Russian Jews played a pioneering role in Hebrew bibliophile publishing during the Weimar Republic, particularly between 1921–1924 when Berlin became a vibrant center of Hebrew cultural activity following the Bolshevik Revolution. Germany's hyperinflation created ideal conditions for producing luxury editions through a synergy of German technical expertise, Russian-Jewish financial resources, and collaboration with prominent artists and typographers. This publishing renaissance involved developing modern Hebrew typefaces, implementing sophisticated printing techniques, and producing limited editions with original illustrations, establishing unprecedented aesthetic standards for Hebrew books. The period concluded with Germany's economic stabilization in 1924, coinciding with Ch. N. Bialik's emigration to Palestine—an event symbolizing the broader transition of Hebrew cultural, literary, and publishing activity from Europe to Eretz Israel. The typographic and design principles established during this brief flourishing significantly influenced Hebrew book evolution for generations.
The article examines Friedrich Gorenstein’s novel The Place as a distinctive example of the twentieth-century epic novel. Challenging the author’s own genre designation of the work as a “political novel,” the research argues that The Place redefines epic form under post-Stalinist conditions by combining large-scale historical vision with an intensely subjective first-person narration. Particular attention is paid to the tension between the limited consciousness of the protagonist-narrator, Gosha Tsvibyshev, and the presence of an epic narrator articulating broader ideological and philosophical generalizations. The study analyzes the novel’s treatment of Stalinism, post-Stalinist disillusionment, and antisemitism by demonstrating how these themes function as structural elements of its epic poetics. The article situates Gorenstein’s novel within the tradition of Russian epic prose while highlighting its modern psychological and ethical complexity.
The acquisition of the Promised Land as presented in the Torah (the Pentateuch) is examined both in sequence and in its preceding stages, which are associated with the fulfillment of necessary conditions. On this basis, a structure of ten motifs preceding the entry into the Land of Israel is derived, along with an explanation of their meaning and significance within the general composition. Particular attention is paid to what, according to the Torah, determines the possibility of inheriting the land: a corresponding level of consciousness. The second part of the article is devoted to a typological correlation between these ten motifs and existing ideas of unusual, wondrous, and distant lands in Russian folk tradition – including fairy tales, legends, and oral histories. Three types of narratives are identified, each reflecting the derived motifs and related thematic determinants in different ways. Emphasis is placed on themes of grace and abundance, the hardships of the search and transition, and the hero endowed with exceptional abilities who introduces these realms.
This article explores the motif of death, drawing on the short stories of Sholem-Aleichem Kasrilovka and the ethnographic sketch Podlipovtsy by Fyodor Reshetnikov. Although the aforementioned motif is not central or foregrounded in either work, but rather is more of an accompanying character and appears in the background of the main plot, it nevertheless takes on various symbolic, cultural, and socio-existential significance. The author discusses individual examples, taking into account the types of death appearing in the selected texts: pathological death resulting from disease, starvation, and unfavorable climatic factors; violent death resulting from an accident or suicide; metaphorical death understood as the abandonment of one's previous way of life; and death as an object of commercial and profit-making activity.
This article analyzes a key motive in the book The End of the Quote (1996) by philologist and writer Mikhail Bezrodny. Bezrodny emigrated to Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1991; his work reflects a Russian-Jewish emigrant’s perspective on the phenomenon of emigration itself. A recurring theme in the book is a specific nostalgia for a "homeland," embodied by the State Public Library (GPB) in Leningrad, where the author worked from 1979 to 1991. Furthermore, this motive is integrated into the "Petersburg text" of Russian literature—a concept central to Bezrodny’s work both as a scholar and a writer.
The article is devoted to the image of Jews and related topoi in the works of foreign students of the subject “Creative Writing” at the Faculty of Education of Palacký University in Olomouc. The research question asked was whether the Holocaust continues to appear in written works or whether new, contemporary topics are emerging. The analysis partially confirmed the research question. The topic of the Holocaust continues to appear, but topics related to the current state of Israel are also emerging.
10.31261/IR
English
Język Polski