This issue of the magazine features:

• History: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in the USSR

At the height of the Khrushchev Thaw, on March 10, 1956, a review entitled “In the Theaters and Cinemas of the United States” appeared in a major Soviet newspaper. Among other things, the review discussed the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, dramatized by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett. This article can be considered the beginning of not only of the play’s journey to Soviet readers and viewers, but also of the story behind it, which was destined to occupy one of the central places among the millions of stories that made up the tragedy of the Holocaust. The magazine publishes a study that attempts to trace this difficult and controversial path. The study’s author emphasizes that Anne Frank’s book was published only once in the Soviet Union in a very limited edition and that the censors tampered with the text. Nevertheless, it was extremely important publication since, consequently, a segment of the country’s populace learned about the story of the Jewish girl from Amsterdam as one episode in Hitler’s occupation of Europe.

• Synopsis: Two New Books

The magazine’s reviewers examine two books published in Russia in 2020. The first one is Yuri Vexler’s biography of Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002), a Russian prose writer and screenwriter whose works primarily deal with Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and Jewish-Christian relations. The second book is a translation of the American historian Eugene M. Avrutin’s book The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town, published as part of the recently launched series “Contemporary Western Russian Studies.”

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: May–June 2021

• Bibliography: Eighty New Books