This issue of the magazine includes:

• New Dimensions: Arkady Gendler’s Yidishe lider

Yidishe lider (Jewish Songs), the new CD by Arkady Gendler from Zaporozhye, Ukraine, was recently issued by the US label Golden Horn Records. It includes new songs that the ninety-year-old Yiddish folk poet and singer had written during the last two years. The first European presentation of the album and Gendler’s new concert program took place in St. Petersburg in October 2012. The author of the article combines his personal observation of the program and an interview with Berlin-based clarinetist Christian Dawid, who produced the album and did the musical arrangements for it.

• Review: Margarita Khemlin’s Tough Heroes

Contemporary Russian prose writer Margarita Khemlin is unique in one aspect: she writes “about Jews” and only about them. The setting of most of her novels and short stories is the small town of Oster in Eastern Ukraine after World War II. Analyzing her books, the reviewer concludes she is primarily attracted by the vitality of her heroes in a crazy world that has lost its moorings—the world after the Holocaust.

• Survey: News from the Hinterlands

Three new Jewish academic journals have been launched in recent years in Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, that is, in the “hinterlands” of the former Russian/Soviet empire: Bulletin of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (Kharkiv), Tsaytshrift (Minsk–Vilnius), and Pinkas (Vilnius). A major trend that can be seen from analyzing these journals is that Jewish studies in the post-Soviet countries is becoming less Moscow-centric, less oriented towards the Russian language, and, finally, more integrated into international scholarly networks.

• Synopses: Walter Benjamin’s Reflections of His Childhood

The brief review presents Walter Benjamin’s books One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood Around 1900, which were recently published in Russian translation.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: May–June 2013