A History of Russian Jewish Literature. by V. Lvov-Rogachevsky; Arthur Levin; B. GorevReview by: John D. KlierSlavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), p. 719Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496551 .

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Reviews 719

Ivankiad, or the Tale of the Writer Voinovich's Installation in His New Apartment. Translated by David Lapeza, the book offers, in addition to delightful reading, much information on Soviet class structure, housing problems, social mores, and sundry matters. Your students, I vouch, will be grateful. They may even forgive you some of your own boring lectures.

I also bring glad tidings. A sequel to Private Chonkin is already available in Russian. Entitled Pretendent na prestol: Novye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina, it will, I am sure, eventually appear in English under the title of Chonkin Strikes Again, or The Return of Chonkin. The sad forecast is that the sequel is no more likely to appear in the USSR than did the novel's first part.

MAURICE FRIEDBERG University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A HISTORY OF RUSSIAN JEWISH LITERATURE. By V. Lvov-Rogachevsky. Edited and translated by Arthur Levin. Essay by B. Gorev. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979. 213 pp. Photographs. $14.00, cloth. $4.95, paper.

It is a pleasure to welcome this volume into print. It is a stimulating potpourri of useful information on the Jews in Russia, hitherto available only in fairly inaccessible Russian periodicals. The volume consists of an essay on the treatment of the Jews in Russian literature written by B. Gorev in 1917, followed by an extended essay on Jewish writers in the Russian language published by V. Lvov-Rogachevsky in 1922. The work is smoothly translated by Arthur Levin, who provides useful, copious notes. One minor point on the translation: it would be helpful if the translator had indicated the Russian original of "Jew" in each instance-is it evrei, zhid, iudei, or izrail'tianin?

The heart of the volume is Lvov-Rogachevsky's panoramic portrait of the various generations of Russian-Jewish authors: the Nicholaen era Maskilim, loyal to the state and to the ideals of secular education; reform era Enlighteners bent on complete integration and civil emancipation; nationalists, compelled by pogrom violence to reject assimilation and to seek a haven in a "national" (Yiddish) literature or in Zionism; and the socialists, who rejected narrow national pride and pursued the ideals of social justice and international solidarity. As Levin observes, this analysis bears the marks of its intellectual genesis: Lvov-Rogachevsky was a former Menshevik writing in the philo-Semitic atmosphere which followed the Revolution. Consequently, his analysis of the Zionist theme is guarded and restrained, and he implicitly approves the era of "social ideals."

In his introduction, Levin expresses the hope that this volume will "at the very least inspire a sequel dealing with the Jewish contribution to Russian literature since 1917." This reviewer would go further. Both Gorev's and Lvov-Rogachevsky's con- tributions provide an orientation and an important starting point, but both are essen- tially essays which seek to cover three-quarters of a century of diverse literary activity. A fertile field remains for dissertations and monographs dealing with the Jew in Rus- sian literature and the Russian-Jewish litterateurs surveyed in the book. Levin's work points the way and helps suggest a scholarly agenda.

JOHN D. KLIER Fort Hays State University

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