This issue of the magazine includes:

• Names: Zemach Shabad, Physician, Yiddishist, and Leader

Dr. Zemach Shabad (1864–1935) was a popular doctor in his native city of Vilna as well as one of the most important leaders of Vilna’s Jewish community. Among his varied social, political, and cultural activities one clearly has to be emphasized: he was one of the key founders of YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which was established in 1925 in order to study and preserve the cultural heritage of East European Jewry. On the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Zemach Shabad’s birth, our magazine presents the first Russian publication of prominent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow’s essay about him, as well as a fragment from Shabad’s autobiography.

• Review: Dina Kalinovskaia and Her Forgotten Novel

The plot of Russian-Jewish author Dina Kalinovskaia’s novel O subbota! (Oh, Saturday!) was slightly too edgy for it to be easily published in the Soviet Union: an old Jew who emigrated from a small Ukrainian town to America in the early twentieth century returns many years later to Odessa to meet his relatives and friends. A work like this was obviously going to have a rough time of it in the Soviet publishing world. An abridged version first appeared, in Yiddish, in the Moscow-based monthly Sovetish heymland in 1975, and only five years later was the Russian original published in a Soviet literary magazine. It came out as a book only in 2007, a year before the author’s death. Analyzing the novel, the reviewer concludes that Kalinovskaia’s work “poses new questions and does not give simple answers.”

• Looking Through Russian Literary Magazines: Novels and Articles of Jewish Interest

• In Memoriam: Sarah Shpitalnik (1928–2013)

An obituary of Sarah Shpitalnik, a Kishinev bibliographer and longstanding collaborator of our magazine, is accompanied by a list of her published works.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: March–April 2014