This issue of the magazine includes:

• New Dimensions: Yudovin in Basel

The review discusses the exhibition Chagall: The Breakthrough Years, 1911–1919, on display at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2017. The show’s documentary section focused on the everyday life of Eastern European Jewish shtetls in the years before the First World War. It included a collection of vintage prints by Soviet artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954), who was a member of the famous expeditions of 1912–1914 led by S.Ansky, a writer and political activist known as the father of Jewish ethnography. The reviewer argues that the bold decision by the curators to combine Chagall’s paintings with Yudovin’s photos gave viewers the chance “to experience the illusion of immersion in the lost world of the shtetl.”

• Response: The Usefulness of Nonsense

Our reviewer has harsh words for the prefaces in new Russian editions of two classic Yiddish books—Sholem Aleichem’s novel Motl the Cantor’s Son and his short-story collection Tevye the Dairyman. Moscow publishers Vremya decided to republish the books with new introductions, commissioning two Russian writers who had nothing to do with the study of Jewish history and culture to pen them. The outcome was preordained. As our reviewer argues, both prefaces are chockablock with “unadulterated nonsense.”

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

• Publishers and Publishing Projects: Jewish Books from Kazakhstan

This section features a complete bibliography of Russian-language books on Jewish subjects published in Kazakhstan during the 2000s and 2010s. The books mainly deal with the history of Jews in Central Asia and Western Siberia, in particular, the history of how Jews were evacuated from the European part of the Soviet Union to Central Asia and Western Siberia during the Second World War.

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: November–December 2018