kenneth b. moss,jewish renaissance in the russian revolution

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Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution by Kenneth B. Moss Review by: Harriet Murav The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 232-233 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658046 . Accessed: 22/05/2014 08:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Modern History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.65 on Thu, 22 May 2014 08:19:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Kenneth B. Moss,Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution

Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian RevolutionJewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution by Kenneth B. MossReview by: Harriet   MuravThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 232-233Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658046 .

Accessed: 22/05/2014 08:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Modern History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.65 on Thu, 22 May 2014 08:19:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Kenneth B. Moss,Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution

fashion industry. The fashion industry does indeed, in Ruane’s account, provideanother means to understand the origins and development of capitalism in Russia.

HUGH D. HUDSON JR.Georgia State University

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. By Kenneth B. Moss.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. x�384. $39.95.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant, among other things, that historiansstarted to look at 1917 differently: 1917 is no longer only the year of the Bolshevikrevolution and the beginning of the establishment of Soviet power; 1917 is now viewedas part of longer and more global trajectories. One of the many significant accom-plishments of Kenneth Moss’s extraordinarily impressive book is to contribute to thisshift in meaning of what used to be an absolute chronology. The Jewish culturalmovement that is the subject of this study began before the revolution and flourishedduring 1917–19 but not as a consequence of the revolution. Its leading activists werecommitted to secular high art in Hebrew and Yiddish, at a remove from older, moreparochial concerns; furthermore, they worked to provide individuals with expressivefreedom, participation in cosmopolitan culture, and at the same time, a sense ofnational cultural continuity. What these cultural activists were interested in was notculture for the sake of politics or nation building but for the sake of the “unfetteringof the individual.” For the historical actors studied in this work, and for its author,culture is not the after-effect or distillation of economic, political, global, historical, ordemographic tensions and shifts but a distinct arena of human endeavor, valid and ofvalue in its own right. As Moss brilliantly and startlingly shows, for the Jewish culturalactivists who promulgated this view, the Russian revolution was not the fulfillment oftheir dream of emancipation but more of a welcome coincidence, consonant with atleast some aspects of the agenda they had already developed.

There has been some scholarly attention devoted to the Kiev Kultur-Lige, dedicatedto Yiddish visual art, education, literature, and theater, but most scholars will not knowthat Moscow in 1917 was the center of a vital Hebraist movement that sought thereform and expansion of Hebrew-language education and publication. Moss is the firstscholar to look at these parallel developments as a unified phenomenon. He sees broadsimilarities between the perspectives of the Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson and theHebrew national poet Haim Nahman Bialik, who in different ways made similar pointsabout the necessary separation of art from politics. Their common perspective issurprising given their ideological commitments, but Moss shows the importance of thetension between aesthetics and politics in the Jewish cultural movement of this period.The comparison between Bergelson and Bialik, it should be pointed out, is significantin and of itself since Moss is one of the very few scholars to analyze a pro-MoscowYiddishist together with the Zionist Hebrew poet. Walls have indeed come down.

Moss skillfully unites the study of these more widely known Hebrew and Yiddishcultural activists with less well-known figures, such as Kalman Zingman, whoseutopian vision of a separate, full-fledged Jewish high culture exemplifies the movementas a whole. Among the distinctive features of this movement were its refusal to limitJewish culture to folklore, insistence on its separateness from Russian culture, itsavoidance of the ideology of rupture characteristic of other movements of the time, aswell as its disinclination to redefine Jewish identity. The theoreticians of this vision,including Moshe Litvakov, for example, did not define national culture as the embodi-

232 Book Reviews

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Page 3: Kenneth B. Moss,Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution

ment of a Herderian folkish essence but, rather, as a particular kind of dialogue withworld art and world literature, and therefore they argued for the importance oftranslation for the development of a Jewish literary canon.

To his credit, and as is befitting for a book about aesthetics, Moss’s literaryinterpretations are nuanced and multifaceted, revealing the complexities of the workshe discusses. For example, Moss analyzes Dovid Hofshteyn’s “Nemen” (Names), inwhich the poet incongruously describes his children, named after the sages of antiquityShammai and Hillel, as “young wolves” (102–4). He adroitly shows how the pull oftradition and the new impulse toward physicality and wildness (also an importanttheme for the young Perets Markish, as Moss shows) underlie the work.

The final chapters of the book concern the increasing pressures on Jewish activiststo conform to emerging templates of the revolutionary organization of cultural pro-duction and of art itself. By 1921 the so-called Jewish sections of the Communist Party(in other words, Jews) definitively suppressed Hebrew, and Yiddish was declared theofficial language of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Bolshevik intolerance of high cultureand disdain for the cultural accomplishments of the past presented a harsh challenge tothe Jewish cultural project.

Moss’s study provides innovative, erudite scholarship in a crucial but neglecteddimension of Jewish studies and Russian history, offering a necessary corrective to farmore one-sided views of the meaning of Jewish culture. His subtle literary readingsshould inspire his readers to learn more about the authors he discusses. His work hasfar-reaching implications for those interested in the intersection of culture and politics,beyond Jewish or Russian studies, because he does not reduce one to the other.

I cannot agree, however, with all of his conclusions. Artistic innovation did notcome to an end in Russia in the 1920s or the 1930s. Bergelson, Markish, and otherYiddish authors continued to produce artistically challenging work throughout theircareers. Soviet officials may not have tolerated hyphenated identities and hybrid formsof expression, but Jewish artists and theoreticians living in the Soviet Union producedworks that embodied this approach. Among the figures who come to mind are IsaacBabel, the poet Il’ia Sel’vinskii, and the linguist and translator David Vygodskii(cousin of the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotskii). Jewish culture and fullexpressivity may be had in languages other than Hebrew or Yiddish, as BenjaminHarshav and others have argued (Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution[Stanford, CA, 1993]).

But this is another discussion. Moss’s provocative instigation of this and a range ofother questions—including, most centrally, the meaning of culture generally—is ofimmense value to literary scholars and historians in Russian and Jewish studies and inother fields.

HARRIET MURAV

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War.By Rebecca Manley.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii�282. $45.00.

This book is one of the most significant recent contributions to the history of the SovietUnion in the Second World War. A nuanced, complex, and confident interpretation ofa rich and diverse source base, it is much more than just a careful study of a policy,its (non-) implementation, and unintended consequences—the Soviet evacuation of

Book Reviews 233

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