Marat Grinberg’s academic volume The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis UP, 2022) is an important book for the authors of this blog for personal and professional reasons as it reflects on a large body of work that we grew up with and have returned to in professional contexts. In its contributions toward re-defining Soviet Jewish identity in positive terms–as thick and multidirectional–it allows us to reshape our personal narratives and forge a path toward future research and creative projects.
Today we’re highlighting our responses to this book and encourage our readers to continue this conversation.
Yelena Furman reviewed The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf for the Los Angeles Review of Books, writing that “Grinberg demonstrates how, despite the heavy censorship of Jewish content and the difficulty of procuring books by Jewish writers, Soviet Jews consciously built up Soviet Jewish bookshelves, maintaining their Jewish identity through their ‘reading practices’ that, in an atmosphere of repression, often hinged on reading between the lines. In a novel approach to identity, Grinberg proposes ‘the Soviet Jewish bookshelf as the basis of Soviet Jews’ improbably defiant and necessarily makeshift Jewish heritage and knowledge.’”
Thanks to the invitation by the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Olga Zilberbourg held a conversation with Marat about ideas covered in the book, from the particularly Jewish approach to reading between the lines, to the role of young adult literature on this bookshelf, to the role of translated literature on this bookshelf, and more. The recorded video from this conversation is below.
Punctured Lines 