Mikhail Krutikov's study of Meir Weiner is a meticulously researched, original, and important contribution to the fields of Yiddish, Germanic, Russian, and Jewish Studies. Born in 1893 in Cracow, Meir Wiener was an intellectual, scholar, literary critic, creative artist, and memoirist, whose life path took him to Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Kiev, and Moscow. After the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted in the Writers' Battalion and was killed in 1941. Krutikov analyzes the major themes of Wiener's creative and scholarly writing and contextualizes his readings in detailed discussions of Central Europe and Russia in the interwar period.

Wiener wrote articles in German about German-Jewish writers, including Else Lasker-Schüler, and a volume of collected poetry about three historical messianic figures, which he dedicated to Martin Buber. He researched messianism, Kabbalah, and Jewish liturgy and published his own German translation of Kabbalistic poetry. Later, in his Soviet period, Wiener wrote, but did not publish, a lengthy novel in Yiddish that described the interwar years in Europe. Wiener's decision to leave Western Europe and settle in the Soviet Union—which meant switching languages from German to Yiddish—was, as Krutikov argues, motivated both by practical concerns and by Wiener's belief in the Soviet project, especially in relation to national minorities. Soviet multiculturalism allowed for the development of national cultures in a universalistic framework that at least initially avoided some of the pitfalls of nationalism.

In his assessment of Wiener's attraction to the Soviet Union, Krutikov does not shy away from the violence that was part and parcel of the Soviet multicultural experiment. He wisely avoids tendentious discussions that emphasize the delusional nature of the choice that Wiener and many others like him made in the same era. Wiener's aspirations for art, literature, culture, and for the Jewish people, as Krutikov shows, were apparently satisfied by what Wiener knew of Soviet conditions in the 1920s.

While in Moscow, Wiener planned and wrote a major portion of his history of Yiddish literature from the reform period to the Soviet era. Krutikov argues that it is “the most detailed and theoretically coherent study of the subject to this day” (205). Unlike Max Weinreich and other Yiddish scholars, Wiener emphasized the discontinuities and ruptures of Yiddish literary history. By demonstrating the continuity of Weiner's Soviet and pre-Soviet work in both German and Yiddish and by showing that Wiener's oeuvre shares a common cultural and linguistic reservoir with other major Jewish thinkers of the West, Krutikov's study provides us with scholarship that is significant not only for its archival research and analytic keenness, but also for the larger argument that it makes about Jewish culture in the Soviet framework.

Krutikov shows that Wiener's early interests in Jewish prayer, legend, mysticism, and the Baroque (interests he shared with such important German-Jewish cultural critics as Walter Benjamin) persisted during his years in the Soviet Union and influenced the work that he produced there. For example, Krutikov makes the argument that traces of Lurianic Kabbalah can be seen in Wiener's theory of the transformations that Yiddish literature underwent on its path to Socialism. To give another example, he finds that Wiener's portrait of his grandfather in his Soviet-era autobiography resembles the ideal folk type that Wiener had already written about earlier in his studies of I. L. Peretz and other Yiddish authors. The grandfather appears as a would-be Socialist not because Wiener was toeing the party line, but because he was, as Krutikov says, “sincerely committed to a synthesis of Marxist utopianism and Jewish ethics” (316).

The chapter on Wiener's life-writing is an outstanding demonstration of Krutikov's ability to examine the specificity of Wiener's writing in the broad cultural and historical contexts of the Soviet Union and the history of Yiddish literature. Krutikov makes the fascinating claim that Wiener's autobiography, far from conforming to Soviet ideological expectations, explored a past that could not serve Soviet purposes, demonstrating Wiener's interest in the unusable past, another point of comparison, I would add, between Wiener and Benjamin. Krutikov's argument that Wiener deserves to be as widely known as Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem is completely convincing. This is a pathbreaking work that should provide a point of departure for other scholars pursuing comparative studies of Jewish thought and criticism.