Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources - including novels, plays, and archival material - Imagining Russian Jews is a reflection on reading, collective memory and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past.
SYNOPSIS
In the aptly titles IMAGINING RUSSIAN JEWRY, Zipperstein explores the ideas and ideals that Russian Jewish history invokes as much as the actual historical reality.
FROM THE CRITICS
George Cohen - Booklist
Zipperstein, in a series of essay-chapters (which were originally lectures), looks at the relationship between history and metaphor in the ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been understood in the last century. Chapter 1 examines literary and other popular responses in the U.S. to the Old World, beginning with turn-of-the-century immigrant novels and culminating in the 1960s with "Fiddler on the Roof". In Chapter 2 the author analyzes a widespread unease among turn-of-the-century Russian Jews regarding their culture's viability and future. Chapter 3 studies how over the course of the last century the Russian Jewish past has been written and rewritten with particular reference to the history of Odessa.
The last chapter evaluates- and criticizes- efforts to excise the impact
of the Holocaust from historical constructions of the East European Jewish
past written since the Holocaust. Both sad and uplifting, this book is
compelling from beginning to end.
Hillel Hawkin - Forward
Is such a thing as the writing of "objective history" possible? And if
not, what are the rules that put limits or constraints on the writing of
"subjective history"? Can a historian be too emotionally involved with
his subject? Or is, on the contrary, such involvement a precondition for
writing anything of historical value?
Stanford historian Steven Zipperstein's slim book Imagining Russian Jewry asks more questions than it answers. Since the questions are good ones, however, and have no simple answers, this is all to its credit.
Despite their many methodological ramifications, these questions boil down to a central issue that far transcends the specific field of East-European Jewish history in which Mr. Zipperstein works. What, they ask, should be the relationship between the historian and his material?
Library Journal
Despite negative images of tsarist repression, pogroms, and the Holocaust, Russia, argues Zipperstein (Jewish studies, Stanford Univ.), has become a source of nostalgia and "a self-reflective yardstick for the successes and failures in contemporary Jewish life." In a study focusing on Russian Jewry during the last century, Zipperstein challenges historians' belief that popular recollections are incompatible with scholarly research. He details the way historical writings and popular culture influence each other in themes that include literary and popular responses of America to the Old World; pre-Revolutionary Russian Jewish culture; and the changing perception of the past, particularly in Odessa. A final chapter evaluates and criticizes efforts to minimize the impact of the Holocaust on historical scholarship. Recommended for libraries specializing in Jewish studies, along with Jonathan Kaufman's A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe (LJ 12/96).--Michael W. Ellis, Ellenville P.L., NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
The near-mythic heder, the shtetl, the Holocaust, the extent of Jewish learning in Eastern Europe- these elements, bordering on the sacrosanct in recent Jewish memory, are the focus of this remarkably insightful work by Steven J. Zipperstein, who, using newly discovered archives, takes us, with stylistic clarity and scholarly self-control, into a startlingly new and challenging landscape of Jewish history and history writing. — Chaim Potok
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