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.


76

October 2008

This issue of the magazine includes:


• In Memoriam: The “Jewish Question” in the Works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn


The book Two Hundred Years Together by the Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn has provoked a variety of responses. Many critics regarded this book as strongly anti-Jewish. Other authors, including some Jewish ones, respected Solzhenitsyn’s attempts to reconcile the Russian and Jewish peoples. However, since Solzhenitsyn’s death on August 4, 2008, his views on “Jewish question” are becoming a part of history, rather than topics of current relevance. This article attempts to summarize the many debates surrounding the life and works of this controversial personality.


• Overview: Old Jewish Postcards are Returning


Old Jewish postcards are at the peak of their popularity today. Since the middle of the 1990s, they are among the most desirable objects for collecting, exhibiting, and publishing. Over the last decade in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, about ten books have been published on the topic of Jewish themes in illustrated postcards. Some of these publications present private or museum collections, others try to demonstrate the diversity of subject matter that is reproduced on Jewish postcards. One album is dedicated to the particular subject of synagogue imagery on old postcards. The author of this overview concludes that these recent publications have managed to present the very rich visual materials, but do not analyze the meaning of all the subjects and images for both publishers and users of Jewish postcards at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.


• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: November–December 2008


• Bibliography: 30 New Books