Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

Acknowledgments

xiii acknowledgments This book initially emerged at Columbia University’s Department of History . I owe the most profound debt to my teachers there, especially to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose patient, clear-eyed guidance and near-prophetic wisdom steered me toward a career as a historian of Eastern European Jewry. Thanks also go to Richard Wortman for discerning a topic in a very preliminary and inchoate proposal and for asking me all those difficult questions. I am very grateful to Mark Von Hagen for helping me to approach the social and cultural role of the military in new ways, and to Elliot Wolfson, whose strong readings of rabbinic texts continually reassert themselves in my own analytical inclinations. My profound thanks to Dan Miron for teaching me how to think with literature. The enthusiasm and critical acumen of the other members of my committee, Abraham Ascher and David Roskies, saved me from despair and countless mistakes. While at Columbia I was blessed with the wonderful company of fellow graduate students who have since become fast friends and treasured colleagues . I am deeply thankful to Nils and Jennifer Roemer, Dan Unowsky, Marc Miller, Robert Crews (who keeps leaving every place just as I get there), and Margaret Sena for the shelter of their enduring affection. My thanks to Nancy Sinkoff for breaking ranks to talk to me when I was still an undergraduate, and for remaining, ever since, a steadfast member of our mutual admiration society. I thank Yaacob Dweck for all the unearned but much needed applause. And most of all I thank Avi Matalon, my best pal and partner-in-crime, for generously sharing your mind when I felt like I was losing mine; and thank you, sweetheart, for 9 June 2002. This book could only have been conceived at Columbia but it could only have been written at Princeton where I have spent seven very productive years. The mentoring of my colleagues at the history department and in the Program of Judaic Studies helped me to find my way toward these pages. Laura Engelstein’s guidance was instrumental in shaping the direction of xiv acknowledgments the project. She gave generously of her time, and provided acutely constructive criticism and an immensely fruitful exchange of ideas. Thanks to Tony Grafton for an eye-opening conversation about Jewish counter-history, to Dan Rodgers for a comparative perspective on the problem of the AngloSaxon genitive, and to Andy Rabinbach, for linking East and West. Three people in the department fearlessly undertook the task of reading the entire manuscript and providing copious and immeasurably useful, heartening notes. I am grateful to Bill Jordan, Dirk Hartog, and Michael Gordin for taking time away from their own work and for seeing things clearly before I did. Thanks to Cormac Ò Gráda, Davis Center fellow in 2003–2004, for sharing my enthusiasm for the nineteenth century and for a truly crossdisciplinary conversation. My warmest thanks to Angela Creager for leading by example, and to Molly Greene for always keeping her office door open. I am deeply grateful to Leora Batnitzky, a constant source of intellectual and personal support, and to Barbara Hahn whose perfect company I sorely miss. My thanks to Froma Zeitlin for her passionate interest in Jewish Eastern Europe and for her generous and warmhearted welcome to Princeton. Peter Schaefer, in his inimitably calm and penetrating way, helped me to embrace the imbrication of literature and history which is central to this book. Thanks to his invaluable intervention and advice, I finally stopped agonizing about my sources. I thank all my students at Princeton, especially the HIS281 fan club and Vance Serchuk, Boris Fishman, Anne O’Donnell, Adina Yoffie, Amos Bitzan, Mark Schwartz, Marissa Troiano, Amy Widdowson , and Joe Skloot, for all the ways in which their own brilliant readings of the Jewish past helped to inspire my work (but mostly for laughing at all my jokes). I am immensely grateful to my colleagues in the field of Eastern European Jewish history who gathered together at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002–2003. My thanks to David Ruderman, its guiding spirit. I am deeply in debt to Ben Nathans for his engaging and sympathetic reading of my manuscript. His friendship and unparalleled analytical skills have made all the difference. I am grateful to John Klier, Adam Teller, Ken Moss, Marcus Moseley, Bat-Sheva Ben-Amos, David Engel, Zvi Gitelman, and Moshe Rosman for their challenging...