Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies.)

by Steven J. Zipperstein

Release Date: September, 1999

Edition: Paperback

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brilliant and powerfully evocative

In these lectures the author opens a whole universe which is unknown to most comtemporary readers. Fascinating discussion of how we recapture the past - is it possible, for example, to arrive at a vision of rural stetl life that is not colored or distorted by the holocaust that followed? The Jewish secular life of Odessa and the institution of the Heder are poignantly depicted. Not only are the intellectual rewards considerable but the prose is quite wonderful. I recommend this book highly.

Title misleading, should be for limited audience.

This was a really good book and well worth reading. However, I do not think the book is for everyone, as I think you need to already have some understanding of Russian Jewish life. You may be misled by the title, as I was. I thought the author would describe the daily life of the Russian Jew, how he lived, what he thought about, what his environment looked like. This he did not do at all. Instead he picked four topics and compared how time, distance or opinion may have colored the historical event. He cites many examples from newspapers, books, movies, etc. One really good example is how American Jewry has romanticized the Cheder. My mother even has a picture hanging on the living room wall of a boy getting his ear tweaked (hard!) by the Melamed. The author did a very good job of explaining how fifty years later we could come to feeling nostalgic over events such as these.