Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia

A history of Russian-Jewish and Soviet Yiddish literature from the 1920s to 2006, the study focuses on the themes of time, memory, and the body.

This study is a work of restoration, an attempt to recover Jewish literature and culture from the Soviet Union, in order to tell a story long overshadowed by the teleology of “hope to ashes.” The recovery does not depend on a trip to archives closed until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The recovery depends rather on the act of reading. My readings situate Isaac Babel, David Bergelson, Mandelshtam, Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Der Nister, Semen Gekht, Itsik Kipnis, Il’ia Erenburg, Emmanuel Kazakevich, Vasilii Grossman, Semen Lipkin, Il’ia Sel’vinskii, Fridrikh Gorenshtein, Shire Gorshman, Dina Kalinovskaia, Dina Rubina, Alexandr Melikhov, Inna Lesovaia, and other authors in the same literary universe in which modernism and socialist realism, revolution and catastrophe, as well as traditional Jewish writings, including the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and classic rabbinic texts provide the framework for creativity.

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