The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines

By Marat Grinberg

An original investigation into the reading strategies and uses of books by Jews in the Soviet era. 
 
In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Dec 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684581320

Book preview

THE TAUBER INSTITUTE SERIES FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY

Jehuda Reinharz,

General Editor

ChaeRan Y. Freeze,

Associate Editor

Sylvia Fuks Fried,

Associate Editor

Eugene R. Sheppard,

Associate Editor

The Tauber Institute Series is dedicated to publishing compelling and innovative approaches to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture, and society. The series features scholarly works related to the Enlightenment, modern Judaism and the struggle for emancipation, the rise of nationalism and the spread of antisemitism, the Holocaust and its aftermath, as well as the contemporary Jewish experience. The series is published under the auspices of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry—established by a gift to Brandeis University from Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber—and is supported, in part, by the Tauber Foundation and the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment.

For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see https://brandeisuniversitypress.com/series/tauber

*Marat Grinberg

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines

Arthur Green

Defender of the Faithful: The Life and Thought of Rabbi Levi Yitshak of Berdychiv

Gilad Sharvit

Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Conversation with Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Transmitting Jewish History

Charles Dellheim

Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern

Cedric Cohen-Skalli

Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography

ChaeRan Y. Freeze

A Jewish Woman of Distinction: The Life and Diaries of Zinaida Poliakova

Chava Turniansky

Glikl: Memoirs 1691–1719

Dan Rabinowitz

The Lost Library: The Legacy of Vilna’s Strashun Library in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit

The Road to September 1939: Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War II

Adi Gordon

Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn

Noam Zadoff

Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

*A Sarnat Library Book

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

JEWISH CULTURE AND IDENTITY BETWEEN THE LINES

MARAT GRINBERG

A Sarnat Library Book

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waltham, Massachusetts

Brandeis University Press

2023 © Marat Grinberg

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Richard Hendel

Typeset in Sabon by Passumpsic Publishing

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

NAMES: Grinberg, Marat, 1977– author.

TITLE: The Soviet Jewish bookshelf: Jewish culture and identity between the lines / Marat Grinberg.

DESCRIPTION: Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2023. | Series: The Tauber institute series for the study of European Jewry | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: In an environment where a public Jewish presence was routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided for many Soviet Jews an entry to communal memory and identity. This project decodes the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put—Provided by publisher.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2022036040 | ISBN 9781684581313 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684581320 (ebook)

SUBJECTS: LCSH: Jews—Books and reading—Soviet union. | Jews—Soviet Union—Identity.

CLASSIFICATION: LCC Z1003.5.S62 G75 2023 | DDC 028.90947—dc23/eng/20220901

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036040

This publication was made possible through the generous support of Brandeis University’s Bernard G. and Rhoda G. Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness, which aims to promote a deeper understanding of anti-Jewish prejudice, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to this phenomenon, from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

5  4  3  2  1

To Matthew and Maya—my two miracles

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: There’s "there, there"

1. Lion Feuchtwanger: The Soviet Jewish Scripture

2. The Core: Salvage Fragments

3. Translated from Jewish: Read and Unread

4. The Bottom Shelf: Between the Lines of Reactionary Judaism and Anti-Zionism

5. Signs of the Times: Yuri Trifonov and the Strugatsky Brothers

Epilogue: Perestroika and Beyond

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An idea for writing a book about what and how Soviet Jews read dates back to my undergraduate years at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where I was startled to discover that the name of Lion Feuchtwanger, the German Jewish writer lionized by Soviet Jews, meant nothing to my American Jewish peers and very little, if anything at all, even to professors of German. This experience provided a major impetus for what would become this book’s project: uncovering and explaining the contents of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf to reveal that Soviet Jewishness was much more than an empty sign or only the sign of victimhood and persecution.

As I was sending my final manuscript to the publisher in the fall of 2021, I thought of it as my Covid book. Much of it was written during the pandemic crisis in the midst of school closures and Zoom teaching. Working on the book provided a respite from the uncertainty and anxiety of those months. As I am writing this now, the war in Ukraine has been raging for more than three months. I cannot know what the state of affairs will be when the book reaches the reader, but it is clear that the war has shaped and will continue to shape how we, as both scholars and individuals, view the past, the present, and the future. In my case, the war has hit too close to home. My long and deep ancestral roots are in Ukraine, in the Podilia region, where, surrounded by both Russian and Ukrainian, I spent the first sixteen years of my life prior to coming to the United States in 1993. I studied Ukrainian language and literature all through the years of secondary school. Living in Ukraine undoubtedly contributed to my family’s sense of being Soviet Jews. The intertwining of Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish elements is a frequent topic in this book.

Despite the ongoing tragedy and the devaluing and reevaluating of culture it has caused, I dare hope that this book about preservation of one’s identity in the face of the overwhelming desire to squash and efface it has not lost its relevance, and perhaps even gained some. A book that examines surviving under censorship and offering resistance to the authoritarian and totalitarian rule contains lessons for today. The Soviet modus operandi of reading between the lines might become the norm in Russia again. So many are turning to books for answers and parallels to what is happening and it is the works from the Soviet Jewish bookshelf—from Feuchtwanger to the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers—that often top the people’s lists. There are photos of scorched books saved from the bombings in Ukraine and books again taken into emigration; there is use and misuse of memories of the Holocaust and World War II—all of this finds loud echoes in my book’s contents.

I am grateful to everyone with whom I have discussed The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf over the years, especially Gennady Estraikh, Maxim Shrayer, Anna Shternshis, Radislav Lapushin (who read the manuscript in its entirety and offered valuable comments), Dorian Stuber, Nila Friedberg, Zhenya Bershtein, Alice Nakhimovsky, Polina Barskova, Marina Aptekman, Arkadi Zeltser, Mikhail Krutikov, Michael Weingrad, Naya Lekht, the late David Shneer, Evgeny Wiener, and my students, Zachary Youcha and Misha Lerner. I am deeply indebted to Olga Trifonova, Marianna Shakhnovich, Zsuzsa Hetenyi, and Mikhail Tsypkin for providing invaluable information and photographs, and to folks at the Jewish Museum in Moscow, especially Lyubov Lavrova, and at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, where I conducted research in the summer of 2019. I’m also, of course, grateful to everyone at Brandeis University Press and the Tauber Institute, especially Sylvia Fried, ChaeRan Freeze, and Sue Ramin, for all their assistance and insight. I’m thankful to the manuscript’s two anonymous reviewers for their assessment and input as well.

The legacy of my family is in this book’s pages. I’m grateful to my mom and sister for everything. As always, none of this would have been possible without my wife’s love, patience, and support. I dedicate this book to my beloved children—Matthew and Maya—the inheritors of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf.

INTRODUCTION: THE SOVIET JEWISH BOOKSHELF

There’s there, there

In all honesty, Soviet Jews endured their trial better than the biblical Jews. They fought against the tornado of history like the giants.

—Semen Gekht, The Ship Is Sailing to Jaffo and Back

In 1965, as Leonid Brezhnev served his first year after the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev, the first collection of Franz Kafka’s writings came out in the Soviet Union. It was a hefty comprehensive volume with superb translations into Russian of the Prague writer’s major works (one notable exclusion was The Castle). Boris Suchkov, head of the Institute of World Literature, wrote the critical preface. He was a champion of such translations, as he was also responsible for the publication of Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, and had wanted to publish James Joyce, but his career was both tragic and turbulent. In 1947, Suchkov was arrested, accused of espionage for the US, and spent eight years in the Gulag, only being released after Josef Stalin’s death. His take on Kafka was at points accurate and insightful and at points paid lip service to propaganda. Most interesting, however, was the fact that Suchkov, a non-Jew, stressed Kafka’s Jewishness in no uncertain and even endearing terms. He quoted a famous passage from Kafka’s diary, What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself and all I’m capable of is standing quietly in the corner, happy that I’m allowed to breathe. Following that, Suchkov writes, "Kafka could have said something similar not only about his kinsmen, whose fate mattered to him (ch’ia sud’ba byla dlia nego ne bezrazlichna)."¹ In 1969, when Suchkov included this preface in his collection of essays, Images of Time, he added that the process of assimilation did not succeed in resolving the acute Jewish question in Austria-Hungary. The word Zionist also appeared there and, remarkably for a Soviet publication, was used if not positively then at least neutrally (it talked of Max Brod’s Zionist ideas).

To appreciate the significance of these few sentences, it is worth putting oneself in the mind of a Soviet Jewish reader who was lucky to purchase or obtain a copy of the volume, which would remain the only edition of Kafka’s writings in Russian until 1988. What did it mean to read that Kafka, this mysterious and only a short time ago outlawed writer, whose works would be valorized by the Soviet intelligentsia at large, was not indifferent to the fate of his people, toyed with Zionist ideas, and was sceptical about the promise of assimilation? It certainly meant a great deal emotionally, intellectually, and even ontologically, as far as the nature of Soviet Jewishness was concerned. The Soviet Jewish reader and hence Soviet Jewish consciousness was forged by careful and selective reading.

To reflect on a cultural history of Soviet Jewry of the post–World War II period and the Holocaust—and of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia as its critically thinking vanguard in particular—is a daunting task. At the same time, it is impossible to properly understand the Jewish experience in modernity without grasping the history and complicated culture of Soviet Jews, the single largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the US for most of the twentieth century. The principal Cold War account, encapsulated in Elie Wiesel’s notion of them as Jews of silence living in terror and yearning for piety,² is deeply insufficient and in some crucial ways erroneous, yet, unfortunately, remains the dominant version for the general reader. This reader remains largely unaware that despite persecution in its various manifestations, the world of Soviet Jewry was much richer and more intricate than previously thought and the place of Jews more prominent in Soviet society overall. Thanks to recent scholarship by Anna Shternshis,³ Jeffrey Veidlinger,⁴ Elissa Bemporad,⁵ and Yuri Slezkine,⁶ among others,⁷ the students of the subject have now a much more accurate picture of Jewish lives in the early postrevolutionary period and under Stalin, when the shtetl Jewry underwent a sweeping transformation and Soviet Jewish intelligentsia was established, scattered across the Soviet cities both big and small. The post-Stalin eras, however, are explored much less, though they are, of course, most critical in terms of radical shifts and permutations in Jewish moods and Soviet policies on Jews as well as responses to the larger events, such as the Holocaust, de-Stalinization, and the existence of Israel.⁸

The fascinating phenomenon that was Soviet Jewish consciousness consisted of far more than the remains of Yiddishkeit, linguistic, culinary, and religious, on the one hand, and total Russification and Sovi-etization on the other. Soviet Jewish culture was also in profound ways a post-Holocaust phenomenon that went far beyond local cases of Jewish worship and remembrance of the war atrocities. Less familiar than and distinct from the Jewish cultures and identities that emerged in the state of Israel and the US yet undeniably linked to them, it constitutes a captivating and vital topic of inquiry. The question of culture is key here—that is how Jewishly thin or thick Soviet Jewish culture was. If in the thick category, knowledge of . . . ethnoreligious tradition/culture⁹ is central; in the thin one, the identity is much more essentialized and nominal, and hence, as suggested by pioneer historian of Soviet Jewry Zvi Gitelman, perhaps not sufficiently substantive and sustainable to preserve a group’s distinctiveness on more than a symbolic level.¹⁰ However, as pointed out by the Israeli researcher Arkadi Zeltser, to employ the concept of ‘thin’ . . . to the culture of people who united informally based on explicit ethnic content and whose actions were of a regular, mass nature and not something occasional is also problematic.¹¹ The well-known scholar of Russian Jewish literature Leonid Katsis puts it most emphatically, stating, It is clear now that nothing like the often alleged complete break with tradition occurred in Russian Jewish reality. ‘The Jews of silence’ had never actually given up their self-awareness.¹²

It is also undeniable that Soviet Jews underwent a profound transformation in the Soviet period,¹³ which created an identity that was often fragmentary and commonly instinctual rather than conceptualized. After the war, and in the subsequent decades, though the Pale of Settlement was gone, this identity was expressed in numerous and often intricate ways, but only to a point, since Soviet Jews constituted no autonomous community and were by no means a homogeneous group.¹⁴ Yet living in a centralized oppressive state meant that their differences could also matter only to a point. Frequently subject to quotas and varying degrees of discrimination, Soviet Jews participated fully within the larger society and had to abide by its rules, at times shaping these very rules from their professional and intellectual positions. The vast majority of them were thoroughly secular, with Russian as their native or primary tongue, and with no or very little knowledge of Judaic practice, which the state firmly opposed as it did any other religion. While in the capitals and larger cities some synagogues stayed open, they were practically all closed down in the former Pale in the late 1930s or shortly after the war. Thus, tradition in the Soviet Jewish case was hardly traditional, since the bulk of Soviet Jewish cultural memory was formed neither in the religious sphere nor that of material culture.

What constituted it then? Unless we as students, chroniclers, and interpreters of Soviet Jewishness answer this question and arrive at an understanding of what comprised the knowledge base of Soviet Jews across the board and how this knowledge was transmitted through historical periods and generations, the thickness of Soviet Jewish identity would remain a debatable proposition at best. The historian Olga Litvak sees it as precisely that, writing, "There is no there, there. Russian Jews broke their ties to Judaism when they became Soviet citizens . . . the Jewishness of Soviet Jews was radically stripped of Jewish content. Cut off from access to Jewish knowledge, it could generate none."¹⁵ My book challenges and offers a rebuttal to this claim, returning us to the Soviet Jewish readers of Kafka. The reading practices of Soviet Jews hold the key to the sources of Jewish knowledge that fed their identity, for again, to quote Litvak, "context is everything."¹⁶

To uncover this context and fill in the existing lacuna, I reconstruct post-Holocaust Soviet Jewish identity and culture through the novel concept of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf as the basis of Soviet Jews’ improbably defiant and necessarily makeshift Jewish heritage and knowledge. In an atmosphere where Judaism was all but destroyed and the very public presence of the Jew delegitimized, Jewish memory and identity continued to exist and develop through subversive and implicit reading practices, underpinned by fractured memories and half-whispered conversations.¹⁷

The idea of Soviet Jewish intelligentsia as a textual community¹⁸ and Jewish remnant in the post-Holocaust and post-Stalinist era is central to this book, which recounts the story of a Soviet Jewish idea by bringing to life the intellectual and moral universe of this intelligentsia. At the same time, the book reaches beyond intellectual history to demonstrate or even reimagine how Soviet Jews as a whole maintained and shaped their Jewishness by reading themselves into and out of books to ascertain a connection between their identities and texts. My goal is to form a more fluid, complex understanding of identity that does take ideological forces seriously, but ultimately presents Soviet Jews themselves as actors and agents rather than mere subjects of oppressive authorities. Instead of relying on familiar rigid social scientific models, I concentrate on reading as a social, creative, and existential community-forming act, the function that it traditionally performed in both Russian and Jewish civilizations, and ask not how reading shapes reality, but how it creates a sense of intimacy and a shared experience. Considering the importance of Soviet Jewish lineage in today’s politics, culture, and literary scene, be it in Russia and the post-Soviet space, Israel or the US or Germany, the book helps understand not just the past Soviet Jewish experience but also its global effects in the present. The war in Ukraine has magnified this importance, because it is safe to assume that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, grew up with his own Soviet Jewish bookshelf and likely drew lessons from it.

As famously argued by Evgeny Dobrenko, The shaping of the Soviet reader can be regarded as one of the aspects of a larger process—the shaping of the Soviet man.¹⁹ Soviet Jews were part of this process as both its practitioners and at times theoreticians, but they were also shaped as Jews precisely by being Jewish readers. The social life²⁰ of the books they read is a mirror of how reading uniquely provided for many of them an entry to communal memory and selfhood. As Jewish readers, Soviet Jews operated both within the official culture and cautiously, though at times combatively, outside and against it, maintaining a distinct a priori sense of their Jewish difference and subjectivity: ethnic and nationalist, cultural and existential, reinforced and imbued with meaningful content through what and how they read.²¹

Unlike the earlier or more recent investigations of Jewishness in Soviet literary contexts, which identified Jewish themes in and Jewish contributions to Soviet literature on a biographical basis, my book is concerned with pinpointing or even decoding the often Aesopian reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books lined up on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put, which means that Jews read them, and only Jews read them in a particular way.²² While this approach invariably involves a close engagement with the text, the goal here is not an encyclopedic investigation of Jewishness in Soviet literature or a strict social scientific analysis of X many books and X titles, but the reconstruction of a culturological portrait of the post-Holocaust Soviet Jew with the help of both testimonial (biographical and oral) evidence and critical and archival sources. Despite geographic distinctions—between the former Pale and the capitals; the Baltic states, Western Ukraine, Moldova, and the Soviet inlands; Ashkenazi communities and those of Georgia and Central Asia²³—and generational and professional ones, which corresponded to both the broader trends and Jewish specificities, a composite unified picture can be gleaned.

Literature took on the chief role for Soviet Jews for both long historical and more immediate reasons. For many of them, being Jewish meant reading certain books and in a certain fashion, keeping in mind that any printed material that had the word Jewish in it was seized upon by the Soviet Jewish reader. In the atmosphere of constant restrictions and shortages, books in the Soviet Union were the objects of desire to be hunted for and possessed, making bookcases a central and permanent fixture of postwar Soviet households. As the contemporary Russian poet and critic Maria Stepanova puts it, Soviet distribution was organized in such a way that going to a bookshop was an adventure, with all the pleasure of the hunt: every shop had a different selection, and some were notably better than others—there were books that only very rarely appeared, but the hope of a find, and the occasional successes, kept the hunt alive.²⁴ This especially applied to various collected works (sobranie sochinenii) editions of Russian, Soviet, and foreign classics. Widely unavailable, they could be found either at the black market or specialty stores or given out according to book rations (talony), special tickets that one could acquire by turning in, for instance, paper goods for recycling.²⁵ Unsurprisingly, bookcases featuring these trophies dominated the often meager and cramped spaces of communal and private apartments. The bookshelves in Soviet Jewish homes had their own unique installments and were predominantly the only visible signs of Jewishness. The Soviet Jewish bookshelf stands at the intersection of contexts—Russian and Jewish, Western and Soviet, literary and historical, official and un-official—and contains the paradoxes and vicissitudes of post-Stalinist Soviet culture.

The richness uncovered via our model is not unexpected. Historically, the bookcase has long been a defining cultural object for both Russians and Jews; contemplations of it permeate Russian Jewish, Hebrew, and Yiddish texts and biographies. Osip Mandelstam and H. N. Bialik provide the most resonant blueprints of the symbolism of the bookcase. Mandelstam, a cult figure for many among the postwar Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, famously states in his autobiography The Noise of Time, as if foreshadowing the fragmented core of Soviet Jewish readerly psyche:

My memory is inimical to all that is personal. If it depended on me, I should only make a wry face in remembering the past . . . I repeat—my memory is not loving but inimical, and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past. A raznochinets [member of intelligentsia] needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell the books he has read, and his biography is done.²⁶

It is also in The Noise of Time where Mandelstam creates the paradigm of the bookcase as the central feature of his memory excavation: Every book in the first bookcase is, willy-nilly, a classic, and not one of them can ever be expelled, and yet there is unmistakably a hierarchy:

I always remember the lower shelf as chaotic: the books were not standing side by side but lay like ruins: reddish [Pentateuch] with ragged covers, a Russian history of the Jews written in the clumsy, [timid] language of a Russian-speaking Talmudist. This was the Judaic chaos thrown into the dust.²⁷

Above these Jewish ruins began the orderly arrangements of books, the classics of Russian and German traditions. Mandelstam’s notion of the bookcase as a geological bed is at the foundation of his poetics. Following in the great poet’s footsteps, I dig out in my book the tiers and hierarchies within the Soviet Jewish bookshelf, including that of my parents, trying to determine not only what volumes it held, but also which were privileged and why.

There is a striking parallel between Mandelstam’s image of the bookcase and Bialik’s poem Before the Book Closet.²⁸ This seminal Hebrew verse tells of the lyrical speaker, almost synonymous with Bialik himself, who returns to a traditional Jewish house of study to confront the sacred Jewish past after abandoning it in favor of the cosmopolitan European culture he found in Odesa. Having addressed the holy folios as dear friends (as did Alexander Pushkin when bidding farewell to his books—his friends—before dying), he discovers that there no longer exists an intimate profound relationship between him and the volumes. They stopped inspiring him either because he lost an ability to decipher them, or because their ancient wisdom, which he once held to be so precious and sacred, had lost its power and glory, or perhaps had always been an illusion.

The relationship between Soviet Jewish readers and their bookcases was not, at least in most cases, as dramatic. Yet it is plausible to speak of Soviet Jewish cultural memory as a product of unique Soviet circumstances and at the same time an indelible part of the overall modern Jewish cultural experiment, heralded in part by Bialik, that aimed to find the voice of Jewish difference through secular works and concepts, both breaking with the religious past and renegotiating it. Indeed, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf responds to a fundamental question of modern Jewish history, namely What is the relationship between Jewish culture and history and the culture and history of the non-Jews among whom the Jews lived and live?²⁹

My book proceeds along thematic, chronological, and conceptual lines. It locates the roots of the formation of the Soviet Jewish reader in the 1930s and traces its development through the post-Stalinist Thaw period of the 1950s and 1960s, the Stagnation period of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Perestroika reforms of the late 1980s. The book weaves the Jewish story into the larger Soviet one by uncovering both the continuities and disruptions in the reading preferences and tendencies and figuring out which themes and genres, from translations to historical fiction to science fiction to literary scholarship to samizdat literature, were significant for each epoch and most in demand. It also reaches beyond the Soviet by drawing parallels between the Soviet Jewish reading lists and those in the US. The book decodes the reading strategies and again their relationship to each epoch’s politics and trends. Throughout, my approach is inspired and informed by Leo Strauss’s notion of writing and reading between the lines from his seminal Persecution and the Art of Writing.

According to Strauss, Persecution . . . gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.³⁰ Soviet Jews were precisely such types of readers, intuitive and cautiously perceptive, able to locate the instances of subversion and Jewishness in between a text’s gaps and absences and within the official pernicious line. The Straussian model reveals how the meaning of content is shaped by context and the reader who emerges out of that context. With Strauss in mind, I also concentrate on the officially published works, which were accessible to everyone, because, as the students of Soviet culture increasingly understand, the strict demarcation between official and underground literature is false. The official language colored everything, including the unpublishable texts, underpinning all shades of the Soviet mindset, even the dissident ones.³¹

The book is divided into five chapters and the epilogue. The first chapter begins the story of the Soviet Jewish reader with the most consequential part of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf—the historical novels of the renowned German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger, published in a twelve-volume collected works edition between 1963 and 1969 with a print run of 300,000 copies. I investigate how Feuchtwanger’s works essentially became the Soviet Jewish scripture and the main sources of Jewish historical and cultural knowledge.

The long second chapter turns to the Soviet Jewish canon of the Thaw mid-1950s to the stagnating 1970s and early 1980s, the Russian books that were most thematically Jewish as well as most popular and accessible, and describes the critical correlation between the Soviet Jews’ reading culture and their lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Reading these books was a rite of passage that equipped Soviet Jews with a common language and a shared set of historical and thematic references and codes. The chapter also uncovers the sanctioned Soviet Holocaust canon, consisting of fiction, poetry, and documentary literature, and shows how the issue of Holocaust remembrance and memorialization was part and parcel of the larger Soviet cultural changes and debates, in which Jews took active part. This