Israel and the Concept of Homeland in Russian Jewish Literature after 1970

Modern Jewish Russian-language prose offers much insight into the culture of Russian aliya since the 1970s, considering the subject of Jewish identity to be linked to a discursive process of repatriation. For authors, and their protagonists, the question of Israel as a destination may be merely coincidental or spiritually predestined. It is impossible to discuss all views on Russian emigration to Israel (as contained in recent Russian Jewish prose) in a single essay, rather, I focus on a single yet relevant aspect of this topic: Pessimism. The selection of authors and texts examined here reveals a profound negativity toward the factors that appear at the axes of the controversy surrounding immigration to Israel. Drawing on texts by Efraim Sevela, Mikhail Baranovskii, Jakov Zigelman, and Grigorii Kanovich, I consider the factors which link these authors together and encourage us to view their works as parts of a whole: the state of being Jewish in the late Soviet period, the experience of emigration and repatriation (i.e. the experience of whole generations, which creates a specific historical perspective), and the experience of identity crises, which sets up the texts, their authors, and their characters as Soviet-Jewish. All the authors reflect on the status and condition of Jews who immigrate to Israel from the FSU as adults, yet they also have a collective understanding of the ways in which Soviet-Jewish emigration (read here: repatriation) takes its place in Jewish history. They consider such a concept as the "return of the dispersed" in terms of disillusionment, while the old Jewish hope for a recovery of their homeland is analyzed and challenged in a variety of ways.

The repressive measures of the Soviet regime created a climate favorable to the creation of literary works that interpreted the "Jewish" in primarily social and political terms, and also understood it as an important aspect of dissident culture. The political ban on freedom of expression fostered a culture in which protesting against the totalitarian state and its restrictions became an important part of being Jewish. The question of Jewish identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet context finds itself displaced on a historical, political, and social level, but also because during this time Russian Jewish self-image was not nourished by religion and ritual, i.e. the traditional sources of Judaism. This was a result of, on the one hand, the advanced assimilation typical of all Jewish minorities in Europe, and on the other, the ban on all things Jewish for political reasons, which in the main suppressed traditional Judaism from the consciousness of those born between 1930 and 1960. Thus, in literary prose, the world of traditional Judaism such as the Torah, Jewish beliefs and prayers, Hebrew, synagogue services, Kashrut, or Jewish feast days, and far-reaching aspects of Yiddish culture are only ever-present in the narrators' fictional accounts of their grandparents or in the authors' digressions into Jewish history. For a number of contemporary post-Soviet Jewish authors, traditional Judaism is an important component of their familial and personal history. It is an object of nostalgia, an irreplaceable loss. Very rarely in the relevant literature, however, does Judaism become a life-defining, meaningful element for the protagonist, narrator, or author. This growing attention to Jewish religious tradition in contemporary Russian Jewish literature can be seen in the psychological or symbolic—and very individual—interpretations of the Holy Scriptures, which are far removed from the traditional Judaic reading (take, for example. Freidrich Gorenshteyn or, to a certain extent, Efrem Bauch.) This can be explained by the fact that many authors had only begun looking at and working with the writings of the Torah or the Old Testament, Jewish customs, and ancient Jewish history when they were much older.

Efrem Bauch's novel Lestnica Iakova (Jacob's Ladder, written in 1984 and, first published in 1987) is an example of the type of historically sensitive writing that shows how important the rediscovery of Jewish memorial and exegetical traditions became to many Soviet Jews at the time of the "Jewish Renaissance" in the 1970s. The novel was...