Roman Katsman – författare

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the “big wave” of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constitute a new generation of Jewish-Russian writers: diasporic Russians and new Israelis.

A hundred years is the period long enough to talk about Russian-Israeli literature as a historically consistent, though quite an indeterminate community. Not being a historical study, Roman Katsman's new book subtly outlines one of the magnetic lines of this community—the search for an answer to the main question of modernity—“what is reality?”, as well as the search for the real, which makes the core of the Jewish existence. Today, just like a hundred years ago, the success of this search depends on how well Russian-Israeli literature can overcome fears and temptations of the Russian melancholy and the Israeli marginality. Fighting for its existence in unique conditions, it chooses sophisticated forms of transforming its double cultural unbelonging into the paradoxical philosophical realism that can be perfectly comprehended only today, with the benefits of postmodernism appropriated and left behind. At the same time, despite its peculiar nature, Russian-Israeli literature shares the fundamental trend of the world literature, namely its transition to virtual, web-based, augmented reality.

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

In the third volume of his studies in Russian-language Israeli literature (the first two were Nostalgia for a Foreign Land, 2016, and Elusive Reality, 2020), Roman Katsman discusses its fundamental mythologems, while suggesting a new approach to myth-creation. This is a book about how literature preserves its significance by addressing the main questions of our time through the imagination of miraculous encounter and everyday holiness, catastrophe and salvation, victim and foundation, cities and empires. The book dwells on the most famous as well as the less known but no less bright novelists: Efraim Bauch, Alexander Goldshtein, Linor Goralik, Daniel Kluger, Leonid Levinson, Anna Likhtikman, Elena Makarova, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, Victoria Reicher, Dina Rubina, Yakov Shechter, Nekoda Singer, Dennis Sobolev, Alex Tarn, Yakov Tsigelman, Naum Vaiman, and Mikhail Yudson.This book is for everyone who is interested in modern Russian and Israeli literature and culture, theoretical problems of modern literature, mythopoesis, issues of Russian and Jewish emigration and mobility, the history of twentieth century literature, and literary processes in the twenty-first century