To the Editor:

I greatly enjoyed the wonderful article by Hillel Halkin about his journey to the ex-evil empire [“The Road to Naybikhov,” November 1998]. But it is a pity he did not mention a body of literature that is definitely as important an expression of the shtetl as the literature in Yiddish and Hebrew he does mention.

Russian-Jewish literature (i.e., Jewish literature in Russian) precedes chronologically both Hebrew and Yiddish writing (and printing) in the Russian empire, and from the very beginning it paid substantial attention to the life and habits of the shtetl. Of course, this attention was not very friendly. Quite the contrary: early Russian-Jewish authors were convinced (one could say, fanatically convinced) maskilim, or “enlighteners.” Still, their work contains valuable information, and offers a kind of introduction to everyday Jewish existence. One example is Memoirs of a Jew by Grigory Bogrov, published in the early 1870’s in St. Petersburg. But even some hardcore maskilim could find sympathetic words for the world of their fathers. There is, for instance, the wonderful Story of Chaim-Shulim Feigis (1865), the last work by the founding father of this literature, Osip Rabinovitch(1865).

My last example is a long short story by N. Naumov-Kogan, “In a Remote Shtetl” (1892). It appeared in one of the most prestigious Russian monthlies, and was met with enthusiasm by contemporary critics. One should also not forget that perhaps the best-known Russian-Jewish author, S. An-ski, wrote mostly in Russian and that the first version of his famous play, The Dybbuk (1916), was in that language.

An English-language anthology of this largely forgotten literature is, it seems to me, a prime desideratum, and something that might well appeal to American Jewish readers.

Shimon Markish
Budapest, Hungary

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