From the second half of the 1960s on, a Jewish revival within the Soviet Union stimulated a multi-faceted and complex literary production in Russian-speaking Jewish literature. Methodologically anchored in concepts of post-memory and (intertextual) practices of reinvention, Klavdia Smola presents an overview of Russian Jewish prose from a literary-historical and transnational perspective. Her corpus covers the unofficial, nonconformist Soviet Jewish literary underground, Israel-, German, or America-based e-/im-migration texts, as well as prose from the post-Soviet and contemporary period.

The volume aims to reconstruct the productive interplay between Jewish rediscovery, self-exploration, and the aesthetic and performative effect when an almost lost tradition is transposed into contemporary literature. Jewish modes of exegesis, hermeneutics, and intertextuality are crucial for this endeavor. This is all the more relevant as the condition of Soviet Jewry was characterized by (ideological) assimilation, cultural asymmetry, and even self-negation. At the same time, powerful impulses of self-discovery and literary strategies undermining official discourse pushed the project of a Jewish reinvention to become a creative tool against cultural amnesia (265).

In order to introduce the issue of literary reinvention in a posthumous condition, in Chapter 1 Smola traces Jewish literary criticism and literary practices of commenting such as midrash (19). On the backdrop of a primarily binary semiotics of Russian and Soviet culture, an alternative Jewish culture emerges, synthetic and eclectic (39). Chapter 2 briefly summarizes research on Russian Jewish (émigré) literature, its evolution, and today's state of the art in the fields of comparative and Slavic literary studies. For her part, Smola chooses a close reading approach that considers broader contextual (inter)cultural entanglements of a literary text (73).

Chapter 3 forms the lion's share of the study, divided into nine subchapters. Aware of the difficulties in classifying such diverse literary phenomena of the (post-)Soviet and contemporary Jewish revival, Smola discusses Russian-language Jewish texts as hybrid, bicultural transgressions of a national literary canon, as hyphenated literature (79). On the examples of David Shraer-Petrov, Jakov Cigel΄man, Efraim Sevela, Grigori Kanovich, Oleg Yurev, Aleksandr Melikhov and others, the analysis covers temporal, spatial, and conceptual issues such as mimicry or counterculture. Smola examines modes of the unofficial and nonconformist in Jewish prose of the former Soviet Union as well as tropes of Exodus (see the otkaznik Shraer Petrov) or (dys-)utopian elements in Russian-language Aliya-literature (Sevela, Cigel΄man). Post-perestroika and contemporary Jewish literature explore (post-)memorial writing strategies of palimpsest, fragmentation, residue, and mnemonic topography (Kanovich). As a form of creative empowerment, authors like Michail Judson, Melichov, or Yurev choose the postmodern, postcolonial way of “writing back.”

An all-embracing feature of this literature is the “fusion of the historical documentary with the mystical and legendary” (76). Its poetics is characterized by stylization and parody, narrative travesty, and creative simulations of the past. Yiddish plays a special role with its rich linguistic, literary, and cultural implications (76). To show this, Chapter 3.7 focuses on the reinvention of a specific Yiddish-based storytelling, typical for East European Jewry (265–94).

On the example of Efrem Sevela's Legendy invalidnoj ulicy (Legends of Invalid Street, 1971), Smola shows how orality, dialogue, and mimed Yiddish create a particular kind of Jewish skaz. In the period of post-vernacularity (Jeffrey Shandler), Sevela fuses shtetl experience with socialism and transfers the depicted reality into the realm of mythologization. Sevela's narration continues the tragi-comical tradition of Yiddish storytelling as shaped by Sholem Aleichem and Mendele. With Cigel΄man, Chassidic storytelling, notably the outstanding tales by Nachman Braslavski, reappears in the literary production (410). Yet, all these devices that draw on Jewish and Yiddish cultural history are displayed on the backdrop of real catastrophes (Holocaust, Soviet totalitarianism).

Russian-language Jewish literature after the downfall of the USSR is characterized by the synthesis of the mnemonic and counter-cultural as shaped during the Jewish revival in the 1960s (295) and a high degree of cultural self-reflection within all this literary (counter-) memory work (421). Stressing either remembering and nostalgia (Kanovich) or ludic elements and postmodern hybridization (Yurev), all the examined texts make ample use of a (formerly tabuized) Jewish code, be it literature sui generis or the sophisticated extension of the Jewish text as commentary (Cigel΄man). The study shows that the chosen material at times exceeds the dichotomist approach to Russian-speaking Jewish literature as a “bicultural phenomenon” (79), but Klavdia Smola's panorama of Russian-speaking Jewish literature is a valuable contribution to the fascinating topic of the Jewish cultural revival in its different historical stages, in its oscillations between de-Judaization and re-Judaization from its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century up to today.