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Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953) was the eldest daughter of Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, one of the three brothers known as the Russian Rothschilds. They were moguls who dominated Russian finance and business and built almost a quarter of the railroad lines in Imperial Russia. For more than seventy-five years, Poliakova kept detailed diaries of her world, giving us a rare look into the exclusive world of Jewish elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These rare documents reveal how Jews successfully integrated into Russian aristocratic society through their intimate friendships and patronage of the arts and philanthropy. And they did it all without converting—in fact, while staunchly demonstra...
For the general reader and the historian this book shows what it was really like to experience these ghastly years in Belgium during the German occupation.
An original perspective on the experience of refugees and relief workers.
This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.
In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian empire’s last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest’s Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthod...
Populated by urbane Jewish merchants and professionals as well as new arrivals from the shtetl, imperial Kiev was acclaimed for its opportunities for education, culture, employment, and entrepreneurship but cursed for the often pitiless persecution of its Jews. Kiev, Jewish Metropolis limns the history of Kiev Jewry from the official readmission of Jews to the city in 1859 to the outbreak of World War I. It explores the Jewish community's politics, its leadership struggles, socioeconomic and demographic shifts, religious and cultural sensibilities, and relations with the city's Christian population. Drawing on archival documents, the local press, memoirs, and belles lettres, Natan M. Meir shows Kiev's Jews at work, at leisure, in the synagogue, and engaged in the activities of myriad Jewish organizations and philanthropies.
A vibrant and moving memoir of life in Australia and Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. "In Pursuit of a Dream" begins with a brief portrait of the author's family circumstances after the Second World War, when they were finally reunited after being forced into hiding to escape the Gestapo. This appealing personal history combines autobiography with a picture of the international situation in the middle of the twentieth century. After some time spent visiting friends and family in war-torn France and Belgium, the author and her parents obtained passes to join her brother in Australia on a journey which was to change her life completely. Through her eyes we experience the sea voyage and Sydney life in the 1940s and gain an original perspective on Australia during this period. Her vivid descriptions clearly convey the impact of post-war migration, and the story of her subsequent return to Europe and later marriage to the Australian scientist, Henry Harris, make this a most attractive and authentic cultural history.
"This bibliography contains everything that has been published in the West--except from Russia--about the relations between the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) and Russia--in every Western language"--P. [4] of cover.
The author is a direct descendant of the prominent Kiev Brodskys, whose wealth derived from the sugar industry at a time when Ukraine formed part of Russia. This family's lavish benefactions - hospitals, educational institutions and a bacteriological institute - mainly to Kiev, Odessa and Zlatopol, gave them a certain power and influence. Alexandra Brodsky has drawn on family archives and Russian-language publications to sketch her ancestors' life of affluence before the Russian Revolution. Her personal account begins in pre-war Berlin among the Russian emigre community and childhood memories of bewildering situations and poverty. The humourless atmosphere is further darkened by the rise of the Nazis and Hitler. By the time she is in High School, the need to emigrate has become acute and the tension builds as expulsion looms. The reader shares these anxieties through the eyes of a child who has learned to watch in silence.
Here is a detailed glimpse into the lives and times of Yiddish writers enthralled with Communism at the turn of the century through the mid-1930s. Centering mainly on the Soviet Jewish literati but with an eye to their American counterparts, the book follows their paths from avant-garde beginnings in Kiev after the 1905 revolution to their peak in the mid-1930s. Notables such as David Bergelson—who helmed the short-lived Yiddish periodical called In Harness—and Der Nister and David Hodshtein come to life as do Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, Moshe Litvakov, Yekhezkel Dobrushin, and Nokhum Oislender. Gennady J. Estraikh charts the course of their artistic and political flowering and decline and considers the effects of geographyprovincial vs. urbanand party politics upon literary development and aesthetics. No other book concentrates on this aspect of the Jewish intellectual scene nor has any book unveiled the scale and intensity of Yiddish Communist literary life in the 1920s and 1930s or the contributions its writers made to Jewish culture.