The analysis of the prayer contained in the Hebrew-Russian prayer book allows to describe the linguistic image of God and his people — Israel/Jews. Appealing to the patriarchs, to the covenant between God and Israel, to the Torah, Jerusalem and temple worship, that is, the centuries-long Jewish religious tradition, are cultural codes, and at the same time key components of Jewish identity. They are a point of reference in considering so called the Jewish question, taking into account primarily the Jewish perspective, not the Christian one.

In this article we made a review of the works of Russian literature in which Bukharian Jews are mentioned: for the first time in the 19th century — as an ethnographic and aesthetic discovery in the prose of Nikolai Karazin; at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (in the prose of Dina Rubina, Marina Chernova, Marina Avrukina) — as a reflection of the previously half-tabulated theme till the stereotype breakdown; in the contemporary works of Yevgeny Abdullayev (Sukhbat Aflatuni) — as a reception with postcolonial overtones, the departing and forever gone nature of the Soviet and post-Soviet everyday life — Bukharian Jews.

This article presents Jewish portraits and views on the so-called the Jewish question of Zinaida Hippius and Maria Dabrowska based on their diaries. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that both the Russian and the Polish writers referred to the Jews in the ambivalent way, and their views, determined by historical events, evolved over time. Both authors were declared opponents of anti-Semitism, understood as a racist ideology manifested in the use of violence against Jews. However, the attitude of Hippius, especially after the Bolshevik Coup, and Dabrowska — after the Second World War, largely have defined the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism and stereotypical approach to another.

The paper is devoted to Salomon Bart (1885-1941), a poet and an emigrant, who moved to Warsaw after the October Revolution. In the 1930s, he joined Literaturnoe Sodruzhestvo, which gathered Russian intellectuals and artists in Poland. He published five volumes of poetry, focusing predominantly on death. Even during his lifetime, he was considered a peculiar poet. In October of 1940, he was transported to and held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died of hunger.

The article is devoted to the issue of Lasik Roitschwantz’s (the main character of The Stormy Life Of Lasik Roitschwantz by Ilya Ehrenburg) Jewish language attributes in the Polish translation of the novel. The author of the paper pays particular attention to the analysis of particles, exclamations, conjuctions, personal pronouns in their conjugation forms and sentence structure. As a result, the article implies that in the ma¬jority of cases Jewish language attributes got lost in Polish translation, however, it is partly compensated by the translation of Лазик (the character’s name) as Lejzorek.

A comprehensive study of “The Jewish question in modern novel” printed in “Illustrated Weekly Newspaper” (“Tygodnik Ilustrowany”) in 1879 by Waleria Marrené (1832–1903) — Polish writer and publicist, critic and feminist of the positivist age, has been analyzed. The author in great depth goes into the so-called Jewish question in modern novel, represented by examples from four European literatures: French, German, English and Polish. Valeria Marrené analyses the conflict between the local community and the Jewish-origin newcomers and indicates differences in presenting subject matters interesting for her.

Paul Celan’s (1920–1970) poetic cartography builds on the “holograms of darkness” (thus addressed by Amy Colin, an American Celan scholar), the metaphorical constellations which map the experiences of suffering, twilight and death. The poetry “after Shoa” of the Romanian poet of Jewish descent, writing in German, constitutes a particular landscape of his musical “death fugue” in which human suffering is depicted in surrealist images that silently express of the trauma of the Holocaust. Celan’s theodicy is created as the “rhetoric of the ineffable”, a silent dialogue with the Other (Lévinas) but also the absent Other, the No one with whom the poet converses and who becomes the addressee of his “poems-prayers” or “no-poems” (noems), as he calls them. It is the absent Other the poet worships and celebrates in his “poetry of silence”. Language also experienced suffering but was “enriched by it” and now can be heard “on the other side of silence”. Celan’s poetry is firmly anchored in the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish people’s traumatic experiences. To soothe his pain, the poet constantly returns to the “Brunnenland”, his birthplace located in Bukovina where he always found the spring that fueled his poetic soul and heart. The poet’s favourite metaphor is that of the meridian which marks the reference place on the cartographic grid of all his poetic images.