The Assimilated Jew: Between Two Worlds

Throughout the Modern Era, assimilation has emerged as one of the fundamental challenges to Jewish existence. This issue is highly pressing in the United States, Europe, and the post-Soviet space alike. On one hand, assimilation processes have reflected the decline of the religious factor in the life of the individual. (Self-)identification as "a Jew, but not of the Judaic faith" is today perceived by almost no one as an oxymoron or a play on words. On the other hand, the formation of secular states with their political, rather than confessional or "tribal," "collective body" leads to a reshaping of long-established affiliations. Within these processes, both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds are transitioning into a state of ethno-cultural substratum, giving way to other groups[2], and along with this, the very concept of Jewishness is being transformed.

In recent times, the question of defining the borders of the Jewish ethnic group has acquired particular urgency[3], but on the whole, this topic has been a matter of debate since ancient times [Ezra 9: 1 — 10: 5]. If we speak of the relatively close nineteenth century... the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli — is he a Jew or not? In that era, such a question was highly relevant, both in Great Britain[4] and in Russia. Arkady Kovner, for instance, reproaches Dostoevsky for the Russian writer's obsession with Jewishness, referring specifically to the image of Disraeli painted by Dostoevsky: "Your hatred of the 'Yid' extends even to Disraeli, who probably does not know himself that his ancestors were once Spanish Jews, and who certainly does not direct English conservative policy from the perspective of a 'Yid'"[5].

For Kovner, Disraeli is an ordinary Briton who has lost all national and religious affiliation. But Dostoevsky does not view the British Prime Minister this way: "I am ready to believe that Lord Beaconsfield himself may have forgotten his descent, once upon a time, from Spanish Yids (though he probably has not forgotten); but that he 'directed English conservative policy' over the past year partly from the perspective of a Yid is, in my opinion, beyond doubt. 'Partly' at least cannot but be admitted" [XXV, 77].

Let us leave aside the provocative manner of writing characteristic of Dostoevsky ("partly at least cannot but be admitted"), which reflects his rejection of the word as a carrier of meaning and truth[6]. Dostoevsky's disbelief in the politician's sincere "Britishness" is beyond question. In other words, he believes that Jewishness is of an insurmountable nature. And this does not concern Disraeli alone. When Kovner contrasted ethnically Russian manufacturers and bankers with Jewish ones, demonstrating that the former were in no way inferior to the latter, Fyodor Mikhailovich reacted in a similar fashion: "...here again are several names which I... do not consider myself entitled to print, because some of them might find it unpleasant to read that they descend from Jews" [XXV, 76].

Dostoevsky was mistaken in his interpretation of the surnames, attributing them to far more successful individuals than Arkady Kovner had actually cited. Yet the fact remains: for the great writer, a Jew by descent remains a Jew forever; a successful person might simply be distressed to read about their background in a mass publication. Formal departure from Jewishness does not yet constitute the cessation of the latter.

Jewishness: Affiliation and Narrative

In his dissertation, Sh. Markish closely examines Ilya Ehrenburg's unfulfilled "romance" with Jewishness, arriving at a highly categorical conclusion: "...the engineer Shor from Ilya Ehrenburg's 'production novel' *The Second Day*, first published in Paris in 1933, is of no more interest to a researcher of Russian-Jewish culture than the engineer Margulies from Valentin Kataev's 'production' novel *Time, Forward!*, which appeared in Moscow a year earlier <...>. And equally uninteresting is the entire long line of Jewish characters in Ehrenburg's novels, novellas, and short stories of the 1930s — 1950s <...> the attempts to approach Jewish culture and mentality <...> have ended. And therefore, on the 'United Front' I too must conclude"[7]. The presence of Jewish characters in the books of a Jewish writer turns out to be an insignificant fact compared to the absence of actual traditional Jewish (equally religious?) themes. And yet... why does the author need these Jewish characters for something? Why do they appear in Ehrenburg's work systematically — from piece to piece? Including in his late period. Perhaps the transformation of the images of Jews in the late Ehrenburg reflects not so much a rejection of Jewishness as a "change of landmarks" in the depiction of the Jew? Traditional and familiar, "programmatic" Ashkenazi Jewishness in the form of Hasidim and Litvaks is replaced by thoroughly Soviet Jews, whom society a few decades earlier would not even have recognized as such.

In addition to affiliation expressed in the observance of traditions, Jewishness is also a specific life experience — personal, family, and collective. (Cf. Ehrenburg's statement that incensed Sh. Markish: "I am a Russian writer, but as long as there is even one anti-Semite left on earth, I will answer the question of nationality with pride: Jewish"[8].) Such "Jewishness as a personal experience" does not evaporate instantly and without a trace — sometimes even in spite of the will of the person being assimilated. An eloquent yet typical paradox: "Children growing up in the families of assimilated Jews are practically devoid of any influence of Jewish tradition. Life-cycle Jewish rituals are not performed for them, the Sabbath is not observed in the family, children from such families do not attend synagogue [... yet] 25% of assimilated Jews noted that there is a mezuzah, Shabbat, and Hanukkah candlesticks in their home"[9]. What are a mezuzah and candlesticks doing in such a family? Since archaic times, the phenomenon of the "narrative of the object" has been observed[10]. Behind the object lies life experience, while narrative is a type of speech aimed at transmitting experience[11], so the world of objects manifests a background and at least *in potentia* tells a story — in this case, a fragmented story about the affiliation of an assimilated family to Jewishness.

Unlike objects, literary narratives allow us to take a multifaceted look at assimilation as if from within the process; to see how a specific Jew experiences parting with a familiar way of life. The narrative traces the affiliation to Jewishness that did not break off after the formal "rupture," which is presented as a significant, but by no means final, step.

Let us turn to the ego-narratives of Nathanael Kuznetsky (born Itska Borodin) and Arkady Kovner. What is the Jewish world for the nineteenth-century converts — the atheist Kovner and the missionary-priest Nathanael Kuznetsky? Time and again, we encounter a very narrow and repetitive set of patterns.

The Jewish World. Family and Home

*Family*. Since Arkady Kovner is writing a memoir, its beginning naturally goes back to childhood. Childhood means family, in this case, a Jewish family: "The social status of my parents was far from brilliant, but quite honorable among Jews. Having among his ancestors and relatives many scholarly rabbis, my father was considered a *yakhson*, that is, an aristocrat; he knew no trade, but from his earliest years occupied himself with the study of the Talmud and the Bible [sic! — before us is, after all, the writing of an atheist], which he knew in perfection, almost entirely by heart. <...>. My uncle, Rabbi Mordkhe-Leyzer, was about ten years older than my father and enjoyed great renown among the Vilna Jews. He was, as it were, a sun whose light and warmth were enjoyed by all his relatives. <...>. I remember this grandfather of ours well. A tall, stately old man, he resembled a patriarch"[12]. The depiction of the family may well be ironic or even negative: "The greatness of my uncle, however, consisted mainly in the fact that, thanks to a fortune accidentally acquired by his wife, he stood in need of no one"[13]. Nonetheless, the turn to family roots invariably demonstrates the continuous nature of the connection.

In the case of Nathanael Kuznetsky, the connection between him and the Jewish world was severed for decades. Moreover, his encounter with the past is of an unexpected and, to some extent, accidental nature. It was prompted by questions from readers. The encounter is accidental, but the memoirist chooses a nostalgic tone of recollecting something long forgotten and dear for his narrative: "I recognized many of those looking at me, — some as relatives, others as my close companions from my studies, and for the most part as neighboring residents. Every familiar face filled me with delight; I felt ready, it seemed, to embrace and kiss everyone, but, of course, my holy orders and my position restrained me from such an outburst of feelings. <...> it was more pleasant for me to see my own flesh and blood, and so I directed my path to that house <...>

— Where is that Abramko who once lived and worked here?

— Why, Abramka died long ago <...> And Kelman is also a hatmaker; but still, not like me <...> — this interested party continued, not knowing and not noticing the sadness that overcame me at the news of the death of my relatives"[14].

Let us note a historical-cultural point. The disappearance of Jewish relatives from one's field of vision is not simply a consequence of baptism (baptized = found a new Christian family and forgot the old one). Nathanael Kuznetsky was not only baptized, but became a priest (by the time the text was written, he had taken monastic vows). Today this seems strange, but the Russian clergy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not inclined to maintain long-distance family ties. N.P. Gilyarov-Platonov, for example, wondered in his book *From What Has Been Experienced* that not far from Kolomna and Moscow, in Tula, he must have a large family of whom he knew nothing. When the Kolomna Seminary was transferred to Tula during the reign of Emperor Paul, contact with relatives who were instructors was cut off[15]. Similarly, Fyodor Dostoevsky's father, transferred to Moscow, knew nothing of his relatives who remained in Kamenets-Podolsky. Why did this happen? Perhaps so that no one in the parish would be tempted to think the priest was dividing his parishioners on the principle of "all beasts are equal, but some are more equal," placing relatives (his fleshly family) before his spiritual family. Under the conditions of nineteenth-century Russia, seven hundred versts between Poltava, where Nathanael Kuznetsky serves, and his unnamed shtetl in Western Ukraine, — is a significant distance for the loss of all communication with relatives.

In such a context, the very journey to one's Jewish relatives is significant. And it is remarkable how the traveling priest himself emphasizes his "integration" into the circle of relatives who remain Jewish. "Do not wonder, — I said to Kelman, — that I know your wife's name; when I was acquainted with your brother Abram, I knew all your relatives by name; I, for example, knew you from your early years, knew your two sisters, and I knew another younger brother of yours from Abramko; I have only forgotten his name, — at this I made it appear as though I were trying to remember my own Jewish name, for I was speaking of myself. — Itska, — Kelman prompted me. — Yes, yes, Itska, — I repeated. — Where is this Itska now?"[16]

Nathanael Kuznetsky enjoys feeling himself within the circle of his physical relatives, even though he maintains a "pose" so as not to completely shock the Christian reader of the *Poltava Diocesan Gazette* (and, naturally, the diocesan authorities).

*The Jewish Bible.* Another recurring element in nineteenth-century post-Jewish memoirs is the Torah, which continues to act as a cornerstone. And even more so, since the converts insist that they still remain within its boundaries. Nathanael Kuznetsky's aforementioned meeting with his relatives is explicitly oriented toward the "story of Joseph." What is he if not Joseph before his brothers?

"Ah, Kelman! — I spoke after a few minutes of silence, — your Jewish law is not good if it does not convince you to care for and help your neighbors. — Ah, truly it was worth seeing this sad scene, this inexplicable situation, in which by the most ordinary circumstances two own brothers were placed eye to eye, of whom one with full consciousness reproaches the other for the injustice of his actions, while the latter completely does not know from whom he hears such reproaches, yet feels a kindred voice... The situation of Kelman, his wife, and all his workers, during the conversation about their brother who had supposedly gone missing, was sad..."[17]. The narrator, acting here in the guise of a priest, does not express this thought explicitly, but all the verbalization accompanying the episode literally screams — have biblical times really ended for the "Old Testament Jews" if... the story of Joseph is repeated once more?[18]

*Home.* The home is usually characterized as "impoverished." The poverty of Jewish shtetls has been a constant theme in Russian literature since the times of Derzhavin. Memoirists transmit this and, moreover, link their conversion to poverty: "No, Father Archpriest; you likely do not know the surname of my relatives; for my relatives are of a poor family; indeed, if I were from a wealthy family, I would hardly have been deemed worthy to be not only a priest, but even a Christian"[19]. However, as soon as the narrative or characterization transitions into description, we notice that what is described does not resemble *poverty*. The impoverished Arkady Kovner, supposedly descending from a family where, as he wrote to Dostoevsky, they cursed for a piece of bread, grew up in an "estate": "From six to eight years of age, I spent in the countryside, where our family had moved. We lived on the private estate of my grandmother on my mother's side. A strange 'estate' it was! It was located seven versts from the city of Vilna and consisted of a single wooden house and several meager outbuildings. The entire 'estate' stood open, but a shady linden alley led to it from the high road"[20]. The description curiously combines the features of a dacha (not far from the city and in constant accessibility from it) with the topography of a Russian noble estate (away from the road, the "highway," entrance through a linden alley). A Russian journalist associated in one way or another with the leading cultural figures of the Russian Empire, of course, knows how "fashionable" it is in Europe at the turn of the century to live outside a large city[21]. The memoirist here seems to tease his Russian reader: in his *impoverished* Jewish childhood, he had what they dream of in Europe today. "There are other values besides money," — as if echoed from the text, and this statement sounds very much in the spirit of Maeterlinck's *The Blue Bird*, despite the fact that Kovner's memoirs were written for the reader of the modernist era. Only the voice of the memoirist supposedly anticipates European history, for it comes from the first half of the nineteenth century, when he, *impoverished*, grew up on his *dacha*. By the way, who is to blame for the deterioration of the Jewish way of life? Paradoxically, it is not Jewish backwardness: "...in those times, although they were Newtonian, Jews were not yet forbidden either to live in villages or to own land property"[22].

The Jewish World. Public Institutions

The circle of post-Jewish experiences also includes two public institutions — the school and the synagogue.

*School*. Arkady Kovner repeatedly points to various kinds of intellectual activity accompanying Jewish life[23]. Noting that in the authentic Jewish world, the evaluation of everything depends on the level of knowledge. The grandfather is a patriarch, an old man living literally in the synagogue, but dependent on his wealthy son. Jews always adore money — a reader of the *Historical Gazette*, published by the not-so-pro-Jewish publisher A.S. Suvorin, might think. But the reader will not have time to think so, because Kovner anticipates his thought: the grandfather values his son not at all for money: "And so this patriarch [grandfather], being in constant [financial] dependence on his first-born son, revered the latter, mainly because he considered his son a greater connoisseur of the talmud [lowercase letter — sic!] than he himself, his father"[24]. Education as immersion in Jewish tradition might (or rather, *must*) seem a strange phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century: "The news of this [the brother's distinction in mastering the Russian language — G.P.] flew through the entire Jewish population of Vilna, and many came to congratulate our parents on such an unheard-of triumph of their son. But simple, religious Jews were in no way flattered by this distinction and naively expressed that if their son had won such a victory in the field of the talmud, they would then consider themselves far happier"[25]. In spite of all this, the very principle of evaluating someone according to their knowledge fills the memoirist with admiration.

The missionary Alexander Alekseev also turns to Jewish training. Many times he insists that he held his ground in debates against religious teachers — and we see that some of his counterattacks are quite sharp, even though it is a duel between a teenager and a mature graduate of an Orthodox seminary or even a theological academy. Moreover, the discourse of Alexander Alekseev's book is styled after the Apostle Paul, positioned in the New Testament as an intellectual. Alekseev views Jewish education as an ingenious mechanism for teaching delusion, which is fully explained by the main purpose of his text — a vividly written guide on missionary activity.

Arkady Kovner has no such pragmatic goal. And he admires the results of learning Hebrew, the vitality of this dead language, the ability to read the text subtly... Jewish education inspires sincere pride in the Russian journalist — though exclusively in the humanities. "Meanwhile, the result of the nonsensical teaching of the ancient Hebrew language, incomparably more difficult than Greek, was that I and my peers mastered this language quite quickly, and I, being a seven-year-old boy, was already composing a large poem in verse in ancient Hebrew on the theme of the biblical story of the adventures of the Persian Queen Esther and the Grand Vizier Haman. The poem, of course, was exceptionally bad and was later thrown into the fire by me, but the fact remains, and one can hardly meet such a phenomenon anywhere, that a boy of ordinary abilities at seven years of age wrote verses independently in ancient Greek, for example"[26].

*Synagogue*. The synagogue appears comprehensively — as a house of prayer, a center of communal life, a territory of study, and a place of first aesthetic experiences, including cantorial singing and sermons[27]. Kovner was a secular man. Is the synagogue present in the self-consciousness of converts who became priests? Indeed it is! Only its image is split.

"With hasty steps I walked home already by another street, where I wished once more in my life to look upon the Synagogue [capital letter — sic!], in which from my early years I learned to thirst for the salvation of our God. 'Alas! — I thought at the sight of the synagogue [lowercase letter — sic!], — is this the house of God and the gate of heaven, as deluded Israel calls it! No! This is that veil of Talmudism which covers the eyes of the heart of the once chosen people, to keep them from seeing the salvation prepared by the merciful Lord before the face of all people'"[28]. The encounter with the synagogue clearly evokes a storm of emotions in the narrator, and he does not perceive the temple exclusively as a place of preaching; its other strata are free from corrosion.

Points of contact with the Jewish world act as the core elements of the "post-Jewish" consciousness, probably reflecting the elements in which the convert continues to internally feel like a Jew.

Why They Left. Between the Shtetl, the Christian Capital, and the Jewish State

Kovner is an atheist who fell in love with an Orthodox girl. Nathanael Kuznetsky — as well as another publicist and missionary of Jewish origin, — Alexander Alekseev, believed in Jesus as the Messiah. However, memoirs make it possible to see "points of irritation" not at the moment of narration, but in the life story itself. In this story, several repeating themes are present: a) isolation, non-involvement in the life of the surrounding society; b) a sense of backwardness — "we are not on the axis of History"; c) the lack of affiliation with the centers of culture and civilization — the European empires of the nineteenth century.

Before "exiting" Jewishness, the mentioned memoirists are torn between traditional life in the shtetl, a claim to the status of an "insider" in the large Christian world, and skepticism toward the Palestinophiles. The shtetl does not satisfy. Does an alternative exist within Jewishness? Haskalah seems a half-measure to the future converts at that moment: entering the Christian world with the rights of an a priori outsider. They do not believe in the success of early Zionism in the spirit of L. Pinsker's *Auto-Emancipation*. Moreover, not even in a political sense, but in an ideological one. "Do you dream of a national European-style state? We are capable of building it ourselves," — is an impressive slogan. However, how will such a national state differ from an ordinary European country? A little later, another "matrimonial convert," Mikhail Gershenzon, will regard political Zionism as a subversion of Jewish values and the diasporic vision of the world. He will write of "assimilation" as an extravagant but generally harmless pose, since a Jew is not given to assimilate, even with the greatest desire: "Do not try to be a nation: you are inevitably a nation, by the very nature of things. And when you simultaneously assert that Jewishness is a nation, that dispersed over the earth, it is incapable of national creativity due to its dispersion, — I reply: if it is indeed a nation, — and I think so along with you, — then its fragmented, collective creativity must in some sphere inaccessible to our sight form a national whole. Clouds rise not only from the seas; every brook and every puddle evaporates moisture into the air. A nation does not necessarily have to be gathered in one territory for its creativity to be national: it creates thus in any case and under all conditions. The whole point is that Jewish national creativity as a whole is invisible, though no less real for that"[29].

Accordingly, for Mikhail Osipovich, the Jewish national-political project is not the realization of an ancestral yearning, but the result of a lack of faith in the Jewish mission in the world[30]. We suddenly find something similar in the early Ilya Ehrenburg, when the Jew is always other: "Jews can be loved or hated, looked upon with horror as arsonists, or with hope as saviors, but their blood is not yours and their cause is not yours <...>. One can destroy all ghettos, erase all 'pales of settlement,' level all borders, but nothing can fill these five arshins separating you from him"[31]. Before us is the speech of the novel's characters, but this is a novel written by a journalist, and therefore the boundary between the author and the character, fundamental for aesthetics, remains highly blurred here...

History would take a different path than what seemed to Mikhail Gershenzon and Ilya Ehrenburg at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century... The Jewish state would arise, and moreover, would become a tangible symbol of Jewishness and a barrier to assimilation. However, in general terms, we continue the old dialogue, discussing Jewishness, the boundaries of democracy and tradition, the secular and religious worlds, Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora. And the lost voices of the nineteenth-century converts probably deserve a new reading in the twenty-first century. They reflect the reality of the Diaspora. A line from the Passover Haggadah is well known: "...in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they themselves came out of Egypt." But how did the Jews differ from the Egyptians in Egypt? Life in the diaspora presupposes affiliation not only to an ethnic community, but also to the surrounding community. (The representation of Jews as a separate and isolated community[32] is a popular stereotype, yet characteristic of anti-Semitic discourse). In reality, the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds interacted always and everywhere, and the degree and depth of "contact" — or if you will, assimilation, — was determined by each separate individual. The voices of those assimilated in the nineteenth century allow us to understand in what exactly the Jewish world lost the competition. and these same texts help us see what is most valuable and significant in the Jewish world for people ready to leave it or who have attempted to do so. Perhaps this will help us find a point of support more effectively, so as to continue to maintain the unity of a large and diverse family in the globalist, cosmopolitan, and (post?)-postmodern twenty-first century.

Obviously, some of the assimilated Jews continue to perceive and experience the Jewish world as a personal past. A narrative about the past is, naturally, impossible without distance: "...stopping for a time on a small platform near the Orthodox church, I, looking at the holy temple of God, which had also experienced all the insolence of my unbelief in Judaism, and with a feeling of repentance and reverence, crossed myself..."[33]. The verbal ("insolence of unbelief," "holy Temple of God") and non-verbal ("crossed myself") levels demonstrate that the narrator occupies a fundamentally different ideological position in relation to his former self. But there is no isolation in this — the narrator is incapable of tearing himself away from his past self. Accordingly, the affiliation to Jewishness denied by words and gestures does not disappear, and is even approved: "...one young Jew in particular begged me to come to his courtyard <...>. When he told me his name and surname and pointed out his courtyard to me, I remembered him and all his relatives <...>; I was fully acquainted with and even benefited by the parents of this young Jew during my orphanhood, and my younger sister even married from the house of his own grandmother..."[34].

Nathanael Kuznetsky is capable of proving to his relatives the seriousness of his personal conversion to Christianity. But why did he come to his native shtetl? Officially, to preach (he is a missionary, after all): "And so it came to my mind — to write my relatives a letter, in which I intended to expose their delusion regarding the Messiah expected by the Jews and to point out to them the way to the knowledge of the true Messiah in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. But this intention of mine was halted by the thought that however convincingly my letter might be written to persuade the Jews, they would not read it anyway; because Jews are so stubborn in their delusion that at the first hint of their instruction in the truth, as is well known to me, they would immediately tear up a work written in such a manner, and thus the goal of my labor would still not be achieved. In hesitation, I began to seek means and resolved at all costs to undertake a long and difficult journey, according to my state, to my homeland..."[35].

At some point, he probably managed to interest a portion of his relatives: "Having heard this proposal [to be baptized], she [the sister] said with a smile: 'Speaking with you, one might indeed go mad and convert. But, I pray you, better not tell me this; it is enough for you that you converted'"[36]. What next? The traveling hero understands his sister and abandons the explicit mission: "Under such consoling and at the same time instructive circumstances for me was my journey accomplished to see my relatives, whom the Lord God helped me not to leave in ignorance of Christ the Savior! The conversion of any of them to Christ, however, depends not on me, but on the Grace of God..."[37]. The conversion did not occur, and the intended mission failed. But the journey to the old home took place. Who knows, perhaps proselytism was never the goal, but rather a "proper" mask that allowed the convert and priest to arrange for himself, in the twilight of his years, a meeting with his Jewish relatives and his small homeland...

1 |  The work was conducted under an international grant from the "Sefer" Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization for research into the history and culture of Russian Jewry in various historical periods. The grant was provided as part of the charitable program "Academic Jewish Studies in the Post-Soviet Space," implemented with the support of the Genesis Philanthropy Group.

2 |  Chernin V., "On the Question of Russian-Speaking Jews as a Sub-Ethnos" // https://institute.eajc.org/eajpp-42/

3 |  Ben Yaakov H., "Israel and the Diaspora: Identity Debates. On the 70th Anniversary of the Law of Return," *EAJC Annual. 5780*. www.shorturl.at/sxAJ4 (screen access).

4 |  Prokhorov G., "Dostoevsky's Journalism in the Harmonies of 'Small Time': Gilyarov, Kovner, O'Connell, Disraeli," *Bulletin of Smolensk State University*. No. 3(43), 2018, pp. 23-36

5 |  Kovner A., *[Letters to Dostoevsky]* // NIOR RGB. F. 93. K. 5. R. 2. L. 9 rev.

6 |  Prokhorov G., "The Dispute in Dostoevsky's Journalism: Discourse or Communication Tool?", *RGGU Bulletin*. Ser. "Literary Studies. Linguistics. Culturology," No. 2. 2020, pp. 45-58

7 |  Markish Sh., *Russian-Jewish Literature: From and To*. Orenburg: Orenburg Book Publishing House, 2020, pp. 332-333

8 |  Ibid. P. 332.

9 |  Davydova M., "Religion as a Factor in the Formation of Ethnic Identity of Jewish Children in Modern Russia," *Tirosh,* No. 20, 2021, p. 292

10 |  Freidenberg O., *Poetics of Plot and Genre*. Moscow: Labyrinth, 1997, pp. 180-182, 198-200

11 |  Tyupa V., *Introduction to Comparative Narratology*. Moscow: Intrada, 2016, pp. 7-8

12 |  Kovner A., "From the Notes of a Jew." *Historical Gazette*. 1903. Vol. XCI, pp. 978-979

13 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew," p. 979

14 |  Kuznetsky. "My Meeting with Relatives (From the Notes of a Missionary-Priest Converted from the Jews)," *Poltava Diocesan Gazette*. 1866. No. 2, pp. 69-70

15 |  Gilyarov-Platonov N., *From What Has Been Experienced: Autobiographical Memoirs <Kolomna chapters>*. Kolomna: Liga, 2016, p. 49

16 |  Kuznetsky. "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 2, p. 75

17 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 2, p. 76; cf. pp. 69-70

18 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 3, pp. 93-95, No. 4, pp. 146-147

19 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 2, pp. 65-66

20 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew." p. 983

21 |  Seth Lerer, *Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter* (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 253

22 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", pp. 983-984

23 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", p. 996

24 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", p. 980

25 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", p. 989

26 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", p. 982

27 |  Kovner, "From the Notes of a Jew", p. 980

28 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 3, p. 91

29 |  Gershenzon M., *Destinies of the Jewish People* [Text]. M. O. Gershenzon. — Petersburg; Berlin: Epokha, printed 1922, p. 16.

30 |  Gershenzon M., *Destinies...* Pp. 18-19.

31 |  Ehrenburg I., *Julio Jurenito*. Collected Works: in 8 vols. Vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1990, p. 299

32 |  Cf.: Kostomarov N., "To the Jews," *Osnova*. 1862. No. 1, p. 44

33 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 2, p. 60

34 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives...". No. 2, p. 61

35 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 2, pp. 56-57

36 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 4, pp. 151-152, cf. 156-157

37 |  Kuznetsky, "My Meeting with Relatives..." No. 4, p. 158