Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity

by Steven J. Zipperstein

Overview

This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including novels, plays, and archival material—Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures.

Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof. In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295977904
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Series:	Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.35(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and the Taube Director of Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Among his previous publications are the award-winning books The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History and Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. He is the editor of Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue

1. Shtetls There and Here: Imagining Russia in America
2. Reinventing Heders
3. Remapping Odessa
4. On the Holocaust in the Writing of the East European Jewish Past

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Chaim Potok

The near-mythic heder, the shtetl, the Holocaust, the extent of Jewish learning in Eastern Europe- these elements, bordering on the sacrosanct in recent Jewish memory, are the focus of this remarkably insightful work by Steven J. Zipperstein, who, using newly discovered archives, takes us, with stylistic clarity and scholarly self-control, into a startlingly new and challenging landscape of Jewish history and history writing.

Hillel J. Kieval

"This splendid book consists of a sustained, and self-consciously personal, reflection on the themes of memory, nostalgia, and forgetting as they relate to narratives of Jewish life in Russia that have been produced both here and in Europe since the era of the great migrations."

Editorial Reviews

Zipperstein, in a series of essay-chapters (which were originally lectures), looks at the relationship between history and metaphor in the ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been understood in the last century. Chapter 1 examines literary and other popular responses in the U.S. to the Old World, beginning with turn-of-the-century immigrant novels and culminating in the 1960s with "Fiddler on the Roof". In Chapter 2 the author analyzes a widespread unease among turn-of-the-century Russian Jews regarding their culture's viability and future. Chapter 3 studies how over the course of the last century the Russian Jewish past has been written and rewritten with particular reference to the history of Odessa.

The last chapter evaluates- and criticizes- efforts to excise the impact of the Holocaust from historical constructions of the East European Jewish past written since the Holocaust. Both sad and uplifting, this book is compelling from beginning to end.
— Booklist

George Cohen

Stanford historian Steven Zipperstein's slim book Imagining Russian Jewry asks more questions than it answers. Since the questions are good ones, however, and have no simple answers, this is all to its credit.

Despite their many methodological ramifications, these questions boil down to a central issue that far transcends the specific field of East-European Jewish history in which Mr. Zipperstein works. What, they ask, should be the relationship between the historian and his material?

— Forward Is such a thing as the writing of "objective history" possible? And if not, what are the rules that put limits or constraints on the writing of "subjective history"? Can a historian be too emotionally involved with his subject? Or is, on the contrary, such involvement a precondition for writing anything of historical value?

Hillel Hawkin

Despite negative images of tsarist repression, pogroms, and the Holocaust, Russia, argues Zipperstein (Jewish studies, Stanford Univ.), has become a source of nostalgia and "a self-reflective yardstick for the successes and failures in contemporary Jewish life." In a study focusing on Russian Jewry during the last century, Zipperstein challenges historians' belief that popular recollections are incompatible with scholarly research. He details the way historical writings and popular culture influence each other in themes that include literary and popular responses of America to the Old World; pre-Revolutionary Russian Jewish culture; and the changing perception of the past, particularly in Odessa. A final chapter evaluates and criticizes efforts to minimize the impact of the Holocaust on historical scholarship. Recommended for libraries specializing in Jewish studies, along with Jonathan Kaufman's A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe (LJ 12/96).--Michael W. Ellis, Ellenville P.L., NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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