This issue of the magazine includes:

• In Memoriam: Philip Roth (1933–2018)

Philip Roth, one of the most celebrated twentieth-century American novelists, has died at the age of eighty-five. The obituary writer argues, “We Russian Jews have always lacked a writer like Philip Roth, because Roth made it his mission to be the voice of the modern American Jew: secular, successful, living in the big city, and only rarely recalling that his grandparents or great-grandparents came to suffer in this ‘brave new world’ of America from Eastern European shtetls, while he was like a fish in water in this world. We Russian Jews from Moscow, Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and so on, have never had a writer like this.” The obituary is followed by a complete bibliography of Philip Roth's works in Russian translation.

• Names: Mendele’s Manifesto Revisited

The magazine revisits “Introduction by Mendele Moykher-Sforim on the Debut of His First Published Stories,” by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh aka Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1836–1917). The editors published a translation of the text in No. 131, claiming it had not been published in Russian before, but later discovered the claim was incorrect. The essay had been printed in Russian in 1929 as the foreword to Mendele’s novel Fishke the Lame, published by Puchina, one of the last private publishers in the Soviet Union. The article compares the two translations of “Introduction,” the 1929 translation and the modern translation, and discusses certain ambiguities in this important literary manifesto by a classic Yiddish writer.

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: July–August 2018

• Bibliography: Fifty Five New Books