Description
Book SynopsisThis volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constitute a new generation of Jewish-Russian writers: diasporic Russians and new Israelis.
Trade Review"Roman Katsman’s pioneering
Nostalgia for a Foreign Land addresses one of the most impressive, unusual and intriguing literary phenomena in Russian since 1991: Russian-language prose in Israel. While aspiring to its synthetic study, the book covers a broad range of writers from an immensely popular contemporary fiction writer to a leading member of an experimental avant-garde group. This is an excellent, illuminating and cogent work; its in-depth literary analysis is rich in detail. The book makes no attempt to embellish the literary works it analyzes; their unquestionable aesthetic achievements and sometimes problematic ideologies are examined with attention and unfailing honesty. Within broader a context, this is a very significant contribution to the understanding of Jewish literature in Russian, as well as contemporary Jewish literary writing.” -- Dennis Sobolev, University of Haifa
Table of ContentsPreface
Dina Rubina: A Portrait of the Artist as a Messiah and a Pirate
Introduction
Carnival and Sincerity
Migration and Neoindigeneity
Messiahs, Mothers, and Orphans
Victims and Heroes
From Trauma to the Real
Origins and Copies
Fugitives, Nomads, and Pirates
The Metaphysical Leap
Nekod Singer in Russian and Hebrew: Neoeclecticism and Beyond
A Noble Man of Our Times
The Jerusalem Trilogy of Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis
Ierusalimsky dvorianin (A noble man of Jerusalem, 1997): An Abortive Gesture of Violence
I/e_rus.olim (2004): History, Sacrifice, and Network
ЗЫ (Preemptive Revenge, 2006): The Other’s Heroism
Mikhail Yudson’s Lestnitsa na shkaf (The ladder to the cabinet): The New Language of Metaphysics
A Ladder to the Neoindigeneity
Afterword
Works Cited
