In the introduction to this interesting, if uneven, volume of essays, the editors, both leading scholars of Yiddish, declare their aim: “To examine various forms of cultural contacts and interactions between spaces, identities, cultures, and languages across geographical borders and political boundaries” (2). Citing as inspiration Sholem Asch's novel trilogy on Warsaw, Moscow, and St. Petersburg Farn mabl (Before the Deluge, translated as Three Cities, 1927–32), they emphasize the new creative activities and adaptive strategies that arose among urbanizing Yiddish writers and artists in the early twentieth century (2).

The essays collected here map those new cultural activities from various angles. Three essays focus on sociocultural issues: literacy rates (Jeffrey Veidlinger); relations between “Litvaks” and Polish Jews (Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov); readership, literary taste, and the journal Literarishe bleter (Sima Beeri). Four essays—by Harriet Murav, Gennady Estraikh, Sabine Koller, and Mikhail Krutikov—focus on specific writers. Four more deal with performance and exhibitions: singer Mikhail Epelbaum (Alexander Frenkel), actress Clara Young (Galina Eliasberg), Yiddish music in Petrogard-Leningrad-St. Petersburg (Alexander Ivanov), and Jewish ethnography and religion in “anti-religious” museums (Alla Sokolova).

The contributions, as often with such volumes, vary in quality and methodology. Some essays explicitly explore connections between cities, cultural forms and contacts, and creative adaptation, others do not. Some contributions offer sharp textual or historical analyses, others primarily description or state-of-research reports.

With rich comparative demographic analysis, Veidlinger shows literacy rates to be lower among Yiddish speakers in Warsaw, Moscow, and St. Petersburg than often thought. Beeri cites two 1920s surveys conducted by the high-brow Literarishe bleter, showing that earlier readers wanted world literature translated into Yiddish, later wanting more literature by Yiddish writers—suggesting access to world literature in other languages, especially Polish (42). Ivanov reports on music holdings in the Petersburg city archive while commenting incisively on the shifting course of Klezmer music in the Soviet Union and post-1991. In the 1950s–70s, Soviet authorities’ attempts in Leningrad “to limit the repertoire of restaurant orchestras and bands” failed to eliminate undesirable Yiddish music. Their prohibition on tune requests by payment of tips to waiters and musicians only drove the music “from the sphere of official culture to informal underground subcultures” (151–52).

Turning to literature, Estraikh describes Sholem Asch's visit, with “official invitation,” to Moscow in 1928. A “tea party” held for him at the Yiddish theater turned into a “ritual act of hospitality-cum-opprobrium” to “honor the unwanted guest.” Revealing a mix of mutual admiration, misperception, and apparent dislike—seemingly motivated by ideological differences and “the inferiority complex … [of] Soviet Yiddish writers and critics” (63)—it culminated in scandal. Asch, viewed as a nationalist, lost his temper after receiving sharp criticism from Moshe Litvakov, editor of the Soviet Yiddish daily Der emes (Truth) (63–64). Mutual ambivalence between Asch and Soviet writers, though varying as cultural politics evolved, continued into the 1960s.

Two essays give two different readings of avant garde writer Der Nister's infrequently discussed reportage Hoyptshtet (1929). For Sabine Koller, the language of subversion directed at the Soviet order governs the text's Leningrad section. Der Nister gives “a vivid picture of … three growing socialist cities [Leningrad, Moscow, and Kharkiv],” as he seeks to reshape his literary identity from “symbolist” to “socialist” (74–75). Yet, by introducing elements of the “St. Petersburg ‘text’ concept”— of the fantastic, of aesthetics associated with Pushkin, Gogol΄, and Dostoevskii—he undermines the documentary style (ocherk, or fartseykhenung in Yiddish) now expected of him (75). A “product of the schizophrenic state of existence under Stalin's regime,” Hoyptshtet “undermines the socialist ocherk by perceiving and depicting the world that goes beyond ordinary logic and destabilizes the new order” (81, 84).

Alternatively, Krutikov, focusing on “space and architecture,” presents Hoyptshtet as “an experiment in ‘realistic’ depiction of the new Soviet urban reality, an attempt to conquer new stylistic and thematic territories and to catch the dynamic characters of three capital cities” (90). Affirming the Soviet present and communist future, while criticizing the imperial past, it reflects on the artist's historical role. Not undermining socialist realism, Hoyptshtet “expand[s] … [its] norms by incorporating elements of fantasy and symbolism into the realist master narrative” as it describes “architectural ensembles” (90, 101). Kharkov and its new Gosprom building are freed from the weight of the past but “barely attached to the ground” (101); Leningrad's Tauride Palace, “having already fulfilled … [its] historical future,” is reduced to a museum (102). Moscow's “Red Square,” as communist synthesis, exemplifies an architectural space with “both a past and a future.” Yet, its purpose remains concealed and will be revealed only in “the envisioned communist future,” and only the perceptive writer can see “prefigured in certain architectural forms,” or built “facts,” the “symbols” that point to a future yet to arrive (102).

In “Moscow Threefold: Olgin, Bergelson, Benjamin,” Murav elegantly analyzes depictions of Moscow in the mid-1920s by three writers. Emphasizing Moscow as a Jewish “space of contiguity,” Murav addresses no less the relating of Moscow to time. Moshe Olgin, editor of the New York-based communist daily Frayhayt, described Moscow on May 1, 1924 as “a moment out of time,” a utopian “space in which everything has already happened,” yet with a “black spot” (Lenin's death) at its “core” (47, 53). In the essay “Moskve,” David Bergelson also situates it as “city of the future” “beyond time”—“a view consistent with the … socialist realism” then emerging—but his Muscovites, like his shtetl characters elsewhere, lead lives “dog[ged]” by “anticipation, delay, and regret” (51). Past remnants linger in Moscow, and Bergelson shows “a strange tension between futurity and the past,” raising the question: “will [Muscovites] ever arrive”? (51). Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary and essay “Moscow” stress “the extraordinary, contradictory timescape of Moscow in the mid-1920s,” one devoid of “rationality, order, or predictability,” as symbolized by missed encounters with the longed-for Asja Lacis and the inability “to pin down a specific time in any sort of transaction” (51–52). Yet, Benjamin transforms such “[t]ime catastrophes” into a meaningful “superabundance” of time that “that has the potential to fulfil the expectation and waiting that began long before” (52), an image akin to Benjamin's notion of Messianic time in his essay “On the Concept of History.” If Olgin's Moscow “has achieved … its future,” the works of Benjamin and Bergelson show more ambivalence, and Murav is especially vivid on Bergelson's vision of destruction likely to precede any possible redemption, which may end up permanently deferred.

Minor complaints: a list of contributors would have been helpful; editing could have been better, especially of some non-native speakers’ texts, where the writing distracts from otherwise valuable points. In addition, perhaps future collections in this series could also address other urbanizing centers of Yiddish—Kiev, Vilna/Vilnius, or New York? Still, the volume contains some excellent essays. Even if not all fulfill the editors’ aims, most offer valuable information or resources for further study.