A final Soviet triumph …

… � The Hollowing of Gary Shteyngart Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This is an interesting hodgepodge—Russian pride and Soviet nostalgia coming from a man whose family fled the institutional Jew-hatred of a totalitarian regime. Shteyngart’s list is carefully selective, to the exclusion of anything Jewish. The actual Soviet Jewish list would have been far more complex. What about the fact that along with BBC and the voice of America, the voice of Israel was also desperately sought out? What about the cultural resonances of Sholem Aleichem, whose six-volume collected writings in Russian were in practically every single Soviet Jewish household? What of the German Jewish writer Leon Feuchtwanger, whose historical novels about Josephus and medieval Spain practically constituted the Soviet Jewish Bible? There is much to excavate in how the traces of Jewish memory functioned in the Soviet context, but Shteyngart does not go near those sites.