Hebrew literature, from the second half of the nineteenth century to well into the twentieth, was unmistakably influenced in style and substance by Russian prose and poetry. These influences have been readily acknowledged but have been studied only in an episodic and fragmented way. Rina Lapidus systematically identifies those Hebrew authors and poets upon whom Russian influence is most striking and upon whom it seems to have exerted the greatest power. After examining the textual parallels in the works of both the influencing and the influenced authors, she presents intertextual sources for the passages discussed, focusing on various idioms or linguistic and literary patterns commonly found in Russian literature. Nine case studies illustrate this influence. For each case, Lapidus answers three questions: How, precisely, is the literary influence expressed? With what belletristic, intellectual, ideological, or philosophical category may it be connected? and What were its primary sources, even before the influencing author absorbed them from authentic Russian culture? Lapidus explores the influence of Russian language, literature, and culture upon Y. H. Brenner in his novel Around the Point; the influence of the Russian version of decadence as found in Turgenev's novels Rudin and Fathers and Sons on Yeshaya Bershadsky's novel Aimless; the poetics of humor and satire in the fiction of Gogol and Mendele Mocher Sefarim; the influence of classic Russian autobiographical novels--primarily the Tolstoy trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth-on Y. D. Berkowitz's Chapters of Childhood; the impact of the poetry of Afanasii Fet on Hayyim Lensky; Russian influences on two novels by Hayyim Hazaz; and the poetic influence of Mikhail Lermontov on the works of the young Saul Tchernichowsky. A theoretical introductory chapter discusses the contributions of Harold Bloom, Julia Kristeva, and others to the contemporary study of influence.

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) was a successful Soviet author and journalist, but he is more often recognized in the West as Russian literature's leading dissident. How do we account for this paradox? In the first collection of essays to explore the Russian author's life and works in English, leading experts present recent multidisciplinary research on Grossman's experiences, his place in the history of Russian literature, key themes in his writing, and the wider implications of his life and work in the realms of philosophy and politics. Born into a Jewish family in Berdychiv, Grossman was initially a supporter of the ideals of the Russian Revolution and the new Soviet state. During the Second World War, he worked as a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper and was the first journalist to write about the Nazi extermination camps. As a witness to the daily violence of the Soviet regime, Grossman became more and more aware of the nature and forms of totalitarian coercion, which gradually alienated him from the Soviet regime and earned him a reputation for dissidence. A survey of the remarkable accomplishments and legacy left by this controversial and contradictory figure, Vasily Grossman reveals a writer's power to express freedom even under totalitarianism.

Around the Point is a unique collection that brings to readers the works of almost thirty scholars dealing with Jewish literature in various Jewish and non-Jewish languages, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Polish, and Russian. Although this volume does not cover all the languages of Jewish letters, it is a significant endeavor in establishing the realm of multilingual international study of Jewish literature and culture. Among the questions under discussion, are the problems of the definition of Jewish identity and literature, literary history, language choice and diglossy, lingual and cultural influences, intertextuality, Holocaust literature, Kabbala and Hassidism, Jewish poetics, theatre and art, and the problems of the acceptance of literature.

For most of the last four centuries, the broad expanse of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas, known since the Enlightenment as "Eastern Europe," has been home to the world's largest Jewish population. The Jews of Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Galicia, Romania, and Ukraine were prodigious generators of modern Jewish culture. Their volatile blend of religious traditionalism and precocious quests for collective self-emancipation lies at the heart of Culture Front. This volume brings together contributions by both historians and literary scholars to take readers on a journey across the cultural history of East European Jewry from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. The articles collected here explore how Jews and their Slavic neighbors produced and consumed imaginative representations of Jewish life in chronicles, plays, novels, poetry, memoirs, museums, and more. The book puts culture at the forefront of analysis, treating verbal artistry itself as a kind of frontier through which Jews and Slavs imagined, experienced, and negotiated with themselves and each other. The four sections investigate the distinctive themes of that frontier: violence and civility; popular culture; politics and aesthetics; and memory. The result is a fresh exploration of ideas and movements that helped change the landscape of modern Jewish history.

Piyyut is the art of Hebrew or Aramaic poetry composed either in place of or as adornments to Jewish statutory prayers. Laura S. Lieber uses the piyyutim of a single poet, Yannai (ca. sixth century C.E.), to introduce readers to this important but largely unfamiliar body of writings. Yannai, the first Hebrew poet to sign his name to his works (by means of an acrostic), influenced Hebrew sacred poetry for centuries beyond his lifespan. He was the first to consistently use true end rhyme, and he was among the first to have written for the weekly service and festivals rather than just particular holidays. As literary works, his poems are as dazzling as they are complex, rich with sound and play, allusion and linguistic beauty. Lieber presents the Hebrew texts of Yannai's 31 extant piyyutim which embellish the Book of Genesis. She translates, annotates, and analyzes these complex poems, which display the poet's transformative treatments of some of the most familiar biblical narratives. She contextualizes these poems and teaches readers how to read and appreciate piyyut by studying Yannai's poetic language and the formal structures of the poems; his exegetical, cultural, and societal importance; and intriguing motifs in Yannai's worldview such as mysticism, holiness, Jewish-Christian relations, and the role of women. Lieber's groundbreaking study is an invitation to those with interests in areas such as liturgical studies, rabbinic literature and targum studies, the early synagogue and its art, Byzantine Christian culture and society, and the history of biblical interpretation to engage with these beautiful and neglected texts and include them in larger intellectual conversations.

Solomon Bennett Freehof (1892-1990) was one of America's most distinguished, influential, and beloved rabbis. Ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1915, he was of the generation of rabbis from east European immigrant backgrounds who moved Reform Judaism away from its classical form toward a renewed appreciation of traditional practices. Freehof himself was less interested in restoring discarded rituals than in demonstrating how the Reform approach to Jewish religious practice was rooted in the Jewish legal tradition (halakhah). Opposed to any attempt to create a code of Reform practice, he nevertheless called for Reform Judaism to turn to the halakhah, not in order to adhere to codified law, but to be guided in ritual and in all areas of life by its values and its ethical insights. For Reform Jews, Jewish law was to offer "guidance, not governance," and this guidance was to be provided through the writing of responsa, individual rulings based on legal precedent, written by an organized rabbinic authority in response to questions about real-life situations. After World War II, the earlier consensus about what constituted proper observance in a Reform context vanished as the children of east European immigrants flocked to new Reform synagogues in new suburbs, bringing with them a more traditional sensibility. Even before Freehof was named chairman of the Central Conference of American Rabbis Responsa Committee in 1956, his colleagues began turning to him for guidance, especially in the situations Freehof recognized as inevitably arising from living in an open society where the boundaries between what was Jewish and what was not were ambiguous or blurred. Over nearly five decades, he answered several thousand inquiries regarding Jewish practice, the plurality of which concerned the tensions Jews experienced in navigating this open society-questions concerning mixed marriage, Jewish status, non-Jewish participation in the synagogue, conversion, and so on-and published several hundred of these in eight volumes of Reform responsa. In her pioneering study, Friedman analyzes Freehof's responsa on a select number of crucial issues that illustrate the evolution of American Reform Judaism. She also discusses the deeper issues with which the movement struggled, and continues to struggle, in its attempt to meet the ever-changing challenges of the present while preserving both individual autonomy and faithfulness to the Jewish tradition.

In 1953, Freud biographer Ernest Jones revealed that the famous hysteric Anna O. was really Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), the prolific author, German-Jewish feminist, pioneering social worker, and activist. Elizabeth Loentz directs attention away from the young woman who arguably invented the talking cure and back to Pappenheim and her post-Anna O. achievements. Her writings, especially, reveal her to be one of the most versatile, productive, influential, and controversial Jewish thinkers and leaders of her time. Pappenheim's oeuvre includes stories, plays, poems, prayers, travel literature, letters, essays, speeches, and aphorisms. She translated Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women as well as the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelnand other Old Yiddish texts into German. She was discussed as both writer and newsmaker in German-Jewish newspapers of every religious and political affiliation and in German feminist publications. As founder and leader of the League of Jewish Women in Germany and the international League of Jewish Women, she was at the forefront of the campaign to combat human trafficking and forced prostitution. A pioneer of modern Jewish social work, she founded a home for at-risk girls and unwed mothers and advocated on behalf of Jewish women, children, refugees, and immigrants. Her accomplishments are all the more remarkable because she attained them after struggling to recover from the debilitating mental illness chronicled in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria(1895). Loentz examines how Pappenheim engaged, in words and deeds, with the key political, social, and cultural issues concerning German Jewry in the early decades of the twentieth century: the status of the Yiddish language, Zionism, the conversion epidemic, responses to the plight of Eastern European Jews, and Jewish spirituality. Pappenheim's unique approach to each of these issues balanced allegiances to feminism, the Jewish religion, and German culture. Loentz also explores how biographers and artists have rediscovered Pappenheim, rewritten her life story, and renegotiated her identity.