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25 1 : To The russian reader Preface to the Russian edition of Zakhor (Moscow: Gesharim, 2004). The following is the English original of the preface to the Russian-language translation of Zakhor, published in Moscow in 2004. Although Zakhor was translated into eight languages, Yosef Yerushalmi professed a special feeling for the Russian version, even though he could not read it. He began this brief, but revealing, excerpt by discussing his family’s Russian roots and the origins of the family name—Yerusalimski—which was changed to Yerushalmi after his father fled the post-Revolution violence in Russia and immigrated to Palestine. Yerushalmi further recounted the arrival of his parents to the United States, his father from Palestine and his mother from Russia. Then he described the distinctive cultural milieu in which he grew up in the Bronx, a mix of Jewish religious sensibilities, ideologies, and languages. In reporting on his multilingual upbringing (Hebrew and Yiddish), Yerushalmi admitted to a “lifelong regret” that he never learned Russian, which was his parents ’ “private language.” He confided his great passion for Russian song, which filled his childhood home, as well as for Russian belles lettres. Indeed, it was Russian literature, of all the world literatures that Yerushalmi knew and loved, that spoke to him “most directly and intimately.” There was something of the capacity to peer into the human soul, in all its richness and darkness, that drew Yerushalmi to the Russian classics. This capacity informed his own historical labors, most particularly , his attempts to peer into the soul of the crypto-Jew—and of the inquisitor , as well. So too it would seem that the Russian literary ethos, which yielded a deep, at times tortured, introspection, left a profound mark on Yerushalmi as a person. Since its first publication in English in 1982 Zakhor has been translated into eight languages, including Japanese, yet this translation into Russian has for me a special and very personal significance. My parents were both Russian Jews, my mother born Kaplan in Pinsk, my father born Yerusalimski in Goloskov, though he received his Hebrew and Russian education in Odessa and studied at the university prior to the Revolution. I was born Yerushalmi in New York. As far as I can determine, Yerusalimski was a rather uncommon name among Russian Jews. The family tradition is that in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, when all Jews were forced to adopt family names, my fore- 26 | self-reflecTIon bear choseYerusalimski because he hoped one day to live in Jerusalem. It was my father and an older brother who finally took this step. During the Civil War following the Revolution, when another brother had been killed in a pogrom, the two young men managed to flee from Russia and make their way to what was then Palestine. There they lived the life of pioneers and the name changed automatically to its Hebrew form—Yerushalmi. My father joined a kibbutz, working as a guard, in construction, and in the fields. In 1923 his brother returned to Russia intending to bring my grandfather to the Land of Israel. Unfortunately, this was just around the time that the anti-Zionist persecutions had begun. Neither of them got out, and thus I never knew my grandfather, my uncle, or any other members of my father’s large family, some of whose members were exiled as Zionists to Siberia and dispersed to other places in Russia. As for my father, in 1928, he was engaged in draining swamps and became severely ill with malaria, an illness that broke his health completely and made further physical work impossible. A friend from Russia who had settled in America invited him to come, recuperate, and then he could go back. He came, and for the rest of his life he was always “going back.” But he never had the money to do so, nor any useful profession that would earn him a living there. My mother had come directly to America with my grandmother in 1922 as a girl of sixteen. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, she met my father in NewYork, they fell in love, married, and two years later I came into the world. It is almost impossible for me to describe the culture and society in which I was raised, because that world has disappeared.The entire neighborhood was Jewish, not necessarily Orthodox, but Jewish to the core, mostly from Eastern Europe, traditionalists and secularists, Zionists, Bundists and Communists, all...

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