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John Doyle Klier's pioneering publications on the relations between Jews and the Russian social order-on topics such as public opinion, governance, conversion, Russification politics, antisemitism, and pogroms-have influenced an entire generation of new scholarship. Jews in the East European Borderlands, a collection of essays honoring Klier's life and work, brings together some of the most innovative scholarship in the field. Focusing on the complex, often violent, entanglements between Jews and Russians, historians and literary scholars critically reassess the artifacts of high culture, including Yiddish and Russian prose and poetry, as well as dimensions of daily life, including letter-writing, diaries, the work of philanthropy, photojournalism, and the mass circulation press.
About the author
Eugene M. Avrutin (PhD University of Michigan) is assistant professor of modern European Jewish history and Tobor family scholar in the Program of Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (2010). He and Harriet Murav co-edited, together with Petersburg Judaica, Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expedition (2009). Harriet Murav (PhD Stanford University) is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois. She is the author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (1992), Russia's Legal Fictions (1998), Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (2003), and Music From a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (2011).
Summary
This collection of essays honouring John Doyle Klier’s life and work, brings together some of the most innovative scholarship in the field. Focusing on the complex, often violent, entanglements between Jews and Russians, historians and literary scholars critically reassess the artifacts of high culture, including Yiddish and Russian prose and poetry, as well as dimensions of daily life.
Additional text
"This volume . . . is a real bonanza for scholars of Russian-Jewish history. The essays are of high quality overall, and the book may serve as a mirror of what is happening now in the field of Russian-Jewish history and literature. . . . Essays such as these help brand the field as more than merely a subfield of Russian or Jewish history, but as a high-quality discipline in its own right."
