Abraham Sutzkever

Abraham Sutzkever (Yiddish: Avrom Sutskever; Hebrew: Avraham Sutskever) (b. 1913–d. 2010) was a titan of Yiddish literature. Over the course of six decades, he published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. He also edited the most important postwar Yiddish journal of arts and letters, Di goldene keyt, from 1949 to 1995. From his youth in Vilna and Siberia to his later years in Tel Aviv, Sutzkever insistently posited the power of poetry to sustain life and culture. His wartime experiences further marked the writer as both poet and hero. During his incarceration in the Vilna Ghetto, he served as a member of the “Paper Brigade,” rescuing the cultural heritage of the Jewish community of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” He also took up arms as a partisan fighter in the forests surrounding the city. After the war, he testified in graphic detail at the Nuremberg Tribunals at the request of the Soviet Union. A writer of wide-ranging interests—from the frozen tundra of Omsk to the cafés of Paris, from the cellars of the Vilna Ghetto to the shores of the Red Sea—Sutzkever continually exercised his neologistic skills, poeticizing his present life in conversation with the memories of his past and his cultural ambitions for the future. Some of his most prominent volumes include his first collection, Lider (Poems), published in Warsaw in 1937; his epic poem Sibir (Siberia), illustrated by Marc Chagall and published in Jerusalem in 1953; the series of experimental prose poems of memorialization, Griner akvaryum (Green Aquarium), published in Jerusalem in 1975; and one of his later volumes, Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary), published in Tel Aviv in 1977.

Author(s):  
Rita Bobuevna Salmorbekova ◽  
Dilshat Karimova

The article examines the problems of the population of the residential areas of the city of Bishkek based on the sociological study. An expert survey carried out in four districts of Bishkek is presented. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 50 new residential areas appeared in the city. Naturally, new residential areas do not have sufficient infrastructure for the population to this day. The current situation with internal migrants in Kyrgyzstan violates the regional demographic balance and the rational distribution of the population across the country. The population is moving actively at the interdistrict and interregional levels. As a result, the main influx of internal migrants moves to Bishkek and Chui Region. The problem of researching the state of the new residential areas in Bishkek is relevant for modern Kyrgyzstan. However, the official statistical base does not cover all citizens living in new buildings, since most residents do not have a residence registration in the area. 75–80 % of the population does not have education and health services. In many residential areas, social facilities, roads, and communications have not been built yet, and the infrastructure as a whole is not developed. Ignoring the issue on the part of the state can lead to a social explosion, expressed by protest actions, exacerbation of social and interregional conflicts among residents of the given area. Based on this, it was necessary to conduct an expert survey among the representatives of the municipal territorial authorities of each district. The main problems of residents of the new residential areas were studied as much as possible.


Author(s):  
N.D. Borshchik ◽  

The article deals with the problems of post-war reconstruction of Yalta – one of the most popular resorts of the Soviet Union. During the great Patriotic war, this all-Union health resort was subjected to barbaric destruction and looting. The fascist occupation regime (1941-1944) caused enormous damage to the health resort Fund of Yalta, the city economy and the entire infrastructure of the southern coast of Crimea. The rapid return to the pre-war structure and the commissioning of social facilities has become a priority for the regional authorities and the population. In addition to traditional methods, the Patriotic «Сherkassov» movement, which began in the liberated Stalingrad in 1943 and spread throughout the country, was widely used. A solid Foundation was laid for the interaction of the city administration of Yalta and the local population with the commanders and soldiers of the red Army. Based on the analysis of archival documents of the State archive of the Republic of Crimea, it was possible to trace the course of restoration work in the fi rst months after the liberation of the Crimean Peninsula from fascism. It is established that for the rapid restoration and functioning of the Yalta resorts, public activists launched a socialist competition on «Сherkassov» methods


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War, the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Yet the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. This book recreates this lost world, beginning with Jewish economic, cultural and religious life, including the emergence of hasidism. By the late eighteenth century, other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews, and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the Haskalah movement. The book looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. It shows how the deterioration in the position of the Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements as well as the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. It also examines Jewish urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part, starting from the First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, looks in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second World War. It reviews Polish–Jewish relations during the war and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust. The final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of communism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 177-179
Author(s):  
Clayton Black

Abstract This article offers a brief tribute to the life and career of Sergei Viktorovich Yarov, whose works pioneered new avenues of research in the history of workers, popular mentalities, and the city of Leningrad, especially during the Siege. It provides an assessment of his key works, especially his monographs, and his role in the development of the historical discipline in Russia before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.


1990 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 379-418 ◽  

Juda Hirsch Quastel, who contributed for more than 60 years to the growth of biochemistry, was born in Sheffield, in a room over his father’s rented sweet shop on the Ecclesall Road. The date was 2 October 1899, and his parents, Jonas and Flora (Itcovitz) Quastel, had lived in England for only a few years. They had emigrated separately from the city of Tamopol in eastern Galicia, which was then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it has since, after a period under Polish rule, become part of the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union. Tamopol at the end of the 19th century was a city of some 30 000 and the centre of an agricultural district. Its inhabitants were ethnically mixed, but about half of them were Jews, many of whom under the relatively benevolent Austrian regime were fairly prosperous. Quastel used to recall how his father and grandfather had held the Emperor Franz Joseph in great respect. His grandfather, also Juda Hirsch (married to Yetta Rappoport), had at one time worked as a chemist in a brewery laboratory in Tamopol. The parents of the subject of this biography had been in commerce there, and were not poor; but today’s family members know little about the life of Jonas and Flora in Tamopol, or about the reasons that persuaded them, like many of their neighbours, to emigrate to the West. An uncle had already gone to England, and perhaps had encouraged them to follow because of the greater opportunities. In England they lived at first in London’s east end, where they worked in garment factories; but their move to Sheffield, and to Jonas’s modest entrepreneurship, had been completed in the late 1890s. It was there that Juda Hirsch and his four younger siblings (Charles, Doris, Hetty and Anne) were born.


1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-178 ◽  

Quadripartite Activity: Failure to find a solution of the Berlin currency problem after the question had been considered by the United Nations Security Council was evident when the replies of the western powers and the Soviet Union to Dr. Juan Atilio Bramuglia's questions about the problem were made public on November 26, 1948. The Soviet reply stated that an agreement on the four-power control plan would mean the simultaneous lifting of the Berlin blockade and a return to four-power collaboration in the administration of Berlin, which in effect would mean resumption of direct conversations on the currency questions among the four military governors. The western powers made it clear that they considered the unity of Berlin city administration as the basic prerequisite for an agreement. Several days later, on November 30, a city government was installed in the Soviet sector of Berlin, with Friedrich Ebert as its mayor and on December 21, the western military governments announced formal reconstitution of the Allied Kommandatura on a three-power basis. In announcing the move, Brig. Gen. Jean Ganeval, French sector commandant, stated that fourparty administration of the city could be resumed any time that Soviet authorities decided to abide by agreements to which the four powers were committed.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Michael E. Meagher ◽  

Most Americans in the 1920s and 1930s were unaware of the crimes committed in the Soviet Union. Even today, the full extent of the carnage is unknown. This essay explores the ways in which Presidents Kennedy and Reagan dealt with the contrast between the open societies of the West and the severely damage civil societies of the Soviet bloc through the rhetorical presidency. Key speeches throughout the two administrations stressed the use of presidential rhetoric as a way of challenging the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR. For both Presidents, the key rhetorical moment came in West Berlin, in 1963 and 1987, respectively. Using comparable language Kennedy and Reagan spoke of the hope offered by West Berlin to those suffering under communist rule. The highlight came when Reagan challenged the Soviet leaders to tear down the Wall separating the city. Ironically, the victory over Soviet bloc communism has not led to the elimination of communist regimes, notably China. That chapter in the struggle against communism remains yet to be written.


Inner Asia ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. A. Shnirelman

AbstractArkaim is the name given to the site of an ancient town in the Southern Urals, dated to the 17th–16th centuries BC. Discovered in 1987, Arkaim rapidly became more than an archaeological site. It became the focus for an extraordinary congolmeration of ideas linked to ecological and political movements, in particular those of Russian nationalists. Threatened with flooding because of a dam project, Arkaim was made a ‘Museum Reserve’. Soon it became the focus for theories that this was a sacred place and furthermore the home of proto-Slavs. The break-up of the Soviet Union was followed by attempts by Russian nationalists to demonstrate the legitimacy of their domination of the former empire. The article shows how quasi historical claims expanded into myth and fantasy, linked to the emergence of new cults. Arkaim became the city not only of proto Slavs but of Zarathustra and the Aryans too. Such inventions are related to local politics and ethnic tensions as well as to wider Russian nationalism.


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