Steven J. Zipperstein - Böcker

This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including novels, plays, and archival material—Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures.Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof. In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

A haunting consideration of the extraordinary mind of Saul Bellow’s unjustly forgotten friend and literary rival and the extremes of the writing lifeBorn in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by “opening up” his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the “small mountain” of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.Rosenfeld’s Lives is a fascinating exploration of literary genius and aspiration and the paradoxical power of literature to elevate and to enslave. It illuminates the cultural and political tensions of post-war America, Jewish intellectual life of the era, and—most poignantly—the struggle at the heart of any writer’s life.

A landmark biography of one of our most prominent chroniclers of American life  In this groundbreaking literary biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth (1933–2018), one of America’s most celebrated writers. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and books were often set—Roth wrote with ambition and awareness of what was required to produce great literature. No writer was more dedicated to his craft, even as he was rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances. And yet, as much as Roth wrote about sex and self, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).  Zipperstein explores the unprecedented range of Roth’s work—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Drawing on extensive archival materials and over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth about his life and work, Zipperstein provides an intimate and insightful look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, placing his work in the context of his obsessions, as well as American Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality.

The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century in Europe (1815-81) have long been regarded as the major period of assimilation in post-medieval Jewish history. Moreover the established historiography dealing with those years has tended to focus on the processes of accommodation and communal disintegration. However, the historical processes as analysed in this collection of essays emerge as multi- rather than uni-directional, far more variegated and complex than usually described hitherto. Contradictory trends were associated with different localities, levels of development and ideological allegiances. Traditional loyalties, new socio-ethnic structures, communal cohesion, romantic rediscoveries of the past and the political solidarity engendered by the struggle for emancipation across Europe, all served to counterbalance the homogenizing forces of modernity. Bringing together the work of fourteen leading historians, this book represents a major contribution to the revision, which has gained momentum in recent years, of the traditional historiography.

Founded in 1794 as a frontier city on the Black Sea, Odessa soon grew to be one of Russia's busiest seaports. Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. Zipperstein emphasizes Jewish acculturation: changes in behavior, attitude, and ideology as reflected in schools, synagogues, newspapers, and other institutions of the period. The patterns set then affected the community's cultural development well into the second decade of the twentieth century. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience.

So shattering were the after-effects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was “nothing less than a prototype for the Holocaust itself”. In three days of violence, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or wounded, whilst more than 1,000 Jewish-owned houses and stores were ransacked and destroyed. Recounted in lurid detail by newspapers throughout the Western world, the pre-Easter attacks seized the imagination of an international public, quickly becoming the prototype for what would become known as a “pogrom” and providing the impetus for efforts as varied as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the NAACP.With new evidence from Russia, Israel and Europe, Steven J. Zipperstein brings historical insight and clarity to a much-misunderstood event.