Jewish culture, though not always explicit or immediately apparent, is fundamentally an important and, to a considerable extent, formative part of world culture. Literature — and modernist literature in particular — is a cornerstone of this culture, rooted in ancient practices of reading, creation, and existence through texts. Jewish literature, however, despite its richness and its proximity to — indeed, its kinship with — Ukrainian literature in terms of the places and circumstances of its creation, remains largely unknown, obscure, or confined to a handful of authors who have themselves become almost stereotypical figures, not only for the general reading public but, regrettably, at times even for literary scholars.
Today, Ukrainian readers have access to several anthologies offering substantial, though necessarily non-exhaustive (as is only to be expected of anthologies), and not always representative (which is more problematic) selections of prose and poetry. This reader is the next step, another building block in the foundations of the study of Jewish literature in Ukraine. The selection spans a considerable period of time (focusing, in particular, on literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and a fairly broad geographical range (again, with particular emphasis on authors and works connected with Ukraine). It also draws appropriately on more recent publications and on the work of a younger generation of Ukrainian literary scholars and translators, in order to offer a fuller picture of Jewish literature.
In the works selected here, the everyday intertwines with the mystical, the communal with the personal, and what might at first seem foreign and different often turns out to be familiar and close.