This issue of the magazine includes:

• Memoirs: Sholem Aleichem and Others through the Eyes of an Idealistic Publisher

The magazine publishes the second and final part of the recollections of the merchant, publisher, and Zionist activist Alexander (Shabse) Rapoport (c. 1862–1928). The crowning achievement of his life was the establishment of Der fraynd, the first Yiddish daily in Russia, which would become a landmark in the history of Jewish culture. Written in a simple, unpretentious style, Rapoport’s memoirs are full of significant details about life in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He shares interesting observations about the Jewish literary circles of that time, and recounts curious episodes from the lives of Sholem Aleichem and other founding fathers of Yiddish literature.

• Names: Ilya Erenburg and Masha Rolnikaitė’s Diary

At the beginning of 1965, in the relatively liberal atmosphere of Khrushchev's Thaw, the Leningrad literary magazine Zvezda (Star) issued a Russian translation of Masha Rolnikaitė’s diary. The diary had originally been written in Yiddish in the Vilna Ghetto and in Nazi concentration camps. Soon the diary was published in Moscow as a separate book under the title I Must Tell. The appearance of this book—the only memoir of a Holocaust survivor ever published in the USSR—became possible as a result of many people’s efforts, including the prominent Soviet writer and public figure Ilya Erenburg (1891–1967). Later, Erenburg helped Rolnikaitė with the French edition of her diary, which was published in Paris with his foreword. The original Russian text of this foreword is published here in this magazine for the first time.

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: November–December 2009