Ken Frieden

... of New York Press, Albany © 1995 State University of New York All rights reserved Production by Susan Geraghty Marketing by ... the Lame) through Volin (Volhynia) and Podolia to Komenitz (Kamenets-Podolsk); became acquainted with Avraham-Ber Gottlober, whose daughters ...

cal states of Jesus Christ enable even the most radical transpositions of the kenosis concept, including fundamental distortions of religious dogma. Christ's inexplicable double nature and revaluation of suffering in fact guarantee kenosis's virtual omnipresence and continued vitality in traditional Orthodoxy, as well as its heresies, monastic mysticism, iconpainting, liturgy, art, socialism, communism, postcommunism, and, not least, religious, antireligious, and secular literature. Add to the divine-human paradox of descent the paradox of the reversal—that crucified Jesus becomes Christ the Pantokrator—and Christianity emerges as the religion of paradox, characterized by a creative tension between irreconcilable concepts (such as human and divine, defeat and triumph) that nevertheless fuse while simultaneously remaining separate. Sometimes ascent to glory is moved into the foreground and kenosis becomes worldly triumph (Aleksandr Nevskii, Ivan the Terrible). Orthodoxy explores all the contradictions of the concept, allowing for such ironies as Alexander II becoming "sanctified" together with his killers, both sides having "suffered," if not for Christ's sake, then for the same men he decided to save, or even just as sacrificial victims. Christ, "emptying" himself of all worldly glory in order to (re)gain the heavenly, together with his "metonymy-metaphor" the "ever-virginal" mother Theotokos, represent the emblems of a religion based on "revaluation logics" (78). "Is someone like Christ at all imaginable?" (117) the author asks and implies that being unimaginable allows for endless imaginations of the most contradictory kind. St. Paul "de-automatized" (142) hierarchical axiology forever and also left us with the legacy of "following Christ" and "imitating" him by seeking degradation, "foolishness," and humiliation as states "devoudy to be wished for," as well as to be transferred to secular life. After all, modern thinkers, like Gianni Vattimo, point out that Christ himself "started secularization" by becoming human. Denying the value of self-sacrifice, Chernyshevskii's Rakhmetov nevertheless pursues actions that represent what he denies, being in fact self-sacrificial and not manifestations of "egotism." Nilovna brings about a gender shift in the socialist Redeemer paradigm. Pavka does not "reverse" Christian values; as a "sacrificial hero" {Opferheld, 756) he in fact willy-nilly keeps the kenotic legacy alive, since "cultural memory cannot be extinguished by polemics" (728). Even though the 1970s and the 1980s bring neo-iurodstvo, can we really see someone like Venichka as "Christo-form"? Yes, since a "drunken sod" is as unlike Christ as Christ is unlike God; Venichka's undignified self-destruction ultimately targets hubris. Sorokin's Marina, whose sex life with twenty-nine women ends in a "kenotic orgasm" (906) with a male party functionary, subsequently replaces sex with service to the collective—an anti-climax in all respects. Perhaps, in Marina's case, the Unattainable Bride Russia model (Ellen Rutten, Unattainable Bride Russia, 2010) fits better than the kenotic one? In sum, Uffelmann surveys a millennium of Russian culture from an original, often rewarding (paradoxical) and value-free perspective in an encyclopedic work that displays an impressive, even overwhelming, erudition. The author clearly could have been more readable in the pursuit of his intriguing topic, were it not for the genre. Nonetheless, ironic innuendo emerges occasionally, as with Uffelmann's mentioning that Vladimir Putin disapproved of a recent picture of Boris and Gleb by Il'ia Glazunov because of the "undesirable meekness" the saints displayed when faced by their enemy. Uffelmann also attributes "dialectical" (920) flexibility to today's Russian church, which published a prayer book for soldiers in which these strastoterptsy are asked to help Russian warriors instill terror in the hearts of the country's enemies.

emphasis that Rabbi Israel placed upon wealth and material acquisitions. Here was a rabbi who inhabited palatial quarters, awoke each morning to the sounds of his private orchestra, was transported in his gilded, horse-drawn chariot, and declared, "all the money in the world is mine!" (213). Assaf expertly explores the nature of Rabbi Israel's materialism and grandiosity, challenging both the worshipful Hasidic view that Rabbi Israel did not derive any personal pleasure from his material possessions and the harsh scholarly assessment exemplified by Dubnow. This biography is of value not only to students of Jewish mysticism. Those interested in the multicultural world of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian empire will find the final part of the book, where Assaf describes the inner world of Ruzhin Hasidism, to be particularly rewarding. Here the intricately coded culture and distinctive rituals of the grandiose and palatial Hasidic courts spawned throughout Moldavia, Bukovina, and Galicia by the descendants of Rabbi Israel come to life. To this day, visitors to numerous tiny towns in northern Moldavia and southwestern Ukraine—former shtetls with the Yiddishized names of Sadigure, Vizhnitz, Chortkov, Buhush, and Husiatin—will come across the surprising remains of these palatial Hasidic complexes, edifices entirely out of proportion with their surroundings. These magnificent buildings, the courts of the Hasidic rebbes of the Ruzhin dynasty, are all that is left in Europe of the vibrant Hasidic civilization that was ravaged by World War I and finally annihilated by the Holocaust.

... xlviii + 1064 pages, $39.95. ARION I3.2 FALL 2OO5 Page 2. ... Even a simple word like the verb "to take" assumes greater significance in Alter's commentary on Exodus 2. Its meaning shifts from the opening phrase?"a man from the house of Levi took a L?vite daughter" (Ex. 2:1)?to ...

Sigmund Freud was nor a Zionist. Despite Theodor Herzl's proximity in Vienna, Freud remained so aloof from Zionism that he hardly ever expressed himself concerning individual or national Jewish identity. Although on rare occasions he did acknowledge his Jewishness, he renounced nationalistic ideas. Developing a personal solution "Jewish Question," Freud never explained his views at length; Freudian methods of analysis suggest that this near-total silence derived from an avoidance or a disavowal (Verneinung). One of Freud's dreams is a "royal road" to his ambivalence toward Judaic traditions. The decisive encounter with Zionism came in January 1898, three weeks after Freud lectured to the B'nei Brith Society in Vienna and only a few months after the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel. At that time Freud saw Herzl's play Das neue Ghetto (The new ghetto); his reaction took the form of a dream, which he recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams.

During the 1930\u27s, as a young Yiddish poet in New York, YehudaLeyb Teller produced some of the memorab1e pre-war poetry of his generation.Like the introspectivist writers who inspired him, Teller was increasingly aware of politica1 deve10pments in Europe. Thepoetic cyc1e entit1ed Psychoana1ysis, one of Teller\u27s most outstandingaccomp1ishments, fuses real and imaginary dimensions. Twoof the six Psychoana1ysis poems confront Sigmund Freud and thesituation of the European Jews

Itzik Gottesman's Defining the Yiddish Nation will be indispensable to anyone interested in the collection of Jewish ethnographic materials. Focusing on the early twentieth century in Poland, Gottesman discusses the underlying ideology, the methodology, and the practice of folklore study.

The thirtieth annual B. G. Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies was deliv -ered by Professor Ken Frieden on 5 October 1993. His essay, A Centuryin the Life of Sholem Aleichem\u27s Tevye, inaugurates the newseries of B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies. Founded in 1963 ,well before the Association for Jewish Studies was established, this serieshas included original work by many distinguished scholars

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 247 pp. $55.00.To write a literary history, even one that covers only nine years, is a project inherently full of sacrifices and tradeoffs. Consider the immense task that lay before Mikhail Krutikov as he set out to write this important new book.Firstly, the years 1905 to 1914 were anni mirabili in the world of Yiddish publishing. The three "classic" Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, were continuing to publish important work, but a new generation of writers, including Sholem Asch, S. An-sky, Isaac Meir Weissenberg, David Bergelson, David Ignatov, and Joseph Opatoshu, were beginning to touch on new themes, new styles, to carve out a place of their own in the field. The Yiddish reader of the time had an embarrassment of riches; the contemporary critic is faced with a commensurately large challenge of selection and analysis.But the sense of immensity comes not merely from the amount of work being published, but from the sense shared by readers then and now that the period was one of monumental historical change. For writers, constantly aware of the time of their times, the sweeping rise in immigration to the United States, the establishment of new political parties, movements, and even attempted revolutions, and the increasing rate of economic change among Jews of the period had to be filtered, sifted, and considered when thinking about how to write their respective works. Krutikov, a literary historian and critic influenced by a "special interest in the Marxist school" (p. 8), could do no less.As Krutikov points out, the vast majority of critical works on Yiddish literature have been diachronic, not synchronic, and so a work like this is particularly welcome, as Krutikov strives not merely to implicitly identify the major works and authors of the period, but to explain how they demonstrated a sea change from the works of Yiddish writers of the previous period, ones who either had yet to encounter the "crisis of modernity" or who consciously avoided it altogether.Were one simply to seek an overview to the major works and authors of the period, as well as the seminal critical responses to those works and authors, one would be hard pressed to do better than this work. Given that many of these works, popular or critically feted at the time, have now fallen into obscurity among all but scholars of Yiddish literature (for example, many of the works remain untranslated, and of those that were, few of the translations in question remain in print), Krutikov takes little for granted: in giving plot summaries that are detailed but not burdensome, as well as concise and well-crafted, he both explicates and advocates. Many who read this book will be convinced, for example, to pick up a copy of Ansky's Pionern, or Asch's Meri, and we may hope that translations will soon follow. Krutikov also bridges high and low culture, paying as much and as careful attention to the works of Mordekhai Spektor and Leon Kobrin as to David Bergelson or David Ignatov.Krutikov also is well aware of the significant tradition of Yiddish literary criticism concerning the seminal works he discusses: more recent names like Wisse, Roskies, and Miron coexist cheek by jowl with Bal-Makhshoves, Dobrushin, Niger, Mayzel, and Rivkin, to name just a few. While a history of Yiddish literary criticism remains a significant desideratum in the field, Kmtikov's discussion of the various critical opinions on authors and works may well be among the most useful overviews to scholars wishing to treat in detail the books he is forced to discuss in only a few pages.It is this limitation that is one of the major, though inherent, disappointments of the work, if one may use the term without prejudice: Kmtikov's own readings of the works, building on other critical comment when sensible and wholly original when desirable, are compelling, persuasive, sensitive to theme, image, and language. …

Y. L. Teller's poetry underwent radical transformations in the 1930s, and its shifting forms were representative of the age. Influenced by the introspectivists, Teller excluded proper names, identifiable places, and definite time from his early poems. By the end of the decade, however, he had developed a style that drew heavily from news reports. The relationship between poetry and journalism became a matter of dispute in American Yiddish literature during these years, when Arn Glants-Leyeles and Yankev Glatshteyn were among the leading poets who dirtied their hands with news-print.

Two early works by S.Y. Abramovitsh introduce the reader to Abramovitsh's alter ego Mendele the Book Peddler. Mendele narrates both The Little Man and Fishke the Lame. In different voices, he also presents a diverse cast of characters including Isaac Abraham as tailor's apprentice, choirboy, and corrupt businessman. Reb Alter tells of his matchmaking mishap and Fishke relates his travels through the Ukraine with a caravan of beggars. Sholem Aleichem's Tevye reemerges from new translations of "Hodel" and "Chava" in all of his comic splendor. Notes enable students to follow Tevye's uneven steps through Bible quotations. Four of Sholem Aleichem's other eloquent monologists come back to haunt us in scintillating translations. The selections from Peretz include his finest stories about the hasidim, such as "Kabbalists," "Teachings of the Hasidim," and the ironic tale "The Rebbe's Pipe." A fresh rendering of Peretz&...