University
of Nebraska Press
Shofar
- Books Received
Shofar
- Advertising &
Mailing List Info
Shofar
- Book Reviews |
An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, edited by Maxim D. Shrayer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007. 2 vols., 1278 pps. $225.00.
As a reader of Russian-Jewish literature, I have to welcome Maxim Shrayer’s anthology, because there are few resources on the subject. But I have reservations that I will raise in the course of this review.
The anthology consists of two volumes and features over a hundred writers, some well known and others less so. Consisting of eleven sections, the anthology groups together authors who wrote at the same time. In each section the editor provides an introduction and gives a short biographical sketch of each author. Because of the large number of authors, the original prose stories are often abridged, which makes them less valuable for scholars, but perhaps still useful for the classroom.
The working definition that Professor Shrayer uses for the selection of authors in the volume is this: “Any Russian-language writer of Jewish origin for whom the question of Jewish identity is, on some level, compelling” (p. xxx). Borrowing this formulation from Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Shrayer applies it to some writers for whom it does not work well. For example, while the definition leads Nakhimovsky to write about Vladimir Jabotinsky, Isaac Babel, and Felix Roziner, Professor Shrayer features a long list of writers of Jewish background for whom Jewish identity is hardly compelling. This is particularly true for writers in the former Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia who either purposely drew attention away from their ethnicity or did not consider it a significant fact of their biography. Such authors in the volume as Joseph Brodsky, Naum Korzhavin, Yuly Daniel, Vassily Aksyonov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Yury Trifonov, Evgeny Reyn, Michael Kreps, Sergei Dovlatov, Anatoly Nayman, Ludmila Ulitskaia, Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Ilya Kutik, and Yuri Leving cannot be said to have a compelling attitude toward their Jewish identity. They are, for better or worse, Russian authors.
The issue of definition is central because it reflects the editor’s conception of Jewish identity and Jewish-Russian literature (as he uniquely calls it; the conventional name is Russian-Jewish literature). Ordinarily one defines a Russian-Jewish writer according to the author’s involvement with Jewish life, whether in politics, culture, or society. Here audience, orientation, and context matter. In their discussions about who belongs to Russian-Jewish literature, experts like Vladimir Jabotinsky and Shimon Markish ask directly whether this literature is important to the Jewish people and to Jews for whom Jewish life and culture is central to their consciousness. This is why most scholars—including the ones Professor Shrayer praises in his introduction—do not consider Boris Pasternak or Osip Mandelshtam authors of Russian-Jewish literature. These authors were not occupied with Jewish life and the problems of the Jewish world even if they were born Jews and at times wrote on Jewish themes.
To decide if an author should be in an anthology of Russian-Jewish literature, one should ask, what is the context, to which literary world, political orientation, and social context is the author speaking? Jewish background or the so-called “piatyi punkt” (ethnicity) in one’s passport is not the determining factor. For example, there are good reasons why no one calls Walter Benjamin a writer of German-Jewish literature, and why everyone knows that Gershom Sholem is a German-Jewish writer. It is because, while both are Jewish and even deal at times with Jewish issues, one, Sholem, is occupied with Jewish problems in a Jewish context, while the other has devoted himself to German literature and cosmopolitanism.
This problem of definition goes far beyond mere nomenclature. Professor Shrayer’s introduction offers us a good deal of information about what he considers to be the criteria for defining Jewish-Russian literature. In this case, it is significant that he dismisses the position of Saul Tchernikhovsky, one of the greatest Hebrew poets of the twentieth century, because the latter gave a strongly negative appraisal of Russian-Jewish literature. Tchernikhovsky thought that literature in Russian written by Jews would inevitably be absorbed into Russian culture. Yet it is exactly Tchernikhovsky’s views that deserve deep contemplation because he reflects seriously about context, orientation, and audience.
In other places Shrayer discusses at length the identity of baptized Christians, born Jews. For example, he describes at length the life of Inna Lisnyanskaya who was born to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother and was baptized. He explains, however, that she supposedly “declared her official nationality as Jewish in 1944,” claiming that, “I must register myself as a Jew, because so many have been annihilated” (p. xlvii). Explaining this confession, Professor Shrayer remarks, “Her example illustrates how during the Soviet years both the official rhetoric on Jewish identity and anti-Semitism might have enhanced a Jewish-Russian writer’s self-awareness” (p. xlvii). For me, this is exactly an example of what Russian-Jewish literature is not. An assertion of an individual’s identity does not automatically create a social context. Ms. Lisnyanskaya may be a Jewish writer, but she is not a writer of Russian-Jewish literature.
What, then, is Russian-Jewish literature? The answer will clearly depend on whether you consider the Jews to be a distinct nation—as did Zionism—or rather merely an ethnicity or a people. Clearly Professor Shrayer believes they are a people, one of the peoples who inhabit the Russian land and write in Russian. For the most part, his authors are urban intellectuals, assimilated and russified; many of them consider themselves Russian and exponents of Russian culture. Admittedly, some grapple with being the object of antisemitism, recall their Jewish background, and even feel a longing for Jewish rituals or a memory of Jewish history. But without a Jewish context, a Jewish world, and a Jewish audience, they are not representatives of Russian-Jewish literature. This is my position, and clearly Professor Shrayer would not and does not ascribe to it.
What we have here for the most part, then, is an anthology of the Jewish theme in Russian literature. This is writing by outsiders to Jewish life for other outsiders. Nonetheless, the Jewish theme has an important place in the study of national tropes in Russian literature. The volumes tell us how Russians perceived Jews, how they formed a vocabulary for describing Jews, and how individuals of Jewish extraction assimilated this vocabulary and even creatively adopted it.
If we accept this definition, then the anthology is entirely irreproachable. But while Professor Shrayer should receive every accolade for presenting such a large number of authors on the Jewish theme (some of which admittedly I had never heard of), he also deserves criticism for passing as Russian-Jewish literature something that it is not. Still, there is a lot of good literature to read since the translations are of a high quality. Used selectively and with awareness, the volume can be useful for students, teachers, and even scholars.
Brian J. Horowitz
German and Slavic Studies
Tulane University
|
