This issue of the magazine includes:

• Memoirs: Jews and Others, or, Ten Years at a Jewish Newspaper

In this issue, the magazine publishes a new selection of excerpts from the book by the Moscow journalist and public figure Nikolay Propirny. The excerpts describe a unique and important albeit contradictory and intricate process—the renewal of Jewish community institutions in Russia during the first years after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Propirny has asked the editors to remind readers that his work is not a research essay or a simple memoir but a piece of fiction, an attempt at literature. The author does not necessarily try and reproduce events with historical accuracy. His task, rather, is to convey the atmosphere of the time he describes.

• Review: Through the Pages of Zaporozhye Archive

The article analyzes two volumes of the Zaporozhye Archive—a collection of research papers and archival documents on Jewish history compiled and published in the Ukrainian industrial city of Zaporozhye. The reviewer criticizes the publishers for their lack of a clear concept and the low quality of editing, but acknowledges the volumes contain a great amount of valuable and useful information on the lives of various Jewish communities, Jewish religious, political, and cultural institutions, and even individual Jews.

• Synopses: Becoming Soviet Jews by Elissa Bemporad

The author of this brief review of Elissa Bemporad’s Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, recently published by Indiana University Press, emphasizes that Minsk is fortunate: it is the only Soviet city to have been treated to such a deep and serious analysis by a Jewish historian.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: September–October 2013