This issue of the magazine includes:

• Names: Zemach Shabad, Physician, Yiddishist, and Leader

In this issue, we publish the second and final excerpt from the autobiography of Dr. Zemach Shabad (1864–1935), one of the most important leaders of Vilna’s Jewish community. Written in a simple, unpretentious style, these memoirs present an impressive picture of the intense Jewish social, political, and cultural life in Shabad’s native city just before and during the first Russian Revolution of 1905.

• Names: Lev Berinsky, the True Jewish Poet

Lev Berinsky was born in 1939 in the Bessarabian shtetl of Căușeni, but he spent the greater part of his life in Moscow, and since 1991 has lived in Israel. His case was unique in the late twentieth century. He knew Yiddish from childhood but began writing poems in Yiddish only at the age of forty-two, when he already was a rather well-known Soviet Russian-language poet and translator. Moreover, he began writing poetry that was bound up not with the classical Yiddish literary heritage but drew on the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, especially futurism. Occasioned by Berinsky’s seventy-fifth birthday, the article emphasizes that by being affiliated with various literary contexts (Russian, Israeli, Western European, Eastern European), Berinsky has given back to Jewish literature its best quality, its multilingualism.

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: May–June 2014

• Bibliography: 30 New Books