This issue of the magazine features:

• Looking Through “The People of the Book in the World of Books”

For this anniversary issue, the editors perused the magazine’s entire print run. The editorial that resulted from this survey is a fragmentary albeit expressive picture of the magazine’s evolution. The article ends on this note: “Are we maintaining the level we reached over two and a half decades? Are we still relevant? Are we growing? This is for the readers to judge.”

• Review: Reading W.G.Sebald’s Austerlitz

In his final fiction workshop at the University of East Anglia, during the autumn of 2001, the German writer W.G.Sebald (1944–2001) advised students, “By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.” In keeping with this exhortation, the magazine’s reviewer readily took part in Sebald’s “experiment” as he attempted to answer the questions that arise when reading the writer’s most famous novel, Austerlitz, the story of the Prague-born Jew Jacques Austerlitz, who was taken from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Great Britain at the age of five.

• Response: Why Dmitry Bykov Is Wrong About Sholem Aleichem

One of the most prolific modern Russian writers, Dmitry Bykov has also achieved extremely broad popularity in Russia as a public lecturer on classic Russian literature and as the host of his own shows on the radio station Echo of Moscow. When answering questions posed by his radio listeners, he has spoken on many occasions about Sholem Aleichem and Jewish culture in general. The author of this sharply critical article analyzes these statements by Bykov, concluding that “we see in this instance his poor knowledge of the subject, tendentiousness, trivial arguments, and latent Jewish self-hatred.”

• Looking Through Russian Literary Magazines: Novels and Articles of Jewish Interest

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: September–October 2021

• Bibliography: Twenty Five New Books