Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 542–544 STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN. Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Pp. xii Ⳮ 139. In this accessible and lucid book, Steven Zipperstein ponders the broad question of the interplay between history and memory, relating it specifically to the reconstruction of the Russian-Jewish past. Zipperstein illuminates the particular historiographic tensions experienced by historians of Jewish Eastern Europe who must balance both being scholars and vessels of collective memory as they reconstruct the past for Jews in America—the cultural and demographic center of the East European Jewish Diaspora—who have been cut off from their past by migration, the devastation of the Holocaust, and the inaccessibility (until recently) of East European archival material. In four essays, Zipperstein summons an impressive array of cultural texts and historical sources as he explores such topics as the image of the shtetl, education and the heder, Russian Jewish life in Odessa, and the Holocaust’s influence on the writing of East European Jewish history. Driving these four discussions is Zipperstein ’s interest in addressing the formidable question of how Jewish historians should ‘‘write about the past in ways that balance critical scrutiny, self-awareness, and engagement’’ (p. 9). The evolving image of Russia in American Jewish consciousness is the focal point of Zipperstein’s first chapter. Drawing on the works of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Philip Roth, Zipperstein tries to ‘‘provide insight into moments of Jewish life that fall between the cracks of the more standard historical narratives about American Jewry’’ (p. 19). Through a close reading of a wide assortment of literary sources, Zipperstein contends that the changing image of Russian Jewish life was directly related to developments in American Jewish life. In the first decades of the twentieth century, for example, the image of Russia in Jewish fiction emphasized how Russia was ‘‘merely a noisome, violent, pogrom-ridden backdrop, a place from which to escape,’’ highlighting the chasm between Russia and the United States (p. 23). By the 1960s, Zipperstein argues, the shtetl, rather than the pogrom, emerged as the icon of Jewish Eastern Europe. Zipperstein maintains that this transforThe Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. ZIPPERSTEIN, IMAGINING RUSSIAN JEWRY—KOBRIN 543 mation took place because ‘‘the Holocaust [had] rendered Eastern Europe more conducive to sentimentalization’’ and the disjuncture of suburbanization nurtured in American Jewry a desire to imagine ‘‘a direct , even linear relationship between the East European shtetl and the American suburb’’ (pp. 32, 30). In many ways, what is fascinating about this first chapter, the departure point for Zipperstein’s larger discussion of Russian-Jewish history, is how centered it is on American Jewry, a focal point, in different ways, of the entire book. The study of American Jewry has in the past been relegated to the periphery in the field of modern Jewish history. Zipperstein ’s reflections point to a new trend in field: the unofficial acceptance of American Jewry as an interesting and critical arena of research for historians of Jewish Eastern Europe. Paula Hyman’s emphasis on the United States in her Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle , 1995; also part of the Stroum lecture series) provides another illustrative example. By demonstrating how historical visions of Russia were integrally intertwined with the existential needs of American Jewry, this chapter raises important questions about the ways in which local concerns and historiographic traditions intersect to shape our understanding of the past. How was the shtetl imagined differently in other centers of the East European Jewish Diaspora, such as Israel, South America, or even the Soviet Union? By compelling one to wonder how the reconstruction of the Jewish past varies across time and space, this chapter focuses the reader on the perplexing issues central to the entire study. In the second essay, ‘‘Reinventing Heders,’’ a condensed version of an earlier treatment of the issue, Zipperstein transports the reader back to Russia and into the boardroom of the...