This book is interesting because it takes issue with an entire body of scholarship that looked positively on the maskilim (Hebrew for enlighteners, intellectuals, secular Jews) in the Russian Empire. It makes sense that many people would emphasize the positive in the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) and their practitioners, the maskilim. For one thing, they played an essential role in the revival of Hebrew. Additionally, they were seen as incomparably brave to battle with the dominant Jewish elite.

Svetlana Natkovich, Professor at Haifa University in Jewish Literature, will not have it. She reevaluates their motives. Theirs is not the virtuous fight with Orthodox Jewry, but a plan to attain money, power, and sex. The maskilim appear similar to meshumodim (Heb. traitors of the Jewish people). For this paradigm shift to convince, we are going to need to see examples of immoral behavior, evidence of greed, and displays of hostility to Jewish interests. Svetlana Natkovich gives us precisely what we need in the figure of Avraham Uri Kovner.

Much of the book features Kovner. For example, he wrote an “erotic memoir,” Moi Pobedy, Uvlecheniia i Bezobraziia (1898–1906), in which Natkovich tell us, he “exemplifies both imitative and innovative experimentation with noncanonical literary registers as a vehicle for portraying the modern Jewish experience” (131). Natkovich gets graphic in conveying what appears to be a sadistic encounter. “A strange thing when I first had intercourse, with a young woman who was completely innocent in additional to everything else, I was far removed from the sense of delight that I had imagined in throughout my life. Was it because the act itself involved an obstacle? Was this because the act inflicted pain upon another being?” (133)

Kovner’s honest rendition (bragging) of this piggish encounter is troubling, but ordinary for this generation who had broken with the community’s rules of conduct and set off to make their own rules. Most maskilim do not use sex as a means of self-realization, as the example of Moshe Leib Lilienblum shows. Married off at fourteen, he divorced his wife but restrained himself from female attentions. However, as a theme sexuality is important because it illuminates conceptions of society, self, behavior, and masculinity. Natkovich argues that the absence of norms are the issue; she shows how these men need to imagine a world in which they would belong and feel comfortable because no such world exists for them.

Abraham Kovner continues his path as the bad Jew, converting to Christianity, and then stealing as a sum of money an employee of a St. Petersburg bank, for which he is sent to prison. In a dialogue with Vasilii Rozanov, who was a clever (antisemitic) writer interested in Jewish sexuality, Kovner explains himself through the script of Fedor Dostoevskii’s hero, Raskolnikov—I would use the money for good—but weaves in the discourse of sex. Natkovich sees this as Kovner’s attempt to entice Rozanov. In any case, this bizarre “friendship” ultimately portrays the Jew as criminal and the Russian as his salacious mentor.

We also encounter good Jews, such as the Yiddish writer Mendele Mokher Sforim, the publisher, Aleksandr Tsederbaum, and the Russian-Jewish writer, Lev Levanda. One can add Yehuda Leib Gordon as well. They represent the friction of an acculturated Jew who is “strange” and complicated to himself and others.

In his writings, Semyon An-sky described this period in Jewish history as a revolution. Few have looked at how the revolution affected the first and second generations of Jewish intellectuals who left their homes and set out to invent a different world. They expected generosity from the non-Jews and the government. They did not get it or at least not as they expected. So, they improvised.

My pet peeve is Natkovich’s use of professional jargon. Just one example: “Unlike the author of My Secret Life, who erroneously equates his narration of sex with an act of opposition to power, Kovner consciously employed this discourse to subject himself to power, attempting to detect the evasive frequency through which he could attune his experiences to the tropes of societal hegemony, rendering them accessible to its eyes and ears” (132). The book contains Foucaultian language that seems dated and linguistically infelicitous.

One thing is clear. This book has something to say about Jews in Russia’s nineteenth century. It brings a perspective that enlivens the field after the Olga Litvak’s sensational Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (2012).