How the Soviet Jew Was Made

Regular price €43.99
A01=Sasha Senderovich
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
antisemitism
Author_Sasha Senderovich
automatic-update
Birobidzhan
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APFA
Category=ATFA
Category=DS
Category=HBJQ
Category=HBTB
Category=JBSR
Category=JFSR1
Category=NHQ
Category=NHTB
Cinema
COP=United States
cossacks
David Bergelson
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
dispersal
displacement
Dovid
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
hershele ostropoler
human rights
language
Language_English
mobility
PA=Available
Pogroms
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
return of neitan bekker
Russian Jewish
semyon gekht
softlaunch
Soviet Jewry
Stalin
Wandering Jew

Product details

  • ISBN 9780674238190
  • Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
  • Publication Date: 05 Jul 2022
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist

A close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire's western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life.

This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew—not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink’s Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the émigré who repatriates to the USSR.

Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. With Harriet Murav, he translated the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s novel Judgment. Senderovich has written on contemporary fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors in the United States including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis, and Irina Reyn.