Mikhail Krutikov is the Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and a regular contributor to the Forward. You can reach him at krutikov@umich.edu.
Mikhail Krutikov
By Mikhail Krutikov
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Yiddish World Recalling The Unsavory Characters Of Jewish History, From ‘Prophets’ To Murderers
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press By Eddy Portnoy Stanford University Press, 280 pages $15.25 When the study of Jewish history began in the 19th century, it had two goals: To create an objective picture of the Jewish past and to…
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Yiddish World Grigory Kanovich’s Remarkable Love Song For a Lithuanian Shtetl
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to the hard work of his literary admirers, an English translation of Grigory Kanovich’s autobiographical novel “Shtetl Love Song” has finally appeared. The novel was released by a boutique British publishing house, Noir Press, that specializes in modern Lithuanian literature. It’s remarkable that one of the…
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Yiddish World A Fable About a Modern King David
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The American writer Joshua Cohen’s last two books, Book of Numbers and Witz, were considerable epic novels that dealt with philosophical issues through a mix of satirical realism and grotesque fantasy. But his new book, “Moving Kings” (both a name of a company and an allegorical key),…
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Yiddish World The Fantasy Writer, Der Nister, and His Ambivalence Towards Zionism
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Der Nister, a master of fantasy tales who later turned to Soviet-style realism in his writing, was a complicated man and rarely opened himself up to strangers. There were books of memoirs written about him but they deal, for the most part, with his earlier years. The…
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Yiddish World Jewish Converts in the Russian Empire
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Ellie R. Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford University Press) In Sholem Asch’s novel “Petersburg,” Madam Kvasnetsova, an interesting Jewish woman who has converted to Christianity, owns a house in St. Petersburg and an inn for Jews who come to…
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Culture Insightful Biography of Hebrew Poet H. N. Bialik Misses Key Element
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Why and how did Hayim Nahman Bialik become Israel’s national poet? Avner Holtzman, a professor of Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University, poses this very question in his new biography, “Hayim Nahman Bialik: Poet of Hebrew”, published as part of the “Jewish Lives” series by Yale University…
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Yiddish World When Polish Intellectuals Thrived in Pre-State Israel
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A new book describes a surprising phenomenon in Palestine right before the founding of the State of Israel: a burst of literary creativity by respected non-Jewish Polish writers who were stationed in Palestine during World War II. In 1941, soon after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union,…
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Culture The Spirit of Sholem Aleichem Thrives in the Work of Boris Sandler
Before World War II, the town of Bălţi (in Yiddish, Belts, not to be confused with Belz in Galicia) in the Romanian, formerly Russian, province of Bessarabia, was not different from thousands of shtetls of Eastern Europe. What was exceptional, though, was that it largely retained its Jewish character during the 1950s and ’60s, when…
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