The second half of the 20th century was marked by the de facto dissolution of the "old" Ashkenazi Jewish sub-ethnic group, which has been losing such defining attributes as the Yiddish language, the folklore created in that language, and many other elements of the traditional Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe. At the same time, the formation of a new sub-ethnic group of the Jewish people is being completed today in the post-Soviet space, in Israel, and in the countries of the Russian-Jewish diaspora. Namely, that of Russian-speaking Jews, for whose culture the heritage of the Eastern European Ashkenazi serves as a substrate (including in the form of numerous translations of fiction from Yiddish into Russian).[1]

Thanks to the "Great Aliyah" from the countries of the former USSR, which brought over 1 million 128 thousand Russian-speaking repatriates to Israel over a period of 30 years, the center of this community has permanently shifted to the Jewish state. Research indicates that Israel is currently one of the most significant factors in the collective identification of post-Soviet Jews living in dozens of countries across five continents.[2] It is the parameters of the Israeli Law of Return (Law of Return), which establish the right to obtain Israeli citizenship—notwithstanding the controversial nature of this topic[3]—that essentially define the boundaries of the Russian-Jewish collective. Finally, it is the Russian-speaking community of Israel, shaped by two waves of Aliyah in the 1970s and 1990s, that currently sets the tone in forming many elements of Russian-Jewish culture, including, and perhaps primarily, the literature of this community.

The analysis of the current state and the cultural-historical prerequisites of this phenomenon, which in our view has not yet received sufficient coverage in professional literature, is the subject of this article.

Russian-Jewish Literature: The Scope of the Phenomenon

Today, according to various estimates, between two and nearly three million Jews living in their historical homeland, in the countries of the new diaspora (the US, Germany, Canada, Australia, etc.), and in the post-Soviet space speak Russian as their mother tongue. It is difficult to provide a more precise figure for several reasons:

1. The boundaries of the Russian-speaking Jewish national collective, much like the Jewish national collective as a whole, are quite fluid.

2. Russian was not the native language for all Jews of the former USSR, even on the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Other languages served in this capacity, albeit to a significantly lesser extent: Yiddish, Georgian, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Bukharic, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, etc.

3. For the majority of Jews born to Russian-speaking families in Israel and the West, Russian is no longer their primary language, although there are numerous exceptions to this rule. Conversely, Russian does not remain the primary language for all Jews who arrived in Israel and Western countries from the former USSR during childhood.

This new cultural-linguistic group of the Jewish people—"Russian-speaking Jews"—began to form less than 200 years ago, a generation after the Russian Empire annexed vast territories inhabited by Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish and, with rare exceptions, did not know Russian. By now, the linguistic transition is complete, and knowledge of Yiddish among individual Russian-speaking Jews can be considered an exotic exception. In any case, "Russian" Jews today represent a fully formed cultural-linguistic group of predominantly (though not exclusively) Ashkenazi origin. It is the Russian language (and a specifically assimilated Russian culture), rather than a political connection to Russia as a state, that serves as the primary marker of this group.

The mass repatriation of Soviet Jews and their emigration to the West had led to a completely new situation by the late 1990s: from that moment on, the absolute majority of Russian-speaking Jews resided outside the former USSR—in Israel, the USA, Germany, Canada, Australia, etc. Furthermore, the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of new independent states on its ruins meant that even within the post-Soviet space, Russian-speaking Jews are now politically divided into many local communities.

The Russian language and the culture created in it, combined with a Jewish identity, unite Russian-speaking Jews scattered across different continents into a single whole. In defining the boundaries of this cultural-linguistic community, it seems appropriate to include those Jews for whom Russian is not the sole or even primary language—this applies to the majority of Jews in Lithuania and Georgia, not to mention a significant portion of Russian-speaking Jews living in Israel and the West. Bilingualism and multilingualism have accompanied the Jewish people through almost the greater part of their history, not only in the diaspora but also in Eretz Yisrael; thus, we are not dealing with a fundamentally new phenomenon.

An attempt to describe the culture of Russian-speaking Jews as a distinct Jewish cultural-linguistic group raises a key question: are we indeed dealing with a new group (in terms of ethnic processes) within the Jewish people, or merely with "persons of Jewish origin" at various stages of assimilation into the Russian ethnic environment? After all, Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a specifically Jewish language, and the current lifestyle of the vast majority of Russian-speaking Jews is far removed from the cultural and religious practices of their ancestors who lived in Eastern European shtetls. Russian-speaking Jews, at least within the territory of the former USSR, are deeply integrated into the surrounding non-Jewish society.

However, as already noted, the absolute majority of Russian-speaking Jews now reside outside the post-Soviet space and outside the Russian ethnic environment. Consequently, for these individuals, the Russian language is a factor that separates them from the surrounding population rather than uniting them with it. More than half of all Russian-speaking Jews outside the former USSR have settled in the Jewish national state, where the process of assimilation has reversed. Studies demonstrate that in Israel, even members of the "extended Jewish population"—who are not Halakhically Jewish and, moreover, were registered as such in the "nationality" field of Soviet documents—integrate into the Jewish national collective in terms of language, culture, and identity. Similar processes are characteristic of Russian-speaking Jews in Western countries, many of whom are members of Jewish communities.

The literature created in Russian over the past two centuries has become one of the most prominent expressions of the cultural self-manifestation of Russian-speaking Jewry. It would seem that in this context, the term "Russian-Jewish literature" suggests itself, being far more convenient than the cumbersome phrasing "Russian-language literary output of Jews." However, a narrower meaning has firmly attached itself to the collocation "Russian-Jewish literature." This term traditionally refers to the Russian-language literature created by Jewish enlighteners of the first half of the 19th century, which constituted an integral part of the national literature of Eastern European Jewry, alongside literature in Yiddish (referred to as "jargon literature" at the time) and Hebrew, and in certain cases, works in German, such as Leon Mandelstahm's collection of poems "Voices in the Wilderness: Selected Jewish Songs," Leon Pinsker's pamphlet "Auto-Emancipation," and others.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian-Jewish literature was gradually sidelined by the increasingly active participation of Jews in Russian literature proper. By the late 1930s, this unique phenomenon had practically vanished, due on the one hand to the de facto ban on Russian-Jewish literature in the USSR, and on the other, to its gradual decline in emigration, isolated from a Russian-speaking environment.

Professor Shimon Markish (1931–2003) was the first literary scholar to pay serious attention to the phenomenon of Russian-Jewish literature[4]. In his eponymous article for the "Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia," he formulated the criteria that allow for a distinction between Russian-Jewish literature and the participation of Jews in Russian literature proper. The author identified four such criteria:

1. A free choice of one's national-cultural affiliation, leading to national self-awareness.

2. Rootedness in Jewish civilization, an organic connection to it, and, as a consequence, a natural turn to Jewish themes. Regardless of the writer's attitude toward the material, their perspective is always an insider's view, which constitutes the main difference between a Jewish writer and a non-Jewish writer (irrespective of ethnic origin) addressing a Jewish subject.

3. Social representativeness, i.e., the writer's ability to serve as the voice of the community as a whole or a significant part of it. Writers and publicists who severed ties with the national collective <...> and did not express solidarity with it do not belong to Russian-Jewish literature, even if their work was dedicated to Jewish themes <...>.

4. A dual belonging to both Russian and Jewish civilizations (a characteristic feature of the 20th century), meaning, among other things, that the writer's work belongs equally to both peoples[5].

It was precisely this "dual civilizational belonging" of the work of Russian-Jewish writers, as mentioned by Markish, that often prompted them toward self-censorship and apologetics. Shaul Tchernichovsky noted this aspect in his article "Russian-Jewish Fiction," written for the "Jewish Encyclopedia" published in the early 20th century: "In dedicating his works to his people, the Jewish writer did not forget that his reader was located not only within this environment but also in the surrounding society, and therefore weighed his every word for fear of being misunderstood; not infrequently, he was carried away by apologetic zeal..."[6]. A vivid illustration of Tchernichovsky's thesis is the approach of Semyon (Shimon) Frug (1860–1916), whom he highly esteemed. Frug wrote in both Russian and Yiddish, and while he avoided criticizing rabbis in his Russian-language works, he did so constantly in Yiddish[7].

The words quoted above from the classic of modern Hebrew poetry underscore once again that the boundary between Russian-Jewish literature as a part of national Jewish literature and the participation of Jews in Russian literature proper is highly conventional. For instance, Nikolai Minsky (1855–1937), one of the founders of Russian Decadent poetry, is firmly established in the history of Russian-Jewish literature as the author of the historical verse play "The Siege of Tulchin." Since Minsky was baptized in 1882, he should theoretically not be considered a Russian-Jewish writer according to the criteria of Shimon Markish, who believed that "writers and publicists who broke with the national community <...> do not belong to Russian-Jewish literature..." What could be viewed in the 19th century as a more overt break with the Jewish community than baptism? Nevertheless, Markish included the aforementioned verse play in his anthology of Russian-Jewish literature, "The Native Voice."

In other words, one can easily dispute the classification of a given work either as Russian-Jewish literature in the narrow sense of the term or as Russian literature written by authors who, on the surface, share nothing with Jewishness but their ancestry. Between these lies an extremely broad spectrum of transitional forms, making it impossible to assign a number of works exclusively to either Jewish or Russian literature. In this regard, in the contemporary ethno-cultural context, it seems constructive to view the history of the Russian-language literary output of Jews as a single entity, without ignoring the distinctions mentioned above.

Within the framework of this approach, the following periodization of this phenomenon can be proposed:

1. Prior to the early 1840s: The prehistory of the Russian-language literary output of Jews, the primary component of which is Jewish folklore in East Slavic languages.

2. 1840s–1900s: The development of Russian-Jewish literature as the predominant form of Russian-language literary output of Jews. The emergence of the Russian-Jewish periodical press. The appearance of the first prominent Russian writers of Jewish origin.

3. 1910s–1930s: The beginning of mass participation of Jews in Russian literature, against the backdrop of the gradual marginalization of Russian-Jewish literature within the broader Russian-language literary output of Jews.

4. 1940s–1970s: The transformation of Jews into one of the two main ethnic groups (alongside Russians) producing Russian literature.

5. From the 1980s to the present day: The revival of Russian-Jewish literature, the formation of Russian-Israeli literature, and its emergence as the predominant form of Russian-language literary output of Jews.

It must be emphasized that the delineation of the aforementioned periods is determined by political and ethno-linguistic factors specific to each era, which found reflection in literary works. It can be argued that the corpus of literary texts created by Jews in Russian over the last 22 decades, when viewed chronologically, reflects two successive, opposing trends. First, a convergence with the Russian (Great Russian) ethnos, its language, and culture, leading to what seemed to be complete acculturation and subsequent assimilation. Then, with the beginning of the Soviet Jews' struggle for repatriation, a divergence from Russians as an ethnos and from Russia as a country occurred, resulting in the reincarnation of Russian-Jewish literature first in the USSR and later in Israel and the West, with Russian-Israeli literature emerging as its most significant branch.

It appears that the line from the poem "Achilles and the Tortoise" by the Russian-language Israeli poet Valery Slutsky (born in 1954, in Israel since 1990)—based on the paradox of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno—which serves as the title of this section, can serve as a brief description of the historical development vector of Russian-speaking Jewry in its relationship with Russia and ethnic Russians. The rapid convergence—on an historical scale—of Jews with the Russian language and culture, and their colossal contribution to Russian literature, cannot lead to a complete merger of Russian-speaking Jews with the Russian people. A gap, at times nearly invisible but nonetheless insurmountable, will always remain:

Achilles races after the tortoise,
Against the backdrop of trees blurred into a ribbon,
Marking his target with spear poised
And heating his sandals to smoke.
That tortoise is an alluring idol.
The heel of Achilles slips
With all the fury of a desperate thrust—
Churn up all your thirst, power, and pride,
Surrender entirely to the urge to possess,
Brandish your spear, mount the chariot,
Yet that tortoise remains unattainable[8].

Based on the foregoing, let us attempt to provide a concise description of the history of the Russian-language literary output of Jews as an independent and coherent cultural phenomenon, rather than a mere compilation of facts demonstrating the contribution of Jews to Russian literature.

Milestones in the History of the Russian-Language Literary Output of Jews

A little over a century ago, the vast majority of Jews in the Russian Empire lived outside the Russian provinces proper, within the Pale of Settlement established in 1791 as part of discriminatory anti-Jewish laws. It is important to note that the law restricted the right of Jews to reside in the major city of Kyiv, which was located within the Pale and served as a center of Russian language and culture in Ukrainian ethnic territory (tellingly, according to the 1897 All-Russian census, 54.2% of Kyiv's residents declared Great Russian as their mother tongue). Consequently, Jews had little contact with ethnic Russians at that time and possessed poor, if any, command of the Russian language (with the exception of the Russian-educated elite and self-taught individuals striving for modernization).

The Ukrainian and Belarusian languages present a different case. Although they held no official status in the Russian Empire (as had been the case in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and were not even granted a proper name in Jewish literature—usually referred to simply as "Goyish" (the language of gentiles) or "Poyerish" (peasant language)[9]—they were familiar to Jews due to constant contact with native speakers of these languages. This was true despite the fact that Russian laws also restricted the right of Jews to reside in villages, where the bulk of Ukrainians and Belarusians were concentrated. Knowledge of Ukrainian and Belarusian, owing to the obvious proximity of the three East Slavic languages, provided a solid foundation for many Jews, including prominent writers, to subsequently master literary Russian.

A unique body of Jewish song folklore developed in East Slavic languages, primarily Ukrainian and Belarusian in their dialectal and often distorted forms[10]. In many instances, this involved the direct borrowing of Ukrainian and Belarusian folkloric texts and their adaptation to Jewish realities and religious specifics. Primarily Russian-language songs, which emerged among the cantonists who found themselves outside the Pale of Settlement against their will, stand apart. Nonetheless, these texts employ Jewish religious terminology borrowed from Yiddish, making them somewhat incomprehensible to Slavs. The borrowing of melodies and song texts from non-Jews, followed by their "Judaization," aligned with Kabbalistic concepts prevalent in Hasidic circles regarding sparks of purity scattered in the lower world that needed to be redeemed.

We note three primary sources for the appearance of such texts:

1. Hasidic adaptations of originally non-Jewish songs: "Piv ya, piv ya u nediliu...", "Ne zhurytesia vy, khloptsi...", "Ekh, ty duren, Marko...", "Po tym botsi Dunaiu", etc.

2. Songs that emerged among cantonists: "Listen, compatriot...", "The Jewish Faith", etc.

3. Folk songs that arose among the Judaizers (Subbotniks)—either Russian-speaking (e.g., "Oy, vy gertchiki-evreytchiki") or Ukrainian-speaking (e.g., "Koly dukh Hospoden napovniaie mene")—stand apart.

In addition, there existed a large corpus of macaronic texts in which Slavic and Jewish (Yiddish and Hebrew) languages were used interchangeably. In some cases, Slavic linguistic elements served as the base, while in others, Jewish elements predominated. It should be noted that many Jewish folkloric macaronic texts emerged relatively late, reflecting the modernization of Jews in Eastern Europe and the development of active bilingualism. Examples of such songs, recorded by Jewish folklorists in the first half of the 20th century, include "The City of Nikolaev, the French Factory...", "When I Was a Poltava Feygele...", "Beyond the Mountains, Beyond the Valleys...", "Yankel, Yankel, Give Me a Glass of Vodka...", and others.

Often, the internal bilingualism of the Jewish macaronic folk song produced a humorous effect. This was achieved, for instance, through the homophony of certain non-Jewish words with Jewish words of different meanings; deliberately inaccurate translations; or the use of Slavic words absent from the Yiddish lexicon according to Yiddish grammatical rules. Similar techniques were widely employed in minor folklore genres—proverbs and jokes—current among Eastern European Jews.

Since Russian was a foreign, learned language for even educated Russian Jews of the 19th century, with rare exceptions, the first properly Russian (rather than Russian-Jewish) writers of Jewish origin were not Jews raised in a traditional Jewish environment, but rather the children of converts who had received a Russian education from early childhood.

The first notable figure in Russian literature born into a baptized Jewish family was Alexander Nevakhovich—son of Lev Nevakhovich (1776–1831)[11], who is unjustifiably considered the founder of Russian-Jewish literature, having converted to Lutheranism in 1806 and received hereditary nobility. In his youth, in the late 1820s, Alexander Nevakhovich published several poems in the journal "The Northern Bee." He translated plays from French into Russian, and in 1837 he headed the repertoire section of the office of the Director of the Imperial Theaters, holding this post until 1856.

A far more significant figure was Pyotr Weinberg (1831–1908), born a year after his parents converted to Orthodoxy. He graduated from the Lyceum and subsequently from the Faculty of History and Philology of Kharkiv University. Weinberg is known today primarily as the author of the once highly popular poem "He Was a Titular Councilor." However, in the second half of the 19th century, he was considered one of the most prominent poets, translators, and historians of Russian literature. Pyotr Weinberg's standing in the hierarchy of that period is evidenced by the fact that in 1895 and 1903 he was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Academy of Sciences—the most prestigious literary award in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Pyotr's younger brother, the satirist and actor Pavel Weinberg (1846–1904), achieved notorious fame. He did not shy away from mocking Jews, their accents, manners, appearance, and lifestyle in his works and performances. In 1870, he published a book of humorous sketches, "Scenes from Jewish Life," which went through eight editions.

The poetry of Semyon Nadson (1862–1887), who won the Pushkin Prize in 1886, enjoyed immense popularity in the 1880s. The poet's father was a baptized Jew who rose to the rank of court councilor, and his mother was a Russian noblewoman. It was Nadson who, in a poem written under the impression of the 1905 pogroms, brilliantly expressed the duality of the national identity of Russian writers raised in Jewish families that had embraced Christianity:

I grew up a stranger to you, rejected people,
And it was not to you I sang in moments of inspiration.
The world of your legends, the weight of your sorrow

Are foreign to me, as are your teachings.

And had you been, as of old, happy and strong,
And had you not been humbled by the whole world—
Warmed and carried away by another aspiration,
I would not have come to you with greetings.

But in these days of ours, when under the burden of sorrows
You bow your brow and vainly await salvation,
In those days when the very name "Jew"
In the mouth of the crowd sounds like a symbol of rejection,

When your enemies, like a pack of greedy hounds,
Tear you to pieces, mocking you—
Allow me to stand modestly in the ranks of your fighters,
O people wronged by fate[12].

As for Russian-Jewish literature, until the end of the 19th century, it was created by authors for whom Russian was not their native tongue. They chose it deliberately, in accordance with the ideals of the Haskalah and in the spirit of Yehuda Leib Gordon's poetic appeal: "Sikha bi-lshonam"—"Speak in their language," meaning the language of the dominant group in the country of residence.

The founder of Russian-Jewish literature was the prose writer Osip Rabinovich (1817–1869)[13], whose first publications in the Russian press appeared in the late 1840s. In 1860, he became one of the founders of the first Jewish periodical in Russian—the Odessa weekly "Dawn." The readership of the journal consisted of the then still small Jewish intelligentsia who had mastered Russian. The significance of Osip Rabinovich's work extends beyond the history of Russian-Jewish literature to the entire trilingual Jewish literature of Eastern Europe. Markish's studies contain occasional mentions of parallels between the work of Osip Rabinovich and his namesake Sholem Rabinovich, better known as Sholem Aleichem. In particular, Markish notes that Osip Rabinovich drew the "first sketch of the type that would later (thanks to Sholem Aleichem) enter Jewish and world literature as the luftmensch, the 'man of air'"[14].

However, it appears that Osip Rabinovich's contribution was far more substantial. Above all, he was the first in Jewish literature to create a model of realistic prose, striving with no small success to meet the high standards of imperial Russian letters. In this capacity, his influence on the work of Mendele Mocher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, and through them on subsequent generations of Jewish prose writers, is indubitable.

Osip Rabinovich was precisely a Jewish, rather than a Russian, writer. He was perceived as such by both his contemporaries and his successors. Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940), in his article "On Jews in Russian Literature," draws a clear line between Russian literature proper and Russian-Jewish literature, categorizing Osip Rabinovich—alongside Zionistically oriented authors who wrote in both Russian and Yiddish, such as Mordecai Ben-Ami (1854–1932) and Semyon Frug—as a Jewish writer: "...writing in Russian does not in itself mean departing from Jewish literature. In our complex times, the nationality of a literary work is by no means determined solely by the language in which it is written. (...) Our chroniclers O. Rabinovich and Ben-Ami, or the poet Frug, belong to Jewish rather than Russian literature, even though their works are written in Russian"[15].

Rabinovich was followed by a whole constellation of Russian-Jewish writers, among whom a prominent place is occupied by the publicist and prose writer Lev Levanda (1835–1888), who published initially in "Dawn" and later in other Russian-Jewish periodicals: "The Russian Jew," "The Sunrise", "The Jewish Library," and others.

Odessa was considered the most important center of Russian-Jewish literature. In addition to "Dawn" and, initially, "The Sunrise," the Russian-Jewish weeklies "Zion" and "The Day" were published here. The second most important center of Russian-Jewish literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries was Saint Petersburg. The classic Hebrew poet Yehuda Leib (Lev) Gordon, who resided in this city, wrote journalistic and critical articles in Russian. Of particular interest for understanding the internal contradiction that accompanied Gordon in his attitude toward the Russification of Jews on the one hand, and the Hebrew language on the other, is the article "A Review of Modern Jewish Literature," published in the first issue of "The Jewish Library" in 1871. By "Jewish literature," the author meant exclusively literature in Hebrew. In the essay, Gordon expresses concern over the weakening position of Hebrew and Hebrew literature among the enlightened Jews of Russia who had embarked on the path of rapid Russification.

Russian-Jewish poetry lagged far behind Russian-Jewish prose and literary criticism in its development. Chronologically, the first Russian-Jewish poet was Leon (Aryeh Leib) Mandelstahm (1819–1889), who wrote primarily in Hebrew and German[16]. In 1841, his Russian-language collection "Poems," consisting mainly of his own translations from Hebrew, was published in Moscow. This was the first book of poems written by a Jew in Russian in history. Content-wise and poetically, these early attempts appear quite weak when set against the Russian poetry of that period. Despite the fact that the author graduated from a Russian gymnasium in Vilna, the reader is left with the persistent impression that the Russian language remained foreign to him.

Until the late 1870s, Russian-Jewish poetry failed to make a decisive breakthrough, despite the fact that the level of Russian language proficiency among educated young Jews had increased significantly. The leading Russian-Jewish poet of that era was considered to be Mikhail Abramovich (1859–1940), son of the classic of Jewish literature Mendele Mocher Sforim. Today, his works are of interest primarily as testimonies to that era in Russian-Jewish literature, reflecting the ideological vacillations of the second generation of the Haskalah.

In 1879, Semyon (Shimon Shmuel) Frug, the poet of early Zionism and the first truly significant Russian-language Jewish poet, made his debut in the pages of "The Sunrise." His very first poems elicited an enthusiastic response from readers. The journal's editorial board invited the young man to move from provincial Kherson to Saint Petersburg as a regular contributor. "Frug's name instantly became extraordinarily popular,"[17] recalled the prominent Petersburg historian and journalist Saul Ginzburg (1866–1940) after the poet's death. Frug's close friend Semyon Dubnov (1860–1941) noted that "people of subsequent decades simply cannot imagine what a deep spiritual experience his topical legends, his biblical motifs, and his historical poems evoked in the first years of that fatal epoch."[18] They were seconded by Shaul Tchernichovsky, who asserted that "Russian-Jewish literature reached its zenith in Frug's poems."[19] "...He mastered not only the spirit of the Bible, but its language as well," explained the historian and literary scholar Joseph Gedaliah Klausner (1874–1958) regarding the secret of the magical power of the poet's works. "He seems to translate from Hebrew. Biblical imagery and prophetic expressions fill every stanza of these poetic reflections and outpourings. Here, the questions of Russian-Jewish life are elevated to the level of pan-Jewish, and at times even religious-national and philosophical-universal concerns."[20]

In the 1880s, S. An-sky (1863–1920), Osip Dymov (1878–1959), David Aizman (1869–1922), Semyon Yushkevich (1868–1927), and Mordecai Ben-Ami took their first steps in Russian-Jewish prose and drama. It was also during this period that the aforementioned outstanding literary critic and historian Semyon Dubnov, who wrote primarily in Russian, began to publish. It should be noted that Jewish authors of that era frequently wrote in two or even three languages.

At the beginning of the 20th century, authors for whom Russian was not a learned language but their primary or even first language appeared in Russian-Jewish literature. Among them were Vladimir Jabotinsky, Samuil Marshak (1887–1964), Andrey Sobol (1888–1926), and Leyb Jaffe (1876–1948). All four were either active adherents of Zionism (Jabotinsky and Jaffe) or openly sympathetic to it (Marshak and Sobol), which found expression in their work. Telling in this regard are the lines from Marshak's poem "Palestine": "When my eyes are dark with grief, I recall the land of my fathers..."

During this same period, notable poets and prose writers of Jewish origin made their mark in Russian literature proper. Among them were still many converts. It is sufficient to mention such luminous names as Sasha Cherny (1880–1932), Sofia Parnok (1885–1933), Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939), Benedikt Livshits (1887–1938), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), and Georgy Adamovich (1892–1972)[21]. Jewish motifs occurred only occasionally in their work—it is fitting to recall Sasha Cherny's verse tale "Love Is Not a Potato," Khodasevich's[22] poem "Rachel's Tears," Mandelstam's[23] "This night is irremediable...", and others. One might also mention Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), born out of wedlock to a Jewish father and a Ukrainian mother, who showed considerable interest in Jewish themes (for instance, his programmatic article "Jews and Russian Literature," published in 1908). Against this background, many Russian writers of Jewish origin during this period, including those who were not baptized, were characterized by an almost demonstrative ignoring of Jewish issues. The most famous example of this kind is the young Boris Pasternak (1890–1960).

Following the October Coup, Russian-Jewish literature within the territory of the former Russian Empire continued to develop for some time. Its most prominent representative in those years was Isaac Babel (1894–1940), who had begun publishing on the eve of the First World War. Some Jewish writers of the period who wrote in Russian, such as the prose writers Lev Lunts (1901–1924) and Doyvber Levin (1904–1941), can be associated simultaneously with both Russian and Russian-Jewish literature.

Jewish national motifs occupy an important place in the early work of a number of Russian-language Jewish poets of the Civil War generation. It is sufficient to recall the poem by Iosif Utkin (1903–1944) "The Tale of Red Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Bloch," "Poems about the Rebbe" by Mikhail Svetlov (1903–1964), "The Lay of Panas" by Eduard Bagritsky (1895–1934), and Ilya Selvinsky's (1899–1968) sonnet cycle "Bar Kokhba."

However, the conditions for the development of Russian-Jewish literature in the USSR were extremely unfavorable. Its elite character, stemming from its close connection to the pre-revolutionary intellectual elite of Russian Jewry, made such literature a target of persecution by the Soviet authorities, including the notorious Yevsektsiya[24]. By the late 1920s, the entire Russian-Jewish periodical press in the USSR had been liquidated[25], and Russian-Jewish literature ceased to exist as a phenomenon. The arrest in 1938 and subsequent death in a camp of the outstanding historian of Jewish literature and publicist Sergey (Israel) Zinberg (1873–1939) put a symbolic end to the history of this phenomenon. Other dates are also proposed—for instance, Shimon Markish believed that "the Russian-Jewish literature of the past was strangled and ceased to exist on the eve of the Second World War. The execution of Isaac Babel in 1940 can be considered a symbol and a portent of the end."[26] However, this does not alter the essence of the matter.

For a time, the traditions of this literature were preserved in emigration. We note in particular the novels written during this period by Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Samson the Nazarite" (Berlin, 1927) and "The Five" (Paris, 1936). The most striking manifestation of emigre Russian-Jewish poetry was the work of Dovid Knut (1900–1955; in France from 1921, in Israel from 1949). The concluding lines of his poem "Kishinev Burial" (1927): ...A special Jewish-Russian air.../ Blessed is he who has ever breathed it, can serve as a sort of general title for the entirety of Russian-language Jewish culture. Ultimately, however, cut off from its linguistic environment, Russian-Jewish literature faded away in emigration as well.

Almost simultaneously with the disappearance of Russian-Jewish literature in the USSR, Jews became one of the primary ethnic groups producing Russian literature, coming to the fore in prose, poetry, drama, literary translation, and literary criticism. Luminous Jewish names in the Russian literature of this period are so numerous that it is impossible to list all those worthy of attention within the scope of this article.

One of the main factors that drove the influx of Jewish authors into Russian literature was the accelerated linguistic assimilation of Soviet Jews. Yiddish was rapidly displaced from their lives, first as a literary language and then as an everyday spoken tongue. By the end of the Soviet period, even a passive command of spoken Yiddish, let alone fluency in the literary language, was preserved primarily among the older generation. Under these conditions, the literary bilingualism and trilingualism characteristic of Jewish literary output in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries became a thing of the past. Of the leading Jewish writers of the Soviet era, only Emmanuil Kazakevich (1913–1962) was creatively bilingual in the full sense of the word, having started as a poet in Yiddish and later becoming a Russian-language prose writer, while continuing to write and publish in Yiddish until the end of his life. Indeed, his first prose work—the novella "The Star"—was published in 1947 almost simultaneously in two authorial versions: in Yiddish (under the title "Grine shotns"—"Green Shadows") and in Russian.

Many, if not most, Russian-language Soviet Jewish writers of the older generation possessed some degree of Yiddish, acquired in their parental homes. Yet, they deliberately distanced themselves from Jewish literature as such. Perhaps the only thread connecting them to it was translations from Yiddish, primarily of poetry. Such translations were produced by Lev Ozerov (1914–1996), Margarita Aliger (1915–1992), Boris Slutsky (1919–1986), David Samoylov (1920–1990), Naum Grebnev (1921–1988; who also translated from Hebrew and Judeo-Tat), Genrikh Sapgir (1928–1999), Lev Berinsky (in Israel since 1991; writes in Russian and Yiddish), and others.

On the whole, however, the Russian-language literary output of Jews in the Soviet period was characterized by a desire to distance themselves from Jewishness. The Russian Jewish writer in those years was, in the words of Boris Pasternak, one who had "ingratiated himself into a foreign kinship" ("Travel Notes," 1936). In other words, origin, family ties, relics of Jewish life and language, and the like came into conflict with the worldview of the Russian-language Jewish writer, who sought to identify entirely with the Russian language, Russian culture, and the Russian people.

To be sure, not all Russian writers of Jewish origin treated this immanent dilemma of their existence with the same deliberate gravity as Pasternak, who, through the mouth of his heroine Lara in the novel "Doctor Zhivago," accused Jews of being "powerless to free themselves from themselves, from loyalty to an obsolete antediluvian name that has lost its meaning, unable to rise above themselves and dissolve without a trace among the rest." Far more common was an attitude toward one's Jewishness as a kind of secret society, the essence of which was incomprehensible to its younger members. This approach is formulated with brilliant wit in a dialogue between an older and a younger brother in Lev Kassil's famous biographical novel "Conduit and Shvambraniya":

Suddenly Osya asks:

— Lelya, oh Lelya! What is a Jew?

— Well, a kind of people... There are different kinds: Russians, for example, Americans, Chinese. Germans too, French. And there are Jews.

— Are we Jews? — Osyka is surprised. — Sort of or for real? Give me your word of honor that we are Jews.

— Word of honor, we are Jews. Osyka is struck by the discovery. He tosses and turns for a long time, and already through my sleep I hear him whisper, so as not to wake me:

— Lelya!

— Yes?

— Is Mama a Jew too?

— Yes. Go to sleep. (...)

At night, Papa and Mama return from visiting. (...) At this moment Osya wakes up. (...)

— Mama, — asks Osya, sitting up in bed, — Mama, is our cat a Jew too?

Sometimes, thanks to such authors who did not emphasize their Jewishness but belonged to the "secret society of Jews," Russian prose was enriched by direct borrowings from Jewish literature. The most striking example of such borrowing is the plot line of Father Fyodor and his wife Katerina Alexandrovna from the novella "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, which clearly copies the Menakhem-Mendl—Sheyne-Sheyndl line from Sholem Aleichem's stories. There is no reason to doubt that Ilya Ilf (Iekhiel-Leib Fainzilberg) was familiar with the works of the classic of Yiddish literature in the original.

Speaking of Ilf, we note that the use of Russian pseudonyms served as a mechanism of "liberation from themselves" for Russian writers of Jewish origin: Veniamin Kaverin (Zilber; 1902–1989), Lev Ozerov (Goldberg), Alexander Galich (Ginzburg; 1918–1977), David Samoylov (Kaufman), Leonid Zorin (Zaltzman; 1924–2020), Anatoly Rybakov (Aronov; 1911–1998), Naum Grebnev (Rambakh), Naum Korzhavin (Mandel; 1925–2018), and so on. However, a pseudonym in itself was not a marker of complete detachment from Jewish themes. One can recall such works as Alexander Galich's poem "Kaddish," Anatoly Rybakov's novel "Heavy Sand," and Naum Korzhavin's poems "Children in Auschwitz" and "The World of Jewish Shtetls." All of these are dedicated to the Holocaust. This was no coincidence. The genocide of the Jewish people became a powerful stimulus for the awakening of national self-awareness in Russian-language Soviet Jewish writers who had seemingly completely "freed themselves from themselves."

The Holocaust demonstrated with stark clarity the distinctiveness of the Jewish fate, the impossibility of assimilating into a featureless "Soviet people." It was not for nothing that the authorities persistently silenced the Catastrophe, and the inscriptions on monuments to the victims of the Shoah, usually erected with money raised by Jews themselves, spoke of some "Soviet citizens" devoid of ethnic affiliation. In the context of the topic under discussion, it seems appropriate to recall the harsh criticism leveled at Ilya Selvinsky's 1942 poem "I Saw It" and the actual hounding of Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) in retaliation for his novels "For a Just Cause" and "Life and Fate."

In the case of Boris Slutsky, it can be said that the Holocaust and the subsequent anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR forced him off the well-trodden path of a Russian poet of Jewish origin. The Jewish theme occupies a vast place in his work. Both the poet and his lyric hero see themselves as Jewish and only Jewish. It was perhaps Slutsky who expressed most acutely the impossibility of continuing to remain, in his words, a "Jewish Russian," and the inevitability of returning to one's origins:

I am ripening or aging—
I discern the Jew within myself.
I thought that I had broken through.
I thought that I had burst forth.
I did not break through, I broke,
I did not burst forth, I fell.
I, who had stepped with one foot
Either into allegiance,
Or into citizenship,
Am returning to my native rootlessness,
Returning from a point back into space.

From this feeling, there was but one step to the reincarnation of Russian-Jewish literature.

Israel and the Russian-Jewish Literary Revival

In the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, writers of the older generation published a number of works of an autobiographical character in which the Jewish theme was clearly discernible: Alexandra Brushtein's trilogy "The Road Goes into the Distance..." — "At the Dawn Hour" — "Spring" (1956–1961); Samuil Marshak's "At the Beginning of Life: Pages of Memoirs" (1960); and Ilya Selvinsky's "O, My Youth!" (1966). However, the foundation of the new Russian-Jewish literature was not laid by them.

Paradoxically, the founder of the revived Russian-Jewish literature can rightfully be considered an author who wrote not in Russian, but in Lithuanian. We refer to Icchokas Meras (1934–2014), whose works became, through translations, an important fact of Russian-language literature. First and foremost, we should note his novels "Stalemate" (in Lithuanian, 1963; Russian translation, 1965) and "On What the World Hangs" (in Lithuanian, 1965; Russian translation, 1966), where the problem of a Jew's self-determination precisely as a Jew is posed with extreme sharpness. Meras answered this question for himself not only through his work but also by repatriating to Israel in 1972. In Israel, he continued to write in Lithuanian, remaining at the center of the emerging new Russian-Jewish literature through translations. From 1977 to 1981, Icchokas Meras even headed the Union of Russian-Speaking Writers of Israel.

It was in the State of Israel that the new Russian-Jewish literature found its organizational forms. The beginning of the Russian-language Israeli periodical press was laid as far back as the 1950s by repatriates from China, who founded the annual "Bulletin of the Association of Emigrants from China" in 1954. From 1959 to 1963, the propaganda and information monthly "Herald of Israel" was published, and from 1963 to 1967, the literary and publicist journal "Shalom" appeared bimonthly. In 1968, on the initiative of the Mapai party, the first Russian-language newspaper (initially a weekly), "Our Country," appeared in Israel, surviving until 2002.

With the start of the Aliyah from the USSR, the active development of the Russian-language press and publishing began. Thus, from 1971 to 1974, the independent weekly "Tribune" was published in Tel Aviv, and in 1972, the Coordinating Committee of Aliyah Activists from the Soviet Union began issuing the literary-publicist journal "Zion" (22 issues were published). A year later, the writer Vladimir Fromer (1940–2018), who had repatriated to Israel in 1965 via Poland, co-founded with Vladimir Levin the first literary Russian-language Israeli journal, "Ami" (3 issues were published). In 1978, "Zion" was replaced by the journal "22," which still exists today. From 1973 to 1974, the literary journal "Dawn" was published in Tel Aviv.

Israeli Russian-language publications entered the USSR illegally, contributing, along with the Russian-language Jewish samizdat (the first samizdat Jewish journal, "Iton," appeared in 1970 in Riga), to the formation of a nationally oriented Jewish reading and writing environment. Numerous translations from Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and other languages, as well as original works by Igor Guberman (born in 1936, in Israel since 1988), Felix Kandel (born in 1932, in Israel since 1977), Mikhail Gendelev (1950–2009, in Israel since 1977), Boris Kamianov (Baruch Avni; born in 1945, in Israel since 1976), Svetlana Shenbrunn (born in 1939, in Israel since 1975), Nina Voronel (born in 1932, in Israel since 1975), and others, were published in samizdat. Works on Jewish themes by "legal" Russian-language authors that were little known in the Soviet Union also appeared in samizdat: Vladislav Khodasevich, Mikhail Svetlov, Eduard Bagritsky, Boris Slutsky, Naum Korzhavin, Alexander Galich, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), and others.

Characteristically, Jews played a disproportionately large role in the "general" Russian-language literary samizdat as well. An example is the famous almanac "Metropol," published in 1978 in Moscow. Twenty-two authors participated in it, half of whom were Jewish: Vasily Aksyonov (1932–2009, Jewish on his mother's side; lived in the USA from 1980), Yuz Aleshkovsky (born in 1929, in the USA since 1979), Arkady Arkanov (1933–2015), Vladimir Vysotsky (Jewish on his father's side; 1938–1980), Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002; from 1980 in Austria and Germany), Yuri Karabchievsky (1938–1992), Semyon Lipkin (1911–2003), Inna Lisnyanskaya (1928–2014; in Israel since 2004), Evgeny Rein (born in 1935), Mark Rozovsky (Jewish on his father's side; born in 1937), and Genrikh Sapgir. Of the three artists who designed the almanac, all were Jewish: David Borovsky (1934–2006), Boris Messerer (Jewish on his father's side; born in 1933), and Anatoly Brusilovsky (born in 1932).

As for censored literature, the most prominent representative of its Russian-Jewish segment in the late USSR was the prose writer Grigory Kanovich (born in 1929), whose novels "Birds over the Cemetery" (1974), "Tears and Prayers of Fools" (1983), "There Is No Heaven for Slaves" (1985), and "A Kid for Two Farthings" (1987) enjoyed immense popularity. Their plots unfold in Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they raise issues highly relevant to Soviet Jews of the 1970s and 1980s, above all the problems of Jewish identity and returning to one's roots despite far-reaching assimilation. His fluency in Yiddish allowed Grigory Kanovich (like Icchokas Meras) not to lose a living connection with the Jewish literature and culture of previous generations, which cannot be said of the majority of Russian-Jewish writers of the new formation. It was Kanovich who became the spokesman for the aspirations of the last generation of Soviet Jews in his widely known 1991 article "The Jewish Chamomile," calling for repatriation to the historical homeland. This material appeared in the first Russian-language Jewish literary-publicist journal in the USSR, "VEK" ("Herald of Jewish Culture"), which had been published in Riga since 1989. In 1993, Grigory Kanovich himself repatriated.

The mass Aliyah transformed the State of Israel into the main center of Russian-speaking Jewry, including the most important center of Russian-language literary output of Jews. Literary and literary-publicist journals, almanacs, and literary supplements to newspapers in Russian appear here one after another: "Mirror" (since 1991) — edited by Irina Vrubel-Golubkina; "Colon" (since 1995) — edited by Gali-Dana Singer; "Solar Plexus" (1997–2003) — edited by Mikhail Weisskopf; "Jerusalem Journal" (since 1999) — edited by Igor Bialsky; "Article" (since 2002) — edited by Yakov Shechter; "Nota bene" (2004–2006) — edited by Eduard Kuznetsov, and others.

Of the Jewish periodicals of this kind that have appeared in the post-Soviet space, the Saint Petersburg journal "People of the Book in the World of Books" (published since 1996 six times a year, edited by Alexander Frenkel) deserves special attention, having become a unique book review of Russian-language Jewish literature. We should also mention the Kyiv almanac "Yehupets" (published since 1995, with some materials printed in Ukrainian) and the annual "Birobidzhan" (published since 2004, with some materials in Yiddish).

The countries of the former USSR also play a very prominent role in Jewish book publishing in Russian, primarily thanks to the Moscow publishing house "Knizhniki."

What Lies Ahead? (In Lieu of a Conclusion)

In analyzing the trends and prospects for the development of the Russian-language literary output of Jews, it is useful to pay attention to several factors.

Russian-Israeli literature is often no less "Israeli" in its themes than contemporary literature in Hebrew. Among the works illustrating this thesis, we note: the poems "Sinai" (1978) and "Soviet Tanks Are Coming..." (2011) by Mikhail Grobman; the novellas by Vladimir Lazaris "Reservists" (1980) and "The Bunker" (1981); the novel by Icchokas Meras "Sara" (in Lithuanian, 1982; Russian translation, 1984); "The Ballad of the Bridge over the Litani River" by Mikhail Gendelev; the poems "Tank" (2002) by Valery Slutsky and "While the Buses Were Exploding..." (2003) by Igor Bialsky; and the novellas of Dina Rubina over the past three decades. In most of these works, the country of departure, if present at all, is only mediated.

The phenomenon of Russian-Jewish literature outside Israel is also obvious. In this context, one can consider the work of the prose writer Friedrich Gorenstein, who lived in Germany and actively cooperated with the Tel Aviv journal "Mirror"; Efraim Sevela, who lived in Israel from 1971 to 1977, then in the USA until 1990, after which he returned to Russia; Dina Kalinovskaya of Odessa; Psoy Korolenko (who lives in New York); and a number of other authors.

In the countries of the former USSR and the new Russian-Jewish emigration in the West, many highly successful Russian-language authors of Jewish (including mixed) origin work, remaining within the stream of Russian literature proper: Lyudmila Ulitskaya (born in 1943, resides in Moscow), Lev Rubinstein (born in 1947, lives in Moscow), Boris Akunin (born in 1956, lives in London), the poet Vladimir Druk (born in 1957, lives in New York), and others.

The geographical movement of authors from the diaspora to their historical homeland, when not dictated by ideological choice, does not automatically transform them into Israeli writers. Quite a few Russian-language writers who have settled in Israel remain (both thematically and ideologically) Russian writers of Jewish origin living outside Russia.

In the postmodern era, the boundaries between Russian-Israeli literature, the Russian-Jewish literature of the diaspora, and the work of Jews within the framework of Russian literature proper are often highly conventional. Open borders have minimized the difficulties of moving people, books, and ideas. And the Internet simplifies the participation of diaspora Jews (both as authors and readers) in the Russian-Israeli literary process and, accordingly, the participation of Israelis in literary life outside the Jewish state.

Among Jewish writers writing in Russian, there are no natives of Israel (or of the countries of the new emigration). At the same time, one can name a number of creatively bilingual authors born in the diaspora who write in both Russian and Hebrew: Efraim Bauch (1934–2020, in Israel since 1977), Gali-Dana Singer (born in 1962, in Israel since 1988), Hava-Brocha Korzakova (born in 1969, in Israel since 1991), and others. In one way or another, Russian-Israeli literature (like the Russian-language literary output of Jews in Western countries) is a "literature of a single generation," relevant as long as the Aliyah/emigration from the former USSR continues to feed Russian-speaking Jewish communities outside the post-Soviet space.

[1] Chernin V., "Boundaries of the Jewish National Collective: The Eastern European and Euro-Asian Context," Jews of Europe and Asia: State, Heritage, and Prospects. Yearbook of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies. Vol. 1 (2018 — 2019/5779) / Chernin V. and Khanin V., eds. — Herzliya: IEAEJS and the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2019. — pp. 29-39

[2] Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, “Between Eurasia and Europe: Jewish Community and Identities in Contemporary Russia and Ukraine”, in Julius H. Schoeps and Olaf Glukner, Eds. A Road to Nowhere? Jewish Experiences in the Unifying Europe (Laden: Brill, 2011), p. 63-89

[3] For more details on the debate around the Law of Return and the concept of Jewishness in Israel and the diaspora, see the article by H. Ben Yaakov "Israel and the Diaspora: Identity Debates (On the 70th Anniversary of the Law of Return)" in this volume

[4] His numerous works on various Russian-Jewish authors were recently collected in the book: Markish Sh., Russian-Jewish Literature From A to Z. — Orenburg: G. P. Donkovtsev Publishing House, 2020; he also compiled the anthology The Native Voice. Pages of Russian-Jewish Literature of the Late 19th — Early 20th Centuries. — Kyiv: "Dukh i Litera", 2001

[5] See Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia: https://eleven.co.il/jewish-literature/in-russian/13625/

[6] Tchernichovsky S., "Russian-Jewish Fiction," Jewish Encyclopedia in 16 volumes, vol. 13, Saint Petersburg, 1908 — 1913, column 641

[7] For details, see: Chernin V., "The Lord's Song in a Foreign Tongue: Shimon Shmuel Frug Between Russian and Yiddish," Scientific Works on Jewish Studies. Materials of the XVII International Annual Conference on Jewish Studies, vol. I, Moscow, 2010, pp. 407-427

[8] Valery Slutsky, The New Century. — Kdumim, 2002, p. 23

[9] For details on this phenomenon, see: Chernin V., "On the Problem of Slavic Glosses in Yiddish Fiction," Bulletin of the Jewish University, Jerusalem — Moscow, No. 6 (24), 2001, pp. 145-162

[10] See: Moisei Beregovsky, "Foreign-Language and Multilingual Songs Among the Jews of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland," Ethnographic Bulletin, 1930, 9, pp. 35-51; Examples of Jewish song folklore in Slavic languages are also given in the article by Zmitrok Byadulya "Jews in Belarus. Everyday Sketches," see: Byadulya Z., Selected Works, Minsk, 2006, pp. 399-409; The most complete presentation of Jewish folkloric macaronic texts, which are a mixture of Yiddish and Slavic languages, is found in the master's thesis of Hava Shmulevich, Macaronic Songs in Yiddish Folklore: Characteristics, Sources, and Parallels (in Hebrew), Ariel University in Samaria, 2018

[11] To his pen belongs the apologetic treatise "The Wail of the Daughter of Judah" (1803), the first book written by a Jew in Russian

[12] Quoted from the edition: Menorah. Jewish Motifs in Russian Poetry. — Moscow — Jerusalem, Jewish University in Moscow, 1993, p. 27

[13] For more details on Osip Rabinovich, see: Markish Sh., "Osip Rabinovich," Bulletin of the Jewish University in Moscow, 1994, No. 1(5), pp. 128-150 and No. 2 (6), pp. 106-172; see also: Chernin V., "Much of what Reb Chaim-Shulim did not understand... Yiddish as a substrate of Osip Rabinovich's Russian language," Lekhaim, 2006, No. 12, pp. 89-101

[14] Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 7, col. 17

[15] Jabotinsky V., "On Jews in Russian Literature," Dawn, No. 13, 29.3.1908, col. 17

[16] For details on Leon Mandelstahm, see: Berdnikov L., "The Learned Jew," Lekhaim, May 2008 — 5 (193)

[17] Ginzburg S., "In Memory of Frug," The New Path, 1916, 44, p. 33.

[18] Dubnov Sh., From Jargon to Yiddish (in Yiddish). — Vilna, 1929, pp. 143-144

[19] Tchernichovsky S., "Russian-Jewish Fiction," Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 13, St. Petersburg, p. 643

[20] I.L. Klausner, ibid., pp. XI-XII

[21] An idea of the development of the Russian-language poetic work of Jews from the frankly weak poems of Leon Mandelstahm to the masterpieces created at the beginning of the 20th century is provided by "A Short Anthology of Pre-Revolutionary Russian-Language Poetry of Jews," see: "Birobidzhan" almanac, 14-15, 2020, pp. 151-180

[22] Vladislav Khodasevich made a huge contribution to the popularization of modern Hebrew poetry, translating into Russian works by Chaim Nachman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Yaakov Fichman, Yitzhak Katzenelson, David Shimoni, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, David Frishman, and Zalman Shneur. See: From Jewish Poets, — Berlin, 1923

[23] Some researchers also view Osip Mandelstam as belonging to Russian-Jewish literature proper. See, for example: Katsis L., Osip Mandelstam: Musk of Judaism. — Moscow, "Mosty Kultury", 2002

[24] Sections of the VKP(b) and the communist parties of Ukraine and Belorussia, established after the October Revolution of 1917 to disseminate communist ideology and combat "bourgeois culture" among the Jewish population of the USSR

[25] For details on the Russian-Jewish press of the early 20th century, see: Slutsky I., The Jewish-Russian Press in the Twentieth Century: 1900 — 1918 (in Hebrew), Tel Aviv, Diaspora Research Institute, 1978

[26] Markish Sh., On Russian Jewry and its Literature. Babel and Others. — Moscow — Jerusalem: "Gesharim", 1997, p. 204