A01=Ber Kotlerman
A23=Zvi Gitelman
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ber Kotlerman
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=HBLW3
Category=HBTZ
Category=HRJ
Category=NHTZ
Category=QRJ
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Hassidism
Holocaust
Jewish Autonomies
Jewish Culture in the USSR
Language_English
Modern Jewish History
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Soviet Jewish History
Stalinism
Yiddish Literature
Zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9781618115300
- Dimensions: 155 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Mar 2017
- Publisher: Academic Studies Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In the summer of 1947, three years before his death in a labor camp hospital, one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884-1950) made a trip from Moscow to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. He traveled there on a special migrant train, together with a thousand Holocaust survivors. The present study examines this journey as an original protest against the conformism of the majority of Soviet Jewish activists. In his travel notes, Der Nister described the train as the ""modern Noah's ark,"" heading ""to put an end to the historical silliness"". This rhetoric paraphrasing Nietzsche's ""historical sickness"", challenged the Jewish history in the Diaspora, which broke the people's mythical wholeness. Der Nister formulated his vision of a post-Holocaust Jewish reconstruction more clearly in his previously unknown manifesto. Without their own territory, he wrote, the Jews were like ""a soul without a body or a body without a soul, and in either case, always a cripple"". Records of the fabricated investigation case against the anti-Soviet nationalist grouping in Birobidzhan reveal details about Der Nister's thoughts and real acts. Both the records and the manifesto are being published here for the first time.
Ber Kotlerman is Associate Professor at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar Ilan University, Israel where in 2011-14 he served as Academic Director of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies. His fields of interest include Jewish history in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Far East, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Jewish theater and cinema. He is the author of Disenchanted Tailor in illusion: Sholem Aleichem behind the Scenes of Early Jewish Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 2014), The Cultural World of Soviet Jewry (Raanana, 2014), In Search of Milk and Honey: The Theater of Soviet Jewish Statehood (Bloomington, IN, 2009), and Bauhaus in Birobidzhan (Tel Aviv, 2008); the editor of Mizrekh: Jewish Studies in the Far East, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 2009 and 2011), Yiddish Theater: Literature, Culture, and Nationalism (Ramat Gan, 2009); and the co-editor of Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014)
