Synopses & Reviews
"Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." --Benjamin Nathans
Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers.
Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.
Review
"Olga Litvak has written an incisive, thought-provoking, and critical account of the emergence in late imperial Russia of a new Jewish literary discourse in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew." --Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY, Vol. 81.2 June 2009 Indiana University Press
Review
"Litvak has written an imaginative, path-breaking study that contributes immeasurably to the study of modern Jewish history and culture, Imperial Russian history, and theoretical discussions regarding the intersection between literature, history, and memory." --Religious Studies Review Indiana University Press Indiana University Press
Review
"... this is a valuable, theoretically sophisticated contribution to both Russian and Jewish history. Litvak has convincingly shown that what Russian Jews came to know about conscription was a literary, and highly polemical, construction that helped shaped how Jews came to understand and remember their collective plight in tsarist Russia." --Charters Wynn, University of Texas at Austin, The Russian Review, Vol. 68.1 Jan. 2009
Review
"... [A] valuable scholarly work... Recommended." --Choice
Synopsis
Reveals the enduring impact of forced service in the Tsarist army on both Russian Jewish youth and Russian Jewish literary culture
About the Author
Olga Litvak teaches European and Jewish history at Princeton University. Born in Soviet Russia and educated in the United States, she is a New Yorker by conviction.
Table of Contents
Contents<\>A Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Literary Response to Conscription and the Persistence of Enlightenment in Russian-Jewish Culture
1. Stepchildren of the Tsar: Jewish Cantonists and the Official Origins of Russian Jewry
2. Great Expectations: The Beginnings of Cantonist Literature and the Emancipation of Russian-Jewish Consciousness
3. The Romance of Enlightenment: Gender and the Critique of Embourgeoisement in the Recruitment Novels of I. M. Dik, Grigorii Bogrov, and J. L. Gordon
4. Return of the Native: The Nicholaevan Universe of Sh. J. Abramovich and the Enlightenment Origins of Russian-Jewish Populism
5. Dead Children of the Hebrew Renaissance: The Conscription Story as Nationalist Myth
6. The Writing of Conscription History and the Making of the Russian-Jewish Diaspora
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index