The edition contains the translations of works of eleven Jewish writers from the Eastern Europe of the second half of the neneteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholom Aleichem, Janusz Korczak, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Itzik Kipnis, Itzik Manger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Debora Vogel, and Abraham Sutzkever. The Jewish prose in the book is rather diverse in its nature in terms of genre and style characteristics. That is since it ranges from traditional educational plots that include distinctive parable features, to the examples of the European literature of the ‘stream of consciousness’ based on lavish metaphors, and alliterations that combine the history with modernity, the old with the new, as well as undermine the rigidity of canonical topics and masterfully lead readers to themselves, which is the most fascinating destination. Continue reading
Tehillim (David’s Psalms) is one of the first books of the First Testament, which is an essential part of religious service in Jewish and Christian traditions. The book consists of 150 psalms with the commentary on daily life occurrences, feelings, and emotions familiar to everyone regardless of religious belief. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was born in Hamburg in 1808. He was the first to combine the Jewish tradition with the ideas of secularism and became one of the most profound commentators of the Biblical texts in the world. His writings are addressed not only to the Biblical scientists but also to those who question the basis of faith or even who has lost it. The edition contains the texts of psalms and detailed commentary by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch as well as reference materials such as an index of names from the Tanakh and the Bible, a glossary, and a bibliography. Continue reading
Volodymyr Yermolenko’s discussion with Leonid Finberg, Director of the Center for Studies in History and Culture of East European Jewry, took in Ukrainian-Jewish relations in history, about their positive and negative aspects, anti-Semitism and the search for mutual understanding, the Ukrainian liberation movement and the USSR, as well as the people who connect the Ukrainian and Jewish cultures.
Source: Ukraine in Histories and Stories: Essays by Ukrainian Intellectuals / ed. Volodymyr Yermolenko. – Kyiv: Internews Ukraine; UkraineWorld, 2019. – P. 254–271.
Turning over the pages of the twentieth-century cultural history of Odesa, the author analyzes the frontier identity that developed in this peculiar city. The first part analyzes the general processes that defined the cultural face of Odessa, while the second one presents the portraits of prominent artists, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, Pyotr Leshchenko, Mykhailo Zhuk, Borys Necherda, and Borys Khersonsky. Each of them originally embodied the image of the seaside city in its different identity and invariable charm. And if these figures are forgotten today, then we have a good opportunity to know and evaluate them more deeply, at the same time rethinking the phenomenon of twentieth-century Odesa.
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Historians Ola Hnatiuk and Anna Umanska talk on historical, literary and artistic discoveries that the 28th issue of Yehupets Art & Criticism Almanac offers to its readers.
