Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama Odessa describes the émigrés’ attempts at adjustment to the free world.

A sequel to the author's autobiographical trilogy--Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, and Farewell, Mama Odessa--this book is part memoir and part cultural study about the challenges of immigration and American accculturation. With self-deprecating humor, the author, a former Soviet satirist who was punished for trespassing the boundaries of public criticism, recollects his growing pains as he overcame his indoctrinated upbringing in a totalitarian society to embrace America's defining values.

“Outstanding . . . A delightfully written work of serious scholarship.” —Jewish Book World Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the nineteenth century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the nineteenth century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il’ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives. “Traces the emergence, development, and persistence of the myth of Odessa as both Garden of Eden and Gomorrah . . . A joy to read.” —Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College

The original publications of the 1930s are scarcely to be found. The posthumous 1962 volume in the Soviet Union was limited to a tiny edition. Yet the work of the man who has been called "the foremost authority on Jewish folk music before the Holocaust," Moshe Beregovski, survives and is now available for the first time to the English-speaking world. As a member of the Jewish community as well as an ethnomusicologist in prewar Russia, Beregovski had not only the inspiration to preserve the spirit and vitality of the music that filled the lives of his people but also the professional training to document his findings to exacting standards. The first section of SIobin's book contains translations of some of Beregovski's responses to Jewish folk music in its living context during the 1930s. He raises important questions about ethnicity in his essay on interaction between Ukrainian and Jewish musical influences. His work on klezmer music. the music of the Jewish folk instrumental bands, is the most authoritative on the subject and includes his complete guide to fieldworkers in folk music. In another essay Beregovski analyzes an unmistakable trademark of Jewish folk music, the "altered Dorian" scale, and its symbolism in Eastern European Jewish culture. The second section constitutes Beregovski's anthologies of hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English song texts. Each song is carefully notated exactly as it was sung and is accompanied by Beregovski's notes on origins and variants. Beregovski's essays and transcriptions form a pat and a symbol of what was lost in the mass destruction of Eastern European Jewish culture in this century. They form a cultural record of deep significance not only for the Jewish people, but also for folklorists and scholars as evidence of a distinctive music culture that interacted with—and influenced—the folk musics of Eastern Europe.

Imaging of Isaac Babel's final trip to his hometown.

Here presented for the first time in English are Moshe Beregovski's surviving essays, plus his anthologies containing hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English texts.

Part of the Jewish Encounter series Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice. Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall’s life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present. Wilson’s portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe–showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century. Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.