Books in the Jews of Russia & Eastern Europ series

This volume examines the intertwined lives of six women and three men, Russian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, as their belief in the Soviet dream unraveled. Under what circumstances did they bow to political pressures, and under what circumstances did they resist, even heroically?

The studies gathered in the collection present the Russian-language Israeli literature that has been forming over the past hundred years in all the variety of genres and aesthetic movements. In every generation and in every aliyah, Russian-Israeli authors tirelessly search for new forms, born of the encounter with the new land.

Klavdia Smola explores how the Jewish tradition was reinvented in Russian-Jewish literature after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust and decades of Communism. The process of reinventing the tradition began in the counter-culture of Jewish dissidents, in the midst of the late-Soviet underground of the 1960-1970s, and it continues to the present day.