Russian-Jewish Literature: Reinventing Tradition Under Communism

How was the Jewish tradition reinvented in Russian-language literature after a long period of assimilation, the Holocaust, and decades of Communism? The process of reinventing the tradition began in the counterculture of Jewish dissidents in the midst of the late Soviet underground of the 1960s-1970s. From then on, Russian Jewish literature turned to the traditions of Jewish writing, from biblical Judaism to the early Soviet (anti-) Zionist novels. Among other things, it ‘re-wrote’ the Haskalah satire, Hassidic Midrash and Yiddish travelogues. In her talk, Professor Klavdia Smola discusses the main topics of her new book "Reinventing Tradition: Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction" (Academic Studies Press, 2023). She illustrates how the process of the late Soviet Jews’ return to their roots in literature constituted an alternative to the socialist-realist canon (similar to numerous other alternatives in the late communist period—such as village prose or the re-ethnicization of the literature of the Soviet republics) and at the same time, in many ways, created its own mirror image.