This issue of the magazine includes:

• Names: Grigory Kanovich

The prose-writer Grigory Kanovich was "discovered" by the Soviet intelligentsia at the end of the 1980s, although in his native Vilnius he was known and popular long before. He grew up in a Yiddish and Lithuanian-speaking environment but chose to write in Russian, because it provided him with a larger reading audience. His prose was a unique phenomenon in Soviet literature of the 1960s–1980s. When Jewish themes were almost totally banned in the USSR, he wrote and published novels about life in the Jewish shtetls before the Holocaust. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kanovich emigrated from independent Lithuania to Israel. His last novels, written in Israel, sound like a requiem to the vanished world of Lithuanian Jewry. The article is dedicated to the 75th birthday of the writer who can be considered the last representative of traditional Russian-Jewish literature.

• Point of View: Karaites, Mountain Jews, Crimchaks — Who are They?

Throughout the long history of the Jewish people, many groups have sought acceptance in the Jewish community. But from time to time, other groups want to be "excluded from the Jews," or at least their leaders, real or self-proclaimed, formulate such intentions. In the former Soviet Union, certain intellectuals among the Crimean Karaites, Mountain Jews, and the Crimchak Jews are expressing these sentiments. The article analyzes several recent publications trying to understand the reasons for their authors' attempts to rewrite the historical past of Mountain Jews and Crimchaks in order to create a future for themselves separate from the Jewish people.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: May–June 2004

• Bibliography: 50 New Books