This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources?including novels, plays, and archival material? Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures. Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof . In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), the author of the best known play in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, "The Dybbuk,” was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. He was a leading Russian populist; he was the author of the poem adopted as the anthem of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund; he is credited with being the founder of the field of Jewish ethnography; and he wrote one of the most influential works of Jewish catastrophe literature in modern times, his masterpiece "Hurbn Galitsye,” on the travails of East European Jews in the First World War. This volume is the most complete examination of An-sky ever produced. It draws together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others in a far-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration. It also contains numerous photographs culled from archives in the former Soviet Union, a superb English translation of an early Russian draft--among the very first--of "The Dybbuk,” and a timeline that covers all of An-sky’s peripatetic life. Finally, it includes a compact disk combining material drawn from An-sky’s own 1912-14 field recordings of Jewish songs, together with contemporary renditions, recorded at Stanford, of the Russian and Yiddish music that An-sky wrote, collected, and heard. Includes a CD of An-sky’s music,, in Russian and Yiddish