Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Soviet nationalities policies and the making of the Soviet Yiddish Intelligentsia; 2. Ideology and Jewish language politics: How Yiddish became the national language of Soviet Jewry; 3. Modernising Yiddish; 4. Who owns the means of cultural production? The Soviet Yiddish publishing industry of the 1920s; 5. Engineers of Jewish souls: Soviet Yiddish writers envisioning the Jewish past, present and future; 6. Becoming revolutionary: Izi Kharik and the question of aesthetics, politics and ideology; Afterword. How does the story end?; Appendices; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Promotional Information

This book explores the ways in which Jews were part of, not apart from, both the Soviet system and Jewish history.

Reviews

'Shneer's history is an important contribution not only to Soviet (and Russian) history (and most especially Soviet nationality policy and politics) but at least as much (if not more) to Jewish history, which, as he correctly argues, has been reluctant to consider the Russian and Soviet chapters of Jews' communal and intellectual history as anything but victimology and part of the overall history of the Holocaust. He brings to the project a wide reading in the contemporary press and published sources, enhanced by recently accessible archives in Russia and Ukraine. I found particularly attractive David's ability to bring to life several of the key players in this story of Jewish cultural and intellectual politics in the 1920s and his reluctance to pigeonhole them (and himself) in many of the stereotypically conventional ways that historians before him have done. Moreover, very few scholars who write on these matters, and especially representatives of the younger generation, command David's mastery of Yiddish-, Hebrew-, and Ukrainian-language sources.' Mark von Hagen, author of: Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet State, 1917-1930 (Cornell University Press, 1993) and Co-Editor: After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Westview Press, 1997) '... a detailed and insightful study.' Journal for the Study of the Old Testament '... sensitive and well-argued ...' The Slavonic and East European Review