Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 by Anna ShternshisReview by: Harriet MuravSlavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 574-575Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20060352 .

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574 Slavic Review

a year after its resolutions attacking literature and theater until musical life was a "tinder

box waiting for a match" (129) thanks to intra-professional rivalry and discord before it

intervened so dramatically in the musical field. He also persuasively argues that, although the clumsiness of the party's intervention was resented and it exacerbated the tensions be

tween "highbrow" and "populist" camps of composers, many not only welcomed its inter

vention, but benefited from it.

Creative Union is therefore a book that successfully challenges long-held preconcep tions about Soviet musical life in the period 1939-1953. It is not without faults; for example, the bibliography is not exhaustive, and more reference should have been made to the work

of Leonid Makismenkov, who has consulted similar archival sources. The Union of Soviet

Composers is also largely treated as an autonomous institution, detached from other areas

of musical life with which it was involved, such as publishing and education. Its role as a

provider of ideological guidance, particularly with regard to the application of socialist re

alism to music, is ignored, and a glossary providing brief biographical details of the often

obscure personalities to which Tomoff refers would have been appreciated. There is also an

unfortunate claim that "no book about the Soviet music system can proceed without noting

the controversy in [Dmitrii] Shostakovich studies that has been raging since 1979, when

Solomon Volkov published what he claimed were Shostakovich's memoirs" (5-6) followed

by a brief discussion of the controversy. This is not only erroneous, but somewhat bizarre,

since Tomoff conclusively proves it is possible to write an outstanding book about the Soviet

music system in which Shostakovich is not a central figure.

Neil Edmunds

University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom

Soviet and Kosher: Jezvish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. By Anna Shternshis.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xxiii, 252 pp. Notes. Bibliography. In

dex. Illustrations. Photographs. $65.00, hard bound. $24.95, paper.

Anna Shternshis's study belongs to a new and important trend in Russian-Jewish studies,

exemplified in Jeffrey Veidlinger's work on the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, David

Shneer's examination of Yiddish print culture, and Gennady Estraikh's book on Soviet Yid

dish writers, among others. These works not only revisit the lachrymose view of Russian

Jewish history in the twentieth century but also trace the contours of a specifically Jewish

culture within the framework of the Soviet Union. Soviet and Kosher, however, is distinct

from these studies because it focuses on popular culture, using the methods of oral history

to examine Russian-Jewish theater, songs, films, and other forms of popular cultural ex

pression in both Yiddish and Russian, primarily in the interwar period. Shternshis's work

advances the claim that, despite some parallels between the practices of secular western

Jews and Soviet Jews, Soviet Jewish culture was unique in its fusion of Soviet and Jewish forms of expression and, moreover, in the institutions, attitudes, and preferences that, as

this book shows, Soviet Jews claimed as their own. Abandoning religious observance did

not mean abandoning Jewishness. The work opens with an overview of secularization policies aimed at transforming

Jewish practice and traditional institutions, such as the synagogue and the educational sys tem. Here as in other places in the study, Shternshis traces the contradiction between the

performance of certain types of behavior and the attitudes behind them. In one instance,

a child denounced a parent at the parent's own instigation,

as a way of bettering the child's

chances at advancement. Young people attended events designed to compete with tradi

tional religious observances and then returned to their homes to celebrate the holiday with their parents in the traditional manner. Shternshis's research adds complexity to our

understanding of Soviet life generally, because she shows that behavior that might be

viewed as merely conformist instead served more than one agenda.

Yiddish theater and music played a

significant role in the emergence of the "Soviet

and kosher" Jewish identity. Shternshis argues convincingly that going to the Yiddish

theater was a way of constituting membership in the Soviet Jewish community. The theater

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Book Reviews bib

served a similar function as the synagogue in a previous era. The viewing audience derived

nostalgic pleasure from plays that were supposed to criticize traditional Jewish life in the

shtetl. Soviet Jewish audiences responded similarly to songs intended to advance the new

way of life: listeners had positive reactions to the allegedly negative characters and behav

iors depicted in the songs. One of the most significant findings of Shternshis's research is the gap between the

intention of government-sponsored materials and their reception among Soviet Jews. The

1934 film Seekers of Happiness is an excellent example of this phenomenon, as Shternshis

shows. Designed to promote Jewish resettlement and agricultural labor in Birobidzhan, the film uses the Yiddish actor Veniamin Zuskin to portray the negative character Pinia,

who selfishly digs for gold while his fellow Jews labor in the fields of the collective farm.

Most respondents to Shternshis's inquiries did not see Pinia in negative or antisemitic

terms, but instead drew a connection between him and the beloved characters of Sholom

Aleichem's fiction. Alia Zuskina-Perel'man reports a similar positive reception of Zuskin's

character in her memoir of her father. Shternshis uses the episode to make the broader

point that the film became a Jewish film in the eyes of its Jewish viewers, not because they

accepted the idea of Jewish resettlement in the Far East, but because of Zuskin's acting. Shternshis's work makes an

important contribution to Russian-Jewish studies in par ticular and to Soviet studies generally. It is packed with information about Jewish popular culture, and its numerous interviews reveal a layer of complexity in Soviet Jewish life not

available from other sources. Soviet and Kosher is a welcome addition to the steadily in

creasing number of materials available for classroom use in both the undergraduate and

the graduate setting.

Harriet Murav

University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign

L' uvre de Friedrich Gorenstein: Violence du regard, regards sur la violence. By Korine

Amacher. Slavica Helvetica, no. 72. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. xvi, 585 pp. Notes.

Bibliography. Chronology. $82.95, paper.

This is the first book-length study of Fridrikh Gorenshtein's works, which stand apart styl

istically from Russian prose published in the last fifty years. Korine Amacher's thesis is that

Jewish-Russian relations permeate Gorenshtein's novels, stories, and plays and serve as the

exploratory grounds for the writer's main theme, confronting evil in the world. She ad

mirably maintains this focus in spite of the breadth of the study, whose thirteen chapters

explore kinds of Judeophobia (state and popular) in Russian history and literature and in

Germany, violence in Russian culture, political visions for Russia, female characters in

Gorenshtein's works, and other topics. Gorenshtein the writer and thinker emerges as a

classical liberal (my term), whose focus on the individual leads to the dictum that the

greatest evil is to harm another person. Amacher explains Gorenshtein's opposition to col

lectivist thinking of all stripes based on this ideal.

The author most specifically positions this discussion within the context of Russian lit

erature in chapters 6 and 7 of part 1. Chapter 6 compares the treatment of Jewish charac ters in Vasilii Grossman's works with their treatment in Gorenshtein's and examines both

writers' attitudes toward precedents in Fedor Dostoevskii and Anton Chekhov, whom

Gorenshtein greatly admired. The next chapter takes up Gorenshtein's polemic with Dos

toevskii over Russianness and Jewishness, primarily in the novels Mesto (1991) and Psalom

(1986) and the play Spory oDostoevskom (1988). She also notes similarities between the two

in characterization and moral and spiritual concerns. Needless to say, this is a

challenging task for a

twenty-five-page chapter. One wonders whether additional references to west ern studies?Russian criticism is fairly frequently cited?would not bolster Amacher's ar

guments. Monographs by Alice Nakhimovsky (Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 1992) and Efraim Sicher (Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution, 1995) come to

mind (there are no French- or German-language equivalents in the bibliography), both

published well before Amacher's 2002 dissertation, which is the basis for this book.

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