The People of the Book in the World of Books is a Russian bimonthly publication for serious readers with Jewish interests. Our English website includes only the summaries of the published articles. To access the complete text of them, please visit the Russian version of this website.


114

February 2015

This issue of the magazine includes:


• History: A Meeting of Two Poets


On the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of Boris Pasternak’s birth, the magazine publishes (for the first time in Russian) an article from an old Paris Yiddish newspaper little known even to literary scholars but important in the history of literature. The article is about a remarkable episode from the great Russian poet’s life: his meeting with another outstanding poet, a Yiddish poet. The meeting took place during World War Two, in Moscow in late 1944. The Yiddish poet, Avrom Sutzkever, recalled this event many times and described it in numerous interviews (one of them served as the basis for the article). He even wrote a poem about it. Pasternak for his part always denied any acquaintance with Sutzkever. There are different explanations for his strange disavowal. Some researchers have argued that the stories of Jewish suffering in the Vilnius ghetto, as recounted by Sutzkever, were so painful to Pasternak that they disappeared from his memory. Other scholars have put the disavowal down to Pasternak’s antagonistic relationship to Jewishness and claimed that he remembered the meeting with his antipode, the Yiddish poet and Jewish ghetto fighter, until the end of his life.


Survey: The People of the Book in the World of Comics


Russian readers mostly regard comics as pulp literature for uneducated audiences, but Russian editions of graphic novels, released recently by publishers in Moscow and Petersburg, could change this negative attitude. The reviewer discusses some of them, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat, and congratulates the readers that their introduction to the world of “Jewish comics” has begun with the best examples of the genre.


Looking through Russian Literary Magazines: Novels and Articles of Jewish Interest


Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: March–April 2015


Bibliography: 20 New Books