Mikhail Berkhin (Benediktov) was one of the famous Russian and Russian-Jewish journalists, and a Zionist leader, and a loyal supporter of V. Jabotinsky. His life, activity, and literary production ​​have, however, not actually been studied. Without any exaggeration, we can say that Berkhin, as a person and the author of a rather voluminous journalistic heritage in different languages ​​(Russian, English, Hebrew, Yiddish), is little known to the modern reader. Experts have not yet tried to fully discover his depths or describe him neither from the point of view of his private biography, nor as a historical phenomenon. This article is, in fact, the first attempt of this kind to give a relatively complete overview of the currently known biographical material of Berkhin and his ideological and creative heritage.

The author analyses the Fyodor Dostoevsky’s approach to the Jewish question through the Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden. According to the principle of the postmodern text, the narration is conducted in several dimensions. The Jewish question is comprehended in the context of Dostoevsky’s corpus of texts. Next to that, the diary of the writer’s wife — Anna Dostoevskaya becomes an attribute of expression. Attention is drawn to the subjective approach of Tsypkin, who periodically goes into the genre of a literary essay, and also experiences an internal conflict of his origin. The paradox here is Dostoevsky’s humanism and
anti-Semitism. The love for the literature wins, but the Jewish question remains an insurmountable trauma. The raising of the Jewish question determines the peculiarities of the novel’s poetics.

The prewar short story by Vasily Grossman is the starting point for emerging and determining the
parameters as well as hierarchically well-ordered elements which due to their specificity should be interpreted as the typical ones for the Jewish community. This community existed in the time of the Polish-Bolshevik War and during the civil war and afterwards. The time (the era) is very essential in the story as the everyday life of the Jewish community in the Ukraine. The scheme of the literary work is very specific as it shows the nuances of the Jewish-Russian spoken language, the attitude of the community members towards the large offspring, family as well as the heart of home. The aforesaid story also describes the typical situations and places such as the street, the market-square, and a noisy street crowd. In the course of the story the examples of the Jewish behaviour are described as they are being emerged. These examples are not of accidental character and at the same time they present identificational/iconic features. These features are classified into the topical parameters and they also create the modelling system which is the key point. This system is presented in the semantic units which are similar to the conceptual “utterances”, which are the projections of the knowledge of their nature.

The paper explores the choice of narrative forms and ideology and their function in Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land (1912). To emphasize her ardent support of assimilation and to persuade the American readers that immigrants from the Russian Empire pose no threat to the cultural and political life in America, Antin deliberately opted for autobiography and captivity narrative as genres which were already firmly established in American literature and culture. In her uncritical celebration of all aspects of American life, Antin employs Crèvecœur’s concept of the American, as well as the ideology of American transcendentalism.

The posthumously published short story collection Shylock Must Die (2018) by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair works with Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice in a variety of creative ways. The short stories borrow from The Merchant of Venice especially the theme of antisemitism and Shylock as the main Jewish character but are usually set in the 20^th or 21st century rather than in the Renaissance. Some stories react to notable productions of the play across the globe, e.g. in Stockholm in 1944, London in 2012 or in Venice in 2016, the year of the quincentennial commemorations of the foundation of the Venetian ghetto. The stories also include tragicomic elements as typical features of Jewish literature. 

The article discusses selected texts from the multilingual "Canon of memoir literature of Polish Jews". Most of them have not been published in Polish before. Some of the authors lived in the Polish territories under the Russian partition or spent some time in pre- or post-revolutionary Russia. In the egodocuments they wrote, they focused on their own experiences, religion, culture and Jewish identity. They also created, although sometimes only in the margins of their memories, a picture of Russian Jews, Ruthenians and Russians. They referred to Russian culture and language, politics, history and social tensions. They bear witness to life in a sometimes multicultural and multilingual melting pot, and their contents reflect a rich and diverse culture. The texts of the " Canon of memoir literature" are rediscovered sources, offering the possibility of new interdisciplinary interpretations.

An interview with the Israeli writer Elena Makarova.

Александр Любинский — израильский прозаик, поэт, эссеист и литературный критик. Родился в 1949 году в Москве. В начале 1970–х окончил Институт Народного хозяйства им. Г.В. Плеханова, посещал поэтические семинары «Зеленая лампа» при журнале «Юность». Репатриировался в Израиль в 1989 году. Начиная с 1990–х годов работал в местных русскоязычных газетах, вел еженедельную колонку литературной критики в газете «Новости недели». Выпустил книги: сборник прозы и эссеистики Фабула (Иерусалим, 1997); роман Заповедная зона, (Алетейя, Санкт-Петербург, 2005), сборник эссе и культурологических статей На перекрестье (Алетейя, Санкт-Петербург, 2007), роман Виноградники ночи (Алетейя, Санкт-Петербург, 2011) (Русская премия 2011 года в номинации «крупная проза»), сборник повестей Тени вечерние (Алетейя, Санкт-Петербург, 2015).

Еłumaczenie fragmentu prozy Aleksandra Lubińskiego. Fragment zatytułowany "Strefa chroniona"