We are happy to feature an excerpt from Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024), translated by Marat Grinberg, professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College and Goldis’s grandson. Grinberg’s previous book was the highly informative The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis University Press, 2022). The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf makes the original argument that, in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, Jews circumvented the proscriptions on public expression of Jewish identity “through their ‘reading practices'”: they built up home libraries of books on Jewish subjects, which, given “the heavy censorship of Jewish content,” they often had to read “between the lines” (the citations are from my review). Olga interviewed Marat about his book, and you can listen to their rich conversation here, which includes reading suggestions of the various writers the book discusses.
Continue reading “Seven Forty: Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marat Grinberg”Tag: Marat Grinberg
Responding to Marat Grinberg’s The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf
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.
Continue reading “Responding to Marat Grinberg’s The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf”

