This issue of the magazine includes:

• In Memory of Avrom Sutskever (1913–2010)

Russia’s newspapers and television channels have not responded to Sutskever’s passing. The Israeli mass media has also paid scant attention to this loss. Meanwhile, the death of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutskever has become the “tectonic fault” in the history of culture—and not only of Jewish culture, but of culture more broadly. This magazine publishes two essays on Avrom Sutskever’s poetry, as well as two of his poems in Russian translation—Di fidlroyz (The Violin Rose) and Ode tsu der toyb (Ode to the Dove).

• Review: Memory of a Place and the Places of Memory

How to save the past: this is a challenging problem for many Jewish communities of the Former USSR whose history extends back for centuries. To save means in some sense to document, to present, and to interpret the past using modern methodologies and technologies. The aim is to overcome the feeling of a break with the past, the feeling that is connected with the tragic events of the Holocaust and the Soviet ideological taboos of the post-war years. In the context of this problem, the reviewer analyzes two photographic albums published recently in Lithuania—Sounds of Silence: Traces of Jewish life in Lithuania and They Lived in Vabalninkas, 1925–1941. The first album presents the traces of Jewish past that can be found in Lithuanian cities and towns even 65 years after the World War II. The second album is dedicated to the pre-war life of the small shtetl of Vabalninkas. The Holocaust remains off-screen throughout both albums, but the reviewer emphasizes that it is exactly the theme of the Holocaust that, in both cases, creates a special emotional disposition for the viewer’s perceptions.

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

• Jewish Calendar of Significant Dates: March–April 2010

• Bibliography: 25 New Books