This issue of the magazine features:

• In memoriam: Boris Frezinsky (1941–2020)

Boris Frezinsky has passed away: a literary critic and literary historian, he was a world-renowned specialist in the work of the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. For two decades, Frezinsky collaborated with our magazine: almost half of the many articles he published here were later included in collections of his selected works. Two members of the magazine’s editorial board share their memories of this remarkable researcher and outstanding human being.

• Synopsis: New Books about Yiddish or Translated from Yiddish

Our reviewers examine four new books in Russian that in one way or another have something to do with Yiddish. Two books, published in Birobidzhan and Moscow, are aids for teaching Yiddish to Russian-speaking students. The other two are translations of works by contemporary Yiddish authors. The collection of poems by Velvl Chernin, an Israeli poet writing in Yiddish, was published in Birobidzhan, but all the translators live in other cities—St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, etc. A collection of short stories by the Yiddish writer Boris Sandler was also published in Russian, but on the other side of the globe, in New York. One of the reviewers concludes that even Russian readers who do not understand Yiddish have the chance today to read something that, according to conventional wisdom, allegedly does not exist—good contemporary Yiddish literature.

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: January–February 2021

• Bibliography: Fifty New Books