Read complete books and articles on: Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia

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12 of the Best Books and Articles on: Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, Vol.1 » Read Now
by S. M. Dubnow, I. Friedlaender. 416 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...history of the Jews of Russia and Poland...Alexander I., in 1825. The...lands of Eastern Europe, was a terra...settlement of Jews in the east of Europe antedated...west...
2.

History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times Until the Present Day, Vol.3 » Read Now
by S. M. Dubnow, I. Friedlaender. 404 pgs.
3.

The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe » Read Now
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. 502 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

"I find myself unable to praise it too highly. It is quite as if a whole culture had been rescued from the dust, and all of its inner qualities, its half-forgotten voices and passions, have been brought to hidden life.... All persons who care about the possibilities of human exaltation and suffering...
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"I find myself unable to praise it too highly. It is quite as if a whole culture had been rescued from the dust, and all of its inner qualities, its half-forgotten voices and passions, have been brought to hidden life.... All persons who care about the possibilities of human exaltation and suffering will find this an endlessly absorbing and endlessly tragic book". -- Irving Howe
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4.

Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe » Read Now
by Mark Zborowski, Elizabeth Herzog. 456 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...of Eastern European Jews, who lived in the small...from the eastern borders of...Tzarist Russia embracing...Jews, Polish Jews, to parallel...of Czech, Russian and Polish...
5.

Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity » Read Now
by Gershon David Hundert. 286 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

""Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century provides a wide-ranging synthesis of the current scholarship on Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. Gershon David Hundert's control of the secondary literature is magnificent: he incorporates the findings of over a century of research up to and including the...
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""Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century provides a wide-ranging synthesis of the current scholarship on Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. Gershon David Hundert's control of the secondary literature is magnificent: he incorporates the findings of over a century of research up to and including the most recent works in every relevant language. Only a handful of scholars in the world today could approach this level of mastery."--Benjamin Nathans, author of "Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
"Gershon David Hundert's "Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century is likely to be viewed as the standard scholarly survey of the topic of 'classic' Polish Jewry for years to come."--Moshe Rosman, author of "Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov
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6.

Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records, 1944-1947 » Read Now
by Lucjan Dobroszycki. 164 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...journey to liberated Europe. His mission was to seek...lost and utterly alone in the world. He came to...three million Polish Jews, destroying an entire...Bialystok was...
7.

The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 » Read Now
by Don Levin, Naftali Greenwood. 346 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

The book's title, The Lesser of Two Evils, describes the dilemma and ultimate fate of the two million Eastern European Jews following the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August, 1939, which divided the regions of eastern Poland, the Baltics, and, eastern Romania between Nazi Germany and the...
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The book's title, The Lesser of Two Evils, describes the dilemma and ultimate fate of the two million Eastern European Jews following the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August, 1939, which divided the regions of eastern Poland, the Baltics, and, eastern Romania between Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. Because of the imminent geographical and political changes, the Jews in these areas had to calculate who was the "lesser of two evils" - the Soviets or the Nazis. The book, originally published in Hebrew, is the culmination of 30 years of research by noted historian Dov Levin. It is the only study that deals comprehensively with the economic, social, religious, cultural, and political consequences of this overlooked episode in modern history. In order to obtain an authentic account, the author interviewed hundreds of witnesses and consulted thousands of original documents in 13 languages. The book also portrays the everyday life of the Jewish communities at that time. The events that occurred during this significant period in Jewish history led directly to the destruction of the Jewish populations of these regions in the Holocaust.
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8.

The Haskalah Movement in Russia » Read Now
by Jacob S. Raisin. 358 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...the Slavonic Jews. For a while...pass over the eastern portion of Europe without beneficent results. In Lithuania...the rest of Europe. Every reformatory...was nipped in...
9.

Trotsky and the Jews » Read Now
by Joseph Nedava. 299 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library
10.

Soviet Jewry in the 1980s: The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement » Read Now
by Robert O. Freedman. 268 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...the anti-Semitic Union of the Russian People, an organization that existed in czarist times and which promoted...priorities is the ingathering of Jews from all over the...
11.

Vilna » Read Now
by Israel Cohen. 531 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library
12.

Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire » Read Now
by Gabriella Safran. 265 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

In the Russian Empire of the 1870s and 1880s, while intellectuals and politicians furiously debated the "Jewish Question", more and more acculturating Jews, who dressed, spoke, and behaved like non-Jews, appeared in real life and in literature. This book examines stories about Jewish assimilation by...
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In the Russian Empire of the 1870s and 1880s, while intellectuals and politicians furiously debated the "Jewish Question", more and more acculturating Jews, who dressed, spoke, and behaved like non-Jews, appeared in real life and in literature. This book examines stories about Jewish assimilation by four authors: Grigory Bogrov, a Russian Jew; Eliza Orzeszkowa, a Polish Catholic; and Nikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov, both Eastern Orthodox Russians. Safran introduces the English-language reader to works that were much discussed in their own time, and she situates Jewish and non-Jewish writers together in the context they shared.
For nineteenth-century writers and readers, successful fictional characters were "types", literary creations that both mirrored and influenced the trajectories of real lives. Stories about Jewish assimilators and converts often juxtaposed two contrasting types: the sincere reformer or true convert who has experienced a complete transformation, and the secret recidivist or false convert whose real loyalties will never change. As Safran shows, writers borrowed these types from many sources, including the novel of education produced by the Jewish enlightenment movement (the Haskalah), the political rhetoric of "Positivist" Polish nationalism, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Slavic folk beliefs.
Rewriting the Jew casts new light on the concept of type itself and on the question of whether literature can transfigure readers. The classic story of Jewish assimilation describes readers who redesign themselves after the model of fictional characters in secular texts. The writers studied here, though, examine attempts at Jewish self-transformation while wondering about thereformability of personality. In looking at their works, Safran relates the modern Eastern European Jewish experience to a fundamental question of aesthetics: Can art change us?
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