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.


43

February 2003

This issue of the magazine includes:


Names: 100th Anniversary of Artist Anatoly Kaplan


Anatoly (Tanchum) Kaplan (1902–1980) became a symbol of the Jewish national artist for generations of Soviet/Russian Jews. His artistic heritage integrates different aspects of Jewish culture and history—from synagogue to Jewish kolkhoz, from traditional folk art to avant-gardism. It can be said that Kaplan is the culmination of the development of a whole school—the school of Soviet Jewish artists. Those artists started their creative work in the late 1920s—early 1930s. Their childhood linked them with the old shtetl, they witnessed its destruction in the flames of the Second World War, but they continued to work as Jewish artists even in the years when the possibility of Jewish expression in Soviet art became problematic. There was a whole galaxy of great masters—Tyshler, Axelrod, Inger, Tabenkin. The name of Kaplan closes this file, this tradition that is still waiting to be thoroughly comprehended. The memorial article analyzes Kaplan's art as deeply rooted in classical Yiddish literature.


Response: From Solzhenitsyn to Rabinovich


The reviewer strongly criticizes Yakov Rabinovich's historical monograph In Search of a Destiny: The Jewish People in the Cycle of History, two volumes of which were published recently in Moscow by the prestigious publishing house Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya. The book is an example of a historical work written by a dilettante and can be compared with another recent publication on Russian-Jewish relations—Solzhenitsyn's book Two Hundred Years Together. Both authors claim that they wrote historical research and both are wrong about this. The reviewer calls Solzhenitsyn's book an “impassioned manifesto of Russian enlightened nationalism.” Rabinovich's book he describes as a “moralizing compilation written by an ardent Jewish patriot.”


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


Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: March–April 2003


Bibliography: 60 New Books