Die Ruckkehr des Stetl

The topos of the Stetl are often linked to ideas of home, ghetto or even backwardness. In contrast, his portrayal in the Russian-language Jewish literature of the late Soviet period is shaped less by nostalgic reconsideration and more by Soviet-Jewish interculturalization. Olaf Terpitz combines a historical contextualization of the tetl discourse in the Soviet era with a literary approach to interpretation. His analysis uses four prose texts to illustrate the search of the Soviet Jews for a "useful past" (David G. Roskies). It was differentiated from the Soviet postulate of equality and dealt with its own Russian cultural tradition and reflected its self-image in literary terms.