How was the Jewish tradition reinvented in Russian-Jewish literature after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust, and decades of Communism? The process of reinventing the tradition began in the counter-culture of Jewish dissidents, in the midst of the late-Soviet underground of the 1960-1970s, and it continues to the present day. In this period, Jewish literature addresses the reader of the ‘post-human’ epoch, when the knowledge about traditional Jewry and Judaism is received not from the family members or the collective environment, but rather from books, paintings, museums and popular culture. Klavdia Smola explores how contemporary Russian Jewish literature turns to the traditions of Jewish writing, from biblical Judaism to early-Soviet (anti-)Zionist novels, and how it ‘re-writes’ Haskalah satire, Hassidic Midrash or Yiddish travelogues. Klavdia Smola is professor and chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Dresden. She (co-)edited among others The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2022); (Multi)national Faces of Socialist Realism: Beyond the Russian Literary Canon (special issue of Slavic Review, 2022), and Russia – Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (special issue of Russian Literature, 2018).

Two books which appeared almost simultaneously on both sides of the Iron Curtain share similar, analytical and unusual, indications as to their genre: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: “The true account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences” (the author would usually refer to his text as “Non-fiction Novel”) and Lev Ginzburg’s The Abyss “A Narrative Based on Documents”. A similarity can be traced on the thematic plan as well: In Cold Blood is centered on the murders’ story, while The Abyss is based on the records of a trial to collaborationists serving in the SS during the war and taking part in the mass murders of Soviet civilians, reporting for the first time in the Soviet Union about their personal histories: both authors undertake an inquiry on the nature of Evil – they are both, probably, written under the impression of Eichmann’s trial and possibly of Arendt’s book – and, in order to undertake this task, they both challenge traditional literary categories. Is there a necessary connection between the thematic and the generic plans? A definitive answer can hardly be reached. A parallel reading of the American debate on Capote and the Soviet one – not on Ginzburg in particular, but about the blooming genre that at the time was beginning to be called “documentary literature” - can help shed some light. Both Capote and Ginzburg aim at a narrative of reality clearly detached from novelist traditions, however different those were in their respective countries. In the United States, this meant setting oneself apart from a modernist tradition that had renounced to any pretense to depict society; in the Soviet Union, to set oneself free from the Socialist Realist canon, doubting of its capacity to give a meaningful depiction of the horrors of the Twentieth Century (a tradition which will develop up to Svetlana Aleksievich). In both cases, anyway, a criticism of the conventions of Realism was implied, clearly resounding, at a glance from today, the late avant-garde. In the Soviet debate of the Sixties, however, any reminding of it was significantly missing – the only mention of Sergei Tretyakov and the “literature of fact” are in quotations from an American review of Capote. The disappearing of Tretyakov from the Soviet debate has yet to be explained: was censorship the reading, or was his name totally unknown to the younger writers? A renewed interest in the avant-garde can, anyway, be observed in the Soviet Union in the Sixties, clearly connected with the atmosphere of destalinization. A resurgence of avant-gard experimentation is characteristic for the Western world in the same era. Both Capote’s and Ginzburg’s texts are conceived in this atmosphere, and after the Eichmann trial, which is considered a milestone in the development of a new attitude towards the Shoah and its witnesses. On both sides of the divide, it seems – and as several further instances show - it was the attempt to “write poetry after Auschwitz” that caused to question novelistic conventions.

The article analyzes early twenty-first century English-language literature by Soviet-born Jewish writers as a response to the Jewish literary and cultural politics of the Cold War period. First, by reexamining the postcolonial concept of hybridity, it argues that the “Soviet Jew” is not a neutral description of a Jewish person from the USSR. Rather, it is a discursive product that emerged during the Soviet Jewry Movement, a figure who requires re-education, specifically of a religious nature, as part of advocacy by Jews in the West on behalf of Jews in the USSR. Second, it analyzes texts by Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud, and Chaim Potok that have become part of the North American Jewish literary canon with a focus on these works’ scenes of encounter between Jews in the USSR and Jewish writers visiting from abroad. These depictions specifically emphasize the visiting writers’ projections of their concerns about their own Jewish identities and about Jewish continuity more broadly onto the figure of the “Soviet Jew.” Finally, it demonstrates that Boris Fishman, Anya Ulinich, and David Bezmozgis offer a contemporary restaging of such scenes of encounter, now between émigré Jews from the USSR and their Jewish hosts in North America. In these recent works, the “Soviet Jew” is a figure that can be manipulated—frequently in satirical ways—as immigrant literary protagonists navigate the process of fitting in (or, not fitting in) within North American Jewish communal landscapes created, in part, with the help of the figure of the "Soviet Jew" itself.

In the late 1920s, Boris Eikhenbaum began to identify himself as a Jew; not by religion certainly, but as a member of a different ethnos than Russians. Despite his foreign sounding name, until that point there had been few clues that Eikhenbaum had a Jewish background. He made this declaration in “Moi vremennik” (1929), the part autobiography, part notebook, and part chronicle of his life and times.

Culled in part from nearly 20 hours of audio recordings of the author's father's experiences with displacement prior to, during, and after World War II, this paper explores some conditions that make it possible for people to feel at home in the aftermath of forced dislocation and the ways in which storytelling can help break the subsequent cycle of violence that can emerge from such an experience. The author's father's story is interspersed with her own narrative voice as well as a theoretical exploration of what is at stake for the storyteller and for those who bear witness to the stories told of experience at the nexus between memory and history.

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