesti Iokhanana Eikhorna (Tales of Yohanan Eichorn). In his version, the theme of magic, which is so important for Shekhter, is almost entirely removed and replaced by insane, desperate gambling with fate. In Tarn’s version, Pushkin’s “The Shot” is renamed into “Itsik,” and it is indubitably reflected through the prism of Shekhter’s work, because in Tarn, like in Shekhter, Silvio’s Israeli double is named Livio.

Archipelago Novels Earlier, we discussed Kluger’s and Shekhter’s adaptations, which they have included in collections of stories that are united by a very vague outline of a plot. Importantly, Kluger himself describes the genre of his book as “novel in stories.” This tendency comes through in the recently published novels: Aleks Tarn’s Oblordoz, Dennis Sobolev’s Ierusalim and Legendy gory Karmel′ (Legends of Mount Carmel), and Nekod Singer’s Chernoviki Ierusalima (Rough drafts of Jerusalem). Despite their distinct differences, all these novels are united by two peculiar traits that bring them close to the texts examined in the previous section. First, a considerable (at times even dominant) portion of their text is comprised of stylizations, pastiches that border on the parody. This is the same fourth assumption that was discussed in the introduction. Second, they stand out for their fragmentation and nonlinearity; in each, the reader can freely navigate between separate chapters. Aleks Tarn even offers the reader several different roadmaps for reading his novel Oblordoz,93 each of which produces, through the reading of the same text, different narratives belonging to different genres: a young-adult drama with elements of fantasy, a saga about the Zoaretz clan, a mystical story about Lilith, and an alternative dystopian history. The authors of the other novels in this group that have been mentioned here do not provide such clear directions for the readers, who are free to roam the text and regroup the chapters as they please. 92 Anna Fain, afterword to Kabbala i besy, by Iakov Shekhter (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2008), 303. 93 Aleks Tarn, Oblordoz (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel—Isradon, 2019).

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In Oblordoz, the Lilith plot line is consistent with her representation in traditional Jewish mythology: she brings death to men and small children. According to the version presented by one of the characters, this is her way of exacting revenge on Adam and his descendants for rejecting her.94 Doctor Krichevskii, who is also pursued by Lilith, gives up hope of saving himself and instead selflessly tries to protect a two-year-old girl. At the last moment, he finds an ancient protective amulet brought back from Spain by Viktor Zoaretz. Dennis Sobolev was born in Leningrad in 1971 and made aliyah in 1991. In Sobolev’s Ierusalim, Lilith, who happens to be one of the main characters, also performs the role prescribed to her by the myth. However, unlike the previously mentioned treatments of this myth, in Sobolev’s novel this role neither horrifies nor repels the narrator. Instead, he rather identifies with Lilith because she is the only woman who has chosen freedom over happiness, which has spared her, if not from the universal law of suffering, then, at the very least, from the endless circle of births, hopes, lies, fears, and deaths. [. . .] I once asked about her entourage and her curse; I was worried that it would irk her, but she laughed. “Don’t you feel bad for the children?” I asked. “Children?” repeated Lilith, smiling with the corners of her mouth. “Children are disgusting.” It was difficult to disagree with that.95 Lilith and Orvietta, irresistible superwomen and vampires, appear in Sobolev’s novel independently, without any causal links to other plotlines (for example, the story of the rebel Elisha). Each of the novel’s chapters has its own narrator and protagonist, and each over their lives there comes a moment when their daily life within the space of contemporary Jerusalem and its suburbs inexplicably intersects with beings and events sparingly mentioned in Jewish and Arabic medieval Aggadic and historiographic literature that resurface in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The relationship between the chapters is not causal, but rather metaphorical.96 In the concluding chapter of Sobolev’s Ierusalim, the narrator stands on the shores of the Mediterranean and thinks about the cities and countries that lie

94 Tarn, Oblordoz, 152. 95 Dennis Sobolev [Denis Sobolev], Ierusalim (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2005), 50–51. 96 The causal connection appears only in the concluding chapter, when all these heroesnarrators meet in the most ordinary situation—annual reserve duty in the little Samaria settlement.

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on the other side of the sea. “I tried to visualize other countries that lay there, beyond the western sea, but couldn’t; for me those countries were located in a completely different place, on the other side of the white building of the airport, made of glass and cement, with countless countertops with electronic scales.”97 In the twenty-first century, countries and cities are united and divided not so much by seas and straits as by the hallways of the terminals linking Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport with the airports of New York, Hong Kong, and St. Petersburg. Not only space but also time in Sobolev’s novel is structured based on the archipelago principle. In the last chapter, the imagination of the narrator, the commander of a group of reserve soldiers defending a tiny outpost in Samaria, “swims over” to the surroundings of the Khazar town of Itil that was leveled by Grand Prince Sviatoslav,98 and then returns to Samaria, connecting early twenty-first-century Israel with Khazaria of the tenth century, to form a unity of a special kind, akin to the unity of the individual islands that form an archipelago. Such is the unique architectonics of the archipelago novel, in which the author, in Roman Katsman’s formulation, “models history as an archipelago of islands of individual cognition in an ocean of memories, desires, fears, hopes, loves, and guilts. Sobolev’s novels are epitomes of expression of the island-like, disjointed but lively mytho-historical reality of Israel.”99 In contrast to the existential melancholy that blankets Jerusalem in Sobolev’s novel, in Nekod Singer’s Chernoviki Ierusalima (Rough drafts of Jerusalem) the city is presented as a space of upbeat, joyful, and clever game with European culture.100 Nekod Singer was born in 1960 in Novosibirsk and came to Israel in 1988. Singer’s novel contains no scientific discoveries or mythological personages. Nevertheless, it is a fantastic novel. It is a completely unique fantastic mode, which, as we have already observed, is quite typical of Russian-Israeli literature. This is the fourth assumption, that of the literary fantastic fiction, whereby Russian literary plots are recreated in a different setting and different culture. The premise of the plot is the arrival in 1935 in Jaffa port of the steamboat “Theodor Nette,” with “the last three hundred Zionists of Soviet Russian on board” (an allusion to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous poem “To Comrade Nette—Steamboat and Man”). One of the passengers who disembarks the 97 Sobolev, Ierusalim, 426. 98 Readers of Israeli poetry are well acquainted with such transitions: “Jerusalem is a port on the shore of eternity” (Yehuda Amichai); “When you are in Jerusalem, you are in Tétouan, and when you are in Tétouan, you are in Granada, and when you are in Granada, you are in Jerusalem” (Mikhal Held, ‫)מיכל הלד‬, and so on. 99 Katsman, Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia, 244. 100 Nekod Singer [Nekod Zinger], Chernoviki Ierusalima (Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2014).

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steamboat is none other than Ostap Bender from Il′ia Il′f and Evgenii Petrov’s famous dilogy of satirical novels; Bender who now prefers to be called Asaf Bender Luria. In Jerusalem, on the Street of Prophets, Ostap-Asaf runs into his relative Gavriel Luria, the protagonist of David Shachar’s novel series The Palace of Shattered Vessels (two of which Nekod Singer has translated into Russian101), and the latter explains that “all other cities are nothing but drafts of Jerusalem”: “There are as many sketches of Jerusalem as there are cities in the world.” “Even Rio-de-Janeiro?” “All of them. On the other hand, in Jerusalem there is nothing, practically nothing, on which you can rest your eye or point with a finger. It is both this and that, or rather, neither this, nor that, and ten thousand other things. Which is to say, nothing. Today it is not Paris for me, and [. . .] it will not become my Baghdad. [. . .] There are no fakes and no possibility of fakes, because the originals in the world in essence are copies of this empty place.”102 Ostap-Asaf Bender brings with him to Jerusalem a “treasure that is invaluable for the entire educated humanity.” It is a suitcase103 containing manuscripts of unpublished texts about this city written over the course of centuries by the greatest masters of language. Goethe, Chateaubriand, Shakespeare, Simeon of Polotsk, Daniel Defoe, Counts Tolstoy and Salias! Eyewitness accounts and inventions of geniuses. [. . .] The complete archive, shedding new, well-forgotten old light on the historical physiognomy of our ancient capital. Ah, what is there to say! Even if Jerusalem is ruined anew, it can be easily recreated using these notes.104

101 See David Shakhar, Puteshestvie v Ur Khaldeiskii, trans. Nekod Singer ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2003); David Shakhar, Leto na ulitse Prorokov, trans. Nekod Singer ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004). 102 Singer, Chernoviki Ierusalima, 20. 103 A detail that moves from Il′f and Petrov’s novel Twelve Chairs to their Golden Calf, and from there to Chernoviki Ierusalima. 104 Singer, Chernoviki Ierusalima, 18.

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Ostap-Asaf attempts to sell this archive to the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sochnut), but the agency official turns down the purchase, explaining that as it is they do not know what to do with similar treasures that they already have: “Anywhere you look are the Dead Sea Scrolls.”105 Half an hour later, the suitcase with the manuscripts vanishes, seemingly without a trace. But in culture, as everybody knows, nothing ever disappears without a trace. Singer’s novel is the reconstruction (or forgery) of the lost manuscripts about Jerusalem by different authors of all times and cultures. Not all of the manuscripts enumerated by Bender are mentioned later (what else does one expect from a con artist?), but in the course of the narrative, the following ones surface: Jerusalem texts of Chesterton and Raspe, Hoffman and Alexander Dumas, Il′f and Petrov, Iulian Semenov and Dostoevsky, Sholom Aleichem and Daniel Defoe, along with Lazar′ Lagin’s Starik Khottabych (Old man Khottabych), Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, almost all of the popular literature of our childhood and youth. “Here, for example, is a previously unknown note by Mark Twain, dated 1867: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sawyer, during their journey in the Holy Land, got lost in the cave of Sedekia; old man Jim is sweeping floors at Hotel American Colony, humming ‘Jordan River’s gonna roll.’”106 The heroic (or rather mock-heroic) project of the search and reconstruction of the lost intellectual treasures depicts for the reader the physical return to Jerusalem of everyone who is anyone, except the two Hoffman eccentrics who, while in Germany, have convinced themselves that they are actually located in Jerusalem, and Franz Kafka, who never got past his attempts to pack for the road. Both the arrival and the non-arrival become a pretext for intertextual play. I would like to cite here one of the characteristic moments of this literary game: an excerpt from a narrative by an unknown author about how Vladimir Lenin makes a very secret trip to Palestine so that he can bury Karl Marx’s skull and bones at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem to fulfill his late teacher’s last wishes: “Unsuspecting Marxists still visit the Highgate Cemetery [in London] to honor the memory of the great economist whose bones lie at the Mount of Olives, under a small stone slab with a slightly slanting inscription in Hebrew: ‘Caleb-Henoch Ben Hershel Mordechai Diamat.’”107 105 Ibid., 19. 106 Ibid., 18. 107 Ibid., 262–263. Diamat, abbreviation of “dialectical materialism,” is a philosophical teaching that confirms the primacy of matter over spirit. It was a mandatory subject for the students of all Soviet institutions of higher learning. “Dialectical materialism” was founded upon the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that were later developed by Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist philosophers.

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A chapter in the novel is dedicated to the Jerusalem adventures of Porthos, one of the main characters from Alexander Dumas’s novels Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. In Singer’s novel, much like in Daniel′ Kluger’s Mushketer, ili Podlinnaia istoriia Isaaka de Portu (The musketeer, or The true story of Isaac de Porthau, 2007), Porthos turns out to be a descendant of Portuguese crypto-Jews. Having discovered the mystery of his origin, the musketeer returns to his people. While discussing his return to Judaism in a conversation with a rabbi, in response to the question: “Have you, my son, succumbed to overindulging your flesh?” Porthos responds with a question: “Didn’t Solomon the Wise say, ‘Enjoy the beauty of your young wife, the wine from a full cup, and the joy of children of men—the lucky blade, and give thanks to God!’”108 This is an amusing amalgamation of two completely dissimilar texts. The first text is a quote from the Bible: “Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.”109 The second source here is D’Artagnan’s song from the popular Soviet TV movie D’Artagnan and Three Musketeers (1978): “Let’s enjoy, in our life, the beauty, the cup, and the lucky blade” (song lyrics by Iurii Riashentsev). “‘Is that what Ecclesiastes actually says, my son?’ asks the rabbi incredulously. ‘It definitely said something along those lines.’”110 And truly, in this context even this simple popular song also reveals traces of Ecclesiastic influence. The general image of Jerusalem in the novel is constructed based on this principle: Jerusalem is a city-midrash, comprised of excerpts of interpretations of interpretations of different interpretations, often rather incoherent and always incredibly opaque. The city wall, constructed by Suleiman the Magnificent, which we can observe today as well, is a striking example of this eclectic method. No detail is missing in its masonry! The little educated but pedantic sort will distinguish among them the crudely hewn fragments of Jebusite fortifications, boulders of Solomon’s temple, cut out by the beetle-worm shamir without the aid of metal, Herod’s

108 Ibid., 190. 109 Ecclesiastes 9:10. 110 Singer, Chernoviki Ierusalima, 190.

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blocks, Adrian’s monoliths, the forcible contributions of various Byzantians, crusaders and various other saladins.111 The reconstruction of the lost text is indistinguishable from its interpretation, translation, and update—even the creation of a new one. In Singer’s novel, this project of reconstruction-update-creation contains additional aspects. The first aspect is the collection into one, a sort of “gathering of exiles” (kibbutz galuiot), a concentration of the new context into singular focus: “Now I finally get it: Jerusalem is a train station, where begin all the routes that take one to all the ends of the world, and where all the meandering plotlines of all the novels in the world gather. Its eternal waiting room is packed with characters and authors who failed to find peace.”112 The second aspect, imminently tied to the previous one, is translation. It is this aspect that serves as the focal point for one of Singer’s characters, Zinaida Berlovna Shtibel′.113 In essence, this fictional character creates the specific area of Russian-Israeli fantasy identified for the first time in the current paper, the “fourth assumption,” a Jewish rewriting of Russian literature. Zinaida Berlovna rewrote Russian classics into Jewish ones in Russian, [. . .] According to testimony by her contemporaries, [. . .] among works completed by her were the Jewish “Nose,” the Jewish “Poor Folk,” Turgenev’s young girl “Hasia,” and a number of these books, along with the metamorphoses of their texts, underwent a natural change of titles, familiar to all since childhood. So, “The Captain’s Daughter” inevitably because “The Daughter of the Army Rabbi,” and “The Gentryfolk’s Nest” transformed into “The Hasidic Nest.” [. . .] Her entire archive

111 Ibid., 8. 112 Ibid., 266. 113  A translator named Zinaida Shtibel′ (Stiebel) never existed. Singer’s text cheerfully parodies the real-life grandiose project of translating world classics into Hebrew undertaken in the first third of the twentieth century organized by the Polish-Jewish merchant and philanthropist Avraham Josef Stiebel (1885–1946). Stiebel established a publishing house named after him and recruited the best Hebrew writers (Hayim Nahman Bialik, David Shimoni, David Frishman, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Yaakov Steinberg, David Kimchi, Yitskhak Lamdan) who translated for him the best works of world literature into Hebrew (the epic of Gilgamesh, Fedor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Heinrich Heine, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and so forth).

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was irretrievably lost long before the [. . .] first timid waves of postmodernism made it to the war-ravaged Jerusalem.114 However, the idea of “translating” literary plots from one text into another and from one culture into another, such as from Russian literature into the language of Jewish reality, told in Russian, has not disappeared, no matter how fantastic it may appear to be (just like the manuscripts from Ostap-Asafa Bender-Luria’s suitcase did not disappear). As we can see, the idea of translation is realized in Russian-Israeli literature of the early twenty-first century, and specifically in Russian-language Israeli fantastic literature. This is the idea that has framed the present investigation. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, each meaning will have its own festival of rebirth.115 Translated from Russian by Margarit T. Ordukhanyan

Bibliography Primary Sources Adaf, Shimon. K’for [Frost]. Kineret: Zmora-Bitan, 2007. Amnuel′, Pavel. Goluboi Al′tsior [Blue Altsior]. Jerusalem: Zvezdy Mlechnogo puti, 2010. ———. Liudi Koda [The code people]. Rehovot: Miry, 1996. ———. Mest′ v domino [Revenge in dominoes]. Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom—Veche, 2010. ———. “Ostrov” [Island] and “Povodyr′” [Guide]. In his Problema nabliudatelia [Observer problem]. Jerusalem: Mlechnyi Put′, 2017. ———. “Probuzhdenie” [Awakening]. In his Chas uragana [Hurricane hour]. Moscow: ASTLiuks, 2005. ———. Smeshchenie [Displacement]. Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2021. ———. Trivselennaia [Triuniverse]. Novomoskovsk: PP Shirokova N. Iu., 2004. ———. Udar gil′otiny (Tainy detektiva Manna) [Guillotine strike (Secrets of detective Mann)]. Jerusalem: Zvezdy Mlechnogo puti, 2011. Baram, Nir. Machzir chalomot [The remaker of dreams]. Tel Aviv: Keter, 2006. Bartana, Ortsion. Ha-Makom she-bo ha-kol matchil [The place where it all begins]. Tel Aviv: Emda, 2011. Ben Ner, Yitzhak. Malakhim ba’im [Angels are coming]. Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1987 Berstein, Ilana. Ha-ir ha-mizrachit [The eastern city]. Tel Aviv: Yediot Sfarim, 2013. Blau, Saharah. Yetser lev ha-adamah [Desire of the earth’s heart]. Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 2007. Castel-Bloom, Orly. Dolly City. Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1992.

114 Singer, Chernoviki Ierusalima, 266, original emphasis. 115 Mikhail Bakhtin, “K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk,” in his Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 373.

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Doron, Erez Moshe. Lochamei ha-tmurot [Warriors of transformation]. Mevo Horon: Lev Dvarim, 2007. Dotan, Danielle. Anarkhia motek [Anarchy honey]. Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuchad, 1999. Fain, Anna. “Pis′mo na golubom kartone” [Letter on blue cardboard] Accessed May 2, 2022. https://feinanna.livejournal.com/2531.html. ———. “Tret′iakovskaia baldareia” [Tretyakov balldery]. In her Khroniki tret′ei avtopady [Chronicles of the third autofallda]. Odesa: Studiia “Negotsiant,” 2004. Fiks, Ol′ga. Temnoe ditia [Dark child]. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 59 (2018). https://magazines.gorky. media/ier/2018/59/tyomnoe-ditya.html. Gavron, Asaf. Hydromania. Kineret: Zmora-Bitan, 2008. Geffen, Yehonatan. Keter zmani [Temporary crown]. Tel Aviv: Chargol, 2013. Goralik, Linor. Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie [All those capable of breathing breath]. Moscow: AST, 2019. Goralik, Linor, and Sergei Kuznetsov. Net [No]. St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2014. Grigor′eva, Ol′ga. Slavianskii tsikl [Slavonic cycle]. St. Petersburg: Azbuka-Terra, 1996–2008. Iudson, Mikhail. Lestnitsa na shkaf: Skazka dlia emigrantov v trekh chastiakh [Ladder onto the wardrobe: A fairy tale for emigrants in three parts]. Moscow: Zebra E, 2013. Kenan, Amos. Ha-Derech le-Ein Charod [The road to Ein Charod]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984. Kluger, Daniel′. Chaiki nad Kremlem [Seagulls over the Kremlin]. In Antologiia al′ternativnoi istorii [Alternative history anthology], edited by Vladislav Goncharov. Moscow: Eksmo, 2007. ———. “Chert po imeni Iankel′” [A devil named Yankel]. Lekhaim. Literaturnye shtudii (November 15, 2020). https://lechaim.ru/events/chert-po-imeni-yankel/ ———. Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi [She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night]. Jerusalem: Mlechnyi Put′, 2016. Kluger, Daniel′, and Aleksandr Rybalka. Tysiacha let v dolg [A thousand years borrowed]. Moscow: Armada-Press, 2001. Lavi, Shimon. Ketem paz: Perush al ha-Zohar, Bereshit [Golden spot: A commentary on Zohar Bereshit]. Vol. 1. Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 2021. Lazarchuk, Andrei. Vse sposobnye derzhat′ oruzhie [All those capable of bearing arms]. Moscow: Vagrius, 1997. London, Hagai. Al-harmonia, tsimkhonut ve-shalom [On harmony, vegetarianism, and peace]. Tel Aviv: Rosh Yehudi, 2008. Margaliot, Reuben. Malache elyon: Ha-Muzkarim ba-Talmud Bavli vi-Yerushalmi, be-khol hamidrashim, Zohar ve-tikunim, targumim ve-yalkutim le-sifre kodesh shel ha-kabalah [Archangels mentioned in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, in all midrashim, Zohar and tikkunim, translations and commentaries to the sacred books of the Kabbalah]. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kuk, 1944. Mishmari, Avivit. Zaken ishtagea [Old man went crazy]. Tel Aviv: Chargol, 2013. Nikitin, Iurii. Troe iz lesa [The three from the forest]. Moscow: Eksmo, 1993–2010. Oldi, Henry Lyon [Genri Laion Oldi, pseudonym of Dmitrii Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhenskii]. “Master-klass: Fantasticheskoe dopushchenie.” Mir Fantastiki 54 (2008). Accessed May 3, 2022. https://www.mirf.ru/book/chto-takoe-fantasticheskoe-dopuschenie/. Pushkin, Alexander [Aleksandr Pushkin]. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 7. Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia, 1938. Ron, Sofiia. Perezhit′ faraona [To outlive the pharaoh]. Kyriat Arba: n.p., 1995.

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Rybakov, Vladislav. Gravilet Tsesarevich. St. Petersburg: Lan′, 1994. Sarid, Yishai. Ha-Shlishi [The rhird]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013. Semenova, Mariia. Volkodav [Wolfhound]. St. Petersburg: Terra—Azbuka, 1995–2014. Shapira, Amichay. Yom ha-din [ Judgment day]. Tel Aviv: Chalonot-Alim, 2002. Sobol, Yali. Etzbaot shel psantran [Pianist’s fingers]. Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 2012. Sobolev, Dennis [Denis Sobolev]. Ierusalim [ Jerusalem]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2005. Strugatskii, Arkadii, and Boris Strugatskii. Ponedel′nik nachinaietsia v subbotu. Trudno byt′ bogom. Piknik na obochine. Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003. Tammuz, Benjamin. Pundako shel Yirmiyahu [Yirmiyahu’s inn]. Tel Aviv: Keter, 1984. Tarn, Aleks. “Khaim.” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 45 (2013): 40–201. ———. Oblordoz. Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel—Isradon, 2019. ———. “Zapiski kuklovoda” [Notes of a puppeteer]. Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 27 (2008): 57–177. Shakhar, David. Leto na ulitse Prorokov. Translated by Nekod Singer. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2003. ———. Puteshestvie v Ur Khaldeiskii. Translated by Nekod Singer. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2003. Shekhter, Iakov. Kabbala i besy [Kabbalah and demons]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2008. ———. Samouchitel’ Kabbaly [A self-study guide to Kabbalah]. Odesa: Astroprint, 2019. ———. Vokrug sebia byl nikto [There was no one around oneself]. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 2004. ———. Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia [The second coming of the teacher from Qumran]. Odesa: Astroprint, 2016. Singer, Nekod [Nekod Zinger]. Chernoviki Ierusalima [Rough drafts of Jerusalem]. Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2014. Valentinov, Andrei. Oko sily [Eye of might]. St. Petersburg: AST—Terra Fantastica; Moscow: Eksmo, 1996–2011.

Secondary Sources Abasheva, Marina, and Olga Krinitsyna. “Problematika natsional′noi identichnosti v slavianskoi fentezi,” 7–10. Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 332 (2010). Badkhen, Meir. Evreiskaia chertovshchina. Moscow: Gesharim, 2006. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Sobranine sochinenii. Vol. 2. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000. Banerjee, Anindita. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, 31–47. Boston. MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Berdiaev, Nikolai. Demokratiia, sotsialism i teokratiia. Berlin: Novoe Srednevekov′e, 1924. Bykov, Dmitrii. Afterword to Lestnitsa na shkaf: skazka dlia emigrantov v trekh chastiakh, by Mikhail Iudson, 554–558. Moscow: Zebra E, 2013. Claeys, Gregory. Dystopia: A Natural History: A Study of Modern Despotism, Its Antecedents, and Its Literary Diffractions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. “Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia.” In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, on Screen, on Stage, edited by Fátima Vieira, 14–18. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

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Conmigo, Darya. Comment on Vse sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie, by Linor Goralik. Goodreads.com. December 6, 2018. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43062512. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Dalton, David. “Science Fiction vs. Magical Realism: Oppositional Aesthetics and Contradictory Discourses in Sergio Arau’s A Day without a Mexican.” In Companion to Latin American Science Fiction, edited by Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel de Rosso, 43–53. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. Davidson, Gustav. A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels. New York: The Free Press, 1967. Fokkema, Douwe. Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Hall, Stuart and Paul du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996. James, Edward. “Before the Novum: The Prehistory of Science Fiction Criticism.” In Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, edited by Patrick Parrinder, 19–35. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.  Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Katsman, Roman. Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia: sleduyishchie sto let russko-izrail’skoi literatury. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021. Kul′tiasova, Galina. “Zametki dotoshnogo chitatelia.” Ierusalimskii Zhurnal 50 (2015): 180–186. Lanin, Boris. “Razmyshleniia nad knigami: russkaia utopia, antiutopiia i fantastika v novom sotsial′no-kul′turnom kontekste.” Problemy Sovremennogo Obrazovaniia 1 (2014): 161–169. Losada, José Manuel. Editorial: “Myth, Fantasy and Magic.” Amaltea, Journal of Mythocriticism 10 (2018): 1–6. Moylan, Thomas. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. New York: Routledge, 2018. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 1990. Plett, Heinrich F. “Intertextualities.” In Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett, 3–30. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. Suvin, Darko. “Locus, Horizon and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 69–83. ———. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1979. Singer, Gali-Dana, and Nekod Singer. “Dvar ha-orkhim.” Nekudataim 1 (2001). www.nekudataim. wordpress.com/about. ——— [Gali-Dana and Nekod Zinger]. “Izrail′ Maler i drugie: Fotografii iz al′boma.” Dvoetochie 22 (2014). https://dvoetochie.org/category/двоеточие-22. ———. “Ot redaktorov.” Dvoetochie 1 (2001). https://dvoetochie.org/2019/01/23/about. Singer, Nekod [Nekod Zinger]. “Kak my pristupili k ispolneniiu.” Dvoetochie 35 (2021). https:// dvoetochie.org/2021/02/12/nekod-singer-io/. Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 9–16. In Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Louis P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Smola, Klavdia [Klavdiia Smola]. Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literaturа. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021.

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The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s Zlata Zaretsky In the twentieth century, drama, as a source of revelations in the art of the word and of the stage, ceased to be at the center of theater and literature. The main reason is philosophical: human beings were now perceived as cogs in the engine of history. Drama as living literature—as a vehicle for reflecting the personal authorial reconstitution of being in action—lost value vis-à-vis poetry and prose as genres more adequate to the expressing time in history. The theater, due to the dominant influence of the director, devoured the authors vision, denying them the right to serve as the voice of history. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, everything that once made drama powerful, that is, the artist’s ideas dissolved in the characters as though in the script of time, lost its significance in the face of social slogans and dictatorial doctrines. The world lost itself in the chaos of wars and revolutions in the course of which the word as a higher truth, as revelation, was devalued. The author now depended on the director and became secondary to the mysteries of the text. Ignoring the play, relating to it as a means rather than as to a goal, and negating the author’s right to the truth, have led to a shift in attitudes towards beauty and ugliness on the stage, and to the delegitimization of drama as a genre. Hegel places drama at the epicenter of his philosophical system: “Drama is the highest stage of poetry and of art in general”:1 Drama, in Hegel’s view, is primary in the trinity of literary forms (epic, lyric poetry, theater). It “combines the objectivity of the epos with the subjective foundation of lyric poetry.” The materiality of drama is a possible source of truth about events taking place because the playwright, like the poet and the novelist, registers the pictorial essence of time: “in Copyright © 2023 by Zlata Zaretsky. 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [G. Gegel′], Lektsii po estetike: V 2-kh tomakh, trans. B. Stolpner (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001), 21.

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art, as the history of the life of the human spirit.”2 Hegel categorically negates the independence of theater from playwriting and dramaturgy. Drama is an essential but underappreciated way for a nation to discover itself. The goal of this essay is to describe only one of its ranges, that of the art of drama of the Jews from Russia in Israel, the phenomenon of the creative work of the playwrights of the aliyah of the 1970s–2020s, a new art in that country because of both the sheer number of the playwrights who have arrived and because of the characteristic features of their artistic thinking. Russian-Israeli drama is a boundary phenomenon that embodies a RussianJewish symbiosis because it is connected both to the Russian and to the Jewish culture of the word. Research into the “special Jewish-Russian air” of culture has been going on for many decades. The books O prirode russko-evreiskoi literatury (On the nature of Russian-Jewish literature, 1985) by Ilya Serman, Russkoevreiskaia literatura 20-go v. (Russian-Jewish literature of the twentieth century, 2001), by Мatvei Geizer, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura”—Trudy 90-kh godov (“Russian-Jewish literature”—works of the 1990s, 2021) by Shimon Markish, and Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura (Inventing tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish literature, 2021) by Klavdia Smola can be noted as significant. Scholars are writing about Jewish themes in Soviet literature, specifically in the creative work of Vasily Grossman, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Slutsky, and David Samoilov, but they are also thinking about the way in which Jewish assimilation is taking place simultaneously with the growth of the idea of Russian nationalism among authors of Jewish descent. In the late Soviet period, Jewish counterculture written in Russian occupied a significant place in the creative work of refuseniks. Shimon Markish in his O rossiiskom evreistve i ego literature (On Russian Jewry and its literature, 1997) characterizes drama as the spiritual baggage with which those returning from the galut would come to Israel. The works of Roman Katsman—Nostalgia for a Foreign Land (2016), Neulovimaia real′nost′ (Elusive reality, 2020), and Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia (The higher lightness of creating, 2021)—are dedicated to this complex synthesis, the coupling, the duality of cultures within a single text. In examining the experience of prose authors who write in Russian over the course of more than one hundred years in the Promised Land, Katsman describes their new worldview and mythologems as the figurative reactions of repatriates to Israeli reality. Katsman’s ideas about the search for identity in disparate literatures, about the chaotic dialogue of traditions, about

2

Konstantin Stanislavskii, Rabota aktera nad soboi, vol. 2 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1954), 25.

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“dissipative reality” and the creation of a new individual artistic outcome as a reflection of a collective spiritual experience are important. At the academic seminar on the history of Russian-Israeli literature that took place at Bar-Ilan University in 2020, Katsman argued that a Russian-Israeli author is someone who in one way or another is connected to the historical-cultural context of Israel, wherever the artist might live. This position is the key one in identifying the subject of this study. Jewish drama in Russian has not been allotted due attention in literary and theater studies. The theater scholar Viktoria Levitina, who after coming to Israel published her rescued trilogy, Russkii teatr i evrei (The Russian theater and the Jews, 1988), I evrei moia krov′. Evreiskaia drama—russkaia stsena (And Jews are also my blood: Jewish drama—Russian stage, 1991), and Evreiskii vopros i sovetskii teatr (The Jewish question and the Soviet theater, 2001), was a pioneer of this topic. Levitina resurrected from oblivion dozens of names of playwrights, critics, actors, and those in the theater who were creating the history of Jewish spirituality, as well as those who were successfully destroying it—names given without masks, brought by the author to the courtroom of the reader. In the first book Levitina moves from the patronizing efforts of Russian writers to approach the image of the Jew as the tuning fork of their own humanity; through the depths of the vision of their own path by Jews themselves within Russian culture in the second book; to the third book, where a synthesis occurs between the two points of view and shows the complexity of the problem. The value of Levitina’s trilogy is in the documentation and arrangement, following a historical logic, of facts that were always on the periphery of social consciousness and were often totally unavailable to the broad reading public. In Levitina’s work, the elucidation of the past clears pathways for understanding the processes of modern Russian-Israeli playwriting and dramaturgy. Levitina indicates her sources: both the philosophical (the influence of the European ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah) and the artistic as seen in the creative work of David Aizman, Osip Dymov, and Semen Iushkevich. RussianJewish dramaturgy, in Levitina’s opinion, emerged as part of the general movement toward national renaissance. From the moment of the formation of the Israeli government, the main problem for those Jews who were writing in Russian lay in understanding who they were, in gathering the “shards of the shattered tablets” of the national spiritual sources with the goal of self-restoration. As Dov Kontorer writes in the book Zoloto galuta (Gold of the exile), the “difficult meetings of the depersonalized” take place upon their arrival in Israel, and this is a sign of an “identity crisis”; “a self-awareness of the Jewish collective is formed, of emigrants from Russia,

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doomed to searching for their individuality.”3 These searches are extremely painful. The transformation of Jews into Russian-Soviet unthinking slaves, who do not remember their kinship, was a spiritual catastrophe. Stalin’s attempts to destroy the Jewish spirit led Jews to replace what was theirs for what was foreign, to an imperceptible transformation, when the imperial Russian consciousness became the sign of a civilization of a higher order than one’s own forgotten familial one. Olga Gershenson, the author of a book about the Gesher Theater, speaks of the Russian conquest of Israel by Jews who have fled the USSR: “A Russian spiritual colonization of Israel is taking place by Jewish creators who feel comfortable here, remaining adepts in Russian—‘European’—and not local, ‘provincial,’ thinking.”4 The one-sidedness of the view of Jewish history and the lack of understanding of Israeli cultural processes lead the researcher to unequivocal conclusions about the “depersonalization” of Israel itself as a third country, one that does not have its own cultural tradition at all, only borrowings. Meanwhile, it is precisely the Gesher Theater, as the bridge (in Hebrew, gesher) on which a meeting between the Russian and the Jewish cultures took place, that provided the first examples of “the third art of the neophytes”5 in the signature directorial stagings of Evgeny Arye: S. An-sky’s Dibuk (Dybbuk), Bulgakov’s Satana v Moskve (Satan in Moscow), and Bashevis Singer’s Shosha and Rab (The slave). Similar views about the dominant role of “extra-spatial” dramatic art created above and outside the Russian-Israeli coordinates were held by Valentin Krasnogorov, a repatriate who lives in two countries, Israel and Russia, both a theoretician and a practitioner, and the chairman of the Playwrights’ Guild of Russia. Founder of his own theory of “Dramatic Art without Borders,” Krasnogorov practiced the writing of dramatic texts in conformity with abstract scenic formulas designated by him and the common laws of theater tradition. Krasnogorov created a structure of a precisely calculated fail-safe “dramaturgy,” feasible on any international stage, a technique that can be taught to beginning authors: “The word ‘traditional’ has become almost an expletive. But after all, tradition includes Shakespeare, Racine, Gogol, Chekhov, Brecht, and Erdman—‘traditional’ playwrights wrote in various ways, but they wrote well.” Krasnogorov explains how to write “well” in the books Chetyre steny i odna strast′

3 4 5

Dov Kontorer, Zoloto galuta, coll. and ed. Moshe Kenigshtein ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2009), 55. Olga Gershenson, Russian Theatre in Israel: A Study of Cultural Colonization (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 120. The name of a new theater concept based on the encounter of traditions of different cultures.

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(Four walls and one passion, 1997), O drame i teatre (About drama and the theater, 2018), and Osnovy dramaturgii. Teoriia, tekhnika i praktika dramy (Basics of dramaturgy: The theory, technique, and practice of drama, 2021). His goal is to call upon playwrights to create a certain ideal supranational scenic literature. Dozens of his plays are put on all over the world and convince us, that it is possible to comprehend the “secret of dramaturgy that fits everyone.” To write “well,” that is, to create plays according to formulas that are in accord with the needs of the director and the audience is, in his opinion, what “tradition” that should be adhered to is, and success will be assured. Yet the only places where Krasnogorov’s dramaturgical ideas have not been officially recognized and are not considered “good” are Israel and Israel’s professional theater. Krasnogorov’s plays are not staged in Israel. Meanwhile, he has written five plays on topics of Jewish history: Vavilon (Babylon), Pesn′ Pesnei (Song of Songs), Delo Beilisa (The Beilis affair), Zhrebii (The lot), and the Purim play Treugol′nye bulochki (Three-cornered pastries). Another play, Liubov′ do poteri pamiati (Love to the point of amnesia), accidentally found itself connected by plot with an incident that took place in Israel. There is nothing specifically Jewish in it, incidentally, as in the others. Such as, for example, the play Vavilon (2002). Its theme is Tanakhic, but the treatment is totally Soviet: ethnic strife, a lack of understanding between one nation and another, and, as a consequence, an inextinguishable enmity between them; Babylon as a symbol of conflicts in the world. The residents undertake the building of a huge, prestigious but useless tower. The dictatorial government, incomprehension of languages, and ethnic hostility lead to the destruction of the tower and the destruction of the city. What results is an analogy with the collapse of the USSR. Krasnogorov emphasizes the problem: “The paradox is that I wrote all those (biblical) plays in Russia, before leaving for Israel.”6 This “paradox” is the stamp of Russian-Jewish consciousness, an organic discordance of Russian and Jewish codes of thinking, the mechanical imposition of Russian association onto Israeli historical realities, the use of biblical parables for the designation of Soviet ideologemes, of which both the author and many of his countrymen were victims. Twenty-three performances of Krasnogorov’s plays, including the biblical ones, took place in Israel as well; they reflect the common illness of a rupture of comprehension; they were performed only by amateur collectives in Russian. However, they were staged by Jews who had already liberated themselves of illusion, and this is the path to self-discovery. 6 Quotations without indicated sources refer to my personal conversations with as-yetunpublished authors.

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Krasnogorov’s works are the key to the complex phenomenon of all RussianIsraeli drama. What is the essence and meaning of this phenomenon for today’s art in this country? Are there models of the achievements of Russian-Israeli dramaturgy that are accessible in Hebrew as well? How does a pictorial Jewish universality arise that is sufficiently deep and that is located outside national borders? These questions form the essence of my conversations with playwrights and are presented in fragments throughout this essay. Gathering material was the first step in describing the phenomenon of Russian-Israeli drama of the 1970s–2020s. The results of this project became a sourcebook of the Israeli Playwrights Association affiliated with the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. Included in the sourcebook are about sixty authors, each of whom is examined according to the above-mentioned principle proposed by Roman Katsman. Israeli Russian-language literature for the stage reflects the authors’ selfknowledge and national and artistic self-identification in a new system of artistic coordinates. Based on the idea of an Israeli spiritual primary source, in terms of the form and intensity of the search for artistic harmony between multilingual (Hebrew-Russian) poles, contrasting cultural codes and taking place of residence and mentality into account, all the authors who constitute the subject of this essay can be divided into three groups. The first group consists of universalists and globalists, for whom a general knowledge of Jewish history and the depths of the Bible are the path not to slavery but to the status of the citizens of the world. The values of Judaism are not a closed world limited by religious dogmas but only an initial starting point of the journey to oneself, an open spiritual space, where man looks for an image of personal existence. This group is represented by such playwrights as Efim Gammer, Aryeh Elkana, Nina Voronel′, and Leon Agulianskii. *** Efim Gammer is the author of the plays Rossiia-Izrail′. Nu i Teatr! (Russia-Israel: What theater!), V snegakh za gran′iu vremeni (In the snows beyond the margin of time), V chas Messii, u kolodtsa s zhivoi vodoi (In the hour of the Messiah, at the well with the living waters), and Lunnaia golova Gogolia (The lunar head of Gogol). He is an artist of immense journalistic strength. His plays are reports from the scene of events, mystical drama-parables, in which legends are born from recognizable Russian-Siberian or ancient Judaic realia; these are, so to speak, an Oral Torah of the theater, a theatrical midrash. Israeli or Russian reality is transformed under the pen of Gammer into the mythological RussianJewish world. With the whole structure of events, the author convinces us that

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the Messiah has been born in Russia and from there comes the salvation of Israel (V snegakh za gran′iu vremeni), because there is unity in Jewish-Russian history, in his opinion. His symbolic mystical play Lunnaia golova Gogolia is about this; in it the missing head of the Russian writer appears in the imagination of a soldier-repatriate at the grave of the Jewish Patriarchs in Hebron, in the Cave of Machpelah. *** Unlike Efim Gammer, who weighs Israel on the Russian scales of values, Aryeh Elkana judges Russia from an Israeli distance. Moreover, Israel itself turns out to be “under judgement.” A theater scholar and philosopher, Elkana writes about this in the following plays: Brat′ia (Brothers), Sestry (Sisters), Mir! Mir! Mir! (Peace! Peace! Peace!), Bred (Delirium), Demokratiia, tlia, demokratiia (Democracy, aphid, democracy), Ia—Fedra (I Phaedra), Meier-Buff (Meyer Buff, as well as in the documentary trilogy Tragediia Sovetskogo teatra (Tragedy of the Soviet theater) about the directors Vsevolod Meyerkhol′d, Aleksandr Tairov, and Anatolii Efros. The drama of the founders of Soviet theater is depicted in the context of the tragic existence of the Soviet intelligentsia. In this “most-Christian of worlds” (to quote the famous line from Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End) every intellectual is an “Yid.” “His plays are psychological satires, in which a dissident from Russia remains “above the fray” in the battle for one’s human dignity, acquiring the status of an independent thinker, which he retains among other places, also in Israel, viewed at a distance and critically. *** Nina Voronel′, who for many years published the Russian-Israeli magazine 22 with her husband, Aleksandr Voronel′, is the author of the following plays: Etoi noch′iu eshche odin dissident (One more dissident tonight), Khimchistka vremeni (Dry cleaners of time), Nado ochen′ zakhotet′ (You have to really want it), Utomlennoe solntse (The exhausted sun), Voskreshennyi (The resurrected), Kassir vechnosti (Cashier of eternity), Skazka nashego vremeni (Fairy tale of our time), Main liber Kats (Mein lieber Katz), Dusia i dramaturg (Dusya and the playwright), and others. Voronel′’s plays are a psychological reflection of the Soviet catastrophe, an attempt to overcome it in the Israeli historical context. For her, Jewish history facilitates access to universal culture, which Voronel′ perceives as a form of worldwide biblical civilization and in the face of which she experiences a feeling of guilt as a Jewish woman, who has just returned to her origin.

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

In Voronel′’s 1970s play Prosti menia, Khanaan (Dibuk nashikh dnei) (Forgive me, Canaan [The dybbuk of our day]), the well-known Judaic archetype is dissolved in the subconscious of modern Israelis, predetermining their feelings and direct reactions. The action develops in the mirror of a myth, acquiring through its reflection a vast mystical meaning. Dibuk nashikh dnei is a psychodrama calling for personal transformation, everyone’s possible catharsis through a dialogue with the spirits of the loved and unforgettable dead. This is the story of an idealist who perished in one of Israel’s wars (crushed by a tank) and left his wife Leah a widow. An-sky’s enamored kabbalist Chanan, after deciding to pay the price of death to reach the garden of Eden, becomes, in Nina Voronel′’s play, Canaan, a symbol of the primary Jewish homeland, the land to which Abraham was ordered to go by divine command. A personal story of unrealized love with Canaan develops as Israel’s ceremony of repentance before its past for the sake of its continuation in the present and the future. Voronel′’s prose, plays, and journalism, like her editorship of the magazine 22, construct the harmonic path of a universalist author. They show the development of her identity as a Jewish cosmopolitan. *** The playwright and prose writer Leon Agulianskii takes a similar position in his work. “A Jew is a man of the Land, whom you can become, if you allow all nationalities to pass through you” is his slogan. He is an Israeli doctor, special forces volunteer, and author of plays about conscious and free sacrificial choice on behalf of art, the search for truth outside countries and borders: Bolezn′ pod nazvaniem zhizn′ (That illness called life), Dirizher (The conductor), Dereviannyi teatr (Wooden theater), Gnezdo vorob′ia (Sparrow’s nest), and Ya zhiv! (I’m alive!). In a conversation with me, Agulianskii said, “In my view, culture does not have citizenship. Borders are not visible from the height of a bird’s flight. What interests me in my creative work is man’s dialogue with himself, wherever he might be!” Agulianskii’s basic theme, both in his novels and in his plays, is the existential search for a Jewish self both in Israel and in the world that does not lose touch with fundamental principles. The author writes, in his own words, about the “conflict with the world and with oneself.” Being a Jew means putting into practice the connection with one’s own spiritual source, searching for the paths of its expression, acquiring the ability to manage it, like a conductor (following the title of his play) of a pan-human orchestra. This same approach to Jewish-Israeli realia as a stepping stone on the way to a personal cosmopolitan self-definition at any point in the world is also characteristic for Semen Zlotnikov. “Jerusalem is worth a mass!” is his credo

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of self-sacrifice approaching self-abnegation and self-dissolution. Zlotnikov is the author of such plays as Ostorozhno, k Vam sumasshedsshii! (Be careful, a madman is here to see you!), Mne ne zhit′ bez tebia (I can’t live without you), Val′s odinokikh (Waltz of the lonely), Intsest (Incest), and Ivan i Sara (Ivan and Sarah), which were staged in Israel in Russian, as well as bilingual plays such as Prekrasnoe lekarstvo ot toski (An excellent medicine for longing) and Razgovory s Bogom (Conversations with God). The plays Prishel muzhchina k zhenshchine (A man came to a woman) and Ukhodil starik ot starukhi (An old man was leaving an old woman), subsequently performed “in the context of local realities,” sounded in Israel like a repetition of the idea of Russian-Israeli spiritual unity, an example to be copied in the theaters of Europe. In the plays Eshche ne vecher (It’s still not evening) and Ne meniaisia nigde (Don’t change anywhere), Zlotnikov continues the story of the spiritual ascent he began in Israel, thanks to which he turns his original existential Russian drama into a biblical play about universal psychological issues, important to all his compatriots. His experience of the two countries, first Russia then Israel, helps him feel that he is simply a “man of the globe.” *** The second group of playwrights consists of “assimilationists”—Jewish adepts of Russian culture within the Israeli one, who exaggerate the significance of the Russian tradition. They are nostalgic negationists of the Jewish-Israeli culture who present it as local, small, provincial, limited, unequal to the Russian classical tradition, which, in their opinion, dominates in the world theater. The spiritual catastrophe of separation from their own cultural roots, experienced by Soviet Jews, is reflected in many plays by these “Russian Israelis.” Here are a few examples: Aleksandr Karabchievskii’s play Po spetsial′nosti (By profession), about the tragedy of not being in demand because of mental disparity; Dmitrii Arkadin’s play U kogo trava zelenei? (Whose grass is greener?), about nostalgic recollections and the pain of irreversible changes in a community of repatriates; Adam Eitan’s plays Nebroskoe nasledstvo (Inconspicuous inheritance) and Posle liubvi (After love), in which the psychological devices of a modern Russian detective are used as a surgical scalpel to expose any social (including Israeli) system that does not recognize its successfully legalized criminals. Finally, this group includes the plays of Boris Goller, published in Israel in 2000 in the book Fleity na ploshchadi (Flutes in the square): Sto brat′ev Bestuzhevykh (One hundred Bestuzhev brothers), Peterburgskie fleity (Petersburg flutes), Plach po Lermontovu, ili Belye oleni (A lament for Lermontov,

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

or White deers), and Prival komedianta, ili Venok Griboedovu (Teatr odnogo dramaturga) (A comedian’s rest, or A garland for Griboedov [A theater of one playwright]); the book also included his essay “Slovo i teatr” (The word and the theater). Many of Goller’s plays were banned in the USSR. For example, the play Pokolenie 41 (The generation of ’41) was staged in the Theater of the Young Viewer in St. Petersburg in 1968, when Soviet tanks had already entered Czechoslovakia, and was immediately removed for mentioning the mass persecutions of 1937. In 1969, the theater director Zinovii Korogodskii proposed to Goller that he do an adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin for his theater. This “attempt at a dramatic study” of the novel changed the writer’s whole life and led his path to a cycle of “historical dramas.” With the aid of the theater, these dramas researched the events of the past that excited the Russian public even today: Vokrug ploshchadi (Around the square), Plach po Lermontovu, and Venok Griboedovu. The success of one of them, Sto brat′ev Bestuzhevykh, in Vladimir Malyshchitskii’s amateur staging, foreshadowed the birth in 1978 of the State Youth Theater, which created out of Goller’s text a new kind of authorial intellectual theater, in which the playwright’s thought and not the director’s willfulness determined the action on the stage, drawing the audience into a field of precise visual and intellectual associations. However, in 1989, the radio version of the play about Griboedov, Prival komedianta, turned out to be his last work for the stage. Boris Goller was on the brink of death more than once because of the condescending attitude toward his work in Russia and the limited performances of his plays. Nonetheless, once he became a free Israeli and had the possibility of working in two countries, he consciously rejected the new Israeli theatrical realia, refused to study his cultural roots, and became, in his historical home, a writer of Russian history. This is confirmed by the publication of his best plays in Fleity na ploshchadi in Jerusalem. In his essay “Slovo i teatr,” Goller sketches out the perspectives of an authorial theater in which the word will be decisive. In 2003, he proved that an “aristocratic theater of the lofty Word” is possible: he staged, at the Russian Cultural Center (Tel Aviv), his play Plach po Lermontovu under the direction of Mikhail Narodetskii. In 2006, Goller returned to St. Petersburg. Now he conducts the Playwriting Seminar at the St. Petersburg House of Writers, does research on Russian classical literature of the nineteenth century, and teaches at the Academy of Theatrical Art. In 2019, he published the book Masterskaia Shekspira (Shakespeare’s workshop). A brilliant man of letters, a poet, playwright, and Judaic scholar, he has

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made an important contribution to Russian culture. This is also a component of the phenomenon of Russian-Israeli drama: mutual interaction takes place even at the most extreme poles. *** The Jewish view of Russian and Zionist reality, backed by the tradition of classic Russian critical realism, reveals itself in the work of Aleksandr Radovskii, who emigrated to Israel from Leningrad in 1973. His plays Stikhiinoe bedstvie (Natural disaster), Korol′ i prints, ili Pravda o Gamlete (The king and the prince, or The truth about Hamlet), and Schastlivyi bilet, ili Brat′ia i sestry (Lucky ticket, or Brothers and sisters) are a critical pictorial cross-section of skewed Russian history, a warning about coming catastrophes, about the destruction of values, the foreshadowing of which he sees in Jewish history. But he writes about this history like a Russian analyst, who in his codes of cultural thinking is close to his addressee, the Russian Jew, a dissident, searching for the truth. For this reason, it is not myths that the playwright reconstructs but analytical, disquisitional pictures of contemporary Israeli realities, as well as biblical history—see, for example, his play Etot chelovek—Moisei (This man is Moses). In the play Korol′ i prints (2005), for all his “love of our ancestral graves,” Radovskii describes them without illusions. He makes the audience think about order and predestination in the Israeli chaos in his plays Somnambuly (Sleepwalkers), Strannye proisshestviia v dome Shapiro (Strange events in the Shapiro house), Glazami Sheiloka (Through Shylock’s eyes), Chasy i master (The clock and the master), and Zachem? (What for?). He shows Israel without unnecessary ornament and with total responsibility, as his own domestic space, where the hero dissolves within himself, his deficiencies and virtues, ready to give his life for his home. *** The Jerusalem writer Mikhail Kheifets, disregarding Jewish history and mentality, masterfully creates abstract dramatic art without borders, proceeding only from the codes of Russian cultural thinking. Its apotheosis is the play Spasti kamer-iunkera Pushkina (To save Kammerjunker Pushkin), which became a winner of the International Competition of Russian-Language Dramatic Art “Deistvuiushchie litsa” (Dramatis personae) in 2012, winner of the “Zolotaia maska” Prize for 2013, of the “Molodye teatry Rossii” Festival in 2015, and of the International Theater Forum in India in 2016. The play was honored with dozens of performances in the Russian-speaking world, but it was received in Israel only by the nostalgia-filled adepts of Russian culture. Nonetheless, it is also part

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

of the phenomenon of Russian-Israeli dramatic art, a turn from Jerusalem to our “Egyptian” past. The vigor and persistence of the Russian cultural tradition, the “gold of the galut,” is seen more clearly from Israel. Spasti kamer-iunkera Pushkina is a polysemic notional pyramid, where the image of Pushkin is inserted into the coming-of-age story of a pioneer, a “Soviet man” (as referred to by the colloquial term sovok), a boor (zhlob) of the heady 1990s. It is not only a story of Russia, but a story of the maturation of the human soul, for which Pushkin becomes an attractive secret, the focus of values. For the character, this secret makes it worth living and dying; and for the audience, to have hope in the future. The character’s obsession with Pushkin helps him develop general human qualities such as conscience, nobility, and dignity. The ending, in which the alcoholic Pitunin’s death occurs on the date of Pushkin’s duel, turns into a healing revelatory scene: the character comes to the realization that the cause of his murder was not a friend’s betrayal, but a reunion with the spirit of Pushkin, who marked his life with his blood, like a path of honor. After this discovery, everything recedes to the background. In the flight toward the light, nothing is of any import. This higher moment of Kheifets’s notional pyramid marks the play as humanistic “dramatic art without borders.” It also shows the influence of Krasnogorov’s theory of universalistic dramaturgy—not coincidentally, as Krasnogorov was Kheifets’s teacher. *** The third group consists of nationalists—the playwrights for whom Jewish history, Judaic culture, its past and current sources, are not a means, but a goal and mission, defining both their personal ethics, their selection of topics, and the choice of appropriate artistic means. The work of Aleskandr Kazarnovskii, Irina Gorelik, Galina Podol′skaia, Oleg Firer, and Mark Azov belongs to this group. *** The turn to biblical times and subjects can bring writers to belief in the rebirth and predestination of man–on earth, in general, and in the new Israel, in particular. In awe of the Holy Land, the Israeli culturologist Galina Podol′skaia created a new theatrical Russian-Israeli regional study: plays based on her personal discoveries in art and archeology that serve as a means to attaining a deeper knowledge of Israel. Her poetic scenic fantasies are Judaic pictures come to life, in which the plot is the key to understanding their immense spiritual potential for the modern day. Devoting her life to the immortalization of

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Marc Chagall, she wrote the play Po lestnitse Iakova (Along Jacob’s ladder), a reconstruction of the person of the artist through the prism of his paintings, essays, and the autobiographical tale Moia zhizn′ (My life), which she combined with the story of Jacob’s dream. The idea of the immortality of art, formulated by an ancient Jewish master, is presented in the play Galileiskaia Mona Liza (The Mona Lisa of Galilee). The play focuses on the portrait of a beautiful woman, a mosaic by an unknown artist from the moshav of Tzippori where, possibly, the disputes of the Jerusalem Talmud unfolded. The heroine is one thousand years older than Leonardo da Vinci’s Gioconda. In the fantastical plot about the love between the woman, who comes to life from stone, and the archeologist Aleksandr, who has revealed her to the world, we see the authorial fantasy about the power of the biblical beauty arising from the ashes, like the legendary bird phoenix, in order to heal human hearts and save them from rationalism and pragmatism. Deti Radugi (Children of the rainbow), a lyrical comedy in the style of Maeterlinck, was written during the Days of Israel in St. Petersburg in 2004. In this play, Israel is created by children, who come to Israel from various corners of the planet and become “flowers of the rainbow” there, embodying the heavenly principle on the earth. Galina Podol'skaia’s plays have been performed at festivals in Jerusalem, Astrakhan, St. Petersburg, and Jaffa and serve as an excellent advertisement for Israeli culture. *** The biblical trilogy of Mark Azov (1925–2011), a prose writer, poet, soldier, playwright, and satirist, became the model of the “third art,” which arose in connection with the Jewish forefathers and the secrets of the Tanakh. Azov first became acquainted with the Judaic texts in Tashkent in 1942 when, while at university, he learned from a Polish refugee about the efforts to create the state of Israel. Azov moved to Israel in 1994. All his work after emigration focuses on the idea of national self-identification, the answer to the question of who Jews are as a nation, who they were and who they will be in the light of their history and the prophets. The trilogy consists of the plays Vesennii tsar′ chernogolovykh (The spring king of the black-headed ones), Iftakh-odnoliub ( Jephthah, man of a single love), and Poslednii den′ Sodoma (Last day of Sodom), as well as an epilogue titled “Misteriia blef ” (Mystery-bluff), was published together in I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ (Of laughter, prose, and love, 2003) and directed by Zigmund Belevich at Galileia Theater in 1997–2003. On the stage, it became the symbol of RussianIsraeli theater, a sign of the national identity of Russian Jews, the successor of the civilized intellectuals of David’s Kingdom, a connection which the playwright,

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

driven by anxiety about the future of Israel, was able to establish in biblical scenic texts. Azov also expresses this philosophical doctrine in his biblical prose, such as the short stories “Odin” (Alone), “Kainova pechat′” (Stamp of Cain), “Potselui Lilit” (Lilith’s kiss), “Zhitie valaamovoi oslitsy” (The life of Balaam’s ass), “Iov” ( Job), “Kniga golubia” (Book of the pigeon), “Glotaiushchaia zemlia” (The earth that ingests), “Chto nasha zhizn′” (What is our life?), “Gennaia pamiat′” (Gene memory), and “Ochevidnoe veroiatnoe” (The obviously probable), published in the collection I obrushatsia gory (And mountains shall fall, 2009). The question that permeates all these texts is: Why is Jewish history so tragic?! Where is the source of the greatness and the woe, and can the inevitable be averted? Like a knight of his nation, a Jewish Don Quixote, Azov challenges G-d Himself to a duel, demanding an answer. In his biblical texts, Azov argues with the creator, accuses Him, and attempts to understand His design. In the story “I obrushatsia gory,” as in his plays, he talks to G-d as playwright to playwright, as creator of the theater of history to creator of plays: “Is it possible that He himself pits nations against each other [. . .] for the sake of the bloody victory of good over evil?”7 In Azov’s theatrical trilogy, the Almighty emerges as an abstract, cruel force, a hidden source of energy. G-d is far from humankind, and yet G-d is humankind’s mirror, and so humankind is required to awaken, to understand itself in the past and the present in order to be saved. What is the secret of the poetics of these plays? How did the author manage to place the Tanakh at the service to artistic goals, to achieve an extremely powerful effect, and to remain true to himself? Azov tells us: It is the truth that draws me to the Tanakh; it is written like a good realistic work. There is neither black nor white—there is ambiguous truth and multidimensional characters with negative as well as positive features. Jews spare neither their righteous men nor G-d himself. And I like the Tanakh precisely because of its contradiction. The plots and images of the Tanakh are contradictory, like life itself. I juxtapose two truths: the historical, the Tanakh; and the modern. And so, a mask appears, that is, an artistic image, a generalization. The truth of history and that of

7

Mark Azov, I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ (Tel Aviv: Gutenberg, 2003), 18.

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today, of the moment, in combination provide drama, tragedy, that is, poetry translated into artistic prose.8 The theater of the intrinsically valuable “third art” is thus born at the juncture of times. Reflected in it, as in the facets of a crystal, are the past, the present, and the future as a unity. In this unity lies the answer to the question about the nature of the creator’s work and the prospects of humankind: The clash of two truths leads to an aesthetic explosion, an emission of aesthetic energy. This can save us, because it helps us recognize, where we are! We should not be afraid of speaking the truth! If man knows where he is sailing, he can pass between Scylla and Charybdis. One thing is clear to me: the further from the obvious, the closer to the truth—therein lies the secret of art!9 Azov’s first biblical play, Vesennii tsar′ chernogolovykh, was received precisely in this way—as a revelation. It was written at the beginning of the 1990s before he left Moscow, as a prelude to his aliyah, a foretaste of Israel. Azov was deeply affected by the deciphering of cuneiform writing from the ancient Ur. Drawing on the images of a lost civilization, Azov devised a plot about a poor gardener Elilbani, who is chosen as king in order to be burned according to ritual. Elilbani accidentally remains alive and, in an attempt to save the state, creates the first moral law—a prototype of the idea of monotheism. In this play, Azov raises questions about the intended purpose of the given world, about the necessity of defending it, and the weapons in this struggle—whether they are conscience and honesty or malice and greed. Elilbani consciously refuses to live after realizing that his prophesies, chiseled in stone, bring grief, as they are perverted by blind men who are unscrupulous and limited, unprepared for this new morality. However, the staged version of the play unexpectedly ends not with a beautiful death but with a prosaic life. The king, who has seen the light, is now “newborn.” In this irrational state, he gobbles up what belongs to someone else. This humiliation encapsulates the feeling of dependence of any newly arrived repatriate. And in the eyes of the actor, drilling into the audience, there is despair

Quoted in Zlata Zaretsky [Zlata Zaretskaia], Fenomen izrail′skogo teatra ( Jerusalem: Studiia Klik, 2018), 285. 9 Ibid. 8

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

and determination! The director condemns the character to a life in which he will have to stand up for his convictions. In the director’s vision, it is more important to do battle than to surrender and not be fulfilled. This theme of clarity and the personal responsibility of everyone rings out in the epilogue of the play, combined with images of spring renewal. This refers to the idea of God as victory over chaos. And this unites the director with the playwright, who writes, “For us Jews, this is about today. The action takes place in the Chaldean city of Ur, which our forefather Abraham left after hearing His [order], Lech-Lecha [Pick yourself up and go]. The Great Ur, the cradle of the oldest civilization, fell due to the fault of its own citizens. No one can destroy our house except ourselves.” This thought remains the main idea for Azov in the whole trilogy. Other questions are also connected with it: What is man; what is man’s destiny; and can man stand against the higher power, against divine will and commandments, especially in Israel? Dialogue with the ruler of the universe is also present in Belevich’s staging of Azov’s play Iftakh-odnoliub. Belevich’s vision was a contemporary “metatheater,” as seen in the number of performers on stage (out of forty people, seven were main actors and everyone else took the role of a “plastic landscape,” representing a battle, a girls’ game, a wandering in the mountains, a palace)—ensemble work and a polyphony of sound. It emerged in the context of a wave of terror as a message about the tragedy of a nation and an individual who took upon himself the mission of its salvation. The play Iftakh-odnoliub is based on biblical chronicles ( Judges 11–12) and follows the true hero of this story. Jephthah is the illegitimate son of Gilead, who was cast out of his father’s house by his brothers. In a time of troubles, he saves his nation from annihilation, and then sacrifices his own daughter for its sake. The play is a meditation on human blindness and the danger of personal ambitions. It is a passionate debate with God, in which man is crushed by His power and His inconceivable designs. In his debate with Azov, Belevich arranged the action as consistent proof of the illusoriness of Jephthah’s faith—the “pseudoreality” in which, in Belevich’s opinion, the character lives and that destroys him. However, the scenic result turned out to be the opposite, closer to Azov’s message. The spiritual presence of the higher power, its participation in the fate of the characters was obvious, despite the director’s strong opposition to the religious idea. In his defiance of Azov’s word, Belevich actually followed it. In my perception as a viewer, its effect on the audience was similar to a purifying fire, burning away doubts and fears in the name of certainty, regardless of pain and anguish, tears and lies.

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Ill. 1. Iftakh-odnoliub, by Mark Azov, directed by Zigmund Belevich, Galileia Theater, 1999. The title role is played by Igor Elizaryev.

Belevich and Azov’s biblical stage productions are an example of the multivoiced, polyphonic metatheater which emerged from dialogue with God, an intellectual debate on stage. The characters oppose God or rebel against a higher power, but this leads to an unexpected result: it becomes evident that a higher reason actually controls the actions of characters, determining their lives and deaths. Who, then, is the architect of the temple, that is, the staged play? Who overcomes the dust of the past and reveals the new, who is the builder and the Messiah in the theater? The author, who writes the text in which every word is as precious as gold? The director, who gives life to dead letters, filling them with original human constructs? The actors, who draw truth from their souls and bodies? The audience member, who sees in the hints of others not mundanity but existence? And filling in what is unsaid with the power of imagination? Who can say who he is—first, the central one? The main one is probably the Creator, who dictates the laws of creativity to His charges. And only those who submit to Him, who dissolve themselves in creative passion, are the winners—and sometimes they become equal to the creator Himself. In Azov’s short story “I obrushatsia gory,” there is a key dialogue on this subject between the author and G-d, who also calls Himself the “Playwright”: “So let’s talk as playwright to playwright [. . .] Our creation has yet to be embodied in life.” This fantastical dialogue is also realized in the play Poslednii den′ Sodoma. The events of the Tanakh on which it is based are part of the global human drama, which is even now developing according to the scenario of the

The Phenomenon of Russian-Israeli Drama of the 1970s–2020s

creator. It was presented in the Galileia Theater with a paradoxical ambiguity. On the stage there appeared a small fascist town, occupied with its own selfsatisfaction as the principle of life. Egotism, elevated to a cult and realized as free love, was represented by a colossal phallus, at the base of which there are flowers and fruit, symbols of adoration of base principles. Against this background, acrobatic scenes of homosexual love unfolded, accompanied by a piano that was visible to the audience. The nakedness of the intention, its “concert-like” quality provoked the viewer to take part in dialogue. From the very beginning, the audience was invited to think with the actors. Frank gestures were projected— “shot”—onto the audience because the recognizability of the most unrestricted, uncensored erotic images that nowadays are shown on television and widespread on the internet does not require the slightest historical memory. The speeches of the masters of Sodom confirmed that the events taking place on the stage mirrored the audience’s life: “I believe that somewhere in the twenty-first century our experience will be adopted, perceived with interest, and called ‘culture’ and ‘progress.’”10 The timeliness of the performance was evident from the outset. Azov constructed his play on the supposed confession of those who were ordered to be destroyed. This was a theatrical midrash in action, because the Jewish oral tradition permits everyone to interpret. What were they thinking about when they found out they had one day left to Live? Where did their souls turn in the last moment, when they were forced to analyze their whole life path? The novelty of the play is that Azov sees a person in every sinner, one who lives, exists in reality, wishes to live according to the rules of the space and time in which one finds oneself, who makes mistakes, but also has moments of clarity, if only short ones, in the attempt to see and in this way, perhaps, be saved. This position grew out of Azov’s reading of the Tanakh. However, Azov was also a soldier, made wise by experience. He fearlessly looked into the face of mortally dangerous modernity, and followed his skepticism as he added a prologue and an epilogue to his play. In the prologue, a debate unfolds about fairness. Abraham begs to postpone the destruction and even asks the angels of G-d not to destroy Sodom, if at least ten honest men can be found there. Azov’s Abraham does not even accept the idea of such a judgment: “They can’t all [be killed] one after the other!” Abraham does not hesitate to haggle for every man—he is not G-d, he does not see the universe as an experiment. Everyone is dear to him, and he manages to obtain the most sparing verdict: salvation for the price of ten righteous men.

10 Azov, I smekh, i proza, i liubov′, 167.

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Later, in the central part, comes the destruction of Sodom caused by the triumph of the sinners. In the epilogue, in the dispute with G-d over man, the author introduces another biblical image: the daughters of Lot, who sin with their own father for the sake of perpetuating the family line. Abraham, whom the author makes witness the scene in the desert, “freezes in horror and, raising his arms to the heavens, inquires: ‘Why did you wipe out the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah in order to give birth to another, most terrible sin?’” The playwright places the justice of G-d’s retribution in doubt. His paradoxical text stages the contrast of the composition and images, aimed at discrediting the idealization of Jewish history, which, in Azov’s view, is based on a battle for the purity and sanctity of Jacob’s nation. “I am the LORD your G-d; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy” is an indefensible idea, in Azov’s opinion. The sinful reality is generated by the same Experimenter, who tests us every day, checking our conformity with His design. Mark Azov, the creator of the Tanakhic trilogy in the Galileia Theater, is a writer who thinks in global categories, reflecting the changes in the consciousness of a whole generation that has awoken and arrived in the Holy Land in search of an answer. His thought encompasses the development of history from the first appearance of the idea of monotheism in pre-Abrahamic Mesopotamia (in the first play), to a direct dialogue with G-d (in the second play), to a criticism of the universal experiment (in the third play). In his trilogy, Azov expresses his pain, as a human and an Israeli citizen, over everything that happens with his nation. He does this in his brilliantly written and highly relevant philosophical parable, which he calls an “artistic invention,” where “any correspondence of names, including biblical ones, are absolutely coincidental.” The trilogy, in the spirit of the “third art,” which emerged from the clash of temporal paradigms and an eruption of aesthetic energy, became the true metatheater of our time. Expressed in it is the surreal life of modern Israeli society, which also stands in dispute with the higher idea, trying to save its children from bloody sacrifice. Azov’s Poslednii den′ Sodoma is a play in which the scale of the outcome is obvious. Its central characters are not Tanakhic heroes, but random people, who fall under the wheels of history on the streets of Sodom, and the angels, who come to kill them. In the humanistic conception of the author and the director, who defend man in the face of God, the most important characters are two small creatures with big hearts: the White Angel and his failed bride, Sgulati. Their love, which develops in spite of time and divine judgment, is one of the most powerful elements of the play.

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The combination of white apparel, white circles, and gestures directed at our subconscious, inspired thoughts about the harmony of the feeble and wonderful life, which stands against all experiments, even the most justified ones. The proofs of the power of weakness were so convincing that they outweighed the rational reasoning of the Black Angel of Death, who argued for “blood in the name of the idea,” as he turned into the reincarnations of coming dictators, among them phantoms of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Arafat.

Ill. 2. Poslednii den′ Sodoma, by Mark Azov, directed by Zigmund Belevich. Galileia Theater, 2003. The role of the Black Angel is played by Igor Elizaryev.

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Only his eyes betrayed our contemporary, the same eternal Jephthah, who continued his argument with G-d and with his conscience. After the Angel of Death, the warrior of G-d, cleared the earth of sinful filth and fulfilled the divine plan, he also began to doubt. The epilogue, which arose by the will of the director and not the author (Azov’s text concludes with the impossible meeting of the two lovers), takes place in the already “cleansed,” dead desert. The White and Black angels protect a small girl from the desert wind; she is symbolically addressed by the name of the dead Sgulati.

Ill. 3. Poslednii den′ Sodoma, by Mark Azov, directed by Zigmund Belevich. Galileia Theater, 2003. “Will we protect our home?”

Their hands are joined over the roof of her illuminated little hut, and their anxious eyes are turned to the audience . . . And the music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is heard. It sounds as if grim fate is banging on our door, too. Will we protect our home, Israel, from possible destruction? Will we have enough strength to overcome ourselves—we are, after all, not angels?! In Mark Azov’s own words, “the Book of Books is built on the conflict of Man with G-d and G-d with Himself. [. . .] But despite this conflict, each of us is responsible. The trilogy of the Galileia Theater is a call to think, stop, and reconsider one’s path. For in every person there is the root not only of ruin but also of salvation.” Azov’s biblical triad, as staged by Belevich, is the embodiment of the spiritual quests and the great creative possibilities of the aliyah of the 1990s. Azov’s

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playwrighting incorporates a dream about an Israeli theater that will offer universal images, accessible for many people who strive to comprehend the primary text, the history of the Jews, as a scenario of the fate of humankind. The prophecy of Azov’s biblical playwrighting, based on a reinterpretation of the Tanakh, is relevant and priceless.

Conclusion As a cultural phenomenon, Russian-Israeli drama of the exodus from the USSR at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is rooted in Jewish culture, which takes its sources from the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and extends to the time of the reclamation of Eretz Israel as a historical Jewish homeland and the rebirth of the state. The precursors of this dramaturgy in the 1920s, such as Avraam Wissotzky (Krov′ Makkaveev [Blood of the Maccabees]) and Naum Shimkin (the trilogy Saul, David, and Solomon), created romantic heroic images, myths in the name of the ideology of a future state. (See Vladimir Khazan’s essay in this volume.) During the period of the Shoah (Holocaust), Jewish drama turned into the “art of clenched fists,” an image of national memory and faith (Sami Feder in the Kazet Theater, Kasriel Broydo and Leyb Rozental in the theater of the Vilno ghetto, Itzhak Katzenelson and his texts and performances in the Warsaw ghetto). The explosion of Russian-Jewish drama in the postwar USSR, as a reaction to the ongoing genocide, encompassed the underground culture of the refusenik movement of the 1960s–1980s. In Israel, beginning in the 1970s, this creative dramatic wave turned into a free artistic movement. Drama documented, like a chronicle, the annals of the spiritual life of the Russian Jews in their new crossing of the Red Sea, which led them into the Israeli desert. From 1970s to the present, the history of drama has been a free search for a national identity, an effort to comprehend the Russian roots and combine them with the Jewish national tradition. This difficult path is marked by the playwrights’ quests for their own place in the free cultural space and, above all, by the attempts to find harmony in the synthesis of traditions, embodied in the creative work of a new type of theater, “neophytes of third art,” for which Mark Azov’s biblical trilogy became the model in Israel.11 The time of free experimentation, the search for an 11 We can also mention Irina Gorelik’s creative fantasies about Jewish history, written for “Mikro” Theater. “Angely Iudifi” ( Judith’s angels), “Obety” (Vows), and “Nebesnyi Ierusalim” (Heavenly Jerusalem).

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artistic identity continues. This is a difficult path of self-acquisition, a “drive to the unknown,” leading to unpredictable discoveries. The free making of JewishIsraeli drama and theater is a test that we have to pass as we face the country that we discover as our historical homeland, and as our creative work becomes an integral part of Israel’s national culture. Translated from Russian by Dobrochna E. Fire

Bibliography Primary Sources Azov, Mark. I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ [Of laughter, prose, and love]. Haifa: Gutenberg, 2003. Aizman, David. Sbornik rasskazov s avtobiograficheskim ocherkom [A collection of stories with an autobiographical sketch]. Leningrad: Priboi, 1926. ———. Ternovyi kust: P′esa v 4-kh deistviiakh [Briar patch: A play in four acts). St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1920. An-sky, S. [S. An-skii]. Otets i syn. P′esa, 1906 [Father and son: A play, 1906]. Moscow: Zemlia i volia, 1917. Dymov, Osip. Slushai, Izrail′! Drama v 3-kh deistviiakh [Hear, o Israel! A drama in three acts]. St. Petersburg: Delo, 1907. Goller, Boris. Masterskaia Shekspira: Povest′ [Shakespeare’s workshop: A short novel]. St. Petersburg: Gelikon-Plius, 2019. Jabotinsky, Vladimir [Vladimir Zhabotinskii]. Chuzhbina: P′esa [Foreign land: A play]. Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2000. Kontorer, Dov. Zoloto Galuta [Gold of the galut]. Collected and edited by Moshe Kenigshtein. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2009. Radovskii, Aleksandr. Korol′ i prints, ili Pravda o Gamlete. P′esy [The king and the prince, or The truth about Hamlet: Plays]. St. Petersburg: Dorn, 2005.

Secondary Sources Eliasberg, Galina. “‘Razbrosany i rasseiany.’ Russko-evreiskaia drama 1900–1910.” In Russkoevreiskaia kul′tura, edited by O. Budnitskii, 210–245. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006. ———. “The Drama of Faith and the National Question in Russian-Jewish Playwrights (1880– 1910).” In Jewishness in Russian Culture, edited by L. Katsis and H. Tolstoy, 75–91. Boston: Brill, 2014. Geizer, Matvei. Russko-evreiskaia literatura XX veka. Doctor of Philological Sciences dissertation. Moscow State University for the Humanities, Moscow, 2001. Genzeleva, Rita. Puti evreiskogo samosoznaniia [Paths of Jewish self-awareness]. Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 1999.

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Gershenson, Olga. Russian Theatre in Israel: A Study of Cultural Colonization. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Goller, Boris. “O p′esakh i liudiakh” [About plays and people]. 22 111 (1999): 113. ———. Slovo i teatr. Fleity na ploshchadi [The word and the theater: Flutes on the square]. Jerusalem: LIRA, 2000. Hegel, Georg [Georg Gegel′]. Lektsii po estetike: V 2-kh tomakh. Translated by B. Stolpner. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001. Iushkevich, Semen, ed., Kratkaia evreiskaia entsiklopediia. Vol. 10. Jerusalem: Obshchestvo po issledovaniiu evreiskikh obshchin, 2001. Katsis, Leonid, and Helen Tolstoy, eds. Jewishness in Russian Culture. Boston: Brill, 2014. Katsman, Roman. Neulovimaia real′nost′: Sto let russko-izrail′skoi literatury, 1920–2020. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2020. ———. Nostalgia for a Foreign Land. Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2016. ———. Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia: Sleduiushchie sto let russko-izrailskoi literatury. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021. Khazan, Vladimir. Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh. Moscow: Gesharim, 2001. ———. “Pechal′ny vesel′chak Osip Dymov.” Paralleli: russko-evreiskii istoriko-literaturnyo i bibliograficheskii al′manakh, 6–7 (2005): 186–206. Khazan, Vladimir, Roman Katsman, and Larisa Zhukhovitskaia. “‘Ya byl by schastliv naiti svoe malen′koe mestechko v russkoi literature . . .’: Pis′ma Avraama Vysotskogo Maksimu Gor′komu.” Supplement 2, “A. L. Vysotsky. Krov′ Makkaveev: Drama v 4-kh kartinakh.” Literaturnyi fakt 15 (2020): 147–170. Kogan, Leonid. Evreiskaia russkoiazychnaia literatura: monografiia. Jerusalem: n.p., 2000. Krasnogorov, Valentin. O drame i teatre. Berlin: Dirkt-Media, 2018. Levitina, Viktoriia. Evreiskii vopros i sovetskii teatr. Jerusalem: Levtina, 2001. ———. I evrei moia krov′. Evreiskaia drama—russkaia stsena. Moscow: Vozdushnyi transport, 1991. ———. Russkii teatr i evrei. Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1988. Lunacharskii, Anatolii. Sotsializm i iskusstvo. Teatr: Kniga o novom teatre. St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908. L′vov-Rogachevskii, Vasilii. Russko-evreiskaia literatura. Moscow: Moskovskii otdel Gosudarstvennogo izdatel′stva, 1922. Markish, Shimon. Russko-evreiskaia literatura, vol. 3. Budapest: ELTE-Mümü, 2021. Mironov, Dmitrii. “Aizman David. Russkie pisateli 1800–1917.” In Biograficheskii slovar′, vol. 1, 26–27. Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989. Pavis, Patrice [Patris Pavi]. Slovar′ teatra. Trans. L. Bazhenova et al. Moscow: Progress, 1991. Serman, Il′ia. “Spory 1908 goda o russko-evreiskoi literature i posleoktiabr′skoe desiatiletie.” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 2, no. 26 (1985): 127–174. Smola, Klavdia [Klavdiia Smola]. Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2021. Stanislavsky, Konstantin [Konstantin Stanislavskii]. Rabota aktera nad soboi . Vol. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1954. Zaretsky, Zlata [Zlata Zaretskaia]. Fenomen izrail′skogo teatra. Jerusalem: Studiia Klik, 2018.

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From the History of Russian-Israeli Literary Criticism (On One Method of Delineating Literary Contacts between Russia and Israel) Leonid Katsis As part of the rapid assimilation process, the linguistic assimilation of Russian Jews prepared the scene for new literary names whose importance arguably equaled those of their Russian counterparts. By the time the State of Israel was created in 1947, Russian Jewish writers, whose work carried a few unmistakably Jewish features, had established themselves at the forefront of Russian literature. This essay will draw from several examples in the history of Russian-Israeli literature to demonstrate how the topics and themes found in Russian-Jewish literature could, to some extent, explain the attitudes of Russian-Israeli critics to Russian writers. The dual nature of the critiques that still bore signs of old pre-Palestinian, Chovevei-Zionist or proper Zionist polemics while nested in the new reality of Russian-Israeli culture added to their suggestive and coded character, that has become less apparent today. The essay focuses on some of the defining features of Russian-Israeli literary criticism, its structure, and its sources. Three case studies will be considered. The first is that of the scandal that shook the Jewish community after Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958. The controversy grew around the Jewish episodes in the novel, and the Hebrew and Yiddish discourse on the novelist’s feelings towards Judaism and the existence of the State of Israel itself. Here, an important piece

Copyright © 2023 by the Estate of Leonid Katsis.

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to consider is Julius Margolin’s article on the subject, sent from Eretz Yisrael to be printed in Novoe Russkoe Slovo in light of Israel Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s critical remarks about the book. Julius Margolin hoped to temper the accusations of antisemitism directed at the Nobel laureate. (About Margolin, see Luba Jurgenson’s essay in this volume.) The second case could not be more different from the first. It involves Maiia Kaganskaia’s well-known article “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii” (Osip Mandelstam, a Judean poet), written in Soviet Kyiv and brought to Israel once it had been discussed with the poet’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam. A typescript copy of the text with the widow’s notes is found in Kaganskaia’s archive. It is public knowledge that, short-lived plans for repatriation and a few “Jewish” chapters in her books notwithstanding, Nadezhda Mandelstam fought all attempts to paint her husband as something other than a strictly Russian, strictly Christian—Orthodox or Catholic—poet. The third, last case is a historical overview of a series of events that occurred in the Russian-Israeli critical and literary circles as they appeared on the pages of the Zionist religious and literary journal Menora, whose editor had direct ties with the widow of the Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin.

1. Doctor Zhivago through the Prism of Julius Margolin from Eretz Yisrael on the Background of Jabotinsky Understanding the history of Doctor Zhivago’s reception by the global Jewish community, the background of the creative activity of the author’s father, Leonid Pasternak, the contacts between Leonid Pasternak and Hayim Nahman Bialik, and the disputes in the Russian émigré press over Russian-Jewish themes in Doctor Zhivago, is crucial for several reasons. The first is that both the Russian and Jewish diasporas were very keen on finding out what the readers living in the freshly formed Jewish state had to say. The second reason is that this discussion figured prominently in the philological circles of the journal Slavica Hierosolymitana (founded in at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977), but not only in the pages of this Slavic studies journal. Our story begins with a short article by the acclaimed essayist and memoirist Julius Margolin that summarizes the Israeli reaction to the publication of Doctor Zhivago,1 the roots of which can be traced back to Russia circa the 1910s. Yet, this 1

Julius Margolin [Iulii Margolin], “‘Byt′ znamenitym—nekrasivo . . .’ (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva)” in B. L. Pasternak: Pro et contra. B. L. Pasternak v sovetskoi, emigrantskoi, rossiiskoi literaturnoi kritike; antologiia, ed. Elena V. Pasternak, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo Russkoi

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particular aspect of the text never received much scholarly attention. In his article sent from Tel Aviv, but published outside Israel, Margolin makes two important points. The first is that there was hardly anyone in Israel who could fully appreciate the novel, which is why the discussions it provoked were reduced to the Jewish themes within the text. In turn, the tensions over that topic were aggravated by the scathing remarks of the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who described the novel as the single most hateful piece of writing produced by a Jew about Jews in the twentieth century, even if it came from a man who dared to speak out against his own government. This statement, quoted in the Russian émigré publications, is now part of the main corpus of texts about Pasternak, along with Margolin’s article. Another point raised by the Israeli journalist was that Jewish nationalists were too narrow-minded to look beyond the offensive passages and recognize that Pasternak’s protest, both against the government and against Judaism, were very Jewish in nature, not to mention that the ideas that his novel broadcasted into the world were of greater benefit to Jews than primitive nationalist outbursts. This would all be well and good if, on the one hand, it was actually true and, on the other, if Margolin’s last sentiment did not carry an echo of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s pseudonymous articles commemorating Leo Tolstoy in the Russian Zionist magazine Rassvet (Dawn) in 1910–1911.2 At the time, while crediting the literary talent of Tolstoy, Jewish writers also noted that the loss of this socalled champion of Jewish rights was inconsequential to the Jews themselves. Many of Pasternak’s critics also followed this logic. However, only Margolin went as far as to say that the poet’s anti-Jewish stance was actually Jewish, insofar as it reflected some ideas familiar to Jews, and that in principle, dissent was a very Jewish trait, both in relation to internal matters and the world at large. The Zionist Rassvet held the same view of Tolstoy’s work and philosophy, namely that his struggle for good in the world combined with the condemnation of any violence or national humiliation, albeit not specifically applied to Jews, benefited the suffering and struggling Jewry overall. Still, going back to Margolin and Doctor Zhivago, it is important to acknowledge that Tolstoy’s style was a point of reference for Pasternak. Hence, traces of the discussion of this particular feature of Tolstoy’s work in Russian-Jewish publications from 1910–1911 are especially significant. After all, Margolin’s national and Zionist views were in open contradiction to those of Pasternak and

2

Khristianskoi Gumanitarnoi Akademii, 2013), 291–298. For more on the subject, see Ivan Opishnia, “Zhizn′ i pechat′. Ben-Gurion osuzhdaet B. Pasternaka,” Vozrozhdenie 87 (March 1959). A. I., “Lev Tolstoi,” Rassvet 46 (1910): 4–6.

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his supporters. Moreover, the poet’s remarks that were quoted in the articles by those who had visited him in the USSR or that the poet had made in interviews could hardly have pleased Margolin. Herein we encounter an important characteristic of the Russian-Israeli literary criticism, including, of course, Margolin’s own article. Such readers of Russian literature were mindful of the sources of their critical inspiration, preserving for their peers and compatriots also their obvious subtexts. To clarify this point, it is necessary to compare the texts of the Zionist magazine Rassvet from 1910–1911 and that of Margolin on Doctor Zhivago, which was meant as a response to David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of the then twelve-year-old State of Israel. A. I., “Lev Tolstoi” (Leo Tolstoy) Every Jew has on many an occasion felt bitter disappointment that the great man rightly nicknamed “the European conscience” never raised his voice in defense of the people whom “Europe” persecutes the most. [. . .] Nevertheless, Tolstoy was close to the soul of every Jew, possibly even closer than to most of his own people. Perhaps it is the similarities between the great writer’s fate and the fate of the Jewish people that made it so: Jews know what it means to hold a truth only grudgingly recognized, and to share it with a world that meets it with either indifference or hostility. Tolstoy had a truth of his own, which he did not uncover by philosophical reasoning, but that was revealed to him at his Sinai the one he heard from his God: he confessed it openly and was persecuted for it. His books were anathematized, his thoughts kept under,

Margolin, “Byt′ znamenitym nekrasivo” (Being famous is not pretty) The author’s conformism already fully makes itself known in the scene that received the brunt of the indignation of the poet’s Jewish readers and admirers. Doctor [Yuri] Zhivago and his friend Misha Gordon happen to witness a young Cossack throwing ugly taunts at an old Jew. The author has Misha Gordon repeat the all too familiar age-old refrain of all those who are disappearing from Jewish history (the quote calling on the Jews to scatter and put an end their centuries-long martyrdom) [. . .] Is it not clear that someone who dispenses such advice to the Jewish people—to scatter, to stop resisting—must surely have had to adopt in his own struggle the position of conformity—why become a “voluntary martyr”? But it would appear that giving advice is easier than following it. Unbeknownst to him, Pasternak’s attitude to Soviet reality, his

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close supervision, and there was not a promise or threat that was not made to him to bring him back in line with the ruling beliefs. But ever firm in his conviction, he paid no mind to promises, threats, enmity, or persecution. He taught his truth and kept to his own path. Who could understand and appreciate that better than a Jew? [. . .] There is no denying that Leo Tolstoy did not care for Judaism, much like for all other official religions. But he knew it not, and thus could not imagine that he held within him many elements of the very doctrine he rejected. Tolstoy turned away from all official faiths, leaving behind the smoldering fires of the inquisition, the blood-stained swords whose blades converted nonbelievers. So, he withdrew to the mountains of Galilee and the Judean deserts that would nourish his religious and moral strength. It was not moral principles he drew from there, for the moral precepts that were born there have been universally adopted. Love for one’s neighbor, unity with G-d and the vanity of earthly existence are openly proclaimed, for one . . . before an execution. [.  .  .] These rules were brought to life by the descendants of those who came from the mountains of Galilee and the Judean deserts and who have been scattered in the world for many centuries already [. . .] Therefore Tolstoy’s obstinate rejection of the

stubborn rejection of the dominant ideology and simultaneous compromise with its proponents make him a very typical descendant of his ancestors. We Jews, who know well who benefits from voluntary martyrdom and why, could be proud of “our” Pasternak, if, on the other hand, the Soviet camp was not so replete with contemptible [David] Zaslavskys and pathetic [Ilya] Ehrenburgs. This Russian Orthodox Jew and leading Russian poet of our day remains intimately close to us in some aspect of his angular and incongruous being. We can only regret the undignified pettiness with which the overzealous Jewish “nationalists” criticize his wonderful book. The novel was called harmful because it contains a few naive thoughts about Jewish history. [. . .] I do not know whether the author of Doctor Zhivago goes to church on Sundays and bows in prayer . . . But if his evangelical enlightenment offers the same clear and uncomplicated message that is so well articulated in the book: loving one’s neighbor, the idea of the free self, of life as sacrifice, then Jewish nationalists have no reason to argue with Pasternak. His journey from Soviet Moscow to Galilee is, after a fashion, a “return to Israel,” the only one possible for a Russian poet born into a deeply assimilated Jewish family under conditions of complete and total as

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existing order of things, one that yields almost nothing in return, resonated with the Jews. They imagined the great philosopher to be an unrelenting champion against the systems that oppressed them, felt him to be the enemy of their enemies.

similation. And it is no coincidence that of all the poets currently active in the Soviet Union, it was a Jew, a son of the people for whom Galilee is not only the home of the spirit, but the literal homeland of all life and industry, who found his way to the Gospel, conquered the futility of life by religious means, and felt compelled to proclaim his victory for all to hear.

Although it is not explicitly discussed, authors and readers of such novels and articles could not fail to see that in the most poignant episodes of Doctor Zhivago featuring Jews, Mikhail Gordon does not simply recite what Pasternak would have him say on the subject but reproduces a complex cento of texts on assimilation by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the historian of Jewish literature Israel Zinberg, A. Gurlyand (the Jewish scholar of Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism and the novelist’s former mentor), or Simon Dubnow; some of these authors often made anti-Zionist statements.3 Meanwhile, both in Israel and throughout the Jewish community, the backlash to Pasternak’s novel was intense and extensive, but until very recently it remained beyond the scope of official Pasternak studies.4 Not until all the 3 4

Leonid Katsis, “Dialog: Iurii Zhivago—Mikhail Gordon i russko-evreiskoe neokantianstvo 1914–1915 godov,” in Judaica Rossica, vol. 3, ed. N. Basovskaia, D. Fishman, M. Uebb, and L. Katsis (Moscow: Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2003), 174–207. Leonid Katsis, “On Yiddish Translations and Translators of B. Pasternak’s Novel Doctor Zhivago,” in Yiddish and the Field of Translation. Agents, Strategies, Concepts and Discourses across Time and Space, ed. Olaf Terpitz and Marianne Windsperger (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2020), 291–313. A substantial portion of the Yiddish texts was originally published in Israel in Hebrew. See Roman Katsman, “Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the Eyes of Israeli Writers and Intellectuals (1958–1960) (A Minimal Foundation of Multilingual Jewish Philology),” in Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Multilingual Literature, ed. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 643–686. In the book series he edits in the United States, Lazar Fleishman, a former professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published an article reporting that his protagonist, who corresponded with Pasternak from Tel Aviv on questions of Judaism and Christianity and translated his poems into German, could find no one in Israel in the 1960s with whom he could discuss Pasternak, according to his letter to the poet’s sister. Lazar Fleishman, “Iz Pasternakovskoi perepiski. Doktor iz Tel′-Aviva,” in Скрещения судеб. Literarische und kulturelle Beziehungen zwischen Russland und dem Westen. A Festschrift for Fedor B. Poljakov, ed. Lazar Fleishman, Stefan Michael Newerkla, and Michael Wachtel (Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH, 2019), 723–821. More

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layers of old and newly available literature about the relationship between the Pasternak brothers and that family’s older generation are investigated will it become possible to appreciate the tension that reigned over where Margolin’s words fell, infused with the powerful spirit of the Zionist Rassvet circa the 1910s. Just recently, a correspondence between Boris Pasternak and his brother Aleksandr was recovered. There, the older brother delighted in the marriage of the younger to a non-Jewish woman, regretted he could never have that for himself, being the eldest son of his family, deplored the mediocrity of all Jews with the exception of Hayim Nahman Bialik, describing the eviction of David Frischmann’s family from the Moscow apartment as a purely antisemitic issue. According to a yet more recent discovery, Aleksandr Pasternak, who in the 1920s was living in Berlin, apparently felt weighed down by the fact that he was employed in a firm that designed factories in Haifa. With this in mind, the following passage of Margolin’s article, omitted from the comparison above, reads quite differently: “Pasternak, son of a Jewish artist, who left behind not only likenesses of Tolstoy but also portraits of Bialik, Tchernichovsky, Frischmann, did not stray so far that we could not recognize him as one of our own.” Thus, a short article by Julius Margolin, the author of the anti-assimilationist Puteshestvie v stranu ZeKa (A journey to the land of ZeKa) or Povest′ tysiacheletii. Szhatyi ocherk istorii evreiskogo naroda (The tale of a millennia. A concise sketch of the history of the Jewish people), a militant Zionist and proponent of Jabotinsky, shielded Pasternak’s novel for many decades. After all, the key organizers of the campaign that won Pasternak the Nobel Prize did everything they could to keep the extremely unpleasant and decidedly antiPasternak texts in Hebrew and Yiddish confined to the pages of newspapers and magazines written in the square script. These debates were even more uncomfortable in 1958, which marked the 10th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. Articles of the time also proclaimed seemingly impossible and outlandish ideas attributed to the poet’s father, notably, Leonid Pasternak’s suggestions of relocating his family to Mandatory

important, however, is that a letter from the editor of the Tel Aviv journal Heimisch, whose pages accommodated an animated discussion of Doctor Zhivago, was made public only in 2015. The letter was addressed to Pasternak, who was planning to respond, but did not (access to this letter has always been restricted to a narrow circle of Pasternak researchers with ties to his family). The resolution of this complex issue in the present day is punctuated with arguments as to whether or not there ever existed a medium where discussions of Doctor Zhivago, of Judeo-Christian relations, and the attitudes of Boris Pasternak and his family to Israel could be held.

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Palestine, which until recently were only considered rumors.5 Furthermore, the latest revelations from the correspondence between Boris and Aleksandr Pasternak, which confirmed the family’s plans to move to Palestine, make it easier to understand what renouncing the “Jewish destiny” looks like. This topic is integral to the Russian-Israeli branch of Russian-Jewish literature, which by virtue of its very locus of creation binds the author to the Jewish people and its plight. This is an amazing counterpoint to Julius Margolin’s RussianIsraeli text, designed, on the one hand, to uphold its perfectly Israeli character and, on the other, to find a way to insulate the poet from the same brand of antiPalestinianism, bordering on antisemitism, that the Pasternak family espoused. All non-Hebrew advocates of Doctor Zhivago were bothered by precisely that. In a letter to Aleksandr Pasternak from February 15, 1923, Boris Pasternak wrote: “The Frischmanns. [. . .] Living alongside them has made us and will continue to make us unfair, biased, ungrateful to them all in the worst possible way. This disposition is purely antisemitic. The deeply contradictory, inescapable, fatal, and tragic properties and foundations, dilemmas, and antinomies of our very being and existence are inflamed, congealed, and salted with their closeness.”6 In a previous letter to his brother concerning the latter’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman, Pasternak had written that their parents looked favorably on preventing the perpetuation of the distinct and anecdotal Jewish features, which Pasternak somehow did not see in Bialik.7 The case of Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago is important precisely because, though straightforward, it branches out into the greater world, not just the Russian-speaking one, encompassing the internationally publicized scandal surrounding Pasternak’s Nobel Prize. This is useful for discerning the venom boiling beneath the veneer of a short text, whose relevance comes from the fact that it was written in Israel, supposedly about the Israeli reception of a novel written by a Russian Jew. After all, even Margolin’s reason for writing the article could also be considered inconsequential: it is just two or three pages out of a hefty volume. However, in the same manner that the Nobel Prize scandal propelled this story to political heights, Margolin’s two-page piece grew in significance thanks to a handful of sharp words from Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. 5

6 7

Lazar Fleishman, “Iz Pasternakovskoi perepiski. Sobytiia nobelevskikh dnei glazami brata,” in Unacknowledged Legislators: Studies in Russian Literary History and Poetics in Honor of Michael Wachtel, ed. Lazar Fleishman, David M. Bethea, and Ilya Vinitsky (Bern: Peter Lang GmbH, 2020), 714–715. Boris Pasternak, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 11 tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Slovo, 2005), 442. Ibid., 435.

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It is now possible to reconstruct the other side of the dialogue. For his contribution to the construction of Lenin’s Mausoleum, Pasternak’s brother was sent to Berlin. There he worked under Alexander Berwald, architect and member of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden organization, which designed construction projects for Mandatory Palestine. On this occasion, in the spring of 1925, Aleksandr Pasternak wrote to his sister Josephine in Munich: Do you really want to know what I am doing? Alas, despite my antisemitism, I am responsible for designing a section (a different part of the same building is being done by another architect, not a Jew but a full-blooded German, though a communist nonetheless—shh!) of a large technical school in Palestinian Haifa. My part is made up of three floors meant for a secondary school, three classrooms for a vocational school, a synagogue that would fit 300 people and an adjoining aula for 600 seats, with a canteen and kitchen below. Very interesting project, but why does it have to be a synagogue, and in a Jewish land! Would it not have been better if it had been a building for Europe.8 This is the context behind Zionist and Jabotinist Margolin’s defense of Doctor Zhivago against “narrow-minded nationalists,” which is why he needed the Tolstoyan subtext from Rassvet that his inner circle would instantly recognize.9 This seemingly distant story just took a new, unexpected turn. Not long ago, Professor Dmitrii Segal of the Hebrew University, the author of an important article “Pro Doma Sua”10 on the Jewish undertones of Doctor Zhivago, published

8 Fleishman, “Iz Pasternakovskoi perepiski. Sobytiia nobelevskikh dnei glazami brata,” 714–715. 9 This essay does not seek to determine the authorship of the texts published in Rassvet under the handle A. I., that is, most likely Avraam Idelson. However, the second item printed under the same “signature” in Rassvet 4 (1911) is a direct quotation from Jabotinsky’s well-known article “Vmesto apologii” (In lieu of an apology). At the time, it was yet unpublished, and would first appear in Odesskie novosti when the Beilis case had already emerged. Thus, “A. I.”’s closing lines of the 1911 article anticipated the most famous texts by Altalena (pseudonym of Jabotinsky). 10 At first, it had appeared in English in Slavica Hierosolimitana, and then, upon the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR, was printed in extended form in the Jerusalem journal Narod i Zemlia. The Russian academic audience did not have access to the Russian version of the Israeli publication, much less to its latest additions. Meanwhile, the text from the Jerusalem Slavic journal was available in translation. The “zigzag path” of this article’s circulation in different languages and countries is a perfect illustration of the kind of processes the present essay attempts to describe.

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another article in Russia titled “Doctor Zhivago, a Jewish novel?” in which he argued that this text drew many Jews to Zionism.11 In other words, in the opinion of Professor Segal,12 the notoriously anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli novel Doctor Zhivago, with its direct and hidden quotations from Jabotinsky, had the same effect on the self-identification of Russian Jews as, in their own time, had the works of Leo Tolstoy, who could hardly have been mistaken for a Semitophile, as A. I. (that is., Jabotinsky) pointed out. The poet’s son Evgenii Pasternak and his entourage maintained a radically opposite view on the topic, just as in his response to Margolin, the Russian critic Mikhail Koriakov emphatically rejected the very idea of discussing Doctor Zhivago outside a Christian context.13 The wealth of images and meanings found in Margolin’s short text, written in Israel, suggests that texts much longer and created for less pragmatic political purposes could prove just as deep. Their sources and subtexts may turn out to be texts, documents, and historical episodes that have nothing to do with Russian literature.

2.  Maiia Kaganskaia, Osip Mandelstam, Semen Frug The time has come to turn to a different case, which is almost the complete opposite of the first. Its general outlines are as follows. In the mid-1970s, the then Kyiv-based essayist Maiia Kaganskaia completed a draft of her essay “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii” (Osip Mandelstam—a Jewish poet) and brought it to Moscow to show it to the poet’s widow Nadezhda Mandelstam. This article, with its unexpected and shocking subtitle “Mandel′shtam i Khomiakov” (Mandelstam and Khomiakov),14 was written when Osip Mandelstam’s poetry

11 Dmitrii Segal, “Pro Doma Sua: O Borise Pasternake,” in his Literatura kak okhrannaia gramota (Moscow: Vodolei, 2006), 677–749. 12 Dmitrii Segal, “‘Doctor Zhivago’—evreiskii roman?,” in Issledovaniia po lingvistike i semiotike. Sbornik statei k 80-letiiu Viach. Vs. Ivanova (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul′tur, 2010), 553–561. 13 Mikhail Koriakov, “Listki iz bloknota. Iulii Margolin i Boris Pasternak,” in Pasternak B. L.: Pro et Contra. B. L. Pasternak v sovetskoi, emigrantskoi, rossiiskoi literaturnoi kritike; Antologiia, edited by Elena V. Pasternak, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2013). 14 Maiia Kaganskaia, “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii. Mandel′shtam i Khomiakov,” Sion 20 (1977): 174–195. See also her posthumous collection, Maya Kaganskaya, Antologiia zhanra, introduction by Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf], ed. Sergei Shargorodskii (Moscow: Tekst, 2014).

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was believed to have been rooted in the best of Russian culture, meaning Pushkin and the Gospel. The rest seemed to be derivative from that. On the one hand, this article was read and approved by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who saved its annotated copy in her archive, and on the other, this same text practically “granted” its author entry to Jerusalem. It was not so much about Mandelstam’s Judaism, which was simply inconceivable at the time (Mandelstam was counted among the Christian apostates in Jewish circles), as about the fact that the biblical settings found in Mandelstam’s poetry hearkened back to the religious verses of Russian liubomudry (“wisdom-loving”) poets. As it was, Russian Orthodoxy itself was found not to be especially influenced by the Bible (or the Old Testament), most of the key religious poems coming from conservative or Slavophile writers. This discovery, made back in Soviet Ukraine, in Kyiv, approved in Soviet Moscow by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was contemplating leaving for Israel, and published in the Promised Land, is a significant symbolic link between Russian-Jewish literature of the mid-to-last quarter of the nineteenth century and its modern Russian-Israeli branch. The latter was characterized by the search for its progenitors among Russian literary figures, when Russian Jewish writers were referred to as “the Jewish SaltykovShchedrin,” or prompted comparisons like that between Sholom Aleichem and Gogol, his glaring antisemitism notwithstanding. This is the very thing against which Jabotinsky fought bitterly at the time, maintaining the singularity of the Jewish classic. This case is doubly significant. In 2018–2019, the Jewish Museum in Moscow held an exhibition titled “Longing for World Culture. The Poet’s Bookcase,” displaying Maiia Kaganskaia’s manuscript with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s annotations together with memoir entries published by Afanasii Mamedov15 in the Moscow-based Jewish magazine Lekhaim, which related the attempts of the poet’s widow to leave for Israel. The exhibit also included visa-related documents sent to the USSR by friends of Nadezhda Mandelstam, who were already living in Israel.16 Later, Maiia Kaganskaia’s interview informed her substantial work about Nadezhda Mandelstam, which was included in the three-volume posthumous

15 Afanasii Mamedov, “Khaos iudeiskii i khristianskii,” interview with Mikhail Gendelev, Maiia Kaganskaia, Elena Tolstaia, and Iurii Tabak, Lekhaim 2 (190) (2008), https://lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/190/mamedov.htm. 16 David Markish, “Spravka dlia Nadezhdy Iakovlevny,” in “Posmotrim, kto kogo pereupriamit . . .” Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel′shtam v pis′makh, vospominaniiakh, svidetel′stvakh, comp. Pavel Nerler, ed. Elena Shubina (Moscow: AST, 2015) , 584–585.

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digital edition of her writings.17 Most importantly, these texts appeared to supplement Kaganskaia’s article “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii.” Yet, neither the Jewish imagery in Mandelstam’s poems, nor the Jewish themes of his prose, and certainly not the Jewish interests of Nadezhda Mandelstam, could be reconciled to the double myth of “Osip and Nadezhda,” which was cultivated by Mandelstam’s admirers in the USSR, and later in Russia, as well as abroad. This story could have run its course by the late 1980s, when it would have been established that the conclusions of the Israel-bound essayist had been fundamentally different from those of Mandelstam’s Russian and Russian Jewish admirers, particularly those who gravitated toward the opposite cultural pole, namely, the Jewish or Zionist one, especially. Nevertheless, there was a Jewish layer to be found between Mandelstam’s poems and their “Jewish” underpinning, originating from the uncommon biblical imagery of some of the Russian poems associated with Orthodox pundits like Aleksei Khomiakov, one of the founders of Slavophilism. These were deeply Russian-Jewish poems, based, oddly enough, or perhaps not so much, on the poems by the very same Khomiakov. A major figure in this respect is the Russian-Jewish and truly Jewish poet Simon (Semen) Frug, known for his 1885 collection titled “Stikhotvoreniia” (Poems). It was published by Alexander Suvorin,18 then a liberal journalist who would become a radically conservative and antisemitic publisher. The first half of this volume is composed of a series of assimilationist poems drawing on the imagery and style of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, even Nikolai Gogol. The second half of the book is the polar opposite of the first. There the reader finds poems about the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, about Christian autos-da-fé, and pogroms. The poems progressively feature more stories from the Talmud and the Haggadah, and a number of texts play off the romantic imagery of Byron’s “Palestinian” compositions. These distinctly Jewish verses are often accompanied by a surprising combination of epigraphs taken from the Talmud and Russian Slavophiles. Thus, Maiia Kaganskaia’s critical intuition appears to be correct. However, Frug’s route was not the only way that attempts at reconstructing the Palestinophile and later Zionist character of “Jewishness” in Russian poetry followed. The explication of this element in academic literature (or critiques in 17 Maiia Kaganskaia, Shutovskoi khorovod. Izbrannoe 1977–2011 (s.l.: Salamandra P.V.V., 2011). 18 For more, see Leonid Katsis, “Kniga S. Fruga ‘Stikhotvorenia’ ot 1885 g. Dinamika podteksta v russko-evreiskoi poezii,” Evreiskii Knigonosha (2005): 31–39. Note also the useful volume compiled by Nelli Portnova, with her introductory article and commentary: Semen Frug, Iudeiskaia smokovnitsa: Vospominania, ocherki, fel′etony [ Jewish fig tree: memoirs, essays, feuilletons], ed. Nelli A. Portnova ( Jerusalem: Evreiskii universitet, 1995).

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the broad understanding of American literary studies) allows, as in the case of Julius Margolin’s article, to recreate the context of which one might be unaware at the time of the writing, thus leading the Israeli or Israeli-oriented (pre-aliyah) critic to conclusions that can sometimes be surprising. This is how RussianJewish authors pondering the origins of the Jewish elements in the poetry of Russian Jews discovered they could add Mikhail Lermontov to their arsenal. Though Lermontov died early, the poetics of “Vetka Palestiny” (The palm branch of Palestine) left an impression, but his name rang out especially loud in Jewish circles after the posthumous publication of the drama Ispantsy (The Spaniards), which coincided with the assimilationist crisis that followed the pogroms of 1881 and subsequent years. This event took on a Jewish angle because among those actively involved in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II was Hesya Helfman, a Jewish woman. A vast body of literature exists on the topic, including the works of the Israeli critic Zoia Kopel′man.19 She briefly summarized this thought when comparing the line from Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “Zohar” (or “Zorei,” as this poem is called in Jabotinsky’s translation): “In my soul, I feel a thirst for things of light and wonder. / It murmurs, fermenting, like the wine . . .” with Lermontov’s “My soul, since childhood’s first blunders / Has longed for ceaseless wonder. . . .” Kopel′man writes: “What is this? Plagiarism? No, a kinship of poetic souls. As well as the conscious or unconscious choice of the translator, who found himself asking the eternal question of the Jewish sages: What does it look like? And then responds: Like something that reads like Lermontov. Jabotinsky could not have known that Bialik, who wrote almost exclusively in Hebrew and sometimes in Yiddish, began experimenting with poetry by attempting, but never finishing, a translation of Lermontov’s “The Angel”: “An angel crossed the midnight skies / Filling the air with his soft cries. . . .” This fact would only come to light years after Bialik’s death.”20 Unlike Jabotinsky’s famous preface and translations, Kopel′man’s article cited above is certainly representative of Russian-Israeli literary criticism.21 It forms 19 Zoia Kopel′man, “Ia znaiu: kanu ia, kak zvezdochka, v tuman . . .,” in Khaim Nakhman Bialik: Pesni i poemy, ed. Evgenii Kogan and Zoia Kopel′man, trans. Vladimir Zhabotinskii (Tel Aviv: Babel′, 2021), 172. 20 Ibid., 172. 21 Just like two other texts that precede that article chronologically but cover the same topics. Both examine Mikhail Gendelev’s clearly “Lermontovian” poem “Memories of the Demon,” which, of course, was written in Israel. One of the texts in question is an essay by Maiia Kaganskaia, “Pamiati ‘Pamiati Demona’. Chernovik proshchania,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (2009), https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2009/4/pamyati-pamyati-demona. html, the other an academic critique: Elena Tolstaia, “‘Giurza tenginskogo polka’:

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part of a series whose publication is sponsored today, in the 2020s, by a Russian bookstore in Israel and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, which is based outside the Holy Land and operates across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This is yet another twist in the history of Russian-Jewish and RussianIsraeli literature and criticism, which seems to lead us almost inevitably to Frug. In that same collection of Russian translations of Bialik’s poetry, Jabotinsky’s preface, published in different versions and in different languages, starting with the Russian edition of 1911, reads: “The first book in Russian that he [Bialik— L.K.] ever read were Frug’s poems, which left an indelible impression on the young man.”22 Like many Russian-Jewish authors, Frug wrote in other languages besides Russian. He died in 1916, when World War I resulted in the devastation of the Russian-Jewish community in the Russian Empire. In many ways, therefore, Frug became a symbolic figure. Simon Dubnow (BILU is an acronym of “Beit Yaakov Lekhu Ve-nelkha” [Let the house of Jacob go], Isaiah 2:5) famously wrote of his “Jewish melody” that accompanied the BILU group to Eretz Yisrael as the “enthusiastic march of exodus” of the first stages of the Russian Jewish aliyah to Palestine.23 Frug’s books followed their readers as they were leaving Russia, before and after the revolutionary events of 1917–1929. These texts were finally published in Riga just before the historian perished in the city’s ghetto. This is a characteristic example of the Jewish fate of a Russian-Jewish figure not connected to Russian-Israeli issues. These processes were far from linear. One landmark event was the 1884 publication Palestina. Sbornik statei i svedenii o evreiskikh poseleniiakh v Sv. Zemle (Palestine. A collection of articles and reports about Jewish settlements in the Holy Land).24 It was supervised by Akim Volynsky and opened with “The Pilgrim’s Song” by S. F. (that is, Semen Frug), followed by contributions from Gendelevskaia oda Lermontovu,” https://helenadtolstoy.com/gyurza_lermontov/. For the time being, they bring to a close this article’s analysis of Russian-Jewish and Russian-Israeli writers’ attitudes to Mikhail Lermontov’s reception in Russian Israeli circles, even if both were published in Russia, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. For the time being, an academic assessment of this current state of affairs is impossible at this stage, as the dialogue between Israeli literary and critical texts, both in Israel and Russia, is complex and ongoing, and depending on the political situation and new waves of aliyah and, partly, yerida (emigration of Jews from Israel), it can take on new aspects. 22 Vladimir Jabotinsky [Vladimir Zhabotinskii], Introduction to Khaim Nakhman Bialik: Pesni i poemy, ed. Evgenii Kogan and Zoia Kopel′man, trans. Vladimir Zhabotinskii (Tel Aviv: Babel′, 2021), 11–12. 23 “Frug, Semen,” World ORT—Elektronnaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, n.d. https://goo.su/ GzaBu. 24 Palestina. Sbornik statei i svedenii o evreiskikh poseleniiakh v Sv. Zemle, ed. Akim Flekser (Akim Volynskii) and Vasilii (Vul′f) Berman (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia N. A. Lebedeva, 1884).

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Leon Pinsker and Lev Levanda, Akim Flekser’s (Volynsky) article “Novoe slovo v zhizni russkogo evreistva” (“A new word in the life of the Russian Jewry”), and others. Assuming that this dense Frug-Lermontovian background is embedded in the consciousness of authors from Mandelstam to Gendelev and critics from Jabotinsky to Kaganskaia, then it is all the more interesting to examine its effects on the creative development of contemporary Russian-Israeli writers and critics. The most prominent figures to emerge in this period were Mikhail Gendelev and Maiia Kaganskaia.25 The latter remained very sensitive to ideological shifts until the end of her days. Possibly in anticipation of today’s disastrous flood of ignorant essays on the so-called “Jewish Mandelstam” (nomina sunt odiosa), Kaganskaia wrote the following in her afterword to Gendelev’s Legkaia muzyka (Light music):26 Many years ago, my old and new compatriots almost chewed me to the bone for an article with the simple title “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii.” According to my haters, Mandelstam was and still remains the greatest, most talented and poignantly Russian poet. Therefore, by calling him “Jewish,” I denied Mandelstam both the title of poet and the rank of genius. Since then, Mandelstam’s Jewish roots have been so triumphantly laid bare by the world’s Mandelstam scholars that the Christianity of the author of “Notre Dame,” which went unchallenged in the 1960s, has receded into the shadows . . . Yet, this, too, is an overstatement, and therefore untrue. While a baptism certainly does not leave as visible a mark as the circumcision that preceded it, a circumcision of the spirit, in the words of the Founder [Osnovopolozhnik], hardly leaves one completely unaffected. Gendelev guessed that the Founder was the original source of Mandelstam’s appeal to the murderers’ mercy. This is when Gendelev’s “K nemetskoi rechi” [To German speech] links up with his “Pervoe poslanie evreiam” [First epistle to the Hebrews].

25 On Gendelev, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay in this collection. 26 Maiia Kaganskaia, “Slovo o milosti i gordosti,” in Legkaia muzyka: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Light music: poems], by Mikhail Gendelev ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004), http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/152-majya-kaganskaya-slovo-omilosti-i-gordosti.html.

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To appreciate the brilliant and tragic irony of this verse, one must realize that, in Gendelev’s extraordinary vision, Paul converts the Jews not to Christianity, but to Islam. But what difference does it really make if the end goal is the same as in the original text: “. . . that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need”? The Apostle dutifully explains that Mercy, or Grace, depends on holding “the beginning of our life steadfast to the end.” He suggests the means to do so: “Strive for peace with all men.” But Gendelev offers his own, brutal advice: “I must either grit my teeth and clack out loud the cry for War . . . or perish!” In summary: In the years following World War II and the formation of Israel, the Jewish poet’s rejection of the Russian language and appeal to German was replaced in Russian-Israeli poetry and criticism by an appeal to the “hostile” Arab tongue. At the same time, having reflected upon the RussianIsraeli verse of Gendelev and considered the progress made by contemporary research into the Jewish elements of Mandelstam’s writing, the author of “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii” reasoned that this pendulum will swing back. The timing and context of Kaganskaia’s piece are what determines the purely Israeli aspect of the assessment of the two poets: one Russian, one Israeli, the former the author of “Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate” (Verses to an unknown soldier), and the latter of “K arabskoi rechi” (To Arabic speech). This is all the more remarkable because Gendelev stands out in another way: unlike Mandelstam, he considered himself a military poet, something that lays the groundwork for the “Lermontovian” angle analyzed by Kaganskaia.

3. Pavel Gol′dshtein’s Menora on Russian, RussianJewish, and -Israeli Literature It might seem that the easiest way to approach the characterization of RussianIsraeli literature is by describing it as a perpetual “entrance to Jerusalem” (after the title of Mikhail Gendelev’s work V′′ezd v Ierusalim), forever repeating itself from one aliyah to the next. Such a description would not be entirely fair, however. The “long historical perspectives” elaborated in this study allow to examine the evolution of Russian-Israeli literature beyond the discrete waves of aliyah. That is, in fact, how the critical statements of most prominent

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cases of Russian-Israeli literary criticism took form. Although, of course, each separate stage of this process was marked by meetings on Israeli soil between its respective representatives who either formed some type of connection or feuded with each other. Often, it could take decades for certain topics that had been brought up in Israeli Russian-language press to emerge in literary discourse. It makes sense to follow up the above about Maiia Kaganskaia with a complementary review of the activities of a historically significant, if lesser known, journal Menora and its editor, Pavel Gol′dshtein. In contrast to 22 or Vremia i my (Time and we), the influence of this periodical on the literary situation in the USSR and Russia was negligible. It is possible that this was due to issues of including or failing to include certain press associations in the delivery of printed products to the USSR within the context of the ongoing ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West. In 2012, an electronic collection of select texts was compiled, and Gol′dshtein’s own article logically concludes the collection.27 The collection includes much of what has been discussed in this essay. The selection itself is made up of diverse articles from the Menora, such as reflections about Vasily Rozanov and the Jews, about the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court in the case of 1962 Oswald Rufeisen v. the Minister of the Interior, which decades later inspired Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006) and elicited a strong reaction in Christian circles, as wells as works about Leonid Pasternak, Rembrandt, and Judaism. However, a number of pivotal texts were left out, such as “Pis′mo Shimona Markisha v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Menora’” (The letter of Shimon Markish to the editorial board of Menora).28 This item is fundamental for the history of the perception of Russian-Jewish literature among the representatives of the aliyah of the 1970s, who grouped around the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the letter, the future chief historian of Russian-Jewish literature described with hopeless pessimism this circle’s complete rejection of the very same Russian-Jewish literature that eventually absorbed many of the names Markish had implied as representative of the new Russian-Israeli literature, which has been flourishing since the late 1980s.

27 Pavel Gol′dshtein, “Introduction,” in Menora 1973–2013, ed. Pavel Gol′dshtein, Moshe Barsela, Menachem Gordin, Iurii Grauze, Barukh Kuperman, Shlomo Pines, Eliezer Eliner, Ar′e Vudka, and Avraam Elinson ( Jerusalem: n.p., 2013). 28 Shimon Markish, “Pis′mo Shimona Markisha v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Menora,’” Menora 14 (1977): 75–77.

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Markish’s letter suggests that the editorial leadership of Slavica Hierosolymitana, like those of journals kindred to it (Russian Literature, International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, Wiener Slavistischer Almanach), often refused to consider the possibility of Russian literature having Russian-Jewish, not to mention strictly Jewish or Zionist, influences. Their vision and their approach were based on Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs and the exclusively Christian lens she applied to her husband’s work, as well as on Pasternak’s Christian beliefs, and, at best, on Marina Tsvetaeva’s lines “In this most Christian of worlds / All poets are Yids.” For obvious reasons, the exclusion of the dozens of magazines, the hundreds of books and articles that Shimon Markish had in mind (Voskhod and Novy voskhod, Evreiskiy mir, Khronika evreiskoy shizni, and others) was quite deliberate. Even something as innocuous and self-evident as Mandelstam’s “Judeo-Christianity” postulated by by the Parisian émigré scholar Nikita Struve was then considered out of bounds. The development of this line of thinking was greatly influenced by the Englishlanguage Encyclopedia Judaica, and perhaps even more so by its Supplemental Yearbook 1972, which was released in 1973 and is of primary importance to the topic of my essay. Published in the Supplemental Yearbook 1972 were trend-setting articles by Omry Ronen, who at the time was living in the United States but soon returned to Israel to become a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For decades, and until the turn of the 1990s–2000s, Ronen’s encyclopedic entries defined how much space Russian-Jewish literature could be allowed to occupy within Slavic studies. Back then, conducting research on the subject of Russian-Jewish literature at the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies in Hebrew University was practically impossible, while Jewish studies in Russian were considered ludicrous nonsense. Considering the Israeli establishment’s demonstrative rejection not only of the Russian language, but also of Yiddish in the 1970s, it seemed then that the stance opposed by Shimon Markish, who eventually left Israel having written an article titled “Pochemu my uezzhaem” (Why we leave), was the only acceptable one in Israel’s academic establishment. Again, it is impossible to let this particular topic of Pasternak go unmentioned, since it was raised by Iakov Eidel′man in his Zionist collection Pis′ma k synu (Letters to my son) and resurfaced in his obituary published in Menora. Its importance is all the greater in light of what has already been said about Julius Margolin’s article. The “letters,”29 written in the 1960s by Iakov Eidel′man one 29 These follow the tradition of Jewish parents writing to their children wishing to receive the baptism, or of Zionists’ letters to their descendants, which is more relevant in the context of this essay. See, for example, Maks Mandel′shtam, “Sushchnost′ sionizma. Pis′mo sionista

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of the leaders of the Moscow Zionist underground in the 1920s and 1960s, were addressed to his son, the fully assimilated intellectual historian Natan Eidel′man and included the father’s thoughts on various topics, including his attitudes toward Russian literature. For this reason, the history of publication and reception of this text both in Russia and in Israel is especially relevant for the present discussion. After all, even the volume of Eidel′man’s Dnevniki (Diaries) was largely falsified with respect to information about Israel and coming from it, which Eidel′man would have gathered from Kol Yisrael broadcasts, both in Russian and in Hebrew—and this with the publisher Iuliia Madora already living in Israel at the time.30 The fierce anti-assimilationist pathos of Pis′ma k synu, including an analysis of the Jewish chapters of Doctor Zhivago, is more suitable for the Israeli Hebrew life, or the Anglophone Jewish American context, than the Soviet Jewish setting. One of Iakov Eidel′man’s fellows and readers wrote a book, which provides a detailed description of their group.31 It is symbolic that the release of both this book and Eidel′man’s Pis′ma k synu was handled by an Israeli Russianlanguage publisher.32 Menora also featured an opposite case to the one we examined above. Another one of its articles, typically overlooked in Russia, established a permanent link between the names of outstanding critic and children’s author Kornei Chukovskii and of Jabotinsky, effectively young Chukovskii’s patron and teacher. This text failed to make it into Izbrannoe (Menora’s selected texts).33 It is also supplemented by an obituary.34 Mikhail Zand, a veteran of the Zionist movement and professor of Iranian studies whose life and creative journey ended in Israel, left behind a book of memoirs,35 which contains an account of his personal contribution to refuting the lies of Soviet propaganda about the Leningrad airplane hijacking affair of 1970. Incidentally,

30 31 32 33 34 35

docheri,” in Byt′ evreem v Rossii: Materialy po istorii russkogo evreistva, 1880–1890-e gody, ed. Nelli A. Portnova ( Jerusalem: Evreiskii universitet, 1999), 271–272. For details see Leonid Katsis, Vladimir Maiakovskii: Poet v intellektual′nom kontekste epokhi, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2004), index, s.v. “Zhabotinskii.” Iuliia Eidel′man, Dnevniki Natana Eidel′mana (Moscow: Materik, 2003). Mikhail Morgulis, “Evreiskaia” kamera Lubianki ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 1996). Iakov Eidel′man, Nezakonchennye dialogi ( Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 1999). Rakhel′ Margolina, Perepiska s Korneem Ivanovichem Chukovskim, Menora 13 (1977): 49–73. Mikhail Zand, “Pamiati Rakheli Margolinoi,” Menora 13 (1977): 74–75. Mikhail Zand, Russkie vospominaniia izrail′skogo uchenogo, trans. Sergei Groizman ( Jerusalem and Moscow: Izdatel′stvo M. Grinberga and Studiia “4+4,” 2020).

From the Histor y of Russian-Israeli Literar y Criticism

these memoirs were recorded in Hebrew and thus required translation for the Russian edition. Without a doubt, the memoirs of Eduard Kuznetsov, Yosef Mendelevitch, and of others involved in the airplane affair, not to mention the thick corpus of refusenik memoires, occupied a special and unique place in Russian-Israeli literature for about fifty years. As such, being able to read Yosef Mendelevitch’s prison letters and those of other “prisoners of Zion” in Menora’s thirteenth issue hardly comes as a surprise. It is telling that this took place at a time when a series of works being published by Russian featured Jews, and that the title of the editor’s semi-memoiristic reflections references Maksimilian Voloshin’s poem “Dom poeta” (The house of the poet), which offered great insight into that cradle of Russian culture. In a way that is to some extent comparable with Mandelstam, it is a summing up of the Russian-Jewish experience of the writer and critic who chose to continue his life in Israel in a strictly Zionist fashion. It is worth noting that Pavel Gol′dshtein, who became a staff member at the Literary Museum in Moscow after years spent in the Gulag, like all of his fellow dissident contemporaries, was “struck” by Vladimir Mayakovsky. In his later years, especially, he was captivated by Mayakovsky’s poem “Zhid” (Yid). Meanwhile, the poem “Evrei. Tovarishcham iz OZETa” ( Jews. To Comrades from OZET) apparently fell short of his notice. Yet, even “Zhid” mentions Crimea and its Jewish settlements. As a member of OZET (Obshchestvo zemleustroistva evreiskikh trudiashchiakhsia, Society for Settling Jewish Laborers on the Land), Mayakovsky not only penned poems but, together with Lilya Brik and Viktor Shklovsky, also took part in the production of the anti-Zionist film Evrei na zemle ( Jews on the land, 1925). Understandably, the Israeli Zionists found this to be unacceptable and typically off-limits for discussion. Nevertheless, this film was conceived as a response to movies featuring Jabotinsky’s appeals to the Jewish masses.36 Thus, Mayakovsky’s anti-Zionist Soviet initiative ended up in precisely the last place the Russian poet ever wanted to find the members of his “Mayakovsky Brigade.” These examples thus provide an opportunity to distinguish between proper Russian Israeli literary criticism in its broadest sense and those literary critiques and studies which, though written in the Land of Israel, belong to the tradition of émigré writing, being published anywhere from New York and Paris to London and, of course, to Israel. It would appear that in this case, too, the

36 For details, see Leonid Katsis, Vladimir Maiakovskii, index, s.v. “Zhabotinskii.”

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deceptively linear development of Russian-Israeli literature and its reflective criticism acquires a familiar and typical historical depth and contradictory character, once longer periods of its evolution are taken into account.37 

Translated from Russian by Anastasia Degtiariova

Bibliography A. I. “Lev Tolstoi.” Rassvet 46 (1910): 4–6. Ben-Gurion, David. “Ben-Gurion i ‘Doctor Zhivago.’” In B. L. Pasternak: Pro et contra. B. L. Pasternak v sovetskoi, emigrantskoi, rossiiskoi literaturnoi kritike; Antologiia, edited by Elena V. Pasternak, vol. 1. St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2012. Eidel′man, Iakov. Nezakonchennye dialogi. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 1999. Eidel′man, Iuliia. Dnevniki Natana Eidel′mana. Moscow: Materik, 2003. Fleishman, Lazar. “Iz Pasternakovskoi perepiski. Doktor iz Tel′-Aviva.”  In Скрещения судеб. Literarische und kulturelle Beziehungen zwischen Russland und dem Westen. A Festschrift for Fedor B. Poljakov, edited by Lazar Fleishman, Stefan Michael Newerkla, and Michael Wachtel, 723– 821. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH, 2019. ———. “Iz Pasternakovskoi perepiski. Sobytiia nobelevskikh dnei glazami brata.” In Unacknowledged Legislators: Studies in Russian Literary History and Poetics in Honor of Michael  Wachtel, edited by Lazar Fleishman, David M. Bethea, and Ilya Vinitsky, 714–715. Bern: Peter Lang GmbH, 2020. Frug, Semen. Iudeiskaia smokovnitsa: Vospominania, ocherki, fel′etony [ Jewish fig tree: memoirs, essays, feuilletons]. Edited by Nelli A. Portnova. Jerusalem: Evreiskii universitet, 1995. “Frug, Semen.” World ORT—Elektronnaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia. n.d. https://goo.su/GzaBu. Gendelev, Mikhail. Legkaia muzyka: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 1996–2004 [Light music: poems, 1996–2004], edited by Maiia Kaganskaia. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004. Gol′dshtein, Pavel. “Introduction.” In Menora 1973–2013, edited by Pavel Gold′shtein, Moshe Barsela, Menachem Gordin, Iurii Grauze, Barukh Kuperman, Shlomo Pines, Eliezer Eliner, Ar′e Vudka, and Avraam Elinson. Jerusalem, 2013. Menora 16 (1978): 319–321.

37 While on the subject of Mayakovsky and his opinion on the Land of Israel, it is worth noting the recent translation from Yiddish into Russian of several pages from the memoirs of the Russian Jewish anarchist Abba Gordin. The text was first published in Israel in the mid-1950s and is a chronicle of the life of Moscow poets in the early postrevolutionary years. Gordin’s anarchist utopias were written in Russian in 1917–1918. Without going into detail, in these passages, the author of the “Backbone Flute,” famous for its image of the “Hebrew Queen of Zion” that can be traced to Heinrich Heine’s “Princess Sabbath,” is painted as the “High Priest of poets clad in meil and ephod.” Had this text been timely printed in Europe or the United States in Russian or in English, the story of Russian futurism could have gone differently. But what happened, happened. See Katsis, “On Yiddish Translations.”

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———. “Pamiati Vladimira Nabokova.” Menora 13 (1977) : 26–27. Jabotinsky, Vladimir [Vladimir Zhabotinskii]. Introduction to Khaim Nakhman Bialik: Pesni i poemy, edited by Evgenii Kogan and Zoia Kopel′man, translated by Vladimir Zhabotinskii, 11–12. Tel Aviv: Babel′, 2021. Kaganskaia, Maiia. Antologiia zhanra, edited by Sergei Shargorodskii. Introduction by Mikhail Weisskopf [Mikhail Vaiskopf]. Moscow: Tekst, 2014. ———. “Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii. Mandel′shtam i Khomiakov.” Sion 20 (1977): 174–195. ———. “Pamiati ‘Pamiati Demona’. Chernovik proshchania.” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 4 (2009). https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2009/4/pamyati-pamyati-demona.html. ———. Shutovskoi khorovod. Izbrannoe 1977–2011. S.l.: Salamandra P.V.V., 2011. ———. “Slovo o milosti i gordosti” [A word about grace and pride]. In Legkaia muzyka: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Light music: poems], by Mikhail Gendelev. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 2004. http://www.gendelev.org/issledovaniya/152-majya-kaganskaya-slovo-o-milosti-i-gordosti.html. Katsis, Leonid. “Dialog: Iurii Zhivago—Mikhail Gordon i russko-evreiskoe neokantianstvo 1914–1915 godov.” In Judaica Rossica, vol. 3, edited by N. Basovskaia, D. Fishman, M. Uebb, and L. Katsis, 174–207. Moscow: Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2003. ———. “Kniga S. Fruga ‘Stikhotvorenia’ ot 1885 g. Dinamika podteksta v russko-evreiskoi poezii.” Evreiskii Knigonosha (2005): 31–39. ———. “On Yiddish Translations and Translators of B. Pasternak’s Novel Doctor Zhivago.” In Yiddish and the Field of Translation. Agents, Strategies, Concepts and Discourses across Time and Space, edited by Olaf Terpitz and Marianne Windsperger, 291–313. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2020. ———. “The Jewish Theologem of the Russian Avant-Garde (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Abba Gordin and Velvl Gordin-Beobi on the Background of Kdushi Musaf for the New Year).” Issues of Theology 2, no. 1 (2020): 17–51. https://doi.org/10.21638/ spbu28.2020.102. ———. Vladimir Maiakovskii: Poet v intellektual′nom kontekste epokhi. 2nd ed. Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2004. Katsman, Roman. “Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the Eyes of Israeli Writers and Intellectuals (1958–1960) (A Minimal Foundation of Multilingual Jewish Philology).” In Around the Point. Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages, edited by Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman, 643–686. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Kopel′man, Zoia. “Ia znaiu: kanu ia, kak zvezdochka, v tuman. . . .” In Khaim Nakhman Bialik: Pesni i poemy, edited by Evgenii Kogan and Zoia Kopel′man, translated by Vladimir Zhabotinskii, 172. Tel Aviv: Babel′, 2021. Mamedov, Afanasii. “Khaos iudeiskii i khristianskii.” Interview with Mikhail Gendelev, Maiia Kaganskaia, Elena Tolstaia, and Iurii Tabak. Lekhaim 2 (190) (2008). https://lechaim.ru/ ARHIV/190/mamedov.htm. Mandel′shtam, Maks. “Sushchnost′ sionizma. Pis′mo sionista docheri.” In Byt′ evreem v Rossii: Materialy po istorii russkogo evreistva, 1880–1890-e gody, edited by Nelli A. Portnova, 271–272. Jerusalem: Center for Slavic Languages and Literatures, Evreiskii universitet, 1999.

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Margolin, Julius [Iulii Margolin]. “‘Byt′ znamenitym—nekrasivo . . .’ (Pis′mo iz Tel′-Aviva).” In B. L. Pasternak: Pro et contra. B. L. Pasternak v sovetskoi, emigrantskoi, rossiiskoi literaturnoi kritike; antologiia, edited by Elena V. Pasternak, vol. 2, 291–298. St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo Russkoi Khristianskoi Gumanitarnoi Akademii, 2013. Originally published in Novoe Russkoe Slovo, December 7, 1958; and in Russkaia mysl′, December 18, 1958. Margolina, Rakhel′. “Perepiska s Korneem Ivanovichem Chukovskim.” Menora 13 (1977): 49–73. Markish, David. “Spravka dlia Nadezhdy Iakovlevny.” In “Posmotrim, kto kogo pereupriamit . . .” Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel′shtam v pis′makh, vospominaniiakh, svidetel′stvakh, compiled by Pavel Nerler, edited by Elena Shubina, 584–585. Moscow: AST, 2015. Morgulis, Mikhail. “Evreiskaia” kamera Lubianki. Jerusalem: Gesharim; and Moscow: Mosty Kul′tury, 1996. Opishnia, Ivan. “Zhizn′ i pechat′. Ben-Gurion osuzhdaet B. Pasternaka.” Vozrozhdenie 87 (March 1959). Pasternak, Boris. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 11 tomakh. Vol. 7. Moscow: Slovo, 2005. Segal, Dmitrii. “‘Doctor Zhivago’—evreiskii roman?” In Issledovaniia po lingvistike i semiotike. Sbornik statei k 80-letiiu Viach. Vs. Ivanova, 553–561. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul′tur, 2010. ———. “Pro Doma Sua: O Borise Pasternake.” In his Literatura kak okhrannaia gramota, 677–749. Moscow: Vodolei, 2006. Tolstaia, Elena. “‘Giurza tenginskogo polka’: Gendelevskaia oda Lermontovu.” https://helenadtolstoy.com/gyurza_lermontov/. Zand, Mikhail. “Pamiati Rakheli Margolinoi.” Menora 13 (1977): 74–75. ———. Russkie vospominaniia izrail′skogo uchenogo. Translated by Sergei Groizman. Jerusalem and Moscow: Izdatel′stvo M. Grinberga and Studiia “4+4,” 2020.

About the Contributors

Marat Grinberg received his PhD from the University of Chicago. A scholar of Jewish and Russian literature and culture, and of cinema, he is a professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College. Grinberg is the author of “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and coeditor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2013). Grinberg’s latest book, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity between the Lines, was published by Brandeis University Press in early 2023. Luba Jurgenson, professor of Russian Literature at Sorbonne University, serves as Director of Eur’Orbem (Center for Research on Oriental, Balkan, and Median Europe). She is the editor of the new (complete) French-language edition of Journey into the Land of the Zeka, as well as Julius Margolin’s Road to the West and his reports on the Rousset and Eichmann trials. Jurgenson’s recent academic publications include The Eye Sower. Varlam Shalamov’s Paths (2022), Landscapes of/by Memory (exhibition catalogue, 2020), and Mirror of the Gulag: Perceptions of Soviet Repression in France and Italy (2019). Leonid Katsis (1958–2022), Dr. habil. of Philology, was professor and head of the Department of Theology of Judaism, Bible, and Judaic Studies at Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). He was the author of many books, including Osip Mandelstam: Musk of Judaism (2002), Blood Libel and Russian Thought. Historical and Theological Study of the Beilis Affair (2006), The “Russian Spring” of Vladimir Jabotinsky (2019). With Brian Horowitz, Katsis coedited Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life (2015). Leonid Katsis was the academic editor of the seven-volume Complete Works of Jabotinsky (in Russian). Roman Katsman is a professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. Katsman is the author of books and articles about Hebrew and Russian literature, particularly about Jewish-Russian and RussianIsraeli literature and thought. He has worked on the theoretical problems of mythopoesis, chaos, nonverbal communication, sincerity, alternative history,

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and humor. His most recent books examine the Russian-language literature in Israel: Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia: sleduiushchie sto let russko-izrail'skoi literatury (The sublime lightness of creation. Next hundred years of Russian-Israeli literature, 2021), Neulovimaia real'nost': sto let russko-izrail'skoi literatury (1920–2020) (Elusive reality: A hundred years of Russian-Israeli literature, 2020), Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel (2016). Vladimir Khazan is a professor in the Department of German, Russian, and East European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His principal research fields include Russian-Jewish historical-cultural interaction and the history of Russian literature in exile between the two world wars. He is the author of almost thirty books and several hundred articles and publications of archival documents in Russian and English. Among his publications are the books “A Double Burden, a Double Cross”: Andrei Sobol as a Russian Jewish Writer (2017), Pinhas Rutenberg: Ot terrorista k sionistu (Opyt identifikatsii cheloveka, kotoryi delal istoriiu), 2 vols. (2008), and Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh: K problematike i poetike russko-evreiskogo literaturnogo dialoga v XX veke (2001). Elena Promyshlianskaia received her PhD at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University in the field of contemporary Russianlanguage literature in Israel. She works as a research assistant at the same department and teaches literature and Hebrew in high school, where she is the head of the division of humanities. For several years she has served as the leader of an educational program focusing on the studies of the history of Jews from the former USSR in cooperation with the Israeli Organization of Veterans of World War II. The project has received recognition and high praise in Israel. Elena Rimon received her PhD (theory of literature) in the Moscow State University (1985) and emigrated to Israel in 1987. She teaches Hebrew literature in the Jewish Heritage Department of Ariel University in Samaria (Israel). She published a number of articles in Russian, Hebrew, and English, as well as books such as The Time and the Place of Mikhail Bakhtin (in Hebrew, 2010), The Russian Formalists: Centrality of the Margins (in Hebrew, 2021), The Jewish Literature in Modern Time (in Russian, 2011). She is the editor of Israeli Literature in the Russian translation, Anthology (1998), Sh. Y. Agnon’s short stories in Russian translation (2004), and the collective volume Intellectuals and Terror: The Fatal Attraction (Present vis-à-vis the Past, Aspects of Theory and History) (in English, 2013).

About the Contributors

Maxim D. Shrayer is professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College. A bilingual author and translator, Shrayer is the author and editor of over twenty books of criticism and biography, fiction and nonfiction, and poetry. His books include The World of Nabokov’s Stories, Russian Poet/Soviet Jew, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, and Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story. He is the editor of An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature and Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature and of four volumes of the fiction by David Shrayer-Petrov in English translation. Shrayer is a Guggenheim fellow and the winner of a National Jewish Book Award. Shrayer’s most recent books are the collection of Russian poetry Stikhi iz aipada (Poems from the iPad) and the memoir Immigrant Baggage. Aleksei Surin is a poet, journalist, PhD student, and research assistant at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). In addition to research on Russian-Israeli literature, he studies the works of J. R. R. Tolkien through the prism of twentieth-century philosophy. His poems and short stories have appeared in the journals Artikl’, Zerkalo, ROAR and others. As a journalist and interviewer, he has contributed to such publications as The Times of Israel, Judaica Russica, Jewish.ru, and Jewish Journal. Zlata Zaretsky holds a PhD from the Moscow Central Academic Institute for Arts Research. She is the organizer of the Jerusalem-based international conferences “Problems of Modern Israeli Culturology” and the founder of the Association of Israeli Playwrights in the Union of Russian-Language Writers of Israel. A member of the State Commission of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration for new repatriate artists, Zaretsky is a theater critic and a regular contributor to periodicals. Her books include The Phenomenon of Israeli Theatre and Russian Dramaturgy of Israel, 1970–2020. In 2021 the Union of RussianLanguage Writers of Israel awarded her the Mark Azov Prize for her contributions to theater arts.

387

Index of Names 22, magazine, 100–1, 109, 112, 117, 119–20, 125, 127–28, 131, 135, 202, 205, 221, 344–45, 378 24 chasa (24 hours), newspaper, 115, 236 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 89–92, 94, 131, 270, 386 Agulianskii, Leon (Leonid), 247, 343, 345 Beg radi zhizni (Running to live), 247n85 Bolezn′ pod nazvaniem zhizn′ (That illness called life), 345 Dereviannyi teatr (Wooden theater), 345 Dirizher (The conductor), 345 Gnezdo vorob′ia (Sparrow’s nest), 345 Nerusskaia ruletka (Un-Russian roulette), 247n85 Parallel′nye krivye: povesti, rasskazy, p′esa (Parallel curves: Tales, short stories, a play), 247n85 Rezervist (The reservist), 247n85 Vizit v Zazerkal′e (The world behind the looking glass), 247n85 Ya zhiv! (I’m alive!), 345 Aktsent (Accent), journal, 198 Alef (Aleph), journal, 133, 198 Aleksin, Anatolii (Goberman), 237 Saga o Pevznerakh (The Pevzner saga), 237 Aleteiia, publishing house, 232 Almi, Lyova (Yehuda), (né Shiputinovsky), 6, 7n14, 9–10

Ba-sha’ar (At the gates), 9 Migdaliada: Zikhronot (Migdaliada: Memories), 7n14 S russkim narodom razgovor na ty (A conversation on familiar terms with the Russian people), 6n12, 9–10 Alterman, Nathan, 84, 94, 96, 102 The Silver Tray, 84–86 Amalrik, Andrei, 111 Prosushchestvuet li Sovetskii Soiuz do 1984 goda? (Will the Soviet Union last until 1984?), 111 Ami (My people), almanac, 100 Amichai, Yehuda, 84, 87, 178, 208, 329n98 God Full of Mercy, 87 I Want to Die in My Own Bed, 87 Amnuel′, Pesakh (Pavel), 198, 242, 294–96, 298–99, 316 Chisto nauchnaia ekspertiza (Purely scientific expertise), 295n10 Goluboi Al′tsior (Blue Altsior), 295 Liudi Koda (The code people), 299 Mest′ v domino (Revenge in dominoes), 294 Monastyr′ (Monastery), 294, 295 Ostrov (Island), 295n10 Povodyr′ (Guide), 295n10 Probuzhdenie (Awakening), 295 Smeshchenie (Displacement), 296, 299 Trivselennaia (Triuniverse), 299 Ukhodiashchie v temnotu (Leaving into the darkness), 295n10

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Amusin, Mark, 200 Ankori, Yehoshua, 6, 10–11 Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems), 10 Napadenie (The assault), 10 Appelfeld, Aharon, 89, 131, 208, 270 Ardis, publishing house, 136 Arendt, Hannah, 60, 72, 73n113 Arest, Avraam (Abram), 6–10, 226 Mashber, 6n10, 7, 8n17, 9, 226 Arik, children’s journal, 199, 269 Arkadin, Dmitrii, 346 U kogo trava zelenei? (Whose grass is greener?), 346 Arkadin, A. See Tsetlin, Isaak Artikl’, journal, 204–5, 213, 221, 267, 271–74, 387 Arutiunova, Karine, 247–48 Angel Gofman i drugie (The angel Gofman and others), 248 Docheri Evy (Eve’s daughters), 248n87, 249–50 Moi drug Bendzhamen (My friend Benjamin), 249n87, 250 Narekatsi ot Lilit (Narekatsi from Lilith), 249n87, 250 Padaet sneg, letit ptitsa (It’s snowing, a bird’s flying), 249 Pepel krasnoi korovy (Ashes of the red cow), 248n87 Schastlivye liudi (Happy people), 248n87, 249 Skazhi Krasnyi (Say Red), 248n87 Svet Bonnara. Eskizy na poliakh (Bonnard’s light. Sketches on the margins), 249n87 Tsvet granata, vkus limona (Color of pomegranates, taste of lemon), 248–49n87 Auschwitz, 57–58, 63, 69, 187, 238 Australia, 265 Austria, 187 Aviv (Spring), journal, 102

Avrora, journal 125 Azov (Aizenshtadt), Mark, 208, 349–59, 387 Iftakh-odnoliub ( Jephthah, man of a single love), 350, 353–54 I obrushatsia gory. Kniga otkrovenii i fantazmov (And mountains will fall: A book of revelations and phantasms), 208, 351, 354 I smekh, i proza, i liubov′ (Laughter, prose, and love), 208, 350 Misteriia blef (Mystery-bluff), 350 Poslednii den′ Sodoma (Last day of Sodom), 350, 354, 356–58 Sochinitel′ snov. Otkroveniia i fantazmy (Composer of dreams: Revelations and phantasms), 208 Vesennii tsar′ chernogolovykh (The spring king of the black-headed ones), 350, 352 Babel, Isaac, 92, 95, 102, 117, 214, 339 Babinsky, Khanan. See Khanan, Vladimir Balagasha, children’s journal, 235 Barash, Aleksandr, 147n1, 153, 168n30, 178–79, 181–82, 183n49, 203 Vremia tret′ikh dozhdei (Time of the third rain), 179–80 Istochnik v vinogradnike (Source in the vineyard), 179–80 Sredizemnomorskaia nota (Mediterranean note), 179, 180n44, 181–8 Baukh, Efraim (Efrem), 104–6, 139–40, 204 Apologia nebytiia. Shlomo Sand: novyi mif o evreiakh (Apology of non-being. Shlomo Sand: a new myth about the Jews), 106–7 Dante in Moscow, 105

Index of Names

Effekt babochki (Butterfly effect), 106 Goroshki i graf Triufel (Peas and Count Truffle), 105 Grani (Edges), 104 Iadro iudeistva (Nucleus of Judaism), 106 Isk istorii (Claim of history), 106 Kamen′ Moriia (The stone Moriia), 105 Kin i Orman (Kin and Orman), 105 Krasnyi vecher (Red evening), 104 Lestnitsa Iakova ( Jacob’s ladder), 105–6, 139 Nochnye tramvai (Nighttime trams), 104 Oklik (Call), 106 Perstami ruki chelovecheskoi: Fellini—Venetsiia—Fuko (With the fingers of the human hand: Fellini—Venice—Foucault), 106 Prevrashcheniia (Transformations), 104 Pustynia vnemlet Bogu (The desert heeds God), 106 Puteshestvie v stranu Geo ( Journey to the country of Geo), 105 Ruach, 105 Solntse samoubiits (The sun of suicides), 106 Sny o zhizni (Dreams about life), 105 Tridtsataia vesna pobedy (The thirtieth spring of victory), 104 Vremia besov (The time of demons), 107 Zavesa (Veil), 106 Belarus, 68n99, 96 Belov, Avraam. See Elinson, Avraam Bel′ski, Rene. See Roitman, Viktoriia Ben-Gurion, David, 59n52, 60, 285, 329, 363–65, 369 Benjamin, Walter, 73, 219

Berlin, 11–12, 14, 22–23, 29, 33, 50, 55, 368, 370 Beseder?, journal, 236 Beseder, publishing house, 236 Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 3, 52, 55, 83–84, 90, 92, 96, 102, 333n113, 363, 368–69, 374–375 Zohar (Zorei), 374 Bial′skaia, Alisa, 276–77, 285 Legkaia korona (A light crown), 276–77 Opyt bor′by s udush′em (Struggle against suffocation), 276–77 Bial′skii, Igor′, 210–11 Biblioteka Aliia, publishing house, 95–97, 102, 118, 124, 269 Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, publishing house, 201, 204–5 Bibliotechka Besedera, publishing house, 236 Birobidzhaner Shtern, newspaper, 119 Boguslavskii, Mordekhai Moiseevich. See Egart, Mark Bokstein, Ilia, 153, 157, 162, 210, 226 Bliki volny (Glints of the Wave), 158, 160n21 Afánta-Utóma (Fantasia-Judaica), 158–62 Bosch, Hieronymus, 308 The Last Judgment, 308 Brodsky, Joseph, xiii, 111, 114, 136–37, 168, 173, 176, 182, 276 Chast′ rechi (A part of speech), 176 Ia vsegda tverdil, chto sud′ba igra (I said fate plays a game without a score), 276 Bul′var Rotshilda (Rothschild Boulevard), journal, 201 Bumerang, publishing house, 103 Bunin, Ivan, 28–29, 35, 105, 247n86, 320 Roza Ierikhona (The Rose of Jericho), 28

391

392

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Canaan, 345 Celan, Paul, 182, 184–85, 187, 207 Chagall, Marc, 350 Chastnyi Correspondent (Private correspondent), journal, 137 Cherikover, publishing house, 103 Chekhov, Anton, 247n85, 341 Chelak, Grigorii, 203 Chernin, Velvl, 198–99 Chernivtsi, 184, 269 Chernovik (Draft), journal, 150 Chernovitskie Listki (Chernivtsi sheets), newspaper, 269 Chernyi, Matvei, 201, 204-5 Levantiiskaia korona. Venki sonetov (Levantine crown. Wreaths of sonnets), 205 Cherut, newspaper, 88n30 Chukovsky, Kornei, 92, 94, 113, 380 Cracow, 58, 274 Daniel the Immured, 1 Dektor, Feliks, 102, 199 Deich, Dmitrii, 207, 281–82 Avgust nepostizhimyi (Incomprehensible August), 281 Iavleniia (Phenomena), 282 Preimushchestvo Griffita (The advantage of Griffith), 281 Preliudii i fantazii (Preludes and fantasies), 281–82 Skazki dlia Marty (Fairy tales for Marta), 281 Zapiski o probuzhdenii bodrstvuiushchikh (Notes on the awakening of the sleepless), 281–82 Zima v Tel′-Avive (Winter in Tel Aviv), 281–82 Di Zukunft, journal, 6n11, 19n73 Don Quixote, 277, 351

Dostoianie (Heritage), publishing house, 212 Druzhba narodov, journal, 213, 215, 275 Dvoetochie (Colon), journal, 175, 202, 226–28, 281–82 Dymova, Lorina, 210 Effekt, publishing house, 103 Egart, Mark (Boguslavskii, Mordekhai), 30–32 Opalennaia zemlia (Scorched Earth), 31–32 Eidel′man, Iakov, 379–80 Pis′ma k synu (Letters to my son), 379–80 Eidel′man, Natan, 379–80 Dnevniki (Diaries), 380 Eitan, Adam, 346 Nebroskoe nasledstvo (Inconspicuous inheritance), 346 Posle liubvi (After love), 346 Ekho, journal, 127–28, 135 Ekspress, publishing house, 131 Elinson, Avraam (pseud. Belov, Avraam), 94–95, 101 I Told Myself to the End: Verse of Israeli Female Poets, 95 Elkana, Aryeh, 343–44 Brat′ia (Brothers), 344 Bred (Delirium), 344 Demokratiia, tlia, demokratiia (Democracy, aphid, democracy), 344 Ia—Fedra (I Phaedra), 344 Meier-Buff (Meyer Buff), 344 Mir! Mir! Mir! (Peace! Peace! Peace!), 344 Sestry (Sisters), 344 Tragediia Sovetskogo teatra (Tragedy of the Soviet theater), 344 Engele, Asya, 188

Index of Names

England, 92, 130 Energiia (Energy), journal, 242n78 Epstein, Israel (Srolik), 61 Eretz Israel (Yisrael), 1–10, 12–13, 15–19, 21–22, 23n91, 24–25, 27–35, 36n127, 47, 58, 61, 359, 363, 375 Erlikh, Viktor, 200 Ermitazh, publishing house, 128 Erofeev, Venedikt, 100, 127 Moskva-Petushki (Moscow to the End of the Line), 100 Etkind, Efim, 200 Evrei v SSSR ( Jews in USSR), samizdat journal, 100, 112n25 Evreiskii knigonosha ( Jewish book peddler), journal, 199 Fain, Anna, 205, 272–74, 301, 316, 327 Goriachee pivo Krakova (Cracow’s hot beer), 274 Khroniki tret′ei avtopady (Chronicles of the third autofallda), 273 Pis′mo na golubom kartone (Letter on blue cardboard), 301 Pod flagom Gambrinusa (Under the flag of Gambrinus), 274 Tret′iakovskaia baldareia (Tretyakov balldery), 273–74, 301 Fainerman, Mikhail, 231n71 Feinberg, Yehuda Aryeh Leib (Grebnev), 32–33 Dovid Blank, 33h Liricheskii sad (Lyrical garden), 33 Na paperti dorog (At the parvis of the roads), 33 Feniks (Phoenix), samizdat journal, 134 Fiks, Ol′ga, xii, 205, 312–18, 320 Temnoe ditia (Dark child), 312–15, 317, 320 Finkel′, Leonid, 260, 267, 269

Dorogami vechnogo zhida (On the roads of the Wandering Jew), 269 I za efes ego tsepliaiutsia rozy (And roses cling to his sword hilt), 269 Lakrimoza (Lacrimosa), 269 Meblirovannaia pustynia (Furnished desert), 269 Nedostovernoe nastoiashchee (The unreliable present), 269 Pis′mo vnuku (Letter to my grandson), 269 Shalom Aleikhem (Sholom Aleichem), 269 Zazhgi solntse (Light the sun), 269 Zolotaia pechal′ (Golden sorrow), 269 France, 4, 10, 24, 134, 138 Fridliand, Iosif (Oss), 206 Fromer, Vladimir, 46 Nesostoiavshaiasia vstrecha (A Failed Encounter), 46 Frost, Robert, 175 A Peril of Hope, 175 Frug, Semen (Simon), 371, 373–76 Stikhotvoreniia (Poems), 373 The Pilgrim’s Song, 375 Galesnik, Mark, 207, 234–36 Prorokov 48, 235n74, 236 Galileia. Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi zhurnal (Galilee. Literary-artistic journal), 208 Gamburd, Miriam, 209 Dvukhfigurnaia obnazhenka (Two-figure nude), 209 Gargul′ia (Gargoyle), 209 Gammer, Efim, 204, 343–44 Rossiia-Izrail′. Nu i Teatr! (RussiaIsrael: What theater!), 343 V snegakh za gran′iu vremeni (In the snows beyond the margin of time), 343–44

393

394

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

V chas Messii, u kolodtsa s zhivoi vodoi (In the hour of the Messiah, at the well with the living waters), 343 Lunnaia golova Gogolia (The lunar head of Gogol), 343–44 Geizer, Мatvei, 339 Russko-evreiskaia literatura XX v. (Russian-Jewish literature of the 20th century), 339 Gekht, Semen, 31 Parokhod idet v Iaffu i obratno (The ship sails to Jaffa and back), 31 Gel′bakh, Igor′, 260, 265–66 Muzeinaia krysa (Museum rat), 266 Ochertaniia Gruzii (Contours of Georgia), 266 Opozdavshie (Latecomers), 266 Pod goroi Davida (Beneath David’s mountain), 266 Priznaniia glinianogo cheloveka (Confessions of a clay man), 265 Sklon gory v sukhoi den′ (Mountainside on a dry day), 266 Uteriannyi Blium (The lost Bloom), 265 Zabytyi Sebastopolis (Forgotten Sebastopolis), 266 Gendelev, Mikhail, 103, 126–28, 153, 166–75, 207, 372n15, 374–75n21, 376–77 Billiards in Yafo, 168–73 Diaspora, 127 Iz russkoi poezii (From Russian poetry), 127–28 Legkaia muzyka: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Light music: poems), 127–28, 376 Liubov′, voina i smert′ v vospominaniiakh sovremennika

(Love, war, and death in a contemporary’s memoirs), 128 Nepolnoe sobranie sochinenii (Incomplete collected works), 127 Poslanie k lemuram (A Message to lemurs), 127 Prazdnik (Celebration), 127, 168 Stikhotvoreniia Mikhaila Gendeleva (Poems of Mikhail Gendelev), 127 Tsar′ (Tsar), 127 V′′ezd v Ierusalim (Entrance to Jerusalem), 377 Velikoe russkoe puteshestvie (Great Russian journey), 127 V sadakh Allakha (In Allah’s gardens), 127 Germany, 4, 21, 22n86, 27, 35, 47, 55, 61, 123, 125, 129, 163, 187, 221–22, 286, 300, 302, 331 Gesharim / Mosty Kul′tury (Bridging cultures), publishing house, 199 Glebova, Rimma, 247 Misticheskie istorii (Mystical stories), 247 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 52, 105, 293, 320, 322–23, 341, 372–73 Goldberg, Leah, 78, 84–85, 95 Gol′dshtein, Aleksandr, 181–82, 198, 201, 208–9, 216–18, 223, 230, 233, 244 Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Parting with Narcissus), 201, 216–18 Aspekty dukhovnogo braka (Aspects of a spiritual matrimony), 217–18 Pomni o Famaguste (Remember Famagusta), 217–18 Spokoinye polia (Quiet fields), 217–18, 244 Gol′dshtein, Pavel, 101, 121–22, 377–78, 381

Index of Names

V Butyrskoi tiur′me 1938 goda (In Butyrskaia prison in 1938), 122 V Butyrskoi i Lefortovskoi tiur′makh 1939 goda (In Butyrskaia and Lefortovo prisons in 1939), 122 17 let v lageriakh zhizni i smerti (Seventeen years in camps of life and death), 122 Mir suditsia dobrom (The world is judged by goodness), 122 Goller, Boris, 346–48 Fleity na ploshchadi (Flutes in the square), 346 Peterburgskie fleity (Petersburg flutes), 346 Plach po Lermontovu, ili Belye oleni (A lament for Lermontov, or White deers), 346–47 Pokolenie 41 (The generation of ’41), 347 Prival komedianta, ili Venok Griboedovu (Teatr odnogo dramaturga) (A comedian’s rest, or A garland for Griboedov [A theater of one playwright]), 347 Slovo i teatr (The word and the theater), 347 Sto brat′ev Bestuzhevykh (One hundred Bestuzhev brothers), 346 Goralik, Linor, 203, 281–82, 285–86, 306–9 Agata vozvrashchaetsia domoi (Agata returns home), 285 Bibleiskii zoopark (Biblical zoo), 285 Govorit (They say), 285 Kholodnaia voda Vinesany (Vinesana’s cold water), 285 Koroche (In brief), 285 Nedetskaia eda (No child’s food), 285

Nedetskaia eda. Bez sladkogo (No child’s food: Without dessert), 285 Putevoditel′ po Izrailiu (Traveler’s guide to Israel), 285 Valerii, 285 . . . Vot skazhem (. . . Let’s just say), 285 Vsenoshchnaia zver′ (The all-night beast), 285 Vse, sposobnye dyshat′ dykhanie (All those capable of breathing breath), 285–86, 307, 309 Gorenko, Anna (née Karpa), 153, 182–87, 206–7 Perevod s evropeiskogo (Translating from the European), 185–87 Grani (Facets), journal, 109, 131 Grebnev, Leonid. See Feinberg Grinberg, Marat, x, 78, 385 Grinberg, Mikhail, 199–200 Grinberg, Savelii, 150, 188, 227 Grinberg, Semen, 210 Grinberg, Uri Zvi, 84, 94, 106, 210–11 In the Middle of the World, in the Middle of Time, 106 Grobman, Mikhail Jakovlevich, 153–57, 216, 226 Voennye tetradi (Military notebooks), 154–57 Guberman, Igor’, 100n3, 199, 236, 250 Ierusalimskie dnevniki ( Jerusalem diaries), 251 Iskusstvo staret′ (The art of aging), 251 Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi zhizni (Book about a tasteful and healthy life), 251 Kniga stranstvii (Book of wanderings), 250 O vypivke, o boge, o liubvi (About boozing, god, and love), 251

395

396

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Pozhilye zapiski (Aged notes), 250 Progulki vokrug baraka (Strolling around the barracks), 250 Putevoditel′ po strane sionskikh mudretsov (Guidebook to the land of the Elders of Zion), 251 Shtrikhi k portretu (Touches to a portrait), 250 Vechernii zvon (Evening bells), 250 Zametki s dorogi (Notes from the road), 250 Gulag, 47–49, 51, 53, 62–63, 66–67, 71, 73, 95, 302n32, 381 Gutina, Nelli, 196–98, 209 Ha-Aretz, newspaper, 21, 35–36, 86, 266 Ha-Boker, newspaper, 14n47 Haifa, 4, 14, 22–23, 59, 219–20, 368, 370 Ha-Mashkif, newspaper, 59 Ha-Poel ha-Tsair, publishing house, 7 Hazaz, Chayim, 89 Hebrew and Yiddish, 5, 11, 18, 29–30, 52, 90–91, 93, 95, 106, 178, 199, 362, 367n4, 368, 374 Heimisch, journal, 368n4 Holocaust (Shoah), 47, 66, 67n93, 68, 70, 72n112, 84, 96, 183–85, 187, 222–23, 237–39, 243, 264, 271, 274, 359 Holy Sepulcher, 1 Huxley, Aldous, 305 Brave New World, 305 Iakobson, Anatolii, 45–47 Popytka rekviema (Attempt at a requiem), 45–47, 62 Iakov-Press, publishing house, 103 Ialan-Shtekelis, Miriam (née Vilenskaia), 29–30 Pis′mo russkomu poetu (Letter to a Russian Poet), 30 Ierusalimskii bibliofil ( Jerusalem bibliophile), almanac, 211

Ierusalimskii Zhurnal ( Jerusalem journal), 132, 209–11, 233, 241, 246, 267, 270, 284 Ierusalimsky ezhenedel′nik ( Jerusalem weekly), 208 Ilichevsky, Alexander, 205, 279–81 I. O., journal, 202, 226–27 Isakova, Anna, 209–10 Akh, eta chernaia luna! (Oh, that black moon!), 210 Moi Izrail′ (My Israel), 210 Iskatel′ (Searcher), journal, 242n78 Italy, 58, 61 Iudson, Mikhail, 201, 205, 209, 216, 221–23, 266, 272, 301–5 Chetvero (The four), 221 God 5757-i (Year 5757), 221 Lestnitsa na shkaf (Ladder onto the wardrobe), 221–22, 301–5 Mozgovoi (Braintine), 221–22 Ostatki (Remnants), 221 Iunost′ (Youth), journal, 86, 107, 109, 137, 261 Ivrus, publishing house, 121 Izdatel′stvo Iakova Vaiskopfa. See Bumerang Izvestiia (The news), newspaper, 133 Izrail’ segodnia (Israel today), journal, 464 Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze’ev , pseud. Altalena), xiii, 4, 25n100, 53, 58n52, 60, 64n82, 66–67, 70, 88, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 149, 363–64, 367–68, 370n9, 371–72, 374–76, 380–81, 385 Pamiati Gertslia (In the Memory of Herzl), 149 Piatero (The Five), 53 Vmesto apologii”(In lieu of an apology), 370n9 Zhidenok (The little Jewboy), 4 Jaffa, 14, 31, 329, 350

Index of Names

Jerusalem, 4, 7–9, 10n26, 14n45, 15, 21, 24–25, 29, 32–33, 36, 54, 91, 97, 100, 102, 105, 111, 116, 118–19, 122, 127, 129, 131–32, 134–36, 139, 150, 153, 175, 182, 198–99, 202, 204, 206, 209–10, 219–20, 223–24, 226–28, 230, 236, 240, 242n78, 271, 277–78, 280, 284, 301, 312, 314–15, 319, 328–35, 347–50, 363, 367n4, 370n10, 372, 377–79, 386–87 Jurgenson, Luba, xii, 45, 363, 385 Kaganskaia, Maiia, 196–97, 202, 207, 363, 371–73, 374n21, 376–78 Osip Mandel′shtam—poet iudeiskii (Osip Mandelstam, a Judean poet), 363, 371, 373, 376–77 Kakhol-Lavan, publishing house, 103 Kamyshnyi, Aleksei (pseud. Mukh, Aleks), 206–7 Kandel’, Felix (Filipp), 13, 108, 140 Kniga vremen i sobytii (Book of times and events), 110 Koridor (Corridor), 110 Liudi mimoezzhie. Kniga puteshestvii (People passing by: A book of travels), 110 Na noch′ gliadia (On the eve), 110 Ne proshlo i zhizni (Not even a lifetime later), 110 Peredai ulybku (Pass on a smile), 108 Pervyi etazh (First floor), 110 Protiv neba na zemle (Against the sky on Earth), 110 Shel staryi evrei po Novomu Arbatu… (An old Jew was walking down Novyi Arbat…), 110 Slovo za slovo (Word for word), 110 Smert′ gerontologa (Death of a gerontologist), 110

Vrata iskhoda nashego (Gates of our exodus), 110 Zemlia pod nogami (Earth underneath the feet), 110 Zona otdykha ili piatnadtsat′ sutok na razmyshlenie (The zone of rest or fifteen days for contemplation), 109–10 Kanevskii, Aleksandr, 234–35 Dvadtsat′ let spustia (Twenty years later), 234 Goroda i liudi. Polnoe sobranie vpechatlenii (Cities and people: Complete collection of impressions), 234 Moe otkrytie Izrailia (My discovery of Israel), 234 Smeisia, paiats! (Laugh, Pagliaccio!), 235 Teza s nashego dvora (Teza from our courtyard), 234 Kanovich, Grigory, 199, 202, 208, 237, 240–41 Blagoslovi i list′ia, i ogon′ (Bless the leaves and the fire), 240n77 I net rabam raia (And there is no paradise for slaves), 240n77 Kolybel′naia snezhnoi babe (Lullaby for a snowwoman), 240n77, 241 Kozlenok za dva grosha (A goatling for two cents), 240n77, 241 Liki vo t′me (Faces in the dark), 240n77 Mestechkovyi romans (Shtetl romance), 240n77, 241 Ocharovan′e satany (Enchantment of Satan), 240n77, 241 Park zabytykh evreev (Park of forgotten Jews), 202, 240n77, 241 Prodavets snov (Seller of dreams), 240n77

397

398

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Ptitsy nad kladbishchem (Birds over the cemetery), 240n77 Shelest srublennykh derev′ev (Murmur of felled trees), 240n77, 241 Slezy i molitvy durakov (The tears and prayers of fools), 240n77 Svechi na vetru (Candles in the wind), 240n77 Ulybnis′ nam, Gospodi (Smile upon us, Lord), 240n77 Karabchievskii, Aleksandr, 205–6, 346 Po spetsial′nosti (By profession), 346 Karabchievskii, Arkadii (pseud. Kariv, Arkan), 274–75 Odnazhdy v Bishkeke (Once upon a time in Bishkek), 275 Operatsiia “Kennedi” (Operation “Kennedy”), 275 Perevodchik (The translator), 275 Slovo za slovo (Little by little), 274–75 Karabchievskii, Iurii, 241, 274 Karakei i Kadikei (Karakeui and Kadikeui), journal, 227 Kashtanov, Arnold (Ephshtein), 233–34 Kan′on-a-Sharon (The ha-Sharon mall), 233 Khaker Astarty (The Astarta hacker), 233–34 Uspekh kak esteticheskii fenomen (Success as an aesthetic phenomenon), 233 Katsis, Leonid, x, 199, 362, 385 Katsman, Roman, x–xi, 3, 63, 80, 152, 157n20, 194, 260–61, 267, 311n53, 329, 339–40, 343, 385–86 Neulovimaia real′nost′: sto let russkoizrail’skoi literatury (Elusive reality: A hundred years of Russian-Israeli literature), 3, 339, 386

Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel, 339, 386 Vysshaia legkost′ sozidaniia: sleduiushchie sto let russkoizrail’skoi literatury (The sublime lightness of creation. Next hundred years of RussianIsraeli literature,), 339, 386 Khalif , Lev, 150 Khanan, Vladimir (pseud. Liuger, Artemii), 205, 212 Aura fakta (Aura of the fact), 205 Vverkh po lestnitse, vedushchei na podokonnik (Up the staircase leading to the windowsill), 205 Byt′ killerom (To be a killer), 205 Khanelis, Vladimir (Zeev), 132–33, 198 Kosmicheskii eksperiment (Space experiment), 133 Rodilis′ i uchilis′ v Odesse: materialy k entsiklopedicheskomu slovariu (They were born and educated in Odesa: Materials for an encyclopedic dictionary), 133 Tot, s kem proiskhodit chudo (He to whom a miracle happens), 133 V nashem strannom gorode (In our strange city), 133 Kharms, Daniil, 1 Khazan, Vladimir, xii, 1, 35n122, 46, 99, 194, 359, 386 Kheifets, Mikhail, 110–12, 348–49 Gliadia iz Ierusalima (Looking on from Jerusalem), 111 Khanna Arendt sudit XX vek (Hanna Arendt judges the twentieth century), 111 Khanna Arendt: usloviia bytiia cheloveka na Zemle (Hanna Arendt: A human’s conditions for existing on Earth), 111

Index of Names

Kniga schastlivogo cheloveka (The book of a happy man), 111–12 Mesto i vremia (Time and place), 111 Puteshestvie iz Dubrovlaga v Ermak (A Journey from Dubrovlag to Ermak), 111 Russkoie pole (Russian field), 110 Sekretar′ tainoi politsii (Secretary of the secret police), 110 Spasti kamer-iunkera Pushkina (To save Kammerjunker Pushkin), 348–49 Sud nad Iisusom: evreiskie versii i gipotezy ( Jesus’s trial: Jewish versions and hypotheses), 111 Tsareubiistvo v 1918 godu (Assassination of the tsar in 1918), 111 Ukrainskie siluety (Ukrainian silhouettes), 111 Voennoplennyi sekretar′ (Secretary prisoner of war), 111 Vospominanii grustnyi svitok (A sad scroll of memories), 111 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 126, 150, 162, 177 Khokhlovkin, Shlomo (pseud. Ben-Bloria), 16–17 Zigzagi (Zigzags), 16–17 Kholin, Igor, 154 Khomer: Svobodnoe anarkhopsikhodelicheskoe izdanie (Khomer: A free anarcho-psychedelic publication), journal, 206 Khovkin, Ezra, 272–73 Malakhovskii parovoz: detskaia skazka dlia vzroslykh (The Malakhovka steam engine: A children’s fairytale for grownups), 273 Mudrets-izvozchik (The Wise Cabby), 272

Nepokorivshiisia (The unsurrendered one), 273 Skazki dlia vzroslykh (Fairy tales for grownups), 273 Svecha na snegu (Candle in the snow), 272–73 Stranstviia Borukha (Boruch’s wanderings), 273 Khromchenko (née Dubrovkina), Iuliia Vladimirovna. See Vladimirova, Liia Khudozhestvennaia literatura, publishing house, 82, 131, 199 Khvostenko, Aleksei, 125–26, 162–63 Ketro, Marta (Pozdnysheva, Inna), 282–84 Khop, Khop, ulitka (Hop, hop, snail), 283 Khoroshen′kie ne umiraiut (The pretty ones don’t die), 283 Mezhdu vremenem (Between time), 283 Pis′ma bestsennomu M. (Letters to priceless M.), 283 Rasseiannaia zhizn′ (Scattered life), 284 Tel′-Aviv (Tel Aviv), 283 Zhenshchiny i koty, muzhchiny i koshki (Women and male cats, men and female cats), 283 Kim, Iulii, 211 Puteshestvie k maiaku ( Journey toward the lighthouse), 211 King, Steven, 308 The Mist, 308 Cell, 308 The Stand, 308 Kinor (Violin), journal, 101, 104 Klimovski, Keren, 282, 284–85 Bananovyi rai (Banana paradise), 284 Koroleva Anglii kusala menia v nos (The queen of England bit me on the nose), 285

399

400

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Vremia govorit′ (Time to speak), 285 Kliuchevich, Zakhariia Solomonovich (pseud. Ben-Tavria, B.-T., Ma’ayani, Kliuch, Z. Ravich) 7n14, 23–27 Letaiushchii medved′ (The flying bear), 27 Migdaliada: Zikhronot (Migdaliada: Memories), 7n14 Palestinskie pis′ma (Palestinian letters), 25 Sasha Levin, 24 To, chto otrkrylos′ na mig (Things revealed for an instant), 25n100, 26 Veter (The wind), 25 Klub (Club), journal, 101 Kluger, Daniel’ (Daniil), 237, 243–44, 300, 316–17, 320–23, 327, 332 Chaiki nad Kremlem (Seagulls over the Kremlin), 300 Dela magicheskie (Matters of magic), 243 Letaiushchaia v temnykh pokoiakh, prikhodiashchaia v nochi (She flies in dark chambers, she comes in the night), 243, 317, 320–23 Mushketer, ili Podlinnaia istoriia Isaaka de Portu (The musketeer, or The true story of Isaac de Porthau), 243, 332 Poslednii vykhod Sheiloka (Shylock’s last act), 243 Tysiacha let v dolg (A thousand years borrowed), 317 Kobrinski, Aleksandr, 226, 228–29 Fantomnaia real′nost′ (Phantom reality), 229 Plachushchii osel (The crying ass), 229 Povozka s igrushkami (A wagon with toys), 229

Kodry, journal, 104 Kontinent (Continent), journal, 109, 127–28, 131, 135, 137 Korol, Mikhail, 188, 227 Koster (Bonfire), journal, 110 Kotliarskii, Mark, 203, 247–48 Strannaia zhenshchina (Strange woman), 248 Volch′i vorota (Wolf ’s gate), 248 Ved′mina gora (Witch’s mountain), 248 Krasil′shchikov, Arkadii, 244–46 Rasskazy v dorogu (Take-out stories), 245–46 Rasskazy o russkom Izraile (Stories of Russian Israel), 246 Krasnogorov, Valentin, 208, 341–43, 349 Chetyre steny i odna strast′ (Four walls and one passion), 341–42 Delo Beilisa (The Beilis affair), 342 Liubov′ do poteri pamiati (Love to the point of amnesia), 342 O drame i teatre (About drama and the theater), 342 Osnovy dramaturgii. Teoriia, tekhnika i praktika dramy (Basics of dramaturgy: The theory, technique, and practice of drama), 342 Pesn′ Pesnei (Song of Songs), 342 Treugol′nye bulochki (Three-cornered pastries), 342 Vavilon (Babylon), 342 Zhrebii (The lot), 342 Kreshchatik, journal, 246 Krivin, Feliks, 203, 211 Skazki iz zhizni (Fairy tales from life), 211 Krokodil (Crocodile), magazine, 109 Krug (Circle), journal, 101 Kruglikov, Samuil Markovich, 7 V krasnykh tiskakh (In the red vice), 7

Index of Names

Kuznetsov, Eduard, 133–35, 209–10 Dnevniki (Diaries), 134 Mordovskii marafon (Mordovian marathon), 134 Russkii roman (Russian novel), 134 Shag vlevo, shag vpravo (A Step to the left, a step to the right), 135 Landburg, Mikhail (Moshe), 122–23 Drugoi baraban (Another drum), 123 Geran′ iz Gonolulu (Geranium from Honolulu), 123 I da, i net (Both yes and no), 123 Mesiatsy saksofona (Months of saxophone), 123 Na poslednem seanse (At the last session), 123 Otchego dozhd′ padaet vverkh? (Why does rain fall upward?), 123 Otrubi moiu ten′ (Chop off my shadow), 123 Poslanniki (Envoys), 123 Prosti menia, syn (Forgive me, son), 123 Sem′ mesiatsev saksofona (Seven months of saxophone), 123 Sledy (Tracks), 123 S toboi i bez tebia (With you and without you), 123 Takie dlinnye borody (Such long beards), 123 Upavshee nebo (Fallen sky), 123 U-u-u-kh-kh, 123 Lasunskii, Oleg, 200 Lebanon War, 114, 117, 127 Lekhaim, journal, 199–200, 210, 275, 372 Leksikon, publishing house, 102–3 Leningrad, 90, 95, 107, 110, 118–20, 125–29, 134, 151–52, 162–63, 166, 175, 183, 234–36, 265, 267, 278, 328, 348, 380

Lermontov, Mikhail, 11, 13n44, 373–74, 375n21, 376–77 At the Feet of Jerusalem…, 13n44 Levi, Primo, 57–58, 63, 92 If This Is a Man, 57–58 The Truce, 58 Levinzon, Leonid, 205, 210, 260, 267–68, 282 Deti Pushkina (Pushkin’s children), 267 Leningrad–Ierusalim (LeningradJerusalem), 267 Kolichestvo stupenek ne imeet znacheniia (The number of steps doesn’t matter), 267–68 Komi—Afrika (Komi—Africa), 268 Levitina, Viktoria, 340 Evreiskii vopros i sovetskii teatr (The Jewish question and the Soviet theater), 340 I evrei moia krov′. Evreiskaia drama— russkaia stsena (And Jews are also my blood: Jewish drama— Russian stage), 340 Russkii teatr i evrei (The Russian theater and the Jews), 340 Lilith, 312n55, 320–22, 327–28 Literaturnaia Gazeta, newspaper, 81, 86, 90–91, 109 Lithuania, 13, 122–23, 240n77, 271 Liubinskii, Aleksandr, 230–31, 233 Fabula, 230 Na perekrest′e (At the crosslines), 230 Teni vechernie (Evening shadows), 231 Vinogradniki nochi (Vineyards of the night), 230 Liuksemburg, Il′ia Motelevich (Eli), 102, 117–19, 136, 139, 199, 205, 208, 242, 245, 316–17 Desiatyi golod (Tenth hunger), 118, 139, 317n66

401

402

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Pis′mo (Letter), 139 Progulka v Ramu (A stroll to Rama), 118 Sozvezdie Mordekhaia (Constellation of Mordechai), 119 Tretii khram (Third temple), 118, 139, 317n66 Volchonok Itro (Wolf cub Itro), 119 Vorota s kalitkoi (Gates with a sidedoor), 119 V poliakh Amaleka (In the fields of Amalek), 119 Ze’ev Pas, 118 London, 90–91, 110, 113, 115, 129–30, 331, 381 Lukash, Pavel, 204–5 Maariv / Ma’ariv /Mahariv, newspaper, 36, 114, 135 Makarova, Elena, 237–40 Frants Peter Kin. Son i real′nost′ (Frantz Peter Kien: Dream and reality), 238 Fridl (Friedl), 238–39 Krepost′ nad bezdnoi (Fortress over the abyss), 238 Putevoditel′ poteriannykh (A guidebook of the lost), 239 Shleif (Trail), 239–40 Smekh na ruinakh (Laughter on the ruins), 238 Vechnyi sdvig (Eternal shift), 239 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 363, 371–73, 379 Mandelstam, Osip, xiv, 45, 105, 231n71, 371–73, 376–77, 381 No, I was never anyone’s contemporary…, 45 Marchevskaia-Golubchik, Sarah, 20–22 Aza mi-ahava (Stronger than love), 21

Doch′ professora (The Professor’s Daughter), 20n80, 21 Liza, 21 Margolin, Julius (Iulii), 3–4, 6, 45–74, 363–65, 368, 371, 385 Af-al-pi (In spite of all), 3 Diamat: kritika sovetskoi ideologii [Diamat: criticism of the Soviet ideology), 64 Dobavka (The addition), 3 Doroga na Zapad (The Road to the West), 48, 58–59, 68, 385 Evreiskaia povest′ (A Jewish tale), 61–63 Galia, 68–70 Geliopolis (Heliopolis), 59, 64 Ideia Sionisma (The Idea of Zionism), 53, 70 Kniga o zhizni (Book of life), 50–53, 57–58, 72 Nesobrannoe, 65 Non omnis moriar, 57–58, 72 Pamiati Mandel′shtama (In memory of Mandelstam), 45, 63 Piat′desiat let spustia (Fifty years later), 64 Proshchanie (Parting), 3 Povest′ tysiacheletii (The tale of millennia), 61, 368 Puteshestvie v stranu ZeKa ( Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back), 49–50, 56, 58, 60, 62– 69, 368, 385 Resoconto di Parigi (The Paris report), 47, 62 Vostochnoe vospitanie (An eastern upbringing), 74 Markish, David, 96, 114–17, 139, 197, 204–5, 241, 260 Chisto pole (Оpen field), 116 Donor, 117

Index of Names

Granatovyi kolodets (Garnet well), 117 Pes (Dog), 117 Piatero u samogo neba (Five people by the very sky), 115 Poliushko-pole (Song of the plains), 117 Priskazka (Embellished tale), 115–16, 139 Shuty, Ili khronika iz zhizni prokhozhikh liudei ( Jesters, Or the chronicle from the lives of itinerant people), 117 Stat′ Liutovym (To become Liutov), 117 Vershina Utinoi polianki (Summit of Duck Hollow), 117 Za mnoi! Zapiski ofitserapropagandista (After Me! Notes of a propaganda officer), 117 Markish, Peretz, 114 Markish, Shimon, 114, 339, 378–79 O rossiiskom evreistve i ego literature (On Russian Jewry and its literature), 339 Pis′mo Shimona Markisha v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Menora’ (The letter of Shimon Markish to the editorial board of Menora), 378 Russko-evreiskaia literatura—Trudy 90-kh godov (Russian-Jewish literature”—works of the 1990s), 339 Marshak, Samuil, 86, 149, 301 Palestine, 149 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 16, 79, 82, 150, 157, 168, 329, 381, 382n37 Menora, journal, 101, 122, 128, 137, 363, 377–81 Meras, Icchokas, 13, 199, 204 Mezhuritskii, Petr, 204–5

Miloslavskii Iurii (Yury), 135–37 Chto my s nei sdelali (What we did to her), 137 Ot shuma vsadnikov i strelkov (From the ruckus of the riders and shooters), 136 Priglashennaia (The invited one), 137 Skazhite, devushki, podruzhke vashei (Tell your friend, girls), 137 Sobiraites′ i idite (Pack and go), 135 Stikhotvoreniia (Poems), 136 Ukreplennye goroda (Fortified cities), 135–36 Urban Romances, 137 Vozliublennaia ten′ (The beloved shadow), 137 Minkina-Taicher, Elena, 260, 265 Beloe na fone chernogo (White on black), 265 Effekt Rebindera (The Rebinder effect), 265 Tam, gde techet moloko i med (Where milk and honey flow), 265 Vremia obnimat’ (Time to embrace), 265 Zhenshchina na zadanuiu temu (Woman on a given theme), 265 Mikhailichenko, Elizaveta (Elisheva Nesis or Eli7), 202–3, 209, 223–25, 236, 244 Akhmatovskaia kul’tura (Akhmatova’s culture), 223n52 Chertov razvod (The devil divorce), 223–24n52 I/e_rus.olim ( J/e_rus.olim), 223–24 Ierusalimskii dvorianin (A Jerusalem nobleman), 202, 223–24 Marsianka (The woman from Mars), 223n52 Minus na minus (Minus on minus), 223–24n52

403

404

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Neformat (Nonformative), 223n52 Povestka v Venetsiiu (Summons to Venice), 223n52 Seksagonal′naia kaitarma, ili Liubovnyi magendavid (Sexagonal kaytarma, or Love star of David), 223–24n52 Slepoi i suka (The blind man and the bitch), 223n52 Talithakumi, ili Zavet mezh oskolkami butylki (Talithakumi, or Testament between the shards of a bottle), 223–24 Troe v odnom morge, ne shchitaia sobaki (Three in one crypt, not counting the dog), 223n52 ZY (Preemptive Revenge), 223–24, 244 Miry, Izrail′skii zhurnal sovremennoi fantastiki (Worlds: Israeli magazine of modern science fiction), magazine, 242 Moldova, 104, 118, 183 Molodaia Gvardia (Young guard), journal, 137 Molodaia Gvardiia, publishing house, 110 Molodezh′ Moldavii (Moldova’s youth), newspaper, 104 Morev, Gleb, 200 Moriia, publishing house, 103 Moscow, 8–9, 12, 33–34, 55, 80, 83–86, 89–90, 95–97, 100, 105–6, 108–10, 112–17, 121–22, 124, 127–31, 133, 135, 137, 150–51, 153, 156–57, 178, 199, 201–2, 210, 214, 235, 261, 265, 269, 273, 280, 283–85, 294, 299–300, 302, 312, 352, 366, 368, 371–72, 375n21, 380–81, 382n37, 385–87 Moskovskii Komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol member), newspaper, 137 Moskva-Ierusalim, publishing house, 102, 134

Narod i Zemlia (The Nation and the Land), journal, 101, 199, 370n10 Nasha strana (Our country), newspaper, 166n27, 198, 236 Nedelia v Izraile (Week in Israel), newspaper, 135 Neva, journal, 110, 210, 219n47, 284 Nepravda (Untruth), newspaper, 235 Nesis, Iurii, 202–3, 209, 216, 223–25, 236, 244 Akhmatovskaia kul’tura (Akhmatova’s culture), 223n52 Chertov razvod (The devil divorce), 223–24n52 I/e_rus.olim ( J/e_rus.olim), 223–24 Ierusalimskii dvorianin (A Jerusalem nobleman), 202, 223–24 Marsianka (The woman from Mars), 223n52 Minus na minus (Minus on minus), 223–24n52 Neformat (Nonformative), 223n52 Povestka v Venetsiiu (Summons to Venice), 223n52 Seksagonal′naia kaitarma, ili Liubovnyi magendavid (Sexagonal kaytarma, or Love star of David), 223–24n52 Slepoi i suka (The blind man and the bitch), 223n52 Talithakumi, ili Zavet mezh oskolkami butylki (Talithakumi, or Testament between the shards of a bottle), 223–24 Troe v odnom morge, ne shchitaia sobaki (Three in one crypt, not counting the dog), 223n52 ZY (Preemptive Revenge), 223–24, 244 New York, 6, 14, 19n73, 32n116, 33, 36, 59, 101, 115n28, 125, 133, 137, 150, 153, 329, 381

Index of Names

Nishtiak, almanac, 206–7 Nord, publishing house, 123 Nosik, Anton, 203, 236, 275 Nosik, Boris, 200 Novaia Kozha (New skin), almanac, 137 Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New literary review), journal, 201, 217, 285 Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New Russian word), newspaper, 14, 36, 59–60, 72, 137, 363 Novosti nedeli (News of the week), newspaper, 208, 209n25, 210, 245n82, 274 Novyi Gelikon, publishing house, 203 Novyi Mir (New world), journal, 88, 107, 109, 213, 280 Novyi Zhurnal (The new review), journal, 153 OBERIU, movement, 1, 126, 154, 163 Obitaemyi ostrov (Inhabited island), journal, 198 Ocheretyansky, Aleksandr, 150 Odesa, 1n1, 7, 14, 33, 53, 85, 92, 107, 119, 132–33, 234, 271, 274, 277, 315 Ogni stolitsy (Lights of the capital), almanac, 211–12 Oz, Amos, 131, 270 Oktiabr′ (October), journal, 202, 241 Palestine, 7, 10n25, 11, 13n44, 14, 27, 31–33, 35–36, 37n127, 50–51, 54, 58, 70, 72n112, 73, 79, 82, 84, 115– 16, 178, 331, 368–69, 370, 374–75 Palestine Post, newspaper, 36 Panorama, publishing house, 103 Panteleimonov, Boris Grigor′evich, 33–34 Palestine, 34 Pane, Viktor, 211 Chto vdokhnovliaet (What inspires), 211

Gospodin na dlinnom povodke (Gentleman on a long leash), 211 Narukavniki dlia zhuravlei (Armbands for cranes), 211 Tantseval′nyi shag (Dance step), 211 Paris, 8n17, 10, 12, 22, 24–25, 28–29, 34, 36, 48, 62, 109, 111, 114, 116, 127, 134, 149–50, 184, 330, 381 Parnakh, Valentin, 149 Pasternak, Boris, 32, 79–82, 84, 86, 105, 113, 362–71, 379 Doctor Zhivago, 80–81, 362–71, 380 Pedaya, Chaviva, 258 Penn, Alexander, 79–84, 85–87, 93–95 Derev′ia (Trees), 81 Vecher v Ierusalime (A Jerusalem Evening), 81 Serdtse v puti (Heart on a journey), 82 Moledet chadashah, 82 Pgishah (Meeting), 82–83 Lo ani…, 82 Philobiblion, publishing house, 211 Pilnyak, Boris, 31 Povest′ o kliuchakh i gline (A tale of springs and clay), 31 Plotkin, Grigorii, 94 Podol’skaia, Galina 349–50 Podoksik, Efraim, 203 Poland, 10, 48, 52–53, 61, 178, 250 Porshnev, Boris, 234 Prigov, Dmitry Aleksandrovich, 156 Print, publishing house, 51 Promyshlianskaia, Elena, xii, 203, 215, 240, 258, 386 Ptakh, Petia, 188, 206–7 Pushkin, Alexander, 11–12, 16, 58, 94, 120, 168, 269, 279, 293, 320, 323–27, 348–49, 372–73 The Belkin Tales, 293, 323, 325, 327

405

406

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Quevedo, Francisco de, 318n70 Qumran, 181, 272, 317–18 Radio Liberty. See Svoboda Radovskii, Aleksandr, 348 Chasy i master (The clock and the master), 348 Etot chelovek—Moisei (This man is Moses), 348 Glazami Sheiloka (Through Shylock’s eyes), 348 Korol′ i prints, ili Pravda o Gamlete (The king and the prince, or The truth about Hamlet), 348 Schastlivyi bilet, ili Brat′ia i sestry (Lucky ticket, or Brothers and sisters), 348 Somnambuly (Sleepwalkers), 348 Stikhiinoe bedstvie (Natural disaster), 348 Strannye proisshestviia v dome Shapiro (Strange events in the Shapiro house), 348 Zachem? (What for?), 348 Rafaeli, Arieh (Tsentsiper), 13, 204 Raikher, Viktoriia, 278–79, 281 Ioshkin dom (Ioshka’s house), 278–79 Nalevo—skazku govorit (Left for a fairy tale), 278–79 Riga, 19–21, 132, 134, 265, 375 Rimon, Elena, xii, 243, 260, 292–93, 386 Rodina (Homeland), journal, 208 Roitman, Viktoriia (pseud. Bel′ski, Rene), 277 Ierve iz Assedo (Ierve from Assedo), 277 Roman-gazeta (Novel-in-newspaper), literary supplement, 209n25, 245n82, 274 Rotman, Arye, 188 Rousset, David, 47, 61–62, 71, 385

Royzman, Matvey, 149 Roza vetrov (Rose of the winds), almanac, 203, 247 Rozanov, Vasily, 232, 378 Roziner, Felix, 113–14, 241 Akhill begushchii (Achilles running), 114 Nekto Finkel′maier (A certain Finkelmaier), 113–14 Lilovyi dym (Purple smoke), 114 Rasskazhi mne, muzyka, skazku (Tell me a story, music), 113 Rechitativ (Cantillation), 114 Serebrianaia tsepochka (Silver chain), 114 V domike starogo muzykanta (In the old musician’s hut), 113 Vektor veka: Stikhi 1978–1996 godov (Century’s vector: Poems of 1978–1996), 114 Rubina, Dina, 200, 202, 205, 208–10, 213–16, 218, 236, 244, 260–62 Adam i Miriam (Adam and Miriam), 215 Babii veter (Old wives’ wind), 215 Belaia golubka Kordovy (White dove of Cordova), 214–15, 244 Dvoinaia familiia (Duplicate family name), 213 Napoleonov oboz (Napoleon’s supply train), 215, 261–62 Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy (On the sunny side of the street), 214 Odinokii pishushchii chelovek (The lonely writing man), 215, 262 Pocherk Leonardo (Leonardo’s handwriting), 214–15 Poslednii kaban iz lesov Pontevedra (The last wild boar from the forests of Pontevedra), 213–14 Russkaia kanareika (Russian canary), 215, 261–62

Index of Names

Sindikat (The syndicate), 214–15, 244 Sindrom Petrushki (The Petrushka syndrome), 214 Vot idet Messiia! (Here comes the Messiah!), 202, 213–14 Rubinshtein, Lev, 151 Russkaia Mysl′ (The Russian thought), journal, 36, 72 Rybalka, Aleksandr, 242, 316, 318–19 Tysiacha let v dolg (A thousand years borrowed), 318–19 Sabra: ezhemesiachnyi zhurnal dlia molodezhi (Sabra: A monthly magazine for young people), journal, 199, 269 Sakvoiazh, journal, 275 Salamandra (Salamander), almanac, 102, 226 Samizdat, 71, 95–96, 100, 103, 111, 112n25, 114, 124, 126, 134, 151, 153, 199, 205, 226, 228, 250 Samoilov, David, 82, 113, 339 Sapgir, Genrikh, 149–50 Schneersohn, Yitzchak Yosef, rebbe, 273 Schneerson, Lyova (Yitzhak, Levi), 7, 15, 17 I love…, 7 Mi-yomano shel ish NIL’I (From the diary of a NILI member), 15 Bliz Toropetskikh ozer… (Near the lakes of Toropets…), 15n51 Scholem, Gershom, 96 Selvinsky, Ilya, 168 Semenova, Mariia, 296–97 Volkodav (Wolfhound), 297 Semenov, Eduard (pseud. Pchel, Edichka), 206 Serman, Ilya, 107, 200, 339 O prirode russko-evreiskoi literatury (On the nature of RussianJewish literature), 339

Shabtai, Aharon, 177, 178n41 Shalom, journal, 100, 199 Shamir, Moshe, 89, 94, 261 Hu halakh be-sadot (He walked through the fields), 261 Shamir, publishing house, 102 Shargorodskii, Sergei, 198, 226 Shekhter, David, 198 Shekhter, Iakov, 203–5, 221, 241–43, 260, 271–73, 282, 315–18, 323–27 Astronom (Astronomer), 272, 317 Esli zabudu (If I forget), 271 Idoly pustyni (Idols of the desert), 272 Golos v tishine (Voice in the silence), 272 Kabbala i besy (Kabbalah and the devils), 272, 317, 323–27 Kometa nad Kumranom (Comet over Qumran), 272 Levantiiskaia korona. Venki sonetov (Levantine crown. Wreaths of sonnets), 205 Poety “Bol′shogo Tel′-Aviva” (Poets of “Greater Tel Aviv”), 203 Potselui bol′shogo zmeia (Kiss of the large snake), 272 Samouchitel′ Kabbaly (A self-study guide to Kabbalah), 272, 318 Vokrug sebia byl nikto (There was no one around oneself), 271, 315, 317 Vtoroe prishestvie Kumranskogo uchitelia (The second coming of the teacher from Qumran), 272, 317–18 Shenbrunn, Pavel (pseud. Shebunin), 130, 269 Shenbrunn, Svetlana, 102, 130–32, 210, 260, 267, 269–70 Brat moi (Brother of mine), 131 Dekabr′skie sny (December dreams), 131–32, 270

407

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Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Iskusstvo slepogo kino (The art of blind cinema), 132, 270 O, Marianna!, 132, 270 Ostanovka (The stop), 131 Piliuli schast′ia (Happiness pills), 132, 270 Rozy i khrizantemy (Roses and chrysanthemums), 132, 270 Spravka (Certificate), 132 Vse obety (All the vows), 132 Shenderovich, Viktor, 236 Shestov, Lev, 4–5, 35 Iasnaia Poliana and Astapovo, lecture, 4 Shifrin, Efim, 236 Shimkin, Naum, Isaakovich, 13–14, 359 Saul, David, and Solomon, trilogy, 359 Shishkin, Mikhael, 218 Shklovskaia, Margarita, 102, 197 Shklovsky, Viktor, 381 Shlonsky, Avraham, 78, 81, 94–95 Blagodarenie (Giving thanks), 81 Zemlepashets (Tiller of soil), 81 Shmukler, Iuliia, 124–25 Chudo (Miracle), 124 Living through History, 125 Nekhama, 125 Ukhodim iz Rossii (We are leaving Russia), 124 Shoah. See Holocaust Shoikhet, Aleksandr, 244–45 Agasfer (Ahasuerus), 244 Kogda gorit tvoi dom (When your house is burning), 244n81 Legenda o lesorube. Sovremennye evreiskie skazki i istorii (The legend of a lumberjack: Modern Jewish fairy tales and stories), 245 Priekhali my v Izrail′ (We arrived in Israel), 244n81

Tantsy na chuzhoi svad′be (Dances at someone else’s wedding), 244n81 Vitrazhi (Stained-glass windows), 244 Shor, Evsei Davidovich, 4, 12n40, 34–35 Shrayer, Maxim D., xii, 3, 61, 103, 147, 154n15, 181n45, 200, 213, 226, 387 An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, 61, 213 Shrayer-Petrov, David, 96, 163n24, 178n41, 241, 387 refusenik trilogy, 96 Bud’ ty prokliat! Ne umirai… (Cursed Be You! Just Don’t Die…), 96 Genrikh Sapgir: Klassik avangrda, 149n Shturman, Dora, 200 Sibirskii rassvet (Siberian dawn), journal, 19 Sibirskii Student (Siberian student), journal, 19 Sibirskaia Zhizn′ (Siberian life), journal, 19 Simurg (Simurgh), almanac, 203, 207 Singer, Bashevis, 341 Shosha and Rab (The slave), 341 Singer, Nekod, 96, 175, 202, 209, 216, 225–28, 230, 236, 327, 329–33 Bilety v kasse (Will call), 228 Chernoviki Ierusalima (Rough drafts of Jerusalem), 228, 327, 329–33 Mandragory (Mandrakes), 228 Sindrom Notre-Dame (The NotreDame syndrome), 228 V te dni, v nashe vremia (In those days, in our time), 228 Singer, Gali-Dana, 126, 147n1, 153, 175–78, 202, 225–27 Chast′ tse (Part of who), 175–77 Sintaksis (Syntax), journal, 250

Index of Names

Sion (Zion), journal, 100, 104, 109, 115, 120, 127, 135, 137, 202 Six-Day War, 78, 80, 99, 116, 194, 324n87 Slog (Syllable), journal, 198, 226 Slutsky, Boris, 79, 82, 85–88, 339 My Style of Weaving Words…, 87 I translate from Mongolian and Polish…, 87 Smola, Klavdia, xiii, 302–3, 339 Izobretaia traditsiiu: Sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura (Inventing tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish literature), 339 Snob, magazine, 275 Sobolev, Dennis, xiii, 188, 197, 205, 207, 209, 216, 218–21, 242, 244, 278, 313n56, 317, 327–29 Cherez (Through), 219–20 Evrei i Evropa ( Jews and Europe), 219 Ierusalim ( Jerusalem), 219–20, 244, 313n56, 317, 327–29 Legendy gory Karmel′: Chetyrnadtsat′ istorii o liubvi i vremeni (Legends of Mount Carmel: Fourteen stories of love and time), 219–20, 317, 327 Tropy (Trails/Tropes), 219–20 Voskreshenie (Resurrection), 219–20, 278 Solnechnoe spletenie, journal, 202, 207, 281 Soshkin, Evgenii, 1n1, 188, 202–3, 207 Sovetish Heymland, journal, 88, 90–93 Sovetskaia molodezh′ (Soviet youth), newspaper, 132 Soviet Union, 36, 55–56, 65, 71, 80, 84n16, 86, 91, 96, 99, 100n3, 110–12, 115, 118, 127, 129, 136–38, 140, 149, 152n11, 195, 239, 286, 367, 378

Spector, Eva, 59 Sreda (Milieu), journal, 203 Stalin, Joseph, 47, 55, 61, 63, 79, 86, 108, 115, 121, 124, 149, 245, 300, 341, 357 Stern, Avraham, 17–18 Stern, Yuri, 215, 267 St. Petersburg, xv, 15, 114, 205, 220, 232, 236, 267, 284, 329, 347, 350, 375n21 Stranitsy (Pages), journal, 198 Surin, Aleksei, 99, 260, 270, 387 Svet, Gershon Mendelevich (Swet), 35 Svoboda (Liberty), radio, 126, 134–35, 163n23, 210 Talmud, 121, 209, 310, 350, 373 Tamar, publishing house, 201n11 Tanakh, 102, 209, 294, 297n18, 350–51, 354–55, 359 Tarasov, Vladimir, 186n55, 187n56, 188, 198, 207, 211, 226 Tarbut, publishing house, 102, 199 Tarnovitskii, Aleksei (pseud. Tarn, Aleks), 244, 260–61, 263–64, 300, 305, 327 Devushka iz Dzhei-Ef-Kei (The girl from JFK), 264 Khaim, 305 My ne liubim russkikh (We don’t like Russians), 264–65 Oblordoz, 300, 327 Obychnye liudi (Ordinary people), 264 Pepel (Ash), 244 Povesti Iokhanana Eikhorna (Tales of Yohanan Eichorn), 327 Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov (The protocols of the Elders of Zion), 263, 305n39 Reina, koroleva sud′by (Reina, queen of fate), 264 Zapiski kuklovoda (Notes of a puppeteer), 305n39, 306

409

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Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Teatr (Theater), journal, 129 Tel Aviv, 4, 7, 13, 14n47, 18, 20n80, 23n91, 36, 46, 48, 50, 58, 59n52, 71, 112n25, 117, 120, 123–24, 133, 150, 153–54, 166, 178n41, 183, 201, 204, 206, 216–17, 221, 249, 265, 267, 271, 276, 282–83, 311, 325, 329, 347, 364, 367n4, 368n4 Thaw, 154, 194, 296 Timenchik, Roman, xiii, 2, 16n58, 24n96, 34, 200, 210 Russkoe slovo na zemle Izrailia (The Russian word in the land of Israel), 200 Tochka, tochka, zapiataia (Period, period, comma), children’s magazine, 227 Tolstoy, Leo, 4, 33, 48, 51, 53, 122, 333n113, 330, 364–66, 368, 370–71 Childhood, 51 Torah, 70, 121–22, 299, 313, 316, 320, 343 Tsetlin, Isaak (pseud. Arkadin, A.), 11–13, 99 At the Tomb of Dzerzhinsky, 12 Evreiskie temy ( Jewish themes), 12 Izrail′skii immigrant (Podrazhanie Bal′montu) (The Israeli immigrant [An imitation of Balmont]), 12 Nastroeniia (Moods), 12 On Stalin, 12 On the Death of Dzerzhinsky, 12 Palestina (Palestine), 12 Rasskazy (Short stories), 11 Rykov, 12 Sovremennye kolokola (Modern bells), 12 Zinovyev, 12 Tsetlin, Mikhail Osipovich (pseud. Amari), 11–12n34

Tsigel′man, Iakov (pseud. Ashkenazi, Yakov), 119–21, 202, 241, 316–17 Pis′ma iz rozovoi papki (Letters from a pink folder), 120 Pokhorony Moishe Dorfera (Moshe Dorfer’s funeral), 120 Prikliucheniia zheltogo petukha (Adventures of the yellow rooster), 120 Shebsl-muzykant (Shebsl the musician), 121, 202, 317 Ubiistvo na bul′vare Ben-Maimon (Murder on Ben Maimon Boulevard), 120 Tsukerman, Boris, 100n2 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 45, 344, 379 Poem of the End, 344, 379 Tzafon, newspaper, 22 Ukraine, xi–xii, 68, 85, 91, 96, 111, 115, 124, 178, 184, 248n87, 269, 293, 321, 323, 372 Ulitskaya, Lyudmila, 199, 276, 378 Daniel Stein, Interpreter, 378 USA, xii, 84, 94, 114, 124, 128, 134, 137, 150, 156, 221, 294, 367n4, 379, 382n37 USSR, 9, 13, 33, 36n127, 46, 48, 55, 58, 64, 71, 79, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 99–105, 113–15, 118, 120, 122, 124, 129, 134, 138, 147, 150–52, 184, 198n6, 199, 202, 228, 237, 244, 246, 258, 260, 266, 268, 276–78, 300, 341–42, 347, 359, 365, 370n10, 372–73, 378, 386 Urin, Viktor, 150 Vaiman, Naum, 205, 229, 231–34 Khanaanskie khroniki (Chronicles of Canaan), 229, 232, 234 Shchel′ obetovan′ia (The promise cleft), 232 Vakhlis, Grigorii, 244, 246 Zolotoi vek (Golden age), 246

Index of Names

Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow), newspaper, 113 Venger, Khaim, 208 Proroki v svoem otechestve (Prophets in their own homeland), 208 Vergelis Aron, 90–93 Israeli Literature and Its Roots, 90 Vesti (News), newspaper, 111, 128, 133–34, 210, 216, 236, 275 Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta, journal, 199 Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, (Bulletin of the Jewish University in Moscow), journal, 199 Vestnik Izrailia (Israel Herald), journal, 28, 36, 100 Vinokur, Moisei (Moshe, Mikhail), 201, 211 Golany (Golan Heights), 201 Pesn′ pesnei. Dal′nie pastbishcha (Song of songs. Distant pastures), 201 Sneg (Snow), 201 Tri vospitona (Three pupils), 201 Zdes′ i teper′. U podnozhia tainogo ucheniia (Here and now. At the foot of the secret teaching), 201 Vladimirova, Liia (Khromchenko), 103, 137–38 Iamim nesogim (Days running backwards), 137 Pis′mo k sebe (Letter to self), 137–38 Pora predchuvstvii (Season of presentiments), 137 Sneg i pesok (Snow and sand), 137 Stikhotvoreniia (Poems), 137 Strakh (Fear), 137–38 Sviaz′ vremen (Link of times), 137 Zamety serdtsa: Tri esse o tvorchestve poeta Iakova Khromchenko (Notes of the heart: Three

essays on the works of the poet Iakov Khromchenko), 138 Vokrug Sveta (Around the world), journal, 242n78 Volach, Yona (Wallach), 184 Volkenstein, Vladimir, 1n2 Kaliki perekhozhie (Wandering beggars), 1n2 Volokhonsky, Henry, 103, 125–27, 153, 162–66, 207, 226 Chetyre poemy ob odnom (Four poems about one thing), 125 Deviatyi Renessans (The ninth renaissance), 125 Galileia. Pesnia (Galillee. A Song), 163–66 Kentavr (Centaur), 125 Novye perevody (New translations), 126 Roman-pokoinichek (Novel-cadaver), 125 Shkura bubna (Tambourine skin), 125 Stikhi dlia Ksenii (Poems for Kseniia), 125 Stikhotvoreniia (Poems), 125 Tetrad′ Igreiny (Igreina’s notebook), 125 Ueik Finneganov (Wake of Finnegans), 126 Voprosy literatury (Literary issues), journal, 110 Voronel’, Aleksandr, 100n3, 101–2, 112, 202, 205, 221, 344 Ostalsia Iakov odin (Iakov is left alone), 112n25 Po tu storonu uspekha (On the other side of success), 112n25 Vmeste i vroz′ (Together and apart), 112n25 V plenu svobody (Freedom’s captive), 112n25

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Voronel’, Nina, 112–13, 343–45 Bez prikras (Without embellishments), 113 Byloe i damy (The past and dames), 113 Doroga na Sirius (Road to Sirius), 112 Dusia i dramaturg (Dusya and the playwright), 344 Etoi noch′iu eshche odin dissident (One more dissident tonight), 344 Glazami Lolity (Through Lolita’s eyes), 112 Goticheskii roman (Gothic novel), 112 Kassir vechnosti (Cashier of eternity), 112, 344 Khimchistka vremeni (Dry cleaners of time), 344 Kto esli ne ia (Who if not me), 113 Main liber Kats (Mein lieber Katz), 112, 344 Nado ochen′ zakhotet′ (You have to really want it), 344 Paporotnik (Fern), 112 Perekrestok (Crossroads), 112 Perepolokh (Ruckus), 112 Polet babochki (Butterfly’s flight), 112 Po tu storonu zla (On the other side of evil), 113 Prakh i pepel (Dust and ashes), 112 Prochtite pis′mo (Read the letter), 112 Prosti menia, Khanaan. Dibuk nashikh dnei (Forgive me, Canaan. The dybbuk of our day), 345 Shest′iu vosem′—sorok vosem′ (Six times eight makes forty-eight), 112 Skazka nashego vremeni (Fairy tale of our time), 344

Sodom tekh dnei (Sodom of those days), 113 Tel′-vivskie tainy (Tel Aviv mysteries), 112 Utomlennoe solntse (The exhausted sun), 344 Ved′ma i parashiutist (The Witch and the parachutist), 112 Voronel′, 112 Voskreshennyi (The resurrected), 344 V tiskakh—mezhdu Iungom i Freidom: dokumental′nyi roman, vol′naia rekonstruktsiia (In the grips between Jung and Freud: Documentary novel, freestyle reconstruction), 112–13 Voskoboinik, Nelli, 260, 267, 270–71 Ochen′ malen′kie tragedii (Very small tragedies), 270 Korobochka monpans′e (Box of fruit drops), 270 Vy budete smeiat′sia (You’ll laugh), 270 Bukvari i antikvary (Primers and antiquaries), 270 Vozdukh (Air), journal, 281 Voznesensky, Andrey, 149 Vozrozhdenie (Revival), newspaper, 34 Vozrozhdenie (Revival), journal, 102 Vremia (Time), newspaper, 209–10, 236 Vremia, publishing house, 128 Vremia i my (Time and we), journal, 101, 109, 127, 129–31, 137, 378 Vremia vspominat′ (Time to remember), almanac, 212 Vrubel′-Golubkina, Irina, 198, 203, 216 Vvedensky, Aleksandr, 126, 163 Wallon, Henry, 234 Walter, Benjamin, 219 Warsaw, 68, 106, 186–87, 245, 359 Weinshall, Abram, 22

Index of Names

Weinshall, Iakov Vladimirovich (Veinshal, Yaakov), 6, 22, 27–29 Ierikhonskaia roza (The rose of Jericho), 28 Weinshall, Zinaida (Veinshal, née Kevesh, Hannah), 6, 22–23, 27 Emigrant (Biografiia), 23 Miss Mary, 22 Moi million (My million), 23 Palestinskii al′bom (Palestinian album), 22–23 Song of Songs, 22 Weisskopf, Mikhail (Vaiskopf), 121, 128, 138–39, 183n50, 202, 207 Wiener Slavistischer Almanach, journal, 379 Wiesel, Eli, 107 Wilensky, Moshe, 11 Windham, John, 308 The Day Of the Triffids, 308 Wissotzky, Avraam Leibovich (Vysotskii, Avrum), 6–7, 18–22, 359 Ego rodina (His homeland), 19 Faizu, 20 Ha-Tshuva ha-rishona (The first answer), 20 Krov′ Makkaveev (Blood of the Maccabees), 7, 18, 20, 359 Na travke (Upon the grass), 19 Nitka zhemchuga (A string of pearls), 19 Sinii Altai (Blue Altai), 19 Subbota i voskresen′e (Saturday and Sunday), 19–20 Tel Aviv, 20 V Palestine (In Palestine), 19 Zelenoe plamia (Green fire), 19 World War I, 14–15, 28, 265, 375, 386 World War II, 4, 10, 36, 49, 89, 194, 241, 245, 250, 265, 377, 386 Yaffe, Leib (Lev Borisovich), 21–22

Ogni na vysotakh (Fires on the heights), 21 Yafo, 168, 171–72 Yesenin, Sergei, 7, 32, 79, 82 Iron Mirgorod, 32n116 Moskva kabatskaia (Tavern Moscow), 7 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 30, 33 Babii Iar, 30 Yeshurun, Avoth, 178 Yom Kippur War, 114 Yuvachev, Ivan, 1 Zaichik, Mark, 103, 128, 205, 260, 267 Ierusalimskie rasskazy ( Jerusalem tales), 129 Fenomen (Phenomenon), 128–29 Novyi syn (New son), 129 Sdelano v SSSR (Made in the USSR), 129 Tselui menia krepche (Kiss me harder), 129 Zhizn′ prekrasna (Life is wonderful), 129 Zaretsky, Zlata, x, 208, 338, 387 Zerkalo (Mirror), journal, 201–2, 216 Zernova, Ruth (Zevina, Ruf ’), 107–8, 200 Dlinnoe-dlinnoe leto (Long-long summer), 107 Dlinnye teni (Long shadows), 108 Eto bylo pri nas (This happened on our watch), 108 Inaia real′nost′ (Alternate reality), 108 Izrail′ i okrestnosti (Israel and its neighbors), 108 Kniga Rufi. Proza Rufi Zernovoi. Pisatel′skie bloknoty (Book of Ruth. The prose of Ruth Zernova. Writer’s notebooks), 108

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Na more i obratno (To the sea and back), 108 Nemye zvonki (Mute phone calls), 107 Rasskazy pro Antona (Tales of Anton), 107 Ruf′ Zernova—chetyre zhizni. Sbornik vospominanii (Ruf ’ Zernova—four lives: Collection of recollections), 108 Skorpionovy iagody (Scorpion berries), 107 Solnechnaia storona (Sunny side), 107 Svet i teni (Light and shadows), 107 Zhenskie rasskazy (Women’s tales), 107–8 Zhizn′ Altaia (Altai life), newspaper, 19 Ziman, Wolf, 13 Pervyi den′ v tel′-avivskom portu (First day in the Tel Aviv port), 13 The Wailing Wall, 13n44 Zinik, Zinovy, 129–30 Emigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem (Emigration as literary device), 130 Here Comes the Tiger, 130 Izveshchenie (The notification), 129–30 Nisha v panteone (An alcove in the pantheon), 130 Peremeshchennoie litso (A displaced person), 130 Russofobka i fungofil (The Mushroom Picker), 130 Uklonenie ot povinnosti (Dodging conscription), 130

Zlotnikov, Semen, 345–46 Eshche ne vecher (It’s still not evening), 346 Intsest (Incest), 346 Ivan i Sara (Ivan and Sarah), 346 Mne ne zhit′ bez tebia (I can’t live without you), 346 Ne meniaisia nigde (Don’t change anywhere), 346 Ostorozhno, k Vam sumasshedsshii! (Be careful, a madman is here to see you!), 346 Prekrasnoe lekarstvo ot toski (An excellent medicine for longing), 346 Prishel muzhchina k zhenshchine (A man came to a woman), 346 Razgovory s Bogom (Conversations with God), 346 Ukhodil starik ot starukhi (An old man was leaving an old woman), 346 Val′s odinokikh (Waltz of the lonely), 346 Znamia (Banner), journal, 213, 233, 238n75 Znamia stroitelia (Builder’s flag), newspaper, 113 Znanie—sila (Knowledge is power), magazine, 110, 242n78 Zven′ia (Links), journal, 198 Zven′ia (Links), pedagogical journal, 212 Zvezda (Star), journal, 107, 110, 209–10, 239

“While this book features many different authors and diverse objects of investigation, it also creates a panoramic view of Russian-Israeli literature—both in style and in chronology. The book should be of great interest to scholars and general readers alike. The very notion of ‘Russian-Israeli literature’ (similarly to the notion of ‘Russian-American literature’) will doubtless illicit questions. Some readers might even ask: And where does the writer belong if she or he has two addresses, sometimes even simultaneously, in two different countries? In what category should we place translations into the Russian language? What is the principal difference between Russian-Israeli literature and, say, YiddishIsraeli or Polish-Israeli literatures? In other words, this book not only offers a great deal of new materials but also invites us to think of the directions of further research.” —Gennady Estraikh, Professor, New York University, author of Transltlantic Russian Jewishness   “Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature is a unique and peerless project. Despite the fragmentary nature of the genre stated in the title, this collection captures many aspects of the previously unexplored, multibranched phenomenon of Russian-Israeli literature. The chronological span renders this collection particularly ponderous as it allows the reader to conceptualize Russian-Israeli literature as one of the most original, historically varied ‘hyphenated’ literatures with its own fairly rather rich traditions. The book brings together some of today’s leading researchers from a number of countries, thus reflecting a diversity of viewpoints, epistemological contexts and theoretical approaches; such diversity has never before been seen in any works on this subject. And this motley gathering of authors constitutes not a shortcoming but rather one of the collection’s great merits for it betokens the very complex nature Russian-Israeli literature, having come about at the intersection of various geographical and cultural identities and styles, which evolved and changed over the course of the waves of aliyah, political regimes, and many other circumstances. 

I urge you to read this book. It will be of great interest to all those interested not only in Israeli and Russian, but also the multilingual and multifaceted Jewish culture of different epoch.” —Klavdia Smola, Professor, University of Dresden, author of Inventing the Tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature   “Russian-Israeli literature is, perhaps, the most fascinating of all the literatures to have been created and still being created in the Russian language outside the boundaries of the Russian Empire, the USSR and the post-Soviet spaces. While the title of this book contains the modest term ‘studies,’ the book in fact carries out a tremendously complex task: to conceptualize the corpus of Russian-Israeli literature by concentrating the work along two principal axes, historical-cultural and generic. Additionally challenges faced by the book’s editors and contributors had to do with the fact that a significant part of Russian-Israeli literature resists cross-cultural translation into any of the dominant languages of contemporary culture. Much of what has been created by Russian-Israeli writers could be translated as ‘thoughtcrime.’  The project of delineating the historical contours of Russian-Israeli literature and to understand its provenance and development lies at the very heart of this remarkable book.”   —Dennis Sobolev, Professor, University of Haifa, author of The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins